al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 612-616 book review th i s c o l l e c t i o n o f t w e n t y n i n e essays, in english and french, with an extended introduction by the editors, emerged from an interdisciplinary symposium in london sponsored by the university of north carolina at chapel hill (may 23–24, 2014). it is a handsome and well executed book. it includes an aghlabid timeline, three color maps, a full set of illustrations, a thorough bibliography, and a good index. edited volumes are often hastily assembled; the editors are to be commended for their due diligence. they have brought together an impressive set of submissions, by established scholars (from both the anglophone and francophone worlds) as well as younger colleagues. t h e v o l u m e o p e n s , i n c o m p e l l i n g fashion, with a photo of mohamed talbi seated alongside sihem lamine of cmes/ harvard university, a close collaborator with the volume’s editors and the author of one of the essays. one understands that talbi, the most important modern scholar of aghlabid history bar none, and a prolific writer on maghribi history more generally, knew of t he book and w as s lat ed to contribute a foreword. talbi died on may 1, 2017, sadly before the book’s appearance. his splendid l’émirat aghlabide (tunis: maisonneuve, 1966), despite some aging, deserves a careful reading. a touchstone for the present volume, it is cited by a number of the contributors. one might quibble with the subtitle; as much as many of the book’s essays address the material legacy of the aghlabids, a near equal number deal with the dynasty’s political and cultural history. the volume opens with chapters on aghlabid politics and power. hugh kennedy and mounira chapoutot-remadi cover much the same ground: the rise of the aghlabid polity in the context of early abbasid imperial history, with detailed comments on conditions in pre-aghlabid ifrīqiya. as with, say, the the aghlabids and their neighbors: art and material culture in ninthcentury north africa. edited by glaire d. anderson, corisande fenwick, and mariam rosser-owen, with sihem lamine. handbook of oriental studies, 122 (leiden; boston: brill, 2017). isbn 978900435566-8. xxxviii + 688 pp. $218/€189 cloth and e-book. matthew s. gordon miami university (gordonms@miamioh.edu) © 2022 matthew s. gordon. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 613 • matthew s. gordon tulunids of egypt, the threads connecting aghlabid ifrīqiya to the iraqi imperial center were acknowledged on both sides but subject to considerable pressure. the difference is that the tulunids, for reasons of relative proximity but also the policies pursued by their pater familias, aḥmad b. ṭūlūn, did not experience the same level of autonomy as their ifrīqiyan counterparts. the much-lamented michael bonner was to have published a comparative study of the two dynasties; the lacuna waits to be filled. kennedy’s chapter, more narrative in style, closes with passing comparative comments on the demise of the abbasid and soviet empires. one would have preferred consideration of the increasingly dire conditions of the abbasid polity that allowed the aghlabids to flourish (a topic kennedy has addressed more successfully elsewhere). this would entail addressing the mix of, on the one hand, aghlabid symbolic deference to the iraqi center and, on the other, the emirate’s near complete s o v e r e i g n t y a n d d e c i s i o n m a k i n g . c h a p o u t o t r e m a d i d e l v e s i n g r e a t e r depth into what are mostly later maghribi sources. her chapter is comparatively richer as a result, if slightly disjointed in its conclusion. to her credit she devotes full comments to the part played by enslaved p e r s o n s a n d f r e e d m e n i n a g h l a b i d religious, military, and political affairs. she does not address directly, however, t h e q u e s t i o n o f e q u a t i n g w a l ā ʾ w i t h enslavement; she speaks throughout of each mawlā (pl. mawālī) as an enslaved or freed person when, in all likelihood, one is dealing with a spectrum of legal and social origins. talbi, in his émirat, is clear as to the extent to which slavery played a part in aghlabid social, cultural, and economic life (one need only consult his index). if one were to organize a companion to the current volume, a chapter on precisely this topic would be in order. the volume’s index lists only one reference to slavery (p. 556) when, according to my count, the following pages ought to be cited as well: 45, 53, 59, 64–66, 69–75, and 572. a not ew ort hy c ont ribut ion of t he (present) volume is annliese nef’s chapter on the aghlabids’ “sicilian policy.” the chapter is, it seems, a condensed version of her arguments on the same topic in french. her work, always stimulating, not simply on aghlabid matters but more generally on the shaping of early medieval islamicate and mediterranean society and politics, deserves to be widely read. this chapter concerns the long aghlabid campaign in sicily. it was, she argues, firstly, less an expression of careful aghlabid policy than the playing out of new regional ambitions on the part of the emirate; and, secondly, a campaign that laid the groundwork for the appearance of the fatimid state in the fourth/tenth century. the aghlabids acted on the potential—commercial, diplomatic, military—of the central maghrib; the fatimids, having muscled in, took even fuller advantage. a further lesson, for the fatimids and modern historians alike, involved the challenge of urban elites. this is the topic of caroline goodson’s valuable chapter on kairouan and its uneasy relationship with the aghlabid center. goodson sees kairouan as not an aghlabid capital but, as local mercantile and sunni judicial “ a l t e r n a t i v e t o p o g r a p h i e s o f p o w e r ” (p. 101) rose within the city, an abiding challenge to aghlabid authority. the sense is that the emirs, starting with ibrāhīm b. al-aghlab, anticipated the challenge al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the aghlabids and their neighbors • 614 b y r a m p i n g u p i n v e s t m e n t i n u r b a n development outside the city proper. later sources know this first of two major administrative and military centers as al-ʿabbāsiyya (the second being raqqāda). al-ʿabbāsiyya is, in turn, the subject of abdelhamid fenina’s close study of the many extant early abbasid-style coins minted in ifrīqiya from the late 760s on. his argument, “attractive” in the view of the editors (p. 18), is that the numerous numismatic references that predate the rise of the aghlabid state indicate the presence of an active center (qaṣr) prior to the decision by ibn al-aghlab to transform the site with the introduction of a new mosque, fortress, and land-grants. he did so on the model of abbasid samarra, another of the close similarities between the tulunid and aghlabid polities. close numismatic research informs mohamed ghodhbane’s chapter as well; his approach, more technical than fenina’s, concerns the stylistic history of aghlabid coin production. part one closes with dwight reynolds’s very reasonable assessment of the single account, in ibn ʿabd rabbih’s fourth/tenth-century kitāb al-ʿiqd, of the brief and troubled sojourn of ziryāb, the renowned singer and teacher, at the court of the aghlabid ruler ziyādat allāh i (r. 817–838). two full sections follow on the material legacy of the aghlabids: the subtitle’s promise is more than fulfilled in these thirteen chapters, each of which is fully illustrated. a shared strength of the submissions is their interdisciplinary a p p r o a c h . t h e e x t e n t o f a g h l a b i d investment in monument building, the general topic of part two, is well-known; the great mosque of kairouan and the zaytūna in tunis come readily to mind. the two structures are the subject here of, respectively, four chapters (mahfoudh, bloom, picotin and déléry, and hamdi) and two (daoulatli and lamine). but, as is made clear by lotfi abdeljaouad’s study of the numerous surviving aghlabid inscriptions (on a series of structures small and large) and ahmed el bahi’s chapter on the history of the north african ribāṭ, aghlabid investment extended well beyond what are today the most visible of the dynasty’s public structures. part three turns to ceramics. five chapters, reflecting the extensive work carried out over decades at raqqāda, p a l e r m o , t h e w i d e r m a g h r i b , a n d al-andalus, share a concern not only with the spread of shapes and techniques but with the potters themselves, whose mobility likely serves to explain the spread (or lack thereof in the case of the western maghrib and al-andalus) of given styles across the late antique mediterranean. graguer chatti puts it this way: “l’empreinte orientalisante, que nous relevons dans la céramique, objet de notre étude, s’explique par les échanges culturels et commerciaux entre l’orient et l’occident islamique, mais aussi par une importante communauté orientale installée à kairouan qui avait introduit son goût particulier” (p. 361). the questions posed across these chapters regarding stylistic and cultural connections linking (or not) the different regions of the islamic west remain tentative. this, in turn, underscores the point made by the editors (pp. 14–16) on the myriad challenges of funding, access, and physical security faced by archeologists across the maghrib. a very considerable amount of in situ work remains to be carried out. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 615 • matthew s. gordon the six studies in part four draw, in varied manner, on a balance of written, documentary, and archaeological sources. in their chapter, using settlement patterns identified from archeological surveys, renata holod and tarek kahlaoui argue against any discernible aghlabid presence on the island of jerba. lorenzo bondioli, drawing on sources in several languages, a d d r e s s e s t h e a g h l a b i d i n t e r v e n t i o n in third/ninth-century southern italy. the emirs, in his view, in conflict with the papacy, the carolingians, and the byzantines, played a proxy role in a chaotic local political scene without prevailing over their rivals. patrice cressier’s chapter might be read alongside charles pellat’s ei2 article on nakūr, first an early islamic s e t t l e m e n t a n d t h e n a n a u t o n o m o u s polity on the northern moroccan littoral. after opening with a brief comment that nothing points to contacts between nakūr and the aghlabid emirate, cressier reads the fragmentary literary references in light of relevant archeological evidence, much of it his own. the emirate also does not occur in elizabeth fentress’s chapter on early idrisid history. in both cases— nakūr and idrisid walīla—it is a matter of two further venues, like ifrīqiya, where socio-cultural and religious symbiosis followed the arrival of “easterners” (read as, in many though certainly not all cases, “arabs”) into the predominantly “berber” milieu of the western maghrib. the value of archeology to the study of early islamic maghribi history—a history for which the medieval arabic chronicles and geographies are so often lacking— is apparent in the chapters by chloé capel and david mattingly and martin sterry. capel, drawing on her doctoral research and what appears to have been c o n s i d e r a b l e f i e l d w o r k , a r g u e s f o r a new reading of the third/ninth-century foundation of sijilmassa. she connects it to the series of new administrative and military settlements created by, among others, the aghlabids at al-ʿabbāsiyya and, soon thereafter and perhaps in direct response, the idrisids at al-ʿāliya. (the tulunid center at al-qaṭāʾiʿ comes readily to mind as well.) mattingly and sterry, for their part, draw on their own considerable w o r k i n r o m a n a n d e a r l y i s l a m i c archaeology in arguing for extensive commercial links, including, importantly, human trafficking, between the sahara and the series of “arab-dominated successor states...and...the berber kharijites...who occupied the saharan fringe and the major oases along the saharan trade routes” (p. 551). their evidence derives from three areas: jarma, qaṣr al-sharrāba, and zuwīla, all thriving oasis commercial hubs prior to the arrival of muslim armies in the first/ seventh century; the aghlabids, here as in sicily, acted on the demonstrated potential of this fiscal and human wealth. the aghlabids and their neighbors closes with two quite different chapters on widely-discussed muṣḥafs: the blue quran, the dating and origin of which remain unclear though it is associated by many scholars with the fourth/tenthcentury maghrib, and the fourth/tenthcentury palermo quran. the first of the two manuscripts is the subject of cheryl porter’s straightforward account of the materials with which it was created. it is not without interest—one is made aware of the differences between “shell gold” and gold leaf, and the specific chemical reaction of sheepskin to blue dye—but more would be welcome on the political and cultural context in which the manuscript was al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the aghlabids and their neighbors • 616 produced. jeremy johns describes his rich, layered article on the palermo quran as, in effect, a preview of a full study in preparation. one very much looks forward to its appearance. johns follows a close physical description of the manuscript with an equally close discussion of the sectarian milieu of ifrīqiya and sicily as the third/ninth-century abbasid miḥna (“test,” or “interrogation”) played out. johns addresses a four-line statement denying the “createdness” of the quran, part of the decoration of the manuscript, alongside inscriptions on the principal mosque in sousse and the zaytūna mosque in tunis. he relates these examples of public writing to the factional infighting between rival sunni madhhabs in ifrīqiya and, in time, sicily, and the shifting postures on the part of aghlabid emirs in response. the volume takes up, in a sense, this question: how and when does an academic field—in this case, arabic and islamic studies—reorient itself to better reflect the history, culture, and material legacy of the societies that it sets out to study? the question concerns the relative but abiding neglect of maghribi (north african) history in modern scholarship, especially in the english-speaking world. in her valuable recent survey of north africa in the first islamic centuries, corisande fenwick, one of the three editors of the present volume, argues for a complex of historiographical, evidential, and disciplinary reasons for the lacuna (early islamic north africa: a new perspective [london: bloomsbury academic, 2020], 1–6). again, it seems fair to say that the problem has been particularly acute in english-language scholarship. a raft of specialized studies on the main islamic-era maghribi dynasties, many quite substantial, were published by french-language researchers in the first part of the twentieth century, among them, of course, mohamed talbi. but the point remains that nothing of the degree of modern scholarship on the early and medieval islamic near east (including egypt) has been devoted to the maghrib. to date, in any case: the appearance of this collection—alongside, for example, new monographs by the (renamed) british institute for libyan and northern african studies (bilnas), a source of funding f o r t h e p r e s e n t v o l u m e — s u g g e s t s a reorientation is afoot. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 237-239 book review this is apparently a reworking of salaymeh’s ph.d. dissertation (uc berkeley, 2012). as she describes her vantage point, “i engage in a postfoundationalist understanding of history that rejects the positivist methodologies of modernism and the nihilistic relativism of post-modernism. a postfoundational understanding of historical objectivity rejects the positivist notion that particular methodologies generate truth” (15–16). i confess i do not follow her theory, which seems to veer between accepting multiple truths (as in refusing to take contradiction as a sign that one or more of the accounts in question are untrue) and seizing on unanimity (i.e. lack of contradiction) as a reason to believe that something did happen as described. my approach in this review will therefore be to look past her theory to see whether she explains particular early legal problems in ways that seem useful to a traditional historian of islamic law. one chapter, then, deals with the problem of whether prisoners of war may be executed. reports vary but salaymeh thinks the preponderant suggestion is that the prophet’s precept and example forbade execution after a battle (although, as she notes, there is no report that he said anything explicitly). she treats ibn ʿabbās and mujāhid’s comments on some relevant verses of the qurʾān. the latter expressly interprets q. 9:5 (“kill the polytheists wherever you find them and take them and confine them”—jones transl.) as allowing the muslim leader to execute, ransom, free, or enslave prisoners of war, but she argues that killing and taking treat respectively before and after the conclusion of combat, so that the qurʾān really allows killing only in battle. it seems to me, to the contrary, useless for an historian to identify what the qurʾān means. it is the nature of scripture to be interpretable in multiple ways, and the most an historian should try to do is to assess why some interpretation either lena salaymeh, the beginnings of islamic law: late antique islamicate legal traditions (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), xiii+242 pp. isbn 978-1-107-13302-0. price: £64.99/$99.99. christopher melchert university of oxford (christopher.melchert@pmb.ox.ac.uk) mailto:christopher.melchert%40pmb.ox.ac.uk?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 238 • christopher melchert did or did not catch on. salaymeh’s survey of later commentators and jurisprudents i s a d e q u a t e l y w i d e r a n g i n g , a n d h e r conclusion agrees with my own sounding of the evidence: that jurisprudents of the followers are commonly quoted as doubting whether prisoners should be killed, of the ninth century and later as leaving it completely up to the leader. but she implicitly dismisses retrojection of competing eighth-century views to account for the confused picture we have of practice in the earlier seventh. salaymeh next surveys the law of circumcision, which she finds weakly supported as an obligation for muslims and only sometimes advocated as a boundary marker, distinguishing muslims from others. it is as if the early community took circumcision so much for granted that it did not trouble to document its exact legal status. i was reminded of norman calder’s generalization about ritual purity laws: the rabbinic system is a complex and rarefied elaboration of a common near eastern set of beliefs about purity (complicated by its hermeneutical relationship to the biblical laws). the muslim system is probably very near to that common or basic system; and has proved on the whole rather resistant to efforts at making it more complex.1 salaymeh never cites calder, but the similarity of her conclusion shows that she proposes nothing upsetting here to conventional opinion. salaymeh’s survey of wife-initiated divorce in jewish and islamic law turns up much variation earlier on, then a certain 1. norman calder, studies in early muslim jurisprudence (oxford: clarendon press, 1993), 212. convergence on allowing judges to dissolve marriages for specified reasons and wives to dissolve marriages with some reduction of the normal settlement. she also detects a certain shift from considering divorce a sort of emancipation to considering it a breach of contract. the jewish parallel is interesting. in this case, it was jewish jurisprudents who rejected earlier practice on the grounds that it reflected external influence, presumably islamic. however, although salaymeh is sure that influence and borrowing are bad concepts, she offers only the vaguest generalities such as “a shared social space and historical t r a d i t i o n ” ( p . 1 9 3 ) t o e x p l a i n t h e similarities. a theoretical chapter against the idea of identifiably aryan or semitic origins of islamic law seems mostly an exercise in knocking down straw men. another chapter proposes to identify the following stages of legal history: “legal circles and networks (c. 610–800 ce), islamic legal beginnings; professionalization of legal schools (c. 800–1000 ce); consolidation a n d f o r m a l i z a t i o n (c . 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 c e ) ; technocratization (c. 1200-1400 ce)” (pp. 147–48). the obvious difference between salaymeh’s scheme and, for example, marshall hodgson’s is that she simply marks out periods of 200 years, whereas he implicitly points to political changes as major pivots: the advent of the marwānid caliphs to mark the end of the “primitive period,” the advent of the būyads (my spelling) to mark the end of the “high caliphal period,” the mongol conquest of baghdad to divide two “middle periods.” one point of salaymeh’s scheme is to stress the arbitrariness of any periodization. this al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) lena salaymeh’s the beginnings of islamic law • 239 seems to me easy to concede but minor inasmuch as all classifications break down at the margins. contra salaymeh, a scheme like hodgson’s that turns on political events does not downplay contingency. rather, it stresses what a difference politics can make (and indeed dynasties play major roles in salaymeh’s own detailed description of the evolution of islamic law, as by judicial appointments). more original, at least for a professed history of islamic law, is the following periodization of jewish legal history, identifying similar developments in each of her 200-year periods. minimally, i would say that salaymeh offers credible sketches of how discussions of rules changed over time with relation to the three problems of killing prisoners, circumcision, and wife-initiated divorce. the second seems the most successful, b u t a n y o n e w i s h i n g t o m a k e m o r e thorough surveys will wish to consider these chapters as starting points. on the other hand, i do not see that she offers c r e d i b l e a l t e r n a t i v e e x p l a n a t i o n s t o existing ones based on supposedly faulty historiographical theories. maximally, i would venture that her ambitions are thwarted by systematically looking away from conflict among classes and status groups in the premodern middle east. she admits a conflictual understanding of divorce law, men asserting control over women, while expressing regret that evidence is lacking to show exactly the basis of women’s power to resist. (i do not object except for the contrast with salaymeh’s earlier scorn for those who say we sorely lack evidence from the seventh century and so can say little with certainty.) but this is more typical: “interpretive communities give meaning to legal texts in ways that cut across social, geographic, or confessional boundaries” (p. 203). more credible, to my mind, is that the medieval legal texts on which salaymeh relies (like the rest of us) reflect the interests and views of particular, aristocratic interpretive communities intent on protecting their own moral and material interests. transliteration is accurate. dates are given in ce only, sometimes carefully split, sometimes not; e.g., al-awzāʿī said to have died precisely in 774, whereas he is most often said to have died in 157, which overlapped 773 and 774, but also 155, 151, 156, and 158, and never with a month. the bibliography usually includes editors’ names but sometimes alphabetizes strangely; e.g.. mālik under i for ibn anas, muslim under q for al-qushayrī. also strange is its identification of al-muzanī as the editor of al-umm. editors zayde antrim, trinity colege alison m. vacca, columbia university managing editor christiane-marie abu sarah, erskine college middle east medievalists (mem) is an international professional non-profit association of scholars interested in the study of the medieval middle east, expansively defined to include all geographies with prominent muslim political, religious, or social presences between 500-1500 ce. mem has two primary goals. the first is to increase the representation of medieval scholarship at scholarly meetings by co-sponsoring panels. the second is to foster communication among individuals and organizations with an interest in the study of the medieval middle east. book review editors malika dekkiche, university of antwerp luke yarbrough, university of california, los angeles editorial board, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā manan ahmed, columbia university sean anthony, the ohio state university mushegh asatryan, university of calgary hannah barker, arizona state university francesca bellino, università di napoli “l’orientale” evrim binbaş, universität bonn amina elbendary, the american university in cairo corisande fenwick, university college london eve krakowski, princeton university josef meri, hamad bin khalifa university oya pancaroğlu, boğaziçi university michael pifer, university of michigan walid salih, university of toronto vanessa van renterghem, institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (paris) board of directors, middle east medievalists stephennie mulder (president), the university of texas at austin najam haider (vice president), barnard college robert haug (secretary), university of cincinnati adam talib (board member), durham university arezou azad (board member), university of oxford khodadad rezakhani (board member), leiden university amanda hannoosh steinberg (board member), harvard university shireen hamza (graduate student representative), harvard university natalie kontny-wendt (graduate student representative), university of hamburg journal website for submissions, archives, contact information, announcements, and more, please visit: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/ index.php/alusur/index copyright and permissions this is an open access journal distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international license, which allows users to copy & distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, & only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. to view a copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) table of contents (cont.) table of contents mem awards recipient of the 2021 mem lifetime achievement award doris behrens-abouseif ......................................................................................................................................... iv–ix articles “the poetics of the sufi carnival: the rogue lyrics (qalandariyyāt) as heterotopic countergenre(s)” matthew thomas miller ........................................................................................................................................ 1–46 “the long arm of the provincial law: a custody battle in a qāḍī petition from the medieval fayyūm” lev weitz ................................................................................................................................................................ 47–78 “the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque in medina” harry munt .......................................................................................................................................................... 79–147 “sweet water on the sea route to china: watering stops and torpedo-jar capacities in longdistance indian ocean sailing” elizabeth lambourn .......................................................................................................................................... 148–182 “dating ibn aʿtham’s history: of persian manuscripts, obscure biographies, and incomplete isnāds” andrew mclaren ............................................................................................................................................... 183–234 “the mosque‒dār al-imāra complex at ʿanjar: preliminary notes from a multi-layered exploration of ceremonial spaces in the marwānid period” aila santi ............................................................................................................................................................. 235–266 “a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories: tribal, ideological, and legal incentives behind the transmission of the prophet’s biography” ehsan roohi ....................................................................................................................................................... 267–319 “translating race in the islamic studies classroom” rachel schine ..................................................................................................................................................... 320–383 “‘the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named’: al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd in late antique accounts of the marwānids and the third fitna” leone pecorini goodall ..................................................................................................................................... 384–434 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) table of contents (cont.) special dossier: acts of rebellion and revolt in the early islamic caliphate guest edited by alon dar & petra m. sijpesteijn “introduction” alon dar and petra m. sijpesteijn ................................................................................................................... 436–444 “was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? rebellion in the early marwānid period” hannah-lena hagemann ................................................................................................................................. 445–468 “closing ranks: discipline and loyalty in the umayyad army” petra m. sijpesteijn .......................................................................................................................................... 469–499 “governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt: a case study of one ‘rebellion’ (709–10 ce)” alon dar .............................................................................................................................................................. 500–515 “the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj (116–28/734–46): the local perspective” said reza huseini .............................................................................................................................................. 516–553 “portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion: the case of abū ḥanīfa” ayşegül şimşek .................................................................................................................................................. 554–572 “entangled symbols: silk and the material semiosis of the zanj rebellion (869–83)” philip grant ........................................................................................................................................................ 573–602 book reviews review of ibn al-muqaffaʿ, kalīlah and dimnah: fables of virtue and vice, edited by michael fishbein; translated by michael fishbein and james e. montgomery. theodore s. beers .............................................................................................................................................. 603–611 review of the aghlabids and their neighbors: art and material culture in ninth-century north africa, edited by glaire d. anderson, corisande fenwick, and mariam rosser-owen, with sihem lamine. matthew s. gordon ............................................................................................................................................ 612–616 review of javier albarrán iruela, ejércitos benditos. yihad y memoria en al-andalus (siglos x-xiii). abigail krasner balbale ..................................................................................................................................... 617–621 review of muslim sources of the crusader period: an anthology, edited and translated by james e. lindsay and suleiman a. mourad. bogdan c. smarandache.................................................................................................................................... 622–630 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) review of monica balda-tillier, histoires d’amour et de mort: le précis de martyrs de l’amour de muġulṭāy (m. 1361). jonathan lawrence ............................................................................................................................................ 631–639 review of simon o’meara, the kaʿba orientations: readings in islam’s ancient house. kader smail ......................................................................................................................................................... 640–643 review of tahera qutbuddin, arabic oration: art and function. pamela klasova ................................................................................................................................................... 644–653 conference report report on rethinking the wearable in the middle ages (bard graduate center, 28-29 april 2022) ellen enderle ...................................................................................................................................................... 654–661 we are pleased to be publishing o u r fi f t h i s s u e o f a l ʿ u ṣ ū r al-wusṭā in its current online and peer-reviewed format. please be aware that the journal is now housed at the new website of middle east medievalists. this is the current url: https://www. middleeastmedievalists.com/. the issue contains yet another set of fine contributions, including five fulll e n g t h s t u d i e s , a s u b s t a n t i a l r e v i e w essay, ten book reviews, and a report of a conference, “mysticism and ethics,” held at the american university of beirut. special thanks are due to professor donald whitcomb for providing his remarks as last year’s recipient of mem’s lifetime achievement award. we would add that the production of this issue proved to be bittersweet as we are publishing michael bonner’s final article, which he was revising at the moment of his passing. t h e j o u r n a l , w h i c h a p p e a r s o n c e annually and has averaged well over two hundred pages per issue, involves no small amount of effort. we would first like to express our gratitude to dr. christianemarie abu sarah. marie began her work with us as a graduate student but, in october of this year, defended her brilliant phd dissertation, “to drink a cup of fire: morality tales and moral emotions in egyptian, algerian, and french anticolonial activism, 1945–1960” (university of maryland, under the supervision of professor peter wien). to marie, many congratulations! we are very grateful indeed for her consistent and excellent work as our managing editor. we would also be remiss in not extending deep thanks to hanna siurua for her outstanding editorial support, and to drs. malika dekkiche (university of antwerp) and luke yarbrough (ucla), our book review editors, for bringing together a superlative set of reviews on a range of new publications in our fields. finally, we would like to thank the history department at the university of maryland; it is their continued institutional support that has helped keep al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā an open-access journal. letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): i-ii (photo of antoine borrut by juliette fradin photography) https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/ https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): ii this issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā contains remembrances by colleagues and former students of three much-lamented teachers and scholars: professors michael bonner (university of michigan), kenneth holum (university of maryland), and speros vryonis jr. (ucla). we publish these remembrances with sadness but also gratitude for the lasting contributions of each. as the testimonies published here make clear, these scholars’ devotion to scholarship and teaching endured over years: they not only contributed vital work in their respective fields but also modeled such dedication to the next generation. we share the anxiety of many of our colleagues in the humanities that a decrease in public funding for higher education, a decline in modern language study, and the relentless assault on science and empirical knowledge, and indeed on reading and critical thinking, are eroding the ability of our students to carry on where these three cherished colleagues left off. the contents of this issue bespeak, however, the considerable intellectual energy and sheer hard work that continue to inform the best scholarship in our many overlapping disciplines. a very grateful thanks to our contributors. to restate our central guiding principle from previous letters, we remain committed to using al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā as a platform from which to bring out significant new scholarship. we seek, with each issue, to produce the journal as expeditiously as possible, thus providing our contributors the opportunity to bring their ongoing work to a broad audience in timely manner. we are no less committed to the publication of longer and more substantial research articles and book reviews. the present roster of articles, the review essay, the book reviews, and the one conference report illustrate, we believe, these aims. it is our hope and expectation to be publishing, in our future issues, new dossiers of research articles devoted to specific themes (and under the aegis of guest editors), as we did in last year’s issue with the dossier coordinated by maribel fierro and patrice cressier, “formulating the caliphate in the islamic west: umayyads, ḥammūdids, and almohads.” as we announced in the previous issue, the journal will continue to appear online but will also become available in print, through a print-on-demand option, in the foreseeable future. issues of the newly formatted journal (2015 to the present) will be obtainable through our website. we close on two familiar notes. first, we continue to rely on your financial support. our journal is online, open access, and peer-reviewed, but it is certainly not free. to cover costs of publication and the work of our staff, among other expenses, you provide valuable support by keeping your membership in middle east medievalists up to date. for information on membership and the fund, please proceed to the mem home page at https://www. middleeastmedievalists.com/ and click on “membership.” second, as we noted in a previous issue (uw 24 [2016]), the full run of the journal is available online. our thanks to professor fred donner (university of chicago) for his assistance in this regard. the full archive can be accessed on our website: https://www. m i d d l e e a s t m e d i e v a l i s t s . c o m / v o l u m e index/. letter from the editors sincerely, antoine borrut and matthew gordon https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/ https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/ https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/volume-index/ https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/volume-index/ https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/volume-index/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 315-318 book review louis ix’s crusading efforts have been a central part of his historical legacy.1 i n t h i s m e t i c u l o u s l y r e s e a r c h e d a n d h i g h l y r e a d a b l e b o o k , h o w e v e r , william chester jordan shifts the focus f r o m c r u s a d e t o c o n v e r s i o n . j o r d a n argues convincingly that the conversion of muslims (and, to a lesser extent, of pagans) was among the chief goals of louis ix’s thirteenth-century crusades. he situates the king’s enthusiasm within the broader thirteenth-century vogue for converting both muslims and jews. this was a period when, for example, the newly created dominican and franciscan orders established convent schools to teach their friars arabic and hebrew. the goal 1. on this subject, jordan’s own first book is still required reading: william c. jordan, louis ix and the challenge of the crusade: a study in rulership (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1979). 2. see, for example, robert chazan, barcelona and beyond: the disputation of 1263 and its aftermath (berkeley: university of california press, 1992); benjamin z. kedar, crusade and mission: european approaches toward the muslims (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2014); christoph t. maier, preaching the crusades: mendicant friars and the cross in the thirteenth century (new york: cambridge university press, 1994); robin vose, dominicans, muslims and jews in the medieval crown of aragon (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2009). was not only for the friars to preach to jews and muslims in europe and abroad w i t h o u t n e e d i n g a n i n t e r p r e t e r , b u t also for them to read jewish and islamic scripture and theology in their original languages, so that the friars might use their prospective converts’ own doctrines to prove the superiority of christianity.2 louis ix himself encouraged ecclesiastical efforts to convert domestic unbelievers, such as french jews, christian heretics, and prostitutes. but when faced with the question of whether louis ix’s evangelical efforts among muslims actually produced converts, or what might have become of such converts after their baptisms, most historians would demur; given the limited william chester jordan, the apple of his eye: converts from islam in the reign of louis ix. jews, christians, and muslims from the ancient to the modern world (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2019), xiii + 177 pp. isbn: 978-0-691-19011-2. price: $35 (cloth). janna bianchini university of maryland (jcwb@umd.edu) mailto:jcwb%40umd.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 316 • janna bianchini documentation that survives, how could such questions be answered? nevertheless, jordan has answered them. the apple of his eye mines thirteenthcentury records to reveal that louis ix’s efforts did result in the conversion of a modest but substantial number of muslims from north africa and acre. some were captives from louis ix’s first crusade, the so-called seventh crusade of 1248–1254, in which the king conquered damietta, was captured and held for ransom by the ayyubids, and subsequently established himself in acre, then the capital of the latin kingdom of jerusalem. other converts were residents of acre who were attracted to christianity by lavish royal gifts and the promise of more to come. still others were slaves purchased by the king, to whom he promised freedom (and more material rewards) in exchange for baptism. the chronicler geoffrey of beaulieu proudly reports that louis not only oversaw the conversion of “many” muslims during his stay in acre but promised them financial support and resettled them in france. although at first glance this claim seems dubious—why would the king send his converts to france, and why would they agree to go?—jordan demonstrates that louis ix did exactly as geoffrey reports and continued to provide for his immigrant converts out of royal funds for as long as they lived.3 jordan does this largely through fiscal accounts, which show royal outlays for the maintenance of “converts from overseas” beginning in 1253. local administrative records indicate that the converts were 3. the book’s title, a biblical phrase, was used by the chronicler william of chartres to characterize louis ix’s attentiveness to all his subjects. jordan adopts it to represent a key part of his argument: that louis not only engineered the conversion of these people but also ensured financial and social support for them thereafter. dispersed among the cities and towns of northern france—but, notably, only those within the royal domain. the crown’s agents in those regions paid out regular sums for housing, clothing, and pensions for “saracens converted to the christian faith.” on the basis of the numbers of convert households listed in the records, jordan estimates that louis ix resettled somewhat more than a thousand recently b a p t i z e d p e o p l e — m e n , w o m e n , a n d children—in france. this was not, in other words, a negligible group, and it could only have been the result of sustained conversionary efforts. needless to say, the records of louis ix’s reign have been mined for all kinds of information before now, and jordan is not the first to have noticed references to “newly baptized” individuals. but previous scholars have assumed that the people in question were all either converted french jews, who did suffer considerable pressure to accept baptism under louis’s regime, or, at most, orphaned muslim infants. jordan clearly shows that this was not the case: that there were in fact muslim converts, that they had come from “overseas,” and that they included people of all ages. he thus makes this group of people visible again in the history of france. t o d e m o n s t r a t e t h e e x i s t e n c e o f the resettled muslim converts through references in geographically scattered records is already an achievement. but jordan goes further, using inference and historical imagination to reconstruct the immigrants’ lived experience—from their adjustment to northern winters to the sorts al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) william chester jordan’s the apple of his eye: converts from islam • 317 of lifestyles they might have maintained on their royal pensions. he is careful to distinguish between documentary evidence and creative induction, as well as to explain the basis for assertions that cannot be traced to the archival record. the result is a book that would make an excellent addition to a graduate syllabus in historical methodology. for example, it utilizes some of the techniques of m i c r o h i s t o r y i n i t s a p p r o a c h t o t h e converts’ lives. we encounter, among others, an unmarried and newly baptized woman named margaret, who lived in the city of tours with her mother; jordan suggests that her mother was physically or mentally disabled, since it was margaret who drew the king’s pension. margaret may later have married another convert from islam, baptized as martin. a third muslim convert, dreux of paris, received ten pounds from the king for his wedding in 1256—a rather spectacular sum, since, as jordan points out, the pensions of converts like margaret and martin ranged from six to twelve pounds a year. why was dreux so specially favored? jordan marshals evidence that dreux became the king’s agent, bringing royal largesse to other converts living in his region and serving in the process as a kind of walking a d v e r t i s e m e n t f o r t h e o p p o r t u n i t i e s available to louis’s cherished converts. but the book is not strictly a microhistory; the documentation is too spare to make that approach feasible. instead, it draws on onomastics, environmental history, and prosopography, among other disciplines, to fill in documentary gaps. graduate students are likely to find ample material for discussion in jordan’s blending of evidence and inference. one of the most intriguing implications of the documents jordan describes is that not all of the king’s treasured converts bloomed where he had planted them. some of their children seem to have struggled economically, and a few converts may have come to regret leaving their homelands. a 1260 document from orléans notes that the number of convert households there had dropped by six; the heads of those six households, it reports, had either died or “fled.” jordan sensitively explores the reasons such converts might have had for “fleeing” (were they hoping to return to islamic lands and resume life as muslims? had they committed crimes for which they sought to evade justice?) and the recourses they might have found. the apple of his eye is a short book, consisting of only three chapters with an introduction and an epilogue. the introduction establishes the thirteenthcentury context for louis ix’s conversion program—one in which the latin church had grown steadily more interested in efforts to convert both muslims and jews to christianity. chapter 1, “the crusade of 1248–1254,” focuses on louis ix’s first crusade to egypt and his subsequent visit to acre, where he put his conversion program into practice. chapter 2, “the resettlement of the converts,” traces the journeys and destinations of the converts from the eastern mediterranean to the french royal domains and interrogates how royal policy shaped both the settlement of converts and their livelihoods. chapter 3, “living in france,” examines how the converts and their children may have adapted to their new homes. regrettably, after the second generation, almost all trace of the converts disappears from the record. in the brief al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 318 • janna bianchini epilogue, “the last crusade,” jordan argues that louis ix carried his dream of conversion even into his 1270 campaign in egypt, the so-called eighth crusade— though very little came of it. a p a r t f r o m i t s m e t h o d o l o g i c a l i n n o v a t i o n , t h e a p p l e o f h i s e y e i s likely to appeal to scholars of religious interchange in the mediterranean, as well as to historians of france, the crusades, and conversion in general. jordan deftly uses the converts’ experience to evoke questions about cultural and religious identity, alterity, migration, and the larger goals of crusade and conversion in the middle ages. what made a person “ f r e n c h ” i n t h e t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y , when regional dialects and cultures even within the kingdom varied so widely as to be mutually incomprehensible? d i d d i s p e r s i n g n e w c o n v e r t s a m o n g different towns and regions encourage or impede their assimilation to christian society? would it have been possible for a disillusioned ex-muslim not only to flee france but to reach and reintegrate into a muslim community elsewhere? did the faltering of crusade efforts in the later thirteenth century, when the conquest of jerusalem was an ever more clearly unattainable goal, help fuel enthusiasm for conversion as an alternative means of extending christendom? jordan’s book invites a reexamination of all these topics from an entirely novel perspective: that of louis’s prized but previously unrecognized converts and immigrants. in doing so, it also makes a noteworthy contribution to the history of nonelites, who are often omitted—but sometimes merely overlooked—in the documentation. the contributions to this fourth issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā (uw) in its new (online, open-access, peer reviewed) format includes, alongside a set of article-length studies, eight book reviews, including a contribution by peter brown (princeton university); three conference reports; a short notice by sean anthony; and elton daniel’s obituary of the late and much lamented ehsan yarshater. we are particularly delighted to introduce a new feature, a thematic dossier guest edited by maribel fierro and patrice cressier, entitled “formulating the caliphate in the islamic west: umayyads, ḥammūdids, and almohads.” the dossier comprises five full-length articles preceded by a substantial introduction. given that the islamic west—the maghreb, sicily, and al-andalus—has seldom received the attention it deserves in anglo-american scholarship, we are particularly glad to present these studies. we are, as always, forever grateful to our colleagues for their response to our invitations to submit current scholarship, write reviews of new books and other pertinent items, and participate on the editorial board. special thanks are due, once again, to our uniquely talented managing editor christiane-marie abu sarah. to simply restate our central guiding principle from previous letters, we remain committed to using al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā as a platform from which to bring out important and groundbreaking new scholarship. we seek, with each issue, to produce the journal in expeditious a manner as possible, thus providing our contributors the opportunity to bring their ongoing work to a broad audience in timely manner. we are no less committed to the publication of longer and more substantial research articles and book reviews. the present roster of articles, book reviews and conference reports speaks, we believe, t o t h e s e a i m s . i n a d d i t i o n , w i t h t h e dossier on the islamic west by colleagues in france and spain, we are following up on our determination to promote non-anglophone scholarship. our hope is to publish our first article in french in the letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): i-iii (photo of antoine borrut by juliette fradin photography) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): ii near future, and we strongly encourage our readers in the middle east, europe and elsewhere to submit their work to us. we open with a solicited comment b y s u z a n n e s t e t k e v y c h ( g e o r g e t o w n university), the 2017 recipient of the m i d d l e e a s t m e d i e v a l i s t s l i f e t i m e achievement award. professor stetkevych, as readers of this journal know well, has played a critical role for years in the production and promotion of scholarship in arabic poetics and literature. she has also been mentor to any number of students, many of whom went on to join the ranks of our respective disciplines of arabic, near eastern and islamic studies. i know we speak for the mem board and membership in extending our warmest appreciation to professor stetkevych on the occasion of her award. the six article-length studies begin with an extended study by ian morris on a long-standing problem of identifying the ancient toponym “macoraba” with mecca. the dossier on the islamic west follows. it contains five research articles and an extended introduction by maribel fierro and patrice cressier. the five papers emerged from what is an ongoing project launched in 2015-2016 under fierro and cressier’s directorship, “the caliphates of the islamic west” (los califatos del o c c i d e n t e / l e s c a l i f a t s d e l ’ o c c i d e n t islamique), sponsored by the casa de velázquez and the consejo superior de investigaciones científicas (csic). the first article, by isabel toral-niehoff, considers ibn ʿabd rabbih’s important fourth/tenth-century compilation, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, and its likely connection to the umayyad court in cordoba. jan thiele, in a discussion of almohad claims to religiop o l i t i c a l a u t h o r i t y , u n d e r s c o r e s t h e ideological peculiarities of these claims. in a close reading of the politics of the islamic west, javier albarrán considers the appeal to jihad on the part of the andalusian caliphs, all in the context of seeking legitimation. pascal buresi’s topic is the almoravid caliphate: he argues that, despite differences in the political histories of the almohad and almoravid states, it is important to keep in mind critical continuities from one dynastic period to the next as well. the final paper in the dossier, by almudena ariza armada, takes up the significant numismatic evidence regarding the history of the ḥammūdid dynasty, a polity little studied in modern scholarship. alongside the articles, we are pleased to include eight book reviews. on display is an impressive range of scholarship, in the reviews and in the publications discussed therein. we can only reiterate our plea to colleagues across the disciplines to not only keep us posted regarding forthcoming and newly published works, but to agree to publish their reviews here. in addition, we have three reports of conferences held, respectively, at the american university of beirut (two of the events) and the marco institute for medieval and renaissance studies at the university of tennessee (knoxville). as we continue to develop the journal a new milestone has been reached this year: al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā will continue its life online but also becomes available in print, through a print-on-demand option. issues of the new uw from 2015 onwards will be obtainable through our website shortly, while hard copies will be presented at mem’s business meeting in san antonio. we close on two familiar notes. first, we continue to rely on your financial support. letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): iii our journal is online, open access, and peer-reviewed, but it is certainly not free. to cover costs of publication and the work of our part-time managing editor, among other expenses, you provide valuable support by keeping your membership in middle east medievalists up to date. for information on membership and the fund, please proceed to the mem home page at http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ and click on “membership. second, as we noted in a previous issue (uw 24 [2016]), the full run of the journal is available online. we are deeply grateful to professor fred donner (university of chicago) for his assistance in this regard. the full archive can be accessed on our website: http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ volume-index/ letter from the editors sincerely, antoine borrut and matthew s. gordon http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/volume-index/ http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/volume-index/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 249-251 book review those of us intimately involved in the study of fatimid history, as well as others who teach areas of islamic history in which this dynasty played a significant role, have long lamented the lack of a good, substantial one-volume account of that era suitable for use in classroom instruction and also generally available and accessible for anyone interested in the period. among those who have such an interest is, of course, a large world-wide population of ismaili muslims w h o c o n t i n u e t o r e g a r d t h e f a t i m i d caliphs as the divinely chosen imams of their religious tradition. i am quite pleased to announce that finally we have just such a work. for the many times i have offered a course specifically devoted to the fatimids, it has been a challenge to cobble together an adequate set of reading materials, 1. heinz halm, das reich des mahdis: der aufstieg der fatimiden (875-973) (münchen: c.h. beck, 1991); die kalifen von kairo: die fatimiden in ägypten, 973-1074 (münchen: c.h. beck, 2003); kalifen und assassinen: ägypten und der vordere orient zur zeit der ersten kreuzzüge, 1074-1171 (münchen: c.h. beck, 2014). most especially if the only language the students could use was english. heinz halm’s truly monumental three-volume history1 is in itself excellent but only one volume has appeared in english thus far. without german the rest remains, sadly, inaccessible. there exist fine works in french, notably some by th. bianquis, and arabic is reasonably well served, most recently by a. f. sayyid. even in english the situation is not hopeless but until now it has required gathering together many separate items: a few book length works, articles on various topics, genizah studies, and the increasing and quite valuable publications of the ismaili institute in london which has added, over the years, immeasurably to our store of fatimid era ismaili texts in translation. yet others have become available due to the efforts of several michael brett, the fatimid empire. the edinburgh history of the islamic empires (edinburgh, edinburgh university press, 2017), viii+337 pp. isbn 978-07-48-64076-8. price: £20.99. paul e. walker university of chicago (pwalker@uchicago.edu) mailto:pwalker%40uchicago.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 250 • paul e. walker scholars (including tahera qutbuddin, devin stewart, most especially ismail poonawala). encyclopaedia of islam entries are often useful and now updated with the latest in the ei3. soas’s michael brett has all along been a major contributor to fatimid studies with an important book on the rise of the dynasty and its early tenth century phase,2 plus a long stream of articles on various aspects and periods of its existence. until this book appeared i had thought i was keeping up with his many publications. however, i now see from its bibliography how many i had missed. one of the lesser but still important benefits it offers is a list of them. there are several areas where brett’s previous work is essential, among them the role of the berbers and the importance of trans-saharan trade, along with the wider problem of tribal versus urban economies and social organizations. his attempts to explain major economic factors, as in the land granting iqṭāʿ system, with its various medieval recalibrations, is also noteworthy, but these are only those that come immediately to mind. after reading this new book, it would seem that he not only well understands a wide range of issues, problems and puzzles peculiar to the fatimid case, but can often explain them as clearly as anyone might be expected to do and with the highest standards of scholarly investigation. the ismaili dimension of this empire and the concomitant role its daʿwa played, both inside and outside of the domain of its direct rule can, as in many past efforts, prove how difficult it is to adequately 2. michael brett, the rise of the fatimids: the world of the mediterranean and the middle east in the fourth century ce, the medieval mediterranean 30 (leiden: brill, 2000). integrate religion in an ordinary historical account of its political affairs. al-maqrīzī’s key ittiʿāẓ al-ḥunafāʾ, the sole medieval attempt to cover the whole period (both the north african and egyptian phase together) in one work, indicates that he wanted to know much more than he did but that he lacked access to most of ismaili materials that we now have. happily brett appears at home with much, if not most, of the recently uncovered works of the daʿwa. it is true that we owe to farhad daftary and his the ismāʿīlīs, substantial credit for the basic, full account that serves this purpose quite well. but, as his work mainly concerns religious history, putting together both religion and state was often not adequately done. and the ismaili daʿwa, its sectarian appeal and membership, was far wider than the political empire, encompassing as it did nearly the whole of the islamic world, east, west, north and south, with pockets of adherences spread to places far from the north african or egyptian home of the imam-caliph. brett devotes considerable space in this book to the far-flung daʿwa, in some cases exceeding what i would have expected at best, for example with the nizār-mustaʿlī split and the subsequent history of the independent polity founded by ḥasan-i ṣabbāḥ and centered on alamut. for a work that needs to cover well over two and a half centuries and territories as diverse and far apart as the furthest maghrib in the west and central asian khurasan in the east, from northern iran to the yemen and on to india, there are bound to arise more than a few bits and pieces that one could quibble with. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) michael brett’s the fatimid empire • 251 brett’s insistence that al-qāḍī al-nuʿmān’s daʿāʾim al-islām had no successor (p. 66, 68) ignores ibn killis’s later work3 of at least the same size and kind wherein he collected the pronouncements of the fatimid imams of his own time. at one l a t e r p o i n t t h e g o v e r n m e n t a c t u a l l y ordered legal authorities to memorize and refer to it along with the daʿāʾim. al-maqrīzī, centuries later still, possessed a copy. in another example brett would have al-ḥākim’s mother be a melkite christian and implies that her brothers b e c a m e p a t r i a r c h s o f j e r u s a l e m a n d alexandria, missing entirely, it seems, the fact that this melkite family belonged to the caliph’s half-sister’s mother. these patriarchs were sitt al-mulk’s maternal uncles, not al-ḥākim’s; he was not related to them by blood in any way. but here i must quickly add that my few quibbles 3. paul e. walker, “ibn killis,” in encyclopaedia of islam, three, ed. k. fleet, g. krämer, d. matringe, j. nawas, e. rowson. online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_30871 pale by comparison to the many items of information i picked up from this book, interpretations of issues i am now forced to rethink and look at in a new light, terms such as “seveners” i previously thought misleading and obsolete but may have been convinced otherwise, along with many works in the bibliography that ought to be read or reread. throughout, the level of detail is impressive for a volume designed as one of a series on various islamic empires. a great deal of material has been skillfully reduced to a single narrative that seldom leaves anything out. for the expert this book will certainly reward; for the novice it is a trustworthy introduction and more. hopefully it will serve to attract more attention to the fatimids in the wider scholarship on the classical islamic period. there is still much left to investigate. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_30871 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 240-242 book review not so long ago, the notion that the islamic faith (not unlike the jewish) is more a matter of orthopraxy than orthodoxy had attained the stature of a bromide. in recent years that view has begun to face substantial challenges. it has been for too long a given, even among educated muslims, that muslims “don’t do theology,” but that characterization is arguably no more applicable to “all” muslims than it is to “all” christians. the amply proportioned oxford handbook of islamic theology offers a virtually encyclopedic overview of solid evidence for the overdue demise of such misperceptions. editor sabine schmidtke’s densely packed “introduction” maps out the broad terrain of the volume with admirable concision and clarity. defining “theology” in a gratifyingly expansive way, thereby including a rich plurality of perspectives, the collection does the great service of portraying this large, complex intellectual tradition in all its rich diversity. overall, virtually every important theme and m e t h o d o l o g y w i t h c l e a r t h e o l o g i c a l resonance merits consideration from one or more points of view and/or in multiple historical-geographic contexts, w i t h w e l c o m e a c k n o w l e d g m e n t o f inter-abrahamic theological concerns as well. contributors from across two full generations include specialists in a remarkable array of related topics. in the market niche of one-volume reference tools in islamic religious studies, the nearest approximation of the present h a n d b o o k i s c a m b r i d g e u n i v e r s i t y ’ s companion to islamic theology. but the two are about as different in structure and coverage as one might imagine. at just under half the size of the oxford volume, the cambridge companion divides its fifteen entries into five “historical perspectives”—qurʾan and early creedal formulation, falsafa, “developed” kalām, and the “social construction of orthodoxy— and ten thematic essays dealing with god’s essence and attributes, divine existence, creation, revelation, ethics, religious law sabine schmidtke, ed., the oxford handbook of islamic theology (oxford: oxford university press, 2016), 815 pp. isbn 978-0-19-969670-3. price: $175 (cloth). john renard saint louis university (renardgj@slu.edu) mailto:renardgj%40slu.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 241 • john renard and theology, worship, epistemology, e s c h a t o l o g y , a n d s u f i s m . o x f o r d ’ s handbook, by contrast, organizes its 41 essays in a set of three historical categories (formative/early medieval, later medieval/ early modern, and end of early modern/ modern), punctuated by two sets of four case-studies each that explore a variety of themes (such as occasionalism, ethics, and logic) and historical phenomena (such as two islamic variations on the theme of ‘inquisition,’ and other theological implications of administrative policy). the historical sweep and inclusiveness of the handbook is remarkable, as is the range of thematic and institutional coverage. a n e s p e c i a l l y w e l c o m e a s p e c t o f the volume’s historical coverage is the organic treatment of major schools, from their precursors to their more “formal” foundational origins, through their survival and continuations across the centuries. a cluster of substantial discussions of early-medieval developments (chs. 12, 13, 21, 22) anchor the ashʿarite school’s story historically. another four chapters (28–31) provide excellent overviews of the later medieval and early modern history of ashʿarism. in addition, portions of still more chapters (e.g., 23, 25, 39) offer further detail on major themes and figures. on an initial cursory glance at the table of contents, one might get the impression that the ashʿarite wing got the lion’s share of coverage among major schools, perhaps at the expense of its too-little studied and under-appreciated opposite number, the māturīdīya. fortunately, the contributors of several regional studies in which the māturīdīya has been a major presence balance things off nicely. though the name may be absent in the titles, apart from an excellent broader overview in relation to the ḥanafī madhhab (ch. 17), the māturīdī tradition’s role and impact in regions such as central and south asia under several major dynasties, and in its far-flung partnering with the ḥanafī madhhab, is well accounted for. one entry—a “case study” (ch. 39) describing the generally i r e n i c i n t e r a c t i o n o f a s h ʿ a r i s m a n d m ā t u r ī d i s m u n d e r b o t h m a m l u k a n d ottoman rule, is particularly helpful, given the methodological similarities of the two schools. here a brief summary listing of points of agreement/disagreement o n m a j o r t h e m e s w o u l d h a v e b e e n pedagogically useful. index entries on both “schools” and their eponyms suggest roughly equal attention in all, though major individual intellectual descendants of ashʿarī figures (bāqillānī, juwaynī, g h a z ā l ī , i n p a r t i c u l a r ) r e c e i v e m o r e explicit coverage than their lesser known māturīdī counterparts, with pazdāwī (d. 1100) a notable exception in this regard. m u ʿ t a z i l i s m m e r i t s a b r e a d t h o f coverage roughly equal to that of the ashʿarīya. three full chapters (chs. 7–9) e x p l o r e m u ʿ t a z i l i s m ’ s o r i g i n s , e a r l y major figures, and “scholastic phase.” two additional chapters (10–11) follow up with specific attention to the school’s considerable influence on both zaydī and twelver shīʿī thought. all or significant portions of at least five studies (chs. 22, 23, 25, 36, and 40) explore further aspects of the history of muʿtazilism, including its impact on several modern thinkers. b y c o n t r a s t , “ t r a d i t i o n a l i s t ” ( e s p . ḥanbalī) thought receives noticeably less explicit attention than one might expect, with only one (albeit very substantial) dedicated chapter (35). further detail on the ḥanbalī persuasion appears in discussions of the muʿtazilī “inquisition” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) sabine schmidtke, ed., the oxford handbook of islamic theology • 242 (ch. 36) and of major twelfth-century ḥanbalī theologians (ch. 37). as a contribution to broadening the interested reader’s further education in matters theological—including here even the occasional jaded islamicist—the rich collective coverage of ashʿarī, māturīdī, muʿtazilī, and (though to a significantly lesser degree) ḥanbalī thought and history is perhaps the volume’s single greatest achievement. in addition to treatments of these four most widely influential theological collectives, the volume’s inclusion of lesser-known individuals and “religiotheological strands” (schmidtke, 16) of thought is noteworthy. these include most prominently pioneers of systematic thinking (kalām) and “strands of thought” that were precursors of developments that would gain much broader influence in subsequent centuries, especially the qadarīya, jahmīya, early shīʿī thought (chs. 1–4), connections to late ancient christian theology (5), ismāʿīlī and sufi theologies (19, 20) and a variety of theologically marginal approaches including the likes of the “free-thinkers.” other such strands include also less influential stand-alones s u c h a s e a r l y i b ā ḍ ī o f f s h o o t o f t h e khawārij and the early medieval persian karrāmīya (chs. 14, 15), the latter related in interesting ways to the jahmīya and solā fidē “murjiʾa” (postponers). particularly gratifying for readers who wonder whether vestiges of genuine islamic theology have managed to escape medieval captivity and made themselves evident in more recent times, the final two chapters (40, 41) offer brief but judicious a s s e s s m e n t s o f a n u m b e r o f m a j o r twentieth-century thinkers from a variety of ethnic and cultural settings. among the more intriguing are the egyptian naṣr ḥāmid abū zayd and the iranian ʿabd al-karīm surūsh. as for ancillary devices, the combined b i b l i o g r a p h i c e n t r i e s a p p e n d e d t o each essay add up to an enormously rich sampling of major scholarship on theological history and themes, and the 24-page index is adequate to its primary task. should the volume ever appear in a paperback edition, the addition of a global timeline and glossary of technical terms would markedly enhance its pedagogical utility. in its current configuration, the handbook is a most welcome contribution to broadening the theological literacy of specialists in islamic studies more g e n e r a l l y a n d c o m p a r a t i v e r e l i g i o u s studies alike. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 309-314 book review in o n e o f h i s m a n y i n d i s p e n s a b l e observations about the development of premodern arabic poetry’s genres a n d t h e m e s , a d a m t a l i b s t a t e s t h a t l i t t e r a t e u r s “ d o c u m e n t e d , p a r o d i e d , celebrated, repurposed, and recast [...] t r o p e s c o n s t a n t l y o v e r m o r e t h a n a millennium and every literary sophisticate was expected to have a comprehensive knowledge of these tropes” (p. 77). and so, i hope it will be taken as a mark of formal knowledge and not of unoriginality when i begin this review by saying that talib has given the field an important volume in how do you say “epigram” in arabic? literary history at the limits of comparison. in the book, he shows that from approximately the seventh/thirteenth century onward, short and pithily written poems called maqāṭīʿ constituted a genre of poetry that had significant commonalities with t h e e p i g r a m — a f o r m o f s h o r t p o e m frequently associated with displays of arch wit or keen observation. talib makes his case by presenting extensive paratextual a n d p o e t i c e v i d e n c e . m a q ā ṭ ī ʿ p o e m s were not explicitly discussed as a genre by premodern literary critics. rather, their coherence as a genre is derivable, according to talib, from a set of readily observable factors: in a significant number of anthologies from the period under c o n s i d e r a t i o n , s e c t i o n s d e d i c a t e d t o maqāṭīʿ by name abound, and the poems within them all share certain qualities. in addition to being short (many of two lines, some of three, and still fewer of four and up), they tend to focus on a single theme— though the theme may vary wildly, as discussed below. many also end with a pointed finale that engages in double entendre (tawriya), a shared reference, or what we might call an inside joke. the book is divided into two large sections. the first part, “on wholeness,” consists of two chapters and presents textual evidence to argue for the status of the maqṭūʿ (or maqṭūʿa, pl. maqāṭīʿ) as a poetic genre of which authors and critics were widely conscious by the seventh/ adam talib, how do you say “epigram” in arabic? literary history at the limits of comparison. brill studies in middle eastern literatures, 40 (leiden: brill, 2017), 362 pp. isbn 978-90-04-34996-4. price: €129/$149. rachel schine university of colorado, boulder (rachel.schine@colorado.edu) mailto:rachel.schine%40colorado.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 310 • rachel schine thirteenth century, and through the collection of which they performed specific artistic functions. the second part, “arabic poetry, greek terminology,” is divided into three further chapters, and it queries, with maqāṭīʿ in mind, how the term epigram has been used in western studies of literature around the globe. in particular, it discusses how the understanding of epigrams has been animated by a few major political and scholarly trends: the privileging of greco-roman “classics” (in which the epigram has been defined historically by such figures as catullus and martial), the stacked divide between the study of qaṣīda and qiṭaʿ compositions in arabic, and even racial theories about the lack of rationality and unity in eastern thought. in light of all this, talib asks, can we (or should we) use the term “epigram” to describe maqāṭīʿ? after all, how do you say epigram in arabic? ultimately, talib walks us through the stakes of this question not to simply give us an answer. rather, he makes the case for the usefulness of drawing comparisons between different genres and genre hermeneutics while underscoring the perils of doing so without a firm grounding in textual evidence, historical context, and legacies of interpretation. talib’s preamble to the monograph o u t l i n e s t h r e e “ a p o r i a s ” — s e e m i n g l y contradictory statements that are all nonetheless valid—concerning poetry a n d i t s c l a s s i f i c a t i o n . e a c h o f t h e s e aporias contains kernels of truth that follow the reader throughout the book. in one aporia, talib explains that arabic poetry simultaneously has strict rules o f f o r m a n d d e f i e s s t r i c t d e f i n i t i o n according to form. though this may seem contradictory, he reminds us that arabic poetry is “formalistically promiscuous.” formal promiscuity is a phrase repeated often throughout the volume, and it is used to mean that any given theme can be rendered in any of the possible meters and rhymes at the poet’s disposal while still being recognizable as located within a particular literary type and tradition. t h e o t h e r t w o a p o r i a s a d d r e s s t h e subjectivity of genre classification among critics and the flexibility of its uses among composers. already in the introduction, the reader is made aware that the name assigned to a given genre can only do so much to illuminate the contents of the works that the genre subsumes. the first chapter, “a bounding line,” then turns to the historical trajectory through which m a q ā ṭ ī ʿ p o e m s c a m e t o p r o m i n e n c e under a formal designation throughout the seventh/thirteenth century. in tables of contents, biographical notices, and standalone collections, authors highlighted their maqāṭīʿ poetry or were accorded recognition for the same. talib amply demonstrates the term’s explicit use to describe poets’ talents and to define their collections, citing, for example, an eighth/ fourteenth-century copy of ibn nubāta al-miṣrī’s al-qaṭr al-nubātī that refers to the poems as maqāṭīʿ in a subtitle. the “formalistic promiscuity” of the maqāṭīʿ is on full display in this chapter, thanks in large part to talib’s translation of the table of contents of ṣafī al-dīn al-ḥillī’s dīwān al-mathālith wa-l-mathānī fī al-maʿālī wa-l-maʿānī; the poems therein range in topic from advice on etiquette to invective and from erotic pieces to riddles, while all being (as the title implies) two or three lines in length. al-ḥillī’s collection is also a prime example of maqāṭīʿ without explicit designation: there is no indication that al-ḥillī ever used the term to describe his al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) adam talib’s how do you say “epigram” in arabic? • 311 collection. therefore, not only did maqāṭīʿ constitute a genre in al-ḥillī’s time, but there was sufficient general awareness of the genre for it to be recognizable without certification (one need not put the word “mystery” in bold type across the cover of an agatha christie novel to know, through readerly intuition, that it is one). talib does, however, identify a pattern of the term’s increased usage throughout the century, saying that “later poets and anthologists were, if anything, more enthusiastic about using the term maqāṭīʿ to describe their work and to situate it within a flourishing genre” (p. 50). indeed, as he argues in the second chapter, it is in a consciously situated, anthologized form that the maqāṭīʿ reach their apogee. in chapter 2, “the sum of its parts,” talib explains that large compendia of maqāṭīʿ began to be produced in the eighth/fourteenth century. most maqāṭīʿ have made their way to us today in this form. talib declares the anthology the place where maqāṭīʿ “come into [their] own” as a genre primarily because anthologists engage in a creative process when they c u r a t e t h e s e s m a l l p o e m s , d r a w i n g them together or dividing them up in accordance with their own interpretations and ambitions. of particular interest in this regard are the gestures that talib makes toward dynamics of literary exchange in this period that foreground the appearance of maqāṭīʿ in these anthologies; several of the poems appear first in correspondence between authors, sometimes in ways that uncannily parallel a modern call for papers. in one instance, a group of aleppan poets compose maqāṭīʿ elegizing a comely young man and then invite their damascene colleagues to do so as well. talib also makes passing mention of the more spontaneous use of maqāṭīʿ both in musical events and in literary salons, or majālis. as he states, many composers of maqāṭīʿ during the mamluk period were in contact with one another, and thus one can speak of a “discernible cluster” of such authors. leading figures included the aforementioned ibn nubāta, al-ṣafadī, ibrāhīm al-miʿmār, and badr al-dīn b. ḥabīb al-ḥalabī, and these individuals are but one part of what seems to have been a far wider, networked field (p. 90). these allusions to patterns of exchange sketch a possible way in which talib’s study could be broadened further to account for the social context of the maqāṭīʿ and their circulation. a key feature of this chapter is talib’s p r e s e n t a t i o n o f a s e r i e s o f a r t f u l l y translated “micro-collections” found in anthologies that span the ninth/fifteenth through twelfth/eighteenth centuries. through these, the reader can gain a sense of the aesthetic and interpretive logic behind the ordering of maqāṭīʿ into an anthology by examining how each piece of poetry fits with its immediate neighbors as well as with the micro-collection as a whole. the micro-collections range from one comprising poems on myrtle berries to one with more than forty poems on sex (this latter collection speaks to an apparently commonplace coincidence, namely, the use of the maqṭūʿ form for writing mujūn, or ribald verse). read together, these poems substantiate talib’s a r g u m e n t t h a t t h e r e i s a s i g n i f i c a n t problem with centering a definition of the maqṭūʿ/epigram on its “pointed” thrust, as has been done in descriptions of epigrams in latin or greek. the poems are densely intertextual throughout, rather than being linked with one another only through a al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 312 • rachel schine common terminal witticism or their single, shared theme; stock phrases, quotations, and puns echo across the different poems from beginning to end. the fact that these often playful discursive features are made so visible in the micro-collections lends credence to talib’s representation of anthologists as carefully “re-casting” maqāṭīʿ in an array that illuminates and entertains through the positioning of each poem in relation to the next. i was struck by the fact that talib barely discusses the poetry’s brevity as a factor in its anthological success and exchangeability. rather, he seeks to define the maqṭūʿ as distinct from other types of short poem in arabic, and this perhaps leads him to gloss over some of the ramifications of their shortness in itself. it would have been interesting to see the genre’s characteristic concision discussed in the context of other works that fall under the more nebulous domain of the qiṭʿa (fragment, short piece) but are not classified as maqāṭīʿ. chapter 3, “epigrams in the world,” moves us from part 1 (“on wholeness”) t o p a r t 2 ( “ a r a b i c p o e t r y , g r e e k terminology”). per the title, talib reviews the use of “epigram” as an orienting term for describing other types of poetry, from its earliest greek forerunners to the japanese tanka and haiku. talib points out that the term “epigram” has itself undergone connotative shifts over time, moving from its original meaning of a brief inscription to that of a brief poetic composition that one would find in a codex, and developing yet further from there. of particular interest in this chapter is the section “epigram goes global,” which takes an incisive look at how thirteenth-/nineteenthand fourteenth-/ twentieth-century european scholars—in this case japanologists—began the trend of applying the term “epigram” to short poetry encountered in other cultures, often with the result that these short poems were regarded not as full-fledged works but as fragmentary and deficient; such conclusions fit all too neatly with then-prevalent views on the inferiority of the “eastern mind.” chapter 4, “hegemonic presumptions and atomic fallout,” shows that arabists have historically hardly been free of similar biases about the faulty nature of non-western verse. it takes aim in particular at the bromide that arabic poetry, from stich to stich, is “atomistic” and discontinuous. talib lays out the arguments both for and against the unity of arabic poetry, as well as those for and against a scholarly search for unity. he applies these discussions to the maqṭūʿ because many scholars ascribe the rise of short poetic works (qiṭaʿ), sometimes referred to as “epigrams,” to the breaking apart of classical arabic poetry’s signature form, the polythematic qaṣīda. this way of thinking privileges the qaṣīda and dooms short poems to being understood as fragmentary, which, talib argues, has slowed the study of short poems in arabic. he does not fully clarify the relationship of this understanding of the qiṭʿa to understandings of the maqṭūʿ, though he hints (p. 199) that a reason he refrains from comparing the qiṭʿa and the maqṭūʿ in detail is that discourse on the qiṭʿa, a broad category, is far more ambiguous and far-ranging than that of the maqṭūʿ, which is just one form of short poem. moreover, rather than wading into theoretical arguments about generic interrelation, talib advocates an “evidence-based” method. his evidence al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) adam talib’s how do you say “epigram” in arabic? • 313 drives the conclusion that using “epigram” for any qiṭʿa regardless of context is a misapplication that hinges on an arbitrary concern with length. because one of the defining features of an epigram is in fact its anthological setting, the term is more appropriate to the maqṭūʿ. even so, talib expresses serious misgivings about putting the greek (or english) before the arabic, as is the current modus operandi of the encyclopaedia of islam’s third edition. rather, the epigram and the maqṭūʿ are “cognate forms,” the different histories and epistemologies of which must be held in mind. in the fifth and final chapter (“epigrams in parallax”), we move from the hazards of “atomic fallout” to the handy notion of “parallax,” or, to paraphrase žižek’s definition as quoted in the text (p. 215), the seeming movement of an object that results from a change in perspective, which provides a novel sightline for v i e w i n g a t h i n g . t a l i b e x p l a i n s t h a t the new realizations brought on by the perspectival shift of parallax are analogous to the discoveries made when navigating between the abstract paradigm of genre and the concrete data provided by a single text. in this vein, he asserts throughout the concluding pages of the book that his use of the term epigram in conversation with maqāṭīʿ offers a relativistic interpretation rather than a prescription. his closing remarks distill a theme that has recurred throughout the book: the anxiety of naming a genre as such and thus isolating it or making it conform to a “worldliterary” term without regard for context. the conclusion is followed by a useful appendix that expands on the source work done in the first chapter, offering a number of paratextual items such as chapter headings, biographical glosses, and introductory remarks that attest to the use of the term maqāṭīʿ to describe various authors’ and anthologists’ bodies of work. finally, talib provides a detailed annotated bibliography of primary sources, featuring numerous unpublished manuscripts. there is much to praise in this book’s approach: the placing of literary evidence front and center, the exploration of “postclassical” works that are rarely given the same attention as, say, ʿabbasid poetry, and the care with which talib asserts the existence of a distinct genre while balancing the essential questions of what a genre is and how we talk about it in the first place. also worthy of highlighting is talib’s frequent use of contemporary arabic-language literary criticism. at times in the first half of the book, further analysis would have better demonstrated how the maqāṭīʿ operate as a genre; in his presentation of the micro-collections, talib largely leaves their close interpretation to the reader. though there is much that might appeal to a wide audience of literary comparativists in the book’s second half, the initial framing renders it most likely to be read by arabists and few others. we find in the conclusion that the starkness of the separation between the volume’s two parts is intentional. the author states: “this, the first history of the maqāṭīʿ-genre, could have been a ‘sterile historical cataloguing,’ and because i know that some may have preferred that, i have tried to inoculate the first half of this study from the ‘political judgment of knowledge effects produced’ that permeates the second half” (p. 221). to prospective readers i will therefore simply say this: you will be worse off for al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 314 • rachel schine not reading and taking to heart the second half; in exemplary fashion, this portion of the book broadens a study of works in a single language into a conversation across several fields, laying bare often invisible aspects of each discipline’s boundaries and tenets. to someone with literary interests outside of arabic wishing to approach the book, i would say: read on; it will be well worth it. mem awards al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): iv-ix i am honored and grateful to be the 2017 recipient of the middle east medieval-ists lifetime achievement award. i will first say a word about the distinguished previous recipients, most of whom i have known for years, not only through their influential and often groundbreaking academic work that has shaped our disciplines —arabic, middle east and islamic studies—as we know them today, but also as friends and colleagues who offered kindness and support over the years. p i e r r e c a c h i a t o o k o v e r a s m y dissertation chair after my marriage to jaroslav stetkevych, and encouraged me to publish one of my early articles, “toward a redefinition of badīʿ poetry” (journal of arabic literature 12, 1981: 3-29). george scanlon invited my husband and me to lunch at his lovely garden city apartment in cairo a couple of weeks after the birth of our first child—most welcome as i was still in shock at new motherhood. jere bacharach, who has known my husband since their harvard days, must have been on the same sabbatical schedule as me as we repeatedly spent time together in cairo over the years, in addition to graciously hosting us while i was the solomon katz distinguished professor at university of washington in the spring of 1999. in cairo, too, i remember us sitting at the gezira club with richard bulliet, now many years back. then of course, there is the university of chicago connection, where i intersected over the years with stephen humphreys, fred donner and wadad al-qadi. i regret that i never met patricia crone, whose work brought so much life to our field but who died so early. in brief, i am honored to be in such company. i am also a bit surprised, partly because i am still laboring under the illusion that i am too young to fall under the remarks by the recipient of the 2017 mem lifetime achievement award given at the annual meeting of middle east medievalists (washington dc, 18 november 2017)* suzanne pinckney stetkevych sultan qaboos bin said professor of arabic & islamic studies, georgetown university (ss3179@georgetown.edu) * this essay is based loosely on my notes for remarks made at the mem members’ meeting held during the mesa conference in washington, dc, in november 2017. mailto:ss3179%40georgetown.edu?subject= v • suzanne pinckney stetkevych al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) “lifetime achievement” rubric and partly because i have so many projects i still hope to complete. a glance in the mirror belies the first misconception. as for the second, i can only hope that my current much anticipated—at least by me—magnum opus on abū al-ʿalā’s al-maʿarrī’s poetry will not meet the fate of becoming an opus posthumous. middle east medievalists has asked me to take this occasion to give a brief retrospective on my academic career. as i am a person who looks forward more than back, it has been a useful if somewhat s t r e s s f u l e x e r c i s e . a l t h o u g h i h a v e recently been exploring the post-modern arabic prose poem (qaṣīdat al-nathr), i have thought it better on this occasion to attempt to impose some narrative c o h e r e n c e o n m y s o m e w h a t c h a o t i c a c a d e m i c c a r e e r — a l t h o u g h t h a t m a y ultimately prove to be a fictional exercise. i entered the field of middle east studies almost entirely by accident when, as an art history major at wellesley college, i had to fill in an elective course my junior year, and introduction to islam fit the available time slot. that led, however, to a course in arab history; and when taking my senior year at johns hopkins university, to the study of the arabic language and the writing of my senior thesis on arab maqāmāt illustrations. intrigued by this, to me, new world and civilization, i applied to graduate school with the idea—and a rather convincing application essay—of studying the modernization of islamic law. i chose the nelc department at the university of chicago on the strength of its arabic program, and settled into what we would now term an orientalist course of study, of languages—arabic, persian and syriac (and a bit of additional greek and latin)—and the close reading of texts in a variety of fields, or what we would now call disciplines (history, theology, qurʾān, kalām, philosophy, sufism, literature, but never, however, law!). when it came time to think of a more focused field, i thought first of cultural history. however, when studying history texts with wilferd madelung we came across a couple lines of poetry. i dutifully looked up the words i didn’t know and translated the lines— completely wrong as prof. madelung informed me. and that was the reason i decided i’d better study classical poetry in graduate school, because i couldn’t read it on my own. the rest is (literary) history. t h e g r e a t e s t a d v a n t a g e o f t h e university of chicago approach was that it covered a variety of disciplines and focused on the mastery of close reading of original texts. this was before the advent of the age of literary criticism and the age of “disciplines.” it is not accidental then that one of my most important critical breakthroughs was in the linking of the high rhetorical badīʿ poetry of the abbasid age to ʿilm al-kalām, a science whose abstract thinking was expressed in terms remarkably similar to the “far-fetched” metaphors of badīʿ poetry at the caliphal courts. nor is it merely coincidental that one of my earliest publications—which still manages to get hits on academia.edu— was “the ʿabbāsid poet interprets history: three qaṣīdahs by abū tammām” (journal of arabic literature 10, 1979: 49-65). that early article set the stage for much of my subsequent work, particularly in exploring the means by which poets and poetic conventions created cultural memory of historical events, transforming them into perduring hegemonic myths of what i later termed “islamic manifest al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) remarks by the recipient of the 2017 mem lifetime achievement award • vi destiny,” that is, a teleological ideology of history along the lines of the 19th century us expansionist idea. this formed the groundwork of my dissertation (1981), which i subsequently developed into my first book, abū tammām and the poetics of the ʿabbāsid age (brill, 1991). by the time i obtained my ph.d., the age of theory was upon us and with it the move to abandon the broad textand languagebased orientalist studies for a particular discipline. for me, that was arabic poetry, clearly text-based and grounded in a variety of islamic and middle east studies fields, but now engaging as well a wide range of exhilarating ideas, from linguistics to literary theory, from structuralism to ritual theory, that held the promise of bringing classical arabic poetry out of the orientalist closet and engaging and integrating it into a broader humanistic enterprise. my first big step was both backwards and forwards. backwards, in that i wanted t o u n d e r s t a n d t h e p r e i s l a m i c r o o t s and origins of the 1500-year tradition of the arabic qaṣida, and forward, in that i wanted to engage current anthropology and religious studies-based theories of ritual to explain why a particular poetic form—seemingly arbitrary and distinctly non-narrative—could dominate a literary culture for so many centuries. to me, ritual, with its tradition-rooted repetition of formal structures and symbolic sequences, l a d e n w i t h i n e x p l i c i t b u t p r o f o u n d meaning and capable of producing spiritual and social transformations while still serving as a bulwark of the social structure, seemed an obvious place to look. i began with victor turner’s and mary douglas’s revival of van gennep’s rites of passage, and proceeded with mauss’s formulation of ritual exchange, as the foundation for my subsequent work, including my book the mute immortals speak: pre-islamic poetry and the poetics of ritual (cornell up 1993) and article “pre-islamic panegyric and the poetics of redemption: mufaḍḍaliyyah 119 of ʿalqamah and bānat suʿād of kaʿb ibn zuhayr” (in reorientations/arabic and persian poetry, ed. by suzanne pinckney stetkevych, indiana up, 1994, 1-49). i n t h e c o u r s e o f t h e s e w o r k s i incorporated as well work in the field of orality and literacy studies, especially that of walter ong and james monroe, to integrate the formal structure of the arabic qaṣida into a scheme of oralformulaic poetics and to conceptualize the effect of literacy on the abstracted rhetorical expressions of the abbasid period. further, i was able to dispense with the textual isolation—quarantine—that the structuralists had imposed on the qaṣida to examine poetry within a tribal or court social structure, and within a historical and cultural setting. i except from this general critique of structuralism in arabic poetry, the fine and influential study of stefan sperl. my engagement with the ritual aspects of arabic poetry left me perfectly poised to absorb and apply the work that appeared in fields as diverse as the classics, folklore, linguistics and literary theory on rituals of royalty and court ceremony, together with performance and performative (speech act) theory. this allowed me to deepen my understanding of the qaṣida and further integrate it into its political and cultural environment, particularly as that setting is presented in the literary akhbār, anecdotes or notices, that accompany so many poems in the classical arabic literary compendia. these texts not only evaluate the poem vii • suzanne pinckney stetkevych al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) in terms of verbal art and performative success, but also show the poet pledging— o r r e t r a c t i n g — h i s a l l e g i a n c e , a n d negotiating for rank and status in complex religious and political settings. above all, the awareness of this exceedingly delicate political role or negotiation that the qaṣida performed alerts us to fine points of imagery, rhetoric, metaphor, etc. that had otherwise been overlooked. the further exploration of the qaṣida in this light led to my book, the poetics of islamic legitimacy: myth, gender and ceremony in the classical arabic ode (indiana up, 2002), whose chapters range from the pre-islamic royal ode to the cordoban court panegyric of al-andalus. then things got out of control. some colleagues suggested that since i had written on the first ode to be given the sobriquet of “mantle ode” (qaṣīdat al-burdah), that is, kaʿb ibn zuhayr’s renowned bānat suʿād poem of apology to the prophet muḥammad, that i should also write about the even more renowned qaṣīdat al-burdah of al-būṣīrī, the 13th century master-poem of prophetic praise (madīḥ nabawī) from mamlūk egypt. why not? i thought, it’s only one poem. little did i know that this poem is the centerpiece of an entire world of postclassical devotional poetry. then, too, the same well-meaning colleagues insisted that if i were to write about al-būṣīrī’s burdah, then i had to write about the neo-classical poet aḥmad shawqī’s (d. 1932) anticolonial response to it, nahj al-burdah, famed throughout the arab world to this day through its performance—you can find it on youtube—by umm kulthoum. of course, i am a believer in life-long learning, but what was supposed to be couple of one-off articles on a couple of poems turned into a book-length study on the three center-pieces of islamic devotional poetry—the two burdahs of kaʿb and al-būṣīrī and nahj al-burdah of aḥmad shawqī--and a plunge into the poetics and politics of the post-classical and colonial periods. my book, the mantle odes: arabic praise poems to the prophet muḥammad (indiana up 2010) is the result of these endeavors. far from being a dead end, however, this has led me to study some of the multitude of poetic offspring of al-būṣīrī’s burdah, such as the 14th c. al-fayyūmī’s takhmīs al-burdah (a poetic amplification in which a new poet adds his own lines to incorporate the original) and the 14th c. ṣafī al-dīn al-ḥillī’s badīʿiyyah (an imitation of al-būṣīrī in which each line exemplifies a particular rhetorical device). so, by some strange providence—or curse—my earliest work on the first badīʿ rhetoric in the abbasid poet abū tammām has led to the badīʿiyyah of the post-classical age and to my reformulation or recontextualization of rhetoric in both the high abbasid classical court qaṣida and the post-classical praise poem to the prophet. as i see it, in the abbasid period, the rhetorically dense and complex badīʿ style served as the linguistic correlative or verbal embodiment of divinely ordained caliphal power and was therefore de rigueur in court panegyric. given its status as the most elevated form of language ( o t h e r t h a n t h e q u r ʾ ā n , o f c o u r s e ) this rhetorical ornateness, which was then buttressed by the classical arabic rhetorical formulations of iʿjāz al-qurʾān, became equally compulsory in medieval poems of prophetic praise. the prophet deserved a level of language at least equal to that for a caliph! al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) remarks by the recipient of the 2017 mem lifetime achievement award • viii h a v i n g m a d e w h a t c o n t r i b u t i o n s i could to the newly flourishing field o f p o s t c l a s s i c a l / p r e m o d e r n a r a b i c l i t e r a t u r e , m y c u r r e n t p r o j e c t i s t o return to where i belong—the abbasid qaṣida. i am now grappling with the poetic works of the blind syrian acerbic ascetic abū al-ʿalāʾ al-maʿarrī (d. 1059). while his first collection, saqṭ al-zand (sparks of the flint), is what i would call somewhat hybrid forms of the high abbasid qaṣida, his second collection, the celebrated luzūmiyyāt (compulsories) is a programmatic alphabetically ordered collection of double-rhymed poems in every rhyme consonant of the arabic alphabet and with every vowel, plus sukūn, ending. the argument that i hope to present is that in the transition from his worldly performative saqṭ al-zand poems to his ascetic programmatic luzūmiyyāt we can s ee the transformation from classical to post-classical arabic aesthetics. should i survive that trial, i will follow al-maʿarrī’s obsession with rhyme, to return to the roots of arabic poetry in the jāhiliyyah, in an attempt to understand how the mono-rhyme and monometer serve both compositionally and mnemonically to shape the arabic qaṣida. for example, the monorhyme at once limits the length of the poem, but also—especially when we include the vowel patterns that are part of the consonantal rhyme—bestows a unique sonority that both defines and preserves the poem in an oral-formulaic setting. this should bring us full circle in the issue of poetry and history. as i know that most mem members are historians, i am aware that we are all grappling with issues of the authenticity and historicity of materials—particularly vexing in the early arab-islamic period. poetic texts are doubly problematic: first, as poetry, they are eminently non-narrative and what is expressed is conveyed through allusion, metaphor, simile and in the context of a performative and ritual negotiation. the poet does not record events, rather he transforms them into the material of negotiation and cultural myth. the “t ext s ” of early arabic p oem s ( u ntil sometime in the umayyad period), as we now know, were largely oral-formulaic in composition and, for the most part, orally transmitted, until the tadwīn-project of the 8th-9th century linguists. however— and this is key—what we know now of the mnemonics of oral poetry, and of the even more stringent case of arabic poetry with its mono-rhyme and monometer (as opposed to mere parallelism, or meter but no rhyme, or varying rhyme) is that the poetic materials we possess from the pre-and early islamic periods should be more stable, and therefore more authentic, than the prose narratives that have come down to us. [by this i mean the “high” qaṣīd poetry, not the more common-place and eminently imitable rajaz-type poetry such as we find in al-sīrah al-nabawiyyah.] so, we may have a body of material that is authentic, but, nevertheless, does not say what it means—or rather, does not provide the information that historians are looking for—or at least, not in the form we are looking for. w h a t t h e n r e m a i n s b e f o r e u s , concerning the problematics of poetry and history, is to ascertain what poetry aims to do and then see if it can answer any of our historical questions. it is not meant to record names and dates and battle descriptions, rather, at least as i now see it through my work, it is a key part of a performative ritual that negotiates issues ix • suzanne pinckney stetkevych al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) of legitimacy, status and allegiance. in this regard, it is ripe for further exploration as we deal with political, religious and cultural history. i f t h i s p r e s e n t a t i o n h a s s e e m e d altogether too solipsistic, it is because it would take far too long to name all the teachers, colleagues, students and friends, not to mention scholars and poets, whose dedication to scholarship and poetry and whose kindness and generosity to me has made my work possible. my greatest hope is that the new generation will find something in my work to inspire them to continue in the exploration and explication of arabic poetry and arab-islamic cultural history. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 640-643 book review prima facie, one may wonder what new information a book on the kaʿba adds to the current bibliography on the topic. cubic in shape and covered with a black silk cloth (kiswa), the kaʿba is perhaps the most famous building of islam. most students in middle eastern studies or curious readers are generally familiar with the kaʿba’s minimalist aesthetic. this singular characteristic, however, has generally received little attention in architectural scholarship and has in fact been met with a certain disinterest. distinguished scholars such as richard ettinghausen and oleg grabar concluded in their groundbreaking book on islamic art and architecture that the kaʿba “was not too impressive as an architectural creation.”1 in their revised edition from 2001, they 1. oleg grabar and richard ettinghausen, islamic art and architecture 650–1250 (new haven, ct: yale university press, 1987), 18. 2. oleg grabar, richard ettinghausen and marilyn jenkins-madina, islamic art and architecture 650–1250 (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2001), 3. bluntly stated that the kaʿba “lacked in architecture quality.”2 by shedding new light on the topic and bringing fresh ways of thinking about it, simon o’meara reassesses ettinghausen and grabar’s view of the kaʿba and more broadly redefines the way to conceptualize the building. the kaʿba should not be reduced to its architectural aspect. such is the author’s initial premise. the disinterested aesthetic view of the kaʿba, in o’meara’s words, is the outcome of divorcing aesthetic experience from religious experience (p. 159). in other words, the aesthetic value of the kaʿba depends on what purposes it serves and what symbols it represents. to address these issues, the author pursues an original approach that consists first and foremost in looking at the literature simon o’meara. the kaʿba orientations: readings in islam’s ancient house (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020). isbn 978-0748699308. 253 pp. £ 95.00 cloth. kader smail university of maryland, college park (ksmail@terpmail.umd.edu) © 2022 kader smail. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 641 • kader smail generated by the kaʿba, as an object of thought, in order to comprehend the m e a n i n g s a n d f u n c t i o n s a s s i g n e d t o the building. this abundant and varied literature, both in arabic and persian, constitutes a large chunk of the forty-one pages of o’meara’s bibliography, which is quite remarkable. covering a broad range of written and visual sources, the author carefully examines historical and geographical material, as well as mystical and cosmological sources, among others. from this literature, o’meara lays out six key themes that are the core framework of his book. the six chapters touch on four aspects of the kaʿba. these include the ritual aspects of the building (chapter one), the symbolic ones (chapters two, three and four), the structure’s interior and its significance (chapter five), and finally the function of the kaʿba’s covering (chapter six). o’meara synthetizes the deep classical thought of authors such as al-ghazālī (d. 505/1111) and ibn ʿarabī (d. 638/1240), notably in chapter four, which partly revolves around the notion of circumambulation (al-ṭawāf). thematically, the author covers artistic, historical, and religious issues and gives all three of them equal weight. this eclecticism certainly enriches the book, but also gives somehow the impression that the reasoning remains incomplete. indeed, the most compelling findings have more to do with religious aspects than historical ones. regarding the religious aspects, it may be useful to examine two of the most salient points of the book. in the first chapter, o’meara deals with the notion of qibla and its implications. the author points out that if mosques are generally aligned with the qibla because of the requirement to pray towards the kaʿba, there is no justification in the islamic tradition for urban settlements to be similarly oriented. several studies on early islamic urban settlements have nonetheless shown networks of streets built on an orthogonal plan and sometimes even aligned with the qibla (pp. 30–38). while these elements were often viewed as coincidences, o’meara notes that similar phenomena were observed in later islamic urban foundations such as al-rāfiqa (syria), al-iṣṭablāt (iraq), fatimid cairo (egypt), taza (morocco), touba (senegal), and khiva (uzbekistan). though it is difficult at this stage to assess the spread of this practice, its antiquity obviously implies an early cultic importance of mecca expressed not only in mosque orientation, but also in the foundation of the first cities of islam. the second salient point of the book emerges from the third chapter, entitled “the kaʿba as substructure,” which is probably the most innovative of the book. the author sheds light on an apparent paradox of the kaʿba in which episodes of destruction and profanation are recorded in primary sources without appearing to provoke any sort of grief and trauma among the chroniclers who reported them. to that, one must add the few ḥadīths attributed to the prophet that predict the apocalypse commencing with the kaʿba’s destruction. how then, the author asks, did such events not provoke similar reactions to those of the jews to the two destructions of the temple? o’meara presents evidence that runs contrary to a common idea, namely that the kaʿba’s sacrality (ḥurma) is not located in its shape or walls, but rather in its unearthly form, which is said in a couple of ḥadīths to have preceded its earthly form and never to have changed al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) simon o’meara’s the kaʿba orientations • 642 (pp. 69–72). elaborating upon the common heritage of this idea among muslims, sufi scholars developed a conceptual framework in which the material kaʿba in mecca is primarily perceived as the physical manifestation of the immaterial kaʿba in human hearts, both of which are viewed as receptacles of god’s presence. this dichotomy between the material and immaterial is merely the reformulation of the duality ẓāhir-bāṭin (apparent-hidden), which is particularly important in shiʿism. turning now to the history of the kaʿba, the author explores in the introduction whether early islamic sources are reliable or not when it comes to describing the origins of islam in general and the kaʿba in particular. this raises a few problems. without explicitly taking a stand on these debates, o’meara argues that the persian traveler nāṣir-i khusraw (d. ca. 481/1088) c o m p o s e d t h e f i r s t i n c o n t e s t a b l y eyewitness account of the kaʿba (pp. 8–11). the author is quite right to remind readers of the problem of sources for the study of early islam. many chroniclers who wrote on the first centuries of islam lived well outside of arabia, mostly in iraq, which raises questions about their firsthand knowledge of the kaʿba. nonetheless, a reasonable number of accounts on the kaʿba before the fifth/eleventh century provide a relatively good picture of the building. indeed, while the author seems familiar with the meccan chronic ler abū al-walīd muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh 3. ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, al-iṣāba fī tamyīz al-ṣaḥāba, ed. ʿādil aḥmad ʿabd al-mawjūd & ʿalī muḥammad muʿawwaḍ (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1995), 1:199, no. 80 (al-azraq b. ʿ uqba). see also in the same volume, the notice of al-azraq’s master: ibid., 687–88, no. 1480 (al-ḥārith b. kalada). 4. the measurements listed by al-azraqī are the followings (length x width x height): abraham (30x22x9 cubits), quraysh (24x22x18), ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr (30x22x27 cubits), ʿabd al-malik b. marwān (24x22x27 cubits). see abū al-walīd muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh al-azraqī, akhbār makka, ed. ʿabd al-malik b. duhaysh (mecca: maktabat al-asadī, 2012), 1:403. al-azraqī (d. 250/864), it is surprising that he does not rely upon him for the history of the building. al-azraqī belonged to a long-time meccan family whose ancestors had secured marriage alliances with the umayyads since the conversion of their eponymous ancestor, al-azraq b. ʿuqba, at the battle of ṭāʾif in the year 8/630.3 in addition to relying upon earlier meccan sources such as his grand-father aḥmad (d. 223/837), al-azraqī actually acts as a firsthand witness of what he recounts. consider two examples to illustrate this point. in a chapter entitled “report on what the interior and exterior measures of the kaʿba were [before] they became what they are today (mā huwā ʿalayhi l-yawm),” a l a z r a q ī r e c o r d s t h e c h a n g e s t h a t occurred inside and outside the building. t h e m e c c a n c h r o n i c l e r p r o v i d e s t h e dimensions of the kaʿba during the eras of abraham, the quraysh shortly before islam, ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr (r. 64–73/683– 692), and ʿabd al-malik b. marwān (r. 66–86/685–705).4 when al-azraqī wrote his chronicle, the building size had supposedly not changed since ʿabd al-malik b. marwān rebuilt the kaʿba. these measurements are given in detail as well as descriptions of the exterior and interior decorations. although there are legitimate grounds for questioning the value of historical information dating back to a century or more before al-azraqī lived, one can hardly dismiss out of hand his testimony on the measurements of the kaʿba during al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 643 • kader smail his lifetime. therefore, one can reasonably look at al-azraqī’s description of the kaʿba in the third century of islam as reliable. in the same vein, the meccan chronicler also reports that the first caliph who adorned the building was al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 86–96/705–715). a century later, the gold on the two doors of the kaʿba plated by al-walīd got thin and cracked (raqqā wa-tafarraqa). during the short reign of muḥammad b. hārūn, nicknamed al-amīn (r. 193–198/809–813), the abbasid caliph undertook a full renovation of the doors and sent 18,000 dīnārs to sālim b. al-jarrāḥ, the one in charge of meccan ṣawāfī, or crown land, to add to the plated gold already on the doors. again, it would be problematic to endorse al-azraqī’s claim about al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik without additional research. however, al-azraqī was a contemporary of the caliph al-amīn and thus of the renovation he describes. his observation that the two doors were 5. ibid., 307. still in the same condition (wa-humā ʿalā ḥālihima) was presumably accurate when he wrote his chronicle.5 to conclude, simon o’meara’s book i s i n n o v a t i v e i n i t s a p p r o a c h . t h e artistic value of the kaʿba lies in its f u n c t i o n , w h i c h i s t o b e u n d e r s t o o d i n t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l o u t p u t g e n e r a t e d throughout the centuries. in this regard, the work undertaken by the author is to be welcomed. by contrast, the historical survey of the building produces a mixed bag of results, which tend to reinforce the idea that it is impossible to write a history of the kaʿba in the first centuries of islam. however, our knowledge of the kaʿba is certainly strengthened and developed by the present study, particularly in terms of the religious meanings of the building. lying at the intersection of several fields, o’meara’s book will also enrich further discussions on the relationship between art, history, and religion. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 267-272 conference report held at the american university of beirut over two intense days and sponsored by the sheikh zayed bin sultan al-nahyan chair for islamic and arabic studies (marking one hundred years since the birth of sheikh zayed), this conference was organized by bilal orfali (professor of arabic and islamic studies and chair of the department of arabic and near eastern languages at aub), mohammed rustom (associate professor of islamic studies at carleton university and library of arabic literature senior fellow at nyu abu dhabi), and radwan sayyid (visiting professor and current sheikh zayed bin sultan al-nahyan chair for islamic and arabic studies). t h e c o n f e r e n c e w a s d e d i c a t e d t o exploring the relationship between islamic ethics and islamic mysticism, usually known as sufism—though the debate as to whether “mysticism” is equivalent to “sufism” or to the arabic taṣawwuf remains open. it brought together well known scholars in the field from around the world. the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, nadia el cheikh, opened the conference along with the organizers, reminding the audience of the history of scholarship in islamic studies at the american university of beirut that has been enabled by the creation of the sheikh zayed chair in 1972. bilal orfali stressed the importance of encouraging research on and around islamic mysticism, or taṣawwuf, and especially on its relevance to islamic ethics, a subfield that remains understudied to this day. one of the goals of this conference was to challenge the widely held idea that ethics in islam and islamic civilization are mainly inherited from previous or neighboring civilizations, w i t h o u t a n y n o t a b l e i n d i g e n o u s contribution. radwan sayyid considered the conference a first answer to last year’s conference “towards a reconstruction of islamic studies,” also held at the american university of beirut, while mohammed mysticism and ethics in islam (american university of beirut, 2–3 may 2019) conference organizers: bilal orfali, mohammed rustom, and radwan sayyid report by: louise gallorini american university of beirut (lcg01@mail.aub.edu) a l-ʿ u ṣū r al -w us ṭā c re at iv e c om m on s mailto:lcg01%40mail.aub.edu?subject= 268 • louise gallorini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) rustom provided the audience with an overview of the conference’s themes and panels. the conference program consisted of seven panels and a keynote address delivered by jamal elias of the university of pennsylvania, who presented a scholarly discussion on an ottoman author’s reading of rūmī’s mathnawī. may 2, 2019 panels 1 and 2: defining boundaries the first two panels, chaired, respect i v e l y, b y r a m z i b a a l b a k i ( a m e r i c a n university of beirut) and atif khalil (university of lethbridge), opened the conference bilingually, as the first panel’s speakers presented in arabic and the second panel’s in english. suad al-hakim (lebanese university) presented a paper entitled “ethics in sufism: between the refinement of the soul and the refinement of behavior,” based on the works of three sufi personalities: al-qaṣṣāb (ninth century ce), al-jarīrī (d. 923), and al-kittānī (d. 933). the paper amounted to a reflection on the idea of ethics as public performance and not only as a set of internal qualities. chafika ouail (orient institute beirut) presented “the ordering of knowledge to (re)produce ethical concepts in sufism,” tracing the gradual transformation of ethical values from communally inherited concepts to ontological ideas that bear different meanings and practices from their original forms. the paper als o explored the varying social repercussions of such values and their production and practice between the personal and the communal and in relationship with their evolving sociohistorical context. the paper of issam eido (vanderbilt university), read by bilal orfali, was titled “shades and hues of sufis and the concept of ethics in sufi literature,” and it explored and analyzed the two basic sufi concepts of “station” (maqām) and “state” (ḥāl) within the nuances of the ideas of fixity and instability, using the theoretical works of foucault and his analysis of greek ethical categories. concluding the first panel was a paper by khaled abdo (muʾminūn bilā ḥudūd institute), “from criticism of sufism to the reform of sufi ethics: discovering the works of al-daylamī.” the paper presented the interesting case of a scholar who veered from a critical stand on sufism in general to its adoption, while trying to pave the way to its reformation. this paper explored the works of al-daylamī (d. 1192), focusing in particular on his book the reformation of ethics (iṣlāḥ al-akhlāq), which deals with sufi ethics and the reformation of sufism as well as the sufi stance toward philosophy; al-daylamī’s book has been so far overlooked as a potentially theoretical grounding work on this subject. the second panel began with michael arnold (american university of beirut), who presented a paper entitled “sufism as an ethical panacea? situating taṣawwuf i n i s l a m i c e t h i c s . ” a c k n o w l e d g i n g that no exact equivalent of ethics as a philosophical category can be found within the islamic intellectual heritage, and recognizing that muslim scholars have not methodically studied this category as defined today, this paper explored the place of the sufi tradition in dealing with ethical considerations in the sunni intellectual tradition while challenging the commonly held view that the latter al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) conference report: mysticism and ethics in islam • 269 took an antiphilosophical and antirational turn after al-ghazālī’s (d. 1111) critique of philosophy. f o l l o w i n g o n t h e d i s c u s s i o n o f al-ghazālī’s heritage in the previous presentation, sophia vasalou (birmingham university) presented a paper entitled “does al-ghazālī have a theory of virtue?” focusing particularly on al-ghazālī’s works, the paper shed light on the dynamic between philosophy and sufi discourse and on how virtue (faḍīla) is problematized within the broader concern with the “ethics of virtue” as found in the works of thinkers more closely associated with philosophy, such as al-farābī (d. 950) and miskawayh (d. 1030). concluding the second panel, jeremy farrell (emory university) presented “a ‘value theory’ of obligations: early sufi approaches to zuhd.” understanding zuhd as supererogatory ethical practice in the context of early sufism, this paper showed that “value theory” allows us to better understand why early sufis adopted such practices. it traced the reasoning behind such practices in the works of al-muḥāsibī ( d . 8 5 7 ) a n d l a t e t e n t h c e n t u r y s u f i handbooks. panel 3: from grief to love c h a i r e d b y s e b a s t i a n g ü n t h e r (university of göttingen), the third panel was opened by riccardo paredi (american university of beirut) with his paper “to grieve or not to grieve? the concept of ḥuzn in early sufism.” tracing the notion of ḥuzn and its evolution from the quran through the first three centuries of islam, when it was initially viewed as a negative emotion (as in the quranic “do not grieve”), t h e p a p e r s h o w e d t h a t i n e a r l y s u f i literature, this emotion is seen as positive and its virtuous merits are discussed, as, for example, in the chapter dedicated to ḥuzn in al-risāla al-qushayriyya. t h e n a t i f k h a l i l ( u n i v e r s i t y o f lethbridge) presented “on patience in early sufi ethics,” which dealt with a quality with obvious virtuous dimensions that has played a central role in islamic piety. the paper analyzed the importance of the notion of patience, which is one of god’s qualities but did not become a subject of wide discussion until the work of ibn ʿarabī (d. 1240). along the way, khalil explored the works of sarrāj (d. 988), kālābādhī (d. 990), abū ṭālib al-makkī (d. 998), al-qushayrī (d. 1072), hujwīrī (d. 1072), and sirjānī (d. 1077) and their approaches to ṣabr. k a z u y o m u r a t a ( k i n g ’ s c o l l e g e ) presented a paper titled “sufism and the pursuit of happiness.” whereas the greek concept of eudaemonia, translated in arabic as saʿāda, is heavily discussed by sufi writers versed in falsafa, this paper argued that the sufi discourse on happiness as a goal of human life is not a simple carryover of this greek antique term. rather, it covers different ideas and their associated notions, such as riḍā, surūr, and faraḥ, all under the generic umbrella of “happiness.” these various notions have been explored by the likes of al-qushayrī (d. 1072), khwāja ʿabd allāh al-anṣārī (d. 1087), and rūzbihān al-baqlī (d. 1209). m o h a m m e d r u s t o m ( c a r l e t o n university) concluded this panel with his paper “theo-fānī: ʿayn al-quḍāt and the fire of love” on the famous sufi martyr ʿayn al-quḍāt hamadānī (d. 1131), who belonged to the persian sufi “school of passionate love” (madhhab-i ʿishq). 270 • louise gallorini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) t h e p a p e r e x p l o r e d ʿ a y n a l q u ḍ ā t ’ s multifaceted understanding of love as it pertains to the divine-human relationship and the lived human experience of love. keynote address jamal elias (university of pennsylvania) presented a keynote lecture entitled “ r e v i s i t i n g r ū m ī ’ s m a t h n a w ī a s t h e ‘persian qurʾān’ through the lens of anqarawī.” the lecture provided a glimpse into a commentary on rūmī’s mathnawī by one of the most influential mevlevi s h a y k h s , i s m ā ʿ ī l r u s ū k h ī a n q a r a w ī (d. 1631). entitled majmuʿat al-laṭāʾif wa maṭmūrat al-maʿārif (collection of subtleties and treasure of knowledge) and consisting of seven volumes, it is usually known as sharḥ-i mathnawī. it curiously contains a commentary on what is supposed to be a seventh volume of rūmī’s mathnawī, which elias analyzed in the context of the frequent reference to the mathnawī as the “persian quran” by classical scholars and authors such as jāmī (d. 1492)—although it should be noted that this comparison is not to be understood in the sense of a formal resemblance to the quranic text but is rather is to be seen as emphasizing its great importance in and impact on the persianate world. may 3rd, 2019 panel 4: late pre-modern sufism the conference’s second day opened w i t h a p a n e l c h a i r e d b y b i l a l o r f a l i (american university of beirut). matthew ingalls (american university of dubai) began with his presentation, “al-shaʿrānī’s laṭāʾif al-minan and the virtue of sincere immodesty.” this work addresses the tension between the virtue of hiding one’s spiritual accomplishments in order to preserve their pure intention and the role of a sufi master in showing his students the different blessings bestowed by god upon him as a guiding example for them. the paper explored this tension and the author’s knowledge of it, his way of dealing with the problem, the possible cynicism that future readers of this work may have, and the attendant ethical stand the reader would adopt in order to avoid this potential pitfall. the paper by rizwan zamir (davidson c o l l e g e ) , p r e s e n t e d b y m o h a m m e d rustom, was entitled “‘dogs are better t h a n y o u ! ’ m o c k e r y i n p u n j a b i s u f i poetry.” the paper analyzed the poetry of three well-known south asian sufis, shah husayn (d. 1593), sultan bāhū (d. 1691) and baba bulleh shah (d. 1758), focusing on the aspect of mockery, which zamir sees as reflecting ethical, mystical, social, and personal discussions in a punjabi society whose hollowness and hypocrisy the poets decried. then alexandre papas (french national center for scientific research) presented “ s u f i s m a n d e t h i c s i n c e n t r a l a s i a : ṣūfī allāhyār’s thabāt al-ʿājizīn and its legacy,” a paper exploring the work of ṣūfī allāhyār (d. 1721), a naqshbandī mujaddidī sufi from samarqand whose influence was greater as an author than it was as a sufi shaykh. composed in mathnawī form, his work became popular in central asian madrasas, exposing a sober sufi view on faith, observance, morals, and ethics. marcia hermansen (loyola university chicago) presented a paper titled “shāh w a l ī a l l ā h a n d t h e v i r t u e s , ” w h i c h discussed the different frameworks for conceiving of the relationship between mysticism and ethics that can be found in al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) conference report: mysticism and ethics in islam • 271 the work of shāh walī allāh (d. 1762) of delhi at the juncture between premodern a n d e a r l y m o d e r n i s l a m . t h e p a p e r uncovered his formulation of the virtues one needs to cultivate in order to attain felicity, and his view of how these virtues are related to the four platonic virtues in a sufi ethical context. concluding this panel was a presentation by paul heck (georgetown university), “mystical traditions of prophetic ethics in moroccan sufism: the case of ʿabd al-ʿazīz al-dabbāgh (d. 1719).” starting with the works and example of this moroccan mystic, this paper presented the ethical aspects of the spiritual path in the late premodern islamic west, with a focus on how spiritual sovereignty interacts with worldly power. panel 5: literary engagements chaired by enass khansa (american university of beirut), this panel was opened by a presentation in arabic by lina jamal (american university of beirut), “sufi dreams,” which discussed the influence of greek thought on oneiric sufi writings and their symbols. the paper analyzed the symbolism of wool (ṣūf) in dreams from artemidorus (second century) to al-nābulsī (d. 1731) and demonstrated how this symbol was adopted by sufis for their own concerns. this adoption represents an example of a greek element used and modified within the islamic tradition. richard mcgregor (vanderbilt university) presented a paper titled “beauty, vision, and the disciplines of bodies in sufi aesthetics.” with an emphasis on egyptian traditions, this paper delved deeper into the relationship between ethics and visual practice in sufism and into the discipline of the mind and body in the pursuit of “beauty” geared toward the development of a virtuous self. concluding this panel, vahid behmardi (lebanese american university) presented “ s o c i a l e t h i c s i n r ū m ī ’ s m a t h n a w ī . ” discussing jalāl al-dīn rūmī (d. 1273) for a second time in this conference, this paper explored the social ethics that can be read in his mathnawī, which is not restricted to a purely personal mystical dimension but also gives the reader social values to be developed in society so that the spiritual and religious being can simultaneously flourish. panels 6 and 7: sufism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the sixth panel was chaired by lyall a r m s t r o n g ( a m e r i c a n u n i v e r s i t y o f beirut) and started with a presentation by ahmed el shamsy (university of chicago) entitled “modernist appropriations of sufi ethics.” looking beyond the existing view of muslim reformers’ criticism of sufism, this paper described how, on the contrary, such reformers embraced and promoted certain aspects of classical works of sufism, a prime example being the iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn by al-ghazālī (d. 1111), which was used by reformers such as rashīd riḍā (d. 1935) and muḥammad ʿabduh (d. 1905) in driving home their own ethical concerns. leila alzamova (international relations k az an fed eral u niv ers it y ) p res ent ed “sufism and modern muslim ethics in 20th century russian islamic thought,” which explored the differing views of two muslim scholars in twentieth-century imperial russia, ziyaaddin kamali (d. 1942) and musa bigiev (d. 1949), and their divergent criticisms of sufi shaykhs and 272 • louise gallorini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) their practice in the context of the great changes brought by modernity and the perceived backwardness of the islamic world vis-à-vis the west. oludamini ogunnaike (university of virginia) presented a paper titled “the existential, epistemological ethics of tarbiyah: ibrahim niasse’s maqāmāt al-dīn al-thalāth.” this presentation focused on the branch of the tijāniyya sufi order that is the largest in in the world and the most popular one in sub-saharan africa thanks to the significant influence of shaykh ibrahim niasse (d. 1975). analyzing his works, the paper shed a great deal of light on niasse’s spiritual training, tracing its origins and exploring the relationship it postulates between ethics, epistemology, ontology, and sufi anthropology. the seventh and final panel of the conference was chaired by bashshar haydar (american university of beirut), with two presentations in arabic. the first of these was by mohammed helmi, “the question of sufism on the contemporary horizon: history and destinies.” it presented an overview of the last century’s criticisms of sufism, from internal criticism by practitioners of sufism to external criticism from non-sufis, according to different religious approaches and currents identified by helmi. then adbelouahab belgherras (centre de recherche en anthropologie sociale et culturelle) presented “sufi ethics in contemporary discourse: the ‘perfect’ man and world citizenship.” this paper discussed the contemporary relevance of the sufi understanding of the “perfect human” in regard to the idea of “world citizenship” through examples such as the international day of living together in peace on may 16 of each year, which was recently adopted by the united nations as the result of an initiative by shaykh khaled bentounes of the ʿalawiyya international association. t h e s e i n t e n s e t w o d a y s g a v e t h e audience a window into trends in the current scholarship and research being conducted on islamic mysticism—both on its established themes, such as rūmī’s works and heritage, and less known but promising fields, such as early sufi texts and non-arabic works from different parts of the premodern islamic world. the particular focus on ethics, an area that is overall not yet systematically researched in islamic and middle eastern studies, helped bring together scholars specialized in different time periods and different islamic languages, which made for fruitful exchanges among participants and with the public. the conference also proved to be a logical step in the context of a growing interest, both scholarly and otherwise, in the subject of sufism. this is hopefully the beginning of regular exchanges and organized discussions around sufism in particular and islamic studies in general at the aub, an institution uniquely situated to bring together scholars from different traditions and disciplines. indeed, the aub can help foster a rare dynamic and discussion between scholars from within and outside of the islamic world. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 305-308 book review th e l a s t d e c a d e h a s s e e n a considerable increase in studies focusing on the issues of identity and identity formation in the early islamic period. to this valuable and growing number of studies, we can add scott savran’s arabs and iranians in the islamic conquest narrative. it is important to note that savran defines the islamic conquest narrative in a broader than usual way. rather than simply concentrating on the arab-islamic conquests themselves, the book dedicates the bulk of its attention to the pre-islamic past and the buildup to the first/seventh-century conquests through a focus on the sasanian state. the modern analysis of the events sees the movement begin late in the career of the prophet muḥammad. although there is often a discussion of the late antique 1. see, for instance, the coverage of the conquests in robert g. hoyland, in god’s path: the arab conquests and the creation of an islamic empire (oxford: oxford university press, 2015); hugh kennedy, the great arab conquests: how the spread of islam changed the world we live in (philadelphia: da capo press, 2007); and fred mcgraw donner, the early islamic conquests (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1981). milieu in which the conquests began and the long-standing conflict between the roman/byzantine and sasanian empires, the spotlight has been firmly on the first–second/seventh–eighth centuries.1 many of our surviving sources, however, are written centuries after the events they purport to describe and do not begin their historical recollection with muḥammad alone. instead, a large number of arabic and persian sources also recall the pre-islamic period and highlight the inevitability of the conquerors’ success o v e r t h e s a s a n i a n s . t h e y r e fl e c t o n sasanian rule and the foreshadowing of what was to come following the rise of muḥammad’s community. yet this material is often omitted from modern reconstructions, and savran seeks to place the period of the conquests themselves scott savran, arabs and iranians in the islamic conquest narrative: memory and identity construction in islamic historiography, 750–1050. culture and civilization in the middle east, 57 (london: routledge, 2018), x + 248 pp. isbn 978-0-415-74968-8. price: $145 (cloth). ryan j. lynch columbus state university (columbus, georgia) (lynch_ryanj@columbusstate.edu) mailto:lynch_ryanj%40columbusstate.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 306 • ryan j. lynch within this wider recollection of events. he puts forth the idea of two distinct phases of islamic historiography that are identifiable in the surviving sources from the period between 132 and 442 ah/750 and 1050 ce, a notion that fits in well with the recent work of sarah bowen savant.2 he ultimately argues that in this wider islamic conquest narrative, iran and the persians were cast as part of a salvific process. in this story, iran needed to fall to the arabislamic conquerors before it could rise, as god had intended, in an “enlightened islamic form”; it underwent a process of defeat and the cleansing of hubris that strengthened the greater whole. the introduction and chapter 2 provide a strong theoretical framework for the larger issues of identity construction and collective memory that the book tackles. additionally, there is a detailed contextual discussion of the persian-influenced court culture of the abbasid state and the shift it reflected against the earlier akhbāriyyūn and their focus on justifying the rise of the arabs over the non-arabs (ʿajam). initially, in the first phase of this two-phase process, we find accounts that promoted a unified and noble arab identity even during the jāhiliyya, and the iranians depicted in these sources serve as little more than foils to further highlight the positive qualities of the bedouin and the inevitability of their success. in the second phase, later i r a n i a n d e s c e n d e d w r i t e r s c o m b i n e d these traditions with the material of the sasanian royal chronicles to highlight how the depravity of their ruling ancestors led to their demise “in order that [iran] might be purified of the imperial arrogance 2. sarah bowen savant, the new muslims of post-conquest iran (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2013). which had marred the sasanians” (p. 26). as savran argues, the “arab versus ʿajam” literary discourse thus played out through a n e v o l v i n g n a r r a t i v e t h a t s a w i r a n ultimately reborn in a stronger islamic context and in which the iranians were one of the primary audiences of the texts rather than the subject alone. from chapter 3 onward, savran traces these two phases chronologically through the islamic historical record, utilizing a wide variety of sources in both arabic and persian. he begins with the first instances of interaction between the arabs and the persians in the narrative sources, with particular emphasis on the reign of the sasanian ruler shāpūr ii. he highlights the discrepancy between the harshness of shāpūr’s punishment of arab transgressions and the overall positive recollection of his reign. two reports of shāpūr’s interaction with selfless arab elders provide “a kerygmatic conversation between representatives of arab and persian civilization” (p. 67); shāpūr reveals a prophecy that the arabs would come to rule over the persians, and the severity of his retaliation against the arab raiders is aimed at preventing this outcome. savran then moves into the fifth century ce, with a discussion of the lakhmids of al-ḥīra and of the ways in which the rearing of the legendary sasanian ruler bahrām gūr by these arabs contributed to his positive qualities as reflected in the sources. it is through the figure of bahrām, savran contends, that “the destinies of the arabs a n d s a s a n i a n s . . . b e g i n t o c o n v e r g e ” (p. 91). he continues by discussing the defeat of the later ruler pīrūz by a central al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) scott savran’s arabs and iranians in the islamic conquest narrative • 307 asian confederation, which served as a forewarning of the vulnerability of the sasanians to a smaller force—like the arabs—that occupied a moral high ground. moving into the sixth century, the focus shifts to khusraw anūshirwān’s reign, which tends to receive noticeably more coverage in early arabic sources than do the reigns of other sasanian rulers. this discussion furnishes an opportunity for savran to introduce the “audience trope” that is such an integral part of the depiction of the sasanians in islamic sources (and a key part of the book’s final three chapters). here, he considers multiple instances in which arab emissaries arrive to the court of the sasanians for an audience with the shāhānshāh. the arab dignitaries resist the pomp of the court and the disdain of the bedouin on behalf of the persians, and the arabs grow in standing as time (and each chapter) passes, first in the form of the yemenis, then as the lakhmids, and finally, as the arab muslims on the eve of the battle of al-qādisiyya. savran articulates the differences in the appearances, characteristics, and attitudes of these arab emissaries at the times of anūshirwān, parvīz, and yazdagird and the literary role these accounts play in the arab-versus-ʿajam theme. it is only the final chapter that concerns the islamic period proper, addressing the arab-muslim victory over the sasanians and the replacement of the dynasty. this is also the chapter that is the most limited in its conclusions. many of the 3. savant, new muslims; d. gershon lewental, “qādisiyyah, then and now: a case study of history and memory, religion, and nationalism in middle eastern discourse” (phd diss., brandeis university, 2011). 4. albrecht noth and lawrence conrad, the early arabic historical tradition: a source-critical study (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1994); tayeb el-hibri, parable and politics in early islamic history: the rashidun caliphs (new york: columbia university press, 2010); and tayeb el-hibri, reinterpreting islamic historiography: hārūn al-rashīd and the narrative of the ʿabbāsid caliphate (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999). narrations discussed here—including the qualities of the persian salmān al-fārisī (the companion of muḥammad) and the decisive battle of al-qādisiyya—are more than competently discussed. they have already been thoroughly covered in recent years, however, by savant (rightly relied upon by savran throughout the book) and gershon lewental.3 this widening of the definition of “ i s l a m i c c o n q u e s t n a r r a t i v e ” m a k e s savran’s work unique in the field of early islamic historiographical studies, and it is where the greatest value in his work lies. savran builds on the scholarship of people such as albrecht noth, lawrence conrad, and tayeb el-hibri, who have previously reviewed the later narrative sources’ depiction of the foundational period of islamic history in order to identify a literary editorial process at work.4 savran continues this approach in convincing ways by looking beyond the abbasid, umayyad, and rāshidūn periods to apply this analysis to the pre-islamic era. in the process, he integrates this earlier era more fully into the wider arc of the arabislamic conquests. he treats the entire narrative as a literary-historical process whose earlier content should not be passed over in our modern analyses, but rather, should be more fully appreciated as part of the wider recounting of abbasid-era aut hors . through s uc h an approach, this material is intricately linked to the abbasid context in which earlier accounts w e r e b e i n g c o m p i l e d , r e d a c t e d , a n d al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 308 • ryan j. lynch published in an intentional form, and we can consequently identify more clearly the authorial processes involved in the creation of the narrative. savran’s analysis and identification of these phases of the historiographical process is compelling, and it reminds us that authors bring certain traditions together as coherent works for a reason. this book might have benefited from a chapter that more fully addresses the challenges of early arabic and persian historiography. further discussion of the limitations of identifying these two phases of writing within the historical record would have been especially useful, given how little survives in an unredacted form from the first phase. chapter 2 serves as a very useful thematic and contextual overview, but there are only some three pages dedicated to direct discussion of the sources in the introduction (pp. 14–17) with a brief return to the infamous akhbārī sayf b. ʿumar in chapter 7 (pp. 161–162). in a book that is so focused on the issues of memory and almost exclusively on the historiographical tradition, this would have been a valuable opportunity for expansion. this is not to disparage the use of sources within the monograph, however, as the author makes excellent use of a substantial swath of both arabic and persian writings to considerable effect. but there are also a number of occasions on which greater analysis of the transmission of and variation in the accounts used would 5. peter webb, imaging the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016). have been meaningful for the reader. for instance, in discussing accounts of the yemeni arabs’ coming to khusraw for aid against the abyssinians (pp. 109–110), the author notes differences in the narratives of al-ṭabarī and balʿamī. he does not explain, however, why these differences might matter and what they might say about the form and content of these texts in comparison to one another. might such differences not point to underlying variations in approach or the sources that these compilers used in creating their texts and narratives? separately, savran does an admirable job of discussing collective memory and the significant contributions to memory studies made in recent years in the introduction, but it then largely fades into the background for the rest of the book, appearing as something of an afterthought. our understanding of what it meant to be “arab” or “persian” in the pre-islamic a n d e a r l y i s l a m i c p e r i o d s h a s b e e n augmented by important new research over the last several years. the growth in studies of epigraphic evidence from arabia and portions of the levant continues to be hugely enlightening, and peter webb’s recent study on the making of arab identity has been greatly instructive, too.5 we can confidently add arabs and iranians in the islamic conquest narrative to the ongoing discourse concerning islamic identity formation and early islamic historiography more generally. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 208-214 al b a l ā d h u r ī ( d . 8 9 2 ) e x p l a i n s the arabization of the umayyad dīwān with an anecdote about a greek scribe who urinated in the inkpot. in response, we are told, ʿabd al-malik dismissed greek scribes from their posts and changed the language of the administration to arabic. this is a concise, entertaining explanation for linguistic change in the near east. nevertheless, al-balādhurī’s explanation falls somewhat short of scholarly expectations. the process of arabization was not merely the purview of the caliph and his scribes, but rather a broad social phenomenon, as merchants, scholars, soldiers, and administrators alike turned to arabic as a lingua franca. muslims used arabic, the language of the qurʾān, to compose religious texts, record bills of sale, write philosophical and scientific texts, and adorn buildings. jews and christians also composed and engaged texts in arabic, signaling the appreciation of arabic across religious boundaries. yet despite the appeal and the undeniable significance of the arabic language, it did not spread evenly or quickly throughout the entire islamic world. from central asia to the caucasus to the iberian peninsula, t h e p o p u l a t i o n s o f m a n y p r o v i n c e s continued to write and converse in other languages such as persian, armenian, coptic, and syriac, to name a few. the aim of the symposium, “navigating language in the early islamic world,” was to situate the history of arabic and arabization within a broader setting of linguistic diversity in the islamic world. the papers represented a number of different approaches to the study of the early islamic near east, bringing art history, linguistics, religion, and history to the same table. they also spanned the geographical reaches of the early islamic world with an aim to frame the discussion across both the mediterranean and the iranian cultural sphere. the participants began with three goals: (1) to explore evidence of multilingualism in an ethnically and religiously pluralist conference report navigating language in the early islamic world (the marco institute for medieval and renaissance studies, the university of tennessee, knoxville, 6-7 april 2018) conference organizer: alison m. vacca (university of tennessee, knoxville) co-organizers: antoine borrut (university of maryland) manuela ceballos (university of tennessee, knoxville) tina shepardson (university of tennessee, knoxville) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 209 • alison m. vacca e n v i r o n m e n t , i n c l u d i n g t h r o u g h engagement with studies of the pre-islamic near east; (2) to investigate the ways that communities produced, employed, and transformed arabic in their own settings; and (3) to contribute to the ongoing discussion of textual and oral transmission of narratives and historical accounts between the various languages of the islamic world. m u r i e l d e b i é ( é c o l e p r a t i q u e d e s hautes études) opened the symposium with a paper entitled “the languages of diplomacy and religion in the late antique near east: the arab tribes and surrounding official languages.” she investigated the diplomatic and religious languages of arab tribes in the period immediately before the rise of islam to conclude that the choice of language in each context was dependent on both region and setting. debié identified numerous instanc es when arabs participated in diplomatic e x c h a n g e s , t h e a c c o u n t s o f w h i c h presuppose the presence of interpreters or multilingual conversations, e.g., ghassānid complaints against the lakhmids aired in constantinople. debié also pointed to the lasting use of syriac in the near east in matters of religion, speculating i n p a r t i c u l a r a b o u t i n t e r m i a p h y s i t e diplomacy in greek and syriac, set against the competition between the miaphysite churches and the church of the east to expand among arab communities in the near east. she concluded that official languages predominated in matters both political and religious, demonstrating that multilingual arabs participated in these discussions in both the byzantine and sasanian empires. the use of arabic, then, appeared in moments when arabs were not participating in this broader near eastern dialogue, but instead largely in communication aimed at other arabs. k h o d a d a d r e z a k h a n i ( p r i n c e t o n university) presented on “pidginization, creolisation, and hybridity: the interaction of languages in the early islamic east iran and transoxiana.” he began with the acknowledgment that modern studies on persian follow nationalist readings, i.e., that persian survived arabic. rezakhani c h a l l e n g e d t h i s r e a d i n g b y p o i n t i n g out that the very idea of a single middle persian is constructed; rather, he argued, we should understand the zoroastrian texts in middle persian language and pahlavi script to reflect a single dialect among many. he pointed to the localized hybridity of middle persian, e.g., the relationship between middle persian, aramaic and arabic in mesopotamia. this set the stage for the languages of the east (in particular, khwarazmian, sogdian, and bactrian) to serve as the missing links between the “official” languages (as canonized later) and localized forms. in this, the early islamic period emerged as a particularly significant moment, when we find the pidginization of language, such as when arabic and persian in particular mix in amṣār like basra and kufa. here again, the east offers an interesting case study of a sort of linguistic melting pot, particularly the legal documents in bactrian and mercantile in sogdian. in this, rezakhani brought the linguistic diversity of the east to bear on the modern interpretations that streamline the development from a single middle persian to new persian. petra sijpesteijn (leiden university) concluded the first panel with her paper, “a policy of multilingualism in the early muslim empire.” she started with a review of the ways in which the arabization of the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) navigating language in the early islamic world • 210 dīwān appears in our ʿabbāsid-era sources as the result of the initiatives of al-ḥajjāj in iraq, ʿabd allāh ibn ʿabd al-malik in egypt, and walīd ibn ʿabd al-malik in syria. these examples form the rationale f o r m o d e r n s c h o l a r s ’ u n d e r s t a n d i n g of arabization as a deliberate policy, implemented by the umayyad élite to make arabic the language of both religion and state. yet these accounts would have us believe that arabization was both sudden and top-down. while the umayyads instigated similar empire-wide initiatives (e.g., the reform of coinage), sijpesteijn argued that this reading of umayyad arabization cannot make sense of the extant documentary evidence. multilingual papyri in arabic, greek, sogdian, and coptic culled from both egypt and khurāsān demonstrate that the shift from local administrative languages to arabic cannot have been absolute or immediate. with examples from the 640s (a greek-arabic receipt for sheep) to the 830s (land measurements in arabic, reusing a greek papyrus), sijpesteijn argued that the early caliphs opted for and promoted a multilingual administration, even investing in an infrastructure to maintain it. phillip stokes (university of tennessee, knoxville) kicked off the second panel of the symposium with a paper entitled “new perspectives on the linguistic landscape of arabic in the early islamic period.” he argued that the study of arabic has focused on classical arabic and now needs to incorporate pre-islamic and non-islamic e v i d e n c e . p r e i s l a m i c a r a b i c w a s tremendously diverse, both philologically and by script. to illustrate this, stokes offered several examples of linguistic diversity as evidenced through inscriptions and early qurʾān manuscripts. he argued that differences between readings and orthography of certain qurʾānic phrases cannot indicate that the scribes did not know classical arabic. rather, we should understand these variations as cues to the spoken norms of arabic in the ḥijāz. as such, stokes suggested that we consider the orthography seriously rather than dismiss variations, as a way to uncover the norms of preand early islamic arabic. he also suggested, then, that we might uncover the variations of early islamic arabic by revisiting the traditional corpora, focusing s p e c i f i c a l l y o n c h r i s t i a n p a l e s t i n i a n arabic and judeo-arabic. by looking at the spelling of certain words, e.g., the use of nun sofit or alef in judeo-arabic texts to render the accusative marker, we can hypothesize about the use of cases in arabic. qurʾānic muṣḥafs, christian arabic inscriptions, and judeo-arabic texts all point in the same direction, namely that there existed several varieties of arabic in the early islamic period, signaled in these examples by the differences in case endings. classical arabic, stokes concluded, was the result of the successful ʿabbasid project that married the systemization of arabic grammar (e.g., sībawayh) to a wider discourse on arab identity. f r e d a s t r e n ( s a n f r a n c i s c o s t a t e university) offered a paper on “ʿabbāsid book culture and ninth-century jewish sectarianism,” in which he tracked the involvement of jews in the “writerly culture” of ʿabbasid cities. while primarily interested in baghdad, he pointed to the broader processes of urbanization across the islamicate world. relying on toponymy, he demonstrated jewish involvement in the growth of the urban middle class. jews were merchants and bankers; astren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 211 • alison m. vacca tied their participation in the urban social structure to the rise in literacy and, as a result, to the production of texts, including those outlining religious differentiation. the combination of urban intellectualism and the availability of paper allowed for people to search widely for their modes of expression, as astren demonstrated with an anecdote about a certain muqammiṣ, a jewish muʿtazilī scholar who converted to christianity, whose story paints very porous borders between religious and intellectual communities. to clarify the ramifications of jewish participation in the changing urban conversations, astren turned to studies of seventeenth-century e n g l a n d , w h i c h d e m o n s t r a t e c e r t a i n parallels such as increased urbanization, shifts in land use and tenure, and rises in literacy. astren thereby explained the form of jewish sectarianism based on participation in intellectual communities of the ʿabbasid metropole. judith lerner (institute for the study of the ancient world) brought an art historical perspective to the discussion with a paper entitled “from bactrian to arabic: seals and sealing practices observed in the pre-islamic and early islamic documents from bactria.” starting with the late sasanian period, she analyzed the seals on documents from the iranian east, examining evidence from sogdiana, balkh, gorgon, and marw. despite the introduction of arabic in the umayyad period, she indicates a few markers of continuity, such as references to the same family name or toponyms in the pre-islamic and early islamic documents or the use of the same sasanian-era seal even on a document dated to 721/2. lerner also elaborated on several examples of how the documents and their seals can demonstrate changes in the cultural norms of the east as, for example, in the use of single documents as opposed to the double documents used in sasanian practice. in one example, she addressed the relationship between sasanian coins and the stars on early islamic seals, arguing for changes in the style that might indicate different artistic models. instead of relying solely on east iranian models to explain the form of these seals, lerner suggested that we recognize the varieties of cultural practices in umayyad-era iran, born of both cultural interactions in central asia and lasting inheritances from the region’s hellenistic past. alison vacca (university of tennessee, knoxville) concluded the first day of the symposium with a paper on “language, power, and storytelling: arabic in caliphal armenia.” she opened with a challenge facing the study of arabic in umayyad and ʿabbasid-era armenia, namely the lack of direct evidence for multilingualism in written sources. all of the material extant today—e.g., inscriptions, jewelry, glasswork—dates to a later period or can be traced to arabs in armenia. we therefore have no proof that armenians employed arabic, though common sense suggests that they did. in response to this challenge, vacca offered the eighth-century history o f ł e w o n d a s a d e m o n s t r a t i o n t h a t armenian authors were familiar with stories circulating in arabic in the early ʿabbasid period. first, łewond’s account of the islamic conquest of duin in the 640s relies on topoi commonly found in arabic futūḥ collections. second, the inconsistencies in łewond’s account of the battle of bagrewand in 775 can only be explained through recourse to ibn aʿtham’s explanation of the battle. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) navigating language in the early islamic world • 212 argued that these examples demonstrate armenian familiarity with arabic, whether attributed to łewond or to his underlying sources. these examples do not suggest that armenians were reading arabic, but rather that they were part of the same narrative circles in which stories about the conquests circulated in the eighth century. the second day of the symposium opened with informal conversations led by three graduate student participants. t h e p a r t i c i p a n t s e a c h b r o u g h t w i t h them a brief description of their project and/or a research problem that they were working on. they opened their discussions in small groups by introducing their projects before fielding questions o r o p e n c o n v e r s a t i o n s . a f t e r a h a l f hour discussion, the graduate student participants then changed tables, allowing them each three separate conversations in small groups. kader smail (university of maryland) introduced the epistle of the caliph al-mahdī to the people of mecca, a document that chronicles the history of the city, the claims of the quraysh, and the requests and recommendations of the caliph regarding, for example, how people should act in relation to the kaʿba. this document, particularly when read in light of inscriptions, suggests that mecca enjoyed rising prominence in the early ʿabbasid period, perhaps related to the construction of orthodoxy in light of the nearby ʿalid revolts. pamela klasová (georgetown university) presented a snippet of her dissertation on the umayyad g o v e r n o r a l ḥ a j j ā j , f o c u s i n g o n t h e relationship between language and power. noting the significance of oratory as a key tool of empire and a vehicle of ideology, she analyzed the speeches of al-ḥajjāj to argue that these were transmitted orally in a far more stable format than the surrounding narrative. even in cases where certain words were changed, the rhythm is maintained. klasová’s work integrates studies on orality and literacy, arabic poetry, and qurʾānic studies to place oratory at the heart of the umayyad state apparatus. abby kulisz (indiana university) opened a discussion on the problem of translating the arabic word dīn as “religion.” she indicated that the association of religion as a personal belief is a very modern concept, which might not translate correctly in a medieval setting. dīn may alternatively suggest a way of life or a social concept, rather than a personal ideology. this segued into a broader discussion about the meaning of dīn and the lack of the plural form adyān in the qurʾān. aaron butts (catholic university of america) started off the final panel of t h e s y m p o s i u m w i t h a p r e s e n t a t i o n , “ i n t e r s e c t i o n s b e t w e e n a r a b i c a n d aramaic: the case of syriac christians.” he redressed the prevailing accounts about the shift from aramaic to arabic, focusing on the continued knowledge and use of both languages to argue for diglossic communities in the early islamic period. despite the fact that some of the more famous works, such as those of abū qurrā, exist today only in arabic, we know that many also circulated in syriac, as well, whether in translation, abridgements, or adaptations. butts also indicated that the imagined transfer from aramaic to arabic needs to be complicated to allow for multiple registers and dialects of both languages. syriac-speaking communities continued to speak in syriac after the conquests, though their language became increasingly distant from written syriac. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 213 • alison m. vacca similarly, ḥunayn ibn isḥāq may have written in arabic, but this was a literary language quite removed from the arabic that he spoke. as such, the relationship between aramaic and arabic emerges as a complicated conversation, rather than a unidirectional progression of language change. m a r i e l e g e n d r e ( u n i v e r s i t y o f edinburgh) continued with a discussion entitled “state representation vs. practical use: the administrative languages of the umayyads.” she argued that the traditional narratives of language change cannot make sense of documentary evidence from egypt. so, for example, she pointed to the dramatic drop in greek documents in the period between 700 and 750. this fits neatly with the traditional models ascribing arabization to the marwānids. however, she also demonstrated that the documentary evidence in arabic increased at a lower rate than we might expect: while greek documents before 700 numbered to 11,989 and dropped to 4,298 in the period between 700 and 750, arabic documents from the same periods increased only from 47 to 315. far more remarkably, the number of coptic documents remained steady, with 4,196 coptic documents before 700, compared to 4,386 between 700 and 750. legendre reiterated that greek, the administrative language of byzantine egypt, was continuously used in the umayyad period and thus confirms that administration was deliberately multilingual. the use of coptic, however, changed in the early islamic period, as the fiscal documents were never in coptic in the byzantine period; this was a marwānid innovation, certainly explained by the role of monks in the payment of taxes. legendre argued that by naql al-dīwān, the transfer of the registries, we should understand the reassessment of the fisc and a change of personnel. as such, the marwānid reform was not linguistic so much as administrative reorganizing. in the final presentation, “towards an arabic cosmopolis: culture and power in early islam,” antoine borrut (university of maryland) presented the two main n a r r a t i v e s t h a t h a v e d o m i n a t e d t h e discussions of language change in the early islamic world, arabization and the translation movement. he argued that we should keep multilingualism as the sounding board for these discussions. he offered the study of cosmopolitanism as a way to complicate the traditional n a r r a t i v e , f o c u s i n g o n t h e “ p o l i t i c s of difference” (cf: lavan, payne, and weisweiler) and the relationship between language, culture, and power (cf: pollock). stemming from this, he asked whether we might compare arabic to latin, a local vernacular that spread with the state, or perhaps more aptly, to sanskrit a s a t r a n s r e g i o n a l v e r n a c u l a r . t h e models developed to discuss south asian cosmopolitanism and language offer a number of potential avenues of study for the state of arabic and, particularly, the translation movement. here, borrut turned to the work of ronit ricci to suggest t h a t l i t e r a r y n e t w o r k s p r o m u l g a t e d the memory of a communal past. the translation of texts went hand-in-hand with conversion and cultural integration. taking the documentary evidence from qubbat al-khazna in the great mosque of damascus, and particularly the number and nature of greek texts, borrut argued for a process of subordination in early islamic syria, where social difference was not elided, but rather organized. at the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) navigating language in the early islamic world • 214 same time, he stressed that such models cannot be cast as immutable or universal, pointing to other models, particularly one of assimilation in al-andalus. cosmopolitan policies generated cultural, social, and political tensions that can shed a fresh light on the rise of an arabic cosmopolis and on the fragmentation of the caliphate t h a t p a v e d t h e w a y t o a n “ i s l a m i c commonwealth.” t h e t e n p r e s e n t a t i o n s a n d t h r e e graduate student conversations brought together a number of different themes about the social history of language in the early islamic world. the papers spanned a remarkably large geographical area to include both the iranian oikoumene and the mediterranean. they also brought a n u m b e r o f d i f f e r e n t d i s c i p l i n a r y approaches—notably, history, art history, linguistics, and religious studies—into conversation. this disciplinary diversity fostered the discussion of a wide array of sources across many genres, providing a glimpse at the remarkable varieties o f s p o k e n l a n g u a g e s ( i n t h e i r m a n y i n c a r n a t i o n s ) i n t h e n e a r e a s t . t h e symposium gravitated towards a number of different themes, among which would be the role of the “official” language under the umayyads or in the pre-islamic period under the byzantines or sasanians. many of the talks sought to escape the shadow of ʿabd al-malik’s reforms in order to envision language change as a more organic, complicated process. on the one hand, the participants discussed the role of empire and the relationship between prestige languages and power; on the other, they also signaled a larger c o n v e r s a t i o n a b o u t a d m i n i s t r a t i v e flexibility and the use of languages outside of the political setting. the theme of intersections within a polyglot culture recurred as the participants repeatedly argued for multilingual engagements a c r o s s r e l i g i o u s l i n e s . f u r t h e r , t h e relationship between different languages of the near east must be complicated by the varieties of any given language. we cannot understand classical arabic, syriac, or middle persian to be static, but rather we should recognize that the multiplicity of languages of the near east must embrace localized variations and differing registers within any given language. the papers will be published through brepols as part of the marco symposium series. a number of other scholars have j o i n e d t h e t e a m , i n c l u d i n g a r i a n n a d ’ o t t o n e ( u n i v e r s i t à d e g l i s t u d i l a sapienza di roma) on latin and arabic; rob haug (university of cincinnati) on the trilingual coins minted in khurāsān; and marijn van putten (leiden university) on berber and arabic. conference report al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 215-218 a marathon one-day-only symposium took place at aub on may 21st, 2018. a splendid collaborative effort, the event was organized by members of the center for arts and humanities (cah) directed by abdel-rahim abu-husayn ( d e p a r t m e n t o f h i s t o r y ) a n d h a n y rashwan, the andrew mellon postdoctoral fellow at the center. bilal orfali (chair, department of arabic and near eastern languages) and hany rashwan welcomed the audience and introduced the conference. fifteen scholars from at least twelve nations were on hand to discuss “post-eur o c e n t r i c p o e t i c s ” i n a n a t t e m p t ‘t o present and extend the indigenous poetics of islamic traditions, showing how literary figures and devices from these traditions can advance our understanding of world literature in the broadest sense of the term.’ the gathering spent the better part of twelve hours at the conference venue in the basement of college hall on the aub campus. the ambitious program was successfully completed before the sun set. moreover, the experience was thoroughly rewarding for both the participants and the wider audience. fifteen scholars grouped in four panels presented papers on, respectively, medieval persian poetics; arabic and ottoman literary poetics; andalusi and sicilian poetics; and modern arabic literatures. the first speaker was rebecca gould (birmingham university). in her keynote address, entitled “a persian contribution to global literary theory: shams-i qais on the controvertibility of creation and interpretation,” gould argued that a method of global literary theory is still missing and could be advanced only if the canons of arabic, turkish, persian and georgian poetics were included in the process. persian literary theory argues that creation and interpretation are controvertible, as are the poet and critic. she encouraged members of the discipline of comparative literature to engage with this argument. post-eurocentric poetics: new approaches from arabic, turkish and persian literature (american university of beirut, 21 may 2018) helga seeden american university of beirut (hseeden@aub.edu.lb) mailto:hseeden%40aub.edu.lb?subject= 216 • helga seeden al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the first panel followed with scholars from three nations—turkey, germany a n d i r a n — d e a l i n g w i t h m e d i e v a l persian poetics. ferenc csirkes (sabanci university) spoke on “the ‘fresh style’ (tazah-guyi) in safavid persian and turkic poetry, misnamed ‘indian style’ in europe. he asked whether “safavid poets recycled or recast some of their persian poetry or looked to turkic models.” he indicated ways to better understand and interpret the history of turkic literary tradition in iran, and “the relationship between vernaculars and “classical” literary idioms in a persianate context.” c h r i s t i n e k ä m p f e r ( t h e p h i l i p p s universität of marburg) discussed the “dynamics of transmission in medieval persian literature,” using the 14th-century romantic epic of humāy-u humāyūn by the poet khaju kermani as an example. she argued that, if viewed in its entirety, the uninterrupted and self-contained tradition of persian literary production over half a millennium possessed its own “dynamic for the transmission of literary tradition.” western approaches, focused on major poets like ferdowsi and nezāmī, have led to “one-dimensional and ahistorical” interpretations inadequate for evaluating persian literature as a whole. finally, leila seyed ghasem (the university of tehran) discussed the function of taqdim and taʾkhir (preposing and postposing) in medieval persian prose using abolfazl bayhaqi’s history of ghaznavid rule of the eleventh century as a case study. although only partially preserved, this source is the most important record of the period in question as well as a major masterpiece of persian prose. scholars of persian studies ought to investigate how the undeniable aesthetics of persian prose affect readers as works of art and also influence the intent of the message. the second panel dealt with the literary poetics of arabic balāgha (“eloquence, proper style”). the first speaker, alexander k e y ( s t a n f o r d u n i v e r s i t y ) p o s e d t h e question whether the 11th-century persian poet, ʿabd al-qāhir al-jurjāni, equipped us for work on poetry in general. aristotle clearly perceived rhetoric as dealing with politics and hence divided it from poetics. this, however, was an aristotelian divide and ibn sina saw no such break. the image in the eastern context was rather that of two lions fighting, one representing the lexical and the other the metaphorical meaning of a word. the second speaker, hany rashwan (american university of beirut), presented a paper entitled “rethinking al-jurjāni’s literary conditions of tajnis in relation to his nazm theory.” rashwan translated the concept of balāgha as “eloquence;” dealt with comparative rhetoric, including that of animals (!); and compared poetry and ornate prose. the paper discussed the conditions of jinas or tajnis as offered to literary critics a n d w r i t e r s b y p e r s i a n a r a b i s t ʿ a b d al-qāhir al-jurjāni, in order to master the use of this literary device. vocables in different languages like paranomasia, pun, wortspiel and calembour demonstrate that words can acquire a different emphasis of meaning depending on the context of the respective language. the third panel was chaired by rebecca gould and consisted of presentations by five speakers from four nations dealing with ottoman literary poetics. veli n. y a s h i n ( t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f s o u t h e r n california) dealt with the “poetics of late ottoman print culture and the thinking of sovereignty” in the context of the arabic al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) post-eurocentric poetics • 217 renaissance (nahda) and ottoman reform (tanzimat). he discussed the problems of translation and transliteration, where the worst case could be termed today unreferenced ‘plagiarism’ versus the best-case scenario when the translation surpasses the original. late ottoman print culture reached a wider public sphere where sovereignty was elaborated both as a political and poetic problem. yashin stated that in this context “sovereignty is not one, since it does not depend on a single ‘native’.” marc toutant (cnrs, paris), the next s p e a k e r , d i s c u s s e d t w o 1 5 t hc e n t u r y central asian treatises about ʿarūz, “a system of persian poetry that did not easily fit the turkish language.” he stated that there was an “attempt to ‘persify’ turkic prosody and poetry because the latter was considered to be of comparatively low prestige.” the 15th-century timurid poet, mir ʿalī shir nawāʾī, composed his mizan al-awzan in central asian turkish. turkic had emerged as a valid literary medium. the founder of the moghul empire, babur, criticized nawāʾī’s comparisons. the next speaker, murat umut inan (university of ankara) considered questions of imitation and appropriation. he based himself on a twelve-volume eurocentric source claiming that the ottomans attempted to write persian poetry because it was considered to be superior. 16th-century poets – like all poets ever before and long after – were required to know arabic and persian and master considerable literary works by heart. ottoman culture blended arabic, persian and turkish. it was perceived that poetry would prepare one for an understanding of the qurʾān. good poetry created meaning. a period illustration showed a copy of hafez’s text in the hands of ottoman students. murat pointed out parallels between poetry of the sixteenth and nineteenth century respectively. he highlighted “the multilingual and multiliterary underpinnings of ottoman poetics conference participants at the american university of beirut, lebanon, 2018. 218 • helga seeden al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) and the role it played in the making of a literary culture modeled after that of both persia and the arab lands.” sooyong kim (koç university) discussed ankaravi’s miftah al-balāgha of the early seventeenth century, attempting a poetics of continuity and translatability that was aimed at a wide local audience. kim discussed the link between poetry and rhetoric. the renewed ottoman interest in language and concern with local audiences perhaps explains why technical terms were not translated. the last presentation of the panel, by aida gasimova (baku state university), was entitled “many faces of the qurʾān in the depiction of the face (hurūfī poetics of nesīmī).” she dealt with ʿimādudīn nesīmī an important figure in medieval azeri turkic literature. she introduced the poet’s biography and poetry and discussed his usage of the names of the qurʾān. the fourth panel was composed of four motivated women from four nations with murat umut inan as chair. the panel swept over an entire millennium from andalusī and sicilian poetics to modern arabic literatures. enass khansa (aub), the first speaker, spoke on “the poetics of affinity (ittisāq) and the question of legitimacy in andalusī adab.” she examined “the understanding of poetics through the interplay of the literary and the political in three adab works produced in conversation with different political orders,” dating successively from the fourth, sixth and seventh hijrī century. the rhetoric continuity survived dynasties, and andalusi medieval scholarship acquired political legitimacy in the process. ferial bouhafe (the university of cambridge) d e a l t w i t h “ t h e q u r ʾ ā n i c r h e t o r i c a l challenge within the scope of peripatetic rhetoric in ibn rushd’s thought.” she concluded that ibn rushd departed from the theological grounds of prophecy, and established a basis for cross-pollination between aristotelian and arabic rhetoric. this represented a drastic break with traditional theological interpretation. chiara fontana (the university of rome) presented a paper entitled “a pragmatic approach to the rhetorical and metrical analysis of contemporary arabic poetry: nağīb surūr’s kalimāt fī al-hubb.” she extended the subject into modern arabic literature, applying rhetorical and metrical analyses to works of a generation of egyptian authors of the nineteensixties and seventies. such text analyses of pre-modern as well as contemporary l i t e r a t u r e m a y l e a d t o a d e e p e r comprehension of aspects of classical and contemporary arabic poetics from within their roots. claire savina (the university of paris -sorbonne/ the univ ers it y of oxford) discussed “tēlēmachus in egypt.” she had with her the hefty volume of the 17 th-century french original, les aventures de télémaque, and suggested that al-tahtāwī’s translation represented not only an arabization of the text but also a revival of classical arabic literature, in that he had in fact originally translated the work for his students and not for publication, but one of his rivals published it while al-tahtāwī himself was in exile. savina argued that the translation is much more than a translation: “it uses the french to play with the arabic.” the arabic version also bears a different title and vision of the travels from those of the original, more like a 19th-century jules verne. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 617-621 book review javier albarrán iruela’s new book, ejércitos benditos: yihad y memoria en al-andalus (siglos x-xiii), is the most complete study of holy war ideology, ritual, and practice in al-andalus yet written. based on his doctoral dissertation, “los discursos de guerra santa y la memoria de las primeras batallas del islam, al-andalus, siglos x-xiii” (universidad autónoma de madrid, 2019), this book reflects the author’s broad familiarity with a wide range of arabic, latin, and castilian sources on the concept and practice of holy war. a l b a r r á n ’ s c l o s e r e a d i n g o f t h e s e sources demonstrates the ways in which discourses of holy war emerged in the islamic west in the context of the broader islamic middle period, and also in contact a n d c o m p e t i t i o n w i t h t h e c h r i s t i a n kingdoms of iberia. rather than focusing exclusively on the legal formulations of jihad as elaborated by jurists, as many earlier scholars have done, albarrán considers the ways in which broader ideas of holy war (including those called ghazwa, qitāl, ḥarb, fatḥ) were deployed and enacted from the umayyads of cordoba to the almohads. throughout, albarrán’s book focuses on how rulers used the symbolic capital of holy war to legitimate themselves. by looking more broadly at the discourse, images and symbols of holy war and how it functioned as a tool of power in different contexts, albarrán moves beyond legalistic frameworks toward an outline of the practice of holy war, and of islamic rule more generally. seen from this perspective, holy war is not a concrete act with well-established limits, but instead a flexible field of action that could be adapted by diverse actors to justify their behaviors. the book follows a largely chronological organization, beginning with a chapter about the ideas of holy war and jihad and javier albarrán iruela. ejércitos benditos. yihad y memoria en al-andalus (siglos x-xiii). colección historia (granada: editorial universidad de granada, 2020). isbn 9788433867537. 538 pp. €35.00 paper. abigail krasner balbale new york university (abigail.balbale@nyu.edu) © 2022 abigail krasner balbale. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 618 • abigail krasner balbale the importance of the memory of the first battles of islam. as part of this study, he outlines the early islamic conquests as they are presented in the quran and the biographies of the prophet and his companions, emphasizing the themes and concepts that would emerge again and again in later conceptions of holy war. albarrán defines holy war as one in which god was seen as present and helpful to warriors, a war that had a missionary character and that was defined by the defense of the “true” religion against enemies of god, or a war that had a salvific element, often supported by the concept of martyrdom. holy war was one of many discourses that could be used to augment power and, as albarrán shows, one of the most potent tools a ruler had at his disposal. chapter 2 centers on the umayyad caliphate of cordoba, both the campaigns carried out at the behest of the caliph himself and the ascetic frontier warriors who operated outside the direct control of the caliphate. in albarrán’s analysis, both the conduct of holy war and its representation served to legitimate the umayyads as the rightful inheritors of a caliphal role. although holy war was always theoretically aimed at “infidels,” the question of who belonged in this category was flexibly addressed according to the political climate of the moment. holy war, especially along the frontier, also served as a powerful justification for the submission of expansive territories to the central authority defending those border zones. “centralized” jihad, that is organized and managed by the state, was contested by “decentralized” holy war, enacted by individuals along frontiers, which could challenge the power of the state and augment the prestige of scholarwarriors. in chapter 3, albarrán conducts careful analysis of how the memory of the early battles of islam as sites of sacred memory was activated in a series of campaigns i n t h e u m a y y a d p e r i o d , w h i c h t h e n legitimated umayyad power in al-andalus and presented its leaders as following the model of the prophet. the scholarship of the period served to reinforce the image of the andalusī umayyads as continuing the expansion of early islam and also as rightfully inheriting the umayyad caliphate in the east, with one battle p r e s e n t e d a s e c h o i n g t h e u m a y y a d victory over the forces of ibn al-zubayr at marj rāhiṭ, for example. the scholarly production of umayyad cordoba then affected the development of the idea of jihad and how the umayyads of damascus were remembered as well. in the years that followed the fall of the umayyad caliphate of cordoba, holy war continued to carry this important ideological and practical weight. chapter 4 follows how holy war was understood and deployed in the taifa and almoravid periods, and chapter 5 addresses how the memory of the earliest battles was elaborated and transmitted in a time of multiple competing rulers. as albarrán indicates throughout, holy war was the tool perhaps best able to support claimants to power, since it allowed them to eliminate enemies and to present themselves as defenders of the community while aligning themselves with sacred history. thus, in the taifa period, as al-andalus fragmented into competing city-states, the idea of the ghāzī-king was particularly useful and was deployed regularly by claimants to power. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) javier albarrán iruela’s ejércitos benditos • 619 albarrán’s extensive examination of the ways in which holy war was understood and used in the umayyad period helps highlight the continuities and disjunctures with the periods that followed. the idea that the almoravid period was defined b y a n e w f o c u s o n h o l y w a r a g a i n s t the christians is here complicated by albarrán’s close reading of almoravid sources, which shows that they ritualized their holy war less than the umayyads had done before them and that their vision of holy war brought together the centralized impulse of the jihad state with the decentralized asceticism of frontier warriors. nevertheless, like their umayyad predecessors, the almoravids used holy war to justify their expansion, relying particularly on the famous fatwa of al-ghazālī, which made their conquest of the andalusī kingdoms a sacred project. the almohads, on the other hand, ritualized and sacralized holy war even m o r e t h a n t h e u m a y y a d s h a d d o n e . chapters 6 and 7 focus on, respectively, the practice of holy war under the almohads and the memory of early islamic battles developed in their period. as albarrán demonstrates, almohad processes of ḥisba (commanding the good and forbidding the wrong), takfīr (proclaiming muslims to be infidels), and jihad constituted a single important trajectory, allowing them to present themselves as the sole real muslims and to validate holy war against all of their rivals. it is in the discussion of the development of almohad holy war culture that albarrán’s work reaches its highest levels of analysis. using published chronicles, legal texts, and works of futūḥ, as well as an unpublished maghāzī manuscript by ibn al-qaṭṭān from the q a r a w i y y ī n l i b r a r y i n f e z , a l b a r r á n considers the justification, rhetoric, and ritual of almohad holy war. his analysis of the increasingly elaborate rituals of holy war developed by the almohads demonstrates the importance of such traditions as processions, banners, drums, and the presentation of sacred objects in the performance and legitimation of power. he examines the direct involvement of almohad caliphs in leadership of holy wars and in the development of holy war id eology , inc lud ing t hrough t he commissioning of works of maghāzī and futūḥ (including those of ibn ḥubaysh and ibn al-qaṭṭān). albarrán also considers the objects, architecture, and inscriptions that reflected this vision of holy war, and the destruction of objects and symbols of the enemy that accompanied war. finally, he considers how memory functioned in the construction of holy war ideology—both the memory of the conquests of early islam and the ritualized commemorations o f s i t e s o f m e m o r y ( l o c a m e m o r i a e ) associated with battles in al-andalus. one major contribution of this book is in the systematic refutation of the longstanding argument that al-andalus fell because of a lack of jihad ideology. albarrán demonstrates that several of the pieces of evidence of this “lack” put forward by earlier scholars are untrue. he establishes, first, that there was in fact a lively group of ʿulamāʾ-warriors in al-andalus, with considerable social prestige; second, that andalusī ʿulamāʾ developed new concepts of jihad designed to face the threat of the christians, as is visible in their legal w o r k s a n d i n b o o k s o f m a g h ā z ī a n d futūḥ; and third, that the perception of a greater spirit of holy war in the islamic east than in al-andalus is illusory. the earlier analyses that present andalusīs as al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 620 • abigail krasner balbale lacking in the necessary piety or martial fervor are therefore based on incomplete evidence and do not stand up to closer examination. albarrán does not seek to explain the failure of the umayyads or almohads to hold onto power, but rather to demonstrate the continued value of holy war for rulers, warriors, and scholars throughout this period. indeed, as the whole book shows, holy war ideology was central to the legitimation and practice of power of every dynasty he considers. albarrán concludes that holy war was not simply a rhetorical tool for those in power, but functioned in addition as a source of legitimacy and authority, carrying considerable weight for rulers’ subjects. as such, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries in al-andalus, discourses around holy war developed into complex systems of rituals and symbols, many of which continued in various forms in subsequent centuries. by examining the whole period from the rise of islam to the end of the almohad period, albarrán’s book highlights the important continuities across this period and the recursive ways in which subsequent dynasties returned to earlier moments to demonstrate the holiness of their own mission. indeed, using the lens of memory demonstrates the powerful pull early islamic history had on the dynasts of the islamic middle period, who by echoing the tropes of earlier battles could present themselves as embodiments of holy figures. scholars could also use an imagined memory of a unified umma dedicated to the fight against infidel armies to chastise their compatriots for their lack of unity and, as ibn ḥazm did, call for a new jihad to unite the community once more. another major contribution of this book is its familiarity with the literature on christian holy war, and particularly on the development of the idea of holy war on the iberian peninsula more generally. by looking at representations of holy war and its uses for political legitimation i n a l a n d a l u s w i t h r e f e r e n c e t o t h e simultaneous appeals to holy war in the christian kingdoms of iberia, albarrán demonstrates the transcultural nature of ideas about holy war. the discourse of holy war, as well as its symbols and ritualization, are marked by significant parallels in islamic and christian contexts, especially in the twelfth century. albarrán notes fascinating evidence of medieval scholars’ awareness of such parallels, such as when ibn ʿidhārī describes the order of calatrava as conceiving the fight against the muslims as their ḥajj and jihad. the book forms part of a new flurry of interest in jihad in spanish scholarship, with two other books on the topic coming out in 2020. alejandro garcía-sanjuán’s yihad: la regulación de la guerra en la doctrina islámica clásica (madrid: marcial pons, 2020) focuses on legal questions relating to the practice of jihad in the i s l a m i c w o r l d m o r e g e n e r a l l y , w h i l e josep suñé’s guerra, ejército y fiscalidad en al-andalus, ss. viii–xii (madrid: la ergástula, 2020) considers why andalusī a r m i e s b e c a m e u n a b l e t o d e f e n d themselves against their christian rivals. albarrán’s work differentiates itself by its simultaneous attention to the practice of jihad by rulers aspiring to power in al-andalus from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries and how scholars i n t h e i r e m p l o y c o n n e c t e d m i l i t a r y campaigns to the memory of early islam. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) javier albarrán iruela’s ejércitos benditos • 621 overall, this book constitutes a major contribution to the fields of the history of al-andalus and of holy war more generally. scholars working on the ideology of holy war in christian contexts as well as those interested in the practice of power in the broader islamic world will learn much from it. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 297-300 book review in this substantial tome, mathieu tillier provides an exhaustively researched, carefully argued discussion of the origins of the islamic office of qāḍī. his earlier work, les cadis d’iraq et l’état abbasside, focused exclusively on abbasid qāḍīs. here, tillier delves into the more ambiguous and less well-documented r a s h i d u n a n d u m a y y a d p e r i o d s , o n which, as he acknowledges, the available sources are few and (at best) problematic. tillier eschews discussion of the political aspects of the qāḍīship, about which anecdotes are more abundant, choosing instead to focus on judicial procedures and institutional structures, such as they were. as tillier notes, details about these more mundane but ultimately important matters appear rarely in the narrative and biographical sources. although later legal manuals discuss legal procedures more extensively (some might say ad nauseam), these are plagued by back-projections, creating illusions of continuity between later abbasid practice and early islamic precedents. tillier is quite aware of the hazards and is generally cautious in his reading of the sources, inserting all of the necessary caveats along the way. i n a n e f f o r t t o e l u d e t h e p i t f a l l s the sources impose, tillier augments the narrative and legal sources with a careful study of legal papyri, arguably the only truly primary source available. tillier was able to identify thirty-eight papyri dealing with legal procedures in the collections catalogued in the arabic p a p y r o l o g y d a t a b a s e ( h t t p s : / / w w w . apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project. jsp). of these, thirty-five originate from egypt, while the remaining three are from palestine. the small number and limited geographic distribution of the papyri are problematic, as tillier acknowledges. moreover, their usefulness for verifying or challenging later narrative sources is diminished by the fact that they originate in places about which written sources are largely silent. despite these difficulties, tillier carefully avoids reading too much mathieu tillier, l’invention du cadi: la justice des musulmans, des juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’islam. bibliothèque historique des pays d’islam, 10 (paris: sorbonne, 2017), 704 pp. isbn 979-10-351-0000-1. price: €45 (cloth). steven judd southern connecticut state university (judds1@southernct.edu) https://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project.jsp https://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project.jsp https://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project.jsp mailto:judds1%40southernct.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 298 • steven judd into limited, sometimes cryptic documents but is still able to glean a surprising amount of useful data from the papyri. tillier presents evidence of at least a rudimentary legal structure in which the governor is the ultimate legal authority. he also shows that local christian authorities p l a y e d a c e n t r a l r o l e i n d i s p e n s i n g justice, but that their role diminished over time. he also notes that later papyri included more islamic vocabulary, though references to the quran were only implicit. while a hierarchy of authority is evident in the papyri, they reveal less about actual procedures. letters from governors to local authorities do not include details of the cases being litigated or even indicate whether the governor’s involvement took place at an early stage or was the result of protests or appeals against local rulings. even letters commanding witnesses to appear offer no clear indication of the witnesses’ role in the proceedings, nor do they specify whether the summoned individuals were in fact witnesses or the actual litigants. given the brevity of the documents and their lack of context, none of this is surprising. the most curious finding, which adds support to tillier’s overall thesis, is that the title of qāḍī does not appear in pre-abbasid papyri. i n t h e s e c o n d p a r t o f t h e w o r k , having extracted as much evidence as possible from the papyri, tillier turns to the literary/narrative sources with which most specialists are more familiar. h e a c k n o w l e d g e s a n d d i s c u s s e s t h e limitations from which such sources suffer, particularly their tendency toward legendary accretions about particular qāḍīs and back-projection of later practices. his focus on procedures makes the former issue less prevalent, though it perhaps exacerbates the latter. tillier addresses a variety of aspects of legal procedure, focusing primarily on the functioning of judicial audiences or hearings. he offers descriptions of the location, spatial dynamics, and staffing of the qāḍī’s tribunals, noting how these aspects appear to have evolved over time. tillier uncovers a surprising array of details about the treatment and scrutiny of various types of evidence and legal proofs. specifically, he describes procedures related to witness testimony, the scrutiny of witnesses’ veracity, and the number of witnesses required (or allowed) to testify. he describes the various uses to which oaths were put and the many combinations of witness testimony and oaths noted in the sources. tillier also addresses the occasional appearance of “expert” testimony and its significance, as well as the uneven admission of written material. he notes differences in local practice and a long-term trend toward stricter, more formal rules of evidence. his analysis draws heavily on biographical anecdotes and akhbār al-qāḍī works, as well as on later legal manuals, especially that of the ḥanafī scholar al-khaṣṣāf (d. 261/874). the third part of the work examines other legal institutions with which early islamic justice coexisted and which, to an extent, shaped the context of its evolution. tillier begins with a general explanation of the prevailing legal systems in pre-islamic t i m e s , c o n t r a s t i n g t h e s a s a n i a n a n d eastern roman legal landscapes while also describing the rudimentary system of justice in the arabian peninsula. he then turns to the impact islamic expansion had on non-muslim communities’ systems al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) mathieu tillier’s l’invention du cadi • 299 of justice. although minority religious communities had a degree of legal authority under both the sasanians and byzantines, the islamic empire granted them a higher degree of judicial autonomy and eventually formalized dhimmī communities’ spheres of influence. tillier describes the minimal impact the change of regime had on jewish law, arguing that the community already had a sophisticated legal system and was accustomed to functioning as a relatively isolated, autonomous minority community. for christians, the impact was more substantial and was marked by distinctions between the eastern and western syriac communities that resulted from their contrasting imperial status before islam. tillier describes how each of these communities handled judicial hearings, witnesses, and other procedures, illustrating similarities to and differences from the emerging islamic system while also underscoring the subtle changes these communities implemented in response to their new circumstances. based on his analysis, tillier draws a number of significant conclusions. he argues persuasively that the office of qāḍī, its procedures, and the parameters of its authority developed later than the narrative sources suggest and that the qāḍīship was not particularly relevant or defined until the marwānid period. he also emphasizes that early islamic society accommodated multiple dispensers of justice, including especially governors and existing christian arbiters. tillier convincingly refutes the theory advanced by hallaq, simonsohn, and others that the qāḍīship had its origins in the vaguely defined pre-islamic arabian office of ḥ ā k i m , e m p h a s i z i n g t h e d i s t i n c t i o n between the ḥākim’s role as a mediator and the qāḍī’s ability to declare judgment. he also rejects schacht’s widely accepted regional-school paradigm, pointing to more localized distinctions and correctly noting that any image of unity in places such as iraq, or even more narrowly in kufa or basra, is a later myth. tillier takes a cautious stand regarding the influence of earlier legal practices on emerging islamic justice. he notes similarities between some islamic and byzantine practices and evidence of interaction and perhaps influence between islamic, christian, and jewish legal procedures, but does not go so far as to suggest direct borrowing. tillier’s cautious approach is to be appreciated. where he does make bold conclusions, they are defensible. where he hesitates, h e d e m o n s t r a t e s r e c o g n i t i o n o f t h e limitations the evidence imposes. in this work, tillier has examined c o p i o u s s o u r c e s a n d h a s g l e a n e d a surprising level of detail from sources that tend to resist such harvesting. at times he has cast his net a bit broadly. for instance, although it is interesting to explore zaydi and shiʿi literature on the qāḍīship, these communities’ procedures must be seen as purely hypothetical, even speculative, given their inability to appoint qāḍīs during the period in question. while tillier is careful in his use of sources, nagging questions remain. the papyri are few and have narrow geographical origins, raising questions about whether they can be considered representative and precluding their use for larger regional comparative analysis. tillier notes the possibility that many of the anecdotes about certain qāḍīs, such as shurayḥ b. al-ḥārith and iyās b. muʿāwiya, are exaggerated or legendary, yet they still form the basis for significant parts of his analysis. the image al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 300 • steven judd of earlier times presented in the later ḥanafī legal works tillier cites also merits skepticism. tillier generally includes the necessary caveats and approaches these sources with caution. however, the difficulties the sources present remain. perhaps they are ultimately intractable. tillier’s focus on the umayyad era as a crucial phase of legal and institutional d e v e l o p m e n t i s w e l c o m e , a s i s h i s recognition of continuities between the umayyad and abbasid eras. however, his decision to focus exclusively on procedure and institutional developments and to largely ignore the political environment, while understandable, is also potentially limiting. tillier argues that the second half of the umayyad period and the transition to abbasid rule saw substantial procedural and institutional development and standardization. such transformations require a high degree of political stability and rulers’ support. unfortunately, the lack of any significant evidence (papyrological, narrative, or otherwise) on the functioning of the judiciary in the umayyad imperial capital of damascus makes it especially d i f f i c u l t t o d e t e r m i n e t h e e x t e n t o f caliphal involvement. however, it is clear that at times the umayyads could provide support, but often they could not. the turmoil of the last decade of umayyad r u l e c a n n o t h a v e b e e n c o n d u c i v e t o bureaucratic and institutional advances. this reality should not be ignored. it is quite possible that the growing importance of the qāḍī reflected his status as the last bastion of stability in a polity crumbling into factions. political turmoil might also suggest alternative explanations for some of the changes tillier documents. for instance, the growing importance of the mosque as the qāḍī’s venue, which tillier attributes principally to a growing separation between islam and other faiths, may also reflect the status of the mosque as a refuge from the chaos in the streets. similarly, the more frequent mention of guards accompanying the qāḍī may reflect considerations that are less ceremonial than pragmatic in troubled times. t h e q u e s t i o n s r a i s e d h e r e s h o u l d not detract from tillier’s achievement. indeed, they may be impossible to answer, barring the appearance of additional sources. tillier has examined a great deal of material carefully and cautiously and has made great strides in explaining the emergence of the office of qāḍī. unfortunately, this review cannot touch on all of the many interesting and important details he includes in this comprehensive work. combined with his earlier work on abbasid qāḍīs, l’invention du cadi clearly establishes tillier as the leading contemporary scholar on islamic qāḍīs and as a worthy successor to emile tyan in this regard. in memoriam al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 340-344 on march 11, 2019, speros vryonis, jr., a towering figure in byzantine history, hellenic studies in general, and related islamica, passed away in sacramento, california. in anticipation of many tributes to him and commentaries on his astonishing scholarly legacy, i will limit my remarks here to a sketch of his life and some personal recollections. v r y o n i s w a s b o r n i n m e m p h i s , tennessee, on july 18, 1928. it was then a semi-rustic urban center on the mississippi in the segregated south. he always spoke with a slight southern accent. his parents w e r e i m m i g r a n t s f r o m t h e i s l a n d o f cephalonia (various spellings) off the west coast of greece. his father established a large bakery and meat processing plant in memphis, and as a boy vryonis worked in both. he had fond memories of his childhood. he and his father frequently went fishing in the lakes and streams around the city. he grew up bilingual in greek and english. from early in his life, his parents impressed upon him the delights of greek culture and civilization from homer to the present. he would sit enraptured, listening to relatives and members of the greek community in memphis discuss the glories and tragedies of hellenism. he learned of the greco-turkish war of 1919–21 and began to wonder how anatolia had become turkish. in 1937, a few months before his tenth birthday and having just participated in a remembering speros vryonis, jr. (1928–2019) remembering speros vryonis, jr. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 341 state of tennessee piano competition in nashville, his parents took him from school to visit relatives in cephalonia. they sailed on the queen mary to southampton and then crossed europe to venice, where he had his first introduction to byzantine art. from there they continued to athens, where his parents took him to visit the acropolis and parthenon, a site that left an indelible impression on him. this visit was instrumental in determining his future professional and emotional life. later, when he was a student for a year at the american school of classical studies in athens, he visited the site at least five to ten times a month. later still, when he taught at the university of athens, he continued to visit it repeatedly. it was his intellectual and spiritual lodestone. vryonis spent three delightful months in cephalonia, thoroughly immersed in the life and language of the island and exploring every square meter of it. a year after he returned to america, his parents separated. at the age of ten, he was sent to castle heights military academy, a private school in lebanon, tennessee, which closed in 1986. there he excelled in athletics, especially basketball and boxing, but he was cut off from greek life and culture. at the age of sixteen he returned to memphis and attended southern law university for a year (he once thought of becoming a patent attorney) before enrolling at nearby southwestern college, now rhodes college. he had high praise for his teachers there and graduated in 1950 with an honors thesis entitled “the history of cephallenia from 3000 bc to 313 ad.” after graduation he spent a year on a fulbright scholarship at the american school of classical studies in athens and completed a project entitled “a historical and archaeological survey of cephallenia” (1951), which is held in the library of that institution. afterward vryonis entered harvard, earning an ma in 1952 and a phd in 1956 with a dissertation entitled “the internal history of byzantium during the time of troubles, 1057–81.” in 1960, after doing postdoctoral work at dumbarton oaks and teaching at harvard, he became professor of byzantine history at ucla, where he remained for twenty-eight years. in 1972, following the death of gustave e. von grunebaum, who had founded the center for near eastern studies at ucla, he replaced von grunebaum as director, serving twice until 1982. between 1976 and 1984 he also held the chair of medieval and modern history at the university of athens. in 1985 he founded the speros basil vryonis center for the study of hellenism, which housed much of his library, in los angeles and served as its director until 1988. in that year he left ucla to become alexander s. onassis professor of hellenic culture and civilization at nyu and the director of the onassis center for hellenic studies (1988–1993). in 1995 he left nyu and returned to the vryonis center, which had meanwhile been relocated to rancho cordova south of sacramento. between 1996 and 2000 he again directed the center until he retired to his home in el dorado hills, california, east of sacramento. upon his retirement the vryonis center was closed, and in 2002 its library was transferred to california state university sacramento, where it became the tsakopoulos hellenic collection. v r y o n i s ’ s s c h o l a r s h i p w a s o f e x t r a o r d i n a r y b r e a d t h a n d d e p t h . a testament to this was the two-volume festschrift in his honor, tο eλληικον: remembering speros vryonis, jr. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 342 s t u d i e s i n h o n o r o f s p e r o s v r y o n i s , jr. (new rochelle, ny: caratzas, 1993), p r e s e n t e d t o h i m o n h i s s i x t y f i f t h birthday. in reflection of his own work, the contributions ranged over hellenic antiquity, byzantium, byzantinoslavica, armeniaca, islamica, the balkans, and modern greece. the first volume contains a t w e n t y p a g e b i b l i o g r a p h y o f h i s publications. but the festschrift by no means marked the end of his scholarly career. indeed, he continued to publish on many subjects for another twenty-five years. an updated bibliography would probably reach forty pages. vryonis is most renowned, of course, for his unprecedented work the decline of medieval hellenism in asia minor and the process of islamization from the eleventh through the fifteenth century (berkeley: university of california press, 1971). the question of how asia minor had been transformed from a christian byzantine region into a muslim turkish one had long intrigued him. in 1959 he mentioned to helmut ritter in istanbul that he wanted to write a history of this transformation, but ritter discouraged him, saying it would be impossible. vryonis took this response as a challenge. the result was a work that revolutionized the study of medieval asia minor. by a thorough analysis of both greek and muslim sources, he reached a series of conclusions about the causes and consequences of the transformation. his arguments have proven fundamental to our understanding of medieval asia minor. in the introduction to the second revised edition (new york: greekworks. com, 2011), he reviewed scholarship by others on the subject after the first appearance of his book and noted that its basic theses had not been challenged. decline was translated into greek and two attempts have been made to translate it into turkish, but the task has proven too daunting. decline won the haskins medal of the medieval academy of america for the most outstanding book in medieval studies in 1975. vryonis would go on to receive many other prestigious awards and honors during his career, including fellowships (grants), honorary doctorates, election to learned societies, and decorations. v r y o n i s a d h e r e d t o t h e h i g h e s t scholarly standards. he had no tolerance for academics who did poor work or, above all, did not have command of the languages required for their research. this attitude was epitomized by his critique of the first volume of stanford shaw’s history of the ottoman empire and modern turkey (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1976). shaw was a colleague at ucla, but when his work was published vryonis considered it an affront to scholarly excellence, academic freedom, and the integrity of ucla’s evaluative process and standards. he did not feel free to discuss it until after giving up the directorship of ucla’s near east center, which he had renamed in honor of von grunebaum, for whom he had the highest respect. he then published an exhaustive and devastating dissection of shaw’s book in balkan studies 24 (1983): 163–286. he demonstrated in painful detail that, apart from its countless mistakes, it was not an original work based on research in primary sources, as was claimed, but largely plagiarized from or based on secondary publications. before vryonis’s critique, shaw’s book had already been harshly reviewed by rifaat abou al-haj (ahr 82 [1977]), v. l. menage (bsoas 41 [1978]), and colin imber (ehr 93 [1978]). in turkey, aydoğan demir (tarih remembering speros vryonis, jr. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 343 incelemeleri dergisi 1 [1983]) considered the book worthless. i once asked vryonis what halil inalcık thought of his criticism of shaw’s work. he replied that inalcık had agreed with him but said, “we need him”— meaning that shaw would help promote ottoman studies. i first met vryonis in 1985, when i passed through philadelphia while he was attending a conference at the university of pennsylvania. i introduced myself and gave him a box of pistachios from gaziantep, which greatly pleased him. in 1989 my wife and i moved from ankara to vacaville, california, which turned out to be only about forty-five minutes from the vryonis center in rancho cordova. i frequently visited the center to use its remarkable library, and vryonis and i soon became good friends. he was kind and helpful and always encouraged me in my work. eventually we began to meet monthly for lunch. i always looked forward to these lunches because each time was like a tutorial on byzantine or turkish history, or on the state of the art of middle eastern studies in the united states. he was candid in his criticism of certain academics, including a few at ucla in addition to shaw. he felt they were frauds because they published little or mediocre work or had a poor command of the necessary languages. as director of the center at ucla and privy to the quality of the publications of its members, he was in a good position to judge. vryonis could do research in more than a dozen languages. for him, competence in the necessary languages was the sine qua non of solid scholarship. this he found lacking even at harvard in the early 1950s. he would recall that his professor of byzantine history would ask him to translate greek for him and that instruction there in middle eastern languages was terrible. this was before h. a. r. gibb arrived in 1955 and established the center for middle eastern studies at harvard. in the course of his life, vryonis had to face a number of physical challenges. he suffered from seizures as a boy. he overcame two bouts of cancer, and near the end of his life, several vertebrae in his neck fused so that he could not raise his head. but the worst thing to befall him was the loss of the oldest of his three sons, basil, who suffered from schizophrenia and took his own life while in his twenties. vryonis never got over his son’s death and named the center in rancho cordova after him. our older son suffers from a similar condition, and vryonis always offered a sympathetic ear to our dilemmas. vryonis was not religious, nor were his parents in any strict or deep sense, although they were a family of fourteen generations of priests. the greek orthodox church was simply a part of their cultural upbringing. its festivals were markers of the seasons and bonds of community. vryonis had a wicked sense of humor. i once asked him to recommend a greek restaurant in sacramento for lunch. he replied that the greek restaurants in sacramento ranked among the minor greek tragedies. he was the only person i know who had met m. f. köprülü. this m e e t i n g o c c u r r e d w h e n t h e t u r k i s h scholar and politician came to harvard in 1956. vryonis found köprülü arrogant and described him as someone who “could see around corners.” certain graduate students, including shaw, served as his “ghulāms”. curiously, when vryonis was — gary leiser independent scholar (leiser.gary@gmail.com) remembering speros vryonis, jr. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 344 teaching at the university of athens, he said certain people there accused him of being a turkish spy. like that of any scholar, his home was full of books. numbering, he guessed, around nine thousand, they were stacked from floor to ceiling in every room. his garage contained forty file cabinets s t u f f e d w i t h p a p e r s . t h e y i n c l u d e d correspondence, files from his time at ucla, research notes, and even a rare set of court records of the menderes’s trial at yassıada in turkey (1960–61). he also left behind a completed manuscript on the greek sources for the battle of manzikert. one hopes that it will see its way to press as the final contribution to his remarkable legacy. as a great scholar, vryonis was indeed sui generis. but more than that, he was a good teacher and friend. mailto:leiser.gary%40gmail.com?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 301-304 book review there seems to be no end to the scholarly fascination with al-jāḥiẓ. the book under review attests to that, as it is one of several recent studies devoted to this author.1 hans-peter pökel’s 2014 monograph is centered on al-jāḥiẓ’s treatment of eunuchs, the “unmanly man” (der unmännliche mann) to whom the title refers, paying special—though not exclusive—attention to al-jāḥiẓ’s magnum opus, the kitāb al-ḥayawān (the book of living beings). f o r a n a u t h o r c a p t i v a t e d b y t h e infinite wonders of god’s creation, it does not come as a surprise that al-jāḥiẓ, in addition to analyzing men and women, horses and donkeys, wolves, cocks, dogs, phoenixes, ants, flies, bees, and other creepy-crawlies, devoted many pages 1. at least two other monographs have been published recently: thomas hefter, the reader in al-jāḥiẓ (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014); and james e. montgomery, al-jāḥiẓ: in praise of books (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2013), which will be accompanied by a second volume entitled al-jāḥiẓ: in censure of books. 2. david ayalon, eunuchs, caliphs and sultans (jerusalem: magnes press/hebrew university, 1999). of his k. al-ḥayawān to the physical and ethical characteristics of eunuchs. despite the islamic condemnation of castration, eunuchs have always been present in premodern islamic societies, most often as holders of important positions at the court. the historical and social relevance of eunuchs in islam has been well known since ayalon’s pioneering research on the “eunuch institution,”2 which paved the way for further studies, including this one. but this book is not only a work of social history. pökel’s main interest is to explore the relationship between body and sexual identity in the formative period of islam in the light of al-jāḥiẓ’s understanding of animal and human nature; in this regard, this study is also an example of the intellectual history of gender. hans-peter pökel, der unmännliche mann: zur figuration des eunuchen im werk von al-ǧāḥiẓ (gest. 869). mitteilungen zur sozialund kulturgeschichte der islamischen welt, 36 (würzburg: ergon, 2014). isnb 978-3956500282. 390 pp. €48. ignacio sánchez university of warwick (ignacio.sanchez@warwick.ac.uk) mailto:ignacio.sanchez%40warwick.ac.uk?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 302 • ignacio sánchez in the introductory first chapter, pökel discusses the methodological principles that guide his analysis of al-jāḥiẓ’s texts and his research on eunuchs. for pökel, a proper understanding of the relationship between gender and body should take into account, on the one hand, the greek and late antique theories of humoral pathology that informed abbasid notions of human nature and their discourses on the body (körperdiskurse), and, on the other hand, the moral implications that result from this conceptualization, since these shape contemporary conceptions of love and sexuality and even core principles of arab societies such as murūʾa. in chapter 2, pökel reviews the figure of al-jāḥiẓ and surveys the corpus of jāḥiẓian works on which he bases his study. the most important of them is, of course, the k. al-ḥayawān, which is discussed vis-à-vis aristotle’s opus animalium. pökel also lists other works that deal—sometimes only tangentially—with the nature of eunuchs, gender, humoral theory, or manly virtue, namely, k. al-bighāl, k. al-muʿallimīn, k. al-radd ʿalā al-naṣārā, k. al-nisāʾ, risālat al-qiyān, k. fakhr al-sudān ʿalā al-bīḍān, k. al-tabaṣṣur bi-l-tijāra, manāqib al-turk, k. al-ḥijāb, risāla fī al-nābita, maqālat al-ʿuthmāniyya, and k. kitmān al-sirr. chapter 3, which opens with a general overview of slavery in late antiquity and early islam, is centered on the eunuch body and its modification. pökel provides here a detailed discussion of the castration techniques that al-jāḥiẓ describes in intricate detail in his k. al-ḥayawān and that might involve surgical excision (khiṣāʾ, gonadectomy, and jibāb, penectomy) or contusions that result in testicular atrophy (wijāʾ, the latin ablatio). chapter 4 is focused on the physical consequences of castration as understood by al-jāḥiẓ and his contemporaries. in this chapter, pökel surveys the physiological principles that framed the abbasid understanding of human nature, paying special attention to the aristotelian tradition and the galenic synthesis of humoral theory. because of their relevance for the study of eunuchs, greek theories on the production of semen are discussed at length. al-jāḥiẓ, who traces the origin of castration back to byzantium (ḥayawān, 1.125), denounces the practice in the context of his polemics against christians. chapter 5 explores this accusation and the treatment of eunuchs in islam vis-à-vis roman, byzantine, and early christian attitudes toward castration, the loss of manliness, and the protection of the body’s integrity. one of the examples treated in this section is that of the famous o r i g e n o f a l e x a n d r i a , w h o a l l e g e d l y castrated himself and whose legend seems to have been known to al-jāḥiẓ. chapter 6 continues this inquiry into the religious a n d m o r a l i m p l i c a t i o n s o f m a n h o o d and manliness by problematizing the relationship between emasculation and asceticism, but it soon evolves into a lengthy discussion of sexual preferences and gender identity. in this chapter, which contains the most theoretical sections of the book, pökel discusses the emotions and “unmanly sexuality” of eunuchs, their contrasts with heterosexual and homosexual models, and the treatment of these problems in an islamic context. chapter 7 centers on the ethnicity of the eunuchs, mostly slavs (ṣaqāliba) and black africans (sūdān), and the implications that geographical determinism and ethnic stereotypes have for al-jāḥiẓ’s typologies. the eighth and final chapter deals only al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) hans-peter pökel’s der unmännliche mann: zur figuration des eunuchen • 303 occasionally with al-jāḥiẓ’s texts. in it pökel discusses the liminality of the spaces occupied by eunuchs in abbasid society and explores the role they played at the court, especially as holders of offices (such as that of the ḥājib) that gave them direct access to the rulers, as harem attendants, and within the armies of the caliphs. this chapter also contains a thoughtful critique of the conceptualization of harems in orientalist scholarship and its reduction of the figure of the eunuch to a mere harem servant. this brief s um m ary has hope fu lly made clear the ambitious scope of pökel’s thorough and well-researched study. it embodies, without doubt, the most illuminating approach to the figure of the eunuch in the first centuries of islam, and it also constitutes a valuable contribution to the study of al-jāḥiẓ; in the latter regard, pökel’s research on the influence of humoral theory and dietetics in the jāḥiẓian understanding of human nature is particularly insightful. the difficulties of al-jāḥiẓ’s meandering prose are also solved competently and, apart from minor mistakes, pökel’s translation is reliable. the centrality of al-jāḥiẓ in the study, however, is not always evident. the sources used in the book are reviewed in chapter 2, and pökel devotes several pages to the most important of them, k. al-ḥayawān, but he does not say much about how al-jāḥiẓ conceived of the long section on eunuchs in his work (k. al-ḥayawān, 1:106– 181) or about how the section is connected with the rest of the chapters. finding the underlying logic of the k. al-ḥayawān is not an easy task, as james montgomery’s recent book on the work shows, and the section on eunuchs is a quintessentially jāḥiẓian example of apparently digressive prose. pökel methodically discusses all the questions tackled by al-jāḥiẓ, but it would have been useful for the reader to have a detailed inventory of the topics and themes that al-jāḥiẓ addresses in these pages, which include, alongside the consequences of castration in humans and animals, digressions on horse-breeding, the differences between domestic and wild animals, and the nature of the giraffe. the relationship of this section with the rest of the k. al-ḥayawān and with the k. al-bighāl also deserves more attention, since the unnamed addressee lambasted by al-jāḥiẓ in the introduction had critical opinions about hybrid categories and interbreeding (ḥayawān, 1:102–106), which are the main topic of al-jāḥiẓ’s book on mules. pökel is, however, very careful when it comes to contextualizing the physiological notions that underlie al-jāḥiẓ’s discussion of human nature in the k. al-ḥayawān. al-jāḥiẓ’s acquaintance with aristotle’s opus animalium and galen’s humoral theories is addressed in various instances, and pökel is right to stress the importance of understanding these influences in the context of the late antique tradition. but the way in which al-jāḥiẓ has become familiar with this legacy is an entirely different matter. al-jāḥiẓ’s elaborate p a r a p h r a s e s o f t e n r e n d e r t h e e x a c t identification of his sources a rather difficult—if not impossible—task. the greek origin of the philosophical and medical ideas discussed in the k. al-ḥayawān is evident, as is the weight of aristotle’s works on animals, but pökel’s insistence on the late antique context sometimes contributes to obscuring relevant aspects of the study of al-jāḥiẓ’s reception of the greek tradition. if we look at the indexes of the aristotelian and galenic corpora, we al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 304 • ignacio sánchez find, in fact, very few mentions of eunuchs in their works. by contrast, eunuchs seem to have held a particular fascination for abbasid scholars, so much so that they made their way into arabic translations of aristotelian works that in their original versions made no mention of eunuchs at all. the arabic translation/adaptation of the parva naturalia is a good example, for it includes discussions on eunuchs that are not present in the original greek. eunuchs are even more relevant in the problemata tradition, which pökel does not discuss. the problemata physica arabica contain questions concerning eunuchs’ sexual desire (v, 3), their change toward a female nature (xi, 34), the occurrence of gout (xi, 35) and sores (xi, 40) in eunuchs, and the tone of their voice (xii, 16);3 the problemata arabica inedita include three 3. see lou s. filius (ed. and trans.), the problemata physica attributed to aristotle: the arabic version of ḥunain ibn isḥāq and the hebrew version of moses ibn tibbon (leiden: brill, 1999). 4. lou s. filius, “the genre problemata in arabic: its motions and changes,” in aristotle’s problemata in different times and tongues, ed. pieter de leemans and michèle goyens, 33–54 (leuven: university press, 2006), 46–47. further questions on eunuchs, two of which address the differences between the khaṣī and the khādim.4 the reception of the aristotelian problemata by al-jāḥiẓ and, in general, by the basran muʿtazila i s a c o m p l i c a t e d m a t t e r t h a t a w a i t s further research, but i cannot help but wonder whether many of the notions and argumentations that we can read in the k. al-ḥayawān might not have come, in fact, from this tradition. these remarks, however, should not distract from the importance of pökel’s study. this book is a masterly contribution to the scholarship on al-jāḥiẓ and on the history of sexuality that will be of interest not only to specialists on the islamic world but also to scholars working on late antiquity, comparative history, and gender studies. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 243-248 book review th i s b o o k s e t s o u t t o e x p l o r e a question that is deliberately more ambitious than it could possibly exhaust, namely: how could the history of polemical literature, which is ostensibly quite confrontational, set christian-muslim relations on a less confrontational course than their shared history? more ambitious, because the answer depends on whether the interpretation that this book models will influence future studies or not, and on what the effect of such influence would be. but the question itself is both important and well positioned. since its inception, the study of muslim polemics against other religions was to a large extent shaped in the shadow of the study of christian anti-jewish polemic. over the course of the nineteenth century, german scholars, many of whom were lutherans who taught or were trained at tübingen, applied the new methods of source criticism and systematic philology to articulate a new paradigm for the rise of christianity and the role of jesus christ. according to this school of new testament studies, second temple judaism had become a sanctimonious, excessively legalistic religion, in which god was remote and inaccessible. in their penchant for dry codification the pharisees had been responsible for the long and inevitable drift away from the spiritual creativity that characterizes parts of the pentateuch. what is more, while jesus and his teaching grew directly from this same tradition, his intellectual and spiritual program were the exact antithesis of judaism. influential theologians such as julius wellhausen and ferdinand wilhelm weber took the polemics against judaism that are found in the new testament—e.g., phil. 3:2; matt. 23; gal. 3:1–5—at face value. for them, the tension that is felt most strongly in paul’s epistles speaks to the fact that the jews living during the time of christ and the apostles were in fact hypocrites, but adhered at the same time to the same corpus that the christians inherited en masse. in other words, paul’s (perceived) diego r. sarrio cucarella, muslim-christian polemics across the mediterranean: the splendid replies of shihāb al-dīn al-qarāfī (d. 684/1285). the history of christian-muslim relations, vol. 23 (leiden: brill, 2014). isbn: 978-90-04-28560-6. price: €141.00/$191.00. uri shachar ben gurion university of the negev (urisha@bgu.ac.il) mailto:urisha%40bgu.ac.il?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 244 • uri shachar polemical attitude toward the mosaic law and toward observing it seemed not only warranted (because it was true, that is), but also necessary. this was equally true for church fathers and early christian theoreticians who composed tracts that polemicized against the jews. for weber and his students, i f i n d e e d p h a r i s e e s w e r e d a n g e r o u s “judaizers,” then early christians, who belonged to a split and persecuted sect, had to explain why some of their fundamental ideas were rooted in the same tradition. from barnabas to augustine, the polemic was not with “real” jews, but with an abstraction that stood for the scripture that christianity inherited. its crucially important objective was to articulate a hermeneutics with which to read the hebrew bible that was the consequence of the christology that is embedded in the gospels. for proponents of the tübingen school and its offshoots, christian polemic is fundamentally benign, free of any political hostility; it is a hermeneutical endeavor, in which theoretical jews are staged as an interpretive foil, born out of fear of assimilation and oppression. not so, however, in islam. nineteenthcentury orientalists did not view polemics as a necessary component in the muslim t h e o l o g i c a l t r a d i t i o n . t h e q u r ʾ ā n points out the shortcomings of judaism and christianity, but on the whole is appreciative of the previous revelations. at the same time, islam did not adopt the old and new testaments as scripture. the need to articulate a hermeneutical position vis-à-vis previous revelations, in other words, did not exist in the same way as it did for christianity. as a religion that very soon after its founding achieved political hegemony, its attitude toward neighboring faiths could not have been driven by the threat of persecution or silencing. for such critics as steinschneider, goldziher, and becker, therefore, the polemical impulse that started to become manifest fully in the ninth century was a sign of the virulent hostility that characterized islam’s attitude toward other faiths. it is no wonder, furthermore, that scholars viewed polemical exchanges from the crusader period—a time when the religions were indeed engaged in an ongoing political and spiritual battle—as particularly emblematic of this inherent enmity. the past two decades, however, have seen a shift in our understanding of the complex inter-religious conversations that unfolded in the ayyubid, mamluk, and frankish near east. while scholars r e c o g n i z e t h e c o m p l i c a t e d p o l i t i c a l circumstances in which authors made attempts to engage with (putatively) rival traditions, there is also a growing understanding that the longstanding i n t e l l e c t u a l e x c h a n g e t h a t e m e r g e d during this period speaks to the rise of what could be called a polemical dialogue. the pioneering work of david thomas, paul khoury, and thomas michel has identified paul of antioch as a key figure in the history of this discourse, facilitating through his treatises a constructive interr e l i g i o u s c o n v e r s a t i o n t h a t s p a n n e d religions and regions. it is to this recent impulse that diego cucarella’s masterful a n d p r o v o c a t i v e s t u d y o f a l q a r ā f ī ’ s treatise al-ajwiba al-fākhira belongs. shihāb al-dīn al-qarāfī (d. 684/1285) was an egyptian mālikī jurist who rose to prominence as a teacher of fiqh in various institutions of learning during the second half of the thirteenth century. a true intellectual, al-qarāfī commanded al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) diego r. sarrio cucarella’s muslim-christian polemics • 245 knowledge in a wide range of fields that stretched well beyond the classical islamic sciences, including astronomy, optics, mathematics, and logic. it was at some time between 1250 and 1278—relatively late in his life—that he turned to the systematic and argumentative defense of islam. indeed, in both title and structure, al-ajwiba is positioned as a response to an attack that was set forth by an unnamed christian critic. in fact, the first chapter consists of replies to every single claim that is found in paul of antioch’s letter to a muslim friend (although it is important to note that al-qarāfī probably responded to some later rendition of the original letter). but al-ajwiba is far more ambitious a project than an attempt narrowly to defend islam from the claims of the melkite theologian. the composition, for example, begins with a series of anthropological o b s e r v a t i o n s c o n c e r n i n g s e c u l a r institutions in christian communities around the mediterranean. for al-qarāfī, the fact that franks in the levant resort to the ordeal (trial by combat), a foolish practice that is incapable of achieving justice he says, or the annual persecution of jews in castile and provence on the basis of the ludicrous accusation that they “stole the [christian] religion” (which is subsequently restored after three days), all prove that christianity has become an ignorant sect overcome by servile conformism (p. 100). the centrality of bishops in christian society, al-qarāfī explains, is to be blamed, for without the firm voice of prophetic guidance t h e c o r r u p t c l e r i c a l e l i t e i n t r o d u c e s blameworthy innovations and error into society. indeed, in all its sections al-ajwiba draws heavily on a wide range of sources, both geographically and thematically, which creates the impression that its opinion on christianity and defense of islam is not only exceptionally erudite b u t a l s o i n t e n t i o n a l l y b r o a d . i n t h e first two chapters of the book cucarella meticulously lays out this thematic and intellectual breadth. he furthermore points out that al-qarāfī set out not only to launch a narrow philosophical attack on the theological tenets of christianity (and, to a lesser extent, judaism); rather, by addressing questions of prophetology and revelation, he also sought to establish the supremacy of islamic culture, as a doctrinal system but also as a civilizational project. this ties in to cucarella’s larger argument in the book, to which i shall return momentarily. chapters 3–6 provide a thorough and insightful survey of al-ajwiba in its entirety. chapter 3 treats the first chapter of al-ajwiba, which is also the most polemical one in tone and content, where al-qarāfī responds to the claims brought forth in the melkite tradition that stand at the bottom of this correspondence. cucarella shows that while paul of antioch’s critiques of islam are numerous and diverse in theological nature, al-qarāfī’s response hinges on one main point on which the two traditions disagree; namely, the doctrine of prophetic infallibility that had become the consensus in muslim theology by al-qarāfī’s time. if muḥammad was an infallible envoy of divine revelation, then by definition his message is to be accepted as universally true. the same, however, is not true for the apostles, who may have distorted jesus’ message, or even for the hebrew bible that may have become corrupt through faulty transmission. in this way al-qarāfī both disproves paul’s christological interpretation of several al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 246 • uri shachar qurʾānic passages, and undermines his claim regarding the restricted quality o f m u ḥ a m m a d ’ s t e a c h i n g s . w h a t i s more, this disagreement on the issue of prophetology, which results in conflicting views of scriptural truth, leads al-qarāfī to draw far-reaching conclusions not only on the veracity of christianity as a creed, but on the very ability of contemporary christians to lead a healthy communal life. despite the harsh critique of christian error, on the whole the first chapter is apologetic, with the objective of escaping the uncomfortable consequences that result from paul’s reading of the qurʾān. in the next two chapters, however, al-qarāfī shifts to the offensive. cucarella points out that in chapter two al-qarāfī is still responding to various attacks on islam, but the stakes are clearly higher, and the tone more acerbic. al-qarāfī, for example, defends the muslim rejection of christ’s crucifixion. he scrutinizes the narrative in the gospels to show that even on the basis of a plain literary analysis, it is an unreliable report of the event. the story as it unfolds in the gospels, in other words, shows that between the arrest and the crucifixion there were several moments in which the identity of the person being crucified was not sufficiently clear. but fundamentally, for al-qarāfī here, too, what lies at the bottom of the matter is a question of epistemology. arguably the most important moment in christian soteriology is an event about which we know via the report of a few people who were present and four scribes, none of whom was a prophet. later in the chapter al-qarāfī responds to one of the earliest and most widespread a r g u m e n t s a g a i n s t i s l a m ; n a m e l y , that it had spread through the use of brute force, showing that its claim for theological supremacy is in fact weak and unconvincing. this argument, of course, invokes not only the history of the early conquests, but also verses in the qurʾān that are seen to preach violence against unbelievers. here again al-qarāfī returns to his basic critique of christianity as a religion that has strayed from the truth revealed to its prophet due to the unchecked influence of “innovative” bishops. if christians engage in warfare, which they clearly did in al-qarāfī’s time, despite the pacifist command to “turn the other cheek” in the gospel, then this must be because power-hungry princes have lured bishops to abrogate christ’s teaching in a way that has left this community, unlike the muslim one, hopelessly misguided. this dismissive tone characterizes the subsequent chapter, which as cucarella states, is the most combative and the least original in al-ajwiba. al-qarāfī collected 107 arguments against christianity from a variety of sources, most dominantly al-jaʿfarī’s takhjīl man ḥarrafa al-tawrāh w a a l i n j ī l , w h i c h w a s e x t r e m e l y popular at the time. al-qarāfī questions and directly refutes many of the basic practices and doctrines that his christian counterparts endorse. because they did not take the teaching of jesus as the one and only authority (which, as a result, has become inaccessible), christians have on the one hand introduced into their faith blameworthy innovations – such as the eucharist and celibacy – and on the other hand have irresponsibly abandoned p r a c t i c e s t h a t c h r i s t i s r e p o r t e d t o have observed – such as ritual purity, circumcision, and the prohibition of eating pork. but in this chapter al-qarāfī directs his arrows mainly at the person he thinks al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) diego r. sarrio cucarella’s muslim-christian polemics • 247 is responsible for the most destructive corruption of christ’s teaching: st. paul. the chapter dwells at length on several narratives of paul’s conversion and his subsequent deceitful ploys that drove the followers of christ away from their original monotheistic faith. cucarella t r a c e s m a s t e r f u l l y t h e c o m p l i c a t e d history of these narratives in their various m a n i f e s t a t i o n s i n t h e a n t i c h r i s t i a n polemical tradition. the final chapter of al-ajwiba (and the penultimate chapter in cucarella’s book) deals with proofs of muḥammad’s prophecy that al-qarāfī attempts to find in the old and new testament. as cucarella points out, this contradicts alqarāfī’s previous attack on the integrity of these scriptural traditions, but the use of these prooftexts here is strictly polemical. al-qarāfī turns to these texts, in other words, not as religiously authoritative, but simply to substantiate the prophethood of muḥammad on the basis of traditions t h a t j e w s a n d c h r i s t i a n s a c c e p t a s revealed truth. cucarella does not quite spell this out, but as a consequence of this attitude al-qarāfī’s treatment of the biblical text does not amount to scriptural polemic in the hermeneutical sense. all of his arguments are historical in nature: passages in the torah or psalms or the gospels, he says, should be seen as referring to islam simply because the descriptions correspond most accurately to muḥammad or the umma. for example, those of whom it is said that “praise of god [is] in their mouths and a doubleedged sword in their hands” in ps. 149:6 must be muslims because they are the only ones who praise god with loud voices in the call to prayer and are allegedly the only ones who use two-edged swords (p. 248). al-qarāfī, in other words, does not accuse jewish or christian exegetes of misinterpreting the bible because they lack the tools or cognitive ability to understand its true meaning; rather, because of their political entanglements that are the result of the lack of proper religious leadership, they deliberately refuse to acknowledge the plain (i.e., historical) meaning of their own texts. that cucarella chose not to draw out this point further is rather surprising, as one of his main arguments in the book is that al-ajwiba should be seen fundamentally as a political text. he reiterates the notion that al-qarāfī was driven by a sense of threat to muslim hegemony, which led him to compose a defense not only of the qurʾān and muḥammad, but of islamic civilization. in the context of the recurring conflicts with latin christians and the rising threat of the mongols, as well as the so-called coptic renaissance, cucarella states aptly, polemics seemed like an appropriate vehicle to trumpet the truth not only of islam but of the muslim community as the “best nation ever brought forth to men” ( q 3 : 1 5 ) . t h i s i s m o s t v i s i b l e w h e r e al-qarāfī’s critique strays from the nuts and bolts of philosophical polemic and turns to issues that concern the ordinary practices of neighboring communities. but this point is more subtle (and urgent) than simply a reminder to consider the context in which this treatise was composed and that shaped the experience of its author, for what underlies cucarella’s treatment of al-ajwiba is the claim that inter-religious discourse is in fact about the basis of human civilization precisely because, through the debate about various al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 248 • uri shachar d o c t r i n a l d i f f e r e n c e s , a u t h o r s r e a l l y attempted the construction of separate identities, which are always profoundly entangled. yet especially after vatican ii, says cucarella, those who have engaged in efforts to resolve long-lasting religious conflicts have tended to assume that the various doctrines are incommensurably different, and that the source of all conflict is the struggle for power. if only we could “depoliticize” theology and refrain from comparison, some say, we might achieve harmony. this fantasy, however, has been rejected even by some of the most vocal supporters of the message brought forth by vatican ii. in contrast, cucarella claims, citing hugh nicholson, we should recognize that some of the most profound doctrinal differences “are the contingent product of the complex processes of selection, emphasis, and recognition through which religious communities situate themselves politically in relation to proximate rivals” (p. 11). in other words, religious discourse—even the most refined and seemingly insular theological t r e a t m e n t — i s p a r t o f t h e i d e n t i t y construction through which muslims and christians situate themselves ‘politically’ in relation to each other (p. 268). this provocative insight is the engine behind cucarella’s approach, which is stated in the question with which this review began: could polemical literature help us foster a better understanding between muslims and christians? it is crucially important to recognize, says c u c a r e l l a , t h a t t h e s e e m i n g p o l a r i t y between the traditions is not essential but rather results from a dialectic of mutual perceptions that was fashioned over centuries of heated and engaged discussion. moreover, polemic plays a decisive role in building this very discourse, the purpose of which was in part to intensify the political sense of ‘us’ against ‘them.’ a sympathetic reading of the polemical tradition, therefore, could teach us that the othering, which now seems so deep and inextricable, owes to various social and political exigencies as much as it does to theological precepts. but how do we both do justice to medieval authors who clearly treated the precepts of their own tradition as axiomatic, and at the same time hold that the very same precepts are the mutable product of political identity construction? this juggling act seems to put the modern commentator in charge of cleaning up what cucarella calls “the rhetorical excesses” of medieval polemics. indeed, it seems that even cucarella wishes that al-qarāfī had had the courtesy to evaluate christianity according to its own standards, and that he had talked with and not “past” his christian interlocutor. one has to be careful that this approach does not end in the same kind of reduction that is created by the comparative theologian who cedes to the other religion only the thinnest common denominator that would anticipate a comfortable, yet useless, bridge. needless to say, however, this is an impressive book and a laudable program, not only for its potential impact on the efforts for a better understanding between religious communities, but also for how we read the pre-modern ancestors of debates that continue to rage. book review al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 319-325 this is not a book about a prophet c a l l e d s a ï d . i n s t e a d , i t i s a n e l o q u e n t l y w r i t t e n , s k i l l f u l l y r e s e a r c h e d s t u d y o f t h e m e c h a n i c s o f w r i t i n g c o m m e n t a r i e s o n h a d i t h c o l l e c t i o n s . t h e t i t l e a n d b l u r b a r e eye-poppingly ambitious, speaking of such breadth and depth that, in fact, we may conclude that it would be unfair t o t a k e t h e m a t f a c e v a l u e . i w o u l d suggest we even ignore blecher’s own characterization of his book as a “survey [...] to track change and continuity in the slow-moving, cumulative tradition of commentary on ṣaḥīh al-bukhārī” (p. 182) and instead take the book to describe the craft of commenting on hadiths, specifically in the case of ṣaḥīḥ a l b u k h ā r ī . t h e a l l e n c o m p a s s i n g a p p r o a c h , b o t h h i s t o r i c a l l y a n d geographically, is part of the argument: there is a fundamental stability in this craft. this fact becomes all the more clear in the epilogue, where blecher discusses the use of hadiths by members of isis. if you read the epilogue after having read everything before it (that is, the actual book), then this discussion does not read as a section that merely describes what people from isis do with hadiths. rather, it is as though blecher is saying that even people from isis use hadiths in a way that is customary, with due regard for the unwritten rules of this craft. as such, blecher makes a very compelling case for the craft’s stability. blecher does a superb job of describing the craft itself, though again not without boldly arguing for two main theses. one is that commentary writing in the field of hadith studies is “a social practice, in which the competition for everyday social and material rewards was entangled with the achievement of certain interpretive e x c e l l e n c e s ” ( p . 2 8 ) . i n c h a p t e r 1 , blecher provides anecdotal evidence of this by presenting the case of the andalusian scholar al-bājī (d. 474/1081). al-bājī interpreted a hadith that speaks of muḥammad signing a document as joel blecher, said the prophet of god: hadith commentary across a millennium (berkeley and los angeles: university of california press, 2018), 288 pp., 13 b/w images, 3 maps, 2 tables. isbn 978-0-52029-594-0. price: $34.95 (cloth). l. w. cornelis van lit, o.p. utrecht university (cornelisvanlit@gmail.com) mailto:cornelisvanlit%40gmail.com?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 320 • l. w. cornelis van lit evidence that muḥammad was literate. this claim had theological implications a b o u t t h e s t a t u s o f t h e q u r ʾ ā n , a n d al-bājī thus had to defend himself against accusations of heresy. the other thesis is that commentators also had to negotiate a “connection to a transtemporal and transregional community” (p. 171), namely that of “tradition” as understood by, for example, talal asad. consequently, commenting on a hadith did not entail simply reading it and giving your opinion. in fact, the first step was recognizing that “simply reading” was not always possible. in chapter 2, blecher discusses the example of a hadith that restricts the number of lashes for non-ḥudūd offenses to ten. the problems with the hadith were manifold: (1) there are different versions of basically the same hadith, (2) they have inconsistencies in their transmission chains, and (3) they seem to contradict mālikī jurisprudence. in dealing with these problems, scholars were expected to use and discuss previous interpretations of these aspects or of this hadith in general. as blecher says, “hadith commentaries sometimes had as much or more to say about the exegetical history of the hadith than about the hadith upon which it claimed to comment” (p. 44). at the same time, it should be noted that as the history of this commentary tradition grew, the craft of commenting increasingly relied on “strategic omissions” (p. 133). in this way, out of the materials supplied by the source text and its tradition, endless varieties of new and original positions could be maintained. in the subsequent chapters, blecher g i v e s e v i d e n c e t h a t “ t h e s i t e o f commentarial authority was not relegated t o t h e q u i e t s u r f a c e s o f t h e w r i t t e n commentary but was performed by living people in the limits of space and time” (p. 96). in chapter 3, he describes how commentators negotiated their intellectual work with their patrons and their students. he does this by focusing on two great commentators in ninth/fifteenth-century cairo: the rivals ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī (d. 852/1449) and badr al-dīn al-ʿaynī (d. 855/1451), who competed over shared p a t r o n s a s w e l l a s m u t u a l s t u d e n t s . chapter 4 digs into what their rivalry meant in terms of commentary writing: through a draft copy and other copies, we can reconstruct how ibn ḥajar went back to the same hadith and rewrote or added materials to the commentary that he was steadily producing. this continuous rewriting was also fueled by the structure of hadith studies, which owed much to the reading of the entire ṣaḥīḥ each year in the month of ramadan. chapter 5 focuses on what went on in that month—namely, live commentary and debates at the court of the sultan. one incident, in which ibn ḥajar bested another scholar in a debate about the number of people who get to enjoy shade in paradise, is discussed at length. by comparing the accounts of this incident in ibn ḥajar’s historical work inbāʾ al-ghumr and in his commentary fatḥ al-bārī, we learn more about what was typical of the craft of writing a commentary on a hadith collection. chapter 6 continues to draw on the case study of ibn ḥajar and al-ʿaynī to give an impression of how authority was established. here we get acquainted with the importance of the “genealogical connection to a canonical collection” (p. 108), which one can imagine as an isnād from the commentator back to al-bukhārī. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) joel blecher’s said the prophet of god • 321 the interplay between hadith studies (ʿulūm al-ḥadīth) and jurisprudence (fiqh) is once more highlighted. t h e n e x t t w o c h a p t e r s e x a m i n e subgenres of hadith commentary. chapter 7 shifts the focus back to the unique challenges posed by al-jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ of al-bukhārī. its chapter headings can be mystifying; sometimes there are even headings but no actual chapter, that is, no hadiths. knowledge of these problems and their solutions became part of becoming a skilled, authoritative commentator. in fact, this issue had such a strong pull that it gave rise to a subgenre of commentaries on the chapter headings alone. in chapter 8 we meet another subgenre, that of ever more concise commentaries in summary form. for this chapter, blecher moves on to another great scholar, al-suyūṭī (d. 911/1505). in general, such commentaries address the bare essentials of reading correctly and understanding the meanings of rare words. the skill involved seems haphazard; at times important pieces of the commentary tradition are left out, while at times seemingly unimportant parts are discussed at length. the final two chapters discuss the i m p a c t o n c o m m e n t a r y w r i t i n g o f a situation in which the commentator is removed from the majority of previous commentaries by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. notably, blecher shows the influence of print technology, modernity, and a local language other than arabic by focusing on deobandi and urduspeaking commentators. as i am not an expert in hadith studies, i leave it to others to double-check the book’s factual correctness. i do, however, w i s h t o r a i s e s o m e i s s u e s r e g a r d i n g blecher’s discussion of the phenomenon of commentary writing. take, for example, chapter 4. blecher goes into great detail in reconstructing the work process of ibn ḥajar, and in this sense the chapter is convincing. at the same time, however, he left me craving more—such as recourse to more manuscripts to triangulate more of the intermediate steps ibn ḥajar took to write the commentary, or the use of samāʿ notes to establish a clearer picture of who was there and why, and what role they played in the formation of the commentary. indeed, a whole book on just the writing, revision, and early reception history of ibn ḥajar’s fatḥ al-bārī would have made for a thrilling read on its own. the same goes for the phenomenon of commenting on the chapter headings of the ṣaḥīḥ or the problems pertaining to the very first hadith of that collection; blecher’s passion for these subjects is contagious and left me wanting more. thus, when blecher claims he writes “thick history” (p. 195), i would love to see it a whole lot thicker. where this succinctness actually hurts the argumentation is in chapter 8, in which blecher is able to show that al-suyūṭī preferred short commentaries but comes up short in explaining exactly why and what impact this preference had. these questions are raised but not satisfactorily settled. the same problem arises sometimes at the sentence level. for example, blecher starts a quantitative argument about the difference in word count between the draft and final versions of ibn ḥajar’s commentary, but then cuts it short and concludes that “more research needs to be done” (p. 69). he promises that the numbers he gives are consistent with some other numbers that he has found, but he does not actually provide those numbers or a description of how he al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 322 • l. w. cornelis van lit arrived at them. in another place, blecher says that “the first three hadith [. . .] sparked wide disagreement [. . .] despite or perhaps because of the clarity of their apparent meaning” (p. 31). as a reader i am left bewildered: which one is it, despite or because? nevertheless, i would advise reading past these minor blemishes and focusing on the core topic—the craft of hadith commentary—which blecher demonstrates that he understands inside and out. a cursory comparison between this book and the dissertation on which it is based reveals that a lot of thought and care went into the production of the former. so, if something in the dissertation is not in the book, the omission must have been strategic. nevertheless, given the thoughtp r o v o k i n g a n a l y s i s a n d c o n c l u s i o n s blecher provides, i would like to provide some counterpoints in the hope that these will foster a continued interest in hadith-commentary writing. i would like to introduce my thinking with the graphic above. this is a heat map showing the lifespans of hadith commentators. i created this graphic using jāmiʿ al-shurūḥ wa-l-ḥawāshī by ʿabd allāh muḥammad al-ḥibshī as my source, looking up the entries for the six canonical hadith collections and noting the death dates for all the commentators in a spreadsheet. i thus discarded some entries that had no (or an uncertain) death date. using only this resource meant that i almost certainly did not catch all commentaries, and given that some entries do not show manuscript evidence i may also have included some that never existed. for our purposes, however, such minor noise does not detract from a generally sound picture of historical reality. from the death dates i extrapolated the commentators’ lifespans by assuming an average life of forty years. the average is certainly not true of everyone: al-suyūṭī was 60 when he passed away, ibn ḥajar 76, al-ʿaynī 93, and zakariyyāʾ al-anṣārī an astonishing 101 years old. we may assume, however, that out of the hundreds of commentators, the majority did not grow this old. further, we may think of the forty-year span as a floruit, presuming that it was, on average, the last forty years of a scholar’s life in which the scholar was active. i would argue that it is important to use a range like this rather than just the death date because if there is one thing we know, it is that commentators did not write their commentaries when they were dead. thus, plotting death dates would significantly shift the shape of the graphic to the right. as blecher convincingly data and code available at: https://github.com/lwcvl/plotting-all-hadith-commentaries https://github.com/lwcvl/plotting-all-hadith-commentaries al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) joel blecher’s said the prophet of god • 323 argues, hadith-commentary writing was a process that took many years, sometimes decades, so plotting a range is a more precise way to visualize when the writing of commentaries itself was popular. on the basis of this data, i plotted a heat map for all commentaries combined. below i also provide a heat map comparing commentaries on al-bukhārī with those on muslim, but i did not produce individual heat maps for the other four collections s i n c e t h e y h a d c o m p a r a t i v e l y f e w commentaries. the index on the right shows that in the combined heat map, dark purple marks a time at which more than fifty hadith scholars were alive and busy writing a commentary. f r o m t h e s e m a p s , s o m e r e s u l t s are readily available. first, to plot all commentators, a millennium was not enough; i had to use a span of 1,200 years. further, we see that hadith commentary in general really took off in the mid-fourth/ tenth century. we observe six notable concentrations; apparently, commentary writing had its ebbs and flows. perhaps t h e r e w e r e c e r t a i n c i r c u m s t a n c e s that promoted the writing of hadith commentaries. the first peak is right around ah 500 (ca. 1100 ce), the second in the early seventh/thirteenth century, and the third in the early eighth/fourteenth c e n t u r y , a n d t h e n t h e i n d i s p u t a b l e explosion of commentary writing took place throughout the ninth/fifteenth century. a discernible bump is visible in the mid-twelfth/eighteenth century, b u t f i n a l l y w e s e e a n e x t r a o r d i n a r y concentration around ah 1300 (ca. 1900 ce). blecher’s book nails both high points of commentary production: his part on the mamluks is about the ninth/fifteenth century, and his part on early modern india is about the thirteenth. in this sense, blecher has chosen well. but because of his focus on case studies and anecdotal evidence, the aptness of his choices would not have been clear from the book itself. blecher emphasizes the importance of live commentary sessions organized by the ruler. these may indeed have been a decisive factor in the remarkable surge in the popularity of commentaries in both time frames, and i hope we will see further studies about the relationship between staged debates at the court and literary production. c o m p a r i n g b l e c h e r ’ s c a s e s t u d i e s with the enormous number of 634 dated commentators (see table below) prompts t he ques t ion how repres ent at iv e his conclusions are for commentary writing in general. i do not have an answer, other than to say that blecher has strategically chosen a variety of commentaries and commentators and that his conclusions are in line with what we are finding out about commentary writing in other genres. i alluded earlier to a great variety in the number of commentaries each hadith collection received. they are listed in the table below. collection number of dated commentators al-nasāʾī 14 ibn māja 19 abū dāwūd 32 al-tirmidhī 36 muslim 189 al-bukhārī 344 total 634 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 324 • l. w. cornelis van lit from the preceding table, it is clear why blecher uses only ṣaḥīḥ al-bukhārī in his book; it already seems to define the genre by itself. yet it is instructive to look at the heat map above, showing the distribution of commentators on muslim and al-bukhārī. note that dark red-purple means that more than thirty commentators lived at the same time. two notable results emerge. first, the writing of commentaries on muslim started quickly after the collection was created. by comparison, al-bukhārī’s collection received commentaries only after a century or so had passed. further, w e s e e t h a t m u s l i m ’ s c o l l e c t i o n w a s generally popular in the first few centuries after its compilation, with spikes in the early seventh/thirteenth and early eighth/ f o u r t e e n t h c e n t u r i e s . a t t h a t p o i n t , attention to muslim’s collection peters out and al-bukhārī’s collection begins to predominate. i do not know whether this trajectory is well known among scholars of hadith studies, but it surprised me, as it is not discussed by blecher. a significant shift such as this begs for explanation. further analysis of this issue would also shed more light on how representative commentaries on al-bukhārī are of hadith commentaries in general. i w o u l d l i k e t o m a k e s o m e f i n a l comments regarding commentaries on al-bukhārī specifically. first, i suspect that more can be said about the phenomenon o f h a d i t h c o m m e n t a r y s t a c k e d u p o n commentary, sometimes several layers d e e p . t h e c l e a r e s t e x a m p l e o f s u c h s t a c k i n g i s a l s a n ū s ī ’ s ( d . 8 9 5 / 1 4 9 0 ) mukammal ikmāl al-ikmāl, a commentary on al-ubbī’s (d. 827/1424) ikmāl al-ikmāl, w h i c h i s a c o m m e n t a r y o n a l q ā ḍ ī ʿiyāḍ’s (d. 544/1149) ikmāl al-muʿlim, which is a commentary on al-māzarī’s ( d . 5 3 6 / 1 1 4 1 ) a l m u ʿ l i m b i f a w ā ʾ i d muslim, a commentary on ṣaḥīḥ muslim. examples abound in the ṣaḥīḥ al-bukhārī c o m m e n t a r y t r a d i t i o n , t o o . s e c o n d , given the importance of the summary of ibn abī jamra (d. 695/1296) and the extensive commentary of al-qasṭallānī (d. 923/1517), both of which spawned supercommentaries, it is a shame they do not receive attention in blecher’s book. and third, al-ḥibshī lists the commentaries on al-bukhārī in groups that function as subgenres. without drawing too much attention to it, blecher touches on most of these but notably does not mention t h r e e : ( 1 ) t h e s o c a l l e d t h u l ā t h i y y ā t subgenre, which collects and comments on only those hadiths that have an isnād al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) joel blecher’s said the prophet of god • 325 of three transmitters; (2) what al-ḥibshi calls ruwāt al-bukhārī wa-tarājimuhum, that is, studies of the reception and transmission of the text after al-bukhārī; and (3) commentaries whose main task is to rearrange al-bukhārī’s collection, for example according to each hadith’s first letter. whether this last subgenre is to be accepted as commentary will be a crucial question for future studies of hadith commentary. i am thinking, in particular, of an entirely different phenomenon: the so-called arbaʿīniyyāt collections, in which hadith scholars worked with a self-imposed limit of forty hadiths, no more. these could be on the same topic, or come from the same narrator, or have another commonality. the point is that a great degree of creativity in this operation should be acknowledged. it was “strategic inclusion and exclusion as commentary” in a radical form. to this end, i suspect blecher’s book will be provocative enough to foster a discussion on methodology and the theoretical framework appropriate for the study of hadith commentary. blecher engages with modern literary theory, and from this starting point i imagine that scholars in hadith studies could engage with recent theoretical reflections on postclassical islam (e.g., those of shahab ahmed and thomas bauer) or theoretical a n d m e t h o d o l o g i c a l t r e a t m e n t s o f commentary writing (e.g., recent special issues of oriens, mideo, and philological encounters) to yield interesting new approaches or analyses. likewise, this book left me wondering how similar or different the genres of hadith commentary and qurʾān commentary are. lastly, i think that quantitative analysis could bolster our understanding of what went on in such large bodies of literature. hadith literature is ripe for such analysis, since many books in the genre are available in plain-text format. i suspect this book will attract a wide readership, including outside of academia. not only will the subject be of interest to many, but blecher’s clear and accessible writing style will on its own attract readers. in that regard, however, i think it is fair to warn that a certain level of knowledge is expected. i could imagine that the book might be just a little too much for an undergraduate student left to his or her own devices. including this book in a graduate seminar on hadith should work out well, however, especially if students are asked to compare blecher’s ideas with their own experience reading bits and pieces of hadith commentaries. scholars working on a variety of topics will benefit from this book, including those working in hadith studies, book history, and postclassical islamic intellectual h i s t o r y a n d p o s t c l a s s i c a l i s l a m i c intellectual history, in particular those focusing on commentary writing. mem awards al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): iii-ix this acknowledgement of my work in islamic archaeology comes as a complete surprise and therefore is all the more appreciated. it is with some humility that i would express my gratitude to middle east medievalists, especially as i had begun to wonder whether my field of studies had become irrelevant or just passé, a forgotten corner of middle east studies. i will discuss this further but, first, i would offer a short account of my entrance into this arcane, if not irrelevant field of studies. as an undergraduate, i wanted to study archaeology in the middle east, and so i went to iran with the peace corps (to experience the region and learn to teach). i returned to the university of georgia to study with joe caldwell and worked on proto-elamite ceramics from tall-i ghazir. he supported my move to chicago to study urbanization with robert adams, who enabled me, in turn, to return to iran to look for proto-elamites in 1972. i conducted a survey in fars province but found nothing except islamic sites. during this time, i also worked at siraf and realized that the same problems of urbanism could be studied in the islamic period, with even more resources. when i told adams of this decision, he was delighted, and, thereafter, i always counseled students to choose a subject that interested their advisor but one the latter has never done themselves. my dissertation committee consisted of robert adams, paul wheatley, and bob braidwood. bob braidwood kept me sane at times when i realized that his promulgation of the study of prehistory was as unaccepted in his day as islamic archaeology seems today. but it was paul wheatley who was a fundamental resource. he showed me his manuscript on the islamic city, what would become the places where men pray together (2002), and for about twenty years we met at least once a week. i would not have finished without his final advice. adams did not like my thesis but could not explain why. wheatley said the problem was simple: remarks by the recipient of the 2018 mem lifetime achievement award given at the annual meeting of middle east medievalists (san antonio, 15 november 2018) donald whitcomb research associate professor in islamic archaeology, the university of chicago (d-whitcomb@uchicago.edu) mailto:d-whitcomb%40uchicago.edu?subject= iv • donald whitcomb al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) i had produced a deductive argument and adams, being a social scientist, wanted an inductive argument. “put your conclusions in front as hypotheses and write a new conclusion,” he suggested. i did so, adding no new ideas, and adams accepted it immediately. in my thesis, “trade and tradition in medieval southern iran” (1979), i describe fars province in terms of the development of islamic cities. i found that, in the field of islamic archaeology, this was a new and rare approach that necessit at ed study of historical contexts as well as art historical resources. my study of islamic archaeology began with potsherds in the collections of the metropolitan museum of art (mma) and elsewhere. while i believe this is the first and necessary concern for all archaeologists, i will make only light reference to it here. i began fieldwork for the oriental institute of chicago (oi) at quseir al-qadim, a medieval port on the red sea (excavated with my wife, janet johnson, from 1978 until 1982). quseir was not a place of great architecture, and, in fact, one of my first questions was whether it was inhabited year-round. we discovered much about the roman port, but it became clear that the islamic reoccupation, which followed a thousand-year period of abandonment, had only minimal housing, rather similar to coastal villages today. the arab/islamic occupation was explained in hundreds of merchants’ letters, which have been read and published by li guo (commerce, culture and community in a red sea port in the thirteenth century, 2004). we next dug trenches in the mound of medieval luxor in 1984–1985. this was an actual “tell” not unlike the mounded r e m a i n s o f a n c i e n t s e t t l e m e n t s . w e discovered the remnants of over two m i l l e n n i a o f o c c u p a t i o n a t l u x o r , a stratification revealed when the temple and avenue of the sphinxes were cleared ( a d e s t r u c t i o n t h a t o c c u r r e d a s l a t e as the 1960s). we excavated two-step trenches that revealed a sequence from a fourteenth-century floor back to a byzantine painted room (with a sculpture collection of different periods, including a head of tuthmosis iii). beginning in 1986, jan and i spent almost a decade discovering and exploring the port of aqaba in jordan. the port recalls the attack scene in the movie lawrence of arabia (1962), a portrayal that conveys only about one-tenth of the actual scale and was filmed on the southern coast of spain. in his written account, t. e. lawrence writes of finding “arab pottery” and of being told of sub-surface walls in 1914. we delineated the walled city and four meters of changes from the islamic conquest to the advent of the crusaders. the mosque, the administrative center, the suq, and other aspects of this islamic urban center became clear and are still being studied today. the information and artifacts are now displayed in a site museum, and aqaba is today a major tourist attraction for jordan. an opportunity then presented itself t o e x c a v a t e t h e s i t e o f q i n n a s r i n i n northern syria near aleppo. i teamed up with marianne barrucand and claus-peter haase for a small but international venture (1998–2000). we avoided the very large tell of qinnasrin and excavated the early islamic village called hadir, literally the “camp.” perhaps our most important find was a house that has been converted from a traditional tent, literally a “settlement” of the muslims. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) remarks by the recipient of the 2018 mem lifetime achievement award • v events from 2001 onwards have made fieldwork more difficult and have provided a prompt to catch up with publications ( b r a i d w o o d o n c e f o u n d a g r o u p o f archaeology students and counseled us, “archaeology would be a fine occupation, if one did not have to publish”). i took part in, and organized, a great variety of lectures and conferences, including the first oi seminar, which resulted in the publication of changing social identity with the spread of islam: archaeological perspectives (2004). that same year, i was invited to iran and examined a series of sites for possible excavations.1 i settled on a return to the islamic city of istakhr, near persepolis. funds and permissions were obtained and a team selected in 2005, but the final permits were denied. visits to saudi arabia yielded potential for digging at jurash in the asir, but again no permit was obtained. i began discussions for an excavation with hamdan taha, director of archaeology for the palestinian authority, in 2007. we agreed on a joint project at the famous site of khirbat al-mafjar in jericho, which lasted from 2011 until 2015. the site was well known from dimitri baramki’s e x c a v a t i o n s ( 1 9 3 5 – 1 9 4 8 ) , w h i c h h a d uncovered a palace and a bath hall highly decorated with mosaics and stucco work of the early islamic period. i was invited 1. for some background on archaeology in iran, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, see d. whitcomb, “archaeology in iran and the experience of arthur upham pope,” in arthur upham pope and a new survey of persian art, ed. y. kadoi, 97–109 (leiden, brill, 2016). 2. d. whitcomb, m. jennings, a. creekmore, and i. arce, “khirbet al-mafjar: new excavations and hypotheses for an umayyad monument,” near eastern archaeology 79 (2016): 78–87; d. whitcomb, “the mosques of mafjar: a sequence and some implications for understanding qasr hisham,” proceedings of the 9th international congress of the archaeology of the ancient near east: islamic session, ed. d. genequand, 2:469–78 (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2016); d. whitcomb, “notes for an archaeology of muʿāwiya: material culture in the transitional period of the believers,” in christians and others in the umayyad state, ed. a. borrut and f. m. donner, 11–27 (chicago: oriental institute, 2016). by the palestinian authority to explore the northern area. this was a building complex that had been excavated by awni dajani in the 1950s, but no records or artifacts are extant. we recovered an original umayyad building complex, later transformed into an abbasid agricultural estate.2 this was the urban focus later transferred to the nearby town of jericho (located near the biblical site). our work with the palestinian authority resulted in the creation of an archaeological park, featuring a museum designed by jack green and specialists from the oi. all of these endeavors were enabled through massive usaid funding using palestinian designers and craftsmen. when we opened the museum, several palestinian colleagues stated, “we can do this, too, and much cheaper.” now there are several more and far less expensive museums in palestine. this is the best sort of aid program and might be a model for future ventures. when i started the project at khirbat al-mafjar, i mentioned the site to the islamic studies faculty at the university of chicago. with the exception of fred donner, they were totally innocent of archaeological knowledge, to the extent of being unfamiliar with the name “mafjar” and its importance for islamic studies, though most did recognize the name “jericho.” as i discussed in a plenary paper vi • donald whitcomb al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) at the sixth international congress for the archaeology of the ancient near east (icaane) in 2010, there is an evident lack of definition of “islamic archaeology” in the minds of almost all historians, many other archaeologists, and not a few of those claiming to belong to this field. islamic archaeology as a new research discipline i describe my research on islamic cities to show the range of types of sites that may be investigated, from untouched p l a c e s t o p r e v i o u s e x c a v a t i o n s . t h e study of islamic urbanization is only one of many possible specializations within islamic archaeology. from the context of near eastern archaeology at the oi, we use fieldwork to elucidate the rise of near eastern civilization by tracing cities and states, and their religions, especially relationships with the biblical tradition. it may seem strange now, but the study of prehistory began with the research of robert braidwood, and this field was not readily accepted. likewise, the study of medieval archaeology in the near east experiences only slow growth. there is a growing awareness that islamic materials provide a connector to the past, showing the continuation of most ancient accomplishments unique to the near east. the islamic material also provides a connector to the present, m a k i n g a r c h a e o l o g y r e l e v a n t a n d important to modern middle eastern studies. yet the academic niche of islamic archaeology is often misunderstood; the analysis of islamic monuments and other artifacts is usually read as the province of art history. but the techniques and approaches of art history, beyond its focus on aesthetic valuation, are quite different. i s l a m i c a r c h a e o l o g y i s p r a c t i c e d as a historical archaeology, providing evidence for the development of society and economy in islamic contexts. each project, whatever its intended goals, produces informative assemblages of artifacts that can be compared to relevant textual sources. the field lacks a clear mandate and anything approaching a guiding textbook. the result has been a wide range of interpretations of context and methodology. like other fields that grew in the oi from comparative analyses of different sites and regions, this new research field illuminates processes of adaptation and development that define this part of the near (or rather, middle) east. previous recipients of the mem lifetime achievement award offer a number of insights into what this award may mean, e s p e c i a l l y i n r e l a t i o n s h i p t o i s l a m i c archaeology. one of the most pertinent sets of remarks is also the most recent: that of suzanne stetkevych (2017), who speaks of the problematics of poetry and history. she begins by stating that “poetic materials should be more stable, and therefore more authentic than the prose narratives that have come down to us.... so, we may have a body of material that is authentic, but... does not provide the information that historians are looking for—or at least, not in the form we are looking for.... it is not meant to record names and dates and battle descriptions, rather... for further exploration as we deal with political, religious and cultural history” (al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 [2018]: viii–ix). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) remarks by the recipient of the 2018 mem lifetime achievement award • vii if the study of archaeology may be compared with poetry, one must examine more carefully the definition of this field. when fred donner, the award recipient in 2016, states that “archaeology... has received a great deal of attention and has brought important insights” (al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 [2017]: vi), he gives a vague acknowledgment without really exploring what the field might have contributed. one might suspect that when patricia crone, the 2014 recipient, first wanted to be an ancient near eastern archaeologist (al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 [2015]: iii), she may have been misled as to the nature of the field (alas, what contributions she might have made!). and finally, when richard bulliet, the 2015 recipient, complains that “the innovative methodologies that are showing such promise in the study of most other parts the world, such as quantitative history, climate history, and material history in general, are still little explored with respect to the middle east” (al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 [2016]: vi), one may be sure that he has not included the progress in islamic archaeology. one might begin with the misunderstandings that historians sometimes have about ceramics, in particular the penchant that archaeologists have for little sherds. these artifacts form the language of archaeology. one might view the sherd as analogous to the “phoneme,” a basic sound that might occasionally convey meaning. one must turn to the pot (or other complete piece) to have the equivalent to a “word,” a complex element full of meaning or uses. more importantly, artifacts should be found together in an 3. see m. l. rautman, “archaeology and byzantine studies,” byzantinische forschungen 15 (1990): 147, 151. “assemblage,” which may be considered the material equivalent to the sentence. an archaeological assemblage has interpretative meaning(s) based on find location and contexts, that is, natural and cultural factors. this linguistic analogy suggests that archaeology, the study of material culture, has a distinctive methodology. the study of artifacts focuses on the idea that artifacts are found in a context or matrix that reflexively amplifies the meaning of each element. it also sees artifacts as correlative in that their physical elements may be abstracted to form categories or typologies to facilitate comparisons. comparative studies, in turn, result in generalizing abstractions aimed at patterns of assemblages. artifactual patterns are the basic tool of archaeology, interpretations from which wider inferences or social history may be postulated. interpretations, on the macrosocial plane of political events and cultural transformations or the microsocial level of private affairs and domestic routines,3 are a necessary element in this methodology. this is because archaeology is never isolated but rather interacts with other studies of particular cultural complexes. i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s o f a r c h a e o l o g i c a l information may then be utilized by h i s t o r i a n s a n d o t h e r s f o r p a r t i c u l a r information, building reflexive inferences for other archaeological patterns, and ultimately archaeological theory building. the study of archaeology, following such a methodology, begins with a concern for the excavations or other field procedures that produced the evidence. this viii • donald whitcomb al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) means concern with the narrator, the archaeologist who has molded the material, and thus his or her background, orientation, presuppositions, and purposes. these factors may not be accessible but must be borne in mind during any evaluation. such evaluations may be normal in scholarly research, but the esoteric nature of ideas derived from digging may be especially vulnerable to misunderstanding, or indeed misrepresentation. the first mem lifetime achievement award was given to george t. scanlon in 1998. curiously, there is no record of scanlon’s remarks on being presented the award, and, indeed, notice of the award seems to have escaped the attention of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā. the publication, initially the newsletter of the middle east medievalists begun by fred donner and sam gellens , carried in it s firs t years (1992–1995) three to six articles on archaeology or art historical subjects. thereafter, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā consistently included two articles in these fields each year between 1996 and 2009, during which time i had the honor of being the journal’s “editorial assistant (archaeology).” this listing continued with the reorganization in 2014, though no articles on archaeology have appeared between that date and the present. a possible explanation might be the launch of the journal of islamic archaeology in that same year (2014), though one may also suspect a change in the orientation of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā (ironically, the change happened in the same year in which scanlon died). 4. an approach to this dialogue is the subject of my comments in “toward a ‘common denominator’: an archaeological response to m. morony on pottery and urban identities,” in identity and material culture in the early islamic world, ed. i. bierman, 47–68 (los angeles: von grunebaum center, 1995). turning to the relationship between archaeology and the field of mamluk s t u d i e s , i w o u l d l i k e t o s t r e s s t h a t , to paraphrase a recent discussion by rautman, mamluk artifacts are more than mere historical illustration; their evidence may be considered necessary to overcome the intrinsic limitations of the written evidence. throughout rautman’s seminal a r t i c l e “ a r c h a e o l o g y a n d b y z a n t i n e studies,” one may substitute “islamic” for “byzantine” to produce an insightful picture of the history and state of this parallel discipline. yet historians of the mamluk period do not seem to be aware of this potential or able to assess the relevance of fieldwork to their research. much of the fault for this separation in disciplinary comprehension lies with the archaeologist, and with what is currently practiced as archaeology.4 the role of archaeological evidence in historical research is often misunderstood because of the nature of its evidential base. although the study of material culture deals, at least in part, with physical objects, their contribution to historical studies is no more “real” or direct than is that of the historian’s more traditional documents; archaeological evidence is cumulative and not specific. in other words, one should not expect new information about specific individuals or historic events. though n e w d o c u m e n t s m a y b e d i s c o v e r e d , archaeological research is more concerned with patterns, repeating contexts, and associations. thus, one may seek patterns of land use (historical geography) and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) remarks by the recipient of the 2018 mem lifetime achievement award • ix social organization (settlement systems), that is, broad questions of social and economic history. be that as it may, one may only hope that a lifetime achievement award does not mark the closure of research. last year i returned to khirbet al-karak on the sea of galilee, where the oi dug in the 1950s, to reveal that the very early islamic site of sinnabra was an early islamic palace next to a mosque (i hope one of the earliest to be physically revealed).5 we came to style the project as “the search for the mosque of muʿāwiya.” indeed, that pivotal personality in early islamic history might have been sympathetic to the structure of a project led by prof. tawfiq da’adli, a palestinian teaching at the hebrew university, with collaborators from chicago and tel aviv, employing local palestinian workmen.6 a return to iran while at the mma, i studied the old e x c a v a t i o n s a t q a s r i a b u n a s r , t h e sasanian and early islamic site near shiraz. i used the istakhr records at the oi in my dissertation and was ready to return to an excavation in istakhr in 2005, but it was canceled at the last moment. a recent article shares my ideas on s a s a n i a n c i t i e s . 7 b e g i n n i n g w i t h j u r (firuzabad), the urban plan was laid out in circles, with radiating roads (some extending 5 km beyond the walls): twenty 5. d. whitcomb, “sinnabra (or khirbat al-karak),” in the oriental institute 2017–2018 annual report, 145–53 (chicago: university of chicago, oriental institute, 2018). 6. see t. da’adli, “stratigraphy and architecture of the fortified palace,” in bet yerah, vol. 3: hellenistic philotera and islamic al-sinnabra, ed. r. greenberg, o. tal, and t. da’adli, 133–78 (jerusalem: iaa reports 61, 2017). 7. d. whitcomb, “‘from shahristan to medina’ revisited,” in cities of medieval iran: sites, society, politics and culture, ed. d. durand-guedy and r. mottahehdeh, 77–99 (leiden: brill, 2018). sectors, axial streets, gates, and a central district with the tirbal and takht-i nishin (the city having a diameter of 2 km, the central district a diameter of 400 m). the circular cities of ardashir (224–242 ce) are not all known. his son built bishapur, again with reliefs nearby, and a fort near the entrance to the city. the royal quarter with temples was laid out in a rectangular grid, but one may also note a grey circular area on the air photograph. this was near the bab shahr, forming a circle (400 m in diameter) centered on the northern limit of the grid city. one may, finally, mention the city of jundi shapur, investigated by robert adams for the oi in 1962–63. this city was famed for its blackboard grid, a design said to imitate antioch. a corona satellite image shows this grid, and within it one can see the circular city, again 2 km in diameter. it follows that one should also find a tirbal and an administrative center (would that we might take a quick field trip!). one reads that shapur found many of his father’s cities in disrepair and rebuilt them, superimposing a western, antiochian model. this became, then, a combination of urban traditions and possibly institutions. when i visited iran in 2015, the director of antiquities said to me, “you are going to excavate jundi shapur!” i replied, “inshallah,” and i retain that hope today. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 334-339 book review th e m o d e r n a c a d e m i c s t u d y o f philosophy in the islamic world has, since its nineteenth-century inception, privileged works written in arabic from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. to some extent, this focus makes intellectual-historical sense. for one thing, the period hinges on the floruit of an inarguably central figure, the philosopher and scientist avicenna (d. 428/1037). for another, if origins are important, the ninth century certainly deserves scholars’ attention. philosophy (falsafa) performed in arabic by selfidentified philosophers living in islamic lands begins only in the ninth century, a movement in part conditioned by and in part conditioning the translation of aristotle and other ancient greek authors into arabic, sometimes via syriac aramaic or, less commonly, middle persian. at least until the modern period, all subsequent philosophers who lived in islamic societies 1. see michael cooperson, “the abbasid ‘golden age’: an excavation,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 41–65. and wrote in arabic, new persian, ottoman turkish, and other languages were in dialogue with a tradition inaugurated in this formative century. yet the focus on the ninth through twelfth centuries has rested on several far less defensible assumptions as well. first, european and middle eastern scholars alike have long designated the first two centuries of the abbasid caliphate as a “golden age” or a “classical period” of “islamic civilization.”1 scholarship has unduly privileged philosophy in this period and in its immediate aftermath just as it has privileged the period’s theology, science, belles-lettres, historiography, and other fields of literary production. second, scholars writing in european languages l o n g l a b o r e d u n d e r t h e n i n e t e e n t h century theory that the twelfth-century theologian al-ghazālī’s (d. 505/1111) criticism of aristotelian falsafa marked a turning point in the history of islamic the oxford handbook of islamic philosophy. edited by khaled el-rouayheb and sabine schmidtke. oxford handbooks (oxford: oxford university press, 2017), 720 pp. isbn 978-0-19991-738-9. price: $175 (cloth). coleman connelly institute for the study of the ancient world, new york university (coleman.connelly@nyu.edu) mailto:coleman.connelly%40nyu.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 335 • coleman connelly philosophy. a new spirit of narrowminded orthodoxy allegedly spelled an end to rational inquiry across the islamic world, especially in sunni quarters.2 all of the post-twelfth-century islamic word’s philosophical output, according to this theory, is necessarily inferior and hence less worthy of study. until at least the 1960s, scholars’ cursory examination of later materials seemed to bear out this “al-ghazālī theory.” for instance, many later contributions to islamic philosophy come in the form of commentaries or even versifications, which were often dismissed as derivative or unoriginal on the basis of inadequate study. this narrative of decadence has long since been exploded in scholarly circles, though it continues to influence some popular narratives of the development of philosophy in the islamic world. nevertheless, the long-held a s s u m p t i o n t h a t t h e n i n t h t h r o u g h twelfth centuries are uniquely worthy of consideration has meant that the bulk of monographs and articles, not to mention critical editions and translations, have covered texts from this period. even after scholars realized the shortcomings of this historical focus, the imbalance has been hard to correct. in a sort of inexorable snowball effect, the disproportionate amount of resources facilitating the study of the ninth through twelfth centuries has 2. this mistaken attitude is exemplified by the statement of edward sachau in the introduction to his translation of al-bīrūnī’s kitāb al-āthār al-bāqiya: “the fourth [islamic] century is the turning-point in the history of the spirit of islâm, and the establishment of the orthodox faith about 500 sealed the fate of independent research for ever. but for alash‘arî and alghazzâlî the arabs might have been a nation of galileos, keplers, and newtons”; see sachau’s introduction to al-bīrūnī, the chronology of ancient nations, trans. edward sachau (london: allen and co., 1879), x. one factor underlying this attitude is surely a eurocentric narrative of the history of philosophy, as the editors of the volume under review note (p. 1). once the progress of islamic philosophy had been mapped up until the twelfth century, the point of its reception by western europe, its continued development was deemed unimportant. 3. reviewed in this journal; see john renard, review of the oxford handbook of islamic theology, edited by sabine schmidtke, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 240–242. ensured that philosophy from this period continues to receive disproportionate attention. the excellent new oxford handbook of islamic philosophy, edited by khaled e l r o u a y h e b a n d s a b i n e s c h m i d t k e , sets out with the aim, made explicit i n i t s i n t r o d u c t i o n , t o c o r r e c t t h i s disproportionate historical emphasis. a s s u c h , t h e v o l u m e s u p e r s e d e s t h e shorter and less comprehensive, though still valuable, cambridge companion to arabic philosophy (2005). the new o x f o r d h a n d b o o k t r e a t s p h i l o s o p h y in the islamic world from the ninth through twentieth centuries, across thirty chapters contributed by an international and intergenerational group of scholars, with roughly equal weight given to each century. the volume is clearly intended a s a c o m p a n i o n o r f o l l o w u p t o t h e oxford handbook of islamic theology (2014), also edited by schmidtke.3 yet the volumes are quite different in structure and purpose. where the theology volume s t ru c t u red it s c hap t ers ac c ord ing to themes and case studies, followingly a loosely chronological order, the editors o f t h e o x f o r d h a n d b o o k o f i s l a m i c philosophy explicitly eschew organization according to theme or even according to author. they argue, convincingly, that the present state of research precludes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) el-rouayheb and schmidtke’s the oxford handbook of islamic philosophy • 336 a thematic organization. moreover, they fear that an author-based approach would yield overwhelmingly diffuse chapters. instead, they have opted to give the reader a representative taste of islamic philosophy’s thousand-year development by centering each chapter on a single work by a single author, ordered chronologically from the ninth-century plotinian theology of aristotle (ch. 1, cristina d’ancona) to the twentieth-century egyptian philosopher zakī najīb maḥmūd’s (d. 1993) naḥwa falsafa ʿilmiyya (ch. 30, muhammad ali khalidi). the result is impressive, a wide-ranging and detailed yet still readable presentation o f t h e f i e l d . t h e w o r k s o v e r v i e w e d treat not only logic, metaphysics, and epistemology but also ethics and physics. after a summary of the philosophical work in question and a brief biography and historical contextualization of its author, chapter contributors are free to explore the work however they wish. some, such as emma gannagé (ch. 2, on al-kindī’s on first philosophy) and ayman shihadeh (ch. 14, on fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī’s commentary on avicenna’s pointers), give detailed analytical philosophical outlines of the contents, highlighting certain sections to make broader points about the author’s philosophical system or to reorient our understanding of his thought. others, such as sarah stroumsa (ch. 4, on a lost work by ibn masarra [d. 319/931]), perform painstaking philological and intellectualhis torical detective work—a favorit e scholarly genre of this particular reviewer. still others, such as peter adamson (ch. 3, on abū bakr al-rāzī’s [d. 313/925] spiritual medicine), khalil andani (ch. 8, on nāṣir-i k h u s r a w ’ s j ā m i ʿ a l ḥ i k m a t a y n ) , a n d taneli kukkonen (ch. 11, on ibn ṭufayl’s [d. 581/1185] ḥayy b. yaqẓān), offer accessible and engaging chapters that will be of interest to experts but would also not be out of place on an advanced undergraduate syllabus. as strong as the early chapters are, the standout stars of the volume are the explorations of later islamic philosophy, and not just by virtue of their quality. the unjustly understudied subject matter itself makes for fascinating reading, as in the case of khaled el-rouayheb’s chapter (ch. 23) on the egyptian scholar al-mallawī’s (d. 1181/1767) versification of al-sanūsī’s influential logical handbook, or fatemeh fana’s study (ch. 35) of the post–mullā ṣadrā ishrāqī philosopher sabzawārī’s (d. 1295 or 1298/1878 or 1881) ghurar al-farāʾid. beyond such later developments in metaphysics and logic, the volume a l s o i n c l u d e s l a t e r w o r k s o f n a t u r a l philosophy. for instance, asad q. ahmed and jon mcginnis (ch. 24) highlight the indian scholar faḍl-i ḥaqq khayrābādī’s (d. 1295/1861) al-hadiyya al-saʿīdiyya, which they characterize as “perhaps the last independent work written within the arabic-islamic tradition of physics” (p. 535) and which includes a critical engagement with the copernican system. one laments, with the editors in the introduction, that external factors prevented the inclusion of further chapters on several important ottoman, safavid, and post-safavid authors. the volume concludes, in an exciting first for the field of islamic philosophy as traditionally conceived, by discussing four twentieth-century philosophers— muḥammad iqbāl (d. 1938), muḥammad bāqir al-ṣadr (d. 1979), ʿallāma ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981), and zakī najīb maḥmūd, treated respectively by mustansir mir (ch. 27), saleh j. agha (ch. 28), sajjad h. rizvi and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 337 • coleman connelly ahab bdaiwi (ch. 29), and muhammad ali khalidi (ch. 30). beyond their individual quality, the millennium-spanning array of chapters provokes an important question—and this is the perhaps the handbook’s greatest contribution. what features unite the w o r k s a n d f i g u r e s t h a t t h e v o l u m e encompasses? in other words, what is the “islamic philosophy” of the handbook’s title? regarding the second part of that phrase, the editors clearly state that they are interested in “philosophy” or “falsafa” in the general, modern sense of those english and arabic words, not merely in the more restrictive premodern arabic sense of falsafa.4 hence their inclusion of a chapter on a figure like al-ghazālī ( c h . 9 , f r a n k g r i f f e l ) , w h o w o u l d emphatically have rejected the title of “philosopher” (faylasūf). nevertheless, most of the chapters do treat texts dealing with falsafa in the restrictive, premodern sense of the word—namely, as the particular neoplatonizing aristotelianism that the islamic world received from graeco-roman late antiquity and creatively developed.5 might it have been helpful to include more borderline figures? one thinks especially 4. for a statement of the difference between the modern and premodern understandings of “philosophy” or “falsafa,” see dimitri gutas, “avicenna and after: the development of paraphilosophy; a history of science approach,” in islamic philosophy from the 12th to the 14th century, ed. abdelkader al ghouz, 19–72 (göttingen: v & r unipress, 2018), at 20–21. it should be noted, of course, that falsafa (“philosophy”) and faylasūf (“philosopher”) do occasionally appear in the generic sense of “wisdom” and “wise man” even in premodern arabic and that various islamic philosophers give their own abstract or tendentious definitions of falsafa and related words. 5. it should also be noted, however, that from the beginning, some self-identified falāsifa, such as abū bakr al-rāzī, could nevertheless consciously reject central aristotelian tenets. 6. on the perception that ibn taymiyya is “doing philosophy” or “falsafa” in the modern sense, see anke von kügelgen, “the poison of philosophy: ibn taymiyya’s struggle for and against reason,” in islamic theology, philosophy and law: debating ibn taymiyya and ibn qayyim al-jawziyya, ed. birgit krawietz and georges tamer, 253–328 (berlin: de gruyter, 2013), especially at 283–284. von kügelgen argues, moreover, that ibn taymiyya was more influenced by the medieval falāsifa than he would have cared to admit. of ibn taymiyya (d. 728/1328), who, in his works against aristotelian logic, is clearly “doing philosophy” in the modern sense of the word, even if he disavows falsafa in the premodern sense. 6 even more boldly, might someone like ibn khaldūn (d. 808/1406), also no friend to premodern falsafa, have been included on the grounds that he is engaging in “philosophy of history”? there are no easy answers to these definitional questions, and the volume’s strength lies in its refusal to offer any, preferring instead to let readers think through the problem themselves. perhaps more interesting than the word “philosophy” in the title is the label “islamic.” what do the editors mean by this term? whereas the 2014 oxford handbook of islamic theology did not need to justify its inclusion of the modifier “islamic,” the editors of the present volume are aware that many readers will find the phrase “islamic philosophy” problematic. responding to proponents of the equally popular “arabic philosophy,” el-rouayheb and schmidtke point out that the term excludes philosophical works written in other languages, such as persian and turkish. quite rightly, “arabic philosophy” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) el-rouayheb and schmidtke’s the oxford handbook of islamic philosophy • 338 was inappropriate given their volume’s scope. yet as the editors themselves admit, “islamic philosophy” runs the risk of excluding christian, jewish, zoroastrian, o r e v e n “ f r e e t h i n k i n g ” p h i l o s o p h e r s writing in islamic lands—some of whom, s u c h a s a b ū b a k r a l r ā z ī a n d y a ḥ y ā b. ʿadī (d. 364/974), receive dedicated chapters in the handbook (ch. 3, peter adamson, and ch. 6, sidney h. griffith). what the editors clearly mean by “islamic p h i l o s o p h y ” i s p h i l o s o p h y a s i t w a s practiced historically and today in islamic lands. why not “philosophy in the islamic world,” then, or the increasingly popular “islamicate philosophy”? el-rouayheb and schmidtke argue that the former is unwieldly and the latter obscure, liable to render an already difficult field still more inaccessible to general readers. indeed, it is hard to imagine a marketing team at oxford university press greenlighting a volume entitled the oxford handbook of islamicate philosophy. o f c o u r s e , m a n y s c h o l a r s p r e f e r “ i s l a m i c a t e p h i l o s o p h y ” t o “ i s l a m i c philosophy” for another reason, one not raised by el-rouayheb and schmidtke when discussing the volume’s scope. to use the term “islamic philosophy,” the argument goes, is to imply, intentionally or not, that there is something essentially “islamic” about the philosophy under d i s c u s s i o n . t h a t i s , b e y o n d m e r e l y describing philosophy written in lands where islam predominated, the term “islamic philosophy” appears to assume a fact not immediately in evidence: that 7. by contrast, for a defense of the term “islamic philosophy” on the grounds that philosophy as practiced in islamic lands is meaningfully “islamic,” see shahab ahmed, what is islam? the importance of being islamic (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016), 10–19. 8. of course, at the end of the count, terms such as “islamicate” and “islamic world” run these same risks. islam influenced the essential character of this tradition.7 by way of illustration, a critic might object that a companion to european philosophy including such diverse thinkers as abelard (d. 1142), descartes (d. 1650), nietzsche (d. 1900), and derrida (d. 2004) would never receive the title the oxford handbook of christian philosophy. all four philosophers hailed from christian-majority countries, but it is highly debatable whether they all p a r t i c i p a t e i n s o m e t h i n g t h a t c o u l d meaningfully be described as “christian philosophy.” use of the term “islamic”— though perhaps unavoidable in a volume of this scope—inevitably risks invoking m o n o l i t h i c n o t i o n s o f c u l t u r e t h a t postcolonial and other theorists have worked to deconstruct.8 s u c h c o n t r o v e r s y o v e r t h e t e r m “islamic” gets at the heart of the volume’s central, if unspoken, question, alluded to above. even if the philosophy under discussion is not essentially “islamic,” what essential features unify the volume’s disparate chapters? since the volume is arranged chronologically, is there a central historical narrative that unites all the thinkers whom the oxford handbook of islamic philosophy brings together? take, for example, the iraq-, syria-, and egypt-based al-fārābī (d. 339/950–951) (ch. 5, damien janos), the andalusian ibn ṭufayl (ch. 11, taneli kukkonen), and the iranian sabzawārī (ch. 25, fatemeh fana). all three philosophers clearly belong to the same tradition inaugurated in ninthcentury baghdad, a tradition that, for al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 339 • coleman connelly convenience, we might choose to label “islamic philosophy,” whether or not we view it as islamic in essence.9 although g e o g r a p h i c a l l y a n d c h r o n o l o g i c a l l y d i s p a r a t e , a l f ā r ā b ī , i b n ṭ u f a y l , a n d sabzawārī shared many preoccupations and consulted many of the same texts and authorities, albeit sometimes through c o m m e n t a r i e s a n d o t h e r f i l t e r s . b y contrast, a figure like zakī najīb maḥmūd, featured in the volume’s final chapter, engaged in an analytic philosophy that was closely in dialogue with his twentiethcentury contemporaries in britain, where maḥmūd studied, and elsewhere across the world. this global school of logical empiricism has its own distinct history and is connected with ninth-century baghdad only at many removes. in other words, one could readily posit an unbroken historical throughline, passing via avicenna (ch. 7, amos bertolacci) and mullā ṣadrā (d. 1045 o r 1 0 5 0 / 1 6 3 5 – 1 6 3 6 o r 1 6 4 0 – 1 6 4 1 ) (ch. 21, cécile bonmariage), that connects al-fārābī with sabzawārī. the handbook includes chapters on every major link in that chain. by contrast, to situate maḥmūd’s logical empiricism fully in its intellectual-historical context, the reader would require chapters covering austria’s ludwig wittgenstein (d. 1951), britain’s a. j. ayer (d. 1989), and china’s hong qian (tscha hung, d. 1992), among others. from a historical or philological perspective, is it useful to describe both al-fārābī and maḥmūd as “islamic philosophers” in 9. this philological approach based on textual traditions and authorial influence is exemplified by dimitri gutas, “the study of arabic philosophy in the twentieth century: an essay on the historiography of arabic philosophy,” british journal of middle eastern studies 29 no. 1 (2002): 7, although gutas uses the term “arabic philosophy” rather than “islamic philosophy.” the same way that it useful to assign that label to both al-fārābī and sabzawārī? alternatively, are historical throughlines and textual traditions reductive and unhelpful ways of approaching “islamic philosophy” in the first place? might a theoretical perspective that emphasizes hybridity and historical rupture or an ahistorical focus on philosophical themes be more fruitful? again, the handbook does not attempt to answer such questions, nor should it, given the current state of research. it would in any case be inappropriate, not to say offensive, for the volume to exclude a set of islamic-world philosophers on the basis that they were somehow less “islamic”— even if the term “islamic philosophy” were couched in a historically restrictive, nonessentialist sense. instead, the volume opts for a refreshingly maximalist spirit of inclusivity, one that challenges future s c h o l a r s t o c o n s i d e r a n d r e i m a g i n e precisely what we mean when we use terms like “islamic philosophy” or even “islamicate philosophy.” in the end, one feature that undeniably unites the figures and works in el-rouayheb and schmidtke’s volume is their long and inexcusable exclusion from eurocentric histories of philosophy. the two editors, and indeed all of the volume’s contributors, are to be thanked for producing a book that treats so many understudied philosophical works so expertly. the oxford handbook of islamic philosophy will serve as a definitive reference for years to come. conference report al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 654-661 the practice of adorning, protecting, and covering the body has long been fundamental to humankind, with recent archaeological discoveries yielding wearable ornaments dating to the middle pleistocene era.1 the wearable is both highly representational and undeniably intimate; it communicates individual, social, and cultural identities, while being worn on the body and sometimes holding complex personal meaning or even performing protective functions for the wearer. addressing an extensive range of adornments found in the byzantine, eurasian, islamic, and western-european medieval traditions, ranging from textiles and jewelry to body modifications such as cosmetics and tattoos, the symposium rethinking the wearable in the middle 1. e. m. sehasseh, p. fernandez, s. kuhn, m. stiner, s. mentzer, d. colarossi, a. clark, f. lanoe, m. pailes, d. hoffmann, a. benson, e. rhodes, m. benmansour, a. laissaoui, i. ziani, p. matutano, j. morales, y. djellal, b. longet, j.-j. hublin, m. mouhiddine, f.-z. rafi, k.b. worthey, i. sanchez-morales, n. ghayati, and a. bouzouggar, “early middle stone age personal ornaments from bizmoune cave, morocco,” science advances, 7 (2021). ages sought to expand our understanding of the wearable in the middle ages. the two-day collaborative event, which took place at bard graduate center in new york city, was organized by ittai weinryb, associate professor at bard graduate center, and elizabeth dospel williams, associate curator of the byzantine collection at dumbarton oaks. on the first morning of the symposium, participants attended a workshop at the metropolitan museum of art hosted by christine brennan (research scholar and collections manager, department of medieval art and the cloisters), kathrin colburn (conservator, textile conservation), melanie holcomb (curator and manager of collection strategy, department of medieval art and the cloisters), and andrew winslow rethinking the wearable in the middle ages (bard graduate center, 28-29 april 2022) conference organizers: ittai weinryb (bard graduate center) elizabeth dospel williams (dumbarton oaks) report by: ellen enderle (bard graduate center and the metropolitan museum of art) © 2022 ellen enderle. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. https://scholar.harvard.edu/amyclark/publications/early-middle-stone-age-personal-ornaments-bizmoune-cave-morocco al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 655 • ellen enderle (principal departmental technician). in this object-focused session, the organizers and presenters viewed, analyzed, and discussed an array of wearable objects of the middle ages, spanning different media, periods, geographies, and specializations. the jewelry and metalwork consisted of a gold earring from early byzantine egypt (25.2.13); a gold necklace with an emerald and agate-intaglio pendant m a d e b e t w e e n t h e s i x t h a n d e i g h t h centuries (58.43); a pendant and a locket, both fourteenth-century french silvergilt and basse-taille enamel (17.190.916, 17.190.964); a fifteenth-century french reliquary pendant (17.190.983); and a gold and cloisonné enamel reliquary fi n i a l m a d e i n n i n t h o r t e n t h c e n tury byzantium (1972.58). the textiles included a british orphrey made of metal, silk, and linen (2009.300.2750) and two italian silk textiles brocaded with metal thread (09.50.967, 46.156.45), all dated to the fourteenth century; an egyptian wool textile fragment depicting a mythological creature produced sometime between the seventh and ninth centuries (2018.913.5); an early byzantine coptic wool and linen fragment displaying confronted roosters and dogs (2011.363); and an egyptian textile fragment of woven wool displaying a geometric pattern made between the sixth and ninth centuries. this shared exercise of reconsidering familiar objects and encountering new ones stimulated many constructive conversations that bridged media and specializations to reveal the interrelatedness of wearable objects––setting the tone for the conference to come. following a brief intermission, the participants reconvened at the bard graduate center for the first session of the symposium. in her opening remarks, williams addressed the need to reconsider the medieval wearable beyond the museological framework and the discrete classification system of the museum storeroom, in which the standard taxonomic divisions o f m e d i u m , p r o d u c t i o n o r i g i n s , a n d period often estrange the wearable from its function, greater assemblage, and the body itself. she proposed an alternative approach that considers adornments and textiles holistically, in terms of ensemble and interrelatedness, and also takes into account the complex technical, visual, somatic, cultural, and material contexts in which these artifacts existed. following dospel williams’ introduction, weinryb contextualized the motivation to “rethink” the wearable in the middle ages within the framework of recent developments in the fields of the history of science, comparative religion, psychology, anthropology, and the history of disability, as well as the impact of the sociological theory of agency on the study of material culture. from advancements in our understanding of medieval manufacturing technologies to archeological discoveries that have shed light on how objects were used in ritual practices, over the past twenty years scholars have benefited from greater insights into how people envisioned, understood, and interacted with wearables in the middle ages, making it an appropriate time for reevaluation. though the following presentations addressed a diverse array of media, cultural traditions, geographies, and time periods, all of them took new analytical perspectives and methodological approaches to evaluating, contextualizing, and ultimately better understanding the wearable in the middle ages. https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/8eneckryp9u9k0jsmw6w7?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/uy9fcl9zqwuxq5vtqhcgq?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/ep8ucm8arwi9pglsjl4hh?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/5rhzcnkbvwi9l1rsr_49p?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/pou8coydw6hwyoghpkcmz?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/kj89cpnexwhzgqlurrzij?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/6rmgcqwgygs9vmxs98haz?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/teexcr6jzjfqy8vt0xbbt?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/8dv1cvojenixb1vtrwuoz?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/utzmcw60gofx3vkhbdyo3?domain=metmuseum.org https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/mmxicxdljphga3jcxyzts?domain=metmuseum.org al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) conference report: rethinking the wearable in the middle ages • 656 alicia walker (bryn mawr college) opened the symposium with her paper entitled, “christian bodies clothed in pagan bodies: the implications of grecoroman mythological imagery on early byzantine items of dress and adornment.” walker presented multiple examples of late roman and byzantine garments, jewelry, and wearable accessories decorated with non-christian mythological figures––many of which were worn by early byzantine c h r i s t i a n s . s h e e x p l o r e d h o w e a r l y christians employed, interpreted, and negotiated the wearing of non-christian imagery, specifically the “social and spiritual implications” of adorning the christian body in a manner that linked the wearer with pagan models. through the examination of several case studies, including an early byzantine necklace with a gold and lapis lazuli pendant of aphrodite anadyomene, a fifth century tunic with woven dionysian ornament, and a gold marriage belt that intermingled christian and pagan iconography, walker proposed that such iconography may have been understood in terms of early byzantine t h e o r i e s o f v i s i o n a n d i m p r e s s i o n , particularly the notion that a person’s eyes were directly connected to the soul and that the impressions made by imagery directly inspired and shaped selfhood. she further stated that these worn images might have functioned as powerful agents utilized in mimetic operations involving emulation, identification with, and the embodiment of aspirational figures by way of imagery worn on garments and personal adornment. moreover, such operations were said to be associated with devotional practices and the construction and expression of identity and power, with enhanced efficacy resulting from the physical intimacy of the wearable with the body. the second speaker was zvezdana dode (nasledie institute) who virtually presented her paper “honorary robes and belts of submissiveness in mongol imperial culture.” the focus of this talk was on mongolian imperial culture and dress, particularly the distinctive qualities of honorific robes and belts. relying on relevant medieval texts and miniature paintings, as well as a few extant textile frag m ent s , t o rec ons t ru c t t he im age of mongolian imperial costume, dode explained that these highly symbolic garments of honor were ceremoniously gifted by mongol khans to their subjects and ambassadors and served as potent symbols of social relations and status. n o t i n g c o l o r f u l s i l k r o b e s w o r n b y persian military leaders and sultans, decorated with elaborate brocades and figural ornament, dode argued that the garments indicated powerful positions a n d u l t i m a t e l y s e r v e d a s s a r t o r i a l manifestations of the centralized power of the ruler as it extended outward to the periphery of the empire. dode further claimed that honorific belts symbolized the obedient submission of powerful local elites to the mongol khan and, citing textual sources, also suggested the concept of a belt signifying a willingness to serve was appropriated by the mongols from islamic ideology and cultural heritage. ultimately, dode concluded that honorary robes and belts of submission materialized the delegation of power and displayed the subordination of the recipient to the imperial authority of the giver, the mongol k h a n . t h e s e t w o p r e s e n t a t i o n s w e r e followed by a question and answer session with walker and dode that included discussions of gender in the reception al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 657 • ellen enderle o f l a t e a n t i q u e a n d e a r l y b y z a n t i n e jewelry with erotic imagery, concepts of love and romance in medieval europe and byzantium, the decline of wearable pagan imagery in the middle ages, the significance of the belt in the eastern and western traditions, and the visual appearance of honorific belts in mongol imperial culture. the second session of presentations delved into themes of political power, identity marking, and the wearable as a performative act. the third speaker of the day was eiren shea (grinnell college) who shared her paper “clothing the khatun: mongol women’s dress and political p o w e r . ” t h i s p r e s e n t a t i o n e x p l o r e d sartorial expressions of elite mongol women’s cultural and political power in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. shea compared the dress of courtly mongol women of the yuan dynasty in china to that of their predecessors of the song, jin, and liao dynasties to determine the extent to which they adhered to or departed from these prior modes of dress, and what this might have signified. examining visual representations, relevant texts, and archeological evidence primarily excavated from tombs, shea discussed the sartorial differences and affinities of elite women of the mongol empire from different backgrounds and locales, while noting a marked tendency to appropriate m o n g o l d r e s s . t h i s “ s a r t o r i a l c o d e switching” was said to have involved the adoption of the distinctive dress of the women of the steppe and turkic cultures, particularly northern groups who ruled over parts of china between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, such as the jurchen, khitan, and mongols. shea explained that this distinctive style of dress included a tall headdress worn by married mongol women called a buqta, often made of birch bark and adorned with gold-woven lampas or red silk, feathers, imported gems, and precious metal ornament, variations of a wide court robe, unbound feet, and earrings. shea’s analysis revealed that clothing and adornment were significant modes of expression among elite mongol women and that these sartorial choices conveyed legitimation, political alignment, and power in the mongol court. the fourth presentation came from juliane von fircks (friedrich schiller university, jena) and was entitled “to adorn the dead body: the representation of the deceased prince in and outside the grave (13th– 15th centuries).” this paper examined the incongruent relationship between the presentation of medieval princely tombs with their monumental memorial sculpture and the material remains deposited within the grave, including textiles, jewelry, and other burial items that adorned and accompanied the corpse. von fircks’ first case study, the tomb and monument of the early fourteenth century italian nobleman, cangrande della scala, in verona, display a sharp contrast between the appearance of the curiously smiling figure represented on the tomb monument and the remnants inside sarcophagus. this apparent lack of correspondence between the internal referent and external representation was further examined in two additional case studies: the monumental tombs of philip the bold and philip the good. in the example of philip the bold, von fircks pointed out that the external sculptural monument displays the duke of burgundy dressed, simultaneously, in his role as courtier and in knightly armor, while the actual corpse was interred in a carthusian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) conference report: rethinking the wearable in the middle ages • 658 monk’s habit. this lack of correspondence in the representation of the princely deceased led her to conclude that the symbolic and sartorial decisions made were intentional; the visage and attire of the external monuments were designed to encourage memorialization and prayers for the soul of the deceased, while the criteria for the adorning of the corpse was of a more eschataological nature, styled only for the “eyes of god’’ so as to secure resurrection at the last judgment. the final presentation of the first day came from cecily j. hilsdale (mcgill university) who offered a paper on “crowns and the situating of authority.” the topic of her discussion was a group of iberian votive crowns dating to the seventh century. though made in the tradition of byzantine votive crowns, hilsdale pointed out the formal qualities that make these crowns of gold and precious gems distinctive, particularly two examples decorated with dangling inset cloisonné letters that reference their visigothic donor-king. after examining the formal qualities of the crowns, representations of votive crowns, and medieval texts that expound upon the qualities and virtues of kingship, hilsdale argued that the regal act of wearing the crown is implied in the disembodied display of the votive crowns. furthermore, she asserted that the very act of dedication, symbolized by the dangling letters that name and represent the absent ruler, performed the most important of kingly virtues: not the wearing of a crown, but the expression of royal piety. the first day of the symposium concluded with a question and answer session with the last three presenters, with discussion of topics including sartorial expressions of distinction and conformity, the categorization of votive crowns, and the question of whether funerary clothing and grave goods were used in life. the second day of the symposium commenced on the morning of april 29th with a presentation by cynthia hahn (hunter college and the graduate center, cuny) that was titled, “the brooch upon the chest: lodestar and amulet / the medieval ‘safety’ pin.” this discussion f o c u s e d o n t h e m u l t i v a l e n c e o f t h e medieval brooch, specifically brooches that were circular in shape––often in the form of disk brooches and annular brooches. hahn presented some early medieval examples of circular brooches with overlaid cross designs, interlace patterns, and figural representations that were said to express a correspondence to the cosmos and the body, while having the potential to possess many other meanings. she also pointed out the connection between materiality and iconography and the potential apotropaic, medicinal, and amuletic functions of medieval brooches. a major point of discussion was the iconography, meaning, a n d p o s s i b l e f u n c t i o n o f t h e f u l l e r brooch, which displays personifications of the five senses in silver and niello. on the brooch, a wide-eyed central figure seems to represent the sense of sight, which the brooch’s iconographic program situates as the dominant sense. referring to multiple contemporary writers who expounded on the topic of the senses, hahn argued that the symbolism of the fuller brooch served a practical function: as a reminder to guard the senses against corruption, particularly the eyes, which were regarded as the windows to the soul. the second presenter, antje bosselmannruickbie (university of gießen), shared her paper, “putting the empress’s neck on al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 659 • ellen enderle the line: the materiality of imperial neck ornamentation in byzantium.” the topic of this talk was byzantine imperial costume, with a specific focus on the broad necklacelike ornament that adorned the necks of byzantine empresses, imperial consorts, and female saints. bosselmann-ruickbie e x p l o r e d q u e s t i o n s o f d e v e l o p m e n t , terminology, and wearability—particularly whether such ornaments were attached like collars to textiles or worn as a separate piece of jewelry. to do so, she analyzed visual representations of imperial neck ornaments and two primary case study objects: a gold necklace with sapphires from the assiut treasure dated to the sixth or seventh century and a tenth century gold and cloisonné enamel necklace from the preslav treasure. in attempting to reconstruct the ensembles with which such neck ornaments may have been worn, bosselmann-ruickbie further observed that there existed a decidedly harmonious relationship between male and female i m p e r i a l r e g a l i a a n d t o u c h e d u p o n byzantine ideas about rulership, nudity, and the “immobility” of the empress that were conveyed by this royal attire. a p r o d u c t i v e q u e s t i o n a n d a n s w e r session followed, with the two speakers covering topics such as the relationship b e t w e e n m e t a l w o r k a n d t e x t i l e s , amuletic brooches, gender distinctions and protective agency, as well as the act of metal polishing as a metaphor for cleansing the soul of sin. t h e s e c o n d s e c t i o n o f a f t e r n o o n presentations focused on grave goods, conditions of display, and fragmentation. the first talk of this session was given by sarah laursen (harvard art museums) on her paper “out of place and out of sight: ornaments from medieval china in american collections.” laursen began by discussing an array of small gold and silver wearable ornaments that were made in china beginning around the time of the han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) and interred with their wearers as part of ornate burial assemblages. she further explained that when these tombs were looted, the ornaments became disembodied fragments entirely divorced from the bodies on which they were worn, their greater assemblage, and their archaeological contexts. using such examples as a jumping-off-point, laursen opened a discussion that explored exhibition strategies for such objects. some of the inquiries included questions of how such discrete ornaments should be valued, categorized, and displayed, whether these artifacts should be presented in quantities or analyzed independently as aesthetic objects, if representations of the body should be shown with the artifacts, and to what extent the archaeological context should come into play. this inquiry into how museums might exhibit fragmentary objects continued as laursen analyzed her main case study objects: a series of men’s belt and cap ornaments of the six dynasties period (220–589 ce) and women’s jewelry and garment ornaments o f t h e t a n g d y n a s t y ( 6 1 8 – 9 0 7 c e ) . ultimately, laursen prompted scholars and museum professionals to rethink the contextualization, categorization, and display of the wearable in a more holistic manner by incorporating a greater context that might include the way the object was worn on the body, the creator’s intention, and the original function of the artifact. the next speaker was meredyth lynn winter (colgate university; philadelphia museum of art) who presented her paper “dressing for paradise: a consideration al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) conference report: rethinking the wearable in the middle ages • 660 of designs & materials befitting islamic burial clothing.” the talk began with two early thirteenth-century painted portraits of badr al-din luʾluʾ from a manuscript entitled kitāb al-aghānī (book of songs). in these portraits, badr al-din luʾluʾ’s attire appears consistent: a long tailored robe that is crossed over the chest, gathered and tied at the waist, and paired with distinctive ṭirāz armbands. winter then offered a brief overview of the scholarship on the subject of his dress, in which the costume has been referred to as the “vanguard” of this influential islamic style of dress and associated with military l e a d e r s h i p , r u l e r s h i p , a n d m e d i e v a l turkic attire. turning to questions of materiality, competing modes of garment c o n s t r u c t i o n , a n d t h e “ a s p i r a t i o n a l aspects” of clothing, winter then discussed several islamic garments and fragmentary burial shrouds, including two garments excavated from eleventh-century seljuk tombs discovered just outside the royal city of rayy, iran. referencing the design similarities between textiles depicted in byzantine paintings, curvilinear draperylike patterns on extant silk fragments from thirteenth-fourteenth-century iran, and the highly-stylized drapery folds depicted in the painted portraits of badr al-din luʾluʾ, winter argued that the unifying factor common to all of these textiles was their silk fabric. she then pointed out how this claim could be seen as controversial, as there are ḥadīths that discouraged men from wearing or being buried in pure silk garments; however, she proceeded to challenge the premise that silk was taboo and suggested that this assumption be reconsidered. returning to the equestrian portrait, she then pointed out that a silk-clad badr al-din luʾluʾ is surrounded by what appear to be angels or jinn, an observation that led winter to propose that silk may have been regarded as a kind of “vehicle to span liminal spaces.” continuing her analysis of the burial shrouds, she then asserted that it seems unlikely the textiles in question functioned as worn garments prior to their funerary use, instead suggesting they might have been employed precisely for the material agency of silk, which in a mortuary context were said to have possibly performed a mediating and “aspirational” function. the final portion of the talk centered o n t h e s i g n i f i c a n c e o f c o n s t r u c t i o n , repurposing, and wearability, shedding light on the ways in which medieval islamic garments were both transformed a n d t r a n s f o r m a t i o n a l . t e x t i l e s a n d metaphor, the ethical concerns involved in contextualizing fragments, and creative exhibition strategies were discussed in the question and answer session that followed. the final session of rethinking the w e a r a b l e i n t h e m i d d l e a g e s b e g a n with ashley elizabeth jones (university of florida) who presented her paper, “wearable matter.” this talk focused on the ways in which the visual, material, symbolic, and magical aspects of jewelry mediate between the wearer and the world, with particular attention given t o h o w g e m s t o n e s a n d j e w e l r y w e r e regarded and represented in late antiquity and the middle ages. to elucidate the role of mimesis and materiality in this study, jones examined late antique and medieval literary descriptions and visual representations of gemstones and precious metals that comprised jewelry, wearable o r n a m e n t s , a n d e v e n t h e b e j e w e l e d walls of the biblical heavenly city of jerusalem. reading detailed and vivid al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 661 • ellen enderle descriptions of gemstones from authors such as cassiodorus, bede, and suger, jones argued that the abstract, often complex, symbolic meaning of the stones, which would continue to be developed in the textual lapidary tradition, was derived from the concrete reality of their appearance and materiality. the final presentation of the conference was given by ivan drpić (university of pennsylvania), who discussed his paper, “the burdened body: devotional jewelry and the weight of the sacred.” the topic of this paper was medieval devotional jewelry, such as pectoral crosses, reliquary rings, rosaries, and prayer knots—a category of jewelry that, according to drpić, was not intended t o m e d i a t e b e t w e e n w e a r e r a n d t h e world, but rather was designed to “stage and facilitate an encounter of the self with itself.” in particular, this discussion focused on the psychological, spiritual, and physical aspects of wearing byzantine devotional neck pendants, or enkolpia. drpić provided an overview of the three main categories of enkolpia, explaining that they were worn by all classes of people and varied greatly in form and material, ranging from engraved gems set in precious metal mounts to simple copper alloy crosses. while sharing several examples enkolpia, he explained that though they did function as status symbols, these pendants were concealed under garments, and that the primary function of enkolpia resided in their perceived ability to protect, support, and sustain the wearer in religious devotion. referring to the sociological concept of hexis proposed by pierre bourdieu, which posits that ideologies are internalized and expressed i n b o d i l y g e s t u r e s a n d h a b i t s , d r p i ć explained that the somatic experience of wearing enkolpia would have involved a constant corporeal reminder to maintain spiritual discipline and, in the case of the larger and sometimes exceedingly heavy copper alloy cross enkolpia, a persistent sensation of self-imposed physical burden. drpić further concluded that the material and corporeal experience of wearing a weighty enkolpion was absolutely integral to the ascetic spiritual work performed and prompted by the devotional pendant: to serve as a constant reminder to the wearer to maintain spiritual and mental vigilance, w h i c h w a s b e l i e v e d t o a d v a n c e t h e devotee on the spiritual path. a question and answer session with jones and drpić followed that included brief discussions on the importance of the material properties o f m a g i c a l g e m s t o n e s , t h e i n c l u s i o n of nonstructural lead in enkolpia, the technical aspects of coin and coin-like impressions on jewelry, grave goods, reliquaries, the act of concealing and revealing enkolpia, and amulets designed for olfactory stimulation, among other topics. afterward, williams and weinryb wrapped up the final day of rethinking the wearable in the middle ages by taking a few more questions and sharing some remarks on inclusive terminology and the scope and possibilities of the project, before concluding with a note on the value of imagination in the work of art historians, curators, and historians of the middle ages. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 219-224 th e c o n f e r e n c e w a s o r g a n i z e d over three days by abdul rahim abu-husayn and bilal orfali and generously supported by the jewett chair of arabic studies and the center for arts and humanities of the american university of beirut (aub). the first day of the conference was held on the premises of the aub, after which the bristol hotel in beirut became the venue for the second and third days of the conference. nadia maria el cheikh (dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, aub), bilal orfali (chair of the department of arabic and near eastern languages, aub) and abdul rahim abu-husayn (director of the center for arts and humanities, aub) welcomed participants on the thursday. this conference, which they had hoped to organize for many years, should result in the publication of the papers presented. the different presentations explored the overwhelming presence of anthologies i n p r e m o d e r n a r a b i c l i t e r a t u r e , a phenomenon unique to this literature, where you find such works on a variety of themes, including love, wine, travel, death, music, difficult words, and blaming or praising things. what were the reasons for the popularity of the genre, and what was its function? to what extent can they be considered as original works in themselves, how the author’s influence can be traced in his manner and method of compiling? what can be inferred from the chosen excerpts over what has been left out by an author and most of the time lost to us? what do these compilations say on the historical and cultural context in which they were produced? these questions and many others have long been raised about this genre, and continue to rise for the readers and scholars today. t h e c o n f e r e n c e w a s c o m p o s e d o f eight panels on the following themes: “ e m o t i o n s , ” “ p l e a s u r e , ” “ f a i t h a n d e d u c a t i o n , ” “ t h i s i s n o t a t a l e , ” “poetry,” “compilation, authorship and readership,” and “geography.” each panel was followed by discussion that allowed conference report approaches to the study of pre-modern arabic anthologies (beirut, 10–12 may 2018) conference organizers: abdul rahim abu-husayn and bilal orfali report by: louise gallorini 220 • louise gallorini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the audience to participate and engage with the participants. ramzi baalbaki (aub) gave the keynote address on the second day, beatrice gruendler (freie universität of berlin) a guest honorary speech on the third day. the conference concluded with a dinner. thursday may 10th panel 1: “emotions” chaired by julia bray (university of oxford), the first panel of the conference opened with a paper by lyall armstrong (aub) on the subject of death and dying, as seen through the reconstruction of one of the earliest works by a muslim scholar on the topic. indeed, dhikr al-mawt by ibn abī al-dunyā (d. 281/894-5), an author known to have had a special interest in the matter of death, and whose work influenced later scholars interested in writing on the subject. it contains excerpts from the qurʾān and religious literature as well as poetry and anecdotes. going back to the world of the living, k a r e n m o u k h e i b e r ( u n i v e r s i t y o f balamand) presented a paper on al-imāʾ al-shawāʿir by al-isfahānī (d. 356/967), an anthology of courtesan-poetesses of the early abbasid period. she analyzed the vocabulary pertaining to emotions used in the text, thus reflecting a male gaze on female characters, by using barbara r o s e n w e i n ’ s c o n c e p t o f “ e m o t i o n a l c o m m u n i t y . ” w i t h o u t b e i n g a b l e t o discover the reality of emotions felt by individuals at the time, her analysis allows us nonetheless to explore the representation of gendered relations and what emotions were highlighted and valued (or not) in written testimony of this kind. the panel concluded with a return to the idea of dying, this time specifically with martyrs of love, with the presentation of vahid behmardi (lebanese american university) on maṣāriʿ al-ʿushshāq by jaʿfar b. aḥmad al-sarrāj al-qāriʾ (d. 500/1107). an anthology dealing specifically with tales and poetry of poets dying from love, it also contains the author’s own poems on passionate forms of love. through an analysis of the text, its isnāds and organisation, clearer light can be shed on the origins of love stories in classical arabic love literature. panel 2: “pleasure” chaired by bilal orfali (aub) the second panel included two presentations on the theme of pleasure. musical pleasure came first, with the presentation of carl davila (state university of new york) on kunnāsh al-ḥāʾik, a famous collection of song-texts of the andalusian tradition of north africa, as found in ms#144 at the khizāna dāwūdiyya in tetouan, dated from 1202/1788. his analysis of the manuscript spoke to the social context of the moroccan andalusian musical tradition. the second paper dealt with physical p l e a s u r e s . j e r e m y k u r z y n i e c ( y a l e u n i v e r s i t y ) d i s c u s s e d a n u n e d i t e d manuscript in a presentation entitled “the encyclopedia of pleasure: a ẓarīf’s guide to the bedroom sciences,” a medieval example of diversely sourced knowledge on the particular subject of sex. from poetry to medical sources, from greek, persian and indian sources, the anthology lists and categorizes what needs to be known regarding matters of the bedroom. analyzing the text and situating it in its larger cultural milieu, one discovers that al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) approaches to the study of pre-modern arabic anthologies • 221 the indian kama-sutra was known and circulated, at least in part, in the medieval islamic world. friday may 11th panel 3: “faith and education” the second day began with the theme of faith and education. kristen brustad (university of texas) chaired a panel in which sadly two participants were unable to attend. kirill dmitriev (university of st andrews) opened with a presentation on the anthology tradition and its theoretical a s p e c t s t h r o u g h a n e x a m p l e f r o m christian arabic sources. the combination of the popular arabic anthology genre and the medieval christian literature and traditions made it natural that christian authors would engage with this genre. the presentation reviewed the different categories of christian arabic anthologies a n d t h e i r a u t h o r s , a n d f o c u s e d o n busṭān al-ruhbān, an anthology compiled by jirmānūs farḥāt (d. 1732). the second presentation by samer traboulsi (university of north carolina) e x p l o r e s t h e u s e o f a n t h o l o g i e s a s educational tools, specifically in the ṭayyibī ismāʿīlī tradition in yemen and the teaching of the ismāʿīlī daʿwa. the paper used the kitāb al-azhār by ḥasan ibn nūḥ al-bhārūchī (d. 939/1533) as an example. this unpublished and lengthy text exists in several manuscripts, hinting at its wide circulation among scholars. the analysis of its great variety of content provides a better picture of the ways in which ismāʿīlī doctrine was taught, where most historians have focused on sermons rather than on these instruction manuals. panel 4: “this is not a tale” chaired by enass khansa (aub), this panel started with maurice pomerantz (new york university, abu dhabi) who presented a paper focused on ʿuqalāʾ al-majānīn by al-nīsābūrī (d. 406/1016). this is an example of an anthology on the theme of the madman; the text mentions around a hundred of such characters, from the historical to the legendary, in tales dealing with piety, foolishness and truth. matthew l. keegan (american university of sharjah) presented the second paper on “commentary as anthology” with the example of the andalusi al-sharīshī’s (d. 619/1222) commentary on al-ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt. using the device of commentary, the author collected and compiled adab excerpts from the islamic east and west. analyzing the commentary and the ones inspiring the author, keegan showed how commentary evolved into an anthologizing form of writing in itself. panel 5: “poetry” chaired by tayeb el-hibri (university of massachusetts, amherst,) the last panel of the day, on the topic of poetry, began with a presentation by adam talib (durham university) on the relationship between poetry anthologies and dīwān. talib spoke to what has been recovered of poetry thanks to anthologies against what has been lost, that is, poetry left out of anthologies. this is an important question for a type of literature that has not been transmitted to us in a direct fashion, most of it having been recorded through anthologies, with what it implies of the reasons for which authors included poems or left them out. talib also argued that the making of a poetry dīwān did 222 • louise gallorini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) not necessarily precede the making of anthologies; it might have been the other way around. david larsen (new york university) p r e s e n t e d a n o n g o i n g p r o j e c t o f a n t h o l o g y r e c o n s t r u c t i o n f r o m t h e fragments found in subsequent works and his method for doing it. he dealt with the genre of maʿānī texts, that is, the study of obscure meanings. working on the now lost kitāb abyāt al-maʿānī by abū naṣr al-bāhilī (231/855), larsen showed how sifting through citations of the work in later anthologies allows for an attempt at reconstructing the original text. he spoke of the challenges he faces in doing so. his reconstruction will be published in an upcoming edition and translation. bilal orfali (aub) concluded the panel with a presentation on poetry in sufi a n t h o l o g i e s o r m a n u a l s . t h e p o e m s constitute in their own right an anthology with its own uses within wider anthologies such as works by al-sulamī (d. 412/1021) and abū naṣr al-qushayrī (d. 514/1120). poetry is used in this type of work to express sentiments otherwise difficult to express in prose. it is also used during the beatific audition (samāʿ), as well as to conclude chapters. these thematic chapters compile different sources on a particular theme, from the qurʾān, ḥadīth, and other types of literature such as poetry. the choice of poetry excerpts is particular to an author, even though the author does not compose poetry himself. the paper concluded with discussion of the use of poetry in the kitāb al-bayāḍ wa-al-sawād of al-sīrjānī (d. ca. 470/1077). keynote speech ramzi baalbaki (jewett chair, aub) d e l i v e r e d t h e k e y n o t e a d d r e s s o n o v e r l o o k e d a s p e c t s o f p r e m o d e r n lexical anthologies. shedding light on an understudied genre, baalbaki focused on ibn manẓūr (d. 711/1311) and his famous lisān al-ʿarab, and the process by which he combined five different sources in his lexicon. baalbaki demonstrated, for the first time, how ibn sīda (d. 458/1066) i n t e r n a l l y a r r a n g e d h i s l e m m a t a o n semantic grounds and how ibn manẓūr adopted that system and supplemented ibn sīda’s material from his four other sources. saturday may 12th panel 6 & 7: “compilation, authorship, and readership” the theme of compilation, authorship, and readership was explored through a double panel, the first one chaired by adam talib, the second by maurice pomerantz. enass khansa (aub) presented the first paper on different aspects of the anthology genre: an anthology presents itself as a reference work, a scholarly endeavor, that sources material from different fields to be presented to a wider readership than what some of these excerpts might have been previously been exposed to. these aspects were presented with an attempt at exploring a possible reconstruction of the readership of these anthologies, and how they inform material research of history and culture through examples such as ibn ʿabd rabbih’s al-ʿiqd al-farīd in al-andalus. the second talk was given by boutheina khaldi (american university of sharjah) on maṭālaʿ al-budūr fī manāzil al-surūr, ʿalāʾ al-dīn ibn ʿabd allāh al-bahāʾī al-ghuzūlī’s al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) approaches to the study of pre-modern arabic anthologies • 223 (d. 815/1412) anthology of the mamluk period. khaldi highlighted the process by which the anthologist organized his compilation; his presence throughout the text; and in this particular case, how the process follows or differs from classical times, challenging the thesis of decline in literature after the abbasid age. p r e s e n t e d b y r a n a s i b l i n i ( d o h a institute for graduate studies), the third paper focused on a particular example, al-manāzil wa-al-diyār by usāma ibn munqidh (d. 584/1188). on the theme of the homeland, it includes many excerpts otherwise lost. one of the particularities of this work is its personal character. siblini showed how the author, grieving for his hometown, included poetry of his own, and interfered with other’s verse, and how this relates to the author’s views on rhetoric and general experience. as one of the participants was unable to attend, the second panel had only a single presentation. isabel toral-niehoff (freie universität of berlin) spoke on the theme of authorship and readership. her talk focused her talk on al-ʿiqd al-farīd by ibn ʿabd rabbih (d. 328/940) and the author’s organizational principle. it was related, in a complex way, to the organization of the ʿuyūn al-akhbār by ibn qutayba (276/889). the paper placed the work in its historical c o n t e x t b e f o r e f o l l o w i n g i t s g r a d u a l reading through time, from being read as a literary anthology to being read as an encyclopedia. panel 8: “geography” chaired by vahid behmardi, the final panel of the conference explored the geographical dimensions of anthologies. the first paper, by nathaniel a. miller (university of cambridge), explored the geographical and ideological dimensions of the evolution of anthologies. miller used the example of the works by ʿimād al-dīn al-isfahānī (d. 597/1201), and his predecessors, al-thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038) and al-bākharzī (d. 467/1075). he explored the shift in literary social practices; the sunni revival coupled with the transfer of an iranian institution such as the anthology on syrian lands; and the decline of court patronage in the mamluk period, which influenced both the content and readership of the anthology genre. ghayde ghraowi (new york university) presented a paper on rayḥānat al-alibbā by shihāb al-dīn al-khafājī (d. 1069/1658), a literary anthology compiling works of the author’s contemporaries as well as his own, in a particular political context. the author’s rejection from imperial patronage is one of the main reasons for the anthology’s existence; the presentation explored why al-khafājī chose this means to respond to the ottoman elite, and the historical information contained in the text. the work situated itself in continuation with an established literary tradition while being a support for political stances. the final paper, by suleiman a. mourad ( s m i t h c o l l e g e / n a n t e s ’ i n s t i t u t e f o r advanced studies), dealt with a subgenre of religious and historical anthologies, the compilation of the fadāʾil of jerusalem, showing the importance of the city in islam. reviewing authors from al-ramlī (d. 300/912) to authors contemporary to the crusades, the presentation focused o n a n u n d e r s t u d i e d a s p e c t o f t h e s e anthologies, that is, the agency of their authors in selecting and presenting their 224 • louise gallorini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) compilations, each anthology shaping a specific legacy for its readers. honorary guest speech beatrice gruendler (freie universität o f b e r l i n ) , i n h e r h o n o r a r y g u e s t speech, spoke on her on-going project on kalīla wa-dimna by ibn al-muqaffaʿ (d. 139/756), which should be the object of an upcoming critical edition. she presented it as an anthology, that is, a compilation of edifying and educative tales, with its sources in indian wisdom, an example of the transfer of indian material t o a r a b i c l i t e r a r y w o r k s . b e f o r e i t s medieval translations into syriac, greek, persian, hebrew, castillan and latin, not much is known of kalīla wa-dimna’s early textual history. gruendler used several charts to map the numerous translations, across time and geography; the different known sources of the work; and studies done on the subject. she also spoke to the difficulties in reconstructing the original sources used by ibn al-muqaffaʿ; her critical edition will involve juxtaposing and comparing versions of the different existing manuscripts. this will allow for documenting the history of the text and an analysis of the context of its development. s o , f o r e x a m p l , e f r o m a n i n d i r e c t transmission of the buddhist tale “king shādram and the wise bilād,” found both in the kalīla wa-dimna and in a treatise on wisdom sayings by ibn miskawayh (d. 421/1030), she will consider differences in translations and the manner in which the arab translators adapted indian sources to fit the arabic corpus and readers’ demands. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 232-236 book review preparing textual editions is among the most pressing challenges for the progress of the historical study of the premodern middle east. yet it is a form of academic work that is not sufficiently acknowledged by the many historians who use these materials. over the past decade, the al-furqān foundation of london (https://www.al-furqan.com/) has undertaken the publication of numerous important texts. notable among these works are the monumental editions of the kitāb al-fihrist of abū al-faraj ibn al-nadīm (d. 380/990) (2014, 2nd ed.), the kitāb al-mawāʿiẓ wa-al-iʿtibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-al-āthār (known as the khiṭaṭ) of taqī al-dīn al-maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) (2013, 2nd ed.), and ibn al-ʿadīm’s (d. 660/1262) bughyat al-ṭalab fī tārīkh ḥalab (2016, 1st ed.). in an age that is otherwise witnessing the proliferation of cheaply produced and regrettably error-filled versions 1. devin j. stewart, “editing the fihrist of ibn al-nadı̄m,” journal of abbasid studies 1, no. 2 (2014): 159–205, issn: 2214-2371, doi:10.1163/22142371-12340007 of classic texts of arabic literature, the al-furqān foundation’s efforts in bringing these important books to the scholars is laudable. criticism of recently published editions has an important role to play in alerting scholars to the promises and pitfalls of these newly edited texts, and may also encourage the preparation of fiable editions in the future. experts have offered valuable critiques of two of the previously m e n t i o n e d h i s t o r i c a l w o r k s . d e v i n stewart’s exemplary article-length review of ayman fuʾād sayyid’s edition of the fihrist offered pages of suggestions and emendations, useful in the preparation of any further revised edition.1 in his review, stewart lamented the fact that the editor did not address the work of earlier editors and scholars, which admittedly remain difficult to access given the limited abū isḥāq al-ṣābiʾ, dīwān rasāʾil al-ṣābīʾ. edited by iḥsān dhannūn al-thāmirī. 2 vols. (london: al-furqān islamic heritage foundation, 2017), 832 pp. isbn 978-1-78814-719-4. price: £80.00. maurice a. pomerantz new york university abu dhabi (mp147@nyu.edu) http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22142371-12340007 mailto:mp147%40nyu.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 233 • maurice a. pomerantz availability of specialist publications and language barriers. frédéric bauden similarly authored an important review of sayyid’s edition o f a l m a q r ī z ī ’ s k h i ṭ a ṭ . i n i t , b a u d e n c o n s i d e r e d t h e w o r k t h a t h a d g o n e into making the edition: he critiqued the choices that sayyid had made in identifying and selecting manuscripts; pointed to the lack of an apparatus criticus; noted a certain arbitrariness in separating authorial notations from the main text; and identified the editor’s overzealous use of already-published sources to correct al-maqrīzī. thus while bauden positively noted that sayyid’s new edition was based on earlier manuscripts than the 1853 būlāq edition, he nevertheless concluded that it was impossible to “consider [sayyid’s] work a critical edition, as it is defined nowadays or a definitive one.”2 the work under review here, the registry of al-ṣābiʾ’s letters (dīwān rasāʾil abū isḥāq ibrāhīm al-ṣābiʾ) (d. 384/994) edited by iḥsān dhannūn al-thāmirī, is an essential work for anyone interested in buyid history, arabic epistolography, classical arabic prose literature, and the conduct of premodern muslim politics a n d s t a t e c r a f t . a l t h o u g h p r e c i o u s little remains from the collections of scribes from the period of 2nd–3rd/8th–9th centuries, numerous large-scale dīwāns of f o u r t h / t e n t h c e n t u r y p r o s e w r i t e r s 2. frédéric bauden, “review of al-mawāʿiẓ wa-l-iʿtibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār li-taqī al-dīn aḥmad ibn ʿalī ibn ʿabd al-qādir al-maqrīzī. edited by ayman fu’ād sayyid. vol. i (london: al-furqān islamic heritage foundation, 1422/2002), alif-ʿayn, 140-772 pp. with several plates. hb £35.00. isbn 1-873992-63-7. vol. ii (london: al-furqān islamic heritage foundation, 1423/2002), 100-614 pp.,” mamluk studies review 11, no. 2 (2007): 169–176, 176. 3. al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād, rasāʾil al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād, ed. ʿa. azzām and sh. ḍayf (cairo: dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī, 1946); al-shīrāzī, rasāʾil al-shīrāzī, ed. iḥsān dhannūn al-thāmirī (beirut: dār ṣādir, 2010); al-khwārizmī, rasāʾil, ed. m. pourgol (tehran: anjuman-i āthār va mafākhir-i farhangī, 2005); al-hamadhānī, badīʿ al-zamān, kashf al-maʿānī wa-al-bayān ʿan rasāʾil badīʿ al-zamān, ed. i. al-ṭarābulsī (beirut: al-maṭbaʿa al-kāthūlīkiyya, 1890). such as the letters of al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād ( d . 3 8 5 / 9 9 5 ) , ʿ a b d a l ʿ a z ī z b . y ū s u f a l s h ī r ā z ī ( d . 3 7 5 / 9 8 5 ) , a b ū b a k r a l k h w ā r i z m ī ( d . 3 8 3 / 9 9 3 ) a n d b a d ī ʿ al-zamān al-hamadhānī (d. 398/1008) were collected primarily for the training of scribes employed in state chanceries. most of these fourth/tenth century lettercollections have been published, however the editions are based on small numbers of manuscripts and thus need to be used with caution.3 t h e r e w a s p e r h a p s n o n e o f t h i s aforementioned group of epistolographers more esteemed by his contemporaries and influential for later generations of scribes than al-ṣābiʾ. the number of surviving epistles from his pen more than doubles that of any of these other scribes and is at present the largest known collection of letters from the first four centuries of muslim rule. anthologists and critics from his own time, such as muḥassin b. ʿalī al-tanūkhī (d. 384/994), abū hilāl al-ʿaskarī (d. after 400/1010), and the preeminent anthologist of the f o u r t h / t e n t h c e n t u r y , a b ū m a n ṣ ū r al-thaʿālibī (d. 429/1039), held his epistles in great esteem. al-ṣābiʾ’s letters were also influential for later prose writers, such as khalīl b. aybak al-ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) and al-qalqashandī (d. 821/1418). one possible reason for the oversized presence of al-ṣābiʾ and his letters must al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) abū isḥāq al-ṣābiʾ’s dīwān rasāʾil al-ṣābīʾ • 234 have been the length of his tenure in the office of the head of the chancery, serving for more than thirty years in baghdad (ṣāḥib dīwān al-inshāʾ) from 349–374/ 959–984. unlike the other buyid capitals where viziers held sway, the head of the chancery of baghdad was responsible for drafting letters on behalf of the caliphs, the buyid emirs of baghdad, and their viziers. al-ṣābiʾ composed letters of nearly every possible type, allowing readers of his collections of epistles to have a sense for the great range of communication required by the leading state scribes. moreover, this was surely a momentous time, during which the buyid emirs of baghdad refashioned the relationship between the amirate, vizierate and caliphate, and these features are reflected in the correspondence of the era. the letters of al-ṣābiʾ are also of great potential interest to historians as sources for the events that they recount, and the role of epistolography in the conduct of state affairs. details of buyid dynastic and political history can now be better traced and documented with reference to these letters. as several studies of letter collections such as those of johannchristoph bürgel, klaus hachmeier, and the present reviewer have shown, epistles can be an invaluable source for deepening our understanding of the ways that states used chancery writing in the conduct of statecraft.4 the collection is also a remarkable w i n d o w i n t o t h e l i f e o f a l e a d i n g 4. johann-christoph bürgel, die hofkorrespondenz ʿaḍud al-daulas und ihr verhältnis zu anderen historischen quellen der frühen buyidenzeit (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1965); klaus u. hachmeier, die briefe abū isḥāq ibrāhīm al-ṣābiʾs (st. 384/994 a.h./a.d.), untersuchungen zur briefsammlung eines berühmten arabischen kanzleischreibers mit erstedition einiger seiner briefe (hildesheim: georg olms verlag, 2002); maurice a. pomerantz, licit magic: the life and letters of al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād (d. 385/995), islamic history and civilization. studies and texts (leiden: brill, 2017). administrator and statesman. abū isḥāq al-ṣābiʾ was from a family of sabians of ḥarrān that had long served the abbasid a d m i n i s t r a t i o n . h e h a d e n t e r e d t h e service of the buyid dynasty during the momentous reign of muʿizz al-dawla ( d . 3 5 6 / 9 6 6 ) i n b a g h d a d w h e n t h e c ou rt ly life of t he bu y id s was at its peak. he remained a loyal servant to m u ʿ i z z a l d a w l a ’ s s o n , ʿ i z z a l d a w l a bakhtiyār (d. 367/977), which led to an infamous falling-out with the chief emir ʿaḍud al-dawla (d. 373/983). the letters, composed on behalf of state officials as well as others, reveal the ways in which state affairs and personal relationships were inextricably bound up with one another. the letters of al-ṣābiʾ also reveal the complex intersections between politics and religion. al-ṣābiʾ was a non-muslim, yet his contemporaries praised the extent to which his letters deployed qurʾānic imagery and language. his voluminous correspondence with contemporary sunnī and shīʿī intellectuals in belles-lettres, poetic criticism, philosophy and the natural sciences are valuable witnesses to the diverse intellectual culture of the fourth/tenth century. there is also a remarkable set of letters (2: 602 and following) preserved of his correspondence with members of the sabian community in ḥarrān, which should merit the attention of any historian interested in the ways that high-ranking officials might intercede al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 235 • maurice a. pomerantz on behalf of their families, neighbors, and co-religionists. t h e p r e s e n t e d i t i o n w a s c a r e f u l l y prepared by iḥsān dhannūn al-thāmirī. among editors working today, al-thāmirī stands out as having a particular interest and affinity for chancery literature, having previously edited the letter collection of ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. yūsuf al-shīrāzī (d. 388/998) based on a unicum manuscript, ms berlin staatsbibliothek 8825.5 prior to the edition of al-thāmirī, there were several small collections of al-ṣābiʾ’s letters edited and published, beginning with shakīb arsalān’s edition of 1898, which selected 42 letters from the 95 that were contained in ms istanbul aşir efendi 317.6 this edition was followed by another collection of the letters exchanged between al-ṣābiʾ and al-sharīf al-raḍī, edited by y. najm and published in 1961.7 klaus hachmeier published 36 of al-ṣābiʾ’s letters in the course of his exemplary work, die briefe abū isḥāq ibrāhīm al-sābiʾs, published in 2002.8 al-thāmirī’s is the first edition to aim at a complete corpus of al-ṣābiʾ’s letters. one of the basic problems identified by devin stewart in his review of the fihrist was that the editors of texts are often unaware of important research articles published on the works that they are editing. this can often have profound consequences for the subsequent editions, and it must be said that al-thāmirī’s work 5. al-shīrāzī, rasāʾil al-shīrāzī, ed. iḥsān dhannūn al-thāmirī (beirut: dār ṣādir, 2010). 6. al-ṣābiʾ, al-mukhtār min rasāʾil abī isḥāq ibrāhīm b. hilāl b. zahrūn al-ṣābī, ed. sh. arsalān (baʿabda: n.p., 1898). 7. rasāʾil al-ṣābiʾ wa-al-raḍī, ed. y. najm (kuwait: dāʾirat al-maṭbūʿāt wa-al-nashr, 1961). 8. hachmeier, die briefe abū isḥāq ibrāhīm al-ṣābiʾs, 325–452. 9. klaus u. hachmeier, “the letters of abū isḥāq ibrāhīm al-ṣābi’: a large buyid collection established from manuscripts and other sources,” mélanges de l’université saint-joseph, no. 53 (2011): 107–222. on the edition would have benefited from a thorough familiarity with hachmeier’s thesis, book, and articles. in the case of extant manuscripts of al-ṣābiʾ’s letters, al-thāmirī describes how he has based his edition on ten m a n u s c r i p t s , w h i c h h e l i s t s i n h i s introduction. however, were he to have read hachmeier’s 2002 dissertation and subsequent article of 2010, he would have learned that hachmeier had identified nineteen manuscripts containing al-ṣābiʾ’s letters. hachmeier’s descriptions of these manuscripts, updated in the 2010 article with further information, provide the definitive census of the manuscripts of al-ṣābiʾ’s letters, a description of their contents, and a stemma of their probable filiation.9 the implication for the present edition of overlooking this earlier scholarship is dramatic. rather than the 419 letters that al-thāmirī has edited, the total extant number of letters found by hachmeier is 523. this alone should be reason for a new revised edition taking into account the basic manuscript evidence presented by hachmeier. each of the letters in al-thāmirī’s edition is identified by the manuscript(s) in which it is located, as well as reference to any literary sources that also reproduce it. in addition, al-thāmirī often supplies helpful historical details that provide the immediate context for the authorship of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) abū isḥāq al-ṣābiʾ’s dīwān rasāʾil al-ṣābīʾ • 236 the letter. this is all extremely helpful for the modern reader, and al-thāmirī’s l i n g u i s t i c n o t e s a r e t h o u g h t f u l a n d generally on target. the arrangement of the letters of al-thāmirī is a modern invention. thus an extremely helpful addition to this collection would have been a listing of dates of letters (when possible). often in dealing with a letter collection, the historian is trying to cross-reference details of historical events in chronicles, and to look for contemporary pieces of evidence found in other letter collections. moreover, it should be said that the current arrangement suffers from a bit of anachronism. for instance, the terms “political letters” (rasāʾil siyāsiyya) and “personal letters” (rasāʾil shakhṣiyya) obscure more than they clarify. t h i s r e a d e r w o u l d h a v e p r e f e r r e d that the editor retain technical terms for the varied types of letters (e.g., rasāʾil fī al-futuḥ, ʿuhūd, manāshīr) found in these manuscripts. this is something where the editor would again have benefited greatly from reading hachmeier’s survey of manuscripts. hachmeier prudently distinguished between what appear to be “complete” manuscripts of al-ṣābiʾ’s letters, and those which are selections from complete manuscripts, and arranged letters according to their types following the structure of the letter-collections. in so doing, he was able to preserve features of the form in which the letters of al-ṣābiʾ were arranged and understood by copyists rather than attempting to place them in assumed historical order. as for the transcription of individual letters in the collection, i compared a letter in this edition to one transcribed and edited by klaus hachmeier. because the text of the letters is quite dense with parallelism, figurative language, and long clausulae, scribes often would deviate from one another in the ways in which they reproduced the same exemplar. the letter in question is 1:161–70 = letter #218 found on pages 348–352 in hachmeier’s 2 0 0 2 p u b l i c a t i o n . i n t h e f i r s t p l a c e , hachmeier’s edition aims to be critical, clearly identifying the sources of the variants he has provided. by contrast, al-thāmirī provides very minimal notes when he prefers one reading over another. this is unfortunate, because it leaves the reader at a loss as to when the editor has preferred a particular word and why. thus differences between manuscripts are easier to trace in hachmeier’s edition of the letter because he notes the variants. that said, al-thāmirī’s choices are often q u i t e g o o d a n d o n e w i s h e s t o k n o w whether there was manuscript evidence behind his emendations. without recourse to hachmeier’s edition or the manuscripts it is impossible to know. scholars of abbasid history and arabic literature would be well advised to take a look at this new edition of al-ṣābīʾ’s letters and they should be grateful for the efforts that al-thāmirī expended in preparing it. they should, however, be aware that this is not a definitive or critical edition of the letters. students of the letters of al-ṣābiʾ would still be wise to consult the manuscripts, and earlier scholarship, in order to be certain of their conclusions. this reviewer is grateful to have a printed edition of these epistles and he hopes that this will spur the editor or other scholars to embark on a more complete and critical revised second edition. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 326-333 book review thomas a. carlson, christianity in fifteenth-century iraq. cambridge studies in islamic civilization (new york: cambridge university press, 2018), xx + 322 pp. isbn 978-1-107-18627-9. price: $99.00 (cloth)/$80.00 (e-book). jonathan parkes allen university of maryland (jallen22@umd.edu) for this groundbreaking study thomas a. carlson directed his attention to one of the major, if still often overlooked, christian communities of the middle east, the church of the east.1 furthermore, he chose to work on one of the most obscure periods of the church’s history, that of the tumultuous, politically fragmented, and poorly documented ninth ah/fifteenth ce century. carlson’s labors have resulted in a work that contributes significantly to the historiography of 1. perhaps more than with any other middle eastern christian community during the medieval period, naming conventions for the church of the east are decidedly confusing. for centuries the church of the east was known to most outsiders as the nestorian church, an appellative usually rejected by members of the ecclesial community itself. meanwhile, scholars have often employed the moniker “east syriac” to distinguish it from the western miaphysite syriac tradition (the church of the east being diaphysite, confessing two distinct natures to christ). in more recent years, “assyrian” and “chaldean” have emerged as signifiers of aspirational national identities attached to east syriac communities, names that have also been used for the proliferation of separate churches coming out of the medieval church of the east thanks to new connections with the catholic church and protestant bodies. on the issue of terminology, see sebastian p. brock, “nestorian church: a lamentable misnomer,” bulletin of the john rylands library 78 (1996): 23–53. 2. such as jack boulos victor tannous, the making of the medieval middle east: religion, society, and simple believers (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2018), or antony eastmond, tamta’s world: the life and encounters of a medieval noblewoman from the middle east to mongolia (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017), on which see z. pogossian’s review essay in this issue. both late medieval christianity in the middle east and the murky period marked by post-timurid türkmen domination while making a plea for more works in a similar vein. of recent works that take non-muslims in the islamicate world as their primary subjects,2 carlson’s has arguably faced the most challenging path to realization, given the limitations of his source base and the historiographical obscurity of the period. despite such issues and a few shortcomings in execution, mailto:jallen22%40umd.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 327 • jonathan parkes allen the study is a fine piece of historical scholarship and will hopefully lead to more rethinkings of the late medieval and early modern history of the middle east that take religious and other forms of diversity more seriously. in the following review i consider in more depth carlson’s subjects, source base, arguments, and overall contributions chapter by chapter, concluding with some critical observations and further suggestions both to supplement carlson’s approaches and to extend his findings in additional directions. f e w r e l i g i o u s c o m m u n i t i e s o f t h e islamic later middle period (roughly, 656–960/1258–1550) are as little known and poorly integrated into historical scholarship as the church of the east. whereas the east syriac tradition from late antiquity up to the rule of the mongols is relatively well known, the period that stretches from the waning of the ilkhanids to the dominance of the ottomans and safavids is much less well represented in the historiography.3 the situation changes in examinations of the much more recent past, during which east syriac christians came under the gaze of western european missionaries, travelers, diplomats, and others, even as the overall situation of the church of the east became increasingly precarious and tragic. 3. among the significant recent works dealing with the church of the east during the earlier period are adam h. becker, fear of god and the beginning of wisdom: the school of nisibis and christian scholastic culture in late antique mesopotamia (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2006); philip wood, the chronicle of seert: christian historical imagination in late antique iraq (oxford : oxford university press, 2013); and joel thomas walker, the legend of mar qardagh: narrative and christian heroism in late antique iraq (berkeley: university of california press, 2006). 4. consider that before this book, the only full-length study of the āqqūyunlū in english was woods’s book, which is by now quite old, even in its updated edition, while perhaps the most extensive discussion of the qarāqūynulū in a western language is a series of articles by minorsky from well over half a century ago! john e. woods, the aqquyunlu: clan, confederation, empire, rev. and expanded ed. (salt lake city: university of utah press, 1999). for minorsky’s own listing of his varied contributions over the years, see v. minorsky, much of the obscurity of the postmongol church of the east’s history is due to the region-wide troubles of the post-ilkhanid age. the conquests of timur soon gave way to political fragmentation a n d c o n t i n u a l c o m p e t i t i o n , m a r k e d by the oscillating dominance of two türkmen dynasties, the āqqūyunlū and the qarāqūyunlū, with other regional and local powers and strongmen carving out their own spaces as well. as carlson notes, timurid rule over this region was at most nominal, if that, while the adjacent mamluks and the ottomans generally exerted little to no control over these competing dynasties. on the whole the ninth/fifteenth century was markedly tumultuous and violent, no empire or world-conqueror giving shape or order to the clash of polities and violent political entrepreneurs. literary, artistic, and architectural production continued among the various religious and cultural communities of the region, but it did so in a diminished state, which, along with the sheer political fluidity and confusion of the period, has tended to discourage sustained h i s t o r i c a l a n a l y s i s . c a r l s o n ’ s h e l p f u l overview of the overarching political history of the region in chapter 1 is therefore in itself a welcome intervention even apart from the rest of the book.4 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) thomas a. carlson’s christianity in fifteenth-century iraq • 328 carlson lays out the challenges in terms of the available sources early in the book. muslim sources are of limited help in reconstructing christian affairs given the general lack of interest ʿulamāʾ authors took in their non-muslim neighbors. that said, carlson draws on islamic sources in both arabic and persian insofar as they aid in establishing the wider political and social context as well as for their occasional bursts of interest. although the church of the east is his main focus, carlson also draws on sources produced by both the miaphysite syriac and the armenian orthodox. as for the church of the east itself, carlson’s source base is relatively small and consists mostly of sources rarely utilized by historians: liturgical and theological didactic poetry, books of ritual, and around three dozen colophons to various manuscripts—an especially important source for carlson given that no church of the east chronicle literature was produced during this period. the book is divided into three sections. the firs t third deals with the wid er political and cultural context of the church of the east in the ninth/fifteenth century, addressing both its relations with its muslim neighbors and its own internal social structure and position vis-à-vis other christians. chapter 1 sets up the complex political situation as well as the internal conditions of the church of the east, which were marked by the dominance of clergy, with the highest “secular” leaders being village chiefs (rēshānē). chapter 2 “jihān-shāh qara-qoyunlu and his poetry (turkmenica 9),” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 16, no. 2 (1954): 271-272. 5. tijana krstić, contested conversions to islam: narratives of religious change in the early modern ottoman empire (redwood city, ca: stanford university press, 2011). see also the discussion of coptic neo-martyrdom in febe armanios, coptic christianity in ottoman egypt (new york: oxford university press, 2011). examines the interplay between muslim rulers and their diverse christian subjects. carlson demonstrates that the rulers of the period did not follow a single consistent approach toward their dhimmī subjects. rather, they alternated between stances that ranged from outright patronage of christians to outright persecution, neither precisely conforming to the theoretical constructions of the ʿulamāʾ nor entirely i g n o r i n g t h e m . c h a p e r 3 c o n t i n u e s on a similar tack, working to uncover the relations between members of the church of the east and their muslim and miaphysite christian neighbors. carlson argues that although violence was endemic through much of this period, it rarely seems to have been of a determinedly “confessional” nature. instead, an uneasy c o e x i s t e n c e t e n d e d t o p r e v a i l , w i t h occasional points of sustained contact and even cultural sharing in evidence (such as hereditary practices of religious h i e r a r c h i c a l s u c c e s s i o n ) . a s i m i l a r l y fraught but mostly nonconfrontational c o e x i s t e n c e s e e m s t o h a v e b e e n t h e n o r m a m o n g t h e v a r i o u s c h r i s t i a n communities as well. this chapter might have also benefited from consideration of another recent work on (among other things) relations among christian and muslim groups, tijana krstić’s contested conversions; in particular, her discussion of the “neo-martyrdom” genre might have helped illuminate why such accounts appear in the armenian context but not in the syriac one during this period.5 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 329 • jonathan parkes allen chapter 4 is an “interlude” transitioning to a more focused discussion of the church of the east’s internal affairs. carlson opens this section with a discussion of theoretical approaches to defining “community” in the premodern world, and the subsequent chapters examine how the church of the east constituted itself as a distinctive community in a religiously plural world. he notes that on the whole the church’s theology, ritual, and communal life were not massively different from previous periods or even from those of other christians in the region. the “payoff” of his findings, he argues, “is not a story about theological change, but an account of how these people understood their social group, in theological terms” (p. 115). some of his findings do point to slight modifications from previous centuries: there was little emphasis in this period, he contends, on the unique diaphysite christology of the church of the east, and the greater perceived threat was not losses to miaphysite churches but apostasy to islam. where chapters 5 and 6 deal primarily with doctrinal and theological constructions, chapter 7 takes the reader through the ritual life of the church. carlson is especially interested in how different people, lay and clergy, men and women, participated in these rituals and constituted themselves as belonging to the wider community. although carlson’s discussion of “community concept” in chapter 4 is theoretically informed, the chapter on ritual and belonging could have benefited from engagement with the burgeoning field of ritual studies, which 6. for relatively recent overviews of the field from two different persepectives, see catherine m. bell and reza aslan, ritual: perspectives and dimensions (oxford: oxford university press, 2009), and ronald l. grimes, the craft of ritual studies (oxford: oxford university press, 2014). might have allowed carlson to draw out additional conclusions from a challenging and primarily prescriptive source base.6 finally, chapters 8 and 9 return to issues of change and adjustment within the fraught circumstances of the ninth/ fifteenth century. chapter 8 examines the failed attempt of the church of the east to resist hereditary succession to the patriarchal throne as well as other measures to reinforce clerical authority. chapter 9 deals with the church’s sense of time and of its place in sacred history. here carlson describes the unsurprising centrality of salvation history, while somewhat more surprisingly noting that although the church of the east placed much emphasis on devotion to saints during this period, it neither produced new saints nor venerated any from after the rise of islam. the work ends with a recapitulation and a plea for future historiography to better attend to the “polyphony” of the middle east in all its complexity and texture. on the whole this is a well-crafted and historiographically overdue study. i t d e m o n s t r a t e s t h a t e v e n f o r s u c h troublesome periods it is possible both to recover non-muslim voices and histories and to make them a part of the larger historical narrative. carlson is to be commended for his interpretive ingenuity and his ability to move back and forth across linguistic divides as well as all the other divides and disparate bodies of literature, secondary and primary, that map onto them. it might be argued that the middle third of the book restates matters al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) thomas a. carlson’s christianity in fifteenth-century iraq • 330 rather obvious to anyone with a passing acquaintance with any form of orthodox christianity, but carlson’s object here is in fact praiseworthy, in that his stated goal is to recover how members of the church of the east saw themselves in relation to god, the wider world, and one another in the theological terms and ritual work that were continually present to them. a l t h o u g h c a r l s o n ’ s c h r o n o l o g i c a l framing is largely effective, it might have been helpful to include discussion of slightly later periods and their literary production, such as the early modern vernacular syriac didactic poetry (durekṭā) studied by alessandro mengozzi. 7 as carlson notes, there is little sense of doctrinal development or change in the sources he is considering, and indeed it would be hard to detect significant change given the limitations of that source base. extending the chronological frame at points, if only for comparative purposes, might have helped surmount this issue while retaining the focus on the ninth/ fifteenth century and the relative stability of doctrine and practice inherited from earlier periods. in a similar vein, it is not so much a criticism of carlson’s findings as a caution to point out that a number of his conclusions rest upon one or two works by a single author, which, carlson implicitly argues, ought to be taken as representative of the wider east syriac 7. alessandro mengozzi, israel of alqosh and joseph of telkepe: a story in a truthful language; religious poems in vernacular syriac (north iraq, 17th century) (leuven: peeters, 2002); idem, “neo-syriac literature in context: a reading of the durektha on revealed truth by joseph of telkepe (17th century),” in redefining christian identity: christian cultural strategies since the rise of islam, ed. j. j. van ginkel, h. l. murre-van den berg, and theo maarten van lint (leuven: peeters and departement oosterse studies, 2005); idem and emanuela braida, religious poetry in vernacular syriac from northern iraq (17th–20th centuries): an anthology (leuven: peeters, 2011). 8. for instance, the ultimately very successful cultus of shāh niʿmat allāh valī (d. ca. 835/1431), for which community. carlson is, of course, not to be faulted for low rates of textual production or survival. but the small available source base could call into question some of his findings, such as the otherwise fascinating suggestion, discussed further below, that the production of “new saints” seems to have been suspended in the church of the east during this period. might it simply be, for instance, that more recent saints’ cults (in this case, any postdating the rise of islam) took place in social milieus and literary contexts other than those represented in the surviving literature? throughout his study carlson rightly emphasizes the diversity of this region, in general and particularly in the ninth/ fifteenth century. by “diversity” he means primarily the diversity of non-muslim groups. the book (and any future research along similar lines) could have benefited, h o w e v e r , f r o m a m o r e r o b u s t s e n s e of the considerable internal diversity that marked expressions of islam in the ninth/fifteenth century across afroeurasia but especially in the region with which carlson deals. this intra-muslim diversity was hardly confined to, or even w e l l e x p r e s s e d b y , t h e c o n v e n t i o n a l b i f u r c a t i o n o f s u n n i a n d s h i ʿ i . t h e ninth/fifteenth century saw widespread experimentation in religious life, from the relatively “mainstream” elaboration of saints’ cults and centers of power8 to the effloresence of ḥurūfī thought and action al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 331 • jonathan parkes allen and to the transformation of the ṣafavī ṭarīqa.9 often condensed into a narrative of “heterodoxy” or “shiʿism,” this epoch of religious experimentation resists neat categorization, yet is significant both for its effect in the ninth/fifteenth century and as a key component in the formation of the empire-dominated early modern world of the tenth/sixteenth.10 a greater awareness of this diversity within ninth/fifteenth century islam itself (such that even referring to a unitary, if only notional, “islam” becomes rather problematic if probably unavoidable) could provide insight into additional points of contact and cultural sharing akin to the shared concepts and practices of hierarchical inheritance discussed in chapter 3. for instance, carlson briefly mentions an armenian vardapet and eventual bishop mkrtič nałaš, who is described in a decidedly hagiographic colophon from 853/1449 as, among other t h i n g s , b e i n g v e n e r a t e d b y m u s l i m s of various ethnic backgrounds, even by the local muslim ruler shāh qarā y o l u q ʿ u t h m ā n . t h e t r e a t m e n t t h a t the author of the colophon says was bestowed by the ruler and other muslims upon mkrtič is highly redolent of how a saintly sufi shaykh would be treated: gifted with various votives and sought out for baraka-bestowing activities such see jean aubin et al., matériaux pour la biographie de shâh ni’matullah walí kermânî: textes persans publiés avec une introduction (tehran: département d’iranologie de l’institut franco-iranien, 1956). 9. see, for instance, shahzad bashir, fazlallah astarabadi and the hurufis (oxford: oneworld, 2005), esp. 85–108. 10. the claims to saintly, messianic, even apocalyptic significance and standing on the part of or on behalf of ottoman, safavid, and mughal rulers (to limit ourselves to the most prominent examples) that mark the tenth/sixteenth century have their roots in the religious ferment and productivity of the ninth/fifteenth. 11. avedis k. sanjian, colophons of armenian manuscripts, 1301–1480: a source for middle eastern history (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1969), 209–214, esp. 210–211. 12. minorsky, “jihān-shāh qara-qoyunlu,” 274. as bodily veneration, recitation, and clothing exchanges.11 such a description, as well as those of other, similar figures to whom carlson alludes (p. 75), suggests at the very least a cross-confessional commensurability in understandings of what constituted a holy person. the presence of widespread islamic “religious experimentation,” in which c o n f e s s i o n a l b o u n d a r i e s w e r e o f t e n rendered more permeable (or at least perceived by others resistant to such experimentation as such), might also help explain why, for instance, a figure s u c h a s t h e q a r ā q ū y u n l ū r u l e r o f baghdad shāh muḥammad b. qarā yūsuf (r. 814–36/1411–33) was reported by some to have become a secret christian. he was said to have queried the ʿulamāʾ, “‘who is better: the living or the dead?’ and when they gave preference to the living, he wound up saying: ‘and jesus is alive, and muḥammad is dead.’”12 might such admittedly hostile reports reflect genuine religious experimentation or attempts at articulating a new sacral identity on the part of türkmen rulers? one need only look at the poetry of the first safavid shāh, ismāʿīl, who emerged out of this broader milieu, to see decided parallels (the poetry of the qarāqūyunlū jihān shāh, as minorsky noted many years ago, bears some resemblance to ismāʿīl’s theophanic al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) thomas a. carlson’s christianity in fifteenth-century iraq • 332 verse).13 that the clergy and ritual of the church of the east may not have played an active or deliberate role in such theological maneuvers and sacral self-stylings, may have served does not preclude the church having been a resource and a reference point for rulers, shaykhs, and others intent on their own elaborations of islam. finally, an expanded sense of islamic diversity might help to further explicate one of carlson’s more striking discoveries, c o n c e r n i n g t h e e a s t s y r i a c s e n s e o f time and practices of saint veneration. as noted above, the panoply of saints venerated by the late medieval church of the east consisted of figures from the late antique past who were nonetheless perceived as close and living by their devotees and supplicants. the sense of an almost mythic communal past, in which saints of ten centuries earlier loom up as if they were contemporaries, was not entirely unique to the church. a similar rendering of time and sanctity can be found among neighboring groups such as the yazīdīs, the ahl-i ḥaqq, and the kākāʾī, religious communities that are perhaps best described as “islam-adjacent” and that probably took their decisive shapes during the period in question. for our purposes, it is notable that although these communities venerate a range of saintly, even divine, figures, the latter have usually been framed in highly fluid chronological terms, with relatively little discernable “new” saintly production in relation to 13. v. minorsky, “jihān-shāh,” 276–283 and passim; for ismāʿīl’s verse, see v. minorsky, “the poetry of shāh ismāʿīl i,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 10, no. 4 (1942): 1006a–1053a. 14. see, for instance, the prose narratives given in the persian ahl-i ḥaqq text edited by wladimir ivanow, the truth-worshippers of kurdistan: ahl-i haqq texts edited in the original persian and analysed by w. ivanow (leiden: e. j. brill, 1953). although evidence of refashioning appears (tobacco is mentioned, as are ottoman officials), the stories of the ahl-i ḥaqq holy “pantheon” are set in a largely undifferentiated and undated past, a rendering that makes them feel very immediate to the participant in the present. the foundational holy figures.14 for all of these communities, localized hierarchies perpetuate the memory of this distant yet immanent sacralized past, with new elaborations tending to take the form of liturgical poetry, often set to song and incorporated into the collective ritual life of the community. herein lies another possible parallel a n d e v e n p o i n t o f c o n t a c t w i t h t h e church of the east during this period—a church also perpetuated in no small part by localized religious hierarchies carrying out rituals and producing poetic liturgical material. like their “heterodox” neighbors, the church of the east was a minority community, predominantly rural, and usually pressed for resources and political clout. such shared circumstances might help explain similar dynamics, even as other christian communities and some “heterodox” muslim groups, such as the early safavids, went in ultimately quite different directions. the armenian orthodox church, for instance, continued to produce a wide range of literature and artistic material while also generating “new” saints, particularly in the form of the so-called neo-martyrs, into the early modern period and beyond. even as (albeit in this period relatively rare) martyrdom marked the armenians off from their muslim neighbors, traces of the shared islamicate milieu are visible everywhere in the ninth/fifteenth century and beyond i n a r m e n i a n c u l t u r e , f r o m t h e n e w al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 333 • jonathan parkes allen and vibrant styles visible in armenian m a n u s c r i p t i l l u m i n a t i o n t o c o m m o n naming practices, displaying different sorts of dynamism and engagement with islamicate culture. 15 at issue here are differing strategies, possibilities, and ensuing dynamics. whereas the church o f t h e e a s t c o u l d o n l y o c c a s i o n a l l y boast the patronage of muslim rulers, otherwise depending on support from its largely rural peasant and mostly nonelite members, an elite of armenians survived into the ottoman and safavid periods, supporting churches and monasteries as best they could. such elites, who also embodied “islamicate” cultural forms by choice and necessity, could serve as conduits for the traces of the islamicate within armenian “religious” works as well. 15. for a fine distillation of these trends in brief, see, for instance, the magnificent miniature of the enthroned theotokos and christ child in an armenian gospel book completed in 1455 at the monastery of gamałiēl in xizan by the scribe yohannēs vardapet, illuminated by the priest xačʿatur: walters w.543, fol. 14v (http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/data/waltersmanuscripts/html/w543/). here as in much other fifteenthcentury armenian artistic production, the artistic style is highly evocative of contemporary production, particularly in baghdad; fol. 14v shows and labels the priest, pʿilipos who commissioned the manuscript, as well as his brothers yusēpʿ and sultanša, both bearing names drawn from the surrounding islamicate milieu. in conclusion, as both carlson’s study and my remarks above suggest, much work remains to be done in understanding the social, religious, cultural, and indeed political parameters of this period in relation to both muslims (with a stress on the plural) and non-muslims in all their diversity. as carlson argues, the one ought not to exist in our reconstructions of the period without the other. groups s u c h a s t h e n i n t h / f i f t e e n t h c e n t u r y church of the east have a recoverable history, and that history was and should be seen as part of the story of their more powerful and historiographically central muslim rulers and neighbors—not just as a casual appendage to be mentioned as a manifestation of clichéd middle eastern diversity but as a central and indeed irreplaceable aspect of the larger story. http://www.thedigitalwalters.org/data/waltersmanuscripts/html/w543/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 225-231 book review muriel debié’s l’écriture de l’his-t o i r e e n s y r i a q u e r e p r e s e n t s the consolidation of a recent dam-burst in the study of a long neglected aspect of the pre-modern middle east. it is nothing less than a compendium of historical writing in syriac in the late antique and medieval periods. it puts syriac historiography on the map. it treats this thousand-year-long tradition with the same seriousness as the other great ventures in historical writing associated with the rise of christianity in the roman empire, with the formation of medieval western europe and with the stunning historiographical output connected with the rise and establishment of islam. it brings little-known writers, usually known to us only as so many names lurking at the very bottom of footnotes, into sudden, gripping focus as authors and historical actors in their own right. it conjures up places and landscapes as distant from each other 1. see also scott johnson, “silk road christians and the translation of culture in tang china,” in translating and from ourselves as the constantinople of justinian, the baghdad of the abbasid caliphs, and the plains and mountainous folds of modern eastern turkey and northern iraq. debié even takes us to the great western capital of the chinese empire at xian-fu, where an official inscription in chinese, erected in 781, cites an imperial document of 638, which registered the coming of christianity—“the religion of light”—to china. covering as it does a hundred and fifty years, the xian-fu inscription is a miniature essay in historiography. framed by the names of the monks and clergy involved in this venture, and written in firm syriac script, it is a monument to an “improbable encounter” (p. 127) between east and west such as only the syriac christianity of iran and central asia, with its “apostolic,” eurasia-wide horizons, could have brought about (pp. 123–27).1 muriel debié. l’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque. transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellénisme et islam. late antique history and religion 12 (louvain: peeters, 2015), xxxiv+724 pp. isbn 978-90-429-3237-1, price: €105. peter brown princeton university (prbrown@princeton.edu) mailto:prbrown%40princeton.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 226 • peter brown but debié does far more than bring to light a vivid strand in the culture of the late antique and medieval middle east. she treats the syriac historians of the time with respect. they are no mere sources to her. they offer a way into a series of distinctive world-views, which change significantly over time. one of the underlying ideas [of this book] is that the study of the memory and of the past of these societies was not fixed. it was a creation of the historians, and, as such, constitutes a way into their identity, their culture, their networks (p. xv). in order to do this, she enters into the minds of these historians. she questions their notions of time and space. she reads over their shoulder, as it were, as they put together, often in seemingly mindless compilations, memories of the distant past. she shows how the image of the past, preserved in the great composite chronicles, which were characteristic of medieval syriac historians, were never as inert as we might think. they were never mere blocks of information transferred, as if by human xerox-machines, from o n e b o o k t o a n o t h e r . s m a l l c h a n g e s in the copying—small inclusions and exclusions, barely noticeable additions— worked, like genetic “splicing,” to create significantly new versions of the past and its relation to the present. by abandoning the modern western notion of the single “author” in favor of a renewed respect christianity, ed. s. ditchfield, c. methuen and a. spicer, studies in church history 53 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017): 15–38. 2. helmut reimitz, history, frankish identity and the framing of western ethnicity, 550-850 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015). for the ingenious “patchwork” artistry of generations of alert scribes, debié can make the seemingly mute pages of syriac chronicles speak (pp. 70–75). in this, she joins a lively tradition of recent studies of the relation between memory of the past and identity-formation in early-medieval western europe. far from being fixed in some primeval mold of an “ethnic” (or in the case of the syriac christians of the middle east, a “confessional”) identity, potentially fluid groups were constantly at work, thinking themselves into shape through constant retellings of their own past. this is what the franks were doing in western europe at much the same time as the syriac christians struggled to define themselves in the middle east.2 debié reminds us that this work of memory was a constant feature of the rival religious confessions of the medieval middle east. history-writing was a way of staking out the boundaries between different groups. frontiers rendered dangerously fluid by a shared culture and by the shared rhythms of daily life were in constant need of firming up. different christian groups had to be constantly reminded (by stories of martyrdom and of long-past conflicts) that they were different from each other and from their muslim neighbors, just as christians in the perilously open world of the sassanian empire had to be reminded, through a particularly dramatic and poignant series of martyr-tales, of non-negotiable frontiers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) muriel debié’s l’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque • 227 in a world that normally functioned, dangerously well, in a “state of mixture.”3 e v e n t h e p h y s i c a l f o r m o f t h e manuscripts in which syriac histories were written tells its own, mute story of tectonic changes of mentality. what does it mean to move from sets of chronological tables in which christianity and the roman empire seem to converge, literally “on the same page,” as in the greek tradition of eusebius, to the careful distinction between “things of the church” and “things of the world”—empires and all— that emerged with western syrian writers of the early middle ages (pp. 86–98)? behind this neat separation lie centuries in which not only had the political profile of the middle east changed, with the diminution of the christian roman empire, but the christianities of the middle east themselves had been slowly shaken loose from the grand mirage of an easy union of church and empire, of christianity and civilization, such as still haunted the chroniclers of byzantium and of the latin west. those clearly visible gaps between the columns in the chronicle of michael the syrian (patriarch of antioch from 1166–99) (fig. 5, p. 96) are not mere clutter: they sum up, in visual form, centuries of sad thought on the role of the christian churches in a world doomed to remain forever separate from the spiritual “kingdom of christ.” last but not least, debié adds to her 500 or so pages of text a 130-odd-page repertory of syriac and syro-arabic texts from all the different confessions of eastern christianity. just to look at the 3. richard payne, a state of mixture. christians, zoroastrians, and iranian political culture in late antiquity (berkeley: university of california press, 2015), 23–58. 4. bar hebraeus, the ecclesiastical chronicle, translated by david wilmshurst (piscataway, new jersey: gorgias press, 2016), 244. bibliographies attached to each text shows how, in recent decades, syriac studies have lurched forward. syriac has, at last, attained the status which it has long deserved beside greek and latin, as the third great language of early christianity, and as a resource for the study of islam that we can now no longer afford to ignore. aided by data-banks such as the syriac portal—syriaca.org, directed by professor david michelson at vanderbilt university, we are, at last, in a position to take the measure of one of the most longlasting cultural empires in the history of the middle east: “a nation—feeble indeed but whose salt seasons all kingdoms.”4 what can scholars who are not directly involved in the progress of syriac studies draw from this magnificent book? here let me speak for myself. for me, a particularly valuable contribution of debié are the vivid portraits which she offers of the writers of so many of these histories. they are not what we had thought they were. a long tradition of european prejudice in favor of single, great authors (as in the classical greco-roman tradition) had led us to expect that, if such authors did not emerge in the syriac tradition, then the only “fall-back” open to our imagination, when faced by the work of ecclesiastics, were faceless, credulous monks. nothing could be more different from this tenacious stereotype than the great ecclesiastical leaders who emerged as the chroniclers of the syriac world. a man such as dionysios of tell mahre came from a well-established noble family in edessa. file:///users/marie/abu%20sarah%20dropbox/marie%20abu%20sarah/academics/uw/uw%20rtfs/uw26%20rtfs/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 228 • peter brown he described a local elite whose memories reached back over six generations to the days of persian rule under khosrow ii, and whose great palaces, four storeys high, sheltered tenacious family legends of treasures buried in the last, dramatic days of byzantine rule. edessa still had its jeunesse dorée, devoted to horses and to hunting dogs, who had changed little, in their worldly swagger, from the days of bardaisan and abgar the great. edessa also still produced a geistesadel. one of the most prominent features of the city was the beth shabta, a classical tetrapylon shaded by a dome, where the elders used to rest after the morning service and discuss theological and philosophical topics until lunchtime.5 dionysios became patriarch of antioch from 818 to 845. though an ecclesiastic, his position placed him at the charged friction point between his church and the outside world. we know so much of his life because the two columns, of “worldly” and “ecclesiastical” affairs, separated by the neat blank spaces in the text of the chronicle that recorded his deeds, were, in reality, joined in his person. the joining generated mighty sparks. it was aristocratbishops such as dionysios, proud and multilingual, who acted as hinge-men between their local community and the distant court of baghdad. they were permitted to approach the caliph on horseback and to stroll with him in the palace gardens. this was because they were useful to him. they 5. bar hebraeus, the ecclesiastical chronicle, p.124, copying michael the syrian, chronique xii, 13, trans. chabot, michel le syrien (paris: 1899= brussels: culture et civilisation, 1963), 3: 61–62. 6. michel foucault, “society must be defended,” lectures at the collège de france, 1975-1976, ed. m. bertraini and a. fontana, english editor arnold j. davidson, trans. david macey (new york: picador, 1997), 135. acted a “whistle-blowers,” keeping an eye on the caliph’s own, muslim provincial governors, as provincial elites had done from time immemorial in the ancient near east. men well versed in the ways of the world, and not the bigoted and timorous m onk s of ou r im ag inat ion, w ere t he historians of middle eastern christianity. altogether, muriel debié shows that it is important that we should do justice to the tenacity of the layers of social status among the christians of the middle east, who were only too often rendered faceless by their conquerors, in the manner of most conquest—and, later, of colonial—regimes (pp. 136–43). b u t t h e r e i s a n o t h e r , m o r e s i l e n t development, which muriel debié has f o l l o w e d w i t h u n u s u a l s k i l l : s y r i a c historiography slowly but surely weaned itself from power. it is a model example of a trend which michel foucault acutely diagnosed in the changes in historiography in ancien régime france, when french antiquarians began to study the structures of early medieval gaul at the time of the barbarian conquests, and the long-term effects of these conquests on the present state of french society: losers also had a history. up to this point, history had never been other than the history of power as told by power itself. this new discourse [he adds] brings with it what might be called a new pathos.6 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) muriel debié’s l’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque • 229 s y r i a c h i s t o r i o g r a p h y ( w r i t t e n b y canny survivors such as dionysios of tell mahre and michael the syrian) was never exactly a vision des vaincus. but it did project a de-mystified vision of empire. furthermore, it tended to privilege the periphery at the expense of the center, and the local over the imperial. it involved a change from an emphasis on the fate of one single, privileged empire—the christian roman empire as presented by eusebius, with his relentless diagram of the convergence of all history on the new christian rome of constantine—to a more “polycentric” relation of different christian peoples to the greatest king of all: to christ. this was the only relationship that mattered, and it could be seen, in any corner of the world, in terms expressed by the prophets of ancient israel – that is, in terms of the afflictions visited by christ on his people for their sins and of the removal of these afflictions as a result of their repentance. a history that moved to the pace of an inexorable alternation of affliction and mercy could be played out anywhere, but it would be experienced at its most gripping in one’s own region. the writer of the article on syriac literature for the eleventh edition of the encyclopedia britannica in 1911 understood this well: nearly all the best writers are characterized by a certain naïve and earnest piety which is attractive and not infrequently displays a force 7. norman mclean, s.v. “syriac literature,” encyclopedia britannica, 11th edition (new york: encyclopedia britannica, 1911), 26: 311. 8. see now g.e.m. de ste. croix, the class struggle in the ancient greek world (london: duckworth, 1981), 220. 9. antoine borrut, “vanishing syria: periodization and power in early islam,” der islam 91 (2014): 37–68. of moral indignation which arrests attention.7 it was this de-mystified view of a humankind subject to the double scourge o f n a t u r e a n d o f g o v e r n m e n t w h i c h ensured that syriac historical sources were sought out by historians of provincial society in the later roman empire long before syriac studies were thought of as other than a somewhat dingy adjunct to the study of the early church. to permit myself a personal memory: when i was challenged by the resolute marxist historian of ancient greece, geoffrey de sainte croix, in 1957, to name any classical author who itemized in any detail the rise of food-prices in a time of famine, i was surprised to be told by de sainte croix that no greek or roman author had ever bothered to mention such humble things; but he told me that a syriac work—the chronicle of our time of afflictions, written by joshua the stylite—contained such precious details, when describing the onset of famine at edessa in 500–1.8 these local histories do not have to be only histories of affliction. the “polycentric” nature of syriac historiography sometimes offers us tempting glimpses o f l i f e i n t h e p r o v i n c e s i n t h e f i r s t , formative centuries of the islamic empire, before local memories succumbed to the formidable centralization of historical memory and to the erasure of provincial differences brought about by the rise of the caliphate of baghdad (p. 383). 9 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 230 • peter brown afflictions linked to sin, however, were the privileged vectors of historical c a u s a l i t y i n m o s t s y r i a c w o r k s . t h e so-called chronicle of zuqnīn of 775 deliberately follows in the footsteps of the sixth-century chronicle of edessa. the events which it describes were seen as re-enactments of the affliction of israel in the bible. “here,” writes the author, “jeremiah the prophet was of great use to us.” no other author but jeremiah, the witness to the last days of the kingdom of jerusalem, could do justice to the phenomenon of the collapse of an entire society, irrespective of religion and of christian denomination. terms such as “worshipping towards the south” [muslims towards mecca] and “worshipping to the north [for zoroastrians]” had become irrelevant. even the sufferings of the christian martyrs lost their unique glamor compared to the shared martyrdom of an entire region: “truly the lord had a case against all the inhabitants of the earth.”10 y e t t h i s p e n i t e n t i a l l a n g u a g e h a d another side. god might punish, but, as christ, he still ruled in glory. the dogged capacity of christian communities to endure up to the very end of the middle ages and beyond derived, in part, from an attitude to christ as the king of his church. whatever happened in the world where mortal rulers (emperors or thugs: usually both in one) came and went, the church was the real kingdom. in it, christ ruled undisputed, hidden only by the thin veil of the flesh—a veil as opaque yet as 10. the chronicle of zuqnîn: parts iii and iv, a.d. 488-775, trans. amir harrak (toronto: pontifical institute of medieval studies, 1999), 168, 273, 290. 11. thomas carlson, christianity in fifteenth–century iraq (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018), 108. 12. adam becker, revival and awakening. american evangelical missionaries in iran and the origins of assyrian nationalism (chicago: university of chicago press, 2015), 61. light as the veil before the altar. beyond that veil, all subjects were equal. humans and angels would sing together “glory to god in the highest,” as the angels had once sung when the great blue veil of heaven itself had been lifted, for a moment, at the birth of christ, “singing while clapping their hands and stamping their feet.”11 this vertical dimension, this sense of the veiled majesty of a kingdom where heaven and earth were joined even in the smallest, most neglected church, had survived among the battered christian communities of northern iraq in the fifteenth century. it would last. it was still there when the american evangelical missionaries made contact with what to them were “lost” christians in the mountains around lake urmia (in northwestern iran) in the 1830s. but the christians of the church of the east with whom these eager westerners came into contact did not feel “lost” at all. looking out over a landscape like the top of the world—a landscape where (in nearby takht-i suleyman) mongol khans had camped beside the palace of the sassanian king of kings as world rulers, the rich grazing grounds of their horses overlooking the plains of the middle east— the christians of a “church of the east” that had once reached as far as western china still knew that they stood at the imagined center of the world, “on the river of the garden of eden,” in the words of one of their patriarchs.12 their church was the prototype of the kingdom of god, the only certain landmark in a changing world: al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) muriel debié’s l’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque • 231 “existing always in a higher frame outside of earthly time, it moves through this world as a ship on a voyage to its haven.13 this makes it all the more tragic that precisely the region which the chronicle of zuqnīn of 775 presented as ravaged by famine, flight, and violence is the scene o f s i m i l a r h o r r e n d o u s e v e n t s t o d a y . these are the areas of eastern turkey and northern iraq, where the plains meet the mountains in an ill-fated combination of places of seeming refuge, criss-crossed by valleys that have always served as 13. becker, revival and awakening, 9. 14. carlson, christianity, 259. busy thoroughfares to men of violence. if anything of the former richness of the “surprisingly polyphonic world”14 once shared by muslims and by christians of syriac culture in the middle east is to be saved, syriac studies—for long the cinderella of the study of the early church and of the islamic world—must be taken seriously. and there could be no better way to do so than that proposed by muriel d e b i é i n h e r m a s t e r w o r k , l ’ é c r i t u r e d’histoire en syriaque. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 631-639 book review if al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn fī man ustush-hida min al-muḥibbīn, an eighth/four-teenth century work of “love theory,” to adopt lois giffen’s terminology,1 ought to be understood as “a vademecum on profane love” (p. 1),2 “containing models of behaviour for a good muslim to follow” (p. 184), monica balda-tillier’s recent monograph should be seen as an expansive vademecum for this vademecum. tightly focused on mughulṭāy b. qilīj (d. 762/1361) and his work, this book brings to light a lesser-known treatise on love from the period of the cairo sultanate and situates it within both its immediate reception context and the much longer intellectual history of the emotions in arabic literature. it will benefit scholarly readers from 1. lois giffen, theory of profane love among the arabs: the development of the genre (new york: new york university press, 1971), xv–xvii. 2. translations of french (not provided) and arabic are my own. 3. giffen, theory, 3–50. across the fields of arabic emotional and intellectual history, as well as arabic-islamic ethics and classical arabic literature more broadly. born in around 690/1291, mughulṭāy was a prolific scholar who controversially served at one time as the preceptor of ḥadīth at the ẓāhiriyya madrasa in cairo, h a v i n g b e e n e l e c t e d t o t h e p o s i t i o n following the death of ibn sayyid al-nās (d.734/1334), the well-known biographer of the prophet. he supposedly wrote over one hundred works, all of which, except al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn, were concerned with the religious sciences; al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn, much like the other works of love theory outlined by giffen,3 combines theoretical discussions about the nature, causes, signs, © 2022 jonathan lawrence. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. monica balda-tillier. histoires d’amour et de mort: le précis de martyrs de l’amour de muġulṭāy (m. 1361) (paris and cairo: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2022). isbn 9782724707892. xiv+284 pp. €49.00 cloth. jonathan lawrence university of oxford (jonathan.lawrence@orinst.ox.ac.uk) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 632 • jonathan lawrence and ethics of love with stories and poetry from the vast corpus of the arabic literary tradition. mughulṭāy’s conception of love is centered on a famously controversial ḥadīth; supposedly, the prophet stated that “man ʿashiqa fa-ʿaffa fa-katama fa-māta māta shahīdan” (whosoever experiences passionate love, remains chaste,4 keeps the secret and dies, dies as a martyr).5 this apocryphal ḥadīth, of which there are several variations, the distinctions between which are ably dissected by balda-tillier across her second chapter (pp. 36–46), informs mughulṭāy’s central thesis: that the experience of love itself, if undertaken within the limits outlined by the ḥadīth, leads to martyrdom. the book is split into four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, followed by three appendices. as balda-tillier notes, the first two chapters of this monograph ought to be understood, in their approach, a s a h i s t o r y o f i d e a s , a t t i t u d e s , a n d emotion, whilst the second two are literary analyses of aspects of the text (p. 4). the first chapter provides readers with an indispensable historical, technical, and biographical grounding to mughulṭāy and his work, including a discussion of its immediate public reception, a description of his methods, and a brief analysis of his intended audience. most significant is balda-tillier’s description and analysis of 4. as outlined by renate jacobi and, more recently, jokha alharthi, the translation of “ʿiffa” as chastity is something of an academic shorthand that does not express the whole range of meaning implied in the term. rather, the virtue of ʿiffa refers here to the maintenance of islamic legal norms with regard to sexual propriety. in other words, only engaging in sexual intercourse with licit partners (an opposite-sex spouse or enslaved person). see renate jacobi, “the ʿudhra: love and death in the umayyad period,” in martyrdom in literature: visions of death and meaningful suffering in europe and the middle east from antiquity to modernity, ed. friedericke pannewick, 163–187 (wiesbaden: reichert, 2004), 140; and jokha alharthi, the body in arabic love poetry: the ʿudhri tradition (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2021), 56–78, esp. 70–72. 5. mughulṭāy b. qilīj, al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn fī man ustushhida min al-muḥibbīn (beirut: muʾassasat al-intishār al-ʿarabī, 1997), 17–19. the different manuscript traditions, and their divergence from the modern printed edition, noting the critical receptions that each variation attests (pp. 14–16); she returns to this manuscript analysis later, in the fourth chapter, to highlight where individual manuscripts show different approaches to the question of who is and who is not a martyr (pp. 129–30). baldatillier provides footnote references not only to the printed edition, but also to all of the manuscript copies she has seen, a highly useful addition to this work. moving into the second chapter, we begin to get into the thick of the analysis. here, balda-tillier scours mughulṭāy’s more theoretical introductory sections (the initial ninety pages in the printed edition) for information regarding his conception of what love is, how it inheres in people, what its signs are, and whether it is a praiseworthy or blameworthy emotion. in sum, she outlines four central aspects of mughulṭāy’s conception of passionate love (pp. 70–71): (i) passionate love is not a deliberate choice of those who experience it; (ii) two souls are linked through mushākala (affinity) and united by that which is good and not by their faults; (iii) once it has taken control of the heart, passionate love inevitably turns into illness, madness, and death; (iv) passionate love only appears harmful, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) monica balda-tillier’s histoires d’amour et de mort • 633 but in reality suffering is a way to elevate oneself and attain a greater reward in the hereafter. although this section is a useful description of the material contents of the introductory section, it might have been profitably enhanced by an integrated analysis of how the theory does or does not show up in different anecdotes; here, balda-tillier might have replicated some of what mughulṭāy himself was doing, showing how the characters exemplify (or not) his theories in action. love is understood in the text, after all, as a lived, phenomenological experience. in the third chapter, balda-tillier situates mughulṭāy’s work within literary h i s t o r y , b u i l d i n g l a r g e l y o n g i f f e n ’ s foundational theory of profane love among the arabs. here, balda-tillier provides a micro-analysis of the genre outlined by giffen and the individual works within it, including those which came after mughulṭāy, emphasizing the novelty of mughulṭāy’s approach and structure. certainly, within the genre, the use of the biographical dictionary form was truly remarkable and highlights mughulṭāy’s literary and practical focus, his use of storytelling as source material to understand emotional experience, and his desire for his work to be easily navigated by the reader. balda-tillier also explains a n d d e m o n s t r a t e s t h e c o n n e c t i o n s m u g h u l ṭ ā y ’ s t h e o r i e s a n d i d e a s h a d with thinkers and works outside of this particular genre, including the more 6. see, for example, monica balda-tillier, “l’épuisement d’un genre littéraire? le ġawānī al-ašwāq fī maʿānī al-ʿuššāq d’ibn al-bakkāʾ (m. 1040/1630),” annales islamologiques 49 (2015): 39–54. 7. victor de castro león, “ibn al-khaṭīb and his mamluk reception,” in new readings in arabic historiography from late medieval egypt and syria: proceedings of the themed day of the fifth conference of the school of mamluk studies, ed. jo van steenbergen and maya termonia, 168–74 (leiden: brill, 2021); th. emil homerin, “ibn abī ḥaǧala and sufism,” in the sultan’s anthologist: ibn abī ḥaǧala and his work, ed. nefeli papoutsakis and syrinx von hees, 13–44 (baden-baden: ergon verlag, 2017), 24–25. mystical-philosophical approach of figures like ibn sīnā (d. 428/1037) or the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, and more general histories like kitāb al-aghānī or nihāyat al-arab. this discussion is useful: it paints mughulṭāy as the inheritor of a broad and longstanding intellectual and literary tradition regarding love and emphasizes the ways in which his work represents a new and innovative contribution to that tradition, which continued long after his death and in which new texts continue to be found and analysed profitably.6 one minor quibble here relates to h e r d i s c u s s i o n o f i b n a l k h a ṭ ī b ’ s ( d . 776/1375) rawḍat al-taʿrīf, a large work on divine love that has a lexicographical focus (pp. 112–13). this work is listed last in the third section of this chapter, which is entitled “the other sources of al-wāḍiḥ” (p. 108). however, although ibn al-khaṭīb was certainly a contemporary of mughulṭāy, this work was famously written as a response to ibn abī ḥajala’s (d. 776/1375) later dīwān al-ṣabāba,7 and should not, therefore, be understood as a source of al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn, even if its appearance in the same century, and its specific orientation towards divine love rather than profane love, helps to clarify the discursive and intellectual context in which al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn was being read. easily the most exciting aspect of baldatillier’s book for this reviewer is the fourth chapter, in which she makes use of the same granular precision we saw in the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 634 • jonathan lawrence second chapter to analyse the biographical dictionary section of al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn. she first explores the difference between those stories that mughulṭāy introduces with the term shahīd (martyr) and those he introduces with the term qatīl (victim) and notes the various ways in which a character might be prevented from becoming a shahīd, such as committing s u i c i d e o r n o t b e l i e v i n g i n i s l a m ; throughout this chapter, she argues that by excluding pagans and animals as well as those who breach islamic legal dicta (by, for example, committing suicide) from being martyrs, mughulṭāy “draws an islamic framework” for the concept of love martyrdom (p. 150). here, baldatillier’s analysis becomes increasingly mathematical and typological, dividing t h e a n e c d o t e s u p t h r o u g h d i f f e r e n t schematics to explore the major motifs, themes, character types, and geographies depicted in the text. this latter part is of particular geopoetic interest; the author focuses on the relationship between space and the development of the individual story, bringing the urban locations of iraq, syria, and the hijaz into conversation with the deserts, convents, psychiatric hospitals, and other locations that form the backdrop to anecdotes depicting lovers and their tribulations. a further highly informative aspect of this chapter is the author’s analysis of “the anchoring of ʿudhrī love” (p. 137) in both the literary tradition and history through her twin discussion of poet-lovers (e.g., jamīl) and real historical characters (e.g., ibn dāwūd, d. 297/909) (pp. 137–45). here, balda-tillier’s literary scholarship is at its apex, as she explores the interplay between biographical, imaginative, poetic, and historical discourses in shaping the reception of different characters and their placement within this meditation on the nature of love. in her conclusion, balda-tillier brings the many and various strands of her analysis of this text together and provides a final meditation on al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn, in which she argues that mughulṭāy marries literary sources with religious ideals. in an “attempt to present and defend his own way of understanding religion,” mughulṭāy brings together “profane” stories and sacred texts to draw up “a new literary sunna” that aims to direct muslims’ personal piety and behavior (p. 184). balda-tillier compares the text here to a sufi manual, emphasizing the text’s own desire for the reader to adopt and practice its ethics. this conclusion is followed by three appendices that outline (i) the sources of the various citations in the theoretical introduction to the work; (ii) the sources of the various stories in the anecdotal section; and (iii) the different anecdotes depicting a group balda-tillier calls the “faux-anonymes” (those whose names are given by mughulṭāy but whose lives are otherwise unknown to history), with a list of other works in which these anecdotes occur. finally, whilst the index is broken down into people and places, i cannot help but think an index of concepts might also have been useful to allow readers to find more easily discussions of, for instance, technical terms like shahāda (martyrdom) or more general topics like divine love. a central theme of balda-tillier’s work is her focus on mughulṭāy’s controversial contemporary reception, which led to his book being removed from sale at the cairo book market and to his arrest some time after 1344; soon after his arrest, however, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) monica balda-tillier’s histoires d’amour et de mort • 635 the emir jankalī b. al-bābā (d. 746/1345), who took exception both to the ban and to the arrest, freed mughulṭāy and returned the book to sale. according to balda-tillier, there were several likely causes for the uproar. she mentions the contemporary theoretical opposition the book would have received from neo-ḥanbalite thought, which opposed the idea of love martyrdom, a theoretical position best elaborated in ibn qayyim al-jawziyya’s (d. 751/1350) earlier rawḍat al-muḥibbīn (p. 12).8 mughulṭāy’s postulations concerning love martyrdom are decidedly different from his ḥanbalite contemporary’s conception of ʿishq as a dangerous emotion that made the lover direct their focus onto an earthly beloved, distracting them from the divine. for that reason, ʿishq was dangerously close to idolatry (shirk) (p. 19) in ibn qayyim al-jawziyya’s understanding.9 by contrast, in suggesting that those who experience ʿishq should be seen as martyrs, and by advocating the proposition that love ennobles man’s spirit, mughulṭāy draws a straight line between human and divine love and thereby establishes what baldatillier calls the “islamization” (a term used throughout the work, most significantly pp. 67–70) of ʿishq with the focus on martyrdom and its associated concept of jihād (p. 71). for this reason, much of al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn is centered on proving the textual and scriptural validity of the ḥadīth al-ʿishq against its detractors (p. 20, p. 181). this represents an explicitly positive vision of ʿishq, one that depicts it not just as an ennobling moral force, but 8. ibn qayyim al-jawziyya, rawḍat al-muḥibbīn wa-nuzhat al-mushtāqīn, ed. sayyid ʿimrān (cairo: dār al-ḥadīth, 2004), 158–60; see also joseph norment bell, love theory in later hanbalite islam (albany: state university of new york press, 1979), 133–38. 9. see bell, love, 139–40, 164–65. also as the “summit” of islamic orthodoxy (p. 181)—an almost necessary experience. in other words, this is a forthright defence of the synergistic relationship between the passionate love of earthly forms and islamic ideals. the author also proffers other possible r e a s o n s f o r t h e b o o k ’ s c o n t r o v e r s i a l r e c e p t i o n , i n c l u d i n g t h e m o r a l l y licentious verses found at its end, noting that contemporary cairo was still in the shadow of baybars’ (d. 676/1277) notorious seventh/thirteenth-century campaign against vice (p. 13). she suggests that the intellectual world of contemporary cairo was such that mughulṭāy, a ḥanafī and a walad al-nās (son of a mamluk), w o u l d h a v e e a s i l y s u s t a i n e d a t t a c k s from the autochthonous, largely shāfiʿī establishment (pp. 13–14). she argues in her conclusion that it was “this innovative religious reading, coupled with his not belonging to the local egyptian scholarly circle, that earned him his prison sentence a n d c a u s e d h i s b o o k t o b e r e m o v e d temporarily from sale” (p. 185). however, much of the controversy at the time revolved more explicitly around mughulṭāy’s repeated references to ʿāʾisha (d. 58/678) and the prophet’s supposed experience of ʿishq for her. it is here (pp. 11–13), i would argue, that balda-tillier gets to the kernel of the contemporary distaste for the work and shows some of the daring ways in which mughulṭāy went about his “islamization” of ʿishq; this is indeed the reason for contemporary disapprobation that is al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 636 • jonathan lawrence mentioned by his friend khalīl ibn aybak al-ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) in his biography of mughulṭāy, and then later taken up by ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī (d. 852/1449) and ibn al-ʿimād (d. 1089/1679).10 at the very beginning of the work, mughulṭāy references the very famous story in which ʿāʾisha loses her necklace and is accused of impropriety;11 balda-tillier argues that mughulṭāy “establishes a parallel between the attacks of those who considered the ḥadīth al-ʿishq as invalid and the ḥadīth of the lie, as well as between the qurʾanic revelation that came to muḥammad in order to prove the innocence of his wife and the wāḍiḥ, written to confound and thwart the opponents of the notion of love martyrdom” (p. 12). the function of these introductory passages was to “legitimate the subject that mughulṭāy chose for his book, profane love, and bring it closer to religious discourses” (p. 11). moreover, mughulṭāy even includes ʿāʾisha as a transmitter of one version of the ḥadīth al-ʿishq. al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn was attacked by scholars who “did not accept making ʿāʾisha... the proponent of a potentially adulterous and illegal passionate love” (p. 12) and who therefore refused to recognise the authenticity of the ḥadīth. here, balda10. khalīl b. aybak al-ṣafadī, aʿyān al-ʿaṣr wa-aʿwān al-naṣr (beirut: dār al-fikr al-muʿaṣir, 1998), 5:433–38; ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, al-durar al-kāmina fī aʿyān al-miʾa al-thāmina (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1997), 4:433; ibn al-ʿimād, shadharāt al-dhahab fī akhbār man dhahab (cairo: maktabat al-qudsī, 1931–32), 6:197. it is worth noting that in a previous publication, balda-tillier had dismissed this reason, alleging that contemporary disapprobation was not about ʿāʾisha specifically but rather more generally targeted at “the theory of love which is based on this ḥadīth” (i.e. the ḥadīth of love martyrdom), with any discussion of ʿāʾisha reframed in this reading as a kind of foil to allow for such criticism; see monica balda-tillier, “the forbidden passion: mughulṭāy’s book on the martyrdom of love and its censorship”, al-qantara 35:1 (2014), 189. 11. a story retold at length in nabia abbott, aishah: the beloved of mohammed (chicago, il: university of chicago press, 1942), 30–38. 12. ibn abī ḥajala, dīwān al-ṣabāba (beirut: dār wa-maktabat al-hilāl, 1980), 257–58 13. see, for example, an anecdote ibn abī ḥajala cites about a man drinking his beloved’s urine as a sexually permissible way to sate his desire: dīwān, 207. tillier’s analysis is piercing and brings out the ways in which mughulṭāy’s work itself courted controversy, the audacious style and language in which he packaged his own ideas, and the particular way in which he brings all manner of stories together under the auspices of his positive interpretation of ʿishq. a c r o s s t h e w o r k , b a l d a t i l l i e r balances her enthusiastic and emphatic analysis of the subtle novelties present in mughulṭāy’s theoretical contributions to the genre with a contextualisation of these ideas and methods within both the well-established genre of love theory a n d w i d e r i n t e l l e c t u a l c u l t u r e . s u c h contextualisation is necessary if one is to take mughulṭāy’s ideas on their own terms and not overstate their novelty or the manner of controversy his work provoked. indeed, within a decade or so, as is noted by balda-tillier (p. 38), mughulṭāy and this ḥadīth are quoted in encomiastic fashion by ibn abī ḥajala in dīwān al-ṣabāba,12 itself a far more openly licentious work than al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn.13 shihāb al-dīn m a ḥ m ū d a l ḥ a l a b ī ( d . 1 3 2 5 ) h a d a l s o cited the ḥadīth in two formulations and integrated it unproblematically into his earlier ḥanbalite work, manāzil al-aḥbāb al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) monica balda-tillier’s histoires d’amour et de mort • 637 wa-manāzih al-albāb. 14 the inclusion of the ḥadīth al-ʿishq into these texts demonstrates the currency of both the ḥadīth and the notion of love martyrdom in contemporary cairo. al-ḥalabī, ibn abī ḥajala, and indeed many other writers in this tradition also bring together profane stories of earthly love with sacred texts and use both sets of materials as evidence for their ethical postulations, harmonizing the correct practice in love with islamic legal and scriptural norms.15 both of these contemporary authors also include explicitly positive descriptions of love as a potentially ennobling emotion even if their final estimation is perhaps more measured than that of mughulṭāy. whilst mughulṭāy’s thesis, that through the experience of love one can elevate oneself above one’s human condition as a martyr (p. 72), would indeed have found opposition in figures like ibn qayyim al-jawziyya, it is worth remembering ibn qayyim al-jawziyya was himself a controversial figure whose literalist ideas also at times met with resistance from the 14. shihāb al-dīn maḥmūd al-ḥalabī, manāzil al-aḥbāb wa-manāzih al-albāb, ed. muḥammad al-dībājī (beirut: dār ṣādir, 2000), 55, 74–76. 15. we can see this approach as far back as al-kharāʾiṭī’s iʿtilāl al-qulūb; see beatrice gruendler, “’pardon those who love passionately’: a theologian’s endorsement of shahādat al-ʿishq,” in martyrdom in literature: visions of death and meaningful suffering in europe and the middle east from antiquity to modernity, ed. friedericke pannewick, 189–236 (wiesbaden: reichert, 2004). 16. he was notably imprisoned with ibn taymiyya (d. 728/1328) in his youth. for a detailed biography of the scholar, see livnat holtzman “ibn qayyim al-jawziyya,” in essays in arabic literary biography 1350–1800, ed. joseph e. lowry and devin stewart, 202–33 (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2009). of note is his longstanding adversarial relationship with taqī al-dīn al-subkī (d.756/1355), surveyed in caterina bori and livnat holtzman, “a scholar in the shadow,” oriente moderno 90:1 (2010), 22–6. as hofer has suggested, for every ibn taymiyya (or ibn qayyim al-jawziyya), there was a tāj al-dīn al-subkī (d. 771/1340) (or taqī al-dīn al-subkī), who “embraced and traditionalized” innovative practices; nathan hofer, the popularisation of sufism in ayyubid and mamluk egypt, 1173-1325 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2015), 11. 17. an obvious example of this would be ibn al-ʿarabī’s (d. 638/1240) tarjumān al-ashwāq, a series of poems that explores divine love with reference to the self-same ʿudhrī stories that populate mughulṭāy’s work. 18. homerin, “ibn abī ḥaǧala,” 39–42. see also ibn abī ḥajala, ghayth al-ʿāriḍ fī muʿāraḍat ibn al-fāriḍ, ed. mujāhid muṣṭafā bahjat (damascus: dār al-qalam, 2018). contemporary scholarly community and mamluk elite.16 moreover, similar ideas concerning the interrelationship between t he exp erienc e of p as s ionat e hu m an love and the divine, at least as textual motifs, had long had traction outside of this genre in sufi communities.17 indeed, ibn abī ḥajala would soon get into hot water politically for opposing the idea of human love as a gateway to the divine as expounded by ibn al-fāriḍ (d. 632/1235).18 w h a t b e c o m e s c l e a r f r o m r e a d i n g across this genre and wider debates on emotion and its embodiment in the cairo sultanate is that, during the period, there was an increasingly contentious intellectual debate surrounding both the practice of love (the ways in which people behave and act when they are in love) and the adoption of love as a practice (a way of knowing god), an intellectual ferment that cut across different social and religious groups. the theory of love centered on love martyrdom, as espoused in al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn, and its reception by its contemporaries, are only aspects al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 638 • jonathan lawrence of a much broader ideological conflict regarding emotional discourses and ethics that runs across the intellectual history of emotions in arabic and islamic literature, an ideological conflict that includes many other vastly heterodox points of view. on a separate note, one area i would have liked to have seen further discussed is the relationship between mughulṭāy’s theoretical discussion of love and his depiction of love martyrdom through anecdotes, on the one hand, and the extratextual world of the reader on the other. as balda-tillier notes, in theory, mughulṭāy’s work “prevents any hierarchy between notices, their contents, or characters” because they are all exemplary, such that “those which concern profane love, heteroor homosexual, like those which depict martyrs of divine love, are placed on the same level” (p. 26). whilst this is technically true in an abstracted and idealistic sense, when that love is grounded in the real, we nevertheless do find areas in which this equality between lovers, and between the demands made on different types of lovers by the central dictum of remaining within the boundaries of ʿiffa, most often translated as chastity (see n. 4 above), is not so clear. for example, mughulṭāy includes several statements that negatively portray the theo-erotic practice of gaz ing upon young m en, including saʿīd b. al-musayyib’s (d. 94/715) threatening dictum: idhā raʾaytum al-rajul yuliḥḥu bi-l-naẓar ilā al-ghulām al-amrad fa-ttahimūhu (if you see a man ogle a beardless youth, accuse him).19 elsewhere, as balda-tillier notes (p. 71), mughulṭāy 19. mughulṭāy, al-wāḍiḥ, 25. 20. ibid., 65; for the broader section in which mughulṭāy discusses love as it pertains to specific types of people, see ibid., 63–66. explains that those who are jāfī al-khilqa (coarse in manner) and manqūṣ al-binya (malformed) do not fall in love;20 rejecting the idea that this has any hierarchical implications, balda-tillier explains this statement as meaning that everyone who is “normally constituted,” a term she does not go on to explain, can fall in love. not falling in love is a “defect” in this analysis (p. 71), even if mughulṭāy suggests that certain people are ontologically unable to do so properly. certain manifestations of love, as well as certain people, do not appear to fit easily within the boundaries of mughulṭāy’s idealized non-hierarchical approach, then. it might have been an interesting line of enquiry to use these and other moments of tension between theory and practice as opportunities to explore the inconsistencies of his theoretical propositions. however, i do not want to suggest that balda-tillier’s analysis falls short i n a n y w a y ; n o b o o k h a s r o o m f o r everything. moreover, any differences of interpretation or emphasis between my own reading and that of balda-tillier are academic in nature and highlight the dynamic and irrepressible nature of the source text, which continues to inspire new readers and readings centuries later. indeed, as she notes at the very beginning of her work, it is impossible to delimit the ideas in mughulṭāy’s book to one point of view; this would “deny its heterogenous nature” and “ignore its riches” (p. 2). her work, she says, does not pretend to be exhaustive, even if it is clearly a thorough analysis of the contents of al-wāḍiḥ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) monica balda-tillier’s histoires d’amour et de mort • 639 al-mubīn. rather, she points to the need to “put these distinct, if contiguous, disciplines, which are constantly in a state of osmosis, into conversation with each other” (p. 2), something which her roving analysis accomplishes, demonstrating the broad range of sources and ideas that informed and shaped mughulṭāy’s postulations on love. indeed, any reader of al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn (or manāzil al-aḥbāb or dīwān al-ṣabāba) is struck repeatedly by the number of discourses that the author deploys, as well as the ease with which he interweaves scriptural, medical, theological, philosophical, sufi, poetic, literary, and comedic material. histoires d’amour et de mort is an exactingly detailed and capacious book t h a t i s g r o u n d e d i n a p r o f o u n d a n d long-term study of mughulṭāy’s life and work. in particular, it will remind readers of the continued value of microhistories a n d l i t e r a r y m i c r o a n a l y s e s ; t h r o u g h centering her study on one thinker and h i s i m m e d i a t e c o n t e x t , b a l d a t i l l i e r is able to connect mughulṭāy’s work to much broader intellectual and literary trends. no doubt, this work will serve as the foundation for further studies that might delve even deeper into the intricacies of the wider intellectual history of love and the relationship between the textual and theoretical discussion of love as emotional ideal and the historical manifestation o f l o v e o u t s i d e o f t h e t e x t . n o w a n indispensable companion for readers of al-wāḍiḥ al-mubīn, and the genre of arabic love theory more broadly, balda-tillier’s book is a highly welcome addition to the growing field of the intellectual history of the emotions in arabic and islamic studies, especially so given its focus on a later author from the cairo sultanate and his reception of a vast, protean tradition. “may his memory be blessed” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 345-353 th e r u i n s o f r u h e i b e h — r e h o v o t in the negev, located in a remote corner of the negev desert—are an impressive example of the byzantineperiod “dead cities.” back in the 1980s, when yoram tsafrir, my teacher and mentor at the hebrew university, began excavating in ruheibeh, revealing its churches, buildings, alleys, and water cisterns, i frequently visited this romantic desert site. ruheibeh could be reached only by a four-wheel-drive vehicle on a rough dirt road. that was the setting of my first encounter with ken, who joined yoram in the 1986 excavation season. it was an interesting combination of israeli and american scholars and students, all staying together in an outdoor camp near remembering kenneth g. holum (1939–2017) (photo of kenneth g. holum by juliette fradin photography) reminiscences by: gideon avni, israel antiquities authority and hebrew university of jerusalem elizabeth conner, university of maryland alan walmsley, macquarie university remembering kenneth g. holum al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 346 the site. ken, then a young professor of classical history at the university of maryland, headed the american team. as a young israeli archaeologist at the time, i had a very clear stereotype about how a distinguished american professor of history should look and behave in the unwelcoming conditions of the negev desert, with its intensive summer heat and occasional bursts of dusty winds. to my great surprise, however, i found ken to be the absolute opposite of my predicted images. it was clear from first sight that he was not an ordinary academic with an urban educational background but rather well acquainted with open-air surroundings, outstandingly familiar with harsh desert conditions, and even enjoying living in a tent in the middle of nowhere. i was specifically impressed by ken’s great abilities in outdoors camping, equipped w i t h h i s s o p h i s t i c a t e d s w i s s a r m y pocketknife always in his immediate reach. ken was helpful in solving all kinds of practical difficulties in the camp, very much attached to his students and taking care of every detail of their unique desert experience. the tall figure of ken with his perennial smile and good humor, s u r r o u n d e d b y h i s y o u n g a m e r i c a n students and knowing precisely his way in the desert and within the ruins of ruheibeh, is still vivid in my mind after all these years. only years later did i discover where all this knowledge originated, as i listened to ken’s stories about his childhood on a farm in the prairies of south dakota, a descendant of norwegian immigrants who settled in the american west, living in conditions that were not so much different from those in the negev camp. another thing that impressed me deeply during the excavations at ruheibeh was the deep friendship that had developed between ken and yoram tsafrir, as if springing from the bottom of their hearts. this long-lasting friendship was further strengthened when ken spent a sabbatical at the institute of advanced studies in jerusalem and when yoram was a fellow at dumbarton oaks in washington, dc. looking back, i believe that this was one of ken’s great qualities—the ability to make true and long-term friendships with colleagues. in his many years of excavations in israel he forged such relationships many times: first with yoram and then with avner raban from haifa university, ken’s partner in the excavations at caesarea maritima. ken’s experience in caesarea began in 1978, when he was a member of the joint expedition to caesarea maritima (jecm), headed by r. b. bull on behalf of the american school of oriental research, with the participation of twenty-two colleges, seminars, and universities in the united states and canada. ken was part of the caesarea excavations from 1978 until his last years, and the study of the capital of palestine prima in roman and byzantine times became one of his primary interests. he excavated with jecm between 1978 and 1984, and later, between 1989 and 2004, he co-headed, together with avner raban and joseph patrich, the combined caesarea excavations (cce), as a joint project of the university of maryland and haifa university. ken also directed the excavations at the temple platform and the warehouse quarter north of the inner harbor, while avner raban headed the inner harbor excavations and those in other areas to the remembering kenneth g. holum al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 347 south. the temple platform excavations proved to be a meticulous enterprise, as the different phases of the roman temple, the octagonal byzantine church, the invisible early islamic mosque, and the crusader church revealed a stratigraphic nightmare for archaeologists. but ken, although he was first and foremost a historian of the byzantine period, proved to be an excellent archaeologist as well. for years he invested all his efforts in deciphering the phases of building and development of this unique complex. in his preliminary publications of the excavations he succeeded in the interpretation of the transformation from temple to church, one of the very few such cases in roman and byzantine palestine. this multiyear project, which revealed some of the most important complexes of caesarea that demonstrated the long sequence in the city’s history from the early roman period to early islamic and crusader times, was the height of ken’s archaeological work in israel. it would be no exaggeration to say that ken was falling in love with caesarea. in 1988 he participated in mounting a major exhibition on the city and its history, named, after its founder, “king herod’s dream.” it seems that this was one of the outcomes of the “love affair” between a scholar of history and archaeology and the capital of roman and byzantine palestine. the long friendship between ken and avner raban also proved very fruitful in terms of publications, featuring articles a n d a r c h a e o l o g i c a l r e p o r t s , a m o n g them ken’s initiative of the series of “ c a e s a r e a p a p e r s ” i n t h e j o u r n a l o f roman archaeology supplements. these d e t a i l e d a r c h a e o l o g i c a l r e p o r t s a n d scientific publications, including ken’s interpretations of caesarea’s economy and society in late antiquity, constitute one of the finest examples of a detailed evaluation of a major city on the mediterranean coast. ken’s love for caesarea continued during his last decade. after ending his excavations at the temple platform, he continued to visit the site annually, working on the publication of the final reports and advising the young generation of israeli archaeologists. his open mind and good spirits led him to foster another collaboration, this time with the israel antiquities authority (iaa) expedition at caesarea, headed first by joseph porat and in recent years by peter gendelman, who continued to excavate the vaults beneath the temple platform. ken’s last visit to caesarea took place in 2016, when he spent several days with peter and his staff, discussing stratigraphic questions following their latest excavation at the site. it was a joy to follow these consultations, in which, once again, ken’s great mind and open heart were so vividly expressed. k e n w a s p r i m a r i l y a h i s t o r i a n , m u c h i n t e r e s t e d i n a r c h a e o l o g y a n d material culture but not trained as an a r c h a e o l o g i s t . n e v e r t h e l e s s , h e w a s devoted to archaeological fieldwork and interpretation, spent time and effort to study these new fields, and became a very fine and qualified archaeologist. some years after our first encounter in ruheibeh, i met ken and marsha during their sabbatical year in jerusalem, when ken joined the research group at the institute of advanced studies (ias) at the hebrew university. this group, organized by yoram tsafrir, focused on the cities of palestine in late antiquity, following the large-scale excavations in scythopolisb a y s a n a n d c a e s a r e a . t h e m e e t i n g s included a weekly seminar in jerusalem remembering kenneth g. holum al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 348 and occasional tours to archaeological sites throughout the country, providing an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with ken’s vast knowledge of the relevant historical background. this combination of deep knowledge of historical sources and practical archaeological experience was unique among the scholars. the addition of ken’s good humor and friendliness, together with his common sense and practical abilities, established him as one of the main “pillars” of the ias group. m y f r i e n d s h i p a n d i n t e r a c t i o n s w i t h k e n a n d m a r s h a b e c a m e m o r e significant in the last years, when they spent their summer terms in jerusalem. ken was working on the publications of the caesarea excavations, and marsha spent her time at the national library at the givat ram campus of the hebrew university, working on her research on modern jewish history. we would meet in the morning or late afternoon at their modest b&b behind the central jerusalem bus station. ken and marsha became good friends with the jerusalemite owner of the b&b, and apparently both sides were very pleased with and looking forward to these summer encounters. in our meetings, we spent lovely times talking about what was new in archaeology here and there, and then touring the excavations in and around jerusalem together. as usual, ken was very enthusiastic and full of new ideas and knowledge on whatever he was looking at. exploring new excavations in jerusalem, he would make the connections and present the “big picture” of whatever was exposed in the corners of the old city. over the years i also had the privilege of meeting ken and marsha at their house in silver spring during my occasional visits to washington, dc, and i especially recall their warm and welcoming hospitality. this was the time, many years after our first encounter in ruheibeh, that i learned about ken’s years as a child and young adult on the family farm in south dakota. in these encounters i also heard about ken’s early years as a student in the big city, the change he experienced when he became attached to a young jewish lady (marsha), and his gradual absorption into the world of judaism. the good humor that emanated from his stories and experiences triggered bursts of laughter: just imagine a nice protestant farm boy of norwegian origin becoming a prominent member of the jewish community in maryland! in the vocabulary of his acquired jewish tradition, ken was first and foremost a “mensch”—a true human being with a big heart open to the world and to all his friends and fellows. as is customary to say in the jewish tradition: may his memory be blessed, . — gideon avni it is my great honor to write about my dear doctoral adviser, my doktorvater—as the germans still say today—and my friend and mentor, ken holum. it seems fitting to begin with the proemium with which choricius of gaza, a teacher of rhetoric who flourished in the mid-sixthcentury city of gaza in roman palestine, dedicated his funeral oration to his beloved mentor, procopius: the oration laments the fact that we have the necessity for a speech of this kind; for it [the oration] honors the funeral rites of my deceased teacher, offering him this repayment insofar as it is possible. יהי זכרו ברוך remembering kenneth g. holum al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 349 l i k e c h o r i c i u s , i h a v e n o d o u b t about the impossibility of repaying my doktorvater for all that he has given me over the years. as ancient rhetoricians o f t h e g r e e k t r a d i t i o n w e r e f o n d o f observing, experience, like the world of sense of perception, will always exhaust the capacity of speech. m y r e l a t i o n s h i p w i t h k e n h o l u m spanned almost half of my life and was one of the most important relationships of my life. as a means of expressing some small measure of my gratitude to this very dear friend, i wish to speak about his work as a highly influential and wide-ranging scholar, a cherished teacher of undergraduate and graduate students alike, and an outstanding and irreplaceable mentor to graduate students. my doktorvater was a rare combination of prolific scholar and truly kind human being. ken was an unusual scholar. he was unusual because he was both an excellent philologist, particularly in the study of late antique greek, and a highly accomplished archaeologist. ken’s first book, theodosian empresses: women and imperial dominion in late antiquity, a pioneering study of women and dynastic politics in the fifth century ce, remains a foundational analysis of the construction of imperial authority through the person of the empress. for more than thirty years, ken was one of the leading archaeologists of the joint expedition to caesarea maritima in northern israel. he published multiple excavation reports of his findings and was still writing a final volume of these reports with steady care when he became sick in february 2017. ken also endeavored to make the site accessible to a more popular audience, coauthoring a popular history of the site with colleagues, contributing to articles on caesarea in popular publications such as national geographic, organizing exhibits at the smithsonian, and appearing on programs on the site that aired on the discovery channel. his genuinely kind and gentle ways made his engagement with the interested public all the more successful. ken’s amazing mastery of the ancient languages—as well as his remarkable facility with german—was thoroughly impressive to me as a graduate student who met with him weekly to translate hitherto untranslated late antique greek letters from gaza. more on this shortly. my doktorvater had first learned greek and latin from german philologists in german—no small undertaking—while working for several years in munich in the mid and late 1960s. ken’s breadth as a historian of the sub-epochs of the ancient mediterranean was also remarkable. he was as comfortable teaching and speaking about classical g r e e c e o r i m p e r i a l r o m e a s h e w a s teaching and discussing his specialty, late antiquity. strong as his technical skills in the ancillary disciplines of ancient history were, ken was keen to deconstruct for his students many of the received scholarly categories set by some of the leading figures who, alongside ken himself, had been pivotal in developing the academic field of late antiquity. in my experience, this interpretive caution, particularly in the study of the triumph of christianity in the roman empire, distinguished my adviser from many of the early architects of our field. following his relatively recent illness and up until his illness and afterward, ken continued to be as active a scholar as ever, writing the archaeological reports remembering kenneth g. holum al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 350 for caesarea, articles, and book reviews and advising his eager gaggle of advanced graduate students. k e n w a s d e v o t e d t o h i s s c h o l a r l y community of specialists working on late antiquity and the ancient mediterranean, and to scholars at all career stages as well as independent scholars and researchers. as a senior scholar, ken was a most supportive adviser to younger colleagues. when i was a teaching fellow at the university of tübingen in germany (2017–18) in the seminar für alte geschichte, i learned in the course of several conversations with aaron johnson, a rising star in our field who spent the summer of 2017 in the theology seminar at tübingen, that my mentor had played a key role in helping aaron develop his first book and his approach to his sources. aaron’s description of his long discussions with ken at dumbarton oaks was vividly reminiscent of my experience with my doktorvater, and his recounting of this story about ken—who was already quite ill by this point in mid-july—made it feel as though he were present with us on those hot, air-conditionless days in the swabian summer sun. ken loved teaching, and he especially loved working with his graduate students. i remember most fondly my years as his teaching assistant, impressed by ken’s clarity as a lecturer, the concept ual a p p a r a t u s u n d e r g i r d i n g e a c h o f h i s courses, his beautiful slideshows filled with his own pictures of various sites and antiquities, and his warmth and genuine respect for his students. ken’s courses demonstrated to students that the study of classical history contributed to the development of cognitive toolkits that had use in the interrogation of information i n e v e r y d a y l i f e . m i l i t a t i n g a g a i n s t “alternative facts,” ken taught that not all arguments are equal. in my mentor’s classroom, the classical world was shown to be vibrantly alive in our living culture and institutions. in courses such as his “athens as the mirror of democracy,” students used the organization of radical democracy in classical athens to examine their expectations and assumptions about their own representative democracy. i began to learn to teach by watching k e n t e a c h a n d b y w o r k i n g a s h i s apprentice. for years, he mentored me in how to teach, guiding me through various situations—the dreaded plagiarism of wikipedia entries on the assigned book!— and teaching me how to lecture and how to teach students to read and understand ancient texts in translation. i was always asking for all sorts of advice, on my work and my teaching, and i feel and will always continue to feel the loss of this mentorship. i know it was a mentorship that was his great joy to give, a mentorship that he would never abandon, a mentorship whose values and lessons i will always carry with me. i will be looking for this mentorship and friendship the rest of my life, and it will never be replaced. ken was an irreplaceable adviser and teacher of graduate students. all members of my cohort will fondly recall our graduate seminars, which took place weekly in ken and marsha’s dining room, the participants seated around the table, often nibbling on delicious cookies marsha had baked. these lively sessions were always so exciting to me. i remember vividly how energized and exhilarated i left these discussions, unable to quiet my mind, flipping back through various issues the rest of the night, remembering kenneth g. holum al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 351 perceiving how my thinking was changing, and drawing immense pleasure from the experience. but the highlight of my week for years and the cornerstone of my graduate work with my doktorvater was our weekly translation meeting. we met for a couple hours a week to read very challenging greek texts, and, to my knowledge, we were the first to translate these texts i n t o e n g l i s h . t h e t e x t s w e r e a d — a couple hundred virtually ignored greek letters written by late antique teachers of rhetoric in roman palestine—were a study of intellectual friendships and mentoring relationships between teachers and students in the late ancient greek east. these letters are compact gifts of antiquarian erudition, which showcase, in particular, the art of constructing expressions of intimacy and friendship in the language of classical texts. we spent long hours meditating about the nature of the relationship between teacher and student, trying to unpack the classical models of this most important relationship as expressed in late antique letters. the letters were an ancient mirror of the remarkable relationship between m e n t o r a n d a d v i s e e . t h e y o f f e r e d a familiar yet different series of registers to represent this intellectual friendship and virtual parental relationship. not unlike the adoptive intellectual families created and the kinship language used to depict intellectual friendships in early modern european literati circles, in the rhetorical c u l t u r e o f l a t e a n t i q u i t y , t e a c h e r s considered themselves fathers to their adopted children, their students. the term doktorvater, in my eyes, is thus an ancient usage. i learned the love of sources—which is the heart of philology—from ken. ken loved reading greek aloud and puzzling t h r o u g h t h e c o n s t r u c t i o n s . f o r h i m , such activity was sheer joy. but what we both loved most was putting the letter back together again after applying the translator’s razor. what were we really looking at? how was a given text a source? for what was it a source? these were wonderful conversations; they constituted the art of doing history. in my estimation, such experiences are highly unusual among advisees. it seems rare to find such a devoted mentor who would give such individualized attention to a student, every week offering her a workshop on philology and source criticism. upon graduating, i mourned the loss of these regular sessions, although ken and i continued to read amazingly rich texts from late antique gaza up until the month before i left for germany. i am deeply grateful for the time and training my doktorvater has given me these many years. but above all i am grateful for ken’s loving support and kindness, which provided such a positive context for learning and growth. from my earliest acquaintance with my mentor, his learning combined with his faith in my ability inspired me to do my very best work for him. i never wanted to let down this most kind and learned friend. i grieve for this loss. thank you, my dear doktorvater, for all you have given me. thank you for our walks through ancient attic meadows. you are missed, and we will always miss you. — elizabeth conner remembering kenneth g. holum al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 352 middle eastern archaeology can b o a s t o f o n l y t h e o c c a s i o n a l p r o t a g o n i s t o f t h e h i g h e s t standing, unlike the many professed archaeologists of mediocrity or, every so often, infamy drawn to the region in the past. not only does ken holum indisputably belong at the top of the protagonist category; he was also a great bloke. he stood in stark contrast to his peers and, empowered with a questioning mind and unshackled thinking, confronted head-on the rigid opinions assumed to be true by his colleagues. my introduction to ken was through his scholarship, most notably through his pioneering work at caesarea m a r i t i m a ( q a y s ā r i y y a t a l s h ā m ) , t h e onetime capital of byzantine palaestina prima and a district center of early islamic filasṭīn. caesarea was no inconsequential town. located on the mediterranean coast, its administrative and commercial strengths gathered people and attracted investment through much of the first millennium ce, and it was thus an ideal case study on the evolving social and economic conditions of palaestina/filasṭīn during one of the most important periods in the history of the east mediterranean. e a r l y e x c a v a t i o n s b y t h e j o i n t expedition to caesarea maritima during the 1970s and 1980s took as read existing assumptions on occupational profiles at the site in the lead-up to and following the arrival of islam, then viewed negatively as a catastrophic and fatal rupture point in history. publications of the joint expedition in the 1970s state that the excavations uncovered destruction levels interpreted as caused by early seventh-century ce attacks by the sasanids and, after them, a muslim siege and conquest. absolutist terms, such as “complete” and “irretrievable,” were readily applied to the supposed fate of caesarea, with “permanent desolation” the outcome. this view was widespread among archaeologists in the 1970s, yet it stood in stark contrast to that held by historians of islam, which caused great reputational damage to archaeology among historical studies. at first, by his own admission, k e n w a s p a r t y t o t h i s d i s i n g e n u o u s interpretation of caesarea’s history, but by the 1980s significant doubt as to the validity of this view began to appear in a number of ken’s publications, culminating in his ground-breaking basor publication of 1992 entitled “archaeological evidence for the fall of byzantine caesarea.” it was a remarkable, courageous, and timely turnaround by a senior member of the joint expedition that not only put caesarea in a new light but also had wider consequences for understanding the archaeological reading of sites in the mid-first millennium ce. just about everyone trying to unravel the complexities of late antique and early islamic history and archaeology in the region suddenly took note of the caesarea discoveries. in my case, having already uncovered contrary evidence to unchallenged paradigms while excavating an extensive late antique/early islamic residential quarter at pella (ṭabaqat faḥl) in jordan (1979–82), ken’s paper was a revelation; here was a significant, y e t p o l i t i c a l l y c h a r g e d , q u e s t i o n i n g and rebuttal of a prevailing narrative widely accepted in the archaeological e s t a b l i s h m e n t o n t h e n a t u r e o f t h e muslim takeover of caesarea and the consequences of that occupation on the town and its people. more personally, ken freely acknowledged the insufficiency of earlier uncritical views adopted by the remembering kenneth g. holum al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 353 joint expedition to which he had initially contributed, drawing on historical sources to question them while introducing into his rebuttal fresh archaeological evidence f r o m c a e s a r e a , i n c l u d i n g i m p o r t a n t material compiled by cherie lenzen for her 1983 doctoral thesis at drew university. archaeological interpretations are usually easy to dispute because of the inherent intricacies and, on the face o f i t , o f t e n c o n f l i c t i n g o u t c o m e s o f archaeological research. however, while demolition is easy, building an alternative explanation is notoriously difficult and t i m e c o n s u m i n g . k e n ’ s r e s e a r c h a n d publications into the 2010s sought new ways of understanding under the banner of “transitions,” a concept prominent in late antique and early islamic studies of the east mediterranean since the 1990s. on occasions our paths crossed, and his openness and friendly disposition were immediately apparent, but it was not until a two-day conference hosted in april 2005 by ken and hayim lapin at the university of maryland that i witnessed first-hand ken’s deep understanding of the period and the breadth of his scholarship (the university of maryland’s library record of the conference publication lists more than twenty subject keywords in english alone, from ethnicity to antiquities). in the “who’s who” of scholars ken gathered for the occasion, such as oleg grabar, irfan shahîd, sidney h. griffith, donald whitcomb, and gideon avni, ken’s eclecticism was on full display, with papers addressing, as one catalog keyword defines it, the “intercultural communication” of the time, as different religious, ethnic, and cultural elements forged new understandings of their socially diverse world. yes, his reach was wide, and his scholarship progressive: ken holum was, indisputably, a scholar of great distinction. — alan walmsley in memoriamin memoriam it is hard to fathom the impact that michael bonner had on my life and hard to accept that he is no longer with us. i first met michael in december of 1990. we had an hourlong meeting in his spartan yet disorderly office in the now defunct frieze building at the university of michigan. somehow, after this nervous, unstructured encounter, i came away convinced that i should pursue my graduate studies at michigan, and he came away persuaded that i should be his first incoming phd student. despite his cautious nature, michael took a tremenremembering michael bonner (1952–2019) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 354-362 reminiscences by: steven judd, southern connecticut state university alison vacca, university of tennessee, knoxville robert haug, university of cincinnati noah gardiner, university of south carolina antoine borrut, university of maryland (photo of michael bonner by daniela gobetti) remembering michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 355 dous risk with me. my arabic was less than adequate (some might say it still is) and my research agenda was vague, idealistic, and unrealistic. had i been more attuned to the dynamics of academia, i would have realized that i also took a risk on him. i abandoned a successful career track to tie my academic future to an untenured assistant professor who had yet to prove himself to his colleagues. it was ultimately one of my best decisions. despite his precarious position, michael was always able to secure funding for my work and insulate me from the peculiarities of academic politics, despite my occasional urge to enter the fray. he encouraged me and enabled me to finish my studies in a timely manner and never exploited my labor to advance his own research agenda. as a mentor, michael’s guidance was a l w a y s u n d e r s t a t e d . h e a l l o w e d a n d encouraged his students to pursue their own research passions. in retrospect, i nonetheless somehow ended up exploring topics that were compatible with his own interests. the exception to his subtle approach to mentoring came when i briefly but actively entertained the possibility of shifting my focus to modern middle eastern politics. at that point, michael organized a multifaceted intervention. i suspect that his efforts were far more extensive than my knowledge of them. i regret that i never found the opportunity to thank him for saving me from modernist follies. while michael’s approach to mentorship was gentle, when it came to actual a c a d e m i c w o r k h e w a s r i g o r o u s a n d e x a c t i n g , p a r t i c u l a r l y i n r e g a r d t o language. as native francophones will attest, his french was impeccable. he was always reticent to acknowledge that his german, which was sufficiently agile to produce publishable translations of heinz halm and albrecht noth, was essentially self-taught. michael had little patience for linguistic sloppiness and expected grammatical precision from himself and his students. in arabic text classes, we quickly learned never to skip a final vowel or to try to mumble past an uncertain dipthong. one memorable encounter with michael’s meticulousness occurred when several of us were reading a complicated arabic prose text that i’ve long since forgotten. midway through my recitation of the text, michael stopped me abruptly, tossed his reading glasses on the table, and challenged me to “defend that kasra!” after i stumblingly explained my thinking, his scowl turned to puzzlement and he begrudgingly concluded that i might be correct and we moved on. a few minutes later, he stopped the next student midway through the subsequent passage to point out that “steve’s kasra” would make the next sentence utterly incoherent. i stood belatedly corrected, and we learned a valuable lesson about paying attention to minute detail while also remembering the broader picture. during my time at michigan, michael was less outgoing with his students than he would become later in his career when he was relieved from the pressures of the tenure clock. on occasion, though, his sense of humor and his élan would surface. i recall one autumn lunch together when we were sharing news of our summer travels. after attentively listening to details of my dissertation progress, it was michael’s turn to report. he began t o d e s c r i b e i n g r e a t d e t a i l a n d w i t h increasing animation the italian tv game show he had watched daily while visiting remembering michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 356 daniela’s family. when he noticed my bewilderment, he quickly explained that he was watching the show to improve his colloquial italian and to master regional accents. however, he admitted that the show was also surprisingly entertaining. coming from anyone else, this would have sounded like a dubious excuse to justify the diversion of vapid television, but from michael, i knew it was the truth. every moment was an opportunity to learn, and learning languages was especially exciting for him. michael was an urbane yet down-toearth man, a brilliant yet humble scholar, and an excellent teacher and mentor. his infectious thirst for knowledge, the high standards he set for himself and others, and his unfailing kindness made him an exemplar both as a scholar and as a friend. he greatly enriched the lives of those who knew him and were privileged to work with him. he will be sorely missed. — steven judd i t seems like i should have a clearer memory of the first time that i met michael. i vaguely remember that we talked about my background in learning arabic, what classes i should take, and the research interests of some of the other students in the program. but i do not remember the details. instead, when i think about my time studying with michael, the smaller moments predominate. i think of my memories of michael as a geniza of sorts: unorganized and unrelated snapshots of the past in a variety of languages, some more comprehensible than others, each preserving moments that may or may not have deserved to be saved for posterity. i remember him looking at our seminar with some exasperation once when we did not match his enthusiasm for the topic of the day. i remember a departmental reception at which michael played his violin and paused to remind us that we should try the wine. he once told me that i could just learn russian over a summer, as if i could walk out of the classroom in april only to return in september knowing russian (i’ve tried this, but remain unsuccessful). i remember that in 2007, nearly anytime we entered into a tangent—regardless of topic—we would somehow end up talking about ibn khaldun et les sept vies de l’islam. i remember when a classmate pitched an idea for a mesa panel on frontiers in early islam and michael responded, wholly unexpectedly, “hot diggedy dog!” he once paused in a lecture in front an undergraduate class, turned to me, asked a question about caucasian history, and segued neatly into his discussion on the mamluk slave trade. i remember his feedback as he read through my book proposal at mesa over several glasses of wine and a surprisingly good thai pizza. he was overjoyed to learn i was pregnant with my first child and celebrated instead of talking about how to survive graduate school with offspring. he emailed me back immediately when i had a suggestion about the correct vocalization of a caucasian albanian toponym in ibn ḥawqal. i remember that he once spoke of his interest in learning an ancient language, leaving me concerned because i had never even heard of it. i remember my french exam, when he turned to his bookshelf and had me read from a book chosen at random. come to think of it, i think he chose martinez-gros, so perhaps it wasn’t quite random. remembering michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 357 when i think through these disjointed snippets in light of conversations i have had with others since michael passed in may, a few common threads emerge t o f o r c e c o h e s i o n o n t h e r a m b l i n g and unpredictable memories. he was enthusiastic, supportive, and frequently surprising. every single one of his students and colleagues has a story of michael’s polyglotism. yet he paired a mastery of languages with unparalleled humility. i once brought michael a particularly torturous text. i do not remember which one it was, but i assume it was something in arabic or the sectarian milieu. i told michael that i simply did not understand a certain passage. he looked it over and nodded: “huh, yes, that’s difficult, isn’t it? let’s muddle through it together.” that stands out to me as the most important anecdote i could recount to explain my appreciation for michael. he made me read the passage aloud and then signaled where i needed to rethink the topic. he did not tell me the answer, but helped me get there on my own. i recognized then, and perhaps even more now, that michael never found that particular passage difficult. he would not have had to “muddle through” it alone. he created an opportunity for me by framing learning as a collaborative space between student and teacher. it was never about proving knowledge or ability and it was never about figuring things out at first glance. michael taught me that research is about muddling until things make sense, about conversations that we generate together when we read texts closely and bring ideas to the table. for that lesson, i remain grateful. michael taught courses on historiography, geography, and biography in early islam. i still have hard copies of the syllabi, even though they are more than a decade old now. over the years, i have come to appreciate how michael’s teaching has created a community. in my first year as an assistant professor, i submitted an abstract to mesa independently. when i received the notification that the paper was accepted, i checked who else was on the panel. i was placed with michael himself and another one of his recently finished advisees. the apples did not far fall from the tree. in the time since, i have had the opportunity to exchange papers and present on panels with other members of the banū bonner, and we do not struggle to find common interests. in part, this community was formed through conversations in ann arbor, spread over years. but i like to think that it emerged because we all inherited some small portion of michael’s enthusiasm, bringing us all back to the table around topics that he introduced to us over a glass of wine or in seminars. — alison vacca w hen i remember my time in ann arbor, one image that always comes to mind is michael bonner laughing, leaning back in his chair, hands raised as he directs his point like an orchestral conductor, his entire face enmeshed in a smile. this is an image i can place in his office during one-on-one meetings to discuss dissertation chapters, in a seminar room while we unraveled some particularly stubborn classical arabic text, or over a drink following a day spent attending panels at a meeting of the american oriental society or mesa. i think many of us can even picture him taking on this pose while presenting a conference paper. remembering michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 358 while people who knew michael only from his work might think first of the scholar with such exacting standards for his own work as well as the work of his students— i can also remember how quickly that laugh turned back toward the business at hand—and a polyglot’s linguistic mastery, those of us who had the advantage of studying under and working alongside michael knew him as a warm and funny man whose enthusiasm for his work and learning in general drew many of us away from other pursuits to study the history of the medieval islamic world with him. i first met michael in the fall of 1999, freshly landed in ann arbor in pursuit of an ma from the center for middle eastern studies. michael was director of the center at that time, and therefore one of my first appointments upon arriving was with him to discuss my plans and ambitions and plot out the next couple years of my life. at that time, i had only the haziest of ideas about my academic interests—a trip to morocco a few years earlier had left me enthusiastic for early modern north africa, and it was my intention to use the ma program to explore the field a bit and, at the very least, learn arabic. michael sussed out the situation and got me enrolled in the survey of early islamic history he co-taught with rudi lindner. once my arabic was ready for classical texts, he had me in a seminar reading geographic and economic texts. when he learned of my background in geographic information systems, he got me involved in a project to map pilgrimage and trading routes that eventually fed into his work on the markets of the arabs. along the way, michael’s enthusiasm for the field drew me earlier and earlier until i decided to pursue a phd with him in early islamic history. in the classroom, i often felt like michael was another student—albeit an exceptionally advanced student who was far, far better prepared than the rest of us. while reading arabic texts, michael would sit at the head of the seminar table, surrounded by his legal pads filled with detailed notes, and when one of us would get stuck on a particularly tricky passage, he would just smile and wag his finger to notify us of the mistake. instead of simply telling us what was wrong or what was right, he was always excited at the possibility we could figure it out ourselves. he never told us the answer directly, even though sometimes i was left guessing until i thought i had run out of possibilities; there aren’t that many case endings in arabic, after all. instead, he pointed us toward the necessary tools to discover the solution for ou rs elv es . ev ery one is rig ht fu lly impressed with michael’s command of languages—he claimed working knowledge of ten on his cv, but i’m certain that was a modest underestimate—but his talents always felt encouraging, a model, rather than intimidating. if he can know ten, why i can’t i learn a fourth and then a fifth? he made it seem possible. michael would fondly tell tales of his own graduate student days, often phrased in terms of jealousy for those of us who, in his words, could still get together in a colleague’s apartment and pull an all-nighter reading for our seminars. from experience, i know he and his seminars could bring students together like this . . . though i don’t know whether any of us enjoyed staying late in the department library and shifting through ṭabaqāt in quite the same way he did. then again, i don’t know whether many of us can enjoy research, learning, and remembering michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 359 exploring the way michael did. i remember times when he would get a mischievous look in his eye, lower his voice, and act like he was about to confess a terrible sin, only to reveal that his greatest transgression was staying up late reading icelandic sagas or attempting to learn egyptian hieroglyphs. exploring something new for the sake of it. thinking back on the decade i spent working closely with michael in ann a r b o r — a s a n m a s t u d e n t a n d o f f i c e a s s i s t a n t i n c m e n a s , a s a r e s e a r c h assistant on the mapping arabia project, and as his phd advisee—one thing that keeps coming back to me is how easy it was to get lost in a conversation with him. i would head to his office with plans to talk about a dissertation chapter, but first we had to chat about whatever was on his mind. sometimes it was mozart’s birthday. more often it was baseball (his dislike for the big red machine of the 1970s was made abundantly clear when i accepted a job in cincinnati). there were very few topics, it seemed, that he couldn’t engage in conversation on or, at the least, wasn’t willing to ask questions and learn something about. eventually our talk would turn back toward work, but first we had to have a laugh. michael’s passing was too sudden for many of us to believe, but i am happy about the many memories and the lessons he taught me over the years. i am also happy about the opportunity to share these stories with others who knew him and were likewise influenced by his passion. — robert haug i first met michael bonner when i was a new graduate student at michigan’s department of near eastern studies, and i lived largely in fear of him for the next two years. after a mediocre training in modern standard arabic at my previous institution (taught with a “communicative” approach that dismissed the importance of such archaisms as iʿrāb), i was almost entirely unprepared for the series of classical arabic reading courses that i was to take with him. i was certainly unaccustomed to being stopped at every e r r o n e o u s s e m i v o w e l o r f a i l u r e t o properly elide the alif, each instance being met with michael’s implacably wagging finger and grunts of displeasure. semester after semester, these classes were a boot camp in learning to read with precision and something approaching complete comprehension. however strict, michael was a model of joyful philological inquiry, of the drive to comprehend something written a thousand years ago as if it were the most pressing problem the world faced. class meetings were occasionally derailed by the need to discern the meaning of a single phrase, a whole shelf of dictionaries being pulled down in the process. after one lengthy discussion of some obscure point of grammar, michael said cheerfully, “it’s sheer pedantry, of course, but that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” these weren’t just language classes, of course; they were also focused on the content of the histories, geographies, biographical dictionaries, and other texts that we read. one had to understand the genre in order to understand the text, michael insisted, whatever labors that e n t a i l e d . w o r k i n g w i t h b i o g r a p h i c a l d i c t i o n a r i e s , f o r i n s t a n c e , w e w e r e “ i n e e d s o m e a d v i c e o n h o w t o c o n d u c t a fitna. ” remembering michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 360 forbidden from using the conveniently s e a r c h a b l e o n l i n e c o p i e s t h a t w e r e beginning to appear, and were instead consigned to hours in the stacks, leafing through the physical texts so as to grasp the logic of their arrangement. the classes were often grueling, but they were also replete with moments of levity, and with awe at the scope of michael’s knowledge. class time was peppered with anecdotes about his own professors, corny polyglot jokes that were often lost on those of us who were merely trior quadrilingual, and impromptu lectures of stunning d e p t h — n o t n e c e s s a r i l y o n m e d i e v a l islamdom. something in al-idrīsī about the italian city-states was the occasion for a disquisition on medieval italian politics that occupied most of a class session, michael protesting that he was really a dilettante on the topic while producing from memory the names of countless minor rulers and their ministers and mistresses, the precise dates of coronations a n d d e a t h s . r e a d i n g a l m a s ʿ ū d ī ( o r someone similar), some detail of a battle in central asia in the ninth century reminded him of a similar situation in canada in the nineteenth, also recounted in minute detail. canada! any reference to music could occasion lessons on the lives and works of european composers, m i c h a e l b e i n g a c o n c e r t v i o l i n i s t i n addition to his other accomplishments. for a while he threatened to put together a course on poetry for us. “threatened,” i say, because i was sure that meeting his standards of understanding prosody would be the death of me. at the time, i was relieved that the course never materialized, though i now count it among my great regrets. as recently as last year i daydreamed about convincing him to let me come back to ann arbor for a few weeks one summer to do an informal version of such a class. entirely selfishly, the closure of that fanciful possibility was one of my first thoughts when i learned of his death. i have regularly caught myself in imagined conversations with him since, accompanied each time by the pang of loss. there is something deeply sobering about such a wealth of knowledge blinking suddenly out of our world, even despite the monumental efforts he made to share it. “you’re a mamlukist,” michael said to me once, shortly after becoming chair during a difficult period in the department’s life; “i need some advice on how to conduct a fitna.” his tenure as chair wasn’t easy, but it was in those years that i grew past my initial intimidation, becoming much closer with him. that my research interests veered off into sufism and the postclassical era did nothing to diminish our relationship, as i was now becoming versed in subjects that he (ostensibly) knew less about and thus was all the more eager to discuss. as a mutual friend once pointed out, one of the wonderful things about michael was that he always treated us as if we were his intellectual equals. he wasn’t teasing, she insisted, when he’d offhandedly suggest that we “pick up” some language or another, even if he made it sound like something one does over a weekend. indeed, he took us seriously and sought out our advice in matters great and small—about the department, about something he was writing or thinking of remembering michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 361 teaching. through his generosity of mind and attention, he made it clear that a field like ours is a communal endeavor rather than the purview of lone geniuses, a running conversation that stretches back centuries and is sometimes best conducted over martinis. i dreamed of michael in september, a couple of months after his death. in the dream, i was back in ann arbor for something called a “post-defense d e f e n s e ” — a n a p p a r e n t l y m a n d a t o r y interrogation of my scholarly contributions since finishing my degree—over which he was presiding. i’ll admit this suggests that i’ve never completely overcome my anxieties about him or about my ability to ever meet the standards he set for us. nevertheless, i was immensely pleased to see him again, and i hope such visitations never cease. — noah gardiner m ichael spent the month of may 2 0 0 1 i n p a r i s a s a n i n v i t e d professor at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales (ehess). on may 18, he gave a talk on the “economy of poverty” in early islam in his impeccable french (“l’économie de la pauvreté dans l’islam des premiers siècles”). at the end of the paper, the chairperson congratulated him for “une présentation très riche,” to which michael immediately objected: “non, on ne peut pas dire ça!” i would discover that this response was quite typical of michael’s wit and sense of humor. it was my very first encounter with michael, at a time when i was a beginning phd student working on early islamic syria with only a vague sense of what i was actually doing. after his talk, he kindly agreed to chat over a drink, and i vividly remember spending a couple of hours discussing the pitfalls of early islamic history, medieval syria, and caliphal frontiers, among other things. michael gave me invaluable advice on how to navigate the meanders of graduate school and provided me with a full panorama o f t h e u s a c a d e m i c l a n d s c a p e . h e notably mentioned the then unpublished dissertation of one of his first doctoral students, steven judd, as a work that would be helpful to my own project. michael was back in paris in may and june of 2007 (again as an invited professor at the ehess), only a few months after my defense, and he proved particularly supportive at a time when job prospects were grim. after my move to the university of maryland in the summer of 2008, i regularly met michael at various conferences in europe and in the united states. i had many occasions, therefore, to enjoy his friendship and good company. discussions with michael were never restricted to scholarship and would always stray into modern-day politics, literature, or food. i fondly remember an animated discussion about italian wines at a conference near milan while seated on the terrace of the spectacular villa cagnola, overlooking lago di varese. i a l s o i n v i t e d m i c h a e l t o t h e washington, dc, area to one of our “first millennium” workshops in february 2016. he was delighted to be paired with chris wickham to discuss the economy of the first millennium. when i picked him up at the airport he immediately told me that i should not have wasted my precious time driving him around since university professors are so busy. he added that remembering michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 362 he was glad i had done it, though, as the period was particularly difficult for him on a personal level. indeed, we had intensely moving discussions during his brief stay in dc, as his father was then dying. at the end of the workshop, michael drove straight to new york for what would be his father’s last days. michael’s humanity, profound kindness, and generosity was more evident than ever during these challenging times. everyone who knew michael had to be amazed by his linguistic skills. our conversations regularly revolved around t h e v e x i n g i s s u e o f n o n a n g l o p h o n e scholarship being increasingly ignored on this side of the atlantic. michael was particularly concerned about this trend, and we often lamented the situation while trying to imagine strategies for translating more foreign scholarship into english. michael had himself contributed t r e m e n d o u s l y t o s u c h a n e f f o r t b y translating german, french, and russian s c h o l a r s h i p , o n t o p o f a r a b i c t e x t s (including a yet to be published translation of ibn ḥawqal’s kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ). he was particularly keen on the prospect of translating gabriel martinez-gros’s book ibn khaldûn et les sept vies de l’islam (2006), not only because of the significance o f t h e w o r k b u t a l s o a s a n e c e s s a r y corrective to the existing anglophone scholarship on ibn khaldūn. much to my surprise, michael, who had regularly written letters on my behalf as one of my referees, once asked me to reciprocate, as he was applying for a fellowship in europe. i happily (but also anxiously) agreed and penned the strongest letter (or, more aptly, hagiography) i had ever written. it is not every day that you get to recommend michael bonner, after all! much to my dismay, michael ended up not getting the fellowship (and i still blame myself for that). i thought for a minute that i should have written my little hagiography in syriac, as one does. i am confident that michael would have laughed and concurred. we exchanged several emails on may 23, 2019, as he was working on the final revisions of his article “in search of the early islamic economy,” published in this issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā. the following day, he was gone. i never was a student of michael’s, but i benefited tremendously from his insights and support over the years. at the 2010 mesa meeting in san diego, i recall walking into a restaurant and finding michael laughing at a table with his former students who had attended the conference that year. he had taken them all out for dinner and immediately invited me or, in fact, summoned me to crash the party. i never was a member of the banū bonner, but i was happy to have become a mawlā. michael was an exceptional scholar, a wonderful mentor, and a great friend. his passing is a tremendous loss for the field. he will be sorely missed. — antoine borrut al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 644-653 book review early islamic history is a history made of speeches. muslim sources are peppered with countless orations, next to other types of direct speech like poetry recitations or simple dialogues, and most early islamic caliphs, generals, governors, rebels, and other salient figures have famous orations ascribed to them. medieval islamic scholars have preserved these speeches in writing and cherished them as models for eloquent speech alongside the qurʾan and arabic poetry. oratory was so crucial to medieval arab identity that the famous polymath al-jāḥiẓ stated that only the arabs and persians have oratory, and only the arabs have the 1. the first monograph on early arabic oration as a genre in a western language was stefan dähne’s 2001 dissertation: stefan dähne, “reden der araber: die politische h̲uṭba in der klassischen arabischen literatur (frankfurt am main: p. lang, 2001). important articles on the topic are tahera qutbuddin, “khuṭba: the evolution of early arabic oration,” in classical arabic humanities in their own terms, ed. beatrice gründler, with michael cooperson, 176–273 (leiden: brill, 2008) ; and wolfhart heinrichs, “early ornate prose and the rhetorization of poetry in arabic literature,” in literary and philosophical rhetoric in the greek, roman, syrian, and arabic worlds, ed. frédérique woerther, 215–34 (hildesheim and new york: olms, 2009). gift of spontaneous and extemporaneous speech “as though it is simply inspiration” (p. 61). yet, despite the omnipresence of speeches in historical and literary sources about the early islamic period and despite the importance that medieval arabo-islamic society ascribed to them, arabic oratory has been a forgotten genre in modern western scholarship.1 tahera qutbuddin’s erudite, comprehensive, and detailed survey of the genre has the potential to change that. her exploration of the early arabic oration (khuṭba) has already won the prestigious sheikh zayed book award in 2021 in the category arabic culture in other languages, recognizing tahera qutbuddin. arabic oration: art and function. handbook of oriental studies, 131 (leiden; boston: brill, 2019). isbn 9789004394407 (cloth); 9789004395800 (e-book). xv+643 pp. $209.00 cloth; $59.00 paper; $209.00 e-book. pamela klasova macalester college (pklasova@macalester.edu) © 2022 pamela klasova. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 645 • pamela klasova its merits. qutbuddin’s arabic oration is an indisputable contribution to the field of classical arabic literature that can pave the way for studies in new directions. in this voluminous book, qutbuddin sets out to chart the early arabic oration’s t h e m a t i c , f u n c t i o n a l , a n d a e s t h e t i c topographies and its major orators, to discuss notions of authority and public space as they relate to oratory, and to tackle the complex issues of the orality, authenticity, historicity, and literary i m p a c t o f o r a t i o n s . s h e a r g u e s t h a t the oration was “the most important communicative event of the public sphere in classical arabian and islamic society” (p. 10). although the focus is on the early period (pre-islamic, early islamic, umayyad, and early abbasid), she also follows the story of the oration into later periods, including the contemporary era. most chapters end with a translation and analysis of one oration that illustrates the features discussed in the chapter. in the introduction, the author delineates the horizons of her project, outlines her methodology, and explains her approach to the broader issues of genre, orality, and authenticity. she defines the oration as “official discourse serving various religious, political, legislative, military, and other purposes, and containing diverse themes of piety, policy, urgings to battle, and law” distinguished by extemporaneous composition and oral delivery (p. 13). she identifies orality as generative of 2. see the author’s disclaimer on pp. 4–5, n.4. 3. among the exceptions in this regard is suzanne stetkevych, who has integrated the broader theoretical discussions of ong and havelock into her work in a sophisticated fashion. see, for instance, suzanne stetkevych, “from jāhiliyyah to badīʿiyyah: orality, literacy, and the transformations of rhetoric in arabic poetry,” oral tradition 25, no. 1 (2010): 211–30. see also shawkat toorawa, ibn abī ṭāhir ṭayfūr and arabic writerly culture (london: routledge, 2005). 4. albrecht noth and lawrence conrad, the early arabic historical tradition, trans. michel bonner t h e o r a t i o n ’ s m n e m o n i c d e s i g n a n d metonymic evocation. she bases her discussion here (and later) in large part on walter ong’s influential 1982 orality and literacy. one may object that this work is now outdated, having attracted much critique for creating the so-called great divide between the “primitive” oral mind and the “civilized” literate mind.2 on the other hand, theoretical work by scholars such as ong, eric havelock, or jack goody that addresses broader cultural changes related to the transition from orality to literacy has not yet been fully integrated into discussions of arabic literature, so including it should be seen as a step in the right direction.3 qutbuddin also refers to other doyens of orality studies, such as john miles foley and his discussion o f m e t o n y m y ’ s i m p o r t a n c e t o o r a l production, in order to support her own consideration of the uses of metonymical evocation in orations. chapter 1 contains a thorough discussion o f a u t h e n t i c i t y , a q u e s t i o n t h a t h a s dominated the modern field of early islam. among the different types of sources for early islam (qurʾan, ḥadīth, poetry, a k h b ā r ) , o r a t o r y h a s g e n e r a l l y b e e n afforded the lowest degree of historicity. albrecht noth in his influential the early arabic historical tradition: a sourcecritical study dismissed the entire genre of early arabic orations as “fictions from beginning to end.”4 qutbuddin has argued elsewhere that a genuine core of early al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) tahera qutbuddin’s arabic oration • 646 orations exists based on what we know about their cultural context, such as the high degree of memorization, their public nature, and note-taking.5 her statement “invent an oration? it is possible. invent a genre? not likely” (p. 56) most eloquently encapsulates her attitude to authenticity here: it’s complicated, but it cannot be dismissed altogether. additionally, she proposes criteria for determining t e n t a t i v e a u t h e n t i c i t y , m a k i n g t h e point that we should always focus on i n d i v i d u a l p i e c e s a n d n a m i n g s o m e positive criteria, including, for example, a wide dissemination of the oration across “generic, political, and sectarian lines” or a lack of anachronistic terminology (p. 59). in chapter 2, the author studies the structure of the oration. she argues that despite the fragmentary nature of the material, a clear structure emerges, which she sees as fivefold: a formulaic praiseof-god introduction (taḥmīd); a transition phrase (ammā baʿd); a phrase of direct address; the main body of the oration; and a concluding formula of prayer for god’s forgiveness. based on the themes and contexts, she identifies four major types of oration: the sermon of pious counsel, the friday and eid sermon, the battle oration, and the political speech (p. 81). she explains that the fixed structure (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1994), 87–96. 5. qutbuddin, “khutba,” 187–89; and idem, ed. and trans., a treasury of virtues: sayings, sermons and teachings of ʿalī by al-qāḍī al-quḍāʿīi, with the one hundred proverbs attributed to al-jāḥiẓ (new york: new york university press, 2013), xvi. 6. michael zwettler and james monroe pioneered the use of orality theory in the field of classical arabic poetry. zwettler and monroe applied the famous parry-lord oral formulaic theory to pre-islamic arabic poetry and were critiqued in more recent scholarship, most influentially by gregor schoeler and thomas bauer. see james t. monroe, “oral composition in pre-islamic poetry,” journal of arabic literature 3 (1972), 1–53; michael zwettler, the oral tradition of classical arabic poetry: its character and implications (columbus, oh: the ohio state university press, 1978); see also “oral composition and transmission of al-ḥajjāj’s speeches: beyond ‘authenticity’” and “appendix ii” in pamela klasova, “empire through language: al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf al-thaqafī and the power of oratory in umayyad iraq” (phd diss., georgetown university, 2018), 272–341, 419–41. and themes do not take away from the orations’ resonance with their religiopolitical context. for example, sulaymān b. ṣurad, the leader of the tawwābūn (“penitents,” an early shiʿite group who were penitent for not fighting alongside the shiʿite martyr ḥusayn) could use an oration to pray for courage in battle before he went to fight the umayyads, while the umayyads could use one to pronounce a curse on ʿalī. qutbuddin’s analysis emphasizes the sophisticated structure of early islamic orations, which facilitated the delivery of the message for both orator and audience, each of whom had clear expectations of what an oration should look like. in chapter 3, the author sets out to answer the question, “wherein lay the beauty and power of the oration?” (p. 9 1 ) b y a n a l y z i n g t h e s t y l e o f a r a b i c oratory. she identifies its signature style as characterized by rhythm, elements of audience engagement, vivid nature imagery, testimonial citation from the qurʾan and poetry, and dignified yet direct language (p. 92). she ascribes the main stylistic features of the oration to its mnemonics-based production, returning to a discussion of orality, which although it had been first applied to arabic poetry may be a much better fit for oratory.6 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 647 • pamela klasova there is indeed much potential in the application of orality theory to arabic oratory, especially as a way of including arabic materials in comparative studies of orality. one more thing to be applauded is qutbuddin’s effort to use native arabic rhetorical terminology to describe the different stylistic elements and explain them clearly so that even a reader not familiar with ʿilm al-balāgha (the islamic s c i e n c e o f r h e t o r i c ) c a n u n d e r s t a n d them. this reinforces the point about the sophistication of arabic oratory as well as its medieval arabic literary scholarship. the main example of this chapter is ʿalī’s oration after the battle of the camel. in chapter 4, the author studies the dynamics between orators and t heir audiences. she notes that most orators were people of political, military, or religious authority (p. 166). using hannah arendt’s discussion of authority, which is to be understood as distinct from both c o e r c i o n a n d p e r s u a s i o n , q u t b u d d i n argues that in the arabic context these categories were not mutually exclusive but existed on a spectrum (p. 167). she documents a move over time from a more pliable to a tougher approach. although this general trend is clearly observable when one looks to political orations from pre-islamic times to the umayyad period, i would hesitate to say that umayyad governors like ziyād b. abīhi and al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf al-thaqafī “did not root their power in a religious mandate” (p. 183).7 qutbuddin also notes that an important part of oratorical performance is the active participation of an audience. listeners wept, gestured, asked questions, or made 7. i have discussed the religious rhetoric of al-ḥajjāj throughout my dissertation and explore it further in my forthcoming book. see klasova, “empire through language,” 225–71. promises in response to the orator, making the whole performance an interactive event. to illustrate the interactive nature of the oration, qutbuddin uses the speech delivered by ḥusayn b. ʿalī at karbala on the morning of ʿāshūrā to the umayyad army before he was killed by them. with chapter 5, the author begins a series of chapters (chapters 5–8) dedicated to the four types of arabic oration she identified earlier: the sermon of pious counsel, the friday and eid sermon, the battle oration, and the political speech. the sermon of pious counsel is marked by themes of piety and obedience, the imminence of death, and preparation for the hereafter, as well as by its own distinctive vocabulary and concepts. qutbuddin notes a crossover with other literary genres, such as the testament, condolence, and admonishment. the famous oration by qaṭarī b. al-fujāʾa censuring this world serves as the main example of the sermon of pious counsel. in chapter 6, the author moves to the friday sermon and the eid sermon (i.e., the sermon delivered during the two annual festivals, ʿīd al-fiṭr and ʿīd al-aḍḥā), which are the most important ritual speeches in islam. qutbuddin discusses the ritual and its structure, themes of piety and politics, and paradigms of authority. both the friday and the eid sermons are delivered in two parts with a short break in the middle, a convention traceable at least to the late second/eighth century, as she notes. she describes the structure of the sermons as beginning with the taḥmīd, in the eid khuṭbas followed by the takbīr (saying allāhu akbar, god is the greatest), al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) tahera qutbuddin’s arabic oration • 648 occasionally including ṣalawāt (blessings on the prophet), and then transitioning to the vocative address to the audience and various themes. the same structure would be repeated in the second part of the sermon. qutbuddin emphasizes that in ritual speeches, as in other genres, piety blended with political, administrative, and military themes (p. 282). ritual orations c o u l d i n c l u d e a n a n n o u n c e m e n t o f policies and their justifications, executive commands, or exhortations to fight in the path of god. the main example given here is muḥammad’s first friday sermon with its mostly pious themes, instructing listeners to be conscious of god, obey him, perform good deeds, and prepare for the hereafter. in chapter 7, the author discusses the battle oration, whose main goal was to rouse warriors to fight by promising heavenly reward (wealth or women) or retribution for non-compliance (certain death). other effective ways to mobilize masses were to issue threats connected f a m o u s l y w i t h a l ḥ a j j ā j b . y ū s u f 8 o r to call for vengeance for the blood of ḥusayn, which was the central feature of the movement of the tawwābūn. using theodore burgess’s division of ancient speeches into twelve types, qutbuddin notes a considerable overlap in the themes between classical arabic and greco-roman oratory (pp. 310–11). one difference she pinpoints is a lack of national patriotism in the arabic materials; another is the greco-roman focus on the superiority of their commander, which contrasts with the arab emphasis on moral rectitude. she also points out that the concept of just war—or jihad in the islamic context— 8. in my dissertation and book, i show that there is more to al-ḥajjāj’s oratory than threats. had its counterparts in the greco-roman world (p. 312). the main example of this chapter is the oration by ṭāriq b. ziyād at the conquest of spain. in chapter 8, the author explores political speech. as she explains, in the pre-islamic period, these speeches dealt with issues of tribal leadership, while in the early islamic period they were speeches of succession, policy, and control. she identifies as the main themes of the political speech succession, accession, threats and maintenance of order, fiscal policy, and pious counsel (p. 334), and provides examples from the speeches o f c a l i p h s a n d g o v e r n o r s . t o s h o w that oratory was shaped by historical developments, she mentions for instance that the punitive flavor of the umayyad governors’ accession speeches reflects the uneasy relationship between the subjects of the region and the central power (p. 345). the main example of this chapter is a famous accession speech by al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf. in chapter 9, the author discusses other types of orations: legislative, theological, oracular, and matrimonial. legislative orations expounded religious rules and disseminated ritual, civic, and criminal legislation and are mainly connected with the prophet muḥammad. what stands out compared to ancient greek oratory is the absence of the forensic subtype. a famous oration of the legislative type is the sermon that the prophet muḥammad delivered on mount ʿarafāt during his last pilgrimage. regarding theological speeches, qutbuddin names a number of examples by ʿalī, which ponder monotheism and god’s transcendence. for the marriage oration al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 649 • pamela klasova s h e g i v e s t h e e x a m p l e o f a b ū ṭ ā l i b , muḥammad’s uncle who officiated his marriage to khadīja (p. 379). for the oracular oration, distinguished by the rhyme of the soothsayers (sajʿ al-kuhhān), she notes consonant rhyming and rare vocabulary, oaths by auspicious natural objects (moon, stars, rain), syntactic p a r a l l e l i s m , s t a c c a t o s e n t e n c e s , a n d contents that involved mantic judgment regarding issues of leadership or divination about outcomes of battles, meanings of dreams, or possibilities for rain. she also notes that soothsayers were often female, in contrast with the overwhelming number of male speakers among regular orators (p. 381), which leads us to the topic of the next chapter. i n c h a p t e r 1 0 , q u t b u d d i n d e a l s w i t h w o m e n ’ s o r a t i o n s . g i v e n t h e predominance of male speakers, she asks what prompted women to speak and if there were any special characteristics to their speeches. the main examples she uses in this chapter are speeches by fāṭima bt muḥammad, ʿāʾisha bt abī bakr, and zaynab bt ʿalī. in her analysis, the two features that characterize their speeches are that the women derive authority from kinship with the prophet muḥammad and that their speeches are grounded in trauma. introducing gayatri spivak and scholars of trauma to speak about the muzzling of women’s voices, qutbuddin argues that in the early islamic context, trauma had the opposite effect; it was a catalyst for freeing women’s voices from the usual societal constraints (p. 401). further, she connects women’s oratorical reactions to the deaths of their relatives to the pre-islamic female poets who were known for their elegies (p. 402). she also uses yuval hariri’s theory of “fleshwitnessing” (p. 403) to analyze orators who have undergone the experiences that they describe, in particular in her discussion of zaynab’s post-karbala oration. in chapter 11, the author discusses o r a t o r y ’ s i n f l u e n c e o n a r a b i c p r o s e , returning once more to discussions of orality and literacy. she sees the locus of the link between the oral and the written in the relationship between the (oral) oration and the (written) epistle, which took up many of the oration’s functions in the more literate world that emerged beginning in the late second/eighth century. and insofar as the epistle played a role in the development of the maqāmāt genre (important to the development of modern prose), the oration, the predecessor of the epistle, should also be part of the story. it does not mean, however, that with the onslaught of literacy, orality disappeared entirely. qutbuddin emphasizes that an oral-written hybridity lasted into the high literate period. the oration also preserved some of its oral aspects, while undergoing a transformation. one change she notes is that orations were now prepared first in writing and made more consistent use of the consonant rhyme (sajʿ, p. 421), which was typical of chancery style (inshāʾ). finally, the functions of the genre changed, with the oration losing its political role to the epistle and becoming increasingly limited to the religious realm, especially the domain of friday and eid sermons. qutbuddin sees the gradual political demise of the oration as parallel to the growing centralization of the state and the caliph’s seclusion from public view (p. 425). in chapter 12, the author's journey continues to the modern era. she makes a novel argument for the influence of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) tahera qutbuddin’s arabic oration • 650 classical arabic oratory on contemporary m u s l i m s e r m o n s a n d s p e e c h e s . h e r observations are based on site visits in 2009, 2011, and 2017 and on printed and online materials, and concern egypt, iraq, india, and turkey—an interesting selection, given the mix of arabic-speaking countries and countries where arabic is not a majority language. the main difference between modern and classical orations is that the features of orality, such as rhythm and parallelism, are limited in the modern sermons. also, colloquial arabic is occasionally used. what remains are the friday and eid ritual itself, the pulpit, some elements like the taḥmīd, and regular qurʾan and ḥadīth citation. in the countries where arabic is not the spoken language, arabic can be either used liturgically or interspersed in the sermon, which is in the local language. she observes that in egypt, the political opposition especially, including salafists and the muslim brotherhood, uses speeches and historical references to bolster their agenda (pp. 445–46). in iraq, she notes that the oratory of the pro-isis leader and preacher badrani is distinguished by the classical register and includes many historical and religious references. in india, the friday and eid sermon is in full classical arabic, and it is often a recitation of a model sermon from compilations o f s e r m o n s . i n t e r e s t i n g l y , t h e r e a r e differences between the shiʿites and the sunnis in using arabic (p. 463). in turkey, preachers also look to the early arabic oration, in terms of both the formulae and citations from the early texts. the framing formulae are usually in arabic while the main part of the sermon is in turkish. this final chapter also serves as a conclusion. qutbuddin ends her long journey that extended over 1,500 years with a call to western scholars to ground their analysis of political discourse in arabic-speaking countries within a knowledge of the earliest oratorical sources, which provide tools to decode it. only then can we understand a sermon’s appeal. the important contribution of arabic oration lies in its comprehensive nature. t h e b o o k b r i n g s m o s t e a r l y a r a b i c oratorical texts together in one volume, either in discussion or in examples. it contains so many long quotations from primary sources that it can serve as a reference work of early arabic oratory. q u t b u d d i n h a s a l s o c o m p i l e d a l o n g reference list of orations (pp. 486–551), which supplies for each oration the page numbers where it is discussed in the book, its historical and geographical context, and the primary sources that preserve it. this list, organized alphabetically based on the names of the orators, too, will be valuable to future researchers. the comprehensiveness of the book naturally also entails some limitations. one byproduct of the amassing of information is the blurring of differences between individual orations. the book includes a wide variety of oratory, each with its own particular flavor. qatarī b. fujāʾa’s speech, for example, is very different from a speech by abū bakr, which in turn differs from a speech by al-ḥajjāj. qutbuddin’s typologies are helpful for understanding the broader contours of the tradition, but they occasionally distract from the particularities of individual orators and orations. this book is also not an easy read. it is full of names, long quotations, lists of typical expressions, lists of formulae, etc. at the same time, this makes it a great resource for researchers. as noted al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 651 • pamela klasova above, chapter 1 takes the question of authenticity head on in a nuanced way, but the reader may lose track of this question in the course of the book, which presents orations as they appear in the sources. for example, it is difficult to imagine that those of ʿalī’s speeches which contained later theological terms like mawṣūf (thing described), ṣifa (attribute), and kaynūna (existence), which would have been foreign to the first/seventh century (p. 373), would be authentic. qutbuddin, however, attempts to defend their authenticity (pp. 374–75), subverting her own criteria related to anachronistic terminology.9 in other words, on many occasions, i would not be as certain as she is of the authenticity of the individual orations; at the same time, however, her inclusion of all speeches, even the ones less likely to be early, is useful: it lays out clearly and comprehensively all that medieval muslim sources have preserved for us in the genre of the arabic oration. future scholars may make their own judgments concerning t h e i n d i v i d u a l p i e c e s , a s t h e a u t h o r recommends. arabic oration holds great potential for future researchers, whether they want to study early arabic oratory, early arabic oral production more broadly, or early islamic ideology of state, warfare, or religion, or to compare early arabic oratorical production with the verbal art of other cultures. staying close to the 9. the author does include a caveat in chapter 1 (p.59) that some terms may have been inserted later to an earlier oration. 10. see, for example, glyn p. norton, “improvisation, time, and opportunity in the rhetorical tradition,” in the oxford handbook of critical improvisation studies, ed. george e. lewis and benjamin piekut, 262–88 (oxford: oxford university press, 2016). 11. mary j. carruthers, the book of memory: a study of memory in medieval culture (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1990), 205. 12. klasova, “empire through language,” 380–83. tradition, and mostly within its bounds, means that the book presents a coherent and singular picture of arabic oratory. in the future, scholars could take this work as a basis to examine arabic oratory from different or comparative perspectives, which may nuance or complicate some of the concepts that qutbuddin presents. i suggest three such concepts to illustrate possible future directions for research: improvisation, piety, and persuasion. q u t b u d d i n f o l l o w s t h e s o u r c e s ( f o r example, al-jāḥiẓ or ibn abī al-ḥadīd) to emphasize that what distinguishes early arabic oratory from oratory in other cultures (and in the abbasid era) is that it was extemporaneous, spontaneous, or, in other words, improvised. but when we look to classical and medieval rhetoric, improvisation was a common topos there too.10 mary carruthers, in her classic book on the central role of memory in medieval europe, explained that improvisation is “the highest reward of our long labors,”11 the result of days spent memorizing, learning the rules, practicing, and training. who can say that the accounts that we have from the early abbasid period about the assiduous training for orators do not reflect something from the practices of the early period?12 the theme of piety, which returns in arabic oration as the binding theme of most texts, is another that lends itself to comparison. fred donner identified piety as perhaps the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) tahera qutbuddin’s arabic oration • 652 most important form of legitimation in the early islamic period and connected it with the broader late antique milieu.13 so rather than thinking about piety as a feature specific to arabic oratory, we may think about it as the common rhetoric of its time and place. finally, let us look at the concept of persuasion, which, as mentioned, qutbuddin uses to highlight the unique nature of arabic oratory, combining persuasion and coercion in its bid for authority. qutbuddin calls t h e t e c h n i q u e s t h a t a r a b i c o r a t o r y espoused “tacit persuasion” (crediting robert lanham with the term).14 that is, the combination of the orator’s high status and potent delivery is what made a speech effective. persuasion has been at the heart of greco-roman oratory and political theory, inextricably connected with argumentation since aristotle. is it really the same persuasion that qutbuddin talks about? (or the same concept of authority as the one arendt discusses, for that matter?) arabic oration could serve as an important starting point to nuance these concepts in the framework of early arabic public speaking. these points illustrate how new studies could explore important phenomena of the early islamic 13. for his treatment of islamic piety, see fred m. donner, narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1998), 64–97. 14. see richard lanham, “tacit persuasion patterns and a dictionary of rhetorical terms” in literary theory: an anthology, 2nd ed., ed. julie rivkin and michael ryan, 177–94 (oxford: blackwell publishing, 2004). 15. with regard to modern discussions about thucydides’ speeches, donald kagan says: “there are few arguments of longer standing in the scholarship on thucydides than the one concerning the speeches in his history, and none is more important for understanding it and its author. the main question is: did thucydides try to reproduce the arguments put forward by the speakers on each occasion as accurately as he could, or did he feel free to invent arguments and even whole speeches?” donald kagan, “the speeches in thucydides and the mytilene debate,” yale classical studies 24 (2010): 71–94, at 71. 16. philip halldén, “what is arab islamic rhetoric? rethinking the history of muslim oratory art and homiletics,” peace research abstracts journal 42, no. 4 (2005): 19–38, at 25. 17. ibid., 27. world through the prisms of ancient and medieval rhetoric, memory studies, late antiquity, and literary theory. finally, i would like to circle back to an earlier question—why has arabic oratory not been studied in the west?—for it highlights the importance of qutbuddin’s intervention in the field. one reason why arabic oratory has been neglected in western scholarship, despite its ubiquity in arabic sources and its cultural relevance in medieval islamic society, may be that it has been regarded as inauthentic. but then, the authenticity of thucydides’ speeches has long been debated, and yet the speeches have been studied, admired, and discussed from antiquity to modern times.15 another reason is one proposed by philip halldén: the misalignment of western and islamic t a x o n o m i e s o f l e a r n i n g . 1 6 i n i s l a m i c tradition, oratory and homily fell under ritual knowledge and thus not under the purview of philosophers and rhetoricians. by the nineteenth century rhetoric came to be understood mainly as encompassing matters of style and aesthetics (elocutio), which according to halldén led western scholars to identify “rhetoric” with ʿilm al-balāgha while oratory (al-khaṭāba) was cast aside.17 consequently, islamic rhetoric al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 653 • pamela klasova came to be understood as hermeneutics and textual aesthetics while western rhetoric retained its ancient connotations of debate and critical thinking. in my view, the chronology here could be flipped. the preconceptions about the east and the west should be the point of departure, not the conclusion. the heart of the matter lies in the continuing essentialist dichotomies of western democracy vs. oriental despotism. western intellectual production is imagined to be creative and worth grappling with, while “oriental” literature is assumed to be passive and formalistic. it is therefore crucial to begin to bring to light some of the beauty and power of early arabic oratory. arabic oration is a magisterial study of early arabic oratory that is mainly aimed at specialists in the field of arabic literature. due to its comprehensive nature, it can serve as an important resource for scholars of early islamic history. thanks to the long quotations from primary texts translated into english, it provides much comparative material for scholars in other fields, such as orality, rhetoric, and communication studies. the close analyses of individual texts can also be used in the classroom context. i look forward to seeing the new interest in the study of early arabic oratory that qutbuddin’s arabic oration should spark. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 603-611 book review the library of arabic literature has added another key title to its catalogue with the publication of kalīlah and dimnah,1 edited by michael fishbein and translated jointly by fishbein and james montgomery.2 there are three main parts of the volume that should be discussed. the first is an introduction by fishbein (roughly twenty-five pages, including his “note on the text”), in which he provides a concise overview of the biography of ibn al-muqaffaʿ (d. ca. 139/757), the journey of kalīla and dimna as a world-literary phenomenon, and noteworthy features of the arabic text as it is given in the manuscript that represents the basis for this edition. second, there is the 1. the spelling kalīlah and dimnah follows the library of congress style for the romanization of arabic. throughout this review, in cases where the title of the work is used in a general sense—rather than in reference to this edition/translation—it is written according to the ijmes style: kalīla and dimna. 2. for the purposes of this review, i will assume that almost everything apart from the translation—for example, the introduction—is to be credited to fishbein alone. edition itself, which has been carried out competently and with an honest, realistic perspective on the complicated nature of the codicology and textual history of the arabic kalīla and dimna—the result being a version of the text that meets the standard for general-purpose use and citation. third, there is the translation by fishbein and montgomery, which should immediately become the english translation of choice for this work, supplanting the fine but dated rendition by wyndham knatchbull (1819). taken as a whole, this publication of kalīla and dimna provides something close to “one-stop shopping.” the book could be handed to students with little prior contextualization; they could use the introduction to gain a general idea of kalīla ibn al-muqaffaʿ, ʿabd allāh rūzbih b. dādūya. kalīlah and dimnah: fables of virtue and vice. edited by michael fishbein; translated by michael fishbein and james e. montgomery. the library of arabic literature (new york: new york university press, 2022). isbn 9781479806539. xxxix + 430 pp. $30 cloth. theodore s. beers freie universität berlin (theodore.beers@fu-berlin.de) © 2022 theodore s. beers. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 604 • theodore beers ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s kalīlah and dimnah • 605 and dimna, after which they would have an arabic text with facing english translation that facilitates different modes of reading (including for language learning).3 what follows is commentary on, and occasional criticism of, various aspects o f t h i s e d i t i o n / t r a n s l a t i o n . i t b e a r s emphasizing that the critical notes below generally relate to complexities and problems of the kalīla and dimna tradition itself and are not meant to detract from this volume’s overwhelmingly positive qualities. fishbein’s introduction t h e f i r s t f e w p a g e s o f f i s h b e i n ’ s i n t r o d u c t i o n a r e d e v o t e d t o a b r i e f discussion of the life and times of ibn al-muqaffaʿ, including an explanation of how kalīla and dimna fits into his oeuvre (much of which has not survived). the goal is not, of course, to add anything to the scholarly literature on ibn al-muqaffaʿ, but rather to give a basic overview. fishbein s u c c e e d s a t t h i s , a n d h e c i t e s a f e w authoritative works of scholarship—e.g., istván kristó-nagy’s la pensée d’ibn a l m u q a f f a ʿ ( 2 0 1 3 ) — w i t h w h i c h a n interested reader could dig deeper. one point in this passage that could perhaps be expanded upon occurs during fishbein’s comparison of kalīla and dimna to another work of political and ethical instruction by ibn al-muqaffaʿ, al-adab al-kabīr. in drawing a link between the two books, fishbein observes, “although the stories of kalīlah and dimnah are, on 3. kalīla and dimna has long (if not always) been used as an educational text. as ahmed el shamsy has shown, the būlāq press in cairo, in its first couple decades of operation, was largely not focused on printing classical arabic works. the exceptions that were made tended to be for books that were “basic teaching texts,” especially on grammar. there was, however, an 1836 printing of kalīla and dimna. this is probably an indication of its perceived educational value. see el shamsy, rediscovering the islamic classics (princeton: princeton university press, 2020), 67–71. it would be only fitting for students of arabic in our time to continue the tradition of relying on kalīla and dimna; a side-by-side edition/translation will make this easier than ever. the surface, entertaining narratives, their underlying purpose … is didactic” (p. xiv). it would be worth adding that the logic of kalīla and dimna, whereby serious messages are encoded in tales that are amusing to read, is an early manifestation of an idea that would become central to arabic adab literature: the mixture of al-jidd wa-l-hazl, seriousness and jest. rather than viewing the entertaining aspects of kalīla and dimna as surfacelevel features that mask the true purpose of the book, one could treat the two sides as more complementary. ibn al-muqaffaʿ says as much in his preface (as translated by fishbein and montgomery): “because such a book combined entertainment with wisdom, the wise would study it for its wisdom, and the simple for its value as entertainment; young pupils and others would be delighted to read it and it would be easy for them to memorize. when the young person reached maturity and grew in knowledge, he would ponder what he had memorized—as it had been recorded and inscribed in his heart without his knowing its true nature—and would come to realize that he had acquired a great treasure” (p. 23). there is no question that fishbein and montgomery are well acquainted with this dynamic, but it might help readers of the introduction to clarify the interplay of seriousness and jest in kalīla and dimna, which is part of situating the work in the early history of arabic adab. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s kalīlah and dimnah • 605 the next section of the introduction traces the development of kalīla and dimna from its origins in the sanskrit pañcatantra, to the sasanian-era translation and expansion in middle persian, to the landmark arabic translation by ibn al-muqaffaʿ, and beyond. this is a story that has been told numerous times, and one will find no surprises in the overview given by fishbein. there are, however, a few points that call for further comment. first, with regard to the older of the two syriac versions of kalīla and dimna— the one translated from middle persian— it is worth noting that, although the original (and unique) extant manuscript disappeared in paris around the turn of the twentieth century, four copies of it had been made for the use of scholars in the 1870s and ’80s, and those have survived.4 so it is still possible to study the older syriac kalīla and dimna in manuscript (with certain caveats). second, after listing the main early translations based on the arabic of ibn al-muqaffaʿ—into persian, syriac (again), old castilian, hebrew, and middle greek— f i s h b e i n c o m m e n t s , “ e a c h o f t h e s e translations was made independently from different forms of the text” (p. xvii). this raises a difficult question. what exactly would it mean for each translation to relate to a “different form” of kalīla and dimna? it is true that, if one looks at translations from the arabic into various other languages in the medieval period, one will sometimes notice significant differences that suggest there was no 4. see the section by jan j. van ginkel in beatrice gruendler et al., “an interim report on the editorial and analytical work of the anonymclassic project,” medieval worlds 11 (2020): 241–79. it is also worth noting that the text of the older syriac kalīla and dimna was edited on the basis of the nineteenth-century copies, not the original manuscript. 5. of course, it is often the case with arabic texts from the early islamic period that they have survived single “original.” the influential persian translation (ca. 540/1146) by abū al-maʿālī naṣr allāh munshī, for example, follows a chapter order unlike what is typically found in arabic manuscripts—and also unlike the chapter order used in many other translations, e.g., into old castilian (1251 ce). we should pay attention to such indications of the divergent evolution of the underlying arabic text. but it is by no means easy to draw definitive general conclusions, and there is a risk of overstatement in the claim that each translator was working with a substantially different version of the book (depending on one’s definition of “different”). third, in a potential case of understatement, fishbein observes, “of the many surviving manuscripts of the arabic kalīlah and dimnah, most are relatively late in date.” in fact, as fishbein specifies in the next paragraph, the earliest extant copy is dated 618/1221—nearly five centuries after the career of ibn al-muqaffaʿ. and we have only a handful of manuscripts from the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries. it is important, particularly for the benefit of non-specialist readers, to stress just how troublesome the codicology of this text really is.5 fourth, fishbein mentions that medieval adab works that contain quotes from kalīla and dimna, such as the ʿuyūn al-akhbār of ibn qutayba (d. 276/889), offer further evidence that the arabic kalīla and dimna “had ceased to have a single authoritative text” from an early period. this is true to a meaningful extent. johannes stephan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 606 • theodore beers ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s kalīlah and dimnah • 607 of the anonymclassic project has carried out important research on the “indirect transmission” of textual material from kalīla and dimna in anthologies and other sources.6 again, however, we should take care when making broad statements. if early adab works quote from kalīla and dimna in ways that reveal variations in the text—and they do—then how remarkable is that? where do we draw the line between “normal variation” to be expected in the transmission and reception of a text, and a more fundamental differentiation? also, how can we correct for problems in the codicology of adab anthologies themselves, where surviving manuscripts are often fairly late? these are complicated issues that demand circumspection. it should be acknowledged, however, that fishbein’s overall point is not wrong: the contents of the arabic kalīla and dimna must already have varied significantly by the time of ibn al-nadīm (d. ca. 385/995), who mentions having seen versions of the book in which multiple chapters are either added or left out.7 the next few sections of the introduction, which address the evolution of kalīla and dimna starting from the pañcatantra, are nicely written. i do not believe that i have seen a clearer or more concise explanation of how the text grew into the form(s) in which it is found in in much later copies (if at all). what makes kalīla and dimna unusually challenging is a combination of factors: the popularity and influential status of the work; the apparent freedom felt by copyists to make changes, both large and small; and, yes, the several-century gap between the initial authorship of the text and the production of the oldest extant manuscripts. 6. for an introduction to this topic, see the section by johannes stephan in gruendler et al., “an interim report.” 7. see dagmar riedel, “kalila wa demna i. redactions and circulation,” encyclopaedia iranica online, https:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/2330-4804_eiro_com_10658. 8. rushain abbasi, “islam and the invention of religion: a study of medieval muslim discourses on dīn,” studia islamica 116 (2021): 1–106. arabic. again, this is based on existing s c h o l a r s h i p — f i s h b e i n c i t e s f r a n k l i n edgerton and carl brockelmann, among ot hers — but it is an ad ept s y nt hesis. when he comes to the question of the prefatory chapter to kalīla and dimna in which the iranian physician burzūya gives his (purported) autobiography, fishbein notes that scholars have debated whether its origins lie in the middle p e r s i a n t r a n s l a t i o n , o r w h e t h e r i b n al-muqaffaʿ authored the chapter himself. fishbein more or less accepts the view of theodor nöldeke that some version of this chapter was probably found in the middle persian—though it is still possible that ibn al-muqaffaʿ made additions and changes to it. it would be worth adding h e r e t h a t b u r z ū y a ’ s a u t o b i o g r a p h y continues to attract scholarly attention as a commentary on general ideas about religion written in (or translated into) arabic in the early islamic period. one recent study, which probably appeared just too late to be included in fishbein’s bibliography, is by rushain abbasi.8 perhaps the most important part of fishbein’s introduction—and definitely the most original—is the discussion of what he terms “islamic elements” that have been woven into the text of kalīla and dimna in the (ca. ninth/fifteenth-century) manuscript that serves as the basis for al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s kalīlah and dimnah • 607 this edition. fishbein shows how the book is given a subtly different flavor through the insertion of references to allāh taʿālā or allāh subḥānahu wa-taʿālā; the use of phrases like in shāʾ allāh in dialogue; and references to, e.g., relying on the help of god to navigate a difficult situation. in one touching example, a pair of doves are discussing a plan to save extra grain for the upcoming dry season, and one of them says, “what a good idea! that’s what we’ll do, in shāʾ allāh taʿālā” (pp. 342–43). these religious flourishes are not found in the earliest extant manuscripts of the arabic kalīla and dimna, such as the one used for the edition of ʿabd al-wahhāb ʿazzām.9 as fishbein notes, there are other versions of kalīla and dimna that are set in a still more explicitly islamic context, with quotes from qurʾanic verses and aḥādīth. we could point to, for example, the sixth/ twelfth-century persian translation by naṣr allāh munshī. what is striking about the base manuscript of this edition is that it presents the “original” arabic kalīla and dimna, in a gently changed form that shows how the stories might be read in a mature islamicate milieu. this section of the introduction represents new research and could be expanded into a journal article. map of kalīla and dimna versions between the introduction and the “note on the text” that follows it, fishbein h a s i n s e r t e d a m a p t i t l e d “ p r i n c i p a l t r a n s l a t i o n s o f t h e a r a b i c k a l ī l a h wa-dimnah.” this will probably be useful to many readers as a visual aid, but, upon examining it in detail, i was puzzled by a 9. ʿabd allāh b. al-muqaffaʿ, kitāb kalīla wa-dimna, ed. ʿabd al-wahhāb ʿazzām (cairo: maktabat al-maʿārif, 1941). few aspects. in general, it can be difficult to use a map to show a combination of geographical breadth and change over time. the versions of kalīla and dimna that are plotted here stretch from toledo to agra geographically, and from the fourth/ tenth to the tenth/sixteenth century chronologically. the languages included are persian (several times), greek (twice), spanish, hebrew, latin, and ottoman turkish. some of the versions are not, in fact, direct translations from the arabic— so the content of the map goes beyond what may be suggested by its title. for example, the persian version that is plotted at konya and dated ca. 641–62/1244–63 refers to a versification by the poet qāniʿī ṭūsī, made on the basis of the prose text of naṣr allāh munshī. the ottoman turkish version placed on the map—i.e., the hümāyūn-nāme of ʿalī vāsiʿ çelebi (d. 959/1543–44)—is based on the anvār-i suhaylī, a persian rewriting by ḥusayn vāʿiẓ kāshifī (d. 910/1504–5). one could also ask why later arabic renditions of kalīla and dimna have not been included. if persian versifications are fair game— the map has two—then why not add the well-known arabic versification by ibn al-habbāriyya (d. ca. 509/1115)? it may be that the primary purpose of such a map is to impress upon the reader that there are many translations and adaptations of kalīla and dimna, in various languages, produced across much of the oikouménē over a period of several centuries. insofar as that is the case, this map is a clear success. if, on the other hand, there were a goal of plotting the descendants of the arabic kalīla and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 608 • theodore beers ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s kalīlah and dimnah • 609 dimna in a relatively comprehensive and fastidiously accurate manner, then various questions could be raised. notes on the text in the last introductory section before the text itself, fishbein explains the process underlying the edition and translation. he notes that it would hardly be sensible to attempt a composite critical edition based on a group of manuscripts. the variation among extant copies is too great, too fundamental—not to mention their general lateness. we will never have an urtext of the arabic kalīla and dimna. a more difficult question is how to choose a manuscript, or a small group of manuscripts, for an edition, after acknowledging that there is no ideal option. both louis cheikho (1905) and ʿabd al-wahhāb ʿazzām (1941) prioritized using the oldest copies that were available to them—even if this led to a greater need for emendation owing to lacunae and other problems with the text. f i s h b e i n h a s c h o s e n a d i f f e r e n t approach. for one thing, it seems that he was (understandably) disinclined to retread the paths of earlier editors. rather than going back to, e.g., the 618/1221 ayasofya manuscript used by ʿazzām, fishbein selected a copy that is somewhat later; is almost complete (with only minor lacunae at the beginning and end); and was written cleanly by a scribe who seems to have had a reasonably good command of classical arabic. the manuscript in question is or. 4044 at the british library. it is worth looking at the catalogue entry for this manuscript, by charles rieu.10 fishbein has not cited it directly, though he does include 10. see charles rieu, supplement to the catalogue of the arabic manuscripts in the british museum (london: british museum, 1894), 731–32, no. 1156. rieu’s supplement in the bibliography. as it turns out, this is a codex that contains two texts. it has kalīla and dimna at fols. 1–135 and, at fols. 136–207, the sulwān al-muṭāʿ fī ʿudwān al-atbāʿ of ibn ẓafar al-ṣiqillī (d. ca. 565/1170)—a “mirror for princes” work that brings together various anecdotes, wisdom sayings, and more. (the sulwān pairs nicely with kalīla and dimna; it would also be a good match for al-adab al-kabīr.) it is not clear whether the copies of these books were produced in the same context, or how they came to be bound together. judging from high-resolution images, however, the grain of the paper, the handwriting, and the art style appear quite similar. both texts feature a number of illustrations, though they are found more frequently in kalīla and dimna than in the sulwān. it may have been on the basis of the paintings that rieu placed this manuscript approximately in the tenth/ fifteenth century, despite the lack of a dated colophon. in any case, for fishbein’s purposes, this represents a good, middleof-the-road copy of kalīla and dimna. it is neither early nor very late; it was evidently produced with care; and it has not been used for previous editions. philologically inclined readers may wish that more space had been given to the description of the manuscript. (the presence of the sulwān al-muṭāʿ, for example, is not mentioned.) but it is possible that, in keeping with the conventions of the library of arabic literature series, technical discussion has been limited to meet the needs of a diverse readership. given that or. 4044 is defective in certain passages, and that there is always al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s kalīlah and dimnah • 609 a need to consult multiple copies at points where the text is unclear, fishbein has made reference to a few other manuscripts of kalīla and dimna, as well as to earlier editions by ʿazzām, cheikho, and others. he follows a hierarchy whereby or. 4044 is t he bas e m anus cript ; t hen, where necessary, he has drawn from two other copies;11 and, when all else fails, he cites further manuscripts and editions. readings from any source apart from or. 4044 are indicated in footnotes. this framework seems reasonable and should be simple enough for the reader to understand. fishbein also discusses his strategy with regard to normalizing the arabic text. he claims not to have forced everything to agree with (what we think of as) standard orthography and classical arabic grammar. nor, by any stretch of the imagination, has he produced a diplomatic edition. fishbein refers to the approach that he has taken as a compromise. dots are often missing from letters in the manuscript; they are always included in the edited text. various forms of hamza are written here according to the modern convention, though they are rarely marked at all in the manuscript. according to fishbein, in contrast to such matters of orthographic consistency, any normalization that has syntactic implications is footnoted. (we will return to this question shortly.) finally, there is a brief note on the english translation, emphasizing that fishbein and montgomery have aimed 11. the two secondary manuscripts are or. 8751 (dated 799/1397) at the british library and ms 3655 at the royal library of morocco (in rabat), which is thought to have been produced in the seventh/thirteenth century. the date of or. 8751 is given by fishbein as 799/1396, based on a description of the manuscript by françois de blois. as it turns out, de blois gives the full colophon date as 1 jumādā al-ūlā 799 and then equates it to january 1396. this is probably a typographical error. the year 799 ah started in october 1396 ce, but most of it (including jumādā al-ūlā) fell in 1397. see de blois, burzōy’s voyage to india and the origin of the book of “kalīlah wa dimnah” (london: royal asiatic society, 1990), 66–67. at a “natural style.” this is true, and perfectly acceptable. the translation will be discussed below. edition there is no way to review the entirety of an edition of a text as substantial as kalīla and dimna. the best that one can do is to compare select passages to the base manuscript in order to gauge whether the work has been done with attention to detail and in accordance with the criteria laid out in the introduction. the short answer, for this edition, is that it looks good. the text is clean and matches what is found in or. 4044, allowing for the aforementioned normalization and setting aside cases where recourse has been made to another manuscript or edition. it may be useful to go through one passage and list the changes that are visible from the manuscript to the edited text. for this i have chosen “the ascetic and the guest,” a short chapter that falls near the end of the book. (in fact, it is the last chapter in or. 4044, though it is not so in all manuscripts.) the first difference that i noticed, on fol. 134v (p. 396 in the edition), is a correction of the verb yataʿaddā (ending in alif) to yataʿaddá (with an alif maqṣūra). this is simply orthographic and, per the standard outlined by fishbein, need not be noted. next, on the same folio/page, the phrase fa-yaṣīr ḥayrānan (or ḥayrānā; the tanwīn al-fatḥa is not marked) has al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 610 • theodore beers ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s kalīlah and dimnah • 611 been corrected to fa-yaṣīr ḥayrān, since ḥayrān is diptote. here i might have expected a footnote, but none is given. next, the verb daʿá is corrected to daʿā. next (and still on fol. 134v, p. 396), the short vowels are marked for the word ṭurfa in the manuscript, but omitted in the edition. this raises a question of the appropriateness of removing detail that is given in the manuscript, which might be seen as more objectionable than adding detail that is lacking, such as dots on letters. next, an unclear word is replaced with qilla from another manuscript. this is properly footnoted. next, on fol. 135r (still p. 396 in the edition), what appears to be the word taʿlīm has been read instead as taʿallum, in a context in which the latter makes more sense. a footnote is provided. next, on the same folio (but now on p. 398),12 the phrase fa-ṣāra ḥayrān mutaraddid is corrected to fa-ṣāra ḥayrān mutaraddidan, since mutaraddid is not diptote. again, there is no note. next, the word lā is read as allā (i.e., the contraction of an lā), as found in the editions of cheikho and ʿazzām. this may be a case of overcorrection, but it is footnoted. next, tadbīr is corrected to tadbīran in an adverbial context, without a note. next, the words ilā baʿḍ are added, with reference to multiple other editions, to complete a “min baʿḍ…” construction. next, on fol. 135v (still p. 398 in the edition), the word fī is added for clarity, based on another manuscript. finally, the phrase taḍyīʿ li-l-ḥazm is inserted, on the same basis. and the chapter comes to a close. 12. we have “skipped” here from p. 396 to 398 because this is a side-by-side edition/translation, with arabic text on even pages and english on odd pages. the numbering runs continuously, so that, for example, the arabic on p. 396 corresponds to the translation on p. 397. hopefully the example of this short section is sufficient to give a sense of fishbein’s editorial practices. there is some normalization, though only to a modest degree (by the standards of arabic literature scholarship). where a sentence might be unclear, fishbein occasionally makes a small change or adds a word or two, drawing on his other sources. the edition is overall close to its base manuscript. again, i have not scoured the whole text, and it may be that a detailoriented reader will find the odd nit to pick. pdf of the edition in accordance with its normal policy, the library of arabic literature has made the edited text of kalīlah and dimnah freely available in digital form. this is commendable. i do think it is worth noting, however, that the pdf file that t h e y h a v e p u b l i s h e d i s u n u s a b l e f o r searching in the text. it contains textual data that does not correspond to the words on the page. i assume that this is related to some technical limitations in their typesetting process. it would be much better if, in the future, the publisher found a way of providing the arabic text of their editions in a format suitable for searching and computational analysis. in the era of digital humanities, that would be an even greater gift to the field. translation o f t h e m a j o r c o m p o n e n t s o f t h i s volume, the english translation is the one about which—in a positive sense—i have al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s kalīlah and dimnah • 611 the least to say. fishbein and montgomery have translated kalīla and dimna just as is indicated in the introduction. the prose is clear and not too formal. the arabic text is represented faithfully enough, but not in a way that hampers the readability of the translation. after all, the arabic is always on the facing page, and every paragraph is numbered, so that there can be no doubt as to the concordance on the level of a sentence. the standard that should be met, from my perspective, is that a student of arabic language and literature should be able to use the translation for help in parsing a difficult passage in the original. as far as i have seen, fishbein and montgomery’s rendering of kalīla and dimna would certainly allow for this. it will also be an easy and enjoyable read for those who are interested only in the english. concluding thoughts t h i s v o l u m e d o e s i n c l u d e s o m e back matter. first, there are occasional notes for the translation—sixty-six in total, across the entire book. these are mostly intended for clarification based on subtleties in the meaning of arabic 13. two of the noteworthy and fairly new articles that are included are christine van ruymbeke, “kalīla and dimna as a case-study: ibn al-muqaffaʿ’s and nasrullah munshī’s translations,” in the routledge handbook of arabic translation, ed. sameh hanna, hanem el-farahaty, and abdel-wahab khalifa, 253–69 (new york: routledge, 2020); and matthew l. keegan, “‘elsewhere lies its meaning’: the vagaries of kalīla and dimna’s reception,” poetica 52 (2021): 13–40. 14. complementary to this edition is the work of the anonymclassic project at the freie universität berlin, which has sought to build a large corpus of manuscripts of kalīla and dimna and to develop a digital platform that facilitates juxtaposing their contents. this effort represents another response to the impossibility of a single solution, i.e., by offering a multitude of partial solutions. phrases, or to comment on points that are unclear in the manuscript. second, there is a short glossary of names and terms. third, fishbein and montgomery have provided a b i b l i o g r a p h y , w h i c h i s o f m o d e s t length but helpful. fourth, and perhaps more importantly, there is a passage on “further reading,” which calls attention to scholarship (some of it quite recent) on different aspects of kalīla and dimna.13 fifth, and finally, we are given an index of proper nouns. as was stated at the outset, this edition/ translation, along with its introduction and other resources, will give many readers everything that they need to study kalīla and dimna. one last question to address is whether fishbein’s edition can replace other published versions of the text, such as that of ʿazzām. the answer, realistically, is “probably not.” given the foundational problems with the textual history of the arabic kalīla and dimna, those who wish to engage in close reading will continue to need to consider a range of versions, in both print and manuscript. thanks to fishbein, we now have another highquality published option, but—as he has freely acknowledged—there is no universal solution.14 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 289-296 book review this book makes use of the largest c o r p u s o f e g y p t i a n d o c u m e n t s dating to the early islamic period. written in coptic and greek on ostraca (pottery or limestone) or papyrus, these documents originate from the theban village of djeme, which was built in and around the ruins of the temple of r a m e s e s i i i a t m e d i n e t a b u “ w i t h a population between fifteen hundred and two thousand” (p. 3). dating from the late sixth to late eighth centuries ce, there are “1,877 texts from djeme, out of a total of 3,559 texts from the wider theban region... almost 20 percent of published coptic texts are from djeme alone” (p. 2, n. 1). these texts have, however, attracted less interest from the wider research community concerned with the history of the early islamic period than has the 1. chris wickham, framing the early middle ages: europe and the mediterranean, 400–800 (oxford: oxford university press, 2005). 2. most notably, terry g. wilfong, women of jeme: lives in a coptic town in late antique egypt (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2002). early eighth-century corpus of aphrodito. this is probably because unlike the latter corpus, the djeme texts are mainly written in coptic. there are no known arabic documents preserved from the theban region in this period, and the preserved communications involve exclusively local actors. the djeme writings contain no texts written by the central administration in fusṭāṭ in the name of the governor, like the famous letters of qurra b. sharīk to the village of aphrodito. nevertheless, the documentation of djeme did not escape examination in chris wickham’s framing the early middle ages (2005),1 and it has been the focus of rich research production by papyrologists, with a particular focus on village life and gender studies.2 jennifer cromwell’s book aims to reconstruct the work and world of one of the scribes of jennifer a. cromwell, recording village life: a coptic scribe in early islamic egypt. new texts from ancient cultures 8 (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2017), xxiv + 287 pp. isbn 978-0-472-13048-1. price: $90.00 (cloth). marie legendre university of edinburgh (marie.legendre@ed.ac.uk) mailto:marie.legendre%40ed.ac.uk?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 290 • marie legendre the djeme corpus and a member of the village elite: aristophanes son of johannes. he was active in the second quarter of the eighth century—that is, the late umayyad p e r i o d . t h e b o o k p l a c e s a s p o t l i g h t on the use of coptic documents in the administration of the later marwanids. t h i s l e n s a l l o w s u s t o d r a s t i c a l l y reconsider a certain understanding of language use in umayyad administration that has been oversimplified by references to the so-called language reform under ʿabd al-malik b. marwān (r. 65–86/685– 705). cromwell creates a link between papyrological studies, on the one hand, and the history of late antiquity and the early islamic period, on the other, by concentrating on several hot topics in those fields, in relation to which the present review is structured: administration and taxation; scribal practices and literacy; and microhistory. administration and taxation chapter 1, entitled “a scribe in his time and place,” introduces the geographical, political, and literary environment in which aristophanes wrote: the theban region, its documents, the village of djeme as known though archaeological excavations, and its place in the administrative structure of early islamic egypt. cromwell notes that the main feature of islamic rule that is visible in the texts of djeme is the payment of the poll tax in addition to less well documented taxes also characteristic of the new administration: forced labor and expense taxes for officials such as the governor or the amīr al-muʾminīn, all discussed in chapter 4. islamic rule 3. cromwell gives him the title of pagarch, though to my knowledge this title never appears for administrators with arab names. also appears in a few mentions of titles, names, and a handful of arabic protocols that were not written locally (pp. 8–9). most notably, an amīr, that is, an umayyad administrator, was appointed over the local capitals of luxor and esna. he had a fiscal and legal role, as he was petitioned for travel permits and the settlement of village disputes (cf. chapter 5). the first chapter also confirms that the use of coptic for administrative texts was an innovation of the umayyad period. chapter 4, “recording taxes,” shows that aristophanes was first involved in drawing up fiscal documents in 724, when he wrote tax demand notes for the office of the amīr of luxor and esna, sahl b. ʿabd allāh.3 he then wrote 106 tax receipts on ostraca between 727 and 730. in those three years he drew up six other texts relating to tax payments (safe conducts and travel permits). different writing supports were utilized for fiscal communications with the amīr (papyrus) and at the village level (ostraca). the tax documents are for the principal money taxes (poll tax, expense taxes) and for forced labor. p.clt 6, dated 724, is of particular interest, as it records an unusual declaration of seventeen men on their contribution to naval duty, stating that they would provide a sum of money to the authorities if they were not able to contribute to the raids. cromwell puts forward a convincing interpretation: the signatories were “great men” of the village “with the ability to buy their way out of the cursus” (p. 92). less convincing is her categorization of this document as reflecting a communal burden. this claim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) jennifer a. cromwell’s recording village life • 291 is not discussed at length, but one wonders whether this unique document, the only one mentioning forced labor in the theban region, really reflects a fiscal system that functioned regularly with both communal and personal liability at the village level. t h e d o c u m e n t i s s o u n c o m m o n t h a t the scribe utilized up to three different n a m e s f o r i t i n t h e t e x t ( h o m o l o g i a n-koinônikon, symphônon n-koinônikon, koinê homologia [p. 90]). it seems to have been an ad hoc initiative that does not necessarily reflect the functioning of the fiscal system of the 720s as a whole. most of the fiscal texts written by aristophanes (p. 103) are concerned with the poll tax, called diagraphon in theban documents. he wrote receipts for a total of sixty-seven men, issuing multiple receipts for nine of them. payments were made in instalments (katabole) in the first part of the fiscal year (between may and september). the five travel permits written by aristophanes were drawn up at the same time, after taxes had been paid. the fixed formulary of these receipts is presented in detail. all but two of the receipts for the poll tax were written in coptic and those for the expense tax in greek. cromwell hypothesizes that the choice of languages depended on the destination of the receipt (p. 98), but she does not say what those different destinations could have been. the chapter reveals that the drafting of tax documents was a closely regulated process in the twenty or so years in which they are attested at djeme and that only one scribe at a time was involved in drawing up such texts. aristophanes 4. the spread of areas represented by the villagers can be inferred from the mention of different strategoi on receipts drawn up on the same day, as cromwell offers a convincing hypothesis that strategoi were the fiscal officials for the different quarters of the village (pp. 107–108). w a s t h e l a s t o f f i v e a t t e s t e d o f f i c i a l scribes issuing tax receipts. after him there is no evidence of tax recording in djeme. receipts mentioned up to five men: aristophanes as scribe, a fiscal official (strategos), two signatories, and sometimes a countersignatory. all of them except the strategos signed the receipts in their own hand. cromwell suggests that aristophanes might have gone around to different areas of the village to write up to sixteen receipts in one day, going from house to house, possibly with the signatories. another possibility is that inhabitants would come to him (or them) each day from various parts of the village.4 the latter arrangement would have saved aristophanes the trouble of wandering around a village of two thousand souls carrying up to sixteen potsherds with him. cromwell also convincingly shows t h a t t h e t a x r e c e i p t s w e r e k e p t b y aristophanes or the village administration as a record of tax collections, as they were the ones liable for this revenue vis-à-vis the higher administrative authorities (cf. chapter 5, pp. 179–180). the ostraca were kept together, as is evident from their acquisition history. a good number of them were bought together, and today they are housed in a limited number of collections. the research presented in chapter 6 is the most innovative work on umayyad administration to appear in the past decade. cromwell provides a fascinating demonstration of the official training o f c o p t i c a n d g r e e k s c r i b e s f o r t h e p r o d u c t i o n o f c e r t a i n t y p e s o f k e y al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 292 • marie legendre documents in the umayyad fiscal system— namely, those concerned with “collection of taxes and requisitioning of goods and labour” (p. 176). such training began in the last decade of the seventh century, and it was still in full force at the time of aristophanes in the second quarter of the eighth century. cromwell does acknowledge the increasing number of arabic papyri in the same period, but, as she shows, this went hand in hand with an increase in the number of greek and coptic documents and with centralized training for scribes in these two languages. the new training is visible in the script and formulary of administrative documents. it can be initially observed in documents drawn up in the local district capitals of the nile valley, and by the time of aristophanes it had reached the village level. he was not the only scribe with this training who was active in djeme, as texts written by cyriacus son of petros, who was active at the same time, show the same features. it is not known where the training took place, but the district capitals would have been a logical choice. cromwell sets the time of the eventual replacement of coptic by arabic after the 730s, though the change is not documented in thebes. she adds that greek was still utilized for administrative documents, at least in some regions, into the abbasid period. she infers from this shift in the 730s a change in the fiscal system, but the nature of the change remains murky. she connects the situation to the difficulties encountered by the caliphate of hishām b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 105–125/724–743). 5. isaac son of constantine went “from barely able to write his name to being able to write longer statements for others as well and for himself” (p. 48). scribal practices and literacy the first three chapters will be of interest to anyone interested in late antique scribal practices and literacy. they reveal the fascinating mechanisms though which the literate and the illiterate functioned at the level of the village community. in a village context in which we would expect literacy levels to be the lowest, we find an impressive range of literate practices: forty-one different writers can be discerned in this dossier alone, in texts written over approximately thirty-five years, with evidence of younger scribes helping older ones, individuals developing scribal skills, 5 and simple crosses used as signatures. cromwell paints a picture of literate groups in which professional scribes “stand in contrast to a greater abundance of writers who were less proficient. such writers—to set them apart from scribes as a professional category—range in ability from those barely able to sign their own names to proficient writers who could write short texts, including letters, and who occur frequently as witnesses to legal documents or amanuenses signing on behalf of others” (pp. 20–21). these nonprofessional writers included two women. chapter 1 ends with an overview of the identification of scribes in theban texts. it reveals that professional scribes were not identified by specific titles, though such titles appear for other individuals ( g r e e k : g r a m m a t e u s , l o g o g r a p h o s , nomikos, notarios; coptic: sach, sacho). the most technical portions of the book are chapter 2, “building aristophanes’ dossier,” and chapter 3, “putting pen on al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) jennifer a. cromwell’s recording village life • 293 papyrus: scribal practices and processes.” they show how texts from djeme can be assigned to aristophanes and conclude that 142 texts were written in his hand, some of them featuring his name as witness or amanuensis. he acted as both an official and a private scribe: of his writings, 115 documents are connected to taxation (106 tax receipts, a few tax demands, protection passes, a travel permit, and a tax agreement), while others are private documents (deeds of sale, dispute settlements, donations of children, property parcels, lists, and a few texts harder to characterize). a total of 120 texts are straightforwardly signed by aristophanes, and 22 others are assigned to his hand. cromwell provides a careful demonstration for this last group, stressing that texts cannot be connected to aristophanes based on a single criterion, such as the context of the document or linguistic features and paleography, and she notes that paleographical similarities can be highly subjective, sometimes present only in the eyes of the papyrologist. this is why she presents the 22 texts without signature—or where the signature is lost in fragmentary documents—together. the text is here punctuated by several illustrations showing aristophanes’s hand. the evidence indicates that individuals and families in djeme requested the expertise of various scribes. aristophanes did not hold a monopoly on literacy for certain parts of the village or for certain types of document (see p. 36: four scribes writing for a single family). the dating of the corpus and of the individual texts is also addressed in chapter 2. cromwell utilizes three dating 6. walter c. till, die koptischen rechtsurkunden aus theben (vienna: hermann böhlaus nachf, 1964). systems. the most common is the indiction system, as is usual for fiscal documents; otherwise, the era of the martyrs and hijri systems each appear once. here, again, cromwell is careful in assigning dates to problematic documents, which are presented consecutively. she establishes a new chronology for the dossier with absolute dates between 724 and 758, correcting a good number of previous datings established largely by walter till.6 the most innovative part of cromwell’s approach is tracking the effect of old age on aristophanes’s writing in the 750s: the tracing of letters becomes clumsy, the ink pressure varies, and he displays difficulties in maintaining a straight line. some of his late documents are even corrected b y a n o t h e r s c r i b e . t h e s e t e x t s c a n nonetheless be attributed to aristophanes either because he signed them or because his hand is still recognizable in the form of individual letters and especially of ligatures. cromwell identifies a document t h a t w a s w r i t t e n b y a n o t h e r s c r i b e , possibly under aristophanes’s guidance, and only the signature is in aristophanes’s hand. information on old age and the ensuing need for corrections is scattered across chapters 2 and 3 and could have been consolidated. chapter 2 ends with a consideration of dossiers and archives. the documents relating to aristophanes are compiled as a dossier. they were not archived together by him or anyone else, and they were not his personal papers. in one he appears only as the seller of a parcel of land; this text seems to have been archived by the buyer. the discovery of these texts is not documented in archaeological records, and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 294 • marie legendre we cannot infer anything of their original arrangement in the absence of accounts of their discovery. acquisition records, however, prove useful. a few sentences in the texts also allow us to reconstruct some of the archival practices in the village and the surrounding monasteries. older deeds of sale are mentioned in new ones and were certainly kept by individual families. documents of child donation were kept in the bibliotêkê of the monastery of apa phoibammon, though it is not clear what exactly this meant. overall, half of aristophanes’s dossier can be attached to a private or monastic archive. private archives are presented together in a single section. these relate to an individual or to an entire family; approximately ten texts can be linked to each on the basis of the content of the documents and their acquisition history. in chapter 3, cromwell focuses on a r i s t o p h a n e s ’ s w r i t i n g s t y l e , w h i c h differed among the types of documents and between his writing of coptic and greek. just as aristophanes appears as a witness, amanuensis, or signatory in documents that were written in the hands of others, references to other individuals commonly appear in his writings. some of these other people are identified by their titles (dioiketes, lashane—two titles for village officials—or deacon). cromwell confirms that status and literacy were not systematically connected in late antiquity, giving the example of a dioiketes who could not write his own witness statement. microhistory chapter 6, “aristophanes’ personal and professional lives,” reconstructs the stages of aristophanes’ career, his neighborhood, and his family. cromwell demonstrates the difficulty of assessing what is in a name. since aristophanes’s father’s name, johannes, is extremely common, it is difficult to ascertain who he was in the long list of homonyms attested in the village. she makes a strong case, however, for the identification of aristophanes’s brother, johannake son of johannes. despite the very common patronymic, her argument is based on property acquisitions and similarity in scribal training. she also identifies a student of aristophanes to whom he taught the writing of legal texts, using the social context of their respective d o c u m e n t s a n d t h e i r c h r o n o l o g y , paleography, and formularies. in chapter 5, “recording private lives,” cromwell reconstructs neighborhood life using about thirty documents that aristophanes wrote concerning personal p r o p e r t y ( h o u s e s , c o u r t y a r d s , l a n d , dress, equipment, marriage gifts) and money. these texts were written for the transactions and legal issues of the wealthiest of the village. large amounts of money are at stake (between one and twelve holokottinoi, or gold coins; see table 5.1, p. 147), which justifies the drawing up of a document by a professional scribe. on the other side of the spectrum, texts were also written for the transactions of those who were possibly among the poorest, though their status is difficult to establish: aristophanes is the scribe of three documents of child donation out of the twenty-five such documents known for eighth-century djeme, mostly from the 760s and 770s. young boys were donated to the monastery of apa phoibammon, built on the ruins of the temple of hatshepsut in deir el bahari, to serve the monastery, but al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) jennifer a. cromwell’s recording village life • 295 they were not destined to become monks.7 c r o m w e l l s h o w s t h a t t h e m o n a s t e r y could not act as the issuing authority for donation documents or travel permits. monks needed to go to the village for an administrative scribe such as aristophanes to write a petition to the amīr for them. as for immovable property, aristophanes’s dossier shows that houses or even rooms within houses were legally divided between members of the same family, multiple houses shared the same front courtyard, and streets in djeme were named (culol street, people of pshumare street, palikene street). the sale of a loom reached the considerable sum of one holokottinos, certainly because it was a source of income. two holokottinoi were loaned for the purchase of a house. scandalous affairs were brought before the amīr in the local capital when 10 2/3 holokottinoi were stolen from a house. these documents systematically involve women as share owners, buyers, sellers, or thieves. texts drawn up by aristophanes mostly belong wider personal archives such as that of aaron son of shenoute, “the most prolific property buyer in the records from djeme” (p. 135), with nine sale documents and a testament. the descriptions of t h e p r o p e r t i e s s o l d a l s o s h o w t h a t aristophanes was the neighbor of some of his clients. transactions took place only in the village and with the surrounding 7. arietta papaconstantinou has shown that these documents allow us to reconstruct the pressure the monasteries put on the christian population to elicit such donations at a time when the new fiscal burden imposed by the umayyad administration was causing increased economic difficulties for monasteries: “theia oikonomia: les actes thébains de donation d’enfants ou la gestion monastique de la pénurie,” travaux et mémoires 14 (2002): 511–526. 8. sarah j. clackson, “museum archaeology and coptic papyrology: the bawit papyri,” in coptic studies on the threshold of a new millennium, vol. 1, proceedings of the seventh international congress of coptic studies, leiden, 27 august–2 september 2000, ed. matt immerzeel and jacques van der vliet, 477–490 (leuven: peeters, 2004). monasteries of apa phoibammon and apa paul. the inhabitants of djeme did not seem to invest outside of the immediate surroundings. conclusion cromwell’s book is punctuated by very useful heuristic tools for the specialized and the nonspecialized reader alike: there are numerous lists and tables of documents and, most importantly, an initial aid for the reader on dating systems, t e c h n i c a l t e r m s , a n d p a p y r o l o g i c a l conventions. appendices comprise highquality images of ten ostraca, a catalogue of aristophanes’s texts (p. 142) and of six others in which he acted as amanuensis, new editions of ten ostraca, tables with information gleaned from tax receipts, and corrections to published texts. the final index is rather short. for instance, it does not include personal names. in all, cromwell masters the art of r e a d i n g a n d s t u d y i n g a n c i e n t t e x t s , overlooking no aspect of the scribal process (formulary, various handwritings, effects of old age, use of greek and coptic). she analyzes texts as objects that were h a n d l e d b y d i f f e r e n t p e o p l e , s t o r e d , disregarded, rediscovered, and sold, and she tracks down the acquisition history of documents using the methodology of museum archaeology established by sarah clackson.8 a strong case is made in this al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 296 • marie legendre book for attention to detail when it comes to ancient documents, and the wealth of information that cromwell extracts from a restricted number of texts is astonishing. the added value of this research is that it also firmly establishes the documents of djeme as a corpus for the study of the early islamic period that ought not escape the attention of historians of that period, thanks to the title on the cover and the focus in several chapters on administration and the payment of the poll tax. the book places a spotlight on the rich contribution of coptic documents to the history of early islamic egypt, a contribution that has been clouded by a narrative of marwanid reform that considers only the highest levels of the administrative hierarchy. cromwell expertly achieves the critical balance of being thought-provoking for specialists in coptic papyrology while remaining accessible to the wider research community and students of late antiquity. this book is a must-read for scholars and students interested in early islamic egypt and late antique history. this is our third issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā (uw) in its new (online, peer-reviewed, and open-access) format. to begin, our deepest thanks t o c h r i s t i a n e m a r i e a b u s a r a h , o u r indispensable managing editor. we have been fortunate, once again, in attracting contributions of decidedly high caliber; we are forever grateful to our colleagues for their response to our invitations to submit current scholarship, produce reviews of new books and other pertinent items, and participate on the editorial board. it is gratifying to see a spectrum of topic areas represented by the articles themselves and in the books under review. these bespeak a flourishing in the adjoining fields of early and medieval arabic, islamic and middle eastern studies. uw stands as a platform from which to bring out significant new scholarship. but our aim, from the onset, has been to rethink the format and role of the academic journal. we are committed, first of all, to publishing submissions in as expeditious a manner as possible (without, of course, sacrificing editorial care). as most of us know first hand, it is frustrating to devote considerable effort to a written piece only to have it linger, even for years, before publication. we are committed, as well, to producing substantial scholarly articles and book reviews. the current r o s t e r o f a r t i c l e s , b o o k r e v i e w s a n d conference reports speaks, we believe, to these aims. finally, we are also determined to promote non-anglophone scholarship. we anticipate publishing our first article in french in the near future, and we strongly encourage our readers in the middle east, europe and elsewhere to submit their work to us. we should add that we are committed to the goal of reviewing non-anglophone scholarship, in all european and middle eastern languages. as is our practice, we open with a solicited comment by the previous year’s recipient of the middle east medievalists (mem) lifetime achievement award. professor fred donner, the 2017 recipient, is a previous president of mem and the middle east studies association (mesa), letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): i-ii (photo of antoine borrut by juliette fradin photography) and long-time editor of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā (in its previous format). he has for decades set a standard for quality scholarship, mentoring, and collegiality in our related fields. it seems wholly unnecessary to introduce his work here. his comment speaks, in part, to clear writing: we are delighted, as editors, to offer our unqualified endorsement. our new issue contains five articlelength studies. digital humanities offers significant promise to our fields, but has not enjoyed the exposure that it deserves. for this reason, we are pleased to include a discussion, by benjamin kiessling, matthew m i l l e r , m a x i m r o m a n o v a n d s a r a h savant, of their ambitious and potentially far-reaching project, the open islamicate texts initiative. luke treadwell’s close discussion of tulunid mints underscores the value of numismatic evidence, and joins a growing body of scholarship on the tulunid period per se and ‘post-imperial’ islamic political history more generally. in a thoughtful and engaging discussion, altogether typical of his scholarship, michael cooperson traces the genealogy of the hoary notion of the abbasid ‘golden age.’ alison vacca, in a compelling study of abbasid-era social history, argues for a closer examination of communal identity and loyalty in the third/ninth century caucasus. identity, in this case as it relates to arab society and history in the islamic conquest period, is the focus of robert hoyland’s detailed discussion. we are no less pleased to produce eight book reviews. our intent remains unchanged: to produce extended reviews that serve their proper purpose, that is, to provide our readers with informed and engaged discussions of new work. we would again note the wealth of scholarship on display in the publications discussed therein. the value of book reviews needs no explanation: we urge our colleagues to keep us posted regarding forthcoming and newly published works, and submit their reviews to us here. in addition, we have two extended reports of conferences held in 2015-2017, and remembrances of anna arkadievna iskoz-dolinina, a prominent russian and soviet arabist, and günter lüling, a german scholar of the qurʾān and early islamic history. we are grateful to our colleagues for agreeing to produce shorter submissions of this kind. we close on two familiar notes. first, we rely on your financial support. our journal is online, open access, and peerreviewed, but it is certainly not free. please keep your membership in middle east medievalists up to date: it goes a long way to helping us cover our costs. for information on membership and the fund, please proceed to the mem home page at http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ and click on “membership.” second, as we noted in our previous issue (uw 24 [2016]), the full run of the journal is available online. our deepest thanks to professor fred donner for his assistance in this regard. the full archive can be accessed on our website: http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ volume-index/ letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): ii sincerely, antoine borrut and matthew s. gordon http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/volume-index/ http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/volume-index/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 622-630 book review james e. lindsay and suleiman a. mourad offer a new collection of primary source texts spanning the period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries and covering muslim relations with western christians as well as muslim perceptions of the latter. the collection has been carefully edited and offers primary sources geared towards the study of the crusade wars, their aftermath, and muslim reactions thereto, though the reader soon learns that this is no ordinary anthology of “crusade sources.” the editors have included less commonly consulted genres of texts, such as letters, poetry, and inscriptions. and, of the * i thank luke yarbrough, malika dekkiche, and the editorial staff at al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā: the journal of middle east medievalists for their corrections and careful copy-editing. any errors that remain are mine. 1. current english-language anthologies available to students of the crusades include: the crusades: a documentary survey, ed. and trans. james a. brundage (milwaukee, wi: marquette university press, 1962; repr., 2020); storici arabi delle crociate, ed. and trans. francesco gabrieli (torino: g. einaudi, 1957); arab historians of the crusades: selected and translated from the arabic sources, trans. e. j. costello (london: routledge & kegan paul, 1969; repr., 1984, 2010); the crusades: a reader, 2nd ed., ed. s. j. allen and emilie amt (toronto: corpus of extant chronicles, lindsay and mourad have selected many that are rarely available to anglophone audiences (e.g., al-ʿaẓīmī’s taʾrīkh ḥalab), while retaining some essential and well-known works (e.g., ibn al-athīr’s al-kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh). this is a welcome departure from the canon of sources used in current anthologies, particularly with regard to the christian campaign “to liberate the church of god” (ad liberandam ecclesiam dei) now known as the first crusade (1096–1099) and with regard to the thirteenth century, a period that often receives less coverage despite the efflorescence of mamluk historiography.1 this canon has traditionally focused muslim sources of the crusader period: an anthology. edited and translated, with an introduction, by james e. lindsay and suleiman a. mourad. (indianapolis; cambridge: hackett publishing company, inc., 2021). isbn: 9781624669842. xxvii+291 pp. $63.00 cloth; $21.00 paper; $16.95 ebook. bogdan c. smarandache* équipe islam médiéval, unité mixte de recherche 8167 orient et méditerranée © 2022 bogdan c. smarandache. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercialnoderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 623 • bogdan c. smarandache on western chronicles and excerpts of islamic texts that provide islamic perspectives on western christians and thereby serve as foils for the events under focus— events whose narrative arcs have been heavily shaped and memorialized by latin christian authors.2 instead, lindsay and mourad’s carefully selected sources guide the reader in understanding not only how muslims perceived and reacted to wars of conquest, but how islamic society persisted beyond and despite the short-lived latin christian presence in the near east.3 lindsay and mourad open the volume with a brief discussion of the historiography of the crusades and the anthology’s central themes. they discuss their objective of “bring[ing] to light a disparate selection of sources that […] introduce the student of crusades history to a more complex understanding of the crusades and the interactions between franks and muslims— which ranged from animosity to amity— in the broader context of islamic history” university of toronto press, 2014). in addition, there are other source readers that contain chapters on the crusades, such as: readings in medieval history, 5th ed., ed. patrick j. geary (toronto: university of toronto press, 2016); reading the middle ages: sources from europe, byzantium, and the islamic world, 3rd ed., ed. barbara h. rosenwein (toronto: university of toronto press, 2018). on the term ad liberandam ecclesiam dei and the conceptualization of the campaign of 1096–1099, see paul e. chevedden, “crusade creationism versus pope urban ii’s conceptualization of the crusades,” the historian (2013): 1–46. 2. on the invention of western crusade narratives, see carol symes, “popular literacies and the first historians of the first crusade,” past & present 235 (2017): 37–67 and the overview article by elizabeth lapina, “crusader chronicles,” in the cambridge companion to the literature of the crusades, ed. anthony bale, 11–24 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019). on the use of islamic sources to corroborate western narratives, see paul e. chevedden, “the islamic view and the christian view of the crusades: a new synthesis,” history 93 (2008): 181–200. 3. one is reminded of carole hillenbrand’s decision to include images of islamic visual and material culture in the crusades: islamic perspectives (edinburgh: university of edinburgh press, 1999), which challenged the over-emphasis on the impact of the crusaders and their military incursions. 4. for a study devoted to this campaign, see suhayr muḥammad ibrāhīm nuʿayniʿ, al-ḥurūb al-ṣalībiyya al-mutaʾakhkhira: ḥamlat buṭrus al-awwal lūsinyān ʿalā al-iskandariyya, 1365 m/747 h (giza: ʿayn, 2002), reviewed by niall christie in mamlūk studies review 10, no. 1 (2006): 199–201. the third volume of the “wisconsin history” of the crusades helped widen the chronological scope of crusade studies: history of the crusades, ed. kenneth m. setton, vol. 3: the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ed. harry w. hazard (madison, wi: university of wisconsin press, 1975). (p. xiv, my italics; see also p. xviii). in fact, they provide this varied picture but also go far beyond it, as i hope to show further below. in outlining the focus of the anthology, they acknowledge that historians have been extending the scope of crusade studies to cover a widening arena of christian militant activity. in this regard, the authors’ decision to include al-nuwayrī al-iskandarānī’s account of peter of cyprus’ (r. 1358–1369) attack on alexandria in 767/1365 (pp. 149–55) challenges popular narratives that end the “crusades period” at 1291 (p. xiii).4 in their introduction, the editors also devote a section to a discussion of jihad in the context of muslim responses to latin christian expansion, drawing on their extensive expertise in this area. without reservation, lindsay and mourad assert that, when the authors of the period used the word jihad, “they invariably meant warfare against the enemies of god and the muslims” (p. xvi, see also p. 249). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) muslim sources of the crusader period • 624 lindsay and mourad have used careful wording to explain that most jurists considered the duty to wage jihad to be incumbent upon all (able) muslims, even those engaged in more contemplative or esoteric forms of jihad. i agree that the term jihād and its cognate jihād fī sabīl allāh—one could add the explicit variant jihād al-ifranj (“jihad against the franks”) used by ibn munqidh (d. 584/1188)—must be read as exhortations to fight the franks, mongols, shīʿīs, nizārī ismaʿilis, nuṣayrīs, or druzes, depending on the (sunnī) author’s perspective and context and specifically in the aftermath o f t h e l a t i n c h r i s t i a n c o n q u e s t s o f 1096–1099. indeed, the cognate mujāhid (“jihad fighter”) springs up in several inscriptions in chapter 6 (nos. 1, 7, 8, 11, 12) and in all cases the term suggests military activity against those whom the ruling elite who commissioned the inscriptions deemed enemies, though the aforementioned groups are never mentioned explicitly.5 however, this use of mujāhid was not universal even in the period in question. the mamluk sultan 5.  n.b., james lindsay and suleiman mourad have translated the term ابــو العزائــم in the ayyūbid inscription at the shrine of isaac and rebecca (corpus inscriptionum arabicarum palaestinae, no. 5, 5:40) as “fearless warrior” (p. 207). more generally, the root of م – ز – can suggest resoluteness (or something pertaining to ع enchantment). i wonder if this term can be translated as “the resolute one” or if it is a laqab-patronymic like abū bakr or abū ḥarb. william edward lane, an arabic-english lexicon, 8 vols. (london: williams, 1863), 5:2038–39; w. m. thackston, an introduction to koranic and classical arabic: an elementary grammar of the language (bethesda, md: ibex publishers, 1994), 181. 6. linda s. northrup, “al-bimāristān al-manṣūrī – explorations: the interface between medicine, politics and culture in early mamluk egypt,” in history and society during the mamluk period (1250–1517): studies of the annemarie schimmel research college i, ed. stephan conermann, 107–42 (bonn: v & r unipress, 2014). 7. hillenbrand, islamic perspectives, 107, 161–62; paul l. heck, “‘jihad’ revisited,” the journal of religious ethics 32, no. 1 (spring 2004): 95–128, at 99. 8. one example is the aleppan chronicler ibn abī ṭayyiʾ (d. 726/1230). see claude cahen, “une chronique chiite au temps des croisades,” comptes rendus des séances de l’académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 79, no. 3 (1935): 258–69; m. c. lyons and d. e. p. jackson, saladin: the politics of the holy war (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1982), 44; anne-marie eddé, saladin (paris: flammarion, 2008), 16, 48, 52. 9. such sources could include pro-fatimid verses by ʿumāra al-yamanī (d. 569/1174), though not a shīʿī qalāwūn (r. 678–689/1279–1290) described his foundation of a hospital in cairo and the appointment of its muslim personnel as acts of jihad.6 it may be helpful for students new to the period, or to the study of islam, to include discussion of changes in the term's usage over time.7 even with frequent references to jihad in the context of muslim responses to frankish military campaigns, students using this anthology will be encouraged to consider the legitimization of warfare b y m u s l i m s a g a i n s t o t h e r m u s l i m s (ibn taymiyya, majmūʿ al-fatāwā, pp. 54–57) or to confront other aspects of interfaith relations, such as diplomacy (ibn wāṣil, mufarrij, p. 143). regarding the former, providing a full range of islamic perspectives for the period is complicated by the absence of shīʿī perspectives on t h e f r a n k s . 8 c o m m e n t a r y f r o m s h ī ʿ ī circles at the time of ṣalāḥ al-dīn’s rise to power in egypt could provide interesting c o u n t e r p o i n t s t o m o s t n a r r a t i v e s emphasizing the sultan’s achievement in terms of campaigning against franks or dissolving the fatimid caliphate.9 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 625 • bogdan c. smarandache lindsay and mourad then provide a brief overview of the range of authorial voices and perspectives in the volume, which is expanded in an extensive survey of sources in appendix c (pp. 225–42).10 they note that “the voice of the uneducated muslim masses” remains underrepresented (p. xvii); however, the edition and translation of ḍiyāʾ al-dīn’s (569–643/1173–1245) a l ‐ ḥ i k ā y ā t a l ‐ m u q t a b a s a f ī k a r ā m ā t mashāyikh al‐arḍ al‐muqaddasa (the cited tales of the wondrous doings of the shaykhs of the holy land) by daniella talmon-heller provides a window into diverse reactions to the frankish presence. other sources cited in alex mallett’s popular muslim reactions to the franks in the levant, 1097–1291 may also be useful in this regard.11 the editors then discuss the organization of the sources in the anthology into six chapters dealing with different genres of text: 1. travel literature and geographical guides 2. jihad books and juridical directives 3. chronicles, memoirs, and poetry himself, or the fatimid diploma of investiture issued to ṣalāḥ al-dīn when he was appointed as wazīr in 564/1169. dwight reynolds, interpreting the self: autobiography in the arabic literary tradition (berkeley: university of california press, 2001), 95–96; eddé, saladin, 49–50, n. 42 (p. 597), 195. 10. this appendix is an immensely useful resource and complements previous surveys of sources, particularly carole hillenbrand, “sources in arabic,” in byzantines and crusaders in non-greek sources, 1025–1204, ed. mary whitby, 283–340 (oxford: oxford university press, 2008); and isabel callejas martín, “los ayubíes (564 h./1168– 658 h./1260): un recorrido historiográfico,” en la españa medieval 38 (2015): 399–467. n.b., al-maqrīzī’s kitāb al-sulūk li-maʿrifat duwal al-mulūk (described on p. 234) runs up to 844 ah (= 1440–1441 ad) in muḥammad ʿ abd al-qādir ʿaṭā’s edition. see also hillenbrand, “sources in arabic,” 321. 11. diyāʾ al-dīn, al-ḥikāyāt al-muqtabasa fī karāmāt mashāyikh al-arḍ al-muqaddasa, ed. and trans. daniella talmon-heller as “the cited tales of the wondrous doings of the shaykhs of the holy land by ḍiyāʾ al-dīn abū ʿabd allāh muḥammad ibn ʿ abd al-wāḥid al-maqdisī (569/1173–643/1245): text, translation and commentary,” crusades 1 (2002): 111–54; alex mallett, popular muslim reactions to the franks in the levant, 1097–1291 (farnham: ashgate, 2014). 4. biographies 5. correspondences, treaties, and truces 6. inscriptions each text is followed by a set of questions about that text, and the end of each chapter includes broader questions that link multiple texts in that chapter. instead of summarizing the sources included in each chapter, i point to some highlights and teaching points that can be especially enlightening for students new to the field. first, the editors’ decision to begin with geography in chapter 1 is refreshing and functions well in terms of framing the study of the period without reference to the crusades and by demonstrating the limited or perhaps circumscribed effect that the expansion of latin christendom had upon some authors, or at least on their writings. for example, readers can compare the descriptions of acre and ascalon in al-harawī’s kitāb al-ishārāt (pp. 1–14) and yāqūt al-ḥamawī’s kitāb muʿjam al-buldān (pp. 28–39), bearing in mind each text’s genre and purpose. the former scarcely acknowledges the presence of the franks al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) muslim sources of the crusader period • 626 or, at least, minimizes their impact, whereas the latter accords them greater attention—at least in the excerpts provided. t h e r i ḥ l a o f i b n j u b a y r ( p p . 1 5 – 2 7 ) provides a third perspective by bringing snapshots of co-existence in acre and other areas to bear on our understanding of the period. furthermore, the ability of al-harawī and ibn jubayr to move between sites controlled by the franks—something that has elicited a range of conclusions by modern historians—provides further insight into frankish-muslim encounters between periods of hostility. a n o t h e r i n s t r u c t i v e c o u n t e r p o i n t p r e s e n t e d i n m u s l i m s o u r c e s i s t h e timeless problem of collaboration with the enemy. comparison between ibn jubayr’s reaction to muslims living comfortably “under frankish rule” (pp. 18–19) and abū al-fawāris ḥamdān’s defence of residing “in a village whose people are not noble” ( p p . 7 6 – 7 7 ) p r o v i d e s a n o t h e r u s e f u l launching point for investigating different muslim reactions to the aftermath of the first crusade and the frankish presence. that ibn jubayr describes a feast arranged by a generous host (who happens to be a village headman, raʾīs, appointed or confirmed in his appointment by the franks!) adds to the complexity of the overall picture. students comparing these texts might be led to believe that muslims did indeed live comfortably under frankish lords, following the depredations of the latin christian invasions of 1096–1099, and that this reality elicited different responses from muslim observers, depending on their allegiance to a particular vision of an ideal society. many sources do support these conclusions. however, the text al‐ḥikāyāt a l ‐ m u q t a b a s a c i t e d a b o v e , a l t h o u g h compiled a generation or two after the frankish-muslim encounters described in its reports, suggests that the franks were very capable of lordly oppression. a question that may arise in courses on christian-muslim political relations i n t h e m e d i e v a l p e r i o d p e r t a i n s t o c ult ures of t rus t and d iplom ac y and how they manifested in various political circumstances, interfaith and intrafaith. taken as a whole, the evidence from chapter 3 suggests that the franks were overwhelmingly less reliable in terms of honoring diplomatic agreements, although certain mamluk sultans can also be accused of such diplomatic mischief. according to the sample of texts in muslim sources, t h e f r a n k s h o n o r e d f o u r s u r r e n d e r agreements: • s a f e p a s s a g e g r a n t e d t o t h e defenders of tyre (p. 36); • s a f e p a s s a g e g r a n t e d t o t h e defenders of the tower of david (pp. 65, 67); and, • s a f e p a s s a g e g r a n t e d t o t h e defenders of jabala and latakia (p. 72). however, several violations by the franks are also recorded in the arabic texts included in the anthology: • safe passage promised to the inhabitants of maʿarrat al-nuʿmān (p. 64); • safe passage promised to the inhabitants of acre (p. 105); and, • safe passage promised to the inhabitants of damietta (p. 109). in contrast, muslim leaders honored a l l a g r e e m e n t s d e s c r i b e d i n t h e anthology: al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 627 • bogdan c. smarandache • s a f e p a s s a g e g r a n t e d t o t h e turkoman defenders of jerusalem (p. 67); • safe passage granted to eschiva of bures and her retinue (p. 95); • safe passage granted to the franks occupying damietta (p. 113); • s a f e p a s s a g e g r a n t e d t o t h e defenders of crac de chevaliers (p. 144); and, • s a f e p a s s a g e g r a n t e d t o t h e inhabitants of tyre, sidon, atlit, beirut, and haifa (p. 147). ibn jubayr’s account suggests that baldwin iv and ṣalāḥ al-dīn honored a truce concluded ca. 580/1184 (p. 16).12 frederick ii and al-malik al-kāmil honored the second “treaty of jaffa” ratified in 626/1229 (pp. 117, 121–22), and al-malik a l ṣ ā l i ḥ i s m ā ʿ ī l , a l m a l i k a l m a n ṣ ū r , and al-malik al-nāṣir dāʾūd and “the franks” (possibly represented by philip of montfort, balian of ibelin, and the templar master armand de périgord13) honored a truce concluded in 640/1243 (p. 128). this sampling brings to mind a major challenge of any source anthology, namely the degree to which a necessarily minute selection of texts can stand in for the huge mass of written material that 12. ʿimād al-dīn al-iṣbahānī, quoted in abū shāma, kitāb al-rawḍatayn fī akhbār al-dawlatayn al-nūriyya wa-l-ṣalāḥiyya, ed. ibrāhīm zaybaq (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1997), 3: 290. an attack by rebellious franks on a group of bedouin herders under safe passage recorded in the lyon eracles/old french continuation must have amounted to a violation of this very truce. la continuation de guillaume de tyr (1184–1197), ed. margaret ruth morgan (paris: paul geuthner, 1982), 18; the conquest of jerusalem and the third crusade: sources in translation, trans. peter w. edbury (aldershot: ashgate, 1997), 12. 13. mary nickerson hardwicke, “the crusader states, 1192–1243,” in history of the crusades, ed. kenneth m. setton, vol. 2: the later crusades, 1189–1311, ed. robert lee wolff and harry w. hazard, 522–54 (madison, wi: university of wisconsin press, 1969), 554; steven runciman, “the crusader states, 1243–1291,” in ibid., 557–98, at 559–61. see also peter thorau, the lion of egypt: sultan baybars i and the near east in the thirteenth century, trans. p. m. holt (new york: longman, 1992), 19 and n. 25 (p. 22). survives, not to mention the many more accounts that are lost. overall, i think that the selection of agreements and cases of violations in muslim sources accurately reflects a tendency of frankish leaders to break agreements that does not find many parallels among muslim leaders. students will not fail to notice this discrepancy, which provides a useful glimpse of the possibilities and limitations of interfaith diplomacy. biographical dictionaries on various scholars and muslim leaders in chapter 4 provide a further perspective that has been largely unavailable to students of the period. the six biographical entries included will help students appreciate the breadth of islamic literature in the period and serve as an introduction to this genre of literature in particular. mourad a n d l i n d s a y h a v e a l s o i n c l u d e d i b n ʿasākir’s entry on jesus to show “jesus’s importance to the islamic conception of history—especially sacred history in the holy land—but also the important role that he plays in the islamic conception of the end of days” (p. 157). with this text in mind, students might revisit the excerpt of al-harawī’s kitāb al-ishārāt in chapter 1 and thereby develop an appreciation of islamic perspectives on prophetic history in tandem with islamic perspectives on sacred landscapes. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) muslim sources of the crusader period • 628 i imagine that the final chapter on inscriptions will be hugely appreciated; it is rare that students of the crusades or medieval islam are given the opportunity to engage with this medium. mourad and lindsay consider the fatimid inscription in their sample (no. 1) as an exemplar of the caliphate’s “highly inflated” display of authority (p. xxii). other tendencies are discernible, such as the militant tone or “warrior theme” emphasized in some inscriptions and the emphasis on piety found in others. these monumental texts provide a window into the diverse systems of titulature and ideologies of various muslim sovereigns and invite comparison of the self-representation of rulers with other portrayals and records of their deeds. another notable feature of the volume is the use of new and original translations for arabic terms, including monarch for al-malik (p. 30, n. 112); juridical directive for fatwā (p. 54); chief commander for atabeg (p. 72, n. 31); the rhymed prose for al-maqāmāt (p. 97); and the sprightly translation of “trailblazer of the religion” for the khiṭāb (honorific title) sābiq al-dīn (p. 194). many students might first encounter the term fatwā in online content or news reports, which raises concerns about the various translations and definitions that western sources might propose for the term. “juridical directive”— an alternative to “legal opinion” widely u s e d i n c u r r e n t s c h o l a r s h i p — d e f t l y i n d i c a t e s t h e i n s t r u m e n t ’ s t e c h n i c a l f u n c t i o n a n d l e g a l v a l u e w i t h o u t suggesting binding force. mourad and 14. the definition of zāwiya (p. 256) might be expanded to include structures for ṣūfī teaching. see ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, ed. carolus johannes tornberg, 13 vols. (leiden: e. j. brill, 1851–76; repr. beirut: dar ṣādir, 1965), 11: 503; the chronicle of ibn al-athīr for the crusading period from al-kāmil fī’l-taʾrīkh, trans. d. s. richards, 3 vols. (aldershot: ashgate, 2006), 2: 298; eddé, saladin, n. 60 (p. 668), cf. 266. l i n d s a y i n c l u d e t r a n s l i t e r a t i o n s f o r many technical terms, including al-ṣāḥib (p. 19, fn. 85), dhimmī (p. 23), sulṭān (p. 51, n. 15), al-rāfiḍa (p. 55, n. 26), khātūn (p. 74, n. 60), and mihmandār (p. 209). the glossary (appendix d) contains many of these terms as well as others introduced throughout the text and is yet another extremely helpful resource packed into this volume.14 some terms that might be of interest to students and researchers are left unglossed: girdle (p. 25, but see n. 94), chamberlain (p. 25), monotheist ( p . 4 2 ) , g a r r i s o n e d w a r r i o r ( p . 4 2 ) , c o m m u n i t y ( p p . 4 5 , 5 1 , 5 2 ) , a g e o f ignorance (p. 45), hypocrites (pp. 47, 56), officer (p. 72), village estate (p. 76), authority (p. 84), nation (p. 97), ethnicities ( p . 1 2 6 ) , e x c o m m u n i c a t e ( p . 1 2 6 ) , volunteers (p. 154), statehood and kingship (p. 171), dominion (p. 198), frontier warrior (pp. 206, 209, 211), the friend of the commander of the faithful (p. 208), and partner of the commander of the faithful (p. 212), but the editors have made it very easy to look up these terms in the original arabic texts (see below). the volume allows multiple configurations in terms of how courses on the crusades or on islamic history during the crusades might be organized. lindsay has suggested one possible approach by assigning, alongside muslim sources, paul m. cobb’s race to paradise, which provides an overarching narrative and additional c o n t e x t f o r s t u d e n t s e n g a g i n g w i t h the texts in the anthology (lindsay has kindly shared his syllabus on the hackett publishing company webpage featuring al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 629 • bogdan c. smarandache muslim sources15). in some cases, students using this anthology might seek a little more context on particular references. for example, students new to the period might not be familiar with the troubled history of najrān (p. 38), whose inhabitants were evicted from their town by ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb (r. 13–23/634–644).16 the f o u r t h q u e s t i o n o n p . 2 0 3 r e g a r d i n g the significance of penalties for truce violations might be challenging to address without more context on the lead-up to qalāwūn’s decision to attack the remaining frankish territorial holdings in the coastal plain.17 overall, the questions seem to gradually become more difficult (see p. 115, for example), which should encourage progressively more critical reading on the part of students. it was wonderful to be able to find some of the inscriptions online on the “discover islamic art” section of the museum with no frontiers (mwnf) website. one concern might be the longevity of hyperlinks, in which case it would help to have an item name and 15. the course is called hist 201 approaches to history: the islamic near east during the crusader period. see “muslim sources of the crusader period: an anthology,” hackett publishing company website, accessed july 22, 2022, https://hackettpublishing.com/muslim-sources-of-the-crusader-period. 16. anver m. emon, religious pluralism and islamic law: dhimmīs and others in the empire of law (oxford: oxford university press, 2012), 103; fred m. donner, the early islamic conquests (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2014), 236. 17. on this episode, see linda s. northrup, from slave to sultan: the career of al-manṣūr qalāwūn and the consolidation of mamlūk rule in egypt and syria (678–689 a.h./1279–1290 a.d.) (stuttgart: f. steiner, 1998), 156–57; peter m. holt, early mamluk diplomacy, 1260–1290: treaties of baybars and qalāwūn with christian rulers (leiden: e. j. brill, 1995), 73; cf. marwan nader, “urban muslims, latin laws, and legal institutions in the kingdom of jerusalem,” medieval encounters 13 (2007): 243–70, at 268–69. 18. on internal politics and reactions to christian-muslim diplomatic agreements concluded in 626/1229 and 641/1244, see suleiman a. mourad, “a critique of the scholarly outlook of the crusades: the case for tolerance and coexistence,” in syria in crusader times: conflict and coexistence, ed. carole hillenbrand, 144–60 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020), at 147–49. mohamad el-merheb makes a similar observation with regard to depictions of king louis ix of france in arabic accounts of the king’s invasion of egypt in 647/1249; mohamad el-merheb, “louis ix in medieval arabic sources: the saint, the king, and the sicilian connection,” al-masāq: journal of the medieval mediterranean 28, no. 3 (2016): 282–301, at 298–99. number for secondary reference (e.g., madrasa al-ṣalāḥiyya, pa 33). t h i s a n t h o l o g y s h o w s t h a t t h e c r u s a d e s , h o w e v e r d e f i n e d , d i d n o t constantly preoccupy the islamic world. the reactions of muslim leaders were v a r i e d a n d c o m p l e x w h e n e v e r a n y western christian powers threatened muslim lives and livelihoods. and internal politics were as important as the frankish factor in shaping contemporary muslim accounts of the frankish invasions and subsequent settlement.18 the volume is innovative and immensely informative. it is also accessible, readable, and easy to use. editions and translations used in the volume are clearly identified in the first footnote of any primary source text or by consulting the bibliography. the volume also has an index organized by honorific titles (khiṭābs), names, place names, terms and events, and qurʾānic and biblical references. the placement of brackets around qurʾānic verses is another nice detail that, as lindsay and mourad explain, https://www.museumwnf.org/ https://hackettpublishing.com/muslim-sources-of-the-crusader-period al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) muslim sources of the crusader period • 630 replicates pre-modern ways of marking out verses of the qurʾān as a sign of deference (p. 2, n. 4). muslim sources of the crusader period: an anthology merits recognition for outstanding content put together b y j a m e s l i n d s a y a n d s u l e i m a n mourad and for its excellent presentation, layout, and formatting, which attests to the careful work of editors and staff a t t h e h a c k e t t p u b l i s h i n g c o m p a n y . i learned a lot from this volume and can imagine how much it will benefit its readership, students and researchers in particular. mem awards al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): iv-ix thank you, dear members of the mem, for giving me the great honor of receiving your lifetime achievement award. from colleagues, such an acknowledgement is most precious. besides gratitude and pride, i also feel humbled by the brilliant company of the colleagues with whom i share this privilege. there is always an element of accident in the choice of a career, as is also the case with me. my studies began in germany at the university of hamburg. but this was not the initial plan. my parents and i expected that, with my french school education in egypt, i would study in france, like my francophile father did. it turned out otherwise: in the same week i graduated from school, i married my german husband gerhard behrens. he had been in cairo for his doctorate research on islamic law and was due now to return home. it was 1964 and i was eighteen when i left egypt with him. my adolescent interests had been so far rather disparate. i painted, and i read all the great novels i could get hold of. my bedtime reading was french poetry, and i was also interested in genetics. but i was quite ignorant in history, which has always been one of my husband’s main interests. when i began to browse in his library and i read philip hitti’s history of the arabs, i realised that something was missing in my education. in germany at that time, the mainstream conservative press was very hostile to egypt and to gamal abd al-nasser and all that he stood for: arab nationalism, liberation movements, and the palestinian cause. i felt i needed to know more about the history of the middle east. i think this was the search for identity that is quite common among young people of migrant backgrounds. i sometimes criticized myself for not having rather explored a different culture than my native one. remarks by the recipient of the 2021 mem lifetime achievement award given at the annual meeting of middle east medievalists (online, 5 december 2021) doris behrens-abouseif soas university of london (da30@soas.ac.uk) © 2022 doris behrens-bouseif. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. v • doris behrens-abouseif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) in hamburg, i joined the department of islamkunde and semitic studies headed by prof. bertold spuler. a student of carl brockelmann, spuler was an academic giant who mastered more than twenty languages and had an enormous range of interests. among these was oriental christianity. at that time the german phd program required besides the major s u b j e c t o f s p e c i a l i z a t i o n , t w o m i n o r topics, one of which should be from a different department. besides islamic history and semitic languages, i chose old testament—genesis. my study of the old testament was one of the most fascinating intellectual experiences i ever had thanks to the research methodology i learned there. my husband warned me that with such topics it would not be easy to find a job afterwards. in the 1960s the students’ movement was in full action, and spuler directly experienced the students’ anger after he shouted during a demonstration that they belonged in a concentration camp. he was suspended and on that occasion a slogan was coined that eventually became famous: unter den talaren muff von 1000 jahren (under the gowns: the stench of 1000 years). however, i myself never had a reason to complain about him. i was one of his last students, things were changing, and at that time the department included several women who eventually made successful careers, including his then assistant barbara flemming. like many other students in the field of “orientalistik” in the sixties, i wanted to write my phd thesis on a contemporary subject. although this was not spuler’s main interest, we agreed on a compromise: t h e h i s t o r y o f t h e c o p t s i n t h e l a t e nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. i always wondered whether he expected the views i presented in my thesis, which did not fully agree with his, though he never contested them. to the present day, this critical phase in the history of coptic-muslim relations has been ignored in favor of the more harmonious later period of national solidarity against british occupation. besides the thesis i published only one article on this topic, years later as a conference paper. i thought coptic history should not be exclusive to coptic historians, as had been the case hitherto, and that more copts should study islamic history, which is their history as well. this has become the case in the meantime. in search of a suitable occupation after my phd—we were in frankfurt then—i went to seek advice in a counselor office that provided career guidance to new graduates. after looking at my credentials, the man in charge politely suggested to me to work as a fortune-teller. as an egyptian woman, he told me, i had a great chance of success. besides, there was increasing interest these days in all things esoteric, which was true. i felt lost. the matter soon became irrelevant as we moved with our son back to cairo where my husband was sent by the deutsche bank as representative in the middle east. in cairo, my interests took a new turn, which had some orientalistic features. for the first time, i did what western-educated people do in cairo, but never anybody from my family or my egyptian friends did: i went to discover the islamic city, and i was overwhelmed by what it revealed to me. with the little book les mosquées du caire by gaston wiet in my handbag and accompanied by my friend christa, i used to go on regular tours of medieval cairo. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) remarks by the recipient of the 2021 mem lifetime achievement award • vi after we had thoroughly visited all the mosques documented in the book, i began to ask myself: “what next?” i could not teach in egyptian universities because the german phd was not acknowledged there at that time, but i was offered an opportunity to teach german. the alternative was: new studies. auc was the place where michael rogers, george scanlon, and christel kessler t a u g h t i s l a m i c a r t a n d a r c h i t e c t u r e . michael rogers was very welcoming and encouraged me to join their ma program (auc had no phd program in this area), but i was not at all after a degree; i just wanted to learn about islamic art and architecture and medieval cairo. years later, george scanlon told me that the fact that i applied for an ma after having already earned a phd raised some eyebrows and that not everyone was convinced that i would fit in. of course, adaptation was needed, but this was technical rather than social: to work visually to read objects is a different process from reading texts. m i c h a e l r o g e r s i n t r o d u c e d m e t o layla ali ibrahim who eventually had a tremendous impact on my career and my life. she was an extraordinary character. the daughter of a prominent figure in egyptian society and culture, and herself a private scholar, she had accumulated a unique firsthand knowledge of cairo’s monuments and of the museum of islamic art, which included her father’s collection. to foreign students and scholars who came to cairo in the seventies and eighties to study art and material culture, a visit to laila was a must. as a private scholar she had an original approach that added a new dimension to my conventional studies. she did not write much, but all that she wrote or lectured on was original and enlightening. my second graduate program was a most enjoyable experience thanks to michael rogers’ dissecting mind, christel k e s s l e r ’ s a b i l i t y t o r e a d t h e s t o n e s , and george scanlon’s eloquence and enthusiasm. i was in no hurry at all to finish, and i did not see then the possibility of a career. however, i gradually found myself writing my first articles and being asked for papers and publications. i taught an introductory course at auc on islamic architecture in cairo. during those years laila and i used to meet once or twice a week to spend the morning visiting and studying monuments. back at home in the afternoon, our architectural chats and deliberations went on for hours on the phone. while working on the topography of late mamluk cairo for my ma, i discovered a mamluk building! the domed zawiya of the sufi shaykh damirdash built in the late fifteenth century. although it was well-known to worshippers and to the damirdash sufi community, the domed building had escaped the attention of art historians and the antiquity authorities. following my publication, it was added to the list of cairo’s historic monuments. one day as laila and i were praising christel kessler’s newly published book on mamluk masonry domes, i said on the spur of the moment that we now need a book on minarets. she immediately replied, “go ahead and do it.” john rodenbeck, the then head of the auc press who happened to be present, added, “and we shall publish it.” a few days later, laila arrived with a pile of shoe boxes filled with photographs of all the minarets of cairo. she handed them to me and ordered me to write the book. vii • doris behrens-abouseif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) in the seventies the waqf and court archives, which had been difficult to access in the previous decades, were reopened for scholars. the ministry of awqaf at the dar al-wathaʾiq at the citadel became a regular meeting point for scholars and students from egypt and abroad. thanks to her means and connections, laila managed to acquire a substantial collection of waqf documents by hiring copyists and ordering p h o t o c o p i e s , w h i c h s h e g e n e r o u s l y distributed to all those interested. so far only a few egyptian scholars had made use of waqf sources for the study of architecture and urban history. for me it was a magnificent experience to find the fifteenth-century foundation deed of the emir azbak min tutukh, which describes the layout of the azbakiyya quarter. this quarter built around an artificial pond had been a landmark and a jewel of cairo for four centuries before it vanished in the nineteenth century. while only briefly mentioned by historians, the document reveals its original design and functions. it became the subject of one of my earliest books. waqf documents revealed to me the connection between architecture and its assigned functions, which has always been a major concern in my research. in the 1980s a number of remarkable and innovative studies based on waqf materials shed a new light on mamluk religious institutions and practices, and on the endowment system itself and its socioeconomic impact. the french archaeological institute ( i f a o ) p r o v i d e d a g r e a t a c a d e m i c e n v i r o n m e n t i n c a i r o f r o m w h i c h i enormously profited in the years between the seventies and eighties. i met there the eminent scholars andré raymond and jean-claude garcin and had the privilege to participate in events that took place in their circles, notably on social and urban s t u d i e s o f t h e m a m l u k a n d o t t o m a n periods. i admired the two of them, and both in their very different ways inspired and influenced me. before time came to return to germany, i decided to make use of the introductory course i had been teaching for several years at auc, while it was still fresh in my mind, and i published my islamic architecture in cairo: an introduction. back in germany in 1986, this time in munich, i realized, in fact i was advised, that in order to keep connected with academic life, i needed to have a habilitation, the post-phd thesis that that was necessary at that time to qualify for a university position. islamic art was not strongly represented in german universities in the eighties and nineties. the topic of my thesis and title of the resulting book was egypt’s adjustment to ottoman rule: institutions, waqf and architecture in cairo (16th & 17th centuries), where i used waqf and architectural patronage to document this period of transition for which chronicles and other archive sources are relatively limited. i submitted it at the university of freiburg where i had the privilege to enjoy the support of the great ulrich haarmann. he was my mentor in those years, and we kept in regular touch to the end of his life. i was highly inspired by his scholarship and his broad-minded approach. his premature death was a shock. only weeks before his death, while in hospital, he wrote me a warm-hearted letter to congratulate me for my new book beauty in arabic culture, which was first published in german. this book was largely inspired by the scholarship done on aesthetics al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) remarks by the recipient of the 2021 mem lifetime achievement award • viii in european culture, which opened my eyes to the fact that arab-islamic art had flourished independently from religious ideology. based on arabic texts of various disciplines, i wanted to emphasize this fact against recent neo-orientalist, wellmeaning misinterpretations that see sacral symbols behind every design. with the status of privat-dozentin earned with the habilitation, one was entitled to teach, without salary but for a symbolic honorarium, until a call, “der ruf” as they describe it in germany, comes for a professorship. it might also not come. visiting professorships and fellowships in those years, including at harvard, filling in for oleg grabar one year and also at the harvard graduate school of design, were invaluable and uplifting experiences. although i did not exactly belong to his “school,” grabar’s visionary and conceptual approach to the discipline impressed me, in particular his emphasis on the iconography of inscriptions. at harvard, i often saw annemarie schimmel whose intellectual vitality was always a model for me. i enjoyed discovering her bon-vivant side as we met for lunch and browsed through vintage jewelery. her scholarship began with the mamluks, with her phd in bonn. dedicated to her memory, the annemarie schimmel-kolleg, headed by stephan conermann, has been recently a center of advanced mamluk studies and a vibrant meeting point of mamlukists from all over the world. “the call” for a professorship did not come from germany, but to my great luck and against all expectations it came from london. michael rogers, with whom i never lost contact and with whom i share many views, was to retire in 2000 from the nasser d. khalili chair of islamic art and archaeology at soas, which he held after years at the british museum. he advised me to apply for his position. apart from michael, i did not have much contact with british universities, and therefore i never expected that this would be the place where i would feel academically and otherwise more at home than ever. i enjoyed teaching. i had interesting and stimulating students from various backgrounds. my participation in the school’s promotion committee has been an especially rewarding and memorable experience. examining the achievements of my colleagues has been very humbling and highly stimulating. there i had t he p riv ileg e t o have access to the wonderful khalili collection of islamic art. one of its remarkable and progressive features is the place it dedicated to the arts of nineteenth c e n t u r y , w h i c h s t e p h e n v e r n o i t h a s brilliantly documented with his book occidentalism. i had the privilege to work together with stephen on a conference and publication on islamic art in the nineteenth century, which was meant to promote more interest in this subject. i wished that my later conference on mamluk art would be coupled with an exhibition like esin atıl had done three decades earlier in washington, but sadly this was not possible. a mamluk exhibition remains an unfulfilled dream of mine. after i published cairo of the mamluks and a new version of the minaret of cairo, other issues of mamluk material culture kept stimulating my curiosity. the conference organized by frédéric bauden, mamluk cairo, a crossroads of embassies, was an eye-opener. provoked by a recent collective publication on the culture of gifts in the muslim world that did not refer ix • doris behrens-abouseif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) to the mamluks, i found myself turning the paper i presented on mamluk diplomatic gifts into a book, practising diplomacy in the mamluk sultanate: gifts and material culture in the medieval islamic world. i h a v e a l w a y s b e e n i n t r i g u e d b y t h e c o n n e c t i o n b e t w e e n p r e s t i g i o u s architecture and function. the incredible n u m b e r o f m a m l u k m a d r a s a s r a i s e d questions about the material culture of teaching and the provision of books. in recent years important publications on reading practices in the arab world and conversations with konrad hirschler at soas prompted me to explore the material aspects of the book and its market in the mamluk sultanate, to which i dedicated a recent book, the book in mamluk egypt and syria (1250-1517). living in london, where museums, galleries, private collections, and high expertise and scholarship in artefacts are densely concentrated like nowhere else, i could not escape dealing with objects. m a m l u k m e t a l w o r k , d u e t o i t s r i c h epigraphy, is a challenging and compelling subject. in the last twenty years i have been trying to decipher poetic inscriptions on mamluk metal objects. it has been a tedious task which is also the reason why it has not been seriously tackled before. the small corpus of poems i collected is in my view one of the most relevant things i have ever done because it has revealed an unknown aspect of mamluk art and culture. it would be ungrateful not to emphasize o n t h i s o c c a s i o n t h e p l e a s u r e a n d satisfaction of teaching. i think the bond between teacher and student, which i felt on both sides, is a very special one, something similar to a parental bond. i have learned from my students and their work, and, as a colleague and friend once told me, “they don’t know how much we learn from them!” i cherish the friendships that developed with my former students and have continued since my retirement. in my retirement i miss teaching; however, the passion and urge for research, which are behind every scholar’s career, have their own schedule. i am grateful for the opportunity to compile this retrospective because it has reminded me that my work has been mainly a pursuit of pleasure. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 210-212 book review longing for the lost caliphate: a transregional history by mona hassan explores the idea of the caliphate—a means through which people could assume leadership after the death of the prophet muḥammad in 11/632— particularly its manifestations and valences under the abbasids and the ottomans through wide-ranging evidence, including poetry and juridical texts (5). chronologically, the work spans two specified time periods, namely the first/seventh into the tenth/sixteenth centuries and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. the study demonstrates strong grounding in theoretical approaches to collective memory and memory studies. it stands out overall as a work that contributes to and encourages important conversations among scholars of islam and also between them and those working in other fields. the work consists of six main chapters, along with an introduction and epilogue. chapter 1, “visions of a lost caliphal capital: baghdad, 1258 ce,” is centered on the mongol conquest of baghdad in 656/1258 and how the loss of this city was felt and conceptualized by muslims in a multitude of sources, including written, visual, and aural texts. for example, hassan explores how the scholar tāj al-dīn al-subkī (d. 771/1370) wrote about this loss in his history, ṭabaqāt al-shāfiʿiyyah al-ku brā , foc u s ing on how t he w ork evokes and interprets the loss of baghdad for muslims collectively. aside from such discussions of specific scholars and their works, the chapter also emphasizes a broader “cultural discourse” that they created and participated in, the contours of which begin to emerge if we assess such figures and their writings in light of one another (22). t h e f i r s t c h a p t e r s i t u a t e s t h e d e s t r u c t i o n a n d l o s s o f b a g h d a d a s a c e n t r a l , d e f i n i n g e v e n t i n m u s l i m collective memory, particularly in terms of subsequent conceptualizations of the caliphate, which is the topic of chapter 2, “recapturing lost glory and legitimacy.” mona hassan, longing for the lost caliphate: a transregional history. princeton and oxford: princeton university press, 2016. pp. xv, 390, with index. $45.00 (hardback). isbn: 9780691166780. isbn: 9781400883714 (ebook). sabahat f. adil university of colorado, boulder (sabahat.adil@colorado.edu) mailto:sabahat.adil%40colorado.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 211 • sabahat f. adil this chapter also examines various texts like chapter 1, but it delves into the years following the seventh/thirteenth century mongol conquest of baghdad. in this vein, it explores how the conquest was conceived of, particularly in terms of reclaiming the past prestige, power, and authority of the caliphate. hassan accentuates these ideas with historical examples of rulers, dynasties, and others in the political domain who sought to assume the power and position once held by the abbasid caliphate. c h a p t e r 3 , “ c o n c e p t u a l i z i n g t h e caliphate, 632–1517 ce,” expands the intellectual frame established by the first two chapters to demonstrate how an interest in the caliphate extended chronologically long before and well after the mongol conquest of baghdad. as such, the idea of the caliphate must be explored in light of the years surrounding the foundation of islam itself, including early abbasid articulations. on this note, chapter 3 looks at how caliphates were conceptualized in juridical texts from the first/seventh into the tenth/sixteenth centuries, paying particular attention to the work of mamluk-era intellectuals such as ibn khaldūn (d. 784/1406) and al-qalqashandī (d. 821/1418). while chapters 1, 2, and 3 focus on the premodern, chapters 4, 5, and 6 are situated in the modern period. chapter 4, “manifold meanings of loss: ottoman defeat, early 1920s,” relies on various types of texts to show how the notion of a caliphate at that time can be understood through a consideration of these texts, but in a contextually distinct moment—post-wwi and on the eve of the shattering of the ottoman caliphate and the launching of the turkish republic—than that of the first three chapters. in terms of sources, this chapter centers on historical documents to examine attitudes towards the caliphate, which ought to be contrasted with the emphasis on texts such as juridical in earlier chapters. this is notable because it suggests that discourse about the caliphate was not limited to a particular discursive domain, but rather pervaded multiple ones. chapter 5, “in international pursuit of a caliphate,” reviews conceptions of the caliphate on a global scale, particularly o r c h e s t r a t e d e f f o r t s t o i m a g i n e t h e caliphate beyond nation-state borders. as the title suggests, this chapter truly sheds light on the international character of such efforts, spanning discussions raging in istanbul and cairo to indonesian and chinese viewpoints on the composition of a caliphal council. finally, chapter 6, “debating a modern caliphate,” looks at specific figures in the ottoman context with ideas, often differing ones, regarding the caliphate, including mustafa sabri (d. 1954) and said nursi (d. 1960). overall lost caliphate makes numerous noteworthy contributions to scholarship. first, it considers a variety of sources rather than remain confined to a single body of texts. in addition to written materials, the work features visuals, including reproductions of paintings, m a p s , a n d m o r e , d e m o n s t r a t i n g t h e multidimensional pull of the idea of the caliphate. because the work delves into numerous texts and forms of evidence, more studies on the topic in the future will be beneficial to move along this area of academic interest in memory studies and islamicate pasts by exploring in greater detail some subset of what has been discussed here. additionally, the work builds upon foundational studies on al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) mona hassan’s longing for the lost caliphate: a transregional history • 212 memory and history, including those by émile durkheim, maurice halbwachs, and others, and it aptly considers their ideas in light of particular islamicate contexts. furthermore, it is highly useful in terms of advancing the study of islamicate intellectual history, and ought to be put into conversation with other works that are also exploring the history of ideas in global and islamicate contexts, including recent ones such as cemil aydin’s the idea of the muslim world: a global intellectual history (harvard up, 2017). scholars and students alike, particularly those with an interest in the history of ideas and memory studies, will find this work intellectually engaging and highly informative. it can be assigned in classroom settings, especially at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, across a range of departments, including history, religious studies, and literature. at its core, longing for the lost caliphate is a timely and noteworthy book about the development and pull of the notion of the caliphate on muslim communities and islamicate contexts over time, and is as relevant to the twenty-first century world stage as ever. in memoriam al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 270-272 the passing of ehsan yarshater, the hagop kevorkian professor emeritus o f i r a n i a n s t u d i e s a t c o l u m b i a university, on 2 september 2018 in fresno, california, was a tremendous loss not just for iranian studies but for the scholarly world. yarshater was born in hamadan, iran, on 3 april 1920. orphaned at a young age, he moved to tehran to live with a maternal uncle. he resumed his education in 1934 after obtaining a scholarship to attend the newly opened danesh-sara-ye moqaddamati high school, graduating at the top of his class. he went on to attend the teachers training college (danesh-sara-ye ʿali), later part of the faculty of letters at the university of tehran, and the faculty of law at the u n i v e r s i t y o f t e h r a n . h e r e c e i v e d a d.litt. degree in 1947 with a dissertation on timurid poetry (published in 1955). yarshater received a fellowship from the british council in 1948 to study educational methods, but after arriving in london he became a student of iranian philology with walter bruno henning at the school of oriental and african studies. upon his return to iran in 1953 to conduct research for his dissertation on southern tati dialects, which conclusively d e m o n s t r a t e d t h e i r c o n n e c t i o n s t o m e d i a n , h e t a u g h t a n c i e n t i r a n i a n languages at the university of tehran and founded or helped found the institute for the translation and publication of books ehsan yarshater (1920–2018) 271 • elton l. daniel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) (bongah-e tarjoma va nashr-e ketab), the book society (anjoman-e ketab), and the journal rahnema-ye ketab. with the recommendation and support of henning, yarshater received a visiting position at columbia university in 1958, and, in 1961, was appointed to the new kevorkian chair in iranian studies there, which he held until his retirement in 1999. in addition t o c h a i r i n g t h e m i d d l e e a s t s t u d i e s department for several years, yarshater also revived the center for iranian studies at columbia in 1968 and served as its director until 2016. in recognition of his many years of contributions to academic life at columbia, the center was endowed and renamed the ehsan yarshater center for iranian studies in august 2018. yarshater’s scholarly interests were every bit as diverse and accomplished as his life story would suggest. his own books and articles included studies not only on linguistics, dialectology, and many periods of persian literature but philosophy, painting, history, religion, ethnology, music, and other topics. among them are many works of significance for the membership of middle east medievalists, notably his edition of volume iii of the cambridge history of iran (including his own important entries on mazdakism, the “iranian world view,” and “iranian national history”) and thought-provoking and seminal articles such as “theme of wine-drinking and the concept of the beloved in early persian poetry,” “textual aspects of the andarznama,” “were the sasanians heirs to the achaemenids?,” and “the persian presence in the islamic world.” yarshater’s contributions, however, go well beyond his own monographs. he continued the love of books and talent for publication he had shown in iran while at columbia, even establishing for a while his own press (bibliotheca persica). under his direction, the columbia center sponsored six series of publications, producing over a hundred titles including translations of persian classics, scholarly monographs in iranian studies, editions of texts (including a new edition of the shahnama), and illustrated works on persian art and architecture as well as publication of lecture series he had helped found at soas, harvard, ucla, and the collège de france. yarshater tirelessly promoted the work of other scholars by organizing conferences and symposia, compiling editing volumes, and sponsoring monographs. moreover, h e w a s r e s p o n s i b l e f o r c r e a t i n g a n d raising funds for two private foundations dedicated to the promotion of iranian studies and culture, the persian heritage foundation and the encyclopaedia iranica foundation, that have the means to carry on his work indefinitely. there are few scholars in the field who are not in his debt directly or indirectly for help with publication, letters of recommendation, financial support for projects, and the like. f i n a l l y , o n e m u s t m a k e a s p e c i a l acknowledgement of what mary boyce called yarshater’s “genius in envisaging ends and securing means,” as it applies to conceiving, organizing, and producing major collaborative scholarly projects. yarshater was not only the principal investigator and general editor for the longest continually funded neh project, but also the only scholar to supervise three major neh projects simultaneously, all of them of particular interest for members of mem: the forty volume tabari translation (albany, ny: suny press, 1985–2007); the three volume translation of bayhaqi’s — elton l. daniel university of hawaii (edaniel@hawaii.edu) in memoriam: ehsan yarshater (1920–2018) • 272 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) history (ilex/harvard university press, 2011), and the encyclopaedia iranica (ongoing, london: i.b. tauris, 2008). the encyclopaedia iranica remains unfinished, as does another major project, the history of persian literature series, but thanks to yarshater’s foresight and planning, they can continue to progress. mailto:edaniel%40hawaii.edu?subject= mem awards al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): iii-ix le t m e b e g i n b y e x p r e s s i n g m y profound gratitude to the officers o f m i d d l e e a s t m e d i e v a l i s t s f o r h o n o r i n g m e w i t h m e m ’ s l i f e t i m e achievement award. it is indeed a great honor to be so recognized by my esteemed colleagues—even though such an honor is a kind of double-edged sword. on the one hand, the recognition is a source of deep satisfaction; on the other, it reaffirms the sobering reality that one is nearing the end of one’s game. but, since turning the award down would not change the reality of age attained, i am most pleased and honored to accept it. thank you all very much. i w o u l d l i k e n o w t o s p e n d a f e w minutes reminiscing on how our “field” of investigation has changed since i first began to study it seriously—which was about a half-century ago, inasmuch as i enrolled in my first arabic course in the summer of 1965. thinking back on the 1960s and 1970s, it is surprising even f o r m e t o r e a l i z e h o w a s t o n i s h i n g l y undeveloped the study of medieval islam and early or medieval near eastern history was, compared to the situation today; and those of you who began your studies considerably later, say in the 1990s or after, or who indeed are still engaged in graduate study now, may be interested to learn just how rudimentary things were when i began my formal studies of the near east, or even when i completed them and took up my first teaching position in yale’s department of history in the fall of 1975. f i r s t o f a l l , t h e r e w e r e f a r f e w e r universities than today that offered any instruction in middle eastern languages or in the region’s history and cultures. some of the relatively few programs that did exist taught only arabic, not remarks by the recipient of the 2016 mem lifetime achievement award given at the annual meeting of middle east medievalists (boston, 17 november 2016) the maturing of medieval islamic and middle eastern studies* fred m. donner university of chicago (f-donner@uchicago.edu) * this essay is based loosely on my notes for remarks made at the mem members’ meeting held during the mesa conference in boston, ma, in november 2016. mailto:f-donner%40uchicago.edu iv • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) persian or turkish as well, and what was offered sometimes did not lead to a very advanced level of mastery. enrollments in near eastern language courses and courses dealing with islamic history were generally fairly low in those days, and persuading university administrations to commit resources to what were then generally considered “obscure” languages w a s n o t e a s y . t h e r e w e r e s u m m e r intensive language courses for american students, but almost all were located in the u.s. in the 1960s there existed east and west coast summer intensive language programs sponsored by consortia of the few universities that had middle east programs, but there did not yet exist the dozens of summer language programs one sees today. study abroad programs for middle eastern languages did not get underway, really, until the 1970s. i was fortunate enough to participate in the late 1960s in what was perhaps the first such program for arabic, a year-long program in lebanon at the middle east centre for arab studies (mecas). this was an institution operated by the british foreign office in order to train diplomats and army personnel destined for service in england’s many middle eastern protectorates—which included, in those days, sudan, aden, and the “trucial states” of the persian gulf. this american study-abroad program for arabic (nuposa—the national undergraduate program for overseas study of arabic) ran for about ten years with funding from the carnegie foundation; it was explicitly designed as a kind of experiment or pilot program, limited to about eight students per year, to see if such a venture might be desirable over the longer term. eventually, the nuposa program’s success led the u.s. government to establish the casa program at the american university in cairo— which in the 1970s became the main studyabroad program for arabic; and in the past twenty years, many more study-abroad programs for arabic were established, although today a number of these have been forced to close down because of political instability (notably programs in yemen and syria). language study in iran has been difficult for american students since 1979 for obvious reasons. i would say that programs for language study in turkey, which have until recently been quite robust, must be put on our watch list as political developments play out in that country. all of this shows that the number of people being produced annually with competence in arabic before and during the 1970s was very small, and often their training was not very deep; and the same was true generally speaking for students of persian and turkish. the number of students entering graduate training in middle eastern studies was still minuscule, and more importantly, very few of them brought much area background to their graduate studies. often entering phd students in the 1960s and 1970s would have to enroll in elementary arabic in their first year, because they had had no way to begin the language in their undergraduate institution, and the dearth of study-abroad and intensive summer programs meant that not a few of them in the 1960s and into the 1970s, completed their doctoral studies with only about four years of arabic training under their belts, barely sufficient to do research in arabic sources, and often with virtually no active command of spoken arabic. this is in no way meant as a criticism of these earlier generations of scholars: most were al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) remarks by the recipient of the 2016 mem lifetime achievement award • v intelligent, dedicated, and did the best they could with the training they received, but the state of the field before the 1970s was such that they simply could not get really deep training. the robust training available today, with dozens of intensive and summer programs here and abroad, means that, in this respect, we live in a different—and much better—world. b e y o n d l a n g u a g e t r a i n i n g , m i d d l e eastern studies were underdeveloped in other ways too. there were fewer programs, and the programs were smaller, with fewer faculty in each than is the norm today. there were many dedicated scholars, but when i was studying in the 1960s it was basically the case that important “fields” within middle eastern studies were virtually the ‘property’ of one established specialist, whose knowledge of that “field” was considered definitive— if a subject that is the province of only one practitioner can really be called a “field.” so, for example, if you wished to know about islamic law, you consulted josef schacht at columbia; for anything dealing with the mamluks, you had to talk to david ayalon. similarly, islamic art “was” richard ettinghausen, succeeded by oleg grabar; the life of muhammad “was” w. montgomery watt; numismatics “was” george miles; the fatimids—well, hardly anybody studied the fatimids in those days. but such a situation is clearly unsatisfactory, because one needs the give and take of different contending voices within a specific field to make it vital and, indeed, viable. the absence of sufficient critical scholarly debate meant that many “fields” remained quite static and conservative over generations; one consulted the reigning “expert” and got the information one wanted. in short, in the 1960s and even the 1970s, our field was much smaller than it is today. change came sometimes by a gradual i n c r e a s e i n t h e n u m b e r o f s t u d e n t s attracted to a subfield, but more often through the impact of a single book, or the determined efforts of a small group of scholars. the current burgeoning of interest in the mamluks, for example, began slowly but was really jump-started in the 1980s when professor carl petry of northwestern and bruce craig, the middle east bibliographer at the university of chicago’s regenstein library, realized their shared enthusiasm and decided to combine forces. petry’s shoeboxes of bibliography index cards became the basis for the online mamluk bibliography that has been maintained and expanded ever since by regenstein’s middle east collection—and which was then followed by the creation of a new journal, mamluk studies review, which is still published (although now only electronically, no longer in a printed version). both of these institutions have greatly stimulated the vigor of mamluk studies. similarly, my own subfield of early islamic history received a double shot in the arm—one just as i was entering graduate school with the publication of peter brown’s the world of late antiquity (1971), another several years later with the publication of cook and crone’s hagarism (1977). brown’s book virtually created the field of “late antiquity studies,” by synthesizing work in what had hitherto been three distinct (and rather sleepy) subfields—late roman (i.e. byzantine) history, eastern church history, and early islamic history. one can see this impact immediately by considering the titles of books: before 1971, the phrase “late vi • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) antiquity” is hardly found in book titles, except for a few in art history (german art historians had first coined the term “spätantike” around 1900); after 1971, however, one finds a proliferation of book titles referring to aspects of late antiquity. and a crucial aspect of brown’s vision, which broke down old barriers and challenged old paradigms, was his inclusion of the umayyads and early islam within the late antique world. t h e p u b l i c a t i o n o f h a g a r i s m represented a bracing challenge of a rather different sort, a blunt rejection of traditional views of early islam and a bold call to study it in a different—and more properly historical—manner. it provoked, at first, both a lot of curiosity and no small measure of rage, but it cleared the way for many new hypotheses about islam’s origins, and in doing so it revivified what had been a moribund subfield, and the energy created by it continues unabated even today, forty years later. as a result of these developments in the 1970s, there has been a veritable explosion of new and innovative scholarship on many aspects of islam’s origins, so much so that what had once been a rather small and inactive field is now being articulated into a number of well-developed (and still rapidly growing) subfields. critical qurʾanic studies, after more than a halfcentury of hibernation, is once again a lively arena of discussion, partly sparked by the seminal, if frustratingly opaque, studies of john wansbrough as well as by hagarism; but qurʾanic studies was also spurred on by the fortuitous discovery of early qurʾan manuscripts in ṣanʿāʾ, yemen, in 1972, and by the return to the public eye in the 1990s of an archive of thousands of photographs of early qurʾan manuscripts made by gotthelf bergsträsser in the 1930s, which the munich arabist, anton spitaler, inexplicably concealed (claiming that it had been destroyed) until the last years of his life. the study of actual documents for the seventh century, in particular arabic papyri and the coins of the early islamic period, has burgeoned in recent years. the archaeology of the byzantine and early islamic periods in the near east, particularly in the levant, has received a great deal of attention and has brought important insights. studies of literary sources for early islam have increased markedly, including arabic historical writing, collections of sayings attributed to the prophet muḥammad (aḥādīth), and studies of syriac literature datable to the seventh century ce/first century ah. i see this increased depth and energy and specialization in medieval islamic studies reflected also in the creation of several new scholarly associations. in the 1960s and 1970s, we all belonged to the broad “umbrella” organizations, the american oriental society and (after its foundation in 1966) mesa, and most of us still do, but we now also have the school of abbasid studies first established at st. andrews university (1979), the international society for arabic papyrology (isap, 2002), and the international qurʾanic studies association (iqsa, 2012), and it seems only a matter of time before we shall also see the creation of associations focused on the study of t he u m ay y ad s , t he fat im id s , i s lamic archaeology, islamic numismatics, etc. there are already several active working groups devoted to all these topics, if not yet formal scholarly associations. i n s u m , o u r f i e l d — o r f i e l d s — h a v e matured remarkably since i began my studies. there is now lively debate among al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) remarks by the recipient of the 2016 mem lifetime achievement award • vii different scholars on a wide range of issues, and studies of medieval islamic history show much greater methodological awareness and disciplinary rigor than was true a half-century ago. other changes in our field of study reflect the changing world of technology in which we live. online dictionaries allow us to consult multiple glossaries and prepare texts with hitherto unknown ease—no longer must we struggle to balance three or four ponderous tomes at once in our lap as we explore the meaning of a word. this is a tremendous convenience. far more revolutionary, and with as yet unforeseen impact, is the creation of large databases of medieval texts, such as al-maktaba al-shamila (http://shamela.ws/). this should finally help us to overcome what has long been a severe obstacle to our collective research, the lack of a truly historical dictionary of arabic from which one might learn about the historical evolution of a particular word—its changing meaning over time; for now, we can have before us the raw material on which a historical dictionary is based, the instances in which a particular word is used in a large selection of texts, and can perceive the way its meaning may have evolved over time. such databases, however, also carry an unintended peril. in the “old days,” one simply had to read through complete texts, or long passages of texts, in the search for a particular kind of information or a particular word. now, with the ability quickly to search thousands of texts for a desired word or phrase, we confront the temptation to read only those sentences in which the target word or phrase occurs, rather than taking the time to read the larger context in which they are found. this shortcut leads us to a quicker answer to our immediate question about a word or phrase or concept, perhaps, but if we fail to read broadly we will also miss a great deal. we will miss not only those totally unrelated, but nevertheless interesting, bits of information that we might have noted for a different project, but also much information relevant to the project on which we are embarked, information that might temper our view of what the word or phrase we have ferreted out via the database actually meant. we miss the chance to acquire a sense for the overall “shape” of a complete text, and the outlook of its author or complier, and we will not encounter repeatedly those peculiar items that seen once or twice appear to be negligible details, but which through repeated occurrence cause us to realize that they are the key to an issue or problem the significance of which we, and others, had overlooked. a much greater danger for those of us who work on islamic history and the academic study of islam and islamic culture is the dwindling support among the general public, and from our governments and universities, for the humanities in general, including the kind of deep foreign language study that is such a crucial component of our own training. as those of you who heard my presidential address at the 2012 mesa conference1 in denver will know, i believe that one of the causes for this marked decline in public support for the humanities is the infatuation of 1. the published version of the presidential address, entitled “mesa and the american university” appeared in the review of middle east studies 47/1 (summer 2013), 4-18 and can be consulted online: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41970032 http://shamela.ws/ http://www.jstor.org/stable/41970032 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41970032 viii • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) some scholars since the 1970s, in literature especially, with theoretical approaches that sought to dismember structural and formal regularities of texts as a kind of exercise, without offering any constructive alternative for deeper understanding of those texts. even more serious was their cultivation of a style of writing that was almost willfully opaque, as if clarity of expression was somehow a flaw. obscurity, however, is not the same as profundity (although many tried to convince us o t h e r w i s e ) . i n t e n t i o n a l o b s c u r i t y i n writing is more likely to be a tactic to conceal the fact that the author lacks any really new ideas, than an indicator of the ‘complexity’ of the subject. the average reader, even a well-educated one, could make little sense of the ramblings of most deconstructionists and postmodernists, which they found incomprehensible and, therefore, uninteresting. they could see no benefit in it; it did not help them understand literature or art, unlike some earlier critical approaches, so eventually t h e y d e c i d e d t h a t t h e c h a m p i o n s o f ‘critical theory’ were basically engaged in a confidence game, retailing at high price ideas that were worthless. several decades of such work, mimicked sometimes by academicians in disciplines other than literary studies such as anthropology, took a terrible toll, persuading much of the general public that humanistic study was little more than academic obscurantism, and causing them to favor the study of things in which the human benefits were obvious: medicine, engineering, it, the natural sciences economics, and industry. t h e u t i l i t y o f t h e s t u d y o f s t e m , medicine, and such fields is undeniable, but when we consider what are the most pressing problems faced by humankind in the 21st century, we realize that they cannot be resolved by technology, or at least by technology alone. global warming threatens the whole planet, but dealing with it requires above all acceptance of our collective responsibility—a question of ethics—and the moral commitment to do something about it. countering the destabilizing effects of gross economic inequality, both within and between countries, demands the altruism that comes from an awareness of our common humanity, and empathy for others who are different from ourselves. battling corruption and exploitation of others requires determination to realize ideals of fairness, acceptance of the other, and the conviction that life is not a zero-sum game, that we all do better when benefits are shared. in other words, the key factors in solving our most pressing problems will be those rooted in ethics and empathy, w h i c h a r e v a l u e s c u l t i v a t e d i n t h e humanities; in abstract terms through the study of philosophy and religion, and in more practical terms through the study of cultures and languages different from our own. battling islamophobia in our own societies can best be undertaken if we can call on a robust, and historically g r o u n d e d , u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f i s l a m ’ s diversity to counter the simplistic negative stereotypes retailed by most islamophobes. empathy for refugees is enhanced when we understand the historical and political circumstances that lead people to flee their home societies, rather than simply seeing them as “spongers” wishing to take advantages of the benefits of western societies. the effort to help shattered m i d d l e e a s t e r n s o c i e t i e s o r p o l i t i c a l systems rebuild themselves—assuming our help is wanted—can best be pursued by al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) remarks by the recipient of the 2016 mem lifetime achievement award • ix those who have a deep knowledge of their history and cultures. all of these concerns point to the importance of having a large cadre of our own citizens—from whatever country we hail—with deep training in the languages, history, and cultures of the region. as scholars, therefore, we need to be active in defending the humanities, whenever we have the opportunity to explain—to our students and colleagues, to our administrations, to our political representatives, to our neighbors—why they are vital. but another way we can make the case for the humanities is to write up the results of our own original research in a manner that makes absolutely clear what we have discovered and why it is important. we must free our writing of theoretical or other obscurantism, and show unequivocally how the analytical distinctions we make shed important light on the subject we are studying. but above all, it comes down to writing clearly. if we do not express ourselves clearly, readers will continue to lose interest in what we do—and with good reason. it is a very good time to be a practitioner of islamic history or near eastern studies. our fields of study are robust, intellectually aware, and thriving as never before. there is a widespread recognition, today, that the middle east is an important part of the world and that we need to pay attention to it. we have a lot to contribute as scholars and a lot to say that relates to national and international debates on many topics. let us say it clearly. we are pleased to present the new issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā (uw). as announced in our preceding issue (uw 23, 2015), we have expanded the role, format and content of the journal: the transition to an online, open access, peer-reviewed publication is complete. our aim is to provide a venue for up-todate scholarship across the variety of fields in islamic, arabic and middle east studies, while remaining a source of news and information on developments in these same fields. we would be remiss in not acknowledging our debt of gratitude to a number of colleagues for their willingness to act as reviewers. we thus continue where we left off in our previous issue in publishing a set of high-caliber and original research articles. fred donner—a former president of middle east medievalists (mem) and a long-time editor of uw—argues in his contribution for a reconsideration of the well-known term fatḥ, drawing on his considerable work on the early islamic period and the arab/islamic conquests in particular. sean anthony, a member of the mem board, considers the difficult question of whether ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī, the third/ninth-century historian and geographer, is properly to be considered a shiʿite author. in his submission, matthew melvin-koushki takes up the arguments regarding writing and written transmission in late medieval arabic and islamic scholarship with a discussion of the work of ṣāʾin al-dīn ʿalī b. muḥammad turka iṣfahānī (770-835/1369-1432). the fourth contribution is that of theodore s. beers. turning to the later persianate literary realm, beers offers a close assessment of an unpublished manuscript text containing letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): i-ii (photo of antoine borrut by juliette fradin photography) the earliest documentation of the life and career of ṣāʾib tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676). we provide, alongside the four articles, two short notices (jonathan brown on ibn ʿuqda, and christian mauder and christopher markiewicz on majālis in the mamluk period) and a set of six book reviews covering a range of topics. the appearance of the new volumes under review only underscores the continued vitality of our respective fields. we would reiterate the point that, in its present format, uw offers the opportunity to produce extended reviews of this kind. it remains a significant goal of this journal to produce reviews of new works not only in european languages but those of the middle east and north africa as well. we urge you, our readers and colleagues, to continue sending us material of this kind. we are also pleased to include in this issue detailed reports of three conferences held in 2015-2016; a remembrance by sarah eltantawi of our much lamented colleague, shahab ahmed; and the statement by richard bulliet (the recipient of the 2015 m e m l i f e t i m e a c h i e v e m e n t a w a r d ) . we also take advantage of this letter to congratulate mem’s two new honorary members, denise aigle (école pratique des hautes études) and ayman fuʾād sayyid (former director of the egyptian national library). the editors also express their gratitude to gabriella hoskin, alexis may, and brett savage, from the institute for advanced study staff, for their help with the copy editing process of this issue of uw. t o m a k e t h e p o i n t a g a i n , w e a r e convinced that al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā provides the ideal venue in which to publish new and exciting scholarship on the history of the medieval middle east. we invite you, our readers and colleagues, to participate by contributing your latest work. we are also delighted to announce that the full run of uw is now available online. we have digitized all of uw’s back issues to facilitate access to this unique mem archive and memory. please visit our “volume index” page on our website: http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ volume-index/ we will close with what will become a familiar note to faithful readers: we rely on your financial support. our journal is now online, open access, and peerreviewed, but it is certainly not free. to cover costs of publication and the work of our part-time managing editor, among other expenses, you provide valuable support by keeping your membership in middle east medievalists up to date. for information on membership and the fund, please proceed to the mem home page at http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ and click on “membership.” letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): ii sincerely, antoine borrut and matthew s. gordon al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 252-257 book review in this exciting new volume, co-ed-itors matthew gordon and kathryn hain provide scholars and students an important resource for the study of slavery and enslaved women. the book comprises fifteen substantive articles plus a useful introductory overview by gordon and an interpretive epilogue by hain. it ranges from the seventh century through the eighteenth, across andalusia and the maghreb, through arabia and the levant, to turkey, iran, and central asia. “the shared aim,” gordon writes, “is a reconstruction of the lives, careers, and representations of women across this same expanse of time, social organization, and political drama” (“introduction: producing songs and sons,” 1). the contributors, who range from doctoral candidate to full professor, are mostly historians and literary scholars, but there is also a musicologist and a librarian. roughly sixty percent of the contributions are by women and most of the essays cite secondary scholarship by women in due proportion. there are overlapping clusters of chapters on the abbasid era; on qiyān— enslaved singers; on andalusia; and on enslaved (or, surprisingly, not) concubines in royal households. a few contributions will be of particular interest for those in religious studies, including nerina rustomji’s “are houris heavenly concubines?” and elizabeth urban’s exploration of how mid-eighthcentury contests over legitimate authority came to invoke abraham and muhammad’s enslaved concubines to “justif[y] the political aspirations of the children of slave mothers” (“hagar and mariya: early islamic models of slave motherhood,” 230). in a similar vein, michael dann’s “between history and hagiography: the mothers of the imams in imami historical memory” looks at hagiographical accounts of the mother of the twelfth imam as part of the construction of a theologically and politically robust messianic legitimacy. younus mirza’s “remembering the umm al-walad: ibn kathir’s treatise on the sale matthew s. gordon and kathryn hain, eds., concubines and courtesans: women and slavery in islamic history (new york: oxford university press, 2017), xi+354 pp. isbn: 978-0-19-062218-3, price: $99 (cloth)/price varies (e-book). kecia ali boston university (ka@bu.edu) mailto:ka%40bu.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 253 • kecia ali of the concubine” is the closest the volume comes to sustained focus on jurisprudence, although the text on which it focuses is not a work of law; it does, however, address how authoritative precedent is constructed and contested. one of the questions that inevitably arises in discussions of islamic history is precisely what is “islamic” about it. w h a t a r e t h e c o m m o n a l t i e s a s w e l l as the distinctions among norms and implementation of slavery in majoritymuslim contexts and other contexts? this collection highlights certain recurring patterns—the legal protections governing the umm walad, for instance—but also reveals substantial divergences among f o r m s o f c o n c u b i n a g e a n d e n s l a v e d c o u r t e s a n s h i p . i t a l s o r e v e a l s h o w dependent such practices were on local contexts and norms as well as the specifics of given historical moments. in “the ethnic origins of female slaves in al-andalus,” christina de la puente tackles the complex ways that race, ethnic origin, skin color, and more play into norms about insiders, outsiders, and status. one intriguing suggestion offered by gordon (34) is that later scholars may have read whiteness or european origins into descriptions of beauty where none are there in original texts. issues of ethnicity crop up in other places from time to time; as marina tolmacheva notes, the fourteenth-century “moroccan globetrotter” ibn battuta rarely names his wives or concubines, typically referring in the latter’s case to their ethnic/geographic origins (“concubines on the road—ibn battuta’s slave women,” 163). one of the merits of this volume is the number of enslaved women about whom it presents biographical information— though of varying levels of detail and facticity. we know very little about the numerous enslaved women whom ibn battuta, who “never traveled without a concubine if he could help it” (168), bought, gave away, used sexually, impregnated, and occasionally mourned. more often than not, what is true for ibn battuta’s enslaved companions is true more broadly: we catch a few telling glimpses of their life experiences, but these are nearly always subordinated to, and told in terms of their relevance to, their owners. there are some exceptions, however. the sources permit betül i̇pşirli argıt to give a rich account of early-eighteenth-century ottoman concubine turned queen mother gülnuş sultan (“a queen mother and the ottoman imperial harem: rabia gülnuş emetullah valide sultan [1640-1715]”). captured and enslaved as a child in crete, she became a favorite consort of sultan mehmed iv. two of her sons ruled successively, from 1695– 1715. her skill at networking and making alliances enabled her participation in internal ottoman politics as well as foreign affairs. another set of exceptional women are certain qiyān, who are the subject of multiple chapters, including matthew s. gordon’s “abbasid courtesans and the question of social mobility,” lisa nielson’s “visibility and performance: courtesans in the early islamicate courts (661-950 ce),” and dwight f. reynolds’ “the qiyan of al-andalus.” it is almost a truism among specialists that the term “slavery” obscures vital differences among the array of legal, social, and personal relationships that fall under its umbrella. islamicists who write about mamluks or palace concubines often toss around the phrase “elite slavery” without conscious awareness of its oxymoronic al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) matthew s. gordon and kathryn hain, eds., concubines and courtesans • 254 nature. certain institutions combined legal servitude with social prestige, informal— and occasionally formal—power, and control over wealth. in her 2003 essay on the abbasid post of qahramāna, steward/ keeper of the harem, nadia maria el cheikh mentions the remarkable thumal, a jāriya of the caliph’s al-muqtadir’s mother. that venerable woman placed thumal in charge of the maẓālim courts, causing considerable consternation.1 but the blurry boundaries among status, influence, and power can be even trickier to analyze when sexuality and self-determination enter into the equation. several contributors focus on questions of social mobility for enslaved women, which require negotiating what marion katz has called “the avenues of opportunity and forms of constriction that were navigated by individual women.”2 in her epilogue (“avenues to social mobility available to concubines and courtesans”), hain points out that “while slave women in islamic society could use their wits, charm, talent, and beauty to achieve social mobility, they remained vulnerable” (336). t h e b o o k ’ s t i t l e h i g h l i g h t s t h e inescapable sexual dimension to “feminine slavery” (2). while authors acknowledge the legal right of (male) masters to have sex with any unmarried women they own (e.g., 78), expectations of seclusion for enslaved girls and women kept as concubines were far more stringent than those attending enslaved servants assigned household work. at the same time, owing to historians’ available sources, concubines, particularly those in courtly and elite households, are 1. nadia maria el-cheikh, “the qahramâna in the abbasid court: position and functions,” studia islamica 97 (2003), pp. 41–55. 2. marion katz, “textual study of gender,” in léon buskens and annemarie van sandwijk, eds., islamic studies in the twenty-first century: transformations and continuities (amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2016), 87–108 at 97–98. those whose presence is most visible to us now. (contributors rely mostly on literary and documentary sources, occasionally including formularies and fatwas, both for historical reconstruction and for evidence of mentalités, dynastic propaganda, and hagiography.) while not all qiyān were sexual partners for their owners, many were—at least when those owners were male—and their sexual allure was part of the point. attachments— and possibilities for manipulation—could be enhanced by qiyān and others who had resources, including education, networks, and social cachet, beyond those of the uprooted women and girls who seem to have comprised the majority of enslaved concubines. singer-composers and other educated enslaved women (see jocelyn sharlet’s “educated slave women and gift exchange in abbasid culture” as well as pernilla myrne’s “a jariya’s prospects in abbasid baghdad,” which follows the poet inan al-natifi) wielded resources beyond those of many other concubines. although t h e t w o e d u c a t e d w o m e n w h o m i b n battuta bought and ultimately returned to their owners themselves had no say in the matter, the men who sold them, and then had changes of heart and sought their return, seem to have been more attached to them than ibn battuta was to most of the women he bought or was given. the variety of terms used throughout the book to name and discuss enslaved women reflects both the diversity of terms used in sources from various languages, e r a s , a n d g e n r e s a n d t h e d i f f e r e n t al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 255 • kecia ali sensibilities of the volume’s contributors. some, as i have tended to do in the past, use “slaves” and others, as i try to do now, make a point of using “enslaved person.”3 the latter phrase highlights that enslavement is not a natural state but something that is actively done to one human being by another, who is not simply a “master” or “mistress” but a “slaveowner.” english terms such as concubine and courtesan (or borrowed terms such as geisha) connote varying levels of status and agency; nielson argues that “the ambiguity” attending prestigious, highly trained qiyān carved out “a liminal social and legal space between free and unfree” which makes courtesan a more a c c u r a t e t e r m t h a n o n e s c o n v e y i n g “ c o n c u b i n a g e o r s e r v i t u d e a l o n e ” (81). reynolds, while noting “myriad” divergences, suggests that “the geisha of japan are perhaps the most comparable form of socially institutionalized female companionship and entertainment for male patrons” (100). v a r i o u s c o n t r i b u t o r s p o n d e r h o w scholars can address consent, affection, and power within relationships between owners and the people they kept enslaved. h o w d o e s o n e c o n c e p t u a l i z e h u m a n relationships across such vital power divides? 4 is meaningful consent to a sexual relationship possible when one 3. katy waldman presents an overview of the debate among historians: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/ the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/05/historians_debate_whether_to_use_the_term_slave_or_enslaved_ person.html. 4. for instance, ehud toledano, as if silent and absent: bonds of enslavement in the islamic middle east (new haven: yale university press, 2007). 5. in addition to kecia ali, sexual ethics and islam: feminist reflections on qurʾan, hadith, and jurisprudence (london: oneworld, 2nd. ed., 2016), chapter 3, see my “consent and concubinage” in “roundtable: locating slavery in middle eastern and islamic history,” international journal of middle east studies, 49, 2017, pp. 148–52; see also my “redeeming slavery: the ‘islamic state’ and the quest for islamic morality,” mizan: journal for the study of muslim societies and civilizations, 1:1, september 2016. online) party is legally unfree? many modern muslims struggle with the institution of concubinage—including although not only in prophetic precedent—in part because consent has come to take center stage in discussions of sex (if not always in its practice).5 yet as myrne observes, “the system of sexual slavery seems to have been taken for granted on the part of society at large; it is hard to find evidence of any sort of opposition” (89). while i suspect numerous captured and enslaved women remained unconvinced of the justice of others’ claims to own them and have sexual rights over them, it is true that there was not widespread protest against the entire institution of captivity, enslavement, or concubinage; no religious scholars railed against the practice. any sustained consideration of slavery, sex, and consent must address the overlap, c o n c e p t u a l a n d o t h e r w i s e , b e t w e e n free and enslaved women and between concubinage and marriage. if the legal relationship of ownership encompassed a wide variety of de facto relationships, so did the contractual relationship of marriage. marriage was sometimes a partnership of (nearly) equals; (some) women could negotiate de jure protections or carve out de facto ones, sometimes by forgoing de jure rights. at other times, marriage was a matter of domination and servility. gordon http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/05/historians_debate_whether_to_use_the_term_slave_or_enslaved_person.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/05/historians_debate_whether_to_use_the_term_slave_or_enslaved_person.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/05/historians_debate_whether_to_use_the_term_slave_or_enslaved_person.html http://www.mizanproject.org/journal-post/redeeming-slavery/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) matthew s. gordon and kathryn hain, eds., concubines and courtesans • 256 deems it “impossible to quantify when sexual union was coerced and thus violent, and when it was consensual and thus expressive of emotional ties”—and this observation holds for marriages as well, involving both free and enslaved women. as he points out, “medieval arabic literary sources,” to which i would add scriptural and legal texts, “speak to a spectrum of conduct from sexual assault to close, extended personal relationships” (4). the book’s subtitle reads “women and slavery in islamic history.” the subtitle is accurate insofar as the volume’s focus is notably on women rather than gender. its contributions say little about enslaved m e n , s e x u a l u s e o f b o y s , n o r m s o f masculinity, or the relevance of eunuchs for regulating and controlling women’s sexual comportment, including enslaved women. free slave-owning women make brief, important appearances; not only are there royal women such as the abbasid queen zubayda but also women who “owned, trained, and traded in jawari” (64), such as the wife of cordoba’s chief judge, who supported him in part by training qiyān (113). yet questions about enslaved, freed, and free women and their interrelationships beg for further exploration, both at the conceptual level and in their historical particularities. as marion katz notes, there are major limitations to the idea of “woman” as a unified legal and social category.6 the historiography of united states slavery has challenged the notion of white women in plantation households a s m e r e d o w n t r o d d e n s u b j e c t s o f 6. katz, “textual study of gender,” 93–102. 7. thavolia glymph, out of the house of bondage: the transformation of the plantation household (new york: cambridge university press, 2008). patriarchal male authority; as thavolia glymph has shown, despite their legal debility compared to their husbands, mistresses exercised brutal power over e n s l a v e d w o m e n , r a t h e r t h a n b e i n g somehow their natural allies on the basis of shared femaleness.7 in contexts where islamic law granted women, including married women, full rights to property o w n e r s h i p , a n d w h e r e t h e r e w a s n o marital property regime, questions about ownership and control of enslaved people in a s p ec ific hou s ehold u nd ou bt edly operated differently. (polygyny, too, would affect these relationships.) there remains much to explore about women’s i n t e r r e l a t i o n s h i p s w i t h i n a n d a c r o s s households, including but not limited to royal harems; contributors to this volume provide helpful, though not systematic, evidence for interactions among free and enslaved women. o n e t h r e a d w e a v i n g t h r o u g h t h e volume is the way that reproductive strategies, especially but not only when rulership is in play, might lead to shifting preferences for marriage to free women, w h o c o u l d o f f e r f a m i l y a l l i a n c e s , o r concubinage with enslaved women, whose lack of such ties would avoid potential d i v i d e d l o y a l t i e s . m a j i e d r o b i n s o n ’ s statistical analysis of umayyad-era qurashi genealogies (“statistical approaches to the rise of concubinage in islam”) shows two seemingly contradictory trends among umayyad caliphs during the eighth century: increased cousin marriage (endogamy) and increased concubinage with “foreign slave women, who are the most exogamous al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 257 • kecia ali marriage partners possible” (19). usman hamid’s account of the freeborn muslim women incorporated into timurid royal households as concubines—contrary to standard interpretations of islamic law— was a way of circumventing the restriction on the number of legal wives a man could take while accruing the benefits of marriage alliances (“slaves only in name: free women as royal concubines in late timurid iran and central asia”). as hain concludes, “reproductive politics favored slave concubines” (336). issues of rulers’ reproduction also come to the fore in heather empey’s chapter, “the mothers of the caliph’s sons: women as spoils of war in the early almohad period,” but the most valuable contribution this chapter makes is to provide a case study of the intersections of war, capture, enslavement, and politicoreligious legitimacy. the almohad practice of enslaving and selling non-almohad freeborn muslim women—and the caliph ʿabd al-muʾmin’s practice of keeping them as concubines, contrary to islamic law—makes clear that “the almohads dealt with the muslim populace of the maghrib as though they were non-muslim enemy combatants or apostates” (155). what empey shows explicitly, and other contributors implicitly, is that the study of enslaved women provides valuable, 8. beverly b. mack and jean boyd, one woman’s jihad: nana asma’u, scholar and scribe (bloomington: indiana university press, 2000), pp. 35–6 and passim. otherwise unavailable, perspectives on important historical phenomena. no volume can cover everything but one obvious lacuna in this volume is non-maghrebi africa. a chapter on the sokoto caliphate, for instance, could have followed up on the apologetic mentions of the integration of captured women into sokoto caliphal households in jean boyd and beverly mack’s account of nana asmaʾu’s career. 8 another important comparative context would be the indian ocean human trade as well as case studies on the subcontinent. the fact that the book omits these topics is not an indictment but a call for more work that builds on hain and gordon’s substantial accomplishments in this volume. concubines and courtesans is essential for scholars who study women or slavery in muslim contexts and valuable for those who work on other topics in the abbasid era, andalusian history, or courtly cultures, and for scholars of slavery in other contexts. it will be useful for courses in history and islamic studies. each chapter is followed by endnotes and bibliography, a feature which makes it easier to select chapters for use in the classroom—and many of these would be good to teach with. the essays in concubines and courtesans will help set our scholarly agenda; there is much work to do. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 225-228 in memoriam anna dolinina (12 march 1923—16 april 2017) anna arkadievna iskoz-dolinina, a prominent russian and soviet arabist, was born into a family of writers and educators. her father, arkady semënovich iskoz-dolinin, was a leningrad state university professor, specializing in dostoyevsky. one of her brothers was a linguist, as was a cousin, while а sisterin-law was a writer and literature scholar. a nephew is a professor of russian literature, while another nephew became a script writer and film director. her life spanned a period of dramatic changes and tribulations in russia and the soviet union. born in petrograd, which, after lenin’s death in 1924, became leningrad, she lived to see the city regain its former name, st. petersburg. so also the university, with which all her adult life was connected: leningrad state became st. petersburg state university (“state” had replaced “imperial” in the university’s name after the 1917 bolshevik revolution). anna dolinina’s intention in applying to the university was to study german literature. wwii changed her plans. the siege of leningrad (1941-1944) forced the evacuation of academic institutions and civilian population to various eastern destinations. the dolinin family, with parts of the university, ended up in tashkent. there, she became fascinated with the orient and developed an interest in arabic literature. the leading russian arabist of the time was ignaty krachkovsky (ignatii iulianovich krachkovskii, 1883-1951). krachkovsky, who survived the 226 • marina tolmacheva al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) siege in leningrad, wore several hats. a full member of the ussr academy of sciences, he became head of the arabic cabinet in the oriental institute of the academy and the department of arabic philology at the university. he presented her a copy of his 1945 book, among arabic manuscripts (“nad arabskimi rukopisiami”), with the inscription: “to anna dolinina in reward for abandoning german studies. the author, ignatii krachkovskii.” the meeting was fateful in a number of ways. limited staffing in the post-war university meant that krachkovsky had to teach courses in arabic as well as in classical and modern arab literature. as a result, dolinina was qualified, upon g r a d u a t i o n , t o t e a c h l a n g u a g e a n d literature courses as well. it was on his advice that she chose to specialize in modern arab literature, then barely known in russia. dolinina’s 1968 book, ocherki istorii arabskoĭ literatury novogo vremeni: egipet i sirii︠a︡: publit︠s︡istika 1870-1914 gg. (“an historical outline of modern arab literature: journalism of 1870-1914 in egypt and syria”) was followed in 1973 by ocherki istorii arabskoĭ literatury novogo vremeni: egipet i sirii︠a︡: prosvetitel’skii roman 1870-1914 gg. (“an historic al outline of modern arab literature: the enlightenment novel in egypt and syria, 1870-1914”). she also became a translator o f k h a l i l j i b r a n a n d a m e e n r i h a n i , published a volume of rihani’s selected works (“izbrannoe”) in 1988, and wrote about the reception of russian literature in the arab world. d o l i n i n a w a s n o t k r a c h k o v s k y ’ s favorite student, but she became his f i r s t b i o g r a p h e r . t h e p u b l i c a t i o n o f nevol’nik dolga (“prisoner of du t y , ” 1994) brought her profound recognition i n r u s s i a n a c a d e m i c c i r c l e s . b e y o n d extensive archival research and personal interviews with krachkovsky’s widow, vera aleksandrovna krachkovskaia, the book painstakingly presented the tableau of soviet intellectual life in the years when everything “foreign” was alien, and anything to do with religion suspect. in fact, krachkovsky was publicly accused by another soviet arabist of admiring a “feudal” culture. loyal to the soviet regime, he nevertheless possessed enough civil courage to support the research of his arrested or exiled students, publish their dissertations (kovalevsky), and hire them upon their release (shumovsky). appropriately, in 2010, anna arkadievna became the first recipient of the memorial krachkovsky medal, established by the oriental institute of the russian academy of sciences (ran). in 2015, she was finally able to bring out a volume of krachkovsky’s largely unpublished “works on the history and philology of the christian orient” (trudy po istorii i filologii khristianskogo vostoka). dolinina’s professional life centered on teaching arabic literature in the very same department of arabic philology where she graduated in 1949. for 50 years after completing her graduate studies in 1953, she taught generations of students, some of whom became university faculty, academic researchers, professional translators and interpreters or diplomats. it was as a beginning student at leningrad state, in the oriental faculty, that i first met anna arkadievna in 1960. given the curriculum set in the 1950s, she would have been my instructor in one of the senior “modern arabic literature” courses, because my major was history of arab countries. but in 1960, things were changing in soviet http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/22497726 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/936199810 http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/936199810 in memoriam: anna dolinina (1923—2017) • 227 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) “oriental studies.” soviet influence was growing in the near east, and the oriental faculty was charged by the ministry of higher education to begin training arabic military interpreters. this meant that the usual enrollment limit of one section of six (!) arabic majors was raised to two sections. as a result, there was a sudden shortage of qualified arabic instructors, and associate professor dolinina, who previously only taught literature courses, became the arabic instructor for freshman majors in the history of the near east. in the 2016 festschrift from her loving students and colleagues, podarok uchënym i uteshenie prosveshchënnym (“a gift to the learned and consolation for the enlightened”), numerous contributions refer to dolinina’s intellectual generosity, wry sense of humor, and demanding yet tactful treatment of students. some authors reminisce about reading medieval a r a b i c p r o s e w i t h h e r o r s t r u g g l i n g with translations of classical poetry; a few contributed their own poetry. p a r a d o x i c a l l y , a l t h o u g h i b e c a m e a medievalist and while dolinina developed, in effect, a second career translating classical arabic literature, we “historians” never took a class in pre-modern arabic literature with anna arkadievna and were long gone when her remarkable translator’s gift became a boon to the reading public. my friendship with her developed in later years, when we met as professionals linked by warm memories and continuing interest in the health of arabic studies in leningrad/st. petersburg. it was at the third all-union conference of arabists (erevan, 1969), which we both attended with other arabists based in leningrad, that anna arkadievna met the moscow arabist v. m. borisov (1924-1987), with whom she embarked upon a project the 2016 podarok uchënym i uteshenie prosveshchënnym (“a gift to the learned and consolation for the enlightened”) 228 • marina tolmacheva al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) that became her crowning achievement. borisov was a lexicologist, translator and aphorist, and he cherished the ambition of rendering into russian the maqamat of al-hariri, never before translat ed into russian in full or from the arabic original. joining forces, they produced a volume of forty maqamas in 1978 and then of all fifty in 1987. in 1999, dolinina published the maqamat of al-hamadhani (with z.m. auezova). these extraordinary t r a n s l a t i o n s e n t e r t a i n t h e r e a d e r i n rhymed prose for sajʿ and in verse for poetic passages. dolinina also produced the first russian poetic translations of the muʿallaqat, included in the 1983 anthology araviiskaia starina: iz drevnei arabskoi p o e z i i i p r o z y ( “ a r a b i a n a n t i q u i t y : selected ancient arab poetry and prose”), which also contains the first russian translation of the ayyam al-ʿarab by one of dolinina’s former students vladimir polosin.1 in her introduction, dolinina explains the methodology and stylistics of producing a readable translation for the contemporary reader and tabulates the metre equivalents and rhyme and rhythm variations of arabic and russian poetry. in recognition of these sustained efforts, dolinina became the first russian scholar to be awarded the king ʿabdallah bin ʿabd al-ʿaziz international prize for translation (2012). her other awards include the 1999 award of the honorific title, the merited worker of higher education of the russian federation (zasluzhennyi rabotnik vysshei shkoly rossiiskoi federatsii) and the 2013 medal “for spiritual unity” from the spiritual administration of muslims of the russian federation. 1. on polosin’s work see d.j. stewart, “scholarship on the fihrsit of ibn al-nadim: the work of valeriy v. polosin,” al-ʿusur al-wusta 18.1 (april 2006), 8-13. — marina tolmacheva washington state university (tolmache@wsu.edu) http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/wp-content/uploads/sites/55/2016/11/uw-18-1-2006.pdf mailto:tolmache%40wsu.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 96-112 facing the mahdī’s true belief: abū ʿamr al-salālijī’s ashʿarite creed and the almohads’ claim to religious authority* jan thiele ilc-cchs, csic, madrid (jan.thiele@cchs.csic.es) during the early history of islam, the question of whether or not the legitimate leader of the muslim community was required to combine political and religious authority gave rise to a momentous controversy. as is well known, fierce discussions in regard to this issue eventually led to the community’s most significant schism. those who supported the view that the legitimate political head of the muslims should also be their highest religious authority came to form the seedbed of shiʿism. its various sub-groups agreed on the basic principle that the community’s supreme authority, the imām, must be a descendent of the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law ʿalī b. abī ṭālib (d. 40/600–661) and at the same time serve as the community’s spiritual guide. sunni scholars, on the other hand, formulated the position that political authority could be exercised by any member of the prophet’s tribe, quraysh, without his being granted superior religious standing. in the end, the sunni position gained acceptance among the majority of the muslim community, and abstract this paper addresses the impact of the almohad caliphs’ claim to religious authority, their religious policy, and specifically their propagation of the creeds attributed to the movement’s founder ibn tūmart. it offers a case study of an ashʿarite creed, abū ʿamr al-salālijī’s al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya which was produced in the sixth/ twelfth-century almohad period. the author argues that rather than echoing the teaching of the almohads, al-salālijī’s creed closely draws on and often literally reproduces a comprehensive compendium of ashʿarite theology, namely al-juwaynī’s kitāb al-irshād. a specifically noteworthy feature of al-salālijī’s creed is that it makes theological claims that should have been considered, from the perspective of almohad doctrine, highly problematic. this in turn raises questions discussed in this paper about the extent to which theological scholars were impacted by the almohad agenda. * the research leading to these results has received funding from the people programme (marie curie actions) of the european union’s seventh framework programme (fp7/2007–2013) under rea grant agreement nº 624808. i wish to thank maribel fierro and the anonymous reviewers for offering helpful suggestions. mailto:jan.thiele%40cchs.csic.es?subject= 97 • jan thiele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the office of the caliph was increasingly reduced to a mere political function where the caliph was not expected to provide spiritual guidance.1 yet in the sixth/twelfth-century maghrib, we observe a contrary development. with the rise of the almohads, the region saw the triumph of a movement that brought all of maghrib and al-andalus under its political control. although they never declared themselves shīʿites, the new almohad rulers claimed they had religious authority and thereby broke with established sunni practice. the movement’s founder, ibn tūmart (d. 524/1130), was proclaimed by his successors to be the infallible (maʿṣūm) and rightly guided (mahdī) leader.2 the major lines of the almohads’ doctrinal teachings were laid down in several creeds attributed to ibn tūmart.3 the almohad caliphs gave these texts the normative status of true belief and imposed their ideas on the rest of the population. whoever rejected the almohad creed could be declared an unbeliever, and christians and jews were forced to convert.4 both pre-modern and modern scholars have struggled to situate almohad doctrines within the spectrum of muslim theological traditions. there is a consensus that at least some specific elements of ibn tūmart’s theology correspond to the teachings of the ashʿarites, the dominant school of theological thought in the islamic west since the fifth/eleventh century.5 actual points of agreement between the two include man’s obligation to acquire knowledge about god by means of rational reflection,6 the reasoning provided as proof of 1. for an account of the sunni doctrine of the imamate and its historical emergence see p. crone, medieval islamic political thought (edinburgh, 2004), 219–255. 2. maribel fierro pointed out the fact that the almohad movement emerged in a context where large parts of north africa were under the rule of the fāṭimids. her discussion, regarding the extent to which the almohad conception of the caliphate drew on ismāʿīlī-fāṭimid ideas, is found in m. fierro, “the almohads and the fatimids,” in b. d. craig (ed.), ismaili and fatimid studies in honor of paul e. walker (chicago, 2010), 161–175 [reprinted in m. fierro, the almohad revolution. politics and religion in the islamic west during the twelfth– thirteenth centuries (london, 2012), text iv]. 3. ibn tūmart’s writings were edited as part of j. d. luciani, le livre de mohammed ibn toumert mahdi des almohades. texte arabe accompagné de notices biographiques et d’une introduction par i. goldziher (algier, 1903). two texts are particularly relevant for the almohads’ theological teaching: the short al-murshida fī al-tawḥīd (pp. 223–224) and al-ʿaqīda al-kubrā (pp. 313–325); for a french translation see h. massé, “la profession de foi (ʿaqīda) et les guides spirituels (morchida) du mahdi ibn toumart,” in mémorial henri basset. nouvelles études nord-africaines et orientales, publiées par l’institut des hautes études marocaines (paris, 1928), 105–121. 4. for an up-to-date survey of research on the almohads’ theology and religious policy, see m. fierro, “the religious policy of the almohads,” in s. schmidtke (ed.), the oxford handbook of islamic theology (oxford, 2016), 679–692; d. serrano, “later ashʿarism in the islamic west,” in s. schmidtke (ed.). the oxford handbook of islamic theology (oxford, 2016), 522–527. 5. pre-modern scholars who draw this doctrinal link include tāj al-dīn al-subkī (d. 771/1370) and ibn khaldūn (d. 808/1406); for further details, see d. urvoy, “la pensée d’ibn tūmart,” bulletin d’études orientales 27 (1974), 20. 6. f. griffel, “ibn tūmart’s rational proof for god’s existence and unity, and his connection to the niẓāmiyya madrasa in baghdad,” in p. cressier, m. fierro, and l. molina (eds.). los almohades: problemas y perspectivas (madrid, 2005), 775–777. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) facing the mahdī’s true belief • 98 god’s existence,7 and denial of the idea that god possesses corporeal and spatial qualities.8 yet the almohad creed also established a number of doctrines that were strongly opposed to ashʿarite teaching. as a corollary to the creed’s central concern that god is absolutely distinct from any of his creations, it radically dismissed what it considered anthropomorphism (tashbīh).9 this included the rejection of such beliefs as affirming, for example, that god possesses knowledge by virtue of which he is described as knowing.10 ashʿarite theologians, in turn, stressed the actual existence of such attributes and supported their claim by using the exact line of reasoning that ibn tūmart rejected in drawing an analogy between man and god. from the perspective of ashʿarite theologians, the almohads’ claim to their founder and spiritual leader’s infallibility remained in conflict with their own sunni mainstream conceptions. nor would they typically consider it the caliph’s business to impose specific doctrines on his subjects. yet if their teachings were incompatible in several respects, what was the position of ashʿarite theologians vis-à-vis the theology promoted by the almohad rulers? to what extent did ibn tūmart’s doctrines affect them in formulating and defending their own positions? questions about the impact of almohad teachings on scholars who lived and wrote during their caliphate have been raised primarily with regard to the discipline of falsafa, that is, hellenizing philosophy, and specifically with regard to the teaching of averroes. the latter served the almohads over many years, participating, for example, in scholarly circles at the caliph’s court in marrakesh. it was there that he wrote several commentaries on aristotle’s works, whose latin translations would become the foundation for his later renown in christian europe. modern scholars’ portrayals of averroes’s teachings range from describing them as containing “certain traces of the almohad ideology”11 to claiming that they were actually formulated within the theoretical framework of ibn tūmart’s doctrine.12 several works, in which he engages with kalām and defends falsafa against the theologians’ attacks, are specifically relevant in the assessment of the relation between the almohads’ and averroes’s teachings. one of these works, entitled al-kashf ʿan manāhij al-adilla fī ʿaqāʾid al-milla appears to have caused controversy within the almohad court. in response, 7. urvoy, “la pensée d’ibn tūmart,” 24; griffel, “ibn tūmart’s rational proof,” 782–793—more precisely, ibn tūmart’s argumentation supporting god’s existence was connected to teachings developed at the niẓāmiyya madrasa in baghdad. 8. m. fletcher, “the almohad tawhīd: theology which relies on logic,” numen 38/1 (1991), 119–120. 9. the almohads’ rejection of anthropomorphism was one way to stress their break with the previous almoravid dynasty and to underline the reformist claim of their movement: see d. serrano ruano, “¿por qué llamaron los almohades antropomorfistas a los almorávides?,” in p. cressier, m. fierro, and l. molina (eds.). los almohades: problemas y perspectivas (madrid, 2005), 815–852. 10. cf. ibn tūmart, al-ʿaqīda al-kubrā, 337. 11. s. stroumsa, “philosophes almohades? averroès, maïmonide et l’idéologie almohade,” in p. cressier, m. fierro, and l. molina (eds.). los almohades: problemas y perspectivas (madrid, 2005), 1137–1162. 12. m. geoffroy, “à propos de l’almohadisme d’averroès: l’anthropomorphisme (taǧsīm) dans la seconde version du kitāb al-kašf ʿan manāhiǧ al-adilla,” in p. cressier, m. fierro, and l. molina (eds.). los almohades: problemas y perspectivas (madrid, 2005), 853-894. 99 • jan thiele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) averroes produced various revisions of the text that allowed him to accommodate his differing positions to the almohad creed.13 the specific case of averroes supports the typical view that the almohads claimed both religious authority and spiritual leadership. should we therefore conclude that ideological control and, perhaps, even a ban on teachings that deviated from the creed of the infallible mahdī were among the methods used by the almohads in the exercise of their caliphal authority? and if so, would not the practitioners of kalām, for whom issues addressed by the almohad creed were of chief concern, have been expected to have been specifically affected by this agenda? in this article of admittedly limited scope, i will approach the question by studying a short theological epistle from the earlier almohad period, entitled al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya.14 more precisely, i will examine the intellectual and textual sources of this treatise in order to ask whether the almohad doctrine is echoed in this work. al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya was written by abū ʿamr ʿuthmān al-salālijī. born c. 521/1127–8, al-salālijī died either in 564/1169, 574/1179 or 594/1197–8.15 a theologian with some level of mystical inclination, he was primarily active in the city of fes, where he received his elementary education and later studied at the qarawiyyīn mosque. later, he traveled to the islamic east (bilād al-mashriq) to seek further instruction. however, it appears that almohad attempts to discourage their population from making the pilgrimage to mecca16 spoiled al-salālijī’s plans: he made it no further than bugie (bijāya), where the local governor prevented him, along with other travelers, from continuing their journey. al-salālijī had to return to fes, where he obviously achieved a reputation as being well-versed in grammar. eventually, his good name captured the attention of a member of marrakesh’s almohad elite, who was looking for a teacher who could help his sons learn arabic. al-salālijī accepted the offer and moved from fes to marrakesh. while there, he also met abū al-ḥasan ʿalī b. aḥmad al-lakhmī al-ishbīlī (d. 567/1171), a major figure of maghrebi ashʿarism.17 at some point, he returned to fes, where he devoted himself primarily to the teachings of ʿilm al-kalām.18 13. geoffroy, “à propos de l’almohadisme d’averroès;” s. di donato, “le kitāb al-kašf ʿan manāhiǧ al-adilla d’averroès: les phases de la rédaction dans les discours sur l’existence de dieu et sur la direction, d’après l’original arabe et la traduction hébraïque,” arabic sciences and philosophy 25/1 (2015), 105–133. 14. the text is available in several recent editions. i have consulted abū ʿamr ʿuthmān b. ʿalī al-salālijī, al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya al-ashʿariyya, ed. jamāl ʿallāl al-bakhtī (tetouan, 2008), and al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya wa-al-fuṣūl al-īmāniyya li-al-imām abī ʿamr ʿuthmān al-salālijī maʿ sharḥ al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya li-al-imām abī ʿuthmān saʿīd b. muḥammad b. al-ʿuqbānī, ed. nizār ḥammādī (beirut, 1429); when citing the ʿaqīda, i provide pages for both editions. on the ʿ aqīda and al-bakhtī’s edition of the text see also m. bilal-achmal, “textos del legado ašʿarī magrebí. al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya al-ašʿariyya de abū ʿamr al-salālŷī al-fāsī,” al-qantara 34/1 (2013), 205–213. 15. for the sources on al-salālijī’s death dates, see the introduction in al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya wa-al-fuṣūl al-īmāniyya, 14–15. 16. m. fierro, “the legal policies of the almohad caliphs and ibn rushd’s bidāyat al-mujtahid,” journal of islamic studies 10/3 (1999), 227. 17. serrano, “los almorávides y la teología ašʿarī,” 503; serrano, “later ashʿarism in the islamic west,” 519. 18. al-salāljī, ʿaqīda, 115–33; al-salālijī’s service to the member of the almohad elite is reported by abū yaʿqūb yūsuf b. yaḥyā ibn zayyāt al-tādilī, al-tashawwuf ilā rijāl al-taṣawwuf wa-akhbār abī al-ʿabbās al-sabtī, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) facing the mahdī’s true belief • 100 although al-salālijī—at least for part of his life—interacted relatively closely with the almohad elite, he appears to have always been a dedicated ashʿarite. several biographical reports stress that from as early as his introductory studies in the field of theology, al-salālijī was deeply influenced by his readings of abū al-maʿālī al-juwaynī’s (d. 478/1085) kitāb al-irshād. while teaching grammar in marrakesh, he deepened his knowledge of the text by studying with abū al-ḥasan al-lakhmī.19 it is consequently not surprising that some religious scholars pointed to the irshād’s impact on al-salālijī’s al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya, going so far as to describe the latter text as a brief summary (mukhtaṣar) of al-juwaynī’s theological summa.20 as i will discuss in more detail, this characterization is appropriate, especially if one bears in mind that al-salālijī immensely shortened al-juwaynī’s voluminous work into just a few pages. the text of al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya itself does not reveal anything about al-salālijī’s motivation in compiling the short creed. later sources—including al-salālijī’s student abū al-ḥasan ʿalī ibn muʾmin al-khazrajī (d. 598/1193), who is quoted in one of the commentaries on the ʿaqīda—report that al-salālijī wrote it at the request of an andalusī woman named khayrūna.21 thus, the fact that al-salālijī composed this work for his almohad patrons appears to have been omitted. let us start examining the text. al-salālijī’s al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya follows the typical structure of an ashʿarite kalām treatise.22 after the ḥamdala, the work opens with the definition of the world (al-ʿālam) and of atoms (jawāhir) and accidents (aʿrāḍ), which are the world’s components according to the concept of the mutakallimūn. atoms are defined as “that which occupies space” (al-mutaḥayyiz), and accidents as “entities that subsist in atoms” (al-maʿnā al-qāʾim bi-al-jawhar). the wording of these definitions has been reproduced almost verbatim from al-juwaynī’s irshād.23 ed. a. al-tawfīq (rabat, 1404/1984), 199–200. french translation: ibn zayyât al tâdilî, regard sur le temps des soufis: vie des saints du sud marocain des ve, vie, viie siècles de l’hégire. texte arabe établi, annoté et présenté par ahmed toufiq. traduit de l’arabe par maurice de fenoyl (casablanca, 1995), 149–150. 19. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 17–19. for the transmission of this work to the islamic west see j. m. fórneas besteiro, “de la transmisión de algunas obras de tendencia ašʿarī en al-andalus,” awrāq 1 (1978), 7–8. 20. see al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 51, quoting the famous traveller and religious scholar ibn rushayd al-fihrī al-sabtī (d. 721/1321): abū ʿabd allāh muḥammad b. ʿumar ibn rushayd al-fihrī al-sabtī, milʾ al-ʿayba bi-mā jumiʿa bi-ṭūl al-ghayba fī al-wijha al-wajīha ilā al-ḥaramayn makka wa-ṭayba, ed. muḥammad al-ḥabīb ibn khawja (tunis, 1982), 2:226. see also abū jaʿfar aḥmad b. yūsuf al-fihrī al-lablī’s (d. 691/1292) fahrasa, ed. nūr al-dīn shūbad (rabat, 1434/2013), 88; al-lablī studied with al-salālijī’s student abū ʿabd allāh muḥammad b. ʿalī b. al-kātibī (d. 596/1295). 21. see al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 50–51, who quotes ʿabd allāh muḥammad al-madyūnī’s sharḥ; this is also related by aḥmad ibn al-qāḍī al-miknāsī, jadhwat al-iqtibās fī dhikr man ḥalla min al-aʿlām madīnat fās, 2 vols. (rabat, 1973), 2:458. 22. for the basic scheme of ashʿarite compendia see r. m. frank, “the science of kalām,” arabic sciences and philosophy 2/1 (1992), 7–37, as well as fn. 12 on the general omission of theoretical discussions on knowledge and reasoning in such shorter works as the one discussed here. 23. cf. al-salālijī, ʿ aqīda, 87–9/23 and imām al-ḥaramayn abū al-maʿālī al-juwaynī, kitāb al-irshād ilā qawāṭiʿ al-adilla fī uṣūl al-iʿtiqād, ed. muḥammad yūsuf mūsā, and ʿalī ʿabd al-munʿim ʿabd al-ḥamīd (cairo, 1369), 17 (l. 5–8). 101 • jan thiele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the next section of the ʿaqīda, chapters 1-5, focuses on arguments for god’s existence. specific historical developments in the argumentation of muslim theologians allow us to conclude that al-salālijī’s proof draws on arguments that were advanced in some of al-juwaynī’s writings. beyond the boundaries of theological schools, the traditional kalām proof for god’s existence departed from the assumption that because the world is created, it consequently requires a creator, who must be god. the world’s createdness was demonstrated by the so-called “proof from accidents,” that built upon the following reasoning: 1) accidents—like movement, rest, composition, or separation—do exist, 2) accidents have a temporal existence, 3) bodies necessarily carry accidents, and 4) whatever does not precede the temporally existent is itself temporally existent.24 al-juwaynī appears to have been the first person within the ashʿarite school to recognize that this proof had several shortcomings and propose revisions.25 to prove god’s existence, he developed the so-called “particularization argument” that finds its most elaborate shape in al-ʿaqīda al-niẓāmiyya.26 its argumentative strength lie in the fact that it no longer presupposed the existence of accidents. a preliminary revision of the revised proof can be found in al-juwaynī’s earlier works al-irshād27 and lumaʿ al-adilla fī qawāʿid ahl al-sunna wa-al-jamāʿa,28 where he still relies on the proof from accidents argument. unlike the traditional proof, al-juwaynī now infers from the createdness of atoms that the existence of the world is possible (jāʾiz al-wujūd), which means that rather than being existent, it is just as possible that the world could also be non-existent or come into existence at different times. this leads him to the conclusion that there must be an agent that chooses arbitrarily whether or not the world exists and when, who in other words “particularizes” (ikhtaṣṣa) the world’s creation and who cannot be anyone other than god.29 al-salālijī’s argumentation in his ʿaqīda follows al-juwaynī’s earlier revision of the proof as found in the irshād and the lumaʿ: using the proof from accidents, he first establishes the createdness of atoms and then concludes that the world’s existence is possible. based on 24. h. a. davidson, proofs for eternity, creation and the existence of god in medieval islamic and jewish philosophy (new york/oxford, 1987), 134–143; d. gimaret, la doctrine d’al-ashʿarī (paris, 1990), 219–227; u. rudolph, “la preuve de l’existence de dieu chez avicenne et dans la théologie musulmane,” in a. de libera, a. elamrani-jamal, and a. galonnier (eds.), langage et philososophie. hommage à jean jolivet (paris, 1997), 340–341. 25. similar concerns were articulated earlier by the muʿtazilite theologian abū al-ḥusayn al-baṣrī (d. 426/1044); see w. madelung, “abū l-ḥusayn al-baṣrī’s proof for the existence of god,” in j.e. montgomery (ed.), arabic theology, arabic philosophy: from the many to the one. essays in celebration of richard m. frank (leuven, 2006), 273-280. 26. imām al-ḥaramayn abū al-maʿālī al-juwaynī, al-ʿaqīda al-niẓāmiyya, ed. muḥammad zubaydī (beirut, 2003), 11–13. 27. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 17–21, 28–29. 28. m. allard, textes apologétiques de ǧuwaynī (beirut, 1968), 120–131 (arabic edition and french translation of al-juwaynī’s lumaʿ). 29. davidson, proofs for eternity, 161–162; rudolph, “la preuve de l’existence de dieu,” 344–346; madelung, “abū al-ḥusayn al-baṣrī’s proof for the existence of god,” 279. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) facing the mahdī’s true belief • 102 these assumptions, he then affirms the need for a “particularizer,” that is a creator (ṣāniʿ), whose arbitrary choice causes the world to be precisely the way it is.30 in chapter 6 of the ʿaqīda, al-salālijī presents proof of the creator’s eternity (qidam). he reasons that if the creator were not eternal, he must also have been created and his existence would consequently have required the existence of another creator before him— clearly absurd reasoning, since this process of creation would result in an infinite regress.31 al-salālijī literally reproduces parts of the corresponding chapter in al-juwaynī’s irshād.32 the same line of reasoning is also found in al-juwaynī’s shāmil and lumaʿ.33 in chapter 7, al-salālijī affirms that god “subsists by himself” (qāʾim bi-nafsihi). in fact, the description qāʾim bi-nafsihi was open to interpretation, and it appears that al-ashʿarī himself hesitated in regard to whether or not it could be rightly—or exclusively—applied to god.34 it is again al-juwaynī’s irshād that offers an almost literal parallel to the ʿaqīda.35 al-salālijī’s argument is, in turn, because it is so condensed, not entirely clear: the proof for god’s subsisting by himself is that he must be described as living, knowing and powerful. yet attributes (al-ṣifāt) cannot be described by predications necessitated by other entities (al-aḥkām allatī tūjibuhā al-maʿānī). if god is necessarily described [as living, knowing and powerful], he must consequently subsist by himself.36 if we compare this passage with al-juwaynī’s irshād, we realize that al-salālijī’s reasoning is based on the implicit premise that if god did not subsist by himself, he would need a substrate (maḥall) and would be an attribute that qualifies his substrate.37 if we add this premise from the irshād to the passage from the ʿaqīda, the argument makes sense: according to ashʿarite teaching, god is living, knowing and powerful by virtue of the entities of life, knowledge, and power. however, life, knowledge, and power cannot subsist in an attribute and therefore god must subsist by himself. in chapter 8, al-salālijī establishes that god is absolutely distinct (mukhālif) from his creation. he consequently follows the progression of arguments found in the irshād, but without reproducing textual elements that can be clearly identified as quotations from al-juwaynī’s text. al-salālijī argues that two things are identical whenever they share all of their essential attributes (jamīʿ ṣifāt al-nafs).38 the same reasoning was already put forward by al-ashʿarī to prove god’s otherness, and al-juwaynī also draws on it in the irshād.39 based 30. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 90–96/24–25. 31. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 97/25. 32. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 32 (l. 6–7). 33. imām al-ḥaramayn abū al-maʿālī al-juwaynī, al-shāmil fī uṣūl al-dīn, ed. f. ʿawn, and sh. m. mukhtār (alexandria, 1969), 617–618; allard, textes apologétiques de ǧuwaynī, 130–131. 34. gimaret, doctrine, 257. 35. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 34 (l. 4–5). 36. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 98/25. 37. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 34. 38. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 99/25. 39. gimaret, doctrine, 249; al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 34. 103 • jan thiele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) on this conceptualization of the resemblance of two things, al-salālijī goes on to argue that god transcends all qualities (simāt) of atoms and accidents and, therefore, is distinct from them. atoms are distinguished by the fact that they occupy space and consequently exist in a specific location, in that they carry accidents and may form composites. accidents in turn subsist in atoms, which means that they need a substrate; they have no self-sustained continued existence and cannot be described by predications necessitated by other entities. these fundamental properties of atoms and accidents cannot be applied to god, which proves, according to al-salālijī, his absolute distinctiveness.40 some of these arguments can also be found—in more elaborate versions—in various chapters on the distinctions between god and his creatures in al-juwaynī’s irshād,41 whereas others were already affirmed in the proof of god’s self-subsistence.42 in chapter 9, al-salālijī goes on to prove that god is knowing, powerful, willing, living, hearing, seeing, perceiving and speaking. the line of argumentation, and the reliance on certain specific formulations, confirm the ʿaqīda’s dependency on the irshād. al-salālijī supports the claim that god is knowing and powerful with the evidence of his creation, every detail of which he ordered and arranged. like al-juwaynī, and in almost the same words, he argues that this implies that god is knowledgeable and powerful.43 the intentionality of god’s acts, revealed by the fact that they come into being at a specific moment and in a specific shape rather than coming into existence at another possible moment and in a different shape, serves as proof of god’s will.44 unlike al-juwaynī in his irshād, however, al-salālijī does not support this claim by drawing an analogy to man’s voluntary acts.45 in order to prove that god lives, he argues that only living beings can possibly possess the aforementioned attributes. this is a standard argument in kalām, although god’s knowledge and power are often considered sufficient evidence for the claim that god lives.46 al-salālijī then reproduces, almost verbatim, a passage from the irshād to prove that god hears, sees, perceives, and speaks. the argument goes as follows: all living beings can possibly hear, see, perceive, and speak; if god could not hear, see, perceive, and speak, he would be defective, and this would be an absurd assertion.47 in chapter 10, al-salālijī expounds upon the doctrine that god possesses co-eternal attributes, including life (ḥayāt), knowledge (ʿilm), power (qudra), and will (irāda), by virtue 40. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 99–102/25–26. 41. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 39 (god does not occupy space and has no location), 44 (he does not carry accidents) and 42–43 (he is not a composite). 42. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 34 (unlike god, accidents cannot be described by predications necessitated by other entities). 43. al-salālijī’s proof (aqīda, 103/26) is mainly composed of fragments from the corresponding chapter in the irshād, namely pp. 61 (l. 4)–62 (l. 1) and 61 (l. 10–11). 44. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 104/27. 45. cf. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 64. 46. in the irshād, al-juwaynī also builds his argumentation exclusively on god’s being knowing and powerful: al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 63. 47. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 104–5/27; the almost identical formulation is found in al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 72 (l. 15)–73 (l. 4). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) facing the mahdī’s true belief • 104 of which he is living (ḥayy), knowing (ʿālim), powerful (qādir), willing (murīd), and so on. this claim was considered valid within ashʿarite thought, but for other theologians it posed a fundamental problem: how could there be co-eternal beings if god alone is eternal and free from multiplicity of any kind? it was primarily the muʿtazilites who, on the basis of this claim, accused the ashʿarites of violating the notion of monotheism. yet in our specific context, it is even more important that almohad doctrine, as expressed in ibn tūmart’s al-ʿaqīda al-kubrā, also rejects the idea of co-eternal attributes. however, unlike the critics from the muʿtazilite school who intended to resolve the problem posed by god’s multiple qualities rationally, the almohad creed categorically rebuffs such speculations about god’s attributes and explicitly rejects any attempt to analyze god’s attributes by way of analogy between god and his creatures.48 drawing such analogies was at the center of the ashʿarite approach, whose goal was to logically resolve the problem.49 in accordance with the solution proposed by the ashʿarites, al-salālijī presents two arguments that correspond to the first and third of the four analogies used by al-juwaynī in his irshād to establish god’s co-eternal attributes.50 the first posits that whenever a predication or judgement (ḥukm) in this world is grounded in, or causally depends on, another entity (muʿallal bi-ʿilla), the same must be true for the transcendent. that is, if we affirm that man’s knowing something is grounded in an entity of knowledge, god must be omniscient by a co-eternal entity of knowledge. al-salālijī’s second argument is that the reality (ḥaqīqa) behind predications such as “he is knowing” is identical irrespective of whether it is affirmed of man or of god: if in the case of man, it means that knowledge subsists in the subject described as knowing (qāma bihi al-ʿilm), the meaning cannot change when the same is affirmed about god.51 it is worth recalling here the case of averroes and the fact that it was precisely the question of god’s attributes that created controversy around his al-kashf ʿan manāhij al-adilla. the dispute finally led averroes to revise the sections of his text which, from the almohad perspective, were seen as problematic. the reason for the debate was averroes’s conviction that sophisticated explanations for corporeal and spatial descriptions of god would be inaccessible to common people, and, even worse, would cause people to deviate from the truth. he therefore claimed that a literal understanding of god’s hands, face, or 48. ibn tūmart, al-ʿaqīda al-kubrā, p. 337. see also urvoy, “la pensée d’ibn tūmart,” 27–28. 49. i do not agree with fletcher, “the almohad tawhīd,” 114–117, who identifies ibn tūmart’s affirmations of god’s attributes in the murshida with muʿtazilite doctrine and then suggests that the mahdī revised his position in al-ʿaqīda al-kubrā according to the ashʿarite doctrine. the denial of co-eternal attributes as found in the murshida is actually confirmed by the passage of al-ʿaqīda al-kubrā quoted in fn. 48; the ʿaqīda only adds that man has to refrain from speculating about the modality of god’s qualities. this is in agreement with neither muʿtazilite nor ashʿarite teachings: indeed, the muʿtazilites denied any co-eternal attributes, but they nonetheless described god by multiple qualities and attempted to explain their reality by rational means; the ashʿarites in turn not only affirmed co-eternal attributes of god, but they also explained them rationally (their bi-lā kayf approach was limited to such revealed qualities as those which appeared to suggest corporeality or spatial characteristics in god). 50. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 83 (l. 5–9 for the ʿilla-argument) and 84 (l. 1–3 for the ḥaqīqa-argument). 51. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 106–107/27. 105 • jan thiele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) his sitting on the throne is fully legitimate. from the position of the almohad creed, this was illicit anthropomorphism.52 yet drawing analogies between man and god, as in the example of ashʿarite reasoning described above, should have provoked the same accusation. nonetheless, al-salālijī draws on the controversial argument and makes no concession to the almohad claim that god is absolutely transconceptual. chapter 11 is devoted to presenting proof of god’s oneness (waḥdāniyya). the argument advanced by al-salālijī was actually used by theologians from the entire spectrum of kalām schools. essentially, the argument is that there can be only one god, because if there were two, any time their wills were opposed they would mutually prevent each other from acting.53 this so-called tamānuʿ-argument (from tamānaʿa, “to mutually prevent”) was already raised by muʿtazilite theologians and also used by al-ashʿarī.54 there are some textual similarities between this chapter and the corresponding one in al-juwaynī’s irshād.55 in addition, al-salālijī quotes q. 21:22, 40:62, and 42:11 to support the claim of god’s oneness.56 in chapter 12, al-salālijī argues that the possible—that is, things that come to be or are possible but will not come to be—are infinite in number. this position entailed a certain risk, since it could be misinterpreted as being a violation of the monotheistic idea that except for god, everything is finite. yet the discussed question has additional implications for the conception of god as omnipotent: the reason behind this is that the possible is tantamount to potential objects of god’s creative capacity (al-maqdūrāt).57 hence, if the possible was finite, then god’s power would likewise be finite. in order to prove the infiniteness of possible things, al-salālijī departs from the contingency of the world; this means that the world could also be considered differently, because there could have been things other than those that actually exist. now possible things do not come into existence by themselves (lā yaqaʿu bi-nafsihi), but rather their existence must be caused by god. however, if god’s power was limited to the finite things that actually come to be, we would have to concede that that which is possible but does not happen is impossible—and this, al-salālijī argues, is self-contradictory.58 here again, al-salālijī’s argumentation reproduces phrases from al-juwaynī’s corresponding chapter in the irshād.59 chapter 13 of al-salālijī’s ʿaqīda contains rational proof of the possibility of beatific vision (ruʾyat allāh). the entire chapter is an almost verbatim reproduction of a passage found in 52. geoffroy, “à propos de l’almohadisme d’averroès;” di donato, “le kitāb al-kašf ʿan manāhiǧ al-adilla d’averroès.” 53. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 109–111/28. 54. gimaret, doctrine, 252–254. 55. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 53 (l. 4–6 and 11–12). 56. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 111/28. 57. for the ashʿarite conception of the possible and its identification with objects of god’s creative capacity see r. m. frank, “the non-existent and the possible in classical ashʿarite teaching,” mélanges de l’institut dominicain d’études orientales 24 (2000), 1-37 (specifically p. 6). 58. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 112/29. 59. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 57 (l. 4–6 and 8). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) facing the mahdī’s true belief • 106 the corresponding chapter of al-juwaynī’s irshād.60 the line of argument originates from ideas about how visual perception operates in the created world. the distinct objects of our perception, it claims, all have in common the fact that they exist. the specific features (aḥwāl), by virtue of which these objects can be distinguished, do not affect their visibility in any way: what actually makes these objects visible to the human eye is their very existence. now, if we see objects because they exist, we must necessarily conclude that whatever exists can be seen—this, a fortiori, includes god.61 al-salālijī’s ashʿarite interpretation of the vision of god—and specifically its rational justification—clashes with ibn tūmart’s doctrine in his ʿaqīda: although the founder of the almohad movement in principle affirms that god will be seen at the last judgement, he insists that this is true only as it is expressed in the qurʾān; any further explanation that derives from visual perception in this world must be avoided and he categorically excludes the possibility that man will see him with his eyes.62 at this point in the text, the style of al-salālijī’s ʿaqīda changes slightly. unlike the previous sections, the remaining ones no longer consist of short rational proofs, but rather of a series of doctrinal statements. these doctrines are in fact ashʿarite commonplaces. they are also affirmed by al-juwaynī in his irshād, but the brevity of al-salālijī’s exposition no longer allows a clear inter-textual dependency to be established. in the following synopsis of the remaining chapters of al-salālijī’s ʿaqīda, i will provide references that show our theologian’s indebtedness to ashʿarite teaching, and more specifically i will also point to the sections in al-juwaynī’s irshād where the same doctrinal principles are formulated. chapter 14 is a highly condensed affirmation of the ashʿarites’ belief in god’s absolute arbitrariness. it includes the following doctrines: god’s creation of man’s acts belongs to the realm of possible existents; god’s acting is not necessary; he is not compensated for his acts; whenever he compensates man, he grants him a favor; god’s punishment is just and he judges man as he wills.63 following this, chapter 15 contains the major lines of prophetology and consists of the following positions: it is possible (jāʾiz) for god (in other words, it is not necessary for him) to send prophets and to support their veracity by miracles; the prophet’s miracles disrupt the habit and they are god’s acts; they are a challenge to imitators and whoever attempts to produce something similar will fail.64 60. al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 177 (l. 2–8). 61. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 113–114/29. 62. ibn tūmart, al-ʿaqīda al-kubrā, 337–338; see also urvoy, “la pensée d’ibn tūmart,” 28 on ibn tūmart’s position on beatific vision. 63. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 115–116/29. for the ashʿarite position see gimaret, doctrine, 433–451. in his irshād, al-juwaynī treats these principles on pp. 188 and 381. 64. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 117–118/29–30. cf. gimaret, doctrine, 453–454 and 459–463 for the identical ashʿarite position; in his irshād, al-juwaynī treats these doctrines on pp. 302–303, 307–309, 312–313; see also allard, textes apologétiques de ǧuwaynī, 169. 107 • jan thiele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) chapter 16 affirms the two fundamental qualities of prophets as found in ashʿarite teaching: the prophets are infallible in what they say, and do not commit grave sins (kabāʾir).65 in chapter 17, al-salālijī starts with a record of the prophet muḥammad’s miracles, by which he challenged his rivals and sceptics.66 he then advocates the principle of theological voluntarism, as is typical in ashʿarite ethics: good and bad are not distinguished by rational principles but can only be extracted from the prophet’s message.67 the sources for moral judgments include the qurʾān, the prophetic tradition (or sunna), and the consensus of the community or of the community’s learned men.68 in the same chapter, al-salālijī moves on to a subject where followers of ashʿarite teaching should have strongly disagreed with almohad doctrine: namely, the question of who is to be considered a believer. al-salālijī introduces the issue by defining the notion of repentance (tawba) for one’s sins according to the ashʿarite understanding as being tantamount to regret (nadam). further following ashʿarite teaching, he claims that repentance may be accepted by god to such an extent that he would even forgive a believer who committed a grave sin (kabīra), or he could alternatively punish him for some time before he lets him enter paradise. this position was derived from the teachings of the murjiʾites, a theological strand of early islam: arguing against muʿtazilites and khārijīs, they believed that even a grave sinner should be regarded as a believer. they claimed that actual belief was not demonstrated through moral conduct, but that it merely consists of knowing that god exists and expressing belief in his existence. they deferred judgment of man’s fate to god, and therefore refrained from declaring others infidels—the practice known as takfīr. the ashʿarites later followed the murjiʾite line of reasoning and defined belief as “assent” (taṣdīq) in one’s heart, that is, a mere interior act. this is also al-salālijī’s position in the ʿaqīda.69 one might wonder whether this could not be interpreted as de-legitimising the almohad practice of takfīr of people who refused to profess the creed they imposed. the ʿaqīda closes with two chapters, 18 and 19, on the imamate. al-salālijī professes in just a few lines the major lines of mainstream sunni teaching, also shared by ashʿarite theologians.70 as scholars have argued previously, this teaching differed significantly from 65. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 119/30 (in ḥammādī’s edition, this passage is not a separate chapter); for the ashʿarite doctrine see gimaret, doctrine, 459, and the corresponding passage in al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 356. 66. al-salālijī, ʿ aqīda, 120–122/30 (in ḥammādī’s edition, this passage not a separate chapter); see al-ashʿarī’s list of muḥammad’s miracles in gimaret, doctrine, 464–467 and al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 345, 353. 67. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 123/30; for al-ashʿarī’s ethical voluntarism see gimaret, doctrine, 444–447 and al-juwaynī, al-irshād, 8, 358. 68. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 124–125/30–31. 69. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 126–128/31; for the corresponding sections in al-juwaynī’s irshād see pp. 398, 401, 403–404; for the ashʿarite understanding of belief, its origins in the teachings of the murjiʾa and the sinner’s fate see gimaret, doctrine, 469–500; more specifically, on the identification of the notions of tawba and nadam, see gimaret, doctrine, 490 and for the definition of belief as “assent,” see r. m. frank, “knowledge and taqlîd: the foundations of religious belief in classical ashʿarism,” journal of the american oriental society 109/1 (1989), 38–46 and gimaret, doctrine, 472–479. 70. see for the ashʿarite theory of the imamate gimaret, doctrine, 547–566 and y. ibish, the political doctrine of al-baqillani (beirut, 1966). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) facing the mahdī’s true belief • 108 the almohad doctrine, which was centered on the infallible figure of the rightly guided imām, the community’s highest authority.71 nothing in al-salālijī’s exposition reflects the almohad conception of the imamate: for him, the imām is legitimized by a contract (ʿaqd), and possible candidates must fulfill the following criteria: they must be members of the quraysh tribe; they must be qualified for the practice of ijtihād, that is, individual reasoning in legal matters; and they must act competently and vigorously whenever calamities and unrest occur. in addition, for al-salālijī, the prophets alone are infallible (lā maʿṣūm illā al-anbiyāʾ), whereby he concludes that infallibility does not apply to the imāms. in other contexts, this claim would have exclusively targeted shiʿite doctrines. it is therefore clear why al-salālijī rejects, immediately afterwards, the idea that the imām must necessarily be designated (a claim twelver-shiʿites actually made), since he can also be legitimated by election (read in both editions ikhtiyāran instead of ijtihādan).72 finally, al-salālijī professes the sunni opinion that after the death of the prophet muḥammad, the people preferred (afḍala al-nās) abū bakr, followed by ʿumar, ʿuthmān, then finally ʿalī. to whom did al-salālijī address his assertion that these four are the rightly guided caliphs and imāms (fa-hum al-khulafāʾ al-rāshidūn wa-al-aʾimma al-mahdiyūn)?73 one can only speculate as to whether, in his chapters on the imamate, al-salālijī actually intended to dismiss the almohads’ claim that their founder ibn tūmart was infallible and rightly guided. my observations from al-salālijī’s brief treatise do not permit any conclusions regarding larger-scale tendencies in ashʿarite teaching under the almohad caliphate. a much wider corpus of theological texts from this era will have to be analyzed to draw a more comprehensive picture. at this point, the examined text can only speak for itself. considering the prominent place of ibn tūmart’s creed in almohad propaganda, it is striking that al-salālijī in no way echoes the mahdī’s teaching. he does not even attempt to hide or minimize points of disagreement, or to argue that ashʿarite teaching perfectly harmonizes with almohad doctrine—let alone that he developed some form of “almohadized” ashʿarism. instead, al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya could have just as easily been written in any other ashʿarite context. it actually reflects an analogous trend found in the eastern shāfiʿite milieu, where al-juwaynī’s irshād was an influential compendium: there it also served as the basis for numerous derivative works, including commentaries and abbreviations.74 71. m. garcía arenal, “the almohad revolution and the mahdī ibn tūmart,” in m. garcía arenal, messianism and puritanical reform: mahdīs of the muslim west (leiden, 2006), 179–181. 72. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 129–130/31. for al-juwaynī’s criteria for the imām in the irshād see 426–427; for the rejection of the necessity of the imām’s designation see pp. 419–423; and for the possibility of his election p. 424. 73. al-salālijī, ʿaqīda, 131/32. al-juwaynī treats the four rightly guided caliphs on pp. 428–430 of his irshād. 74. such works include abū saʿd ʿabd alraḥmān b. maʾmūn al-mutawallī’s (d. 478/1086) al-mughnī, abū al-qāsim al-anṣārī’s (d. 512/1118) sharḥ al-irshād (preserved only in manuscript form) and al-ghunya, or the only surviving work written by fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī’s father ḍiyāʾ al-dīn al-makkī, nihāyat al-marām, that depends greatly on abū al-qāsim al-anṣārī’s ghunya. 109 • jan thiele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) sources abū al-qāsim al-anṣārī. al-ghunya fī ʿilm al-kalām. 2 vols. ed. muṣṭafā ḥasanayn ʿabd al-hadī. cairo: dār al-salām, 1431/2010. al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya wa-al-fuṣūl al-īmāniyya li-al-imām abī ʿamr ʿuthmān al-salālijī maʿ sharḥ al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya li-al-imām abī ʿuthmān saʿīd b. muḥammad b. al-ʿuqbānī. ed. nizār ḥammādī. beirut: muʾassasat al-maʿārif, 1429. ḍiyāʾ al-dīn al-makkī. nihāyat al-marām. facsimile of the autograph manuscript of vol. ii. ed. ayman shihadeh. tehran: mīrāth-e maktūb, 2013. ibn al-qāḍī al-miknāsī, aḥmad. jadhwat al-iqtibās fī dhikr man ḥalla min al-aʿlām madīnat fās. 2 vols. rabat: dār al-manṣūr, 1973. ibn rushayd al-fihrī al-sabtī, abū ʿabd allāh muḥammad b. ʿumar. milʾ al-ʿayba bi-mā jumiʿa bi-ṭūl al-ghayba fī al-wijha al-wajīha ilā al-ḥaramayn makka wa-ṭayba. ed. muḥammad al-ḥabīb ibn khawja. tunis: al-dār al-tūnisiyya li-al-nashr, 1982. al-juwaynī, imām al-ḥaramayn abū al-maʿālī. al-ʿaqīda al-niẓāmiyya. ed. muḥammad zubaydī. beirut: dār sabīl al-rashād/dār al-nafāʾis, 2003. ———. kitāb al-irshād ilā qawāṭiʿ al-adilla fī uṣūl al-iʿtiqād. ed. muḥammad yūsuf mūsā and ʿalī ʿabd al-munʿim ʿabd al-ḥamīd. cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1369. ———. al-shāmil fī uṣūl al-dīn. ed. fayṣal ʿawn and shuhayr muḥammad mukhtār. alexandria: manshaʾat al-maʿārif, 1969. al-lablī, abū jaʿfar aḥmad b. yūsuf al-fihrī. fahrasa. ed. nūr al-dīn shūbad. rabat: al-rābiṭa al-muḥammadiyya li-al-ʿulamāʾ, 1434/2013. luciani, j.d. le livre de mohammed ibn toumert mahdi des almohades. texte arabe accompagné de notices biographiques et d’une introduction par i. goldziher. algier: imprimerie orientale pierre fontana, 1903. massé, henri. “la profession de foi (ʿaqīda) et les guides spirituels (morchida) du mahdi ibn toumart.” in mémorial henri basset. nouvelles études nord-africaines et orientales, publiées par l’institut des hautes études marocaines, 105–121. paris: paul geuthner, 1928. al-mutawallī, abū saʿd ʿabd alraḥmān b. maʾmūn. al-mughnī. ed. marie bernand. cairo: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1986. al-salālijī, abū ʿamr ʿuthmān b. ʿalī. al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya al-ashʿariyya. ed. jamāl ʿallāl al-bakhtī. tetouan: maṭbaʿat al-khalīj al-ʿarabī, 2008. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) facing the mahdī’s true belief • 110 al-tādilī, abū yaʿqūb yūsuf b. yaḥyā ibn zayyāt. al-tashawwuf ilā rijāl al-taṣawwuf wa-akhbār abī al-ʿabbās al-sabtī. ed. aḥmad al-tawfīq. rabat: jāmiʿat muḥammad al-khāmis, 1404/1984. al tâdilî, ibn zayyât. regard sur le temps des soufis: vie des saints du sud marocain des ve, vie, viie siècles de l’hégire. texte arave établi, annoté et présenté par ahmed toufiq. traduit de l’arabe par maurice de fenoyl. casablanca: eddif, 1995. bibliography allard, michel. textes apologétiques de ǧuwaynī. beirut: dar el-machreq, 1968. bilal-achmal, mohamed. “textos del legado ašʿarī magrebí. al-ʿaqīda al-burhāniyya al-ašʿariyya de abū ʿamr al-salālŷī al-fāsī.” al-qantara 34/1 (2013): 205–213. crone, patricia. medieval islamic political thought. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2004. davidson, herbert a. proofs for eternity, creation and the existence of god in medieval islamic and jewish philosophy. new york/oxford: oxford university press, 1987. di donato, silvia. “le kitāb al-kašf ʿan manāhiǧ al-adilla d’averroès: les phases de la rédaction dans les discours sur l’existence de dieu et sur la direction, d’après l’original arabe et la traduction hébraïque.” arabic sciences and philosophy 25/1 (2015): 105–133. fierro, maribel. the almohad revolution. politics and religion in the islamic west during the twelfth–thirteenth centuries. london: ashgate variorum, 2012. ———. “the almohads and the fatimids.” in bruce d. craig (ed.), ismaili and fatimid studies in honor of paul e. walker, 161–175. chicago: middle east documentation center, 2010. ———. “the legal policies of the almohad caliphs and ibn rushd’s bidāyat al-mujtahid.” journal of islamic studies 10/3 (1999): 226–248. ———. “the religious policy of the almohads.” in sabine schmidtke (ed.), the oxford handbook of islamic theology, 679–692. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. fletcher, madeleine. “the almohad tawhīd: theology which relies on logic.” numen 38/1 (1991): 110–127. fórneas besteiro, josé maría. “de la transmisión de algunas obras de tendencia ašʿarī en al-andalus.” awrāq 1 (1978): 4–11. frank, richard m. “knowledge and taqlîd: the foundations of religious belief in classical ashʿarism.” journal of the american oriental society 109/1 (1989): 37–62. 111 • jan thiele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) ———. “the non-existent and the possible in classical ashʿarite teaching,” mélanges de l’institut dominicain d’études orientales 24 (2000): 1-37. ———. “the science of kalām.” arabic sciences and philosophy 2/1 (1992): 7–37. garcía arenal, mercedes. “the almohad revolution and the mahdī ibn tūmart.” in mercedes garcía arenal, messianism and puritanical reform: mahdīs of the muslim west, 157–192. leiden: brill, 2006. geoffroy, marc. “à propos de l’almohadisme d’averroès: l’anthropomorphisme (taǧsīm) dans la seconde version du kitāb al-kašf ʿan manāhiǧ al-adilla.” in patrice cressier, maribel fierro, and luis molina (eds.). los almohades: problemas y perspectivas, 853-894. madrid: consejo superior de investigaciones científicas/casa velázquez, 2005. geoffroy, marc. “l’almohadisme théologique d’averroès (ibn rušd).” archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen age 66 (1999): 9–47. gimaret, daniel. la doctrine d’al-ashʿarī. paris: cerf, 1990. griffel, frank. “ibn tūmart’s rational proof for god’s existence and unity, and his connection to the niẓāmiyya madrasa in baghdad.” in patrice cressier, maribel fierro, and luis molina (eds.). los almohades: problemas y perspectivas, 753–813. madrid: consejo superior de investigaciones científicas/casa velázquez, 2005. ibish, yusuf. the political doctrine of al-baqillani. beirut: american university, 1966. madelung, wilferd. “abū l-ḥusayn al-baṣrī’s proof for the existence of god.” in james e. montgomery (ed.). arabic theology, arabic philosophy. from the many to the one: essays in celebration of richard m. frank, 273–280. leuven: peeters, 2006. rudolph, ulrich. “la preuve de l’existence de dieu chez avicenne et dans la théologie musulmane.” in alain de libera, abdelali elamrani-jamal, and alain galonnier (eds.). langage et philososophie. hommage à jean jolivet, 339–346. paris: vrin, 1997. serrano ruano, delfina. “later ashʿarism in the islamic west.” in sabine schmidtke (ed.). the oxford handbook of islamic theology, 515–533. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. ———. “los almorávides y la teología ašʿarí: ¿contestación o legitimación de una disciplina marginal?” in cristina de la puente (ed.). identidades marginales, 461–516. madrid: consejo superior de investigaciones científicas, 2003. ———. “¿por qué llamaron los almohades antropomorfistas a los almorávides?” in patrice cressier, maribel fierro, and luis molina (eds.). los almohades: problemas y perspectivas, 815–852. madrid: consejo superior de investigaciones científicas/casa velázquez, 2005. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) facing the mahdī’s true belief • 112 stroumsa, sarah. “philosophes almohades? averroès, maïmonide et l’idéologie almohade.” in patrice cressier, maribel fierro, and luis molina (eds.). los almohades: problemas y perspectivas, 1137–1162. madrid: consejo superior de investigaciones científicas/ casa velázquez, 2005. urvoy, dominique. “la pensée d’ibn tūmart.” bulletin d’études orientales 27 (1974): 19–44. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 178-183 book review peter webb’s imagining the arabs r e e x a m i n e s t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p between the advent of islam and the emergence of the arabs. turning much received wisdom on its head, he argues that there was no homogenous arab people that lived in pre-islamic arabia to whom muhammad delivered his message. rather, he argues, arabness was a product of a post-conquest environment, in which the conquerors emphasized language and descent as a means of excluding new converts from claiming the massive resources of the new caliphate. arab identity is not a legacy from pre-islamic times but a new solution for post-conquest questions of self and community in the marwānid period (129-41). webb argues that the ethnonym arab is absent from securely dated pre-islamic poetry and that the term ʿarabī in the qurʾan simply means ‘clear’, as opposed to ʿajam, unclear or distorted (119). to imagine that the inhabitants of the arabian peninsula share an identity is, therefore, to accept the stereotypes of external powers, ranging from the assyrians to romans, in their descriptions of nomadic and changeless barbarians (23-36). building on the work of the late rina drory, webb argues that it is only in the abbasid period that events like the sasanian defeat at dhū qār in 609 were read as victories of an arab people over persian opponents (rather than as a victory by members of shaybān and qays) (88-95; 185). he plausibly argues that this re-reading of history needs to be understood against a context of cultural competition between proponents of arab and persian heritage in baghdad. this was the world in which genealogists such as ibn al-kalbī traced the tribal lineages of ninth-century baghdadis or sought to map paths of descent all the way back to ishmael (194-8; 262). such acts could obscure the matrilineal descent of many converts to islam to persian or aramaic speaking populations and allowed a complete amnesia over the distinctive culture of pre-islamic yemen, which was peter webb, imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016), 403pp. isbn: 9781474408264, price: $44.95 (paperback). philip wood aga khan university, institute for the study of muslim civilisations (philip.wood@aku.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 179 • philip wood now rendered simply as a part of the arab past (203; 210-20). i found webb’s nuanced reading of the abbasid representation of the jāhiliyya especially persuasive. it was not simply a period of ungodly impiety for all writers, and he emphasizes the degree to which authors like al-balādhurī recognized a nobility among pre-islamic arabs that a n t i c i p a t e s t h e c u l t u r a l c o m p e t i t i o n between their (alleged) descendants and non-arab muslims (268). this is a wide-ranging and ambitious b o o k . i w o u l d l i k e t o r a i s e s e v e r a l points where i disagreed with webb’s interpretation, but i should stress that this should in no way undermine my praise for its breadth and scholarship: to be stimulated to disagree is a sign that one has encountered a work that is provocative and thought-provoking. at a number of points, webb attacks those who have placed too much weight on what he (following frederick barth) calls “culture stuff” (language, custom, notions of shared descent and territory) in explaining shared arab identity, to the exclusion of “creed, politics and economy”. i am certainly sympathetic to his warning against presuming a natural shared identity across the peninsula and his interest in how boundaries are constructed. nevertheless, i think there are several areas where he presses this line of argument too far. in particular, i feel that he gives rather short shrift to the possibilities of using parallels to other roman frontiers to build more complex models for what was occurring in the arabian peninsula on the eve of islam.1 1. i think in particular of work on the rhine and danube that differentiates clearly between different webb holds a minimalist position on the spread of old arabic, the ancestor of the arabic spoken and written by the ‘arabs’ of the early caliphate: “the absence of ‘old arabic’ inscriptions and the almost complete absence of development of the arabic script itself implies that arabic lacked a body of writers promoting its use in pre-islamic times, and it perhaps lacked prestige too […] pre-islamic ‘old arabic’ speakers […] were possibly a tiny minority” (61). he argues that inscriptions of old arabic in what we now call arabic script are restricted to a cluster in the north of modern saudi arabia, with examples in jordan and southern syria (62). however, this minimal position is u n t e n a b l e i n t h e l i g h t o f e x t e n s i v e d i s c o v e r i e s o f f i f t h c e n t u r y a r a b i c phases of contact with rome: 1) the acquisition of military experience and resources by barbarians that generates social stratification across the frontier; 2) conflict in the course of migration that causes different, but related cultural groups to merge and 3) the propagation of specific forms of post-roman identity in successor kingdoms. i have found the works of p. heather, the goths (oxford, 1996); g. halsall, barbarian migrations and the roman west, 376-568 (cambridge, 2005) and f. curta, south-eastern europe in the middle ages, 500-1250 (cambridge, 2006) especially helpful. r. hoyland, “arab kings, arab tribes and the beginnings of arab historical memory in the late roman epigraphy,”, in h. cotton, r. hoyland, j. price and d. wasserstein (eds.), cultural and linguistic change in the roman near east (cambridge, 2009), 374-400; g. fisher, between empires. arabs, romans and saracens in late antiquity (oxford, 2011) and p. crone, “quraysh and the roman army: making sense of the meccan leather trade,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 70 (2007), 63-88 are all explicitly influenced by studies of other parts of the roman frontier in their examination of pre-islamic syria and arabia. y. modéran, les maures et l’afrique romaine (ive-viie siècle.) (rome, 2004) may also offer fruitful comparisons to the situation in arabia. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) peter webb’s imagining the arabs • 180 inscriptions, written in a transitional nabateo-arabic script, by frédéric imbert near najrān in 2012.2 this shows that the language had a much wider distribution that webb presumes, and this means that our analysis needs to give greater weight to the mechanisms that gave arabic a distribution across the peninsula (as a spoken and written language) before islam. i n p a r t i c u l a r , i t h i n k w e s h o u l d emphasize the prestige contexts in which arabic script is used before islam and the uniformity with which it is written. the examples that webb refers to from syria and jordan are dedicatory inscriptions made by jafnid phylarchs or those allied to them that were situated on christian religious sites alongside inscriptions in greek and arabic. michael macdonald c o m m e n t s t h a t s c r i p t h a s n o s i m p l e connection to ethnicity (quoted by webb at 63, note 17), and he is surely correct across the peninsula as a whole. but the inscriptions at zebed and ḥarrān are cases where arabic has been raised to the status of greek within the roman empire, and this should be taken as a key sign of the significance of script and language for the elites who created these buildings. likewise, we should also point to the uniformity of epigraphic arabic compared many of the ancient north arabian scripts such as safaitic. arabic is inscribed with 2 . h t t p : / / w w w . a r a b n e w s . c o m / n e w s / art-culture/611411 and http://www.leparisien.fr/ i n t e r n a t i o n a l / a r a b i e s a o u d i t e d e c o u v e r t e d e l a p l u s v i e i l l e i n s c r i p t i o n e n a r a b e d u monde-01-08-2014-4041101.php. cf. c. robin, a. al-ghabban, s. al-said, “inscriptions antique de la region de najrān (arabie séoudite méridionale): nouveaux jalons pour l’histoire de l’écriture, de la langue et du calendrier arabes,” comptes rendus de l’académie des inscriptions et de belles lettres 3 (2014), 1033-1128. a clear ductus and reasonably consistent letter forms in the very early decades of islam (as on the dam built by muʿāwiya in the hijaz in 661).3 to my mind, this suggests that the use of the script already had a history of formal use before islam, which enabled it to compete with the rival statements made in greek or other scripts in the seventh century. w e b b o b j e c t s t o t h e i d e a t h a t pre-islamic arabic was standardized. but the linguistic variety of the peninsula does not preclude the existence of standardized written expression. the development of the arabic script from ‘transitional nabatean’ suggests widespread use of script on perishable materials, probably in institutional contexts such as royal or ecclesiastical scriptoria.4 and the use of arabic in papyri from egypt very soon after the conquests to issue receipts,5 or the use of non-roman legal terminology,6 suggests that the conquerors drew on a p r e c o n q u e s t e x p e r i e n c e o f u s i n g arabic for administration. the choice to administer conquered lands in the language of the conquerors as well as those of the conquered is a symbolic as well as a 3. published in g. miles, “early islamic inscriptions near ṭāʾif in the ḥijāz,” journal of near eastern studies 7.4 (1948), 236-42. 4. l. nehmé, “aramaic or arabic? the nabataeoarabic script and the language of the inscriptions written in this script,” in a. al-jallad (ed.), arabic in context. celebrating 400 years of arabic at leiden university (leiden, 2017), 75-98. 5. perf 558, cited and discussed in a. papaconstantinou, “administering the early islamic empire: insights from the papyri,” in j. haldon (ed.), money, power and politics in early islamic syria: a review of current debates (ashgate, 2010), 57-74, at 65. 6. g. khan, “the pre-islamic background of muslim legal formularies,” aram 6 (1994), 193-224. http://www.arabnews.com/news/art-culture/611411 http://www.arabnews.com/news/art-culture/611411 http://www.leparisien.fr/international/arabie-saoudite-decouverte-de-la-plus-vieille-inscription-en-arabe-du-monde-01-08-2014-4041101.php http://www.leparisien.fr/international/arabie-saoudite-decouverte-de-la-plus-vieille-inscription-en-arabe-du-monde-01-08-2014-4041101.php http://www.leparisien.fr/international/arabie-saoudite-decouverte-de-la-plus-vieille-inscription-en-arabe-du-monde-01-08-2014-4041101.php http://www.leparisien.fr/international/arabie-saoudite-decouverte-de-la-plus-vieille-inscription-en-arabe-du-monde-01-08-2014-4041101.php al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 181 • philip wood practical choice, and is a key factor that differentiates the arabs from the goths or franks in the roman west. i think we have to see the use of arabic in formal contexts as an important differentiating symbol that bound the conquerors together, which a literate class had inherited from their pre-conquest experience. a second area where i disagree with webb is the role of the naṣrid and jafnid kings in providing patronage for the kinds of cultural forms that gave prestige to the arabic script and language (chiefly poetry and epigraphy). he argues that it would be “remarkable if a sense of arab communal cohesion could have been incubated across northern arabia” in light of the contradictory lifestyles of the naṣrid and the jafnids and peoples of the interior ( 7 8 7 9 ) a n d h e s t r e s s e s t h e i n t e r n a l religious divisions of the royal houses and the confederations they ruled (80). there was indeed debate among later genealogists and exegetes about whether or not the men of al-ḥīra could be included as arabs (e.g. 186). this seems to be a function of their christian associations and the efforts by some to render the pre-islamic arabs as proto-muslims. and some of the pre-islamic poetry does mock the unmanliness of the kings of al-ḥīra. but i think it is too great a leap to imagine that all of peoples of the interior of the peninsula had no affiliation to the beduinizing poetry written at al-ḥīra. to my mind, this poetry seems to champion a martial ethos that it claims both for the bedouin and for the ḥīran kings. indeed, the reason that the sasanians or the romans sponsored the naṣrids and the jafnids was because of their ability to suborn other ‘saracen’ populations in a way that the great powers could not accomplish directly. similarly, isabel toral-niehoff plausibly suggests that nomadic groups gradually settled, christianized and acculturated at al-ḥīra.7 if she is correct, then we have to envisage the naṣrids communicating across a cultural continuum within arabia rather than shouting unheard across a void. i do not think that religious diversity would have prevented this either: jafnid princes sponsored pagan temples as well as christian churches, and the naṣrid queens founded christian monasteries and churches while their husbands remained pagan. an element of religious and cultural code-switching was a key part of the utility of both dynasties to their sponsors, and it should help us to understand how ideas and practices from the world of the great powers was disseminated and reformulated into the arabian peninsula. the third area where i disagree with webb is his treatment of “christian arabs” (including the descendants of those who had once served the jafnids and naṣrids). he notes that “christian groups which had assisted the first conquerors but did not subsequently convert to islam faced intractable problems for they could not easily become ‘arabs’ without nudging their monotheistic belief toward islam too” (156). he situates the anxiety about where to place these groups within the definition of both muslim and arab identities under t h e m a r w ā n i d s , a s “ t h e e c u m e n i c a l believers’ movement” began to set up new boundaries to preserve its resources. 7. i. toral-niehoff, al-ḥīra. eine arabische kulturmetropole im spätantiken kontext (leiden, 2014). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) peter webb’s imagining the arabs • 182 i think he is correct to stress the emphasis on religious boundaries between muslims and non-muslims under the marwānids and the pressure this placed on christian populations who had once served the caliphate in a military capacity. thus muʿāwiya made extensive use of the banū kalb and married two christian kalbis, but al-walīd i was responsible for several persecutions of the banū taghlib. michael the syrian even accuses him of eating the flesh of a martyred taghlib chief.8 but webb’s statement imagines that arabness is created under the marwānids and that conquerors who are not muslims (or quasi-muslims?) are ejected at this point. he is forced into this position by his earlier argument that ‘arabness’ is a product of the marwānid amṣār and has no other basis (130-39). yet this ignores the fact that christian arab groups such as the taghlib were not migrant conquerors and dwelt in the jazīra between aleppo and mosul, where they had been converted to miaphysite christianity in the late sixth century. several reports indicate that the taghlib were considered as, and considered themselves as, arabs. abū yūsuf states that ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb had deemed it desirable to tax the taghlib harshly since they were arabs, and therefore more susceptible to conversion.9 al-balādhurī 8. michael the syrian, ed. and tr. j.-b. chabot, le chronique de michel le syrien (paris, 1899-1910), ed. iv: 451-52, trans. ii: 481-82. chabot’s translation has al-walīd forcing the martyr to eat his own flesh, but the syriac is ambiguous. here i follow c. sahner, christian martyrs and the making of an islamic society in the post-conquest period, phd dissertation (princeton, 2015), 60. 9. abū yūsuf, kitāb al-kharāj, ed. i. abbas (cairo, 1985), 121-22, tr. e. fagnan, le livre de l’impôt foncier (paris, 1921), 186. reports that the taghlib paid the double ṣadaqa (rather than the humiliating jizya) because they were “arabs [and] too proud to pay the poll tax”.10 later sources even describe the taghlib approaching ʿumar ii for the right to wear the turban and to be reckoned as arabs.11 this request seems to have been a pitch for higher status on the basis of shared ethnic affiliation without converting to islam and without being migrants or conquerors. the “culture stuff” of language, lifestyle and custom mattered in this instance, since it was the basis of a claim to the caliph that others could not make. finally, webb argues for the postqurʾanic origins of the term ʿarabī as an ethnonym. he sees its original meaning as ‘pure/clear’, as opposed to ʿajam, ‘impure/unclear’. for webb, it is only later that it came to mean a pure people, to distinguish the conquerors from those around them. i do not find this convincing. w e b b l a y s g r e a t s t o r e b y t h e s t e r e o t y p i c a l n a t u r e o f t h e o u t s i d e sources that describe the arabs of the peninsula, which he compares to the stereotyping of native americans as a homogenous unchanging people (40). but stereotypes can be inverted and reclaimed, and the terms used to vilify disparate peoples can end up giving them a shared identity. this is exactly what many scholars have suggested occurred 10. al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, ed. m. de goeje (leiden, 1866), 182, tr. p. hitti, the origins of the islamic state (new york, 1916), 285. 11. y. friedmann, tolerance and coercion in islam; interfaith relations in the muslim tradition (cambridge, 2004), 64-65. cf. m. j. kister, “‘the crowns of this community’…some notes on the turban in the islamic tradition,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 24 (2000), 217-45. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 183 • philip wood in north america, where populations that fled the “shatter zone” of the east coast built new confederations further inland, which embraced more expansive notions of ‘indian’ identity.12 to my mind, the origin of the ethnonym ‘arab’ is more profitably sought in this kind of inversion of roman imperial stereotype. the catch, as the work of fergus millar indicates, is that no seventh century roman would have expected their conquerors to have called themselves arab, since the term had not been used by the romans for the inhabitants of the peninsula since the early second century.13 webb recognizes this shift in usage (47-48, 111-15), but he seems to make the fact that 12. r. ethridge, mapping the mississippian shatter zone: the colonial indian slave trade and regional instability in the american south (lincoln, ne, 2009); w. lee, ‘the military revolution of native north america. firearms, forts and politics,’ in w. lee (ed.), empires and indigenes. intercultural alliance, imperial expansion and warfare in the early modern world (new york, 2011), 49-80, esp. 68-70. the romans had once used the term arab as simply a curious coincidence, unrelated to the qurʾan’s use of ʿarabī. but i think the very use of this term after such a time-lag suggests that it was adopted as an ethnonym by a population in the peninsula during the first century (though this tells us nothing about how widely the term was disseminated). so while webb is right to highlight how important the settlement of the arabs was for the development of an arab identity, i would argue that language, script, poetry and ethnonym all have a pre-islamic history as articulations of different kinds of common identity that were important ingredients for islamic-era assertions of arabness.13 13. f. millar, empire, church and society in the late roman near east (leuven, 2015) would have been a fruitful text for webb to have engaged with, especially his observations on the role of christian ethnography (e.g. cyril of scythopolis) in re-imagining the inhabitants of arabia as saracens or ishmaelites. m. macdonald, “arabs, arabia and arabic before late antiquity,” topoi 19 (2009), 277-32, not cited by webb, stresses the use of arabic as a self-description in epigraphy from ptolemaic egypt and elsewhere. macdonald sees ‘arab’ as a pre-islamic self-designation based on a complex of cultural and linguistic features. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 184-189 book review those subject to arab-islamic rule are likely to have wondered at the life span of the new religio-political order at the close of the first/seventh century. the conquerors were a quarrelsome lot, as quick to engage in internecine violence as they were to subdue local opposition: the ‘believers’ were at each other’s throats. from, in part, the accounts of a then burgeoning and variegated population of clients and slaves (mawālī), it is clear that a new religious program was taking shape. but sharp disagreements over its central precepts were no less obvious; divisions of belief ran as deep as those of kinship. how long could the new masters carry on this way? the christians of the levant and egypt had certainly a special interest in the fortunes of the nascent order given their majority standing. if, at first, somewhat detached, as some modern scholars have argued, following the clashes at marj rāhiṭ (c. 64-65/683-684) and a more aggressive a s s e r t i o n o f a r a b m u s l i m a u t h o r i t y , engagement with the new umayyad rulers took on urgency. the policies of the newly ascendant branch of the umayyad clan (the marwānids) sought a new sectarianstyle unity. the effort sparked a response from christian communities and their res pec t iv e elit es agains t w hom s uch policies were often aimed. thus, in egypt, attitudes shifted on the part of the coptic church and its adherents. joshua mabra, in his concise and understated new book, sees the shift as having taken place under ʿabd al-ʿazīz ibn marwān (d. 85/705), the newly appointed governor, and, again, in good measure, because of his approach to office. ʿabd al-ʿazīz governed egypt for twenty years—65/685 to 85/705—during which time he stood as heir to ʿabd al-malik (d. 85/705), the caliph, his far better known half-brother. the two men had assumed office, respectively, following the untimely death of their father, marwān i b n a l ḥ a k a m i b n a l ʿ ā ṣ ( d . 6 5 / 6 8 5 ) . princely authority in the early marwānid joshua mabra, princely authority in the early marwānid state: the life of ʿabd al-ʿazīz ibn marwān (d. 86/705). islamic history and thought, vol. 2 (piscataway, nj: gorgias press, 2017), bibliography, index. isbn 9781463206321. price: $76.00 (cloth). matthew s. gordon miami university (gordonms@miamioh.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 185 • matthew s. gordon state brings together literary, numismatic, and archeological information in a close discussion of ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s tenure in office. a political biography, it has much to say about ʿabd al-ʿazīz but also widens a useful window onto the quarrels of the new empire and emergent patterns of arab-islamic legitimation. mabra sees, as a failing of modern scholarship, its passing treatment of ʿabd al-ʿazīz. (a quick survey of the indices of modern studies of the umayyad period confirms the point: mentions of ʿabd al-ʿazīz are scattered and few). the lion’s share of attention has been devoted to ʿabd al-malik. this is as it should be given the latter’s achievements, and on many fronts: he is typically held to be the architect of the first islamic state. ʿabd al-malik, more than any other arab/muslim leader, drew on islamic symbols and rhetoric in a bid to join a fractious muslim realm under marwānid rule. but mabra would have ʿabd al-ʿazīz play a “paramount role” (p. 10) in this regard as well. he makes a strong pitch for the significance of ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s contribution and the lessons it offers on umayyad politics. the book joins a now fairly substantial and growing library of revisionist scholarship on the early islamic period. but it has problems, and i address these below. p r i n c e l y a u t h o r i t y o p e n s w i t h a discussion of the introduction of umayyad family rule over egypt, a situation that would prevail into the early second/eighth century. mabra only gets to his main arguments at the close of the first chapter (“egypt and the early umayyads”). this is a touch annoying: history writing ought not adhere to narrow formulas, but there is reason to provide direction early on. his theses are two in number. there is his argument that the new governor sought independence from central authority; i take this up below. the other thesis is that marwān assigned ʿabd al-ʿazīz over egypt because of the legitimation conferred by his mother’s “royal kalbī lineage” ( p . 1 1 ) . t h r o u g h h e r , m a r w ā n a n d , following the latter’s demise and his own ascent to office, ʿabd al-ʿazīz himself, could count on the backing of the quḍāʿa. this is to see ʿabd al-ʿazīz as having continued where muʿāwiya had left off, decades earlier, in drawing support from the syrian tribes, led by the kalb. modern scholarship has long recognized this feature of early u m a y y a d p o l i t i c s . b u t m a b r a s e e m s justified in seeing that modern (western) historiography often moves too quickly through the intricate arab tribal politics of the second fitna. it often overlooks, in particular, ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s role in moving the quḍāʿa-marwānid alliance forward and, thus, consolidating the authority of the marwānids following marj rāhiṭ and the collapse of the zubayrids. ʿabd al-ʿazīz provided continuity: he was the best choice to succeed his father as amīr of egypt upon his (marwān’s) rise to the caliphate. mabra stays with tribal politics in his second chapter (“the coalition of kalb and umayya”). he points to the strained efforts by julius wellhausen, among others, to explain the rise of the marwānids. why that umayyad house? again, mabra locates marwānid success, and does so convincingly, in the support from powerful quḍāʿī circles following marwān’s marriage to laylā bint zabān ibn al-aṣbagh from the ruling house of dūmat al-jandal, a key site linking syria to the najd (north-central arabia). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) joshua mabra’s princely authority in the early marwānid state • 186 the marriage was only one in a series: the early muslim elite long knew to forge such ties to the kalb powerhouse. marwān did so in style, marrying twice, in fact, into the kalb, then in his appointment of ʿabd al-ʿazīz as governor and second heir to the caliphate (after ʿabd al-malik). mabra provides two handy charts of these alliances, and in a rare addition to such charts, includes the women to whom the marwānid chiefs were married (pp. 31-32). the marital ties were critical: “ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. marwān was well aware of the value of his maternal lineage, and he leaned heavily on his mother’s name and nobility” (p. 29). a virtue of mabra’s book is his keen sense of umayyad politics: he is a close reader of his sources, ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, al-kindī, and al-ṭabarī among the arabic writers. mabra knows, in other words, how to build an argument. it is ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s shaping of a “power network” (p. 34) that concerns the third chapter, “al-ḥasham: a provincial power base.” echoing wilfred madelung and patricia crone especially, mabra points to the predominance of the yamānī “super tribal bloc” in egypt and the new governor’s efforts, following the second fitna, to further consolidate his ties (through his kalbī connections) to that same bloc. a key decision was to marry the granddaughter of ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ, egypt’s original boss. no less a measure was the acquisition by ʿabd al-ʿazīz of a series of properties in central fusṭāṭ. this is a useful insight on mabra’s part. he argues that the properties, surrounding the original congregational mosque, gave the governor access to egypt’s best families: the properties provided proximity and prestige alike. poetry is the stuff of chapter four: “the poetic battle for succession.” as would be the case of future egyptian claimants, local poets did much to serve political ambitions along the nile. (michael bonner has demonstrated as much for aḥmad ibn ṭūlūn of third/ninth century fame1). two poets, in particular, lauded ʿabd al-ʿazīz: ibn qays al-ruqayyāt (d. 85/705) and al-aḥwaṣ al-anṣārī (d. 105/723). six poems survive, four from ibn qays, two from his counterpart, and mabra investigates them with care. he includes selections, both in the original arabic and in serviceable translation. i find the latter passages often too close to the arabic: here, as in other ways, mabra should have been better served by his editor and reviewers. but, again, he has studied the poems carefully, and draws out telling evidence that, in particular, ʿabd al-ʿazīz relied heavily on his maternal lineage in gilding his claims, both as amīr and as heir apparent. mabra turns to the second of his overall theses in the final two chapters. the argument, i believe, is new: ʿabd al-ʿazīz insisted on ruling egypt on his own terms, rather than those set out in damascus by ʿabd al-malik. mabra refers to it as independence on the governor’s part: “he ruled with almost no involvement from his brother, the amīr al-muʾminīn ʿabd al-malik…[refusing] to participate in a number of his brother’s islamicizing and centralizing reforms.” (p. 11). again, it seems to me, this is a significant statement in the light of a near scholarly orthodoxy, which holds that, following ʿabd al-malik’s s w e e p i n g r e f o r m s , t h e i n t e r l o c k i n g streams of islamisation and arabisation swept forward across the muslim realm. 1. “ibn ṭūlūn’s jihād: the damascus assembly of 269/883,” journal of the american oriental society, 130:4 (2010), 573-605, see, on the poetry, 593-597. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 187 • matthew s. gordon rather than counter this view outright, i think, mabra complicates it. it would have been helpful had he opted to extend his thinking on this score: again, his style is very understated. so, how did ʿabd al-ʿazīz proceed in constructing his “independent polity” ( c h a p t e r f i v e ) ? m a b r a r e l i e s o n t h e evidence contained in the aphrodito documents (p.lond. iv) and the so-called abaz coin, “the first completely original [copper] coin minted in islamic egypt” (p. 113). the former body of evidence, in mabra’s reading, points to a refusal by ʿabd al-ʿazīz to share egypt’s fiscal and human wealth with the empire: the governor kept revenue and tradesmen at home for his own purposes. the coin, for its part, speaks to the effort by ʿabd al-ʿazīz to nurture relations with egyptian christians. it was, mabra states, “a compromise coin,” designed to avoid the overtly islamic program put in place by ʿabd al-malik. the aim, in other words, was to address political challenges at a regional (egyptian) level quite in contrast with his brother’s more universal (islamic) program. the latter program thus comes off as less uniform, less imperial, less sweeping. and, as mabra demonstrates, citing al-yaʿqūbī and al-kindī, both writers well acquainted with egypt’s recent political history, the governor’s stance had as much to do with a fraternal clash: ʿabd al-malik, at one point, sought to convince ʿabd al-ʿazīz to step down as heir apparent in favor of his own offspring, an offer he rejected out of hand. a further virtue of the book lies in turning our lens from center to periphery, which is to say, the dynamics internal to egypt this early in the arab/islamic period. mabra shares ground with at l e a s t t w o r e c e n t p u b l i c a t i o n s , p e t r a sijp es t eijn’ s shap ing a mu s lim st ate (oxford, 2013) and majed mikhail’s from byzantine to islamic egypt (london & new york, 2014), from which we learn a very great deal of the shaping of islamic-era egypt. mabra appears to have relied on sijpesteijn’s doctoral thesis of the same name (princeton, 2004), although it is a bit difficult to tell (see below). the turns of ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s busy career were, in many cases, predictable, given the significance of egypt: these were matters of tribute and imperial administration. but other matters had a longer ripple effect: so, for example, ʿabd al-ʿazīz, standing up to ʿabd al-malik, did so at one point by rejecting the standardized version of the qurʾanic text produced by al-ḥajjāj ibn yūsuf and ordering up an ‘egyptian’ muṣḥaf, a legitimating gesture paralleling that of his rival in damascus. but the wider point, again, goes to egypt’s often edgy relations with the imperial center, not simply in the umayyad period, but through the first abbasid period as well, that is, into the first part of the fourth/tenth century and the destruction, by an abbasid force, of the tulunid polity. mabra’s contribution, and, again, his discussion overlaps particularly with mikhail, is to insist on paying closer attention than is normally the rule to the evidence provided by coptic sources, chief among them the history of the patriarchs of alexandria. as mikhail points out (see, for example, islamic egypt, 41-42), ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s policies towards the church were singular in their aim of integrating coptic officialdom into the new arab/islamic administration. mabra moves forward with this same evidence. first, he sees the governor’s policies as extending well beyond a warming of relations with al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) joshua mabra’s princely authority in the early marwānid state • 188 the coptic religious establishment: ʿabd al-ʿazīz worked deliberately to wield close authority over the church. but, more to the point, he did so as part and parcel of the effort to consolidate an autonomous authority. the difference, in other words, is that mikhail seems content to see this new relationship as a step in the extension of muslim/imperial hegemony, whereas mabra appears to be arguing for a break occasioned by ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s particular political and administrative strategies. i liked this chapter in particular for its reliance on a mix of literary, numismatic and archeological evidence. i have described the book as understated: mabra is a reticent writer, for all of his clarity. perhaps this is proper in a first book, and fair enough. but mabra has a way of stopping just short of a full argument. so, for example, he treats the critical part played by maternal lineage, as indicated above, and names several of the kalbī women in question, but could underscore the point that, without the perspective of gender, a retelling of umayyad history falls short. he might also have said more about the use of the physical landscape. h e s p e a k s t o t h e p u r p o s e s t o w h i c h property and city-building were put by ʿabd al-ʿazīz, especially in his discussion of ḥulwān, the governor’s new capital. he sees it, properly, as an ideological use of brick and mortar, and comments, in this regard, on the later construction of al-ramla by sulaymān ibn ʿabd al-malik (d. 99/717), which he treats similarly in symbolic terms. but i thought it right for mabra to offer a wider comment that, in this way, as in many others, the umayyad house developed patterns of legitimation— including city-building—that flourished well beyond the dynasty’s fall. i wondered, too, about the counterevidence. it perhaps goes without saying t h a t , l a r g e l y d u e t o t h e v a g a r i e s o f transmission (oral and written), arabic sources on the first islamic period contain contradictory and inconsistent evidence. purely by happenstance, i noted a reference to ʿabd al-ʿazīz in christophe picard’s new study of the ‘islamic mediterranean,’ la mer des califes (seuil, 2015).2 picard quotes a long passage from al-bakrī’s kitāb al-masālik wa al-mamālik, so admittedly a later (fifth/eleventh century) andalusian geographical text. it has ʿabd al-malik, as caliph, order ʿabd al-ʿazīz, as governor, transfer a population of one thousand coptic shipbuilders and their families to tunis, where they were to construct a new fleet with which to engage the byzantines. it has ʿabd al-ʿazīz work out the details with the governor of ifrīqiya, ḥasān ibn al-nuʿmān. there is much here: the passage evinces a practice of population transfer on the part of the umayyads that one reads of in other sources as well (and which was very much a practice of most ancient and medieval empires). it complicates mabra’s account: first, it has ʿabd al-malik working with his brother at a point when, if we follow mabra, the two men were at odds and, second, it has ibn al-nuʿmān on the scene when, according to mabra (p. 93), ʿabd al-ʿazīz had replaced him years earlier as governor of ifrīqiya. this is not to challenge mabra—i find his theses very well supported—so much as to suggest that an engagement with uncomfortable evidence makes for richer history. 2. see my review of picard’s book in this same issue. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 189 • matthew s. gordon finally, the book is marred by two problems that, unfortunately, appear to have become common to academic publishing. one wants not to be naïve as regards the perilous state of book publishing, but the volume is far too expensive. and the shame of it goes to its availability to instructors. as perhaps other colleagues have as well, i have used chase robinson’s ʿabd al-malik (oneworld, 2005) with students to good effect. it works well in part because of its brevity, focus and the narrative ‘story’ inherent to biography. i could see using mabra’s book—it bears the same features—in similar fashion. but the cost is prohibitive. one hopes that gorgias press will see to an affordable paperback edition. the second problem is more serious: the lax editing of the book. it contains, first of all, no small number of typographical errors. more serious are the problems of citation: i checked only a handful of the notes, and in random fashion, and found at least four that needed correcting, which suggests others exist as well. the citation to al-kindī (p. 94, note 33) should be to p. 58 not 55; the references to petra sijpesteijn’s shaping a muslim state (eg. p. 100, note 49 and p. 105, n. 61) are misleading in that they apparently refer to sijpesteijn’s 2004 princeton dissertation, which bears the same title as her later monograph (oxford university press, 2013), but mabra makes no effort to distinguish the two works; and, finally, phil booth’s crisis of empire (university of california press, 2013), is cited (p. 141, note 59) but does not occur in the bibliography. casual errors, perhaps, and certainly not exceptional, but they are pernicious nonetheless in that they reduce confidence. book review al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 273-288 this book is a popular-level publi-cation containing material from daniel alan brubaker’s phd dissertation (rice university, 2014); it is aimed at both the general reader and the scholar. its stated purpose is to introduce the audience to a facet of textual criticism of the quran, namely scribal corrections, through a series of examples from early quranic manuscripts. the first of its kind, brubaker’s book represents the sole accessible work on scribal changes in manuscripts and one of only a few on quranic manuscripts as a whole. it is therefore frustrating that it suffers from a number of critical flaws in methodology, analysis, and discussion. it is not lost on anyone remot ely familiar with quranic manuscripts that the field is going through a transformative period. the plethora of early manuscripts at our disposal combined with digital technologies making them accessible has reawakened a fervor among both scholars a n d t h e p u b l i c . r a d i o c a r b o n d a t i n g of quranic fragments has also pushed some manuscripts back to the mid-first/ seventh century or before, giving us an unprecedented window into the scripture as it was written, handled, and received by the earliest generation of muslims. we are told that a survey of these manuscripts in a little more than a hundred pages will “challenge the traditional assertions about the transmission of the quran in several ways” (p. xxi) and have much to say about the “pious enhancement of the quran’s textual history” (p. xxii). unfortunately, the bold claims are left unsubstantiated. a p a r t f r o m a t w e n t y f i v e p a g e introduction and a ten-page conclusion, the bulk of this book is dedicated to enumerating, in very systematic fashion, s c r i b a l c h a n g e s f o u n d t h r o u g h o u t various quranic manuscripts. there is very little to fault in the presentation of the material; manuscript photographs are provided for each example along with the corresponding text from the cairo edition, and the accompanying daniel alan brubaker, corrections in early qurʾānic manuscripts: twenty examples (lovettsville: think and tell press, 2019), xxv + 102 pp. isbn 978-1-949123-03-6. price: $35 (paper). hythem sidky university of chicago (hsidky@uchicago.edu) mailto:hsidky%40uchicago.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 274 • hythem sidky descriptions focused on word and letter placement, ink color, and paleography are very thoughtful and easy to follow. the author also provides a material description of the change, precisely how the original or corrected text differs from the cairo e d i t i o n , a n d , i n s o m e i n s t a n c e s , a n explanation of the change in meaning. the inclusion of useful “trivia” for most of the featured manuscripts, such as the folkloric attribution of the topkapı muṣḥaf to the caliph ʿuthmān (p. 28), is also a very nice addition. since scribal changes are the focal point of this book, i follow its structure closely in this review. my assessment of both the broader context and the thesis set forth in this work is followed by a detailed appraisal of the scribal changes, grouped by similarity. in light of my reevaluation, i revisit brubaker’s thesis, which i have not found convincing. b r u b a k e r i n t r o d u c e s q u r a n i c m a n u s c r i p t s b y m e n t i o n i n g s o m e o f the major nineteenthand twentiethcentury figures largely responsible for the major manuscript collections in western institutions. he also provides us efu l context to explain why manuscripts from the first/seventh century have survived until today—primarily because of the use of parchment as writing material and because of political circumstances. in contrast to the scripture of the early christian community, he correctly states, the muslim 1. see ʾabū ʿamr al-dānī’s (d. 444/1053), al-muḥkam fī ʿilm naqṭ al-maṣāḥif, ed. ghānim qaddūrī al-ḥamad (damascus: dār al-ghawthānī li-l-dirāsāt al-qurʾāniyya, 2017), 57ff., where the author dedicates to this subject an entire chapter, entitled “discussion of muṣḥafs and how they used to be free of dots.” 2. marijn van putten, “hamzah in the quranic consonantal text,” orientalia 87, no. 1 (2011): 95. 3. the precise term is archigrapheme. see thomas milo, “towards arabic historical script grammar through contrastive analysis of qurʾān manuscripts,” in writings and writing: investigations in islamic text and script in honour of dr. januarius justus witkam, ed. robert m. kerr and thomas milo, 249–92 (cambridge: archetype, 2013), and thomas milo, “arabic typography,” in encyclopedia of arabic language and linguistics, ed. lutz scripture enjoyed an elevated status under a dominant political hegemony from an early period and thus was not subject to censorship or destruction. discussing manuscript dating, brubaker highlights the importance of paleography and, in particular, the classification of scripts by françois déroche, adding the important caveat that script classifications do have overlapping timelines. however, he erroneously states that some of the earliest quranic manuscripts, and in particular those in the hijazi style, were written without diacritical marks (p. 5). this is a common misconception, due not least to medieval muslim scholars, who attributed the invention of such marks and their addition to muṣḥafs to several prominent figures.1 in reality, t h e v e r y e a r l i e s t h i j a z i m a n u s c r i p t s contain occasional diacritical marks. 2 brubaker then makes the strange and equally incorrect assertion that the later development of script grammar allows for precise disambiguation of identical archigraphemes in lieu of diacritics. “script grammar,” a concept introduced by thomas milo, defines how the letters of a given script are drawn, how they stack, and how denticle heights of adjacent letters vary. however, it cannot disambiguate a single undotted word form; it can only distinguish similar skeletal forms from one another.3 brubaker also discusses two al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) daniel alan brubaker’s corrections in early qurʾānic manuscripts • 275 other forms of dating, codicology and radiocarbon dating, the latter of which he calls “not foolproof.” this skepticism towards radiocarbon dating is reminiscent of the discussion regarding the dead sea scrolls; there we find that the consensus has indeed converged on the method being foolproof.4 t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n t o c o n s o n a n t a l v a r i a n t s c o n t a i n s s i g n i f i c a n t e r r o r s , which will undoubtedly leave the novice with a confused distinction between the rasm (consonantal text) and the reading traditions that interpret it. brubaker states that “the readings are different from the rasm and in most cases the one is not affected in the least by the other” (p. 8). the distinction between the two is important to point out, but it is incorrect to state that they are entirely independent. the reading traditions are exactly that: different traditions for reading the same consonantal text. although there is a degree of tension between the two, evident in some instances as slight deviations from the standard rasm, the reading traditions are in large part dependent upon the consonantal text.5 i t i s a l l t h e m o r e s u r p r i s i n g t h a t brubaker makes this distinction between edzard, rudolf de jong, ramzi baalbaki, james dickins, mushira eid, pierre larcher, janet watson, et al. (leiden: brill online), http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1570-6699_eall_eall_sim_000043. 4. see r. e. taylor and ofer bar-yosef, radiocarbon dating: an archeological perspective, 2nd ed. (walnut creek, ca: left coast press, 2014), 38ff., esp. 41. on the dating of quranic manuscripts using 14c and its consistency with paleography, see michael j. marx and tobias j. jocham, “zu den datierungen von koranhandschriften durch die 14c-methode,” frankfurter zeitschrift für islamisch-theologische studien 2 (2015): 9–43. 5. see yasin dutton, “orality, literacy and the ‘seven aḥruf’ ḥadīth,” journal of islamic studies 23, no. 1 (2011): 1–49, and yasin dutton, “two ‘ḥijāzī’ fragments of the qurʾan and their variants, or: when did the shawādhdh become shādhdh?” journal of islamic manuscripts 8, no. 1 (2017): 1–56. 6. he is not alone, however. see yasin dutton, “some notes on the british library’s ‘oldest qurʾan manuscript’ (or. 2165),” journal of qur’anic studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 43–71, for an example of conflating manuscript rasm with the reading of ibn ʿāmir, and intisar a. rabb, “non-canonical readings of the qurʾān: recognition & authenticity,” journal of qur’anic studies 8, no. 2 (2006): 84–127, for a corrective response. the readings and rasm explicit since he proceeds to conflate the two6 when discussing several muṣḥafs edited by tayyar altıkulaç. he states that these codices do not reflect a single reading, leading their editor to describe them in terms of adherence to the various readings. what altıkulaç is actually referring to are the consonantal (read: rasm) differences between the regional muṣḥafs and not the reading traditions. in fact, the cairene muṣḥaf mentioned is not vocalized, which is necessary for identification of the reading. b e f o r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e e v i d e n c e , b r u b a k e r p r e m a t u r e l y a s s e r t s t h a t t he t hou s and s of c orrec t ions he has documented appear to have nothing to do with the reading tradition literature and thus must be explained by another phenomenon, such as a greater degree of perceived flexibility in the quranic text in the early centuries (p. 9). however, one does not expect that mere scribal errors would be featured in the reading tradition literature, and the same applies to orthographic variants that do not affect pronunciation (of which there are many). brubaker makes no mention of these two reasonable possibilities, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1570-6699_eall_eall_sim_000043 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 276 • hythem sidky leaving the reader with the impression that there are thousands of heretofore unknown yet consequential orthographic variants in early muṣḥafs—a claim that, if true, is significant enough to demand substantiation. brubaker’s general observations on manuscript corrections in the introduction contain perhaps the most significant methodological flaw that permeates his book. he notes that most often, changes in manuscripts result in “conformity of that manuscript at the point of correction with the rasm of the now-standard 1924 cairo edition” (p. 10). brubaker sees this as a pattern, which shows “a general movement over time toward conformity, though not immediate complete conformity” (p. 10). there are two major problems with this conclusion. the first is the evident anachronism of centuries-old manuscripts corrected to conform to a text from 1924 (in all cases the corrections predate the cairo edition). in effect, this is a teleological argument for an end goal that did not exist at the time. the second is the presupposition that whatever standard the 1924 cairo edition is based on differs from the standard that existed at the time the early manuscripts w e r e w r i t t e n . h o w e v e r , c o r r e c t i o n s apparently in the direction of conformity to the cairo edition are not evidence of a changing standard, but evidence of the 7. classicization is an orthographic reform toward classical arabic standards that includes hamza and scriptio plena. the classicization of quranic orthography early on was recognized by muslim jurist mālik b. anas (d. 179/795), who was asked about the commission of a new muṣḥaf: “should it be written according to the orthographic practices [hijāʾ] people have innovated?” his response: “no, i do not see that as appropriate. rather, it should be written in the original manner [ʿalā al-katba al-ūlā].” abū ʿ amr al-dānī, al-muqniʿ fī maʿrifat marsūm maṣāḥif ahl al-amṣār, ed. bashīr al-ḥimyarī (beirut: dār al-bashāʾir al-islāmiyya, 2016), 1:352–353. existence of a standard in the first place! demonstrating the evolution of a standard over time is another matter entirely. both of these problems stem from brubaker’s apparent lack of understanding of the nature of the cairo edition. in the edition’s postface we find that its editors relied on works by two figures, abū ʿamr al-dānī (d. 444/1053) and his student abū dāwūd b. najāḥ (d. 496/1103), to fix its orthography, with preference given to the latter in the event of conflict. it becomes immediately apparent that (a) variations in quranic orthography exist within the muslim tradition and (b) the orthography of the cairo edition is dependent on a choice made by a committee in 1924 to give precedence to one text over another. furthermore, a cursory examination of quranic manuscripts across the centuries reveals the rapid classicization of the text’s orthography.7 by contrast, the cairo edition’s reliance on rasm works results in a text that is substantially more archaic and indeed more archetypal than many manuscripts over a millennium older. therefore, the cairo edition in fact breaks away from the orthographic standard of classical arabic that characterized nearly all muṣḥafs prior to its conception. recognizing this aspect of the cairo edition, which belies its use as a standard toward which qurans evolved, makes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) daniel alan brubaker’s corrections in early qurʾānic manuscripts • 277 apparent the anachronistic nature of the approach adopted by brubaker.8 the book also presents a brief survey of difficult issues relating to different aspects of the quran, including an apparent disconnect between the topography of mecca and descriptions within the text, archeological problems with mecca as an ancient center of civilization, and the qibla (direction of prayer) of the early muslim c o m m u n i t y . g i v e n t h e l a t t e r i s s u e ’ s irrelevance to quranic manuscripts and their transmission, brubaker’s raising of it is surprising, as is the length at which he discusses it in comparison to other issues raised and his reliance on dan gibson’s work to the exclusion of that of david king, who is a specialist in early muslim qiblas and who has written at length to debunk the thesis advertised by gibson.9 as the work is primarily focused on scribal changes in quranic manuscripts and aimed at a general audience, more care should have been put into not misrepresenting the state of western scholarship on matters ancillary to the primary focus of the book. once again, in raising the well-known and important issue of the reliability of the 8. one might raise the objection that the works used for the cairo edition are from the fifth century ah. however, no two rasm works are in complete agreement, there is no evidence that any standard existed in the fifth century despite the composition of these rasm works, and manuscripts continued to diverge from the ʿuthmānic standard through the ottoman period. a second possible objection might concern the degree of variation: rasm works are largely (though not exclusively) concerned with orthographic variants, whereas the monograph under review is concerned with more substantial variation. however, if one wishes to argue for the development of a later standard, one must also explain an apparent conundrum. scribes across the entire muslim world, for centuries prior to the 1924 cairo edition, were entirely comfortable with orthographic fluidity yet somehow managed to refrain from making more significant changes. in other words, as orthography continued to diverge, substantive variation simultaneously continued to converge. 9. david a. king, “the petra fallacy: early mosques do face the sacred kaaba in mecca but dan gibson doesn’t know how” (unpublished paper, december 1, 2018), https://www.academia.edu/37957366/king_2018_-_the_ petra_fallacy_-_early_mosques_do_face_the_sacred_kaaba_in_mecca_but_dan_gibson_doesnt_know_how, and david a. king, review of early islamic qiblas, by dan gibson, suhayl 16–17 (2018–2019): 347–66, https://www. academia.edu/40110039/king_2019_-_review_of_gibson._earliest_qiblas. prophetic biography and hadith, brubaker makes no reference to the work of gregor schoeler or harald motzki, both of whom have made seminal contributions in these areas. the final difficulties that brubaker a d d r e s s e s c o n c e r n t h e ʿ u t h m ā n i c standardization. given the monumental n a t u r e o f t h e ʿ u t h m ā n i c p r o j e c t , h e contends, “it is odd that no copy existing today has been reliably identified as one of these actual authoritative copies” (p. 19). why is it odd that of the thousands of muṣḥafs that surely existed in the first/ seventh century, most of which were lost to time, four very specific ones did not survive? moreover, if one were to concede the traditional narrative concerning the ʿuthmānic project involving the largescale destruction of other muṣḥafs, the sheer amount of traffic and handling that the regional exemplars would have received from subsequent copying efforts would almost certainly have compromised their integrity. however, one does not have to concede the traditional narrative. harald motzki has analyzed reports of this event and dated them to the late https://www.academia.edu/37957366/king_2018_-_the_petra_fallacy_-_early_mosques_do_face_the_sacred_kaaba_in_mecca_but_dan_gibson_doesnt_know_how https://www.academia.edu/37957366/king_2018_-_the_petra_fallacy_-_early_mosques_do_face_the_sacred_kaaba_in_mecca_but_dan_gibson_doesnt_know_how https://www.academia.edu/40110039/king_2019_-_review_of_gibson._earliest_qiblas https://www.academia.edu/40110039/king_2019_-_review_of_gibson._earliest_qiblas al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 278 • hythem sidky first/early eighth century.10 nicolai sinai has evaluated the evidence for various positions regarding the codification and concludes that the traditional dating of 30/650 or earlier “ought to be our default v i e w . ” 1 1 a d d i t i o n a l l y , b o t h t h e o d o r nöldeke12 and later michael cook13 (whose work is cited by brubaker elsewhere in the book) have analyzed in greater detail reports of regional variants from the purported ʿuthmānic exemplars and find that the pattern in the variant data forms a “family tree” known as a stemma. the fact that these shared variants form a neat stemma lacking signs of contamination leads cook to conclude that “this must count against any suggestion that the variants were invented.... we can accordingly infer that we have to d o w i t h g e n u i n e t r a n s m i s s i o n s f r o m an archetype.”14 marijn van putten has recently demonstrated that a series of orthographic idiosyncrasies in the earliest quranic manuscripts can be explained only as the results of copying from a single archetype.15 given that the codex parisinopetropolitanus is dated to the third quarter of the first/seventh century16 and contains 10. see harald motzki, “the collection of the qurʾan: a reconsideration of western views in light of recent methodological developments,” der islam 78, no. 1 (2001): 1–34. 11. see nicolai sinai, “when did the consonantal skeleton of the quran reach closure?,” part ii, bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 77, no. 3 (2014): 509–521, and part i, bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 77, no. 2 (2014): 273–292. 12. theodor nöldeke, the history of the qurʾān, trans. wolfgang h. behn (leiden: brill, 2013), 392–402. 13. michael cook, “the stemma of the regional codices of the koran,” in graeco-arabica 9–10: festschrift in honour of v. christides, ed. george k. livadas, 89–104 (athens: institute for graeco-oriental and african studies, 2004). 14. ibid, 103–104. 15. marijn van putten, “‘the grace of god’ as evidence for a written uthmanic archetype: the importance of shared orthographic idiosyncrasies,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 82, no. 2 (2019): 271–288. 16. françois déroche, la transmission écrite du coran dans les débuts de l’islam: le codex parisinopetropolitanus (leiden: brill, 2009), 177. these orthographic idiosyncrasies, the standardization must have taken place before that time. in a forthcoming article, i further show that data collected from many of the same manuscripts surveyed by brubaker produce a stemma that predicts f o u r r e g i o n a l e x e m p l a r s , c o n s i s t e n t with the findings of cook and nöldeke. this is to say that by all indications, the manuscript evidence is consistent with the traditional narrative regarding the ʿuthmānic standardization. the utility of the ʿuthmānic exemplars to the early muslims, rather than some inconsistency with a backprojected notion of veneration as suggested in brubaker’s book, is most likely responsible for their loss. in his additional comments on the ʿuthmānic standardization, brubaker appears unaware of the scholarly history o n t h e t e x t ’ s s t a n d a r d i z a t i o n ; h e i s seemingly informed more by modern muslim apologetics than by knowledge of the arabic sources. he tells the reader that the presence of later corrections in otherwise finely produced manuscripts challenges “the notion that there was strict uniformity and widespread agreement al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) daniel alan brubaker’s corrections in early qurʾānic manuscripts • 279 about every detail, every word and letter, such as one would expect to find if there w e r e w i d e s p r e a d a g r e e m e n t u p o n a standard from a very early date, such as the time of ʿuthmān’s caliphate” (p. 19). although this is not an uncommon notion among modern-day lay muslims, when it comes to scholarly works, as early as we can peer into the islamic past, we find widespread recognition of orthographic variation among muṣḥafs. al-farrāʾ’s (d. 207/822) maʿānī al-qurʾān is brimming with reports of regional and nonregional rasm variants. abū ʿubayd (d. 224/838) traveled the muslim world collecting such differences first-hand; these find their way into his faḍāʾil al-qurʾān and later works. ibn abī dāwūd’s (d. 316/928) kitāb al-maṣāḥif is dedicated to collecting reports of so-called companion codices and other orthographic idiosyncrasies. the canonical hadith collections also make note of contentious rasm variants, with several disagreements attributed to companions themselves. what brubaker does, then, instead of elaborating the scholarly perspective, is to set up a straw man, which he attempts to reinforce with the false notion that anything short of printing press–level agreement constitutes evidence against early standardization. the second chapter represents the majority of the book’s contents, containing the titular examples of corrections in early quranic manuscripts. immediately before these examples, brubaker provides readers with a helpful series of questions to help them think through scribal changes: what was changed? is there a simple explanation for the change? does the pen 17. there are already two alifs to the left of the supposed insert: one for the plural wa-ʿamilū and the other for the definite article of al-ṣāliḥāt; counting the third would yield one too many. used for the change match the original writing? can we identify the original text if it was overwritten? and so on. a glaring omission here is a discussion of the various causes of scribal errors. the lay reader is unlikely to appreciate the challenges involved in hand-copying manuscripts, which are different from those that attend the modern production of printed books. in terms of the manuscripts featured, brubaker draws on a wide selection of muṣḥafs, including several famous ones such as the codex parisino-petropolitanus, the topkapı muṣḥaf, the umayyad fustat codex, and the ḥusaynī muṣḥaf. brubaker’s observations are generally s o u n d , w i t h t h e e x c e p t i o n o f a f e w oversights including example 6 (p. 52), where brubaker describes the secondary addition of an alif to wa-ʿamilū in q 5:93, which itself is part of an interlinear scribal insertion in the manuscript. the relevant portion of the verse, with square brackets marking the insertion, reads, idhā ma ttaqaw wa-āmanū [wa-ʿamilu l-ṣāliḥāti t h u m m a t t a q a w w a ā m a n ū ] t h u m m a t t a q a w w a a ḥ s a n ū , w h i c h t r a n s l a t e s to “so long as they are reverent and believe, [and perform righteous deeds, then are reverent and believe,] and then are reverent and virtuous.” needless to say, the repetition in the verse can be very confusing. the inserted portion was squeezed between two lines, and within it the phrase wa-ʿamilū appears to have had its otiose alif added in later with a different pen. this alif, however, actually belongs to the word wa-anfaqū from the line below, which has been retouched.17 given the spatial constraints and repeated al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 280 • hythem sidky shapes, overlooking one of them is not an unexpected mistake. the other oversights i address later. a l o n g w i t h t h e i s s u e s a s s o c i a t e d with conceiving of the cairo edition as a targeted standard for the changes surveyed in the book—an issue that is brought up in nearly every example—the second major problem has to do with brubaker’s analysis of the changes themselves. apart from a few interesting variants, which i highlight later, the majority of the changes are best explained as scribal errors. even those that can be considered intentional still, as i demonstrate below, do not indicate late standardization. i have done my best to explain each example as clearly as possible and relegated more technical matters to the footnotes, but as brubaker notes, this is inherently a highly technical subject. the most important points to glean from the examples below are the causes of the errors i elaborate; these causes offer alternative explanations for the scribal changes to those proposed by brubaker. i begin with assimilation of parallels, which refers to the assimilation of the wording of one passage to the slightly different wording in a parallel passage.18 given the highly formulaic nature of the quran, such errors are relatively common. example 1 shows a missing huwa in the verse-end formula dhālika huwa l-fawzu l-ʿaẓīm (“that is the great triumph”) of q 9:72 in the topkapı muṣḥaf. there are exactly six verses containing the precise formula with huwa and another six without 18. bruce m. metzger and bart d. ehrman, the text of the new testament: its transmission, corruption, and restoration, 4th ed. (new york: oxford university press; 2005), 257ff. for assimilation of parallels and other scribal errors within the context of the quran, see behnam sadeghi and uwe bergmann, “the codex of a companion of the prophet and the qurʾān of the prophet,” arabica 57, no. 4 (2010): 343–436. 19. verses with huwa: q 9:72, q 9:111, q 10:64, q 40:9, q 44:57, and q 57:12. verses without huwa: q 4:13, q 5:119, q 9:89, q 9:100, q 61:12, and q 64:9. (dhālika l-fawzu l-ʿaẓīm).19 earlier muṣḥafs containing the standard text include saray medina 1a, wetzstein ii 1913, arabe 328a, and bl or. 2165. example 7 shows q 23:86 in arabe 327 with the nonstandard word al-arḍ crossed out and the addition of al-sabʿ above the line. whereas the standard verse reads, qul man rabbu l-samāwati l-sabʿi wa-rabbu l-ʿarshi l-ʿaẓīm (“say, ‘who is the lord of the seven heavens and the lord of the great throne?’”), the phrase qul man rabbu l-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ (“say, ‘who is the lord of the heavens and the earth?’”) occurs in q 13:16, and more generally in the non-interrogative rabbu l-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ (“lord of the heavens and the earth”) in ten other locations. the standard text with al-sabʿ occurs in every other manuscript i could find. if brubaker wishes to make the point that there was early fluidity and that manuscripts move toward the standard text over time, he would have to explain why the standard text is ubiquitous in manuscripts that are evidently paleographically older as well as those that are newer. example 19 shows q 34:27 in marcel 5, where the words huwa llāhu (“he is god”) are written over an unidentifiable erasure. the original gap is small enough that it is reasonable to expect that it originally contained huwa alone; this is suggested in the book (p. 82). what is not suggested however, is the cause: the formula huwa l-ʿazīzu l-ḥakīm (“he is the mighty, the wise”) o c c u r s m o r e t h a n a d o z e n t i m e s throughout the quran, and this is the only al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) daniel alan brubaker’s corrections in early qurʾānic manuscripts • 281 instance where there is an additional allāh, making such a mistake entirely expected. a number of errors best explained as omissions due to eye skip (usually from inadvertently looking to the side), known as parablepsis, are also apparent in the chosen examples. the last subexample of example 3 involves the omission of allāh from q 9:78 in dam 01-20.4. brubaker states that the omission of allāh from the phrase wa-anna llāha ʿallāmu l-ghuyūb gives the reading “and that he knows fully the things that are unseen” (emphasis his), but this is incorrect. the omitted allāh does not have in its place the pronominal w a a n n a h ū , b u t r a t h e r t h e o r i g i n a l wa-anna is maintained—rendering the phrase ungrammatical. therefore, the best explanation is parablepsis. example 6 is rightly recognized as homeoteleuton, eye skip due to a repeating wa-āmanū, and i have already mentioned the mistake in the associated discussion above. example 11 is remarkable in demonstrating the lengths to which brubaker goes in order to avoid suggesting scribal error as an explanation. in the topkapı muṣḥaf, the phrase tūbū ila llāhi tawbatan naṣūḥā (“repent to god with sincere repentance”) in q 66:8 is missing the lām lām hāʾ graphemes of allāh, with only its initial alif written at the end of a line; the next line begins with tawbatan. brubaker starts considering alternative readings of the consonantal text20 before conceding: “it is not clear to me what was intended by the original version, or whether it could have been read viably” (p. 65). it 20. brubaker notes that alternative readings are difficult to propose because of the dotting of the bāʾ in the word tawbatan, which does not afford a lot of flexibility (p. 65). 21. for example, in q 4:148, the standard text is fa-inna llāha kāna ʿ afuwwan qadīran. without the correction we would have the ungrammatical fa-inna llāha ʿafuwwan qadīran rather than fa-inna llāha ʿafuwwun qadīrun. seems pretty reasonable to me that the scribe wrote the first letter of allāh, began a new line, and accidentally forgot to complete the word. that such a scenario is not suggested deprives the reader of a perfectly valid and indeed better explanation. examples 8 and 16 are parablepses that may also be assimilations of parallels. in both examples, the verse-ending formula inna llāha kāna (“truly god is”) is missing kāna, and example 8 appears to have been corrected by the original scribe, as acknowledged in the book (pp. 58–59). there are many verses that end in this common prototypical formula, either with or without kāna, depending on the rhyme. importantly, kāna takes its predicate in the accusative, whereas otherwise t h e p r e d i c a t e w o u l d b e n o m i n a t i v e , s o i t s o m i s s i o n r e n d e r s t h e f o r m u l a ungrammatical. 21 brubaker seemingly recognizes this in his explanation of e x a m p l e 8 , b u t h e t h e n p r o c e e d s t o imply that the insertion of kāna serves no function other than to conform to the standard rasm (p. 59). example 16 presents an identical issue, and here brubaker explicitly and incorrectly states that kāna “is not grammatically necessary” (p. 76). its ungrammaticality is the obvious r e a s o n b r u b a k e r “ f o u n d n o m e n t i o n of an issue at this spot in the qirāʾāt literature” (p. 59). ironically, another interesting example that is mentioned i n t h e q i r ā ʾ ā t l i t e r a t u r e ( d i s c u s s e d below) does not receive any attention. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 282 • hythem sidky examples 9 and 18 are also standard parablepses, with the former omission resulting in a severe disruption in rhyme and a break in a standard formula, as brubaker acknowledges (pp. 60–61). the latter omission of al-sāʿa, “the hour,” in q 6:40 results in a redundant, nonsensical sentence (square brackets mark omission): qul araʾaytakum in atākum ʿadhābu llāhi aw atatkumu [l-sāʿa] “think to yourselves: were the punishment of god to come upon you or were [the hour] to come upon you.” example 12 is an interesting case of parablepsis in which multiple changes can be seen, and i have reproduced an image of the relevant passage above. the text of q 3:171 (with the erasure in brackets) reads: yastabshirūna bi-niʿmatin mina llāhi wa-faḍlin [wa-llāhu] wa-anna llāha lā yuḍīʿu ajra l-muʾminīn “they rejoice in blessing and bounty from god [and god] and that god does not neglect the reward of the believers.” 22. there are numerous examples throughout this manuscript in which the scribe with the black ink erases and rewrites sections for purely cosmetic reasons. this is apparent since the erased text is perfectly readable and matches the rewritten text. what appears to have taken place here, as can be seen in the image above, can be described in the following steps: 1. the scribe writes wa-faḍlin wa-llāhu, accidentally skipping wa-anna. 2. rather than squeeze in the forgotten word, the scribe decides to rewrite the phrase wa-faḍlin wa-anna llāh after the mistake. 3. the erroneous wa-faḍlin wa-llāhu is erased, leaving a gap. an alternative scenario is also possible: 1. the scribe writes wa-faḍlin wa-llāhu, accidentally skipping wa-anna. 2. the scribe inadvertently repeats the phrase (known as a dittography), but this time correctly, as wa-faḍlin wa-anna llāh. 3. after proofreading, the scribe realizes the mistake and erases it, leaving a gap. at a later stage, after either of these two scenarios, someone then erases the ḍād and the lām of the word faḍl and draws an elongated ḍād to cover up the gap, likely for cosmetic reasons.22 we can tell this figure 1: bnf arabe 328, fol. 8r22 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) daniel alan brubaker’s corrections in early qurʾānic manuscripts • 283 took place from the clear difference in the scraping of the original mistake, which was much more thorough and less precise, and the later erasure. none of this is discussed by brubaker nor is a reading of the original text offered. t h e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f e x a m p l e 1 4 a s d e s c r i b e d i n t h e b o o k i s e n t i r e l y u n c o n v i n c i n g . b r u b a k e r a s s e r t s t h a t q 4:167 in the topkapı muṣḥaf has an erasure that takes the verse away from conformity with the standard text. he then opines that “the reason for this erasure is unclear, but its precision in taking out the selected words is evident” (p. 71). there are several reasons to question this conclusion, not the least of which is a total lack of precision in the supposed erasure. the first relevant line ends in wa-ṣaddū ʿan sabīli (“and who turn from the way of”) with an additional erased alif belonging to the next word, allāh.23 the second line, which is partially and unevenly faded (in brackets) but still readable, continues: [llāhi qad] ḍallū ḍalālan baʿīdā (“[god have certainly] wandered far astray”). the faded passage, which includes part of the ḍād of the word ḍallū, contrary to brubaker’s claim of precision erasure, simply appears to have been worn out.24 23. this practice of splitting a word between lines is a feature of scriptio continua and common in early muṣḥafs. 24. it is only the alif on the first line that seems to have been erased, possibly by someone who did not want to retouch the muṣḥaf but at the same time did not want to confuse the reader. this is not a farfetched suggestion, since we can see the vocalization on both the clear and the faded words as ʿan sabīli llāhi. we learn two things from the vocalization: (a) the fading occurred after vocalization and (b) if someone had intended to eliminate the words allāh and qad, it is odd they did not adjust sabīli to sabīlin. without this second adjustment, the reading is ungrammatical. in addition, the translation offered in the book for the passage without the faded words reads, “... and hinder from the way have strayed into error” (p. 71), but this is not supported by the text because of the lack of a definite article on sabīl and the absence of qad. a more accurate translation of the remaining text would be, “... and hinder from a way, wandered far astray.” 25. two of the suggestions made by brubaker are not grammatical, since the possessor of the construct, ʿāqiba, is genitive. also, kullu min should be kullin min and kathīran min should be kathīrin min. examples 4, 15, and 20 are instances in which the significant degree of erasure makes it effectively impossible to know what was originally written. in example 4, brubaker makes some suggestions to fill a gap left in q 30:9 between ʿāqibatu and alladhīna.25 since the gap is at the end of the page and the size of the gap is a good match for allādhīna, a dittography i s a s e n s i b l e p r o p o s i t i o n : t h e s c r i b e accidentally wrote the word twice, once at the end of the first page and again at the beginning of the second. the expression kayfa kāna ʿāqibatu lladhīna is a common quranic formula, which makes it even more unlikely that the erased word was something else. although brubaker makes no suggestion for the gap in example 15, the space and context are also consistent with a dittography. the phrase ḥattā y u g h n i h i m u l l ā h u m i n f a ḍ l i h ( “ u n t i l god enriches them from his bounty”) in q 24:33 is followed by an erasure. since the preceding verse contains the exact same phrase and then ends with the formula wa-llāhu wāsiʿun ʿalīm (“and god is all-encompassing, all-knowing”), it is quite possible that the scribe accidentally reproduced this formula in the next verse. example 20 shows q 8:3 in mia.2014.491 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 284 • hythem sidky with an entire line erased and overwritten with the standard wa-mimmā razaqnāhum yunfiqūn (“and spend from that which we have provided them”). as brubaker notes, “the different writing on this line is somewhat stretched out to fill the space, an indication that what was first written here was longer” (p. 83). the space is consistent with an assimilation of parallels error involving the addition of wa-yuʾtūna l-zakāh (“and give alms”). the correction is in the kufic b.ii script, which matches the original and indicates that the change was made not long after the initial writing, although the ink is distinct, pointing to a different scribe. brubaker’s description of the correction of niʿmata llāh (“grace of god”) in example 17 is inaccurate. despite what is stated in the text, there is no erasure, and the original text has simply been overwritten. beneath the additions, one can clearly read niʾma, as opposed to niʿmatahū, which brubaker proposes.26 this makes it far more likely that the original scribe forgot the word allāh, rather than that he replaced it with the pronominal form. it is also apparent that the original correction was done much earlier and then was retouched later in black ink (best seen on the alif of allāh). in examples 2 and 13, it is simply impossible to know whether the existing text was written deliberately by the original scribes or whether it reflects i n a d v e r t e n t e r r o r s . e x a m p l e 2 f r o m q 42:21 in codex parisino-petropolitanus, an early manuscript from the first/seventh century, has the singular lahū in place of the plural lahum in am lahum shurakāʾ 26. more precisely, he suggests niʿmatihi, which is incorrect as the word is the object of the preceding verb and therefore should be in the accusative. 27. image 6 in the auction listing at https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/quran(“or do they have partners”), and example 13 has the singular wa-qāla in place of the plural wa-qālū (“and they said”) in a third/ ninth-century kufic b.ii manuscript. the broader issue behind these two examples is their implication for brubaker’s thesis. he insists that every deviation from the standard rasm encountered in a manuscript is a deliberate one. this stance leads him to conclude, based on the evidence i have reviewed, that the perception of the standard rasm changed over time, or that the standardization later became more thorough—though the meaning and mechanics of the alleged shift are not entirely clear. he also speculates that the extent of the flexibility may have varied between regions, but that it did exceed the bounds of what is reported in the qirāʾāt literature (p. 95). the problem is that the two elements necessary to demonstrate the early textual fluidity asserted by brubaker are missing. first, one would have to show that the incidence of orthographic deviations is greater in earlier manuscripts than in later ones. a survey of qurans copied after the fourth/tenth century would tell us whether there are fewer mistakes or deviations in these qurans compared to earlier ones. ignoring this necessary step, as brubaker does in his book, would lead one to conclude, for example, that the recently auctioned quran from ninth/ fifteenth-century mamluk egypt, which contains a haplography resulting in the omission of multiple verses, is evidence of even later fluidity.27 https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/quran-signed-tanam-al-najmi-al-maliki-al-ashrafi-mamluk-6195211-details.aspx al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) daniel alan brubaker’s corrections in early qurʾānic manuscripts • 285 second, one should show multiple attestations of the same variant in different manuscripts. otherwise, as with examples 2 and 13, mentioned above, in which the cause of error is inconclusive, one cannot make the case that an intentional deviation is more likely than a mistake. therefore, even though example 13 occurs in cpp, which is a very early manuscript, the fact that no other manuscript, even among those from the same deposit, contains this variant makes it impossible to prove that the difference was intentional. we also find that other first/seventh-century manuscripts contain the text as found in the cairo edition today.28 example 2, of course, occurs in a third/ninth-century quran, while there are many earlier muṣḥafs containing the standard text. this is not to say that nonstandard rasm variants do not exist, only that brubaker has not demonstrated their existence. alba fedeli has written about the word ṭuwā in q 20:12, which appears as ṭāwī in multiple early manuscripts29 and is also recorded as such in qirāʾāt literature. yasin dutton has also studied the evolution of noncanonical rasm variants in early manuscripts.30 example 10 is possibly an instance of such variance, with the variant āmanū bimā (“believe in that”) present in q 2:137 in arabe 331 rather than the standard āmanū bi-mithli mā (“believe signed-tanam-al-najmi-al-maliki-al-ashrafi-mamluk-6195211-details.aspx shows q 47:25–31 inserted in the margin. an eye skip resulted in the scribe jumping from q 47:24 to q 47:32, which, like q 47:25, starts with inna lladhīna. 28. early manuscripts containing the standard lahum in q 42:21 include bl or. 2165, wetzstein ii 1913, saray medina 1a, and dam 01-25.1. 29. alba fedeli, “relevance of the oldest qurʾānic manuscripts for the readings mentioned by the commentaries: a note on sūra ‘ṭā-ḥā,’” manuscripta orientalia 15, no. 1 (2009): 1–10. 30. dutton, “two ‘ḥijāzī’ fragments.” 31. see abū al-fatḥ ibn jinnī, al-muḥtasab fī tabyīn wujūh shawādhdh al-qirāʾāt wa-l-īḍāḥ ʿanhā, ed. muḥammad ʿaṭā (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1998), 1:113. in that which is similar to”), but this possibility goes unmentioned. this variant is recorded as being found in the muṣḥafs of the companions ibn masʿūd and anas b. mālik and the successor abū ṣāliḥ. ibn ʿabbās is also reported to have disliked the ʿuthmānic reading, which contains bi-mithl, as he considered god to have “no equivalent (laysa lahū mathīl).”31 brubaker reaches a similarly frustrating conclusion regarding standardization in example 3, a collection of nine scribal i n s e r t i o n s i n v o l v i n g t h e w o r d a l l ā h , one of which i have already addressed. t h e f i r s t s e v e n s u b e x a m p l e s b e l o n g to the same famous umayyad fustat codex. the omissions of allāh, brubaker states, highlights “the apparent late standardization of a number of instances of allāh” (p. 36). yet in subexamples 6 and 7 from the same codex, the omission of allāh results in ungrammatical phrases. so clearly an accidental omission should be considered the most likely explanation, and it is unclear why brubaker refuses to acknowledge this possibility. brubaker also tells us in example 17, which comes from the same codex, that “this particular fragment has a very high density of corrections” (p. 77). given the frequency of corrections in this manuscript, the resultant ungrammatical phrases in two of the examples, and the fact that allāh https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/quran-signed-tanam-al-najmi-al-maliki-al-ashrafi-mamluk-6195211-details.aspx al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 286 • hythem sidky is a high-frequency word, what reason do we have to suppose that this is more than just the work of a sloppy scribe? it behooves brubaker, if he wishes to prove that more than carelessness is at work, to show us that the frequency of corrections involving allāh relative to the frequency of the word’s occurrence in the manuscript exceeds that of corrections involving other words or phrases. until such evidence is produced, the only reasonable explanation is accidental omission, as i have stated. it is also obvious by this point that the standard text, with allāh, is present in multiple earlier and contemporary manuscripts.32 the remaining example, no. 5, comes from a truly fascinating manuscript held at the museum of islamic art in doha, which contains multiple significant deviations from the standard text. in the single page featured, brubaker identifies eight points at which the rasm diverges and five later corrections. what is particularly interesting is that despite later changes, the page is still not in conformity with the standard text. this fact raises many questions: is the divergence the result of dictation from faulty memory, a sloppy scribe, or a deliberate deviation from the ʿuthmānic text? alternatively, does it represent a pre-ʿuthmānic tradition? the manuscript itself certainly postdates 32. q 33:18 and q 33:24 have the standard allāh in bl or. 2165, tübingen ma vi 165, dam 01-27.1 (upper text), and saray medina 1a. q 33:73 has the standard allāh in saray medina 1a, bl or. 2165, dam 01-29.1, and tübingen ma vi 165. q 41:21 has the standard allāh in saray medina 1a, wetzstein ii 1913, bl or. 2165, dam 01-25.1, and dam 01-27.1 (upper text). q 22:40 has the standard allāh in saray medina 1a, wetzstein ii 1913, bl or. 2165, arabe 328c, dam 01-29.1, and tübingen ma vi 165. the two remaining examples are ungrammatical. 33. behnam sadeghi and mohsen goudarzi, “ṣanʿāʾ 1 and the origins of the qurʾān,” der islam 87, no. 1–2 (2012): 1–129. see esp. 115ff. 34. cook, “stemma of the regional codices,” 94. 35. al-dānī, al-muqniʿ, 2:317–318. standardization, but the written tradition it represents may be more ancient. are any of the variants present attested in the muslim tradition? are they attributed to companion(s)? for comparison, we know that many of the variants in the undertext o f t h e s a n a a p a l i m p s e s t c o r r e s p o n d t o o n e s r e p o r t e d l y f o u n d i n v a r i o u s companion codices. 33 although these questions may well lie beyond the scope of an introductory book, this example certainly leaves the reader wanting more and looking forward to a follow-up. in addition to the points made above, t h e r e a r e a n u m b e r o f o t h e r e r r o r s throughout the book. under example 7, brubaker notes the addition of an alif to li-llāh in q 23:87 to yield allāh, which, h e s a y s , “ c o m p o r t s w i t h a b ū ʿ a m r ’ s reading (and another)” (p. 56). brubaker then cites michael cook as observing that this reading aligns with the codex sent by ʿuthmān to basra, which was o n e o f t h e f o u r r e g i o n a l e x e m p l a r s . b r u b a k e r a l s o s t a t e s t h a t a l d ā n ī ascribes the insertion to al-ḥajjāj. both o f t h e s e s t a t e m e n t s a r e i n a c c u r a t e : cook explicitly rejects this variant as belonging to the basran exemplar,34 while al-dānī very strongly rejects reports of this variant being a later addition.35 nowhere in this discussion is al-ḥajjāj al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) daniel alan brubaker’s corrections in early qurʾānic manuscripts • 287 mentioned.36 on the basis of the stemma and a number of reports in al-muqniʿ,37 it seems most likely that this variant was not in the original basran exemplar and was a later addition; i discuss the variant in more depth in a forthcoming publication. brubaker cites the sanaa palimps es t and a second birmingham palimpsest as examples of highly nonstandard texts (p. 96). however, it is not clear what he means by the birmingham palimpsest. half of a folio of the mingana-lewis palimpsest is housed in the university of birmingham library, but its text is standard. 38 the other possibility is the claim by qasim al-samarrai that birmingham 1572a is a palimpsest. however, this claim has not been accepted by the scholarly community, and no actual text has been uncovered or produced. b r u b a k e r ’ s a d d e n d u m , d i s c u s s i n g c o v e r i n g s i d e n t i f i e d i n t h e c a i r e n e muṣḥaf, is also problematic. he notes that in many instances, the text beneath the tape extends beyond it so that it can be read, and that it conforms with the standard text (pp. 86–87). he also mentions that he did not inspect the manuscript in person and is reliant on photographs, which do not permit careful investigation. it is therefore puzzling that brubaker includes this example only to suggest that “the tape might be serving another purpose, such as selective concealing of 36. an unreliable report attributing this variant to al-ḥajjāj is found in abū bakr ibn abī dāwūd, kitāb al-maṣāḥif, ed. m. al-sayyid and j. sharīf (tanta: dār al-ṣaḥāba li-l-turāth), 347. the issue is also discussed in omar hamdan, “the second maṣāḥif project: a step towards the canonization of the qurʾanic text,” in the qurʾān in context: historical and literary investigations into the qurʾānic milieu, ed. angelika neuwirth, nicolai sinai, and michael marx, 795–835 (leiden: brill, 2011). this may be the source of the confusion. 37. al-dānī, al-muqniʿ, 2:317–318. 38. a transcription of the quranic undertext by alba fedeli can be found here: http://cal-itsee.bham.ac.uk/ itseeweb/fedeli/start.xml. something that is written on the page” (p. 87). the photographs included in the book very clearly show the irregularity of the coverings, which often obscure letters only partially and rest in between lines of text. such taping could well be the result of improper storage or conservation, and it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise when (a) concealment of nonstandard text would be a significant discovery in such a (relatively) late manuscript, and (b) the author has given no indication that he has attempted to contact the curator to ascertain further information about the coverings. if the objective of brubaker’s book is to demonstrate the humanity of the scribes involved in transmitting the quranic text, it certainly succeeds. it is well presented and accessible, and does an admirable job guiding the reader through a nuanced and technical subject using a series of photographs and clear descriptions. where it falls short, however, is in its methodology and analysis. although brubaker states that he always gives scribal error first consideration, this is not apparent from the book. in fact, the vast majority of examples in the book are best explained through simple scribal error. the main thesis, namely, that the flexibility of the quranic text persisted centuries beyond its standardization (p. 95), remains unproven. that is not to say that cataloging and http://cal-itsee.bham.ac.uk/itseeweb/fedeli/start.xml http://cal-itsee.bham.ac.uk/itseeweb/fedeli/start.xml al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 288 • hythem sidky p r e s e n t i n g t h e s e s c r i b a l c h a n g e s i s w i t h o u t m e r i t . b r u b a k e r r i g h t f u l l y recognizes the importance of stemmatics in reconstructing relationships between manuscripts (p. 97), and that requires meticulous documentation of orthographic v a r i a t i o n s . n e v e r t h e l e s s , t a n t a l i z i n g manuscripts such as ms.474.2003 and the promise of more such finds to come leave one hoping that upcoming works will be based on a sounder methodological footing. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 151-168 historical comparison is a delicate practice that requires a certain methodological rigor. this is particularly true for historians who intend to compare and contrast two successive political systems in the same geographical area. by playing with preparing the almohad caliphate: the almoravids* pascal buresi ucnrs (ciham-umr 5648, lyon) and ehess (paris) (pburesi@ehess.fr) abstract until the fifth/eleventh century, the muslim west constituted a periphery under the influence of the eastern islamic world. this does not mean that the western provinces of the dār al-islām were closely controlled by the capitals of the middle east, but that until that date, arab elites retained significant authority over local populations. this was also the case in al-andalus where the dynasty of the umayyad emirs (138/756-316/929), then the caliphs (316/929-422/1031), reinforced this arab supremacy. however, during the fifth/eleventh century and for several centuries thereafter, indigenous berber dynasties seized power and founded original political structures that operated differently from those in the east. the first two dynasties that led the way to western emancipation from the eastern arab matrix were the almoravids (462/1070-541/1147) and the almohads (541/1147-667/1269). the almoravids respected the symbolic authority of the eastern caliph by claiming only derived authority and functioning as an emirate. the almohads, for their part, following the overthrow of the almoravid dynasty, adopted a universalist claim to lead the entire community of believers; in doing so, they built an original and dogmatic political and religious system. the almohad sovereigns also took the supreme titles of islam as their own, those of imām, caliph, and prince of believers. in addition, they claimed possession of characteristics of holiness and divine election including impeccability (ʿiṣma), mahdism, and proximity to god (wilāya). the article demonstrates that, despite opposition between the two dynastic systems, the almoravid experience paved the way for the political and religious emancipation of the muslim west under the almohad caliphate. * this study is part of the igamwi (imperial government and authority in medieval western islam) project and is financed by the 7th pcrd of the european research council: fp7-erc-stg-2010-263361. participating in this project, led by pascal buresi (cnrs-ciham, ehess, iismm), mehdi ghouirgate (univ. bordeaux iii), hassan chahdi (ephe), moez dridi (cnrs-umr 8167), and travis bruce (mcgill university). english translation by courtney krolikoski, phd student (mcgill university). mailto:pburesi%40ehess.fr?subject= 152 • pascal buresi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the chronological and geographical scales and shifting the historical viewpoint, distinctive features and key elements can emerge. as an example, across the mediterranean basin during the pre-modern history of islam, the people whom jean-claude garcin called the “new peoples of islam” came into power in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.1 these non-arab groups came from the periphery of major urban centers that had appeared or developed during the first centuries of islam. these groups seized power and promoted political and religious reforms; from the east came the seljuks and the ayyubids, while from the west came the berber almoravids, almohads, and marinids. the perception of two of these periods, the almoravid and the almohad, depends on the chronological and geographical scale of the study as well as its perspective. from the iberian perspective, in the chronological framework established by al-andalus (1492/897-711/92),2 the reigns of the two berber dynasties resemble those of foreign powers, intervening in the peninsula at the moment when the christian kingdoms of the north threatened the existence of al-andalus. from the historical perspective of the maghrib, however, the perception of the berber dynasties was fundamentally different. their reign corresponded with the culmination of a process that saw the islamization and arabization of a growing portion of the local population and the slow emergence of local authorities whose influence extended far beyond the period and geographic framework of the maghrib. ultimately, the reputation of the almohad empire was perceived in the east in a new way. this political construction was not only regarded as one of the many peripheral powers of secondary princes, but also viewed simultaneously as a threat and a model. determining the fractures and continuities between the almoravid period (c. 441/1050541/1147) and the almohad period (c. 513/1120-667/1269) in the maghrib and al-andalus is further complicated by the damnatio memoriæ that covered the period and the political system of the almoravids; any sources concerning the almoravids have either been erased or rewritten by their successors and gravediggers. it is because the war against the almoravids lasted long after the fall of their dynasty in 541/1147 that the rewriting of almoravid sources by almohad authors was so effective and had such a great significance. indeed, its effects could be felt until the beginning of the thirteenth century, as the banū ghāniya, a dynasty whose founder was governor of cordoba under the almoravids, became the last resisting representatives of their emirate. as successors and heirs to the almoravids, 1. j.-cl. garcin (ed.), états, sociétés et cultures du monde musulman médiéval. xe–xve siècle. 3 vols. (nouvelle clio, puf, 1995 and 2000), t. 1, 123-167 (chapters by j.-c. garcin and p. guichard: “les nouveaux peuples de l’islam”). 2. this is already a historiographical postulate, depending on whether we consider the arab, berber, and muslim conquest of the eighth century as a turning point (p. guichard), or that its influence was superficial (cl. sánchez-albornoz). some authors, such as i. olagüe went even further, supporting the fallacious theory that the conquest never took place, and the islamicization of al-andalus was due to massive conversion to islam (i. olagüe, les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’espagne, 1969). it also depends on whether we insist on the permanence of muslims and islam after the “reconquista” or, rather, the total elimination of all components of the andalusī society after the disappearance of the kingdom of grenada. on islamic periodization, see a. borrut, “vanishing syria: periodization and power in early islam,” der islam 91/1 (2014): 37–68, and s. bashir, “on islamic time: rethinking chronology in the historiography of muslim societies,” history and theory 53/4 (december 2014): 519–44. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) preparing the almohad caliphate: the almovarids • 153 they expressed a permanent hostility and remained a threat to the almohad empire, first from their maritime base in the balearic islands, where they had sought refuge during the third quarter of the twelfth century, then from their foothold in central maghrib, and finally through their alliance with the arab tribes and the ghuzz, a turkish tribe sent from the east by the ayyubids to counter the almohad advance in ifrīqiya and tripolitania.3 the survival of the banū ghāniya, the number of conflicts they participated in, both on land and at sea, and their tenacious nature have undoubtedly prompted such a rereading of the history of the saharan almoravids. the almohad sources insist that ibn tūmart’s dogma and reform represented a radical break from almoravid ideology. the maintenance of a dynasty—the banū ghāniya—representative of an earlier, alternative legitimacy helped to strengthen the ideological identity of the almohads and led them to further stand out from their predecessors. the almohad political system was therefore built in opposition to the almoravid one. the theorists of almohadism (tawḥīd) were forced to refine their political system until well after the initial reign of ʿabd al-muʾmin (r. 524/1130-558/1163) had ended. this decades-long political and military antagonism has been integrated into, and indeed strengthened, the historiography of the opposition between the two dynasties, thus influencing both parties: ṣanhāja vs. maṣmūda, plains vs. mountains, sahara vs. atlas, nomads vs. sedentary populations, emirate vs. caliphate, abbasid legalism vs. the mahdī ibn tūmart’s imamate, east (sharq) vs west (gharb), malikism vs. almohadism, taqlīd vs. ijtihād, tajsīm vs. taʾwīl, and so on. these points of opposition were re-worked by the almohads so that certain ideas were emphasised: the wearing of the veil (lithām), the role of women, the use of furūʿ—rather than the koran and the sunna—by the almoravids. other developments that came from this rewriting include the imamate; the infallibility of the movement’s founder; the different roots of the almohad authority; and the alleged illiteracy of the almoravids. some important steps were also taken; some were institutional and dogmatic, like the prohibition of the maliki school, while others were symbolic, such as the choice of white as the emblematic color of the dynasty, or the reorientation of the qibla in the congregational mosques of the empire (in marrakesh, tlemcen, fez, and other cities). while the bulk of the historiography concerning the almoravids and the almohads has focused on the differences between these two dynasties, this article will instead stress the elements of continuity between them. this perspective will show how, both despite and thanks to their apparent differences, the almoravid period prepared the way for the emergence of the almohad caliphate and determined, either directly or indirectly, the features of the almohad dynasty. the rise to power of the almoravids, the political structures that they developed, and the challenges they faced at the beginning of the sixth/twelfth century paved the way for the almohad caliphate-imamate as well as the unification and independence of the maghrib from the eastern core of the religious and political authority. 3. a. bel, les benou ghanya et leur lutte contre l’empire almohade (paris, 1903); j.-m. mouton, “la conquête de la cyrénaïque et de la tripolitaine par qarāqūsh: initiative individuelle ou entreprise d’état?” in aux rivages des syrtes: la libye, espace et développement de l’antiquité à nos jours, ed. ch. chanson-jabeur (paris, 2000), 59–69; a. s. baadj, saladin, the almohads and the banū ghāniya: the contest for north africa (12th and 13th centuries) (boston, 2015). 154 • pascal buresi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the rise to power of the almoravids the geopolitical dimension of this period plays an important role in understanding the appearance of the almoravid movement. until the end of the fourth/tenth century, the umayyads of cordoba and the fatimids of ifrīqiya were engaged in an extreme game of competing influences in the western maghrib. this played out through the exchange of embassies, financial support given to different groups, and military backing. eventually, in 358/969 the fatimids of ifrīqiya moved their capital to egypt, founded al-qāhira, and relocated the tombs of the first imams of the dynasty. meanwhile, across the strait of gibraltar, the caliphate of cordoba entered a period of crisis that lasted from 399/1009 to 422/1031. due to the remoteness or disappearance of the previous competing powers, interventions in the maghrib gradually ceased working and ultimately resulted in a power vacuum that allowed for local forces to emerge. it was in this moment that the almoravids came to power, “to proclaim the truth, fight against the violations of the law, and suppress illegal taxes,”4 and thus asserted their presence in the region. interestingly, the two etymologies of the name “almoravids” (al-murābiṭūn) proposed by the arab sources are either the “refugees in a fortified convent (ribāṭ)” or those “who form a highly cohesive group” (murābiṭūn). the almoravid movement first developed out of the sanhāja tribes, particularly from the banū gudāla and the banū lamtūna. it was both yaḥyā b. ibrāhīm, a tribal chief responsible for political and military functions, and ʿabd allāh ibn yāsīn, a spiritual guide, who were responsible for leading the movement. al-bakrī reported that ibn yāsīn would have met the grand master of kairouan, abū ʿimrān al-fāsī, after returning from pilgrimage. born between 405/1015-411/1020 and deceased in jumāda i 450/july 1059, ibn yāsīn was a missionary (dāʿī) and reformer.5 through his association with yaḥyā b. ibrāhīm, ibn yāsīn was able to impose his message on the gudāla tribes, and then later, by force, on the lamtūna. united by a common reformist ideology, these two tribes fought other tribes until the emir yaḥyā b. ibrāhīm’s death. the gudāla were ultimately expelled by ibn yāsīn, who was welcomed by the emir of lamtūna, abū zakariyyāʾ yaḥyā b. ʿumar b. buluggīn b. turgūt b. wartasīn al-lamtūnī. the lamtūna wiped out the gudāla in 433/1042. then, after uniting in 446/1055 while still under the direction of yaḥyā b. ʿumar, the two tribes seized sijilmāssa and awdaghust, two major caravan hubs at the northern and southern ends of the western trans-saharan routes, thus linking the kingdom of ghana to the mediterranean. after the death of the emir yaḥyā b. ʿumar, his brother, abū bakr b. ʿumar, succeeded him. 4. ibn ʿidhārī, al-bayān al-mughrib, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās (4 vols. beyrouth, 1983), t. 4, 11: qāmū bi-daʿwati al-ḥaqqi wa raddi al-maẓālim wa qaṭʿi al-maghārim wa hum mutamasikkūn bi-al-sunna. 5. although yaḥyā b. ibrāhīm had made the pilgrimade to mecca, when he returned to kairouan, he said to the great faqīh abū ʿumrān al-fāsī that his people had no religious knowledge and did not belong to any school: mā lanā ʿilm min al-ʿulūm wa lā madhhab mina al-madhāhib li-annanā fī al-ṣaḥrāʾi munqaṭiʿīna lā yaṣil ilaynā illā baʿḍ al-tujjār al-juhhāl (ibn ʿidhārī, bayān, t. 4, p. 7). ʿabd allāh b. yāsīn gathered around him 70 fuqahāʾ, small or important, to teach them and strengthen them in their faith (p. 8). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) preparing the almohad caliphate: the almovarids • 155 in 463/1071 abū bakr b. ʿumar laid the foundations of the capital in marrakech (murr yakush = the “city of god” in berber6), thus establishing the roots of the movement in the territory. symbolically, the construction of the qaṣr al-ḥajar, the “stone palace,” in an area where most palaces were built from adobe, presented a stable and enduring foothold to the federation of nomadic tribes. this decision was the first step in the construction of an emiral state and the transformation of a reform movement into a polity. that same year, abū bakr b. ʿumar appointed yūsuf b. tashfīn as his lieutenant while he returned to the south to confirm his power in the sahara. this episode is more important than it seems. here, two very different models of political and social organizations are competing. the first is the nomadic model of the tribes in which the power moves with the shaykh, the second the static model of the emirate whose institutions (offices, chancellery, palace guard, clientele) constitute the heart of power by ensuring the permanence of the prince’s sovereignty in his absence and establishing a fallback position for him.7 indeed, abū bakr b. ʿumar left marrakech after having established it as the capital. however, his departure also occurred before he had established any institutions. it was his lieutenant, yūsuf b. tashfīn, who ultimately established a number of the institutions that were initiated by his master and cousin. these included administrative offices; taxes, including a specific tax on jews within the territories, and which respected the limits of koranic taxation on muslims;, a princely court; diplomacy; the dispatching of ambassadors across al-andalus; and a royal guard composed of black slaves and christian mercenaries whom he outfitted with horses.8 in doing so, yūsuf b. tashfīn founded the administrative, fiscal, political, and military structures that allowed him to wield authority using a post-tribal model and the clientelism of his supporters. based on these realizations and the established land base, in 465/1073 he was able to carefully depose his cousin and marry his wife, zaynab bt. al-nafzāwiyya, thus becoming the undisputed ruler and true founder of the almoravid emirate. the base of the almoravid power, as with the fatimids and the abbasids before them, was two-pronged: an imām, a “religious” authority, who interpreted texts and traditions, and a political leader who was in charge of military choices and the politics on his behalf.9 the 6. on the origin of the name marrakech, see m. ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade (1120-1269). une nouvelle lecture anthropologique (toulouse, 2014), 88-102. 7. after the victory of zallāqa, yūsuf b. tashfīn returned to maghrib and to marrakech because his heir, sīr, had died. the continuity of dynastic power was threatened, and the physical presence of the sovereign was required for the reassertion of his authority. al-andalus was for the berber dynasties one of the territories where the legitimacy was reinforced, particularly via the jihād, but it was in the maghreb where the power was imposed. 8. ibn ʿidhārī, bayān, t. 4, ed. i. ʿabbās, 23: “once his power was strengthened, yūsuf b. tashfīn procured some black slaves for himself. he sent people to al-andalus to find white slaves (aʿlāj) for him, purchased with his own money. there were two hundred and forty of them and there were two thousand black slaves, he outfitted them with horses and made it his personal guard (ḥasham). his veil expanded (fa-ghaluẓa ḥijābuhu) and his power was consolidated (wa ʿaẓuma mulkuhu).” 9. in the middle of the third/eighth century, muslim, head of the armies of khurasān, a heavily militarised border province of the umayyad arab empire and a region where many arab rebels had been exiled, raised supporters against the umayyad dynasty, considered as unfaithful. he undertook his revolt in the name of the prophet’s family, from which the community’s legitimate imām was to be recruited. this imām, well inspired, 156 • pascal buresi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) prominence enjoyed by the charismatic imām allowed the political leader to make decisions that, without a spiritual and religious endorsement, might have shocked tribal traditions. if the supra-tribal movement was launched thanks to the personality of a preacher-reformer,10 then it was his death that allowed for the emergence of a political sovereignty and the establishment of a dynastic power. tribal solidarities did eventually reappear, but the dawla, the “wheel” of power, was sufficiently rooted and would persevere without many risks to the ancient power structures. indeed, prominent tribal members preferred this new system and took advantage of the benefits it provided rather than questioning it and risking the loss of everything. some sources claim that yaḥyā b. ʿumar (d. 488/1095) was the first to adopt the title of “emir of the muslims,” which did not previously exist within the islamic political tradition.11 however, even if that is the case, it was not until yūsuf b. tashfīn sought out and received the recognition and official investiture from the abbasid caliph of baghdad that this title gained any sort of legitimacy.12 an army of the faithful, guided spiritually by a reformer, was transformed into an army of compromise, where the solidarities, internal rivalries, and divergent interests were arbitrated by the sovereign. yūsuf b. tashfīn was thus able to maintain his power through his ability to satisfy the appetites of some without arousing the jealousy and opposition of others. the provincial organization of the almoravid emirate the organization of provincial power in the almoravid period satisfies this requirement to a certain extent. it favored the members of the movement’s founding tribes through a device based on the niyāba, the delegation of power.13 the governor was the nāʾib, that was to restore the divine order. at the end of the victorious revolt that led to the fall of the umayyads (132/750), it was among the descendants of ʿabbās, the prophet’s uncle, that the new imām emerged and seized power. shortly after his proclamation as caliph, al-saffāḥ (r. 132/750-136/754), executed muslim, whose charisma and authority threatened his power. the fatimid revolution followed much the same pattern. at the beginning of the fourth/tenth century, a fatimid propagandist-missionary (dāʿī), abū ʿabd allāh, raised the berber tribe of the kutāma in ifrīqiya and overthrew the aghlabid dynasty that ruled the region on behalf of the abbasids of baghdad. he preached and led his military and political struggle in the name of a descendant of the prophet of islam. there again, the accession to power of a new imām, al-mahdī (r. 296/909-322/934), resulted in the execution of the military leader. 10. the use of the standards (rāyāt) and the organization by the emir of the orders of battle were also a way to impose a supra-tribal authority, without knowing if the sovereign truly combined the troops from different tribes, or if he only imposed a unified command on them, which is most likely (see ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade, 62-66). 11. translation of al-qādī iyād in ch. 26 of j. f. p. hopkins and n. levtzion, eds., corpus of early arabic sources for west african history (princeton, n.j, 2000), 102. 12. é. lévi-provençal, “le titre souverain des almoravides et sa légitimation par le califat ʿ abbāside,” arabica 2 (1955): 265–288; m. j. viguera molins, “las cartas de al-gazālī y al-ṭurṭušī al soberano almorávide yūsuf b. tashfīn,” al-andalus 42 (1977): 340–74; v. lagardère. “abū bakr b. al-ʿarabī, grand cadi de séville,” revue de l’occident musulman et de la méditerranée 40 (1985): 91–102, especially 96-97. 13. on the issue of the delegation of power, a useful parallel can be found in m. cook, “muhammad’s deputies in medina,” al-‘usur al-wusta 23 (2015): 1-67. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) preparing the almohad caliphate: the almovarids • 157 is to say the “substitute,” of the prince, and thus had all his prerogatives. several letters, which were representative of the almoravid approach to the responsibilities of provincial governors, were written after ibn tashfīn’s ascent to power in 537/1143: it is our substitute (nāʾib), for your leadership, for the conduct of your affairs, and for the government of the young and old among you; no one has the authority to these things [except for] him, […] and we appoint the governor for all of you […]; and everything that he will do, it is us who does it through him, and what he will say to this affect, it is as if we were saying it […]; with our tongue, he speaks […] so listen to him, obey him, and do not defy him.14 almoravid governors are thus characterised, both in fact and in law, by a fair amount of independence. control over the governors by the prince of the almoravids, however, remained very strong, since he was the one who was responsible for their appointment or dismissal.15 in fact, the independence of the governors was closely supervised. any political, military, or fiscal failure in the provinces was blamed on the provincial governor. for example, as he was the one who organised the military expeditions of legal war (jihād) against the christians each year, any failure on this front inevitably led to his dismissal by the prince. mehdi ghouirgate points out how, in this regard, command of the armies was the chief source of the tribe’s authority.16 this was preserved in the almoravid era, as control of the armies was delegated to the provincial governors for the practice of razzias. this is especially true of tāshfīn b. ʿalī b. yūsuf b. tāshfīn who, as governor of cordoba and granada, carried out jihād against the christian principalities of the north. it was also the almoravid governor who controlled the coinage. contrary to what the numismatists often argue concerning the privatization of governmental functions that affected latin societies, the proliferation of coinage mints did not imply a weak central government in the almoravid emirate. in fact, changes in the various mints (mentions of the crown prince, changing the name of the designate heir, etc) were implemented in all the mints of the emirate within a year. the number of mints—since all seats of government had one—does not revel a weakness in the central government as it did in contemporary latin christendom, but instead highlights a decentralised mode of territorial management. mehdi ghouirgate, in l’ordre almohade, identifies a link between almoravid use of the veil (lithām) and the delegation of power. by visually differentiating the ruling elites from the rest of society, the veils of the almoravids created an association between all who wore the veil and the exercise of power. anyone who wore the veil became an indistinct 14. they were written by abū bakr ibn al-qasīra on behalf of ʿalī b. yūsuf from his camp in the outskirts of cordoba: wa huwa al-nāʾib ʿannā fī tadbīrikum wa iqāmat umūrikum wa siyāsat ṣaghīrikum aw kabīrikum laysa li-aḥad maʿahu fî dhalika yad […] wa ḥakamnāhu fī jamīʿikum […] wa mā faʿala min dhalika kulluhu fa-naḥnu faʿalnāh wa mā qāla fīhi fa-kaannā naḥnu qulnāhu […] bi-lisāninā yatakallam […] fa smaʿū wa ṭīʿū wa lā taḫālafūhu (m. a. makkī., “wathāʾiq taʾrīkhiyya jadīda ʿan ʿaṣr al-murabiṭīn,” revista del instituto de estudios islámicos de madrid 7–8 (1960 1959): 109–98, letters n° 5, 6 and 7: 174-177). 15. the average length of a governor’s term was two and a half years, which reveals the full control over government careers by the sovereign. 16. ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade, 177-178. 158 • pascal buresi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) representative of the emir.17 the “ethnic” dimension in the historiography on the wearing of the lithām in al-andalus is well known. the andalusis would have been boldly opposed to the berber domination of the almoravids, who would have been considered crude louts, barely out of the desert. but the distinctions between the almoravids and non-almoravids in ibn ʿabdūn’s manual of ḥisba, written at the beginning of the sixth/twelfth century by an andalusi scholar, were influenced by the communal nature of the laws, the protection of the privileges of officers, social distinctions, and the positioning of scholars against violence in the city, rather than by an opposition of an ethnic nature or a manifestation of a kind of andalusi nationalism.18 ibn ʿabdūn’s main concern does not seem to be the superiority of the andalusis. instead, his focus is on the respect garnered by elite social standing and legitimate political authority, whether foreign or local. additionally, this manual contains the opposition of a lawyer to factors that might lead to disorder, in particular individuals carrying weapons within the community. if the ruling class had the sole right to wear the veil as a sign of distinction and respect, it was certainly not permissible for a simple man-atarms to also wear one. as a sign of respect that was meant for an almoravid officer, the lithām was usurped from the nobility when it was worn by people considered undeserving of it. it was against this usurpation that ibn ʿabdūn rebelled, not in the name of a kind of andalusi pre-nationalism against a berber domination. the last feature of this period of almoravid domination that this paper will examine is, on the one hand, the relationship of the sovereigns with the ʿulamāʾ and the maliki school of law and, on the other hand, the relationship between the central power and the provincial legal-judiciary elites. in al-andalus the political disintegration of the fifth/ eleventh century made room for the emergence of local elites in the different taifa courts. in the fifth/eleventh century it was the “secular” elites, the kuttāb, who emerged. bruna soravia characterised the most famous representatives of this elite element as king-makers.19 however, in the middle of the sixth/twelfth century, in the midst of the almoravid crisis, it was the “religious” elites who seized power, as they had in seville or granada. this was only possible because their power had been asserted under the reign of the almoravids. at first the almoravid rulers attempted to force maghribis into positions of responsibility in the cities of al-andalus, but then they had to compromise with the great local families.20 thus, in 490/1097, ʿabd allāh b. ʿalī b. ʿabd al-malik ibn samajūn, who belonged to a family that was close to the emir and had been earlier appointed qāḍī of algeciras, was appointed qāḍī 17. ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade, 63. 18. e.g.: ibn ʿabdūn advised that four of the ten auxiliaries (ʿawn-s) of the qāḍī of seville ought to be black berbers in cases concerning the almoravids (article 99). ibn ʿabdūn thus reserved the use of the veil (lithām) to ṣanḥāja, lamtūna, and lamṭa and prohibited it to the mercenaries and the militias of black berbers, because the veil should be a distinctive sign of the almoravids “who must be regarded with honor and respect and who should receive aid and assistance” (article 56). 19. b. soravia, “entre bureaucratie et littérature: la kitāba et les kuttāb dans l’administration de l’espagne umayyade,” al-masāq 7 (1994): 165–200. 20. for a complete study of the appointments of judges in the almoravid period, see r. el hour, la administración judicial almorávide en al-andalus: élites, negociaciones y enfrentamientos (helsinki, 2006). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) preparing the almohad caliphate: the almovarids • 159 of granada by yūsuf b. tashfīn himself.21 however, the tensions with the population and with the fuqahāʾ from granada provoked the dismissal of the judge.22 twenty years later, another north african berber, khallūf b. khalaf allāh, was appointed qāḍī, though the post was quickly reclaimed by a major local lineage. also in valencia it seems that there was an attempt to impose a maghribi qāḍī and khaṭīb by the almoravid qāʾid al-mazdalī.23 all of these attempts ultimately failed and the almoravids were forced to come to terms with the local andalusi elites who continued to exercise the office of the judicature and to control its access throughout this period, to the point that they were able to claim power during the crisis of almoravid power in the middle of the sixth/twelfth century. negotiation with the andalusi religious elites and, to a lesser extent, maghribis, became all the more necessary as the almoravids had chosen a path of legalism and respect of the maliki school. the two pillars on which yūsuf b. tashfīn built his emirate were thus the two legal requirements of direct concern to the people of al-andalus: respect for a tax regime that was framed and limited by the sacred texts, and military unity to confront the christian kingdoms on the peninsula. military defeats24 and the proliferation of non-koranic taxes eventually undermined the legitimacy of the almoravid sovereigns in al-andalus, who were at the same time weakened by the almohad rebellion. almohad achievements and continuities the differences between the bases of power in the successive eras of the almoravids and almohads are fairly clear. the former claimed an authority over the maghrib and al-andalus that was derived from the abbasid caliph of baghdad and they also relied on the ʿulamāʾ to legitimate their authority. the latter, however, claimed the universal direction of the umma, refusing any instance of legitimization other than the mahdī ibn tūmart and his “orthodox successors” (al-khulafāʾ al-rāshidūn). even with these differences, it is possible to reconstruct an overview of the relationships between the almohads and the memory and heritage of their almoravid predecessors. initially, from the preaching of the mahdī ibn tūmart (c. 513/1120-525/1130) until the conquest of marrakech (541/1147), the opposition was total and the discourse 21. m. lucini, “los banū samayūn: una familia de cadíes,” estudios onomásticos biográficos de al-andalus 5 (1992): 171–98, esp. 186. 22. f. rodríguez mediano, “instituciones judiciales: cadíes y otras magistraturas,” in el retroceso territorial de al-andalus: almorávides y almohades, siglos xi al xiii, ed. m. j. viguera molíns, historia de españa, 8/2 (madrid, 1997), 171–186, esp. 175-177. 23. p. guichard, les musulmans de valence et la reconquête (xie–xiiie siècles) (damas [paris], 1990), t. 1, 81. 24. the military defeats culminated with the disaster of “cullera” or “alcala” near alcira on the left bank of the júcar in rajab 523/june 1129. it was because of this defeat that abū marwān ibn abī al-khisāl reportedly wrote a letter insulting the almoravids: “sons of vile mothers, you flee like wild asses… the time has come when we will give you a heavy punishment, in which no veil will hide your face, and we will chase you in your sahara and we will wash al-andalus from your filth” (cited in p. guichard, musulmans de valence, t. 1, 91-92). episode evoked by al-marrākushī, kitāb al-muʿjib fī talkhīṣ akhbār al-maghrib, ed. r. p. a. dozy (amsterdam, 1968), 127-128, ed. khalīl ʿumrān al-manṣūr (beyrouth, 2005), 125, spanish translation a. huici miranda, lo admirable en el resumen de las noticias del magrib (tetuan, 1955), 134. 160 • pascal buresi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) polemical: the almoravids were accused of supporting an anthropomorphist interpretation of the book (tajsīm) and betraying the text of revelation. in this way the almohad movement was constructed in opposition to the power of the reigning dynasty. their ideology and militant organization was thus turned towards the fight against the saharan enemy of the plains. there only exists later testimony that reconstructs this period in the hagiographic model of the prophetic sīra and messianic or mahdist movements. further, these movements themselves had likely tapped into an islamic, or perhaps pre-islamic, tradition. this first phase of the development of the almohad ideology, compared with the almoravids, can be linked to the story that describes the meeting between the mahdī ibn tūmart and yūsuf b. tashfīn in the great mosque in marrakech: once in marrakech, the imām went to the masjid sawmaʿat al-ṭūb (“the oratory of the clay minaret”). we remained there until friday. then he went to the congregational mosque of alī b. yūsuf b. tashfīn. he found the latter sitting on the mantel of ibn tīzamt. the viziers were standing near him. they said to the imām: —“welcome the emir by his title of caliph.” —“where is the emir? i only see veiled (munaqqabāt) courtesans (jawārī).” at these words, ʿalī b. yūsuf took off the veil that covered his face and said to his followers: “he’s right!” when he saw the emir’s face uncovered, the infallible said: —“the caliphate belongs to god and not to you, o ʿalī b. yūsuf!” and he continued: “arise from this denatured [thing] (qum ʿan hadhihi al-mughayyarati), and if you want to be an imām of justice, do not sit yourself on this denatured carpet (hadhihi al-ghifārati al-mughayyarati)!” the emir pulled it out from under him and gave it back to the one to whom it belonged and said to the mahdī: —“what has denatured it? (mā taghayyarahā).” —“it was woven with rot (li-annahā tuʿqad bi-al-najāsa),” he answered.25 the story, constructed as a dialogue between the mahdī and the emir, highlights the pre-science of ibn tūmart.26 his knowledge of hidden things allowed him to immediately distinguish the pure from the impure. however, paradoxically, he was not able to distinguish the emir from the other veiled persons who accompanied him. this 25. interview reported in ibn simāk (attributed to), al-ḥulal al-mawshiyya, ed. ʿabd al-qādir būbāyah (beyrouth, 2010), 167, and especially by abū bakr b. ʿ alī al-ṣanhājī al-baydhaq, kitāb akhbār al-mahdī ibn tūmart wa ibtidāʾ dawlati al-muwaḥḥidīn, ed. é. lévi-provençal (paris, 1928), 67-68, french transl. é. lévi-provençal, documents inédits d’histoire almohade. fragments manuscrits du ‘legajo’ 1919 du fonds arabe de l’escurial, publiés et traduits avec une introduction et des notes par é. lévi-provençal. (paris, 1928), 108-109, cited by ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade, 52-53. 26. ibn tūmart is characterized by his knowledge of things and beings. in the account of his meeting with ʿabd al-muʾmin, he knows who is ʿabd al-muʾmin, before him and better than him. he knows both his obscure past and his illustrious future. for accounts of the meeting in al-baydhaq see documents inédits, 85 and following, and al-marrākushī, muʿjib, text 129-130, transl. 156-157. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) preparing the almohad caliphate: the almovarids • 161 difference—the perception of the impurity of the carpet vs. the non-recognition of the figure of the emir—creates two figures of authority. the first figure is inspired; he sees the religious things and is distinct from the rest of the mortals because of his own qualities. the other figure, dressed as a woman, confuses the genres, ignores the impure nature of the objects he touches, and does not stand out from the ordinary because of either his charisma or his extraordinary knowledge. in both cases it is the fabric that creates the connection between the two orifices: the pure one for speech and the impure one for excrement. m. ghouirgate highlights how the almoravids considered it obscene to show their mouths. this story utilizes this taboo to better discredit these figures: how would it be possible for the almoravids to govern with accuracy and justice if they could not distinguish the pure from the impure, the men from the women, or, indeed, one part of their anatomy from another? furthermore, the almoravid emir is presented as an usurper who, by agreeing to unveil and leave the “denatured carpet,” is implicitly recognised to be completely disqualified from using the title of khalīfat allāh, “god’s caliph,” that was reserved for ibn tūmart and his successor ʿabd al-muʾmin. this mention of the term khilāfat allāh in association with the almoravids is not an isolated incident. it can also be found in ibn ʿiḏārī’s bayān, a “dis-almohadised” merinid chronicle (émile fricaut’s neologism), concerning the invention of the title of the “prince of muslims” by yūsuf b. tashfīn: that year, the shaykh-s of the tribes gathered around prince abū yaʿqūb yūsuf b. tashfīn and said to him: —“you are god’s caliph in maghrib (anta khalīfat allāhi fī al-maghrib) and you have the right to call yourself not ‘commander’ (amīr) but rather ‘commander of the believers’ (amīr al-muʾminīn).” he replied to them: —“god forbid that i claim this title, for it is that borne by the caliphs, and i serve the abbasid caliph (wa anā rājilu al-khalīfati al-ʿabbasī), charged with spreading his call in the west (wā al-qāʾimu bi-daʿwatihi fī bilādi al-gharb).” —“you need a title that distinguishes you.” —“so it will be ‘commander of the muslims’ (amīr al-muslimīn).” it is said that it is he who chose this title for himself and that he ordered the secretaries of the chancellery to write letters with this title, in his name or in addressing him.27 in both of these cases, it is the prince’s entourage that assigns the title to the almoravid sovereign, possibly along with that of “commander of the believers.” that these two chronicles—one almohad, intended for an eastern population, and the other post-almohad— mention the presentation of the title of “god’s caliph” to the almoravid emir, shows that the fifth/eleventh century almoravid political construction was important enough that its founder could claim the caliphate at least as much as his umayyad and fatimid predecessors. 27. ibn ʿidhārī, bayān, t. 4, 27. 162 • pascal buresi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) a new era began after the conquest of marrakech in 541/1147. the last almoravid sovereign was executed, the principal city of the central maghrib joined the almohad movement, and the capital of the emirate fell. however, after al-māssī’s revolt in 542/1148, all the provinces (except marrakech and fez) required that the almohads change from their original militant organization into a territorial administration, and appeal to the skilled ancient elites, whose support was essential in ensuring control over a territory where they still retained some power: the central maghrib and al-andalus. ʿabd al-muʾmin, the first almohad caliph, attempted to use the almoravid heritage. judges, administrators, possibly the tribes, and even the great dignitaries who had served the fallen dynasty were integrated into the almohad imperial administration. that is the case, for example, of the kātib ibn ʿaṭiyya who became, as vizier for a time, the closest advisor and favorite of ʿabd al-muʾmin (r. 524/1130-558/1163).28 similarly, yintān b. ʿumar, who led the almoravid troops during the first victorious battle against ibn tūmart, became vizier. he was supposedly spared for having defended ibn tūmart during his interview with ʿalī b. yūsuf b. tashfīn. his subsequent appointment to the post of vizier demonstrated the confidence he had inspired in the almohad sovereign, despite his former responsibilities in the heart of the almoravid regime. generally, the families of the secretaries seem to have retained their power despite the change in dynasty. abū al-ḥakam ʿalī b. muḥammad b. ʿabd al-malik ʿabd al-ʿazīz al-lakhmī al-murkhī was the secretary for ʿabd al-muʾmin, following his father, who held the same position under ʿalī b. yūsuf b. tashfīn. similarly, when ʿabd al-muʾmin decided to restore cordoba as the capital of al-andalus, he entrusted this task to a former almoravid dignitary, barrāz b. muḥammad al-massūfī.29 many other examples of the continuity of careers between the two dynasties can be seen in the chancellery, in the legal-judicial field (with the banū rushd), and even in the control of the armies (e.g. the banū maymūn, the almoravid admirals of the fleet). the almohad sovereign also exploited certain episodes from almoravid history for their political and religious value; for example, ʿabd al-muʾmin asked ibn ʿaṭiyya to bring forward those who participated in the battle of uclés, an almoravid victory, where the heir-apparent of castile-león died, in 501/1108. ʿabd allāh b. zaydūn and ʿumar b. tūrzigīn min ashyākh al-lamtūna were thus invited to participate with the shaykh-s of the jund at the high council (al-majlis al-ʿālī), where, after having testified, they were rewarded with 500 dinars each, while the almohad shaykh-s in attendance received 100.30 until the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century, the banū ghāniya resistance, descendants of the almoravid sovereign who were sheltered in the balearic islands, put the integration of the ancient almoravid elites at risk. ibn ʿaṭiyya and his brother were ultimately executed as the result of a plot carried out by some almohads who were jealous 28. ibn ʿ aṭiyya was married to yūsuf b. tashfīn’s grand-daughter and his brother-in-law was ibn al-ṣaḥrāwiyya, a notorious, fierce and stubborn almoravid rebel who repented and was forgiven by the almohads in 550/1155. 29. ibn ṣāḥib al-ṣalā, al-mann bi-al-imāma, ed. ʿabd al-hādī tāzī (beyrouth, 1987), 138-139. 30. ibn al-qattān, naẓm al-jumān, ed. m. ʿa. makkī (beyrouth, 1990), 177-178. there is a precedent for this, in the story of the battle of yarmūk by balʿamī. khālid b. al-walīd made those who participated in the battle of badr leave from the ranks and demanded that they pray instead of fight (cited in les quatre premiers califes, extrait de la chronique de tabari (m. 922), translated by hermann zotenberg, sindbad, paris, 1981, pp. 108-110). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) preparing the almohad caliphate: the almovarids • 163 of their power. it is not known if their ties to the earlier power was the determining factor in their fate, or, rather, if they were killed because of their acquired power and the danger inherent to being in the proximity of the prince.31 after ʿabd al-muʾmin’s death in 558/1163, the exclusion of the heir, muḥammad abū ʿabd allāh, can also be attributed to his almoravid ancestry as his mother came from sūs. the future caliph, abū yaʿqūb, and his half-brother abū ḥafṣ, grandsons from the maternal side of a maṣmūda judge, were more skilled in dealing with the system of tribal hierarchy that the almohads were implementing. however, this opposition appears to have been of a political nature as much as an ideological one. this also applies to the elimination of the brothers of the mahdī ibn tūmart in 552/1157-1158. as the main body of almohad ideology formed gradually, including the apocryphal draft of the writings of the mahdī, one might ask whether the almohad opposition to the maliki school might not also have been based on a political rationale rather than a dogmatic one, in order to compete with the local elites who, through the patrimonial heritage of judicial offices, formed an “aristocratic judicature” with great financial power in al-andalus.32 the portrait painted by al-marrākushī of the almoravid sovereign, ʿalī b. yūsuf b. tashfīn, in his muʿjib, reveals that almohad writers were selective in their appreciation of the almoravids and that they only paid tribute to certain sovereigns of the saharan dynasty. as it was intended for an eastern audience, the characters in this narrative consisted of princes who were famous for their piety. criticisms are actually reflected in certain explanations or details, and contributed to the value of the path followed by the almohad caliphs: when he succeeded his father, he took the same title of amīr al-muslimīn (‘commander of the muslims’) and called his companions “almoravids.” he followed the path taken by his father (ʿalā sunan abīhi) in choosing the jihād; in terrorising the enemy (ikhāfat al-ʿaduww); and in defending the country (wa ḥimāyat al-bilād). he had good behavior and good intentions, a noble soul, he stayed away from injustice (baʿīdan ʿan al-ẓulm); he was closer to the hermits (zuhhād) and the ascetics (mutabattilīn) than the king (mulūk) and the dominant ones (mutaghghalibīn). very attached to the people of the law and religion, he made no decisions in his kingdom without first consulting the doctors of the law (mushāwarat al-fuqahāʾ). when he appointed a qāḍī, he demanded that they appeal to four doctors of the law, when making any decision.33 ʿalī’s piety, presented here as a quality, becomes a flaw due to his over-the-top character and the excessive caution that it generated in him. it is in this way that the almoravids 31. a. k. bennison, “tribal identities and the formation of the almohad elite: the salutory tale of ibn ʿatiyya,” in m. meouak (ed.), biografías magrebíes: identidades y grupos religiosos, sociales y políticos en el magreb medieval, estudios onomásticos biográficos de al-andalus, xvii (csic, 2012), 245–71. 32. on this question, see m. fierro, “the qāḍī as ruler,” in saber religioso y poder politico en el islam: actas del simposio internacional (granada, 15-18 octubre 1991) (madrid, 1994), 71–116. the figure of the judge benefitted from his dedication to the ʿilm (the monopoly over the transmission of science had a strong power of legitimization), but also from his financial strength. this judge-wealth relationship is a topos in the arab sources and clearly designates the judicature as a source of political power. 33. al-marrākushī, muʿjib, ed. 122, spanish translation 127. 164 • pascal buresi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) served as counter-models and shaped, in part, representations of the almohad power by the court authors. conclusion if the often-rewritten chronicles do not allow us to know whether the idea of the caliphate was present with the first almoravids, then the later sources, by the credit they granted to this notion and by certain allusions, reveal that the caliphate was the target of all important powers in the maghrib in the fifth/eleventh century. the etymology of the place-name, ‘marrakech,’ composed from amūr and yākush and meaning “the city of god,” reveals the original nature of the political-religious project of the almoravids: the construction of a city of god on earth. the recognition of the abbasid authority was therefore a pragmatic and cautious path chosen by the almoravids. however, it was the political structures that they founded in both the maghrib and al-andalus that paved the way for the almohad emancipation. the conservation of the capital and the semantic revitalization of its name by ʿabd al-muʾmin ensured that the almohad mission was a progression from the almoravid movement. the almohad authors also presented the accession of the almoravids in a positive manner. this can be seen in a passage from the muʿjib that equates the assimilation of al-andalus at the end of the fifth/eleventh century with the jāhiliyya, and consequently, in implicit terms, the intervention of yūsuf b. tashfīn in the unification of the arabian peninsula by muḥammad: the situation of the kings of al-andalus, after the fitna, resembled the situation of the kings of the taʾifas of persia after the murder of darius, son of darius. the situation of al-andalus was weakening; its borders were troubled; the appetite of its christian neighbours increased; and they multiplied their interventions. this lasted in this way until god assembled the word, resolved the objections, organized the group, suppressed the dissents, strengthened the religion, elevated the word of islam, and broke the ambitions of the enemy through the fortunate intervention of the prince of the muslims (amīr al-muslimīn) and defender of the religion (nāṣir al-dīn), abū yaʿqūb yūsuf b. tashfīn al-lamtūnī—peace of god in his soul.34 in the system of government that was developed in the fifth/eleventh century, the almoravids imposed the faqīh as a point of legitimization and a source of law. they also delegated a fraction of their power to the provincial governors, as shown through the proclamation and leadership of the jihād as well as coin production. the almohads thus aligned their legitimacy and authority in the person of the imām-caliph, who had a monopoly over all functions, including that of supreme judge, general in chief of the army of the faithful, interpreter of the rule, and as the source of the law. this resulted in the almohad era, from the military perspective, through the disappearance of the summer border raids and by an increasing number of truces. the jihād gave rise to the formation of large caliphal armies led personally by the imām (in 547/1153, 556/1161, 567/1172, 34. al-marrākušī, muʿjib, ed. 64, spanish translation 74. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) preparing the almohad caliphate: the almovarids • 165 580/1184, 591/1195, 601/1205, 607/1211, 608/1212) and, from a monetary perspective, through the removal of any reference to the date or the workshop stamped on dinars and dirhams. the provincial almohad organization was thus the culmination of a process set in place by the almoravids through the development of nation-state structures with a concentrated and 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bureaucratie et littérature: la kitāba et les kuttāb dans l’administration de l’espagne umayyade.” al-masāq 7 (1994): 165–200. viguera molíns, maría jesús, ed. el retroceso territorial de al-andalus: almorávides y almohades, siglos xi al xiii. historia de españa ramón menéndez pidal, 8/2. madrid: espasa calpe, 1997. ———. “las cartas de al-gazālī y al-ṭurṭušī al soberano almorávide yūsuf b. tashfīn.” al-andalus 42 (1977): 340–74. conference report al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 141-148 fo r t w o d a y s i n t h e p i c t u r e s q u e swabian university town of tübingen, a lively cohort of researchers came together for the first international conference on spatial thought in islamicate societies, 1000-1600 ce. organized by kurt franz, jean-charles ducène, and zayde antrim and funded by the university of tübingen, the école pratique des hautes é t u d e s ( e p h e ) — r e s e a r c h u n i v e r s i t y paris, the centre national de la recherche scientifique (cnrs), and trinity college (hartford, ct), the conference schedule was intense, but also left time for informal, if no less vigorous, discussions over walks and meals in a variety of attractive local venues. what was absolutely clear at the end of two days is that a new generation of scholars is challenging traditional approaches to historical geography and cartography, uncovering exciting new sources, and integrating novel theoretical considerations and methodologies into their work. the presentations were organized in panels that treated each of the themes in the conference subtitle: genre, image, and text. kicking off the conference o n t h u r s d a y e v e n i n g , z a y d e a n t r i m (trinity college, hartford, ct) gave an introductory lecture in tübingen’s historic alte aula entitled “spatial thought and the limitations of genre.” antrim questioned the dichotomizing effects of conventional genre distinctions, such as that between mathematical and human geography or that between geography and history. she also invoked, not for the last time during the conference, the foundational work of andré miquel and its complicated ramifications for the study of spatial thought in the period after about 1000 ce. on friday morning, the participants gathered in the lofty tower seminar room of the institute of classical archaeology in hohentübingen castle, boasting panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. opening the first panel on the theme of genre, emmanuelle tixier du mesnil (université paris x nanterre la défense) spatial thought in islamicate societies, 1000-1600: the politics of genre, image, and text (tübingen, 30 march to 1 april 2017) zayde antrim, jean-charles ducène, and kurt franz 142 • zayde antrim, jean-charles ducène, & kurt franz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) challenged traditional history of science approaches to islamicate geography that amount to a catalog of discoveries (or, as she quipped, errors) shorn of social or political context. she argued, following miquel, that medieval arabic geography was not merely a vector carrying ancient geography to renaissance europe, and that its significance cannot be properly appreciated without understanding the social and political context in which i t e m e r g e d . a s a c a s e i n p o i n t , s h e demonstrated the effect of the turbulence and fragmentation of eleventh-century al-andalus on the geographical work of al-bakrī (d. 487/1094), who, by turning toward the south, was emphasizing its importance in his own political context. while tixier du mesnil critiqued the way geographical literature has been t r e a t e d a s a d e c o n t e x t u a l i z e d g e n r e b y h i s t o r i a n s o f s c i e n c e , k u r t f r a n z (universität tübingen) introduced a new way of reading what might be called a “subgenre” of arabic geography—the encyclopedia—exemplified by yāqūt’s thirteenth-century muʿjam al-buldān. instead of using yāqūt’s encyclopedia as a “quarry” from which to solve problems in footnotes, he argued that it should be approached as a coherently composed work that conveys meanings and opinions. proposing narrative analysis as the best way to understand yāqūt’s project, franz identified geographical micro-narratives at the level of individual articles and metatextual master narratives that integrate the book. although doing so for the entire work brings up problems of scale and methodology, franz demonstrated his approach with a subset of yāqūt’s entries for the arabian peninsula, syria, and al-jazīra. his analysis revealed a p reoc c u p at ion wit h forg ot t en p laces and uninhabited sites in the desert or steppe that might be reanimated by a “salvage operation” that featured, most prominently, poetry. these were not spaces shaped by the reach of imperial power, but rather by poetic allusions and the memory of readers whose knowledge of the poetic canon yāqūt relied upon to fill in the blanks in his entries. rounding out the panel, travis zadeh (yale university) used the concept of wonder, often associated with but not confined to the genre of ʿajāʾib literature, to interrogate the epistemological basis u p o n w h i c h w e s t e r n d i s c o u r s e h a s determined what “qualifies,” drawing from ann stoler’s work, as “discovery” and “curiosity.” opening his paper with the claim made by the turkish president, recep tayyip erdoğan, in 2014, that muslims were the first to discover america, zadeh argued that this represented a response to a persistent colonial history in which islamicate society has been deemed inward-looking and lacking in curiosity about the rest of the world. instead, he proposed the concept of wonder as a discursive formation within islamicate societies that made possible a serious engagement with the heterogeneity of existence, the ever-shifting boundary between the known and the unknown, and the limits of human capacity. according to zadeh, meditations on wonder presumed c u r i o s i t y t o b e a p o w e r f u l d r i v e . i t was therefore never a matter of lack of curiosity, but of how—or where—to channel it. this was one of the purposes of spatial thought and geographical writing, zadeh concluded, to establish frontiers as relational concepts—not as barriers to the unknown, but as historically contingent, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) spatial thought in islamicate societies, 1000-1600 • 143 a n d t h u s a l w a y s c h a n g i n g , w a y s o f ordering a world defined by its diversity. the second panel, on the theme of image, was convened after a refreshing lunch at café ranitzky in the marketplace square of tübingen. yossef rapoport ( q u e e n m a r y u n i v e r s i t y o f l o n d o n ) opened the panel with a paper on mapping urban space. he began by noting that scholars have frequently dismissed maps of cities as rare or ignored them entirely. in response, he assembled a sampling of maps from manuscripts, such as the “book of curiosities,” an anonymous cosmographical work composed in the eleventh century, and ibn mujāwir’s thirteenth-century account of the arabian peninsula, to show a recurrent pattern i n t h e g r a p h i c a l d e p i c t i o n o f c i t i e s . according to rapoport, these images focus on protection—walls, harbors—and sites of political authority. the rest of the urban space is frequently portrayed as empty. this offers a contrast to written representations of cities and urban life, which often emphasize religious structures and markets. this paper prompted a debate about whether or not such maps represent continuity with preand extraislamicate depictions of cities, such as the madaba map. next, feray coşkun (freie universität b e r l i n ) a d d r e s s e d w o r l d m a p s i n manuscripts of the popular sixteenthcentury ottoman turkish translation o f i b n a l w a r d ī ’ s f i f t e e n t h c e n t u r y kharīdat al-ʿajāʾib. with examples from a variety of manuscripts, coşkun argued that these world maps are particularly revealing of the historical context of their copying. for instance, the legendary throne of iblīs, pictured in east africa in fifteenth-century arabic manuscripts, was moved to northern europe in one of the earliest manuscript copies of the turkish translation, mirroring an ottoman orient at ion t oward t he nort h as t he land of the unknown or the dangerous. another compelling example came from a seventeenth-century manuscript, which features an extremely large depiction of constantinople, along with additional copyist commentary describing the city as the divinely protected center of the caliphate. coşkun concluded that these changing features indicate the flexibility of maps, which can be altered in dramatic or subtle ways to reflect their historical c o n t e x t , a n d h e l p a c c o u n t f o r t h e prolonged popularity of the work in the ottoman milieu. like rapoport, coşkun s h o w e d t h a t m a p s p r o v i d e a l t e r n a t e venues for promoting conceptions of space than written works. in the third and final paper on image, nadja danilenko (freie universität berlin) analyzed the manuscript tradition of one of the most frequently copied cartographic texts from the medieval islamicate world, al-iṣṭakhrī’s “book of routes and realms.” danilenko’s paper made three main points: first, that al-iṣṭakhrī employed a novel visualization strategy that stayed relatively stable across centuries of manuscript copying; second, that al-iṣṭakhrī’s work w a s t h e o n l y t e n t h c e n t u r y a r a b i c geography translated into both persian and ottoman turkish, a fact that reflects the cultural efflorescence of the mongol and post-mongol persianate world; and third, that the continued copying of the manuscript up to 1898 was driven by many factors but perhaps primarily by its aesthetic appeal as a showpiece for elites. danilenko’s research has uncovered heretofore unknown manuscripts of this 144 • zayde antrim, jean-charles ducène, & kurt franz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) work, bringing the total extant copies up to 51 (arabic, persian, turkish), a major contribution to the field that has entailed painstaking archival work on four continents. hers was one of the few papers in the conference that addressed the materiality of the sources and their role as commodities in circulation. a long and lively day was capped by a visit to the research unit for islamic n u m i s m a t i c s ( f i n t ) h o s t e d b y t h e department of oriental and islamic studies at the university of tübingen. there, conference participants were treated to a presentation by curator lutz ilisch on coins as sources for historical geography. it was a fascinating lesson not only on the ways in which distributions of coins and mints yield insight into political and economic fluctuations, but also on the challenges of assembling and maintaining such an extensive collection, second only to that of st. petersburg. afterwards, we gathered in kurt franz’s office for a brief introduction to “etavo” (tübinger atlas des vorderen orients), the massive geoinformation project under preparation he is coordinating, and the alpha version o f t h e c o m m u n i t y b u i l d i n g w e b s i t e “mamâlik: place and space in islamic history,” to be launched shortly. day two was equally exciting, featuring two panels on the theme of text: a poster session in which four graduate students presented their dissertation work, and an energetic and fruitful summary discussion. the saturday morning panel was convened by a guest chair, dana sajdi (boston college), and opened with a presentation by stefan heidemann (universität hamburg) on a digital humanities project that draws from ninththrough twelfth-century arabic geographies to map the abbasid empire “on its own terms.” focusing on the five regions of ifrīqiya, al-shām, al-jazīra, fārs, and khurāsān, the project’s preliminary findings show that the locations included in each regional unit varied considerably among the geographers under study. this suggests that such regions did not function as territorially-defined provinces, but were rather administrative projections from the center without defined territoriality. he presented a sampling of maps of al-shām from the project, which use translucent polygons to represent each of the region’s administrative districts (ajnād) superimposed on a google earth base. this method makes it possible to layer different interpretations of the ajnād on the same map. it also has an advantage over previous attempts to map the abbasid empire, which have been less successful at conveying ambiguity and territoriality at the same time. t h e s e c o n d p a p e r o f t h e m o r n i n g on al-idrīsī’s twelfth-century nuzhat al-mushtāq constituted one of the only i n d e p t h d i s c u s s i o n s o f a n a u t h o r ’ s method for integrating word and image. according to irina konovalova (russian academy of sciences, moscow), al-idrīsī used route data to organize space, but this presented problems, since the singularity of each of his sectional maps fragmented long-distance itineraries. he managed the limitations of his cartographic method by taking advantage of the possibilities of the written text for toponym repetition and intratextual cross-referencing, which together allow a reader to keep track of itineraries that stretch over more than one sectional map. konovalova also argued that toponyms function in al-idrīsī’s work like “geographical objects.” consumers of this toponymy might appreciate the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) spatial thought in islamicate societies, 1000-1600 • 145 “idea” of the toponym—the object that it constituted, rather than the one it signified—without having need of detailed locational information about it. this was particularly true for faraway or large and boundless places. she concluded that for al-idrīsī word and image not only represented two different ways of presenting information but also conveyed t w o d i f f e r e n t t y p e s o f i n f o r m a t i o n , s o m e t i m e s i n i n t e r d e p e n d e n t a n d sometimes in independent ways. the last paper of the morning panel straddled the themes of genre and text, as jean-charles ducène (école pratique des hautes études, paris) examined a set of works usually identified as administrative or chancellery manuals from the mamlūk period. while al-ʿumarī’s fourteenthcentury masālik al-abṣār is sometimes included under the rubric of geographical literature, in particular because of its maps, other works, such as his taʿrīf bi-l-muṣṭalaḥ al-sharīf and qalqashandī’s ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, not to mention works by their lesser known contemporaries ibn nāẓir al-jaysh and al-saḥmāwī, are rarely considered in discussions of spatial thought. indeed, d u c è n e a r g u e d t h a t a n a l y z i n g t h e s e texts reveals a very different approach to space than that of more “universalist” geographers like al-idrīsī. mamlūk-era chancellery manuals order space in terms of proximity and relevance to the imperial center—in this case, egypt—and sketch a geography of “states,” recognized as such by their political, economic, and military power and their diplomatic relations with the mamlūks. in short, ducène contended, these authors developed a real political geography. before breaking for lunch on the lovely terrace of the hotel am schloss, the group assembled for a poster session featuring four phd researchers who won travel grants to attend the conference. brief presentations accompanied by compelling visuals addressed the importance of the conference participants in tübingen, germany, 2017. 146 • zayde antrim, jean-charles ducène, & kurt franz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) qibla as ritual, metaphor, and identity marker in early islam (ari m. gordon, university of pennsylvania); bosnian hajj literature and local cosmopolitanism in the ottoman empire (dženita karić, school of oriental and african studies, university of london); ibn baṭṭūṭa’s vision of southeast asia as a frontier (aglaia iankovskaia, central european university, budapest); and a new digital approach to comparing descriptive geographies (masoumeh seydi, in collaboration with maxim romanov, universität leipzig). the saturday afternoon panel on the theme of text consisted of two, rather than three, papers, as unfortunately sergey minov (oxford university) was prevented from presenting his work on syriac cosmography due to last-minute visa complications. the panel was opened by alexis n. wick (american university of beirut), whose paper on ibn mājid’s fifteenth-century navigation guide to the indian ocean moved us from land to sea. like konovalova’s al-idrīsī, but unlike ducène’s mamlūk administrators, ibn mājid organized space in terms of toponyms and routes, not sovereignty. his regular use of the first and second person suggested the importance of personal experience in providing practical guidance to others. such references to firsthand knowledge were, of course, a means of authorial legitimation, but wick argued that they must also be seen as part of a wider epistemological system in which experience, scholarship, and instruction were seamlessly integrated in the service of ordering, appreciating, and enabling movement through space. this system produced the sea as an inclusive space, mediated by the authority of navigators to be sure, but with the effect of making it more, not less, accessible outside of limited circles of personal experience and expertise. the final paper of the conference was also the first one to deal with a t e x t e m e r g i n g f r o m w h a t h a s b e e n called the genre of local history rather than geography. in a discussion of ibn isfandiyār’s early thirteenth-century persian tārīkh-i ṭabaristān, robert haug (university of cincinnati) stressed the importance of an author’s autobiography to the representation of space. according to haug, ibn isfandiyār’s experience in exile, watching the bāwandid dynasty fall to the khwārazmshāhs, caused him to represent ṭabaristān as a place of sanctuary. by narrating anecdotes about foreigners seeking refuge in ṭabaristān over the centuries, ibn isfandiyār inserted his home region into the larger political dramas of the time. haug concluded by speculating that this may also be a clue as to ibn isfandiyār’s intended audience, a circle of fellow exiles for whom the ill treatment of refugees was a pressing concern. the closing event of the conference was a summary discussion led by nasser rabbat (massachusetts institute of technology). rabbat began by sketching three modes for depicting space in islamicate societies b e t w e e n 1 0 0 0 a n d 1 6 0 0 . t h e f i r s t , “verbal,” consisting of oral or written descriptions of space, was already highly developed by the beginning of this period. the second, “graphic,” consisting of non-mimetic visualizations of space, was gathering momentum over the course of, but especially toward the end of, this period. and the third, “representational,” c o n s i s t i n g o f m i m e t i c , p e r s p e c t i v a l visualizations of space, became important al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) spatial thought in islamicate societies, 1000-1600 • 147 only from the sixteenth-century on. rabbat cautioned that this typology should be seen along a historical continuum, not as a template for discrete, consecutive p e r i o d i z a t i o n . i n d e e d , t h e “ v e r b a l ” persisted as, arguably, the dominant mode for expressions of spatial thought until the modern period, and there have always been overlaps between the three modes, both within the sources themselves and within historical periods. nonetheless, rabbat contended that a pressing question for the study of spatial thought after circa 1000 is why—and in what cultural or historical circumstances—one mode was chosen rather than another. what do these choices tell us about, for instance, the development of genres, technologies, and divisions of labor? rabbat then provided some comments on recurring themes over the two days of paper presentations. he noted the importance of the political context to the production and circulation of spatially oriented texts, as well as to the shaping of their contents; he suggested ekphrasis as a conceptual tool to understand the rhetorical purpose of many of these texts; and he emphasized the significance of the concept of wonder and questions of the unknown—or unknowable—in spatial thought. the discussion that ensued was extremely vigorous and thoughtprovoking, as the group grappled with questions of epistemology—what “counts” as geography or cartography? how do we respond to persistent discourses that identify “absences” in islamicate societies? do we respond with “presences”? or do we reject the epistemological terms that such questions force us into? the issue of genre was one of the more contentious, with some participants insisting on the usefulness of generic distinctions between, for instance, m a t h e m a t i c a l a n d h u m a n g e o g r a p h y and others seeing such distinctions as problematic or ill-suited to the sources. rabbat asked whether it is even possible for us to identify “indigenous” genres of medieval spatial thought or whether we are trapped between two options, imposing our own genres or defaulting to assumptions of “genre fluidity.” in other words, have we arrived at limits of our own, a frontier behind which lies the unknown—or unknowable? w h i l e l e a v i n g t h i s o p e n t o f u t u r e d e b a t e , t h e c o n f e r e n c e d i d g e n e r a t e consensus in several areas. the period 1000-1600 proved productive, despite often-heard classicist opinions of a deep decline following roughly the year 1000. instead of denigrating “post-classical” geographies as derivative or inferior, participants stressed the ability of authors to innovate and adapt to a variety of contexts in a changing world. also, it was consistently emphasized that the stock of relevant books and maps from this period is by no means exhausted. making more manuscript materials available was deemed a prerequisite for understanding better the significance of spatially oriented works. third, it went almost without saying that the multifold linguistic and cultural character of these centuries calls for more cross-sectional and interdisciplinary study. this pertains not only to the movement of spatial concepts between arabic, persian, ottoman, and other literatures, but also to intertextuality among works composed in different genres or for different audiences, and, it may be added, even among literary or cartographical sources and spatiallyrelevant objects or buildings. finally, the wrap-up session allowed participants to 148 • zayde antrim, jean-charles ducène, & kurt franz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) place the discussion in a larger framework. s o m e o f t h e m o s t f r e q u e n t l y r a i s e d questions during the conference addressed the social context in which geographers and mapmakers worked, to what extent their thought was shaped by practical needs, and what impact their products had on others and on the physical environment. these questions, as franz put it, implied that the spatial thought of expert literati should be seen as but a very specialized and visible expression of the basic human activities that are movement and spatial cognition. as such, franz concluded, the conference provided an incentive to integrate the study of spatial thought more fully into the field of social history. if two days of papers on these topics taught us anything, however, it was that frontiers are always shifting. this r e p r e s e n t s b o t h a c h a l l e n g e a n d a n opportunity, and the group resolved to continue such discussions with the goal of reconvening in some form in two years. a celebratory farewell dinner at tübingen’s culinary treasure le romarin cemented this resolve and we dispersed into the night, some to early morning flights and others to a final day of spring weather on tübingen’s river neckar, but all looking forward to future work on the frontiers of islamicate spatial thought. for the full conference programme and paper abstracts, see: http://www. spatial-thought.uni-tuebingen.de/ http://www.spatial-thought.uni-tuebingen.de/ http://www.spatial-thought.uni-tuebingen.de/ mem awards al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): iii-vi i enrolled in professor giles constable’s seminar in twelfth-century european history in 1962, my first year of graduate study at harvard. he told us to select a cartulary, which he told us was a term for a collection of medieval documents. we were to write a paper based on what we found there. i selected the cartulary of the guillem family, the lords of montpellier in southern france. i realized, given my haphazard memory of the latin i had taken in high school, that i could not expect to read most of the documents. but i noticed that each document ended with a series of names of witnesses, and, the more important the document, the longer the list. moreover, the names often included the witness’ occupation and the name of his father. so i made the study of major witness families over a sequence of generations the core element of my paper. three years later, i decided to write my doctoral dissertation on medieval nishapur, partly because my dissertation director, professor george makdisi, did not know or care much about the history of iran. professor richard n. frye, who would become the second reader of my dissertation, supplied me with manuscripts o f t h e b i o g r a p h i c a l d i c t i o n a r i e s o f nishapur. the longest assemblage of names, however, was in a manuscript that was little more than an index of what had originally been a multi-volume work by al-ḥākim al-bayyiʿ al-naysābūrī. so i had the full names, but no additional information about most of the individuals. it felt like a return to the witness lists in the guillems cartulary. b y c h a n c e , d u r i n g t h e p r e c e d i n g summer, my father, an electrical engineer, had enlisted my services gluing ads for electronic parts onto cards so that he could easily access items he might need. these were royal-mcbee keysort cards, which had holes all around the sides. i never learned how my father coded and used the cards, but it occurred to me that if i copied every nishapur biography onto such a card, i could code salient pieces of remarks by the recipient of the 2015 mem lifetime achievement award given at the annual meeting of middle east medievalists (denver, 21 november 2015) richard w. bulliet columbia university (rwb3@columbia.edu) iv • richard w. bulliet al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) information by turning holes into notches with a special punch. when i wanted to retrieve some bit of information, i simply had to run a knitting needle through a stack of cards, and the ones that had notches instead of holes fell out. computers, at that point, were still in a primitive stage but even if i had had access to a mainframe and knew how to use it, it would have required me to transliterate the arabic into latin letters. with the keysort cards, i could copy the arabic onto the card and not worry about transliteration. when i had finished copying and coding, i had thousands of cards that could be rearranged in any pattern i chose by the application of my knitting needle. today, half a century later, i still use the cards to follow up on new thoughts as they occur to me. without really intending it, in other words, i had created a large searchable database at a time when no one else was doing that sort of thing. p r o f e s s o r m a k d i s i , w h o h a d t a k e n over thesis direction in islamic studies at harvard after professor h.a.r. gibb suffered a stroke, never asked me how or what i was doing, nor did he express much interest in my work. we disagreed repeatedly on the origin of the madrasa, me favoring khurasan and he insisting on baghdad. looking back, i realize that gibb’s forced retirement and makdisi’s unexpected succession as advisor created the opportunity for me to follow my own inclinations and devise my own research techniques. n o t h a v i n g a m e n t o r , o r e v e n a professor particularly interested in my research, would work to my disadvantage at critical points in the coming years. but the privilege of working entirely on my own, both methodologically and substantively, made up for those difficult moments. i was to make use of my cards and the coding system, which i extended to isfahan and jurjan, to write four books and a dozen articles. it was in the summer of 1967, after returning home to rockford, illinois after an invaluable summer seminar at the american numismatic society, that i found myself drawing a blank when trying to remember the classical arabic word for wheel. at first i was irritated at forgetting such a basic word, but then i thought that perhaps i had never encountered the word. how could that be? it then occurred to me that perhaps there had been no wheeled transport in the medieval middle east (hence no formal term). but since oxcarts and chariots were well attested in antiquity, that would mean that the wheel had been abandoned sometime before the arab conquests. i s h a r e d t h e s u s p i c i o n t h a t i w a s onto something important with a senior colleague at harvard. he replied that, were he not a friend, he would have stolen the idea. thank goodness for friendship. i wrote an article arguing that wheeled transport had indeed been abandoned in favor of a more efficient means of hauling heavy loads in the form of the pack camel. to explain how this occurred as it did, i reconstructed a history of camel use based primarily on the evolution of saddle design. just as the keysort cards on nishapur kept me focused on the quantifiable aspects of arabic biographical dictionaries, the camel and the wheel propelled me into a broader study of animal domestication and the technology of transportation. hunters, herders, and hamburgers: the past and future of human-animal relationships and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) remarks by the recipient of the 2015 mem lifetime achievement award • v the wheel: inventions and reinventions were the books that summarized my thoughts in these two areas. in cotton, climate, and camels in early islamic iran: a moment in world history, i combined technology, camels, and the quantitative approach that i had pioneered in writing about nishapur. i also published a number of articles on these subjects. a t t h i s p o i n t , i t s e e m s p r o p e r t o note that in pursuing these two widely diverse areas of research, i had departed irrevocably from the sort of islamic studies i had been trained to carry out. by 1976, when i arrived at columbia university, i had come to see classical oriental studies as a scholarly enterprise that was long on painstaking perusal of classical texts but short on innovative thought. i benefited from the works of the orientalists, of course, but quantitative history and the history of technology were wide open fields where i could ask new and important questions and hope to find answers. the positive side of my pre-columbia research and teaching was the freedom i had to go my own way. the negative side was the lack of mentorship and an awareness that the work i was publishing did not appeal to other scholars in the field. a member of the columbia search committee who opposed my hire wrote in a private communication i happened across: “bulliet has never written any real history and probably never will.” fortunately, the search committee as a whole disagreed. as for the dissenting opinion, it may not have been so far off for the time period. i find it ironic that my work is cited far more often today, when i am 75 years old, than it was in the twentieth century. i resolved, on undertaking graduate instruction at columbia, that my students would have carte blanche to follow their own inclinations in terms of subject matter and methodology, but that i would provide them with strong and active mentorship. i believe i have lived up to both commitments, but one consequence has been that i seldom schooled anyone in my approach to quantitative history, animal history, or history of technology. of the forty-five doctoral theses that i have supervised at columbia, about half dealt with topics before 1700 and half with later periods of history. world history was a different story. i became an enthusiastic advocate. my involvement began in the 1970s in a stillborn project to coauthor a world history textbook. the cash advance made the effort worthwhile, but the main payoff came when world history took off as a robust new disciplinary subfield in the 1980s. the failed project had given me the experience to make the most of this trend. a successful co-authored textbook, the earth and its peoples: a global history, provided tangible success. but i also came up with the idea of a history of the twentieth century that would be topical and global rather than a rehash of world war i, the great depression, world war ii, and the cold war. the columbia history of the twentieth century did not sell many copies, but it was a tremendously exciting project. subsequently, i made a more strenuous effort to school my students on global history than i ever had on nishapur, camels, or wheels. since my work did not fit the mold of old school orientalism, i did not get carried away by the arguments for and against the celebrated redefinition of orientalism developed by edward said, my colleague at vi • richard w. bulliet al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) columbia. nevertheless, the dozen years i spent directing the university’s middle east institute tarred me with the orientalist brush. said’s strongest supporters felt that universities had no legitimate business studying policy matters or interacting with off-campus political and business entities. to their way of thinking, middle east area studies was a tool for turning universities into havens of american neo-imperialism. their hostility led to my removal from the directorship of the middle east institute in 2000. though heartbreaking at the time, it freed me to do more writing and research. i also decided, before anyone had thought up the acronym mooc (massive open online course), to archive the final presentations of my standard lecture courses and make them available for free on the internet. looking back over my middle east career, from first entering a classroom to hear professor robert bellah lecture on islamic institutions in 1959 to the present day, i have few regrets concerning the lines of inquiry that i chose to pursue. but i do regret that the fields of islamic studies and middle eastern history have changed so little from where they were when i started out. true, tens of thousands of books have been authored, and no one today can possibly hope to keep up with these fields as they could in the 1960s. but the innovative methodologies that are showing such promise in the study of most other parts the world, such as quantitative history, climate history, and material history in general, are still little explored with respect to the middle east. the saidian attempt to slay the dragon of orientalism produced a maelstrom of controversy, but it failed to open up viable alternative ways of doing business. alas, what failed to kill orientalism has made it stronger. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023): 77-95 reconsidering islām and dīn in the medinan qurʾan* ilkka lindstedt university of helsinki (ilkka.lindstedt@helsinki.fi) abstract though the study of early islamic identity continues to be a debated field, quite a few scholars have of late suggested that the processes of articulating a clear-cut identity distinct from those of other faiths were complex and took some time, with the year 700 ce or thereabouts often offered as a possible date for the parting of the ways between muslims, on the one hand, and other religious communities, on the other. related to the issue of dating is the question of group nomenclature: what did the arabian believers call themselves, what were they called by outsiders, and how did the different naming practices affect their possible sense of distinctiveness? this article deals with the words islām, muslimūn, and dīn in the late layers of the qurʾan and in the postqurʾanic evidence. i argue that in the qurʾan, the word al-islām never specifies or names the religion of the believers and that the qurʾanic word (al-)dīn is most naturally to be understood as “law” or “judgment,” depending on the context, rather than “religion.” surveying the dated post-qurʾanic documentary record, i suggest that the appearance of the reified sense of a distinct religion called islam and its followers, called muslims, should be dated no earlier than the early second/eighth century. moreover, scholars have recently taken up the possibility of postprophetic additions in the qurʾan, suggesting that verses such as 3:19 and 5:3 might contain such interpolations. however, my interpretation of the verses calls this suggestion into question. introduction according to social psychologists writing within the framework of social identity theory, people self-identify with groups that provide them aspects of positive distinctiveness.1 * i am very grateful to the editors of the journal, the anonymous peer reviewers, and mohsen goudarzi for comments on an earlier version of this article. 1. social identity theory was initiated by henri tajfel; see, e.g., his human groups and social categories: studies in social psychology (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1981). for other motives for identification with a group, see v. l. vignoles, “identity motives,” in handbook of identity theory and research, ed. s. j. schwartz, k. luyckx, and v. l. vignoles, 403–32 (new york: springer, 2011). vignoles notes (at 403) that “evidence suggests that people are motivated not only to see themselves in a positive light (the self-esteem motive), but also to believe that their identities are continuous over time despite significant life changes (the continuity motive), that they are distinguished from other people (the distinctiveness motive), that their lives are meaningful (the meaning motive), that they are competent and capable of influencing their environments (the efficacy motive), © 2023 ilkka lindstedt. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 78 • ilkka lindstedt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) that is to say, people affiliate and associate meanings with groups that provide positive and distinctive selfand social identities and, with them, enhanced self-esteem to their members. this works both ways: those who identify with a group draw on the groups’ existing facets of positive distinctiveness to bolster their own self-esteem, but they also endeavor to shape and uphold that positive distinctiveness through and during their act of self-categorizing as part of the group, sometimes in new ways.2 one facet of distinctiveness, and often of positivity too, is calling the group by a specific name. here, one should begin by noting that groups often have different endonyms (names used by the group members themselves) and exonyms (names used by outsiders): for instance, muslim (endonym) versus muhammadan, saracen, or ishmaelite (exonyms used at different stages of history by non-muslims). it is the in-group endonyms that i am interested in here. the main question explored in this article is: when did muslims begin to call themselves “muslims” and their religion “islam”? and even more importantly, are these words present, in their reified, proper-name senses, already in the qurʾanic proclamation (regardless of when we want to date the different layers of the qurʾanic text)? these appellations were clearly valuable to the in-group members, since islam signifies the positive characteristic of obedience (to god, the prophet, and the law), the word muslim being the active participle; these words are distinctive, too, since no other group in the religious milieu of the late antique near east called itself by these or similar designations. the post-qurʾanic evidence it might be appropriate to begin with the post-qurʾanic sources to engage with the question of when the arabian believers began to call their religion islam and their group muslims. for a long time after the death of the prophet muḥammad in 11/632, the dominant endonym used was muʾminūn, “believers,” with those believers who were part of the conquering armies also using muhājirūn, “settlers,” to designate themselves.3 however, though the name muʾminūn provided positive characteristics to the group, it most certainly did not offer distinctiveness. in fact, the endonym muʾminūn, adopted by the prophet’s community, was probably of christian origin. though the arabic word muʾmin(ūn) is yet to turn up in any pre-islamic inscription, cognate words in ethiopic (məʾəman) and syriac (mhaymnē) were designations that christians around arabia used for themselves before (and after) islam. indeed, the arabic muʾmin appears to have been borrowed from the ethiopic məʾəman,4 probably in the sixth century when ethiopian overlords reigned in south arabia and launched raids on the north. the word muʾmin(ūn) is attested in the pre-islamic poetical corpus, such as among and that they are included and accepted within their social contexts (the belonging motive).” 2. vignoles, “identity motives,” 415–17. 3. for analysis of the dated evidence and group nomenclature, see also i. lindstedt, “who is in, who is out? early muslim identity through epigraphy and theory,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 46 (2019): 147–246, at 190–194. 4. a. jeffery, the foreign vocabulary of the qurʾan (baroda: oriental institute, 1938), 70; w. leslau, comparative dictionary of geʿez (classical ethiopic) (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1987), 24. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) reconsidering islām and dīn in the medinan qurʾan • 79 the poems of the christian ʿadī b. zayd.5 and naturally, during the islamic era, arabicspeaking and -writing christians would continue calling themselves muʾminūn, among other things.6 the missing distinctive endonym is part of the debate on early islamic identity formation, which was begun in earnest by the important study of fred donner.7 some scholars, including myself, have continued this line of thinking, suggesting that until around 700 ce, the social categories were in flux and some jews and christians joined the movement that deemed the west arabian muḥammad a prophet, perhaps without requiring them to jettison their earlier identities qua jews and christians.8 the idea is that the rather general endonym muʾminūn, “believers,” faciliated this process. donner and his followers understand islamic identity articulation as a slow process that took decades to unfold, rather than one that was accomplished toward the end of the life of muḥammad. i will next survey the first post-qurʾanic occurrences of the words islām and muslimūn.9 we can put aside the chronologically earliest example, since the inscription simply quotes the qurʾan. this is the famous dome of the rock mosaic inscription dated to 72 ah, which quotes, among other verses, qurʾan 3:19 (inna al-dīn ʿinda allāh al-islām).10 since i will argue in what follows that the meaning of this verse was not necessarily understood in the reified sense by the earliest believers, it cannot automatically be taken to refer to “islam,” with a capital letter, in the dome of the rock inscription either. 5. ʿadī b. zayd, dīwān ʿadī b. zayd al-ʿibādī, ed. m. j. al-muʿaybid (baghdad: dār al-jumhūriyya, 1965), 61. there are questions concerning the authenticity of the poetical corpus in general and ʿ adī’s poems in particular, but see n. sinai, rain-giver, bone-breaker, score-settler: allāh in pre-quranic poetry (new haven, ct: american oriental society, 2019), 19–26, for optimistic remarks about the poems’ authenticity. 6. see, e.g., r. hoyland, “st andrews ms14 and the earliest arabic summa theologiae,” in syriac polemics: studies in honour of gerrit jan reinink, ed. w. j. van bekkum, j. w. drijvers, and a. c. klugkist, 159–72 (leuven: peeters, 2007), at 161. 7. f. m. donner, “from believers to muslims: confessional self-identity in the early islamic community,” al-abhath 50–51 (2002–3): 9–53. 8. see the various presentations by s. j. shoemaker, the death of a prophet: the end of muhammad’s life and the beginnings of islam (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2012); m. p. penn, envisioning islam: syriac christians and the early muslim world (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2015); lindstedt, “who is in.” cf. also j. tannous, the making of the medieval middle east: religion, society, and simple believers (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2019), who rejects donner’s thesis but emphasizes the overlapping nature of the religious groups and the believers affiliating with those groups. 9. i should note that i am dealing with a specific historical context, that of the first–second/seventh–eighth centuries. the word al-islām naturally has had and has nowadays multifaceted meanings. for a discussion, see, e.g., n. reda, “what is islam? the importance of being islamic in christian theological schools,” islam and christian–muslim relations 29 (2018): 309–29. 10. for the full text and analyses, see c. kessler, “ʿabd al-malik’s inscription in the dome of the rock: a reconsideration,” journal of the royal asiatic society 102 (1970): 2–14; r. hoyland, seeing islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of christian, jewish and zoroastrian writings on early islam (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1997), 696–99; e. whelan, “forgotten witness: evidence for the early codification of the qurʾan,” journal of the american oriental society 118 (1998): 1–14; m. milwright, the dome of the rock and its umayyad mosaic inscriptions (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016). 80 • ilkka lindstedt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) the following examples are more pertinent and show, in my opinion, that at the beginning of the second/eighth century, the names muslims and islam had started to be used within the group. since they are attested in both monumental inscriptions and graffiti, it makes sense to assume that swaths of people, not just the elite, had adopted them. granted, the exact process by which the group agreed on the name muslimūn, relegated muʾminūn to a secondary role, and discarded muhājirūn more or less entirely is unclear.11 we do not know who instigated this name change, or when and where exactly they did so. the words islām and muslimūn appear in the qurʾan, though rather infrequently and, as i argue in this article, always in the general sense of “obedience” and “those who obey.” the words were, then, part of the meaningful religious parlance and vocabulary of the arabian believers, but so were other important qurʾanic terms such as hudā, “guidance,” and taqwā, “god-consciousness,” which, to entertain the counterfactual, might also have ended up as prominent words utilized to refer to the group and its religion. in any case, as far as i know, the first dated reference to islam as a name for the religion is evidenced in a graffito from jabal usays, syria, dated to 119/737 (some fifty years later than the dome of the rock inscription). it begins: rabbī allāh wa-dīnī al-islām, “my lord is god and my religion is islam.”12 contemporary arabic papyri from egypt mention the social category “the people of islam” (ahl al-islām). the locution appears in a papyrus letter found at the fayyūm oasis and dated by petra sijpesteijn to between 730 and 750 ce.13 in the letter, nājid b. muslim, who was in charge of the fayyūm province, gives ʿabd allāh b. asʿad, who held a lower-level administrative position, instructions on the collection of the tax (ṣadaqa, zakāt).14 the letter invokes ahl al-islām and, moreover, ahl al-dīn al-islām al-dīn al-qayyim, which is a rather awkward formulation but can be translated as “the people of the religion, islam, the upright religion” or, supposing that the definite article before the first al-dīn in the phrase is a mistake and should be omitted, “the people of the religion of islam, the upright religion.”15 in these instances it would be strained, in my opinion, to translate dīn as “law” or “judgment” and islām as “obedience,” which is the meaning of these words in qurʾanic arabic, as i will argue later in this article. the earliest extant reference to “muslims” occurs in a graffito from wādī al-gharra, jordan, dated to 107/725–26. in the text, the writer, aqraf b. murr b. riḍā, rejects associating any other deities with god, ending his inscription with “amen, o lord of the muslims, god” (āmīn yā rabb al-muslimīn allāh).16 i suppose it would theoretically be possible to understand rabb al-muslimīn as “lord of the obedient,” but it should be noted that the word 11. see i. lindstedt, “muhājirūn,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., no. 2019–6, for a few examples of later usage. 12. m. al-ʿushsh, “kitabāt ʿarabiyya ghayr manshūra fī jabal usays,” al-abhath 17 (1964): 227–316, at 290–91. 13. p. sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state: the world of a mid-eighth-century egyptian official (oxford: oxford university press, 2013), 312–15. 14. on these figures, see sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state, 124–51. 15. sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state, 314, ll. 8 and 17. 16. j. m. karīm, “naqsh kūfī yaʿūdu li-l-ʿaṣr al-umawī min janūb sharq al-gharra,” dirāsāt: al-ʿulūm al-insāniyya wa-l-ijtimāʿiyya 28, no. 2 (2001): 391–413. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) reconsidering islām and dīn in the medinan qurʾan • 81 pair rabb al-muslimīn does not occur in the qurʾan, and al-muslimīn appears to refer here to a proper name of the group. another early instance can be found in the inscriptions from quṣayr ʿamra, built at the instigation of the (then) heir apparent al-walīd b. yazīd, who served as the caliph for one year and died in 126/744. we do not know the exact date of the building nor of the inscription, but frédéric imbert suggests that the paintings and inscriptions of quṣayr ʿamra were executed in 121 or 122 ah.17 one of the inscriptions calls al-walīd walī [ʿa]hd al-muslimīn wa-l-muslimāt, “the heir apparent of male and female muslims,”18 and according to my interpretation, the capital letter m is clearly warranted in the translation. a graffito from ʿanjar, lebanon, dated to 123/741 also attests to the rise of this word as an endonym. the text reads: “may god bless all muslims and let them enter gardens of delight” (ṣallā allāh ʿalā ʿāmmat al-muslimīn wa-adkhalahum jannāt).19 the foregoing discussion has presented the earliest extant dated or datable pieces of documentary evidence on the matter. the only first/seventh-century text to mention islām or muslimūn is the dome of the rock inscription, and that is simply a qurʾanic quotation. the evidence, in my opinion, indicates that we should date the adoption of the names “muslims” and “islam” to the beginning of the second/eighth century or sometime before that (if one is to suppose, as i think is sensible, that the inscriptions and papyri reflect earlier existing discourse rather than created new group nomenclature). note that there is a variety of evidence of the endonym “believers” being used before this; it is not simply the case that the dated record is silent on the name that was used by the group.20 given the state of the evidence, one is surprised to find out that there is near-consensus among modern researchers that the word “islam,” and perhaps “muslims” too, appears already in the medinan21 stratum of the qurʾan in the reified sense, naming a specific religion and its adherents. in particular, verses 3:19 and 5:3 are mentioned in this context, though some other medinan verses are sometimes adduced as well (2:128, 2:131–32, 3:52, 3:83–85, 4:125, 5:111, 9:74, 22:78, and 61:7, of which some are dealt with in this article).22 17. f. imbert, “le prince al-walīd et son bain: itinéraires épigraphiques à quṣayr amra,” bulletin des études orientales 64 (2015): 321–63, at 359. 18. imbert, “le prince al-walīd,” 340. 19. s. ory, “les graffiti umayyades de ʿayn al-ǧarr,” bulletin du musée de beyrouth 20 (1967): 97–148, at 100. 20. see, e.g., lindstedt, “who is in,” 165, 184–86. 21. i use the conventional division into meccan and medinan here, although it has recently come under sustained criticism in scholarship; see, e.g., s. j. shoemaker, creating the qurʾan: a historical-critical study (oakland: university of california press, 2022). see also the contributions in volume 1 of m. a. amir-moezzi and g. dye, eds., le coran des historiens (paris: editions du cerf, 2019). it is naturally possible that the qurʾanic verses that i am dealing with here are not medinan but post-medinan and postprophetic (though i do not think it is likely). i will come back to this question briefly in the conclusions. 22. for various interpretations, see, e.g., t. nöldeke, geschichte des qorāns, ed. f. schwally, g. bergsträßer, and o. prezl (leipzig: dieterich, 1909–38), 1:145; r. blachère, trans., le coran (paris: g.-p. maisonneuve & larose, 1966), 79, 87; d. z. h. baneth, “what did muḥammad mean when he called his religion ‘islam’? the original meaning of aslama and its derivatives,” israel oriental studies 1 (1971): 183–90; t. izutsu, god and man in the qurʾan: the semantics of the qurʾanic weltanschauung (petaling jaya: islamic book trust, 2002), 249; a. a. ambros, a concise dictionary of koranic arabic (wiesbaden: reichert, 2004), 137; m. sirry, scriptural polemics: 82 • ilkka lindstedt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) juxtaposing this interpretation with the extant post-qurʾanic evidence suggests two possible conclusions: (a) that the word islam acquired this sense during the latest phase of the prophet’s career but then lay dormant for circa 100 years before gaining ground as the primary designation for the group’s religion; or (b) that the qurʾanic verses in which the word appears in a concrete and specific sense are later interpolations.23 my reading of the qurʾanic evidence rejects both of these solutions, suggesting rather that islām can always be understood as “obedience,” even in very late verses such as 5:3; hence, such qurʾanic locutions are unlikely to be postprophetic interpolations. general observations on islām and dīn in the qurʾan i should begin by noting that the form iv verbal noun islām, and expressions derived from the verbal form, are not ubiquitous in the qurʾan. the word islām appears eight times, the verb aslama twenty-two times, and the participle muslim, with inflections, forty-three times.24 even if they were to signal in-group belonging and religiosity, which i argue is not the case in qurʾanic arabic, they would not be the most common words to do so. they can be compared with words derived from the verb āmana, “to believe, to have faith,” which occur around 800 times.25 clearly, islām would merely be an ancillary reference to the group and its aspects of belonging. moreover, the fact that most commentators agree that the semantic shift from general “obedience” to the name “islam” transpired during the late medinan era (or whenever they want to date the key passages of the qurʾan)26 further diminishes the possible usage and function that the term might have had during the time of the proclamation of the qurʾan. the qurʾan and other religions (oxford: oxford university press, 2014), 7, 90; g. böwering, islamic political thought: an introduction (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2015), 217; s. h. nasr et al., eds., the study quran: a new translation and commentary (new york: harperone, 2015), 276; n. sinai, “processes of literary growth and editorial expansion in two medinan surahs,” in islam and its past: jahiliyya, late antiquity, and the qurʾan, ed. c. bakhos and m. cook, 106–22 (oxford: oxford university press, 2017), at 84–85; idem, the qurʾan: a historical-critical introduction (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2017), 128–29, 135–36, n. 58; f. m. donner, “dīn, islām, und muslim im koran, ” in die koranhermeneutik von günter lüling, ed. g. tamer, 129–40 (berlin: de gruyter, 2019); m. d. niemi, “historical & semantic development of dīn and islām from the seventh century to the present” (phd diss., indiana university, bloomington, 2021). all agree that islam with the uppercase initial appears in at least one of the qurʾanic verses surveyed in this article. for a view that aligns to a degree with mine, see j. t. lamptey [rhodes], never wholly other: a muslima theology of religious pluralism (oxford: oxford university press, 2014), 202–5; the author does not see the qurʾanic word islām as denoting islam, with an uppercase letter, though she does translate dīn as “religion,” which i disagree with. 23. for a study arguing for postprophetic interpolation of these verses, see donner, “dīn,” but this possibility is also raised by sinai in “processes of literary growth,” 81. 24. e. m. badawi and m. abdel haleem, trans., arabic-english dictionary of qurʾanic usage (leiden: brill, 2008), 450. 25. badawi and abdel haleem, arabic-english dictionary, 50. 26. e.g., niemi, “historical & semantic development,” 123, comments on verse 5:3: “sūrat al-mā’ida represents the climax of a process beginning with sūrat al-baqara in which god’s diffuse and all-pervasive will is gradually crystallized into a fully distinct and self-conscious religion through the incredible hermeneutic insight and rhetorical skill of the qurʾānic author.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) reconsidering islām and dīn in the medinan qurʾan • 83 as for the word dīn, it appears ninety-two times in the islamic scripture.27 the qurʾanic discourse continues the pre-islamic arabic usage of dīn, as evidenced by the poetical corpus.28 the basic significations of dīn in qurʾanic arabic are “judgment” and “law,” with the former meaning dominating in the meccan discourse, while the latter signification is often present in the medinan corpus.29 by “law,” i mean not the modern notion of a canonized body of authoritative legal stipulations but a loose and living discursive juristic tradition, pertaining also to purity and worship, which was a rather common way to understand “law” in antiquity and late antiquity and which corresponds to the jewish understanding of halakha (in greek: nomos) and later islamic understanding of sharīʿa (or sharʿ). the meaning “judgment” is common in qurʾanic eschatological contexts, often in passages of meccan provenance. for example, the expression yawm al-dīn, “judgment day,” appears thirteen times in the qurʾan.30 similarly, in verse 24:25 the word means “judgment”: “on that day, god will give them their judgment (dīnahum) according to [their] due (al-ḥaqq).” the meaning “law” is already present in the qurʾanic passages that are conventionally (and, i contend, probably correctly) called meccan. for example, 12:76 contains the expression fī dīn al-malik, “according to the king’s law.”31 since the eschatological urgency diminishes in the medinan chapters of the qurʾan while matters of legislation and this-worldly affairs rise in importance, the medinan passages often utilize the word dīn in the sense of “law.”32 27. for the occurrences, see h. e. kassis, a concordance of the qurʾan (berkeley: university of california press, 1983), 382–83. 28. see, e.g., ʿadī b. zayd, dīwān, 52, who panegyrizes a certain king by noting: “you guide humankind and fulfill their needs: as regards the law/judgment (al-dīn), justice [i.e., you are just]; as regards benevolence, abundance [i.e., you give abundantly]” (tahdī l-anāma wa-tuʿṭīhum nawāʾibahum fī l-dīni ʿadlan wa-fī l-iʿṭāʾi ighzārā). translating nawāʾibahum as “their needs” follows the suggestion of the editor of the dīwān, 52, n. 16; however, as the editor notes, this word often means “misfortunes, disasters.” in any case, the issue at hand here is the word dīn, which clearly means “law” or “judgment” in this context. there are instances where the meaning “worship” seems to obtain for dīn, but there is always the possibility that some of the poems are islamic-era forgeries. see the discussion of other poems in izutsu, god and man, 241–46; m. goudarzi, “unearthing abraham’s altar: the cultic dimensions of dīn, islām, and ḥanīf in the qurʾan,” journal of near eastern studies 82, no. 1 (forthcoming in 2023). 29. see the discussion in donner, “dīn.” 30. in verses 1:4, 15:35, 26:82, 37:20, 38:78, 51:12, 56:56, 70:26, 74:46, 82:15, 82:17, 82:18, and 83:11. this qurʾanic expression is borrowed from the syriac yawmā d-dīnā, “the day of judgment”; see e. i. el-badawi, the qurʾān and the aramaic gospel traditions (london: routledge, 2014), 189–90. 31. however, izutsu, god and man, 245, notes that this phrase should be understood as “authority of” or “obedience to the king,” suggesting that interpreting dīn as “law” here would be “reading into the qurʾan a later conception that could only arise after the concept of shar‘ as ‘religious law’ had been well established.” but this is hardly persuasive: it is completely possible that the qurʾanic community of believers had the concept of law, though it might have differed from the later islamic concept of sharīʿa/sharʿ. in fact, i think izutsu’s interpretation (“authority of” or “obedience to”) is difficult to square with the rest of the verse. the poetic quotations of the phrase (fī) dīn fulān that izutsu adduces (god and man, 244–45) are, in my opinion, better interpreted as “someone’s law” or “jurisdiction.” izutsu and i agree that there has been a habit to retroject to the qurʾanic dīn meanings that did not obtain at the time of the prophet; for him, it is the signification “law” that is an anachronism, whereas for me, it is “religion” (which izutsu is willing to allow for the qurʾanic dīn). 32. however, the meaning “judgment” is also present in some medinan instances, in my opinion. see, e.g., q 3:24, where the context indicates this to be the intended signification. in this verse, the disbelievers are 84 • ilkka lindstedt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) modern scholars usually suppose that the semantic broadening of the term to mean not only “the (religious) law” but also “(a/the) religion” occurred during the proclamation of the qurʾanic revelations.33 however, as i argue, all qurʾanic passages are fully understandable by interpreting the word dīn as denoting “judgment” or (particularly in the medinan passages) “law.”34 note also that the plural form adyān never occurs in the qurʾan;35 one would assume it would, if one were to understand the word dīn as denoting “a religion.”36 in my opinion, translating the qurʾanic expression al-dīn as “the religion” and al-islām as “islam” retrojects these words’ later significations to a time when they did not yet obtain. key medinan verses in the following, i deal with the medinan verses of crucial importance: those in which modern historians and other researchers most often perceive a reified islam and translate dīn as “religion.”37 i will begin with verse 5:3, though that may be chronologically surprising since many commentators see it as a very late verse of the qurʾan.38 it is also the one in which interpreters are the most certain about a religion named islam being mentioned. for instance, the authors of the study quran comment that in this verse, “islām is widely considered to be used in the confessional sense of those who follow the religion revealed in the quran through the prophet muhammad, rather than in the universal sense of submission to god that the terms islām and muslim have elsewhere in the quran (see, e.g., 2:131; 3:19, 85).”39 however, in my opinion, verse 5:3 is very easy indeed to align with my reading of portrayed as claiming: “‘the fire will only touch us for a certain number of days.’ their concoctions have misled them regarding their judgment! (wa-gharrahum fī dīnihim mā kānū yaftarūn).” 33. e.g., niemi, “historical & semantic development,” 94–99, 104–23, who suggests that even some meccan revelations employ dīn in the sense of “religion.” in an important and comprehensive study, goudarzi, “unearthing abraham’s altar,” argues that the qurʾanic dīn sometimes denotes “worship” or “service,” understood in the context of cultic deeds associated with the veneration of god. though this is an intriguing suggestion, and this meaning of dīn would fit some occurrences of the word (such as in q 109) very well, in my opinion goudarzi’s interpretation is somewhat conjectural, and the evidence provided by him is open to diverging readings. moreover, the arabic lexica give also the meaning “habit, custom” for dīn, which could be the correct way of understanding the word dīn in qurʾan 109. see e. w. lane, arabic-english lexicon (london: williams and norgate, 1863–93), s.v. dīn, who offers the following meanings in this connection: “custom,” “habit,” “business,” “a way, course, mode, or manner, of acting, or conduct.” 34. by and large, the intra-qurʾanic semantic shift of dīn is, then, from “judgment” to “law,” rather than from “judgment” to “religion,” as is often assumed; see, e.g., izutsu, god and man, 240–41; ambros, concise dictionary, 102. as i have noted, the meaning of “law” obtained already in the pre-islamic arabic poems, so i am suggesting not that this signification was developed during and through the qurʾanic proclamations, but rather that the qurʾan tapped into existing usages of the word dīn. 35. sirry, scriptural polemics, 98. 36. for instance, in verse 9:33. 37. donner, “dīn,” 132–35; niemi, “historical & semantic development,” 119–23. for all occurrences of al-dīn and al-islām in the qurʾan, see kassis, concordance, 382–83, 1079–81. i am not aware of any qurʾanic instance that would clearly go against my interpretation of these words. 38. blachère, coran, 131; nasr et al., study quran, 275. 39. nasr et al., study quran, 276. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) reconsidering islām and dīn in the medinan qurʾan • 85 al-islām as “obedience” (“the universal sense,” to borrow the expression of the study quran) and dīn as “law” because of the verse’s other content, which is specifically legal. if verse 5:3 is considered a very late verse in the internal chronology of the qurʾan (which in my view is a tenable suggestion), and if it can be argued that al-islām there refers to “obedience,” the whole notion of the name “islam” emerging during the qurʾanic proclamation begins to fall apart. however, it is important to treat qurʾan 5:3 in juxtaposition with other medinan verses, which i presently intend to do. qurʾan 5:3 verse 5:3 is very verbose.40 like the beginning of sura 5 as a whole, it is legal in nature, revolving around dietary legislation. the verse reads: you41 are forbidden to consume carrion, blood, pork, anything dedicated to other than god, any [animal] strangled, hit or fallen, gored, or eaten by wild animals—unless you have slaughtered it [properly]—or anything sacrificed on idol stones (al-nuṣub). [moreover, you are forbidden] to draw divining arrows (al-azlām)—that is a transgression. today, those who reject (kafarū min)42 your dīn have lost hope. do not fear them; fear me. today i have perfected (akmaltu) your dīn for you, completed (atmamtu) my blessing upon you, and favored (raḍītu) al-islām dīnan for you. but if anyone is forced [to eat illicit food] because of hunger, not intending to sin, god is forgiving and merciful.43 the crux of the matter lies in the words dīn and islām and, in particular, the expression al-islām dīnan. as far as i know, the vast majority of the translators and scholars of the qurʾan have taken the passage to mean “chosen/favored islam as your religion.”44 the accusative of dīnan is understood as signifying “as dīn,” that is to say, “in the role of dīn.” but is there another option in interpreting the accusative dīnan? indeed there is. the word dīnan of qurʾan 5:3 is what is known in the arabic grammatical tradition as the tamyīz accusative, which has various usages of determining and limiting the predicate. in the case of verse 5:3, i contend that the accusative noun should be translated into english as “with respect to,” “in/with regard to,” or “as regards” (noun).45 hence, the key passage here 40. in this connection, it is pertinent to remark that nicolai sinai has put forward the intriguing, and in my opinion credible, interpretation that verse 5:3 consists of two distinct utterances combined during the later compilatory and editorial work; sinai, “processes of literary growth,” 79–84. be that as it may, the possible editorial processes as regards verse 5:3 do not really affect my interpretation of the crucial word pair al-islām dīnan. 41. all “you” and “your” pronouns in this verse are plural and refer to the believers. 42. or perhaps “hide from.” 43. all translations of the qurʾan are my own, though i have consulted and benefited from m. a. s. abdel haleem’s translation. 44. see, e.g., the various translations available here; r. bell, trans., translation of the qurʾān (edinburgh: t & t clark, 1937), 1:94; and the renderings of this verse in the scholarly literature referenced in this article. 45. see w. wright, a grammar of the arabic language (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1896–98), 2:122, for this sort of tamyīz accusative. there are naturally many different determining and limiting usages of the accusative noun in arabic. https://quran.com/5/3 86 • ilkka lindstedt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) should be translated as “today i have perfected your law for you, completed my blessing upon you, and favored obedience as regards law for you.” not only can the phrase be so understood if it were a disjointed arabic locution, but, in fact, the content of verse 5:3 makes this reading preferable: everything in the verse that precedes and follows the passage under question is about dietary regulations—that is, law. right after the divine locution noting that god has “favored obedience as regards law for you,” the text adds: “but if anyone is forced [to eat illicit food] because of hunger, not intending to sin, god is forgiving and merciful.” obedience to the law is of great importance, but under the duress of hunger one can break the dietary regulations if one’s intentions are good. there are, in fact, quite a few similar tamyīz accusatives in the qurʾan. for example, in verse 11:7, it is stated that god has created the universe “to test which one of you is best as regards deeds” (li-yabluwakum ayyukum aḥsanu ʿamalan). the following instances should also be considered in this connection: ʿadlu dhālika ṣiyāman, “the equivalent as regards fasting” (q 5:95); ishtaʿalā l-raʾsu shayban, “the head has become glowing with grey hair” (q 19:4); and fajjarnā l-arḍa ʿuyūnan, “we have caused the earth to burst with springs” (q 54:12). verses 3:85 and 4:125, discussed below, also contain such tamyīz accusatives. my rendering of the words al-islām dīnan as “obedience as regards law” is, then, not a resort to special pleading but quite ordinary in the context of qurʾanic arabic.46 considering the widespread impression among modern scholars and translators that qurʾan 5:3 refers to and indeed explicitly names a religion known as islam, it might be informative to note what the classical exegete al-ṭabarī has to say about the phrase al-islām dīnan. stating explicitly that he is proffering his own opinion rather than quoting earlier authorities, he interprets the word pair as meaning “submission to my [that is, god’s] command and holding onto my obedience according to what i have decreed for you of limits and ordinances” (al-istislām li-amrī wa-l-inqiyād li-ṭāʿatī ʿalā mā sharaʿtu lakum min ḥudūdihi wa-maʿālimihi).47 the word al-islām is glossed with other words signifying “obedience” (istislām, ṭāʿa), while dīn is unmistakably understood in the framework of legal stipulations that god has decreed. though classical scholars usually engaged with the text of the qurʾan from the viewpoint of islam’s distinctiveness from and hegemony over other religious groups,48 in this case i would contend that al-ṭabarī offers a reading of the verse that is very sensible and, indeed, preferable in the context of qurʾanic arabic. according to nicolai sinai’s interpretation,49 verse 5:3’s passage “today i have perfected your dīn for you, completed my blessing upon you, and favored al-islām dīnan for you” can 46. cf. g. s. reynolds, “sourate 5: al-māʾida (la table),” in le coran des historiens, ed. m. a. amir-moezzi and g. dye, 2:203–35 (paris: editions du cerf, 2019), at 209, who puts forward the following translation for raḍītu lakum al-islām dīnan: “j’ai agréé que la soumission [à moi] soit votre obligation.” generally speaking, this conveys the same sense as my interpretation does, though reynolds does not justify his translation or dwell on the syntax of the phrase raḍītu lakum al-islām dīnan, which cannot, strictly speaking, be rendered in the way he suggests. 47. al-ṭabarī, jāmiʿ al-bayān, ed. a. al-turkī (cairo: dār hajar, 2001), 8:84. 48. see j. smith, a historical and semantic study of the term “islām” as seen in a sequence of qurʾān commentaries (missoula, mt: scholars press, 1975). 49. sinai, “processes of literary growth,” 80–81. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) reconsidering islām and dīn in the medinan qurʾan • 87 be understood in two ways. both interpretations put forward by him have some merit but, in my opinion, should ultimately be rejected. sinai posits the following possibilities: (a) the section indicates that the revelation and the religion are now full and complete. if this is the case, sinai suggests that the passage can be considered a postprophetic addition to the corpus of qurʾanic revelations. (b) alternatively, what has been made complete and perfect is in fact the dietary regulations of the believers. if this is the correct interpretation, then, according to sinai, the verse articulates a facet setting the burgeoning islam apart from other groups. of the two propositions, the first i would simply discard because it is based on the (in my opinion misguided) notion that equates dīn with “religion.” however, i agree with sinai’s second suggestion in so far as it seems to me quite natural, in the context of verse 5:3 and sura 5 more generally, that the word dīn here falls under its usual qurʾanic signification of “law,” more particularly dietary law. however, it is unclear whether this constitutes a characteristic that would have definitely set the followers of the prophet apart from the jews and christians around (and, dare i say, among) them. after all, the content of qurʾan 5:3 rehashes earlier jewish and christian notions about the dietary regulations that gentile believers should follow.50 what is more, verse 5:5 explicitly notes that the prophet’s community of believers can eat the food of the people of the book and vice versa. naturally, if sinai means that qurʾan 5:3 draws a line between the gentile believers and gentile disbelievers, i agree with his analysis. qurʾan 3:83 and 3:85 sura 3 consists, according to most classical and modern commentators, of material that predates sura 5.51 verses 3:83 and 3:85 align well with my general reading of the qurʾanic evidence, though qurʾan 3:85 includes a unique formulation, ghayra l-islām, which has led scholars to see “islam” being contrasted with something other than it in the verse. the expression dīn allāh in verse 3:83 is completely understandable as “god’s law.” verse 3:85 comments on 3:83; the expression in the former, wa-man yabtaghi ghayra l-islām dīnan, is similar to verse 5:3, where i have argued that al-islām dīnan signifies “obedience as regards law.” though qurʾan 3:85 is often understood to refer to al-islām as the name of the religion,52 i do not think this is the case. the word pair ghayra l-islām does not mean “something other than islam”; rather, it signifies “something other than obedience,” that is, “inobedience.” i would thus translate the two verses as follows: 50. h. zellentin, the qurʾān’s legal culture: the didascalia apostolorum as a point of departure (tübingen: mohr siebeck, 2013); idem, “judeo-christian legal culture and the qurʾan: the case of ritual slaughter and the consumption of animal blood,” in jewish-christianity and the origins of islam, ed. f. del río sánchez, 117–59 (turnhout: brepols, 2018); idem, law beyond israel: from the bible to the qurʾan (oxford: oxford university press, 2022), in particular 105–28. 51. blachère, coran, 75, dates sura 3 to the years 624 and 625. such preciseness is hardly possible in my opinion, but i agree that sura 5 comprises very late medinan material. 52. e.g., donner, “dīn,” 134, who understands the beginning of the verse as signifying “wer auch immer eine andere religion als den islam wünscht.” 88 • ilkka lindstedt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) 3:83: do they aspire to something other than god’s law (a-fa-ghayra dīn allāh yabaghūna)? everyone in the heavens and the earth obeys him (lahu aslama), either willingly or unwillingly. they will all return to him. 3:85: whoever aspires to inobedience in law (wa-man yabtaghi ghayra l-islām dīnan)—it will not be accepted from them, and they will be among the losers in the hereafter. it should be noted that the phrase “whoever aspires to inobedience in law” is, in my interpretation, a sarcastic statement. such sarcastic language sometimes appears in the qurʾan: for example, verse 9:34 commands the prophet to bashshir, “give good tidings,” of a painful chastisement to those who hoard mammon. qurʾan 61:7 if one were to subscribe to the notion that the qurʾanic word al-islām often or sometimes denotes the name of the religion, islam, the following verse, q 61:7, could be taken to mean that the wrongdoers should be called (yudʿā) to this religion. however, here, too, al-islām translates effortlessly as “obedience.” who is more wrong (aẓlam) than those who invent lies about god while being summoned to obedience (yudʿā ʿalā al-islām)? god does not guide the wrongdoers (al-ẓālimīn). “those who do wrong” (al-ẓālimīn) often functions in the qurʾan as a catchall category for people who transgress moral norms and legal regulations and fail to worship the one god.53 here as in other verses discussed in this article, al-islām appears to mean not only obedience to god but also obedience to the law, which verses 5:3 and 3:85 signal with the expression al-islām dīnan. qurʾan 3:19 verse 3:19, like 5:3, is one of the instances in which many modern scholars and commentators perceive islam with a capital letter.54 however, i would venture the following translation of the verse: the law in the presence of god is obedience (inna al-dīn ʿinda allāh al-islām). those who were given the scripture [before] did not disagree except only after they had been given knowledge, out of envy among themselves. if someone denies god’s signs [or letters, āyāt], god is swift to take revenge. here, the beginning of the verse communicates a metaphorical signification: obedience 53. badawi and abdel haleem, arabic-english dictionary, 585. 54. e.g., donner, “dīn,” 132–33; niemi, “historical & semantic development,” 121. but cf. nasr et al., study quran, 135: “islām in this verse refers to submission to god even if it is not in the context of islam as the specific religion revealed through the quran.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) reconsidering islām and dīn in the medinan qurʾan • 89 to god is tantamount to living according to god’s law, and vice versa. the word pair ʿinda allāh has multiple usages in the qurʾan, and many might fit here too: “with god,” “in the possession of god,” “in the sight of god,” “before god.”55 whatever the exact meaning here of ʿinda allāh, it is clear that al-dīn is predicated by al-islām. in my opinion, it is possible to translate them with what i suggest are their normal meanings in qurʾanic arabic: al-dīn as “the law” and al-islām as “obedience.”56 the resulting translation in english is, admittedly, a bit awkward (“the law . . . is obedience”), but i would argue that the phrase is to be understood metaphorically: god’s law signifies or includes the characteristic and requirement of obedience. moreover, verse 3:20 notes that both the people of the book and gentiles can be obedient, so in that context, too, the idea that qurʾan 3:19 articulates a distinct name, islam, for a group distinct from jews and christians is mistaken.57 similar metaphorical predicate phrases appear elsewhere in the qurʾan. for instance, verse 9:28 states that “the associators are filth” (al-mushrikūn najas)—note that the passage does not say “the associators are filthy,” using an adjective that would agree with the gender and number of the subject, but instead predicates “the associators” with the uncountable noun “filth.” the famous verse 24:35 proclaims that “god is the light of the heavens and earth.” in none of the examples cited here (3:19, 9:28, or 24:35) is the predicate phrase to be understood literally but rather as a metaphorical transfer of meaning between the two parts of the phrase. phrases such as “god is light” and “the law is obedience” do not communicate propositions that should be taken literally; rather, they invite the reader/hearer to ponder the nature of god and his law using predicates that allude to and indicate what they might entail. it seems to me that the rest of verse 3:19 is part and parcel of the qurʾanic discourse on the law, though its exact meaning and point of contention are somewhat difficult to fathom. i would suggest that the verse is an example of the qurʾanic message that rather than following the additions and concoctions of the people of the book (primarily jews and christians), the believers should follow the law in a gentile manner (ḥanīfan).58 this is communicated in, for example, verse 4:125, which i discuss next. 55. badawi and abdel haleem, arabic-english dictionary, 649. 56. similarly, g. s. reynolds, the qurʾān and the bible: text and commentary (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2018), 111–12: “with ‘islām’ the qurʾān presumably means ‘submission’ (the meaning of the arabic term islām) and not islam as a proper name (it was presumably verses such as this [3:19]—and 3:85, and 5:3—which led later muslims to name their religion ‘islam’).” however, reynolds does not discuss the syntax, which, i admit, poses some problems if islām is understood as “obedience.” 57. as also noted by w. m. watt, companion to the qurʾān (london: george allen and unwin, 1967), 47. 58. zellentin, qurʾān’s legal culture, 10: “the ‘gentile’ self-identity of the qurʾān is actually reflected in its use of the arabic term ḥanīf to depict the original gentile form of worship, going back to abraham.” 90 • ilkka lindstedt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) qurʾan 4:125 verse 4:125 uses the verb aslama.59 it reads: and who could do better as regards law (wa-man aḥsanu dīnan) than the one who submits his/her self to god as a doer of good (aslama wajhahu li-llāh wa-huwa muḥsin) and follows the word of abraham as a gentile (millat ibrāhīm ḥanīfan)? god took abraham as a close friend. the meaning of the qurʾanic word milla is much debated in scholarship. it stems from the syriac mellthē, the basic meaning of which is “word.” in the context of this article, we can gloss over the exact signification of milla and concentrate on the usages of dīn and aslama. note that the word dīnan in the expression man aḥsanu dīnan is a tamyīz accusative similar in usage to those found in verses 5:3 and 3:85 (see also 11:7). in verse 4:125, the exemplary follower of the law is described as someone who submits to god, does good, and follows the milla of abraham as a gentile. here, abraham, the “close friend” of god, features as a prototypical figure from the mythical past proffering an example for the gentile obedient believers around the prophet muḥammad. qurʾan 22:78 verse 22:78, though perhaps meccan,60 is intriguing since it contains the word muslimīn in a context that has made many suggest that it explicitly furnishes the name muslims for the audience of the revelation.61 however, the verb sammā, literally “to call, to name,” which occurs in the verse, is semantically broad in qurʾanic arabic. as matthew niemi notes, the qurʾan contains, for example, the phrase ajal musammā, which should be translated as “specified time.”62 it is not perhaps likely, therefore, that the verb sammā in qurʾan 22:87 would mean “give a name” in a concrete manner. in my interpretation, the verse can be rendered as follows: strive in god’s way as he deserves. he has chosen you63 and has not made the law (al-dīn) burdensome to you, because of the word (milla)64 of your father abraham. he65 has called you obedient (sammākum al-muslimīn) before and in this [pericope]. 59. while donner, “dīn,” adduces qurʾan 3:19, 3:85, and 5:3 as entailing a reified and distinct sense of islam with a capital letter, he interprets verse 4:125 in the same way i do. he translates (p. 136) man aḥsanu dīnan in qurʾan 4:125 as “wer ist besser im dienst.” but since the dīnan construction is grammatically the same in verse 5:3, what grounds are there for translating it in the latter instance as “als religion” (p. 133)? 60. blachère, coran, 356, notes that the sura is a mixture of meccan and medinan materials. 61. see also the discussion in donner, “dīn,” 138. 62. niemi “historical & semantic development,” 118. 63. throughout, the verse is addressed to the second-person plural. 64. here, i would suggest interpreting the accusative millata as functioning as the “motive and object of the agent in doing the act, the cause or reason of his doing it”; wright, grammar, 2:121. 65. this can refer to either god or abraham. see donner, “dīn,” 139; niemi “historical & semantic development,” 118. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) reconsidering islām and dīn in the medinan qurʾan • 91 may the messenger be a witness over you and may you be witnesses over [all] the people. uphold the prayer, give alms, and hold fast to god. he is your guardian—what an excellent guardian and helper! it is rather straightforward to translate al-dīn as “the law” and al-muslimīn as “the obedient” here. as in verse 4:125, dīn and obedience are conceptually connected with the milla of abraham. to what does the word “before” in “he has called you obedient (al-muslimīn) before and in this [pericope]” allude? i would tentatively suggest that it is an intra-qurʾanic reference to verse 2:128, where abraham and ishmael pray to god to make them obedient (muslimayn) to god and to raise from their offspring (dhurriyyatinā) an “obedient nation” (umma muslima). this could be the “before,” the earlier pericope mentioned in verse 22:78 (though that would require that 2:128 was promulgated earlier than 22:78). be that as it may, the verse does not contain a grand disclosure of a new name for the group of believers following the arabian messenger. rather, like many other verses, it characterizes them as people who submit or should submit to god, his messenger, and the law. conclusions i have noted at the beginning of this article that the names islam and muslims are absent from the first/seventh-century documentary record, though they become essential, indeed primary, appellations in the second/eighth century. given this, it would be surprising to see the words islām and muslimūn being used in the qurʾan in their reified connotations. if they were so used, it would make sense to assume that they are postprophetic interpolations to the qurʾanic text. for example, fred donner suggests that the reified senses of dīn and islām, which he sees in some of the verses discussed in this article, belong to the gedankenwelt of the late seventh or early eighth century. he argues that the bulk of the qurʾan stems from the early seventh century, but small changes and interpolations could still have been made in the transmission of the text.66 but such interpolations of reified dīn and islām would have to be quite late, in my opinion, probably from the second/eighth century, and the qurʾanic manuscript evidence appears to indicate that the islamic scripture had already been codified and standardized by then.67 even revisionist scholars, such as stephen shoemaker, place the creation of the standard qurʾanic text no later than the reign of ʿabd al-malik (d. 86/705),68 during which the group’s members still called themselves believers rather than muslims according to the dated documentary evidence. as we have seen, the earliest extant examples of the endonyms muslims and islam are from the 100–110s/720–30s. as regards the qurʾan, i have argued that it is best to understand the words dīn, islām, and muslimūn in their common significations (“law/judgment,” “obedience,” “the obedient”) even in the latest stratum of 66. donner, “dīn,” 139–40. 67. f. déroche, le coran, une histoire plurielle: essai sur la formation du texte coranique (paris: editions du seuil, 2019); m. van putten, “‘the grace of god’ as evidence for a written uthmanic archetype: the importance of shared orthographic idiosyncrasies,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 82 (2019): 271–88. 68. see shoemaker’s creating the qurʾan for a comprehensive discussion of the various pieces of evidence for the date of the qurʾan. 92 • ilkka lindstedt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) the qurʾan: verses such as 5:3 are completely understandable if one intreprets dīn and islām in their usual, rather than reified, senses. moreover, the semantic shift of the qurʾanic dīn is not from “judgment” to “religion,” but from “judgment” to “law” (though, as i have argued, the meaning “law” appears to be present already in pre-islamic poems). my interpretation, then, also has a bearing on the date of the qurʾanic text(s). if anachronisms such as the distinct appellations islam and muslims were present in the qurʾan, a late codification or standardization of the islamic scripture would be more plausible. but if, as i argue, at least these anachronisms are lacking, the scholars arguing for the late date of the bulk or some parts of the qurʾan will have to provide other examples of postprophetic modifications and additions.69 references abdel haleem, m., trans. the qurʾan. oxford: oxford university press, 2004. ʿadī b. zayd. dīwān ʿadī b. zayd al-ʿibādī. edited by m. j. al-muʿaybid. baghdad: dār al-jumhūriyya, 1965. ambros, a. a. a concise dictionary of koranic arabic. wiesbaden: reichert, 2004. amir-moezzi, m. a., and g. dye, eds. le coran des historiens. 2 vols. paris: editions du cerf, 2019. badawi, e. m., and m. abdel haleem. arabic-english dictionary of qurʾanic usage. 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edited by s. j. schwartz, k. luyckx, and v. l. vignoles, 403–32. new york: springer, 2011. watt, w. m. companion to the qurʾān. london: george allen and unwin, 1967. whelan, e. “forgotten witness: evidence for the early codification of the qurʾan.” journal of the american oriental society 118 (1998): 1–14. wright, w. a grammar of the arabic language. 2 vols. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1896–98. zellentin, h. “judeo-christian legal culture and the qurʾan: the case of ritual slaughter and the consumption of animal blood.” in jewish-christianity and the origins of islam, edited by f. del río sánchez, 117–59. turnhout: brepols, 2018. –––. law beyond israel: from the bible to the qurʾan. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. –––. the qurʾān’s legal culture: the didascalia apostolorum as a point of departure. tübingen: mohr siebeck, 2013. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 204-209 book review the technique of using biography t o m a k e h i s t o r y a c c e s s i b l e t o n e w c o m e r s i s a l i v e a n d w e l l . oneworld publishes the makers of the muslim world series, and oxford univers i t y p r e s s h a s t h e w o r l d i n a l i f e . textbooks often introduce chapters with an illustrative biography, such as the travelers in valerie hansen and kenneth curtis’s voyages in world history.1 the islamic world also has its own tradition of ṭabaqāt and maʿājim biographical literature highlighting worthies of different fields and serving as reference material for hadith criticism. referencing the latter tradition, but certainly in harmony with the former, chase robinson has used brief accounts of 30 prominent men and women to introduce readers to the first millennium of islamic history. these thirty chapters are more than just biographies, for the author is also concerned 1. valerie hansen and kenneth curtis, voyages in world history, 3rd edition (boston: cengage: 2017). with the afterlives of his subjects and the sources on which our knowledge is based. as he says at one point, “a leitmotif throughout this book has been the task of disentangling the legendary from the reliable.” (189) the book’s 30 chapters are divided into four chronologically defined parts, each of which begins with a few pages of historical background to contextualize the biographies it contains. covering such a broad subject as “islamic civilization” from 600 to 1525 naturally involves choices, and one aspect of this review will be to highlight the choices which have been made. this is usually not meant as criticism, and the present reviewer is in fact impressed with the amount of ground covered. robinson defines “civilization” as “the distinctive yield, in lived experience and especially high culture, of the religious and political project undertaken by muslims (11).” this “project” was shaped by military, political, and economic conditions, thus leading to an emphasis on conquerors and rulers. chase robinson, islamic civilization in thirty lives: the first 1,000 years (oakland, ca: university of california press, 2016), 272 pages. isbn: 978-0520292987, price: $29.95. brian ulrich shippensburg university (bjulrich@ship.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 205 • brian ulrich in addition, according to robinson, it was the elite who produced “the exemplars, the notables, the stars, the powerful, and the influential (11).” a further principle o f s e l e c t i o n s e e m s t o h a v e b e e n a n emphasis on figures whose contributions remain evident today, as opposed to those involved in movements or trends which did not last. t h e f i r s t s e c t i o n o f t h e b o o k h a s as its theme the creation of the early islamic empire as the crucible of islamic civilization. this empire was born of the creative transformation of the cultural material of late antiquity in ways that, in robinson’s interpretation, completed in the middle east a process begun when constantine the great began making the roman empire into a christian political order. more might have been said here about the sasanian background, though the example of damascus as “a model of change” is useful. the individuals treated in this first section are characterized as “participants in the project of fusing prophecy and politics.” the first biography, perhaps naturally, is that of muḥammad himself. in this chapter, the author informs readers about the complexities of the sources, giving examples of legend and polemic while offering a standard account of his prophetic career and historical context in the ḥijāz. he defines “jihad” as “religiously sanctioned warfare” (24) and translates the verbal form as “fight” in his qurʾanic quotations (26). robinson reads the motive for this warfare as the desire to ensure that monotheistic worship was possible in and around mecca because of the kaʿba. there follow biographies of ʿalī and ʿāʾisha, which establish the division between sunni and shi’ite islam while further explaining the nature of the primary sources for the period. the biography of ʿāʾisha also uses key episodes in her life—her marriage, the accusation of adultery against her, and her role in the battle of the camel— to illustrate what recorders of traditions about her found important and why. robinson does not discuss the origin of the kharijites, nor is there much about the beginning of muslim historical memory, which could have involved ʿāʾisha’s later years as a source for muḥammad’s life. t h e n e x t t w o b i o g r a p h i e s , t h o s e of ʿabd al-malik and ibn al-muqaffaʿ, establish aspects of islam’s imperial high culture while continuing to highlight the types of primary sources available to historians. the biography of ʿabd al-malik calls attention to his coinage and its significance alongside monumental building and other “mass media of the day” in the establishment of a more centralized government for an empire with the developing religion of islam as its ruling ideology (47). the centralized polity was run by officials such as ibn al-muqaffaʿ, whose illustrative career is described alongside his literary output, an output which is used to highlight both the existence of adāb culture and the passing into islamic civilization of elements of sasanian high culture. robinson then uses rābiʿa al-ʿadawiyya to represent islam apart from the ruling class, highlighting the ways in which the sufis of later centuries claimed her as one of their own. his assertion that her renunciatory brand of islam “transformed...the psychological terrain of late antique religion” (54) seems questionable, however, given the ascetic traditions of late antique christianity. the section concludes with a biography of al-maʾmūn dealing with his rise to power al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) chase robinson’s islamic civilization in thirty lives • 206 and impact of the civil war it entailed, his own brief choice of an alid successor, and the miḥna, all of which highlight the disputes over religious and political authority which served as crucial context shaping the reign. part two, “the islamic commonwealth 850-1050,” focuses on the high culture of the post-imperial age as the crystallization of islamic civilization. given his focus on a “polyfocal islamic world” with “a multitude of ruling courts and wealthy cities,” it is unfortunate that robinson’s eight biographies are all of people who flourished in iraq or further east, and most of them are deeply connected to baghdad (72). the section would have greatly benefited from having one or two figures from the mediterranean world, such as the ikshidid eunuch kāfūr, the fatimid historian-jurist qāḍī al-nuʿmān, or al-muqaddasī, the jerusalem-born geographer. however, the eight biographies do cover much thematic ground. the introduction to this section alludes briefly to iberia becoming independent while also highlighting as two major transitions the shift of economic power from iraq to other regions and an increasing rate of conversion. t w o o f t h e b i o g r a p h i e s , t h o s e o f the abbasid singer ʿarīb and the vizier a n d c a l l i g r a p h e r i b n m u q l a , d e a l simultaneously with the arts, court life and politics. ʿarīb’s career provides a lens with which to examine gender, elite slavery, and the culture of performance art, while ibn muqla’s administrative career serves to illustrate the political lives of high government officials even as his calligraphy is the occasion for discussing that distinctive islamic art form. religious developments within islam are explored through al-ḥallāj and al-ṭabarī. al-ḥallāj, of course, is an example of ecstatic sufism, though as with rabiʿa, robinson notes he was not truly claimed by sufis until a later period. al-ṭabarī’s qurʾan commentary is set amidst the debate over the proper uses of prophetic tradition and human reason, while his history is an example of how the leadership debates of the early caliphate were theologically resolved under the abbasids. w i t h a b ū b a k r a l r ā z ī , r o b i n s o n explores abbasid “free-thinking,” locating his medical advances in a willingness to criticize received wisdom that he also applied to religion. robinson here discusses how the technological conditions of knowledge transmission in premodern s o c i e t i e s m a d e t h e p r e s e r v a t i o n o f unpopular ideas much less likely. ibn faḍlān and his diplomatic journey to r u s s i a d i s p l a y “ b a g h d a d ’ s c u r i o s i t y about an unknown world.” (99) with maḥmūd of ghazna, robinson introduces the role of regional military leaders, turks, and the muslim expansion into india and emphasizes the role of persian islamic culture in the eastern islamic world, including the authorship of the shāhnāmah. notably, neither here nor elsewhere in the book is there a discussion of military slavery. the section concludes with al-bīrūnī, who is situated within the ghaznavid context and brought knowledge of and from india into his wide-ranging intellectual endeavors. the geographic panorama grows more extensive in the book’s third section, “a provisional synthesis 1050-1250.” in this part’s introduction, robinson treats two major background themes for the period. one is the inauguration of a pattern of turko-mongol sultanates with the coming of the saljuqs. the other is the prominence al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 207 • brian ulrich of mediterranean powers in the form of the fatimids and latin christians. the first three biographies of the section lay out religious developments that represent an aspect of the “provisional synthesis.” the andalusian polymath ibn ḥazm appears primarily for his role in the ẓāhirī school of islamic jurisprudence, which focused on the explicit meaning of texts and rejected analogy. despite often tying his material to the contemporary world, robinson explains how the school lost out to the four surviving madhhabs, but does not mention the ẓāhirī’s revival by modern salafis. in the next biography, karīma al-marwaziya is used to explore the world of hadith transmission and the role of women therein. finally, al-ghāzalī’s life and harmonization of sufism and rationalism is discussed alongside a critique of orientalist decline narratives, narratives in which al-ghāzalī is said to have robbed islam of its intellectual vibrancy. the third section’s remaining four biographies are an eclectic mix that deal with different facets of the period. the career of abū al-qāsim ramisht opens a window onto the world of seaborne trade and the preservation of wealth through waqf endowments. al-idrīsī’s biography displays how ancient traditions o f g e o g r a p h y a n d c a r t o g r a p h y w e r e developed by muslims and passed on to european civilization. with his biography of saladin, robinson again explores both the life of his subject and the development of later legend, beginning with his own contemporary biographers. although the book views crusading as a mediterraneanwide phenomenon, the chronological view is narrow, as the author states that “by the end of the thirteenth century, c r u s a d i n g w a s a s p e n t m i l i t a r y a n d political force.” (161) the last biography in the section is that of ibn rushd, where there is an exploration of the differences among his own ideas about reason and revelation and the debates sparked in western europe by their latin translation. the fourth and final section of the work is titled “disruption and integration 12501525,” referring to the mongol conquests and the resulting integration of the “pax mongolica.” the subjects of the first two biographies share a reputation for literary output in persian. the first is the sūfī poet jalal al-dīn rūmī. robinson here situates him and his poetry in a thirteenthc e n t u r y a n a t o l i a n e n v i r o n m e n t a s a corrective to his modern reception as an example of “new age religiosity” which is “often reduced to anodyne droplets of near-homeopathic concentration (188).” thereafter, rashīd al-dīn serves as the exemplar for the multiculturalism of the ilkhanate. the next two biographies are both those of theologians, al-ḥillī and ibn taymiyya. the former is the occasion to focus on the development of shiʿism over the centuries, with a particular focus on the development of twelver imamis, a contrast between the sectarian politics of early 21st century iraq and integrated intellectual world of the thirteenth century, and the influence of rationalism on shiʿite thought. a hiccup occurs when robinson describes the buyids as promoting zaydism without mentioning their turn to twelver shiʿism as their power developed. the chapter on ibn taymiyya, in turn, seems to oppose him to al-ḥillī, and focuses on the sunni reactionary’s ideas and their relationship with modern islamists; unfortunately, the author seems to conflate that term with its al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) chase robinson’s islamic civilization in thirty lives • 208 most extreme and violent examples. a biography of timur discusses his image over the centuries, including his use by modern uzbek nationalists, before discussing the ways in which he fused mongol and islamic traditions of rule, including as patron of arts and letters. next is ibn khaldūn, whose career and work are ably summarized, as is the interest shown in his work by recent figures such as ronald reagan. the final two biographies highlight the ottoman and safavid empires, with which the book concludes. robinson’s biography of mehmed ii sets him against the background of the ottoman dynasty and connects him to the mediterranean renaissance, including his interest in ancient greece and rome. finally, shah ismāʿīl is seen as the progenitor of modern iran as both a political unit and shiʿite religious culture. this last section begs the question of what we mean by the “islamic” in “islamic civilization.” robinson’s definition of “civilization” is mentioned above, but he does not address the former term except implicitly with that definition’s “undertaken by muslims.” if that is the only criterion, then by the dawn of the sixteenth century, there is definitely a need to move beyond the stereotypical “islamic world” of the belt from central asia through north africa. mansa musa, bābā farīd, ruqaiya sultan begum and malik ambar are among the candidates one or two of whom could have represented the ongoing geographic spread of islamic civilization, recalling marshall hodgson’s line that, “in the sixteenth century [...] a visitor from mars might well have supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming muslim.”2 each of the biographies has at least one illustration, and maps are found in the introductory material to parts one, three, and four. the book’s copyright information occupies part of a column on the last page of the index (272). the glossary has only 18 entries; more would have been useful. there are also minor editing notes, as rashīd al-dīn and ibn sīna both come up before they are properly introduced, while the mamlūks were mentioned enough to merit at least a bit more explanation. the “suggestions for further reading” section has between three and five works for each biography. these include both primary and secondary sources and general works on broad topics in addition to those specific to the individual portrayed, e.g. books on the crusades as well as those specifically on saladin. readers of this review may doubtless be most interested in the book’s potential for teaching. in a survey course covering the period, robinson’s would make an excellent text to use to introduce more in depth and comprehensive material. the engagingly written biographies will make the topic more accessible to students while also drawing out the variety of individuals who made up “islamic civilization.” the author’s attention to political economy will in simple fashion help students grasp underlying concepts with which they sometimes struggle. finally, the attention to source material, from abbasid-period 2. marshall hodgson, rethinking world history: essays on europe, islam, and world history, ed. edmund burke iii (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1993), p. 97. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 209 • brian ulrich biographies of muḥammad through ibn khaldūn’s autobiography to an inscription which confirms part of shah ismāʿīl’s biography, will illustrate how historians study the past and stimulate thought and discussion, not only on what we know, but why we think we know it. overall, the work is a sound introduction to the field from which people can learn much. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 219-224 book review saʿd al-dīn al-taftāzānī (d. c. 1390) ranks among the most influential muslim theologians of the late middle period and his works continue to shape sunni religious thinking up to the present day. nevertheless, scholars writing in european languages have largely neglected al-taftāzānī, publishing only a few studies of very modest length about his life and works over the past decades. würtz’s book, which constitutes the first book-long study of selected aspects of al-taftāzānī’s thought, is based on the author’s dissertation defended at the university of zurich and represents a most welcome contribution to the field. it focuses on three key topics of al-taftāzānī’s theological writings: his teachings about resurrection, human actions, and creation. the study, furthermore, situates them within their intellectual context as defined by the traditions of falsafa and kalām in the late middle period. moreover, it sheds light on the evolution of al-taftāzānī’s thought by paying special attention to differences in content between his early sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid al-nasafiyya (written in 1367), his main work sharḥ al-maqāṣid (completed in 1383), and his late short summary work tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām (written in the late 1380s). the book consists of seven chapters, a b i b l i o g r a p h y , a n d a n i n d e x . t h e first chapter (pp. 1-16) discusses the s i g n i f i c a n c e o f a l t a f t ā z ā n ī ’ s w o r k s during the 20th and early 21st century by highlighting their ongoing use as teaching materials at cairo’s al-azhar university. it also contrasts al-taftāzānī’s ongoing importance with the thus far very limited amount of research undertaken on him and his writings—a consequence of still widespread notions about an alleged intellectual stagnation of islamic theology in the late middle period. the first chapter moreover reflects on the concepts of “theology” and “philosophy” as used by würtz and argues inter alia that terms such as kalām and mutakallim can be meaningfully translated as “(rational) thomas würtz, islamische theologie im 14. jahrhundert. auferstehungslehre, handlungstheorie und schöpfungsvorstellungen im werk von saʿd ad-dīn at-taftāzānī, welten des islams 7 (berlin: de gruyter 2016), viii, 295 pp. isbn 9783110399585, $113.00. christian mauder university of göttingen (christian.mauder@phil.uni-goettingen.de) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 220 • christian mauder theology” and “theologian,” respectively. while one can disagree with würtz’s point of view in this regard and argue that translating kalām as “theology” bears the risk of attributing to kalām the status of islamic theology per se instead of rather seeing it as a theological tradition within islamic scholarship, the author deserves credit for explicitly discussing an issue that is often enough passed over in silence. chapter two (pp. 17-36) offers the most detailed biography of al-taftāzānī published hitherto in a european language. it begins with a synopsis of the political history of greater iran and central asia in the 13 th and 14 th centuries before discussing al-taftāzānī’s biography proper. würtz focuses in particular detail on questions that have been controversial in earlier scholarship such as the dates of al-taftāzānī’s birth and death, the identity of his teachers in kalām, his madhhab, and his role in learned debates at timur’s court. the remainder of the chapter introduces al-taftāzānī’s works in the fields of rhetoric, grammar, logic, and law not dealt with in the subsequent chapters. the third chapter (pp. 37-84) presents the three above-named theological works by al-taftāzānī that form the basis of würtz’s analysis, whereby the author pays ample attention to their broader theological and philosophical background. to this end, the chapter begins with a general introduction to the early history of theological thought in islam before broadly discussing the theological peculiarities of the theological group of the māturīdiyya. thereafter it turns, likewise briefly, to the teachings of ibn sīnā and abū ḥāmid al-ghazālī inasmuch as these are relevant for al-taftāzānī before shedding light on the qurʾan commentaries of jār allāh al-zamakhsharī and fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī that würtz uses in the remainder of his study to point to similarities and differences between al-taftāzānī’s writings and the tafsīr tradition of his period. the by far longest part of the chapter then deals one by one with sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid a l n a s a f i y y a , s h a r ḥ a l m a q ā ṣ i d , a n d tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām. in each case it offers not only information on the structure and content of the respective work itself, but also on other texts with close intertextual relations, such as—in the case of sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid al-nasafiyya— al-ʿaqāʾid al-nasafiyya by najm al-dīn al-nasafī and tabṣirat al-adilla by abū al-muʿīn al-nasafī or—in the case of sharḥ al-maqāṣid—the pertinent works by imām al-ḥaramayn al-juwaynī, shams al-dīn al-samarqandī, fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī, ʿabdallāh al-bayḍāwī, and ʿaḍud al-dīn al-ījī. the analysis of al-taftāzānī’s writings proper starts in chapter four, which is dedicated to his teachings on resurrection (pp. 85-152). würtz selected this topic mainly because al-taftāzānī’s discussion of this notion is still relied upon by students of al-azhar today, and because it offers a particularly clear case for demonstrating how al-taftāzānī dealt with teachings of the falāsifa that were of theological significance. the chapter begins with short discussions of eschatological material in the qurʾan, the ḥadīth literature, and early kalām works before turning to the relevant sections in al-taftāzānī’s sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid al-nasafiyya, sharḥ al-maqāṣid, a n d t a h d h ī b a l m a n ṭ i q w a l k a l ā m , each of which is discussed separately. as würtz shows, all three works seek to refute the teaching of the falāsifa that there is no bodily resurrection, thereby, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) thomas würtz’s islamische theologie im 14. jahrhundert • 221 however, focusing on different aspects of eschatology. while the broader strands of this discussion are only hinted at in the generally rather concise relevant sections of sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid al-nasafiyya, sharḥ al-maqāṣid deals with this topic in great detail in the sense of a “theological encyclopedia” (p. 100) that seeks to discuss as broad array of different theological opinions about the topic as possible— regardless of whether al-taftāzānī agreed w i t h t h e m o r n o t . m o r e o v e r , s h a r ḥ al-maqāṣid also pays special attention to the importance of the subject within the falsafa tradition, as becomes apparent inter alia from the fact that it uses the word maʿād for “resurrection”—a wellestablished term in the philosophical discussions of the topic, but one that in al-taftāzānī’s time had also found entry into kalām debates, where it was reinterpreted to match the concept of a bodily resurrection. in tahdhīb al-manṭiq wa-l-kalām, al-taftāzānī presents a final systematic synthesis of his own position on the topic which agrees with its more general treatment in sharḥ al-maqāṣid. in the fifth and longest chapter of the book (pp. 154-241), würtz analyzes the passages of al-taftāzānī’s theological works which deal with the theory of h u m a n a c t i o n , a t i m e h o n o r e d t o p i c of the mutakallimūn stimulated by the question of how human beings can be held responsible for their acts if these are known ahead of time and are brought into being by god. after a discussion of the relevant qurʾanic verses, würtz sheds light on earlier kalām debates about this topic and the respective positions held by the theological groups of the qadariyya, the muʿtazila, the ashʿariyya, the māturīdiyya, and the jabriyya, thereby paying special attention to what he calls the neo-jabriyya strand within late ashʿarī kalām. the latter ascribed to human beings a smaller role in their actions than mainstream ashʿarī authors usually did. as würtz shows in his detailed discussions of the development within al-taftāzānī’s position, sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid al-nasafiyya seems to largely follow the standard māturīdī position on the issue which postulated the existence of different aspects (jihāt) of an action that, in part, pertain to god and, in part, to human beings, as well as the presence of a human ability to act (istiṭāʿa) in addition to god’s ability to act. this allowed māturīdī mutkallimūn to endorse a pronounced i n t e r m e d i a t e p o s i t i o n t h a t n e i t h e r negated a human being’s influence on his or her acts nor curtailed god’s power over them. in sharḥ al-maqāṣid, however, which again offers a sophisticated and nuanced discussion of various theological views on the topic but pays also special attention to relevant qurʾanic verses, al-taftāzānī voices support not for the standard māturīdī understanding, but for an ashʿarī view that assumes positions of the neo-jabriyya, while tahdhīb al-manṭiq w a l k a l ā m s h o w s h i m e m b r a c i n g a mainstream ashʿarī outlook and distancing himself from the neo-jabriyya. thus, würtz is able to demonstrate that al-taftāzānī’s v i e w o n t h e i s s u e o f h u m a n a c t i o n s as attested to in his writings evolved considerably over time. the sixth chapter (pp. 242-277) deals with al-taftāzānī’s theory of creation and thus addresses another issue that w a s h i g h l y c o n t e s t e d b e t w e e n t h e mutakallimūn, who opined that the world was created in time, and the falāsifa, who taught that the world was eternal. beginning again with a discussion of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 222 • christian mauder relevant qurʾanic material, würtz offers a brief outline of the positions of falsafa and earlier kalām on the topic before dealing again with the three studied works by al-taftāzānī. his most important findings include the fact that, in sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid al-nasafiyya, al-taftāzānī sides again with the māturīdiyya by viewing creation (takwīn) as an eternal attribute of god, a position he vehemently rejects in his later works, which exhibit a largely mainstream ashʿarī character. moreover, while in all of his works, al-taftāzānī clearly objects to the falsafa opinion about the eternity of the world, his discussion of the philosophical teachings on this issue in sharḥ al-maqāṣid deserves special attention as here he deals with pre-socratic positions that are otherwise only rarely discussed in pre-modern arabic works. t h e s e v e n t h c h a p t e r ( 2 7 8 2 8 3 ) s u m m a r i z e s w ü r t z ’ s m a i n f i n d i n g s . among other things, in this chapter the author highlights al-taftāzānī’s clear e m b e d d e d n e s s i n t h e e a r l i e r k a l ā m tradition as well as the profound impact that the writings of ibn sīnā, being the most prominent representative of the falsafa, had on al-taftāzānī’s works, also and especially when it comes to the latter’s ontological terminology. these close connections between al-taftāzānī and the earlier mutakallimūn and falāsifa become especially apparent when al-taftāzānī quotes their works or implicitly tries to distance himself from their views. with regard to the intellectual tradition represented by ibn sīnā, würtz speaks in this context of an “amalgamation (verschmelzung) of kalām and falsafa” (p. 278). moreover, würtz highlights that his results suggest a development in al-taftāzānī’s thought that made him at later points in time, when he seems to have identified more strongly with the ashʿariyya, reject māturīdī positions that he had embraced earlier in his life. furthermore, würtz emphasizes that, at least when it comes to his teachings about resurrection and the human ability to act, al-taftāzānī engages in more detail with relevant qurʾanic verses and ḥadīths than had previously been documented in the writings of other mutakallimūn of his time. finally, würtz notes that there is little to suggest any direct impact al-taftāzānī’s biographical experiences may have had on his theological writings. thomas würtz’s book is a pioneering contribution to our knowledge about one of the most influential mutakallimūn of the late middle period and thus helps to close a large gap in the state of research obvious to everyone working on islamicate intellectual history of this period. his discussions of the selected aspects of al-taftāzānī’s writings are clear and— bearing in mind the highly technical character of much of the subject matter— r e l a t i v e l y e a s y t o u n d e r s t a n d . t h e y offer not only valuable descriptions of al-taftāzānī’s views, but also contextualize them within their broader intellectual framework in a helpful manner. among his broader conclusions, würtz’s arguments for a significant change in al-taftāzānī’s theological views over time are absolutely convincing, as are his findings regarding the assumption of falsafa terminology by the mutakallim. furthermore, würtz’s discussion of al-taftāzānī’s engagement with pre-socratic philosophy opens up a previously largely neglected area of our knowledge about the reception of greek philosophy within the arabic-speaking t r a d i t i o n . l i k e w i s e , w ü r t z ’ s d e t a i l e d al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) thomas würtz’s islamische theologie im 14. jahrhundert • 223 a c c o u n t o f a l t a f t ā z ā n ī ’ s b i o g r a p h y constitutes an important step forward in our understanding of this thinker. finally, islamische theologie im 14. jahrhundert is a very clearly structured book, written in a sophisticated and always appropriate german that might, however, not always be easily understandable for nonnative speakers. moreover, especially the latter parts of the book would have profited from a more careful proofreading, which might have detected a number of missing words and incomplete sentences. these, however, do not compromise the general clarity of würtz’s argumentation. würtz’s book should be understood as a pioneering foray into the sometimes d e n s e , h i g h l y d e v e l o p e d , a n d b r o a d theological thought of a prolific author. one cannot blame the author for hardly or not at all dealing with many key topics of al-taftāzānī’s thought, such as his epistemology, his teachings about god’s attributes, prophethood, or the imamate, given that, with our present state of knowledge, no monograph could do equal justice to all facets of this mutakallim’s w o r k . l i k e w i s e , t h e q u e s t i o n o f t h e reception of al-taftāzānī’s thought remains almost completely unstudied, apart from würtz’s short remarks about the use of his books at al-azhar, which offer a valuable s t a r t i n g p o i n t f o r f u r t h e r i n q u i r i e s . furthermore, future scholarship should explore whether and to what degree one can discern connections between al-taftāzānī’s theological writings and his works in other scholarly disciplines such as law and rhetoric. nevertheless, there are passages in würtz’s often largely descriptive and in part redundant discussion of al-taftāzānī’s writings where one would have wished for greater analytical depth. this is especially the case with the generally rather short chapter on creation. furthermore, while würtz is absolutely convincing in tracing the evolution of al-taftāzānī’s away from māturīdī towards ashʿarī positions, the reasons for this development remain u n c l e a r a n d d e m a n d m o r e s t u d y . m o r e o v e r , w ü r t z ’ s d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e state of research remains, with less than two pages, overly brief, especially since the author has managed to gain access to several modern studies in arabic that are not easily available to many scholars outside of the arab world and might therefore have called for a more thorough discussion. at the same time, the general introductions to authors and traditions of thought predating al-taftāzānī, based almost completely on secondary literature, are often of interest only to nonspecialists and might have been dispensed with given that most if not all of the readers interested in a book of this nature can be expected to have at least a general knowledge of key aspects of the earlier traditions of kalām and falsafa. f i n a l l y , o n e o f t h e a u t h o r ’ s terminological choices appears infelicitous. given that würtz refers to al-taftāzānī’s time, i.e., the 14th century ce, repeatedly as the “late period” (spätzeit) of the kalām tradition, the question arises as to how we should denote even later periods in the development of the same intellectual tradition, especially since the recent work of aaron spevack, khaled el-rouayheb, and others showed beyond a doubt that the kalām tradition was very much alive in the centuries after al-taftāzānī, up to at least the 19th century ce. here, a clearer discussion of the chronological framework in würtz’s study would have been helpful. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 224 • christian mauder these observations notwithstanding, islamische theologie im 14. jahrhundert deserves applause as a very clear discussion of important aspects of al-taftāzānī’s thought. indeed, it is the very first and thus groundbreaking monograph written in a european language on this much too long neglected important figure of islamic intellectual history. future studies in al-taftāzānī will have a solid grounding in würtz’s book, and it is hoped that it will receive attention beyond the rather small germanophone community of scholars interested in kalām. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 1-13 1.1 summary of results the open islamicate texts initiative (openiti) team1—building on the foundational opensource ocr work of the leipzig university (lu) alexander von humboldt chair for digital humanities—has achieved optical character recognition (ocr) accuracy rates for printed classical arabic-script texts in the high nineties. these numbers are based on our tests of seven different arabic-script texts of varying quality and typefaces, totaling over 7,000 lines (~400 pages, 87,000 words; see table 1 for full details). these accuracy rates not only represent a distinct improvement over the actual2 accuracy rates of the various proprietary ocr options for printed classical arabic-script texts, but, equally important, they are produced using an open-source ocr software called kraken (developed by benjamin kiessling, lu), 1. the co-pis of the open islamicate texts initiative (openiti) are sarah bowen savant (aga khan university, institute for the study of muslim civilisations, london; sarah.savant@aku.edu), maxim g. romanov (leipzig university through june 2017; now university of vienna; maxim.romanov@univie.ac.at), and matthew thomas miller (roshan institute for persian studies, university of maryland, college park; mtmiller@umd.edu). benjamin kiessling can be contacted at mittagessen@l.unchti.me. 2. proprietary ocr programs for persian and arabic (e.g., sakhr’s automatic reader, abbyy finereader, readiris) overpromise the level of accuracy they deliver in practice when used on classical texts (in particular, highly vocalized texts). these companies claim that they provide accuracy rates in the high 90 percentages (e.g., sakhr claims 99.8% accuracy for high-quality documents). this may be the case for texts with simplified typesets and no short vowels; however, our tests of abbyy finereader and readiris on high-quality scans of classical texts turned out accuracy rates of between 65% and 75%. sakhr software was not available to us, as the developers offer no trial versions and it is the most expensive commercial ocr solution for arabic. moreover, since these programs are not open-source and offer only limited trainability (and created training data cannot be reused), their costs are prohibitive for most students and scholars and they cannot be modified according to the interests and needs of the academic community or the public at large. most importantly, they have no web interfaces that would enable the production of wider, user-generated collections. important new developments in arabographic optical character recognition (ocr) benjamin kiessling, matthew thomas miller, maxim g. romanov, & sarah bowen savant https://github.com/mittagessen/kraken mailto:sarah.savant%40aku.edu?subject= mailto:maxim.romanov%40univie.ac.at?subject= mailto:mtmiller%40umd.edu?subject= mailto:mittagessen%40l.unchti.me?subject= 2 • kiessling, miller, romanov, & savant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) thus enabling us to make this arabic-script ocr technology freely available to the broader islamicate, persian, and arabic studies communities in the near future. in the process we also generated over 7,000 lines of “gold standard” (double-checked) training data that can be used by others for arabic-script ocr training and testing purposes.3 1.2 ocr and its importance for islamicate studies fields although there is a wealth of digital persian and arabic texts currently available in various open-access online repositories,4 these collections are not representative of the textual traditions in their chronological, geographical, and generic spread. the existing persian collections, for example, are significantly smaller than the arabic collections and lack prose chronicles and philosophical, mystical, and scientific treatises. the arabic collections would more fully represent the arabic literary tradition if they had more scientific and philosophical texts and texts written by representatives of smaller arabicspeaking religious communities. moreover, the selection of texts for both persian and arabic digital collections reflects the contemporary ideological, aesthetic, and communal commitments of their creators and funders. while these shortcomings of the existing persian and arabic digital collections are well known, the production of larger and more representative digital islamicate corpora has been stymied for decades by the lack of accurate and affordable ocr software.5 3. this gold standard data is available at: https://github.com/openiti/ocr_gs_data. 4. collecting and rendering these texts useful for computational textual analysis (through, for example, adding scholarly metadata and making them machine-actionable) is a somewhat separate but deeply interrelated project that the openiti is currently working on as well. 5. see footnote 2 for more details. table 1: description of data https://github.com/openiti/ocr_gs_data al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new developments in arabographic optical character recognition • 3 ocr programs, in the simplest terms, take an image of a text, such as a scan of a printed book, and extract the text, converting the image of the text into a digital text that then can be edited, searched, computationally analyzed, etc. ocr’s automation of the process of transforming a printed book into a digital text exponentially reduces the effort, cost, and time necessary for the production of digital corpora (as compared to the alternative option for producing high-quality digital texts: i.e., paying multiple individuals to transcribe, or “double key,” entire volumes of printed texts). ocr, in short, is essential for the digitization of large collections of printed texts—a project that to date has remained unrealized in persian, arabic, and other islamicate languages.6 the specific type of ocr software that we employed in our tests is an open-source ocr program called kraken (more specifically, kraken ibn ocropus, see figure 1), which was developed by benjamin kiessling at leipzig university’s alexander von humboldt chair for digital humanities. unlike more traditional ocr approaches, kraken relies on a neural network—which mimics the way we learn—to recognize letters in the images of entire lines of text without attempting first to segment lines into words and then words into letters. this segmentation step—a mainstream ocr approach that persistently performs poorly on connected scripts—is thus completely removed from the process, making kraken uniquely powerful for dealing with the diverse variety of ligatures in connected arabic script (see section 4.1 for more technical details). 2.1 initial ocr tests we began our experiments by using kraken to train a model7 on high-quality8 scans of 1,466 lines of ibn al-faqīh’s kitāb al-buldān (work #0). we first generated training data (line transcriptions) for all of these lines, double checked them (creating so-called “gold standard” data), trained the model, and, finally, tested its ability to accurately recognize and extract the 6. kraken’s logo, kraken ibn ocropus, is based on a depiction of an octopus from a manuscript of kitāb al-ḥashāʾish fī hāyūlā al-ʿilāj al-ṭibbī (leiden, ub : or. 289); special thanks to emily selove for help with finding an octopus in the depths of the islamicate manuscript traditions. 7. “training a model” is a general term used in machine learning for training a program to recognize certain patterns in data. in the context of ocr work, it refers to teaching the ocr software to recognize a particular script or typeface—a process that only requires time and computing power. in our case, this process required 1 computer core and approximately 24 hours per model. 8. “high quality” here means 300 dpi color or grayscale images. before the actual process of ocr, these images must be binarized—i.e. converted into black-and-white images. if binarization is not performed properly, a lot of information is lost from the image, negatively affecting the accuracy of the ocr output. for this reason, for best results, one should avoid using pre-binarized images (i.e., images that were already converted to black and white during the scanning process, usually for size reduction, which results in some degradation of quality and the loss of information). figure 1: kraken ibn ocropus6 4 • kiessling, miller, romanov, & savant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) text. the results were impressive, reaching 97.56% accuracy for the entire text and an even more impressive 99.68% accuracy rate on the arabic script alone (i.e., when errors related to punctuation and spaces were removed from consideration; such non-script errors are easy to fix in the post-correction phase and, in many cases, this correction process for non-script errors can be automated). see table 2, row #0 for full details.9 these numbers were so impressive that we decided to expand our study and use the model built on the text of ibn al-faqīh’s kitāb al-buldān (work #0) to ocr six other texts. we deliberately selected texts that were different from ibn al-faqīh’s original text in terms of both their arabic typeface, editorial orthographic conventions, and image quality. these texts represent at least two different typefaces (within which there are noticeable variations of font, spacing, and ligature styles), and four of the texts were high-quality scans while the other two were low-quality scans downloaded from www.archive.org (via http://waqfeya.com/).10 when looking at the results in table 2, it is important that the reader notes that works #1-6 are “testing” data. that is, these accuracy results were achieved by utilizing a model built on the text of work #0 to perform ocr on these other texts. for this reason, it is not surprising 9. we have also experimented with the internal configuration of our models: more extensive models, containing 200 nodes in the hidden middle layer, showed slightly higher accuracy in most cases (works #3-4 were an exception to this pattern), but it took twice as long to train the model and the ocr process using the larger model also takes more time. 10. “low-quality” here means 200 dpi, black and white, pre-binarized images. in short, the standard quality of most scans available on the internet, which are the product of scanners that prioritize smaller size and speed of scanning for online sharing (i.e., in contrast to high-quality scans that are produced for long-term preservation). table 2: accuracy rates in tests of our custom model http://www.archive.org http://waqfeya.com/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new developments in arabographic optical character recognition • 5 that the accuracy rates for works #1-4 are not as high as the accuracy rates for the training text, work #0. the point that is surprising is that the use of the work #0-based model on the low quality scans of works #5-6 achieved a substantially higher accuracy rate (97.61% and 97.8% respectively on their arabic script alone) than on the high-quality scans of works #1-4. while these higher accuracy rates for works #5-6 are the result of a closer affinity between their typefaces and that of work #0, it also indicates that the distinction between highand low-quality images is not as important for achieving high accuracy rates with kraken as we initially believed. in the future, this will help reduce substantially both the total length of time it takes to ocr a work and the barriers to entry for researchers wanting to ocr the low-quality scans they already possess. the decreased accuracy results for works #1-4 are explainable by a few factors: 1) the typeface of works #3-4 is different than work #0 and it utilizes a number of ligatures that are not present in the typeface of work #0 (for examples, see table 3). 2) the typefaces of works #1-2 are very similar to that of #0, but they both have features that interfere with the #0-based model. #1 actually uses two different fonts, and the length of connections—kashīdas—between letters vary dramatically (visually, one can say that these connections vary within the range of 0.3 kashīda to 2 kashīdas), which is not the case with #0, where letter spacing is very consistent. table 3: ligature variations in typefaces (the table highlights only a few striking differences and is not meant to be comprehensive; examples similar to those of the main text are “greyed out”) 6 • kiessling, miller, romanov, & savant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 3) the text of work #2 is highly vocalized—it has more ḥarakāt than any other text in the sample (and especially in comparison with the model work #0). 4) the text of work #2 also has very complex and excessive punctuation with highly inconsistent spacing. our #0-based model could not completely handle these novel features in the texts of works #1-4 because it was not trained to do so. however, as the results in table 4 of the following section show, new models can be trained to handle these issues successfully. 2.2 round #2 tests: training new models the most important advantage of kraken is that its workflow allows one to train new models relatively easily, including text-specific ones. in a nutshell, the training process requires a transcription of approximately 1,000 lines (the number will vary depending on the complexity of the typeface) aligned with images of these lines as they appear in the printed edition. the training itself takes 12-24 hours. it is performed by a machine without human involvement and multiple models can be trained simultaneously. kraken includes tools for the production of transcription forms (see figure 2 above) and the data supplied through these forms is then used to train a new model. since there are a great number of arabic-script texts that have already been converted into digital texts, one can use these to fill in the forms quickly by copying and pasting from them into the forms (rather than transcribing directly from the printed texts) and then double-checking the forms for accuracy. this was what we did, and it saved us a lot of time.11 11. we are also currently working on an even more user-friendly interface for training data generation. please see section 3.1 for more information. table 4: accuracy rates in text-specific models al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new developments in arabographic optical character recognition • 7 the importance of kraken’s ability to quickly train new models is illustrated clearly by its performance on works #1-4. when using the model built on work #0 in our initial round of testing, we were only able to achieve accuracy rates ranging from the low seventies to low nineties on these texts (see table 2). however, when we trained models on works #1-4 specifically in our second round of testing, the accuracy rates for these texts substantially improved, reaching into the high nineties (see full results in table 4 above). the accuracy results for work #4, for example, improved from 83.42% on arabic script alone in our first work #0-based model tests to 99.18% accuracy when we trained a mode on this text. the accuracy rates for works #1-3 similarly improved, increasing from 90.90% to 97.71%, 87.90% to 98.47%, and 72.78% to 97.59% respectively. (see appendix for the accuracy rates of these new models on all other texts as well.) these accuracy rates for arabic-script recognition are already impressively high, but we actually believe that they can be improved further with larger training data sets. although the process of training a new model for a new text/typeface does require some effort, the only time-consuming component is the generation of the ~1,000 lines of gold standard training data. as we develop the openiti ocr project we will address the issue of the need for multiple models12 through a two-pronged strategy. first, we will try to train generalized models for each script, periodically adding new features that the model has not “seen” before. secondly, we will train individual models for distinct typefaces and editorial styles (which sometimes vary in their use of vocalization, fonts, spacing, and punctuation), 12. generalized models achieve acceptable accuracy across a wide range of fonts by incorporating features of a variety of typefaces during training, allowing them to be used for most texts with common typefaces. figure 2: kraken’s transcription interface 8 • kiessling, miller, romanov, & savant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) producing a library of ocr models that gradually will cover all major typefaces and editorial styles used in modern arabic-script printing. there certainly are numerous arabic-script typefaces and editorial styles that have been used throughout the last century and a half of arabic-script printing, but ultimately the number is finite and definitely not so numerous as to make it impossible to create models for each over the long term. 3.1 conclusions and next steps for the openiti ocr project the two rounds of testing presented here indicate that with a fairly modest amount of gold standard training data (~800–1,000 lines), kraken is consistently able to produce ocr results for arabic-script documents that achieve accuracy rates in the high nineties. in some cases, such as works #5-6, achieving ocr accuracy rates of up to 97.5% does not even require training a new model on that text. however, in other cases, such as works #1-4, achieving high levels of ocr accuracy does require training a model specific to that typeface, and, in some select cases of texts with similar typefaces but different styles of vocalization, font variations, and punctuation patterns (e.g., works #1-2), training a model for the peculiarities of a particular edition. in the near future we are planning to release a new web-interface powered by the microtask platform pybossa that will enable more user-friendly generation of training data and the post-correction of the ocr output (see, figure 3 below and the ocr section of the openiti figure 3: web-based ocr pipeline flowchart al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new developments in arabographic optical character recognition • 9 website). new data supplied by users will allow us to train additional typeface-specific models and improve the overall accuracy of kraken on other typefaces through the development of generalized language models. (it should be stressed, however, that training edition-specific models is quite valuable, as there are a number of multivolume books—often with over a dozen volumes per text—that need to be converted into proper digital editions). furthermore, in collaboration with several colleagues, we are also currently testing kraken on various persian, hebrew, and syriac typefaces (results forthcoming spring 2018) and persian and arabic manuscripts (results forthcoming summer 2018). we plan to also train models for other islamicate languages (in particular, ottoman turkish and urdu) as soon as we can find experts in these languages who are willing to collaborate with us in training data generation.13 in the long term, our hope is that an easy-to-use and effective ocr pipeline will give us the tools we, as a field, collectively need to significantly enrich our collection of digital persian and arabic texts and thereby enable us to understand better the cultural heritage of the middle east as reflected in its literary traditions. ocr, though, should not be interpreted as a magic bullet. we must also cultivate a community of users and secure long-term funding in order to make this project sustainable and develop these collections of digital texts into a representative islamicate corpus—a laborious process which involves the expert selection of new works and the creation and curation of scholarly metadata. however, at the same time, the possibilities that an effective open-source arabic-script ocr program will open up for islamicate studies are difficult to overstate. in addition to rendering hundreds, even thousands, of new texts full-text searchable, scholars will be able to employ computational modes of text analysis (e.g., text re-use, topic modeling, stylometric analysis) on a body of material much more representative of the historical tradition than what we have at this moment. the full impact of these new analytical possibilities and the new levels of scale and specificity in textual analysis that they make possible are difficult to estimate at such an early stage, but the early results are promising. 4.1 the technical details: kraken and its ocr method kraken is the open-source ocr software that we used in our tests. developed by benjamin kiessling at lu’s alexander von humboldt chair for digital humanities, kraken is a “fork”14 of the unmaintained ocropus package15 combined with the clstm neural network library.16 kraken represents a substantial improvement over the ocropus package: its performance is dramatically better, it supports right-to-left scripts and combined ltr/rtl (bidi) texts, and it includes a rudimentary transcription interface for offline use. 13. please contact us for more details if you are interested in generating 1,000 lines of training data for any ottoman turkish or urdu typefaces or a specific arabic or persian typeface for which we do not already have a model trained. 14. “fork” is a computer-science term for a new “branch” of independent development that builds on an existing software. 15. for details, see: https://github.com/tmbdev/ocropy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ocropus 16. see: https://github.com/tmbdev/clstm https://github.com/tmbdev/ocropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ocropus https://github.com/tmbdev/clstm 10 • kiessling, miller, romanov, & savant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the ocr method that powers kraken is based on a long short-term memory (hochreiter and schmidhuber, 1997) recurrent neural network utilizing the connectionist temporal classification objective function.17 in contrast to other systems requiring character-level segmentation before classification, it is uniquely suited for the recognition of connected arabographic scripts because the objective function used during training is geared towards assigning labels—i.e., characters/glyphs—to regions of unsegmented input data. the system works on unsegmented data both during training and recognition—its base unit is a text line (line recognizer). for training, a number of printed lines have to be transcribed using a simple html transcription interface (see figure 2 above). the total amount of training data (i.e., line image-text pairs) required may vary depending on the complexity of the typeface and number of glyphs used by the script. acquisition of training data can be optimized by line-wise alignment of existing digital editions with printed lines, although even wholesale transcription is a faster and relatively unskilled task in comparison to training data creation for other systems such as tesseract.18 our current models were trained on ~1,000 pairs each, corresponding to ~50-60 pages of printed text. models are fairly typographically specific, the most important factor being fonts and spacing, although some mismatch does not degrade recognition accuracy substantially (2-5%).19 thus new training data for an unknown typeface can be produced by correcting the output from a model for a similar font—in other words, generating training data for every subsequent model will require less and less time. last but not least, it is also possible to train multi-typeface (so-called, “generalized”) models by simply combining training data, albeit some parameter tuning is required to account for the richer typographic morphology that the neural network must learn. 5.1 acknowledgements we would never have been able to complete this work without the help of our team members at leipzig university, university of maryland (college park), and aga khan university, london. we would also like to thank elijah cooke (roshan institute, umd) for helping us to process the data, samar ata (roshan institute, umd) for generating several sets of high-quality scans for us, and layal mohammad (aku, ismc), mohammad meqdad (aku, ismc), and fatemeh shams (aku, ismc) for helping us to generate and double check the training data. lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to gregory crane (alexander von humboldt chair for digital humanities, lu), fatemeh keshavarz (roshan institute for persian studies, umd), and david taylor (aku, ismc) for their guidance and support of our work. 17. graves et al., 2006, as elaborated in breuel et al., 2013. 18. see: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tesseract_(software) 19. for example, if a glyph is in a slightly different font than the one that the model was trained on, it may sometimes be misrecognized as another one (or not at all), thus leading the overall accuracy rate to be slightly lower despite the fact that most of the other text is recognized correctly. https://github.com/tmbdev/clstm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tesseract_%28software%29 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new developments in arabographic optical character recognition • 11 bibliography and links computer-science bibliography hochreiter, sepp, and jürgen schmidhuber. “long short-term memory.” neural computation 9.8 (1997): 1735-1780. graves, alex, et al. “connectionist temporal classification: labelling unsegmented sequence data with recurrent neural networks,” proceedings of the 23rd international conference on machine learning. acm, 2006. breuel, thomas m., et al. “high-performance ocr for printed english and fraktur using lstm networks,” 12th international conference on document analysis and recognition. ieee, 2013. clstm neural network library: https://github.com/tmbdev/clstm links to open source software: nidaba: https://openphilology.github.io/nidaba/ kraken: https://github.com/mittagessen/kraken ocr-evaluation tools: https://github.com/ryanfb/ancientgreekocr-ocr-evaluation-tools openiti gold-standard data for arabic ocr: link: https://github.com/openarabic/ocr_gs_data editions of printed texts (when two dates are given, the second one is ce) [#0] ibn al-faqīh (fl. late 3rd/9th century). kitāb al-buldān. ed. yūsuf al-hādī. beirut: ʿālam al-kutub, 1996 ce. [#1] ibn al-athīr (d. 630/1233). al-kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh. ed. ʿabd allāh al-qāḍī. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1415/1994. [#2] ibn qutayba (d. 276/889). kitāb adab al-kātib. ed. muḥammad al-dālī. muʾassasat al-risāla, n.d. [#3] al-jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868-9). kitāb al-ḥayawān. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1424/2003. [#4] al-yaʿqūbī (fl. second half of the 3rd/9th century). al-taʾrīkh. beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d. [#5] al-dhahabī (d. 748/1347). taʾrīkh al-islām. al-maktaba al-tawfīqiyya, n.d. [#6] ibn al-jawzī (d. 597/1200). al-muntaẓam. ed. muḥammad al-qādir ʿaṭā and muṣṭafá al-qādir ʿaṭā. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1412/1992. https://github.com/tmbdev/clstm https://openphilology.github.io/nidaba/ https://github.com/mittagessen/kraken https://github.com/ryanfb/ancientgreekocr-ocr-evaluation-tools https://github.com/openarabic/ocr_gs_data 12 • kiessling, miller, romanov, & savant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) appendix: performance of text-specific models table a: performance of #1-based model on other texts table b: performance of #2-based model on other texts al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new developments in arabographic optical character recognition • 13 appendix: performance of text-specific models table d: performance of #4-based model on other texts table c: performance of #3-based model on other texts al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) thematic dossier formulating the caliphate in the islamic west: umayyads, ḥammūdids, and almohads guest editors maribel fierro and patrice cressier contents: • maribel fierro and patrice cressier, “introduction” • isabel toral-niehoff, “writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih” • jan thiele, “facing the mahdī’s true belief: abū ʿamr al-salālijī’s ashʿarite creed and the almohads’ claim to religious authority” • javier albarrán, “the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam: memory, legitimization and holy war, from cordoba to tinmal” • pascal buresi, “preparing the the almohad caliphate: the almoravids” • almudena ariza armada, “the ḥammūdid caliphate: a new look through the lens of numismatics” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 62-79 the 2014 proclamation of a new caliphate headed by abū bakr al-baghdādī by the so-called islamic state1 sparked renewed interest in the history of the caliphal institu-tion. in 2016, two books by renowned scholars appeared, offering a general overview of the subject addressed to both specialists and a larger audience.2 previous recent studies had focused on specific historical aspects, such as the presence of messianic trends in the caliphate’s conception and the extent of the caliph’s authority.3 the abolition of the ottoman caliphate in 1924 has also been a subject of analysis.4 that abolition—not the first one to happen in the history of islam, as we shall see—caused special commotion among different sectors of the islamic community, including egyptian intellectuals who were re-thinking the place of islam in the modern world, and indian muslims under british colonial rule.5 the abolition had less of an impact in the former north african ottoman * we want to express our deep gratitude to antoine borrut and matthew gordon for their invaluable help in editing this dossier. 1. m. al-rasheed, c. kersten and m. shterin (eds.), demystifying the caliphate: historical memory and contemporary contexts (oxford, 2012); j.-p. filiu, from deep state to islamic state: the arab counter-revolution and its jihadi legacy (london, 2015). 2. h. kennedy, caliphate: the history of an idea (new york, 2016); n. mouline, le califat. histoire politique de l’islam (paris, 2016). 3. just two examples: h. yücesoy, messianic beliefs and imperial politics in medieval islam: the abbasid caliphate in the early ninth century (columbia, sc, 2009); e. j. hanne, putting the caliph in his place. power, authority and the late abbasid caliphate (madison, nj, 2007). 4. m. naeem qureshi, pan-islam in british indian politics: a study of the khilafat movement, 1918-1924 (leiden-boston, 1999); m. hassan, longing for the lost caliphate: a transregional history (princeton, 2016). 5. m. haddad, “arab religious nationalism in the colonial era: rereading rashid rida’s ideas on the caliphate,” journal of the american oriental society 117(2) (1997), 253-277; john willis, “debating the caliphate: introduction* patrice cressier centre national de la recherche scientifique (cressierpatrice@yahoo.es) maribel fierro instituto de lenguas y culturas del mediterráneo-csic, madrid (maribel.fierro@cchs.csic.es) mailto:cressierpatrice%40yahoo.es?subject= mailto:maribel.fierro%40cchs.csic.es?subject= 63 • maribel fierro and patrice cressier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) territories, which were also subjected to colonial rule. morocco had resisted ottoman expansion but was not spared colonial rule, and there caliphal symbolism was maintained by the presence of a “commander of the faithful” (amīr al-muʾminīn), the ʿalawī sultan,6 which served as a reminder of the long history of locally constructed caliphates. the islamic west—corresponding to what are now morocco, mauritania, algeria, tunisia, and libya, as well as the iberian peninsula (al-andalus) and sicily when they were under muslim rule—in fact had its own peculiar caliphal history that has not received the attention it deserves and has not been fully integrated into the general study of the caliphate. the dossier presented here intends to remedy this situation by contributing to a future comprehensive history of the caliphates of the islamic west. the islamic conquest and the initial formation of the islamic societies of north africa and al-andalus occurred at the time when the umayyad caliphs ruled from damascus. the ʿabbasids, following their rise to power in 132/750, were acknowledged as caliphs in ifriqiya (modern-day tunisia) even if the aghlabids ruled autonomously, while in the extreme maghreb the ʿalid prince idrīs i (r. 172/789-175/791) and his successors established an independent polity that provided the basis for a future foundational myth which supported the use of evidence of descent from the prophet muḥammad (sharifism) to legitimize later maghrebi polities.7 in al-andalus, the umayyad prince ʿabd al-raḥmān i (r. 138/756-172/788), having escaped abbasid persecution, also managed to establish an independent emirate with cordoba as its capital. local autonomy reached its peak with the proclamation of the fatimid imamcaliphs in ifriqiya in the year 296/9098 and the subsequent proclamation of the cordoban umayyad caliphate in 316/929.9 the fatimid move to egypt after the foundation of cairo in 358/969—which involved the transfer of corpses of the deceased imam-caliphs to be buried in the new capital—would eventually result in them loosening their control over north african territories and lead to the abandonment of fatimid allegiance on the part of islam and nation in the work of rashid rida and abul kalam azad,” the international history review 32(4) (2010), 711-732. 6. j. waterbury, the commander of the faithful. the moroccan political elite a study in segmented politics (new york, 1970); y. belal, le cheikh et le calife: sociologie religieuse de l’islam politique au maroc (lyon, 2011). 7. h. l. beck, l’image d’idrīs ii, ses descendants de fās et la politique sharīfienne des sultans marīnides (656869/1258-1465) (leiden, 1989). 8. on the fatimid caliphate in north africa see f. dachraoui, le califat fatimide au maghreb (296-365h/909975 jc): histoire politique et institutions (tunis, 1981); h. halm, the empire of the mahdi. the rise of the fatimids, transl. m. bonner (leiden, 1996); m. brett, the rise of the fatimids. the world of the mediterranean and the middle east in the tenth century ce (leiden, 2001), and the fatimid empire (edinburgh, 2017). 9. on the cordoban umayyad caliphate see g. martinez-gros, l’idéologie omeyyade: la construction de la légitimité du califat de cordoue (xe–xie siècles) (madrid, 1992); j. safran the second umayyad caliphate: the articulation of caliphal legitimacy in al-andalus (cambridge, ma, 2000); m. fierro, abd al-rahman iii: the first cordoban caliph (oneworld, 2005). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) introduction to formulating the caliphate in the islamic west • 64 their former representatives, the zirids, who in 440/1048 proclaimed their obedience to the abbasid caliph.10 during this period, the ibāḍī communities in north africa developed their own understanding of the imamate within a khārijī conceptual framework that stressed election and egalitarianism: the leader of the community had to be chosen not because of his genealogy but because of his piety and knowledge. internal schisms among the ibāḍīs were frequent. in the case of the ibāḍī rustamid imamate of tāhert, hereditary succession among the descendants of the imām ʿabd al-raḥmān ibn rustam ibn bahrām (of persian origin although born in qayrawan) ensured continuity until the defeat at the hands of the fatimids (161/778-296/909).11 on his part, the ṣufrī midrarid ruler of sijilmassa—a miknāsa berber—minted coins in which he claimed the caliphate for himself.12 umayyad collapse in al-andalus after a succession crisis gave way to another caliphate, that of the ḥammūdids, whose legitimacy was based both on their idrisid (ʿalid) descent and their claim to the inheritance of the umayyad caliphate.13 in cordoba, the civil wars that ruined the town led to an unprecedented decision made by the notables of the town: the abolition of the caliphate in the year 422/1031.14 during the fifth/eleventh century, the islamic west also confronted the issue of the imamate by paying allegiance to a caliph who was most often referenced as al-imām ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn. this was an ambiguous formula that could refer to the abbasid caliph in baghdad, but could also be understood as acknowledging the “idea” of the caliphate without expressing much concern about who actually embodied it.15 the almoravids—ṣanhāja camel-drivers from the sahara who founded the town of marrakech in 463/1070—found it useful to resort to abbasid legitimacy to support their rule in the empire they had managed to establish, which extended from the south of what is now morocco to 10. on the zirids see h. r. idris, la berbérie orientale sous les zīrīdes, 2 vols. (paris, 1959); m. brett, ibn khaldūn and the medieval maghrib (aldershot, 1999); a. amara, pouvoir, économie et société dans le maghreb hammadide (395-1004/547-1152), ph.d. thesis, université paris 1, 2003. 11. u. rebstock, die ibaditen im magrib (2-8, 4-10 jh): die geschichte einer berberwegung im gewand des islam (berlin, 1983); a. el-ghali, les états kharidjites au maghreb. iie-ive s./viiie-xes. (tunis, 2003); a. gaiser, muslims, scholars, soldiers: the origin and elaboration of the ibadi imamate traditions (new york-oxford, 2010). 12. h. kassis, “coinage of an enigmatic caliph: the midrarid muhammad b. al-fath of sijilmasah,” al-qanṭara 9 (1988), 489-504. 13. m. d. rosado llamas, la dinastía ḥammūdí y el califato en el s. xi (málaga, 2008); a. ariza armada, de barcelona a orán. las emisiones monetales a nombre de los califas ḥammūdíes de al-andalus (grenoble, 2015). 14. d. j. wasserstein, the caliphate in the west. an islamic political institution in the iberian peninsula (oxford, 1993). 15. on this see wasserstein, the caliphate in the west; m. fierro, “on political legitimacy in al-andalus. a review article,” der islam 73 (1995), 138-150; f. clément, pouvoir et légitimité en espagne musulmane à lʼépoque des taifas (ve/xie siècle). lʼimam fictif (paris, 1997); t. ibrahim, “al-imām ʿabd allāh on the coinage of al-andalus and the maghrib al-aqsa,” congresso internazionale di numismatica, messina/taormina, september 21-26, 2015, https://www.academia.edu/16305297/_al-imam_abd_allah_on_the_coinage_of_al-andalus_and_ the_maghrib_al-aqsa. https://www.academia.edu/16305297/_al-imam_abd_allah_on_the_coinage_of_al-andalus_and_the_maghrib_al-aqsa https://www.academia.edu/16305297/_al-imam_abd_allah_on_the_coinage_of_al-andalus_and_the_maghrib_al-aqsa 65 • maribel fierro and patrice cressier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the iberian peninsula.16 the division between an almoravid emir who was a political and military leader, and the maliki jurists who were in charge of the law proved to be a working solution for some time, but with increased taxation and military defeats, the almoravids were soon challenged by the local judges who became rulers in a number of andalusi towns—with some of them even claiming caliphal titles.17 they were also challenged by charismatic figures claiming the imamate according to a model closer to shiʿism than to sunnism.18 one such charismatic figure was the mahdī ibn tūmart, a maṣmūda berber from the mountains of southern morocco who united his and other tribes by preaching his own understanding of god’s unity (tawḥīd). the “unitarians” (al-muwaḥḥidūn) under his leadership and that of his successor, ʿabd al-muʾmin, constituted a powerful army that brought about for the first time the political unification of the islamic west (north africa and the iberian peninsula) under a caliphal dynasty, that of the muʾminids. its founder, ʿabd al-muʾmin, was a zanāta berber who claimed arab descent for himself.19 the almohad caliphate lasted from 524/1130 to 668/1269. mahdism, violence, and religious coercion characterized its early history, including attempts to convert all those living under almohad rule to the mahdī ibn tūmart’s doctrines on divine unity and anti-anthropomorphism.20 the establishment of the muʾminid dynasty led to new developments: the construction of a highly centralized and efficient state that symbolized god’s order (amr allāh), the creation of new religious and intellectual elites whose training included philosophy, and many other innovations.21 although increasing attention is being paid to these and other almohad 16. v. lagardère, les almoravides jusqu’au règne de yūsuf b. tashfīn (1039-1106) (paris, 1989); a. k. bennison, the almoravid and almohad empires (edinburgh, 2016). 17. m. fierro, “the qāḍī as ruler,” saber religioso y poder político. actas del simposio internacional (granada, 15-18 octubre 1991) (madrid, 1994), 71-116. 18. on such figures see m. garcía-arenal, messianism and puritanical reform: mahdis of the muslim west (leiden, 2006). 19. a. huici miranda, historia política del imperio almohade. 2 vols. (tetouan, 1956-7, repr. with preliminary study by e. molina lópez and v. oltra, 2 vols. granada , 2000); p. guichard, “les almohades,” in j.-c. garcin (ed.), etats, sociétés et cultures du monde musulman médiéval, xe-xve siècle, nouvelle clio, 3 vols. (paris, 19952000), vol. i, 205-232; a. j. fromherz, the almohads: the rise of an islamic empire (london-new york, 2010); m. ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade (1120-1269): une nouvelle lecture anthropologique (toulouse, 2014). on the genealogy of the almohad caliphs see m. fierro, “las genealogías de ʿabd al-muʾmin, primer califa almohade,” al-qanṭara xxiv (2003), 77-108. 20. a. kaddouri, mahdisme. crise et changement dans lʼhistoire du maroc. actes de la table ronde organisée à marrakech par la faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines de rabat du 11 au 14 février 1993 (rabat, 1994); y. benhima, “du tamyīz à l’iʿtirāf : usages et légitimation du massacre au début de l’époque almohade,” annales islamologiques 43 (2009), 137-153; m. fierro, “conversion, ancestry and universal religion: the case of the almohads in the islamic west (sixth/twelfth–seventh/thirteenth centuries),” journal of medieval iberian studies 2/2 (2010), 155-173. 21. ʿi. ʿu. mūsā, al-muwaḥḥidūn fī l-gharb al-islāmī tanẓīmātuhum wa-naẓmuhum (beirut, 1411/1991); p. buresi and h. el allaoui, governing the empire: provincial administration in the almohad caliphate (1224-1269) (leiden, 2012); é. fricaud, “origine de l’utilisation privilégiée du terme amr chez les muʾminides almohades,” al-qanṭara xxiii (2002), 93-122; é. fricaud, “les ṭalaba dans la société almohade (le temps d´averroés),” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) introduction to formulating the caliphate in the islamic west • 66 practices and doctrines in a collective effort that will eventually lead to updated syntheses, we will still have to wait years until we have at our disposal the results of the research that is now being carried out, for example, in igilliz (ibn tūmart’s birthplace).22 some almohad caliphal rituals and ceremonies have also been studied;23 this field of research will eventually reveal much more to us about the almohad and the other caliphates.24 with the collapse of the almohad caliphate, new polities emerged—those of the marinids in morocco, the abd al-wadids in algeria, the hafsids in tunisia, and the nasrids in granada —each of which differently “digested” the caliphal absence after the disappearance of the muʾminid dynasty.25 caliphal claims were occasionally made by some of those rulers, but with the exception of the hafsids for a brief period, these claims were made sotto voce, more by suggestion than by explicit and sustained proclamation. the case of the “nasrid caliphate” is of special interest since it departed from traditional political doctrine (the caliph had to be from quraysh) and its local adaptation (the almohad caliphs had claimed a qays ʿaylān genealogy), by claiming an anṣārī (yemeni) genealogy.26 the ottoman conquest of most of north africa and the christian conquest of the nasrid kingdom stopped possible new developments. only morocco maintained both its independence—at least until the 20th century—and its concern for caliphal legitimacy under al-qanṭara xviii (1997), 331-388; j.-p. van staëvel, “l’art almohade fut-il révolutionnaire?,” perspective. actualité en histoire de l’art 2 (2017), 81-102. 22. j.-p. van staëvel, a. s. ettahiri and a. fili, “nouvelles recherches archéologiques sur les origines de l’empire almohade au maroc: les fouilles d’îgîlîz,” comptes rendus des séances de l’académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2013, 1109-1142; j.-p. van staëvel, “la foi peut-elle soulever les montagnes ? révolution almohade, morphologie sociale et formes de domination dans l’anti-atlas et le haut-atlas (début xiie s.),” revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée 135 (2014), 49-76. 23. a. k. bennison, “the almohads and the qurʾan of ʿuthmān: the legacy of the umayyads of cordoba in twelfth-century maghrib,” al-masaq 19/2 (2007), 131-154; p. buresi. “les cultes rendus à la tombe du mahdī ibn tûmart à tinmâl,” académie des inscriptions et belles lettres. comptes rendus des séances de l’année 2008. janvier-mars, paris, 2008, 391-438; p. buresi. “une relique almohade: l’utilisation du coran (attribué à ʿuṯmān b. ʿaffān) de la grande mosquée de cordoue,” oriente moderno lxxxviii-2 (2008): 297-309; t. zadeh, “from drops of blood: charisma and political legitimacy in the translation of the ʿuthmānic codex of al-andalus,” journal of arabic literature 39/3 (2008): 321-46 ; m. ghouirgate, “comment se comporter avec un roi chrétien: l’ouvrage perdu d’abū l-ḥasan ʿalī ibn al-qaṭṭān et les enjeux du cérémonial almohade,” revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée 138 (2015) version online https://remmm.revues.org/8587. 24. see some of the studies collected in a. k. bennison (ed.), the articulation of power in medieval iberia and the maghrib (oxford, 2014), proceedings of the british academy, 195; m. fierro, “rituals and the ruler in the medieval islamic west: the ismaili-fatimid legacy,” in o. mir-kasimov (ed.), intellectual interactions in the islamic world: the ismaili thread, forthcoming. of special relevance are the studies of historical anthropology by j. dakhlia such as le divan des rois. le politique et le religieux dans l’islam (paris, 1998). 25. r. brunschvig, la berbérie orientale sous les ḥafṣides, des origines à la fin du xvème siècle, 2 vols. (paris, 1940-1947); a. dhina, les états de l’occident musulman (xiiie, xive et xve siècles) (algiers, 1984); a. khaneboubi, les premiers sultans mérinides, 1269-1331. histoire politique et sociale (paris, 1987); m. shatzmiller, the berbers and the islamic state. the marīnid experience in pre-protectorate morocco (princeton, 2000). 26. m. j. rubiera, “el califato nazarí,” al-qanṭara xxix (2008), 293-305; m. fierro, “the anṣārīs, nāṣir al-dīn, and the naṣrids in al-andalus,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 32 (2006), 232-247; b. boloix, “the genealogical legitimization of the naṣrid dynasty: the alleged anṣārī origins of the banū naṣr,” in bennison (ed.), the articulation of power in medieval iberia and the maghrib. https://remmm.revues.org/8587 67 • maribel fierro and patrice cressier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the umbrella of the political and religious ideology constituted by sharifism, which was at work both under the saʿdids and the ʿalawis and continues today.27 this brief summary reveals that we have at hand some peculiar developments: an early abolition of the caliphate; the foundation of an ismaili polity—the fatimid caliphate—led by imam-caliphs; the emergence of a “berber” caliphate—that of the almohads—that combined sunni and shiʿi models in novel ways28; and the maintenance of a local caliphate in morocco built upon sharifism, the latter ideology acting as a form of shiʿism under the reins of sunnism. these original peculiarities are little known outside the sphere of north african and iberian studies, as shown for example by their limited coverage in a recent compilation of studies in english on the caliphate.29 scholarship in french and spanish offers a more extensive and inclusive overview; this is also partly the case in arabic scholarship, although here the pressure from political and religious ‘orthodoxy’ often involves interpretative constraints.30 in 2015-2016 a project entitled los califatos del occidente islámico/les califats de l’occident islamique (the caliphates of the islamic west) was carried out under the sponsorship of two european institutions, the french casa de velázquez and the spanish consejo superior de investigaciones científicas (csic), and under the direction of patrice cressier and maribel fierro. two seminars and a course were organized,31 a number of research papers were written by students in their final year or for their ma thesis,32 and 27. st. ch. cory, reviving the islamic caliphate in early modern morocco (surrey, 2014); st. cory, “sharīfian rule in morocco (tenth-twelfth/sixteenth-eighteenth centuries),” in m. fierro (ed.), the new cambridge history of islam, vol. ii, the western islamic world, eleventh to eighteenth centuries (cambridge, 2011), 451-479; n. mouline, le califat imaginaire d’ahmad al-mansûr. pouvoir et diplomatie au maroc au xvie siècle (paris, 2015). 28. as explored by ʿa. al-idrīsī, al-imāma ʿinda ibn tūmart: dirāsa muqārana maʿa l-imāmiyya al-itḫnà ʿashariyya (algiers, 1991), and m. fierro, “the almohads and the fatimids,” in b. d. craig (ed.), ismaili and fatimid studies in honor of paul e. walker (chicago, 2010), 161-175. 29. c. kersten (ed.), the caliphate and islamic statehood formation, fragmentation and modern interpretations, 3 vols. (berlin-london, 2015). 30. to our knowledge no comprehensive monograph on the issue of the maghribi caliphal experience has been written in arabic, and extant studies tend to concentrate on political history. 31. the first seminar took place on november 6 2015 https://www.casadevelazquez.org/es/investigacion/ novedad/los-califatos-del-occidente-islamico-1/, and the second on june 20 2016 https://www.casadevelazquez. org/es/investigacion/novedad/los-califatos-del-occidente-islamico-3/, both at the casa de velázquez (madrid). members of the project collaborated in a course organized by prof. santiago palacios, universidad autónoma de madrid, april 4-15 2016, los califatos desde los sucesores de muhammad al estado islámico: http://www.uam. es/ss/satellite/es/1242652866332/1242693243668/cursocortaduracion/cursocortaduracion/los_califatos,_ desde_los_sucesores_de_muhammad_al_estado_islamico.htm 32. a. arroyo herrero, introducción al estudio de la obra del cadí nuʿmān (s. iv / x), al-manāqib wa-lmaṯālib, trabajo fin de grado, universidad de salamanca, september 2015; d. bercito, a paper caliphate. understanding the islamic state through its documents, trabajo fin de máster (máster en estudios árabes e islámicos contemporáneos-uam), june 2015 (now published in malala (brasil) 5 (2017), 68-88); a. peláez, el califa ausente. cuestiones de autoridad en el siglo xi en al-andalus, trabajo fin de máster, máster universitario https://www.casadevelazquez.org/es/investigacion/novedad/los-califatos-del-occidente-islamico-1/ https://www.casadevelazquez.org/es/investigacion/novedad/los-califatos-del-occidente-islamico-1/ https://www.casadevelazquez.org/es/investigacion/novedad/los-califatos-del-occidente-islamico-3/ https://www.casadevelazquez.org/es/investigacion/novedad/los-califatos-del-occidente-islamico-3/ http://www.uam.es/ss/satellite/es/1242652866332/1242693243668/cursocortaduracion/cursocortaduracion/los_califatos,_desde_los_sucesores_de_muhammad_al_estado_islamico.htm http://www.uam.es/ss/satellite/es/1242652866332/1242693243668/cursocortaduracion/cursocortaduracion/los_califatos,_desde_los_sucesores_de_muhammad_al_estado_islamico.htm http://www.uam.es/ss/satellite/es/1242652866332/1242693243668/cursocortaduracion/cursocortaduracion/los_califatos,_desde_los_sucesores_de_muhammad_al_estado_islamico.htm al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) introduction to formulating the caliphate in the islamic west • 68 collaboration was established through the organization of a conference on the fatimids and umayyads.33 the present dossier and the five papers it contains are the fruit of an ongoing project that aims to analyze the links of the caliphates of the islamic west both in relation to one another, and with the caliphates of the rest of the islamic world in terms of representation and self-representation, political ideology, legal systems, iconography, and architecture. the five contributions included here treat three of the western islamic caliphates: the umayyad, the ḥammūdid and the almohad,34 with the latter receiving the lion’s share of attention (jan thiele, javier albarrán, and, indirectly, pascal buresi). this reflects the fact that in the last two decades—and despite previous neglect—the almohad state has generated renewed interest that honors the originality and broad implications of almohad history. the authors of the five contributions have different backgrounds (philology, history, arabic and islamic studies) and interests (intellectual history, political history, numismatics) and thus illustrate the variety of perspectives from which the caliphates of the islamic west are presently being studied. new layers of understanding from different disciplines will lead to more comprehensive and unitary treatments in the future. the common thread among the contributions is that they deal with the ways in which the western caliphates were represented or represented themselves. knowledge, jihād, and coins were crucial elements in this representation, and they constitute the axes around which the studies included in this dossier revolve. as political and religious leaders of their communities, caliphs needed to convince their people of their special mission, and this included the sunni caliphs who claimed less religious authority than the shiʿi imam. this made knowledge of paramount importance, and it was not uncommon for caliphs to sponsor scholars in order to promote the writing of works. although there is no direct evidence that this was the case with the cordoban ibn ʿabd rabbih (d. 328/940) and his al-ʿiqd al-farīd (the unique necklace), isabel toral-niehoff makes a convincing case for firmly placing this composition within the context of the caliphal court. a compilation frequently quoted for its wealth of adab materials, but seldom studied per se, al-ʿiqd al-farīd is here revealed to be yet another example of encyclopaedism. encyclopaedism is often inextricably linked to imperial aspirations, in the sense that a cultural practice that aims to embrace all human knowledge within a limited work parallels a political construction where diverse territories and their peoples are under the control of a dominating power and culture. what makes al-ʿiqd al-farīd even more interesting is that cordoban umayyad imperial ambitions had to rely heavily on a culture produced elsewhere, that is, in abbasid iraq. thus, under the renewed umayyad caliphate whose capital was now in cordoba, al-andalus continued its long process of cultural “orientalization.” this had en estudios medievales hispánicos, uam, 27/09/2016, now published: a. peláez, el califa ausente: cuestiones de autoridad en al-andalus durante el siglo xi (madrid, 2018). 33. fatimids and umayyads: competing caliphates http://iis.ac.uk/fatimids-and-umayyads, september 23-25, 2016 at the institute of ismaili studies (london), organized by m. ali-de-unzaga, p. cressier, f. daftary and m. fierro. 34. the studies related to the fatimid caliphate will appear in the book resulting from the international conference fatimids and umayyads: competing caliphates. http://iis.ac.uk/fatimids-and-umayyads 69 • maribel fierro and patrice cressier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) deep implications with regard to the construction of a cultural memory and identity which was not extensively rooted in the local context.35 the iberian peninsula thus appears as a periphery eager not only to connect itself to a globalizing religious and literary culture, but to appropriate that culture in an effort to re-center islamdom.36 the almohads were bolder in transforming the periphery into a center by turning the maghrib into a new hijaz. of paramount importance in this move—whose roots had been developed under the preceding imperial power, i.e., that of the almoravids, as highlighted by pascal buresi—was the fact that the almohad movement had been launched by a charismatic, impeccable, and rightly guided figure, the mahdī ibn tūmart. thus, the knowledge the almohads possessed was of higher kind than that claimed in the past by the cordoban umayyads. jan thiele reminds us that the almohads imposed on their subjects the mahdī ibn tūmart’s creed, which had to be memorized and followed, thus departing from standard sunni practices that allowed many creeds to co-exist. theological knowledge that conveyed certitude (because it had been formulated by a mahdī) was one of the assets that the almohads offered in their totalizing political and religious project. however, even if they tried to control the belief system, they did not in fact succeed in eliminating previous theological views, and even new creeds were written under their rule. in analyzing the ashʿari creed by abū ʿamr al-salālijī (d. 564/1169, 574/1179 or 594/1197–8), jan thiele shows its dependence on the thought of al-juwaynī (d. 478/1085). his study also offers new insights that allow for a more precise understanding of both ibn tūmart’s creed and its links with muʿtazilism and ashʿarism, and the limits of the almohad “revolution.” for a scholar who worked for some time in the almohad court, al-salālijī does not seem to have suffered any persecution for reminding his readers that infallibility or impeccability was limited to the prophets—thus excluding ibn tūmart and his representation as al-imām al-maʿsūm al-mahdī al-maʿlūm—and that abū bakr, ʿumar, ʿuthmān and ʿalī were the rightly guided caliphs and imams (fa-hum al-khulafāʾ al-rāshidūn wa-al-aʾimma al-mahdiyyūn), a characterization that the almohad caliphs tried hard to associate with themselves in various ways. ibn ʿabd rabbih wrote a poem celebrating the military campaigns of the cordoban umayyad caliph ʿabd al-raḥmān iii. this speaks to the effort by the almohad caliphs in sponsoring books that memorialized the prophet’s military expeditions and conquests that led, in turn, to the islamic empire under the rule of the four rightly guided caliphs. javier albarrán—after offering an overview of the role played by jihād in the political legitimization of the caliphs, highlighting in particular the case of the cordoban umayyad 35. on this issue the standard studies are m. ʿa. makkī, ensayo sobre las aportaciones orientales en la españa musulmana y su influencia en la formación de la cultura hispano-árabe (madrid, 1968), and j. ramírez del río, la orientalización de al-andalus: los días de los árabes en la península ibérica (sevilla, 2002). on the relationship to the pre-islamic past see j. gómez de caso zuriaga, “la cultura islámica medieval ante los restos del mundo clásico hispano,” in l. a. garcía moreno, e. sánchez medina and l. fernández fonfría (eds.). historiografía y representaciones. iii estudios sobre las fuentes de la conquista islámica (madrid, 2015), 233-285, and j. elices ocón, “el pasado preislámico en al-andalus: fuentes árabes, recesión de la antigüedad y legitimación en época omeya (siglos viii-x),” ph.d. thesis universidad autónoma de madrid, 2017. 36. of special interest along these lines is the dossier on le polycentrisme dans l’islam médiéval : les dynamiques régionales de l’innovation published in annales islamologiques 45 (2011), al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) introduction to formulating the caliphate in the islamic west • 70 caliph ʿabd al-raḥmān iii—explores how caliphal jihād and the memory of the first battles of islam served almohad needs. ibn tūmart and the first almohad caliph had fought against the kuffār, which they identified largely with the almoravids and those who acknowledged their rule and religious beliefs. their successors emphasized the importance of the figure of the “ghāzī-caliph”—he who personally conducts jihād against the enemies of god—through magnificently staged parades, epigraphic reminders, and the commission of works on jihād. a chapter on this topic—added to the kitāb attributed to ibn tūmart—was alleged to have been written by the second caliph, abū yaʿqūb yūsuf, who also ordered ibn ṭufayl (d. 581/1185) to compose a poem inciting holy war. albarrán pays special attention to the case of ibn ḥubaysh (d. 584/1188), who in his kitāb al-ghazawāt concentrated on the conquests organized by the rāshidūn caliphs abū bakr, ʿumar and ʿuthmān. he points out that “ibn ḥubaysh’s work joins a discursive tradition that looks at the past from the present moment and seeks to legitimize itself through the production and reproduction of the memory of early islamic times and the symbolic capital that this historical period contained,” thereby establishing a direct connection between the origins of islam and their self-presentation as its restorers. ibn tūmart reminds us of the prophet while the rāshidūn resemble the first almohad caliphs—an equation that was not new, as ibn ʿabd rabbih (d. 328/940) had done the same with the umayyads of damascus and cordoba in his al-ʿiqd al-farīd. albarrán explains that the absence of ʿalī in ibn ḥubaysh’s work was motivated by the fact that ʿalī’s rule was associated with a narrative of fitna, of civil war or conflict within the islamic community, in conjunction with the fact that by the time the work was written, the almohads were already emphasizing their links with cordoban umayyad legitimacy. before the almohads, the almoravids had also emerged as champions of jihād. in fact, their need to legitimize such practice in the eyes of the andalusis had led the almoravids, according to one source, to acknowledge the abbasid caliphate: only on the orders of a legitimate imam, the andalusis had claimed, could war be considered jihād.37 the renunciation to guide the community they ruled over as imams was made explicit by the almoravid adoption of the title “commander of the muslims” (amīr al-muslimīn), another indication of the political and religious resourcefulness of the non-arabs—in this case, berbers—when they assumed a political power that they had initially been denied. the corrective made by the andalusis regarding almoravid jihād could be understood as one way in which the andalusis—who had been acculturated to normative islam since much earlier than the berber populations of the extreme maghreb (al-maghrib al-aqṣā) such as the saharan ṣanhāja and the maṣmūda of the sūs—sought to integrate the new rulers into their own worldview. the portrayal of the almoravid experience as that of an imperial power that had emerged in a tribal context but had to cope with al-andalus allows us to better understand how and why the almohads departed from such experience through a complex combination of change and continuity, as discussed by pascal buresi. 37. m. j. viguera, “las cartas de al-gazālī y al-ṭurṭūšī al soberano almorávid yūsuf b. tašufīn,” al-andalus xlii (1977), 341-374. 71 • maribel fierro and patrice cressier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the number of mints under the almoravids was proof not of the weakness of the central government but rather, according to buresi, of its de-centralized method of managing the administration. after the disappearance of the ḥammūdids in the second half of the fifth/eleventh century, the almoravids took control of the mines in central and southern maghreb that had provided silver to previous rulers. in her discussion of their coinage, almudena ariza armada points out that certain innovative features of the monetary system of the ḥammūdid caliph idrīs ii recall specific features of almoravid currency. she also offers new insights into the amount of power wielded by the ḥammūdid caliphs, the extent of their rule, and the steps they took to legitimize it. on the one hand, there was the clever fusion between the umayyad sunni tradition and its shiʿi counterpart, which favored their acceptance as caliphs both in sunni al-andalus and in the maghreb where shiʿi trends were stronger. on the other hand, at a certain point it seemed necessary to emphasize the sunni aspect, and idrīs ii adopted the title “emir of the muslims” and the qurʾanic quotation 3:85 (“whoso seeks a religion other than islam, it shall not be accepted of him and in the world to come he shall be among the losers”), both of which would be later employed by the almoravids. 38 but what is particularly striking in ḥammūdid coinage is its rich iconography: the fish symbol; the proliferation of stars; the octogram symbol; the hexagram or “seal of solomon;” isolated letters (wāw and hā’) that according to ariza should be taken for their numeral value (six and eight respectively); and the hexagon that demarcates the legends in the area, and was used by the buyids (shiʿis ruling over a sunni majority). some of these features appear in the copies (mancuses) made by the counts of barcelona that, thanks to jewish trade, travelled as far as kiev. ariza analyzes the magical and protective qualities that can be assigned to the ḥammūdid repertory in a much-needed effort to recover the symbolic meanings that accompanied the caliphal experiences in the islamic west. in the case of the almohads, we still do not fully understand the implications of their choice to use squares and circles in the coins they minted,39 in contrast to the cordoban umayyads who favored floral motifs.40 the five studies offer new approaches to old issues and provide us with new materials that we hope will pique the interest of those who are not familiar with the history of the islamic west and contribute to existing efforts to better integrate the maghreb into writings about of the history of islamic societies, including the domain of material culture. recent years 38. for the qurʾanic verse see h. kassis, “ʿiyāḍʼs doctrinal views and their impact on the maghreb,” maghreb review 13/1-2 (1988), 49-56, 52, and “muslim revival in spain in the fifth/eleventh century: causes and ramifications,” der islam 67 (1990), 78-110. for the almoravid title see é. lévi-provençal, “le titre souverain des almoravides et sa légitimation par le califat ʿabbāside,” arabica ii (1955), 265-80. 39. c. bresc, “l’intriguant ‘carré dans le cercle’. un exemple de diffusion d’un type monétaire dans le monde musulman du xiiie siècle,” annales islamologiques 45 (2011), 243-254; s. peña martín, “el término de origen coránico amr allāh (disposición de dios) y el linguocentrismo trascendente islámico, en torno al siglo xii,” anaquel de estudios árabes 22 (2011), 197-224 40. a. canto, “de la ceca de al-andalus a la de madinat al-zahra’,” cuadernos de madinat al-zahraʾ 3 (1991), 111-19, english translation “from the sikkat al-andalus to the mint of madinat al-zahraʾ,” in m. marín (ed.), the formation of al-andalus. part 1: history and society, ashgate: variorum, 1998 (the formation of the classical islamic world, vol. 46), 329-345. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) introduction to formulating the caliphate in the islamic west • 72 have seen a resurgence of research in this domain, especially in regard to al-andalus. new findings and, more importantly, the new direction followed by archaeological programs, allow us to access information that is often absent in the literary sources and thus enrich the knowledge we have acquired through previous means, sometimes even contradicting it. the advances made in regard to the issue of the caliphate in the islamic west have been noteworthy, stretching from its genesis to its urban formulation. the excavations in the ribāṭ of īgillīz in the high atlas (morocco) offer us insight into the daily life of the almohad movement, before the decisive moment when the caliphate was proclaimed.41 the analysis of the architecture and urbanism of madīnat al-zahrāʾ, from the point of view of archaeology, has provided highly precise information regarding the function of different palace areas and the role played by the architectonic forms and their decoration in affirming of the identity of the caliphate as well as the sources of its legitimacy.42 in all of these domains, the comparative approach is indispensable for its ability to draw clearer conclusions .43 the two seminars organized in madrid included contributions dealing with material culture and we hope to publish a dossier devoted to this topic in the near future. 41. a. s. ettahiri, a. fili and j.-p. van staëvel, “contribution à l’étude de l’habitat des élites en milieu rural dans le maroc médiéval : quelques réflexions à partir de la qaṣba d’īgīlīz, berceau du mouvement almohade,” in s. gutiérrez lloret and i. grau mira (ed.), de la estructura doméstica al espacio social. lecturas arqueológicas del uso social del espacio (alicante, 2013), 265-278, and see also above note 22. 42. a. vallejo triano, la ciudad califal de madīnat al-zahrā’. arqueología de su arquitectura (cordoba, 2010). 43. p. cressier and a. vallejo triano, “madīnat al-zahrā’ et ṣabra al-manṣūriyya : deux versions d’un même scénario,” journal of islamic archaeology 2 (2) [2015], 139-169, and the conference fatimids and umayyads: competing caliphates already mentioned (note 32). transcultural approaches have also been undertaken in the case of the 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york-oxford: oxford university press, 2010. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) introduction to formulating the caliphate in the islamic west • 76 garcía-arenal, mercedes. messianism and puritanical reform: mahdis of the muslim west. leiden: brill, 2006. ghouirgate, mehdi. l’ordre almohade (1120-1269) : une nouvelle lecture anthropologique. toulouse: presses universitaires du mirail, 2014. ———. “comment se comporter avec un roi chrétien: l’ouvrage perdu d’abū l-ḥasan ʿalī ibn al-qaṭṭān et les enjeux du cérémonial almohade.” revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée 138 (2015) version online https://remmm.revues.org/8587 gómez de caso zuriaga, jaime. “la cultura islámica medieval ante los restos del mundo clásico hispano.” in luis a. garcía moreno, esther sánchez medina and lidia fernández fonfría (eds.). historiografía y representaciones. iii estudios sobre las fuentes de la conquista islámica, 233-285. madrid: real academia de la historia, 2015. guichard, pierre. “les almohades.” in j.-c. garcin (ed.), etats, sociétés et cultures du monde musulman médiéval, xe-xve siècle, nouvelle clio, 3 vols., vol. i, 205-232. paris: presses universitaires de france, 1995-2000. haddad, mahmoud. “arab religious nationalism in the colonial era: rereading rashid rida’s ideas on the caliphate.” journal of the american oriental society 117(2) (1997), 253-277. halm, heinz. the empire of the mahdi. the rise of the fatimids, transl. m. bonner. leiden: brill, 1996. hanne, eric j. putting the caliph in his place. power, authority and the late abbasid caliphate. madison, nj: fairleigh dickinson university press, 2007. hassan, mona. longing for the lost caliphate: a transregional history. princeton: princeton university press, 2016. huici miranda, ambrosio. historia política del imperio almohade. 2 vols. tetouan: editora marroquí, 1956-7. repr. with preliminary study by emilio molina lópez and vicente oltra, 2 vols. granada: universidad de granada, 2000 ibrahim, tawfiq. “al-imām ʿabd allāh on the coinage of al-andalus and the maghrib al-aqsa.” congresso internazionale di numismatica, messina/taormina, september 21-26, 2015, https://www.academia.edu/16305297/_al-imam_abd_allah_on_the_ coinage_of_al-andalus_and_the_maghrib_al-aqsa idris, h. r. la berbérie orientale sous les zīrīdes, 2 vols. paris: librairie d’amérique et d’orient, adrien-maisonneuve, 1959. al-idrīsī, ʿalī. al-imāma ʿinda ibn tūmart: dirāsa muqārana maʿa l-imāmiyya al-itḫnà ʿashariyya. algiers: s.n., 1991. https://remmm.revues.org/8587 https://www.academia.edu/16305297/_al-imam_abd_allah_on_the_coinage_of_al-andalus_and_the_maghrib_al-aqsa https://www.academia.edu/16305297/_al-imam_abd_allah_on_the_coinage_of_al-andalus_and_the_maghrib_al-aqsa 77 • maribel fierro and patrice cressier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) kaddouri, a. mahdisme. crise et changement dans lʼhistoire du maroc. actes de la table ronde organisée à marrakech par la faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines de rabat du 11 au 14 février 1993. rabat: manshūrāt kullīyat al-ādāb wa-al-ʻulūm al-insānīyah bi-al-rabāṭ, 1994. kassis, hanna. “coinage of an enigmatic caliph: the midrarid muhammad b. al-fath of sijilmasah.” al-qanṭara 9 (1988): 489-504. ———. “ʿiyāḍʼs doctrinal views and their impact on the maghreb.” maghreb review 13/1-2 (1988): 49-56. ———. “muslim revival in spain in the fifth/eleventh century: causes and ramifications.” der islam 67 (1990): 78-110. kennedy, hugh. caliphate: the history of an idea. new york: basic books, 2016. kersten, carool (ed.). the caliphate and islamic statehood formation, fragmentation and modern interpretations. 3 vols. berlin-london: gerlach press, 2015. khaneboubi, ahmed. les premiers sultans mérinides, 1269-1331. histoire politique et sociale. paris: l’harmattan, 1987. lagardère, vincent. les almoravides jusqu’au règne de yūsuf b. tashfīn (1039-1106). paris: l’harmattan, 1989. lévi-provençal, évariste. “le titre souverain des almoravides et sa légitimation par le califat ʿabbāside.” arabica ii (1955): 265-80. makkī, maḥmūd ʿalī. ensayo sobre las aportaciones orientales en la españa musulmana y su influencia en la formación de la cultura hispano-árabe. madrid: impr. del instituto de estudios islámicos, 1968. martinez-gros, gabriel. l’idéologie omeyyade : la construction de la légitimité du califat de cordoue (xe–xie siècles). madrid: casa de velázquez, 1992. mouline, nabil. le califat imaginaire d’ahmad al-mansûr. pouvoir et diplomatie au maroc au xvie siècle. paris: presses universitaires de france, 2015. ———. le califat. histoire politique de l’islam. paris: flammarion, 2016 mūsā, ʿizz al-dīn ʿumar. al-muwaḥḥidūn fī l-gharb al-islāmī tanẓīmātuhum wa-naẓmuhum. beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1411/1991. le polycentrisme dans l’islam médiéval : les dynamiques régionales de l’innovation in annales islamologiques 45 (2011). peláez, alejandro. el califa ausente. cuestiones de autoridad en el siglo xi en al-andalus, trabajo fin de máster (máster universitario en estudios medievales hispánicos, uam) 27/09/2016. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) introduction to formulating the caliphate in the islamic west • 78 ———. el califa ausente: cuestiones de autoridad en al-andalus durante el siglo xi. madrid: la ergástula, 2018. peña martín, salvador. “el término de origen coránico amr allāh (disposición de dios) y el linguocentrismo trascendente islámico, en torno al siglo xii.” anaquel de estudios árabes 22 (2011): 197-224. qureshi, m. naeem pan-islam in british indian politics: a study of the khilafat movement, 1918-1924. leiden-boston: brill, 1999. ramírez del río, josé. la orientalización de al-andalus: los días de los árabes en la península ibérica. sevilla, 2002. al-rasheed, madawi, carool kersten and marat shterin (eds.). demystifying the caliphate: historical memory and contemporary contexts. oxford: oxford university press, 2012. rebstock, ulrich. die ibaditen im magrib (2-8, 4-10 jh): die geschichte einer berberwegung im gewand des islam. berlin: k. schwarz, 1983. rosado llamas, maría dolores. la dinastía ḥammūdí y el califato en el s. xi. malaga: centro de ediciones de la diputación de málaga, 2008. rubiera, maría jesús. “el califato nazarí,” al-qanṭara xxix (2008): 293-305. safran, janina. the second umayyad caliphate: the articulation of caliphal legitimacy in al-andalus. cambridge (ma): harvard university press, 2000. shatzmiller, maya. the berbers and the islamic state. the marīnid experience in pre-protectorate morocco. princeton: markus wiener, 2000. vallejo triano, antonio. la ciudad califal de madīnat al-zahrā’. arqueología de su arquitectura. cordoba: almuzara, 2010. van staëvel, jean-pierre, ahmed s. ettahiri and abdallah fili. “nouvelles recherches archéologiques sur les origines de l’empire almohade au maroc : les fouilles d’îgîlîz.” comptes rendus des séances de l’académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2013: 1109-1142. van staëvel, jean-pierre. “l’art almohade fut-il révolutionnaire ?” perspective. actualité en histoire de l’art 2 (2017): 81-102. ———. “la foi peut-elle soulever les montagnes ? révolution almohade, morphologie sociale et formes de domination dans l’anti-atlas et le haut-atlas (début xiie s.).” revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée 135 (2014): 49-76. viguera, maría jesús. “las cartas de al-gazālī y al-ṭurṭūšī al soberano almorávid yūsuf b. tašufīn.” al-andalus xlii (1977): 341-374. 79 • maribel fierro and patrice cressier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) wasserstein, david j. the caliphate in the west. an islamic political institution in the iberian peninsula. oxford: oxford university press, 1993. waterbury, john. the commander of the faithful. the moroccan political elite—a study in segmented politics. new york: columbia university press, 1970. willis, john “debating the caliphate: islam and nation in the work of rashid rida and abul kalam azad.” the international history review 32(4) (2010): 711-732. yücesoy, hayrettin. messianic beliefs and imperial politics in medieval islam: the abbasid caliphate in the early ninth century. columbia, sc: university of south carolina press, 2009. zadeh, travis. “from drops of blood: charisma and political legitimacy in the translation of the ʿuthmānic codex of al-andalus.” journal of arabic literature 39/3 (2008): 321-46. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 80-95 writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih* isabel toral-niehoff freie universität berlin (itoral@zedat.fu-berlin.de) in the year 316/929, the umayyad emir ʿabd al-raḥmān, who had been ruling in al-an-dalus since 300/912 as successor to his grandfather ʿabdallāh (275/888–300/912), ended the long period of the umayyad emirate in cordoba that had begun in 136/754.1 he achieved this through a dramatic course of action: by assuming the title of commander of the faithful (amīr al-muʾminīn) and then asserting the prerogatives of khuṭba and sikka. thus he initiated the short but splendid era of the second umayyad caliphate that lasted * this work was presented in the ii jornada de estudios los califatos del occidente islamico and was worked out in the context of my participation in the research project i+d funded by the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness, ref. ffi2013‒43172-p. 1. m. fierro, “sobre la adopción del título califal por ʿabd al-raḥmān iii,” sharq al-andalus 6 (1989), 33-42. abstract this study undertakes a political reading of the ʿiqd al-farīd by ibn ʿabd rabbih (246/860-328/940). it proposes to identify this adab encyclopaedia, composed in cordova as a “caliphal” composition, by interpreting its conceptual agenda and compositional structure against the background of (neo-) umayyad caliphal ideology as reconstructed by janina safran and gabriel martinez-gros. it reads the text as “imperialistic” in its claim to represent umayyad leadership, as unique and universal, against that of its contemporary rivals, the abbasids and fatimids. the umayyads in al-andalus suffered from a peculiarly precarious legitimacy, since, in contrast to the abbasids and fatimids, they could not refer to a kinship link to the prophet. their territory was also situated far outside the central lands of islam and did not dominate the holy sites in the ḥijāz (required for a caliph), which was a source of embarrassment. therefore, there was a particularly strong need for a consistent ideology to compensate for this weakness. the study concentrates on three arguments. first, that the ʿiqd al-farīd was written by a man of the umayyad regime under the tutelage of the caliph; second, that the ʿ iqd reflects a cultural program that aimed at educating cordovan elites according to cultural models set forth by caliphal baghdad; and third, that, as an encyclopaedia, it reflects an inclusive, globalizing, culturally imperialistic program that matched the contemporaneous caliphal universal aspirations of the umayyad regime. a l-ʿ u ṣū r al -w us ṭā c re at iv e c om m on s mailto:itoral%40zedat.fu-berlin.de?subject= 81 • isabel toral-niehoff al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) until 422/1031.2 the period of umayyad al-andalus not only signified an important moment in islamic history, but was also a time of extraordinary cultural splendour that would later be celebrated as a golden age comparable to the mythical baghdad of the abbasids and memorialized as a period of vivid cultural and intellectual activity that produced remarkable achievements in literature, art, and science, many of which would gain status as timeless classics of arabic culture. one of the many masterpieces produced in caliphal cordoba is the multivolume unique necklace (al-ʿiqd al-farīd) by ibn ʿabd rabbih (246–328/860–940), a popular literary compendium that exists in more than 100 manuscripts and was frequently quoted, excerpted and summarized.3 the enthusiastic exordium in the beirut reprint of the standard cairo edition of 1940-53, for instance, clearly expresses the high esteem in which the book is held in arab culture to date.4 it is regrettable that we still lack profound studies of this extremely rich collection that, like many other adab anthologies, has been regularly used as a material quarry for the study of akhbār, but almost never evaluated as a composition in its own right.5 this neglect is also particularly unfortunate since the ʿiqd stands out as the most extended and sophisticated literary text composed before the final collapse of the umayyad regime in 422/1031, which allows it to capture the self-perception of intellectual elites during the triumphant phase of the caliphal age without the distortion of nostalgia and decadence that we find in most of our sources.6 2. for this denomination, used to make a distinction from the “first” umayyad caliphate in damascus, cf. j. m. safran, the second umayyad caliphate: the articulation of caliphal legitimacy in al-andalus (cambridge, m. 2000). the umayyads had ruled as emirs since 138/754 on the iberian peninsula and had never recognized the legitimacy of the abbasid caliphate in the east; however, they never asserted their own counterclaim until then. 3. for a state of research on the ʿiqd, j. haremska, “ibn abd rabbih,” in biblioteca de al-andalus, vol. 1, ed. j. lirola delgado, enciclopedia de la cultura andalusí 1 (almería, 2009), 620–9; r. arié, “un lettré hispanomusulman du haut moyen age: ibn abd rabbih. état des recherches,” in homenaje a josé m. fórneas, (granada 1994), i, 65–72; j. veglison elías de molins, el collar único, de ibn abd rabbihi (madrid: sintesis, 2007); w. werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih: (246/860328/949): ein beitrag zur arabischen literaturgeschichte (berlin: k. schwarz, 1983); hata, “historia de los autores y transmisores andalusíes (hata),” http://kohepocu.cchs.csic.es/. 4. s. pp. alif-yā’ by ʿumar tudmīrī in ibnʻabd rabbih, kitāb al-ʿiqd al-farīd, 7, + index, ed. a. amīn and i. al-abyārī (bayrūt, 1990; repr. ed. 1940-53, cairo). 5.the only monograph on the ʿ iqd to date is j. veglison elías de molins, el collar único, de ibn abd rabbihi, but is rather a short summary of previous studies. the author of this article is preparing a monograph on the ʿiqd. it should be said that in the last several years, there have been several published studies that study compendia as compositions in their own right, such as the very inspiring by h. kilpatrick, making the great book of songs: compilation and the author’s craft in abū l-faraj al-iṣbahānī’s kitāb al-aghānī (london, 2003). for the problems of authorship in pre-modern arabic literature cf. the studies collected in l. behzadi & j. hämeen anttila (eds), concepts of authorship in pre-modern arabic texts (bamberg, 2015). 6. for this perspective of later sources that look at the caliphate as a symbol and reference of past unity in al-andalus cf. g. martinez-gros, l’idéologie omeyyade: la contruction de la légitimité du califat de cordoue (xe-xie siècles) (madrid, 1992), 163-328 and 185-195; cf. also j. safran, the second umayyad caliphate: the articulation of caliphal legitimacy in al-andalus (cambridge, m. 2000), 185-195. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih • 82 the following study proposes to undertake a political reading of this text that prima facie presents itself as a non-political, literary compendium.7 it should be mentioned that, nevertheless, certain passages do convey a more explicit political message. in a previous study, i have already discussed the historical sections found in book 15 in the ʿiqd, “the book of the second adorable jewel on caliphs, their histories, and battles.” there i have shown that ibn ʿabd rabbih organized his history as biographies of an uninterrupted chain of legitimate rulers (khulafāʾ) that linked the prophet, via the eastern umayyads, with the umayyads in al-andalus, ending with ʿabd al-raḥmān al-nāṣir. as already emphasized by janina safran, this “chain of authority” (connected by genealogy and legitimate delegation) was the main argument the umayyads in al-andalus used to support their claim to universal rule.8 from a more general perspective, the first book in the ʿiqd, dealing with sulṭān, gives us an idea of ibn ʿabd rabbih’s idea of governance and good rule, which coincides with the adab-standards of the time: political author ity is part of the divine order and is bestowed by god; and good advice by adequate counsellors is essential.9 finally, the text also presents interesting information regarding ibn ʿabd rabbih’s understanding of the umayyad caliphate in his urjūza on the military campaigns of caliph ʿabd al-raḥmān al-nāṣir, studied by james t. monroe.10 this article approaches the question from a different angle. it proposes to read this adab text as a caliphal composition by interpreting its conceptual agenda and compositional structure against the background of the (neo-)umayyad caliphal ideology as reconstructed by janina safran and gabriel martinez-gros, and assumed to be basically imperialistic in its claim to be the unique and universal leadership against its contemporary rivals, the abbasids and the fatimids.11 as both scholars point out, the umayyads in al-andalus suffered from a peculiarly precarious legitimacy, since, in contrast to the abbasids and fatimids, they could not refer to their parentage with the prophet. in addition, the fact that their territory was situated far outside the central lands of islam and did not dominate the 7. the task involves the difficulty of undertaking the political reading of a literary text, i.e. of “politicising the aesthetic” which is indeed a methodological challenge. julia bray has rightly observed that it is not possible to read the ʿ iqd as a plain piece of political propaganda: j. bray, “ʿabbasid myth and the human act: ibn ʿ abd rabbih and others,” in on fiction and adab in medieval arabic literature, ed. p. f. kennedy, (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2005), 1–54. 8. i. toral-niehoff, “history in adab context: “the book on caliphal histories” by ibn ʿabd rabbih (246/860– 328/940),” journal of abbasid studies 2, no. 1 (2015), 79; for the “chain” safran, the second umayyad caliphate, 32. 9. cf. i. toral-niehoff “the ‘book of the pearl of the ruler’ in the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih: preliminary remarks,” in global medieval: mirrors for princes reconsidered, edited by r. forster and n. yavari (boston, mass., 2015), 134–50. 10. j. t. monroe, “the historical arjuza of ibn abd rabbih, a tenth century hispano-arabic epic poem,” journal of the american oriental society 91 (1971), 67-95. 11. safran, the second umayyad caliphate and martinez-gros, l’idéologie omeyyade. i do not follow the far-reaching thesis of martinez-gros about an “esoteric” aspect of this ideology; however, his book underlines rightly the importance of studying the legitimizing discourse for the second umayyads because of its precariousness. it is regrettable that he did not study the ʿiqd from this perspective in his book. 83 • isabel toral-niehoff al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) holy sites in the ḥijāz (as was required for a caliph) was embarrassing.12 therefore, we must suppose that they felt an even greater need to develop a convincing and coherent caliphal ideology to compensate for this weakness. to this end, the following study concentrates on three arguments. first, that the text was written by a man of the regime, i.e. by a caliphal man, in the sense that he was a representative for the cultural elites of his day who stood close to the caliph; from this, we can presume that his oeuvre reflects the caliphal perspective. it is also of importance that the umayyad regime was very concentrated on cordoba, a city that emerges in our sources as practically the sole focus of political and cultural life in al-andalus in the early fourth/ tenth century. the multifocal and variegated panorama of potential sponsors and competing centers that we find in the contemporaneous east, which provided the opportunity for a certain independence among intellectuals and litterateurs,13 is not to be found in al-andalus in this period. for this reason, i regard it as quite unlikely that a poet of limited economic resources, as was the case for ibn ʿabd rabbih, would have been able to compose an oeuvre of such proportions without the endorsement of the caliph. second, i will argue that the ʿiqd reflects a cultural program that aimed at educating the cordovan elites and transforming them into veritable caliphal men per cultural models already establishd by baghdad. the court culture in baghdad had already been the model throughout the first stages of the “orientalization” of al-andalus in the third/ninth century, during the advent of the noteworthy singer al-ziryāb (d. 243/857) and it continued to be the standard in the tenth14. the third argument is very much connected with the second one. after showing that the ʿiqd is a very encyclopaedic adab work (the ʿiqd is a case in point exemplifying that the phenomena of encyclopaedism and adab often appear in conjunction), i will put forth the thesis that this encyclopaedism makes the ʿiqd very caliphal since it reflects an inclusive, globalizing, imperialistic cultural program that matched the contemporaneous caliphal universal aspirations of the umayyad regime. the ʿiqd: written by a caliphal man first, the caliphal dimension of the ʿiqd is suggested by the biographical data: abū ʿumar aḥmad b. muḥammad b. ibn ʿabd rabbih (246/860–328/940), though not a politician, was in close personal proximity to the ruling elite surrounding the caliph and, not being very wealthy, he depended on their favor and economic support. the clear indications are that he was a regular member of the courtly circles in umayyad cordoba, to which he likely 12. cf. the locus classicus “he who controls the two sanctuaries mecca and medina and leads the pilgrimage thus merits the caliphate” in, e.g., yaʿqūbī (d. 284/897), ta ʾrīkh, ii, 321. for the spatial aspects in the ʿiqd, see toral-niehoff, “history in adab context,” 73. 13. l. osti, “culture, education and the court,” in crisis and continuity at the abbasid court, formal and informal politics in the caliphate of al-muqtadir (295–320/908–932), ed. by m. van berkel, n. m. el cheikh, h. kennedy and l. osti (leiden, 2013), 187-214. 14. j. ramírez del río, la orientalización de al-andalus: los días de los árabes en la península ibérica (sevilla, 2002). file:///users/marie/desktop/abu%20sarah%20dropbox/marie%20abu%20sarah/academics/uw/uw%20rtfs/ file:///users/marie/desktop/abu%20sarah%20dropbox/marie%20abu%20sarah/academics/uw/uw%20rtfs/ file:///users/marie/desktop/abu%20sarah%20dropbox/marie%20abu%20sarah/academics/uw/uw%20rtfs/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih • 84 belonged from the times of emir muḥammad (reg. 238/852273/886) until his death under the rule of ʿabd al-raḥmān in 328/940,15 functioning mainly as court poet. he came from a local family whose members had been clients (mawālī) of the umayyads since the rule of emir hishām i (reg. 172/788–180/796).16 the umayyad clients formed a privileged group, whose support was essential for the umayyad regime, however, ibn ʿabd rabbih seems to have been regarded as being of a lower status,17 probably because he did not belong to the prestigious mawālī of eastern stock (i.e. descendants of those mawālī who had immigrated in earliest times from the east, mainly from syria18); in fact he was a local mawlā. ibn ʿabd rabbih belonged to a class of citizens on the inferior rung of the social ladder who sought the patronage of those above them: this is suggested by the fact that he addressed several of his panegyrics to two prestigious members of the elite buyutāt (large aristocratic houses), namely to the commander aḥmad b. muḥammad b. abī ʿabdāʾ19 and the minister ʿabdallāh b. muḥammad al-zajjālī,20 which indicates that the precariously employed court poet was seeking to gain access to the inner circles.21 we do not know if he ever held an official position in the court administration as a kātib or some other capacity.22 after a period spent outside cordoba during the fitna at the end of the 3rd/9th century, he returned to the umayyad court of cordoba around 300/912, where he spent the last decades of his life as court poet of ʿabd al-raḥmān al-nāṣir, whom he praised in numerous poems, the most famous being a long urjūza celebrating military campaigns undertaken at the beginning of his rule.23 it is likely that the cumbersome collection and composition of the ʿiqd took place during this tranquil period in his life, under the tutelage of ʿabd al-raḥmān al-nāṣir. however, although it is highly probable, we do not know if the caliph officially sponsored 15. cf. werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih, 18–19. 16. ibn-al-faraḍī, kitāb taʾrīẖ ʿulamāʾ al-andalus, ed. f. codera (matriti, 1892), no. 118. 17. actually, he and his family do not appear among the buyutāt listed by mohamed méouak in his prosopographical study of the elites in umayyad cordoba: m. méouak, pouvoir souverain, administration centrale et élites politiques dans l’espagne umayyade: (iie-ive/viiie-xe siècles) (helsinki, 1999). his ancestor is mentioned in m. fierro, “los mawālī de ʿabd al-raḥmān i,” al-qantara xx (1999), 65-98, number 49. 18. i.e. what m. méouak calls “le noyeau dur du personnel politique: les buyūtāt d’origine “arabo-orientale”/ mawlā,” pouvoir souverain, 74–162. 19. werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih, 19. for this prestigious family, cf. méouak, pouvoir souverain, 77–79. for aḥmad b. muḥammad, the most famous member of the family, cf. p. 88-91. he was in charge of the cordovan army under emir ʿabdallāh and ʿabd al-raḥmān iii. he died in 303/917. 20. méouak, pouvoir souverain, 177. he was one of the secretaries of emir ʿabdallāh and continued holding diverse administrative positions under ʿabd al-raḥmān iii. died in 301/914. 21. werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih, 19. 22. under the turbulent rule of emir ʿabdallāh (275/888300/912) he left cordoba and searched for the protection of the rebellious ibn ḥajjāj in seville, a semi-independent chiefdom under the rule of one of the leading sevillian families, the banū hajjāj: werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih, 20. this episode not only indicates a certain alienation from the emiral court, but also the fragility of his position. 23. monroe, “the historical arjuza of ibn abd rabbih.” the urjūza is quoted in the ʿiqd in the 15th book. 85 • isabel toral-niehoff al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the time-consuming composition of the ʿiqd, as the text does not contain a formal dedication to the caliph. it is important to note, however, that formal dedications within prefaces were not yet a convention of the genre at the time, so one would not necessarily have expected to find one.24 a very interesting point in ibn ʿabd rabbih’s biography is that he never left al-andalus25 to undertake pilgrimage and study in the islamic east as many of his contemporaries did.26 this means that in order to compose his enormous collection of adab, ibn ʿabd rabbih would have had to cull from the copious iraqi material that was already circulating in cordoba at the time. in this regard, the ʿiqd is an indirect testimony about the quality and quantity of abbasid material that had reached al-andalus by then, and which marked the climax of the “iraqization” of al-andalus that had begun in the 3rd/9th century.27 further, it indicates the astonishing degree of cultural globalization in the islamicate world of the age, a point that will be addressed later. with regard to this, it is also important to consider ibn ʿabd rabbih’s excellent education: ibn al-faraḍī mentions in his entry on ibn ʿabd rabbih his three distinguished teachers: baqī b. makhlad (d. 276/889), muḥammad b. waḍḍāḥ (d. 287/900) and muḥammad b. ʿabd al-salām al-khushanī (d. 286/899). the first two were the most celebrated fuqahāʾ and muḥaddithūn of the period and are credited with being the first to introduce ʿilm al-hadīth in al-andalus, a discipline until then scarcely known in a region where mālikism and the unsystematic doctrine of fiqh had been firmly rooted since the days of emir al-ḥakam (reg. 154/770–206/822).28 the third teacher was a famous scholar who introduced substantial poetry, philology and adab material to al-andalus.29 a commonality between the three is that they spent long periods of time in the cultural centers of the east before becoming some of the most important disseminators of abbasid culture, science, and wisdom in al-andalus. in summary, since ibn ʿabd rabbih was in close contact with the center of power and dependent on the favor of higher social circles, we must suppose a certain level of political involvement on his part. it is also highly improbable that he could have composed his huge oeuvre without the backing of the umayyads and especially of the caliph, so we can assume that his oeuvre will most likely reflect the caliphal standpoint and ideology. 24. p. freimark, das vorwort als literarische form in der arabischen literatur (münster, 1967), 109-11. 25. werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih, 22–23; discussing also m. shafi, “a description of the two sanctuaries of islam by ibn abd rabbihi,” in a volume of oriental studies presented to edward g. browne on his 60th birthday, ed. t.w arnold and r. a. nicholson (cambridge, 1922), 416–38, who claims he had done the pilgrimage in mecca. 26. m. marín, “la transmisión del saber en al-andalus (hasta 300/912),” al-qantara 8 (1987), 87-98; l. molina, “lugares de destino de los viajeros andalusíes en el taʾrij de ibn al-faradi,” in estudios onomástico-biográficos de al-andalus, i (1988), 585–610. 27. ramírez del río, la orientalización de al-andalus 28. m. fierro, “the introduction of hadith in al-andalus,” der islam 66, no. 1 (1989), 78–83. 29. werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih, 254–62. l. molina, “un árabe entre muladíes: muḥammad b. ʽabd al-salām al-jusanī,” eoba. vi, 337-351. english transl. in m. marín (ed.), the formation of al-andalus. part i: history and society (ashgate, 1998), 115-28. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih • 86 the iraqism of the ʿiqd the ʿiqd was composed in umayyad cordoba by an andalusi author active in courtly circles, but in contrast to later andalusi works, which would owe their popularity to their detailed accounts of local culture, the iqd did not become famous because it depicted regional color and featured a wealth of local traditions. it might come as a surprise, but there is scarcely any information about al-andalus in the ʿiqd. on the contrary, the ʿiqd provides the reader with a well-ordered encyclopaedic sample of the best examples of arabic literature, poetry, wisdom and ethics that were circulating in late third/ninth century abbasid iraq, and which formed the corpus of texts that would become part of the classic canon. the result is such a perfect mimicry of iraqi adab that it is easy to forget that it was not composed in baghdad, but rather in the remote occidental periphery of the islamic world. this peculiarity also explains why the ʿiqd was not considered canonical for arabic culture until much later, and even suggests that it might have contributed significantly to the construction of its literary canon. there is a famous anecdote which is commonly quoted to illustrate the alleged lackluster reception to the ʿiqd in the east of the islamic world,30 but which does not do justice to its actual achievements, which are evidenced by the wealth of preserved manuscripts and the popularity of the work today. according to the story, when the famous būyid vizier and man of letters, ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād (326/938–385/995),31 heard about the ʿiqd by the cordovan ibn ʿabd rabbih, he took pains to get a copy, but after reading it reacted in disappointment to the absence of authentic andalusī material and exclaimed: “this is our merchandise brought back to us! i thought it would contain notices on their country (al-andalus), but it merely contains notices about our country. we do not need it!” in my opinion, the anecdote—first mentioned in al-yāqūt’s irshād (d. 626/1229)32—was probably constructed later and reflects the attitudes that later generations in the middle period, who responded with dismay after reading the “iraqi” ʿiqd, held toward andalusī works. in fact, the ʿiqd as a collection seems not to have reached the east until ayyūbid times, when it was introduced by ibn diḥya (d. 633/1235), who transmitted the ijāza to yāqūt, as he himself mentions in his irshād, and it is only from then onwards that we can reliably attest to its reception. al-thaʿālibī (d. 420/1029), often mentioned as evidence for the early reception of the ʿiqd in the east, was in fact only aware of ibn ʿabd rabbih’s poetry and some rather confusing biographical notices, and since he also quotes verses by him not 30. the anecdote appears e.g. werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen, 38; veglison, collar 79; brockelmann, gals 1, 251. yāqūt seems to be the first to mention the story 31. the anecdote refers to ismāʿīl b. ʿabbād. for him see pellat, ch. “ibn ʿabbād” in ei². 32. yāqūt, irshād, 2/67: hādhihī biḍāʿatunā ruddat ilaynā! ẓanantu anna hādhā al-kitāba yashtamilu ʿalā shay’in min akhbāri bilādihim, wa-innamā mushtamilun ʿ alā akhbār bilādinā lā ḥājata lanā fīhī! fa-raddahū. the anecdote denotes an interesting opposition between the “us” of the mashriqīs and the “they” of the maghribīs. 87 • isabel toral-niehoff al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) contained in the ʿiqd, we must suppose he had access to his dīwān, otherwise unpreserved,33 rather than to the ʿiqd. this “iraqism” of the ʿiqd has also converted the text into a remarkable source for a study of the transfer of knowledge, and as such has been studied by walter werkmeister. he showed that the ʿiqd is almost completely culled from abbasid material that was at the time circulating in scholarly circles as informal draft-books, reflecting a stage in the production of the ordinary book.34 accordingly, the setting of the poetic and prose quotations is almost completely confined to the eastern part of the islamic world. with the exception of several historical sections in book 15 that ibn ʿabd rabbih dedicates to the andalusi umayyads—probably based on local material, but very difficult to identify—there is scarcely any reference to the andalusi local context.35 as has been correctly emphasized by julia bray,36 the anecdotes within the ʿiqd are set in the placeless realm of abbasid myth, namely hijaz, iraq and the timeless jāhiliyya on the arabian peninsula. the only materials that can be unmistakably identified as andalusi are the poetic fragments composed by the author himself, which are spread across the entire collection. it is likely that he thus hoped to frame his oeuvre in a way that put it on par with the metropolitan poetry produced in iraq so the ʿiqd could share in its prestige. i propose that this peculiar “iraqism” of the ʿiqd is also part of its caliphal agenda. as we will see, the ʿiqd, with its plethora of iraqi adab, was probably intended as a handbook for the provincial umayyad court-man of cordoba that instructed him in how to become a cultivated adīb in accordance with the latest metropolitan abbasid fashion, thus transforming the reader into a caliphal man on a par with those living in baghdad. despite the well-known political tensions between the umayyad and abbasid dynasties, and the contemporaneous political decadence of the abbasid caliphate, the ʿiqd’s ‘iraqism’ shows that abbasid baghdad had already established what caliphal culture should look like. the encyclopaedism of the ʿiqd the caliphal dimension of the ʿiqd goes even further and is closely related to its character as typically representative of adab encyclopaedism. hillary kilpatrick, in 1982, classified the ʿiqd as an emblematic adab-encyclopaedia, thus introducing this textual category as an interpretative framework for several vast, multi-thematic, and miscellaneous works like the ʿiqd and ʿuyūn al-akhbār by ibn qutayba, and for later collections of almost elephantine 33. one fourth of his verses are preserved in the yatīmat al-dahr by al-thaʿālibī, in the 9th section of the ninth chapter, dedicated to andalusi and maghribi poets. the andalusi material came to al-thaʿālibī via his friend abū saʿd b. dūst, who had them from al-walīd b. bakr al-faqīh al-andalusī (d. 392/1002), a travelling scholar that had visited syria, iraq, khorasan and transoxania and who had transmitted a lot of knowledge from the maghrib. cf. b. orfali, the anthologists art: abū manṣūr al-thaʿālibī and his yatīmat al-dahr (leiden, 2016), 126-128. 34. werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen., 463-69 and passim. these results of werkmeister’s study became central for the theses of g. schoeler. 35. the only exception is the historical section, namely book 15, already studied in my study: toral-niehoff, “history in adab context.” 36. j. bray, “ʿabbasid myth and the human act.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih • 88 proportions like the nihāya by al-nuwayrī. she defined an adab-encyclopaedia as: “a work designed to provide the basic knowledge in the domains with which the average cultured man (an adīb) may be expected to be acquainted (…) characterized by organization into chapters or books on the different books treated.”37 the ʿiqd can be duly seen as an encyclopedic work: it is a multivolume, adab-work with a sophisticated structure, reflecting a very broad cultural program. it is instructive to read in the main introduction how the author himself explicates his highly ambitious, totalizing, cosmopolitan cultural program that clearly fits into an e n c y c l o p a e d i c scheme. his main objective is indeed to order, present, and organize the many pieces or “jewels” of knowledge, wisdom, and adab as preserved and accumulated by earlier generations from all cultures and languages (i.e., from all past humankind), and to select from them the very best:38 people of every generation and experts of every nation have spoken about adab and have philosophized about branches of learning in every tongue and in every age; and every one of them has given his utmost and done his best to summarize the beautiful ideas of the ancients and to select the gems of the sayings of past generations. they have done this so profusely that their summaries have needed summarization and their selections have needed choice-making (…) i have compiled this work and selected its jewels from the choice gems of adab and the best picks of eloquence. the title “the unique necklace” is not only ornamental, but points to the text’s organizing principle: knowledge is presented as a necklace of twenty precious pearls, and, following this metaphor, each book-title corresponds to the name of a gem or pearl.39 these twenty-five monographic kutub cover a very broad selection of subjects and are ordered according to a hierarchy of importance. within the books, the ʿiqd also features a molecular structure, further developing the metaphor of the jeweled collar. as with many compilations of this type, the structure can be described as a large string of short narrative, poetic, and gnomic units that serve as illustrations of the chapter’s main theme. the twenty-five monographic kutub or chapters cover various subjects and are ordered according to a decreasing hierarchy of importance. the wide thematic range impressively evidences the author’s broad and encyclopaedic idea of adab; and the organization of the material testifies to his efforts to systematize the variegated and then-emerging field of knowledge.40 however, in contrast to encyclopaedias 37. h. kilpatrick, “a genre in classical arabic lterature: the adab encyclopaedia,” in proceedings of the 10th congress of the union européene des arabisants et islamisants, ed. r. hillenbrand (edinburgh 1982), 34 38. ibn ʿabd rabbih, kitāb al-ʿiqd al-farīd, i,16; trans. i. j. boullata, the unique necklace (reading, uk, 2007), 2. 39. titles that make use of the metaphor of “collar of jewels” or “pearls” to designate a book (especially anthologies) abound in arabic literature, the most famous being “the ring of the dove,” the tawq al-ḥamāma by ibn ḥazm. however, these titles are normally only ornamental. cf. the explanation of the title by ibn ʿabd rabbih himself in ibn ʿabd rabbih, kitāb al-ʿiqd al-farīd, i,4. 40. cf. the table of content in the ibn ʿabd rabbih, kitāb al-ʿiqd al-farīd, i, 18-19 and the thematic survey in werkmeister, quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih, 27–43. 89 • isabel toral-niehoff al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) that are organized following a systematic and scientific epistemology of knowledge (inspired by greek models and philosophy, still in statu nascendi then in al-andalus),41 the ʿiqd is arranged in accordance with thematic clusters that follow a descending hierarchy of knowledge (descensus).42 the systematic structure of the ʿiqd also made it very manageable, so that later authors like al-nuwayrī and al-qalqashandī were able to easily excerpt whole books from the ʿiqd for their own works.43 the ʿiqd reflects a broad curriculum that includes, for example, knowledge of statecraft, the military, diplomacy, courtly etiquette, literature, poetry, history, and diverse witty anecdotes; this suggests that it encompassed the broad base of knowledge that a cultivated member of the courtly elite in cordoba would be expected to have. this would also explain the rather secular focus, which points to the courtly and humanistic understanding of knowledge typical for adab (there are no monographic chapters on religious themes in the ʿiqd, although religion is still present as a conceptual reference and through frequent quotations from the hadith and the quran). this also harmonizes with the notion that the nature of knowledge is universal—as shown by the previous quotation, it is the very essence (jawhar) of the perennial, universal wisdom that was accumulated by earlier generations. this is an inclusive concept of wisdom that justifies and even recommends the frequent use of non-islamic material: thus, we will find many pieces localized in the pre-islamic jāhilīya and in greek, iranian, and indian material44. moreover, the cultural ideal of adab as reflected in the ʿiqd emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things, since in fact, an adīb was supposed to know “a little bit of everything.” thus, we can also say that adab is conceptually linked to the concept of encyclopaedism, which has a political dimension. encyclopaedism, if understood broadly, refers to a cultural practice that aims to encompass all human knowledge in one work, which then serves as a sort of panorama or speculum mundi. in this larger sense, it is an extended transcultural practice that can be found in diverse scriptural societies, often in the context of empire and connected to the configuration and consolidation of cultural memory.45 the totalizing scope, categorizing impulse, and universal perspective further link 41. h. h. biesterfeldt, “medieval arabic encyclopedias of science and philosophy,” in islamic medical and scientific tradition, ed. p. e. pormann (london, 2011), 48-65 h. h. biesterfeldt, “arabisch-islamische enzyklopädien: formen und funktionen,” in die enzyklopädie im wandel vom hochmittelalter bis zur frühen neuzeit: akten des kolloquiums des projekts d im sonderforschungsbereich 231 (29.11.-1.12.1996), ed. ch. meier-staubach (münchen, 2002), 43–84. 42. ch. meier-staubach, ed., die enzyklopädie im wandel vom hochmittelalter bis zur frühen neuzeit: akten des kolloquiums des projekts d im sonderforschungsbereich 231 (29.11. 1.12.1996) (münchen, 2002). 43. veglison elías de molins, el collar único, de ibn abd rabbihi, 80. 44. for this concept of wisdom in islam, see l. marlow, “among kings and sages: greek and indian wisdom in an arabic mirror for princes,” arabica 60, 1-2 (2013), 1–57 d. gutas, “the greek and persian background of early arabic encyclopedism,” in organizing knowledge: encyclopaedic activities in the pre-eighteenth century islamic world, ed. g. endress and a. filali-ansary (leiden, boston, 2006), 91–101. 45. p. binkley, ed., pre-modern encyclopaedic texts: proceedings of the second comers congress, groningen, 1-4 july 1996 (leiden, new york, 1997); g. endress and a. filali-ansary, eds., organizing knowledge: encyclopaedic activities in the pre-eighteenth century islamic world (leiden, boston, 2006); j. könig and t. whitmarsh, “ordering knowledge (chapter 1),” in ordering knowledge in the roman empire, ed. j. könig and t. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih • 90 encyclopaedism with imperialism,46 an inclusive discourse that embraces all of humankind under the umbrella of one dominating culture. finally, the idea of preserving the cultural memory of a “we-group” (“our” legacy) is also very present in the ʿiqd. however, there is a certain irony in this, since the legacy from which ibn ʿabd rabbih is drawing is not local (there is no reference to any gothic, iberian, or local maghribī/andalusī knowledge), and he in fact references the standard abbasid program. so, the “we” he is speaking about is the “we” of abbasid iraq, so that “our jāhiliyya” (as used in the book 17 on ayyām al-ʿarab) comes to have taken place in the arabian peninsula. ibn ʿabd rabbih is thus not preserving, so much as constructing, a new cultural memory for al-andalus; by this means, he successfully inscribes his homeland onto the realm of islamic-arabic culture as it was shaped by abbasid iraq in the 2nd/8th -3rd/9th centuries. the ʿiqd: an encyclopaedia for the caliphate? some proposals in summary, i propose that the ʿiqd stands as a caliphal text in many regards and deserves more profound study from this perspective. first, it was composed by a man close to the caliphal regime who was probably supported by elite circles; second, it reflects a cultural program aimed at converting the elite andalusi reader into a caliphal man in accordance with pre-set abbasid models; and third, it conveys a universal, encyclopaedic and humanistic understanding of wisdom that proceeds to subsume precedent knowledge into islamic ʿilm and which is thus conceptually connected to a caliphal ideology. from this perspective, the ʿiqd’s cultural program reflects an inclusive discourse: it is a literary monument that transmits ideas of global order, completeness, and universal wisdom that is shared by humanity of all ages and cultures. here, i see a conceptual connection to the imperialistic and integrating goals of the umayyad caliphal project and its universalizing tendency. the material basis of this “universalizing” compound of knowledge and adab, however, is not actually global. rather, it draws from the peculiar compound of traditions circulating in abbasid iraq, as it were: arabic-islamic, arabic-pre-islamic, and biblical lore, as well as iranian, indian, and greek elements. thus, the ʿiqd evidences and summarizes the climax of the great acculturation process in al-andalus that had been initiated in the 3rd/9th century, and which signified an enormous transfer of knowledge from the mashriq to the maghrib, coupled with an appropriation of abbasid literary culture, which resulted in “orientalising” al-andalus and inscribing it into the world of islam. therefore, it is also fascinating evidence of the arabo-islamic globalization process of the 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries. the ʿiqd embodies a cultural programme that simultaneously follows a dynamic of implementation (transferring abbasid culture into umayyad al-andalus), and of inclusion whitmarsh (cambridge, 2007), 3–39; a. álvar ezquerra, ed., las enciclopedias en españa antes de l’encyclopédie (madrid, 2009), in particular m. fierro, “el saber enciclopédico en el mundo islámico,” las enciclopedias en españa antes de l’encyclopédie, ed. a. álvar ezquerra, 83–104. 46. j. könig and t. whitmarsh, “ordering knowledge (chapter 1),” in ordering knowledge in the roman empire. 91 • isabel toral-niehoff al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) (inscribing umayyad al-andalus into global islamic culture as embodied by the abbasid element). it further transforms umayyad cordoba into a place that holds a supreme position in adab and arabic culture, which is portrayed as universal and perennial. this ambitious program, strongly connected to its caliphal context, would also explain why al-andalus only plays a subordinate role in the ʿiqd, in contrast to later anthologies and compendia composed in al-andalus, that have a regional and local scope and reflect a cultural vision of the post-caliphal era on the peninsula. therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the ʿiqd, written for the caliphate, would later become more successful in the islamic east than in post-caliphal al-andalus. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih • 92 sources ibn ʻabd rabbih, abū ʻumar aḥmad ibn muḥammad. kitāb al-ʿiqd al-farīd. 7, + index. edited by aḥmad amīn and ibrāhīm al-abyārī. bayrūt: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, ca. 1990 (repr. ed. 1940–1953, cairo). ibn ʿabd-rabbih, aḥmad ibn 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construction of knowledge in islamic civilization: qudāma b. jaʻfar and his kitāb al-kharāj wa-ṣināʻat al-kitāba. leiden-boston: brill, 2002. hillenbrand, robert, ed. proceedings of the 10th congress of the union européene des arabisants et islamisants. edinburgh, 1982. kennedy, philip f., ed. on fiction and adab in medieval arabic literature. studies in arabic language and literature 6. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2005. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) writing for the caliphate: the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih • 94 kilpatrick, hilary. “a genre in classical arabic literature: the adab encyclopaedia.” in proceedings of the 10th congress of the union européenne des arabisants et islamisants. edited by robert hillenbrand, 34–42. edinburgh, 1982. ——— . making the great book of songs: compilation and the author’s craft in abū l-faraj al-iṣbahānī’s kitāb al-aghānī. london: routledge curzon, 2003. könig, jason, and tim whitmarsh. “ordering knowledge (chapter 1).” in ordering knowledge in the roman empire. edited by jason könig and tim whitmarsh, 3–39. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007. ——— eds. ordering knowledge in the roman empire. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007. lirola delgado, jorge, ed. biblioteca de al-andalus. enciclopedia de la cultura andalusí 1. almería: fundación ibn tufayl de estudios árabes, 2009. marín, manuela. “la transmisión del saber en al-andalus (hasta 300/912).” al-qantara 8 (1987): 87-98. marlow, louise. “among kings and sages: greek and indian wisdom in an arabic mirror for princes.” arabica 60, 1-2 (2013): 1–57. martinez-gros, gabriel. l’idéologie omeyyade: la contruction de la légitimité du califat de cordoue (xe-xie siècles). madrid: casa de velázquez, 1992. meier-staubach, christel, ed. die enzyklopädie im wandel vom hochmittelalter bis zur frühen neuzeit: akten des kolloquiums des projekts d im sonderforschungsbereich 231 (29.11. 1.12.1996). münstersche mittelalter-schriften 78. münchen: fink, 2002. méouak, mohamed. pouvoir souverain, administration centrale et élites politiques dans l’espagne umayyade (iie-ive/viiie-xe siècles). suomalaisen tiedeakatemian toimituksia sarja humaniora 297. helsinki: academia scientiarum fennica, 1999. molina, luis. “lugares de destino de los viajeros andalusíes en el taʿrīj de ibn al-faraḍī.” in estudios onomástico-biográficos de al-andalus, i (1988), 585–610. ——— . “un árabe entre muladíes: muḥammad b. ʽabd al-salām al-jusanī,” eoba. vi, pp. 337-351 (english transl. in m. marín (ed.), the formation of al-andalus. part i: history and society, ashgate, 1998, pp. 115-28). monroe, james t. “the historical arjuza of ibn abd rabbih, a tenth century hispanoarabic epic poem.” journal of the american oriental society 91 (1971): 67–95. orfali, bilal, the anthologists art: abū manṣūr al-thaʿālibī and his yatīmat al-dahr, leiden: brill, 2016. 95 • isabel toral-niehoff al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) osti, letizia. “culture, education and the court.” in crisis and continuity at the abbasid court, formal and informal politics in the caliphate of al-muqtadir (295–320/908– 932), ed. by maaike van berkel, nadia maria el cheikh, hugh kennedy, and letizia osti, 187-214. leiden: brill, 2013. pormann, peter e., ed. islamic medical and scientific tradition. critical concepts in islamic studies. london: routledge, 2011. ramírez del río, josé. la orientalización de al-andalus: los días de los árabes en la península ibérica. serie historia y geografía no. 83. sevilla: universidad de sevilla, secretariado de publicaciones, 2002. safran, janina m. the second umayyad caliphate: the articulation of caliphal legitimacy in al-andalus. cambridge, m.: harvard university press, 2000. shafi, muhammad. “a description of the two sanctuaries of islam by ibn abd rabbihi.” in a volume of oriental studies presented to edward g. browne on his 60th birthday. edited by t.w arnold and reynold a. nicholson, 416–438. cambridge: the university press, 1922. soravia, bruna. “entre bureaucratie et littérature: la kitāba et les kuttāb dans l’administration de l’ espagne musulmane.” al-masaq. studia arabo-islamica mediterranea 7 (1994): 165-200. ——— . “les manuels arabes à l’usage des fonctionnaires de l’administration (adab al-kātib) dans l’islam classique,” arabica 52/3 (2005): 417-436. toral-niehoff, isabel. “history in adab context: “the book on caliphal histories” by ibn ʿabd rabbih (246/860–328/940).” journal of abbasid studies 2, no. 1 (2015): 61–85. ——— . “the ‘book of the pearl of the ruler’ in the unique necklace by ibn ʿabd rabbih: preliminary remarks.” in global medieval: mirrors for princes reconsidered. edited by regula forster and neguin yavari, 134–50. ilex foundation series 15. boston, mass.: 2015. veglison elías de molins, josefina. el collar único, de ibn abd rabbihi. madrid: síntesis, 2007. werkmeister, walter. quellenuntersuchungen zum kitāb al-ʻiqd al-farīd des andalusiers ibn ʻabdrabbih: (246/860–328/949): ein beitrag zur arabischen literaturgeschichte. islamkundliche untersuchungen bd. 70. berlin: k. schwarz, 1983. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 229-234 in memoriam günter lüling (1928—2014)* dr. günter lüling, author of a number of revisionist works on the qur’ān and the history of islam’s origins, died on 10 september 2014, in wasserburg am inn, germany. he had suffered a coronary thrombosis in april, followed a few days later by a stroke, and over the next few months was moved from his home in erlangen to various rehabilitation clinics in southern bavaria. he was 85. lüling was born on 25 october 1928, in warna, on the bulgarian black sea coast, to pastor and missionary gerhard lüling and his wife ilse (née wilms). the family returned to germany in 1935, where günter attended elementary school in altbelz, near the town of köslin in eastern pomerania (now poland), and then (19391943) the staatliche oberschule für jungen in köslin. günter was drafted into military service on 1 january 1944, that is, at the age of 15, an indication of the desperate need for “manpower” of the third reich in the final years of the war. he was at first utilized as a support worker for the navy, and then, * i am grateful to friedrich lüling, günter lüling’s son, for providing important information about his studies, and to the lüling family for their warm support. the detailed information on lüling’s early life and studies is taken in part from a lebenslauf prepared by lüling himself, dated august 1975. (photo: günter lüling ca. 2012. photo courtesy of friedrich lüling.) 230 • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) starting on 15 march 1945 (still only 16), as an infantryman. at the conclusion of the war, günter b e c a m e a n a l l i e d p r i s o n e r o f w a r , and from october 1945, was entered into training near braunschweig and salzgitter (lower saxony) to be a mason or bricklayer. he was, however, able to return to formal schooling in spring 1947, attending the große schule in wolfenbüttel, near braunschweig, where he passed the reifeprüfung in march 1949. i n e a r l y 1 9 5 0 , h e e m b a r k e d o n u n i v e r s i t y s t u d y , w h i c h h e p u r s u e d c o n t i n u o u s l y u n t i l 1 9 6 1 , m a i n l y i n e r l a n g e n , b u t w i t h s t r e t c h e s a l s o i n göttingen and bern, switzerland. from 1950-1954, he studied protestant theology, w i t h s e c o n d a r y s t u d i e s i n c l a s s i c a l philology, history of religions, germanic languages and literatures, and arabic studies. in the course of these studies, he worked with some of the foremost scholars in these fields, including hans wehr (arabic studies), walther zimmerli (old testament), ernst käsemann and joachim jeremias (new testament and systematic theology), and hans joachim schoeps (history of religions), among others. he was also deeply influenced by the work of martin werner of bern (history of religions), especially werner’s theory of an “angel christology,” although he never formally studied with him.1 lüling passed the first exam in theology in göttingen in february 1954. from 1954 to 1957, he undertook further studies in erlangen, combining the fields of sociology, history of religions, and semitic 1. a helpful summary of werner’s views is john reumann, “martin werner and ‘angel christology’,” lutheran quarterly 8 (1956), 349-58. philology; hans wehr and hans-joachim s c h o e p s a g a i n n u m b e r e d a m o n g h i s teachers. he passed the civil examination for political economy (diplomvolkswirt) in erlangen in november 1957. in early 1958, he resumed his studies with a focus on semitic philology and islamic studies, with sociology and history of religions as subordinate fields. under the direction of prof. dr. jörg kraemer, he started work on an edition of the pseudo-aristotelian liber de pomo as his dissertation. in september 1961, however, his progress was halted by a double shock: first, the news that another scholar was about to release an edition of the liber de pomo, which made lüling’s work superfluous; and second, the tragic early death of his doktorvater, jörg kraemer.2 lüling had little choice but to break off his studies, and starting in january 1962, he worked for several months as an instructor in german for the goetheinstitut in several towns in germany. in august, 1962, he assumed the position of director of the goethe-institut in aleppo, syria. it was there that his two children, friedrich and lieselotte, were born to him and his wife hannelore (née wolfrum), whom he had married in june 1960. günter remained director of the goethe-institut aleppo until august 1965. the family then returned to erlangen, where lüling was able to work at the university, first as assistant in the seminar for the history of medicine, and eventually as assistant in the seminar for oriental studies, where he taught courses in modern arabic while working on a new dissertation, under the 2. lüling informed me that kraemer committed suicide. (personal communication, erlangen, 1970 or 1971). in memoriam: günter lüling (1928—2014) • 231 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) direction of prof. wolfdietrich fischer, another former student of hans wehr. lüling completed his dissertation, entitled “kritisch-exegetische untersuchungen des qur’ān-textes,” in february 1970 and was awarded the doctorate in islamic studies and semitic philology, with history of religions as a secondary field. i had the good fortune to study with him in erlangen in 1970-71. l ü l i n g ’ s d i s s e r t a t i o n p r e s e n t e d r e v o l u t i o n a r y v i e w s o n t h e q u r ’ ā n , advancing ideas that he continued to elaborate in subsequent publications, notably his über den ur-qur’ān: ansätze zur rekonstruktion vorislamischer christlicher stropenlieder im qur’ān (erlangen: h. lüling, 1974) and die wiederentdeckung des propheten muhammad. eine kritik am “christlichen” abendland (erlangen: h. lüling, 1981). über den ur-qurʾān was later translated by lüling himself and issued in an expanded english version as a challenge to islam for reformation. the rediscovery and reliable reconstruction of a comprehensive pre-islamic christian hymnal hidden in the koran under earliest islamic reinterpretations (delhi: motilal banarsidass, 2003). it is difficult to summarize lüling’s arguments concisely, because they are complex and wide-ranging. his basic argument in these works is that the qur’ān text, as we have it today, represents a reworking by muḥammad of earlier christian texts that had served as liturgy in a hitherto unknown pre-islamic christian community in mecca. in developing these ideas, in which he was influenced by the work of albert schweitzer, martin werner, and hans-joachim schoeps, he argued that muḥammad’s original message was a continuation of concepts found in jewish christianity that considered jesus to be an angel (from greek angelos, “messenger”). hellenistic christianity, including the c h r i s t i a n c o m m u n i t y o f m e c c a , h a d rejected this view and saw jesus as divine; but muḥammad, in lüling’s view, clung to the older arabian “religion of abraham” günter lüling in july 2008. photo courtesy of fred m. donner. 232 • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) and its concepts. muḥammad, in his clash with the meccan christians, took strophic hymns that had been used in the christian liturgy and emended them, changing individual words and phrases in order to bring their theology in line with his own views, particularly the idea of jesus not as god, but as a divine messenger (rasūl) in accord with the notion of his status as an angel. lüling attempted to recover the earlier christian teachings of these buried christian hymns by making relatively m i n o r a d j u s t m e n t s t o t h e r e c e i v e d qurʾan text—in effect, reversing the very emendations to these texts that, in lüling’s view, muḥammad himself had made. several observations can be made about lüling’s work. first, his manner of making emendations to the qur’ān text can be criticized as capricious or, perhaps, circular—lüling’s emendations did not prove the existence of an earlier theological outlook in the text, but rather were made by him precisely in order to bring a passage of text in line with the theological arguments he thought “must be there,” even though there was little or no external grounds for suspecting the passage had been subjected to prior manipulation. second, lüling’s hypotheses r e p r e s e n t e d a b o l d c h a l l e n g e t o t h e traditional view of the qur’ān and its environment held not only by muslims, but also by western scholars at the time, for which reason it was received with great hostility by most of the academic establishment in germany (on which more shall be said below). third, lüling’s impressive erudition in old testament and new testament theology, islamic studies, and arabic studies, combined with his keen intellect, meant that his hypotheses are often intriguing but difficult to evaluate confidently, as few people have similarly wide-ranging training in all these areas; reading his work, one often feels that one is “over one’s head” in unfamiliar technical material. the revolutionary nature of lüling’s hypotheses on the qur’ān and islam’s origins led fairly quickly to his being forced out of the german academic establishment, even though his dissertation had originally been supported enthusiastically by his doktorvater and was accepted by his department with the mark of eximium opus, “extraordinary work.” lüling’s i d e a s w e r e j u s t t o o t h r e a t e n i n g t o certain established scholars whose work would have been overturned by it. his effort to submit a habilitationsschrift or “second dissertation,” necessary to qualify for a permanent teaching position in germany, was thwarted; a number of senior orientalists, led apparently by the influential prof. anton spitaler of munich, blocked his efforts to find a position, and organized a virtual conspiracy of silence against him so that his work was hardly reviewed in germany3—and, since it was written in german, few foreign scholars w e r e a b l e r e a d i l y t o f o l l o w l ü l i n g ’ s complex argumentation or bothered to do so. it must be said that regardless of how uncomfortable or threatening a 3. lüling describes these machinations in some detail in the preface to his a challenge to islam for reformation. spitaler was, of course, the same scholar who, for over fifty years, concealed the archive of photographs of early qurʾan manuscripts amassed early in the century by gotthelf bergsträsser and otto pretzl, claiming it had been destroyed by allied bombing during the war—and who thus singlehandedly delayed critical scholarship on the qurʾan for a generation or more. see andrew higgins, “the lost archive,” the wall street journal jan. 12, 2008 (www.wsj.com/articles/sb120008793352784631). www.wsj.com/articles/sb120008793352784631 in memoriam: günter lüling (1928—2014) • 233 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) scholar’s ideas may seem, they deserve to be openly debated, and judged on their merits. the ideas of lüling’s hero, martin werner, were rejected by many german theologians, but werner, as an already established scholar, was able to publish them, and his opponents were forced to write their own formal rebuttals in learned academic works. günter lüling, by comparison, was never shown the decency of straightforward critical engagement. the way lüling was treated by those who should have been his colleagues can only be deemed shabby, and stands as a dark stain on the record of the german academic establishment of his time. d e p r i v e d o f a u n i v e r s i t y c a r e e r , lüling nonetheless continued to pursue scholarship for the remainder of his life, working essentially in isolation. he and his wife lived frugally on her salary, and his scholarship was self-published. he was, naturally, embittered and considered himself a martyr to the causes of true scholarship and proper theology, and sometimes had choice things to say about the german academic establishment; but in his later years, he worked without much overt complaint, ever confident that his ideas would, in the end, be vindicated. when my wife and i last visited him in erlangen in the summer of 2008 (he would have been just short of 80 at the time), he was cheerful, eager to discuss scholarly matters, and vigorous enough to lead us on a memorable bicycle tour of erlangen, carefully pointing out apartments where he had lodged as a student and noteworthy architectural monuments of the town, i n c l u d i n g a c h u r c h w h o s e t o w e r w e climbed to enjoy a fine view of the city. he was even then deeply engaged in research for a new book, of which i think he had already written several hundred pages, on the early history of the hebrews, in which he presented a characteristically radical new vision of their history and impact in the world—in short, it was, like everything h e w r o t e , f i l l e d w i t h r e v o l u t i o n a r y implications.4 regardless of one’s ultimate judgment on lüling’s work, he was in many ways a pioneer. that he was original, highly intelligent, thoughtful, independent of judgment, and possessed of an impressive range of knowledge can hardly be denied; this means that his work often contains intriguing insights and observations, even if his critical judgment, or the system underlying his approach, may be questioned. he was an early voice challenging the traditional islamic origins narrative that represented the dominant consensus until the 1970s—a challenge later raised, albeit in different ways and with different arguments, by such scholars as john wansbrough, patricia crone, michael cook, and others. his sense that the origins of islam had, in some way, an intimate connection with christianity is one that has been advanced more recently by numerous other scholars, notably those associated with the so-called “inarah school” based in saarbrücken. his bold attempt to “correct” the text of the qur’ān to restore what he considered to be its presumed original meaning anticipated by a quarter-century the similar efforts of christoph luxenberg (who, however, never bothered even to mention lüling’s work— or, for that matter, anyone else’s) in his 4. i do not know what the state of this manuscript was at the time of his death—largely completed? mostly only sketched out?—nor where it may be today. 234 • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) die syrisch-aramäische lesart des korans (berlin, 2000). lüling’s works contain many fertile ideas, particularly in the realm of the underlying theology that the qur’ān text attempts to articulate, that deserve more sustained and detailed examination. — fred m. donner university of chicago (f-donner@uchicago.edu) mailto:f-donner%40uchicago.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 197-203 book review la mer des califes, a challenging a n d e r u d i t e w o r k , d e s e r v e s a wide audience. it raises many new questions in centering the mediterranean in early and medieval muslim history and historiography. the sea, christophe picard argues, was a preoccupation of empire and the stuff of memory. a proper english translation is very much in order.1 readers should be forewarned that, particularly for modern works, picard’s annotation is rather spare. he furnishes citations, to be sure, but these are few relative to the wealth of his discussion; the decision is likely to have been editorial, as the volume seems intended for a broad audience. this is less a failing of an excellent book than a source of regret that one cannot more readily engage its many ideas. picard has produced to date a rich body of work on the muslim presence in both the mediterranean and the atlantic 1. a translation, by nicholas elliot, is to be published by harvard university press in early 2018. ocean, including la mer et les musulmans d’occident au moyen age (paris, 1997), l ’ o c é a n a t l a n t i q u e m u s u l m a n d e l a conquête arabe à l’époque almohade: navigation et mise en valeur des côtes d’al-andalus et du maghreb occidental (paris, 1997) and a long series of articlelength studies. his many ideas are on display in this new volume. given their range, however, the book eludes easy summary. it works on several levels (and, for this reason, would serve well in graduate seminars). picard, again, argues for maritime concerns as essential to the course of islamic imperial history from its very onset. this corrects, he argues, a long-held view, a “vulgate of medieval history” (p. 11), that underplays the engagement of early and medieval islamic society with the mediterranean. this seems right: consideration of muslim nav al warfare, for exam ple, is oft e n tacked onto discussions of the early conquests and subsequent periods of islamic/middle east military history. the christophe picard, la mer des califes: une histoire de la méditerranée musulmane. (paris: éditions de seuil, 2015), 439 pages, glossary, bibliography, maps. isbn: 9782020983815, price: €26.00/$31.00. matthew s. gordon miami university (gordonms@miamioh.edu) mailto:gordonms%40miamioh.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 198 • matthew s. gordon tendency in western historiography has been to reduce the arabo-muslim presence in the mediterranean to piracy and a secondary role in the commercial history of the sea. picard’s central point is that, on the contrary, one sees a consistent commitment to maritime matters on the part of successive regimes, whether the abbasid caliphate, the ‘successor’ states (eg. tulunids and aghlabids), the rival fatimid and umayyad caliphates or, finally, the almohad state late in the medieval period. picard provides a full body of evidence; he has read widely, and his extensive, two-part bibliography is a contribution in its own right.2 the book, which includes a useful set of maps (pp. 407-418), is made up of two parts. it opens with a précis of the main points: (i) a fresh look at the islamic mediterranean is in order, one that acknowledges the sea as the venue of close and deliberate interaction of the three medieval realms (islamic, byzantine and latin); (ii) the extant written evidence, still our best source despite considerable archeological gains in recent decades, consists in largest part of works produced 2. to the arabic sources, one can add al-balawī’s fourth/tenth-century sīrat aḥmad ibn ṭūlūn (ed. muḥammad kurd ʿalī, damascus, 1358/1939), which contains additional references to relevant activity by the tulunid regime (mer, pp. 265-267). regarding modern sources, a. borrut’s studies, “l’espace maritime syrien au cours des premiers siècles de l’islam (viie-xe siècle) : le cas de la région entre acre et tripoli,” tempora. annales d’histoire et d’archéologie (université saint-joseph) 10-11 (19992000), 1-33, and “architecture des espaces portuaires et réseaux défensifs du littoral syro-palestinien dans les sources arabes (viie-xie s.),” archéologie islamique, 11 (2001), 21-46 , are cited but missing from the bibliography, while m. mccormick’s two publications and a.-l. de prémare’s les fondations de l’islam (paris, 2002) are listed out of order. by traveller-scholars serving imperial agendas; and (iii), finally, the project, done properly, needs therefore to engage not simply the history proper but the sources themselves. the weave of interrogation, of events and texts alike, makes la mer des califes a very contemporary work of history. part one (“la méditerranée des arabes: entre représentations et appropriations”) takes up both tasks: an assessment of muslim imperial maritime policy set against a close look at the sea as imagined in arabo-islamic sources. it consists of seven chapters. the first chapter, “la découverte de la méditerranée par les arabes,” could stand easily on its own. picard argues that the first generations of arabo-islamic scholars and writers took only mild interest in the sea. but, more to the point, this early material was shaped (instrumentalisé) to meet abbasid caliphal needs: the aim was juridical, that is, an effort to define the fiscal standing of, say, cyprus and coastal regions of the levant, and legitimating, in that the abbasids sought to frame their activity as taking up where the prophet and his successors left off. the mediterranean, in the latter sense, was framed principally as the venue of confrontation against byzantium. picard sees it as having also been, at this initial stage, secondary in interest to the indian ocean, the domain of maritime commerce. only following the third/ninth century, w i t h a p r o l i f e r a t i o n o f g e o g r a p h i c a l writing, did the mediterranean come into its own. picard devotes the remainder of the chapter to the work of three notables of arabo-islamic letters: al-masʿūdī (d. 344/956), al-idrīsī (d. 560/1165) and ibn khaldūn (d. 809/1406). he argues, with these works as evidence, for ‘the creative al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) christophe picard’s la mer des califes • 199 wealth of arab geographical literature, particularly as it relates to the maritime space’ (p. 50). the second chapter, “l’écriture arabe de la conquête de la méditerranée,” begins picard’s more substantial discussion. it takes up the evidence on the arab/ islamic conquests and its careful shaping by abbasid-era scholars. the first muslims produced full accounts of the conquests, works that in turn underwent not simply (selective) transmission and collection but, critically, a reframing by bureaucratscholars writing on behalf of the abbasid court. a similar process, but one that produced a counter-narrative to that of the baghdadi and samarran courts, ensued after the later third/ninth century in aghlabid (then fatimid) ifriqiya and umayyad spain. in each case, one chased legitimation by reworking the past. so, in the case of the abbasids, it was a matter of reworking (syrian) umayyad history, first, to align the ‘ghāzī’ caliphs (eg. hārūn al-rashīd) with the ‘heroes’ of the previous age (eg. maslama) then, second, justify a shift in the dynamics of jihad—for which the mediterranean played an obvious role—from the offensive thrust of the conquest era to the defensive posture of their own age (the shaping of a frontier politics on the taurus range and along the coasts). in this case, the abbasid court made much of the decision by ʿumar ii to rethink imperial policy vis-à-vis the byzantine foe, in halting the conquests in favor of a new policy of consolidation. picard takes up the abbasid shift to a new-style jihad in his third chapter, “les silences de la mer.” the conquest of constantinople now beyond reach, and notwithstanding abbasid sorties into the anatolian interior, the muslimbyzantine frontier stabilized and, thus, the caliphs and the scholars writing on their behalf reframed the terms of conflict. it was a shift in ideology and politics: the caliphs now sought to demonstrate islam’s superiority—its universality—a task achieved by the staging of elaborate receptions for byzantine diplomats and, more grandly, laying claim to knowledge itself, through targeted translation of greek and sasanid works, and rituals of polemic. it was, no less, the pursuit of a new military strategy of, on the one hand, investment on an imperial scale in a defensive infrastructure (forts, ports and so on) and, on the other, the redefinition of jihad itself. the abbasids played their part in shaping and projecting the ceremonial figure of the warrior (ghāzī) caliph. the legacy of baghdad—the cradle of arabic geography and chronography— i s t h e s u b j e c t o f c h a p t e r f o u r , “ l a méditerranée des géographes.” picard, drawing heavily on the work of andré m i q u e l , s e e s t h e n e w d i s c i p l i n e o f g e o g r a p h y a s h a v i n g t u r n e d o n t w o objectives: fixing the islamic realm (and baghdad itself) at the center of the universe, and mapping for all to see the sovereignty of the caliph. if a first step introduced classical, above all ptolemaic, principles, a s e c o n d p r o d u c e d ‘ a d m i n i s t r a t i v e geography,’ as represented by the work of al-yaʿqūbī and ibn khurradādhbih. a shift occurred with a second generation of these author-travellers: if al-muqaddasī (much like al-yaʿqūbī) limited themselves to a description of muslim-held regions of the mediterranean, it fell to ibn ḥawqal (fl. second half of the fourth/tenth century) to fully breach the mental frontier separating t h e e a s t e r n a n d w e s t e r n r e g i o n s o f the islamic realm. the mediterranean al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 200 • matthew s. gordon became whole (un ensemble singulier et cohérent), and, over which, for ibn ḥawqal, the fatimid imamate exercised true sovereignty. the sea was now a venue of frontiers: ibn ḥawqal, among other writers, references a maritime world of confrontation and commerce between muslims, byzantines and latins. three subsequent chapters complete the first part of the book. the three chapters track the course of muslim supremacy over the mediterranean, from the late third/ninth century through the heyday of the fourth/tenth century, and its subsequent demise, with the waning of the almohad state, in the mid-seventh/thirteenth century. from the fourth/tenth century on comes a wealth of evidence. chronicles, works of geography, juridical texts and, notably, the cairo geniza documents, bespeak a remarkable flourishing of scholarship and commerce. but, so too, a ‘media war’ (p. 142) conducted by the umayyad and fatimid courts against one another, and against their latin and byzantine opponents. at the center stood the sea: control of the mediterranean served aims that were ideological—again, the claims to universality on the part of successive dynasties—and strategic alike. s t u d e n t s o f m u s l i m m i l i t a r y a n d economic history will find much to take away from these middle chapters. picard r e c o u n t s a t l e n g t h t h e c o n s i d e r a b l e level of investment in fleets, ports, and coastal fortresses (ribāṭs) on the part of each dynasty in turn. the umayyads of cordoba, for their part, imposed tighter administrative and fiscal control over iberian ports, fleets and sailors; tortosa, along the ebro river in catalonia, and almería, on spain’s southeast corner, each flourished as military and commercial hubs with direct caliphal support. the fatimids, picard seems to suggest, moved matters even further, devoting rhetoric and investment alike in making a bid for authority over the sea. and, finally, there is the case of the almohads: “the texts make frequent mention of the attachment to the sea of the [almohad] sovereigns, and, above all, their personal interest in the fleet and their sailors” (p. 214). to the second part of the book—“les stratégies méditerranéennes des califes”— falls discussion of the scale and complexity of muslim maritime investment. picard, though not explicit as to how the two parts of the book relate to one another, insists that, from as early as the reign of muʿāwiya (41/661-60/680), the character of muslim engagement with the sea was extensive and diverse. if, in other words, the sea remained, through the early and medieval islamic periods, a venue of confrontation, t h e g e n i z a d o c u m e n t s , a m o n g o t h e r sources, make clear that it became a good deal more beside. the umayyad sovereign, alongside ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ, was quick to exploit the naval resources abandoned by the byzantines in egypt and syria. the abbasids, in their turn, as described in chapter eight (“la méditerranée des deux empires”) faced a resurgent byzantium in the later third/ninth century, and thus saw little option but to sustain investment in their navies and the infrastructure of ports and coastal defenses. the abbasids also carried forward an ‘island strategy,’ that is, a determination to take in hand the large seabound territories of both the western and eastern reaches of the sea, sicily most notably. picard is mostly silent on the references to slaves and c o l l e c t i v e e n s l a v e m e n t c o n t a i n e d i n reports of the major umayyad assaults al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) christophe picard’s la mer des califes • 201 on cyprus. he barely mentions slavery, in fact, anywhere in the book, a missed o p p o r t u n i t y , p a r t i c u l a r l y i n l i g h t o f michael mccormick’s sweeping ideas on the significance to medieval european and abbasid history of the slave trade, much of which, after all, was conducted at sea.3 i would also comment on two issues raised by picard in his ninth chapter (“contrôler la méditerranée”), which is devoted to the shaping of an abbasid ‘model’ of jihad. the model was taken up by successor regimes even as the abbasid state surrendered authority beginning in the later third/ninth century. once again, its ingredients were a ‘formidable’ material investment in coastal defenses and a ‘remarkably effective’ program of propaganda (p. 287). my first comment is brief: i would have liked picard to elaborate on a passing observation (p. 253) that the abbasid recruitment of ‘eastern’ forces—iranian forces by al-maʾmūn and turks by al-muʿtaṣim—reframed jihad as having more to do with cavalry than fleets. he suggests a shift in attitude in military circles but also, i think, in logistics and planning. but he cites no texts as evidence and i wondered if he had any particular ones in mind. the second comment concerns the impact of investment in coastal and frontier defenses, by byzantium and muslim powers alike, but especially the abbasid state. picard sees it as having driven demographic and economic growth in these same areas, growth closely tied to the transfer and settlement of soldiers, artisans, workers and other populations (pp. 280-287). it is here, for example, where 3. see his origins of the european economy (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001). one wishes for better annotation: direct references are few. but, regarding one particular locale, tarsus and its hinterland (the thughūr), picard seems clearly reliant on an argument developed by peter von sivers concerning the emergence and rivalry of, in effect, power interests in tarsus—the one military, the other landed/commercial.4 michael bonner5 has raised objections of this argument, and i would follow suit: evidence for the socio-economic organization of tarsus in the late third/ninth century does not appear ‘thick’ enough to support a description of the nature, extent and impact of transregional commerce along the frontier. the existence of un véritable système économique (p. 280) sustained by military and commercial investment is certainly plausible, but the question remains of whether it is borne out by the sources. the fourth/tenth century brought the adoption of caliphal claims by the umayyad and fatimid states. picard takes up the policies of both regimes, and their almohad successors, in the final chapters of the book. two developments occurred: the confrontation of the two caliphates, in which control over maritime waters stood front and center, and a heightened engagement with the latin and byzantine realm s . i f t he t wo em p ires s et t he ir rhetorical sights on baghdad and the overturning of the abbasid house, their 4. “taxes and trade in the ʿabbāsid thughūr, 750-962/133-351,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient, 25:1 (1982): 71-99, see especially 89-93. 5. aristocratic violence and holy war: studies in the jihad and the arab-byzantine frontier (new haven, ct: american oriental society, 1996): 152-153. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 202 • matthew s. gordon real target was one another. chapter ten, “contrôler la méditerranée,” sets the stage with a discussion of the aghlabid commitment, very much in the abbasid style, to the campaign against sicily. here, again, a central regime joined an ideological program to material investment in fleets and coastal infrastructure. similar initiatives occurred to the west, with the moroccan salihid dynasty—a polity little discussed, it seems, in modern s c h o l a r s h i p — a n d t h e e a r l y u m a y y a d state. in each case, jihad and measures to assure coastal security gave way to a more ambitious program of expansion and confrontation. the great flourish of activity—the stuff of chapter eleven, “l’impérialisme maritime des califes méditerranéens au xe siècle”—involved not simply sustained military campaigning— jihad against latin and byzantine territory, and war of one caliphate against another— b u t n e w a n d v i g o r o u s c o m m e r c i a l engagement as well. picard cites evidence provided by the arabic geographers but, so too, a growing body of archaeological data in treating a burst of economic exchange across the fourth/tenth century mediterranean. a key point is that it is likely to have been mediterranean in origin, linking local and regional development—new productivity at the level of villages and local markets on both sides of the sea—with heightened military and fiscal investment on the part of the byzantines, umayyads and fatimids. this is less a rejection of the notion, developed by maurice lombard, among others, that trade flowing from t h e i n d i a n o c e a n , r e d s e a a n d t h e sahara fueled mediterranean commercial growth, than an effort to assign credit t o t h e m e d i t e r r a n e a n r e g i o n i t s e l f . a greater sense of security also explains the spread of european, jewish and muslim merchant networks; in the case of the jewish networks, in particular, and here the geniza letters serve their purpose, fatimid support was decisive. umayyad investment proved no less decisive further west: intense economic activity joined new umayyad diplomatic engagement with the latin powers. the same interplay of confrontation (read: jihad), on the one hand, commercial relations joining latin, byzantine and muslim markets, on the other, was a hallmark of the almohad period. only with the waning of this last medieval mediterranean muslim power— t h e s u b j e c t o f c h a p t e r t w e l v e ( “ l a souveraineté maritime”)—could the latin maritime powers come into their own. picard concludes by insisting that naval men, operating in the mediterranean across the medieval period, stood among the heroes of arabo-islamic tradition. their campaigns, carried out in the name of imperial masters, the latter driven by a determination to project islamic universality (read: hegemony), rendered the mediterranean “the sole maritime venue of caliphal jihad” (p. 347). and, t h r o u g h o u t , a n e y e t o m a t e r i a l g a i n remained: conquest and profit went hand in hand. and it was in this manner that later arabic writers, al-idrīsī, ibn jubayr and ibn khaldūn among them, would remember the sea, the frontier from which to pursue expansion of the islamic realm. t h e s e c o m m e n t s o n l y s c r a t c h t h e surface: la mer des califes is awash with compelling ideas and i have touched o n o n l y t h e m a i n o n e s . p i c a r d , a s amply demonstrated by his long list of publications, has been working on the topics that inform this volume for many al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) christophe picard’s la mer des califes • 203 years. mediterranean studies has a long pedigree in western scholarship; one thinks, of course, of henri pirenne and fernand braudel, and, more recently, of chris wickham and michael mccormick.6 6. picard, acknowledging the contribution of pirenne’s much-discussed mahomet et charlemagne (1937), wrote the preface to a reedition of the work (paris, 2005). in obliging us to reconsider the history of the (islamic) mediterranean—and, thus, perforce, the conclusions of his predecessors—picard surely has earned a place in this worthy company. conference report al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 149-151 over the past few years, the inter-national medieval congress (imc), held at leeds university each july, has grown immensely. those of us interested in regions outside of western europe have found an ever-increasing range of sessions and scholars, coming from the rest of the world, and delving into subjects of islamic and other non-western fields. the trend is positive, of course, allowing as it does opportunities for useful dialogue and cross-fertilization. it reflects a steady broadening of the range of scholarship being done on medieval topics. t h e p a s t f e w y e a r s h a v e s e e n , specifically, a rapid and profound increase in scholarship surrounding questions of slavery in the medieval world. at the 2015 imc, the number of papers treating slavery directly seemed to have reached a peak but, as usual in such a large conference, some conflicted directly with each other. four of us, all scholars of medieval slavery, thought to organize an over-arching series of panels the following year. the response to the call for papers was unprecedented: the effort resulted in the organization of ten panels on the study of slavery in the medieval world. the sessions took up the greater part of three days, with audiences of between thirty and sixty. one of the benefits of having so many people working on questions of slavery in the same place was that discussions were highly productive with many informed questions and comments in all the sessions. the first day began with a panel on domestic slavery across time. it featured papers examining the metaphoric use of god as slaveholder in the sermons o f a u g u s t i n e o f h i p p o ( c a s s a n d r a c a s i a s , e m o r y ) ; a d v i c e o n r e l a t i o n s between freeborn and enslaved youths in john chrysostom (john martens, st. thomas); the appearance of slaves in the hagiographic writings of hrotsvit of gandersheim (sarah bogue, emory); and questions of paternity of children born to slave women in late medieval florence sessions on slavery the international medieval congress (leeds, 4-7 july 2016) thomas macmaster morehouse college (thomas.macmaster@morehouse.edu) 150 • thomas macmaster al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) (lynn laufenberg, sweet briar). t h e s e c o n d p a n e l l o o k e d a t scandinavian slave-trading. the first speaker (matthew delvaux, boston college) argued that slavery and the slave trade were of greater significance than is usually thought in the carolingian construction of power ,and that external viking attack as well as internal social instability subverted carolingian control of these institutions. the second paper (daniel melleno, denver) discussed the role of the viking slave trade in cross-cultural contact across northern europe. the third (michael kræmmer, museum sydøstdanmark) turned to postviking scandinavia and examined literary sources for slave-taking during the baltic crusades. the final panel of the day looked at m a n u m i s s i o n w i t h p a p e r s o n a n g l o saxon processes of manumission at a crossroads (david a. e. pelteret); the freeing of captives, slaves, and prisoners in the crusade-era levant (aysu dinçer, university of warwick); and what it meant to be a slave in the kingdom of mallorca in the thirteenth century, (larry j. simon, department of history, western michigan university). it was an impressive first day. the discussions inspired by the papers made clear that the field of medieval slavery studies has begun to collapse many long-held notions, including the idea that slavery was of only anecdotal importance in post-roman christian europe. a persistent view, even among scholars, is that slavery in the pre-modern world had a particular association with islam. the second day of sessions (wednesday) offered papers looking at slavery in the medieval islamic world. the question remains open as to whether the papers succeeded in challenging such a view. certainly, though, the papers moved the topic substantially forward. the first paper extended michael mccormick’s arguments on the early medieval slave trade by examining arabic sources that compliment his thesis (matthew s. gordon, miami university); the second paper looked at the religious imperative behind the act of manumission in islamic law (cristina de la puente, departamento de estudios judíos e islámicos, instituto de lenguas y culturas del mediterráneo (csic). the papers of the second session looked at questions regarding the role of slaves in medieval islamicate households. the first paper considered accounts of slaves (especially elite ghilmān) to determine the well-being of even the most privileged of slaves, using violence and peril to life, limb, and physical soundness as a standard of measurement (deborah tor, university of notre dame). the next paper also looked at elite slaves by focussing on rasūlid and najāḥid yemen and the roles of eunuchs and others and their conflicts with highstatus women (magdalena kloss, austrian academy of sciences). the third session of the day extended several of these themes. the first paper p r o v i d e d a l o o k a t d o m e s t i c s l a v e r y in thirteenth and fourteenth-century damascus by analysing names contained in reading certificates (samāʿāt) to show that the majority were themselves the first generation of slaves and that the rate of manumission was high (jan hagedorn, university of st. andrews). a second paper took on the famously itinerant household of ibn battuta as a case-study in how the lives of slaves might be viewed more broadly (marina tolmacheva, washington state university). the final session, perhaps the most al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) sessions on slavery: international medieval congress • 151 f o c u s e d , l o o k e d a t c o n c u b i n a g e a n d slavery. the first paper re-examined a s s u m p t i o n s r e g a r d i n g t h e m u s i c a l performances of enslaved women (karen moukheiber, orient institut beirut), the s e c o n d l o o k e d t h r o u g h t h e p r i s m o f medieval erotic literature (pernilla myrne, göteborgs universitet), and the final paper examined issues of gender, ethnicity, and slavery in the study of music in the medieval muslim regions (lisa nielson, case western reserve university). panels on the final day (thursday) c o n t a i n e d q u i t e i n t e r e s t i n g p a p e r s that challenged long-held assumptions r e g a r d i n g m e d i e v a l s l a v e r y . a fi r s t paper looked at length at hungarian historiography on slavery under the árpád kings (cameron sutt, austin peay state university). this was followed by a newly developed but extremely innovative discussion of the ethnonym “slav” and the manner in which it replaced latin terms inherited from antiquity in west european languages (marek jankowiak, university of oxford). the paper that followed discussed the medieval russian slave trade and (russian) exploitation of neighbouring regions (jukka korpela, university of eastern finland). this was followed by a paper that challenged the ‘whig model’ of the history of slavery and questioned whether reading medieval europe as being free of slavery was mistaking exceptional c a s e s f o r t h e n o r m a t i v e ( t h o m a s j . macmaster, morehouse college). the final panel concerned the changing role of the unfree in the post-roman west. a first paper considered the life of eligius of noyon and its depictions of the movement of the unfree (courtney l u c k h a r d t , u n i v e r s i t y o f s o u t h e r n mississippi). the paper that followed revisited arguments made by economists since the 1970s on the decisions underlying the use of unfree rather than free labour; t h e s u g g e s t i o n w a s m a d e t h a t w h i l e economic factors were significant, more weight should be given to the variables that acted to render individuals unfree (judith spicksley, university of york). the final paper focussed on bavaria in the high medieval period, arguing that a large slave population remained present there throughout the medieval period (samuel s. sutherland, department of history, ohio state university). the strong sense is that the study of slavery in the medieval world – long viewed either as of secondary importance or as largely settled – has taken on new life. many of the presenters suggested that, in their own particular sub-specialties, the evidence base has barely been scratched and analysis only begun. the origins of this new ferment in the field of slavery studies is not as evident but it is obvious that interest is growing and scholarship expanding. notes and brief communications al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 139-144 a man for all seasons: ibn ʿuqda and crossing sectarian boundaries in the 4th/10th century jonathan brown georgetown university (brownj2@georgetown.edu) it is well known that the sectarian boundaries of classical islam had not formed in the first, second or even third centuries ah – it was not until the dawn of the fourth century that we can say that the major boundary markers had been set. by the early 300/900’s, ibn ḥanbal and his cohort had established the central tenets of the ahl al-sunna wa al-jamāʿa,1 with 1. the earliest datable mention of the phrase ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamāʿa that i have found is in the writing of ḍirār b. ʿamr (d. 200/815), who uses the phrase “ṣāḥib sunna wa jamāʿa” dismissively to refer to what seems like early sunnis, and he writes of the sultan supposedly thanking him for saving him from the “ahl al-sunna wa’l-jamāʿa”; ḍirār b. ʿamr, kitāb al-taḥrīsh, ed. hüseyin hansu and mehmet keskin (istanbul: sharikat dār al-irshād; beirut: dār ibn ḥazm, 2014), 104, 130. the earliest datable usage by someone identifying with the term comes from al-tirmidhī (d. 279/892), jāmiʿ scholars such as abū al-al-ḥasan al-ashʿarī (d. 324/935-6) beginning to integrate rationalism and speculative theology into the expanding sunni tent. between 260/874 and 329/941 the final occultation of the twelfth imam transpired, providing the defining element of imami shiism. during the first two centuries of islam, it was therefore not at all unusual for scholarly interactions and influences to occur that would seem impossible in the sectarian milieu of later classical islam. early scholars and ḥadīth transmitters l a t e r s e e n a s p i l l a r s o f s u n n i i s l a m could be seen receiving ḥadīths from or studying with shiite or kharijite teachers, for example. sometimes such common al-tirmidhī: kitāb al-zakāt, bāb mā jā’a fī faḍl al-ṣadaqa. editor’s note a previous version of this article was published in al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 20/2 (2008), 55-58. for unknown reasons, however, the published text was a draft version of the article that contained errors. prof. jonathan brown offers here a revised and slightly expanded version of his article. 140 • jonathan brown al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) ground was explained through necessity. the second/eighth century kufan ḥadīth scholar jābir al-juʿfī (d. 128/745-6) was so deeply ensconced in the often-extremist moil of early shiite thought that even later imāmī shiites preferred to keep their distance from him.2 but he appears in major sunni hadith collections, such as the sunans of abū dāwūd, al-tirmidhī and ibn mājah. as the prominent second/eighthcentury sunni scholar wakīʿ b. al-jarrāḥ (d. 197/812) said, “if not for jābir al-juʿfī, the people of kufa would be without ḥadīths.”3 other times sunni scholars believed that a shiite’s sectarian leanings did not affect his overall probity and reliability – ibn maʿīn (d. 233/848) says of one ʿabd al-raḥmān b. sāliḥ: he may be a shiite, but “he would rather fall from the sky than lie about half a word.”4 abū al-ʿabbās aḥmad ibn ʿuqda, the subject of this article, is a fascinating case. a native of kufa who died in 332/944, we need not attempt to determine his actual character or trace his life story. suffice it to say that he was widely esteemed by all for his colossal memory (being in command of a corpus of at least 500,000 narrations) and his astounding library (600 camel loads).5 most importantly for 2. hussein modaressi, tradition and survival: a bibliographical survey of early shīʿite literature vol. 1 (oxford: oneworld, 2003), 92. 3. jāmiʿ al-tirmidhī: kitāb al-ṣalāt, bāb mā jāʾa fī faḍl al-adhān. as the later ḥanbalī scholar ibn rajab pointed out, this is patently not true. kufa enjoyed a slew of major ḥadīth transmitters in that era, such as al-aʿmash and abū isḥāq al-sabīʿī; ibn rajab, sharḥ ʿilal al-tirmidhī, ed. nūr al-dīn ʿitr, 2 vols. (n.p.: n.p., 1398/1978), 1:69-70. 4. al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, tārīkh al-baghdād, ed. muṣṭafā ʿabd al-qādir ʿaṭā, 14 vols. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1417/1997), 10:260. 5. ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, lisān al-mīzān (beirut: us, ibn ʿuqda represents a vestigial tract of common ground after the islamic sectarian boundaries had reified. the sunni, imami shiite and zaydi shiite traditions all accorded him great respect as a transmitter of revealed knowledge and as an architect of formalized muslim scholarship; this despite their recognition of his strong sectarian leanings. sunni scholars and ḥadīth critics of the fourth/tenth century onwards leveled serious but not uncommon critiques at ibn ʿuqda: he was a shiite who narrated ḥadīths insulting the companions in d i c t a t i o n s e s s i o n s , w i t h o n e ʿ a b d ā n al-ahwāzī saying that “ibn ʿuqda exited the boundaries of the ahl al-ḥadīth, and he should not be mentioned as one of them.” another accusation was that he brought ḥ a d ī t h n o t e b o o k s o f h i g h l y d u b i o u s authenticity into kufa and attributed them to kufan teachers.6 t h e s e a r e n o t e w o r t h y c r i t i c i s m s , but other sunnis before and after ibn ʿuqda (such as al-ḥākim al-naysābūrī, d. 405/1014) were tarnished with comparably barbed accusations, and they remained none the worse for wear. what is salient about ibn ʿuqda is that the criticisms about him were not limited to such clichéd and abstract accusations. they were tangible and highly objectionable. ibn al-jawzī (d. 597/1201) blames ibn ʿuqda by name f o r c i r c u l a t i n g t h e f o r g e d h a d i t h o f the sun’s reversing itself miraculously so that ʿalī could make up a prayer.7 dār al-fikr, n.d.), 1:264. 6. ibn ḥajar, lisān al-mīzān, 1:265. 7. ibn al-jawzī, kitāb al-mawḍūʿāt, ed. ʿabd al-raḥmān muḥammad ʿuthmān, 3 vols. (medina: al-maktaba al-salafiyya, 1386-88/1966-68), 1:356-7. aside from isnād criticisms, ibn al-jawzī and others pointed to the supposed ḥadīth contradicting al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) a man for all seasons • 141 another prophetic saying that the sun was only ever reversed for joshua (lam turadd al-shams illā ʿalā yushaʿ b. nūn). for versions of the ḥadīth of the sun being reversed for ʿalī, narrated through asmāʾ bt. ʿumays and al-ḥasan b. ʿalī (kāna rasūl allāh fī ḥujr ʿalī wa huwa yūḥā ilayhi fa-lammā surriya ʿanhu qāla yā ʿalī ṣallayta al-ʿaṣr? fa-qāla lā, fa-qāla allahumma innaka taʿlamu annahu kāna fī ḥājatika wa ḥājat rasūlika fa-rudd ʿalayhi al-shams fa-raddahā ʿalayhi fa-ṣallā wa ghābat al-shams / annahu ʿalayhi al-ṣalāt), see muḥammad b. aḥmad al-dūlābī (d. 310/923, of rayy then of egypt), al-dhurriyya al-ṭāhira al-nabawiyya (kuwait: al-dār al-salafiyya, 1407/1986), 91-2. another version of the ḥadīth comes through jābir from the prophet (anna al-nabī amara al-shams fa-taʾakhkharat sāʿatan min nahār); abū al-qāsim sulaymān al-ṭabarānī, al-muʿjam al-awsaṭ, ed. ṭāriq b. ʿawaḍ allāh al-ḥusaynī, 10 vols. (cairo: dar al-ḥaramayn, 1415/1995), 4:224. the best amalgamation of these narrations was made by abū jaʿfar al-ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/932), sharḥ mushkil al-āthār, ed. shuʿayb al-arnāʾūṭ, 16 vols. (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1994), 3:92-104. ibn al-jawzī relied for parts of his criticism on al-ʿuqaylī (d. 323/934); abū jaʿfar al-ʿuqaylī, kitāb al-ḍuʿafāʾ al-kabīr, ed. ʿabd al-muʿṭī amīn qalʿajī, 4 vols. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1404/1984), 3:337. for other scholars who considered this ḥadīth to be forged, see shams al-dīn al-dhahabī (d. 748/1348), mīzān al-iʿtidāl fī naqd al-rijāl, ed. ʿalī muḥammad al-bijāwī, 4 vols. (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, [n.d.], reprint of 1963-4 cairo ʿīsā al-bābī al-ḥalabī edition), 3:170; mullā ʿalī al-qārī (d. 1014/1606), al-asrār al-marfūʿa, ed. muḥammad luṭfī ṣabbāgh (beirut: al-maktab al-islāmī, 1986), 213, 397-8 (though he notes that al-ṭabarānī and others included this ḥadīth via a ḥasan isnād); muḥammad nāṣir al-dīn al-albānī (d. 1999 ce), silsilat al-aḥādīth al-ḍaʿīfa wa’lmawḍūʿa (riyadh: maktabat al-maʿārif, 1400/2000), 2:395-402 (an extensive discussion of the isnād ad/ transmitters in the book, he would otherwise have left such an esteemed s c h o l a r a s i b n ʿ u q d a o u t . a b ū y a ʿ l ā al-khalīlī (d. 446/1054) calls ibn ʿuqda “one of the ḥadīth masters (min8 al-ḥuffāẓ and matn flaws of the narrations). many scholars, however, have considered this ḥadīth to be ṣaḥīḥ, for example al-ṭaḥāwī (op. cit.), qāḍī ʿiyāḍ (d. 544/1149), kitāb al-shifā (beirut: dār ibn ḥazm, 2002), 177 (it is thābit); jalāl al-dīn al-suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), al-laʾālīʾ al-maṣnūʿa fī al-aḥādīth al-mawḍūʿa, ed. ṣāliḥ muhammad ʿuwayda, 3 vols. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1416/1996), 1:308-13 (he argues that, since no prophet was given a miracle without muḥammad being given its like or better, and the sun was reversed for joshua, then muḥammad must have produced the same miracle); idem, al-khaṣāʾiṣ al-kubrā, 2 vols. (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, reprint of 1320/1902-3 hyderabad edition), 2:82 (here al-suyūṭī claims some of the isnāds for this ḥadīth meet the criteria of ṣaḥīḥ); ismāʿīl al-ʿajlūnī (d. 1748-9 ce), kashf al-khafā, ed. aḥmad qalāsh (cairo: dār al-turāth, n.d.), 1:255-6, 516 (following al-suyūṭī’s reasoning). murtaḍā al-zabīdī (d. 1791 ce) considered the ḥadīth to be reliable and offered rebuttals of ibn al-jawzī’s criticism. he notes how one of ibn al-jawzī’s objections is that once the prayer time ends the prayer is not admissible anymore even if sun returns. al-zabīdī presents scholarly opinions that, if the sun returns, then the time returns and performing the prayer becomes valid; muḥammad murtaḍā al-zabīdī, itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn sharḥ iḥyā’ ʿulūm al-dīn, 10 vols. (beirut: mu’assasat al-tārīkh al-ʿarabī, 1414/1994), 7:191-2. abdallāh al-ghumārī (d. 1993) says the ḥadīth is ṣaḥīḥ; al-ghumārī, afḍal maqūl fī manāqib afḍal rasūl (cairo: makatabat al-qāhira, 2005), 24. 8. al-khaṭīb, tārīkh baghdād, 12:160. al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī (d. 463/1071) notes that one severe shiite (al-ʿabbās b. ʿumar al-kalūdhānī, d. 414/1023) took u n a c c e p t a b l e ḥ a d ī t h s o n t h e v i r t u e s (faḍā’il) of early shiites narrated by ibn ʿuqda and attributed them to the widely a d m i r e d s u n n i c h i e f j u d g e o f k u f a , al-maḥāmilī (d. 330/941).8 yet sunnis heaped praise on ibn ʿuqda as well. in his dictionary of criticized ḥadīth transmitters, ibn ʿadī (d. 365/976-7) calls him “a master of knowledge and memory, at the forefront of this science (ṣāḥib maʿrifa wa ḥifẓ wa muqaddam fī hādhihi al-ṣanʿa).” he adds that, if not for his commitment to mentioning all impugned 142 • jonathan brown al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) al-kibār),” adding, “and he is the shaykh of the shiites.” shams al-dīn al-dhahabī (d. 748/1348), no lover of shiites, calls ibn ʿuqda “the ḥadīth master of his age and the oceanic ḥadīth scholar (ḥāfiẓ al-ʿaṣr wa al-muḥaddith al-baḥr).” al-dhahabī says he even devoted a small book to just his bio.9 in his biographical dictionary of the shāfiʿī school of law, tāj al-dīn al-subkī (d. 771/1370) lists ibn ʿuqda as one of “the ḥadīth masters of the shariah,”10 noting that vaunted sunni ḥadīth scholars like al-dāraquṭnī (d. 385/995), ibn al-jiʿābī (d. 355/966) and al-ḥākim all said, “i’ve never seen anyone with more mastery of ḥadīth than ibn ʿuqda.” 11 al-ḥākim used ibn ʿuqda as a transmitter in his mustadrak, a collection of ḥadīths he claimed met the lofty standards of al-bukhārī and muslim, and al-dāraquṭnī used him in his sunan. in addition, other sunni ḥadīth collectors such as al-ṭabarānī (d. 360/971) and al-silafī (d. 576/1180) also included ḥadīths transmitted by ibn ʿuqda in their works. one story in particular seems to epitomize the grudging respect that sunnis paid ibn ʿuqda for his expertise in ḥadīth. in his tārīkh, aḥmad b. aḥmad al-ḥāfiẓ tells that one ibn ṣāʿid narrated a ḥadīth the isnād of which ibn ʿuqda rejected. ibn ṣāʿid, however, had powerful connections, and ibn ʿuqda was dragged before the vizier to be interrogated about his insulting criticism. the vizier wanted to know who 9. shams al-dīn al-dhahabī, tadhkirat al-ḥuffāẓ, ed. zakariyyāʾ ʿumayrāt, 4 vols. in 2 (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1419/1998), 3:40-42. 10. tāj al-dīn al-subkī, ṭabaqāt al-shāfiʿiyya al-kubrā, ed. maḥmūd muḥammad al-ṭanāḥī and ʿabd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-ḥulw, 2nd ed. (cairo: hujr, 1413/1992), 1:314-6. 11. al-subkī, ṭabaqāt, 10:222. could settle the matter, and no less a vaunted expert than ibn abī ḥātim al-rāzī (d. 327/938) was called in to consult. he sided with ibn ʿuqda.12 furthermore, not only did leading sunnis approve of ibn ʿuqda as a ḥadīth transmitter, they accepted him as a ḥadīth critic. in other words, they accepted his opinions on the worthiness of other ḥadīth transmitters. both al-dhahabī and shams al-dīn al-sakhāwī (d. 897/1402) list him as one of the authoritative ḥadīth transmitter critics,13 although al-sakhāwī notes how he is an example of a critic whose opinions need to be considered in the light of his ideological/sectarian stances.14 ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī (d. 852/1449) uses him as a critical source in at least three biographies in his tahdhīb al-tahdhīb. the earliest surviving evaluation of the ṣaḥīḥayn of al-bukhārī and muslim comes from ibn ʿuqda, and, in fact, he composed the earliest known mustakhraj on the basis of al-bukhārī’s ṣaḥīḥ.15 ibn ʿuqda is even used as an exemplar, and his scholarly works and opinions are cited as compelling precedent by later sunnis. in his foundational work on the ḥadīth sciences, the jamiʿ, al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī employs ibn ʿuqda as an 12. ibn ḥajar, lisān al-mīzān, 1: 266. 13. shams al-dīn al-sakhāwī, “al-mutakallimūn fī al-rijāl,” in arbaʿ rasā’il fī ʿulūm al-ḥadīth, ed. ʿabd al-fattāḥ abū ghudda, 6th ed. (beirut: maktab al-maṭbūʿāt al-islāmiyya, 1419/1999), 111; al-dhahabī, “dhikr man yuʿtamadu qawluhu fī al-jarḥ wa’l-taʿdīl,” arbaʿ rasā’il, 207. 14. al-sakhāwī, fatḥ al-mughīth bi-sharḥ alfiyyat al-ḥadīth, ed. ʿalī ḥusayn ʿalī, 5 vols. (cairo: maktabat al-sunna, 1424/2003), 4:363. 15. al-khaṭīb, tārīkh baghdād, 14:454; jonathan brown, the canonization of al-bukhārī and muslim (leiden: brill, 2007), 127. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) a man for all seasons • 143 e x a m p l e o f h o w i t i s a c c e p t a b l e f o r cont emporaries t o narrat e from one another. in the anecdote provided by al-khaṭīb, ibn ʿuqda’s shiism is prominent. a scholar from isfahan meets ibn ʿuqda in kufa and asks to hear ḥadīths from him. when ibn ʿuqda discovered that the man was from isfahan, he began railing against the city for being antagonistic to the family of the prophet and housing their enemies. to this the man replies that there are in isfahan plenty of shiites who love ʿalī. then ibn ʿuqda examined in him on whom he had studied with in isfahan, responding angrily when the man admitted that he had not heard from people that ibn ʿuqda thought were superb. he was also upset that the man had not heard the musnad of abū dāwūd al-ṭayālisī (d. 204/820), since “its well spring is from isfahan.”16 in his seminal work on the ḥadīth sciences, ibn al-ṣalāḥ (d. 643/1245) uses ibn ʿuqba’s allowing the narration by ijāza as proof of its acceptability (along with other examples like al-khaṭīb and dāraquṭnī).17 when zayn al-dīn al-ʿirāqī (d. 806/1404) rendered ibn al-ṣalāḥ’s book in poetic form, ibn ʿuqda’s name even graces a verse. in the zaydi shiite ḥadīth tradition, ibn ʿuqda is seen as a founding figure (he seems to have espoused the jārūdī zaydi view). his book listing and identifying those people who transmitted ḥadīths from jaʿfar al-ṣādiq (some 4,000 in all) is seen by zaydi scholars like ṣārim al-dīn al-wazīrī (d. 915/1508) as the starting point of zaydi 16. al-khaṭīb, al-jamiʿ li-ikhtilāf al-rāwī wa ādāb al-sāmiʿ, ed. muḥammad ra’fat saʿīd, 2 vols. (mansoura, egypt: dār al-wafā’, 1422/2002), 2:242. 17. abū ʿamr ibn al-ṣalāḥ, muqaddimat ibn al-ṣalāḥ, ed. ʿāʾisha ʿabd al-raḥmān (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1411/1990), 343. ḥadīth scholarship.18 al-wazīrī also notes that ibn ʿuqda wrote a book on the ḥadīth of ghadīr khumm, in which muḥammad commands his followers to take ʿalī as their master, mentioning a total of 105 chains of transmission for the report.19 moving further away from sunnism, imami shiites also held ibn ʿuqda in high esteem, this on the basis of his book on the students of jaʿfar al-ṣādiq as well as his commitment to preserving and transmitting the uṣūl, or the ḥadīth c o l l e c t i o n s c o p i e d f r o m t h e v a r i o u s i m a m s . 2 0 e t a n k o h l b e r g n o t e s t h a t imami shiites respected him despite his jārūdī zaydi leaning. in fact, he was so prominent a transmitter in the four shiite canonical ḥadīth collections that he was indispensable.21 conclusion i t i s n o t u n u s u a l t o c o m e a c r o s s a major sunni ḥadīth transmitter or prominent ḥadīth critic whose reputation was tarnished by accusations such as shiism. but what is interesting about ibn ʿuqda is that he actually was shiite -no one ever debated that. this would have been acceptable two hundred or even one hundred years earlier, before the 18. he was a main source for later zaydi scholars; ʿabdallāh ḥamūd al-ʿizzī, ʿulum al-ḥadīth ʿind al-zaydiyya wa al-muḥaddithīn (ṣaʿda: muʾassasat al-imām zayd b. ʿalī, 1421/2001), 225. 19. ṣārim al-dīn ibrāhīm al-wazīrī, al-falak al-dawwār fī ʿulūm al-ḥadīth wa al-fiqh wa al-āthār, ed. muḥammad yaḥyā ʿazzān (ṣaʿda: maktabat al-turāth al-islāmī and dār al-turāth al-yamanī, 1415/1994), 105. 20. etan kohlbergh, “al-uṣūl al-arbaʿumiʾa,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 10 (1987): 130-1. 21. kohlberg, “al-uṣūl al-arbaʿumiʾa,” 130, 135. 144 • jonathan brown al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) categories of sunni and shiite had gelled. in the early to mid fourth/ninth century, however, ibn ʿuqda’s case is unique. that he became and remained a respected fi g u r e t o t h r e e c o m p e t i n g s e c t a r i a n traditions (sunnism, zaydism and imami shiism), suggests that muslim scholarly society had criteria for expertise that could transcend sectarianism. it is not unusual to come across a ḥadīth transmitter in major sunni ḥadīth collections who was accused of shiism but was nonetheless accepted. but ibn ʿuqda, uniquely as far as i know, was accepted as a ḥadīth critic. it is interesting that we have no record that ibn ʿuqda ever contested charges that he was a jārūdī shiite – he was indeed a man for all seasons. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 213-218 book review in the year 400/1010, after more than three decades of toil, the poet abū a l q ā s i m f i r d a w s ī c o m p l e t e d t h e second, and probably final, redaction of his shāhnāmah.1 the work was begun around 366/976–7, when the samanid dynasty was still nominally in power, but after 388/998 a new empire, based in ghaznah, came to control much of iran and central asia (and beyond). the ghaznavid ruler at this time of expansion was maḥmūd ibn sebüktegin (r. 388–421/998–1030), and he apparently became the new dedicatee of the shāhnāmah by default. as firdawsī revised and expanded his epic, he added a number of passages in praise of maḥmūd. this much is clear. but the question of what, if 1. romanization of persian and arabic words in this review follows the library of congress standard, with some exceptions for proper names (including abolfazl khatibi). historical dates are generally given according to both the islamic (ah) and julian (ce) calendars. please note that the english translation of the book title provided above is taken from the back cover. anything, took place between the poet and his assumed patron after the completion of the work has been one of the longest-running controversies in persian literary history. according to popular narratives that can be traced back at least as far as the mid-twelfth century ce, firdawsī traveled to ghaznah to present the shāhnāmah to maḥmūd, with the understanding that there would be a generous monetary reward. unfortunately, as the story goes in its oldest documented version, there were certain individuals at the ghaznavid court who disliked firdawsī, and they spoke to maḥmūd, a staunch orthodox sunni, about the poet’s shiʿi (rāfiżī) leanings and allegedly muʿtazilī theological views. as a result of this defamation, maḥmūd decided to grant firdawsī twenty thousand silver dirhams—a paltry sum for a masterpiece of fifty thousand lines. firdawsī was so offended that he went straight to the public bath, bought a beer, and gave away all of the money. he then fled ghaznah for abolfazl khatibi, āyā firdawsī maḥmūd-i ghaznavī rā hajv guft? hajv’nāmah-i mansūb bih firdawsī: bar’rasī-yi taḥlīlī, taṣḥīḥ-i intiqādī, va sharḥ-i bayt’hā [did ferdowsi satirize mahmud of ghazni? the satire attributed to ferdowsi: analysis, textual criticism, and commentary] (tehran: pardīs-i dānish, 2016), 226 pages. isbn: 9786003000568, price: $23.95 (paperback). theodore s. beers university of chicago (tbeers@uchicago.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 214 • theodore s. beers the northwest, eventually seeking refuge at the court of the bāvand dynasty in ṭabaristān. once there, the poet composed a verse satire (hajv, hijāʾ, or hajv’nāmah) against maḥmūd, in which he lambasted the king for his lack of appreciation for a work as grand as the shāhnāmah. the bāvandid ruler, who was himself a vassal of the ghaznavids, managed to defuse the situation by paying firdawsī for the hajv’nāmah and then expunging it. only a few lines, we are told, survived in popular memory. some time later, maḥmūd realized that he had done wrong by firdawsī, and he sent a caravan bearing a new, much larger gift. the poet died shortly before its arrival. this is a remarkable tale, and again, it has a long history. the earliest surviving account of firdawsī’s interaction with maḥmūd (i.e., the one just summarized) is given in the chahār maqālah of niẓāmī ʿarūżī, a prose work written around 551/1156 under ghurid patronage.2 niẓāmī claims to have received some of his information from the locals of nīshāpūr, near firdawsī’s home city of ṭūs, during a v i s i t i n 5 1 4 / 1 1 2 0 – 2 1 . i n a f u r t h e r indication of the currency of this story from a relatively early date, both niẓāmī ganjavī (d. ca. 605/1209) and farīd al-dīn ʿaṭṭār (d. 618/1221) refer to maḥmūd’s mistreatment of firdawsī at several points in their own narrative poems. finally, and most importantly, many manuscripts of the shāhnāmah contain some version of the hajv’nāmah, included either as part of an introduction to the work, or at the end as a kind of epilogue. this is where 2. see edward g. browne, revised translation of the “chahár maqála” (“four discourses”) of niẓámíi-ʿarúḍí of samarqand (cambridge, 1921), 54–9. the problems begin; and the problems are numerous and confounding. o u r o l d e s t e x t a n t c o p i e s o f t h e shāhnāmah date to the seventh/thirteenth century, meaning that the deepest layer of textual criticism is separated from the authorship of the work by two hundred years. 3 whether or not firdawsī ever visited ghaznah, there was ample time for stories involving him and maḥmūd to be told and retold—as indeed seems to have happened—with the original truth of the matter being difficult to recover. the text of the purported hajv’nāmah consists of just thirty or forty lines of poetry in some early shāhnāmah manuscripts, while it runs to nearly one hundred and fifty lines in certain later codices. throughout this range, the variations between one copy and the next are often extensive. it is also difficult to reconcile these presentations with the account of niẓāmī ʿarūżī, who, writing in the 1150s, quoted what he claimed were the only six surviving lines of firdawsī’s diatribe against maḥmūd. how are we to explain the dramatic growth of this poem, except as the result of a creative scribal tradition which, over the same period, increased the shāhnāmah’s total size by roughly twenty percent? looking closely at any recension of the hajv’nāmah 3. there may be a few exceptions to this statement, depending on how one views the earliest works that quote lines from firdawsī, such as the anonymous chronicle mujmal al-tavārīkh va al-qiṣaṣ (begun in 520/1126), and indeed the chahār maqālah. it is worth noting, however, that these texts have also survived in significantly later manuscripts. while external sources that discuss firdawsī and transmit segments of his work are clearly important, and provide some insight into the early textual history of the shāhnāmah, the fact remains that we have nothing copied before the seventh/thirteenth century. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) abolfazl khatibi’s āyā firdawsī maḥmūd-i ghaznavī rā hajv guft? • 215 only reveals further problems. some lines appear to have been duplicated from the body of the shāhnāmah. others are stylistically inferior, their meaning difficult to parse. still other lines have metrical faults, or employ arabic loanwords that occur nowhere else in firdawsī’s œuvre. (the persian epic is famous for its small share of arabic-derived vocabulary.) faced with such an array of historical dilemmas and textual inconsistencies (only a few of which have been mentioned here), scholars of the shāhnāmah grew increasingly skeptical about the legitimacy of the hajv’nāmah over the second half of the twentieth century. 4 this trend went hand-in-hand with the process of establishing critical editions of the epic— first in moscow by e. e. bertels’ team, and later by djalal khaleghi-motlagh and his collaborators. in recent years, something approaching a consensus has developed among historians of persian literature, that firdawsī may have gone to ghaznah; that there may have been some unpleasantness between him and maḥmūd; and that other parts of the traditional narrative, including the composition of new verses against the ruler, could reflect actual events; but that we lack the necessary source material to substantiate these conjectures. more to the point, the highly problematic nature of the hajv’nāmah as it occurs in different manuscripts makes it difficult to imagine that any version of the poem could be labeled an authentic work of firdawsī. and so it was set aside. the careful methods 4. several references on this topic are given by djalal khaleghi-motlagh in two entries in encyclopædia iranica: “ferdowsi, abu’l-qāsem i. life,” and “ferdowsi, abu’l-qāsem ii. hajw-nāma.” earlier studies by muḥammad amīn riyāḥī and maḥmūd khān shīrānī are of particular importance. that were used to produce scholarly editions of the shāhnāmah itself were never applied to the hajv’nāmah. i t i s h e r e t h a t a n i m p o r t a n t n e w monograph by abolfazl khatibi enters the conversation. for the first time, a researcher has collected a large number of copies of the hajv’nāmah—with a focus on earlier manuscripts, including those that form the basis of the khaleghi-motlagh edition—and studied them in depth to see what fresh insight can be gained. the short title of the book is āyā firdawsī maḥmūd-i ghaznavī rā hajv guft? or, in the translation provided on the back cover, did ferdowsi satirize mahmud of ghazni? in reality, only the first chapter (of four) is directly concerned with answering this question. khatibi begins by explaining the problem of the hajv’nāmah, after which he offers a concise but comprehensive review of prior scholarship. he then addresses the matter of the poem’s status at some length (pp. 28–70). the conclusion that khatibi reaches is in line with the suspicions of many shāhnāmah scholars; namely, that whatever may have transpired between firdawsī and maḥmūd, we have no sound basis on which to claim the authenticity of the hajv’nāmah, whether by accepting one of the versions found in manuscripts, or by trying to separate some “original” core of the text from the accretions of the scribal tradition. going perhaps a step further, khatibi casts doubt on the idea that there was ever a unified, substantial poem in which firdawsī denounced maḥmūd. some of the early sources, such as the (arabic) āthār al-bilād of zakarīyā ibn muḥammad qazvīnī (d. 682/1283), give the impression that firdawsī composed a few lines out of frustration at the ruler’s failure to reward him as he deserved. if this were true, then al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 216 • theodore s. beers it probably would not make sense to refer to a hajv’nāmah in the first place. while khatibi’s verdict may not come as a surprise to specialists, he is obviously able to discuss the subject with greater authority than earlier commentators, since he has assembled all of the relevant sources. in critiquing the legitimacy of the hajv’nāmah, khatibi emphasizes problems that he organizes into six categories. first, there is a relatively large number of arabic words in the hajv’nāmah, as compared to the remainder of the shāhnāmah. this is most striking in the later, larger versions of the poem; but even in the six lines provided by niẓāmī ʿarūżī, there are three loanwords—ghamz, ḥikāyat, and ḥimāyat— that cannot be found anywhere else in the work of firdawsī. second, khatibi observes a lack of “organic connections” (payvand’hā-yi andām’vār) among the verses of the hajv’nāmah. in his view, the text reads more like a patchwork of individual lines drawn from various places. third, on another point of style, khatibi is critical of the empty verbosity (iṭnāb) of the hajv’nāmah, which is especially clear in the way that certain passages were expanded over time. some of the later copies have added lines that are little more than lists of the kings whose stories are told by firdawsī. fourth—and here we come to an objectively severe problem—many lines in the hajv’nāmah appear to have been copied or adapted from elsewhere in the shāhnāmah, and, in a few cases, from narrative poems by other authors. one of the oldest versions, found in the cairo manuscript of 741/1340–41, includes a line taken from the būstān (655/1257) of saʿdī! fifth, khatibi points out that there are early persian prose works, such as the rāḥat al-ṣudūr (ca. 601/1204–5) of muḥammad ibn ʿalī rāvandī, which t r a n s m i t a s u b s t a n t i a l a m o u n t o f firdawsī’s poetry; but they do not quote any lines unique to the hajv’nāmah. sixth, and finally, there is the blatant (in khatibi’s estimation) technical and stylistic weakness (nāʾustuvārī) of much of the poem, particularly in later versions. it may be that not all of these arguments will be equally persuasive for all readers, but, taken together, they make it more difficult than ever to accept the authenticity of the hajv’nāmah. and they stand beside the badly disordered codicological situation, which is confronted in the next section of khatibi’s book. the second chapter (pp. 71–86) provides a concise guide to the early manuscripts that contain the hajv’nāmah in one form or another, as well as an explanation of the approach taken by khatibi in attempting to construct discrete recensions of the poem. he has made use of about twenty manuscripts of the shāhnāmah, plus a few ancillary sources. (for example, there is a jung, or book of miscellany, which includes a hajv’nāmah of thirty-eight lines and may date to the first half of the eighth/fourteenth century.) in all, khatibi lists twenty-six copies, of which sixteen are considered “primary” (aṣlī) for the recensions to which they belong, while the remainder are “secondary” (farʿī), used for corroboration and largely drawn from newer codices. it should be noted that all of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the shāhnāmah have been considered, including those that were relied upon by khaleghi-motlagh and his colleagues. not all of them contain a hajv’nāmah— the incomplete florence manuscript of 614/1217, for instance, seems to have o f f e r e d a m o r e p o s i t i v e a c c o u n t o f al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) abolfazl khatibi’s āyā firdawsī maḥmūd-i ghaznavī rā hajv guft? • 217 firdawsī’s rapport with maḥmūd—but khatibi has incorporated all available resources, with the result that his work will pair nicely with the critical edition of the shāhnāmah. in the third chapter (pp. 87–120), khatibi’s constructed recensions of the hajv’nāmah are presented. there are four, in addition to the original six lines transmitted by niẓāmī ʿarūżī, and they mostly proceed in both chronological order and increasing size. (the correlation between the date of a manuscript and the number of lines in its hajv’nāmah is unmistakable.) the first post-niẓāmī recension is labeled 1a; it consists of forty-four lines and is drawn from the introductions of three manuscripts dating to the eighth/fourteenth century. next is recension 1b, which is clearly related but larger, at seventy-nine lines; it is based primarily on introductory material from five manuscripts of the ninth and early tenth centuries ah. recension 2 is quite different; it comprises just thirty-two lines, sharing little with 1a or 1b, and it is sourced from the end of six manuscripts dating between the eighth and tenth centuries. finally, recension 3 is the longest, at 143 lines; it is based again on introductory sections, with four primary manuscripts f r o m t h e n i n t h , t e n t h , a n d e l e v e n t h centuries ah. the rough impression given by khatibi’s work is that one form of the hajv’nāmah evolved from the fragment quoted by niẓāmī ʿarūżī (among other sources), growing progressively larger into recensions 1a and 1b as part of the prefatory material often added to the shāhnāmah. a separate textual tradition may have given rise to recension 2, which is placed at the end of manuscripts and consists of mostly new lines. (none of it comes from niẓāmī ʿarūżī.) then, in later codices, the hajv’nāmah continued to grow, building upon all prior versions; and this is what khatibi designates recension 3. of course, none of this is straightforward. as khatibi acknowledges, it is unusual to find any two early manuscripts in w h i c h t h e h a j v ’ n ā m a h h a s t h e s a m e number of lines—let alone that the text be identical. the reader may be tempted to conclude that every copy represents a recension unto itself. again, however, khatibi discusses these problems openly. he is clear about his methods and his intent, and the resulting edition is a huge improvement over what was previously available. most importantly, even if one were to take issue with the form of these composite recensions—and there is no need to treat them as authoritative—the variations among manuscripts are listed. now we know which lines are found in which copies of the hajv’nāmah, as well as the broad arc of the poem’s development over a few centuries. the fourth chapter of the book (pp. 121–72) is devoted to commentary on individual lines (or groups of lines) from each recension. potentially unfamiliar words are defined; attempts are made to parse ambiguous phrases; material that seems to have been taken from the body of the shāhnāmah is traced back to its sources; etc. khatibi also uses this chapter as a place to record additional lines that occur only in his “secondary” copies of the hajv’nāmah. (his stated goal is to document as much as possible from the manuscripts that he consulted.) following these notes, the book ends with four shorter reference sections: a useful list of all of the lines in the hajv’nāmah and where to find each of them in the recensions (pp. 173–94); al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 218 • theodore s. beers photographs of some of the manuscripts (195–207); an index of proper names (208–15); and a bibliography (216–26). t h e r e a r e q u e s t i o n s a b o u t t h e hajv’nāmah that will probably continue to be debated. for example, how should we deal with lines that are strong, unique, and attested from an early date? many copies of the poem begin with the following famous statement: “o shah maḥmūd, conqueror of lands / if you fear no man, then fear god!” 5 should we refuse to attribute such a line to firdawsī because it is part of a problematic whole? more broadly, it is worth wondering about the process whereby recent scholarly editions of persian classics have either excised or modified passages that were widely known and beloved for ages in their previous, perhaps corrupted form. (other examples include the introduction to the story of rustam and suhrāb in the shāhnāmah, 5. ayā shāh maḥmūd-i kishvar’gushāy / zi-kas gar na-tarsī bi-tars az khudāy. see recensions 1a and 1b in khatibi, pp. 88, 92. this line also occurs in recension 3, albeit not at the beginning; see p. 115. and the opening lines of the maṡnavī of rūmī, d. 672/1273.) we might also ask what it means that popular narratives about the conflict between firdawsī and maḥmūd developed relatively soon after the poet’s death. niẓāmī ʿarūżī claims to have spoken about the issue with people in nīshāpūr in 514/1120–21. the lore surrounding firdawsī and his interactions with the ghaznavid court therefore seems to predate, by a considerable margin, our earliest extant manuscripts of the shāhnāmah. how much can we confidently reject? but these are difficult questions that may never be settled. for the time being, the work of abolfazl khatibi represents a major step forward in our understanding of the hajv’nāmah. he has, with his edition, carried out the one arduous task that was most needed. this book deserves a place on the shelf of anyone who cares about the textual history of the shāhnāmah. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 194-196 book review fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī (d. 606/1209) has been the subject of much recent schol-arship that has affirmed his importance as an innovative thinker, who had a hand in advancing the many disciplines in which he wrote. tariq jaffer’s new book stands on the shoulders of long-standing work by the likes of ignaz goldziher and josef van ess, as well as scholars who have recently written on al-rāzī including ayman shihadeh and michel lagarde. j a ff e r a d d s v a l u a b l e i n s i g h t s t o t h e available work on this towering figure in islamic intellectual history. this book is not meant to be a comprehensive account of al-rāzī’s thought but rather a focused examination of his methodology, particularly in his famous commentary on the qurʾān, the mafātīh al-ghayb. jaffer shows how tafsīr, in al-rāzī’s hands, becomes more complex and comprehensive than simply an exegesis in the narrow sense; it provides, rather, “a context in which philosophical questions can be examined,” by using critical reasoning to arrive at truth (173-4). j a ff e r e x p l o r e s s e v e r a l r e l a t e d dimensions of al-rāzī’s thought in the service of demonstrating the scholar’s i n n o v a t i v e a d a p t a t i o n o f d i s p a r a t e methodologies to the genre of tafsīr. in his opening chapter, he briefly takes account of the history of doubt in islamic t h o u g h t a s a m e t h o d o f a r r i v i n g a t personal understanding, highlighting al-rāzī’s effort to escape from taqlīd, the uncritical acceptance of authority, in both his philosophy and exegesis. in order to eschew taqlīd, al-rāzī implemented a dialectical method, raising questions and formulating arguments so to achieve a critical investigation of the philosophical a n d t h e o l o g i c a l i s s u e s t h a t t h e t e x t raises in the reader’s mind. al-rāzī was not the only thinker to apply this type of method in his writings around this time in history, jaffer writes, but he was unique in pioneering its use in tafsīr. tariq jaffer, rāzī: master of qurʾānic interpretation and theological reasoning (oxford: oxford university press, 2015), viii+244 pages. isbn: 9780199947997, price: $78.00. rachel anne friedman program in comparative literature, williams college (raf2@williams.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 195 • rachel anne friedman t h e i n d i v i d u a l e ff o r t t o a r r i v e a t u n d e r s t a n d i n g r a t h e r t h a n b l i n d l y accepting authorities’ conclusions goes hand in hand with privileging the intellect, ʿaql, as a tool for approaching islamic thought. the championing of ʿaql, over and above the authority of transmitted sources (manqūlāt), is conventionally seen as central to muʿtazilite thought. jaffer, in his second chapter, demonstrates al-rāzī’s elevating of the status of ʿaql in tafsīr, thus challenging his identity as a wholehearted ashʿarite and positioning h i m i n s t e a d a s h a v i n g a “ s t r o n g l y muʿtazilite” methodology (55). in so doing, jaffer demonstrates the way in which al-rāzī assigns the intellect priority over revelation, placing limits on the authority of the qurʾān and hadīth. j a ff e r d r a w s c o n n e c t i o n s b e t w e e n this hierarchy and particular facets of al-rāzī’s commentary. applying ʿaql to qurʾānic exegesis, for al-rāzī, meant, most prominently, using reason to determine when non-literal interpretation of a verse is in order. the reader’s ʿaql determines when the plain meaning of a verse is in conflict with rational evidence, providing the cue to read the verse figuratively. ʿaql also plays a central role in establishing the credibility of the qurʾān. it is logically i m p o s s i b l e , i n a l r ā z ī ’ s t h o u g h t , f o r scripture to confirm itself: it requires a w i t n e s s . t h u s , t h e c r e d i b i l i t y o f muḥammad himself, and not simply the attestation of miracles, must be subject to rational confirmation (chapter three). ultimately, it is reason that tells us god would not send a false prophet. these fascinating explorations of the results of al-rāzī’s privileging of ʿaql are a strength of jaffer’s book. the final two chapters of the book consist of case studies of al-rāzī’s tafsīr, carefully chosen to highlight al-rāzī’s adaptation of non-traditional sources and methods in his commentary. jaffer, in chapter four, provides a detailed analysis of al-rāzī’s interpretation of the light verse (q 24:35) as a means of showing that al-rāzī employed avicennian thought as well as the paradoxical logic of al-ghazali’s interpretation in his commentary on the particular āya, ultimately staging a developed theory of knowledge through this exegesis. the methods of avicenna’s allegorical falsafa and al-ghazali’s sufi principles were adopted into sunni tafsīr in this way. jaffer turns, in chapter five, to al-rāzī’s doctrine of the soul in mafātīh al-ghayb. his comments showcase the adoption of muʿtazilite thought on the soul as well as al-rāzī’s mediation between falāsifa and theologians’ disagreements on the topic of the soul. these later chapters of jaffer’s book are very detailed and replete with lengthy quotations. a thorough reading will nonetheless reward the reader who is interested in the fine points of al-rāzī’s exegesis and its relationship to other thinkers’ explanations of the light verse and the soul. though jaffer’s book is a focused study of al-rāzī’s methodology, particularly in his tafsīr, the book does strive to place al-rāzī into the context of his position in the history of islamic thought. al-rāzī was not the first thinker to make many of the important intellectual moves that jaffer examines, and the book provides some background on earlier thinkers such as al-ghazālī (d. 505/1111), accounting for the ways in which al-rāzī responded to and incorporated his predecessors’ insights into his thought. jaffer considers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) tariq jaffer’s rāzī: master of qurʾānic interpretation • 196 the influence that al-rāzī’s methodology had on later islamic thought, referencing research that has shown its adoption among sunni scholars, such as al-ījī (d. c. 756/1355), al-taftazānī (d. 793/1390), and al-jurjānī (d. 816/1413), who drew on al-rāzī’s taʾwīl methodology (117). he also looks closely at the traditionalist rejection of the ʿaqlī method, as represented by ibn taymiyya (d. 728/1328). jaffer’s book is a solid contribution to scholarship on al-rāzī as well as the broader development of islamic disciplines in the “postclassical” period. over and above academic work on individual fields of thought such as exegesis, philosophy, and theology, jaffer offers a perspective into the cross-pollination of thought across disciplines. by showing the ways in which al-rāzī applies a method used in one discipline to his writing in another, jaffer describes and analyzes those methods that were characteristic of al-rāzī as a thinker, as opposed more narrowly as an exegete or theologian. the book provides an account, illustrated through adeptly translated excerpts of al-rāzī’s writings, of al-rāzī’s commitment to integrating ʿaql into tafsīr. in fact, as jaffer shows, al-rāzī saw the qurʾān itself as being organized according to rational logic and containing answers t o t h e q u e s t i o n s i t p o s e s , w i t h “ t h e solutions to difficulties… already worked out by divine reasoning and… embedded in qurʾānic verses for human reasoning to discover” (170). jaffer depicts al-rāzī as a scholar who applied a consistent logic across his oeuvre, one who was concerned with importing the methods of philosophy and theology into tafsīr and applying them critically. the result, jaffer shows, is an eclectic compound method of reading the qurʾān in which elements of disparate origins coexist and together produce insightful interpretation. in light of this methodological exploration, it is especially intriguing to read that al-rāzī in fact developed divergent interpretations of the light verse in different books that he authored. this section raises some thought-provoking questions about the coherence of al-rāzī’s oeuvre. jaffer attributes these differences, especially between the mafātīh al-ghayb and the more sufi-like asrār al-tanzīl, to generic conventions (166) and the “ u n p r e c e d e n t e d ” fl e x i b i l i t y o f h i s methodology (168) rather than concluding that there are inconsistencies in al-rāzī’s work. considering jaffer’s thesis that al-rāzī freely adopted a variety of schools’ ways of thinking in his tafsīr and yet still differed in his explanations of key āyāt across his commentaries, such divergences seems worthy of further exploration. one wonders what the significance of generic boundaries was for a scholar like al-rāzī who, as jaffer so aptly demonstrates, worked to apply the methods of many schools of thought to tafsīr. jaffer’s writing is admirably clear. he carefully leads his readers through each chapter with explicit explanation of what each section seeks to demonstrate and the way each topic fits into jaffer’s larger project. this book will be useful for students and specialists in islamic studies, especially those interested in understanding the so-called postclassical developments in islamic thought across disciplines. jaffer adds his voice to those of scholars who have helped advance u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f o n e o f t h e m o s t influential figures in islamic intellectual history. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 190-196 book review this book focuses on the (oft en neglected) quṣṣāṣ (pl., sg. qāṣṣ) of early islam. its main argument i s t h a t , d e s p i t e t h e i r l a t e r i m a g e a s unreliable storytellers, popular preachers, and innovators, the quṣṣāṣ of early islam were, for the most part, reliable, reputable, a n d c o n f o r m i s t r e l i g i o u s s c h o l a r s . armstrong’s book joins a significant body of modern scholarship on early and later medieval islamic preaching1 with the aim of re-defining the category of the lyall armstrong, the quṣṣāṣ of early islam (leiden: brill, 2017), xii + 342 pages. isbn: 9789004335516, price: $165 (hardback). pamela klasova georgetown university (pmk32@georgetown.edu) 1. some of the main works that have dealt with early islamic preaching are: ignaz goldziher, muslim studies, tr. c. r. barber and s. m. stern (london, 1971), ii, 150-9; johannes pedersen, “the islamic preacher, wāʿiẓ, mudhakkir, qāṣṣ” in ignace goldziher memorial volume (part 1), ed. s. lowinger and j. somogyi, budapest, 1948, 226-51; idem, “the criticism of the islamic preacher,” die welt des islam ii (1953), 215-31; charles pellat, “ḳāṣṣ” ei2, c. e. bosworth, the mediaeval underworld (leiden, 1976), 23-9; al-najm wadīʿa ṭāhā, al-qasas, wa-’l-quṣṣāṣ fī al-adab al-islāmī (kuwait, 1972); q. al-sāmarrāʾī “kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ wa-’l mudhakkirīn, majallat majmaʿ al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya bi-dimashq, 4 (50) 1975, 849-88; jamāl jūda, “al-qaṣaṣ wa-l-quṣṣāṣ fī ṣadr al-islām: bayna al-wāqiʿ al-tārīkhī wa-’l-naẓra al-fiqhīya,” dirāsāt tārīkhiyya 33/34 (damascus, 1989), 105-141; khalil ʿathamina: al-qasas: its emergence, religious origin and its socio-political impact on early society,” studia islamica 76 (1992), 53-74; maxim g. romanov, “computational reading of arabic biographical collections with special reference to preaching in the sunnī world (661-1300ce)” (phd diss., university of michigan, 2013). the most recent works that have focused more on later medieval islamic preaching are: jonathan berkey, popular preaching and religious authority in the medieval islamic near east (seattle, 2001); linda g. jones, the power of oratory in the medieval muslim world (cambridge, 2012); vanessa de gifis, shaping a qurʾanic worldview: scriptural hermeneutics and the rhetoric of moral reform in the caliphate of al-maʾmun (london, 2014); jens scheiner, “teachers and ḥadīth transmitters: the quṣṣāṣ in ibn ḥanbal’s musnad,” in the place to go: contexts of learning in baghdād, 750-1000 ce, eds j. scheiner and d. janos (princeton, 2014), 183-236. on the stories of the prophets in the qur’ān—material often connected with the quṣṣāṣ—see roberto tottoli, biblical prophets in the qurʾan and muslim literature (hoboken, 2013), especially chapter 5, 86-96. on ibn aʿtham, a historian-qāṣṣ, see lawrence al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 191 • pamela klasova quṣṣāṣ and to re-assess their role in early islamic society. for this reason the1 author keeps the term untranslated throughout the book, though he considers the most fitting label for them to be ‘preachers’ (p. 9). the difficulty in defining the quṣṣāṣ lies in the untidy landscape of early islamic preaching, which the quṣṣāṣ shared with other figures such as the wuʿʿāẓ (admonishers), mudhakkirūn (reminders),2 or the khuṭabāʾ (orators). the sources do not draw clear boundaries between these categories and at times use some of these terms interchangeably. however, armstrong is concerned only with the quṣṣāṣ and sets out to nuance our understanding of them by addressing what he has identified as two main flaws in the treatment by modern scholarship of the quṣṣāṣ. first, the association of the quṣṣāṣ with storytelling (based on the lexical meaning of qaṣṣa “to tell 1. 2. a more precise translation would be something along the lines of “those who call others to be cognizant of god,” as armstrong refers to them on p.135. stories”3), is too limiting. indeed, the quṣṣāṣ related material beyond narratives, such as verses of poetry, legal rulings, and short ḥadīth s as he shows mainly in chapter 1. second, the broad definitions of the quṣṣāṣ as islamic religious teachers, stemming from the sources’ treatment of preachers, render the term qāṣṣ void of any meaning of its own. to remedy this terminological imprecision, the author has opted for establishing a clear criterion of selection: an explicit association with the root q-ṣ-ṣ. so, while previous scholars in their discussions of the quṣṣāṣ mainly relied on what medieval compilations, the most influential among them being ibn al-jawzī’s (d.597/1200) kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ w a a l m u d h a k k i r ī n , h a v e s a i d a b o u t them, armstrong has also collected his own pool of qaṣaṣ material. drawing on a wide range of later narrative sources, such as chronicles, ḥadīth compilations, biographical dictionaries, literary works, and works on sufism and asceticism, and setting an end date of 750, he has assembled all the instances in which a qāṣṣ is mentioned, in which the sources designate a certain statement as qaṣaṣ, or 3. the accepted meaning of qaṣṣa is indeed “to tell stories” as armstrong notes (p.6); however, it seems that the term itself is wider than that. etymologically, it means “to follow after the footsteps of, to trace someone.” lane’s examples and translation of iqtaṣṣa al-ḥadītha hint at the logical connections between the two meanings: “he related the tradition, or story, in its proper manner […] as though he followed its traces, in pursuit, and related it accordingly.” in this way, qaṣṣa delivers a connotation of a more serious “storytelling,” which strives for precision and details and is not necessarily based on narrative. the etymological meaning of the term may perhaps serve in support of armstrong’s thesis that the early quṣṣāṣ were not primarily narrators of entertaining and spurious stories. i. conrad, “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” in encyclopedia of arabic literature, eds. j. s. meisami and p. starkey (london, 1998), 1:314; ibid. “the conquest of arwād: a source-critical study in the historiography of the early medieval near east,” in the byzantine and early islamic near east: problems in the literary source material, ed. a. cameron l. i. conrad (princeton, 1992), 317-99; and ibid., “ibn aʿtham and his history,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā: the journal of middle east medievalists 23 (2015), 87-125. on the more formal genre of oratory (khaṭāba) see tahera qutbuddin, “khuṭba” in classical arabic humanities in their own terms festschrift for wolfhart heinrichs on his 65th birthday, eds. wolfhart heinrichs and michael cooperson (leiden, 2008), 176-273; a treasury of virtues: sayings, sermons and teachings of ʿ alī al-qāḍī al-quḍāʾī: with the one hundred proverbs attributed to al-jāḥiẓ (new york, 2013). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) lyall armstrong’s the quṣṣāṣ of early islam • 192 in which they introduce it by a cognate phrase, such as kāna yaquṣṣu fa-qāla (p.7). to compare, armstrong created a list of 109 quṣṣāṣ while ibn al-jawzī listed only 45 quṣṣāṣ and the two lists overlap only partially (see table on p.12). t h i s c o l l e c t i o n o f t h e v a s t b o d y o f m a t e r i a l d i r e c t l y a s s o c i a t e d w i t h qaṣaṣ that armstrong has collected to support his argument, along with the clear presentation of this material with many quotations in arabic with english t r a n s l a t i o n s , a n d t h e b i o g r a p h i c a l sketches of the 109 quṣṣāṣ in the appendix, are among the main strengths of the book. chapter one (“qaṣaṣ: textual evidence”) presents his collection of qaṣaṣ statements. these comprise 43 qaṣaṣ texts, which he divides into three main thematic groups of religious (34), martial (8), and religiopolitical qaṣaṣ (1). they display a wide array of themes, as they deal with the questions of divine will and human responsibility, death and afterlife, narrate exemplars from prophets’ lives, or instruct soldiers in military tactics and incite them to fight. some qaṣaṣ statements also include verses of poetry, prophetic ḥadīth, and legal rulings. this wide range of themes and forms show that qaṣaṣ is not limited to the stories of prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ), which in turn should not be seen as originating with the quṣṣāṣ (p. 38). this constitutes an important aspect of armstrong’s effort to rid the quṣṣāṣ of the label “storytellers,” though it would be unjust to say that all earlier scholars have considered the quṣṣāṣ as such.4 but this chapter’s discussion of 4. armstrong claims that many scholars have considered the quṣṣāṣ to be popular preachers and storytellers, and this is undoubtedly true. however, taking the example of the two scholars who have the qaṣaṣ statements offers more than that. especially the author’s presentation of qaṣaṣ in the martial context brings to light interesting material. al-ṭabarī’s and al-azdī’s use of the term qaṣṣa for byzantine bishops, monks, priests, and deacons who exhorted the byzantines to fight, or al-ṭabarī’s report in which he recorded the khārijite rebel shabīb’s call for the quṣṣāṣ and “he who recites the poetry of ʿantara” (p. 69) before a battle, show the firm place that these oral ways of incitement and exhortation had in the turbulent environment of early islam. based on the diversity of themes among the 43 qaṣaṣ texts discussed in chapter one, armstrong reasons that the content was not the only thing that defined the qaṣaṣ but that its unifying factor was “the aim of eliciting a fervent response from the listener” (p. 74). c h a p t e r t w o e x p l o r e s t h e q u ṣ ṣ ā ṣ ’ associations with qurʾān reciters (qurrāʾ), q u r ʾ ā n c o m m e n t a t o r s ( m u f a s s i r ū n ) , ḥ a d ī t h t r a n s m i t t e r s ( m u ḥ a d d i t h ū n ) , jurists (fuqahāʾ), judges (quḍāt), orators dealt with the issue and whom he includes among those holding such view (on p. 5, n. 17 and p. 151) berkey and ʿathamina, we can note that both views are much more nuanced than that. berkey for his part and precisely on the point of the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ notes that these should not be associated specifically with the quṣṣāṣ because the major collections of them were compiled by exegetes like al-thaʿlabī. jonathan berkey, popular preaching and religious authority in the medieval islamic near east (seattle, 2001), 40. and though armstrong attributes to ʿathamina the view that the quṣṣāṣ were “popular religious teachers targeting the simple masses,” ʿathamina also acknowledges the “broad spectrum of functions fulfilled by the qāṣṣ and the high erudition he must have possessed. see khalil ʿathamina, “al-qasas: its emergence, religious origin, and its socio-political impact on early muslim society,” studia islamica 76 (1992), 54. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 193 • pamela klasova ( k h u ṭ a b ā ʾ ) , a d m o n i s h e r s ( w u ʿ ʿ ā ẓ ) , reminders (mudhakkirūn), and ascetics (zuhhād, nussāk) to prove that the quṣṣāṣ were engaged in most religiously-oriented activities of the day. he acknowledges that some of these categories were rather fluid and is interested in the quṣṣāṣ’ interaction with them, based once again, on linguistic parameters. (in other words, he considers a qāṣṣ to be associated with waʿẓ only if the sources identified him also as a wāʾiẓ or having given a mawʿiẓa, p. 75.) this chapter thus represents, to my knowledge, the first attempt to categorize the quṣṣāṣ based on their affiliations with other disciplines. armstrong shows that almost one third of the quṣṣāṣ were known also as qurʾān reciters (qurrāʾ) and one quarter as qurʾān commentators (mufassirūn). he addresses the accusation that the quṣṣāṣ introduced jewish and christian elements to islam in the form of the qiṣaṣ al-anbyāʾ/isrāʾīlīyāt. armstrong shows that relatively few quṣṣāṣ were known for their knowledge of this pre-islamic material and that the main alleged culprit among them, muqātil b. sulaymān, is not very sympathetic to the jews and christians nor has he adopted more material than others. having discussed the associations of the quṣṣāṣ with the rest of the abovem e n t i o n e d d i s c i p l i n e s , a r m s t r o n g c o n c l u d e s t h a t t h e q u ṣ ṣ ā ṣ i n c l u d e d some of the most respected religious authorities of the time and that out of the 108 (109?) quṣṣāṣ he collected, 74 were considered reliable ḥadīth transmitters (p. 151). from this perspective he thus sees the qāṣṣ mainly as a respected scholar.5 5. l. i. conrad considers ibn aʿtham an example of a qāṣṣ who successfully entered the field of historical studies in the early abbasid times. l. i. conrad, “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” 314. chapter three, most interestingly, brings together reports and debates about the quṣṣāṣ’ performances: skills of effective quṣṣāṣ and their conduct and postures during the qaṣaṣ-giving and where and what time of the day it took place. it also discusses what he sees as ‘malpractices’ which harmed the quṣṣāṣ’ reputation, such as mixing of genders, loudness, raising hands, or fainting during the sessions. this chapter is especially valuable because it gives readers an insight into the variety of the qaṣaṣ performances and the discussions that surrounded them. and the qaṣaṣ performance was indeed varied: the quṣṣāṣ might stand on the pulpit, sit in a corner of the mosque or hold sessions outside of the mosque—in public places and in their homes; they might preach twice a day or twice a week. raising hands, for example, seemed to have been a controversial issue, which was not limited to qaṣaṣ. it was also recorded during funeral processions, during an eclipse of sun, and upon seeing the kaʿba during the ḥajj (p.181-182). and in terms of qaṣaṣ, it was not necessarily only the qāṣṣ who would raise his hands, armstrong mentions two instances in which the audience would join him in this practice (p. 182). it would be extremely interesting to further investigate into a deeper meaning of such a practice. chapter four and chapter five follow the quṣṣāṣ chronologically through the rāshidūn era (chapter four) and through t h e u m a y y a d p e r i o d ( c h a p t e r f i v e ) . chapter four engages with the reports that reject qaṣaṣ as innovation (bidʿa) that had no precedent in the time of the prophet and thus represents a dangerous deviation from his sunna. some of the most interesting attacks represent the reports that connect the emergence of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) lyall armstrong’s the quṣṣāṣ of early islam • 194 qaṣaṣ with the apocalypse (p. 225-229). the author counters the anti-quṣṣāṣ material by arguing that a body of traditions suggest that that qaṣaṣ existed already in the time of the prophet and with more positive representations of the quṣṣāṣ who lived under the first four caliphs. chapter five follows the quṣṣāṣ and their increasing involvement in political affairs during the umayyad period. the q u ṣ ṣ ā ṣ w e r e e s p e c i a l l y a c t i v e i n t h e caliphates of muʿāwiya, ʿabd al-malik and ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz, both for and against the umayyads. yet, the author cautions against considering them all as political figures, for some, including bilāl b. saʿd, ʿabd al-raḥmān b. al-qāsim, or mūsā b. sayyār, remained politically disengaged, and dedicated themselves only to religious education. to armstrong, all the material he collected proves that the early islamic quṣṣāṣ were not exclusively or primarily storytellers but rather reputable religious scholars, who were part of the orthodox religious establishment, often praised for their contribution to a number of islamic religious disciplines.6 their bad reputation originated only during the umayyad period as a result of some of their ‘malpractices’, political affiliations, and negative effects on the public. they were not popular preachers, because their audiences were not only the masses but in some instances also the students of ḥadīth; they were 6. in this regard, we may think of steven judd’s recent book religious scholars and the umayyads: piety-minded supporters of the marwānid caliphate (abingdon, 2014) in which he argues that while pious scholars have been considered to have been opposed to the umayyads, a sizeable number of them in fact supported the regime through their scholarly activities and public performance of piety. public speakers or simply “preachers,” and different elements set them apart from other public performers: qaṣaṣ was less formal than khaṭāba and wider in content and objective than waʿẓ and dhikr, as its use in martial contexts suggests. armstrong concludes: “indeed, the feature that seems to distinguish qaṣaṣ from other public pronouncements and that connected all of its varied expressions, be they religious, martial or religio-political, was exhortation. the objective of the early islamic qāṣṣ was not simply to educate, it was to motivate.” (p. 282). a r m s t r o n g ’ s m e t h o d o l o g y a n d treatment of the sources raises various questions. these are related to either of two issues: (1) a conflation of qaṣaṣ and quṣṣāṣ and (2) authenticity. first, he includes in his discussion of the quṣṣāṣ all those who at some point gave qaṣaṣ, qiṣṣa or qaṣṣū, yet it ought to be asked whether everyone who tells a qiṣṣa or engages in qaṣaṣ is a qāṣṣ. one could say that not everyone who writes is a writer. armstrong’s criteria t h r o w t o g e t h e r d i s p a r a t e c h a r a c t e r s of early islamic society: the prophet muḥammad, prominent rāshidūn-era political figures like abū bakr and ʿamr b . a l ʿ ā s a n d s e m i l e g e n d a r y f i g u r e s of early islam like tamīm al-dārī and, umayyad scholars, and what seem to have been semi-professional martial and partisan umayyad quṣṣāṣ. based on these criteria, god himself could have made it to armstrong’s list.7 armstrong’s criteria thus make for a too-large and too varied body of individuals to be discussed as a distinct sociological group, something that seems 7. the qur’ān says “we do relate unto thee the most beautiful of stories” naḥnu naquṣṣu ʿalayka aḥsana al-qaṣaṣi q 12:3. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 195 • pamela klasova to be armstrong’s main concern here as he tries to redeem the quṣṣāṣ as reputable and conformist scholars. second, the later nature of sources is something that cannot be avoided, as we have no contemporary accounts of the quṣṣāṣ. yet, the author discards the question of authenticity all too easily. he mentions the general problem in passing during his discussion of the qaṣaṣ statements (chapter one): “for my part, i have accepted the attribution of the statement as a qiṣṣa recognizing that this, in itself, reveals the viewpoint of what constitutes a qiṣṣa in the mind of the author of the specific source text, if not of the islamic community in general at the time of the compilation of the source, preserving an earlier view of the features of qaṣaṣ (p.15). yet armstrong does speak mainly about the quṣṣāṣ of early islam, as the title clearly states, and not about their later perception. he also refers the reader to aziz al-azmeh’s excellent essay that criticizes the overly critical approach t o a r a b i c s o u r c e s t h a t h a s b e c o m e characteristic of western scholarship.8 but while al-azmeh is correct in his assessment of western scholarship’s obsession with the issue of authenticity, this does not mean that we can stop being cautious about what the sources tell us or that we need to follow their argumentative lines. for example, armstrong makes an effort to represent the quṣṣāṣ as “conformists,” rather than innovators, as they have been cast by some later sources. that’s why it is important for him to prove that quṣṣāṣ and qaṣaṣ existed in the time of the prophet, 8. aziz al-azmeh, the arabs and islam in late antiquity: a critique of approaches to arabic sources (berlin, 2014). something about which scholarship has been either divided or agnostic, and he concludes that rather than later backprojections “it seems more likely [...] that this miscellany [of perceptions and reports about quṣṣāṣ and qaṣaṣ] signifies that we have an authentic corpus of reports preserving the complex and evolving religious milieu of the early period.” (p. 206). i do not follow the author’s argument here: why cannot the existence of diverse views on pre-umayyad quṣṣāṣ reflect later attempts to legitimize or de-legitimize the practice of preaching, which was clearly a significant feature of islamic society and a powerful tool of propaganda? nor do i see the need to portray them as conformists. this c o n t e n t i o n s t e m s f r o m t h e a u t h o r ’ s following too closely the later sources that engage in such debates. however, we cannot be sure that the discussion about the quṣṣāṣ as innovators took place during the early period of islam (until 750). these debates might be of later origins and their application to the historical early quṣṣāṣ may thus be anachronistic. these two issues—conflating qaṣaṣ and qāṣṣ and downplaying the problem of authenticity—raise further questions about armstrong’s book. as far as the definition of qaṣaṣ is concerned, it may be asked whether all the instances in which the later sources preserved statements containing the verb qaṣṣa used it deliberately to refer to the practice of qaṣaṣ, and did not replace, for instance, akhbara at an earlier stage of transmission. and even if the term’s usage were constant, we may ask whether qaṣṣa meant the same thing in different time periods. furthermore, if one of the author’s main goals is precisely to define al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) lyall armstrong’s the quṣṣāṣ of early islam • 196 qaṣaṣ, his conclusion (see above or p. 282) seems rather unsatisfying. “exhortation” and “to motivate” are indeed objectives of most public speakers throughout human history; aristotle considered rhetoric to be the art of persuasion (rhet. i.2). if one of the main flaws of modern scholarly treatment of qaṣaṣ is too a broad definition, as he claims, he has not satisfactorily solved the problem. in any case, the main purpose of this book lies in correcting the other misconception that he sets to refute: the view of the quṣṣāṣ as storytellers. this is what leads us to the second point: armstrong’s treatment of the material and his arguments turn his list of quṣṣās into a homogeneous group, as it were. but as we have seen, the quṣṣāṣ were rather amorphous. jonathan berkey, talking about later medieval islamic preachers, notes that using terms such as qāṣṣ and wāʿiẓ “is in a way misleading, because the quṣṣāṣ and wuʿʿāẓ did not necessarily form a discrete social or occupational category”; rather, their performances should be seen rather as “activities or even different aspects of the same activity.”9 such understanding of qaṣaṣ is even more plausible in early islam before many occupations became professionalized. it is 9. jonathan berkey, popular preaching and religious authority in the medieval islamic near east (seattle, 2001), 14. therefore warranted to ask whether the quṣṣāṣ existed as a separate social group. the third point would be that armstrong, as we saw with his discussion of innovators and conformers, is perhaps too eager to pass value judgments. to give a more concrete example, he discusses the various forms of qaṣaṣ performance, such as hand raising or fainting, as ‘malpractices’ that harmed the reputation of the quṣṣāṣ rather than as extremely interesting evidence of the ritual and performative dimension of their work. and since his main focus lies in redeeming the reputation of the quṣṣās, he casts, to this end, secular (storytelling) against religious, reputable against popular, and unorthodox against orthodox, creating dichotomies that did not necessarily exist. e v e n r e a d e r s u n p e r s u a d e d b y a l l as p ec t s of a rm s t rong ’ s m et hod ology will be grateful to him for collecting a comprehensive body of qaṣaṣ, qiṣṣa, and qāṣṣ material and for its clear presentation. it contains many excerpts in arabic and in english translation and a helpful appendix of early islamic figures engaged in qaṣaṣ activities. it is an indispensable work for any islamicist or historian interested in early islamic and medieval preaching. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 141-142 book review th i s i s e v i d e n t l y a n e d i t i o n o f maḥjūbī’s doctoral dissertation from around 2003, under the direction of muḥammad al-ṣiqillī al-ḥusaynī, presumably in fez. it is a highly systematic survey of hadith terminology in ibn abī ḥātim’s huge biographical dictionary, al-jarḥ wa-altaʿdīl. about half of his entries include an evaluation of the person’s hadith transmission, especially (in descending order of frequency) from his father, abū ḥātim (d. 277/890), yaḥyā ibn maʿīn (d. 233/848), aḥmad ibn ḥanbal (d. 241/855), and abū zurʿah al-rāzī (d. 264/878). maḥjūbī takes one term after another and gives first its dictionary (non-technical) definition, then its technical meaning, its appearance in prophetic hadith, if any, then the way it is used in al-jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl. this study will be useful principally as a reference, so that if one comes across an odd term, one can look it up to see how it used in al-jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl, e.g. malīʾ (new to me), meaning “trustworthy.” it seems to be accurate, at least as regards hadith terminology. fairly often, maḥjūbī goes beyond identifying usage in al-jarḥ wa-altaʿdīl, as when he interprets yaḥyā ibn maʿīn’s calling someone ṣuwayliḥ by means of quoting ibn ʿādī, al-dhahabī, and ibn ḥajar concerning the same man (134-5). the dubious underlying assumption is evidently that characterizations of men are effectively observations of fact, so that ibn ʿādī and the rest must have meant exactly the same thing as yaḥyā ibn maʿīn. occasionally, however, maḥjūbī does recognize change over time; for example, the concentration of ninth-century critics on isnād comparison to define who was thiqah (“trustworthy”) where critics of the high middle ages such as ibn al-ṣalāḥ stressed personal characteristics such as probity and precision (81). he is not so good at terminology outside the field of hadith; for example, when he quotes ibn ḥibbān as saying that someone was a mujtahid as if it were relevant to his reliability as a traditionist (129), whereas this quotation must mean rather that he ʿabd al-raḥmān maḥjūbī, al-muṣṭalaḥ al-ḥadīthī min khilāl kitāb al-jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl li-ibn abī ḥātim al-rāzī (240-327 h) [ḥadīth terms by way of kitāb al-jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl by ibn abī ḥātim al-rāzī]. baḥth li-nayl al-duktūrāh fī al-dirāsāt al-islāmīyah (beirut: dār ibn ḥazm, 1432/2011), 474 pages. christopher melchert university of oxford (christopher.melchert@orinst.ox.ac.uk) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 142 • christopher melchert was much given to supererogatory prayer. another example: he defines the abdāl as ʿthe virtuous, trustworthy ones given to renunciation and worship’ (156) without reference to the theory of substitution (that each one can be said to have taken the place of another, deceased intercessor), association with syria, and so on. i also missed a few terms, outstandingly laysa bi-dhāk. in all, then, this is a workmanlike s t u d y , s o m e w h a t u n i m a g i n a t i v e b u t useful, still, for understanding particular expressions of early hadith criticism. conference report al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 152-158 the conference was hosted by the erc advanced grant project, “the early islamic empire at work – the view from the regions toward the center,” under the direction of stefan heidemann. it has now entered its second phase, looking at the conceptualization and functioning of transregional and regional elites. the project is the first systematic attempt to explain the operation of the empire from a regional perspective, that is, by adopting the view from the provinces. it studies how elites, in the provinces and the caliphal center alike, contributed to the organization and management of the early islamic empire. this regional perspective represents an important alternative to histories written from the perspective of the imperial center. the conference papers examined the myriad roles that regional and transregional elites played in governing the vast early islamic empire (7th10-th century ce). in his introduction, ‘transregional and regional elites,’ stefan heidemann (hamburg) noted the current lack of any theoretical conceptualization of elites in ou r field and exp res s ed t he hope that the conference might address this shortcoming in scholarship. heidemann began by offering a working vocabulary: he defined ‘elites’ as groups of people with an elevated (political, military, judicial, religious and/or economic) status that entitled them to power, wealth, influence, and other notable benefits. the status of regional and transregional elites: connecting the early islamic empire (universität hamburg, 7-8 october 2016) stefan heidemann* universität hamburg (stefan.heidemann@uni-hamburg.de) website: https://www.islamic-empire.uni-hamburg.de/ en/news-and-events/conferences/elite-conference.html * this report was written with the team of the erc project “the early islamic empire.” the research leading to these results has received funding from the european research council under the european union’s seventh framework program (fp7/2007-2013/ erc grant agreement no. [340362]. file:///users/marie/desktop/ file:///users/marie/desktop/ 153 • stefan heidemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) elites depended on conceptions of merit, performance, ethnicity, ancestry, wealth, military prowess, religion, education, social capital, and forms of privilege. heidemann’s presentation expanded upon the project’s distinction between ‘ r e g i o n a l ’ a n d ‘ t r a n s r e g i o n a l ’ e l i t e s . transregional elites operated across the regions of the empire, as in the case of arab governors during the umayyad and early ʿabbāsid period and khurāsāni generals at the peak of ʿabbāsid power. transregional elites were vital for the maintenance of the empire. regional elites largely were confined to specific provinces, and it was in these regions where their sphere of influence was most visible. their influence often had pre-islamic roots. however, there were occasions where regional elites evolved into transregional elites, and vice versa, as in the case of the aghlabids, whose founder was a (transregional) khurāsānī arab commander, who built up a regional dynasty in north africa/ifrīqiya. the advantage of the use of these qualifiers over others – such as ‘imperial’ – is that they are measurable; prosopographical research into the careers of individuals can reveal their movements. a term such as ‘imperial elites’ is not synonymous with transregional elites, because it is too vague, but may refer to an entitlement by the caliphal administration. by design, the project puts less emphasis on the important role of religion and ideology in elite formation. summarising the current research of the group, the i n t r o d u c t i o n f u r t h e r q u e s t i o n e d t h e concept of territoriality of the provinces, except for iraq and egypt, and the notion of an imperial capital. instead it hinted at a layered structure of authority within each province. considering the projection of power from the imperial center through the appointment of a governor (usually from one of the entitled elites) and the establishment of a loyal garrison, the idea of the capital was dismissed in favour of imperial cities. heidemann highlighted the exchange of military elites of different geographical and ethnic backgrounds after two to three generations as a feature that set the early islamic empire apart from the roman and sasanian empires, both of which were characterised by a more evolutionary development of their elite structures. under the umayyads, for example, the military elite consisted almost entirely of arabs; and under the ʿabbāsids this military elite was replaced first by khurāsānis, who themselves were displaced by central asian military elites. the question of military elites in the early islamic empire was a recurrent theme in the conference papers. this prompted many of the participants to discuss the nature of the mamlūk institution and question whether the terminology used to describe them (mamlūks as slaves) should give way to new concepts such as bonded military. p e t e r v e r k i n d e r e n a n d s i m o n gundelfinger (hamburg), “governors of the early islamic empire – a comparative r e g i o n a l p e r s p e c t i v e , ” a n a l y z e d t h e appointments of governors in fārs and al-shām on several levels. due to the lack of a distinct hierarchical terminology in the sources, these individuals were classified using the terms governor, supergovernor and sub-governor. verkinderen and gundelfinger identified patterns in the backgrounds of these officials that changed over time and noted that these patterns rarely applied in both provinces at the same time. they closed their paper al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) connecting the early islamic empire • 154 by highlighting, therefore, the need for a regional approach to the study of elites and government structures. f a n n y b e s s a r d ( b r i s t o l ) , “ t h e twilight of the late antique clerical and landowning elite and the dawn of a civilian bourgeoisie,” highlighted the shift from a pre-islamic landowning elite to an urban landowning merchant elite (tujjār). she dates the emergence of this new elite to the beginning of the ninth century, when they began taking up government functions and developing a class consciousness. the discussion raised the question of overlapping or layered identities: were merchants also ḥadīth transmitters, land holders, etc.? a related question is whether the apparent rise of an urban merchant class might be related to the changing emphasis of the primary sources, and a shift in stress on the layers of identity. finally, bessard’s presentation raised questions about whether the notion of a bourgeoisie serves as a useful heuristic for locating the rise of merchant elites in early islamic society. amikam elad (jerusalem), “preliminary notes on the term and institution of al-shākiriyya in early islam,” addressed the problem of terminology in arabic sources as it relates to the case of the shākiriyya. in a close examination of references to the shākiriyya in primary sources up to the reign of al-maʾmūn, he challenged current scholarship on the term. his view is that the term denotes different groups in varying contexts. sometimes, ‘shākiriyya’ refers to a group of people with a military character (as armed guards or as a fighting force on the battle field). in other contexts, no military connection is apparent, and the shākiriyya in question appeared to be simply servants or devoted followers. a certain link with khurāsāni/centralasian practices seemed apparent, but elad stressed how both an institution and the meaning of its name can change once they are transplanted to another context. the discussion raised, not for the last time during the conference, the question of military slavery and the tension between slave and elite status. cyrille aillet (lyon), “connecting the ibadi network in north africa with the empire,” focused on the ibāḍī imamate of the rustumids in tahart and its economic and other connections with the rest of the empire, especially iraq. he noted how the ibāḍī rustumids drew on their alleged ‘eastern’ persian heritage in an effort to create common ground with their berber supporters against the rule of the ‘arab’ ʿabbāsids. petra sijpesteijn (leiden), “establishing local elite authority in egypt through arbitration and mediation,” used egyptian papyri to draw attention to jurisprudential matters in the period from the arab/ muslim conquests through the early ʿabbāsid period. she concluded that, on a local level, arbitration and mediation was sought from bishops, islamic governors, and qāḍīs alike, regardless of the religion of the petitioner. hence, it was via the authority of arbitration itself that local elite status was created and affirmed. arbitration thus became an important tool for elites to maintain their standing even as their formal administrative authority d e c l i n e d . t h i s c a n b e s e e n fi r s t a n d foremost with christian elites, who were gradually pushed out of administrative functions by the arabs, and, in turn, during the early ʿabbāsid period, with the replacement of the arabs by central asians. 155 • stefan heidemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) y a a c o v l e v ( r a m a t g a n , i s r a e l ) , addressed “the civilian ruling elite of the tulunid-ikhshidid period,” in a first foray into contemporary terminology for elites. among the most important sources he identified for ninth and tenth-century egypt were the works by ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam (789-871), al-kindī (897-961), and ibn yūnis (894-958), as well as the significantly later writings of al-maqrīzī. lev dealt with such terms as aṣnāf, ʿawwām, ahl (al-dawla) and wujūh (al-dawla), and their applications. matthew gordon (oxford, oh/beirut), “ s a m a r r a n p o l i t i c s a n d t h e a b b a s i d provinces,” set the career of ahmad ibn ṭūlūn in the context of what he termed ‘samarran politics.’ ibn ṭūlūn conducted himself very much in the manner of his peers in the samarran military elite, at the heart of whose efforts lay twin goals: the security of lucrative interests, including authority over appointments to egypt, and an upper hand over the abbasid court in sāmarrāʾ. it is this combination that defined ‘samarran politics’ at the provincial level, on the part of ibn ṭūlūn but other ranking members of the turkic/ central asian military as well. as gordon put it, ibn ṭūlūn “overplayed his hand” in trying to balance his interest in sāmarrāʾ and his own powerbase in syria and egypt, until he became an enemy of al-muwaffaq and his successors. p h i l i p w o o d ( l o n d o n ) , “ c h r i s t i a n elite networks in the jazira, c.730-850,” opened with a definition of aristocracy by chris wickham as individuals and groups possessing memory of ancestry, land, office, lifestyle, mutual recognition, and proximity to royal patronage. wood considered the bishops of the syrian orthodox church (the ‘jacobites’) in the jazīra as aristocratic elites. his main source was the chronicle of dionysius of tel maḥrē (mid-9th century ce), whom he characterized as no less a patronages e e k i n g a r i s t o c r a t t h a n a c l e r i c a n d p a t r i a r c h . h e p o s t u l a t e d a n ‘ i n d i a n summer’ of the late roman christian a r i s t o c r a c y b e t w e e n 5 8 0 t o 7 2 0 c e , displayed among others by the building of churches and monasteries. churchmen received diplomas for raising taxes, making them compliant in justifying the new islamic rule as legitimate. however, the rise of the islamic empire also resulted in the disempowerment of christian laymen, who were largely excluded from joining the army, and whose syriac education was temporarily devalued by the increasing a r a b i z a t i o n o f t h e a d m i n i s t r a t i o n . the growing administrative apparatus and taxation in the jazīra in the early ʿabbāsid period curtailed some of the privileges enjoyed by wealthy christian (ecclesiastical) elites. the period also witnessed increased caliphal involvement in church affairs and the election of bishops and patriarchs. comments raised in the discussion compared the jazīran bishops with the local aristocracy in other regions of the empire, including the dihqāns and the bukhārān bukhārkhudās. hannah-lena hagemann (hamburg), “ m u s l i m e l i t e s i n t h e e a r l y i s l a m i c jazīra: the qāḍīs of ḥarrān, al-raqqa, a n d a l m a w ṣ i l , ” a r g u e d t h a t w h i l e information about governors in jazīran cities is rather sketchy, the qāḍīs of the province are much better documented. clear local differences were visible in the composition and dynamics of the juridical elite of the three cities used as case studies. the judges of ḥarrān were a local elite having a local power base and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) connecting the early islamic empire • 156 thus being significantly independent on patronage from the imperial court. the qāḍīs of al-raqqa, on the other hand, mostly represented a transregional elite. they served in the caliphal residence city under hārūn al-rashīd, and later al-raqqa became the administrative center of the western empire. the standing of judges i n a l m a w ṣ i l c o m b i n e d f e a t u r e s o f a regional elite with those of transregional incumbents. affiliation with arab tribes and involvement in ḥadīth transmission were the defining features of almost all qāḍīs examined in the paper. alison vacca (knoxville), “ʿabbāsid governors of the south caucasus and central asia,” utilized armenian and arabic sources in locating armenia’s position within the multilayered provincial structure of the empire. she also evaluated the movement of khurāsāni elites in armenian politics. a familiar pattern emerged in her presentation of a layered structure of the provincial region and the occasional projection of power from the caliphal center via garrisons. in tbilisi, a muslim elite emerged that was apparently not interested in royal patronage, but nevertheless was a part of the caliphal umbrella state. hugh kennedy (london), “creating an imperial elite: al-manṣūr and the formation of the early ʿabbāsid ruling class,” took up the original question of the empire’s (ex-)changing elites with a discussion of al-manṣūr’s creation of khurāsāni military elite. he observed that in the early ʿabbāsid caliphate, the inner core provinces, such as ʿirāq, the jazīra, and syria, were reserved for members of theʿabbāsid family, while the newly created class of quwwād went to the militarily threatened frontiers, ifrīqiya, armīniya, and khurāsān. as an imperial elite, these men were geographically m o b i l e , r e t u r n i n g t o b a g h d a d a f t e r their assignment, before again receiving provincial appointments. their status was almost hereditary. their leaders, such as khuzayma b. khāzim, served their retainers as conduits of royal patronage and influence. this newly created ʿabbāsid elite of quwwād lasted at most three generations. noëmie lucas (paris), “landowners in lower-iraq during the 8th century: types and interplays” analyzed social shifts in the landholding class of lower iraq. the paper defined a number of types of landowners (local jewish and christian landowners alongside regional and transregional land-owners), and looked into the advancing concentration of land in the hands of large landowners, often members of the baghdādi elite and ʿabbāsid family members, at the expense of small, local landowners. in some cases, the process of transregional elites going regional can be observed. lucas discussed the interactions between different types of landowning elites in regards to acquisition of land by purchase and protection, and conflicts over land and water. the discussion shifted to the nature of the local landowners and the maintenance of the irrigation system. jürgen paul (halle), “who were the mulūk fārs?,” looked into a section of the elite that is usually difficult to pin down in the available sources: local lords in iran. using al-iṣṭakhrī’s discussion of the mulūk fārs as a starting point, he laid out the characteristics of this class. as a case study, he presented the (arab) family of muḥammad ibn wāṣil, who had moved to fārs and had become part of the regional land-holding elite. paul also corrected the 157 • stefan heidemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) image of ibn wāṣil himself in the literature: he was not an adventurer, much less a khārijite rebel, but a regional player who only aspired political power and patronage when his interests were threatened during the period of chaos in sāmarrā. ahmad khan (hamburg), “elites and empire in khurāsān: the view from the archives,” looked at documents from a family archive in southern tukharistān from the time of al-manṣūr and al-mahdī. khan used these documents to construct a taxonomy of elites in the province of khurāsān (from landowning elites to state officials). despite almost all of these state officials being absent from the literary and historical sources, khan argued that this small cache of documentary sources sheds light on exactly who administered the early islamic empire in the province of khurāsān and what their precise functions w e r e . a b o v e a l l , t h e s e d o c u m e n t a r y records exhibit the smooth and successful interaction between landowning elites in khurāsān and provincial administrative elites. finally, khan examined how the circulation of money (nafaqāt) from the province to the imperial household of the caliph represented one important instance o f h o w l o c a l t a x p a y i n g e l i t e s w e r e connected to the fortunes of the empire’s supreme elites: the caliph and his imperial household. luke treadwell (oxford), “muṭṭawwiʿī and mamlūk: military elites in samanid central asia and beyond,” treated the c a s e o f t h e s ā m ā n i d s , a f a m i l y t h a t emerged as a regional elite already in 2 0 5 / 8 2 0 , w h e n a l m aʾ m ū n m o v e d t o baghdād. in striking contrast to t he ṭūlūnids in egypt, the sāmānids never strove for caliphal patronage or positions at court. just the opposite: when they became actual rulers of transoxiana and khurāsān, their geographical outlook differed tremendously from that of the ʿ a b b ā s i d e m p i r e . t h e y w e r e f o c u s e d north toward the steppes, and even their commercial enterprise reached via the volga to the baltic sea. one reason for their seemingly atypical behavior might be that they were content with their status, viewing themselves almost as equals of the ʿabbāsids, without challenging their position in baghdād nor “stepping on their carpet” as clients. t h e r o u n d t a b l e d i s c u s s i o n t h a t followed highlighted the importance of the conference in studying the provinces of the empire individually and within a comparative perspective. studying a particular province in isolation carries with it the risk of neglecting how developments in one province affected other provinces, and broader patterns of imperial rule. an integrative approach promises insights into the structures and administration of the empire, especially as we deal with layered structures of authority in each province. this, in turn, brings into focus the role of elites and how their character and function varied from province to province. the roundtable closed with remarks about important research gaps in scholarship on early islamic history. questions of group formation and the identity of elites (as regards ethnicity, military assignments, economic patterns, landowning, and religious affiliations) have yet to be addressed comprehensively in our field. the terminology currently employed to describe military elites and forms of service requires further deliberation. as one example, ‘mamlūks’ as ‘slaves’ is misleading because mamlūk denotes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) connecting the early islamic empire • 158 a variety of forms of bonded labour and military and contractual service. the notion of elites, too, is still a poorly theorized one in the field of islamic history, and the participants offered original perspectives on how the results of this conference could be placed in conversation with scholarship on elites in other empires and societies. we hope that the forthcoming conference volume will be an important first step towards addressing many of these questions and pioneering new research into elites in the early islamic empire. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 203-207 book review sc h o l a r s o f m a m l u k h i s t o r y a r e indebted to the late ulrich haarmann (1942-1999) for underscoring the value of travelogues by european pilgrims and diplomats as primary sources. in his pioneering article, “ the mamluk system of rule in the eyes of western travelers,” published posthumously in 2001 in the mamlūk studies review (pp. 1-24), haarmann showed that the works of europeans who visited egypt and syria during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries included valuable information on the social, natural, cultural and political history of the later mamluk period. their writings constitute an important corpus that can help modern-day historians to supplement and scrutinize the contents of works in near eastern languages. this is especially the case since european authors sometimes provide information on aspects of everyday life that, while of great interest to modern-day readers, were taken for granted and therefore left uncommented by local historiographers. while haarmann referred to a large number of relevant sources in his article, he never intended it as an exhaustive review of the extant premodern european literature on the mamluk sultanate. it is thus not surprising that subsequent scholarship has pointed to other texts i n e u r o p e a n l a n g u a g e s t h a t a r e o f considerable value for the study of late m a m l u k h i s t o r y . o n e o f t h e s e t e x t s , the legatio babylonica by the spanish envoy petrus martyr anglerius (14571526), has long been available only in the latin original and a very dated spanish translation. it is now accessible to the broader scholarly public by means of hans heinrich todt’s recent re-edition and german translation. this new publication is of outstanding quality and deserves the full attention of all scholars interested in the history of the late mamluk period, especially since the legatio babylonica includes ample and valuable information on a period for which the corpus of arabic sources is very limited, namely, petrus martyr anglerius, legatio babylonica. edition, übersetzung und kommentar von hans heinrich todt, corpus islamochristianum 8 (wiesbaden: harrassowitz 2015), x, 450 pages. isbn 9783447103473, price: € 122.00. christian mauder university of göttingen (christian.mauder@phil.uni-goettingen.de) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 204 • christian mauder from the death of the mamluk sultan qāyitbāy (r. 872-901/1468-1496) to the early reign of sultan qanṣawh al-ghawrī (r. 906-922/1501-1516). the book under review, based on the author’s phd dissertation, consists of a comprehensive introduction (pp. 1-160), the latin edition with parallel german translation and notes (pp. 161-365), three appendices (pp. 366-426), a bibliography (pp. 427-443), a list of figures (pp. 444-6) a n d a n i n d e x o f p r o p e r n a m e s ( p p . 447-450). the introduction is divided into eleven subsections. in the first subsection (pp. 1 3 ) , t o d t e x p l a i n s w h y t h e l e g a t i o b a b y l o n i c a d e s e r v e s a n e w e d i t i o n , pointing inter alia to the value of the text as a work of latin literature and as a unique source on the history of the near east at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century. nevertheless, neither a text-critical edition of the text nor an up-to-date annotated translation had been available up to now. todt addresses these desiderata with his publication. todt offers a brief albeit adequate overview of the state of research on the legatio babylonica (pp. 3-8). he then turns in the third section of the introduction to the historical context of the text (pp. 9-24). here, the editor provides detailed information on the conquest of the last primarily muslim-inhabited areas of the iberian peninsula at the hands of the catholic kings isabella i and ferdinand ii and the religious policy of these christian rulers in the years 1481-1502. these developments resulted in the forced mass conversion, expulsion, enslavement or killing of most of the remaining muslim and jewish population of the iberian peninsula. the fourth section is dedicated to a study of the biography of the petrus martyr anglerius (pp. 25-48). born in the italian town of arona on the shores of the lago maggiore in 1457, petrus martyr held numerous diplomatic, educational and administrative posts at various localities in northern and central italy, thereby using to full advantage his thorough education in the antique latin cultural heritage which he had received in milan and rome. in 1487, he moved to spain, where he joined the court society of isabella i. having participated in military activities against the muslims of granada, he became a priest in 1492 and thereafter served as a tutor to young noblemen and as the queen’s personal confessor. after his return from his diplomatic embassy to egypt, petrus martyr received several promotions, including that to the post of prior of granada in 1503. after isabella’s death in 1504, petrus martyr continued his service to the crown in various religious, literary, diplomatic and administrative capacities, reaching the pinnacle of his career in 1524 with his promotion to bishop of jamaica. suffering from weak health, however, the newly appointed bishop was unable to travel to his oversea diocese and died in 1526, most likely in granada. among his literary works, petrus martyr’s multivolume history of the spanish conquest of the americas, de orbe novo decades, has received by far the most attention, although the author is also known for his collection of letters as well as a number of other works, including the legatio babylonica. the short fifth section (pp. 49-51) deals with the background of petrus martyr’s mission to egypt and the content of the account of his trip, the legatio babylonica. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) petrus martyr anglerius’s legatio babylonica • 205 in reaction to the measures taken by isabella and ferdinand against the muslim inhabitants of the iberian peninsula, the mamluk sultan al-ghawrī had threatened to force european merchants to convert to islam, to banish them from their territory or to kill them outright. moreover, he a n n o u n c e d h i s i n t e n t i o n t o d e s t r o y christian pilgrimage sites within his realm. isabella and ferdinand responded by sending an envoy to egypt to dissuade the mamluk ruler from these plans, ensure favorable conditions for christian pilgrims, and point out the economic and military advantages that friendly relations between spain and the mamluk sultanate would have for the muslim side. they appointed petrus martyr for this mission. the legatio babylonica contains the detailed account of his undertaking. it consists of three letters. the first of these letters deals with the envoy’s trip from granada to venice and his sojourn in this city. the second letter describes the crossing of the mediterranean and petrus martyr’s arrival in alexandria. petrus martyr’s trip to cairo, his diplomatic activities in this city, and his return to europe form the contents of the third and by far longest part of the work. here, the author provides not only a detailed report of his negotiations with the mamluk sultan al-ghawrī, but also informs his readers about the history and the political system of the mamluk sultanate as well as the natural history of egypt and its famous sights such as the pyramids of giza. the sixth section of the introduction (pp. 52-75) includes a thorough historical reconstruction of petrus martyr’s mission to egypt, which lasted from august 1501 (departure from granada) to september 1502 (return to toledo) and included a sojourn in egypt of about three months between late december 1501 and late march 1502. among other things, todt elucidates in painstaking detail the route that the spanish envoy took to and from egypt. the seventh section (pp. 76-98) is dedicated to a study of the biographies of petrus martyr’s two most important i n t e r l o c u t o r s i n m a m l u k e g y p t , t h e dragoman and low-ranking amīr taghrī birdī and sultan al-ghawrī. whereas todt’s short overview of the career of the mamluk sultan provides hardly any new information on this well-known political figure, his discussion of taghrī birdī’s life and background constitutes in itself a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the social history of the late mamluk period. among other things, todt shows that taghrī birdī was most likely born in catalonia into a jewish family before coming to egypt in the wake of a shipwreck. this information on taghrī birdī’s background is of considerable i m p o r t a n c e , g i v e n t h a t i n n u m e r o us instances petrus martyr highlights the mamluk dragoman’s connection to the iberian peninsula as an important basis for their good collaboration in egypt. t h e e i g h t h s e c t i o n ( p p . 9 9 1 0 3 ) provides an in-depth analysis of petrus martyr’s account of his negotiations with al-ghawrī, paying special attention to the argumentative, rhetoric and narrative strategies featuring in this portion of the latin text. continuing the focus of the preceding section, the ninth part of the introduction (pp. 104-21) studies the literary character of the legatio babylonica. it contextualizes the text within the genre of diplomatic r e p o r t s a n d d e a l s w i t h i t s n a r r a t i v e al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 206 • christian mauder strategies in engaging with the foreign as well as with its language and style. the tenth section (pp. 122-157) provides detailed bibliographical information and comments on the preceding editions and translations of legatio babylonica, beginning with the latin editio princeps of 1511 and ending with the latin edition cum spanish translation of 1947. reproductions of the cover pages of all editions and translations dealt with allow the reader direct insights into the history of the text and its publications. introductory remarks on the translation and edition proper makes up the eleventh and final section (pp. 158-160) of the introduction. todt explains that textcritical annotations can be kept to a minimum, given that early prints of the work offer a generally very reliable text with few variants. the author has slightly adjusted the latin text, however, using a more common orthography, additional punctuation marks, and chapter and paragraph breaks to make it more readable. his endnotes provide helpful information on linguistic peculiarities, uncommon names, and technical terms. the edition and translation of the text make up the bulk of the volume. the latin text and the corresponding german translation are presented on opposite p a g e s , w i t h p a r a g r a p h a n d s e n t e n c e numbers allowing for easy navigation and comparison. petrus martyr’s eloquent latin is, as the editor himself notes, of high linguistic quality and a considerable degree of complexity. readers who are not thoroughly familiar with the latin literature of the early sixteenth century w i l l t h e r e f o r e o f t e n r e l y o n t o d t ’ s translation. they can do so without the slightest reservations, given that the translation, as an in-depth comparison of several sample passages showed, is a very precise and linguistically absolutely a p p r o p r i a t e r e n d e r i n g o f t h e l a t i n original. todt deserves ample praise for this masterpiece of philological precision and stylistic beauty. in terms of content, the sections of the text (pp. 258-271) that deal with the reign of sultan qāytbāy, the chaotic period following his death and sultan a l g h a w r ī ’ s a s c e n s i o n t o t h e t h r o n e deserve special attention, given that they include numerous pieces of information not included in our arabic standard source for this period, muḥammad ibn iyās’ (d. after 928/1522) badāʾiʿ al-zuhūr fī waqāʾiʿ al-duhūr. any future study of this still little understood period will have to take petrus martyr’s statements into account, especially since the european envoy received his information from people directly involved in the events. the first of the three appendices (pp. 366-413) deals with the latin inscriptions petrus martyr mentions in his text, which are of limited interest to the non-specialist. t h e s e c o n d a p p e n d i x ( p p . 4 1 3 4 1 6 ) discusses the historical background of the fact that petrus martyr refers to parts of cairo as “babylon,” while the third one (pp. 416-425) contains editions of letters and other documents related to the envoy’s mission. t o d t ’ s t h o r o u g h i n t r o d u c t i o n t o the text provides the reader with all information necessary. the edition itself and his translation are of very high scholarly quality, leaving little room for improvement. it should be noted, however, that todt’s book is the work of a latinist who writes primarily with a latinist readership in mind. hence, the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) petrus martyr anglerius’s legatio babylonica • 207 introduction includes several lengthy untranslated latin quotations that not every reader will find easily accessible. moreover, todt’s transliteration of arabic and turkish words and names is at times idiosyncratic (e.g., “bajazet ii.” [pp. 89, 95] instead of “bāyezīd ii.”) and sometimes does not comply with the rules of the german oriental society that the author seeks to apply (cf. p. 159).1 readers should, moreover, keep two additional points in mind which, however, cannot be fairly blamed on the editor. first, todt did his best in his notes to compare petrus martyr’s account of the history of the late mamluk sultanate t o t h a t o f i b n i y ā s ( w h i c h i s w i d e l y available in french, german and english translations). but he was obviously unable to incorporate relevant material from other, thus far untranslated works of the arabic historiographical tradition, such as the chronicles of aḥmad ibn ṭūlūn (d. 953/1546), ibn al-ḥimṣī (d. 934/1527) or ibn sibāṭ (d. in or after 926/1520). for historians of the near east of the late middle period, even todt’s thorough annotations are no substitute for a detailed knowledge of the primary arabic sources. 1. pedro mártir de anglería: una embajada española al egipto de principios del siglo xvi: la legatio babilonica de pedro mártir de anglería: estudio y edición trilingüe anotada en latín, español y árabe. estudio, edición latina, notas y traducción al español de raúl álvarez-moreno. traducción al árabe de ebtisam shaban mursi. revisión de la traducción al árabe de el sayed ibrahm soheim, madrid 2013. second, todt was unable to take into account another recent re-edition of petrus martyr’s text published together with a (valuable) spanish and a (highly anachronistic and problematic) arabic translation in madrid in 2013.1 although todt’s introduction and notes are generally more detailed and comprehensive than those included in the recent spanish edition, readers who want to make sure that they are fully familiar with the latest scholarship on petrus martyr and the legatio babylonica will wish to consult both recent publications. these minor points notwithstanding, todt’s re-edition and translation of the text with the accompanying comprehensive introduction is a philological achievement o f e x e m p l a r y c h a r a c t e r . s c h o l a r s interested in using petrus martyr’s text as a source for their study of the history of the late mamluk period could not have hoped for a better basis for their work. it is hoped that todt’s work will incite new interest in this era in general and the chaotic five-year period between sultan qāytbāy’s death and sultan al-ghawrī’s ascension in particular – a fascinating period that still awaits a detailed historical analysis. this new issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā (uw) marks a turning point. uw b e g a n i n 1 9 8 9 a s a n e w s l e t t e r, edited by sam gellens, a co-founder with richard bulliet of middle east medievalists. fred donner, as president of mem (1992-1994), then expanded uw into a substantial bulletin, the first issue of which appeared in 1992 (4:1). he added new features: research articles and reviews of books in arabic and other middle eastern languages, thus publications about which many of us would not have been aware. the bulletin has played an invaluable role in this sense, and in continuing to provide news of developments in the discipline. o u r a p p r e c i a t i o n o f t h e w o r k o f p r o f e s s o r d o n n e r – a n d t h e m a n y contributors to the bulletin – runs deep. but the time came to consider anew the role, format and content of uw. following much discussion among the editors, board members and our membership, we have refashioned it into what you find here before you: an online, open access, peerreviewed journal. our aim is to make use of the best qualities of online publishing: the flexibility and timeliness that are a hallmark of publications of this kind. we also believe that we will provide colleagues worldwide – especially those without ready access to the best libraries – a means by which to keep abreast of trends in our respective fields. we will continue where the bulletin left off: we will produce reviews of new publications, written in european and middle eastern languages alike; short “thought pieces” and other brief notices of ongoing and forthcoming work; obituaries; and as much news of the field as we can provide. we urge you, our readers and colleagues, to continue sending us material of this kind. letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): i-ii (photo of antoine borrut by juliette fradin photography) but we will now rely on a peer review system in producing original, full-length articles. our aim is attract the best work of colleagues from across the globe, drawing on new research initiatives across the many individual fields that make up islamic and middle eastern studies writ large. it is in recognition of such work, and, it needs to be said, the realities of the tenure system, that we are carrying out these changes. it is also in light of these changes that we are very pleased to announce the creation of a new uw editorial board. the new board consists of colleagues from a variety of institutions and scholarly backgrounds. their participation, we believe, will ensure high-level contributions and access to a global scholarly network. the content of our new issue represents scholarship of this kind. we are delighted t o h ave t h e o p p o r t u n i t y t o p u b l i s h lawrence conrad’s article on ibn aʿtham al-kufi’s k. al-futuh, a significant study known only to the lucky few that have had the opportunity to read it in unpublished form. we are grateful to dr. conrad for agreeing to allow us to bring it to print. we are no less pleased to have articles by michael cook and christopher melchert, neither of whom requires an introduction; their respective contributions here reflect the depth of scholarship for which each of the two individuals is known. alongside the three principal articles, and an important short notice by bogdan smarandache, are several book reviews, a set of six obituaries of colleagues recently deceased, and the respective texts of comments by patricia crone and steven humphreys (recipients of the mem lifetime achievement award). as a measure of our commitment to remaking uw, we would point out that this first issue runs to a total of nearly 250 pages. our conviction is that al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā provides the ideal venue in which to publish new and exciting scholarship on the history of the medieval middle east. we invite you, our readers and colleagues, to participate by contributing your latest work. and one last note: we will continue to rely on your financial support. that uw is now an open access journal should not be understood to mean that it is free: it is not. to cover costs of publication and the work of our part-time managing editor, among other expenses, we ask that you keep your membership in middle east medievalists up to date, and that you consider a gift to the mem general fund. for information on membership and the fund, please proceed to mem’s website: http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ sincerely, antoine borrut and matthew s. gordon letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): ii http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/al-%ca%bfusur-al-wusta-editorial-board/ http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/mem-lifetime-achievement-award/ http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/membership-application/join-mem/ http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/ notes and brief communications al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 145-148 since mohammad awad’s pioneering work in 1940, the learned social gath-erings (majālis) of the penultimate mamluk sultan qānṣawh al-ghawrī (r. 906-922/1501-1516) have helped produce a small, but lively scholarship on the courtly life of the late mamluk period.1 doubtless, such interest has been fueled largely by ʿabd al-wahhāb ʿazzām’s 1941 edition of two arabic sources that focus on the majālis: nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya fī ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-qurʾāniyya (sic) of the little known author al-sharīf ḥusayn b. muḥammad al-ḥusaynī (fl. early 10th/16th c.), and al-kawkab al-durrī fī masāʾil al-ghawrī of unknown authorship.2 both texts include the purported proceedings of al-ghawrī’s majālis and focus primarily on 1. awad, m., “sultan al-ghawri. his place in literature and learning (three books written under his patronage),” in actes du xxe congrès international des orientalistes, bruxelles 5-10 septembre 1938, leuven 1940, 321-322. 2. ʿazzām, ʿabd al-wahhāb (ed.), majālis al-sulṭān al-ghawrī, cairo 1941. learned discussions taken up at these gatherings pertaining to law, quranic exegesis, history, literature, theology, philosophy and the natural sciences, among others. given their rich and varied contents, these two texts have received considerable attention from numerous authors including barbara flemming, jonathan berkey, doris behrens-abouseif, stephan conermann, robert irwin and yehoshua f r e n k e l . 3 e v e n s o , t h e y s t i l l a w a i t a 3. flemming, b., “šerīf, sultan ġavrī und die „perser“,”der islam 45 (1969), 81-93; flemming, b., “literary activities in mamluk halls and barracks,” in m. rosen-ayalon (ed.), studies in memory of gaston wiet, jerusalem 1977, 249-60; flemming, b., “aus den nachtgesprächen des sultan ġaurīs,” in h. franke et al. (eds.), folia rara. wolfgang voigt lxv. diem natalem celebranti, wiesbaden 1976, 22-28; berkey, j., “the mamluks as muslims. the military elite and the construction of islam in medieval egypt,” in t. philipp and u. haarmann (eds.), the mamluks in egyptian politics and society, cambridge 1998, 163-173; behrens-abouseif, d., “sultan al-ghawrī and the arts,” mamlūk studies review 6 (2002), 71-94; a new source on the social gatherings (majālis) of the mamluk sultan qānṣawh al-ghawrī christian mauder university of göttingen christopher markiewicz university of oxford 146 • c. mauder & c. markiewicz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) thorough and comprehensive analysis as literary texts and historical sources on late mamluk court life.4 in addition to these two relatively well known sources of qānṣawh al-ghawrī’s reign, the aya sofya collection of the süleymaniye library in istanbul preserves another important majālis work in two volumes entitled al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya fī ʾl-nawādir al-ghawriyya. in early 2013, christopher markiewicz encountered these manuscripts while conducting research on the life and work of idrīs bidlīsī (861926/1457-1520), an itinerant scholar and statesman best known as a historian of the ottoman dynasty, who spent several months in cairo in 918/1512. as bidlīsī later recalled the scholarly and social gatherings of the mamluk sultan to which he was invited, al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya, with its near contemporaneous recounting of similar gatherings promised to offer an exceptional window into the court culture which bidlīsī observed.5 working conermann, s., “es boomt! die mamlūkenforschung (1992-2002),” in s. conermann and a. pistor-hatam (eds.), die mamlūken. studien zu ihrer geschichte und kultur. zum gedenken an ulrich haarmann (1942-1999), schenefeld 2003, 1-69; irwin, r., “the political thinking of the “virtuous ruler,” qānsūh al-ghawrī,” mamlūk studies review 12 (2008), 37-49; frenkel, y., is there a mamlūk culture?, schenefeld 2014; frenkel, y., “the mamluks among the nations. a medieval sultanate in its global context,” in s. conermann (ed.), everything is on the move. the mamluk empire as a node in (trans-) regional networks, göttingen 2014, 61-79. 4. christian mauder is currently preparing a detailed study of these works and the wider culture of late mamluk court life in his dissertation: “in the sultan’s salon: learning, religion and rulership at the mamluk court of qāniṣawh al-ghawrī (r. 1501-1516)” to be defended at the university of göttingen, germany, in early 2017. 5. christopher markiewicz, “the crisis of rule independently at the same time, christian mauder pursued a doctoral dissertation on this court culture through an examination of the extant oeuvre of majālis works from the reign of qānṣawh al-ghawrī. in late 2012, he came across a passing reference to al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya in an earlier publication that described the text as a “universal history” written for al-ghawrī and therefore decided to travel to turkey to examine the manuscript in person.6 we met in istanbul in the spring of 2013, where we exchanged notes on several manuscripts, including al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya. this work is preserved in a unique two-volume manuscript held today in the süleymaniye library, istanbul, turkey as mss aya sofya 3312 and 3313. the title of the text is given in the introduction a n d i n a s l i g h t l y d i ff e r e n t f o r m a s a l ʿ u q ū d a l j a w h a r i y y a f ī ʾ l m a ḥ ā s i n al-dawla al-ashrafiyya al-ghawriyya at the beginning of the second volume.7 according to their colophons, the first volume was finished in mid-ṣafar 921/ april 15158 and the second in mid-rabīʿ al-awwal 921/may 1515.9 neither of the two volumes of the work includes the names of its author or its scribe. the paper of both volumes, which consist of 111 and 113 folios respectively, is finished, of creamy color and uniform in in late medieval islam: a study of idrīs bidlīsī (861-926/1457-1520) and kingship at the turn of the sixteenth century,” (ph.d. diss., university of chicago), 2015, 170-180. 6. eckmann, j., “the mamluk-kipchak literature,” central asiatic journal 8 (1963), 310-311. 7. anonymous, al-ʿuqūd i, fol. 4a; ii, fol. 1b. 8. anonymous, al-ʿuqūd i, fol. 111a. 9. anonymous, al-ʿuqūd ii, fol. 113a. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) a new source on the social gatherings • 147 size. there are seventeen lines per page. modern pencil foliation in arabic script numerals has been added to both volumes from the second folio onwards. catchwords are found in the lower left corner of every other page. the main text of the entire manuscript is written by a single scribe in a rather regular and clear naskh. thuluth is used sparingly for the purposes of highlighting, especially at the beginning of both volumes. most of the text is in black ink, while gold and red inks are used for textual dividers, rubrications and for words written in thuluth. the manuscript i n c l u d e s n o p a i n t e d d e c o r a t i o n s o r illustrations. secondary entries on its first folios indicate that the two volumes were bequeathed to aya sofya during the reign of maḥmūd i (r. 1143-1168/1730-1754).10 as with the other works of this small genre, the anonymous author of al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya organized his work around several topical gatherings (majālis): 1) on certain noble questions and the stories of the prophets, 2) on kings and sultans, 3) on the wisdom of the philosophers (fī ḥikmat al-ḥukamāʾ), and 4) on the schemes and duplicity of women.11 the two extant manuscripts only cover the first two topics. while the presentation of these discussions places qānṣawh al-ghawrī – his questions, responses, and views – at the center of each subsection, the compiler, on a few occasions, mentions the sultan’s interlocutors by name. the participants in the majālis occasionally reference authoritative sources, such as al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923) or al-ḥasan ibn muḥammad 10. see chapter three of christian mauder’s dissertation (as note 4) for a detailed codicological description of the manuscript and a reconstruction of its history. 11. anonymous, al-ʿuqūd i, fol. 4a. al-nīsābūrī (d. 406/1015-16), yet, as a whole, the extant parts of the work present a kind of brief universal history of the world from creation up until the reign of qānṣawh.12 accordingly, the noble matters taken up in the beginning of the first section often focus on basic cosmological and cosmographical questions such as whether light preceded dark, but include other basic investigations, such as whether alexander is the same as dhūʾl-qarnayn of the qurʾān and the reason for the seven canonical readings of the qurʾān.13 these thorny matters are followed by a recounting of the lives of the prophets from adam to muḥammad, while the final folios of this first majlis are devoted to the caliphates of the first four caliphs and ḥasan ibn ʿalī.14 the second majlis mentions the various kings and sultans who have ruled since the prophets. it begins with the caliphate of muʿāwīya and the subsequent umayyads, follows with the abbasids, briefly mentions the mamluk sultans of the baḥrī period (fī dhikr al-dawla al-turkiyya), before offering relatively detailed discussions of all of the sultans of the burjī period beginning with barqūq (d. 801/1399). significantly, the work is a valuable resource for the biography and selfcultivated image of qānṣawh al-ghawrī. in a number of asides beginning in the section on the prophet yūsuf, the compiler offers detailed discussion of the origins and history of the circassians (jarkas/jarākisa) and the early life, career, and reign of 12. for mention of al-ṭabarī, see anonymous, al-ʿuqūd i, fol. 5a; for al-nīsābūrī, see i, fol. 12b. 13. on the discussion of light and dark, see anonymous, al-ʿuqūd i, fol. 4b; on alexander, see i, fol. 7a; on the canonical readings of the qurʾān, see i, fol. 8a. 14. anonymous, al-ʿuqūd i, fols. 8b-66b, 148 • c. mauder & c. markiewicz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) the sultan himself.15 such details include the sultan’s birth date (848/1444-1445), family background, and adolescence and offer valuable information for historians of the mamluk period on the life of qānṣawh al-ghawrī.16 central to the presentation of this biography is the image of qānṣawh al-ghawrī as a divinely ordained ruler, the circumstances of whose life from its earliest moments offer parallels with prophets (especially yūsuf) and indications of future greatness.17 in this regard, al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya offers valuable insights into how al-ghawrī and those around him sought to legitimize his rule. noteworthy in this regard are inter alia al-ghawrī’s lofty titles enumerated in the introductory section of the work; in addition to forms of address typical for late mamluk rulers, we find here formulas such as caliph of the earth, inheritor of the rule of the prophet yūsuf, commander of the faithful (amīr al-muʾminīn) and caliph of the muslims (khalīfat al-muslimīn).18 these titles indicate that the author of al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya – and possibly also al-ghawrī himself – claimed for the mamluk ruler a supreme religio-political status. moreover, al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya presents sultan al-ghawrī as caliph, thus crediting him with – at least juridically – the highest level of authority any muslim ruler could aspire to. according to present 15. on the origins of the circassians, see anonymous, al-ʿuqūd i, fol. 34b. 16. see especially, anonymous, al-ʿuqūd ii, fols. 51b-111a. 17. markiewicz, “the crisis of rule,” 178-179. 18. anonymous, ʿuqūd i, fols. 2a-2b. knowledge, this step is without precedent in mamluk political history and hence deserves intensive further study.19 finally, through references to al-ghawrī as “imām of the tenth century” and citation of the prophetic ḥadīth on centennial religious renewal (tajdīd), al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya also suggests al-ghawrī’s status as the centennial renewer (mujaddid). t h e s e t i t l e s – m o s t o f w h i c h h a d garnered widespread usage in timurid, turkmen, and ottoman domains over the course of the fifteenth century – as well as the participation of bidlīsī in similar gatherings in cairo a few years earlier, suggest the involvement and immersion o f q ā n ṣ a w h a l g h a w r ī ’ s c o u r t i n a n ecumenical islamicate cultural mode that, in some measure, cut across linguistic and ethnic boundaries. indeed, the structure of the work reflects a universally recognized and cultivated cultural form, namely, the polite gatherings of refined and learned men, the etiquette and expectations of which were embraced across the lands of islam. in this regard, further study of this work and related works of its genre promises not only to illuminate of the cultural impulses of late mamluk egypt, but to connect such impulses with the broader currents of a clearly discernible islamicate ecumene in the sixteenth century. 19. see chapter five of christopher markiewicz’s dissertation (as note 5) and chapters five and six of christian mauder’s dissertation (as note 4) for discussions of the context and the significance of the political and religious claims raised with regard to al-ghawrī in al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 208-211 in memoriam shahab ahmed (1966-2015) wh e n i a r r i v e d a t h a r v a r d a s a doctoral student in islamic studies in 2005, the then-chair of my department, in an attempt to orient me, mentioned a certain shahab ahmed. he had been offered a faculty position, but was spending the year at princeton completing a post-doctoral fellowship. i asked: “what does he specialize in?” he replied: “everything.” when i met shahab the following fall at a department cocktail party, he approached me and said, “i read your file. i should be your supervisor.” i asked: “what do you specialize in?” “everything,” he replied. shahab became my co-advisor, along w i t h l e i l a a h m e d , w h o m h e a l w a y s respected and admired. the greatest period of my intellectual growth began. over time i would come to realize that shahab’s statement that he specialized in “everything” was not braggadocio. less a comment of what he had achieved, it was an indication of his impeccable standards and sense of what was possible for a scholar to attain. it will perhaps not surprise the reader to learn that his graduate students could find this attitude challenging. it simply was not acceptable to shahab not to know something, though (photo courtesy of nora lessersohn, harvard university.) in memoriam: shahab ahmed al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 209 it would also excite him when he did not. he would be sure to look into whatever lapse in knowledge had emerged, and he would bring it up the next time you saw him. his obsessiveness, a stunning intellectual strength, was difficult on him as a person. shahab once asked me to articulate exactly why i was pursuing a ph.d. in islamic studies. after giving it some thought, i replied, “if it is not to make positive change, i don’t see the point.” he seemed satisfied with this answer and a touch surprised. he told me that, for his part, it was fazlur rahman’s work that inspired him to become a scholar of islamic studies. “most doctoral students start out as reformers,” he once reflected, an insight i have never forgotten for its simple truth. how different a place so many of us land after years of rigorous study. he went on to become, in my view, one of the best islamicists in the world. he perhaps felt that the journey had required him to abandon the goal of reform, though i personally do not think he ever completely did. i was in awe of shahab for many years. i had never met anyone so intellectually dedicated, exacting, exciting, relentless, unsatisfied with cutting the slightest corner, at once ruthlessly self-critical and self-aggrandizing, deeply kind and, at times, cruel. his eyes were always lively and curious, even when he was depressed or in physical pain, which he often was. i also never worked harder for anyone in my life than i did for shahab. nearly every interaction expanded me as a scholar. he profoundly changed my world-view. shahab and i had much in common. we both came from muslim backgrounds, b u t w e r e b o t h i n t e l l e c t u a l l y a n d sociologically westernized. he, having h a d a m o r e d i z z y i n g l y c o s m o p o l i t a n childhood, struggled with his rootlessness and pan-culturalism more than i did. we shared a sense of wanting to redeem the past and change the future of the islamic world. we had hundreds of conversations about how and why to do this. in one particularly memorable exchange, we discussed the possibility of simply erasing all of islamic history and starting, as he put it, at “year zero.” this nuclear option seemed appealing on days when there was another terrorist bombing in pakistan, h i s a n c e s t r a l h o m e l a n d ( a l o n g w i t h india), whereupon his father, who lived in malaysia, would suggest that he delay his next visit. or on days when one would hear of a retrograde fatwa. or on days of islamophobic violence in the west. t h e r e w e r e m o m e n t s i n w h i c h i would be frustrated with what i saw as the intransigence of the arcane islamic legal treatises that i was reading for my dissertation. shahab was not particularly tolerant of such feelings, once snapping, “ y o u n e e d t o b e a b e t t e r s t r u c t u r a l engineer.” what did that mean? “you can’t dismantle the one pillar that survived colonialism.” rather taken aback at the accusation, i assured shahab that i was not trying to destroy post-colonial muslim hope, but that i found many of the texts hopelessly patriarchal and to engage them in arcane detail was to fight an eternally losing battle. shahab replied: “god is male. get used to it.” “ m o s t d o c t o r a l s t u d e n t s s t a r t o u t a s r e f o r m e r s . . . ” in memoriam: shahab ahmed al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 210 the comment typified shahab in several respects. those who have read his peerless, indeed landmark book, what is islam? the importance of being islamic (princeton university press, 2015) understand that underlying his discerning arguments is a critique of our contemporary tendency to overemphasize the islamic legal tradition. what did it mean that, in what he coined the “bengal to balkans complex” – the regions outside what is typically regarded as the arab “orthodox” geographical center of islam – sufi poetry was written in praise of wine? or that islamic legal thinking influenced and was influenced by speculative theology, which often r e a s o n e d i t s e l f a w a y f r o m l i t e r a l i s t strict constructionist legal orthodoxies? shahab argues that we must expand our idea of islam to admit the contradictions embedded in its texts and practices. the book, a nimble scholarly offering, surely will engage generations of islamicists. shahab would not let me, a graduate student, get away with a critique of islamic legal fetishism without first mastering it. for this, i thank him. “god is male.” the islamic tradition is in part a historicized, secular one with particular foundational features. one of those, for shahab, was patriarchy. having engaged shahab on a range of topics, i can report that, as a person, shahab saw the problems with patriarchy, and agreed with me that it was as bad for men as it was for women. but, as an intellectual matter, the evidence was clear to him that the islamic tradition was patriarchal, and to deny this was for him intellectual dishonesty. i understood this and fundamentally agreed. but there was more. feminist scholarship set shahab on edge, and he loathed nothing more than to be anxious and uncertain about any scholarly question. this strain of scholarship threatened him, and, being who he was, he knew that he would eventually have to engage with – indeed, master – an approach with which he was uncomfortable. this unsettled him, but i know he took it to heart. this intellectual integrity was a main reason i respected shahab. by the time i learned shahab was gravely ill, we had not been in close contact for a few years. i was devastated to receive the news. i immediately wrote shahab a letter, which i hope he received. i continue to find his death unfathomable, and mourn it as a personal loss and a loss to modern scholarship. i am grateful that we have not only what is islam?, but that we will soon have before orthodoxy: the satanic verses in early islam (harvard university press, 2017), his magnum opus on the implications for the development of islamic orthodoxy of the infamous satanic versus incident in early islam. it is tragic that shahab will not be here to engage with other scholars on these important works. at the same time, there is a small part of me that is grateful – for his sake – that he will not have to engage with the inevitable critique. it was not his strong suit, and i believe that part of the reason that his work was delayed for publication was that he was acutely aware of what potential critiques could be, and he worked tirelessly to preempt them. shahab was, at once, obsessive, difficult, u n q u e s t i o n a b l y b r i l l i a n t , c h a r m i n g , meticulous, and in possession of a wickedly dry sense of humor. he was an absolute original. i miss him, and owe any of my own high scholarly standards very much to him. as i wrote in my letter, i pledge to do what i can to honor his legacy by sharing in memoriam: shahab ahmed al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 211 and engaging his work with students. i have no doubt that scholars of islam around the world will do the same, which i believe is what shahab wanted more than anything. i pray that my tough teacher, and this great soul, will rest in peace. — sarah eltantawi evergreen state college (eltantas@evergreen.edu) mem awards al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): vii-x i must begin by expressing my thanks to the officers and board of middle east medievalists for bestowing on me the honor of a lifetime achievement award. it comes from a group of colleagues whose work i greatly admire, and who have been at the heart of the extraordinary progress in studies on the medieval middle east over the past two decades. no less important, they have also ensured that this field has remained a visible and sometimes even influential presence in an area where contemporary issues threaten to dominate if not obliterate all other perspectives. i have found it deeply rewarding to be part of the common enterprise during such a dynamic and creative period. a year shy of half a century as a student (always a student) and scholar of middle east studies, along with a university teaching career of forty-three years, might seem to demand a serious review and evaluation of one’s contributions to the field, a retrospective of achievements and shortcomings that goes beyond a rueful, “what happened? where did it go? what did i actually do with all that time, now mysteriously vanished?” more dubiously, it might also encourage one to claim some deep wisdom, even the power of prophecy. in these remarks i hope to avoid both temptations, alluring as they are. what i will try to do is to identify what has motivated (and continues to motivate) my writing and teaching, what has led me to take the somewhat meandering path i have chosen to follow. to some degree, to be frank, it was all an accident. my grandmother—an old-school evangelical southern lady of the best kind—told me reams of bible stories when i was a child and shared with me her good personal library on the ancient near east, and so i fell into a fascination with the peoples and cultures of those lands— at first the ancient world of sumerians, egyptians, and hittites, but soon enough the medieval and modern periods. i was an odd kid in many ways. thus in the summer between my junior and senior “the shape of a career” remarks by the recipient of the 2013 mem lifetime achievement award given at the annual meeting of middle east medievalists (october 10, 2013, new orleans) r. stephen humphreys university of california at santa barbara viii • r. stephen humphreys al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) years in high school i read gibbon’s decline and fall of the roman empire, all of it. obviously i could not grasp gibbon on any but the most superficial level, but from him i did get a vivid sense (without being able to articulate it) of the longue durée and the grand narrative. the ways of imagining the past, however inchoate, which were planted in my childhood and adolescence—images of a region which d r e w o n e b a c k t o t h e b e g i n n i n g s o f agrarian and urban society, the sense of vast spans of time that stretched unbroken down to the present day, the notion that it was possible to encompass all this in a single story, however complicated—have guided my approach to history ever since. my undergraduate studies as a history major at amherst college added another dimension to this. in my time there, at least, history was taught chiefly through a close confrontation with contemporary sources. it was a hermeneutic rather than synthetic approach, and if this approach left major gaps in our overall knowledge, it did teach us to bring our own questions to the texts and not to be awed by claims of superior authority. it was during my graduate studies at the university of michigan that these various half-formed approaches and sensibilities began to take on a coherent shape. i was in the first place fortunate to study with a r e m a r k a b l e a n d e x t r e m e l y d i v e r s e group of fellow students, and through them i was exposed to a wide range of experiences of the middle east and ways of thinking about it. much the same was true of my teachers. in that milieu, a narrow vision was not really an option. quite by happenstance, andrew ehrenkreutz became my dissertation adviser. andrew was a highly innovative scholar in many ways; sooner than most he saw how emerging technologies might advance our field. in this regard, however, i am afraid i disappointed him. he thought i might do a computerized study of mamluk coinage or something of that kind, but i both valued my eyesight and knew my technological limitations. instead i chose to undertake a political study of saladin’s successors in syria—a superficially traditional topic, but one that opened up some exciting perspectives. the ayyubids were not a long-lived dynasty—some ninety years at most— but they proved to be a window not only on a mature (though still very dynamic) political and cultural tradition, but also on a critical moment in eurasian history. the stage was filled with mongols, crusaders, t h e b u r g e o n i n g c o m m e r c e o f t h e mediterranean and indian ocean basins. as all of us know, dissertations often lead you into long, narrow tunnels, and it can be very difficult to dig your way out of them. but i was lucky. since almost every big thing in the thirteenth century intersected in ayyubid syria, a broad sense of time and space, integrated within an overarching narrative, was only enhanced. clearly the ayyubids, fascinating as they were (at least to me), were only one point on a big canvas. the question was, what to do next. one choice, the obvious one, was to dig more deeply into this important and very rewarding period. i certainly did not abandon the world of the ayyubids after publishing my first book, since i have continued throughout my career to write about syria (and secondarily egypt) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. but i quickly made a conscious decision to focus my attention elsewhere, and that elsewhere has turned out to be all over the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) remarks by the recipient of the 2013 mem lifetime achievement award • ix map. at times i have felt a bit like a dabbler, all the more as the path—the many paths—i have taken have very often originated in proposals and suggestions from colleagues and friends. but if i am suggestible, i cannot be gulled into doing something that i do not want to do. and so a glance at my bibliography will reveal work of varied size and scope on the analytic theory of history, arabic historical writing (both medieval and modern), the early caliphate, the middle east in the twentieth century, and most recently christian communities under muslim rule between the seventh and eleventh centuries. but in this dabbling there has been a kind of coherence, a purpose and goal. it has first of all been an effort to see whether i could bridge in my own mind the vast chasm that separates the community’s first decades from the muslim societies of my adult lifetime (roughly since 1967). was it possible to grasp each of these eras, and much in between, in its own unique terms, and yet see them all as part of a continuous process of fourteen centuries? second, i wanted to place the phenomena of islamic and middle eastern societies within a broad matrix, to see them as an integral element in eurasian history— hence my interest in rome and sassanian iran in late antiquity, in the convulsions of the crusades and the mongol conquests, and in the profound cultural and social d i s r u p t i o n s o f m o d e r n i t y a n d p o s t modernity. obviously i am not the only scholar to attempt this. most historians of the m e d i e v a l i s l a m i c w o r l d a r e e n g a g e d in such a quest on some level. on the level of the grand narrative, marshall hodgson’s venture of islam (now almost half a century old, though i encountered it when it was brand new) set a very high bar in its critical self-awareness, moral commitment, and effort to define the broad themes and concepts that should guide our understanding of islamic and islamicate cultures. likewise, a previous awardee of this honor, ira lapidus, has constructed a wonderfully comprehensive and balanced presentation of “islamic history” in his history of muslim societies, soon to be released in its third iteration as he continues to rethink the issues posed by this immense subject. however, i have chosen to take a different path— not by trying to construct an overarching synthesis, but by probing discrete points in the story in some depth. the closest i have come to such a synthesis is islamic history: a framework for inquiry, which is really an effort to define and evaluate a rather peculiar and idiosyncratic field of study. moreover, it proceeds by probing a series of particular problems, not by trying to survey the field as a whole. there is a synthesis implicit in my work, i hope, but i have so far kept that synthesis in my head. what now, then? i have envisioned two major projects, and we will have to see whether i am given time and energy to bring them to fruition. the first i have already alluded to: a study of the adaptation of christian communities in syria and the jazira to muslim rule in the first four centuries of islam—in essence, from the initial arab-muslim conquests to the coming of the turks. this topic is driven by many things: current events in the region, the impressive and often moving physical traces left by these communities in late antique and early islamic times, and most of all by the need to recognize that muslims were for several centuries a minority among the x • r. stephen humphreys al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) peoples they ruled. we all need to remind ourselves that the islamic empire was for a long time an empire of christians, jews, and zoroastrians, and only slowly became chiefly an empire of muslims. the sources are both scattered and overwhelming; the scholarly literature is dense and sophisticated on some topics, a void on others. progress is slow, so we shall see. the second project—at the moment more a vision than a work in progress— rather belies my claim to have sidestepped any attempt at a grand synthesis. i have imagined a history of eurasia (stretching from ireland to japan), and going from alexander the great to chinggis khan. i have traveled widely enough to see that such an enterprise is both possible and deeply meaningful, and i have given some thought to the conceptual and literary framework for it. it is a large enough project, i believe, to earn the approbation of my first mentor, edward gibbon. for it i have done a lot of reading and a little writing. i cannot say when it will move from sketchbook to work bench, but when it does i will let you know. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 147-148 book review this important volume is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted in 2004 to the department of history at aden university. it follows a number of valuable sources on the rasulid era in yemen that have been published in yemen and are rarely accessible outside yemen. the author has consulted 182 arabic sources (manuscripts and printed material), including the major chronicles, but is unaware of important sources in western languages by r. b. serjeant, g. rex smith, eric vallet and other scholars who have written on the rasulids. the introduction (pp. 15-20) lays out the purpose of the book, which is to highlight the interaction of yemeni tribes with the rasulid state. the rasulids and the zaydi imams, located in the northern highlands, forged alliances with various tribes, who were prone to frequently rebel against rasulid policies and taxation. the main value of the book is presenting information on the relations of the rasulid rulers to specific yemeni tribes rather than simply having a chronological account. his text is divided into four parts. the first part describes the politics of the rasulid state and the nature of the tribal system at the time. the second part focuses on several specific tribal rebellions, indicating their causes and consequences, whether political, economic, social or religious. the third part concentrates on the yemeni tribes ʿakk, al-ashʿār, madhḥaj and ḥimyar, but also discusses other specific tribes as they related to the rasulid state. the final part analyzes the methods of peacemaking and military action of the rasulids in dealing with the tribes. also included in the introduction (pp. 20-36) is an annotated description of the major rasulid texts consulted for the study. the book includes a number of valuable appendices, listing the ayyubid and rasulid rulers in yemen, as well as the zaydi imams during the period. a genealogical chart of the descendants of ʿalī ibn muḥammad ibn hārūn (known as al-rasūl) is provided, ṭaha ḥusayn ʿawaḍ hudayl, tamarrudāt al-qabīla fī ʿaṣr al-dawla al-rasūlīya wa-atharhā fī al-ḥayāt al-ʿāmma fī al-yaman (626-858 h) [tribal revolts in the era of the rasulid state and their impact on ordinary life in yemen] (aden: dār al-wafāq, 1433/2012), 440 pages. daniel martin varisco qatar university (dmvarisco@ahjur.org) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 148 • daniel martin varisco as well as a chart of yemeni tribes from the ancestral stock of kahlān and ḥimyar. the four maps provided (of the rasulid state and tribal groups) are very difficult to read, given the small size of the print. in addition to the bibliography there are indices of individuals (pp. 395-411), tribes (pp. 413-421) and placenames (pp. 423-436). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 197-202 book review amina elbendary’s book is an attempt to reconsider the social implications of the economic crises and political transformations of the fifteenth century while taking into account the point of view of common people, especially the urban non-elite. this “non-elite” is defined as craftsmen, artisans, and tradesmen, as well as minor clerks and employees of the ruling and educational institutions of egyptian and syrian cities. all these members of society were traditionally marginalized in contemporary sources, but their increasing presence in the narratives of the late mamluk period is interpreted by elbendary as the result of social transformations. popular protests thus offer a unique window to observe non-elite participation in politics. t h e p e r i o d c o n s i d e r e d i s a l o n g fifteenth century, presented in chapter 1 (pp.1-18). this century begins with the reign of sultan barqūq (r. 1382-1399) and includes the start of the ottoman domination over the arab provinces, which undermines the generally accepted periodization, and erases the rupture between mamluks and ottomans. the author chooses to avoid the “decline and fall paradigm” and instead reinstates the mamluk regime in line with the work of imad abu ghazi. she considers that the actions taken by the mamluk regime to address declining revenues (such as the payment of bribes and the venality of offices) formed part of a policy of financial compensation, which allowed the state to function in a more decentralized manner. challenging the supremacy of the sultan paved the way for the participation of other groups – amirs as well as people from the middle class – in political life. despite the undeniably autocratic nature of the regime, certain policies could be adjusted or modified in response to public dissatisfaction. the different political and economic crises that dotted this century can thus be considered as opportunities for some groups to gain more access to power and renegotiate their positions. amina elbendary, crowds and sultans: urban protest in late medieval egypt and syria (cairo/new york: the american university of cairo press, 2015), 276 pages. isbn: 9789774167171, price: $49.95 (cloth). anne troadec université paul valéry montpellier iii, france (annetroadec@gmail.com) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 198 • anne troadec c h a p t e r 2 ( “ t h e m a m l u k s t a t e transformed,” pp. 19-43) is devoted to the transformations of the state and the reactions prompted by these changes. by deductive reasoning, the author endeavors to determine the root causes behind these transformations and the sequence of events: state response, popular reaction, and the turn to negotiated settlements. “the policies that the mamluk rulers followed were not only a reaction to these changes, but also factors that shaped them, and they resulted in many people’s suffering and/or social displacement. this in turn prompted more acts of protest” (p. 20). the first challenge was the black plague, for which the author gives an estimate of the human and economic cost based on the studies of m. dols, j. abu lughod, and a. raymond (between one-third and two-fifths of the population of cairo wiped out, and two-fifths of syria). a decline in resources fueled elite competition, while a shortage of gold and subsequent currency devaluation led to popular protests. a revolt against qāyt bāy in 1481 related by ibn iyās, which was sparked by the issuance of new copper coins, reveals the existence of negotiation procedures: the authorities accepted a monetary adjustment in order to regulate the conflict. yet the reader would have liked a more detailed presentation of the monetary reforms, since they were the cause of numerous popular revolts in both cairo and damascus and gave r i s e t o n u m e r o u s h i s t o r i o g r a p h i c a l commentaries from al-maqrīzī to ibn ṭawq (see notably the studies of w. schultz1). 1. warren c. schultz, “mahmûd ibn ʿalî and the ‘new fulûs’: late fourteenth century mamluk egyptian copper coinage reconsidered,” american journal of numismatics, 2nd series, the author briefly reviews the revolts brought on by currency devaluation in chapter 5 (pp. 136-9), but without further consideration of the objectives pursued by the authorities, notably in relation to the urban popular classes directly targeted by these reforms. other measures, interpreted as signs of decline and corruption by contemporaries, aimed at solving the economic crisis: taxation, or alternative measures such as bribery, ḥimāya, forced sales (ṭarḥ), sales of offices, extortion, confiscation, and land sales. according to the author, who cites j. meloy, bribery and extortion were “a routine feature that allowed the state to function” (p. 33). the iqṭāʿ system collapsed because of the conversion of land into private property, while the mamluk amirs were given administrative and judiciary functions, reinforcing the militarization of society. thus, the entire mamluk system was transformed. in this respect, the author concludes of decentralization and the diffusion of power among numerous actors. chapter 3, “a society in flux” (pp. 4 5 6 9 ) , d i s c u s s e s b o t h u p w a r d a n d downward social mobility. some groups rose to the fore, taking advantage of the diffusion of power and decentralization of government. once again, the greater visibility of a group in historiography is interpreted as an indication of its 10 (1998): 127-48; warren c. schultz, “‘it has no root among any community that believes in revealed religion, nor legal foundation for its implementation’: placing al-maqrīzī’s comments on money in a wider context,” mamlūk studies review 7, no. 2 (2003): 169-81. on al-maqrīzī, see adel allouche, mamluk economics: a study and translation of al-maqrīzī’s ighāthah (salt lake city: university of utah press, 1994). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) amina elbendary’s crowds and sultans • 199 increasing political prominence. a case in point were the bedouins. they took hold of a large share of the iqṭāʿ (46 percent in the province of sharqiya). their shaykhs thus became official authorities in the countryside and levied taxes. this situation i n e v i t a b l y c a u s e d t e n s i o n s w i t h t h e mamluk authorities, leading to plundering, especially during the pilgrimage and harvest seasons (with the transfer of grain to the capital), an indication of the extent to which the central authorities controlled the countryside. c o p t i c c o n v e r s i o n t o i s l a m a l s o a c c e l e r a t e d d u r i n g t h i s p e r i o d . t h e pressure put on the copts is seen as the result of the mamluk rulers bolstering islam, as they themselves were born n o n m u s l i m s ( p p . 5 6 8 ) . t h e a u t h o r interprets the numerous acts of violence against non-muslims as a consequence of the evolving social position of the coptic community and the will to restore an imagined traditional social order. this explanation is extremely interesting and opens up avenues for future research, but is insufficiently analyzed in the book: the link between conversion and violence against christians deserves further exploration.2 other unexpected personalities moved from the periphery of society to the core at this time as well. the author examines at length one case of the ascension of a commoner, that of abū al-khayr al-naḥḥās (d. 1459), who has already been studied by r. mortel. 2. denis gril, “une émeute anti-chrétienne à qūṣ au début du viiie-xive siècle,” annales islamologiques/ḥawlīyāt islāmīyah 16 (1980): 241-74, contends that the uprising against the copts was provoked by their boast of having highranking support. all of these transformations created a sense of anxiety and social malaise, which is reflected in mamluk sources in terms of nostalgia for the previous social order. in the streets, the social malaise led to an increased rate of violence and urban protest. indeed, references to incidents of protest appear to be more frequent than those reported for other historical periods. elbandary relies on a study on suicide and voluntary death by b. martel-thoumian, which allow us to gauge the pressure placed on people by the authorities3. chapter 4 is entitled “popularization of culture and the bourgeois trend” (pp. 71-120). the patterns of social mobility analyzed in the previous chapter are presented here as the cause of changes t o c u l t u r a l p r o d u c t i o n ( l i t e r a t u r e , historiography, and religious texts) in the late mamluk period. this reflects a “bourgeois trend” that allowed people from t he “m id dle clas s ” (in a s ocioeconomic sense) to make their voices heard by engaging in cultural production. one of the principal manifestations of this “bourgeois trend” was the popularization and vernacularizing of cultural forms. s u fi s m , f o r e x a m p l e , b e c a m e t h e expression of the “merging of classical and vernacular culture and the mainstreaming of popular culture during the late mamluk period” (p. 78). the popularization of culture also m a n i f e s t e d i t s e l f i n w r i t t e n t e x t s through the use of colloquial arabic as well as non-canonical forms of arabic and colloquial poetry (see, for example, ibn sūdūn’s (d. 1464) nuzhat al-nufūs 3. b. martel-thoumian, “la mort volontaire : le traitement du suicide et du suicidé dans les chroniques mameloukes tardives”, annales islamologiques 38 (2004): 405-435. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 200 • anne troadec wa muḍḥik al-ʿabūs or the diffusion of rubāʿiya, kān wa-kān, qūmā, muwashḥah, mawāliya and zajal). the author interprets this as a means to reach a new audience (pp. 106-9). mamluk sources “include e c h o e s o f t h e v e r n a c u l a r , r e fl e c t a n i n c r e a s i n g i n t e r e s t i n t h e m u n d a n e , and reveal a different sense of self and identity of the authors – many of whom came from popular backgrounds – who include themselves in the narrative” (p. 82). elbendary devotes specific comments to the inclusion of women in biographical dictionaries (cf. kitāb al-nisāʾ of al-sakhāwī (d. 1497) at the end of his ḍawʾ al-lāmiʾ, pp. 84-7). thus, everyday life became a topic of interest in both literature and history. yet some discrepancies exist between the historiography of cairo, more focused on the politics of the sultanate, and that of syria, where authors like ibn ṭawq (d. 1509, a notary at the damascus court) and ibn ṭulūn (d. 1546) were more interested in events from a local perspective. however, in egypt, changes to historical works only emerged during the period of ottoman domination. the works of such authors as ibn abī al-surūr al-bakrī (d. ca. 1619), al-damurdāshī (d. 1775), and al-jabartī (d. 1825), suggest a strong connection between the egyptian historians of the late mamluk period and the regime, which supports t. khalidi’s thesis about “siyāsa-oriented historiography.” 4 this does not mean that egyptian historians were disconnected from the life of the community: they recorded the annual level of the nile, changing prices, food 4. see t. khalidi, arabic historical thought in the classical period (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1996): 182-231. shortages, crimes, rumors, disputes, and so forth, which reveal a “civic interest” (pp. 98-103). despite their differences, both damascene and cairene historians seem to have used history as a way to protest against the dominant political order, as shown by their critical attitude toward contemporary rulers (pp. 112-9). these three chapters set the stage for the remainder of the book, which treats the main subject: popular protest. this section offers more of a synthesis of recent studies on the economic and social situation of egypt and syria in the fifteenth century than new research. some of this material is drawn exclusively in fact from the secondary literature, sometimes quite briefly and without contributing any s u p p lem ent ary c onc lu s ions . the subchapter entitled “emerging landowning class” (pp. 55-6) does not draw from any primary sources and cites only one author (imad abu ghazi) without giving a precise reference. furthermore, numerous repetitions give an impression of déjà vu, and should have been spotted by the editor (sometimes, the same sentence is repeated on the same page, see p. 22). i n c h a p t e r 5 , “ b e t w e e n r i o t s a n d negotiations: popular politics and protest” (pp. 121-55), the author relies on detailed narratives of popular protests, which show that the urban populace, far from being a submissive mass, was part of the transformations taking place in mamluk society. these events can be understood as a sign of a “new civic awareness and vitality” (p. 122). “artisans and ulama, traders and amirs, formed temporary alliances for a variety of reasons in order to confront particular situations” (p. 125). the ulama—be they high-ranking or more modest—played a key role in protests. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) amina elbendary’s crowds and sultans • 201 they did so as agents of protest, as in the revolt in damascus against the high sugar price fixed by the ustādār ibn shād bek (p. 127), and as mediators between the state and the masses, as in jumādā i 907/ november 1501, when the governor of damascus sent a delegation including four qadis to negotiate with rebel leaders (pp. 127-8). in damascus, the protests often included the chanting of takbīr and a march to/ from the umayyad mosque (detailed further in chapter 6, pp. 191-3). at times, women were also involved (pp. 134-6). demonstrations took place to protest against currency devaluation, extra levies and taxes, food shortages, or whatever was perceived by the rioters as an injustice or an indication of official corruption. t h e n o t i o n o f a “ m o r a l e c o n o m y , ” conceptualized by e. p. thomson for early modern europe, is mentioned once (p. 129), but one would have expected the author to define the concept more precisely during the argumentation itself.5 e l b e n d a r y a l s o c o n s i d e r s m a m l u k protests (pp. 149-53). these protests were not only against economic burdens and injustices: they also attempted to maintain a certain social order as shown in chapter 6, “protest and the medieval social imagination” (pp. 157-201). for example, in the name of ḥisba as the responsibility o f e v e r y m u s l i m , m o r a l i s s u e s ( t h e consumption of alcohol and hashish, especially when they involved members of the military elite) were the cause of popular revolt. some of these campaigns 5. for a transposition of the concept in the mamluk context, see amalia levanoni, “the al-nashw episode: a case study of ‘moral economy’,” mamlūk studies review 9, no. 1 (2005): 207-20. t o r e d r e s s i n ju s t i c e t h u s c o u l d h a v e occurred with the official endorsement of the authorities, which would have allowed them to boost their popularity. but crowds sometimes managed to take the law into their own hands in carrying out justice. similarly, sectarian violence manifested as an appeal to revive the restrictions on dhimmīs. as for the administration, it was a way to prove its credentials and bolster its legitimacy. protests were often directed against middle-class officials. muḥtasibs could thus be the targets of stoning, because of the transformation of their function from regulating public morality to more administrative and financial duties. riots against governors often took place in provincial cities, far from the control of the central government. they could become violent and even lead to murder, as occurred in damietta in 1417 (pp. 181-2). “this suggests that it was the crowd rather than the ulama, that had the upper hand and were deciding what would happen” (p. 182). g e n e r a l l y , t h e h e a d o f s t a t e — t h e sultan—remained untouched. a brief analysis of the theoretical literature (from al-mawardī to ibn qayyim al-jawzīyah) on the legitimacy of rebelling against the ruler shows that the “attitudes and positions in the literature vis-à-vis the imams were transferred to mamluk sultans, making real, meaningful protest against them very limited. instead, the sultan was often presented as the judge of last resort and above blame” (p. 188). but this did not prevent the ruling factions from using popular crowds in their struggles for power. satire and parody could also be used against rulers (pp. 193-7). this book has the merit of revealing the complexity of urban societies in the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 202 • anne troadec pre-modern middle east and drawing attention to a topic that has been poorly researched until now. without calling into question the conclusions of the author, this subject would have benefited from being situated in a better defined conceptual framework. f i r s t o f a l l , t h i s c o n c e r n s t h e p e r i o d i z a t i o n . f r o m t h e s t a r t o f t h e book, the author claims to query the periodization by broadening the fifteenth century to include the ottoman period,6 so to speak. the fifteenth century was a time of intense transformations, whose mechanisms are described here with clarity. nevertheless, the starting point of this specific periodization is not justified. some elements analyzed in this work appear well before the fifteenth century a n d c h a r a c t e r i z e t h e m i d d l e i s l a m i c period spanning from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. for example, the “popularization” and the changes made to the writing of history pre-existed the fifteenth century. on these issues, elbendary might have drawn on t he work of c. hirschler, the written word in the medieval arabic lands: a social and cultural history of reading practices (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 6. the chapter of jean-claude garcin, “la révolte donnée à voir chez les populations civiles de l’état militaire mamluk (xiiie-xve s.),” in éric chaumont (ed.), autour du regard : mélanges gimaret (leuven: peeters, 2003), 261-78, would have been very useful in this respect. 2013). this would have provided a more satisfactory definition of the concept of popularization (i.e., the spread of the written word to non-elite groups) in order to avoid the pitfall of the dichotomy of popular/elite culture. further, a conceptual refocusing of revolts and their representation in the sources (notably through the study of vocabulary) would have been expected. a definition of the “urban protests” announced in the title of the book should be given in the introduction,6 and the study of bedouin revolts, addressed in the work, but outside the framework of the urban protests, should be justified.7 f i n a l l y , t h e k i n d o f n e g o t i a t i o n p r o c e d u r e s t h a t p u t a n e n d t o t h e revolts, and which are discussed here as characteristic of the fifteenth century, h a v e b e e n t r e a t e d e x t e n s i v e l y i n scholarship on medieval western europe since the research of claude gauvard8. taking this into account could give rise, mutatis mutandis, to quite interesting comparisons with the islamic middle east. these remarks notwithstanding, elbendary’s study of popular protest in the late mamluk period is a welcome addition to the field. 7. on the mecanism of this revolt, see sarah büssow-schmitz, “rules of communication and politics between bedouin and mamluk elites in egypt: the case of the al-aḥdab revolt, c. 1353,” nomads in the political field. eurasian studies (2010): 67-104. 8. see for instance, the studies collected by c. gauvard, violence et ordre public au moyen âge, “les médiévistes fançais” 5 (paris, picard: 2005). notes and brief communications al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 126-128 i have recently had the opportunity to examine a remarkable doctoral disser-tation completed in 1979 under the supervision of prof. charles pellat and now housed at the bibliothèque orient monde arabe of the université sorbonne nouvelle paris iii. dr. al-hafsi’s dissertation is, according to his title and introductions (french and arabic), a study of the “official and private correspondence” of mūḥyī al‐dīn abū ʿalī ʿabd al‐raḥīm ibn ʿalī ibn muḥammad ibn al‐ḥasan al‐lakhmī al‐baysānī al‐ʿasqalānī “al‐qāḍī al‐fāḍil” (529‐596/1135‐1200), secretary and private scribe (kātib al-sirr) for the fāṭimid caliph, nūr al-dīn ibn zankī’s deputy in egypt, and ṣalāḥ al-dīn, founder of the ayyūbid dynasty. al‐qāḍī al‐fāḍil wrote his letters in such a florid and intricate style that excerpts made their way into medieval biographical dictionaries, chronicles, and manuals on the secretarial arts. many of al-qāḍī al‐fāḍil’s poems and letters also survive in dīwān collections, compiled to showcase the secretary’s finest literary achievements. dr. al-hafsi undertook the gargantuan effort of collecting and collating al-qāḍī’s works. accordingly, volumes 2-4 of his d i s s e r t a t i o n , c o m p r i s i n g 1 2 6 5 p a g e s , contain some 430 letters and 44 entries from al‐qāḍī’s diary, the mutajaddidāt–all transcribed by hand (!). he also provides manuscript sources in the first footnote of every document and notes variants in the manuscript witnesses, or editions, in the case of published texts, in subsequent f o o t n o t e s . t h e f o o t n o t e s w e r e a l s o handwritten. dr. al‐hafsi actually adds eleven additional sources for fragments of can doctoral dissertations disappear? a look at ibrahim al‐hafsi’s “correspondance officielle et privée d’al‐qāḍī al‐fāḍil” and its prospects in a digital age bogdan c. smarandache* centre for medieval studies, university of toronto (bogdan.smarandache@mail.utoronto.ca) * i thank mrs. anne‐marie crotty and the staff of interlibrary loans at robarts library, university of toronto, for their assiduous efforts in processing my request for an interlibrary loan and i thank mme. anne cathelineau of the bibliothèque orient ‐ monde arabe, for allowing me to examine ibrahim al‐hafsi’s dissertation overseas. 127 • bogdan c. smarandache al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) al‐qāḍī’s letters to adolph helbig’s list of twenty‐one manuscript sources. in effect, he has carried out major steps towards completing the desideratum announced by claude cahen and carl brockelmann in their 1998 encyclopaedia of islam article on al-qāḍī. exceeding the proposed aims of his d i s s e r t a t i o n , d r . a l h a f s i g e n e r o u s l y provides a biography of al‐qāḍī al‐fāḍil’s life, analyzes his political thought in the context of the jihād al-ifranj (jihād against the franks), and explores his social network. more in line with his main focus, he devotes a lengthy chapter to an analysis of al‐qāḍī al‐fāḍil’s writing style, covering his use of motifs and a range of literary devices. only in recent years are we beginning to appreciate the use of literary devices such as tawriyya (double entendre) in literature from the ayyūbid and mamlūk periods, thanks to the perceptive work of thomas bauer and other experts. since adolph helbig’s pioneering work, only one dissertation and one monograph on the life of al‐qāḍī have appeared, both written by hadia dajani‐shakeel. her dissertation was completed at the university of michigan in 1972 under the supervision of profs. james a. bellamy and andrew s. ehrenkreutz. her monograph is entitled al‐qādī al‐fāḍil ʿabdar‐raḥīm al‐ bīsānī al‐ʻasqalānī (526‐596 h, 1131‐1199 m): dauruhu at‐tah̲ṭīṭī fī daulat ṣalāḥ‐ad‐ dīn wa‐futūḥatih (al‐qādī al‐fāḍil: his role and administration in the state of ṣalāḥ al‐dīn and his conquests). dajani‐shakeel’s w o r k s a r e t h e m o s t c o m p r e h e n s i v e and authoritative studies of al‐qāḍī to date but no corresponding study of the secretary’s works is available to students and scholars. the editing and publication of al‐hafsi’s monumental dissertation would undoubtedly fill this gap. it is hoped that in the meantime his dissertation will be digitized and made more accessible to historians of the ayyūbids and mamlūks, literary historians, and historical linguists. on a final note, although the multilingual marginalia scattered throughout the dissertation may be of historical interest one day, the digitization of the thesis would also ensure its preservation. bibliography* helbig, adolph h. 1908 al‐qāḍī al‐fāḍil, der wezir saladins. leipzig. al-hafsi, ibrahim 1979 correspondance officielle et priveé d’al-qāḍī al-fāḍil, ph.d. dissertation, université de paris iv-sorbonne. bauer, thomas 2013 “ʿayna hādhā min al‐mutanabbī!’ toward an aesthetics of mamluk literature,” mamlūk studies review 17: 6‐7, 12. bauer, thomas 2007 “in search of post‐classical literature: a review article,” mamluk studies review 11: 146, 166‐7. brockelmann, carl, claude cahen 1998 “al‐qadi al‐fāḍil,” encyclopaedia of islam, new edition. 12 vols. ed. by bernard lewis et al. leiden. iv: 376-7. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) can doctoral dissertations disappear? • 128 dajani‐shakeel, hadia 1972 al‐qāḍı ̄al‐fāḍil: his life and political career, ph.d. disserttion, near eastern languages & literatures, university of michigan. dajani‐shakeel, hadia 1993 al‐qādī al‐fāḍil ʻabd‐ar‐raḥīm al‐bīsānī al‐ʻasqalānī: (526 ‐ 596 h, 1131 ‐ 1199 m): dauruhu at‐tah̲ṭīṭī fī daulat ṣalāḥ‐ad‐dīn wa‐futūḥatihi. beirut. note: at present a project of editing and publishing the letters of al‐qāḍī is being headed under the supervision of prof. stefan leder, dr. sabine dorpmüller, and dr. muhammad helmy at the orient institut beirut: “chancery and diplomatics exemplified by the correspondence of al‐qadi al‐fāḍil”, current projects, orient institut beirut. accessed june 2015. www.orient‐institut.org/index.php?id=93. * i thank mrs. anne‐marie crotty and the staff of interlibrary loans at robarts library, university of toronto, for their assiduous efforts in processing my request for an interlibrary loan and i thank mme. anne cathelineau of the bibliothèque orient ‐ monde arabe, for allowing me to examine ibrahim al‐hafsi’s dissertation overseas. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 181-186 book review when the phrase “late antiquity” a p p e a r s t o d a y i n s c h o l a r l y publications on early islam, it connotes a quest for continuity across time. that is, we expect that when authors use this phrase, they seek elements of continuity between the early islamic world and the world that preceded it in the near east. until recently, however, and somewhat paradoxically, arabia (geographically speaking, in the broadest sense) has often appeared outside this model. arabia existed, of course, throughout the late antique period (however defined), but according to this view, its destiny and historical meaning were, first of all, for it to be remote from its imperial, bureaucratized, urbanized, and monotheistic neighbors; and second, for it to bring discontinuity and even rupture to near eastern history, precisely through the rise and spread of islam. as a result, historians who have advocated for continuity between late antiquity and early islam have often presented this as proceeding more or less independently of the coming of the arabs and islam. according to this approach, in other words, things mostly went on as before, despite the arrival of a new religion, language, and political system. the book under review here, which features late antiquity in both its title and its content, provides occasion for reflecting on these matters. its subject matter is at once familiar and strange. it is well known that the city of al-ḥīra had an important place in the history of the arabs before islam, even though it was situated outside arabia proper (at least in modern terms), not far from the sasanian capital of ctesiphon in iraq. however, modern guides to al-ḥīra have not been plentiful. beginning with gustav rothstein’s detailed die dynastie der laḫmiden in al-ḥīra, now well over a century old, these have tended to focus on the lakhmid dynasty and its role in international politics and warfare. meanwhile, the lakhmid court and its patronage loom large in the early history isabel toral-niehoff, al-ḥīra, eine arabische kulturmetropole im spätantiken kontext, islamic history and civilization: studies and texts, ol. 104 (leiden and boston: brill, 2014), xvii + 248 pages, appendix, indices, maps. isbn: 9789004229266, price: $133 (cloth). michael bonner department of near eastern studies, the university of michigan (mbonner@umich.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 182 • michael bonner of arabic literature, especially poetry, but the connection between this court on the one hand, and the just-mentioned political and military role of the lakhmids on the other hand, is historiographically tenuous. moreover, when al-ḥīra and its inhabitants appear in eastern christian literature, they present an entirely different set of concerns, heroes, and villains. as isabel toral-niehoff points out (p. 27), we can easily get the (erroneous) impression of dealing not with one city but several: in arabic, a nurturing ground for poets and a stage for arab kings; in greek (and perhaps persian), a source of allied troops for the imperial wars; and in syriac and christian arabic, a breeding-place for bishops and saints engaged in theological controversies and in the conversion of the arab nomads of the steppe land. this book proposes to put these pieces together in a unified picture. this involves a focus on the city itself (or as often, “the oasis”); if the book foregrounds any particular group, this is the christian arab urbanites known as the ʿibād, rather than the lakhmid (or naṣrid) ruling house. the book also features late antiquity, and not as a matter of mere lip service. after all, al-ḥīra was founded in or around the third century ce, and fell into eclipse after its conquest by the arab muslims in the seventh. the christian sources relating to it are unmistakably products of late antiquity. but then, if we want to integrate the islamic arabic sources into this picture, we need to view them in a similar, or at least comparative light. isabel toral-niehoff has not achieved— and does not claim to have achieved—a completely unified picture of al-ḥīra, but she has come as close to this goal as seems imaginable. since the relevant source material is so vast, she restricts herself to outlines of certain issues and events, while entering more fully into others. the mode of presentation is thematic, rather than sequential and chronological. this means that readers who want, say, a full, detailed account of the lakhmid princes, will find that, while this book has much to say on the topic, they may still want to consult rothstein and more recent contributions (cited in the book’s bibliography). the book’s chapters indicate its main thematic divisions as follows. the first chapter, on “historical background,” deals with dynastic, urban, and tribal h i s t o r y , a n d w i t h h i s t o r i o g r a p h i c a l i s s u e s p r e s e n t e d b y t h e m u s l i m a n d christian sources. it also considers the (unfortunately meager) archaeological and inscriptional evidence. the next chapter, on “the natural environment,” provides a somewhat surprising view of al-ḥīra, set in a pleasant upland location at some remove from the euphrates, and founded at a time when technological advances had just made settlement of this area possible. indeed, al-ḥīra’s climate was mild enough to permit the production of wine, provoking later disapproval among some of the area’s inhabitants in the islamic era, and bringing delight to pleasureseeking tourists. the city was truly “arab” in the sense that like yathrib/medina, it consisted of separate settlements, partly rural in character and linked together without external fortifications. t h e n c o m e s a c h a p t e r o n t h e community’s origins, including its relation to palmyra and its trade, the zenobia legend, and the possibility that al-ḥīra may have played host to manichaeans seeking refuge from sasanid repression. (the author wonders if this could have al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) isabel toral-niehoff’s al-ḥīra • 183 c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h e l a t e r t r i u m p h o f christianity at al-ḥīra, but this can only be speculation.) a treatment of “al-ḥīra and the sasanians” follows, again not in chronological order, but with a focus on political and cultural relations. then we have a discussion of “the city,” including the structure of its settlement and royal palaces. a subsequent chapter discusses “the population,” divided ethnically among arabs, aramaeans, and persians, although the latter are so rare in al-ḥīra – apart from the ongoing presence of a unit of heavy cavalry – that we may wonder why they are included here at all. the aramaean element is overwhelmingly christian, rural, and of low social status. meanwhile, the aramaic language is entirely familiar to the arabic-speaking urban elite (the ʿibād), though the written form of aramaic most in use was edessene, or western syriac. these ʿibād are, as already mentioned, this book’s main protagonists. they were the ones who participated fully both in arab life and culture and in the sophisticated urban life of late antiquity, for well over two centuries. t o r a l n i e h o ff f o l l o w s w i t h a discussion of al-ḥīra’s languages and the relations among them (die sprachlichen verhältnisse). as just mentioned, she argues for an urban environment that in the case of the elite, is bilingual or even trilingual, as some of the ‘ibād learned persian during their education and travels. their position as a “minority in the middle” enhanced their elite status, or even made it possible. the author cites knauf’s argument that this kind of “functional multilinguism” was characteristic of the near east in late antiquity.1 the idea 1. ernst axel knauf, “arabo-aramaic and deserves further consideration, as does also the question of continuity afterward under islam.2 “subaltern” elements, meanwhile, are relegated to monolingualism: aramaic for the rural peasantry, arabic for the arab “allies” (aḥlāf) recently arrived from the steppes. a subsequent chapter takes up “the king and the tribes.” like the royal house of kinda, the lakhmids were a dynasty and not a tribe, and their skill at tribal politics helps to explain their remarkable longevity. the author delves into their relations with tamīm, taghlib b. wāʾil, and bakr b.wāʾil. in the chapter entitled “the king and his court,” we see the fascination that lakhmid cultural production exerted over poets, prose writers, and audiences of the umayyad and ‘abbāsid eras. several interesting questions arise, for which full answers cannot be provided. for instance, did the corpus of pre-islamic poetry really have its origins in the desert, where poets recited their compositions for the clan gathered around the campfire? or should we view it, following thomas bauer, as a product of the “three courts” (kinda, ghassānids, lakhmids, p. 86), at least as much as of the “campfire”; or similarly, following james montgomery, as more “beduinizing” than “beduin”?3 ʿarabiyya: from ancient arabic to early standard arabic, 200 ce-600 ce,” in a. neuwirth et al., eds., the qur’ān in context. historical and literary investigations into the qur’ānic milieu (leiden: brill, 2010), 197-254, esp. 229-32 (on the nabataeans) and 242-45 (the ghassānids). 2. one implication of knauf’s work is that the diglossia (or as he thinks, triglossia) of arabic could be an inheritance from late antiquity at least as much as from the arabian jāhiliyya. 3. thomas bauer, “die schriftliche sprache im arabischen,” in schrift und schriftlichkeit, ed. h. günther and o. ludwig (berlin and new york: al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 184 • michael bonner the chapter concludes by asking whether a truly christian arabic poetry existed in al-ḥīra; the answer to this question is no, not by any strict definition of the term. however, we have an exception in ʿadī b. zayd, maker and baptizer of kings, able administrator, virtuoso polyglot, hapless victim of intrigue, and arabic poet. (why we should admit ʿadī and no one else into this category is still not entirely clear.) t h e l o n g e s t c h a p t e r d e a l s w i t h “christianity in al-ḥīra.” it describes the arrival of christianity; relations and contacts with members of other faiths; the activities of ascetics and missionaries; and the life of the ḥīran saint, john the arab (yoḥanan ṭayāya). the author relates, in chronological order, the relations of al-ḥīra’s princes with the christians and their institutions. these relations were hardly typical of the time, since the lakhmids remained outside the faith nearly until the end. the conversion of al-nu‘mān iii b. al-mundhir took place (largely through the machinations of ‘adī b. zayd), around a decade before his dethronement and the final destruction of the lakhmid state. nonetheless, from the fifth century onward al-ḥīra figured as a christian city, adhering to the “persian” or “nestorian” church. at the same time, it maintained contacts with syria/palestine, so that its monastic architecture came to bear traces of that world, while the conversion of the nomadic arabs of al-ḥīra’s surrounding steppes tended toward monophysite/ miaphysite christianity, rather than the de gruyter, 1996), 1483-91; james montgomery, “the empty ḥijāz,” in arabic theology, arabic philosophy...in celebration of richard m. frank, ed. j. montgomery (leuven and paris: peeters, 2006), 37-97. nestorianism of al-ḥīra itself. the book concludes with a summary and conclusion. so many themes and topics come up in this book—more than i have managed to list—that i can only comment on a few of them. the treatment of historiographical issues, though brief, holds considerable interest. one point strikes me especially, namely (p. 10) the fact that we still lack a full, systematic treatment of the islamic arabic sources for pre-islamic arabia, with regard to their literary forms and genres, their historicity, and the process whereby these narrative materials assumed written or literary form (literarizität). i would add that werner caskel was probably the arabist who went farthest in this direction during the past century. since caskel’s death in 1970, however, a tremendous amount of work has been done on the sources for early islam, including arabia, especially regarding the genres of sīra/ maghāzi (life and campaigns of muhammad and the earliest community) and of akhbār (historical narratives) on the era of the great conquests and the early caliphate. and here, even though the contemporary profession has not arrived at consensus (and probably never will), we can still benefit from strong opposing arguments, each drawing on painstaking research. for pre-islamic arabia, however, we have nothing of the kind. from a literary and rhetorical point of view, should we think of jāhiliyya as a “primary theme” all by itself, along the lines of albrecht noth’s thematic triad of ridda, futūḥ, and fitna? or should we break these narrative materials down into genres or sub-genres such as ayyām al-ʿarab (“battle-days of the arabs”); aswāq al-ʿarab (“markets and commerce of the arabs”); monographic treatments of tribes (kitāb tamīm, etc.) and of royal al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) isabel toral-niehoff’s al-ḥīra • 185 dynasties (kinda, lakhmids, etc.); and so on? why did so accomplished and prolific a scholar as ibn al-kalbī devote himself to this material, and why do we have so much of it? answers to this latter question are available,4 but it remains a difficult area for historians. commerce, trade, and the economy writ large constitute another area of interest. the arabic historical sources do not dwell on agriculture in al-ḥīra, but then, they have little interest in peasants and agriculture overall (p. 39f.). of course agriculture must have been important for al-ḥīra, considering its favorable location, rich soil, relatively large population, and so on. and what about trade? al-ḥira’s early history involved both commerce and rivalry with palmyra (p. 51). coming closer to the islamic era, its location must have made it a (or the) primary point for communication between eastern arabia and sasanid iraq. accordingly, modern historians often refer to al-ḥīra as one of the two most important players (together with mecca) in sixth-century peninsular trade, as it constituted the point of departure for sasanid commerce with yamāma, the ḥijāz, yemen, and so on (p. 52). but given the lack of archaeological evidence, how do we actually know this? the literary sources relate a late sixth-century episode involving a caravan (laṭīma) intended for commerce in south arabian aromatics, dispatched by the lakhmid ruler once each year. this episode recurs constantly in modern treatments of arabian trade, including the one under discussion here 4. as in nina drory, “the abbasid construction of the jāhiliyya: cultural authority in the making,” studia islamica 83 (1996): 33-49. (p. 52). but, in fact, it appears only once in the narratives transmitted by ibn al-kalbī, briefly describing the caravan’s arrival at the annual fair of ‘ukāẓ.5 apart from this one episode, our sources have little to tell us about al-ḥīra’s place in sixth-century arabian commerce as a whole. elsewhere, seeking to demonstrate the existence of commercial ties between ḥīra and yamāma, toral-niehoff refers to the well-attested fact that christianity was present, or even dominant, in eastern arabia from the fifth century onward. this point, which goes against the picture of an “idolatrous” arabia on the eve of islam, is worth emphasizing, but it hardly constitutes concrete proof of commercial relations between these two places (as toral-niehoff basically agrees, pp. 92-99). the author also includes al-ḥīra (at p. 53) within the annual sequence of “markets of the arabs,” reported by ibn al-kalbī and others, which included sites throughout the entire peninsula. in fact, however, this narrative tradition does not include al-ḥīra, just as it does not include several other obvious candidates including yathrib and mecca.6 so in the end, “ḥīran trade” remains, historiographically speaking, on thin ice. again, there is no reason to deny al-ḥīra a major role in sixth-century arabian commerce. the problem is rather that “ḥīran trade” has become subsumed 5. abū l-faraj, aghānī (cairo: dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1927-), 19:75; ibn ḥabīb, muḥabbar (hyderabad: dā’irat al-ma‘ārif al-‘uthmāniyya, 1941), 195, and other sources, all referring back to the same piece of information from ibn al-kalbī. 6. m. bonner, “commerce and migration before islam: a brief history of a long literary tradition,” in iranian language and culture, ed. b. aghaei and m.r. ghanoonparvar (malibu and costa mesa: mazda, 2012), 65-89, esp. 71-75. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 186 • michael bonner into “meccan trade,” an argument which has seen little progress in the nearly thirty years since the appearance of patricia crone’s book bearing that same title. the author also assigns a central role to al-ḥīra in the development of the arabic language and literary culture. again, the “intermediary” position of the ʿibād, together with the patronage of the lakhmid court, led to an early blossoming not only of orally-transmitted poetry, but also of written prose, perhaps even in al-ḥīra’s chancery, and even resulting in an official court historiography by the turn of the seventh century (pp. 14, 114-18, 123, 234). this thesis rests on difficult evidence, but deserves further consideration. if all this is true, meanwhile, it would make eminent sense for arabic writing to have been invented first in al-ḥīra, as used to be commonly thought. toral-niehoff admits that the consensus of recent decades favors the nabataeans as the originators of arabic writing, but she rightly claims that al-ḥīra’s literate elite must have had a key role in the process nonetheless. it also appears now that the older view, in favor of al-ḥīra, is gaining back some ground; certainly the evidence collected here would favor this view. this book is written in a clear, accessible, academic german style. readers who lack sufficient german to read it should consult an article in english by the same author, bringing together several of the book’s arguments with a focus on its protagonists, the ʿibād.7 the article appeared in a volume featuring the work of several important german-language scholars, here presented in english. english-speakers should be grateful for this effort. at the same time, we may hope that scholarly production in the german language, with its great tradition in our fields, will continue to prosper. this book, an illuminating, indeed eye-opening contribution to our knowledge, is an excellent case in point. 7. i. toral-niehoff, “the ʿibād in al-ḥīra: an arab christian community in late antique iraq,” in the qurʾān in context (see above, n. 1), 328-56. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 258-269 book review the book focuses on a central topic of medieval islam: baghdad and its elites under the saljuqs, between 447/1055 and 575/1180. this baghdad was the caliphal capital where al-ghazālī (d. 505/1111) taught and where ibn al-jawzī (d. 597/1200) preached—a city transformed by the foundation of madrasas and ribāṭs, and fought over by the saljuq turks, their iranian viziers, their emirs, the ʿayyārs, and the abbasids caliphs. the city was indeed the heart of “traditional islam,” to quote the late george makdisi (d. 2002), the leading figure in “baghdad studies” during this key period. for all these reasons, the potential readership of van renterghem’s book is far greater than what is normally expected for monograph on a medieval city. t h e a u t h o r a i m s t o o f f e r a s o c i a l history of baghdad by focusing on the best documented section of the population: its elites (p. 21-22). her book is based upon a phd dissertation submitted in 2004 at the university of paris, sorbonne. the result is two volumes, 3.4 kg, a thousand pages in-quarto; 30 maps and graphics, 53 tables and 34 genealogical trees; a lexicon including about 550 entries; and a bibliography of more than 650 titles. imposing in its size, the work is also unique in its statistical basis. at the core of the book is a database of 2,639 persons having lived in baghdad long enough to be considered as baghdadi. to generate t his p ros op og rap hic al d at abas e, v an renterghem has dug through in a vast corpus of 23 biographical sources (listed in table 1.1, and discussed in vol. 1: 25-39). unexpectedly, ibn al-jawzī’s muntaẓam a n d i b n a l ʿ i m ā d ’ s ( d . 1 0 8 9 / 1 6 7 9 ) shadharāt contain the highest number of relevant notices. but other sources, often disregarded, have proven invaluable: for example, 70% of the notices drawn from al-bundārī’s (d. after 639/1241–2) dhayl taʾrīkh baghdād (still in manuscript at the bibliothèque nationale de france) are not found anywhere else, and the figure is 74% for ibn al-najjār (d. 643/1246) (see vanessa van renterghem, les élites bagdadiennes au temps des seldjoukides. étude d’histoire sociale, 2 vols. (beirut-damascus: presses de l’ifpo, 2015), vol. 1 xx + 530 pp., vol 2. 493 pp. isbn: 978-2-35-159704-0. price: €150 (paper). available in openedition books (https://books.openedition.org/ifpo/9172). david durand-guédy (david_durandguedy@yahoo.com) mailto:david_durandguedy%40yahoo.com?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 259 • david durand-guédy table 1-2). van renterghem explains in detail how the database was designed, with its 97 fields (see vol. 2: 5-21). this huge dataset fuels the maps, graphics and tables that make up most of the second volume. these figures are, in turn, commented upon in great detail in the first volume of text. as such the work honors the french tradition of statistical method applied to history. after all, it was pierre chaunu who founded quantitative history in the 1950s.1 for medieval islam, it follows dominique urvoy’s milestone work on the ʿulamāʾ of al-andalus, as well as the onomasticon arabicum project.2 outside of france, this statistical approach has been developed and theorized by richard bulliet.3 these studies are mentioned in the introduction, along with a discussion on the concept of elites (its inception in the seminal work of the italian sociologist pareto as a reaction to marxist theory; the new approach brought by prosopography; the major contributions of elias and bourdieu) and an analysis of the arabic t e r m s u s e d i n t h e s o u r c e s ( k h ā ṣ ṣ a / ʿāmma, aʿyān, bayt, etc. ). eventually, van renterghem defines the baghdadian elites as follows: they enjoyed a superior social status recognized by their peers and by the rest of the population; they developed strategies of legitimation and distinction; and they lived in baghdad long enough to implement these strategies (p. 21). van renterghem thus differentiates herself from the classical weberian trilogy of power, money, and prestige as she 1. pierre chaunu, “histoire quantitative ou histoire sérielle,” cahiers vilfredo pareto 2/3 (1964): 165-176. 2. dominique urvoy, le monde des ulémas andalous du ve/xie au viie/xiiie siècle. étude sociologique (geneva: droz, 1978). the onomasticon arabicum is available online: onomasticon.irht.cnrs.fr (it now aggregates over 25,000 records). 3. richard bulliet, conversion to islam in the medieval period: an essay in quantitative history (cambridge: harvard univ. press, 1979). considers that economic factors are not paramount. t h e a u t h o r s u c c e s s i v e l y t a k e s t h r e e d i f f e r e n t a p p r o a c h e s : f u n c tional, sociological and spatial. after a presentation of the sources, the first section of the first volume contains a functional analysis of the various fields in which elites can be identified: religious authorities (chap. 2), sufism (chap. 3), traditional sciences (i.e. transmitters and ʿulamāʾ) (chap. 4), the judiciary (chap. 5), the military (chap. 6), the divans (chap. 7), the abbasid court (chap. 8), and the bazars (chap. 9). i n t h e s e c o n d s e c t i o n , t h e a u t h o r switches to a socio-historical approach. it focuses on the “practices of distinction” in a set of activities: eating, moving, and getting dressed (chap. 10). van renterghem then turns to the “signs of reverence” d u r i n g t h e p r o c e s s i o n s ( m a w ā k i b ) , funerals, or investiture ceremonies (chap. 11). elaborating upon this bourdieusian m o d e l , t h e n e x t c h a p t e r h i g h l i g h t s practices of “social reproduction” through the example of fifteen great families, such as the dāmghānis (who controlled the office of the qāḍī al-quḍāt throughout the period), the family of ibn al-jawzī, the zaynabīs (the great hanafi family of baghdad), and the banū muslimas. this part, which highlights the links and the unity within the elites, counterbalances the analytical presentation of the first section (although we had already been told http://onomasticon.irht.cnrs.fr al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) vanessa van renterghem’s les élites bagdadiennes au temps des seldjoukides • 260 that the sufis and the faqīhs had followed the same curriculum, p. 103). the third and final section of the book takes a spatial turn. after a presentation of the topographical framework, van renterghem analyzes in great d et ail where these men (and women) lived and died, and also how their presence was felt in the urban space (through mawākib, funeral processions, or festivals) (chap. 13). next, she scrutinizes the competition between various actors for urban control: the saljuqs (through the ʿamīd, and the shiḥna), the caliph (through the ḥājib and the muḥtasib), and the hashemites (through the naqīb) (chap. 14). finally, c h a p t e r 1 5 e x a m i n e s t h e p o l i t i c s o f architectural patronage in baghdad. this last chapter is typical of how van renterghem proceeds. the text comments on two detailed tables and five maps. table 15-1 (12 pages long) is a list of the 100 building projects launched between 447/1055 and 573/1177 in baghdad, not counting the madrasas and ribāṭs, which are dealt with elsewhere. table 15-2 lists the 66 known patrons of building projects, this time including madrasas and ribāṭs (112 in total because powerful and wealthy patrons could launch several projects). map 17 synthetizes all the data, and maps 18 to 21 contain a more precise representation of the areas favored by v a r i o u s a c t o r s ( r e s p e c t i v e l y s a l j u q s , abbasids, abbasid officials, and civilians). the tables are extremely detailed, and conveniently include mention of the primary sources. the maps are well drawn, in color, and very readable. many of the diagrams and figures which aggregate the results of the database are truly enlightening. for example, a series of four charts elucidates the evolution of hadith transmission in saljuq baghdad. elaborating upon a method designed by dominique urvoy, van renterghem is thus able to identify four generations of hadith transmitters. with the exception of the first generation, they include an equivalent number of masters (about 17) and disciples (about 550). the diagrams (4-2 to 4-5) show how many disciples the various transmitters had in common. in the first period (before the arrival of the saljuqs), we see a clear hierarchy within two groups of transmitters which do not communicate; conversely, in the second period (transmitters who died between 439/1047 and 479/1086), the network is remarkably integrated (i.e. a student has many professors, and no professor stands out); in the third period, the network has lost density and five transmitters prevail; finally, in the last period (transmitters who died between 510/1116 and 564/1168), the network is strongly polarized around t h e f i g u r e o f o n e t r a n s m i t t e r ( t h e pro-ḥanbalī ibn al-ḥusayn, d. 525/1131). van renterghem concludes that “we can witness a tightening of the circle of hadith transmitters around ever less numerous figures and ever more dominant ones” ( p . 1 3 9 ) . s h e o f f e r s n o d e f i n i t i v e explanation for such a trend—though she suggests that the distinction between the ḥanbalīs and the other sunni groups may have played a role—but the visual representation of this phenomenon is striking. another valuable series of illustrations are the maps of residential areas. several filters are successively applied and the results are telling. while hardly any social zoning can be highlighted (see maps 2 and 3, which show that simple transmitters and high-profile elites live al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 261 • david durand-guédy in the same districts), we clearly see that the center of gravity of baghdad moved to the east during the century of saljuq rule (compare maps 4 and 6). also compelling is the evidence of residential segregation according to madhhab (map 10) and occupation (map 7-9). we now have a clear idea of where the ḥanbalīs were living: south-west of dār al-khilāfa on the east side, and south of the jāmiʿ al-manṣūr on the west side. i could mention dozens of other such valuable “hard facts” offered throughout the book. i cannot resist mentioning two further examples: of the 31 sufis who are known to have studied fiqh, 29 are shāfiʿite (p. 105)! this is quite striking. similarly, i found interesting the low proportion of mystics among the persons who enjoyed divine baraka (4 out of 32): unlike later periods, the sufis did not have the monopoly on baraka. the endeavors of the author to provide her readers with a robust documentary basis on which the analysis is built is admirable. history, however, is not a science and van renterghem does not pretend that she has found the grail (she is aware of the unbalanced character of her corpus), but as long as new sources are not discovered (which is very hypothetical), it seems unlikely that the general picture painted in her tables can be challenged. that said, the whole project suffers from two problems. the first is the decision to hermetically isolate the documentary evidence (maps, tables, trees, graphics) from the text; all this valuable material is 4. the running head at the top of the page only refers to the number of any given table, not to its subject. since the volume lacks a detailed list of figures, precious time is wasted in searching for them. 5. strikingly, one previous reviewer of the book starts by stating that he will discuss only the first volume, as if the “annexes” (appendices) contained only marginal information. see m.h. benkheira, studia islamica 112/2 (2017), 303-314, here p. 303. relegated to the second volume (alongside the bibliography and indices). this choice is questionable for a volume of this scale, because following the argumentation requires constantly navigating between two in-quarto volumes, an operation which is hampered by the type of binding (the volume often closes by itself) and the absence of clear running heads.4 i am aware that one figure can be used in multiple passages, and appendices work just fine with significantly smaller books. in this case, however, this sort of reasoning has proved counterproductive, and many figures (all the genealogical trees, all the diagrams and maps; many tables) could easily have been inserted into the text section.5 another problem is the content and scope of the book itself. it says too much and not enough at the same time. too much because van renterghem seems to refuse to choose what story she wants to tell with her abundant material. as a consequence, for each category or issue, she adds up quantitative data, a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l a n a l y s i s , a n d c a s e studies. here again there is a scale effect: what is possible for other cities less well documented does not work well here. take one example: in the corpus of sources on saljuq isfahan, i have not been able to find a single mention of a muḥtasib, though such figures naturally existed in that place and time as in any other city; but for baghdad, 23 muḥtasibs can be identified, often with many details (see table 14-3). multiply this by the number of “catégories élitaires” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) vanessa van renterghem’s les élites bagdadiennes au temps des seldjoukides • 262 defined by van renterghem and it is easily understandable how we end up with this behemoth of a book. this is aggravated by the overreaching approach: thus, in the first section of the book, van renterghem deals with the “milieux élitaires,” but i n s t e a d o f r e s t r i c t i n g h e r s e l f t o t h e relevant positions (preachers, etc.), she also adds a spatial dimension and speaks about the institutions (she deals with the ribāṭ in the chapter on the sufis, with the madrasa in the chapter on the traditional sciences). this leads to repetition in the last section of her discussion, which is space-oriented. there are, indeed, a very high number of repetitions throughout the text. these are sometimes small anecdotes,6 but also include much longer developments.7 at some point we would have expected the author to choose an angle and stick to it, even if it meant leaving aside a vast amount of hard-won data (scholars’ computers are full of such treasures waiting to be dealt with!). at the same time, much of the story that the book contains has already been told. van renterghem’s work is truly admirable, and every scholar has a natural tendency to overvalue his or her contribution to the field. but the case of saljuq baghdad 6. 50 pages apart, we read exactly the same anecdote about the faqīh abū isḥāq shīrāzī, who refused to pray in the madrasa in which he teaches; cf. pp. 423-424 and p. 486, with full references in both cases. 7. the lexicon of social preeminence is dealt with in the introduction (pp. 14-20), then again in chapter 11 (pp. 326-329); the function of the abbasid ḥājib is presented in the functional analysis (chap. 7, pp. 220-222) and also in chapter 14, which focuses on social order (p. 468). the mawkib is dealt with in chapters 11 (pp. 329-330) and 13 (p. 436). even the concept of elites is explained as far into the book as page 416. other examples abound: e.g., the issue of clothing imposed on dhimmis (p. 302 = p. 209), and the role played by women in urban development (pp. 248-251 and pp. 495-500). other examples abound: e.g., the issue of clothing imposed on dhimmis (p. 302 = p. 209), and the role played by women in urban development (pp. 248-251 and pp. 495-500). 8. george makdisi, “the topography of eleventh century baġdād: materials and notes,” arabica 6/2 (1959): 178-97 and 6/3 (1959): 281-309. can hardly be compared to the state of scholarship on pre-mongol nishapur when bulliet started investigating it, or on saljuq isfahan when i embarked on its study. “very few works have been carried out on iraqi cities, including baghdad, despite its status as the seat of the caliphate,” van renterghem writes in the introduction (p. 9). the presentation of the scholarship which follows aims to substantiate that claim. le strange’s topographic study is mentioned briefly in a footnote. george makdisi’s seminal work is alluded to in only a few lines, in a rather curious way: can we really say that he limits himself to “political and intellectual history” and “does not aim to analyze urban society” (p. 10)? while he never engaged in quantitative analyses, makdisi insisted on the fact that the life of a public person such as ibn ʿaqīl ( d . 5 1 3 / 1 1 1 9 ) c o u l d o n l y b e t r u l y understood through a global analysis of the period, space, and milieu in which he lived.8 also, his substantial article on the madrasas not only includes a list of all the “institutions of learning” in the saljuq period, but also proposes a new understanding of their function (a tool for the elites “to control the masses”) based on a reflection on the power relationship al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 263 • david durand-guédy in that very time and space.9 likewise, his article on the topography of baghdad10 is much more than an arid list of toponyms: makdisi shows how the urban space was fought over between the abbasid caliph and the saljuq sultan, which is precisely the subject of van renterghem’s last chapter (15). and makdisi’s annotated translation of the journal of ibn al-bannāʾ ( d . 4 7 1 / 1 0 7 9 ) , w h i c h i s n a t u r a l l y abundantly used by van renterghem, provides a unique insider perspective on an urban (ḥanbalī) community.11 in the same section, one would have expected at least one reference to simha sabari’s study on popular movements in abbasid baghdad, insomuch as claude cahen— sabari’s supervisor—was the first to connect the fitnas with power struggles among the elite (sabari is dismissed much later in a footnote as too “descriptive”).12 b r u s h i n g a w a y m a k d i s i , v a n renterghem dedicates a little more to e p h r a t ’ s w o r k o n t h e s u n n i ʿ u l a m ā ʾ of eleventh-century baghdad. it was published in 2000 and was not particularly well received. indeed, reviewers pointed out that her study was marred by too many factual errors, by several essential sources 9. george makdisi, “muslim institutions of learning in eleventh-century baghdad,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 24/1 (1961): 1–56. 10. george makdisi, “the topography of eleventh century baġdād: materials and notes,” arabica 6/2 (1959): 178-97 and 6/3 (1959): 281-309. 11. george makdisi, “autograph diary of an eleventh-century historian of baghdād,” bsoas 18/1 (1956): 9-33, 18/2 (1956): 239-260 and 19 (1957): 13-48. 12. simha sabari, mouvements populaires à bagdad à l’époque ʿabbasside, ixe-xie siècles (paris: maisonneuve, 1981). claude cahen, “mouvements populaires et autonomisme urbain dans l’asie musulmane du moyen-age,” arabica 5 (1958) and 6 (1959) (with separate pagination). 13. daphna ephrat, a learned society in a period of transition: the sunni ʿulamaʾ of eleventh-century baghdad (albany: state university of new york press, 2000). see, notably, the reviews by t. el-hibri in the international journal of middle east studies 34 (2002): 736-738; v. van renterghem in the bulletin critique des annales islamologiques 18 (2002): 65-67; and, most importantly, shahab ahmed in the journal of the american oriental society 123/1 (2003): 179-182. and studies simply overlooked and, above all, by a thesis which proved untenable.13 that being said, and despite what van renterghem implies, her book and ephrat’s have much in common: the same main biographical sources, the same focus on the ʿulamāʾ (not the only elites dealt with by van renterghem, but certainly the most documented), and the same themes (e.g. assessing baghdad’s attraction or the family background of the ʿulamāʾ). m o r e o v e r , i n a n u t s h e l l b o t h b o o k s share the same approach: statistics cum historical anthropology. van renterghem has not referenced modern authors in her 88-page index section, but an online search reveals that she refers only exceptionally to ephrat’s study outside the introduction. these few examples lead to a broader concern: van renterghem too seldom refers to the existing scholarship in the course of her argumentation. she justifies herself in the introduction by the wish to stay immune from any “foreign problematics,” be it that of medieval europe (e.g., the issue of autonomy, which largely defined the history of western cities) or of “islamic cities,” especially in syria and egypt. the fact is that the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) vanessa van renterghem’s les élites bagdadiennes au temps des seldjoukides • 264 questions at the heart of ephrat’s study were derived from michael chamberlain and joan gilbert’s studies on damascus.14 i can understand this line of reasoning (i.e., to let the sources speak for themselves), but this works best when no source stands above the others, like in bulliet’s patricians, garcin’s qūṣ, or the urban studies based upon ibn ʿasākir (d. 571/1176) or al-khatīb al-baghdādī (d. 463/1071).15 this is not the case with saljuq baghdad. in some cases, van renterghem adds a note to say that her results confirm other studies (e.g., on the precarious situation of the viziers, p. 243, or on the versatility of the emirs, p. 218). on rare occasions, recent studies are discussed in the text (aloha’s u n p u b l i s h e d s t a t i s t i c a l i n q u i r y i n t o al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī’s dictionary is used as a comparendum, p. 131; the same is true for tor’s book on the ʿayyār, p. 457).16 but the level of critical engagement with the existing scholarship remains insufficient. for example, at the outset of the second section, the author introduces examples o f “ s o c i a l d e a t h s ” ( d i s g r a c e , i n f a m y parade) without referring to christian lange’s essential book on the subject.17 14. joan gilbert, the ulama of medieval damascus and the international world of islamic scholarship (ph.d. dissertation, university of california berkeley, 1977); michael chamberlain, knowledge and social practice in medieval damascus, 1190-1350 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1994). 15. richard bulliet, the patricians of nishapur: a study in medieval islamic social history (cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1972); jean-claude garcin, un centre musulman de la haute egypte médiévale: qūṣ (cairo: ifao, 1976 ; 2nd ed. 2005). 16. deborah tor, violent order: religious warfare, chivalry, and the “ʿayyār” phenomenon in the medieval islamic world (würzburg: ergon, 2007); judith ahola, the community of scholars: an analysis of the biographical data from ta’rīkh baghdād (phd st andrews, 2004). 17. christian lange, justice, punishment and the medieval muslim imagination (cambridge: cambridge univ. press, 2008). 18. see muḥammad badrī fahd, taʾrīkh al-ʿirāq fī al-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī al-akhīr, baghdad: irshād, 1973. fahd has also investigated the amīr al-ḥajj before van renterghem (p. 206-10); see his article “taʾrīkh umarāʾ al-ḥajj,” al-mawrid 4 (1981). 19. see kazuo morimoto (ed.), sayyids and sharifs in muslim societies: the living links to the prophet (london and new york: routledge, 2012) with extended reference to previous scholarship. van renterghem rightly considers the niqāba as a key institution, and the naqīb appears in several passages of the book as one of the most important public persons in baghdad. but can we say with the author that “the niqāba is an institution not well known” (p. 84, repeated p.474, with a reference to a single article in italian), when the naqībs of baghdad are dealt with by badrī muḥammad fahd, a scholar who, incidentally, has published extensively on baghdad during the saljuq period, but is never mentioned?18 this is to say nothing of a new stream of research, best exemplified by the studies of kazuo morimoto, who has profoundly renewed our understanding of the issue.19 can we speak of the guilds (“corps de métiers,” p. 440) without hinting at the substantial bibliography on the subject, in particular in relation to the abbasid capital studied long ago by massignon. a quick look at the footnotes reveals that van renterghem hardly refers to the relevant scholarship, even when she tackles issues as hotly debated as the attitude of the ʿulamāʾ toward rulers, the relationship between al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 265 • david durand-guédy the saljuqs and the shīʿites, and the place of the horse in medieval societies. this is also true for individuals or specific families. the ibn jahīr family and abū shujāʿ are well known to specialists of the period, but a reference to hanne’s study on the abbasid vizierate during the saljuq period would be expected.20 with regard to the shiḥna (i.e., the military governor representing saljuq power), van renterghem’s lengthy discussion offers a case study on the career of jawhar āʾīn. but she does not mention the key thing for which jawhar āʾīn was famous, namely his role in the capture of the byzantine emperor at manzikert, nor an article encapsulating the career of the same emir.21 for the many individuals connected to isfahan and discussed by van renterghem throughout her book, much more relevant material would have been found in my own work.22 and that is not even to mention scholarship in turkish and persian. another consequence of her lack of engagement with the existing scholarship is that van renterghem misses several key problematics. i will limit myself to three examples that illustrate the problem. van renterghem claims that ʿamīd al-mulk 20. eric hanne, putting the caliph in his place: power, authority, and the late abbasid caliphate (madison, n.j.: fairleigh dickinson univ. press, 2007). 21. kosuke shimizu, “amīr gawhar ā’īn,” orient 32 (1997): 26-36. 22. david durand-guédy, iranian elites and turkish rulers: a history of iṣfahān in the saljūq period (london & new york: routledge, 2010), e.g., p. 185 about the two qāḍīs al-khāṭibi, who played a critical political role at the saljuq court; or p. 466, n. 146, regarding an emir who occupied the post of shiḥna in isfahan and in baghdad (for whom van renterghem erroneously writes that “no notice is available”). 23. heinz halm, “der wesir al-kundurī und die fitna von nīšāpūr,” die welt des orients 6/2 (1971): 205-233. generally speaking, van renterghem lists german scholarship in the bibliography but never in the text. for example, about the shiʿis during the buyid period (p. 81), van renterghem refers to donohue’s book (which she criticizes elsewhere), but not busse’s authoritative work. john j. donohue, the buwayhid dynasty in iraq 334 h./945 to 403 h./1012: shaping institutions for the future (leiden: brill, 2003). see heribert busse, chalif und grosskönig. die buyiden im iraq (945-1055) (beirut: orient-institut der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft, 1969), 405-431. al-kundurī, toghrïl beg’s vizier, was “well-known” for his “hanafi leanings” (p. 184). this view is that of ibn al-athīr and al-subkī, two of the main sources used by van renterghem. but one of the most famous—and brilliant—scholarly article about saljuq rule (halm’s on the fitna in nishapur) precisely shows that al-kundurī’s madhhab was not clear, and that he remained close to the great shāfiʿī families of nishapur to whom he owed his rise.23 as a second example, in the section on clothing, van renterghem refers to an ashʿarī preacher walking through the city surrounded by armed bodyguards ( p . 3 0 4 ) . t h i s a n e c d o t e c o u l d h a v e provided the occasion to discuss the issue of the militarization of society. following cahen’s pioneering analysis, important research (in particular by jürgen paul) has been dedicated to this important issue of “civilian” elites engaging in warfare in the iranian world. interestingly enough, the preacher mentioned by van renterghem was an iranian (his nisba is al-ṭūsī). as a final example, also concerning military matters, the term khādim is recurrent in the sources, but beyond its generic meaning of “servant,” it could mean more specifically “eunuch,” a key figure al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) vanessa van renterghem’s les élites bagdadiennes au temps des seldjoukides • 266 in pre-modern muslim polities as ayalon has shown. (van renterghem exclusively translates khādim as “serviteur,” hence s h e c o n s i d e r s t h a t a k h ā d i m c a n n o t be shiḥna, p. 467). this is all the more frustrating given that ayalon’s relevant studies on the subject are duly listed in the bibliography.24 the lack of a broader perspective is particularly problematic when dealing with the saljuqs themselves. in the very first pages of the book, we read that “the sultans did not stay much [résident peu] in bagdad, which was a secondary basis of their power” (p. 4); later, in the chapter on the military elites, the “instability of the saljuq regime” (p. 197) is noted, but merely as one of the various threats to baghdad’s security. but nowhere do we read the obvious: any saljuq ruler with imperial ambition had to control baghdad, the seat of the caliphate. at the same time, however, he could not cut himself off from his main source of power, which remained on the iranian plateau. this is the reason why we see an itinerant pattern emerging at the end of the reign of malik-shāh that would last until 547/1152, when the saljuq state imploded. according to this practice, the sultan and his court spent their winters in mesopotamia, usually in baghdad, and moved back to the plateau during the spring. (isfahan, the first dār al-mulk, was abandoned for hamadan when the “instability of the saljuq regime” imposed not only shorter routes, but also 24. see especially david ayalon, “the mamlūks of the seljuks: islam’s military might at the crossroads,” journal of the royal asiatic society, series 3, 6/3 (1996): 305-333, here p. 306. reprinted in eunuchs, caliphs and sultans: a study of power relationships (jerusalem: the magnes press, 1999). 25. this is an issue i have tackled in my book (iranian elites, pp. 319-323 with a table listing the stays of the sultans in isfahan or elsewhere). i have further investigated the topic in subsequent articles (quoted by van renterghem in her bibliography), e.g. “where did the saljūqs live? a case study based on the reign of sultan masʿūd b. muḥammad (1134-1152),” studia iranica, 42 (2011): 211-58. greater proximity to azerbaijan, the new mainstay of power).25 after the end of the dynastic crisis (485/1092–498/1105) and the victory over the ismailis of isfahan in 500/1107, sultan muḥammad travelled to baghdad every winter, not just three times as posited by van renterghem (p. 484, n. 3). although his son masʿūd spent 12 of the 18 winters of his long reign in baghdad, it was clearly not he who “made baghdad one of his residences” (p. 225). assessing the saljuq presence in the city correctly is not a small issue for understanding the consequences of the saljuq domination of local society. beyond some of the specifics, it is the global logic of this pattern that is missed: alp arslan never bothered to go to baghdad because the presence of the most powerful saljuq sultan was not needed there to have his authority respected. but his great grand-son masʿūd kept going to baghdad precisely because he was weak: he had to be physically present to keep the centrifugal forces in check (since he could not physically visit all his territories, he focused on baghdad and hamadan, and let fārs and azerbaijan slip away). similarly, van renterghem is, i believe, mistaken about the relationship of the saljuqs to city life. she contends that the sultans preferred the way they were received in iranian cities (p. 485) but, in bagdad as in iran, the sultans actually did not live inside the city. at best they spent time by the walls, in a military camp. in baghdad, this camp dated back to the buyid al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 267 • david durand-guédy period and is called in the sources the dār al-mamlaka; it had several buildings and its own friday mosque. but elsewhere the saljuq court was set in a tented encampment, sometimes with a pavilion called kūshk in the persian sources (see turk.: köşk, but not kishk as the author writes erroneously on p. 493).26 does this mean that the saljuqs were “türkmens”? van renterghem constantly r e f e r s t o t h e m a s s u c h : “ s o u v e r a i n s t u r k m è n e s , ” “ d y n a s t i e t u r k m è n e , ” “sultanat turkmène,” “empire turkmène.”27 they were, indeed, the leaders of türkmens at the very beginning, but they quickly became much more than that and soon presented themselves as legitimate iranian rulers. it is true that, contrary to what has been argued in the past, the saljuqs did not sever their links with the türkmens after the establishment of the sultanate.28 likewise, saljuq court poets celebrated the turkish identity of their patrons. but it is inaccurate to systematically speak 26. see david durand-guédy, “the tents of the saljuqs,” in turko-mongol rulers, cities and city life ed. david durand-guédy (leiden-boston: brill, 2013), 149-189. 27. ibid., 4, 48, 506, 507, 516. 28. for a critic of “diversion theory” (i.e. iranized saljuq sultans diverting turbulent turkmen tribes to frontier regions in the caucasus and anatolia), see, following cahen’s insight, a.c.s. peacock, “nomadic society and the seljūq campaign in caucasia,” iran and the caucasus, 9/2 (2005): 205-230; a.c.s peacock, early seljūq history. a new interpretation (london and new york: routledge, 2010), 139-151. 29. when van renterghem says that the “saljūqs kept their nomadic habits and… were accompanied by their families, mounts, and herds” (p. 314), the first part of the sentence can be supported, but the last half is at best misleading (saljuq armies could be followed by some cattle, just like any other army). 30. see pp. 393-394, about “the presence of the turks and the turkmens” in baghdad; see p. 459 about the departure of the “turkmen troops from baghdad.” 31. qimāj (cf. index) for qumāj. qumāj of balkh was the key actor of the fall of sanjar’s rule in the east. 32. actually all the names in table 14-2 are turkish. the “salār kurd” of the year 542/1147 is not a name but a function. of the saljuqs as turkmens. it gives the false impression that they were nothing more than pastoral nomads, which was certainly not the case, at least from the time they occupied baghdad in 447/1055.29 powerful groups of türkmens occupied parts of the mountainous regions east of baghdad (especially in the liḥf region, or around shahrazūr), but van renterghem’s text give the impression that they were systematically inside baghdad.30 the overall lack of familiarity with the saljuqs and with saljuq rule is all too visible throughout the text. thus, v a n r e n t e r g h e m f o r g e t s t o m e n t i o n n i s h a p u r o r m a r w a m o n g t h e m o s t important saljuq cities (p. 4); misses the panj nawbāt (privilege to have a fanfare played five times a day) when dealing with a text obviously referring to it (p. 437); improperly vocalizes a well-known turkish name;31 assumes that the position of shiḥna could be given to non-turkish emirs (p. 464);32 or confuses the functions al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) vanessa van renterghem’s les élites bagdadiennes au temps des seldjoukides • 268 of shiḥna and ʿamīd.33 i also spotted a fairly significant number of factual errors.34 but enough with the minutia. a broader issue is that the general conclusions are frustrating. vague statements are quite typical: “les collections de notables de l a b a g d a d s e l d j o u k i d e f o r m a i e n t d e s ensembles mouvants, traversés par des lignes de fracture et composés d’individus hétérogènes en terme de statut social, de richesses matérielle ou de prestige” (p. 505). this generality may be due to the fact that van renterghem never clearly articulates the main questions guiding her investigation. by contrast, it was easy to get the thesis of ephrat’s work (“madrasas were not that important after all”), and ahmed was right to note that despite all its shortcomings, it was a book that “makes people think, and think hard.” one problem with the present book is that, after reading over 500 pages, i have found a lot of data and am convinced that these data are as exhaustive as possible—even if not entirely new—but i have not found a clear thesis. one option could have been to clearly focus on what happened in baghdad during the saljuq period. makdisi and even ephrat tried to answer this vexing 33. on p. 460, van renterghem apparently does not see that the shiḥna commanded the garrison, while the ʿamīd was in charge of what can be called non-military affairs. this is evidenced by the latter’s actions: seizing the iqṭāʿ of the caliph, abolishing the unlawful taxes (mukūs), presiding over the maẓālim court, initiating building projects. 34. for example, on p. 4, malik-shāh’s death (492/1085) did not mean the end of the great saljuq period (which occurred 60 years later, with the death of sanjar in 552/1157; some scholars even speak of the great saljuqs until the demise of the dynasty in iran in 590/1194). on p. 30, it should be noted that bundārī did not write a history of the saljuqs, he merely abridged one. on p. 440, there is confusion between muḥammad b. malik-shāh and his son maḥmūd b. muḥammad. on p. 455, it should be clarified that the “ibn qāwurd” mentioned by ibn al-jawzī is not “the son of” qāwurd, but his descendant. on p. 485, toghrïl beg did not build the masjid-i jāmʿi al-sulṭān in baghdad—it was actually malik-shāh. on p. 488, the vizier of malik-shāh in 480/1087 was not tāj al-mulk but niẓām al-mulk (tāj al-mulk was not promoted to the vizierate before niẓām al-mulk’s murder in 485/1092). 35. jean-michel mouton, damas et sa principauté sous les saldjoukides et les bourides, 468–549/1076–1154 (cairo: ifao, 1994). issue. this is obviously not a question for me to answer, but what struck me while i was reading the book was the importance of the iranian presence in baghdad. the database is filled with iranian nisbas. the function of qāḍī al-quḍāt was entrusted t o t h e d ā m g h ā n i s ; t h e p r e e m i n e n t figures of baghdadian sufism were all iranian (zawzanī, mayhanī, suhravardī and nīshāpūrī); a great proportion of mudarrisūn (23 out 70) were connected to iran; most of the ʿamīds (nihāvandī, iṣfahānī, dihistānī) were iranian (and naturally all the saljuq secretaries as well). this was to be expected: jean-michel mouton has shown a similar pattern for saljuq and burid damascus,35 but it is naturally more conspicuous here. indeed, the importance gained by iranians among the local elite would have deserved study for its own sake. it is only at the very end of the book that we read: l’intégration de bagdad dans un ensemble oriental de tradition turcoiranienne consolida les liens de la ville et de la société locale avec une sphère culturelle non arabophone porteuse d’héritage propres et de penchants idéologiques se distinguant, par al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) 269 • david durand-guédy certains aspects de ceux prévalant dans les régions centrales de l’ancien empire abbaside (p. 515). in other words, saljuq baghdad was connected first and foremost to western iran. here, it seems to me that the most important sources on saljuq baghdad encapsulate a ḥanbalī-abbasid point of view that, to some extent, was embraced by van renterghem. following bulliet, i would argue that adopting the view from the edge is always fruitful, and so looking at baghdad from iran would have much to offer. in her introduction, van renterghem notes that the scholarship on urban studies deals primarily with the egyptian and syrian cases (pp. 6-7); and yet in her conclusion she does not refer to cairo (lapidus) or damascus (chamberlain, gilbert), but focuses on nishapur (bulliet) and isfahan (myself) (while jean aubin is notably absent from her discussion). the above criticisms should not obscure the fact that van renterghem has done a tremendous service to the scholarly community. her monumental book is a product that perhaps only publishing houses of state-funded french research institutes can publish. the author should be thanked for having provided fellow scholars with an indispensable tool to n a v i g a t e t h e c o m p l e x w a t e r s o f t h e abbasid capital in saljuq times. given the importance of bagdad in the muslim world, any specialist of the pre-mongol period will benefit from her work, notably thanks to the valuable indices and tables, covering a wide array of subjects. the formidable quantity of data carefully amassed throughout the book will foster future research on a variety of topics. for these reasons, van renterghem’s volume should be kept close at hand, and will likely become a standard reference work. this is all the easier now that the book is freely available online (https://books. o p e n e d i t i o n . o r g / i f p o / 9 1 7 2 ? l a n g = e n , accessed 23 sept 2018). https://books.openedition.org/ifpo/9172?lang=en https://books.openedition.org/ifpo/9172?lang=en al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 1-14 scholarship on the rise of islam routinely translates the arabic word fatḥ (pl. futūḥ),1 when used in the context of the first expansion of the believers’ movement, as “conquest.”2 in this, it follows classical arabic usage, which offers “conquest” as one of the secondary meanings of fatḥ, and used the term to refer to that extensive genre of accounts--called the futūḥ literature--that described the islamic state’s seemingly inexorable expansion during its first century or so.3 from classical arabic, the term was 1. i am grateful to carel bertram, george hatke, ilkka lindstedt, jens scheiner, and especially uw’s anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments on the draft of this article. 2. several other scholars have discussed the meanings of the word fatḥ. see in particular rudi paret, “die bedeutungsentwicklung von arabisch fatḥ,” in j. m. barral (ed.), orientalia hispanica sive studia f. m. pareja dicata (leiden: e.j. brill, 1974), i, 537-41; g. r. hawting, “al-ḥudaybiyya and the conquest of mecca. a reconsideration of the tradition about the muslim takeover of the sanctuary,” jsai 8 (1986), 1-23; hani hayajneh, “arabian languages as a source for qurʾānic vocabulary,” in gabriel said reynolds (ed.), new perspectives on the qur’ān. the qur’ān in its historical context, 2 (abingdon and new york: routledge, 2011), 117-146, at p. 144 on f-t-ḥ; and chase f. robinson, “conquest,” in encyclopaedia of the qurʾān. general editor: jane dammen mcauliffe, brill online 2015. referenced 25 february 2015. in the nature of things, there is much overlap in the discussion among these four articles and the present one. 3. on the futūḥ literature, see albrecht noth and lawrence i. conrad, the early arabic historiographical arabic fatḥ as ‘conquest’ and its origin in islamic tradition1 fred m. donner the oriental institute the university of chicago (f-donner@uchicago.edu) abstract the arabic term fatḥ (pl. futūḥ) is often translated as “conquest,” but this meaning is not intrinsic to the root f-t-ḥ either in arabic or in other semitic languages. rather, the word was applied to episodes in the expansion of the early islamic state by later muslim writers who described these events following a particular use of the word fatḥ in the qur’ān, where it referred to an act of god’s grace that was favorable for the community. this might include instances of actual conquest, but could also be applied to other ways in which an area came into the state, such as by treaty agreement. the rigid translation as “conquest” is therefore potentially misleading. 2 • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) adopted into other islamic languages in the sense of “conquest;” thus it forms part of the etymology, for example, of the ottoman turkish term fatḥ-nāme, or official announcement of a military victory.4 the present note considers how the word fatḥ became associated with these events and the appropriateness of translating it as “conquest.” as mentioned already, “conquest” is a secondary meaning of fatḥ in arabic; as is well known, the basic meaning of the verb fataḥa in arabic is “he opened,” with the verbal noun fatḥ meaning “opening.” in this respect, arabic is consistent with cognate languages in the northwest semitic group, in which the primary (and sometimes the only attested) meanings from the root f/p-t-ḥ have to do with the concept of “opening” (e.g., “to open;” “door, gate, entrance;” etc.).5 in these languages, meanings related to “conquest” occur sparingly and, one might say, tangentially: in the northwest semitic inscriptions, for example, the form nptḥt is attested with the meaning “to be thrown open, said of an army camp,”6 and one can imagine that in any language, it might be said that a city “was opened” when it yielded to an invader, but this is not the same as giving the active form of the verb the meaning “to conquer.” the only exception among the northwest semitic languages is syriac, where in addition to the basic meaning “to open” the verb ptaḥ can mean “to conquer,” as in arabic. this syriac usage is, however, likely a borrowing from the arabic, and occurs almost exclusively in the works of later authors such as bar hebraeus (d. 1286), michael the syrian (d. 1199), and elias of nisibis (d.1046).7 most of the earlier syriac chronicles, such as the anonymous chronicle up to 724 and the anonymous chronicle up to 846, seem to use other words when describing events such as the sasanian and early islamic conquests in the near east: kbash or ethkbash, “to conquer/be conquered;” qrab, “to fight,” or qarbā, “a battle;” ḥrab, “to devastate, lay waste;” npaq, “to invade;” nḥat, “to descend upon, march against.”8 ptaḥ with the meaning of “to capture” is found once in the context of the islamic conquests in the chronicle of zuqnīn (written ca. 775), but generally tradition: a source-critical study (princeton: darwin press, 1994); fred m. donner, narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton: darwin press, 1998), 174-82; lawrence i. conrad, “futūḥ,” in julie s. meisami and paul starkey (eds.), encyclopedia of arabic literature (london and new york: routledge, 1998),” i: 237-40. 4. on these see encyclopaedia of islam (2nd ed.), “fatḥnāme” (g. l. lewis). 5. e.g. ludwig koehler and walter baumgartner, the hebrew and aramaic lexicon of the old testament (leiden: brill, 1996), s.v.; g. del olmo lete and j. sanmartin, diccionario de la lengua ugarítica (barcelona: ausa, 1996-2000), 358; j. haftijzer and k. jongeling, dictionary of the north-west semitic inscriptions (leiden: brill, 1995), 948-51; m. sokoloff, a dictionary of christian palestinian aramaic (leuven & walpole, ma: peeters, 2015), 344-45. 6. haftijzer and jongeling, 950. 7. michael sokoloff, a syriac lexicon: a translation from the latin; correction, expansion and update of c. brockelmann’s lexicon syriacum (winona lake, in: eisenbrauns, and piscataway, nj: gorgias press, 2009), 1265-66, provides references. i am indebted to two anonymous reviewers for clarifying the syriac references for me. 8. these two texts are found in ignatius guidi, e. w. brooks, and j. b chabot (eds.), chronica minora (= corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium, scriptores syri, textus, series tertia, tomus iv) (paris: e typographeo reipublicae and leipzig: harrassowitz, 1903-5), e.g. pp. 145-47, 232-35. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) arabic fatḥ as ‘conquest’ • 3 it uses other words for “conquer/conquest.”.9 this suggests that the arabic use of the root f-t-ḥ for “conquest” was not yet current in syriac when these texts were compiled.10 in sum, arabic f-t-ḥ in the sense of “to open” is fully consonant with the northwest semitic evidence, but it seems that we must look elsewhere for an explanation of arabic f-t-ḥ in the sense of “to conquer.” surprisingly, the root f-t-ḥ has not (yet) turned up as a common noun or verb in pre-islamic north arabian inscriptions; ptḥ is attested as a personal name in ḥismaic and safaitic, but this cannot provide any guidance on the meaning of the root.11 sabaic (one of the epigraphic south arabian languages) seems, at first glance, particularly promising as a possible source for the meaning “to conquer” in arabic, because the dictionaries state that in south arabian the verb ftḥ can mean “to conquer” or “to lay waste.”12 (surprisingly, sabaic does not seem to know the meaning “to open” with this root.) this might be taken as evidence that arabic fataḥa “to conquer” is a loan-word from south arabian, an idea that seems even more plausible in view of the fact that the military terminology of classical arabic contains some loan-words from south arabian, such as khamīs, “army” (from sabaic ẖms, “army, infantry”).13 one assumes that these terms became current in arabic in the centuries before the rise of islam, when the south arabian kingdoms and their culture exercised significant political and cultural influence over areas to the north, including the ḥijāz.14 there are, however, reasons to question whether arabic fatḥ with the meaning “conquest” actually does have a south arabian etymology. for one thing, the dictionaries’ attestations of sabaic ftḥ are few, and often seem amenable to other meanings, opening 9. incerti auctoris chronicon pseudo-dionysianum vulgo dictum (ed. j.-b. chabot, paris: e typographeo reipublicae, 1933), 151.3 [=csco, scriptores syri, series tertia, tomus ii, textus], on the conquest of dara; cf. the chronicle of zuqnīn, parts iii and iv, a.d. 488-775, translated by amir harrak (toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, 1999), 143. note that the same text (incerti auctoris…), p. 149, line 13, referring to the conquest of palestine, uses the word kbash; p. 151 line 7, referring to the conquest of caesarea, again kbash; p. 151 line 24, referring to the conquest of arwād, ethkbash; etc. sokoloff, syriac lexicon, also lists a single reference to ptaḥ in the syriac translation of the lost greek chronicle of zacharias rhetor, who died in the mid-6th century; but the translation may be of considerably later date. 10. some arabic words were, however, borrowed into syriac early in the islamic era, evidently from umayyad-era arabic texts; see antoine borrut, “vanishing syria: periodization and power in early islam,” der islam 91:1 (2014), 37-68, at 49; see also the chronicle of zuqnīn, 25-28, for a discussion of arabisms in the chronicle (dated to 775). 11. i thank ilkka lindstedt for this information (email, 28 july 2015). 12. joan copeland biella, dictionary of old south arabic (chico, ca: scholars press, 1982 [=harvard semitic studies, no. 25], p. 412-13; a.f.l. beeston et al., sabaic dictionary (louvain-la-neuve: peeters, and beirut: librairie du liban, 1982), p. 47. 13. the dependence of muḥammad’s community on south arabian (ḥimyarite) military practices is emphasized by john w. jandora, the march from medina. a revisionist study of the arab conquests (clifton, n.j.: kingston press, 1990), esp. 50-51. jandora’s appendix b, p. 131, provides a list of military terms in arabic that he considers of south arabic origin; the list does not, however, include fatḥ. 14. on ḥimyar’s military and political expansion northward into the arabian peninsula, see christian julien robin, “ḥimyar, aksūm, and arabia deserta in late antiquity. the epigraphic evidence,” in greg fisher (ed.), arabs and empires before islam (oxford: oxford university press, 2015), 127-71, esp. 137-39. 4 • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) the possibility that the translation “to conquer” proposed by the modern lexicographers was influenced by their knowledge of the arabic usage. moreover, it is indisputable that the primary meaning of south arabian ftḥ is “to render judgment” or “to decree;” in this it seems closely cognate with the ethiopic (geʿez) root f-t-ḥ, which shows no trace of any meaning related to “conquest.”15 the easy assumption of a south arabian origin for arabic fataḥa, “to conquer,” is rendered even more dubious by the evidence of the qurʾān. since the qurʾān is the oldest surviving monument of arabic literature and seems to hail from a west-arabian milieu,16 one would expect to find the south arabian meaning of fatḥ as “conquest” reflected in its vocabulary if, in fact, this was the origin of the later arabic usage. however, although the word fatḥ and other words derived from the root are used almost forty times in the qurʾān in a variety of ways, in no case does fatḥ in the qurʾān obviously mean “conquest.”17 this suggests that if south arabian fatḥ did mean “conquest,” such a meaning was not known to the arabic represented by the qurʾān. on balance, then, it seems that the association of the south arabian root f-t-ḥ with the concept of “conquest” is dubious and should be held in reserve, at least until new evidence comes to light. it also suggests that the development of the meaning “conquest” for fatḥ must be a development within the evolution of arabic itself, and not a meaning derived from some earlier semitic language. the qurʾānic data, then, must be examined in more detail, because it offers the earliest literary examples of arabic usage of words from the root f-t-ḥ.18 we can classify the qurʾān’s use of words from the root f-t-ḥ into four categories, which we shall call groups a, b, c, and d: a. a first group of qurʾānic passages clearly has fataḥa (or related words) with the regular northwest semitic meaning of “to open” (such as “opening the gates of heaven.”) they include, at least, q. 7 (al-aʿrāf): 40; q. 12 (yūsuf): 65; q. 15 (al-ḥijr): 14; q. 23 (al-muʾminīn): 77; q. 38 (ṣād): 50; q. 39 (al-zumar): 71 and 73; q. 54 (al-qamar): 11; and q. 78 (al-nabaʾ): 19. these need not detain us further here. b. another group of qurʾānic passages seems to use f-t-ḥ in the sense of “to decide 15. wolf leslau, comparative dictionary of geʿez (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1987), 170. the meanings for the ethiopic verb fatḥa cluster around the concepts of “to open, loosen, set free, absolve” and “to judge, decide, pass judgment.” 16. on the date and locale of the qurʾān text, see f. donner, narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton: darwin press, 1997), ch. 1; nikolai sinai, “when did the consonantal skeleton of the qurʾan reach closure? part 1,” bsoas 77 (2014), 273-92. 17. see the discussion in robinson, “conquest.” 18. i have set aside here a search of the corpus of pre-islamic arabic poetry, in view of the fact that it is all transmitted to us by authors of the islamic period. some recent studies, however, have profitably utilized the poetry to reveal shifting meanings of certain key words, going back to the pre-islamic era: peter webb, “al-jāhiliyya: uncertain times of uncertain meanings,” der islam 91:1 (2014), 69-94, and suzanne stetkevych, “the abbasid poet interprets history: three qaṣīdahs by abū tammām,” journal of arabic literature 10 (1979), 49-64 [both on jāhiliyya]; peter webb, imagining the arabs. arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016), esp. ch. 2 (60-109) [on ʿarab]. see also aziz al-azmeh, the arabs and islam in late antiquity. a critique of approaches to arabic sources (berlin: gerlach, 2014), 101-11. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) arabic fatḥ as ‘conquest’ • 5 between” two parties or “to render judgment.”19 these include q. 7 (al-aʿrāf): 89, 26 (al-shuʿarāʾ):118, and 34 (al-sabaʾ):26 and (as we shall see below) probably a number of others. q. 7: 89, for example, reads (in part); “[...] our lord, decide/judge between us and between our people with truth; you are the best of deciders/judges” [rabba-nā ftaḥ bayna-nā wa bayna qawmi-nā bi-l-ḥaqqi wa anta khayru l-fātiḥīna]. as was pointed out long ago by j. horovitz, this usage seems to be derived from or cognate with the ethiopic fetḥ, “judgment, verdict, decision;”20 it might be considered even more likely that this signification came into both arabic and ethiopic from the south arabian, which as we have seen above also uses the verb ftḥ with the meaning “to obtain a judicial order; initiate a lawsuit; give judgment.”21 c. several verses seem to use fataḥa, with the preposition ʿalā, in ways that extend semantically the sense of “to open.” two verses (q. 6 [al-anʿām]: 44 and q. 7 [al-aʿrāf]: 96) use fataḥa ʿalā to mean “to bestow upon” or “to grant” (a meaning perhaps not semantically too distant from the basic idea of “to open;” cf. the english “open-handed.”). q. 7: 96, for example, says “and if the people of the villages had believed and been god-fearing, we would have opened/bestowed upon them blessings from the heavens and the earth...” [wa-law anna ahla l-qurā āmanū wa-ttaqaw la-fataḥnā ʿalay-him barakātin min al-samāʾi wa l-arḍi...]. a third verse (q. 2 [al-baqara]: 76) uses the same construction but evidently with the meaning of “to reveal or disclose” previously hidden things. this meaning, too, is not very distant from the basic meaning of “to open:” “[...] do you talk to them about what god has opened/revealed to you...?” [...a-tuḥaddithūna-hum bi-mā fataḥa llāhu ʿalay-kum...]. d. there remain, however, several qurʾānic passages that use the verbal noun fatḥ (or other words from the root f-t-ḥ) in which the exact meaning is more difficult to discern. they include q. 2 (al-baqara): 89; q. 4 (al-nisāʾ): 141; q. 5 (al-māʾida): 53; q. 8 (al-anfāl): 19; q. 14 (ibrāhīm): 15; q. 32 (al-sajdah): 28 and 29; q. 35 (al-fāṭir): 2; q. 48 (al-fatḥ): 1, 18, and 27; q. 57 (al-ḥadīd): 10; q. 61 (al-ṣaff): 13; and q. 110 (al-naṣr): 1. the word fatḥ in these verses seems to refer to some momentous event that is good for the believers, but its exact nature is not clear, or seems different in different verses.22 q. 35:2 speaks of the “mercy that god opens (? grants? reveals?) to the people” [mā yaftaḥi llāhu li-l-nāsi min raḥmatin]. some of these verses suggest that the meaning of fatḥ may be something like “judgment,” thus making them similar to group b, or they may imply that fatḥ refers to some kind of victory or success, although its exact nature remains elusive. the word istaftaḥa, “to ask for a fatḥ,” usually against the unbelievers or other opponents, occurs in some of these verses and would fit either meaning—i.e., fatḥ as 19. paret, “die bedeutungsentwicklung,” emphasizes this meaning in particular, as does hayajneh, “arabian languages,”144. 20. josef horovitz, koranische untersuchungen (berlin and leipzig, 1926), 18, note 2; see also arthur jeffery, the foreign vocabulary of the qur’ān (baroda: oriental institute, 1938), 221-2; rudi paret, der koran. kommentar und konkordanz (2nd ed. stuttgart: kohlhammer, 1977), 167. see in particular leslau, comparative dictionary of geʿez, 170. 21. biella, loc. cit.; beeston, loc. cit. 22. paret, “bedeutungsentwicklung,” links such events with a “decision” by god (meaning c here). 6 • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) “judgment” or as “victory.” (q. 2: 89; q. 8: 19; q. 14: 15). a few verses seem to associate or equate fatḥ with naṣr, “aid” or “assistance,” presumably from god (q. 61: 13; q. 110: 1, and more distantly, q. 48: 1-3). in these last cases, it may be that fatḥ is used in a sense akin to that in section c above, “a bounty bestowed by god.” the context at the end of sūra 32, in which there is much mention of the last judgment, might tempt us to infer that fatḥ there is a reference to the last judgment itself (verses 25-32)--the word fatḥ is even used in the phrase yawm al-fatḥ, “the day of the fatḥ,” which has a ring of finality to it (q. 32: 29). references to fatḥ qarīb, “a near fatḥ” (q. 48: 18; q. 61: 13) might also be taken to suggest a connection with a day of judgment presumed to be imminent, but still in the future. q. 5: 52 states, “perhaps god will bring the fatḥ or a command from him...” that will make opponents repent [fa-ʿasā llāhu an yaʾtiya bi-l-fatḥi aw amrin min ʿinda-hu...], suggesting that it is something in the future. on the other hand, q. 8: 19, q. 48 verses 1, 18, and 27, and q. 57: 10 all state that the fatḥ has already come, and is not something in the future: for example, q. 8: 19 reads, “if you ask for a fatḥ, indeed the fatḥ has already come to you” [in tastaftiḥū fa-qad jāʾa-kum al-fatḥu]. so, all things considered, the temptation to understand fatḥ as a reference to the last judgment seems ill-founded. this thicket of seemingly inconsistent or contradictory meanings of fatḥ and related words in the qurʾān resulted in different glosses being supplied by the commentators, depending on what the context seemed to require: so the word fatḥ is explained as meaning not only “opening” but also “judgment,” “victory,” or “assistance,” or sometimes all together. the commentaries on sūra 48 (sūrat al-fatḥ) are especially instructive. in the first verse of this sūra, “verily, we have granted (?) you a clear fatḥ” [innā fataḥnā laka fatḥan mubīnan], the words fataḥa and fatḥ are usually construed by modern translators to mean something like “victory.”23 in doing so, they follow the medieval commentators, who for the most part explain this verse as a reference to muḥammad’s agreement with quraysh at al-ḥudaybiya.24 al-ṭabarī’s tafsīr provides a variety of reports arguing that in this verse fatḥ means ḥukm (a judgment) against those who opposed muḥammad and in support of those who backed him; in summarizing, he paraphrases the verse to mean, “we gave a verdict of assistance (naṣr) and victory (ẓafr) against the polytheists (kuffār) and with you.” so al-ṭabarī offers both the meanings of “judgment” and “victory/assistance” as glosses. moreover, almost all the traditions about this passage cited by al-ṭabarī link it to 23. the translations of pickthall, arberry, dawood, muḥammad ʿalī, ʿabdullāh yūsuf ʿalī, fakhry and droge all translate as “victory.” bell renders the verse “verily we have given thee a manifest clearing-up,” which seems to draw mainly from the meaning of the adjective mubīn and leaves the meaning of the verb and noun fataḥa and fatḥ unclear. paret translates the verse as “wir haben dir einen offenkundigen erfolg beschieden,” thus giving the sense of “success” to fatḥ. droge translates “victory,” but in a footnote says that the literal meaning is “we have opened for you a clear opening.” 24. this association is noted by u. rubin, “the life of muḥammad and the islamic self-image. a comparative analysis of an episode in the campaigns of badr and al-ḥudaybiya,” in harald motzki (ed.), the biography of muḥammad. the issue of the sources (leiden: e. j. brill, 2000), 3-17, at p. 4, and by hawting, “al-ḥudaybiyya and the conquest of mecca.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) arabic fatḥ as ‘conquest’ • 7 al-ḥudaybiya, where the verse is according to some commentators supposed to have been revealed.25 the tafsīr of muqātil ibn sulaymān (d. 150/767)--one of the earliest extant commentaries--also links this verse to the al-ḥudaybiya episode. according to muqātil, the verse was revealed by god upon muḥammad’s return from al-ḥudaybiya to medina, and he glosses it as meaning “we rendered for you a clear judgment in your favor, i.e., islām.”26 despite a certain confusion surrounding the exact meaning of fatḥ in the qurʾān, howevr, one thing is immediately clear: nowhere in the qurʾān does the word fatḥ seem to mean “conquest.” the equation of fatḥ with “victory” by some commentators comes perhaps nearest to the idea of conquest, but this signification (“victory”) seems to be no more than an intelligent guess at the meaning of fatḥ based on its context; several other possible meanings seem equally apt (“assistance”, for example) and, in any case, “victory” is not the same thing as “conquest.” the commentators’ association of fatḥ in q. 48 with the incident at al-ḥudaybiya is instructive here. the commentators may have considered the al-ḥudaybiya episode a moral victory for the prophet in his struggle against the polytheists of mecca, but it certainly could not in any way be considered a “conquest.” the islamic tradition of later times considered the armistice that the prophet concluded with the meccans at al-ḥudaybiya to be a diplomatic coup; ibn isḥāq states baldly, “no previous victory (fatḥ) in islam was greater than this.”27 but the import of this victory does not seem to have been immediately clear to many of muḥammad’s close followers, who according to some reports complained that he had conceded too much to the meccan negotiators and were disappointed to be unable to perform the pilgrimage.28 in military terms, the “raid” was a complete flop, for muhammad and his followers were required to turn back without attaining their stated objective of performing pilgrimage. it is very difficult, therefore, to consider the al-ḥudaybiya episode, consistently described by the commentators as a fatḥ, in any way a “conquest,” even if it may be considered a “victory.”29 hawting argues that al-ḥudaybiya was called a fatḥ because it resulted in the “opening” of the meccan sanctuary;30 but muḥammad and his followers were only allowed to visit the sanctuary a year later, so this argument seems a bit far-fetched. paret, going against the majority of the commentators, suggests that fatḥ in sūra 48 [sūrat al-fatḥ] refers not to al-ḥudaybiyya at 25. muḥammad ibn jarīr al-ṭabarī, tafsīr (30 vols., cairo: al-matbaʿa al-maymanīya, 1321/1903), xxvi, 42-5. 26. muqātil ibn sulaymān, tafsīr (ed. aḥmad farīd, 3 vols., beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīya, n.d. [ca. 2003?]), iii, 244. 27. ibn hishām, al-sīra al-nabawīya (ed. f. wüstenfeld, göttingen: dieterich, 1858-60), 751. the translation is that of a. guillaume, the life of muhammad. a translation of ibn isḥāq’s sīrat rasūl allāh (oxford: oxford university press, 1955), 507. 28. e.g., ibn hishām, al-sīra al-nabawīya (ed. f. wüstenfeld, göttingen: dieterich, 1858-60), 746-53. 29. paret, “bedeutungsentwicklung,” opines that the association of fatḥ with “conquest” derives from the fatḥ makka, but it seems more likely that this phrase is itself a back-formation of later sīra -tradition; it does not occur in the qurʾān, nor does the qurʾān contain any explicit reference to the event. moreover, the occupation of mecca by muḥammad’s forces is only slightly more plausibly considered a “conquest”— “surrender” would be a more apt description. 30. hawting, “al-ḥudaybiyya and the conquest of mecca.” 8 • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) all, but to fatḥ makka, the conquest of mecca.31 what, then, did the islamic historiographical tradition intend when it drew on the term fatḥ and its plural futūḥ to designate that genre of reports that related to the expansion of the early islamic state? since, as we have seen, fatḥ in the qurʾān does not seem to mean military conquest, and since there were other available arabic roots (such as gh-l-b or q-h-r or ẓ-f-r, all known to the qurʾān) that did convey more unequivocally the meaning of conquest, it seems that the key point of designating collections of such reports with the label “futūḥ” must have been something other than the military dimension of these events. nor was the object merely to collect and tabulate evidence for the expansion of the early islamic state and community, although that was doubtless a significant secondary consideration. the main goal, rather, seems to have been to show that this expansion was an act of god’s favor, a divine blessing bestowed upon his prophet and those faithful believers who followed him. to make this point, the traditionists who collected reports of battles and treaty-agreements and compiled them to form the futūḥ literature selected from the qurʾān a term or usage that specifically made the expansion a sign of god’s grace--a fatḥ in the sense of the two qurʾānic verses cited in section c above, in which god bestows some blessing or benefit upon (fataḥa ʿalā) the believers (q. 6:44 and q. 7:96). in the conquest accounts we sometimes find exactly the phrase “god bestowed [a place x] upon [the conqueror y],” fataḥa llāhu [x] ʿalā [y];32 in such passages, the emphasis is clearly not on the exact manner of a place’s submission, but rather on the fact that it was overcome with god’s help. each place that came to be absorbed into the expanding islamic state--whether by conquest, or by treaty agreement, or by voluntary affiliation--could thus be seen as a fatḥ; god had “bestowed it upon” the muslim community and state, as an act of divine grace.33 indeed, even in modern colloquial arabic when one wishes to invoke god’s blessings on someone, one may say yiftaḥ allāh ‘alayk.” this terminology is thus part of the salvation-historical agenda of nascent islamic historiography, with its emphasis on how god directed historical events to realize his designs for mankind and for his favored community, the community of muḥammad and his followers.34 the designation of reports about the expansion of the early community of believers as futūḥ seems to be part of a broader process by which muslim traditionists in the second and later centuries ah sought out qurʾānic words or phrases to designate institutions or phenomena that, in earlier years, had been referred to by other, non-qurʾānic, words--a 31. paret, “bedeutungsentwicklung.” 32. for example, al-wāqidi, kitāb al-maghāzī (ed. marsden jones, london: oxford university press, 1966), 636, 655, dealing with the seizure of certain fortresses at khaybar. 33. b. lewis, the political language of islam (chicago: university of chicago press, 1988), 93-4, is right to state that “underlying this usage [of the term futūḥ], clearly, is a concept of the essential rightness or legitimacy of the muslim advance...,” but he seems not to emphasize the idea that the expansion is an act of god’s grace and stresses rather the presumed illegitimacy of those regimes overthrown. 34. on the salvation-historical character of islamic historiography, see john wansbrough, the sectarian milieu: content and composition of islamic salvation history (oxford: oxford university press, 1978); noth and conrad, early arabic historiograhical tradition; donner, narratives. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) arabic fatḥ as ‘conquest’ • 9 process i have elsewhere called the “qurʾānicization” of islamic discourse.35 the object of this process was, of course, to legitimize the renamed institutions in islamic, i.e. qurʾānic, terms. the best-attested example is the shift in the term for head of state from amīr al-muʾminīn (the term found in all early documents so far discovered) to khalīfa (a qurʾānic term which seems first to be used in this sense by ʿabd al-malik in his coinage, near the end of the first century ah). the development of the terminology of futūḥ offers another example; the term futūḥ seems gradually to supplant (or to augment) earlier terms, such as ghazwa, maghāzī, or sarīya that were already in use.36 our reflections leave us with some questions. the first is whether we should continue to translate fatḥ in these contexts simply as “conquest.” is a suitable alternative term available? could we, for example, refer to al-balādhurī’s famous futūḥ al-buldān, usually translated as “the conquest of the nations,” by something like “the divine bequeathing of the lands” or “the regions bestowed by god’s grace”? these seem rather clumsy; something like “the incorporation of the nations” might be smoother, but then it lacks the crucial component in the term fatḥ, its reference to the working of divine grace. a second question is whether our facile equation of fatḥ with conquest has caused us to overemphasize the importance of military action—conquest—in the expansion of the early islamic state, and in so doing to neglect or ignore the degree to which the islamic state may have expanded by means of compromise with, cooperation with, and even concession to the so-called “conquered” peoples.37 a purely military model cannot adequately explain the long-lasting expansion of the early islamic state, and its eventually successful integration of millions of new people. recent research by a number of scholars has helped clarify the ways in which the arabic-speaking populations of the desert fringes of syria and iraq were integrated into the realms of the byzantine and sasanian empires.38 some townsmen of the ḥijāz appear to have had close commercial ties with syria, or to have owned property 35. fred m. donner, “the qurʾāncization of religio-political discourse during the umayyad period,” in a. borrut (ed.), écriture de l’histoire et processus de canonisation dans les premiers siècles de l’islam. hommage à alfred-louis de prémare, revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerrannée 129 (2011), 79-92. 36. it is difficult to prove this without undertaking a comprehensive examination of all existing reports, and in any case all reports we have are found in later compilations that may have edited earlier reports to insert the later terminology. however, it is worth noting that one of the earliest extant chronicles, the taʾrīkh of khalīfa b. khayyāṭ (d. 854) seems to use the word futūḥ mainly (but not exclusively) in section headings rather than in the text of reports contained in these sections, suggesting that the word was part of the compilation process and not found in the earlier reports themselves. interestingly, the taʾrīkh of abū zurʿa al-dimashqī (d. 893) uses the word futūḥ only once, in a report according to which someone told the amīr al-muʾminīn that the killing of the qadarite ghaylān (d. 749) was min futūḥ allāh, “one of god’s blessings.” 37. on this possibility see fred m. donner, “visions of the early islamic expansion: between the heroic and the horrific,” in nadia maria el cheikh and sean o’sullivan (eds.), byzantium in early islamic syria (beirut: american university of beirut and balamand: university of balamand, 2011), 9-29. 38. see, for example, the essays in greg fisher (ed.), arabs and empires before islam (oxford: oxford university press, 2015); aziz al-azmeh, the emergence of islam in late antiquity. allāh and his people (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2014); robert g. hoyland, “arab kings, arab tribes and the beginnings of arab historical memory in late roman epigraphy,” in hannah m. cotton, robert g. hoyland, jonathan j. price, and david j. wasserstein (eds.), from hellenism to islam. cultural and linguistic change in the roman near east (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2009) pp. 374-400. 10 • fred m. donner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) there.39 all this suggests that the inhabitants of the arabian fringes, and even of the towns of western arabia, were on familiar terms with the people of syria and iraq, and vice-versa, which could have provided conditions for cooperation between the arabians and those they knew in syria and iraq. muʿāwiya, when he became governor of syria in 18/639 established close relations with the powerful syrian tribe of kalb—if these ties had not already been made shortly after he arrived in syria with his brother and predecessor, yazīd b. abī sufyān, in 13/634;40 and we know that the umayyads after him maintained close ties with the kalb and other syrian tribal groups. this suggests that the process we usually call the conquests, while it certainly involved military confrontations, should not be seen solely in military terms. in this context, our concern over the meaning and proper translation of futūḥ can be seen as more than a mere quibble over terminology. rather, by misunderstanding the semantic content of the term fatḥ, we may have allowed ourselves to misconstrue the character of the process of expansion to which it refers. 39. michael lecker, “the estates of ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ in palestine: notes on a new negev inscription,” bsoas 52 (1989), 24-37. 40. ei (2), “kalb b. wabara, ii—islamic period” [a. a. dixon]; 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correction, expansion and update of c. brockelmann’s lexicon syriacum. winona lake, in: eisenbrauns, and piscataway, nj: gorgias press, 2009. stetkevych, suzanne. “the abbasid poet interprets history: three qaṣīdahs by abū tammām,” journal of arabic literature 10 (1979), 49-64. al-ṭabarī, muḥammad ibn jarīr. tafsīr. 30 vols., cairo, 1321/1903. wansbrough, john. the sectarian milieu: content and composition of islamic salvation history. oxford: oxford university press, 1978. al-wāqidi, muḥammad ibn ʿumar. kitāb al-maghāzī. edited by marsden jones. 3 vols. london, 1966. webb, peter. imagining the arabs. arab identity and the rise of islam. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016. webb, peter. “al-jāhiliyya: uncertain times of uncertain meanings,” der islam 91:1 (2014), 69-94. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 173-180 book review the volume under review revisits the ghassānids, the famous arab dynasty allied to byzantium that h a s a t t r a c t e d c o n s i d e r a b l e s c h o l a r l y attention over a good century or more. this undertaking begins with a challenge to the very name granted to the dynasty: “ghassānid” is indeed quite a misnomer. names ending in –ids (-idès in greek) imply a common ancestor and so one should more accurately refer to them as jafnids, that is the descendants of one jafna (80 and n. 2, 193). (the same applies to the lakhmids who are more aptly named naṣrids after their eponym naṣr.)1 the papers collected here are the outcome of a symposium held in paris 1. see also the proceedings of another conference that took place at the same time published by joëlle beaucamp, françoise briquelchatonnet, and christian julien robin (eds.), juifs et chrétiens en arabie aux ve et vie siècles: regards croisés sur les sources (paris: association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2010). in 2008, one in a series of conferences on pre-islamic arabia and pre-islamic arabs.1 interest in these topics has grown considerably over the last number of years and continues with the recent surge of publications by, inter alia, greg fisher, peter webb, aziz al-azmeh, and isabel toral-niehoff.2 but if pre-islamic arabia and pre-islamic arabs have been much neglected in modern scholarship, such has not been the case with the jafnids, the subject of continuous modern scholarly 2. greg fisher (ed.), arabs and empire before islam (oxford: oxford university press, 2015); peter webb, imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016); aziz al-azmeh, the emergence of islam in late antiquity: allāh and his people (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2014), on which, see webb’s review in al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015), 149-53; isabel toral-niehoff, al-ḥīra. eine arabische kulturmetropole im spätantiken kontext (leiden and boston: brill, 2014), and reviewed by michael bonner in this issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā, 181-186. denis genequand and christian julien robin (eds.), les jafnides: des rois arabes au service de byzance (vie siècle de l’ère chrétienne) (paris: éditions de boccard, 2015), 293 pages. isbn: 9782701804378, price: €49 (paperback). antoine borrut university of maryland and patricia crone member, school of historical studies, institute for advanced study (aborrut@umd.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 174 • antoine borrut attention from the nineteenth century to the present. in the opening contribution to the volume (“rethinking the jafnids: new approaches to rome’s arab allies,” 11-36), mark whittow justifies this sustained interest in noting that “they were a non-roman dynasty on the boundaries of the empire about whom there is an unusually large body of evidence, much of it relatively contemporary” (11). as arabs, the jafnids have also been seen as forerunners to the world conquerors about to emerge from the arabian peninsula, and as a significant source of evidence on the immediate pre-islamic period. the jafnids are also situated at the nexus of the roman/persian conflict, while “jafnid history can be read as a prolegomenon to the epoch-defining fall of the roman empire in the levant” (12). this last point is reinforced by their adoption of monophysitism, which “has often been seen as the very fault line that divided the sixth-century empire” (12). it is, therefore, n o t s u r p r i s i n g t h a t a r m a n d p i e r r e caussin de perceval and theodor nöldeke could be regarded as founding fathers of what might rightly be called the field of “jafnid studies” already in the nineteenth century.3 the field, as it were, generated a sustained body of scholarship arguably best exemplified by the extensive work of irfan shahîd.4 the latter’s arguments, in fact, are discussed throughout this volume. 3. armand-pierre caussin de perceval, essai sur l’histoire des arabes avant l’islamisme, pendant l’époque de mahomet, et jusqu’à la réduction de toutes les tribus sous la loi musulmane. 3 vols. (paris: librairie firmin didot frères, 1847-8) and theodor nöldeke, die ghassânischen fürsten aus deam hause gafna’s (berlin: verlag der königlichen akademie der wissenschaften, 1887). several of the contributors to the present book see shahîd’s work as inextricably linked to arab nationalism (5) and, thus, revisit his conclusions on the jafnids and what they can tell us of arab practices of power on the eve of islam. such has been the effort to reconstruct jafnid history that whittow even suggests that the field may have become overworked (12ff.). he wonders, in other words, if new discoveries and interpretations have in fact dramatically changed our understanding of jafnid history. after a thorough review of the source material, whittow explores theoretical and comparative approaches most likely to shed new light. in particular, he underscores the importance of studies on “borderlands” and “middle ground,” following the pioneering work of herbert eugene bolton, which could lead to a more nuanced analysis of cooperation along the frontier zone.5 whittow also advocates for a more global approach to roman frontiers, urging scholars to take into account more closely what he terms “african approaches” (27-29), especially in light of the field-changing contribution on 4. see most recently his byzantium and the arabs in the sixth century. vol. 2, part 2 (washington dc: dumbarton oaks, 2010). 5. bolton’s work has generated its own industry but see the classic discussion of david j. weber, “turner, the boltonians, and the borderlands,” american historical review 91 (1986): 66-81. weber’s article should now be complemented by the recent contributions of albert l. hurtado, herbert eugene bolton: historian of the american borderlands (berkeley and los angeles: university of california press, 2012) and “bolton and turner: the borderlands and american exceptionalism,” western historical quarterly 44 (2013): 5-20. i am indebted to my colleague chantel rodriguez for these references. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) denis genequand and christian j. robin’s les jafnides • 175 the moors of the late yves modéran.6 t h e p a r a l l e l w i t h n o r t h a f r i c a suggested by whittow is supported by maurice sartre’s article (“rome et les arabes nomades: le dossier épigraphique de eeitha,” 37-51), which offers a fresh appraisal of the epigraphic corpus of hīt (ancient eeitha). hīt’s inscriptions indeed suggest that the romans had developed a specific strategy to interact with nomads in the ḥarra (basalt desert), even though these policies are not as well documented as they are for north africa (48). epigraphy also helps sartre identify family strategies: a remarkable family of roman agents seems to have cultivated names evoking the memory of the age of herod the great to assert its cultural and social capital (42). moreover, the village of hīt/eeitha produced a sizeable number of officials and agents that served in the roman administration. this might be explained by the fact that the villagers had erected a temple dedicated to the imperial cult (43), and thus were rewarded for their support for the regime. william and fidelity lancaster offer an anthropological approach to tribes in line with their previous work on the ruwala bedouins from jordan (“concepts of tribe, tribal confederation and tribal leadership,” 53-77). they settle on the following definition: “tribe is a set of ideas about how people think about themselves as a series of social, economic and political groupings that provide livelihood and profits, and the development and defence of these, predicated on certain moral premises or givens, and which take account 6. yves modéran, les maures et l’afrique romaine (ive-viie siècle) (rome: école française de rome, 2003). of geographical facts and historical events” (53). this may be a useful chapter to discuss the concept of tribe, but its relevance and applicability to a sixth century context remains unclear (as duly acknowledged by the authors themselves and by the editors in the general introduction to the volume, 6-7). only the last sentence of the chapter suggests a potential parallel wit h t he jafnid s , w it h regard t o t he effort by tribal leaders “to negotiate with central authorities for opportunities for tribespeople in service provision or for trade” (73). the combination of history and anthropology has proved remarkably fruitful and transformative over the past few decades,7 but has not yet reached its full potential in the fields of late antiquity and early islam, despite some important (and controversial) contributions.8 christian julien robin, in his chapter, takes up literary and epigraphic evidence on ghassān in arabia (“ghassān en arabie,” 79-120). robin shows that the epigraphic evidence contradicts werner caskel’s idea that ghassān was not a real tribe but rather a “fictive community” (german: “fiktive 7. this is perhaps best exemplified by the evolution of the journal annales: histoire, sciences sociales, which is not to say that the relationship between history and anthropology has not generated its share of debates. see for a recent discussion elisa brilli, pierre-olivier dittmar and blaise dufal (eds.), faire l’anthropologie historique du moyen âge, atelier du centre de recherches historiques 6 (2010) (available online: https://acrh. revues.org/1911, consulted on october 12, 2016). 8. see in particular christian décobert, le mendiant et le combattant: l’institution de l’islam (paris: le seuil, 1991); jacqueline chabbi, le seigneur des tribus: l’islam de mahomet (paris: noésis, 1997) and, most recently, les trois piliers de l’islam: lecture anthropologique du coran (paris: seuil, 2016). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 176 • antoine borrut gemeinschaft”) (95). robin explores the origins of the jafnids and the singularity of the ghassān tribe in the islamic tradition. indeed, ghassān is not integrated into the sprawling genealogical tree of arab tribes, a specificity only shared by the tanūkh (83). this is usually explained by the fact that ghassān is not a man’s name, but a place (a water hole located in yemen) (83-84). but, since ghassān is elsewhere attested as a personal name, robin suggests that there might have been a deliberate strategy to classify them apart from traditional tribal groups (84). ghassān is otherwise depicted in muslim literary sources (especially in the works of ibn al-kalbī and ibn ḥazm) as a confederacy (jimāʿ) claiming māzin b. al-azd as a common ancestor, and subdivided in various branches among his descendants (83-92). i n t e r e s t i n g l y , t h e a p p a r e n t exceptionalism made by muslim sources is contradicted by epigraphic sources prior to the fourth century. these sources depict ghassān as an unremarkable sedentary (sabian: s2ʿb) arabian tribe (95). epigraphy shows that a territorial principality named ghassān existed in western arabia, likely in the ḥijāz, in the third and fourth centuries (101), probably centered around yathrīb (97). this leads robin to observe that islamic historiography has preserved reliable material about the few decades prior to the rise of islam, but that the deeper arabian past is irremediably lost (79). robin also debunks the classic parallel between the trajectories of naṣrid and jafnid history. the former lasted over 300 years and constituted a true political entity with a capital and an army, while the latter vanished after about 50 years and lacked such attributes (80). it is impossible to do justice to such a rich contribution in a brief review, but robin also provides useful appendices, including a list of all dated references to ghassān and of the relevant epigraphic texts (110-114). geoffrey greatrex (“les jafnides et la défense de l’empire au vie siècle,” 121-54) suggests that the jafnids concluded an agreement with the roman empire in the early sixth century, likely under anastasius. this would explain their anti-chalcedonian stance (123). greatrex contends, pace shahîd, that the jafnids were allies (symmachoi) rather than foederati (126), and that al-hārith was elevated to the status of archiphylarchos in 529 (123), in response to the growing threat posed by naṣrid raids in syria (129). this policy has to be understood in the broader framework of the reorganization of the eastern frontier by justinian in the context of war against persia (131). the restructuring of the limes prompted economic and agricultural development and generated increasing rivalries among local power brokers and élites (135-7). the result was that the jafnids eventually acquired, from the roman perspective, too much authority over the course of the sixth century. this situation prompted the romans, following a well-established practice, to topple them, and al-mundhir was exiled to sicily (123-4). it was normal practice for the romans to remove allies’ chiefs when they were not loyal enough or when they aspired to too great a degree of autonomy. the decision to exile al-mundhir and his son, al-nuʿmān, was therefore, relative to execution, not unduly harsh (139). in his chapter on the likelihood of a roman military strategy in the levant (“did the roman empire have a military s t r a t e g y a n d w e r e t h e j a f n i d s p a r t al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) denis genequand and christian j. robin’s les jafnides • 177 of it?”, 155-92), ariel lewin challenges edward luttwak’s famous theory. the latter posited a grand roman military strategy for the defense of the frontiers (156-8). lewin insists on the rise of arab tribes in late antiquity that required new approaches and policies: sasanians and romans tended to rely on the tribes “to damage the interests of their rival”. at the same time, “the arab tribes exploited the warfare between the two empires for their own advantage” (159). lewin concludes that diocletian “conceived a large project of defensive works whose main purpose was to defend the eastern provinces from the arab menace” (162). yet, it is unclear whether this is precisely the system that the notitia dignitatum describes; it might in fact have emerged earlier. lewin then turns to the question of the role of arab tribes in the defense of the empire prior to justinian (166-69) and during the initial years of his reign. this last period was marked by increasingly complex relationships with arab tribes whose chiefs were gradually promoted to the phylarchate. this situation prompted the creation of a brand new position when al-hārith was assigned authority over a large sector of the near east, a form, one might say, of “superphylarchate” (169-74). at the same time, his brother, abū karib, w a s a l s o a p h y l a r c h w i t h e n h a n c e d authority. as many scholars have rightly pointed out, the two brothers exercised power over two different sections of the near eastern frontier: al-ḥārith was given authority over phoenice and arabia, and probably syria and euphratensis, while abū karib controlled palestina and the hedjaz” (174). despite the richness of the material examined here, one would have expected a more analytical discussion of the implications of these reforms. pierre-louis gatier looks at a small corpus of ten greek inscriptions that mention jafnid princes (“les jafnides dans l’épigraphie grecque au vie siècle,” 193-222). this limited body of evidence provides important information but also underlines the need to resist the tendency to identify all or most extant sites with the jafnids. following denis genequand,9 gatier rejects the notion of a jafnid architectural landscape as has been articulated by shahîd and others. gatier, in particular, seconds genequand’s argument that qaṣr al-ḥayr al-gharbī was not a “ghassānid construction,” but, more likely, a roman postal site prior to the construction of the monastery. the greek inscription bears witness to the acclamation of arethas/ al-ḥārith by the monastery authorities upon his arrival (198). gatier also challenges robert hoyland’s interpretation that the dating under al-ḥārith’s phylarchate testifies to jafnid control over the countryside (199). gatier contends, instead, that the mention of the phylarch is not a sign of his independence but rather of his integration into the administrative and military imperial system (201). al-ḥārith’s involvement in the construction of the monastery can be better understood in light of the “military importance” of the region and the need to control roads and itineraries (200201). the other inscriptions discussed by gatier point to jafnid patronage and the evolving titles of jafnid princes prior to and during their phylarchate. their title 9. denis genequand, “some thoughts on qasr al-hayr al-gharbi, its dam, its monastery and the ghassanids,” levant 36 (2006): 63-84. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 178 • antoine borrut as king is, however, not reflected in greek inscriptions (217). g r e g f i s h e r ’ s c h a p t e r r e v i s i t s t h e eclipse of the jafnids (“emperors, politics, and the plague: rome and the jafnids, 570-585,” 223-37). he suggests that their inability to “operate effectively in the top echelon of roman politics, as well as their participation in the unstable ecclesiastical disputes of the sixth century” (223), were the main factors behind their demise. more specifically, al-nuʿmān’s revolt p r e c i p i t a t e d t h e e x i l e o f h i s f a t h e r , al-mundhir. the latter was released in 602, after which father and son seem to have vanished from the scene (225). the jafnids never managed to gain influence at the highest levels of imperial administration. “this left them critically exposed when events turned against them – al-mundhir could not, when it counted, compete with the imperial networks of favour and patronage in the capital” (227). the degradation of chalcedonian and miaphysite relations also negatively affected the family, which proved unable to adjust to the “rapidly evolving political realities of the late sixth century” (228). fisher also briefly considers the possible economic impact of the plague on the standing of the jafnids (229). he then turns to comparative approaches, briefly considering examples such as the naṣrids, the ruwala bedouins in ottoman-era jordan, or the sardar in modern iran (231-33). these last two points offer useful elements of discussion but prove largely inconclusive. they simply suggest “that the experience of the jafnids was by no means unique” (233). m i c h a e l a k o n r a d o ff e r s a n archaeological re-evaluation of the most famous jafnid monument, the so-called p r a e t o r i u m o f r ū ṣ a f a ( “ l a f r o n t i è r e romaine au vie siècle et le bâtiment dit “ p r a e t o r i u m d ’ a l m u n d h i r ” à r u ṣ ā f a – sergiopolis,” 239-57). the building h a s g e n e r a t e d f a m o u s l y c o m p e t i n g interpretations: jean sauvaget construed it as a praetorium and audience hall where the jafnids interacted with local tribes, a view rejected by gunnar brands, who understood it to be a church. elizabeth key fowden later sought to reconcile the two theories. in her new assessment of the edifice, konrad sees no obvious link between the building and the adjoining cemetery, thus undermining brands’ conclusions (243). konrad instead understands the site as having had military and political strategic significance. ruṣāfa was arguably the seat of jafnid power for the northern syrian limes (244), and the building bears witness to an “architectural language” that became common among the arabs in the sixth century. it is likely that al-mundhir used it to affirm his status vis-à-vis byzantium (248). konrad argues that the iconography inside the building was not necessarily that of a christian church (250-1). she concludes that the evidence contradicts brands’ interpretation – that the structure was a church – and thus holds to sauvaget’s interpretation (251). her main argument is that the edifice is remarkably consistent with other principia (251): it requires to be set firmly in a broader late antique context. h a n i h a y a j n e h a n d m o h a m m a d i . ababneh offer a brief discussion of a ṣafaitic inscription found in 1999 at the syrian-jordanian border (“the ‘god of the ġs1n’ in an ancient north arabian i n s c r i p t i o n f r o m t h e ḥ a r r a r e g i o n – n o r t h e a s t e r n j o r d a n , ” 2 5 9 7 6 ) . t h e al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) denis genequand and christian j. robin’s les jafnides • 179 inscription is remarkable because it lists a “unique and extraordinary collection of divine names” (270), and specifically mentions ġs1n. the identification of ġs1n with ghassān remains conjectural but is regarded as the most likely option (267, 269). the final paper is by michael lecker (“were the ghassānids and the byzantines behind muḥammad’s hijra?”, 277-93). it explores an intriguing hypothesis that links heraclius’ campaign (april 622), the ʿaqaba meeting between muḥammad and the anṣār (composed of khazraj and aws, june 622), and the subsequent hijra (september 622) (277). to demonstrate these connections, lecker considers the long-term interest of the khazraj in the “water resources of the jews in upper medina,” which they attempted but failed to capture around 617 at the battle of buʿāth (278). lecker assumes that the khazraj had a “dominant role” in the ʿaqaba meeting (279) precisely because they were seeking support for the effort to seize those same lands. lecker then turns to the links between the khazraj and ghassānids; he concludes that “the communication channels between the khazraj and ghassān were open, and hence the assumption that the latter played a role in the ʿaqaba meeting is not far-fetched” (287). the ghassān are also attested in the u m m a a g r e e m e n t ( i . e . , t h e s o c a l l e d constitution of medina, ca. 623 ce): after listing khazraj (§28-32) and aws (§33), the list continues with the banū thaʿlaba (§ 34), the jafna (§ 35), and the banū al-shuṭayba (§ 36). the three last groups were ghassānids (or their clients). lecker thus concludes that “the participation of three ghassānid groups in the umma agreement suggests that, shortly after his arrival at medina, muḥammad was backed by the ghassānids alongside their byzantine overlords” (289). the argument, however fascinating, largely ignores the demise of the ghassānids several decades earlier. it also undermines jafnid agency at a time when their loyalty to byzantium was far from obvious. lecker situates his hypothesis in a broader context, namely the byzantine effort to replace the jews of medina, “longtime allies of the sassanians, with a political entity friendly to byzantium” (289). and thus the long-term goal of the khazraj to seize yathrīb/medina was achieved by muḥammad (290). lecker is perfectly right to note “that heraclius’ fortune in his war against the sasanians s i n c e 6 2 2 c o i n c i d e d w i t h t h o s e o f muḥammad in his takeover of medina and large parts of arabia” (p. 290, n. 66). again, the hypothesis is compelling. it will need much more research, however, to be fully convincing. e d i t e d v o l u m e s a r e i n e v i t a b l y uneven. despite the insistence on the fact that “jafnid” should be preferred to “ghassānid,” the usage proves quite inconsistent throughout the volume. the internal structure of the book itself would have been arguably clearer if the contributions had been arranged by their respective source material (e.g., epigraphy, literary sources, etc.). some repetitions between various chapters could have been avoided with more internal references. in addition, contradictory arguments c o n t a i n e d i n s e v e r a l o f t h e p a p e r s might have been at least partly resolved b y g r e a t e r e n g a g e m e n t b e t w e e n t h e contributors. the occasional typographical error appears (see especially some of the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 180 • antoine borrut block quotes in robin’s article where spaces between words are almost nonexistent, e.g. p. 97). and the absence of an index is unfortunate, given the rich content of the volume, the epigraphic material in particular. these few caveats should not obscure the fact that this book will mark an important milestone in the study of the jafnid dynasty and the pre-islamic arabs more broadly. mem awards al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): iii-vi when i discussed with matthew what i should talk about, he said he’d like to hear some manner of reflection on my work, career, books, students, and the state of the field, or some combination of these things. well, i doubt that i shall be able to talk about all these things, but let me start by telling you a story. one summer towards the end of my time at school, one of my sisters and i went to the theatre festival at avignon, and there for the first time in my life, i met a live muslim, a moroccan. i had decided to study the muslim world without ever knowingly having set eyes on an arab or persian or heard arabic or persian spoken. there weren’t any of them in denmark back then: it was gilgamesh who had seduced me. i discovered him in my teens and wanted to be an ancient near eastern archaeologist, but for a variety of reasons i became an islamicist instead. anyway, i met this moroccan in avignon, and he told me the story of the battle of siffin: the syrians were losing and responded by hoisting qurans on their lances, the battle stopped, and so ali lost. it never occurred to me to believe it; i smiled politely and thought to myself, “when i get to university i’ll hear a different story.” i got to copenhagen university, but no islamic history was taught there, only semitic philology, which i did not want to do, and history, meaning european history, which i did do and enjoyed, but which was not where i wanted to stay. eventually i got myself to england, and there i was accepted by soas and heard professor lewis lecture on early islamic history, including the battle of siffin. he told the story exactly as my moroccan friend had told it. i could not believe it. it struck me as obvious that the narrative was fiction, remarks by the recipient of the 2014 mem lifetime achievement award written for the annual meeting of middle east medievalists and read in absentia by matthew s. gordon (november 22, 2014, washington, d.c.) patricia crone* institute for advanced study, princeton * middle east medievalists is deeply saddened by patricia crone’s passing in july 2015. several colleagues have written reminiscences in her memory to be found in the “in memoriam” section of the journal below. [a. b.] iv • patricia crone al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) and besides, everyone knows that battle accounts are most unlikely to be reliable, least of all when they are told by the loser. i thought about it again many years later, in 2003, when one of saddam hussain’s generals, muhammad saeed al-sahhaf, also known as comical (not chemical) ali, persistently asserted that the iraqis had defeated the americans and put them to flight, so that there weren’t any american troops in iraq any more. at the very least one would have expected lewis to say something about the problematic nature of battle narratives, and was this really true? but no: it was a truth universally acknowledged that, during the battle of siffin, the syrians hoisted qurans on their lances and thereby stopped the battle, depriving the iraqis of their victory. i think this is the biggest academic shock i’ve ever suffered, but i didn’t say anything. i never did, i was too shy. and then i encountered john wansbrough. he read arabic texts with us undergraduates, clearly thinking we were a hopeless lot, but he was the first person i met at soas who doubted the siffin story. as it turned out, he doubted just about everything in the tradition. i was fascinated by him. i wanted to know how he thought we should go about writing about early islamic history, so i continued reading texts with him as a graduate, but i never got an answer. once, when we were reading tabari’s account of ibn al-ashʿath’s revolt in the mid-umayyad period, wansbrough asked: “what year are we in?” i thought he simply meant “what year has tabari put this in?,” but when i replied year 82,” or whatever, he acidly retorted, “i see you have the confidence of your supervisor,” meaning bernard lewis, my supervisor, whom he deeply disliked. i think his question was meant to be understood as, “is all this really something that happened in year 82 (or whenever) or is it stereotyped battle scenes interspersed with poetry that could be put in any heroic account in need of amplification?” i don’t know, for he did not explain. he never did. he was an imam samit. from all this you can see two things. first, it was not exposure to wansbrough that made me a sceptic or radical or whatever else they like to call me. i was a sceptic already in avignon, years before i came to england, without being aware of it. in my own understanding i was just thinking commonsense. and secondly, islamic history was not studied at an advanced level. i don’t know how the battle of siffin is taught these days, but i cannot imagine it is done with the credulity of those days and, at least in england, lewis must take part of the credit for this, for he was very keen for islamicists to become historians. after i’d finished my thesis, michael cook and i finished hagarism (1977) which i assume you have heard about and don’t propose to talk about; and next, in between some articles, i wrote slaves on horses (1980), which was the first third of my thesis, drastically rewritten. then it was roman, provincial and islamic law (1987), which was a drastically rewritten version of my thesis part two and which i loved researching because the literature on the greek, roman and provincial side was so superb. the legal learning possessed by these late nineteenthand early twentiethcentury german and italian scholars was incredible, and on top of that they were wonderfully intelligent and lucid. the first world war and now it is all gone. apparently it isn’t even done to admire them any more. a perfectly friendly al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) remarks by the recipient of the 2014 mem lifetime achievement award • v reviewer of my book on law cautioned his readers that i was an admirer of these scholars, as if it were self-evident that they were bad people. i don’t see why. in any case, meccan trade came out in the same year. it was delayed by a report so negative that i withdrew it and sent it to princeton university press. the author of the negative report said that i should have my head examined, that nothing i’d written would win general acceptance and that i’d never get a job in america. this last was particularly hilarious since it had never occurred to me to apply for one there. serjeant was also outraged by meccan trade. he wrote a furious review in which he accused me of all sorts of misdeeds. but today the book is perceived as being about the location of mecca, to which i devote a page. i’ve even heard somebody introduce me as a speaker and list meccan trade among my books with the comment that it is about the location of mecca, to which i had to say sorry, no, actually meccan trade is about meccan trade. after meccan trade, or at the same time (both this and other books took a long time to reach print), i published god’s caliph with martin hinds. it was a short book, but calder nonetheless thought it was longwinded: i admit i found that hard to take seriously. it was as usual: the reviewers found fault with this, that and the other, and you let it pass. the one thing i really disliked about god’s caliph was the massive number of misprints, which martin hinds was no better at spotting than i was. it must have been after god’s caliph had gone to press that i wrote pre-industrial societies, which i hugely enjoyed doing because i had to read about all kinds of places that i didn’t know much about, and also because i wrote without footnotes. it saves you masses of time. pis, as i called it (pronouncing it piss) was barely reviewed and took a while to gather attention, and it too was riddled with misprints, but the misprints should now have been eliminated and a fresh print-run with a new cover is on its way. the next book i wrote was the book of strangers: medieval arabic graffiti on the theme of nostalgia (1999), which was completely new to me when i started translating it. i inherited it from martin hinds and was captivated by it, but had trouble with the poetry in it. however, shmuel moreh came to cambridge shortly after i’d started, and he was well versed in arabic poetry, so i asked him if he’d help me, and he would. so we translated it together and i took responsibility for the rest. that book almost generated another siffin story. the author is traditionally identified as abu ’l-faraj al-isfahani, but he himself says that he was in his youth in 356/967, which makes him considerably younger than abu ’l-faraj [who allegedly died in 356/967 – a. b.]. yaqut, who said he did not know how to resolve the problem, noticed this already. there is only one way to resolve it: the author is not abu ’l-faraj. the book doesn’t have much in common with abu ’l-faraj’s works either. but a specialist in abu ’l-faraj insisted that it was him and came up with the explanation, also tried by older scholars, that abu ’l-faraj was senile when he wrote the book, so that he had forgotten when he was young. honestly, the things that islamicists will say! the next book was also a joint project and also connected with martin hinds and the so-called “hinds-xerox” which martin vi • patricia crone al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) had received from amr khalifa ennami and which michael cook used for his section on the murjiʿa in his early muslim dogma. martin hinds was working on the last section of the manuscript when he died. i could have finished that last section, but it seemed a bad idea to translate yet another fragment. what should be done was a translation of the whole epistle. but i couldn’t do that on my own – there were parts of the manuscript that i simply could not decipher. so i asked my former colleague in oxford, fritz zimmermann, if he would participate, and thank god, he would. so we started by writing a translation each and then amalgamating them, with long pauses over passages that seemed impossible. fritz had some great brain waves, and somehow we managed to get a complete typescript together. then there was all the rest, where the fun for me lay in comparing salim and the ibadi epistles that i had been able to buy in oman. the epistle of salim b. dhakwan was published in oxford in 2001. very few people are interested in the ibadis so it has not exactly been a bestseller, but i learned an extraordinary amount from writing it. after that, i wrote medieval islamic political thought, which the americans called god’s rule, though it is disagreeably close to god’s caliph and not particularly apt in my view. that book started as exam questions in cambridge. carole hillenbrand was our external examiner, and when she saw the questions, she asked me if i wanted to write a volume of political thought for her edinburgh series. i liked the idea, envisaging the book as much smaller than it actually became. i also thought i could do it fast because i thought i knew the field inside out, but that was only true of some of the subjects i wrote about. i had to do a lot of work on the ismailis, for example because i did not know the sources well enough. i was also acutely aware of having inadequate knowledge of the last century before the mongol invasions and don’t think i managed to get that right. i suppose i was running out of patience. i wasn’t under any pressure, for i had refused a contract. i usually did until i was close to the end. my book on political thought was the first book of mine that was uniformly well received. all the others had a controversial element to them that the reviewers didn’t like, if only for my refusal to accept that abu’l-faraj al-isbahani had forgotten when he was young. mercifully, there were also reviewers who found that a ridiculous argument. not long afterwards they gave me the levi della vida medal and i also received several honorary doctorates. altogether, it was clear that i was no longer an enfant terrible. my latest, and probably also last, book is the nativist prophets of early islamic iran: rural revolt and local zoroastrianism (2012), which had its roots in my teaching in oxford and which was very exciting to write because it was about villagers, whom we rarely see in the sources, and because their form of zoroastrianism was quite different from that of the pahlavi books. that book was also well received, it was awarded no less than four book-prizes, for its contribution to islamic studies, to iranian studies, to central asian studies, to historical studies in general. if i had not fallen ill, i would have started a book on the dahris, godless people on whom i have written some articles, and who are certainly worth a book. but i don’t think i have enough time. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 129-133 book review by s u r v e y i n g a n d i n t e r p r e t i n g major ʿalid shrines in syria from t h e e l e v e n t h c e n t u r y t o t o d a y , s t e p h e n n i e m u l d e r h a s p r o d u c e d a timely work of great value and insight. based on over a decade of fieldwork in syria and extensive engagement with arabic texts, shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria makes a convincing case for the emergence of an architecture of ecumenism between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, in which muslims of different sectarian orientations came together to mourn, commemorate, and supplicate descendants of the prophet muḥammad through his son-in-law ʿalī (the ʿalids). mulder argues that the form this ecumenical architecture took – the shrine (mashhad) – is uniquely suited to inclusive and polyvalent devotional practices, but at the same time, because of its very flexibility and popularity, presents a particular challenge to the architectural historian. the buildings mulder analyzes in this book have been, with only a couple of exceptions, used continuously as ritual spaces from the medieval period to the present. studying such spaces requires an innovative methodology, and one of mulder’s many strengths is her willingness to go beyond what has been thought of as the purview of the medievalist or archaeologist. she does not hesitate to seek out oral histories, written texts, and the lived experience of present-day muslims as windows onto the origins, meanings, and transformations of shrines over the centuries. the book is divided into two parts: f o u r c h a p t e r s i n w h i c h s h e l a y s o u t empirical evidence for the history of ʿalid shrines in bālis (a site on the euphrates in northern syria), aleppo, and damascus and a fifth chapter in which she explores the theoretical and historiographical implications of her findings. the chapter on bālis allows mulder to put her skills and experience as an archaeologist to good use. abandoned as a mongol army advanced in 1259, bālis may have been home to stephennie mulder, the shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria: sunnis, shiʿis and the architecture of coexistence, edinburgh studies in islamic art (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014), 320 pages. isbn: 9780748645794, price: £75.00 (cloth). zayde antrim department of history and international studies program, trinity college, hartford, connecticut (zayde.antrim@trincoll.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 130 • zayde antrim as many as three ʿalid shrines in the medieval period, but the one in question, excavated by a princeton-syrian team over 2005-2009 for which mulder served as ceramicist, yields important evidence as to the dynamic and varied usage of such structures over the centuries. mulder argues that the shrine was dedicated to ʿalī himself and was not the original location, as previously believed, of a well-known set of stucco panels inscribed to al-khiḍr now housed in the damascus museum. she also suggests that the one patron of the site whose name has been preserved in the written record was a sunni. thus, the shrine at bālis acts as a “template” or “prototype” for the other shrines discussed in the book, a site that exhibits signs of intensive and changing usage over an extended period (in this case about 250 years); that was dedicated not only to an ʿalid but to the ʿalid, ʿalī b. abī ṭālib himself; and that was patronized at least once by a sunni, indicating its wide appeal. the next chapter on two of the most important ʿalid shrines in syria, located just outside aleppo, is perhaps the most impressive in the book. entitled “aleppo: an experiment in islamic ecumenism,” it is an important reminder of aleppo’s long history as a city with an influential and prosperous shiʿi population and o f t h e o f t e n o v e r l o o k e d c h a p t e r i n that history in which a sunni ayyubid prince in aleppo, al-ẓāhir ghāzī (r. 11861216), following the example of a sunni abbasid caliph in baghdad, al-nāsir (r. 1180-1225), actively pursued a policy of rapprochement between sunnis and shiʿis in which an architecture of ecumenism – namely ʿalid shrines – played a pivotal part. one of the most effective analytic and methodological interventions of the chapter is mulder’s re-reading of a set of inscriptions on the entrance to the mashhad al-ḥusayn, located about 1.5 km south of the city. this elaborate and imposing portal was constructed in 1195-1196 and likely commissioned by al-ẓāhir himself. mulder’s interpretation of the three inscriptions on the portal p e r s u a s i v e l y o v e r t u r n s p r e v i o u s interpretations in which scholars have suggested that one of the inscriptions represents a sunni attempt to “neutralize” or overshadow the shiʿi implications of the other two. mulder’s methodology entails not just a close reading of the words of the inscriptions but an analysis of their physical and aesthetic arrangement. she argues that instead of one inscription cancelling out the other two, all three of them “communicated a single message. and the vehicle of that unification was, in fact, the frieze of miḥrāb images that decorates the portal, which consists of a series of lamps hanging within intricately carved, multilobed niches” (98). mulder pays attention not only to the physical relationship between the inscriptions and the aesthetic elements of the portal, but also the iconographic meaning of those elements – lamps as symbols of divine light associated with ʿalī and the twelve i m a m s . 1 m o r e o v e r , s h e s t r e s s e s t h e experience of reading the inscriptions in situ: “for viewers, the process of actively reading the inscriptions, guided by the miḥrāb image, literally integrated the two opposing viewpoints on figures revered 1. mulder elaborates on this argument in a recent book chapter: “seeing the light: enacting the divine at three medieval syrian shrines,” in envisioning islamic art and architecture: essays in honor of renata holod, ed. david roxburgh (leiden: brill, 2014), 89-109. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) stephennie mulder’s the shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria • 131 by the different sects. it spoke to viewers, worshippers and pilgrims as a unifying rhetorical device intended to emphasize the possibility for coexistence and respect between the two seemingly opposite positions” (98). this insightful argument about a single portal is applicable to the book as a whole – physical structures, written texts, and lived experience coming together to illuminate a unifying sacred landscape in medieval syria. the next two chapters discuss ʿalid shrines in damascus. these are in many ways the most challenging chapters of the book, as most of the shrines are located in densely populated areas and the way they look today is largely the product of twentieth-century reconstruction. the structures themselves, therefore, provide very little physical evidence for their medieval incarnations. mulder approaches this problem by vigorously mining written texts from the eleventh century on for evidence of foundation, location, patronage, usage, and renovation over the years. unfortunately the texts themselves often offer vague or conflicting information, and mulder’s discussion of them is occasionally difficult to follow. in chapter four, the discussion mirrors the sources by confusing the caliphs ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb and ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz (see pp. 208, 218-220). at the end of the same chapter, there is a problem with the english translation of a key passage from al-badrī’s fifteenth-century faḍāʾil treatise on damascus for which only a variant french translation is cited (see pp. 233-234, 245n96).2 these issues do 2. after consulting an arabic edition of the text, i favor henri sauvaire’s french translation, which mulder cites, over mulder’s own. see ʿabd allāh al-badrī, nuzhat al-anām fī mahāsin al-shām not, however, weaken mulder’s overall conclusion, which is that the patronage and visitation of ʿalid shrines in medieval damascus were popular acts among the city’s overwhelmingly sunni residents and that despite powerful sunni voices criticizing such acts in the written record there were others (such as al-badrī in the passage referred to above) who supported and defended them. one of the strengths of the chapters o n d a m a s c u s i s m u l d e r ’ s i n n o v a t i v e e n g a g e m e n t w i t h t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y history and today’s lived experience of these sites. few scholars of early and medieval islamic history venture beyond the bounds of their periods, and mulder not only does so, but does so in such a compelling way that the reader feels that he or she is trailing a pilgrim through the city of damascus, encountering shrines and their surroundings as they occur in space. her ability to evoke this literary tour is testimony to the breadth and depth of her fieldwork, as are the photographs that are beautifully reproduced throughout the book. moreover, the interviews she was able to conduct with the damascene shiʿi caretaker of a number of shrines, whose family has played this role for at least four generations, allows her to include (beirut: dār al-rāʾid al-ʿarabī, 1980), 224; and henri sauvaire, “description de damas,” journal asiatique 7, 3 (1896), 453. it may be that mulder is following josef meri’s english translation of the same anecdote as reported in ibn al-ḥawrānī’s sixteenth-century pilgrimage guide, which mulder reproduces as the epigraph of the book’s conclusion (267). see josef w. meri, “a late medieval syrian pilgrimage guide: ibn al-ḥawrānī’s al-ishārāt ilā amākin al-ziyārāt (guide to pilgrimage places),” medieval encounters 7, 1 (2001), 68. i was not able to consult an arabic edition of ibn al-ḥawrānī’s text. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 132 • zayde antrim a discussion of late ottoman patronage i n d a m a s c u s . t h e fi n a n c i a l s u p p o r t provided by the sultan abdülhamid ii (r. 1876-1909) for the renovation and beautification of several ʿalid shrines in the first decade of the twentieth century can be seen as a continuation of the medieval pattern of ecumenism in which sunni princes and patrons endowed ʿalid shrines for the benefit of a diverse muslim population.3 of course, two of the most heavily visited ʿalid shrines in syria – the mashhad sayyida zaynab, about 7km south of damascus, and the mashhad sayyida ruqayya, near bāb al-farādīs within the walls of the old city – have been famously and sometimes controversially reconstructed due to political patronage in the late twentiethand early twentyfirst centuries, most recently through joint syrian-iranian efforts to promote the sites as destinations for international shiʿi pilgrimage. nonetheless, the pattern set in the medieval period continues – while international visitors tend to be shiʿi, local muslims of various sectarian orientations worship at these sites as their ancestors had for hundreds of years. s a d l y , t h i s p a t t e r n i s n o w b e i n g disrupted. since 2012, many of the sites documented so beautifully in the book have been damaged, and sectarian violence has fragmented and traumatized the syrian population. of the experience of finishing her book during this period, mulder writes: “this reality has made writing about the unifying force of syria’s landscape of ʿalid shrines a poignant enterprise, leaving me 3. mulder has usefully expanded this section of the book into an article: “abdülhamid and the ʿalids: ottoman patronage of ‘shiʿi’ shrines in the cemetary of bāb al-ṣaghīr in damascus,” studia islamica 108 (2013): 16-47. to wonder at times whether the past i have written of here is relevant for syria’s present. and yet, that past beckons, with its evidence of coexistence even in times of contestation” (268). this past does beckon, and the final chapters of the book make clear why shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria is such a significant contribution. mulder attributes the emergence of this architecture of ecumenism to another time of military and sectarian conflict – the onset of the crusades in the late eleventh century and the nearly simultaneous transition between the era known as the “shiʿi century” and the era known as the “sunni revival.” she argues that this was a period of intensive “emplacement” of islamic sacred history, when “islamic history was linked to the landscape in an ever-increasing variety of ways” (258). and in this landscape, “the shrines of the ʿalids occupied a very particular place” (261). unlike many other syrian holy sites that were linked to biblical history and therefore could be seen as reinforcing christian claims in the region, shrines to the ʿ alids were meaningful only to muslims. moreover, at a time when sunni rulers were consolidating power over territories that had recently been under shiʿi rule while also calling for muslim solidarity in the face of crusader incursions, the ʿalids were reassuringly unifying. as mulder argues, “shrines for the family of the prophet function as a neutral palette, from which… visitors could simultaneously paint an image of sectarian specificity or of pan-islamic inclusivism, depending on the needs and context of those who found them relevant” (237). this made shrines to the ʿalids the perfect material form for making manifest a uniquely islamic sacred landscape that could be many things to al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) stephennie mulder’s the shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria • 133 many muslims. throughout the book mulder brilliantly reads the built environment as inseparable from lived experience, even when this makes determining the origins and past uses of such living spaces difficult, to say the least. the structures mulder analyzes in shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria have been renovated, reconstructed, abandoned, enlarged, beautified, and rededicated over the centuries; some structures that were originally outside of the city walls are now, thanks to urban expansion, located inside of the city walls; and some structures have literally sunk underground, taking on new life as crypts. in all of these cases, devotional practice and material culture have been mutually constitutive. in her conclusion, mulder emphasizes how studying material culture in this way can complement, enhance, and even provide counter-narratives to a primarily text-based approach to medieval islamic history, especially since surviving textual sources tend to communicate the perspectives of a relatively homogenous male urban elite. these sources, for i n s t a n c e , m a k e m e d i e v a l d a m a s c u s seem like a quintessentially sunni city, intolerant of minority sects and suspicious of associations with shiʿism. in shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria, however, damascus is transformed into a diverse city in which ordinary people, wealthy patrons, and bookish scholars – sunnis and shiʿis, men and women alike – have mingled together in ʿalid shrines for hundreds of years. we can only hope that the ecumenism to which mulder’s study is eloquent testimony re-emerges victorious from the rubble of war; the cycle of reconstruction and transformation begins anew; and the resilient syrian people re-claim their past and present. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 187-193 book review it 1 is surprising that the book lauded here as being on a par with said’s seminal work orientalism is still relatively unknown within islamic studies, despite being published in 2011. thomas bauer’s kultur der ambiguität seems to be one of those works that draws more attention and provokes more enthusiasm in the neighboring disciplines than in in its own field. so it still remains that this book, which has enjoyed great reception in the german media and has inspired several interdisciplinary workshops,2 is still in 1. quoted in the publisher’s english version of the book’s homepage: http://www.suhrkamp. de/buecher/the_culture_of_ambiguity-thomas_ bauer_71033.html?d_view=english (accessed september 23, 2016). 2. e.g. the conference held in erlangen in 2012: neue fundamentalismen – ambiguität und die macht der eindeutigkeit (http://www.hsozkult. de/event/id/termine-19469) and the conference organized in greifswald in 2013: ambiguität im mittelalter. formen zeitgenössischer reflexion und need of critical evaluation within the field, particularly for a specialist readership outside germany (an english translation is in the making3). i will first summarize by chapter this ambitious and comprehensive book. i will then assess bauer’s argumentation and analyze his underlying theoretical assumptions, as well as discuss the applicability of the concept he is introducing, i.e. the notion of ‘cultural ambiguity’ (kulturelle ambiguität). the book is divided into ten chapters: t h e fi r s t t w o a r e i n t r o d u c t o r y a n d m e t h o d o l o g i c a l , t h e f o l l o w i n g s e v e n chiefly thematic, covering a broad range interdisziplinärer rezeption (http://www.hsozkult. de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-4872; both webpages accessed on september 23, 2016). 3. see the book’s english homepage mentioned in note 1. the only extensive review in a scientific journal is still that of irene schneider (in german), der islam 88 (2012), 439-448. she focuses in particular on his understanding of islamic law and her assessment is rather critical. thomas bauer, die kultur der ambiguität: eine andere geschichte des islams (berlin: verlag der weltreligionen, 2011), 463 pages. isbn: 9783458710332, price: €34. isabel toral-niehoff free university of berlin (itoral@zedat.fu-berlin.de) “this turns out to be one of the best books about islam in ages and is set to become a classic of cultural studies on par with edward said’s orientalism.” stefan weidner, süddeutsche zeitung 1 file:///users/marie/desktop/ file:///users/marie/desktop/ file:///users/marie/desktop/ file:///users/marie/desktop/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 188 • isabel toral-niehoff of topics from the qurʾān and arabic literature to sexuality discourses and philosophy. the final chapter contains a concluding discussion. bauer formulates the basic assumptions and purposes of the book in the first chapter (15-25): 1) there has been a radical shift in islamic culture, from a broadly tolerant attitude towards ‘cultural ambiguity’ and plurality in pre-modern times to an increasing intolerance, as exemplified today by fundamentalist islam. this change should be investigated. 2) the phenomenon called ‘cultural ambiguity’ is universal; however, there are important differences in the cultural attitude towards it. some cultures are more prone to tolerate ambiguity (they are ‘ambiguity tolerant’), while others try to eradicate ambiguity (they are ‘ambiguity intolerant’). there is a need to investigate cultures from this perspective. 3) the book aims to establish a new narrative of islamic history (eine andere geschichte des islams), by focusing on the aforementioned question on the basis of several key-texts merging from the lesser known post-formative period of islam (in particular of the ayyūbid and mamluk period in egypt and syria between 1180 and 1500). bauer assumes that this period represents that form of “islamic culture”, which came into contact with western modernity in the nineteenth century (24), that makes it particularly relevant to the topic. in the second chapter (26-53), bauer clarifies his understanding of the term ‘ c u l t u r a l a m b i g u i t y ’ , a n d i n t r o d u c e s such terms as ‘ambiguity tolerance’, ‘ambiguity anxiety’, ‘crisis of ambiguity’ and ‘domesticated ambiguity’, all of which are essential to his argumentation. i will analyze this core chapter below in my critical assessment. the third chapter (54-114) discusses the traditional field of qiraʾāt (i.e. the various canonical readings of the quranic text) as a telling example for the capacity o f p o s t f o r m a t i v e i s l a m i c c u l t u r e t o cope with ambiguity. therefore, bauer summarizes the thinking of ibn al-jazarī (751-833/1350-1429) on qiraʾāt and shows how this intellectual did not only accept the polyvalence of the quranic text, but even regarded it as a particular richness that denotes god’s presence therein. for al-jazarī, multiplicity is a divine grace (“vielfalt als gnade,” 86-94). bauer then contrasts al-jazarī’s theories with those of the wahhābī scholar, ibn al-ʿuthaymīn (d. 2001), who pleaded for a unique, unified reading of the qurʾān. bauer further discusses the ideas of the liberal litterateur tāhā ḥusayn (1889-1973) and those the of the islamist al-mawdūdī (1903-1973). according to bauer, all three modern thinkers favored the idea of a unique, unambiguous reading of texts: in spite of their differing political ideas, they shared a common, modern and ‘ambiguityintolerant’ attitude. as we will see, this will be a central argument in bauer’s thinking: modern liberal islam and contemporaneous fundamentalist islam are both equivalent offshoots of european modernity, and both are basically ‘ambiguity-intolerant’ (cf. also his schema, 60). in contrast, postformative islam was ‘ambiguity-tolerant’ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) thomas bauer’s die kultur der ambiguität • 189 and parallels the postmodern worldview insofar that it emphasizes a multiperspective idea of reality (112-114). the fourth chapter (115-142) treats the traditional field of tafsīr (quranic exegesis). as in the third chapter, bauer contrasts the ideas of a post-formative, ‘ a m b i g u i t y t o l e r a n t t h i n k e r ’ , i n t h i s case, al-māwardī (364-450/974-1058), who defended the richness of multiple interpretations of the qurʾān, with those of a modern, ‘ambiguity intolerant’ one, the aforementioned wahhābī writer, ibn al-ʿuthaymīn. in a second section of the chapter, he argues again an excessive ‘theologization’ of islam (“theologisierung des islams,” 131-142). according to bauer, orientalist scholars have paid too much attention to the religious and theologybased aspects of islamic culture, to the degree that they have failed to understand islam’s inherent ‘ambiguity tolerance’. to illustrate his argument, he first discusses the term of ʿilm ẓannī (hypothetical t r u t h ) a s u s e d b y j u r i s t s ( w h o m h e regards as the “archetypes of scholars,” 133), a notion that contrasts the concept of ʿilm qaṭʿī (absolute truth) as used by the kalām theologians, which ultimately derives from logical argumentation. as a second example, bauer refers to the doctrine of the inimitability of the qurʾān (iʿdjāz al-qurʾān), often misunderstood as untranslatability (in reality, it refers t o t h e i m p o s s i b i l i t y t o c a p t u r e t h e inapprehensible divine meaning of the qurʾān), and summarizes its classical formulation by al-zamakhsharī (467538/1075-1144). in the fifth chapter (143-192), bauer turns his view to the traditional field of hadith studies. therefore, he outlines the principles established by ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī (773-852/1372-1449), who classified prophetical hadith into different categories of reliability, within a scale of increasing plausibility, but excluding the possibility of absolute certainty. this peculiar understanding of truth leads bauer to further elaborate the idea of the scholarly ikhtilāf (conflicting juridical opinions). bauer notably refers here to the thinking of abū al-qāsim ibn al-juzayy al-kalbī (693-741/1294-1340), that is based on the assumption that scholars only possess the capacity of hypothetical truth (ʿilm ẓannī, see chapter 3), what would explain the coexistence of diverse but still valid opinions. however, in order to reduce and ‘domesticate’ (zähmen) the resulting cultural ambiguity, islam has developed the notion of the four law schools. in contrast, and in accordance with their c h a r a c t e r i s t i c ‘ a m b i g u i t y i n t o l e r a n t ’ world-view, the modern wahhābī ibn al-ʿuthaymīn and other contemporaneous fundamentalists and salafists oppose the idea of the diversity of law schools (lā madhhabīya). the sixth chapter (192-223) is devoted to a more general theme: the relationship between the secular and religious spheres in islamic culture. bauer refers to the widely-held idea (192) that islam does not differentiate between the two spheres, since religion pervades all aspects of life. as the differentiation between these sectors is considered a crucial asset of modernity (this common idea ultimately goes back to luhmann’s system theory), its absence would be a feature of islam’s backwardness. in the following, bauer battles vehemently against this supposedly fatal ‘islamization of islam’ (islamisierung des islams) and points to several ‘religion-free zones’ (religionsfreie zonen) in islam that would al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 190 • isabel toral-niehoff indicate the successful differentiation of diverse societal systems in premodern islam; for instance, he enumerates fiqh, s u fi s m , t h e o l o g y a n d h a d i t h . i n h i s argumentation, bauer then opposes the views of several prestigious scholars in islamic studies that allegedly have been engaged in this process of the ‘islamization of islam’, gustav von grunebaum, martin plessner, and ignaz goldziher. he finally points to the pervasive interpretation scheme in modern media that reduces all phenomena in the middle east to its ‘islamic dimension’. bauer dedicates the seventh chapter (224-267) to the role of ambiguity in rhetoric and poetry. one of the most brilliant chapters of the book, it reminds one that these are bauer’s chief areas of expertise. he reconstructs the emergence of classical arabic as a key cultural element in the first centuries of islam, a process which gave way to sophisticated theories in grammar, lexicography, linguistic theories, rhetoric and philology. according to bauer, this centrality of language fostered the fascination for polysemy and opened the way to the playful sides of ambiguity. he then comments on such frequent arabic literary tropes and genres as iqtibās, muʿāraḍa, naqāʾid, thawriya and badīʿiyya, all of which evidence this broad attitude, and whose use also served a s t r a i n i n g i n ‘ a m b i g u i t y t o l e r a n c e ’ (“ambiguitätstraining,” 253-267). bauer c o n t r a s t s t h e s e c u r r e n t s o f t h o u g h t with the bias against rhetoric in modern western scholarship (as exemplified, for example, by the orientalist h.l. fleischer), rooted as it was in romantic ideas of veracity and a resistance to ornate style and semantic ambiguity. the eighth chapter (268-312) addresses t h e r a d i c a l c h a n g e s t h a t , a c c o r d i n g t o b a u e r , t h e i s l a m i c u n d e r s t a n d i n g of sexuality has undergone since the ninet eent h c ent ury ( in part ic ular as regards male homosexuality). until then, sexuality was seen as something natural and enjoyable, as long as it took place within islamic legality (i.e., matrimony), since islam does not hold to the idea of original sin. furthermore, pre-modern near eastern societies did not feel the need to differentiate between (male) love and friendship. in contrast, present islamic attitudes towards sexuality are clearly prudish, misogynist and homophobic. as in the previous chapters, bauer attributes these transformations to the impact of western ideas: the ‘ambiguity-intolerant’ sexuality discourse of the west that emerged in the nineteenth century (rooted in pre-modern christian hostility to the body) introduced an essentialized ‘heterohomo-binarity.’ homosexuality became an unnatural deviation and perversion. in addition, the western ‘obsession with truth’ (wahrheitsobsession) would have forced individuals to ‘confess’ (bekennen) their sexual orientation and to live ‘truly’ according to it. his argumentation is widely based on the theories formulated by foucault and muchembled about the european history of sexuality. finally, this peculiar ‘western’ understanding of sexuality was fatally combined with the need to universalize european concepts and to colonize, so that the peculiar discourse of sexuality was imposed on the allegedly ‘decadent’ and ‘degenerated’ islam. the ninth chapter (312-375) elaborates on the idea that the west has sought to universalize its peculiar worldview. it seeks to monopolize dominating discourses, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) thomas bauer’s die kultur der ambiguität • 191 an attitude that stands in contrast to the open attitude of the pre-modern islamic orient, a period that was characterized by an awareness that there were multiple perspectives on reality and a general acceptance of plurality. according to bauer, post-formative islam would feature a ‘relaxed view on the world’ (gelassener blick auf die welt). bauer then discusses several political discourses in islam and argues in favor of a greater consideration of textual genres, such as panegyric poetry, mirror of princes and fiqh literature, that all convey a secular view on politics. in a second part (343-375), he analyses the term arabic gharīb (‘foreigner, stranger’) and argues that its meaning does not d e n o t e a n y x e n o p h o b i c d i m e n s i o n . the west, in contrast, understands the semantic equivalents of gharīb in an objectivizing, discriminating way, denoting a characteristic ‘ambiguity anxiety’, and so feels a need to convert and assimilate the ‘foreigner’ in order to disambiguate his ambiguous status. the tenth chapter (376-405) functions in part as a conclusion. in it bauer develops his thesis of an ‘ambiguity-tolerant’ and multi-perspective pre-modern islam that only changed after the confrontation with the ‘ambiguity-intolerant’ west. bauer deals with abstract philosophical ideas and concepts that, according to his far-reaching argumentation, are radically different in the west and pre-modern islam. islam pursued a skeptical worldview that accepted the human limits of cognition, as seen in the work of fakhr a l d ī n a l r ā z ī ( 5 4 3 6 0 6 / 1 1 4 9 1 2 0 9 ) , and even developed, in the ideas of ibn sinān al-khafājī (422-466/1031-1074), a theory of non-understanding. the west, for its part, adhered, after descartes, to an anti-humanist, logistic philosophy that ultimately aims to eradicate any a m b i v a l e n c e a n d a m b i g u i t y . m o d e r n fundamentalist and liberal islam have both incorporated this originally western perception of reality that only allows for one unique truth. it is a paradox that the post-modernist west, in the meanwhile, has abandoned these attitudes for an open, humanistic and tolerant philosophy, whereas islam is still ‘stuck’ in monochrome modernity. as illustrated above, bauer pursues three main goals: the introduction of a new analytic tool to explain cultural changes (‘cultural ambiguity’); second, its application to islamic history and culture, and third, to propose thereby a new overriding narrative of islamic history. what are the main constituents of this new term as proposed by bauer? i n i t s o r i g i n a l c o n t e x t , t h e t e r m ambiguity is used in the field of semantics and linguistics to denominate the inherent capacity of utterances, words and other symbols to carry multiple meanings, i.e., semantic polyvalence. if semantic ambiguity goes too far and produces misunderstandings, it loses efficacy. but ambiguity is also a necessary quality of language, since it provides the appropriate flexibility for its social use. ambiguity can also be a quality of social acts, insofar as they might be socially interpreted (i.e., ‘read’) and valued in multiple and conflicting ways. in this case, ambiguity t e n d s t o b e a p r o b l e m a n d b e c o m e s a source of anxiety: the ability of an individual to cope with this ambiguity, and manage it in a positive way, is commonly seen as part of his personal capacity of solving conflicts. psychology, since the 1950’s, has investigated the degree of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 192 • isabel toral-niehoff ‘ambiguity tolerance’ as a personality trait; this was related to the study of the so-called ‘authoritarian personality’ and its hypothetical connection to fascism and racism. bauer proposes now to broaden the term’s application, by defining ‘ambiguity tolerance’ as a basic trait of whole cultures and societies. such a qualitative leap from individual psychology to collective psychology, and then to cultural studies is risky, but can also be very inspiring and might open the path to new perspectives. a telling example is the remarkable career of the term ‘identity’, which in its origin was only used in psychology and philosophy, but has come to be used in the last decades mainly in the sense of collective identity or identities (understood variously as cultural, religious or ethnic). a similar case is that of ‘memory’ (as in ‘collective’ or ‘cultural memory’). from this perspective, the introduction of the term ‘cultural ambiguity’ in cultural studies promises to open a fruitful new field of research. an essential weakness of this kind of ambitious, broad, and comparative approach, however, is that it relies on g e n e r a l i z a t i o n s , s i m p l i fi c a t i o n s a n d a selective evidence base that can be c h a l l e n g e d f r o m m a n y p e r s p e c t i v e s . bauer posits a dichotomy between an ‘ambiguity-tolerant’ pre-modern islam a n d a n ‘ a m b i g u i t y i n t o l e r a n t ’ w e s t . unfortunately, aside from being an undue simplification on both sides, based on a debatable selection of sources, he fails to adequately explain why and how this basic difference emerged, creating in the process a radical contrast between two neighboring and entangled cultures, both equally offshoots of late antiquity (and ultimately of aristotelian epistemology). it also remains unclear why it was so easy for the west to impose its unitary world-view and eradicate successfully pre-modern, ‘ambiguity-tolerant’ islam. a further point is that bauer’s portrayal of pre-modern islam occasionally suggests that this period was almost post-modern, which is, of course, a contradictio in adjecto (e.g., 113 “konzeption […] ist unverkennbar postmodern”), since postmodernity presupposes modernity by its very essence. furthermore, bauer has to rely on previous generalizing, selective and often outdated studies that provide a unidimensional view on many phenomena. this applies, in particular, to his portrayal of western sexuality and his understanding of homosexuality (based on foucault and muchembled), as well as that of modern european philosophy (here bauer relies mostly on the antilogicist and postmodernist stephen toulmin and his polemics against analytical philosophy, which would explain the almost complete omission of german idealism in bauer’s b o o k ) . i t i s a l s o c u r i o u s t h a t b a u e r , in his enthusiasm for the blessings of ambiguity, refers to the argumentation of the sociologist d.n. levine4, who actually condemned ambiguity as an essential trait of sharply stratified societies in which elites used secrecy to maintain their privileged status. in contrast to edward said, whose expertise was in english and french l i t e r a t u r e – s a i d ’ s i g n o r a n c e o f t h e academic field of oriental studies has always been a crucial argument against his theories bauer is an established scholar in the field. a widely-acknowledged expert 4. the flight from ambiguity.essays in social and cultural theory. chicago 1985. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) thomas bauer’s die kultur der ambiguität • 193 in classical arabic poetry, arabic rhetoric and mamluk literature, he is a professor of arabic and islamic studies (university of münster). thus, bauer’s scholarly knowledge of islamic culture is beyond doubt (particularly in the field of arabic literature). his selection of sources is at times puzzling; he omits the thinker and fundamentalist ante litteram, ibn ṭaymiyya (661-728/1263-1328), and focuses almost exclusively on the mamluk and ayyūbid periods. (for other questionable omissions, see the review by irene schneider).5 another point concerns his understanding of sex, gender and sexuality in pre-modern islam, which is debatable;6 and bauer’s almost complete neglect of female sexuality and gender in a chapter addressing sexuality in islam is also hardly comprehensible. bauer might be said to share a certain lack of balance with edward said, though in his case regarding “the west,” about which his sweeping comments are occasionally superficial and selective. his expertise in arabic and islamic studies, however, is on display 5. see note 3 above. 6. see in particular sara omar’s study “from semantics to normative law: perceptions of liwāṭ (sodomy) and siḥāq (tribadism) in islamic jurisprudence (8th to 15th century c.e.),” islamic law and society 19 (2012), 222-256.. throughout. bauer’s treatment of arabic literature, for example, offers inspired insights into its playful aesthetics, and his introduction to important muslim thinkers from the rather unknown post-formative period are very meritorious, readable and highly interesting. bauer’s book is overall a commendable work. it suggests the possibility of writing an alternative history of islam that would focus on the post-formative or middle period and its many original if far less known thinkers. one hopes that the book will also remind european scholars that the modern roots of islamic fundamentalism are by no means ‘medieval’. it is also remarkable that an arabist has written a b o o k o f s u c h w i d e c u l t u r a l s c o p e . even if some of bauer’s assumptions and conclusions might be debatable, it is very exciting to think about scholars i n ‘ e u r o p e a n ’ a n d ‘ w e s t e r n ’ s t u d i e s henceforth discussing questions of islamic law, hadith, qurʾān and arabic literature as topics that might be relevant to them and to cultural studies in general. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 149-153 book review az i z a l a z m e h a i m s h i s t h e e m e r g e n c e o f i s l a m i n l a t e a n t i q u i t y a t t w o o f t h e m o s t important questions concerning middle eastern history: how did the muslim faith arise, and what was the role of the arab people in the venture of islam? al-azmeh proposes to lead the flock of middle east historians into the pastures of hellenism, l a t e a n t i q u i t y a n d a n t h r o p o l o g y o f religion, which he intones have been littlenibbled hitherto, and thereby suggests a “fresh look at muslim emergence” (i). with this ambitious program, the emergence of islam is a lengthy text which surveys a wide array of studies written over the past 150 years on late antiquity, early islam, paganism and monotheism to evaluate the paradigms through which modern scholars contemplate islam’s rise and to situate al-azmeh’s own position. the admirably omnivorous bibliography and the extensive discussions of late antique christianity and mediterranean polytheism, politics and philosophy in chapters 1 and 2 establish this book as the fruit of a long scholarly genesis. pursuant to his intentions, al-azmeh introduces a host of intriguing theoretical questions about the nature of monotheism, the patterns of its adoption and its continuities with prior beliefs, and his expedition into arabian polytheism in chapter 4 adds further potentials for complexity, all of which should be welcomed by specialists. al-azmeh’s attention to recent a r c h a e o l o g i c a l fi n d s a n d p r e i s l a m i c arabian epigraphy is another strength of the book, presenting a store of material that can facilitate constructive advances in scholarship. as the reader rounds the corner into the book’s final chapter on the articulation of islam as the end-product of umayyad imperial canonisation, he will have traversed a plentiful gamut of details and inferences that argue for the development of paleo-islam, an “arab religion” (100) in the “pagan reservation” (40) of central arabia, into a “recognisably muslim cult” and an “imperial religion” aziz al-azmeh, the emergence of islam in late antiquity: allāh and his people (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2014), pp. xxiii-634. isbn: 9781107031876, price: £110 (us$180). peter webb department of history soas, university of london (pw9@soas.ac.uk) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 150 • peter webb (428) under the transformative vision of the caliph ʿabd al-malik and his entourage who rigorously dissociated their islam from both “arab religion” and judeochristian monotheisms. by this juncture, however, the reader will also be carrying a number of qualms, and these need some elaboration before appraising the conclusions al-azmeh draws from his theoretical questions. o n e i s s u e s t e m s f r o m a l a z m e h ’ s theoretical lens. by formulating a model i n c h a p t e r s 1 2 f o r t h e e m e r g e n c e o f m o n o t h e i s m s i n l a t e a n t i q u i t y a s a f u n c t i o n o f c u l t i c a n d p o l i t i c a l centralisation, he establishes a mould into which he pours the evidence about early islam, driving the argument that islam’s form needs to be understood as a (independent) replication of processes i n c h r i s t i a n i s i n g r o m e ( 2 7 9 ) . t h e preponderant weight accorded to romanobyzantine legacies renders al-azmeh’s vision of islam as beholden to what he d u b s “ r o m a n i t y ” , a n d t h e s p a c e f o r sasanian inputs is expressly marginalised (3). this could summon concerns: the arabic sources for early islam are iraqi, and the a priori conceptualisation of the islamic faith as a purely syrian imperial operation, separate from the supposedly ‘persian’ abbasids, perpetuates a timeworn conceptual model which is currently in need of more reflection than al-azmeh’s model permits. al-azmeh’s rigid adhesion t o h i s m o d e l a l s o h a s t h e a t t e n d a n t drawback of subordinating evidence to structure: the model takes precedence, and while theory is manifestly valuable in the field, textual evidence remains important – and here the book docks in difficult methodological moorings. a l a z m e h d e t a i l s h i s i n t e r p r e t i v e methodology in a companion volume, the arabs and islam in late antiquity (berlin: gerlach, 2014). it is directed against the formerly hyper-critical approach to early islam adopted by various scholars, but in seeking to redress earlier cynicism, al-azmeh swings far towards a form of positivism whereby writers of arabic literary sources between the second/ eighth and fourth/tenth centuries are lauded as “antiquarians” (the arabs in islam 43, 62; the emergence of islam 173) with “scrupulous” intentions to accurately record pre-islamic facts. this reviewer supports the broad tenor of the arabic literary tradition, but a classification of its authors as essentially anthropologists will stumble into hazardous misreadings of their literature. al-azmeh argues for the sources’ empirical accuracy in order to use them as data repositories from which almost any quotation can be extracted to reconstruct the pre-islamic arab way of life, but this approach is not sustainable. while arabic literature houses incredibly rich information, it is not a cultural monolith: anecdotal contradictions abound, and the most pressing task of analysis is not simply to distinguish ‘correct’ from ‘false’, but rather to question why different visions of the past subsisted (and co-existed) in arabic literature. the field remains needy of better understanding of the discourses which constructed the edifices of classical arabic literature before the corpus can be simply trawled for data. the sources require diachronic analysis to unpick the layers of historiography that developed over the 300-year period of recording the pre-islamic past, with due accord to genre and the voices of classical-era authors, as they were developing varied discourses. r e l e g a t i n g w r i t e r s t o t h e s t a t u s o f al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) aziz al-azmeh’s the emergence of islam in late antiquity • 151 archivists homogenises them and silences their voices, overlooking the important advances in modern historiography that analyse history writing as narrative. al-azmeh’s the arabs and islam refers to hayden white as a kind of waiver (37), noting the value of his narratological theories, but not adopting his methods. accordingly, the emergence of islam t r a c e s i s l a m ’ s d e v e l o p m e n t w i t h o u t giving feel for the arabic material from which its evidence is adduced, and it rests manifold conclusions on single anecdotes. for example, a reference in the fourth/ tenth century al-iṣfahānī’s kitāb al-aghānī about the island of ḥaḍūḍā as a place of imprisonment is adduced to indicate that the pre-islamic arabs had an articulated pan-arabian public political sphere (142). one reference in the reconstituted ‘source’ of the second/eighth ibn isḥāq’s biography of muhammad is quoted as evidence for the ‘fact’ that pre-islamic arabs had a habit of rubbing their bodies on idols (226). and a quotation from the book of exodus is matched with an anecdote from the fifth/eleventh century iranian poetry specialist al-tabrīzī to prove that the pre-islamic arabs and ancient hebrews shared common views towards sacrifice (225). chapter 3 relies particularly on the kitāb al-aghānī to reconstruct the facts of arab life, but the complex question of how a book of songs, composed for a fourth/ tenth century hamdanid prince in aleppo can be used as an anthropological survey of pre-islamic arabian etiquette is left for the readers to resolve. as a consequence, large sections of al-azmeh’s book, particularly chapters 3-5 reduce into vast lists of detail argued as being emblematic of the arab ways and as proof for the book’s model of monotheistic development. but we lack analysis as to why muslim authors recorded the information, or synthesis of the facts. investigation of the ‘facts’ also unearths s o m e i n c o n s i s t e n c i e s . f o r e x a m p l e , al-azmeh is rightly critical of the notion of ‘tribe’, and avows to see through the tidy tribal classifications of muslim-era genealogies when he discusses the iraqi group bakr ibn wāʾil (127), but elsewhere he expressly cites bakr as a cohesive tribal actor on the iraqi-arabian frontier (119), and chapter 4 is replete with detailed taxonomies of specific tribal religious practices. i sense that al-azmeh wants to deconstruct orientalist prejudices about ‘tribal arabia’, and this is an asset to his thinking (see 109), but because he uses muslim-era sources with limited sourcecritical apparatus, he incorporates their embedded tribalism via the backdoor, and so ultimately repeats too many of the old sentiments about ‘bedouin’ pre-islam. a l a z m e h ’ s e m p i r i c a l a p p l i c a t i o n o f arabic sources causes some misleading s i m p l i fi c a t i o n s t o o . f o r i n s t a n c e , h e names taʾabbaṭa sharran as one of the quintessential outlaw ṣaʿālīk brigand poets (142), but taʾabbaṭa sharran’s literary persona as such a brigand was actually crafted by muslim narrators over 150 years of storytelling between the second/ eighth and fourth/tenth centuries, and the association of taʾabbaṭa sharran with ghouls, which al-azmeh notes as an factoid about pre-islamic arabian belief in spirits (209), was likewise augmented by muslims and only began to truly flower in the fourth/tenth century with the aghānī’s lengthy biography about the poet. literary figures such as taʾabbaṭa sharran are too complex to be adduced as one-dimensional exemplars of this or that arab trait: al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 152 • peter webb the memories of pre-islam became the property of iraqi muslims and often took on new significations, some seemingly different to the ‘reality’ of pre-islamic times. a related, and also fundamental issue concerns al-azmeh’s treatment of the arab people. al-azmeh’s model needs ‘arabs’ as the protagonists for its story – the possessors of a definitive range of pre-islamic beliefs that constituted the ‘arab religion’, and the actors who transformed islam into its current form. in aligning “allāh and his people” with “arabs”, the analysis ignores bashear’s the arabs and others with its observations from hadith and exegesis that islam acquired its supposed ‘signature’ arab i d e n t i t y o n l y d u r i n g t h e l a t e r fi r s t / seventh and second/eighth centuries. the problems with viewing islam as an ‘arab national movement’ recently resurfaced in donner (muhammad and the believers) a n d m i l l a r ( r e l i g i o n , l a n g u a g e a n d community in the roman near east), but are not aired in al-azmeh’s arab narrative. furthermore, al-azmeh’s underlying assumption that pre-islamic pan-arabian populations were ethnically unified under the term ‘arab’, projects arab identity into an ancient past which verges on primordialist racial archetype, and this notion is critically challenged by the fact that pre-islamic arabians did not seem to call themselves ‘arabs’, nor did their neighbours describe them as such, labelling arabians instead as saracens/ s a r a c e n i a n d ṭ a y y ā y ē . a l a z m e h acknowledges the absence of the name ‘arab’ in pre-islamic records, (104-5), and he argues to trace arab “ethnogenesis”, i.e. the process by which arab communities developed their identity (and name) over time (100, 110, 147), but to substantiate h i s i n v e s t i g a t i o n i n t o e t h n i c i t y a n d ethnogenesis, there is a surprising lack of theoretical engagement, especially given al-azmeh’s wide anthropological reading in other fields. scholarship now possesses elaborate models to interpret how groups gather together and imagine themselves to constitute an ethnic community: the idea of ethnogenesis began with max weber, and more recently with key contributions from barth, anderson, smith, hobsbawm, geary and pohl and reimitz,1 but reference to these works is absent in the emergence of islam. using the word ‘ethnogenesis’ without consulting the relevant theorists is a substantial misrepresentation, and the fallout is reflected in al-azmeh’s h o m o g e n i s e d t r e a t m e n t o f a r a b n e s s i n p r e i s l a m . t h e c o n s e q u e n c e s a r e n o t m e r e l y s e m a n t i c : i m p o s i n g a n anachronistic notion of arabness across arabia engenders the presumption that there was one cohesive body of people who were ‘ready’ to come together under  1. the classic study for ethnicity and identity is weber, max, “the origins of ethnic groups,” in john hutchinson and anthony smith, ethnicity. oxford: oxford up, 1996, pp. 35-9. for more recent work, see barth, fredrik, ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of culture difference (oslo: universitetsforlaget, 1969); anderson, benedict, imagined communities (london: verso, 1991); hobsbawm, eric, nations and nationalism since 1780 (cambridge: cambridge up, 1990); smith, anthony, chosen peoples: sacred sources of national identity (oxford: oxford up, 2003); pohl, walter and helmut reimitz (eds.), strategies of distinction: the construction of ethnic communities (300-800) (leiden: brill, 1998); geary, patrick, the myth of nations: the medieval origins of europe (princeton: princeton up, 2003); and jenkins, richard, rethinking ethnicity (london: sage, 2008). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) aziz al-azmeh’s the emergence of islam in late antiquity • 153 m u h a m m a d ’ s m e s s a g e , a n d s o r i s k s overlooking perhaps the most important achievement of early islam: the creation of a novel community of believers. these peoples’ decision to call themselves arabs is reflected in convoluted discourses in arabic literature about arab family trees, the definition of ʿarabī and the merits of arabness: such issues can be broached by carefully examining muslim-era narratives, but this is absent in the emergence of islam. a reader may equate the tenor of a l a z m e h ’ s b o o k w i t h j a w ā d ʿ a l ī ’ s ten-volume survey of pre-islamic arabness, al-mufaṣṣal: both present their readers w i t h a n a g g l o m e r a t i o n o f a n e c d o t e s about ‘arabs’, but yet without according space for source-critical reflection or investigation into muslim discourses about their pre-islamic past. herein, a reader would expect engagement with the idea of al-jāhiliyya (the pre-islamic ‘age of ignorance’ or ‘passion’): al-azmeh offers a brief statement illustrating his ample grasp of the discourses involved (359-60), but his treatment of the sources precludes deeper probing; he lists drory’s important 1996 article “the abbasid construction of the jāhiliyya” in his bibliography, but, according to my reading, i could not find it cited in the text or footnotes. o v e r a l l , a l a z m e h ’ s t h o u g h t s o n m o n o t h e i s m a n d l a t e a n t i q u i t y a r e original and pertinent, and it is therefore unfortunate that he retreated into an unsophisticated approach to the arabic s o u r c e s w h i c h m e a n s h i s e x c e l l e n t questions and inferences are not always b a c k e d b y c o m p e l l i n g e v i d e n c e . t h e result is a dense narrative about islam’s o r i g i n s a s a n e v o l u t i o n f r o m p a g a n arabia, through a nascent guise under the charismatic leadership of a prophet, to a fully articulated faith system in the fertile crescent. this ultimately reflects the narratives of many current (and past) scholars, and instead of spearheading the “fresh approach”, al-azmeh rather points towards it. we can hope that scholars will take up his many erudite challenges and think around them with more sensitive methodologies to both sources and the notions of community, faith and ethnicity. in memoriam wolfhart p. heinrichs (1941-2014)* al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 227-229 on january 23, 2014, we lost a teacher, a mentor, and a friend. wolfhart p. heinrichs was born on october 3, 1941, into a family of philologists. his father h. matthias was a germanist, and his mother anne a scholar of old norse who attained a full professorship at the freie universität in berlin at the age of 80. w o l f h a r t b e g a n h i s s t u d i e s i n h i s hometown of cologne. his university years included much traveling and many languages. after semesters spent at bonn and tübingen, he joined the school of oriental and african studies in london. he then studied at frankfurt and finally at giessen, where he received his doctorate in 1967. along the way, he learned latin, greek, french, english, hebrew, arabic, p e r s i a n , s y r i a c , o l d s o u t h a r a b i a n , ethiopic, ottoman, and uigur. he also studied certain other african languages— which ones, specifically, i do not recall, though he is fondly remembered for reciting a text in one of them, complete with clicks, at parties. after stints in beirut and istanbul, and a first foray into neo-aramaic, wolfhart returned to teach at giessen. in 1977, he was offered a professorship in arabic at harvard university. three years later, he *this obituary was originally published in the journal of abbasid studies 1 (2014), 4-6. (photo by satoru murata) in memoriam: wolfhart p. heinrichs al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 228 married alma giese, a fellow scholar of arabic and islam, and an accomplished translator into german. in 1996, he was appointed james richard jewett professor of arabic at harvard, a position he held until his death. most of wolfhart’s work concerned arabic literary theory and criticism. with enormous breadth and precision, he investigated questions such as the possible influence of greek thought on arabic poetics, the meaning of istiʿārah (metaphor), and the relationship between literary theory and legal hermeneutics. he was one of the few internationally recognized authorities on neo-aramaic. and as co-editor of the encyclopaedia of islam, he not only reviewed countless entries written by others but contributed some fifty articles himself, beginning with “mubālaghah” and ending with “zanjānī.” “he never promoted himself,” one of his former students recently wrote. “he just quietly and steadily produced, each item of scholarly output a gem contributing to a glittering tapestry of refreshingly oblique perspectives on things otherwise taken for granted or previously not considered.” as a teacher and doktorvater, wolfhart was reluctant to suggest topics for his students, much less impose a particular method or approach. he was, however, uncompromising in his insistence that students think clearly, write carefully, and translate precisely. to ensure that these standards were met, he would comment copiously on whatever was submitted to him, often poking gentle fun at flights of fancy or (worse yet) errors in transliteration. i once amused him no end by mis-transliterating the name of the abbasid caliph al-mustaḍīʾ, “the one who seeks light,” as al-mustaḍīʿ, “the one who seeks ruination.” “now that’s really funny,” i remember him scribbling in the margin. he may even have permitted himself an exclamation mark. in retrospect, wolfhart’s insistence on getting the details right seems to have arisen from a principle: that of respecting the complexity of the material we deal with. since edward said, it has become c us t om ary t o d is m is s philologis t s as “orientalists,” that is, as not-so-harmless drudges intent on dominating the natives they study. it is hard to imagine wolfhart aspiring to anything so grandiose. his method, if i might venture to distill it, consisted of the following premises. first, we must understand what problem it is that our text is trying to solve. second, we must assume that the response makes sense. if it doesn’t make sense to us, then we must have misunderstood it. wolfhart e x t e n d e d t h i s s o c a l l e d p r i n c i p l e o f charity to everything he read, including our comically wrongheaded translations. i don’t recall hearing him say that our translations were wrong. instead, he would ask: “if you wanted to say that in arabic, how would you say it?” this is a question i still ask my own students. a t h i s m e m o r i a l s e r v i c e , h e l d i n cambridge, ma, on january 27, 2014, those of us who knew him primarily as a scholar and teacher were touched to hear neighbors and friends outside the university speak of his kindness, his good humor, and his love of life. “he never made anyone feel a lesser person for not knowing all the things he knew,” was a refrain we heard again and again. in retrospect it seems that he thought of his work not only as a calling but also as a job, in the good healthy sense of the word. i remember him telling me, with a hint of pride perhaps, in memoriam: wolfhart p. heinrichs al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 229 that the briefcase he carried was actually a satchel of the kind carried by german working men. a longer biography, a bibliography of his works and alma’s, and a list of his students all appear in his festschrift, classical arabic humanities in their own terms, edited by beatrice gruendler ( b r i l l , 2 0 0 8 ) . m e a n w h i l e , t r i b u t e s t o him continue to appear. a particularly apt one was posted on facebook some weeks ago by one of his former students. it consists of a poem by abū al-ḥusayn ibn fāris that, according to wolfhart, “encapsulated the life of a scholar”: “how are you?” they asked. “all is well,” i replied:
 “one need met, others unfulfilled.” 
when the heart’s sorrows accumulate, we say:
 “perhaps one day there shall be release.”
 my cat is my companion, my heart’s delight my papers; and my beloved, the lamp. — michael cooperson in memoriam irene “renie” a. bierman-mckinney (1942-2015) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 164-166 writing obituary notes is an expec-tation when one is as senior as i am, but when the subject is your closest friend for three and a half decades, your intellectual mentor, and your collaborator on a wide range of projects the task is very hard, very sad but necessary. this is the case for me in preparing what follows. born irene abernathy, renie attended as an undergraduate western college for women, which is now part of miami university in ohio. she then went on to take an m.a. in middle east studies at harvard and then a certificate in arabic from auc. renie then went to work on her ph.d. at the university of chicago, which had no one in islamic art history. in fact renie is the only major scholar of her generation in islamic art history who was not trained by either oleg grabar at harvard or richard ettinghausen in new york. this was already a clear sign of her independent mind. b y t h e m i d 1 9 7 0 s s h e w a s r e n i e bierman resident in portland, or. for the next half decade she taught courses on islamic art at portland state university and the university of washington in seattle where we met in 1977. before i knew what was happening we had received a national endowment for the humanities grant to put on interpretive exhibitions of “oriental” carpets in portland, seattle, bellingham, wa, spokane, wa, and reno, nv with appropriate publications and public presentations. then it was a 12 part in memoriam: irene “renie” a. bierman-mckinney al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 165 tv series on islamic art shown extensively in the pacific northwest long before tv as an informational source became popular. all the time she was working on her university of chicago ph.d. which she completed in 1980. a major change in her intellectual and professional life took place in 1981 when renie had the opportunity to interact with a wide range of art historians as a fellow at center for the advanced study of the visual arts, which is part of the national gallery in washington, dc. from there she went to ucla for her first and only tenure track position retiring in 2012 as professor emerita. as an administrator renie was known for her professionalism, openness and fairness and ucla took advantage of those traits. she served as director of their middle east center for 8 years and later as chair, department of art history. renie also had a reputation as an outstanding administrator based upon her service to arce as an interim director in cairo. she was also the only art historian president of middle east medievalists (2001-2003) and during her career an active committee m e m b e r o f m a n y o t h e r a c a d e m i c organizations including arce and hiaa. her willingness to “think out of the box” and to create collaborative projects resulted in a number of international activities. she did an amazing job running two getty foundation grant in istanbul and other parts of turkey which included participants from over a dozen countries. as first a participant and then a co-director i can attest that under renie’s leadership we worked hard, played hard, and even effectively got the then head of egyptian antiquities, dr. zahi hawass, to istanbul for a major public lecture and reception. renie created and then ran served a s c o d i r e c t o r o f a n a r c e / f r e n c h institute 4-year research project in cairo including 3 international conferences. h e r p u b l i c a t i o n r e c o r d i n c l u d e d 7 authored or edited books, 25 articles, and numerous exhibition pamphlets, catalogue descriptions and project reports. as her former m.a. student and friend nasser rabbat wrote “her scholarship was both historical and interpretative, solidly rooted in research and knowingly conversant in memoriam: irene “renie” a. bierman-mckinney al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 166 with theory. her work on the role of public writing in islamic iconography was pathbreaking; her study of the ottomanization o f c i t i e s e x t r e m e l y i n v e n t i v e , a n d her understanding of the function of conservation in our understanding of cities today constructively critical.” as a mentor to graduate students, renie set exceptionally high standards and deliberately limited the number she would work with. as wendy shaw, one of her ph.d. students, reflecting the voice of her almost dozen ph.d.s, wrote “renie was my first teacher in art history, and i never realized how unique she was until i entered the world and discovered the breadth with which she enabled her students to think outside of the boundaries of disciplinarity. i think she lives on in how we approach our careers as well as in how we give shape to our work. i particularly appreciate her desire to engage students of all levels in excitement about discovering the world, her respect for the multiplicity of cultures and people in them, and her professionalism.” for all her public career, renie was a very private person. one day she told me that she had once published a piece of fiction for the new yorker, one of the most prestigious literary journals in the united states. “under what name did you write it?” i eagerly asked. “i forgot,” was her reply and the subject never came up again. as one of her friends and admirers said to me “in short, renie was a stylish, graceful, intellectual whirlwind.” may she rest in peace. — jere l. bacharach al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 143-146 book review seta dadoyan, whose work on the f ā ṭ i m i d s s t a n d s a s a s t a p l e i n medieval armenian history, recently published her trilogy the armenians in the medieval islamic world. these ambitious books center on several significant points about the nature of armenian society and the place of armenian christians in the broader islamic world. aimed at both islamicists and armenologists and navigating both arabic and armenian sources, they provide an overview of armenian-muslim relations from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. these books join recent studies in dismantling the assumption that there was a single and united medieval armenian society. significantly, they argue that we cannot see armenian experiences as separate from broader near eastern civilization. dadoyan’s work paints a broad picture of relations between armenians and muslims, suggesting overarching patterns to make sense of diverse accounts and various events over multiple centuries. the first volume, reviewed here, is subtitled “the arab period in armīnyah.” it introduces readers to armenian society and religiosity from the fifth century (eznik and the council of šahapiwan) before focusing on umayyad and ʿabbasid rule in the province and culminating in the rise and fall of the arcruni and bagratuni. historians frequently turn to armenian sources as outside verification of political, social, and religious developments in other places. this potentially implies that armenians are other, or even exotic, rendering them observers instead of participants in near eastern civilization. we need to pay more attention to setting armenian experiences into the broader currents of near eastern history, whether we identify them as islamic (as dadoyan does here) or iranian (as is more common in studies since the 1970s). the challenge is not related to a civilizational divide, b u t r a t h e r t h e n a t u r e o f a r m e n i a n historiography and the structure of history as an academic discipline. armenians seta dadoyan, the armenians in the medieval islamic world: paradigms of interaction, seventh to fourteenth centuries. volume one: the arab period in armīnyah, seventh to eleventh centuries (new brunswick/london: transaction publishers, 2011), pp. xxvii 208. price: $42.95 (hardcover). alison m. vacca department of history, university of tennessee, knoxville (avacca@utk.edu) mailto:avacca@utk.edu al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 144 • alison m. vacca are certainly not intrinsically foreign to the islamic world, but armenian sources support a clear divide between armenian christians and the “foreigners” (aylazgi), a term frequently employed to refer to arab muslims.1 further, as historians we are trained in either armenian or islamic history. bridging that disciplinary divide r e q u i r e s e n g a g e m e n t w i t h m u l t i p l e historical subfields that typically do not overlap. as dadoyan points out, the “so-called objectivity” of the historian is an impossible ideal because our training informs what we look at and how we engage with the material at hand. 2 it should come as no surprise, then, that w r i t i n g i n t e r d i s c i p l i n a r y h i s t o r y i s hampered by our training. predictably, the types of questions islamicists might ask about the arab conquest or umayyad and ʿabbasid rule in armenia are not always answered in dadoyan’s book because she has her own filters and concerns. dadoyan openly notes in her prologue that she “avoided debates on specific issues” and deliberately did not engage with “what some call ‘scholarship out there,’” preferring instead “relatively old sources such as gibbon.”3 but these debates and scholarship are precisely what would bridge the disciplinary divide and pull armenia into dialogue with islamic history. the first volume of her trilogy is organized as traditional dynastic history: chapter 2 deals with the arab conquest; chapter 3, 1. thomson, “christian perception of history – the armenian perspective,” in van ginkel, murre, & van lint (ed), redefining christian identity (louvain: peeters, 2005). 2. dadoyan, the armenians in the medieval islamic world (new brunswick: transaction p, 2011), 2. 3. dadoyan (2011), xxv – xxvi. the umayyad period; and chapter 4, the ʿabbasid period, but a broader discussion about alternative periodization in islamic history would have prompted fascinating q u e s t i o n s a b o u t h o w t o u n d e r s t a n d a r m e n i a a s a c a l i p h a l p r o v i n c e . f o r example, dadoyan explains that after the death of “the prophet ʿalī and the rise of the meccan umayyads” in 40ah/661ce,4 t h e u m a y y a d s c r e a t e d t h e c a l i p h a l province of armenia in 73ah/693ce. she describes this as a correction of the commonly-cited 82ah/701ce. there is no demonstrably right or wrong answer here, as the inexactitude of the date is linked to the various arab military campaigns under muḥammad b. marwān against byzantine and armenian forces in the north. the problem is not whether we choose the fitna of ibn al-zubayr or the marwānid reforms as the impetus for the creation of caliphal armenia. instead, we need to address how we might write a chapter about “umayyad armenia” given two main problems. first, as dadoyan herself argues, the marwānids created caliphal armenia. sebēos’s treaty between t‘ēodoros ṙštuni and muʿāwiya p r o m i s e s n o a r a b o v e r s i g h t i n t h e province and, subsequently, łewond’s history gives no indication that there were sufyānid governors in armenia.5 al-ṭabarī 4. dadoyan (2011), 43 – 44. presumably, the reference to “the prophet ʿalī” is a typo and should be read as ʿalī, the son-in-law and cousin of the prophet muḥammad. the designation of umayyads as meccans reappears later in the book to refer (correctly) to abū sufyān. while we might also count ʿuthmān as a “meccan umayyad,” the umayyads who rose to power in 40ah/661ce in fact attacked mecca twice, once in 64ah/683ce and again in 73ah/692ce, even reportedly starting a fire that threatened the kaʿba itself. it was the heart of zubayrid territory. 5. sebēos, patmut‘iwn, ed. abgaryan (erevan: al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) seta dadoyan’s the armenians in the medieval islamic world • 145 e v e n m e n t i o n s a z u b a y r i d g o v e r n o r named muhallab b. abī ṣufra stationed there in 67ah/687ce,6 so it seems unlikely that the sufyānids ever controlled the territory directly. second, we only have ʿabbasid-era sources about the umayyad period. sebēos’s patmut‘iwn cuts off at the end of the first fitna and łewond wrote his patmagirk‘ after the rise of the ʿabbasids. our earliest arabic sources on caliphal armenia, such as the works of khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, al-yaʿqūbī, and al-balādhurī, are from the ninth century. telling conquest and umayyad-era history of a caliphal province without problematizing the extant sources bypasses an enormous body of literature on islamic historiography. dadoyan’s attempt to circumvent the problem of reliability of extant sources puts the accounts about caliphal armenia into a broader history, i.e. looking for patterns that make sense of umayyad and ʿabbasid history based on our knowledge of islamic history writ large. yet her focus on “paradigms of interaction” presents the reader with a frustrating conundrum. on the one hand, dadoyan is committed to showing diversity and heterodoxy within armenian society. on the other hand, she proposes that we generalize history, as if “armenians” and “muslims” over the centuries always interacted with each other in predictable ways that we can now haykakan ssh gitut‘yunneru akademiayi hratarakč‘ut‘yun, 1979), 164; jinbashian, “araboarmenian peace treaty of a.d. 652,” haykazean hayagitakan handēs 6 (1977-8), 169 – 174. 6. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1879 – 1901), ii 750: muhallab is placed over mawṣil, jazīra, azerbaijan, and armenia, a province known since m. bates’s 1989 article as “the umayyad north”; laurent & canard, l’arménie entre byzance et l’islam (lisbon: librairie bertrand, 1919/1980), 410 n. 6. identify and isolate as paradigmatic. if “[t] he point is that the armenian experience in the medieval near east is too diverse and complicated to respond to simplistic and quasi-epic constructions,”7 then how can the reader make use of “paradigms of interaction”? every historian looks for shapes to give meaning to our sources and to the events we study, but this surely does not signify that there are broad patterns governing all of the shapes over multiple centuries. to take a specific example, one of dadoyan’s paradigms of interaction is the proliferation of treaties stipulating armenian dhimmitude. dadoyan argues that “the issue of strict authenticity [of any particular treaty] is secondary to the historicity of the tradition of so-called islamic oaths to christians in medieval histories.”8 while scholars have revisited the issue of authenticity recently,9 she is undeniably correct that armenians and muslims frequently signed multiple comparable treaties throughout the entire period of this study and beyond. still, it is unclear how a paradigmatic framework w o u l d a l l o w f o r a n e x a m i n a t i o n o f historicity. to support her argument, dadoyan presents the treaty between ḥabīb b. maslama and the people of dabīl/ dwin, the caliphal capital of armenia. she compares english translations of the treaty from al-balādhurī’s ninth-century arabic futūḥ al-buldān and samuēl anec‘i’s twelfth-century armenian hawak‘munk‘ i groc‘ patmagrac‘. as they appear here, 7. dadoyan (2011), 3. 8. dadoyan (2011), 59. 9. see robinson, empire and elites after the muslim conquest (cambridge: cambridge up, 2000) and levy-rubin, non-muslims in the early islamic empire (cambridge: cambridge up, 2011). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 146 • alison m. vacca these texts are nearly verbatim. she pulls in references to comparable ayyūbid-, m o n g o l , s a f a v i d , a n d o t t o m a n e r a treaties and concludes: “it can be argued that irrespicive [sic] of their authenticity— which cannot be established anyway—in medieval armenian histories the tradition of oaths should be studied as a single broad aspect of islamic-armenian relations.”10 with this example, dadoyan casts a wide net to speak about the long history of armenian-muslim relations, but it is in fact a remarkable comparison that can illuminate a much more specific, historicized moment: the twelfth century. it suggests that samuēl anec‘i or his informants had access to arabic sources and that these informed the armenian historian so much that he even referred to the city by the arabic dābil [sic]11 instead of by the armenian dwin. this does not necessarily diverge from the findings about other armenian histories written in twelfth-century ani,12 but it does suggest that this is part of a much broader literary interaction that should be contextualized and examined in greater depth instead of as an unmoored paradigm, comparable to the prophet’s medinan oaths and the 10. dadoyan (2011), 61. 11. the arabic name for dwin appears as dābil consistently in this volume and should instead be read dabīl. also, it is unclear why it appears with a macron in this particular instance, since this passage purports to translate the treaty from armenian and, accordingly, should not have long vowels. 12. kouymjian, “mxit‘ar (mekhitar) of ani on the rise of the seljuqs,” rea 6 (1969), 331 – 53 and kouymjian, “problems of medieval armenian and muslim historiography: the mxit‘ar of ani fragment,” ijmes vol. 4 no. 4 (1973), 465 – 475. granted, mxit‘ar anec‘i was probably familiar with persian sources rather than arabic. ottomans alike. while this is a serviceable example of how the paradigmatic approach favors the generalized retelling of history, the matter is moot anyway since dadoyan’s s o u r c e s c a n n o t b e v e r i fi e d . s a m u ē l anec‘i’s text actually covers the arab c o n q u e s t o f d a b ī l / d w i n v e r y b r i e fl y and does not mention ḥabīb b. maslama at all.13 dadoyan’s footnote for samuēl anec‘i’s rendition of the treaty points the reader not to the hawak‘munk‘ itself, but to a passage from a modern study of armenian history that does not mention samuēl at all. without recourse to the exact passage in samuēl anec‘i’s text, we cannot make any conclusions about a twelfth-century rendition of the treaty or its potential relation to earlier arabic accounts, let alone the similarities between it and ayyūbid-, mongol-, safavid-, and ottoman-era treaties. we need historians who are brave enough to step back from the minutia, to gather up all of the details, and to shape them into some sort of narrative. dadoyan takes a look at the big picture and challenges modern presumptions about categorical identities in the near east. significantly, the first volume of the armenians in the medieval islamic world is approachable and encourages students of armenian history to read the armenian texts against the grain. from a researchoriented perspective, it introduces a number of interesting questions that d a d o y a n w i l l h o p e f u l l y c o n t i n u e t o advance in future publications. 13. samuēl anec‘i, hawak‘munk‘ i groc‘ patmagrac‘, ed. tēr-mik‘elean (vałaršapat: ēǰmiacni tparan, 1893), 80. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 134-140 book review robert hoyland’s in god’s path: the arab conquests and the creation of an islamic empire is the most recent attempt to make sense of the worldchanging developments associated with the rise of islam. it offers an attractive, well-informed, and readily comprehensible account of the geopolitical background in the near east, the conquests, and the rise of the first islamic empire up to the fall of the umayyad dynasty in 750. its author, an established scholar who has made important earlier contributions to the study of arabia and the seventh century, i s i n m a n y w a y s i d e a l l y q u a l i fi e d t o undertake such an enterprise. its writing style and organization are absolutely lucid; it provides a readable and fairly concise narrative of the events of the conquests on many different fronts, from spain to central asia and india, made lively by interlarding the narrative with frequent quotes from relevant primary (or literary) sources; and it grapples in numerous asides with some of the broader processes that are associated with this historical phenomenon, such as arabization and islamization. the book contains a number of illustrations that, like the quotes from primary sources, help make the material “come alive” for the reader. moreover, it emphasizes the importance of using contemporary sources rather than later chronicles, partly as a way of giving more voice to the conquered populations who wrote many of them, and partly because of the likelihood that 7th and 8th century sources will provide a more accurate view of “what actually happened” than the idealizing views of the conquests w r i t t e n c e n t u r i e s l a t e r i n a r a b i c b y muslim authors. this is a fundamental * the author is grateful to the stanford humanities center and its director, prof. caroline winterer, for appointing him marta sutton weeks fellow for the academic year 2014-2015, and providing him with the supportive environment in which this review was first drafted. robert hoyland, in god’s path: the arab conquests and the creation of an islamic empire (oxford and new york: oxford university press, 2015), x + 303 pages. isbn: 9780199916368, price: $29.95 (cloth). fred m. donner* department of near eastern languages and civilizations and the oriental institute, university of chicago (f-donner@uchicago.edu) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 135 • fred m. donner point of method, widely recognized now for several decades, and an approach to which hoyland himself made a yeoman contribution almost twenty years ago with his indispensable earlier book, seeing islam as others saw it.1 this methodological point will be especially important for new readers, and together with the book’s accessibility means that it will probably find a wide audience, particularly as a textbook in college survey courses on early islamic history. it is therefore most unfortunate that this book, with so many points in its favor, adopts an interpretation of the conquests that this reviewer considers seriously misleading—besides having its share of merely formal or cosmetic shortcomings. let us begin with the latter. in god’s path is marred by what must be called a lack of professional courtesy or etiquette, in that its author often fails to give appropriate (or, sometimes, any) credit to the many scholars whose work prepared the way for his own—sometimes, indeed, conveying the impression that he is the originator of an idea or approach. to pick one glaring example: hoyland stresses in the “introduction” that he will emphasize the testimony of seventh-century sources, and non-arabic sources, rather than later arabic-islamic ones—implying strongly in doing so that all previous authors have done otherwise. but, important though it is, this is not an approach new with hoyland, and precisely because the book is intended for non-specialists, he has a responsibility to make clear (if only in a few brief notes) that he is continuing on 1. robert hoyland, seeing islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of christian, jewish and zoroastrian writings on early islam (princeton: darwin press, 1997). a trail blazed by others. yet one looks in vain in these passages for any reference to or acknowledgement of the work of scholars like walter e. kaegi,2 patricia crone (hoyland’s teacher!) and michael cook,3 sebastian brock,4 lawrence conrad,5 steven shoemaker,6 and many others7—to mention only those writing in english— some of whom had already adopted this approach when hoyland was still in grade school. in the “appendix” (p. 231), he once again notes the importance of relying on contemporary and non-muslim sources, saying with satisfaction, “which is what i have done in this book,” but here, too, he does not find it necessary to mention the work of the many predecessors who showed the way. 2. walter e. kaegi, jr., “initial byzantine reactions to the arab conquest,” church history 38 (1969), 139-49. 3. patricia crone and michael cook, hagarism: the making of the islamic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1977). 4. sebastian brock, “syriac views of emergent islam,” in g. h. a. juynboll (ed.), studies on the first century of islamic society (carbondale and edwardsville: southern illinois university press, 1982), 9-21. 5. lawrence i. conrad, “the conquest of arwād: a source-critical study in the historiography of the early medieval near east,” in averil cameron and lawrence i. conrad (eds.), the byzantine and early islamic near east, i. problems in the literary source material (princeton: darwin press, 1992), 317-401. 6. stephen j. shoemaker, the death of a prophet: the end of muḥammad’s life and the beginnings of islam (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2012) 7. including the present reviewer: see fred m. donner, “the formation of the islamic state, journal of the american oriental society 106 (1986), 283-96; idem, muhammad and the believers: at the origins of islam (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2010). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) robert hoyland’s in god’s path: the arab conquests • 136 the problem of failing to give proper a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t i s u n f o r t u n a t e l y p e r v a s i v e . i n p a r t , t h i s f a i l u r e t o acknowledge may reflect a lack of close familiarity with others’ work, particularly studies in languages other than english. some key works are included, in list form, in hoyland’s “select bibliography” but otherwise seem to have had no impact;8 others are simply missing,9 even though they are highly relevant, even critical, to hoyland’s subject. these shortcomings do not for the most part materially affect the book’s content; and, since in god’s path is likely to sell well and be widely used in teaching, they can be easily rectified in a future edition by the addition of a few notes. there are, 8. for example, alfred-louis de prémare’s les fondations de l’islam: entre écriture et histoire (paris: seuil, 2002), and christian décobert’s le mendicant et le combatant: l’institution de l’islam (paris: seuil, 1991) are both mentioned in the bibliography, but never in the notes, and i sense little trace of their content in hoyland’s presentation. 9. for example, jens scheiner’s massive die eroberung von damaskus: quellenkritische untersuchung zur historiographie in klassisch-islamischer zeit (leiden and boston: e. j. brill, 2010), on the conquest of damascus—which one might expect to be mentioned in a book on the conquests; the work of muriel debié (see now her l’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque: transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellénisme et islam [leuven: peeters, 2015], which offers a comprehensive bibliography on syriac historiography) and others on the syriac and other non-muslim sources; or antoine borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72-193/692-809) (leiden and boston: brill, 2011), with its important insights into historiography and ‘image-making’ and his detailed study of the career of the umayyad prince maslama ibn ʿabd al-malik and his siege of constantinople, discussed at length by hoyland with no reference to this work. however, also fundamental problems with the book’s interpretation, which takes a strong but, to this reviewer at least, highly misleading position in the larger debate about how to characterize the conquests. the basic argument of in god’s path is that the expansion of muḥammad’s community, which took over most of the near east in the seventh and eighth centuries, should be seen as akin to the expansions of other “peripheral peoples” living just beyond the frontiers of the roman empire. in hoyland’s view, it is important to see the conquests in this way both because of their intrinsic similarity to the european “barbarian” migrations, and in order to avoid the overly islamicizing trend of the later muslim sources (mostly 9th century and later), which viewed the whole expansion as due to the impulse provided by the new religion of islam. hoyland is certainly correct to point out the tendency of later islamic sources to “islamicize” the conquest movement, projecting their later understandings back to the origins period of the community. here he is drawing on the pioneering work of albrecht noth, in particular, who revealed the strongly salvation-historical agenda that underlay the later islamic conquest narratives,10 work that has been followed by other studies (again, mostly not acknowledged) that brought to light different aspects of this tendency.11 10. albrecht noth, quellenkritische untersuchungen zu themen, formen und tendenzen frühislamischer überlieferungsgeschichte (bonn: selbstverlag der universität, 1973); revised english translation: lawrence i. conrad and albrecht noth, the early arabic historical tradition: a source-critical study (princeton: the darwin press, 1994). 11. john wansbrough, the sectarian milieul al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 137 • fred m. donner there is, however, a reason to eschew referring to the early expansion as the “islamic conquests” that is even stronger than the desire to counteract the bias of later sources: it is because in the available early sources the conquerors did not call themselves “muslims,” in the sense of a distinct monotheistic community, before about 700 c.e. instead, to judge from the testimony of their seventhcentury documents and the qurʾān, the conquerors in their earliest years seem to have referred to themselves as muʾminūn, “believers.” curiously, however—perhaps because of his desire to avoid a religious i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f a n y k i n d — h o y l a n d passes in virtual silence over the term muʾminūn. despite the author’s professed desire to privilege seventh-century and documentary sources, he devotes only a passing mention and brief discussion (p. 57) to the word muʾmin and its implications; the uninitiated reader will probably not realize that the early conquerors called themselves, and presumably thought of themselves, primarily a “believers.”12 in this respect, in god’s path is likely to sow confusion, because hoyland populates the pages of the book with “muslims,” even for the earliest period, when the term was not yet in use. he states, for example: “for the first fifty years or so after the death of muhammad there was a quite clear (oxford: oxford university press, 1978); fred m. donner, narrative of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton: darwin press, 1998); chase f. robinson, islamic historiography (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003). 12. it is noteworthy that the index contains no entry for “believer” or “muʾmin,” but does include entries for terms such as “islam/muslim,” “arab identity,” and “muhajirun.” demarcation between the conquerors and the conquered. the former were mostly arabs and mostly muslims, though not as uniformly so as later histories suggest, and the latter were mostly non-arabs and very few had converted to islam.” [p. 157]. this passage makes it clear that in the author’s mind, “muslim” is a distinct religious category, admission to which requires members of other religions, such jews or christians, to “convert,” and that this clear-cut confessional distinction was present already in the earliest years of the movement. there is a deep irony here, because despite hoyland’s expressed desire to avoid the islamicizing tendencies of the later sources, he seems to have bought into one of those later sources’ m o s t b a s i c o b j e c t i v e s — w h i c h w a s t o demonstrate that “islam,” in its later sense of a separate religious confession distinct from other monotheisms like christianity and judaism, already existed at the time of the prophet and during the era of the early conquests. this unfortunate implication c o u l d h a v e b e e n a v o i d e d s i m p l y b y referring to the early community as one of muʾminūn, “believers,” as they themselves did. despite hoyland’s desire to avoid a religious explanation for the conquests, a decided ambiguity between the religious and non-religious (in this case, “arab”). perspectives is palpable throughout the book. hoyland at times acknowledges religion as motivator, as for example when he states, “…there were many non-muslims in [the conquerors’] ranks initially; what united them was their focus on jihad…,” which sounds pretty religious. indeed, this ambiguity is reflected even in the book’s complete title (or title and subtitle): in god’s path: the arab conquests and the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) robert hoyland’s in god’s path: the arab conquests • 138 creation of an islamic empire. the title phrase is of course a truncated translation of jihād fī sabīl allāh, “jihad in the path of god,” so the title seems to put strong emphasis the religious motivations of the conquest—yet the book itself strives to downplay the religious impetus. and what, then, about the phrase “arab conquests,” which hoyland proposes as a more suitable, because less religious, terminology? the problem with t his nomenclature—despite the fact that it has been frequently used over the past century—is that there is no inscription, or papyrus document, or coin produced by the conquerors in the seventh century in which they refer to themselves as “arabs.” (such usage only occurs in the later islamic chronicles.) it is therefore especially m i s l e a d i n g w h e n , i n s u p p o r t o f h i s interpretation, hoyland quotes the caliph sulaymān b. ‘abd al-malik (r. 715-717) as saying “i shall not cease from the struggle for constantinople until either i conquer it or i destroy the entire dominion of the arabs in trying.” (p. 172). this seems to suggest that the caliph conceived of the state as the “dominion of the arabs.” the quote, however, comes not from an arabic source, but from the syriac chronicon ad annum 1234, on which hoyland relied to reconstruct the now-lost work of theophilus of edessa;13 and the syriac text does not say “dominion of the arabs”, but rather uses the term ṭayyāyē,14 a standard 13. robert g. hoyland, theophilus of edessa’s chronicle and the circulation of historical knowledge in late antiquity and early islam (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2011), p. 210. 14. chronicon ad annum christi 1234 pertinens (ed. j. b. chabot: louvain: l. durbecq, 1920), p. 301 [=csco 81, scriptores syri 36]. the syriac designation for nomads—a word that cannot be considered an effort to replicate arabic al-‘arab, and should not blithely be translated as “arab,” which decidedly rings of conceptions of ethnic nationalism that arose only in the nineteenth century. to call the movement an “arab conquest” will thus be profoundly misleading to the general readers to whom this book will appeal—offering, as it does, a simplistic i n t e r p o l a t i o n o f m o d e r n n a t i o n a l i s t terminology onto the distant past. h o y l a n d a l s o c o n t e n d s t h a t t h e expansion should be seen as “arab” because it was closely analogous to the barbarian invasions in western europe. like those invasions, he claims, the conquests were part of a process of ethnogenesis by which “the arabs” crystallized into a distinct people, just as the visigoths, ostrogoths, and other peoples had done in europe. in view of the fact that no self-styled “arab kingdom” resembling the kingdoms of the ostrogoths or visigoths ever seems to emerge, however, the idea that arab ethnogenesis was taking place at this time seems questionable. hoyland also seems to want the “arab conquest” to be similar to the germanic invasions because he sees them both a s p r o c e s s e s t h a t l a c k e d a r e l i g i o u s underpinning. he faults islamicists for saying “that religion plays a greater role in the object of their study, but this is a latin translation by chabot (anonymi auctoris, chronicon ad annum christi 1234 pertinens, i. louvain: l. durbecq, 1937), 234 [=csco 109, scriptores syri 56]) uses “arabum” for this passage, so perhaps hoyland was simply following chabot’s initiative on this rendering. but chabot (18601948) was raised in the heyday of european nationalism and could be expected to see history in terms of projected national identities. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 139 • fred m. donner dubious claim.” (p. 5). but, as we have seen, there is good reason to believe that the conquests actually did have a religious (if not yet an “islamic”) impetus—as a movement of muʾminūn, “believers,” led by their amīr al-muʾminīn or “commander of the believers.” the differences between the germanic invasions and the arabian ones are in this respect surely as striking as their similarities: in a nutshell, western europe saw the emergence neither of a new gothic scripture analogous to the qurʾān, nor of a “gothic caliph, “ a unified leader of all germanic groups having a religious as well as political aura analogous to that of the amīr al-muʾminīn. instead, western europe saw the emergence of several autonomous gothic kingdoms. the germanic invasions did not lead to the emergence of a new religion dominating europe, as islam came to dominate the near east. nor did the gothic peoples who fell upon the roman empire first announce their presence by emblazoning on their earliest coins, inscriptions, and other documents slogans that are essentially religious. the arabian believers, however, added short phrases in arabic such as “in the name of god, who has no associate” to their first coins, based on byzantine or sasanian prototypes, which are among the earliest documents testifying to their presence. the religious (if not yet islamic) character of the early expansion of the believers’ movement is thus not merely a figment of the imagination of modern historians, snookered by later islamic sources, but something for which solid seventh-century documentation actually exists. hoyland’s determined avoidance of any religious explanation for the believers’ movement also leads him to neglect completely the possibility that apocalyptic e s c h a t o l o g y , t h e a n t i c i p a t i o n o f t h e imminent end of the world, may have played a part in its dynamism. this idea has in recent years gained considerable support, partly because of the patently eschatological character of many qurʾānic passages. in god’s path, however, makes no mention at all of eschatological concerns.15 hoyland describes in some detail the two umayyad sieges of constantinople, but says nothing about apocalyptic thought as a possible motivation for them, even though the conquest of that city was a central and highly-anticipated event in early islamic apocalyptic texts, a key objective to be achieved in order to usher in the end-time. the extraordinary effort expended by the umayyads to carry out these two assaults suggests that the conquest of constantinople may have had cosmic significance to them, as one would expect if they were motivated by eschatological concerns. it is perfectly fine to point out that the conquerors were united by a common commitment to jihād, and one might certainly further develop the idea that it was the common experience of engaging in jihād together that helped bond conquerors of disparate tribes and regions together, and so helped a movement imbued with communitas develop the institutional structures of a nascent state. but jihād in the name of what, for what cause? unless we assume something like eschatological enthusiasm, it is difficult to understand what would have motivated the early believers to embark on the conquests in the first place. 15. the index has no entry for “apocalyptic/ ism,” “eschatology,” “last judgment,” or yawm al-dīn (“day of judgment”). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) robert hoyland’s in god’s path: the arab conquests • 140 the apocalyptic spark seems most likely to be what ignited the sudden burst of expansionist conquest that we associate with the eventual emergence—almost a century later—of islam. it is unfortunate that this well-written a n d r e a d a b l e v o l u m e e m b r a c e s a n interpretation that, to this reviewer at least, seems so stubbornly wrong-headed. the many non-specialists who are likely to learn from it for the first time about the events of islam’s origins will either be forced to re-conceptualize what they know as they learn more, or will continue to cling to the outmoded trope of the “arab conquests.” in neither case will in god’s path have done them a service. it is with great satisfaction, and no small amount of relief, that we present the latest issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā (uw). it is our longest issue to date. as ever, we seek to provide a venue for up-to-date scholarship across the fields of early and medieval islamic, arabic, and middle east studies, while remaining a source of news and information on the latest work of our colleagues and students. our deepest appreciation goes to four colleagues without whose efforts we could not proceed. christiane-marie abu sarah, now assistant professor of history at erskine college, has again put in consistent and excellent work as our managing editor. we are very grateful for the outstanding editorial contribution of hanna siurua; we also thank our book review editors malika dekkiche (university of antwerp) and luke yarbrough (ucla) for bringing together a fine set of ten reviews on topics in a variety of disciplines. we are delighted to introduce the j o u r n a l ’ s n e w m a s t h e a d a s w e l l a s mem’s new logo, both designed by artist joumana medlej (https://majnouna.com/). although the journal’s masthead has been entirely redesigned, it still emulates the kufic pattern originally developed by fred m. donner in the 1990s. our deepest thanks to joumana for this wonderful addition to uw. we would further like to express our gratitude to manan ahmed asif (columbia university). we are pleased to announce that thanks to his efforts, the journal is now housed at columbia university library (https://journals.library.columbia. edu/index.php/alusur/index) in the open journals platform as well as in columbia’s academic commons. uw is also included in the directory of open access journals (https://doaj.org/), which provides access to a variety of databases and online search engines, such as worldcat, and thus letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): i-iii (photo of antoine borrut by juliette fradin photography) © 2020 antoine borrut and matthew s. gordon. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attributionnoncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. https://majnouna.com/ https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/index https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/index https://doaj.org/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): ii greatly enhances the online visibility of the articles, reviews, and other content of the journal. our hope is that the move to the new platform makes uw an even more attractive option for colleagues— particularly younger scholars—seeking to publish their research. the issue begins with an account by maribel fierro, recipient of the 2019 middle east medievalists lifetime achievement award, of her intellectual formation and the range of scholarly topics that she has pursued over the course of a remarkable career. six full-length research articles follow, addressing a range of topics: the erotics of identity in the 1001 nights (zayde antrim); the provenance of the mashhad manuscript of ibn faḍ lān’ s kitāb and its three companion texts (luke treadwell); an edition, translation, and study of a sixth/twelfth-century a r a b i c t r a v e l a c c o u n t t o a l e x a n d r i a ( j e l l e b r u n i n g ) ; e a r l y a r a b i c / i s l a m i c representations of umayyad-era caliphal succession (abed el-rahman tayyara); the idea of “islamic civilization,” its genesis, and its institutional ramifications (kevin van bladel); and muslim perceptions of near eastern stylites in the early islamic period (simon pierre). the topics bespeak the energy and creativity of current scholarship in our respective disciplines. we are very pleased, in the case of jelle bruning’s study, to include our first arabic edition, and, with the selections by simon pierre and sébastien garnier (see below), our first articles in french. g a r n i e r ’ s s t u d y o f g l u t t o n y a s a narrative device in the sindbad story cycle is one of six articles in our latest special dossier, “islamic history broadly conceived: a tribute to michael cook and the holberg seminar.” the other five pieces are theodore beers’s study o f e l e v e n t h / s e v e n t e e n t h c e n t u r y p e r s i a n p o e t r y i n a r a b l a n g u a g e anthologies; matthew keegan’s analysis of a sixth/twelfth-century epistle on c o m p a n i o n s h i p a n d h u n t i n g ; p a m e l a klasova’s discussion of the widely treated ḥ a d ī t h o n t h e i n t e l l e c t ( ʿ a q l ) ; d a i s y livingston’s treatment of the life cycle of a set of mamluk-era iqṭāʿ documents; and christian mauder’s study of persian identity in late mamluk egyptian court culture. led by michael cook (princeton university), khaled el-rouayheb (harvard university), jack tannous (princeton university), and our own antoine borrut (university of maryland) and held at princeton over four successive summers, the seminar takes its name from the n o r w e g i a n g o v e r n m e n t ’ s p r e s t i g i o u s holberg prize, granted to professor cook in 2014. the selections in the dossier, treating topics across medieval islamic culture, politics, and history, suggest that there is much to look forward to from the up-and-coming generation of scholars in our overlapping fields. this issue also inaugurates a feature new to uw: a section devoted to teaching, which contains a short comment by jo van steenbergen (ghent university) on his new textbook, a history of the islamic world, 600–1800 (routledge, 2021), and a description by hannah barker (arizona state university) of her new and exciting online resource, teaching medieval slavery and captivity. the site can be accessed at: https://www.medievalslavery.org/. the issue closes with the book review section. our heartfelt thanks not only to our two stellar book review editors, dekkiche and yarbrough, but also to all our colleagues who agreed to take on what letter from the editors https://www.medievalslavery.org is a necessary yet often underappreciated task. as with the articles cited above, the topical range of the publications treated in the reviews and the expertise on display in the reviews themselves speak volumes of the vitality of the scholarly community to which we belong. as is our custom, we close with two reminders. f i r s t , w e r e l y o n y o u r f i n a n c i a l s u p p o r t . u w i s o n l i n e , o p e n a c c e s s , and peer-reviewed, but it is certainly not free. to cover the costs of publication and the work of our staff, among other expenses, you provide valuable support by keeping your membership in middle east medievalists up to date. for information on membership and the fund, please proceed to mem’s website: https://www.middleeastmedievalists. com/membership-application/ second, the full run of the journal, in its several iterations, is available online. the full archive can be accessed at: https://www.middleeastmedievalists. com/volume-index/. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): iii letter from the editors sincerely, antoine borrut and matthew gordon https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/membership-application https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/membership-application https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/volume-index/ https://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/volume-index/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 231-232 in recognition of his remarkable contributions to scholarship on the history and traditions of islam, michael cook was awarded the prestigious holberg prize in 2014. established by the norwegian parliament in 2003, the award is intended “to increase awareness of the value of academic scholarship in the arts, humanities, social sciences, law, and theology.” in keeping with his abiding commitment to teaching, michael decided to use part of the award to establish the holberg seminar, envisioned as an international graduate seminar on pre-1800 islamic history. michael invited khaled el-rouayheb (harvard university), jack tannous (princeton university), and myself to assist in organizing the seminar, starting with the selection of participants. drawn from a considerable pool of applicants, a highly cosmopolitan group of ten students—hailing from the united states, the united kingdom, france, germany, the czech republic, bulgaria, and egypt—was thus formed. the plan was to work with the same cohort over several years; when a few participants withdrew for personal reasons, they were replaced by equally talented peers. the inaugural meeting took place in june 2015. subsequently, the seminar met in princeton every summer until june 2018. each of the annual meetings began with a dinner followed by three to four days of dense programming. the final session always took place at michael’s home and was followed by a lovely farewell dinner. each year, the students had the opportunity to extend their stay in princeton for a few days to enjoy the endless resources of the firestone library. the central aim of the seminar was to provide the participants with sustained and highlevel feedback on their research and writing at a formative stage in their careers. this approach generated an extraordinary level of discussion, far superior to anything i have introduction: the holberg seminar antoine borrut university of maryland (aborrut@umd.edu) © 2020 antoine borrut. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:aborrut%40umd.edu?subject= 232 • antoine borrut al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) experienced to date in my own career. the format followed, in part, michael’s practice of using his own graduate seminar as a “dissertation chapter clinic.” each year, several of the holberg students submitted chapters of their theses or draft articles in advance; each submission was then read by all the participants and divided among multiple discussants. we usually spent about three hours on each paper. a typical day entailed discussing a first paper in the morning, a second one in the afternoon, and a third one over dinner. conversations often continued well into the evening. another option was for participants to give a talk on a topic of interest, such as new scholarly trends or recent publications. when time allowed, faculty members also presented new research of their own. in this fashion, the students were exposed to what can be termed best intellectual and scholarly practices. in addition, following our initial meeting, we decided each year to invite a major scholar to present her own work and share with the students the trajectory of her career and the lessons it offered to those embarking on similar paths. marina rustow (princeton university), sabine schmidtke (princeton, institute for advanced study), and lale behzadi (university of bamberg) all proved significant sources of inspiration for the participants. sabine schmidtke also generously hosted part of the seminar at the institute in june 2017, thus giving the students an opportunity to interact with ias visiting scholars that year. another, more latent purpose of the seminar was to provide a setting in which the students would get to know each other’s scholarly profiles well, develop relations of trust, and network with each other, as well as with the faculty members and other guests. only time will tell, of course, but the co-convenors anticipate that the holberg seminar will continue to bear fruit in the work of its graduate participants. list of the holberg participants: najah nadi ahmad theodore s. beers sébastien garnier lidia gocheva matthew l. keegan pamela klasová daisy livingston christian mauder eugénie rébillard naseem surhio edward zychowicz-coghill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 154-159 book review th i s b o o k b e l o n g s t o a s u b fi e l d that has emerged over the past h a l f c e n t u r y i n a r a b o p h o n e historical scholarship. we might call i t “ n o n m u s l i m s t u d i e s . ” i t i s fi r s t cousin to that historiography which has focused on particular non-muslim religious communities—usually jews or christians—in relation to some period of islamic history (think of louis cheikho’s pioneering work on christian p oet s , scholars, and state officials, or muḥammad ʿabd al-ḥamīd al-ḥamad’s dawr al-yahūd fī al-ḥaḍārah al-islāmiyyah [al-raqqah, 2006]). but “non-muslim studies” treats non-muslims trans-communally, usually in their legal personality, as ahl al-dhimmah. the subfield is distinctive, too, in that most of its contributors have been muslims, and have written as such. its appearance has coincided with that of independent nationstates in the arab world, in which the political salience of religious identities and religious minorities has been increasingly debated amongst a new muslim-majority reading public. it has also been invigorated by a growing awareness of europeanlanguage historical scholarship, with its longstanding, occasionally antagonistic concern for christians and jews “under islam.” one struggles, in fact, to find arabic historiography on ahl al-dhimmah as such before 1949, when arthur stanley tritton’s foundational the caliphs and their non-muslim subjects first appeared in arabic translation (ahl al-dhimmah fī al-islām, tr. ḥ. ḥabashī. cairo: dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī). but since then the studies have followed in quickening succession: • qāsim ʿabduh qāsim, ahl al-dhimmah fī miṣr al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā: dirāsah wathāʾiqiyyah (cairo, 1977 • idem, ahl al-dhimma fī miṣr min al-fatḥ al-islāmī ḥattā nihāyat dawlat al-mamālīk (al-haram, 2003) • sallām shāfiʿī maḥmūd, ahl al-dhimmah fī miṣr fī al-ʿaṣr al-fāṭimī jāsim muḥammad kaẓim, ahl al-dhimmah fī al-mujtamaʿ al-baghdādī fī al-ʿahdayn al-buwayhī wa-al-saljūqī (baghdad: dār al-madīnah al-fāḍilah, 2013), 327 pages. (paperback). luke yarbrough department of history saint louis university (lyarbro5@slu.edu) mailto:lyarbro5%40slu.edu al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 155 • luke yarbrough al-thānī wa-al-ʿaṣr al-ayyūbī (cairo, 1982 • idem, ahl al-dhimmah fī miṣr fī al-ʿaṣr al-fāṭimī al-awwal (cairo, 1995 • tawfīq sulṭān yūzbakī, tārīkh ahl al-dhimmah fī al-ʿirāq, 12–247 (riyadh, 1983) • shafīq yamūt, ahl al-dhimmah fī mukhtalif aṭwārihim wa-ʿuṣūrihim (beirut, 1991) • sayyidah ismāʿīl kāshif, miṣr al-islāmiyyah wa-ahl al-dhimmah (cairo, 1993) • ḥasan al-mimmī, ahl al-dhimmah fī al-ḥaḍārah al-islāmiyyah (beirut, 1998) the subfield continues to flourish in the new millennium: • fāṭimah muṣṭafā ʿamir, tārīkh ahl al-dhimmah fī miṣr al-islāmiyyah min al-fatḥ al-ʿarabī ḥattā nihāyat al-ʿaṣr al-fāṭimī, 2v. (cairo, 2000) • yaḥyā aḥmad ʿabd al-hādī ḥusayn, ahl al-dhimmah fī al-ʿirāq fī al-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī: al-fatrah al-saljūqiyyah namūdhajan (447–590/1055–1194) (irbid, 2004) • ḥāmid muḥammad al-hādī sharīf, aḥwāl ghayr al-muslimīn fī bilād al-shām ḥattā nihāyat al-ʿaṣr al-umawī (amman, 2007) • wasan ḥusayn muḥaymīd ghurayrī, ahl al-dhimmah fī al-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī: dirāsah fī awḍāʿihim al-ijtimāʿiyyah wa-al-iqtiṣadiyyah (baghdad, 2009) • banāz ismāʿīl ʿadū, ahl al-dhimma fī bilād al-kurd fī al-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī, 132–447/749–1055: dirāsah taʾrīkhiyyah taḥlīliyyah (irbil, 2011) • muḥammad al-amīn wuld ān, ahl al-dhimmah bi-al-andalus fī ẓill al-dawlah al-umawiyyah, 138–422/755– 1031 (damascus, 2011) • ʿalī fulayḥ ʿabdallāh al-ṣumaydiʿī, ahl al-dhimmah fī al-maghrib al-aqṣā min al-fatḥ al-islāmī ḥattā nihāyat dawlat al-muwaḥḥidīn (amman, 2014) we may conclude this brief, inexhaustive survey with a 2005 zagazig university dissertation — fittingly, by one of qāsim’s students— zaynab ʿabdallāh aḥmad karīr’s ahl al-dhimma fī al-ʿahd al-ḥafṣī (626982/1228–1574). this is to say nothing of the steady flow of studies concerned with specific religious communities or sects, or more narrowly with islamic law as it related historically to non-muslims (construed as ahl al-dhimmah). europeanlanguage scholarship has engaged much less with the arabophone subfield of non-muslim studies than the works that comprise the subfield have done with it, which is to say, very little indeed. jāsim muḥammad kaẓim’s study sets out to fill a geographical and chronological gap in this literature: baghdad in the būyid and saljūq periods, including the interlude between the demise of saljūq rule and the mongol sack of the city (so, ca. 334–656/945–1258). the book is divided into four thematic chapters (fuṣūl). the first surveys the history of non-muslims (al-dhimmiyyūn) in baghdad prior to the būyid period, while the remaining three cover aspects of non-muslims’ history in the period under study. there is a thorough introduction and a brief conclusion. lastly, the author provides seven appendices: four diplomas of investiture from an abbasid caliph to a christian or jewish communal leader (three nestorian katholikoi and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) jāsim kaẓim’s ahl al-dhimmah fī al-mujtamaʿ al-baghdādī • 156 a j e w i s h h e a d o f t h e y e s h i v a ) , f r o m published sources, and three family trees: of the bukhtīshūʿ dynasty of doctors and the sabian qurrah and zahrūn secretarial clans. the latter are helpful enough, the former less so, as they offer no critical apparatus whatsoever. i shall briefly review each major division of the book in its turn, then conclude with some general observations. the introductory section is in two parts: prologue (muqaddimah) and introduction (tamhīd). the prologue outlines the book’s rationale, approach, structure, and major sources. the author does not conceal his preference for the abbasid caliphs’ rule over that of the “foreign” būyids and saljūqs. he is also eager to highlight the salutary diversity that characterized i s l a m i c s o c i e t y i n t h e p e r i o d u n d e r study. to do this, he engages in what he calls “social history,” which earns its name by being attuned to all aspects of non-muslims’ participation (in effect, that of christians, jews, and sabians, since zoroastrians are evidently all but invisible in the sources) in the society of baghdad. the book’s sources, both primary and secondary, are almost all in arabic. all will be known to the specialist. it is worth noting that the author has exhaustively c o m b e d i b n a l j a w z ī ’ s m u n t a ẓ a m , a valuable service; that he uses the works of non-muslim writers such as bar hebraeus, mārī b. sulaymān, and benjamin of tudela; and that he is cognizant of some europeanlanguage scholarship, principally the work of tritton and (crucially) j.-m. fiey. the introduction that next follows presents a standard political history of the period under study, concentrating on the abbasid caliphs. it is evident in these introductory portions of the book that the author will take a critical approach to some of his sources—such as the works of al-dhahabī (“extreme” in his views on non-muslims) and ibn al-athīr (too fulsome in praising the late abbasids)—but not to those for islam’s formative period, and that he has consulted a very wide range of sources beyond the main ones identified in the prologue. though the title of the first chapter p r o m i s e s a s t u d y o f n o n m u s l i m s i n baghdad before the būyids, this is the subject only of its second and final section (mabḥath). the first section is a survey of the juristic notion of ahl al-dhimmah and the financial obligations of dhimmis. it is in this first section that the author’s sanguine and ahistorical approach to the early islamic period is most apparent, and with it the implicit deference to islamic law that characterizes much of the subfield of “non-muslim studies” outlined above. non-muslim communities and the individuals that comprised them apparently sprang into existence at the precise moment that they concluded the all-important pact with the muslims, w h e n c e fl o w e d t h e s t a t i c , d i v i n e l y o r d a i n e d d h i m m a h i n s t i t u t i o n t h a t regulated their subsequent lives (“the qurʾān makes numerous references to dhimmīs” [46]; “the wisdom behind this divine legislation… was to create a wide arena for mixing with muslims, thereby to facilitate their conversion to islam. the goal was certainly not to amass money” [47]). the presentation of the dhimmah arrangement here is highly schematic and idealized. fortunately, the author soon recovers his critical faculties, but it must be borne in mind that the entire historical investigation is framed by reference to persistent personal-status categories al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 157 • luke yarbrough devised by premodern muslim jurists. the picture of pre-būyid baghdad presented in the second section would fi t w e l l i n a m o d e r n f a ḍ ā ʾ i l w o r k i n its glowing descriptions of economic flourishing coupled with the caliphs’ boundless tolerance and leniency, but this rhetoric, too, gives way soon enough to a well-informed treatment of the major phases in the life of non-muslims in baghdad before 334/945. the highlights are all here, including basic introductions to the major religious communities; the discriminatory decrees under al-rashīd, al-mutawakkil, and al-muqtadir; the hotly contested employment of non-muslims in administration; and their participation in many cultural arenas. the larger picture that emerges is of a thoroughly integrated, multi-religious society in which muslims formed the ruling class but, apart from enforcing persistent minor disabilities s u c h a s t h e j i z y a h , o n l y t i g h t e n t h e screws on non-muslims under anomalous circumstances. the second chapter studies state policy toward the non-muslims of baghdad in the period under examination, under the headings of their “rights and obligations”; the state’s treatment of them; and their communal leaders’ dealings with the state. the bulk of the section on “rights and obligations” uses diplomas of investiture issued by the abbasid state to communal leaders to flesh out the boundaries of peaceful cooperation. we then get the author’s catalog of non-muslims’ “rights” (e.g., legal autonomy, limited freedom o f w o r s h i p , a n d s t a t e e m p l o y m e n t , the last of which is misleading) and “obligations” (e.g., respect for islamic symbols, concealment of islamic taboos like pork and alcoholic drinks). we find out about the riots that could ensue if those obligations were not met, which the author blames on the urban rabble, not the dhimmah arrangement itself. in the author’s view (85) the significance of the distinctive dress sometimes imposed on non-muslims (ghiyār) evolved gradually until the būyid period, when it settled in as a means of punitive and extortionate state discrimination. the state’s treatment of non-muslims, meanwhile, turns out to be far from a top-down affair. rather, for the author it is a ceaselessly evolving story of shifting alliances and conflicts among caliphs, būyid and saljūq military men, muslim and non-muslim high administrative officials, t h e u r b a n p o p u l a c e , a n d i n fl u e n t i a l muslim scholars. the dhimmah discourse is deployed alongside other discursive registers as a weapon in this unending struggle. this is a richly documented discussion with many colorful and littlek n o w n a n e c d o t a l e x a m p l e s . m o s t o f the harsher repression is blamed by the author on the urban masses and the scholars, whom he refers to as “jurists” (fuqahaʾ) and who allegedly envied the high social and economic standing of certain non-muslims. this argument is convincing, and reassuringly distant from the wooden conception of islamic law that clogged the book’s earlier sections. the chapter concludes with a survey of how the state interfaced with the leaders of non-muslim communities. specialists will find relatively little new in this final survey. the treatment is competent but thinly documented, as it makes little use of non-arabic sources, european-language scholarship, or new arabic sources beyond the well-known information of ibn al-sāʿī and al-qalqashandī on the subject. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) jāsim kaẓim’s ahl al-dhimmah fī al-mujtamaʿ al-baghdādī • 158 t h e t h i r d c h a p t e r i s p e r h a p s t h e b o o k ’ s r i c h e s t . c o v e r i n g t h e s o c i a l , economic, and political conditions of non-muslims in baghdad, it is divided into three sections—on “the relationship between ahl al-dhimmah and the society of baghdad,” non-muslims’ occupations, and their political and economic roles— but these tend to bleed together. we get a reasonably thorough tour of the urban topography of baghdad and the religious makeup of its inhabitants (without a good map, unfortunately), a survey of the city’s churches and monasteries, and anecdotal evidence of how non-elite muslims and non-muslims got along. the author claims (147) that christians mixed far more freely with muslims than did jews, who were (as he repeatedly states, without compelling justification) a community turned in upon itself. the sources for all this are uneven; some anecdotes are richly documented from primary sources like the muntaẓam or the nestorian christian mārī b. sulaymān’s kitāb al-majdal, but too often the author falls back on arabic t r a n s l a t i o n s o f e u r o p e a n l a n g u a g e secondary sources, like adam metz’s the renaissance of islam (dated) and richard coke’s 1927 baghdad: the city of peace (dubious). one particularly spotty passage (157) blames “christian armies” that, under mongol command, sacked baghdad in 1258—an exaggeration, to say the least. nevertheless, the author successfully shows that economic and political motives underlay much of the recorded animosity toward non-muslims in the period (160). this applied especially to non-muslim o ffi c i a l s , w h o a r e t r e a t e d n e x t , i n a lengthy and well-researched section that collects a wealth of material that will be new to many specialists. time and again we see muslim jurists, competing with non-muslim officials for prestige and influence, rouse urban baghdādīs against their adversaries. yet the chapter’s final section, on non-muslims’ economic and political roles, disappoints. too reliant on secondary sources, it briskly surveys non-muslims’ involvement in certain famous intrigues and occupations, notably trade. the highlight is a fascinating (though abortive) “strike” against the imposition of the ghiyār that ibn al-jawzī reports for the year 450/1057; all the jews and christians of baghdad were to stay home in protest. this incident deserves careful study, but does not receive it here. the fourth and final chapter attempts to present a picture of non-muslims’ intellectual life in baghdad. since the author is so heavily dependent on arabic sources and secondary literature of uneven quality, it natural that this chapter is the book’s weakest. the account of arabization after the conquests, for instance, is so truncated as to be useless, reliant as it is on antiquated european scholarship i n t r a n s l a t i o n ( m a u r i c e g a u d e f r o y d e m o m b y n e s ’ 1 9 2 1 l e s i n s t i t u t i o n s musulmanes) and questionable assertions in more recent arabic-language works (suhayl qāshā’s authority is invoked for the claim that “it was the tolerance of the arab muslims that led to the spread of arabic” [197]). lacking access to aramaic, hebrew, and judeo-arabic sources, or recent scholarship on them, the author has not moved beyond the accounts— primarily of non-muslim educational institutions—that are available in those arabic secondary sources on which he depended most heavily. when he arrives at non-muslim doctors and translators, however, the arabic primary sources come al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) 159 • luke yarbrough online once again, and the treatment is accordingly rich, though it amounts to little more than a prosopography derived from the biographical dictionaries of ibn abī uṣaybiʿah, al-qifṭī, and other such authors. as such the chapter could be a useful resource for modern historians— who will enjoy such anecdotes as that of the christian doctor ibn al-tilmīdh (d. 560/1164), whose house adjoined the niẓāmiyyah madrasah and who did brisk business treating muslim jurists (239)— but adds little value to the material it assembles. the non-muslim learned men treated in the chapter’s final section— on non-muslim philosophers, natural scientists, and littérateurs—are mostly doctors, too, and much of the material about their lives is drawn from the same biographical dictionaries. that which comes from elsewhere, particularly arabic poetry composed by such men, is chiefly from secondary sources, such as the works of louis cheikho. the specifically religious i n t e l l e c t u a l a c t i v i t i e s o f b a g h d a d ’ s non-muslims are glaringly absent. nevertheless, several of the conclusions presented in the book’s succinct conclusion are astute, particularly the observation that instances of conflict that ostensibly took place between members of different r e l i g i o u s c o m m u n i t i e s w e r e u s u a l l y rooted in factors beyond the ideological. given the general neglect of arabophone “non-muslim studies” by scholars working in european languages, one would like to report that the subfield, to which this book belongs, has a great deal to offer. that claim would not be wholly untrue; the present volume unites much material that was previously quarantined in confessional silos and scours the arabic literary sources with unprecedented care, bringing new or long-forgotten anecdotes to light and curating it with real skill. readers of this journal stand to gain by building on its advances in these respects, and they should read those sections that pertain to their interests. moreover, one is grateful for such a measured contribution to arabophone scholarship in these dark days of intercommunal strife in iraq and syria; it cannot have been easy to research and write the book under such conditions. yet it must be said that in many respects the book falls short of the reader’s hopes: in the stiffly juristic framing of its subject; in its too-frequent reliance on modern studies of irregular quality; in its blithe disregard for sources in languages other than arabic; in its preference for surveying a set topic, however general and scantily documented, rather than following where the surviving sources lead. yet instead of continuing to ignore “non-muslim studies” because of such reservations, we should engage with it, for its strengths, and to bridge the gulf that still separates its practitioners from our own traditions of scholarship, to our mutual disadvantage. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 201-232 few poets have had as far-reaching an influence as farid al-din ʿaṭṭār (d. ca. 618/1221). the author of the famous manṭeq al-ṭayr and several other important works, he is remembered both within the tradition and outside it as a critical figure in the development of persian mystical poetry.1 as is the case with many premodern persian poets, as * although this paper generally follows the transliteration guidelines of the international journal of middle east studies, vowels are transliterated according to the system of encyclopaedia iranica, which is phonetically more accurate for persian: short vowels appear as “a,” “e,” and “o,” and long ones as “ā,” “i,” and “u.” i would like to thank cameron cross, alexandra hoffmann, alexander jabbari, franklin lewis, and matthew miller for their comments and suggestions in the preparation of this paper. 1. moḥammad reżā shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to manṭeq al-ṭayr, by farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, 2nd ed. (tehran: sokhan, 1387/[2008–9]), 38–50; julian baldick, “persian ṣūfī poetry up to the fifteenth century,” in history of persian literature: from the beginning of the islamic period to the present day, ed. george morrison (leiden: brill, 1981); seyyed hossein nasr, “some observations on the place of ʿaṭṭār within the sufi tradition,” in colloquio italo-iraniano sul poeta mistico fariduddin ʿaṭṭār (roma, 24–25 marzo 1977) (rome: accademia an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma* austin o’malley the university of arizona (austinomalley@email.arizona.edu) abstract this article examines the authorship of the khosrow-nāma, a perso-hellenic romance traditionally attributed to ʿaṭṭār. forty years ago, shafiʿi-kadkani laid out a complex argument against ʿaṭṭār’s authorship. he claimed that the attribution was a result of a later forgery, basing his argument on internal chronological evidence, religious and stylistic markers, and the manuscript tradition. the present article systematically evaluates this argument, showing it to be less persuasive than it first appears. first, i introduce new manuscript evidence to demonstrate that the poem was circulating under ʿaṭṭār’s name already before the time of the alleged forgery. i then reassess the internal evidence to show that the khosrow-nāma could, in fact, fit into a plausible chronology of ʿaṭṭār’s oeuvre. next, i critique the stylistic and religious arguments against ʿaṭṭār’s authorship, arguing that the romance does not deviate from ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works nearly as much as is often supposed. i conclude by suggesting that the available data are explained more easily by accepting ʿaṭṭār’s authorship than by adopting the theory of a later forgery. mailto:austinomalley%40email.arizona.edu?subject= 202 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) his fame grew spurious works began to circulate under his name. with ʿaṭṭār, however, the number of spurious attributions is staggering: by the eleventh/seventeenth century, he was said to have composed a total of 114 works, equal to the number of suras in the quran.2 given the sacral significance of the number, it cannot be taken as an accurate count of all attributions, but it testifies to the scale of his supposed output. according to ʿali miranṣāri, who has produced a bibliographical survey of ʿaṭṭār’s works, at least fifty-nine independent titles, many of them still extant, have at some point been attributed to him.3 some of these works were composed by other poets who went by the name of ʿaṭṭār, and their poems were inadvertently absorbed into the oeuvre of their more famous predecessor.4 others, however, were deliberate forgeries: the lesān al-ghayb and the maẓhar al-ʿajāʾeb, for instance, were written by a ninth/fifteenth-century shiʿi poet, ʿaṭṭār-e tuni, who purposefully presented himself as farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, the author of the manṭeq al-ṭayr.5 in the twentieth century, with the advancement of textual criticism, scholars such as qazvini, sherani, nafisi, and ritter began to methodically whittle away at these spurious accretions to ʿaṭṭār’s oeuvre.6 through their work, a stable scholarly consensus emerged: ʿaṭṭār was thought to have written four mystical-didactic mas̱navis (the elāhi-nāma, the manṭeq al-ṭayr, the asrār-nāma, and the moṣibat-nāma), a divān, a collection of quatrains (the mokhtār-nāma), and a prose hagiography (taẕkerat al-awliā). these scholars also accepted as authentic a mas̱navi romance that was commonly attributed to ʿaṭṭār and known as the khosrow-nāma. unlike ʿaṭṭār’s mystical-didactic mas̱navis, which comprise short anecdotes and homiletic exhortations, the khosrow-nāma recounts the story of two royal lovers, tragically separated, as they seek to reunite; it is thus reminiscent of greek novels and perso-hellenic romances such as varqa o golshāh and vis o rāmin. the work is a clear generic outlier in ʿaṭṭār’s oeuvre; nevertheless, because ʿaṭṭār includes the title khosrow-nāma in a list of his works, and because the author of the khosrow-nāma identifies himself as ʿaṭṭār and as the author of the manṭeq al-ṭayr, the abovementioned scholars accepted the poem as genuine. nazionale dei lincei, 1978), 12–13; husayn ilahi-gomeshei, “of scent and sweetness: ʿaṭṭār’s legacy in rūmī, shabistarī, and ḥāfiẓ,” in ʿaṭṭār and the persian sufi tradition: the art of spiritual flight, ed. leonard lewisohn and christopher shackle (london: i. b. tauris and institute of ismaili studies, 2006). 2. sayyed nurallāh shushtari, majāles al-moʾmenin (tehran: ketāb-forushi-ye eslāmiya, 1365/[1986–87]), 99. 3. ʿ ali miranṣāri, ketāb-shenāsi-ye shaykh farid al-din ʿaṭṭār-e nayshāburi (tehran: anjoman-e ās̱ār va mafākhar-e farhangi, 1384/[2005–6]), 7–16. 4. mirzā moḥammad qazvini, introduction to taẕkerat al-awliā, by farid al-din ʿ aṭṭār, ed. reynold nicholson (london: luzac, 1905), 1:14; hellmut ritter, “philologika x: farīdaddīn ʿaṭṭār,” der islam 25 (1939): 157. 5. ʿ abdu’l-ḳādir sarfarāz, a descriptive catalogue of the arabic, persian and urdu manuscripts in the library of the university of bombay (bombay: university of bombay, 1935), 60–65; saʿid nafisi, jostoju dar aḥvāl va ās̱ār-e farid al-din ʿaṭṭār-e nayshāburi (tehran: eqbāl, 1320/[1941]), 147–54; hellmut ritter, “philologika xiv: farīduddīn ʿaṭṭār ii,” oriens 11, no. 1/2 (1958): 3–4. 6. qazvini, introduction to taẕkerat al-awliā, 1:14; sarfarāz, descriptive catalogue, 60–65; nafisi, jostoju, 70–73, 145–67; hellmut ritter, “ʿaṭṭār,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), posted 2012, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0074; ritter, “philologika x,” 156–60; ritter, “philologika xiv,” 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0074 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 203 in 1979, however, the poet and scholar shafiʿi-kadkani laid out an erudite, intricate argument claiming that the khosrow-nāma was a spurious attribution and that its preface, in which the poem’s author identifies himself as ʿaṭṭār, was the work of a ninth/fifteenthcentury forger.7 this influential argument is now almost universally accepted, and it has conditioned nearly all of the major work on ʿaṭṭār produced since its publication. leonard lewison and christopher shackle, in their edited volume on ʿaṭṭār, deem shafiʿi-kadkani’s rejection of the khosrow-nāma definitive.8 newer reference works and editions, including the third edition of the encyclopaedia of islam, repeat shafiʿi-kadkani’s conclusions.9 of the two most recent monographs on ʿaṭṭār, by navid kermani and claudia yaghoobi, the former dismisses the khosrow-nāma with a citation to shafiʿi-kadkani, and the latter fails to mention it at all.10 as far as the scholarship seems to be concerned, the case is closed: the khosrow-nāma is spurious, and it has thus justly disappeared from the arena of ʿaṭṭār studies. shafiʿi-kadkani’s argument, however, although frequently cited as settled fact, has not been systematically evaluated.11 in the present article, i will problematize shafiʿi-kadkani’s analysis and propose a more plausible scenario, in which the khosrow-nāma is indeed an authentic work by ʿaṭṭār. although there can be no doubting shafiʿi-kadkani’s brilliance, his argument is, as a whole, less convincing than the sum of its parts: he seems to have begun with the assumption that the khosrow-nāma was forged, and then worked backward to determine how that could have been the case. as we shall see, his conclusions are not justified by the stylistic, religious, manuscript, and internal chronological evidence he provides. ultimately, it is much easier to accept the khosrow-nāma as an authentic work of ʿaṭṭār’s than to imagine it was the product of a complex literary conspiracy, as shafiʿikadkani proposes. if the romance were to be accepted as an authentic work, much of the scholarship on ʿaṭṭār’s life and his place in literary history would need to rethought. one of the difficulties for ʿaṭṭār scholarship has been the dearth of biographical information, both within his 7. moḥammad reżā shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, by farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, 2nd ed. (tehran: sokhan, 1389/[2010–11]), 33–59. 8. leonard lewisohn and christopher shackle, editors’ introduction to lewisohn and shackle, spiritual flight, xviii. see also hermann landolt, “ʿaṭṭār, sufism, and ismailism,” in lewisohn and shackle, spiritual flight, 3. 9. moḥammad esteʿlāmi, introduction to taẕkerat al-awliā, by farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, rev. ed. (tehran: zavvār, 1383/[2004–5]), xxv; miranṣāri, ketāb-shenāsi, 75, 232; omid safi, “ʿaṭṭār, farīd al-dīn,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. kate fleet et al. (leiden: brill online), posted 2016, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_ com_23976. 10. navid kermani, the terror of god: attar, job and the metaphysical revolt, trans. wieland hoban (cambridge: polity press, 2011), 30; claudia yaghoobi, subjectivity in ʿaṭṭār, persian sufism, and european mysticism (west lafayette, in: purdue university press, 2017). 11. ʿ abd al-ḥosayn zarrinkub agrees with shafiʿi-kadkani’s conclusion that the khosrow-nāma is spurious, but he criticizes some of the latter’s specific arguments in a scattered fashion: ṣedā-ye bāl-e simorgh (tehran: sokhan, 1386/[2007–8]), 69; ḥekāyat hamchonān bāqi (tehran: sokhan, 1376/[1997–98]), 170–88. cf. shafiʿikadkani’s response in zabur-e pārsi: negāhi be zendegi va ghazal-hā-ye ʿaṭṭār (tehran: āgāh, 1378/[1999]), 84–90. https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_23976 https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_23976 204 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) works and in the external sources. while the khosrow-nāma is hardly effusive on the matter, it does provide some important biographical data not found in his other works, including an account of his mother’s death and some information on the chronological order of his oeuvre. especially interesting is ʿaṭṭār’s praise of one ebn al-rabib as his formal spiritual guide, which challenges the current consensus that ʿaṭṭār was “more of an empathetic observer of sufism than an active exponent.”12 by raising the possibility of the khosrownāma’s authenticity, the present article aims to encourage scholars to take a fresh look at such issues, which have not been seriously reconsidered for a generation. even more significantly for our understanding of literary history, the khosrow-nāma shows that ʿaṭṭār positioned himself against a wider range of poetic models than is usually thought. in contemporary scholarship, ʿaṭṭār is almost always seen as a stepping stone between sanāʾi and rumi; this teleological reading is particularly common in the literary criticism of shafiʿi-kadkani himself.13 the composition of the khosrow-nāma, however, complicates this picture and suggests he was working not just against sanāʾi but also against versifiers of romantic tales such as gorgāni, ʿayyuqi, and even neẓāmi. indeed, if the khosrow-nāma is authentic, then ʿaṭṭār composed five mas̱navis, perhaps the earliest imitation of the khamsa.14 the investigation into possible intertextual linkages between ʿaṭṭār and neẓāmi has only barely begun, and i hope that this article will set the stage for wider-ranging analysis of ʿaṭṭār’s literary models and his relationship to the romantic tradition.15 finally, ʿaṭṭār’s authorship of the khosrow-nāma troubles reductive notions of “mystical poetry” and “mystical poets,” essentializing categories that have come to dominate discussions of ʿaṭṭār and that likely motivated the excision of the khosrow-nāma from his oeuvre in the first place. a little romance the romance in question is most commonly known as the khosrow-nāma, but it also circulated under the titles gol o khosrow, gol o hermez, and hermez o golrokh, in reference to the tale’s two principal lovers—gol also being known as golrokh, and hermez being the name given to khosrow by his foster parents.16 although his name is often voweled as hormoz in modern scholarship, it frequently rhymes with words such as hargez and ʿājez, meaning that its final vowel must be “e.”17 shafiʿi-kadkani further suggests that the 12. kermani, terror of god, 26. 13. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to manṭeq al-ṭayr, 38; shafiʿi-kadkani, zabur, 19–20. 14. ʿ aṭṭār wrote mas̱navis only in the hazaj and ramal meters, so his five works, unlike later formal imitations, do not metrically match those of neẓāmi. 15. barāt zanjāni, “ḥakim neẓāmi-ye ganjavi va shaykh farid al-din ʿaṭṭār,” āyanda 2, no. 9 (ordibehesht 1362/[april–may 1983]): 106–14. 16. titles of this format (x and y) are common for the romance genre: see cameron cross, “the poetics of romantic love in vis & rāmin” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2015), 104. 17. farid al-din ʿaṭṭār (attrib.), khosrow-nāma, ed. aḥmad sohayli-khwānsāri (tehran: anjoman-e ās̱ār-e melli, 1339/[1961–62]), lines 1057, 1317. all references to the printed edition of the khosrow-nāma are to sohayli-khwānsāri’s edition. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 205 name should be fully voweled as hermez, which he links to the greek name hermes. this reading would be consistent with the hellenistic roots of the romance genre as well as the geography of the story, which shifts between constantinople and khuzestān.18 (one should note, however, that the name hermes is usually transliterated with an “s,” not a “z,” in medieval arabic and persian). the khosrow-nāma trades in narrative structures and topoi that are characteristic of a group of fifth/eleventh-century persian verse romances—including varqa o golshāh, vis o rāmin, and vāmeq o ʿaẕrā—and that bear a striking resemblance to the greek novels of the early common era. both traditions can be traced back to the syncretic literary milieu of the eastern mediterranean during the achaemenid and hellenistic periods, which was characterized by a cross-fertilization of stories, narremes, and tropes between greek and persian literary cultures. in general, the heroes and heroines of these romances (whether written in greek or in persian) are young, of noble lineage, and hopelessly in love. they are separated by force or chance, and the bulk of the story is devoted to their quest to reunite and (especially in the woman’s case) to maintain their chastity. once reunited, they marry and live out the rest of their lives in happiness. within this basic plot, numerous topoi and narrative structures reappear. the story often begins with the protagonists’ conception; as youths they fall in love at first sight; they are afflicted by shipwrecks, imprisonment, and bandits; the woman, and sometimes also the man, is repeatedly propositioned and/ or threatened by sexual violence but escapes with chastity intact; to evade danger, they often disguise themselves, and readers are treated to numerous scenes involving failed recognition and revelation. the lovers’ peregrinations take them all over the eastern mediterranean, reflecting the cultural heterogeneity and literary syncretism of the genre’s origins.19 the khosrow-nāma fits very comfortably into this generic model. the story begins with the qayṣar (caesar) of rum, who has great wealth and power but no son. he owns a beautiful slave girl, and after a tryst she becomes pregnant, but qayṣar must leave to fight invaders immediately after their encounter, so he does not learn of her pregnancy. the baby, who is born while the king is away, is named khosrow; or, to be more exact, “they gave that heartstealer a name in greek [rumi] / which in the persian [pārsi] language is ‘khosrow-shāh.’”20 the infant is then spirited out of the country to khuzestān by a loyal servant to protect him from a cabal. he is raised by the king of khuzestān’s gardener, who gives him the name hermez. he grows up to be a strapping young man, an expert in all realms of knowledge and skilled in the arts of war. one day, gol, the princess of khuzestān, is strolling on the roof of the palace, and she catches sight of hermez napping in the garden and immediately falls in love. but she has already been promised in marriage to the king of isfahan, and when she 18. shafiʿi-kadkani, zabur, 101. vāmeq o ʿaẕrā also includes greek names that were transliterated into the perso-arabic script: see bo utas, “did ʿadhrā remain a virgin?,” orientalia suecana 3335 (1984–86): 429–41. 19. dick davis, panthea’s children: hellenistic novels and medieval persian romances (new york: bibliotheca persica, 2002); cross, “poetics of romantic love,” 94–135; tomas hägg, “the oriental reception of greek novels: a survey with some preliminary considerations,” symbolae osloenses 61, no. 1 (1986): 99–131. 20. ʿ aṭṭār (attrib.), khosrow-nāma, bibliothèque nationale de france, supplément persan 1434 (hereafter cited as bnf 1434), fol. 28v. cf. sohayli-khwānsāri’s printed edition, line 882. 206 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) has her father call off the marriage, the former raises an army to take her by force. thus begins a long set of adventures featuring cannibals, bandits, disguises, cross-dressing, love triangles, betrayal, shipwrecks, and daring escapes. although gol and khosrow are reunited at several points, circumstances always conspire to quickly separate them again. when khosrow finally manages to defeat the king of isfahan at the end of the story, the lovers are married in constantinople along with several other couples of supporting characters who variously aided (and sometimes opposed) them during their trials, and they live happily for thirty more years until their deaths.21 ʿaṭṭār lists a work titled khosrow-nāma as one of his own in the preface to the mokhtārnāma, and the author of the khosrow-nāma identifies himself as ʿaṭṭār in the preface to the romance. however, shafiʿi-kadkani claims that the romance’s preface is a ninth/fifteenthcentury forgery that was fraudulently attached to the poem. he points out that just as the mokhtār-nāma’s preface refers to the khosrow-nāma as a completed work, so too does the khosrow-nāma’s preface refer to the mokhtār-nāma as a completed work. this fact leads to a chicken-and-egg problem that, according to shafiʿi-kadkani, no possible chronology could plausibly explain. on the basis of stylistic, religious, and manuscript evidence, he further argues for a ninth/fifteenth-century provenance for the poem and its allegedly forged preface. as for ʿaṭṭār’s inclusion of the khosrow-nāma in his list of previous titles, shafiʿi-kadkani reasons that the mention refers not to the romance in question but to the elāhi-nāma, the authorship of which is not in doubt. he suggests that this mystical-didactic mas̱navi was originally known as the khosrow-nāma and only later came to circulate under its present title. shafiʿi-kadkani first advanced his argument in 1979 in the introduction to his edition of the mokhtār-nāma. since then, he has introduced several complicating lines of argumentation, first in 1999 in zabur-e pārsi and more recently in 2008 in his introduction to his edition of the elāhi-nāma.22 these later additions and revisions are less systematic than the original argument, however, and it is not always clear how they are meant to be integrated into his previous claims. the 1979 version of his argument remains the most comprehensive and the most widely cited, so we must deal with its claims directly. over the course of the following discussion, however, i will also mention the later variations and conclusions wherever relevant. manuscript evidence many of ʿaṭṭār’s authentic works exist in manuscripts dated as early as the end of the seventh/thirteenth century. according to shafiʿi-kadkani, however, the earliest manuscripts of the khosrow-nāma do not appear until the ninth/fifteenth century, suggesting a much later composition; he further argues that this is consistent with the romance’s stylistic and 21. for a detailed summary of the entire tale, see sohayli-khwānsāri’s introduction to the khosrow-nāma, v–xxv; ritter, “philologika x,” 161–71. 22. shafiʿi-kadkani, zabur, 96–101; moḥammad reżā shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to elāhi-nāma, by farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, 2nd ed. (tehran: sokhan, 1388/[2009–10]), 48–63. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 207 religious content, which also point to a ninth/fifteenth-century provenance.23 the allegedly late appearance of the khosrow-nāma relative to ʿaṭṭār’s other works does seem a strong reason to be suspicious of its authenticity. but shafiʿi-kadkani’s reading of the manuscript evidence is incomplete. in particular, he overlooks an early manuscript of the khosrownāma held by the bibliothèque nationale de france, which bears a colophon stating that it was completed on 29 shawwāl 696/august 27, 1297, in line with the earliest manuscripts of ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works.24 shafiʿi-kadkani cites only the handlist of aḥmad monzavi for his information on these manuscripts, and monzavi does not include this early copy.25 nevertheless, it is surprising that shafiʿi-kadkani was not aware of it, since it served, along with the 1878 lucknow lithograph, as the basis for ritter’s discussion of the poem in his seminal 1939 article on ʿaṭṭār.26 written in a rough but legible naskh, this modest manuscript was likely produced for sale or for a minor collector, not a royal patron. it displays the archaic spellings that one would expect from a manuscript of this age, such as ki for ke, and it does not distinguish between the letters be and pe, jim and che, or kāf and gāf. final yay is written with two points above the letter. the postvocalic ẕāl, which was fading over the course of the seventh/thirteenth century, has not been retained.27 the text is framed by a rule-border of double red lines. according to blochet’s handlist, several of its folios were redone in the nineteenth century, and a dozen of its folios do seem to have been written in a different, and likely much later, hand; they are fully pointed and lack the rule-border.28 the first three folios also appear to have been rewritten at some point. although they more closely resemble the original in terms of style, they are much sloppier, and the rule-border seems to have been drawn freely without the aid of a straightedge.29 finally, a pair of folios closer to the end of the manuscript were written in yet another hand. they lack the rule-border, and the hemistichs are separated by (usually) three red marks.30 the arabic colophon appears to be written in the same hand as the original folios, with its distinctive ligatures between yay and nun and slating points, although it is more compact than the surrounding persian text. the scribe may, therefore, have recut the pen before writing the colophon, or he may have focused more intently on his work as he switched from persian to arabic and from text to paratext. 23. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 55–56. 24. bnf 1434, fol. 233r. i have examined the manuscript in digital reproduction, which can be accessed online at http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc1006349. 25. aḥmad monzavi, fehrest-e noskha-hā-ye fārsi-ye khaṭṭi (tehran: moʾassasa-ye farhangi-ye manṭeqa, 1348–51/[1969–72]), 4:3084–85. 26. ritter, “philologika x,” 144–46. ritter treats the manuscript as an authentic early copy, although he hedges somewhat by initially introducing it as “supposedly (angeblich) written in 696 h” (145). 27. ludwig paul, “persian language i. early new persian,” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed., ed. ehsan yarshater, updated november 19, 2013, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/persian-language-1-early-newpersian. 28. e. blochet, catalogue des manuscrits persans (paris: réunion des bibliothèques nationales, 1905–34), 3:87–88; bnf 1434, fols. 80r–91v. 29. bnf 1434, fols. 1r–3v. 30. ibid., fols. 186r–187v. http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc1006349 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/persian-language-1-early-new-persian http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/persian-language-1-early-new-persian 208 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in any case, there is no indication that the colophon has been altered, and the original folios are stylistically consistent with a late seventh/thirteenth-century provenance (fig. 1). figure 1. conclusion and colophon of bnf 1434, fol. 233r. image courtesy of bibliothèque nationale de france. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 209 ʿali miranṣāri, who accepts the argument for the khosrow-nāma’s spuriousness, lists this manuscript in his bibliographical survey of ʿaṭṭār’s works but quotes blochet’s comment that some of its folios were rewritten in the nineteenth century. he claims, on this basis, that the alleged date of composition is not trustworthy.31 these later folios, however, are clearly identifiable, and the vast majority of the manuscript appears original and unaltered, including the preface (with the exception of the title page and the first two folios) and the final page with the colophon. on its own, of course, the existence of this manuscript does not prove that the khosrownāma was composed by ʿaṭṭār. likewise, we should note that for most of ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works, several manuscripts exist from the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries, whereas the khosrow-nāma is attested only by this single copy.32 nevertheless, the bibliothèque nationale manuscript shows that the khosrow-nāma cannot be a product of the ninth/fifteenth century, as shafiʿi-kadkani claims in the 1979 version of his argument, since it was already circulating in the seventh/thirteenth century. in 1999, by contrast, shafiʿi-kadkani allowed that the romance may have been composed as early as the seventh/ thirteenth century, but he still insisted that the work’s preface was a later forgery attached to the poem during the eighth/fourteenth or ninth/fifteenth century.33 however, this chronology, too, is disproved by the bnf manuscript, since it shows that the complete preface was already attached to the poem by the end of the seventh/thirteenth century. the bnf manuscript thus brings ʿaṭṭār’s authorship back into the realm of possibility, at least from a chronological perspective. even though the romance and its preface were circulating in the late seventh/thirteenth century, their attribution to ʿaṭṭār may still very well be spurious. and even though this manuscript shows that shafiʿi-kadkani’s dating of the poem and its preface to the ninth/ fifteenth century on the basis of stylistic and religious evidence was incorrect, there may still be good reasons to dismiss the attribution to ʿaṭṭār on such grounds. we must therefore carefully consider the stylistic and religious evidence, along with the alleged “contradictions” in the khosrow-nāma’s preface. an ouroboric oeuvre ironically, one of the main points adduced by shafiʿi-kadkani to prove the khosrownāma’s spuriousness is one that led ritter to believe that the work was authentic: it references ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works, and it is referenced by those undisputed works in turn. more specifically, in the introduction to his collection of quatrains, the mokhtārnāma, ʿaṭṭār enumerates his works and includes the title khosrow-nāma in the list; likewise, the author of the khosrow-nāma provides a similar enumeration in the preface to the romance, claiming the mokhtār-nāma and other authentic works of ʿaṭṭār as his own. as shafiʿi-kadkani points out, however, acceptance of these statements at face value creates a chicken-and-egg problem that plagues any attempt to reconstruct the chronology of 31. miranṣāri, ketāb-shenāsi, 234. 32. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 55. 33. shafiʿi-kadkani, zabur, 99–100. 210 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) ʿaṭṭār’s oeuvre. if ʿaṭṭār finished the khosrow-nāma before the mokhtār-nāma, how could he reference the latter? and if he finished it after the mokhtār-nāma, how could he mention it in the latter as a completed and disseminated poem? shafiʿi-kadkani concludes that this “contradiction between the two introductions shows that the existing khosrow-nāma . . . cannot be the khosrow-nāma mentioned in the mokhtār-nāma.”34 this circular situation, however, can also be explained by the fact that medieval authors would often disseminate multiple versions of their poems, revising and rewriting them even after their initial “publication.” such a solution was briefly proposed by ritter in 1939, and, as i will argue here, it provides a more likely explanation for this literary ouroboros than does the theory of a later forgery.35 the khosrow-nāma’s preface mentions the mokhtār-nāma twice while recounting its own two-stage composition. according to an introductory section entitled “on the reason for the expounding of the story” (dar sabab-e sharḥ dādan-e qeṣṣa), the author was persuaded to compose the romance one spring night while sitting with a group of friends.36 as the author tells it, one of his companions that night was something of a fanatic for his poetry; whenever the companion heard one of his verses, he would swoon or dance in ecstatic bewilderment as he contemplated its meaning.37 this friend had memorized more than one hundred of his qaṣidas as well as nearly one thousand ghazals and qeṭʿas, and he was constantly quoting the javāher-nāma and sharḥ al-qalb. most relevant for our present purposes, he had also memorized “the entire mokhtār-nāma of quatrains.”38 these titles, of course, support the conclusion that the author who is speaking is farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, as does the fact that he explicitly calls himself “ʿaṭṭār” at various points in the poem.39 on that night, this particular friend allegedly implored ʿaṭṭār, who had apparently taken a three-year hiatus from versifying, to start composing poetry again.40 more specifically, he recommended that ʿaṭṭār versify a prose romance from one badr-e ahvāzi.41 dehkhoda speculates that this may be the same ahvāzi mentioned by nāṣer-e khosrow, who compares this ahvāzi unfavorably with himself, insinuating that the former’s poetry is devoid of religious wisdom.42 in any case, since much of the khosrow-nāma’s action takes place in khuzestān, it makes sense that its source would be associated with ahvāz, a major city in the region. ʿaṭṭār reports that his friend urged him to versify the story and thus make it new: “string the pearls of this speech beautifully on the thread / make this old soul new 34. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 39. 35. ritter, “philologika x,” 155. 36. bnf 1434, fol. 20r. in the printed edition, the heading reads “the reason for the versification of the book” (sabab-e naẓm-e ketāb); ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, 28. 37. ʿ aṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 601–2. 38. ibid., lines 603. 39. ibid., lines 2261, 5349, 6069, 8260, 8267. 40. ibid., line 614. 41. ibid., line 617. 42. ʿ ali akbar dehkhodā, loghat-nāma-ye dehkhodā, ed. moḥammad moʿin and jaʿfar shahidi (tehran: enteshārāt-e dāneshgāh-e tehrān, 1373/[1993–94]), s.v. “ahvāzi.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 211 with meaning.”43 he immediately saw the wisdom in his friend’s request and began setting verses down on paper. but this was only the first stage of the poem’s composition. the next section of the introduction, entitled “the extraction of the tale” (entekhāb kardan-e dāstān) details events that took place an indeterminate amount of time later, when some version of the khosrow-nāma was already circulating.44 according to the author, he was approached by a friend (whether this is the same friend who initially suggested the project is unclear) who criticized the poem for its excessive length and because ‬it shared some of its homiletic content with the asrār-nāma: i had a friend, to whom had accrued many benefits of the soul; he was devoted to my verse. he said to me: “the khosrow-nāma is, today, endowed with a heart-illuminating, royal brilliance. although the story is delightful— what can i say: shorter is better; it’s long! if you would abbreviate this story, no thorn would remain in this garden. on the path, husks and kernels are two obstacles; if you would choose just the essential oils, it would be better. the tawḥid, praise, wisdom, and proverbs that were first found in the khosrow-nāma you have placed in the asrār-nāma as well, so you have begun the same thing in two places!”45 in other words, the khosrow-nāma was too long, and some of the proverbs, religious praise, and homiletic material that it originally contained were later reused in the asrārnāma. the passage can even be read as implying that some of the romance’s verses were repeated verbatim in the later didactic mas̱navi, perhaps in its opening doxology, which is conventionally dominated by this kind of content. since the two poems share the same meter, it would have been easy to recycle lines from the former into the latter. 43. ʿ aṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, line 626. 44. bnf 1434, fol. 22r. in the printed edition, the section is titled “on the completion of the story” (dar pardākhtan-e in dāstān); ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, 32. 45. bnf 1434, fol. 22v; cf. ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 650–56. بجــان در کار مــن بســته دلــی داشــت رفیقــی داشــتم کــو حاصلــی داشــت فروغــی خســروی دارد دلفــروز مــرا گفتــا چــو خســرونامه امــروز چگویــم قصــه کوتــه بــه درازســت اگــر چــه قصــه ای بــس دلنــواز اســت نمانــد هیــچ خــار ایــن بوســتان را اگــر موجــز کنــی ایــن داســتان را همــه روغــن گزینــی نغــز باشــد دو بنــد راه قشــر و مغــز باشــد کــه خســرونامه را بــود اول حــال دگــر توحیــد و نعــت و پنــد و امثــال دو موضــع کــرده ای یــک چیــز آغــاز45 چــو در اســرارنامه گفتــه ای بــاز 212 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) the author of the khosrow-nāma took this call for revision to heart, extracting a section (bāb) from each chapter (faṣl) and then stringing these “pearls of wisdom” together from the beginning with a new introductory doxology: because he spoke the truth of this story beautifully, i did, in short, just what he said. i extracted a selection from over here, i removed a section from every chapter. i composed separate verses of tawḥid and praise, and then i strung the pearls of wisdom from the beginning. if there was any defect in its brocade, i repaired it from that state. some verses that were renowned like gold i melted down in the furnace for golden ink.46 although more thorough philological work needs to be done, all known manuscripts of the khosrow-nāma seem to reflect these revisions; the earlier version of the poem does not appear to have been preserved, or at least it has not yet been identified.47 it thus probably did not enjoy wide circulation, since otherwise the author could not have suppressed it so completely. although he claims that some of the verses in the first version of the khosrownāma had gained wide currency before he set about revising the poem (“some verses... were renowned like gold”), the actual text was likely circulating only within a small community of his associates. finally, at the end of the section, the author again mentions his various other poems, including the mokhtār-nāma. such enumerations served an important function by informing readers about the author’s other works and encouraging them to seek them out—a manuscript version of the “also by this author” page found at the back of many mass-market paperbacks: 46. bnf 1434, fol. 22v; cf. ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 661–65. 47. b. reinert, “ʿaṭṭār, farīd-al-dīn,” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed., ed. ehsan yarshater, updated august 17, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/attar-farid-al-din-poet; ritter, “philologika x,” 144–46; françois de blois and c.a. storey, persian literature: a bio-bibliographical survey (london: royal asiatic society of great britain and ireland, 1992–94), 5.2:276. several catalogers note highly abridged versions of the romance, but they are all quite late, and those that ritter has examined all contain the same two-part story of the poem’s composition. he thus believes that these abridgments reflect later editorial undertakings and do not represent an authorial version. compare, for example, bnf 1434 with the later (and shorter) recension of the poem contained in bnf supplément persan 811 (dated 1013/1605). also see bodleian, elliott 204, and asiatic society of bengal, 477, manuscripts that contain both the full khosrow-nāma as it exists today and a much shorter précis. چــو او ایــن قّصــه را الحــق نکــو گفــت چنــان کــردم همــی القصــه کــو گفــت بــرون کــردم از اینجــا انتخابــی بــر آوردم ز یــک یــک فصــل بابــی جــدا نعتــی و توحیــدی بگفتــم ز ســردر دّر حکمــت نیــز ســفتم وگــر چیــزی طــرازش را زیــان داشــت بگردانیــدم از طــرزی کــه آن داشــت ســخن بعضــی کــه چــون زر نامــور شــد در آتــش بردمــش تــا آب زر شــد46 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/attar-farid-al-din-poet al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 213 the moṣibat-nāma is the sorrow of the world, the elāhi-nāma’s secrets are manifest. i began both of them in the apothecary, and—what can i say—i finished both quickly. there were five hundred patients in the apothecary, every day, for me to take their pulse. among all the things that i’ve heard and said, i’ve seen no speech better than this. if there is any fault, cover it up; if you won’t praise me, at least stay silent. through the moṣibat-nāma, atoms are animated, the elāhi-nāma is the treasure of kings. the asrār-nāma is the world of gnosis, the mokhtār-nāma is paradise for the people of the heart. and as for the maqāmāt-e ṭoyur [i.e., manṭeq al-ṭayr], it is like an ascension of the soul for the bird of love. because the khosrow-nāma has a wondrous nature, both the noble and the common have a share in it.48 we thus have a situation in which the khosrow-nāma references the mokhtār-nāma twice by name as a finished work, just as the mokhtār-nāma cites the khosrow-nāma as a finished work; this leads to a “contradiction” that, according to shafiʿi-kadkani, indicates the latter’s spuriousness as a work by ʿaṭṭār. these circular cross-references, however, are not necessarily a sign of the khosrow-nāma’s forgery; they can also be explained by the complex, multi-staged process in which works of the manuscript age were revised and circulated in new forms. sanāʾi, for instance, circulated multiple drafts of his ḥadiqa, and najm al-din dāya revised, retitled, and repackaged his merṣād al-ʿebād for a new patron.49 most significantly for our purposes, ʿaṭṭār himself testifies in the introduction to 48. bnf 1434, fols. 22v–23r; cf. ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 266–74. 49. j. t. p. de bruijn, of piety and poetry: the interaction of religion and literature in the life and works of ḥakīm sanāʾī of ghazna (leiden: brill, 1983), 119–39; barbara flemming, “from archetype to oral tradition: editing persian and turkish literary texts,” manuscripts of the middle east 3 (1998): 7–11; franklin lewis, “the modes of literary production: remarks on the composition, revision and ‘publication’ of persian texts in the الهینامــه کاســرارش عیــان اســت مصیبتنامــه کانــدوه جهــان اســت چگویــم زود رســتم زان و زیــن بــاز بداروخانــه کــردم هــر دو آغــاز کــه در هــر روز نبضــم مــی نمودنــد بداروخانــه پانصــد شــخص بودنــد ســخن را بــه ازیــن رویــی ندیــدم میــان آن همــه گفــت و شــنیدم چــو تحســین نکنیــم بــاری خموشــی اگــر عیبــی بــود گــر عیــب پوشــی الهینامــه گنــج خســروان اســت مصیبتنامــه را ذّره روان اســت بهشــت اهــل دل مختارنامه ســت جهــان معرفــت اسرارنامه ســت کــه مــرغ عشــق را معــراج جــان اســت مقامــات طیــور امــا چنــان اســت ز طــرز او کــه و مــه را نصیــب اســت48 چــو خســرونامه را طــرزی عجیــب اســت 214 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) the mokhtār-nāma that he altered several of his works after their initial “publication.” for example, he explains that his divān originally contained three thousand quatrains, but at the urging of his friends, he created a new recension from which he removed all but five hundred. of the excised quatrains, he organized two thousand in the mokhtār-nāma and destroyed five hundred that “were not fit for this world.”50 similarly, ʿaṭṭār refers to his javāher-nāma and sharḥ al-qalb as completed works in the taẕkerat al-awliā, directing readers to them for further commentary on the sayings of the saints.51 in the mokhtār-nāma, however, we learn that ʿaṭṭār destroyed these two poems at some later point.52 thus, in the cases of the divān, the sharḥ al-qalb, and the javāher-nāma, ʿaṭṭār circulated finished works within his textual community in nishapur before making further revisions or suppressing them entirely. the fact that ʿaṭṭār was able to control “published” texts in this way testifies to their limited circulation, the small size of his textual community, and the influence that ʿaṭṭār likely held as a spiritual leader. given this background, the account of the khosrownāma’s two-staged composition no longer seems illogical, contradictory, or far-fetched. the request from a friend is a common topos that need not be taken literally, but the preface’s description of initial circulation followed by revision and a second “publication” not only is possible but also accords well with what we know of ʿaṭṭār’s literary habits from his other works. on the basis of ʿaṭṭār’s testimony and literary cross-references, one can even construct a relative chronology for his oeuvre that would explain how the present versions of the mokhtār-nāma and the khosrow-nāma both came to cite each other as finished works. ritter proposed one such possible chronology in 1939; i offer a similar one here that incorporates data from the taẕkerat al-awliā:53 1. divān [first recension], sharḥ al-qalb, javāher-nāma 2. khosrow-nāma [first recension] 3. manṭeq al-ṭayr, moṣibat-nāma, asrār-nāma54 medieval period,” persica 17 (2001): 69–83. 50. farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, mokhtār-nāma, ed. moḥammad reżā shafiʿi-kadkani, 2nd ed. (tehran: sokhan, 1389/ [2010–11]), 71. on the composition of the mokhtār-nāma, see austin o’malley, “poetry and pedagogy: the homiletic verse of farid al-din ʿaṭṭâr” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2017), 58–68. it should be noted that none of the existing manuscripts of the divān contain anything near five hundred quatrains, and most contain none at all. ʿaṭṭār’s second authorial recension thus must have undergone further revisions, either by ʿaṭṭār or at the hands of later scribes. 51. farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, taẕkerat al-awliā, ed. moḥammad esteʿlāmi, rev. ed. (tehran: zavvār, 1383/[2004–5]), 4, 466. 52. ʿ aṭṭār, mokhtār-nāma, 70. 53. ritter, “philologika x,” 151–52. 54. some manuscripts of the manṭeq al-ṭayr contain a verse claiming that the poem was completed in the late sixth/twelfth century. the verse does not appear in most manuscripts, however, including the earliest ones, and the actual date given in the manuscripts varies from 570/1174–75 to 583/1187–88. most scholars therefore reject it as an interpolation. (on the other hand, it is difficult to see what would motivate a scribe to insert such a line.) see de blois and storey, persian literature, 5.2:281; badiʿ al-zamān foruzānfar, sharḥ-e aḥvāl va naqd va taḥlil-e ās̱ār-e shaykh farid al-din moḥammad ʿaṭṭār-e nayshāburi (tehran: chāp-khāna-ye dāneshgāh, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 215 4. taẕkerat al-awliā55 5. destruction of the sharḥ al-qalb and the javāher-nāma 6. revision of the divān and compilation of the mokhtār-nāma 7. elāhi-nāma 8. revision of the khosrow-nāma the first recension of the khosrow-nāma was allegedly composed at the instigation of a friend who often quoted the sharḥ al-qalb and the javāher-nāma, and who had memorized a large number of poems from the divān and all of the quatrains of the mokhtār-nāma. the sharḥ al-qalb and javāher-nāma must therefore have already been written, and likely some textual version of the divān had been, too. the reference to the mokhtār-nāma is more problematic because, at this point, the quatrains did not yet exist as a separate work outside of the divān. as ritter suggests, however, there is a plausible explanation: if we accept the author’s account of his revisions to the khosrow-nāma, the reference to the mokhtār-nāma could have been inserted during that process (indeed, the entire preface may have been reworked at that time) as a way of referring to the quatrains as a totality.56 the aforementioned friend does not seem to have been familiar with ʿaṭṭār’s mysticaldidactic mas̱navis, so they were likely written after the first version of the khosrow-nāma. the taẕkerat al-awliā is also difficult to place relative to the other works, but because it cites the sharḥ al-qalb as if the latter still existed, it must have been compiled before that work’s destruction. the mokhtār-nāma, on the other hand, mentions the suppression of the sharḥ al-qalb and the javāher-nāma, so it must have been compiled after the taẕkerat al-awliā. according to the mokhtār-nāma’s preface, it was produced simultaneously with a new textual recension of the divān, and it references the khosrow-nāma (which would have still been in its unrevised form), the manṭeq al-ṭayr, the moṣibat-nāma, and the asrār-nāma as completed works. ʿaṭṭār then produced the elāhi-nāma, which is not mentioned in the mokhtār-nāma, before revising the khosrow-nāma, in which he names the mokhtār-nāma and all of the completed ethical-didactic mas̱navis. such a career arc is consistent with the practices of poets with whom we are more familiar. generally speaking, premodern persian poets tend to begin with the monorhyme forms, which they continue to compose throughout their careers, and later in life turn to mas̱navis along with the curation of earlier output.57 ʿaṭṭār may have even anticipated that his reworking of the khosrow-nāma would be his final work, and this fact (along with issues of genre) may explain why he was more willing to mention his previous titles in this poem 1339/[1960–61]; repr., tehran: āsim, 1389/[2010–11]), 61–63; ritter, “philologika xiv,” 50–56; shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to manṭeq al-ṭayr, 74. 55. it is also possible that the taẕkerat al-awliā was compiled before the asrār-nāma, the moṣibat-nāma, and the manṭeq al-ṭayr, or even before the first recension of the khosrow-nāma. all that is certain is that it must have been compiled after the composition of the sharḥ al-qalb, but before its destruction. 56. ritter, “philologika x,” 151–52. 57. such a career trajectory is also consistent with shafiʿi-kadkani’s dating of the mas̱navis—he argues that the they were written after ʿawfi’s visit to nishapur in 1206–7, when, by his reckoning, ʿaṭṭār had likely already entered late middle age. see shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to manṭeq al-ṭayr, 72–74. 216 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) than he had been in his other mas̱navis: at the end of his literary (and earthly) career, he felt the need to lay out his literary estate.58 it is thus chronologically possible for ʿaṭṭār to have written the khosrow-nāma, both in terms of the manuscript tradition and in view of the development of his own oeuvre. nevertheless, we may still be compelled to dismiss the traditional attribution for other reasons. in particular, shafiʿi-kadkani argues that the khosrow-nāma’s literary style and religious outlook are inconsistent with ʿaṭṭār’s literary and religious habits as known from his undisputed works. as we shall see, however, these arguments are also less convincing than they first appear. religious reasons according to shafiʿi-kadkani, the introduction to the khosrow-nāma contains terms and concepts derived from ebn ʿarabi’s mysticism that are characteristic of a later period of persian literary history; this, he argues, proves the introduction’s ninth/fifteenth-century provenance and thus its spuriousness. however, although ebn ʿarabi is often thought to mark a sharp dividing line in the history of mystical thought, he did not arise in a vacuum, and the terms and concepts that he developed were already percolating in the preceding centuries. indeed, many of the ostensibly akbarian terms and concepts identified by shafiʿikadkani in the khosrow-nāma are, in fact, present in ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works as well. their presence, as we shall see, is consistent with ʿaṭṭār’s own style and religious outlook and thus does not necessitate a later provenance. there are several passages in the khosrow-nāma that allegedly exemplify the islamic philosophical-mystical concept of “the unity of being” (waḥdat al-wojud); although ebn ʿarabi himself never uses this term, he is seen as the intellectual fountainhead of the idea that it represents—namely, that divine unity underlies all creation.59 such an attitude is certainly evident in some of the verses in the khosrow-nāma, although we must note that, as far as these things go, the verses in question are rather tame. the following is perhaps the most direct example: of the unity of the two worlds there is no doubt, since the true being is only one. there is god, and creation is but the light of god, but his light is never separate from him. there is god and the light of god. what else is there? we must say god; besides god who could there be? behind the curtain there is only one idol-image, even if the light has a thousand forms. 58. although he does not mention his other titles in his ethical-didactic mas̱navis, ʿaṭṭār has no problem discussing his output in his prose introductions to the taẕkerat al-awliā and the mokhtār-nāma. 59. william chittick, “rumi and waḥdat al-wujūd,” in poetry and mysticism in islam: the heritage of rumi, ed. amin banani, richard g. hovannisian, and georges sabagh (new york: cambridge university press, 1994), 62. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 217 these verses explain worldly multiplicity as a manifestation of divine unity, a conceptualization that shafiʿi-kadkani considers foreign to the work of ʿaṭṭār, who, in his view, maintains a sharp separation between creator and creation.60 although the “unity of being” is certainly not the dominant metaphysics of ʿaṭṭār’s works, he does, in fact, often meditate on the fundamental unity of all existence. for example, compare the above passage with the following quotation from the manṭeq al-ṭayr’s doxology: look, this world and that world are him; there is nothing other than him, and if there were, it would be him! everything is one essence, just elaborated; everything is one word with different vocalizations.61 there are several other instances in ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works in which he treats this allegedly akbarian theme of god’s coextension with his creation.62 shafiʿi-kadkani further argues that the author of the khosrow-nāma uses specific terms derived from ebn ʿarabi’s metaphysics of divine names, in particular “the named” (mosammā) and “the names” (asmā), indicating god’s essence and its refraction in the world.63 but these terms, too, appear several times in ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works with similar metaphysical significance.64 this is not to suggest that ʿaṭṭār read ebn ʿarabi, who composed his major works after ʿaṭṭār’s probable death date.65 rather, it is another indication that many of the ideas and terms that we have come to associate with ebn ʿarabi were already in the air as sufi thinkers engaged and reworked the earlier tradition. formulations that recall ebn ʿarabi’s teachings can be found in the works of several of his predecessors and 60. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 48–49. 61. farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, manṭeq al-ṭayr, ed. moḥammad reżā shafiʿi-kadkani, 2nd ed. (tehran: sokhan, 1387/ [2008–9]), lines 62–63. 62. ibid., lines 1124–28. 63. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 49–50. 64. farid al-din ʿ aṭṭār, divān-e ʿ aṭṭār-e nayshāburi, ed. mahdi madāyini and mehrān afshāri (tehran: charkh, 1392/[2013–14]), ghazal 362, qaṣida 10; farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, moṣibat-nāma, ed. moḥammad reżā shafiʿi-kadkani, 2nd ed. (tehran: sokhan, 1388/[2009–10]), lines 418, 5085–87; farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, asrār-nāma, ed. moḥammad reżā shafiʿi-kadkani, 2nd ed. (tehran: sokhan, 1388/[2009–10]), lines 696–98. 65. ahmed ateş, “ibn al-ʿarabī,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), posted 2012, https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0316. on ʿaṭṭār’s death date, see o’malley, “poetry and pedagogy,” 32–34. کــه موجــود حقیقــی جــز یکــی نیســت در آن وحــدت دو عالــم را شــکی نیســت ولــی زو نــور او هرگــز جــدا نیســت خداســت و خلــق جــز نــور خــدا نیســت ببایــد گفــت حــق جــز حــق دگــر کیســت حقســت و نــور حــق چیــزی دگــر چیســت اگــر آن نــور را صــورت هزارســت ولــی در پــرده یــک صــورت نگارســت60 نیســت غیــر او وگــر هســت آن هــم اوســت در نگــر کایــن عالــم و آن عالــم اوســت جملــه یــک ذات اســت امــا مّتصــف جملــه یــک حــرف و عبــارت مختلــف62 https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0316 218 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) contemporaries, including ebn al-fāreż, ahṃad-e ghazzāli, ʿaṭṭār, and even rumi, but these isomorphic parallelisms do not necessarily indicate any direct influence.66 more serious is shafiʿi-kadkani’s claim that the khosrow-nāma contains a tażmin (exact quotation of one author by another) from the golshan-e rāz of shabestari (d. 1340), a mystical poet who helped popularize ebn ʿarabi in the persian-speaking world. the verse in question justifies ḥallāj’s famous utterance “i am the truth” by likening him to the burning bush through which god spoke to moses: if “verily, i am god” is allowed from a bush, then why is it not allowed from a fortunate one?67 obviously, if the author of the khosrow-nāma copied this line from the golshan-e rāz, he could not have been ʿaṭṭār, who had died more than a century earlier. this verse, however, is not found in the oldest manuscripts of the golshan-e rāz or in the critical edition by ṣamad movaḥḥed, who traces it to the later commentary by lāhiji.68 it is thus entirely possible that the line actually originated with ʿaṭṭār and was later assimilated into the textual legacy of shabestari, who was a self-confessed ʿaṭṭār superfan.69 this scenario is made more likely by the fact that the line is found in the bnf manuscript of the khosrow-nāma, which was copied before the golshan-e rāz was even written. furthermore, ʿaṭṭār’s taẕkera contains a line of prose that makes exactly the same point with the same vocabulary: “[if] it is allowed [ravā] that the cry of ‘verily, i am god’ [enni anā allāh] emerge from a bush [darakhti]—without the bush intervening—then why is it not allowed [ravā] for ‘i am the truth’ to emerge from ḥosayn [ḥallāj]?”70 prose material included in the taẕkera is often found in poetic form in ʿaṭṭār’s mas̱navis, and this appears to be classic case of such transference. besides the alleged influence of shabestari and ebn ʿarabi, shafiʿi-kadkani also argues that the romance’s praise of saʿd al-din b. al-rabib, who seems to have been the author’s 66. nasrallāh purjavādi, solṭān-e ṭariqat: savāneḥ, zendegi, va sharḥ-e ās̱ār-e khwāja aḥmad-e ghazzāli (tehran: āgāh, 1358/[1979]), 104–7; chittick, “rumi and waḥdat al-wujūd,” 70–71, 91–97, 101–4; th. emil homerin, ed. and trans., ʿumar ibn al-fāriḍ: sufi verse, saintly life (new york: paulist press, 2001), 34–35. in his chapter’s appendix, chittick facetiously argues that ʿaṭṭār was influenced by ebn ʿarabi. his purpose is to show that general formulations of the “unity of being” are common in the persian poetical tradition, and if one believes that they are necessarily indicative of influence from ebn ʿarabi, one must concede that even a poet like ʿaṭṭār, who died before ebn ʿarabi’s most important works were written, was somehow influenced by him. 67. bnf 1434, fol. 5r; cf. ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, line 141. 68. maḥmud shabestari, majmuʿa-ye ās̱ār-e shaykh maḥmud shabestari, ed. ṣamad movaḥḥed (tehran: ṭahuri, 1365/[1986–87]), 135. the khosrow-nāma also puns on the letter mim that separates aḥmad (muhammad) from aḥad (god), and shafiʿi-kadkani argues that this punning is a direct response to a couple of lines in shabestari. in this case, too, however, the most salient line is missing from the critical edition of the golshan-e rāz, while such punning is well attested in ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works. see shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 46–47; shabestari, ās̱ār-e shabestari, 67, 123; ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 332–35; ʿaṭṭār, moṣibat-nāma, ed. shafiʿi-kadkani, lines 339–41, 440–41. 69. shabestari, ās̱ār-e shabestari, 69. 70. ʿ aṭṭār, taẕkerat al-awliā, 510. چــرا نبــود روا از نیــک بختــی68 رواســت انــی انــا اهلل از درختــی al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 219 spiritual guide, contains terminology that was not applied to religious figures until the eighth/fourteenth century: specifically, the title khwāja and the honorific qoṭb-e awliā (pole of the saints).71 contrary to this claim, however, the term khwāja is attested in sixth/ twelfthand seventh/thirteenth-century texts—in fact, it is even used by ʿaṭṭār himself in his undisputed mas̱navis in reference to religious leaders. in the elāhi-nāma, two anecdotes are attributed to abu ʿali farmādi, a mystical preacher from the fifth/eleventh century, who is referred to in the text as khwāja bu ʿali.72 we also find references to khwāja akkāfi, a nayshāburi religious figure from the generation prior to ʿaṭṭār, and a story featuring khwāja bu ʿali daqqāq, the famed teacher of qoshayri.73 the title also appears in ʿaṭṭār’s taẕkera—not in the chapter headings, but within the anecdotes themselves, where students routinely call their teachers by this title. and in at least one case, the titled is affixed to a proper name (khwāja ‬ʿali sirgāni).74 ʿaṭṭār uses the term qoṭb relatively frequently as well, especially in the rhyming prose introductions to the biographies in the taẕkera. saints are often described as the axial pole (qoṭb al-madār), the axis of the age (qoṭb-e vaqt), the axis of the world (qoṭb-e ʿālam), and the axis of religion (qoṭb-e din).75 shafiʿi-kadkani is correct that the specific compound qoṭb-e awliā does not appear, but i am reluctant to banish the khosrow-nāma as spurious on the basis of this single unique phrase not found in other works of the corpus.76 matters of style the khosrow-nāma allegedly deviates from ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works in terms of style and literary norms, too. according to this argument, the khosrow-nāma exhibits excessive repetition (eltezām) that is more consistent with the literary tastes of the ninth/fifteenth century than with those of the sixth/twelfth or seventh/thirteenth. more specifically, shafiʿi-kadkani points to a thirty-verse passage in the poem’s opening praise of muhammad that, in some manuscripts, contains more than sixty instances of the word “stone.”77 this passage, which begins with a divine voice addressing muhammad, references the battle of uḥud, during which several of the prophet’s teeth were allegedly knocked out by a 71. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 51–52; ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 540–60. 72. farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, elāhi-nāma, ed. mohammad reżā shafiʿi-kadkani, 2nd ed. (tehran: sokhan, 1388/ [2009–10]), lines 2660, 6180. 73. ʿ aṭṭār, moṣibat-nāma, ed. shafiʿi-kadkani, lines 2071, 3823, 4613. 74. ʿ aṭṭār, taẕkerat al-awliā, 332. 75. ibid., 118, 138, 248, 459. 76. although qoṭb-e awliā appears only once, other distinctive words are found across the corpus. particularly interesting is chekāda, an unusual variant of chekād, indicating the crown of the head. the word is found in the khosrow-nāma (line 5801), as well as the elāhi-nāma (line 1307) and the divān; see farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, divān-e ʿaṭṭār, ed. taqi tafażżoli (tehran: enteshārāt-e ʿelmi va farhangi, 1386/[2007]), ghazal 367. a search of ganjoor.net, the popular online database of persian poetry, reveals no other instances of the word’s use by poets other than ʿaṭṭār. likewise, although chekāda is defined in the major mughal-era and contemporary dictionaries (farhang-e jahāngiri, farhang-e rashidi, loghat-nāma-ye dehkhodā, farhang-e sokhan), these give no attestations of the word outside of ʿaṭṭār’s oeuvre. 77. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 44–45. 220 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) rock.78 such repetition, which many modern critics find poetically unpleasing, is allegedly foreign to the style of ʿaṭṭār and his contemporaries. it is not confined to the doxology, either; the khosrow-nāma contains several examples of the device throughout its eight thousand verses, which is one of the reasons that shafiʿi-kadkani, in the 1979 version of his argument, attributes the poem as a whole, and not just its introduction, to the ninth/ fifteenth century.79 the point is not especially convincing, however, because a close inspection of ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works shows similar instances of protracted repetition. for example, the famous shaykh ṣanʿān story from the manṭeq al-ṭayr features a cluster of twenty verses that almost all contain some variation on the word “night.”80 the asrār-nāma’s praise of the prophet boasts a spectacular forty-line passage in which every verse contains one—and sometimes two—instances of the word “finger” (angosht) or closely related terms such as “ring” (angoshtari), “thimble” (angoshtvāna), or “charcoal” (angesht).81 there are also several extended sections of anaphora (repetition at the beginning of the line) in the moṣibatnāma’s doxology, including a hundred verses that each ask “what is (chist) . . . ?” and then define a different religious concept.82 according to bürgel, who has identified a number of additional examples, anaphora and repetition are prominent features of ʿaṭṭār’s work.83 given ʿaṭṭār’s fondness for such devices in his undisputed works, the khosrow-nāma’s use of repetition does not seem particularly unusual.84 the second point relates not to style but to ʿaṭṭār’s broader literary habits. the khosrownāma contains a line that, in shafiʿi-kadkani’s reading, suggests the poem was titled in honor of a temporal ruler, which would seem to be at odds with the condemnation of 78. ʿ aṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 258–61. 79. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 45. 80. ʿ aṭṭār, manṭeq al-ṭayr, lines 1246–65. 81. ʿ aṭṭār, asrār-nāma, lines 200–41. see the translation in j. christoph bürgel, “some remarks on forms and functions of repetitive structures in the epic poetry of ʿaṭṭār,” in lewisohn and shackle, spiritual flight, 208–11. 82. farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, moṣibat-nāma, ed. nurāni veṣāl (tehran: zavvār, 1373/[1994]), 41–46. shafiʿikadkani, in his edition, expresses doubt that these passages are authentic. although they are found in all known manuscripts of the poem, the hundred lines repeating “what is . . . ?” are crossed out in one of the earliest copies, where a marginal note claims that they were taken from the oshtor-nāma (a likely spurious work attributed to ʿaṭṭār). see his introduction to the moṣibat-nāma, 105, 112. 83. bürgel, “repetitive structures in ʿaṭṭār.” 84. shafiʿi-kadkani makes another argument in this section regarding a line in the khosrow-nāma’s introduction that puns on the titles of ebn sinā’s books: “although medicine is found in the canon (qānun) / pointers (eshārāt) are found in poetry and riddles (moʿammā)” (line 615). according to shafiʿi-kadkani, such punning was not a common literary trope until the eighth/fourteenth century. furthermore, shafiʿi-kadkani argues that riddles became a serious literary genre that could be reasonably paired with “poetry” only in the ninth/fifteenth century. however, ʿaṭṭār also puns on the titles of ebn sinā’s books in his undisputed works, and the term “riddles” here seems to refer not so much to a fixed genre as to the spiritual secrets that ʿaṭṭār purports to explore through speech. see shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 45–46; ʿ aṭṭār, moṣibatnāma, ed. shafiʿi-kadkani, line 865. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 221 panegyric found in ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works. this anti-panegyric sentiment finds its strongest expression in the conclusion to the manṭeq al-ṭayr: thank god that i am no courtier, that i am unbound to any reprobate. why should i bind my heart to anyone, and take the name of some degenerate as lord? i have not eaten the victuals of a tyrant, nor have i closed a book with a patron’s name. my high aspiration suffices for my patron; sustenance of body and power of spirit are enough for me.85 ʿaṭṭār represents himself as untainted by participation in the patronage economy: he has not attached himself to the court, he has not dedicated a book to any patron, and he has received no reward for his verse. the khosrow-nāma, however, contains the following line in its preface, according to which the poem’s title honors the “king of the face of the earth”: in the name of the king (khosrow) of the face of the earth, i have named this the khosrow-nāma.86 according to shafiʿi-kadkani, such a line could not have been written by ʿaṭṭār given his strong denunciations of panegyric.87 it is not immediately clear to me, however, that this “khosrow” necessarily refers to a historical potentate. the khosrow in question is not named, and he is praised only with a vague allusion to the universal scope of his rule. if this were intended as praise for an actual patron, one would expect something a bit more specific and extensive. it thus seems more likely that the khosrow referred to here is not a temporal ruler but the protagonist of the poem, who, as the emperor of rum and iran, can be appropriately styled the “king of the face of the earth.”88 85. ʿ aṭṭār, manṭeq al-ṭayr, lines 4601–4. 86. ʿ aṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, line 586. 87. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 40–41. 88. the passage continues with a vocative address to some “lord” (khodāvandā), enjoining him to keep the khosrow-nāma illuminated by the eyes of the people of wisdom and protected from the malevolence of the ignorant (lines 587–91). although one could also read this passage as an address to the patron, one can just as easily see it as a prayer to god to protect ʿaṭṭār’s literary legacy. بســتٔه هــر ناســزاواری نَیــم شــکر ایــزد را کــه دربــاری نَیــم نــاِم هــر دون را خداونــدی نهــم مــن ز کــس بــر دل کجــا بنــدی نهــم نــه کتابــی را تخّلــص کــرده ام نــه طعــاِم هیــج ظالــم خــورده ام قــوِت جســم و قــّوِت روحــم بــس اســت86 هّمــِت عالیــم ممدوحــم بــس اســت نهــادم نــام خســرونامه ایــن را86 بــه نــام خســرو روی زمیــن را 222 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in any case, even if this verse were intended to refer to a particular king, it would hardly disprove ʿaṭṭār’s authorship. such an argument assumes a stark binary between panegyric and non-panegyric verse, in which an allusive reference to an unnamed temporal ruler automatically qualifies as full-blown praise poetry (madḥ). but it is not at all clear that ʿaṭṭār would have accepted this characterization. he may have included the line to honor a prince for whom he felt some particular gratitude, but unless he had contacts in the court to introduce him into courtly literary circles, it is unlikely that he could have ever derived monetary benefit from a single verse.89 moreover, ʿaṭṭār’s rhetorical condemnations of panegyric poetry should not be taken to mean that he never composed a single verse at any point in his life in praise of a political ruler. his condemnations are idealized projections, not statements of fact. solṭān valad, rumi’s son and successor, condemned “the poetry of professional poets” (sheʿr-e shāʿer) but still composed a number of panegyric poems in a classical vein.90 sanāʾi, too, pursued patronage relationships with political and religious authorities even as he criticized panegyric in much the same language as ʿaṭṭār.91 if these poets entered into formal patronage relationships despite their criticism of the practice, i see no reason to assume that ʿaṭṭār could not have written the occasional verse that evokes panegyric poetry.92 ultimately, the recent scholarly resistance to the authenticity of the khosrow-nāma seems to be rooted in the assumption that a spiritually inclined writer like ʿaṭṭār would 89. on the importance of having an introduction to the court—in a variety of periods—see jerome clinton, the divan of manūchihrī dāmghānī: a critical study (minneapolis: bibliotheca islamica, 1972), 29–44; franklin lewis, “reading, writing, and recitation: sanāʾi and the origins of the persian ghazal” (phd diss., university of chicago, 1995), 165–68; e. m. subtelny, “scenes from the literary life of tīmūrid herāt,” in logos islamikos: studia islamica in honorem georgii michaelis wickens, ed. roger savory and dionisius agius (toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, 1984). 90. franklin lewis, “solṭân valad and the political order: framing the ethos and praxis of poetry in the mevlevi tradition after rumi,” in persian language, literature and culture: new leaves, fresh looks, ed. kamran talattof (abingdon, uk: routledge, 2015), 24–25. 91. lewis, “reading, writing, and recitation,” 124–25, 176–78; j. t. p. de bruijn, “comparative notes on sanāʾī and ʿaṭṭār,” in classical persian sufism from its origins to rumi, ed. leonard lewisohn (london: khaniqahi nimatullahi publications, 1993), 362–63, 375–77. 92. there are several verses attributed to ʿaṭṭār that seem to have been dedicated to royal patrons. shafiʿikadkani argues that they cannot, for this reason, be authentic. in tafażżoli’s edition of the divān, the poems in question are qaṣidas 3, 9, 14, 15, and 27, and ghazals 201 and 307. the ghazals are not included in madāyeni and afshāri’s more recent edition, but two of the qaṣidas are reproduced in its appendix of doubtful attributions, where they are numbered 1 and 3. furthermore, the rhetorical manual of shams-e qays attributes to ʿaṭṭār a verse that praises the khwārazm-shāh moḥammad b. tekish by name. this verse is not found in ʿaṭṭār’s divān, but qaṣida 15 in tafażżoli’s edition is in the same rhyme and meter. shafiʿi-kadkani thus speculates that this verse was originally part of that poem, and that it was composed by a different ʿaṭṭār who was working as a panegyrist in the khwārazm-shāh’s court. furthermore, because the qaṣida in question contains some extended repetition, and the romance khosrow-nāma contains extended repetition, he claims they are by one and the same poet. needless to say, the argument is rather speculative. see shafiʿi-kadkani, zabur, 95–99; shams-e qays, al-moʿjam fi maʿāyir ashʿār al-ʿajam, ed. sirus shamisā (tehran: enteshārāt-e dāneshgāh-e tehrān, 1373/[1994– 95]), 276. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 223 never write a “love story without the slightest relation to sufism.”93 such an attitude reductively draws a sharp, artificial border between the “secular” and the “mystical” and expects a uniformity of output from poets who were, after all, human beings endowed with multifaceted personalities. and the khosrow-nāma, although a love story, does in fact display mystical and religious sensibilities, especially in its moralizing passages on the inevitability of death, the evils of material wealth, and the necessity of detachment from the world. further, ʿaṭṭār’s authentic “mystical” works also show an interest in romance narratives. the elāhi-nāma, for instance, contains the tragic love story of bektash and rābeʿa, the daughter of kaʿb.94 even more salient is the tale of marḥuma, also from the elāhi-nāma, which clearly recalls the narrative structures of hellenistic romances. it relates the adventures of a woman who must preserve her chastity after being separated from her husband, and it includes familiar topoi such as a lustful male protector, mendacious accusations of infidelity, multiple instances of love at first sight, a sea voyage, a false death, and a failure of recognition before a final revelation.95 especially interesting is a scene in which marḥuma, after a sea voyage, dons men’s clothes in order to pass as a young man and thereby discourage further male suitors and assailants; in the khosrow-nāma, gol employs the exact same stratagem after she is shipwrecked in china.96 in any case, ʿaṭṭār clearly displays an interest in long romantic stories in his authentic works, and the khosrow-nāma could have easily emerged from the same set of authorial preoccupations. shifting titles and changing claims let us presume, for a moment, that the khosrow-nāma was not a product of ʿaṭṭār’s pen. why, then, does ʿaṭṭār list the poem as one of his own in the preface to the mokhtār-nāma, which is generally considered an authentic work? shafiʿi-kadkani has an ingenious (but ultimately unsatisfying) answer to this knotty problem. because the mokhtār-nāma does not include the elāhi-nāma in its enumeration of ʿaṭṭār’s previous works, he postulates that its mention of the khosrow-nāma refers not to the romance gol o hermez, but to that otherwise unmentioned mas̱navi.97 according to shafiʿi-kadkani, the title “khosrow-nāma” (literally “book of the king”) would actually be an appropriate name for the elāhi-nāma because it recounts the pedagogical discussions of six princes with their wise royal father 93. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 35–36; zarrinkub, ṣedā-ye bāl-e simorgh, 69. 94. ʿ aṭṭār, elāhi-nāma, lines 371–86. 95. ibid., lines 484–792. the tale has been translated by lewis as “tale of the righteous woman (whose husband had gone on a journey),” in converging zones: persian literary tradition and the writing of history, ed. wali ahmad (costa mesa, ca: mazda, 2012). also see franklin lewis, “one chaste muslim maiden and a persian in a pear tree: analogues of boccaccio and chaucer in four earlier arabic and persian tales,” in metaphors and imagery: studies in classical persian poetry, ed. asghar seyed-gohrab (leiden: brill, 2012), 164–87; davis, panthea’s children, 105–9. 96. ʿ aṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 6483–818. 97. my alternative explanation for this silence is that the elāhi-nāma was composed after the compilation of the mokhtār-nāma. 224 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) (who is referred to within the poem as a caliph [khalifa]).98 he thus speculates that the poem was originally entitled the khosrow-nāma, but that over time its title shifted to the more generic elāhi-nāma.99 this name change may have even been instigated by the same forger or forgers who repackaged the romance gol o hermez as the khosrow-nāma of ʿaṭṭār.100 as shafiʿi-kadkani rightly observes, premodern titles display a remarkable fluidity. even many of ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works have been known by multiple names: some manuscripts of the moṣibat-nāma bear the title javāb-nāma; the asrār-nāma is occasionally labeled ramz-nāma;101 and ʿaṭṭār himself refers to the manṭeq al-ṭayr not only by that name, but also as the maqāmāt-e ṭoyur and the ṭoyur-nāma.102 nevertheless, even though multiple titles are often attested for premodern mas̱navis, there is no solid evidence that the elāhināma was ever known as the khosrow-nāma. the latter title is not found at the head of any of manuscripts of the poem, and no later anthologists or bibliographers discuss it under that name. ʿaṭṭār makes no mention of such a title in the poem itself, even though he often explains the titles of his other works. if the elāhi-nāma were originally known as the khosrow-nāma, one would expect that some trace of the original name would remain, either in the manuscript paratexts, in the biographical tradition, or in the poem itself. the only major piece of evidence that shafiʿi-kadkani provides, however, is an early manuscript of ʿaṭṭār’s collected works whose calligraphic frontispiece lists, in addition to the rest of ʿaṭṭār’s titles, both the elāhi-nāma and the khosrow-nāma, even though it does not contain the text of the latter.103 according to shafiʿi-kadkani, this discrepancy shows that the poem now known as the elāhi-nāma was also known as the khosrow-nāma when the manuscript was copied, but the scribe mistakenly thought each name referred to a separate work, so he listed them separately on the frontispiece.104 but it is far from obvious how the mismatch between the frontispiece and the contents of the manuscript should be interpreted—it could have resulted from any number of confusions or miscommunications. perhaps the scribe originally intended to include khosrow-nāma, but then dropped it on the basis that it did not fit generically with the other works.105 98. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 57–58; shafiʿi-kadkani, zabur, 86–88; ʿaṭṭār, elāhi-nāma, line 465. 99. on elāhi-nāma as a generic title, see de bruijn, piety and poetry, 128. 100. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to elāhi-nāma, 51, 55. 101. manuscripts bearing these alternate titles are listed in ritter, “philologika xiv,” 10, 58. 102. ʿ aṭṭār, mokhtār-nāma, 70, 72; ʿaṭṭār, manṭeq al-ṭayr, line 4487. 103. ketāb-khāna-ye salṭanati 327; see the descriptions in badri ātābāy, fehrest-e divān-hā-ye khaṭṭi-ye ketāb-khāna-ye salṭanati (tehran: chāp-khāna-ye zibā, 2535 sh./[1976]), 799–804; mahdi bayāni, fehrest-e nā-tamām-e teʿdādi az kotob-e ketāb-khāna-ye salṭanati (tehran: chāp-khāna-ye bānk-e melli-ye irān, 1970), 92–97. 104. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 56. 105. shafiʿi-kadkani also adduces two even more ambiguous pieces of evidence. first, aḥmad rāzi’s haft eqlim lists the khosrow-nāma, the gol o hermez, and the elāhi-nāma as three separate works, which, according to shafiʿi-kadkani, shows that throughout the tenth/sixteenth century there was still a memory of the khosrow-nāma (i.e., the elāhi-nāma) and the gol o hermez as different poems. to my mind, however, this mention is easily explained by the bibliographers’ habit of treating variant titles as independent works; i do al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 225 it is not, moreover, readily apparent why someone would forge an elaborate introduction to attribute this particular romance to ʿaṭṭār. it is true that many spurious poems were attributed to him, sometimes through deliberate forgery. ʿaṭṭār-e tuni, for instance, composed the lesān al-ghayb and the maẓhar al-ʿajāʾeb in the ninth/fifteenth century and falsely attributed them to ʿaṭṭār-e nayshāburi. but by the time ʿaṭṭār-e tuni was writing, ʿaṭṭār’s reputation as a saintly poet was firmly established; tuni seems to have been motivated by a desire to attract a wider audience for his own religio-didactic mas̱navis, and perhaps also to co-opt the famed ʿaṭṭār as a shiʿi poet.106 it is difficult to see, however, what a forger could gain in the case of the khosrow-nāma. the romance does not bolster or accord with ʿaṭṭār’s saintly image among later generations, so it is unlikely that a devotee or a spiritual follower of ʿaṭṭār would have constructed the introduction. likewise, if the author of the gol o hermez or one of his fans wanted to boost that poem’s circulation, it would not make much sense to attribute it to ʿaṭṭār, who was celebrated not for romances, but for his didactic mas̱navis.107 in the introduction to his 2008 edition of the elāhi-nāma, shafiʿi-kadkani added a new, complicating layer to the argument: he suggested that parts of the khosrow-nāma’s conclusion and some of its doxology may actually be authentic to ʿaṭṭār. according to this hypothesis, a group of forgers wanted to attribute the romance gol o hermez to ʿaṭṭār-e nayshāburi; they thus prefaced the romance with a fake account of the work’s composition, and to give this forged introduction an air of authenticity, they extracted part of ʿaṭṭār’s genuine doxology from the poem now known as the elāhi-nāma—including its opening praise of god and the prophet—and attached it to the romance.108 to make the forgery even more convincing, they also attached much of the elāhi-nāma’s original conclusion to the khosrow-nāma.109 these forgers then replaced the elāhi-nāma’s “missing” doxology with a set of forged lines and verses taken from ʿaṭṭār’s asrār-nāma and other parts of the elāhināma.110 shafiʿi-kadkani does not fully spell out the reasoning behind this new claim—the only concrete evidence he offers has to do with the relative lengths of the various doxologies and conclusions—but the argument as a whole seems to be motivated by his discomfort with the not see how it supports shafiʿi-kadkani’s claim. second, shafiʿi-kadkani also writes that the title page of the 1295/1878 lucknow lithograph reads “hormoz o golrokh, famous as the elāhi-nāma,” but in my copy of the text i find only “hormoz o golrokh, famous as the khosrow-nāma.” it is possible, of course, that other title pages were produced, but in any case the evidence is rather late and likely not very reliable. see shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to mokhtār-nāma, 58–59. 106. many pre-safavid persian poets were later “claimed” as shiʿis; see, for example, the case of sanāʾi, discussed in de bruijn, piety and poetry, 13, 73–74; cf. lewis, “reading, writing, and recitation,” 183–85. 107. at one point, shafiʿi-kadkani suggests that literary agents collecting manuscripts for court libraries were behind the forgery, as it allowed them to collect fees for two manuscripts in place of one (introduction to elāhi-nāma, 61). it is still not clear, however, why they would have attached the poem specifically to ʿaṭṭār, especially given the massive amount of work involved (see below). 108. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to elāhi-nāma, 56–63. 109. ibid., 59–60. 110. ibid., 58, 69–71. 226 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) textual messiness of the elāhi-nāma’s current doxology, whose multiple recensions cannot be easily reconciled into a single “authentic” authorial version.111 although he does not discuss the stylistic particulars, we should also note that the khosrow-nāma’s conclusion exhibits striking similarities with the concluding sections of ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works. the speaker begins with self-praise regarding the beauty of his verses and their spiritual value and then shifts to self-criticism and confessions of hypocrisy, before concluding with a prayer for himself and his deceased mother, which recalls ʿaṭṭār’s lament for his father at the end of the asrār-nāma.112 in any case, whereas previously shafiʿi-kadkani argued on the basis of stylistic and religious evidence that the entire doxology of the khosrow-nāma was fabricated, he now suggests that much of it may be authentic, although he maintains that the lines he earlier identified as problematic are still later interpolations.113 furthermore, the new argument presupposes that the alleged forgery must have taken place before all extant copies of the elāhi-nāma were transcribed, meaning before 729/1328–1329; he thus seems to have abandoned the claim that the poem is a timurid-era forgery, although he does not make this explicit.114 however, the proposed forgery would have necessitated a literary conspiracy of truly epic proportions. certainly we must acknowledge the philological messiness of the elāhināma’s introduction, but it is difficult to believe that the poem’s original doxology can now be found in khosrow-nāma, where it was transferred on a line-by-line basis by a group of later forgers. how could such a forgery have been perpetrated in the manuscript age on two circulating texts, one of which must have enjoyed some popularity, so completely that no trace of their original forms remains? no manuscript of the khosrow-nāma has come to light without its allegedly forged preface, nor is there any extant manuscript of the elāhi-nāma that retains its allegedly original title or doxology. i do not see how a group of forgers could have accomplished this feat without identifying, gathering, doctoring, and recirculating the majority of existing manuscripts of both poems across the iranian world. and for such a project to have been worth undertaking, ʿaṭṭār must have been a well-known and desirable poet—in which case a great number of manuscripts of his elāhi-nāma would presumably have been in existence, making the endeavor even more difficult. conclusion shafiʿi-kadkani’s argument for the spuriousness of the khosrow-nāma’s attribution to ʿaṭṭār has, over the past forty years, exerted considerable influence on scholarship. nevertheless, even though it is often cited and widely accepted, it has a number of weak points. first, the list of manuscripts used by shafiʿi-kadkani to argue for a later provenance is incomplete; he does not include the early bibliothèque nationale manuscript, which was transcribed in the late seventh/thirteenth century and thus contradicts a ninth/fifteenthcentury dating. next, the circular cross-references that he identifies as contradictory could 111. ibid., 60–61, 63–67; zarrinkub, ṣedā-ye bāl-e simorgh, 70. 112. ʿaṭṭār, khosrow-nāma, lines 8338–64; ʿaṭṭār, asrār-nāma, lines 3282–301. 113. shafiʿi-kadkani, introduction to elāhi-nāma, 64, 68. 114. ritter, “philologika xiv,” 47. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) an unexpected romance: reevaluating the authorship of the khosrow-nāma • 227 easily have resulted from a process of authorial revision; in fact, the khosrow-nāma’s introduction describes just such a process. further, shafiʿi-kadkani asserts that the poem (and especially its preface) diverges from ʿaṭṭār’s undisputed works in terms of style and religious terminology, but i have shown that these divergences are exaggerated. finally, if the romance is forged, one must explain how ʿaṭṭār came to mention it in the mokhtārnāma, and the theory of a title shift, although possible in the abstract, is not supported by any evidence in this specific case. in short, although shafiʿi-kadkani’s argument is erudite and complex, its version of events is ultimately less likely than a much simpler alternative: namely, that ʿaṭṭār actually did write the khosrow-nāma. certainly, this explanation is not without its own peculiarities. it means that ʿaṭṭār tried his hand at the romance genre, and that he composed one version of the poem before the mokhtār-nāma, only to revise it later. but this version of events is much easier to imagine than is a literary conspiracy in which forgers changed the titles of two poems, constructed a false preface attributing the khosrow-nāma to ʿaṭṭār, transferred the elāhi-nāma’s doxology to the khosrow-nāma, and then successfully suppressed the previous forms of both poems, all without any clear motivation. unless new, contrary evidence surfaces, the most reasonable attitude toward the question of the khosrow-nāma’s authenticity is thus one of circumspect acceptance. the impact of shafiʿi-kadkani’s argument is difficult to overstate. nearly all scholarly work on ʿaṭṭār, for almost the past half century, has discounted the khosrow-nāma on the premise that it is a spurious attribution. but as i have shown, the argument for its spuriousness is shaky at best. i thus hope that this article will spur scholars to reconsider their understanding of ʿaṭṭār and his place in literary history given the likelihood that the khosrow-nāma is, in fact, authentic. in particular, further investigations into ʿaṭṭār’s biography and authorial development that take the khosrow-nāma into account are needed, as are reevaluations of conclusions about his relationship to sufism, the scope of his poetic models, and possible intertextual ties with authors in the romantic tradition. more than this, however, the above examination testifies to the importance of continuing scholarly evaluation of basic, field-shaping arguments. conclusions about attribution have the potential to shape generations of scholarship, and they thus must not be simply treated as “one and done.” rather, they must be carefully checked and rechecked, even when proposed by respected scholars and involving rather unglamorous, nitty-gritty philological work. 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(1939): 134–73. ———. “philologika xiv: farīduddīn ʿaṭṭār ii.” oriens 11, no. 1/2 (1958): 1–76. safi, omid. “ʿaṭṭār, farīd al-dīn.” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., edited by kate fleet, gudrun krämer, denis matringe, john nawas, and everett rowson. leiden: brill online. posted 2016. https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_23976. sarfarāz, ʿabdu’l-ḳādir. a descriptive catalogue of the arabic, persian and urdu manuscripts in the library of the university of bombay. bombay: university of bombay, 1935. shabestari, maḥmud. majmuʿa-ye ās̱ār-e shaykh maḥmud shabestari. edited by ṣamad movaḥḥed. tehran: ṭahuri, 1365/[1986–87]. shafiʿi-kadkani, moḥammad reżā. introduction to elāhi-nāma, by farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, 29–108. 2nd ed. tehran: sokhan, 1388/[2009–10]. ———. introduction to manṭeq al-ṭayr, by farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, 17–230. 2nd ed. tehran: sokhan, 1387/[2008–9]. ———. introduction to mokhtār-nāma, by farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, 11–66. 2nd ed. tehran: sokhan, 1389/[2010–11]. ———. introduction to moṣibat-nāma, by farid al-din ʿaṭṭār, 35–115. 2nd ed. tehran: sokhan, 1388/[2009–10]. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/attar-farid-al-din-poet http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/attar-farid-al-din-poet https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_23976 232 • austin o’malley al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) ———, ed. zabur-e pārsi: negāhi be zendegi va ghazal-hā-ye ʿaṭṭār. tehran: āgāh, 1378/ [1999]. shams-e qays. al-moʿjam fi maʿāyir ashʿār al-ʿajam. edited by sirus shamisā. tehran: enteshārāt-e dāneshgāh-e tehrān, 1373/[1994–95]. shushtari, sayyed nurallāh. majāles al-moʾmenin. tehran: ketāb-forushi-ye eslāmiya, 1365/ [1986–87]. subtelny, e. m. “scenes from the literary life of tīmūrid herāt.” in logos islamikos: studia islamica in honorem georgii michaelis wickens, edited by roger savory and dionisius agius, 137–55. toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, 1984. utas, bo. “did ʿadhrā remain a virgin?” orientalia suecana 33–35 (1984–86): 429–41. yaghoobi, claudia. subjectivity in ʿaṭṭār, persian sufism, and european mysticism. west lafayette, in: purdue university press, 2017. zanjāni, barāt. “ḥakim neẓāmi-ye ganjavi va shaykh farid al-din ʿaṭṭār.” āyanda 2, no. 9 (ordibehesht 1362 [april-may 1983]): 106–14. zarrinkub, ʿabd al-ḥosayn. ḥekāyat hamchonān bāqi. tehran: sokhan, 1376/[1997–98]. ———. ṣedā-ye bāl-e simorgh. tehran: sokhan, 1386/[2007–8]. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 1-39 the early islamic empire and its economy in comparative perspective in recent decades many historians have taken to viewing the empires of the past from comparative perspectives, and in doing this they have devoted considerable attention to the economic sphere.1 much of this work has come from historians of the roman * this article began at the conference “comparative economies of the first millennium,” presented by the first millennium network at the catholic university of america, washington, dc, on february 11, 2016. i wish to thank all the participants, especially chris wickham and the conveners, antoine borrut and jennifer davis. i also wish to thank ray van dam and the participants in the seminar on premodern empires at the university of michigan in fall 2015. many thanks are also due to the three anonymous reviewers for this journal, who gave a wide range of comments, all of them “raising the bar” considerably. i have not been able to integrate all their criticisms and suggestions, but i have thought about them and am keeping them in mind for future work. 1. recent contributions to this literature include j. burbank and f. cooper, empires in world history: power and the politics of difference (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2010); c. a. bayly and p. f. bang, “introduction: comparing pre-modern empires,” medieval history journal 6 (2003): 169–87; p. f. bang and in search of the early islamic economy* michael bonner university of michigan editors’ note michael bonner passed suddenly and tragically on may 25 of this year while at work on a late draft of the present article. we are grateful to his spouse, dr. daniela gobetti, for granting us permission to publish it in its current form. we opted to do so, not simply because it was well along in the production process, but more to the point, on the strength of its content. it is our understanding that michael had intended to produce a full, book-length study on the basis of these same ideas and arguments. the present article, if somewhat programmatic, builds on michael’s recent scholarship on the “economy of poverty” and arabian trade, among other topics. his stated goal was to raise new and pressing questions on a much-neglected topic and, in doing so, situate his discussion in the context of the most recent developments in imperial economic history—in this case as they relate to the early islamic realm. it is our conviction that here, as in all of his previous published work, michael advances the study of early and medieval islamic history forward many paces. 2 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) empire,2 not surprisingly since these were among its pioneers. but nowadays historians also bring comparative perspectives to the empires of medieval china, the early modern muslim empires of the ottomans and the mughals, and many others.3 in all this activity, however, the early islamic empire or “classical” caliphate has had a low profile,4 even though it seems an excellent candidate for comparison on many fronts. likewise, the modern historiography of the early islamic world itself has not often featured comparative approaches—at least from the perspective of empire—in the halfcentury since marshall hodgson’s venture of islam.5 some interesting exceptions have come from scholars who are not, in the first instance, historians of islam.6 important comparative work has been done in environmental and ecological history and related areas.7 but in the end it seems that many historians prefer not to describe the early islamic polity as an empire at all. behind this reluctance lies a tendency to view the early islamic polity as sui c. a. bayly, eds., tributary empires in global history (houndmills: palgrave macmillan, 2011); p. f. bang and d. kołodziejczyk, eds., universal empire: a comparative approach to imperial culture and representation in eurasian history (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012); a. j. s. spawforth, ed., the court and court society in ancient monarchies (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007); j. duindam, t. artan, and m. kunt, eds., royal courts in dynastic states and empires: a global perspective (leiden: brill, 2011); j. duindam and s. dabringhaus, eds., the dynastic centre and the provinces: agents and interactions (leiden: brill, 2014); a. monson and w. scheidel, eds., fiscal regimes and the political economy of premodern states (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015). 2. more recently, such work includes p. f. bang, “rome and the comparative study of tributary empires,” medieval history journal 6 (2003): 189–216; idem, “trade and empire—in search of organizing concepts for the roman economy,” past and present 195 (2007): 3–54; w. m. jongman, “rome: the political economy of a worldempire,” medieval history journal 6 (2003): 303–26. 3. e.g., l. de ligt, “taxes, trade, and the circulation of coin: the roman empire, mughal india and t’ang china compared,” medieval history journal 6 (2003): 231–48; d. kołodziejczyk, “khan, caliph, tsar and imperator: the multiple identities of the ottoman sultan,” in bang and kołodziejczyk, universal empire, 175–93. 4. exceptions include h. kennedy, “the islamic near east in islamic late antiquity,” in monson and scheidel, fiscal regimes and the political economy, 390–403. 5. m. hodgson, the venture of islam: conscience and history in a world civilization (chicago: university of chicago press, 1974, but written earlier); idem, rethinking world history: essays on europe, islam and world history (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1993). 6. for instance, c. w. wickham, “tributary empires: late rome and the arab caliphate,” in bang and bayly, tributary empires, 205–13. 7. r. bulliet, cotton, climate and camels in early islamic iran (new york: columbia university press, 2010). see also a. m. watson, agricultural innovation in the early islamic world: the diffusion of crops and farming techniques, 700–1100 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983), and critiques of it, including m. decker, “plants and progress: rethinking the islamic agricultural revolution,” journal of world history 20 (2009): 187–206; and l. i. conrad, “ṭāʿūn and wabāʾ: conceptions of plague and pestilence in early islam,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 25 (1982): 268–307. environmental and ecological issues figure in m. mccormick, origins of the european economy: communications and commerce, ad 300–900 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001), and c. wickham, framing the early middle ages: europe and the mediterranean, 400–800 (oxford: oxford university press, 2006). see also a. w. crosby, ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of europe, 900–1900 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004), and w. beinart and l. hughes, environment and empire, oxford history of the british empire companion series (oxford: oxford university press, 2007). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 3 generis and thus beyond comparison. indeed, it is often proposed or assumed that islam’s founding structures and principles were unique to it and marked it off from other empires and polities. in this way a kind of “islamic exceptionalism”8 has planted itself in scholarly discourse and public opinion. one reason for this exceptionalism involves present-day concerns about “universal caliphate,” “political islam,” and other notions beyond this article’s scope. another is the well-known problem of the literary sources for the first two centuries of islam. we have material evidence for this era, including coins, inscriptions, and documents written on papyrus and other materials. but when we try to set this evidence within a narrative frame— whether for economic or any other kind of history—we have no choice but to rely on the great corpus of writings in arabic that have come down through a process of combined oral and literary transmission and that deal with this formative era. and here, as we all know, debates have raged for generations over the reliability, authenticity, and interpretation of these sources. these debates, while necessary and useful, have had the side effect of marginalizing certain historical questions and approaches, including comparisons of the caliphate with other polities and empires. in what follows i hope to extend these debates over the literary sources to the economy of the early islamic world. i also propose to discuss some of the ways in which we think about that economy; problems that this area of research has encountered; and possible new paths involving, among other things, comparison with other imperial structures. however, i can only discuss a limited number of issues. this essay will serve as the basis for a larger project, which will include fuller treatments of “economy,” “empire,” the relation between these two, and many other questions. at the same time, i have the sense that i am dealing here with some fundamental matters. i agree with those practitioners of economic history (and other kinds of history) who insist that work of this kind needs to be based squarely on reliable data, typically (or to the extent possible) of a concrete, empirically verifiable nature. i also agree that we now have considerable amounts of such data for the early islamic world, thanks to archaeology, papyrology, numismatics, and related fields. i still think, however, that we cannot bypass the problems of the early literary sources, many (though not all) of them in the arabic language, to which i have already alluded. this is not only because these may, at times, provide unreliable information on revenues from taxation, agricultural and industrial production, trade routes, and so forth. it is also and above all because we need to have a governing narrative or, perhaps more realistically, a set of narratives within which to place our data. to take an often-cited example, we now know a great deal about the economy, government, and administration (especially at the local level) in umayyad egypt, thanks to the work of papyrologists and others. however, for a number of reasons it is difficult for us to integrate this knowledge into the larger history of the umayyad caliphate. here, to an unusually large extent, local knowledge has a firmer foundation than nonlocal and 8. see c. robinson, “reconstructing early islam: truth and consequences,” in method and theory in the study of islamic origins, ed. h berg, 101–34 (leiden: brill, 2004). 4 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) “imperial-level” knowledge, which necessarily requires narratives that are both broad and detailed. it is true that we already have historical narratives regarding the rise of islam. however, some recent historiographical work has had the effect not so much of undermining those narratives as of demonstrating how varied, subtle, and at times conflictual they can be. meanwhile, this historiographical work has concentrated on political, religious, and juridical aspects of the early islamic world, and only rarely on economic aspects. i believe that it is necessary to bridge this gap, so as to bring the economic domain more fully into our discussions of the early islamic empire or caliphate, and at the same time to give a fuller accounting of economic history itself. markets in the early islamic economy some, though not all modern observers would probably agree that the first few centuries of the islamic era in the near east and north africa witnessed the unfolding of two related but distinct processes. the first of these had to do with markets in the sense of concrete, individual loci of exchange. this process involved a net increase in the degree of integration,9 connection, and specialized articulation among individual markets throughout the region. the second process featured the market in the abstract, generalized, and modern sense so familiar to us now. it consisted of the emergence of an economy which, at least to some extent, functioned in harmony with some of the principles of modern liberal (or “neoclassical”) economics. in other words, when compared with its predecessors and contemporaries, the early islamic economy had a greater share of the characteristics that we associate with the “free market.” but can we prove that these two processes actually took place? and if they did, how can we explain and contextualize them? one obstacle in the way of answering these questions lurks in the already-mentioned problems with the literary source materials for early islam. in this essay i wish to discuss several approaches that can allow us to put at least some of these literary sources to productive (if somewhat unconventional) use. one of these involves the occurrence— generally though not universally admitted nowadays—of an economic boom in the early caliphate, beginning around the middle of the second/eighth century and lasting into the fourth/tenth century in some areas and beyond that in others. another has to do with the spread of the arabic and persian languages throughout the caliphate and their penetration, over roughly two centuries, into both city and countryside at all levels of society. i will maintain that this phenomenon, which has still not been adequately explained on sociolinguistic grounds, can be related to the history of markets and provides proof of their increasing integration though not, of course, of their free-market character. beyond this we have, beginning in the later third/ninth century, the rich literature that we call “geographical,” in which markets and the economy (in some sense) have central roles. we also have other writings, mainly in arabic, that deal with “economic” matters: not under that rubric, which at that time did not exist, but still relevant to these questions. some of 9. on this concept, see p. f. bang, the roman bazaar: a comparative study of trade and markets in a tributary empire (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2008), 12, 29, 114–15. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 5 these writings belong to the broad category of juridical texts, others to that of humanistic belles-lettres (adab), and others to other categories. modern discussions often identify islam itself as the main factor in these processes and events, indeed as the very phenomenon under investigation. and it is certainly true that many norms and practices that we identify as islamic have direct bearing on this discussion. i wish to argue, however, that it was internal developments within the polity and the order of society that we identify as “islamic” that resulted in the phenomena in question, including the two processes involving markets already mentioned. these developments involved religious and ethical precepts familiar to us from the qurʾān, the prophetic tradition (sunna), biographies of the prophet and other major figures, and so forth. however, they also involved other things. and while it is true that islamic law, especially commercial law, had a major role, it is also true that a considerable period of time had to elapse before islamic law extended its hegemony over marketplaces throughout the region—a period of time which corresponds to the formative era of the islamic economy. accordingly, i will propose that certain elements of the nascent islamic order, in addition to or even apart from the religious and juridical ones, played determining roles in the formation of what we may call the “islamic marketplace.” one of these was the imperial project of the early caliphate, which included, in addition to a religiously based ideology, an administrative bureaucracy operating within a patrimonial order centered upon the caliphs, their families, and their followers. another was the role of the caliphs themselves, together with their patrimonial households, in the workings of the marketplace and the economy. i will argue that the market-friendly character of islamic law and commercial practice had its origins, paradoxically, in an imperial-patrimonial system which, we might think, ought rather to have been its adversary and nemesis. boom or bust the study of the medieval islamic economy lost momentum in the late 1970s, and while it has revived and flourished since then,10 it has a more scattered character than it did before, in the sense that most of this work is now done on particular localities and regions, in accordance with a variety of methods and problematics. this is for excellent reasons: researchers have sought concrete data, and they have been successful in this endeavor. however, one characteristic that many of these studies have had in common since before the 1970s is a tendency to view the early islamic economy in terms of either boom or bust. the proponents of the “boom” view have painted an attractive picture that begins toward the middle of the second/eighth century. here we have a huge landmass with a correspondingly broad surface of navigable sea, incorporated within a single entity which 10. an excellent, indispensable starting point is m. shatzmiller, “economic performance and economic growth in the early islamic world,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 54 (2011): 132–84. see also a. walmsley, “production exchange and regional trade in the islamic east mediterranean: old structures, new systems?,” in the long eighth century: production, distribution and demand, ed. i. l. hansen and c. wickham, 265–343 (leiden: brill, 2000); idem, early islamic syria: an archaeological assessment (london: bloomsbury, 2007); m. morony, “economic boundaries? late antiquity and early islam,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 47 (2004): 166–94; j. haldon, ed., money, power and politics in early 6 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in its extent surpasses any other political system yet seen on the planet. the caliphate’s inhabitants enjoy peace and relative ease of movement within its borders. almost anywhere they go, they can make themselves understood in either arabic or persian. they participate in monetized fiscal and commercial systems. all these things encourage the inhabitants of the caliphate to travel for purposes of trade. and while there is nothing new about such journeys, they happen now on an unprecedented scale. a wide range of goods, from luxury products to everyday commodities, moves over both long and short routes. the consumers constitute a wider swath of society—including and beyond the elites—than the world has seen before. customers also appear beyond the borders of the islamic world. to satisfy this truly global demand, old centers of production flourish and new ones emerge. meanwhile, the profession of merchant enjoys more respectability than previously, while the overall number of merchants increases, as does also, we may imagine (but never know for sure), their slice of the overall economic pie. one of the best-known expressions of this view appeared a half-century ago in maurice lombard’s l’islam dans sa première grandeur.11 this work provided, in broad strokes, an upbeat portrait of the early caliphate, with emphasis on its commercial networks. rather than describe a world where trade routes plod from city to city and region to region, where contacts take place among distinct political, social, and religious groups, and where time is allocated into discrete historical periods, lombard drew—quite literally—a series of connecting circles and spirals, taking form within overlapping and quickly changing units of time, among people whose linguistic, religious, commercial, and political affiliations change rapidly, slowly, or barely at all.12 lombard wanted to convince his readers that something new was going on here, with profound consequences for the entire old world. although some of the initial reception of this book was harshly negative,13 since then many historians have agreed with much of it. other scholars, however, dissent from this view. they may concede that the early ʿ abbāsid era experienced growth, but they consider this growth epiphenomenal and outweighed by subsequent long-term decline. these writers, who include professional economists, point to the prohibition in islamic law of lending on interest as a source of inefficiency. they also point to the prevalence in the islamic world of short-lived partnerships instead of more durable firms, and they ascribe this supposed defect to the lack of a concept of corporation in classical islamic law.14 going a step further, the advocates of the “bust” islamic syria (farnham: ashgate, 2010); a. schubert and p. sijpesteijn, eds., documents and the history of the early islamic world (leiden: brill, 2014). 11. paris: flammarion, 1971, repr. 2014 with a preface by hichem djaït; the text was assembled posthumously from lombard’s notes. english translation by j. spencer, the golden age of islam (amsterdam: north-holland, 1975). 12. this helps explain why, according to djaït’s preface to the recent reissue (p. 13), fernand braudel said that lombard was “le plus doué, le plus brillant historien de notre génération, le seul qui fût incontestablement de la classe d’un marc bloch.” 13. c. cahen in revue historique 502 (1972): 471–73. 14. t. kuran, “why the middle east is economically underdeveloped: historical mechanisms of institutional stagnation,” journal of economic perspectives 18, no. 3 (2004): 71–90; idem, “the absence of the corporation al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 7 narrative tend to identify islamic institutions as the root of these ills. for instance, they view awqāf (sing. waqf), pious endowments, not in the positive way that marshall hodgson once did,15 but as a cause of a long-term decrease in the revenue accruing to the state and in the capital available to private enterprise. this approach, which has been described as “institutionalist,” will come up again later in this article. other disciplines, including papyrology and archaeology, tend to focus more on local data and circumstances than on such “big picture” arguments, although they also arrive at big pictures of their own. we can see this in alan walmsley’s summary of the situation in syria and, more generally, in other provinces of the early caliphate.16 according to walmsley, the circumstances of different places need to be reconstructed painstakingly from the ground up, all the more so because the islamic world began with lots of diversity among its regions and provinces. in syria the arrival of islamic rule did not leave much of a mark on local archaeological records, at least at first. trade and infrastructure continued as before, apparently unscathed. local production and consumption went on in this way throughout the seventh century. currency remained readily available. toward the end of the seventh century came a spike in production and arguably in overall wealth. large-scale change did not arrive, however, until the late eighth century. for example, at that point highquality ceramics in syria moved away from local traditions toward styles and techniques originating in other places such as iraq and khurasan. this process involved both importing new wares from those places and imitating them in local production. now we finally arrive in a world that we can recognize, technologically, stylistically, and culturally, as islamic. walmsley notes that the concerns of archaeologists differ from those of historians who work mainly with the arabic literary tradition. he also notes that both kinds of work are necessary and may ultimately come together through an integration of “bottom-up” and “top-down” approaches. this point is crucial, although the integration of the two approaches may, in the end, prove rather difficult. it may also be the case that with regard to the economy of the early islamic world, archaeological research is more advanced nowadays than is historical or, perhaps more precisely, historiographical research. if this article has more to say about the historical/historiographical side of things than it does about the archaeological (and papyrological and numismatic), it is because of my own predilections and experience, of course, but also because that historical/historiographical side needs more attention right now. meanwhile, we may add that even while much recent archaeological work tends to emphasize continuity from late antiquity to early islam, it also points ultimately to historical change, if not rupture. for the changes visible in the archaeological record beginning in islamic law: origins and persistence,” american journal of comparative law 53 (2005): 785–835 [798–99]; m. coşgel, “stagnation and change in islamic history,” university of connecticut working paper 2007-47 (sept. 2007), http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1195&context=econ_wpapers. 15. see also a. greif, institutions and the path to the modern economy: lessons from medieval trade (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006), and below, n. 38. hodgson, venture of islam, 2:124. 16. walmsley, early islamic syria. see also g. avni, the byzantine-islamic transition in palestine: an archaeological approach (oxford: oxford university press, 2014). 8 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) around the turn of the third/ninth century are not merely stylistic; they are centrally important for political, economic, and religious history as well. other modern advocates of the historicity of an early islamic economic boom privilege such terms as “market” and “free market.” in this view, muḥammad was not only a merchant, as everyone knows,17 but something like the ceo of a state-sponsored enterprise run according to sound business principles. in this way the early muslim community achieved a balanced market economy.18 in tandem with this argument comes the statement or supposition that islam has always been compatible with modernity and that it acted in its early period as a harbinger of modern capitalism by instituting market-friendly principles long before these appeared in christian europe. this way of thinking goes back at least to the mid-twentieth century, when some western scholars argued for parallels and connections between the commercial expansion of early islam and the rise of modern capitalism in early modern europe.19 it has also been a concern for modern muslim reformers.20 empires and their economies one comparative discussion that has gone missing in modern work on the early caliphate regards the fundamental nature of imperial economies as a whole. for other imperial contexts, this discussion goes back at least to the 1970s and to work by the greco-roman historian m. i. finley,21 as well as to earlier writers including the sociologist max weber. for a long time it involved a debate between “modernists” and “primitivists”: can we apply modern economic analysis to ancient economies, as we do to modern ones? as finley and others moved beyond this narrow binary, they referred not only to weber but also to the anthropologists marcel mauss and bronisław malinowski and the economist karl polanyi. polanyi, as is well known, rejected the (to us) familiar notion that the market, in the sense in which neoclassical or liberal economists use the term, constitutes a natural or default mode of human behavior and organization.22 instead he thought of the market as “instituted,” that is, as the product of forces external to itself. another, related principle was that of the “embedded” economy, namely, the idea that the economic realm is inextricably connected to elements deriving from culture, politics, religion, and so forth. also of interest 17. even though we have this information mainly on the authority of ibn isḥāq; much other early arabic literature ignores or contradicts it. 18. b. koehler, early islam and the birth of capitalism (london: lexington, 2014); a more balanced and detailed treatment in g. heck, charlemagne, muhammad, and the arab roots of capitalism (berlin: de gruyter, 2006). 19. s. d. goitein, “the rise of the middle-eastern bourgeoisie in early islamic times,” in studies in islam and islamic institutions (leiden: brill, 1968), 217–41; cf. m. bonner, “the kitāb al-kasb attributed to al-shaybānī: poverty, surplus, and the circulation of wealth,” journal of the american oriental society 121 (2001): 410–27. 20. c. tripp, islam and the moral economy: the challenge of capitalism (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006). 21. especially finley’s the ancient economy (berkeley: university of california press, 1973, 1985). 22. most famously in polanyi, the great transformation (boston: beacon, 2001). much of polanyi’s work relevant for this discussion is collected in trade and markets in the early empires (chicago: university of chicago press, 1957). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 9 is the identification, by polanyi and others, of three principal modes of exchange. the first, redistribution, consists of extracting resources more or less forcibly from certain groups and redistributing them among others, a core activity of all premodern empires and indeed of all states. the second mode is reciprocity, whereby resources are transferred with the expectation that something else will be transferred in return at some unspecified, later time. here the participants already know one another, and the transfer of objects is part and parcel of their relationship. the third mode consists of market exchange, in which goods or services are provided without either party (necessarily) being acquainted with the other. the process takes place, at least ideally, without constraint and without creating any obligations beyond the object of the transaction itself. here i do not mean to propose a polanyian model for the early islamic economy. not only economists, but many specialists in the history of ancient empires, assyriologists in particular, 23 have rejected polanyi’s ventures into these areas. nonetheless, we may wish to consider applying certain elements of his approach to our study of the economy of the early islamic world, especially because discussion of that economy has become so heavily weighted toward modern notions of market, wealth-seeking rational actors, and so forth. in other words, a partial and provisional “re-embedding” of the early islamic economy may be in order, to help us see these phenomena in the context not only of the commercial and fiscal, but also of the political and religious domains. in his masterful the ancient economy, which first appeared in 1973, finley built on polanyi’s work, even though he barely mentioned it there.24 earlier treatments of this subjectmatter, especially that of m. i. rostovsteff,25 had portrayed the roman economy as a unified space where elites engaged in large-scale, rationally planned investment, development, and management in agriculture, industry, and commerce. controversy around this view had already gone on for some time, including in the “modernist-primitivist” debate already mentioned. but finley took things farther. he viewed the roman economy in terms of its structures, which for him were as much political and cultural as economic. in his analysis, finley focused on the notion of status, following polanyi and, especially, weber. both of these stated that in the nineteenth century, class had replaced status as the most important social classifier in much of europe, at the same time as market relationships became predominant; however, this had not been the case in earlier times and places, including the ancient empires. so in finley’s view, the ancient economy, though quite complex, was not really a market economy. he presented it through a series of status-related pairs: order and status, masters and slaves, landlords and peasants, town and country, and so forth. the subsequent discussion of the roman economy has been rich and varied. more recently there has been a trend to view it again in market terms; in particular, the economist peter temin has argued that the roman economy was constituted by a series of integrated 23. though see j. renger, “economy of ancient mesopotamia: a general outline,” in the babylonian world, ed. g. leick, 187–97 (london: routledge, 2007). 24. finley attended polanyi’s economic history seminar at columbia university from 1948 to 1953; see ian morris’s foreword to the second edition of finley’s ancient economy, xi. 25. rostovsteff, the social and economic history of the roman empire (oxford: oxford university press, 1957). 10 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) markets operating outside state control, and thus “free.”26 on the other hand, there has been a contrasting trend to argue that the roman empire had a “tied” economy in the polanyian sense, in which the state exerted control over the supply of staple foodstuffs to the capital and regulated and restricted traffic in strategic commodities such as materials for producing armaments, silks, and purple dyes. according to this view, trade in other commodities took place in the shadow of the state, though not under its direct control. institutionalism and new institutional economics we may recall that in the argument over boom or bust in the early islamic economy, some proponents of the “bust” perspective have been described as “institutionalist,” because they point to institutional arrangements already present at the origins; or in other words, they posit an original and apparently endlessly durable “constitution” of islam. maya shatzmiller has argued convincingly against these views by opposing the practice of relying on a priori generalizations generated by theoretical models that privilege political and economic institutions.27 she instead advocates empirically based research and arrives at a model of an early islamic economy undergoing growth and expansion. along the way she provides estimates of its gdp for the years 700 and 1000 ce. here the fundamental concept is economic performance, centered on growth and expansion. at this point, however, we need to say more about the institutionalist approach. in fact, historians of the islamic world have argued along these lines for many years, though more often with a focus on “principles” or “conditions” than on “institutions.” for example, maxime rodinson, in his islam and capitalism and elsewhere, began his discussion of islamic economic life with its “religious conditions.”28 here principles derived from the qurʾān, sunna, and islamic fiscal and commercial law set the stage in advance, perhaps not strictly so in terms of chronology, but logically and heuristically all the same. accordingly, many economic characteristics of the islamic world, throughout its historical existence, would have stemmed from those principles and foundational texts. and even if not all these principles were religious in a strict sense, islam still imposed habits and outlooks that had (and may still have) a determining role.29 more recently, as we have seen, others have argued for the reverse proposition: that islamic law imposed principles and practices that turned out, in the long run, to have negative economic consequences. either way, principles established at the foundation, perceptible to us now in islamic law, shaped and determined the course of events. 26. p. temin, “a market economy in the early roman empire,” journal of roman studies 91 (2001): 169–81; the roman market economy (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2013). 27. shatzmiller, “economic performance and economic growth,” esp. 142ff. 28. rodinson, islam and capitalism, trans. b. pearce (new york: pantheon, 1974), 39–56, 111–57; idem, “les conditions religieuses de la vie économique,” in wirtschaftsgeschichte des vorderen orients, ed. b. spuler, 18–30 (leiden: brill, 1977). 29. as c. becker already said in “islam und wirtschaft,” islamstudien i (leipzig: quelle und meyere, 1924), 54–65, esp. 54. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 11 islamic law provides support for arguments of this kind. for instance, it states that prices in the market must remain beyond the control of individuals who might seek to manipulate them to their own advantage. indeed, the maxim “prices are in god’s hands”30 seems to converge nicely with adam smith’s statement that whenever prices in the market become skewed, an “invisible hand” will intervene to reestablish balance. with regard to continuity with the past, islamic law presents its doctrines and principles as having been transmitted through unbroken chains of authorities extending all the way back to the prophet muḥammad in arabia. at the same time, however, islamic legal texts do not make it easy to investigate the concrete circumstances of markets and exchange during this early period. for instance, the muwaṭṭaʾ ascribed to mālik b. anas (d. 179/795)31 is generally thought, despite some modern dissent,32 to express doctrines prevalent in medina in the late second/eighth century. it cites authorities associated with that city from mālik himself (or even later) all the way back to the prophet. its chapter on commercial law (buyūʿ) examines transactions involving sellers, buyers, and third parties. with regard to the setting, we see trade in grains and other foodstuffs, with slaves receiving especially detailed attention. but while these transactions could certainly be characteristic of a market in medina, they could also be taking place in any muslim and arabic-speaking environment of the time. apart from a few actions attributed to caliphs, ʿumar i in particular, there is little mention of the marketplace’s organization and regulation. modern controversies surround the origins and early development of islamic law. for the purposes of this article, the most important of these controversies include the thesis that the early caliphs not only established a system of courts and legal bureaucracy but also legislated on their own authority, using the term sunna to refer to a tradition linked to the prophet muḥammad but also embodied in themselves;33 and the question of continuity between islamic law and its predecessors, such as arabian customary, roman, jewish, and sasanian law. accordingly, we may ask: while islamic commercial law seems to have reigned supreme, at least formally, in the marketplaces of the ʿabbāsid caliphate from the later second/eighth century onward, what system(s) prevailed earlier on? for instance, in the midto late first/seventh century, the overwhelming majority of the caliphate’s inhabitants were not muslim, but they certainly bought and sold things and traveled in order to trade. what commercial systems and rules did they use? the likely answer is that they used whatever systems happened to be in place, dating from before the conquests; perhaps they modified or abandoned these systems whenever they dealt with the conquerors, but transactions of this kind can only have constituted a fraction of the total. what, then, were these older systems? 30. a. sabra, “prices are in god’s hands,” in poverty and charity in middle eastern contexts, ed. m. bonner et al., 73–91 (albany: state university of new york press, 2003). 31. ed. m. f. ʿabd al-bāqī (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1406/1985), 2:609–86. 32. n. calder, studies in early muslim jurisprudence (oxford: clarendon, 1993). 33. j. schacht, the origins of muhammadan jurisprudence (oxford: clarendon, 1950), 192–213; c. décobert, “notule sur le patrimonialisme omeyyade,” in umayyad legacies, ed. a. borrut and p. cobb, 213–54 (leiden: brill, 2010), esp. 241–42. 12 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) until now this question has been considered, in large part, under the rubric of roman provincial law. here the idea is that pre-islamic near eastern legal systems may have preserved certain aspects of older, local, non-roman law, combined somehow with roman law itself.34 modern work on this theory, at least relating to the seventh century and its environs, has focused on discovering the influence (if any) that such hybrid systems had on the formation of islamic law over exploring how non-muslims actually conducted their affairs before and after the coming of islam. meanwhile, modern discussions of byzantine markets and trade in egypt and syria-palestine tend to end with the persian conquest in the 610s or with the arab/islamic conquests beginning in the 630s.35 studies of sasanian commerce and trade in this era are even scarcer.36 one thing emerges clearly from this work: namely, that principles and rules derived from the qurʾān, sunna, and islamic law in general did not govern—and could not have governed—this vast economic and commercial space at the outset. here as elsewhere, a certain amount of time had to go by before islamic principles and institutions became hegemonic and assumed the forms familiar to us now. from this fact we may proceed to two conclusions. the first is that we cannot avoid the modern debates over methods and approaches to the literary sources for early islam, beginning with the sources for the early development of islamic law. for example, when shatzmiller opposes the practice of relying on a priori generalizations generated by theoretical models—in this case, models that privilege political and economic institutions37— we must agree. however, when she advocates, as an alternative, “empirically based research,” we need to ask this question: “upon which empirically sound data is this research founded?” this is not to deny the existence of such data, by any means. nonetheless, we ought to evaluate our source materials in light of recent work on historiography, source criticism, and other areas, which has shown such methodological sophistication and philological accuracy—even if these have not yet been applied to the economic realm. the second conclusion is that we need to devote our attention squarely to the near eastern marketplace, including in arabia shortly before islam and in the entire region during the era of the great conquests and the early caliphate. precisely because our knowledge of this marketplace is so limited, we must avoid the temptation of imposing on it the better-known structures of roman and/or mature islamic law. 34. p. crone, roman, provincial and islamic law (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987). for subsequent discussion of the fifth-century “syrian-roman lawbook,” see w. selb and h. kaufhold, das syrischrömische rechtsbuch, 3 vols., österreichische akademie der wissenschaften, denkschriften der philosophischhistorischen klasse 295 (vienna: verlag der österreichischen akademie der wissenschaften, 2002). see also p. crone and a. silverstein, “the ancient near east and islam: the case of lot-casting,” journal of semitic studies 55 (2010): 423–50, repr. in crone, islam, the ancient near east, and varieties of godlessness, collected studies 3 (leiden: brill, 2016), 17–43. 35. this is generally true of the papers in c. morrisson, ed., trade and markets in byzantium (washington, dc: dumbarton oaks, 2012). 36. see morony, “economic boundaries?”; e. de la vaissière, soghdian traders, trans. j. ward (leiden: brill, 2005). 37. shatzmiller, “economic performance and economic growth.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 13 we may also inquire further into the very nature of institutions themselves, broadly speaking. students of the early islamic economy have worked with institutions and related concepts, as we have seen. they have not, however, done much with the “new institutional economics” (nie) which has been discussed and deployed by historians of rome, medieval europe, and other areas.38 as the late douglass north, a leading figure of nie, observed, “[present-day] economists hang on to a body of theory developed to deal with advanced economies of nineteenth-century vintage in which the problems were those of resource allocation,” but this approach is no longer adequate, especially for the history of earlier economies.39 a minority of today’s economists would agree, at least in part, with north’s statement, as would many non-economists. but north, and nie in general, goes farther. for north an “institution” is not a preexisting, determining framework. in some ways it seems close to the french term institution as deployed by pierre bourdieu,40 although this concept does not seem to have a major role in north’s arguments. in any case, north takes care to distinguish “institutions” from “organizations.” the former “are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction. . . . [t]hey structure incentives in . . . exchange, whether political, social or economic.” institutions constitute “self-imposed constraints,” a definition which is “complementary to the choice theoretic approach of neoclassical economic theory”41 instead of opposing it. meanwhile, if institutions are the rules of the game, organizations are the players, consisting of “groups of individuals bound together by some common objectives.” the determining factor for the kinds of organizations that will come into existence in a given historical context is the relevant “institutional matrix.”42 if nie eventually proves relevant to the study of the early islamic economy, it will be because of its flexible concept of institution. if we maintain that islamic economic practice and theory were (and maybe still are) based on a certain institutional matrix or matrices, or that they evolved from something of this kind, this does not mean that a particular set of rules and practices—such as we may find in mature islamic law and in later islamic commerce and fiscal administration—was present at the beginning and determined all of the following sequence of events. instead we may say that there was indeed some institutional 38. see p. f. bang, “the ancient economy and new institutional economics,” journal of roman studies 99 (2009): 194–206. the most important contributions to nie include douglass c. north, structure and change in economic history (new york: norton, 1980); idem, institutions, institutional change and economic performance (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1990); idem, understanding the process of economic change (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2005); and a. greif, institutions and the path to the modern economy: lessons from medieval trade (cambridge: cambridge university press), 2006. see the detailed discussion and refutation of greif in shatzmiller, “economic performance and economic growth,” 134–37. 39. north, understanding the process, 168. 40. as in c. décobert, le mendiant et le combattant: l’institution de l’islam (paris: le seuil, 1991), using institution in bourdieu’s sense. 41. north, institutions, institutional change and economic performance, 3–5. in other words, north maintains here that nie does not contradict but rather enhances “mainstream” economic thinking. his later work shows less optimism on this score. 42. ibid., 58–61. 14 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) matrix—or more likely, matrices—present at the outset, which we must then identify and contextualize. here we have a different task from that of, say, historians of the roman economy, in that we have to deal with a relatively short period that appears unsettled and transitional. we need to remember, however, that it did not necessarily appear that way to the economic actors of that time and place. more importantly, certain institutional matrices must have been present there. all these things changed over time, without doubt, and this is precisely where institutions, as conceptualized by nie, can help. in the rest of this article i will take up several issues, or episodes, relating to the early islamic economy writ large. these amount to a representative sampling and not a thorough and exhaustive treatment. two considerations underlie them from beginning to end. the first is the attempt to discover institutional matrices, with an emphasis on their dynamic, changing nature. the second has to do with the sources, especially those which may be described as literary and which use the arabic language. when, as often happens, these sources give us information which seems conflictual or even contradictory, how can we go beyond the (possibly hopeless) task of reconciling them, or promoting one of them at the expense of the other? the impasse of meccan trade as noted earlier, the modern term “market” can refer to a physical place where activities of a certain kind typically happen and also, in a more generalized, abstract sense, to a system of exchange prevailing within a certain geographical space or even through all of space. we may think of these two meanings as poles at either end of a continuum, or in peter bang’s words, as “two ideal-types at either end of a broad spectrum of varying degrees of integration.”43 our everyday use of the term often falls somewhere in between. modern discussions of the early islamic economy as a whole have clustered around the general, abstract sense of “market,” while the discrete, concrete sense has prevailed in the archaeological literature. it seems, however, that confusion between these two senses of the term may have been present in one of the most important historical and historiographical debates in this area. for some time there has been a consensus that when islam first emerged in arabia, it was already so marketand merchant-friendly as to instill commercial habits and ideals into its followers. this characteristic led to the economic boom that began in the second/ eighth century, and ultimately to the pro-market attitude and behavior that muslims have maintained ever since. how did this happen? well before muḥammad’s time, we are told, his tribe, the quraysh, were great traders who established commercial networks so successfully that they became the peninsula’s dominant economic and even political actors. and even though the majority of quraysh opposed muḥammad’s teachings, they all, including muḥammad himself, shared these market-oriented ways of thinking and behaving. according to one theory, the rapid accumulation of wealth in mecca created inequalities and dislocations, so that the tribal system which maintained loyalty and 43. bang, roman bazaar, 140. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 15 security began to unravel. the result was a crisis, at once social, economic, and spiritual, to which muḥammad’s teachings and the qurʾān provided both a response and a cure.44 in 1987 these ways of considering the matter received a challenge in patricia crone’s meccan trade and the rise of islam.45 crone argued that pre-islamic mecca was not the favorable location for trade that modern scholars have made it out to be. in fact its barren soil and off-track location made it useless as a center of trade. mecca never dominated arabia’s commerce with other countries and failed even to attract any notice from those countries. meccan trade, if it existed, must have consisted of local distribution of leather, cheap cloth, livestock, and other such things. crone based this demolition work on a devastating running critique of the arabic literary sources for pre-islamic arabia. while some of the responses to meccan trade consisted of outraged rejection of the entire thing,46 others sought to overturn parts of the argument but not all of it.47 and although there have been interesting contributions since then,48 in overall terms there has not been much progress. as a result, it has seemed for some time that the argument over meccan trade is over and done with. if we accept crone’s argument, then we agree that the entire edifice of pre-islamic arabian history, as constructed by twentieth-century scholars, has collapsed with no alternative edifice available to replace it. if we do not accept it, then we may maintain that quraysh extended their commercial networks to the point that mecca came to resemble the italian merchant republics of later centuries;49 that being shrewd businessmen, quraysh grew rich; that this accumulation of wealth, together with increasingly individualistic behavior, led to a social and spiritual crisis in mecca; and that the triumph of commercial values and market institutions in early islam emerged from this sequence of events, or something like it, in western arabia. in this way we find ourselves back where we were over half a century ago. this controversy involves historiographical problems too complex to allow for any neat resolution, at least in such a brief space as this. instead, i will attempt to find another mode of inquiry, another ground of debate, which perhaps can help us move forward. 44. w. m. watt, muhammad at mecca (oxford: clarendon, 1953). this portrayal of spiritual crisis as a response to social dislocation resembles e. r. dodds’s later explanation for the triumph of christianity in late antiquity in pagan and christian in an age of anxiety (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1965). 45. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1987. 46. especially r. b. serjeant’s “meccan trade and the rise of islam: misconceptions and flawed polemics,” journal of the american oriental society 110 (1990): 472–86, to which crone replied in “serjeant and meccan trade,” arabica 39 (1992): 216–40. 47. for instance, m. lecker, “king ibn ubayy and the quṣṣāṣ,” in methods and theories in the study of islamic origins, ed. h. berg, 29–71 (leiden, brill, 2003). 48. g. heck, charlemagne, muhammad, and arab roots; idem, “gold mining in arabia and the rise of the islamic state,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 42 (1999): 364–95; p. crone, “quraysh and the roman army: making sense of the meccan leather trade,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 70 (2007): 63–88, repr. in idem, the qurʾānic pagans and related matters, collected studies 1 (leiden: brill, 2016), 21–51. 49. h. lammens, “la république marchande de la mecque vers l’an 600 de notre ère,” bulletin de l’institut egyptien, 5th ser., 4 (1910): 23–54. 16 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) narratives and counternarratives the idea that the manner in which a polity first comes into being provides a matrix for all of its subsequent history has a highly respectable pedigree, including such authorities as the ancient roman historian livy and his renaissance florentine disciple machiavelli. no one, however, interprets this principle more generously than do modern historians of islam, who often present the entire edifice of islamic civilization as having taken form, ineluctably, from the circumstances of its foundation. for the economic realm this approach yields the argument that islam was (and is) friendly to commerce and the free market because muḥammad was a merchant, mecca was a trading city, the qurʾān and sunna established principles for conducting commerce, and so forth. as already mentioned, arguments of this kind rely on a body of arabic texts that did not appear in the form in which we have them until the later second/eighth century and in most cases considerably later than that. modern controversies around them have focused on whether their narratives may be taken as “authentic,” in the sense of corresponding to events that actually happened in the world. meanwhile, the arguments over method and interpretation have focused on such areas as politics, jurisprudence, and theology, and only rarely on economy. yet there is no reason why this should be so. in other words, a modern treatment of the early islamic economy needs to enter these methodological debates over the sources, just as much as do treatments of politics and religion. readers of ancient and medieval source materials know that different authors, while discussing identical or similar topics, often bring different, competing agendas and biases to bear on them. the authors may come from similar linguistic, political, or religious traditions and backgrounds, or they may not. either way, they often express their differences without identifying their adversaries, and at times without even identifying the cause of dissension itself. what matters here is that such differences and tensions often exist in our source materials, and that practically by definition they are obscure to us.50 recovering them is accordingly a major part of our task. to do this we must recognize contested territory when we have it before us, and we must reconstruct the relevant narratives and counternarratives as best we can.51 some recent work—not, however, devoted to economic history—offers examples of how this may be done.52 50. j. lassner, islamic revolution and historical memory (new haven, ct: american oriental society, 1986); idem, the middle east remembered (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2000); t. el-hibri, reinterpreting islamic historiography (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999); a. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leiden: brill, 2011); n. haider, waṣīya of abū hāshim,” in scholars and scholarship of the islamic world, ed. a. ahmed et al., 49–83 (leiden: brill, 2011). 51. or “alternative pasts”; see borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 5. 52. see lassner, islamic revolution and historical memory; idem, middle east remembered; el-hibri, reinterpreting islamic historiography; borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir; haider, “waṣīya of abū hāshim.” s. j. shoemaker, the death of a prophet: the end of muhammad’s life and the beginnings of islam (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2014), builds on discordant views in the sources regarding the time of the prophet’s death to reconstruct a detailed narrative and counternarrative, and draws historical consequences from this tension. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 17 looking back at the controversy over meccan trade, participants in the debate have agreed on one thing—namely, that pre-islamic arabia was deeply contested territory of some kind. at issue, among other things, has been whether quraysh sought and achieved commercial dominance throughout arabia. for those who think they did, quraysh’s political preeminence seems a logical (if not always explicitly stated) corollary. for those who think they did not, pre-islamic arabian tribal politics and commercial networks remain a puzzle. elsewhere i have discussed an arabic narrative tradition about “the markets of the arabs before islam.”53 this tradition describes an annual series of markets or fairs that extended throughout the arabian peninsula. according to the tradition, the series began in northcentral arabia at dūmat al-jandal. it then moved across yamāma and the eastern coastlands and oman and on to ḥaḍramawt and yemen before reaching its culminating point at the annual fair of ʿukāẓ. mecca and medina did not belong to the sequence; in spatial terms, the closest they came to it was at ʿukāẓ, not far from mecca but separate and distinct from it. this tradition provides a counternarrative to the better-known narrative(s) that we find in many sources, among which the history of mecca by the third/ninth-century author al-azraqī may be taken as representative. al-azraqī also describes an annual sequence of markets before islam, but his is much shorter than the one in the “markets of the arabs.” in al-azraqī this sequence assumes the form of a circle and culminates in the pilgrimage, for which the markets seem to function as prologue or “warm-up.”54 in the “markets of the arabs,” by contrast, the sequence is longer, both in space and in time, and takes the form not of a circle but of an inwardly directed, accelerating spiral, culminating in the fair of ʿukāẓ (and not the pilgrimage). furthermore, this spiral describes a moral trajectory that begins at a low point, dūmat al-jandal, where the local ruler enjoys a proprietary role in the market, levying taxes and selling his goods before anyone else, thus fixing prices. even worse, the market at dūma specializes in prostitution and slavery. the sequence thus begins at a point of total commodification: instead of good deeds requited or benefits reciprocated, we have persons deprived of their social status and the use of their own bodies. even for free participants, exchanges are constrained by the selfish activity of a ruler, who is, in turn, hampered in his sovereignty and autonomy. the next few points in the sequence come under the partial control or protectorate of the sasanian empire. here arab rulers enjoy the same privileges as the ruler of dūma. in ḥaḍramawt we find the absence of any sovereignty whatsoever, together with the necessity for visitors of finding “protection.” by contrast, the tradition expresses admiration for the markets at ʿadan and ṣanʿāʾ, where the rulers do not exact taxes and refrain from any activity at all. 53. “the arabian silent trade: profit and nobility in the ‘markets of the arabs,’” in histories of the middle east, ed. a. sabra et al., 23–51 (leiden: brill, 2010); “‘time has come full circle: markets, fairs and the calendar in arabia before islam,” in scholars and scholarship of the islamic world, ed. a. ahmed et al., 15–47 (leiden: brill, 2011); “commerce and migration before islam: a brief history of a long literary tradition,” in iranian language and culture, ed. b. aghaei and m. r. ghanoonparvar, 1–27 (malibu, ca: mazda, 2012). 54. al-azraqī, akhbār makka (mecca: dār al-thaqāfa, 1385/1965), 1:182–87; bonner, “time has come full circle,” 36–40. 18 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) the sequence reaches its moral high point at ʿukāẓ. here the negative aspects of the earlier markets, from greedy “kings” to extorting tribal chiefs, are absent. whereas at dūmat al-jandal everything was a commodity, at ʿukāẓ market participants trade commodities, including luxury goods and everyday items such as “leather of ʿukāẓ.” the medieval sources single out ʿukāẓ in terms such as these: “the tribes of the arabs used to congregate at ʿukāẓ every year and used to hold their boasting contests there (wa-yatafākharūna fīhā). their poets would attend [the market] and would vie with one another with their most recent compositions. then they would disperse.”55 the tradition thus associates the fair of ʿukāẓ with the twin themes of generosity and competitiveness. ʿukāẓ was also a place where questions of leadership were decided, even though—or precisely because—it lay under the control of no one. in former times, the kings of yemen used to send agents to ʿukāẓ to find out who was “the most valiant of the arabs” and then “to cultivate him and offer him presents.”56 meanwhile, other “kings” gave presents and “shares of the profits” to the “nobles.” ribḥ, the usual arabic word for “profit,” is tied here to the evaluation of nobility and the constant competition among “nobles” for prestige, recognition, and royal gifts. one effect of ʿukāẓ, and ultimately of the market sequence as a whole, was thus to transform the proceeds from commerce and taxation into prestige-enhancing gifts.57 al-azraqī is evidently aware of this “counternarrative” because he echoes its details, accommodating them within his own meccaand pilgrimage-centered narrative. what, then, are the differences here between narrative and counternarrative? the world of the “markets of the arabs” differs starkly from the world of islam in its ethics (boastful selfaggrandizement) and politics (limited and fragmented sovereignty). it favors an archaic morality, exalting gift-giving and competition for noble status over what we now call commoditization and market exchange. however, the sequence also features such activities as transporting and selling goods. in the end it brings together international maritime trade, desert-crossing caravans, and local production and traffic, all within a single grand sequence. we find a similar contrast within early islam itself. the qurʾān and sunna regulate behavior in the marketplace, laying down principles that we can indeed interpret as favoring the “free market,” for instance by insisting on transparency in transactions and by protecting weaker actors from stronger, tendentially predatory ones. but at the same time, the qurʾān prescribes a morality based on generosity and reciprocity.58 it uses lots of commercial metaphors, as is well known, but this does not mean that it imposes a morality based on what we moderns call free-market principles.59 these differences and similarities between the tradition on the markets, on the one hand, and fundamental texts of early islam, on the other, point to tensions between competing ideologies within the contested space 55. abū ʿubayd al-bakrī, muʿjam mā istaʿjam (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2008), 3:218; yāqūt al-rūmī al-ḥamawī, muʿjam al-buldān (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1955–57), 4:142. 56. al-marzūqī, kitāb al-azmina wa-l-amkina (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif, 1914), 2:165. 57. bonner, “arabian silent trade.” 58. m. bonner, “poverty and economics in the qur’an,” journal of interdisciplinary history 35 (2005): 391–406. 59. a. rippin, “the commerce of eschatology,” in the qur’an as text, ed. s. wild, 125–35 (leiden: brill, 1995). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 19 of pre-islamic arabia.60 alternatively, perhaps it is better to view both market sequences together as harbingers of the nascent islamic order. either way, we find ourselves in a (to us) largely unfamiliar arabian environment, historiographically more promising than the impasse of meccan trade. another contrast here between narrative and counternarrative has to do with the role of quraysh. the modern arguments over meccan trade may have obscured whatever it was that authors such as al-azraqī actually had to say on this score. but it is clear, in any case, that al-azraqī and others like him assign a major role in peninsular trade to quraysh. in the tradition on the markets, by contrast, quraysh are present and respected but in the end only one collective player among many. other groups, especially tamīm, have more prominent roles. this goes against what we think we know about tribal politics and the pilgrimage in arabia before islam.61 however, the point here is not to claim that one or the other of these versions is historically accurate, but rather to explore the contours of this contested terrain. one of the most attractive characteristics, historiographically speaking, of the counternarrative of the arabian markets is its dynamism, as it sweeps up merchants, tribesmen, townsmen, gifts, commodities, and moral values into its spiraling movement. this circuit of markets and fairs is idealized, of course, but it may also correspond to movements that actually took place. it has similarities to, and likely connections with, fairs and markets in contemporary byzantine syria.62 it also bears an uncanny similarity to events that happened soon afterward, especially the wars of the ridda, which, in the admittedly fragmented picture we have of them from muslim historiography,63 also constituted a grand movement around arabia, this time proceeding counterclockwise instead of clockwise and featuring armies instead of traders and battles instead of seasonal fairs.64 we may find it useful to think of these things in terms of douglass north’s “institutional matrices.” in any case, in this way we obtain access to territory that the impasse of meccan trade has prevented us from entering. it is important to emphasize again that as of right now, we still do not have a clear narrative, based on undisputed data and facts, for the politics and economy of arabia at this crucial time. what we do have, for better or worse, is a set of intertwining controversies and arguments, some of them dating from that time itself or soon afterward, and others dating from the modern era. accordingly, we have no choice but to work with these arguments 60. bonner, “time has come full circle,” 40–44. 61. m. kister, “mecca and tamīm,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 8 (1965): 113–63. 62. l. de ligt, fairs and markets in the roman empire: economic and social aspects of periodic trade in a pre-industrial society (amsterdam: gieben, 1993); a. binggeli, “annual fairs, regional networks, and trade routes in syria, sixth-tenth centuries,” in morrison, trade and markets in byzantium, 281–96. the tradition on the “markets of the arabs” describes such markets in umayyad southern syria; al-marzūqī, kitāb al-azmina wa-l-amkina, 2:169–70. 63. m. bonner, “the ridda in east arabian perspective,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the middle east studies association, denver, november 24, 2015. 64. the chronology of the ridda is problematic, but muslim historical writing preferred to describe it in the order ḥijāz—yemen—oman—baḥrayn—yamāma. 20 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) and controversies, hoping to discover narratives that will accommodate the data and facts that we actually do have. an imperial economy now we turn to a later set of episodes. the combined era of the rāshidūn and umayyad caliphs (11–132/632–750) is critical for understanding the history of the economy of the islamic world overall. under what conditions and within what structures did this economy operate during that formative era? when and how did the boom of the early ʿabbāsid era get underway? we may begin with a brief look at the early caliphate through a comparative lens. the caliphate assumed distinctive positions with regard to religion, law, military organization, and claims to legitimacy, although even in these areas it actually had much in common with its immediate predecessors.65 in its basic organization and structure, however, the caliphate belonged to the venerably ancient club of land-based tributary empires. taken together, these constituted a type that lasted from sargon of akkad in the later third millennium bce down to the chinese and other empires of the early modern and even the modern era.66 their tributary character relates to the first element in the polanyian triad, namely, redistribution: they extracted resources, typically though not only through taxation, from certain segments of the population and then redistributed these resources to other segments. the recipients generally included courts (including bureaucracies), armies, and religious establishments (also often including bureaucracies). these processes took place on a massive scale and required enormous investments in labor, technological and organizational input, and other resources. what about the other two elements of the polanyian triad? reciprocity has always played a major role, for instance, in relations between imperial aristocracies and other groups, and within those aristocracies themselves. of most concern to us now, however, is market exchange. in the eyes of some observers, including polanyi himself, market exchange and redistribution are incompatible, at least tendentially. accordingly, to the extent that a premodern empire or state functioned through redistribution, it did not (and presumably could not) function through market exchange. we see this in polanyi’s identification of certain merchants as “factors,” agents of the ruler or the state, rather than independent entrepreneurs—even though these merchants were active in markets (in the physical, concrete sense). this view of the incompatibility of imperial redistribution with market exchange is shared both by antimarket polanyians and certain promarket economists, for whom redistribution seems grossly inefficient and unlikely to have produced such grand results as the roman empire67 or, we may suppose, the early caliphate. 65. g. fowden, empire to commonwealth: consequences of monotheism in late antiquity (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1993). 66. bang and bayly, tributary empires in global history, including wickham, “tributary empires”; bang, roman bazaar, 59–62, 122–23. 67. as in temin, “market economy.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 21 the role and nature of markets accordingly have an important place in these debates among historians of empire. for instance, it is sometimes argued that for various technological, political, and cultural reasons, tributary empires were unable or unwilling to intervene in or to control systematically the marketplaces within their own territory beyond restricting traffic in strategic commodities such as, in the case of rome, materials for armaments, silks, dyes, and foodstuffs destined for the capital city. it is similarly maintained that such empires were unable to accomplish on their own all the tasks necessary for keeping themselves functioning. for example, peasants in the countryside made over a large portion of their produce to the state in the form of taxes. when, as often, the state wanted its tax payments in cash, the agricultural surplus had to be transformed into coin, for which markets were necessary. and even if the state agreed to receive payments in kind, the logistics of collection and transportation were generally too much for the imperial authorities to handle by themselves. markets were thus part and parcel of the imperial system, as were also intermediary figures such as provincial notables and well-connected merchants. at the same time, although local markets may very well have behaved the way we now expect them to, by setting prices in accordance with the forces of supply and demand, they were not, at least by modern standards, well integrated, neither among themselves nor with the provincial and imperial centers. here i will argue that a similar situation prevailed in the early caliphate, though with some distinctive characteristics. for in addition to the shared features just discussed, each tributary empire had characteristics of its own. in the case of rome, once the tributary surplus had been accumulated, it was disbursed mainly to three categories of recipients: first, the imperial court and its dependents; second, the residents and physical infrastructure of the capital and perhaps a few other great cities; and third, the armies stationed along the frontiers. this process of allocation was characteristic of rome, if not utterly unique to it. the early caliphate, meanwhile, stood out for its relation to its own internal markets, as we’ll see shortly. it also stood out for its manner of recruiting and financing its armies, as already mentioned, a topic which we cannot reexamine here in any detail, but which leads us to consider the following. all empires are built on conquest, or at least on expansion of some kind, and they achieve this in different ways. in this regard the early caliphate was exceptional in its astonishingly rapid expansion. this quick pace had consequences, including a considerable variety among the caliphate’s provinces, visible afterward in their fiscal organization. another consequence was a peculiar kind of decentralization, especially during the umayyad era (41–132/661–750). part of the problem here is that our arabic literary sources provide less information about syria, the imperial center, than about certain other provinces, but in any case, these matters remain obscure. how regularly did provincial governors forward their fiscal surplus to the capital in syria? what resources did the umayyad caliphs have available at hand? how far did their writ really extend? one answer came in k. y. blankinship’s the end of the jihād state.68 blankinship argued that since the umayyad caliphs lacked access to much or even most of the revenues from 68. albany: state university of new york press, 1994. 22 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) the far-flung provinces, they came to rely, to an unhealthy extent, on their metropolitan province of syria. but since these resources could not suffice for all the palaces, monuments, bureaucrats, armies, and so forth, how did the central state finance itself? blankinship’s response lies in his title. the umayyad caliphate was a “jihad state” because of its devotion to foreign expansion. lacking revenues from the provinces, it relied on spoils of war arriving from newly conquered territories. and arrive they did: the chronicles tell about fabulous hauls of precious metals, slaves, and other goods. but then expansion met its inevitable limits, rebellions and civil wars flared up, and new, formidable adversaries emerged. no longer able to afford the large armies it needed, the umayyad caliphate tottered and collapsed. it seems clear that the umayyad state could never have lived from depredation alone. nonetheless, blankinship was right to identify it as a conquest polity. and here we arrive at an important difference between the two tributary empires under comparison, the roman and the early islamic. the romans, as mentioned, stationed their legions along the frontiers. this involved lots of coming and going between the frontiers and their local hinterlands, but not so much of it between the frontiers and the imperial capital and heartlands. the umayyad armies, by contrast, were constantly on the move from center to periphery and back again. the “camp cities” (amṣār) in the central provinces housed fighters waiting to be called up for service on the frontiers. some of these eventually settled in the frontier provinces, whereas others returned to the amṣār. in addition to army regulars, unpaid volunteers (mutaṭawwiʿa) also choked the highways. accordingly, the great routes in the umayyad realm saw the constant movement of supplies, matériel, fighters and their families, and camp followers, including, of course, merchants. it seems likely that these highways would have had a higher concentration of military traffic on average than the old roman ones, though this is something incapable of proof. in territories that had previously belonged to the sasanian and byzantine empires and that now belonged to the caliphate, there were already roads, including the ones that we refer to nowadays as constituting the “silk route.” but now some of these, together with other, newer roads, became what i would call, collectively and anachronistically, a “superhighway,” a product both of the initial movement of conquest and of the ensuing large-scale movement of persons and goods. here it is important to emphasize that the frontiers were vital to the umayyad state, not only for expansion and defense, but for the fiscal survival of a cash-starved imperial center and the legitimization of an unpopular regime. we may also note that like their near-contemporaries the carolingians, the umayyads rulers were mobile and peripatetic.69 this superhighway network had a role in the economic boom that began in the mid-second/eighth century, if not earlier. yet it was expenditure by the state, especially military expenditure, that created it in the first place. a similar thing had already happened in the later roman republic and early empire (principate), where the great roads, built by and for armies, contributed toward commerce and trade. in both cases, military 69. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 390, 397–411; cf. m. g. chang, a court on horseback: imperial touring and the construction of qing rule, 1680–1785 (cambridge, ma: harvard university asia center, 2007). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 23 expenditure by the state provided, more or less unintentionally, infrastructure for civilian commerce. but there were also differences. one of these had to do with the speed and care of construction. the romans built their roads slowly, as part of a meticulously planned military infrastructure. the umayyad roads, by contrast, possibly weren’t roads at all, at least by the standards of the modern world or the roman empire—since wheeled transport was likely already on its way out in the near east. at the same time, however, the caliphate did invest in other aspects of long-distance communication.70 another difference had to do with markets. regarding the legions posted along the roman frontiers and receiving their pay in coin, we may say, following bang, that they represented a concentration of surplus consumption which attracted private resources, as civilian merchants and contractors provided services and goods to the army and the state. few, if any, other places in the roman empire afforded opportunities for transregional private commercial ventures on this scale.71 the situation for the early caliphal armies must have been comparable. markets sprang up along the routes, or if they were already there they increased in size. individuals whom we may call private entrepreneurs provided the same service of transforming surplus for soldiers gathered in large numbers with cash to spend. once again, however, there were differences between the roman and umayyad cases. one of these was the high volume of traffic along the umayyad superhighway, at least in strategically important areas. another was the direct connection that the superhighway created between the frontier zones and the cities of the interior. in other words, the military apparatus of the early islamic state linked individual markets to one another while connecting the imperial heartland with its peripheries more directly and on a larger scale than had happened earlier in the roman, byzantine, and (quite likely) sasanian empires. now, however, we encounter a problem: we have little evidence—especially archaeological—for these military markets. we may begin with the armies themselves. army regulars (muqātila) received both stipends (ʿaṭāʾ), or payments in cash, and in-kind sustenance or provisions (rizq). these fighters would not have needed to visit markets for their basic needs, although some of them would have gone there anyway. however, there were others who did need markets, including the volunteers, who didn’t receive provisions from the commissary. in any case, the chronicles provide little information about these markets, although they do recount episodes in which army commanders, cut off from their lines of supply, had recourse to markets.72 we need to look elsewhere. some of the earliest extant literary productions of islamic jurisprudence come from the area of siyar, or law of war and military justice. these books mention the exchange of goods in markets, especially in the context of division of spoils of war. if a fighter receives a share and prefers to exchange it for something else, he may do this in the marketplace. furthermore, the army commander may, if he chooses, sell the entire haul on the market 70. a. j. silverstein, postal systems in the pre-modern islamic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007). 71. an example is the rhône-saône-rhine axis in gaul; see bang, roman bazaar, 110–11, 127–28. 72. examples include al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh (leiden: brill, 1879–1901), 2:1315–17 (maslama’s army starving before constantinople) and 2:1494 (asad b. ʿabd allāh in khuttal). cf. n. fries, das heereswesen der araber zur zeit der omaijaden nach tabari (tübingen: schnürlen, 1921), 12–13. 24 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) and then divide the proceeds among the fighters.73 however, the siyar literature says little or nothing about how these markets functioned—not even whether they followed islamic commercial law or whether any of the merchants conducting business there were non-muslim (as likely they often were). linguistic evidence the notion of a caliphal superhighway has linguistic evidence in its favor. gilbert lazard has argued that new persian (persian of the islamic era) became the language of the entire iranian cultural area as a direct result of the early islamic conquests. before that time, under the sasanian empire, new persian’s immediate ancestor, middle persian or, more precisely, that version of middle persian known to us as pahlavi, had already expanded beyond its original homeland in southwestern iran, since it (pahlavi) was the first language of the empire. however, other regions continued to use other languages including, on the inner asian frontier, soghdian. but then, with the early islamic conquests, came a large-scale movement from western to eastern iran, involving lines of communication and supply, soldiers and their families, camp followers, and military governors with their courts and administrative apparatus. while arabic served as the language of command and written communication, persian constituted the everyday vernacular. it is accordingly in khurasan and transoxania that we find the earliest evidence for new persian, using the arabic alphabet. by 1000 ce it had replaced soghdian in the east, by which time it had also moved back west and become the language of the entire iranian cultural region.74 a similar argument could be made for the spread of arabic in former byzantine lands at the expense of greek. how can we account for the rapid spread of arabic, through all levels of society and in both urban and rural areas, when greek had not spread similarly under hellenistic and roman rule?75 the answer must have to do with increased communication among markets and towns and the articulation of their roles. here we may note that the evidence of language, in and of itself, can be useful. we may also note that dynamic movement on a large scale provides a key to understanding the early development of the islamic economy. ownership of the market in classical islamic law, the market (a concrete, physical space, not the abstract space of the modern concept) is, or should be, marked by openness, both in the accessibility of the space and in the transparency of the transactions taking place there. the marketplace needs to be sustained and protected from predators, both internal and external, and 73. a. morabia, le ğihâd dans l’islam médiéval (paris: albin michel, 1993), 245. 74. lazard, “the rise of the new persian language,” in cambridge history of iran, vol. 4, ed. r. n. frye, 595–632 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1975); idem, la formation de la langue persane, travaux et mémoires de l’institut d’etudes iraniennes i (paris: peeters, 1995). 75. d. wasserstein, “why did arabic succeed where greek failed? language change in the near east after muhammad,” scripta classica israelica 22 (2003): 257–72. see also r. stroumsa, “greek and arabic in nessana,” in schubert and sijpesteijn, documents and history, 143–57. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 25 the political authorities are assumed to take responsibility for its safeguarding. it is not, however, a space owned by anyone. to this we may add that it is generally thought that islamic governments, beginning with the early caliphate, did not exert monopolistic power in the marketplace in any systematic way. in particular, they did not corner the production and/or distribution of strategic commodities, at least not on the scale that their roman and byzantine predecessors and counterparts had achieved.76 however, this picture contrasts with other known characteristics of early islamic government, especially of the umayyads. we begin with the words attributed to yazīd iii upon his ascent to the caliphate in 126/744 during the civil war known as the third fitna: “o people, i give you my pledge that i will not place stone upon stone nor brick upon brick, i will not dig any canal, i will not accumulate wealth or give it to any wife or child [of mine]. . . .”77 here yazīd condemned not only his predecessor al-walīd ii but the entire umayyad dynasty and clan. however, yazīd’s attempt to dissociate himself from his family’s mania for building did him little good, as he soon fell victim to the ongoing dynastic and civil strife. despite all the differences among the various opponents of the umayyads (including zubayrids, shīʿites, and khārijites), they agreed among themselves in condemning the umayyads for having “usurped” property that ought, in the first instance, to have belonged to the early arab settlers, or to the community as a whole, or to the family of the prophet. now the umayyads had their own claims and justifications in these matters. however, their accusers had material evidence on their side, in that the ruling elite demonstrably did engage in commercial and agricultural ventures, some of them quite extensive, in addition to the mosques and palaces and other buildings for which they are better known today. according to a fairly well-known report, after muḥammad first arrived in medina, he opened a market there and gave instructions that no one should impose taxes on it or build it up. perhaps around forty years later the caliph muʿāwiya, who pursued building and agricultural projects in both western and eastern arabia,78 built two commercial spaces within the market of medina and refurbished a third,79 in apparent violation of the principle previously established by the prophet. afterward, during the reign of hishām, the caliph’s uncle ibrāhīm, then governor of medina, ordered the construction of a walled complex of shops, warehouses, and inns, thus uniting the city’s commercial activity within one space. the complex was built handsomely and solidly with its rents accruing, of course, to ibrāhīm. but when hishām died, the city’s residents razed the buildings to the ground.80 we are not told what caused this resentment, but it may have had to do with the usurpation of assets properly belonging to the community or something similar. did opposition also cohere 76. a. laiou and c. morrisson, the byzantine economy (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007). 77. al-ṭabarī, ta’rīkh, 2:1834–35; the history of al-ṭabarī, trans. c. hillenbrand (albany: state university of new york press, 1987–2007), 26:194; borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 395. 78. g. c. miles, “early islamic inscriptions near ṭāʾif in the ḥijāz,” journal of near eastern studies 7 (1948): 236–42; a. al-askar, al-yamama in the early islamic era (reading: ithaca press, 2002), 84. 79. ʿabd allāh b. shihāb al-dīn al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafāʾ bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-ādāb, 1373/1953), 1:541–43; r. foote, “umayyad markets and manufacturing: evidence for a commercialized and industrializing economy in early islamic bilād al-shām” (phd diss., harvard university, 1999), 182–83. 80. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafāʾ, 1:541–43; foote, “umayyad markets,” 182–86. 26 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) around the notion that this activity constituted a constriction of the market, upsetting the balance prescribed by islamic law? we do not know, as our information on the episode is sparse and the “mainstream” chronicles do not even report it. the muwaṭṭaʾ of mālik, a medinan product, does not hint at these events. in syria, the umayyad caliphs and their relatives built and exploited many markets. we have both archaeological and textual evidence for some of these.81 now we may consider this information in the light of recent research on the “desert castles” of umayyad bilād al-shām, which has both expanded and problematized our knowledge of these buildings’ commercial, agricultural, and urban contexts.82 meanwhile, we are also told that governors for the umayyads built commercial structures in iraq, and similar things are likely to have happened elsewhere, although the best-documented province, egypt, does not yield a clear picture in this regard. the ʿabbāsids seem to have engaged in this kind of activity less than their predecessors did, or in any case they managed to attract less attention in the process. it seems on the whole, however, that governors, rulers, and their relatives did continue to own commercial spaces and to rent them out for profit, at least some of the time. why, then, do the umayyads stand out for this practice? the umayyad caliphate was a patrimonial state, like the roman/byzantine and sasanian empires before it and the ʿabbāsid caliphate after it.83 at the same time it was a frontier state (or as blankinship calls it, a jihad state), not only because it relied on revenue from conquest, but because the frontier was essential to the ways in which it exerted and expressed its authority. this applied in particular to the metropolitan province of syria, where the caliphate faced its first and greatest enemy, byzantium, in frontier lands that were close by and readily accessible via the superhighway. apocalyptic literature from this era points to anxiety over a possible byzantine invasion of the syrian heartland. the umayyad caliph, meanwhile, presented himself as the protector of the syrian muslims in his person, just as he embodied the sunna for the entire community.84 in this frontier zone, ordinary muslims seem to have been prevented from acquiring landed property, at least during the later umayyad era, because ownership of such property was considered a prerogative of the caliph.85 it may also be that the umayyad patrimonial frontier state extended its claim to ownership, at least tendentially, not only over newly conquered lands in the syrian frontier zone but also over agricultural and commercial property in the syrian 81. see foote, “umayyad markets”; m. mccormick, “movements and markets in the first millennium: information, containers, and shipwrecks,” in morrisson, trade and markets in byzantium, 51–98; a. walmsley, “regional exchange and the role of the shop in byzantine and early islamic syria-palestine: an archaeological view,” in morrisson, trade and markets in byzantium, 311–30. 82. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 412–43 ; d. genequand, les établissements des élites omeyyades en palmyrène et au proche-orient (beirut: institut français du proche-orient, 2013); idem, “formation et devenir du paysage architectural omeyyade: l’apport de l’archéologie,” in borrut and cobb, umayyad legacies, 417–73. 83. the literature on patrimonial states is enormous, though not for the early caliphate; see borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 391–92. 84. décobert, “notule.” 85. m. bonner, “the naming of the frontier: ʿawāṣim, thughūr, and the arab geographers,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 57 (1994): 17–24, esp. 21–22. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 27 heartland. it then put all these resources to productive use, compensating for the deficiency or unpredictability of revenues from other provinces.86 meanwhile, it may also be the case— although the matter remains controversial—that the umayyad caliphs exerted control over the legal apparatus, which presumably had the final say in who owned what.87 muslims, christians, and jews certainly mixed together in umayyad syria, and they must also have shopped together. this brings up once again the question of what legal system held sway over those marketplaces that were not, as in medina, frequented entirely by arabic-speaking muslims. the only thing that seems certain is that some of these marketplaces were owned by the umayyad extended family. yet this was the formative era of islamic commercial law, a system that prevents powerful individuals from dominating the marketplace. here we have the basis of another contrasting narrative and counternarrative. our usual idea is that in the formative era, the islamic marketplace assumed its characteristics—including its emphasis on transparency and the absence of monopolistic activity, including by the powers that be—in a linear fashion, parallel to the early development of the law governing these practices. against this we have a picture of a marketplace best characterized as diverse and conflictual. poverty, wealth, asceticism modern discussions of the early islamic economy often have an ethical, even moralizing character. writers—whether historians, economists, journalists, apologists, or polemicists— have their views about progress or decline in the islamic world, and they tend to attach the praise or blame for it to islam itself. we have already seen this in the arguments over boom and bust. we can also see it in another way of thinking about the early islamic economy, which, unlike “boom or bust,” has deep roots in arguments that actually took place in the near east during the early islamic era. these take the form of the following narrative, or something like it. before the coming of islam, the arabs lived simply and were accustomed to hardship. those among them who acquired wealth preferred to give it away or to consume it with ostentatious hospitality and feasts, hoping in this way to acquire fame, followers, and clients. this picture did not change fundamentally with the coming of islam, as muḥammad and his community remained frugal in their habits and practiced solidarity and generosity toward those less fortunate than themselves. but then the great conquests transformed everything. accustomed to making do with little in an austere land, the arabs suddenly had all the wealth of the great empires spread before them. they divided some of this wealth among themselves as spoils of war and took advantage of the rest as beneficiaries of the tax revenues that now came their way. from then on, however, things did not go smoothly. some individuals acquired fabulous wealth and flaunted it with the arrogance of nouveaux riches. others—most famously the second caliph ‘umar b. al-khaṭṭāb—condemned this attitude and practiced self-denial in ways which may strike us now as equally flamboyant. meanwhile, tensions arose over who was to have how much and in comparison to whom. 86. borrut, entre mémoire and pouvoir, 431–44. 87. schacht, origins of muhammadan jurisprudence, 192–213; décobert, “notule.” 28 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) tensions of this kind underlay what some modern observers have called “social protests,” such as the events associated with abū dharr al-ghifārī, and they had a role in the fitnas, or civil wars. dissatisfaction of this kind also resulted, later on, in a widespread ethos of passively renouncing the world (zuhd). indeed, islamic asceticism is often portrayed as having emerged directly from the old arabian austerity, or else from nostalgia for it.88 this mode of arguing and narrating had a major place in early islamic economic thought and practice. for even if there was, as s. d. goitein claimed, an “early islamic bourgeoisie,”89 not all its members enjoyed their prosperity with blissfully carefree consciences. contrary to what some present-day writers claim when they link early islam to modern notions of property, market, and consumption, many early muslims in the commercial sector felt profound unease about “gain” (kasb, iktisāb).90 some of them expressed this unease, and perhaps even resolved it, through renunciatory practices (“this-worldly asceticism”). what we call the realm of economics was for them at least as much an ethical—and of course, religious—area of concern as it was a practical one. perhaps our modern discussions have taken this discourse too literally. it was quite natural for people in, say, third/ninth-century baghdad to view their own ups and downs in continuity with events in arabia two or three centuries earlier. for after all, it was old arabia and the earliest generations of islam that provided them with legal and ethical frameworks for understanding these matters. nonetheless, they lived in a different world: wealthier, urbanized, monetized, and with incomparably higher degrees of division of labor and social inequality. accordingly, we should pay attention to this discourse, and others like it, not as literal accounts of what happened, but as components of early muslims’ understanding of the economic realm. conclusions here we may step back for a moment to ask what questions matter most for us regarding the economy of early islam. we will all have our own preferences, but it seems that most of the modern contributions discussed here share a concern with continuity. did the coming of islam mean business as usual or a fresh start? did property and infrastructure suffer damage from the early conquests? what new technologies were introduced and what already-existing technologies advanced or declined? what happened to trade networks at the local, regional, and interregional levels? these questions often occur in the framework of an inquiry regarding the transition “from late antiquity to early islam.” these questions are all important. however, as scholars have asked and (where possible) answered them, they have not managed to avoid the problems discussed toward the beginning of this article. in particular, the term “economy” recurs in its modern sense, as an autonomous domain of experience, whereas the inhabitants of the early caliphate did not think of the economy in such terms—as indeed no one did before the modern era. this does not mean that we should avoid the term, precisely in its modern sense: for as modern 88. l. kinberg, “what is meant by zuhd,” studia islamica 66 (1985): 27–44. 89. goitein, “rise of the middle-eastern bourgeoisie.” 90. l. kinberg, “compromise of commerce,” der islam 66 (1989): 193–212; bonner, “kitāb al-kasb.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 29 observers, we have no real alternative. however, we do need to integrate the economy into other areas of experience, including religion and politics (both civilian and military). we also need to consider the early islamic economy in the comparative context of tributary empires. modern discussions tend to portray these changes in near eastern society, politics, and economy as dutifully attending upon the arrival of a new ideology. once certain basic principles and habits have been inculcated in the earliest generations, they remain in force basically forever. yet everything that we know about early islam suggests that this was an era of dynamic change. for that collective actor known to us as the muslim community, it was an era of intense conflict, both external and internal. accordingly, we may do well to seek approaches that feature dynamism and movement. here maurice lombard stands out, in retrospect, as a pioneer. in this article i have discussed only a few of the many pieces that need to be integrated into a broad picture. i have tried to find ways to use the early sources productively, by identifying contrasting and conflicting narratives and counternarratives within them. in this way i hope to discover certain institutional matrices that shaped these processes— though they did not govern or determine them. in the case of the argument over meccan trade, we can identify two rival matrices, one in the master narrative familiar to us from such authors as al-azraqī, and the other in the narrative of the “markets of the arabs.” these matrices are then, in turn, relevant to the events of the ridda wars, which, as already noted, followed the sequence of the “markets of the arabs” throughout the peninsula, but in reverse order. for the umayyad era, meanwhile, we have lots of information regarding the economy, but we lack a framework (or matrix) for bringing it all together. again, the juxtaposition of rival conceptions may be useful: instead of an orderly progress toward the “free-market” world of the ʿabbāsid era, we may have before us a diverse, even chaotic marketplace in which the ruling elites do precisely that which, according to islamic law, they are not supposed to do, namely, manipulate and create productive and commercial infrastructure and institutions, all to their own advantage. finally, we may return to the economic boom that began in the early ʿabbāsid era, if not earlier. we do not know exactly how it happened, but during the third/ninth century the situation becomes clearer, as we begin to have literary sources of various kinds. among these the arabic geographical literature is especially helpful, and within this literature the fourth/tenth-century author ibn ḥawqal91 stands out in particular. with his expertise in trade, commerce, finance, and public administration, ibn ḥawqal helps us recognize our point of arrival. he also presents the advantage of having devoured (or thoroughly plagiarized) his predecessor al-iṣṭakhrī, so that this single text provides detailed information from at least two successive generations. one of the features of ibn ḥawqal’s work is his detailed itinerary, already familiar from earlier arabic geographical literature. even though al-iṣṭakhrī and ibn ḥawqal offer the results of their own experience and research, these itineraries constitute the collective 91. abū al-qāsim ibn ḥawqal al-naṣībī, kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ, ed. j. kramers (leiden: brill, 1938; repr. 1967); trans. m. bonner, book of the image of the earth (reading: garnet, 2018). 30 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) achievement of several generations. they are tied in their origins not only to the imperial postal system (barīd) but also to the army, including of the umayyad era, with its superhighway. another feature is political fragmentation. al-iṣṭakhrī and ibn ḥawqal do not even try to peddle the fiction of a unitary caliphate, which in their time existed barely or not at all. despite this fragmentation, however, a remarkable integration of markets and production emerges from ibn ḥawqal’s presentation of networks at the local, regional, and interregional levels. i use “integration” here in a general sense, but i think that upon close examination, this and similar texts will also yield evidence of integration in a more technical sense, regarding the relation (coordination) of prices for a range of commodities and over time in different, but connected markets.92 for the most part in ibn ḥawqal’s world, governors and rulers do not intervene often in the marketplace, at least directly. the great exception, the ḥamdānid ruler nāṣir al-dawla, intervenes in, or rather usurps and destroys marketplaces, especially in nisibis and mosul, so egregiously and outrageously as actually to prove the rule.93 on another occasion, in tiflīs (tbilisi), when a group of merchants undertake a rather questionable piece of business, their leader sends a message to the amīr to inform him but does not wait for permission to proceed.94 here we see no polanyian “factors” (merchants operating on the account of the ruler or the state), and none of the “piggybacking” activity of certain merchants in the roman empire who, many centuries earlier, had combined lucrative activity on behalf of the state with commerce on their own account, receiving handsome tax breaks along the way.95 on the other hand, ibn ḥawqal shows endless admiration for certain great men who, after acquiring fortunes in government service, set themselves up in the countryside in manorial splendor,96 like provincial magnates in the roman and other tributary empires. he never tires of recounting the exploits of such people in the fiercely competitive domain of generosity and hospitality. ibn ḥawqal brings us to where we knew we were going to arrive all along: a world where princes and governors exert only limited control over the marketplace; where islamic commercial law prevails, more or less, in that marketplace; where prices find their “correct” levels on their own; and where many people—including ibn ḥawqal himself— show remarkable sophistication in the economic, commercial, and fiscal domains. one way or another, this is a different world from that of late byzantine syria and egypt and sasanian iraq and iran. markets are now more integrated and yes, by modern standards, more “free.” how have we arrived here? i would argue that it has not been along a straight line leading back to the mecca and medina of the prophet and beyond that to an earlier, promarket (though still pagan) mecca. instead, the early islamic economic regime included what we may call, in polanyian terms, a surprisingly large dose of reciprocity, frequently expressed 92. bang, roman bazaar, 12, 29, 114–15. 93. ibn ḥawqal, kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ, 211–16. the same applies to sayf al-dawla in aleppo, and other members of the ḥamdānid clan. 94. ibid., 340–42. 95. bang, roman bazaar, 74–75. 96. ibn ḥawqal, kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ, 98–99, 154, 454, 466. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) in search of the early islamic economy • 31 in qurʾānic rhetoric and ethics, together with more predictable doses of redistribution and market exchange. above all, the early islamic economic order emerged from the large-scale movements and mixings of merchants, soldiers, and other people, together with the legal and moral principles, commodities, gifts, and other things that they bring with them. it also emerged from a long series of conflicts, such as those between quraysh and their rivals in old arabia over trade and access to markets; between the earliest islam and its ideological, political, and commercial rivals; between the umayyad ruling house and its enemies; and others that remain to be identified and charted. 32 • michael bonner al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) bibliography al-askar, abdullah. al-yamama in the early islamic era. reading: ithaca press, 2002. avni, gideon. the byzantine-islamic transition in palestine: an archaeological approach. oxford: oxford university press, 2014. al-azraqī, muḥammad ibn ʿabd allāh. akhbār makka. mecca: dār al-thaqāfa, 1385/1965. al-bakrī, abū ʿubayd. muʿjam mā istaʿjam. beirut: 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m. agricultural innovation in the early islamic world: the diffusion of crops and farming techniques, 700–1100. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983. watt, w. montgomery. muhammad at mecca. oxford: clarendon, 1953. wickham, chris. framing the early middle ages: europe and the mediterranean, 400–800. oxford: oxford university press, 2006. ———. “tributary empires: late rome and the arab caliphate.” in tributary empires in global history, 205–213. edited by peter bang and christopher a. bayly. houndmills: palgrave macmillan, 2011. review essay al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 233-266 women, identity, and power: a review essay of antony eastmond, tamta’s world* zaroui pogossian ruhr-universität-bochum center for religious studies (germany) (zaroui.pogossian@rub.de) antony eastmond, tamta’s world: the life and encounters of a medieval noblewoman from the middle east to mongolia (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017). isbn 978-1107-16756-8. abstract this article, a response to antony eastmond’s monograph tamta’s world, pays particular attention to women’s history and identity at the intersection of cultural and religious interactions in medieval georgia, armenia, and anatolia. it highlights the importance of the women in t‘amt‘a’s family—her mother and aunts—in shaping her identity, despite eastmond’s emphasis on the agency of men in this process. i argue that the lives and self-representation of these women were far more relevant to t‘amt‘a than the numerous examples from various parts of the islamicate world that eastmond provides would suggest. the article critically examines the notion of “fluid identities” as applied to the medieval evidence. it does so by considering previous research that has rejected the historicity of zak‘arid/mxargrʒeli princes’ kurdish origin. furthermore, it outlines the divergent armenian and georgian historiographical traditions on the naming of this dynasty, reveals their sources, and underscores that genealogical constructions and the choice of dynastic monikers were strategies of legitimation. the visual evidence likewise requires nuanced interpretation, as i demonstrate in treating the axtala monastery’s frescoes. i conclude by emphasizing that research aimed at bridging different disciplines, like eastmond’s, is essential but highly challenging. its challenges may be partially offset through collaborative efforts among specialists. * i would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this article whose comments helped me fine tune the arguments presented here. i am grateful to the journal’s superb editing and copy-editing work, a rarity in our age, which has improved the flow and style of writing beyond what i would have otherwise accomplished. research for this paper was carried out under the auspices of a project funded by the european research council (erc) within the european union’s horizon 2020 research and innovative programme (grant agreement no. 647467, consolidator grant jewseast). mailto:zaroui.pogossian%40rub.de?subject= 234 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) general remarks tamta’s world is an imaginative reconstruction of the turbulent, fascinating story and the historical context of a thirteenth-century armenian noblewoman’s—t‘amt‘a’s—life.1 eastmond takes the reader through the various circumstances that forced t‘amt‘a to move in 1210 from her native lands in the north of historical armenia (the province of loṙi) to a city on the northwestern coast of lake van, xlat‘ (akhlat in eastmond), which was then under ayyubid rule.2 from there she traveled to jazīra and syria, where she may have sojourned for a brief period of time. soon going back to xlat‘, she lived in and ruled over the city on behalf of her husband, al-ashraf (d. 1254). a dramatic encounter with jalāl al-dīn khwārazmshāh in 1230 likely forced her to return to her paternal family at some point in late 1230s. subsequently, t‘amt‘a may have been forced to undertake a long journey to the mongol court in qaraqorum, where she resided as a hostage for nine years before she was granted permission to return once more to xlat‘ in 1245. she was appointed the city’s ruler, this time in her own name, but subject to mongol overlordship. t‘amt‘a probably died in xlat‘ in the mid-1250s. already the bare geography of t‘amt‘a’s movements is extraordinary by any standard. the various peoples, religions, cultures, and languages that she encountered mark her life as anything but dull. yet it would be reductive to describe the book’s scope as merely a reconstruction of t‘amt‘a’s life, in which the city of xlat‘ serves as the “other main actor” (p. 124). instead, eastmond uses the very brief and fragmentary notices on this noblewoman in contemporary armenian,3 georgian, persian, and arabic sources as triggers for delving into various aspects of courtly life and ruling practices; religion and interreligious contact and conflict; and pious foundations, their significance for the display of power, and the role of women as patrons, among others. eastmond pays particular attention to visual and material culture, such as the urban environment and the landscape, including various types of buildings and their architectural features. nor does he neglect trade, politics, or war, exploring their interreligious dimensions. the geographical sweep of the book is impressive: it covers portions of the eurasian and african continents, stretching from the southern foothills of the caucasus mountains further southand westward, through anatolia and 1. the scholarly transcription of her name, following the conventional system of hübschmann-meilletbenveniste (hmb), is t‘amt‘a. eastmond has opted for a simplified spelling—tamta—for this name as well as other proper names, as he explains on p. xxii. in this review, all armenian proper names are transcribed according hbm (adopted by revue des études arméniennes), georgian names according to revue des études géorgiennes et caucasiennes, and arabic, persian, and turkish names according to the encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed. after the first mention of each name, i indicate in parentheses the transliteration used by eastmond. any direct quotations from eastmond reproduce his spelling. this paper is based mainly on armenian and some georgian sources. within each of these traditions there are different dating systems. in order to avoid multiple conversions between these and other chronological conventions, this article will provide only ce dates. 2. the city is called akhlāṭ/khilaṭ in islamic sources and khilat/khliat in byzantine ones. in view of the diversity of spellings, eastmond opts for akhlat throughout the book. 3. armenian sources are the most detailed on t‘amt‘a. of prime importance is kirakos ganjakec‘i, patmut‘iwn hayoc‘ [history of the armenians], ed. k. melik‘-ōhanǰanyan (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1961), finished ca. 1265. kirakos is one of the few authors to mention t‘amt‘a by name. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 235 mesopotamia to egypt, and eastward to the mongol steppes, with the great khan’s court in qaraqorum at their center. eastmond’s aim is to recreate t‘amt‘a’s world on the basis of all possible external evidence that has reached us. in the process, he masterfully transforms t‘amt‘a and xlat‘ to anything but a mere “footnote in history” (p. 391). ultimately, he makes a strong case for placing armenian and georgian medieval history within a multicultural and multireligious landscape as the most fruitful interpretative framework. t‘amt‘a’s odyssey started in 1210, when her father, iwanē, of the zak‘arid/mxargrʒeli family (ivane mqargrdzeli) was taken prisoner by an ayyubid guard during his unsuccessful siege of xlat‘ (pp. 3–7). iwanē was a leading member of a new but powerful armenian military nobility of zak‘arid lineage (i return to these denominations below) who pursued a brilliant military-political career at the georgian court, then at the apogee of its power. to regain his freedom, iwanē used t‘amt‘a as a diplomatic commodity, giving her in marriage to the ayyubid ruler of xlat‘, al-awḥad, the nephew of the famous ṣalāḥ al-dīn. al-awḥad’s death only a few months later meant that his wives passed to his brother al-ashraf, a much more ambitious ruler. as the wife of al-ashraf, t‘amt‘a is thought to have remained in xlat‘ until ca. 1237, with a possible short stay in syria. her husband was absent from xlat‘ most of the time, since his political interests lay elsewhere, in jazīra. while in xlat‘, t‘amt‘a used her position to benefit the christian inhabitants of the city as well as those of the historical region of tarōn to the west. sources credit her for having created propitious conditions for pilgrims passing through the territories around xlat‘ and through tarōn on their way to jerusalem (p. 8). the armenian historian kirakos ganjakec‘i states that these policies were especially beneficial for georgian christians, which could equally denote ethnic georgian christians and armenian chalcedonians. kirakos calls t‘amt‘a the “lord of the city [of xlat‘].”4 after a forced and short-lived marriage to jalāl al-dīn khwārazmshāh (ca. 1230), t‘amt‘a likely returned to her homeland, which was ruled by her brother awag at the time. she witnessed the mongol campaigns and conquest of these territories from 1236 onward, which had a profound effect on the power balance between armenian military elites and the georgian court. awag now acted on his own behalf rather than as a representative of the georgian kingdom, directly negotiating for peace with the mongols through his complete submission. thereupon t‘amt‘a became once more a valuable diplomatic tool, possibly undertaking a voyage to qaraqorum and remaining there as a hostage to ensure awag’s loyalty to the mongols. her return to xlat‘ around 1245 as the ruler of the city under the mongols brought her life full circle. she probably died and was buried in xlat‘, though there is no explicit evidence of this. 4. kirakos, patmut‘iwn hayoc‘, 292. kirakos uses the word tēr, literally “lord,” rather than its feminine counterpart tikin (“lady”). there has been no study of the significance of gendered uses of this title in t‘amt‘a’s time. nevertheless, this period witnessed important transformations in traditional social structures, land tenure practices, and titles. these topics are discussed in s. la porta, “‘the kingdom and the sultanate were conjoined’: legitimizing land and power in armenia during the 12th and early 13th centuries,” revue des études arméniennes 34 (2012): 73–118. one may speculate that tēr had stronger legal and political connotations than did tikin, which may have constituted an honorary title. admittedly, the issue requires further research. 236 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) given the paucity of direct information on t‘amt‘a, the various chapters of the book are digressions on themes that help us imagine her world. eastmond explores such topics as the theory and practice of marriage at the ayyubid court and other contemporary muslim societies; public works, such as pious foundations established by high-standing wives or widows among the ayyubids, saljuqs, and armenians; rivalry among women at court and in the harem; and the various options available to them for exerting influence or creating a public image, not least through the management of taxation. eastmond then evokes the physical features that characterized t‘amt‘a’s world, from palaces and objects therein to cityscapes. this portrait is based on other medieval anatolian cities and palaces, which, for eastmond, provide parallels to the now lost premodern structures of xlat‘. he thus explores the ways in which different ethnic and religious groups lived and displayed symbols of their faith within these other cities’ internal topography and on their very walls. but the methodological soundness of this procedure is questionable. overall, eastmond’s reconstruction sets out two lines of argumentation that contribute to the study of medieval georgia, armenia, and anatolia. first, he masterfully describes the multicultural landscape of these territories. they were inhabited or invaded by peoples speaking a multiplicity of languages, confessing different faiths, and organized according to varied social structures. such diversity translated into intense interactions in the social, artistic, military, and religious spheres but could also give rise to conflict. it also meant, at least among military elites, the formation of multifaceted or even fluid identities with numerous shared features and a common language of rulership. the subject of identity politics is thus one of eastmond’s central themes. second, he highlights the place of women in this world. he emphasizes the impact of patriarchal societies on the formation and transformations of women’s identities. he forcefully argues that women’s identities were largely imposed upon them by men, and he explores the impact of such gender dynamics on women’s history. i believe, however, that both of these key themes—identity formation and women’s agency within it—require more nuanced interpretations. the individual topics and specific persons as well as single objects, buildings, and cities explored in this book are mostly well known, and many are well researched. thus, eastmond’s purpose is not to break new ground but rather to bring this wealth of material together in a comparative perspective. his emphasis on visual culture and the material heritage is especially noteworthy. such a painstaking collection of information in one book provides an overall vision and brings to life a vibrant but also violent world, one of close interaction among peoples of different faiths, languages, and social structures. this view helps us imagine how a woman like t‘amt‘a managed to survive and rule as she moved through these different social, cultural, and linguistic environments. needless to say, her world was a male-dominated world, which makes t‘amt‘a all the more interesting as a historical figure. whether these encounters resulted in “shifting identities” or even imposed “different identities” on t‘amt‘a is a subject i will explore below. because of the diversity of the material covered in the book, tamta’s world appears to be aimed at a broad readership, including scholars engaged in a variety of disciplines. its fluid and clear style of writing is likely to attract also interested readers outside of scholarly circles. the courage to tackle such vast material, bridging multiple academic al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 237 fields and bringing scholarly traditions into conversation with each other, is praiseworthy. projects with such ambitious sweep open up new vistas of research by juxtaposing multiple perspectives on the same problem. yet the great breadth of the book is also what leaves several critical questions unanswered. precisely because of its wide-ranging scope, it is perhaps inevitable that specialists in various more specific fields may find some of the author’s interpretations of complex problems and unresolved hypotheses, as well as his use and presentation of certain sources, less convincing. still, it is yet another merit of the book to have raised these questions, which then stimulate more specialized discussion. i will explore some of these questions below. remarks of an armenologist in his acknowledgements (p. xx), eastmond recognizes the challenges of conducting research into t‘amt‘a’s world caused by the variety of languages used in the primary sources and the near-impossibility of mastering them all. one could hardly disagree. yet in view of the central subject matter—t‘amt‘a—and the available sources on her, knowledge of arabic and armenian, in particular, would seem indispensable, not only because of the importance of direct access to all available primary material, but also because the acquisition of these languages would also entail a thorough training in the relevant historiography (and, not least, in the fields’ historiographic problems). given my own specialization, i do not feel competent to analyze the author’s use of sources in arabic or persian. my remarks are focused on the area i know and can judge best, namely, medieval armenian history and the relevant sources, but i will also make a limited foray into the georgian material when necessary. through these reflections, some of which challenge eastmond’s overarching conclusions as well as his specific interpretations, i hope to emphasize the diversity of the armenian sources, the importance of using them in full in order to appreciate the multiplicity of points of view, and the new interpretative possibilities these sources offer for attempts to reconstruct christian-muslim interactions in medieval anatolia. shifting identities and methodological concerns as mentioned earlier, identity, and women’s identity in particular, is a key concept in the book, viewed through the lens of t‘amt‘a’s experiences. indeed, we are informed already in the book’s first pages that, through her life story and encounters with different peoples and languages, t‘amt‘a’s “identity changed in consequence” (p. 2), and that “as her life was subject to such change and fluctuation, the transformations of her identity are central” (p. 20). eastmond also duly notes that we will never be able to reach “t‘amt‘a’s internal character and personality” but can explore only its “outward display” (p. 15). various examples of individuals and groups whose identities were expressed in ways that seem ambiguous or fluid are cited in an effort to imagine how t‘amt‘a’s own identity might have been transformed. the starting point for these transformations is her family. eastmond reminds us that the family had a history of identity changes prior to and during t‘amt‘a’s own lifetime. thus, the zak‘arids, who were “of kurdish origin,” became armenianized a few generations before t‘amt‘a, adopting the non-chalcedonian form of armenian christianity 238 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) and the language. t‘amt‘a’s father, iwanē, then converted to the chalcedonian confession of the georgian (and byzantine) church as he pursued a military career at the court of the georgian queen tamar (r. 1184–1210). his elder brother zak‘arē (zakare in eastmond), however, remained in the fold of the armenian apostolic church. in the twelfth century and the first three decades of the thirteenth, the kingdom of georgia was the strongest christian state in the region, one that often portrayed itself as the protector of all the christians in the face of the conquests and rule of various islamic dynasties in historical armenia and anatolia. zak‘arē’s and iwanē’s flexible religious strategy ensured the appeal of the brothers to their (chalcedonian) georgian and (non-chalcedonian) armenian subjects. this appeal was particularly vital for the command of their mixed armeno-georgian military forces. in their core territories—the border area of armenian-georgian settlements—there was also an important armenian chalcedonian community, which iwanē may have wished to strengthen (pp. 21–65). considering the fluidity of the brothers and those they ruled, eastmond calls for abandoning “any simple ‘national’ categorisation” (p. 27). it is beyond question that any discussion of medieval identities must be free of anachronistic notions and “national categorisation” based on the modern concept of a nation-state. i could not agree more with eastmond on this point. at the same time, however, when challenging this outdated scholarly paradigm, which was, at any rate, the result of intellectual developments in a post-enlightenment european context, the availability, complexity, and agenda of the sources should be given due credit. although in some cases “changing identities” or at least shifts in their public display may be possible to trace, in others we should apply more caution in drawing conclusions. i will first make a few general methodological remarks before embarking on a more detailed analysis of certain specific cases presented by eastmond as evidence of “fluid identities” in order to point out some of the inherent source-critical and historiographic problems. naturally, it is not possible to discuss every single example offered by eastmond. i focus on those that are directly relevant to the central topic of the book—t‘amt‘a’s life—and on which my familiarity with the problems at hand allows me to make critical remarks. to break free of a “national” or “nationalistic” outlook when analyzing medieval sources, eastmond draws on two theoretical works: b. anderson’s imagined communities and a. smith’s “national identities: modern and medieval” (p. 22).5 yet anderson’s book, as popular as it has been, is relevant to the process and methods of identity construction (or imagination, if one wishes) of only some nations in the modern era. beyond the merits of his paradigm, which has been questioned on various grounds,6 anderson’s model relies on an entirely different and much vaster set of sources, not to speak of the hardly comparable material and technological context of the period it tackles (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), than what is available to scholars who deal with the thirteenth 5. b. anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (london: verso, 1991); a. d. smith, “national identities: modern and medieval,” in concepts of national identity in the middle ages, ed. l. johnson, a. v. murray, and s. forde, 21–46 (leeds: university of leeds, 1995). 6. for a recent criticism of the use of this model for understanding medieval concepts of “nation,” particularly the “roman” identity in byzantium, see, for example, a. kaldellis, “the social scope of roman identity in byzantium: an evidence-based approach,” byzantina symmeikta 27 (2017): 200–201. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 239 century. anderson’s treatment of the “middle ages” itself is so fragmentary, superficial, and stereotypical that his paradigm’s utility for a medieval historian seems as questionable as that of paradigms based on concepts of a nation-state.7 similarly, smith’s oft-cited article’s definition of a “nation” has been subject to criticism for its inapplicability to medieval societies.8 a recent and even more thorough critique of smith from an islamicist’s point of view—by j. bray in a talk given in june 2016—emphasized the unreliability of smith’s model when brought to bear on medieval islamic sources.9 unfortunately, this analysis was not available to eastmond. but one hopes that every scholar would apply his or her critical judgment in evaluating the utility of a theoretical framework to be applied to the available source material. various studies by n. garsoïan and b. l. zekiyan, two of the few but illustrious contemporary scholars who have carried out extensive research on the premodern understanding and formation of armenian identity, are regrettably absent from eastmond’s book. garsoïan has focused mainly on late antiquity. however, her methodological considerations on the facets of armenian identity and the tension between modern scholarly discourse limited by a “national” view and the available evidence would have added depth to eastmond’s own analysis.10 zekiyan, too, has explored the multiple components of medieval armenian identity, emphasizing its “polyvalence.” particularly valuable given eastmond’s subject matter would have been two of zekiyan’s works that focus precisely on the zak‘arids/mxargrʒelis, while his more recent magisterial treatment of the theme of cultural interactions in “subcaucasia” represents a milestone in research on armenian 7. see, for example, anderson, imagined communities, 15–17, where the author uses such problematic (and unexplained) concepts as the “unselfconscious coherence” that characterized (presumably) the european middle ages. for a more sustained discussion of anderson, see kaldellis, “social scope,” and the bibliography cited there. 8. r. davies, “nations and national identities in the medieval world: an apologia,” journal of belgian history 34 (2004): 567–579. 9. j. bray, “vexed questions” (paper presented at the conference “‘and you shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation’: chosen peoples from the bible to daesh,” university of oxford, june 20, 2016). bray’s talk is available as a podcast at http://torch.ox.ac.uk/role-religion-identity. 10. n. garsoïan, “reality and myth in armenian history,” in the east and the meaning of history: proceedings of the international conference, rome, 23–27 november 1992, ed. g. garbini and b. scarcia amoretti, 117–145 (rome: bardi, 1994); eadem, “notes préliminaires sur l’anthroponymie arménienne du moyen âge,” in l’anthroponymie: document de l’histoire sociale des mondes méditerranéens médiévaux, ed. m. bourin, j.-m. martin, and f. menant, 227–39 (rome: école française de rome, 1996); eadem, “the two voices of armenian medieval historiography: the iranian index,” studia iranica 25 (1996): 7–43; eadem, “the problem of armenian integration into the byzantine empire,” in studies on the internal diaspora of the byzantine empire, ed. h. ahrweiler and a. laiou, 53–124 (washington, dc: dumbarton oaks research library and collection, 1998). these articles have been reprinted in n. garsoïan, church and culture in early medieval armenia (ashgate: variorum, 1999), as nos. xii, ix, xi, and xiii, respectively. see also n. garsoïan, “evolution et crise dans l’historiographie récente de l’arménie médiévale,” revue du monde arménien modern et contemporain 6 (2001): 7–27, reprinted in n. garsoïan, studies on the formation of christian armenia (ashgate: variorum, 2010), no. i, and eadem, “mer hołer,” in mélanges jean-pierre mahé, ed. a. mardirossian, a. ouzounian, and c. zuckerman, 369–76 (paris: association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2014). http://torch.ox.ac.uk/role-religion-identity 240 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) identity and should have been consulted for the methodological tools it proposes.11 indeed, zekiyan has long called for distinguishing the various facets that made up the identity of medieval personages, including ethnicity, state, religion, and class, and for revealing the combinations and displays of these facets in different contexts. by way of example, such a nuanced understanding is necessary when one wishes to evaluate the function of the art sponsored by the zak‘arids and the message it conveyed, as well as the type of identity (ethnic? state-related? religious?) it represented.12 even if eastmond had disagreed with garsoïan’s or zekiyan’s views, it would have been important to engage with previous scholarship that has treated the very same subjects and one of the most fundamental concepts of the book—identity.13 identity transformations and women in t‘amt‘a’s family it is appropriate to start my exploration of the specific themes evoked in tamta’s world with its protagonist, the amazing t‘amt‘a. although the main purpose of the book is to follow t‘amt‘a and try to see the world through her eyes, the lack of any direct information on her compels eastmond to dedicate numerous pages, perhaps too many, to the reconstruction of the context of her life on the basis of possible parallel cases. the descriptions of marital practices, the activities of other high-standing christian or muslim wives (particularly their sponsorship of pious foundations), and the ways in which such women could wield power are meant to hint at the social environment in which t‘amt‘a may have lived and acted. accompanied by ample visual material, the descriptions are a feast for the eyes, but frequently it feels as though we lose sight of t‘amt‘a herself. one is not always sure to what extent the various examples are applicable to or useful for understanding the main protagonist of the book. meanwhile, other, in my view crucial material is absent. the transformations of t‘amt‘a’s identity run through the book as one of its leitmotifs. in order to understand them, one has to form an idea of their different stages, including t‘amt‘a’s origins. here eastmond insists on the role of iwanē in shaping his daughter’s identity: “tamta’s identity before her first marriage was intimately bound up with that of her father” (p. 27). given the absence of t‘amt‘a’s name in any inscriptions left by iwanē and her anonymity before her marriage, he concludes: “this invisibility, this dependence on the father, ensures that we are right to think of tamta as sharing her father’s identity 11. b. l. zekiyan, “prémisses pour une méthodologie critique dans les études arméno-géorgienne,” bazmavēp 139 (1981): 460–469, and idem, “le croisement des cultures dans les regions limitrophe de géorgie, d’arménie et de byzance,” annali di ca’ foscari 25, no. 3 (1986): 81–96. for more general remarks, see his “lo studio delle interazioni politiche e culturali tra le popolazioni della subcaucasia: alcuni problemi di metodologia e di fondo in prospettiva sincronica e diacronica,” in il caucaso: cerniera fra culture dal mediterraneo alla persia (secoli iv–xi), 1:427–481 (spoleto: centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1996), and the various chapters in his l’armenia e gli armeni. polis lacerata e patria spirituale: la sfida di una sopravvivenza (milan: guerrini e associati, 2000). 12. zekiyan, “le croisement des cultures,” 89. 13. the continued importance of this subject is attested by more recent publications. a new collected volume, unfortunately not yet available to eastmond, is particularly noteworthy: k. babayan and m. pifer, eds., an armenian mediterranean: words and worlds in motion (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2018). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 241 during this first stage of her life” (p. 84). men’s role in the evolution of t‘amt‘a’s identity is stressed also after her marriage: “when tamta transferred from her father’s family to that of her new husband, she was forced to become part of a new family with a new identity” (p. 84); “to the core of being an armenian-georgian noblewoman she added the role of wife of an ayyubid prince” (p. 172). likewise, as eastmond recounts the hypothetical physical structures of a palace in which t‘amt‘a may have lived, he argues that “the design and decoration of palaces suggest that her identity continued to be framed through the men who controlled her, just as it had been by her father before her marriage” (p. 264). these conclusions can be accepted only partially given the precious little evidence we possess. the sources also allow alternative readings and interpretations. eastmond emphasizes throughout the book that t‘amt‘a lived in a world in which gender lines were clearly drawn. if so, it would be unusual for a father who was away on military campaigns a great deal of time to develop such an intimate relationship with his daughter as to shape her identity in that most delicate period of personality formation: childhood and adolescence. eastmond dedicates pages to the certainly interesting lives of other individual women at various muslim courts from cairo to mosul to tokat, but it is surprising that barely a line alludes to t‘amt‘a’s mother or to other women of her family. nor does he say anything about the activities or role of women among the georgian nobility or at court beyond the exceptional cases of the queens tamar and rusudan and the latter’s daughter tamar. the second tamar converted to islam and appears as gurji khātūn in the sources. t‘amt‘a’s mother xošak‘ (khoshak) appears very briefly on p. 2 and then not again until p. 324. although surely the information available on her in the sources is slimmer than that available on her husband, this fact should not discourage us from trying to form an image of her. she is far from invisible. it is reasonable to assume that xošak‘ was t‘amt‘a’s earliest model of behavior and probably taught her daughter rulership skills for her future life as a high-standing wife with at least some local power, and it is thus worth looking at what we know about xošak‘. eastmond remarks that the thirteenth-century monastic teacher, historian, and intellectual vardan arewelc‘i briefly mentions xošak‘ in polemical contexts. he first blames her for having instigated zak‘arē’s son’s conversion to “the chalcedonian heresy.” vardan then accuses her of a bizarre blasphemous act: she burned a dog to eradicate a newly emerging cult of the priest parkešt (pp. 324–325).14 certainly, vardan’s anti-chalcedonian sentiments are evident. at the same time, his accusations cannot be taken as only expressions of misogyny. that it was iwanē’s wife who was held responsible for the religious orientation of zak‘arē’s (her brother-in-law’s) son implies, at least, that women’s agency in such matters was credible to vardan’s readers, even if not endorsed by all of them. as long as this is not simply a narrative device to clear iwanē’s name, we may assume that xošak‘ had just as much if not more say in the religious education and orientation of her daughter t‘amt‘a. 14. vardan vardapet, hawak‘umn patmut‘ean [historical compilation] (venice: mechitarist press, 1862), 140 and 143. 242 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) eastmond also includes a good summary of women’s political involvement at the mongol court, as well as of the participation of high-standing women in the new political chessboard (pp. 378–380). it would be pertinent to add that t‘amt‘a’s mother, too, was part of that world. indeed, she acted as a mediator between her son (t‘amt‘a’s brother) awag and the mongol commander č‘ałatay (chaγatay). according to kirakos ganjakec‘i, at a feast with his friendsin-arms, awag, perhaps having drunk more than his fair share, boasted about rebelling against the mongols. when the gossip reached č‘ałatay, he prepared for a punishing action. the situation was saved by awag’s mother, who “went to them and pledged for the faithfulness of her son.” after due punishment and payment “for their heads,” the mongols left awag alone.15 this episode reveals a strong and willful woman acting as a high-profile ambassador to the representative of a new “foreign” power, something that was not as unusual as it appears at first sight.16 xošak‘’s assertive personality and claims to power are evident also in earlier sources, such as inscriptions. as eastmond rightly notes, inscriptions are one form of “outward display of . . . personality” (p. 15). xošak‘ was hardly unique, in view of the importance of medieval armenian women throughout the centuries as donors and founders of monasteries and churches, immortalizing their names on such buildings rather than merely representing the male power to which they were subjected.17 in one inscription from širakawan, slightly northeast of ani, dated to 1229, xošak‘ declares herself “the queen of the georgians and the armenians,” while in another one from 1232 she appears as “the overseer of the georgians and the armenians and their queen.”18 such audacious language vis-à-vis the georgian court reflects the zak‘arids’ independent-minded policy, which they pursued cautiously by various means throughout their rule in armenia, but with greater confidence toward the end of queen tamar’s rule and after her death.19 moreover, xošak‘’s inscriptions echo pretensions to autonomy articulated in language that emphasizes female power: she claims to be a “queen.” and there is another inscription in širakawan from 1228 in which xošak‘ is celebrated for exempting širakawan’s population from a certain tax. this tax break was obtained by the head of the community, gurgēn, whose position appears subordinate to xošak‘’s, underscoring the priority of class over gender hierarchies.20 15. kirakos, patmut‘iwn hayoc‘, 319–320. 16. for other examples from an earlier period, see a. vacca, “conflict and community in the medieval caucasus,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 66–112. 17. for early evidence of female patronage and agency, see t. greenwood, “a corpus of early medieval armenian inscriptions,” dumbarton oaks papers 58 (2004): 27–91, esp. 68–69. for a late ninth/early tenth century case study, see z. pogossian, “the foundation of the monastery of sevan: a case study on monasteries, economy and political power in ix–x century armenia,” in le valli dei monaci: atti del iii convegno internazionale di studio “de re monastica,” roma-subiaco, 17–19 maggio, 2010, ed. l. ermini pani, 1:181–215 (spoleto: centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2012). 18. ł. ališan, širak (venice: mechitarist press, 1881), 10. 19. la porta, “kingdom and sultanate,” 92–95, 100–102, 105, 108. these centrifugal tendencies became more accentuated in queen tamar’s final years and after her death in 1210. 20. l. xač‘ikyan, “xiv–xv dareri haykakan giwłakan hamaynk‘i masin” [on the armenian village community al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 243 xošak‘’s name is recorded also in the monastery of keč‘aṙis in northern armenia, in an inscription on the western façade of the main church. she is listed after her husband, iwanē, the latter’s nephew šahnšah (zak‘arē’s son, whom she “converted”), and her own son awag, but she is given the title “patron.” the same title is repeated (in the variant “paron”) on the southern wall of the same church.21 although we may note that xošak‘’s identity in these inscriptions was bound to her function as a mother, we may also argue that, given the wording of the inscription, she was important for awag and awag’s own identity. the latter defined himself not only through his father but also through his mother. it is probably not by chance that zak‘arē’s son šahnšah appears immediately after his uncle iwanē, while the latter’s son awag is the third in line. could we conclude that the presence of his self-confident mother’s name buttressed his otherwise not very prominent position? these suggestions are hypothetical, and the inscriptions certainly need further analysis in light of kinship structures within these families. however, as far as t‘amt‘a is concerned, this evidence is essential. if we are to think that the intriguing experiences of shajar al-durr in cairo (pp. 117–121, 184, and elsewhere) and of māhparī khātūn in anatolia (pp. 197–205 and elsewhere) can give us clues to t‘amt‘a’s behavior and the challenges she faced, we are certainly entitled to postulate that her own mother was far more relevant. she must have had a direct influence on t‘amt‘a’s ideas of gendered power structures and the display of her own standing in the relevant hierarchies. both textual and epigraphic sources converge in depicting xošak‘ as a leading figure in her own right who knew how to convey her claims in appropriate language. it would be odd if she did not pass on this wisdom to her daughter or educate her in the same spirit. t‘amt‘a had also some formidable paternal aunts, through whom the brothers zak‘arē and iwanē established a whole network of connections both with newly emerging nobility made up of military men with no celebrated lineages and with “old blood.”22 t‘amt‘a’s case as a diplomatic bride was by no means unique in the zak‘arid family. moreover, a strong bond between women and their mothers and paternal aunts may be gleaned from an inscription commissioned in 1185 by mariam, the daughter of the bagratid king of lōṙi-tašir, kiwrikē ii, for her mother and paternal aunt.23 these women were active one generation before t‘amt‘a and in the same region in which she grew up. incidentally, one of t‘amt‘a’s aunts in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries], patmabanasirakan handes 1 (1958): 110–34, reprinted in idem, ašxatut‘yunner [opera], 2: 274–295 (erevan: gandzasar, 1999), 275. 21. h. ełiazaryan, “keč‘aṙisi vank‘ə ev nra vimagir arjanagrut‘yunnerə” [the monastery of keč‘aṙis and its inscriptions], ēǰmiacin 11 (1955): 45. 22. this process was masterfully described almost a century ago by g. hovsep‘yan [yovsēp‘ean], xałbakyank‘ kam pṙošyank‘ hayoc‘ patmut‘yan meǰ: patma-hnagitakan usumnasirut‘yun i. [xałbakyans or pṙošyans in armenian history: a historical-archaeological study i] (vałaršapat [ēǰmiacin]: pethrat, 1928), esp. 13–26. see also la porta “kingdom and sultanate,” 88. 23. for details, see s. la porta, “lineage, legitimacy, and loyalty in post-seljuk armenia: a reassessment of the sources of the failed ōrbēlean revolt against king giorgi iii of georgia,” revue des études arméniennes 31 (2008–9): 133–34. see also the genealogical tables in c. toumanoff, les dynasties de la caucasie chrétienne de l’antiquité jusqu’au xixe siècle: tables généalogiques et chronologiques (rome: n.p., 1990), 294–301; all of t‘amt‘a’s aunts are listed on p. 295. 244 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) married into the kiwrikid family, as we shall see, and a process of intra-family transmission of pious behavior and its norms is not to be discounted. eastmond mentions two of t‘amt‘a’s aunts without identifying their relationship to her (pp. 216–217). one is xorišah (khorishah), who founded the monastery of ganjasar together with her son, hasan jalal dawla, in 1216 (the building was completed in 1238). eastmond cites her as one of the people who benefited from t‘amt‘a’s efforts to facilitate pilgrimage to jerusalem. when imagining “t‘amt‘a’s world,” we may well suppose that xorišah even visited her niece on one of her three journeys to the holy city.24 the other aunt mentioned by eastmond is vaneni (or nana), whom he qualifies as “possibly a relative of zakare and ivane” (p. 191). in fact she was their sister.25 she was married to the last kiwrikid (bagratid) king of loṙi, abas ii. eastmond discusses the bridge she built over the debed river to commemorate her husband and highlights the importance of such constructions as part of the “good works” that married (or widowed) women undertook. yet the bridge displayed more than one layer and nuance of power. indeed, vaneni claimed the royal prerogatives of her husband for herself, too, since, according to the book of judgments of mxit‘ar goš, a prominent monastic intellectual and jurist with close ties to the zak‘arids, the construction of bridges was the “prerogative of kings.”26 was vaneni affirming her role as a “queen” even after her husband’s death? were such notions of rulership as a wife and a widow passed on to the younger members of the family, such as t‘amt‘a? as with many similar questions posed throughout the pages of the book, we are as yet not in a position to provide definitive answers. however, the available material indicates that the effort to uncover them will surely be repaid. another of t‘amt‘a’s aunts, dop‘, was so influential that the entire dynasty issuing from her marriage to hasan, a ruler from the historical region of arc‘ax, took her name and was known as dop‘eank‘. one modern historian goes as far as calling her the “founding mother” of the dynasty.27 the historian kirakos ganjakec‘i calls their son grigor “son of dop‘” rather than “son of hasan.”28 thus, although eastmond may be right that in some cases women’s identities were “completely transformed through marriage” (p. 92), in others the reverse was true. women not only maintained a strong attachment to their pre-marriage identities 24. eastmond’s statement (p. 217) that these three pilgrimages took place between 1216 and 1238 must be corrected. this assumption is based on an erroneous translation of an inscription on the two sides of the northern window in the main church of the ganjasar monastery. instead of “[she] went three times to jerusalem,” the relevant words should be translated as “she went for the third time to jerusalem.” thus, we know the date of xorišah’s last visit to jerusalem—between 1216 and 1238—but not the dates of the previous two. 25. this relationship is attested in her inscription on a xač‘k‘ar (cross-stone) near the sanahin bridge, which she built over the debed river. see k. łafadaryan, sanahni vank‘ǝ ev nra arjanagrut‘yunnerǝ [the monastery of sanahin and its inscriptions] (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1957), 185–186; hovsep‘yan, xałbakyans, 15; toumanoff, les dynasties, 295; la porta, “kingdom and sultanate,” 94–95. 26. mxit‘ar goš, girk‘ datastani [book of judgments], ed. x. t‘orosyan (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1975), 29; english translation by r. w. thomson, the lawcode [datastanagirk’] of mxit’ar goš (amsterdam: rodopi, 2000). 27. hovsep‘yan, xałbakyans, 16. 28. kirakos, patmut‘iwn hayoc‘, 280. ˇ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 245 but also transmitted them together with their name to generations to come. it appears that in the fluid thirteenth-century social context the preeminence of a given lineage was of key importance in identity formation. it could challenge or even supersede gender hierarchies and expectations. indeed, dop‘, who was married to a presumably promising military man with no important lineage, passed on her name to her offspring. like vaneni, t‘amt‘a’s last aunt, nerǰis, also married a representative of the old nobility who claimed mamikonid descent.29 she bore no children and became an ascetic. in this role she “nourished” a number of monks and female attendants (perhaps nuns), who left nerǰis’s name, with expressions of gratitude, on their own gravestones. she is given the title “patron” in a number of inscriptions, including on her own grave, where her brothers zak‘arē and iwanē appear with the identical title and nothing more.30 what does all of the above tell us about t‘amt‘a, the women of her time, and her own marriages and rulership of xlat‘? we can draw one sure conclusion. she must have witnessed and presumably absorbed lessons and behavioral patterns from the variegated experiences of the women in her family. as the daughter of one of the leading nobles of the time, t‘amt‘a must have been prepared for a marriage to seal one alliance or another. she probably expected to become a high-profile wife one day, just like her mother and aunts. the possibility of marriage to a non-christian was certainly not excluded. for example, a second cousin of hers named xawṙas was married twice. from a colophon in the celebrated bagnayr gospels we learn that xawṙas commissioned the codex together with his second wife, zmruxt, who was “tačik by race.” the colophon also records the name of xawṙas’s deceased first wife, xut‘lu xat‘un, who was “persian by race.” both labels were used to denote muslims in medieval armenian sources, rather than reflecting ethnic belonging.31 presumably, both women converted to christianity after their marriage to xawṙas, given that xawṙas and zmruxt eventually commissioned a gospel manuscript that commemorated xut‘lu xat‘un. it is likely that girls—whether muslim or christian, of whatever denomination or ethnicity—were taught early on how to behave also on such occasions, adapting the public display of their identity to the circumstances. when t‘amt‘a was given in marriage in exchange for her father’s liberation she was probably no longer a tender adolescent. eastmond assumes that she must have been thirteen or over in 1210, basing himself on byzantine marriage laws and practices (p. 3). one wonders why he did not consult the armenian book of canons or the already mentioned book of judgments of mxit‘ar goš as a source of normative practice or theory on marriage among the armenians. the latter source would have been especially pertinent, since it was finished only a couple of decades before t‘amt‘a’s marriage in one of the monasteries of 29. hovsep‘yan, xałbakyans, 15–16. 30. łafadaryan, sanahni vank‘ǝ, 171. see also s. avagyan and h. janp‘oladyan, eds., divan hay vimagrut‘yan, vol. 6, iǰevani šrǰan [corpus inscriptionum armenicarum, vol. 6, iǰevan region], (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1977), 83; and s. barxudaryan, ed., divan hay vimagrut‘yan, vol. 10, širaki marz [corpus inscriptionum armenicarum, vol. 10, širak region] (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 2017), 53. 31. information and sources in k. mat‘evosyan and s. boloyan, “the scriptorium of hoṙomos monastery,” in hoṙomos monastery: art and history, ed. e. vardanyan, 325–59 (paris: association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2015), 334. ˇ 246 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) t‘amt‘a’s homeland, loṙi. in any case, this was not the first time a marriage was planned for t‘amt‘a. according to the historian step‘anos ōrbēlean (end of the thirteenth/beginning of the fourteenth century), whose own family had had a conflicted history with the zak‘arids, iwanē had proposed an alliance between the two families to be sealed through the marriage of t‘amt‘a and liparit ōrbēlean around 1203.32 the latter was the only surviving heir of the ōrbēleans in armenia at the time. the plan was never fulfilled, because liparit chose a different wife. but this information implies that t‘amt‘a had reached the age of thirteen already in 1203, and by 1210 she must have been rather more mature. i believe that such details are not unimportant in reconstructing t‘amt‘a’s life, her world, and the transformations of her identity. indeed, leaving her father’s home (and identity?) at the age of twenty or more would mean traveling with a heavier baggage of cultural and religious imprinting than if she departed as a teenager. certainly, to survive a life lived in such diverse contexts, t‘amt‘a had to adapt. but what is the basis for insisting that she had to transform her identity in the process? from the scant notices in the sources, even considering all their biases, it appears that t‘amt‘a maintained a strong connection to her roots and her christian identity. indeed, she used her role as the wife of consecutive ayyubid rulers to benefit christians in xlat‘ and beyond it, in the region of tarōn, where the majority were armenians. eastmond notes kirakos ganjakec‘i’s contention that georgian christians, particularly pilgrims to jerusalem, benefited even more from t‘amt‘a’s interventions. this suggests that t‘amt‘a was, in a way, an ally of her father, and her choices buttressed his policies and position at the georgian court. it is thus problematic to correlate the experiences and changes of identity of other originally christian wives of muslim potentates in the region with t‘amt‘a’s possible identity transformations. for various reasons—and eastmond enumerates a few rather plausible ones—t‘amt‘a followed a different path from that, for example, of the georgian queen rusudan’s daughter tamar, who married the saljuq sultan kaykhusraw ii (1237–1246). tamar converted to islam and is known as gurji khātūn (gürcü hatun) in islamic sources. she became a patron of the celebrated sufi intellectual, mystic, and poet jalāl al-dīn rūmī. gurji khātūn’s devotional practices show significant mingling of christian and muslim religious elements, attesting to a vibrant environment of exchange and interactions in medieval anatolia (pp. 225–228). the religious development of māhparī khātūn occurred along similar lines. originally an armenian christian, she converted to islam upon her marriage to the sultan ʿalāʾ al-dīn 32. manandyan dates the liberation of liparit ōrbēlean to the time immediately after zak‘arē and iwanē’s conquest of dwin in 1203: h. manandyan, erker [opera], vol. 3 (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1977), 143 and 163. the failed marriage plan is mentioned in step‘anos ōrbēlean, patmut‘iwn nahangin sisakan [history of the region of sisakan] (tiflis: ałaneanc‘ press, 1910), 396. in this edition the text reads erroneously “iwanē’s sister t‘amt‘i,” but such a sister is otherwise not known. moreover, liparit is described as a young boy, whereas a sister of iwanē must have been much older. the modern armenian translation, which is based on a comparison of two published versions and one manuscript of this history, in fact corrects “sister” to “daughter.” s. ōrbelyan, syunik‘i patmut‘yun [history of syunik‘], trans. a. abrahamyan (erevan: sovetakan groł, 1986), 319. on the conflict between the zak‘arid and ōrbēlean families, see la porta, “lineage, legitimacy and loyalty.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 247 kayqubād i (1219–1237).33 by contrast, t‘amt‘a’s first husband, al-awḥad, is said to have built a church for her (p. 133). we may speculate that this indicates a respect for (or indifference to?) her identity and an admission that he would not expect or require her to change it. similarly, although the practice of establishing and supporting pious foundations among high-standing ayyubid and saljuq women provides a fascinating backdrop for t‘amt‘a’s own activities, her mother and her aunts surely gave her first-hand examples of or even instructions for such work. they must have also taught her her first lessons in how a woman could survive and rule in their turbulent world. we may wonder, with eastmond, whether t‘amt‘a painted a portrait of herself in one of xlat‘’s churches following the example of queen tamar of georgia (p. 121), or whether she left her name in inscriptions on the walls following the example of her mother, aunts, and numerous other elite armenian women throughout the centuries. perhaps she did both. the lack of archaeological data from xlat‘ precludes not only an accurate appraisal of its urban structure, but also of t‘amt‘a’s impact on the cityscape, despite eastmond’s efforts to fill this gap by appealing to the features of other anatolian cities. kurdish zak‘arids vs kurdish ayyubids and “fluid” identities in his monograph, eastmond often joins the key term “identity” to the notion of “fluidity.” the “fluidity” of identities, however, is a concept inspired by a contemporary context and concerns, our fast-paced world, and the possibility of tracing how movements between cultures, countries, languages, and religions—for whatever reason or purpose— impact individuals and groups, including their identities. we are in a position to evaluate such fluidity thanks to the overabundance of information. but this is hardly the case with medieval sources, which are more limited in terms of both quantity and quality. in the next three sections i assess the basis on which eastmond postulates the “fluid identity” of the other important actors in his book—members of t‘amt‘a’s family, the zak‘arids. in doing so, i hope to point out the dangers of imposing notions taken from the contemporary globalized world on the medieval source evidence, as well as to highlight the methodological pitfalls of such an exercise. the discussion above sought to make it clear that in the case of women, individual situations could be complex and diverse, and not always fit for generalization. in some cases we may detect strong cultural consistency and attachment to “one’s roots,” whereas in others profound transformations of identity may have taken place. i argue below that the same attention to detail and context is required when studying multiple identities regardless of the gender of the individuals involved. eastmond starts his discussion of the “fluidity” of zak‘arid identity (p. 21) by referring to the family’s presumed kurdish origins. at some point they then morphed into “armenians” and, at least in the case of iwanē, to “georgian chalcedonians.” there is certainly a neat 33. p. blessing, “women patrons in medieval anatolia and a discussion of māhbarī khātūn’s mosque complex in kayseri,” türk tarih kurumu belleten 78, no. 282 (2014): 475–526; s. yalman, “the ‘dual identity’ of mahperi khatun: piety, patronage and marriage across frontiers in seljuk anatolia,” in architecture and landscape in medieval anatolia, 1100–1500, ed. p. blessing and r. goshgarian, 224–252 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2017). 248 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) symmetry in eastmond’s statement that “[t]he common caucasian, kurdish roots of the ayyubids and the mqargrdzelis underline the capacity of medieval people to reinvent themselves: two families from the same region rising to power in different states, using different languages and professing different religions” (p. 81). however, as margaryan has convincingly argued, the zak‘arid claim to “kurdish” origins, mentioned by kirakos ganjakec‘i and repeated by vardan arewelc‘i and uncritically accepted by many modern scholars, was one of the strategies of legitimation that the zak‘arids adopted in the second half of the thirteenth century. 34 reported by a historian positively biased toward the zak‘arids, the myth of a kurdish origin was aimed at bestowing a luster of antiquity and “exoticism” on the family. moreover, in describing this primordial exotic origin, kirakos followed the narrative strategy and was inspired by the very wording of movsēs xorenac‘i. the latter had been enshrined as the “father of armenian historiography” by kirakos’s time. margaryan’s painstaking analysis of the possible context of such a kurdish migration to northern armenia, of the “memory” of this event (or rather its invention), and of the linguistic and conceptual problems in kirakos’s passage describing these “kurds” has further strengthened the conclusion that the claimed genealogy is unreliable from a historical point of view and must be treated as fictitious.35 on the other hand, in zak‘arid inscriptions, many of which predate kirakos ganjakec‘i’s history, a different strategy of legitimation and search for origins is also visible, one tied to the “glorious” old armenian royal dynasties of the arcrunids and the bagratids. these, too, were tendentious claims, as margaryan has demonstrated. therefore, due caution must be exercised when positing a “fluid identity” for the zak‘arids on the basis of their transformation from “kurds” to “armenians” and then comparing and contrasting their experiences with those of the coeval ayyubids. another example of zak‘arid claims to an ancient genealogy as a legitimation strategy is encapsulated in the family’s georgian moniker, mxargrʒeli, to which i turn next. zak‘arid or mxargrʒeli? to emphasize the zak‘arids’ simultaneous engagement in the georgian and armenian “worlds,” eastmond explores various aspects of their identity and points out that its inherent complexities have been insufficiently recognized in modern scholarship: the conflicting claims of the brothers, as vassals in georgia but as independent kings in their own lands, are reflected in the modern disagreement about their family’s name: mqargrdzeli in medieval georgian sources, zakarian in modern armenian histories. no 34. kirakos, patmut‘iwn hayoc‘, 162. 35. h. margaryan, “zak‘aryanneri cagman avandut‘yunə miǰnadaryan hay patmagrut‘yan meǰ” [the tradition on the origin of the zak‘arids in medieval armenian historiography], patmabanasirakan handes 2-3 (1992): 139–52, esp. 164–173 on the family’s “kurdish” origins; and idem, “zak‘aryanneri cagumə” [the origin of the zak‘arids], patmabanasirakan handes 1-2 (1994): 156–75. for a french version of his work, see h. margarian, “autour des hypothèses de l’origine kurde de la maison princière arménienne des zakarids,” iran and the caucasus 1 (1997): 24–44. margaryan’s findings are brilliantly summarized with further in-depth analysis of the function of such fictitious genealogies in la porta, “kingdom and sultanate,” 77–81, 92–94. surprisingly, although this article seems to be known to eastmond, he apparently did not take its contents fully into consideration. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 249 compromise seems possible in the modern histories of georgia and armenia. although most of the evidence i draw on about the brothers comes from the modern-day territory of armenia, i have used their georgian surname in this account in order to hint at their ambivalent position within armenia and to stress the way they lie outside any simple “national” categorisation. (p. 27) eastmond thus argues forcefully that the discussion of zak‘arid/mxargrʒeli identity has been distorted by the prism of national or nationalistic thinking. however, the actual situation of the secondary literature is far more complex than the above quotation concedes. first, it is curious that eastmond contrasts “medieval georgian sources” with “modern armenian histories” and then posits divergent views in “modern histories of georgia and armenia.” beyond the differences in language, perspective, and specific names employed in georgian versus armenian sources, the sources themselves are not homogenous. they vary in nature, weight, and credibility. in the secondary literature, too, scholars’ approach to the family is far from monolithic. zekiyan, for example, uses the appellation “la dynastie des erkaynabazukk‘ ou mxargrdzeli.”36 in a general, collected volume histoire du peuple arménien, dédéyan refers to the zak‘arids as “une grande famille féodale arménienne (peut-être d’ascendance kurde), celle des mekhargrdzéli.”37 more than a century ago, presumably at the height of the spread and popularity of national and nationalistic sentiments, šahnazareanc‘ had similarly no qualms in discussing the meaning and origin of the name mxargrʒeli, with no hint of polemic.38 the relevant volume in one of the most standard reference works, history of the armenian people, published by the armenian academy of sciences in the 1970s, includes quotations from the georgian kartlis cxovreba, transliterating the name as “mxargrjeli” in reference to sargis, zak‘arē, and iwanē.39 it would be tedious to list all of the modern (armenian) scholars who acknowledge and employ both names—mxargrʒeli and zak‘arid. the concept “armenian” itself is as complex today as it was in the thirteenth century, if not more so. consequently, there is presumably room to argue that zekiyan’s, dédéyan’s, and others’ studies also constitute “modern armenian histories.” i leave it to georgianists to 36. zekiyan, “le croisement des cultures,” 93. “erkaynabazukk‘” is the armenian version of the nickname “long-armed,” which is the meaning of the georgian name “mxargrʒeli.” i discuss the origin of the name below. 37. g. dédéyan, ed., histoire du peuple arménien (toulouse: édition privat, 2007), 329. the kurdish origin of the zak‘arids is debated, as discussed above. 38. a. s. šahnazareanc‘, “zak‘arean (erkaynabazuk) tohmi cagumə, gałt‘ə dēpi joraget ew naxordnerə: ža/ žb dar” [the origin of the zak‘arid (long-armed) dynasty, [its] emigration to joraget, and [its] forefathers: eleventh–twelfth centuries], in sołakat‘: s. ēǰmiacni hayagitakan žołovacu [sołakat‘: collection of [works] on armenian studies of st. ēǰmiacin], book 1, 66–83 (vałaršapat/ēǰmiacin: holy ējmiacin publishing, 1913). for a synopsis of genealogical information on the zak‘arids based on the historiographic and epigraphic evidence available to šahnazareanc‘, see p. 75. šahnazareanc‘ noted that the name mxargrʒeli was translated into russian as “dolgorukij” and had been employed since the seventeenth century. he further explained that a more accurate translation of the term from georgian to armenian would be “erkarat‘ikunk‘ kam erkar us,” that is, “long-shouldered.” the armenian and georgian names are both calques from the original greek; see below. 39. c. ałayan et al., eds., hay žołovrdi patmut‘yun [history of the armenian people], vol. 3 (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1976), 530. 250 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) accept or refute eastmond’s evaluation of the reluctance of “modern georgian histories” to employ the name zak‘arid, as opposed to mxargrʒeli, and its possible reasons. the sources themselves appear to contain and justify the use of both names, mxargrʒeli and zak‘arid. in armenian history, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were characterized by tectonic shifts in the structure and the very identity of noble dynasties (traditionally called naxarars in the sources, a term that may no longer be applicable for this period) that had dominated the territories inhabited by the armenians up until the mid-eleventh century.40 the zak‘arids were newcomers on the scene and could boast no ancient lineage or old name compared to such illustrious but no longer politically viable lines as the royal bagratids or arcrunids, for instance. hence, they adopted different strategies of legitimation, such as tracing their line of descent to a (real) ancestor (e.g., zak‘arē or awag-sargis) to showcase the dynasty’s longevity, listing various honorific military titles conferred on them by the georgian court to emphasize their preeminence, and creating myths of distant and exotic origins—kurdish or ancient persian—to extend their ancestry even further back in history, to the quasi-mythical past of the achaemenids.41 of course, these strategies of legitimation were neither new nor specific to the zak‘arids: the bagratids, for example, claimed jewish origins, an assertion that no researcher today would accept as a historical fact.42 an illustrious seventh-century bagratid figure, smbat, proclaimed his (non-chalcedonian) orthodoxy and support of the armenian church while at the same time proudly carrying the iranian title—xosrov š[n]um, the “joy of xosrov”—bestowed on him by the zoroastrian king of kings.43 let us return to the zak‘arids. kirakos ganjakec‘i, who is our best informant, traces the ancestry of zak‘arē and iwanē to their grandfather zak‘arē/zak‘aria (i will refer to him as zak‘arē i to avoid confusion).44 kirakos’s friend and study companion vardan arewelc‘i, who for this portion of his own historical compilation relies heavily on kirakos, mentions zak‘arē i’s father, awag-sargis, in an effort to trace the family’s genealogy further into the past. of course, the fame and fortunes of the zak‘arids were built by awag-sargis’s grandson sargis ii (the son of zak‘arē i) and the latter’s two sons, the celebrated zak‘arē ii, often mentioned with the epithet great, and iwanē, at the service of the georgian king giorgi iii 40. r. bedrosyan, “armenia during the seljuk and mongol periods,” in armenian people from ancient to modern times, vol. 1, the dynastic periods: from antiquity to the fourteenth century, ed. r. hovannisian, 241–71 (new york: st. martin’s press, 2004); la porta, “kingdom and sultanate,” 74–77. 41. margaryan, “zak‘aryanneri cagumə.” 42. movsēs xorenac‘i, patmut‘iwn hayoc‘ [history of the armenians], ed. m. abełean and s. yarut‘iwnean (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1991), 68 (book 1, chap. 22). 43. sebēos, patmut‘iwn [history], ed. g. abgaryan (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1979), 101–3. 44. kirakos, patmut‘iwn hayoc‘, 162. eastmond (p. 19) is surprised at the multiple orthographies of the name zak‘arē/zak‘aria/zaxaria, particularly in inscriptions. however, this is a common feature not only of inscriptions (and not only with regard to zak‘arē) but also of manuscripts, and no particular significance can be attached to it, unless clearly argued. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 251 (1156–1184) and his daughter, the formidable queen tamar.45 the historian vardan calls sargis ii “sargis zak‘arean.”46 the use of the appellation “zak‘arean” in modern armenian historiography follows this tradition and may be justified as being based on the name of zak‘arē and iwanē’s grandfather, but with convenient reference also to zak‘arē ii, “the great,” paying tribute to his exalted status in medieval armenian historiography. the georgian appellation mxargrʒeli is also well attested, but in georgian sources, such as the relevant portions of kartlis cxovreba, the life of queen tamar, and other later narratives.47 as margaryan has demonstrated, this designation was based on yet another of the family’s origin legends, transmitted in georgian by the first chronicle of queen tamar. its author claims that zak‘arē was a kinsman of the achaemenid king artaxerxes i (465–425 bce). the latter appears as “erkaynajeṙn” (“long-handed”) or “erkaynabazuk” (“longarmed”) in armenian sources predating the thirteenth century.48 for example, the tenthcentury historian step‘anōs tarōnec‘i (asołik) mentions artaxerxes once as erkaynajeṙn and another time as erkaynabazuk. the names are armenian calques for the greek makrocheir (latin: longimanus). this nickname originated in classical sources and was transmitted through late antique authors, such as the fifth-century armenian translation of eusebius of caesarea’s chronicle, which employs the form erkaynabazuk.49 the corresponding georgian calque is mxargrʒeli, which served to substantiate the family’s claim to an ancient royal iranian pedigree. georgian sources may have either relied on knowledge of earlier armenian traditions or tapped directly into greek sources (perhaps in georgian translation). as eastmond rightly mentions (p. 19), no medieval armenian narrative sources employ the name mxargrʒeli. it is not clear why this is so, nor does eastmond discuss it. not only the armenian historians but also the inscriptions commissioned by the zak‘arids generally refrain from using the name mxargrʒeli as a dynastic self-appellation, though they have no 45. we may observe the repetitive onomasticon, particularly the names sargis, zak‘arē, iwanē, and awag, as another strategy of creating a sense of continuity and, thus, of lineage in the early generations of the zak‘arids. 46. vardan, hawak‘umn patmut‘ean, 127. a brief, schematic presentation of the earliest zak‘arids’ genealogy may be found in šahnazareanc‘, “zak‘arean (erkaynabazuk) tohmi cagumə,” 68, and in margaryan, “zak‘aryanneri cagumə,” 165. margaryan notes the confusion and inconsistency of the armenian sources, indicating that by the time the zak‘arids began to pass down a deliberate genealogical construction, precise memory of anything beyond the third generation had already been lost. the most extended family tree, though not without some problems, has been drawn up by toumanoff: c. toumanoff, manuel de généalogie et de chronologie pour l’historie de la caucasie chrétienne (arménie-géorgie-albanie) (rome: edizioni aquila, 1976), 290–301 (including the family’s gageli branch), and idem, les dynasties, 294–301. see also la porta, “kingdom and sultanate,” 77–78. 47. kartlis cxovreba names the male members of the mxargrʒeli family. i have consulted the georgian sources in translation: histoire de la géorgie depuis l’antiquité jusqu’au xixe siècle, trans. m. brosset (st. petersburg: imprimerie de l’académie impériale des sciences, 1849); kartlis tskhovreba: a history of georgia, trans. r. metreveli, s. jones, et al. (tbilisi: artanuji publishing, 2014). for the life of tamar i have used the russian translation: žizn’ c‘aric‘y caric‘ tamar [life of the queen of queens tamar], trans. v. d. dondua, comm. berdznišvili (tbilisi: mecniereba, 1985). 48. margaryan, “zak‘aryanneri cagumə,” 163, with further references to the relevant armenian and georgian sources. 49. la porta, “kingdom and sultanate,” 79; the “universal history” of step‘anos tarōnec‘i, trans. t. greenwood (oxford: oxford university press, 2017), 40, 107, 116. 252 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) qualms about proclaiming the family’s georgian court titles. among the dozens of extant inscriptions by the zak‘arids, there are four exceptions to this silence; however, these reveal a very different perspective. chronologically the earliest and the most important is an inscription by zak‘arē ii on the interior of the western wall of his church in ani, in which he calls himself the “son of the great prince of princes, amirspasalar, mxargrceli sargis.” yet when listing his own appellatives, he uses the terms “mandatort‘uxuc‘ēs, amispasalar, šahnšah zak‘arē,” listing his titles without availing himself of the moniker mxargrʒeli.50 three other inscriptions use the armenian transcription of “mxargrjel/mxargrcel,” but they refer to the personal name of zak‘arē’s grandson. mxargrjel does not signify a dynastic marker in these inscriptions. rather, it seems that it was taken as the title of sargis ii and then became a personal name, a process attested on other occasions, too.51 in sum, the difference in the armenian and georgian historiographic conventions for naming a family that belonged to both worlds is not a mere product of nationalistic sentiments. although such sentiments may well have inspired some scholars, they are not necessarily uniform. both appellations stem from the relevant sources transmitted in the two languages, and one may compare this usage to the similar case of die staufer versus gli svevi in reference to one and the same medieval family in german and italian historiography, respectively. whether modern scholars opt for zak‘arid or mxargrʒeli, they inevitably imply one or the other perspective on the family’s origins or origin myths or, if one wishes, one or another form of bias. indeed, eastmond’s choice of consistently applying the “surname” mxargrʒeli is no more neutral than using the name zak‘arid would be.52 even the notion of a “surname” for a medieval dynasty is questionable, and the term “moniker” seems more appropriate in this case. in view of the above discussion, eastmond’s approach of adopting the name “tamta mqargrdzeli” throughout his book is less than satisfactory. first, and most importantly, this name never appears in the sources. second, it is unclear whether the moniker, with its obvious military implications, was ever applied to any female member of the family. third, the use of the “name and last name” format leaves the impression that despite her three marriages, her extensive travels, and her many presumed shifts of identity during her long and eventful life, t‘amt‘a maintained a monolithic attachment to her paternal line of 50. h. orbeli, ed., divan hay vimagrut‘yan, vol. 1, ani k‘ałak‘ [corpus inscriptionum armenicarum, vol. 1, the city of ani] (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1966), 58. 51. barxudaryan, širaki marz, 66, on an inscription dated to 1222 on the western arm of the cross-in-square church of st. gēorg in art‘ik; 108, on a fallen slab currently preserved in the regional museum of širak in gumry (both in the republic of armenia). the third inscription is from hałbat and is published in k. łafadaryan, hałbat: čartarapetakan kaṙuc‘vack‘nerə ew vimakan arjanagrut‘yunnerə [hałbat: architectural constructions and epigraphic inscriptions] (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1963), 171. there are other attested cases in which a title becomes a first name. for example, šah[ə]nšah (“king of kings”), employed by the bagratids as a title, became a personal name among the zak‘arids: zak‘arē’s son (t‘amt‘a’s cousin) was named šahnšah. 52. to overcome this impasse, the art historian lidov ecumenically notes that “one branch of the family bore the name mkhargrdzeli,” which is only partially true, as discussed above. see a. lidov, rospisi monastyrja axtala: istorija, ikonografija, mastera / the wall paintings of akhtala monastery: history, iconography, masters (moscow: dmitry pozharsky university, 2014), 34, 340. the book, published in both russian and english, is available online at http://hierotopy.ru/contents/ahtalabookall2014.pdf. http://hierotopy.ru/contents/ahtalabookall2014.pdf al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 253 descent. the notion of “fluid identities” upheld throughout the book is hardly reconcilable with such solidity and constancy. moreover, eastmond provides a negative assessment of t‘amt‘a’s relationship with her family, particularly with her father, iwanē. the latter appears to have used his daughter as a diplomatic tool to advance his own military and political goals, not unlike other potentates of his time.53 although i do not necessarily share his evaluation, eastmond’s assumption that the relationship was unpleasant would have provided another reason to avoid using an appellation not attested in the medieval sources. fluid identities and further source-critical problems according to eastmond, the conversion of iwanē, t‘amt‘a’s father, to chalcedonian orthodoxy was an expression par excellence of his “fluid” identity. iwanē’s construction of the church of the mother of god, perhaps replacing a preexisting structure, as his “mausoleum church at akhtala” (p. 28) was consequently one of the most important public statements of his new faith.54 thus, the theological message that may be deduced from its architectural features, its external decorations, and the fresco cycle in its interior are of paramount importance for getting as close as possible to iwanē’s personal beliefs. eastmond highlights the blending of georgian, byzantine, and armenian cultural elements and theological ideas, heavily emphasizing iwanē’s efforts at “georgianization.” these interminglings are extremely intricate, something that stands out even in eastmond’s brief, perhaps too brief, descriptions.55 but as in his treatment of the written sources discussed above, so in the analysis of the visual material of axt‘ala eastmond overlooks some important circumstances that lie at the intersection of art, theology, and key concepts in religionsgeschichte. let me provide some examples that illustrate the need to add further nuance to eastmond’s assumptions and conclusions. eastmond makes a good case that the external sculptural decoration of the east façade of the main church in axt‘ala fits contemporary georgian style and tastes much more closely than it does any other models, to the point that “as much as stones could speak, those at akhtala shouted out for the triumph of georgian chalcedonian orthodoxy” (p. 34). yet inside the church, a central scene, immediately below a disproportionately large virgin enthroned, is the communion of the apostles, which runs along the whole apse.56 i am not sure whether “the scene subtly emphasises … the converts’ desire to adhere to trends from the centre of the orthodox world,” or whether it also, in a different way, “shouted out the triumph of… [byzantine?] orthodoxy.” given such a central position, the scene was 53. to mention two examples, eastmond describes her as “a bargaining chip in the ransom negotiations for her father” (p. 2) and underscores “how little regard for tamta the rest of her family ever publicly displayed” (p. 343). 54. the name axt‘ala is attested only in the fifteenth century; until the fourteenth century, the settlement was referred to by its armenian name, płnjahank‘ (lit. “copper mines”). a. lidov, “plindzaxank-axtala, istorija monastyrja, ktitor i datirovka rospisi” [plindaxank-axtala, the history of the monastery, its founder, and the dating of its wall paintings], in armenia and the christian orient, 266–278 (erevan: armenian academy of sciences “gitut‘yun” press, 2000), 270. 55. a more detailed analysis may be found in lidov’s bilingual wall paintings. 56. see the relevant illustrations in lidov, wall paintings, 63, 68–69, 250–258. 254 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) hardly a subtlety, and as lidov has argued, the entire program of the apse “adhere[s] to the strictest byzantine models… [and] was not at all characteristic of contemporary georgian churches.”57 eastmond, too, duly notes that the scene was not a common one in contemporary georgian churches and that the painters “had to look further west to byzantium” for inspiration (p. 43). he, too, brings forth the only other contemporary georgian parallel, at q’inc’visi, but fails to specify that there the scene is depicted not in the center of the apse but on the wall of the bema.58 lidov, on the other hand, whose study on axt‘ala is the most detailed to date, remarks that the same compositional choice—the communion of the apostles—and the same location within the space of the church as in axt‘ala may be observed in five other churches that have been classified as “armenian chalcedonian.”59 thus, the elements of fluidity and the interpenetration of different pictorial and sculptural traditions in the church of axt‘ala appear to be rather more complex than eastmond allows. eastmond is unsure of the utility of the category “armenian chalcedonians” as theorized by marr and arutyunova-fidanyan, since it would denote “a distinct confessional group” with a high level of self-consciousness and cohesion (p. 45). he questions these characteristics, since, according to him, the thirteenth-century conversions were driven also by “cynical motives: to seek promotion at the georgian court” (p. 46). this may be true for such high-standing figures as iwanē, but even so, the sincerity of a conversion is one thing, the public display of that conversion through the deliberate choice of certain themes and iconographic programs quite another. this distinction would be especially important if iwanē wished to appeal to an already existing community of chalcedonian armenians and georgians at the same time. we may thus wonder whether iwanē really set out to “attempt to forge a clearer georgian identity among worshippers” (p. 41). it may instead be the case that the older interpretation of iwanē as seeking to strengthen a chalcedonian armenian community that had a tendency to distinguish itself from georgian models by appealing to byzantine ones still holds a grain of truth, regardless of the sincerity of the conversions.60 this possibility would also imply that iwanē was enacting a carefully thought-out policy toward the various constituencies whose support he needed for controlling the territories he conquered. indeed, the depiction of the communion of apostles with its accompanying greek inscription (on which see below) in the central register of the apse seems to indicate that iwanē was engaged in a careful balancing act between different priorities and perhaps chose not to favor one group too much over the other when commissioning the decorations of his church. the sophisticated art-historical evidence and the theological message of axt‘ala’s wall paintings go beyond this one scene, of course. they cannot all be explored here, but a few 57. ibid., 62, 362. 58. ibid. 59. ibid. 60. more detailed consideration of the axt‘ala paintings in relation to the juridical status of the armenian chalcedonian church may be found in lidov, wall paintings, 63–64, 362–363. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 255 further points will highlight the necessity of paying sufficient attention to the intricacies at hand. i find eastmond’s discussion of the inscription accompanying the scene of the communion of the apostles so laconic as to be confusing at best and misleading at worst. eastmond indicates that the inscription is in greek, and he reads it as saying, “this is my blood.”61 he observes that the citation is “unusual” but that it “stress[es] this element of liturgy,” without specifying what element in the liturgy is being considered. we are then provided with a parallel example from a very different context: “the blood is similarly stressed in the image of the crucifixion in the red gospels, highlighting the different interpretations the [armenian and georgian] churches had of the mixing of wine and water in the eucharist” (p. 43).62 eastmond makes no further comments regarding, for example, the implications of these differences, the usage of each church, and their divergences. he simply goes on to speculate on how the image and its inscription might have been perceived by the congregation. even a reader who is well versed in medieval armeno-georgian (and armenobyzantine) polemical literature has a hard time following the logic of these statements and understanding the message of this specific inscription in axt‘ala and the kind of parallel that the red gospels yield. despite the very different medium and audience of a church fresco compared to the more private view that a manuscript affords, did they both assume a clearly chalcedonian position on a specific liturgical practice, namely, the mixing of water with wine in the eucharistic chalice? this seems to be the unstated argument, especially since eastmond affirms elsewhere that the red gospels were “probably made for a chalcedonian (i.e. georgian christian) patron” (p. 38). furthermore, he diminishes the importance of the theological message of the inscription in axt‘ala by stating that “[t]hese fine theological differences may have been lost on many of the congregation” (p. 43). however, this interpretation cannot be accepted and requires revision, particularly if the congregation was composed of monks. eastmond should also have clarified whether it is possible to decipher what the frescoes and the accompanying inscription wished to convey or which liturgical tradition they upheld. the uniquely armenian liturgical praxis of not mixing water with wine during the eucharistic celebration was one of the major causes of the endless discussions and polemic that raged between the armenian and imperial (byzantine) as well as the armenian and georgian churches over centuries.63 the difference in praxis was also raised in negotiations 61. the allusion is to matt. 26:28. lidov specifies that the inscription appears along the rim of the eucharistic chalice and, again, above the entire composition, but that it does not reproduce matthew verbatim. lidov, wall paintings, 69–70, 375–376. 62. the red gospels, also called the ganjasar gospels, is a thirteenth-century manuscript currently held in the university of chicago library, goodspeed ms 949. it can be viewed online at http://goodspeed.lib.uchicago. edu/ms/index.php?doc=0949. 63. among the many studies on this issue, see b. l. zekiyan, “la rupture entre l’église géorgienne et arménienne au début du viie siècle,” revue des études arméniennes 16 (1982): 155–174, and n. garsoïan, “le vin pur du chalice dans l’église arménienne,” in pratiques de l’eucharistie dans les églises d’orient et d’occident (antiquité et moyen-âges), vol. 1, l’institution, ed. n. bériou, b. caseau, and d. rigau, 249–271 (paris: institut http://goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu/ms/index.php?doc=0949 http://goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu/ms/index.php?doc=0949 256 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) over a possible church union between armenian and roman churchmen since the twelfth century. it is unthinkable that monks or even common people who lived in a region with a mixed population and were aware of different liturgical usages would miss such an unmistakable reference to the divergent traditions. miaphysite armenian theologians had interpreted the liturgical peculiarity in a christological sense since the sixth century. for them, the use of unmixed wine symbolized christ’s pure blood, on the one hand, and his one nature, on the other.64 it is thus highly intriguing that a greek inscription in an unapologetically chalcedonian church would emphasize a verse about christ’s blood in a eucharistic context, with no hint of water or mixture. did it endorse the armenian church’s contested usage of pure wine as a symbol of christ’s blood? this is hardly conceivable. was it then a deliberately ambiguous reference? a more circumstantial interpretation of the scene and its inscriptions would be a fascinating topic of research, especially in view of the many other “armenianizing” elements in the decorations of the axt‘ala church that lidov has pointed out.65 in his analysis of the scene, eastmond should have at least clarified what the verse could imply regarding armenian or georgian liturgical usages. the miniature of the red gospels, presented by eastmond as a parallel case, has a very different iconographic scene and is not comparable to the frescoes of axt‘ala. in the crucifixion scene on fol. 6v, it appears that blood and water issue from christ’s rib and flow into what may have been intended as a eucharistic cup.66 presumably, this was a symbolic reference to the mixing of water and wine during the eucharist and thus endorsed a chalcedonian tradition. i have not viewed the image in situ, and the digital reproduction, especially the blue color of the water in contrast to the red of the blood, is not as clearly visible as one would wish. my analysis is consequently tentative. nevertheless, the issuing of blood and water from christ’s rib when he was on the cross was not in itself debated in the armenian theological tradition. rather, armenian theologians insisted on the interpretation of the blood as referring to the (pure) eucharistic wine and the water as symbolizing the water of baptism. d’études augustiniennes/brepols, 2009); reprinted in eadem, studies on the formation of christian armenia (ashgate: variorum, 2010), no. xi. 64. on the basis of john 19:34, medieval armenian theologians argued that blood issuing from christ’s rib prefigured the eucharistic (pure) wine, whereas water signified baptism. for discussion, see the sources cited in the previous note as well as p. cowe, “an armenian job fragment from sinai and its implications,” oriens christianus 76 (1992): 123–157, and idem, “armenian christology in the seventh and eighth centuries with particular reference to the contribution of yovhan ōjnec‘i and xosrovik t‘argmanič‘,” journal of theological studies 55, no. 1 (2004): 30–54. 65. lidov interprets this inscription as a rejection of a roman liturgical usage introduced in the armenian church in cilician armenia, namely, the taking of only the host during the communion, and as an endorsement of the byzantine orthodox practice of taking both the bread and the wine. lidov, wall paintings, 376. this subject, however, is not an important theme in twelfthand thirteenth-century armenian theological discussions, whereas the use of mixed versus unmixed wine is one of the most prominent. it is thus in this direction that i believe research may yield interesting results. 66. this image can be viewed at http://goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu/view/index.php?doc=0949&obj=016. http://goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu/view/index.php?doc=0949&obj=016 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 257 the “chalcedonian” nature of the red gospels has been questioned on the basis of its trilingual inscription.67 more importantly, the unanswered questions regarding the commissioner(s), scribes, miniaturists, and time periods involved in the creation of this manuscript are in need of more thorough investigation before any conclusions may be drawn. as yovsēp‘ean’s pioneering study of this manuscript in 1940 indicated, the codex is composed of three distinct parts, written in three different hands and illuminated by at least two other miniaturists. the text of the gospels, with ornamental headpieces and marginal decorations, was likely copied earlier. to this, folios with full-page miniatures by two different artists were later added. furthermore, canon tables were traced by yet another hand than those that produced dominical scenes. in addition, the tables were executed on parchment of different quality, according to yovsēp‘ean.68 given the multilayered process of the manuscript’s production, making any comments on the christological orientation of the manuscript’s commissioner (and was there only one commissioner?) appears premature. similarly, a better-informed analysis of the fresco cycle of axt‘ala may lead to very different conclusions, highlighting a much more complex religious/confessional situation. an overly zealous desire to affirm the hegemony of georgian or georgianizing tendencies in the decorations of axt‘ala leads eastmond to yet another curious conclusion. he reveals that paintings of “particularly celebrated georgian saints” were executed “to either side of the west door, a location where everyone leaving the church must see them” (p. 43). he then compares this placement to the “less prominent” position of two saints “particularly venerated in armenia, sts. gregory the illuminator and jacob of nisibis,” because they appear “among the sixteen church fathers in the lowest register of the apse of the church. uniform in dress and appearance with the other church fathers, and hidden from view behind the templon screen… ” (p. 45). but the implied contrast completely overlooks the so-called sacred hierarchy within a holy site. in a number of religious traditions it is the “holy of holies” that is concealed from general view and accorded the greatest awe and veneration. in a christian context, the location in the center of the apse is anything but “less prominent.” on the contrary, it is where the culmination of the liturgical service—the eucharist—takes place, accessible only to the few who administer it, a fact that heightens its mystical significance. here, too, one is bound rather to agree with lidov: “the choice of the holy bishops in the altar apse also reveals the intentions of those behind the programme. in one of the most prestigious locations, to the right of the synthronon in the centre of the first tier, we find gregory the illuminator.”69 lidov goes on to emphasize the importance 67. i. rapti, “art chrétien en anatolie turque au xiiie siècle: les évangiles rouges de chicago (university library, goodspeed 949),” in mélanges catherine jolivet-lévy, ed. s. brodbeck et al., 473–98 (paris: association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2016), has interesting reflections on this matter despite the curiously anachronistic title of the article. 68. g. yovsēp‘ean, “mi jeṙagir awetaran” [a gospel manuscript], hayastaneayc‘ ekełec‘i 1, no. 11 (1940): 15–29, reprinted in idem, nyut‘er ew usumnasirut‘iwnner hay arvesti ew mšakuyt‘i patmut‘yan [materials and research on armenian art and culture], book 2, 45–59 (new york: n.p., 1943), and in idem, nyut‘er ew usumnasirut‘iwnner hay arvesti patmut‘yan [materials and research on armenian art history], 2:108–115 (erevan: armenian academy of sciences press, 1987). 69. lidov, wall paintings, 79, 81, illustrations at 265, quotation from 373. 258 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) of the cult of st. gregory the illuminator among armenians of various confessions, both chalcedonian and not. these nuances are, unfortunately, missing from eastmond’s discussion of axt‘ala’s fresco cycle. eastmond also points out various architectural and topographic features of the axt‘ala monastic complex that were created deliberately to emphasize visually its different theological orientation compared to the nearby non-chalcedonian armenian monasteries. one of these features was the arrangement of the buildings. in axt‘ala the main church built by iwanē stood alone in the center of the complex, in contrast to the more clustered arrangement of ancillary buildings around the main church typical of armenian monasteries in the region (p. 30). in order to support this point, eastmond would have been well advised to provide the ground plan of axt‘ala, as he did for gošavank‘ (p. 32) and haṙičavank‘ (p. 49), including the date of the construction of various buildings within the complex. since these were built at different points in time, eastmond would have made a more convincing case had he considered how such deliberate choices in the arrangement of the buildings could be sustained or developed over the medium to long term. the above discussion shows that in employing art-historical and architectural evidence as indicators of cultural interaction, just as in the use of written sources, one must pay due attention to the various details that make up the whole picture. the exploration of seemingly contradictory elements cannot be left to overly succinct descriptions that blur these elements’ most substantial features. consequently, a reliable comparative approach requires knowledge and application of methodologies not only from the field of art history but also, for example, from theology and the history of interactions among the various relevant groups. only then can we appreciate the full range of issues that were at stake and defined cultural interactions and entanglements, particularly those crossing ethnic and religious boundaries. parvus error in principio … i would like to round off this essay with some minor critical remarks. although the presence of certain errors or the presentation of some not unanimously accepted hypotheses (such as the “kurdish origin” of the zak‘arids) as established facts may seem inconsequential to the overall argument of the book, they can give rise to ambiguities and, possibly, further hypotheses, particularly among nonspecialist readers. as doctor angelicus admonished centuries ago: “parvus error in principio magnus est in fine.”70 eastmond’s citations of primary sources are not always clear, especially when more than one edition or translation of a work is included in the bibliography but the footnotes contain only the name of the author or the title without further details. for example, if one wishes to consult the references to kartlis cxovreba (first cited on p. 3, n. 7) or step‘anos ōrbēlean (first cited on p. 37, n. 22), one cannot be sure which edition eastmond is citing, since the bibliography contains three items under “kartlis tshkovreba” and two under “stepanos orbelian” (both on p. 397). 70. “a small mistake in the beginning is a big one in the end”. thomas aquinas, “prooemium,” in de ente et essentia, consulted at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/oee.html. http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/oee.html al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) women, identity, and power: a review essay of tamta’s world • 259 armenologists will experience some cognitive dissonance when reading the caption of an illustration from the famous hałbat gospels (p. 52, fig. 17, and the color plate between pp. 132 and 133). the figure on the lower left with fish appears as “sahak,” instead of the name reported in the manuscript, the rather nonbiblical šeranik. the confusion is likely due to a transposition of the commissioner’s name, which was indeed sahak. on the other hand, šeranik was probably the same person as a homonymous soldier recorded in one of the inscriptions of ani. this illustration is noteworthy, since it represents a unique feature of the hałbat gospels, in which numerous depictions of daily life have made their way even into dominical scenes.71 i wonder if it is wise to use a nineteenth-century engraving of walls or a gate in konya (p. 148, fig. 43; p. 151, fig. 46) to draw conclusions about the use of spolia in their thirteenthcentury reconstruction. one would wish to be better informed of the context of the engraving and the reliability of such a visual source. on a different occasion, eastmond does not fail to note that even photographs and their “staging” require a critical eye before they can be used as sources (pp. 158–59, figs. 50 and 51). when discussing war and relics as booty during the mongol campaigns in anatolia and the participation of armenians in these campaigns, eastmond makes an unclear remark with regard to the “island monastery of aghtamar [which] was known as the seat of st. bartholomew” (p. 374). it might be useful for non-specialists to explain the implications of this reference. eastmond probably wished to indicate that the catholicosate of ałt‘amar (which lasted from 1113 to 1895) claimed to represent the true center of the armenian church as the heir to apostle bartholomew’s seat. a few words on the centrality of apostle bartholomew in buttressing the apostolic claims of the armenian church—not only the “island monastery of aghtamar”—would have significantly clarified the importance of his relics and of their transfer to the monastery of hałbat.72 the book closes with a note on the importance of conducting studies that cross “modern political and academic frontiers” (p. 393) and briefly touches on the possible biases and problems involved in doing so. this is a conviction that i fully share, but i insist that such research be done with a thorough knowledge of the disciplines that one wishes to bridge. eastmond then asserts that “armenians are... reluctant to place their culture within a broader framework of islamic/turkish culture,” a statement whose terms contradict his very premises and aspirations. it is anachronistic to apply the blanket term “turkish culture” to the medieval turkic peoples that inhabited anatolia, and it does not do justice to the diversity that eastmond sets out to highlight in his book. if we are to abandon categorizations that emerged from outdated notions of nation-states, as eastmond persuasively advocates throughout the book, why subsume the great variety and vibrancy 71. k. mat‘evosyan, hałbati avetaranə: anii manrankarč‘ut‘yan ezaki nmuš [the hałbat gospels: a unique example of miniature illumination from ani] (erevan: nairi, 2012), 12–25, and idem, “the history of the monastery of hoṙomos,” in hoṙomos monastery: art and history, ed. e. vardanyan, 17–53 (paris: association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2015), 44. 72. on this subject, see, most recently, v. calzolari, les apôtres thaddée et barthélemy: aux origines du christianisme arménien (turnhout: brepols, 2011). 260 • zaroui pogossian al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) of turkic cultures in medieval anatolia under the label “islamic/turkish,” which echoes a twentieth-century political formation—the nation-state? moreover, eastmond’s statement also neglects the legacy of numerous noteworthy scholars. i would like to mention just one prominent historian who was far from a marginal figure: levon xač‘ikean, the director of the institute of ancient manuscripts (matenadaran, erevan) from 1954 until his death in 1982. a cursory look at the titles in his opera, collected in a three-volume publication, is enough to highlight his engagement with the history of medieval anatolia and the different peoples that inhabited it, as well as the place of the armenians therein and their multifaceted interactions with turkic and other peoples throughout the middle ages.73 to support the thesis of “armenian exceptionalism,” eastmond cites two exhibitions dedicated to byzantine art and contrasts the unwillingness of armenian lenders to participate in them with such lenders’ interest in exhibitions dedicated entirely to armenian art and culture. even leaving aside the supposition that it would be logical to expect more armenian lenders and objects to be present in an exhibition that focuses on armenian rather than byzantine art, i am not sure how armenian participation or lack thereof in byzantine art exhibitions illuminates tendencies in the study of armenian history outside the “framework of islamic/turkish culture.” eastmond should have provided further remarks to clarify his criticism. concluding thoughts as the saying goes, “the devil is in the details,” and it is not the details that make eastmond’s book interesting. rather, it is his courage not to be boggled by them and to look beyond them, to outline the big picture and try to make sense of a world in which, despite difference and conflict, peoples, goods, and ideas moved and enriched each other. this vision the book manages to convey with great force, but the precise delineation of the various movements with their complexities and a rigorous analysis of the sources remains to be done. despite its shortcomings, eastmond’s monograph is an important contribution to the study of multicultural interactions in a part of the world that is usually not explored from this perspective. viewed as marginal from the centers of the great empires, the homeland of t‘amt‘a in northern armenia and her new base in xlat‘ on the shores of lake van were, nevertheless, part of an interconnected world with specific local configurations. bridging these two dimensions requires a scholar to overcome research paradigms tied to “national histories” or specific academic disciplines. this is an arduous task and admittedly difficult to complete by one individual. eastmond’s willingness to face a challenge of this magnitude is commendable. the monograph marks an important step in raising greater awareness about the untapped potential of research on entangled histories, and it will certainly encourage specialists in various relevant fields to develop this approach further. 73. l. xačikean, ašxatut‘yunner [opera], 3 vols. 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by the universities of stanford, chicago, and harvard. academic worlds are all similar in many ways, but also different, and these differences may strike an outsider as odd. this works both ways, and i can only hope that what i am going to discuss here will be of some interest for you, just as the american academic system is of interest to me. in what follows, i will mention some of the previous recipients of this award with whom i had direct contact at some point or whose work is related to mine. i began my studies at the universidad complutense of madrid in 1973, a year that cannot be forgotten by many of m y g e n e r a t i o n b e c a u s e o f t h e c o u p d’état against salvador allende in chile. i mention this because when i was in college, politics interested me more than study did. in spain we were living the last years of the dictatorship of francisco franco, and events like those in chile were easily translated into our own concerns, in this case as another reminder of the power of the army—the army being one of the major dangers that we all knew we would remarks by the recipient of the 2019 mem lifetime achievement award given at the annual meeting of middle east medievalists (new orleans, 14 november 2019) maribel fierro consejo superior de investigaciones científicas (csic) (maribel.fierro@cchs.csic.es) © 2020 maribel fierro. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:maribel.fierro%40cchs.csic.es?subject= v • maribel fierro al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) have to face in the transition period that was to unfold after the dictator’s death and that would, we hoped, lead to democracy. before and after franco’s death in 1975, what i remember of my years at the university has little to do with books or debates about scholarly matters. what remains most vivid in my mind are the armed police inside university buildings, the almost daily students’ demonstrations that usually ended with being chased by those armed officers, and widespread political activism aimed at putting an end to the glaring dissonance between what most people—especially young people— desired and sought and what the official propaganda of the regime claimed we desired and sought. that period has given me a permanent reluctance to equate official, standard, or normative statements regarding a specific society with the realities on the ground, a reluctance that i have always found rewarding when i have applied it to the countries i have visited, including those on the southern shore of the mediterranean. i said that my memories of college have little to do with books or scholarly debates; dictatorships are very bad news for scholarship and for academic life in general. they stifle the free exchange of ideas, they suffocate innovative thinking, and they promote servile attitudes in every area of life. during my five years as an arabic and islamic studies major, i do not recall having attended a single seminar or lecture that gave rise to debate. i was taught “facts” to memorize, not ideas to ponder and discuss. the classes in general were quite boring, with some exceptions because there are always, even in the worst of circumstances, individuals who somehow manage to preserve areas of intellectual freedom and integrity that, however small, remain exemplary and set a model to follow. my supervisor, fernando de la granja, taught me to respect the arabic language and maría jesús rubiera surprised me with her innovative ideas. teresa garulo and emilio tornero were always supportive and inspiring. but as i said, the classes were for the most part dull and uninspiring, all the more so because i was the only arabic and islamic studies major in my graduating class, which meant that in some courses i s at alone wit h t he t eac hers in t he classroom. under these circumstances, some of my teachers were tempted to transform the class into a conversation— usually a monologue—about their own concerns. i recall one who was obsessed with the petty aspects of academic life and spent most of our class time enumerating them. his case alerted me to the danger of letting such aspects gain the upper hand in your life as a scholar. later experiences confirmed that academic grievances, when nurtured, have damaging effects on both personality and scholarship. i f i w a s u n l u c k y i n n o t h a v i n g classmates (which, on the other hand, also meant having no competitors), i was extremely lucky in meeting two older students, luis molina and maría luisa ávila, who befriended me and helped me in a myriad of ways, as they still do today. luis molina’s knowledge of arabic is superb, and i still consult him when i know that i do not understand a text, and i am never disappointed by his guidance. maría luisa ávila, initially trained as a mathematician, has spent most of her academic life building an extremely useful online resource, the prosopography of the scholars of al-andalus, which now al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) remarks by the recipient of the 2019 mem lifetime achievement award • vi comprises more than 11,000 entries. i still remember the computer she was using in 1985 when she wrote her phd dissertation on demographics in al-andalus through an analysis of the biographies of scholars. they both introduced me to ulamology and to the thought-provoking work of stephen humphreys and richard bulliet. my interest was not initially related to the ʿulamāʾ and their scholarly and social practices, like theirs was. i was interested in heresy and heretics. this was an interest closely linked to my own family history. my parents had been on the losing side of the civil war that brought the dictator to power. while growing up in francoist spain, i was constantly reminded by the official propaganda that there was only one way to be a spaniard, the nationalcatholic way, and that therefore my parents and i did not quite belong, as we were neither nationalists nor catholic; hence, we were (labeled as) “outsiders” in our own country. when, later, i was taught spanish national history, i was fascinated by those who had received this label in earlier periods, among them the muslims who had lived in the iberian peninsula for more than eight centuries. i became very curious about them. fortunately, my parents had enrolled me in the italian school in madrid, so i grew up knowing that there was no single way to write and understand history. having learned italian from the age of three, i developed a liking for foreign languages and, like many spaniards of my generation, i wanted to go abroad and see other ways of living. when it came time to go to college, i decided to study the most exotic language that the complutense university had to offer as a way to ensure a g o o d j u s t i f i c a t i o n t o t r a v e l t o t h e countries where this language was spoken. as hebrew and arabic fit the bill, i started studying semitic philology, soon deciding that arabic was what i really liked. at the university, i held on to my initial interests in heresy and the history of al-andalus, but a new and related i n t e r e s t s l o w l y e n t e r e d t h e f r a y , a s i b e c a m e i n c r e a s i n g l y f a s c i n a t e d b y those muslims who thought differently from other muslims, who were labeled heretics, innovators, or even infidels by their coreligionists, or who considered themselves ghurabāʾ. researching these figures proved one of the most enjoyable experiences of my academic life, and i eventually wrote my phd dissertation on a tract by an early cordoban scholar, ibn waḍḍāḥ (d. 287/900), attacking religious innovations and innovators. my focus has mostly been on the intersection between politics and knowledge: how the authority to determine what is right and what is wrong was constructed and enforced, and by whom, and how it changed over time, along with how violence was used in such processes and how it was checked. when working on my dissertation, i s t a r t e d t o r e a d a b o u t e a r l y h a d i t h literature, qurʾan, and theology. these were topics that had never been core interests of the spanish school of arabists, especially not at the time i was studying. i longed to be able to consult with someone who was familiar with such topics, and i was lucky enough to be granted a british council scholarship to attend the school of oriental and african studies as a “research scholar.” in 1982 london was an exciting place to be, with its mixture of different peoples and its vibrant cultural life. there my good luck continued, as i was able to establish contact with michael brett vii • maribel fierro al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) and michael cook, who were extremely generous with their time and knowledge and helped me make sense of the text i was studying. cook, in particular, read every single page i wrote, even if it was written in spanish, and made many critical remarks and suggestions that taught me more in a year than i had learned in five years of college. through michael cook i came into contact with a group of scholars who attended the “late antiquity and early islam” conferences organized by larry conrad, among others, and the “from jahiliyya to islam” conferences held in jerusalem. it was there that i attended my first international conference in 1987, and i was terrified when professor kister invited me to his office, closed the door, produced a manuscript, and commanded: “read it.” i then met patricia crone, whose writings i found provocative and illuminating, and who many years later invited me to write my book on ʿabd al-rahman iii. i also met gauthier juynboll, who pushed me to write my first paper in english. at the time, he was writing his book on early hadith, and he immediately asked me: “who was the first person to introduce hadith in al-andalus?” having come up with an unsatisfactory answer, i decided to work on a better one. when i returned to spain after my soas experience, i was again lucky in that i found a job almost immediately, first at the universidad complutense and afterward at the consejo superior de investigaciones científicas (csic), a national research institution. although i could have stayed in both, i finally opted for the csic. the reason was the csic’s proactive approach to the opportunities offered by the new political situation following the 1978 constitution, which transformed spain into a democracy. the csic actively worked toward convergence w i t h t h e a c a d e m i c s t a n d a r d s o f t h e european community, which spain joined in 1986. in order to get a job at the csic, it became mandatory to first carry out a long research stay abroad: exposure to other academic cultures and ways of doing things was considered the only way to overcome the shortcomings and perversions introduced to our academic culture during the dictatorship period. i also had the good fortune to overlap at the csic with two colleagues with whom i shared a vision of what needed to be done. they were manuela marín and mercedes garcía arenal, with whom i have worked closely since then—and in spite of which we are still friends. together we tried to open up opportunities for students at the doctoral level and to offer them the possibility of contact with scholars f r o m a b r o a d , l e v e r a g i n g o u r l i m i t e d resources to bring to madrid scholars such as wadad al-qadi and fred donner. we also developed fruitful relations with our french colleagues thanks to a french institution located in madrid, the casa de velázquez, which has played a crucial role in advancing the study of al-andalus. i have learned a great deal from french scholarship, and it saddens me that today many scholars, especially the younger ones, ignore anything that is not written in english. in more recent times, i have been given the opportunity—thanks to the alexander von humboldt foundation—to get to know the german academic context better, an experience that has enriched my own work in many ways. traditionally, in spain, our contact with the arab and islamic worlds has mostly been via north al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) remarks by the recipient of the 2019 mem lifetime achievement award • viii africa. i have a longstanding love of both tunisia and morocco and have always felt at home in these countries, whether looking at manuscripts in their rich collections or through my contacts with professors such as mounira chapoutotremadi and halima ferhat. i have enjoyed every minute of my time at the csic, and i will continue enjoying it as i still have some years ahead of me b e f o r e r e t i r e m e n t . t h e r e h a v e b e e n difficult moments, especially the awful blow that we were dealt in the 2008 economic crisis, which erased much of our progress toward convergence with our more advanced european neighbors. with manuela marín, i have pursued a shared interest in the political and intellectual history of al-andalus, a topic dealt with by sam gellens in his seminal study of the riḥla practices of the andalusis. i have written extensively on political, religious, and intellectual developments in al-andalus, more in spanish than in english, though sometimes these writings do get translated into english. we spanish scholars are well aware that anything written in spanish is very rarely read outside spanish-speaking contexts and that to exist in the global academic world one must write in english, even if it means an extra effort for those of us who have learned english late and imperfectly. although i continue to work on andalusi topics, several decades ago my interest expanded to encompass north africa, as it became clear to me that i could not study the one without the other, especially when dealing with the cordoban umayyad caliphate and with the almohads. it may sound silly, but in spain al-andalus has traditionally been studied in and of itself as something unique and almost selfexplanatory. the first spanish arabists tried to legitimize the study of al-andalus within the framework of spanish national h i s t o r y b y r e b r a n d i n g a l a n d a l u s a s “muslim spain.” the way we name things is related to the way we conceive of them, in turn influencing how we study them. the choice of terms has always fascinated me, and it was by tracing the history of a term that i made my first incursions into studies that transcended al-andalus. an early andalusi rebel was called al-fāṭimī, and this led me to study how that term was used in arabic sources inside and o u t s i d e a l a n d a l u s . w h i l e s e a r c h i n g for fatimids, i came across some rebels referred to as al-aṣfar, sparking research that led me to conclude that some of the arab conquerors had painted their faces yellow, thus offering another explanation for the term ṣufrīs. i am presently doing research on the sacrifice of she-camels, a practice that i first encountered when studying the rituals of the fatimids in north africa and that has now led me to safavid iran, passing through norman sicily. it is exhilarating to venture outside al-andalus while at the same time never losing sight of it. i abhor nationalism, but i do love spain and thus i love al-andalus. a l o n g t h e w a y i h a v e m e t m a n y scholars, of different ages, both inside and outside spain, who have been extremely generous with their knowledge and time. i have also been fortunate in having contact with younger scholars, whose enthusiasm and vocation have helped me to keep my own alive. if i have been able to offer them help at all resembling the help that i myself have received from others throughout my academic life, i will be ix • maribel fierro al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) satisfied. i only hope that in the troubled and troubling times in which we now live, they will be not exposed to the kind of context in which i started my career back in 1973, and that those who live and work in dictatorial contexts will be as fortunate as i was in eventually finding themselves in better times. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 228-230 on the last day of each year’s holberg seminar, we holbergians would gather at the home of michael cook and his wife kim for a delicious and delightful dinner. the final meeting was held over four days in the summer of 2018, and there was a feeling of nostalgia in the air as we picked over our coffee, wine, and dessert at that closing dinner. rather spontaneously, each member of the group shared their own reflections and heartfelt thanks to michael, to kim, and to the professors and graduate students who made up the holberg seminar. for many of us, these meetings were the highlight of the academic year: an opportunity to gather with a wide range of excellent scholars who would read our work and respond to it thoughtfully. but the holberg seminar’s long duration meant that it was also a time when we could be ourselves, without the facades and performances of knowledge that we all sometimes fall back on in academic settings. that level of comfort did not come spontaneously. many of us faced the first meeting of the holberg seminar with both excitement and trepidation. we were to be surrounded by well-established scholars and brilliant graduate students from an array of different fields. but after four years of exhausting and exhilarating meetings, what had once seemed intimidating was now a room full of familiar faces and supportive colleagues who could find our mistakes with kindness, broaden our knowledge of adjacent fields, and deepen our understanding of our own texts. this kind of supportive community is precious in academic life. and it takes time. each summer, we met for four days, from the early morning to the late evening. soon enough, everyone had little choice but to lose the academic personas they assumed and be themselves. michael designed the seminar so that we devoted at least three hours to each submitted thesis chapter or article draft. the format introduction: a note from the holbergians sébastien garnier ehess, paris (sebastiengarnier@hotmail.fr) matthew l. keegan barnard college of columbia university (mlkeegan@barnard.edu) pamela klasova macalester college (pklasova@macalester.edu) © 2020 sébastien garnier et al. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:sebastiengarnier%40hotmail.fr?subject= mailto:mlkeegan%40barnard.edu?subject= mailto:pklasova%40macalester.edu?subject= 229 • sébastien garnier, matthew l. keegan, & pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a note from the holbergians • 230 was intense and exhausting, but also extremely stimulating. after three hours of questions, corrections, and comments, the holbergian in the “hot seat” was inevitably exhausted but also inevitably enriched. it is, after all, such a rare experience for a graduate student to have so many thoughtful and meticulous responses to a piece of writing prior to the dissertation defense. each meeting broadened our horizons and inspired us to venture into fields beyond our own. the fact that the holberg seminar was such a success and had such an impact on so many graduate students will come as no surprise to those who know michael (as he asked us to call him at our first meeting). he is a consummate engineer of pedagogical spaces. in the holberg seminar, he gathered a group of scholars who worked on different fields of islamic history, from the earliest arabic historiography to early modern persian literature, islamic theology, and social history. this plethora of academic perspectives from diverse subfields meant that our fellow holbergians were often asking us questions that we had never thought to pose before, thus revealing the blind spots of our individual specialties and academic disciplines. the holbergians came with academic training from egypt, france, germany, england, the czech republic, and the united states, and we each came to learn something more about these distinct academic traditions as the years went on, just as we also came to appreciate the particular quirks and queries we were likely to receive from our colleagues. as we developed our own scholarly voices, we learned to appreciate the proclivities and predilections of the other holbergians. the peculiar styles of the members’ contributions became a source of warmth, familiarity, and community. these divergent methodological approaches proved harmonious rather than cacophonous, thanks to michael and to the other holberg faculty members. antoine borrut, jack tannous, and khaled el-rouayheb, the other holberg faculty members, each contributed in their own way. antoine helped us see new connections to existing scholarship, enthusiastically circulating sources that were related to each paper as he helped guide the discussion. khaled’s quiet, calm voice would offer succinct comments that often revealed the unresolved issues lurking behind each paper. jack’s perspective from late antiquity offered material that many of us would have overlooked, and he delivered it with the affable air of a storyteller. special thanks are also due to marina rustow and lale behzadi, who brought their expertise as guest scholars, as well as to sabine schmidtke, who hosted us at the institute for advanced studies for part of our deliberations in 2017. the willingness and ability of each of these scholars to reach outside of their own subfield to engage with the wide variety of scholarly disciplines on offer at the holberg was a model for us all, encouraging us to stretch ourselves beyond our habitual modes of thinking. we also wish to thank the staff at princeton’s department of near eastern studies for their administrative support in organizing our visits. and, of course, there’s michael, who made holberg happen. one remarkable thing about michael is his indefatigability through the long days of holberg. he seemed to derive immense energy and pleasure from listening to the conversation unfold around each paper, smiling or chuckling at this or that comment. but in his typical, self-effacing manner, he would wait patiently for everyone else to offer up their thoughts. he would then take out his scribbled notes to see if something had been left unsaid. when we had exhausted our stores, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a note from the holbergians • 230 michael somehow still had a crucial nugget that we had overlooked. the unselfishness of allowing others to speak first was not, we imagine, simply a matter of temperament. the point of the seminar was to build knowledge as a group, not through attacking one another or posturing, but rather through a collective intellectual effort. scholarship need not be a solitary affair, and michael’s gift to us was making our graduate education that much less solitary. it is much more fun and much more fruitful when scholarship is undertaken together and when critiques come from colleagues who are looking out for you and not trying to tear you down. it is a testament to michael’s spirit of scholarly generosity that we have all benefited so much from the holberg experience and that it generated personal and scholarly connections that will long outlast it. for many of us, it is difficult to imagine what would have come of our graduate experience without it, but one thing is certain: it would have been a lot less fun. we, the graduate students of the holberg seminar, dedicate this special dossier to michael cook for giving us that annual experience of academic camaraderie and rejuvenation. it was at that final dinner that one of our number asked michael if, upon receiving the holberg award for a career of academic excellence, he might have spent his award on a yacht or something of the sort. in his typically humble manner, he replied that he doesn’t know how to sail (this story is a case of riwāya bi-l-maʿnā and not bi-l-lafẓ). but given the frequent appearance of michael’s broad smile during the swampy princeton summer days we spent around a seminar table, we like to hope that michael is pleased with what came of his award. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 165-200 nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making in medieval arabic popular literature rachel schine university of colorado, boulder (rachel.schine@colorado.edu) introduction o my daughter, what’s become of you that you’re raising orphan bastards and foundlings? really, you have no need to do so, and your milk is pure and sound.1 sin is recompensed with sin. –sīrat al-dalhama2 one of the first acts in many newborns’ lives is suckling at a breast—be it their mother’s or a wet nurse’s. instances of a decisive and often providential first encounter between a 1. the judeo-arabic original uses the word ( ), jalāl, meaning glory or splendor, rather than ḥalāl, meaning sound or legitimate. however, in light of the context and syntax, this seems to be a transcription error on the part of the text’s editor. i am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for this observation. 2. all translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own. sīrat al-dalhama, ed. eliezer farḥī and ḥai sitrūk (tunis: farhi and sitruk, 1890?), 11. abstract this essay examines the role of nursing experiences in the formation of popular heroes in arabic literature of the medieval period, with a primary focus on the genres of siyar shaʿbiyya and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ. i show that the miraculous nursing of heroes—many of whom are foundlings—in popular texts tends to follow a providential meeting either with an animal or with a woman who is capable of nursing. though such tale patterns are attested across many cultures, they are also elaborated in specific, linked ways in traditional muslim sources, as in narratives of moses’s miraculous nursing and stories of muḥammad’s wet nurse, ḥalīma. whereas prophetic literature often depicts nursing solely as a human-human relationship, the heroic literature incorporates significant human-animal encounters. using an exemplary anecdote about a hero’s suckling found in manuscripts and early print editions of sīrat dhāt al-himma, i sketch how one such instance can travel and shift across an epic tradition. i interpret the experience of the hero’s foster mother through the lens both of traditional islamic institutions of milk kinship and of a reading practice that attends closely to women’s presences and agencies in the early lives of (mostly) male literary figures. ומלקוט. אלזנא אולאד אלאיתאם תרבי חתא מנך האדא לאש אנתי בנתי יא ואלחאל מא ענדך חאׅגא ביה וחליבך צא̇פי חלאל1 ירׅגע חראם ̇פי חראם. يــا بنتــي انــت الش هــذا منــك حتــى تربــي االيتــام اوالد الزنــا وملقــوط والحــال مــا عنــدك حاجــة بــه ل يرجــع حــرام فــي حــرام وحليبــك صافــي حــا ִגלאל جالل mailto:rachel.schine%40colorado.edu?subject= 166 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) child destined for heroic status and a woman capable of nursing occur throughout arabic popular literature and folklore, and images of milk and lactation abound. in islamic societies, milk kinship forms bonds that, in addition to implying a physical intimacy between woman and child, carry a legal status that mirrors that of agnatic ties by instantiating a prohibition against marriage among milk-siblings. in contemporary discourse, the choice of whether and how to nurse is conceived of either as a female biological imperative, and thus a foregone conclusion, or as something that has been taken from women and harnessed by patriarchal, sovereign forces and interests.3 nonetheless, in choosing to nurse certain children, women are theoretically able to exercise gatekeeping power over the constitution of their families and social worlds, and this prospect is reflected in a number of popular narratives.4 this essay uses an anecdote found in less well-known versions of the medieval arabic frontier epic sīrat dhāt al-himma—the tunisian, judeo-arabic version printed in the 1890s/1307-1318 and ms arabe 3840 at the bibliothèque nationale de france (dated to the seventeenth or eighteenth/eleventh or twelfth century)5—as well as comparative materials from qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (stories of the prophets) and other siyar shaʿbiyya (popular epics) to show that the popular literary imaginary at times represents mother figures as wielding sizeable influence through their capacity to nurse. this ability allows them to determine the survival and loyalties of the text’s protagonists well before the heroes first step into a political or military role. moreover, nursing was commonly understood in the medieval period to impart not only nutrients but also traits, both physical and intellectual, to the child, making it even an essential feature of a hero’s characterization. ibn qutayba captures this view—as well as the potentially negative subtext that nursing can cause a child to lose certain aspects of its pre-nursing existence—pithily with a few citations in the portion of his ʿuyūn al-akhbār concerned with the constitution of the human body: abū ḥatim relayed to me through al-asmaʿī via ibn abī ṭarfa al-hudhalī via jundab b. shuʿayb that “when you see a newborn before he has been given his mother’s milk, his face glows with pure clarity [ʿalā wajhihi miṣbāḥ al-bayān],” by which he means that women’s milk changes this. for this reason, they say, “milk forges resemblances,” meaning that it renders the newborn similar to the wet nurse [yanziʿ bi-l-mawlūd fī shabah al-ẓiʾr]. the poet [al-qaṭṭāl al-kilābī] says, “i suckled from one teat, never more / for a fair-faced one better guards the door.”6 3. on the relation between breastfeeding and patriarchal and/or statist power structures, see lia moran and jacob gilad, “from folklore to scientific evidence: breast-feeding and wet-nursing in islam and the case of non-puerperal lactation,” international journal of biomedical science 3, no. 4 (2007): 251–57. see also jonathan wells, “the role of cultural factors in human breastfeeding: adaptive behaviour or biopower,” in ecology, culture, nutrition, health and disease, ed. k. bose, 39–47 (delhi: kamla-raj enterprises, 2006). 4. on prohibited (maḥram) forms of marital relations predicated on kinship status, see j. schacht et al., “niḳāḥ,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), http://doi.org/10.1163/15733912_islam_com_0863. see also q 4:23. 5. bibliothèque nationale de france, ms arabe 3480. 6. ibn qutayba al-dīnawarī, ʿuyūn al-akhbār, ed. aḥmad zakī al-ʿadawī (cairo: dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1925), 2:68. i am indebted to several colleagues for suggestions on the meaning of the final line. http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0863 http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0863 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 167 here, contact with milk and the nursing body from which it is dispensed alters the coloring of infants, who are here presumed to be born with fair skin that nursing darkens. in the quoted stich, the fairness of one’s skin is tied not only to the abstract impression of childhood innocence alluded to in the hadith, but also to notions of aptitude that somatic qualities such as skin color are thought to suggest. thus, viewing nursing as a formative feature in the lives of protagonists not only orients us toward a more gender-balanced reading of the texts in which they appear but also gives further insight into the forces to which the protagonist is subject socially and corporeally. at the most basic level, portrayals of the early life of many popular heroes can be broken down into two main elements: a birth narrative—which tends to include descriptions of the hero’s mother and her pregnancy as well as reference to the child’s subsequent nursing circumstances7—and a description of what peter heath has dubbed the hero’s “preparatory youth,” usually involving the development of skills in martial arts and—if the hero is muslim—quran study.8 this pattern means that at least half of the experiences that are considered staples of a typical heroic exposition are heavily influenced by a female presence, which has often gone unnoticed. this study aims to draw out the significance of such presences (or, when heroes nurse from animals, absences), using the hero’s nursing experience as a focal point. whereas the prophetic literature sets a precedent of selfsacrificing nurses who take on maternal duties often at their personal expense, heroic narratives can include a more tempestuous set of nursing dynamics, with children refusing human milk in favor of that of animals or with mothers enduring difficult feedings and weaning. above all, popular sources expound further on the uncertainties engendered by a hero-child’s often obscure nasab (genealogy), and characters visibly grapple with the social implications of bringing a strange child into their homes or raising children who look starkly different from themselves. in the male-dominated recitation tradition of the sīra literature, such tales may have conveyed insights into the norms and expectations of 7. one common trope about pregnancies in the sīras is the premonitory dream (called nubuwwa, or revelation, by some authors), in which the mother has a vision that foretells her child’s heroic (or villainous) destiny. on this feature, see aḥmad shams al-dīn al-ḥajjājī, mawlid al-baṭal fī al-sīra al-shaʿbiyya (cairo: dār al-hilāl, 1991), 48–49; nabīla ibrāhīm, ashkāl al-taʿbīr fī al-adab al-shaʿbī (cairo: dār nahḍat miṣr, 1966), 129. 8. on the “preparatory youth” of ʿantar, see peter heath, the thirsty sword: sīrat ʿantar and the arabic popular epic (salt lake city: university of utah press, 1996), 72–74. in the case of the hero abū zayd of sīrat banī hilāl, his pious learning takes the form of a mystical initiation, in which the child falls under the tutelage of a sufi shaykh. see dwight reynolds, “abū zayd al-hilālī: trickster, womanizer, warrior, shaykh,” journal of arabic literature 49, nos. 1–2 (2018): 78–103. preparatory youths are also a staple of heroic narratives in elite literature, including hagiographic works such as the maqātil (martyrdom) narratives of particular prominence in shiʿi traditions, as well as in biographies of prominent historical figures embedded in projects such as universal histories and biographical dictionaries. on heroic youths in the maqātil genre, see khalid sindawi, “the image of ḥusayn ibn ʿalī in ‘maqātil’ literature,” quaderni di studi arabi 20/21 (2002–3): 80. as one reviewer of the present essay pointed out, narratives of preparatory youth are relayed with respect to caliphs and courtiers, too, as in al-masʿūdī’s account of the curriculum undertaken by al-amīn at hārūn al-rashīd’s bidding: he was taught (among other things) quran, history, poetry, sunna, rhetorical arts, and how to convene meetings with respect to the rank of the persons involved, all of which are clearly intended to be the fundaments of a well-bred governor. al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab (beirut: dār al-andalus, 1965–66), vol. 4, 212. see also michael cooperson, al-maʾmūn (oxford: oneworld, 2005), 22–23. 168 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) husbandly duties, the relationship between genealogical preservation and social class, and even certain aspects of family law.9 sīrat dhāt al-himma, which deals in the main with the legendary arabo-muslim heroes who battled the byzantines in the early period of islamic expansion, is the only text of its genre to be named for a female military personality.10 as a result, it has drawn significant scholarly attention, in particular in the work of remke kruk on the text’s warrior women.11 most studies of sīrat dhāt al-himma make use of one of two printed versions, namely, the cairo edition of 1909 (henceforth the “standard version”) and its later beirut reprinting, with some emendations, in 1980.12 venturing further afield from this version, however, we find some remarkable additions to the standard story of the text’s first protagonist, junduba, whose freeborn mother loses her husband, a chief of the tribe of kilāb, and is then murdered by one of her slaves for refusing his sexual advances. the newborn junduba is found still at his slain mother’s side by dārim, a leader from a neighboring tribe, who takes junduba to his wife to be nursed and raised as one of the family. in the standard version of the text, this happens with some complaint about the uncertainty of the child’s origins, and dārim gives his wife monetary compensation in order to settle the debate. upon her first nursing of junduba, god immediately inspires her and her spouse with loving tenderness for the child (alqā allāh taʿālā muḥibbatahu fī qalbihā wa-fī qalb al-amīr dārim), and his early childhood proceeds without further incident.13 however, the versions examined below 9. although there is very little evidence about who presided over the tradition of reciting these texts in the earliest period aside from all-male lists of rāwīs in various sīra manuscripts, modern accounts of sessions in which the sīras were recited attest to almost solely male reciters and oftentimes predominantly male audiences. remke kruk notes that sessions held by the storyteller sī mlūd outside morocco’s kutubiyya mosque were “almost exclusively male.” in recording recitations of sīrat banī hilāl in the egyptian village of bakātūsh, dwight reynolds participated in sessions in private homes with “one to two dozen men.” somewhat exceptionally, cathryn anita baker records the presence of women in the audiences of sīra recitations throughout tunisia’s southern provinces, many of which occurred in the homes of government officials. she tells of mixed-age and mixed-gender groups, with the “littlest ones” in the sessions “peering wide-eyed from the shadows of their mothers’ robes” as the stories are told. see remke kruk, warrior women of islam: female empowerment in arabic popular literature (london: i. b. tauris, 2014), 11; cathryn anita baker, “the hilālī saga in the tunisian south” (phd diss., university of indiana, 1978), 26; dwight reynolds, “start,” sirat bani hilal digital archive, http://www.siratbanihilal.ucsb.edu/node/425, accessed september 18, 2018. see also remke kruk and claudia ott, “‘in the popular manner’: sīra-recitation in marrakesh anno 1997,” edebiyât 10, no. 2 (1999): 183–98. 10. for background on the sīra and its provenance, see m. canard, “dhu ’l-himma,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0164. on the dating of the siyar, see danuta madeyska, “the language and structure of the sīra,” quaderni di studi arabi 9 (1991): 193. for a full summary of sīrat dhāt al-himma, consult malcolm lyons, the arabian epic: heroic and oral storytelling (new york: cambridge university press, 1995), vol. 3, 301-505. 11. see kruk, warrior women of islam. see also remke kruk, “warrior women in arabic popular romance: qannāṣa bint muẓāhim and other valiant ladies,” part 1, journal of arabic literature 24, no. 3 (1993): 213–30; part 2, journal of arabic literature 25, no. 1 (1994): 16–33. 12. i cite the cairo edition throughout using a roman numeral for the juzʾ and an arabic numeral for the page number (e.g., iv:49); sīrat al-amīra dhāt al-himma, ed. ʿalī b. mūsā al-maqānibī b. bakr al-māzinī and ṣāliḥ al-jaʿfarī (cairo: maktabat al-maṭbaʿa al-ḥusayniyya, 1909). 13. sīrat al-amīra dhāt al-himma, i:14. http://www.siratbanihilal.ucsb.edu/node/425 http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0164 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 169 provide a more detailed narrative, in which the wife’s mother, suspecting that the child is illegitimate, proposes a novel method of testing his legitimacy: if the child consents to drink only from the right breast, he is of pure blood, but if he suckles from the left, he is a bastard. this test ends poorly when the child refuses both breasts outright, and as dārim is unable to persuade his wife that the child is of noble birth, he promises her a monthly stipend as compensation for her breastfeeding. in this fashion, he effectively sponsors his wife during her period of nursing, assuages his harpy of a mother-in-law, and keeps his household’s peace.14 sīrat dhāt al-himma is a fitting text with which to begin an exploration of lactation myths and miracles in arabic popular literature, first, because across its variations it incorporates a large proportion of the core motifs that attend nursing narratives in other works. second, this sīra contains a seemingly unique pivotal element—the legitimacy test—that i have not encountered elsewhere in my preliminary survey of the literature.15 i have worked with two variations of the story in addition to the standard version in order to underscore the ways in which the narrative has traveled and been tailored to various contexts, and i note differences of interest between them throughout.16 i argue that in its various iterations, this anecdote illustrates views about the social, physiological, and psychological suitability of certain nurses and nursing contexts for certain children that can be found throughout prophetic lore and other heroic literature. in particular, these notions divulge concerns about parity of class or of “kind,” that is, the fit between the respective ethno-racial or cultural groups of the child and his or her nurse; the best and highest expression of such parity is, typically, a mother-child nursing relationship. in the sīra, women are portrayed 14. in some versions, the mother-in-law’s name is shuʾm al-zamān, “the ill omen of her age,” though in judeo-arabic she appears as umm al-sharr, “the mother of evil.” it is perhaps not coincidental that shuʾm al-zamān/umm al-sharr is juxtaposed with the character of ḥusna, whose name evokes beauty or goodness. it is generally the case that major heroic figures of the sīra (unless based on historical personages whose names are predetermined) who receive more exposition are given conventional muslim names, while sidekick characters (even those who loom quite large, such as al-baṭṭāl, the idle, who is the central trickster-friend in this text) or others who stand outside the text’s ethnic or social norms are given more descriptive names, which perform much of their characterization. thus the villainous crone in this vignette, whose speaking role is relatively minor, is named for the evil that she evokes. african warriors—often stock figures in the text— are given names such as ʿifrīt (demon) and abū zalāzil (father of earthquakes), evoking their intimidating, exaggerated size or strength. the same applies to warrior women whose cycles as sidekicks or enemies of the main characters are relatively brief. an example is sīrat dhāt al-himma’s qaṭṭalat al-shujʿān (murderess of the brave), whose function and abrupt demise in the text have been discussed by wen-chin ouyang, as have the symbolic portents of the acquisition of names (alqāb) in the sīra. see wen-chin ouyang, “princess of resolution: the emergence of al-amira dhat al-himma, a medieval arab warrior woman,” in to speak or be silent: the paradox of disobedience in the lives of women, ed. lena b. ross, 197–209 (wilmette, il: chiron, 1993). 15. to be sure, trials of a hero’s legitimacy are common across the sīra corpus, but they are often mediated by a judge or another social institution rather than an at-home remedy. black-skinned heroes born to whiteskinned parents, such as sīrat banī hilāl’s abū zayd and sīrat dhāt al-himma’s ʿ abd al-wahhāb, are presumed to be bastards, whose legitimacy requires verification shortly after their births. for more on paternity tests in sīrat dhāt al-himma, see rachel schine, “conceiving the pre-modern black-arab hero: on the gendered production of racial difference in sīrat al-amīrah dhāt al-himmah,” journal of arabic literature 48, no. 3 (2017): 298–326. 16. i differentiate the various versions of the story in citations by their titles: the cairo “standard version” is sīrat dhāt al-himma, the tunis version is sīrat al-dalhama, and the paris version is sīrat al-mujāhidīn. 170 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) not only as being aware of their stake in these questions but also as manipulating access to breastfeeding to their direct personal benefit. they are also shown to construe their domestic, maternal labors as having economic value, and this view is supported by certain precepts in islamic scripture that are discussed below. legal and scientific views on breast milk and the kinship bonds it engenders in islamic contexts have been well documented. the legal status imparted by riḍāʿ (suckling), which creates a relationship between biologically unrelated persons that is tantamount to fosterage, has been used to secure the positions of children within dynasties, to prevent unwanted marriages by rendering them legally incestuous, and to bring families or tribes closer.17 medical opinions on the health-improving qualities of breast milk and suggestions about timetables for weaning and the selection of nurses are present in some of the earliest traditional sources.18 however, despite their frequency, which has merited their registration in motif indexes of arabic folklore, relatively little attention has been given to the mechanics and meanings of literary representations of nursing compared to these more clinical references;19 kathryn kueny’s reading of accounts of the birth and nursing of cain is a notable exception.20 nonetheless, nursing is a recurring element in the lives of central protagonists throughout the sīras, the length and popular nature of which leads them to rove over significant swaths of everyday life even as they deliver narratives of extraordinary adventures. moreover, fundamental biological changes that accompany maternity are exaggerated or rendered uncanny in much popular literature to foretell the coming of heroes. in her recent dissertation on women’s roles in the siyar shaʿbiyya, amanda hannoosh steinberg discusses the “heroic pregnancies” that typically predict a 17. legal adoption, in the sense of conferring one’s family name to someone outside one’s natal line, is prohibited in the quran (q 33:5, q 33:37), but other types of fosterage are permitted, most typically that established through milk-kinship, which integrates an infant into a family through a biological process. though cases of adults being adopted are infrequent, several muslim legal schools permit “non-infant suckling” (riḍāʿ al-kabīr), typically using pumped milk, as a means of ceremonially brokering such a relationship later in an adoptee’s life. for more on fosterage in islamic law, see j. schacht, j. burton, and j. chelhod, “raḍāʿ or riḍāʿ,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), http://doi.org/10.1163/15733912_islam_com_0896. on adoption, see e. chaumont, “tabannin,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., http:// doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_8913. on the prohibition against marriage and copulation between those related through milk kinship (riḍāʿa), which is equivalent to the prohibition pertaining to those who share blood kinship (nasab), see soraya altorki, “milk-kinship in arab society: an unexplored problem in the ethnography of marriage,” ethnology 19, no. 2 (1980): 233–44. see also peter parkes, “fostering fealty: a comparative analysis of tributary allegiances of adoptive kinship,” comparative studies in society and history 45, no. 4 (2003): 746. on milk kinship as a structure used to supplant or simulate adoption for political reasons in islamic societies, see balkrishan shivram, kinship structures and foster relations in islamic society: milk kinship allegiance in the mughal world (shimla: indian institute of advanced study, 2014). 18. on perceptions of maternal physiology in the medieval islamic medical establishment, the most recent thoroughgoing study is kathryn kueny, conceiving identities: maternity in medieval muslim discourse and practice (albany: state university of new york press, 2013). 19. hasan m. el-shamy, folk traditions of the arab world: a guide to motif classification (indianapolis: indiana university press, 1995), 1:69, 2:87–89. 20. see kathryn kueny, “the birth of cain: reproduction, maternal responsibility, and moral character in early islamic exegesis,” history of religions 48, no. 2 (2008): 110–29. http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0896 http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0896 http://dx.doi.org.proxy.uchicago.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_8913 http://dx.doi.org.proxy.uchicago.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_8913 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 171 hero’s advent—pregnancies that are “unusual and challenging for the mother” and that are often accompanied by supernatural circumstances.21 as seen below, lactation carries some of this magic and mystery as well. with respect to household dynamics, nursing constitutes a domestic flashpoint of sorts. it is an everyday occasion in which the conventional power dynamics of the family are destabilized, with women providing a form of nourishment that men—usually the “breadwinners”—are unable to supply. in the words of avner giladi, “[nursing] plays a decisive role not only in ensuring the nursling’s survival prospects, the first stages of his/ her socialization, and, according to islamic medical theories, the consolidation of his/her character traits but also in corroborating women’s status vis-à-vis men and the power relations that reign within the family.”22 this renders breastfeeding a contested terrain between gendered factions.23 in some circumstances, conventionalized steps such as taḥnīk (the administering of date pap by a father to a male child as his first food before he takes a sip of his mother’s milk) intervene against the role of the woman as sole nurturer of a newborn, so that, as kueny’s puts it, “patriarchy continuously reasserts itself through a series of postpartum rituals.”24 the ability to lactate is also, of course, a defining element of our speciation (we are mammals) and sex differentiation (females have mammary glands) that is conditioned on what women have rather than what they lack.25 therefore, breastfeeding presents a ripe moment for the emergence of another aspect of the gender anxieties that figure in much premodern arabic popular literature. below, i give a preliminary assessment of the import of breastfeeding as a feature of popular literary sources. i begin with a brief survey of lactation and nursing imagery in related sources and then present the vignette from sīrat dhāt al-himma along with my analysis. the versions of dhāt al-himma though the earliest evidence we have of sīrat dhāt al-himma’s existence dates to the twelfth/sixth century, its extant manuscripts are from several centuries later—a trait 21. amanda hannoosh steinberg, “wives, witches, and warriors: women in arabic popular epic” (phd diss., university of pennsylvania, 2018), 153. 22. avner giladi, “liminal craft, exceptional law: preliminary notes on midwives in medieval islamic writings,” international journal of middle east studies 42, no. 2 (2010): 192. 23. this tension perhaps conjures up associations with another common gender-differentiated issue evident in popular literature, namely, the fitna, or chaos and strife, that is often born out of a woman’s sexualization and the distraction she poses to men. the management of male appetite, albeit appetite of a different nature, is at issue in debates over fitna just as it is in the matter of breastfeeding. on the role of fitna in sīrat dhāt al-himma, see remke kruk, “the bold and the beautiful: women and ‘fitna’ in the sīrat dhāt al-himma; the story of nūrā,” in women in the medieval islamic world: power, patronage, and piety, ed. gavin hambly, 99–116 (new york: st. martin’s press, 1998). 24. kueny, conceiving identities, 141. 25. as robyn lee reminds us, though, the category of “mammal” is, of course, itself a construct that bears some historical contextualization. she explains that one of linnaeus’s aims in “establish[ing] the mammary gland as the defining feature of animal classification in 1758” was a political one, as linnaeus was strongly in favor of maternal breastfeeding and was an anti–wet nursing advocate. robyn lee, “breastfeeding and sexual difference: queering irigaray,” feminist theory 19 (2018): 78. 172 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) common to popular tales that circulated between oral and written modes.26 sīra texts are often lengthy, and their volumes were not necessarily kept consistently together. consequently, the remnants of such works are frequently incomplete, consisting of a few manuscript volumes that are sometimes inconsecutive.27 having said that, mss arabe 3840–51 contain an extensive version of sīrat dhāt al-himma that, according to georges vajda’s notes on the manuscript, consists of twelve volumes that have been patched with fragments in different hands to bridge lacunae in the text. claudia ott notes that the patching occasionally results in overlaps, or repetition of passages.28 vajda records the names of three readers of the text that appear at the start of different volumes, given with dates ranging from 1767–68/1180-82 to 1787/1201-02.29 in her extensive work on the manuscript tradition of the sīra, ott identifies this large, composite manuscript as the source from which a number of other manuscripts of the text were copied over the course of the nineteenth/thirteenth century.30 the tunisian edition of the text was printed in judeo-arabic in the 1890s, and its provenance is better understood than that of ms 3840–51. this is in large part because one of the men who oversaw its printing and distribution, rabbi eliezer farhi, was a prolific and well-networked member of the tunisian jewish intellectual elite of his era. his writings covered myriad topics and genres, from journalism to parables.31 in particular, he was avidly 26. as has been discussed by several scholars, the earliest mention of this sīra is found in the autobiographical section of samawʾal al-maghribī’s (d. 1175) polemical treatise, ifhām al-yahūd (silencing the jews), written after samawʾal’s conversion from judaism to islam. strikingly, he refers to having “read” the story rather than hearing it told aloud. he encountered the story of dhāt al-himma as part of what moshe perlmann refers to as “the arabic fiction literature of his day—stories, anecdotes, popular romances of knighthood.” the “romances” that samawʾal lists are ʿantar, dhū al-himma wa-l-baṭṭāl, and iskandar dhū al-qarnayn. see samawʾal al-maghribī, ifḥām al-yahūd: silencing the jews, ed. and trans. moshe perlmann (new york: american academy for jewish research, 1964), 15, 100. the earliest dated portions of sīrat dhāt al-himma, meanwhile, are from 1430–31/833-35, according to claudia ott. see claudia ott, “from the coffeehouse into the manuscript: the storyteller and his audience in the manuscripts of an arabic epic,” oriente moderno 22, no. 83 (2003): 444; claudia ott, metamorphosen des epos: sīrat al-muǧāhidīn (sīrat al-amīra dāt al-himma) zwischen mündlichkeit und schriftlichkeit (leiden: leiden university, research school cnws, 2003), 67. for a more recent discussion of versions of the sīra, both handwritten and printed, see melanie magidow, “epic of the commander dhat al-himma,” medieval feminist forum, subsidia series no. 9, medieval texts in translation 6 (2019): 3–5. 27. on the partitioning and condensing of popular sīra texts such as sīrat dhāt al-himma in manuscripts used by reciters, see ott, “from the coffeehouse,” passim. on the “lending economy” of popular texts, see konrad hirschler, the written word in the medieval arabic lands: a social and cultural history of reading practices (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2012), 164–96. 28. ott, metamorphosen des epos, 106. 29. georges vajda, “notices des manuscrits arabe 3630–3698,” manuscript (paris: bibliothèque nationale de france, département des manuscrits, 1940-69), ms. arabe 7302, fol. 53–54. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b8458430f (october 17, 2019). 30. ott, metamorphosen des epos, 112. 31. on farḥī’s intellectual network, see yosef tobi, “farḥī, eliezer,” in encyclopedia of jews in the islamic world, ed. norman a. stillman (leiden: brill, 2010), https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/ encyclopedia-of-jews-in-the-islamic-world/farhi-eliezer-sim_0007630; david m. bunis, joseph chetrit, and haideh sahim, “jewish languages enter the modern era,” in the jews of the middle east and north africa https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8458430f https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8458430f https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-jews-in-the-islamic-world/farhi-eliez https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-jews-in-the-islamic-world/farhi-eliez al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 173 interested in educational reform in the jewish community, leading him to earn the moniker maskīl (enlightened individual, or participant in the haskala, a jewish intellectual revivalist movement not dissimilar to the arabic nahḍa).32 farhi was committed to producing judeoarabic editions of the siyar shaʿbiyya, including the azaliyya, the ʿantariyya, and the tijāniyya, and in part through them he came to be known as a father figure of tunisian judeoarabic popular literature. although his partner in printing, hai sitruk, was widely published as well, his role in the dissemination of sīra literature is comparatively smaller: beyond a translation of the alexander romance and his collaboration with farhi on dhāt al-himma, he produced or coauthored translations of more contemporary works of derring-do, such as defoe’s robinson crusoe and eugène sue’s les mystères de paris. both men also penned a number of creative works.33 eusèbe vassel, who wrote an extensive catalogue of literature printed in judeo-arabic in tunis throughout the second half of the nineteenth/thirteenth century, notes that at least for his first sīra publication, farhi worked from a preexisting manuscript that he had purchased.34 the occasional nearly verbatim overlap between his version of sīrat dhāt al-himma and other arabic versions of the text suggests that he did likewise here. but the question of how much he emended the text in his possession remains. he seems to have made certain expurgations himself: the name of the prophet muḥammad appears virtually nowhere in the text, being usually replaced by ibrāhīm or sulaymān, though some slips do occur, as in the occasional reference to al-muṣṭafā, the chosen one, an epithet for muḥammad. other differences, however, may be either his own doing or quirks in the manuscript he used; dialogue in the text takes place in tunisian arabic, and in at least one instance of importance to the present study, a gloss on an obscure word is embedded directly into the narrative. when explaining the naming of the protagonist junduba, who is named after the type of bird that miraculously shelters him from the heat when he has been abandoned in the desert, the narrator states:35 in modern times, ed. reeva spector simon, michael menachem laskier, and sara reguer, 113–42 (new york: columbia university press, 2002), 131–32. 32. on the parallels between the haskala and the nahḍa, see lital levy, “the nahḍa and the haskala: a comparative reading of ‘revival’ and ‘reform,’” middle eastern literatures: incorporating edebiyat 16, no. 3 (2013): 300–16. see also yosef chetrit and lital levy, “haskala movement,” in encyclopedia of jews in the islamic world, ed. norman a. stillman (leiden: brill, 2010); tzivia tobi, “ha-rav ha-maskil elʿazar farḥi ṿe-yetsirotaṿ ha-saṭiriyyot (tunis 1851–1930),” in ben ʿ ever la-ʿarav: contacts between arabic literature and jewish literature in the middle ages and modern times, ed. yosef tobi and yitsak avishur, 127–44 (tel aviv: afikim, 2015). 33. several of sitruk’s contributions are enumerated in a booklist compiled by yosef and tsivia tobi that covers a century of tunisian judeo-arabic works. see yosef tobi and tsivia tobi, judeo-arabic literature in tunisia, 1850–1950 (detroit: wayne state university press, 2014), 303–21. 34. eusèbe vassel, la littérature populaire des israélites tunisiens, avec un essai ethnographique et archéologique sur leurs superstitions (paris: e. leroux, 1904–7), 108–9. 35. ʿ uqāb (eagle) is here transliterated as ʿugāb to reflect local pronunciation and the judeo-arabic original. דאלך אילא תעאלא אללה וארסל אלסלאמא אללה יא שדיד חר וקתהא וכאן אלצבי טיר יסמא ענד אלערב ׅגנדבא ואחנא כיף מא נקולו עגאב35 או נסר ו̇צלל עלא האך אלׅגני בׅגואנחו 174 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) at that time it was extremely hot—good lord! god almighty sent the young boy a bird, called a junduba among the arabs, and we call it an ʿugāb or a nasr (eagle), and it shaded that newborn with its wings.36 in light of these ambiguities, i read the judeo-arabic version of the sīra under the assumption that it emerges from a similar context to other arabic versions of the text, which is to say that it is the product of a primarily muslim compositional context rather than having been noticeably tailored for a new, jewish readership. however, as discussed below, there are some felicitous parallels between junduba’s tale and certain midrashic or isrāʾīliyyātderived representations of prophetic figures shared between judaism and islam. milk and myth, from moses to muḥammad in her work on sīrat sayf b. dhī yazan, helen blatherwick formulates a threefold typology under which references to the prophets—or, to use her term, the “prophetic intertext”— found in popular literature may be classified. prophets make cameos in intra-diegetic, moral tales told among the protagonists of the text; they appear as the former owners of heirlooms or relics acquired by the protagonists (a device that blatherford reads as a form of waṣiyya, or prophetic inheritance, following john renard); and they are alluded to obliquely through the reproduction of motifs drawn from apocryphal stories and regional myths.37 thus, the precedent of miraculous, providential, or bizarre lactation scenarios in the corpus of anthological literature known as the qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (stories of the prophets) bears some discussion here. the following is by no means an exhaustive list of the sorts of lactation miracles and nursing tropes that appear in arabic tales of the prophets and hero legends. however, i have attempted to account for a number of the more prominent or exemplary motifs to guide the reading of the sīrat dhāt al-himma excerpts below. perhaps the most famous case of a nursling refusing milk from an unfit source, like junduba does, occurs in the story of moses. according to al-kisāʾī’s collection of tales of the prophets, once mūsā, peace be upon him, was settled in the pharaoh’s house, [āsiya’s retinue] wished to nourish him by nursing. but he would not accept a breast, nor would he eat. they grew perplexed and made every endeavor to feed him, but he [still] would not eat—as god said, “we had prevented him from nurses previously” (q 28:12)—so they sent him with the caravans and women to the marketplace, [hoping] that perhaps they would find someone who would agree to nurse him.38 36. sīrat al-dalhama, 10. 37. helen blatherwick, prophets, gods, and kings in sīrat sayf ibn dhī yazan: an intertextual reading of an egyptian epic (leiden: brill, 2016), 67. see also john renard, islam and the heroic image: themes in literature and the visual arts (macon, ga: mercer university press, 1999), 140–45. 38. al-kisāʾī, qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (cairo: dār al-ṭibāʿa wa-l-nashr al-islāmiyya, 1997), 382–83. وكان وقتهــا حــر شــديد يــا اهلل الســامة وأرســل اهلل تعالــى الــى ذلــك الصبــي طيــر يســمي عنــد العــرب جندبــة واحنــا كيــف مــا نقولــه عغــاب او نســر وظــّل علــى هــاك الجنــي بجوانحــه al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 175 the women happen upon moses’s sister, who brings them to his mother’s abode, where he finally nurses. here, the mother-child bond is preserved not only because they are drawn together by their natural connection but because of divine intercession precluding moses’s nursing during their period of separation. according to the tafsīr of ibn kathīr, the restoration of moses to his mother for nursing after the divinely ordained hunger strike mentioned in verse 12 of sūrat al-qaṣaṣ (wa-ḥarramnā ʿalayhi al-marāḍiʿ min qabl) had benefits not only for the child but also for the mother, because she was calmed after fearing for her child’s wellbeing (wa-hiya āmina baʿd mā kānat khāʾifa).39 in rabbinic readings of the moses story, moses rejects the breasts of egyptian women not merely on the grounds that they are not his mother but because of his prescient sense of community-based notions of milk purity: halakha frowns on jews using non-jewish wet nurses except when necessary to preserve life. moses, who is “destined to speak with the divine presence,” cannot place his mouth on an impure breast.40 perhaps because such rules about the correspondence of a nurse’s faith with that of her nursling do not apply in islam, muslim thinkers do not, by and large, seem to have explicitly adopted such an interpretation. however, certain mystical readings of the verse do attribute moses’s lack of desire to nurse from egyptian women to his emerging prophetic discernment rather than to an infant’s yearning for his mother. ibn ʿarabī, for example, interprets the phrase min qabl (previously) in the quranic verse as indicating that moses was prevented from satisfying his body’s base, pleasure and instinct-driven needs for nourishment and physical fortification (al-taqawwī wa-ltaghadhdhī bi-ladhdhāt al-quwwa al-nafsāniyya wa-shahawātihā) before his attainment of wisdom and purity of nature (qabl istiʿmāl al-fikr bi-nūr al-istiʿdād wa-ṣafāʾ al-fiṭra).41 other prominent sufi exegetes, such as al-sulamī and al-baqlī, claim that moses understood that had he nursed from a transgressor of god’s commands (mukhālifa) or an animal (waḥsha), he would not have been fit for a close relationship with god, metaphorically represented as being on his carpet (bisāṭ al-qurba). they even imply that the nursemaid of a child must be human in order for the child to attain esoteric knowledge.42 ibn hishām, in his prophetic biography, connects god’s intercession on moses’s behalf to promote nursing from a mother figure—and thus from a figure of a moral and cultural disposition that befits the prophet-child—with an experience in the prophet muḥammad’s early infancy, involving his foster mother, ḥalīma bt. abī dhuʾayb. because of ongoing drought and malnutrition, ḥalīma is unable to produce milk even for her own son. nevertheless, she follows the custom of her tribe’s women and rides through the environs of mecca, seeking a child to nurse. all of the other women spurn muḥammad because he is an orphan, not recognizing his impending significance. failing to find a nursling and feeling 39. ibn kathīr, tafsīr ibn kathīr (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1998), 2:201. 40. jordan rosenblum, “‘blessings of the breasts’: breastfeeding in rabbinic literature,” hebrew union college annual 87, no. 145 (2016): 172–73. 41. ibn al-ʿarabī, tafsīr muḥyī al-dīn b. al-ʿarabī (cairo: maṭbaʿat būlāq, 1867), 2:109. 42. abū ʿabd al-raḥmān muḥammad b. al-ḥusayn al-sulamī, ḥaqāʾiq al-tafsīr, ed. sayyid ʿumrān (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2001), 101; rūzbihān al-baqlī al-shīrāzī, ʿarāʾis al-bayān fī ḥaqāʾiq al-qurʾān, ed. aḥmad farīd al-mizyadī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2008), 80. 176 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) remorse, ḥalīma resolves to nurse muḥammad despite knowing that she physically cannot do so at that time. her husband advises her that “god may be on the verge of giving you a blessing through him,” and ḥalīma returns to her mount with the child and gives him her breasts, which fill with milk to the child’s satisfaction. even ḥalīma’s milch camel, whose milk supply had also dwindled because of the harsh conditions, suddenly yields milk again, enabling ḥalīma, too, to drink and to replenish herself.43 in the sīra, ibn hishām prefaces the narrative of ḥalīma nursing muḥammad with the quranic verse about moses’s delayed suckling, creating a vivid similarity between the two infants.44 according to kueny, such stories valorize nursing women who prioritize their children’s nutrition or health over their own and thus promote an ideal of maternal self-sacrifice. but the stories may also be read to some extent as an exaggeration of the workings of the natural world, for in these tales it is not only the women who earn acclaim, but also the children whom they nurse.45 children who are able to nurse consistently and plentifully are likely to have better health and survival prospects. it is unsurprising, then, that super-strong champions and unblemished prophets alike should have legendarily superlative (even god-given) access to breast milk. for women, meanwhile, ample lactation is an affirmation of god’s power and has the capacity to restore their faith—ḥalīma’s husband is quick to remark that she has been blessed by the boy, to which she replies, “truly this is my hope (wa-llāhī innī la-arjū dhālik)!”46 in this fashion, the mother-child bond becomes enveloped in a sacred or miraculous awareness. even when a child is consuming a mother’s milk, though, environmental factors can intervene in the nursing experience, leaving an indelible mark on the child’s traits that persists long after weaning. in her discussion of the birth of cain, kueny notes that al-thaʿlabī, in his collection of prophetic lore, ʿarāʾis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, claims that cain was nursed in the heavenly garden prior to eve’s first menses (which is one of the punishments later visited upon her as she leaves the garden). most medieval thinkers believed breast milk and menstrual issue to be composed of the same material, channeled to different parts of the body.47 the “pure milk” that cain drank, in kueny’s reading, ironically sets him up not to be pure of heart but rather to have a nonnormative ethical constitution that reflects his nonnormative childhood, the dark implications of which come to fruition when cain murders his brother.48 being born and suckled in the garden has left cain poorly adapted to the earthly realm in which he later finds himself. a supernatural nursing experience portends an unnatural and at times dangerous existence. cain’s tale is 43. ibn hishām, al-sīra al-nabawiyya li-ibn hishām (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1990), 188–89. 44. ibid., 185. 45. kueny, conceiving identities, 133–34. 46. ibn hishām, al-sīra al-nabawiyya, 189. 47. this belief has roots in ancient greek thought and has long been used to explain such phenomena as the disappearance of the menses during lactation. at times, heavy menstruation was treated with the application of cupping-glasses to the breasts. helen king, hippocrates’ woman: reading the female body in ancient greece (london: routledge, 1998), 34–35. 48. kueny, “birth of cain,” 115–17. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 177 cautionary. in contrast, moses’s birth story and its citation in the quran looms large as the guiding framework for idealizations of nursing in prophetic literature, informing narrations of muḥammad’s own struggles with nursing. the ideal of women caring for abandoned children despite adversity is visible popular literature as well.49 milk from humans and beasts in popular sources in addition to their robust prophetic intertexts, many of the sīra texts also make frequent reference to other texts of their genre and of neighboring genres of popular literature, such as the nighttime stories (asmār) found in alf layla wa-layla.50 in the case of nonprophetic popular works, supernatural nursing experiences arise not only through environmental influences and divine-human interaction but also through the appearance of nonhuman nurses. although, as noted above, prophetic narratives tend to follow the quranic precedent of moses in promoting tales of mothers or foster mothers who are able to sustain their nursing regimens even in dire circumstances, and portions of the exegetical tradition even militate directly against suckling from animals, there are numerous attestations in popular literature in both arabic and persian of children being suckled by animals when human nurses are absent or have failed to provide milk for them. as seen below, variations of the hero junduba’s narrative describe his nurturing by a variety of animals who ensure the newborn’s survival. the jundub bird shades him from the desert heat, and in one variant a gazelle suckles him after his mother is killed. when prince dārim retrieves the child, he takes it as a sign of junduba’s mother’s apotropaic purity and goodness that the baby has not been carried off by a desert beast. junduba is far from the only child in arabic literature to be reared by wild animals rather than by humans. perhaps the best-known occurrence of this motif is in the life of the feral man ḥayy b. yaqẓān, born from the ground itself and raised untouched by human contact; he is nursed by a female gazelle or deer (ẓabiya).51 in the collection of stories that make up al-ḥikāyāt al-ʿajība wa-lakhbār al-gharība, recently translated from a sole surviving manuscript by malcolm lyons as tales of the marvelous and news of the strange, a prince named mauhub, who is born to king shimrakh, a descendant of nebuchadnezzar, refuses to nurse from any of the palace 49. the story of moses as the archetypical foundling also provides the pattern for a number of heroic childhoods in popular arabic and persian lore, sometimes quite explicitly. for example, sīrat dhāt al-himma’s baḥrūn and the persian dārābnāma’s eponym, dārāb both have names relating to their being transported by and found in the water; this naming pattern plays directly on the etymology of moses’s name, meaning “drawn from the water” (exodus 2:10). 50. in the case of sīrat dhāt al-himma, such borrowing is especially evident in the fact that parts of the triumphal chivalric legend of ʿumar al-nuʿmān (or ʿamr b. ʿubayd allāh, as he is designated in the sīra) appear both in this sīra and in alf layla. following wen-chin ouyang’s logic, we may say that in sīrat dhāt al-himma this intertextuality has the effect of nesting a (mini-)sīra within the main sīra, whereas in alf layla it perturbs the line between epic and romance given the star-crossed, romantic backdrop of the principal storyline. see canard, “dhu ’l himma”; wen-chin ouyang, “the epical turn of romance: love in the narrative of ʿumar al-nuʿmān,” oriente moderno 22, no. 83 (2003): 485–504. 51. ibn ṭufayl, ḥayy b. yaqẓān (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1952), 52. 178 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) maids after his mother dies.52 but when shimrakh brings home a lioness captured on a hunt, the prince suckles from her alongside the lioness’s two cubs, which endows him with the lion’s archetypical courage and strength. the infant sīra hero ʿalī al-zaybaq is subject to a set of events that demonstrate how the nursing motifs sketched above can combine and compound: like moses, he is removed from his mother immediately after birth, but unlike moses he is swept off into the world of the jinn. when returned, he suckles from a lion rather than his mother.53 fosterage by jinn also occurs in sīrat sayf b. dhī yazan, though this time following willful maternal abandonment. as a result, the young sayf acquires a jinnīya milk-sister, who becomes a key ally—a supernatural accomplice produced by the binding of sayf’s lineage to a magical realm.54 such tropes appear in persian literature as well. for example, in the shāhnāma the sīmurgh (who, despite being a birdlike creature, has mammary glands and feeds its young with milk) nurses the foundling zāl, abandoned by his parents because of his albinism.55 in each case, a defining feature is once again the unique destiny of the child, who is set to attain the heights of heroism or, in the case of ḥayy, of perspicacity and intellect. the cameoed animals often have associations that underscore the child’s uniqueness and importance: a gazelle, in much arabic literature, is the epitome of feminine grace and beauty, and so the gazelle-as-nurse in some ways not merely supplants but supersedes the image of a human woman. the nursing of a lioness—whose ferocity and role as the family’s chief huntress invert norms of masculinity and femininity in human family structures— endows a male child with the lioness’s qualities, which manifest as a ratcheted-up masculinity, rendering him dauntless, competent, and strong. by implication, rearing by two human, gender-normative parents may not confer such heroic traits in equal measure. and of course, the lion is a symbol of kingship, so nursing only from a lioness firmly marks a child’s royal status. even in perfectly ordinary birth and nursing scenarios, an infant hero’s response to nursing can sometimes presage his future as a fighter. this is especially evident in the sīra of ʿantar b. shaddād, whose comportment on occasions when his mother delays nursing him adumbrates his preternatural strength and pugnacity. at the two-year mark—the conventional time of weaning in islamic societies56—ʿantar’s mischievous streak reaches an early apogee: if his mother zabība ever prevented him from nursing, ʿantar would grumble and wail and growl and reproach her, like the grousing of beasts of prey. his eyes would redden until they became like embers set ablaze. every day he required a new swaddle because 52. malcolm lyons, tales of the marvelous and news of the strange (london: penguin classics, 2014), 399. 53. lyons, arabian epic, 5. see also malcolm lyons, the man of wiles in popular arabic literature: a study of a medieval arab hero (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2012), 2. 54. blatherwick, prophets, gods, and kings, 32, 192–96. i am indebted to helen blatherwick for her comments on earlier drafts of this paper and for bringing her work on sayf’s foster family to my attention. 55. see a. shapur shahbazi and simone cristoforetti, “zāl,” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed., ed. ehsan yarshater, updated july 20, 2009, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/zal. 56. q 2:233 (discussed below). http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/zal al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 179 he would tear it apart, even if it was made of iron. when he reached two full years of age, he began to move and play around the camp, and he would grab tent pegs and uproot them so that the tents would collapse upon their occupants. many times over he did this, and he would wrestle with dogs, take hold of their tails, and strangle their young to death, and he would assail young men and children. if he saw a small child, he would snatch at his face, throw him down on his back, and take what he wanted from him. if it was a big child, he would wrestle him until his limbs failed. he did not cease doing this until he was weaned and turned three years old, and he grew, developed, and matured. then he set out, and mention of him began to spread.57 the significance of milk bonds and nursing practices looms large in sīrat dhāt al-himma also beyond junduba. the text’s central heroine, fāṭima dhāt al-himma, is nearly killed in infancy by her father because he had so desperately wanted a son—indeed, he had staked his share of the tribal chiefdom in a pact with his brother on the prospect of having a male heir. a benevolent servant, named suʿdā, takes her in. suʿdā, who is elegized as a generous woman, is said to be of turkish origin (bādhila turkiyya), but she is evidently black-skinned. this may be gleaned from the fact that when fāṭima unexpectedly births a black child, she is accused of having had an affair with her milk-brother marzūq, son of suʿdā.58 the scandal of fāṭima’s alleged dalliance is magnified by the notion that it may have been with her milk-kin, making her guilty not only of adultery but also of incest; her father-in-law connects the blackness of her child with her alleged sexual deviance in a line of satirical (hijāʾ) poetry that likens the boy’s origins to those of dogs and his color to that of crows.59 the epithet “son of marzūq” follows fāṭima’s child, the hero ʿabd al-wahhāb, throughout his adventures and is often used as an instigating tactic by his enemies before battle. in this way, violation (or apparent violation) of the normative relationships imparted by bonds of milk—which are, in turn, underpinned by considerations of class and race—incurs castigation of both the mother and the child.60 in an abridgement of the sīra, written by shawqī ʿabd al-ḥakīm and translated by omaima abou-bakr, that is there described as a palestinian epic, fāṭima is so distraught at the existence of her newborn son—conceived during a sexual assault by her husband— 57. sīrat ʿantara b. shaddād (cairo: maṭbaʿat būlāq, 1886), 1:127. 58. su‘dā being portrayed simultaneously as a turk and a black-skinned woman likely emerges from the common semiotic conflation of black people and slaves in arabic popular literature. sīrat dhāt al-himma, vi:15, vii:18. on the historical development of the identification of blacks with slavery in theology, literature, and public discourse, see david m. goldenberg, black and slave: the origins and history of the curse of ham (boston: de gruyter, 2017). 59. sīrat dhāt al-himma, vii:36. 60. this treatment of ʿabd al-wahhāb raises another significant parallel between his story and that of junduba, namely, the centrality to his early childhood of a trial to ascertain his legitimacy. having been born a different color from his parents, ʿabd al-wahhāb must prove the nobility of his bloodline, though unlike the infant junduba, he must do so when he is already on the precipice of warriorhood, and in his case it is his epidermal race that he must overcome, rather than his having been a foundling. see schine, “conceiving the pre-modern black-arab hero.” 180 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) that she refuses to nurse him and he must be removed from her.61 this is another instance of carryover from the mother’s experiences to those of her child, in that fāṭima’s sexual trauma renders her unable to nourish her son. to be sure, the idea of a milk-mediated bodily and spiritual connection between a nurse and an infant was supported by the medical discourses of the time, which held that the person from whom the child suckled, whether the mother or a wet nurse, would impart her traits to the infant, from skin color to physiognomy to general disposition. like the uterine blood from which it was thought to be derived, breast milk was construed as a conduit through which traits were transmitted outside the womb, just as they had been transmitted through blood within it. figures such as al-jāḥiẓ carried this scientific analogy between milk and blood particularly far, arguing that just as blood tinctures the baby in the womb, milk clarifies and lightens the baby’s skin in infancy. ibn qutayba noted that children would grow to resemble either their mothers or their wet nurses, depending on how they received their nourishment.62 according to ibn sīnā, wet nurses therefore ought to be chosen for their appropriate age (sinn), comely appearance (suḥan), and moral rectitude (akhlāq).63 consequently, if a child passes from one nurse to another, these bonds and semblances may transform, which may explain, in part, the foundling junduba’s reticence to nurse from his new mother—a reticence that she reciprocates. such concerns about the disposition and appearance of a wet nurse are compounded by the quality of her social standing, as with the anxieties produced by fāṭima dhāt al-himma’s association with the black suʿdā and her son. similar anxieties—though operating in the reverse direction—about junduba’s provenance and the effect that his dishonorable birth might have on his new family’s social standing come to bear on the question of whether or not to take him in as a nursling. junduba the foundling junduba, the first major hero to make an appearance in sīrat dhāt al-himma, is the great-grandfather of the eponymous heroine, fāṭima. his story begins with the death of his father, al-ḥārith, chief of the tribe of kilāb. al-ḥārith’s pregnant widow, arbāb (or rabāb), begins to fear for her safety, knowing that al-ḥārith had kept the other tribes in line and had successfully staved off raiding parties. she decides to abscond with the slave sallām, who had remained a loyal member of her household even after his master’s death. sallām’s loyalty had an ulterior motive, however, and while on the road he propositions her, asking 61. shawqī ʿabd al-ḥakīm and omaima abou-bakr, princess dhat al-himma: the princess of high resolve (guizeh: foreign cultural information dept., 1995), 75–76. 62. on the function of milk in forging physical and psychological resemblance, see schine, “conceiving the pre-modern black-arab hero,” 14–15; kueny, conceiving identities, 140; al-jāḥiẓ, al-ʿibar wa-l-iʿtibār, ed. ṣābir idrīs (cairo: al-ʿarabī, 1994), 78; ʿabd allāh b. muslim b. qutayba, ʿuyūn al-akhbār, 2:68-69. on ideas about the utility of animal milk in altering one’s physical form, aysha hidayatullah cites a telling story in which ʿāʾisha says that muḥammad’s son by māriyya the copt, ibrāhīm, resembles his father only because he was fed camel and sheep milk, which lightened his skin and fattened him up. see aysha hidayatullah, “māriyya the copt: gender, sex and heritage in the legacy of muḥammad’s umm walad,” islam and christian-muslim relations 21, no. 3 (2010): 233. 63. ibn sīnā, qānūn fī al-ṭibb (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1999), 114. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 181 of her “what men ask of women.” trying to elude him, arbāb excuses herself to wash and immediately goes into labor, giving birth to a son. when sallām sees what has happened, the text states:64 he looked at her with an angry gaze and said, “what’s this trick you’ve pulled, you whore, that you’ve only just given birth now, right when i wanted something from you?” because he had it in his head that a woman could give birth of her own will.65 he pulled her by her forelocks, laid her on the ground, and brought forth a dagger. then he fell upon her, [going] from the gemini to mercury.66 whether sallām actually rapes arbāb before killing her remains ambiguous. in the 1909 cairo version, sallām cuts off her head in a rage without fulfilling his desire, and she tumbles to the ground.67 in ms arabe 3840, however, arbāb dies from the childbirth itself, with sallām having run off in fear as soon as her labor began.68 but all versions agree that immediately after the birth, just before she expires, arbāb attaches to her newborn son’s forearm a small locket-like case (ḥirz) detailing his nasab (genealogy). some time later, a prince from the nearest wādī, named dārim, happens upon the child while on a gazelle hunt, trying to distract himself from the loss of his own newborn son:69 64. though the conventional spelling is ʿuṭārid, the term appears with this orthography in the original. 65. in the 1909 cairo edition, the dialogue is more drawn out, and sallām claims he was told by another man that women could give birth by “squeezing their bellies” and using sheer force. arbāb rebuts this false assumption, saying that “this [would take] a stunning ability, and it is beyond [the capacity of] all humankind.” sīrat dhāt al-himma, i:10. 66. this enigmatic idiom seems to connote the length of the cut he made on arbāb’s body with the dagger. sīrat al-dalhama, 9. 67. sīrat dhāt al-himma, i:10. 68. sīrat al-mujāhidīn, fol. 6. 69. sic. מכרת אלדי עאהרא יא אלמכרה האד לאש להא וקאל אלׅג̇צב בעין ̇פיהא ו̇כזר ואנתי מא לקית תולד אלא תווא? וקת אלדי אנא חאׅגתי ביך. לאנהו ̇פי באלו אלדי אלאר̇ץ אילא וסתחהא נואציהא מן וׅגבדהא כי̇פהא עלא תולד אלמראה וׅגבד אל̇כנׅגר וסקט עליהא מן אלׅגוזא ללאעטראד. وخــزر فيهــا بعيــن الغضــب وقــال لهــا الش هــاذ المكــرة يــا عاهــرة الــذي مكــرت وانــت مــا لقيــت تولــد مــن وجبدهــا كيفهــا علــى تولــد المــراة الــذي بالــه فــي نــه ال بــك. حاجتــي انــا الــذي وقــت تــّوة؟ اال نواصيهــا وســتحها الــى األرض وجبــد الخنجــر وســقط عليهــا مــن الجــوزاء لاعطــراد64 ושאף אלמאליכא ארבאב מטרוחה מקתולה והאד אלמולוד יר̇צע מנהא ואלחליב ̇פאי̇ץ ויתבזע מעא קדרת צאחב אלקדרה ]…[ ואמהו תר̇צעהו והיא קתילא קדאם ׅגנבהו ולמא נ̇צר אלאלמיר69 דארם אילא דאלך אלת̇פת אילא וזירהו וקאל להו: איהא אלוזיר אנ̇צר אילא האדי אלצבייה והאד אלׅגני אלדי בׅגנבהא והאד אלטיר י̇צלל עליה ואמהו תר̇צעהו והיא קתילה ואעלם ודמת אלערב 182 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) he saw the princess arbāb, left behind and slain, and this newborn was suckling from her. the milk was pouring out in excess, by the power of the possessor of power […], and his mother was nursing him though she was dead at his side. when the prince dārim saw that, he turned to his advisor and said, “o wazīr, look at this young woman and this newborn beside her, and this bird shading him. his mother is nursing him though she is dead! by the covenant of the arabs, and the favor of the month of rajab, know that if you don’t find out what happened to this young woman and the reason for her death, i’ll cut off your head just like hers.”70 by contrast, in ms arabe 3840, dārim finds junduba asleep at his mother’s side:71 at that time, [dārim] went out to hunt and shoot in order to relieve his grief and unleash his sorrow [at losing his son]. then he saw al-rabāb in that open space, and [s]he was dead, and that newborn was sleeping at her side […]72 unbeknownst to dārim, a gazelle has suckled the child before his arrival on the scene, a fact that becomes important later on. whereas the phenomenon of suckling from animals is not uncommon in such stories, the image of a mother’s corpse continuing to lactate is a rarer feature, yet it has some overlap with another, more prevalent notion: a hadith cited in muḥammad al-manbijī’s tasliyat ahl al-maṣāʾib, a work designed to console bereaved parents, promises that there is a tree in the garden with teats for children to suckle at should they die in infancy.73 other variations on the idea of heavenly nursing in hadith narrations do not feature a tree but rather explain that because muḥammad’s son, ibrāhīm, “died at the breast” of a qayna, or lady’s maid, who had been suckling him, his suckling will continue 70. sīrat al-dalhama, 9. 71. sic. 72. sīrat al-mujāhidīn, fol. 6. 73. see muslim b. al-ḥajjāj, ṣaḥīḥ muslim, kitāb al-faḍāʾil, no. 2316; al-manbijī, tasliyat ahl al-maṣāʾib (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2005), 185. see also avner giladi, “concepts of childhood and attitudes towards children in medieval islam: a preliminary study with special reference to reaction to infant and child mortality,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 32, no. 2 (1989): 149. נרמי קתלהא וסבב אלצבייה האדי ̇כבר לי תכשף לם אידא רׅגב שהר ו̇פ̇צל ראסך מתלהא مــع ويتبــزع فائــض والحليــب منهــا يرضــع المولــود وهــاذ مقتولــة مطروحــة اربــاب المالكــة وشــاف قــدرة صاحــب القــدرة وامــه ترضعــه وهــي قتيلــة قــدام جنبــه ولمــا نظــر االميــر دارم الــى ذلــك التفــت الــى وزيــره وقــال لــه أيهــا الوزيــر انظــر الــى هــاذي الصبيــة وهــاذ الجنــي الــذي بجنبهــا وهــاذ الطيــر لــي تكشــف لــم اذا رجــب شــهر وفضــل العــرب وذمــة واعلــم قتيلــة وهــي ترضعــه وامــه عليــه يظــّل خبــر هــاذي الصبيــة وســبب قتلهــا نرمــي راســك مثلهــا فخــرج فــي تلــك الســاعة الــي الصيــد والقنــص ليفــرج همــه ويكشــف غمــه فــراي الربــاب فــي تلــك البريــة وهــو71 مقتولــة وذلــك المولــود نايــم فــي جنبهــا al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 183 in the garden, and the same will be true of other infants in similar circumstances. the story of junduba contrasts with these hadiths in that it is the mother who dies, not the child. and yet, it echoes the central theme of a child continuing to nurse after a family calamity in that the body of his dead mother continues to provide life-giving sustenance, even though it has become otherwise inert. not unlike a tree with breasts, arbāb is transformed through her death into a purely functional instrument for her child’s survival. god’s ability to revive the dead is, of course, manifest throughout the quran, but this partial vivification of the portions of the female body essential for sustaining other life smacks of a certain alchemical reasoning that strips life down to its bare material constituents.74 the amplification of the importance of the breasts—even to the point of neglecting the woman herself—perhaps foreshadows the gender-bending significance of breasts in the next section of the text, in which they assume a key role in adjudicating junduba’s paternity.75 the test of which breast having received dārim’s threat, the vizier speculates that arbāb was of a prominent family and had an affair, compelling her family to kill her and abandon her child to the desert. dārim grows incensed and roundly rejects this theory, pointing to the many patent signs of arbāb’s enjoyment of divine favor, from the bird shading her child to the beasts of prey leaving him be. all versions of dārim’s poetic rejoinder to the advisor contain the remark, addressed to arbāb, “if you were not a free-born woman, you would not have [been able to] nurse your son in death.”76 confident that junduba is from good stock, dārim gives arbāb a proper burial and takes the child home to his wife, ḥusna, jokingly telling her, “i left to capture you some beast, but instead i took this boy for quarry!” (in the paris version, he says, “i left to capture you some beast, but instead i’ve brought you a person [fa-jibtuh lakī insī]!”).77 he gives her the child, along with the locket on his wrist, and instructs her to feed the boy and raise him as her own. he thus implies that he wants her relationship to him to closely emulate that of a mother, rather than simply a temporary wet nurse. providentially—in the sense of a deus ex machina—ḥusna is lactating because she has recently given birth, though the child has died and so her breast milk is going unconsumed. in the tunisian version, we are told: 74. q 2:260, q 19:66–67, q 22:5–7, q 30:19. 75. a number of legal sources also deal with the prospect of al-riḍāʿ min al-mayyata (suckling from a dead woman), that is, a scenario in which a woman “lactates into a container and then dies, and the child drinks from her milk.” the question is whether such “nursing” renders subsequent marriage between the child and a relative of the woman impermissible. in arbāb’s case, her lactation miraculously persists in death so that she remains the only necessary vessel for the milk. see, for example, ibn qudāma, kitāb al-mughnī, vol. 11, ed. ʿabdallāh b. ʿabbād al-muḥsin al-turkī and ʿabd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-ḥalw (riyadh: dār ʿālam al-kutub, 1986), no. 6419. see also avner giladi, infants, parents and wet nurses: medieval islamic views on breastfeeding and their social implications (leiden: brill, 1999), 87–89. 76. sīrat al-dalhama, 10; sīrat al-mujāhidīn, fol. 7. 77. sīrat al-dalhama, 11; sīrat al-mujāhidīn, fol. 7. 184 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 78 79 this ḥusna had an old [mother], named umm al-sharr, of whom iblīs had made an emissary—and truly god gives refuge! she said to her, “o my daughter, what’s become of you that you’re raising orphan bastards and foundlings? really, you have no need to do so, and your milk is pure and sound. sin is recompensed with sin.” ḥusna replied, “what should you know, mother? and who told you that he’s a foundling bastard child?” the old woman said, “do you know what to do in order to bring the thing to light? begin by giving him your left teat, and if he drinks from it then he’s a bastard. and if he won’t drink from it, you’ll know that he’s a legitimate (ḥalāl) child.” with that, ḥusna pulled out her breast and gave it to him, supplying him with the left one. the child began to cry, dodging it with his lips and refusing it with his tongue. he clamped his mouth shut and wouldn’t nurse, and then he began wailing. when she gave him the right breast, he pulled at it but did not have a desire to suckle [lit. inhale].80 in ms arabe 3840, the scene transpires similarly (though there, as in the standard version, the mother’s name is shuʾm al-zamān), except that when given the right breast, 78. see note 1. 79. in the judeo-arabic, this phrase appears as . 80. sīrat al-dalhama, 11. ولعيــاذو باهلل וכאנת האדי חסנא ענדהא עׅגוזתהא תסמא אם אלשר יסתעו̇ץ מנהא אבליס ולעיאדו אלאיתאם תרבי חתא מנך האדא לאש אנתי בנתי יא להא: קאלת תם באללה צא̇פי וחליבך ביה חאׅגא ענדך מא ואלחאל ומלקוט. אלזנא אולאד ער̇פת? באש אמי יא ואנתי חסנא להא פקאלת חראם. ̇פי חראם ירׅגע ]ח[לאל78 אמאלא אלעׅגוז להא קאלת ולמקוט? זנא ולד האדא אנהו ̇כברך אלדי ואשכון תער̇פשי אש תעמל באש יבאן לך האדא מן האדא אבדא אעטי בזולתך אליסאר ולד הוא אלדי אערף מנהא שרבשי מא ואידא זנא ולד פהוא מנהא שרב ואידא וצאר אלשמאל. מתע והיא ואעטאתו אלבזול חסנא ׅגבת דאלך ̇פענד חלאל יר̇צע חבשי ומא ̇פמהו ויטבק בלסאנו וירדהא בשפאיפו ̇פיהא וידז יבכי אלולד ולם כיפהו עלא ימׅגט צאר אלימין תדי אעטאתו ולמא ̇פאחם באכי וצאר חב ינפס وكانــت هــاذي حســنة عندهــا عجوزتهــا تســمى ام الشــر يســتعوض منهــا ابليــس والعيــاذ هــو بــاهلل80 ثــم قالــت لهــا يــا بنتــي انــت الش هــذا منــك حتــى تربــي االيتــام أوالد الزنــا وملقــوط والحــال مــا عنــدك ل يرجــع حــرام فــي حــرام فقالــت لهــا حســنة وانــت يــا امــي بــاش عرفــت؟ حاجــة بــه وحليبــك صافــي حــا تعمــل اش تعرفشــي امالــه العجــوز لهــا قالــت وملقــوط؟ زنــاء ولــد هــذا انــه خبــرك الــذي واشــكون بــاش يبــان لــك هــذا مــن هــذا ابــدأ اعطــي بزولتــك اليســار واذا شــرب منهــا فهــو ولــد زنــا واذا مــا متــع وهــي واعطاتــه البــزول حســنة جبــت ذلــك فعنــد ل حــا ولــد هــو الــذي اعــرف منهــا شربشــي يرضــع حبشــي ومــا فمــه ويطبــق بلســانه ويردهــا بشــفايفه فيهــا ويــدز يبكــي الولــد وصــار الشــمال وصــار باكــي فاحــم ولمــا اعطاتــه ثــدي اليميــن صــار يمغــط علــى كيفــه ولــم حــب ينفــس al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 185 he took three gulps from it and cried, for he was accustomed to the milk of gazelles, which is sweet, and their milk was [like] fresh water and musk. he started screaming and kept it up all night long.81 in the standard version, meanwhile, no such test is proposed, though ḥusna does still call the child’s legitimacy into question after being egged on by a woman who is referred to simply as an old woman (ʿajūz) but who we may presume is her mother because dārim eventually promises to support this woman financially during ḥusna’s nursing term.82 the “test of which breast” subverts gender norms in almost every way.83 because the question of legitimacy typically amounts to the question “who is the father?” it is conventionally men who do the inquiring. the adjudication of the question effectively hangs on determining which male sexual organ impelled the child’s existence. here, it is the women who want to establish the identity of the child’s father, and the organ that will reveal the child’s pedigree is not a penis, but rather a breast. the bodily fluid central to this paternity test is thus not semen but milk, and the source from which it is drawn will either validate or invalidate the child’s legitimacy. recognition of the shared symbolism of the breast and the phallus as indicators of fecundity, as well as of their morphological similarities, is evident across cultures and times. as late as the nineteenth/thirteenth century, the overlapping symbolism of the breast and the phallus was utilized as part of a grotesque iconography to argue for the regulation of nursing practices. this rhetoric of analogy around the two organs, which simon richter has referred to as a putative “physiological isomorphism,” drew on the fact that the nipples on a lactating woman, like the phallus, can become aroused to erection, ejaculate liquid, and are an erogenous zone.84 etymologically, certain terms in arabic (along with other semitic languages) bear an element of this reasoning—albeit in a far more distant and less calculated fashion than in the analogies drawn in the early modern european works in richter’s study. for example, iḥlīl denotes simultaneously the penis, the urethra (that is, the orifice through which urine passes), and the nipple in a breast or udder, through which milk passes.85 in discussing the transmission of muḥammad’s intercessory capacity to his descendants, mohammad ali amir-moezzi also notes that the relationship between milk 81. sīrat al-mujāhidīn, fols. 7–8. 82. sīrat dhāt al-himma, i:13–14. 83. i would like to thank franklin lewis for suggesting this nomenclature. 84. simon richter, “wet-nursing, onanism, and the breast in eighteenth-century germany,” journal of the history of sexuality 7 (1996): 2. 85. ashraf m. fathy, “identical familial terms in egyptian and arabic: a sociolinguistic approach,” in egyptology at the dawn of the twenty-first century: proceedings of the eighth international congress of egyptologists, ed. zahi hawass (cairo: american university in cairo press, 2003), 3:186. see also the definition of iḥlīl in lisān al-ʿarab as makhraj al-būl min al-insān wa-makhraj al-laban min al-thadī wa-l-ḍarʿ. ibn manẓūr, lisān al-ʿarab (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1955–56), 977. نــه كان معــود بلبــن الغــزالن الن لبنهــا كان حلــو ولبــن هــذه عــذب فشــرب منــه ثــاث جرعــات وبكــي ال ومســكه عــرق صيــاح مــن العشــا الــي الصبــاح 186 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) and semen has been distilled into various common aphorisms that encapsulate dimensions of heredity thought to be activated by sharing these fluids: in terms of the qualities of saintliness, islamic sources speak repeatedly about the power of transmission of the seminal substance from muḥammad’s ancestors, manifested by the “light” and symbolized by the ṣulb (kidney, loins), an organ regarded as the repository of the semen. passing via the uterus (raḥim) of the woman, the repository of her “seed,” the man’s semen forms the milk of the mother’s breast, which in turn enables the transmission of the father’s qualities to his child; whence the inseparable link between sperm and milk that one finds in such expressions as “milk is from man” (al-laban min al-marʾ), “the reproductive milk” (laban al-faḥl) or “the unique sperm” (liqāḥ wāḥid) that designate both the man’s seminal fluid as well as the woman’s milk.86 absent from this symbolic web, though, is what makes the phallic image of ḥusna’s breasts particularly trenchant, and that is the influence her breasts exert over the perceived purity of her family. ḥusna’s mother posits that her “pure milk” would be wasted on a bastard, like semen spilled in an adulterous or impure relationship.87 moreover, because of the workings of milk fosterage, in controlling whom she suckles, ḥusna effectively controls who is incorporated into her line of descent. whereas the literature discussed by richter evinces anxiety over the use by mothers of grotesque, unclean, often lower-class wet nurses, and whereas the milk-semen relationship discussed by amir-moezzi functions in a positive fashion to transmit noble paternal qualities, in ḥusna’s case the priority is to preserve her purity from the classed taint of a child of unknown nasab. the narrative could choose to relieve this tension by simply having ḥusna open the locket bound to junduba’s wrist that contains information about his family. instead, it leaves his identity unresolved, and the failure of the “test of which breast” perpetuates the withholding of information. there is, perhaps, another, more oblique way in which this portion of the text reflects an ancient literary association, by evoking a test that moses was compelled to endure in his infancy and that figures in collections of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ as well as in midrashic literature.88 fearing that the child might grow up to be a usurper because he keeps grabbing for the pharaoh’s scepter, the pharaoh permits his wife, āsiya, to place two vessels before the child, one containing jewels and the other hot coals. choosing the former will confirm moses’s lust for power; choosing the latter will certify his humility. below is william brinner’s translation of the subsequent events as they appear in al-thaʿlabī’s anthology: 86. mohammad ali amir-moezzi, “reflections on the expression dīn ʿalī: the origins of the shiʿi faith,” in the study of shiʿi islam: history, theology, and law, ed. farhad daftary and gurdofarid miskinzoda, 17–46 (london: i. b. tauris, 2014), 39. 87. in some circumstances, this logic cuts both ways. many imāmī shiʿi legal scholars as well as mālik b. anas advise against employing a woman known to have been born from an adulterous relationship as a wet nurse whenever it can be avoided. in actuality, however, as etan kohlberg notes, this rule seems “not to have been rigorously applied, perhaps because it was not always possible to find a wet-nurse the purity of whose origins could be ascertained.” see etan kohlberg, “the position of the walad zinā in imāmī shīʿism,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 48, no. 2 (1985): 247. 88. exodus rabbah 1:26. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 187 “i shall put in front of him a trinket of gold and sapphire, and i shall put in front of him a live coal. if he takes the sapphire, then he understands, and you may kill him; but if he takes the coal, you will know that he is only a lad.” thereupon she placed before him a basin in which were the gold and sapphire, and another basin in which was the coal. moses stretched out his hand in order to take the jewel and seize it, but gabriel turned his hand away to the coals, and he grabbed a coal and put it in his mouth.89 as with junduba, at issue is whether the child is worthy of a place in a well-off household, and so the test becomes a determiner of the child’s survival. however, whereas the apprehension about moses stems from the prospect of his social ambition, the concern over junduba centers instead on his possible social inferiority. furthermore, whereas moses’s test produces a result, junduba’s situation is left unresolved. as a consequence, the test feature of the vignette is reduplicated and refracted, with ḥusna facing a perceived choice between taking the route of the nurses who spurned muḥammad or “sacrificing” her pure milk for the survival of a child whose importance will prove far beyond her immediate estimation. nursing at a price dārim returns to find his wife crying. when he inquires after the cause of her distress, she poetically recounts her misgivings about the child while giving him an all-too-familiar account of a mother’s sleepless night. below i provide the original versions of the poem and then a translation that balances the two versions, as they are quite close, in rhythmic and rhymed english: 89. al-thaʿlabī, ʿarāʾis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, or “lives of the prophets,” translated by william m. brinner (boston: brill, 2002), 286. ואללה יא דארם קד כסרת ב̇כאטרי ואסהרת לילי ואלבחאר נוא̇צירי ̇כרׅגת אילא אלבר ורׅגעת לי באבן לקיט נסל קום ̇פואׅגירי לקיט זנאת ביה אמהו ̇פי אל̇פ̇פא מ̇כ̇צרא מא א̇כתשאת רבהא קאדירי לא אבוהא ר̇צא ולא א̇כוהא ב̇פעלהא וקד נחרוהא מתל נחר אלאבעירי וׅגבתהו אליא וקלת אר̇צעיה לאׅגל ̇כאטרנא ואלבן להו דאם עלא אלאר̇ץ ̇פאירי ונאולתהו אלבז אלימין ולם ר̇צא וזאד אלבכא מנהו ואליל עאכירי וצאר יטול אלנוסואני חזינא אנוח ונבכי באלדמוע אלחואדירי ואחרמני אלנום מן כתרת נוחהו לתאמל ̇פיה אלוחוש ואלטאירי אידא לם תדיה מכאנהו תרדהו לאקתל נ̇פסי בסיוף אלבואתירי وهلل يــا دارم قــد كســرت بخاطــري واســهرت ليلــي والبحــار نواظيــري خرجــت الــى البــرء ورجعــت لــي بابــن لقيــط نســل قــوم فواجيــري لقيــط زنــات بــه امــه فــي الّفــة مخضــرة مــا اختشــات ربهــا قاديــري ال ابوهــا رضــى وال اخوهــا بفعلهــا وقــد نحرهــا مثــل نحــر االبعيــري 188 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) sīrat al-mujāhidīn i swear to god, dārim, i’m going mad i didn’t sleep a wink, thoughts in a spin you headed to the countryside but then brought me home an orphan born in sin a child whose mother must’ve whored around inside her own home, heedless of the lord the men of her house heard what she had done and, like a camel, put her to the sword you brought this child to make of me a nurse, but when i gave my left side, he abstained its milk spilled, wasted, gushing on the floor and when i gave my right, he just complained he kept up crying through the whole dark night, and here’s the thing that has me going mad— in my heart i know there’s no good cause for taking in a boy who has no dad. he kept on wailing, whimpering in the dark, until, at last, i started crying too and as his sobs were mounting ever higher my own mind’s afflictions only grew وجبتــه الــّي وقلــت ارضعيــه الجــل خاطرنــا والبــن لــه دام علــى االرض فائــري وناولتــه البــز اليميــن ولــم رضــى وزاد البــكاء منــه واليــل عاكيــري وصــار يطــول النوســواني حزينــة انــوح ونبكــي بالدمــوع الحواديــري واحرمنــي النــوم مــن كثــرة نوحــه لتأمــل فيــه الوحــوش والطائــري اذا لــم تديــه مكانــه تــرده القتــل نفســي بســيوف البواتيــري اال يــا ملــك دارم قــد كســرت خاطــري واســهرت فــي الليــل الطويــل بذاكــري خرجــت الــي البــر الفســيح وعــدت لــي بابــن لقيــط نســل قــوم فواجــري لقيــط زنــت بــه امــه وهــو فــي الخبــا مخــدرة مــا اختشــت رب قــادري ابوهــا ردي وبلــي اخوهــا بفعلهــا لقــد نحرهــا مثــل نحــر االباعــري وجبتــه وقلــت ارضعيــه مــن اجلنــا ومــن اجــل هــذا االمــر كــدرت خاطــري أخرجــت لــه الثــدي الشــمال فامتنــع وعــاد اللبــن منــه علــي األرض فايــري وناولتــه البــز اليميــن فلــم رضــي ومــن اجــل هــذا االمــر كــدرت خاطــري نــه لقيــط نســل قــوم فواجــري وقلبــي يقــول لــي ليــس لــي بــه حاجــة ال وســار ينــوح بالليــل وانــي حزينــة انــوح وابكــي بالدمــوع الحــوادري واحرمنــي النــوم مــن كثــرة نوحــه ومــن اجــل هــذا االمــر دادت فكايــري فخــذه وارميــه فــي مــكان لقيتــه لياكلــوا منــه وحشــها والطوايــري اذا لــم توديــه مكانــا لقيتــه القتــل روحــي بالســيوف البواتــري al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 189 take him back and leave him where he lay, exposed to hungry bird and beast alike if you don’t dispose of the boy where he was found, i’ll run myself through with your sharpest spike90 two motifs recur throughout this poem, especially in the more repetitious paris version: the deteriorating mental state of dārim’s wife and her suspicion that the child is from a “fornicating people” or, more literally, a nation of adulteresses (qawm fawājir). the former refrain captures the psychological and physical strain of motherhood, with its sleepless nights and difficult feedings, whereas the latter raises the question of value: is this exhaustion worth it for such a child? the main consideration that undermines the infant junduba’s value is the possibility that his nasab has been squandered—that is, that he is the product of an extramarital flirtation between a high-born woman and a strange man—and that ḥusna might in turn squander her lineage by bringing the child into her family. this concern over pedigree calls to mind a staple feature of foster relationships in reality and in narrative as analyzed by anthropologist peter parkes, namely, that in a number of societies many pathways of milk-based fosterage were exercised almost exclusively by elite families. these fosterage methods were a means to orchestrate allegiances, creating tributary relationships aimed at developing cliental ties or shoring up loyalties to the existing social hierarchy. relationships of milk kinship thus often emanated from higherranked individuals to lower-ranked ones. in certain myths, such relationships serve to ennoble humble peasants who care for displaced future protagonists in their infancy.91 in ḥusna’s account, we see that the prospect of a reversal of this directionality is abhorrent: an elite woman suckling a lowly nursling is anathema. compounding this concern about the maintenance of social decorum are the physiological implications of ḥusna’s continuing to nurse the foundling, which are left implicit: it will likely suppress her menses and make it difficult for her to quickly conceive a new child of her own. continuing to nurse may also injure ḥusna’s practical chances of conceiving a child, as both medical and religious authorities often cautioned against sexual intercourse during nursing.92 these considerations are perhaps not at the forefront of dārim’s mind when he responds to his wife, but he nonetheless does offer to compensate her for her suffering. in the poem below, dārim’s castigation of his wife for her ill-tempered speech against arbāb is coupled with his seeming bafflement at her refusal to nurse such a clearly noble child. both failings, 90. sīrat al-dalhama, 12; sīrat al-mujāhidīn, fol. 8. 91. peter parkes, “fosterage, kinship, and legend: when milk was thicker than blood?” comparative studies in society and history 46, no. 3 (2004): 595. 92. though there are reports of muḥammad explicitly deciding not to prohibit intercourse while nursing “because the byzantines and persians nurse their children while sexually active or pregnant and it does no harm to their children,” elsewhere there is a precedent cited by some legal scholars for not having sexual intercourse with a nursing woman (ghīla), due in part to muḥammad’s insistence that his wife, umm salama, cease nursing before they could consummate their marriage. see giladi, infants, parents, and wet nurses, 31–32, 98–100; ruth roded, “umm salama hind,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_7723; muslim, ṣaḥīḥ muslim, kitāb al-nikāḥ, no. 2704. http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_7723 190 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) he implies, call her own social mores into question. again, both versions of the poem are fairly close: sīrat al-mujāhidīn o my cousin, how dare you think this way? and surely you know better than to slander, the mother of this child is noble-born! when have princesses been known to philander? if she had conceived the boy by whoring, would god have kept him from stampede and sun? and would his mother’s milk have flowed in death [alt. would he have nursed from a gazelle], were it not the work of the most able one? and beside the child was flung a locket, hewn from fine metal, fitting for a king, so take my fortune and go nurse him, now surely god aids the long-suffering93 93. sīrat al-dalhama, 12; sīrat al-mujāhidīn, fols. 8–9. הא יא בנת אלעם אקצרי דיאל אלת̇פכאירי ומן קול שר אלנאס כוני חאדירי מעא אם דא אלמולוד אלאמירא ובנת אמיר נסל קום אכאבירי ̇פאן כאנת אמהו קד זנאת ביה ̇כ̇פיא לא חסן להו אלרחמאן וחש נא̇פירי ואמהו תר̇צעהו ואלטיר י̇צללהו ואן ׅגמיע האדא בקדרת קאדירי וחרז דא אלמולוד מרמי בׅגנבהו ד̇כירא וצלח ללמלוך אלאכאבירי ̇פמני ̇כוד מאלא ׅגזילא ואר̇צעיה ̇פלא ̇כייב אלרחמאן מן כאן צאבירי هــا يــا بنــت العــم اقصــري ديــال التفكائــري ومــن قــول شــر النــاس كونــي حاذيــري مــع ام ذا المولــود االميــرة وبنــت اميــر نســل قــوم اكابيــري فــان كانــت امــه قــد زنــات بــه خفيــا ال حســن لــه الرحمــان وحــش نفائــري وأمــه ترضعــه والطيــر يظّلــه وان جميــع هــذا بقــدرة قاديــري كابيــري وحــرز ذا المولــود مرمــي بجنبــه ذخيــرة وصلــح للملــوك اال فمنــي خــوذ مــاال جزيــا وارضعيــه فــا خّيــب الرحمــان مــن كان صابيــري اال يــا بنــت عمــي اقصــري ذا التفاكــري ومــن قــول شــر الخلــق كونــي محــاذري فمــا ام ذي المولــود اال اميــرة وبنــت اميــر نســل قــوم اكابــري فلــو كانــت امــه زنــت بــه لمــا حســن الرحمــن لــه وحــش نافــري غــزاال نرضعــه وطيــرا يظلــه وان جميــع هــذا بقــدرة قــادري كابــري وحــرز ذا المولــود مرمــي بجانبــه دخيــرا ويصلــح للملــوك اال فمنــي خــذي المــال الكثيــر ورضعــي فمــا خيــب الرحمــن مــن كان صابــري al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 191 dārim then promises his wife thirty dirhams per month, with ten more for her mother. at this promise, “ḥusna was gladdened and nursed,” and, perhaps in light of her changed attitude, junduba readily accepts her breast. although it might seem that ḥusna has won one over on her beleaguered spouse, the quran explicitly prescribes payment to wives for nursing newborns as well as fair compensation for wet nurses (ḥusna presumably acted in the former stead rather than the latter). verse 233 of sūrat al-baqara reads: mothers suckle their children for two whole years, if they wish to complete the term, and clothing and maintenance must be borne by the father in a fair manner. no one should be burdened with more than they can bear: no mother shall be made to suffer harm on account of her child, nor any father on account of his. the same duty is incumbent upon the father’s heir. if, by mutual consent and consultation, the couple wish to wean [the child], they will not be blamed, nor will there be any blame if you wish to engage a wet nurse, provided you pay her as agreed in a fair manner. be mindful of god, knowing that he sees everything you do.94 exegetes debate the exact nature of the provision that is due a nursing wife from her husband (called rizq, maintenance or sustenance). though the quran specifies material goods such as clothing and food, it does not name amounts beyond bi-l-maʿrūf, “according to what is known or intuitively correct.” al-ṭabarī connects the quantity of rizq to the subsequent injunction against overburdening a parent, concluding that the amount must be in proportion to the husband’s means: because god has created people rich and poor, he “commands the two alike to provide that which is required for his wife’s provision, [according to] the measure of his wealth.”95 ibn kathīr adds a stipulation about local standards of living, saying that bi-l-maʿrūf should be interpreted as “taking the customs of similar people [i.e., other women] in their local community into consideration, [at a level that is] neither excessive nor privative,” in addition to being within the husband’s means.96 interestingly, the shiʿi commentator al-ṭūsī takes a slightly more legalistic approach to this verse, arguing that the interpretation of bi-l-maʿrūf hinges on whether ceasing nursing when the child turns two is merely recommended (mandūb) or incumbent upon the individual (farḍ). in his view, payment is required only for an obligatory service. therefore, if a woman continues nursing beyond the two-year mark in a supererogatory fashion, she may have no claim to further payment.97 al-ṭūsī thus seeks to prevent wives from using prolonged nursing as a means of extracting excessive allowances from their husbands, though one may reasonably wonder how often such cases would occur. the anecdote in the sīra provides an opposing example of a husband initially withholding the requisite funds. there are also precedents for supplementing a wife’s income when she is caring for a newborn that perhaps deepened the resonances of this vignette for the tunisian version’s intended audiences. masekhet ketubbôt, the section of the talmud most directly concerned 94. translation from the qurʾān, trans. m. a. s. abdel haleem (oxford: oxford university press, 2005), 26–27. 95. al-ṭabarī, tafsīr al-ṭabarī (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1955), 5:44. 96. ibn kathīr, tafsīr, 1:634. 97. al-ṭūsī, al-tibyān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1830), 2:255. 192 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) with contracts and contractual obligations in marriage, advocates that a wife’s budget be increased and her other household chores and handiwork decreased while she is nursing.98 and, of course, such precedents also emanate from nature, as the physical demands of nursing lend support to the idea that a nursing woman should enjoy increased access to food when possible. these scriptural and exegetical passages posit breastfeeding as an exercise of social capital rather than a simple means of supplying nutrition and mandate the compensation of aspects of childrearing labor. situating ḥusna’s interaction with dārim within this framework complicates the superficial reading of ḥusna as a minor villain whom an ominous old crone manipulates into showing callousness toward a newborn child. dārim promises her a handsome amount of money, and as a tribal chief he can clearly afford it. moreover, he is supposed to be sponsoring her financially as a new mother, and the exegetical consensus is that this funding should be in accordance with his ostensibly ample means. such a reading transforms the scene from one in which a wife imposes on her husband to one in which she negotiates with him to have her needs met, leveraging the exclusive resources that she possesses in order to do so. thus, although we could see ḥusna as the anti-ideal, contrasted with the likes of moses’s tenacious mother and the self-sacrificing ḥalīma, we can also recognize in her a more pragmatic and even necessary image of a wife and a new mother, namely, one who cares for her own mental and physical wellbeing, values her own labor, and ensures that her childcare burdens are understood and supported by her spouse. conclusion the femininity of women has often been interpreted as a force of chaos and subterfuge in arabic popular literature: using their womanly bodies and speech, they exercise kayd (wiles) and foment fitna (discord).99 many of the female figures in arabic siyar that have drawn the most curiosity and admiration from modern audiences and scholars are those who embody what might be considered relatively androgynous or masculinized ideals, as the warrior women whom remke kruk has analyzed illustrate. however, as amanda hannoosh steinberg has argued, there are also many quieter and more quotidian female exemplars in the siyar. i have argued that ḥusna belongs to this type. although she at first glance appears to be using her body’s gendered capacities in a calculating manner reminiscent of the sexualized, wily, and chaotic women of the popular imagination, with her breasts playing the part of a phallus in junduba’s “paternity test,” ultimately ḥusna uses her ability to nurse to enforce the rights that the quran guarantees to her as a caregiver. furthermore, by calling attention to her bodily and mental hardships and needs, her behavior challenges the silent and solicitous ideal of maternal behavior embodied in the self-sacrificing women of prophetic literature. as a nursing woman, ḥusna is in good literary company, given the wealth of lactation and nursing motifs in prophetic and popular lore. however, there is a notable difference 98. masekhet ketubbôt 5:9. see also rosenblum, “‘blessings of the breasts,’” 158. 99. on the significance of kayd in alf layla wa-layla, see fedwa malti-douglas, woman’s body, woman’s word: gender and discourse in arabo-islamic writing (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1991), passim. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 193 between these two corpora on the issue of who does the nursing. tales of the prophets are populated solely by human nurses (with the occasional angelic intercessor), who are celebrated for continuing to nurse even under difficult circumstances. by contrast, legendary heroes are often nursed by beasts in the absence of their human parents, and through their milk these creatures can impart certain animalistic qualities, affinities, and preferences to their nurslings. both forms of nursing are found in variations of sīrat dhāt al-himma, with arbāb continuing to nurse even in death in some versions and a gazelle taking up the task in others. because such episodes are didactic or legendary, they often play with or actively reject the “real,” in ways big and small. so, muḥammad’s wet nurse ḥalīma seems completely unconcerned by the personal and financial ramifications of her actions, agreeing to nurse the prophet despite his family’s inability to pay and implicitly censuring the other wet nurses of her tribe for not wanting to provide for an orphan at what would likely have been their personal expense. by this metric, despite the miracle of his suckling in the desert, the auspicious coincidence of ḥusna’s lactation and childlessness, and the absurd test of his legitimacy, the story of the foundling junduba nonetheless provides a realistic and candid portrayal of the considerations that accompany the nursing of others’ children. though the text primes us to see her as a bad actor by drawing a direct link between ḥusna’s behavior and the devilish inclinations of her mother, her conduct discloses anxieties about class, genealogy, and stigma as well as about the physiological and psychological logistics of nursing. these anxieties have echoes in traditional discussions of kinship structures and familial duties, suggesting that ḥusna’s trepidation reflects a broader social discourse. moreover, her concerns underscore the social and legal problems inherent in nursing foundling children—an issue that is endemic to popular literature, which is rich with heroes who have been orphaned or estranged from their natal families. the circumstances of their displacement often mirror social plights typical to the stories’ settings, from internecine warfare and practices of captivity and slavery to anxieties over disability and difference and even suggestive references to female infanticide and sex-selective family planning.100 in this fashion, the story of ḥusna and junduba innovates on a common literary topos 100. regarding the uses of siyar as social allegory, robert brunschvig argues that sīrat ʿantar, in which the black-skinned ʿantar is separated from his father because of the latter’s rejection of his slave son, may be construed as a roman à thèse, advocating more complete recognition for children born from concubinage (the effect of which is compounded, in ʿ antar’s case, by racial difference). see r. brunschvig, “ʿabd,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0003. a similar reading is possible in the case of fāṭima dhāt al-himma, whose father initially wishes to kill her because of her gender but is forced to rethink his position upon confronting her later in life on the battlefield, where she proves her mettle as an elite warrior. these questions often have a transhistorical resonance, both at the emotive level and because of the intimate empathy brought about by personal experience. dwight reynolds notes that an episode in sīrat banī hilāl in which the medieval hero abū zayd kills his quran tutor for beating another student prompts “heated discussions” when recited to contemporary audiences. he speculates that rural listeners may harbor bitter memories of the physical brutality inflicted along class lines in quran schools, with poorer children receiving the brunt of beatings, “whereas boys from rich and powerful families are left untouched.” in this way, the demise abū zayd’s quran teacher distills elements of contemporary audiences’ experiences of education and class—and perhaps their fantasies of vindication—into a single, brief episode. reynolds, “abū zayd al-hilālī,” 93–94. http://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_0003 194 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) by showcasing one such issue. ultimately, by speaking up—flouting her husband’s initial demands, questioning his social judgment, and defying common assumptions about the absolute, universal nature of maternal instinct and affection—ḥusna calls attention to her status as a new and hesitant foster mother and asserts control over her domestic realm. in the process, she guides her husband toward correct practice vis-à-vis a nursing spouse and positions herself as central to their new family arrangement. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) nourishing the noble: breastfeeding and hero-making • 195 bibliography ʿabd al-ḥakīm, shawqī, and omaima abou-bakr. princess dhat al-himma: the princess of 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al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 409-410 teaching note back in early 2007, when i started teaching an undergraduate survey course on islamic history, i was frustrated in my search for teaching materials that would align with how i had come to appreciate that history. there definitely were great history textbooks out there (hodgson, lapidus, hourani, endress & hillenbrand, egger, choueiri, noth & paul, haarmann, garcin, et al.). islamic history research had, however, been expanding rapidly, and its diversifying fields of specialization continued to generate exciting new insights and interpretations, which even the more recent of these textbooks had not yet managed to fully acknowledge. i therefore became one of the many colleagues who take it upon themselves to integrate this ongoing research into their lectures and generate 1. jo van steenbergen, a history of the islamic world, 600–1800. empire, dynastic formations, and heterogeneities in pre-modern islamic west-asia (new york: routledge, 2021). their own comprehensive overviews. this gargantuan task first took shape in the default format of annually updated and upgraded personal lecture notes, but it soon transformed into a textbook publication project that took the challenge to keep our teaching materials up to date more seriously. now, more than a decade later, this project has finally borne the desired fruit.1 a h i s t o r y o f t h e i s l a m i c w o r l d , 600–1800 presents one of the ways in which today a history of the islamic world can be written and taught. this involved m a k i n g s e v e r a l k e y d e c i s i o n s . t h e temporal and geographical parameters that define and connect the chapters of this textbook emphasize the intense asian connectedness of the landscapes ranging from the nile in the southwest why do we need a new textbook? jo van steenbergen ghent university belgium (jo.vansteenbergen@ugent.be) © 2020 jo van steenbergen. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:jo.vansteenbergen%40ugent.be?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 410 • jo van steenbergen and the bosporus in the northwest to t h e o x u s ( a m u d a r y a ) a n d j a x a r t e s (syr darya) in the northeast and the indus in the southeast between the seventh and eighteenth centuries ce. this means that i made the choice to tell only the story of what marshall hodgson called the pre-technical and theocratic age, defined here as the late antique and ‘medieval’– early modern periods, in islamic west asia’s history. central to the framework of historical interpretation that i use to tell this story is the argument of the mutually constitutive interaction between dynastic reconfigurations and cultural efflorescence and, in particular, between practices of power and discourses of belonging in the making and remaking of premodern islamic west asia’s diverse social and cultural landscapes. this connected social and cultural history approach enables the reconstruction of a particular, but also meaningful, framework narrative about different waves in premodern islamic history’s ocean of events, people, and stories. not only did each of these waves carry diverse but related sets of leadership groups; they also continued to do so defined by multifarious but equally related sets of practices and discourses. the analytical grid—insufficiently specified in many textbooks—used to reconstruct the narrative of these leaderships, practices, and discourses combines a khaldunian reading of the historical interaction between nomads and urban dwellers with a weberian conceptual framework of different types of legitimate authority. a history of the islamic world, 600–1800 explains how two major historical waves in the khaldunian movement of nomadicurban interaction can be usefully identified as coherent time-space units of social and cultural history. a first, late antique imperial wave started swelling during the arabian expansion from the early seventh century and lost momentum in the course of the complete disintegration of the abbasid imperial formation in the tenth century. a second, ‘medieval’–early modern dynastic wave then took over in the polycentric form of a long series of invasions by inner asian turkicand mongolian-speaking leaderships from the early eleventh century onward, and the social and cultural effects of their conquest practices and (post-)nomadic stabilizations appeared to peter out only with the radical transformations of the region’s early modern dynastic formations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. the first wave is traditionally, and rightly, deemed of enormous importance and relevance. the second wave, however, is often considered to represent only a ‘postclassical’ shadow of the first. one of the contentions of this textbook is that this stereotype does not hold true and, therefore, this second period of dynastic polycentrism, creative heterogeneity, and being islamic also deserves full attention and appreciation in its own right. only when one understands the intensity, innovativeness, and decisive impact of leadership configurations, social and cultural practices, and discourses of belonging in both periods can one fully estimate the further, modern trajectories of these regions’ social and cultural histories. the two chronological parts and fourteen illustrated chapters of a history of the islamic world, 600–1800 therefore invite students and teachers as well as general readers and specialists to be acquainted with, and reflect on, such new understandings of islamic history. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 411-412 pulling together enough primary sources in translation to sustain an undergraduate course on slavery in the medieval period is difficult. if the students need to write research papers, it becomes even more difficult. after my first attempt at teaching such a class, i decided to create a permanent and easily accessible place to share the translations i had done for my own students and to enable colleagues to share theirs. a website, teaching medieval slavery and captivity (www.medievalslavery.org), turned out to be the best way to meet these twin goals of sharing resources and making it easier to teach about the long history of slavery and captivity, whether as the focus of an entire course or as the topic for a single day’s discussion. to make the website useful across disciplines, i decided that the geographical scope should be global and that the m e d i e v a l e r a s h o u l d b e i n t e r p r e t e d broadly. i also used thematic categories to connect sources from disparate regions and time periods that might be interesting to teach in comparative perspective. consulting with scholars in areas beyond my expertise was great fun (and valuable for incorporating slavery into my global history survey), but as a scholar of the mamluks, i also wanted to have a robust collection of sources on slavery in a variety of islamicate societies. if you access the website today, most of these have been gathered under regional headings (middle east and north africa, africa, europe, and russia and central asia), but there are also some short passages formatted for the ap world history exam that could be adapted for other purposes. for those of us teaching the medieval middle east, i hope that this website w i l l h e l p a d d r e s s t h r e e p e d a g o g i c a l teaching note teaching medieval slavery and captivity: an online pedagogical resource hannah barker arizona state university (hannah.barker.1@asu.edu) © 2020 hannah barker. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. http://www.medievalslavery.org mailto:hannah.barker.1%40asu.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 412 • hannah barker challenges. first, i hope that it will add interdisciplinary richness to our classes. as a historian, i am used to working with written texts, but in teaching i want to include art, architecture, music, archaeology, and many other ang les into the past. enslaved and manumitted people were involved in so many aspects of cultural and artistic life in the medieval middle east, as creators and patrons as well as objects of depiction or description, that it makes sense to use their status as the focus of an interdisciplinary discussion. s e c o n d , g i v e n s o m e o f t h e l u r i d stories that circulate about practices of slavery in medieval muslim societies, i hope that a comparative perspective will help undergraduates reexamine their assumptions in this area. for example, it is worth reminding students that slave ownership, including sexual exploitation and physical abuse, was normal among medieval christians and jews as well as muslims, in the middle east and elsewhere, a n d t h a t t e n s i o n s s u r r o u n d i n g t h e treatment of slaves were connected to the policing of social boundaries. for this purpose, i might pair a source such as “the slave women of al-manṣūr ḥajjī,” in which political boundaries are at stake, with “a legal query to moses maimonides” and “felix fabri’s wanderings in the holy land,” in which the boundaries between religious communities are threatened. for a 1. tiffiny tung, “violence against women: differential treatment of local and foreign females in the heartland of the wari empire, peru,” in the bioarchaeology of violence, ed. debra martin, ryan harrod, and ventura pérez, 180–98 (gainesville: university press of florida, 2012). 2. debra martin, “ripped flesh and torn souls: skeletal evidence for captivity and slavery from the la plata valley, new mexico, ad 1100–1300,” in invisible citizens: captives and their consequences, ed. catherine cameron, 159–80 (salt lake city: university of utah press, 2008). course with a global/comparative element, i also recommend the bioarchaeological work of tiffiny tung1 on peru and debra martin2 on the american southwest. on a more mundane level, i also have students compare the contractual formulas used in sale documents for slaves, such as “a deed of sale of yumn” and “slave sale contracts from genoa.” this helps them both compare practices of slavery and understand the distinction between the fixed and variable elements of a contract. finally, i hope that presenting a broad array of sources will enable students to have more nuanced discussions about the ways in which slavery intersected with religion, race, and gender within medieval islamicate societies. the complex positionality of eunuchs between power (“the sabīl-kuttāb of yūsuf āghā dār al-saʿadāt) and vulnerability (“the guide book for obtaining divine favors”) is one example; the contrast between the honored mother of a former mamluk and the domestic slave who killed her is another (“execution of a mamluk slave woman”). i plan to continue adding materials to this website for the foreseeable future. if you would like to contribute a source t o t h e c o l l e c t i o n , o r i f y o u u s e t h e website in your class and would like to write a teaching reflection about your experiences, please get in touch. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 41-65 the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation1 michael cooperson university of california, los angeles (cooperso@humnet.ucla.edu) i. in 1956,1 a well-attended conference on “classicism and cultural decline in islamic history” could be held in bordeaux in full confidence that those things existed.2 but the 1. i am grateful to matthew gordon for his kind invitation to submit this essay; to antoine borrut and the three anonymous reviewers for their many helpful suggestions; and to ahmed el shamsy and john nawas for commenting on an early draft. 2. r. brunschvig and g. e. von grunebaum, eds., classicisme et déclin culturel dans l’histoire de l’islam (paris: maisonneuve, 1957; repr. 1977). among the many notable contributors were regis blachère, claude cahen, francesco gabrieli, charles pellat, and joseph schacht. most seem to agree that “the muslim peoples” had been in decline since the end of the middle ages (29). pellat argues specifically that the decline of “arab culture” was a multi-stage affair that began in the third islamic (ninth gregorian) century (81-91). though in its own way perhaps equally essentialist, henri massé’s discussion of whether persian literature represents a “renewal” of islamic culture (339-43) at least has the virtue of not conflating “arab” and “islamic.” for an english-language example of this sort of inquiry see j. j. saunders, “the problem of islamic decadence,” journal of world history, 7 (1963): 701-20. abstract the application of a hegelian rise-and-fall narrative to the history of arabic literature has been erroneously attributed to ibn khaldūn and his successors, though it can more probably be traced back to hammer-purgstall’s literaturgeschichte der araber (1850). although this paradigm has long been out of favor, its disappearance leaves us without a ready answer to the question of what (if anything) was distinctive about what is still sometimes called the early abbasid golden age. the prominence of this era in later memory is here traced to the adoption of paper, which supported, on the one hand, the simplification and vulgarization of arab language, lore, and religion; and on the other, the appearance of the first reliably contemporary eyewitness accounts in arabic literature. these productions made the period the first islamic space to be imaginable in almost granular detail, as well as the source of much of what we know about antecedent “arab” and “islamic” history. these features gave the period an outsized place even in the pre-modern arabic tradition. they also made it available for popularization by jurjī zaydān, whose taʾrīkh al-tamaddun al-islāmī (1902-1906) proved formative of later attitudes in arabic-language scholarship. mailto:cooperso%40humnet.ucla.edu?subject= 42 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) paradigm’s days were numbered. as albert hourani pointed out, there was nothing innocent in the choice of “islamic civilization”as the unit of analysis.3 and as roger owen was quick to add, there was no good reason to assume that “islamic civilization”—or even a better-defined entity like ottoman society after 1600—was in decline, at least not until “decline” could be defined in terms not entirely dependent on comparisons with the west.4 today no serious historian speaks of “islamic decadence” any more. but if one narrows the field a bit, the situation seems less clear-cut. in the study of arabic literature, which will be my focus here, it was long considered axiomatic that the mongol, mamluk, and ottoman periods constituted one long age of decline.5 today one finds vigorous arguments against this position,6 but no generally accepted counter-narrative,7 and some pushback from colleagues, who sense that some modern scholars, in their eagerness to disavow the old paradigm, “overcompensate by denying any reality” to nineteenth-century arab accounts of the preceding two hundred years, “as a period of decline in arabic letters and the institutions that sustained them.”8 there is also the awkward fact that the orientalist paradigm, though the “orientalists” themselves have largely abandoned it, remains the default position in arabic-language literary histories and mass-culture references to the arab and islamic past, even if it has had, and continues to have, its critics.9 if we drop the notion of a “golden age,” which entails dropping “decline” and “renaissance” too, what, if anything, remains distinctive about early abbasid culture? to answer this 3. albert hourani, “islam and the philosophers of history,” middle eastern studies 3:3 (1967): 206-68. 4. roger owen, “studying islamic history,” the journal of interdisciplinary history 4:2 (1973) 287-98; idem., “the middle east in the eighteenth century—an islamic society in decline?” bulletin (british society for middle eastern studies) 3:2 (1976): 110-17. 5. see, e.g., reynold nicholson, a literary history of the arabs (new york: scribners, 1907), 442-43. 6. thomas bauer, “in search of ‘post-classical literature’: a review article,” mamluk studies review 11:2 (2007): 137-67. 7. one ostensibly non-whiggish approach is to use the terms early, middle, and late period, as konrad hirschler does in the written word in the medieval arabic lands: a social and cultural history of reading practices (edinburgh up, 2012). for new takes on periodization see antoine borrut, “vanishing syria: periodization and power in early islam,” der islam 2014 91(1): 37-68 (in a special issue, edited by hirschler and sarah bowen savant, devoted to periodization), and shahzad bashir, “on islamic time: rethinking chronology in the historiography of muslim societies,” history and theory 53 (december 2014): 519-544, both of which propose the adoption of multiple temporalities instead of a single timeline. in thinking about the periodization of literary history in particular, i am indebted to panagiotis a. agapitos, “contesting conceptual boundaries: byzantine literature and its history,” interfaces 1 (2015): 62-91. 8. ahmed el shamsy, personal communication. 9. for early criticism of the paradigm as espoused by jurjī zaydān, see note 40 below. on later arabiclanguage histories see werner ende, arabische nation und islamische geschichte (beirut: steiner, 1977), who reads arguments for and against particular dynasties as extensions of arab-nationalist, regional, and sectarian quarrels. partiality to the abbasids, for example, was often a concomitant of iraqi shiite identity (ende, arabische nation, 233-60). for current arabic-language criticism of the rise-and-fall model, see ghāzī al-tawbah, “qirāʾah fī maqūlatay ‘ʿaṣr al-inḥiṭāṭ’ wa ʿaṣr al-nahḍah,’” al-jazīrah, 24 december 2009; aḥmad kāmil ghunaym, “āliyyat taqsīm al-adab al-ʿarabī ilā ʿuṣūr adabiyyah,” alūkah al-thaqāfiyyah, 3 march 2015 (i thank mohamed elsawy for this reference); mūrīs abū nāḍir, “mā jadwā iʿādat taʾrīkh al-adab al-ʿarabī bi-manhaj taqlīdī?,” al-ḥayāt, 21 august 2015. http://www.aljazeera.net/knowledgegate/opinions/2009/12/24/%25d9%2582%25d8%25b1%25d8%25a7%25d8%25a1%25d8%25a9-%25d9%2581%25d9%258a-%25d9%2585%25d9%2582%25d9%2588%25d9%2584%25d8%25aa%25d9%258a-%25d8%25b9%25d8%25b5%25d8%25b1-%25d8%25a7%25d9%2584%25d8%25a7%25d9%2586%25d8%25ad%25d8%25b7%25d8%25a7%25d8%25b7-%25d9%2588%25d8%25b9%25d8%25b5%25d8%25b1-%25d8%25a7%25d9%2584%25d http://www.aljazeera.net/knowledgegate/opinions/2009/12/24/%25d9%2582%25d8%25b1%25d8%25a7%25d8%25a1%25d8%25a9-%25d9%2581%25d9%258a-%25d9%2585%25d9%2582%25d9%2588%25d9%2584%25d8%25aa%25d9%258a-%25d8%25b9%25d8%25b5%25d8%25b1-%25d8%25a7%25d9%2584%25d8%25a7%25d9%2586%25d8%25ad%25d8%25b7%25d8%25a7%25d8%25b7-%25d9%2588%25d8%25b9%25d8%25b5%25d8%25b1-%25d8%25a7%25d9%2584%25d http://www.alukah.net/culture/0/83265/ http://www.alukah.net/culture/0/83265/ http://www.alhayat.com/articles/10886422/%25d9%2585%25d8%25a7-%25d8%25ac%25d8%25af%25d9%2588%25d9%2589-%25d8%25a5%25d8%25b9%25d8%25a7%25d8%25af%25d8%25a9-%25d8%25aa%25d8%25a3%25d8%25b1%25d9%258a%25d8%25ae-%25d8%25a7%25d9%2584%25d8%25a3%25d8%25af%25d8%25a8-%25d8%25a8%25d9%2585%25d9%2586%25d9%2587%25d8%25ac-%25d8%25aa%25d9%2582%25d9%2584%25d9%258a%25d8%25af%25d9%258a%25d8%259f http://www.alhayat.com/articles/10886422/%25d9%2585%25d8%25a7-%25d8%25ac%25d8%25af%25d9%2588%25d9%2589-%25d8%25a5%25d8%25b9%25d8%25a7%25d8%25af%25d8%25a9-%25d8%25aa%25d8%25a3%25d8%25b1%25d9%258a%25d8%25ae-%25d8%25a7%25d9%2584%25d8%25a3%25d8%25af%25d8%25a8-%25d8%25a8%25d9%2585%25d9%2586%25d9%2587%25d8%25ac-%25d8%25aa%25d9%2582%25d9%2584%25d9%258a%25d8%25af%25d9%258a%25d8%259f al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 43 question, it will be helpful to ask how the label “golden age” and its equivalents came to be applied to it in the first place.10 few readers will be surprised to learn that much of the work was carried out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. but, as we will see, the early abbasid period was available to be used for this purpose, though not—or not only— for the reasons usually adduced. in the end, i will propose an alternative explanation for the persistence of the early abbasids in historical memory, one that takes into account its distinctive or formative characteristics while resisting the slide into “golden age” rhetoric. ii. pre-modern arabic scholarship had much to say about why polities decline. it is important to consider at least one strand of this thought, not only as a corrective to the assumption that notions of decline were entirely a european imposition, but also because the euro-arab nineteenth century11 conflated this particular strand with the rather different early-modern european idea of civilizational decline, creating a particularly powerful and long-lived narrative of oriental decadence. the easiest way to show this is by looking at the reception of ibn khaldūn (d. 1406).12 ibn khaldūn’s famous “theory of civilization” deals with human communities at several orders of magnitude. the largest order is that of ʿimrān, “organized habitation” or “human aggregation” (as aziz al-azmeh translates it13), of which one manifestation is ḥaḍārah, “the culture centered around life in cities” (as muhsin mahdi renders it14). these entities are subject to change of various kinds. but the entity that can most easily be seen moving in real time, so to speak, is the dawlah or polity. regardless of the religion or ethnicity of the people involved, polities (duwal) rise and fall for the same reasons, even if certain adventitious 10. in its original, ancient greek use, the golden age was a paradise on earth, like schlaraffenland or the land of cockaigne. aware of this meaning, ṭāhā ḥusayn speaks dismissively of purported ʿuṣūr dhahabiyyah in both and greek and arabic literary history: see fī al-adab al-jāhilī, 15th edition (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, n.d.), 178. like marwa el-shakry, “between enlightenment and evolution: arabic and the arab golden ages of jurji zaydan,” jurji zaydan: contributions to modern arab thought and literature, ed. george c. zaidan and thomas philipp (washington, dc: zaidan foundation, 2013), 123-44, which studies zaydān’s argument that there were several arab golden ages, my concern here is with the idealization of a particular period and not with the term as such. here i address only the purported abbasid golden age. another major contender for the title, namely “muslim spain,” presents a strikingly different case. one important difference is that the idealization of al-andalus has been grounded, from the beginning and recurrently, in visits by arab men of letters to the monuments in cordoba, granada, and seville. see peter wien, arab nationalism (london: routledge, 2017), 48-79. 11. by this i mean the community of orientalists (for lack of a better term) working in europe and the levant from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. although the differences between, say, alfred von kremer and jurjī zaydān are many and significant, there are also good reasons to read them together, at least for the purposes of this study. 12. my comments here are necessarily very selective. for broader treatments see gabriel martinez-gros, ibn khaldûn et les sept vies de l’islam (arles: sindbad, 2006); allen james fromherz, ibn khaldun: life and times (edinburgh, 2010); mohammad salama, islam, orientalism, and intellectual history (new york: tauris, 2011), esp. chs 2 and 3; and nabil matar, “confronting decline in early modern arabic thought,” journal of early modern history, 9:1-2 (2005): 51-78, at 56-59 (i thank john nawas for this reference). 13. see his ibn khaldūn: an essay in reinterpretation (london: frank cass, 1982), 48 and 62. 14. see his ibn khaldûn’s philosophy of history (london: unwin and allen, 1957), 201. 44 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) circumstances may accelerate or retard the process of change.15 already, then, it is clear that ʿimrān, ḥaḍārah, and dawlah are each quite distinct from what g. w. f. hegel (d. 1831) was to call a civilization, that is, the life and spirit of a particular people as manifested in history.16 ibn khaldūn does know a concept roughly comparable to “a (single) civilization,” namely ummah, that is, the global and transhistorical community of muslims.17 by his time, though, that ummah had long since ceased to exist as a unit. rather, it was divided into multiple polities, each of which behaved like any other dawlah. and it was the dawlah, not the ummah, whose behavior ibn khaldūn was trying to explain. when dynastic cyclism was taken up by ottoman theorists of decline, they retained the dawlah as the unit of analysis.18 since my concern here is with literary history, i will take an illustration from the short history of islamic scholarship prefixed to ḥajjī khalīfah’s (d. 1657) bibliographic encyclopedia kashf al-ẓunūn. the great nations (umam), he says, all practiced ʿilm, the search for knowledge. the arabs had knowledge revealed to them by the qurʾān, which, being a scripture for all peoples, provided a basis for an islamic community (millat al-islām). the reduction of this knowledge to writing was an achievement of the umayyad period. then, under the early abbasid caliphs, foreign sciences such as philosophy were adopted and adapted. but as the abbasid polity unraveled, learning suffered.19 what happened next is not entirely clear, but there is no doubt that muslims eventually went back to seeking knowledge and writing books, including the many persian and ottoman books that the kashf describes. even from this cursory survey it is evident that ḥājjī khalīfah was familiar with the idea of national or racial communities—that is, with something roughly comparable to hegel’s 15. in his study of the ʿibar (the history to which the muqaddimah is a preface), martinez-gros notes that ibn khaldūn treats each of the ancient peoples (e.g., the hebrews, the persians, the greeks) with due regard for its particular circumstances. even so the individual case studies amount to a “double application des regles déjà posées: les peuples épuisent leur souveraineté et leur existence de branche (jîl) en branche; et la conquète reprend souvent le flambeau tombé des mains de son conquérant” (martinez-gros, ibn khaldûn, 132-33). 16. for hegel’s original formulations see grundlinien der philosophie des rechts, in werke, vol. 7 (berlin: nicolai, 1821; reprinted frankfurt a. m. 1979, online here); and elements of the philosophy of right, tr. h.b. nisbet (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1991), paragraphs 341-60 (in both german and english). 17. this is also ibn khaldūn’s term for what we might call ethnic groups, such as the hebrews, greeks, persians, and so on, and as such a source of possible confusion. i would argue that the muslim ummah, being a faith community, is conceptually distinct from the others, but that his broad use of the term is justified in that all umam, however constituted and defined, are subject to the same historical processes. 18. how much of the theory came directly from ibn khaldūn has been taken up, with largely negative conclusions, by cornell fleischer, “royal authority, dynastic cyclism, and ‘ibn khaldūnism’ in sixteenthcentury ottoman letters,” journal of asian and african studies xviii 3-4 (1983), 198-220 (i thank mohammad salama for this reference). for a recent and more ibn-khaldūn-friendly survey of the question see nurullah ardıç, “genealogy or asabiyya? ibn khaldun between arab nationalism and the ottoman caliphate,” journal of near eastern studies 71:2 (october 2012), 315-24, at 317-18. 19. ḥājjī khalīfah, kasf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa l-funūn, ed. muḥammad sharaf al-dīn yaltqāyā (istanbul, 1941; reprinted beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, n.d.), 1:26-35 (these numerals refer to the numbered columns, of which there are two per page). http://www.zeno.org/philosophie/m/hegel%2c%2bgeorg%2bwilhelm%2bfriedrich/grundlinien%2bder%2bphilosophie%2bdes%2brechts/dritter%2bteil.%2bdie%2bsittlichkeit/dritter%2babschnitt.%2bder%2bstaat/c.%2bdie%2bweltgeschichte al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 45 “civilization.” the muslim community was one such community, even if it was defined by religion, not ethnicity. again, though, this ummah or millah does not rise, flourish, and collapse as a whole. rather, only particular polities within it—the umayyads, the abbasids, and so on—follow the ibn-khaldūnian trajectory. from another source (a fiscal report he was commissioned to write) we happen to know that ḥājjī khalīfah believed that he himself was living through an age of crisis—in this case, a crisis of his own dawlah, the ottoman state.20 but if this was a decline, it was a decline with respect to the reign of sultan suleiman (r. 1520-66), not the fall of baghdad.21 evidently, then, ḥājjī khalīfah believed that cultural production does not thrive once and then collapse forever, in a longue-durée arc. rather, it rises and falls in dynastic epicycles. remarkably, this focus on the dawlah persisted even when ḥājjī khalīfah’s work was taken up (or perhaps more accurately, plagiarized) by barthelmy d’herbelot (d. 1695), who used it as the basis of his bibliothèque orientale, the first european encyclopedia of arabic, persian, and turkish literature.22 as nicholas dew has shown, the bibliothèque does not lend itself to a telelogical vision of its subject, for the simple reason that the entries appear in alphabetical rather than chronological order.23 at one place, admittedly, d’herbelot refers to the abbasids as “[la] race la plus féconde en grands personnages de toutes celles qui ont regné parmi les musulmans.”24 but he is quoting the persian historian khwānd mīr (d. 1535?),25 and in any case the reader will not encounter this claim unless he or she happens to consult the entry on the abbasid caliph al-maʾmūn. where we do find some broader historical claims is in antoine galland’s introduction to the work. the umayyads, says galland, never declined:26 they were simply overthrown. the abbasids, on the other hand, did decline, but they were succeeded 20. bernard lewis, “ottoman observers of ottoman decline,” in islamic studies 1:1 (1962), 71-87, at 79-81; cf. douglas a. howard, “ottoman historiography and the literature of ‘decline’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” journal of asian history 22:1 (1988): 52-77. 21. see cornell h. fleischer, bureaucrat and intellectual in the ottoman empire: the historian mustafa ali (princeton 1986): 243-45, 257-68 (i thank dana sajdi for this reference). even so, suleiman’s reign was not immune to criticism: see cemal kafadar, “the myth of the golden age: ottoman historical consciousness in the post süleymânic era,” in süleymân the second and his time, ed. halil i̇nalcık and cemal kafadar (istanbul: isis, 1993), 37-48. 22. d’herbelot, bibliothèque orientale, ou dictionnaire universel contenant generalement tout ce qui fait connoître les peuples de l’orient (paris: compaignie des libraires, 1697); on its sources see henry laurens, la bibliothèque orientale de barthélemi d’herbelot : aux sources de l’orientalisme (paris: maisonneuve, 1978). 23. nicholas dew, “the order of oriental knowledge: the making of d’herbelot’s bibliothèque orientale,” in debating world literature, edited by christopher prendergast (london: verso, 2004), 233-252, at 248-9 and 250-52. 24. in the entry on al-maʾmūn: d’herbelot, bibliothèque, 546. 25. d’herbelot is citing the khulāṣat al-akhbār, which remains unedited and unpublished. i have not found the claim in khvānd mīr’s ḥabīb al-siyar, ed. jalāl al-dīn humāʾī (tehran: khayyām, 1954). i thank theodore s. beers for sharing with the editors his information on khvānd mīr. 26. “...ne recevra point d’atteinte, & ne tombera pas en décadence”: antoine galland, “discours pour servir de préface,” in d’herbelot, bibliothèque, sixth page (the preface is unpaginated in the first edition). 46 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) by new dynasties, some of them quite powerful. strikingly, this process was still churning along, even if ... all these great dynasties, and others less powerful...are reduced, in our time, to the emperors of india, or the great mongol; the uzbeks, masters of turkestan, transoxania, and khurasan; the sufis [safavids] of persia; the ottoman emperors of constantinople; and the kings of fez and morocco [= marrakesh]”.27 this is still the world of ibn khaldūn: what rises and falls are dynasties, not something called “islamic civilization.” it is with the next major european history of arabic literature28 that the hegelian riseand-fall becomes the framing device. the work in question is alfred von hammer-purgstall’s enormous literaturgeschichte der araber.29 in his preface, a fascinating document that deserves more attention than i can give it here, von hammer-purgstall (d. 1856) explains that what determines a period of literary history is the interaction of the literary and the political—an interaction that is visible only in retrospect. although literary production does not always require centralized political authority in order to flourish, it is nevertheless the rise and fall of dynasties (he says) that mark off the great periods of arabic literature.30 on this basis, he divides the literary history of the arabs in half: one great period from muhammad to the fall of baghdad, and another from baghdad to napoleon. he adds that each half can itself be halved, giving four periods as follows: the rise, from muhammad to about 925; the flowering, from 925 to 1258; the fall-off, from 1258 to 1517; and the decadence, from 1517 to 1789.31 the work itself is organized according to this plan, which makes it, as far as i know, the first chronological history of arabic literature. in any case, what matters for us is that the literaturgeschichte replaces the little cycles of ibn khaldūn’s duwal with one great rise and one great fall.32 with schemes like this in place, it became possible for subsequent writers to isolate and explore the golden age as a topic in itself. a notable example of this approach is 27. ibid., seventh page. 28. all the works discussed so far included persian and turkish; von hammer-purgstall’s literaturgeschichte surveys arabic only. 29. hammer-purgstall, literaturgeschichte der araber von ihrem beginne bis zu ende des zwölften jahrhunderts der hidschret (vienna: k. k. hofund staatsdruckerei, 1850). 30. von hammer-purgstall, literaturgeschichte, 1: xxvi and lvi. 31. “jeder der zwei grossen zeitraüme, in welche der sturz der chalifats die arabische geschichte zerschneidet, zerfällt wieder in zwei fast gleiche hälften, und also nach dem jahrhunderte des beginns vor mohammed die ganze geschichte arabischer literatur in vier grosse perioden, jede von beiläufig dreihundert jahren, wovon die zwei ersten die der aufnahme und den höchsten flores, die zwei letzten die der abnahme und des verfalls” (von hammer-purgstall, literaturgeschichte, 1: xxvii). 32. von hammer-purgstall was of course not the first to claim that “islamic civilization,” or the orient, or the semites, had declined. ernest renan, for example, had made the claim in no uncertain terms only a few years earlier: see, for example, his 1859 study of al-ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt, in essais de morale et de critique (paris: michel lévy, 1859), 287-382. i thank maurice pomeranz for this reference. my point here is that with von hammer-purgstall, the rise-and-fall scheme becomes the basis for writing histories of arabic literature. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 47 culturgeschichte des orients unter den chalifen (1875-77), by the austrian diplomat and scholar alfred von kremer (d. 1889). in his preface, von kremer tells the reader not to be misled by the sad spectacle of the present-day orient. islam, he says, was once a great civilization, distinguished by “a surprisingly humane spirit” (ein überraschend humaner geist). the scholars of baghdad, receptive as they were to the ancient greek heritage, led the world in the exact sciences. in philosophy, law, and political theory, medieval islam outstripped europe. the jurists of baghdad espoused many humanistic principles, arguing, for example, that the life of a non-muslim or a slave was equal to that of a muslim. the institutions of the early caliphal period, including the tax system, the courier routes, and the provisions for public welfare, attest (he says) to a high level of culture. later, however, these institutions were exploited by despotic rulers, and collapsed.33 one of the notable things about von kremer’s approach is its determination to look at everything—law, literature, and so forth—as manifestations of the particular spirit of the civilization being studied. this is the approach called kulturgeschichte (cultural history), and we find it practiced in other european treatments of the “golden age,” including adam mez’s renaissance of islam and gustav von gruenbaum’s medieval islam.34 it also served as the structuring principle of major works in arabic, including jurjī zaydān’s tārīkh al-tamaddun al-islāmī, aḥmad amīn’s fajr, dūḥā, and ʿaṣr al-islām, and shawqī ḍayf’s tārīkh al-adab al-ʿarabī. in a moment we will have occasion to look more closely at zaydān in particular. first, though, i want to close this section with a glance backward at ibn khaldūn. according to von kremer, it was ibn khaldūn who first conceived of kulturgeschichte. in an essay published in 1879, the austrian declared that his north african predecessor was the first to regard history, “not as a description of events or of the succession of dynasties but rather of the intellectual and material development of peoples.”35 in effect, von kremer is crediting an arab muslim theorist with inventing the method by which the decline of his civilization might be diagnosed. but von kremer is committing a category mistake: that of replacing ibn khaldūn’s dawlah with “islamic” or “oriental” or “arab” civilization. according to classical orientalism and some strains of modern arab thought, “arab-islamic civilization,” rather than some particular dawlah, is the thing that is supposed to have risen, fallen, and risen again. ibn khaldūn, as i read him, offers no basis for thinking so. iii. in this section i want to take a closer look at arabic-language kulturgeschichte in order to explain why the early abbasid period came to serve as the golden age of nationalist historiography. a key moment, i believe, is the publication of jurjī zaydān’s taʾrīkh 33. alfred von kremer, culturgeschichte des orients under den chalifen (vienna: braumüller, 1875), 1: iv-x. 34. for general background see josef van ess, “from wellhausen to becker: the emergence of kulturgeschichte in islamic studies,” in malcolm h. kerr, ed., islamic studies: a tradition and its problems (malibu: undena, 1979), 27-51. 35. von kremer, “ibn chaldun und seine culturgeschichte der islamischen reiche,” sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen akademie der wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische classe, 93: 581-640, at 584-85. von kremer finds it remarkable that such an original thinker should have come along at a time when the decline of “the arab people” had already begun (581). 48 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) al-tamaddun al-islāmī. when zaydān (d. 1914) set out to write a history of islamic civilization, he justified the endeavor by arguing that previous histories written in arabic had dwelt on the wrong topics. “the true history of a nation (ummah) is the history of its civilization (tamaddun) and its settled life (ḥaḍārah), not the history of its battles and conquests.”36 but how was one to write this new kind of history? one did so by providing a lively account of social life and material culture. in his preface to the final volume of his history, zaydan explains that his aim has been to write so vividly that whatever he is talking about “appears to the reader as if it were physically there before him.”37 even for modern historians, cultural history is hard to write because—among other things—there is no conventional way to impose order on one’s material. zaydān’s history is not well organized, by any standard. but it does have a method. as a novelist, zaydān knew that the only way to conjure the past into seemingly physical existence was to choose a particular past and fill it out with as much local color as he could find. in volume 1, he explains which past he chose to focus on and why. after zipping through the political history of the umayyads, abbasids, spanish umayyads, and fatimids, zaydan declares that it would take too long to go through all the other islamic dynasties that have existed in the world. so he lists them in tabular form, giving their capitals, how many kings each had, the year each was founded, and the year each came to an end. the table takes up four pages. he then continues: to sum up, from the earliest days of islam until now, over a hundred islamic dynasties have come into existence, with some 1200 leaders, among them caliphs, sultans, kings, emirs, atabegs, ikhshīds, khedives, sherifs, beys, deys, and more; by origin arabs, persians, turks, circassians, kurds, indians, tatars, mongols, afghans, and others; and ruled from medina, kufa, damascus, baghdad, egypt, cairawan, cordova, istanbul, sanaa, oman, delhi, and elsewhere... but inasmuch as the abbasid dynasty is the most famous of them all, and the first to attain civilization (tamaddun), we shall base our description of tamaddun for the most part on the abbasids.38 here zaydān does not quite say that the early abbasid period was the golden age. but his decision to use it as the exemplar of arab-islamic civilization certainly implies a certain 36. jurjī zaydān, tārīkh al-tamaddun al-islāmī, 4th ed (cairo: al-hilāl, 1935; originally published 1902-06), 1:3. cf. von hammer-purgstall: “erst im verflossenen jahrhunderte haben europäische geschichtschreiber einzushehen begonnen, das die geschichte eines volkes nicht nur seine thaten im kriege, sondern auch in die im frieden, die seiner künste und wissenschaften, seiner geistigen und sittlichen bildung umfassen müsse...” (literaturgeschichte, 1: xv). zaydān goes on to argue that histories written in western languages are inadequate for different reasons. 37. li-anna wijhatanā al-ūlā fī kitābatinā innamā hiya basṭu al-ʿibārati wa-īḍāḥu al-mawḍūʿi ḥattā yanjalī lil-qāriʾi kaʾannahu mujassam: zaydan, tamaddun, 5:3. a worthy successor of zaydān in this regard is guy le strange’s baghdad during the abbasid caliphate (oxford, 1900), which, despite the tenuousness of its reconstructions, delivers a powerful reality effect, describing, as it does, some parts of baghdad almost street by street. 38. zaydān, tamaddun, 1:81-86. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 49 privilege over the many other times and places he might have written about.39 this approach, and the decline-and-fall paradigm it implied, was criticized even by some of zaydān’s contemporaries, who reproached him for adopting an orientalist model.40 yet it has served as the basis for the literary histories found in schoolbooks and dictionaries even today.41 for example, the literary-history chart in the munjid encyclopedic dictionary, a standard reference work, until recently labeled the entire period from 750 to 1258 “the abbasid age,” and the period from 1258 to 1789 “the age of decline.”42 admittedly, this arrangement has its advantages: the alternative would have been to create a new section for each of zaydān’s hundred-odd dynasties, or to come up with some new principle of classification. in the end the munjid editors took the easy way out: following zaydān, they declare the abbasids to have been the most important islamic dynasty, and then herd every writer between 750 and 1258 into the abbasid tent. this way of looking at literary history may seem natural to many arabic speakers today, but it hardly follows in any obvious way from historical reality—not even the reality known to zaydān. rather, the construction of an abbasid golden age follows in part from the choices zaydān made in order to write a specifically cultural history. most fatefully, he decided to focus on the abbasids because the sources on them would give him more of what he thought of as the raw material of kulturgeschichte—social life, material culture, and so on. for that purpose, his choice made sense. but, as he himself was aware, there were plenty of other dynasties out there: in fact, he lists them in his chart. their subsequent disappearance is doubtless the result of a streamlining intended to produce a curriculum for a secular arabnationalist history. fortunately, the many criticisms of this scheme finally appear to have had an effect: the most recent edition of the munjid has a new chart. in this one, the unfortunate “abbasid” label for 750-1258 is retained, but the period from 1258 to 1798 is called the mamluk and ottoman period, not the age of decline. 39. for another early example see ḥasan tawfīq al-ʿadl, tārīkh ādāb al-lughah al-ʿarabiyyah (cairo: al-funūn, 1906), which divides the field into “pre-islamic, umayyad, abbasid, andalusian, and after.” he appears to have derived this scheme from carl brockelmann, making it a descendant of hammer-purgstall’s. see konrad hirschler and sarah bowen savant, “introduction: what is a period?” der islam 91:1 (2014): 6-19, at 14, citing jan brugman, an introduction to the history of modern arabic literature in egypt (leiden: brill, 1984), 327-30. note that although al-ʿadl’s work precedes zaydan’s tārīkh ādāb al-lughah al-ʿarabiyyah (cairo: al-hilāl, 1911-13) it postdates the tamaddun (1902-1906). 40. on luwīs shaykhū’s criticism of zaydān’s dependence on brockelmann’s geschichte der arabischen litteratur, see anne-laure dupont, “how should the history of the arabs be written? the impact of european orientalism on jurjī zaydān’s work,” in zaidan and philipp, eds., jurji zaidan, 85-121, at 104-7. another early critique is that of muṣṭafā ṣādiq al-rāfiʿī (d. 1937), taʾrīkh ādāb al-ʿarab, originally published 1911, reissued and edited by ʿ abd allāh al-minshāwī and mahdī al-baḥqīrī (cairo: al-īmān, undated reprint of 1911 edition), 1:13-19. the gist of his objection is that literary history is neither progressive nor cumulative; indeed, its finest hour came near the beginning, with the revelation of the qurʾan. moreover, it is independent from events in other spheres, including religion, politics, and science. i thank ahmed el shamsy for this reference. 41. a prominent example in the schoolbook category is [shaykhū, luwīs,] al-majānī al-ḥadīthah ʿan majānī al-ab shaykhū, edited by fuʾād afrām al-bustānī et al (beirut: al-kāthulīkiyyah, 1960-61). i thank john nawas for drawing this example to my attention. 42. “tārīkh al-ādāb wa l-ʿulūm al-ʿarabiyyah,” in al-munjid fī l-lughah wa l-aʿlām, 27th ed. (beirut: dar el-mashreq, 1984), pp. 462-69. i thank bilal orfali and john nawas for sending me photos of these pages. 50 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) iv. on the basis of the preceding survey one might be tempted to conclude that the elevation of the early abbasid period is entirely the result of back-projection. but there is plenty of evidence that abbasid glory was a topos in arabic literature even before the modern process of mythification got started. having now excavated and put aside the modern riseand-fall paradigm that requires a golden age, we can proceed to examine the pre-modern topos in more detail. in what now seems an amateurish essay published two decades ago, i offered a selective history of the trope of baghdad as a city of vanished glory.43 century after century, one finds the claim that the city had only recently stopped being a glorious center of political power, prosperity, scholarship, and so on. whatever the weaknesses of my essay, it still seems true that the trope was persistent and ubiquitous, and that its persistence and ubiquity make it impossible to treat the glorification of the early abbasid period (for which baghdad is the most convenient synecdoche) as a purely modern phenomenon.44 a recent essay by suzanne stetkevych seems to address the problem with its argument that the golden age is the creation of abbasid court poets.45 but stetkevych takes it as axiomatic that abū tammām (d. 845 or 846), al-buḥturī (d. 897), and the rest had something to celebrate, namely, “the astounding and unprecedented might and dominion of the rulers of the arab-islamic state” and “the moral, military, scientific, and cultural achievements of abbasid rule” (3). or at least, she takes it as axiomatic until she doesn’t: a few pages later she says that “the abbasid golden age was a literary construct, not a historical reality,” adding that it is “an image created and promulgated by the court panegyrists and not an objective historical assessment of the period” (7). apart from the circularity of the argument, i am not convinced by the poems she analyzes that the panegyrists believed that theirs was a golden age, or, if they did, that this belief would have mattered very much. the problem is one of genre: madīḥ, by definition, insists that tout va pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes. since this is what praise-poets always say, no matter where or when they live, their having said it during the early abbasid period would seem to lack probative value. on the other hand, stetkevych’s further argument that nineteenthand twentieth-century neo-classical poets invoked abū tammām, al-buḥturī, et al., to construct the image of a lost arab-islamic utopia is fully convincing.46 what remains to be determined why the poets of this particular period should have been chosen to play this role. a convenient way to re-open the problem is to ask what different users of the trope thought the early abbasid period was like. in the thousand and one nights, the stories that feature al-rashīd, zubaydah, al-amīn, jaʿfar al-barmakī, abū nuwās, masrūr, and isḥāq 43. michael cooperson, “baghdad in rhetoric and narrative,” muqarnas 13 (1996): 99-113. 44. for a more recent study of this trope, see zayde antrim, “connectivity and creativity: representations of baghdad’s centrality, 5th-11th centuries,” in i̇slam medeniyetinde bağdat (medînetü’s-selam) uluslarası sempozyum, ed. ismail saa üstün (istanbul: marmara university, 2011), 55-74. 45. suzanne pinckney stetkevych, “abbasid panegyric: badīʿ poetry and the invention of the arab golden age,” in british journal of middle eastern studies, published online 04 may 2016. 46. on the notion of “arab-muslim utopia” see wien, arab nationalism, 48-79. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 51 al-mawṣilī draw on associations with vast wealth and spectacular self-indulgence.47 in the french travelogue of rifāʿah rāfiʿ al-ṭahṭāwī, on the other hand, the early abbasid period is notable not for its prosperity and glamor but for its promotion of culture and learning.48 these two attributes—wealth and learning—have become so naturalized as attributes of the early abbasids that it becomes tempting to argue that the golden-age trope came about because the caliphs were, as a matter of historical fact, wealthier or more supportive of science than other pre-modern muslim rulers. but that claim is hard to prove. baghdad may have been a very wealthy town, but how much wealthier can it have been than (for example) umayyad damascus or fatimid cairo? more importantly, how would any pre-modern observer really know? what needs to be explained—in a study of cultural history, anyway—is the reputation for wealth, or more broadly, why abbasid materiality should have left such a vivid afterglow in cultural memory. the matter of scientific learning is also less straightforward than it may appear. at some point in history, instrumental rationality became thinkable, and was felt to be a good thing. historians who found something analogous to it in past societies declared those societies prescient or precocious, especially when their discoveries and inventions—algebra, say, or movable type—anticipated their counterparts in western europe or, better yet, led to them. as a premise for historical study, the problem with this idea is that it leads modern observers to assume that people like al-khwārizmī (who systematized algebra) shared our modern ideas about the nature and purpose of scientific inquiry. this assumption, in turn, forecloses questions about why someone in ninth-century baghdad would trouble to systematize algebra or why someone else would pay him to do it. especially in the case of islamic societies, the march-of-progress trope also tends to support the claim that science was a marginal endeavor that flourished in a few obscure corners before being snuffed out by the dark forces of orthodoxy.49 47. it would be tedious to list every reference to these figures in the nights. the best-known example is the appearance of al-rashīd and jaʿfar in the middle of the story of the porter and the three ladies of baghdad: see [shahrzād,] kitāb alf laylah wa-laylah min uṣūlihi al-ʿarabiyyah al-ūlā, ed. muḥsin mahdī (leiden: brill, 1984), 138 = l32). jean-claude garcin has identified distinct stages in the representation of these figures: see his pour une lecture historique des mille et une nuits (arles: sindbad, 2013), 62-77. as garcin notes, antecedents for these characters may be found in the literature generated more proximately by the early abbasid period itself. for our purposes, however, the question is why these particular figures came to assume such a prominent place in popular memory. 48. rifāʿah rāfiʿ al-ṭahṭāwī, takhlīs al-ibrīz fī talkhīṣ bārīs (cairo: kalimāt, 2011), 17, 25, 309. this trope has been tirelessly repeated since al-ṭahṭāwī, and still appears regularly when arabic media has reason to refer to the abbasids. see, e.g., muḥammad majdī, “baghdād madīnat al-thaqāfah al-ʿarabiyyah bayna izdihār al-māḍī wa-ʿālam al-wāqiʿ“ (veto, march 4, 2016). 49. this is the assumption behind richard dawkins’s notorious tweet: “all the world’s muslims have fewer nobel prizes than trinity college, cambridge. they did great things in the middle ages, though” (richard dawkins, august 8, 2013). for studies that complicate this bit of received wisdom, see george saliba, islamic science and the making of the european renaissance (boston: mit, 2007); ahmad dallal, islam, science, and the challenge of history (yale, 2010); justin stearns, “writing the history of the natural sciences in the pre-modern muslim world: historiography, religion, and the importance of the pre-modern period,” history compass 9/12 (2011): 923-51. http://www.vetogate.com/2077016 http://www.vetogate.com/2077016 https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/365473573768400896%3flang%3dar https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/365473573768400896%3flang%3dar 52 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the reality, as it turns out, is more complex. some early muslim scientists did believe that the study of nature was progressive and cumulative. but their actual investigations often had more in common with neo-platonic magical thinking than with anything we might recognize as science. similarly, their patrons were motivated by desires that may seem odd to us: using translation to establish a philosophical pedigree that bypassed the byzantine empire,50 for example, or constructing an epistemology that could serve as an alternative to imami shiism on the one hand and scriptural nominalism on the other.51 understandably, opponents of these endeavors took a dim view of abbasid science: arabic historians’ references to al-maʾmūn’s scholarly interests, for example, are often derogatory.52 moreover, scientific activity, however defined, continued long after the end of the so-called golden age, and in many places all over the world defined by islam. for all these reasons, saying that the abbasid-period scholars were good scientists, and were acknowledged and appreciated as such, cannot serve as a complete explanation for all the love that al-ṭahṭāwī and his successors have thrown at them. v. so why an abbasid golden age? let’s begin with a contingency: the appearance of paper. paper came to the attention of muslims in the eighth century.53 compared to parchment and papyrus, it was simple to produce, cheap, and easy to work with. thanks to paper, the west asians of the early abbasid era were able to produce a good deal more writing than their predecessors. the result has been described as “an efflorescence of books and written culture incomparably more brilliant than was known anywhere in europe until the invention of printing with movable type in the fifteenth century.”54 for our purposes, the point is that only after 750 was it possible for muslims and their west asian neighbors to record their thoughts and share them with others so efficiently. it doesn’t matter whether those thoughts were brilliant or not: whatever they were, they were saved—or at least, more of them were saved than had ever been possible before. thanks to paper, then, abbasid writing was plentiful and easy to reproduce. but there’s more to it than that. as several modern studies have argued, abbasid-era compilers did not simply record the tradition: they constructed it, in accordance with their own preoccupations and concerns.55 in that sense, our image of preand early islam is the abbasid image of pre 50. dimitri gutas, greek thought, arabic culture: the graeco-arabic translation movement in baghdad and early ʿabbasid society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.) (new york: routledge, 1998). 51. michael cooperson, al maʾmun (oxford: oneworld, 2005). 52. michael cooperson, classical arabic biography (cambridge, 2000), 65-66. 53. this was probably not—as tradition has it—because muslims captured chinese papermakers at the battle of talas in 751, but through contact with central asian craftsmen. see jonathan m. bloom, paper before print (yale, 2001), 42-45 (citations at 44-45). 54. bloom, paper, 91. 55. see rina drory, “the abbasid construction of the jahiliyya: cultural authority in the making,” studia islamica 1996/1 (february): 38-49, which argues that early abbasid mawālī “constructed arab identity” by “collecting and organizing knowledge belonging to ‘the arab (and islamic) sciences’“ (42); borrut, “vanishing syria,” which shows that our periodization of early islam is an abbasid-era creation; and peter webb, arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh 2016), esp. 255-69, which makes a similar argument about arab identity—not merely its content, à la drory, but its very existence. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 53 and early islam, and seeing through it or around it requires an enormous amount of effort. to this insight i would add that when abbasid-period compliers set about their work, they were doing something else that had not been done before: they were setting out to make arab lore and islamic tradition readable to people raised in other traditions, as well as to the people who had came to think of themselves as arabs. when a rāwī performed a pre-islamic ode at the umayyad court of damascus, or when jarīr, al-farazdaq, and al-akhṭal took turns savaging each other at the great poetry slam that was basra, no one bothered to ask whether greek captives or persian converts could understand what was being said or why they should care. under unusual circumstances, some freedmen and converts did acquire a native or near-native command of arabic, but those fortunate few seem to have been content to make a fortune and then pull the ladder up behind them.56 only in the early abbasid period do we find authors intent on making arab lore and islamic tradition accessible to outsiders.57 this was not done kindly: it often involved name-calling, mockery, and threats, along with complaints about how culture was going to the dogs.58 but the result was fortunate: a dumbing-down of everything that had been thought and said in arabic up to that point.59 this dumbing-down made the tradition accessible not only to the mawālī but also to arabs who had lost touch with their roots60 (or, perhaps more exactly, were now being told for the 56. michael cooperson, “‘arabs’ and ‘iranians’: the uses of ethnicity in the early abbasid period,” islamic cultures, islamic contexts. essays in honor of professor patricia crone (leiden: brill, 2015), 364-387. 57. the intention may have been, as gérard lecomte says of ibn qutaybah, to create “un système intellectuel et moral composite, mais homogène, qui deviendra le dénominateur commun de la communauté.” ibn qutayba (m. 276/889): l’homme, son oeuvre, ses idées (damascus: ifpo, 1965), 421. yet the presentation of this system by ibn qutaybah at least comes off as snarky rather than high-minded. in any event, i agree entirely with lecomte that ibn qutaybah’s notion of adab was neither secular (as religion is unmistakably a part of it) nor humanist (because the term is simply anachronistic; lecomte, ibn qutayba, 424ff.) on this last point see alexander key, “the applicability of the term ‘humanism’ to abū ḥayyān al-tawḥīdī,” studia islamica 100/101 (2005): 71-112. 58. see. e.g., ibn qutaybah, ʿuyūn al-akhbār (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, undated reprint of 1925 edition), where incompetence is everywhere (shumūl al-naqṣ) and learning extinct (durūs al-ʿilm; 1: ṭāʾ), and where the author has made his work as complete as possible because the reader, if left to his own devices, is too lazy to seek learning on his own (1: yāʾ). see also, by the same author, adab al-kātib, ed. muḥyī al-dīn ʿabd al-ḥamīd (cairo: dār al-saʿādah, 1963), where scribes who scorn the arab and islamic sciences are likened to beasts (6) and the reader is given several examples of bureaucrats who embarrassed themselves by their ignorance of arabic expressions and lack of general knowledge (7-8). 59. in offering his readers a “menu” of possibly useful information to choose from, ibn qutaybah, whom i take as a representative example of the vulgarizer, “is apparently bowing to values of the semi or self-educated, and by designing a manual of short cuts for them, freeing them from the need to acquire real intellectual discipline.” julia bray, “lists and memory: ibn qutayba and muḥammad ibn ḥabīb,” in culture and memory in medieval islam: essays in honour of wilferd madelung, ed. farhad daftary and josef w. meri (london: i. b. tauris, 2003), 210-31, at 221. 60. among his prospective readers ibn qutaybah lists not only “sons of persian kings who know nothing of their father and his times” but also “tribespeople of quraysh who cannot explain their relationship to the prophet and his companions.” ibn qutaybah, al-maʿārif, ed. tharwat ʿukkāshah, 4th ed. (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1981), 2. 54 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) first time that they had specifically arab roots to be proud of). in the long run, it also made the tradition accessible to later generations of readers, including us. let me flesh out this claim with some examples. today it is entirely commonplace to hear muslims say that a believer should know arabic. as it turns out, though, someone actually had to argue this position. the first such someone i know of is the famous jurist al-shāfiʿī (d. 820). in his foundational treatise on law, he declares that believers are required to understand what the qurʾān says. since the book is entirely in arabic, it is “incumbent on every muslim to learn as much of the arabs’ language as his efforts allow.”61 moreover, anyone who acquires arabic from arabs “becomes one of the speakers of their language.” al-shāfiʿī concedes that the learner’s language will be imperfect, but he insists that this is no excuse for not trying: native speakers don’t know arabic perfectly either (¶54-57). given the state of the relationship between arabs and mawālī at the time, al-shāfiʿī’s position was anything but obvious, as is evident, too, from the careful way he lays it out. yet, despite flying in the face of many commonplace assumptions about language, ethnicity, and the hierarchy of peoples, his argument won the day. for modern muslims who care about such matters, it now seems beyond dispute that arabic can and should be acquired. it also seems obvious that native proficiency in a language offers no free ride when it comes to content: that is, being a native speaker does not guarantee fiqh (understanding). for our purposes, the important point is that these positions were articulated in the early abbasid period, not at any other time, as part of what i am calling the great dumbing-down of arab lore and islamic learning: that is, the process by which the language and culture of the arabs, like their religion, were simplified for consumption by non-natives as well as “arabs.”62 to show what the dumbing-down looked like in practice, there is no better example than ibn qutaybah (d. 276/889). most of his books amount to lists of “things you need to know” about arabs: their food, drinks, games, poems, stories, and so on, with his books on qurʾan and hadith arguably being extensions of the same impulse. in the faḍl al-ʿarab wa t-tanbīh ilā ʿulūmihā, for example, he begins by admonishing the presumptuous non-arab reader that he has no basis to feel superior to arabs.63 then he lists the kinds of lore (ʿilm) that the arabs were experts in, including astronomy, divination, and horsemanship, clinching his case by citing poems that would be incomprehensible to any but an expert in those fields. in one passage, for example, he quotes the following verses about a horse: ... a smooth-cheeked, broad-breasted, full-chested steed, with imposing “five longs,” compact “four shorts,” 61. muḥammad ibn idrīs al-shāfiʿī, the epistle on legal theory, ed. and trans. joseph e. lowry (new york university, 2013), ¶65. (i cite this and other library of arabic literature volumes by paragraph numbers, which are the same across the arabic and english pages.) 62. for practical purposes, this “simplification for consumption” is probably indistinguishable (from our perspective, anyway) from constructing the relevant notions of language, culture, and religion. see drory, “abbasid construction,” 44; bray, “lists and memory,” at 225; and more generally webb, arab identity. 63. ibn qutaybah, the excellence of the arabs, ed. james e. mongomery and peter webb, tr. sarah bowen savant and peter webb (new york: new york university, 2017), 1.1.1ff. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 55 and ample “six-broads”: towering legs, solid and firm. its “sevens” chiselled and “nines” stripped...64 having made his point—that “arab lore” can easily stump a layman—ibn qutaybah does not even explain the jargon words. rather, he advises the reader to look them up in his book on horses. peter webb, the translator of these verses, has done so, and explains the terms as follows: the “five longs” refers to... the neck, the ears, the forelegs, the haunches, and forelock; “four shorts” refers to the pastern, the dock, the back and the flanks... the “six broads”, the forehead, chest, the haunches, the thighs, the cannons of the hind legs, and the place between the ear-roots; the “sevens” are the ears, eyes, the shoulder, the barrel, the hamstrings of the hind legs, the bones meeting the fetlock, and the bones meeting the shoulder; and the “nines” are the bones under the eyes, the bones under the tearducts, the cheeks, the forehead, the place between the ear-roots, the fetlocks, the veins in its forelegs and the hind legs...65 this may not look like a dumbed-down version to us, but it is easier to understand than the poem, and would doubtless have been straightforward enough to an audience at home with horses. a near equivalent in our own world might be something like this, from a bbc site that attempts to explain american football to audiences more familiar with british games: touchdown (six points) a touchdown is scored when a team crosses the opposition’s goal line with the ball, or catches or collects the ball in the end zone. field goal (three points) these are usually attempted on fourth down if the kicker is close enough to the end zone to kick the ball through the posts, or uprights. extra point (one or two points) a point is earned by kicking the ball through the uprights after a touchdown (similar to a rugby conversion). two points are earned by taking the ball into the end zone again...66 it is with the early abbasids, then, that everything before them becomes readable for the first time. this does not mean that abbasid-period glosses and commentaries on, say, the qurʾān or the muʿallaqāt were necessarily the ones used in later periods.67 but the format and 64. ibn qutaybah, excellence of the arabs, 2.2.10. 65. ibn qutaybah, excellence, notes 172 and 173. 66. bbc sport, american football, “nfl in a nutshell,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/ american_football/3192002.stm. 67. in fact they usually weren’t: ahmed el shamsy, “islamic book culture through the lens of two private libraries, 1850-1940,” intellectual history of the islamicate world 4 (2016): 61-81, shows that “the late manuscript http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/american_football/3192002.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/american_football/3192002.stm 56 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) substance of many later commentaries—and more importantly the idea that one should need a commentary in the first place—go back to the early abbasid period.68 as a result, the names of late-eighthto mid-tenth-century authorities were baked into the exegetical tradition at its source, and have echoed down the centuries long after most of their works ceased to be consulted and were eventually lost. at some point, citing an abbasid-period source became a trope even in popular literature, where, for example, we find the massive, sprawling, wildly unhistorical epic of antar attributed to al-aṣmaʿī. this growing backwards of isnāds (to borrow a term from islamic legal history) does not mean that sources cited informally or for effect were always from the early abbasid period itself. but when other sources are cited, they consist of figures canonized by the early abbasid tadwīn, as ḥājjī khalīfah calls it (1:33). for example, in al-ḥarīrī’s fortieth maqāmah (usually called ‘of tabrīz’), abū zayd and his wife have a slanging match in which they refer to two dozen figures from preand early islamic history, of whom the latest is al-aṣmaʿī (there called ibn qurayb, d. 828).69 al-ḥarīrī died in 1122, meaning that there was three centuries’ worth of poets, scholars, and other luminaries he might have cited in this episode. instead, though, he limits himself to figures of the early abbasid period and before. the last point to be made about the explosion of writing in the eighth and ninth centuries is that it made the abbasids themselves more readable as well. though much of what they wrote was about the past, they wrote about themselves too, and enough of this has survived—though again not always in its original form—to convey the sense of a dense, layered world. to exemplify, ibn al-jawzī’s life of ibn ḥanbal provides a rich store of detail on how life was lived in the poor-to-middling neighborhoods of ninth-century baghdad. from it we learn, for example, that a month’s rent might be three dirhams (¶42.1) while live chickens, cuppings, and circumcisions cost one dirham (¶49.18, 63.4, 38.9); that landlords kept registers of tenants and how much rent they owed (¶42.1); that roofs had drainpipes that might empty into the street (¶49.28); that rooms were heated using clay pans full of embers (¶45.10) and might be closed off by curtains instead of doors (¶45.7-8); that grocers sold thorns for kindling (¶47.1, 52.3) and wrapped their butter in leaves of chard (¶49.24); that the penniless might pawn items like sandals and pails in exchange for food (¶41.3, 49.7); and that children were given almonds, sugar, and raisins as treats (¶38.11, 44.10).70 strikingly, ibn al-jawzī died in 597/1201, that is, three and a half centuries after the death of his subject (241/855). yet enough had already been written about ibn ḥanbal to provide his biographer with enough material to fill some 230 folios of manuscript. because the realia (unlike, say, the creeds ascribed to the imam) are there by accident, they seem believable; tradition was overwhelmingly focused on a small number of curriculum texts and extensive commentaries on them, while ignoring most of the works that we today consider the classics of those fields” (61). 68. in the field of tafsīr, for example, the works andrew rippin classes as “formative” include those ascribed to muqātil b. sulaymān (d. 150/767), al-farrāʾ (d. 207/822), ʿ abd al-razzāq al-sanʿānī (d. 211/827), and al-akhfash al-awsaṭ (d. 215/830), with the caveat that attributions are made to earlier figures, and the dating of all these works remains uncertain (rippin, “tafsīr,” in ei2). 69. les séances de hariri, ed. silvestre de sacy (paris, imprimerie royale, 1822), i:443-58, at 453. 70. ibn al-jawzī, the virtues of aḥmad ibn ḥanbal, ed. and trans. by michael cooperson (new york university, 2013 and 2015). chapters 1-50 are in vol. 1 and chapters 51-100 are in vol. 2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 57 and the overall effect is so dense that the few obvious fabrications (for example, the story where ibn hanbal is shipwrecked on a desert island, ¶4.22) stand out like a sore thumb.71 to fully appreciate the reality effect (as roland barthes would call it) of this material, we might compare it to what is known about an earlier celebrity, al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 728). although he is often cited as an authority in piety and theology, his life story is much thinner than ibn ḥanbal’s, and many of the statements and actions attributed to him appear to be spurious.72 in this respect, the main difference between him and ibn ḥanbal is that the latter lived in the full light of history—that is, at the beginning of the period when, as the sharpeyed mamluk-era biographer al-dhahabī (d. 1348) put it, muslims began making an effort to keep track of biographical information.73 with writing itself made easier, ibn ḥanbal’s family, friends, and colleagues could record their memories of him, or have them written down. this kind of record-keeping was evidently a novelty to him, and he did not like it (see chapter 29). to this argument one might object that later periods have their vivid personalities and densely layered stories too. indeed they do. but my argument here is merely that there was plentiful abbasid (and pseudo-abbasid) material standing ready to be activated once the initial choice had been made to declare the mid-eighth to mid-tenth centuries the golden age. had the choice fallen upon, say, the late mamluk period, the rich material characteristic of that era would no doubt have been pressed into service in the same way. conversely, had the early abbasids been chosen on purely formal grounds, as almost seems to be the case in von hammer-purgstall’s four-part schema, but then failed to supply the raw material for a kulturgeschichte, it seems unlikely that their elevation would have succeeded as well as it has. this is what zaydān means when he says that the history of tamaddun and ḥadārah can best be told when the sources are sufficiently dense to let the physical reality of a past society “appear to the reader as if it were physically there before him.” vi. at a recent conference in doha, qatar, i heard a speaker at a panel on the history of translation speak at length on the abbasid bayt al-ḥikmah, describing it as an unprecedented, large-scale initiative to translate the literatures of the world into arabic. during the question 71. this is a significant difference, i think, between the biography of ibn ḥanbal and that of earlier celebrities such as (for example) the first caliphs. any given khabar about, say, ʿumar, might be (a) entirely made up but (b) indistinguishable from an authentic one, simply because so many different kinds of things are said about ʿumar that there is no obviously authentic core to compare it to. reports about ibn ḥanbal, on the other hand, almost all seem to be about the same person. this is doubtless because most of them go back to a relatively limited number of eyewitnesses, most of whom, furthermore, were committed to, and trained in, the practice of exact transmission. of course, anyone interested in glorifying a particular era might draw on dubious reports as well as more reliable ones. but an account based on reliable reports would, it seems to me, be more persuasive, precisely because of its reality effect. 72. suleiman ali mourad, early islam between myth and history: al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 110h/728ce) and the formation of his legacy in classical islamic scholarship (leiden: brill, 2006). 73. “the ancients did not record death dates as they should have, relying instead on their memories. as a result, the death dates of many companions and successors nearly down to the time of abū ʿabd allāh al-shāfiʿī [d. 204/820], were lost... then latter-day [authorities] began to make careful note of when learned persons and so forth died.” al-dhahabī, taʾrīkh al-islām, ed. ʿabd al-salām tadmurī (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1990), 1:26. 58 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) period, a member of the audience (and a moroccan, like the speaker) correctly pointed out that recent research has called into question the size, importance, and even the function of the bayt al-ḥikmah. the speaker dismissively replied that matters were as he had described them, adding that anyone who doubted his account probably had “ideological motives” for doing so. this incident serves as a reminder that any questioning of the traditional golden-age story may be perceived as an attack on an already embattled culture. but getting past inherited notions of “decadence” and “decline” means putting aside equally facile notions of “golden ages” and “renaissances.” in excavating the myth of the early abbasid golden age, my purpose here has not been to write off what one colleague calls “the ‘fact’ of an enormously creative period.”74 rather, i have tried to see what happens if we approach it without neo-hegelian baggage. what happens, in my view, is that we can tell a story not about a golden age but about a convergence of contingencies. after the mid-eighth century, paper made it possible to create an archive. because it came into being at the time it did, that archive preserves the first systematic efforts to make the language, lore, and religion of the arabs readable to outsiders—or more likely, to help bring those things into being, at least in the form we know them today. paper also made it possible to preserve memories almost immediately. accordingly, the abbasid archive contains what are almost the first fully reliable accounts of contemporary experience in arabic. as a result of these developments, the early abbasid period became, simultaneously, the first islamic space to be imaginable in almost granular detail, and the source of much of what we know about everything that had gone before. describing the period this way is not to deny or belittle its achievements, however one chooses to define them. the point, rather, is to clear a space for studying them as the products of contingency rather than as points placed along a trajectory of glory and decline. the work of ninthor tenth-century writers, for example, need not represent the pinnacle of literary achievement in arabic. instead, it can be understood as the distinctive product of a particular conjuncture. as such, we may as well admit, it is often not so much glorious as maddeningly local and opaque—a fact that should remind us how much we owe to the vulgarizers. in different ways, previous scholarship has circled around this idea of a dumbing-down: we have, for example, gregor schoeler’s eighthand ninth-century “taṣnif movement”,75 shawkat m. toorawa’s ninth-century “readerly culture,”76 and garth fowden’s ninthto tenth-century baghdadi “exegetical culture.”77 where my approach differs is in its insistence that our own present position as readers give these postulated “movements” and “cultures” some of the transparency and coherence they seem to possess. the idea of a golden age, or indeed of any age at all, results from the encounter between the archive and our expectations. it has been my argument throughout that the early abbasid period produced an archive some parts of 74. matthew gordon, personal communication. 75. gregor schoeler, the genesis of literature in islam: from the aural to the read. revised edition, in collaboration with and translated by shawkat m. toorawa (edinburgh university press, 2009), esp. ch. 5. 76. shawkat m. toorawa, ibn abi tahir tayfur and arabic writerly culture: a ninth‐century bookman in baghdad (london and new york: routledgecurzon, 2005). 77. garth fowden, before and after muḥammad: the first millenium refocused (princeton, 2014). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the abbasid “golden age”: an excavation • 59 which happen to be easily readable to us. this readability, finally, is doubtless one reason for the fascination that the period exerts. i would call this fascination an affect, in the sense of a feeling that can be studied historically. von kremer, zaydān, and others among our mashāyikh felt it, and passed it on to others, who in due course passed it down to us. i am not sure i want to give it up, but i hope now to have understood it better, at least. 60 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) works cited abū nāḍir, mūrīs. “mā jadwā iʿādat taʾrīkh al-adab 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studies review 11:2 (2007): 137-67. bbc sport, american football. “nfl in a nutshell.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_ sports/american_football/3192002.stm. bloom, jonathan m. paper before print. yale, 2001. borrut, antoine. “vanishing syria: periodization and power in early islam.” der islam 2014 91(1): 37-68. bray, julia. “lists and memory: ibn qutayba and muḥammad ibn ḥabīb.” in ed. farhad daftary and josef w. meri, eds. culture and memory in medieval islam: essays in honour of wilferd madelung. london: i. b. tauris, 2003. brugman, jan. an introduction to the history of modern arabic literature in egypt. leiden: brill, 1984. brunschvig, r. and g. e. von grunebaum, eds. classicisme et déclin culturel dans l’histoire de l’islam. paris: maisonneuve, 1957; repr. 1977. cooperson, michael. “‘arabs’ and ‘iranians’: the uses of ethnicity in the early abbasid period.” in islamic cultures, islamic contexts. essays in honor of professor patricia crone (leiden: brill, 2015): 364-387. 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[shaykhū, luwīs.] al-majānī al-ḥadīthah ʿan majānī al-ab shaykhū. ed. fuʾād afrām al-bustānī et al. beirut: al-kāthulīkiyyah, 1960-61. majdī, muḥammad. “baghdād madīnat al-thaqāfah al-ʿarabiyyah bayna izdihār al-māḍī wa-ʿālam al-wāqiʿ.” veto, march 4, 2016. martinez-gros, gabriel. ibn khaldûn et les sept vies de l’islam. arles: sindbad, 2006. matar, nabil. “confronting decline in early modern arabic thought.” journal of early modern history, 9:1-2 (2005): 51-78. mourad, suleiman ali. early islam between myth and history: al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 110h/728ce) and the formation of his legacy in classical islamic scholarship. leiden: brill, 2006. munjid fī l-lughah wa l-aʿlām, al-. 27th ed. beirut: dar el-mashreq, 1984. 35th. ed. beirut: dar el-mashreq, 2015. http://www.vetogate.com/2077016 http://www.vetogate.com/2077016 64 • michael cooperson al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) nicholson, reynold. a literary history of the arabs. new york: scribners, 1907. owen, roger. “studying islamic history.” the journal of interdisciplinary history 4:2 (1973) 287-98. ———. “the middle east in the eighteenth century—an islamic society in decline?” bulletin (british society for middle eastern studies) 3:2 (1976): 110-17. rāfiʿī, muṣṭafā ṣādiq al-. taʾrīkh ādāb al-ʿarab. ed. ʿabd allāh al-minshāwī and mahdī al-baḥqīrī. cairo: al-īmān, undated reprint of 1911 edition. renan, ernest. “les séances de hariri.” in essais de morale et de critique. paris: michel lévy, 1859): 287-382. rippin, andrew. “tafsīr.” ei2. salama, mohammad. islam, orientalism, and intellectual history. new york: tauris, 2011. saliba, george. islamic science and the making of the european renaissance. boston: mit, 2007. saunders, j. j. “the problem of islamic decadence.” journal of world history, 7 (1963): 701-20. schoeler, gregor. the genesis of literature in islam: from the aural to the read. revised edition, in collaboration with and translated by shawkat m. toorawa. edinburgh university press, 2009. shāfiʿī, muḥammad ibn idrīs al-. the epistle on legal theory. ed. and trans. joseph e. lowry. new york university, 2013. 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the state of the question* sean w. anthony the ohio state university (anthony.288@osu.edu) modern historians of early islam have read, studied, and relied upon the third/ninth-century arabic chronicle known today as tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī (eng. the history of al-yaʿqūbī) for nearly a century and a half, yet throughout the modern study of early islamic history, a rather persistent question has haunted the work. namely, is the chronicle written by a shiʿite author? and is its portrait of early islamic history ‘shiʿite’? for the most part, the view that ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī’s history offers a shiʿite take on islamic history has prevailed in modern scholarship on muslim historical writing since the first printed edition of the text was published in the late-nineteenth century. in truth, the very question of a shiʿite bias is a tedious one though often asserted, only rarely does one find the implications of the assertion, if there are any, explicitly spelled out. yet, given how tenacious of a hold this question of the putative shiʿite bias of al-yaʿqūbī’s history continues to have on scholarship, this essay seeks to revisit the issue. but we begin with restating the question in clearer terms: what does it mean to say that al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle is a shiʿite work? does it mean simply that the author was himself shiʿite, or does it mean that the author uses history to vindicate shiʿite * i would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for the insights and comments that they offered for improving the essay. in particular, i owe a debt of gratitude to matthew gordon for encouraging me to put pen to paper on this topic in the first place. abstract the works of the third/ninth-century historian and geographer ibn al-wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī have long served as an indispensable source in the modern study of islamic historiography, but nagging questions about alyaʿqūbī’s purportedly shiʿite identity have continued to bedevil modern attempts to interpret his works. this essay re-visits the question of al-yaʿqūbī’s shiʿite identity in of light of new data and a re-evaluation of the old, and it questions what evidence there exists for considering him a shiʿite as well as what heuristic value, if any, labeling him as a shiʿite holds for modern scholars who read his works. 16 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) beliefs? what use, if any, does answering this question serve when reading this chronicle? although the view that al-yaʿqūbī harbored shiʿite beliefs attained axiomatic status in the century following the publication of his history, modern scholarship has failed to reach a consensus as to what his putative shiʿite beliefs mean for how his chronicle ought to be read. hence, one may rightly wonder whether one gains any insight at all by categorizing al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle as a shiʿite one—identifying the sectarian loyalties of an author hardly nullifies the value of his works as historical sources. labelling al-yaʿqūbī as a shiʿite historian has indeed been a hindrance to historians taking his history seriously in the past, as some notorious examples clearly demonstrate.1 in a relatively recent, iconoclastic essay, elton daniel pursued the question of al-yaʿqūbī’s purported shiʿite bias farther than any of his predecessors, even going so far as to challenge the certainty with which twentiethcentury scholars read al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle for its putative shiʿite bias. daniel rejected the long-standing justifications for labelling al-yaʿqūbī as a shiʿite author as dubious at best and tendentious at worst. he rightly warned that preemptively labelling al-yaʿqūbī’s history does more to hinder than facilitate our understanding of the text.2 nevertheless, evaluating al-yaʿqūbī’s history as a shiʿite account of islamic history boasts a hoary pedigree and remains an entrenched scholarly legacy with which one must still contend, notwithstanding daniel’s critique. the inception of this view can be traced to the publication of m. j. de goeje’s 1876 missive on the cambridge manuscript, in which he extols the importance al-yaʿqūbī’s history as the work of “a full-blooded shiʿite.”3 the manuscript’s editor, m. th. houtsma, recapitulated de goeje’s verdict on the chronicle in the preface to the printed edition published by e.j. brill in 1883,4 and over a century of scholarly opinion ratified this evaluation of the chronicle, albeit with the usual nuances that distinguish one scholar’s approach from another.5 al-yaʿqūbī’s history thus gained a reputation for being a distinctively shiʿite reading of early islamic history that stood out from the work of other abbasid-era historians, such as ibn saʿd (d. 230/845), al-balādhurī (d. 279/892), and abū jaʿfar al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923). 1. the most infamous example is goitein’s dismissive attitude towards al-yaʿqūbī’s account of ʿabd al-malik ibn marwān’s construction of the dome of the rock as sheer shiʿite, anti-umayyad polemic. contrary to goitein’s suspicions, al-yaʿqūbī’s account, as amikam elad has demonstrated, originated not with his shiʿite bias but, rather, with the non-shiʿite sources his chronicle drew upon. see a. elad, “why did ʿabd al-malik build the dome of the rock? a re-examination of the muslim sources,” in bayt al-maqdis: ʿabd al-malik’s jerusalem, eds. j. raby and j. johns (oxford: oxford university press, 1992), 241-308 and, more recently, idem, “ʿabd al-malik and the dome of the rock: a further examination of the muslim sources,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 35 (2008): 167-226. 2. e. daniel, “al-yaʿqūbī and shiʿism reconsidered,” in ʿabbasid studies: occasional paper of the school of ʿabbasid studies, cambridge, 6-10 july 2002, ed. j.e. montgomery (leuven: peeters, 2004), 209-231. 3. m. j. de goeje, “ueber die geschichte der abbâsiden von al-jakûbî,” in travaux de la troisième session du congrès international des orientalistes, vol. 2 (leiden: brill, 1876) 156-57, “[w]eil uns hier die islamische geschichte erzählt wird von einem vollblut-schî’iten, der wahrheitsliebend ist, obgleich in der wahl der berichte unter dem einflüsse seiner verehrung für das haus alî’s steht.” 4. “praefatio,” in th. houtsma, ed., ibn wāḍiḥ qui dicitur al-jaʿqūbī historiae (leiden: brill, 1883), i, ix-x. 5. daniel cites a few outliers (ibid., 212-13), but rarely do they go as far as to deny al-yaʿqūbī’s shiʿite inclinations outright. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 17 most of the scholarship on the relationship between shiʿism and yaʿqūbī’s chronicle in the decades following houtsma’s edition remained impressionistic, and few scholars delved into a detailed analysis of al-yaʿqūbī’s work and the specific ways in which his putative shiʿite perspective shaped its content. this situation changed for the better beginning in the 1970s. two scholars, william g. milward6 and yves marquet,7 published watershed studies of al-yaʿqūbī’s oeuvre that simultaneously confirmed and nuanced de goeje’s and houtsma’s views. milward’s and marquet’s respective work was considerably more thorough than that of their predecessors. milward in particular argued that, although recognizably shiʿite in disposition, al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle was neither parochial nor insular but, much like the work of other historians of the abbasid era, drew upon a diverse swathe of sources that exhibited no conspicuously sectarian biases. yves marquet’s analyses, albeit occasionally tendentious, also demonstrated that, while broadly shiʿite in outlook, al-yaʿqūbī’s history did not espouse a perspective that could be easily identified with any one shiʿite community from among the multitude of shiʿite movements of the early islamic period. inasmuch as shiʿism remained a fissiparous phenomenon in the abbasid period, al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle did not promote the parochial interests of any single shiʿite community and, therefore, defies any strict categorization.8 as argued below, the precise communal locus of al-yaʿqūbī’s sectarian loyalties remain unknowable barring future discovery of new data concerning his biography. that being said, the chronicle does contain a wealth of material that one can use to demonstrate that he favored a staunchly rejectionist, or ‘rāfiḍī’, shiʿite view of early islamic history. this essay argues, in other words, that, despite daniel’s critique, a reading of al-yaʿqūbī’s history that views the work as one animated by a staunchly shiʿite view of history remains not only justifiable but also imperative. in particular, al-yaʿqūbī’s narratives of the succession to the prophet and the first civil war (al-fitna al-kubrā) are staunchly pro-ʿalid and pro-hāshimid while simultaneously being profoundly hostile not only to controversial companions, such as the caliph muʿāwiya ibn abī sufyān, but also to the likes of abū bakr and ʿumar ibn al-khaṭṭāb. such textual posturing, of course, does not mean that one can automatically infer that al-yaʿqūbī espoused this or that ideology or assume that every account in his chronicle ought to be read through the lens of shiʿite sectarianism. islamic historiography is replete with histories that relate contradictory and even mutually exclusive accounts and versions of events.9 yet, as will be seen below, what grants the presence of such sectarian narratives particular significance is when, as in al-yaʿqūbī’s case, a chronicler rarely (or never) takes 6. m. milward, a study of al-yaʿqūbī with special reference to his alleged shīʿa [sic] bias, unpublished ph.d., princeton, 1962; idem, “the adaptation of men to their time: an historical essay by al-yaʿqūbī,” jaos 84 (1964): 329-344; idem, “al-yaʿqūbī’s sources and the question of shīʿa [sic] partiality,” abr-nahrayn 12 (1971-72): 47-75. 7. y. marquet, “le šīʿisme au ixe siècle à travers l’histoire de yaʿqūbī,” arabica 19 (1972): 1-45, 103-138. 8. cf. ei2, art. “al-yaʿḳūbī” (m.q. zaman). 9. albrecht noth and lawrence i. conrad, the early arabic historical tradition: a source critical study, tr. michael bonner (princeton: darwin, 1994), 7-10. 18 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) any measures to temper their net effect on the reader by providing alternative narratives. unlike many of his peers, al-yaʿqūbī dispenses with the method of compiling narratives out of discrete and disparate reports (akhbār) and, instead, usually opts for a single narrative voice. thus does al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle clearly stack the narrative deck in favor of one particular sectarian viewpoint—in his case, that of a rāfiḍī shiʿite? but, this being said, i also follow daniel’s basic instinct that reading al-yaʿqūbī as “merely shiʿite” has its limitations, too. as such, this essay seeks a nuanced reading of al-yaʿqūbī’s work as a ‘shiʿite chronicle’. two lines of inquiry elucidate the challenges posed by al-yaʿqūbī’s history and why the place of shiʿism in the work remains such a difficult question. the first relates to the difficulty of reconstructing al-yaʿqūbī’s biography. the available data about al-yaʿqūbī is not only sparse, it is also fraught with ambiguities and contradictions, raising the question as to whether any of the data point to his sectarian loyalties. the second line of inquiry pursues a more complicated question: what exactly would a shiʿite history from the abbasid period look like? this second line of questioning draws on a recognition of the internal diversity of shiʿism in the 3rd/9th-century abbasid empire without losing sight of the unifying features of shiʿism broadly conceived. thus, a narrative that espoused a shiʿite view of history can be expected, at a minimum, to uphold the view that the prophet’s family (ahl al-bayt) enjoyed a particular claim to political and religious leadership. this constitutes the rudiments of a view that even non-shiʿite scholars of the abbasid period, particularly among the staunchly sunnī ḥadīth folk, broadly termed ‘good’ or ‘benign shiʿism’ (ar. tashayyuʿ ḥasan). a more hardline – a so-called rāfiḍī or ‘rejectionist’ view would contend that only the prophet’s family, whether defined as the prophet’s kin (either defined broadly as the hāshim clan or more narrowly as ʿalī and his progeny), could rightfully claim this leadership. the rejectionist view also entails the belief that those who deny this leadership have gravely sinned, including even such prominent companions of the prophet as abū bakr and ʿumar, since they refused to recognize ʿalī’s rights from the outset and even thwarted their realization. it is this later view, i contend, that one finds in the chronicle of al-yaʿqūbī, and inasmuch as his chronicle espouses this view of the succession to muḥammad, one can justifiably regard him as a shiʿite author. the biographical data al-yaʿqūbī’s family history and personal biography have long been recognized as difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct. in a rare and fragmentary autobiographical note that begins his geographical work, the kitāb al-buldān, al-yaʿqūbī gives us our best insight into his life, portraying himself as follows (buldān, 232-33):10 in the prime of my youth and during the occupations of adulthood i dedicated the keenness of my intellect to the study of the stories of various lands and the distances between them, for i had travelled from a young age. my travels continued and my foreign sojourns never ceased. when i encountered someone from these lands, i 10. ed. m.j. de goeje, bibliotheca geographorum arabicorum (leiden: brill, 19272), vii, 231-373. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 19 would ask him about his homeland and cities …and afterwards i would verify what he reported to me from the most trustworthy testimony. i posed queries to person after person until i had questioned a great multitude of the learned in and out of season as well as easterners and westerners. thus did i write down their reports and transmit their reports … for a long time. all of this he states, however, without informing his readers what course these journeys traced or whence he began them. a little later on, he begins his treatise with a detailed and adulatory account of baghdād, a decision he justifies in part because his ancestors once resided in baghdād and because one of them even helped manage its affairs11—likely a reference to his ancestor wāḍiḥ, an abbasid client who served the caliphs as a court steward (qahramān). he does not, however, claim to have been born there himself. hence, these comments might give us the sense of a figure who was curious, intrepid, and welltravelled, but they settle little else. the longest biographical notice for al-yaʿqūbī appears in yāqūt al-ḥamawī’s (d. 626/1229) biographical dictionary of belletrists, and yāqūt draws his account almost entirely from information recorded by the egyptian historian abū ʿumar al-kindī (d. 350/961). yāqūt’s entry is exceedingly laconic and makes no explicit statement regarding al-yaʿqūbī’s sectarian loyalties. the entry includes yaʿqūbī’s name and lineage (nasab); notes that he was a client (mawlā) of the banū hāshim (i.e., the prophet’s clan of quraysh); lists his works;12 and records his death as transpiring in the year 284/897.13 yāqūt’s account is also problematic: the date he gives for al-yaʿqūbī’s death is certainly erroneous—citations of al-yaʿqūbī’s poetry on the fall of the ṭūlūnid dynasty14 and the death of the abbasid caliph al-muktafī prove that he must have lived beyond 295/908 (see below). to further muddy the waters, the death date that yāqūt gleans from al-kindī also appears associated with a similarly named figure in the biographical dictionaries of the scholars of ḥadīth. they record a minor egyptian traditionist by the name of abū jaʿfar aḥmad ibn isḥāq ibn wādiḥ ibn ʿabd al-ṣamad ibn wāḍiḥ al-ʿassāl (‘the honey merchant’), a mawlā of the quraysh. they report his death date as ṣafar 284/march-april 897—a date matching exactly the death date yāqūt records for al-yaʿqūbī.15 the ḥadith literature places this aḥmad ibn isḥāq ibn wāḍiḥ al-ʿassāl within the orbit 11. buldān, 226.12-13, “li-anna salafī kānū [min] al-qāʾimīn bihā wa-aḥadahum tawallā amrahā.” 12. the works yāqūt lists are: kitāb al-tārīkh al-kabīr, kitāb asmāʾ al-buldān, kitāb fī akhbār al-umam al-sālifa, and kitāb mushākalat al-nās li-zamānihim. arguably, all of these works can be regarded as extant in some way if one regards the kitāb fī akhbār al-umam al-sālifa as referring to the first volume of the work known today as tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī. 13. yāqūt al-ḥamawī, muʿjam al-udabāʾ (irshād al-arīb ilā maʿrifat al-adīb), ed. iḥsān ʿabbās (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1993), ii, 557. 14. see gaston wiet, tr., les pays de yaʿḳūbī (cairo: ifao, 1937), viii; ḥusayn ʿāṣī, al-yaʿqūbī: ʿaṣruh, sīrat ḥayātih, wa-manhajuhu l-tārīkhī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1992), 50-51; daniel, 209 and n. 2 thereto. 15. ʿabd al-karīm ibn muḥammad al-samʿānī, al-ansāb (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1962-82), ix, 291 (citing the kitāb ghurabāʾ of the egyptian scholar ibn yūnus al-ṣadafī, d. 347/958); shams al-dīn al-dhahabī, tārīkh al-islām wa-wafayāt al-mashāhīr wa-l-aʿlām, ed. bashshār ʿawwād maʿrūf (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 2003), vi, 668. 20 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of the egyptian ḥadīth scholars. he appears, for example, as a minor ḥadīth scholar and an authority in the works of sulaymān ibn aḥmad al-ṭabarānī (260-360/873-970), wherein he transmits traditions from the egyptian scholar saʿīd ibn al-ḥakam ibn abī maryam (d. 224/839)16 and ḥāmid ibn yaḥyā al-balkhī (d. 242/857), a scholar who resided in tarsus (ṭarsūs) but who had a large number of egyptian students.17 in addition to al-ṭabarānī’s works, aḥmad ibn isḥāq ibn wāḍiḥ al-ʿassāl also makes scattered appearances as a ḥadīth transmitter in the works of the mālikī scholar of al-andalus ibn ʿabd al-barr (d. 463/1071). ibn ʿabd al-barr transmits these traditions from the egyptian ḥadīth scholar ʿabdallāh ibn jaʿfar ibn al-ward (d. 351/362),18 who cites aḥmad ibn isḥāq ibn wāḍiḥ as an authority for reports from abū dāwūd al-sijistānī (d. 275/889), the compiler of the famous sunan,19 as well as two egyptian scholars named saʿīd ibn asad ibn mūsā al-umawī (d. 229/84344)20 and muḥammad ibn khallād al-iskandarānī (d. 231/845).21 the impression left by this material is certainly not of the scholarly networks cultivated by a shiʿite but rather a minor ḥadīth scholar known locally among egyptian traditionists. but is he to be identified with al-yaʿqūbī the historian? i believe not, but to see why we need to broaden the scope of our analysis. most of the other biographical details available to modern historians must be gleaned from the scattered references to and citations of al-yaʿqūbī’s writings in the works of other medieval authors, and all of these recommend against identifying the author of the so-called tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī with aḥmad ibn isḥāq ibn wāḍiḥ al-ʿassāl. al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle was scarcely known to medieval authors—the earliest known citation of the history appears in a treatise on qurʾānic exegesis by the famed theologian muḥammad ibn ʿabd al-karīm al-shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), who cites his account of ʿalī ibn abī ṭālib’s 16. jamāl al-dīn al-mizzī, tahdhīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl, ed. bashshār ʿawwād maʿrūf (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1983-1992), x, 393. cf. these traditions in al-ṭabarānī, al-muʿjam al-kabīr, ed. ḥamdī ibn ʿabd al-majīd al-salafī (cairo: maktabat ibn taymiyya, 1983-), ii, 73 (al-ḥasan ibn ʿalī on the witr prayer); vii, 70 (abū bakr’s prayers during ramaḍan); ix, 99 (pietistic wisdom of ibn masʿūd); x, 26-27 (on the most excellent good works) and 191 (proscription of smacking cheeks and lacerating chests); and xii, 47 (the prophet’s recitations friday mornings) and 91 (the prophet’s prayers at night). see also idem, musnad al-shāmiyyīn, ed. ḥamdī ibn ʿabd al-majīd al-salafī (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1983), iv, 365 (on reciting al-fātiḥa during prayer). 17. ṭabarānī, al-muʿjam al-ṣaghīr (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1983), i, 25 (ʿāʾisha on cleaning semen from the prophet’s clothing); cf. mizzī, tahdhīb, v, 325-27 for ḥāmid ibn yaḥyā’s egyptian pupils. 18. originally from baghdād, ibn al-ward settled in egypt later in life; see al-dhahabī, siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, ed. shuʿayb al-arnaʾūṭ et al. (beirut: muʾassasat al-risālah, 1996), xvi, 39. 19. ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-tamhīd li-mā fī l-muwaṭṭaʾ min al-maʿānī wa’l-asānīd (rabat: wizārat al-awqāf wa’l-shuʾūn al-islāmiyya, 1967-1992), vii, 142 (sufyān al-thawrī’s interpretation of q. 57:4). 20. ibn ʿabd al-barr, tamhīd, xvii, 416 (biographical notice on ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabd al-raḥmān ibn maʿmar, a muḥaddith and qāḍī of the umayyad period); idem, al-istīʿāb fī maʿrifat al-aṣḥāb, ed. ʿalī muḥammad al-bijāwī (cairo: nahḍat miṣr, c. 1960), iv, 1620 (the prophet’s admonition to abū juḥayfa against gluttony). 21. idem, al-intiqāʾ fī faḍāʾil al-thalātha al-aʾimma al-fuqahāʾ, ed. ʿabd al-fattāḥ abū ghudda (beirut: dār al-bashāʾir al-islāmiyya, 1997), 79 (on an alexandrian’s dream about mālik ibn anas). on muḥammad ibn khallād al-iskandarānī, see ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, lisān al-mīzān, ed. ʿabd al-fattāḥ abū ghudda (beirut: dār al-bashāʾir al-islāmiyya , 2002), vii, 118-19. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 21 collection of the qurʾān (on which, see below).22 by contrast, scholars such as ibn al-ʿadīm (d. 660/1262), al-qazwīnī (d. 682/1283), and al-maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) cited al-yaʿqūbī’s geographical work, kitāb al-buldān, rather frequently by comparison. 23 these medieval authors call him by many names: aḥmad ibn wāḍiḥ, ibn wādiḥ, ibn abī yaʿqūb, and aḥmad al-kātib (i.e., aḥmad ‘the scribe’)—though they never refer to him by the laqab ‘the honey merchant’ (al-ʿassāl).24 indeed, even the designation of this scholar as ‘al-yaʿqūbī’ is a modern phenomenon based on the version of his name that appears on the colophons of the extant manuscripts of his works. most notably, al-yaʿqūbī’s contemporary and fellow geographer ibn al-faqīh al-hamadhānī (d. c. 289-90/902-3) cites the author of the kitāb al-buldān as ‘ibn wādiḥ al-iṣfahānī’, indicating that the author was at one point in his career known for being of iranian rather than egyptian extraction.25 daniel too hastily dismisses ibn al-faqīh’s reference as isolated; in fact, it is not. abū manṣūr al-thaʿālibī (d. 429/1039) also ranks “aḥmad ibn wāḍiḥ” among a long list of literary elite who hailed from iṣfahān.26 although it is unlikely that the egyptian honey-merchant named ‘aḥmad ibn isḥāq ibn wāḍiḥ’ known to the ḥadīth scholars is the same ‘aḥmad ibn abī yaʿqūb ibn wāḍiḥ’ who authored the tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī and kitāb al-buldān, the honey-merchant ḥadīth scholar may, however, have been the author of the kitāb mushākalat al-nās li-zamānihim conventionally attributed to al-yaʿqūbī, insofar as the work differs so starkly in style and content from the work known as tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī.27 this is mostly speculative. what 22. mafātīḥ al-asrār wa-maṣābiḥ al-abrār, ed. muḥammad ʿalī ādharshab (tehran: mirāth-i maktūb, 2008), i, 24 ff., calling the work tārīkh ibn wāḍiḥ. earlier citations of the tārīkh might be found in the leiden manuscript of an anonymous history of the abbasids called dhikr banī ʿabbās wa-ẓuhūrihim (leiden or. 14.023), which cites yaʿqūbī’s tārīkh directly. see qāsim al-sāmarrāʾī, “hal kataba l-tanūkhī kitāban fī l-tārīkh?” al-majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿarabī 50 (1975): 531. for a description of the manuscript, see jan just witkam, inventory of the oriental manuscripts of the library of the university of leiden (leiden: ter lugt, 2006-2016), 15: 11 23. ibn al-ʿadīm, bughyat al-ṭalab fī tārīkh ḥalab, ed. suhayl zakkār (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1988), i, 88, 107-8, 123, 141, 150, 156, 173, 219, 263, 265, 478; zakariyāʾ ibn muḥammad al-qazwīnī, āthār al-bilād wa-akhbār al-ʿibād (beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d.), 187 (citing yaʿqūbī, buldān, 333-34). see daniel, 216 n. 43 for references to al-yaʿqūbī’s k. al-buldān in al-maqrīzī’s khiṭaṭ 24. for these variants, see m.j. de goeje, ed., bibliotheca geographorum arabicorum (leiden: brill, 19272), vii, 361-73. 25. ibn al-faqīh al-hamadhānī, mukhtaṣar kitāb al-buldān, in de goeje, ed., bibliotheca geographorum arabicorum, v, 290-92; yāqūt, muʿjam al-buldān (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1977), i, 161. this is a passage that no less exhibits the extensive familiarity with the pre-islamic history of the persian sasanid dynasty that characterizes al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle. shiʿite sources know of an aḥmad ibn yaʿqūb al-iṣfahānī, but he is a figure of the mid-fourth/tenth century who died in 354/965 and, therefore, too late to be identified with the author of al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle. see al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, tārīkh madīnat al-salām, ed. bashshār ʿawwād maʿrūf (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 2001), vi, 479-80; al-majlisī, biḥār al-anwār (tehran: dār al-kutub al-islāmiyya, 1956-72), xlv, 105, lxxxviii, 267.12, and xcii, 225.-8. 26. yatīmat al-dahr wa-maḥāsin ahl al-ʿaṣr, ed. muḥammad muḥyī al-dīn ʿabd al-ḥamīd (cairo: al-saʿāda, 1956-58), iii, 299 (citing the lost kitāb iṣfahān of ḥamza ibn al-ḥusayn al-iṣfahānī, d. between 350/961 and 360/970). 27. the praise of abū bakr as “the most ascetic of the muslims” is incongruent with the portrayal of abū 22 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) remains indubitable is that al-yaʿqūbī did in fact have a long tenure in egypt as well. some indications of al-yaʿqūbī’s time in egypt are subtle. for instance, the reliance of the early sections of his history on an early arabic translation of cave of treasures—a source also utilized by the coptic historian eutychius of alexandria (d. 940 ce)—suggests a common egyptian milieu shared by the two authors.28 however, other indications of his tenure in egypt, especially his familiarity with the affairs of the ṭūlūnid dynasty, are far more decisive. in fact, the 4th/10th-century egyptian historian ibn al-dāya knows al-yaʿqūbī as an administrator of the land-tax (kharāj) for aḥmad ibn ṭūlūn in barqa (modern-day al-marj in northeastern libya) during the rebellion of ibn ṭūlūn’s son al-ʿabbās in 265/878.29 al-yaʿqūbī’s entry on barqa in his geographical work survives and is not insubstantial, a fact which would seem to confirm ibn al-dāya’s assertion. further evidence suggests that al-yaʿqūbī fondly remembered his tenure with the ṭūlūnids and ultimately lived to see the dynasty’s collapse. the historian al-maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) ends his account of the ṭūlūnid dynasty with an anecdote about how, on the night of ʿīd al-fiṭr in 292 ah (5 august 905), aḥmad30 ibn abī yaʿqūb found himself pondering what had befallen the ṭūlūnids as he fell asleep. in his sleep, he heard a spectral voice (hātif) declare, “dominion, its pursuit, and honor departed when the ṭūlūnids vanished (dhahaba l-mulk wa-ltamalluk wa-l-zīna lammā maḍā banū ṭūlūn).” 31 these sentiments towards the ṭūlūnids are affirmed in several lines of poetry an earlier egyptian historian, al-kindī, attributes to al-yaʿqūbī in his k. al-wulāt:32 if you ask about the glory of their dominion, then wind and wander the great square, now overgrown and behold these palaces and all they encompass and take delight in the bloom of that garden if you contemplate, there too will you find a lesson revealing to you just how the ages change although nostalgic perhaps for the glory days of the ṭūlūnids, by the poem’s end al-yaʿqūbī seems to welcome the abbasid assault that brought the ṭūlūnid reign to an end. bakr in the tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī (see below). the chronological scope of this short work also fits well with the chronological scope of aḥmad ibn isḥāq al-miṣrī’s lifespan. for an english translation of the text, see w.g. milward, “the adaptation of men to their time: an historical essay by al-yaʿqūbī,” jaos 84 (1964), 329-44 (the passage about abū bakr is on p. 333). 28. sidney griffith, the bible in arabic: the scripture of the ‘people of the book’ in the language of islam (princeton: princeton university press, 2013), 186. 29. ibn saʿīd, al-mughrib fī ḥulā l-maghrib, ed. z. hassan et al. (cairo, 1953), 122, kāna yatawallā kharāj barqa. 30. read “aḥmad” for “muḥammad” in the printed text—a reading supported by kindī’s kitāb al-wulāt cited below. 31. aḥmad ibn ʿalī al-maqrīzī, al-mawāʿiẓ wa-l-iʿtibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār, ed. ayman fuʾād sayyid (london: muʾassasat al-furqān, 2002), i.2, 112 and n. 1 thereto. 32. abū ʿumar muḥammad ibn yūsuf al-kindī, the governors and judges of egypt (kitāb al-wulāt wa-kitāb al-quḍāt), ed. rhuvon guest (leiden: brill, 1912), 250. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 23 on this abbasid victory, he declares:33 so [the factions] rushed to embrace the dynasty of prophecy and guidance [i.e., the abbasids] and wrested themselves free of the partisans of satan the laudatory manner in which al-yaʿqūbī describes the abbasids as ‘the dynasty of prophecy and guidance’ is the sole hint of al-yaʿqūbī’s shiʿite inclinations outside the history. however, one should not overestimate the importance of this evidence: al-rāghib al-iṣfahānī (d. early 5th/11th century) cites verses attributed to al-yaʿqūbī where he seems to welcome the death of the caliph al-muktafī (r. 289-95/902-8), stating “when [the caliph] died, his affliction lived on (lammā māta ʿāsha adhāhu).”34 there are, however, other indications of his abiding interest in the hāshimites that could be broadly construed as pious reverence for the prophet’s clan and its descendants. abū l-ḥasan al-masʿūdī (d. 345/956) lists among the sources he relied upon to write his murūj al-dhahab a kitāb al-tārīkh of a certain aḥmad ibn [abī?] yaʿqūb al-miṣrī “concerning the stories of the abbasids (fī akhbār al-ʿabbāsiyyīn).”35 it is tempting to view this as a clear attestation to al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle. houtsma succumbed to the temptation and thus attempted to identify the author of al-yaʿqūbī’s history with the individual cited by al-masʿūdī (“praefatio,” vi). but the evidence works against houtsma’s identification. first, the work that modern scholars know as tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī is by no means so narrow that one would characterize it as primarily about the abbasids—al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle is a universal, not a dynastic, history. al-maqrīzī also knows of a certain aḥmad ibn abī yaʿqūb al-kātib who composed a k. al-buldān and “a book on the history of hāshimites, which is large (kitāb fī tārīkh al-hāshimiyyīn wa-huwa kabīr).”36 furthermore, ibn al-dāya likely quotes extensively this same history mentioned by al-masʿūdī and later al-maqrīzī,37 yet none of ibn al-dāya’s quotations from aḥmad ibn abī yaʿqūb’s work on the abbasids resemble any passage found in al-yaʿqūbī’s history—whether in content or style. whereas al-yaʿqūbī’s history mostly adopts a detached and economical style of narrative prose, the passages of the work that ibn al-dāya quotes are often anecdotal, highly personal, and related on the authority of aḥmad ibn abī yaʿqūb’s ancestor wāḍiḥ, a mawlā of the abbasid caliph al-manṣūr and a 33. ibid. cf. ei2, art. “ṭūlūnids” (m. gordon) and thierry bianquis, “autonomous egypt from ibn ṭūlūn to kāfūr, 868-969,” in the cambridge history of egypt, vol. 1: islamic egypt, 640-1517, ed. carl f. petry (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998), 107-8. 34. muḥāḍarāt al-udabāʾ wa-muḥāwarāt al-shuʿarāʾ wa-l-bulaghāʾ, ed. (beirut: dār maktabat al-ḥayāt, 1961), ii, 534. 35. murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhwar, ed. ch. pellat (beirut: manshūrāt al-jāmiʿa al-lubnāniyya, 1965-79), i, 16. 36. k. al-muqaffā al-kabīr, ed. muḥammad al-yaʿlāwī (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1991), i, 738. 37. see ibn dāya, al-mukāfaʾa wa-ḥusn al-ʿuqdā, ed. maḥmūd muḥammad shākir (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1900), 45-48, 61-62, 66, 83-85, 119-20, 144-45; ibn ʿasākir, tārīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. ʿumar ibn ghurāma al-ʿamrawī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1995-2000), lxviii, 209. 24 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) household steward (qahramān) of the abbasid court, via his father, abū yaʿqūb ibn wāḍiḥ.38 taken together, the many references to al-yaʿqūbī leave the impression that he was deeply enmeshed in the bureaucratic circles of the abbasid era. yet these notices also offer us little by way of insight into al-yaʿqūbī’s religious views. staunch shiʿite loyalties would certainly not have precluded al-yaʿqūbī from enjoying such a career, as the history of the famously shiʿite nawbakhtī family amply suggests.39 the only hint of a shiʿite interest one finds in this biographical material comes from al-yaʿqūbī’s lost work on the hāshimids and abbasids, but his interest in the scions of the hāshim tribe can just as easily be attributed to his family’s political attachment to the abbasids as it can to any purported sectarian allegiances. in summary, the surviving biographical data on al-yaʿqūbī are too paltry and too indeterminate to be of much use in describing his sectarian loyalties.40 there is little information about the author of the tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī other than what occurs in the chronicle itself, and what information we can glean from other sources is not only fragmentary but also bereft of any indications that al-yaʿqūbī harbored shiʿite loyalties. evidence from the history if research into yaʿqūbī’s biography yields little by way of insights into his sectarian identity, then we are forced to examine the text of the history itself. two strategies have been adopted to deduce al-yaʿqūbī’s shiʿite inclinations from his chronicle to date with uneven results. the first strategy is the least successful and relies on a rather shallow analysis; it focuses on the chapter headings al-yaʿqūbī employs in his history. previous scholars have sought to see these headings as a window into his sectarian biases inasmuch as al-yaʿqūbī conspicuously designates only the reigns of ʿalī ibn abī ṭālib and his son al-ḥasan with heading ‘the caliphate of … (khilāfat …)’, whereas the reigns of other rulers simply appear under the rubric of “the days (ayyām) of x.” the idea is that, by using these different rubrics, al-yaʿqūbī discriminates between the legitimacy of ʿalī and al-ḥasan and the illegitimacy of other rulers and, thus, reveals his shiʿite bias. elton daniel has convincingly undermined the viability of this superficial reading. daniel first questions whether such rubrics can justifiably be regarded as work of al-yaʿqūbī’s authorial hand or if such rubrics merely result from the vicissitudes of the text’s transmission. indeed, such textual minutiae and adornments are rarely immutable features 38. as daniel (217-21) convincingly demonstrates, this wāḍiḥ is not the notorious wādiḥ al-maskīn, slaveclient (mawlā) of the abbasid prince ṣāliḥ ibn al-manṣūr, whom the chronicles often denounced as a “vile shiʿite (rāfiḍī khabīth)” and who was beheaded and crucified for betraying the abbasids by aiding the ʿalid rebel idrīs ibn ʿabd allāh to escape to the distant maghrib. see aḥmad ibn yaḥyā al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, vol. ii, ed. wilferd madelung (beirut: klaus schwarz, 2003), 540-41; abū jaʿfar al-ṭabarī, tārīkh al-rusul wa’lmulūk, ed. m.j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1879-1901), 3: 560-61; cf. najam haider, “the community divided: a textual analysis of the murders of idrīs b. ʿabd allāh (d. 175/791),” jaos 128 (2008): 459-75. this wāḍiḥ turns out to have been a eunuch (ar. khaṣī) and, hence, could not possibly have been al-yaʿqūbī’s ancestor. 39. cf. eir, art. “the nawbakti family” (s. w. anthony) 40. daniel, 217-21. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 25 of a text during its transmission history over the centuries. rather, these textual features tend to be subject to erasure and expansion—dependent, in other words, on the whimsy of copyists. houtsma’s 1883 edition of al-yaʿqūbī’s history, the basis for all subsequent re-printings of the chronicle in the arabic-speaking world and beyond, relied solely on a single, late cambridge manuscript, copied in shiʿite-dominated, ṣafavid persia in rabīʿ i 1096/february-march 1685. since the publication of his edition, an earlier, albeit undated, manuscript has come to light in the john rylands library in manchester.41 any comparison of the cambridge and rylands manuscripts reveals that, although the two manuscripts descend from a common template (even the textual lacunae are the same), such headings, rubrics, and pious formulae following the names are far from immutable; rather, they are subject to erasure, expansion, and revision in the course of textual transmission and are often the product of the whims of a copyist.42 moreover, as daniel further noted, al-yaʿqūbī provides his readers with some indication in the preface to the second section of his history that ‘ayyām’, or ‘days’, will indeed serve as a rubric for organizing his history, suggesting that the term is void of sectarian valence. hence, al-yaʿqūbī states that, after recounting the prophet’s death, he will relate, “the stories of the caliphs after him and the conduct of each caliph one after another (sīrat khalifatin baʿda khalīfatin), as well all his conquests and all that he achieved and transpired during his days (fī ayyāmih)” (tārīkh, ii, 3). thus does al-yaʿqūbī in a single breath refer to each of the prophet’s successors as caliphs and specify that the stories of the caliphs’ reigns will be subsumed under accounts of each of their “days (ayyām).” al-yaʿqūbī extends this pattern to most of the caliphs’ reigns, beginning each section with “then x ruled as caliph (thumma ’stakhlafa)”; he only makes an explicit exception for the umayyads, each of whom, he says rather, “reigned as king (malaka).”43 there is, finally, a long-standing tendency in the scholarly literature to overemphasize the importance of al-yaʿqūbī’s use the heading ‘wafāt’ to mark off entries for the deaths of certain imams of the twelver shiʿa. two points are worth highlighting here. the first is that, while al-yaʿqūbī does devote considerable attention to the deaths of some of the earlier imams of the twelver shiʿa as well as their teachings, he does not do so in every case. in the case of mūsā al-kāẓim and ʿalī al-riḍā, the wafāt headings that mark off their obituaries in the printed text are houtsma’s own insertions (ii, 499, 550), present neither in the cambridge nor the rylands manuscripts.44 while their lengthy death notices certainly reveal that the imams of the imāmi-shiʿa are an important interest for al-yaʿqūbī, this interest unquestionably wanes the closer the chronicle comes to al-yaʿqūbī’s own era. hence, his obituary for the eighth imam ʿalī al-riḍā (ii, 550), who died under mysterious 41. t. m. johnstone, “an early manuscript of yaʿḳūbī’s taʾrīḫ,” journal of semitic studies 2 (1957): 189-95, re-affirming reaffirms mingana’s dating of the manuscript, for paleographic reasons, to the mid-14th century. 42. johnstone, 195; daniel, 225 ff. 43. daniel, 223. notably, the only umayyad whose rise to power yaʿqūbī describes in terms of assuming the caliphate (al-istikhlāf) is ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān (tārīkh, ii, 186). for a recent analysis of yaʿqūbī’s hostile portrayal of yazīd ibn muʿawiya, see khaled keshk, “how to frame history,” arabica 56 (2009): 393-95. 44. cf. daniel, 226-27, 230. 26 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) and controversial circumstances, is neither partisan nor sensational and seems remarkably brief compared to previous obituary notices on al-riḍā’s predecessors.45 his death notices on subsequent imams are either non-existent, as in the case of the ninth imam muḥammad al-jawād (ii, 552-53) and the eleventh imam al-ḥasan al-ʿaskarī (ii, 615), or terse and unremarkable, as in the case of the tenth imam ʿalī ibn muḥammad al-hādī (ii, 591-92, 614). furthermore, while al-yaʿqūbī devotes extended obituaries to the imams ʿalī zayn al-ʿābidīn (ii, 363-65), muḥammad al-bāqir (ii, 384-85), jaʿfar al-ṣādiq (ii, 458-60), and mūsā al-kāẓim (ii, 499-500) that prominently feature their teachings and virtues, he also accords similar treatment to ʿalī ibn ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabbās (ii, 355-56). the attention lavished on these figures is more easily explained with reference to al-yaʿqūbī’s interest in the descendants of the hāshim clan of the quraysh, about whom he composed a large history that is apparently no longer extant.46 attempting to explain this pattern in al-yaʿqūbī’s treatment of ʿalī’s descendants, houtsma and brockelmann put forward a hypothesis (subsequently entertained by marquet as well) that al-yaʿqūbī belonged to the wāqifa, or mūsawiyya, trend of the shiʿa47— i.e., those shiʿa who believed that the line of imams stopped with mūsā al-kāẓim and that he defied death, entering into occultation in 183/799.48 an argument in support of this hypothesis but not yet adduced is that, contemporary with al-yaʿqūbī’s tenure with the ṭūlūnids in egypt during the late 3rd/9th century, many mūsawiyya shiʿa, such as the followers of ʿalī ibn warsand al-bajalī, were migrating westward from baghdad into north african and the maghrib.49 but there’s reason to challenge this hypothesis as well. if al-yaʿqūbī’s loyalties lay with those partisans of mūsā al-kāẓim who refused to recognize any of his successors, his account of mūsā’s death during the caliphate of hārūn al-rashīd becomes quite puzzling. indeed, as noted by a.a. duri, if al-yaʿqūbī’s account of mūsā’s death aligns with any view, it would not be that of mūsā’s partisans, but rather that of the abbasid court, which exculpated the dynasty of any wrongdoing in mūsā’s death.50 the foregoing has argued that the established readings of the structural characteristics of al-yaʿqūbī’s history aimed at discerning his sectarian loyalties have produced unreliable results. how, then, does one begin to evaluate al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle as representative of a ‘shiʿite’ view of history in any meaningful sense? 45. for insightful analysis of just how far afield yaʿqūbī’s account of ʿalī al-riḍā’s death from the hagiographical accounts of the twelver-shiʿa, see deborah tor, “an historiographical re-examination of the appointment and death of ʿalī al-riḍā,” der islam 71 (2001): 112 and n. 77 thereto, 126 n. 100. 46. maqrīzī, muqaffā, i, 738. 47. houtsma, “praefatio,” i, ix; ei1, “al-yaʿḳūbī” (carl brockelmann); marquet, 136. 48. on this sect, see e. kohlberg, “from imāmiyya to ithnā-ʿashariyya,” bsoas 39 (1976): 529 ff.; m. ali buyukkara, “the schism in the party of mūsā al-kāẓim and the emergence of the wāqifa,” arabica 47 (2000): 78-99. 49. wilferd madelung, “notes on non-ismāʿīlī shiism in the maghrib,” studia islamica 44 (1976): 87-91; wadād al-qāḍī, “al-shīʿa al-bajaliyya fī l-maghrib al-aqṣā,” acts of the first congress on the history of the civilization of the maghrib (tunis: university of tunis ceres, 1979), 1: 164-94. 50. the rise of the historical writing among the arabs, ed. and tr. l.i. conrad (princeton: princeton university press, 1983), 67. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 27 rather than identify al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle with a specific, historical community of shiʿa, one can adopt a second approach by starting with a workable, historical definition of the general features of shiʿite beliefs in al-yaʿqūbī’s era. with such a working definition, one can then subject al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle to a ‘shiʿite litmus test’ of sorts. the next section of the essay does just this by exploring al-yaʿqūbī’s treatment of ʿalid legitimism during the so-called era of the ‘rāshidūn’ caliphs. granted, any delineation of the parameters of shiʿism risks running afoul of the circular reasoning against which daniel warns: namely, “using material from the history to claim that al-yaʿqūbī was shiʿite, but also using the premise that al-yaʿqūbī was a shiʿite to justify a shiʿite reading of the text.”51 yet, the reading proposed here is a historical one, rooted in what muslims of al-yaʿqūbī’s era and subsequent times would recognize (or even virulently denounce) as a shiʿite perspective on islamic history, inasmuch as rāfiḍī narratives and views on the controversies of early islamic history had become an entrenched and debated feature of the sectarian landscape at least a century before the history was written. (as a result, such debates are also broadly attested.)52 how, then, does al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle stack up? evaluations of the merits or demerits of abū bakr’s succession to muḥammad and the merits and rights of ʿalī serve as the locus classicus for early sectarian debates over legitimate leadership in islam. they provide an ideal arena for exploring the sectarian proclivities of al-yaʿqūbī as a chronicler. key to the rift that emerged between the sunni and shiʿi memories of the succession to prophet were, respectively, the affirmation of the legitimacy of abū bakr’s leadership as the prophet’s worthy successor and the dissenting objections against the legitimacy of his leadership in favor of the prophet’s son-in-law ʿalī. narratives rejecting the legitimacy of abū bakr’s leadership emphasized that the oath of allegiance to him at the portico (saqīfa) of the sāʿida clan had been too hastily rendered and invalidated the allegiance rendered to abū bakr due to the absence of the prophet’s kinsfolk, the hāshim clan, from the proceedings. hence, according to the dissenting view, abū bakr’s appointment was illegitimate because it was an ad hoc decision (ar. falta)53 and had alienated the rights of the prophet’s household. even a cursory reading of al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle will reveal that he eschews all arguments in favor of abū bakr’s legitimacy, choosing rather to fill his narrative of abū bakr’s succession with episodes that expose the ambition of abū bakr and his supporters and that underscore the truth of hāshimid and ʿalid legitimist claims to the prophet’s legacy. al-yaʿqūbī viewed abū bakr’s rise to leadership over the prophet’s community as a combination of travesty and tragedy.54 al-yaʿqūbī lays the groundwork for his objections to abū bakr’s caliphate early on in his chronicle with two set pieces, each essential to a distinctively shiʿite view of early islamic 51. daniel, 210. 52. josef van ess, theologie und gesellschaft im 2. und 3. jahrhundert hidschra: eine geschichte des religiösen denkens im frühen islam (berlin: w. de gruyter, 1991-97), i, 308-12. 53. even non-shiʿite narratives portray abū bakr’s appointment as ad hoc, but they do not see that fact as mitigating the legitimacy of his claim to the caliphate. e.g., see maʿmar ibn rāshid, the expeditions (kitāb al-maghāzī), ed. and tr. s.w. anthony (new york: new york university press, 2014), 194-95 (xxi.1, 2). 54. my reading here contrasts with that of t. khalidi, islamic historiography: the histories of masʿūdī (albany: suny press, 1975), 127, whose characterizations of these narratives i find to be quite far off the mark. 28 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) history: the incident at ghadīr khumm and the ḥadīth al-thaqalayn (ii, 125). al-yaʿqūbī affirms that, on 18 dhū l-ḥijja 10/ 10 march 632, the prophet delivered a sermon outside medina near ghadīr khumm during which, having taken ʿalī’s hand in his own, the prophet proclaimed, “whoever regards me as his protector (mawlā), ʿalī too is his protector. o lord be a friend to those who befriend him and an enemy of all those who spread enmity against him!”55 al-yaʿqūbī then has the prophet utter the so-called ḥadīth al-thaqalayn. the prophet admonishes his followers that he will precede them all to the eschatological basin (al-ḥawḍ) where, gathered on the day of judgment, he will ask them concerning “the two precious items (al-thaqalayn)” that will safeguard their salvation until the day of judgment. when the prophet’s followers ask what the two items are, he answers: “god’s scripture (kitāb allāh) and my kinsmen, the people of my household (ʿitratī ahl baytī).” although of weightier importance to the shiʿa, neither the ghadīr khumm tradition nor the ḥadīth al-thaqalayn are foreign to authoritative sunni collections of ḥadīth.56 they are not, in other words, prima facie evidence of a rejectionist shiʿi perspective. indeed, in a version of the traditions attributed to the companion zayd ibn arqam, also widespread in sunni ḥadīth collections, the two pronouncements even appear in juxtaposition as they do in al-yaʿqūbī’s text.57 arguably, then, the presence of the traditions in the history might display the so-called ‘benign shīʿism (tashayyuʿ ḥasan)’ that populates sunni ḥadīth concerned with the merits and virtues of ʿalī just as much as more hardline shiʿite literature. more telling, however, is al-yaʿqūbī’s utilization of the two traditions. he does not feature these traditions, for example, alongside the prophet’s appointment of abū bakr to lead the prayers during his last illness or litanies of abū bakr’s bounty of virtues as one of the prophet’s most trusted companions—the most important indications of abū bakr’s superior merits and worthiness to succeed the prophet in sunni narratives. indeed, al-yaʿqūbī excludes the prophet’s appointment of abū bakr as prayer leader entirely. thus, his mention of the ghadīr khumm incident and the ḥadīth al-thaqalayn is no innocuous notation of the merits of ʿalī. al-yaʿqubī mobilizes these two traditions to set up a far more scandalous narrative of abū bakr’s accession to the caliphate following the prophet’s death. initially, al-yaʿqūbī arranges the narrative set pieces for abū bakr’s succession in the conventional manner: after the prophet’s passing, his medinan followers, the helpers, gather in the portico of the sāʿida clan to appoint saʿd ibn ʿubāda their new leader, and the hāshim clan retreats to prepare muḥammad’s corpse for burial. abū bakr, ʿumar ibn al-khaṭṭāb, and other qurashī emigrants hear word of the helpers’ plans to appoint a 55. man kuntu mawlāhu fa-ʿalī huwa mawlāhu allāhumma wāli man wālāhu wa-ʿādi man ʿādāhu. 56. for an analysis of these traditions, see ei3, art. “ghadīr khumm” (m.a. amir-moezzi); maria m. dakake, the charismatic community: shiʿite identity in early islam (albany: suny press, 2008), ch. 2; and me’ir bar-asher, scripture and exegesis in early imāmī-shiism (leiden: brill, 1999), 39 ff. dakake’s odd (and probably careless) assertion that al-yaʿqūbī’s history gives this tradition “a brief mention, not a narrative account” and ranks among those works that “underplay” the importance of the event (charismatic community, 36, 38) ought to be rejected. 57. e.g., al-balādhurī, ansāb, ii, 114-15; muslim ibn al-hajjāj, al-ṣaḥīḥ (vaduz: thesaurus islamicus, 2000), ii, 1032 (k. faḍāʾil al-ṣaḥāba, no. 6378) and aḥmad ibn ḥanbal, al-musnad, ed. shuʿayb arnaʾūṭ (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1993), xxxii, 10-12. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 29 leader of their own and rush in order to stop the proceedings. in the tense deliberations that ensue, ʿumar and abū ʿubayda ibn al-jarrāḥ nominate abū bakr as the community’s most worthy leader; the helpers and emigrants present agree to render him their oath of allegiance. al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle frames the conflict between the helpers and the emigrants in terms of the respective merits of the quraysh, the prophet’s tribe, versus those of the helpers. in this way, al-yaʿqūbī prepares the reader for a parallel debate to ensue when the prophet’s kin from the hāshim clan make their entrance. abū bakr, ʿumar, and abū ʿubayda speak with one voice when they aver, “the messenger of god came from us [the quraysh], thus are we the most deserving to occupy his place (aḥaqqu bi-maqāmih)” (ii, 137)—but, conspicuously, fail to see how such logic applies to their absent, fellow tribesmen from the hāshim clan. the emigrant ʿabd al-raḥmān ibn ʿawf likewise admonishes the helpers to submit to the leadership of the quraysh, declaring, “there is none equal to abū bakr, ʿumar, and ʿalī in your midst,” but clumsily let slip mention of ʿalī. in a revealing passage, the helper al-mundhir ibn arqam pounces on ʿabd al-raḥmān’s mention of ʿalī retorting, “indeed, there is one man, were he to pursue this matter, none would contest him over it (law ṭalaba hādhā l-amr lam yunāziʿhu fīhi aḥad)” (ii, 137). when the helper al-barāʾ ibn ʿāzib tells the hāshim clan of abū bakr’s successful bid for the leadership of the community, the prophet’s kin are aghast, leading one of their number to gainsay the whole affair as invalid given their absence. the prophet’s uncle al-ʿabbās utters a cry of disbelief at what he considers a debacle. most outspoken is his son al-faḍl ibn al-ʿabbās, who exclaims, “o company of quraysh! the caliphate does not become your right by virtue of guile (bi-l-tamwīh)! we [the hāshim clan] are the household of the caliphate before you (ahluhā dūnakum) and our kinsman [ʿalī] is far more deserving of it than you (ṣāḥibunā awlā bihā minkum)” (ii, 138). after this scene, al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle portrays ʿalī’s response as forbearing and, hence, key to letting cooler heads prevail. the chronicle also provides a list of emigrants and helpers who remain loyal to ʿalī and refuse to give abū bakr their allegiance. here, too, his chronicle seizes the opportunity portray abū bakr’s supporters as animated by crude ambition to exclude the hāshim clan from the caliphate. abū bakr turns to ʿumar, abū ʿubayda, and al-mughīra ibn shuʿba for their advice, whereupon they recommend bribing the prophet’s uncle al-ʿabbās with a share (naṣīb) for himself and his progeny in the rule of community in order to convince him to cajole the hāshim clan into accepting abū bakr’s leadership. the four plead with al-ʿabbās to accept the believers’ choice of abū bakr as unanimous. the reply of the prophet’s uncle is damning: how can they claim the consensus of the believers’ when the hāshimites dissent? how can they offer al-ʿabbās a share in the community’s rule if leadership rests on the believers’ consensus? matters worsen further still for abū bakr and his cadre when the umayyad clan voices its support for ʿalī. when the early umayyad convert, khālid ibn saʿīd ibn al-ʿāṣ, returns to medina, he calls a gathering of medinans together, summoning them to swear allegiance to ʿalī “heads shaved (muḥallaqīn al-ruʾūs)” in repentance. though only three persons step forward, the event suffices to spur ʿumar and abū bakr to rush to fāṭima’s residence, which, aided by others, they begin to demolish. ʿalī exits the house with sword in hand 30 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) and confronts ʿumar. they wrestle until, at last, ʿumar breaks ʿalī’s sword. facing eviction from her home, the prophet’s daughter fāṭima shrilly rebukes abū bakr and his supporters: “will you expel me from my home? or should i expose my hair and cry out to god in fury?” al-yaʿqūbī concludes the imbroglio remarking that, though one by one ʿalī’s supports rendered their allegiance to abū bakr, he withheld giving his for six months (ii, 141).58 al-yaʿqūbī’s narrative is a far cry from the irenic narratives that come to populate the emerging sunni historical canon and must account, at least partially, for his exclusion from that canon. medieval readers would likely find his narratives of fāṭima and ʿalī’s opposition to abū bakr sectarian as well as invidious.59 the sunni historian al-ṭabarī, although he does not entirely conceal the discontents of ʿalī and the hāshim clan in his annals, turns to the narratives composed by the notoriously anti-shiʿite historian sayf ibn ʿumar al-tamīmī (fl. late 2nd/8th century) to dilute their impact. sayf ibn ʿumar, for example, rather incredulously portrays ʿalī as so eager to pledge allegiance to abū bakr that he accidently leaves home without being fully dressed.60 compared against an author of pious fictions like sayf, al-yaʿqūbī’s effort to inveigh on behalf of pro-ʿalid legitimist claims are unmistakable. by the time al-yaʿqūbī’s narrative arrives at ʿalī’s bid for the caliphate in the wake of ʿuthmān’s assassination, the shiʿite subtext becomes all the more conspicuous. the comparably early muslim chroniclers—such as ibn saʿd, al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī—wring their hands over the intractable controversies surrounding these events: was ʿalī complicit in ʿuthmān’s murder? did ʿalī’s sympathies lie with rebels who murdered ʿuthmān? did ṭalḥa and al-zubayr willingly offer ʿalī their allegiance (bayʿa) or were they compelled by force of threat? while by no means uninterested in these issues, al-yaʿqūbī bypasses these issues and, instead, seems to exult in ʿalī’s accession to the caliphate where these other chroniclers do not. his narrative teems with praise for ʿalī’s merits vaunted by the tongues of the helpers and ʿalī’s loyal partisans. thus does khuzayma ibn thābit al-anṣārī publicly declare to ʿalī that, among all the prophet’s followers, “you possess all that they can claim and they lack all that you can claim (laka mā lahum wa-laysa lahum mā laka).” “you have exalted the caliphate and made it resplendent,” proclaims ʿalī’s kūfan acolyte ṣaʿṣaʿa ibn ṣūḥān, “but it has added naught to you, for it is more in need of you than you of it.” most striking of all, however, is the declaration of mālik al-ashtar: “listen people! this man is the legatee of the legatees (waṣī al-awṣiyāʾ) and the inheritor of prophets’ knowledge” (ii, 208). this last statement attributed to al-ashtar contains two especially important ideas that appear elsewhere throughout al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle. first, al-ashtar assigns the 58. al-yaʿqūbī also notes the minority report that ʿalī delayed his bayʿa to abū bakr a mere forty days. the refusal of ʿalī along with the rest of the banū hāshim to proffer their bayʿa to abū bakr is standard in non-shiʿite narratives as well. cf. maʿmar ibn rāshid, the expeditions, 248-51 (xxvii.3); balādhurī, ansāb, ii, 14. 59. cf. verena klemm, “die frühe islamische erzählung von fāṭima bint muḥammad: vom ḫabar zur legende,” der islam 79 (2002): 78-80. 60. ṭabarī, tārīkh, i, 1825. sayf’s narratives, although indispensable to ṭabarī’s construction of sunnī view of early islamic history, represents the viewpoint of the ʿuthmāniyya. see s. w. anthony, the caliph and the heretic: ibn sabaʾ and the origins of shiʿism (leiden: brill, 2012), 101-6. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 31 title waṣī al-awṣiyāʾ to ʿalī. the appellation was widely regarded as a touchstone of the type of language that exposed one as a rāfiḍī, or rejectionist, shiʿite. thus did the imāmī traditionist jābir al-juʿfī fall out of favor with the kufan ḥadīth-folk when overheard citing a tradition on muḥammad al-bāqir’s authority by saying, “the legatee of the legatees reported to me … (ḥaddathanī waṣī al-awṣiyāʾ).”61 second, and more important, is the ideological underpinning of designating ʿalī as muḥammad’s waṣī. this designation implies that ʿalī inherited a sacred bequest (waṣiyya), and hence his legitimacy, from the prophet based on kinship—a claim of inheritance that neither abū bakr, ʿumar, nor ʿuthmān could boast. as an argument in favor of ʿalī’s unique legitimacy as the prophet’s successor, the notion of ʿalī as the prophet’s waṣī stands among the very earliest put forward in philoʿalid and shiʿite historiography. thus, for example, does ʿalī’s loyal acolyte, muḥammad ibn abī bakr, write to rebuke muʿāwiya ibn abī sufyān for defying ʿalī’s bid for the caliphate, “woe to you for comparing yourself to ʿalī, who is the inheritor (wārith) of god’s messenger, his waṣī, the father of his progeny (abū waladih), and first of all to follow him.”62 the idea appears also in the earliest poetry extolling the rights of ʿalī, as in the following lines of the shiʿite poet abū l-aswad al-duʾalī (d. 69/688):63 i love muḥammad with the deepest love and ʿabbās and ḥamza and the waṣī [i.e., ʿalī] sons of the messenger’s uncle and each near relative most beloved of people each and all to me closely tied with the pro-hāshimid and pro-ʿalid legitimism that pervades—indeed drives—al-yaʿqūbī’s narrative is the notion that ʿalī as the waṣī also inherits not merely a political right to rule the community’s affairs but also the prophet’s knowledge. this idea emerges clearly in the bayʿa scene recounted above where the affirmation of ʿalī’s status as muḥammad’s waṣī not only underscores ʿalī’s legitimacy as the ruler of the umma but also undercuts the claims to legitimate leadership put forward by his predecessors, especially abū bakr and his cohort, who could not themselves lay claim to the title. when rendering his allegiance to ʿalī upon assuming the caliphate, mālik al-ashtar simultaneously identifies ʿalī as the prophet’s true waṣī and “the inheritor of the prophets’ knowledge (wārith ʿilm 61. abū yūsuf al-fasawī, k. al-maʿrifa wa-l-tārīkh, ed. akram ḍiyāʾ al-ʿumarī (medina: maktabat al-dār, 1989), ii, 716. that in referring to waṣī al-awṣiyāʾ jābir al-juʿfī refers not to ʿalī but rather his descendent, muḥammad al-bāqir, is made apparent by a tradition recorded in ibn bābūyah, ʿuyūn akhbār al-riḍā (beirut: muʾassasat al-aʿlamī, 1984), i, 288. writing in the late-eighth century, the kufan akhbārī sayf ibn ʿumar al-tamīmī likewise attributes the invention of the title khātam al-awṣiyāʾ for ʿalī as originating in the invidious view of the heresiarch ibn sabaʾ; see anthony, the caliph and the heretic, 82 ff. 62. naṣr ibn muzāḥim al-minqarī, waqʿat ṣiffīn, ed. ʿabd al-salām muḥammad hārūn (cairo: al-muʾassasa al-ʿarabiyya al-ḥadītha, 19622), 119. cf. m. a. amir-moezzi, spirituality of shiʿi islam (london: i.b. tauris, 2011), 13-15 and m. yazigi, “defense and validation in shiʿi and sunni tradition: the case of muḥammad b. abī bakr,” studia islamica 98-99 (2004): 67-68. 63. abū l-faraj al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, ed. iḥsān ʿabbas, ibrāhīm al-saʿāfīn, and bakr ʿabbās (beirut: dār ṣādir, 2008), xii, 232. 32 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) al-anbiyāʾ).” mālik al-ashtar’s bayʿa is also not the first time that al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle introduces the idea that ʿalī possessed a measure of preternatural, prophetic knowledge thanks to his close kinship to the prophet and the favor the prophet bestowed upon him. these ideas first manifest in poetry composed by the prophet’s bard ḥassān ibn thābit during the dispute over abū bakr’s assuming the leadership of the community. ḥassān praises ʿalī as follows (ii, 144): you preserve for us god’s messenger; and his testament is yours—and who is nearer in kinship to him? who? are you not declared his brother? are you not his legatee (waṣī), and of the fihr tribe the most knowledgeable of the scripture and sunna? these verses provide one of the clearest and earliest expressions of ʿalī’s superior merits in al-yaʿqūbī’s history. that the ideas of ʿalī’s legitimacy as the prophets true successor, his legatee (waṣī), and therefore an inheritor of prophetic knowledge reappear again at ʿalī’s assumption of the caliphate is of paramount importance for understanding al-yaʿqūbī’s historical perspective. sometimes al-yaʿqūbī manifests his exalted view of ʿalī only subtly, as when the caliph ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān’s collection of the qurʾān creates an opportunity for al-yaʿqūbī to highlight ʿalī’s unrivaled authority on the qurʾān. as ʿalī is the most learnèd of the quraysh, al-yaʿqūbī lists in extended detail the unique features of ʿalī’s neglected codex in an account that overshadows his treatment of the caliph ʿuthmān’s famous collection (ii, 152-54).64 implicit in al-yaʿqūbī’s account seems to be the widespread shiʿi view that ʿalī was the most learned of the companions, but although he compiled the qurʾān and presented it the umma, the prophet’s recalcitrant companions rejected his codex (muṣḥaf) for ʿuthmān’s recension nonetheless.65 yet, the idea that ʿalī inherits the knowledge of god’s prophets from muḥammad as his waṣī also features prominently, too. these ideas appear in a striking scene from the caliphate of ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān that features ʿuthmān’s most strident, piety-minded critic: abū dharr al-ghifārī. for al-yaʿqūbī, abū dharr represents not merely the dissent of the piety-minded against the abuses of political power or the corruption of wealth during ʿuthmān’s caliphate,66 he is also staunchly partisan and 64. cf. th. nöldeke, f. schwally, g. bergsträßer, and o. pretzl, the history of the qurʾān, tr. w.h. behn (leiden: brill, 2013), 220 (ii, 9-11). yaʿqūbī’s account of the arrangement of the sūras in ʿalī’s qurʾān codex is, to my knowledge, unique; cf. shahrastānī, mafātiḥ al-asrār, i, 24-28. other accounts assert, rather, that ʿalī organized his codex according to the order of revelation; see arthur jeffery, two muqaddimas to the qur’anic sciences (cairo: al-khaniji booksellers, 1943), 14-16. on shiʿite views of ʿalī’s qurʾān more generally, see etan kohlberg and mohammad ali amir-moezzi, revelation and falsification: the kitāb al-qirāʾāt of aḥmad b. muḥammad al-sayyārī (leiden: brill, 2009), 25-27. 65. muḥammad ibn yaʿqūb al-kulaynī, al-kāfī, ed. ʿalī akbar al-ghaffārī (tehran: dār al-kutub al-islāmiyya, 1968-71), ii, 633; cf. h. modarressi, tradition and survival: a bibliographical survey of early shīʿite literature (oxford: oneworld, 2003), 2-4. it is worth noting that ʿalī’s enemies denied that he possessed exceptional knowledge of the qurʾān and rejected any notion that his insight into the revelation was anything more than even ordinary companions; see ʿamr ibn baḥr al-jāḥiẓ, al-ʿuthmāniyya, ed. ʿabd al-salām muḥammad hārūn (cairo: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1955), 92-93. 66. a topic that features in mushākalat al-nās li-zāmanihim as well; see tayeb el-hibri, parable and politics al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 33 loyal to ʿalī. with unbridled conviction, abū dharr declares (ii, 198): muḥammad inherited the knowledge of adam and that which exalted the prophets, and ʿalī ibn abī ṭālib is the legatee of muḥammad and the inheritor of his knowledge. this idea that ʿalī inherits the prophets’ knowledge as the prophet’s successor is not unique to al-yaʿqūbī by any means. it is striking that abū dharr’s declaration fits quite well with the saying of the fifth imam muḥammad al-bāqir, who related that, when ʿalī reported that he could hear gabriel’s voice and see light (al-ḍawʾ), the prophet replied: were i not the seal of the prophets, then you would share prophecy with me. were it not so, you would be a prophet. rather, you are to be the executor and inheritor of a prophet’s legacy, chief of the executors and imam of the god-fearing.67 yet, do such pronouncements on ʿalī’s superior merits, his preternatural knowledge, and his unassailable rights as the sole legitimate successor to muḥammad reflect al-yaʿqūbī’s own shiʿite vision of islamic history? confirmation that indeed they do can be found in the very organization of his chronicle. on the one hand, these are the utterances of his narrative’s most heroic and praiseworthy protagonists. on the other, al-yaʿqūbī’s account of ʿalī’s caliphate is bereft of criticism one finds of his predecessors and ends with a lengthy treatment of the pious sayings and wise maxims ʿalī bequeathed to his partisans. these take up nine pages in houtsma’s edition of the arabic text (ii, 242-51)—this is quite a sizeable amount relative to his chronicle’s scope that is without parallel within its pages. no other figure receives such treatment at al-yaʿqūbī’s hands—let alone any of the other so-called ‘rāshidūn’ caliphs. abū bakr, by contrast, faces his death with naught but regret and a litany of deathbed confessions of his wrongdoings (ii, 155-56),68 whereas ʿalī offers bezels of wisdom and timeless guidance. conclusion if one is to find any indication of al-yaʿqūbī’s putatively shiʿite perspective on islamic history, one must look to his treatment of the controversies over the succession to the prophet where such views are most conspicuously manifest. as seen above, al-yaʿqūbī’s in early islamic history: the rashidun caliphs (new york: columbia university press, 2010), 6-7. 67. ibn abī l-ḥadīd, sharḥ nahj al-balāgha, ed. muḥammad abū l-faḍl ibrāhīm (repr. beirut: dār al-sāqiya li-l-ʿulūm, 2001), xiii, 163: law lā annī khātam al-anbiyāʾ la-kunta sharīkan fī l-nabuwwa fa-in lā takun nabiyyan fa-innaka wasiyyu nabiyyin wa-wārithuh bal anta sayyidu l-awṣiyāʾ wa-imāmu l-atqiyāʾ. 68. sunnī scholars such as al-dhahabī (d. 748/1348) attributed the forgery of abū bakr’s deathbed confessions to a certain ʿulwān ibn dāwūd [ibn ṣāliḥ] al-bajalī (d. 180/796-97), who appears as the common link for all versions of the tradition cited; cf. shams al-dīn al-dhahabī, mīzān al-iʿtidāl fī naqd al-rijāl, ed. ʿalī muḥammad al-bijāwī (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, n.d.), iii, 108-10. the tradition is indeed cited by scholars of the shiʿa in anti-sunni polemics; e.g., see (ps.)-faḍl ibn shādhān, al-īḍāḥ, ed. jalāl al-dīn al-ḥusaynī al-armawī al-muḥaddith (tehran: dānashgāh-ye tehran, 1984), 518 and ibn bābūyah al-ṣadūq (d. 381/991), al-khiṣāl, 171-73. however, the longest, best-preserved versions appear in sunni works. see ṭabarī, tārīkh, i, 2139-41; ṭabarānī, al-muʿjam al-kabīr, i, 62-63; ibn ʿasākir, dimashq, xxx, 417-23. 34 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) narrative of the succession to the prophet and his celebration of the survival of the pro-ʿalid cause and its realization during the caliphate of ʿalī—despite all the tragedies inflicted upon the cause subsequently—leave little doubt about the shiʿite perspective put forward in his chronicle. at its seminal stages, islamic historiography never split into merely two hostile binaries, with the sunni cult of the ṣaḥāba at one end and the shiʿite exaltation of the prophet’s household and damnation of their rivals on the other. as scott lucas has compellingly argued, the rāfiḍī position cultivated by certain shiʿa and the cult of the ṣaḥāba espoused by the ḥadīth folk were, rather, two extreme poles of a spectrum that accommodated a panoply of perspectives on the prophet’s companions (ʿuthmānī, murjiʾī, zaydī, ibāḍī, muʿtazilī, etc.)69—albeit historiographical perspectives that proved less durable than the two that came to predominate in the ensuing centuries. yet, a careful reading of the narratives al-yaʿqūbī recounts in his chronicle allows one to easily discern his place at the ‘rejectionist’, or rāfiḍī, shiʿite end of this spectrum. hence, any attempt to underplay how trenchantly pro-ʿalī al-yaʿqūbī’s history is or to minimize its hostility towards abū bakr and ʿumar will miss an important point about the chronicle. the narratives honed in yaʿqūbī’s chronicle are simply irreconcilable even with the so-called ‘benign shiʿism (tashayyuʿ ḥasan)’ tolerated among the ḥadīth folk. he belongs in an entirely different genus of scholars than those scholars who were famous for espousing the benign shiʿism tolerated by the ḥadīth folk. partiality towards ʿalī indisputably features in the writings of such giant ḥadīth scholars as al-nasāʾī (d. c. 303/915), who may have even died for his dedication to ʿalī,70 and al-ḥākim al-naysāpūrī (d. 405/1014), who courted controversy for his staunch criticism of muʿāwiya ibn abī sufyān;71 yet, even given what little we know about the precise shiʿite community to which al-yaʿqūbī belonged, the chronicle signals to us that he stands apart from figures such as these. none of these figures nor their likes would have tolerated or espoused the portrayals and characterizations of abū bakr and ʿumar that one finds in al-yaʿqūbī’s history. finally, if one does not read al-yaʿqūbī’s history as a shiʿite chronicle, one must ponder what is lost. specifically, one loses perspective of al-yaʿqūbī’s own authorial self-awareness and the stakes at play for him in the process of crafting the narratives of his chronicle. al-yaʿqūbī is but one of many abbasid-era historians writing in a tumultuous sea of contested historical memory, but his authorial vision for his chronicle sets him apart from his contemporaries in palpable ways. al-yaʿqūbī’s chronicle is no mere receptacle of older, disparate accounts. as chase robinson has noted, al-yaʿqūbī chronicle is an ‘iconoclastic’ 69. scott c. lucas, constructive critics, ḥadīth literature, and the articulation of sunnī islam: the legacy of the generation of ibn saʿd, ibn maʿīn, and ibn ḥanbal (leiden: brill, 2004), 221-85. cf. anthony, the caliph and the heretic, 101-6 and w. madelung, “al-haytham b. ʿadī on the offences of the caliph ʿuthmān,” in centre and periphery within the borders of islam: proceedings of the 23rd congress of l’union européenne des arabisants et islamisantes, ed. g. contu (leuven: peeters, 2012), 47-51. 70. christopher melchert, “the life and works of al-nasāʾī,” journal of semitic studies 59 (2014): 403-5. 71. s. c. lucas, “al-ḥākim al-naysābūrī and the companions of the prophet: an original sunnī voice in the shīʿī century,” in the heritage of arabo islamic learning: studies presented to wadad kadi, eds. maurice pomerantz and aram shahin (leiden: brill, 2015), 258-71. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 35 one that sails against the prevailing winds the emerging sunni historiography;72 certainly his shiʿite perspective factors into this iconoclastic perspective. hence, to lose sight of the extent to which al-yaʿqūbī filled his chronicle with narratives crafted to resonate with the vision of the early islamic community cultivated by the shiʿa causes modern readers to lose sight of how he navigated this sea of historical memory. losing sight of al-yaʿqūbī’s shiʿi perspective blinds us to his authorial vision and, therefore, a key contribution of his chronicle to islamic historiography. 72. islamic historiography (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003), 36, 132-33. 36 • sean w. anthony al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) bibliography amir-moezzi, mohammad ali. spirituality of shiʿi islam. london: i.b. tauris, 2011. anthony, sean w. the caliph and the heretic: ibn sabaʾ and the origins of shiʿism. leiden: brill, 2012. ʿāṣī, ḥusayn. al-yaʿqūbī: ʿaṣruh, sīrat ḥayātih, wa-manhajuhu l-tārīkhī. 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1879-1901. thaʿālibī, abū manṣūr al-. yatīmat al-dahr wa-maḥāsin ahl al-ʿaṣr, 4 vols. edited by muḥammad muḥyī al-dīn ʿabd al-ḥamīd. cairo: al-saʿāda, 1956-58. tor, deborah. “an historiographical re-examination of the appointment and death of ʿalī al-riḍā,” der islam 71 (2001): 103-28. van ess, josef. theologie und gesellschaft im 2. und 3. jahrhundert hidschra: eine geschichte des religiösen denkens im frühen islam, 6 vols. berlin: w. de gruyter, 1991-97. witkam, jan just. inventory of the oriental manuscripts of the library of the university of leiden. leiden: ter lugt, 2006-2016. yāqūt al-ḥamawī. muʿjam al-udabāʾ (irshād al-arīb ilā maʿrifat al-adīb), 7 vols. edited by iḥsān ʿabbās. beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1993. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) was ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī a shiʿite historian? • 41 —. muʿjam al-buldān. 5 vols. beirut: dār ṣādir, 1977. yazigi, maya. “defense and validation in shiʿi and sunni tradition: the case of muḥammad b. abī bakr.” studia islamica 98-99 (2004): 49-70. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 413-415 book review is an exhaustive treatment of the life a n d c a r e e r o f m u ḥ a m m a d a l n a f s a l z a k i y y a w a r r a n t e d ? a q u i c k browse of recent secondary literature— maher jarrar’s bibliography (“ibrāhīm b. ʿabdallāh,” ei3) is very useful in this regard—suggests that the need has been long-standing.1 does the present volume thus fill a lacuna? to my mind, only partly so. elad has gone further than any other modern scholar in collecting the material required for the sort of book that would satisfy. for this reason, he deserves much credit. but i would have had him proceed many steps further. he has effectively cataloged what one can only think are the most relevant references in the early and medieval arabic canon. but he holds back from drawing out full conclusions and, 1. maher jarrar, “ibrāhīm b. ʿabdallāh,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. kate fleet, gudrun krämer, denis matringe, john nawas, and everett rowson (leiden: brill online), https://referenceworks.brillonline. com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/ibrahim-b-abdallah-com_32328. © 2020 matthew gordon. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. thus, from providing an account for any but the most interested specialists. most modern discussions center on the rebellion organized by al-nafs al-zakiyya (“the pure soul”) and his reportedly talented full brother (ibrāhīm) against the new abbasid caliph, abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr, in 145/762. the abbasids had only recently donned the caliphal mantle, and thus a concerted challenge from members of a key circle of elite islamic society was no minor matter. to the contrary: it brought into question the very claims to office of the new regime. the episode also contributed an early and significant chapter to the long history of middle eastern messianism; we owe a goodly portion of the extant literature on al-nafs al-zakiyya to the interest of later muslim amikam elad, the rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya in 145/762: ṭālibīs and early ʿabbāsīs in conflict. islamic history and civilization 118 (leiden: brill, 2016), 527 pp., map. isbn 978-9-00422-989-1. price: $257 (cloth or e-book). matthew s. gordon miami university, oxford, ohio (gordonms@miamioh.edu) https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/ibrahim-b-abdallah-com_32328 https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/ibrahim-b-abdallah-com_32328 mailto:gordonms%40miamioh.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 414 • matthew s. gordon writers in the messianic element of his rebellion. a puzzling feature of the present volume is that elad says little about ibrāhīm, despite the many indications that, like raúl for fidel, he sustained much of his brother’s activity and, indeed, pressed on following muḥammad’s demise until his own death months later (jarrar’s reference to al-yaʿqūbī’s taʾrīkh is to be amended).2 that modern scholarship is mostly concerned with the rebellion itself makes sense. the events of the uprising and, especially, its connection with messianic and sectarian patterns of early islamic society are properly situated at the center of any account. elad provides the stuff of a richer context, however, in bringing together a wealth of detail on, for example, the person and family of al-nafs al-zakiyya. the man’s stutter, which he tried to control by slapping his thigh (pp. 34–36), and his prominent black mole, a sign of the mahdi for biographers and followers alike (pp. 44–46), are details one is happy to have. they enrich the picture one has of the man and his career and of the ingredients of a nascent arabic sectarian literary tradition; as with so much else in early arabic letters, one is left to choose how best to account for such seemingly intimate information. elad fills out our picture of the sociopolitical as well as the personal scene, very helpfully bringing together what the arabic canon says of the seemingly profound impact that the uprising had upon local, that is, hijazi/ m e d i n a n s o c i e t y ( c h a p t e r s 7 a n d 8 ) . clansmen and kin took sides, and thus civil divisions ensued, with both immediate and 2. aḥmad b. abī yaʿqūb al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, ed. m. th. houtsma as ibn wadhih qui dicitur al-ja’qubi historiae, 2 vols. (leiden: e. j. brill, 1883). the correct reference is 2:246. long-term consequences across subsequent local and imperial (abbasid) history. elad, in fact, concludes the volume (pp. 361–62) on this very point. but for stutter and social antagonism alike, elad declines the opportunity to tell us what to think of all this personal detail and social furor. he leaves it instead to “a future study” (p. 233), presumably to be written by other hands, to fill in the color, action, and, above all, conclusions. t h e b o o k i s i n t h i s s e n s e a c a t a l o g . is this right? one cannot, of course, insist that it be otherwise: we write the books we write. it is also the case that history is written ultimately in collaboration with the generations that follow (who may, of course, raise objections) as well as with those that precede. one throws out arguments and ideas for younger colleagues to chew on. on this score, elad has performed a valuable service, and one cannot but be impressed by the doggedness with which he has worked through the arabic sources. the volume is thick with references, nearly every page crowded with notes. a brief description of his method (pp. 11–12) points to his use of such large repositories of arabic texts as al-maktaba al-shāmila and others. so he has prepared the way for a rounded recounting of an episode deeply significant to the rise of the abbasid polity, to early islamic sectarian history, and to the more local history of the hijaz. but, again, why stop so abruptly? elad probably knows more about al-nafs al-zakiyya than any living scholar and, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) amikam elad’s the rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya in 145/762 • 415 thus, would certainly seem to have much more to tell us. the many indications are there; in brief comments scattered through the book, he suggests perfectly cogent ways in which to consider the different “data” that he has so carefully collected. but there is also the view that we—scholars of arab, middle eastern, and islamic history, society, and religion— ought to do our utmost to reach an audience beyond our own circles. consider quite a different version, hugh kennedy’s pithy account of the uprising in when b a g h d a d r u l e d t h e m u s l i m w o r l d . 3 granted, kennedy wrote his book for a wider audience than that sought by elad. the point, though, is that it is accessible 3. hugh kennedy, when baghdad ruled the muslim world: the rise and fall of islam’s greatest dynasty (cambridge, ma: da capo press, 2006), 21–26. and dramatic: one engages, so to speak, with al-nafs al-zakiyya and his challenge to the existing imperial order. but it has its problems. to my mind, kennedy’s version is too quick and too easy, and says little by way of conclusion regarding, say, the shaping of distinct models of araboislamic leadership or, more specifically, the alid-abbasid confrontation. kennedy, quite unlike elad, is also far too content to parrot one version—namely, al-ṭabarī’s— of the events. this is really the point: elad is positioned to offer a nuanced and contextualized rendition of the rebel and his rebellion, in which we would grapple with a body of full and often disparate references. it would make for fine history. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 113-140 reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors of the seventh-century middle east robert g. hoyland institute for the study of the ancient world, new york university (rgh2@nyu.edu) introduction this article began its life as a reply to some negative reviews of my book in god’s path: the arab conquests and the first islamic empire (oxford: oxford university press, 2015), in particular those by fred donner and peter webb. however, in the process of reflection i became more interested in the issues which underlay their reviews, especially the matter of the identity of the key participants in the arabian conquest of the middle east. both scholars have written books which deal innovatively with this issue and which, despite their recent date, have already had a substantial impact upon the field.1 this is due in part to the originality of their ideas and in part to the current enthusiasm for this topic, for, as webb has recently observed, “the study of communal identities in the early muslim-era middle east is perhaps 1. donner articulates his theory in three works: “from believers to muslims: confessional self-identity in the early islamic community,” al-abhath 50-51 (2002-03): 9-53; muhammad and the believers. at the origins of islam (cambridge ma: belknap press, 2010); and his review of my in god’s path in al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 134-40. webb presents his theory in his book imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016), on which see philip wood’s review in this issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā; in his review of my in god’s path: “the march of islam”, times literary supplement, 13 march 2015, 24; and in the article in the following footnote. abstract this paper offers some reflections on the nature of the identity of the seventh-century arabian conquerors of the middle east based on the author’s own experience of writing about this topic in his book in god’s path (oxford 2015). this subject has been considerably enlivened by the influential and provocative publications of fred donner (muhammad and the believers, 2010) and peter webb (imagining the arabs, 2016). what follows is an attempt to respond to and engage with these publications and to offer some thoughts on how this debate might productively move forward. mailto:rgh2%40nyu.edu 114 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the most direct pathway into the heart of pressing questions about the rise of islam”.2 what follows is a discussion of their theories about the identity of the arabian conquerors together with some ideas of my own and replies to what i feel are misunderstandings of my position in in god’s path. since the three of us have thought long and hard about this topic, it is to be hoped that it will be of some benefit to readers to see our different perspectives contrasted and compared. although it is by now something of a ritual, it is necessary to highlight, for newcomers at least, the paucity of documentation coming from within the community of the prophet muhammad in the first sixty years after his death in 632 ce, which makes it difficult to say anything concrete about this community’s self-definition. it is not just that documents are few, but also they are not really of the right sort (mostly they are army requisition notes, tax demands, prayers and coin legends) to yield information on this topic.3 inevitably this has led to a proliferation of theories about what was going on. it is crucial to bear in mind, though, that all are to some extent speculative—notwithstanding their purveyors’ often assiduous protestations to the contrary—and the scraps of evidence that are deployed to underpin them are open to different interpretations. for example, the most striking thing in the eyes of many is that muhammad is not mentioned on any media until the 680s, but conclusions from that vary from the non-existence of muhammad (yehuda nevo) to the ecumenical nature of early islam (fred donner).4 we do of course have voluminous accounts from muslim authors of the ninth century telling us exactly what muhammad and his companions said and did throughout their lives, but since these also serve as legal and moral proof texts there is good reason to be critical of their worth as historical texts.5 one solution offered in the past was to “step outside” and use non-muslim sources that predate the crystallization of the official muslim view of their sacred past in the second half of the eighth century.6 i adopted that solution myself for some time, though also striving “to bring out the parallels and similarities between the reports of muslim and non-muslim witnesses”.7 however, i have become convinced in recent years that 2. “identity and social formation in the early caliphate,” in routledge handbook on early islam, ed. herbert berg (london and new york: routledge, 2017), 129. 3. jeremy johns, “archaeology and the early history of islam: the first seventy years,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 46 (2003): 411-36. 4. yehuda nevo and judith koren, crossroads to islam: the origins of the arab religion and the arab state (new york: prometheus books, 2003), esp. iii.3. donner promotes his ecumenical islam theory in all three of his works listed in note 1 above. 5. there is a huge literature on this topic, but arguably the best introductions to it are still patricia crone, slaves on horses: the evolution of the islamic polity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1980), 3-17, and r.s. humphreys, islamic history: a framework for inquiry (princeton: princeton university press, 1991), ch. 3. 6. patricia crone and michael cook, hagarism: the making of the islamic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1977), 3. 7. robert hoyland, seeing islam as others saw it (princeton: darwin press, 1997), 591. i would like to note here that i did not write seeing islam in order to refute hagarism, which some students have told me is a commonly held opinion, but rather to penetrate deeper into the question of islam’s origins, with the idea that i was going to find out the truth of the matter (strange as that seems to my now cynical/wiser self), but certainly with no sense that hagarism was wrong. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 115 this approach is not really valid, since the two bodies of material are much more intertwined than had previously been thought,8 and so i changed tack. as i put it in my introduction to in god’s path: i do not want to champion non-muslim sources over muslim sources; indeed, it is my argument that the division is a false one. muslims and non-muslims inhabited the same world, interacted with one another and even read one another’s writings. in this book the distinction i make is simply between earlier and later sources, and i favor the former over the latter irrespective of the religious affiliation of their author (pp. 2-3).9 fred donner and jens scheiner failed to pick up on this change of stance in their reviews and it was also missed by glen bowersock in his recent book, who likewise assumed that i was following my older position of distinguishing between non-muslim and muslim sources.10 in the case of in god’s path, i chose instead to write according to the methods that a historian of any other civilization would employ, avoiding the usual sectarian approach of islamic studies and privileging early sources over later ones irrespective of whether they were by muslims or non-muslims. the pioneer of this approach was lawrence conrad, who has greatly influenced my thinking, and it has recently been taken up by antoine borrut in his sophisticated discussion of the ways in which the later umayyad caliphs were portrayed and remembered.11 terminology if we are to investigate the identity of the members of the early islamic community, we need to pay heed to the ways in which they referred to themselves and in which others referred to them. of course, we have to be attentive to the fact that there was often a discrepancy between the two sets of terms, since outsiders to a group often apply labels to its members that they would not use themselves and that they may reject as inaccurate or offensive. given that my book in god’s path was aimed at a non-expert audience, i decided to use the widely accepted terms arab and muslim, but, as i acknowledge, there are problems with this: both terms [arab and muslim] are to some degree inaccurate, since the conquerors were neither all arabs nor all muslims, and the meaning of both terms was in any case 8. noted in my theophilus of edessa’s chronicle and the circulation of historical knowledge in late antiquity and early islam (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2011), 26-32. 9. my source appendix on pages 231-33 sometimes harked back to my earlier stance, as unfortunately an unrevised version of it was used in the final text. 10. donner, “review of in god’s path,” 135; jens scheiner, “reflections on hoyland’s in god’s path,” bustan: the middle east book review 7 (2016): 25-26; glen bowersock, the crucible of islam (cambridge ma: harvard university press, 2017), 5. not appreciating my intention, donner and scheiner censure me for not acknowledging those who had advocated using non-muslim sources before me. 11. conrad already advocated this approach in his “theophanes and the arabic historical tradition: some indications of intercultural transmission,” byzantinische forschungen 15, 1990, 1-44). see antoine borut, entre mémoire et pouvoir. l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbasides (leiden: brill, 2011), which discusses this exact point on pages 137-66. 116 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) evolving in the immediate aftermath of the conquests (p. 5).12 moreover, though these two terms are the usual ones employed by ninth-century muslim authors to designate the followers of muhammad and the arabian conquerors of the middle east, they only feature very rarely in our surviving seventh-century texts. so what did the early conquerors call themselves? the conquerors as non-confessional believers donner dislikes use of the terms “muslim” and “islam” for muhammad’s time and the first decades thereafter because he feels it is wrong to assume that “islam from its earliest days constituted a separate religious confession distinct from others.”13 this is true inasmuch as it certainly cannot be what muhammad had wanted to achieve. the qurʾan makes it clear that he believed that there had only ever been one true religion (dīn al-ḥaqq)—christianity and judaism were simply the result of people introducing false doctrines into it—and he was now calling on everyone to return to the original pure form that had been conveyed by all god’s messengers from adam to himself. as the qurʾan says, “with regard to religion we have prescribed for you what we entrusted to noah, and what we have imparted to you is (the same as) what we entrusted to abraham, moses and jesus: uphold the (one true) religion and do not become divided over it” (42:13). so muhammad was not trying to devise a new creed. many of his contemporaries, of course, disagreed and regarded him as an innovator, but this is a very common experience for would-be religious reformers: they preach a return to the true form of the faith, their reform program is rejected and their followers are repudiated by the mainstream, which means that these followers, if they hold firm to the reformer’s utterings, will end up by giving rise to a new sect rather than reforming the old faith. this is what happened in the case of jesus, luther, mirza ghulam ahmad and many others.14 the ur-monotheism preached by muhammad, by the very fact that it was, in his eyes, the only true faith of all mankind, was in this sense free of all sectarian divisions, or as donner puts it: “independent of confessional identities.”15 muhammad wished to bring together under one umbrella all those who would affirm the oneness of god and the imminence of the day of judgement and who were prepared to live piously.16 this is unproblematic. it is 12. to get round this problem of the evolution of the term muslim some modern scholars coin new terms; e.g. aziz al-azmeh, muslim kingship: power and the sacred in muslim, christian and pagan politics (london: i.b. tauris, 1997), 63 (proto-muslim), and id., the times of history: universal topics in islamic historiography (budapest: central european university, 2007), 102 (palaeo-muslim). 13. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 9. 14. there is a slight complication in muhammad’s case in that we do not really know the nature of the religion in which he was raised. 15. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 11. 16. possibly for apocalyptic reasons, i.e. an ingathering of mankind under one religious banner in time for judgement day, as is argued by donner (donner, “from believers to muslims,”13). however, it is difficult to distinguish in our sources between eschatological speculation (continual and ubiquitous; see chapter 8 of my seeing islam) and apocalyptic action, i.e. a decision that we must act now to be ready for the imminent end. for an excellent recent argument in favor of the latter in the case of muhammad’s community, see stephen al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 117 easy to believe that muhammad was happy to welcome everyone to his new community— islam still today has a strong missionary component to it and accepts all comers without restriction.17 moreover, it was increasingly taken as a given in the late roman world that there was only one true religion and that it was the same religion that had been imparted by god to abraham. as paul the apostle put it in his letter to the galatians, “the believers (those of belief) are children of abraham” (3:7). paul’s attitude towards the jews is similar to that of muhammad vis-à-vis jews and christians: they are still children of abraham, it is just that they are “disobedient children for rejecting jesus as the christ”.18 interestingly, paul also has a universalist view of “the faith of abraham” (romans 4:16), emphasizing that it is belief in christ that saves (“the righteous will live by faith”, galatians 3:11), not practice of the law, and in this respect “there is neither jew nor gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in christ jesus” (galatians 3:28). however, donner throws in an extra ingredient which would make muhammad’s community unusual: “believers could be members of any one of several religious confessions— christians or jews19 for example—if the doctrines of their religious confession were consonant with strict monotheism and not too inimical to the believer’s other basic ideas.”20 so within muhammad’s community, says donner, there were jews and christians who continued to be jews and christians, following their own customs and laws, but acknowledging muhammad as “the community’s supreme political authority.”21 the idea is interesting, but is it backed up by the evidence? no source actually specifies an individual who was in this situation,22 but does the qurʾan allow for this eventuality? let us have a look, beginning with the qurʾanic verse that donner regards as a clear support of his thesis: those who believe, and jews and sabians and christians—those who believe in god and the last day and who act righteously—will have no fear and shall not grieve (on the day of judgement) (5:69) shoemaker, “‘the reign of god has come’: eschatology and empire in late antiquity and early islam,” arabica 61 (2014): 514-58. 17. in the fourteenth century, for example, ibn khaldūn wrote: “in the muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the (muslim) mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to islam either by persuasion or by force” (the muqaddimah, tr. franz rosenthal, princeton: princeton university press, 1958, 473 = i.3.31). 18. jeffrey siker, disinheriting the jews: abraham in early christian controversy (louisville ky: westminster/ john knox press, 1991), 13. 19. it is a moot question whether jews at this time would have thought in terms of being a believer—was not being a jew the key to salvation rather than being a believer? (see menachem kellner, must a jew believe anything (oxford: littman library, 1999)—my thanks to adam silverstein for this reference)—but i leave that aside for the purposes of this article. 20. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 11. 21. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 16. 22. donner points to people who worked in the conquerors’ administration or spoke positively about them, but as patricia crone observes in her review of donner’s book, “evidence for warm attitudes and collaborators is not evidence for full integration without conversion” (“among the believers,” tablet, august 10, 2010: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/42023/among-the-believers, paragraph 5). http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/42023/among-the-believers 118 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) one could interpret this for or against donner, since on the one hand, “those who believe” are distinguished from jews, sabians and christians, intimating an awareness of confessional boundaries, but, on the other hand, they are categorized together with jews, sabians and christians in respect of their common belief in god and the last day, their righteous behavior and an implication of easy entry into heaven.23 thus, although it is not made explicit in what way other monotheist groups related to muhammad’s community in this world, they certainly would appear to be on a par with muhammad’s community in the next world, sharing equally in the benefits of the afterlife. as 5:65 says: “if the people of the book believe and are god-fearing we shall efface their evil deeds and admit them to the gardens of bliss”. this implies, says donner, that, in the qurʾanic view, “proper piety, avoidance of sinful behavior, is what saves, alongside a basic abstract belief in one god and the last day” and consequently “it is virtually immaterial to which monotheism community one belongs.”24 this is nicely illustrated by 2:111-112, which first quotes what the people of the book say: “only those who are jews and christians will enter paradise” and then contrasts it with the qurʾan’s own position: “rather whoever submits before god and is virtuous will have his reward with his lord, they shall have no fear and shall not grieve.” christians and jews could, therefore, continue on in their faith as long as they did not do anything that violated the core tenets of the original monotheism and as long as they properly followed the message that god had addressed specifically to them: “if they uphold the torah and the gospel and what has been sent down to them from their lord, they will eat (the fruits of paradise) that are above them and below their feet” (5:66).25 donner postulates that “those individuals among the ahl al-kitāb who embrace right belief and right action will be welcomed among the believers,”26 and the qurʾan does frequently emphasize that these two qualities will provide succor on the day of judgement: whoever follows my guidance will have no fear and shall not grieve (2:38) whoever believes and is righteous will have no fear and shall not grieve (6:48) whoever is god-fearing and is righteous will have no fear and shall not grieve (7:35) as for he who believes and does good he will have the finest recompense (18:88) whoever says our lord is god and is upright will have no fear and shall not grieve (46:13) however, even if muhammad allowed jews and christians to join his non-confessional form of monotheism, it does not mean that many of them did so. the qurʾan seems to suggest that 23. the verse is repeated at 2:62 with the addition of “they will have their reward with their lord”. another list has: believers, jews, sabians, christians, magians and associators (alladhīna ashrakū), and this time it is said that god will distinguish between them on resurrection day (22:17)—presumably the magians and the associators do not get an easy entry into heaven. note that the expression “will have no fear and shall not grieve” is particular to these expressions about the rewards for virtuous believers (see below) and seems to imply that all will go well for them on judgement day. 24. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 20. 25. though note that the qurʾan only ever talks about the situation of righteous jews and christians in the next life, never in this life. 26. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 21. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 119 only a few of them accepted the call, while most of their co-religionaries were dismissive. sometimes this is stated only briefly: “among them is a moderate community (umma muqtaṣida), though most of them act evilly” (5:66); “among them are believers, but most of them are wicked” (3:110); “they (the jews) do not believe except for a few” (4:46). occasionally it is set out at length: “among the people of the book is an upright community; they recite god’s revelations through the night, prostrate, believe in god and the last day, command good and prohibit evil, are quick to do good things and are righteous” (3:113-114). it is often argued that these were judaeo-christians of one sort or another,27 but it may be that they were regular christians who decided to accept muhammad’s christological position.28 two conditions for membership of muhammad’s community perhaps limited its appeal. the first was submission to muhammad as head of the community, for discussion of which see the next section below. the second condition was a strict monotheism that allowed no room for any divine entities besides god; muhammad’s strongly anti-trinitarian stance, in particular, would have posed a problem for any orthodox christian. the opposite of believers are deniers (kāfirūn) and the qurʾan makes it abundantly clear that those who say that god is “the messiah son of mary” or “the third of three” or that jesus was a son of god are very definitely deniers and not believers (e.g. 5:17: “those who say that god is christ son of mary have certainly disbelieved”). what they had to do is spelled out in verse 4:171: “o people of the book, do not exceed proper bounds in religion and speak only the truth about god. the messiah, jesus son of mary, was only a messenger of god and his word, which he cast into mary [...] so believe in god and his apostles and do not say ‘three’; desist (from that), it will be better for you.” donner takes this to mean that christians were “seen as suitable for ‘rehabilitation’ and inclusion among the believers.”29 this seems reasonable, but surely only in the way that you can join most religious groups, namely by disavowing your former incorrect beliefs, in this case the trinity. donner adds a couple of extra mitigating factors regarding “passages that seem to contradict our hypothesis”, namely that “these particular qurʾanic verses were not widely known among the believers” or that the believers were happy to live with the contradictions between the false doctrines of the people of the book among them and the qurʾanic doctrines.30 yet christian trinitarian views were diametrically opposed to the original monotheism that muhammad sought to revive, and both were core beliefs to the respective communities, so it is hard to see how they could pass unnoticed or be disregarded. an illustration of how non-muslim cooperation with muhammad could have worked is illustrated by a document that is commonly known as the “constitution of medina”. it marks the foundation of muhammad’s polity and is widely considered to have been faithfully 27. most recently see patricia crone, “jewish christianity and the qurʾan,” journal of near eastern studies 74 and 75 (2015 and 2016): 225-53 and 1-21. this option is then seen as explaining the origin of some of muhammad’s christological doctrines (a prophet but not son of god, not crucified, preached to the israelites etc). 28. of course, christians who adopted muhammad’s anti-trinitarian position would have run the risk of excommunication from their own community. 29. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 26. 30. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 26-28. 120 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) transmitted and to be what it says it is, namely “a writing from the prophet muhammad between the believers and the muslims of quraysh and yathrib, and those who follow them, join with them and fight alongside them”.31 those who adhere to this document are “a single community (umma wāḥida) to the exclusion of the (other) people” (§1) and for them “the inner part (jawf) of yathrib (i.e. medina) is sacred” (§49).32 each clan is still responsible for its own affairs, but “they help one another against whoever fights the people (who are signatories) of this document” (§45), and god and muhammad are the arbiters for all parties (§§26, 52). importantly for donner, among its adherents are the jews who are specifically catered for in a number of clauses. as i noted back in 1995, the document seems to have been “meant as a blueprint for a politico-religious community, uniting muslims and jews under the protection of god (dhimmat allāh) so that they might fight” god’s enemies.33 however, its purpose is not to advocate a non-confessional form of monotheism, but simply to say that confessional differences should be put aside (“the jews have their religion and the muslims have their religion”, §28) so that all efforts could be directed towards fighting the unbelievers. a unifying formula is advanced that all parties could agree to: a believer is “he who has affirmed what is in this document and believes in god and the last day” (§25). although signatories are most frequently designated as “believers” (32 times), the terms “muslim” (3 times) and “jew” (6 times, excluding the term “jews of banū...”) are used, which suggests some distinctions are made within the overall category of believers. again one could take this as for or against donner’s theory. the participants in the constitution of medina could be part of a grand a-confessional religious movement, but it could also be argued that what the constitution shows is that muhammad had formed a community of “muslims”/“submitters (to the one god)” and that he was willing to enter into military pacts with other monotheist communities for the sake of the greater purpose of defeating ungodly opponents. in either case, though, donner is right that belief in one god and the imminent reality of the last day was a key component of the identity of the members of muhammad’s community, who referred to one another as “believers”. the conquerors as muhammadans both christian and muslim scholars who strove to categorize religious groups would typically name them after their founder (e.g. bardaisanites, marcionites, lutherans, calvinists, azraqites, ibadites, zaydis, ahmadis, etc). for at least four centuries european scholars did the 31. the sense of the phrase “the believers and the muslims” is unclear (perhaps a hendiadys), and donner’s explanation (donner, “from believers to muslims,” 33) that believers = believing jews + muslims is not very satisfying (if “believers” comprise both jews and muslims, there would be no need to say “and the muslims”). the constitution also mentions “the muhājirūn of quraysh” (§3) with no hint that this group overlaps with the believers and/or muslims. 32. the paragraph numbering is that of michael lecker, the constitution of medina: muhammad’s first legal document (princeton: darwin press, 2004), who provides text, translation and commentary and cites earlier literature. for a more recent study see saïd arjomand, “the constitution of medina: a socio-legal interpretation of muhammad’s acts of foundation of the umma,” international journal of middle east studies 41 (2009): 555-75. 33. “sebeos, the jews and the rise of islam,” muslim-jewish relations 2 (1995): 94. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 121 same thing and frequently referred to believers in muhammad’s mission as muhammadans.34 it was dropped out of respect to muslims, who objected that they followed god, not a man. i would certainly not recommend re-adopting it, but the term does serve to remind us that acceptance of muhammad’s mission was one of the key defining features of islam from its first days. our earliest christian witnesses to the conquests, from the late 630s onwards, describe the conquerors with reference to muhammad.35 and the north mesopotamian monk and chronicler john bar penkāyē, who states that he is writing in the year 687, makes clear the importance of muhammad to his followers, calling him their “guide” and “instructor” and asserting that “they kept to the tradition of muhammad [...] to such an extent that they inflicted the death penalty on anyone who was seen to act brazenly against his laws”.36 both the qurʾan and the constitution of medina reinforce this view of muhammad, that he was supreme arbiter and leader of his community. both make the point that if members have a disagreement, they should defer to the judgment of muhammad.37 a number of times the qurʾan states that “the believers are those who believe in god and his messenger” (24:62, 49:15), commands its audience to “believe in god and his messenger” (4:136, 7:158, 57:7, 64:8), warns that god’s enemies are those who “disbelieve in god and his messenger” (9:81, 9:84, 48:13), and urges its members to “fight those who do not believe in god and the last day and who do not forbid what god and his messenger have forbidden” (9:29). and occasionally the simple promises of reward to those who believe and behave are extended to include allegiance to muhammad; e.g. “whoever of you is obedient to god and his messenger and does good will be brought his reward” (33:31). this is of course pretty much in line with the standard muslim confession of faith—“i witness that there is no god but god and that muhammad is his messenger”, the first step in becoming a muslim since at least the eighth century. it is true that other verses say only that believers were those who believed in god and the last day and do not mention muhammad, as pointed out by donner,38 but that just goes to show that none of these elements were as yet formalized into a rigid creed, so we cannot justifiably favor some elements over others. donner seeks to play down muhammad’s status, especially his role as a prophet, since he worries that this would give muhammad’s community greater confessional distinctiveness.39 it is nevertheless evident from the qurʾan’s own testimony that many did find this membership criterion too much for them and they rejected muhammad’s role as a messenger for a variety of reasons, such as fear that he was some sort of sorcerer (14:47, 25:8, 26:153, 26:185, 34. probably the last two major western academics to do so were h.a.r. gibb (d. 1971): mohammedanism: an historical survey (oxford: oxford university press, 1949), and joseph schacht (d. 1969): the origins of muhammadan jurisprudence, (oxford: clarendon press, 1950). 35. see my “the earliest christian writings on muhammad: an appraisal,” in the biography of muhammad: the issue of the sources, ed. harald motzki (leiden: brill, 2000), 277 n. 6 (“a prophet who has appeared with the saracens”), 277-78 (the ṭayyāyē d-mḥmṭ); and two longer descriptions come in the 660s—the khuzistan chronicle and sebeos (ibid., 278 and 283)—that make muhammad the leader and instigator of the conquerors. 36. ibid., 284. 37. qurʾan 4:65; constitution of medina, §§26, 52. 38. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 38. 39. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 34-44. 122 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 30:58, 46:7), or that he could not be genuine since only angels brought down messages from god.40 nevertheless, the qurʾan does make muhammad say that “i am only a man like you”, it is just that “it was revealed to me that your god is one god” (41:6), and so there was no big gulf that separated him from ordinary mortals. moreover, accepting him did not require rejecting any of the previous prophets and warners that god had sent to mankind, which in the qurʾan’s inclusivist worldview was a particularly long line-up, comprising figures like adam, noah, lot and job, and a couple of arabian characters (hud and salih), as well as the a-listers abraham, moses and jesus. a big change in the status of muhammad for his community is heralded by three arabsasanian dirhams on the margin of which is inscribed a truncated muslim profession of faith: “in the name of god, muhammad is the messenger of god”. all were minted at bīshāpūr in fārs and bear the usual imperial bust on the obverse and a sasanian fire-altar on the reverse. two of them are dated to the years 66 and 67, which in the hijri era correspond to 685-86 and 686-87 ce, and the issuing authority is named as ʿabd al-malik ibn ʿabd allāh. he was married to the sister of the would-be-caliph ibn al-zubayr, and his brother was entrusted with the governorship of sīstān by ibn al-zubayr’s brother in ah 66. the earliest attested islamic profession of faith, therefore, comes from the party of ibn al-zubayr, the rival to ʿabd al-malik (685-705 ce). the contemporary north mesopotamian monk john bar penkāyē says of him that “he had come out of zeal for the house of god,” and so it was presumably to bolster his religious claims that he placed the name of muhammad on his coins. ʿabd al-malik, once he had triumphed over ibn al-zubayr and all other contenders, decided to take over this idea, though prefacing it with “there is no god but god”, thus making the confession of faith that is still used today.41 the conquerors as emigrants (muhājirūn) the most substantial corpus of seventh-century material that we possess are the numerous papyri related to the local arab administration in egypt, which start from 21/642. the new armies had not only to be paid, but also to be fed, housed and equipped, which led to a flurry of documentation as demand notes were dispatched and receipts were issued for a wide variety of goods, such as grain, oil, fodder, blankets, saddles and horses. most of these texts are written in greek and a number of them refer to the conquerors as magaritai (or mōagaritai), which is matched by the appearance of the term mhaggrē (or mhaggrāyē) in syriac literary texts from the 640s onwards. both terms are evidently intended to convey the arabic word 40. a point discussed by patricia crone, “angels versus humans as messengers of god,” in revelation, literature, and community in late antiquity, eds. p. townsend and m. vidas (tübingen: mohr siebeck, 2011), 315-36. 41. this point is made and discussed in hoyland, seeing islam, 550-52. donner’s claim that “the earliest documentary attestations of the shahāda found on coins, papyri and inscriptions dating before about 66/685, include only the first part of the later ‘double shahāda’: ‘there is no god but god’—muhammad is not yet mentioned” (donner, muhammad and the believers, 112; also donner, “from believers to muslims,” 47) is incorrect. the creedal statement “muhammad is the messenger of god” is attested in our extant documentary record before the statement “there is no god but god”. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 123 muhājir, which features in the qurʾan and the constitution of medina.42 crone and cook take it to be the earliest self-identifier of the conquerors, and they became interested in it for its biblical allusions: hagar and hijra (i.e. exodus), which in their view cast the conquerors “as hagarene participants in a hijra to the promised land”.43 in the qurʾan it is often linked with jihad, both being conducted “in god’s path”, and in early arabic poetry it means those who accept to leave tribal life to settle in a garrison city in order to participate in the conquests. it becomes contrasted with and opposed to the idea of taʿarrub, returning to desert life, or to the person of the nomad (badū or aʿrābī), who continues to lead a carefree existence as a desert pastoralist, shirking his duty to fight for god’s kingdom on earth. this clash of values is frequently encountered in verse, as when one poet worries that his beloved “is alarmed by the remnants of nomadism in a garrisoned soldier (aʿrābiyya fī muhājir)”, and in the terse statement of one early governor of iraq that “a muhājir is never a nomad (laysa bi-aʿrābī).44 the word has the meaning, then, of both soldier and settler, but to the conquered peoples it simply served as a label for the conquering armies, and in the rare cases that magaritai features in a bilingual greek-arabic document it is rendered in arabic by the word juyūsh, that is, troops.45 as i noted in my book in god’s path: since it is the most common word for the conquerors in the seventh century, employed by themselves and by the conquered, we should really speak of the conquests of the muhājirūn, rather than of the arabs or muslims, which only become popular terms in the eighth century. at the least, we should recognise this primary impulse of the movement after muhammad’s death, namely to conquer and settle, a message that must have originated in the early drive to recruit the nomadic tribes of arabia and the syrian desert (p. 102). the term muhājir also had economic implications, for it was linked to entitlement to the revenues that accrued from the conquered lands (fayʾ). the settler soldiers automatically received regular stipends (ʿaṭāʾ) paid out of these revenues, but conversely if they were to abandon the hijra lands in which they were garrisoned they would automatically forfeit 42. scheiner, “reflections on hoyland’s in god’s path,” 26, resurrects sidney griffith’s doubts about whether the greek and syriac terms were derived from the arabic, which seems unwarranted given their simultaneous appearance. see my seeing islam, 180, n. 25, and ilkka lindstedt, “muhājirūn as a name for the first/seventh century muslims,” journal of near eastern studies 74 (2015): 68 (this article provides a nice illustration of the use of the term in arabic literary texts). 43. hagarism, 9. 44. saleh said agha and tarif khalidi, “poetry and identity in the umayyad age,” al-abhath 50-51 (2002-3): 80. the governor is al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf who makes this statement in the course of his inaugural speech in 75/694 (abū jaʿfar al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk, ed. m.j. de goeje et al., leiden: brill, 1879-1901, 2: 864). note that in sabaic and ethiopic hajar means town or city, and in sabaic we find the same contrast as in arabic between muhājirūn and aʿrāb; e.g. the inscription ry508 qualifies the tribesmen of a region with the words: “their town-dwellers and their bedouin” / hgrhmw w-ʿrbhmw (cited in hoyland, in god’s path, 263). 45. jean gascou, “sur la lettre arabe de qurra b. šarīk p. sorb inv. 2344,” annales islamologiques 45 (2011): 269-71. for more discussion about the significance of the term and its occurrence in the seventh century see patricia crone, “the first-century concept of hiğra,” arabica 41 (1994): 352-87; kh. athamina, “aʿrāb and muhājirūn in the environment of amṣār,” studia islamica 66 (1987): 5-25; webb, imagining the arabs, 141-46. 124 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) their stipends.46 the term drops out of the documentary record in the first half of the eighth century as a consequence of the professionalization of the army, which meant that stipends were no longer determined by past entitlement but only in return for ongoing military service.47 the trajectory of this term, from high frequency to disappearance, nicely illustrates the fact that the identity of the early conquest community was evolving in the course of the first century of its existence. the conquerors as subjects of the “commander of the believers” moving a little later in time, we encounter the term “believers” in the context of political ideology. we have no texts from the time of the four medinan caliphs (632-60) that tell us how they conceptualized their rule,48 but the fifth caliph, muʿāwiya (661-80), styles himself as “commander of the believers” on five coins minted at darābjird in southwest iran in the year 43/663-64 and on three building inscriptions.49 this is written in persian on the coins (amyr y wrwyšnykʾn) and in greek (amira almoumenin) and arabic (amīr al-muʾminīn) on the inscriptions. there are also two papyri which are dated according to the “dispensation of the believers”/qaḑāʾ al-muʾminīn, presumably also relating to the way that muʿāwiya chose to portray the nature of his rule.50 does “believers” refer here just to the conquerors or is muʿāwiya reaching out to all monotheists? donner takes the title as evidence that “the members of muhammad’s religious movement continued to conceive of themselves in the first instance as believers as evidenced by the qurʾan,”51 i.e. as non-confessional believers in god and the last day. before accepting this, however, there are a few points that need to be borne in mind. firstly, the title only appears on coins in southwest iran, a region that was a stronghold of zoroastrianism with a very low christian and jewish population, and, as noted above, the qurʾan excludes zoroastrians from the category of believers. secondly, one could read this not as an ecumenical move by muʿāwiya, but as a projection of power, a claim to 46. this is clearly stated by abū ʿubayd al-qāsim, kitāb al-amwāl, ed. abū anas sayyid ibn rajab (cairo: dār al-hudā, 2007), 1: 317. see also petra sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state: the world of a mid-eighth-century egyptian official (oxford: oxford university press, 2013), 65 and 77-78. 47. discussed in crone, slaves, 37-41, and hoyland, in god’s path, 164-66. 48. the inscription of ʿumar i (634-44) published by ʿali ibn ibrahim ghabban (“the inscription of zuhayr, the oldest islamic inscription (24 ah/644-5 ad), the rise of the arabic script and the nature of the early islamic state”, arabian archaeology and epigraphy 19, 2008) accords him no title. this is also true of the inscriptions mentioning ʿumar and ʿuthman (644-56) published by frédéric imbert, “califes, princes et compagnons dans les graffiti du début de l’islam,” romano-arabica 15 (2015): 64-66. note that the inscription of ʿumar at ibid., 64 and fig. 2, is likely to be quite late, if not modern, since the lām of al-khaṭṭāb sits on the following khā and the medial alif is written, both of which are late features. 49. hoyland, seeing islam, 690-91. the building inscriptions are on two dams in the hijaz (in arabic) and on a renovated bath complex at ancient gadara, at the southern end of the sea of galilee (in greek). for discussion of their physical setting see donald whitcomb, “notes for an archaeology of muʿāwiya: material culture in the transitional period of believers,” in christians and others in the umayyad state, ed. antoine borrut and fred m. donner (chicago: oriental institute, 2016), 11-27. 50. yusuf raġib, “une ère inconnue d’égypte musulmane: l’ère de la juridiction des croyants,” annales islamologiques 41 (2007): 187-204. 51. donner, muhammad and the believers, 99. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 125 have usurped the byzantine emperor as god’s representative on earth. this is implied in his alleged challenge to the emperor constans: “deny (the divinity of) jesus and turn to the great god whom i worship, the god of our father abraham”.52 and it is also suggested by one of his arabic inscriptions, which commemorates the construction of a dam in the hijaz.53 it contains a request from muʿāwiya to god for forgiveness, strength and support, and a plea to let “the believers profit by him”, evidently maintaining that he stood between god and the faithful, and the latter needed him for their wellbeing. thirdly, “believer” is a standard in-group designation for any religious grouping, the out-group designation being “unbeliever”. both are, for example, ubiquitous terms in late antique christian texts, referring both to individuals and to concepts such as “the polity of the believers” and “the city of the believers, in which virtue and justice reside”.54 emperor heraclius took the title of “the believer-in-christ king” (pistos en christǭ basileus), and so muʿāwiya is effectively taking matters to their logical conclusion by proclaiming himself “commander of the believers”. assuming that his subjects did accept this designation, i.e. called themselves believers, how could we tell if they were using it in an “ecumenical” vein (à la donner) or in the same way as christians and jews used it, i.e. to indicate their membership of an in-group as defined against the out-group of unbelievers? the principal evidence that donner adduces in support of the ecumenical sense of the term is the presence of jews and christians in the new imperial administration and army. yet every successful conquering army in history has attracted to their cause, and often actively recruited, willing outsiders, and all conquerors leave in place the lower echelons of the previous administration and then tend to pick for the more senior posts the most talented, often favoring those who were not members of the ancien régime. observers often remark upon their indiscriminate choice of personnel. for example, the comment of the churchman and historian bar hebraeus about the mongols—“with the mongols there is neither slave nor free man, neither believer nor pagan [...] everyone who approaches them and offers to them any of the mammon of the world, they accept it from him, and they entrust to him whatsoever office he seeks; all they demand is strenuous service and submission”—finds some echo in the lament of john bar 52. hoyland, in god’s path, 105 (quoting sebeos, a contemporary of muʿāwiya). the importance of abraham to muslims is noted in the mid-seventh-century chronicle of khūzistān (hoyland, seeing islam, 187-88) and is of course emphasized in the qurʾan, but christians also thought that their faith “took its beginning from abraham, the first of the fathers” (adam h. becker, sources for the history of the school of nisibis, liverpool: liverpool university press, 2008, 25, citing the sixth-century bishop simeon of beth arsham). 53. george c. miles, “early islamic inscriptions near ṭāʾif in the ḥijāz,” journal of near eastern studies 7 (1948): 237-41. 54. olympiodorus the deacon (6th-century), “commentary on ecclestiastes”, patrologia graeca (ed. j.p. migne) 93 (1865): 536 (tōn piston hē politeia); procopius of gaza (d. ca. 520), “commentary on isaiah”, patrologia graeca (ed. j.p. migne) 87.2 (1865): 1857 (polin tēn tōn piston). for a wealth of other examples see under pistoi / “believers” in the thesaurus linguae graecae. note that olympiodorus’ expression (“administration/ government of the believers”) is reminiscent of the aforementioned phrase qaḑāʾ al-muʾminīn that occurs in two early arabic papyri. 126 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) penkāyē that under the new arabian rulers “there was no distinction between pagan or christian, the believer was not known from a jew”.55 the conquerors as arabs the idea that the arabian conquerors were arabs, once ubiquitous, has received quite a hammering of late. the reason for this is twofold. first, it has been noticed that the arabian conquerors seldom called themselves arabs in their writings,56 though the term does feature in arabic poetry. secondly, it has become increasingly common to define muhammad’s movement as a wholly religious one (in a spiritual/pious non-material vein) without any hint of “nationalist” or ethnic undertones.57 this point has been made most forcefully by donner and it has been embraced enthusiastically by many young scholars. in particular, peter webb has convincingly argued for “the comprehensive construction of arabness in the early muslim period.”58 as the conquerors ranged far afield, they encountered ever more peoples, many with a much more ancient and illustrious pedigree than themselves. this prompted the new leaders to use their new found wealth and power to redefine and project their identity in a way that would highlight their difference from and superiority to all other peoples. accordingly, the sense of the term arab was expanded in geographical scope (e.g. incorporating within it groups like the south arabians, who had never defined themselves as arabs before islam) and historical depth (going all the way back to abraham and his son ishmael, “father of the arabs”) and equipped with a literary patrimony (pre-islamic arabic poetry and lore). this sense of difference is reflected in the expression that occurs very often in arabic historical texts referring to the first century of islam: al-ʿarab wa-al-mawālī, the latter being members of the conquered population who became affiliated to the conquerors, usually to perform services for them. the expression would appear to correspond to the latin ingenui et clientes, where the first word means free and noble, and if so then the term arab also had a social dimension to it. moreover, from the number of times that arab is used when muslim or arabic-speaker is meant, it must have been perceived to be closely associated with the religion and language of the conquerors.59 given that the latter enjoyed privilege and 55. bar hebraeus is quoted by d.o. morgan, “who ran the mongol empire?” journal of the royal asiatic society 114 (1982): 124, who adds: “all sorts and conditions of men were inevitably conscripted by the conquering mongols to lend a hand in administering their newly-acquired possessions”. john bar penkāyē is cited in hoyland, seeing islam, 11. 56. pointed out by jan retsö, the arabs in antiquity: their history from the assyrians to the umayyads (abingdon: routledgecurzon, 2003), 505-25. 57. see especially donner, muhammad and the believers, xii, 218. 58. webb, imagining the arabs, 5. 59. e.g. the financial governor of khurāsān in the 720s wrote to the governor about the mass conversions to islam, saying: “who will you take the tax from now that all the people have become arabs” (al-ṭabarī, 2.1508); abū muslim, the leader of the abbasid revolution in the east, was ordered “to kill every arabic-speaker in khurāsān” (ibid., 3.25, 2.1937). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 127 prestige, many of the conquered applied the term to themselves, which led to competing notions about what it meant to be an arab.60 in order to reinforce his point that a new arab identity was forged in the wake of the arabian conquests, webb chose to deny the term arab any meaning for the period before this, stating bluntly that “for over 300 years before islam ‘arab’ never appears in latin or greek literature to identify arabian communities” and that “the inhabitants of the geographical area now known as arabia did not call themselves arabs”.61 however, this assertion is both unnecessary and untrue. it is unnecessary because webb’s argument for the emergence of a new arab identity after muhammad in no way precludes the existence of a different sort of arab identity before muhammad. and it is untrue because we do actually have a few examples of persons self-defining as arabs in late antiquity:62 1. “rufinus son of germanus, bird-augurer, arab” from qanawāt (southern syria) 2. marʾ al-qays, “king of all the arabs” from namāra (southern syria) 3. two soldiers named john “from the lands of the arab ethnos”, from pella 4. “john the blessed cell-dweller, arab” from near jericho the names in numbers 1, 2 and 4 signal that there was likely a big difference between this late antique arab identity and the early islamic one that we know from our muslim sources. i have argued elsewhere that the basis of this late antique arab identity was probably geographical, connected with the province of arabia that was created with the roman annexation of the nabataean kingdom in 105-6 ce, principally because the above four inscriptions were all found in the territory of roman arabia and because provinces of the roman empire tended over time to generate a sense of identity.63 this process, combined with the declaration of universal citizenship for all imperial residents in 212 ce, gave a new 60. in my in god’s path, 163, i contrast the narrower geographical/genealogical definition (from arabia/ an arabian tribe) with an emerging broader linguistic-cultural definition. see also patricia crone, “imperial trauma: the case of the arabs,” common knowledge 12 (2006): 107-16 (note p. 112: “the locally made arabs had swamped the category”). 61. webb, imagining the arabs, 47, 95; cf. ibid., 40: “nor does it seem pre-islamic arabians called themselves arabs”. 62. references given in hoyland, in god’s path, 23, and id., “arab kings, arab tribes and the beginnings of arab historical memory in late roman epigraphy,” in from hellenism to islam: cultural and linguistic change in the roman near east, ed. hannah cotton et al. (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2009), 379, 392. 63. ibid., 392-93. fritz mitthof, “zur neustiftung von identität unter imperialer herrschaft: die provinzen des römischen reiches als ethnische entitäten,” in visions of community in the post-roman world: the west, byzantium and the islamic world, 300-1100, ed. walter pohl et al. (burlington: ashgate, 2012), e.g. 70: “die provinzen galten im 2.-4. jh. nicht nur als verwaltungseinheiten, sondern auch als (pseudo-) ethnische entitäten”. note that it was not only that the provincial labels were applied to inhabitants of these provinces by the romans, but that these inhabitants started to refer to themselves by these labels (“we syrians” etc). even when administrative borders changed, people’s conceptions of their province often did not; for example, epiphanius of salamis, writing in the fourth century, describes petra as being “the main city of arabia,” even though in his day it was in palestina iii salutaris (hoyland, “arab kings,” 392). in arabia’s case this is perhaps because it was the nabataean kingdom before it was the province of arabia, putting its history back into the first millennium bc. 128 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) twist to the meaning of the term arab. whereas classical writers had used it rather vaguely and liberally (and incorrectly) to apply to anybody who lived in or hailed from the arabian peninsula and adjoining desert areas, it now became increasingly reserved for natives of the province of arabia, which was called “province of the arabs” (provincia araborum) in official documentation.64 these settled provincial arabs are clearly distinguished in our literature from the pastoralists who lived among and around them, but were not imperial citizens, and who were designated by such terms as “saracens” (in greek and latin), ṭayyāyē (in aramaic and persian), and aʿrāb (in the qurʾan and in the inscriptions of pre-islamic yemen).65 for example, john cassian, writing in the early fifth century, observes that some monks killed in the judaean desert by “saracens” were mourned “by the whole people of the arabs” (a universa plebe arabum). and the sixth-century historian procopius of caesarea, informs us that al-ḥārith ibn jabala, a powerful tribal chief based in the region around bostra and a key ally of byzantium, “ruled the saracens among the arabs” (en arabiois).66 there is also a nice link between the late antique and the early islamic worlds in the appearance of the greek expression for dating by the era of the province of arabia, “year x according to the arabs (kata arabas)”, in the inscription of muʿāwiya at the baths of gadara in what would have been the north of roman arabia.67 it is also possible that there was a linguistic dimension to the term arab in late antiquity. the reason for thinking this is the coincidence of a number of new developments in the period 470-630. firstly, there is the emergence of inscriptions written in the arabic language and in recognisably arabic script from najrān in the south to aleppo in the north. it used to be thought that there were no more than three or four of these, but there have been a number of discoveries in the last few years that have brought the number up to more than thirty, and there is every chance that many more will be found as more professional surveys 64. webb, imagining the arabs, 137, notes that arḑ al-ʿarab is probably the earliest geographical term for “arabs’ land” and that it did not refer to the whole of the arabian peninsula (jazīrat al-ʿarab), but to “mecca and the wider al-ḥijāz”; it would then be a perfect fit, geographically and linguistically, for provincia araborum (arḍ is the term used to designate a province on early islamic seals). 65. so it was not that saracen replaced the word arab (pace webb, imagining the arabs, 47), it is simply that the two came to refer to different things. since the arabs were just inhabitants of a backwoods province, whereas “saracens” designated all pastoralists who were not roman citizens (as was the case also for the term ṭayyāyē in the syriac-speaking and persian realms), who presented both military threat and opportunity, it is not surprising that saracens (and ṭayyāyē) are dramatically more common in our sources. i should emphasize that the terms saracens, ṭayyāyē and aʿrāb are applied to the pastoralists of arabia by outsiders, and were not, so far as we know, used by them. 66. hoyland, “arab kings,” 392. for the late antique period webb’s point that one should not translate saracen and ṭayyāyē by “arab” is, therefore, correct, but since greek-speakers and syriac-speakers kept using these two terms for many centuries after muhammad to mean subjects of the caliphate, one presumably should translate them by “arab” and/or “muslim” at some point. webb does not grapple with the problem that group labels can shift in meaning over time. 67. yiannis meimaris, “the arab (hijra) era mentioned in greek inscriptions and papyri from palestine,” graeco-arabica 3 (1984): 177-89 (nos. 1-5 = late antique, no. 6 and nessana papyri 60-66 = islamic). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 129 are carried out in saudi arabia and neighbouring areas.68 secondly, there is the employment of arabic alongside greek in a bilingual inscription on the lintel of a church in the village of ḥarrān, south of damascus, that was commissioned by one sharaḥīl son of ẓālim, described as a phylarch in the greek text. he evidently wielded some power in the region and should be seen as emblematic of a newly emergent christian arabophone elite in the province of arabia. thirdly, there is the use of the term ʿarabī in the qurʾan to refer to the language in which it is revealed, which is patently close to the language of the aforementioned sixthcentury arabic inscriptions. when one adds to this the enhanced presence of christianity and the increase in commercial activity from najrān to damascus at this time, one gets a sense of major changes taking place in this region.69 whether this is also connected with developments in arab identity is too early to say, but it seems premature to rule it out entirely. the exciting discoveries of such innovative and dedicated scholars as laïla nehmé and ahmad al-jallad are bringing new insights to this field and are sure to lead to a revision of current thinking. i fully sympathize with webb’s desire to prevent the retrojection of the arab identity forged in the islamic period into pre-islamic arabia. medieval muslim authors did just that and many modern scholars have followed them, and it has certainly impeded a clear understanding of the identities of the various peoples of the arabian peninsula before islam. however, webb’s conviction that arab identity arose ex nihilo in the islamic period leads him to dismiss too quickly any signs of its existence in late antiquity. it takes webb, for example, less than five pages to conclude that pre-islamic poetry shows that the term arab meant nothing to its authors.70 part of the problem is that he operates with the notion that either we have a coherent all-embracing arab identity or no identity, whereas a much more nuanced approach is needed. pre-islamic arabic poetry would have been intended for internal consumption, mostly involving intertribal activity, so rarely necessitating reference to any higher-order identity terms. an example of one of these rare occasions is the verse by durayd ibn al-ṣimma: “i travelled throughout the land and yet i do not see the like of ibn jadʿān among the arabs”;71 presumably the term was used to imply how widely durayd 68. greg fisher (ed.), arabs and empires before islam (oxford: oxford university press, 2015), 410-15; christian robin et al., “inscriptions antiques de la région de najran (arabie séoudite meridionale),” académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, comptes rendus 2014, esp. 1087-1107; laïla nehmé, “new dated inscriptions (nabataean and pre-islamic arabic) from a site near al-jawf, ancient dūmah, saudi arabia,” arabian epigraphic notes 3 (2017): 121-64 (on a new arabic inscription dated 548-49 ce); ʿabdallāh al-saʿīd, “nuqūsh ʿarabiyya bi-lukna nabaṭiyya,” al-sahra, september 5, 2017: http://alsahra.org/?p=17938 (6 plausibly pre-islamic arabic graffiti from the hegra-tabuk region). others have been found by ahmad al-jallad, who will be publishing them in due course. 69. robin, “ancient inscriptions,” 1052-5; patricia crone, “quraysh and the roman army: making sense of the meccan leather trade,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 70 (2007): 63-88; aziz al-azmeh, the emergence of islam in late antiquity: allāh and his people (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2014), 133-40, 263-76. 70. webb, imagining the arabs, 66-70. 71. louis cheikho, majānī al-adab fī ḥadāʾiq al-ʿarab, vol. 6 (beirut, 1913), 290. the hebrew university’s concordance of early arabic poetry throws up at least ten references on top of those looked at by webb. a couple more are analyzed in agha and khalidi, “poetry and identity in the umayyad age” (not cited by webb). it is also a shame that webb decided to take no account of poets who lived into the islamic period, though born before it, http://alsahra.org/?p=17938 130 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) searched. there is no hint of course of a politically-conscious arab community, but nor does it endorse the idea that the term had no meaning. i am absolutely not suggesting that “it was the powerful desire to realize this latent collective identity as ‘arabs’ in political form that really generated the believers’ expansion and the creation of their empire”72 or that “there was one pre-islamic ‘arab’ identity”. i just feel that one should factor into the equation of the rise of islam and the ensuing conquests all the complexities of the late antique setting. the conquerors as muslims crone and cook observed long ago, in reference to muhammad’s followers, that “there is no good reason to suppose that the bearers of this primitive identity called themselves ‘muslim’”.73 the qurʾan does employ the word “muslim”, but only to indicate the action of submitting to god rather than to qualify members of a defined group, except perhaps for the qurʾanic phrase “he called you the muslims” (huwa sammākum al-muslimīn, 22:78). even in the dome of the rock inscription in jerusalem, it does not appear to have a technical sense: naḥnu lahu muslimūn evidently means “we are submitting to him” rather than “we are muslims for him”. similarly, the phrase al-dīn ʿind allāh al-islām should be translated “religion in god’s view is about submission (to him)” rather than “religion in god’s view is (the faith that bears the name) islam”.74 however, the creed of the conquerors might have been distinguished from judaism and christianity even before their naming had been settled, and there are good reasons to believe that this would have been the case. the first and most obvious one, mostly ignored by armchair academics, is that war is nasty. once people start dying, the lines between the opposing groups tend to harden. not having any worries about political correctness, muslim authors happily talk of beheadings and large-scale slaughter, though, as donner is right to emphasize, they also speak of peace treaties and non-aggression pacts.75 this leads us to a second factor that might have precipitated the erection of communal boundaries. in return for protection of their life and property the conquered had to pay a which would have yielded at least forty references to “arab(s)”, since they appear to demonstrate an increase in the use of the term even at this early stage. 72. donner, muhammad and the believers, 218; webb, imagining the arabs, 5. contrary to what both imply (ibid., 17 n. 15, lumps me with those who “view islam’s rise as a racial/national movement”), i have never written that arab ethnogenesis drove muhammad’s movement or the arab conquests. often authors are using the label “arab” because it is convenient, not because they necessarily think that all so labelled were participants in an outpouring of ethnic/nationalist sentiment (just as one can speak of the french conquest of north africa without meaning that it was a consequence of french ethnogenesis, so also one might write about the arab conquest of the middle east without meaning that it resulted from arab ethnogenesis). 73. hagarism, 8. though as noted above, the term muslim seems to have more of a confessional sense in the constitution of medina. 74. max van berchem, matériaux pour un corpus inscriptionum arabicarum ii.2 jérusalem (cairo: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1927), 231 (no. 215, inner band, islām), 250 (no. 217, copper plate on lintel of north door, muslimūn). possibly muslim became a technical term not so much because the community was now becoming confessionally distinct from others, but because it was attracting large numbers of converts, who had to make a declaration of submission (islām) to the one god and to their new community. 75. donner, muhammad and the believers, 107-9. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 131 special tax, a poll tax, and this was not paid by the conquerors.76 this differential tax status may initially have only signified the distinction between conquerors and conquered, but it very soon came to be perceived and represented as one between followers of muhammad’s religion and the people of the book (jews, christians, zoroastrians, etc), prompting many to “convert” to gain this tax-free status and so further reinforcing the divide between the religion of the conquerors and all other faiths. a final factor that must have some relevance to the question is the radically changed situation in which the hijazis found themselves as their conquests progressed. they were now rulers of a vast empire that comprised numerous different peoples and cultures. donner takes it for granted that change was gradual and there was initially continuity of ideology between muhammad’s community and the subsequent conquest society, but possibly the drastically changed situation and/or the entry into the ranks of the conquering army of vast numbers of non-hijazis forced a swift rethinking of aims and expectations.77 one could even argue that a discontinuity between the prophet’s days and later times was perceived by the early conquerors, who mythologized it in the tale of how the caliph ʿuthman lost muhammad’s ring down a well halfway through his reign, ushering in a period of more unjust rule. but whether rapid or gradual, donner is right that one of the changes was the transition from a confessionally open religious grouping to a more tightly defined and exclusivist one.78 however, the present state of our evidence does not allow us to reconstruct this transition or ascertain when it occurred. one could argue, for example, that ʿabd al-malik’s citation of the qurʾanic verses instructing christians not to “say three” or that god has a son on the dome of the rock indicates that christianity was not yet perceived as a distinct confession from the conquerors and that the caliph was still trying to attract the christians into the believers’ fold. yet, in the absence of context or commentary, one could equally make a good case for the opposite view: that ʿabd al-malik was being deliberately confrontational and intended to demonstrate the superiority of the conqueror’s religion over those of the conquered.79 conclusions the question of the identity of the seventh-century arabian conquerors is a difficult one to answer, but it is clear from the above that there is much more to be said about it and in certain fields, such as epigraphy and qurʾanic studies, there have been some fascinating discoveries and important advances. by way of conclusion, i would just like to comment on some of the challenges that i have encountered in writing on this topic. 76. for discussion and references see sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state, 72-74. 77. patricia crone, “two legal problems bearing on the early history of the qurʾan,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 18 (1994): 7, speaks of “discontinuity of a more drastic kind” in trying to explain why the meaning of a number of qurʾanic words and concepts seem to have been unknown to the generation after muhammad. 78. to my mind muhammad had already initiated this process when he changed the qibla, opted for ramadan as the month of fasting and instituted the hajj, as these sort of practices tend to mark out people as different. 79. one could likewise interpret the early muslim use of churches for prayer as either a reflection of non-sectarianism (donner, “from believers to muslims,” 51-52) or as a demonstration of colonial power. 132 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) acceptance of diversity at the beginning of in god’s path i quoted the aphorism of marc bloch that “to the great despair of historians men fail to change their vocabulary every time they change their customs”. this is particularly worth bearing in mind for the period of the rise of islam, since the rapid transformation in the fortunes and circumstances of muhammad’s followers is likely to have led to equally quick shifts in the meanings of the terms that we use to speak of them. moreover, one must accept that people do not operate with just one label for themselves, but employ different ones according to context and over time. even if being a “believer” were paramount, other affiliations—to tribe, to city or region, to fellow traders or agriculturalists, and so on—would still have been in play. as regards the term arab, “each individual could hold several passports,” as one scholar has recently remarked in a consideration of ethnic identity in early medieval europe.80 it is possible, then, that some of the early conquerors would have used all the terms “believer”, “muslim”, “muhājir” and “arab” in different contexts, since they are in no way contradictory, but have different significances and connotations. as regards the term arab, it might be better not to worry about ascertaining the moment of arab ethnogenesis, or even thinking that there would have been such a moment,81 but rather to accept that terms like arab have been around for millennia, but who, what and where they refer to have changed frequently in the course of those years. in this respect webb is certainly right to draw a line between the pre-islamic and islamic senses of the term (even if he negates the former), for there is no doubt that arab came to be applied to many more people in many more places and with much changed content in the aftermath of the arabian conquests. in sum, we need to have a nuanced approach when handling these terms and we should not get too fixated on coming up with a single term to describe the conquerors, the more so as their enormous success attracted huge numbers to their venture, quickly making the conquest society a very pluralist one.82 the role of religion the most common criticism against my book, in god’s path, was that i was trying to minimize or even reject the role of religion. thus webb alleges that i neglect religion in favor 80. herwig wolfram, “how many peoples are (in) a people?” in pohl et al., visions, 105. 81. webb, imagining the arabs, 6: “the moment when self-styled ‘arabs’ began to imagine an ancient history for themselves is precisely when meaningful ethnogenesis was underway,” but do we know that the self-styled arabs of late antiquity that i listed above did not imagine an ancient history for themselves? i am increasingly thinking that ethnogenesis, with its implications of a people born anew and its close links to the “birth” of the new peoples of europe out of the ashes of the roman empire, is not a helpful concept for thinking about identity shifts in the wake of the arabian conquests. was arab ever an ethnic term, as opposed to a geographical, supratribal, linguistic or cultural one? for some thoughts see chris wickham, “conclusions,” in pohl et al., visions, 551-58. 82. see my in god’s path, 56-61, for the idea that the conquest armies comprised many non-arabs and non-muslims in their ranks, and the excellent study of wadād al-qāḍī, “non-muslims in the muslim conquest army in early islam,” in christians and others in the umayyad state, ed. antoine borrut and fred donner (chicago: oriental institute, 2016), 83-128. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 133 of “realpolitik” and adopt “a secular perspective,”83 and scheiner attributes to me the views that “it was not religious zeal that motivated the conquests” and that “islam functioned as an integrating factor but not as means of personal motivation”.84 donner goes further and makes the repeated charge that i seek “to avoid a religious explanation of any kind,” “to downplay the religious impetus” and view the arab muslim conquests as a process “that lacked a religious underpinning.”85 in reality i strongly emphasized the importance of religion to the conquests: i do not want to belittle the role of religion but rather to expand its remit. religion is integral to the conquests and the evolution of an islamic empire, but religion is not just piety and devotion, especially not in the seventh century; it is as much about power and identity as spiritual yearnings and righteous behavior (p. 5). furthermore, i pointed to the conquerors’ “ideological commitment” (p. 62), which i prefer to the rather amorphous term “zeal”, and i underlined the mutually reinforcing motivations of god and booty: “the gains won by fighting for god made his warriors more desirous to serve him in war and worship” (p. 64). it would seem, therefore, that what divides me and these reviewers is not whether religion contributed to the arabian conquests, but rather the nature of that contribution. this to some extent reflects a difference in the approaches of the disciplines of islamic studies and history. whereas the former tends to stress heavily the belief aspect of religion, the discipline of history, while acknowledging this aspect, also seeks to bring out its socio-economic and political dimensions. so whereas donner focuses on islam “as a religious movement—not as a social, economic or ‘national’ one,”86 i strove to bring out its other traits, such as its strong integrative capacity, which enabled it to assimilate the native population into the conquest society, a crucial precondition for the formation of a new civilization. i also take it for granted that, as a historian, one should look more to long-term processes rather than to individuals to explain major events and phenomena, so in seeking to explain the arabian conquests one would want to consider what lay behind the collapse of ḥimyar and axum, the drop in settlement in east arabia, the endemic fighting between byzantium and iran, the expansion of the turks into the middle east and so on, rather than just concentrate on muhammad’s activities in the hijaz.87 one could construe this as an attempt to reduce the role of religion, as my critics did. however, i think it is just a recognition that, like it or not, humans are embedded in the material world, so that even piety and spirituality cannot be regarded as free of all worldly connections (though they will often be portrayed as such), and that we 83. webb, “the march of islam,” 24. 84. scheiner, “reflections on hoyland’s in god’s path,” 25. 85. donner, “review of in god’s path,” 137-38. 86. donner, muhammad and the believers, xii. 87. in the first draft that i sent to oxford university press i actually did not discuss muhammad at all, since i felt that in some respects it made sense to separate out muhammad’s missionary work from the onset of the arabian conquests, but it was felt to be unacceptable not to mention him at all. 134 • robert g. hoyland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) are all to some extent subject to larger forces that both limit our ability to act and drive it in ways that we do not fully control. isolationism and exceptionalism patricia crone once mused on the dearth of new studies on the relationship of islamic law to roman law and attributed it to “the intellectual isolation in which islamic studies have come to be conducted since the first world war.” her explanation for this was that “as the era of the colony gave way to that of the mandate and eventually to that of independence, islamicists increasingly preferred to study islam as an autonomous system developing internally in response to its own needs and by the use of its own resources.”88 historians, by contrast, find it helpful and instructive to compare and contrast different cultures and polities. donner states that “the basic argument of in god’s path is that the expansion of muḥammad’s community, which took over most of the near east in the seventh and eighth centuries, should be seen as akin to the expansions of other ‘peripheral peoples’.”89 however, i do not argue that the various expansions have some “intrinsic similarity,”90 but rather that the weakness of eurasian empires at this time and the simultaneous emergence of a number of different peoples who had been deemed marginal by their imperial neighbors should make one pause for thought and ponder whether there are common environmental or geopolitical forces at work. in each case, though, the emergence is triggered in different ways, follows a different trajectory and results in different entities. yet it seems to me that it facilitates and enhances our understanding of the rise of islam to think about the bigger picture rather than to look solely to muhammad and west arabia, but that does not mean that i wish in any way to downgrade the importance of the prophet and his homeland. a related problem is the idea of islam’s exceptionalism91—that islam is so radically different that it cannot be subject to the usual rules of historical enquiry. this idea lies behind the disinclination to compare islamic civilization with any other and the desire to portray the islamic conquests as different from that of any other group. as noted by aziz al-azmeh, “claims for exceptionalism are used to justify an egregious disregard to both the normal equipment 88. roman, provincial and islamic law (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987), 1, 6. 89. donner, “review of in god’s path,” 136. 90. donner, “review of in god’s path,” 136. likewise i do not argue that the arab conquests are “similar to the germanic invasions” and i certainly do not “see them both as processes that lacked a religious underpinning” (donner, “review of in god’s path,” 138); i actually made the opposite point, i.e. not that religion was less important to the arab muslims, but that religion was a lot more important to the germanic kingdoms than islamicists tend to think; e.g. see emöke horvath, “the role of arianism in the vandal kingdom,” in religion, ritual and mythology: aspects of identity formation in europe, ed. joaquim carvalho (pisa: edizioni plus, 2006), 171-79. there are, therefore, some grounds for fruitful comparison. 91. this term has been commandeered recently by shadi hamid in his book islamic exceptionalism (new york: st martin’s press, 2016), where he argues that islam is unique in its relationship to politics. he is right that modern islam is quite different from other contemporary religions in its involvement with politics, but in the past other religions, including christianity, became intertwined with the political sphere. he is also right that the beginnings of a religion have some impact upon its future course, and yet many christian groups have employed violence despite jesus’ injunction to turn the other cheek, and plenty of muslim ones have urged peace despite muhammad’s role as a military leader. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) reflections on the identity of the arabian conquerors • 135 of the historical science and the usual workings of human societies.”92 this is particularly evident in recent works dealing with the conquests. webb states that my “purpose is to explain islam’s rise in rational terms, comparing it to other world empires,” letting it be known that he regards both strategies as misplaced.93 and it is common to encounter assertions such as “the success of the conquests is virtually beyond plausible historical explanation”94 and “the dynamism of islam’s expansion defies explanation in ordinary human terms,” or even that we should “dissuade historians from striving vainly to explain the almost inexplicable in normal historical terms”.95 i assume that there is a (presumably subconscious) apologetic aim at work, striving to counter the heavily negative press islam receives in our day. however, to my mind such an approach, though well intentioned, does a disservice to the subject, and to muslims for that matter, since it implies that they and their past are not part of the ordinary ebb and flow of human history. in my own words from my book, “my aim is to re-integrate these conquests and their impact into the fabric of human history, against the prevailing trend to see them as utterly exceptional, and i hope thereby to make them more explicable according to the usual norms of human behaviour” (p. 6). that does not mean that i wish to downplay their extraordinary nature—i emphasize that “the achievements of the arab conquerors were immense”—but i feel that to give differential treatment is to risk exclusion, and it is surely better for all concerned if muslims and their history participate, and are included, fully in the struggle of humanity to understand where it came from and where it is going.96 92. the times of history, 249. cf. chase robinson: “the supposed ‘exceptionalism’ of islamic history says as much about professional expertise and religious belief as it does about the history made by muslims: the laws of history (insofar as they exist) are not suspended in southwest asia” (“reconstructing early islam: truth and consequences,” in method and theory in the study of islamic origins, ed. herbert berg, leiden: brill, 2003, 134). 93. webb, “the march of islam,” 24. he also says that i call the conquests “ordinary”, which i do not (i do not use that word in the book, rather i call them an “immense” and a “stunning” achievement), and “an accident which arabians happen to pull off”, whereas i offer a list of plausible causes. he also says that it is my “principal argument that islam’s rise was not exceptional,” which i do not say at all in the book; but i would say that it was not exceptional in the literal sense of being an exception to human history at large. yet it is surely not the job of a historian either to write a paean to his/her subject or to say that it is inexplicable. 94. donner, “from believers to muslims,” 50. 95. james howard-johnston, witnesses to a world crisis: historians and histories of the middle east in the seventh century (oxford: oxford university press, 2010), 463 and 464. 96. arguing in a slightly different but related vein, crone concludes her reply to robert serjeant’s review of her meccan trade by saying “i have simply refused to 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umayyad state, 11-27. edited by antoine borrut and fred m. donner. chicago: oriental institute, 2016. wickham, chris. “conclusions.” in pohl et al., visions, 551-58. wolfram, herwig. “how many peoples are (in) a people?” in pohl et al., visions, 101-8. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 149-177 in his seminal study, islamic history: a f r a m e w o r k o f i n q u i r y, s t e p h e n h u m p h r e y s p r e s e n t e d t h e c e n t r a l question all scholars who try to reconstruct the origins of islam have to answer on a methodological level: “in what sense […] is it possible to reconstruct the political history of early islam?” 1 in order to address this question several related issues have to be taken into account: (1) the textual form of the sources we use, (2) the degree of accordance between available sources to their previous textual forms in terms of narrative structure and content, (3) the paucity of reliable criteria for evaluating the texts’ authenticity or fictiveness, (4) the problem that intensive source criticism does not leave much material for a historical reconstruction, (5) the issue 1. r. stephen humphreys: islamic history. a framework for inquiry. 2nd ed. london 1991, p. 70. of course, this question can also be applied to social, economic, religious or any other type of historical approach to this period. that many of these texts do not respond to our contemporary questions.2 these (and related) challenges have long puzzled historians of the islamicate w o r l d . i n a w o r k s h o p h e l d a t t h e university of göttingen in june 2015,3 seventeen junior and senior researchers of early islamic history discussed questions o f s o u r c e c r i t i c i s m , a u t h o r s h i p , a n d authenticity of arabic sources by also contextualizing them with syriac, greek, and ancient near eastern sources. most of the participants presented their individual perspectives on one of the points raised above. these approaches (in addition to the ensuing discussions)4 were not only 2. this list is inspired by humphreys, islamic history, 70-71. 3. this workshop was sponsored by the courant research center “education and religion (edris),” the ministry of science and culture of lower saxony, and the göttingen graduate school for humanities. 4. the organizers would like to thank the panel chairs prof. dr. lale behzadi, dr. nicolet boekhoff-van der voort, dr. zachary chitwood, conference report new insights into early islamic historiography: a substantial conference report (göttingen, 25-26 june 2015) yoones dehghani farsani and jens scheiner with contributions by mehmetcan akpınar, antoine borrut, yoones dehghani farsani, fred m. donner, georg leube, ilkka lindstedt, masoud sadeghi, jens scheiner, mónika schönléber, isabel toral-niehoff, manolis ulbricht al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 150 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner thought-provoking, but also offered new individual insights into some of the central problems of early islamic historiography described above. therefore, the workshop conveners together with the participants agreed to publish these approaches in the rather unusual format of a “substantial conference report”. t h u s , e a c h p a r t i c i p a n t w a s a s k e d to summarize his ideas, case study or argument in a two-to-four-page long text in order to introduce them to an interested audience before the publication of the respective papers, monographs, translations, and studies. the outcome was impressive. each contribution had something important to say on the abovementioned issues and is worth being read. for instance, one contribution is—after severe source criticism—event-orientated, i.e. focusing on the status of the jews of khaybar after the town’s conquest by the prophet (f. donner). that only one study pursues this path shows how significant the methodological obstacles are in writing the political history of early muslim society. most contributions, instead, are source-orientated, i.e. they either study the textual forms of the available sources or try to come up with older textual forms of these sources. to the first group belong and prof. dr. sebastian günther for their effective moderation and engaged discussion. the contribution on geographical terms in al-azdī’s futūḥ al-shām (j. scheiner) and on ibn aʿtham’s ridda narrative ( m . s c h ö n l é b e r ) , w h i l e t h e s e c o n d g rou p inc lu d es c ont ribu t ions on t he prophet’s nocturnal journey to jerusalem ( m . a k p ı n a r ) , o n ʿ u m a r ’ s k h u ṭ b a a t al-jābiya (y. dehghani farsani), on the ʿabbāsid revolution (i. lindstedt), and on the oldest greek translation of the qurʾān (m. ulbricht). a third group of contributions highlights general features of early islamic historiography, such as the one that discusses factuality and fictionality as doubtful criteria for a source’s authenticity (i. toral-niehoff). other contributions tackle multi-layer intertextuality as typical feature of this type of literature (g. leube), the origins of the fitna theme in historical sources (m. sadeghi) or the change of societal definitions on what constitute historical sources (leading to the exclusion of astrological histories) (a. borrut). the discussions during the workshop as well as this report prove that some s t i m u l a t i n g s t u d i e s a r e c u r r e n t l y underway that—once published in fully developed forms—will further deepen our understanding of the potentials and boundaries of writing early islamic history. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 151 contents i. fred m. donner, “the status of the jews of khaybar.” ii. jens scheiner, “geographical terminology in al-azdī’s futūḥ al-shām.” iii. mónika schönléber, “ibn aʿtham’s arrangement of ridda material.” iv. mehmetcan akpınar, “parallelisms between ibn isḥāq’s sīra material and muqātil b. sulaymān’s tafsīr.” v. yoones dehghani farsani, “genesis and textual development of the futūḥ al-shām ascribed to al-wāqidī (d. 207/823).” vi. ilkka lindstedt, “the ʿabbāsid revolution and its earliest historiography” vii. manolis ulbricht, “the earliest translation of the qurʾān.” viii. isabel toral-niehoff, “the fact-fiction-debate in early muslim historiography.” ix. georg leube, “intertextuality as a typical feature of early arabic historiography.” x. masoud sadeghi, “the origins of fitna-writing in islamic historiography.” xi. antoine borrut, “addressing the ‘gap of sources’: historiography and cultural memory in early islam.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 152 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner there exist in the traditional arabic sources many reports about the prophet muḥammad’s conquest of the oasis town of khaybar in northern arabia. more than 125 reports are known, which vary in length, detail, content, and focus; some are related with full or partial isnād, others with no hint as to their origin or transmission. there are many conflicting details among these reports, and some exhibit clear signs of being later creations rather than accurate reports going back to the events themselves, such as the presence of ṣulḥʿanwa traditions of the kind analyzed long ago by albrecht noth.5 this contribution focuses on reports about the status of the jews of khaybar following the prophet’s conquest of the town. the general impression one receives after studying the many reports is that the jews of the city, after being conquered by the prophet’s forces, were at first asked to leave the oasis, taking with them only what they could carry: that is, the prophet 5. albrecht noth, “zum verhältnis von kalifaler zentralgewalt und provinzen in umayyadischer zeit. die „ṣulḫ“—„ʿanwa“-traditionen für ägypten und den iraq,” die welt des islam 14 (1973), 150–162. an english translation by gwendolin goldbloom is found in fred m. donner (ed.), the expansion of the early islamic state (aldershot, 2008), 177-188. see for example the reports traced back to ibn shihāb al-zuhrī (d. 124/741-2) in abū dāwūd al-sijistānī, kitāb al-sunan, ed. m. ʿabd al-ḥamīd (n.p., ca. 1990?), iii: 171 (no. 3018), or aḥmad b. yaḥyā al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, ed. m. de goeje as: liber expugnationis regionum. auctore imámo ahmed ibn jahja ibn djábir al-beládsorí (leiden, 1866), 23. condemned the khaybar jews to almost total dispossession. some reports include a story involving deceit by some of the jews’ leaders, which seems to provide the reason for the prophet’s harsh treatment of these leaders, although it is not explicitly given as a cause for the decision to evict the jews as a whole. however, when the prophet realized that the medinese did not have sufficient manpower to cultivate the palm groves of khaybar, the jews were allowed by the prophet to stay temporarily, so they could care for and harvest the date palms as sharecroppers, in exchange for half of the crop. many reports describe the process of crop estimation and division, and many others discuss specifically how the lands of khaybar were divided among the prophet’s followers. this arrangement—according to which the jews continued to occupy the town and work its palm groves in exchange for half the produce—lasted until the time of ʿumar; by then, we are told, the muslims had enough manpower to work the lands themselves, and so the jews were expelled and the lands divided up among their muslim owners. when the jews objected, ʿumar quoted as justification a saying of the prophet that “no two religions should exist in arabia.” a number of reports exist, however, that diverge somewhat, or sometimes considerably, from the general narrative summarized above. but there are, as i argue, two basic facts on which all reports agree. they are (1) that jews remained in khaybar, in some status, after the prophet took it over, and (2) that the jews were i. the status of the jews of khaybar fred m. donner university of chicago al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 153 eventually expelled from the oasis by ʿumar and their lands divided among the muslim settlers. to explain the evolution of the many confusing traditions about khaybar and its jews, i propose that the actual course of events was different from that implied in the traditions found in ibn hishām, and in many others that resemble it. the actual sequence of developments may have been as follows: (1) when the prophet and his forces subjected khaybar, its jewish population was left on the land because of a treaty they had concluded with the prophet. the town’s inhabitants, however, were required to pay half the annual date-crop as tribute. this arrangement continued until the time of ʿumar (or later). (2) the jews of khaybar were expelled by ʿumar (or at a later time?) and their lands divided among the muslims. (the division of lands may reflect an earlier division by the prophet of the date crop taken as tribute.) (3) in order to legitimate ʿumar’s action, three stories (or sets of stories) were generated by later traditionists and must have been already in circulation by the early second/eighth century. i argue that these three stories are: (a) the story that the jews were “hired” by the prophet as sharecroppers because of a shortage of labor. this story effectively changed the initial status of the jews of khaybar from that of rightful owners having treaty rights to that of temporary sharecroppers who could be expelled at any time. this story is contradicted by a few reports that imply that the jews had actually concluded a treaty or security agreement (amān) with the prophet6 (in which case they would not have been subject to expulsion). in yet other reports, the prophet tells the jews “i affirm you on this basis as long as we wish” (uqirrukum ʿalā dhālika mā shiʾnā), or “as long as god wishes” (mā shāʾa allāh),7 but a variant transmitted via al-wāqidī reads “i affirm you in that which god affirmed you” (uqirrukum ʿalā mā aqarrakum allāh),8 which sounds like a recognition of the jews’ possession of the land. the idea that the prophet himself planned to expel the jews of khaybar until he changed his mind and let them stay was, of course, a convenient way of providing an exculpation for ʿumar’s (or someone’s) later act of expelling them. (b) the stories of jewish perfidy. these stories seemingly justify the decision to expel jews from khaybar, but they are suspicious because they assume distinctly different forms in different reports. in one version, the jewish leaders hide things the prophet explicitly asks about, pleading that they no longer have them, and when 6. e.g., abū ʿubayd al-qāsim b. sallām, kitāb al-amwāl, ed. m. khalīl harrās (cairo, 1969), 241-242 (no. 457). 7. ibn shubba, taʾrīkh al-madīna al-munawwara, ed. f. shaltūt, 4 vols. (beirut, 1990), 178.2 and ibid., 177.2. 8. muḥammad b. ʿumar al-wāqidī, kitāb al-maghāzī, ed. j. m. jones, 3 vols. (oxford, 1966), 690-691. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 154 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner their deceit is revealed by discovery of the hidden objects, the leaders are killed.9 in a second form, however, the story is completely different: in it, the jews kill ʿabdallāh b. sahl, who had come to khaybar in the time of the prophet (but after the conquest) as crop estimator.10 the fact that the jews’ offense is described differently in various kinds of reports, each situated in a different time-frame, makes it appear to be a floating topos of “jewish perfidy” used to justify their eventual expulsion, by either the prophet or ʿumar. it seems also possible to suggest that the ultimate expulsion of the jews took place later than the time of ʿumar, since ʿumar, no less than the prophet, was a convenient grafting-point for justifications of actions taken at later times. (c) the story that the prophet said, “no two religions should exist in arabia.” some features of the wording and conceptualization of this report already make it suspicious, in particular its use of the phrase jazīrat al-ʿarab, which seems likely to reflect conditions toward the middle or end of the second/eighth century, when 9. e.g., muḥammad ibn saʿd: kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. e. sachau et al. as: ibn saad. biographien muhammeds, seiner gefährten und der späteren träger des islams bis zum jahre 230 der flucht, 9 vols. (leiden, 1904-1940), ii-1, p. 79, l. 27; abū dāwūd, sunan, iii, 157-158 (no. 3006). 10. ʿabd al-malik ibn hishām, al-sīra al-nabawiyya, ed. f. wüstenfeld as: das leben muhammed’s nach muhammed ibn ishâk bearbeitet von abd el-malik ibn hischâm. aus den handschriften zu berlin, leipzig, gotha und leyden, 3 vols. (göttingen, 1858-1860), 777-778. the concept of “arabness” appears to have been developed and circulated by traditionists. moreover, other reports suggest that the prophet did not take such a negative view of other religions, or of the jews—indeed, among the reports on khaybar is one stating that the prophet took ten jews of medina along with him when he went on the khaybar campaign, evidently as advisers11—suggesting that he was not hostile to jews as such, and making very suspect the claim that he issued a sweeping statement barring the existence of two religions in arabia. the use of the word dīn in this report to mean “religion” in an abstract sense also arouses our skepticism. in the qurʾān, dīn generally means either “custom” or “law, judgment”; it seems to have become commonly used to mean “religion” only in the eighth century,12 which is therefore a more likely timeframe for the origin of the “no two religions” ḥadīth than the time of the prophet in the early seventh century. i n c o n c l u s i o n , i t s e e m s l i k e l y , i n other words, that the “discovery” of this supposed ḥadīth of the prophet was another way to exculpate ʿumar (or whoever eventually drove the jews from khaybar) for having expelled the jews of khaybar, via an appeal to alleged prophetic authority. 11. al-wāqidī, maghāzī, 684. 12. see fred m. donner, “dīn, islām, und muslim im koran,” in georges tamer (ed.), kritische koranhermeneutik. in memoriam günter lüling (erlangen, forthcoming). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 155 in 1850, the famous orientalist, aloys sprenger (1813-1893), discovered an old and worm-eaten manuscript in one of delhi’s private libraries, which was said to have been established by the great moghuls. since then this manuscript has been the focus of the study of the origins of islamic religion and culture. according to its colophon, the manuscript bears the title kitāb futūḥ al-shām (i.e. the book on the conquests in syria) and was copied in jerusalem in 613/1217 by an unknown writer called muḥammad b. ibrāhīm al-ghassānī. this work mainly describes how a group of people called “muslims” (i.e. submitters [to god’s will]) took control of southern mesopotamia and greater syria (today’s lebanon, syria, israel, jordan, the palestinian territories, and the north of the arabian peninsula) in the course of a few years by means of negotiating with local people and fighting the byzantine overlords. the detailed events and their narratological features shall not concern us here. it is rather the question of authorship that is addressed in this contribution. since the time when william nassau lees prepared the first critical edition of the manuscript in 1854, there seems to have been a consensus among scholars that the work was composed by a single compilerauthor. on the basis of the manuscript’s chains of transmission (riwāyāt) and t h e a p p r o x i m a t e l y 2 0 0 s i n g l e c h a i n s of transmitters (asānīd) that are found throughout the manuscript a case can be (and was) made for abū ismāʿīl muḥammad b. ʿabdallāh al-azdī al-baṣrī as compilerauthor of the work.1 although biographical information on al-azdī is scarce, based on his name he seems to have belonged to the southern arabian tribe of azd and he—or one of his ancestors—seems to have dwelled in baṣra where the azd had settled in early islamic times. al-azdī’s death date is not preserved. on the basis of his teachers and disciples as documented in the asānīd, various years in the last quarter of the second/eighth or the early decades of the third/ninth century were suggested, making al-azdī a contemporary of the well-known iraqi scholar sayf b. ʿumar (d. ca. 180/796-797), who belonged to the northern arabian tribe of tamīm. the aim of this contribution is to give additional support to the view that the futūḥ al-shām was compiled by one person (who most likely was muḥammad 1. already lees argued on the basis of the asānīd for al-azdī’s authorship: see muḥammad b. ʿ abdallāh al-azdī, futūḥ al-shām, ed. w. lees as: the fotooh al-shām. being an account of the moslim conquests in syria by aboo ismāʾaīl mohammad bin ʿabd allah al-azdī al-baçrī, who flourished about the middle of the second century of the mohammadan era (calcutta, 1854 [reprint osnabrück 1980]), p. v. for a more detailed argument see lawrence i. conrad, “al-azdīʼs history of the arab conquests in bilād al-shām. some historiographical observations,” in muḥammad ʿa. al-bakhīt (ed.), proceedings of the second symposium on the history of bilād al-shām during the early islamic period up to 40 a.h./640 a.d. the fourth international conference on the history of bilad al-sham (1985). vol. 1. english and french papers (amman, 1987), 28–62. ii. geographical terminology in al-azdī’s futūḥ al-shām jens scheiner university of göttingen al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 156 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner b. ʿabdallāh al-azdī). this can be done by studying several clusters of information that serve as indicators for the work’s textual cohesion. to these clusters belong the set of individuals and tribes mentioned in the work, the religious depiction of the byzantines and the muslims therein, and the usage of geographical terms in the text. while i have tackled the first two points in the study accompanying my forthcoming english translation of the kitāb futūḥ al-shām, some thoughts on the spatial feature of this work shall be presented here. “greater syria” is expressed in the arabic original as “bilād al-shām” (i.e. the lands—or the regions—of syria). in other words, this geographical space is conceived as an aggregation of regions that, together with some major cities, are mentioned in the work as well. going roughly from north to south, these regions are: arḍ qinnaṣrīn (i.e. the land of qinnaṣrīn); arḍ ḥimṣ (i.e. the land of ḥimṣ) with ḥimṣ as the major city; arḍ dimashq (i.e. the land of damascus) with damascus as the major city; arḍ al-balqāʾ (i.e. the land of al-balqāʾ) with ʿammān as the major city; arḍ ḥawrān (i.e. the land of ḥawrān) with bosra as the major city; arḍ al-biqāʿ (i.e. the land of the beqaa valley) with baalbek as the major city; arḍ al-urdunn (i.e. the land of the jordan river) with fiḥl as the major city; and arḍ filasṭīn (i.e. the land of palestine) with caesarea and jerusalem as the two major cities. these regions and cities are referred to over and over again, sometimes in relation to one another, for example, “arḍ al-urdunn is adjacent to arḍ filasṭīn”, while at other times a city is related to the respective region, as in the case of bosra, “the city of ḥawrān.” in analogy, southern mesopotamia is referred to as arḍ al-ʿirāq (i.e. the land of iraq), which consisted of the “land of al-kūfa,” “the land of al-baṣra,” and “the arable lands of iraq” (sawād al-ʿirāq), and includes the major cities of al-kūfa, al-baṣra, al-ḥīra, al-ubulla, and ʿayn al-tamr. neighboring “the lands of syria” and “the land of iraq” is, according to the futūḥ al-shām, the geographical space of “al-ḥijāz” that is described as lying south of bilād al-shām and north of yaman (i.e. yemen), and that represents the muslims’ home region. al-ḥijāz seems to have ended somewhere north of medina, because ayla, the port city at the gulf of ʿaqaba, is described as a “syrian” town (most likely belonging to the “land of palestine”). beside these geographical terms, many more place names are mentioned in the futūḥ al-shām. however, most of them occur only once and cannot be taken into consideration here. suffice it to say that all place names and in particular the regions and major cities are consistently used throughout the work, thus creating a coherent geographical image of these parts of the middle east. this coherence speaks in favor of a single authorial hand that has shaped the work. in addition, the historiogeographical image that arises from this analysis can be tentatively associated with a well-known historical context. hence, this image does not fit the context of the ayyubid or mamluk periods, i.e. a period during which the futūḥ al-shām is erroneously said to have been written.2 on the contrary, this image is in accord to all what is known about syrian space in the 2. michel j. de goeje, “mémoire sur le fotouho’sscham attributé à abou ismaïl al-baçri,” in m.j. de goeje (ed.): mémoires d’histoire et de géographie orientales (leiden, 1862-1864), ii: 22-23. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 157 first/seventh or second/eighth centuries. in other words, it fits the periods when the events are said to have taken place or when the suggested compiler-author, al-azdī, is said to have flourished. in conclusion, on a methodological level, this case study has shown that the analysis of geographical images can serve as an argument for a work’s cohesion and its authorship. on a content level, the usage of geographical terminology (in addition to other indicators that earlier scholars had brought forward) strongly supports the argument that muḥammad b. ʿabdallāh al-azdī was the compiler-author of the futūḥ al-shām. iii. ibn aʿtham’s arrangement of ridda material mónika schönléber avicenna institute of middle eastern studies, piliscsaba, hungary ever since c. brockelmann’s comment, i n h i s m a g i s t e r i a l g e s c h i c h t e d e r arabischen litteratur, according to which ibn aʿtham’s (d. ca. in the first quarter of the 10th century1) kitāb al-futūḥ is a “fanciful history […] written from a shīʿī viewpoint”, 2 certain suspicions swirl around this work. o f c o u r s e , t h i s h a s n o t p r e v e n t e d specialists to use ibn aʿtham’s texts for various purposes, although their access to the kitāb al-futūḥ was for a long time 1. for ibn aʿtham’s life, see recently ilkka lindstedt, “al-madāʾinīʼs kitāb al-dawla and the death of ibrāhīm al-imām,” in ilkka lindstedt, jaakko hämeen-anttila, raija mattila, and robert rollinger (eds.), case studies in transmission (münster, 2014), 103–130, esp. 118–123. for an earlier dating, cf. lawrence i. conrad, “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” in julie s. meisami and paul starkey (eds.), the routledge encyclopedia of arabic literature (london, 1998), 314, and his long-awaited and recently published study: lawrence i. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” al-ʿusūr al-wustā 23 (2015), 87–125, henceforth conrad, “ibn aʿtham”. 2. carl brockelmann, geschichte der arabischen litteratur. supplement, 3 vols. (leiden, 1937-1942), ii: 220. the english translation follows conrad, “ibn aʿtham,”88. significantly complicated by the lack of a comprehensive edition, which was only published in the 1970s.3 however, this edition, prepared on the basis of four incomplete arabic manuscripts4 and a sixth/twelfth-century persian translation of the work, did not necessarily clear up all important uncertainties. to mention only a single eloquent example, i refer to the fact that little more than one-third of the kitāb al-futūḥ’s hayderabad edition could be created by relying on texts provided by more than one manuscript, given that the work’s first ca. 22% (168 fols.) were 3. aḥmad b. ʿalī ibn aʿtham al-kūfī, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. m. khān, 8 vols. (hyderabad, 19681975), henceforth ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ. 4. namely, fb gotha ms. orient. a 1592, ahmet iii 2956/i–ii, chester beatty 3272, and ms mingana 572. for the proportion of the kitāb al-futūḥ’s preserved parts in the respective manuscripts, see the concise summary in mónika schönléber, “notes on the textual tradition of ibn aʿtham’s kitāb al-futūḥ,” in jaakko hämeen-anttila, petteri koskikallio, and ilkka lindstedt (eds.), contacts and interaction. proceedings of the 27th congress of the union européenne des arabisants et islamisants. helsinki 2014 (leuven, 2017), 427–438. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 158 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner preserved only in a unique manuscript now kept in gotha,5 while another ca. 38% (278 fols.) containing the final parts of the book is again known from a single copy.6 in view of this unfortunate distribution of preserved sections, the exploration and proper identification of a new codex7 (kept in patna, india) incorporating a further copy of the kitāb al-futūḥ’s first c h a p t e r s — c o v e r i n g t h e s t o r y o f a b ū bakr’s election, the ridda wars, and the early futūḥāt in iraq—has enabled a significant breakthrough in the study of the early parts of ibn aʿtham’s book. 8 it is, therefore, more than surprising that all successive editions9 of the patna manuscript ascribed the text to al-wāqidī and, consequently, their accompanying critical apparatuses mirror the editors’ firm belief in al-wāqidī’s authorship. moreover, their misidentification also prevented them from correcting the 5. published in ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, i–ii, p. 146. 6. ahmet iii 2956, ii, published in ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, vi, p. 101–viii. 7. kbl cat. no. 1042, ff. pp. 1r-44v. 8. miklos muranyi, “ein neuer bericht über die wahl des ersten kalifen abū bakr,” arabica 25 (1978), 233–260 and fred m. donner, “the bakr b. wāʾil tribes and politics in northeastern arabia on the eve of islam,” studia islamica 51 (1980), 5–38, esp. 16, n. 2. 9. muḥammad b. ʿumar al-wāqidī, kitāb al-ridda wa-nabdha min futūḥ al-ʿirāq. kilāhumā riwāyat ibn al-aʿtham al-kūfī ʿalā asās al-makhṭūṭa al-waḥīda bi-bānkī būr (bāqī būr/al-hind), ed. m. ḥamīdallāh (paris, 1989); idem: kitāb al-ridda maʿa nabdha min futūḥ al-ʿirāq wa-dhikr al-muthannā b. ḥāritha al-shaybānī. riwāyat aḥmad b. muḥammad b. aʿtham al-kūfī, ed. y. al-jabūrī (beirut, 1990), henceforth (ps.-) al-wāqidī, ridda, ed. al-jabūrī; and idem: kitāb al-ridda, ed. m. ʿabdallāh abū al-khayr (ʿammān, 1991). mistakes of the patna text on the basis of the corresponding part of the gotha codex, or vice versa. thus, at the onset of my research, a l l t h e s e i n a d e q u a c i e s p r o m p t e d m e to make an attempt to prepare a new critical edition of the kitāb al-futūḥ’s above mentioned early parts basing it on the available arabic manuscripts and the lessons provided by the late sixth/ twelfth-century persian translation, in the hope that a new, firmly established text accompanied by an in-depth analysis of the work’s textual tradition would be able to serve the needs of further studies.10 the creation of a reliable text is likewise a sine qua non of the investigations of my phd dissertation (in preparation), whose main aim is to understand ibn aʿtham’s authorial contribution and concept when producing his version of the ridda wars. instead of trying to fulfil the rankeian maxima, i.e. to reconstruct “what actually happened” during the ridda fights, the focus of my research is rather on finding the place of ibn aʿtham’s ridda narrative among the other written accounts reporting about these events. the value of ibn aʿtham’s text lies firstly in the fact that his narrative is not only one of the few literary sources informing us about the tribal conflicts after the death of muḥammad, but it is—beside al-ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923), ibn ḥubaysh’s (d. 584/1188), and al-kalāʿī’s (d. 634/1237) respective accounts—one of the longest and most informative one as well. this latter fact seems especially important because, with the exception of the above-mentioned authors, all other extant written sources 10. for some preliminary remarks on the textual tradition, see schönléber, “notes.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 159 on the ridda are only several pages long, w h i l e t h e w o r k s o f t h e k n o w n l a t e r second/eighthand third/ninth-century authors, who are reported to have written separate works on the ridda or one of its individual subjects, are now lost.11 beside this, ibn aʿtham’s ridda narrative has another interesting characteristic, namely that, although it is formally inserted into a book entitled as “futūḥ”, it is, in fact, an independent theme within the whole work marked off by its own introductory section and a brief closing passage.12 t h e p r e s e n t c o n t r i b u t i o n o f f e r s some of the results of a case-study that concentrates on the figure of khālid b. al-walīd as characterised in ibn aʿtham’s ridda narrative. this examination does not only make it clear that ibn aʿtham was remarkably familiar with a considerable n u m b e r o f s o u r c e s a n d t r a d i t i o n s available in his time, but it also serves the recognition of the compiler-author’s m a t e r i a l a r r a n g e m e n t m e t h o d . t h e incorporation of several motifs originating from different traditions, as well as the omission of others, enabled ibn aʿtham to reshape pre-existing narrations and 11. see wilhelm hoenerbach, waṯīma’s kitāb ar-ridda aus ibn ḥaǧar’s iṣāba. ein beitrag zur geschichte des abfalls der araberstämme nach muḥammads tod (wiesbaden, 1951), esp. 18–21. 12. this detached nature has been already pointed out by albrecht noth, the early arabic historical tradition. a source-critical study. in collaboration with lawrence i. conrad. translated from the german by michael bonner, 2nd ed. (princeton, 1994), 29. to construct his own version by placing special emphases on certain characteristics of his protagonists. it is also interesting t o not e t hat i bn aʿt ham ’ s rend ering preserved several motifs, not mentioned in other written sources, that might have been derived from now lost traditions, but which, for one reason or another, had not gained currency in muslim historiography. further similar analyses are needed in order to gain a better understanding of the emergence and raison d’être of this long neglected source. but the limits of such an investigation are also clear. many important issues raised by l. i. conrad’s ground-breaking study, such as, among others, the authorship, structure and later continuation of the work, and the use of isnāds, can only be conclusively answered after an in-depth analysis of ibn aʿtham’s entire work.13 in conclusion, the above-mentioned (as well as some further) characteristics of the ridda narrative strongly suggest the benefit of conducting a separate analysis of ibn aʿtham’s ridda story, whose results offer useful starting points for further research into the entire work. 13. see conrad, “ibn aʿtham.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 160 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner the tafsīr work by muqātil b. sulaymān (d. ca. 150/767) is a prime source for extensive narrative material (e.g. asbāb al-nuzūl) that can be dated to the second/ eighth century. a significant number of the narratives recorded in the tafsīr also have parallels in ibn isḥāq’s (d. 150/767) sīra work. however, muqātil is silent about his informants, and his sources are unknown to us. by undertaking a comparative source analysis, this contribution investigates the possibility of common sources for the traditions of muqātil and ibn isḥāq. earlier scholarship has already indicated certain parallels between the two sources. t h u s , j o h n w a n s b r o u g h p o i n t e d o u t similarities between muqātil’s and ibn isḥāq’s versions of a dialogue between the meccan polytheists and the jewish rabbis from medina.1 similarly, harald motzki h i g h l i g h t e d m a n y p a r a l l e l s b e t w e e n muqātil’s and ibn isḥāq’s accounts of the story according to which walīd b. mughīra devised a plan to defame the prophet during the fair season in mecca.2 in expanding this investigation, i examine another account in which muqātil’s and ibn isḥāq’s versions resemble each other more than any other available account. i focus 1. john e. wansbrough, qurʾānic studies. sources and methods of scriptual interpretation (amherst, 2004), 122ff. 2. harald motzki, nicolet boekhoff-van der voort, and sean w. anthony (eds.), analysing muslim traditions. studies in legal, exegetical and maghāzī ḥadīth (leiden, 2010), 274-276. on various episodes from the prophet’s nocturnal journey to jerusalem, notably the description of burāq and the detailed characterization of the physical features of abraham, moses, and jesus, as well as the episode in which abū bakr meets the quraysh, and then goes to the prophet to inquire about the details of muḥammad’s journey. while, for example, an analysis of a wide range of classical sources on the descriptions of burāq has shown that the information about its physical appearance originates exclusively in basra, and is found especially in the basran exegete qatāda b. diʿāma’s (d. 118/735) narrations, i can show that ibn isḥāq’s accounts on the isrāʾ episodes also demonstrate that the basran exegetical traditions (i.e., a mixture of qatāda’s and his teacher al-ḥasan al-baṣrī’s [d. 110/728] narrations) are his main source(s) for descriptions of burāq. the physical appearance of burāq as described in muqātil’s tafsīr is also similar, and thus constitutes another parallel between his and ibn isḥāq’s work. although muqātil almost never mentioned his sources, i can show other instances in which qatāda’s accounts are integrated into his tafsīr. overall, my contribution discusses t h e r o l e o f t h e e a r l y s e c o n d / e i g h t h basran exegetical material, especially the traditions which are often attributed to al-ḥasan al-baṣrī and qatāda, both in iv. parallelisms between ibn isḥāq’s sīra material and muqātil b. sulaymān’s tafsīr mehmetcan akpınar university of tübingen al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 161 muqātil’s and ibn isḥāq’s works. thus, i raise the question about the symbiotic r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n t h e i n d i v i d u a l exegetical traditions and the new forms that they take, not only in exegetical works, but also in the sīra literature. v. genesis and textual development of the futūḥ al-shām ascribed to al-wāqidī (d. 207/823) yoones dehghani farsani university of göttingen among the extant futūḥ works there i s o n e k n o w n u n d e r t h e t i t l e f u t ū ḥ al-shām, which is conventionally ascribed to al-wāqidī (d. 207/823), the medinanbaghdadi historian of early ʿabbāsid times. unlike other available futūḥ works, such as that of al-azdī and of ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, which enjoy recognition among scholars of islamic studies as being valuable historical s ources , the futūḥ al-shām ascribed to al-wāqidī has been considered as a “pseudo-work” on the muslim conquests that, although drawing on historical materials, is mostly a work composed in later times.1 according to bioand bibliographical dictionaries, al-wāqidī wrote several books on the early muslim conquests during his lifetime, among them the one entitled futūḥ al-shām. we find accounts on these works and citations from them in later sources as well. this provides us with an opportunity to compare the extant corpus of the futūḥ material written/compiled by al-wāqidī in his futūḥ al-shām (from now on fsw) with the book futūḥ al-shām ascribed to him (from now on fsaw) as two text corpora. i will provide a summary of this comparison in this contribution. 1. three versions have been edited and published, although no edition is a critical one. the comparison between the quotations from the fsw and fsaw was conducted from the viewpoints of the isnāds, the compilation methods of the compilerauthors of the two corpora, and the content of selected passages. at the end it should yield an image for each corpus, which then shows, how similar or diverse the fsaw and fsw are. in doing so, i aim to suggest a hypothesis regarding the genesis and development of the fsaw. in this contribution, i will confine myself to one example from the isnāds and one selected passage contained in the two corpora. i will therefore first provide a short account of the classical perception of the fws, then a comparison between the two corpora. i will then discuss the results of this comparison. little is known about the original book, futūḥ al-shām by al-wāqidī (fsw); few identifiable citations from it can be found in later sources. muḥammad b. saʿd, al-wāqidī’s distinguished pupil, speaks in the entry on his master in the kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr about the great knowledge of his master in the fields of prophetic campaigns, the biography of the prophet, and the early muslim conquests, about each of which al-wāqidī is said to al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 162 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner have written books.2 more than a century later, ibn al-nadīm provides a list of al-wāqidī’s works, in which a book under the title futūḥ al-shām can be found.3 one century later, we find the fsw mentioned and quotations taken from it in the taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq (tmd) by ibn ʿasākir.4 ibn ʿasākir’s reports show that he must have had the book at his disposal. in one place, he even points out that he read the quoted account in the futūḥ al-shām which al-wāqidī wrote.5 let us now turn to the comparison of the extant corpus of fsw with the book fsaw from the viewpoint of isnāds and selected passages from the two corpora, respectively. (1) the tmd provides a single isnād t h r e e t i m e s i n d i f f e r e n t p l a c e s t h a t connects ibn ʿasākir to al-wāqidī. this isnād reads: abū al-faraj ghayth b. ʿalī > […] > abū al-qāsim ibrāhīm b. aḥmad b. jaʿfar al-khiraqī > abū bakr aḥmad b. al-ḥasan b. sufyān al-naḥwī > 2. muḥammad ibn saʿd, kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. e. sachau et al. as: ibn saad. biographien muhammeds, seiner gefährten und der späteren träger des islams bis zum jahre 230 der flucht, 9 vols. (leiden, 1904-1940), i: 314. 3. muḥammad ibn al-nadīm, kitāb al-fihrist, ed. a. f. sayyid (london, 2014), ii: 308. 4. see for example: ʿalī b. al-ḥasan ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. ʿu. al-ʿamrawī and a. shīrī, 80 vols. (beirut, 1995-2001), xxvii: 139. 5. ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, xl: 455. that ibn ʿasākir used al-wāqidīs work was also recently argued for by scheiner. see jens j. scheiner, “ibn ʿasākirʼs virtual library as reflected in his taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq,” in steven c. judd and jens j. scheiner (eds.), new perspectives on ibn ʿasākir in islamic historiography (leiden, 2017), 176-178. abū jaʿfar aḥmad b. ʿubayd b. nāṣiḥ al-naḥwī > muḥammad b. ʿumar al-wāqidī […]. as one can see in this isnād, before reaching al-wāqidī, there are two scholars m e n t i o n e d , i . e . a b ū b a k r a ḥ m a d b . al-ḥasan al-naḥwī and abū jaʿfar aḥmad b. ʿubayd, respectively. according to the biographical dictionaries, aḥmad b. ʿubayd was one of al-wāqidī’s pupils, while aḥmad b. al-ḥasan was a pupil of aḥmad b. ʿubayd.6 furthermore, the former used to study the works of al-wāqidī with his master aḥmad b. ʿubayd and transmitted them to later generations.7 in the collective isnād that stands at the beginning of the fsaw, one recognizes the names of abū jaʿfar aḥmad b. ʿubayd and abū bakr aḥmad b. al-ḥasan al-naḥwī.8 this part of the collective isnād reads: abū ʿabdallāh muḥammad b. ʿumar al-wāqidī > abū bakr aḥmad b. al-ḥusayn b. sufyān al-naḥwī > aḥmad b. ʿubayd it is obvious that al-wāqidī is falsely positioned at the beginning of this isnād, since he could not have studied with a pupil of his pupil. if we put al-wāqidī in the right place in this isnād, i. e. after aḥmad b. ʿubayd, then we gain the last part of the isnād as found in the tmd mentioned above. this chain of al-wāqidī, aḥmad 6. aḥmad b. ʿalī al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, taʾrīkh baghdād aw madīnat al-salām, ed. b. maʿrūf, 12 vols. (beirut, 2001), v: 142. 7. ibid. 8. muḥammad b. ʿumar al-wāqidī, futūḥ al-shām, ed. w. lees as: the conquest of syria. commonly ascribed to aboo ʾabd allah moḥammad b. ʾomar al-wáqidí, 3 vols. (calcutta, 1854-1862), i: 1. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 163 b. ʿubayd, and aḥmad b. al-ḥasan occurs at least one more time in the fsaw.9 what one may conclude is that in both the fsaw and the fsw a similar ṭarīq of transmission of knowledge from al-wāqidī to later generations is identifiable. (2) as mentioned above, ibn ʿasākir quotes short accounts directly from the original fsw. in one place he mentions the beginning of the khuṭba which ʿumar delivered in al-jābiya.10 it reads: ayyuhā al-nās, ūṣīkum bi-taqwā llāh al-lādhī yabqā wa-yafnā mā siwāhu, wa-l-lādhī bi-ṭāʿatihī yanfaʿ awliyāʾuhū wa-bi-maʿṣiyatihī yaḍurru aʿdāʾuhū. fa-dhakara al-khuṭba. oh people! i advise you to fear god, who is everlasting and everything but him will perish, whose friends will benefit from their obedience to them, and whose enemies will be harmed through their disobedience towards him. afterwards he started his speech. a khuṭba which ʿumar is said to have delivered in al-jābiya is found in the fsaw, as well.11 the beginning of this khuṭba, according to the fsaw, reads: ammā baʿd: fa-innī ūṣīkum bi-taqwā llāh ʿazza wa-jalla al-lādhī yabqā 9. al-wāqidī, futūḥ al-shām, iii: 1. 10. ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, xl: 455. 11. al-wāqidī, futūḥ al-shām, ii: 261. wa-yafnā kull shayʾ siwāhu, al-lādhī bi-ṭāʿatihī yanfaʿ awliyāʾuhū wa-bimaʿṣiyatihī yafnī aʿdāʾuhū. ayyuhā al-nās! addū zakat amwālikum. now to the topic: i advise you to fear god―the strong and exalted― who is everlasting and everything but him will perish, whose friends will benefit from his obedience and whose enemies will be harmed by their disobedience towards him. oh people! pay the alms tax from your ownings […]. this example shows that both works preserve the same texts and that one should expect to find this khuṭba in both corpora. however, ibn ʿasākir abbreviated his version. a number of other parallel passages occur in the tmd and the fwas as well.12 in conclusion, one may observe that the two corpora, i.e. the fsw and the fsaw, resemble each other from the viewpoints of isnāds and the content of selected passages. therefore, it seems possible to suggest the hypothesis that the fwas actually represents in its core the fsw, which however has presumably suffered changes during the pass of time. this hypothesis has to be supported by more evidence which i will provide in my forthcoming study of the fwas. 12. i am aware that one should take the possibility into account that the two very similar passages could represent a standard formulaic beginning for a khuṭba. however, even in this case it is more likely that both corpora have a similar content. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 164 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner t h i s c o n t r i b u t i o n c e n t e r s o n t h e narratives of the ʿabbāsid revolution (dawla) and its aftermath that took place in the years 129–137 ah/747–755 ce. i study two works on these events, both called kitāb al-dawla, composed by arab muslim collectors (akhbārīs) of historical narratives, al-haytham b. ʿadī (d. ca. 205/820–1) and al-madāʾinī (d. ca. 228/ 842–3). the works are not extant, but can be reconstructed, to some extent, on the basis of later quotations.1 t h e p r i n c i p l e s f o r r e c o n s t r u c t i n g al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla from ibn aʿtham’s kitāb al-futūḥ and al-ṭabarī’s annales have been discussed previously by gernot rotter and myself.2 al-haytham b . ʿ a d ī ’ s k i t ā b a l d a w l a h a s b e e n reconstructed in a study by tilman nagel on the basis of ibn ʿabd rabbihi’s (d. 328/940) al-ʿiqd al-farīd.3 i argue that themes in preparation of the revolution are not very important in al-madāʾinī’s narrative.4 the fact that 1. ilkka lindstedt, “al-madāʾinīʼs kitāb al-dawla and the death of ibrāhīm al-imām,” in ilkka lindstedt, jaakko hämeen-anttila, raija mattila, and robert rollinger (eds.), case studies in transmission (münster, 2014), 103–130. 2. gernot rotter, “zur überlieferung einiger historischer werke madāʾinīs in ṭabarīs annalen,” oriens 23-24 (1974), 103–133; lindstedt, al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla. 3. tilman nagel, untersuchungen zur entstehung des abbasidischen kalifates (bonn, 1972), 9–69; ibn ʿabd rabbihi al-andalusī, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, ed. a. amīn, a. al-zayn, and i. al-abyārī, 7 vols. (cairo, 1940), iv: 475–482. 4. only aḥmad b. ʿalī ibn aʿtham al-kūfī, kitāb al-madāʾinī did not have much to do with the ʿabbāsid ruling elite might be a factor in this. as to al-haytham b. ʿadī, who frequented the ʿabbāsid caliphs from al-manṣūr to al-rashīd, themes of preparation were much more important for him, as far as we can judge from n a g e l ’ s r e c o n s t r u c t i o n . i n h i s k i t ā b al-dawla, al-haytham b. ʿadī emphasized t h e s i g n i f i c a n c e o f a b ū h ā s h i m b . muḥammad b. al-ḥanafiyya’s testament to the ʿabbāsids.5 for him, the role of al-ʿabbās as the prophet’s uncle is not an important factor for the genealogical legitimation of the ʿabbāsids. according to al-haytham, the “secret bayʿa and the clandestine daʿwa”6 was carried out by the hāshimites since the killing of al-ḥusayn. his narrative, then, links the advent of the ʿabbāsids with the wider context of the shīʿa. in al-haytham b. ʿadī’s narrative, the testament of abū hāshim foretells that the two first ʿabbāsid caliphs (abū al-ʿabbās and al-manṣūr) will both be ṣāḥib hādhā al-amr, “possessor of this authority/ cause.”7 ibrāhīm al-imām is overlooked, probably showing embarrassment of his fate: his untimely death in ḥarrān at the hands of marwān.8 al-futūḥ, ed. m. khān, 8 vols. (hyderabad, 19681975), viii: 159–160, represents them. 5. ibn ʿabd rabbihi, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, iv: 475–476. 6. ibn ʿabd rabbihi, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, iv: 475. 7. jacob lassner, islamic revolution and historical memory. an inquiry into the art of ʿabbāsid apologetics (new haven, 1986), 57–58. 8. on the accounts of ibrāhīm al-imām’s demise, see lindstedt, al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla. vi. the ʿabbāsid revolution and its earliest historiography ilkka lindstedt university of helsinki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 165 in al-haytham’s kitāb al-dawla, the sending of the ʿabbāsid propagandists (duʿāt) is placed at the year 100 ah, 9 a f i g u r e t h a t h a s c l e a r a p o c a l y p t i c undertones. in the same year, it is said, the ʿabbāsid mahdī, the first caliph abū al-ʿabbās, is born. indeed, it seems that al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla also began with a narrative that ‘demonstrated’ the ʿabbāsids’ supremacy over the ḥasanids (and, one suspects, at the same time of the ʿabbāsids’ supremacy over the other lineages of the family of the prophet).10 in the story, which takes place in the umayyad era, ʿabdallāh b. al-ḥasan, al-nafs al-zakiyya’s father, says that it is not yet the time for his sons to revolt. however, the ʿabbāsid ʿabdallāh b. ʿalī says that if the ḥasanids will not revolt, he will snatch the power from the umayyads. a c c o r d i n g t o n a g e l , i n t h e e a r l y narratives speaking about the revolution itself, the word dawla takes on messianistic overtones.11 there are accounts ascribed to al-haytham b. ʿadī that connect the ʿabbāsids daʿwa and dawla to the different shīʿī uprisings of the last years of the umayyads. these accounts can be adorned with poetic embellishment, such as the poetry of sudayf b. maymūn that link together the killings of al-ḥusayn (called sibṭ aḥmad, “the grandson of aḥmad [the prophet]”), zayd b. ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn, his son yaḥyā b. zayd, and ibrāhīm al-imām.12 the ʿabbāsids are in this way connected to the shīʿa, broadly understood, and are seen 9. ibn ʿabd rabbihi, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, iv: 477. 10. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii: 159–160. 11. nagel, untersuchungen, 9–12. 12. aḥmad b. yaḥyā al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. ʿa. al-dūrī et al. to date 7 vols. in 9 (beirut, 1978), iii: 126, 162. as avengers of the deaths of the earlier shīʿī figures.13 moreover, abū al-ʿabbās is transformed as the sole real, legitimate caliph that the muslim community has ever had in addition to ʿalī b. abī ṭālib.14 also in al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla the killings of zayd b. ʿalī and yaḥyā b. zayd play a significant role. it is said that donning the color black was a sign of mourning for the two figures.15 in one tradition, when the khurāsānians address ibrāhīm al-imām, they note that zayd b. ʿalī and yaḥyā b. zayd are called “people of your house” (ahl baytika).16 ʿabbāsid historiography, then, showed the ʿabbāsids drawing legitimacy from three different shīʿī sources: a) through a testament from abū hāshim ← muḥammad b. al-ḥanafiyya ← ʿalī b. abī ṭālib; b) al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī, by avenging his killing; c) zayd b. ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī and his son yaḥyā b. zayd, by avenging their killings. n o w o n d e r , t h e n , t h a t a c c o r d i n g t o al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla, the people in al-kūfa expected the khurāsānian troops to proclaim an ʿalid as caliph.17 t h e n a r r a t i v e s r e p r e s e n t i n g t h e themes in the aftermath of the battle were important in al-madāʾinī’s kitāb 13. elton daniel, the political and social history of khurasan under abbasid rule 747–820 (minneapolis, 1979), 39 remarks: “as always, the abbasids capitalized on the strength of other movements by assimilating them with their own.” 14. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, iii: 140–141. 15. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii: 160. 16. moshe sharon, black banners from the east. the establishment of the ʿabbāsid state. incubation of a revolt (leiden, 1983), 147, n. 176, referring to the anonymous, akhbār al-ʿabbās, ed. ʿa. al-dūrī and ʿa. al-muṭṭalibī as: akhbār al-dawla al-ʿabbāsiyya wa-fīhi akhbār al-ʿabbās wa-waladihī (beirut, 1971), 241. 17. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii: 177, last line. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 166 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner al-dawla. the accounts form a story how the ʿabbāsids, once in power, cleansed their political base of figures that were not anymore needed or that were dangerous to the new dynasty in the post-revolutionary reality. for al-haytham, these themes were not as central. his kitāb al-dawla virtually ends with the bayʿa to abū al-ʿabbās in the year 132/749. the reign of al-manṣūr and the murders of abū salama and abū muslim are only briefly hinted at.18 al-madāʾinī continued the story to the first years of the second ʿabbāsid caliph, al-manṣūr, who is indeed the principal figure in the political murders. in al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla, the aftermath consists of four different narratives: (1) the murder of abū salama which takes place in the reign of abū al-ʿabbās but in which al-manṣūr is the central player.19 (2) the death of abū al-ʿabbās (136/754) and the bayʿa to al-manṣūr. however, at the former’s death, ʿabdallāh b. ʿalī also proclaims himself caliph, which leads al-manṣūr to send abū muslim to fight him. ʿabdallāh b. ʿalī is defeated but not killed.20 18. ibn ʿabd rabbihi, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, iv: 482; nagel, untersuchungen, 11. 19. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii: 207–209; abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. m. de goeje et al. as: annales quos scripsit abu djafar mohammed ibn djarir at-tabari, 15 vols. (leiden, 1879-1901), iii: 58–59; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, iii: 154–155. 20. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii: 89–98; ibn aʿtham, (3) ibn al-muqaffaʿ drafts a foolproof amān for ʿabdallāh b. ʿalī. this irks a l m a n ṣ ū r w h o w a n t s t o h a v e i b n al-muqaffaʿ killed. the murder is carried out by sufyān b. muʿāwiya al-muhallabī who had also a personal grudge.21 (4) the ending and the culmination of the kitāb al-dawla is the murder of abū muslim at the hands of al-manṣūr. the leading figure in the revolutionary phase is done away with and the rule belongs completely to al-manṣūr.22 al-haytham b. ʿadī does not mention ibn al-muqaffaʿ in his kitāb al-dawla, as far as it can be reconstructed. to add the killing of ibn al-muqaffaʿ (ca. 139/756–7) to those of abū salama and abū muslim seems to be a novel innovation of al-madāʾinī. in conclusion, the early third/ninth century was a time when interest in the history of the ʿabbāsid dawla really began, although it is impossible in most cases to date the works with any precision. early compilations, like those by al-haytham b . ʿ a d ī a n d a l m a d ā ʾ i n ī , w e r e l a t e r inc orporat ed in t he longer works of authors such as ibn aʿtham al-kūfī and al-ṭabarī and into the grand narrative of the muslim community. kitāb al-futūḥ, viii: 214–218. 21. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii: 218–219; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, iii: 221–223. 22. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii: 219–229; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii: 99–119; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, iii: 201–204. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 167 my contribution aims at examining the very first translation of the qurʾān, produced in greek in the third/ninth century, and to compare it with the original arabic text. this translation by an anonymous author, while generally very accurate, contains some textually subtle, but theologically highly important differences with respect to the arabic text. this seems to be the result of a christian hermeneutical reading of the qurʾān. the translation was used in a byzantine p o l e m i c a g a i n s t i s l a m , t h e s o c a l l e d refutation of the qurʾān (ἀνατροπὴ τοῦ κορανίου)1 by nicetas of byzantium (fl. 9th century). additionally, and beyond the comparison, the research analyzes the use and function of this translation in nicetas’ anatropē, which is its main and oldest source (vat. gr. 681). this is important in order to determine nicetas’ image of islam and to consider his impact on later byzantine and western writers concerning islam. nicetas is the first to actually use the qurʾān itself for a refutation of the islamic faith. his attempt had a vast influence on later byzantine and even mediaeval e u r o p e a n a p o l o g e t i c w r i t i n g a g a i n s t islam. he composed, besides a polemical treatise against the latins and armenians respectively, two letters directed to a muslim emir as well as his opus magnum, the refutation of the qurʾān, which he wrote around 860 ce. nicetas ought to be seen in the light of the re-emerging 1. henceforth anatropē. byzantine empire in the ninth century; he is likely to have been a monk2 and a member of the clerical elite of constantinople, since he was close to the emperor’s court and to the patriarch of constantinople, photios (858–867 & 878–886).3 biographical details about nicetas are very scarce and can only be reconstructed from his works, even though he was one of the most important polemicists, wielding the greatest influence on byzantine and even medieval views of islam until the late middle ages. it is astonishing, therefore, that until now there has been conducted no complete analytical research of nicetas’ writings. furthermore, no studies have been written about possible interrelations between the first translation of the qurʾān, which was used by nicetas, and later translations, such as the one commissioned by petrus venerabilis (1142), from which 2. inferring from some expressions in his works which apply the conviction of a monk, cf. manolis ulbricht: “al-tarjama al-ʾūlā li-l-qurʾān al-karīm min al-qarn 8/9 m. fī sijjāl nīkītās al-bīzanṭī (al-qarn 9 m) maʿa al-islām bi-ism tafnīd al-qurʾān“ [in arabic: “la première traduction du coran du 8ème/9ème siècle et son utilisation dans la polémique de nicétas de byzance (9ème siècle) avec le titre ‘réfutation du coran’”], chronos: revue d’histoire de l’université de balamand 25 (2012), 33–58, here p. 37 (or online url: http://edocs.fu-berlin.de/ d o c s / s e r v l e t s / m c r f i l e n o d e s e r v l e t / f u d o c s _ derivate_000000005501/ulbricht_traduction-ducoran_chronos-25_2012.pdf) 3. as he was officially assigned to compose the response to the armenians. cf. also the title of his letter against the armenians (in pg 105, 587–588). vii. the earliest translation of the qurʾān manolis ulbricht freie universität berlin http://edocs.fu-berlin.de/docs/servlets/mcrfilenodeservlet/fudocs_derivate_000000005501/ulbricht_traduction-du-coran_chronos-25_2012.pdf http://edocs.fu-berlin.de/docs/servlets/mcrfilenodeservlet/fudocs_derivate_000000005501/ulbricht_traduction-du-coran_chronos-25_2012.pdf http://edocs.fu-berlin.de/docs/servlets/mcrfilenodeservlet/fudocs_derivate_000000005501/ulbricht_traduction-du-coran_chronos-25_2012.pdf http://edocs.fu-berlin.de/docs/servlets/mcrfilenodeservlet/fudocs_derivate_000000005501/ulbricht_traduction-du-coran_chronos-25_2012.pdf al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 168 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner martin luther (1483–1546) was inspired, or the one later made by marcus of toledo (1209/10). as part of my research on the coranus graecus,4 i will provide a critical edition of the fragments of the greek translation of the qurʾān, preserved in the codex unicus vat. gr. 681 of nicetas of byzantium, and an analytical commentary of nicetas’ work. furthermore, i will analyze nicetas’ argumentation in his anatropē along with his methods of adapting the greek translation for polemical theological purposes. this forthcoming work will i n c l u d e a c o n c o r d a n c e a n d i n d i c e s , such as for grammatical phenomena, transliterated terms, syntactical patterns, and the translation of particular arabic expressions into greek, and so on. the commentary studies the greek translation of the qurʾān with respect to historical, theological, and socio-cultural aspects. first, i examine the differences between the greek and the arabic texts of the qurʾān by verifying if another reading, besides the reading of ḥafṣ ʿan ʿāṣim, i.e. the one of the current cairo edition of 1924, was used for the translation. from the typology of linguistic inconsistencies between the greek and the arabic texts, i furthermore draw conclusions about the religious and cultural environment of the translator and about the character of the translation. finally, i give insight into how nicetas used this translation by classifying the usage of the qurʾān within his polemics into different subjects, such as: ‘ethics’, ‘christology’, ‘violence’, etc. this way one can illustrate that nicetas’ arguments had 4. manolis ulbricht, “coranus graecus” [in preparation for studi e testi, rome (vatican) forthcoming]. a long afterlife not only in the byzantine realm, but also in the latin middle ages up to the modern period. focusing on the translation itself, it became clear, that it is an accurate and mostly literal one. 5 however, it does not seem to be an official work since its language level is close to the spoken byzantine greek. it has rather strong i n f l u e n c e s o f a v u l g a r g r e e k o f t h e byzantine era, which makes the manuscript one of the rare testimonies of written byzantine colloquial language. moreover, as the concordance and indices will show, there are a number of irregularities within the translation process, which might stem from the use of another arabic qurʾān reading than ḥafṣ ʿan ʿāṣim and/or from the fact that it was not only one person who translated the qurʾān. the translator obviously possessed deep knowledge of the christian orthodox liturgy as he uses various technical terms from the greek liturgical books in his work. for example, he depicts the arabic word “qurʾān” in greek as «ἀνάγνωσμα» (‘reading’) with a clear reference to the gospel readings in christian liturgy, or he translates the word “sūra” as «ὠδή» (‘ode’), which is an expression for a certain form of liturgical hymn. these observations lead to the conclusion that the anonymous translator is most likely a christian, maybe a monk, but at the same time acquainted with a profound knowledge of islamic rites and prayer practices. he can only have acquired this knowledge by cohabitation with muslims. as i argue, the translator, who lived somewhere in the middle east, was also part of this cultural-religious exchange and therefore followed the 5. for the following see ulbricht, “al-tarjama.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 169 tradition of john of damascus and theodor abū qurra. it is remarkable that discrepancies between both the greek and the arabic version appear particularly in expressions related to doctrinal questions in islam and christianity. for instance, a certain kind of difference appears regularly in verses referring to jesus christ: in different sūras, his name is connected to the term kalima (‘word’). however, in the arabic text, the word appears without the article. the greek translation, by contrast, determines this expression by adding the definite article, calling him e.g. «ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ» (‘the word of god’), while the arabic text gives ‘a word of god’. this radically changes the sense of the qurʾānic text because it thereby assumes the christian teachings about jesus christ as ‘the word of god’ and thus, as the ‘only begotten son of god’, which is strictly refused by islam and in the qurʾān itself. in conclusion, my research is directly related to the question of understanding t h e q u r ʾ ā n i t s e l f , w h i c h r e q u i r e s consulting lexicographical and exegetical l i t e r a t u r e . b y a n a l y z i n g t h e g r e e k translation, we can get an idea of the comprehension of the qurʾānic text itself in early times and furthermore, of the literature the translator had at his disposal for both understanding and translating the qurʾān. this would provide us with a better understanding of the historical development of exegetical literature on the qurʾān. viii. the fact-fiction-debate in early muslim historiography isabel toral-niehoff university of göttingen/freie universität berlin since the pivotal publications in the s eventies by albrecht noth, patric ia crone, and michael cook, there has been an ongoing and most likely never-ending debate on the validity, authenticity, and historicity of arabic historiography for the study of early islam. it has produced c o n f l i c t i n g a n d m u t u a l l y e x c l u s i v e “schools” of historians working on this period.1 against the background of the 1. cf. for a survey fred m. donner, “modern approaches to early islamic history,” in chase robinson (ed.), the new cambridge history of islam. vol. i, (cambridge, 2011), 625-644; cf. also robert g. hoyland, “history, fiction and authorship in the first centuries of islam,” in julia bray (ed.), writing and representation in medieval islam. muslim general “linguistic” and “literary” turn in historical studies of recent decades,2 we can further observe that islamicists i n c r e a s i n g l y h a v e s t a r t e d t o a p p l y methodical tools drawn from literary studies (as e.g. from the broad field of narratology3), in the hope that these might help to assess the factuality (and therefore reliability) of these texts. the articles by horizons (london, 2006), 16–46. 2. this process was strongly influenced by hayden white, metahistory. the historical imagination in nineteenth-century europe (baltimore, 1973). 3. see for instance gérard genette, nitsa ben-ari, and brian mchale, “fictional narrative, factual narrative,” poetics today 11 (1990), 755-774. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 170 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner stefan leder have been pioneering in this regard,4 since he introduced the theses of the german medievalist wolfgang iser on the origins and ontology of fictionality (“fiktionalität”) into the field of arabic and islamic studies.5 in the following contribution, i want to renew the discussion by making some points inspired by theoretical approaches developed in the thriving field of medieval studies in germany. i will argue that the many similarities between early arabic historiography and medieval chronicles call for a closer cooperation to better evaluate the status of these texts. (1) on the one hand, there is a discussion among arabists regarding the alleged “rejection of fiction” within classical arabic literature. except maqāmāt texts and fables, we do not have any prose text from the initial period that overtly refer to a literary and autonomous world of fiction.6 critical statements of premodern arab scholars against “inventions” and “lies” in literature have contributed to convey the impression that there was an ideological taboo working against fiction. furthermore, classical arabic literary criticism does not have any reflection about the concept of fiction. all seems 4. see for example stefan leder (ed.), storytelling in the framework of non-fictional arabic literature (wiesbaden, 1998); especially his “conventions of fictional narration in learned literature,” in s. leder (ed.), story-telling in the framework of non-fictional arabic literature (wiesbaden, 1998), 34-60. 5. wolfgang iser, das fiktive und das imaginäre. perspektiven einer literarischen anthropologie (münchen, 1983). 6. rina drory, “three attempts to legitimize fiction in classical arabic literature,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 18 (1994), 289-307. to indicate that literary fiction—though existent, as shown by the list in the fihrist by ibn al-nadīm7—was relegated to the depreciated realm of trivial literature. medieval studies, on the other hand, discuss the “invention” of fiction in the late medieval period,8 which was apparently unknown till then.9 (2) a special problem seems to arise from the narrative style we find in early a r a b i c p r o s e t e x t s ( s o c a l l e d k h a b a r s t y l e ) , s i n c e i t h a r m o n i z e s w i t h o u r understanding of factuality. however, this apparent factual status often contradicts the obviously fictitious content. some scholars argue that this “confusion” is a special problem of arabic text traditions, so that they regard it as crucial to “detect fiction” by establishing specific textual signals.10 however, european medieval chronicles are equally fuzzy in their delimitation of “fact and fiction”. this discrepancy between “factual style and fictitious content” might also be due to our distorting eurocentric11 and maybe anachronistically modern12 understanding of reality. in addition, as the medievalist 7. mohammed ferid ghazi, “la litterature d’imagination en arabe du iie/viiie au ve/xie siècles,” arabica 4 (1957), 164-168. 8. cf. walter haug, “die entdeckung der fiktionalität,” in w. haug (ed.), die wahrheit der fiktion. studien zur weltlichen und geistlichen literatur des mittelalters und der frühen neuzeit (tübingen, 2003), 128-144. 9. cf. jan-dirk müller, “literarische und andere spiele. zum fiktionalitätsprinzip in vormoderner literatur,” poetica: zeitschrift für sprachund literaturwissenschaft 36 (2004), 281-312. 10. leder, story-telling. 11. cf. julie scott meisami, “history as literature,” iranian studies 33 (2000), 15-30. 12. müller, literarische und andere spiele. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 171 jan müller emphasizes, a factual style does not necessarily indicate a non-fictional status, but might be a peculiar literary strategy.13 ( 3 ) f u r t h e r p r o b l e m s a r i s e f r o m s e m a n t i c c o n f u s i o n a n d i m p r e c i s e terminology. this applies not only to the semantic field of fact/fiction, e.g. true/ false, real/imaginary, real/unreal, fiction/ fictionalized, etc., that tend to get blurred and mixed. it is also important to note that we still cannot establish often all the semantic dimensions of core arabic terms used in this regard like kadhib (“lie”, “falsehood”, “dishonesty” ?). hence, we need further clarifications on arab terminology and conceptualization. (4) one critical point noted in both fields is the lack of distinction made between rhetorical embellishment, or functional fictionality on the one hand, and free invention and autonomous fictionality on the other hand.14 (5) it is important to keep in mind that the idea of “fiction” in the sense of german “literatur” presupposes an independent framework (bourdieu: “field”) where “ f i c t i o n ” i s a l l o w e d , e x p e c t e d , a n d a p p r e c i a t e d — s o m e t h i n g t h a t w o u l d emerge in european modernity. this is not 13. ibid. 14. ibid. the case in classical arabic literature, and likewise in earlier medieval literature. ( 6 ) a r a b i c a k h b ā r ī s w o r k e d i n a different manner than modern historians; and thus they rather resemble those medieval historians doing “vorzeitkunde” (antiquities). their main endeavor was not to draw, via scientific methods, verifiable and accurate representations of the past, but rather to evoke the resonance of these memories and to produce historical meaning. the isnād served to establish further the validity of the record, since absolute certainty was impossible to obtain. (7) another potentially useful concept is that of rhetoric history,15 whose purpose is to convey moral values by referring to exempla of the past and so convince the reader via rhetoric embellishment. these historians wanted to reconstruct a plausible and version of the past according to the testimonies of reliable transmitters, a n d t h e n t o i n t e r p r e t t h e s e e v e n t s according to their world-view. i n c o n c l u s i o n , a s t h e s e p a r a l l e l s between arabic and medieval european source material have shown, there is much to be learned through interdisciplinary e x c h a n g e a n d s c i e n t i f i c c o o p e r a t i o n between both fields. therefore, any further intercultural study between both fields of research is more than welcome. 15. meisami, history as literature. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 172 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner if the work of a historian consists of patient chiselwork in a quarry of sources, early arabic historiography, particularly w h e n d e a l i n g w i t h i s l a m i c s a l v a t i o n history, rather resembles an ocean: there is always more material relevant to any particular topic, than one is able to keep in mind, and the closer one looks at any episode, the less clear it becomes where exactly this episode belongs to. while the first aspect of the oceanic extent of early arabic historiography makes i t p a r t i c u l a r l y d i f f i c u l t t o c o n s t r u c t any argument ex negativo and makes indispensable a systematic evaluation of the source-material as a whole, i will in this contribution concentrate on the multitude of equally relevant intertextual references pertaining to any particular episode. as an example, i study the conquest of dūmat al-jandal by khālid b. al-walīd. while this is by no means the only account linking muḥammad and his time with the north arabian oasis-town of dūmat al-jandal, there exists a fairly well defined corpus of stories describing the capture of a “king” affiliated to the arabic tribe of kinda by muslim troops led by khālid following a prediction by muḥammad. they say: the messenger of god [...] sent khālid b. al-walīd [...] against ukaydir b. ͑abd al-malik [ruler] of dūmat al-jandal. ukaydir was the king (malik) of kinda and he was a christian. khālid asked: “[...] how can i get at him in the middle of the land of [the tribe of] kalb?” [...] the prophet [...] answered: “you will find him hunting cattle (al-baqar) and will take him captive!”1 i argue that the first dimension in which intertextual references can be traced in this simple story is the general depiction of kindites as part of a coherent pattern extending across images of kinda. i will limit myself in the following to an exemplary enumeration, having discussed the motives mentioned in the following in more detail elsewhere.2 the portrayal of ukaydir as king over arabs belonging to other tribes fits into a general trend to portray kindītes as rulers over other tribes. the costly cloak of ukaydir’s brother dazzles the muslims as does the garment presented by ukaydir to muḥammad during his audience. both form part of general tendencies to ridicule kindītes as weavers of textiles and praise the their beautiful clothing. the princely pastimes of the kindīte ruler, hunting for example, and his haughty opposition to islamic authority can also be described as part of a more widespread trend in the depiction of kindītes. the second dimension of conflicting intertextual references concerns the early islamic polity of islamic salvation 1. muḥammad b. ʿumar al-wāqidī, kitāb al-maghāzī, ed. m. ʿaṭā, 2 vols. (beirut, 2004), ii: 405. 2. see georg leube, kinda in der frühislamischen historiographie (würzburg, forthcoming). ix. intertextuality as a typical feature of early arabic historiography georg leube university of marburg al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 173 history in general. the structure of the prediction and its eventual fulfillment in the above mentioned text confirms the status of muḥammad as a true prophet; the confident obedience of khālid b. al-walīd serves as a rehabilitation of this general often censored harshly for un-islamic behaviour; the subsequent agreements over tribute and protection, jizya and dhimma, serve as prophetic precedents for administrative structures in the lands conquered under muḥammad’s successors; a n d m u ḥ a m m a d ’ s a c c e p t a n c e o f t h e presence of an unbeliever (mushrik) serves as precedence for the acceptability of all kinds of gifts by islamic authorities. how then is one to interpret a story t o r n b e t w e e n s u c h a m u l t i t u d e o f conflicting contexts? i would like to make two suggestions. while the interweaving of such a multitude of strands makes the exclusive interpretation of any single one of the potentially viable contexts highly problematic, the origin of a body o f m a t e r i a l t h a t i s t h o u g h t t h r o u g h i n t h i s m a n n e r c a n b e e x p l a i n e d b y assuming a high degree of unfestigkeit and philological contamination of the text during the process of transmission. as synchronous contamination is not usually reflected in the isnāds, this necessitates a reinterpretation of the isnāds, commonly understood as chains of transmission, as chains authorizing accounts known, discussed and thereby transmitted in much wider circles. put axiomatically, every transmitter knows more than he is quoted for and every account is known to more people than show up in its isnād(s). this in turn offers the possibility to trace in process the multivocal negotiation of tradition inside a community characterized until today by the paradigmatic importance of its salvation history. x. the origins of fitna-writing in islamic historiography masoud sadeghi university of tehran the theme of fitna was one of the main themes of classical islamic historiography. f i t n a , a s a h i s t o r i o g r a p h i c a l t h e m e , referred to religio-political conflicts within the muslim community itself. the term fitna (“temptation”, “discord”) is generally negative and the antithesis of obedience and stability (more commonly expressed as “unity of the community”). my main question in this contribution therefore is: when, where, and why did the theme of fitna arise? before proposing my answer i scrutinize three previous answers to this question. (1) in his narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing, fred m. donner argues that the theme of fitna was inaugurated by the shīʿa during the first civil war, because—as a losing party—they “needed to justify their continued resistance to umayyad rule and their continued support of the political claims of ʿalī’s descendants.”1 tackling the 1. fred m. donner, narratives of islamic origins: al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 174 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner question how the fitna theme was included into the sunnī historical tradition, donner ventures that the ʿabbāsids’ revolutionary movement took over the bulk of the shīʿa narrative tradition, including this theme.2 i have several remarks concerning donner’s view. first, the term fitna did and does generally carry a negative connotation and was the antithesis of obedience—a strongly recommended principle in the early muslim society—and stability. so this term was not used by actual participants in the early civil wars—whether shīʿa or other groups—to refer to those events or to the motivations of various actors in them. second, explaining the emergence of this theme, donner stresses the political incentive and need, and does not point out the difference between history written for the purposes of political patronage and historicizing legitimation, and history written in response to or as a result of political events and issues. finally, the use of fitna in shīʿi collections of ḥadīth and monographs mostly carry an apocalyptic sense and has to do with the messianic literature (like the kitāb al-fitan wa-lmalāḥim written by ibn ṭāwūs). (2) although chase f. robinson does not pay attention to fitna writing as a historical type, he regards the writing of fitan and malāḥim, in the apocalyptic sense, to be influenced by the syriac christian tradition. “we have reports”, he says, “that histories in the eusebian tradition were being translated during the reign of al-manṣūr (r. 136-158/754-775), and it seems that one muslim apocalyptic text [i.e. the kitāb al-fitan wa-l-malāḥim], the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton, 1998), 187 (italics mine). 2. donner, narratives, 188-190. perhaps written about 163/780, is the reworking and translation of a christian version written in syria”.3 to robinson’s origin of the apocalyptic sense of fitnaliterature has to be added the political and social circumstances of the early muslim society that had an impact on accepting and reworking this literature. (3) in their the early arabic historical tradition: a source critical study, albrecht noth and lawrence conrad divide the major themes around which historical texts were composed into primary and secondary ones, and consider fitna (sedition), along with futūḥ (conquests), ridda (apostasy), ansāb (genealogies), and administration as a primary theme that is said to have some roots in historical reality. in contrast, secondary themes are considered to be derived from the primary ones and provide less reliable information to historians.4 although they do not propose a general dating scheme for their “themes”, they base the view that the annalistic form a s a n e s t a b l i s h e d h i s t o r i o g r a p h i c a l feature is a product of the late second/ eighth or early third/ninth centuries and works arranged by caliphates appeared thereafter, and probably derived from, the annalistic scheme, on the reason that such “original” themes as futūḥ and fitna “clash with a thematic outlook oriented towards everything that happened under each individual caliph”.5 in other words, 3. chase f. robinson, islamic historiography (cambridge, 2003), 49. 4. albrecht noth, the early arabic historical tradition. a source-critical study. in collaboration with lawrence i. conrad. translated from the german by michael bonner, 2nd ed. (princeton, 1994), 27. 5. noth, early arabic historical tradition, 27. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 175 since the futūḥ and fitna themes occurred during more than one caliphate, the material could not have been fitted into a caliphate based arrangement. however, it may be said that since the futūḥ and fitna themes historically occurred during more than one year the material could not have been fitted into an annalistic scheme, either. therefore, i argue that to answer the question on the origins of fitna literature, a closer look at ḥadīth literature and monographs on the theme of fitna is necessary. the usage of fitna in ḥadīths can be regarded as a middle phase between its qurʾānic and historical usage. it was through ḥadīth literature that fitna could have been used as a historical theme and could have found different connotations from its previous qurʾānic meanings. in addition to a chapter on fitna in maʿmar b. rāshid al-azdī’s (d. 151/768-769) al-jāmiʿ, the sunnī authoritative ḥadīth collections that emerged in the mid-third/ninth century also include a chapter on fitna. for example, al-bukhārī’s (d. 256/870) chapter on fitna in his authoritative ḥadīth collection al-ṣaḥīḥ was arranged into 28 sections (abwāb).6 other ḥadīth collections’ chapters on fitna were arranged somewhat differently. although there are in fact d i f f e r e n c e s a m o n g v a r i o u s ḥ a d ī t h collections, for instance, in the methods and purposes governing the selection, the use of the materials, and in the contents of such materials themselves (hence, every one of them needs a proper study), for the 6. muḥammad b. ismāʿīl al-bukhārī, al-jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, ed. l. krehl as: le recueil des traditions mahométanes par abou abdallah mohammed ibn ismaîl el-bokhâri, 4 vols. (leiden, 1862-1908), iv: 365-383. present purpose it is sufficient to derive some conclusions regarding the semantics of the word fitna from the respective ḥadīth collections’ chapters. fitna in these collections is used in two general different, but related, senses: (1) fitna as opposed to obedience means revolt, as opposed to unity, order, and stability means conflict, turmoil, and disorder, and as opposed to the sunna of prophet means innovation and heresy. (2) in contrast, fitna, is also used in an apocalyptic sense when associated with malāḥim and the coming of the mahdī. i argue that on this basis it is possible to differentiate two types of fitna writings: fitna writings as history of rebellion, revolt, and turmoil (i.e. civil war) and fitna writings as history of the future, i.e. the coming of the mahdī and apocalyptic events. the first type of literature was formed i n t h e l a t e u m a y y a d a n d t h e e a r l y ʿabbāsid periods. although it did not witness worries of the prophet about the future of his community, it testifies to the political and social circumstances after the death of the prophet and reflects the conservative approach of the early muslim society to its social and political problems. the second type was influenced by near eastern religious communities in the years before and following the rise of islam. the apocalyptic connotation of the second and the predicting character of the first type are, therefore, the fictional aspect of most fitna writings by muslim scholars. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 176 • yoones dehghani farsani & jens scheiner m y c o n t r i b u t i o n a d d r e s s e s t h e construction of historical knowledge i n e a r l y i s l a m , a n d t h e c h a n c e s o f survival of early texts. in particular, i am interested in the construction of what became a historiographical vulgate, and what it represented for the society that produced it, in order to shed light on the cultural memory of early islam. in this line of enquiry, i also question the gap of narrative sources we are facing for the first 200 years of islam or so, and address the problematic question of the disappearance of earlier texts. to discuss these thorny issues, i look at the specific example of muḥammad b. mūsā al-khwārizmī (d. after 323/847), who was arguably one of the most famous scholars of the early ʿabbāsid period. he enjoys an impressive scholarly fame and legacy, ranging from algebra and mathematics to astronomy, geography, and cartography. yet, he has been almost totally forgotten as a historian, even if it is well established that he wrote a now lost kitāb al-taʾrīkh. how can we make sense of this selective memory of his work? i argue that a substantial amount from his lost history can be retrieved and that it sheds a new light on ʿabbāsid historiography in the making. i also contend that his history primarily vanished because of its specific genre. indeed, al-khwārizmī wrote an astrological history that represented a very popular genre in early ʿabbāsid times, using planetary conjunctions to explain past, present, and future events.1 i study the various reasons behind the eventual decline of this mode of historical writing, and suggest that, with the waning of astrological histories, came the vanishing of al-khwārizmī’s history. w h y i s t h i s s i g n i f i c a n t a n d w h a t does this tell us about historiographical developments during the first centuries of islam? one point to emphasize is that scholars like to lament the dearth of narrative sources for early islam but we should take into account all existing texts, even when they do not fit our traditional categories. thus, for various reasons, astrological histories have been excluded from traditional accounts of the rise of i s l a m i c h i s t o r i o g r a p h y , e v e n t h o u g h they shed fresh light on the construction of historical knowledge in early islam. indeed, some of these astrological histories are significantly earlier than our more traditional narrative sources and thus offer rare access to early layers of islamic historiography. moreover, the vanishing of astrological histories reveals a radical shift in historical writing in early islam, and in historical causality in particular. their disappearance bears testimony to a change of “régime d’historicité” in the late 1. for more on astrological histories, see antoine borrut, “court astrologers and historical writing in early ʿabbāsid baghdad: an appraisal,” in jens scheiner and damien janos (eds.), the place to go: contexts of learning in baghdād, 750-1000 c.e. (princeton, 2014), 455–501. xi. addressing the ‘gap of sources’: historiography and cultural memory in early islam antoine borrut university of maryland al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) new insights into early islamic historiography • 177 third/ninth century, that is a moment in which a society redefines its relationship b e t w e e n “ p a s t , p r e s e n t , a n d f u t u r e ” in the context of a “crisis of time,” to follow french historian françois hartog’s definition.2 finally, and more broadly, i argue that these elements should force us to re-evaluate the gap of (narrative) sources we are facing for the first centuries of islam. astrological histories only represent one alternative mode of historical writing that flourished in early ʿabbāsid times if not earlier. we should also make room for other genres and categories (quṣṣāṣ or futūḥ literature, muslim apocalyptic, etc.). and we ought, furthermore, to stop opposing “internal” (i.e., muslim) to “external” (i.e., non-muslim) sources. non-muslim sources have a critical role to play if we want to properly integrate early islam into the multicultural world of late 2. françois hartog, régimes d’historicité. présentisme et expériences du temps (paris, 2003), 27.
 antiquity. besides, a sizeable number of texts produced by non-muslim scholars were composed while their authors were serving at the caliphal court in some official capacity, and so they can hardly be regarded as “external”. such an approach not only significantly reduces our gap of sources but also opens up new perspectives on the circulation of historical information and the construction of historical knowledge. the first two and a half centuries of islam remain a formidable methodological challenge for scholars. perhaps a preliminary step is to fully acknowledge that the so-called gap of (narrative) sources we are facing up to the middle of the third/ninth century is, for a large part, an optical illusion and a historiographical construct, both ancient and modern. the vanishing of histories, of alternative pasts and memories is, ultimately, historically explainable. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018): 113-150 in the year 840/1411 ibn nuḥās died near damieta while defending the town of al-ṭīnah 1 against a crusader attack. thereby, he died as a martyr in the fulfillment of the jihād. previously, he had written on the merits of the jihād in his work mashāriʿ al-ashwāq ilā maṣāriʿ al-ʿushshāq, which from chapter 32 on included a brief but interesting history of jihād.2 the bulk of the text is composed of the prophet’s campaigns, the maghāzī,3 followed 1. this work was supported by the european research council under the european union’s seventh framework programme (fp7/20072013) / erc grant agreement n° 323316. pi: mercedes garcía-arenal. i would like to thank maribel fierro and patrice cressier for inviting me to participate in this volume. a first version of this paper was presented at the conference les califats de l’occident islamique i. formuler, représenter et légitimer le califat, 6th november 2015, casa de velázquez (madrid). 2. ibn nuḥās, mashāriʿ al-ashwāq ilā maṣāriʿ al-ʿushāq (beirut, 2002), 840 and ff. 3. the term maghāzī, apparently from the times of al-wāqidī’s kitāb al-maghāzī (3rd/9th century), if not earlier, the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam: memory, legitimization and holy war, from cordoba to tinmal javier albarrán universidad autónoma de madrid1 (javier.albarran@uam.es) abstract this paper analyzes how the memorialization and commemoration of early conflicts in islamic history influenced the performance and legitimization of jihād, especially on the part of caliphs who ruled in the islamic west. jihād is defined here as an ideology, a discursive tool that appealed to accepted and shared sacred elements; created a framework for the justification of specific actions on the part of the caliphs; and generated new authority. the paper also discusses the importance of the maghāzī and futūḥ, as well as its later impact, reception, reinvention, and re-contextualization. the focus of this study, however, is the key role that military expeditions during the founding period of islam played in the conceptualization of jihād, which turned primitive episodes of war into legitimizing elements by utilizing the image of ideal behavior enjoyed by muḥammad and the rāshidūn within the umma. this study considers the cordoban umayyad caliphate and the almohad movement, two periods during which al-andalus was ruled directly by a caliph. by considering both chronological and geographical contexts, the paper analyzes the commemoration of the first battles of islam, wherein both caliphates in the islamic west presented themselves as a renewal of the early “golden age” of islam. a comparison between the caliphates illuminates their similarities and differences. mailto:javier.albarran%40uam.es?subject= 114 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) by the battles and conquests of the first caliphs, the rāshidūn, as well as of a summary of the most important islamic victories. following a traditional narrative that can be found in books devoted to the prophet’s expeditions4 and still widely disseminated in the islamic world today, ibn nuḥās describes (prior to discussing the expeditions) how god did not allow the muslims to fight against the infidels until the hijra. that is to say, the jihād did not begin until muḥammad’s arrival in medina. ibn nuḥās then organizes the prophet’s battles into two sections: firstly, those that muḥammad conducted himself and, secondly, the expeditions that he dispatched but did not participate in.5 although the author emphasizes that the jihād would not end until judgment day and that it was a duty of all muslims of every age, the outline of this chapter seems to show that the most important fight was the one carried out by the prophet against the infidels and hypocrites of his time, while the rest were mere derivations of it. that is to say, the maghāzī represented the true and pure spirit of jihād. following these sections, and also of great interest, were the conquests of the “rightly guided” caliphs. the memory of the battles of the prophet and the rāshidūn caliphs is also reflected in al-shaybānī’s (d. 189/805) theory of the “four swords,” according to which god had given the prophet four swords to use in his fight against the infidels: the first was brandished by muḥammad himself and used against the polytheists; the second was used by abū bakr against the apostates; the third was raised by ʿumar against the people of the book; and the fourth was used by ʿalī to fight against the rebels.6 in this sense, shams al-dīn al-sarakhsī (d. 490/1090), one of the great jurists of the classical period, claimed that the actions related referred to the prophet’s expeditions, and thus not only battles, of the medina period. the first of the stories in al-wāqidī concerns the departure of 30 men led by hamza b. ʿabd al-muṭṭalib, who in 1/623 intercepted a caravan of qurayshis heading from mecca to syria along the coastal route. the last story in the text concerns an expedition conducted by usāma b. zayd along with 3,000 men toward syria in 11/623, right after the prophet’s death. see al-wāqidī, the life of muḥammad. al-wāqidī’s kitāb al-maghāzī, ed. r. faizer (london/new york, 2011); j. horovitz, the earliest biographies of the prophet and their authors (princeton, 2002; ed. orig. 1927); r. paret, die legendäre maghazi-literatur (tubinga, 1930); j. schacht, “on mūsā b. ʿuqba’s kitāb al-maghāzī,” acta orientalia 21 (1953), 288-300; j. jones, “the chronology of the maghāzī-a textual survey,” in uri rubin (ed.), the life of muḥammad (aldershot, 1998, 1st ed. 1957), 193-228; m. hinds, “maghāzī and sira in early islamic scholarship,” in t. fahd (ed.), la vie du prophète mahomet (paris, 1983), 57-66; m. hinds, “al-maghazi,” ei2, vol. 5, leiden, 1986, 1161-1164; ḥ. mujīb al-masrī, ghazawāt al-rasūl bayn shuʿarāʾ al-shuʿūb al-islāmiyyah: dirāsah fī al-adab al-islāmī al-muqāran (cairo, 2000); m. hammīdullāh, the battlefields of the prophet muhammad, with maps, illustrations and sketches: a continuation to muslim military history (new delhi, 2003), and maʿmar ibn rāshid, the expeditions. an early biography of muḥammad, ed. and transl. sean w. anthony (new york/ london, 2014), xv-xix. 4. ḥāmid aḥmad al-ṭāhir, ghazawāt al-rasūl (cairo, 2010), 7 and 26 ff. 5. the second category is known as the sarāyā (sing. sariyah). m. s. tantāwī, al-sarāyā al-ḥarbiyyah fī al-ʿahd al-nabawī (cairo, 1990), 21. like many other biographers of the prophet, ibn isḥāq distinguishes the campaigns conducted in person by muḥammad from the sarāyā, but, in narrating them, omits the distinction and follows a strictly chronological order. ibn isḥāq/ibn hishām, sīrat rasūl allāh, trans. a. guillaume (oxford, 1955), 659-660. 6. m. khaddūrī, war and peace in the law of islām (baltimore/london, 1955, 1st ed. 1949), 74; a. morabia, le ǧihâd dans l’islam médiéval. le « combat sacré » des origines au xiie siècle (paris, 1993), 303 and 502 n. 66, and r. booney, jihad. from qurʾan to bin laden (new york, 2004), 53. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 115 to the jihād of the four orthodox caliphs served as a precedent, or as legal justification.7 the jurist ʿalī ibn ṭāhir al-sulamī (d. 499-500/1106) also recounted the memory of the first caliphs’ victories in an attempt to revitalize the jihād he had carried out after the first crusade with his treatise on holy war.8 just as the rāshidūn had done, contemporary rulers had to lead the jihād against the infidels. therefore we can see the fundamental relationship between the idea of jihād and the memory of the first battles of islam. the resignification and recontextualization of the expeditions of the prophet and the first caliphs’ memory, along with the symbolic capital that these expeditions carried, played a key role in the conceptualization and theorization of jihād, which turned the earliest episodes of war into legitimizing elements due to the image of an ideal behavior enjoyed by muḥammad and the rāshidūn within the umma, or, in other words, what tarif khalidi calls “social ideality.”9 let me briefly explain what i mean by “memory” of the first expeditions of islam.10 in the first place, it is important to take into account the position that the early islamic times, that is, the time of the prophet and the rāshidūn caliphs,11 occupy in the collective imagination. this period is understood as an exemplary “golden age” that must be constantly emulated and referred to. the prophet and his life experience, followed by the orthodox caliphs, carry a symbolic capital12 and an absolute charisma.13 whenever the memory of this period 7. t. osman, the jurisprudence of sarakhsī with particular reference to war and peace: a comparative study in islamic law, phd thesis, university of exeter, 1993, 108 and ff., and booney, jihad, 75. 8. e. sivan, “la genèse de la contre-croisade: un traité damasquin du début du xiie siècle,” journal asiatique 254 (1966), 197-224 and n. christies, the book of the jihād of ʿalī ibn ṭāhir al-sulamī (d. 1106): text, translation and commentary (aldershot, 2015). 9. t. khalidi, images of muhammad. narratives of the prophet in islam across the centuries (new york, 2009), viii. 10. for an overview of “memory studies,” see m. tamm, “beyond history and memory: new perspectives in memory studies,” history compass 11/6 (2013), 458-473. 11. quoting el-hibri: “the age of the rashidun is more a form of religious representation than one of actual historical fact.” t. el-hibri, parable and politics in early islamic history: the rashidun caliphs (new york, 2010), 4. the concept of “rāshidūn caliphs” was an abbasid-era development and i will use it in that sense, since this idea was also consolidated in tenth century al-andalus with the arrival of works such as al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh and khalīfa b. khayyāṭ’s history. for example, in ibn ʿabd rabbih’s al-ʿiqd al-farīd the four rāshidūn (abū bakr, ʿumar, ʿuthmān and ʿalī) are included to support the idea that the umayyads succeeded them. a. al-azmeh, “muslim history, reflections on periodisation and categorisation,” the medieval history journal 19/1-2 (1998), 195-231; a. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (72–193/692–809) (leiden, 2011); a. borrut, “vanishing syria: periodization and power in early islam,” der islam 91/1 (2014), 37-68; a. afsaruddin, the first muslims: history and memory (oxford, 2008), 57; i. toral-niehoff, “history in adab context: ‘the book on caliphal histories’ by ibn ʿabd rabbih (246/860328/940),” journal of abbasid studies 2 (2015), 61-85. 12. p. bourdieu, el sentido práctico (madrid, 2008), 179-193. 13. m. weber, sociología del poder. los tipos de dominación (madrid, 2007); m. weber, sociología de la religión (madrid, 2012); d. barnes, “charisma and religious leadership: an historical analysis,” journal for the scientific study of religion 17 (1978), 1-18; b. turner, weber and islam (london, 1978); j. post, “charisma,” in r. landes (ed.), encyclopedia of millennialism and millennial movements (new york, 2000), 118-125; p. rieff, charisma: the gift of grace and how it has been taken away from us (new york, 2007); k. jansen and m. 116 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) is voiced, it produces an appropriation and reproduction of this symbolic capital along with the charisma and social authority that it confers. in fact, through this memorialization, throughout the resignification and recontextualization, in this case of the expeditions of the prophet and the memory of the first caliphs, the aforementioned charismatic authority is reactivated. as a consequence, new obligations are simultaneously generated and demanded while evoking the sacred symbols of shared culture and memory and associating them with images that have, again, an enormous symbolic capital. accordingly, as sean anthony says, “maghāzī are also sites of sacred memory,” events and stories of sacred history that left their mark on the collective memory of the community of believers.14 thus, these early expeditions of islam are part of the cultural memory of the umma, where we understand “cultural memory” as jan assman defined it: as “that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image.”15 in order to better comprehend this phenomenon of “memorialization,” i will draw on the idea of “commemoration” as a dynamic process in which stories and reports from the past are recovered, re-narrated, and recontextualized in a given present in order to serve future aims. these narratives, and the beliefs and values they contain, can create cohesion within the group that performs the commemoration while simultaneously conflicting with the collective myths and narratives of other groups. consequently, collective memorialization is not neutral since it is always linked to issues of identity and power.16 therefore, by studying the commemoration of the first battles of islam through repeated mention and narration, we will carry out an exercise in “mnemohistory.” coined again by assmann, this term “is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered. it surveys the story-lines of tradition, the webs of intertextuality, the diachronic continuities and discontinuities of reading the past.”17 thus, the interest is not only the factuality of the maghāzī and futūḥ, but their later impact, reception, reinvention, and recontextualization. rubin, “introduction” in k. jansen and m. rubin (eds.), charisma and religious authority. jewish, christian, and muslim preaching 1200-1500 (turnhout, 2010), 1-16. 14. maʿmar ibn rāshid, the expeditions, xviii. for the idea of “sites of memory,” p. nora, les lieux de mémoire (paris, 1984). 15. j. assmann, “collective memory and cultural identity,” new german critique 65 (1995), 125-133. see also j. assmann, religion and cultural memory (stanford, california, 2006); j. assmann, cultural memory and early civilization: writing, remembrance, and political imagination (cambridge, 2011). 16. for more on this concept of “commemoration” see, for example, d. tilles and j. richardson, “poland and the holocaust. a new law exposes the problematic nature of holocaust remembrance,” history today 68/5 (2018) published online: https://www.historytoday.com/daniel-tilles-and-john-richardson/poland-andholocaust 17. j. assmann, moses the egyptian: the memory of egypt in western monotheism (cambridge, mass., 1997), 54. as marek tamm says, one of the earliest examples of “mnemohistory” in medieval studies is g. duby, le dimanche de bouvines (paris, 1973). tamm, “beyond history and memoy,” 458-473. see also m. tamm, “history as cultural memory: mnemohistory and the construction of estonian nation,” journal of baltic studies 39 (2008), 499-516. https://www.historytoday.com/daniel-tilles-and-john-richardson/poland-and-holocaust https://www.historytoday.com/daniel-tilles-and-john-richardson/poland-and-holocaust al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 117 this paper will analyze, then, using several different cases as examples, the process by which memorialization, the commemoration of the first battles of islam, becomes an important element for the performance and legitimization of jihād.18 jihād is here understood as an ideology, a discursive tool that appeals to accepted and shared sacred elements; creates a framework that provides justification for specific actions; and generates powerful doses of authority. therefore, holy war should be understood, rather than as a concrete action, as a flexible performance setting, centered on a discourse of struggle against the enemies of god. it has a concrete language, can be adapted to different contexts, and is used by a variety of actors in order to legitimize their actions.19 regarding the choice of geographical and chronological context, i will focus on the cordoban umayyad caliphate as well as on the almohad movement, two cases in which al-andalus was ruled directly by a caliph. additionally, i consider this framework suitable for the analysis of the commemoration of the first battles of islam, since both caliphates presented themselves as a recommencement of the early days of islam, that is, as a return to that “golden age,” by referring to the eschatological times of its appearance—the year 300 in the case of ʿabd al-raḥmān iii and 500 in ibn tūmart’s—or the idea that cordoba was the new medina and tinmal the destiny of a new hijra,20 issues to which i will return later. thereby, we can also establish a comparison between the two cases. the umayyad caliphate of cordoba in umayyad al-andalus, the frontier of the islamic world for eight centuries, jihād and the memory of the first battles of islam maintained an intense relationship. the chronicles portrayed the umayyad sovereign, ʿabd al-raḥmān iii (d. 350/961) in particular,21 as a 18. for the use of memory within the discourse of jihād see, for example, a. anooshahr, the ghazi sultans and the frontiers of islam. a comparative study of the late medieval and early modern periods (london-new york, 2009); b. shoshan, the arabic historical tradition and the early islamic conquests. folklore, tribal lore, holy war (london, 2016), and m. cook, ancient religions, modern politics: the islamic case in comparative perspective (princeton, 2014), 215 ff. 19. for a similar approach see, for example, a. krasner balbale, “jihād as a means of political legitimation in thirteenth-century sharq al-andalus,” in a. bennison (ed.), the articulation of power in medieval iberia and the maghrib (oxford, 2014), 87-105. 20. see, for example, m. fierro, “the movable minbar in cordoba: how the umayyads of al-andalus claimed the inheritance of the prophet,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 33 (2007), 149-168; m. fierro, abderramán iii y el califato omeya de córdoba (guipuzcoa, 2011), 28 ff; m. fierro, “le mahdi ibn tûmart et al-andalus: l’élaboration de la légitimité almohade,” in mercedes garcía-arenal (coord.), mahdisme et millénarisme en islam (aix-en-provence, 2001), 107-124. 21. c. picard, “regards croisés sur l’élaboration du jihad entre orient et occident musulman (viiie-xiie siècle). perspectives et réflexions sur une origine commune,” in d. baloup and ph. josserand (eds.), regards croisés sur la guerre sainte : guerre, idéologie et religion dans l’espace méditerranéen latin (xie-xiiie siècle) (toulouse, 2006), 33-66. g. martinez-gros, l’idéologie omeyyade: la construction de la légitimité du califat de cordoue (xe–xie siècles) (madrid, 1992); j. safran, the second umayyad caliphate: the articulation of caliphal legitimacy in al-andalus (cambridge ma, 2000), and fierro, abderramán iii. 118 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) warrior-ruler, as a “ghāzī-caliph”22 who personally led the expeditions, as the prophet had on numerous occasions. it was the caliph who incarnated holy war. the idea that one of the duties of the ruler was to defend islam and the fight against the enemies of god was fully developed in al-andalus. in a fragment praising ʿabd al-raḥmān iii in the muqtabis, ibn ḥayyān (d. 469/1076) says that he was following in the footsteps of the rāshidūn caliphs, “fighting and defending allāh with the sword of god, making the truth triumph over the false.”23 this position as defender of islam and its community, claimed and exercised by the cordoban caliph, granted him a high level of legitimacy. in fact, it was one of the main reasons that justified the auctoritas that he possessed. supposedly, it was explained by ʿabd al-raḥmān iii himself at the time of the execution of the culprits of the defeat of simancas/al-khandaq in 327/939,24 when he addressed the prisoners: “look at these poor people—pointing to the populace that was watching them—have they given us authority (maqāda), becoming our submissive servants, but for us to defend and protect them?.”25 in addition, the term translated here as “authority,” maqāda, has a direct relationship with the military context, that is, the direction of an army, as they are derived from the same root, as in, for example, the word qāʾid.26 therefore, the leadership that the community had given to the caliph was closely linked to his capacity and duty to lead the war. the campaigns launched by the cordoban state served for the defense of the realm, like many of those carried out by ʿabd al-raḥmān iii in response to different christian threats. the effort was to consolidate the border or even to expand territory, as with the fortification of medinaceli in 334/946 or, perhaps, almanzor’s expeditions. but these efforts also had a strong discursive component directed towards their internal audience: they were a legitimating instrument of extraordinary scope that was renewed year after year with each new campaign. they strengthened the hand of the ruler, particularly when he led the armies in person. therefore, holy war cannot be considered, in the cordoban caliphate, as simply a reactive element to external pressures;27 it must also be thought of as a highly significant political asset. thus, it is not surprising that ʿabd al-raḥmān iii exploited this image as soon as he ascended to power, a moment of fitna in which cordoban authority was under siege and 22. the term “ghazi-caliph” was first used by c.e. bosworth in the introduction to the 30th volume of the english translation of the history of al-ṭabarī, and referred to the warlike activity of the abbasid caliphs, particularly of hārūn alrashīd. al-ṭabarī, the history of al-ṭabarī vol. 30: the ʿ abbāsid caliphate in equilibrium: the caliphates of mūsā al-hādī and hārūn al-rashīd a.d. 785-809/a.h. 169-193, trans. c. e. bosworth (albany, 1989), xvii. see also m. bonner, aristocratic violence and holy war. studies in the jihad and the arab-byzantine frontier (new haven, 1996), 99 ff. 23. ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas v (rabat, 1979), 22. 24. on this battle p. chalmeta, “simancas y alhandega,” hispania 133 (1976), 359-444; j. p. molénat, “shant maankash,” ei2, vol. 9 (leiden, 1997), 304, and t. zadeh, “from drops of blood: charisma and political legitimacy in the translation of the ʿuthmānic codex of al-andalus,” journal of arabic literature 39 (2008), 321-346. 25. ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas v, 446. 26. r. dozy, supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (leiden, 1881), vol. ii, 424-425. 27. p. chalmeta, “las campañas califales en al-andalus,” in castrum 3. guerre, fortification et habitat dans le monde méditerranéen au moyen age (madrid-roma, 1988), 33-42. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 119 in which it was necessary to utilize all available legitimating tools: he would be presented as a ghazi-ruler, a sultan who personally led the armies against their enemies.28 the chronicles, creators, and bearers of ideology underlined again and again the military events of each year, thus configuring an image of a state that consistently took action against its adversaries. in ibn ḥayyān’s work, in the chapters devoted to the period of caliphal cordoba, the term jihād is mostly associated with the caliph’s capacity for leading the holy war. the term is connected not only to propagandistic passages that concern the person of the sovereign, such as letters encouraging the fight against infidels and heretics, but also to circumstances like the departure of volunteers to “the fight in the path of god.” it is used as a means of dramatizing an exceptional moment of fighting against the enemies of islam, in a kind of account that is different from a mere military speech.29 for instance, in the anonymous chronicle on ʿabd al-raḥmān iii the word jihād refers to the expeditions and encounters of the caliph against the christian kingdoms. it occurs in a passage narrating the sovereign’s decision to go out himself on a campaign and send letters ordering the recruitment of troops to fight the enemies of god and inciting them to participate in the jihād.30 in these sources, the caliphal expeditions follow a narrative model very similar to that used for the prophet’s maghāzī. in the simancas campaign, for instance, ibn ḥayyān, following ibn fuṭays’ kitāb al-fatḥ, recounts how ʿabd al-raḥmān iii led the umayyad army against the enemies of god to teach them that the word of allāh is the truth,31 thus calling to mind muḥammad’s actions against the infidels. the battle, which ended in defeat for the caliphal troops, became known in arab sources as al-khandaq, the trench, probably alluding to the famous siege of medina by the arab pagans during the times of the prophet. we might consider it as a two-way discourse: on the one hand, the cordoba caliph’s actions during war were related to those of the prophet; on the other hand, no completely covert criticism was being made by remembering that members of his family were defeated that day in the presence of the messenger of god.32 but this is not the only example of ʿabd al-raḥmān iii’s use of the memory of the prophet’s activity as a military leader, that is, in commemorating the maghāzī. in the campaign of osma (322/934), the caliph used the flag 28. m. fierro, “abd al-rahman iii frente al califato fatimí y al reino astur-leonés: campañas militares y procesos de legitimación político-religiosa,” in rudesindus. san rosendo. su tiempo y legado. congreso internacional mondoñedo, santo tirso y celanova 27-30 junio, 2007 (santiago de compostela, 2009), 30-50; e. manzano moreno, conquistadores, emires y califas. los omeyas y la formación de al-andalus (barcelona, 2011), 354 and ff. 29. picard, “regards croisés sur l’élaboration du jihad,” 33-66. 30. c. de la puente, “el ŷihād en el califato omeya de al-andalus y su culminación bajo hišām ii,” in fernando valdés (coord.), la península ibérica y el mediterráneo en los siglos xi y xii. almanzor y los terrores del milenio (aguilar de campoo, 1999), 23-38. 31. ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas v, 438-439. 32. m. fierro, “the battle of the ditch (al-khandaq) of the cordoban caliph ʿ abd al-raḥmān iii,” in a. ahmed, b. sadeghi and m. bonner (eds.), the islamic scholarly tradition. studies in history, law, and thought in honor of professor michael allan cook (leiden/boston, 2011), 107-130. 120 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) known as “the eagle,” which called to mind one formerly used by muḥammad in the battles of badr and khaybar.33 also ibn ʿabd rabbih (d. 328/940), on occasion of a cordoban victory over the count of barcelona (324/935-6), composed a poem in which he compared that action to the battles of badr and ḥunayn.34 ibn ʿabd rabbih also compared the campaigns of ʿabd al-raḥmān iii with badr and ḥunayn in the urjūza devoted to the caliph in the kitāb al-masjada al-thāniya fī al-khulafāʾ wa al-tawārīkh wa ayyāmihim, one of the books in his al-ʿiqd al-farīd.35 the urjūza is a long poem in which a constant parallelism is created between the umayyad ruler and the prophet. the choice of badr and ḥunayn was not unintentional and speaks to the importance of both battles for the development of the islamic idea of holy war, as well as for the very history of the umayyad dynasty. badr, as the most commemorated battle in the history of islam, is endowed with more symbolic capital and prestige than any other such episode, at least in terms of religiosity and sacredness. the participants in the clash are typically held up as the most exceptional among the muslims after the rāshidūn and ten of the prophet’s companions, whose entrance to paradise had already been guaranteed.36 thus, according to the urjūza, the fighters who followed the cordoban caliph were new “badrites.” the text recontextualizes the meaning of the battle, and thus guarantees salvation to these fighters. on the other hand, an important element of the qurʾānic doctrine of holy war is contained in sūra 8 (al-anfāl), and exegetes hold the chapter to have been revealed following the battle of badr, to which, they argue, the chapter refers.37 the battle of ḥunayn, also led by the prophet, is of great importance as well since it is one of the only battles that is directly named in the qurʾān (q. 9: 25). god participated in the event through his angels, as he had at badr, and a huge spoil was obtained. additionally, abū sufyān, ancestor of the umayyads, having now converted to islam, participated in the expedition, and, in fact, together with the prophet, was one of the few who endured the attack of the pagans.38 the battle is thus one of the most important in “umayyad memory,” since the positive role of abū sufyān in ḥunayn is undeniable. it is also worth remembering that abū sufyān, both as a pagan and enemy of the prophet, was often used by the enemies of the umayyads, for example the fatimids, to attack the cordoban dynasty.39 moreover, in order to give more 33. ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas v, p. 334; ibn isḥāq/ibn hishām, sīrat rasūl allāh, 289 ff, 510 ff; al-wāqidī, the life of muḥammad, 322. 34. fierro, “the battle of the ditch (al-khandaq),” 107-130. ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas v, 380. 35. j. monroe, “the historical arjuza of ibn ʿabd , a tenth-century hispano-arabic epic poem,” journal of the american oriental society 91 (1971), 67-95; toral-niehoff, “history in adab context,” 61-85. 36. see, for example, afsaruddin, the first muslims, 57 ff. 37. ibn isḥāq/ibn hishām, sīrat rasūl allāh, 321 ff.; al-wāqidī, the life of muḥammad, 66 ff. see, for example, bonner, jihad, 62-63. 38. ibn isḥāq/ibn hishām, sīrat rasūl allāh, 566 ff.; al-wāqidī, the life of muḥammad, 435 ff. 39. see, for example, al-qāḍī al-nuʿmān, founding the fatimid state: the rise of an early islamic empire. an annotated english translation al-qāḍī al-nuʿmān’s iftitāḥ al-daʿwa, trans. h. haji (london, 2006), 140 ff. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 121 importance to the remembrance of the battle of badr by the umayyads, abū sufyān did not fight that day against the prophet.40 in the ʿiqd al-farīd, ibn ʿabd rabbih goes even further with the comparison between ʿabd al-raḥmān iii and muḥammad, trying to prove that cordoba’s mosque was a renewal of medina’s, thereby linking the new umayyad capital with the prophet’s city.41 in the same sense, as maribel fierro has shown, mundhir b. saʿīd al-ballūṭī (d. 355/966), the cordoban qāḍī, encouraged the adoption of the nisba al-anṣārī among the andalusi muslims without a tribal arabic filiation. these andalusis became the new prophet anṣār, “helpers,” and cordoba the “new medina” that had to be defended.42 the practice of mixing umayyad family memory with the commemoration of outstanding battles and the ideology of jihād, as in the case of abū sufyān, was a recurrent tool in umayyad-era texts. a further example occurs in an interesting poem by muḥammad ibn shukhayṣ, in which the poet remembers the battle of marj rāhiṭ. the context was the declaration of obedience by the banū khazar to al-ḥakam ii in the war against the fatimids in 360/971.43 both dynasties considered the conflict between them,44 as holy.45 the battle of marj rāhiṭ, in 64/684, pitted the banū kalb, supporters of the umayyad caliph of damascus, marwān i, against the banū qays. the latter were supporters of ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr, who had proclaimed himself caliph and who had previously supported the proto-shiʿi rebellion of al-ḥusayn.46 ibn al-zubayr was remembered, especially in narratives transmitted by pro-umayyad circles,47 as the prototype of an anti-caliph. following his defeat, according to these accounts, his body faced the same fate as that of apostates: decapitation and crucifixion.48 40. ibn isḥāq/ibn hishām, sīrat rasūl allāh, 289 ff.; al-wāqidī, the life of muḥammad, 11 ff. 41. fierro, abderramán iii, 28. 42. fierro, abderramán iii, 29. 43. on al-ḥakam ii see martinez-gros, l’idéologie omeyyade; j. vallvé, el califato de córdoba (madrid, 1992); d. wasserstein, the caliphate in the west. an islamic political institution in the iberian peninsula (oxford, 1993); safran, the second umayyad caliphate; manzano moreno, conquistadores, emires y califas. 44. on the umayyad intervention in the maghreb see, for example, j. vallvé, “la intervención omeya en el norte de áfrica,” cuadernos de la biblioteca española de tetuán 4 (1967), 6-37; safran, the second umayyad caliphate, 25 ff. 45. ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas vii. al-muqtabas fī ajbār balad al-andalus, ed. al-ḥaǧǧī (beirut, 1965), 55. 46. al-ṭabarī, the history of al-ṭabarī vol. 20: the collapse of sufyānid authority and the coming of the marwānids. the caliphates of muʿāwiyah ii and marwān i and the beginning of the caliphate of ʿabd al-malik a.d.683–685/a.h. 64–66, trans. g. r. hawting (albany, 1989), 54-69; g. r. hawting, the first dynasty of islam: the umayyad caliphate ad 661–750 (london and new york, 2000), 46 ff.; h. kennedy, the armies of the caliphs: military and society in the early islamic state (london, 2001), 31-32. 47. antoine borrut (see for example borrut, “vanishing syria,” 37-68; shoshan, the arabic historical tradition, 171 ff.) has shown that, in addition to al-andalus, there was a “competing historiography” in the tenth-century east that made umayyad memory very much alive and that also made an uninterrupted chain of succession between damascus and cordoba, even prophesying a return of the arab dynasty to the mashreq, an idea with which the cordoban umayyads flirted. see, for example, ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas v, 306-307. 48. kennedy, the armies of the caliphs, 92-98. 122 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the texts are very specific in drawing a clear parallel between marj rāhiṭ and its recontextualization: the banū khazar were the new banū kalb, the original supporters of marwān i. al-ḥakam ii thus appears as the latter’s successor, confronting the allies of the apostate anti-caliph, represented by the fatimid ruler, whose words and deeds acted against the religion of the prophet. just as ibn al-zubayr had been defeated, the ismāʿīlī imām—as predicted indirectly by the poem—would be too. indeed, the memory of the battle of marj rāhiṭ was widely used in umayyad memory production circles. ibn al-qūṭiyya, for example, compared the confrontation with one that had taken place between ʿabd al-raḥmān i (d. 172/788) and yūsuf al-fihrī (d. 138/756) when the former entered al-andalus. both contests took place on the day of ʿīd al-aḍḥā, and in both events, members of the same families fought against each other: ʿabd al-raḥmān i, as a descendant of the caliph marwān, and yūsuf al-fihrī, the descendant of al-ḍaḥḥāk b. al-qays al-fihrī, one of ibn al-zubayr’s commanders.49 the battle of marj rāhiṭ also appears in ibn ʿidhārī’s bayān, where it is compared with one of the victories of almanzor.50 he, ibn abī ʿāmir al-manṣūr (d. 392/1002), known in christian sources as almanzor, is, doubtlessly, the best representation of the figure of the warrior-ruler in caliphal cordoba.51 as ḥājib of the caliph hishām ii, he conducted more than fifty expeditions against christian territories, including one to santiago de compostela.52 he is said to have been buried in his combat clothing. in contrast with the period of the umayyad caliph al-ḥakam ii, who did not directly lead any campaign,53 almanzor incarnated the figure of the military commander. he symbolized the spirit of jihād, which he used as a basis for his legitimacy.54 he also justified his government in front of his subjects by becoming the standard-bearer of the holy war and the defender of orthodoxy. the historian al-ḥumaydī (d. 488/1095) says that he did not reside in cordoba because he was concerned with jihād, leading razzias against the 49. ibn al-qūṭiyya, taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-andalus (historia de la conquista de españa de abenalcotia el cordobés), ed. and trans. julián ribera (madrid, 1926), 26-27. see also safran, the second umayyad caliphate, 131. 50. ibn ʿ idhārī, al-bayān al-mughrib fī akhbār al-andalus wa al-maghrib, eds. g. s. colin and é. lévi-provençal (beirut, 2009 [1948-1951]), vol. ii, 298. 51. l. molina, “las campañas de almanzor,” al-qanṭara 2 (1981), 204-264; l. bariani, almanzor (madrid, 2003); p. sénac, al-mansur, le fléau de l’an mil (paris, 2006), and a. echevarría, almanzor: un califa en la sombra (madrid, 2011). 52. ibn ʿidhārī, al-bayān al-mughrib, vol. ii, 294; dhikr bilād al-andalus, ed. and trans. l. molina (madrid, 1983), vol. i, 194; m. fernández rodríguez, “la expedición de almanzor a santiago de compostela,” cuadernos de historia de españa 43-44 (1966), 345-363; r. pinto de azevedo, “a expediçao de almançor a santiago de compostela em 997, e a de piratas normandos à galiza em 1015-1016,” revista portuguesa de história 14 (1974), 73-93; m. i. pérez de tudela, “guerra, violencia y terror: la destrucción de santiago de compostela por almanzor hace mil años,” en la españa medieval 21 (1988), 9-28; c. de la puente, “la campaña de santiago de compostela (387/997): ŷihâd y legitimación de poder,” qurtuba 6 (2001), 7-21. 53. nonetheless, the sources depict him as an active and victorious caliph in the battle. thus, according to the muqtabis, in the victory of ghālib b. ʿabd al-raḥmān in the year 360/971 against the normans, it was because of the grace of al-ḥakam ii that they obtained the triumph and it was his zeal to defend islam that had led his followers to the fight. ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas vii, 37. 54. picard, “regards croisés sur l’élaboration du jihad,” 33-66. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 123 christians to such a degree that he would go out to pray on a holy day and instead of returning to his palace would set out to war.55 the propaganda machine boosted the imagery of almanzor as a “ghāzī-ruler,” and mujāhid; in these accounts of his role, the memory of the first battles of islam would grow in importance. for example, in the poem written by ibn darrāj honouring almanzor and his sons, ʿabd al-mālik and ʿabd al-raḥmān, after the expedition against compostela,56 the campaign (in which, according to the panegyrist, the true religion had defeated infidelity) is compared to the muslim victory at the battle of ḥunayn, an expedition led personally by the prophet and which resulted, much like the compostela campaign, in substantial booty.57 moreover, as the prophet resisted the pagans in ḥunayn with only a few warriors, now almanzor and his sons were defending the umma alone. in this discursive process of enthronement of the cordoban ḥājib as a mujāhid, the historiographical-biographical texts also played an important role. two works stand as examples in this regard: the kitāb al-maʾāthir al-ʿāmiriyya fī siyar al-manṣūr muḥammad b. abī ʿāmir wa-ghazawātihi wa-awqātihā of ibn ʿāṣim al-thaqafī (d. 450/1058 or before 461/1069)58 and the ghazawāt al-manṣūr b. abī ʿāmir of ibn ḥazm (d. 456/1064).59 each of the two texts is modelled after the works of the prophet’s maghāzī/ghazawāt.60 thus, for example, each follows the pattern—evident in ibn darrāj’s association of compostela with ḥunayn—of comparing almanzor’s actions with those of the prophet, thus using muḥammad’s symbolic capital and memory in his (almanzor’s) effort to legitimize himself. the expansion of the almohad movement: ibn ḥubaysh’s kitāb al-ghazawāt following the collapse of the umayyad caliphate of cordoba,61 it is not until the arrival of the almohads that we will see a caliph once again ruling directly over the whole of al-andalus, in this case unified with the maghreb. the north african dynasty copied many of the legitimation elements of the umayyads, presenting themselves on some occasions as their successors.62 the use of jihād and of the commemoration of the first battles of islam were among these discursive tools. 55. al-ḥumaydī, jaḏwat al-muqtabis fī taʾrīkh ʿulamāʾ al-andalus, ed. al-abyārī (beirut, 1989), nº 121. 56. m. a. makki, dīwān ibn darrāj (beirut, 1970), 314-320. see also m. la chica, almanzor en los poemas de ibn darray (zaragoza, 1979). 57. ibn isḥāq/ibn hishām, sīrat rasūl allāh, 566 ff.; al-wāqidī, the life of muḥammad, 435 ff. see also ḥāmid aḥmad al-ṭāhir, ghazawāt, 474 ff. 58. historia de los autores y transmisores andalusíes, vol. vi, 77. 59. historia de los autores y transmisores andalusíes, vol. vi, 79 ff. as is very well known, ibn ḥazm was a passionate defender of the umayyad caliphate. for more information, see c. adang, m. fierro and s. schmidtke (eds.), ibn ḥazm of cordoba: the life and works of a controversial thinker (leiden, 2013). ibn ḥazm also wrote a sīra of the prophet. m. jarrar, die prophetenbiographie im islamischen spanien (frankfurt, 1989), 169-173. 60. see footnote 3. 61. p. scales, the fall of the caliphate of cordoba: berbers and andalusis in conflict (leiden, 1993). 62. see, for example, zadeh, “from drops of blood,” 321-346; a. bennison, “the almohads and the qurʾan of ʿuthman: the legacy of the umayyads of cordoba in twelfth-century maghrib,” al-masaq: islam and the medieval mediterranean 19/2 (2007), 131-154. 124 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) indeed, if ever there was a moment in which the relationship between jihād and the memory of early islam and its battles was more evident in al-andalus, it was during the almohad period. as we will see, two key elements of almohad discourse were the allusion to the beginnings of islam, viewed during this period as a model to return to, and a strong reliance on jihād as a source of legitimation and justification. it was the memory of the prophet’s expeditions and the first caliphs that connected both elements. the first of these two elements, the almohad reform project,63 was established in the beginnings of the sixth/twelfth century by muḥammad ibn tūmart in his role as the “restorer” of the original purity of islam. almohad discourse made frequent reference to the hadith that claimed: “islam began as something strange and it will return as strange as it began, so glad tidings for the strangers!”64 ibn tūmart and his followers, the true believers, were identified with strangers, ghurabāʾ, in a world of religious decadence.65 the “perversion” of religion was most apparent in two forms of intoxication (sakratāni): ignorance, that is, forgetfulness of religious knowledge, and love of the worldly life, which implies forgetfulness of the eternal life and neglect of jihād. the fight against this supposed period of corruption would become one of the objectives of the almohad project, which consequently strived to remove the two sources of “intoxication.” to this end, ibn tūmart appeared as a mahdī,66 or saviour, and an imām maʿṣūm, impeccable and infallible in his religious knowledge, someone who wanted to break with the immediate past and return to the first moments of muḥammad’s community by reverting to the model of moral puritanism and military activism represented by the prophet and the rāshidūn caliphs.67 ibn tūmart’s own history was narrated with a rhetorical construction that linked his vital experience with that of the prophet’s career. thus, for example, he began his mission as a religious reformer in a cave, al-ghār al-muqaddas, a reference to the cavern in mount hira where the prophet used to retire and where he encountered gabriel for the first time, thus starting the revelation of the qurʾān.68 similarly, ibn tumart’s flight 63. a. bennison, the almoravid and almohad empires (edinburgh, 2016). 64. muslim, ṣaḥīḥ muslim (beirut, 1987), n.º 270. 65. m. fierro, “doctrina y práctica jurídicas bajo los almohades” in p. cressier, m. fierro and l. molina (eds.), los almohades: problemas y perspectivas (madrid, 2005), vol. ii, 895-935. for more information about the figure of the ghurabāʾ see m. fierro, “spiritual alienation and political activism: the ghuraba in al-andalus during the sixth/twelfth century,” arabica 47/1 (2000), 230-260. m. ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade (1120-1269) : une nouvelle lecture anthropologique (toulouse, 2014), 231 ff. 66. m. fierro, “doctrinas y movimientos de tipo mesiánico en al-andalus,” in j. i. de la iglesia duarte, ix semana de estudios medievales. milenarismos y milenaristas en la europa medieval (logroño, 1999), 159-175. fierro, “le mahdi ibn tûmart,” 107-124. 67. fierro, “le mahdi ibn tûmart,” 107-124. l. bombrun, “les mémoires d’al-baydaq. l’écriture de l’histoire à l’époque almohade,” in a. nef and é. voguet (eds.), la légitimation du pouvoir au maghreb médiéval : de l’orientalisation à l’émancipation politique (madrid, 2011), 93-108. 68. j. p. van staëvel, “la caverne, refuge de « l’ami de dieu » : une forme particulière de l’eremitisme au temps des almorávides et des almohades (magreb extrême, xie-xiiie siècles),” cuadernos de madīnat al-zahrāʾ 7 (2010), 311-325. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 125 to tinmal was remembered as akin to the hijra of muḥammad and his first followers.69 this process can be also observed in the fact that the almohads neglected their duty to make a pilgrimage to mecca, considering that they had their own sanctuary in tinmal, where ibn tūmart was buried.70 in this context, devotion to the direct study of the revealed sources, the qurʾān and the sunna, was undoubtedly, from a doctrinal point of view, one of the almohads’ main objectives. the founder of the almohad movement made his own recension of mālik’s muwaṭṭaʾ and a summary of muslim’s ṣaḥīḥ.71 under the caliphate of al-manṣūr the study and teaching of al-bukhārī and muslim’s ṣaḥīḥ, as well as the composition of hadith works, like the so-called arbaʿūn, the “forty” hadiths, spread.72 ʿabd al-wāḥid al-marrākushī reports that, in the course of a discussion between the caliph al-manṣūr and the maliki jurist, abū bakr b. al-jadd, about the reasons for diversity in scholarly opinion (ikhtilāf), the caliph replied that, on the one hand, there was only the qurʾān and the prophet’s tradition, specifically abū dāwud’s sunan, and, on the other, the sword, that is, jihād.73 the second of the elements that we have pointed out, jihād, turns out to have been fundamental. it was proclaimed from the very beginning against the almoravids,74 denying their condition as true believers.75 the almohads used the doctrine of takfīr,76 classifying 69. a. huici miranda, “la leyenda y la historia en los orígenes del imperio almohade,” al-andalus 14 (1949), 139-176. the sources that transmit his biographical data were written chiefly as a means of legitimizing the almohad empire. m. fierro, “el mahdī ibn tūmart: más allá de la biografía oficial,” in m. a. manzano and r. el hour (eds.), política, sociedad e identidades en el occidente islámico (siglos xi-xiv) (salamanca, 2016), 73-97. as ʿabd al-wāḥid al-marrākushī points out, he also traced his lineage back to the prophet. ʿabd al-wāḥid al-marrākushī, kitāb al-muʾjib fī talkhīṣ akhbār al-maghrib, trans. ambrosio huici (tetouan, 1955), 146-147. ʿabd al-muʾmin, the first almohad caliph, also did something similar when he included quraysh, prophet muḥammad’s tribe, in the qaysī genealogy that was attributed to him. m. fierro, “las genealogías de ʿabd al-muʾmin, primer califa almohade,” al-qanṭara 24/1 (2003), 77-107. 70. p. buresi, “les cultes rendus à la tombe du mahdi ibn tûmart à tinmâl,” comptes rendus des séances de l’académie des inscriptions et belles lettres 152/1 (2008), 391-438. ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade, 416 ff. 71. d. urvoy, “les écrits de ibn tumart,” in le maroc médiéval. un empire de l’afrique à l’espagne (paris, 2014), 274-280. 72. m. fierro, “revolución y tradición: algunos aspectos del mundo del saber en al-ándalus durante las épocas almorávide y almohade,” in m. l. ávila and m. fierro (eds.), biografías almohades, vol. ii (madridgranada, 2000), 131-165. 73. m. fierro, “the legal policies of the almohad caliphs and ibn rushd’s bidāyat al-mujtahid,” journal of islamic studies 10/3 (1999), 226-248. 74. e. lévi-provençal, documents inédits d’histoire almohade. fragment du “legajo” 1919 du fons arabe de l’escorial (paris, 1928), 3. 75. m. fierro, “la religión” in m. j. viguera (ed.), los reinos de taifas. al-andalus en el siglo xi, vol. viii/1, historia de españa menéndez pidal (madrid, 1994), 399-496. a. huici miranda, historia política del imperio almohade (tetouan, 1957), vol. i, pp. 32-38. see also d. serrano, “¿por qué llamaron los almohades antropomorfistas a los almorávides?” in p. cressier, m. fierro and l. molina (eds.), los almohades, vol. ii, 815-852. 76. c. adang, h. ansari, m. fierro and s. schmidtke (eds.), accusations of unbelief in islam: a diachronic perspective on takfīr (leiden, 2016). 126 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) believers as infidels, just as the khārijis had done before them.77 jihād was to be conducted against all those who did not accept the almohad vision of islam, which they considered the only true one. after fleeing to tinmal (the new hijra), they became the new muhājirūn, emigrants who had escaped from a corrupt society and now had to bring it to an end by means of jihād.78 the effort was thus conceived of as a holy war against the almoravid state, which they thought of as unjust and illicit. in this sense, jihād was intertwined with ḥisba, the notion of “commanding right and forbidding wrong.”79 the jihād was soon extended to the christians,80 especially after the ifrīqiya campaign had been carried out by ʿabd al-muʾmin in the year 552-553/1158. that same year, the caliph directly confronted a christian power, that of the normands, by taking mahdiyya. two years later, in 554-555/1160, ʿabd al-muʾmin crossed the strait of gibraltar announcing, during the festival of the sacrifice, the next jihād against the christians.81 this is how the figure of the “ghāzī-caliph” reappeared, something the almohad state devoted great care to, through, for instance, carefully planned parades.82 official propaganda also emphasized this notion to the point that, for example, letters announcing victories over the infidels (kutub al-fatḥ) were sent to the capitals of the empire in the names of the caliphs and publicly read in the most important mosques.83 works on 77. booney, jihad, 56. apparently, the almoravids may have qualified the almohads as khārijis. a. kadhim, estudio crítico, traducción y análisis de la obra nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, tesis doctoral, universidad autónoma de madrid, 1991, vol. ii, 10-13. the fatimids also used this discourse to authorize violence against other muslims, although in their sources only the takfīr is implicit. the terms kāfirūn or kuffār are only recalled to refer to the infidels that opposed abraham, moses, or muḥammad, but, according to the various descriptions of kufr behavior, one can deduce an analogy between the infidels who deny god and those muslims who deny the ahl al-bayt and the ismaelite doctrines. see d. de smet, “kufr et takfīr dans l’ismaélisme fatimide: le kitāb tanbīh al-hādī de ḥamīd al-dīn al-kirmānī,” in c. adang, m. fierro, h. ansari and s. schmidtke (eds.), accusations of unbelief in islam, 82-102. also the cordoban umayyads called some of their muslim enemies kuffār. see, for example, ibn ḥayyān, al-muqtabas v, 234. 78. the khārijis also viewed themselves as muhājirūn. booney, jihad, 56. 79. m. garcía-arenal, messianism and puritanical reform. mahdīs of the muslim west (leiden, 2006), 157-192. m. cook, commanding right and forbidding wrong in islamic thought (cambridge, 2001), 390, 478, 496 and 511. 80. m. h. m. al-qarqūṭī, jihād al-muwaḥḥidīn fī bilād al-andalus, 541-629 h/1146-1233 m (argel, 2005); s. m. a. al-raqab, shiʿr al-jihād fī ʿaṣr al-muwaḥḥidīn (amman, 1984). see also p. buresi, “la réaction idéologique almoravide et almohade à l’expansion occidentale dans la péninsule ibérique (fin xie-mi xiiie siècles),” in l’expansion occidentale (xie-xve siècles) formes et conséquences xxxiiie congrès de la s.h.m.e.s. (paris, 2003), 229-241, and m. fierro, “la palabra y la espada: posturas frente al «otro» en la época almohade” in m. a. carmona and c. estepa (coords.), la península ibérica en tiempos de las navas de tolosa (madrid, 2014), 53-77. 81. fierro, “la palabra y la espada,” 53-77. 82. m. marín, “el califa almohade: una presencia activa y benéfica,” in p. cressier, m. fierro and l. molina (eds.), los almohades, vol. ii, 451-476; m. fierro, “algunas reflexiones sobre el poder itinerante almohade,” e-spania. revue interdisciplinaire d’études hispaniques médiévales et modernes (8 december 2009), available online at http://e-spania.revues.org/18653#bodyftn9, n. 9. (accessed 29 may 2016), and ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade, 311 ff. 83. c. mohamed, “notions de guerre et de paix à l’époque almohade,” in p. cressier and v. salvatierra (eds.), las navas de tolosa (1212-2012): miradas cruzadas (jaén, 2014), 53-68. for the importance of the concept of fatḥ as holy war in the almohad context, see a. garcía sanjuán, “la noción de fatḥ en las fuentes árabes andalusíes y magrebíes (siglos viii al xiii),” in c. de ayala, p. henriet and s. palacios (eds.), orígenes y desarrollo de la al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 127 jihād were also composed at the express request of the almohad authorities, as in the case of ibn al-munāṣif (d. 620/1223), the qāḍī of valencia and murcia. in the introduction to this work, commissioned by the governor of valencia, who was none other than the youngest son of the caliph ʿabd al-muʾmin, the author explained why he had composed it: to fulfill the noblest of duties and express the best way to subordinate oneself to god, namely through jihād against allāh’s enemies.84 but although ibn tūmart never confronted the christians, since the scope of his action never extended beyond the atlas, later almohad rulers tried to highlight the fact that the founder of the unitarian movement also included in its doctrine the idea of repelling the followers of jesus through the use of armed force.85 ibn al-qaṭṭān,86 for instance, offers numerous examples of alleged discourses of the mahdī filled with allusions to the christians, as well as qurʾān verses referring to those who, according to the chronicler, were recited by the founder of the almohad movement.87 in fact, under the second caliph, abū yaʿqūb yūsuf, a specific chapter on jihād was added to the kitāb attributed to ibn tūmart.88 therefore, it is along these two major lines of the almohad project, the alleged return to the origins of islam and the revitalization of jihād, where one must situate the reproduction of the memory of the first battles of islam as a shared element of both pillars. one of the best examples is ibn ḥubaysh’s kitāb al-ghazawāt. ibn ḥubaysh, born in almería in 540/1111, was a faqīh, qāḍī, khaṭīb: traditionist, genealogist, and lexicographer. having studied in cordoba with scholars like abū bakr ibn al-ʿarabī, he became a renowned expert in the field of hadith. he witnessed the christian conquest of almería in 542/1147 and, in 556/1161, established himself in murcia, where he took up the post of judge under the almohad government. he died in 584/1188.89 allegedly, the same day he was appointed judge, the almohad caliph abū yaʿqūb yūsuf asked him to write the kitāb al-ghazawāt, as is stated in the prologue of the work.90 the work deals with the wars and conquests that took place under the government of the three first caliphs of islam, namely abū bakr, ʿumar, and ʿuthmān. for its composition, ibn ḥubaysh used eastern sources like ibn isḥāq’s sīra, al-wāqidī’s kitāb al-ridda, al-ṭabarī’s kitāb al-taʾrīkh, sayf b. ʿumar’s kitāb al-ridda wa guerra santa en la península ibérica (madrid, 2016), 31-50, especially 42-50. see also f. donner, “arabic fatḥ as ‘conquest’ and its origin in islamic tradition,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016), 1-14. 84. mohamed, “notions de guerre et de paix,” 53-68. 85. for more information about jihād against christians and about the ideology promoted by the almohads towards the followers of christ, see j. albarrán, “de la conversión y expulsión al mercenariado: la ideología en torno a los cristianos en las crónicas almohades,” in m. a. carmona and c. estepa (coords.), la península ibérica, 79-91. 86. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, vol. ii, 52-56. 87. q. 3:149, 9:123, 33:1 and 33:48. 88. huici miranda, historia política, 95-100. 89. a. carmona, “el saber y el poder: cuarenta biografías de ulemas levantinos de época de ibn mardanīš,” in m. l. ávila and m. fierro (eds.), biografías almohades, vol. ii, 57-130 and a. rodríguez figueroa, “abū l-qāsim ibn ḥubayš,” in biblioteca de al-andalus, vol. iii (almeria, 2004), 472-476. 90. d. m. dunlop, “the spanish historian ibn hubaysh,” journal of the royal asiatic society 73/4 (1941), 359-362 and ibn ḥubaysh, kitāb al-ghazawāt (cairo, 1983), vol. i, 1. 128 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) al-futūḥ, and a kitāb futūḥ al-shām, of which he reports having seen several copies, each attributed to a different author, but which were in fact copies of al-azdī’s kitāb.91 the production, implications, and readings of ibn ḥubaysh’s kitāb al-ghazawāt must be understood in the context of the almohad movement and what it sought. just as ibn tūmart’s biography had been constructed similarly to that of the prophet or the fictitious genealogy that the first almohad caliph, ʿabd al-muʾmin, invented for himself,92 ibn ḥubaysh’s work joins a discursive tradition that looks at the past from the present moment93 and seeks to legitimize itself through the production and reproduction of the memory of early islamic times and the symbolic capital that this historical period contained. it is therefore a link within the social process of construction and the re-reading of history that was started by the almohads themselves, in which they attempted to connect directly with the origins of islam and present themselves as its restorers, thereby commemorating this sacred memory. ibn ḥubaysh’s kitāb al-ghazawāt also played an important role in regards to the almohad jihād ideology, which prevailed especially during the government of abū yaʿqūb yūsuf, a great promoter of the holy war against the christians of the iberian peninsula. not only did abū yaʿqūb die in the midst of a battle at santarem, but he was also the caliph who added the section on jihād to ibn tūmart’s kitāb and who ordered ibn ṭufayl to compose a poem inciting a holy war.94 ibn ḥubaysh’s work thus acted as a pious exhortation encouraging believers to follow the example of the first muslims and their victories along the path of god and jihād. moreover, this function would not belong exclusively to the futūḥ.95 the traditionalist and historian al-kalāʿī (d. 634/1236), a disciple of ibn ḥubaysh, authored his kitāb al-iktifāʾ 91. s. mourad, “on early islamic historiography: abū ismāʿīl al-azdī and his futūḥ al-shām,” journal of the american oriental society 120/4 (2000), 577-593 and e. landau tasseron, “new data on an old manuscript: an andalusian version of the work entiled futūḥ al-shām,” al-qanṭara 21 (2000), 361-380. on the futūḥ work by al-azdī see l. conrad, “al-azdi’s history of the arab conquests in bilad al-sham: some historiographical observations,” in proceedings of the second symposium on the history of bilad al-sham during the early islamic period up to 40 ah/640 ad (amman, 1987), vol. i, 28-62; mourad, “on early islamic historiography,” 577-593; a. mazor, “the kitāb futūḥ al-shām of al-qudamī as a case study for the transmission of traditions about the conquest of syria,” der islam 84 (2007), 17-45; j. scheiner, “writing the history of the futūḥ: the futūḥ works by al-azdī, ibn aʿtham and al-wāqidī,” in the lineaments of islam (leiden, 2012), 151-176. suleiman mourad’s paper also includes information about its transmission in al-andalus. on other futūḥ works see r. paret, “the legendary futūḥ literature,” in fred m. donner (ed.), the expansion of the early islamic state (aldershot, 2008), 163–175; y. dehghani, “historical writing in baghdād: the case of the futūḥ al-shām ascribed to al-wāqidī (d. 207/822),” in j. scheiner and d. janos (eds.), the place to go: contexts of learning in baghdād, 750-1000 c.e (princeton, 2014), 587-599; shoshan, the arabic historical tradition. 92. fierro, “las genealogías de ʿabd al-muʾmin,” 77-107. for the genealogies invented by ibn tūmart and ʿabd al-muʾmin see lévi-provençal, documents inédits d’histoire almohade, 30-32. 93. t. asad, “the idea of an anthropology of islam,” in occasional papers series (washington, 1986), 1-22. 94. e. garcía gómez, “una qaṣīda política inédita de ibn ṭufayl,” revista del instituto egipcio de estudios islámicos 1 (1953), 21-28. for other poets that wrote about the jihād see t. garulo, “la poesía de al-andalus en época almohade” in música y poesía. el legado andalusí (barcelona, 1995), 149-160. 95. for brief notes on the production of works about the prophet and the first caliphs of the almohad period, see jarrar, die prophetenbiographie, 265 ff. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 129 fī maghāzī al-muṣṭafā wa al-thalātha al-khulafāʾ,96 a work describing the battles of the prophet and the first three caliphs, which was based on ibn ḥubaysh’s text, among others.97 apart from being the secretary of the almohad governor of valencia, he was closely linked to jihād tendencies, whereby his work acted as a stimulus by reviving the memory of the first battles of islam. having participated in many campaigns, he died on dhū l-ḥijja 19th, 643/august 13th, 1237 in the battle of anisha, north of valencia, during which he accused fleeing soldiers of, in his words, fleeing from paradise.98 when we consider reformation in this sense, it is not difficult to find examples within the almohad context that connect the jihād phenomenon with the idea of restoring the purity of early islam. the repeated return to the direct study of primary islamic sources is evidenced within the context of war. for example, ʿabd al-wāḥid al-marrākushī relates an episode which describes how, while preparing an expedition against the christians in 574-5/1179, the caliph abū yaʿqūb, the patron—it must be noted—of ibn ḥubaysh’s work, ordered the ʿulamāʾ to dictate the available traditions on jihād to the almohads which they then copied onto wooden tables and learned by heart. the spirit of warlike religiousness described by the chronicler was such that one of these scholars, abū al-qamar, ordered that his tables be kept so that he could be buried with them.99 these same ideas can also be associated with a copy of ʿuthmān’s qurʾān that was used on the battlefield. four chroniclers reported that the almohad caliphs carried a copy of the qurʾān in military parades and in war expeditions, yet only three of them specified that it was a copy of the qurʾān of the third of the rāshidūn caliphs, ʿuthmān.100 along with this codex, they also carried another qurʾān that had been copied by hand by the mahdī ibn tūmart, thus linking the caliphs who carried these copies with the origin of the almohad movement; their possession of this symbolic capital, which was associated with the memory of the early caliphs, granted them a high degree of legitimization. according to ʿabd al-wāḥid al-marrākushī, ʿuthmān’s qurʾān had belonged to the umayyads;101 it was the copy that, according to some traditions, ʿabd al-raḥmān iii himself carried into battle and that the umayyad used to commemorate the times of the rāshidūn.102 96. al-kalāʿī, kitāb al-iktifāʾ fī maghāzī al-muṣṭafā wa al-thalātha al-khulafāʾ (beirut, 2000). 97. landau-tasseron, “on the reconstruction of lost sources,” 45-91. 98. a. carmona, “ibn sālim al-kalāʿī,” in biblioteca de al-andalus, vol. v (almería, 2007), 205-211. 99. ʿabd al-wāḥid al-marrākushī, kitāb al-muʿjib, 208. 100. ibn ṣāḥib al-ṣalāt, al-mann bil-imāma, trans. ambrosio huici (valencia, 1969), 178. ibn abī zarʿ, rawd al-qirṭās, trans. ambrosio huici (valencia, 1964), vol. ii, 433. ibn ʿidhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib fi ikhtiṣār akhbār muluk al-andalus wa al-maghrib, trans. ambrosio huici, almohad part, vol. i (tetouan, 1953), 63. ʿabd al-wāḥid al-marrākushī, kitāb al-muʿjib, 206-207. 101. most likely brought by ʿabd al-muʾmin from cordoba. 102. according to these traditions, this exemplar of the qurʾān, copied by hand by ʿ uthmān himself, would be the same one the caliph was praying with when he was assassinated, as evidenced by the blood stains that could be visible in its pages. zadeh, “from drops of blood,” 321-346. see also a. d. lamare, “le muṣḥaf de la mosquée de cordove et son mobilier mécanique,” journal asiatique 230 (1938), 551-575; bennison, “the almohads and the qurʾan of ʿuthman,” 131-154, p. buresi, “une relique almohade: l’utilisation du coran (attribué a ʿuṯmān b. ʿaffān) de la grande mosquée de cordoue,” oriente moderno 88/2 (2008), 297-309 and p. buresi, “d’une péninsule 130 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) another episode that directly reminds us of the first battles of islam, specifically the prophet’s campaigns against the meccans (something which further strengthens the possible context of production that i propose for ibn ḥubaysh’s work), is narrated by ibn abī zarʿ, and is no doubt based on the memory of the battle of badr, and in particular the appearance of angels103 during the fighting.104 the episode describes how, prior to the alarcos battle, the almohad caliph al-manṣūr had a dream in which a knight, described as an angel, riding a white horse and carrying a green standard, announced the imminent victory of the unitarian leader by the grace of god.105 interestingly, ibn ʿabd rabbih’s urjūza also says that ʿabd al-raḥmān iii’s armies were preceded by angels, like those of the prophet at badr and ḥunayn.106 let’s return to ibn ḥubaysh: if we keep in mind the ideas we have set forth about the almohad movement, its continued desire to restore the past, and its commitment to jihād, the reading that i propose for his introduction to his kitāb al-ghazawāt appears to be fully coherent. indeed, ibn ḥubaysh expresses that, having been commissioned by the almohad caliph abū yaʿqūb yūsuf to compose it, he will set out to describe the battles and conquests that took place during the stable and peaceful times of the first three caliphs: abū bakr, ʿumar and ʿuthmān.107 ibn ḥubaysh also points out that the baraka associated with the caliphs and linked to the prophet’s campaigns, was “destructive of the enduring foundations of polytheism”108 and, at the same time, fundamental for the consolidation of tawḥīd and the pillars of islam.109 according to his introduction, it is certainly reasonable to argue that ibn ḥubaysh establishes a parallelism between nascent islam and his own times, just as ibn ʿabd rabbih had done with ʿabd al-raḥmān’s campaigns and the maghāzī. the prophet thus equates ibn tūmart—an idea that was already being circulated, as we have seen—and the rāshidūn parallel the first almohad caliphs. by focusing on the caliphs rather than on the prophet, ibn ḥubaysh aims to legitimize the institutionalization and the routinization—in the weberian sense—of almohad authority. the almohad rulers are presented as the embodiment and continuation of ibn tūmart’s charismatic domination and of the rupturist movement he led, perhaps echoing what possibly occurred after the prophet’s death. the almohad caliphs are responsible for continuing the mahdī’s work, just as the rāshidūn were responsible à l’autre: cordoue, ʿuṯmān (644-656) et les arabes à l’époque almohade (xiie-xiiie siècle),” al-qanṭara 31/1 (2010), 7-29. ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade, 337 ff. 103. within islam, angels appearing in a dream represent divine assistance, ennoblement of the dreamer and his fate as a martyr. p. lory, le rêve et ses interprétations en islam (paris, 2003), 145-149. see also g. h. a. juynboll, “fighting angels. reply to waugh’s «jealous angels»,” ohio journal of religious studies 2 (1974), 85-87. 104. an example of this is the following hadith transmitted by al-bukhārī: “the prophet, to whom allāh may give his grace and peace, said on the day of badr: there is jibrīl grabbing the head of his horse and equipped for war.” al-bukhārī, ṣaḥīḥ al-bukhārī (granada, 2008), 380. 105. ibn abī zarʿ, rawd al-qirṭās, vol. ii, 438. 106. monroe, “the historical arjuza,” 67-95. 107. ibn ḥubaysh, kitāb al-ghazawāt, vol. i, 1. 108. al-hādima limā istiṭāl min mabānī al-shirk. 109. ibn ḥubaysh, kitāb al-ghazawāt, vol. i, 1. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 131 for continuing the prophet’s, and therefore the prophetic baraka (or ibn tūmart’s, if we focus on the parallelism we have established) was associated with them. moreover, the rāshidūn caliphs had acted just as the almohad caliphs were now trying to act in their role as restorers of that alleged golden past.110 with their battles and conquests, which the jihād conducted first against the apostates111 and later against the infidels, they were undermining polytheism and strengthening the tawḥīd and the pillars of islam. in this context, we must not forget how essential the insistence on radical divine unity (tawḥīd) was to almohad thought,112 as seen, of course, in the adoption of the name al-muwaḥḥidūn.113 tawḥīd was conceived of as the key element of revelation. the almohads were thus fulfilling the mandate of god (amr allāh)114 just as the prophet and the first caliphs had done, and it was acknowledged as such, for instance, in one of the unitary rulers’ titles: al-qāʾim bi-amr allāh.115 in fact, the chronicles often show the conversion to tawḥīd of entire populations, either infidels or muslims, after being conquered by the almohads.116 the occurrence of the term, tawḥīd, in the introduction of ibn ḥubaysh’s work in connection with the first campaigns of islam cannot be due to chance. as had occurred during the times of the rāshidūn, the war on the infidels was a fundamental part of the attempt to restore the purity of the first period of islam, a process which would result in a period of stability similar to the one supposedly enjoyed by muslims under the government of the first caliphs. this is how both caliphates, the rāshidūn and almohads, are presented: as the restorers of order for the umma, in contrast to the disorder that was represented by the period of the ridda and the government of the almoravid hypocrites, and the establishers of tawḥīd. neither is it by chance that the expression, “let god extend the overflowing of their lights,”117 was used for the almohad caliphs and their legacy. according to almohad thought, the knowledge (ʿilm) created by god revealed itself inside the believer as a lamp. as a mahdī, ibn tūmart believed that his mission was to again reveal the light that had dimmed 110. equating caliphs (and even emirs) to the rāshidūn is not new. it had already been done, for instance, by ibn ʿabd rabbih in his kitāb al-masjada al-thaniya fī l-khulafāʾ wa al-tawārīkh wa-ayyāmihim of his al-ʿiqd al-farīd. toral-niehoff, “history in adab context,” 61-85. 111. one of the chapters of ibn al-munāṣif’s work defined the notion of jihād as war against the apostates. we can also detect here a clear parallelism between the ridda, the apostasy wars that took place after the prophet’s death, and the war that the almohads declared on the almoravids, whom they considered to be hypocrites and false muslims. 112. r. brunschvig, “sur la doctrine du mahdī ibn tūmart,” arabica 2 (1955), 137-149 and m. fletcher, “the almohad tawḥīd: theology which relies on logic,” numen 38 (1991), 110-127. 113. according to some sources, the original name of the movement may have been that of al-muʾminūn, “the believers,” thus indicating that the remaining muslims had lost the path of allah, sabīl allāh, and had to be led back to the right track. fierro, “revolución y tradición,” 131-165. 114. e. fricaud, “origine de l’utilisation privilégiée du terme de amr chez les muʾminides almohades,” al-qanṭara 23/1 (2002), 93-122. 115. l. jones, “the preaching of the almohads: loyalty and resistance across the strait of gibraltar,” medieval encounters 19 (2013), 71-101. 116. albarrán, “de la conversión y expulsión al mercenariado,” 79-91. 117. madda allāh fī ifāḍat anwārihim. ibn ḥubaysh, kitāb al-ghazawāt, vol. i, 2. 132 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) after the prophet’s death.118 just as the prophet had been identified with the notion of nūr muḥammadī,119 ibn tūmart is clearly identified with the principle of “illumination” in the appellative asafu, apparently meaning in berber “light” or “lamp,” a nickname which some of his disciples called him by during his youth. such an identification may also be extended to ʿabd al-muʾmin, “the lamp of the almohads,” sirāj al-muwaḥḥidīn.120 the association of the almohad caliphs, especially the first ones, with the rāshidūn caliphs may also be noted in other testimonies like the inscription on the axis of the almohad lamp kept at the qarawiyyin of fez, made between 598-609/1202-1213 which identified abū yūsuf yaʿqūb al-manṣūr as the son of the rāshidūn caliphs;121 or in documents such as the letter sent from ifrīqiya by ʿabd al-raḥmān, son of the almohad caliph al-nāṣir, to the authorities of pisa, girardo visconti, in april 1202. at the beginning of the letter, where he includes various almohad titularies, he refers to the rāshidūn imam caliphs, as well as the imam caliph al-nāṣir li-dīn allāh, prince of the believers and son of the immaculate imam caliphs (ṭāhirīn).122 therefore, the restoration of true islam and jihād, as pillars of the almohad project, are legitimized in this work through the commemoration of the rāshidūn caliphs’ futūḥ and the symbolic capital they carried. they are justified by the remembrance of the origins they wish to return to, which had been established by ibn ḥubaysh as a mirror-image of his own time. however, memory involves not simply remembrance, but also selective forgetting. and omissions often reveal the anxieties of a given discourse. since we have already explained the absence of the prophet, it is more relevant to shed light upon what had happened—and was still happening for the almohads—after the death of the founder, be he the prophet or the mahdī. but another absence is worth noting: that of the fourth of the rāshidūn caliphs, ʿalī. this omission may have to do with what a given discourse suggests about the government of the figure being discussed. according to donner’s classification,123 the narrative on ʿalī more closely resembles a narrative of fitna, that is, civil war or conflict within the islamic 118. m. brett, “the lamp of the almohads: illumination as a political idea in twelfth-century morocco” in brett, m. (ed.), ibn khaldun and the medieval maghrib (aldershot, 1999), 1-27, and garcía-arenal, messianism and puritanical reform, 182-184. 119. u. rubin, “pre-existence and light: aspects of the concept of nūr muḥammad,” israel oriental studies 5 (1975), 62-117. 120. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, vol. ii, 40. garcía-arenal, messianism and puritanical reform, 182-184. 121. le maroc médiéval, 334. linda jones, in her interesting paper on almohad sermons, refers to the form of address, “son of the rāshidīn caliphs” (here for caliph al-nāṣir), in a khuṭba transmitted by ʿabd al-wāḥid al-marrākushī. jones, “the preaching of the almohads,” 71-101. 122. m. amari, diplomi arabi dell’ archivio fiorentino (florence, 1864-1869), vol. i, 65-71; a. al-tazi, al-tarikh al-diblumasi li al-maghrib (rabat, 1987), vol. vi, 202-205; a. azzawi, nouvelles lettres almohades (kenitra, 1995), 226-228 and p. buresi, “les documents arabes et latins échangés entre pise et l’empire almohade en 596-598/1200-1202: la chancellerie au cœur des relations diplomatiques,” in a. regourd (dir.), documents et manuscrits árabes (paris, 2012), 21-96. 123. f. donner, narratives of islamic origins. the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton, 1998), 184 ff. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 133 community, a discourse which is more closely related to the struggle for the leadership of the umma. however, the discourse of the almohad movement was not one of internal struggle between two islamic models, but of a return to the pure form of islam to face external enemies. therefore, it was not the discourse of fitna that was of interest, but that of ridda and futūḥ, the discourse of war against apostasy and infidelity. besides, the caliphate of ʿalī and the fitna represent the end of stability and unity in the umma and, therefore, of that alleged golden period that the almohads wished to restore. additionally, ʿalī did not fit well in the discourse that the unitarians had constructed and even inscribed in the line of the damascus and cordoba umayyads through symbolic acts such as designating cordoba as the capital of al-andalus in 557-8/1162 or restoring the dynasty’s emblematic color to white rather than using black like the abbasids, who had legitimized the almoravids.124 in this sense, this re-elaboration of the classical historiographic periodization in regard to the rāshidūn caliphs, imposed especially by the abbasids, reminds us of certain pro-umayyad testimonies studied by antoine borrut that also “forgot” ʿalī and that had now perhaps been restored by the first almohad caliphs, especially through the andalusi historiographical memory.125 in fact, in the pro-almohad chronicle, naẓm al-jumān, one can see how ʿabd al-muʾmin’s caliphate is legitimized. he is described as the “lord of the conquests” through a prophecy which was supposedly included in ibn ʿabd rabbih’s pro-umayyad work, al-ʿiqd al-farīd.126 that is to say, there is apparently a search for umayyad sources to support and justify the almohad project. the dusk of almohad power: ibn al-qaṭṭān’s ghazawāt ibn ḥubaysh’s work was written in a moment when the almohad movement was expanding rapidly and reaching its climax. as the caliphate extended its power, conquests were made one after another both in the maghreb and in al-andalus. consequently, the commemoration of the conquests of the first caliphs as well as the expansion of islam in what was considered a golden period fit perfectly within the discourse that the almohads were trying to promote. however, the recourse to the memory of early islam and its recontextualization also became rhetorical tools in moments of crisis and decadence, when the message was no longer that of expansion, but rather of recovering the initial impulse of islam. in 625/1228, al-maʾmūn, who had proclaimed himself caliph in al-andalus in 624/1227, and upon entering marrakech, renounced the doctrinal core of “almohadism.”127 he abjured not only central almohad doctrines, but also the figure of ibn tūmart himself, noting that jesus was the only mahdī. among other things, he ordered the removal of ibn tūmart’s 124. fierro, “the legal policies of the almohad caliphs,” 226-248, and p. cressier and p. marinetto sánchez, “les chapiteaux islamiques de la péninsule ibérique et du maroc de la renaissance émirale aux almohades,” in lʼacanthe dans la sculpture architecturale de lʼantiquité à la renaissance (paris, 1993), 211-246. 125. borrut, “vanishing syria,” 37-68. 126. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, vol. ii, 167. 127. ibn abī zarʿ, rawd al-qirṭās, vol. ii, pp. 487-488. ibn ʿidhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib, almohad part, vol. i, 318-319. 134 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) name from the khuṭba and also from coins. this doctrinal change clearly reflects the crisis the almohad power was experiencing.128 the caliphs that succeeded al-maʾmūn tried to recover the splendor of the tawḥīd movement, but it was already too late. among those who devoted considerable effort to the cause, at least in framing almohad discourse, was the new caliph, al-murtaḍā (r. 646-665/1248-1266).129 appointed during his provincial rule in sale, he stood out, according to the sources, for his intelligence, piety, and modesty.130 the onset of his reign coincided with the merinid seizure of taza, which clearly indicates the degree of unrest the government he headed was experiencing. although he led numerous campaigns in an effort to re-activate the image of the ghāzī-caliph and thus prevent almohad collapse, almost all of them failed. likewise, the chronicles show how, from the very beginning of his reign, he tried to model his rule on the practices of previous almohad caliphs. immediately after his acknowledgment as caliph, he began to put into practice the ḥisba131 and, when he arrived to marrakech from sale, almohad notables received him in full, beautifully adorned dress as well as horses, drums, flags, and regular soldiers.132 on ramaḍān 1st 649/november 17th 1251 he went to tinmal to visit and honor ibn tūmart’s sepulchre and receive his baraka by kissing and touching his remains.133 the new caliph also ordered the immediate punishment of anyone that raised doubts about the doctrine of infallibility of the founder of the almohads.134 in this sense, before each expedition, he visited the mahdī’s tomb in the custom of his forefathers and applied their standards to it.135 he also marched to combat in the same formation his predecessors had, and carried the famous afrāj, a linen rim that isolated the ruler’s tent from the rest of the encampment.136 sources also portray him as a literate ruler and poet. he liked to read books attentively and also compose them. he asked the faqīh abū muḥammad ibn al-qaṭṭān to compose several books for him, paying him in great positions and significant goods. these works were, according to ibn ʿidhārī: the naẓm al-jumān, the kitāb shifāʾ al-ghilal fī akhbār al-anbiyāʾ wa al-rusul, the kitāb al-iḥkām li-bayān ayātihi, the kitāb al-munājāt and the kitāb al-masmūʿāt.137 in this list, however, another work commissioned by al-murtaḍā to ibn al-qaṭṭān is missing: the kitāb al-rawḍāt al-bahiya al-wasīma fī ghazawāt al-nabawiyya al-karīma. 128. huici miranda, historia política, vol. ii, 476-7. 129. huici miranda, historia política, vol. ii, 541 ff. 130. ibn ʿidhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib, almohad part, vol. ii, 198. 131. fa-min ḥaynihi nahā wa amara 132. ibn ʿidhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib, almohad part, vol. ii, 200. 133. ibn ʿidhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib, almohad part, vol. ii, 219. 134. ibn ʿ idhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib, almohad part, vol. ii, 309-311 and jones, “the preaching of the almohads,” 71-101. 135. ibn ʿidhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib, almohad part, vol. ii, 218 and 239. 136. ibn ʿidhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib, almohad part, vol. ii, 221-222. ghouirgate, l’ordre almohade, 314 ff. 137. ibn ʿidhārī al-marrākushī, al-bayān al-mughrib, almohad part, vol. ii, 309-311. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 135 little is known about ibn al-qaṭṭān, who was probably born in fez or marrakech around the year 579-580/1185.138 son of abū al-ḥasan ibn al-qaṭṭān (d. 628/1231) and known for his work as a historian, most notably as the author of the naẓm al-jumān, it seems obvious that he was raised according to the principles of the almohad movement and that he inherited from his father his belief in these doctrines. the latter served as one of the ṭalaba for the caliphs al-manṣūr, al-nāṣir, and al-mustanṣir and became a principal apologist of the regime through such works as the risāla fī al-imāma al-kubrā, whose main objective was to legitimize the almohad empire.139 abū muḥammad followed in his father’s footsteps and entered the service of the caliph al-murtaḍā, for whom, as we have seen, he composed many works. the naẓm al-jumān, his most famous work, evinces his enthusiasm for the almohad movement. apparently, it was a huge encyclopedia on the geography and history of the entire maghreb, although the manuscript in which it is preserved only comprises a very short time span of the years 500-533 of the hegira (1107-1138).140 of key interest is another of the works that al-murtaḍā ordered ibn al-qaṭṭān to write and that, as already mentioned, ibn ʿidhārī did not include in his list, which was perhaps the reason why it has gone unnoticed by researchers. the kitāb al-rawḍāt al-bahiya al-wasīma fī ghazawāt al-nabawiyya al-karīma is a maghāzī work which still remains unpublished; a manuscript of the work is housed in the qarawiyyin library in fez.141 at the beginning of the manuscript, it is said that al-murtaḍā ordered him to compile and write the work142 and at the end that it was finished in the month of dhū al-ḥijja of the year 662 (september-october 1264),143 just before the end of al-murtaḍā’s government in 665/1266. likewise, in a note added later in the margin of one of the first pages, it is said that the manuscript entered the qarawiyyin library in the month of rajab of 1009 (january-february 1601) during the regency of the sultan aḥmad al-manṣūr.144 just as we saw in ibn nuḥās’ treatise on jihād, ibn al-qaṭṭān divided his work into two unusual parts in maghāzī books: the first is dedicated to the expeditions directly conducted by the prophet,145 whereas the second deals with those that muḥammad sent, but did not 138. a. rodríguez figueroa, “ibn al-qaṭṭān, abū muḥammad,” in biblioteca de al-andalus, vol. iv (almería, 2006), 398-403. 139. a. rodríguez figueroa, “ibn al-qaṭṭān, abū l-ḥasan,” in biblioteca de al-andalus, vol. iv (almeria, 2006), 390-398. 140. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan and m. fletcher, “the nazm al-juman as a source for almohad history,” in actes du 1er congrès d’histoire et de la civilisation du maghreb (tunis, 1979), 193-200. 141. mss. 296. my dissertation (la memoria de las primeras batallas del islam y el yihad en el occidente islámico. ss. xii-xiii, directed by carlos de ayala and mercedes garcía-arenal) will include a study of this work and of this manuscript. for a paleographical edition of the introduction see j. albarrán, “memoria y ŷihād en el ocaso del poder almohade: el kitāb al-rawḍāt al-bahiya al-wasīma fī gazawāt al-nabawiyya al-karīma,” al-qanṭara 38/2 (2017), 387-406. 142. we follow the numbering of the manuscript. mss. qarawiyyin 296, f. 3. 143. mss. qarawiyyin 296, f. 252. 144. mss. qarawiyyin 296, f. 3. 145. mss. qarawiyyin 296, ff. 11-173. 136 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) participate in.146 ibn al-qaṭṭān announces that he will mainly follow ibn isḥāq, but will also attend to discrepancies with other authors, like al-wāqidī.147 the text must be understood and read within the framework of the revitalization project of the almohad movement that al-murtaḍā started without success. ibn al-qaṭṭān’s text emphasizes the link between jihād and the first battles of islam and, as in ibn ḥubaysh’s work, that between the rāshidūn caliphs and the early almohad rulers. it also creates a clear link between the prophet and ibn tūmart,148 and, ultimately, between the latter and al-murtaḍā in his efforts to recover almohad doctrine and tradition. the author, commissioned by the caliph, commemorates the difficult beginnings of the almohad movement as well as the fight of the mahdī and his followers against their enemies through the recontextualization of the arduous beginnings of islam and of the encounters of the prophet and his companions with the pagans. in his introduction, ibn al-qaṭṭān states that god sent the prophet guidance and “true religion” in order to reveal it.149 curiously enough, in the naẓm al-jumān he also speaks in these terms in regard to ibn tūmart’s role.150 that is to say, the mission of the mahdī is likened to muḥammad’s. he then introduces a series of images of fighting, war, and jihād, with direct allusions not only to infidels in a general manner, but also to christians: the prophet was sent to “raise the sun of faith over the infidels and vanquish its enemies, in order to destroy the source of infidelity, its lighthouses and its temples, and to wipe out and break their crosses.”151 likewise, as in ibn ḥubaysh’s introduction, the metaphor of the “lights” is shown again, on this occasion to illustrate the triumph of faith and of the prophet. looking back at the naẓm al-jumān, one notes how the mahdī is represented as the carrier of light against injustice.152 in the kitāb al-rawḍāt, god had promised victory to the prophet and fulfilled his word by giving him triumphs in his expeditions until he could establish his religion and punish the hypocrites, a term used by the mahdī and the almohads to qualify the almoravids in their practice of takfīr, as we have seen. muḥammad’s objective was to lead jihād until his religion prevailed over the world, since salvation was achieved by testifying that there was no other god than god.153 this claim in the introduction of the kitāb al-rawḍāt takes us back to the naẓm al-jumān, to a passage in which ibn al-qaṭṭān mentions the duty to fight against the infidels already pointed out by ibn tūmart by using the verse q. 9:123, as well 146. mss. qarawiyyin 296, ff. 173-252. 147. mss. qarawiyyin 296, ff. 11. 148. the comparison muḥammad /ibn tūmart is constant in the naẓm al-jumān. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, vol. ii, 76 ff. it also appears in another almohad sources such as al-baydhaq, kitāb akhbār al-mahdī ibn tūmart, ed. ʿabd al-ḥamīd hajiyāt (argel, 1975). see also bombrun, “les mémoires d’al-baydaq,” 93-108; fierro, “el mahdī ibn tūmart,” 73-97. 149. mss. qarawiyyin 296, f. 4. 150. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, vol. ii, 76 ff. 151. mss. qarawiyyin 296, f. 4. 152. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, vol. ii, 107. 153. mss. qarawiyyin 296, f. 5. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) the jihād of the caliphs and the first battles of islam • 137 as a hadith according to which the prophet said: “it has been ordered to fight against the people until they say ‘there is no other god than god.’”154 the use of this hadith in both ibn al-qaṭṭān’s works emphasizes again the parallelism muḥammad/ibn tūmart. moreover, in the kitāb al-rawḍāt ibn al-qaṭṭān establishes a chronology for the beginning of the prophet’s jihād. in citing a narrative of abū ʿubayd (d. 224/838) he says that jihād was forbidden before the hijra and that until that moment allāh had ordered the predication of islam without fighting. however, that prohibition was lifted after the emigration to medina, where the permission to fight the polytheists was obtained until there remained no more fitna.155 that is to say, he is following the traditional outline of the evolution of jihād.156 during the first period, that of the beginning of revelation in mecca, the muslims were forbidden to participate in battle, according to the interpretation of several qurʾānic verses (q. 5:13; 23:96; 73:10; 88:22). the second one, as seen in ibn al-qaṭṭān’s work, begins after the hijra, when muḥammad received the authorization to fight. what is interesting is that the outline articulated around the hijra can also be seen in the case of the almohad movement and their own “hijra” to tinmal. after this flight, the companions of the mahdī, just like those of muḥammad, are also called muhājirūn, a theme that also occurs in the naẓm al-jumān.157 thus, from this point of view, both emigrations not only meant a change in space, but also a shift in relations with the enemies of muḥammad/ ibn tūmart. in this sense, the hijra signifies the entry into a state of war and demonstrates the necessity of carrying out jihād.158 therefore, through the kitāb al-rawḍāt (and other works with which the naẓm al-jumān dialogued) the caliph al-murtaḍā and ibn al-qaṭṭān created a rhetorical framework that commemorated, by employing the memory of the prophet’s jihād, the beginnings of the almohad movement as well as the figure of the mahdī ibn tūmart, in order to discursively legitimize their attempted recovery of their doctrine, legacy, and glory during times of decadence and crisis for the almohad caliphate, a project that would eventually fail. although the almohad empire did not obtain the revitalization that al-murtaḍā was after and in the end disappeared, one must not underestimate the effort, especially on an intellectual level, that this ruler made in his attempts to return the almohad movement to the space it had occupied decades prior. 154. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, vol. ii, 54-55. muslim, saḥīḥ muslim, book of the faith, chapter 9, nº 31. 155. mss. qarawiyyin 296, ff. 9-10. 156. r. firestone, jihād. the origin of holy war in islam (oxford, 1999), 47 ff., and garcía sanjuán, “bases doctrinales y jurídicas del ŷihād,” 243-277. 157. kadhim, nazm al-yuman de ibn al-qattan, vol. ii, 29. 158. p. crone, “the first-century concept of hiğra,” arabica 61 (1994), 352-387; m. ebstein, “the connection between hijra and jihād in classical islam,” jamāʿa 15 (2005-2006), 53-85; i. lindstedt, “muhājirūn as a name for the first/seventh-century muslims,” journal of near eastern studies 74/1 (2015), 67-73. 138 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) concluding remarks throughout this study we have seen how the islamic discursive tradition159 (in this case around jihād) is dominated by the memory of the prophet and of early islamic times, and vice-versa, how this memory has been limited and molded by this discursive tradition. the remembrance of the first battles of islam and their recontextualization has proven to be a fundamental tool for the conceptualization and legitimization of jihād. the most important war was the one carried out by the prophet against the infidels and hypocrites of his time, and after it the conquests of the rāshidūn took place. all other jihads within islamic history are simply derivations of the initial one. ergo, the maghāzī and futūḥ represented the true and pure spirit of jihād. theories like that of al-shaybānī’s “four swords” further underpinned this reality. the first expeditions of islam functioned as a “social ideality” in times when jihād had to be conceptualized and justified. during the period of the cordoban caliphate, the ruler’s consolidation of power and authority was sought through the figure of the “ghāzī-caliph,” a figure that in turn was legitimized through the commemoration of the first expeditions of islam in a dynamic process whereby these battles were recovered, re-narrated and recontextualized. however, except in the case of ibn ʿabd rabbih, there does not seem to be a systematic program of memorialization of maghāzī and futūḥ: no one wrote, for example, a work on these topics. rather, together with other legitimation tools such as the recourse to the own memory of the umayyad dynasty, they were used as punctual discursive mechanisms. on the other hand, in a project like that of the almohads, which attempted to restore the alleged purity of the times of the prophet and the rāshidūn and which had a marked emphasis on jihād, the commemoration of maghāzī and futūḥ became the perfect link between holy war and the origins of islam. the recontextualization of the prophet and the first caliphs’ charisma and the symbolic capital they had acquired due to the establishment of contemporaneous parallelisms, became the perfect legitimization tool. in this case, we do find a systematic program of remembrance with which the almohad rulers, through the commission of maghāzī and futūḥ works, legitimized their actions. in this exercise of “mnemohistory” we have seen how, in different contexts, the unitarian caliphs reformulated and appropriated the first battles of islam as sites of sacred memory, to shape ibn tūmart 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rabbih (246/860-328/940).” journal of abbasid studies 2 (2015): 61-85. turner, brian. weber and islam. london: routledge, 1978. urvoy, dominique. “les écrits de ibn tumart.” in le maroc médiéval. un empire de l’afrique à l’espagne, 274-280. paris: louvre, 2014. vallvé, joaquín. “la intervención omeya en el norte de áfrica,” cuadernos de la biblioteca española de tetuán 4 (1967): 6-37. ———. el califato de córdoba. madrid: mapfre, 1992. van staëvel, jean-pierre. “la caverne, refuge de « l’ami de dieu » : une forme particulière de l’eremitisme au temps des almorávides et des almohades (magreb extrême, xie-xiiie siècles).” cuadernos de madīnat al-zahrā 7 (2010): 311-325. wasserstein, david. the caliphate in the west. an islamic political institution in the iberian peninsula. oxford: clarendon press, 1993. https://www.historytoday.com/daniel-tilles-and-john-richardson/poland-and-holocaust https://www.historytoday.com/daniel-tilles-and-john-richardson/poland-and-holocaust 150 • javier albarrán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 26 (2018) weber, max. sociología del poder. los tipos de dominación. madrid: alianza, 2007. ———. sociología de la religión. madrid: akal, 2012. zadeh, travis. “from drops of blood: charisma and political legitimacy in the translation of the ʿuthmānic codex of al-andalus.” journal of arabic literature 39 (2008): 321-346. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 459-464 book review emma j. flatt, the courts of the deccan sultanates: living well in the persian cosmopolis (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019), xix + 318 pp. isbn 978-1-108-48193-9. price: £75.00 (cloth). meia walravens university of antwerp (meia.walravens@uantwerpen.be) emma j. flatt’s the courts of the deccan sultanates is a convincing a n d e x p e r t l y w r i t t e n s t u d y o f courtly culture in the bahmani sultanate (1347–1528) and its five successor sultanates, bijapur (ca. 1490–1686), ahmadnagar (ca. 1490–1636), berar (ca. 1490–1574), b i d a r ( c a . 1 4 9 2 – 1 6 1 9 ) , a n d g o l k o n d a (ca. 1501–1687). the members of the courtly societies of these indo-islamic states had roots in (most prominently) north india, iran, and central asia, and they had adopted persian as the language of the 1. e.g., jean aubin, “de kûhbanân à bidar: la famille niʿmatullahī,” studia iranica 20, no. 2 (1991): 233–261; simonetta casci, “cultural mobility in the deccan: the afaqis’ long journey,” deccan studies 7, no. 2 (2014): 5–23; richard m. eaton, a social history of the deccan, 1300–1761: eight indian lives (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2005), 59–77; muḥsin maʿṣūmī, “ʿanāṣir-i qawmī-yi tashkīl dihanda-yi jāmiʿa-yi dakan dar dawra-yi bahmanīyān va chigūnagī-yi taʿāmul-i ānhā bā yakdīgar,” majalla-yi ʿilmī-pizhūhishī-yi dānishkada-yi adabiyāt va ʿulūm-i insānī-yi dānishgāh-i iṣfahān 2, no. 53 (1387 sh./2008): 81–91; muhammad suleman siddiqi, “ethnic change in the bahmanid society at bidar: a.d. 1422–1538,” islamic culture 60, no. 3 (1986): 61–80; idem, “the pro-afaqi policy of ahmad shah wali bahmani: its impact and consequences,” deccan studies 11, no. 2 (2013): 25–48; sanjay subrahmanyam, “iranians abroad: intra-asian elite migration and early modern state formation,” journal of asian studies 51, no. 2 (1992): 340–363. court and administration. scholarship in the field shows a long-standing interest in studying these elite migrants to the deccan.1 prompted by the observation that courtiers moved as easily between the deccan’s courts as they did to them, flatt now aims to elucidate what practices and ideas allowed their easy integration and their high degree of mobility. as such, the book also fits within a growing body of scholarly literature that pays attention to the topic of mobility—not only of people, © 2020 meia walravens. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:meia.walravens%40uantwerpen.be?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 460 • meia walravens but also of objects and ideas—in the wider islamic world.2 flatt argues that vital to understanding this historical phenomenon is to grasp what constituted courtliness. she contends t h a t t h e d e c c a n ’ s e l i t e s h a r e d w i t h their counterparts in persian-speaking lands a particular courtly disposition: a certain awareness of and engagement with authoritative literature and related knowledge, behaviors, and skills. it was a c q u i r e d t h r o u g h a “ c o s m o p o l i t a n ” education based on a “canon” of persian (and arabic) texts that betray a concern with instruction and moralization. the aim of this education was to impart to the student a specific mindset that would make him value the ongoing effort to gain proficiency in a variety of fields and to perfect a range of courtly qualities. this mindset consequently helped courtiers from diverse backgrounds to carve out a space for themselves in the persianoriented sultanates of the deccan. flatt builds this argument on the idea of the persian cosmopolis, a concept that is gaining currency among historians of islamic south asia. the term is a shorthand for a tradition stretching over a vast time and space marked by a reliance on deeprooted and transregionally appealing ideas, images, and practices associated 2. on the deccan, specifically, the most recent example (which appeared after flatt’s book) is keelan overton’s edited volume iran and the deccan: persianate art, culture, and talent in circulation, 1400–1700 (bloomington: indiana university press, 2020). for the islamic world more generally, see, for example, stefan rohdewald, stephan conermann, and albrecht fuess, eds., transottomanica – osteuropäisch-osmanischpersische mobilitätsdynamiken: perspektiven und forschungsstand (göttingen: v&r unipress, 2019), which also includes a part on india (christoph u. werner, “persisch-indisch-osmanische interaktionen”). 3. ronit ricci, islam translated: literature, conversion, and the arabic cosmopolis of south and southeast asia (chicago: university of chicago press, 2011). 4. e.g., christopher d. bahl, “transoceanic arabic historiography: sharing the past of the sixteenth-century western indian ocean,” journal of global history 15, no. 2 (2020): 203–223; mahmood kooria, “languages of law: islamic legal cosmopolis and its arabic and malay microcosmoi,” journal of the royal asiatic society 29, no. 4 (2019): 705–722. with the persian language and its literary heritage. these were often reinterpreted and adapted to local contexts, mainly in the political realm. the author provides a c l e a r e x p l a n a t i o n o f t h i s c o n c e p t , engaging with sheldon pollock’s work on the sanskrit cosmopolis, as well as with richard eaton’s and philip wagoner’s use of the term persian cosmopolis (pp. 17–24). absent from this discussion is the arabic cosmopolis, which was introduced almost a decade ago by ronit ricci.3 the role of arabic itself, however, is not forgotten in the book; flatt mentions that arabic works were also part of the courtier’s canon and in chapter 5 points to the use of an “arabicized” persian in bahmani inshāʾ (epistolography, meaning both the art and its products) as a political tool. it might have been interesting to consider the implications of these glimmers of an arabic presence at south asian courts for the idea of the persian cosmopolis—and of an arabic one. in flatt’s defense, though, the concept of the arabic cosmopolis is only now making headway in a couple of recent studies, which appeared after the publication of flatt’s work.4 this young field shows the utility of thinking about cosmopolises as a way to grasp issues of mobility, transmission, and connectedness over larger areas, as flatt does, but it al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) emma j. flatt’s the courts of the deccan sultanates • 461 also highlights the fact that the concept is still in full development and that the complexities of the south asian context call for both refinement and extension. in a laudably innovative approach, flatt herself extends the concept of the persian cosmopolis to comprise not only language practices but bodily ones as well (see p. 20). this allows her to highlight the importance of the physical manifestations in which the influence of the persian cosmopolis in the deccan courts is visible, such as rituals, the training of the body for particular skills, and material objects. in the first chapter of the book (“courtly disposition,” pp. 31–73), the author elaborates on this line of thinking. she explains that the way a courtier in the persian cosmopolis thought about what constitutes courtliness and how to achieve it was influenced by the idea, prevalent in islamic advice literature as well as in sufi thought and medico-philosophical theories, that both the body and the character were malleable and could be perfected (or corrupted) via internal and external forces. the self, the body, the world, and the cosmos constituted a continuum: changes in one sphere were believed to influence the others. by extension, this idea implied that the cultivation of courtliness was crucial not only to attain worldly success, but also to live ethically and to refine one’s soul. this interplay between the political and the personal, practices and knowledge, the worldly and the ethical, and the mundane and the spiritual in the courtly culture of the deccan sultanates is a common thread throughout the book. 5. an edition of the collection has been available in print for five years but has received very little scholarly attention: ʿabd al-karīm nīmdihī, kanz al-maʿānī (munshaʾāt-ī nīmdihī), ed. muḥammad-riżā naṣīrī and muḥammad-bāqir wusūqī (tehran: academy of persian language and literature [farhangistān-i zabān va adab-i fārsī], 1394 sh./2015). chapter 2 (“networks, patrons and f r i e n d s , ” p p . 7 4 – 1 1 9 ) a n d c h a p t e r 3 (“courts, merchants and commodities,” pp. 120–164) consider the social and economic networks that tied the deccan sultanates to the persian cosmopolis. most of the subtopics discussed in these chapters are well known in the field through previous scholarship; they include the connotation of knowledge acquisition that “travel” had in islamic accounts, the bahmani sultans’ pro-immigration policies, the interdependence of trade and state in the premodern indian subcontinent, and the bahmani chief minister maḥmūd gāvān’s (d. 1481) mercantile networks. the part on the bahmani secretary ʿabd al-karīm nīmdihī’s (d. ca. 1501) social network (pp. 83–88), in particular, might have benefited from a fresh examination of the material in the main source, nīmdihī’s inshāʾ collection kanz al-maʿānī, instead of relying on jean aubin’s publications.5 still, these chapters are valuable for bringing together the complex and varied aspects of the deccan’s transregional relations in a comprehensible overview. further, the addition of highly engaging sections related to flatt’s interest in bodily practices brings back the focus from the wider context of economic and social connections to the court. for example, as part of demonstrating the role of friendship relations and sociability in courtiers’ careers, flatt discusses the practice of sitting together in the assembly (majlis) and how concerns about the body and its susceptibility to external influences shaped this social encounter (pp. 109–119). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 462 • meia walravens the remaining chapters of the book each deal with a set of skills that were important in the courtly life of the deccan sultanates: letter writing (chapter 4, “scribal skills,” pp. 167–209); knowledge of esoteric sciences (chapter 5, “esoteric skills,” pp. 210–267); and mastery of martial arts (chapter 6, “martial skills,” pp. 268–302). these chapters illustrate some of the concrete aspects of courtly life, but their aim is also to show how these three seemingly very different occupations were all underpinned by the same idea: that they (and the literary or scientific works that treated them) had transformative powers on both a communal and an individual level. to the individual courtier, each of these skills held obvious practical value; one should be able to write letters for the sultan and to colleagues and friends, be aware of the power of esoteric sciences to better serve the sultan and to safeguard one’s own well-being, and be ready to fight in battles. at the same time, given the continuum between physical activities and the soul explained by flatt in the beginning of the book, these skills were linked to courtly ideals of perfected selves: the true munshī (composer of inshāʾ), the spiritual master, and the javānmard (a person embodying characteristics of “young-manliness”). at the communal level, flatt argues, we can observe attempts to mobilize each of these three courtly skills to deal with the ethnic, linguistic, and religious heterogeneity of deccani society. the bahmani chief minister maḥmūd gāvān thus advocated in his chancery manual an 6. an exception is flatt’s own previous study “the authorship and significance of the nujūm al-ʿulūm: a sixteenth-century astrological encyclopedia from bijapur,” journal of the american oriental society 131, no. 2 (2011): 223–244. “arabicized” persian, purged of vernacular influences, as the basis of inshāʾ to balance out rivalries between ethnic-political factions at the court, which are well known for the disrupting role they played in bahmani history. as for the esoteric sciences, one of the sultans of bijapur, ʿalī ʿādil shāh i (r. 1558–1580), found them an ideal arena in which “to create conceptual commensurabilities between indic and islamicate cosmologies with the aim of promoting a shared culture in a multiethnic and religiously plural society” (p. 305). he did so by writing an astrological encyclopaedia that drew on both islamic and indic beliefs, images, and practices. finally, the deccan sultans are shown to have encouraged or prohibited certain martial arts depending on whether they perceived them as a unifying or disrupting force. in addition to a range of more conventional primary sources on the early modern deccan, such as firishtah’s tārīkh, ʿiṣāmī’s f u t ū ḥ a l s a l ā ṭ ī n , s h ī r ā z ī ’ s t a d h k i r a t al-mulūk, and ṭabāṭabā’s burhān-i maʾāsir, the book’s main arguments build on two particularly noteworthy sources: maḥmūd g ā v ā n ’ s c h a n c e r y m a n u a l m a n ā ẓ i r al-inshāʾ (chapter 4) and ʿalī ʿādil shāh’s astrological encyclopaedia nujūm al-ʿulūm (chapter 5). flatt’s use of them makes a key contribution to the field, because both works to date have been looked at only from specific angles. nujūm al-ʿulūm has mainly received art-historical attention o w i n g t o i t s s p l e n d i d m i n i a t u r e s . 6 in manāẓir al-inshāʾ, the sections on the rules of letter composition have been singled al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) emma j. flatt’s the courts of the deccan sultanates • 463 out for use in analyzing official letters from other premodern islamic dynasties.7 flatt’s argument that these works served political, societal, and personal ends for the first time sheds light on the purposes for which they were potentially written. much work remains to be done to better u n d e r s t a n d t h e s e d e c c a n i t e x t s ( f o r example, no attempt has so far been made to examine manāẓir al-inshāʾ’s place within the larger islamic tradition of inshāʾ), but flatt’s intervention is an important step forward. only two minor reflections about the effectiveness of the book’s arguments as a whole impose themselves. first, the arguments presented slightly lose sight of the book’s opening question: “how had the ideas of ‘the court’ and ‘courtliness’ become so immediately recognisable across a wide geographic area, and so readily applicable—by persians—to indic culture?” (p. 2). this question is raised after observing that certain images of the court modeled on ancient persian e x a m p l e s a r e u s e d b y t h e b i j a p u r i historian rafīʿ al-dīn shīrāzī to describe the cave temples at ellora. it also relates to an aim articulated in the abstract: that the book “challenges the idea of perpetual hostility between islam and hinduism in indian history.” although the introduction recognizes that one should not disregard the local context when focusing on the persian cosmopolis (pp. 22–24), the issue of the interaction between “persian” and “indic” elements in the deccan’s courtly culture only really receives attention in chapter 5. the author herself suggests, in 7. e.g., malika dekkiche, “the letter and its response: the exchanges between the qara qoyunlu and the mamluk sultan: ms arabe 4440 (bnf, paris),” arabica 63 (2016): 579–626; matthew melvin-koushki, “the delicate art of aggression: uzun hasan’s fathnama to qaytbay of 1469,” iranian studies 44, no. 2 (2011): 193–214. her concluding remarks, that this question deserves to be taken up more elaborately in future research (p. 306–307). second, a risk of the thematic instead of chronological approach of the book is that the reasoning of one of the central arguments becomes somewhat circular: strong connections, often through human travel, with the persian-speaking world allowed the deccan sultanates to develop a courtly culture compatible with those o f o t h e r r e g i o n s w i t h i n t h e p e r s i a n cosmopolis, which in turn facilitated the transregional movement of courtiers. admittedly, it would be pointless to try to establish cause and effect in this complex, two-way process. nevertheless, an attempt might have been made to discern certain e v o l u t i o n s i n m i g r a n t s ’ m o v e m e n t s over the almost three centuries under discussion and to explain how they related to deccani courts’ participation in the persian cosmopolis. that this remains a very difficult thing to do further illustrates the relevance of flatt’s research and the pressing need for contributions like the courts of the deccan sultanates. the book features some useful and clear maps of the early modern deccan (pp. 5 and 8), the persian cosmopolis (p. 76), and the bahmani capital of bidar (p. 278), as well as wonderful illustrations taken from persian manuscripts, mostly from the nujūm al-ʿulūm (ms cbl in. 02). as to the transliteration of titles and phrases from persian and arabic, unfortunately a rather large number of mistakes remain in the publication, mostly due to an inconsistent rendering of the letters ʿayn (ʿ) and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 464 • meia walravens hamza (ʾ) throughout. for example, we find ʿajāʿib (p. 39) instead of the correct ʿajāʾib, mujtamiʾ (p. 157) instead of mujtamiʿ, al-māʿida (p. 199) instead of al-māʾida, and rasāʿil (p. 233) instead of rasāʾil. there is also iqʿra (p. 179, n. 42) instead of correctly iqraʾ, al-mutanabbīʿ (p. 198, n. 112) instead of al-mutanabbī, faṣāhat (p. 201) instead of faṣāḥat, makhzān (p. 202, n. 129) instead of makhzan, and manāz̤īr (throughout chapter 4) instead of manāẓir. this does not change the fact, however, that the courts of the deccan sultanates is a highly erudite work, carefully structured and original in its approach and arguments, which should certainly become part of the “canon”— to use some vocabulary that matches the themes of the book—of historians, area specialists, political scientists, and scholars of language and literature alike. in memoriam clifford edmund bosworth (1928-2015) al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 167-178 clifford edmund bosworth was a giant amongst historians of the middle east and central asia, and only the likes of his direct and indirect mentors, vladimir minorsky (d. 1966) and v.v. barthold (d. 1930) respectively, could parallel his staggering erudition and productive zeal in his writings on the eastern islamic world and beyond it.1 other colleagues have written detailed bibliographies of edmund bosworth’s astoundingly prolific work, and i will draw on these.2 in this essay, i offer 1. c.e. bosworth, a century of british orientalists, 1902-2001 (oxford: oxford university press, 2001): 205. 2. until now, the two-volume festschrift published in his honour fifteen years ago provides the most comprehensive and accurate a biographical sketch, while weaving in the highlights from his scholarly portfolio. above all, i want to explore what made edmund—as he liked to be called—who he was: an institution unto his own, a trailblazer, and nonetheless, incredibly kind, polite, and generous in spirit, a tall, slender man with his hallmark “unfashionable sideburns.” 3 after publishing bibliography. ed. ian r. netton, carole hillenbrand and and c.e. bosworth, studies in honour of clifford edmund bosworth (leiden: brill, 2000), vol. 1: xiii-xxxv. that list has now been boosted and updated to the present day by michael o’neal in “c. edmund bosworth: an updated bibliography,” in this issue of al-ʿusur al-wusta. 3. ian r. netton, “an appreciation of the life of professor clifford edmund bosworth,” posted in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 168 hundreds of articles, twenty monographs and edited volumes, hundreds of conference papers, and editorial productions of multi-tome compendia such as the encyclopaedia of islam (second edition), the british institute of persian studies journal (iran) for more than 40 years—“surely a record in journal editorship!” by his own account4—the journal of semitic studies, and the unesco series on the history of civilizations in central asia, as well as numerous major translation projects in advanced age, edmund bosworth never lacked the time to meet and support the lowliest of scholars—myself included (i had the pleasure of edmund’s acquaintance and mentorship in the last decade of his life). geert jan van gelder remarks that: meeting him was always a pleasure, for he was not only a mine of information, often curious and entertaining, to use that phrase once again, but also kind and interested in other people (unlike some other brilliant academics i have known).5 i have divided up the biographical sketch into four chronological sections: i) edmund’s formative years in war-time sheffield, and his early studies at oxford; ii) his scottish years and his transformation into an academic and a family man; iii) manchester, where edmund consolidated a n d e s t a b l i s h e d h i m s e l f a s a s e n i o r academic; and finally, iv) castle cary, his refuge of peace and writing, and setting online http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/iais/ news/title_443572_en.html [last accessed: 15.09.15]. 4. c.e. bosworth (tr. and ed.), the ornament of histories. a history of the eastern islamic lands ad 650-1041. the persian text of abu sa’id abd al-hayy gardizi (london: i.b. tauris, 2011): xi. 5. international study for iranian studies newsletter 36/1 (may 2015): 16-18. the foundations for the next generation of scholars and making more widely available the primary sources for non-specialists and specialist readerships alike. i. formative years: sheffield and oxford (1928-52) edmund was born during the christmas season, on the 29th of december 1928, in the industrial steel-producing town of sheffield in the english county of south yorkshire. his grandfather had worked in the steel industry as a fitter, and his father was a local government clerk. his mother had come to sheffield from peterborough as a teenager for her father to take up a post as a reporter with one of the local papers. at the time, sheffield was suffering from a recession and the effects of high levels of urban growth. the city saw the development of back-to-back dwellings, poor water supply, and factory pollution, which inspired george orwell to write in 1937 (when edmund was nine years old): “sheffield, i suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the old world.”6 edmund began his secondary schooling at sheffield city grammar school at the start of world war ii in 1939. the pupils at grammar schools, which provided a strong focus on intellectual subjects (classics, literatures, math), were given the best opportunities of any school children in the state system, and many had received extra tutoring for entering the oxford and cambridge university systems. edmund was to become a success story of that system. sheffield city grammar school “was to prove very influential in his 6. george orwell, “chapter 7,” the road to wigan pier (victor gollancz ltd. 1937): 72. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 169 life,” writes edmund’s family.7 it is worth mentioning some of the fine qualities of his school: it was co-educational at a time when it was considered revolutionary for the sexes to mingle in class. one reporter wrote: . . . t h e r e i s a s o l i d , d o w n t o e a r t h atmosphere about it that fits the character o f t h e c i t y , a n d i t s p u p i l s h a v e t h e friendliness and assurance one expects f r o m s h e ffi e l d ’ s h a r d w o r k i n g , s e l f respecting citizens ...8 s h e ffi e l d ’ s s t e e l f a c t o r i e s b e g a n manufacturing weapons and ammunition f o r t h e w a r e ff o r t , w h i c h m a d e i t a target for bombing raids by the german l u f t w a ff e . e d m u n d ’ s s c h o o l s u ff e r e d damage after the “sheffield blitz” on the 12th of december 1940, but it was nothing that could not be fixed in a few weeks.9 however, more than 660 lives were lost and many other buildings were destroyed in the blitz.10 according to an account written in 1963 and attributed to the school’s headmaster, stephen northeast, the school resumed its normal function after the christmas holiday in january 1941 amid occasional e v e n i n g r a i d s . i n h i s r e t r o s p e c t i v e , northeast marveled at the steadfastness of the pupils to assemble at the usual 7. personal communication, 6 may 2015. 8. “the city grammar school, sheffield,” yorkshire life illustrated (march 1960): 54. 9. account by stephen northeast, “you will have a new building soon.” http://www. omnesamici.co.uk/sptc/sptcnortheast.htm [last accessed 14.09.15] 10. mary walton and joseph p. lamb, raiders over sheffield: the story of the air raids of 12th & 15th december 194 (sheffield: sheffield city libraries, 1980). time despite a sleepless night caused by the air raids. it would be hard to imagine that young edmund’s drive for knowledge and cross-cultural understanding was not related to his childhood wartime experience. he was only 12 during the “sheffield blitz” and 16 when the war ended: too young to be involved on the battlefield, but too old to be unmoved by the horrors that war and hatred of “the other” can bring. the end of the war also brought to the british education system a new vigour. edmund’s old headmaster, mr northeast, explained: “as all who lived through it will remember, the end of the war brought a great surge of spirits as though we had emerged into the daylight after a journey through a long, dark tunnel.”11edmund’s m u s i c t u t o r i n s t i l l e d i n h i m a l o v e for classical music (edward elgar, in particular), and his history tutor coached him for the oxford entrance exams. he was awarded a scholarship (“exhibition”) at st john’s college, which edmund took up after attending his mandatory army service from 1947 to 1949. at oxford, edmund picked up choir singing and photography, while earning a first-class degree in modern history—a programme that was focussed on europe and the history of the west. at oxford, he also began his contact with the church, which was to become a lifelong passion. it was a personal acquaintance with an american friend at oxford studying arabic that awakened in edmund what would become an enduring interest in arabic and the islamic world. and thus, his journey 11. http://www.omnesamici.co.uk/sptc/ sptcnortheast.htm [last accessed on 10 september 2015] http://www.omnesamici.co.uk/sptc/sptcnortheast.htm http://www.omnesamici.co.uk/sptc/sptcnortheast.htm http://www.omnesamici.co.uk/sptc/sptcnortheast.htm http://www.omnesamici.co.uk/sptc/sptcnortheast.htm in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 170 into the world of the islamic history began. but first he had to earn money. ii. scottish period (1952-67): becoming an academic, gazing to “the east” edmund set off for scotland in 1952, aged 24, to take up a new post in the department of agriculture. the job paid the bills, but edmund’s real interest lay elsewhere. he managed to combine work with arabic studies with the help of the reverend professor montgomery watt, who headed the department of arabic and islamic studies at edinburgh university (1947-79). watt studied islam from a christian perspective, and was driven by the desire for a better understanding between the religions.12 given edmund’s increasing closeness to the church, watt’s motivation must have had an effect on him too. edmund was not a straight-out-ofthe-mould “orientalist” (in the best sense of the term, i.e. someone who worked closely with the primary source texts in the original language). he had experienced life as a civil servant, a theme that would be echoed in his thematic interests in medieval politico-administrative and military s ystems as a scholar of t he islamic world. during a visit to oxford, when edmund took me to st john’s senior common room, he reassured me, in his usual generosity of spirit, that he, too, had come late to studying the islamic world. in 1954, edmund obtained a scholarship for a masters degree in persian, turkish, 12. in an interview he said that the study of islam had taught him more about the “one-ness of god,” something he found to have been obscured by the concept of the holy trinity in christianity. interview with bashir maan and alastair mcintosh, coracle (august, 2000): 8-11. rev. prof. watt died in 2006, aged 97. and arabic at the university of edinburgh. in edinburgh, he met annette todd. they married, and she joined him in st andrews where edmund took up his first lectureship and started working on his ph.d. (at edinburgh). edmund and annette had a long and happy marriage together, and their three daughters were all born in st andrews (and eventually produced six grandchildren). edmund was awarded his ph.d. in 1961 when he was 33 years old. edmund’s thesis on the “transition from ghaznavid to seljuq rule in the islamic east” was prepared under the joint supervision of montgomery watt (d. 2006) and j.r. walsh (d. 1993). it was walsh, senior lecturer in turkish at edinburgh, who instilled in edmund a specific interest in the eastern iranian world.13 edmund also collaborated with john andrew boyle (d. 1978), a student of vladimir minorsky, on turkish name forms. boyle was at the university of manchester, which was to become edmund’s main academic base a few years thence.14 in his ph.d. thesis, edmund examined a number of themes that have set the tone and direction of scholarship on the region until the present 13. c.e. bosworth, unpublished ph.d. thesis at the university of edinburgh, entitled “transition from ghaznavid to seljuq rule in the islamic east” (1961): v; and c.e. bosworth, the ghaznavids, their empire in afghanistan and eastern iran 994-1040 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1963), with a 2nd ed. in beirut 1973, reprint in new delhi 1992, and a persian translation: v. 14. idem. j.a. boyle is best known for his translations of the ilkhānid chronicles of ʿaṭā malik juwaynī’s (d. 681/1283) tārīkh-i jahānghushāy (manchester: manchester university press, 1997 [1958]), based on an earlier translation by muḥammad qazwīnī, and parts of rashīd al-dīn’s (d. ca. 718/1318) jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh in the successors of genghis khan (new york: columbia university press, 1971). in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 171 time, such as the background of the turkic oghuz confederation, conversions to islam and the general islamization of the turkmen tribes, as well as the processes and consequences of the entry of the turks into the islamic lands of central asia and the middle east.15 edmund had already started publishing whilst working on his ph.d. his first article, an entry for the second edition of the encyclopaedia of islam’s (ei2) first volume, appeared in 1959. might he already have suspected that he would become the most prolific encyclopaedia writer in his field? edmund became the british editor of ei2 for the next three decades. in his updated bibliography of edmund’s works, michael o’neal has brought the publication list up to october 2015, and revised the frequently cited number of 200 to more than 700.16 to this, can be added many dozens of articles written by edmund as consulting editor for the encyclopaedia iranica (http:// i r a n i c a o n l i n e . o r g ) . i n 1 9 6 1 , e d m u n d published his first book review: again, one of many more to come every single year of his illustrious scholarly career. in 1963, two years after completing his ph.d., edmund published his first book, the ghaznavids, their empire in afghanistan and eastern iran 994-1040. it was a revision of his ph.d. thesis, and it secured edmund’s place as the foremost historian of medieval a f g h a n i s t a n . m i k l ó s m a r ó t h o f t h e hungarian academy of sciences (of which edmund was an honorary member) has pointed out that edmund was “admired not only by european orientalists, but 15. see michael o’neal’s bibliography below for details. 16. these are listed in ei2 as being written by “ed.” by oriental scholars too.”17 the book was reprinted in beirut and new delhi, and translated into persian.18 f o r t h e r e m a i n d e r o f h i s 1 5 y e a r s c o t t i s h s o j o u r n , e d m u n d p r o d u c e d around 35 articles and book chapters dealing mainly with afghan and islamic c e n t r a l a s i a n h i s t o r y , p a r t i c u l a r l y medieval dynasties, such as, the ghūrids, the ghaznavids, and the khwarazmshāhs. edmund was also able to branch out and publish on administrative and political manuals produced elsewhere in the islamic world, such as the egyptian qalqashandī’s ṣubḥ al-aʿshā. he began inventorying dynasties in places like daylam, gurgān and ṭabaristān in modern-day iran, for example.19 this research culminated in perhaps his best-known and most-used work, the islamic dynasties.20 it continues to serve as the standard manual for historians on the rulers and ruling families of the entire islamic world. edmund substantially reworked and extended the 17. maróth miklós akadémikus laudációja c. e. bosworth tiszteleti tag székfoglalója alkalmából 2005. április 25-én. 18. c.e. bosworth, the ghaznavids, their empire in afghanistan and eastern iran 994-1040 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1963); 2nd ed. (beirut: librairie du liban, 1973); repr. (new delhi: munshiram manoharlal, 1992); persian translation (tehran: amīr kabīr, 1356/1977-8). 19. “dailamīs in central iran: the kākūyids of jibāl and yazd,” iran 7 (1970): 73–95, repr. the medieval history of iran, afghanistan and central asia (london: variorum reprints, 1977), art. v; “on the chronology of the ziyārids in gurgān and ṭabaristān,” der islam 40 (1964): 25–34, repr. medieval history, art. ii; and ei2 article on “ṭabaristān.” 20. c.e. bosworth, the islamic dynasties. a chronological and genealogical handbook, islamic surveys 5 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1967). http://iranicaonline.org http://iranicaonline.org in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 172 text in 1996, and again in 2010. the increase in dynasties from 82 (in 1967) to 186 (in 1996) is a testament to the superlative span of edmund’s vision. it would take the cooperative efforts of a team of scholars to produce a future dynastic manual that exceeded the scale and scope of his 2010 edition, and this only underscores the gaping hole that edmund has left in the field.21 edmund spent the final two years of his lectureship at st andrews on a visiting professorship in the university of toronto, where he must have been putting the final touches on his third book in the course of a mere five years, sistan under the arabs, which came out in 1968. this book continues to be the standard work on the ṣaffārids, and the medieval history of this highly complex and (still) little understood part of the world: an area between modern-day iran (zahedan) and afghanistan (zarang and nimruz), with an ancient history known as the middle persian sakastan. sīstān was the staging ground for the caliphate’s push into qandahar and kabul, and ultimately india, which were only brought into the dār al-islām four centuries later. this area, clustered in afghanistan around the helmand riverine areas, was a linchpin to the umayyad and ʿabbāsid eastward expansion project. it continues, of course, to provide the focus for the international security efforts in afghanistan today. although edmund was about to embark on a new chapter in his life outside scotland, he never turned his back on the scottish hills which he loved. he would return to isle of arran for family holidays 21. i am grateful to michael o’neal for studying edmund’s bibliography in detail. almost every year, with his characteristic walking stick and hat. iii. manchester (1967-93): consolidating and going international in 1967, edmund took up the post of professor of arabic studies at the u n i v e r s i t y o f m a n c h e s t e r w h e r e h e remained until his retirement 26 years l a t e r ( i n 1 9 9 3 ) . d u r i n g m o s t o f h i s mancunian period edmund (in his forties to sixties), also carried the burden of being head of his department. this seems in no way to have reduced edmund’s output either in scope or in diversity. in his research and publications, he remained true to his interest in the history of the eastern islamic regions, but equally explored new areas as wide and varied as the study of the turks in medieval islam and turkish onomastics, islamic military organisation, early modern european travel literature and orientalism, theology, t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n m e d i e v a l m u s l i m s a n d n o n m u s l i m s , l i t e r a r y criticism (e.g. the influence of arabic on english), the biographies of sufi shaykhs, and many more.22 22. see details in o’neal’s bibliography below. on turkish onomastics: “notes on some turkish names in abu ’l-faḍl bayhaqī’s tārīkh-i masʿūdī,” oriens 36 (2001): 299–313; “further notes on the turkish names in abu’l-faḍl bayhaqī’s tārīkh-i masʿūdī,” ch. 18 in o. alí-de-unzaga, fortresses of the intellect. ismaili and other islamic studies in honour of farhad daftary (london: i.b. tauris, 2011): 443–52; “notes on some turkish personal names in seljūq military history”, isl., lxxxix/2 (2012), 97–110. on military: “ghaznavid military organization,” der islam 36 (1960): 37–77; “military organization under the būyids of persia and iraq,” oriens 17-19 (1965–6): 143–67, repr. medieval history, art. iii. on theology: “al-ḫwārazmī on theology in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 173 a t t h e s a m e t i m e , e d m u n d ’ s encyclopaedia articles proliferated at an astronomical rate. for example, in the span of just three years, from 1968 to 1970, edmund produced 40 encyclopaedia articles, on top of publishing several book reviews and scholarly articles. rather than being a mere summary of the existing l i t e r a t u r e , e d m u n d ’ s e n c y c l o p a e d i a articles are substantial pieces of original scholarship, such as his very important article on the “saldjūḳids.” around this time, in 1969, edmund took on a visiting professorship at the near eastern center, and sects: the chapter on kalām in the mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm,” beo, 29 (1977) [1978] [= mélanges offerts à henri laoust]: 85–95, repr., medieval history, art. vii. on muslims and non-muslims: “christian and jewish religions dignitaries in mamlūk egypt and syria: qalqashandī’s information on their hierarchy, titulature and appointment,” ijmes 3 (1972): 59–74, 199–216, repr. medieval history, art. xvi; “jewish elements in the banū sāsān,” bior 33/5–6 (sept.–nov. 1976) [1977], 289–94, repr. medieval history, art. vi; “the ‘protected people’ (christians and jews) in mediaeval egypt and syria,” bjrul 62/1 (autumn 1979): 11–36, repr. medieval history, art. vii; “the concept of dhimma in early islam,” in b. braude and b. lewis (eds), christians and jews in the ottoman empire. the functioning of a plural society, i, the central lands (new york: homes & meier publishers, 1982): 37–51, repr. medieval history, art. vi, updated in m. grey, et al. (eds), living stones yearbook 2012 ([london] 2012): 143–64. on literary criticism: “the influence of arabic literature on english literature,” azure 5 (spring 1980): 14–19. arabic tr., “taʾthīr al-adab al-ʿarabī fi ’l-adab al-inkilīzī,” al-maʿrifa, damascus, nos. 191–2 (february 1978): 199–215. on sufi shaykhs: “an early persian ṣūfī: shaykh abū saʿīd of mayhanah,” in r.m. savory and d.a. agius (eds), logos islamikos. studia islamica in honorem georgii michaelis wickens (toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, 1984): 79–96, repr. medieval history, art. xxiii. in the university of california los angeles. he was now a world-renowned scholar and a “go-to” person for providing overarching introductions to many general works on islamic history, the history of iran, a n d r e l i g i o u s h i s t o r y . e d m u n d , t h e islamic scholar, was indefatigable and unflappable—to use the words of his iran co-editor, c.a. petrie23—and there was nothing that would hold him back. three more books came out in the 1970s, amongst them a sequel to his ghaznavid history—a study of “the later ghaznavids.”24 a lesserknown but equally exciting new book was his treatment of the “islamic underworld.”25 he saw the book as “scratching the surface” of what was a pioneering area of focus, and hoped that it would stimulate other scholars to follow suit.26 in his obituary piece, geert jan van gelder highlights this work as one of his favourites, and probably one that influenced van gelder’s attraction to the “marginal” in arabic literature. “like edmund bosworth i have always eschewed the decent obscurity of latin,” he declares.27 edmund’s penchant for the underworld might also be reflected in his fine collection of penguin original crime fiction editions.28 23. personal communication, 14.09.15. 24. the later ghaznavids, splendour and decay. the dynasty in afghanistan and northern india 1040–1186, (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1977). reprinted munshiram manoharlal, delhi 1992. 25. c.e. bosworth, the mediaeval islamic underworld, the banū sāsān in arabic society and literature, in 2 vols (leiden: brill, 1976). 26. ibid: vii. 27. geert jan van gelder, “obituary for edmund bosworth,” isis newsletter, 36/1 (summer 2015): 17. 28. personal communication with edmund’s in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 174 edmund’s children were now of school age, and his daughter felicity reminisced a t h e r f a t h e r ’ s m e m o r i a l s e r v i c e a t edmund’s alma mater, st john’s college, oxford, on the 13th of june 2015, that the house rule was not to disturb her father when he was working. but the rule could be bent: the children always knew that if they needed help with their homework their father would lend a kind ear. edmund loved to travel widely. he took on visiting fellowships at kuwait university (1975), at the center for the humanities fellow, princeton university (fall semester 1984), and the middle east center, harvard university (1997). his wife annette formed the firm backbone of family life that gave him the ability to travel. “he always took many photos, which formed the basis of many family evenings spent with the projector viewing his slides,” writes his family.29 edmund’s output is too large to list in detail, and only a few highlights and trends can be selected. the 1980s marked the beginning of his most impressive scholarly output: his translations of some important medieval arabic chronicles. edmund translated three books from al-ṭabarī’s history in the span of four years (1987-91), as well as the delightful book of curious and entertaining information by abū manṣūr al-thaʿālibī (d. 412/1021).30 family, 6 may 2015. 29. personal communication, 6 may 2015. 30. the history of al-ṭabarī. an annotated translation. vol. xxxii. the reunification of the ʿabbāsid caliphate. the caliphate of al-maʾmūn a.d. 812–833/a.h. 198–213 (albany: state university of new york press, 1987); the history of al-ṭabarī. an annotated translation. vol. xxx. the ʿabbāsid caliphate in equilibrium. the caliphates of mūsā al-hādī and hārūn al-rashīd a.d. 785–809/ edmund was sensitive to the importance of manuscript traditions in his historical studies.31 also in the 1980s, he added to his continued encyclopaedic production a new series of what eventually totaled 80 articles for the then newly established encyclopaedia iranica under the editorship of ehsan yarshater in new york. he also edited, corrected and annotated the works of minorsky and barthold, such as in the third edition of turkestan down to the mongol invasion and the ḥudūd al-ʿālam translated by vladimir minorsky.32 and a.h. 169–193 (albany: state university of new york press: 1989); c.e. bosworth, the history of al-ṭabarī. an annotated translation. vol. xxxiii. storm and stress along the northern frontiers of the ʿabbāsid caliphate (albany: state university of new york press, 1991), the book of curious and entertaining information. the laṭāʾif al-maʿārif of thaʿālibī. translated with an introduction and notes (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1968). 31. see, for example, “some new manuscripts of al-khwārizmī’s mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm,” journal of semitic studies ix (1964): 341–5; “manuscripts of thaʿālibī’s yatīmat ad-dahr in the süleymaniye library, istanbul,” journal of semitic studies xvi (1971): 41–9; also catalogue publications for arabic manuscripts at the john rylands library in manchester (1974, published 1975) and the chetham’s library in manchester (1976). 32. see details in o’neal’s bibliography. v.v. barthold, turkestan down to the mongol invasion, 3rd ed. with additional chapter hitherto unpublished in english trans. mrs. t. minorsky and ed. c.e. bosworth, and with further addenda and corrigenda by c.e. bosworth, gibb memorial series, n.s. v (london: luzac, 1968); vladimir minorsky, ḥudūd al-ʿālam. the regions of the world, a persian geography 372 a.h.–982 a.d., 2nd ed., pref. v.v. barthold, trans. from russian and with additional material by the late professor minorsky, edited by c.e. bosworth, gms, n.s. xi (london: luzac, 1970); v.v. barthold, an historical geography of iran, tr. svat soucek, ed. with intro. by c.e. bosworth, modern classics in near eastern studies (princeton: in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 175 edmund also edited minorsky’s festschrift.33 edmund’s editorial exceptionalism was probably best described in the obituary notice of charles melville who had worked with him on the british institute of persian studies (bips) editorial board: edmund was a long-standing member o f t h e b i p s g o v e r n i n g c o u n c i l a n d , most admirably, editor of the institute’s journal iran for many years, handling all the contributions in the non-archaeological fields. a measure of the work he dedicated to this task is the fact that it has taken a committee of editors to try to fill the gap left by his retirement. a t e d m u n d ’ s m e m o r i a l s e r v i c e i n oxford, the islamic art historian robert hillenbrand again reiterated edmund’s unfailing politeness and industriousness as an editor, a task that has led many a seasoned scholar to near-collapse and angry repartee. i experienced edmund’s tactful handling of my errors as a junior scholar submitting her very first scholarly article for the last iran volume which edmund was editing. i also experienced the immense hospitality to which his colleague ian r. netton (at the university of exeter’s institute of arabic and islamic studies where edmund was a visiting professor) refers in his obituary piece.34 my two-year old daughter and i were welcomed at edmund and annette’s home with open arms when we were passing through castle cary in 2012. our hosts very quickly produced their children’s toys, neatly preserved in original 1960s tin princeton university press: 1984). section by c.e. bosworth: “editor’s introduction,” ix–xv. 33. iran and islam. in memory of the late vladimir minorsky, ed. c.e. bosworth (edinburgh: edinburgh university press 1971). 34. netton, “appreciation of the life.” boxes to ensure my toddler was sufficiently entertained. in 1992, edmund—having just been elected to the prestigious and select f e l l o w s h i p o f t h e b r i t i s h a c a d e m y — edited a centenary monograph of british orientalists (1902-2001) on behalf of the academy. out of the thirteen biographies (twelve of which were of academy fellows and all of whom were men), edmund contributed the chapters on e.g. browne, gerard clauson and vladimir minorsky. minors ky , in part ic ular— t he rus s ian t r a i n e d o r i e n t a l i s t w h o u l t i m a t e l y settled in the uk following the bolshevik revolution—is constantly invoked in edmund’s work, as will be seen shortly. edmund’s gratitude and respect towards his senior colleagues are evident from the obituaries he produced.35 he has also, rather unselfishly, as macuch observed, picked up occasional work left undone by his deceased colleagues. the exceptionally good qurʾān commentary by richard bell is one such example.36 iv. castle cary, somerset (1993-2015): going back to the basics castle cary, a picturesque and sleepy 35. obituary of s.m. stern, iran 8 (1970): ix; obituary, “sir gerard clauson (1891–1973)”, in bulletin bsmes, i/1 (1974): 39–40; obituary, “professor j.a. boyle,” iran 17 (1979): i–ix; obituary, “martin hinds, 1941–1988,” in bulletin bsmes 16 (1989): 118–20; obituary: “joan allgrove 1928–1991,” iran 29 (1991): v; obituary: “professor charles beckingham,” the daily telegraph, 14.10.98; obituary, “ronald whitaker ferrier 1929– 2003,” iran 41 (2003): v–vi. 36. a commentary on the qurʾān . . . prepared by richard bell. vol. 1. surahs i–xxiv. vol. 2. surahs xxv–cxiv, edited by c.e. bosworth and m.e.j. richardson, 2 vols. jss monograph no. 14 (manchester: manchester university press, 1991). in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 176 small town in the heart of the english countryside of somerset was to become edmund’s refuge and retirement bliss. his library was vast, extending into a converted garage set against the rest of the house. “i don’t need to use any libraries; i have my very own,” he said proudly when showing me around the house during our visit in 2012. “i could use a librarian though,” he smiled. e d m u n d w a s s t i l l r e c e i v i n g m a n y accolades for a lifetime of achievement: the silver avicenna medal of unesco (1998); the dr mahmud afshar foundation prize for contributions to iranian studies in 2001 and the prize by the iranian ministry of culture and islamic guidance for contributions to iranian historical studies in 2003, both in tehran; the annual award for services to middle eastern studies in britain of the british society for middle east studies in 2007 in oxford; the levi della vida award for excellence in islamic studies in 2010 in los angeles; and the triennial royal asiatic society award in 2013 in london. edmund had retired at 65, but some of the best of his bibliography came during more than two decades of retirement in castle cary (1993-2015). first, edmund tied up loose ends with books on the saffarids (1994), by revising new islamic dynasties (1996 and 2010), and completing a fourth book of translation based on ṭabarī’s history.37 then edmund returned to his love of travel writing and british orientalism with a charming biography of an “intrepid scot,” a william lithgow of lanark, published in 37. the history of al-ṭabarī (taʾrīkh al-rusul wa’l-mulūk). vol. v. the sāsānids, the byzantines, the lahkmids, and yemen, translated and annotated by c.e. bosworth (albany: bibliotheca persica, state university of new york press: 1999). 2006.38 edmund possessed the rare skill of knowing how to speak to a variety of new audiences. a review by a non-islamicist illustrates this point: in numerous intriguing notes, this book directs readers to studies of eastern sources that add mightily to the general project of advancing our understanding of the encounter between britain and the muslim world in the early modern period. this project tended to be dominated, during the 1990s, by scholars working in english literature and drama who became intrigued by ‘turks’ but who had little interest in or access to ottoman, maghribian, safavid or mughul sources, and largely ignored recent work being produced in the fields of near eastern studies. bosworth’s study quietly and unobtrusively draws attention to this deficit by correcting it by example rather than by engaging in polemic.39 in some sort of grand finale, edmund actively worked on a series of major translations, all of which were published in 2011—two from persian and one from arabic into english. far from taking it easy in his retirement years, in his early eighties, edmund had reinvented himself as a persianist (with the help of his revisers, profs heshmat moayyad and mohsen ashtiany). edmund chose one of the most difficult 38. an intrepid scot: william lithgow of lanark’s travels in the ottoman lands, north africa and central europe, 1609–21 (aldershot: ashgate, 2006). 39. gerald maclean, “review: an intrepid scot: william lithgow of lanark’s travels in the ottoman lands, north africa and central europe, 1609–21, by clifford edmund bosworth (aldershot: ashgate, 2006),” the english historical review 122/497 (2007): 825-6. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 177 pieces of persian prose as one translation object: the history of abu al-faḍl bayhaqī (d. 470/1077). bayhaqī had served the ghaznavid court as chronicler, and his work had formed the cornerstone of edmund’s ph.d. and all the subsequent scholarship that emanated from it. already 30 years prior to this edmund had been asked by his old mentor minorsky during a visit to his house in cambridge to work on the text. he managed to find the time for it only after ehsan yarshater had asked him again in the late 1990s.40 edmund dedicated the three-volume annotated t r a n s l a t i o n t o “ v l a d i m i r f e d o r o v i c h minorsky.” he was now going back to the basic texts and making them available to the next generation of scholars and a wider non-specialist audience. but edmund did not just translate this fragmentary, but highly entertaining, work that provides us with a rare insight into the inner workings of the ghaznavid court and on the topography of 11th-century ghazna (modern-day ghazni, afghanistan). the final product—three volumes published i n 2 0 1 1 — i n c l u d e d o n e v o l u m e o f detailed commentary on the historical, geographical and philological background. in 398 pages of commentary, edmund brings to bear his vast and all-embracing scholarly insight on aspects of bayhaqī’s text that range from armaments to food, festivals to military campaigns. t w o m o r e o f e d m u n d ’ s m a j o r translations were published in 2011. one was the “historical section” of ʿabd al-ḥayy 40. the history of beyhaqī (the history of sultan mas’ud of ghazna, 1030-1041) by abu’l fażl beyhaqi. tr. by c.e. bosworth and rev. by mohsen ashtiany, vol. i (421-423 a.h. (1030-1032 a.d.) (boston, mass.: ilex foundation and center for hellenistic studies, 2011): xxi. gardīzī’s (flourished first half of the 5th/11th century) zayn al-akhbār.41 edmund dedicated this work, again, to vladimir minorsky, and also gerard clauson “who were always ready to share their expert knowledge on the iranian and turkish world with a much younger scholar.”42 charles melville, in his 2013 review of the zayn al-akhbār translation, utters a not-soveiled lament that edmund has left out the sections on the neighbouring peoples, especially the indian and turks, as well as the pre-islamic kings, caliphs and local islamic ruler, which makes it a model for later works, and also “stands as a testament to the imperial horizons of the ghaznavid court.” at the same time, melville declares that bosworth is “at his most magisterial at elucidating these facts [of khurāsānī history] and identifying the correct record of names, dates and places, upon which a secure knowledge of medieval history can be placed.”43 the third major translation was that of the arabic chronicle, akhbār al-dawla al-saljūqiyya (“history of the seljuq state”) ascribed to ṣadr al-dīn al-ḥusaynī (fl. a.d. 1180-1225).44 it is the first complete 41. c. e. bosworth, the ornament of histories. a history of the eastern islamic lands ad 650–1041. the original text of abū saʿīd ʿabd al-ḥayy gardīzī translated and edited (london: i.b. tauris, 2011). 42. bosworth, ornament of histories, preliminaries. 43. charles melville, “review of c. edmund bosworth: the ornament of histories. a history of the eastern islamic lands ad 650–1041. the original text of abū saʿīd ʿabd al-ḥayy gardīzī translated and edited. (i.b. tauris and bips persian studies series.) xiv (london: i.b. tauris, 2011),” bsoas 76/1 (2013): 114-6. 44. the history of the seljuq state: a translation with commentary of the akhbār al-dawla al-saljūqiyya, translated by c.e. bosworth in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 178 english translation to appear in print (superseding qibla ayaz’s translation in his laudable though unpublished ph.d. thesis). the source is important for seljuq history, especially for western iran in the late sixth to twelfth centuries where much of its testimony is unique and must derive from first-hand reports. the highly detailed commentary of 497 endnotes that accompanies the text supersedes edmund’s own 202-page article on the seljūqs in the cambridge history of iran which was the standard reference on the seljuqs for nearly five decades, with a necessary update provided by the 1995 article “saldjūḳids” in ei2 that incorporates numismatic material. the translation of the akhbār and his more recent articles, therefore, provide important supplements to his earlier seljuq scholarship.45 conclusion edmund bosworth had a sixty-year scholarly career that is truly staggering, f r o m t h e b e g i n n i n g o f h i s d o c t o r a l studies in 1956 to his very last months in 2 0 14 . edm und’s greates t qualit ies were fourfold: first, he had the vision to put afghanistan and central asia on the map of islamic history within western european scholarly circles, thus correcting the biased view of the western islamic lands as the “heartlands” of islam. second, edmund understood the need to produce (milton park, abingdon, oxon: routledge, 2011). 45. i am grateful for michael o’neal’s bibliography below that highlights edmund’s contributions to seljuq history. foundational books that could facilitate a sound understanding of the medieval islamic world. these included elucidating difficult primary sources, identifying place names, and translating and interpreting the sources. edmund was not one for grand theories and daring hypotheses, and for this he is sometimes diminished, especially by younger scholars who may not appreciate the diversity and soundness of his scholarship. but, as geert jan van gelder comments, theories come and go, and it is the solid studies that remain.46 third, edmund was highly versatile in his linguistic abilities and a historian with a lively interest in literature and language which enabled him to write cultural his t ory . finally , he had a w ond erful personality: a humane, kind and generous colleague. with these qualities, edmund was able to bridge the divide that still e x i s t s b e t w e e n i s l a m i c h i s t o r i a n s i n western europe, north america, russia and central europe, and those in the studied region itself. it is only in this way that the divergence perceived in cultures can be overcome. and ultimately, i think this this is what drove edmund, the war-time schoolboy from smoky sheffield who never missed a beat and always looked ahead. — arezou azad university of birmingham (a.azad@bham.ac.uk) 46. van gelder, “obituary”: 17. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 436-442 book review although there has been a consid-e r a b l e a m o u n t o f s c h o l a r s h i p devoted to the many dynasties, caliphs, emirs, and sultans who exercised dominion throughout the islamic world in the medieval and early modern eras, until recently, comparatively little attention has been paid to the officials tasked with governing and administering these 1. marina rustow, the lost archive: traces of a caliphate in a cairo synagogue (princeton: princeton university press, 2020), and petra m. sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state: the world of a mid-eighth-century egyptian official (oxford: oxford university press, 2014). 2. fozia bora, writing history in the medieval islamic world: the value of chronicles as archives (london: i.b. tauris, 2019). 3. emma j. flatt, the courts of the deccan sultanates: living well in the persian cosmopolis (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020); samuel england, medieval empires and the culture of competition: literary duels at islamic and christian courts (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2017), and i̇lker evrim binbaş, intellectual networks in timurid iran: sharaf al-dīn ‘alī yazdī and the islamicate republic of letters (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016). 4. hüseyin yılmaz, caliphate redefined: the mystical turn in ottoman political thought (princeton: princeton university press, 2018), and john p. turner, inquisition in early islam: the competition for religious and political authority in the abbasid empire (london: i.b. tauris, 2013). 5. christopher markiewicz, the crisis of kingship in late medieval islam: persian emigres and the making of ottoman sovereignty (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019). states. recent approaches to the topic have attempted to think carefully about the importance of the production of documents and administration,1 archives and historical writing,2 connections and competition at royal courts,3 the nexus between rulers and religious authority, 4 and the emergence of particular discourses of kingship and sovereignty,5 luke b. yarbrough, friends of the emir: non-muslim state officials in premodern islamic thought (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019), xiv + 361 pp. isbn 978-1-1087-2174-5. price: £90/$120 (cloth) and £24.99/$32.99 (paperback). mohamad ballan stony brook university (mohamad.ballan@stonybrook.edu) © 2020 mohamad ballan. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:mohamad.ballan%40stonybrook.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 437 • mohamad ballan w h i l e s h e d d i n g l i g h t o n t h e s t a t u s , function, and self-perceptions of military and administrative elites.6 with friends of the emir: non-muslim state officials in premodern islamic thought, luke b. yarbrough contributes to this growing body of scholarship by closely examining the jewish, christian, zoroastrian, and other non-muslim officials whose employment occasioned energetic discussions a m o n g m u s l i m s c h o l a r s a n d r u l e r s . this masterfully written and well-argued book reveals those discussions for the first time in all their diversity, drawing on unexplored medieval sources in the realms of law, history, poetry, adab, administration, and polemic. it traces the discourse on non-muslim officials from its emergence in the umayyad era (661–750) through medieval iraq, syria, spain, and egypt to its apex in the mamluk period (1250– 1517). yarbrough compellingly demonstrates that for all the diversity among premodern muslim thinkers on the topic of non-muslim officials, their writings constituted not a disjointed miscellany but a “continuously evolving prescriptive discourse, characterized by numerous recurrent structures, themes, topoi, and schemata, as well as by pervasive and overt intertextuality” (p. 4). far from being an intrinsic part of islam, yarbrough convincingly argues, views about non-muslim state officials were devised, transmitted, and elaborated at moments of intense competition between muslim and non-muslim learned elites. this focus upon competition, professional rivalry, and the “ubiquitous pursuit of resources” makes friends 6. jo van steenbergen (ed.), trajectories of state formation across fifteenth-century islamic west-asia: eurasian parallels, connections and divergences (leiden: brill, 2020), and maaike van berkel and jeroen duindam (eds.), prince, pen, and sword: eurasian perspectives (leiden: brill, 2018). of the emir a particularly important intervention by prompting scholars to rethink notions of sovereignty, cultural polemics, and the practice of politics in the medieval islamic world. yarbrough’s considered and nuanced approach to the subject provides a productive framework for scholars seeking to look beyond sharp dichotomies between “normative discourses” and “historical realities” in their approach to the premodern world. the book is divided into three broad sections: “beginnings” (chapters 1–4), “ e l a b o r a t i o n ” ( c h a p t e r s 5 – 6 ) , a n d “efflorescence and comparisons” (chapters 7–9). chapter 1 (“an introduction to the prescriptive discourse surrounding non-muslim state officials”) establishes t h e h i s t o r i c a l , m e t h o d o l o g i c a l , a n d theoretical background for the study. the chapter provides a useful historiographical overview of works written in english, french, and arabic about the question of non-muslim officials, demonstrating that much of the scholarship has been rooted in ahistorical assumptions that posit a dichotomy between textual prescription and historical practice. the remainder o f t h e c h a p t e r o u t l i n e s y a r b r o u g h ’ s o w n m e t h o d o l o g i c a l a n d t h e o r e t i c a l approach. it is here that he provides a critical explanation of his interpretive choices, particularly the development and utilization of the concept of “valued resources,” which is heavily indebted to social theory (particularly the writings of pierre bourdieu), in order to demonstrate the utility of thinking carefully about “resources” and “capital” as ways of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) luke b. yarbrough’s friends of the emir: non-muslim state officials • 438 evaluating the practices of historical actors and their motivations. one of the most valuable contributions of the book is its exploration of the ways in which exclusionary behavior, including the articulation and dissemination of particular discourses about non-muslim officials, constituted a discursive tool in the ubiquitous pursuit of resources. while rejecting the notion that these discourses constituted a smokescreen for sociopolitical motives, yarbrough d e m o n s t r a t e s t h a t m a n y m e d i e v a l muslims who shaped the discourse about non-muslim officials wrote to achieve specific personal ends, which included b o t h w o r l d l y r e n o w n a n d u l t i m a t e salvation. chapter 2 (“preludes to the discourse: non-muslim officials and late ancient antecedents”) presents a synchronic study of non-muslim officials and the reasons for their employment while surveying late antique discourses around dissenting officials, particularly surviving writings on non-christian officials in the eastern r o m a n e m p i r e a n d n o n z o r o a s t r i a n officials in the sasanian empire. the chapter carefully defines the various c a t e g o r i e s , t e r m s , a n d i n t e r p r e t i v e frameworks employed throughout the b o o k , d e l i n e a t i n g h o w a n d w h y t h e study of the prescriptive discourse about non-muslim officials can shed important light on premodern islamic politics and society. in the first part of the chapter, yarbrough argues that non-muslim officials were ubiquitous in the administration of premodern islamic states, primarily in a bureaucratic capacity. he stresses that their continued employment, despite considerable opposition, was due to a number of factors, including various combinations of dependence, loyalty, special competencies, and lower cost in both material and symbolic terms. t h e r e m a i n d e r o f t h e c h a p t e r i s dedicated to a survey of several lateancient antecedents to the discourse, not necessarily as part of an argument about the degree to which these antecedents influenced the emergence of muslim prescriptive discourses but in order to explore the similar dynamics at play within the eastern roman and sasanian empires. yarbrough demonstrates that in the late roman empire, a number of imperial laws restricted or prohibited the employment of officials who dissented from christian orthodoxy, while in the sasanian empire, non-zoroastrian officials were sometimes viewed as problematic because their elevation destabilized the hierarchies that structured sasanian society. the chapter illustrates the importance of considering the emergence of islamic polities against the backdrop of the world of late antiquity while serving as a useful comparative study of the three empires (sasanian, roman, and early islamic). chapter 3 (“the beginnings of the discourse to 236/851”) introduces the oldest stratum of the discourse proper, w h i c h e n c o m p a s s e s a w i d e r a n g e o f sources and consists largely of parabolic stories about early caliphs and their putative statements about non-muslim o f f i c i a l s . t h e c h a p t e r a r g u e s t h a t these stories should be interpreted as instruments of competition and were composed in various settings long after the events that they purportedly describe. according to yarbrough, the narrators of these stories used them to challenge rivals for social, material, and political resources. this chapter, which brings together several al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 439 • mohamad ballan case studies, demonstrates the historical value of parables as a window into the normative imaginations of muslims during the first two centuries of islamic history. it convincingly argues that the earliest element s of the is lamic prescrip t iv e discourse concerning non-muslim officials did not rest on pre-islamic foundations but originated in second/eighthand t h i r d / n i n t h c e n t u r y i r a q , a s l i t e r a t e muslim elites produced and propagated disapproving parables that were ascribed to revered early authorities, specifically the caliphs ʿumar i and ʿumar ii. the chapter demonstrates yarbrough’s command of the early islamic source material and context and illustrates the utility of his larger theory of “valued resources” for thinking about the emergence of islamic prescriptive discourses about non-muslim officials. in addition to showing that the most important proof texts emerged in a particular time and place, yarbrough traces how the discourse was shaped by specific individuals, circumstances, and concerns. chapter 4 (“the discourse comes of age: the edicts of the caliph al-mutawakkil”) provides a translation, contextualization, and detailed analysis of the principal prescript (tawqīʿ) of the abbasid caliph al-mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–61), which yarbrough dates to 236/851. the chapter locates the edict within al-mutawakkil’s broader strategy to secure his rule and stave off challenges to his legitimacy by rewarding the detractors of non-muslim officials. al-mutawakkil was the first caliph for whose sweeping directive against non-muslim officials we have plentiful and solid evidence, and yarbrough’s contextualization and analysis of this d o c u m e n t i l l u s t r a t e s t h e m a n n e r i n w h i c h t h e d i s c o u r s e w a s e f f e c t i v e l y mobilized by the state itself to articulate a change in policy. beyond providing an instructive case study of the intersection of prescriptive discourse and notions of sovereignty in the premodern islamic world, this chapter underscores that t h e a r t i c u l a t i o n a n d d e p l o y m e n t o f the prescriptive discourse concerning non-muslim officials needs to be situated within the broader context of intra-muslim competition and rivalry. the next section of the book traces t h e c o n t i n u e d d e v e l o p m e n t o f t h e prescriptive discourse about non-muslim officials by studying its two major aspects: juristic and literary. chapter 5 (“juristic aspects of the discourse”) illustrates the discourse’s blossoming into a minor theme in juristic works of many kinds and demonstrates that these discussions were more historically embedded and more diverse than has been previously recognized. the chapter examines this diversity while observing the development of muslim juristic writings on the issue, an investigation that encompasses sunni jurisprudence as well as ibāḍī and shiʿi juristic thought. yarbrough shows that the juristic writings were motivated not only by contemporaneous historical factors but also by the desire to uphold the established positions of the authors’ own juristic traditions and to regulate non-muslim officials within the coherent prescriptive systems that those systems aspired to create. in addition to cataloging and evaluating the various aspects of the juristic strands of the prescriptive discourse, this chapter is particularly valuable for its contextualization and analysis of the writings of abū al-ḥasan al-māwardī (d. 450/1058) on the issue of non-muslim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) luke b. yarbrough’s friends of the emir: non-muslim state officials • 440 officials, particularly his argument (in the aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya) that permitted a non-muslim to be appointed an executive vizier (wazīr al-tanfīdh). throughout the chapter, yarbrough highlights how muslim jurists developed diverse rationales for limiting, discouraging, or prohibiting the employment of non-muslim officials; how these rationales were frequently repeated and developed during moments of tension with states or non-muslim elites; and how jurists sought, above all, to mediate between their madhhab traditions and contemporary exigencies. chapter 6 (“literary aspects of the discourse”) examines the role of rivalry and defamation across various genres of literature (adab), and in premodern islamic political life more generally, before turning to diverse literary representations of non-muslim officials. the chapter points out that some of these literary texts shared materials and themes with juristic strands of the discourse. it also sheds important light on the ways in which particular rhetorical practices—especially in the genre of counsel literature (naṣīḥa)— formed part of a larger set of competitive practices deployed by elites in pursuit of scarce resources. a work of adab—whether a chronicle, a biography, a compendium of entertaining stories, or a mirror for princes—could deliver a prescription as forcefully as a handbook of substantive law could. the chapter confirms the importance of the various genres of adab for illuminating both the prescriptive discourse, in particular, and premodern islamic society and politics, in general. 7. ʿuthmān b. ibrāhīm al-nābulusī, the sword of ambition: bureaucratic rivalry in medieval egypt, trans. luke b. yarbrough (new york: new york university press, library of arabic literature, 2016). following this exploration of literary sources, chapter 7 (“the discourse at its apogee: the independent counsel works”) focuses on a small cluster of works that were written in the central islamic lands, from iraq to egypt, between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, and that were dedicated entirely to the issue of non-muslim officials. the chapter introduces these works, their authors, and the circumstances of their composition, s i t u a t e s t h e m w i t h i n a l o n g l i t e r a r y tradition, and offers a historical account o f t h e f l o w e r i n g o f t h e p r e s c r i p t i v e discourses that they contain. as yarbrough masterfully demonstrates, these works combined numerous earlier elements of the discourse—including exegetical, literary, juristic, and historical strands— with components hitherto outside it to produce distinctive polemical amalgams. one of the most interesting and insightful o f t h e s e w o r k s , ʿ u t h m ā n b . i b r ā h ī m al-nābulusī’s tajrīd sayf al-himma, has been recently translated and annotated by yarbrough.7 the chapter shows how such books were fashioned by muslim learned elites as tools of competition in their own pursuit of resources that were increasingly mediated by the ayyubid and mamluk states. yarbrough also positions these works within a larger social and political context that was characterized by extended conflict among muslims, non-muslims, and the state in egypt; as such, yarbrough argues, they were both products of, and contributors to, that larger climate of conflict. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 441 • mohamad ballan c h a p t e r 8 ( “ t h e d i s c o u r s e i n wider perspective: comparisons and c o n c l u s i o n s ” ) , w h i c h i s a m o n g t h e most ambitious parts of the book, looks b e y o n d i s l a m i c h i s t o r y t o m e d i e v a l latin christendom, particularly arpad hungary, and yuan china in order to think comparatively about the prescriptive d i s c o u r s e . b e f o r e p u r s u i n g t h i s comparative study, however, yarbrough summarizes his own arguments about the islamic prescriptive discourse concerning n o n m u s l i m o f f i c i a l s . a c c o r d i n g t o yarbrough, the four key factors that explain the discourse’s flourishing in some historical settings and its faltering in others are “(1) ideological communal diversity in which intercommunal rivalry for prestige has a zero-sum dimension; (2) direct competition for scarce resources a m o n g l i t e r a t e e l i t e s w h o b e l o n g t o d i s t i n c t i d e o l o g i c a l c o m m u n i t i e s ; ( 3 ) e x i s t i n g e x c l u s i o n a r y d i s c o u r s e s within those communities; and (4) access to ruling elites who would be expected t o s y m p a t h i z e w i t h e x p r e s s i o n s o f discontent” (p. 263). yarbrough finds all four of his criteria—ideological diversity, direct competition for scarce resources, traditions of exclusionary rhetoric, and the receptivity of ruling elites—present in arpad hungary, but he nonetheless determines the latin christian discourse to be substantially different in both form and substance. examining the case of yuan china, yarbrough concludes that no exclusionary discourse surrounding outsider-officials as such was generated, d e s p i t e t h e e x i s t e n c e o f o s t e n s i b l y similar circumstances. although each of the three cases had distinctive features, t h e c h a p t e r a r g u e s t h a t t h e i s l a m i c discourse is unrivaled in its thematic and intertextual continuity and coherence, its sophistication, and its sheer magnitude. as a possible explanation, yarbrough offers the peculiar evolving relationship between “postclassical” islamic state power and authority, which he contrasts with the persistent salience of exclusive communal affiliation that was shared by rulers and learned elites in the case of china, and the separation of moral authority and political power in the case of late medieval europe. while the reader may take issue with some of yarbrough’s particular choices and broader conclusions in this chapter, his comparative approach is to be commended for its integration of the islamic world into a larger conversation about the interplay between prescriptive discourses, notions of sovereignty, and practices of politics across late medieval eurasia. the book concludes with chapter 9 (“afterword: the discourse to the nineteenth century”), which provides some observations on the afterlives of the prescriptive discourse in the nineteenth-century middle east, indicating the ways in which it survived in attenuated form under the ottomans. friends of the emir is a groundbreaking work. its original and innovative approach to the topic of non-muslim officials in premodern islamic states is underpinned by a robust theoretical and methodological framework; command of a vast array of sources across regions, time periods, languages, and genres; and a commitment to both interdisciplinarity and comparative approaches. the book paves the way for a nuanced understanding of governance in the medieval islamic world that seeks to encompass normative juristic discourses, theories of sovereignty, and the practice of politics. yarbrough has produced a remarkable account of the emergence and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) luke b. yarbrough’s friends of the emir: non-muslim state officials • 442 dissemination of prescriptive discourses about non-muslim officials at the fraught n e x u s o f i s l a m i c a u t h o r i t y , t e x t u a l production, state power, and communal difference. by demonstrating that the prescriptive discourse was the contingent, cumulative creation of particular historical actors rather than an ahistorical, indelible feature of islam, friends of the emir reorients our view of how non-muslims participated in premodern islamic politics. yarbrough’s most significant contribution is to historicize the surviving textual evidence of that prescriptive discourse by situating it not within understandings o f “ d h i m m ī l a w ” o r “ i s l a m i c l e g a l norms” but within the dynamic social, p o l i t i c a l , a n d i d e o l o g i c a l c o n t e x t o f professional rivalry and competition over resources. the development and notion of valued resources, which historicizes a n d c o n t e x t u a l i z e s t h e e m e r g e n c e o f p r e s c r i p t i v e d i s c o u r s e s , s e r v e s t o reintegrate islamic history into broader conversations about the transformation of society and politics across premodern eurasia. even though there is much that is laudable about the book in terms of its c o m p r e h e n s i v e n e s s , o r i g i n a l i t y , a n d interdisciplinary approach, this reviewer was hoping to learn more about the different ways in which women and gender figured in the larger discourses about non-muslim officials. since exclusionary discourses directed against female counsel and intimates—whose number would have included a significant proportion of non-muslims, especially in the royal courts—were also widespread during this period, it would have been useful for the author to have engaged more directly with this question. the book would also have been strengthened by an elaboration on the notion of “friendship” as articulated and discussed within the prescriptive discourse concerning non-muslim officials in the premodern islamic world. yarbrough indicates that “direct service to rulers . . . frequently assumed a personal rather than official quality” (p. 29), but a more elaborate discussion of this distinction would have been helpful, especially as it would have underscored the importance of personal access to and intimate bonds of affinity with the ruler as yet another “valued resource” to be pursued. indeed, the very title of the book, friends of the emir, alludes to the importance of the personal bonds between the king and his subordinates, which led this reviewer to expect a sustained discussion of the i m p l i c a t i o n s o f f r i e n d s h i p , b o n d s o f obligation, and intimacy within a royal context. although there is already an e x t e n s i v e b o d y o f l i t e r a t u r e o n t h i s question in the case of latin christendom, it awaits further exploration in the context of the medieval islamic world. t h e s e a r e m i n o r q u i b b l e s w i t h a n o t h e r w i s e c o m p r e h e n s i v e a n d pathbreaking book, which will provoke numerous conversations among scholars of history, literature, and islamic studies. friends of the emir is an original piece of scholarship that is thoroughly researched and beautifully written. it will be useful for anyone seeking to think critically about the relationship between muslim learned elites and state power, the historical development of prescriptive thought, and the manner in which discourses of sovereignty and political practice were deeply intertwined in the medieval islamic world. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 448-453 book review twenty-two years after his death, the visionary work of jean aubin is an enduring source of inspiration for scholars working on medieval iran. for this reason alone, the publication of this volume is to be welcomed. prepared by his student denise aigle, it contains seventeen of aubin’s articles on the subject, published between 1959 and 1991. who was jean aubin? in the article on ḥasan jūrī, the improbable leader of the sarbedar movement in fourteenth-century khurasan, aubin notes that “he did not like to parade himself in front of the public. he conducted his preaching in secret” (p. 308). no doubt aubin felt an affinity with his subject. he discouraged the preparation of any festschrift to honor his work, going 1. see jean calmard and jacqueline calmard, “jean aubin 1927–1998,” studia iranica 27 (1998): 9–14, at 9. it seems that no one has dared to violate the prohibition in or outside of france. 2. aubin’s source editions include biographies (in 1954: sayyids of fifteenth-century bam; in 1956: shāh niʿmat allāh walī) as well as chronicles (in 1957: the timurid chronicle muntakhab al-tawārīkh-i muʿīnī). so far as to prohibit his colleagues from writing his obituary after his death.1 born to a family of printers in rural france, with no particular predisposition to dedicate a large part of his life to iran, aubin was twenty-two years old when he left for tehran immediately after graduating from the école des langues orientales in paris with a degree in persian. over a period of roughly six years (1949– 55), he was in contact with luminaries such as said nafisi and m.t. danishpazhuh, traveled extensively inside the country, and worked directly with unexploited manuscripts. it was during this stint in iran that he prepared his editions of important sources for timurid history, which at the time was something of a poor relation in the field of medieval iranian studies.2 jean aubin, études sur l’iran médiéval: géographie historique et société. edited by denise aigle. les cahiers de studia iranica 60 (paris: association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2018), 371 pp., index, maps. isbn 978-2-91064-046-0. price: €60 (paper). david durand-guédy independent scholar (david_durandguedy@yahoo.com) © 2020 david durand-guédy. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:david_durandguedy%40yahoo.com?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 449 • david durand-guédy his first publication, the 1953 “les princes d’ormuz du xiiie au xve siècle,” carried within it the seeds of his future research: the turko-mongol period, local frameworks of study, and portugal. indeed, aubin dedicated most of his attention to the four centuries from the mongol invasion in the early thirteenth century to the transformation of the safavid state in the late sixteenth, and its key issue: the acculturation process induced by the rule of turko-mongol nomads over a country, or rather, a world (“le monde iranien”), with a different social fabric. for aubin, the historical analysis could be done only at the local level, through the analysis of interpersonal relations.3 in 1953, this local framework was a small island in the persian gulf. later he would choose a city (bam, shiraz, yazd), a rural area (eastern azarbayjan and northern gilan), or even a road network (in khurasan, or by the persian gulf). conversely, aubin always remained defiant of preconceived theories and even more so of dogmatism. for example, he was able to show that the various ideas put forward to explain the rise of the sarbedar state in fourteenthcentury khurasan (a shiʿi movement for some, the result of class struggle for others) did not hold up when the evidence the complete references can be found in the bibliography of aubin’s works at pp. 367–71 in the reviewed volume. 3. in the foreword to the first issue of le monde iranien et l’islam, a journal he founded in 1971, aubin writes that “local history is the natural framework of analytical research. only the analysis at the level of the cells of the iranian body, that is the counties and the cities, will allow us to realize . . . the remarkable permanence of iranian-ness [thanks] to the cohesion and the social forces at play” (quoted in the reviewed volume at p. 12, my translation). 4. the absence of the aforementioned 1953 article on hormuz and the famous 1963 article on tamerlane’s warfare tactics is regrettable. the articles on the safavid period will be included in another volume. 5. these editorial choices have caused some misprints (e.g., p. 180, n. 36: “distriblition” for distribution; p. 159, n. 15: “india” for indica) and formatting issues (e.g., p. 201: the subtitle “ii. les cadis kakuli” should have was subjected to scrutiny (articles 16 and 17 in the reviewed volume). finally, there is hormuz, which was a portuguese base from 1507 to 1622 and the european gateway to persia. aubin, ever alert for new sources, was quick to grasp the potential of the portuguese archives to complement the persian sources on the safavid period. this interest led him to become a major scholar of the history of the indian ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when iranians, indians, and europeans took part in the shaping of a new world. that a believer in local approaches to history became a pioneer of “global history” is an apparent paradox on which to meditate. the present volume contains most of aubin’s articles on the pre-safavid period, with the exception of the source editions.4 they are organized in four sections: (1) cities and roads, (2) religious and cultural elites, (3) mongol azarbayjan, and (4) acculturation and social issues. it goes without saying that these categories are not hermetic; they are mere tools that serve to highlight aubin’s various areas of interest. the articles have been not simply reprinted but entirely retyped (even the maps have been redrawn) and printed in a uniform, well-spaced, and highly readable layout. 5 thus this volume looks more al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) jean aubin’s études sur l’iran médiéval • 450 like claude cahen’s famous collection of articles, les peuples musulmans dans l’histoire médiévale (damascus: ifead, 1977), than like the typical variorum reprints. the index is thirty-five pages long. the insertion, between brackets or in the margins, of the original pagination of the articles would, however, have been helpful. in addition, the new layout would have been an opportunity to update the text, at least as far as source editions are concerned. although aubin’s analysis stands the test of time remarkably well, many critical editions have since been published (for example: bayhaqī in article 7; shabānkāraʾī in article 9; ibn bazzāz in articles 11–13; faryūmadī in article 17).6 but these omissions do not detract from the fact that this is a fine book that will be of benefit to every specialist in medieval iran. why spend so much effort on the publication of relatively old articles come with the table on p. 218, not in the text) that even a painstaking proofreading process could not avoid. on a more critical note, the choice to standardize all the transliterations in the reference system (to follow the later system propounded by aubin in studia iranica and le monde iranien et l’islam) has led to multiple mistakes (e.g., p. 159, n. 11: “tāriḫ” instead of tārīḫ; nn. 16 and 18: “tavarīḫ” instead of tavārīḫ; n. 19: “mirağ” instead of miʿrāğ). also, the map in the 1959 article on siraf has been left out. the reader can refer to the relevant map in the article on shilau (= siraf) on p. 89, but this fact could have been mentioned. 6. abū l-faḍl bayhaqī, tārīkh-i bayhaqī, ed. ʿalī akbar fayyāḍ, 2nd ed. (mashhad: dānishgāh-i mashhad, 2536 shamsī shāhānshāhī/1977); muḥammad b. ʿalī shabānkāraʾī, majmaʿ al-ansāb, ed. mīr hāshim muḥaddith (tehran: amīr kabīr, 1363sh./1984); ibn bazzāz, tawakkul b. ismāʿīl al-ardabīlī, ṣafwat al-ṣafā, ed. ghulām riḍā ṭabāṭabāʼī majd (tehran: intishārāt-i zaryāb, 1373sh./1994); ibn yamīn faryūmadī, dīwān, ed. ḥusayn-ʿalī bāstānī-rād (tehran: kitābkhāna-yi sanāʾī, 1363sh./1984). 7. the new cambridge history of islam, vol. 3, the eastern islamic world, eleventh to eighteenth centuries, ed. david o. morgan and anthony reid (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010). aubin has the most cited titles (after thomas allsen) in beatrice forbes manz’s chapter on the mongols as well as in sholeh quinn’s on the safavids. see also a. c. s. peacock’s synthesis, the great seljuk empire (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2015). specialists of medieval iran, such as jürgen paul in germany (on sufi orders, local rule, and mongol domination) and kazuo morimoto in japan (on sayyids), are among those who have also made the most of aubin’s publications. in iran, aubin (ūbin) is known mostly through translations of articles quoting him, starting with denise aigle’s collection of articles (the mongol empire between myth and reality: studies in anthropological history [leiden: brill, 2015]). an exception who has made more use of aubin’s work is m. b. wuthūqī, a native of lār, which happens to be a region in southern iran that aubin knew very well. 8. these are le monde iranien et l’islam (four issues published from 1971 to 1977) and moyen-orient & océan indien (seven issues published from 1984 to 1990). (and, incidentally, why review the result in such length in a journal that aims to be at the cutting edge of scholarship)? of course, anyone studying medieval iran and the mongols knows aubin’s name. he is all over the bibliographies of volume 3 of the new cambridge history of islam, which treats the eastern islamic world between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries.7 but for a number of reasons, his work has not been as widely read as it should have been. several factors are to blame for this. for one thing, it did not help that many of the key texts were published in two journals that did not survive aubin and that never made it to the digital world.8 t h e m a i n p r o b l e m , h o w e v e r , l i e s elsewhere. very demanding of himself, aubin was also demanding of his students and readers. his meticulosity resulted in immense notes, in which he displayed an al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 451 • david durand-guédy amazing command of the sources and the scholarship in all european languages, beginning with russian, a key language for the mongol period. aubin never taught undergraduates and never felt the need to reach a wider public, as cahen (to take another example from france) did with his excellent book l’islam des origines au début de l’empire ottoman (paris: bordas, 1970).9 or rather, he felt that as far as medieval iran was concerned, the time was not yet ripe for synthesis, and he remained unconvinced by the synthetic attempts made by a. k. s. lambton in english and i. p. petrushevsky in russian.10 it was only when he realized that he was ill that he finally agreed to write a very short book (ninety-six pages) on ilkhanid iran. the resulting volume—émirs mongols et vizirs persans dans les remous de l’acculturation (1995)—develops some of the broader conclusions that he reached after four decades in the sources, namely that, for the elite, acculturation between mongols and iranians worked in both directions and personal interest trumped racial/national antagonism. aubin also suffered from the decline of french, along with several other european 9. a shorter german version appeared as islam: 1. vom ursprung bis zu den anfängen des osmanenreiches (frankfurt am main: fischer taschenbuch, 1968). 10. a. k. s. lambton, landlord and peasant in persia: a study of land tenure and land revenue administration (oxford: oxford university press, 1953); i. p. pertruševskij, zemledelie i agrarnye otnošenija v irane xiii–xiv vekov (moscow: akademija nauk sssr, 1960). similarly, aubin thought that john masson smith jr.’s pioneering history of the sarbedar was useful for its numismatic analysis but still premature given the “lack of familiarity [of the author] with fourteenth century iran” (smith, the history of the sarbadār dynasty, 1336–1381 a.d., and its sources [the hague: mouton, 1970], reviewed in journal of the economic and social history of the orient 14, no. 3 (1971): 332–33). 11. among aubin’s few students, we should mention, in addition to the editor of the volume under review, the late chahyar adle in paris (who developed primary interests in art history and archaeology) and masashi haneda in tokyo (who emulated his teacher by combining research on medieval iran and the first phase of globalization). languages, in the field of iranian studies. the effects of this decline were aggravated by aubin’s complex prose, which demands a very good command of the language. like that of fritz meier in german, aubin’s historical analysis was neglected as the values of european orientalism faded and as english monolingualism grew rampant. e v e n i n f r a n c e , a u b i n ’ s w o r k l e f t little trace, but for different reasons: the students he trained were too few, and his field was not able to compete with the hegemony of the arabists on the one hand and that of the students of henry corbin on the other.11 a few reading suggestions may perhaps h e l p t h e n e o p h y t e u s e t h i s v o l u m e . the first step should be aigle’s very useful introduction, entitled “l’œuvre de jean aubin (1927–1998) et l’histoire globale” (pp. 11–24), followed by aubin’s own “elements of the study of urban a g g l o m e r a t i o n s i n m e d i e v a l i r a n ” (article 1). in it, he provides guidelines “to move from the descriptive inventory [of events and spaces] to a dynamic approach and the formulation of complex problems” (p. 31). this article is very synthetic, very clear, and truly thought-provoking, and it al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) jean aubin’s études sur l’iran médiéval • 452 should form part of any curriculum on the history of iran.12 the same is true for his aforementioned short book, émirs mongols et vizirs persans.13 a f t e r c o m p l e t i n g t h e s e r e l a t i v e l y approachable pieces, the non-expert reader is advised to proceed to the article on shaykh zāhid (no. 13). this is an extremely readable biography of a sufi master in thirteenth-century azarbayjan in which aubin shows a real talent for integrating extracts from a source into his own prose. the student will then be ready to tackle aubin’s most emblematic writings. the slope in these articles is steep, but if the reader makes it to the summit, he will be able to see a great deal farther. three articles, in particular, should be mentioned. “réseau pastoral et réseau caravanier: les grand’routes du khorassan à l’époque mongole” (article 16) shows that the mongol period saw the creation of a dual network of roads: those for caravans (in the plains) and pastoral ones (at higher altitudes). aubin describes them through a broad sociohistorical analysis that involves the initiatives of local dynasties (e.g., the juwaynīs in bayhaq) and the transformation in the economy and the 12. i give the title of this article in english, as it is translated in david durand-guédy, roy p. mottahedeh, and jürgen paul, eds., “cities of medieval iran,” special issue, eurasian studies 16, no. 1–2 (2018): 21–38 (repr. leiden: brill, 2020), with an introduction by jürgen paul. 13. the text is devoid of footnotes. aubin assumed that specialists would be familiar enough with the sources to fill in the gaps and that nonspecialists would benefit from a fluid and compact narrative. this methodological choice had been “harshly criticized,” as philippe gignoux recalls in the foreword (without naming it, gignoux is referring to monika gronke’s review in journal of the economic and social history of the orient 40, no. 3 [1997]: 310–12). 14. denise aigle, ed., l’iran face à la domination mongole (tehran: institut français de recherche en iran, 1997). 15. in the second preface of her book on timurid iran, beatrice manz mentions aubin as someone whose work was foundational to her. at some point in the analysis, she argues against aubin’s interpretation of the events of 850/1446 in isfahan as a “shi’ite uprising” (manz, power, politics and religion in timurid iran [cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007], 256). indeed, aubin had spoken of “the aristocratic attempt structure of power during the turko mongol period. in “la propriété foncière en azerbaïjan sous les mongols” (article 11), aubin uses the unique documentation l i n k e d t o t h e s a f a v i d o r d e r t o s h o w that, contrary to preconceived ideas, the peasantry was able to resist; iranian landowners did not hesitate to call on the mongols when needed; and, above all, for new religious elites such as the early safavid masters, spiritual authority and good land management went hand in hand. in “l’ethnogenèse des qaraunas,” (article 14) he solves an issue concerning which the contradictions within the sources (the most famous being marco polo) had puzzled everyone from yule to pelliot. in 1997, aigle oversaw the publication o f t h e p r o c e e d i n g s o f a n i m p o r t a n t c o n f e r e n c e c o n v e n e d u n d e r a u b i n ’ s aegis.14 it is to be hoped that this latest tribute will draw still more attention to a truly pioneering historian whose work remains useful and reliable. sources he was the first to use in manuscript are now on every scholar’s desk, and many of his findings have been confirmed by later research (although the terminology may have changed).15 like minorsky’s, aubin’s al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 453 • david durand-guédy methodological approach, his lack of regard for theoretical frameworks, and his refusal to follow l’air du temps gave of the shii notables of isfahan under the ‘honorific patronage’ of sulṭān muḥammad-i baysonġor,” but he was also the first to note, on the same page, that “the demarcation between sunnism and shiism is made of nuances, and as long as these are not clarified by a specific research, we will not know exactly what does the label ‘shi’i’ cover in the fifteenth century” (aubin, deux sayyids de bam au xve siècle [wiesbaden: franz steiner, 1954], 484). 16. although aubin was loath to write obituaries, he made a telling exception for minorsky, whose erudition and method he regarded as a model to emulate. the obituary appeared in studia iranica 5 (1976): 131–33. his articles a high resistance to aging.16 his path is not an easy one to follow, but is there another one? al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 14-40 the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn (254 –270/868-883) luke treadwell university of oxford (luke.treadwell@orinst.ox.ac.uk) tulunid history (254–292/868-904) has enjoyed a revival in recent years. careful analyses of the tulunid dynasty in egypt, particularly the life and works of the first ruler, aḥmad b. ṭūlūn, have brought the subject into the mainstream and have begun the process of updating and correcting the narrative of zaky mohamed hassan’s les tulunides (1933), the only monograph-length history of the dynasty in a european language.1 in an attempt to provide a context for the emergence and consolidation of tulunid power, this article reviews the relationship between ibn ṭūlūn and the abbasid family during his governorship of egypt, by bringing the coinage evidence to bear and re-examining certain key passages in the textual sources in light of that evidence. a central aim of the article is to argue the case for a reappraisal of the crucial triangular relationship between ibn ṭūlūn, the caliph al-muʿtamid ʿalā allāh (256–279/869-892) and the latter’s brother abū aḥmad (known as al-muwaffaq billāh from 261/874). 1. in addition to hassan 1933, see in particular becker (1902–1903) for ibn ṭūlūn’s life and career; bonner 2010a; gordon 2014; and gordon 2015. gordon’s biography of ibn ṭūlūn will appear in the series makers of islamic civilization (oxford centre for islamic studies), i.b. tauris, london. abstract this paper re-examines the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn (254 –270/868-883), taking account of the currently available numismatic evidence. it argues for a reappraisal of the crucial triangular relationship between ibn ṭūlūn, the caliph al-muʿtamid ʿalā allāh (256–279/869-892) and the latter’s brother abū aḥmad (known as al-muwaffaq billāh from 261/874). the rise of the tulunids is situated within the context of the weakening of the abbasid unitary state in the middle of the third century ah/ninth century ce, and the emergence of powerful provincial governors whose rise to power anticipated the eclipse of the caliphal state in the fourth/tenth century. the value of the numismatic evidence lies mainly in the names and titles that occur on the coins. these allow the historian to control the sometimes contradictory narrative of the textual sources and also raise questions about the nature and extent of tulunid autonomy. mailto:luke.treadwell%40orinst.ox.ac.uk?subject= 15 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) this reassessment places the significant collaboration between ibn ṭūlūn and the caliph centre stage and suggests that hassan exaggerated the extent of al-muwaffaq’s dominance of the state from 257–261/870-874, due to his heavy reliance on the sīrat ibn ṭūlūn of the egyptian historian ibn al-dāya (d.c. 330–340/941-951). hassan accepted the latter’s sequence of events uncritically, while ignoring al-ṭabarī’s chronicle and such numismatic evidence as was available to him. consequently he mistakenly assumed that al-muwaffaq became the dominant power in the state in 257/870 and immediately took action to remove ibn ṭūlūn from the governorship of egypt.2 hassan’s book is now more than eighty years old and is no longer much cited by contemporary scholars of the tulunids. however, in the absence of a replacement for his study, we will begin with a critical analysis of hassan’s chapter on ibn ṭūlūn’s conflict with al-muwaffaq. 2. z. m. hassan on ibn ṭūlūn and al-muwaffaq as we will see below (section 4), al-ṭabarī’s chronicle dates the succession arrangements implemented by al-muʿtamid to the year 261/874. he tells us that al-muʿtamid gave his brother the title al-muwaffaq billāh and elevated him to the position of second in line to the throne, after his own son, jaʿfar. al-ṭabarī’s evidence fits perfectly with the changes in numismatic titulature that emerge in the following year, 262/875, when the first coins bearing al-muwaffaq’s newly-acquired title were issued. in chapter four of les tulunides, however, hassan claims that al-muwaffaq acquired his title in 257/870, before setting off to fight the zanj. as soon as he engaged the zanj, he demanded that ibn ṭūlūn send him the revenues of egypt to help fund his campaign. having received less than he expected from egypt, he turned against ibn ṭūlūn and attempted to force his dismissal from the governorship. in response, ibn ṭūlūn began to fortify his capital city and managed to face down mūsā b. bughā, al-muwaffaq’s right-hand man, who had taken charge of the campaign to replace him as governor of egypt. ibn ṭūlūn’s actions bore fruit very quickly: by 259/872, hassan tells us, mūsā was dead, egypt was secure, and ibn ṭūlūn was enjoying a period of unprecedented economic and military success. hassan’s chronology is patently wrong.3 among other indications, the two following points are crucial: al-muwaffaq could not have begun his campaign against ibn ṭūlūn before 262/875 (or late 261/874) because the correspondence between them could only have been written after the succession arrangements had been concluded in 261/874 (see below, section 8); and mūsā b. bughā died in 264/877, as ibn al-dāya himself notes, not 259/872.4 2. hassan (1933, p. 41) quotes fakhrī (written in 701/1302) in summary of his own view: “a mutamid appartenait le khutba (prȏne), le droit de battre la monnaie et le droit de porter le titre d’emir des croyants; à son frère talha, le droit d’ordonner et de défendre, la conduite des troupes, l’exercice des hostilités contre les ennemis, la garde des frontières, l’installation des vizirs et des émirs.” hassan continues (p. 42) in his own words: “ibn ṭūlūn aura presque toujours à lutter contre muwaffak et non contre le calife legitime.” 3. hassan’s chronology was accepted by randa (see randa 1990, p. 156, note 2). 4. ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 83. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 16 how did hassan arrive at this erroneous version of events? the answer lies partly in his dependence upon a source that was written a few decades after the events described, namely ibn al-dāya’s sīrat ibn ṭūlūn, which survives in the later work of the andalusian writer ibn saʿīd (d. 685/1286), known as al-mughrib fi ḥulā al-maghrib. ibn al-dāya’s account describes the events of 258/871, when ibn ṭūlūn assumed control of the kharāj of egypt, accurately enough.5 but it is followed by his account of an earlier series of events which begin with al-muwaffaq’s recall from exile in 257/870, and al-muʿtamid’s immediate announcement of the succession arrangements (i.e. in 257–258/870-871). ibn al-dāya’s text then describes the course of the conflict between ibn ṭūlūn and al-muwaffaq over the revenues of egypt, which, the reader is led to understand, blew up soon afterwards (i.e. in the late 250s).6 these accounts and the sequence in which they were presented were adopted almost verbatim by al-balawī (writing in the 4th c. ah/10th c. ce), who copied and extended ibn al-dāya’s narrative in his sīrat āl ṭūlūn, although he provided a different ending to the story of the conflict.7 thus the two main egyptian sources for the life and career of ibn ṭūlūn (henceforth referred to collectively as the egyptian sīra tradition) 5. ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 84. see below, section 6, for a detailed treatment of the events of the year 258 ah. hassan cited vollers’ edition of ibn al–dāya: idem., sīrat aḥmad b. ṭūlūn, in fragmente aus dem mugrib des ibn saʿīd, ed. k. vollers, berlin, 1894 6. ibn al-dāya 1953, pp. 84–91 (for a detailed analysis of the conflict between ibn ṭūlūn and al-muwaffaq see below, section 8). the sequence of accounts in ibn al-dāya’s text is as follows: events of 258 (the date given is given in the text) (p. 84); the story of ibn ṭūlūn’s rejection of the advice of ʿabdallāh b. dashūma regarding his plans for reducing the tax burden on his egyptian subjects (pp. 85–86); within the account relating to ibn dashūma, ibn al-dāya places a short reference to the treasures found in the egyptian desert that ibn ṭūlūn used to fund construction of his new mosque and hospital (māristān); next he recounts abū aḥmad’s return from exile and the succession arrangements (pp. 86–87) ; this is followed by his remarks on the beginning of the conflict between abū aḥmad and ibn ṭūlūn, which includes a misplaced reference to al-muwaffaq’s plot to replace ibn ṭūlūn as governor of egypt with amājūr (pp. 87–88); then he presents the full text of ibn ṭūlūn’s letter to al-muwaffaq (pp. 89–91); finally, he describes how al-muwaffaq reacted to ibn ṭūlūn’s angry letter by persuading al-muʿtamid that ibn ṭūlūn should not be allowed to send a representative to take control of the syrian thughūr (pp. 91–92). but here ibn al-dāya’s text is confused. as al-balawī’s account correctly points out, after receiving ibn ṭūlūn’s long letter, al-muwaffaq did not complain to the caliph about ibn ṭūlūn and question his right to be involved in the thughūr, but instead opted for unilateral action; he ordered mūsā b. bughā to take charge of the campaign to remove ibn ṭūlūn from office and replace him with amājūr (see next footnote). 7. al-balawī 1939. al-balawī adopts ibn al-dāya’s narrative and interpolates a couple of anecdotes into it, but makes no substantial modifications to it, until the final episode. his narrative runs as follows: the events of 258/871 (pp. 73–74); ibn ṭūlūn’s rejection of the advice of ʿabdallāh b. dashūma and the story of the treasures (pp. 74–77); then follows his account of the succession arrangements—in this passage he explicitly mentions that al-muʿtamid appointed al-muwaffaq to the succession when he first arrived in samarra (fa-lamma waṣala ilayhi ʿaqada al-ahd baʿdahu li-ibnihi al-mufawwaḍ wa lahu min baʿdahu) (p. 77). at this point al-balawī introduces a couple of anecdotes: the first concerns al-muʿtamid’s addiction to pleasurable pursuits, while the second draws a parallel between al-muʿtamid and the caliph al-maʾmūn in respect of their succession arrangements (pp. 78–79). al-balawī picks up the thread again with his description of al-muwaffaq’s conflict with ibn ṭūlūn (p. 79–81); this is followed by the text of ibn ṭūlūn’s letter (p. 82–85). in the final episode, al-balawī deviates from ibn al-dāya’s narrative, stating that al-muwaffaq ordered mūsā b. bughā to lead the ill-fated campaign to remove him as governor of egypt (pp. 85–80). 17 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) present misleading accounts of ibn ṭūlūn’s relations with the abbasids between the years 257–262/870-875.8 one wonders how ibn al-dāya, a near-contemporary observer of ibn ṭūlūn’s career, could have made such glaring errors. it seems that the fault may not have lain with ibn al-dāya himself. his account is preserved only as an abbreviated text (a mukhtaṣar) which was incorporated in ibn saʿīd’s mughrib. the sīra as we have it in ibn saʿīd’s recension appears as a collection of stories focused on the tulunid rulers, which are mostly arranged in roughly chronological order, interspersed with digressions on interesting characters and observations on caliphal history. but the chronological sequence of the narrative is occasionally disturbed, as we have noted above; and, moreover, the text gives very few dates for individual events, which makes it difficult to keep track of the chronology. although we have no idea of the form of the original text written by ibn al-dāya, it is reasonable to assume that some of the disruptions in the present text may have arisen during the process of abridgement. the section of ibn al-dāya’s narrative which misled hassan begins with the passage in which al-muʿtamid asked his brother to return to samarra from his exile in mecca. here the text reads: “[…] (in 257/870) al-muʿtamid sent a messenger to bring al-muwaffaq from mecca, where he had been exiled by al-muhtadī, to the capital and settled the succession upon al-mufawwaḍ, then (as second in line) upon abū aḥmad and gave him the title al-muwaffaq […] and divided the state between them…”.9 hassan follows ibn al-dāya’s text in dating the succession arrangements to 257/870, but adopts a far more condensed chronology than his source for subsequent events. his narrative collapses ibn ṭūlūn’s rise to power into half a decade of frenzied activity, during which he successfully resisted al-muwaffaq’s challenge to his authority and saw off all his enemies. hassan concludes that only five years after he became governor of egypt (i.e. in 259/872), ibn ṭūlūn effectively achieved his independence.10 as we will see below, ibn ṭūlūn’s rise to power in egypt followed a slower and more circuitous path than this. having noted the problems with hassan’s chronology, we will now try to reconstruct a more accurate view of early tulunid history on the basis of a wider range of sources, some of which, notably the abundant numismatic sources, were unavailable to hassan. 3. the importance of the numismatic evidence numismatic evidence has not yet played a very big part in tulunid historiography. grabar’s publication of the coinage of the tulunids was thoughtful and trenchant but lacked the 8. for a succinct general introduction to the historiography of the early tulunid period, see bonner 2010a, pp. 578–580. 9. ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 86: fa-anfadha al-muʿtamid rasūlan fī ḥaml al-muwaffaq min makka ilā al-ḥaḍra wa kāna al-muhtadī nafāhu ilayhā fa-ʿaqada al-muʿtamid al-ʿahd baʿdahu li al-mufawwaḍ thumma li abī aḥmad wa laqabahu al-muwaffaq…wa qasama al-mamlaka baynahumā. 10. hassan 1933, p. 63. hassan’s next chapter (chapter five), on ibn ṭūlūn’s syrian campaign of 264/877, fails to account for the five-year gap between 259–264/872-877. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 18 more plentiful evidence available today.11 by contrast, the historiography of the succeeding ikhshidid dynasty (323–358/934-968), has been re-examined by bacharach, paying particular attention to the value of coins as a historical source.12 central to our understanding of the political significance of the coinage is the caliph’s enduring control over the production of abbasid precious metal coins (silver dirhams and gold dinars) in the third century ah/ninth century ce. the commonly accepted meaning of the caliphal right of sikka takes the word in its figurative sense to mean the ruler’s right to place his name on the coinage, thus making sikka, alongside the khuṭba (the ruler’s right to have his name pronounced in the friday address), one of the two essential components of his authority.13 in the second half of the third/ninth century, the caliph exercised direct control over coinage production in many mints in the central islamic lands through his monopoly over the production of coin dies, which were produced in a centralised die manufactory in the caliphal capital. this allowed the caliph’s administrators to determine both what was written on the dies and the quantity of dies produced every year for each mint.14 in light of the considerable power which the caliph exercised by this means, it may be worth considering whether the term sikka was, at least in this period, understood not only in a figurative, but also in a literal, sense, as the right to produce, or at least closely monitor, the production of the dies (sikak) from which the coinage was struck. the aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya, the well-known work on the theory of state written by the abbasid wazir, al-māwardī (d. 450/1058) was written almost a century and a half after the tulunid period, but is nevertheless relevant to our discussion. it offers the following definition of legal coinage:15 so long as the gold and silver (bullion) is free of corruption (i.e. adulteration), it (the bullion) is worthy to (be struck into) legal coin and to be impressed with the sultan’s dies and trusted due to its impression (with these dies) to be free from substitution or fraud. this is indeed valid (coinage). here the emphasis lies clearly on the caliph’s (sulṭān’s) control of the coin-making process through the application of the “sulṭān’s dies” to the bullion. the question where the dies used in the miṣr mint were manufactured—whether in samarra or fusṭāṭ—recurs more than once in the course of this article. 11. grabar 1957. 12. see bacharach 2015. see chapter 1, for an introduction to the use of coinage as a historical source up to and including the ikhshīdid period. 13. darley-doran 2012. 14. the caliphal monopoly over die production was enforced intermittently in the early islamic period, but was upheld, albeit within a limited geographical scope, during the second half of the third/ninth century—for the ground-breaking article which first brought this topic to light was, see ilisch 1979. for further details, see treadwell 2011, chapter 2. 15. […] wa idhā khalaṣa al-ʿayn wa al-waraq min ghishsh kāna huwa al-muʿtabar fī al-nuqūd al-mustaḥiqqa wa al-maṭbūʿ minhā bi al-sikka al-sulṭāniyya al-mawthūq bi-salāmati ṭabʿihi min tabdīlihi wa talbīsihi huwa al-mustaḥiqq… (al-māwardī 1327, p. 139). 19 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the coins struck in egypt and syria in the tulunid period are easy to read, but they do not yield their secrets lightly. they bear titles that sometimes appear difficult to match with the texts, and tantalising evidence of big shifts of power between the centre (samarra/baghdad) and the periphery (miṣr), which need to be given contextualised meaning. we are hampered in our attempts to address these questions by our uncertainty about who issued the dies or commissioned the inscriptions. we do not know a great deal about the contemporary numismatic context in other regions of the abbasid world, which, taken as a whole, is one of the most complex and intriguing of the early islamic period. vasmer made an important start with his study of saffarid numismatics, but there is still some way to go with saffarid coinage.16 the picture for the khurāsānī mints is clearer than for the mints of iraq and fars, especially in the case of the mint of nishapur, where self-appointed rulers of the city began to strike their own coins from the mid third/ninth century onwards.17 the wider numismatic context, although still not fully understood, provides an indispensable background for the tulunid coinage record. 4. abbasid politics in the mid-third/ninth century how was the caliphal state configured in 254/868, the year of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn’s appointment as governor of egypt? and what can his sixteen years as governor of egypt tell us about the breakdown of the unitary caliphal state, a process that began in the years prior to ibn ṭūlūn’s arrival in egypt, with the deposition and murder of the caliphs in samarra by their own courtiers and soldiers? the abbasid dawla was plunged into a state of crisis by the events of the 250s/860s. once the caliphs began to be deposed and murdered with impunity, the nature of the political process changed. the caliphs lost their position at the centre of the patronage network that had controlled the state. the extreme fluidity of personal and group alliances that characterised the hyper-volatile politics of the period meant that no political actor had much to gain from remaining loyal indefinitely to a single master or peer group. the turmoil at the centre made available sources of wealth and power to all who wielded a modicum of military force.18 at the same time, the abbasid state entered a period of steep economic decline as the caliphal tax-collection system faltered and peripheral provinces ceased remitting revenues to the centre.19 the political trajectories traced by the conflicts that arose from the competition for resources among the turkish amirs from the 240s/850s onwards seem to have been mainly centripetal. most successful amirs returned when they could to the capital in their anxiety to keep an eye on events. no long-term power bases were established elsewhere. to take the pre-tulunid governorship of egypt as a case in point: in this province, turkish officers with 16. see vasmer 1930: and tor 2002 for a recent summary of the saffarid numismatic evidence. 17. see ramadan 2012. 18. for a good general description of the political situation in the mid-third/ninth century, see bonner 2010b. 19. for the causes and consequences of economic decline, see kennedy 1986, pp. 200–211; kennedy 2004; gordon 2001, pp. 90-91 and 118-119; and gordon 2015, pp. 229–230. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 20 samarran backgrounds had held senior positions for many years before ibn ṭūlūn’s arrival, yet none of them managed to establish an enduring regional presence.20 it seems that it was in no-one’s interest to permit the emergence of a hegemon, either at the centre of power or in the regions. even the most powerful generals were reluctant to commit their forces to all-out contests of strength for fear that deserters might change the course of a battle in the flash of an eye. in spite of the undoubted turmoil of these years, there is a curious sense of restraint on the part of the amirs: now that there were few rules in the game of power, even those who were best placed to seize it, hedged their bets for fear of failure. from the mid-250s/860s, when the abbasid state began a temporary recovery, under al-muʿtamid ʿalā allāh (256–270/869-883) and his brother, abū aḥmad ṭalḥa (later al-muwaffaq billāh), the caliph’s scope for effective action was limited to the central islamic lands which still lay within his grasp. the shockwaves of the anarchy in samarra contributed to the rapid weakening of caliphal authority in the mashriq, where tahirid rule was abruptly brought to an end in 260/873 by the saffarid ruler yaʿqūb b. layth, who proceeded to press very hard against caliphal interests in fars and khuzistan.21 in the 260s/870s, central and northern iraq remained under direct caliphal control and the caliph’s horizon of action had narrowed to the defence of southern iraq against the saffarid raiders and the zanj rebels and the consolidation of the northern border with byzantium. egypt, the traditional provider of abundant revenues to the caliph’s exchequer, was a key resource for the abbasids. while the caliphs had undoubtedly lost personal credibility, the institution they served remained ideologically valid, and the state apparatus largely intact. although circumscribed in the range of demands he was able to make, the caliph continued to levy taxes and moreover, never relinquished control of the levers of moral power. al-muʿtamid is certainly portrayed in some sources as weak and ineffectual, by comparison with his dynamic brother abū aḥmad (al-muwaffaq), who had extensive military experience and enjoyed good relations with many of the most influential turkish commanders.22 but, as this article will argue, in the first decade of his reign, there is evidence to suggest that al-muʿtamid managed to restrain his more active brother quite effectively. al-ṭabarī is our most reliable source for the first contacts between al-muʿtamid and his brother.23 when he became caliph, al-muʿtamid summoned abū aḥmad from mecca, where he 20. for yazīd b. ʿabdallāh al-turkī, ibn ṭūlūn’s predecessor as governor of egypt, see al-kindī n.d., pp. 228–234. 21. see tor 2007 (chapter 5) who argues, on the contrary, that the saffarid yaʿqūb was a supporter of the abbasid state, who wanted to revive the abbasid state by replacing al-muʿtamid with a more dynamic caliph. 22. see al-masʿūdī 1966, vol. 4, pp. 111–142 for an account of al-muʿtamid’s reign which mentions his addiction to pleasurable pursuits and his love of wine. al-maqrīzī (n.d., vol. 2, p. 178, line 14 from the bottom of the page) characterizes the caliph as a man devoted to the indulgence of personal pleasures, which included hunting, game playing and secluding himself with his slave girls. al-maqrīzī did not copy this characterization of the caliph from ibn al-dāya: the latter’s account lacks any adverse comments on the caliph’s character. 23. as a resident of baghdad with a keen eye for the day-to-day political scene, al-ṭabarī was meticulous in his recording of state appointments and court ceremonies in this period. he tells us that he personally witnessed abū aḥmad’s departure from samarra to fight the zanj in 258/871 (al-ṭabarī 1879–1901, vol. 3, p. 1862). 21 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) had been exiled by al-muhtadī (255–256/868-869). in safar 257/869 he assigned him territories in s. iraq, the hijaz and the yemen and in ramadan of the same year he added baghdad, the sawad, the tigris districts, wasit, al-basra, al-ahwaz and fars, appointing governors to baghdad and al-basra on abū aḥmad’s behalf.24 in the following year he assigned him several more territories on iraq’s northern flank, no doubt with the aim of deploying his military skills to strengthen the frontier with byzantium, which had become vulnerable during the period of anarchy in samarra. these territories included the ʿawāṣim, qinnasrīn and diyār muḍar.25 in the same year, he appointed him to lead the military campaign against the rebellious zanj in s. iraq.26 in the course of these two years, therefore, al-muʿtamid appointed his brother over many of the core territories of the abbasid state, and put him in charge of the army, while he himself retained control of the capital samarra, as well as the caliphal chancery and mint. furthermore, the caliph did not immediately appoint his powerful brother as his successor, even though he did not have a son of a suitable age to fill the role. when al-muʿtamid did address the question of the succession in 261/874, he bestowed on his infant son jaʿfar the title al-mufawwaḍ ilā allāh, and appointed him heir apparent, even though as a minor he was not eligible for the role. he appointed him governor of the ‘maghrib’, a region which for these purposes was defined as including ifrīqiya, egypt, syria, the jazira, as well as the khurāsān road up to ḥulwān.27 yet the caliph also conceded an important, though undefinable, role in the management of the western territories to none other than mūsā b. bughā, a close ally of al-muwaffaq. al-ṭabarī tells us that al-muʿtamid “attached” mūsā b. bughā to him.28 the sense conveyed here is that mūsā was appointed as executive officer on behalf of the heir apparent, perhaps with responsibility to ensure the payment of revenues due to the caliph’s son from his territories, though mūsā never seems to have exercised this responsibility in tulunid egypt.29 as we will see, only a few years after these arrangements were put in place, al-muwaffaq ordered mūsā to attack ibn ṭūlūn in egypt. although formally attached to al-mufawwaḍ by the terms of the arrangements made in 261/874, there is no doubt that mūsā remained a loyal ally of al-muwaffaq. as for his brother, al-muʿtamid confirmed abū aḥmad’s de facto control of the eastern regions by appointing him governor of the mashriq, and brought him into the line of 24. al-ṭabarī 1879–1901, vol. 3, pp. 1841–1842 (appointments of 257/870). 25. al-ṭabarī 1879 –1901, vol. 3, pp. 1859–60 (appointments of 258/871). 26. for an overview of his career, see kennedy 2012. 27. the aghlabids (184–290/800-902) were still governors of ifrīqiya in this year. the term maghrib (“western lands”) had never before this date included any lands to the east of egypt. as for the khurāsān road, al-yaʿqubī notes that the caliph’s stud was located in the meadows at the foot of the ḥulwān pass, while ibn ḥawqal mentions the fertility of the region (le strange 1930, p. 192). 28. al-balawī (1939) uses the phrase ḍammahu ilayhi. al-maqrīzī (n.d., vol. 2, p. 178) says that al-muʿtamid appointed mūsā b. bughā as deputy (istakhlafahu) over al-mufawwaḍ’s territories and that mūsā in turn appointed ʿubaydallāh b. sulaymān b. wahb as his secretary. 29. mūsā did possess property in egypt, in the form of several private estates (al-balawī 1939, pp. 88–89). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 22 succession after his son, conferring on him the title al-muwaffaq billāh.30 in a document which he ordered to be displayed within the kaʿba in mecca, no doubt as a conscious attempt to bring to mind harūn al-rashīd’s succession arrangements, the caliph decreed that each of his heirs was only entitled to draw revenues from his half of the empire. the document also stipulated that the son was first in line to the succession, while his uncle was second in line, though the uncle would succeed should the son die before he reached the age of majority. in the normal course of events, no heir apparent could be appointed before he reached his majority, so it appears that al-muʿtamid was bending the rules somewhat, in order to enable him to divide the empire’s resources between his two heirs and to frustrate his brother’s claim to the succession. the deal was made in 261/874, and from 262/875, the son and the uncle’s titles appeared on coins struck in their respective halves of the empire.31 5. establishment of ibn ṭūlūn’s authority (254-258/868-871): the emergence of a new relationship between miṣr and the caliphal capital ibn ṭūlūn’s early career has been covered in some detail in the secondary literature and there is no need to dwell on the few facts that appear to be reliable.32 ibn al-dāya and al-balawī tell us that he was an able turk who aspired to a life of orthodox piety and looked down on his fellow turks as uncouth and corrupt. a spell in the frontier zone (al-thughūr) early in his adult life implanted a love of the ascetic pioneering way of life in him as well as an enduring fondness for the physical surroundings of the northern syrian borderlands. ibn ṭūlūn spent most of his early career among the turkish elite in iraq and managed to keep in with the most powerful men in the state. in 254/868 his patron, the turk bāyakbāk, was appointed governor of egypt and sent his young protégé off as governor of fusṭāṭ. although we know nothing about the army that ibn ṭūlūn led to egypt, it is a reasonable guess that he commanded a sizeable force and that it was for his military skills as much as his political acumen that bāyakbāk had chosen him for the job. at the time of his arrival in fusṭāṭ, ibn al-mudabbir was the long-serving financial officer (sāḥib al-kharāj) in the province, with responsibility for ensuring the prompt dispatch of tax revenue to the abbasid capital. ibn 30. al-ṭabarī 1879–1901, vol. 3, p. 1890. two erroneous references to the succession arrangements should be noted here. ibn al-athīr (d. 630) states that abū aḥmad received the full title al-nāṣir li-dīn allāh/al-muwaffaq billāh in 261/874 (ibn al-athīr 1998, vol. 6, p. 252). however, the first element of this title only appears on the coinage from 271/884, having presumably been awarded to al-muwaffaq in recognition of his victory over the zanj in the previous year. for an early dirham with the title abū aḥmad al-nāṣir li-dīn allāh see isbahan 271 (american numismatic society collection of islamic coins 1971.316.173). second, al-yaʿqūbī (1960, vol. 2, p. 510) mistakenly claims that al-muwaffaq’s son, abū al-ʿabbās aḥmad, the future caliph al-muʿtaḍid billāh (278–289/891-901), also received his title and secured a place in the succession before the end of the 250s/860s (first noted in becker 1902–1903, pp. 162–163). however, there is no numismatic evidence to support the appearance of his title until 278/891, the year he succeeded his uncle as caliph. see e.g. dirham of 278/891 of jannaba (vasmer 1930, p. 42). 31. but see below for the exceptional use of of jaʿfar’s ism on the dinars struck in miṣr in 263/876. 32. see gordon 2015, and gordon 2017a for a good summary of ibn ṭūlūn’s career. 23 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) al-mudabbir’s task had been made difficult in recent years by a series of revolts triggered by anti-tax protests, which were probably stimulated by the widespread recognition that the caliph’s authority had been much weakened by events in samarra. ibn ṭūlūn’s first actions speak of his determination to bolster his personal power and authority at the expense of the ṣāḥib al-kharāj. we are told that ibn al-mudabbir sent him a gift of 10,000 dinars, which was surely intended to buy his acquiescence to the status quo. but the new governor refused the money and demanded instead that ibn al-mudabbir give him his personal bodyguard of one hundred ghurid soldiers. the bodyguard’s transfer to tulunid service must have sent an unambiguous message to all egyptians that henceforth supreme power lay in the hands of the governor.33 his first year as governor of egypt has left a small memorial in the form of a glass weight dated 254/868, which bears the words amara bihi al-amīr (…?) aḥmad b. ṭūlūn. fahmy suggests that the weight demonstrates that ibn ṭūlūn controlled the finances of egypt from this year, but this is an over-interpretation of the inscription.34 egyptian governors had issued glass weights throughout the first half of the third/ninth century with the same formulae as we find on ibn ṭūlūn’s piece.35 while the weight bears testimony to the new governor’s intention to support the provincial administration’s efforts to maintain good working practices in the markets of fusṭāṭ, it tells us nothing about who controlled the country’s finances. indeed, the evidence to hand suggests that ibn al-mudabbir continued to be in charge of the country’s financial affairs until he left the country in 258/871. ibn ṭūlūn’s early achievements impressed his iraqi backers, most importantly yārjūkh, the successor of his first patron bāyakbāk.36 within two years, he had been assigned the governorship of the whole province of egypt and had appointed his own governors to alexandria and barqa. in 256/869, he responded to a request from the caliph to march northwards to hunt down ʿ īsā b. shaykh, a maverick amir who had seized a large consignment of several hundred thousand dinars that had been dispatched by ibn mudabbir towards the caliphal treasury. the caliphal command gave him the opportunity to recruit large numbers of soldiers (greeks, africans and others), but in the event he did not mobilise his forces, because al-muʿtamid sent another amir, amājūr, against ʿīsā, possibly for fear that ibn ṭūlūn might capitalise on his success by incorporating syria into the territories under his control. reports sent back to samarra by amājūr and others warned the caliph that ibn ṭūlūn had assembled a huge army in preparation for this campaign. when invited to return to iraq and take up the post of commander-inchief, ibn ṭūlūn wisely declined the caliph’s offer and sent his agent al-wāsiṭī to the capital with sufficient funds to grease the palms of the amirs whose support he required. al-wāsiṭī’s 33. ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 78. 34. fahmy 1957, p. 5. 35. see balog 1976. 36. gordon 2015, p. 248. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 24 mission was successful: he gave the caliph’s wazir such a valuable present that ibn ṭūlūn was excused his absence.37 the huge investment which ibn ṭūlūn made in the system of spies and go-betweens to secure support in the caliphal capital shows that he regarded the distribution of favours in iraq as being of vital importance to his success in egypt. meanwhile in fusṭāṭ, he began the construction of al-qaṭāʾiʿ, a new administrative quarter with public buildings designed to accommodate his growing secretariat and army. at the same time, he kept up the pressure on ibn al-mudabbir and tried to implement reforms in the economic and tax regimes to increase the amount of revenue available to him locally and help him forge good relations with his new subjects, both rich and poor. at least this is impression given by the egyptian sīra tradition, which acknowledges his enormous energy and praises his determination to implement economic initiatives (e.g. the cultivation of flax and the promotion of the linen industry) and eradicate occasional taxes that held back development and exchange. 38 ibn al-mudabbir finally conceded that ibn ṭūlūn’s standing in samarra was unassailable and that his position had become exposed as a result.39 with the help of his brother in iraq, he secured a transfer northwards to take up the post of ṣāḥib al-kharāj in syria and palestine, handing over his egyptian properties to ibn ṭūlūn so as to guarantee safe passage out of egypt. ibn ṭūlūn provided an escort to accompany him up to the border, perhaps mindful of the impression that his measured actions would have in samarra as well as fusṭāṭ.40 the record of the precious metal coinage (mostly gold) of the mint of fusṭāṭ between 254–258/868-871 gives us another useful perspective on ibn ṭūlūn’s first period as governor. in these early years the mint of miṣr struck only small quantities of dinars, as well as some dirhams.41 bates discusses the extraordinary fact that the many specimens of miṣr dinars dated 255/868 appear to have had the name of the caliph al-muʿtazz (252–255/866-868) and that of his son ʿabdallāh gouged out of the die before the coins were struck. two blank raised areas (with no lettering) are visible above the titles of the caliph and his son (amīr al-muʾminīn and ibn amīr al-muʾminīn respectively).42 37. see ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 84 and al-balawī 1939, pp. 57–58, for the primary reference and becker (1902 –1903, p. 161) for the analysis. the story recounts the wazir’s delight in the gift and his subsequent favour to ibn ṭūlūn. no doubt al-wāsiṭī’s successful mission also served to remind al-muʿtamid that ibn ṭūlūn had the means to provide substantial funds for the caliphal exchequer. 38. ibn al-dāya 1953, pp. 85–86 (ibn ṭūlūn’s remission of taxes). 39. ibn al-mudabbir may also have found it difficult to remit the annual tribute to the caliphal court at a time when there was little coin being struck in fusṭāṭ (see below). 40. ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 84. 41. bates n.d. stated that, at the time of writing his paper, he knew of only five dinars of miṣr struck in the period from the accession of al-muhtadī to the end of 257/870. no dinars are known to have been struck in 256/869. for the tulunid copper coins of miṣr issued between 257–259/870-872 and those of the thughūr issued in the 260s/870s, see below (section 11). 42. for a specimen of these dinars on which the names and titles of the caliph and his son have been erased on the die, see morton and eden sale 27.4.17, lot 342 (https://www.numisbids.com/ n.php?p=sale&sid=1937&cid=&pg=4&so=1&search=&s=1). https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=sale&sid=1937&cid=&pg=4&so=1&search=&s=1 https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=sale&sid=1937&cid=&pg=4&so=1&search=&s=1 25 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) bates suggests that ibn ṭūlūn refused to name the new caliph al-muhtadī when he came to the throne in 255/868 because of religious differences, and chose instead to erase the names of muʿtazz and his son from the dies that were already in use in the mint and to continue using these altered dies to strike coins.43 however, rulers did not usually allow their religious scruples to dictate their fiscal policies and furthermore, a small number of miṣr dinars and dirhams bearing al-muhtadī’s name are known to have been struck, so we can be sure that at least a small quantity of such dies was manufactured.44 the question is where these dies were manufactured and why so few of them were made available to the mint that the master of the mint decided to reuse existing dies. the more likely explanation for the continuing use of obsolete dies is simply that there were no new dinar dies available for use in the mint. the very small quantity of coinage struck by the mint of miṣr in this period could have been a result of interruptions in the supply of dies from samarra, rather than ibn ṭūlūn’s reluctance to produce coinage.45 could there have been other reasons for the lack of dies supplied to the mint of miṣr? perhaps the caliphs were so alarmed by ʿisā b. shaykh’s seizure of a huge consignment of egyptian dinars en route to iraq that they did not commission the striking of large amounts of cash in fusṭāṭ for fear of losing more shipments of coin. in fusṭāṭ itself, ibn ṭūlūn may have hoarded those tax revenues in cash and kind which did arrive in his treasury, in order to meet the expenses required by his growing army and his ambitious building programme on the new settlement of al-qaṭāʾiʿ—but we have no idea of the means by which he paid for his ambitious plans.46 in 258/871, al-muʿtamid agreed that he would not seek to recoup outstanding amounts of revenue owed from egypt (see section 6), suggesting that revenue flows to iraq had not been fully maintained in the preceding years. 6. 258/871-872: the conclusion of the financial agreement between aḥmad b. ṭūlūn and the caliph al-muʿtamid with ibn al-mudabbir out of the way, ibn ṭūlūn took full control of the financial affairs of egypt. the account becomes a little opaque at this juncture, but the story (as told by ibn al-dāya)47 seems to have unfolded as follows. in 258/871, al-muʿtamid sent a certain aḥmad b. muḥammad b. ukht al-wazīr as ibn al-mudabbir’s successor. he relayed the caliphal command that ibn ṭūlūn should continue payments to samarra, presumably in order to reassure the caliph that ibn al-mudabbir’s departure would not entail a cessation of payments. however ibn ṭūlūn managed to negotiate a private agreement with the caliph that guaranteed the resumption of regular annual payments to iraq and ensured his right to a portion of the 43. bates n.d., pp. 3–4. 44. bates n.d., note 5. 45. see fn. 14 (above) for the distribution of dies from the caliphal capital in the third/ninth century. 46. see above, section 2, for the stories about the fortuitous discovery of treasures that ibn ṭūlūn used to pay for his building projects. 47. ibn al-dāya 1953, pp. 84 ff. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 26 revenue of egypt.48 furthermore, he persuaded al-muʿtamid that he could only conceal the full amount of the annual payment he would make to the caliph’s private treasury from the caliph’s awliyāʾ (the military elite) if he himself took direct responsibility for the kharāj.49 the caliph accepted his proposal and added the responsibility for the maʿūna50 of egypt as well as the kharāj of the syrian thughūr to ibn ṭūlūn’s portfolio, perhaps in order to increase the amount of revenue which would be secretly dispatched to his own treasury.51 as a further concession to ibn ṭūlūn, al-muʿtamid agreed to waive his demand for the sums which ibn ṭūlūn owed to samarra (from the first four years of his governorship), so long as he promised to resume payments to samarra on the same scale as they had been “in the past”, i.e. in pre-tulunid times. the caliph dispatched two trusted agents in the delegation which he sent to negotiate these special terms secretly with ibn ṭūlūn. here, it must be said, we enter a particularly tangled and complex episode of early tulunid history, in which the prosopography of the principal actors is difficult to ascertain. ibn al-dāya tells us that the caliph sent two highlevel clients (khādims, probably therefore both eunuchs) of his, named nafīs and nasīm, to oversee the process.52 however, another source identifies a third khādim who also played a role in these events. the book of gifts and rarities, an anonymous fifth/eleventh-century compilation of brief accounts of rare and precious objects, tells us that a certain niḥrīr, who is described as the khādim of al-muʿtamid, took charge of the sum of 1.2 million dinars that ibn ṭūlūn sent to the caliph in iraq, as well as a consignment of slaves, horses, weapons and luxuries.53 the date of niḥrīr’s mission is only vaguely alluded to in the text, but the 48. although no source explicitly states that ibn ṭūlūn received a guaranteed portion of the annual revenues as part of this deal, it is very likely that he did so. he must have been receiving a part of the annual revenues from 254/868 onwards, otherwise he would not have been able to fund the recruitment of his large army and the beginning of his ambitious building program. but by taking control of the kharāj himself and making a secret deal with the caliph, he was able to regularize the previous ad hoc arrangements and put them on a stable basis. 49. the reference to the awliyāʾ must have been to the senior turkish officers at the caliphal court and perhaps also hinted at the supporters of the caliph’s brother, abū aḥmad. 50. we should understand maʿūna in this context as ‘special payments,’ which were made to the governor that were not included in the annual taxation assessment (see crone 2012). 51. bonner (2010a, pp. 583-584) dates ibn ṭūlūn’s assumption of financial control over egypt to 262/875, but this is four years too late. 52. ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 84; al-balawī, (1939, p. 73) mentions only nafīs. bonner notes that nafīs subsequently took up a post in the tulunid diwān al-kharāj and became a trusted confidant of governor (bonner 2010a, p. 583). the implication of the story seems to be that the client played the role of the guarantor of the clandestine agreement between caliph and governor, earning the confidence of the governor, while still able to reassure his caliphal master that the tulunids were carrying out their part of the bargain. 53. see hamidallah 1959 for the arabic text: and al-qaddūmi 1996 for an english translation and important revisions to the questions of authorship and title of the book. the account in question can be found in al-qaddūmī 1996, passage no. 43. bates (n.d.) notes that variant vowellings of this khādim’s ism are found in different sources. 27 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) numismatic evidence allows for precision. many of the miṣr dinars dated 258/871 ah bear niḥrīr’s name below the reverse field.54 the miṣr dinars of 258/871 display a similar style of engraving to contemporary dinars of other caliphal mints and may well have been struck from dies which had been engraved in al-muʿtamid’s die manufactories in samarra. if these were indeed of iraqi manufacture, one might imagine that, having sent the two khādims to supervise the conclusion of the deal with ibn ṭūlūn, al-muʿtamid dispatched niḥrīr with several pairs of dies to the mint of miṣr, where the gold bullion was waiting to be struck into coin. those bearing the name niḥrīr were struck up and returned to the caliph’s personal treasury in nīḥrīr’s charge, while the other half were presumably used to strike dinars that were destined for the payment of ibn ṭūlūn’s officials and troops—though the sources say nothing about the fate of these coins. ibn al-dāya gives us no explanation of the caliph’s decision to accept ibn ṭūlūn’s demands. did al-muʿtamid act out of self-interest, calculating that the surest way of maintaining a share of egypt’s declining revenues was to align himself with the tulunid governor? it seems that the caliph realised that he had to sustain the flow of revenue from egypt to samarra in order to strengthen his hand against his brother. the deal enabled ibn ṭūlūn to recruit a huge army that the caliph allowed him to pay from local revenues and to acquire large reserves of funding which gave him the opportunity to retain the favour of key players in the abbasid regime. 7. the history of the syrian thughūr (258–263/871-876) one of the murkiest topics of early tulunid history concerns the administration of the syrian thughūr during the years 258–263/871-876.55 as noted above (in section 4), al-ṭabarī tells us that caliph appointed his brother abū aḥmad governor of the ʿawāṣim and diyār muḍar in 258/871, thus making him the de facto powerbroker of the northern frontier. it may be for this reason that, according to ibn al-athīr, ibn ṭūlūn appealed to abū aḥmad, rather than the caliph, to appoint him governor of tarsus in the same year.56 his request was turned down. ibn al-dāya provides a brief synopsis of the careers of the three governors whom abū aḥmad appointed to take charge of the thughūr, one after the other, beginning in the late 250s/860s, probably soon after he had turned down ibn ṭūlūn’s request to govern tarsus.57 before appointing the first of these governors, abū aḥmad complained to the caliph that aḥmad b. ṭūlūn would only appoint a governor to 54. the date at which niḥrīr performed this duty is said to have been the period in which the ‘ʿalawī of baṣra rose (in rebellion)’. the reference must be to the ṣāḥib al-zanj, whose rebellion lasted from 255/868 to the early 270s/880s. the full text of the reverse field of the dinars of 258/871 is lillāh/muḥammad/rasūl/allāh/ al-muʿtamid ʿalā allāh/niḥrīr. for a specimen of this dinar type see morton and eden, 27/6/2006, no. 61 (http:// www.mortonandeden.com/pdfcats/20web.pdf). bates n.d., pp. 4–5, estimates that roughly half the known dinar dies of that year bear the name of niḥrīr below the reverse inscription. 55. as bonner (2010a, p. 583) states: “[…] the events and chronology are especially confusing.” 56. ibn al-athīr 1998, vol. 6, p. 272 (anno 263 ah). 57. ibn al-dāya 1953, 91–92. the third of these governors, who is named arjwān b. ūlugh ṭarkhān al–turkī in his text, was appointed in 260/873 and ended his career in the thughūr in 263/876. http://www.mortonandeden.com/pdfcats/20web.pdf http://www.mortonandeden.com/pdfcats/20web.pdf al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 28 the thughūr who would not carry out his responsibilities there.58 this cryptic remark is clarified by al-balawī, who explains that abū aḥmad believed that ibn ṭūlūn’s appointee would not seek to take independent action as governor and would not fulfil the duty of leading the local population in ghazawāt against their byzantine enemy.59 although the egyptian sīra tradition gives no explanation for abū aḥmad’s remark, a clue to its context may lie in the details of the financial deal that ibn ṭūlūn concluded with the caliph in the same year, 258/871 (see above, section 6).60 in addition to awarding him full responsibility for the collection and disbursement of the egyptian kharāj, the caliph also placed responsibility for the kharāj of the thughūr in ibn ṭūlūn’s hands.61 could this appointment have prompted abū aḥmad’s remark? was abū aḥmad saying that he understood that tulunid financial administrators would be appointed to the thughūr, but that as they would not be tasked with military responsibilities, the region still needed a governor who would lead the jihād against the byzantines? since it was abū aḥmad who subsequently took the initiative to appoint the three governors, we must assume either that the caliph permitted him to take charge of these appointments or that abū aḥmad acted unilaterally: the sources do not allow us to come to a definite conclusion on this matter.62 abū aḥmad’s governors proved to be unfortunate choices. the first died before arriving in the region; the second was murdered by the people of tarsus and the third disgraced himself in 263/876 by stealing public funds donated for the relief of the garrison of an important fortress (luʾluʾa) which was under threat from the enemy. the thughūr descended into chaos at this point and ibn ṭūlūn was asked to regain control of the region.63 his appointee, ṭukhshī b. balīn (b. balzad in al-balawī’s text) managed to pacify the region. in the following year, ibn ṭūlūn marched into syria and in 265/878 he came to the thughūr in person.64 58. ibn al-dāya (1953, pp. 91-92) states: aʿlama (al-muwaffaq) al-muʿtamid anna […] aḥmad b. ṭūlūn innamā yabʿathu ilayhā man lā yashtaghilu (= yastaqillu? see next footnote) bihā… 59. al-balawī (1939, p. 89) states: kataba al-muwaffaq ilā al-muʿtamid inna al-thughūr al-shāmiyya ḍāʾiʿa wa innahā taḥtāju ilā man yuqīmu fīhā wa yaghzū bi-ahlihā wa inna aḥmad b. ṭūlūn muhmilun li-amrihā wa innamā yabʿathu ilayhā man lā yastaqillu bihā… 60. bonner (2010a, pp. 583-584) believes that ibn ṭūlūn was not assigned responsibility for the kharāj of the thughūr until 262/875. 61. the implication here is that muʿtamid gave ibn ṭūlūn the responsibility for collecting and disbursing the revenues of the thughūr but did not appoint him as governor of the region. in other words, muʿtamid did not grant ibn ṭūlūn the wilāya of the thughūr. 62. gordon (2017b, p. 7) has suggested that muʿtamid and his brother each made their own appointments to the thughūr, implying that the two governors had overlapping responsibilities. but it seems that ibn ṭūlūn’s representatives were limited to the management of financial matters before 263/876, while abū aḥmad’s held the wilāya: the two posts were complementary. 63. ibn al-dāya (1953, p. 92) does not make it clear who involved ibn ṭūlūn in this matter, although the context suggests that it was abū aḥmad (by now titled al-muwaffaq) rather than the caliph. 64. for the history of ibn ṭūlūn’s less than successful interventions in the region, see bonner 2010a and gordon 2017b. 29 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) 8. breakdown in relations between ibn ṭūlūn and al-muwaffaq (c. 262/875) as already noted, soon after al-muwaffaq’s appointment as an heir to the throne in 261, a violent quarrel erupted between him and ibn ṭūlūn over the apportionment of egyptian revenues. although no source mentions the date on which this conflict broke out, it must have postdated 261/874, the year in which al-muwaffaq acquired his title.65 we may assume that the quarrel most likely broke out in the following year, 262/875, although it is possible that the seeds of the conflict had already been planted earlier, given the rising tension between the two amirs over the management of the thughūr and al-muwaffaq’s brittle relationship with the caliph.66 the story is recounted in detail by al-maqrīzī, who based his account on the same passage in ibn al-dāya, that led hassan to miscalculate the chronology of the early tulunid period (see sections 1 and 2).67 the trouble began when al-muwaffaq wrote to ibn ṭūlūn, seeking funds for the prosecution of the war against the zanj. in the letter he acknowledged that egypt belonged to the maghrib region and was thus within the territories of al-mufawwaḍ, but pleaded his case on the grounds that revenues from the mashriq were much reduced, as a result of the disruption caused by the zanj. egypt was the richest territory in the maghrib and the most accessible from iraq.68 al-muwaffaq appears to have discovered that muʿtamid had been secretly sequestrating the annual revenues from egypt (or at least a part of them) since 258/871, according to the terms of the deal he had concluded ibn ṭūlūn in that year (see section 6).69 this knowledge allowed him to maintain a degree of leverage over his brother, who for four years had benefitted from a private financial agreement that was probably never legally ratified. al-balawī states that al-muwaffaq was compelled to seek the revenues of egypt because of unavoidable financial expenses incurred in the war against the zanj.70 in fact al-muwaffaq was looking for more than monetary gain alone in egypt. it is clear that he intended from the outset to bring down ibn ṭūlūn by subverting the loyalty of his generals and replacing him as governor. with ibn ṭūlūn gone, al-muwaffaq knew that his brother’s privileged access to egyptian funds would cease and that he himself would be able to tap into the province’s wealth. as for the detailed narrative of these events: al-maqrīzī begins by telling us that al-muwaffaq dispatched a certain niḥrīr, whom he describes as mutawakkil’s khādim, to 65. as noted above (section 2), ibn al-dāya’s account implicitly dates the conclusion of the succession arrangements to the year 257/870, when abū aḥmad returned from mecca to the hijaz. 66. indeed it is possible that al-muwaffaq began pondering how he could get his hands on the revenues of egypt as soon as he returned to samarra from exile in the hijaz. but he first took action on the issue only after he had been placed in the line of succession to the throne in 261/874. 67. al-maqrīzī n.d., vol. 2, pp. 178–179: ibn al-dāya 1953, pp. 89–91. 68. although more remote from iraq than egypt, ifrīqiya was also a rich province. but there is no evidence that the aghlabids (184–290/800-904) paid kharāj to the abbasids on an annual basis. 69. ibn al-dāya (1953, p. 87) notes that when al-muwaffaq complained of his urgent need for funds, the “revenues of egypt were delayed (i.e. had not arrived in the abbasid treasury) because they were secretly carried to al-muʿtamid.” the implication is that al-muwaffaq himself already knew that his brother was siphoning off egyptian funds into his private treasury. 70. fa-daʿat abā aḥmad al-ḍarūra ilā an kataba ilā aḥmad b. ṭūlūn… (p 79). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 30 collect the funds he had requested from ibn ṭūlūn.71 at first glance, it would seem that al-maqrīzī’s source, ibn al-dāya, has misnamed al-muwaffaq’s envoy, confusing him with the khādim of al-muʿtamid who was took charge of the financial arrangements in 258/871 and whose ism appears on the egyptian coins of the same year. on further investigation, however, it appears that niḥrīr did make a second journey to egypt, this time on behalf of al-muwaffaq, in c. 262/875. al-muwaffaq evidently managed to coerce niḥrīr, the caliph’s khādim and a senior financial official in the abbasid financial system, into helping him to oust ibn ṭūlūn.72 why did al-muwaffaq make the risky choice of the caliph’s khādim to lead the embassy to miṣr? one reason may have been that niḥrīr’s presence conveyed the impression that the caliph sanctioned al-muwaffaq’s appropriation of egyptian wealth. niḥrīr was also the bearer of seditious letters to ibn ṭūlūn’s generals. the reader of al-maqrīzī would assume that al-muwaffaq himself was the signatory of these letters: and so he may have been. but it is also possible that muʿtamid had been coerced by his brother into signing the letters. if this were the case, niḥrīr would have been a good choice as the messenger, because he could reassure the generals that his master the caliph was acting in their best interests. forewarned of his arrival by al-muʿtamid, ibn ṭūlūn arrested the envoy in egypt and confined him to his quarters, to prevent him from making contact with the generals. ibn ṭūlūn then took possession of the letters that niḥrīr was carrying and punished those who were implicated in the plot against him. but ibn ṭūlūn could not solve his main dilemma. he found himself caught between the competing demands of the caliph, to whom he had existing financial obligations, and the new demands made by his powerful brother. the caliph had reminded ibn ṭūlūn of his obligation to send the customary annual tribute of cash and other goods including ṭirāz, slaves, horses and wax (shamʿ) to the caliphal treasury. but the tulunid decided to honour al-muwaffaq’s demands instead73 and sent him the province’s annual tribute (or at least a portion of it), amounting to the sum of between 1.2–2.2 million dinars, as well as other 71. al-maqrīzī (n.d., p. 179) has ‘taḥrīr’, but this must be a scribal error for niḥrīr, which is the spelling given in ibn al-dāya’s text (ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 87). 72. as a major player in the events of 258 and a close associate of the caliph, niḥrīr must have been fully aware of, and was probably complicit in, the caliph’s financial subterfuge. niḥrīr remained loyal to muʿtamid throughout this period, as proved by his presence at muʿtamid’s side in 269–270/882-883, during the caliph’s attempted flight to egypt—he also witnessed his tearful reaction to the news of ibn ṭūlūn’s death in 270/883 (see al-balawī 1939, pp. 291 and 357 respectively). 73. gordon (2015 pp. 230–231) says that al-balawī (1939, pp. 80–81) notes that ibn ṭūlūn sent 1.2 million dinars to the imperial treasures in 262/875. but al-balawī’s text states that this was the sum that ibn ṭūlūn consigned to niḥrīr when he escorted him to the egyptian border, before formally handing it over to amājūr, governor of syria. the next appearance niḥrīr made in the story was when he delivered the 1.2 million dinars to al-muwaffaq. it seems that ibn ṭūlūn diverted the sum which was annually sent to muʿtamid (mā jarā al-rasm bi-ḥamlihi—al-balawī 1953, p. 81) to al-muwaffaq, taking great care to have witnesses record the full amount before handing niḥrīr and the revenue over into amājūr’s care. amājūr’s task was to ensure the safe passage of the envoy and his consignment through syria en route to al-muwaffaq’s court. 31 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) commodities that were customarily included in the annual remittances from egypt.74 by giving in to al-muwaffaq’s demands, ibn ṭūlūn broke the terms of his standing agreement with al-muʿtamid.75 but when niḥrīr delivered the kharāj to al-muwaffaq, the latter declared himself dissatisfied with the tulunid’s contribution.76 he wrote again to ibn ṭūlūn, this time in intemperate terms, complaining that he had received only a fraction of the amount he was due.77 ibn ṭūlūn was no doubt desperately disappointed by the failure of his attempt to mollify al-muwaffaq by sending him funds. he adopted a tone of righteous indignation in his response to al-muwaffaq, querying the claim that there was an outstanding account that needed to be settled and drawing attention to the great contribution he had made to the defence of the dawla and the trouble he had taken to recruit the bravest soldiers to his army and to feed and equip them. he claimed that all who showed loyalty to such a degree were deserving of recognition and promotion. yet he, by contrast, had been subjected to demands in unnecessarily harsh terms. he reminded al-muwaffaq that those who made demands on their inferiors, were expected to accompany their requests with gifts and promises of favours. in raising this complaint, ibn ṭūlūn was in effect accusing al-muwaffaq of failing to show the gratitude expected of a master whose servant had excelled himself in his service. the charge of kufrān al-niʿma (ingratitude for benefits delivered) was a powerful one, which could be launched by a complainant against both social superiors and social inferiors. in the same letter, ibn ṭūlūn reminded al-muwaffaq that he had broken the terms of the succession agreement of 261/874 and that for this reason, the muslim community was no longer obliged to render allegiance to him.78 he said that his senior amirs (awliyāʾ) had begged him to remove his name from the khuṭba but claimed that he had chosen not to give in to their pleas. ibn ṭūlūn also accused al-muwaffaq of seeking to replace him as governor of egypt, a charge that both he and al-muwaffaq knew to be true. finally he reminded him that he commanded a powerful army that would prevail against all opponents in battle. the general tone of the letter is one of outrage for wrongs done to him: but one also suspects that the high emotion of ibn ṭūlūn’s language was fuelled by anxiety—his gamble had failed and he now found himself in dispute with both al-muwaffaq and al-muʿtamid. 74. al-maqrīzī (n.d., p. 179) gives the amount as 1.2 million dinars while ibn khaldūn (1284, p. 299) states that the amount was 2.2 million. the question of the exact amount sent to al-muwaffaq remains unresolved. the total annual yield from egypt was estimated at 4.3 million dinars by bianquis (1998, p. 95), but without references. it is impossible to calculate the average amount of the annual tribute from egypt accurately, due to the inconsistency of different reports: moreover, the amount of revenue may have changed from year to year, depending on the success of the harvests. 75. al-maqrīzī n.d., p. 179. 76. ibn al-dāya 1953, p. 89: “he (al-muwaffaq) said that the total sum amounted to many times the sum that (ibn ṭūlūn) conveyed to him in the care of niḥrīr.” it seems likely that al-muwaffaq had specified the sum he wanted in his first message, but that ibn ṭūlūn had not remitted it in full. 77. the phrase is yaqūlu inna al-ḥisāb yujābu aḍʿafa ma ḥumilat (al-maqrīzī n.d., p. 178). 78. here ibn ṭūlūn first articulated the grievance against al-muwaffaq that subsequently drove him to convene the ‘damascus assembly’ in 269/882 (see below). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 32 to summarise the conclusions drawn so far about the events of 262/875—the evidence strongly suggests that al-muwaffaq intended to get rid of ibn ṭūlūn from the outset. although the intense rivalry between two must have kicked off in the late 250s, they did not come into direct conflict with one another until this year. by 262/875, al-muwaffaq was already an experienced field general with many campaigns under his belt. he knew that ibn ṭūlūn commanded a mighty army and that his capital was well defended. he realised that a military assault against egypt would probably not succeed and that the best way to unseat ibn ṭūlūn was to turn his own men against him. but once ibn ṭūlūn had frustrated the attempt to subvert his generals, al-muwaffaq was forced to challenge him directly. when al-muwaffaq received ibn ṭūlūn’s dismissive response, he ordered mūsā b. bughā to drive the tulunid out of egypt and appoint amājūr, the governor of syria, in his place. amājūr refused to accept the appointment, realising that his army was no match for ibn ṭūlūn’s forces. mūsā then marched against egypt, reaching al-rāfiqa, and ibn ṭūlūn began to construct fortifications in his capital to resist the new threat. but, in 264/877, mūsā withdrew from syria, due to lack of adequate funds for the payment of his soldiers and amājūr died in the same year. ibn ṭūlūn’s next step was novel. in a tactical move that must have been intended to frustrate any future threat from syria, he took advantage of amājūr’s death and mūsā’s withdrawal to fill the syrian power vacuum himself. he marched northwards, rapidly taking over amājūr’s territories and appointing his own governors to syrian cities and created a buffer zone between his core lands in egypt and those of his enemies in iraq. by the time he was forced to return to egypt from tarsus in 265/878 to deal with his son’s rebellion, he had consolidated tulunid authority over syria. 9. dinars of 265/878 bearing ibn ṭūlūn’s name at this point we come to another numismatic crux. in 265/878, gold coins were struck in miṣr and al-rāfiqa bearing the name aḥmad b. ṭūlūn below that of the caliph al-muʿtamid on the reverse field, with al-mufawwaḍ’s title placed below the obverse field. such coins were struck in these and other mints for the remainder of ibn ṭūlūn’s life.79 why did his name appear on these dinars and what did it signify? to address this question, we begin by reviewing the precious metal coinage struck in the region from 259–265/872-878, in order to establish a context for the new inscription.80 from 259–260/872-873, the mint of miṣr produced a small supply of precious metal coins, but no miṣr dinars are known dated to 261–262/874-875.81 this raises the question of how ibn ṭūlūn remitted the revenue due to the caliph in those two years. miṣr dinars are known 79. for the dinars of 265 see kazan 1983, p. 288, no. 401 (al-rāfiqa); and ibrāhīm 2005 (miṣr). the miṣr dinar is held in the petrie museum of egyptian archaeology, ucl, item no. 49711 (see http://petriecat.museums. ucl.ac.uk/detail.aspx). both mints struck dinars every year from 265–270 (see grabar 1957 and nicol 2007). in addition, a dinar is known from ḥims dated 266 (nicol 2007, ‘ṭūlūnids’, no. 1) as well as dinars and dirhams from dimashq. 80. for a review of precious metal coinage from the region struck before 259, see above, section 5. 81. bates n.d., p. 8. http://petriecat.museums.ucl.ac.uk/detail.aspx http://petriecat.museums.ucl.ac.uk/detail.aspx 33 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) for the year 263/876, but these coins bear jaʿfar’s ism, rather than his title (al-mufawwaḍ), which appeared on all abbasid precious metal coinage struck in the maghrib from 262/875 onwards. the exceptional occurrence of jaʿfar’s ism in the inscriptions of the miṣr coins of 263/876 requires an explanation. bates has suggested that ibn ṭūlūn may have refused to make the bayʿa to jaʿfar b. al-muʿtamid as heir apparent in 261/874, because he was displeased by al-muwaffaq’s simultaneous appointment as second in line to the throne. yet our sources provide no evidence that ibn ṭūlūn and al-muwaffaq were in dispute with each other before the succession arrangements were made.82 on the other hand, ibn ṭūlūn did divert the annual caliphal tribute to al-muwaffaq’s treasury in the following year, 262/875. al-muʿtamid tried to prevent the diversion of egyptian funds away from samarra and must have been deeply aggrieved by ibn ṭūlūn’s decision to send funds to al-muwaffaq. it is quite likely that the positive relationship they had enjoyed hitherto was soured by these events. in these circumstances, it is conceivable that ibn ṭūlūn commissioned dies to be made for the mint of miṣr without jaʿfar’s new title as a sign of his displeasure with the caliph. whatever the truth of the matter, the dies for the dinars of 263/876 must have been made in miṣr, rather than samarra, suggesting that the days when the caliph supplied dies for the miṣr mint had come to an end. however the quarrel with the caliph, if such it was, did not last long. miṣr dinars with standard inscriptions, including jaʿfar’s title al-mufawwaḍ, were struck in small quantities in 264/877 and early 265/878.83 why did ibn ṭūlūn issue dinars that bore his own ism and patronymic in 265/878? these were not the first tulunid coins struck in syria. a copper fals struck in damascus in 264/877, shortly after the tulunid occupation of the syrian capital, bears ibn ṭūlūn’s ism aḥmad.84 since no coppers had been struck in the city during amājūr’s governorship, we may assume that one reason for the named tulunid issue of 264/877 was to mark the inauguration of the new regime. the inclusion of the caliph’s name on the dinars of the following year suggests that the ibn ṭūlūn did not strike these coins as a declaration of his independence from the abbasid regime. although there is no evidence to support the idea that ibn ṭūlūn considered himself a rebel against the abbasids,85 however, the new inscription did coincide with his occupation of syria and must have been intended to publicise the significant expansion of the tulunid state. ibn ṭūlūn’s initiative was prefigured by rapid changes that occurred in the naming practices of other abbasid mints in this period. the saffarid yaʿqūb b. layth had 82. it is hard to understand why ibn ṭūlūn would have refused to acknowledge the appointment of muʿtamid’s son, if he was disturbed by al-muwaffaq’s appointment as second in line to the throne. moreover, as we know from ibn ṭūlūn’s letter, al-muwaffaq’s title was included in the egyptian khuṭba (see section 8). 83. bates n.d., p. 9. 84. see nicol 2007, ‘ṭūlūnids’, no. 3. the defective specimen described by nicol lacks the decade, but has been assigned, presumably on the evidence of style and historical context, to the year 264/877. 85. ibn al-ʿadim claims that ibn ṭūlūn cut the route to baghdad and ceased sending revenue to al-muʿtamid at this time, but he is probably confusing events in 265–266/878-879 with those of 269/882, when the tulunid was once again in dispute with al-muwaffaq (see ibn al-ʿadīm 1988–1989, p. 826). bonner (2010b, p. 320) notes that ibn ṭūlūn assumed the prestigious title mawlā amīr al-muʾminīn “after 265/878,” which suggests that relations with muʿtamid continued to be amicable after this year. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 34 already begun to put his own name on his coins from the late 250s/860s and the various amirs who governed nishapur, like ʿabdallāh al-khujustānī and rāfiʿ b. harthama, followed suit in the 260s/870s: this is a process that is not yet well understood and deserves further study.86 10. the events of 268–269/881-883 after ibn ṭūlūn was forced to return to egypt in 265/878, al-muwaffaq’s efforts to undermine ibn ṭūlūn’s authority in syria began to bear fruit. luʾluʾ, ibn ṭūlūn’s mawlā and his governor of al-rāfiqa, renounced his allegiance to the tulunids and fled to al-muwaffaq with his army. as an intriguing aside to this major event, it should be noted that the coins of al-rāfiqa dated to the year 268/881 bear the name luʾluʾ below that of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn on the reverse.87 there is little to guide our understanding of the background to this new inscription. did luʾluʾ’s name appear on the coins to indicate that he was responsible for collecting the caliphal tax revenues due from al-rāfiqa (as in the case of niḥrīr’s name which appeared on the miṣr coins of 258/871)? should the coins be seen as an attempt at political self-assertion, immediately prior to luʾluʾ’s defection? if so, it is strange that luʾluʾ took care to include ibn ṭūlūn’s name and patronymic. as in the case of ibn ṭūlūn’s named coins of 265/878, it is impossible to answer this question with certainty. perhaps luʾluʾ’s coin should be taken as a sign of the extent to which powerful local rulers, even those who were city governors rather than regional governors, were becoming aware of the value of the coinage as a means of asserting their presence in the regions they governed. luʾluʾ’s defection caused a further deterioration in relations between ibn ṭūlūn and al-muwaffaq. after al-muwaffaq’s allies had arrested al-muʿtamid in 269/882, preventing him from fleeing to ibn ṭūlūn, the latter declared al-muwaffaq unfit for his office and convened a group of ʿulamāʾ in damascus to ratify his declaration, with mixed results.88 a year after the meeting in damascus, aḥmad b. ṭūlūn was dead. 11. conclusions although the coinage inscriptions offer insights into relations between the abbasids and ibn ṭūlūn, many issues surrounding the production and use of egyptian coinage and the raising and distribution of egyptian revenue in the tulunid period remain obscure. for example, we do not always know in which form the ‘money’ owed to the abbasids was paid: whether in gold coin or in bullion or in coinage of other denominations. given the imprecision and sparseness of the textual source material, we cannot be sure that the amounts recorded in dinars were always remitted in islamic gold coins. the sums of dinars quoted in some of our sources may have been cited as a money of account, rather than quantities of individual 86. yaʿqūb the saffarid began striking coins bearing his own ism in the mid-250s/860s (for a dirham of fars dated 256/869, see nicol 2012, no. 714)—a dirham of the same mint dated 255/870 which also bears his ism is reported to be in a private collection. it is reasonably safe to conclude that these early saffarid issues from fars were struck from yaʿqūb’s own dies, given the parlous state of his relations with the abbasids. 87. see nicol 2007, nos. 8–9. 88. see bonner (2010a) for an in-depth discussion of the so-called damascus assembly. 35 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) coins. this means that it is difficult to correlate the estimated output of the mint of miṣr (which seems to have been low in the first years of ibn ṭūlūn’s governorship, judging by the numbers of surviving specimens) with the amount of egyptian revenue received by the caliph and his brother. aḥmad b. ṭūlūn played an important role in the history of the abbasid caliphate as the first turkish amir to leave the iraqi centre and construct a stable polity in a major imperial province. his career reflects the conditions of a new phase in the evolution of the caliphal state, which began with the murder of al-mutawakkil. abbasid authority became progressively diminished as local rulers began to encroach upon caliphal lands and eventually, with the buyid capture of baghdad in 334/945, the temporal power of the caliphate was completely eclipsed. the tulunid interval represents an intermediate stage in the transition from a strong unitary state to the political fragmentation of the fourth/tenth century. in the second half of the third/ninth century, the abbasids retained enough authority to keep a grip on the central islamic lands, but they did so at the expense of having to negotiate working relationships with regional actors like ibn ṭūlūn.89 ibn ṭūlūn was the first turkish amir in abbasid service to establish a measure of autonomous agency within a province of the abbasid state. this article has attempted to sort out the political history of ibn ṭūlūn’s career with a particular focus on his relations with the caliph al-muʿtamid and his brother al-muwaffaq. some aspects of this triangular relationship have remained obscure until now, in spite of the best efforts of several scholars, largely due to two factors: the failure to utilize the available numismatic evidence;90 and a reluctance to explore the complex historiography of the written record for the tulunids, in particular the work of ibn al-dāya and al-balawī. tulunid historiography is a wearisome but not overwhelmingly challenging subject: a comprehensive comparative survey of the common patterns within, and intertextual links between, the main sources outside the sīra tradition (among them al-kindī, al-yaʿqūbī, ibn khaldūn, ibn al-ʿadīm and al-maqrīzī) is much needed.91 finally, a few thoughts on one of the fundamental questions governing ibn ṭūlūn’s rise to power—how did he legitimize his rule in egypt (and later in syria), given the recent precipitous decline of caliphal power and his status as a member of the samarran turkish community? when he arrived in egypt in 254/868, ibn ṭūlūn suffered from a chronic deficit of political 89. see bonner 2010b for the notion of the ‘intermediate stage’ in the decline of the unitary state. 90. the islamic historian’s disinclination to make full use of the evidence of the coinage is understandable. for the non-numismatist, the numismatic literature is difficult to master, especially now that so much material is available online. even when one has a grasp of the relevant material, there is little reliable guidance as to its proper use. 91. it is puzzling that little serious work has been done on the historiography of the tulunids since becker addressed the issue at the beginning of the 20th century. current academic fashion is one factor. the compulsion to publish accessible scholarship that engages with live macrohistorical issues, such as, in this case, the modalities of the disintegration of the unitary abbasid state, is strong in today’s academic environment. a worthy historiographical study of a tradition that is partial, fragmented, and, for the most part, much later than the events it describes, would be unlikely to win much recognition for its author. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 36 capital.92 as the son of a deracinated turkish lord who had been sold into slavery and given as a gift to the caliph al-maʾmūn at the beginning of the third/ninth century, he had no access to (and probably little conception of) any tradition of regnal authority that might have helped him establish and sustain his authority. unlike the samanids of transoxania, for example, who had already spent half a century consolidating their grip over western central asia when ibn ṭūlun entered fusṭāṭ, he was not a local nobleman with a genealogy that he could exploit to his own political ends. nor did he have access to the longstanding tradition of persian kingship to which the samanids and their buyid contemporaries, in their different ways, both claimed to be heirs.93 ibn ṭūlūn’s only recourse was to a tradition of pious islamic authoritarianism which would allow him to refashion himself in the image of an ideal muslim sovereign, who practiced just rule, in close collaboration with pious muslim scholars.94 close alignment with the world of the pious scholar also helped him to maintain the illusion that he was a faithful servant of the abbasid caliph, rather than a powerful regional ruler who commanded substantial military and economic resources. the egyptian sīra tradition, whatever its shortcomings as a source for annalistic history, provides persuasive testimony for ibn ṭūlūn’s efforts to cast himself in this mold. did ibn ṭūlūn also seek to present himself as a ghāzī warrior, the defender of the northern frontier against the byzantine enemy, as a boost to his image as a righteous muslim ruler? according to the sīra he had spent time in his early youth taking part in ghazawāt against the byzantines and was deeply attracted to the ghāzī ideal. ibn al-athīr tells us that soon after he arrived in egypt he asked to be appointed governor of tarsus, which indicates that he had not lost his enthusiasm for the frontier by the late 250s/860s (see section 7). whether he had the opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to jihād effectively in later years is doubtful. his interventions in the thughūr were not particularly successful and he never personally led a campaign against the christian enemy.95 but it is true that he used the language of the ghāzī quite freely, calling for jihād against no less powerful a figure than al-muwaffaq towards the end of his life. we should also bear in mind that after 258/871, the thughūr represented for ibn ṭūlūn not only a spiritual ideal, but also a source of revenue. al-muwaffaq appears to have tried to frustrate ibn ṭūlūn’s attempts to fulfill his role as the ṣāḥib al-kharāj of the frontier region by appointing his own governors to the region. ibn ṭūlūn’s interest in the region must have been sharpened by his financial interests as well as a desire to counter al-muwaffaq’s persistent interference. 92. the phrase is gordon’s: see gordon 2015 (pp. 240–252) for an excellent discussion of ibn ṭūlūn’s strategies of self-legitimization. 93. see, among other useful studies, bosworth 1978. 94. gordon, 2015, points to ibn ṭūlūn’s efforts to create his credentials as a pious muslim ruler, including dispensation of justice through the maẓālim courts, good works (such as the hospital [māristān] and his enormous new mosque), and the cultivation of good relations with the most important community leaders, like the chief qāḍī. 95. see bonner 2010a and gordon 2017b for mildly divergent views on ibn ṭūlūn’s ‘jihād’. 37 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) did ibn ṭūlūn intend to create a dynasty that would rule egypt and syria after his death? he did appoint his son as his heir apparent, which shows that he anticipated continuity of rule among his descendants. but there is nothing to indicate that he invested heavily in the notion of dynastic identity, in the way that his iranian contemporaries did. however, one intriguing piece of numismatic evidence suggests that he went some way towards creating an emblem of his family’s collective identity. a series of copper coins struck on his authority in miṣr between 257–259/870-873 bear no names: neither the title of the caliph, nor the ism of ibn ṭūlūn himself (see figure 1).96 but they do contain an enigmatic graphic sign at the bottom of the obverse consisting of a rhombus lying on its longer axis, which is flanked by a number of vertical lines to either side. the sign may have been modeled on the tamghas employed on some copper issues struck by the early abbasid governors of transoxania.97 the same sign recurs on coppers bearing aḥmad’s name, which were struck in the region of the thughūr in the 260s/870s (see figure 2).98 a central asian tamgha of a different design was also employed on the copper coinage struck by muḥammad b. tughj (323–334/934-945), the founder of the regime of the ikhshidids, the next ruling family to govern egypt after the demise of the tulunids. like ibn ṭūlūn, ibn tughj was a turk, though of farghanan rather than inner asian, origin.99 both tamghas seem to have belonged to an ‘invented tradition’, sourced from the coinage imagery of second/eighth-century central asia, which was appropriated by these amirs to provide themselves with an originary foothold in the central asian region. both the intention behind such collective symbols of identity and their effectiveness are difficult to gauge in the absence of any other objects bearing these symbols. the choice of central asian tamghas, or approximations to them, hints that both tulunids and ikhshidids recognized that these symbols resonated with some aspects of the identity they had created for themselves as servants of the abbasid state. 96. see grabar 1957, p. 10, no. 17. 97. see the mintless issue of abū muslim (nastich 2012, fig. 4b) and the issue of al-ṣāghāniyān dated 146/763 (nastich 2012, fig. 13). both these coppers have horizontal lozenges with palmettes to either side. 98. see miles 1956, no. 20. a recent specimen of this type offered for sale in the bruno peus auction of 7 –9 november 2012, identifies the date of issue as 2(6)4/877 and the mint as al-thughūr al-shāmiyya (peus 2012, no. 1471). 99. bacharach 2015, pp. 34–36. figure 1: fals of miṣr 258 ah (zeno no. 71755) figure 2: fals of al-thughūr al-shāmiyya 2(6?)4 ah (zeno no. 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(= al-maqrīzī n.d.) al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, vol. 4, beirut (dar al-andalus), 1966. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the numismatic evidence for the reign of aḥmad b. ṭūlūn • 40 al-māwardī, ʿalī b. muḥammad, al-aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya, ed. m.b. ḥalabī, fusṭāṭ, 1327. miles, g.c., “islamic coins from the tarsus excavations of 1935–1937,” in the aegean and the near east: studies presented to hetty goldman on the occasion of her seventyfifth birthday, ed. s. weinberg, locust valley, 1956, pp. 297–312. nastich, v. n., “early islamic copper coinage of transoxania: a generic survey focused on newly discovered coin types,” in third simone assemani symposium on islamic coins, ed. b. callegher and a. d’ottone, trieste, 2012, pp. 144–190. nicol, n.d., later ʿabbāsid precious metal coinage (to 218 ah) (sylloge of the islamic coins in the ashmolean museum, vol. 4), oxford, 2012. nicol, n.d. the egyptian dynasties (sylloge of the islamic coins in the ashmolean museum, vol. 6), oxford, 2007. peus: dr bruno peus nachf., auctions 407/408, 7–9 november, 2012. al-qaddūmi, g., book of gifts and rarities, cambridge, mass., 1996. ramadan, a.m., naysābūr, sabzawār und die münzstätten in ǧuwayn (sylloge numorum arabicorum tübingen, vol. xiva, ḫurāsān i), tübingen, 2012. randa, e.w., the tulunid dynasty in egypt: loyalty and state formation during the dissolution of the ʿabbasid caliphate, unpublished phd thesis, university of utah, 1990. al-ṭabarī, muḥammad b. jarīr, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, ed. de goeje, leiden, 1879–1901. tor, d., “a numismatic history of the first saffarid dynasty (ah 247–300/ad 861–911),” numismatic chronicle series 7/162 (2002), pp. 293–314. tor, d., violent order: religious warfare, chivalry and the ʿayyār phenomenon in the medieval islamic world, würzburg, 2007. treadwell, w.l., craftsmen and coins: signed dies in the iranian world (third to fifth centuries ah), vienna, 2011. vasmer, r., “über die münzen der ṣaffārīden und ihrer gegner in fārs und ḫurāsān,” numizmatische zeitschrift 63 (1930), pp. 131–162. al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh al-yaʿqūbī, beirut, dar sadir, 1960. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 416-420 book review this is a high-quality translation of the muwaṭṭaʾ, not only because the translators are renowned scholars in the field of islamic studies but also— and mainly—because the participation of mohammad fadel, who specializes in islamic law, ensures the accuracy of the terminology employed. this english translation of the royal m o r o c c a n e d i t i o n o f t h e m u w a ṭ ṭ a ʾ responds to a series of initiatives started in morocco aimed at producing academic english translations of the ummahāt (foundational texts) of the mālikī school of law. since the author of the muwaṭṭaʾ, m ā l i k b . a n a s ( d . 1 7 9 / 7 9 6 ) , w a s t h e eponym of the school and one of the 1. jonathan a. c. brown, “mālik, the muwaṭṭaʾ, and sunni identity,” muwaṭṭaʾ roundtable, islamic law blog, december 7, 2019, https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/07/malik-muwatta-sunni-identity/. 2. mālik b. anas, al-muwaṭṭaʾ, 2. at least twenty manuscripts have been preserved of yaḥyā b. yaḥyā’s recension of mālik’s muwaṭṭaʾ. see history of andalusi authors and transmitters (hata), 3. fiqh: 9, http:// kohepocu.cchs.csic.es/flipbooks/3/#p=8. 3. this was collated with the manuscripts of abū ʿumar al-muntajālī (d. 350/961) and the autograph most prominent figures in the formation of early sunni identity,1 the muwaṭṭaʾ is a reasonable starting point, particularly as the previous translations into english are of a non-academic character. the translation is based on the royal m o r o c c a n e d i t i o n o f t h e m u w a ṭ ṭ a ʾ published in 2013, which in turn is based on “some of the most ancient north a f r i c a n a n d a n d a l u s i a n m a n u s c r i p t s a v a i l a b l e . ” 2 s i x m a n u s c r i p t s a r e mentioned in the arabic introduction to the royal moroccan edition (pp. 39–72), namely, (1) a manuscript from al-zāwiya al-ḥamzawiyya preserved in tunis that was copied in 487/1094, which was taken as the base manuscript for the edition;3 mālik b. anas, al-muwaṭṭaʾ: the recension of yaḥyā b. yaḥyā al-laythī; a translation of the royal moroccan edition. translated with notes by mohammad fadel and connell monette. harvard series in islamic law 8 (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2019), 858 pp. price: $95.00 (cloth). adday hernández csic – instituto de lenguas y culturas del mediterráneo y oriente próximo (ilc) (adday.hernandez@cchs.csic.es) © 2020 adday hernández. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/07/malik-muwatta-sunni-identity/ mailto:adday.hernandez%40cchs.csic.es?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 417 • adday hernández (2) the copy of abū ʿabd allāh b. al-ṭallāʿ (d. 497/1103), copied at the beginning o f t h e s e v e n t h / t h i r t e e n t h c e n t u r y ; ( 3 ) t h e c o p y o f a b ū m u ḥ a m m a d shurayḥ al-ruʿaynī (d. 539/1144), one of the companions of ibn ḥazm, who wrote the manuscript in his own hand f o r h i s s o n m u ḥ a m m a d b . s h u r a y ḥ (d. 567/1171), probably copied during the first half of the sixth/twelfth century; (4) a manuscript copied in 595/1198; (5) a manuscript copied by ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad b. muḥammad b. al-labbād (d. 613/1216); (6) a final manuscript copied around the same time as the latter. unfortunately, the places where these manuscripts are kept are rarely mentioned (see pp. 67–72).4 moreover, the editors report consulting previous editions as well, namely, (1) the egyptian edition of muḥammad fuʾād ʿabd al-bāqī, (2) the edition of bashshār ʿawwād maʿrūf,5 and (3) the edition of muṣṭafā al-aʿẓamī. preceding the translation, we find three introductory chapters which helpfully situate the work in its context, although the titles of the first two are quite similar, making it somewhat difficult to distinguish their respective content. first, “the english translation of the royal moroccan edition” (pp. 1–6), the author of which is not specified, offers background to the initiative that led to the translation of the muwaṭṭaʾ, as well as an account of the previous translations, the manuscript of abū ʿabd allāh muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh b. abī ʿīsā (d. 339/950), chief judge of cordoba and a relative of yaḥyā b. yaḥyā, the transmitter of this recension of the muwaṭṭaʾ. 4. in the electronic resource history of andalusi authors and transmitters it is possible to find a list of manuscripts of yaḥyā b. yaḥyā’s recension of mālik’s muwaṭṭaʾ with references to the libraries where they are kept and the catalogs in which these copies are listed (3. fiqh: 9, http://kohepocu.cchs.csic.es/flipbooks/3/#p=8). 5. his critical edition of ibn ʿabd al-barr’s tamhīd has been recently published. ibn ʿabd al-barr, kitāb al-tamhīd li-mā fī al-muwaṭṭaʾ min al-maʿānī wa-l-asānīd, ed. bashshār ʿawwād maʿrūf, 17 vols. (london: al-furqān islamic heritage foundation, 2017). translation team, the process followed in the translation work, and the editorial conventions. second, “introduction to the translation of the royal moroccan edition of the muwaṭṭaʾ, recension of yaḥyā b. yaḥyā al-laythī” (pp. 7–38) provides readers with a biography of mālik b. anas and the role he played within the sunni tradition. it also contains a subsection on the place of the muwaṭṭaʾ in modern scholarship and, finally, an overview of the work’s contents. third, “arabic introduction to the royal moroccan edition of the muwaṭṭaʾ” (pp. 39–72) is an english translation of the introduction to the arabic edition from which the present translation has been made. regarding the language and style, the unsigned first introduction states t h a t “ t h e t r a n s l a t i o n h a s s o m e t i m e s adopted a very formal, even archaic tone, while at other times, a colloquial style was deemed more appropriate” (p. 3). t h i s v a r i a t i o n n o t w i t h s t a n d i n g , t h e language is always clear and idiomatic. as stated in the first introductory chapter, the text was initially translated by drs. ali azeria and mohamed ouakrime of al akhawayn university, with the help of the editors of the royal moroccan edition and two graduate assistants, lahoucine amedjar and dawud nasir. this initial translation relied on primary and secondary mālikī sources. in a second stage, in order http://kohepocu.cchs.csic.es/flipbooks/3/#p=8 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) mālik b. anas’s al-muwaṭṭaʾ • 418 to make the text accessible to modern legal scholars, nonspecialists in islamic law, and english-speaking muslims, fadel adapted the translation to contemporary legal terminology in english. in a third stage, fadel and monette modified the translation to produce an easily readable text, which occasionally led them to depart from the original structure and sense of the arabic. both the decision to translate every term into english and the specific translation choices made for each term can be debated.6 for example, whereas the term ribā has usually been translated as “usury,” it is here translated as “unlawful profit.” although it is true that “usury” is not an accurate translation,7 a profit obtained from selling wine or pork is also unlawful but does not constitute ribā, so perhaps “interest” would have been a more appropriate translation. this kind of critique, however, does not detract from the merit of the translation, which constitutes, in my view, a valuable scholarly accomplishment. 6. kecia ali, for instance, has questioned the decision to translate into english terms that are not objects of comparative legal study. in particular, she focused on the translation of the terms ama and jāriya as “handmaiden,” a term that she considers archaic and ambiguous and one that does not reflect the reality of slavery in the period in which the muwaṭṭaʾ was composed. kecia ali, “the handmaiden’s tale,” muwaṭṭaʾ roundtable, islamic law blog, december 6, 2019, https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/06/muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%beroundtable-the-handmaidens-tale/. 7. on the meaning of ribā and usury, see adday hernández, el valor del tiempo: doctrina jurídica de la usura (ribā) en el occidente islámico medieval (helsinki: academia scientiarum fennica, 2016). 8. hady roger idris, “reflections on mālikism under the umayyads of spain”, in the formation of al-andalus. part 2: language, religion, culture and the sciences, ed. maribel fierro and julio samsó, 85–101, (aldershot: ashgate variorum, 1998), 92–95. 9. ḥusayn mu’nis (hussain monès), “the role of men of religion in the history of muslim spain up to the end of the caliphate,” in the formation of al-andalus. part 2: language, religion, culture and the sciences, ed. maribel fierro and julio samsó (aldershot: ashgate variorum, 1998), 51–84. 10. maribel fierro, “proto-malikis, malikis and reformed malikis,” in the islamic school of law: evolution, devolution, and progress, ed. peri j. bearman, rudolph peters, and frank e. vogel, 57–76 (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2005), 62; alfonso carmona, “the introduction of malik’s teachings in al-andalus,” in bearman, peters, and vogel, islamic school of law, 41–56. there is little to say about the structure of the translation, since it retains the structure of the original work, which is the same as that followed by the later manuals of mālikī fiqh. one does note, however, the absence of information on the transmitter of this version of the muwaṭṭaʾ, yaḥyā b. yaḥyā al-laythī (d. 234/848): his origins, his powerful position in cordoba, and how his many disciples accorded him fame and spread his recension of the work. it would also have been helpful for the volume to have offered a more detailed account of the introduction of the muwaṭṭaʾ in the islamic west, a process linked to the spread of mālikism. according to hady roger idris,8 and contrary to what muʾnis affirms, 9 the introduction of mālik’s doctrine was not supported by the umayyad dynasty o f c o r d o b a . i n s t e a d , i t w a s a d o p t e d independently by ʿulamāʾ educated in the islamic east who transmitted it after their return and was only later endorsed by the umayyads.10 of the two main legal https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/06/muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%be-roundtable-the-handmaidens-tale/ https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/06/muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%be-roundtable-the-handmaidens-tale/ https://bibliographies--brillonline--com.csic.debiblio.com/entries/index-islamicus/the-role-of-men-of-religion-in-the-history-of-muslim-spain-up-to-the-end-of-the-caliphate-a217831?s.num=6&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.index-islamicus&s.q=mu%27nis+husayn https://bibliographies--brillonline--com.csic.debiblio.com/entries/index-islamicus/the-role-of-men-of-religion-in-the-history-of-muslim-spain-up-to-the-end-of-the-caliphate-a217831?s.num=6&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.index-islamicus&s.q=mu%27nis+husayn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 419 • adday hernández trends found between the late second/ eighth and the early third/ninth centuries, mālikism was the only possible choice, since ḥanafism had been adopted by the abbasids and was thus perceived by the umayyads, who opposed its introduction in al-andalus, as the doctrine of the enemy. in addition, the muwaṭṭaʾ had a series of features that dovetailed with fit the ideological program of the umayyads. for instance, according to maribel fierro, the criticisms of the “east” (al-mashriq, a reference to iraq) found in the text fit the umayyads’ anti-abbasid policies, and the report included in the muwaṭṭaʾ on the taxes taken by ʿuthmān b. ʿaffān from the berbers of the maghrib demonstrated that their conversion to islam took place under umayyad rule, an argument that was used to fight the spread of fāṭimid influence in north africa.11 there is an academic debate about whether we can talk about a real affiliation by the andalusī jurists to the mālikī madhhab as such in yaḥyā b. yaḥyā’s t i m e s , o r w h e t h e r i t w o u l d b e m o r e appropriate to talk about geographical schools, the medinese/egyptian school 11. maribel fierro, “medina, the mashriq, and the maghrib in the recension of mālik’s muwaṭṭaʾ by the cordoban yaḥyā b. yaḥyā al-laythī,” muwaṭṭaʾ roundtable, islamic law blog, december 6, 2019, https:// islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/06/muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%be-roundtable-medina-the-mashriqand-the-maghrib-in-the-recension-of-maliks-muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%bc-by-the-cordoban-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-b-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-al/. 12. see, for instance, knut vikør, between god and the sultan: a history of islamic law (london: hurst and co., 2005), 98; ana fernández félix, “biografías de alfaquíes: la generación de al-‘utbī,” in biografías y género biográfico en el occidente islámico, ed. maría luisa avila navarro, 141–75 (granada: csic, 1997), 165; miklos muranyi, “a unique manuscript from kairouan in the british library: the samāʿ-work of ibn al-qāsim al-ʿutaqī and issues of methodology,” in method and theory in the study of islamic origins, ed. herbert berg, 325–68 (leiden: brill, 2003); fierro, “proto-malikis,” 65. 13. maribel fierro, “el alfaquí beréber yaḥyā b. yaḥyā al-layṯī (m. 234/848), ‘el inteligente de al-andalus,’” in ávila navarro, biografías y género biográfico, 269–344, at 334. 14. fierro, “el alfaquí beréber,” 330. 15. manuela marín, “una familia de ulemas cordobeses: los banū abī ʿīsà,” al-qanṭara 6 (1985): 291–320. in this particular case.12 however, the influence exerted by mālik b. anas in the islamic west at the time is undeniable, regardless of whether the mālikī school had already taken form. during the fourth/ tenth century, the muwaṭṭaʾ became t h e c a n o n i c a l ḥ a d ī t h c o m p i l a t i o n i n al-andalus, although apparently it did not influence fiqh substantially in that period.13 yaḥyā b. yaḥyā, who had transmitted it to al-andalus, was then regarded as the introducer of the orthodox canon, which included both the muwaṭṭaʾ in relation to ḥadīth and nāfiʿ’s (d. 169/785) qirāʾa (reading variant) of the qurʾan.14 y a ḥ y ā b . y a ḥ y ā w a s a n a n d a l u s ī scholar of berber origin (belonging to the maṣmūda from tangier and ceuta) whose family, known as the banū abī ʿīsā,15 had settled in al-andalus at the time of the conquests and supported the umayyads. by yaḥyā’s generation, the family had already reached a high degree of arabization and islamization and was very well situated in andalusī society. yaḥyā is said to have studied with mālik, nāfiʿ, and al-layth b. saʿd (d. 174/791), but the contradictions https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/06/muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%be-roundtable-medina-the-mashriq-and-the-maghrib-in-the-recension-of-maliks-muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%bc-by-the-cordoban-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-b-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-al/ https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/06/muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%be-roundtable-medina-the-mashriq-and-the-maghrib-in-the-recension-of-maliks-muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%bc-by-the-cordoban-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-b-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-al/ https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/06/muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%be-roundtable-medina-the-mashriq-and-the-maghrib-in-the-recension-of-maliks-muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%bc-by-the-cordoban-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-b-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-al/ https://islamiclaw.blog/2019/12/06/muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%be-roundtable-medina-the-mashriq-and-the-maghrib-in-the-recension-of-maliks-muwa%e1%b9%ad%e1%b9%ada%ca%bc-by-the-cordoban-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-b-ya%e1%b8%a5ya-al/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) mālik b. anas’s al-muwaṭṭaʾ • 420 found in the sources, together with the fact that the formal criteria followed in yaḥyā b. yaḥyā’s time regarding the transmission of texts were not as strict as those imposed from the third/ninth century onward, have led some scholars, such as maribel fierro, if not to deny, at least to question this direct contact.16 there are no doubts, however, about the fact that he attended the lessons of the egyptian disciples of mālik, including ibn al-qāsim (d. 191/806), whose doctrine would become the most widely followed in al-andalus. after the “traditionalization” of fiqh (jurisprudence) initiated by al-shāfiʿī,17 the muwaṭṭaʾ, whose transmission chains (isnāds) do not conform to the strict standards imposed by the supporters of this traditionalization, was used by those ʿulamāʾ who sought an intermediat e position between raʾy (personal opinion) and ḥadīth, such as ibn waḍḍāḥ (d. 286/ 900). the fact that the isnāds were not complete meant that the muwaṭṭaʾ was not considered a valid source of ḥadīth after the canonization of muslim’s and bukhārī’s ṣaḥīḥayn.18 however, ibn ʿabd al-barr (d. 463/1071) managed to complete all the chains except four in his kitāb al-tamhīd li-mā fī al-muwaṭṭaʾ min al-maʿānī wa-l16. fierro, “el alfaquí beréber,” 329–330. 17. see, for instance, joseph e. lowry, early islamic legal theory: the “risāla” of muhammad ibn idrīs al-shāfiʿī (leiden: brill, 2007), 165–205 (chap. 3: “prophetic sunna and hadith in the risāla”); ahmed el shamsy, the canonization of islamic law: a social and intellectual history (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015), 65–68 (“al-shāfiʿī’s critique of mālik”). 18. jonathan brown, the canonization of al-bukhārī and muslim (leiden: brill, 2007), 232–234. asānīd, with the aim of adapting the muwaṭṭaʾ to the principles established by the discipline of ḥadīth (ʿilm al-ḥadīth) and providing mālik’s work with the same legitimacy that had been granted to the ṣaḥīḥayn. in summary, this is a highly welcome contribution, especially for researchers working on subjects related to islamic law in the premodern islamic west, and there is no doubt that it will become one of the main reference sources in this field. the content is clear and accurate and the arabic technical terms related to the key concepts discussed in each chapter are provided in transcription between brackets the first time they appear, which not only makes it easier to locate the specific expression in the arabic text but also eases the reading of the english. the indexes are extremely useful for finding specific names and terms and allow the reader to identify both the chapters specifically devoted to particular concepts and the occasional occurrences of those concepts in other chapters. t h i s t r u s t w o r t h y t r a n s l a t i o n w i l l contribute to raising the quality of future studies by helping academic researchers in islamic studies interpret mālik’s work. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 454-458 book review the term “persianate” is widely used by scholars in various disciplines at present. of course, it has been around for several decades, but although it has been used to serve different purposes by scholars depending on their disciplines or regional specialties, there have been frequent attempts to return to marshall hodgson’s original definition to justify or challenge its use. not surprisingly, the term’s usage is largely confined to academic writing and it has not caught on in the larger world, unlike other area s t u d i e s d e s i g n a t i o n s s u c h a s m i d d l e eastern, south asian, and east asian. in literary and art-historical scholarship, persianate is often conflated with persian, suggesting the aspiration for a more transnational and cosmopolitan civilizational reach. but persian (like iranian) denotes a national designation as well as a language, and hence there is some slippage in the use of these terms. literary scholars and art and architecture historians have long grappled with these questions and faced the dilemma of choosing between persian, persianate, indo-persian, and islamicate in the case of south asia. naturally, people, texts, and cultural practices can be discussed under multiple categories, and often there are no precise distinctions between them. are some persian texts persianate, while others are not? are the instances in which the medieval persian poet ḥāfiẓ shīrāzī’s poetry was commented on by an ottoman turkish scholar or translated into a vernacular language of the deccan in the sixteenth century manifestations of persianate culture? or is it perhaps more accurate to state that they occurred in a persianate world? the transregional extent of persian in different premodern vernacular contexts justifies the use of the term in the original hodgthe persianate world: the frontiers of a eurasian lingua franca. edited by nile green (oakland: university of california press, 2019), xvi + 340 pp. isbn 978-0-520-30092-7. price: $34.95 (paper). the persianate world: rethinking a shared sphere. edited by abbas amanat and assef ashraf. iran studies 18 (leiden: brill, 2019), 256 pp. isbn 978-90-04-38728-7. price: $126 (cloth). sunil sharma boston university (sharma@bu.edu) © 2020 sunil sharma. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:sharma%40bu.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 455 • sunil sharma sonian sense, but outside of literary and artistic discourses, style and genre are not the defining criteria for what is persianate. in recent times, historians have taken up the challenge to further articulate and even broaden the conceptual parameters of the persianate. this effort has resulted in two edited volumes, issuing from conferences held a few years ago, with the same title, albeit different subtitles: the persianate world. there is obviously some overlap in the introductory historical surveys of the spread of persian beyond iran in the two books, but there is also some degree of conversation between the essays of a few scholars, including two of the three editors, whose work appears in both books. green states early in his introduction that the collection of essays in the volume he edited is “an exercise in world history, [whose] aim is to decouple the study of persian from both explicit and implicit m e t h o d o l o g i c a l n a t i o n a l i s m s ” ( p . 2 ) . building largely on post-hodgsonian scholarship on the multiple dimensions of the persianate by bert fragner,1 brian spooner, and william hanaway2 and the seminal essays of saïd amir arjomand,3 all of which explored the role of persian as a spoken or written contact language entrenched in the activities of specific social groups, green proposes a new and more precise term for the premodern 1. bert fragner, die “persophonie”: regionalität, identität und sprachkontakt in der geschichte asiens (berlin: das arabische buch, 1999). 2. william hanaway, literacy in the persianate world: writing and the social order (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania museum of archaeology and anthropology, 2012). 3. saïd amir arjomand, “defining persianate studies,” journal of persianate studies 1 (2008): 1–4; idem, “evolution of the persianate polity and its transmission to india,” journal of persianate studies 2 (2009): 115–136. 4. wiebke denecke and nam nguyen, “shared literary heritage in the east asian sinographic sphere,” the oxford handbook of classical chinese literature, ed. wiebke denecke, wai-yee lee, and xiaofei tian, 551–567 (new york: oxford university press, 2017). persianate world: “persographia,” as d i s t i n c t f r o m t h e “ p e r s o p h o n i e ” o r persophonia, a term introduced by fragner. this term has a parallel in the field of east asian studies, where the designation “sinographic sphere” has found consensus among current scholars and provides a b e t t e r a p p r o a c h , h i s t o r i c a l l y a n d intellectually, than the area studies model.4 placing the emphasis on “scribal practices and manuscript-based exchanges” that spread through courtly and sufi networks, which were distinct from those connected to the spread of islam, rather than merely on the movement of persian-speaking communities outside the iranian plateau, the concept of a persographic sphere is highly appealing in many ways. it is even applicable to cultural areas with languages not written in the perso-arabic script, such as armenian, georgian, and bengali, to name a few, where literary genres and poetic images were nevertheless derived from persian. according to green, it is not sufficient to delineate a broad perso-islamic “cultural axis” to map the geographic region of the persianate; instead, more precise locations that served as sites for the circulation of texts and people must be identified. the attempt to shift the focus of the study of the persianate from disciplines that privilege aesthetics to a world-historical inquiry nevertheless calls al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) nile green’s the persianate world, amanat & ashraf’s the persianate world • 456 for a survey of the origins and spread of the new persian language as a lingua franca in the longue durée in order to identify the “breaking points and fault lines” in this global phenomenon. persian as a lingua franca and persianate practices flourished in multilingual societies, at times in tandem with other vernacular languages, but eventually lost out to them as this world shrank. even as printing technology allowed more communities to have access to texts from a shared literary heritage, it also helped the cause of the languages that were in competition with persian and were linked to nascent nationalist movements. as a result, the map of the persianate w o r l d , e s p e c i a l l y t h e l o c a t i o n s o f persographic hubs and centers, underwent a dramatic and permanent change. the twelve essays in green’s volume were carefully curated to highlight the fullest geographic spread of the persian world from china in the east to britain in the west. there is a chronological division, with three parts of four essays each by scholars who are specialists in a particular area of the persianate world. the overall narrative charts the rise and apex of persianate cultural achievement in the medieval and early modern periods, including the incorporation of many non-persophone communities into the fold, leading to the so-called breaking point. part i, “pan-eurasian expansions, ca. 1400–1600,” is on the earliest period, covering the history of persian learning in the early ottoman empire and the careers of some ottoman persianists (murat umut inan); the spread of persian in rural bengal and the formation of a bengali muslim identity (thibaut d’hubert); translation between persian and chinese at the ming court (graeme ford); and the history of the use of persian vis-à-vis turkic in the volga-ural region in inner asia (devin deweese). part ii, under the rubric “the constraints of cosmopolitanism, ca. 1600– 1800,” includes essays on the importance of personal and provincial networks in the production of mughal persian texts (purnima dhavan); the fate of persian in qing china, especially its sufi communities (david brophy); multilingual persianate communities in imperial russia (alfrid bustanov); and the new use of persian through a study of talismanic scrolls in xinjiang, eastern turkistan (alexandre papas). part iii, with the heading “new empires, new nations, ca. 1800–1920,” has essays on hybrid identities as exemplified in the life and career of the white mughal d. o. dyce sombre (michael fisher); on the de-persification translation program at the court of the khanate of khiva (marc toutant); on colonial daghestan as seen through the lives of migrants such as ʿabd al-rahim talibuf (rebecca ruth gould); and on the poet adīb peshāwarī (d. 1930), another migrant, this time one who had left british india to settle in iran (abbas amanat). the book concludes with a short excursus, in the form of an epilogue titled “the persianate millennium” by brian spooner, that provides a brief history of the persian language. the topic of multilingualism in persianate societies is one of the overarching themes in these essays, attesting to the development of persian in interaction with other literary cultures in various societies through a range of textual practices. together, the essays provide different pieces of the history of persian learning at the court, chancery, school, and shrine, enmeshed in webs of power and politics over a m i l l e n n i u m . t h e r e c o u l d h a v e b e e n al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 457 • sunil sharma more dialogue among the essays in this volume, including direct cross-references, but that is a difficult task and green ties them together in the introduction. the essays open up exciting prospects for more comparative work, especially with respect to the degree of persianization and competition with vernacular cultures in different corners of the persianate world at the local or transregional levels. the underlying questions in the volume edited by amanat and ashraf, as articulated in the introduction by ashraf and the first essay by amanat (“remembering the persianate”), are whether the “category of iran” can effectively be marginalized in persianate studies, and how iranian s t u d i e s — t h e c o n c e r n i s m a i n l y w i t h the discipline of history—can avoid the pitfalls of “parochialism and essentialism” ( p . 1 3 ) . t h e p r o c e s s o f r e t r i e v i n g the cultural high points of a unified c u l t u r a l s p h e r e d e m o n s t r a t e s t h a t the persianate model is central to the academic study of the middle east, in particular iran. stressing the existence of a vast sociocultural sphere connected by persophonie (fārsī-zabān), a harmonious “comfort zone,” the editors emphasize the viability of persianate studies as an academic field whose purview extends beyond language and literature. it was the shared experience of persianate forms of governance, learning, and pleasure in the courts of premodern transregional empires that allowed the sustenance of this ecumene. the expansion from a persian to a persianate sphere is mapped through the mobility of medieval literary figures such as nāṣir khusraw, amīr khusraw dihlavī, and others who upheld the cause of persian in areas beyond the iranian heartland. rooted in ideals of kingship and statecraft in the pre-islamic past, the cultural achievements of iran in poetry and music—described in a celebratory vein— along with the mobility of sufis, trade networks, and material culture blossomed in a muslim context, overlapping to some extent with the use of arabic. literary genres and texts played a central role in the flowering of the persianate, attesting to the persographic feature of the cultural expansion. in contrast to green’s book, in which particular geographic spots in the history of the persianate world are scrutinized as sites for the limits of persian, here it is the waning and demise of the robust persianate cultural sphere, with its shared legacy that failed to “survive the trauma of encounters with modernity” (p. 40), that signals the swan song of the vast cultural ecumene. the eight essays in the volume edited by amanat and ashraf explore a range of topics. after amanat’s historical survey, which is really a second introduction to the volume, richard eaton’s essay offers a comparative discussion of the persian and sanskrit cosmopolises, the latter related to the pioneering work of sheldon pollock. the implicit suggestion that the persian cosmopolis is perhaps a more useful term for the same geographic and cultural sphere as that denoted by the persianate world is supported by a preference for it in some current scholarship. eaton points out the pitfalls of confusing the application of two hodgsonian terms, islamicate and persianate, in the case of premodern s o u t h a s i a , e s p e c i a l l y t h e d e c c a n . the essay by a. azfar moin on the politics of saint shrines in the ottoman, safavid, and mughal empires is also comparative in nature. a study of the bengali version of the sayf al-mulūk romance by ālāol al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) nile green’s the persianate world, amanat & ashraf’s the persianate world • 458 (fl. 1651–71) in arakan by thibaut d’hubert is the sole piece on a literary text. the other four essays are studies on the rise of naqshbandi-mujaddidi sufi networks (waleed ziad); multilingualism in the context of the enikolopian family in the caucasus (hirotake maeda); inclusion and exclusion of the baluch people in the persianate world (joanna de groot); and the twilight of persian in india through a close analysis of an indo-persian travel account to britain by mīr lāʾiq ʿalī from the late nineteenth century (nile green). only de groot’s essay includes a further elucidation of the conceptual value of the term “persianate world,” suggesting that “explorations of its fluidity, complexity, a n d h e t e r o g e n e i t y w i l l g i v e i t m o r e force and impact as an analytical tool” (p. 197). altogether the essays attempt to provide case studies representing the four persianate modalities identified in the first essay: governance and statecraft; a shared literary heritage; sufi networks; and commonalities in material cultures. these two books with their wide array of scholarly output will certainly remain landmark volumes marking the maturation of persianate studies as an interdisciplinary field of historical inquiry. the introductions are valuable in themselves, especially for pedagogical purposes. as with most edited volumes, the individual essays will mostly be consulted by those with a specialized interest in a particular region or linguistic tradition. in the end, it is not possible to marginalize iran, or for that matter india, because of the astounding levels of persographic textual and artistic production in those areas as compared to frontier areas. at the same time, the books afford the opportunity to take stock of the state of the field, and it may be time to stop redefining the term at every instance, or to stop avoiding its existence altogether, as the case may be. going beyond offering sweeping surveys of perso-islamic political and persian literary histories or collating a set of case studies in an edited volume, more nuanced and comparative studies of how the term can be effectively integrated into various methodological approaches that do rely heavily on texts—such as the self and body, sexuality and gender, history of emotions and sports, food, and travel studies—will further establish the conceptual uses of the term. the various roles played by women in persianate societies, whether as poets or patrons, a point brought up by green in his introduction, should also be given more attention. mana kia’s recent book, persianate selves: memories of place and origin before nationalism (stanford university press, 2020), offers a compelling and attractive model to understand what persianate signified at an individual level in the broader context of the interconnected histories of iran and india. this is currently a t hriv ing area of s t u d y d es p it e t he disparate understandings of the term in different disciplines, but as green argues in his introduction, the persianate will always be a “contingent” and “contested” category and has the scope to be redefined in multiple ways in future scholarship. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 443-447 book review one of the most important extant agricult ural treatises from t he m i d d l e i s l a m i c e r a i s b u g h y a t al-fallāḥīn fī al-ashjār al-muthmira wa-lrayāḥin by the sixth yemeni rasulid sultan, al-malik al-afḍal al-ʿabbās b. ʿalī (d. 788/1376). there are five known extant copies of this text, although none from the rasulid era itself, apart from an abridged version by the author.1 attention was first drawn to the treatise by max meyerhof in the bulletin de l’institut d’égypte in 1943.2 he translated the title as l’objet des désirs des agriculteurs au sujet des arbres fruitiers et des plantes odoriférantes. his description of the manuscript was based on a 1931 copy of an undated manuscript 1. this is published in d. m. varisco and g. r. smith, eds., the manuscript of al-malik al-afḍal al-ʿabbās b. ʿalī b. dāʾūd b. yūsuf b. ʿumar b. ʿalī ibn rasūl: a medieval arabic anthology from the yemen (warminster, uk: aris and phillips for the e. j. w. gibb memorial trust, 1989), 206–211. 2. max meyerhof, “sur un traité d’agriculture composé par un sultan yéménite du xive siècle.” bulletin de l’institut d’égypte 25 (1943): 55–63; 26 (1944): 51–65. 3. https://archives.collections.ed.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/537. (zirāʿa 155) in dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya; at the time, the copy had been sent outside the library for its safety during the war. i n 1 9 5 3 – 5 4 , r . b . s e r j e a n t c o p i e d a manuscript of the text that was made available to him by a certain shaykh muḥammad b. aḥmad al-shāṭirī in tarim. t h e t a r i m t e x t , n o w n o t a c c o u n t e d for, had itself been copied in 1197/1782. serjeant’s transcription is housed with his papers at the university of edinburgh.3 the oldest surviving manuscript is in the ahmet iii library (a. 2432, fols. 177v–225r) in istanbul. there is also a copy in the western library of the great mosque in sanaa (zirāʿa 1), which was copied in 1362/1943, although it wrongly al-malik al-afḍal al-ʿabbās b. ʿalī b. dāwūd al-rasūlī, bughyat al-fallāḥīn fī al-ashjār al-muthmira wa-l-rayāḥīn. edited by khālid khalfān b. nāṣir al-wahībī (damascus: dār al-farqad, 2016), 2 vols., 1199 pp., 6 b/w images, map, indices. price: $30 (cloth). daniel martin varisco institute for advanced study, princeton (dmvarisco@gmail.com) © 2020 daniel martin varisco. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:dmvarisco%40gmail.com?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 444 • daniel martin varisco attributes the text to al-malik yaḥyā b. ismāʿīl al-ghassānī. none of these copies appears to be complete. the editor of the present edition, dr. khālid al-wahībī, is omani and the son of a former minister in the omani government. during 2005–6 he visited dār al-kutub in cairo and examined two manuscript copies of the text as well as microfilms of the copy in the western library of the great mosque and of the earliest manuscript in the ahmet iii library. the edition of al-wahībī is an important contribution to the study of islamic-era agriculture for several reasons. this is the first publication of the bughyat al-fallāḥīn, based on four manuscripts. variations between the manuscripts are noted in the extensive footnotes. the editor provides a discussion o f p r e v i o u s r e s e a r c h b y m e y e r h o f , serjeant,4 myself,5 yaḥyā al-ʿansī,6 and ʿabd al-wāḥid al-khāmirī7 (pp. 17–21). drawing on al-khāmirī and the yemeni chronicles, he provides a biography of 4. r. b. serjeant, “the cultivation of cereals in medieval yemen,” arabian studies 1 (1974): 25–74; idem, “agriculture and horticulture: some cultural interchanges of the medieval arabs and europe,” in oriente e occidente nel medioevo, filosofia e scienze, 535–548 (rome: accademia nazionale dei lincei, 1971). 5. d. m. varisco, medieval folk astronomy and agriculture in arabia and the yemen (aldershot: variorum, 1997); idem, “water sources and traditional irrigation in yemen,” new arabian studies 3 (1996): 238–83; idem, “an anonymous 14th century almanac from rasulid yemen,” zeitschrift für geschichte der arabischislamischen wissenschaften 9 (1994): 195–228; idem, medieval agriculture and islamic science: the almanac of a yemeni sultan (seattle: university of washington press, 1994); idem, “a royal crop register from rasulid yemen,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 34 (1991): 1–22; idem, “medieval agricultural texts from rasulid yemen,” manuscripts of the middle east 4 (1989): 150–154; idem, “the production of sorghum (dhurah) in highland yemen,” arabian studies 7 (1985): 53–88; idem, “sayl and ghayl: the ecology of water allocation in yemen,” human ecology 11 (1983): 365–383. 6. yaḥyā al-ʿansī, al-turāth al-zirāʿī wa-maʿārifuhu fī al-yaman (sanaa: american institute for yemeni studies, 2008); al-mawāqīt al-zirāʿiyya fī al-yaman (sanaa: american institute for yemeni studies, 2006); al-maʿālim al-zirāʿiyya fī al-yaman (sanaa: american institute for yemeni studies and centre français d’archéologie et de sciences sociales, 2004). al-ʿansī discusses contemporary knowledge of agriculture in yemen, but not that of the rasulid era. 7. ʿabd al-wāḥid al-khāmirī edited a biographical text of al-afḍal al-ʿabbās: al-ʿaṭāyā al-saniyya wa-lmawāhib al-haniyya fī al-manāqib al-yamaniyya (sanaa: wizārat al-thaqāfa wa-l-siyāḥa, 2004). al-afḍal, including the books ascribed to the sultan (pp. 24–36). he describes the four manuscripts he consulted in cairo, with a summary of their contents (pp. 37–61), and he identifies the sources used or quoted by al-afḍal in his treatise (pp. 62–95). the edition is followed by a bibliography of references (pp. 1119–34) and very useful indexes (pp. 1135–99) on a range of topics: names of tribes and peoples; place-names; plants and the diseases and pests that afflict them; animals and the diseases and pests that afflict them; stars and lunar stations (anwāʾ); seasons and almanac lore; soils and agricultural land; water sources; seeds, seedlings, and plantings; harvest, storage and ripening; pruning and grafting of trees; human diseases and cures; books mentioned in the text; cultural terms; agricultural tools; and terms of measure. t h e p r i m a r y v a l u e o f b u g h y a t al-fallāḥīn lies in the information it yields on agriculture in yemen. al-afḍal provides s o m e d e t a i l s o f h i s o w n b u t m a i n l y al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) al-malik al-afḍal al-ʿabbās b. ʿalī b. dāwūd al-rasūlī’s bughyat al-fallāḥīn • 445 relies on two earlier yemeni sources: milḥ al-malāḥa fī maʿrifat al-filāḥa 8 of al-malik al-ashraf ʿumar (d. 696/1296) and al-ishāra fī al-ʿimāra of his father, al-malik al-mujāhid ʿalī (d. 764/1362). two known copies of milḥ al-malāḥa exist: one published by muḥammad jāzim and the other acquired by eduard glaser in the late nineteenth century.9 mixed in with details on yemen is information taken from three well-known texts that have received previous attention. these are the tenth-century al-filāḥa al-nabaṭiyya attributed to ibn waḥshiyya and translated from the syriac, the arabic translation of the byzantine al-filāḥa al-rūmiyya of qusṭūs (cassiano basso scolastico) of the sixth–seventh century, and the eleventhcentury al-filāḥa of the andalusian ibn baṣṣāl. a few other non-yemeni sources are also used. given that these non-yemeni sources exist and have been published, the principal contribution of bughyat al-fallāḥīn is the yemeni material. there exist a number of other yemeni sources with relevant information on yemeni agriculture, but these have largely been ignored by the editor.10 the editor has chosen to compare the two texts in dār al-kutub, the earliest one in the ahmet iii library and the very late copy in sanaa. it is clear from his footnotes that the most trustworthy witness is cairo’s zirāʿa 155. there is no colophon 8. meyerhof transliterated the first word as milḥ, which i follow. jāzim prefers mulaḥ, but both have similar meanings. lacking an original text, it is difficult to determine which term al-ashraf used. 9. muḥammad jāzim, “kitāb mulāḥ al-malāḥa fī maʿrifat al-filāḥa,” al-iklīl 3, no. 1 (1985): 170–207. jāzim copied an incomplete text copied in yemen after 1172/1758. the edition by ʿ abd allāh al-mujāhid, milḥ al-milāḥa fi maʿrifat al-filāḥa (damascus: dār al-fikr, 1987), was copied from jāzim’s handwritten transcription and should be avoided. the glaser manuscript (no. 247) is in vienna. i am preparing a translation of this text based on the two extant copies and quoted excerpts in bughyat al-fallāḥīn. 10. see the list in my “medieval agricultural texts,” updated online at http://filaha.org/medieval_ agricultural.html. and the writing does not look rasulid, but there is a marginal note in this manuscript with the date 1131 ah (1718–19 ce). this note appears to have been added by a later hand, given that it refers to a group of scholars from mocha who came to shaykh aḥmad b. ʿīsā al-walīdī, referred to as a father in the note, regarding seeds for the clove (qaranful) plant. al-wahībī (p. 39) assumes this is the approximate date of the manuscript, but the note appears to have been made by someone who owned the manuscript rather than at the time of its copying. there are relatively few comments in the margins. some appear to be corrections to the text, but others add information, often about the tihāma region. regardless of the date of the manuscript’s copying, it is the secondoldest manuscript surviving thus far. the copy made of this text in 1931 is useless, since we have the original from which it was copied. similarly, the very late sanaa manuscript is of little value because it is poorly written and contains numerous errors, extending even to the name of the author. although al-wahībī suggests that the manuscript preserved in the ahmet iii library in istanbul was copied by ʿalī b. ʿamr al-qādirī in 868 ah (1463–64 ce), i a m n o t s u r e w h e r e h e f o u n d t h i s very early date. when i examined the manuscript in istanbul in 1983, i noted al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 446 • daniel martin varisco that it was copied by a kurd in 1001/1592. regardless of the date, it remains the oldest copy known, although the author’s name and the book’s title are missing. it is not clear how a yemeni manuscript could have been copied in istanbul in the fifteenth century, since the rasulid dynasty ended in 1454 and the earliest invasion of yemen by the ottomans took place in 1538. thus far no original yemeni copy of the text has been found in turkey. ahmet iii lived at the start of the eighteenth century, when the cairo copy was made. it is bound with a copy of the byzantine al-filāḥa al-rūmiyya. unfortunately, the text is full of errors and was clearly copied by someone who had little knowledge of yemen. it is interesting to note that both the ahmet iii copy and the main cairo copy are incomplete and end at almost the same point. the ahmet iii copy ends with a discussion of the seven climes, about three lines longer than the cairo copy. the two later copies also do not go beyond this point. this suggests that the original text may in fact not have been finished. it is also possible that the agricultural text of sixteen chapters was completed, since the last section on the seven climes is not listed in the contents and is referred to in the text as a fāʾida. we have no information on the original manuscript, but there must have been a very early copy, most probably a rasulid one, that was taken to istanbul for the copy made there. the cairo copy was clearly written in yemen, although it is not clear when it arrived in cairo. the fact that there are more recent copies in tarim and sanaa indicates that there must be an earlier copy, or more than one in yemen, unless it has been destroyed. given that many manuscripts are still found in private yemeni libraries, with some now sold to wealthy individuals in neighboring states, other copies of bughyat al-fallāḥīn may yet surface. given the effort put into this edition, it is unfortunate that the editor has a limited knowledge of rasulid yemen and the history of yemeni agriculture in general. one of the glaring errors is misidentifying the author of milḥ al-malāḥa, whom he elsewhere recognizes as al-ashraf (p. 77), as al-malik al-muẓaffar in a footnote on p. 193, note 3. the problem is that al-afḍal is using the term jadd here as an honorific for his father’s uncle, not to denote his literal grandfather. in describing al-ashraf’s book, al-afḍal calls the author his jadd (p. 100), but al-afḍal’s grandfather was al-malik al-muʾayyad dāwūd, the brother of al-ashraf. in the passage on p. 193 the reference is to the jadd of his father, called the khalīfa, but the author of milḥ al-malāḥa is not his father’s grandfather. the same problem occurs o n p . 1 9 4 , n o t e 7 , w h e r e a l w a h ī b ī assumes the quotation is from al-malik al-muʾayyad when it is from al-ashraf. i suspect that al-afḍal is quoting his father about al-ashraf here, since this is the usual formula used. on p. 199, note 16, al-wahībī misidentifies the star called kalb in egypt as the lunar station ʿawwāʾ, but the reference is to the summer rising of sirius, a famous marker in ancient egypt. the substitution of qittāʾ (p. 203) for the snake cucumber (qiththāʾ) is probably a printing error. the list of non-arabic references has a number of errors and indicates that the editor did not have access to western commentaries on the non-yemeni texts quoted by al-afḍal. a comparison of this published edition to the cairo manuscript reveals a few instances in which the latter has been al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) al-malik al-afḍal al-ʿabbās b. ʿalī b. dāwūd al-rasūlī’s bughyat al-fallāḥīn • 447 misread. on p. 185, line 1, al-wahībī chooses nayrūz rather than what is clearly buzūr in the cairo manuscript. the word cannot be nayrūz because it refers to summer rather than spring and other parts of the text note that this is the season when seeds appear. the himyaritic month name for february is dhū dithāʾ and not dhū al-dhayā (p. 190), although none of the copies gives the proper spelling. on p. 192 the word ayḍan is left out. on p. 193 al-wahībī misreads the cairo manuscript, which i read as taṭammu rather than yaḍummu; the verb taṭammu is used in the text of ibn al-waḥshiyya.11 i suspect that the reference on p. 198, line 4, is to grapevines in the village of al-janāt, as in the cairo manuscript, rather than al-jibāl. on p. 327, al-wahībī misreads sawāqī (water channels) as sawālif. on p. 413, line 6, after the coastal plant name al-ʿrhf 11. ibn waḥshiyya, l’agriculture nabatéenne = al-filāḥa al-nabaṭiyya, ed. toufic fahd, 3 vols. (damascus: institut français d’études arabes de damas, 1995), 2:944. for mulūkhiyya, he drops from the cairo manuscript the phrase wa-fī al-ṭarafāt/ al-ṭaraqāt (?), which appears to be the term for a region. in sum, this is a valuable resource on a very important fourteenth-century yemeni text, although it has a number of annoying errors and misreadings. t h e o n l y m a n u s c r i p t c o p i e s w o r t h examining are the cairo and ahmet iii ones, given the numerous errors in the two later copies, so it is not clear why the editor bothered with the latter. he also did not have access to serjeant’s copy of the tarim manuscript, although this is archived in edinburgh. since the two volumes were published in damascus, they will be difficult to access for most scholars. however, anyone interested in agriculture during the mamluk and rasulid eras should secure a copy of them. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 421-429 book review the book under review is a new, p a r t i a l e d i t i o n o f i b n a ʿ t h a m al-kūfī’s kitāb al-futūḥ, made by qays al-ʿaṭṭār and printed in 2017 in karbalāʾ, iraq.1 although the kitāb al-futūḥ has been edited several times over the past half-century, the present volume deserves special attention as it is based on a manuscript—ms ankara (saib 5418), kept in dil ve tarih-coğrafya fakültesi kütüphanesi of ankara university—that has not been used for any of the work’s previous printed editions. 1. i am deeply indebted to dr. mahdi mojtahedi, ferdowsi university of mashhad, for calling my attention to this edition and making a copy of it available to me. al-shaykh qays al-ʿaṭṭār, the editor of the book, is the director of markaz al-imām al-ḥasan li-l-dirāsāt al-takhaṣṣuṣiyya farʿ mashhad (see https://imamhassan.org/ contents/view/details?id=135). 2. mustawfī, tarjuma-yi kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. mīrzā muḥammad shīrāzī malik al-kuttāb as tarjuma-yi kitāb al-futūḥ az aḥmad b. muḥammad b. ʿalī al-maʿrūf bi-aʿtham al-kūfī, wa mutarjim-i ān aḥmad b. muḥammad al-harawī (bombay: mīrzā muḥammad shīrāzī malik al-kuttāb, 1305/1887). 3. zeki velidi togan, “ibn aʿtham-al-kufi,” islamic culture 44, no. 1 (1970): 249–252. © 2020 mónika schönléber. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. until the middle third of the twentieth century, scholars of arabic historiography wishing to use this work had to rely, besides manuscripts, on a later nineteenth-century lithograph edition of the work’s persian translation.2 although the most extensive extant arabic manuscript of the work had already been found in 1925,3 it remained u n e d i t e d f o r a l m o s t h a l f a c e n t u r y . this shortcoming was finally remedied, at least in part, by the publication of the hitherto most reliable and complete printed text, published in hyderābād in 1968–1975 ibn aʿtham al-kūfī, qiṭʿa min kitāb al-futūḥ, li-l-ʿallāma al-muʾarrikh abī muḥammad aḥmad b. aʿtham al-kūfī, al-mutawaffā baʿda sanat 320 h, qūbilat ʿalā nuskha qadīma min al-qarn al-sādis al-hijrī, akhrajahu wa-waḍaʿa fahārisahu markaz iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-tābiʿ li-dār makhṭūṭāt al-ʿataba al-ʿabbāsiyya al-muqaddasa. edited by qays al-ʿaṭṭār (karbalāʾ: maktabat wa-dār makhṭūṭāt al-ʿataba al-ʿabbāsiyya al-muqaddasa, 1438/2017), 4* + 736 pp. mónika schönléber avicenna institute of middle eastern studies (piliscsaba/budapest, hungary) (schonleber@avicenna-kkki.hu) https://imamhassan.org/contents/view/details?id=135 https://imamhassan.org/contents/view/details?id=135 mailto:schonleber%40avicenna-kkki.hu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 422 • mónika schönléber (henceforth abbreviated as h).4 yet strictly speaking, that volume cannot be regarded as a truly critical edition, either, even if the editors made a major effort to base their undertaking on all the manuscripts preserving the arabic text that were available to them. in fact, they used four out of the seven currently known arabic exemplars: ms gotha (fb ms. orient. a 1592), ms istanbul (ahmet iii 2956/1–2), ms dublin (chester beatty 3272), and ms birmingham (mingana 572). two further copies might have escaped the editors’ attention because of the misidentification of their codices: ms patna (khudā bakhsh 1042) was ascribed to al-wāqidī in the library’s 1929 printed catalog,5 while fuat sezgin referred to ms ankara in his first, 1967 volume of geschichte des arabischen schrifttums as a work by abū mikhnaf.6 the same cannot be said of the last known fragment, ms milan (ambrosiana h 129), since it was properly identified as ibn aʿtham’s work in the very first paper to mention it. yet this piece, published in an italian festschrift in 1910 and also quoted by c. brockelmann in his entry on ibn aʿtham in the encyclopaedia of islam, did not gain particularly wide currency in later research, which could explain why it was overlooked by the editors of h.7 despite the unquestionable merits of the editors, who, for the first time, made available a fairly complete arabic 4. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. muḥammad ʿaẓīm al-dīn and muḥammad ʿabd al-muʿīn khān, 8 vols. (hyderābād: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1388–1395/1968–1975). 5. maulavi muinuddin nadwi, catalogue of the arabic and persian manuscripts in the oriental public library at bankipore, vol. 15, arabic mss., history (patna: baptist mission press, 1929), 108–110. 6. fuat sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 9 vols. (leiden: e. j. brill, 1967–1974), 1:308–309 (4–5). 7. eugenio griffini, “i due episodi siciliani dello pseudo al waqîdî in uno nuova redazione anonima,” centenario della nascita di michele amari, ed. enrico besta, gaetano m. columba, carlo a. nallino, antonio salinas, giambattista siragusa, and carlo o. zuretti, 402–415 (palermo: virzì, 1910). 8. lawrence i. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 87–125, esp. 114. text of ibn aʿtham’s history, like most pioneering enterprises, h was unable to settle all the problematic issues raised by the manuscript tradition. unfortunately, since no introduction is provided to the eight volumes, the editors share neither working principles and methods nor their observations concerning the work’s textual tradition. in the absence of such information, readers are left almost entirely in the dark about major questions, including the physical condition and dating problems of the manuscripts, their copyists, the circumstances of their copying, the lacunae, and the handling of poems, to mention but a few issues. thus, from time to time, a shroud of vagueness envelops the source of textual insertions and their extent, especially since not even the most careful reading of the footnotes sheds light on these issues. it is not always clear, for example, why some of the poems missing from ms istanbul (the one apparently chosen as the edition’s basis against which the other three were collated) but preserved in mss dublin and birmingham were sometimes included in the main text, whereas in other cases they were relegated to the footnotes. nor are hypercorrections infrequent, particularly when isnāds are concerned, as lawrence i. conrad has already pointed out.8 although much caution thus needs to be exercised when drawing conclusions al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ibn aʿtham al-kūfī’s qiṭʿa min kitāb al-futūḥ • 423 b a s e d o n h ’ s t e x t b e c a u s e o f t h e s e uncertainties, none of the kitāb al-futūḥ’s three subsequent editions provided a more solid basis for research. the edition published by nuʿaym zarzūr in 1986 only rarely offers more than a simple retyping of h.9 the editor also chose a peculiar “method” to fill the lacunae of the arabic text. in most cases, he simply inserted the medieval persian translation’s modern arabic retranslation without indicating this fact accurately. as though to worsen this indefensible practice, such insertions were from time to time also complemented with additional texts from, for example, the work of al-ṭabarī (d. 310/92 3 ). 10 moreover, even a careful reading of his text is sometimes of little help in securely distinguishing the entire extent of editorial interventions. for instance, although at 1:75, n. 1, zarzūr draws his readers’ attention to a gap and refers to the persian manuscripts he used (mss hyderābād, salar jung 144 and 145),11 ten pages later the endpoint of the arabic retranslation is marked only by a square bracket , without any explanation.12 the process of harmonizing h and the retranslation of the persian may have led to further difficulties, 9. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. nuʿaym zarzūr as: al-futūḥ, 4 vols. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1406/1986). 10. see, e.g., ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ (ed. zarzūr), 1:78, lines 20–21; 1:81, lines 4–5. 11. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ (ed. zarzūr), 1:75, n. 1. 12. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ (ed. zarzūr), 1:84, line 20. 13. for the missing part, see h 1:100, lines 1–11. 14. see, for example, ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. by ʿalī shīrī as futūḥ, 5 vols. (beirut: dār al-aḍwāʾ, 1411/1991), from 1:72, line 16 to 1:83, line 8, esp. 1:83, n. 1. 15. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. suhayl zakkār as al-futūḥ, 3 vols. (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1412/1992). 16. since shīrī’s text is identical with zarzūr’s, there is good reason to assume that he simply recycled his predecessor’s text. 17. ibn ḥubaysh, ghazawāt, ed. suhayl zakkār as ghazawāt ibn ḥubaysh, 2 vols. (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1412/1992), 13 (introduction). including losses from the arabic text transmitted through the extant codices, as is the case with a section of about half a page that was in all probability left out when the end of the retranslated persian passage was inadequately joined to the arabic of h.13 the same method of filling the lacunae o f t h e o r i g i n a l a r a b i c w i t h s e c t i o n s translated back from the persian was employed by both later editors of the kitāb al-futūḥ. however, one of them, ʿalī shīrī, was more careful in systematically marking these insertions by introducing them with an editorial note and indicating their terminations by square brackets supplemented with clarifying footnotes.14 the insertions are less easily discerned in suhayl zakkār’s 1992 edition.15 unlike s h ī r ī , z a k k ā r d i d n o t m e r e l y r e u s e zarzūr’s modern arabic retranslation16 but chose to create his own based on shīrāzī’s abovementioned lithograph.17 to be sure, this is very much in line with zakkār’s intention to finally prepare the much-needed critical edition, for which he likewise chose to rely on ms istanbul, using ms dublin as the control text. yet his footnotes reveal that he did not al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 424 • mónika schönléber systematically refer to the readings of the latter, and like zarzūr before him, he also incorporated different passages from independent works into the main text of the kitāb al-futūḥ (e.g. “ṣiffīn,” most likely the waqʿat ṣiffīn).18 this brief overview perhaps explains t h e e x c i t e m e n t f e l t b y a n y s t u d e n t o f n i n t h a n d t e n t h c e n t u r y a r a b i c historiography when laying hands on a freshly edited ibn aʿtham, especially if, as is the case with the volume reviewed here, it draws on a previously neglected manuscript, thereby making its testimony available to the academic community. of course, the choice to edit merely a select part of a multivolume opus has its potential pitfalls. however, in view of the enormous extent of the kitāb al-futūḥ, the hardships of accessing its manuscripts, and the difficulties abounding in its extant printed versions, of which my review gives no more than a slight glimpse, all efforts to improve the entire text or portions of it are easily justifiable and more than welcome.19 this having been said, it may also be noted that an approach along these lines yields the best results if the editor selects a particular portion that provides a n i n t r i n s i c r a t i o n a l e f o r i t s q u a s i independent treatment, either in terms of its textual transmission or because of the work’s structure. this does not entirely hold true for the present volume, since, 18. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ (ed. zakkār), 1:164, lines 13–17. 19. this would also be true for other partial editions based on different codices, if their editors had not ascribed ibn aʿtham’s text to others, thereby deluding themselves while modifying and commenting on the text; cf. mónika schönléber, “notes on the textual tradition of ibn aʿtham’s kitāb al-futūḥ,” in contacts and interaction: proceedings of the 27th congress of the union européenne des arabisants et islamisants, helsinki 2014, ed. jaakko hämeen-anttila, petteri koskikallio, and ilkka lindstedt, 427–38 (leuven: peeters, 2017), esp. 429–31, with further literature. as the editor, qays al-ʿaṭṭār, explains in his introduction, his intention was simply to complement the kitāb al-futūḥ’s existing editions by making a previously unpublished manuscript available to a broader audience. it must also be noted that ms ankara does not seem to represent a separate, easily definable thematic unit within the kitāb al-futūḥ. although neither the original beginning nor the end of the codex is extant, in my estimation, which is based on an examination of the quire signatures of the manuscript, no more than a few, most likely about two to three, folios could have been lost from its beginning. unfortunately, no similar calculation can produce a reliable estimate of the number of missing folios at the manuscript’s end. comparing the estimated loss in the beginning closely with ibn aʿtham’s text suggests that ms ankara very possibly did not start with the beginning of a larger thematic unit but rather was part of a multivolume set of manuscripts in which textual units were not necessarily distributed among the single codices according to thematic principles. yet mention should be made of the interesting circumstance that the very first preserved lines of ms ankara are three hemistichs of a poem. the poem cannot be completed on the strength of the other manuscripts because those either do not preserve al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ibn aʿtham al-kūfī’s qiṭʿa min kitāb al-futūḥ • 425 these lines or contain another poetical composition.20 t h e e d i t i o n u n d e r r e v i e w b e g i n s with a very detailed introduction that o c c u p i e s a l m o s t o n e h u n d r e d p a g e s . to the reader’s delight, besides some general issues usually discussed in this s e c t i o n , a l ʿ a ṭ ṭ ā r a d d r e s s e s c e r t a i n problems rarely touched upon in middle eastern editions. he opens his discussion with a chapter on ibn aʿtham, covering his name, madhhab, works, poetry, and death (pp. 9–23). al-ʿaṭṭār’s conclusions are generally reliable. only in some cases should they be treated with caution because, though he bases his arguments on a majority of the available sources, a few important ones are not mentioned.21 the next chapter (pp. 23–33) outlines the rise of early arabic historiography and offers an overview of how historical information was transmitted from abū mikhnaf (d. 157/774) down to ibn al-jawzī ( d . 5 9 7 / 1 2 0 0 ) ; a p a r t i c u l a r e m p h a s i s is placed on the role of isnāds and the emergence of their use in historiography. the main aim of the next chapter is to explore the kitāb al-futūḥ’s reception history between the fifth and thirteenth hijrī centuries (pp. 34–56). the sources r e v i e w e d a r e l i s t e d i n t w e n t y t h r e e sections in chronological order. the chapter collects the most important data 20. ms birmingham (fol. 63v, lines 6–7) has two lines, while ms dublin (fol. 150r, line 8) has only one, which is identical with the first line of ms birmingham. by contrast, ms istanbul (fol. 91v, line 14) only alludes to a poem (shiʿran, “a poem”) but omits its text. 21. significant sources not consulted include, for example, al-sahmī’s (d. 427/1038) taʾrīkh jurjān, ibn mākūlā’s (d. ca. 475/1082) al-ikmāl fī rafʿ al-irtiyāb ʿ an al-muʾtalif wa-l-mukhtalif fī l-asmāʾ wa-l-kunā wa-l-ansāb, ibn funduq al-bayhaqī’s (d. 565/1169–70) tārīkh-i bayhaq, and ibn nuqṭa’s (d. 629/1231) takmilat al-ikmāl. 22. al-ʿaṭṭār uses this term in a consistent manner throughout his introduction to designate non-shiʿi persons and institutions. on authors and works that made use of the kitāb al-futūḥ, but its principal value is no doubt the attention al-ʿaṭṭār pays to ibn aʿtham’s confessional affiliation (pp. 13–19). after citing some medieval and modern authorities who explicitly declared ibn aʿtham to be a shiʿi writer, al-ʿaṭṭār reviews a significant amount of medieval and early modern muslim literature, including authors who belonged to al-shīʿa and what he calls al-ʿāmma.22 on the basis of their writings, he rejects the previous claim, arguing that ibn aʿtham was not in fact committed to any particular madrasa (school) or madhhab. the next chapter explains the editor’s goal in taking on this project and presents in detail—over almost twenty pages—the main differences between his text and the previous editions (pp. 57–74). curiously, instead of basing his editorial undertaking on comparing the text transmitted in ms ankara to those preserved in other m a n u s c r i p t s , o f w h o s e e x i s t e n c e h e was aware, and making emendations accordingly, al-ʿaṭṭār chose to use zarzūr’s and zakkār’s editions as control material to ms ankara. in light of the problems mentioned above, this choice is less than fortunate in several respects. to highlight ms ankara’s value, the editor meticulously lists the differences b e t w e e n t h e t w o e d i t i o n s a n d h i s al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 426 • mónika schönléber manuscript.23 his examples are divided into the following four larger groups: 1. missing parts: ms ankara preserves texts, mostly poems, missing from the two editions (pp. 58–63). 2. completeness: it contains a more complete version of the text than do the two editions (pp. 64–67). 3. correctness: it has the correct wording in sections that were corrupted in the previously published versions (pp. 68–72). 4. vocalization: its vocalization is more reliable than that in the two editions (pp. 73–74). to prove his points, al-ʿaṭṭār provides a detailed list of examples—in the form of direct quotations—for each group. this meticulous work has unquestionable merits, but its effectiveness is necessarily constrained by the inherent deficiencies of zarzūr’s and zakkār’s volumes, not to mention the fact that h, on which zarzūr’s edition was based, failed to include a detailed description of the principles applied in establishing its readings. given that al-ʿaṭṭār was aware that zarzūr’s work was merely a copy of h, his rationale for choosing that edition remains obscure, and he provides no clear explanation for it in his introduction. t h e d i s c u s s i o n c o n t i n u e s w i t h a description of ms ankara (pp. 74–77). al-ʿaṭṭār reaffirms that in spite of fuat sezgin’s earlier attribution of ms ankara 23. al-ʿaṭṭār’s volume covers the following pages in the two editions: ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ (ed. zarzūr), from 2:55, line 8 to 317, line 5; ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ (ed. zakkār), from 1:281, line 1 to 2:31, line 4. 24. the text covered by ms ankara is equivalent to h 3:87, line 13 to 4:197, line 10, and ms istanbul 1:91v, line 14 to 169r, line 18. to abū mikhnaf, the manuscript, in fact, contains a long section of the kitāb al-futūḥ covering the stories of ṣiffīn, al-nahrawān, the caliphate of al-ḥasan and his treaties, and muʿāwīya’s reign (pp. 74–75). as for the manuscript’s date, he seconds sezgin’s opinion in assigning it to the sixth/twelfth century. there is no indication, either in the introduction or elsewhere in the text, as to whether this dating is based on the editor’s personal examination of the manuscript. after introducing his readers to the main manuscript, al-ʿaṭṭār also briefly discusses the two previously published editions on which his comparisons are based. he notes explicitly that zarzūr’s work is “taken literally from the printing of dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya in india,” that is, h (pp. 75–76). however, for reasons that remain unclear (see below), he seems to think that the editors of h consulted only ms istanbul. thus he does not mention h’s use of mss birmingham and dublin, or of the persian translation.24 by contrast, he correctly acknowledges mss istanbul and dublin as the sources of zakkār’s edition. al-ʿaṭṭār explains the main principles o f h i s e d i t o r i a l m e t h o d i n f o u r t e e n paragraphs (pp. 76–77). as a general rule, he has compared the three texts a g a i n s t e a c h o t h e r , w i t h p r e f e r e n c e given to readings in ms ankara, which, if necessary, have been corrected against the two selected editions. in several cases, he has also consulted other historical sources. normally, changes made to the text of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ibn aʿtham al-kūfī’s qiṭʿa min kitāb al-futūḥ • 427 ms ankara are clearly indicated in the footnotes. however, this principle is overruled in a curious set of editorial interventions (p. 78). al-ʿaṭṭār emphasizes that he has changed certain recurrent features of the manuscript’s text without marking these changes in the critical apparatus. these are as follows: 1. changes to word order (e.g., an yakhruja ilā al-kurdūsīna bi-aṣḥābihi, instead of an yakhruja bi-aṣḥābihi ilā al-kurdūsīna) 2. spelling of innī, innā and similar words with one nūn as preserved in the manuscript instead of innanī and innanā, as in the two editions 3. the addition of nasab to all names appearing without it in the manuscript (e.g., fa-qāla al-ashʿath b. qays, instead of fa-qāla al-ashʿath) 4. modifications to conjunctions such as wa-, fa-, and thumma 5. slight changes to sentences introducing poems (e.g., fa-kataba ilayhi qaʿb b. jaʿīl shiʿran instead of fa-kataba ilayhi qaʿb b. jaʿīl) 6. in cases where arabic grammar allows both feminine and masculine forms of a verb, selection of the form that agrees with the gender of the subject (e.g. zaḥafat al-nās rather than zaḥafa al-nās) although al-ʿaṭṭār explains his decision n o t t o m a r k t h e s e m o d i f i c a t i o n s i n the footnotes by invoking their high n u m b e r , o n e m i g h t a r g u e t h a t t h e i r regular appearance in fact makes them a valuable object of study for gaining a better understanding of the manuscript, its archetype, and its copyist, on the one hand, and perhaps of the text itself, on the other. the edited text covers almost 550 pages (pp. 89–641). the layout is pleasing and carefully designed, and the font size chosen for the text is convenient, which makes the book easy to read. readers will surely appreciate that the editor put in the time and effort to vocalize the poems. the only annoyance to readers hoping to exploit the volume for textual studies is the editor’s choice to mark all divergences between ms ankara and the two printed editions while omitting all references in the footnotes to the volume and page numbers of those editions. this decision, made perhaps for the sake of simplicity, makes the timeconsuming work of double-checking the sources of these modifications even more tiresome. the volume concludes with a set of indexes covering qurʾānic verses, proper names, place-names, tribes, battles, and poems, as well as a bibliographic section that lists the primary and secondary sources cited in the introduction (pp. 6 4 3 – 7 0 1 ) . a s ep arat e bibliog rap hy is provided for the sources used in the preparation of the edited text (pp. 703–30). a very detailed table of contents can be found at the very end of the volume. this includes not only the subchapters of the introduction but also all chapter titles in the edited text (pp. 731–36). the volume under review is a solid, careful work and an outstanding example of the high-quality editions produced in the middle east. by making available the text of a previously unedited—and thus largely al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 428 • mónika schönléber inaccessible—manuscript, it enables future scholars to base their studies on a larger number of testimonies to the transmission of ibn aʿtham’s work, thereby significantly contributing to our understanding of this process. besides suggesting new readings of already published textual units, an even more significant contribution of ms ankara is its abundance of poems. in this regard, ms ankara is hardly unique among the manuscripts that were disregarded in the production of h. the present edition thus again drives home how incomplete and imperfect our knowledge of the kitāb al-futūḥ must by necessity remain if we base our assessment solely on the text of h, until now the most complete and reliable printed version. on the other hand, in light of the present edition as well as further similar enterprises, we can confidently entertain hopes of coming much closer to restoring a more complete version of ibn aʿtham’s text by reinstituting large portions of text that post-tenthcentury readers and/or copyists had found unappealing and thus unnecessary but without which the author’s original aims and methods cannot be properly understood. a central feature constraining the edited text’s suitability for philological and textcritical analyses is al-ʿaṭṭār’s self-imposed reliance on “control material”—namely, zarzūr’s and zakkār’s editions—that is, by its nature, inadequate as a reliable basis for such an undertaking. to be sure, using previously published editions in searching for the “best” readings for one’s own critical text is an established and accepted 25. the text covered by ms ankara is the equivalent of ms birmingham (fols. 63v, line 8 to 150v, line 14) and ms dublin (fols. 150r, line 9 to 254r, line 9). practice, especially if the editor lacks firsthand access to all extant manuscripts. the legitimacy of this approach may seem reasonable at first sight in the present case, too, since zakkār’s and zarzūr’s volumes were directly or indirectly based on manuscripts that were apparently available to al-ʿaṭṭār only in this secondhand form. (as noted earlier, zakkār worked with mss istanbul and dublin, whereas h, whose text zarzūr in part retyped, used mss istanbul, dublin, and birmingham for the portions of the kitāb al-futūḥ covered by ms ankara.25) however, while retyping h, zarzūr pruned his model’s footnotes with a heavy hand. in his own notes, references almost always point to al-aṣl, which seems to stand for ms istanbul, while omitting the readings of mss dublin and birmingham (referred to as “d” and “b” in h). this “simplification” can easily mislead the unwary reader unfamiliar with h, not least by conveying the impression of an edition carefully based on a single genuine manuscript. this state of affairs might explain why al-ʿaṭṭār apparently believed that zarzūr’s volume was based solely on ms istanbul, which could equally have led him to omit any mention of mss dublin and birmingham, ignored by zarzūr. in addition, the process of retyping can easily introduce errors into the body of the text, which makes such a retyped volume even more unsuited to further comparisons. in conclusion, despite the shortcomings of major and minor importance that i have indicated, this volume is without doubt a useful and important edition that, by al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ibn aʿtham al-kūfī’s qiṭʿa min kitāb al-futūḥ • 429 making available a previously unedited codex, fills a significant gap in the study of the manuscript tradition of the kitāb al-futūḥ. accordingly, al-ʿaṭṭār’s work is of considerable interest to and a valuable tool for both scholars focusing their research on this specific topic and those investigating the period of the first fitna. therefore, the editor and the publisher are to be commended for undertaking this laborious task. in view of the volume’s significance, it is to be regretted that very few copies of this work are available in the specialized libraries of the western world, limiting access to this long-awaited edition of a key witness to ibn aʿtham’s history. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 465-470 book review scholars write books out of various motivations, such as curiosity about and fascination with the unknown, the desire to impart knowledge, the urge to contribute to a debate, or the wish to advance their careers. according to its preface, warum es kein islamisches mittelalter gab: das erbe der antike und der orient (why there was no islamic middle ages: the heritage of antiquity and the orient) was written for a different reason, namely, “anger about the widespread negligence with which a term is used that causes more damage than those who use it are usually aware of” (p. 7; my translations throughout). the term in question is, of course, “middle ages,” especially as part of the phrase “islamic middle ages.” thomas bauer’s book is essentially a strongly worded and well-argued plea against the use of this term, which is still very common in both german and — e s p e c i a l l y i n i t s a d j e c t i v e f o r m “medieval”—english scholarly literature about islam and islamic history. moreover, bauer develops a reasoned alternative to this term and the periodization it expresses by arguing that, up to the eleventh century ce, islamic history should be understood as the final, albeit not fundamentally distinct, phase of late antiquity. the main part of the book consists of five chapters. the first chapter (pp. 11–31) provides what its title promises: “the ‘islamic middle ages’: six reasons against it.” the first reason bauer adduces is a lack of precision: even among europeanists, it is disputed when the middle ages begin and end; once the term “islamic” is added, the picture becomes even more muddied, given that this religious label is used to refer to the history of societies that consist largely of non-muslims. second, “middle thomas bauer, warum es kein islamisches mittelalter gab: das erbe der antike und der orient (munich: c. h. beck, 2018), 175 pp. isbn 978-3406-72730-6. price: €22.95 (cloth). christian mauder university of bergen (christian.mauder@uib.no) © 2020 christian mauder. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:christian.mauder%40uib.no?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 466 • christian mauder ages” is often accompanied by misleading notions, such as the erroneous idea that the people who lived in this period were particularly pious. again, one aggravates this problem by combining “middle ages” with “islamic,” since the two terms in combination imply what bauer calls “an epitome of religious fanaticism” (p. 16). according to bauer, this leaves no room for nonreligious aspects of literature, political thought, science, and art. third, the term “middle ages” can be pejorative, especially when combined with the term “islamic.” bauer’s case in point here is the media coverage of the islamic revolution in iran, which was depicted as a “return to the middle ages” (p. 19). fourth, the term “middle ages” inherently serves purposes of exoticizing and othering; it is used to project an antithesis to one’s own, enlightened present. fifth, derived as it is from the periodization of european h i s t o r y , i t i s e u r o c e n t r i c a n d o f t e n imperialistic. the latter aspect becomes clear when non-western—and especially often islamic—societies are presented as mired in or even regressing to the middle ages, thus lacking the essentially western characteristic of modernity. sixth, the term lacks an empirical basis when applied to the islamic world, since it presupposes a similarity of living conditions in european and islamic parts of the globe during the period of roughly 500–1500 ce. such a similarity, however, did not exist, as bauer details in the next chapter. chapter 2 (pp. 33–77) uses the letters of the latin alphabet to demonstrate through twenty-six short case studies that, in terms of intellectual, cultural, and social history, as well as the history of everyday life and mentalities, the conditions of living in the premodern islamic world were profoundly different from those in contemporaneous europe during the time from the rise of islam to the eleventh century ce. the case studies, some of which are illustrated, examine pertinent objects of material culture such as public bathhouses, glass objects, copper coins, and roofing tiles alongside fields of learning such as medicine and the natural sciences, social characteristics such as literacy and urbanity, and concepts such as the dogma of hereditary sin and homoeroticism. bauer argues that each of these examples demonstrates that the islamic world did not experience a break with earlier, antique periods of history comparable to what european societies underwent during the later centuries of the first millennium. instead, the islamic world exhibited characteristics bauer summarizes under the keywords “ c o n t i n u a t i o n o f l a t e a n t i q u i t y , ” “resurgence of ideas from pre-christian antiquity,” “independent developments that anticipate achievements of the early modern period,” “no ‘barbarization,’” and “preservation and further development of the culture of antiquity” (pp. 74–75). given this lack of a clear break with antiquity, it is not justified to apply the term “middle ages” to the islamic world. having thus thoroughly deconstructed the concept of an “islamic middle ages” in the first half of his book, bauer uses the remainder to develop a viable alternative. he begins this undertaking in the third chapter, “looking for the complete picture: from the mediterranean to the hindukush” (pp. 79–117), by discussing what effective concepts of periodization ought to do, namely, (1) be objective and unbiased, (2) be applicable to large areas, (3) reflect fundamental changes affecting all or at al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) thomas bauer’s warum es kein islamisches mittelalter gab • 467 least many spheres of life in broad strata of society, and (4) be based on permanent and irreversible historical changes. building on insights from linguistic theory, bauer then argues that, optimally, periodization should be based on what he calls “clusters of characteristics” (merkmalsbündel). this means that when developing systems of periodization, scholars should not merely take their cues from changes in one or two areas, such as politics or religion, but instead identify times that are characterized by multiple transformations in numerous aspects of human life. on the basis of these theoretical considerations, bauer goes on to deconstruct the notion of the rise of islam in the seventh century as marking the beginning of a new period of history. the beginning of islam neither brought with it an immediate, largescale transformation of the religious and economic landscape nor resulted in a profoundly different political map of europe and the middle east. rather, as bauer points out, the late antique pre-islamic political order was dominated by two emperors—a western roman one in southern and central europe and an eastern roman one based in constantinople—and the sassanian great king who ruled his middle eastern empire from his residence on the banks of the tigris in what is today iraq. around the year 800, more than a century after the rise of islam, the political map looked strikingly similar. there were again two roman emperors and a ruler— now called caliph instead of great king— who governed his middle eastern empire from his capital on the tigris. moreover, all three rulers personified the same type of political leadership, something bauer, quoting almut höfert, calls “imperial monotheism.” only the disintegration of the caliphal imperial monotheism during the tenth and eleventh centuries marked the beginning of a profoundly new period in the political history of the region. bauer thus argues that the rise of islam, rather than marking the end of late antiquity, resulted only in the beginning of a new phase of late antique history. bauer calls this phase “islamic late antiquity” and understands it as a transformative period for both the islamic world and what is commonly called “early medieval” europe. during this phase, both regions underwent gradual but very different processes of transformation of their late antique heritage, culminating in the start of a new period of history in the eleventh century. during this new period, the two regions again became much more similar in terms of their intellectual, economic, and cultural development than had been the case during the centuries of transformation. building on these findings and the work o f g a r t h f o w d e n , b a u e r a r g u e s t h a t instead of taking dates such as 476 or 635 ce as markers of the beginning of a new period, historians should understand the first millennium as one cohesive period of history. regarding islamic cultural, literary, and intellectual history, bauer contends that the time from the rise of islam to the eleventh century should not be misrepresented as a hegelian “golden age” in which islamic societies “preserved” the antique cultural heritage that later enabled europe to experience its renaissance while the islamic lands were caught in an inevitable process of cultural decline. rather, the phase up to the eleventh century represents the formative period of islamic intellectual culture, which then gave way to a long “classical” period until al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 468 • christian mauder the end of the fifteenth century. because o f t h e l o n g d o m i n a n t p a r a d i g m o f a general cultural decline that in part served colonial goals, a teleological worldview that saw modern europe as the pinnacle of human history and evaluated other cultures on the basis of their contributions to european modernity, and a general scholarly fascination with the beginnings of historical processes, the intellectual and cultural output of this classical period remains very little studied. this holds true even though, when examining a certain field of intellectual history, modern-day scholars typically begin their explorations w i t h s o m e o f t h e w e l l o r d e r e d a n d comprehensive works from the classical period rather than with the often highly innovative, but not yet fully developed s c h o l a r l y p r o d u c t s o f t h e f o r m a t i v e period. nevertheless, the latter were long considered by modern-day scholars to be the more interesting and more relevant objects of study. t h e f i r s t p a r t o f b a u e r ’ s f o u r t h chapter, “islamic late antiquity: the formative period of the islamic sciences” (pp. 119–148), takes up the topic of the importance of scholarly works from the classical period. it underlines the central place works authored in or around the eleventh century occupied in later islamic scholarship by examining two works from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, that provide broad overviews of islamic intellectual history: kātib čelebi’s (d. 1657) kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-l-funūn and muḥammad b. ʿalī al-shawkānī’s (d. 1839) adab al-ṭalab wa-muntahā al-arab. for each discipline of islamic learning, bauer identifies the works that receive a great deal of attention from kātib čelebi and al-shawkānī or that they recommend for study. he presents a list of more than twenty works that were of central importance for what he calls “the islamic curriculum” (p. 121). the vast majority of these works were produced in or around the eleventh century, when most disciplines of islamic learning had reached a level of maturity denoting the beginning of their postformative period. the status of these works as syntheses of earlier accomplishments and as the cornerstones of later developments within their respective disciplines demonstrates the pivotal significance of their time of production to the history of islamic scholarship, as seen through the lens of two late representatives of this intellectual tradition who were steeped in its classical heritage. t h e s e c o n d p a r t o f t h e f o u r t h chapter looks in detail at the changes the islamic world experienced during the eleventh century. it pays special a t t e n t i o n t o t h e c u l t u r a l , e c o n o m i c , political, and demographic situation in different regions of the islamic world. bauer points, among other things, to the period of crisis in greater syria and egypt during the eleventh century, which manifested itself in developments such as increased incursions by bedouin groups and migrating nomads, famines, and deurbanization, which in turn likely had their underlying causes in adverse climate conditions. these developments went hand in hand with the end of islamic imperial monotheism as represented by the abbasid caliphate in baghdad as well as with the downfall of the umayyads of al-andalus and, slightly later, that of the fatimids of egypt. because this time of crisis was of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) thomas bauer’s warum es kein islamisches mittelalter gab • 469 only regional importance and lasted less than two hundred years, it did not result in a fundamental cultural discontinuity, although it nevertheless indicated the beginning of a new period. t h e f i f t h a n d f i n a l c h a p t e r , “ t h e eleventh-century epochal threshold: conclusion and outlook” (pp. 149–158), summarizes the main arguments and f i n d i n g s o f t h e b o o k , o f f e r s a b r i e f discussion of their applicability to african history, and closes with reflections on the periodization of later islamic history. regarding the latter point, bauer argues against the view that the early sixteenth c e n t u r y m a r k s t h e b e g i n n i n g o f a fundamentally new period. instead, he proposes a periodization that treats the time from the eleventh to the second half of the eighteenth century as one single period of islamic history, with the events at the beginning of the sixteenth century marking only the turn from the earlier to the later part of this period. altogether, thomas bauer’s warum e s k e i n i s l a m i s c h e s m i t t e l a l t e r g a b constitutes a remarkably broad, wellargued, clearly structured, and richly illustrated contribution to one of the most 1. see especially th. bauer, “in search of ‘post-classical literature’: a review article,” mamlūk studies review 11, no. 2 (2007): 137–167. 2. see, e.g., his “narrative and community in islamic late antiquity,” past & present 185, no. 1 (2004): 9–42. 3. for a useful overview of current systems of periodization of islamic history and the debates about them, see f. donner, “periodization as a tool of the historian with special reference to islamic history,” der islam 91, no. 1 (2014): 20–36, especially 28–36; and with regard to early islam in particular, a. borrut, “vanishing syria: periodization and power in early islam,” der islam 91, no. 1 (2014): 37–68. 4. see, e.g., s. von hees, ed., inḥiṭāṭ—the decline paradigm: its influence and persistence in the writing of arab cultural history (würzburg: ergon, 2017); s. brentjes, “the prison of categories: ‘decline’ and its company,” in islamic philosophy, science, culture, and religion: studies in honor of dimitri gutas, ed. f. m. m. opwis and d. reisman, 131–156 (leiden: brill, 2012). 5. see, e.g., s. conermann and g. şen, “introduction: a transitional point of view,” in the mamluk-ottoman transition: continuity and change in egypt and bilād al-shām in the sixteenth century, ed. s. conermann and g. şen, 13–32 (göttingen: bonn university press, 2017), especially 13–20. fundamental debates of islamic history. building on the author’s important earlier work on questions of periodization, 1 it offers a persuasive deconstruction of what bauer shows to be the highly problematic notion of an “islamic middle ages.” historians who continue to use this term will be hard-pressed to find convincing reasons for their terminological choice. moreover, any future attempt to arrive at a meaningful periodization of islamic history must take bauer’s conclusive arguments for the notion of an “islamic late antiquity” into account. in his book, bauer does not simply return this notion of an “islamic late antiquity,” which had already figured prominently in the work of the late thomas sizgorich,2 to the center of the debate about the proper understanding of early islam. he also contributes to several important recent trends in the revision of traditional systems of periodization of islamic history.3 these trends include the deconstruction of the concept of “decline” as a useful category of historical inquiry,4 the reevaluation of the early sixteenth century as a supposed watershed in islamic history,5 and the tendency no al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 470 • christian mauder longer to regard dynastic changes alone as sufficient indicators of the beginnings of new periods.6 as is almost inevitable in a book of its breadth, warum es kein islamisches mittelalter gab includes a few elements s p e c i a l i s t s m i g h t f i n d p r o b l e m a t i c . statements such as “egypt is ruled from the sixth [sic] century onward by arabicspeaking muslims” (p. 85) or the claim that al-shawkānī’s adab al-ṭalab wa-muntahā al-arab, which was completed around 1807, belongs to the eighteenth century (p. 120) might best be explained as slips of the pen. the claim that it was “foreign” to the premodern islamic world to treat converts to islam with suspicion should be revised in light of luke yarbrough’s recent work on islamic anti-dhimmī discourses that also targeted converts.7 yet, of course, these minor points in no way diminish the value of the book as a whole. possibly more serious is an unfortunate terminological choice that is particularly puzzling in a work that calls consistently for careful reflection on the potential pitfalls of our scholarly vocabulary: the term “orient.” this term, which appears prominently in the subtitle of bauer’s book, is no less problematic in german than it is in english and, ever since the publication of said’s orientalism, brings to mind a bygone time of exoticizing literature about the 6. see, e.g., k. hirschler and s. b. savant, “introduction: what is in a period? arabic historiography and periodization,” der islam 91, no. 1 (2014), 6–19, at 13–16. 7. l. yarbrough, friends of the emir: non-muslim state officials in premodern islamic thought (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019). “oriental” other. within the germanspeaking context, in particular, recent calls by far-right political actors to defend the “occident” against “oriental” invaders make the term appear even more unfit for academic use. it should be pointed out, however, that in the main text of bauer’s book, which in more than one place engages critically and thoughtfully w i t h o r i e n t a l i s t d i s c o u r s e , t h e t e r m “orient” is largely absent, appearing most often in quotations from other studies. its prominent—and unexplained—appearance on the cover of the book is thus difficult to fathom. one is left to wonder whether its use reflects primarily the marketing strategy of the publisher rather than any terminological preferences of the author. i n t h e p r e f a c e t o w a r u m e s k e i n islamisches mittelalter gab, the author apt ly des cribes his book as “m ov ing between a hopefully not too polemical essayistic style and a hopefully not too dry specialized scholarship” (p. 8). to the present reviewer, bauer’s work clearly fulfills both hopes and constitutes one of the most important german-language books on islamic history published in recent years. it is a work no historian of the islamic world interested in questions of periodization can afford to ignore, and it will have a profound impact on one of the most fundamental debates of our field. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 68-86 abū al-ḥasan ʿalī ibn muḥammad ibn ḥabīb al-māwardī was a muslim polymath, born in basra, 364/974, and died in baghdad, 30 rabīʿ i 450/27 may 1058.1 his extensive handbook of shāfiʿi law, al-ḥāwī al-kabīr, was much quoted in 1. for pre-modern biographies, v. al-dhahabī, tārīkh al-islām, ed. ʿumar ʿabd al-salām tadmurī, 52 vols (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1407-21/1987-2000), 30 (441-460 h.): 253-6 with further references. among modern biographies in arabic, i have been able to consult muḥammad sulaymān dāwūd and fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim aḥmad, al-imām abū al-ḥasan al-māwardī (alexandria: muʾassasat shabāb al-jāmiʿah, 1978), which collects many useful facts but is not always reliable in detail. for example, it confuses māwardī’s title aqḍā al-quḍāh with the post of qāḍī al-quḍāh (17). for surveys of māwardī’s oeuvre, v. also fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim aḥmad, introduction to māwardī, k. durar al-sulūk fī siyāsat al-mulūk (riyadh: dār al-waṭan, 1417/1997), and khālik ʿabd al-raḥmān al-ʿakk, introduction to māwardī, aʿlām al-nubūwah (beirut: dār al-nafāʾis, 1414/1994). in european languages, v. above all carl brockelmann, geschichte der arabischen litterature, 2nd edn, 2 vols (leiden: e. j. brill, 1943-89), 1:483 (386); supplementband, 3 vols (leiden: e. j. brill, 1937-41), 1:668; george makdisi, ibn ʿaqīl et la résurgence de l’islam traditionaliste au xie siécle (ve siécle de l’hégire) (damascus: institut français de damas, 1963), 221-3; and henri laoust, “la pensée et l’action politiques d’al-māwardī,” revue des études islamiques 36 (1968): 11-92. abstract abū al-ḥasan ʿalī ibn muḥammad ibn ḥabīb al-māwardī was a muslim polymath, born in basra, 364/974, died in baghdad, 30 rabīʿ i 450/27 may 1058. he is most famous today for al-aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah, a review of the law as it affects or requires the action of the caliph. his extensive handbook of shāfiʿi law, al-ḥāwī al-kabīr (of which al-aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah is effectively an abstract), was much quoted in succeeding centuries. he also wrote a major qur’an commentary and various shorter works, some in the perso-hellenistic wisdom tradition. most of this study is devoted to three sample passages from the ḥāwī in translation with commentary: on the ritual law, particularly the salutation at the close of the ritual prayer; on the law of waqf (pious foundations), particularly whether a waqf property is subject to division among heirs; and, finally, on penal law, particularly whether the stoning and flogging penalties for adultery are to be combined. they are sometimes opportunistic, seizing on any argument at hand, whether or not it is foreseen in the literature of jurisprudence (uṣūl alfiqh). they are sometimes indeterminate, leaving questions of what to do unanswered. they sometimes refute obsolete positions, sometimes seem to expect to convert no one. they suggest that māwardī’s purpose in writing was not mainly practical, to persuade people to execute the rules of the shāfiʿi school. equally important, they suggest, were māwardī’s religious vision of a faithful community (distinguished more by its theory and ritual practice than, say, particular patterns of property transfer) and the ludic pleasure of argument within the learned élite for whom he was writing. māwardī’s legal thinking christopher melchert university of oxford (christopher.melchert@orinst.ox.ac.uk) 69 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) succeeding centuries, and most of this article is devoted to three sample passages from it in translation with commentary. i have elsewhere reviewed his training in shāfiʿi law and his position within the school.2 in modern times, māwardī has become most famous for al-aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah.3 the ʿabbāsid caliphs of his own time were politically weak, although slowly regaining power as part of the sunni revival.4 almost their only means of influencing politics were (1) refusing to confirm appointments made and titles claimed by the warlords and (2) threatening to call in other warlords from further afield, such as the ghaznavids. accordingly, māwardī stresses that all authority flows by delegation from the caliph. he appoints military commanders to maintain order, qadis to maintain justice. there is a close verbal parallel to māwardī’s aḥkām under the same title by the ḥanbali qadi abū yaʿlá ibn al-farrā’ (d. baghdad, 458/1065)—so close that either one must be a rewriting of the other or each must be a rewriting of some unknown original.5 most scholars who have discussed the two have refused to offer any opinion as to which was the original, which a rewriting: muḥammad ḥāmid al-fiqī, the first editor of abū yaʿlá’s version; henri laoust, chronicler of māwardī’s political career; donald little, who made the first systematic comparison; and nimrod hurvitz, notable especially for correctly observing that these are principally works of islamic law, not political theory.6 on the other hand, muḥammad ʿabd al-qādir abū fāris published a book-length study of abū yaʿlá’s version 2. christopher melchert, “māwardī, abū ya‛lā, and the sunni revival,” prosperity and stagnation: some cultural and social aspects of the abbasid period (750-1258), ed. krzystof kościelniak, orientalia christiana cracoviensia, monographiae 1 (cracow: unum, 2010), 37-61, esp. 41-3. 3. available in numerous editions—my references in what follows are to māwardī, al-aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah, ed. ʿiṣām fāris al-ḥarastānī and muḥammad ibrāhīm al-zughlī (beirut: al-maktab al-islāmī, 1416/1996). i have examined two english translations, both of which seem adequate: the laws of islamic governance, trans. asadullah yate (london: ta-ha publishers, 1996), and the ordinances of government, trans. wafaa h. wahba (reading, uk: garnet, 1996). the classic exposé is h. a. r. gibb, “al-mawardi’s theory of the caliphate,” studies on the civilization of islam, ed. stanford j. shaw and william r. polk (princeton: univ. press, 1962), 151-65 (originally in islamic culture [hyderabad] 11 [1937]: 291-302). v. also mohammed arkoun, “l’éthique musulmane d’après māwardī,” revue des études islamiques 31 (1963): 1-31; donald little, “a new look at al-aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya,” muslim world 64 (1974): 1-18; hanna mikhail, politics and revelation: māwardī and after (edinburgh: university press, 1995); eltigani abdulqadir hamid, “al-mawardi’s theory of state: some ignored dimensions,” american journal of islamic social sciences 18/4 (2001): 1-18; eric j. hanne, “abbasid politics and the classical theory of the caliphate,” writers and rulers, ed. beatrice gruendler and louise marlow, literaturen im kontext: arabisch-persisch-türkisch 16 (wiesbaden: reichert, 2004), 49-71; and nimrod hurvitz, competing texts: the relationship between al-mawardi’s and abu ya‛la’s al-ahkam al-sultaniyya, islamic legal studies program, harvard law school, occasional publications 8 (october 2007) (cambridge, mass.: islamic legal studies program, harvard law school, 2007). for surveys of māwardī’s oeuvre, see dāwūd and aḥmad, al-imām (cited above, n. 1), also these: fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim aḥmad, introduction to māwardī, k. durar al-sulūk fī siyāsat al-mulūk (riyadh: dār al-waṭan, 1417/1997); khālik ʿabd al-raḥmān al-ʿakk, introduction to māwardī, aʿlām al-nubūwah (beirut: dār al-nafāʾis, 1414/1994). 4. v. makdisi, ibn ʿaqīl, chaps. 2, 4; idem, “the sunnī revival,” islamic civilization 950-1150, ed. d. s. richards, papers on islamic history 3 (oxford: cassirer, 1973), 155-68; glassen, der mittlere weg, chap. 2. 5. abū yaʿlā ibn al-farrāʾ, al-aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah, ed. muḥammad ḥāmid al-fiqī (cairo: maktabat muṣṭafá al-bābī al-ḥalabī, n.d.; 2nd edn., 1966; 2nd edn. repr. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīyah, 1403/1983). 6. fiqī, introduction to abū yaʿlá, aḥkām, 18; laoust, “pensée,” 15; little, “new look”; hurvitz, competing texts. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 70 that includes an extended argument for the priority of māwardī’s version.7 i myself, to the contrary, have argued that abū yaʿlá’s ḥanbali version is the earlier, so that māwardī’s version describing ḥanafi, māliki, and shāfiʿi positions must have been written as a supplement to it.8 i will not rehearse the argument here. besides their reviewing the rules of different schools, the outstanding difference between the two seems to be what donald little stressed, namely that māwardī seems less reluctant than abū yaʿlá to countenance the removal of a wicked caliph.9 with some other details, the difference suggests that māwardī stood a little further back from the caliph. before the 19th century, māwardī was equally famous for al-ḥāwī al-kabīr, of which only recently has a full text been published.10 formally a commentary on the mukhtaṣar of al-muzanī (d. old cairo, 264/877?), it rehearses and defends the rules of shāfiʿi law at great length. it once refers to the hypothetical case of someone who has resolved to fast the year 440 (1048-9), suggesting that māwardī was composing it around then; that is, after his retirement from politics in 437/1045-6.11 in al-nawawī’s highly detailed survey of shāfiʿī law, al-majmūʿ, māwardī is the fourth most often cited authority, behind imām al-ḥaramayn (d. bushtaniqān, 478/1085) but ahead of al-ghazālī (d. tus, 505/1111).12 there seems to have been also a smaller version, al-ḥāwī al-ṣaghīr, for it was the subject of a commentary by kamāl al-dīn aḥmad ibn ʿumar (d. cairo, 758/1357).13 also now in print is māwardī’s commentary on the qur’an, al-nukat wa-al-ʿuyūn.14 it treats the entire qur’an in order, quoting a few verses at a time, then short glosses mainly from exegetes of the eighth century c.e., occasionally also textual variants and examples of usage from poetry. in line with the sunni tradition of qur’an commentary, it normally presents a range of possible interpretations without asserting that any one is the best.15 it also was influential in the later tradition; for example, the famous commentator al-qurṭubī 7. muḥammad ʿabd al-qādir abū fāris, al-qāḍī abū yaʿlá al-farrāʾ wa-kitābuhu al-aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah (beirut: muʾassasat al-risālah, 1403/1983), 516-47. 8. melchert, “māwardī,” 53-9. 9. little, “new look,” 13-14. 10. al-māwardī, al-ḥāwī al-kabīr, ed. maḥmūd maṭrajī, et al., 24 vols (bei rut: dār al-fikr, 1414/1994); also ed. ʿalī muḥammad muʿawwaḍ and ʿādil aḥmad ʿabd al-mawjūd, 20 vols (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīyah, 1414/1994). henceforth, references to the latter edition will be in italics. neither edition is particularly good. 11. māwardī, ḥāwī 20:36 15:491. 12. al-nawawī, al-majmūʿ, 18 vols., ed. zakarīyāʾ ʿalī yūsuf (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-ʿāṣimah or maṭbaʿat al-imām, 1966-9). vols. 1-9 are by al-nawawī, the rest by various continuators. on the most-cited names in the shāfiʿi tradition, v. christopher melchert, “abū isḥāq al-šīrāzī and ibn al-ṣabbāġ and the advantages of teaching at a madrasa,” annales islamolo giques, no 45 (2011), 141-66, at 155-6. 13. subkī, ṭabaqāt 9:19. kamāl al-dīn also apparently abridged al-ḥāwī al-kabīr and combined it with his abridgement of another shāfiʿi handbook. 14. al-māwardī, k. al-nukat wa-al-ʿuyūn, ed. al-sayyid ibn ʿabd al-maqṣūd ibn ʿabd al-raḥīm, 6 vols (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīyah and muʾassasat al-kutub al-thaqāfīyah, n.d.). i have not seen the earlier edition of khiḍr muḥammad khiḍr, 4 vols (kuwait: wizārat al-awqāf, 1982). 15. on the tradition, v. norman calder, “tafsīr from ṭabarī to ibn kathīr,” approaches to the qurʾān, ed. g. r. hawting and abdul-kader a. shareef, routledge/soas series on con temporary politics and culture in the mid dle east (london: routledge, 1993), 101-40. 71 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) (d. 671/1273?) cites māwardī more often than any other earlier commentator except al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923).16 concerning the qur’an, māwardī also wrote an amthāl al-qur’ān, of which a manuscript is extant in turkey, and a lost mukhtaṣar ʿulūm al-qur’ān mentioned in the introduction to the amthāl.17 al-nukat is where pre-modern muslim critics complained of māwardī’s advocating muʿtazili theological views, such as rejection of predestination.18 however, pre-modern critics exculpated māwardī of advocating muʿtazilī views systematically. i know of no muʿtazili biographical dictionary that lays claim to māwardī, although the chief of the baghdadi shāfiʿi school in his time, abū al-ṭayyib al-ṭabarī (d. 450/1058), may appear in one.19 finally, there are also in print several shorter works on law, religion, politics, and adab. to begin with law, al-iqnāʿ was written for the caliph al-qādir (r. 381-422/991-1031), who requested exposés of the ordinances of each of the four sunni schools of law. the famous mukhtaṣar of al-qudūrī (d. baghdad, 428/1037) is its ḥanafī counterpart, while ʿabd al-wahhāb al-thaʿlabī (d. cairo, 422/1031) prepared an epitome of māliki law, probably al-talqīn.20 aʿlām al-nubūwah deals with the signs of prophecy.21 in part, this entails kalām questions such as the differences between prophetic miracles and magic and how to tell false prophets from true. among the signs that islam is the best religion is its moderation between the severity of the christians and the laxity of the jews; between christian rejection of the world and jewish embrace of it—not an original idea with māwardī but apparently typical of his inclination toward the middle.22 qawānīn al-wizārah is another work on government.23 māwardī describes it at the beginning as a response to someone’s request, addressing an unnamed vizier in the 16. according to al-qurṭubī, al-jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-qurʾān, ed. muḥammad ibrāhīm al-ḥifnāwī & maḥmūd ḥāmid ʿuthmān, 22 vols (cairo: dār al-ḥadīth, 1414/1994), indexes by sayyid ibrāhīm ṣādiq & muḥammad ʿalī ʿabd al -qādir, al-ṭabarī is cited 179 times, al-māwardī 154, abū naṣr al-qushayrī (d. 514/1120) 148, al-thaʿlabī (d. 427/1035) 80. 17. fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim aḥmad, introduction to al-māwardī, k. durar al-sulūk fī siyāsat al-mulūk (riyadh: dār al-waṭan, 1417/1997), 37. 18. e.g., ibn al-ṣalāḥ, ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ al-shāfiʿīyah, ed. al-nawawī, al-mizzī, and muḥyī al-dīn ʿalī najīb, 2 vols (beirut: dār al-bashāʾir al-islāmīyah, 1413/1992), 2:638-40, 642, followed by subkī, ṭabaqāt 5:270. 19. on māwardī’s muʿtazilism, v. further melchert, “māwardī,” 46-7, but the question deserves a fuller study. on abū al-ṭayyib al-ṭabarī, v. bayhaqī (al-ḥākim al-jushamī or jishumī), sharḥ ʿuyūn al-masāʾil, in fuʾād sayyid, ed., faḍl al-iʿtizāl wa-ṭabaqāt al-muʿtazilah (tunis: al-dār al-tūnisīyah lil-nashr, 1393/1974), 385. 20. al-māwardī, al-iqnāʿ fī al-fiqh al-shāfiʿī, ed. khiḍr muḥammad khiḍr (kuwait: maktabat dār al-ʿurūbah, 1402/1982). for the story of the commissioning, v. yāqūt, ed. margoliouth, 5:408 = ed. ʿabbās, 5:1956. yāqūt states that he does not know who wrote an epitome of ḥanbali law on this occasion, but my guess is that it was abū ya‛lá, probably al-mujarrad. 21. al-māwardī, aʿlām al-nubūwah, several editions, of which the one with the most helpful notes is that of khālik ʿabd al-raḥmān al-ʿakk (beirut: dār al-nafāʾis, 1414/1994). 22. māwardī, aʿlām, ed. ʿakk, 331-2. 23. māwardī, adab al-wazīr, al-rasāʾil al-nādirah 5 (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1348/1929); al-wizārah (adab al-wazīr), ed. muḥammad sulaymān dāwud and fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim aḥmad (alexandria: dār al-jāmiʿāt al-miṣrīyah, 1396/1976); qawānīn al-wizārah wa-siyāsat al-mulk, ed. riḍwān al-sayyid (beirut: dār al-ṭalīʿah, 1979). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 72 second person.24 the vizier in question is told of claims on him from both sulṭān and malik, likewise of claims he has on them, presumably indicating the caliph and the leading buwayhid warlord, respectively.25 it does not always agree exactly with al-aḥkām al-sulṭānīyah. for example, a controversial point in the aḥkām is māwardī’s assertion that wazīr al-tanfīdh, the government minister who carries out orders without ever originating any himself, may be a dhimmī (tribute-paying non-muslim). al-wizārah mentions wazīr al-tanfīdh but says nothing of his religion.26 one might infer from such differences the evolution of māwardī’s thinking, on the assumption that al-wizārah is an early work and al-aḥkām a late; however, it would be difficult to distinguish between differences occasioned by the evolution of his thought and others occasioned by genre and limits on length, and i attempt no systematic comparison here. māwardī is also associated with several other texts in the tradition of ‘mirrors for princes’: (1) al-tuḥfah al-mulūkīyah fī al-ādāb al-siyāsīyah27; (2) naṣīḥat al-mulūk28; (3) tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar29; and (4) durar al-sulūk fī siyāsat al-mulūk.30 the first two are not mentioned by pre-modern biographers, and their attribution to māwardī has now been discredited.31 the third is attributed to māwardī by yāqūt under a slightly different title (taʿjīl al-naṣr wa-tashīl al-ẓafar). it draws heavily on the persian and hellenistic traditions as well as on the arabo-islamic.32 the fourth seems to be one of his earliest works, from about 393/1002-3.33 dedicated to the buwayhid prince bahā’ al-dawlah, it too draws for its quotations on both the persian and islamic imperial traditions (anūshirvān and ardashīr on the persian side, various umayyad and ʿabbāsid caliphs and their governors on the islamic), besides various unnamed ḥukamā’, some evidently in the hellenistic tradition.34 an unpublished manuscript in the escorial titled al-faḍā’il 24. māwardī, wizārah, 47. 25. māwardī, wizārah, 101-5 (sulṭān), 139-42 (malik). 26. māwardī, wizārah, 126-7; idem, aḥkām, 46-7. for indignation on the part of later shāfiʿi jurisprudents, v. dāwūd and ʿabd al-munʿim, imām, 109-11. abū yaʿlá attributes the opinion that wazīr al-tanfīdh may be a dhimmī to the ḥanbali al-khiraqī (d. damascus, 334/945-6), aḥkām, 32. 27. for the edition of fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim, v. n. 17. 28. i have consulted naṣīḥat al-mulūk, ed. muḥammad jāsim al-ḥabashī (baghdad: dār al-shuʾūn al-thaqāfīyah al-ʿāmmah, n.d.). i have heard of but not seen editions by khiḍr muḥammad khiḍr (kuwait, 1983) and fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim aḥmad (alexandria, 1988). 29. al-māwardī, tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar, ed. muḥyī hilāl al-sarḥān, sup. ḥasan al-sāʿātī (beirut: dār al-nahḍah al-ʿarabīyah, 1401/1981; ed. riḍwān al-sayyid, silsilat nuṣūṣ al-fikr al-siyāsī al-ʿarabī al-islāmī 1 (beirut: dār al-ʿulūm al-ʿarabīyah & al-markaz al-islāmī lil-buḥūth, 1987). 30. for aḥmad’s edition, v. n. 1. 31. fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim, introduction to māwardī (attrib.), tuḥfah, 38; idem, introduction to his edition of the naṣīḥah; v. most recently louise marlow, “difference and encyclopaedism in tenth-century eastern iran,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam, no 40 (2013), 195-244, esp. 197-9 on the authorship of naṣīḥat al-mulūk. 32. v. n. 34 for one hellenistic example. 33. on the date, v. aḥmad, introduction, 36-40. 34. e.g., durar, 112, attributed by māwardī to manthūr al-ḥikam, elsewhere to hermes trismegistus. 73 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) and attributed to māwardī is suspected of being a section of either durar al-sulūk or adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn.35 likewise uncertain is the attribution to māwardī of two books concerning the ḥisbah (enforcement of public morals), of which manuscripts are found in cairo and jerusalem.36 kātib çelebī attributes to him a musnad collecting hadith related by abū ḥanīfah, incorporated into a synthesis of fifteen such masānīd by muḥammad ibn maḥmūd al-khwārizmī (d. 665/1266-7?).37 however, i suspect this is a mistake, for al-khwārizmī himself apparently identifies the musnad in question as the work of someone else entirely.38 as for adab, adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn comprises three sections: adab al-dīn, on islamic law, adab al-dunyā, on the wisdom tradition, and adab al-nafs on the cultivation of personal virtues such as not to be loquacious or envious. the introduction is notable for its argument that reason and revelation (ʿaql and sharʿ) are complementary.39 the section on islamic law supplies rational justifications for the rules; for example, it is the earliest work known to me that presents the ramaḍān fast as training in sympathy and forbearance toward the poor, who are hungry most of the time.40 the same attention to balancing reason and revelation that shows up in adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn is also evident in al-ḥāwī al-kabīr.41 al-amthāl wa-al-ḥikam, a smaller work, comprises ten sections.42 each starts with advice from the prophet. then come proverbs and poetry. most of the proverbs are the sayings of “wise men (ḥukamā’),” here meaning eighth-century renunciants (zuhhād, nussāk). however, some are from the persian tradition, like much of the middle section of adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn, among other works. a substantial work on arabic grammar is apparently lost.43 i am inclined to suppose that māwardī put away the persian and hellenistic traditions as the sunni revival progressed and he transferred his principal loyalties from the buwayhids to the caliph. in this way, the development of his oeuvre 35. aḥmad, introduction to durar al-sulūk, 30. 36. dāwūd and ʿabd al-munʿim, imām, 114. 37. kātib çelebī, kashf al-ẓunūn, ed. şerefettin yaltkaya and rifat bilge, 2 vols (istanbul: maarif matbaası, 1941, 1943), 2:1681. 38. al-khwārizmī, jāmiʿ masānīd al-imām al-aʿẓam, 2 vols (hyderabad: majlis dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-niẓāmīyah, 1332), 1:5. the fifteenth work on this list is attributed to an abū al-qāsim ʿabd allāh ibn muḥammad ibn abī al-ʿawwām al-sughdī, so far untraced by me. 39. al-māwardī, adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn, ed. muḥammad karīm rājiḥ (beirut: dār iqraʾ, 1401/1981), 7. i have heard of but not seen a translation into english: the discipline of religious and worldly matters, trans. thoreya mahdi allam, rev. magdi wahba and abderrafi benhallam ([morocco]: isesco, 1995). 40. māwardī, adab al-dunyā, 102. 41. for a longer discussion of adab al-dunyā wa-al-dīn, v. jean-claude vadet, les idées morales dans l’islam, islamiques (paris: presses universitaires de france, 1995), 48-54. vadet likewise stresses reason and revelation, finding in māwardī a subtle synthesis of the islamic and persian traditions. v. also arkoun, “l’éthique musulmane,” finally stressing māwardī’s synthesis of worldly wisdom and religious. 42. i have examined two editions, both by fuʾād ʿabd al-munʿim aḥmad: doha: dār al-ḥaramayn, 1403/1983 and riyadh: dār al-waṭan, 1420/1999. the former is expressly based on only two mss. the latter describes three additional mss but offers no further corrections based on them. 43. listed by yāqūt, irshād, ed. margoliouth, 5:408 = ed. ʿabbās, 5:1956. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 74 illustrates the waning of what has been called the renaissance of islam and the waxing of the new, thoroughgoing re-emphasis on arabic and islam associated especially with the saljuqs to come.44 legal thought the section on qadis in al-ḥāwī includes one of the earliest extant expositions of uṣūl al-fiqh, islamic jurisprudence strictly speaking.45 (it apparently appears in this unusual place because, as a shāfiʿi, māwardī thought the qadi ought to be familiar with uṣūl al-fiqh as well as furūʿ, the practical rules.46 however, devin stewart has made out that some of the earliest expositions of uṣūl al-fiqh were in books about judgeship, so the ḥāwī may represent the end of the primitive tradition on this point.47) hitherto, students of islamic legal thought have more often approached it through uṣūl al-fiqh than collections of rules, and it is certainly to be hoped that one of them soon brings māwardī’s exposition into the discussion.48 what follows are translations with comments of three passages from the ḥāwī concerning practical rules. like other extensive presentations of the law (mabsūṭāt, sometimes muṭawwalāt), the ḥāwī offers detailed justifications of the rules of one school (for māwardī of course the shāfiʿi), implying a great deal of legal theory. example 1: whether the salutation is necessary at the end of the prayer here is māwardī’s discussion of the conclusion of the ritual prayer. all schools agree that the prayer ends when one kneels and recites the tashahhud, then salutes to left and right (taslīm). they disagree over which steps are required, which merely recommended (māwardī, ḥāwī 2:187-9 2:143-4).49 * * * * 44. for the sunni revival, v. makdisi, ibn ʿaqīl, chaps. 2, 4; idem, “the sunnī revival,” islamic civilization 950-1150, ed. d. s. richards, papers on islamic history 3 (oxford: cassirer, 1973), 155-68; glassen, der mittlere weg, chap. 2. 45. māwardī, al-ḥāwī 20:106-216 16:55-152. 46. v. māwardī, ḥāwī 20:105-6, 224-6 16:54-5, 159-61. 47. devin j. stewart, “muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī’s al-bayān ʿan uṣūl al-fiqh and the genre of uṣūl al-fiqh in ninth century baghdad,” ʿabbasid studies, ed. james e. montgomery, orientalia lovaniensia analecta 135 (leuven: peeters, 2004), 321-49, citing abū ʿubayd, adab al-qāḍī, and al-jāḥiẓ, k. uṣūl al-futyā wa-al-aḥkām, at 344. 48. two important translations with studies of uṣūl al-fiqh in the eleventh century are al-baṣrī, l’accord unanime de la communauté comme fondement des statuts légaux de l’islam, trans. marie bernand, études musulmanes 11 (paris: j. vrin, 1970), and abū isḥāq al-shīrāzī, kitāb al-lumaʿ fī uṣūl al-fiqh, trans. eric chaumont, studies in comparative legal history (berkeley: robbins collection, 1999). neither makes comparisons with māwardī. i think of no comparable discussions on the side of furūʿ. 49. v. also yasin dutton, “‘an innovation from the time of the banī hāshim’: some reflections on the taslīm at the end of the prayer,” journal of islamic studies 16 (2005): 147-76, and christopher melchert, “the concluding salutation in islamic ritual prayer,” le muséon 114 (2001): 389-406. 75 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) al-muzanī said that al-shāfiʿī (god have mercy on him) said, “then he salutes to his right, al-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatu ’llāh, then to his left, al-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatu ’llāh, until his cheeks are seen.”50 al-māwardī said this: as for going out of the ritual prayer, it is obligatory: it does not end save by this. however, they have disagreed concerning exactly how. al-shāfiʿī taught that it was specified as the salutation. going out of [the prayer] is not sound save by it. this is the majority view. abū ḥanīfah said that going out of the prayer is not specified as the salutation. one may go out of it by farting or speaking. as evidence, he cites the hadith report of ibn masʿūd, that the prophet . . . , when he taught him the tashahhud, [said,] “when you finish this, your prayer is complete. if you wish, leave; if you wish, remain seated.” he also cites what ʿabd allāh ibn ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ related, that the messenger of god . . . said, “when a man raises his head from the last prostration and sits, then farts before saluting, his prayer is over.” this is an express declaration (naṣṣ). they also say that the salutation is for whoever is present. this implies that it is not obligatory in the ritual prayer, like the second salutation.51 they additionally say that it [viz., the salutation] is talk that contradicts the prayer, so it must not be specified as obligatory in the prayer, like addressing humans. this is on account of what muḥammad ibn ʿalī ibn al-ḥanafīyah related of his father, that the messenger of god . . . said, “the key to the ritual prayer is ritual purity, its sacralization is saying allāhu akbar, and its desacralization is the salutation.” misʿar ibn kidām related of ibn al-qibṭīyah of jābir ibn samurah that he said, “we were with the messenger of god. when he saluted, one of us said, by his hand, to his right and his left, al-salāmu ʿalaykum, al-salāmu ʿalaykum, and pointed by his hand to his right and to his left. the prophet . . . said, ‘what is this? do you see with your hands, as if they were restless horses’ tails? it suffices for one of you that he put his hand on his thigh, then salute to his right and to his left, al-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatu ’llāh, al-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatu ’llāh.’”52 thus he made the sufficient minimum to be achieved by the salutation, which implies that the sufficient minimum is not achieved by anything else. also, it is one of the two ends of the ritual prayer, which implies that a condition of it is something said, like the first end. moreover, going out of the ritual prayer is an essential part of the prayer, so it should be specifically required, like the inclination and prostration. it is the completion of the worship, and cannot be achieved by what is contradictory of it, similarly to sexual intercourse in the pilgrimage. the ritual prayer is a form of worship 50. muzanī, mukhtaṣar, margin of shāfiʿī, kitāb al-umm, 7 vols. in 4 (cairo: al-maṭbaʿah al-kubrā al-amīrīyah, 1321-5; repr. cairo: kitāb al-shaʿb, 1388/1968), 1:77. 51. the shāfiʿi school held that only the first salutation was obligatory, the second being highly recommended; e.g., māwardī, ḥāwī 2:300 2:233; abū isḥāq al-shīrāzī, al-tanbīh, bāb furūḍ al-ṣalāh wa-sunanihā = (cairo: muṣṭafā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1370/1951), 25; idem, al-muhadhdhab, ṣifat al-ṣalāh, al-farḍ = 2 vols. (cairo: muṣṭafā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, n.d.; 3rd printing, 1396/1976), 1:116-17. 52. likewise quoted by shāfiʿī, umm 1:106, ll. 10-5 = ed. rifʿat fawzī ʿabd al-muṭṭalib, 11 vols (al-manṣūrah: dār al-wafāʾ, 1422/2001; 2nd printing 1425/2004), 1:278. references to the latter edition henceforth in italic. the expression adhnāb khayl shums and this very hadith report are explained in lisān al-ʿarab, s.v. sh m s. thanks to professor geert jan van gelder for directing me to it. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 76 that is nullified by farting in the middle of it, so it must be nullified by farting at the end of it, like the ritual ablution. it is not sound that one should go out of the ritual prayer by what contradicts it, like the ending of the period of wiping. the ritual prayer is a form of worship, so it is not sound that it be completed by what is not a part of worship, as the other forms of worship [cannot be so completed]. as for the answer to the hadith report of ibn masʿūd, it has two aspects. one of them is that his saying . . . “your prayer is complete” meant “coming near to completing it.” his saying, “if you wish, arise; if you wish, remain seated,” is the talk of ibn masʿūd [not the prophet]. the second is that the apparent meaning of this hadith report is to be abandoned, for going out of the prayer remains an obligation [for the one praying]. our disagreement concerns only the means of going out of it. as for the hadith report of ʿabd allāh ibn ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ, it is unsound. if it were sound, it could be interpreted as concerning what is after the first salutation but before the second. as for their analogy by the second salutation, the second salutation is not obligatory, whereas the first salutation is. as for their analogy by addressing humans, that it contradicts the prayer, it is an unsafe interpretation (waṣf ghayr musallam). besides, the meaning of addressing humans is that if he omits it and what is equivalent to it, his ritual prayer is not spoilt (lam tafsud). but if he omits the salutation and its equivalent, in their opinion, then his ritual prayer is nullified (baṭalat). * * * * typical here is the order in which māwardī treats the problem: a brief statement of the shāfiʿi rule; alternative rules from other schools (here just the ḥanafī); how the other schools argue; how the shāfiʿi school argues; finally, what is wrong with the other schools’s arguments. systematic debate with other schools in this fashion is distinctive of writing in the shāfiʿi tradition, imitated by writers of the māliki and ḥanbali.53 ḥanafi and shiʿi writing stands somewhat apart.54 earlier examples of it than the ḥāwī cannot be found, but this is unsurprising inasmuch as nothing survives of the works of ibn surayj, ibn abī hurayrah, abū ḥāmid al-isfarāyinī, and māwardī’s other baghdadi predecessors except in quotation. it must have developed out of the training by debate (munāẓarah) and the recording of debating points in the graduate student’s taʿlīqah that were the hallmarks of 53. a good example of an early māliki work in this style is al-bājī, al-muntaqā, ed. muḥammad ibn al-ʿabbās ibn shaqrūn, 7 vols. in 4 (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-saʿādah, 1331-32). bājī (d. almeria, 474/1081?) studied in baghdad under abū al-ṭayyib al-ṭabarī and abū isḥāq al-shīrāzī, among others. an outstanding ḥanbali example is ibn qudāmah, al-mughnī, ed. ʿabd allāh ibn ʿabd al-muḥsin al-turkī and ʿabd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-ḥulw, 15 vols. (cairo: hajr, 1406-11/1986-90). ibn qudāmah (d. damascus, 620/1223) likewise studied in iraq, and although he is not reported to have formally trained under shāfiʿi teachers, his works include massive borrowing from earlier shāfiʿi literature, especially from abū isḥāq al-shīrāzī and ghazālī. 54. at the level of rules, patricia crone has identified the māliki, shāfiʿi, and ḥanbali schools as constituting a medinese bloc, ḥanafi and shīʿi a kufan: roman, provincial, and islamic law (cambridge: university press, 1987), 23. i expect research to show increasingly that these blocs were originally basran and kufan, respectively. at the level of uṣūl al-fiqh, the distinctiveness of the shāfiʿi and ḥanafi traditions has been noted fairly often although so far little developed systematically; e.g., éric chaumont, introduction, kitāb al-lumaʿ by abū isḥāq al-shīrāzī, 12-15. 77 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) the classical school of law.55 as elsewhere, close investigation shows that māwardī’s account of his opponents’ position is simplistic. in this passage, he once alludes and once expressly refers to the obligatory character of the first salutation, arguing that the ḥanafi position would make it merely recommended. actually, it seems, the ḥanafīyah were divided, only some of them considering that the salutation at the end was merely recommended (sunnah) but not absolutely required (farḍ).56 whether māwardī simplified from ignorance of ḥanafi discussions or for polemical convenience is impossible for us to say. also typical is the ad hoc character of some of māwardī’s arguments. for example, this appeal to aesthetics, that a series of ritual acts should be symmetrical, as by one’s beginning the prayer by speech (allāhu akbar) and therefore also ending it by speech (al-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatu ’llāh), surely has no basis in uṣūl al-fiqh. this is one of many passages that once provoked my question to john makdisi, dean of a law school as well as student of islamic law: why does māwardī continually go beyond the hadithbased arguments one expects of a shāfiʿi to further arguments it seems he could not have believed in? makdisi assured me this was the way lawyers always argue: they offer one reason after another to accept their case, not particularly caring if half of them seem feeble, just so one of them persuades the reader. māwardī’s dismissal of the hadith report of ʿabd allāh ibn ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ seems strikingly casual. he first attacks it as unsound without further explanation. it comes up in standard collections, including those of abū dāwūd and al-tirmidhī.57 but tirmidhī doubted it, asserting that it was muḍṭarib, meaning supported by contradictory asānīd, and that one of its transmitters, ʿabd al-raḥmān ibn ziyād ibn ʿāṣim, had been aspersed by earlier critics. perhaps his critique was sufficiently well known for māwardī to feel no need of repeating it. at the end, māwardī proposes to deal with the hadith report of ʿabd allāh ibn ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ by harmonization (literally istiʿmāl, meaning practical application) rather than rejection. this does not necessarily indicate bad faith. the qur’an enjoyed tawātur, meaning that it was transmitted to later generations by so many different paths as to preclude any suppression or distortion; hence it afforded certain knowledge. hadith, by 55. v. george makdisi, the rise of colleges: institutions of learning in islam and the west (edinburgh: university press, 1981), 116-22. 56. e.g., ʿalāʾ al-dīn al-samarqandī, tuḥfat al-fuqahāʾ, al-ṣalāh, iftitāḥ al-ṣalāh = 3 vols. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīyah, n.d.), 1:138-9. similarly, al-kāsānī, badāʾiʿ al-ṣanāʾiʿ fī tartīb al-sharāʾiʿ, 7 vols. (cairo: maṭbaʿat sharikat al-maṭbūʿāt al-ʿilmīyah, 1327-8; repr. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmīyah, 1406/1986), 1:194, noting three characterizations within the school: farḍ, wājib, and sunnah. the first two indicate requirements but of different degrees of certainty, the last the highest degree of being recommended, for which v. a. kevin reinhart, “‘like the difference between heaven and earth:’ ḥanafī and shāfiʿī discussions of wājib and farḍ,” studies in islamic legal theory, ed. bernard g. weiss, studies in islamic law and society 15 (leiden: brill, 2002), 205-34. 57. abū dāwūd, al-sunan, k. al-ṣalāh 73, al-imām yuḥdithu baʿda mā yarfaʿu raʾsahu min ākhir al-rakʿah, no 617; al-tirmidhī, al-jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, ṣalāh 184, mā jāʾa fī al-rajul yuḥdithu fī al-tashahhud, no 408. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 78 contrast, was widely recognized by sunni writers as affording only probable knowledge.58 hadith reports were authenticated or not by comparison of asānīd, the paths of their transmission. as we see from continual disagreement among rijāl critics, however, pre-modern muslim critics worked as intuitively as modern students of hadith.59 māwardī could see as well as we how evaluations of particular hadith reports were necessarily tentative, hence his proposing to harmonize a contrary hadith report even after aspersing its authenticity. example 2: heirs and waqf property here is māwardī on a question of waqf, the setting aside of a part of one’s property and the assignment of its yield in perpetuity to whomever one wishes. normally, the property can never again be bought or sold or divided normally among heirs (māwardī, ḥāwī 9:390-1 7:527).60 * * * * if someone establishes a waqf for the benefit of his son, then his son’s heirs, then [if they should die out] the poor and destitute, then the son dies, with the establisher of the waqf one of his heirs, does he receive his normal share of the heritage or not? there are two views. one of them is that he does receive [his normal share]. this is the position of ibn surayj and al-zubayrī.61 the second view is that he does not receive it, nor any of the [son’s] other heirs. this is because the heirs take only their heritage from him [the deceased son] and not anyone else’s heritage. it is rendered to the poor. next, one investigates the heirs of his son he [the establisher of the waqf] made beneficiaries. there are just three possibilities. one of them is that he made them beneficiaries in proportion to their normal inheritance shares, in which case it is [divided] among them so. the second is that he made them beneficiaries equally, in which case it is [divided among them] so, the male, female, wife, and child all inheriting equal shares. the third is that he made an absolute pronouncement [that the son’s normal heirs would 58. see bernard weiss, the spirit of islamic law, the spirit of the laws (athens: univ. of georgia press, 1998), chap. 5, esp. 89-90; wael b. hallaq, “the authenticity of prophetic ḥadīth: a pseudo-problem,” studia islamica, no 89 (1999), 73-90. 59. v. above all eerik nael dickinson, the development of early sunnite ḥadīth criticism, islamic history and civilization, studies and texts, 38 (leiden: brill, 2001), chap. 6, for a description of hadith criticism in the ninth and tenth centuries c.e., and herbert berg, the development of exegesis in early islam, curzon studies in the qurʾan (richmond: curzon, 2000), chap. 2, for a review of the modern controversy, stressing how much the findings of different scholars have depended on their initial assumptions. cf. harald motzki, the origins of islamic jurisprudence, trans. marion h. katz, islamic history and civilization, studies and texts 41 (leiden: brill, 2002), chap. 1, another good review of the modern controversy with acute comments on method. i disagree with motzki that his own method is less speculative than the methods of earlier scholars. 60. for the law of waqf and references to earlier studies, v. ei2, s.v. “waḳf,” § 1, by doris behrens-abouseif, and peter c. hennigan, the birth of a legal institution: the formation of the waqf in third-century a.h. ḥanafī legal discourse, studies in islamic law and society 18 (leiden: brill, 2004). 61. abū ʿabd allāh al-zubayrī (d. 318/930-1), a basran shāfiʿi of unknown formation, for whom v. subkī, ṭabaqāt 3:295-9. 79 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) benefit from the waqf on his decease, without further detail]. in this case, it is [divided among them] equally, for the presumption (al-aṣl) is equality when it comes to gifts and no preference has been specified for some over others. thus, if he has established a waqf for the benefit of zayd’s heirs, with zayd alive, none of them has any claim on it, for claims are inherited. the members of his family are called ‘heirs’ only figuratively, not actually. if that were so, then the waqf would have been established concerning something perishable, as discussed above. with zayd dead, it remains a sound waqf for the benefit of zayd’s heirs. then it falls under one of the three possibilities as to equality or preferring some over others. * * * * as māwardī has explained earlier, only something that will not be used up can be subject to waqf (according to the shāfiʿi school); hence, for example, real estate may be made into waqf but a chest of money may not. if a waqf property were divided up amongst heirs, it would cease to exist, at least as a unit. only its yield (such as the fruit of an orchard, the rental of a building) may be divided up and distributed. notably, in default of an express stipulation to the contrary, māwardī calls for the yield of a waqf property to be divided equally among the named beneficiaries, not by the qur’anic rules of dividing estates, whereby a widow receives a quarter if her husband had no children, otherwise an eighth, a widower half if his wife had no children, otherwise a quarter, a daughter half the share of a son, and so forth. the law of property transfers (sales, pledges, fraud, &c.), not obviously religious concerns to the christian (as ritual and adultery seem obviously religious concerns), is an important section of the law, occupying about a quarter of the ḥāwī. māwardī’s reasoning in the section on waqf, likewise property transfers generally, is in some respects typical of his reasoning throughout the ḥāwī; for example, this exhaustive listing of the possibilities. in other respects, however, it contrasts sharply with other sections of the ḥāwī, exemplified by the foregoing discussion of the ritual prayer (likewise by the discussion of the penalty for adultery to come). first, although māwardī continues to acknowledge contrary positions, he seldom here identifies them expressly with other schools. hence, as we move from ritual law to property transfers, we suddenly have many fewer refutations of ḥanafi doctrine, among others. secondly, māwardī here quotes much less hadith, and most of that little without asānīd. hadith usually appears in connection with controversy, and isnād criticism is one way of refuting an opponent’s case. where there is less controversy with other schools, there is also, then, less hadith. it may also be that, on the whole, the law of ritual was fixed substantially earlier than the law of property transfers. consequently, as the generation of hadith slowed in the ninth century, the still-developing law of property had to forgo rich documentation by hadith.62 62. peter hennigan argues especially from the diversity of terminology that the law of waqf was still highly fluid in the later eighth century and did not crystallize until the ninth: birth, esp. chap. 3. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 80 thirdly, māwardī is often inconclusive. in this passage concerning waqf, we have to guess that he prefers the position of ibn surayj and zubayrī. in some nearby passages, he seems even less conclusive; for example, over who can be said to own a waqf property and whether, if someone establishes a waqf for the benefit of himself, then the poor and destitute, the poor and destitute begin to benefit immediately (since a valid waqf cannot be established in one’s own favor) or only on his death.63 two centuries before māwardī, traditionalist jurisprudents such as ʿabd al-razzāq (d. yemen, 211/827), abū bakr ibn abī shaybah (d. kufa, 235/849), and aḥmad ibn ḥanbal (d. baghdad, 241/855) might exhibit inconclusive ness by their habit of letting hadith speak for itself, presenting contradictory hadith reports in succession and leaving it to their reader or questioner to chose for himself which to follow. two centuries after māwardī, a jurisprudent such as al-nawawī might exhibit inconclusive ness by his habit of laying out contradictory positions from within the shāfiʿī school without identifying any one as correct. but neither of these habits seems to fit māwardī’s loss of interest in pointing out the most likely rule when it comes to property transfers as opposed to ritual (although māwardī anticipates nawawī’s reluctance to overrule disagreement within the school more than he retains ʿabd al-razzāq’s and the others’ simple veneration of hadith). why should the law of property transfers seem systematically different from the law of ritual and family relations? it used to be a commonplace that islamic law regulated ritual and family life (especially marriage and divorce) closely, commerce in rough outline, international relations and the suppression of crime hardly at all.64 this is presumably an inference partly from just the relative abstractness of the law of property transfers as one sees in the ḥāwī. yet the law of waqf should, by this reasoning, stand out from the rest of the law of property transfers just because waqf properties were commonly regulated by qadis, not priv ate persons or secretaries (kuttāb). that is, unlike sales or criminal justice, they were directly regulated by trained jurisprudents. hence, if closeness of supervision were the issue, the law of waqf would be quite as detailed as that of the ritual prayer. some modern scholars have distinguished between strictly legal concerns in islamic law and non-legal, moral concerns.65 following them, one might suppose that māwardī argues differently about prayer because there his concerns are religious, whereas here he is free to discourse about waqf as a real jurisprudent. but surely the law of property transfers is where one most needs a law that is clear and predictable; where one urgently needs to know, for example, on the death of the original beneficiary of a waqf, whether the next beneficiaries will be his natural heirs or the poor and destitute. i propose that māwardī’s discussion of waqf seems cursory and abstract by compar63. māwardī, ḥāwī 9:372-4, 388-9 7:515-16, 526. 64. “its hold was strongest on the law of family (marriage, divorce, maintenance, &c.), of inheritance, and of pious foundations (waḳf); it was weakest, and in some respects even non-existent, on penal law, taxation, constitutional law, and the law of war; and the law of contracts and obligations stands in the middle”: joseph schacht, an introduction to islamic law (oxford: clarendon press, 1964), 76. 65. the most sophisticated attempt to distinguish between legal and non-legal concerns in islamic law has been baber johansen, contingency in a sacred law, studies in islamic law and society 7 (leiden: brill, 1998). cf. review by wilferd madelung, islamic law and society 7 (2000): 104-9. 81 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ison with his discussion of the ritual prayer (and of ritual and family relations in general) mainly because the ḥāwī is dominated by a religious vision; because the ḥāwī is first a work of devotion, only secondarily of directions for its readers how to order their lives. waqf was a widespread, everyday economic institution, so every man of substance, such as māwardī undoubtedly was, must have had extensive personal acquaintance with waqf property. moreover, as it was among the qadi’s chief duties to oversee waqf properties, so māwardī should have had more extensive personal experience even than most jurisprudents. perhaps when he sat in his mosque teaching students orally, he indeed brought up cases from his personal experience and explained how a working qadi dealt with worldly disputes. but he wrote the ḥāwī to elaborate god’s law. bringing in hard cases from his personal experience as a qadi, involving imperfect information, gain for some and loss for others, and probably extrajudicial pressures, would just have sullied what māwardī preferred to contemplate as transcendently pristine. example 3: the penalty for adultery here is māwardī in al-ḥāwī on the problem of whether to flog as well as stone the muḥṣan adulterer; i.e. a sane, free muslim who has consummated a marriage with another free person (māwardī, ḥāwī 17:15-8 13:191-3).66 * * * * granted what we have described of the penalty for adultery, that it is stoning the non-virgin (thayyib) and flogging the virgin (bikr), the adulterer’s state must fall into one of two cate gories: either he is a virgin or a non-virgin, as we shall describe the states of the virgin and non-virgin. if he is a non-virgin, the non-virgin being called a muḥṣan, his penalty is stoning without flogging. the khawārij teach that he is to be given a hundred lashes without stoning, treating virgin and non-virgin alike. they argue by the apparent meaning of the qur’an, for stoning is among akhbār al-āḥād [‘reports of individuals’, hence uncorroborated], and they are not an argument for them when it comes to ordinances. dāwūd ibn ʿalī, among the ẓāhirīyah, says that he is to be flogged a hundred lashes and stoned, combining the two punishments.67 they argue by the statement of the prophet, “take it from me. god has made a way for them: for the virgin with the virgin, a hundred lashes and banishment for a year; for the non-virgin with the non-virgin, a hundred lashes and stoning.” [they argue] also by what qatādah related of al-shaʿbī: that shurāḥah al-hamdānīyah came to ʿalī and 66. also kitāb al-ḥudūd min al-ḥāwī al-kabīr, ed. ibrāhīm ibn ʿalī al-ṣanduqjī, 2 vols. (n.p.: n.p., 1415/1995), 1:128-37. because it raises problems of conflict between qurʾan and sunnah, the penalty for adultery has attracted an unusual number of studies. v. esp. john burton, the sources of islamic law: islamic theories of abrogation (edinburgh: univ. press, 1990), chap. 7, and ei2, s.v. “zinā,” by r. peters, with further references. 67. dāwūd al-ẓāhirī (d. baghdad, 270/884), on whom v. dhahabī, siyar 13:97-108, with further references. on the basis of his teaching developed the ẓāhiri school of law, for which v. provisionally melchert, formation, 178-90. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 82 said, “i have committed adultery.” he said to her, “perhaps you are jealous. perhaps you dreamt it.” she said, “no.” so he flogged her on thursday and stoned her on friday, saying, “i flogged her according to the book of god and stoned her according to the sunnah of the messenger of god . . . .” [they say also] that the penalty for adultery must combine two punishments, the way flogging and exile are combined for the virgin. al-shāfiʿī, abū ḥanīfah, mālik, and the overwhelming majority of jurisprudents teach that stoning is necessary without flogging. the evidence for the necessity of stoning, contrary to what the khawārij teach, is what we have cited earlier by way of reports of the messenger of god . . . , both word and deed, and of the companions, both transmission [from the prophet] and deed; also people’s widespread agreement and the crystallizing of consensus concerning it, such that this ordinance has become mutawātir [so widespread as to leave no doubt of its being true], even though the instances of being stoned are known by akhbār al-āḥād, which forbids the rise of disagreement afterwards. the evidence that there is no more flogging in association with stoning the non-virgin is what shāfiʿī related of mālik of nāfiʿ of ibn ʿumar, that the messenger of god . . . stoned two jews who had committed adultery.68 had he flogged them, that would have been transmitted just as it was that they were stoned. ʿikrimah related of ibn ʿabbās that the messenger of god . . . said to māʿiz ibn mālik when he came to him and confessed to adultery, “perhaps you kissed or had a peek or looked?” he said, “no.” he asked, “did you do such-and-such?” without indirection.69 he said, “yes.” at that, he ordered him stoned. abū al-muhallab related of ʿimrān ibn al-ḥuṣayn that a woman of juhaynah came to the prophet . . . and confessed to adultery. she said, “i am pregnant.” so the prophet . . . summoned her guardian and said, “treat her well, and when she is delivered, bring her to me.” so he did this, and when she was delivered, he brought her. then the prophet . . . said, “go and nurse him.” she did that, then came. so the prophet . . . gave orders concerning her. her clothing was wrapped tightly about her, then he ordered her to be stoned and [afterwards] prayed over her. ʿumar said to him, “o messenger of god, you stone her then pray over her?” he said, “she repented such that if it were divided among seventy persons of medina, it would suffice for them. have you found anything better than what she did for herself?” he said in what we have described already of the hadith report of abū hurayrah, “go, unays, to this one’s wife: if she confesses, stone her.”70 these reports indicate that he restricted himself to stoning without flogging and that what the hadith report of ʿubādah ibn al-ṣāmit entails, by way of his saying “for the non-virgin with the non-virgin, a hundred lashes and stoning,” is abrogated. it came before what we have related, for it was the original exposition of stoning. also, what requires execution does not require flogging, as with apostasy. 68. cited by shāfiʿī, umm 6:143, ll. 7-8 7:390, but without comment on flogging. 69. a-niktahā (as blunt as “did you fuck her?”) in bukhārī, ḥudūd 28, no 6824. it was probably not māwardī himself but some later copyist who refused to quote exactly. 70. this is the hadith report quoted by shāfiʿī himself as showing that flogging had been abrogated as concerned non-virgins whereas stoning stood: al-risālah, ed. aḥmad muḥammad shākir (cairo: maṭbaʿat muṣṭafā al-ḥalabī wa-awlādih, 1358/1940; repr. beirut: n.p., n.d.), ¶ 382; umm 6:119, 7:251marg. 7:336, 10:205-6. 83 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) as for the hadith report of ʿalī concerning the flogging and stoning of shurāḥah, there are three answers to it. one is that there is a gap in its chain of transmitters, since the one who relates it of him is al-shaʿbī, who never met him. the second is that he flogged her thinking her a virgin, then learnt that she was not a virgin and so stoned her. consider that he flogged her on thursday and stoned her on friday: otherwise, he would have combined them on a single day. the third is that she committed adultery as a virgin, so he flogged her, then she committed adultery as a non-virgin, so he stoned her. it is conceivable that he stoned her on a friday not immediately following the thursday as well as that it did follow immediately. as for analogy, even if it is not an indication of preponderance for the ẓāhiri school, its significance for stoning is that it is general, subsuming in itself what is lesser, whereas flogging is particular and may be paired with banishment, which is not subsumed in it.71 * * * * here we are back to the familiar order: a brief statement of the shāfiʿi rule; alternative rules from other schools; how the other schools argue; how the shāfiʿi school argues; finally, what is wrong with how the other schools argue. note also how, typically, māwardī treats in order qur’an, sunnah, consensus, and analogy. the identification of precisely these four sources is a major characteristic of the shāfiʿi school (even if the list does not go quite back to shāfiʿī himself).72 also familiar and typical is the way he successively deals with a contrary hadith report first by isnād criticism, then by harmonization with other hadith reports supporting the shāfiʿi position. some of his terminological ambiguity is also, alas, typical. in this example, māwardī continually contrasts bikr and thayyib. students reading such texts under me have continually objected that someone who has committed adultery is by definition no longer a virgin, while māwardī himself brings up the more precise term muḥṣan but then goes back to using thayyib throughout. one can say only that many jurisprudents before māwardī used the same shifting terminology and that it does not actually confuse the discussion. there is something artificial about refuting khāriji and ẓāhiri positions. did māwardī expect any of his readers to take them seriously? it is not known that there were ever import ant khārijī jurisprudents in baghdad.73 the ẓāhiri school had died out in baghdad by 71. ‘analogy’ here is the conventional translation of qiyās, but qiyās was actually somewhat wider than ‘analogy’, sometimes practically embracing ‘reason’ (ijtihād, in shāfiʿī’s formulation). v. wael b. hallaq, “non-analogical arguments in sunnī juridical qiyās,” arabica 36 (1989): 286-306. for the equation of ijtihād with qiyās, v. shāfiʿī, risālah, §§ 1323-5. māwardī argues against ibn abī hurayrah that shāfiʿī did not mean to identify them completely: ḥāwī, 20:178 16:118. “an indication of preponderance” translates murajjiḥ. given two conceivable rules, the capable muslim jurisprudent will normally identify one as weighing more; that is, more probably representing god’s intention than the other. thanks to dr. joseph lowry for help at translating this paragraph. 72. joseph e. lowry, “does shāfiʿī have a theory of ‘four sources’ of law?” studies, ed. weiss, 23-50. 73. fuat sezgin mentions basran, khurasani, and algerian khāriji jurisprudents but no bagh dadis: geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 11 vols. to date (leiden: e. j. brill, 1967-2000), 1:586. ibn al-nadīm mentions five khāriji jurisprudents, one of whom he saw himself in 340/951-2, possibly in baghdad, but he al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 84 the time māwardī wrote the ḥāwī.74 he might better have argued against the ḥanābilah of his own time, many of whom (including abū yaʿlá ibn al-farrā’) did call for both flogging and stoning.75 i see two reasons why māwardī should have ignored actual disagreement in favour of refuting what was merely hypothetical. first, it was not his purpose, here or elsewhere, to sketch the history of the law. he shows no strong interest even in the history of shāfiʿi doc trine; for example, although the ḥāwī is formally a commentary on the mukhtaṣar of muzanī, it normally omits to quote muzanī’s own comments, including alternative versions of what shāfiʿī said.76 rather, māwardī is maintaining a long tradition of refuting certain arguments. (ibn surayj regularly debated with abū bakr al-ẓāhirī: perhaps māwardī is simply rehearsing some of what they said about the penalty for adultery.77) secondly, coming from a learned culture of continual debate, māwardī did not rehearse juridical controversy in the ḥāwī in order to cause shāfiʿi rules to be enforced rather than others. (it seems likely that eleventh-century baghdadis had their own informal means of dealing with adultery not resembling the doctrine of any school. the police were unwilling to suppress prostitution without special compensation, presumably to replace a share they were used to taking directly from the prostitutes or their owners.78) rather, his point was to show off his own prowess in debate. (compare how many scholars in our day, too, routinely set up straw men and knock them down.) lack of interest in historical stages and arguing to show off, not to change the world, are two features that make it difficult to infer social history from handbooks of islamic law, even those as detailed as the ḥāwī. argument for the sake of demonstrating one’s prowess in debate is also a reason why present-day salafīyah are impatient with islamic scholasticism and like to go back directly to qur’an and hadith to construct an enforceable code—not what māwardī presents in the ḥāwī. professed to be a muʿtazili: fihrist, fann 7, maqā lah 6. on khāriji jurisprudence, v. provisionally michael cook, “ʿanan and islam: the origins of karaite scripturalism,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam, no. 9 (1987), 161-82, and g. r. hawting, “the significance of the slogan lā ḥukma illā lillāh and the references to the ḥudūd in the traditions about the fitna and the murder of ʿuthmān,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 41 (1978): 453-63. 74. the last ẓāhiri jurisprudent of baghdad mentioned by abū isḥāq al-shīrāzī (d. baghdad, 476/1083) is ibn al-akhḍar (d. 429/1038): ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās (beirut: dār al-rāʾid al-ʿarabī, 1970), 178-9. shīrāzī states expressly that the ẓāhiri school has died out in baghdad, although adherents remain in shiraz. 75. al-mardāwī, al-inṣāf fī maʾrifat al-rājiḥ min al-khilāf ‘alā madhhab al-imām aḥmad ibn ḥanbal, ed. muḥammad ḥāmid al-fiqī, 12 vols. (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-sunnah al-muḥammadīyah, 1955-58, repr. beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1419/1998), 10:129. in two short works of his that are extant, ibn al-farrāʾ merely observes that there is disagreement over whether to flog and stone or stone alone: aḥkām, 264, and al-jāmiʿ al-ṣaghīr, ed. nāṣir ibn saʿūd ibn ʿabd allāh al-salāmah (riyadh: dār aṭlas, 1421/2000), 307. 76. on the ambiguous relation of the mukhtaṣar of muzanī to the doctrine of shāfiʿī himself, v. provisionally norman calder, studies in early muslim jurisprudence (new york: claren don press, 1993), chap. 5, and christopher melchert, “the meaning of qāla ’l-shāfiʿī in ninth-century sources,” ʿabbasid studies, ed. james montgomery (leuven: peeters, 2004), 277-301. 77. ibn al-nadīm, fihrist, fann 3, maqālah 6; shīrāzī, ṭabaqāt, 100. 78. makdisi, ibn ʿaqīl, 152. 85 • christopher melchert al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) conclusion māwardī’s style of argumentation continually suggests less than absolute certainty. for example, there is the way he continually attacks hadith supporting another school’s rule as unsound, then reinterprets it in support of the shāfiʿi rule, implicitly acknowledging that their hadith may be sound after all (and implicitly asking that the hadith he cites be treated with equal charity). it thus marks the transition from a tradition of legal writing that aims to establish the correctness of its school’s doctrine to one that aims to establish only its plausibility; to recognition that there will always be multiple schools. implicitly, the different schools of the eleventh century had become somewhat like modern protestant denominations. presbyterians, for example, may like to think that theirs is the best church but will never declare that other protestant churches are inadequate or seriously try to persuade methodists (for example) to renounce their doctrines in favour of presbyterian. in the same fashion, māwardī may have thought that the shāfiʿi school was the best, but by no means did he think adherence to the ḥanafi school (among others) indicated unbelief, or even that there was any serious hope of refuting ḥanafi doctrine and converting everyone to shāfiʿism. in some measure, the shāfiʿi school stood from the start for agreeing to disagree in this fashion, at least among sunni jurisprudents on questions of law. the legitimacy of ikhtilāf, disagreement among qualified jurisprudents, is one main point of the risālah.79 the new agreement to disagree marked the transformation of ahl al-sunnah wa-al-jamāʿah from one party among others (as represented above all by aḥmad ibn ḥanbal [d. 241/855]) to the default category for all muslims except shiʿi and khāriji sectarians.80 similarly in his qur’an commentary, continually pointing out multiple legitimate interpretations, and in his political and ethical writing, synthesizing islamic and persian traditions, māwardī seems a strong example of the catholic tendency of classical sunni islam. to some extent, the new agree ment to disagree marked the influence of uṣūl al-fiqh, the literature of jurisprudence strictly speaking, on furūʿ, the discipline of making out actual rules, from about 1000 c.e.81 finally, the style of al-ḥāwī marks the transformation of islamic jurisprudence into a form of aristo cratic play.82 “aristocratic” is to be insisted on because, with the advent 79. norman calder, “ikhtilâf and ijmâʿ in shâfiʿi’s risâla,” studia islamica, no 58 (1983), 39-47. 80. v. john b. henderson, the construction of orthodoxy and heresy: neo-confucian, islamic, jewish, and early christian patterns (albany: state univ. of new york press, 1998), esp. 41 (comparison with church history, where likewise later orthodoxy was earlier one minority position among many), 53 (chronology of sunnism). henderson draws heavily on w. montgomery watt, the formative period of islamic thought (edinburgh: univ. press, 1973). 81. yaʿakov meron, l’obligation alimentaire entre époux en droit musulman hanéfite, bibliothèque de droi privé 114 (paris: r. pichon and r. durand-auzias, 1971), 323-9. cf. chaumont’s remark that uṣūl al-fiqh substituted argument for proof: introduction to al-lumaʿ, 7. 82. for traditional islamic legal writing as play, v. esp. norman calder, “the law,” history of islamic philosophy, ed. seyyed hossein nasr and oliver leaman, routledge his tory of world philosophies 1, 2 vols. (london: routledge, 1996), 979-98. opportunism and capriciousness are observed in high medieval ḥanafi writing by behnam sadeghi, the logic of law making in islam: women and prayer in the legal tradition, cambridge studies in islamic civilization (cambridge: univ. press, 2013) but with stress on parallels to al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) māwardī’s legal thinking • 86 of the saljuqs, islamic politics was permanently militarized (at least to the end of the middle ages). the triumphant iqṭāʿ system made large landowners finally disappear and the civilian élite came to comprise scholars such as māwardī almost alone. their claim to aristocratic privilege was their mastery of an intricate technical discipline, expounding islamic law, that was emphatically international and non-local. “play” is what aristocracies normally take up to distinguish themselves from the vulgar who have to work. in europe, aristocrats hunted and fought. in the middle east, that was the preserve of turcophone soldiers, so the ulema elaborated an impractical law. māwardī’s style of argument is notably uneven, continually piling up flimsy evidences and reasonings on top of apparently sound ones. vestiges of māwardī’s involvement in adab (belles lettres) are evident in, among other things, the collections of “fun facts” that introduce major sections; for example, his exposition of the non-technical meaning of ṣiyām as “ceasing,” including lines of poetry about horses that have ceased to move, to introduce the book of fasting in al-ḥāwī.83 in purely legal discussions, māwardī confirmed and exploited his membership in the élite by showing off his supple powers of argument in support of the traditional rules. a principal reason for spend ing time with māwardī is simply the ludic pleasure of scholarship in general. european legal history. 83. māwardī, ḥāwī 3:239 3:394. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 430-435 book review this volume is the first installment of a complete edition and trans-l a t i o n o f a l t a n ū k h ī ’ s a l f a r a j baʿd al-shidda by julia bray, the laudian professor of arabic at oxford, and contains the first three of the fourteen chapters of the work. the edition, bray notes (p. xxiii), adopts “the substance of al-shāljī’s text.”1 she has examined several manuscripts that were not consulted by al-shāljī, but as she points out, for this volume they yielded only a small number of variants or additions. “in subsequent volumes, the proportion will be higher” (p. xxiv). this, i think, will come from the increasing complexity of the stories in the later chapters. published by the library of arabic l i t e r a t u r e , w i t h t h e a r a b i c a n d t h e english printed in clear type on facing 1. al-muḥassin b. ʿ alī al-tanūkhī, al-faraj baʿd al-shidda, ed. ʿ abbūd al-shāljī, 5 vols. (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1978). pages, the book is a pleasure to hold in one’s hands. the translation is dazzling. brimming with life, the faraj is by far the most enjoyable abbasid collection of anecdotes. it is also a rich source for the history of abbasid society and administration, and for the study of arabic narratology. because of al-tanūkhī’s ground plan for the book, the first two chapters are devoted largely, although not exclusively, to brief or elaborate recommendations of trust in god’s mercy, qurʾanic verses and prayers guaranteed to rescue believers from a tight spot, and exemplary stories of the religious worthies of the past. the third chapter contains anecdotes of menace and deliverance experienced by characters entangled in the social and political realities of abbasid society, offering the reader a narrative thrill and a taste of the volumes to come. al-muḥassin b. ʿalī al-tanūkhī, stories of piety and prayer: deliverance follows adversity. edited and translated by julia bray. library of arabic literature (new york: new york university press, 2019), xxxi + 352 pp. isbn 978-1-4798-5596-4. price: $35 (cloth). andrás hámori princeton university (emeritus) (hamori@princeton.edu) © 2020 andrás hámori. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:hamori%40princeton.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 431 • andrás hámori in composing his faraj, al-tanūkhī (d. 384/994) took up a narrow genre already in existence and turned it into one of delightful variety. in the preface he tells us of three books on the subject. the first, by al-madāʾinī (who died in the second quarter of the third/first half of the ninth century), was very short. it was no doubt similar in conception to the longer work by ibn abī al-dunyā ( d . 2 8 1 / 8 9 4 ) . t h i s s e c o n d f a r a j b a ʿ d al-shidda, which has been published, is described by al-tanūkhī as being “about twenty folios long” and consisting “mostly of reports about the prophet . . . and accounts of the companions and successors . . .” (p. 5).2 judging by al-tanūkhī’s quotes, the third book, by the qāḍī abū al-ḥusayn al-azdī, must have been no less limited in scope. al-tanūkhī still writes about d e l i v e r a n c e a f t e r a d v e r s i t y — h e w a s familiar with adversity himself—but, as bray makes clear in her introduction, his catchment area is far broader (p. xvi): his predecessors had thought of deliverance in conventionally devotional terms. al-tanūkhī’s notion of deliverance embraced most kinds of human situation and many ways of writing about them. there are few limits to what qualifies as a rescue story in the deliverance. under the story-telling rules that emerge as one reads, deliverance must be earned, sometimes heroically, or deserved, sometimes by the truly deserving; but often it takes only a very little faith or hope for someone to be plucked from misery, and luck in all its 2. ibn abī al-dunyā, ʿabdallāh b. muḥammad, al-faraj baʿd l-shidda, edited by ḥasan b. ʿabd al-ʿāl and ʿimād fārih (ṭanṭā: maktabat al-ṣaḥāba, 1405/1985). forms, including that of unexpected human kindness, plays a major part. t h i s a p p r o a c h a l l o w s a l t a n ū k h ī to range from stories of government f u n c t i o n a r i e s k n o w n t o h i s t o r y w h o e s c a p e d i m p r i s o n m e n t , t o r t u r e , o r worse, through accounts of anonymous characters such as the man delivered from a murderous cook, to stories of the wonderful, as in the “i-only-am-escaped” story of the man who, to his good fortune, had sworn not to eat elephant. in all this, al-tanūkhī presents himself as an anthologist. he cites his sources. at times he records several versions of the same story, and literary elaboration becomes apparent. this still does not tell us much about his own role in the writing, although when a story begins with “a trustworthy friend related to me,” the vagueness of attribution may arouse the reader’s suspicions. in the first three chapters there are (at least) three principal stylistic registers. if the feel of the arabic is to be conveyed, each register presents the translator with demands peculiar to it, and bray’s admirable versions are spot-on. first, there are intricate periods whose english equivalent, if it is to be readable, must adapt syntax and occasionally idiom, and still convey a sense of the architectonic qualities of the original: retardations, forward drive, syntactic connections at a distance. two examples will suffice. the first is found on pp. 2–5: wa-wajadtu aqwā mā yafzaʿu ilayhi man anākha al-dahru bi-makrūhin ʿalayhi qirāʾata al-akhbāri allatī al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) al-muḥassin b. ʿalī al-tanūkhī’s stories of piety and prayer • 432 tunabbī ʿan tafaḍḍuli allāhi ʿazza wa-jalla ʿalā man ḥaṣala qablahu fī maḥṣalihi wa-nazala bihi mithlu balāʾihi wa-muʿḍilihi bimā atāḥahu lahu min ṣunʿin amsaka bihi al-armāqa wa-maʿūnatin ḥulla bihā min al-khināqi wa-luṭfin gharībin najjāhu wa-farajin ʿajībin anqadhahu wa-talāfāhu, wa-in khafiyat tilka al-asbābu wa-lam tablugh mā ḥadatha min dhālika al-fikru wa-l-ḥisābu . . . to those enduring fate’s injuries, nothing, i find, affords more powerful solace than reading accounts of god’s graciousness, mighty and glorious is he, toward those who have previously suffered the same plight and undergone the same tribulations and perplexities, for they show how those at their last gasp have been preserved through the working of his ordinance, those sore beset succored, or saved by an extraordinary grace, or freed by a marvelous deliverance that made all come right again. how these things came to pass may not be evident; what happened may not be susceptible to reasoning or calculation . . . one might have opted for “favor” rather than “his ordinance,” but there is no quarreling with the important choices. literal translation of the metaphors (especially of the temptingly concreteseeming ḥulla bihi min al-khināqi) is renounced in favor of an english sentence rhythm that gives us a flavor of the arabic—indeed, a syntax that reproduces the slowly emergent pleasure given by its arabic counterpart. a literal translation could have achieved nothing like this. another passage, pp. 96–97: wa-sayyidunā al-qāḍī adāma allāhu taʾyīdahu anwaru baṣīratan wa-aṭharu sarīratan wa-akmalu ḥazman wa anfadhu maḍāʾan wa-ʿazman min an yatasallaṭa al-shakku ʿalā yaqīnihi aw yaqdaḥa iʿtirāḍu al-shubahi fī murūʾatihi wa-dīnihi fa-yalqā mā iʿtamadahu allāhu min ṭāriqi al-qaḍāʾi al-maḥtūmi bi-ghayri wājibatin min farḍi al-riḍā wa-l-taslīmi. your excellency the judge, may god ever sustain you, has a discernment too enlightened, is too pure-hearted, too perfectly resolute, and has too lively a strength of purpose for doubt to get the better of your assurance or niggling uncertainties to impair your manly honor and faith and prevent you from meeting with the requisite consent and resignation the ineluctable decree that god has determined shall come to pass. t h i s i s a f i n e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f t h e ceremonial, cumulative composition of the arabic. the second stylistic register i have in mind is that of elevated religious admonition. for example, pp. 40–41: qamaʿa al-jāḥidīna wa-l-mushrikīna wa-qatala ulāʾika al-kafarata al māriqīna wa-l-muʿānidīna wa ghayrahum min al-mukadhdhibīna al-kādhibīna alladhīna kānū ʿan al-ḥaqqi nākithīna wa-bi-l-dīni mustahziʾīn . . . he subdued the infidels and the idolaters and slew the renegade and obdurate miscreants, those liars who al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 433 • andrás hámori had called muḥammad a liar, who broke their word and mocked the faith . . . consider the options for al-kafara. to pair “infidels” with “unbelievers” would be feeble. the case for “miscreants” is not only that the word originally meant “unbeliever” and only that, but also that the whole latinate phrase “renegade and obdurate miscreants” is of a piece, reproducing the pulpit gravity of the arabic. a somewhat similar example is found on p. 88–89: ʿalī b. abī ṭālib is teaching a bedouin how to ask for god’s forgiveness. he begins: akhliṣ niyyataka wa-aṭiʿ rabbaka wa-qul . . . bray translates: “make sincere your intent, bend yourself to the will of your lord, and say . . .” why not go by the dictionary and just say “obey your lord?” the penitential prayer that follows, much too long to cite (and also beautifully translated), is cast in the high style of art prose, with characteristic complexities of syntax, including the decorative variation of prepositional phrases. “bend yourself to the will of your lord” takes the reader to the stylistic register proper to the setting, a solemn homiletic style patinated by centuries of sermons. (a simple google search turns up, in the works of robert harris, president of trinity college in oxford, published 1654: “truth of life, is whereby a man bends himself to please god, and to be conformable to his will in all things.”)3 the “ordinary speech” of dialogue in oratio recta and of unadorned to-the point narration is the third register for 3. robert harris, the works of robert harris . . . : revised, corrected, and now collected into one volume, with an addition of sundry sermons, some not printed in the former edition, others never before extant (london: james flesher for john bartlet the elder and john bartlet the younger, 1654), 204. which an english match needs to be found. i put quotation marks around “ordinary speech” because the language is bookarabic deployed to produce the illusion of living speech. i do not know whether a formal analysis of al-tanūkhī’s “ordinary style” would find in it anything peculiar to him. he does, after all, claim, as does everyone up to the moment when al-ḥarīrī admits to being a writer of stories, that he is only a transmitter of what he has read or heard. in any event, in his narratives s p e e c h a n d s c e n e w o r k t o g e t h e r . sharply focused exchanges in stories of bureaucratic intrigue or discussions of financial chicaneries strike the reader as only too plausible. but plausibility is not a requirement: a character’s deadpan narration of the extraordinary can also suggest linguistic immediacy. such is the case with a man’s recollection, free of any marks of literariness, of how he was startled awake by an oppressive weight on his chest, only to see his wife kneeling on him, a straight razor in her uplifted hand. frequently, the unmediated is suggested by a single brush stroke. in one passage (pp. 164–165) the malefactor defies the victim to go on complaining to god, and the narrator, remembering the mockery, also remembers his enemy’s country a c c e n t : f a q ā l a l ī k u n ʿ a l ā a l ẓ u l ā m i [written ʿalā al-ẓulāmati] . . . yukarriruhā dafaʿātin wa-yukassiru al-mīma bi-lisāni ahli al-kūfa. it is the illusion of ordinary s p e e c h i n s p e c i f i c s e t t i n g s t h a t t h e translator must match. bray does this with a light and pitch-perfect touch. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) al-muḥassin b. ʿalī al-tanūkhī’s stories of piety and prayer • 434 in one story, al-mutawakkil lays this to a man’s charge: kullu mā dabbarahu ītākh fa-min raʾyihi (pp. 148–49). the meaning of min raʾyihi is as plain as can be, but which translation preserves the snappy rhythm—the stylistic soul—of the original? anything with “opinion,” “advice,” or even “consultation” would end up clunky. i do not see how bray’s “he is the brains behind all ītākh’s plotting” could be bettered. the test is this: would the conversation come alive on the stage? it would. a similar issue comes up later in the same story (pp. 152–153). the narrator is subject to a confiscatory fine. torture is applied. a friend advises him to pledge a huge sum he does not have. the narrator is puzzled, but the friend explains: anā aʿlamu annaka ṣādiqun wa-lākin uḥrus nafsaka ʿājilan . . . “i know. of course. the thing is to buy safety for now . . . ” “to buy safety for now” fits the context perfectly and also moves the story along at the pace the urgency of the moment requires. try a more dictionary-bound translation of uḥrus nafsaka ʿājilan, and you will see how much is lost. the colloquially authentic rendering of the introductory part of the sentence is also just right. i much prefer it to a classroom version like “as for me, i know that you’re telling the truth . . .” there is nothing wrong with the latter except that it sinks like lead. in another passage (pp. 204–205) a father and a son are in prison and bribe the guards to let them send a letter. the son relates: fa-qultu li-l-muwakkalīna fī ʿashiyyi dhālika al-yawmi: qad wajabat 4. jalāl al-dīn ʿabd al-raḥmān al-suyūṭī, al-dībāj fi sharḥ muslim b. al-ḥajjāj, edited by fatḥī ḥijāzī, 5 vols. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2006), 3:64, at ḥadīth no. 3020. lakum ʿalaynā ḥuqūqun fa-khudhū hādhihi al-darāhima fa-ntafiʿū bihā fa-mtanaʿū. that evening, i said to the guards, “we are much obliged to you. please accept this money for yourselves,” but they refused. fa-ntafiʿū bihā does not mean “so use it.” it could be supplemented (“spend it on yourselves,” “use it as you like”), but bray’s solution is far better, replacing the imperative with a phrase that might accompany a nice tip to a taxi driver. let me finally add an example where bray offers the tonally perfect english for an expression whose precise sense is not perhaps immediately obvious: “there are three places where a man reveals himself: in his bed, in his wife’s arms, and in the saddle” (p. 227). “in his wife’s arms” renders idhā khalā bi-ʿursihi. there can be no better translation. this is how al-suyūṭī in his commentary on the ṣaḥīḥ of muslim explains aʿrasa, which in the ḥadīth clearly means “to have sexual intercourse”: aʿrasa al-rajulu idhā khalā bi-ʿursihi ayy zawjatihi.4 bray’s translation is true to both the sense and sensibility of the decorously reticent original. there are hardly any passages in which i disagree with bray’s interpretation. i will mention one, and that only because if i am right the memorable moment that gives the pious anecdote its hook into reality is so delicious. in one version of a story (pp. 210–13), cited from al-madāʾinī, yazīd b. abī muslim threatens to kill the hero before he, yazīd, finishes a bunch of grapes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 435 • andrás hámori but is himself killed before the grapes are gone. in a second, cannier version, the hero prays that god should destroy yazīd in the twinkling of an eye. narrating his adventure, he recalls: jaʿaltu aḥbasu ṭarfī rajāʾata l-ijāba. having recently paid a visit to the ophthalmologist, i think the meaning is perhaps not so much “i covered my own eyes in the hope that my prayer would be answered,” but rather “i made an effort to keep my eyes from blinking.” i have offered a sampling of bray’s method. but translating a thousandyear-old book is not just a matter of philology and style, and bray also makes it accessible in a variety of ways. there are helpful explanatory translations, as in kāna badʾa khurūjī ilā al-shāmi anna al-mutawakkil . . . , “this is how my posting to syria came about. the caliph al-mutawakkil . . .” (pp. 176–177). or kuntu fī waqtin min al-awqāti (yaʿnī fī awwali amrihi) . . . , “once upon a time (that is, at the start of his career) . . .” (pp. 124–125). technical expressions whose meaning is no longer readily apparent are put in context and clarified. on pp. 50–51, for example, x demands that y pay him five thousand dirhams, “which he owed him according to a tax-farming contract he held from him”; ṭālabahu bi-khamsati ālāfi dirhamin kānat ʿalayhi min ḍamānin ḍaminahu ʿanhu. extremely useful to all readers is a generous glossary (pp. 247–304) identifying persons, places, and also administrative and cultural matters such as “shurṭa,” “reading back for verification (qirāʾah ʿalā),” “tax (or revenue) farming,” “seven heavens,” etc. there are delights here for the specialist no less than for the reader with no arabic. al-tanūkhī has found his translator. one cannot read this book without a sense of exhilaration and gratitude. we are very pleased to publish the newest issue of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā (uw). we remain, as ever, committed to the ideal of providing a venue for up-to-date scholarship in the disciplines of early and medieval islamic, arabic, and middle east studies, while remaining a source of news and information on the current work of our colleagues and students. on a personal note, the two of us, a n t o i n e a n d m a t t h e w , a r e d e l i g h t e d (and, yes, relieved) to announce that we will be turning over editorship of the journal to our esteemed colleagues alison vacca (utk) and zayde antrim (trinity college). to effect the transition, we asked alison to join us in producing this issue (uw 29); alison and zayde will be taking over as coeditors from this point forward. we cannot think of two colleagues more likely to sustain the high standards of both scholarship and editing that we have pursued over these past years. the editorial adventure of turning mem’s long-established bulletin into an online, peer-reviewed, and openaccess journal began almost a decade ago, when antoine became secretary of mem (november 2011) and matthew mem’s president the following year. by then, mem’s bulletin was reaching its end. although two new issues came out (in 2012 and 2014), it seemed clear that the bulletin—established in 1989 and expanded by fred m. donner from the 1990s on—was no longer sustainable in its original format in our digital age. mem approved the idea of turning uw into a full-fledged journal at the november 2013 mesa meeting in new orleans. antoine and matthew volunteered to become coeditors, thus embarking on a journey whose many challenges we perceived dimly, if at all. we presented the first issue of the newly conceived journal at the mesa meeting in denver in november 2015, the same meeting at which matthew stepped letter from the editors al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): i-iii (photo of antoine borrut by juliette fradin photography) © 2021 antoine borrut, matthew s. gordon, and alison vacca. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): ii down as mem’s president. seven years, forty-five articles, fifty-eight book reviews, and assorted other submissions later, we have published 2,261 pages. along the way, after thousands of emails exchanged with authors and reviewers, the journal finally made its way to the directory of open-access journals and to a new home. as announced in our previous issue, and thanks to the efforts of manan ahmed asif (columbia university), uw is now on a new platform, academic commons, a program of the columbia university library system. we would like to direct all potential authors and contributors to that site (https://journals.library.columbia. edu/index.php/alusur/index). o u r e f f o r t s t h r o u g h o u t w o u l d have fallen short had it not been for the contributions of four colleagues. christiane-marie abu sarah, now assistant professor of history at erskine college, has served as managing editor from the onset and was instrumental to the success of the journal. we are deeply grateful for her consistent and excellent work. to hanna siurua, our lasting appreciation for equally consistent and fine editing. warmest thanks, as always, to malika dekkiche (university of antwerp) and luke yarbrough (ucla), our book review editors, for again bringing together a set of extended reviews on topics in a variety of disciplines. the new issue begins with a statement by prof. michael cook, recipient of the 2020 middle east medievalists lifetime a c h i e v e m e n t a w a r d , r e g a r d i n g h i s intellectual training and the fields to which he has devoted a rich and illustrious career as author, educator, and mentor. among the many honors accorded to prof. cook in recent years was the norwegian government’s holberg prize (2014) and the balzan prize (2019), awarded by the international balzan prize foundation in recognition of “the exceptional impact of [professor cook’s] work on several research areas in islamic studies.” our previous issue featured a special dossier of six papers by emerging scholars in a r a b i c , i s l a m i c , a n d m i d d l e e a s t e r n studies developed in the holberg seminar (2015–18), directed by cook and borrut alongside jack tannous (princeton) and khaled el-rouayheb (harvard). what follows is a set of six full-length research articles on a range of topics. each evinces the high quality of the scholarship of which our colleagues, in their respective disciplines, are capable. ahmad al-jallad h a s p r o d u c e d a w e l l i l l u s t r a t e d a n d technical study of what he proposes was a particular orthographic feature of seventhand eighth-century arabic script. in an equally close study of the set of texts known typically as the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica, liana saif argues for a third/ n i n t hc e n t u r y d a t i n g o f t h e s e t e x t s , which purport to record conversations between aristotle and alexander the great. katja von schöneman, in a feminist, discourse-analytic reading, treats arabic commentaries on qurʾān 4:1 produced by twelve premodern shīʿī exegetes. joshua mugler’s submission contains a study, translation, and edition of the life of christopher, a tenth-century greekarabic christian hagiography produced in baghdad. this is our second arabic edition, the first having been published by jelle bruning in 2020 (uw 28). in a study of women in the medieval and premodern islamic world, david durandguédy’s contribution examines an arabic inscription from an anatolian caravanserai letter from the editors https://doaj.org/toc/1068-1051 https://doaj.org/toc/1068-1051 https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/index https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/index https://www.balzan.org/en/prizewinners/michael-cook https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/issue/view/770 https://doi.org/10.52214/uw.v28i1.8410 built by the georgian wife of a thirteenthcentury rum saljuq ruler. the final piece, by gohar grigoryan savary, considers the life—and the problematic historiography t h a t s u r r o u n d s i t — o f q u e e n m a r i u n ( d . 1 3 7 7 ? ) , a s i g n i f i c a n t f i g u r e o f fourteenth-century cilician armenia and mamluk jerusalem. t h e i s s u e t u r n s n e x t t o a p a i r o f substantial review essays by, respectively, michael pregill and alejandro garcíasanjuán. pregill discusses two recent works by aaron w. hughes on “the jewishmuslim encounter” in the premodern and modern islamicate world. garcía-sanjuán, for his part, in a wide-angle reading o f c h a r l e s h i r s c h k i n d ’ s t h e f e e l i n g o f h i s t o r y : i s l a m , r o m a n t i c i s m , a n d andalusia (university of chicago press, 2021), takes on the questions surrounding the legacy of islamic iberia in modern spain. the two essays are then followed by a report on a conference, “pre-modern comparative literary practice in the multilingual islamic world(s),” organized by the oxford comparative criticism a n d t r a n s l a t i o n r e s e a r c h c e n t r e ( o c c t ) a t t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f o x f o r d , 22–24 july 2022. our thanks to clarissa burt (united states naval academy) for the report. we close with the book review section. the nine reviews treat recent publications dealing with such topics as jihād as a legaldoctrinal issue; archaeology and the arabislamic conquest of iberia; the greek-to arabic translation project of the medieval islamic period; medieval damascene book culture and letters; and new approaches to the study of islamic art, as well as sacred space and sacred time in medieval islam. we are forever grateful to those of our colleagues who took on the invaluable if sadly under-appreciated task of producing the reviews. as with the articles, the disciplinary topics of the publications treated in the reviews, alongside the expertise manifested by the reviews themselves, speak volumes of the vitality of the scholarly community to which we belong. as is our custom, we close with the following two reminders. first, we rely on your financial support. again, although uw is online, open access, and peer-reviewed, it is certainly not free. to cover the costs of publication and the work of our staff, among other expenses, you provide valuable support by keeping your membership in middle east medievalists up to date. for information on membership and the fund, please proceed to the mem home page at: https://www.middleeastmedievalists. com/membership-form/ second, the full run of the journal, in its several iterations, is available online. to access the archive, please go to: https://journals.library.columbia. e d u / i n d e x . p h p / a l u s u r / i s s u e / archive. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): iii letter from the editors sincerely, antoine borrut, matthew gordon, and alison vacca file:///users/marie/dropbox/academics/uw/uw%20rtfs/tmedievalists.com/membership-form/ file:///users/marie/dropbox/academics/uw/uw%20rtfs/tmedievalists.com/membership-form/ https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/issue/archive https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/issue/archive https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/issue/archive al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 150-173 a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late nineteenth century to its institutional entrenchment* kevin van bladel yale university (kevin.vanbladel@yale.edu) abstract this article sketches the early history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late nineteenth century to its institutionalization in the twentieth. key moments include its enshrinement in journals and a monumental encyclopedia and the flight of european semitists to the united states. its institutionalization in the undergraduate curriculum at the university of chicago in 1956 created a successful model for the subsequent dissemination of islamic civilization. working in a committee on general education (the core curriculum) in the social sciences at the university of chicago, marshall hodgson inaugurated islamic civilization as a subject of university study that was not just for specialists but available to american college students as fulfilling a basic requirement in a liberal arts education. many other universities followed this practice. since then, islamic civilization has come to be shared by the educated public. today it is an internationally accepted and wellfunded entity that confers contested social power but still lacks analytical power. the purpose of this article is briefly to trace the development of islamic civilization from its beginning in the nineteenth century, in the intellectual context of its formation, to the middle of the twentieth century, when it became a part of institutions that ensured its reproduction. after that, islamic civilization becomes too widespread and too various for me to capture in short compass. others may wish to pursue that difficult task. nevertheless, i do reflect in conclusion on the ramifications of islamic civilization for university curricula. * i thank the three anonymous reviewers of this article for suggestions that have improved it. i also thank the discussants and participants at the symposium “fifty years after marshall hodgson and the idea of a discernible islamic civilization,” held at yale law school’s abdallah s. kamel center for the study of islamic law and civilization, november 9, 2018, for their thought-provoking responses to an early version of the article. the shortcomings that remain are my own responsibility. © 2020 kevin van bladel. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:kevin.vanbladel%40yale.edu?subject= 151 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) “islamic civilization” is common currency in english, as are its equivalents in other languages. it appears in the titles of books, in the names of university courses and wealthy foundations, and in the programs of policy think tanks. it is a widely accepted framework for explaining a large part of human history. historians of islamic civilization understand that it is a problematic concept, but they have normally been satisfied to leave it undefined or to deploy ad hoc definitions. specialists often use the term merely out of convention or convenience.1 recent efforts to analyze it are either tangential to a larger concern to define islam itself, a different project,2 or part of muslims’ efforts to develop a transnational muslim community for coordinated social and political action. neither of these aspects of the problem is discussed here. i do not address debates about the nature or definition of islam or of religion itself. although the religion of islam and islamic civilization are frequently equated or used interchangeably, only the latter is discussed here. i will, however, inadvertently shed some light on their conflation. where, then, did islamic civilization come from, and how did it become entrenched? islamic civilization has a history. its own myth of its origin posits a beginning in the seventh century, but it did not originate with muḥammad or with any caliph. no early muslims ever even mentioned “islamic civilization.” some early muslims did eventually come to talk about events that happened “in islam” (fī al-islām), using the term to refer to an ongoing period contrasting with what came before, and muslim jurisconsults did develop a concept 1. for example, j. w. meri writes in the editorial introduction to medieval islamic civilization: an encyclopedia, 2 vols. (new york: routledge, 2006), 1:xi, “such fundamental questions as to what islamic civilization is . . . remain largely unanswered.” neither the introduction nor any article in this reference work on islamic civilization defines its subject. another recent example is c. robinson’s islamic civilization in thirty lives: the first 1,000 years (berkeley: university of california press, 2016). robinson says in the introduction that he means by islamic civilization “the distinctive yield, in lived experience and especially high culture, of the religious and political project undertaken by muslims over the near millennium that spans from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries.” it seems to be a term of convenience to put thirty interesting biographies of muslims into one book. the idea that islamic civilization is defined by its “high culture” is owed especially to von grunebaum and hodgson, whose impact is discussed below. 2. see, e.g., a. karamustafa, who relies on the islamic civilization concept to define islam in “islam: a civilizational project in progress,” in progressive muslims: on justice, gender, and pluralism, ed. o. safi, 98–110 (oxford: oneworld, 2003). similarly, s. ahmed directly criticizes the islamic civilization model in defining islam (along with most other major models for the study of islam), but then substitutes his own expression for a 500-year period of it, dubbing it the “balkans-to-bengal complex” of 1350–1850. the “muslims (and others)” inhabiting this broad region in this period, he maintains, participated in “a common paradigm of islamic life and thought” that admitted of internal contradiction. despite the different terms and emphases, this is, practically speaking, the same as hodgson’s islamic civilization bound by an elite culture of letters, which i discuss below. see s. ahmed, what is islam? (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016), 73–85 and 153–75. ahmed’s explicit goal is “to provide a new language for the conceptualization of islam,” so the new terminology is not surprising. whatever the results of their investigations, neither karamustafa nor ahmed are searching for the reasons we talk about islamic civilization; rather, they are attempting to define islam as islamic civilization or by means of a closely similar stand-in concept. of the many reviews of ahmed’s book, see especially f. griffel, “contradictions and lots of ambiguity: two new perspectives on premodern (and postclassical) islamic societies,” bustan: the middle east book review 8, no. 1 (2017): 1–21. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 152 of the domain of islam (dār al-islām) for rulings about residence and warfare.3 these terms, like the qurʾānic concept of umma, or religious community, deserve historical studies to elucidate their development, but they were not intended to define a discrete and ideally uniform transnational civilization and its contents to serve as one subject of a world history in contrast or comparison with distinct, non-islamic civilizations. the story told here involves very few muslims. that, in itself, reveals something about the origins of islamic civilization. some have suggested to me that the identification of individual muslim intellectuals who used similar (but different) concepts here and there might bequeath analytical validity to the present use of the term and increase its utility. but even if one were to discover a premodern “insider” concept of islamic civilization—perhaps an arabic word that once served a purpose like that of the english expression—it would not explain the modern use of islamic civilization, which arose in historical circumstances peculiar to europe, which i shall outline. islamic civilization came into existence without recourse to parallel “native” concepts. otherwise we might have used those terms instead.4 attempts to validate the use of islamic civilization for analysis on the basis of arabic terms are afterthoughts. islamic civilization first appeared among non-muslim europeans. to understand it, the concept, its institutionalization, and its reiteration in the outlook of individuals, one must begin with its component parts. civilization the term “civilization” appeared in english in the sixteenth century, but it became current in the eighteenth, when it referred at first to the progress of the civil law as followed in catholic scotland and on the continent against other kinds of law, such as english common law. in these early english uses, it meant the subjugation of the scottish highlanders, who had their own customary clan laws, and the imposition on them, as barbarian savages, of the civil law of the scottish lowlanders. that is what the english word civilization meant when samuel johnson debated its use as a neologism for his a dictionary of the english language (1755). thus, already in its earliest uses in english, the new word civilization implied the contrast of regulated and refined city-dwellers with anarchic savages. by the 1820s, the term civilization referred to the development of manners and improvement with 3. s. albrecht, “dār al-islām and dār al-ḥarb,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. k. fleet, g. krämer, d. matringe, j. nawas, and e. rowson (leiden: brill online), http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_25867. 4. ibn khaldūn (d. 808/1406), the andalusī scholar and courtier of the ḥafṣids in north africa, is sometimes mentioned as discussing islamic civilization. he wrote about al-ʿumrān al-basharī, “human cultivation,” which rosenthal and others have translated as “civilization”—not incorrectly, in one sense of the english word. see ibn khaldūn, al-muqaddima, ed. m. quatremère (paris: benjamin duprat, 1858), 1:68; f. rosenthal, trans., the muqaddimah, 2nd ed. (london: routledge and kegan paul, 1967), 1:89. but ibn khaldūn distinguished varieties of human cultivation merely as divided into the sedentary and pastoral types (ḥaḍarī and badawī), not as supernational entities in world history, nor as founded on religions such as his own (islam). ibn khaldūn also distinguished between different types of government and between arabs and non-arabs, and identified other interesting factors in large-scale history, but he never once referred to islamic civilization. his discussion of the nature of the caliphate is likewise not about a transnational unit of human society with a common “high culture” unique to it. his interest was in patterns of human society. 153 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) arts and sciences.5 in france, the term civilisation developed almost simultaneously with the english word. it had, in french, especially the connotation of manners, civility, and refined and prestigious forms of conduct. the german word zivilisation was borrowed from french in the eighteenth century. civilizations in these derived senses, civilization was a matter of degree. society could be more or less civilized, and successful civilization meant progress toward less savage qualities. it was apparent to europeans in the late nineteenth century, however, that different peoples of the world had developed differently from them. therefore, authors began to identify distinctly different “civilizations,” turning the concept into one that also admitted of plurality. in this way, during the nineteenth century, the word civilization gradually developed the capacity to a serve as a vague stand-in for the word nation, especially when a collective term for societies before the modern nation-state was needed. by the end of the nineteenth century, books were being published in english with titles such as primitive civilizations (london, 1894)—this one, by edith jemima simcox, describing the economies of egypt, mesopotamia, and china in antiquity. this use of the term is intact today. with these terminological developments in place, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the term civilization was adopted by thinkers seeking to account for all the major patterns of human history. a model for discussing world history had been set by g. w. f. hegel (1770–1831), whose spiritual interpretation of history was expressed in his vorlesungen über die philosophie der weltgeschichte (1837). in this work, hegel sought meaningful mystical patterns in supranational historical movements. for him, however, civilization was still a matter of degree, though distinct, individual nations carried the torch in each consecutive stage of his fanciful master narrative of enlightenment.6 race, nation, and civilization competed as subjects of different master narratives of history in the late nineteenth century, but civilization became especially widespread in the early twentieth century between the world wars. two historians stand out as most responsible for applying and popularizing the term as the key to global history in this period. in highly influential works, oswald spengler (1880–1936)7 and arnold j. toynbee (1889–1975)8 both concocted what were in effect their own complete lists of the distinct civilizations of the world. these entities had their life cycles: birth, adolescence, maturity, and senescence. spengler counted eight civilizations that were the outcome of progress to “high cultures.” toynbee counted nineteen civilizations in the world, not to mention the “abortive” and 5. for the preceding, see g. c. caffentzis, “on the scottish origins of ‘civilization,’” in enduring western civilization, ed. s. federici, 13–36 (westport, ct: praeger, 1995). johnson’s dictionary uses “uncivilized” as a gloss for “brute.” 6. a concise summary of hegel’s view on the role of islam in history can be found in a. hourani, “islam and the philosophers of history,” middle east studies 3, no. 3 (1967): 206–68, at 245–46. 7. o. spengler, der untergang des abendlandes, 2 vols. (vienna: w. braumüller, 1918–22); english translation the decline of the west (new york: alfred a. knopf, 1926–28). 8. a. j. toynbee, a study of history, 12 vols. (london: oxford university press, 1934–61). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 154 “arrested” civilizations that might have entered maturity but did not. the history of the world could be told in terms of the vigor of the spirit and special characteristics of these distinct civilizations and the factors at play in that vigor. civilizations, once understood as separate entities, needed to be compared to understand what made the peoples of the world irreducibly different. spengler and toynbee did not invent this way of thinking, and their use of “civilization” was controversial,9 but they did make civilizations a vernacular framework for twentieth-century talk about the peoples of the world and their histories. by distinguishing separate civilizations, historians committed themselves to an attempt to determine their essential characteristics, which applied generally to each of their respective human participants. for some historians, the use of “civilization” was anti-nationalist and therefore antifascist. thus werner jaeger (1888–1961), the influential classical scholar, wrote in 1936 of “the disruption of western civilization which we are witnessing, with the rise of the doctrine that culture and knowledge are nationalistic possessions, dividing group from group, rather than expressions of kinship binding the heirs of a common heritage into closer union.”10 for jaeger, who had just emigrated to the united states to leave the national socialist regime behind, the greek texts he taught were the educational key to a united “west,” meaning europe and its colonies of people of european descent. other examples could be produced, but this suffices to indicate that the well-intentioned goal of transcending nationalism was one early motivation in the development of the study of a putative western civilization. today, that has backfired badly, as western civilization has become a rallying cry for racism and bigotry similar to those that the idea of western civilization was developed to oppose. the assumption that such distinct, different civilizations existed was taken for granted by innumerable intelligent people who nevertheless have never succeeded in defining the term in a way that would bear convincing analytical utility. to this day, the term civilization has no sound analytical basis. it has been conveniently redeployed in incommensurate ways on ever smaller scales to dignify important subjects for those unfamiliar with them. for example, one encounters talk of the civilization of the hittites (a people), or of mesopotamia (a region), or of islam (a religion). civilizations are designated not by thoroughgoing argument, but for the convenience of the historian in defining an area of expertise to bear the weight of a master narrative. 9. see, for example, the reaction of p. a. sorokin, “toynbee’s philosophy of history,” journal of modern history 12 (1940): 374–87, at 381: “his ‘civilizations’ are not united systems but mere conglomerations of various civilizational objects and phenomena (congeries of systems and singular cultural traits) united only by special adjacency but not by causal or meaningful bonds.” walter kaufman was similarly skeptical about toynbee. in “toynbee and super-history,” partisan review 22, no. 4 (1955): 531–41, at 536–37, he wrote, “the question of how many civilizations there are is like asking how many sciences there are, and the question when a particular civilization originated is on a level with the query when art began. worse still, the conceit that civilizations are not only individual entities but the only units which can be studied historically one at a time, without referring beyond them, is the height of naiveté.” these kinds of criticisms of the category have seldom been heard in the study of islamic civilization, which begins by taking it for granted. 10. w. jaeger, “classical philology and humanism,” transactions and proceedings of the american philological association 67 (1936): 363–74, at 363. 155 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the study of civilizations as the historical counterpart of philology the alleged founders of the putative western civilization, ancient greek authors, never wrote of such a thing as western civilization. the expression in this sense occurs in english only as early as the 1850s, growing widespread only in the late nineteenth century. its spread coincided with changes in the curriculum of universities. as technological subjects and professional skills gradually displaced classical learning in higher education, german philologists of greek and latin led a new approach to the study of their texts: alterthumswissenschaft, the science of antiquity. this approach required the rich contextualization of ancient texts with realien, all the materials of ancient life known through archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, ethnography, and any other possible method. the broadened scope of traditional greek and latin scholarship is exemplified by the monumental realencyclopädie der classischen altertumswissenschaft (first edition 1837–52, expanded version 1894–1980). scholars of greek and latin were now poised to become teachers of general courses on “classical civilization” for students who were facing too many demands to learn greek and latin for themselves and for whom learning greek and latin alone were inadequate to understand “classical antiquity” in the awesome complexity now revealed through enormous scholarly labors.11 this was a highly successful approach that professionalized scholars of greek and latin. it was soon emulated by the semitists, who invented “islamic civilization” for the purpose. from semitic philology to islamic civilization islamic civilization was likewise conceived as distinct and internally coherent before any analysis. the term itself, with the qualifier “islamic,” implies at least one other (western) civilization, the assumption of which was the precondition of its existence. from its first conception, therefore, and still today, one of the central debates about islamic civilization has been its definition and boundaries. as its frontiers were never adequately defined, an overriding early concern has been the determination of what muslims received or adopted from other allegedly distinct civilizations, and what that says about the character of this alleged islamic civilization and the mentality of its inhabitants. the early european pioneers of islamic civilization addressed not just texts but the realien of their contexts, following the approach of altertumswissenschaft. soon they shifted, however, from studying the historical transmission of cultural goods and ideas between supposed separate civilizations, and especially into islamic civilization from prior civilizations, to making claims about such concepts as “the muslim mind” or “the conscience of islam.” in doing so, they almost always ignored economic conditions and other material factors in the lives of the persons participating in these exchanges. such transactions are, indeed, “exchanges” and “encounters” only when they are conceived as crossing the boundaries of civilizations, which historians have preconceived in the first place. in this respect, the concept of distinct civilizations is an impediment to critical historical thinking. 11. c. winterer, the culture of classicism (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2002). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 156 the concept of islamic civilization, also long designated as “muhammadan civilization,” evolved gradually in the wake of classical civilization. in the early nineteenth century, historians did not write about a muhammadan civilization. gustav weil (1808–1889), for example, wrote a geschichte der chaliphen in five volumes (1846–1862), which was, true to its title, a history of the caliphs from abū bakr onward, based closely on the arabic sources available to him. his geschichte der islamitischen völker von mohammed bis zur zeit des sultans selim (1866), dealing with the religion, culture, and politics of specific peoples, was aimed at a learned public but likewise was not intended to provide broad generalizations about the character of an islamic civilization. nineteenth-century semitists, perhaps not surprisingly, relied rather on “semitic” as their category, making race—a false concept made worse through instinctively drawn but spurious ties to the genealogy of language families— the subject of their master narratives. for the prodigious philologist and historian theodor nöldeke (1836–1930), for example, islam (the religion) and the caliphs (its chiefs) formed the subject of a historical narrative, but not a topic about which he could generalize on the broadest scale. for him, the latter entity was “the semitic race,” which he addressed in a work for a popular audience; in this work he contradicted some of the negative assessments of the semites current in his day.12 gustave le bon (1841–1931) wrote his la civilisation des arabes (1884) in a similarly racial vein: the book begins with an essay on the racial and psychological characteristics of the arabs. the austrian ambassador and historian alfred von kremer (1828–1889) may have been the first real expert in arabic texts to plant the seeds of the idea of a muhammadan (islamic) civilization rather than a national, arab civilization. for scholars of his generation, race and civilization were blurred as categories. he generalized about the muhammadan world in works such as geschichte der herrschenden ideen des islams (1868) and culturgeschichte des orients unter den chaliphen (1875–1877), conceiving of a muhammadan civilization that had already experienced its decline after racial mixture diluted its vigor. in the latter work, von kremer dedicated a chapter to the volkscharacter of his object, which he begins by observing that arab civilization had brought some of the highest cultural goods that the semitic race had ever produced. these semites were guided by lofty ideal characteristics that enabled them to do relatively great things, though the same ideals also made for their shortcomings. in this way, putative civilizations were evaluated for their contributions to humanity. this way of thinking remains common today, as one regularly reads arguments about the “contributions” of islamic civilization. such arguments remain entangled in the concept of the efflorescence and decline of distinct civilizations. the earliest use of “muhammadan civilization” that i can find in english is from 1877, by the hungarian orientalist edward rehatsek, who spent most of his life in bombay, where he catalogued persian and other manuscripts, administered state language examinations, and taught latin and mathematics at the university of bombay.13 his use of the term makes 12. compare his popular essay on “some characteristics of the semitic race” with his historical sketch, “islam,” from muḥammad to his own colonial time, both in th. nöldeke, sketches from eastern history (london: adam and charles black, 1892), 1–20 and 60–106, respectively. 13. e. rehatsek, catalogue raisonné of the arabic, hindoostani, persian and turkish mss. in the mulla firuz library (bombay: education society’s press, 1873). 157 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) for a revealing anecdote. he began his essay “the reciprocal influence of european and muhammadan civilization” by explaining that “nations” have “various phases” of existence, “their first developments, their vigour, and their decay,” “compared with the three principal stages of human life, namely, youth, virility, and decrepitude.”14 for rehatsek, nation and civilization were nearly interchangeable, and civilization admitted of degrees—nations are more or less civilized. he listed as other examples of civilizations “ancient india, persia, assyria, babylonia, rome, and greece.” writing in colonial british india, he devoted his essay to the idea that “power, dominion, civilization, the sciences and the arts, have left the east and have migrated to the west, whence their powerful rays are again beginning to fecundate and to revive the lands of their birth.” however, the argument of rehatsek’s essay was preconceived by educated persons in the british imperial government of india. he originally wrote it in 1863 or 1864 in the hope of a monetary reward in response to a public announcement by the government that a cash prize would be given to the best essay on this very thesis: compare the influence of greek learning on the arabs, under the abbaside caliphs of bagdad and the ommyade [sic] caliphs of cordova, with the subsequent influence of arabian learning on the reviving european mind after the dark ages; and from the comparison infer the probable influence which the mature intellect of europe should exercise in its turn, now that it is once more brought into contact with the muhammadan mind in india. the essay was supposed to be written in the urdu “of common conversation,” indicating its purpose—to indoctrinate indian muslims about the cultural benefits of british rule, not many years after the great indian rebellion of 1857–1859. rehatsek’s essay merely elaborated and illustrated some arguments for the thesis already set by the prize offer, but it did so with “civilization,” a term not found in the essay prompt. although he wrote his piece in english and then translated it into persian, not urdu, for submission, a government committee led by william muir (1819–1905), the scottish historian of the caliphate, nevertheless awarded the prize to rehatsek’s essay, leading to its eventual publication. it was, after all, only one of two submissions for the prize received in calcutta. one of the judges, a certain muhammad wajih, wrote in assessment, “i agree with this report [namely, the approval of the essay by muir], but some portions of the essay are contrary to the tenets of islam, are irrelevant to the question, and are not true.” hilariously, but in all fairness, this statement accompanied rehatsek’s essay in the printed version. the essay seems to have had little influence, but it demonstrates, along with von kremer’s publications, that “muhammadan civilization” was an idea in its infancy in the 1860s. soon scholars like ernest renan (1823–1892) would write essays on the character of this civilization, understood in such terms.15 14. e. rehatsek, prize essay on the reciprocal influence of european and muhammadan civilization during the period of the khalifs and the present time (bombay: education society’s press, 1877), 1. 15. e. renan, l’islamisme et la science (paris: calmann lévy, 1883). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 158 collaborating semitists, familiar with works such as those of von kremer, conceived of an oriental encyclopaedia that could be the eastern counterpart to the realencyclopädie der classischen altertumswissenschaft, discussing the project in 1892 at the ninth international congress of orientalists in london. its prospective range was immediately delimited in that meeting as “arabic-muhammadan.”16 this is one of the clearest early instances of the collocation of the two topics in the still-living designation “arabic and islamic studies.” after much planning and effort, the outcome was the encyclopaedia of islam (first edition 1913–1938). ultimately, islamic civilization became widespread through the attempt by arabic specialists, who were semitic philologists by training, to imitate for their materials what classical scholars had done for their own. whereas classical scholars had a “classical civilization” to frame their investigations combining greek and roman antiquities, semitists used “muhammadan civilization” to give historical meaning to arabic philology. it also facilitated their inclusion of persian and turkish along with arabic, dividing semitic studies henceforth into two trajectories, ancient and islamic.17 the mastery of the three “islamic” languages became an ideal very rarely attained, for practical reasons. in any case, arabic and islamic studies became an entity as tightly bound as greek, latin, and classical studies. islam specialists gradually ceased to study comparative semitic linguistics. as preparation was underway for the encyclopædia of islam, scholars continued to broaden the conceptual kulturkreis of islam.18 around the turn of the century, it became normal for scholars to write about muhammadan civilization. the concept was adopted in arab countries now, too: von kremer’s and le bon’s work informed the lebanese scholar jurji zaydan (1861–1914), who used the term “islamic” rather than “arab” in his tārīkh al-tamaddun al-islāmī (history of islamic civilization, 1901–1906) while he worked at the egyptian university. in 1910, carl heinrich becker (1876–1933), a german scholar and politician, founded the journal der islam and wrote the first article of its inaugural issue, “der islam als problem,” a kind of manifesto for islamic studies. he argued, in the vein of von kremer, that islam was not just a religion but also an empire and a political theory. these factors, combined, made islam into a unitary civilization (einheitszivilisation) that, despite local variations, bore a uniform imprint in every place of its existence.19 this clearly articulated view is still being repeated today. no matter the country, the century, the ecology, the economy, the customs, or the language, islamic civilization is supposed to taste the same wherever one finds it. the next year, 1911, saw the first issue of the moslem world, published by the hartford seminary. in the opening editorial of the journal, rev. s. m. zwemer noted the new periodical der islam and the forthcoming encyclopaedia of islam and insisted that there 16. p. bearman, a history of the “encyclopaedia of islam” (atlanta: lockwood press, 2018), 1. 17. this was just the kind of change called for by the fiery martin hartmann in 1898, in favor of a new field of islamic studies: “die arabistik: reformvorschläge,” orientalistische literaturzeitung 1 (1898): 333–42. cf. m. kramer, “arabistik and arabism: the passions of martin hartmann,” middle eastern studies 24, no. 3 (1989): 283–300, at 286. 18. the austrian ethnologist leo frobenius published the concept of “cultural area” in 1898. 19. c. h. becker, “der islam als problem,” der islam 1 (1910): 1–21. 159 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) should be a journal that contextualizes matters islamic “as they affect the church of christ and its missionary programme.”20 the first edition of the encyclopaedia of islam: a dictionary of the geography, ethnography and biography of the muhammadan peoples, published in english, french, and german versions, corralled the world’s leading scholars of arabic and islamic studies into an enterprise in which the basis of collaboration was islamic civilization. the monumental outcome remains an extremely useful tool of scholarship and a compendium of vast learning. scholars’ shared participation in this effort made the expression “islamic civilization” common currency internationally. the ideas expressed by becker were now adopted widely. for example, edward granville browne (1862–1926), sir thomas adams’s professor of arabic, in his 1921 monograph arabian medicine, explicitly prefers “muhammadan” civilization to “arabian” (“more correctly,” he says), though arabic was the chief language of learning in this civilization and bound it together.21 he was on the steering committee for ei at the time. with at least two journals and an encyclopedia of its own, islamic civilization had become, by the onset of the first world war, a framework common to formerly separate strands of scholarship. it was, however, still a domain of discussion for specialist philologists, not for social scientist generalists. islamic civilization migrates to the united states in the wake of the second world war, arabic scholars in the united states began to write in earnest about the general essential characteristics of an islamic civilization. two events promoted this turn. one was the emigration of semitists specializing in arabic to the united states, as the national socialist regime endangered their prospects for life in europe. they brought with them the framework of arabic and islamic studies, in which the two terms represented the philological study of the main source language and the historical approach to the corresponding “civilization,” respectively. the other event was the rapid growth of the american university and the development of new curricula to meet the new educational demands of postwar american society. in this setting, the general education movement sought to reorganize liberal arts and sciences education to avoid both exclusive specialization and the transformation of universities into technical colleges. the roots of the general education movement were closely tied to efforts by the us state department to equip americans, and especially military personnel, with knowledge of the european nations among which and for which americans would fight. understanding a common civilizational heritage was explicitly meant to build morale. columbia university’s mandatory “contemporary civilization” course—originally entitled “war issues”—was developed specifically in response to a request from the state department in 1917 to train future soldiers. though it was first offered only in 1919, after the war’s end, it became a model in american higher education. “western civilization” thereafter became not just a concept for organizing and integrating classical studies and the history of european 20. s. w. zwemer, “editorial,” the moslem world 1, no. 1 (1911): 1–4, at 2. 21. e. g. browne, arabian medicine (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1921), 4 and 6. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 160 culture but an institution of formally organized courses required for certain university degrees at various universities.22 once enshrined in an authoritative educational institution, iterated annually, the western civilization concept more easily took on the character of a widespread, socially shared belief. the general education movement became pervasive in the united states in the 1940s during the next great war. in 1943, the president of harvard university created a committee that produced, two years later, a book-length thesis, the objectives of general education in a free society (harvard university committee, 1945), published “with the compliments of the department of state of the united states of america.” this document became standard reading and remains an underlying template for american higher education in the liberal arts and sciences. the model explicitly offered an educational prescription for freedom and democracy against totalitarianism. the ideological charge of the plan reflects its preparation in a time of devastating global war. it is underpinned by the belief that western civilization needed to be defended against antitraditional forces, which emerged into focus as fascism and communism. western civilization was also used beyond higher education as a rationale for us patronage of countries seeking to “develop” with us aid and anticommunist intervention. although “western civilization” courses first took root at columbia, “islamic civilization” survey courses were launched at the university of chicago. general education was the motive; a european semitist was the initiator; and a dean who had studied at columbia during the onset of the contemporary civilization curriculum was one of the main instigators. the outcome of this new trend was to create an educated nonspecialist public that believed in the existence of an islamic civilization. one of the leaders of the general education movement was richard mckeon (1900–1985), professor of philosophy at the university of chicago from 1934 and dean of humanities there from 1940 until 1952. mckeon finished his bachelor’s in 1920 at columbia university, a year after the inception of the contemporary civilization model. he wrote in 1949 in the new journal of general education (which had been launched in 1946), at the time published by the university of chicago press, that the postwar “present age” required an education imparting a global outlook and promoting cultural understanding to reduce conflicts everywhere. “the western tradition or the civilization of western europe has taken its place in a context of world civilization and world cultures. . . . oriental cultures, which influenced the west in past periods, are now not influence but part of the contexture of world civilization.”23 these cultures required, therefore, special courses of study available to the generality of university students. the plan was carried out over the next few years. at that time, mckeon was a supervising dean of the austrian scholar gustave von grunebaum (1909–1972). von grunebaum had emigrated to the united states in 1938 upon the annexation of austria by germany and in 1943 had joined the faculty of the university 22. s. federici, “the god that never failed: the origins and crises of western civilization,” in federici, enduring western civilization, 63–89. 23. r. mckeon, “the nature and teaching of the humanities,” journal of general education 3, no. 4 (1949): 290–303, at 292–93. 161 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) of chicago, where he became professor of arabic in 1949. he would go on to be a major organizer of european-style “arabic and islamic studies” in the united states. in the issue of the journal of general education immediately following that in which his dean, mckeon, made the case for fostering the study of oriental civilizations in the general requirements of every college student, von grunebaum published an article on the role of “islam in a humanistic education.”24 though meandering and diffuse, this article responded to mckeon’s call. von grunebaum’s medieval islam: a study in cultural orientation, which was based on public lectures delivered at chicago in 1945, had been issued by the university of chicago press in 1946. it was probably used in instruction there; in any case, it sold enough copies that the first edition was printed again in 1947. the book treats islamic civilization as an entity long past its prime—hence the qualification “medieval” in the title—and debates the contrast between the apparent “picturesque uniformity of islamic civilization” and its “inexhaustible diversity behind the colorful veil.”25 muslim civilization, for von grunebaum, was both composite and uniform as well as self-contained. believing he understood the synthesis arising from its ingredients, he could declare that “the strength of islam is in the roundedness of personality which at its best it is able to produce,”26 along with other similarly dubious generalizations. von grunebaum, whose early specialty was arabic poetry, believed that “muslim civilization’s contributions to man’s spiritual life were offered on the verbal level,” or, in other words, appeared in the texts that he himself happened to know.27 the conviction that islamic civilization had peculiar, pervasive, general characteristics wherever it took root, out of which sense could be made, was fundamental to von grunebaum’s role in promoting this subject. not everybody was happy with the way islamic civilization was developing as a topic. franz rosenthal was another semitist emigrant from germany to the united states. as a jew, he had escaped death at the hands of the national socialist regime. in the introduction to his source-based monograph of 1947, the technique and approach of muslim scholarship, written when he was on the faculty of hebrew union college in cincinnati, he referred to “the highly debated subject of the general character of muslim civilization.” he confronted the views of scholars from hegel to von kremer and found them mutually inconsistent. by adhering to the method of recovery and analysis of primary resources, rosenthal held, “(i)t might then be possible to avoid distortions of the picture of muslim civilization such as result from ill-advised generalizations.” here he explicitly had hegel in mind.28 it is not clear whether he had read von grunebaum’s medieval islam at this time, but decades later, in his obituary of von grunebaum, with whom he had often had lunch in the summer 24. g. von grunebaum, “islam in a humanistic education,” journal of general education 4, no. 1 (1949): 12–31. 25. g. von grunebaum, medieval islam (chicago: university of chicago press, 1946), 320. 26. ibid., 346. 27. ibid., 258. 28. f. rosenthal, the technique and approach of muslim scholarship (rome: pontificium institutum biblicum, 1947), 4. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 162 of 194229 and whom he certainly knew from other occasions, rosenthal would briefly pay compliment to the book as a “standard work of synthesis of the cultural history of islam.”30 rosenthal’s own major publications were likewise based on the assumption that a distinct muslim civilization existed, fundamentally different from the western civilization though closely intertwined with it. his approach was historical, based on primary sources, and more cautious, but he, too, offered generalizations from time to time about islamic topics with monographs such as the muslim concept of freedom (1960) and das fortleben der antike im islam (1960). yet in his 1947 technique and approach he wrote, “general statements about civilizations which are as complex and far-flung as islam usually turn out to be little satisfactory, especially after some time has elapsed and scholarly trends have changed.”31 these words have turned out to be true still today. a more revealing and pointed reaction to the model of islamic civilization, which had no echo, was offered by the orientalist vladimir minorsky (1877–1966). von grunebaum, his junior by more than three decades, had invited minorsky to deliver a presentation at a 1953 conference entitled “unity and variety in muslim civilization” at the university of liège, belgium, cosponsored by the university of chicago. many leading european scholars participated. the title itself reveals the dilemma in accepting a category such as islamic civilization, even as it insists that the topic is real. von grunebaum presented the keynote address and edited the proceedings, published by the university of chicago press (1955). in his address he insisted that islamized peoples are essentially changed into a uniform islamic type.32 minorsky, however, stated at the outset of his contribution that he found the very theme of the conference problematic. he remarked that this is because “the present tendency is rather to treat separately the history of the arab, iranian, and turkish lands and peoples, as we treat the history of the european peoples regardless of the fact that in the middle ages they recognized the same authority of the church, and used the same latin and the same canon law.” (he should have said “the earlier tendency was.”) the answer he offered to the dilemma was to take a historical approach to the study of islam in persia and tacitly to avoid generalizations about discrete civilizations. at the end of the paper, he directly criticized the approach of von grunebaum, the editor of the volume, for his judgmental stance on the personality and character of persians occurring in his book medieval islam. minorsky insisted that the characteristics von grunebaum attributed to them, such as duplicity and emotionalism, had to be understood as products of historical events—specifically, the experience of repeated subjugation by foreign invaders. “one must not speak,” he wrote, “of islâm and its subdivisions as if these were logical and absolute categories.” minorsky’s attitude reflects an earlier phase of oriental research, in which the 29. h. h. biesterfeldt, ed., “franz rosenthal’s half an autobiography,” die welt des islams 54 (2014): 34–105, at 71 and 75. 30. f. rosenthal, “in memoriam: gustave e. von grunebaum,” international journal of middle east studies 4, no. 3 (1973): 355–58, at 357. 31. rosenthal, technique, 4. 32. g. e. von grunebaum, “the problem: unity in diversity,” in unity and variety in muslim civilization, ed. g. e. von grunebaum, 17–37 (chicago: university of chicago press, 1955). 163 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) subjects of history were not supranational, internally uniform “civilizations” but nations (an older conceptual unit) and the individuals in them and the works they wrote. minorsky’s explicit discomfort with islamic civilization shows that addressing it was still novel to many, even though minorsky had contributed amply to the encyclopaedia of islam. he was certainly willing to condone character generalizations regarding nations, but he demanded an explanation for them in terms of changing historical conditions.33 it is impossible to know whether other european historians of islam, such as ignaz goldziher (1850–1921), refrained from using the concept of islamic civilization because they objected to it or because they were simply uninterested in it, but many historians readily and increasingly accepted islamic civilization as a valid concept without opposition. the historian philip hitti (1886–1978), for example, could casually endorse the idea in 1956 in his review of the conference proceedings volume just mentioned, stating that islamic civilization was “one of the five or six major civilizations of the world.”34 earlier in his career, while a professor at princeton, he had written his history of the arabs (1937), which was essentially a history from muḥammad to the present, covering what is generally known today as the history of islamic civilization but focusing on “the arabs.” the work was widely read. by 1970, when that earlier book was entering its tenth edition, he published a new work entitled islam: a way of life. it argues that “islam” is not just a religion but simultaneously a state and a culture. the subject of the master narrative had changed from the arabs to islam, and the latter was more than merely a religion. already sixty years earlier, becker had articulated the same idea, and before becker, von kremer. chicago was, of course, not the only site at which scholars offered unfounded generalizations about the alleged islamic civilization. civilizations became a major topic in the early to mid-twentieth century. in the 1930s, reuben levy, professor of persian at the university of cambridge, expressed in the preface to his two-volume the sociology of islam (1931–1933, reprinted in 1955, as the structural anthropology of claude lévi-strauss became current, with the title the social structure of islam), that “the muhammadan communities of the world, possessing certain common characteristics traceable to the religion, are suited for treatment as a unity.”35 though von grunebaum and others used and cited this work of levy’s, it was von grunebaum’s student and successor who made islamic civilization into a general educational institution of practice. hodgson and the first general education undergraduate islamic civilization course the issues sketched above were central in the field in which marshal hodgson (1922–1968) received his education. hodgson was von grunebaum’s doctoral advisee at the university of chicago, where he received the phd in 1951 as part of the first graduating 33. v. minorsky, “iran: opposition, martyrdom, and revolt,” in von grunebaum, unity and variety, 183–206; reprinted (with the title that minorsky originally chose) as “persia: religion and history,” in v. minorsky, iranica: twenty articles, 242–57 (tehran: university of tehran, 1964). 34. p. k. hitti, review of von grunebaum, unity and variety, in american historical review 61, no. 4 (1956): 931–32. 35. r. levy, the social structure of islam (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1957), 1:v. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 164 class of the doctoral program of the transdisciplinary committee on social thought. he shared his teacher’s preoccupation with the problem of unity and diversity in muslim civilization. it may be true, as a recent new york times magazine article states of him with a whiff of hagiography, that “hodgson devoted his professional life to correcting the errors of the orientalists,”36 but he also accepted the frame of reference in which they worked—islamic civilization—and many of the assumptions that a such a premise confers. von grunebaum must have been involved in hiring hodgson to the chicago faculty in 1953, soon after his completion of the doctorate. the same year saw the appearance of the second edition of von grunebaum’s medieval islam from the university of chicago press. when von grunebaum left the university of chicago in 1957 to join ucla and play a founding role in the center for near eastern studies there, hodgson filled von grunebaum’s part in teaching islamic civilization at chicago. but whereas von grunebaum was teaching islamic civilization as a part of the humanities, hodgson’s task was to make it part of the general education curriculum of social sciences at chicago. the university of chicago inaugurated the first required “non-western civilization” courses in 1956, after two years of committee meetings and discussions about their advisability and feasibility. as a quartet of articles published in the journal of general education—still issued by the university of chicago press—in 1959 explains, three non-western civilization courses were created, rather than a single yearlong “oriental civilizations” course such as existed already experimentally at columbia university. china, india, and islam were the three “civilizations” chosen. the rationale for this new curricular development was explained by milton singer, who had been one of the organizers of von grunebaum’s conference in liège. he summarized the recommendation of the faculty committee at the university of chicago: the committee believed that such study [of non-western civilizations] would not only “familiarize the student with a civilized tradition other than his own, and thus permit him to glimpse the world and his own civilization as others see them,” but would also “enable him to understand better his own cultural heritage by comparing it with another.” such study, it hoped, would “offset the almost exclusive emphasis upon study of the society and culture of europe and the united states which currently prevails in the college and most divisional courses.”37 marshall hodgson, still an assistant professor, contributed one of the accompanying journal articles to explain the rationale of a yearlong islamic civilization course that would satisfy the new non-western civilization requirement in the social sciences.38 his explanation is 36. l. kiesling, “letter of recommendation: the life of marshall hodgson,” new york times magazine, october 6, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-the-life-ofmarshall-hodgson.html. 37. m. singer, “chicago’s non-western civilizations program,” journal of general education 12, no. 1 (1959): 22–23. 38. m. hodgson, “a non-western civilization course in a liberal education with special attention to the case of islâm,” journal of general education 12, no. 1 (1959): 39–49. 165 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) clear and rational, and it expresses the hope for high enough enrollment to justify hiring more faculty to teach it. hodgson offered the first such course, beginning in the autumn academic quarter of 1956. this is the first instance in which islamic civilization was offered as a course fulfilling a general requirement (rather than as a special elective topic) for an undergraduate degree, at least in the united states, and it may fairly be regarded as the beginning of islamic civilization as a regular institution. it would henceforth recur annually. to this day, the yearlong islamic history and society course sequence can fulfill the civilization studies component of the core general education requirements in the college of the university of chicago (though there are now many other such civilization courses in competition with it). chicago was only the first of many sites at which islamic civilization took root in a robust institution. many other universities have followed the practice. “non-western civilization” requirements have become and remain common in american universities and colleges. islamic civilization has spread as a feature of institutions of higher education. the three volumes of hodgson’s posthumously published the venture of islam correspond to the three quarter terms of the regular academic year in which he taught this survey at the university of chicago. his article of 1959 ends with an outline of the yearlong course’s topics. these topics were reflected in the prototype of his venture of islam, issued by the university of chicago press for his course in 1958–1959 under the title introduction to islamic civilization: course syllabus and selected readings, likewise in three volumes. the problem that confronted hodgson was how to organize the narrative of an entire alleged civilization to yield the greater, moral lessons demanded by a general education. hodgson believed that islamic civilization should not be the domain of specialists alone, and he saw that instruction of undergraduate students in the history of islamic civilization was a way to promote the project of history in general and world history in particular. islamicate civilization in the venture of islam, hodgson was explicit that his interest was in “civilization studies,” which he glossed as “the study of the great cultural heritages.” unlike most of his predecessors, he attempted to define clearly what a civilization is, and he did so with great earnestness. in the face of the incommensurability of the civilizations already accepted at large (“islam,” “the west,” and others), he concluded that “the reason for distinguishing a civilization cannot be a single, universal one”; rather, “it must almost be special to each case.” this is to say that each civilization must be defined by its own criteria—which, logically, should mean that civilization is not a category of analysis but the vague product of subjective judgment. nevertheless, hodgson wanted a civilization to refer to “any wider grouping of cultures in so far as they share consciously in interdependent cumulative traditions.” by this he meant “major lettered traditions.”39 in this concession one hears echoes of von grunebaum. in his teaching and research, hodgson wrestled with the problem articulated as long ago as by edward rehatsek in 1877, when muhammadan civilization was a new idea. how 39. m. hodgson, the venture of islam, 3 vols. (chicago: university of chicago press, 1974), 1:22. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 166 can the religion of islam alone characterize innumerable societies that differ in every way and that contain many non-muslim people and many things not concerned with religion at all, not to mention the many varieties of islam? how can scholars insist on a single islamic civilization when there is infinite variation among muslim peoples in every human dimension? what distinguishes islamic civilization from other civilizations when there is a constant exchange evident between them and the boundaries are always blurry? “islamicate” was the term hodgson proposed to rectify the problem. the neologism is formed by analogy with english words derived from latin passive participles to signify that which is made to be or construed as islamic rather than being so essentially. that is, islamicate was supposed to refer only to the quality of belonging to islamic civilization without claiming that the thing to which it applies is essentially a feature of islam. it was a term, therefore, intended to be intellectually honest about the explanatory limits in calling something islamic within the context of islamic civilization. yet the problem inherent in islamic civilization remained even after the adjective was changed because it remained an undefined civilization. moreover, in hindsight it is clear that hodgson was already trained and bound to teach islamic civilization by his career at the university of chicago. it was a professional responsibility that he had inherited. it was a framework that he made highly effective for teaching the history of the “medieval” and “early modern” middle east in a way that was meaningful for twentieth-century college students. he recognized that islamic civilization as a category was not sufficient, but instead of throwing out the category on which his place in the curriculum was based, he concluded that new terminology was required for blurrier distinctions.40 “islamicate” offered a way to continue teaching an ill-defined subject while acknowledging that ultimately it made little sense unless one ignored a vast amount of meaningful complexity. certainly, hodgson understood the degree of complexity involved, but he wanted not to abandon islamic civilization. we can only assume he believed his own argument about the unity of islamic civilization, which he had heard from von grunebaum and read from becker and many others. the term “islamicate” was therefore an awkward compromise as it is an awkward neologism, albeit one that is now, in the twenty-first century, widely employed as a term of art. painting the field into a corner the palatable model of an islamic civilization course in the framework of non-western civilization curricula, widely emulated, seems to have generated a demand for university instruction about life and history in a broad region of the earth hitherto neglected by the european and american academy. it helped to create a thriving field of scholarship. islamic civilization became a popular subject. at the same time, islamic civilization, being conceived as a unitary object of investigation, becker’s einheitszivilisation, also set a tight limit on the institutional growth of the field. islamic civilization was an economical model for university administrations: history departments or religious studies departments at colleges and universities that developed “non-western” or “global” general requirements for their students could apparently satisfy the need to cover all of islamic civilization, 40. hodgson, venture, 1:57–60. 167 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) across continents and over fourteen centuries, by hiring one specialist in that unitary field. these prospects were a vast improvement over the situation in 1955, when the asia society found only seven american institutions offering regular undergraduate instruction on asian civilizations.41 now every self-respecting university required one such expert— just one, who could teach islamic civilization for undergraduates. graduate programs that trained near eastern language specialists responded to the new market in “non-western civ” courses by granting more phds to individuals taught to use arabic sources who could survey this unitary civilization in courses for undergraduates. the claim to be able to explain all this material to college students was a professional requirement: positions were created specifically for instruction in islamic civilization. arabs, iranians, turks, and other subjects of the past and present had to crowd into a single classroom under the umbrella of a grand narrative unified by a single religion to the exclusion of other salient factors. those called to teach islamic civilization by job description understandably provided the requisite master narrative that explained the area of expertise for which they were employed. again, the wider availability of instruction on islam and middle eastern societies was an enormous gain for higher education. at the same time, the encompassing moral vision of a unitary islamic civilization has stunted the potential for increased numbers of professional scholars making sense of the complex history of cultures bearing distinct differences. while the most powerful nations of europe and america can, as fields of study, demand specialist professors devoted to them individually at a large institution of higher education—sometimes multiple professors for one country—the entirety of islamic civilization, from the seventh to the twenty-first century and from the atlantic to the pacific, usually gets one, or often at best one per relevant disciplinary department. the master narrative of islamic civilization thus first entrenched but then restricted the intellectual and professional interests of the scholars hired to promote it with limited resources. their development of the vision of a whole essentially religious civilization, in turn, has granted authoritative scholarly legitimation to those seeking ideological and political power in the world around them in terms of islam. some of these individuals used the european scholar’s concept of islamic civilization as a platform for social influence in the name of the religion of islam, thanks to the supranational and essentially religious “civilization” it has been granted by putatively neutral outsider experts. apologists and those using the religion of islam as a vehicle of social power adopted the orientalists’ fundamental concept and cherry-picked the latter’s research for elements that suited their personal and anti-historical political agenda, rejecting the rest as “orientalism” (in the negative sense promoted after said’s 1978 book orientalism).42 others wished to detract from and stigmatize a generalized islamic civilization in the name of political policies or even furtive racial and national bigotry of different varieties. bernard lewis 41. w. morehouse, “asian studies in undergraduate education,” journal of general education 11, no. 3 (1958): 125–40. 42. on this book and its impact, see z. lockman, contending visions of the middle east: the history and politics of orientalism, 2nd ed. (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 168 (1916–2018) famously invoked the notion of a “clash of civilizations” (1990),43 which became the title of a book (1996) by political scientist samuel huntington (1927–2008). huntington’s book developed a neo-spenglerian concept of inter-civilizational struggle, imagining nine distinct civilizations in the world at the end of the twentieth century, each basically rooted in a religion, such as islam. social scientists affirm or deny islamic civilization, sometimes with pseudoscience.44 islamic civilization forms a unitary target for polemicists as much as it does a unitary platform for apologists. donors participate, too, with various intentions, by creating endowments and academic positions for the study of islamic civilization. the well-meaning goal of dignifying present people resorts to myths of a glorious past, even though respect for humans living in the present, in my view at least, should never depend on their cultural, ancestral, or genetic lineage. government entities devote funds to islamic civilization, generating events that prolong its existence and give it a shared social reality, however nebulous and debated its definition. now islamic civilization exists well beyond the writing of arabic specialists. it has more money behind it than ever before. historians no longer create it; they serve it. beyond islamic civilization? most scholars who employ islamic civilization and teach courses about it are sincerely attempting to create knowledge and foster understanding about an important part of human history. among them there have been a few who have reflected critically on islamic civilization. as long ago as 1973, roger owen (1935–2018) called for a reexamination of the assumption that the basic unit of study remains something called “islamic civilization.” until this is done, the subject will continue to be handicapped. . . . [one way in which this occurs is through] the imposition of an artificial unity upon a world spreading from morocco to indonesia, thus making what it is that the societies of this area have in common far outweigh that which divides them. . . . the assumption that [islam] provides the essential ingredient in a complex chain of societies stretching across africa and asia may now be acting to encourage the writing of bad history and to prevent the emergence of something more worthwhile. owen added that “even such a limited program of reexamination will surely be resisted.”45 the expectation of resistance conveys the extent to which islamic civilization had become entrenched by the 1970s. but the program of reexamination was not resisted because it never arrived. islamic civilization has continued to grow through the annual reiteration of college courses, journals, and events, as well as book series and other material manifestations of islamic civilization. in short, islamic civilization acquired institutions when it was a preeminent model, in the mid-twentieth century, becoming embedded in curricula connected with specific faculty positions. institutions are resistant to change. 43. b. lewis, “the roots of muslim rage,” atlantic, september 1990. 44. e.g., y. esmer, “is there an islamic civilization?,” comparative sociology 1 (2002): 265–98. (the answer offered, based on absurd criteria and numbers derived from personal surveys, is “yes.”) 45. r. owen, “studying islamic history,” journal of interdisciplinary history 4, no. 2 (1973): 287–98. 169 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) despite occasional conferences revisiting the topic and questioning the relevance of islamic civilization, like the one at which i first presented part of this paper, its institutional existence and its common currency have made it into a convenient default for both instruction and discussion. moreover, humanistic scholars, social scientists, proponents of islam, and antagonists of islam share a common interest in promoting islamic civilization. a unitary islamic civilization facilitates a master narrative intended to persuade and greatly simplifies analysis and argument through generalization without evidence. islamic civilization makes it easy for all these participants to justify what they were already doing, and so it is not likely to disappear. all the objects of islamic civilization deserve scholarly research and understanding. but is there an alternative to islamic civilization for these objects? is it possible to move beyond islamic civilization’s ill-posed inherent question about unity and diversity? the analytical utility of this civilization remains doubtful now as it was before. recognizing this, specialists continue to posit modified, hybrid, and rationalized islamic civilizations, sometimes using different terminology for the same effect.46 even if islamic civilization foundations and journals keep their names, can historians abandon islamic civilization and enhance their analysis? some years ago, i expressed these ideas to an eminent senior colleague in near eastern studies, whose specialty was islamic history. she nodded and seemed to agree but then asked, “so if there is no islamic civilization, what do you call it?” my answer was that there is no “it.” the matter is rather as hodgson himself explicitly stated: “there are many ways of grouping into ‘civilizations’ what is in fact an endless chain of interrelated cultural life. we must know why we make the selection we do.”47 yet his selection was determined by the academic position he held and the curricular opportunity he saw to promote knowledge and human understanding on a wide scale—a laudable goal. any criterion may have sufficed because islamic civilization was already assumed. it is like the essay prompt answered by rehatsek for cash in the 1860s. today’s scholars usually do not know why they still make this selection. it is just how we were taught. the myth of its origins in the seventh century promotes the sense that islamic civilization existed before analysis. hodgson’s assumption that we need to group the endless chain of interrelated cultural life into civilizational categories—a convenient way to explain all history in broad brushstrokes—still has its most important manifestation in the curricula we teach today. sometimes broad brushstrokes are useful and necessary. but we must ask whether our histories of the middle east and other regions will make sense without islamic civilization. if our histories do make sense without islamic civilization, why do we continue to use it? but if they do not make sense without islamic civilization, then how valid can our histories be when islamic civilization has no accepted definition, having become pervasive solely as an accident of recent european colonial history and postwar developments in american university curricula? can professional historians of muslims or middle eastern peoples find 46. e.g., r. bulliet’s the case for islamo-christian civilization (new york: columbia university press, 2004), a response to the world trade center attacks in 2001. s. ahmed, in what is islam?, rejects hodgson’s islamicate civilization but defines islam itself in very nearly the same terms, connecting it with adab and literary culture. 47. hodgson, venture, 1:91. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 170 other ways to make sense for an educated public and to convey relevant educational lessons for college students out of the humans of the past and present whose lives they study? or is islamic civilization still adequate for what it was supposed to do in the classroom, even now when its existence is widely interpreted to mean that muslims are irreducibly incompatible with others? one might suppose from this essay that i think that islamic civilization courses should come to an end. to me, this does not precisely follow. we often use artificial terms of wide currency for the sake of convenience. “the middle east” is one such term;48 “medieval” is another.49 such expressions have peculiar histories. there are scholars of “the medieval middle east” and “medieval islamic civilization.” whatever terms one uses, the religion of islam and the peoples of the middle east and other regions in which muslims predominate require study and understanding. yet we should know why we use the terms we do use, what they were devised to address, what they assume, and who benefits from them, lest we rely on them to the point that they misguide us. there are other ways to organize knowledge about muslims and the countries muslims have ruled. islamic civilization is only one possibility. its use conditions the questions one asks and the answers one gives while deferring questions never considered, but both the questions and the answers are symptoms of our time and our society, not of most other times and places. 48. r. adelson, “british and u.s. use and misuse of the term ‘middle east,’” in is there a middle east? the evolution of a geopolitical concept, ed. m. e. bonine, a. amanat, and m. e. gasper, 36–55 (stanford: stanford university press, 2012). 49. n. f. cantor, inventing the middle ages (new york: william and morrow, 1991). 171 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) bibliography adelson, roger. “british and u.s. use and misuse of the term ‘middle east.’” in is there a middle east? the evolution of a geopolitical concept, edited by m. e. bonine, a. amanat, and m. e. gasper, 36–55. stanford: stanford university press, 2012. ahmed, s. what is islam? princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016. albrecht, s. “dār al-islām and dār al-ḥarb.” in the encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., edited by k. fleet, g. krämer, d. matringe, j. nawas, and e. rowson. leiden: brill online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_25867. bearman, p. a history of the “encyclopaedia of islam.” atlanta: lockwood press, 2018. becker, c. h. “der islam als problem.” der islam 1 (1910): 1–21. biesterfeldt, h. h., ed. “franz rosenthal’s half an autobiography.” die welt des islams 54 (2014): 34–105. browne, e. g. arabian medicine. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1921. bulliet, r. the case for islamo-christian civilization. new york: columbia university press, 2004. caffentzis, g. c. “on the scottish origins of ‘civilization.’” in enduring western civilization, edited by s. federici, 13–36. westport, ct: praeger, 1995. cantor, n. f. inventing the middle ages. new york: william and morrow, 1991. esmer, y. “is there an islamic civilization?” comparative sociology 1 (2002): 265–98. federici, s. “the god that never failed: the origins and crises of western civilization.” in enduring western civilization, edited by s. federici, 63–89. westport, ct: praeger, 1995. griffel, f. “contradictions and lots of ambiguity: two new perspectives on premodern (and postclassical) islamic societies.” bustan: the middle east book review 8, no. 1 (2017): 1–21. hartmann, m. “die arabistik: reformvorschläge.” orientalistische literaturzeitung 1 (1898): 333–42. hitti, p. k. review of unity and variety in muslim civilization, edited by g. e. von grunebaum. american historical review 61, no. 4 (1956): 931–32. hodgson, m. “a non-western civilization course in a liberal education with special attention to the case of islâm.” journal of general education 12, no. 1 (1959): 39–49. ———. the venture of islam. 3 volumes. chicago: university of chicago press, 1974. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late 19th century • 172 hourani, a. “islam and the philosophers of history.” middle east studies 3, no. 3 (1967): 206–68. ibn khaldūn. al-muqaddima. edited by m. quatremère. 3 volumes. paris: benjamin duprat, 1858. jaeger, w. “classical philology and humanism.” transactions and proceedings of the american philological association 67 (1936): 363–74. karamustafa, a. “islam: a civilizational project in progress.” in progressive muslims: on justice, gender, and pluralism, edited by o. safi, 98–110. oxford: oneworld, 2003. kaufman, w. “toynbee and super-history.” partisan review 22, no. 4 (1955): 531–41. kiesling, l. “letter of recommendation: the life of marshall hodgson.” new york times magazine, october 6, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/magazine/letterof-recommendation-the-life-of-marshall-hodgson.html. kramer, m. “arabistik and arabism: the passions of martin hartmann.” middle eastern studies 24, no. 3 (1989): 283–300. levy, r. the social structure of islam. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1957. lewis, b. “the roots of muslim rage.” atlantic, september 1990. lockman, z. contending visions of the middle east: the history and politics of orientalism. 2nd ed. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999. mckeon, r. “the nature and teaching of the humanities.” journal of general education 3, no. 4 (1949): 290–303. meri, j., ed. medieval islamic civilization: an encyclopedia. 2 volumes. new york: routledge, 2006. minorsky, v. “iran: opposition, martyrdom, and revolt.” in unity and variety in muslim civilization, edited by g. e. von grunebaum, 183–206. chicago: university of chicago press. reprinted as “persia: religion and history,” in v. minorsky, iranica: twenty articles, 242–57. tehran: university of tehran, 1964. morehouse, w. “asian studies in undergraduate education.” the journal of general education 11, no. 3 (1958): 125–40. nöldeke, th. sketches from eastern history. london: adam and charles black, 1892. owen, r. “studying islamic history.” journal of interdisciplinary history 4, no. 2 (1973): 287–98. rehatsek, e. catalogue raisonné of the arabic, hindoostani, persian and turkish mss. in the mulla firuz library. bombay: education society’s press, 1873. 173 • kevin van bladel al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ———. prize essay on the reciprocal influence of european and muhammadan civilization during the period of the khalifs and the present time. bombay: education society’s press, 1877. renan, e. l’islamisme et la science. paris: calmann lévy, 1883. robinson, c. islamic civilization in thirty lives: the first 1,000 years. berkeley: university of california press, 2016. rosenthal, f. “in memoriam: gustave e. von grunebaum.” international journal of middle 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von grunebaum, 17–37. chicago: university of chicago press, 1955. winterer, c. the culture of classicism. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2002. zwemer, s. m. “editorial.” the moslem world, 1, no. 1 (1911): 1–4. 404 not found al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 233-253 abstract in this short article, i draw attention to the discussion of poets from iran (al-ʿajam) in two arabic biographical anthologies of the eleventh/seventeenth century: the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr of ibn maʿṣūm (d. 1120/1709) and the nafḥat al-rayḥāna of muḥammad amīn al-muḥibbī (d. 1111/1699). the latter text not only addresses the careers of noteworthy persian poets, but it also presents samples of their work that al-muḥibbī has translated into arabic verse. in the case of the poet ṣāʾib tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676), at least one of al-muḥibbī’s translations can be traced to the original persian. this reveals a specific instance of cross-cultural literary appreciation in the ottoman-safavid-mughal period. introduction this paper is intended to alert specialists in persian literary history to a heretofore unnoted curiosity: that some arabic literati of the eleventh/seventeenth century were familiar with recent happenings in persian poetry. as a general statement, given the context of ottoman cosmopolitanism, this should come as no surprise. however, it is the particulars of the present case that are most interesting. two anthologists of the period, the damascene muḥammad amīn al-muḥibbī (d. 1111/1699) and the medinese (though widely the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies of the eleventh/seventeenth century: a preliminary study* theodore s. beers freie universität berlin (theo.beers@fu-berlin.de) * arabic and persian transliteration in this paper generally follows the ijmes standard (with a couple of exceptions for persian). i am fortunate to be working as a postdoctoral fellow in the erc-funded project anonymclassic at freie universität berlin, and i thank the project and its principal investigator, beatrice gründler, for their support of my research. thanks are due also to the three anonymous reviewers of this paper, whose detailed and insightful comments made it possible for the argument to be sharpened in several respects. beyond the revisions that i have made to this article, i plan to address some of the issues highlighted by the reviewers in a subsequent paper, which is already in progress. © 2020 theodore s. beers. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:theo.beers%40fu-berlin.de?subject= 234 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 235 itinerant) ibn maʿṣūm (d. 1120/1709), included sections on ʿajamī poets in works that are otherwise mainly devoted to surveying literary and intellectual figures from around the arab world. the result is that we are able to gain some insight into which iranian or persian poets of the early modern era developed reputations that crossed into the arabic cultural sphere. (of course, it was nothing special for ottoman turkish literati of this period to have extensive knowledge of persian poetry, from the classics to the works of some of their contemporaries. but here we are considering arabic anthologies, which represent a different scenario—an issue to which we will return.) it should be acknowledged at the outset that what follows is one modest result from an initial assessment of a few sources. there are, in all likelihood, early modern arabic anthologists apart from al-muḥibbī and ibn maʿṣūm who incorporate some treatment of persian poets into their work. and it is difficult to imagine the full range of questions that might productively be investigated with regard to the sharing of literary culture across nominal political and linguistic lines in the ottoman-safavid-mughal era. we are currently at a point at which the fields of persian and arabic literary history, each in its own way, are engaged in the process of revisiting texts from what was long considered a period of decline.1 it will require still more time for us to understand the broader regional dialogues that accompanied this so-called decadence. for the moment, we can pick a bit of low-hanging fruit. among the simplest questions to ask of the sources at hand are the following: which persian poets do al-muḥibbī and ibn maʿṣūm discuss in their anthologies? what do they have to say about those figures? what selections of verse do they quote, and in what manner? a particularly exciting finding is that al-muḥibbī provides a notice on the poet ṣāʾib tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676), who was not long dead at this time, and translates snippets of his poetry into arabic—into arabic verse, no less. we will see that it is possible, in at least one case, to identify the original persian poem(s) in ṣāʾib’s dīvān. in the process, we find an innovative image that ṣāʾib deploys in a number of his ghazals, and which was evidently successful enough to find its way to damascus and to be rendered into arabic. such a result is already useful, despite the preliminary nature of the current paper. a note of appreciation before moving forward, i must express my gratitude to the members of the holberg seminar on islamic history, a group that met annually at princeton between 2015 and 2018. the seminar was established by michael cook after he was awarded the holberg prize in 2014. the aim of this paper and the special issue in which it appears is to honor michael, the other senior scholars who led the seminar—khaled el-rouayheb, antoine borrut, and jack tannous—and the graduate student members, myself included, who were 1. two of the many recent monographs in this vein are adam talib’s history of the maqṭūʿ genre in arabic poetry of the later medieval and early modern periods, and sunil sharma’s elegant study of persian poetry in mughal india. see adam talib, how do you say “epigram” in arabic? literary history at the limits of comparison (leiden: brill, 2018); sunil sharma, mughal arcadia: persian literature in an indian court (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2017). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 235 given transformative mentorship and learned a great deal from one another over the course of four years. considering this paper and the ongoing research that it represents, i can thank the holberg seminar in at least three ways. first, it was khaled who suggested that i examine arabic literary anthologies of the eleventh/seventeenth century, since he had studied them and noticed mention of persian poets. i am not sure whether i would have stumbled upon this connection on my own or heard about it from anyone else. second, in a more general sense, the other members of the holberg group—who are mostly arabists of one stripe or another—always encouraged me to continue working with arabic sources in addition to my specialization in persian. our field stands in need of researchers who are able and willing to engage with texts in multiple languages and from different traditions. with regard to the literary history of the early modern near east, it is relatively easy to find scholars with mastery of both persian and turkic (sooyong kim and ferenc csirkés come to mind). the artificial boundary in research between persian and arabic seems a bit stronger for the time being. in any case, were it not for my experiences in the holberg seminar, i might have remained in the safe territory of classical persian poetry. third, and finally, committing to writing a few thoughts about the anthologies of al-muḥibbī and ibn maʿṣūm, long before i will have the ability to do justice to the topic, strikes me as a reminder of how much my research plans have been enriched through interaction with my holberg colleagues and mentors—and through michael’s generosity. i made note of so many questions that demand further study that i will likely never stop reaping dividends from the long days and evenings that we spent together in jones hall, listening to the cicadas’ song and the pattering rain in the unmistakable atmosphere of the new jersey summer. setting out the problem did arabic literati of the early modern period follow contemporary developments in persian poetry? the answer is clearly yes, to an extent; this much will be demonstrated below. but it is difficult to find discussion of the matter in scholarship on persian literary history. it is certainly possible that this has been addressed in studies that i have not managed to find. and i will be pleased if the process of bringing this paper to publication makes me, and others, aware of additional prior literature.2 to take a specific example, none of what i have read about ṣāʾib tabrīzī, either in persian or in european languages, mentions his inclusion in the anthology of al-muḥibbī.3 if the connection were widely known, it would 2. there is more scholarship on literary interplay between arabic and persian in earlier historical periods. in this connection, two recent papers by alexander key and an important monograph in persian by āẕartāsh āẕarnūsh should be highlighted: alexander key, “moving from persian to arabic,” in essays in islamic philology, history, and philosophy, ed. william granara, alireza korangy, and roy mottahedeh, 93–140 (berlin: de gruyter, 2016); idem, “translation of poetry from persian to arabic: ʿabd al-qāhir al-jurjānī and others,” journal of abbasid studies 5 (2018): 146–76; āẕartāsh āẕarnūsh, chālish-i miyān-i fārsī va ʿarabī: sada-hā-yi nukhust (tehran: nashr-i nay, 2008). extending this body of work to later periods will be a valuable endeavor. 3. for a review, see theodore s. beers, “taẕkirah-i khayr al-bayān: the earliest source on the career and poetry of ṣāʾib tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676),” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 114–38. 236 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 237 merit a note in any overview of the poet’s biography and legacy.4 there can be no doubt about the pertinence of the fact that ṣāʾib’s reputation spread to damascus, with samples of his work being translated into arabic, either during his life or within a couple of decades of his death. so there is clearly reason to draw further attention to these sources. in any event, given that i propose to offer a bit of new insight into a question that does not have a well-defined treatment in the existing literature, it might be helpful to begin by sketching a few relevant ideas. first, and most importantly, there should be no assumption that a cultural barrier stood between the ottoman arab provinces and safavid iran, or between the classical persian and arabic poetic traditions. if anything, we should default to the hypothesis that the persian poets of a given era had some awareness of, if not interaction with, coeval arabic poetry— and vice versa. it is in no way counterintuitive or, a priori, surprising that anthologists such as ibn maʿṣūm and al-muḥibbī should have paid some attention to literary happenings in iran and the broader persianate sphere. what would have prevented authors in these lands from becoming aware of one another? at the same time, the intuitiveness of a phenomenon does not obviate the need to go to the trouble of investigating it. it is plausible that a damascene intellectual would hear about a few of the famous iranian poets of his day. the resulting discussion in an arabic anthology may still be new to researchers (especially persianists). second, there is probably a kernel of truth to the idea in near eastern history that more persian-speakers were versed in arabic literature than arabic-speakers were versed in persian, and, in turn, that more turkic-speakers were versed in arabic and persian literature than either arabic-speakers or persian-speakers were versed in turkic. this is, in part, a simple matter of chronology. the classics of arabic poetry stretch back to the pre-islamic era. the great works of new persian literature (in poetry and prose) begin to appear in the fourth/tenth century. turkic literature, by contrast, although it can be traced to the same early period, took longer to attain critical mass, at least in written form. it is illustrative that the work of the timurid statesman-intellectual ʿalī shīr navāʾī (d. 906/1501) is considered to have played a foundational role in the development of turkic poetry, with classical persian models among the dominant influences in this process. another obvious consideration is the use of arabic in religious contexts and in the sciences. any educated person would need to learn arabic for purposes as fundamental as studying the qurʾan, regardless of what poetry or belle-lettrist prose he or she might also read. these points are not worth belaboring. we know that transmission and influence in the literary culture of the premodern near east were both multidirectional and continuous.5 4. see, for example, paul e. losensky, “ṣāʾeb tabrizi,” in encyclopædia iranica; and aḥmad gulchīn-i maʿānī, kārvān-i hind: dar aḥvāl va āṡār-i shāʿirān-i ʿaṣr-i ṣafavī kih bih hindūstān rafta-and, 2 vols. (mashhad: āstān-i quds-i rażavī, 1369/1990–91), 700ff. 5. one of the more vivid cases in this dynamic is kalīla wa-dimna, a book that was repeatedly translated and adapted in all of the region’s literary languages. the arabic text of ibn al-muqaffaʿ was reworked in persian (ca. 540/1146) by naṣr allāh munshī—whose version became influential enough that it was retranslated into arabic in the ayyubid period, under the title siyar al-mulūk (ca. 683–98/1284–99). a later persian adaptation, the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 237 but we have valid reasons to be less predisposed to expect arabic literati to have knowledge of persian poets, in distinction to the familiarity that persian literati are assumed to have with the arabic tradition. it bears noting that some persian biographical anthologies (taẕkiras), including the genre-defining taẕkirat al-shuʿarāʾ (892/1487) of dawlatshāh samarqandī, include prefatory sections that honor the great arabic poets.6 the inverse is hardly true. third, on a related note, there is a difference between reading the older, “canonical” works of another literary tradition and following its recent or current developments. the former seems to have been more common in the case of intercultural appreciation between arabic and persian. if we found that an arabic anthologist or balāgha theorist mentions firdawsī (d. ca. 411/1020), jalāl al-dīn rūmī (d. 672/1273), or saʿdī shīrāzī (d. ca. 690/1291), we would not be surprised in the slightest, given the longstanding importance of these figures. the shāhnāma even saw a partial translation into arabic at the hands of al-fatḥ b. ʿalī al-bundārī (d. after 639/1241–42).7 (there is no indication that al-bundārī’s rendering was particularly influential in its own right, but the fact that it was produced speaks to the status of firdawsī’s original.) a similar tendency holds in persian authors’ engagement with the arabic tradition. for instance, the prefatory discussion in dawlatshāh’s taẕkira, mentioned above, starts with labīd (d. ca. 40/660–61) and goes no further than the generation of al-ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122). dawlatshāh was writing in the 1480s, but it is not made explicit whether he was familiar with arabic poetry from later than the sixth/twelfth century. a hypothetical equivalent of what we find with al-muḥibbī and ibn maʿṣūm—namely, an early modern persian anthology that includes discussion of arabic poets recently active in the ottoman provinces—would be noteworthy indeed. the bias of classicism is perhaps more consistent, and more relevant, than the imbalance between persians’ familiarity with arabic and arabs’ familiarity with persian. fourth, on another related topic, it should be borne in mind that many persian poets also composed verse in arabic. this is, in fact, the context in which a chapter on iran (al-ʿajam) appears in ibn maʿṣūm’s anthology: he focuses on arabic poetry by his contemporaries from that land. (the differences between the approaches of al-muḥibbī and ibn maʿṣūm will be discussed below.) i have suggested that there is some validity to the idea that arabs were less likely to be knowledgeable about persian literature. one of the manifestations of this phenomenon is the relative paucity of authors whose native and primary language was arabic but who also wrote in persian. a list of figures meeting these criteria would be short, and they would fall under special circumstances. (among the first examples that come to mind are the shiʿi scholars who moved from the jabal ʿāmil region to iran in the safavid anvār-i suhaylī of ḥusayn vāʿiẓ kāshifī (d. 910/1504–5), served as the basis for an ottoman turkish translation, the humāyūn-nāma of ali vasi çelebi (d. 959/1543–44). on this complex process, see dagmar riedel, “kalila wa demna i. redactions and circulation,” in encyclopædia iranica. 6. see dawlatshāh samarqandī, taẕkirat al-shuʿarāʾ, ed. fāṭima ʿalāqa (tehran: pizhūhishgāh-i ʿulūm-i insānī va muṭālaʿāt-i farhangī, 2007), 33ff. 7. see david durand-guédy, “al-bundārī, al-fatḥ b. ʿalī,” in encyclopædia of islam, 3rd ed. 238 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 239 period, such as shaykh bahāʾī, d. 1030/1621.)8 the fact that it was common for persian poets to have some work in arabic may represent an additional vector by which they could gain an international reputation. fifth, whereas we still do not know a great deal about the sharing of poetry or belles lettres between the arabic and persian spheres in the early modern era, somewhat more work has been done on cosmopolitanism in intellectual culture. of particular note here is an article by khaled el-rouayheb, which demonstrates that the eleventh/seventeenth century saw a kind of efflorescence of scholarship in the ottoman arab provinces.9 el-rouayheb discusses a number of important authors of this period, highlighting ways in which their work was influenced and invigorated through new contact with the ideas of persian and maghribī scholars. during the eleventh/seventeenth century, there was some migration of intellectuals from safavid territory in the caucasus to ottoman syria; from india to the ḥijāz (medina in particular); and from the maghrib to egypt. these movements gave students in the ottoman provinces access to works with which they were previously unfamiliar— including, in the case of persian influence in syria, a number of commentaries by jalāl al-dīn davānī (d. 908/1502) and ʿiṣām al-dīn isfarāʾīnī (d. ca. 943/1536–37). el-rouayheb also points to a specific individual who settled in damascus in this period and became a successful teacher credited with broadening the horizons of local intellectuals: mullā maḥmūd al-kurdī (d. 1074/1663–64). he was one of a number of sunni kurdish or azeri scholars who migrated westward into ottoman territory upon the conquests of the safavid shah ʿabbās i (r. 995–1038/1587–1629) in the caucasus.10 maḥmūd al-kurdī spent several decades teaching in damascus, and his students carried his approach to a new generation, which included none other than muḥammad amīn al-muḥibbī. we could, therefore, posit a logical narrative to explain the way in which al-muḥibbī, at least, initially became aware of persian poets of his century. there was a political development—the seizure of territories in the caucasus by the safavids—which spurred the movement of scholars from that region into syria. there they began teaching books (mainly ones written in arabic) by prominent authors from the persianate realm; and this could have given rise to a broader interest in the intellectual and cultural products of the eastern lands. in the end, a damascene such as al-muḥibbī was primed to learn persian and to read (and translate!) a certain amount of recently composed poetry. there is, no doubt, more to the story, but this is a useful starting point.11 we can leverage scholarship in intellectual history to begin to understand a related, but less-studied, phenomenon in literary history. it is also worth noting that the connection between medina and india explains the familiarity of ibn maʿṣūm with iranian and persian poets. as we will see in the following section, he 8. see rula jurdi abisaab, “jabal ʿāmel,” in encyclopædia iranica; and etan kohlberg, “bahāʾ-al-din ʿāmeli,” in encyclopædia iranica. 9. khaled el-rouayheb, “opening the gate of verification: the forgotten arab-islamic florescence of the 17th century,” international journal of middle east studies 38, no. 2 (may 2006): 263–81. 10. on these campaigns, see h. r. roemer, “the safavid period,” in the cambridge history of iran, vol. 6, the timurid and safavid periods, ed. peter jackson and laurence lockhart, 189–350 (cambridge, 1986), 266–68. 11. as is mentioned below, al-muḥibbī spent time in istanbul, and he evidently learned turkish. it is possible that the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capital played a role in introducing him to persian literature. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 239 spent most of his life in india, starting when his father was offered a position at the quṭbshāhī court in the deccan. where does this leave us? there may not be an acknowledged framework in the field of persian literature studies within which to analyze the reception of persian poetry among early modern arabic anthologists. this type of question represents a small niche. but we may be guided by the ideas outlined above. should we be surprised to find discussion of coeval persian poets in arabic biographical works of the eleventh/seventeenth century? probably not, though it would be difficult to dispute the uncommonness of such sources. we are more accustomed to seeing persian authors’ engagement with the arabic tradition— and, in many cases, their writing in arabic—than we are to encountering the inverse. the reciprocal influence between persian and turkic poetry in the timurid and ottomansafavid periods is well understood,12 but it seems less obvious how to conceptualize the persian-arabic nexus.13 there is also the tendency, mentioned above, for the reception of an outside cultural tradition to focus on “canonical” texts. for now, we can begin by considering the sources before us and some of the factors that help to explain how authors such as al-muḥibbī and ibn maʿṣūm may have gained their interest in, and familiarity with, the poets of al-ʿajam. introducing the authors and texts although the work of al-muḥibbī is of greater importance to this paper, i will start with a brief review of the career of ibn maʿṣūm, since his anthology was completed earlier and seems to have reached and influenced his damascene contemporary.14 his full name (sans patronymics) is ʿalī khān ṣadr al-dīn ibn maʿṣūm, and he was born in medina in 1052/1642. his father, niẓām al-dīn aḥmad (d. 1086/1675), belonged to a shiʿi sayyid family, whereas his mother was the daughter of a sunni merchant-cum-jurist. as will become clear, ibn maʿṣūm identified as a shiʿi, or at least presented himself as such. niẓām al-dīn aḥmad had a rather complicated career, which need not be addressed in detail here; but the most relevant point is that he was able to secure a position at the court of the quṭb-shāhī dynasty 12. to give an illustrative example, the ottoman historian mustafa âli of gallipoli (d. 1008/1600) was an admirer and, for a time, a correspondent of the poet muḥtasham kāshānī (d. 996/1588)—despite the latter’s close ties to the safavid court. see cornell h. fleischer, bureaucrat and intellectual in the ottoman empire: the historian mustafa âli (1541–1600) (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1986), 142. 13. one approach is to consider the process whereby persian literature influenced developments in ottoman turkish, which in turn had an impact on arabic authors. this phenomenon has been studied, for example, with reference to the history of the arabic chronogram. see thomas bauer, “vom sinn der zeit: aus der geschichte des arabischen chronogramms,” arabica 50, no. 4 (2003): 501–31. 14. all of the details about ibn maʿṣūm’s biography that are provided here, and a good deal more, can be found in joseph e. lowry, “ibn maʿṣūm,” in essays in arabic literary biography, 1350–1850, ed. joseph e. lowry and devin j. stewart, 174–84 (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2009). please note, however, that i have corrected a couple of date conversions, including in the case of ibn maʿṣūm’s death. he is reported to have died in dhū al-qaʿda 1120, which corresponds to january–february 1709. for more on this point, see maḥmūd khalaf al-bādī’s introduction to his edition of ibn maʿṣūm, sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin ahl al-ʿaṣr, 2 vols. (damascus: dār kinān, 1430/2009), 17. 240 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 241 in golconda, near hyderabad.15 in due course, the rest of the family, including the teenaged ibn maʿṣūm, relocated to india. our author would remain on the subcontinent for most of his adult life. niẓām al-dīn aḥmad served at the quṭb-shāhī court through the 1660s and into the early 1670s, and it is probable that ibn maʿṣūm followed in his footsteps. when the quṭb-shāh of that period, ʿabd allāh, died in 1082/1672, niẓām al-dīn aḥmad was bold enough to make a claim for the throne, on the basis that he had taken one of the ruler’s daughters as his second wife. this plan was thwarted, and both the father and the son were jailed.16 for niẓām al-dīn aḥmad, this was the end of the line: he died in prison in 1086/1675. but ibn maʿṣūm managed to appeal to the mughal emperor awrangzēb for release, after which he traveled to the central court. he spent nearly three productive decades in awrangzēb’s service. this might appear surprising at first glance, given ibn maʿṣūm’s shiʿi leanings and the ruler’s famous concern for sunni orthodoxy. in reality, the oft-misunderstood awrangzēb was willing to employ a substantial number of shiʿi bureaucrats and intellectuals at his court. ibn maʿṣūm may also have benefited from his status as a sayyid from the ḥijāz. finally, in 1114/1702–3, ibn maʿṣūm felt that his position at the mughal court was deteriorating, so he took the excuse of a pilgrimage trip to return home. he then tried to establish himself in various other places, including at the safavid court in iṣfahān, before settling at last in shīrāz. he spent a few years teaching at the manṣūriyya madrasa and died in 1120/1709. we have a number of extant works from ibn maʿṣūm, in a range of fields. his first book is a stylized travel narrative of his family’s move from medina to golconda, completed in 1075/1665, when he was in his early twenties. it appears that he was almost continuously producing something new from this point until his death, with the exception of his period of imprisonment. the text that is of relevance here is a literary anthology titled sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin aʿyān al-ʿaṣr, or “the unpressed wine on the distinctions of the notables of the epoch,” which ibn maʿṣūm finished in 1082/1671.17 before proceeding any further, i must note that there has been a surprising amount of disagreement and confusion about this title. it is often rendered in scholarship (including in lowry’s essay), and even in printings, as sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin al-shuʿarāʾ bi-kull miṣr, or “the unpressed wine on the distinctions of the poets of every land.”18 this reading is puzzling, since it breaks the rhyming prose (sajʿ) of the title, unless miṣr were read in the informal manner as maṣr. i consulted four manuscripts of the work—the finest of which is ms petermann i 630 at the staatsbibliothek zu berlin, copied in 1212/1798—and all of them have sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin aʿyān al-ʿaṣr or a close variant thereof, such as sulāfat al-ʿaṣr min maḥāsin aʿyān 15. on this dynasty and its regional competitors, see carl w. ernst, “deccan i. political and literary history,” in encyclopædia iranica. 16. a fuller version of the story is given in lowry, “ibn maʿṣūm.” 17. the completion of the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr, according to the colophons of several copies that i consulted (see below for details), took place on a thursday with seven days remaining in the month of rabīʿ al-ākhir 1082. this would correspond to late august 1671. 18. see, for example, the printing of aḥmad nājī al-jamālī and muḥammad amīn al-khānjī (egypt, 1324/1906). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 241 al-ʿaṣr.19 this is not simply a matter of comparing title pages; ibn maʿṣūm describes his naming of the work in the preface (fol. 6r in the berlin manuscript). another problem with changing the title to al-shuʿarāʾ bi-kull miṣr is that it spoils ibn maʿṣūm’s wordplay. the repetition of al-ʿaṣr is deliberate, denoting the pressing of wine in the first instance and “epoch” in the second.20 in any event, the author explains that he was motivated to write this work after receiving a copy of an earlier anthology, the rayḥānat al-alibbā wa-zahrat al-ḥayāt al-dunyā (“the sweet basil of the intelligent and the flower of worldly life”) of shihāb al-dīn aḥmad al-khafājī, an egyptian who died in 1069/1658.21 this is an interesting point, since, as we will see below, al-muḥibbī was likewise inspired by the rayḥānat al-alibbā. it bears emphasizing that ibn maʿṣūm, then living in golconda or hyderabad, was sent a copy of al-khafājī’s work (which had been written in egypt) by an unnamed acquaintance in mecca. this shows an impressive degree of interconnectedness across the dār al-islām and fits with el-rouayheb’s identification of a vibrant intellectual culture in the eleventh/seventeenth century. the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr is divided into five main chapters on the basis of geography. this is a common organizational scheme, used also by al-khafājī and al-muḥibbī. the first chapter is devoted to mecca and medina; the second, to egypt and the levant; the third, to yemen; the fourth, to iraq, bahrain, and iran (al-ʿajam); and the fifth, to the maghrib.22 the focus throughout is on recent and contemporary figures, which is in keeping with the tendency in the arabic anthological tradition to produce an update or continuation of what prior authors have established. ibn maʿṣūm aims to address some of al-khafājī’s omissions and to pick up where he left off. unlike al-muḥibbī (discussed below), however, ibn maʿṣūm does not give his new work a title that clearly references that of the text that inspired it. the part of the fourth chapter that addresses the notables of al-ʿajam is fairly short and, for a persianist, perhaps not entirely satisfying.23 there are only four dedicated notices, on the following individuals: muḥammad bāqir “al-dāmād al-ḥusaynī,” that is, mīr dāmād (d. 1041/1631); al-mīrzā ibrāhīm b. al-mīrzā al-hamadānī (d. ca. 1025/1616); abū al-ḥusayn b. ibrāhīm “al-ṭabīb al-shīrāzī” (d. after 1075/1664–65); and mullā faraj allāh al-shūshtarī. the first two figures are better known—especially mīr dāmād, of course. by contrast, it is 19. in addition to the berlin manuscript, i saw three copies that are held at the kitāb-khāna-yi majlīs-i shūrā-yi millī in tehran, under the numbers 2279 (or 404), 5799, and 9372. 20. the edition of the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr used for references in this paper (along with the berlin manuscript) is that of maḥmūd khalaf al-bādī. 21. the rayḥānat al-alibbā has been edited by ʿ abd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-ḥulw in two volumes (cairo: ʿ īsā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1967). this is the same scholar responsible for the edition of al-muḥibbī’s nafḥat al-rayḥāna (discussed below). note that the word alibbāʾ—presumably of the pattern afʿilāʾ, adjusted for the geminate root—has a final hamza, but it may be left out in this title to help the rhyme with dunyā. 22. in the edition of al-bādī, these chapters begin, respectively, on pp. 39, 483, 685, 773, and 899. it is clear from the page numbers—and unsurprising, given ibn maʿṣūm’s background—that the first chapter is by far the largest. 23. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr, ed. al-bādī, 775–96. 242 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 243 difficult to find further information about the latter two.24 it seems clear that the common thread in all four cases, and a connection between them and ibn maʿṣūm, is their shiʿism. the author also indicates that he had some interaction with al-shīrāzī and al-shūshtarī; for example, he describes an exchange of poetry by correspondence with the former.25 perhaps the most striking aspect of this section in the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr is that it contains little persian. ibn maʿṣūm focuses on the arabic poetry of iranian shiʿi intellectuals. the one exception occurs in the notice on al-hamadānī, in which the author quotes a few snippets of persian verse by “people of understanding” (dhawī al-albāb) to emphasize points that he has raised in his discussion. these poems are unattributed, but i was able to trace one line to a ghazal by ʿurfī shīrāzī (d. 999/1591). it goes as follows: “except in time of calamity, congratulation is a vice among us, a vice; in our city, eid has no custom of felicitation” (tahniyat juz dar muṣībat pīsh-i mā ʿayb ast, ʿayb; ʿīd rā dar shahr-i mā rasm-i mubārak-bād nīst).26 apart from these “outside quotations,” ibn maʿṣūm cites no persian (as far as i could determine). in fact, he closes the section on al-ʿajam by explaining that there have been numerous eminent iranians in the past century, “but most of them did not occupy themselves with arabic verse, focusing rather on more important matters” (ghayr anna aktharahum lam yataʿāṭa al-naẓm al-ʿarabī, ihtimāman bi-mā huwa ahamm minhu).27 and he follows this note with a list of further ʿajamī notables that he did not manage to address in detail. the focus remains on shiʿi scholars; two of the figures included in this list are mullā ṣadrā (d. ca. 1050/1640–41) and mullā muḥsin fayḍ kāshānī (d. 1091/1680).28 it would certainly be worth pursuing a thorough study of this subchapter in the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr, and i hope to do so. for the purposes of the present paper, however, this source is not as immediately attractive as is the anthology of al-muḥibbī. ibn maʿṣūm shows a preference for limiting his discussion to arabic authors, even when considering iranians. this may come as a disappointment, since he obviously knew persian and spent the bulk of his career in india, where he would have had limitless exposure to poetry in that language. i do not mean to downplay the importance of the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr; it is a valuable work that seems to have received little attention from arabists and perhaps none from persianists. as we will see below, however, al-muḥibbī takes a different and more striking approach, keeping his text in arabic by translating samples of persian poetry. 24. ibrāhīm hamadānī was a prominent shiʿi scholar and jurist who was shown favor by shah ʿabbās. see andrew j. newman, safavid iran: rebirth of a persian empire (london: i. b. tauris, 2006), 178. 25. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr, ed. al-bādī, 783. 26. ibid., 781. the full persian text of the poem can be found in the online corpus ganjoor at https://ganjoor. net/orfi/ghazalor/sh137/. the meter is ramal. alternatively, see the edition of ʿurfī’s kulliyyāt by ghulām ḥusayn javāhirī vajdī (tehran: kitāb-khāna-yi sanāʾī, 1357/1978), 249; or the edition of muḥammad valī al-ḥaqq anṣārī, 3 vols. in 2 (tehran: university of tehran press, 1378/1999), 1:216. (this ghazal is numbered 137 by ganjoor and 256 by anṣārī; it is unnumbered in javāhirī’s edition.) at several points in this paper, i provide links to ganjoor, since it is universally accessible, while also citing scholarly editions that may be more difficult to find. 27. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr, ed. al-bādī, 794. 28. ibid., 795. in the berlin manuscript, this is found on fol. 424v. https://ganjoor.net/orfi/ghazalor/sh137/ https://ganjoor.net/orfi/ghazalor/sh137/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 243 muḥammad amīn al-muḥibbī was born in damascus in 1061/1651 into a prominent family of intellectuals that had roots in hama.29 his grandfather served a long tenure as a judge (qāḍī) in damascus. muḥammad amīn’s father (b. 1031/1621–22, d. 1082/1671) was similarly well educated, and he was appointed to a range of administrative and judicial posts throughout the ottoman lands, including in istanbul, āmid (i.e., diyār bakr), and beirut. this meant that the younger al-muḥibbī was often apart from his father during his childhood, but he received a comprehensive education with the leading scholars in damascus. in the 1670s, after his father’s death, muḥammad amīn embarked on a period of itinerancy of his own. he spent a substantial amount of time in istanbul, where he continued his studies. at some point after he turned thirty—around the early 1090s/1680s—al-muḥibbī returned to damascus and wrote the work to be discussed in this paper.30 it is a literary anthology titled nafḥat al-rayḥāna wa-rashḥat ṭilāʾ al-ḥāna, or “the scent of sweet basil and the flowing wine of the tavern.” we do not know when exactly al-muḥibbī completed this text. neither the preface nor the conclusion mentions a specific date, and in all of the references that i have seen to the nafḥat al-rayḥāna in scholarship, the year that is cited (1111/1699) pertains to the author’s death. nevertheless, it appears that the anthology is linked to the earlier part of al-muḥibbī’s authorly career and that it predates his more famous book in the same genre, khulāṣat al-athar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿashar (“the essence of the legacy of the notables of the eleventh century”).31 the khulāṣat al-athar has references to events that took place as late as 1101/1690, which provides a terminus post quem. it is also worth noting that al-muḥibbī began work on a continuation (dhayl) of the nafḥat al-rayḥāna, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in 1111/1699.32 so it seems plausible that he wrote the nafḥat al-rayḥāna and then the khulāṣat al-athar, then returned to the former to add a dhayl, but died before it was finished. (more could be done to confirm this sequence of events.) among the other extant works by al-muḥibbī are several treatises on linguistic and grammatical topics. one of these, qaṣd al-sabīl fīmā fī lughat al-ʿarab min dakhīl, is described by el-rouayheb as among “the most extensive premodern works on foreign loanwords in arabic.”33 the concept of the nafḥat al-rayḥāna is to collect information about noteworthy individuals whose lives overlapped with that of al-muḥibbī. as is customary in anthological texts (often called ṭabaqāt or tarājim in arabic), the content is presented in a series of notices (tarājim), each devoted to a specific person. in a given notice, discussion of the 29. on al-muḥibbī’s biography, see the introduction of ʿabd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-ḥulw in his edition of nafḥat al-rayḥāna wa-rashḥat ṭilāʾ al-ḥāna, 6 vols. (cairo: ʿ īsā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1967–71), starting at 1:4. another helpful overview is provided by muḥammad zāhid abū ghudda in “al-ʿallāma al-muʾarrikh al-adīb al-shāʿir muḥammad amīn al-muḥibbī,” website of rābiṭat al-ʿulamāʾ al-sūriyyīn, march 1, 2016, https://islamsyria. com/site/show_articles/7939/. 30. these events are described by al-muḥibbī in the preface to the nafḥat al-rayḥāna, starting at 1:9. 31. see the four-volume beirut printing of the work by maktabat khayyāṭ in 1966. i believe this is a reproduction of the version that was published in cairo by al-maṭbaʿa al-wahbiyya in 1284/1867–68. 32. the incomplete dhayl has also been edited by al-ḥulw; it is included as the sixth volume in his edition of the nafḥat al-rayḥāna. 33. el-rouayheb, “opening the gate,” 276. https://islamsyria.com/site/show_articles/7939/ https://islamsyria.com/site/show_articles/7939/ 244 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 245 biography of the figure in question—his family background, teachers, students, and works, with perhaps a few anecdotes—is followed by selections of poetry. the organization of this anthology is again based on geography: there are eight chapters, for the eight regions whose notables al-muḥibbī covers. the first chapter addresses damascus and its environs,34 and, for obvious reasons, it is the longest section of the nafḥat al-rayḥāna, with the author discussing many of his personal connections. the second chapter is devoted to aleppo, and the third to al-rūm, i.e., the ottoman heartland.35 significantly, al-muḥibbī presents some of his own arabic translations of turkic poetry written by the individuals treated in the third chapter, which parallels his treatment of persian poets later in the text.36 the fourth chapter addresses iraq and bahrain,37 and at the end of it, al-muḥibbī adds a brief section on the notables of iran (al-ʿajam)—though this would be easy to miss in a survey of the anthology’s contents, since it is not given a proper heading.38 this passage contains only five notices, of which the first two seem to have been sourced from the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr. the paucity of content does not, however, diminish the section’s thought-provoking nature. i will review al-muḥibbī’s treatment of the ʿajamīs in greater detail below, with particular attention to his notice on ṣāʾib tabrīzī. the fifth chapter of the nafḥat al-rayḥāna is on yemen; the sixth, on the ḥijāz; the seventh, on egypt; and the eighth, on the maghrib.39 the work is of considerable magnitude: in the edition of ʿabd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-ḥulw, it runs to five full volumes (with most of the fifth devoted to indexes). the same edition includes a sixth volume containing the extant material from al-muḥibbī’s incomplete dhayl. the length of notices in this anthology ranges from a couple of pages for individuals whom the author deems relatively less important, to around twenty pages for especially distinguished figures or those who were close to al-muḥibbī. in the larger notices, extensive quotation of poetry tends to account for most of the space. a final general point to emphasize about the nafḥat al-rayḥāna is that the entire work is intended as a kind of continuation of an earlier text, al-khafājī’s abovementioned rayḥānat al-alibbā. the title of al-muḥibbī’s book encodes a reference to that of al-khafājī, and in the preface of the nafḥat al-rayḥāna, al-muḥibbī explains that he read the rayḥānat al-alibbā and wanted to extend its approach to cover the prominent individuals of his own time. the practice of authoring an update to a prior work and giving it a title to indicate the connection was common in the arabic anthological tradition. it can be traced to the yatīmat al-dahr fī maḥāsin ahl al-ʿaṣr (“the peerless of the age on the distinctions of the people of the epoch”) of abū manṣūr al-thaʿālibī (d. ca. 429/1038) and the texts that took up its 34. in al-ḥulw’s edition of the nafḥat al-rayḥāna, this chapter takes up all of the first volume and most of the second. 35. these chapters start, respectively, at 2:429 and 3:3 in al-ḥulw’s edition. 36. for example, all of the last eight notices in this chapter include lines of poetry that al-muḥibbī claims to have “arabized” (ʿarrabtu). see nafḥat al-rayḥāna, 3:129–38. 37. this chapter begins at 3:139. 38. nafḥat al-rayḥāna, 3:213–38. 39. these chapters start, respectively, at 3:239, 4:3, 4:391, and 5:3 in al-ḥulw’s edition. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 245 mantle, most importantly the dumyat al-qaṣr wa-ʿuṣrat ahl al-ʿaṣr (“the palace statue and the refuge of the people of the epoch”) of abū al-qāsim ʿalī al-bākharzī (d. 467/1075) and the kharīdat al-qaṣr wa-jarīdat al-ʿaṣr (“the palace pearl and the record of the epoch”) of ʿimād al-dīn al-iṣfahānī (d. 597/1201).40 the treatment of persian by al-muḥibbī now that we have a general sense of these two works, we can look more closely at the passage concerning ʿajamī figures in the nafḥat al-rayḥāna. as was noted above, al-muḥibbī provides only five dedicated notices. they pertain to the following individuals, in order: al-ṭabīb al-shīrāzī; mullā faraj allāh al-shūshtarī; ʿurfī al-shīrāzī (d. 999/1591); ṭālib al-āmulī (d. 1036/1626–27); and ṣāʾib (d. ca. 1087/1676).41 it is plain that the first two notices are based on the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr—a work that al-muḥibbī cites at several points.42 less clear is how al-muḥibbī came into possession of a copy of ibn maʿṣūm’s anthology, which was completed perhaps a decade before the nafḥat al-rayḥāna was started. in any case, the discussion of al-ṭabīb al-shīrāzī and faraj allāh al-shūshtarī is of relatively little interest, compared to the original material that follows. the notices on ʿurfī, ṭālib, and ṣāʾib are brief; none of them takes up more than a page. in his biographical comments on ʿurfī, al-muḥibbī explains that the poet moved to india—we know from other sources that this occurred in 992/1584—and that “he roamed around that country and filled it with his sublimity” (wa-kāna dakhala al-hind fa-jāsa khilālahu, wa-malaʾa bilādahu jalālatahu).43 the author then reports that ʿurfī died in india after “setting loose what was in his quiver of secrets” (fa-nashala mā fī kinānatihi min al-maknūnāt) and “scattering what was in his treasury of riches” (wa-nathara mā fī dhakhāʾirihi min al-makhzūnāt). at this point in the notice, al-muḥibbī wishes to transition to quoting ʿurfī’s poetry, but he remarks that he “did not come upon any arabic poem by him that has been conveyed by transmitters” (lam aqif lahu ʿalā shiʿr ʿarabī tanquluhu al-ruwāt). and so, he explains, he translated a few lines himself (fa-ʿarrabtu mufradāt). it should be noted that al-muḥibbī consistently uses the verb ʿarraba (of the second wazn) and its derivatives in this anthology when referring to poetry that he has “arabized.”44 from ʿurfī, he offers a total of five lines, evidently taken from three poems. i have not yet been able to identify the original persian for any of these lines, despite spending a fair amount of time searching; but it ought to be possible. in one of the excerpts, ʿurfī complains of having become an old man before experiencing middle age. there are poems in his dīvān that express similar ideas, though none appears to be a close match. two other general features of al-muḥibbī’s translation practice should be mentioned. first, he never quotes 40. a valuable introduction to this genre in arabic literature is given in bilal orfali, the anthologist’s art: abū manṣūr al-thaʿālibī and his “yatīmat al-dahr” (leiden: brill, 2016), 1–33 (i.e., chap. 1). 41. in the edition of al-ḥulw, at least, the heading for the notice on ṣāʾib—unlike the others in this section— does not include his nisba (tabrīzī) or any other part of his name. 42. for a list of these citations, see nafḥat al-rayḥāna, 5:634. 43. ibid., 3:225. 44. this includes al-muḥibbī’s translations from turkic. 246 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 247 the persian directly, making it necessary to “reverse-engineer” his lines to uncover the source poems. second, al-muḥibbī is strict in rendering the persian verse into arabic verse that follows the standard rules of prosody. he does not keep the same meter and rhyme as those used in the original poems—persian is such a different language from arabic, anyway, that its implementation of the khalīlian system is effectively a new creation—but there is always some meter and rhyme. ṭālib āmulī receives the least discussion of any figure in this section.45 al-muḥibbī praises the quality of his poetry in conventional terms and then provides two lines (apparently from a single poem) that he has translated. in this case, also, i have not managed to find a match in ṭālib’s persian dīvān. it is a frustrating task to attempt to pick distinctive words in the arabic and search for possible equivalents in persian, with no other clues. there is, furthermore, the chance that al-muḥibbī produced a free or inaccurate translation, which would doom the effort. the entry on ṣāʾib is where we are fortunate enough to achieve a true result.46 and this is ideal, since ṣāʾib is by far the latest of the three poets. both ʿurfī and ṭālib, in fact, died before al-muḥibbī was born, which makes their inclusion in the anthology somewhat atypical. (had they been arabic poets, they likely would have been covered by al-khafājī.) ṣāʾib, on the other hand, may have been alive until just four or five years before al-muḥibbī began writing the nafḥat al-rayḥāna. the praise for ṣāʾib at the beginning of the notice is also more hyperbolic than what we find with ʿurfī and ṭālib. al-muḥibbī describes him as “one worth a thousand” (wāḥid maʿdūd bi-alf) and states that “all who preceded him among the poets [of the persians] lag behind him, along with his followers” (jamīʿ man taqaddamahu min shuʿarāʾihim mutaʾakhkhir maʿa al-khalaf). in a nice turn of phrase, al-muḥibbī adds that ṣāʾib “played with meanings as the east wind plays with the ben tree, and as maidenhood [plays] with the desirous lover” (wa-qad talāʿaba bi-l-maʿānī talāʿub al-ṣabā bi-l-bāna, wa-l-ṣibā bi-l-ʿāshiq dhī al-lubāna). note the use of words derived from the root ṣ-b-w, close to ṣ-w-b, the source of the name ṣāʾib. at the transition to the poetry portion of the notice, al-muḥibbī explains that he “has brought forth of his arabized [selections] that which the mind cannot imagine” (wa-qad awradtu min muʿarrabātihi mā taṭīshu ʿinda takhayyulihi al-adhhān). this is slightly confusing, as it seems to leave open the possibility that the author is presenting someone else’s translations of ṣāʾib. but it remains most probable that al-muḥibbī made his own arabic versions, as in the prior entries. he quotes four lines drawn from two of ṣāʾib’s poems (two lines from each). the second excerpt contains a phrase that is sufficiently uncommon that i hoped it might occur in the same form in the original persian. it goes as follows: “kingship lies not in wealth / nor in horses or armor; the alexander of the age is a youth / who possesses bare sustenance” (mā al-mulk bi-l-māl wa-lā / bi-l-khayl wa-lā bi-l-daraq; iskandar al-dahr fatan / yamliku sadd al-ramaq).47 the term used for “bare 45. nafḥat al-rayḥāna, 3:226. 46. ibid., 3:227. 47. the meter appears to be a variant of rajaz. the following transcription better represents the way that these lines would be read: ma’l-mulku bi’l-māli wa-lā / bi’l-khayli wa-lā bi’d-daraqi; iskandaru’d-dahri fatan / al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 247 sustenance” is sadd al-ramaq, which may require explanation. sadd can refer to a dam, or to the stopping up or blocking of something (among other senses, depending on the context). and ramaq refers to the spark or breath of life. the compound sadd al-ramaq, then, can be translated as “stopping up the breath of life,” that is, the minimum amount of sustenance required to keep a person alive. in modern arabic, it is more common to see a verbal form such as sadda ramaqahu, “he had just enough to keep body and soul together.”48 a perceptive reader may already notice the connection between the mention of sadd al-ramaq and the invocation of alexander the great in this poem. there is an implicit reference to the sadd of alexander—the barrier built by the character dhū al-qarnayn (identified with alexander) in the qurʾan to protect humanity from the hordes of gog and magog.49 in the relevant verse, al-kahf 94, the word employed is indeed sadd. this context allows for a deeper reading of ṣāʾib’s poetry fragment. kingship is not defined by worldly possessions, we are told; rather, whoever is living on the edge, just barely subsisting, is the alexander of his age—with the stopping up of his breath of life equivalent to the wall of dhū al-qarnayn. before i describe the results of searching for sadd al-ramaq in ṣāʾib’s dīvān, it should be noted that al-muḥibbī’s treatment of persian poetry does not end completely with this notice. this is followed by yet another short section (faṣl), which the author reports that he “assembled from arabic translations old and new” (jaʿaltuhu li-l-muʿarrabāt qadīman wa-ḥadīthan).50 here al-muḥibbī quotes numerous excerpts of verse that he identifies as having been translated from persian, drawing on a variety of sources. the first several examples are from the dumyat al-qaṣr of al-bākharzī (d. 467/1075). several others are attributed to shihāb al-dīn al-khafājī (whom al-muḥibbī calls “al-shihāb”), including one that is apparently found in his work titled ṭirāz al-majālis (“ornament of the symposia”).51 in another case, there are two lines that the syrian-palestinian scholar ḥasan al-būrīnī (d. 1024/1615) purportedly translated from the poet vaḥshī bāfqī (d. 991/1583).52 (i have tried to identify the original persian, so far without success.) and al-muḥibbī mentions ibn maʿṣūm as the source of one excerpt, though it is not drawn from the section on al-ʿajam in the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr. this passage in the nafḥat al-rayḥāna is fascinating in its own right and merits careful study. in fact, not all of the material assembled here is poetry; there are also yamliku sadda’r-ramaqi. please note, additionally, that my general practice when quoting poetry in this paper is to separate hemistichs with a semicolon. i have made an exception in this case, owing to the brevity of the meter. 48. this verbal construct is mentioned under the definition of ramaq in hans wehr, a dictionary of modern written arabic, 4th ed. (urbana, il: spoken language services, 1994), 417. 49. see william l. hanaway, “eskandar-nāma,” in encyclopædia iranica. 50. nafḥat al-rayḥāna, 3:228. the section continues through 3:238. 51. nafḥat al-rayḥāna, 3:231. the ṭirāz al-majālis is little known, but it has been published (cairo: al-maṭbaʿa al-wahbiyya, 1284/1867–68). 52. on this author, see khaled el-rouayheb, “al-burini, hasan b. muhammad,” historians of the ottoman empire website, september 2008, https://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu/en/historian/al-burini-hasan-bmuhammad/. https://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu/en/historian/al-burini-hasan-b-muhammad/ https://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu/en/historian/al-burini-hasan-b-muhammad/ 248 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 249 a few proverbs (amthāl) said to be of persian origin. but any further investigation will need to wait for a different paper. a distinctive image in ṣāʾib’s poetry as far as i have been able to establish, the term sadd-i ramaq (with the persian iżāfa) is used in seven of ṣāʾib’s ghazals, as well as in one of his “scattered snippets.” the latter is a category of poetry with formal similarities to qiṭʿas, labeled mutafarriqāt in copies of ṣāʾib’s dīvān. in three of the ghazals, sadd-i ramaq occurs in the opening line, or maṭlaʿ. i will review each instance, but we should begin with that which appears closest to the translation of al-muḥibbī: ghazal no. 3,439. its first line goes as follows: “kingship lies not in silver and gold and jewels; whoever has bare sustenance is alexander” (pādshāhī na bih sīm u zar u gawhar bāshad; har-kih rā sadd-i ramaq hast, sikandar bāshad).53 this is an almost perfect match, considering the degree of license required to transform persian verse into arabic verse. it may also be significant that it is a maṭlaʿ, since opening lines are disproportionately quoted in anthologies. the next closest occurrence is in the ninth line (of eleven) in ghazal no. 969: “the king is not the one who has a limitless treasure of jewels; whoever has just enough to subsist in the world is alexander” (nīst shāh ān kas kih dārad ganj-i gawhar bī-shumār; har-kih rā sadd-i ramaq hast az jahān iskandar ast).54 even this is similar enough to al-muḥibbī’s version to be a plausible source. moving on, we find similar phrases in the following locations. the ninth line (of ten) in ghazal no. 1,832: “make do with whatever sustenance you receive; since the one who survives on the bare minimum becomes alexander” (bih har-chih mī-rasad az rizq sāzgārī kun; kih har-kih sākht bih sadd-i ramaq sikandar gasht).55 the first line of ghazal no. 1,887: “for us, the cap of poverty is equal to the crown; bare sustenance is equal to the kingdom of alexander” (mā rā kulāh-i faqr bih afsar barābar ast; sadd-i ramaq bih mulk-i sikandar barābar ast).56 the eleventh line (of twelve) in ghazal no. 3,430: “that day i was among the people of noble souls; when minimal sustenance became for me the wall of alexander” (būdam ān rūz man az jumla-yi āzāda-ravān; kih marā sadd-i ramaq sadd-i sikandar mī-shud).57 the opening line of ghazal no. 4,884: “if you have a golden face, refuse the treasury of gold; if you have bare sustenance, refuse the wall of alexander” (chihra-yi 53. the full text of the poem can be found in the online corpus ganjoor at https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divansaeb/ghazalkasa/sh3439/. the meter is ramal. among printed versions of ṣāʾib’s poetry, the edition of his dīvān by muḥammad qahramān in six volumes (tehran: shirkat-i intishārāt-i ʿilmī va farhangī, 1985–91) is generally preferred. in that edition, ghazal no. 3,439 (per ganjoor) is numbered 3,443 and is found at 4:1662–63. 54. see ganjoor at https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh969/ and the qahramān edition of ṣāʾib’s dīvān, 2:491 (ghazal no. 969). the meter is ramal. 55. see ganjoor at https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh1832/ and the qahramān edition of ṣāʾib’s dīvān, 2:901–2 (ghazal no. 1,832). the meter is mujtaṡṡ. 56. see ganjoor at https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh1887/ and the qahramān edition of ṣāʾib’s dīvān, 2:927 (ghazal no. 1,887). the meter is mużāriʿ. 57. see ganjoor at https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh3430/ and the qahramān edition of ṣāʾib’s dīvān, 4:1658–59 (ghazal no. 3,434). the meter is ramal. https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh3439/ https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh3439/ https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh969/ https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh1832/ https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh1887/ https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh3430/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 249 zarrīn chu bāshad, makhzan-i zar gū mabāsh; hast chūn sadd-i ramaq, sadd-i sikandar gū mabāsh).58 the fourth line (of seventeen) in ghazal no. 6,714: “until he blocks for himself the path of desire at the point of bare subsistence; a man will not be compared to alexander” (tā na-bandad rāh-i khwāhish bar khud az sadd-i ramaq; dar naẓar-hā shaʾn-i iskandar na-dārad ādamī).59 and, finally, the second line (of three) in no. 388 of the mutafarriqāt: “he is alexander, even if he is in the garb of poverty; whoever restricts himself to bare sustenance” (iskandar ast agar-chih buvad dar libās-i faqr; har kas kih ikhtiṣār bih sadd-i ramaq kunad).60 taken together, these appearances of the phrase sadd-i ramaq constitute a significant result. they are also reflective of ṣāʾib’s œuvre. he composed around seven thousand ghazals over the course of a career that lasted at least five decades (even if we set as the starting point his departure for kabul in 1034/1624–25). ṣāʾib was not only prolific but also inventive, striving to develop new poetic images. he could take a peculiar, mundane term and construct an intricate field of meaning around it.61 given his corpus of thousands of poems, if one notices an interesting choice of words in a given ghazal and searches for it elsewhere, one is likely to find numerous examples. in fact, sadd-i ramaq, with (it seems) fewer than ten occurrences, is probably among the rarer images deployed by ṣāʾib. it is all the more remarkable, then, that one of these poems found its way to damascus and struck the fancy of al-muḥibbī. it may have been relevant that sadd-i ramaq is such an arabicsounding turn of phrase, even when employed in persian. a final question here is whether ṣāʾib’s way of using sadd-i ramaq is actually uncommon. the answer is that it appears to be unique. it is rare to come upon this phrase in persian poetry in any context. i found only two ghazals by bēdil of lahore (d. 1133/1720)—who lived after ṣāʾib, of course—and neither includes the connection to alexander.62 for bēdil, in both instances, the relevant idea is the virtue of contentment (qanāʿat). even in prose literature, there are few occurrences of sadd-i ramaq. it appears once in the gulistān of saʿdī and twice 58. see ganjoor at https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh4884/ and the qahramān edition of ṣāʾib’s dīvān, 5:2360 (ghazal no. 4,888). the meter is ramal. 59. see ganjoor at https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh6714/. the meter is ramal. the copy of the qahramān edition of ṣāʾib’s dīvān that i was able to access lacked the sixth volume, in which this and the next reference would fall. for the final two ṣāʾib references, therefore, i consulted a different edition, carried out by sīrūs shamīsā (tehran: intishārāt-i mustawfī and intishārāt-i bihzād, 1373/1994) on the basis of a manuscript held at the national museum of pakistan. in the shamīsā edition, this ghazal is numbered 1,848 and is found on p. 712. 60. see ganjoor at https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/motefarreghat/sh388/ and the shamīsā edition of ṣāʾib’s dīvān, 822 (in which the mutafarriqāt are unnumbered). the meter is mużāriʿ. 61. i recall a paper that paul losensky delivered at the asps conference in sarajevo in 2013, focusing on ṣāʾib’s figurative use of the term shīrāza, which refers to the thread that stitches together a bookbinding. there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of such linguistic treasures in ṣāʾib’s dīvān. 62. in the online corpus ganjoor, these are ghazals 1,213 and 2,065 from bēdil. in the former, it is in the fifth line (out of ten); in the latter, also onthe fifth line (out of nine). the meters are ramal and hazaj, respectively. for printed versions of these poems, see the edition of bēdil’s kulliyyāt by akbar bihdārvand and parvīz ʿabbāsī dākānī, 3 vols. (tehran: intishārāt-i ilhām, 1376/1997), 177, 492. the ghazals are not numbered in this edition. https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh4884/ https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/ghazalkasa/sh6714/ https://ganjoor.net/saeb/divan-saeb/motefarreghat/sh388/ 250 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 251 in naṣr allāh munshī’s version of kalīla va dimna.63 there is again no mention of alexander. unless i have overlooked something, within the persian tradition this metaphor belongs to ṣāʾib. conclusions this paper has drawn attention to the fact that there are at least two arabic anthologies of the eleventh/seventeenth century that incorporate some treatment of then-recent persian poets. the second of these sources, the nafḥat al-rayḥāna of al-muḥibbī, is further distinguished by its notices on poets who are major figures in persian literary history, and by the inclusion of arabic verse translations from their works. it is exciting to be able to follow one of al-muḥibbī’s renditions to the original ghazal(s) in the dīvān of ṣāʾib and, in the process, to discover a highly original motif. a great deal remains to be done to contextualize these findings. to what extent, for example, do other anthologies from the ottoman arab sphere engage with the works of iranian or persian authors? can more be determined about the role of shihāb al-dīn al-khafājī and his rayḥanat al-alibbā, given the clear influence that the text exerted on both ibn maʿṣūm and al-muḥibbī? (did al-khafājī also know persian?) are there other snippets of translated arabic poetry in the nafḥat al-rayḥāna, or quotations of persian poetry in the sulāfat al-ʿaṣr, that could be traced to their sources with sufficient effort? these are a few of the questions that i intend to pursue in my ongoing research into early modern anthological sources. on a broader level, i would like to emphasize again the need for persianists and arabists who study this period to collaborate in order to enhance our understanding of the ties between literary traditions that have often been viewed in isolation. the time is ripe to pursue more thorough dialogue across the field. the inḥiṭāṭ paradigm has been challenged; works under the rubric of ṭabaqāt, tarājim, and taẕkiras are studied more intensively than ever; and the term “indian style” (sabk-i hindī) has all but lost its pejorative connotation. is there yet a wider cultural world of the ottoman-safavid-mughal era for us to rediscover? 63. in wheeler m. thackston’s bilingual edition of the gulistān (bethesda, md: ibex, 2008), the relevant passage is at 158–59. in mujtabā mīnuvī’s edition of kalīla va dimna (tehran: dānishgāh-i tihrān, 1343/1964), see 83, 109. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 251 bibliography primary sources bēdil, ʿabd al-qādir. kulliyyāt-i bēdil. edited by akbar bihdārvand and parvīz ʿabbāsī dākānī. 3 vols. tehran: intishārāt-i ilhām, 1376/1997. dawlatshāh samarqandī. taẕkirat al-shuʿarāʾ. edited by fāṭima ʿ alāqa. tehran: pizhūhishgāh-i ʿulūm-i insānī va muṭālaʿāt-i farhangī, 2007. ibn maʿṣūm. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin ahl al-ʿaṣr. edited by maḥmūd khalaf al-bādī. 2 vols. damascus: dār kinān, 1430/2009. ———. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin al-shuʿarāʾ bi-kull miṣr. egypt [probably cairo]: aḥmad nājī al-jamālī and muḥammad amīn al-khānjī, 1324/1906. ———. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin aʿyān al-ʿaṣr. ms berlin, staatsbibliothek zu berlin, petermann i 630. ———. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin aʿyān al-ʿaṣr. ms tehran, kitāb-khāna-yi majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 9372. ———. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr min maḥāsin aʿyān al-ʿaṣr. ms tehran, kitāb-khāna-yi majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 2279 [old] / 404 [new]. ———. sulāfat al-ʿaṣr min maḥāsin aʿyān al-ʿaṣr. ms tehran, kitāb-khāna-yi majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 5799. al-khafājī, shihāb al-dīn. rayḥānat al-alibbā wa-zahrat al-ḥayāt al-dunyā. edited by ʿabd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-ḥulw. 2 vols. cairo: ʿīsā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1967. ———. ṭirāz al-majālis. cairo: al-maṭbaʿa al wahbiyya, 1284/1867–68. al-muḥibbī, muḥammad amīn. khulāṣat al-athar fī aʿyān al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿ ashar. 4 vols. beirut: maktabat khayyāṭ, 1966. ———. nafḥat al-rayḥāna wa-rashḥat ṭilāʾ al-ḥāna. edited by ʿabd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-ḥulw. 6 vols. cairo: ʿīsā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1967–71. naṣr allāh munshī, abū al-maʿālī. kalīla va dimna. edited by mujtabā mīnuvī. tehran: dānishgāh-i tihrān, 1343/1964. saʿdī shīrāzī. the gulistan of saʿdi: bilingual english and persian edition with vocabulary. translated by wheeler m. thackston. bethesda, md: ibex, 2008. ṣāʾib tabrīzī. dīvān-i ṣāʾib tabrīzī. edited by muḥammad qahramān. 6 vols. tehran: shirkat-i intishārāt-i ʿilmī va farhangī, 1985–91. ———. dīvān-i ṣāʾib tabrīzī, bar asās-i nuskha-yi mūza-yi millī-i pākistān. edited by sīrūs shamīsā. tehran: intishārāt-i mustawfī and intishārāt-i bihzād, 1373/1994. 252 • theodore s. beers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the treatment of coeval persian poetry in arabic anthologies • 253 ʿurfī shīrāzī. kulliyyāt-i ʿurfī shīrāzī, mushtamil bar qaṣīda-hā, tarkīb-band-hā, tarjīʿband-hā, qiṭaʿāt, bar asās-i nuskha-hā-yi abū al-qāsim sirājā iṣfahānī va muḥammad ṣādiq nāẓim tabrīzī. edited by muḥammad valī al-ḥaqq anṣārī. 3 vols. in 2. tehran: university of tehran press, 1378/1999. ———. kulliyyāt-i ʿurfī shīrāzī, shāmil-i risāla-yi nafsiyya, qaṣāʾid, tarjīʿ-band, tarkīb-band, ghazaliyyāt, rubāʿiyyāt, sāqī-nāma, maṡnaviyyāt. edited by ghulām ḥusayn javāhirī 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website, september 2008. https://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu/en/historian/ al-burini-hasan-b-muhammad/. ———. “opening the gate of verification: the forgotten arab-islamic florescence of the 17th century.” international journal of middle east studies 38, no. 2 (may 2006): 263–81. ernst, carl w. “deccan i. political and literary history.” in encyclopædia iranica. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/deccan. fleischer, cornell h. bureaucrat and intellectual in the ottoman empire: the historian mustafa âli (1541–1600). princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1986. gulchīn-i maʿānī, aḥmad. kārvān-i hind: dar aḥvāl va āṡār-i shāʿirān-i ʿaṣr-i ṣafavī kih bih hindūstān rafta-and. 2 vols. mashhad: āstān-i quds-i rażavī, 1369/1990–91. hanaway, william l. “eskandar-nāma.” in encyclopædia iranica. https://iranicaonline.org/ articles/eskandar-nama. https://iranicaonline.org/articles/jabal-amel-2 https://iranicaonline.org/articles/jabal-amel-2 https://islamsyria.com/site/show_articles/7939/ 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https://www.iranicaonline.org/ articles/saeb-tabrizi. lowry, joseph e. “ibn maʿṣūm.” in essays in arabic literary biography, 1350–1850, edited by joseph e. lowry and devin j. stewart, 174–84. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2009. newman, andrew j. safavid iran: rebirth of a persian empire. london: i. b.tauris, 2006. orfali, bilal. the anthologist’s art: abū manṣūr al thaʿālibī and his “yatīmat al-dahr.” leiden: brill, 2016. riedel, dagmar. “kalila wa demna i. redactions and circulation.” in encyclopædia iranica. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kalila-demna-i. roemer, h. r. “the safavid period.” in the cambridge history of iran, vol. 6, the timurid and safavid periods, edited by peter jackson and laurence lockhart, 189–350. cambridge university press, 1986. sharma, sunil. mughal arcadia: persian literature in an indian court. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2017. talib, adam. how do you say “epigram” in arabic? literary history at the limits of comparison. leiden: brill, 2018. wehr, hans. a dictionary of modern written arabic. 4th ed. edited by j. milton cowan. urbana, il: spoken language services, 1994. https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/baha-al-din-ameli-shaikh-mohammad-b https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/baha-al-din-ameli-shaikh-mohammad-b https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saeb-tabrizi https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/saeb-tabrizi https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kalila-demna-i al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 254-271 abstract le cycle des sept voyages de sindbad le marin comprend un grand nombre d’actes diégétiques relevant du manger. plus profondément, nous soutenons ici que la progression même de chaque péripétie s’appuie sur une forme de repas. à bien y regarder, les intrigues, plus ou moins complexes, comportent toutes une ou plusieurs scènes dans lesquelles se nourrir détermine la suite des événements. nous croyons que les narrèmes mobilisés servent un projet qui ressortit à l’adab : montrer jusqu’à quelles extrémités l’accumulation pousse les hommes. le motif alimentaire au cœur de ce dispositif relève alors de la métaphore, celle du glouton. the story cycle of sindbad the sailor’s seven travelogues contains many diegetic acts related to eating. i will argue that on each journey, the narrative relies on the form of a meal. furthermore, on closer inspection, the plots, whether complex or not, all contain one or more scenes in which feeding determines the sequence of events. i contend that the underlying narremes serve a purpose pertaining to the axiological adab system: to show to what extremes accumulation can drive people. from this perspective, the food motif at the heart of this literary device falls under the metaphor of a glutton. « nulle île n’est une île. » — carlo ginzburg introduction lors du dernier séminaire holberg, qui s’était tenu en juin 2018, michael cook avait partagé avec son auditoire plusieurs de ses questionnements relatifs à l’océan indien. nous lui proposons de poursuivre l’échange en empruntant le sentier de la fiction. dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin ou la satire du glouton ? sébastien garnier ehess, paris (sebastiengarnier@hotmail.fr) © 2020 sébastien garnier. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:sebastiengarnier%40hotmail.fr?subject= 255 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 256 cette contribution1 relit2 le parcours de sindbād al-baḥrī dans une perspective satirique3. primo, chaque riḥla s’avère fondamentalement alimentaire. secundo, nous assistons au fil du feuilleton à une déchéance morale. tertio, son histoire globale exprime le malaise attaché à la chrématistique. le cycle des sept voyages de sindbad le marin4 comprend un grand nombre d’actes diégétiques relevant du manger. plus profondément, nous soutenons ici que la progression même de chaque péripétie passe par une forme de repas (ou d’ingestion). certes, le déclenchement du départ réside dans une promesse non tenue — celle de ne pas reprendre 1. nous remercions chaleureusement les rapporteurs anonymes pour leurs nombreuses critiques, références et suggestions qui ont incontestablement étoffé le présent travail. 2. toute étude sur les voyages se heurte à la question des sources, de leurs éditions et traductions. nous avons opté pour celle, fidèle et élégante, de la pléiade : les mille et une nuits, trad. jamal eddine bencheikh et andré miquel (paris : gallimard, 2006). elle figure également dans : les mille et une nuits iv. sindbâd de la mer et autres contes, trad. jamal eddine bencheikh (paris : gallimard, 2001), 341–466. nous avons également consulté françois pétis de la croix, trad., sindabad le marin. traduction inédite de 1701, éd. aboubakr chraïbi et ulrich marzolph (paris : espaces&signes, 2016). cet ouvrage n’a malheureusement pas bénéficié du texte trilingue — arabe [recension aleppine de 1672], interligne en latin, français — princeps du même auteur (achevé en 1713), histoire arabe de sindabad le marin, ms. w 385.3a-p445h, conservé à cleveland public library. langlès en possédait un exemplaire dans sa bibliothèque ; voir francesca bellino, « another manuscript of pétis de la croix’s histoire arabe de sindabad le marin. a possible sub-family in the fluid transmission of the story », quaderni di studi arabi, n.s., 12 (2017) : 103–32. les divergences textuelles — nous signalons les principales en synthèse — n’affectent globalement pas l’inventaire des motifs mobilisés pour la démonstration. c’est à la fin du sixième voyage que s’opère une disjonction notable ; voir mia i. gerhardt, les voyages de sindbad le marin (utrecht : kemink en zoon, 1957), 20 sq. nous en rendons compte plus loin. à cela, il conviendrait d’ajouter les versions en turc ottoman, karšūnī et ṭurōyo, lesquelles débordent notre cadre ; voir francesca bellino, « i viaggi di sindbād tra oriente e occidente, medioevo et modernità. materiali inediti e nuove prospettive di ricerca », dans linee storiografiche e nuove prospettive di ricerca. xi colloquio internazionale medioevo romanzo e orientale, éd. francesca bellino, eliana creazzo et antonio pioletti, 141–67 (soveria mannelli : rubbettino editore, 2019), qui traite aussi de l’intertextualité. 3. en cela, nous nous inscrivons notamment dans les pas de deux devanciers. d’une part peter d. molan, « sinbad the sailor. a commentary on the ethics of violence », journal of the american oriental society 98, no 3 (1978) : 237–47 [réimpr. dans the arabian nights reader, éd. ulrich marzolph (détroit : wayne state university press, 2006), 327–46], rejette la lecture de mia gerhardt et le postulat d’une adhésion qu'éprouverait un public conquis (« the voyages of sindbad the sailor become a veritable glorification of navigation and maritime commerce; and sindbad as a model set up for the admiration of a sympathetic public, is the proper symbol of the sailor’s profession [. . .] », ibid., 237–38) et lui oppose qu’au contraire « an ironic disparity exists between the protagonist’s actions and his ethical stance » (ibid., 237). d’autre part jean-claude garcin, « le passage des anciennes à de nouvelles mille et une nuits au xve siècle », médiévales 64 (2013) : 74–90, « le sindbād le marin que nous connaissons est un conte du xve siècle, littéraire et parodique, où l’auteur exerce son ironie sur les voyages d’ibn baṭṭūṭa autant que sur ceux de bulūqiyā » (ibid., 82). 4. pour un aperçu académique de ce récit, nous renvoyons aux entrées : u. marzolph, « sindbād », ei2 ; coll., « sindbâd the seaman and sindbâd the landman, 179 (burton from the calcutta ii edition) », dans the arabian nights encyclopedia, éd. ulrich marzolph et richard van leeuwen, 383–89 (santa barbara, ca : abc-clio, 2004) ; ainsi qu’aux articles et chapitres suivants : paul casanova, « notes sur les voyages de sindbâd le marin », bulletin de l’institut français d’archéologie orientale 20 (1920) : 113–99 ; andré miquel, sept contes des mille et une nuits ou il n’y a pas de conte innocent (paris : sindbad, 1981), 79–109, « les voyages de sindbad le marin » ; jean-pierre picot, « dynamique et répétitivité dans les mille et une nuits ou les sept voyages de sindbad le marin ont-ils un “sens” ? », littératures 23 (1990) : 33–46 ; jean-claude garcin, pour une lecture historique des mille et une al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 256 la mer — comme pour signifier l’expédition de trop. si c’est dans l’excès, voire l’acrasie5, que réside sa faute, c’est dans son dépassement que s’origine sa récompense, sous la forme d’un enrichissement matériel6. notre héros échoue systématiquement7 sur une île, seul ou accompagné, victime d’un revers de fortune. il s’efforce alors de regagner la civilisation, épreuve qu’il parvient à surmonter par une ruse. néanmoins, à bien y regarder, les intrigues, plus ou moins complexes, comportent toutes une ou plusieurs scènes dans lesquelles se nourrir détermine la suite des événements. dire que l’alimentation joue un rôle moteur dans l’enchaînement des tableaux nous amène à préciser cette intuition : il convient de distinguer deux groupes de situations8. une ligne démarque en effet un sindbad qui mange d’un sindbad qui risque d’être mangé, plus ou moins directement. naviguant entre nécessité et danger, il se gare de la faim comme des prédateurs. puis il regagne ses pénates9, à bassora. gardons ce point à l’esprit. si nous nous plaçons à présent dans la perspective du mécanisme narratif, nous pensons pouvoir opérer une tripartition des voyages10, lesquels s’avèrent fonctionner par paires successives11. celles-ci s’articulent, selon nous, à travers une involution du personnage principal en trois étapes, une dynamique qui dicte le plan de notre propos. dans un premier nuits. essai sur l’édition de būlāq (1835) (arles : actes sud, 2013), 259–80, « sindbād » ; francesca bellino, « i sette viaggi di sindbād il marinaio. un romanzo arabo nelle mille e una notte », dans paradossi delle notti. dieci studi su le mille e una notte, éd. leonardo capezzone et elisabetta benigni, 101–29 (pise : fabrizio serra editore, 2015) ; emanuela braida, « christian arabic and garšūnī versions of sindbad the sailor. an overview », polish journal of the arts and culture, n.s., 3, no 1 (2016) : 7–28. 5. l’incontinence qui obscurcit le jugement. 6. en outre, on reconnaît le genre du faraj baʿda al-šidda ; voir hakan özkan, narrativität im kitāb al-faraǧ baʿda š-šidda des abū ʿalī al-muḥassin at-tanūḫī. eine literaturwissenschaftliche studie abbasidischer prosa (berlin : klaus schwarz, 2008). 7. sauf au septième et dernier périple, « l’ambassade », si singulier dans son déroulement. pour une approche structuraliste d’envergure et pionnière en son temps, voir mia irene gerhardt, the art of story-telling. a literary study of the thousand and one nights (leyde : brill, 1963). elle avait schématisé la séquence répétitive : départ — malheur — aventure(s) — merveille(s) — retour, conforme au modèle de propp, à l’exception du quatrième maillon, lié aux ʿajāʾib et aux masālik. 8. on pourrait y ajouter l’opposition anthropologique du cru et du cuit, laquelle dessine respectivement la barbarie et la culture. 9. les pénates étaient les gardiennes du feu et, par extension, de la nourriture cuite. livré à la sauvagerie, sindbad ne connaît que le cru, des fruits pour l’essentiel. 10. on considérera par ailleurs que plusieurs voyages s’apparentent à des dyptiques et qu’ils peuvent avoir résulté de l’assemblages d’unités narratives — i.e. dotées d’une intrigue propre. le deuxième comme le troisième combinent deux scènes insulaires, la seconde s’avérant pire que la première ; le quatrième et le cinquième articulent une action en milieu sauvage à une autre en milieu citadin, le septième s’y laisse apparenter (version du caire). 11. sans ouvrir outre mesure la jarre de pandore du comparatisme, cela nous évoque assez nettement le principe de symétrie mis au jour dans les travaux sur la rhétorique sémitique. la revue studia rhetorica biblica e semitica accueille les publications de ce courant d’analyse : https://www.retoricabiblicaesemitica.org/studia_ rhetorica_fr.php. ici, nous parlerions de parallélisme. ainsi, une première partie traite-t-elle des voyages 1 & 2, une deuxième partie des voyages 3 & 4, une troisième partie des voyages 5 & 6. https://www.retoricabiblicaesemitica.org/studia_rhetorica_fr.php https://www.retoricabiblicaesemitica.org/studia_rhetorica_fr.php 257 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 258 moment, il pèche par oubli12. cela rompt son lien de sociabilité, coupé qu’il est de ses compagnons. dans un deuxième temps, il régresse vers l’animalité, dégradé au rang de bétail. dans une troisième phase, il enfreint des tabous majeurs et atteint les limites de sa condition. ce « decrescendo dramatique » assure à l’ensemble un suspens efficace. il permet de surcroît d’agencer une critique en creux. le mouvement — oubli, animalité et limites — nous apparaît essentiel. nous croyons que le canevas sous-jacent sert un projet qui ressortit à l’adab : montrer jusqu’à quelles condamnables extrémités l’accumulation pousse les hommes. le motif alimentaire au cœur de ce dispositif relève alors de la métaphore, celle du glouton. amasser des biens plus que de raison — exécrable obsession, il n’en a jamais assez ! — reviendrait à laisser libre cours à son hybris, c’est-à-dire à s’empiffrer — à « vivre pour manger ». une caricature s’esquisse. à travers les lignes qui suivent, nous examinerons le détail et les variations de la chute qui entraîne notre anti-héros insatiable, mais avant d’entrer dans le vif du sujet, il nous faut débuter par le conte cadre, puisque c’est lui qui libère la parole de sindbad. le banquet une histoire tient à peu de choses. il aura suffi d’un vers [mètre mutaqārib] pour provoquer la confession fleuve des voyages : wa-ġayrī saʿīdun bi-lā šaqwatin wa-mā ḥamala l-dahru yawman ka-ḥimlī13 d’autres sont bienheureux loin de toute misère qui jamais ne portèrent de pareils fardeaux14 un portefaix15 se lamente sur son sort et interroge le passé du riche marchand dont il contemple l’opulente demeure. on ne s’y trompera pas : non seulement le ḥammāl, ce sosie 12. sur ce thème, abdelfattah kilito, l’œil et l’aiguille. essais sur les mille et une nuits (paris : la découverte, 1992), chap. 5, « le sourire de sindbâd », 62–85 qui s’ouvre ainsi : « sindbâd est un homme de l’oubli ». 13. nous nous référons pour le texte arabe à : alf layla wa-layla (beyrouth : dār ṣādir, 1999). les voyages figurent au 2 : 1–39. 14. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 351. 15. quasi-homophone du héros, il se prénomme hindbād dans plusieurs manuscrits de cette histoire autonome : mss ar 3645, 3646, 3649, 3667 et 5176 bnf, ou encore gotha orient. 2651 et diez a oct. 185 (= 9181) berlin. c’est également le cas dans les traductions de pétis de la croix (hindabad, 1701) et galland (hindbad, 1705), mais aussi dans l’édition bilingue les voyages de sind-bâd le marin et les ruses des femmes, éd. et trad. louis langlès (paris : imprimerie royale, 1814) et dans alf layla wa-layla or the arabian nights entertainments, in the original arabic, éd. aḥmad b. muḥammad al-yamanī al-širwānī (calcutta : pereira, 1814) [= calcutta i]. cela correspond à la version a (plus ancienne) identifiée par michael jan de goeje, « de reizen van sindebaad », de gids 53 (1889) : 278–312, part. 280. il s’appelle en revanche sindbād de la terre (al-barrī), double lexical de sindbād de la mer (al-baḥrī) dans les mss ar 3648 bnf ou encore gotha orient. 2650 — qui lisent sindbāḏ —, ainsi que dans maintes éditions imprimées : alf layla wa-layla, éd. william hay macnaghten (calcutta, 1840) [= calcutta ii], 3 : 4–82 ; alf layla wa-layla, éd. saʿīd ʿalī al-ḫuṣūṣī (būlāq, 1280/1863 ; réimpr. le caire, 1935), 3 : 81–122. cela correspond à la version b (postérieure) identifiée par de goeje, « reizen ». il est sindbād al-ḥammāl dans le al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 258 onomastique, s’avère l’auxiliaire économiquement indispensable du commerçant — il irrigue par son travail les canaux de l’échange et ses bras réalisent la valeur des biens charriés —, mais il remplit aussi la fonction d’auditeur-déclencheur16. visé par cette apostrophe amère, sindbad va l’inviter à entendre, au milieu d’une riche assemblée, le récit de ses aventures. il régale ses convives d’un banquet17 quotidien et s’assure que, rassasiés, ils seront tout ouïe. c’est le prix à payer pour se justifier, voire alléger sa conscience. ce symposium consiste en un discours attablé. il pourrait représenter l’idéal-type : des égaux conversant autour d’un repas, quoiqu’il confine ici au monologue. le rituel se répète chaque jour et, en l’espace d’une semaine, l’amphitryon a narré ses exploits qui pourront ensuite être diffusés (de bouche à oreille) dans bassorah. face à son public, sindbad rend des comptes et défend sa position : sache que j’ai derrière moi une histoire merveilleuse. je t’en raconterai toutes les péripéties. je n’ai atteint au bonheur dans cette maison où tu me vois qu’après d’innombrables épreuves et d’immenses peines et non sans avoir échappé à de terrifiants dangers. que de fatigues et de périls n’ai-je pas affrontés jadis au cours de mon existence. j’ai fait sept voyages aussi extraordinaires les uns que les autres18. il entend démontrer par ses mémoires l’utilité de son métier, il n’est pas un profiteur, ainsi que le mérite de ses actes, il n’est pas un héritier19. en investissant le hiatus auteurnarrateur, nous pouvons nous demander si un second niveau de lecture ne doit pas être envisagé, celui d’une critique de la classe marchande. une tension existe de fait entre l’éthique — système d’interdits et de prescriptions — de la formation médiévale considérée, d’une part, et le stimulant de l’intérêt individuel — mesuré à l’aune du profit retiré d’une somme de comportements —, d’autre part. c’est dans cet écart que nous allons bâtir notre thèse. nous montrerons que le narrème de l’ingestion articule chaque voyage dans une descente aux enfers. nous synthétiserons ensuite les occurrences relevées pour les placer en regard de ce que sindbad dit de sa compulsion au départ et de ce qu’il perçoit avant de rentrer. passons maintenant à l’ « odyssée sindbadienne20 » à proprement parler. ms. ar 3615 bnf (fo 210r). les mss ar 3647 bnf et we 1730 (= 9182) berlin comportent la déformation sindbān/ hindbān. est-ce un glissement graphique du nūn au ḏāl ? le premier cité donne par la suite aux deux hommes le même nom, sindbān. nous n’insistons pas sur la préfixation ou non de l’article défini à ces patronymes. enfin, il pourrait tirer son nom de sindbad le sage (al-ḥakīm) dont le livre éponyme accouche de la délivrance du prince injustement incriminé, au terme d’une narration de sept jours et sept nuits ; il est déjà mentionné par al-masʿūdī (m. 345/956) et ibn al-nadīm (m. 385/995), voir j.-p. guillaume, « sindbād al-ḥakīm », ei2 et bellino, « i sette viaggi », 103. retenons de ce qui précède la mise en abyme du porteur qui tend le miroir à son alter ego. 16. si dounyazade/dinarzade aide sa sœur schéhérazade à s’emparer du verbe salvateur, la nuit, hindbad force sindbad à se livrer, le jour. 17. voir g. j. van gelder, « banquet », ei3. 18. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 353–54. 19. il dilapida la fortune léguée par son père et dut faire ses armes « seul ». 20. les séances puisent indiscutablement à des fonds divers (bellino, « i sette viaggi »). le remaniement de matériaux issus de traditions diverses et leurs différents agencements en un tout cohérent et indépendant 259 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 260 l’ingestion motrice nous nous appuierons sur le schéma actanciel élaboré par greimas21. c’est le ventre des actants qui guide la narration, qu’il s’agisse du sujet, de l’adjuvant ou de l’opposant. oubli (v1 & v2)22 dans le premier et le deuxième voyages, sindbad est victime de négligence. à deux reprises, l’inattention lui vaut d’être abandonné, comme conséquence d’une restauration insouciante. d’abord (v123) pour s’être attardé sur le dos d’un grand animal marin — pris par erreur pour une île —, où l’on avait chauffé un déjeuner. ensuite (v2) pour s’être assoupi à l’écart après un bon repas, le bateau ayant levé l’ancre sans lui. esseulé, il se nourrit d’herbes, comme une bête. à deux reprises, il risque d’être dévoré par un animal (fabuleux). d’abord (v1), il aperçoit un cheval marin sortir des flots et se livrer à un bien étrange manège, à l’instar d’une mante religieuse24. ensuite (v2), il doit réchapper aux serpents qui pullulent dans la forêt où il a débarqué. dans ce dernier cas, c’est en s’enroulant dans un morceau de viande qu’il parvient à quitter le piège mortel auquel il ne voyait pas d’issue, emporté dans les airs par des aigles géants qui l’ont pris, ainsi déguisé en appât, pour leur pitance. jamais ses robinsonnades ne durent et jamais il n’essaie de s’adapter à la vie sauvage. de retour à la civilisation, il peut faire bombance, servi par les palefreniers du roi mihrage (v1). dans cette phase « apéritive », il demeure dans un cadre vertueux et irréprochable, ne causant aucun tort à ses congénères. ces deux voyages symbolisent un état « témoin » auquel le lecteur ne manquera pas de comparer les voyages suivants afin de mesurer la dégradation morale du principal protagoniste. néanmoins, ils sonnent d’ores et déjà un avertissement primordial, un rappel à l’ordre. s’oublier c’est encourir une certaine déshumanisation25. animalité (v3 & v4)26 dans le troisième et le quatrième voyages, sindbad déchoit, ravalé au règne animal, assimilé à du vulgaire bétail. ces épisodes se dédoublent par ailleurs en tableaux distincts. forment le corpus auquel nous adossons notre étude. ici, il ne sera pas question de diachronie ; voir bellino, « i viaggi di sindbād ». 21. algirdas julien greimas, sémantique structurale (paris : larousse, 1966), en particulier 172–91, « réflexions sur les modèles actanciels », et 192–221, « à la recherche des modèles de transformation ». 22. cet « homme de l’oubli » court après son identité perdue à chaque voyage ; kilito, l’œil et l’aiguille, chap. 5. 23. par commodité, nous abrégeons dans le corps du texte la référence au voyage considéré d’un v suivi du numéro dudit voyage. 24. deux variantes coexistent : il la couvre puis essaie de l’entraîner dans la mer (yurīdu aḫḏahā maʿahu, le caire) ou de la tuer (pétis de la croix, sindabad, 32 ; langlès, sind-bâd, 12 [ar.], yurīdu qatlahā). 25. la plante lotos efface les souvenirs, au chant ix de l’odyssée. 26. un possible devancier persan est aussi à envisager : ulrich marzolph, « an early persian precursor to the tales of sindbād the seafaring merchant », zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 167, no 1 (2017) : 127–41, pour v3 et v4. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 260 à deux reprises, notre marin est destiné à satisfaire l’appétit d’un ogre. d’abord (v3), c’est le sosie de polyphème qu’il parvient à terrasser en usant de la métis bien connue du chant ix : il aveugle l’ennemi endormi en transperçant ses yeux au moyen d’une broche incandescente. avec ses deux camarades rescapés, il survit grâce à des fruits cueillis sur l’île où ils se sont échoués. hélas, il est tombé de charybde en scylla ! c’est in extremis — et seul — qu’il échappe aux crocs d’un terrible serpent, avant d’être récupéré par un bateau qui croisait par chance au large. on le régale, il revit. ensuite (v4), une île le sauve, avec les autres passagers, d’une tempête dévastatrice. des anthropophages les surprennent et les capturent. ils droguent les mets qu’ils leur servent pour les engraisser en vue d’un festin cannibale. une prescience bienvenue évite à notre personnage ce sort funeste. se méfiant de ses hôtes, il se sort sain et sauf des griffes d’une sorte de circé27. il n’en a pas pour autant terminé car sa condition humaine va être soumise à l’épreuve de la mort. en effet, il gagne une contrée civilisée et là, son intelligence du commerce — il y introduit avec succès la selle à cheval — l’élève socialement. une nouvelle tragédie s’abat sur lui. le décès subit de son épouse lui vaut, selon la coutume locale, d’être emmuré dans la nécropole, à ses côtés (une forme de mort d’accompagnement). une fois son viatique funéraire (prévu pour une semaine) épuisé, il se comporte en charognard28 et dépouille les autres malheureuses victimes de ladite coutume des provisions avec lesquelles elles rejoignent tragiquement le sépulcre collectif. il tue ses semblables pour ne pas périr affamé. c’est alors que j’entendis le bruit que faisait la dalle lorsqu’on la tirait de la margelle du puits qui donnait accès à la caverne. un rayon de lumière apparut. « que se passet-il ? », me dis-je. eh bien c’était que des hommes, assemblés en grand nombre, faisaient glisser dans la caverne une civière portant le cadavre d’un homme. son épouse, encore en vie, pleurant et gémissant, fut descendue à sa suite, suspendue à une corde. on l’avait munie de galettes et d’eau. je l’observai à son insu alors que la dalle avait été remise en place et que le cortège s’était éloigné. elle ne pouvait me voir dans le noir. je me saisis du tibia d’un cadavre d’homme, m’approchai de la femme et lui assenai sur le sommet du crâne un coup qui l’assomma. elle tomba au sol évanouie. je la frappai une deuxième puis une troisième fois, elle en mourut. je vis qu’elle portait vêtements de prix, bijoux d’or et d’argent, colliers de perles, joyaux, pendentifs. je m’emparai de tout cela. je pris les galettes et l’eau dont on l’avait munie puis revins à l’emplacement que je m’étais ménagé au 27. cette magicienne ensorcèle les compagnons d’ulysse puis les métamorphose en porcs au chant x. 28. c’est d’ailleurs en suivant une bête qui fréquente la grotte-tombeau pour y manger les défunts — un régime qui fait écho à son propre comportement — que sindbad trouve le chemin de la sortie. en cela, l’issue diffère d’une histoire tramée sur le même motif mais dotée d’une fin plus civilisée : la jeune femme se réveille, parvient à s’extraire de sa prison grâce à un seau puis fait délivrer son mari, qubāṯ b. razīn ; voir al-tanūḫī, kitāb al-faraj baʿda al-šidda, éd. ʿabbūd al-šāljī (beyrouth : dār ṣādir, 1987), 2 : 201–2, # 197, « asarahu al-rūm fī ayyām muʿāwiya wa-aṭlaqūhu fī ayyām ʿabd al-malik », et son analyse dans marius canard, « les aventures d’un prisonnier arabe et d’un patrice byzantin à l’époque des guerres bulgaro-byzantines », dumbarton oaks papers 9/10 (1956) : 49–72. sur ce thème, l’étude suivante fournit de lumineuses parentés : maurice a. pomerantz, « tales from the crypt. on some uncharted voyages of sindbad the sailor », narrative culture 2, no 2 (2015) : 250–69, en particulier le tableau comparatiste, 159. 261 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 262 fond de la caverne pour y dormir. je mangeai et bus parcimonieusement afin de ne pas épuiser trop vite mes provisions, évitant ainsi de mourir de faim et de soif. c’est ainsi que je pus survivre dans la caverne un certain temps, tuant au fur et à mesure toute personne jetée vivante avec le cadavre de son conjoint pour me saisir de la nourriture et de l’eau dont on l’avait munie29. ceci constitue un véritable basculement moral. homo homini lupus est. à partir de cet instant, sindbad a commis un meurtre. son crime ouvre la voie à une série de péripéties liées à l’idée de justice. limites (v5 & v6) dans le cinquième et le sixième voyages, sindbad tutoie la transgression. d’abord (v5), c’est parce que certains de ses collègues ont rôti — malgré les mises en garde de notre bassorien avisé — un jeune ruḫḫ30, que son navire sombre sous le bombardement vengeur des deux parents ayant découvert le meurtre de leur progéniture. revenu à lui sur une île édénique où les fruits abondent, il se retrouve littéralement monté par le vieillard de la mer, alors qu’il lui avait rendu service31. il s’en débarrasse en le saoulant d’un vin de vigueur qu’il a tiré d’une calebasse de raisins fermentés, puis en tuant son « cavalier » ainsi enivré. ce passage interpelle le concept de bonne action : il est puni de sa charité et se libère en usant d’une boisson à laquelle s’attache une prohibition32. c’est quelque part un monde à l’envers. plus prosaïquement dirons-nous avec l’adage que « nécessité fait loi »33. ensuite (v6), il atteint bien involontairement son propre enfer. jeté avec sa compagnie sur un rivage insulaire par un courant hostile, il découvre à sa grande terreur une arcadie funeste : tout y est richesse — pierres et bois précieux y foisonnent naturellement, trésors et cargaisons s’y sont échoués par le passé — et désolation : aucune nourriture ne s’y devine. 29. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 414–15. 30. sa chair représente de facto un tabou. le respect de l’interdit alimentaire peut a contrario sauver la vie, telle celle de jaʿfar al-ḫuldī qu’un éléphant épargna parce que, à la différence de ses camarades d’infortune, il n’avait pas mangé son petit ; al-tanūḫī, faraj, 4 : 129–32, # 409 « āla ʿalā nafsihi an lā yaʾkula laḥm fīl abadan ». cette parabole du tawakkul, en circulation chez de nombreux auteurs, a été étudiée dans geert jan van gelder, « to eat or not to eat elephant. a travelling story in arabic and persian literature », bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 66, no 3 (2003) : 419–30. 31. ce monstre — une manière de centaure — connote également le parasite (ṭufaylī), un être à la polarité négative qui hante la littérature d’adab. c’est l’intrus que l’on n’a pas invité et dont l’intérêt personnel viole les convenances sans éprouver la moindre honte. 32. sur les interprétations des quatre passages coraniques et les positions des madhhabs à ce sujet, nous renvoyons à a. j. wensinck et j. sadan, « khamr », ei2. tout au plus dirait-on ici que sindbad agit en koufien hanéfite — c’est le seul courant légal qui tolère l’alcool —, produisant du vin comme arme, afin de quitter sa servitude. à la fin de v5, il fustige les habitants mécréants d’une île parce qu’ils « s’adonnent à la débauche et à la boisson » (yuḥibbūn al-fasād wa-šarb al-ḫumūr). est-ce là une sentence insérée pour lever l’ambiguïté ? 33. en écho, il arrive dans la ville des singes où la multitude simiesque contraint la population à s’exiler la nuit. néanmoins, c’est en provoquant ces mêmes animaux qu’il se procure quantité de noix de coco et réalise des affaires florissantes. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 262 cette montagne dominait une grande île sur le rivage de laquelle gisaient de nombreuses carcasses de vaisseaux fracassés. le sable était jonché de cargaisons éparpillées là par les flots après que les bateaux qui les transportaient eurent fait naufrage et que leurs passagers se furent noyés. il y avait là un nombre incroyable et inimaginable de marchandises et de richesses que les tempêtes jetaient sur l’île. je pris pied et me mis à marcher. je trouvai, au centre de l’île, une source dont l’eau douce jaillissait, élargissait son courant et disparaissait sous la montagne. tous nos rescapés s’étaient répandus ici et là. ils semblaient avoir perdu la raison, devenus comme fous au spectacle des biens et des richesses qui jonchaient le rivage. [. . .] nous ne cessâmes de parcourir cette île, émerveillés par les richesses exceptionnelles dont le seigneur, exalté soit-il, l’avait pourvue, mais fort inquiets pour notre avenir et saisis d’une grande crainte à regarder ce qui nous environnait34. voilà où l’a mené sa soif inextinguible, auri sacra fames ! il n’a jamais été aussi riche mais il n’y a [plus] rien à monnayer : le luxe ne peut ici pourvoir aux besoins primaires. le commerce est mort. paradoxe du marchand ou malédiction de midas ? le lecteur aura reconnu l’anathème antique à peine voilé lancé contre la chrématistique35. sindbad aurait dissimulé aux autres naufragés ses dernières réserves, tandis que la famine les décime. il ne partage pas avec ses semblables, alors que la fin approche : pour moi, je restai en vie un peu plus longtemps que les autres ; n’ayant que fort peu de vivres que j’avais cachés sous terre, de peur de mes camarades36. il largue pragmatiquement les amarres de l’humanité. c’est donc seul qu’il va renaître. les lieux opèrent telle une camera oscura : il embarque sur un radeau qu’il a confectionné et s’engouffre dans le ventre périlleux du tartare montagneux, emporté par une rivière souterraine. il débouche dans le royaume de serendib. il y demeure quelque temps à la cour où on lui témoigne grand respect. désireux de revoir les siens, il fait voile vers l’irak, porteur de cadeaux du souverain à l’attention du calife hārūn al-rašīd37. manger ou être mangé nous synthétisons ici les éléments précédents puis les commentons. le tableau ci-après résume les dangers auxquels sindbad est exposé, en proie tantôt à la faim (c’est lui qui cherche à ingérer activement), tantôt à un opposant carnivore (il se trouve passivement sous la menace d’une ingestion). 34. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 438–39. 35. on se réfèrera à la politique d’aristote, en ce qu’il y distingue l’économique (ou chrématistique naturelle) — soit l’entretien de la maison (oïkos), une administration domestique — de la chrématistique [commerciale] — soit la maximisation sans limite de la richesse. sur l’aporie d’une monnaie-étalon sans échange — c’est-à-dire d’un argent sans bien —, on lira l’éthique à nicomaque. 36. une mention qui se trouve chez pétis de la croix, sindabad, 75 ; ms. cleveland, ḥikāya 6, fo 4. 37. dans le texte de pétis de la croix, la lettre déploie une incroyable majesté quand le présent n’est pas détaillé. dans l’édition du caire, c’est rigoureusement l’inverse. 263 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 264 figure 1. manger ou être mangé voyage faim prédateur38 v1 « de l’île-baleine au royaume des cavales » sindbad n’a que fruits et eau douce. v2 « l’oiseau ruḫḫ et la vallée aux diamants » sindbad n’a que fruits et eau douce. sur la seconde île, il n’a plus rien à manger. sur la seconde île, des serpents menacent de le dévorer. il réchappe au danger en se déguisant en appât pour transformer un opposant (rapace géant) en adjuvant (moyen de locomotion). v3 « les singes et le monstre noir » sur la première île, le monstre géant dévore la compagnie. sur la seconde île, un serpent géant dévore les rescapés. v4 « dans la caverne des mourants » un roi-ogre fait engraisser la compagnie pour la dévorer lors d’un festin. sindbad tue les malheureux descendus dans la nécropole aux côtés des défunts pour voler leur viatique. v5 « le vieillard satanique et l’île aux singes » sindbad enivre le vieillard pour se défaire de sa servitude39. v6 « la rivière aux trésors » l’île est dépourvue de toute nourriture. v7 « la mer du bout du monde40 » trois monstres marins menacent d’engloutir le navire. un lion menace de le dévorer dans une mosquée de nuit41. 38. un prédateur est un opposant qui cherche à ingérer sindbad. 39. ici le vieillard relève plus du parasite que du prédateur. 40. dans la traduction de bencheikh. il s’écarte ici de l’édition du caire, celle-ci ne faisant état d’aucune ambassade en retour. voir e.g. ms. ar 3648 bnf, fos 43v sq. 41. dans la version de pétis de la croix. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 264 selon que le narrème de l’ingestion est interne (faim) ou externe (prédation), on obtient la répartition schématique suivante : figure 2. répartition des narrèmes au prisme de l’ingestion voyage 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 faim + + + + prédation + + + + (+) + si l’objet initial est le profit, il s’avère rapidement qu’un second objet s’y enchâsse, celui de la plus élémentaire des survies : manger ou être mangé. la quête du gain engage directement son intégrité physique. nous commençons par quelques remarques de cadrage. un repas malheureux amorce la paire v1-v2, tandis qu’un repas tabou (la consommation de la chair d’un jeune ruḫḫ) cause la perdition du v5. sindbad voit ses compagnons (adjuvants) dévorés dans la paire v3-v4, ou mourir de faim, l’un après l’autre, au v6 : pareil spectacle accroît la dimension dramatique. les lieux se distinguent par l’alimentation qui s’y rattache : ainsi, aux v1, v2 (première île), v3 (sur les deux îles) et v7, sindbad n’a que fruits42 et eau douce pour se sustenter, sans oublier qu’au v4, il refuse les mets empoisonnés et se contente d’herbes et de plantes : l’île héberge un monde transitionnel du cru, entre les pôles de la faim et du cuit. le passage de la paire v1-v2 à la paire v3-v4 correspond à un basculement, de la faim vers la dévoration. elle culmine avec l’enterrement vivant de sindbad. dans l’hypogée, il ne peut plus compter sur les aliments crus qu’offre, selon le topos du locus amoenus, toute île au naufragé (en v1 et v2). revenu à la vie, il joue avec les codes au v5 puisque c’est en piégeant son opposant, le vieillard de la mer, — il le saoule, c’est-à-dire qu’il lui fait avaler une substance déréglante — qu’il élimine ce corps étranger. l’île au trésor (v6) fausse à son tour les attentes du lecteur : il est immensément riche, mais n’a rien à manger. là encore (cf. v4), c’est en s’enfonçant sous la terre qu’il renaît. enfin, le signal du salut — il est alors hors de danger — intervient sous la forme d’un rassasiement : « il [. . .] me servit un repas auquel je fis honneur car j’étais affamé. une fois repu et rassuré, . . . » (v1) ; « ils m’offrirent aussi quelques provisions et je pus manger à ma faim et étancher ma soif à de l’eau pure et fraîche » (v3) ; « [. . .] ils me prièrent de prendre place parmi eux et m’offrirent un repas auquel je fis honneur car j’avais grand-faim » (v4) ; « ils me donnèrent de la nourriture et je mangeai à ma faim » (v5) ; « “je t’en conjure par dieu, ami, apporte-moi d’abord à manger, je suis affamé, je répondrai ensuite aux questions qu’il te plaira de poser.” il s’empressa de me servir un peu de nourriture que je dévorai. rassasié, je me reposai, ma frayeur s’apaisa et je recouvrai mes esprits. » (v6) ; « le vieillard [. . .] fit servir un repas très recherché. je me régalai et, une fois rassasié, remerciai dieu [. . .]. à bien manger, boire agréablement [. . .] je repris mes esprits, oubliai mes angoisses et retrouvai quiétude et sérénité. » (v7). 42. des légumes aussi aux v3 et v4. 265 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 266 l’appétit vient en partant il nous faut maintenant lier ingestion et accumulation. nous postulons que le ventre sert de métaphore à l’absorption vorace : il représente le mécanisme dénoncé à chacun des voyages, une manière d’indigestion. une formule s’impose : sindbad est puni par là où il a péché. il sait qu’il ne doit pas s’absenter de chez lui, car nulle indigence ne l’y contraint plus. l’inventaire récurrent — alors qu’il navigue vers bassora — de ce qu’il a amassé confirme l’inutilité de repartir. c’est donc une fort mauvaise manie qui se répète ad nauseam : « mais me revint en l’âme [. . .] le désir [. . .] de me livrer au négoce [. . .] et d’accroître mes richesses » (ištāqat nafsī ilā al-tijāra [. . .] wa-ktisāb al-maʿāš, v2) ; « mais j’éprouvais bientôt le besoin [. . .] de reprendre une activité lucrative. j’étais en effet — tant il est vrai que “l’âme incite au mal” (coran xii/53) — poussé par un appétit insatiable du gain et l’espoir de réaliser des bénéfices substantiels » (wa-tašawwaqtu ilā al-matjar wa-l-kasb wa-l-fawāʾid wa-l-nafs ammāra bi-l-sūʾ, v3) ; « mais ma vilaine âme m’incita à [. . .] m’adonner à un commerce lucratif » (fa-ḥaddaṯatnī nafsī al-ḫabīṯa [. . .] wa-štaqtu ilā [. . .] al-bayʿ wa-l-maksib, v4) ; « [. . .] au comble de la joie d’avoir réuni tant de richesses, fait de si nombreux gains et profits. mais le démon du voyage me reprit » ([. . .] min šiddat farḥī bi-l-maksib wa-l-ribḥ wa-l-fawāʾid fa-ḥaddaṯatnī nafsī bi-l-safar, v5) ; « [. . .] je me surpris à rêver encore à de nouveaux voyages qui permettraient de commercer (fa-štāqat nafsī bi-l-safar wa-l-tijāra, v643). il est vrai au demeurant que la réprobation verbale proférée par sindbad (al-nafs al-ammāra bi-l-sūʾ ou nafsī al-ḫabīṯa) se prolonge dans ses actes possiblement criminels, alors même qu’il rapporte avoir tué, volé et menti pour accaparer : en attendant, je me constituais un véritable trésor avec les bijoux dont je dépouillais les cadavres. je les enveloppais dans leurs propres vêtements et les remontais avec moi. [. . .] [au capitaine qui l’a recueilli, il explique :] — je suis un marchand. je voyageais sur un grand navire qui s’est brisé et a coulé par le fond. toutes mes marchandises sont tombées à la mer. elles étaient faites de ces étoffes et de ces vêtements que tu peux voir autour de mes ballots. j’ai pu les placer sur une grande poutre arrachée à la coque du bateau [. . .]44. écoutons sindbad, le plus lucide sur le cercle vicieux dont il peine à se déprendre (au v4) : laʿana llāh nafsī iḏ ramānī al-ṭamʿ bi-hāḏihi al-mawta baʿdamā laqītu tilka al-šadāʾid wa-ḫalaṣtu minhā, iʿtabartu wa-mā qanaʿtu45 43. ici, c’est précisément en voyant passer « des négociants marqués par les fatigues du voyages » que son mal ressurgit. 44. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 417. 45. ms. cleveland, ḥikāya 4, fo 9 (nos soulignés). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 266 la malédiction de dieu soit sur ma convoitise. car c’est l’avidité qui m’a jeté dans cette mort, après avoir souffert de tant de calamités et m’en être délivré. j’ai fait des réflexions, et je ne me suis pas contenté46. pareilles pensées l’avaient déjà assailli (v2). elles le taraudent encore au dernier voyage rémunérateur (v6) : n’étais-je pas tranquille chez moi, dans un pays où je vivais heureux, jouissant de bien manger, bien boire et de me bien vêtir ? et je ne manquais de rien : argent et marchandise. qu’avais-je eu à quitter bagdad et à reprendre la mer [. . .]47 ? [. . .] je n’avais pourtant aucun besoin, ma fortune était telle que je n’aurais pu l’épuiser ou même arriver à en dépenser la moitié tout le restant de ma vie. j’en avais suffisance et plus encore48. au dernier voyage, il exprime sans ambages l’impérieuse nécessité du repentir et de l’abstinence dans une contrition de circonstance : tu mérites, continuais-je de me dire, tout ce qui t’arrive. c’est le décret prononcé contre toi par dieu, le très haut, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin tu te corriges de ton avidité au gain. car c’est bien de cela qu’il s’agit. je cours après la fortune alors que j’ai des biens considérables49. chacune des paires (v1 et v2, v3 et v4, v5 et v6) le voit blâmer sa compulsion cupide. pourquoi aspirer à toujours plus ? il lui faut un dénouement. épilogue : servir pour briser l’addiction si schéhérazade a guéri son roi et époux de la folie, ici c’est le roi de serendib qui enclenche la cure de sindbad : « il me confia une somptueuse offrande et une lettre pour le calife hârûn ar-rashîd, maître de bagdad50 ». son septième et ultime voyage serait une ambassade 51. le calife de bagdad l’y contraint — comment refuser ? —, obligé qu’il est lui-même de rendre le don au monarque 46. pétis de la croix, sindabad, 59 (nos soulignés). cette mention figure aussi chez galland. 47. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 371. 48. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 441. 49. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 455 (nos soulignés). 50. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 446. 51. la version a chez gerhardt, voyages, 22 pour son analyse du lien entre v6 et v7. des discordances existent, mais elles n’influencent pas ce qui suit. il n’est pas à exclure que nous soyons en présence d’un ajout, un genre de post scriptum qui signifie à l’auditoire que ces débordements sont terminés et que tout est définitivement rentré dans l’ordre moral. son statut diffère des couples v1-v2, v3-v4 et v5-v6. cela a amené les traducteurs à modifier leurs sources manuscrites : littmann « ajoute, à titre de variante importante, la version a pour la fin du vime et le viime voyage » (ibid., 23–24) ; lane « a également combiné les deux versions [. . .] le viime voyage de b est ajouté en note » (ibid., 25). bencheikh procède à une fusion analogue : ambassade califale (a) et monstres marin (b). 267 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 268 de serendib. deux variantes parallèles viennent clore six journées passées à raconter. la première le voit s’enrichir par la découverte d’un cimetière d’éléphants : la mort des pachydermes le couvre d’or52. la seconde53, plus élaborée54, le rejette sur une énième plage où il se ravitaille en fruits. il rallie ensuite une mystérieuse communauté de créatures lucifériennes, au sein de laquelle il passe de longues et prospères années, avant que sa femme ne le décide à regagner son irak natal. l’intervention d’un tiers — l’autorité politique — le sort de cette spirale vicieuse. en sa qualité d’émissaire, il ne voyage plus pour satisfaire sa névrose mais pour servir diplomatiquement deux monarques. il n’est donc plus seulement mû par l’intérêt personnel mais par la raison d’état. sous l’angle psychanalytique, nous dirions qu’il a dépassé l’instance du moi pour la coiffer d’un surmoi. l’enchaînement diabolique est rompu et la morale est sauve. cet explicit permet de rendre la totalité du récit acceptable. et pourtant . . . la « faim » justifie-t-elle les moyens ? quel a pu être l’accueil réservé à ce cycle ? quel « héros » est-ce là ? c’est un caractère. sindbad a menti. sindbad a volé. sindbad a tué — des coupables comme des innocents. jamais il ne se repent. jamais il n’est condamné. tout au plus promet-il de ne plus recommencer et . . . se parjure. il n’exprime aucun regret en narrant ses aventures à une élite citadine ? évoluant dans une trame qui s’apparente à l’adab, il y développe une fonction éducative, non pour transmettre un ethos mais en vue d’instruire sur le succès55. « réussir, se tirer d’affaire, aller plus loin »56. ne faudrait-il pas alors voir en lui une satire de ces parvenus capables de tout pour se hisser toujours plus haut57 ? dans ce cas, il incarnerait un anti-héros dissimulé sous les habits de la chance — sa bonne étoile ne le quitte pas — et de la malice. ce point demeure délicat. les belles-lettres moquent explicitement le vice, à l’instar des avares58, tandis que notre interprétation traque l’implicite tapi dans 52. de nouveau il s’en lit un écho plus moral chez al-tanūḫī, faraj, 4 : 174–76, # 424, « aʿāna al-fīl ʿalā qatl ṯuʿbān fa-kāfaʾūhu bi-mā aġnāhu » où c’est en récompense pour les avoir débarrassés d’un serpent que le protagoniste est conduit audit cimetière. 53. c’est notamment le texte traduit par bencheikh. 54. elle remploie et combine des narrèmes déjà employés : le radeau entraîné par un fleuve sous terre (v6), le mariage local (v4), ainsi qu’un serpent prédateur (v2 & v3). 55. « ce faisant, le conte suit la règle de la culture générale du temps, de l’adab [. . .] “instruisez-vous à l’image de sindbâd”, disait la calife. mais s’instruire de quoi ? [. . .] tout le comportement de sindbâd vise à nous présenter à travers lui, non pas un juste qui raisonne, mais un homme qui agit, mieux : un paragon de l’efficacité. » miquel, sept contes, 82–84. 56. miquel, sept contes, 85. 57. « it is that greed [for surplus wealth] that speeds sinbad on his voyages for, as he points out in introducing each of his tales, he undertakes his voyages not out of need but for the desire for adventure which is subsumed under and intimately related to the desire to buy and sell: the desire for profitable commercial ventures— greed » ; molan, « sinbad », 246. « but the story has become, “not a veritable glorification of navigation and maritime commerce,” but a critique of the disparity between ethics and action. for, the audience, including shahrazad’s king, is aware of the cost of sinbad’s success: the suppression of the merchant’s ethical sensibility in his pursuit of material gain » ; ibid., 247, à un bémol près : le cycle peut avoir précédé le conte cadre. 58. « they are featured in anecdotes and short stories, whose tone is often comique or grotesque » ; a. ghersetti, « avarice, in premodern literature », ei3. elles raillent tout autant le ṭufaylī pour son abus d’hospitalité, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 268 des conduites. sindbad n’est pas ridiculisé mais il partage avec les bukhalāʾ une pathologie accumulatrice assumée qui génère un comportement blâmable en le poussant à transgresser limite après limite. de plus, véritable tour de force littéraire — c’est une autobiographie —, il se confie sans remords. il livre le mobile, un irrépressible appétit de richesses, mais aucun des convives ne rit de lui ni ne le désavoue : bien au contraire, l’émerveillement domine59. son commensalhomonyme a le mot de la fin : ô sindbâd, ô terrien, considère ce qui m’est advenu, ce qui s’est passé, ce qui en a été de mon destin. certes, comme tu l’as dit dans tes vers, tu es pauvre et moi riche, mais à quel prix ! — que dieu te garde, répondit sindbâd le portefaix. ne me tiens pas rigueur de ce que j’ai pu penser injustement de toi60. cela interroge l’audience même. la réception fictive, pour ne pas dire factice, représentet-elle un contexte réaliste ? la morale conclusive fut-elle partagée par ceux qui entendirent la fin du cycle en d’autres époques ? furent-ils convaincus par ces paroles ? nous ne pouvons juger sur pièces. néanmoins, nous pensons avoir mis au jour un faisceau de propriétés narratives qui esquissent un horizon critique. c’est dans le silence qui retombe une fois la séance levée, après le ʿajab, que s’insinue le doute : la folle course des voyages ne reflète-t-elle pas les angoisses suscitées par les dangers que cèle l’argent, ce corrosif social omnipotent ? tout en lui ménageant un droit de réponse, une justification rhétorique, f. malti-douglas, « ṭufaylī », ei2. 59. ainsi réagit le ḥammāl : « . . . plongé qu’il était dans le plus grand étonnement » (wa-yataʿajjabu ġāyat al-ʿajab, v1) ; « [. . .] il songeait aux stupéfiants dangers » (wa-huwa yataʿajjabu mimmā qāsāhu, v2) ; « [. . .] encore sous le coup du récit » (wa-huwa mutaʿajjib mimmā samiʿahu, v3) ; non traduit (wa-huwa mutaʿajjib, v4) ; « émerveillé de ce qu’il venait d’entendre » (wa-huwa mutaʿajjib min ḏālika al-amr, v5). ainsi réagissent les autres invités : « . . . au grand émerveillement de ses amis » (taʿajjabū min ḏālika, v2) ; « [. . .] à l’assemblée émerveillée par ce qu’elle avait entendu » (wa-hum yataʿajjabūn min tilka al-ḥikāya, v3) ; « [. . .] la tête pleine des aventures — aussi étranges les unes que les autres — » (wa-hum mutaʿajjibūn ġāyat al-ʿajab, v4) ; « tous étaient au comble de l’émerveillement » (wa-hum mutaʿajjibūn min ḏālika ġāyat al-ʿajab, v6). 60. bencheikh, sindbâd de la mer, 466. 269 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 270 bibliographie manuscrits consultés bayerische staatsbibliothek : françois pétis de la croix (trad.), histoire arabe de sindbad le marin, ms. bsb-hss cod. gall. 799. bibliothèque nationale de france : mss ar 3615, 3645, 3646, 3647, 3648, 3649, 3667 et 5176. cleveland public library : françois pétis de la croix (trad.), histoire arabe de sindabad le marin (texte arabe, interligne en latin et traduction en français, avec index lexical), ms. w 385.3a-p445h. staatsbibliothek zu berlin : mss gotha orient. 2650, 2651, diez a oct. 185 (= 9181)] et we 1730 (= 9182). sources primaires alf layla wa-layla. beyrouth : dār ṣādir, 1999. alf layla wa-layla or the arabian nights entertainments, in the original arabic. édité par aḥmad b. muḥammad al-yamanī al-širwānī. calcutta : pereira, 1814 [= calcutta i]. alf layla wa-layla. édité par william hay macnaghten. calcutta : thacker and co, 1840 [= calcutta ii]. alf layla wa-layla. édité par saʿīd ʿalī l-ḫuṣūṣī. būlāq, 1280/1863. réimprimé : le caire : al-maṭbaʿa wa-l-maktaba al-saʿīdiyya, 1935. bencheikh, jamal eddine, et andré miquel, trad. les mille et une nuits. paris : gallimard, 2006. voir aussi : jamal eddine bencheikh, trad. les mille et une nuits iv. sindbâd de la mer et autres contes. paris : gallimard, 2001. langlès, louis, éd. et trad. les voyages de sind-bâd le marin et les ruses des femmes. paris : imprimerie royale, 1814. pétis de la croix, françois, trad. sindabad le marin. traduction inédite de 1701. édité par aboubakr chraïbi et ulrich marzolph. paris : espaces&signes, 2016. al-tanūḫī. kitāb al-faraj baʿda al-šidda. édité par ʿabbūd al-šāljī. beyrouth : dār ṣādir, 1987. littérature secondaire bellino, francesca. « another manuscript of pétis de la croix’s histoire arabe de sindabad le marin. a possible sub-family in the fluid transmission of the story ». quaderni di studi arabi, n.s., 12 (2017) : 103–32. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) dans le ventre de l’histoire : sindbad le marin • 270 ———. « i sette viaggi di sindbād il marinaio. un romanzo arabo nelle mille e una notte ». dans paradossi delle notti. dieci studi su le mille e una notte, édité par leonardo capezzone et elisabetta benigni, 101–29. pise : fabrizio serra editore, 2015. ———. « i viaggi di sindbād tra oriente e occidente, medioevo et modernità. materiali inediti e nuove prospettive di ricerca ». (éds), linee storiografiche e nuove prospettive di ricerca. xi colloquio internazionale medioevo romanzo e orientale, édité par francesca bellino, eliana creazzo et antonio pioletti, 141–67. soveria mannelli : rubbettino editore, 2019. braida, emanuela. « christian arabic and garšūnī versions of sindbad the sailor. an overview ». polish journal of the arts and culture, n.s., 3, no 1 (2016) : 7–28. canard, marius. « les aventures d’un prisonnier arabe et d’un patrice byzantin à l’époque des guerres bulgaro-byzantines ». dumbarton oaks papers 9/10 (1956) : 49–72. casanova, paul. « notes sur les voyages de sindbâd le marin ». bulletin de l’institut français d’archéologie orientale 20 (1920) : 113–99. collectif. « sindbâd the seaman and sindbâd the landman, 179 (burton from the calcutta ii edition) ». dans the arabian nights encyclopedia, édité par ulrich marzolph et richard van leeuwen, 383–89. santa barbara, ca : abc-clio, 2004. goeje, michael jan de. « de reizen van sindebaad ». de gids 53 (1889) : 278–312. garcin, jean-claude. « le passage des anciennes à de nouvelles mille et une nuits au xve siècle ». médiévales 64 (2013) : 74–90. ———. pour une lecture historique des mille et une nuits. essai sur l’édition de būlāq (1835). arles : actes sud, 2013. gerhardt, mia irene. the art of story-telling. a literary study of the thousand and one nights. leyde : brill, 1963. ———. les voyages de sindbad le marin. utrecht : kemink en zoon, 1957. ghersetti, antonella. « avarice, in premodern literature ». ei3. greimas, algirdas julien. sémantique structurale. paris : larousse, 1966. guillaume, jean-patrick. « sindbād al-ḥakīm ». ei2. kilito, abdelfattah. l’œil et l’aiguille. essais sur les mille et une nuits. paris : la découverte, 1992. malti-douglas, fedwa. « ṭufaylī ». ei2. marzolph, ulrich. « an early persian precursor to the tales of sindbād the seafaring merchant ». zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 167, no 1 (2017) : 127–41. 271 • sébastien garnier al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ———. « sindbād ». ei2 . miquel, andré. sept contes des mille et une nuits ou il n’y a pas de conte innocent. paris : sindbad, 1981. molan, peter d. « sinbad the sailor. a commentary on the ethics of violence ». journal of the american oriental society 98, no 3 (1978) : 237–47. réimprimé dans the arabian nights reader, édité par ulrich marzolph, 327–46. détroit : wayne state university press, 2006. özkan, hakan. narrativität im kitāb al-faraǧ baʿda š-šidda des abū ʿ alī al-muḥassin at-tanūḫī. eine literaturwissenschaftliche studie abbasidischer prosa. berlin : klaus schwarz, 2008. picot, jean-pierre. « dynamique et répétitivité dans les mille et une nuits ou les sept voyages de sindbad le marin ont-ils un “sens” ? ». littératures 23 (1990) : 33–46. pomerantz, maurice a. « tales from the crypt. on some uncharted voyages of sindbad the sailor ». narrative culture 2, no 2 (2015) : 250–69. van gelder, geert jan. « banquet ». ei3. ———. « to eat or not to eat elephant. a travelling story in arabic and persian literature ». bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 66, no 3 (2003) : 419–30. wensinck, arent jan, et joseph sadan. « khamr ». ei2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 366-368 book review this book collects information on the rings found in or originating from the iberian peninsula that are linked to the three religious communities (jewish, christian, and muslim) that lived there from 711 to 1611. this was, of course, the period of islamic presence in the iberian peninsula down to the expulsion of the moriscos. following the study (pp. 1–92), the catalog (pp. 93–320)—which features data about where and how the rings were found, their present locations, their material features, their epigraphy (if any), and the relevant academic literature, a l o n g w i t h i m a g e s — i s d i v i d e d i n t o three main sections. these are devoted, respectively, to rings found in islamic, jewish, and christian contexts. the rings listed are made overwhelmingly of silver with a few of gold, which raises a number of questions that the author discusses (p. 51): were there no gold rings? were gold rings reused, and would such reuse explain their disappearance? did the gold rings preserved belong to women or to jews, given that muslim men were forbidden to use them? rings made of other materials (black jet, glass, ivory, or bone) are dealt with in the following sections. the catalog ends with sections on other circular objects that were not used as rings, anomalous cases, a group of basque-navarrese rings that present peculiar features, and cases on which there is incomplete information. one index lists the rings’ places of origin and another the places where they are now preserved. the author is ana labarta, professor of arabic and i s lam ic s t u d ies at t he university of valencia and a scholar known for her research on subjects as varied as astrology, magic, chancery letters, seals, arabic place-names, food, ana labarta (with carmen barceló). anillos de la península ibérica, 711–1611 (valencia: editorial angeles carrillo baeza, 2017), 324 pp. isbn 978-849464-375-0. price: €85.00 (cloth). maribel fierro consejo superior de investigaciones científicas (madrid, spain) (maribel.fierro@cchs.csic.es) © 2021 maribel fierro. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:maribel.fierro%40cchs.csic.es?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 367 • maribel fierro and clothing. together with carmen barceló (her collaborator in this book), she has also worked on the arabic poetry written in the iberian peninsula during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on the arabic texts produced by the muslim minority in valencia from 1401 to 1608. the two s c h o l a r s h a v e p r o d u c e d f a s c i n a t i n g books on these topics,1 all of which were published, like the bulk of labarta’s solo research, in spanish. this means that the books’ circulation has not matched their scholarly importance. labarta’s interest in rings started in 2013, when she was asked to read the a r a b i c e p i g r a p h y i n s c r i b e d o n e i g h t carnelians, some held in rings, found in graves from caliphal cordoba. to gain a broader perspective, she looked for previous studies on rings and found that rings have seldom been included in studies devoted to metals. indeed, the extant bibliography was scarce, scattered, and fragmentary. this monograph, therefore, i s a m o s t w e l c o m e a d d i t i o n t o o u r knowledge of the material culture of the three religious communities that lived in the iberian peninsula. labarta begins her study by reviewing what we know about the pre-islamic situation, paying attention to roman and visigothic rings. i learned from this section that there is no evidence for the presence of people who dressed in visigothic style— and used visigothic rings—in the southern regions of the iberian peninsula (the betica). the islamic conquest introduced noticeable formal and other changes 1. carmen barceló torres and ana labarta, cancionero morisco: poesía árabe de los siglos xv y xvi (valencia: editorial angeles carrillo baeza, 2016); carmen barceló torres and ana labarta, archivos moriscos: textos árabes de la minoría islámica valenciana 1401–1608 (barcelona: publicacions de la universitat de valència, 2009). (p. 53). the earliest dated rings are all made of silver and are inscribed with arabic legends in negative, which indicates their use as seals (p. 54). the almohad period appears also to have prompted changes (p. 55). the medieval religious, legal, and cultural norms related to the use of rings—whatever such norms there were— are dealt with in an illuminating section that highlights the mālikī dislike of men’s using gold or iron rings; as mentioned, this prohibition is to be related to the almost complete prevalence of silver rings found in islamic contexts (p. 51). a few rings have even been recovered from muslim graves. for example, a muslim woman buried in caliphal cordoba had two rings with gemstones on her hands and another gem in her mouth, all of them inscribed with the complete islamic profession of faith. such cases, as noted by labarta, are exceptional, and we have to date no explanation for them, given the general islamic insistence on burying the dead without any grave g o o d s . e s p e c i a l l y t h o u g h t p r o v o k i n g are rings found in burials that seem to challenge religious boundaries, such as one in which the corpse had a ring with a cross in one hand and in the other a ring with the arabic inscription “there is no god but god.” equally interesting is the fact that rings associated with jewish contexts are dated between 1350 and 1492, which suggests that before 1350 the rings used by jews were indistinguishable from others (p. 32). the inscriptions in arabic used in the early islamic period include the quranic expression ḥasbī allāh (“god is enough al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) ana labarta’s anillos de la península ibérica • 368 f o r m e ” ) , p r e s e n t o n r i n g s f o u n d i n funerary contexts. the same formula reappears later, in almoravid times, but on coins.2 sometimes the inscriptions also include names, information that enriches our knowledge of iberian onomastics; one of the fascinating contributions of labarta’s study concerns a ring found in ecija on which a member of the berber banū tājīt—well attested in chronicles— is mentioned (p. 125). labarta also pays attention to the moulds used for casting the rings, some of which have appeared in archaeological excavations, and to f o r g e r i e s . a u s e f u l a p p e n d i x o n t h e inscriptions used, according to literary sources, by andalusi rulers and others on their seals is also included. l a b a r t a s o u n d s c a u t i o n a r y n o t e s r e g a r d i n g t h e i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f t h e materials she has collected, such as the (in fact extremely limited) extent to which modern north african jewellery continues andalusi practices (p. 58). she is also not shy in stating the limits of her knowledge as regards, for example, the reasons for the choice of certain gemstones (p. 61). 2. miguel vega martín and salvador peña martín, “allah hasbi, lema coránico (ix:129) en una moneda meriní hallada en granada,” miscelánea de estudios arabes y hebraicos: sección arabe-islam 51 (2002): 327–38. labarta’s study is concise but rich in insights and also in questions for which there are no easy answers. it also includes much more than just her research on rings. when dealing with the issue of how to explain the presence of objects in muslim graves, she points out that we similarly have no explanation for the presence of corpses buried in non-islamic bodily positions in muslim cemeteries (p. 31). one can only hope that this comment is a signal that she may be considering preparing a monograph on islamic burial practices in the iberian peninsula. al-andalus is a region of the islamic world for which we have studies on a considerable variety of topics, but there are still lacunae that need to be filled through the type of rigorous and innovative scholarship at which labarta excels and that allows for wellgrounded and significant advances in our understanding of the religious and cultural l a n d s c a p e o f m e d i e v a l i b e r i a . w h e n reading any study by labarta, one can be sure that most of what one encounters is new evidence, something that is often as rare as medieval iberian gold rings. mem awards al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): iv-ix first and foremost, let me say how much i appreciate the honor that middle east medievalists, its members and officers, are doing me in giving me this award. i’m very happy to be a link in a chain that includes scholars of the caliber of wadad al-qadi, fred donner, and maribel fierro, to name just a few of my predecessors. you asked me to speak for half an hour about two things in acknowledgment of the award: my career and the discipline in general. as to the discipline in general, i contributed my two cents of doom and gloom at a recent mesa panel organized by antoine borrut,1 and i do not want to get everyone depressed again— even though my remarks on that occasion included a cent of optimism. so what i will do is talk mainly about my career, and just come back briefly to the discipline at 1. “the future of the field: ‘premodern’ islam at the crossroads,” mesa panel held on october 5, 2020, featuring also profs. matthew s. gordon, stephennie mulder, adam a. sabra, and a. holly shissler. the end. the main interest of my career from the point of view of readers today is probably that it took shape under conditions very different from what we are now familiar with. o n e t h i n g i r e a l l y l i k e a b o u t o u r field is that if you ask people the simple question “how on earth did you get into this field?” you get so many different and often colorful answers. so here is mine. it begins with me about seven years old on a hill a few miles north of izmir. think of olive trees, vines, and some tents; this is an archaeological excavation led by my father and ekrem bey. ekrem bey— ekrem akurgal—was a good kemalist, but like many of his generation he kept his notebooks in the arabic script. this piqued my childish curiosity, and i asked him to write out the arabic alphabet, which he remarks by the recipient of the 2020 mem lifetime achievement award given at the annual meeting of middle east medievalists (online, 18 october 2020) michael cook princeton university (mcook@princeton.edu) © 2021 michael cook. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. https://mesana.org/mymesa/meeting_program_session.php?sid=4ced21cbf34b0b34d05c737aaaf42207 mailto:mcook%40princeton.edu?subject= v • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) did. i think i learnt the first two letters before i got bored and ran off to play (since then my work discipline has improved somewhat). i did not get around to learning the rest of the alphabet till i was nineteen and we were living in bristol. this city had an old and well-stocked municipal library, in which i found and borrowed a copy of cowan’s textbook an introduction to modern literary arabic. at that point i went down with mild pneumonia—it was a cold, wet, english winter—and i was feverish as i read through the first pages of the book, with the result that the arabic words i learnt then are still suffused with a touch of delirium. once i recovered i made more rapid progress, but there was one problem: the book could not tell me what the language actually sounded like. my solution was to acquire an enormous radio that was powerful enough to tune into radio cairo, though not very reliably. the book and the radio at least got me started. later my teachers at cambridge warned me that if you persist in trying to learn arabic, the first fifteen years are the worst. looking back on it several decades later, i am inclined to see that as british understatement. but in telling the story of how i learnt t h e a r a b i c a l p h a b e t , i h a v e s k i p p e d over something that matters for the d e v e l o p m e n t o f m y c a r e e r . b e t w e e n l e a r n i n g t h e f i r s t t w o l e t t e r s a n d completing my knowledge of the alphabet i had made a rational choice—one of two i have made in the course of my academic career. by way of background, at the age of sixteen i was going to be a physicist, and it is still part of my self-image to believe that i could have made it as a fifth-rate physicist. in england in those days you had to specialize at a very early stage, and i had embarked on a track that focused on physics and math. soon after i had a truly formative conversation with my math teacher, mr. unwin. he told me that as a mathematician i was all right, but nothing special. this was the most valuable piece of career advice i have ever been given, and the next day i switched to a track with a focus on history and english literature. i was not much good at the english literature, but i was some good at the history component. now comes the rational choice. somehow i figured out that if you brought an average talent to bear on mainstream history, you faced a lot of competition in an overpopulated field. (perhaps i should explain that in those days mainstream history meant english and western european history, with the celtic fringe and the non-western world evenhandedly excluded.) by contrast, i was thinking, if you were to learn a language or two and shift to the non-western world, you would find yourself in a much less crowded part of the western academy, with much more fresh ground to break. in retrospect i think i got that right, and it has been the foundation of my career. h e r e , t h e n , i s h o w i e x e c u t e d m y rational choice. i went up to cambridge and first spent two years reading history, learning how state-of-the-art history was done. the highlights of those years were two people at whose feet i sat, moses finley and michael postan. in politics they were chalk and cheese, but they were both inspiringly intelligent lecturers. then i went on to two years of oriental studies, studying turkish and persian and some arabic on the side. that was when i met professor arberry. he liked to see every student who was about to embark on oriental studies in the middle eastern al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) remarks by the recipient of the 2020 mem lifetime achievement award • vi field for a few minutes, but it tended to be a slightly awkward occasion because he did not have very much to say to the student. fortunately i had been learning persian grammar from an old copy of sir william jones’s little book a grammar of the persian language, and i was stuck on a sentence that i could not make syntactic sense of. so i pulled out the book and asked him about it. he took one look and immediately diagnosed the problem: the preposition bar had dropped out at the beginning of the sentence. i think he was tickled by the fact that a member of a barbarous generation such as mine should be learning persian from an eighteenthcentury textbook, making this a fleeting moment of warmth and contact. it also taught me a philological lesson: try your hardest to make sense of the text in front of you, but do not forget the possibility that it may not in fact make sense. i applied that lesson a year or so later when reading ḥāfiẓ and coming to the half-verse zinda rūd-u bāgh kārān yād bād, “let’s remember the zinda rūd and the bāgh kārān.” the zinda rūd is, of course, the river of isfahan, but what are bāgh kārān? the english translators and the bosnian commentator sūdī said it meant “gardeners,” but the persian for “gardener” is bāghbān, not bāghkār. now, as it happened, in another of our courses we were reading rāwandī’s rāḥat al-ṣudūr, and there we came upon an account of a garden in isfahan called the bāgh-i kārān. so that was what ḥāfiẓ was talking about. no doubt some iranian scholar had pointed this out long before, but the experience of solving the problem gave me a bit of a high, and the hope that if i tried hard enough i could maybe be some good in the field i was entering. again, i was fortunate in my teachers. there was dr. hopkins (the father of simon hopkins), who took a real interest in his students in very practical ways—he looked at the abominable imitation of print in which we wrote arabic and pushed us to learn ruqʿa. and there was turhan gendjei, my teacher of turkish, to whom i owed my awareness of sūdī. he was a fine scholar, though he did not publish much. he never prepared the texts we read, and for the most part he did not need to. but it was the moments when he was puzzled that were the most valuable learning experience for me: we would be sitting in his study with his books on the shelves around us, and he would reach for the work of reference or the parallel passage that would solve the problem. that taught me a lot about what to do when you are stumped. college is also about the people you meet in your own age group. someone who made a big difference to my career was roy mottahedeh, who was in cambridge on a fellowship. i remember puzzling with him about a word spelled b-m-b in a persian text of the early twentieth century. today a beginner would have no trouble seeing in it the loan-word “bomb,” but in those days you did not expect to see such things in the language of ḥāfiẓ and rāwandī. roy was to play a big part in getting me to princeton, but that comes later—first comes my time at the school of oriental and african studies. i b e g a n m y y e a r s a t s o a s a s a postgraduate student doing research under bernard lewis. this was economic history based on the ottoman fiscal surveys of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. i was supposed to be writing a dissertation, but i never actually submitted it—which was not smart, but i got away with it, publishing my work as a book. lewis then gave me vii • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a lectureship in economic history, but by then i was more interested in other things, so that i never really did much more economic history (apart from a rather juvenile chapter for the second edition of the legacy of islam2). i am not sure that was smart, either, but again i got away with it; nobody seemed to be very concerned to check up on what i was doing. i mention these things because they show you how lucky i was, not just in getting away with it, but also in having a decade in which i could cast around and experiment. for example, i wrote a book about islam and the nation. i never published it, but this period of my life was fundamental in my formation. two people were really important to my development in that period. one was albert hourani at oxford. he was genuinely interested in young scholars and their careers, and kept an eye on mine. once when he went on leave he asked me to stand in for him and give a course of undergraduate lectures on early islamic history. that was a subject i knew precious little about when i started, but by the end i was beginning to know my way around. the other person was patricia crone, with whom i did the only collaborative work i have done in my career. it is not that i think we were right in much of what we said, but it got me thinking creatively about a lot of things i have worked on ever since. the final vignette of life at soas i want to give you is the découverte. it was colin heywood who instituted this. he has always been fascinated by wittek; unlike me, he had met him. in belgium in the 2. michael cook, “economic developments,” in the legacy of islam, 2nd ed., ed. joseph schacht with c. e. bosworth, 210–43 (oxford: clarendon, 1974). 1930s wittek and lemerle had apparently established the principle of the découverte quotidienne: every day you had to make some discovery and submit it to your colleagues. in reviving this tradition we quickly decided that quotidienne was for gods and heroes, and met once a week instead. a group of us would gather over a bottle of wine after the administration had gone home and the building had gone quiet, and we would discuss some little discovery one of us had made. colleagues like robert irwin, sandy morton, and david morgan would be there. it was a little oasis of calm and camaraderie during mrs. thatcher’s onslaught on britain’s universities. inspiring as the découverte was, this was a good time to think of emigrating. that brings me to my time at princeton. thanks to abraham udovitch and roy mottahedeh, i spent a spring semester at princeton on approval, and a couple of years later, again thanks to them, i got an offer. accepting it was the second rational choice of my career, but this time i did not need to do any figuring out. altogether, the last thirty-four years have made a fantastic difference to my career. one aspect of this has been the scale of the available resources. it was my first day on the job when my chair told me that the department had a fund that needed to be spent by a certain date; could i think of a way to spend it? that was the first time i had ever heard anyone ask such a question. the change extended to my salary: from the start i was paid about twice my british salary. with spending habits shaped in mrs. thatcher’s britain, i have never quite al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) remarks by the recipient of the 2020 mem lifetime achievement award • viii adapted to this. at the same time i had the good luck to find myself in a department that was very supportive of my scholarship a n d s h e l t e r e d m e f r o m m u c h o f t h e waste of time and energy that goes into america’s culture wars. i also had the good fortune to meet my wife, kim hegelbach, without whose reassuring presence in my life i would have been far less productive over these decades. but in academic terms the biggest change has been my role as a dissertation adviser. during my time at soas i had never once had a phd advisee; since then i have had about as many as i have spent years at princeton, roughly one phd dissertation a year, not to mention other dissertations i have played a lesser role in. most of the ones i have advised have been outside my comfort zone as a researcher. for example, the very first was about the fifteenth-century dream diary of a failed sufi, and sufism is definitely not my thing. but it was very interesting. if you think about it, everybody in the field goes on and on about successful sufis, but here was a chance to see what you had to do to fail as a sufi. i tried to get my student to put “failed sufi” in the title of the book that came out of the dissertation, but he would not hear of it. r i g h t n o w i t h i n k i h a v e f i v e dissertations still in the oven. one is about what people got out of the turāth in the twentieth-century muslim world— or maybe just egypt, since dissertations have a way of narrowing their focus. one is about tracing linkages through women in late jāhilī and early islamic society, going behind the patriarchal façade of the genealogists. one is about the mongols and their client states in southern iran, a basic point being that the garmsīr is so arid it is hard to cross, particularly for a mongol army with all its horses and sheep. one is about state formation in the early modern yemen: you have the zaydī imamate tradition, and you have the ottomans gatecrashing the yemen till they are kicked out, so what was the ottoman legacy in governance to the post-ottoman zaydī imamate? and one is about the law of sabb—what is to be done when dhimmīs vilify the prophet. here the drama lies in the evolution that takes place within the ḥanafī law school, and incidentally it dramatizes how spurious the pakistani blasphemy law is in ḥanafī terms. so i guess the total number of dissertations i have advised could reach forty before i am done, a good islamic number. they are obviously all very diverse, but there is one thing i can say about them in general. it seems my advisees genuinely believe i have been doing them a big favor, or at least the ones who have submitted their dissertations so far have said so in their prefaces. i have no objection to this, and it is absolutely fine by me if they actually think that way. but the real truth is that they have been doing me a big favor: these dissertations are my continuing education program, and the older i get the more i need it. the other thing i will say about them is that they have brought something significant home to me—it is a point i m a d e a t t h a t m e s a p a n e l a l r e a d y mentioned. we are in a field where there is still an abundance of new ground to break. at that panel i used the case of dynastic monographs as an example; the genre is an old one, going back at least to wellhausen’s arab kingdom, yet there are many perfectly decent dynasties in bosworth’s handbook that have yet to receive monographic study. but here let me take the example of ix • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the study of the qurʾān. if anything in our field was saturated with modern scholarly studies, this topic would be it. indeed, for a long time i thought the study of the qurʾān was saturated, and i would tend to steer students away from it. but the fact is that some of my former advisees— and not just my former advisees—have done dramatically new work in that field, making really impressive breakthroughs and showing how completely wrong i was in my expectations. so i guess one way to see this award is as encouragement to obsolesce gracefully. my contacts with scholars in the early years of their careers have not, of course, b e e n l i m i t e d t o p r i n c e t o n g r a d u a t e students. in particular, i have been lucky enough to find myself in receipt of funds that i was able to use to bring bright young scholars together in long-term seminars in which a central feature has been the exchange of feedback on their current work. one of these ventures was the holberg seminar, and the other, beginning last year, is the balzan seminar.3 both have helped me, as well as the colleagues who 3. on the holberg seminar, see the special dossier published last year in this journal: “islamic history broadly conceived: a tribute to michael cook and the holberg seminar,” guest-edited by sébastien garnier, matthew l. keegan, and pamela klasova, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020). a brief presentation of the balzan seminar, which focuses on the formation, maintenance, and failure of states in the muslim world before 1800, can be found here: https://www.balzan.org/en/prizewinners/michael-cook/research-project-cook. generously participated in them, keep in touch with new and exciting scholarship in the field and play some part in shaping it. these seminars are yet another contribution to my continuing education program. with all this i have not left myself much time to cover the discipline in general, and as i said at the beginning i do not want to get back into the doom and g l o o m . b u t w h a t i s a i d a b o v e a b o u t the new ground that is there for the b r e a k i n g i s o n e b i g p o i n t t h a t a n optimist could focus on. we are fortunate not to be in a field so saturated that the only way to make a splash is to be either utterly brilliant or utterly silly. so let me end by expressing the hope that we will get a continuing opportunity to break all this new ground. as a link in the chain of recipients of this award, i would like to think that that i will have successors as distinguished as my predecessors, and that in the future it will still be possible for scholars to have the luxury of spending a lifetime in this field, as i have been privileged to do. https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alusur/issue/view/770 https://www.balzan.org/en/prizewinners/michael-cook/research-project-cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 374-378 book review as wendy shaw states in her intro-duction, what is “islamic” art? b e t w e e n r e l i g i o n a n d p e r c e p tion aims to provide readers with a new episteme to approach the field of islamic art. shaw hopes, she writes, to move the conversation from the production of islamic art to its reception, emphasizing commonalities across time and space. above all, what is “islamic” art?, recipient of the 2020 albert hourani book award honorable mention from mesa and the 28 th iran’s world book award, advocates for a philosophy that understands islamic art as experiential and interactional, something she finds lacking in current scholarship. shaw’s book has enjoyed a mixed reception thus far, perhaps unsurprisingly, given its ambitious title. readers should approach this book with the understanding that it does not offer an answer to the question “what is islamic art?” rather, shaw interrogates the question itself, and the title should b e u n d e r s t o o d a s c h a l l e n g i n g t h e boundaries of the discipline, encouraging her audience to think about whether the western-defined field of art history is an appropriate model for conceiving of non-western cultural production. her working title, fortress of form, robber of consciousness (p. 221), far better encompasses the book, and one is curious as to what considerations in the publishing process led to the title under which the book ended up being distributed. although shaw’s book does challenge what constitutes the field of islamic art and, interestingly, pushes scholars away from visual understandings toward aural and performative ones, the book does not review historiographical debates about islamic art, nor does it provide the type of wendy m. k. shaw. what is “islamic” art? between religion and perception (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019), xix + 366 pp. isbn 978-11-0847-465-8. price: $28.85 (cloth). sarah slingluff university of edinburgh (s.e.slingluff@sms.ed.ac.uk) © 2021 sarah slingluff. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:s.e.slingluff%40sms.ed.ac.uk?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 375 • sarah slingluff analysis that its clear comparand, shahab ahmed’s what is islam?, does. reading i t w i t h t h i s u n d e r s t a n d i n g , o n e c a n appreciate the novel arguments shaw has to offer. what is “islamic” art? eschews the geographical and temporal organization that typically dominates introductory books in the field, and for that it deserves commendation.1 instead of centering a particular place and time, shaw chooses a structure that focuses on how the individual receives “art,” then moves outward in considering reflections of the self before looking at how poets, philosophers, and makers conceived of “the image.” shaw begins with a discussion of “the islamic image” (chapter 1) and then transitions from visual perception to audial reception in chapter 2, “seeing with the ear.” chapters 3 (“the insufficient image”) and 4 (“seeing with the heart”) emphasize the importance of understanding the role of the divine in artistic production, arguing that islamic art cannot be understood outside of an inspired tradition. at this point, shaw moves the discussion away from the individual to a more relational approach, looking at the whats, hows, and whys of artists and their production. chapters 5 through 8 explore the various webs and networks of makers, looking at what those who create are interacting with, how artists and patrons express their works in a variety of forms, and why art in islamic traditions manifests 1. for a summary of historiographical approaches to survey texts of islamic art, see sheila blair and jonathan bloom, “the mirage of islamic art: reflections on the study of an unwieldy field,” art bulletin 85, no. 1 (2003): 152–184. 2. see shahab ahmed, what is islam? the importance of being islamic (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016); christiane j. gruber, ed., the image debate: figural representation in islam and across the world (london: gingko, 2019); eadem, the praiseworthy one: the prophet muhammad in islamic texts and images (bloomington: indiana university press, 2018). in different genres. the book ends with discussions on geometry and perspective, which seem not to fit the flow of the narrative; instead, they read as addenda of issues not covered elsewhere. at times it is unclear why a particular topic follows another, an aspect that is particularly e v i d e n t i n t h e l a c k o f t r a n s i t i o n between “seeing through the mirror” (chapter 5) and “deceiving deception” (chapter 6). on a macro level, this feature could be challenging for beginning scholars attempting to understand the field that shaw intends to introduce. one is left with the feeling that this work could just as well have been published as a series of articles or, alternatively, as a much longer book that fully engages with all the issues upon which it touches. shaw’s strongest chapter is her first, in which she joins a chorus of scholars, most recently shahab ahmed and christiane gruber, in attempting to debunk myths about the prohibition of figural imagery in islamic art.2 although many of her arguments are not novel, this concise look at the subject benefits from her unique voice. one’s view of shaw’s writing style, with its abundant opinions and generalizations mixed with academic jargon, is a matter of preference. her writing is often polarizing—frustrating for those who find it too casual or opinionated, energizing for those who appreciate her passion—and readers may grapple with both reactions while reading her work. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) wendy m. k. shaw’s what is “islamic” art? • 376 y e t f o r i s l a m i c a r t h i s t o r i a n s , h e r willingness to be candid and clear about the supposed prohibition of figural image in islamic art is welcome. chapter 1 is masterful and should be required reading for every introduction to art history c o u r s e , a n d p e r h a p s f o r a n y c o u r s e that touches on islamic culture. shaw’s exasperation at the unending repetition of such an easily refutable myth echoes that felt by anyone who has had to teach and continuously explain its erroneousness—to both students and the general public—and her willingness to express these sentiments openly and forcefully in an academic text is long overdue. though the chapter runs through the early history of islam and the development of the quran, hadith, and sunni schools of jurisprudence at a breakneck pace that might leave those new to islamic studies feeling overwhelmed, the overall arc of the chapter is well conceived and delivered. for those for whom the history moves too fast, the appropriate r e f e r e n c e s a r e a v a i l a b l e f o r f u r t h e r investigation and study. for specialists, the coherent weaving together of seminal works on imagery in islam is unmatched in current scholarship. finally, shaw’s discussion of the ways in which twentiethcentury popular culture contributed to a modern understanding of an aniconic islam is new and well argued. another novel contribution to the field is shaw’s focus on the role that poetry has played and continues to play in “express[ing] cultural roles for perception” of islamic art (p. 25). as a result, poetry and the arts of the book form the core source base for her argument. what is 3. lawrence nees, review of what is “islamic” art? between religion and perception, by wendy shaw, choice: current reviews for academic libraries 57, no. 10 (2020): 1081. “islamic” art? elucidates philosophies in islamic poetry to explicate a theory of perceptual culture in islamic art. this is a major shift in considering islamic art as both a field and a corpus, a choice perhaps driven by shaw’s aim to integrate poetry as the progenitor of the illustrated manuscript tradition more fully into the study of islamic art as well as by her stated goal of demonstrating the ubiquity of figural imagery in the arts of islam. however, the choice to exclude other forms of islamic art, including architecture, metalwork, ivories, and ceramics, from a book titled what is “islamic” art? implies that readers have a working knowledge of the field prior to engaging with this work. in short, shaw assumes her readers know that up until this point, islamic art has not been defined the way she chooses to do in this book. as lawrence nees has pointed out, the book’s source base is surprisingly limited to the “persianate” world. 3 with the exception of one picture of the sasanian taq-e-bustan and illustrations on her discussion of geometry in chapter 8, all illustrations date to after the thirteenth century, and the majority were produced within the “balkans-to-bengal complex” as defined by ahmed. coverage of many areas, including north africa and southeast asia, is almost nonexistent. as a result, many scholars of islamic art can read the book without ever recognizing themselves or their area of research in its pages. there is a pronounced lack of images for an art-historical text, and despite the discussions of islamic art as object, only the forms of painting and carved stucco al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 377 • sarah slingluff appear in the work. of course, to some extent this is shaw’s point: that islamic art need not be defined by what we see with our eyes, and that there is far more to consider in terms of experiencing art than just what we process visually. s h a w ’ s l e a s t s u c c e s s f u l c h a p t e r s a r e t h o s e i n w h i c h s h e a t t e m p t s t o generalize about islamic art history and its development in relation to the late a n t i q u e a n d e a r l y m e d i e v a l p e r i o d s (chapters 4, “seeing with the heart,” and 10, “perspectives on perspective”). it is clear that this is not her area of expertise, and her depiction of post– nicene creed (325 ce) christianity as a monolith does to christianity what she argues we must not do to islam: paints it as an unnuanced, singular faith (p. 106). this is the greatest fault of the book: shaw’s unfamiliarity with late antique culture leads her to see differences as “christian”/”christianate”/”western” versus “islamic,” and while she convincingly argues that this dynamic began in the late middle ages with “renaissance” and “enlightenment” thought and was later entrenched in european hegemony and colonization, this binary simply does not work as a framework for the late 4. it is also of some concern that shaw never explains why she accepts ahmed’s definition of “christianate” but rejects the use of “islamicate,” referring the reader only to ahmed’s work in a footnote. this sets up a strange tension between christianate vs. islamic art, which is never fully explained. though many scholars have discussed the problems with projecting nineteenthand twentieth-century cultural dynamics onto the medieval period, perhaps the most succinct discussion of works in the field of ottoman studies, and thus the balkans-to-bengal complex, can be found in alan mikhail and christine m philliou, “the ottoman empire and the imperial turn,” comparative studies in society and history 54, no. 4 (2012): 721–45. 5. for further reading on challenging approaches to medieval art, see miriam schild bunim, space in medieval painting and the forerunners of perspective (new york: columbia university press, 1940) and meg boulton, “‘the end of the world as we know it’: the eschatology of symbolic space/s in insular art,” in making histories: proceedings of the sixth international insular arts conference, ed. jane hawkes, 279–90 (donington: shaun tyas, 2013). 6. for similar essentializing assertions about the perspectival nature of christian art, see pp. 300, 301, 305, 306, 319, and 321. antique and early medieval periods. 4 s h a w ’ s u n f a m i l i a r i t y w i t h t h i s t i m e period and the scholarship on it reveals a lack of understanding of methods in and approaches to premodern “art.”5 in chapter 10, she repeatedly states that christian art lacks a “multi-centered mode of viewing the world,” seemingly unaware that for the first one thousand years of “christian” a r t , m a k e r s d e p i c t e d e x p r e s s i o n s o f space from “an infinite network of focal points” in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional pieces (pp. 314, 325).6 this seems a missed opportunity; readers wait for a discussion that never comes on how theoretical approaches tied to pre-perspectival theories of medieval art might be useful in the study of islamic cultural perception. similarly, the discussion in her longest c h a p t e r , “ t h e t r a n s g r e s s i v e i m a g e ” (chapter 7), inhabits this christian vs. islamic dynamic that she criticizes in her assessments of early scholars in the fields of art history and islamic art, particularly alois riegl, erwin panofsky, ernst kühnel, oleg grabar, and owen jones. in this chapter, shaw regularly juxtaposes islam and christianity, forcing comparisons that may not be appropriate. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) wendy m. k. shaw’s what is “islamic” art? • 378 the crux of this chapter revolves around islamic artistic renderings of the story of joseph, zuleikha, and potiphar, dominant in the poetic and artistic corpus of islam, and their comparison with christian depictions of the same story. although one sees why she chose this story as representative for islam, the potiphar story has relatively l i t t l e i m p o r t a n c e i n t h e c h r i s t i a n tradition and as such provides a poor example from which to make sweeping g e n e r a l i z a t i o n s a b o u t c h r i s t i a n a r t . one wonders why the comparison to christian art is necessary, given the strength of her argument concerning the indivisibility of painting and poetry evinced in her chosen exemplar. ultimately, a tension between defining and interrogating the field of islamic a r t p e r s i s t s t h r o u g h o u t t h e b o o k . t h e a t t e m p t t o e x p l a i n t h e f i e l d t o a novice audience, coupled with the deep theoretical discussions that could only make sense to those well versed i n b o t h a r t h i s t o r y a n d i s l a m i c art history, results in a lack of cohesion. however, one should not dismiss the questions that shaw begs us to consider. despite its shortcomings, the book is a valuable contribution. what is “islamic” art? seeks to answer a question, but perhaps more importantly, it challenges readers to think about what questions we ask and why. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 369-373 book review daniella talmon-heller. sacred place and sacred time in the medieval islamic middle east: a historical perspective. edinburgh studies in classical islamic history and culture (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020), x + 279 pp, 28 illustrations, 1 map, index. isbn 978-14-7446-096-5. price: $105.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper). kader smail university of maryland, college park (ksmail@terpmail.umd.edu) over the last two decades, daniella talmon-heller has published widely on religion and social practices in the medieval islamic world. recently, she edited a remarkable volume that sought to integrate material and textual evidence for the study of the medieval and modern middle east.1 the book under review inaugurates a new theme. at the intersection of history, anthropology, and religion, sacred place and sacred time in the medieval islamic middle east examines the dual issues of sacred place and sacred time while surveying the development of rites associated with them. the book is divided into two parts. the first part studies the sanctification of the martyrdom of al-ḥusayn, muḥammad’s grandson and ʿalī’s second son, through the construc1. see daniella talmon-heller, islamic piety in medieval syria: mosques, cemeteries and sermons under the zangids and ayyūbids (1146–1260), jerusalem studies in religion and culture 7 (leiden: brill, 2007); daniella talmon-heller and katia cytryn-silverman, eds., material evidence and narrative sources: interdisciplinary studies of the history of the muslim middle east, islamic history and civilization 108 (leiden: brill, 2015). tion of two shrines, in ascalon and in cairo, that purportedly hold the head of the martyr. the second part investigates the month of rajab, the seventh month of the islamic calendar, whose sanctity, both acknowledged and disputed by generations of scholars, was characterized by truces, pilgrimage to the sanctuary of mecca, ritual slaughter, fasting, prayers, and supplications. the geographical scope of the book is for the most part restricted to egypt and palestine; the period considered extends from fatimid ismāʿīlī rule (358–567/969–1171) to the mamluks (548– 923/1250–1517). the author convincingly demonstrates how the shrines of al-ḥusayn and the month of rajab were venerated, how the rites performed in public were promoted © 2021 kader smail. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:ksmail%40terpmail.umd.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 370 • kader smail by rulers, and, most importantly, how old beliefs and practices were adjusted to fit changing historical circumstances. talmon-heller draws on a large variety of narrative sources, both sunni and shiʿi, and frequently combines them with material ones. authors such as nāṣir-i k h u s r a w ( d . b e t w e e n 4 6 5 / 1 0 7 2 a n d 471/1078), al-bīrūnī (d. ca. 440/1050), ibn ṭāwūs (d. 664/1266), and ibn taymiyya (d. 728/1328), to name but a few, provide a broad spectrum of travelogue, historical, a n d l e g a l l i t e r a t u r e . i n a d e t a i l e d historiographical discussion (“the state of the art”), talmon-heller offers a survey of modern scholarship, especially on sacred spaces. she notes the relative scarcity of works on time; most such works, according to her, deal primarily with scientific computation of the hijri calendar rather than with calendars as cultural artifacts (p. 19). this discrepancy is also reflected in the book’s structure, which raises a few issues. while its two parts are roughly of the same length, the first contains eleven chapters, five of them excursuses, whereas the second consists of seven chapters and three excursuses. as the author explains, t h e e x c u r s u s e s a i m t o “ s u p p l e m e n t the narrative of each part of the book, digressing from the main plotlines in order to elaborate on a number of themes” (p. 6). yet, given their similarities, two excursuses could have been merged with the preceding chapters (chaps. 4–5 and 6–7). two others merely list treatises in praise of ascalon and the sacred months 2. mircea eliade, images and symbols: studies in religious symbolism, trans. philip mairet (new york: sheed & ward, 1961), 39–51. 3. victor turner, “the center out there: pilgrim’s goal,” history of religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191–230. in islam without building on what might have constituted a solid working basis for a more substantial discussion (chaps. 9 and 20). finally, an excursus on saladin and al-ḥusayn in palestinian folklore teleports the reader from medieval times to the twentieth century but contributes little to the general discussion (chap. 11). inevitably, this organization creates a serious imbalance between the two parts, which is exacerbated by the eight excursuses. with regard to content, the book’s e p i s t e m o l o g i c a l f r a m e w o r k i s w e l l defined and particularly welcome in an often theory-poor field. for the reasons explained above, the emphasis here is exclusively on sacred spaces. talmonheller considers what a sacred space is and what can be inferred from its geographical location. in response to the first question, she offers an overview of mircea eliade’s concept of axis mundi: “every microcosm, every inhabited region has a center, that is to say, a place that is sacred above all,” says eliade, and this place symbolizes the connection between heaven and earth or the higher and lower realms.2 talmonheller then turns to the second question and discusses victor turner’s theoretical model of pilgrimage, commonly referred to as “the center out there.” turner noticed the remoteness and distinctness of many popular pilgrimage sites from sociopolitical centers.3 finally, talmon-heller presents and largely adopts erik cohen’s continuum approach between eliade’s and turner’s centers, which throws new al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) daniella talmon-heller’s sacred place and sacred time • 371 light on the anthropological study of pilgrimage. 4 succinctly, according to cohen, pilgrimage sites are either “formal” or “popular” centers, and several criteria determine where they are to be placed on the spectrum. in talmon-heller’s words, these criteria are the observance of formal islamic devotions vs. the use of relics and ritual objects; sponsorship by the political or religious establishment vs. initiatives “from below”; and the availability (vs. absence) of entertainment and commerce at or near the site. the “excessive” presence of women was often regarded—especially by men of religion, and sometimes also by ruling authorities—to indicate a deviation from proper and “serious” religious activity (p. 11). in the case of al-ḥusayn’s shrine, the pilgrimage site is initially a popular center, then eventually becomes a formal one. talmon-heller argues that the shrine where al-ḥusayn’s head was buried in ascalon was possibly a burial place of decapitated christian martyrs in the early fourth century ce (p. 62). little is known about ascalon between the fourth and eleventh centuries ce; churches were built and destroyed, and a mosque was constructed in 155/771–72. more than three centuries later, in 484/1091, the fatimid vizier badr al-jamālī (d. 487/1094) commissioned a long inscription on a minbar found among the ruins in ascalon that commemorates the discovery of al-ḥusayn’s head (p. 46). apart from this source, the evidence associating 4. erik cohen, “pilgrimage centers: concentric and excentric,” annals of tourism research 19, no. 1 (1992): 33–50. al-ḥusayn’s head with ascalon postdates the fatimid-era inscription. talmon-heller acknowledges this lack of evidence. what is also lacking from her audacious and fascinating history in the longue durée is twofold: on the one hand, there is no historicization of al-ḥusayn’s memory; on the other, there is no attempt to make sense of any of the twelve sites the book identifies that commemorate the voyage of the head throughout the middle east. b o t h o f t h e i g n o r e d p h e n o m e n a a r e connected to the battle of karbalāʾ and, more specifically, with the shaping of the memory of this tragic episode. in an article on the memorialization of karbalāʾ, antoine borrut demonstrated that this episode, which was “often reduced, in fact, to a police operation directed against a rebel refusing to acknowledge caliphal authority,” was remembered differently under the umayyads and the abbasids. during the reign of the former, historical information circulated primarily in medina and kufa, where the ʿalids’ memories were preserved. the traumatic memory of the defeat and assassination of the grandson of the prophet muḥammad was subjected to caliphal repression of the ʿalids, while pro-umayyad discourses favored strategies to silence the episode or deflect blame onto local actors. during the reign of the abbasids, the ʿalids became the victims and martyrs in whose name the abbasids were “seeking vengeance and legitimacy” and whose memory was to be gradually revived. the redemption of ʿalid memory, as recalled by borrut, seems to have followed the paradigm suggested by stephen humphreys: covenant, betrayal, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 372 • kader smail and redemption. thus, “the redemption process starts early, chiefly with the tawwābūn, but is not complete until ḥusaynid memory has been redeemed in ʿabbāsī sources,” after nearly two centuries.5 to return to the book under review, it seems clear that a shrine visited by sunnis and shiʿis alike must commemorate s omething meaningful for both. the history of the process leading to this shared practice is missing from the book.6 similarly, with respect to the numerous shrines commemorating the voyage of al-ḥusayn’s head, one wonders to what extent these sacred places, which are de facto sites of memory, are part of the long process of redemption and of the sacred g e o g r a p h y c o n t r i b u t i n g t o a s c a l o n ’ s prestige. in the second part of the book, the author examines the month of rajab, the rites associated with it, and their evolution between the first/seventh and ninth/fifteenth centuries. celebrated in arabia before the rise of islam, rajab was connected to the springtime festivities of the peninsula and the ban on warfare. although it goes beyond the scope of the present work, this phenomenon is somewhat reminiscent of the “peace and truce of god” (pax et treuga dei) in 5. antoine borrut, “remembering karbalāʾ: the construction of an early islamic site of memory,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 42 (2015): 249–282 (quotations from pp. 249, 269, 271); r. stephen humphreys, “qurʾānic myth and narrative structure in early islamic historiography,” in tradition and innovation in late antiquity, ed. frank m. clover and r. stephen humphreys (madison: university of wisconsin press, 1989), 271–90. 6. on the same topic, see stephennie mulder, the shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria: sunnis, shi’is and the architecture of coexistence (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014), chap. 2. 7. see hartmut hoffmann, gottesfriede und treuga dei, schriften der monumenta germaniae historica 20 (stuttgart: a. hiersemann, 1964); thomas head and richard landes, the peace of god: social violence and religious response in france around the year 1000 (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1992); dominique barthélemy, l’an mil et la paix de dieu: la france chrétienne et féodale, 980–1060 (paris: fayard, 1999). europe during the middle ages, a topic that has generated a rich scholarship.7 a comparison of the two environments (and other non-western contexts) remains to be done. for several generations, talmon-heller argues, the rajab visitation of mecca was an individual practice. in the fourth/tenth century under the fatimids, however, it became a formal public commemoration in egypt and northern syria. the fridays of the month were marked by special sermons given in the presence of the ruler (p. 155). from this point onward, rajab took on a new dimension. a new communal devotion, the prayer of great rewards (ṣalāt al-raghāʾib), surfaced in jerusalem around the fifth/ eleventh century (p. 183). the mamluk sultan baybars (d. 676/1277) incorporated the procession of the kiswa and the maḥmal into the annual caravan that left cairo for mecca in rajab 661/1263 (p. 206). liturgical texts were produced to frame religious practices during rajab. as in the case of al-ḥusayn’s shrines, some medieval scholars—exclusively sunnis— argued against the sanctity of rajab; in this specific case, they pointed out the absence of evidence designating certain days as “special.” besides the very descriptive approach of this second part, its main weakness lies in its disconnection from al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) daniella talmon-heller’s sacred place and sacred time • 373 the first one. indeed, visiting al-ḥusayn’s shrines in rajab confers no additional merit. the karbalāʾ episode, for instance, offers the opportunity of studying the case of muḥarram, which is, like rajab, one of the four sacred months of the islamic calendar. the month of ramaḍān could also have been an excellent choice. yet this potential weakness is also, paradoxically, a strength insofar as the reader can read one part or the other without losing the common thread of the book. in the “final comment” (i.e., general conclusion), talmon-heller points out that sacred place and time both aim to promote and develop humans’ sanctity 8. arezou azad, sacred landscape in medieval afghanistan: revisiting the “faḍāʾil-i balkh” (oxford: oxford university press, 2013); yaron friedmann, “‘kūfa is better’: the sanctity of kūfa in early islam and shīʿism in particular,” le muséon 126, no. 1–2 (2013): 203–37; harry munt, the holy city of medina: sacred space in early islamic arabia (new york: cambridge university press, 2014); mulder, shrines of the ʿalids. through rites. this element is what links the two parts of the book. on another level, the author identifies new avenues of research to be studied: on the one hand, the social dimension of festivities associated with sacred space and time c r e a t e s n u m e r o u s o p p o r t u n i t i e s f o r philanthropy; on the other, large-scale patronage by rulers and members of the elite redefines the contours of local identities. this book contributes another element to the field of sanctity in islam alongside the contributions of arezou azad (2013), yaron friedmann (2013), harry munt (2014), and stephennie mulder (2014).8 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 330-337 book review this work offers the first compre-hensive archaeological analysis o f t h e i s l a m i c c o n q u e s t o f t h e r e g n u m g o t h o r u m / s p a n i a , f r o m t h e landing of ṭāriq b. ziyād in gibraltar at the westernmost tip of algeciras bay in 92/711 to the consolidation of the iberian peninsula’s conquest around 100/718–19, which eventually brought the islamic armies to narbonne, septimania, northern catalonia, and neighboring areas. julián ortega takes the islamic conquest of 92/711 as the watershed moment marking the inception of a new society, a new country, and a new culture—al-andalus. understanding this set of changes requires a close reading of settlement patterns and material culture, the main research fields of archaeologists. the meticulous and thorough attention to detail that ortega invests to provide a clear explanation of this process is one of the main strengths of this book. the reader should not expect a book infused with textual criticism, warranted or unwarranted, of the arabic or latin sources—notwithstanding the author’s knowledge of the postmodern approach to written sources— nor one that tackles the sisyphean task of collating a cogent and plausible account of the conquest from the available source material—a task that has not yet been accomplished. rather, ortega has used the archaeological remains of material culture to detect and understand the islamic conquest and the distinctive appearance of al-andalus. the book begins with an introduction, which is followed by eleven chapters and a conclusion, a bibliography, and analytical indexes. the chapters’ titles are quite straightforward and explanatory, even for a readership not used to the history of al-andalus or the high middle ages: chapter 1 (pp. 25–35), “(de)limiting the scope of the sources”; chapter 2 julián m. ortega ortega. la conquista islámica de la península ibérica: una perspectiva arqueológica. serie arqueología y patrimonio 14 (madrid: ediciones de la ergástula, 2018), 414 pp, 9 figs. isbn 978-84-16242-30-6. price: €28.00 (paper). xavier ballestín universitat de barcelona (xballestin@ub.edu) © 2021 xavier ballestín. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:xballestin%40ub.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 331 • xavier ballestín (pp. 37–58), “prolegomenon”; chapter 3 (pp. 59–87), “the conquest (al-fatḥ) without rhetoric: toward a calibration o f m i l i t a r y o p e r a t i o n s ” ; c h a p t e r 4 (pp. 88–108), “the spoils”; chapter 5 (pp. 109–28), “the treasury and coinage”; c h a p t e r 6 ( p p . 1 2 9 – 6 0 ) , “ t h e u r b a n i m p r i n t o f t h e c o n q u e s t ” ; c h a p t e r 7 (pp. 161–72), “the territorial arrangem e n t o f t h e o c c u p a t i o n ” ; c h a p t e r 8 (pp. 173–222), “migration and colonization”; chapter 9 (pp. 223–54), “taking root: green revolution or agrarian reform?”; chapter 10 (pp. 255–90), aristocracies, t r i b e s , a n d s l a v e s ” ; a n d c h a p t e r 1 1 ( p p . 2 9 1 – 3 2 8 ) , “ t h e p e o p l e o f t h e conquest: ethnogenesis and islamization.” the main issues treated in these chapters are discussed below. t h e i n t r o d u c t i o n s t a r t s w i t h t h e anonymous crónica del 754, written by a cultured priest whose acquaintance with byzantine and early islamic history is extensive and who considered the demise of the visigothic kingdom an unparalleled tragedy. the dramatic, almost apocalyptic account of the disappearance of the realm and the islamic conquest found in this highly sophisticated latin source is followed by the account that prevailed amongst historians of the treatment meted out by the muslim conquerors—a tale also infused with overtones of catastrophe, upheaval, radical change, destruction, loss of life and property, and the end of times. ortega manages to show clearly not only how spanish medieval and arabist scholarship has dealt with the existence of al-andalus but also how heavily knowledge of the conquest and the inception of andalusi society relies on a full and thorough grasp of the changes taking place in what we can label early islam in the middle east, arabia, and egypt, and how the issues scholars and archeologists have raised about these changes should be used to develop a balanced and nuanced approach to the high middle ages in the iberian peninsula. in the closing remarks of the introduction, ortega acknowledges explicitly that intellectual production, i n c l u d i n g t h i s v e r y b o o k , m u s t b e conceived of as a collective endeavor; this statement allows the author to present the names of the scholars and other people to whom he is indebted for their help and advice. after his up-to-date and astonishingly rich appraisal of islamic historiography on the two ends of the mediterranean, ortega comes to grips with the nature, availability, and reliability of the written and material sources. two points inform the author’s approach to both kinds of sources. the first, made by th. glick and f. curta (p. 23), is the capital contribution of medieval archaeology to the knowledge of al-andalus’s early history—the second/ eighth to fifth/eleventh centuries—which is unparalleled in the fields of medieval history and spanish arabism. the second is that the recent prominence of archaeology is directly related to the changes taking place in the study of late antiquity, the end of the roman empire, and the successor states, a development that has come to encompass the umayyad caliphate in the east and that a. giardina in 1999 labeled the “explosion of late antiquity” (p. 24, n. 41). within this framework, ortega proceeds to consider the relevant data that can be obtained from different layers of the source material, with particular attention to texts, toponymy, numismatics and, in a more detailed way, archaeological research and fieldwork. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) julián m. ortega ortega’s la conquista islámica de la península ibérica • 332 ortega’s approach to original sources s h o w s h i s e x p e r t i s e w i t h t h e i s s u e s a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e a r a b i c s o u r c e s . these are plentiful but late and beset by contradictions, and their reliability and trustworthiness, both for islamic history in the middle east and for the central and eastern mediterranean, are questionable. ortega argues that the age in which archaeologists try to illustrate and elucidate source data by means of data from the field has come to an end. literary and annalistic source scholarship and the archaeological fieldwork of surveys and excavations each follow their own paths, and the search for historical truth should not be guided exclusively by written sources. nevertheless—and this is a major asset of the book—ortega never loses sight of the written sources and constantly checks the raw data, even if scarce and inconclusive, yielded by the latin and arabic sources against the data provided by excavations, field surveys, and the theoretical field of anthropology. toponymy has received a good deal of scholarly attention, as it provides clues about the settlement of arabic and berber groups in the countryside after the conquest. their presence left an imprint in toponyms containing the word beni, analyzed for the first time by jaime oliver asín in 1973 and thoroughly investigated by pierre guichard in 1976. juan zozaya has studied the imprint of toponyms formed or derived from the latin or romance word for “five”—quintana, quintos, quintanilla, quinto—which had a direct relationship with the fifth (khums) of war spoils and landed property that was allotted to the state in the wake of the conquest. and manuel acién has researched toponyms r e l a t e d t o q a l ʿ a ( p l . q i l ā ʿ ; f o r t r e s s , stronghold, citadel), such as calatañazor, calatayud, calatrava, and alcalá la real, which were conceived as new settlements in the conquered countryside. ortega also devotes attention to the research of ramon martí, who has traced the names of palaces and lighthouses in catalunya and septimania. if the attention that ortega gives to toponymy—a single page (pp. 27–28)—might profitably have been expanded, he is nonetheless truly aware in his work of the issues associated with the data provided by toponyms and advocates for a study of place-names that relies more on geography and fieldwork than on dictionaries and bibliographies (p. 28). n u m i s m a t i c s h a s l o n g s i n c e l e f t the traditional field of antiquarianism and joined the areas of historical and archaeological research. the production, supply, and circulation of coins and their stratigraphic distribution in excavations and fieldwork are now the mainstays of numismatic research. the problem is that the lifespan of a coin in the high middle ages, whether arabic, greek, or latin, stretches beyond the chronological strata in which it may be found; this fact requires a very nuanced approach to the information afforded by excavations. the data provided by archaeological research show that the second/eighth century w i t n e s s e d t h e u t t e r d e c a y a n d e v e n cessation of the elite’s ability to exert power. this means that the footprint of the regnum gothorum in material culture, architecture, and symbolic expressions of power in this period becomes very weak and rather difficult to identify in the field, a trend that does not change until the umayyads’ arrival in al-andalus in the second half of the second/eighth century. o r t e g a a r g u e s t h a t p o w e r f u l s t a t e s al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 333 • xavier ballestín allow the development of a traditional archaeology, with historicist overtones, well suited for tracing the exercise of power and furnished with index fossils and clear and well-coded pottery typologies. this approach is poorly suited, however, to the age of the islamic conquests in the mediterranean basin and the last years of the regnum gothorum (p. 31). besides the problems associated with what may be called the poverty of the material culture of the elite, and despite the advances in ceramics typology and geochronological c14 dating, there is neither a cohesive chronological framework nor a clear-cut typology for the first half of the second/ eighth century. notwithstanding these challenges, ortega offers the reader a list of index fossils for a wide range of daily use pottery, tableware, metal tableware, glass, and clothing accessories. he concludes with a remark about the use of radiocarbon dating and the issues associated with it for a period that covers half a century. he notes, wisely, that medieval archaeology is best placed to assess what are the pertinent questions and issues to be addressed, and these should be considered not only by archaeologists but also by scholars working on written sources. after a detailed appraisal of the nature of the source material, easily readable even by non-archaeologists (a trait that numbers amongst the main strengths of the book), ortega gives due attention to the context of the islamic conquest. this brings to the fore his critical explanation of the relationship between the umayyad caliphate in damascus, the leadership of the conquest armies, the ideology of jihād, and the governance and control of the conquered areas, which can also be seen through the lens of the almost dialectical relationship between center and periphery. ortega emphasizes the fluid and changing nature of the administrative arrangements made during the consolidation of umayyad power in the middle east. this fluidity went hand in hand with the autonomy enjoyed by the conquerors, who benefited from a wide network of clientship (walāʾ) and, in the case of the conquest of the islamic west, the systematic inclusion of berbers/ amazigh in the conquering armies of mūsā b. nuṣayr. the reader should be aware that the islamic conquest of the regnum gothorum followed administrative reforms ascribed to ʿabd al-malik b. marwān (r. 65-86/685–705) and their consolidation under the aegis of his son and successor al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 86-96/705– 15). it would therefore be very difficult to ascertain which instructions were followed by the armies of ṭāriq b. ziyād and mūsā b. nuṣayr, if there was a set of centrally sanctioned conquest practices at all. in fact, even if we acknowledge that the degree of centralization and control exerted by the umayyads of damascus remains debated, there does not seem to have been a clear policy to be followed for every eventuality, as indicated by the variegated formulae and legends that appear on the islamic coinage, whether latin or arabic or mixed, minted shortly before and immediately after the conquest of 92/711. ortega’s next step in narrating the islamic conquest and the creation of al-andalus is to outline the military conquest by the armies of ṭāriq b. ziyād and mūsā b. nuṣayr. the main lines developed are the building of fortified settlements (amṣār) and their relationship with the progress of the conquering armies, the use of the standing network of ancient roman roads, the role of city walls in the defense al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) julián m. ortega ortega’s la conquista islámica de la península ibérica • 334 of resisting local communities, the remains of violence that have been found, and the development of an archaeological reading of surrender covenants (p. 59). ortega, whose knowledge of current debates on the islamic conquest is considerable, concludes that the few data points in the material record pointing conclusively to destruction, loss of life, and war can be explained only in the framework of a very careful and well-conceived strategy that he qualifies with the very contemporary word “surgical.” according to ortega, violence and the clash of the islamic armies with the inhabitants of the regnum gothorum was restricted to selected s t r a t e g i c l o c a t i o n s — m o s t l y c i t i e s — while the countryside was left to its own devices except for the wealthiest and most protected settlements. in fact, even if the written sources and field surveys point to at least two amṣār (one, near écija, has not yet been located, and the other, located near huesca, awaits a full excavation campaign), these temporary army camps built to house besieging armies never became true amṣār, which are not to be found in either the maghreb or al-andalus. the lack of amṣār in the latter could be explained by a very fast conquest followed by a comprehensive settlement pattern. the islamic conquest fueled itself and maintained its pace, ortega argues, with substantial amounts of booty and spoils, both human and material. this statement appears contradictory with his earlier claim about the poverty of the material culture of the elite. but members of the regnum gothorum elite measured their own status and social relevance in the kingdom by the gold and treasure that they were able to store. accordingly, in addition to the official thesaurun regnum gothorum, there were abundant treasures, lay and ecclesiastical, with varying degrees of complexity, richness, and sumptuousness; some have been lost altogether, others have been recovered, and a small handful are seemingly datable to the aftermath of the islamic conquest because they were found in conditions and contexts that indicate hurried and haphazard efforts to hide them. these treasures have received a great deal of attention in arabic sources. the solomon table—the most valued item of the state treasury—and the lead seals of septimania, mostly from the settlement at ruscino and other areas, were found during field surveys or rediscovered in museums and on antiquarians’ shelves. they show that the distribution and allotment of booty and spoils was a matter of concern, and accordingly it was regulated from the beginning. although the inscriptions on the lead seals are sometimes difficult to read and lacking some words, and the locations at which the seals were found are mostly unknown, they show that the booty and the spoils were allotted following a previously established set of fiscal practices. as far as the human booty is concerned, ortega acknowledges that finding archaeological evidence of slavery is very difficult, but he argues that the brief upsurge in cave settlements, which ended around the third/ninth century and was concentrated in the northern areas of cantabria, aragón, euskadi, and catalunya, may point to a need for shelters and hideaways for people fleeing the awful prospect of slavery (pp. 97–100). such escapees would have been part of the human booty of the conquest in the maghreb, in the iberian peninsula, and the middle east. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 335 • xavier ballestín the inevitable corollary to a treatment of booty and spoils is a discussion of tributary practices and coinage, the tools par excellence of state building, booty distribution, and wealth accumulation. o r t e g a t a k e s u p t h e s e t o p i c s a n d thoroughly discusses the production, use, distribution, and currency of golden coinage (dīnār), silver coinage (dirham), and copper coinage (fals). the distribution patterns of hoards and single coins found and dated to the first half of the second/ eighth century show, on the one hand, the geography of the power exerted by the islamic governors of al-andalus, reflected in the amount of coinage found in each region, and, on the other, that those governors managed to build an efficient and working fiscal system shortly after the events of 92/711. ortega continues with an analysis of the imprint the conquest made on the urban landscape of the country, providing an updated and minute study of housing, household items, mosques, city ramparts, and pottery. the rural landscape, which is not restricted to the hinterland of cities and receives detailed attention, is the theater of hilltop fortified settlements, new fortresses (qilāʿ) built in the first years of the conquest, and a network of lighthouses (fars) and settlements ( b a l ā ṭ ) , m o s t l y l o c a t e d i n c a t a l u n y a and septimania, whose purpose was to enhance the authority and control of the conquerors over the countryside. the islamic conquest involved the arrival of conquering armies and settlers from the maghreb, ifrīqiya, egypt, and the middle east. ortega studies their settlement patterns, the areas where they settled, and their relationships with the new landscape and with the iberian peninsula’s native people, both christian and jewish. there has not been enough field research or excavations to produce a detailed and thorough map of even the settlements that have been identified, and most settlements await discovery. in fact, the existing research on the settlement and distribution patterns of the first wave of settlers, the so-called baladiyyūn, who arrived in al-andalus during and shortly after the conquest, and of the second wave, the so-called shāmiyyūn, who arrived with the defeated syrian army of balj b. bishr around 123–124/741–742, allows only a sketch of general features established mainly through a close reading of the available written sources, which offer a consistent and credible account. from the vantage point of material culture, both waves, when they settled in rural areas, left few traces of radical change or of a substantial and distinct material culture. instead, one finds a novel rearrangement of the late antique settlement tissue, which was clearly disrupted by the disappearance of a sizeable number of settlements and the creation of others. the next subject ortega deals with is the ability and resources of the new settlers to adapt and change the landscape to their own ends. ortega addresses here a. watson’s controversial theory of an “islamic agricultural revolution” in order to determine whether there really was a such a transformation from an agriculture adapted to a “mediterranean ecotype” to one suited to a “hydraulic ecotype” and, if there was, how it would have been reflected in material culture (pp. 223–24). according to watson, this transformation was brought about by the conquerors through a panoply of new techniques, plants, and practices and the allegedly al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) julián m. ortega ortega’s la conquista islámica de la península ibérica • 336 widespread diffusion of small settlements closely associated with irrigated areas. this is not the place to review this theory and the critical responses that it has occasioned. suffice it to say that such a “revolution” has often been understood as a direct and lasting result of t he islamic conquest. ortega holds, however, that there was no green revolution, but the innovations introduced between the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries nevertheless radically altered the iberian landscape for the remainder of the middle ages (p. 253). the author then turns to the social o r g a n i z a t i o n o f t h e n e w c o m e r s a n d their relationships with the original iberian population. this topic prompts a discussion of segmentary lineages/ tribes, the vocabulary used to identify them in the arabic sources (mostly the term qawm), the relationships among tribes and lineages and between them and political authorities, and the problem of recognizing segmentary arrangements in material culture and settlement structure, as well as of identifying their influence, or lack thereof, on the original iberian population. the book’s last chapter is a proposal to use ethnogenesis as a conceptual tool for understanding the full array of changes triggered by the islamic conquest, the demise of the regnum gothorum, and the settlement of arabs and berbers in a postimperial and late antique milieu. ortega also gives full attention here to the meaning and use of the concept of islamization, its relevance, and the w a y s i t c a n b e a s s e s s e d i n m a t e r i a l culture. settlement structures, the building o f m o s q u e s o v e r e i t h e r f u n c t i o n i n g o r d e s e r t e d c h u r c h e s , t h e l a y o u t o f c e m e t e r i e s , a n d t h e o r i e n t a t i o n a n d placement of corpses in graves show that the pace of islamization reflected in islamic burials was as fast as it was heterogeneous and early. in fact, ortega contends that i t w o u l d n o t b e s u r p r i s i n g i f f u t u r e excavations were to uncover mosques in the countryside besides those already found and excavated, especially in places quite far from cities. if so, bulliet’s thesis about the incompleteness and slowness of islamic conversion in al-andalus will need a thorough review (pp. 309–10). to readers well versed in scholarship on al-andalus, ortega’s concluding remarks may appear a set of truisms, devoid of novelty and imbued with anthropological jargon. yet this is the kind of judgment that, not so long ago, would have been encountered in book reviews written by classical archaeologists and punctilious armchair scholars about new publications in archaeology. ortega offers the reader a refreshing and readily verifiable set of assertions about the islamic conquest: it was well conceived, cohesively arranged, and the expected result of a proven previous strategy. it was not, in other words, the lucky outcome of a single and decisive battle or of some hypothetical factionalism among the potentes in the regnum gothorum. it entailed a rural and urban colonization by arab and berber peoples, who developed a set of agrarian practices but not a colonial regime. above all, ortega’s book shows that the study of the conquest is in need of renewed and fresh approaches. my recommendation to potential readers of ortega’s book will thus come as no surprise: the book must be read with the care and attention due to true scholarship and to long-term, careful, detailed, and difficult research, usually al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 337 • xavier ballestín done neither in the best of institutional frameworks nor with the required funding. at the end of the book, ortega provides an analytical index of persons and placenames, a very welcome and rather unusual addition that enables readers to look for and trace the settlements and the people, whether historians, archaeologists, or historical actors, mentioned in the body of the text. in addition, the book contains ninety-five figures, maps, and graphs, clear proof of ortega’s exhaustive knowledge of the difficult and costly archaeological r e s e a r c h d o n e i n t h e f i e l d . i d o n o t understand why this book has not been published also in pdf, epub, or another digital format, a step that has been taken by other publishing houses. the paperback with jacket format, the typeface, and the quality of the images is not as good as one would have expected, and these shortcomings would have been averted in a digital edition. i strongly recommend, therefore, that the book receive a new e d i t i o n t h a t t a k e s i n t o a c c o u n t t h e archaeological expeditions, field surveys, a n d r e s c u e e x c a v a t i o n s u n d e r t a k e n between 2018 and 2021. the new edition should also correct the unexpected error of the claim that the seven-branched candelabra (menorah) and solomon’s table can be seen in trajan’s column (p. 88); in fact their location is the arch of titus. some spelling and agreement mistakes and some inadequate references that lack page numbers could also be corrected in the new edition that this book deserves. overall, ortega’s work is an outstanding masterpiece that must be read by everyone concerned with an accurate understanding of the islamic conquest of the iberian peninsula. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 356-359 book review the library of arabic literature (lal)’s young readers (yr) series o ff e r s c o l l e c t i o n s o f s e l e c t e d excerpts from premodern arabic literary texts (https://www.libraryofarabiclitaerature.org/ar/young-readers). all texts in the series are presented exclusively in arabic and made available for free online. in their accessible format and their minimal scholarly footnotes and references, the collections are similar to the lal’s parent series of monograph arabic editions and english translations. in something of a departure into new territory, however, the yr series takes up the lal’s goal of expanding arabic literature’s readership and focuses it on younger readers of arabic. the series editors seek to highlight the brilliance of original arabic texts from the fourth/tenth century while also making them accessible to younger readers. the editors have also involved contemporary visual artists as coeditors in their project. the most visible product of this collaboration is the stimulating complement of interpretive illustrations. a limited number of excerpts from ḥiyākat al-kalām (weaving words) have also been adapted into audio recordings in levantine mā lidhdhat al-ʿishq illā li-l-majānīn [love is only for fools]. edited by philip kennedy, bilal orfali, and maurice pomerantz. library of arabic literature young readers series (abu dhabi: university bookshop, 2019). isbn 978-99-4885-880-5. ḥiyākat al-kalām [weaving words]. edited by philip kennedy, enass khansa, and bilal orfali. library of arabic literature young readers series (abu dhabi: university bookshop, 2019). isbn 978-99-4836-916-5. lima ishtadda ʿishq al-insān li-hādhā al-ʿālam? [why did humanity so love this world?]. edited by philip kennedy, enass khansa, and bilal orfali. library of arabic literature young readers series (abu dhabi: university bookshop, 2020). isbn 978-99-4825-962-6. philip raad american university of beirut (pjr01@mail.aub.edu) © 2021 philip raad. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/young-readers https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/young-readers https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/books_ar/%d8%ad%d9%8a%d8%a7%d9%83%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%83%d9%84%d8%a7%d9%85/ https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/books_ar/%d8%ad%d9%8a%d8%a7%d9%83%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%83%d9%84%d8%a7%d9%85/ https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/books_ar/%d8%ad%d9%8a%d8%a7%d9%83%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%83%d9%84%d8%a7%d9%85/ https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/books_ar/%d9%84%d9%90%d9%85%d9%8e-%d8%a7%d8%b4%d8%aa%d8%af%d9%91%d9%8e-%d8%b9%d8%b4%d9%82-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d9%86%d8%b3%d8%a7%d9%86-%d9%84%da%be%d8%b0%d8%a7-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%9f/ mailto:pjr01%40mail.aub.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 357 • philip raad a r a b i c b y t h e s t o r y t e l l e r s h a l a b i y a hakawatiya (https://soundcloud.com/lal_ nyuad). the series contains three titles thus far. bilal orfali and maurice pomerantz made selections for mā lidhdhat al-ʿishq illā li-lmajānīn (love is only for fools), while selections for lima ishtadda ʿishq al-insān li-hadhā al-ʿālam? (why did humanity so love this world?) and weaving words were made by bilal orfali and enass khansa. all three works acknowledge philip kennedy as general editor. illustrations for love is only for fools, the sole work illustrated in color, and why did humanity so love this world? were provided by ward khalaf. those for weaving words were provided by jana traboulsi. for love is only for fools, the editors have selected excerpts from ibn habīb a l n a y s ā b ū r ī ’ s ( d . 4 0 6 / 1 0 1 6 ) ʿ u q a l ā ʾ al-majānīn (wise madmen).1 the collected selection of anecdotes, lexical treatises, and poetry, even in this abridged form, captures a complex meditation on junūn ( f o l l y ) a n d i t s p r o m i n e n t e x e m p l a r s i n p r e m o d e r n a r a b i c l i t e r a t u r e . t h e editors begin with selections that briefly reconstruct al-naysābūrī’s exposition of the general meaning of junūn. this is followed by a colorful recounting of the tales of prominent majānīn (wise fools). t h r o u g h o u t , a l n a y s a b ū r ī w i t h h o l d s judgment and fosters an appreciation of the often humorous or poignant capacity 1. the editors of the yr series drew their selections from the following manuscript: ms new haven, beinecke, beineck-l600 (740/1340). for additional information on this work, see shereen el-ezabi, “al-naysaburi’s wise madmen,” alif: journal of comparative poetics 14 (1994): 192–205. 2. kristina richardson, difference and disability in the medieval islamic world (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2012); sara scalenge, disability in the ottoman arab world, 1500–1800 (new york: cambridge university press, 2014). 3. the editors of the series made their selections from the following manuscripts of al-faraj baʿd al-shidda: ms istanbul, fatih millet kütüphanesi, fatih 4013 and ms istanbul, nuruosmaniye kütüphanesi, nuruosmaniye o f t h e m a j n ū n t o e x p o s e h y p o c r i s y and symptoms of social contradiction. despite the author’s apparent neutrality, readers are led to revel in the fecundity of the wise fool’s words and actions. the anecdotes selected suggest that wise fools such as buhlul and majnun layla became important for their capacity to expose the limits of the social imagination, to pierce through appearances, and to expose the essence of social forms. read in tandem with works of disability history, such as kristina richardson’s difference and disability in the medieval islamic world: b l i g h t e d b o d i e s o r s a r a s c a l e n g h e ’ s disability history in the ottoman arab world, 1500–1800, the excerpts in love is only for fools allow access to stories of the historical person of the majnūn that point to the variety in approaches to social difference across history.2 an appreciation of the history of difference can lead to creative thought: how do our own societies treat nonconformity with predominant social norms? and can we imagine, perhaps with buhlul’s help, a society whose formal mechanisms imply a more just treatment of all? weaving words consists of selections from al-muḥassin b. ʿalī al-tanūkhī’s (d. 384/994) anthologies al-faraj baʿd al-shidda (deliverance follows adversity) and nishwār al-muḥāḍara wa-akhbār a l m u d h ā k a r a ( t h e t a b l e t a l k o f a mesopotamian judge).3 the text contains https://soundcloud.com/lal_nyuad https://soundcloud.com/lal_nyuad https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/books_ar/%d9%84%d9%90%d9%85%d9%8e-%d8%a7%d8%b4%d8%aa%d8%af%d9%91%d9%8e-%d8%b9%d8%b4%d9%82-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d9%86%d8%b3%d8%a7%d9%86-%d9%84%da%be%d8%b0%d8%a7-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%9f/ https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/books_ar/%d9%84%d9%90%d9%85%d9%8e-%d8%a7%d8%b4%d8%aa%d8%af%d9%91%d9%8e-%d8%b9%d8%b4%d9%82-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d9%86%d8%b3%d8%a7%d9%86-%d9%84%da%be%d8%b0%d8%a7-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%9f/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/i222579 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the library of arabic literature’s young readers series • 358 twenty-one selected anecdotes , each two to nine pages in length. some of these fall within the faraj baʿd al-shidda (“deliverance after adversity”) genre, which centers on the tropes of piety in the face of hardship and serendipitous, if at times implicitly divine, deliverance. those anecdotes that do not fall within the faraj genre are no less enthralling. read in tandem with academic works such as julia bray’s article “reading ‘the exotic’ and organising the production of knowledge” or philip kennedy’s chapter on the faraj genre in recognition in the arabic narrative tradition, the collected a n e c d o t e s m i g h t b e d i s c u s s e d i n a classroom setting in terms of recurring formal components such as the structure of the isnād and the organization of the text around the element of recognition.4 such discussions might also take their cues from the titles given to the three sections by the editors. the first section is entitled tirḥāl: al-kashf wa-l-waʿd wa-l-manām (“travel: recognition, oath, and dream”); the second, faḍāʾāt mutashābika: al-ṣawt wa-l-ḥajar wa-l-qadar (“interconnected spaces: voice, stone, and fate”); and the third, liqāʾāt wa-aqniʿa wa-adwār mutaghayyira (“encounters, masks, and changing roles”). lima ishtadda ʿishq al-insān li-hādhā al-ʿālam? (why did humanity so love this world?) contains selections from al-hawāmil wa-l-shawāmil, a collection of 4135. for selections from the nishwār, the editors turned to the printed edition: al-muḥassin b. ʿalī al-tanūkhī, nishwār al-muḥāḍara wa-akhbār al-mudhākara, ed. ʿabbūd al-shāljī (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1971). 4. julia bray, “reading ‘the exotic’ and organising the production of knowledge: al-tanūkhī on indians and their elephants,” asiatische studien / études asiatiques 71, no. 3 (2017): 833–56, https://doi.org/10.1515/asia2017-0003; philip kennedy, recognition in the arabic narrative tradition (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016). 5. the editors of the yr series drew their selections from the following manuscript: ms istanbul, süleymaniye kütüphanesi, ayasofya 2476. correspondence between two prominent contributors to intellectual life in the islamicate world in the fourth/tenth century.5 the first of these is the adīb abū ḥayyān al-tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023), who poses questions (including that which gives the work its title) to the second author, the philosopher-historian abū ʿalī miskawayh (d. 412/1030), who answers them. the collection includes thirty-four questions and their answers, separated into three sections under the titles asʾila muqārina (“comparative questions”), al-insān: al-ʿishq wa-l-naqṣ (“humanity: love and lack”), and masāʾil jadaliyya (“controversial issues”). the dialogue between the two authors touches on philosophy, religion, science, and language. the text is presented as a reflection of the debates and interests of its time and a mirror of the spirit of rationality that defined it, which found its common thread in a celebration of humanity’s desire for understanding. a reading of the text may be supplemented by a discussion of the genre of risāla in early arabic prose and enriched by comparison with other epistolary works and dialogues of the time. the lal young readers series makes a timely suggestion: that the re-presentation of works of premodern writing, in this case in abridged, curated, and illustrated form, might facilitate and enhance an invigorated p r a c t i c e o f r e a d i n g i n t h e p r e s e n t . in making this suggestion, the series has set https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/books_ar/%d9%84%d9%90%d9%85%d9%8e-%d8%a7%d8%b4%d8%aa%d8%af%d9%91%d9%8e-%d8%b9%d8%b4%d9%82-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d9%86%d8%b3%d8%a7%d9%86-%d9%84%da%be%d8%b0%d8%a7-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%9f/ https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/ar/books_ar/%d9%84%d9%90%d9%85%d9%8e-%d8%a7%d8%b4%d8%aa%d8%af%d9%91%d9%8e-%d8%b9%d8%b4%d9%82-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a5%d9%86%d8%b3%d8%a7%d9%86-%d9%84%da%be%d8%b0%d8%a7-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%9f/ https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2017-0003 https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2017-0003 https://nyupress.org/author/abu-ali-miskawayh https://nyupress.org/author/abu-ali-miskawayh al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 359 • philip raad itself at odds with contemporary culture, which considers premodern literary texts eccentric. the series defiantly asserts the value of premodern arabic writing for projects of self-reflection and creativity today. however, without significant pedagogical scaffolding, the difficulty of the texts will likely pose a significant obstacle to the types of reading practices the series editors hope to encourage. perhaps another way of putting this is that the series has yet to define exactly what it wants to be, preferring instead to be many things at once. the editors of the yr series will do well to ask themselves the following questions: is the yr series in fact a more a valuable contribution to the arabic classroom than it is to “story time” at home? and if so, could the benefits of an editing process more intimately in touch with pedagogy justify a departure from the lal’s customary evasion of a pedagogical routine, perhaps in the form of investment in the development of lesson plans or other material to supplement the yr texts? in an environment of staunch competition from publishers of children’s books and young adult fiction, could the energies of the yr series be more effectively spent on a concerted effort to facilitate arabic language and literature pedagogies, or perhaps even multiliteracy and digital social reading? al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 338-342 book review because the history of al-andalus has mostly been written from a capital-centered perspective, the historical trajectory of the provinces has elicited only slight historiographical interest. eneko lópez martínez de marigorta’s book, which is based on his phd dissertation written under the supervision of professors eduardo manzano moreno and manuel acién almansa and defended at the consejo superior de investigaciones cientificas (csic) in 2017, fills this gap in an excellent way. the book is dedicated to the study of the cities of southeastern al-andalus, nominally the kūras (“provinces”) of elvira and pechina. these correspond roughly to the modern provinces of granada and almeria, which are very different in their topographical and cultural characteristics. the book’s temporal scope is the umayyad era (second/eighth to fifth/eleventh centuries), set within a longue durée perspective that sees the author make frequent reference to the visigothic and taifa periods. this is an ambitious approach, since the objective of the book is to identify the historical trajectory of the region by looking at both cities and people, especially the progress of urbanization (p. 13). the author has collected information from a wide range of sources, employing all the classical chronicles and geographical treatises while also making good use of the biographical literature (ṭabaqāt) and of some latin christian texts. with respect to the documentation, one of the strengths of the study is the systematic use of archaeological reports from recent investigations in the region, mostly in pechina and madīnat elvira, though some eneko lópez martínez de marigorta. mercaderes, artesanos y ulemas: las ciudades de las coras de ilbira y pechina en época omeya. arqueologías, serie medieval, 2 (jaén: uja editorial, 2020), 432 pp. isbn 978-84-9159-298-3. price: €50.00 (paper), €17.00 (e-book). aurélien montel ciham (umr 5648) (france) (aurelien.montel@gmail.com) © 2021 aurélien montel. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:aurelien.montel%40gmail.com?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 339 • aurélien montel rural settlements are documented, too. methodologically, that study does a fine job connecting textual sources and material evidence, both of which are meticulously examined and cross-checked. the study’s methodological rigor contributes to both the ambition and the innovativeness of the conclusions. the book is divided into seven chapters. it also contains twenty-three maps, which greatly assist the reader in understanding the discussion; nineteen color figures; and twenty black-and-white figures of various kinds (here we must also commend the editor for the high-quality product). the list of sources occupies a six-page section (pp. 371–77), which shows their breadth, and an extensive bibliography of fortyeight pages likewise gives the reader insight into the wide range of materials used (pp. 377–415). although the chapters are arranged to follow a chronological progression, in fact they also reflect three geographical scales: local, iberian, and mediterranean. focused on the kūra of elvira-granada, c h a p t e r s 1 ( “ t h e a r t i c u l a t i o n o f t h e province of ilbīra before the creation of its madīna,” pp. 19–65) and 2 (“the madīna o f i l b ī r a a n d t e r r i t o r i a l h i e r a r c h i c a l organization,” pp. 67–108) investigate how the transition from the visigothic era to umayyad rule affected the southeastern portion of the iberian peninsula—in other words, how it inflected the course of late antiquity in the region. after reviewing the narratives of the islamic conquest at the beginning of the second/eighth century, t h e a u t h o r p r o p o s e s a n i n t e r e s t i n g s y n t h e s i s r e g a r d i n g t h e s e t t l e m e n t of the arab ajnād (military divisions), whose territorial distribution, which partly differs from that of the visigothic a r i s t o c r a c y , h e p r e c i s e l y d e l i n e a t e d (p. 32). another interesting facet of this first chapter is the data the author has gathered regarding the administration of the region; such information is rare for al-andalus because of the scarcity of sources for the first centuries of the islamic era. it is notable that in this peripheral reg ion, t he a rab ajnād c ont inu ed t o hold the most prominent administrative positions; umayyad power seems to have been very limited here, although the kūra of elvira was one of the provinces that contributed the most to the treasury due to the dynamism of its economic life. it seems that islamic elvira—a place d i s t i n c t f r o m l a t e a n t i q u e i l l i b e r i s — became the capital city of the kūra in the middle of the third/ninth century, when it was inhabited by syrian arabs, whose importance can be seen in the ṭabaqāt, especially in the tribal nisbas. elvira gradually managed to polarize its hinterland, especially from a fiscal point of view. it was also a major vector for transmitting islamic scholarship, since many of the local scholars traveled east for a riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm (journey in search of knowledge). the author notes that elvira produced more such traveling scholars than most other cities. this indicates that in peripheral spaces, islamization must be seen as a local initiative, with only slight interference from the capital. because of the influence of the syrian ajnād, umayyad emirs had only a limited role in the city; their one attempt to appoint a judge, for example, ended in failure. although elvira was deeply affected by the fitna in the late third/ninth century, these effects had highly specific local features. it seems that the proportion of rebels belonging to the social group of the muwalladūn (muslims al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) eneko lópez martínez de marigorta’s mercaderes, artesanos y ulemas • 340 of local descent) was smaller in elvira than it was anywhere else in al-andalus; the most important local rebels were in fact syrians. in this context, the first appearance of the toponym granada, at the end of the third/ninth century, is quite remarkable. that toponym had, of course, a storied career after the end of the fourth/tenth century, as shown in chapter 6 (“the madīna of granada and the substitution of the shāmiyyūn by stipendiary troops,” pp. 277–95). under the umayyad caliphate, elvira experienced a major disturbance after hājib al-manṣūr recruited a great number of mercenaries from the maghrib. during the fitna that ended the caliphate of cordoba, madīnat ilbīra was destroyed a n d i t s i n h a b i t a n t s m o v e d i n t o t h e highlands, where they settled at the site of late medieval granada. there, a lineage belonging to the banū zīrī family took over and ruled over an independent taifa until the end of the fifth/eleventh century. thus the fitna appears to have been a real watershed, in some regards much more important than the muslim conquest of the iberian peninsula, for it completely changed the territorial configuration of the region. t h e m e d i t e r r a n e a n o r i e n t a t i o n o f the southeastern iberian peninsula is investigated in chapters 3 (“the madīna of pechina and the connection to the mashriq,” pp. 109–61) and 5 (“the madīna of almeria and the umayyad maritime influence,” pp. 231–75), with an emphasis on pechina and almeria. the main focus of chapter 3 is the foundation of pechina, which has been discussed in many earlier publications and is regarded as convincing p r o o f o f t h e i n c r e a s e d o p e n n e s s o f a l a n d a l u s t o t h e m e d i t e r r a n e a n i n the middle of the third/ninth century. an important partner in that opening was the maghrib, where, the author underscores, many andalusians from the peninsula’s southeast settled and f o r m e d a d i a s p o r i c n e t w o r k . t h e i r communities included one in al-qayrawān (in modern-day tunisia), which was at that time the “mother city” of the islamic west, and another in tenes (today’s algeria), which is presented in medieval sources as an andalusian foundation. this chapter clearly shows how pechina was shaped by its very specific opening to the sea. it became a major hub of western mediterranean trade but also one of the most dynamic peripheral cities of al-andalus in terms of islamic scholarship because of its links with the maghrib and the east. the author’s use of the andalusian ṭabaqāt literature here is very convincing. he extracts from this corpus extensive information regarding local ʿulamāʾ who traveled to the maghrib and/or to the east, studied there, and brought back islamic knowledge. these data thus illustrate clearly the social and cultural construction of a city founded by muslims. the author makes good use of archaeological reports from a material and economic perspective. chapter 5 presents the consequences of the foundation of almeria, which was chosen as the harbor of the umayyad navy in the middle of the fourth/tenth century and quickly overshadowed pechina. here, the reader may regret that the conflict b e t w e e n t h e u m a y y a d a n d f a t i m i d caliphates is passed over so quickly, since medieval authors argued that ʿabd al-raḥmān iii founded almeria specifically in response to a fatimid attack in 344/955; that moment was as traumatic as it was foundational. apart from this aspect, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 341 • aurélien montel the chapter continues the reflections of the previous one, looking into the mediterranean functions of almeria from an iberian perspective. founded as a caliphal initiative, the city followed a very specific trajectory, increasingly guided by central political power. the author observes that notables from pechina continued to play a political role within the administration of the caliphate, especially in its navy, until al-manṣūr managed to curb their influence. from an economic point of view, almeria became the most important city on the mediterranean shore of al-andalus, receiving considerable investment from the caliphs, who acted as traders in their own right. the city’s two functions—military and economic—had a direct influence on its urban arrangement, which featured the unique association of a qayṣariyya (public market) and a dār al-ṣināʿa (arsenal) in the center. because of the macro-development of almeria, p e c h i n a e x p e r i e n c e d a l o n g d e c l i n e . the pages dedicated to the taifa period (fifth/eleventh century) are especially interesting, since the author shows that the fitna, traditionally considered to have represented a breakdown, did not hamper urban development in this area. in addition to functioning as the main mediterranean harbor of al-andalus—its “door to the east” (bāb al-sharq)—almeria also became one of the peninsula’s most powerful cities, and its population was still growing during the taifa period, when several new suburbs were established. indeed, economic life at the local level is the subject of chapters 4 (“the artisanal and mercantile environment of the madīnat ilbīra and pechina,” pp. 163–229) and 7 (“the flourishing of production and trade in the cities of the provinces of ilbīra and pechina,” pp. 297–359). here, the author adopts a double perspective, analyzing first manufacturing activities and then trade. regarding the production of goods, archaeological investigations have clearly s h o w n t h a t p r o d u c t s s u c h a s l u x u r y ceramics and glass are well represented in the archaeological record as early as the third/ninth century. within the city, the textual sources document also other luxury products, including items made of iron, copper, and brass; leather goods; marble carvings; and perfumes. textiles seem to have been very important within local economic networks, and specific, renowned items such as silk (ḥarīr) became key products for the local economy, sold in mediterranean markets. later, silk ensured the wealth of the nasrid emirate of granada. local linen (kattān) was also prized. the consumption of such goods, which clearly increased in the fourth/tenth century, can be related to the expansion and refinement of the urban way of life. the author develops a very interesting approach to the study of production, combining archaeological findings and textual data, such as professional nisbas extracted from the ṭabaqāt literature. by doing so, he manages to circumvent the silence of the medieval authors on economic matters and to reconnect the products to their makers, who are usually invisible. these cities were also major hubs of trade, at different scales. the author demonstrates, through archaeological studies, that the cities’ inhabitants lived on the agro-pastoral products of their own hinterland. more important, however, were their regional trading functions. open to the mediterranean, they were also tightly connected with the capital al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) eneko lópez martínez de marigorta’s mercaderes, artesanos y ulemas • 342 city of cordoba, the node of all economic networks in umayyad al-andalus. for the first time, pechina seems to have been connected to cordoba by a route that remains partly unknown; following the foundation of almeria, it seems that the road between cordoba and the new harbor was one of the most important. at this point, granada became the node that connected the two segments of the route. t h r o u g h t h e v a s t s w e e p o f h i s scholarship, eneko lópez martínez de marigorta delivers with this book an insightful reflection on the construction and resilience of a territory. the book’s merging of spatial and cultural approaches, using a wide range of very different sources of information, proves both generative and innovative. by demonstrating the true importance of territories that are normally considered peripheral from a political perspective, this book makes an important contribution to the history of the islamic west. it shows that the kūras of elvira and pechina were crucial in the creation and development of relations with the opposite shore of the mediterranean and with the east, an important source of both trade goods and scholarship. another important conclusion is that academic periodization is open to discussion and debate. in this region the most important period seems to have been not the islamic conquest o f t h e e a r l y s e c o n d / e i g h t h c e n t u r y b u t r a t h e r t h e m i d d l e o f t h e f i f t h / 1. see, for instance, christine mazzoli-guintard, “almería, ¿ciudad-mundo en los siglos xi y xii?,” in carolus: homenaje a friedrich edelmayer, ed. francisco toro ceballos, 241–49 (alcalá la real: ayuntamiento de alcalá la real, 2017); christophe picard, “pechina-almeria aux ixe–xe siècles: la naissance d’un port omeyyade en méditerranée,” in villes méditerranéennes au moyen âge, ed. élisabeth malamut and mohamed ouerfelli, 163–76 (aix-en-provence: presses universitaires de provence, 2014); mohamed meouak, “les banū-l-rumāḥis et les banū ṭumlus, fonctionnaires au service de l’état hispano-umayyade,” in familias andalusíes: estudios onomástico-biográficos de al-andalus v, ed. manuela marín and jesús zanón, 273–88 (madrid: csic-instituto de cooperación con el mundo árabe, 1992). e l e v e n t h c e n t u r y , w h i c h s a w s u c h important changes as the emergence o f g r a n a d a a n d t h e a s c e n d a n c y o f a l m e r i a a t a m e d i t e r r a n e a n l e v e l . these developments produced a very d i f f e r e n t p a t t e r n f r o m t h a t s e e n i n visigothic iberia. o n e m a y n o t e s e v e r a l w e a k n e s s e s in the section on the book’s sources. first, most of the sources are referenced o n l y i n a n a r a b i c e d i t i o n , a n d n o t always the edition preferred by scholars. this can be disconcerting for readers in search of translated texts. moreover, s o m e r e f e r e n c e s a r e m i s t a k e n ; f o r instance, the mafākhir al-barbar is said t o h a v e b e e n e d i t e d a n d t r a n s l a t e d by muḥammad yaʿlā, but in fact it was only edited by him. in terms of historiography, it is unfortunate that the bibliographical references consulted do not include more works from the french scholars who have dedicated important studies to andalusian cities and especially pechina-almeria ( s u c h as chris t ine mazzoli-gu int ard, m o h a m e d m e o u a k , a n d c h r i s t o p h e picard).1 yet these observations concerning the bibliography do not detract from the high quality of the analysis or of the book overall, and its abundant pictorial documentation will be of great help to readers. original in its methodology, this very erudite book should certainly be welcomed, read, and discussed. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 343-347 book review reason and revelation in byzantine antioch: the christian translation program of abdallah ibn al-fadl, by alexandre m. roberts, is a remarkable achievement. to fully understand the importance of the book’s contributions, it is worth briefly introducing the scholarly fields with which the volume engages. i n r e c e n t t i m e s , s c h o l a r s h i p h a s focused on the relationships between the islamicate and byzantine worlds by examining manuscripts that prov id e traces of exchanges between the two. b e n e f i t i n g f r o m n i n e t e e n t h a n d twentieth-century catalogs and surveys of translations from arabic into greek and vice versa, new approaches to manuscript analysis, codicology, and paleography have allowed scholars to reach a deeper understanding of the historical dimension of translations. they have revisited old conclusions, undertaken new surveys, and arrived at a new state of the art. yet scholarship has yet to provide a fine-grained, comprehensive account of the complexity of historical phenomena related to these translations. the working questions include the following: to what extent are arabic-into-greek translations o f p h i l o s o p h i c a l a n d s c i e n t i f i c t e x t s connected to the translations undertaken in ninth-century baghdad? what kinds of exchanges (if any are traceable) took place between translators from arabic into greek working in byzantine territories in the tenth and eleventh centuries and translators of christian textual materials from greek into arabic? and what impact did translators’ religious beliefs have on the translation processes? the nature of challenging the historiography of philosophy, science, and religion through greek-into-arabic translations from eleventh-century antioch alexandre m. roberts. reason and revelation in byzantine antioch: the christian translation program of abdallah ibn al-fadl (oakland: university of california press, 2020), xiii + 357pp. isbn 978-0-520-34349-8. price: $95.00 (cloth), £74.00 (e-book). alberto bardi tsinghua university (alberto.bardi@live.com) © 2021 alberto bardi. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:alberto.bardi%40live.com?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 344 • alberto bardi the demand for translations from arabic on the byzantine side and the impact of these translations on byzantine intellectual history and politics are currently under e x p l o r a t i o n ; i t r e m a i n s t o b e f u l l y established what strategies were employed to absorb arabic-into-greek translations into the greek curricula. moreover, it is still unclear whether religious concerns and struggles—such as the emergence of iconoclasm—were responsible for what is usually deemed a loss of scientific and philosophical heritage in the byzantine world, a heritage whose transmission is ordinarily assumed to have been kept alive thanks to arabic or syriac translations. to tackle such questions is difficult not only because a scholar faces problems of ethnocentrism, such as the hellenophilia implicit in the narrative of the rebirth of greek philosophy and science in the renaissance, but also because she or he must deal with several crystallized—and still popular—theses having to do with byzantine and islamicate civilizations. prominent among these is the view of voltaire and edward gibbon, of byzantium as a period of general decline, and the repercussions of this thesis in modern scholarship. under the influence of this thesis, the rises of christianity and islam are usually deemed (e.g., by karl popper) t o b e r e s p o n s i b l e f o r t h e d e c l i n e o f philosophy and science as cultivated by the greeks. in this wide and complex scholarly frame, roberts’s contribution, as presented in the book under review, is relevant for at least two reasons. first, it provides a step forward in understanding the intellectual networks that linked the byzantine and islamicate worlds and the connections between arabic and greek scholarship after late antiquity. second, it shows, through textual evidence from unpublished sources that the author has often edited and translated for the first time, how the narrative of the decline of greek philosophy and science needs to be urgently readdressed in the historiography of science and philosophy between late antiquity and early modernity. roberts’s volume is arranged in two p a r t s . t h e f i r s t p a r t , “ t r a n s l a t i o n , ” r e c o n s t r u c t s t h e c o n t e n t a n d s o c i a l c o n t e x t o f t h e t r a n s l a t i o n p r o g r a m o f t h e d e a c o n a b d a l l a h i b n a l f a d l . the section contains three chapters: c h a p t e r 1 “ a s c h o l a r a n d h i s c i t y ” ; chapter 2 “a translation program”; and chapter 3 “a byzantine ecclesiastical curriculum.” working in the multicultural setting of eleventh-century antioch, ibn al-fadl faced a unique arabic-speaking milieu whose intellectual features he had to accurately apprehend in order to select fundamental theological (patristic), philosophical, and scientific texts and translate them from greek into arabic in such a way that the content could be delivered effectively and received within t h o s e f r a m e s ( f a i t h , s t y l e , l a n g u a g e , rhetoric). the greek corpus that the antiochene deacon worked on for his translations appears at first glance to be strictly religious, but a closer examination proves the superficial reader wrong. in the first part of the book, one learns to put aside modern and contemporary categorizations of knowledge fields and to adopt the lens of a historico-critical approach. as a matter of fact, basil’s hexaemeron —whose time-consuming t r a n s l a t i o n i b n a l f a d l u n d e r t o o k — concerns itself with matters of philosophy, astronomy, and cosmology. undoubtedly, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) alexandre m. roberts’ reason and revelation in byzantine antioch • 345 ibn al-fadl needed what we would consider a scientific and philosophical background to understand basil and the other authors with whom he engaged for his translations, such as isaac the syrian, john chrysostom, john of damascus, john of thessaloniki, and maximos the confessor. i n t h e s e c o n d p a r t o f t h e b o o k , “philosophy,” the reader can all but see ibn al-fadl’s program through the eyes of the translator himself, for roberts offers an aesthetic experience of immersion in the antiochene deacon’s philosophy of translation. this section, in continuity with the first part, covers the textual typologies and topics the antiochene scholar dealt with, and it contains the following chapters: chapter 4 “purpose in the prefaces”; chapter 5 “education i n t h e m a r g i n s ” ; c h a p t e r 6 “ l o g i c ” ; chapter 7 “physics”; chapter 8 “cosmol o g y ” ; c h a p t e r 9 “ a s t r o n o m y ” ; a n d chapter 10 “a shared scholarly culture.” the author provides editions and english t r a n s l a t i o n s o f p r e f a c e s a n d o t h e r relevant texts, including marginalia, authored by ibn al-fadl or taken from his sources. primary sources are reproduced in the original arabic or greek, with significant variant readings in footnotes (the sigla of all manuscripts are given in the bibliography). a translation is placed below each original text. in the case of text portions with unintuitive interpretations in english, the reader finds between brackets transliterations of the relevant words or sentences. accordingly, roberts’s choices are explained either in footnotes or in the commentary that accompanies the source. all of this material reveals the rationales behind ibn al-fadl’s translation choices in fields ranging from theology and moral philosophy to logic, natural philosophy, cosmology, and astronomy. with the primary sources presented in such detail, it is possible to grasp how the translator deploys rhetoric and style to present the content of the translated texts within the aristotelian framework that was familiar to the arabic-speaking elite of antioch. b y r e a d i n g i b n a l f a d l ’ s o w n t e x t s alongside roberts’s commentary, the reader learns an essential trait, one that is decisive to understand the importance of the author’s intellectual labor. many of the texts that ibn al-fadl translated into arabic and commented upon were already available in that language before him. from that point of view, there would appear to be nothing new about his work. nevertheless, the arabic elites whom ibn al-fadl was addressing needed to be approached with proper stylistic codes that would sound appropriate to them. herein lies the importance of rhetoric to the educational purpose of ibn al-fadl’s translation program. greek theological, philosophical, and scientific texts would n o t h a v e b e e n r e c e i v e d w i t h o u t t h e prefaces, the rhetoric, the corrections, and the stylistic improvements that ibn al-fadl adopted and whose traits are reconstructed and displayed in part two of roberts’s book. the reader is further aided by arabic and greek indexes at the end of the volume, which prove useful in consulting the sources presented in the book. ibn al-fadl’s skills in the art of translation can be fully appreciated in the cases in which roberts has identified, in addition to the greek original, the arabic s ou rc es t hat t he ant ioc hene s c holar had at his disposal. the reader can even compare the different arabic versions of a text thanks to roberts’s decision to print al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 346 • alberto bardi in boldface those textual portions that are identical in ibn al-fadl’s own version and in the source he used. an emblematic case is his reworking of a passage from basil’s hexaemeron concerning cosmology, which we can find both in an anonymous arabic version in ms sinai arabicus 270 and in ibn al-fadl’s translation in ms damascus op arabicus 142 (see pp. 200–221). reading the overlapping passages presented in user-friendly boldface not only readily reveals the translator’s choices but also sheds new light on his conceptual and terminological background. the relevance of ibn al-fadl’s reworked version—as roberts’s commentary accurately explains (pp. 221–30)—is manifold. among others, ( 1 ) t h e g e n e r a l t e r m i n o l o g y i s k e p t unmodified: ʿilla stands for the greek aitia (cause), al-kull for ta hola (universe, all things, the whole), ʿālam for kosmos ( t h e w o r l d ) , a n d a l m u b ṣ a r ā t f o r t a horata (the visible things); (2) the specific aristotelian terminology does not change: al-asbāb al-hayūlāniyya stands for hylikai hypotheseis (material causes) and isṭiqsāt/ istiqṣāt for stoicheia (elements); and (3) ibn al-fadl translates the greek aitia emphrona (intelligent cause) with ʿilla ʿāqila, while the previous translator had chosen ʿilla mafhūma (intellected cause). this choice not only proves the value of ibn al-fadl’s philosophical background but also gives a radically different meaning, as roberts points out: “aside from making god, usually considered beyond comprehension, into something that can be ‘understood,’ the anonymous translation had missed, or at least, weakened, the point of the passage, which is that the world did not arise out of mindless matter, but rather out of a first cause with mental capacity” (p. 222). on the basis of this and many other critical examinations of the sources presented in his volume, roberts argues convincingly for the importance of retranslations (which he explains in detail on p. 289) in educating the arabic elites of antioch, who shared a distinctive style of thought and were accustomed to receiving content in a specific rhetorical style. retranslations by ibn al-fadl show that questions about the transmission of greek science and philosophy into a christian context were not solved once and for all thanks to the reasoning of church fathers such as basil, chrysostom, and gregory and that the efforts of previous translators from greek into arabic in arabic-speaking contexts needed to be revisited. churchmen like ibn al-fadl understood that science and philosophy are not independent of the stylistic codes of the language in which they are conveyed. on this account, roberts has shown not only that translating science and philosophy from greek into a r a b i c p r e s e r v e d t h o s e b r a n c h e s o f knowledge but also that being christian played an essential role in challenging the receiving culture and in starting a process of appropriation and transformation of greek science and philosophy. in light of cases such as ibn al-fadl’s, it is evident that the old-fashioned thesis concerning the rebirth of greek science in the renaissance after its decline in byzantium breaks down. on the contrary, it was thanks to “religious” scholars such as ibn al-fadl that greek science and philosophy thrived. further discussions on the historiography of science and philosophy between late a n t i q u i t y a n d e a r l y m o d e r n i t y m u s t c o n s i d e r t r a n s l a t i o n p r o c e s s e s m o r e accurately by analyzing the social context in which they occurred and by taking manuscript analysis into account and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) alexandre m. roberts’ reason and revelation in byzantine antioch • 347 studying texts as entities embodied in their transmission and in the flux of history, rather than as abstract entities as in old-school philology. in sum, roberts has produced not only an impressive work of intellectual and social history but also an accomplished exemplar of the exploration of unpublished sources with insightful philological and linguistic examinations. since his book does not deal with the translation program alone, the title does not entirely capture the relevance of the topics contained in the volume. this is a minor problem, of course, but readers should be aware that the book goes beyond the focus on translation suggested by the subtitle a n d a l s o e n g a g e s e x t e n s i v e l y w i t h the practice and philosophy of translations (especially in its second part), as summarized above. m o s t o f t h e c h a p t e r s c o n t a i n i n t r o d u c t o r y p a r t s , w h i c h p r o v i d e an almost encyclopedic survey of the literature on a given topic. although this enhances the clarity of the author’s arguments for nonexperts and provide a helpful guide to novices, they could have been condensed, as the relevant literature is cited in the footnotes. in my opinion, as roberts has demonstrated his talent in dealing with unpublished sources and conveys his discoveries in a detailed manner, even the omission of these introductory sections would have detracted little from his achievements. despite these minor issues, the volume manages to strike a balance between the reconstruction of unpublished sources, the translations, and discussion of the extant literature (primary and secondary sources). the practice of translating works of science and philosophy in an arabicspeaking context has shed new light on the nature of the transmission of science and philosophy and on the nexus between transmission and its historical context. the topic of retranslations, in my view, has strong potential to foster future scholarship and might bring philology into dialogue with the histories of science, philosophy, and religions, and with the philosophy of science and religion. indeed, ibn al-fadl’s retranslations reveal the necessity of s h a p i n g s c i e n t i f i c a n d p h i l o s o p h i c a l content according to expected styles in order to communicate that content to a specific community (in this case an arab elite within a christianized aristotelian framework) so that it can be received, accepted, and transformed. such a view is not so distant from reflections on the role of language and styles with reference to the nature of science as elaborated by philosophers such as ludwik fleck, thomas kuhn, and ian hacking. to what extent are retranslations connected to the communication of scientific discoveries and their acceptance or rejection? this is just one of the many questions that arise upon reading roberts’s book. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 348-355 book review in his new book, konrad hirschler continues his research on the history of libraries and catalogs. after studying the catalog of the damascene ashrafiyya library,1 hirschler remains in damascus but this time turns his gaze to the books of the ḥanbalī scholar yūsuf ibn ʿabd al-hādī (840–909/1437–1503). ibn ʿabd al-hādī, also known as ibn mibrad, was a minor scholarly personality. he belonged to the maqdisī branch of local ḥanbalism, and like many members of that branch, he lived in the damascene neighborhood of ṣāliḥiyya, on the slopes of mt. qāsiyūn, west of the * cecilia palombo read and discussed with me the last version of this text. i would like to thank her here for her sensible suggestions. 1. konrad hirschler, medieval damascus: plurality and diversity in an arabic library; the ashrafiya library catalogue (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016). 2. ṣāliḥiyya has been at the center of recent scholarly attention: see toru miura, dynamism in the urban society of damascus: the ṣāliḥiyya quarter from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries (leiden: brill, 2016). 3. said aljoumani and konrad hirschler, muʾallafāt yūsuf b. ḥasan b. ʿabd al-hādī wa-musāhamatuhu fī ḥifẓ al-turāth al-fikrī (leiden: brill, 2021). the book is more than a translation of the english one presented here, especially chapters 4 to 6. it will not be discussed here. i thank mohamed merheb for drawing my attention to it. old city’s walls.2 ibn ʿabd al-hādī traveled little and wrote a lot—an estimated 800 works according to hirschler—but not many of his works enjoyed wide dissemination. he was a precise and dedicated bibliophile equipped with a strong sense of himself and of the prestigious scholarly tradition to which he belonged. accordingly, he compiled several autobibliographies, one of which has just been published by said aljoumani and hirschler.3 most importantly, for the purposes of the book under review, ibn ʿabd al-hādī also accumulated a collection of some 3,000 works konrad hirschler. a monument to medieval syrian book culture: the library of ibn ʿabd al-hādī. edinburgh series in classical islamic history and culture (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020), x + 612 pp. isbn 978-14-7445-156-7. price: £85.00 (cloth). caterina bori* università di bologna (caterina.bori@unibo.it) © 2021 caterina bori. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:caterina.bori%40unibo.it?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 349 • caterina bori contained in almost 600 manuscripts that, toward the end of his life, he endowed to the ʿumariyya madrasa along with their fihrist (catalog). the fihrist survived, and so did a substantial portion of his book endowment. both lie at the heart of this study. the research carried out by hirschler combines two main dimensions that are already explicit in the title of the book. one focuses on ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s project of constructing a large corpus of books that he itemized in his fihrist and donated to a madrasa that was particularly prominent in the history of syrian ḥanbalism. with a special emphasis on materiality (here “material philology”), hirschler explores how and why ibn ʿabd al-hādī assembled his collection.4 hirschler argues that ibn ʿabd al-hādī conceived of this corpus of books as a monument to the heyday of the local culture of hadith transmission, an activity whose literary outcomes, social mechanics, and cultural implications have recently been at the center of a growing scholarly trend.5 the second and more ambitious dimension that hirschler intends to illuminate through the case study of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s fihrist and his extant books is the social and cultural significance of 4. for nonspecialists, a clarification of the differences between “material philology” and “codicology” may have been appropriate. the reference is to stephen nichols, “philology in a manuscript culture,” speculum: a journal of medieval studies 65, no. 1 (1990): 1–10, but see also, slightly later, idem, “why material philology? some thoughts,” in philologie als textwissenschaft: alte und neue horizonte, ed. helmut tervooren and horst wenzel, special issue, zeitschrift für deutsche philologie 116 (1997): 10–30. a useful overview can be found in lena rohrbach, “material philology,” in handbook of pre-modern nordic memory studies: interdisciplinary approaches, ed. jürg glauser, pernille hermann, and stephen a. mitchell, part 1: disciplines, traditions and perspectives, 210–16 (berlin: de gruyter, 2018). 5. in english, see, above all, garret davidson, a social and intellectual history of hadith transmission across a thousand years (boston: brill, 2020) and before him the seminal article by eerik dickinson, “ibn al-ṣalāḥ al-shahrazūrī and the isnād,” journal of the american oriental society 122, no. 3 (2002): 481–505. 6. chapters 1 to 4 with introduction and conclusion, pp. 1–170. 7. chapters 5 and 6, pp. 171–554. owning and endowing books in the late medieval period (p. 2). in this regard, ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s fihrist and endowment are presumably treated as representative of a larger book culture, although—as will be pointed out below—his collection bore the marks of a highly distinctive personal and individual project. hirschler explains that ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s collection deserves to be studied because “it is surrounded by an outstandingly dense documentation” ( i b i d . ) . t h e b o o k u n f o l d s a s a c l o s e examination of this documentation. without being explicitly divided into two parts, a monument to medieval syrian book culture is in fact organized in two sets of chapters. the first one consists of four narrative chapters that cover ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s life and his book endowment: its material aspects, aims, and history.6 the second one consists of two chapters and is bulkier.7 it comprises an edition of yūsuf ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s fihrist, preceded by identification of the items mentioned in it. the single works are also matched—when possible—with ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s extant manuscripts and modern editions. two sections of plates, at the end of chapters 4 and 6, allow the reader to follow the argument and to visualize the sources and https://brill.com/view/title/39428 https://brill.com/view/title/39428 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) konrad hirschler’s a monument to medieval syrian book culture • 350 much of the information provided by the author. in addition to the general index and bibliography, the provided indexes of titles, authors, thematic categories, and identified manuscripts of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s books (pp. 582–612) are necessary ancillary tools to make the best of the catalog. the book is rich and informed by a variety of approaches with a strong penchant for material history. it starts by providing context for ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s scholarly background, his ancestors and descendants, and more generally his family branch—the maqdisīs—that was renowned for its commitment to hadith transmission.8 hadith transmission is also the field of which ibn ʿabd al-hādī was most fond, as is clear from his own book collection. despite his impressive written p r o d u c t i o n , b i o g r a p h i e s o f i b n ʿ a b d al-hādī are not very informative. yet close inspection of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s books (i.e., manuscripts) allows hirschler to uncover details about this scholar’s real-estate and professional activities, details that are omitted by biographical sources. this is one of the main points the book seeks to make: that documentary and manuscript sources are essential for bringing to light information that remains below the radar of normative and narrative texts. at the end of the first chapter, two topics are tangentially touched upon ( p p . 5 9 – 6 3 ) . t h e y a r e p e r i p h e r a l t o 8. see stefan leder, “charismatic scripturalism: the ḥanbalī maqdisīs of damascus,” der islam 74, no. 2 (1997): 279–304. 9. too often overlooked is denis gril, “de la khirqa à la ṭarīqa: continuité et évolution dans l’identification et la classification des voies,” in le soufisme en égypte et dans le monde musulman à l’époque ottomane, ed. rachida chih and catherine mayeur-jaouen, 58–81 (cairo: ifao, 2009), esp. 63–72, 80 with n. 75. gril makes important points about the meaning of khirqa treatises written in the ayyubid and mamluk periods. 10. arjan post, the journeys of a taymiyyan sufi: sufism through the eyes of ʿimād al-dīn aḥmad al-wāsiṭī (d. 711/1311) (leiden: brill, 2020). 11. hirschler, monument, 60–61; yūsuf ibn ʿabd al-hādī, badʾ al-ʿulqa bi-lubs al-khirqa, in lubs al-khirqa hirschler’s agenda but deserve to be mentioned here since they are important for a complete understanding of late medieval syrian ḥanbalism. the first is ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s sufism, which raises the broader issue of the relationship of hadith scholars and transmitters with local forms of taṣawwuf. as hirschler observes (p. 59), the mutual permeability of the boundary between these trends h a s b e e n r e p e a t e d l y p o i n t e d o u t i n recent research. 9 nonetheless, its full configuration has yet to be understood. one significant step in this direction has been taken by arjan post in his book on the tradition-oriented taṣawwuf of the taymiyyan sufi ʿimād al-dīn al-wāsiṭī (d. 711/1311). 10 at some point at the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century, ʿimād al-dīn al-wāsiṭī became a student of ibn taymiyya (d. 728/1328) in damascus and the sufi teacher of ibn taymiyya’s circle of followers, many of whom were devoted to hadith transmission and scholarship. al-wāsiṭī devised a sober, scripturalist, prophet-centered taṣawwuf. like many of his peers, ibn ʿabd al-hādī was the author of a booklet on the khirqa (the initiatory sufi cloak) in which he professes to have received the cloak of the qādirī brotherhood via a lineage featuring the names of the authoritative ḥanbalīs ibn rajab (d. 795/1392), ibn qayyim al-jawziyya ( d . 7 5 1 / 1 3 5 0 ) , a n d i b n t a y m i y y a . 1 1 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 351 • caterina bori he also reports, from the shāfiʿī hadith specialist ibn nāṣir al-dīn al-dimashqī (d. 842/1438), a famous statement in which ibn taymiyya describes the qādirī path as “the greatest path among the well-known ones.”12 all these elements are duly noted by hirschler, but it remains unclear what boasting of having worn the qādirī khirqa meant to ibn ʿabd al-hādī and, overall, what the implications of claiming such spiritual affiliations were. in what senses and ways a scholar like ibn ʿabd al-hādī was a sufi is a big question that remains to be answered.13 the mention of ibn taymiyya’s name leads to the second issue—namely, ibn taymiyya’s marginal position in ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s library. the broader issue at stake is, of course, the (not so obvious) r e l a t i o n s h i p o f l a t e m e d i e v a l s y r i a n ḥanbalism to the legacy of the towering and controversial ibn taymiyya. although quite a few of ibn taymiyya’s occasional writings are recorded in ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s f i h r i s t , n o n e o f h i s b i g t r e a t i s e s i s . fī al-sulūk al-ṣūfī, ed. ʿāṣim ibrāhīm al-kayālī, 45–75 (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2008), 72–73. 12. yūsuf ibn ʿabd al-hādī, badʾ al-ʿulqa, 28. famously, these materials were noticed by george makdisi in “ibn taimīya: a ṣūfī of the qādiriya order,” american journal of arabic studies 1 (1974): 118–29, at 124; idem, “the ḥanbalī school and sufism,” boletín de la asociación española de orientalistas 15 (1979): 115–26, at 123, 125. see also idem, “l’isnād initiatique de muwaffaq al-dīn ibn qudāma,” cahiers de l’herne 13 (1970): 88–96. 13. while writing this review, i became aware of daphna ephrat, sufi masters and the creation of saintly spheres in medieval syria (leeds: arc humanities press, 2021) which may provide answers to some of these questions. 14. stefan leder, yāsīn m. al-sawwās, and maʾmūn al-ṣāgharjī, muʿjam al-samāʿāt al-dimashqiyya: les certificats d’audition à damas, 550–750/1155–1349, 2 vols. (damascus: institut français d’études arabes de damas, 1996–2000). 15. i make this point in “ḥadīth culture and ibn taymiyya’s controversial legacy in fifteenth century damascus: ibn nāṣir al-dīn al-dimashqī and his al-radd al-wāfir (d. 842/1438),” in the presence of the prophet in early modern and contemporary islam: the prophet between doctrine, literature and arts; historical legacies and their unfolding, ed. denis gril, stefan reichmuth, and dilek sarmis, vol. 1 (leiden: brill, 2021). the work of ibn nāṣir al-dīn in question is al-radd al-wāfir ʿalā man zaʿama anna man sammā ibn taymiyya shaykh al-islām kāfir, ed. zuhayr al-shāwīsh (beirut: al-maktab al-islāmī, 1393 [1973 or 1974]; 2nd rev. ed. 1400/1980). 16. well argued by fozia bora with regard to historiography in writing history in the medieval islamic world: the value of chronicles as archives (london: i. b. tauris, 2019), 1–7, 12–27. according to hirschler, this is due to ibn taymiyya’s scant engagement in hadith transmission, which is corroborated by his minor role in the index of damascene audition certificates when compared to the maqdisīs.14 although there is certainly some truth in this claim, it is equally true that the samāʿāt excerpts reported by ibn nāṣir al-dīn al-dimashqī in his defense of those who acknowledged ibn taymiyya as shaykh al-islām do attest to some involvement on ibn taymiyya’s part in local hadith transmission.15 this element alerts us to remain vigilant about the limits of the index of damascene audition certificates and not to give up exploring literary sources as repositories of documentary ones.16 hirschler suggests that there were two local trends of ḥanbalism: a ṣāliḥiyyacentered, hadith-focused ḥanbalism, and a taymiyyan ḥanbalism concentrated within the city walls (p. 63). it is an interesting suggestion that deserves to be taken up in the future. the boundary al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) konrad hirschler’s a monument to medieval syrian book culture • 352 b e t w e e n t h e s e g r o u p s w a s p r o b a b l y more fluid than one might think. a good illustration of this point is muḥammad b. aḥmad ibn ʿabd al-hādī (d. 744/1343), one of yūsuf’s ancestors. muḥammad, too, was a ṣāliḥiyya-based ḥanbalī who was committed to hadith. he studied with the great hadith scholars of the day, al-dhahabī (d. 748/1348) and al-mizzī (d. 742/1341), taught in the ṣāliḥiyya (at al-ṣadriyya madrasa), and was close to ibn taymiyya, whose life he recounted and documented in the most voluminous and important biography of ibn taymiyya we possess.17 n o t o n l y i s m u ḥ a m m a d ’ s w o r k w e l l represented in yūsuf ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s library,18 but yūsuf also compiled two bibliographies of his ancestor’s writings. yet muḥammad’s al-ʿuqūd al-durriyya, so important for us, is not included in the fihrist.19 hirschler’s book is thus a good reminder of the difficulty we face in figuring out the relationship between these close but diverse groups within the same school of law, a relationship we generally tend to depict as neater than it effectively was. this first chapter also performs a service by reminding us that little has yet been done on postand extrataymiyyan ḥanbalism. the book continues by approaching ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s collection and fihrist from different angles. chapter 2 addresses the purpose of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s project, which was—according to the author—the creation of a monument, or “museum of texts,” commemorating ṣāliḥiyya’s 17. muḥammad b. aḥmad ibn ʿabd al-hādī, al-ʿuqūd al-durriyya min manāqib shaykh al-islām aḥmad b. taymiyya, ed. muḥammad al-ḥāmid fiqī (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-hijāz, 1938). on his life, see ibn rajab, al-dhayl ʿalā ṭabaqāt al-ḥanābila, ed. ʿ abd al-raḥmān b. sulaymān al-ʿuthaymīn, 5 vols. (mecca: maktabat al-ʿubaykān, 2005), 5:117–23. 18. see hirschler, monument, 603 for references to the fihrist’s entries. 19. hirschler, monument, 94, and entries 511–12, 514–15. great legacy of hadith scholarship and transmission (p. 113). chapter 3 adds t o t h e m o n u m e n t a l i z a t i o n a r g u m e n t b y e x a m i n i n g t h e m a t e r i a l i t y o f i b n ʿabd al-hādī’s books: the shape of his manuscripts, the layout of their notes, and ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s archival practices. chapter 4 retraces the afterlife of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s collection. it is here that the exquisite local flavor of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s books enters into conversation with the broader history of the nineteenth-century european book trade in the arab middle east, through which many of the oriental manuscript collections of western libraries took shape. hirschler convincingly shows that ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s collection was saved from dispersal by its unattractive character together with the foundation, in 1878, of the public library in damascus, where ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s corpus was transferred. in the last chapter (chap. 5), the author unpacks the logic of the fihrist and presents the difficulties involved in identifying the works it mentions. the identification of the works, authors, subjects, extant editions, and/or manuscripts for each of the titles listed in the catalog covers the rest of the book and forms its most voluminous part (pp. 198–511). the argument running throughout the book revolves around the idea that ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s collection and endowment constituted an attempt to “monumentalise a bygone era of scholarly practices, namely post-canonical ḥadīth transmission” (p. 4). this argument is validated through several al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 353 • caterina bori indicators originating from hirschler’s insightful reading of his materials: ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s careful construction of a corpus of books that consisted mainly of small-scale hadith booklets with a strong ḥanbalī-ṣāliḥī bent in terms of their transmission history; his transmission notes, which drew renewed attention to booklets that had gone unread for a hundred years; the fihrist itself, which was meant to accompany the books and framed itself as a guide to the (monument’s?) visitor; and the repeated readings to which ibn ʿabd al-hādī subjected his household in order to bid farewell to his books right before their endowment in 897/1492. finally, the choice of the endowment’s destination—the ʿumariyya madrasa— was not accidental. as the madrasa that embodied the origins of ṣāliḥī ḥanbalism, it would have been particularly meaningful for somebody like ibn ʿabd al-hādī. m a t e r i a l l y s p e a k i n g , h i r s c h l e r argues that ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s project w a s r e i n f o r c e d b y h i s c r e a t i o n o f a significant set of new books by binding small booklets together into new, largescale composite manuscripts. on these newly bound books, ibn ʿabd al-hādī left evidence of his presence by means of distinctive “legalized” transmission notes that functioned, according to hirschler, as stamps. contrary to the norm, ibn ʿabd al-hādī wrote his notes on the title page. his presence on his books was thus highly visible and distinctive. finally, ibn ʿabd al-hādī used his newly bound books as archives by sewing into them a significant amount of his paperwork. 20. one significant title among others is gülru necipoğlu, cemal kafadar, and cornell h. fleischer, eds., treasures of knowledge: an inventory of the ottoman palace library (1502/3–1503/4), 2 vols. (leiden: brill, 2019). for hirschler, these are all strong markers of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s “conscious project of monumentalising what was for him the the glorious past of his hometown” (p. 67). this book is part of a trend of growing interest in the history of libraries, catalogs, and book collections.20 it participates in a wider documentary and material wave that studies archival practices rather than archives and manuscripts as objects rather than as texts, with their own life cycles, specific agencies, and performative functions. it is from this perspective, and not so much from that of intellectual history, that the book approaches the fihrist as well as ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s extant corpus. in this regard, hirschler’s achievements are manifold. his book illustrates the fascinating historical trajectory of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s books, which passed from book markets to ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s home and then through the ʿumariyya madrasa, the modern al-maktaba al-ʿumūmiyya, and the ẓāhiriyya library before ending up in the present-day al-asad national library, where they sit today. the book makes the long afterlife of this book collection extraordinarily alive. in so doing, it succeeds in showing the debt that a modern-day manuscript library owes to the personal project of a single seventh/ fifteenth-century scholar of middling rank. equally impressive is the amount of information hirschler can extract from his material inspection of the manuscripts. it will also be important for scholars who work with damascene samāʿāt to know that 94% of the manuscript notes that leder, al-sawwās, and al-ṣaghārjī indexed in al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) konrad hirschler’s a monument to medieval syrian book culture • 354 their muʿjam come from ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s collection (p. 67). finally, ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s very personal self-inscription on his books and hirschler’s skillful grasp of it allow the latter to track the provenance of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s books even though some of them are now scattered around the world. it is thus a relief to observe that the loss of historical information that normally accompanies unprovenanced objects or manuscripts is significantly reduced here.21 i have one further point to raise and one complaint to make. let me start with the former. as anticipated above, part of hirschler’s agenda is demonstrating that manuscript and documentary sources and their material inspection can yield much information that literary sources do not divulge. in this vein, the contribution of hirschler’s work in general has been influential. yet at the same time, the book under review also shows how much scholars can gain not by turning away from the dominance of narrative and normative sources 22 but by activating a fruitful interplay between different types of sources. it is only thanks to ibn ṭūlūn that chunks of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s history of ṣāliḥiyya have come down to us (pp. 48, 58). and it is ibn ṭūlūn, too, who tells us that at some point ibn ʿabd al-hādī endowed his books to the al-ʿumariyya madrasa (p. 97). “in fact,” writes hirschler, “we do not have a single note stating that 21. charming discussions by cecilia palombo on working with (unprovenanced) collections can be read on the website of the embedding conquest project: https://emco.hcommons.org/2021/03/19/it-belongs-in-amuseum-or-does-it/ and https://emco.hcommons.org/2020/12/21/working-with-collections/. 22. hirschler, “from archive to archival practices,” journal of the american oriental society 131, no. 1 (2016): 1–28, at 3. 23. see, for example, pp. 4, 67, 72, 80, 83, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95, 111, 112, 117, 138, 140, 141, 145, 149, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, and 167. 24. federico bellentanti and mario panico, in “the meanings of monuments and memorials: toward a semiotic approach,” punctum 2, no. 1 (2016): 28–46, advocate a semiotic approach to monuments but also any of his books were endowed to the ʿumariyya madrasa” (p. 96). the work on material and documentary sources carried out by hirschler and others is innovative, refreshing, and inspiring. now that these materials have begun to receive the attention they deserve, and their value has accordingly begun to be appreciated, serious critical reflection is needed not only on their potential but also on their limitations, if we are to make the most of them. as for the complaint, it regards the heuristic term devised by hirschler to explain the aim of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s project—namely, the idea, repeated many times throughout the book, that ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s purpose was to erect a monument to commemorate a golden past of thriving hadith transmission that was focused on the ṣāliḥiyya neighborhood and was on the brink of disappearance by ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s time. given the prominence of this argument in the book,23 it is surprising that the concept of “monument” as a heuristic tool is never discussed. the a b s e n c e o f s u c h a d i s c u s s i o n i n a n otherwise theoretically rich study has the consequence of making the monument argument not fully convincing. in related literature, monuments are defined as “built forms erected to confer meanings on space.”24 recent approaches emphasize that a monument bears multiple meanings https://emco.hcommons.org/2021/03/19/it-belongs-in-a-museum-or-does-it/ https://emco.hcommons.org/2021/03/19/it-belongs-in-a-museum-or-does-it/ https://emco.hcommons.org/2020/12/21/working-with-collections/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 355 • caterina bori that stem from the interplay among its designers, its users, the monument itself, a n d t h e s u r r o u n d i n g e n v i r o n m e n t . 2 5 the spatial dimension of a monument is a central aspect of it.26 the issues of space and users are too important to be overlooked. w h e r e a n d h o w i n t h e a l ʿ u m a r i y y a madrasa were ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s books placed? were they displayed and thus visually accessible? hirschler discusses the significance of the ʿumariyya location for ibn ʿabd al-hādī in a paragraph titled “placing the monument” (pp. 103–12), yet the monument is not the ʿumariyya building but the collection of books itself. it is thus the spatial positioning of the collection within the ʿumariyya with its ensuing consumption “as a monument” that one expects to find discussed here. one might assume that hirscher uses the word “monument” metaphorically to mean “a tribute to.” this does not seem to be the case, however, because the word occurs in the title of the book and too often thereafter to be just a suggestive metaphor. furthermore, the paragraph on “placing the monument” just mentioned shows that the word is not intended figuratively. ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s endowment is also referred to as a “museum of texts” ( p . 1 1 3 ) . p r e s e r v a t i o n , c o n s e r v a t i o n , and safeguarding are perhaps implicit illustrate the main approaches to the subject. 25. ibid. 26. henri lefevbre, the production of space (oxford: blackwell, 1991), 220–26 (originally published in french in 1974 as la production de l’espace). dimensions here. yet a museum—like a monument—is also, and above all, a place of visual accessibility and display. on the contrary, what emerges with great force throughout the book is the highly individual character of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s enterprise. in putting together his book collection, in binding insignificant booklets into larger ones, in signing his notes and styling them in a strikingly distinctive fashion, in placing them on the first rather than the last page of his books, in sewing his own paperwork into his manuscripts, and finally in endowing all of this to a famous ḥanbalī madrasa, this littleknown ḥanbalī scholar exhibited a robust sense of self. this is a self that appears inextricably tied to his books, which in turn bespoke the scholarly profile of the community ibn ʿabd al-hādī belonged to and its chosen place (ṣāliḥiyya). in other words, a conscious and deliberate personal project surfaces from hirschler’s material study of ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s library and catalog. ibn ʿabd al-hādī’s self-inscription into these materials is so pervasive that both the fihrist and the books could almost be read as material ego documents. this is precisely what strikes the present reader, and it is here that material philology as advocated and practiced by konrad hirschler performs at its best. conference report al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 323-329 this three-day virtual conference, organized by huda fakhreddine (university of pennsylvania), david larsen (new york university), and hany rashwan (university of birmingham) and hosted by the university of oxford’s c o m p a r a t i v e c r i t i c i s m a n d t r a n s l a tion research centre (occt), delivered a splendid set of twenty-two papers by scholars from all over the world, examining a broad variety of multilingual texts from islamic history. in october 2020, the organizers called for papers examining the web of literary practices and critical theories of multilingual writers working in urdu, persian, turkish, arabic, kurdish, and other languages of asia and africa, which fall outside the eurocentric purview of modern comparative literature. the respondents, including individuals from fourteen countries, fulfilled the ambitious scope of the call for papers. thanks to the efforts of rawad wehbe (university of pennsylvania), the logistics of the conference proceeded smoothly. the conference started on thursday, july 22 at 10 a.m. et (3 p.m. british summer time) with matthew reynolds, chair of the occt, who welcomed attendees with some opening remarks in support of the conference’s mission of challenging eurocentric approaches to the discipline. hany rashwan then introduced the first keynote speaker, fatemeh keshavarz (director of the school of languages, literatures, and cultures at the university of maryland), whose address, “multilingual poetry, the information highway of the medieval muslim world,” focused on poetry’s transmission along the “silk road of literary distribution and understanding,” with the persian sufi fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī ( 1 2 1 3 – 1 2 8 9 c e ) a s a p r i m e e x a m p l e . with a review of ʿirāqī’s life, travels, and pre-modern comparative literary practice in the multilingual islamic world(s) (oxford comparative criticism and translation research centre/occt, university of oxford, 22–24 july 2021) conference organizers: huda fakhreddine, david larsen, and hany rashwan report by: clarissa burt united states naval academy (burt@usna.edu) © 2021 clarissa burt. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:burt%40usna.edu?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 324 • clarissa burt texts, supplemented with references to rūmī, saʿdī of shiraz, and several others, keshavarz argued convincingly for cosmopolitan multilinguality in elite sufi circles, where linguistic and cultural diversity was embraced and celebrated. t h u r s d a y ’ s f i r s t s e s s i o n , e n t i t l e d “multilingual scholars and scholarly practice” and chaired by david larsen, followed kesharvarz’s keynote. larsen introduced claire gallien (université montpellier 3), whose presentation was e n t i t l e d “ m u l t i l i n g u a l c o m m e n t a r y literatures of the islamicate and their r o l e i n e a r l y m o d e r n o r i e n t a l i s m . ” i n t h i s s o p h i s t i c a t e d p i e c e , g a l l i e n examined the disposition of manuscripts (including quranic commentaries and other works of islamic science) in arabic, persian, and turkish that were gathered as artifacts by great britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and remain unedited. she argues that the selection of materials for translation and publication in english fed orientalist conceptions and prejudices and ignored the intellectual engagement that multilingual commentaries represent. gallien gave the example of richardson’s 1774 translation of ḥāfiẓ, and its reliance on the commentary by ahmed sudi bosnevi (an ottoman scholar of the sixteenth century ce), which eclipsed more mystical commentaries by sururi and shemʿi in the orientalist reception. a l i k a r j o o r a v a r y ( b u c k n e l l ) g a v e a paper entitled “a brocade of many textures: literary trilingualism in 14th century anatolia, iran and beyond,” in which he displayed stunning examples of trilingual literary production from the court of kadi burhâneddin of sivas (d. 1398). pointing to mulammaʿ and talmīʿ as critical terms for multilingual stylistics in islamic poetry, karjoo-ravary argued for a hierarchical theory of language use in constructing texts for the community of scholars and saints and traced its continued use in trilingual texts with reference to nineteenth-century works from iran, eastern anatolia, and central asia. z e y n e p o k t a y u s l u ( b o ğ a z i ç i university) presented “sufi metaphysics as literary theory: şeyh gālib’s beauty and love.” sketching the life and works of the multilingual ottoman sufi şeyh gālib (d. 1798 ce), oktay-uslu focused on gālib’s turkish mathnavῑ poem ḥüsn ü ʿaşḳ (beauty and love), in which she found three layers of allegory: a mystical cosmology, a sufi pathway to the divine, a n d t h e w r i t i n g p r o c e s s . o k t a y u s l u considered this layered analogical tale using its relationship with ibn ʿarabī’s doctrine of the oneness of being and its interaction with rūmī’s work, arguing that only such multidimensional analysis opens complex layers of meaning in gālib’s text. c h r i s t o p h e r l i v a n o s ( u n i v e r s i t y of wisconsin at madison) chaired the second friday session, “translinguistic adaptations of genre and form.” maryam fatima (university of massachusetts at amherst) presented “ʿibrat for an islami pablik: nineteenth-century historical novel in urdu,” in which she examined the historical novels through which abdul halim sharar (1860–1926) navigated his own form of colonial modernity. these contain a unique mix of islamic scholarship and western-style rich paratextual notes, revealing sharar’s control of islamic historiography. next, alaaeldin mahmoud (american university of the middle east in kuwait) p r e s e n t e d “ r e t h i n k i n g t h e a r t o f al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) conference report: pre-modern comparative literary practice • 325 composition (inshāʾ) in arabic and persian maqāmāt: badīʿ al zamān al-hamadhānī and al-ḥarīrī in dialogue with ḥamīd al-dīn balkhī.” using theoretical terms from al-shaybānī (d. 298/910–11) and qalqashandī (d. 821/1418), mahmoud engaged with the arabic maqāmāt of a l h a m a d h ā n ī a n d a l ḥ a r ī r ī a n d t h e persian maqāmāt of ḥamīd al-dīn balkhī (d. 599/1202–3) as multimodal productions. mahmoud looked specifically at the use of the persian term sabk for the “stylistics” expounded by muḥammad taqī bahār in his sabkshināsī, yā tārīḵh-i taṭavvur-i nasr-i fārsī (stylistics, or the history of change in persian prose), questioning the crosslingual relationship of sabk with taṣannuʿ (artfulness). s i m o n l e e s e ( u t r e c h t u n i v e r s i t y ) presented the panel’s third paper, entitled “refrains of comparison: bringing the p e r s i a n r a d ī f i n t o a r a b i c p o e t r y i n e i g h t e e n t h c e n t u r y i n d i a . ” f o c u s i n g on the multilingual poetry of ghulām ʿalī “āzād” al-bilgrāmī (d. 1786) and m u ḥ a m m a d b ā q i r “ ā g ā h ” a l m a d r ā s ī (d. 1806), leese demonstrated how these poets incorporated the persian stylistic radīf (refrain) into their arabic poetic compositions and engaged in theoretical disputes using the terms ʿarab, ʿajam, and hindī to signify relationships between languages and literary practices in arabic, persian, and the languages of india as a critical apparatus for their multilingual poetics. in the last presentation of the day, orhan elmaz (university of saint andrews) g a v e a p a p e r e n t i t l e d “ c o n t r a s t i n g masculine and feminine poetic voices in wine poetry: cases from arabic and o t t o m a n p o e t r y . ” u s i n g s e l e c t i o n s from pre-islamic arabic poetry through sixteenth-century ottoman poetry, elmaz s k e t c h e d t h e w i n e s o n g t r a d i t i o n i n arabic and turkish with its contrasts in poetic conventions, attitudes, and social functions and its occasional overlaps with love poetry. elmaz highlighted selections from the ottoman poets fużûlî (1483–1556) and bâḳî (1526–1600), in which abstemious attitudes toward wine contrast with the fakhr of wine songs in pre-islamic poetry. elsewhere, the female ottoman poet mihrî hatun (1460–1506/1512) composed wine poetry that elmaz compared, in imagery and sentiment, to the poetry of al-aʿshā (d. 627 ce). w h e n t h e c o n f e r e n c e r e s u m e d o n friday july 23, hany rashwan chaired the day’s first panel, “translation and non-translation in the islamic world,” and introduced the first speaker, peter webb (leiden university), who presented a paper entitled “arabic texts as ottoman literary phenomena: the multilingual l i v e s o f s a r ḥ a l ʿ u y ū n ( p a s t u r i n g a t the wellsprings of knowledge).” webb traced the dissemination of al-risāla al-hazaliyya (the witty letter) by the andalusian poet ibn zaydūn (1003–1071) and the fourteenth-century commentary on it composed by the egyptian poet ibn nubāta (1287–1366), sarḥ al-ʿuyūn, which exploded in popularity in the subsequent c e n t u r i e s a s a t t e s t e d b y t h e s h e e r number and geographical range of extant manuscripts of the work. webb followed ibn nubāta’s use of a persian phrase across manuscripts to see how scribes understood it (or not) across time, space, and linguistic difference. on the basis of the content of sarḥ al-ʿuyūn, webb posits that the ottoman popularity of the work derived from its presentation of succinct narratives of classical pre-islamic arabic al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 326 • clarissa burt figures, which summarized the cultural traditions of arab lands under ottoman control. in “islam in the vernacular: the world(s) of arabi malayalam, and multilingual i m a g i n a r i e s i n k e r a l a , s o u t h i n d i a , ” muneer aram kuzhiyan (aligarh muslim university) examined literary production in arabi malayalam, a form of malayalam in arabic script with lexical borrowings from arabic, tamil, persian, urdu, and sanskrit. kuzhiyan focused on muhyiddin mala by qāḍī muḥammad (d. 1616), a praise poem for the twelfth-century sufi master shaykh ʿabd al-qādir al-jīlānī (d. 1166), which contributed to “translating islam” for the muslims of kerala. kuzhiyan spoke of anthologies of other “sabina songs,” as devotional texts in arabi malayalam were called. he offered several etymologies for the term but focused more on translations into arabi malayalam in the second half of the eighteenth century, situating arabi malayalam as a locus for multilingual comparative studies in relation to its many languages and cultures of contact. ayelet kotler (university of chicago) presented “translation as a poetic point of departure: persianizing the rāmāyaṇa in early 17th-century india.” in this wellargued paper on mas̠navī-i rām u sītā, a persian verse translation of the sanskrit e p i c r ā m ā y a ṇ a b y t h e s e v e n t e e n t h century north indian poet masīḥ saʿdallāh pānipatī, kotler analyzed masīḥ’s faithfulness to the sanskrit original and his creative process in building the persian poetic text to argue for analytical criticism of premodern persian translations through the values inherent in such compositions as moghul mediations of indian culture in persian. simon leese chaired the second friday session, “minorities, shibboleths and polyglossia.” nasim basiri (oregon state university) offered the first paper, entitled “rethinking queering in the pre-modern p e r s i a n p o e t r y : a d i a l o g u e b e t w e e n rūmī and ḥāfeẓ-e shīrāzī.” in her paper, basiri addressed modern scholarship of premodern persian poetry and its neglect of lgbtq+ identities. through her readings of rūmī and ḥāfiẓ, basiri aimed to “save pre-modern queer poetry from marginalization” and “read queerness” into the study of persian poetry, in the process breaking open eurocentric, white, cisgender, male-centered comparative literary analysis. t a l y a f i s h m a n ( u n i v e r s i t y o f pennsylvania) turned her attention to multilingual medieval jewish scholarly culture in her paper, “echoes of arabic linguistic theory, practice and muslim doctrine in jewish writings of the medieval islamicate world.” focusing on rabbanite and qaraite authors of the ninth through eleventh centuries, fishman related the hebrew dictionaries of saadia al-fayyumi (882–942 ce), the gaon (leader) of the babylonian talmudic academy of sura in iraq, to arabic lexicographical scholarship on rare lexemes in the quran. similarly, her analysis of the tenth-century aramaic epistle of sherira (a subsequent gaon of the suran yeshiva) pointed to the application of the islamic doctrine of inimitability (iʿjāz) to rabbinic tradition. seerwan ali hariry (soran university i n i r a q i k u r d i s t a n ) e n d e d t h e p a n e l w i t h h i s f a s c i n a t i n g p a p e r , “ p o e t i c s o f m u l t i l i n g u a l i s m i n m e d i e v a l a n d pre-modern kurdish poetry: rethinking macaronic verses in classical kurdish al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) conference report: pre-modern comparative literary practice • 327 poetry.” in one of the most delightful e x a m p l e s o f m u l t i l i n g u a l i s m i n t h e conference, hariry presented selections of mixed-language macaronic verses by the kurdish poets aḥmad-ī khānī (1651–1707), nālī (1797–1877), and mahwī (1830–1909) in which each group of verses were composed in arabic, persian, turkish, and kurdish in turn, signaling the poet’s virtuosity and requiring a similar multilingualism on the part of the audience. although kurds at the geographic crossroads between araboislamic, safavid, and ottoman empires u s e d h e g e m o n i c l a n g u a g e s i n t h e i r writings to the detriment of their own, these poets added kurdish to crown their literary canon with compositions that broaden the definition of macaronic verse for comparative purposes. nasim basiri convened the third friday session, titled “catachresis and creative misreadings.” christopher livanos opened the session with his paper, “reading christian heresy into the qur’an in the latin fathers, the medieval translators and the modern academy.” citing bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” livanos argued that western criticism of the quran has centered on a heresiological approach seeking to uncover distorted christian and biblical sources for the quranic text, an approach he finds in the “syriac turn” in quranic scholarship. in contrast, livanos hopes for new academic approaches to the quran to account for its literary and religious significance. colinda lindermann (freie universität berlin) came next with her “loanwords f r o m w i t h i n : d e b a t i n g t a ʿ r ī b i n t h e multilingual ottoman environment,” in which she traced the history of arabic theory concerning taʿrīb (arabicizing) loanwords from other languages, from a l k h a l ī l b . a ḥ m a d ( d . c a . 1 7 0 / 7 8 6 ) to al-jawālīqī’s (d. 540/1144) treatise al-muʿarrab min al-kalām al-aʿjamī ʿalā ḥurūf al-muʿjam. lindermann traced t h e d e b a t e f r o m e a r l y s c h o l a r s t o al-suyūṭī (d. 1505), through the treatise of kemalpaşazāde (d. 1534), al-risāla fī taḥqīq taʿrīb al-kalima al-ʿajamiyya, and al-munshī (d. 1592) to al-khafājī (d. 1659), w h o m e n t i o n s t h e s l a n g o f o t t o m a n gender-benders under the rubric of lughat al-mukhannathīn. lindermann argued that this scholarly discourse was clearly engaged with the living linguistic and sociocultural ottoman milieu. m e h t a p o z d e m i r ( u n i v e r s i t y o f massachusetts at amherst) presented friday’s last paper, “debating belagat: the poetics of (af)filiative translation in late ottoman literary modernity.” ozdemir pointed to the wave of nineteenth-century translations from arabic and french that imported literary values into turkish and its impact on late ottoman literature. ozdemir analyzed recaizade ekrem’s 1882 talim-i edebiyat (teaching of literature) and the controversy that followed its publication, with hacı i̇brahim efendi arguing over the legacy of belagat (poetics) from arabic in balance with or in contrast to french-oriented literary theory. this literary-theoretical debate reflects the tension between a necessary rupture with the past to build ottoman modernity and the preservation of traditional devices as encased in belagat so as to create a unique, self-possessed ottoman literature. h u d a f a k h r e d d i n e c h a i r e d t h e f i r s t s a t u r d a y s e s s i o n , “ m u l t i l i n g u a l l e x i c o l o g y a n d e x e g e s i s . ” l e i l a chamankhah (university of california at san diego) presented a paper entitled “mapping ibn ʿarabī’s teachings in the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 328 • clarissa burt premodern persian sufi world: ʿabdul razzāq kāshānī’s lexicons and their literary importance in formalizing sufi terminology.” she detailed ʿabdul razzāq kāshānī’s (d. 1335) prolific dissemination of ibn ʿarabī’s teachings in ilkhanid iran (1256–1353) and his own contributions to sufi literature. the paper focused on three lexicons by kāshānī: iṣṭilāḥāt al-ṣūfiyya (technical terms of sufism), rashḥ al-zulāl (distilling pure water), and laṭāʾif al-iʿlām (the niceties of imparting knowledge). next, salour evaz malayeri (university of saint andrews) presented “religion and literature in dialogue: nāṣir-i khusraw’s reception of the quran and hadith.” a well-traveled persian bilingual (persian and arabic) poet, nāṣir-i khusraw (1004– 1076 ce) contributed widely to persian literature. the paper focused on the poet’s religious and exegetical thought as revealed in his jamʿ al-ḥikmatayn (reconciling the two wisdoms). the two sources of wisdom were falsafa/philosophy and ismaʿili doctrine/taʾwīl. by comparing the quran and hadith with nāṣir’s use of rhetorical devices and philosophical propositions, malayeri showed that the poet used the quran and hadith to support his own argument. t h i s p a p e r w a s f o l l o w e d b y t h a t o f a b d u l m a n a n b h a t ( u n i v e r s i t y o f pennsylvania), “prophethood in poetic wisdom: beginnings, adab and muhammad iqbal.” the paper examined persianurdu diglossia in muhammad iqbal’s (d. 1938) concept of payām as inspirational i m p e t u s f o r p o e t i c a n d p r o p h e t i c discourse. tentatively translating payām as “message,” bhat showed that payām for iqbal is both what prophets deliver to humanity and the poetic yearning that poets channel to construct poetic texts. after discussion, ali karjoo-ravary convened the final panel of the conference, “textual practice, media, and reception.” s u h e i l l a h e r ( h a r t f o r d s e m i n a r y ) presented an intriguing paper, “arabic prayer or persian or both? abū ḥanīfa’s view and its legal reception.” laher traced the history of translation of the quran into persian (starting with salman the persian, d. 33/654), and its recitation in prayer. abū ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), unlike other legal scholars, allowed the use of persian in ritual prayer, perhaps as accommodation for non-arab converts. the question points to the historical dispute over whether the quran consists in its meanings qua meaning, or in the meanings of the arabic; the majority of scholars of islamic law ultimately settled on the latter position. citing a range of legal opinions from abū-l-layth al-samarqandī (d. 376/983) to burhān al-dīn al-marghīnānī (d. 593/1197), laher showed that ḥanafī jurists tolerated the use of persian in ritual prayer and supplication and faced a consequent antishuʿūbī backlash, which enforced the use of arabic alone in devotional practice across the muslim world. f a y a z a . d a r a n d z u b a i r k h a l i d (jawaharlal nehru university, new delhi, india) offered a joint paper, “sheikh nuruddin’s koshur quran: translinguistic poetry of a fourteenth century kashmiri saint.” the authors detailed the legacy and kashmiri mystical poetry of sheikh nuruddin (1378–1440 ce). venerated as the saint and founder of a mystical order, nuruddin incorporated quranic references, figures, and verses in arabic into his shrukh poetry, to the point that his poetry has been described as koshur quran, or “the quran in kashmiri.” his verse also refers to such sufi figures as al-ḥallāj and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) conference report: pre-modern comparative literary practice • 329 rūmī, making his poetry an addition to sufi mystical kashmiri literature, which combines arabic, kashmiri, and sanskrit values. aqsa ijaz (mcgill university) gave the conference’s last paper, “shaping the language of love: the afterlife of nizami’s khusrau u shīrīn in persianate india,” in which ijaz considered three north indian versions (persian, urdu, and punjabi) of nizami ganjavi’s (1141–1209) celebrated poem. ijaz explored intertextuality among the different versions, which articulated the poetics of love and desire in khusrau u s h ī r ī n a c r o s s c u l t u r e s , l a n g u a g e s , and time. h u d a f a k h r e d d i n e i n t r o d u c e d t h e c l o s i n g k e y n o t e s p e a k e r , m i c h a e l cooperson (ucla), whose delightful talk, “learning arabic in pre-modern times,” was a consolation for anyone who struggles with a second, third, or fourth language. as muslims conquered non-arab lands, cooperson asked, how did the ʿajam, those who were linguistically “othered,” submit to and function in arabic as a hegemonic language? in answer, he offered several t e x t s t h a t w e r e u s e d a s p r i m e r s f o r non-arabs to learn arabic, including tafsīr muqātil b. sulaymān (d. 150/767) and maqāmāt al-ḥarīrī (mentioning a gilaki interlinear commentary) for acquiring vocabulary and mastering grammatical intricacies. he shared anecdotes of bishr al-ḥāfī (d. 227/841) and ʿalī b. ʿabd allāh al-ghuzūlī (d. 815/1412) and the linguistic challenges they encountered, suggesting that the formal and rule-bound nature of arabic and its literary devices was a source of empowerment for non-arabs that allowed them to excel and contribute broadly to the arabo-islamic cultural heritage. c o n c l u d i n g t h i s a m a z i n g r a n g e o f papers, david larsen offered closing remarks, reviewing the salient points of many papers and encouraging scholars to follow up on avenues for further research. the conference closed with mutual thanks and greetings from all. o v e r a l l , t h e e v e n t w a s a s t e r l i n g example of an intimate seminar in which participants benefit hugely from the papers and feedback of their peers. the online format did not detract at all; instead, it made possible the geographic range of the participating scholars. rawad wehbe curated an extraordinary video record of the conference, which can now be seen on youtube (https://www.youtube. c o m / p l a y l i s t ? l i s t = p l v 1 d o u b w b q h w zo6frtdq5m28l-lyxzy). an edited volume of the conference proceedings is much to be hoped for. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=plv1do-ubwbqhw-zo6frtdq5m28l-lyxzy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=plv1do-ubwbqhw-zo6frtdq5m28l-lyxzy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=plv1do-ubwbqhw-zo6frtdq5m28l-lyxzy al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 66-112 in 238/852-3, 1 abū mūsā bughā al-kabīr, a celebrated general in al-mutawakkil’s army, sent two of his lieutenants, zīrak and the son of abū al-ʿabbās, against an opponent named abū mūsā in the town of kithīsh/k‘t‘iš.2 the battles that followed constituted 1. in an effort to speak consistently across disciplines, the dates will appear first in hijrī (238), then according to the common era (852-3). similarly, the toponyms appear here first in arabic (kithīsh), then in armenian (k‘t‘iš) or, if relevant, in georgian. 2. abū mūsā bughā al-kabīr was a turkish slave soldier who started his career in the army of the caliph al-muʿtaṣim. over the course of his exceptionally long life, he participated in some of the more famous ʿabbāsid campaigns of the early ninth century. he helped quell bābak’s khurramī rebellion and sack ʿammūriyya; see matthew gordon, “bughā al-kabīr,” in ei3. bughā built a reputation of piety, military skill, and devotion to the ʿabbāsid family. for example, al-masʿūdī reports that bughā survived his battles unscathed despite the fact that conflict and community in the medieval caucasus* alison m. vacca university of tennessee, knoxville (avacca@utk.edu) abstract in the 230s/850s, the caliph al-mutawakkil sent his general, bughā al-kabīr, to assert control over the wayward northern frontier of the ʿabbāsid caliphate. this campaign typically appears in modern scholarship as a moment that pitted armenian christians against tačiks (arab muslims). this paper complicates this binary by (1) placing t‘ovma arcruni’s history of the arcruni house in dialog with arabic accounts of the campaign and (2) locating the campaign in the broader context of fragmented political power in the caucasus as a whole. it reviews bughā’s main allies and adversaries in the conflict with close attention to the descriptors (or lack thereof) of their identities in medieval texts. from there, it challenges the oversimplification of the campaign in ethnoreligious absolutes as arab v. armenian or muslim v. christian as a product of t‘ovma’s own agenda. this article posits the narrative use of ethnic and religious signifiers, despite the apparent flexibility of communal identities in the medieval period, and focuses specifically on the experience of women in the campaign to signal the close relations between groups of different ethnicities and religions. * i would like to thank antoine borrut, manuela ceballos, matthew gordon, sergio la porta, michael morony, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on various drafts of this article. of course, all mistakes in narration or errors in interpretation are solely of my own making. mailto:avacca%40utk.edu?subject= 67 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the final legs of a long and arduous campaign that pitted the caliphal army against many amīrs and armies of the south caucasus.3 historians today rely heavily on the main primary source for this campaign, the tenth-century history of the arcruni house by t‘ovma arcruni, which deplores the circumstances of armenian christians under tačik (understood as either arab or muslim) rule.4 yet this particular moment in kithīsh/k‘t‘iš—and many others like it through the course of the campaign—illustrates a messier reality. none of these leaders were arabs. bughā and zīrak were turks, abū al-ʿabbās was armenian, and abū mūsā was caucasian albanian. the battle lines were not drawn by religion: bughā and zīrak were muslims while the son of abū al-ʿabbās, abū mūsā, and their soldiers were christians. despite t‘ovma’s claims about the bonds and brotherhood of the christian community, a common faith did not always draw up armies. rather, christians and muslims fought together on both sides.5 our christian protagonists in this episode even sport arabic kunyas, hinting that t‘ovma’s construction of a distinct ethno-religious community was important specifically because of the blurred borders between arab, armenian, and albanian that existed in the ʿabbāsid period. al-mutawakkil ordered bughā to the caucasus in response to the murder of a caliphal governor, yūsuf b. muḥammad al-marwazī. the resulting campaign spanned over a number of years and stretched over territory now part of the modern republics of armenia, azerbaijan, and georgia. as local leaders decided whether to fight or to join the caliphal forces, they negotiated alliances that served their own needs and concerns. in the process, they built bonds he wore no armor because the prophet muḥammad himself had appeared in a dream and promised him longevity for helping a muslim avoid punishment for a crime; for a translation of the full passage, see ali anooshahr, the ghazi sultans and the frontiers of islam: a comparative study of the late medieval and early modern periods (london; new york: routledge, 2009), 81-2. the armenian tradition, though, preserves an alternative reading of bughā’s life. he appears in armenian as bułay (or buxay or buhay), “a sly and faithless man”; kirakos ganjakec‘i, patmut‘iwn hayoc‘ (erevan: erevani hamalsarani hratarakč‘ut‘yun, 1961), 78. a few pages later (82), bughā appears alongside afshīn, abū saʿīd, and yūsuf in a list of ոստիկանք չարք և անմարդիք արձակեալք լինէին յաշխարհս մեր. he is enshrined in the armenian national epic as the villain bat‘mana buła, where bat‘mana renders the persian bad nām, i.e., infamous; c. j. f. dowsett, “versification in the armenian epic,” in david of sasun: critical studies on the armenian epic, ed. dickran kouymjian and barlow dermugrdechian (fresno: press at california state university, 2013), 128. 3. the “south caucasus” refers to armenia, albania, and georgia. on the problematic use of the term caucasus in reference to the early ʿabbāsid period, see alison vacca, non-muslim provinces under early islam: islamic rule and iranian legitimacy in armenia and caucasian albania (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017), xv. sources in arabic, syriac, armenian, and georgian instead refer to the south caucasus as “the north.” 4. t‘ovma arcruni’s history of the arcruni house cuts off in 904ce. we do not have firm birth or death dates for the author, but he claims to have recorded the accounts of the combatants themselves: “and i myself with my own eyes saw that man who struck him [yūsuf b. muḥammad al-marwazī, the caliphal governor whose murder sparked bughā’s campaigns], and from him i learned the truth about it”; t‘ovma arcruni, history of the house of the artsrunik‘: translation and commentary, trans. robert thomson (detroit: wayne state press, 1985), 187, see also 18; patmut‘iwn tann arcruneac‘ (erevan: erevani hamalsarani hratarakč‘ut‘yun, 1985), 190. 5. mixed armies had a long history in the near east and can be identified through the entire period of caliphal rule in armenia and albania. see vacca, non-muslim provinces, 190 (for armenia) and 203 (for albania); wadād al-qāḍī, “non-muslims in the muslim conquest army in early islam,” in christians and others in the umayyad state, ed. antoine borrut and fred donner (chicago: oriental institute, 2016); khalil ʿathamina, “non-arab regiments and private militias during the umayyad period,” arabica 45, no. 3 (1998). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 68 between communities with mixed religious and ethnic ties, solidified through intermarriage. this article examines the descriptions of the protagonists and circumstances of bughā’s campaign in order to investigate how our authors represent communal identity and loyalty in the caucasus for their own purposes. bughā’s campaign as a case study into local identities and loyalties bughā’s caucasian campaign has never been the object of close scholarly interest, perhaps because it drags the scholar out of the centers of the caliphate but more likely because it demands the exploration of both armenian and arabic texts. as a result, the campaign typically appears as an episode of armenian history, rather than in broader studies of the caliphate.6 in an early study of ʿabbāsid armenia, m. ghazarian explains bughā’s campaign in religious terms. “mutawakkil sandte nun den befehlshaber bughā al-kabīr mit dem auftrage, das muslimische blut an dem unbotmässigen land zu rächen und dessen grossen gänzlich auszurotten.”7 this assumes a certain type of identity construction: bughā campaigned in the caucasus to avenge “muslimische blut,” which is implicitly different from christian blood. this makes little sense given that bughā killed and imprisoned muslim amīrs and soldiers in the course of the campaign and, accordingly, modern studies have moved away from the religiously charged interpretation. more recently, z. pogossian noted that “[a]lliances were formed and discarded startlingly fast and the religion of parties involved was by no means an obstacle or the most determining factor in creating partnerships or betraying a onetime ally.”8 most modern introductions to medieval armenia focus instead on ethnic identifiers. they mention the campaign with brief references to the annihilation of the armenian nobles (naxarars), the devastation of the armenian heartlands, and the expansion of arab landholding to the detriment of the armenian nobility. a. ter-łevondyan, the foremost modern expert on medieval arab-armenian relations, set the tone for how scholars discuss bughā’s campaign in his arab emirates in bagratid armenia (1965 in armenian; translated into english in 1976), which remains today one of the best sources on ʿabbāsid-era armenia. he approaches bughā’s campaign for what it can tell us about the arabization of armenia in the ʿabbāsid period and explains that bugha left armenia in a.d. 855. all the leading naχarars had been taken prisoners [sic] and the time had apparently come for the arab settlers to make the most of the situation. 6. i discuss the problematic tendency to separate armenian from early ʿ abbāsid history in vacca, non-muslim provinces. 7. mkrtitsch ghazarian, “armenien unter der arabischen herrschaft bis zur entstehung des bagratidenreiches nach arabischen und armenischen quellen bearbeitet,” zeitschrift für armenische philologie 2 (1904): 191. 8. zaroui pogossian, “locating religion, controlling territory: conquest and legitimation in late ninth century vaspurakan and its interreligious context,” (leiden: brill, 2017), 177. i would like to thank zara for sharing this article before its publication. 69 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) the local arabs had contributed in every way to the advance of bugha’s army, and gradually increased their own holdings.9 here ter-łevondyan is echoing (and citing explicitly) t‘ovma arcruni’s famous statement that the caliphal army was “accompanied by the tačiks of armenia who dwelt in various regions of the land and guided bugha on his way in and out of the country.”10 yet t‘ovma’s history also clarifies that some of the armenian élite were in fact not imprisoned and that some of the local muslims refused to help bughā. despite this, ter-łevondyan borrows from t‘ovma to imagine the battle lines drawn around ethnicity, effectively polarizing armenians and arabs. in l’arménie entre byzance et l’islam (1919, but rewritten and republished in 1980), laurent and canard offer another perspective on the armenian responses to bughā’s campaign: “toutes les familles arméniennes ont fourni des hommes qui, dans cette crise, se sont conduits en égoïstes, en véritables traîtres contre leurs compatriotes, bien que les historiens arméniens ne les aient pas jugés aussi durement.”11 laurent and canard here account for what ter-łevondyan’s analysis cannot, namely that many armenians joined bughā’s forces, rendering problematic the facile division between armenian v. arab. yet laurent and canard’s reading also presumes the existence of a cohesive and recognizable ethnic identity in the medieval period. as their discussion stands, they invite the reader to subscribe to the idea that armenians were united, such that any armenian who collaborated with bughā was perforce a selfish traitor. the very fact that medieval historians do not lambast such collaborators as traitors (although t‘ovma certainly did, albeit very selectively) hints that perhaps modern concepts of national identity have dictated our reading of medieval social organization. yet even with the recognition that some armenians in fact aided bughā’s advance, modern scholars have generally persisted with the organization of bughā’s campaign around recognizable ethno-religious groups. for example, n. garsoïan summarizes the campaign briefly, including t‘ovma’s quote about how the tačiks helped bughā. she explains that bughā deported a multitude of captive naxarars, among them the sparapet [general] smbat whose neutrality or continuous loyalty to the muslim authorities had not saved him from sharing the fate of the other armenian magnates. the condition of armenia after the devastating expeditions of bugha was once more tragic. the arab emirs profited from the captivity of the armenian princes to expand their own possessions.12 9. aram ter-łevondyan, arab emirates in bagratid armenia, trans. nina garsoïan (lisbon: livraria bertrand, 1976), 44. this is garsoïan’s english translation, but the original arabakan amirayut‘yunnerǝ bagratunyac‘ hayastanum (erevan: erevani hamalsarani hratarakč‘ut‘yun, 1965), 84 does indeed employ արաբ here, not tačik. 10. arcruni, history, 198, though thomson translates tačiks as “muslims”; patmut‘iwn, 206; ter-łevondyan, arab emirates, 43. 11. joseph laurent and marius canard, l’arménie entre byzance et l’islam depuis la conquête arabe jusqu’en 886 (lisbon: fondation calouste gulbenkian, 1980), 149. 12. nina garsoïan, “the arab invasions and the rise of the bagratuni (640-884),” in armenian people from al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 70 this summary sets the story into a comfortable framework of arab empire v. armenian rebel. armenians, regardless of their loyalties, were imprisoned while arabs profited. this is an entirely valid reading of t‘ovma’s account of bughā’s campaign. yet this does not allow for the armenian and albanian patricians who did not end up in samarrāʾ, nor does it mention the zurārids, who were also deported to samarrāʾ despite the fact that they were muslims. nor can this explain why “arab emirs profited” and yet bughā “defeated and killed the local muslim emir [isḥāq b. ismāʿīl] and burned the [muslim] city of tiflis.”13 in response to the reliance on t‘ovma’s account prevalent in modern discussions of the ninth-century conflict, this article suggests two methodological interventions to the way that we read bughā’s campaign. the first is that we need to balance arabic and armenian sources despite the fact that t‘ovma’s history offers significantly more detail than any extant arabic source. t‘ovma is crafting a lesson that speaks to his armenian (frequently, even a specifically arcruni) audience and employs the story for a reason, namely to construct conceptual borders between christian armenians and tačiks. this explains why t‘ovma relies heavily on pre-islamic narratives of armenian battles and persecution. he calques large portions of ełišē’s history of the armenian-persian wars of 451 into an ʿabbāsid setting by changing the sasanian emperor yazdegerd and his vizier mihrnerseh to the caliph al-mutawakkil and his general bughā. t‘ovma’s purpose is not to tell the story of bughā’s campaign but to emplot this moment of armenian history into a metanarrative of christian minorities under imperial persecution, tapping into a storyline that was well known to an armenian audience but completely absent in arabic accounts. reading t‘ovma against al-ṭabarī (or any other arabic source) is a useful reminder to disentangle t‘ovma’s interpretation of the campaign from the details that he offers about the main protagonists.14 the second methodological intervention proposed here is related to the first: we need to situate the campaign in the ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity of the caucasus as a whole. bughā’s campaign crops up most regularly in studies of armenian history that are interested primarily in situating armenian experience during the conflict. this article instead places the campaign into the far more religiouslyand ethnically-diverse setting of the caucasus. this complicates the armenian v. arab narrative and instead presents armenians as some of the many peoples confronting and colluding with bughā. by examining bughā’s campaign as a moment in caucasian instead of armenian history, we can take a step back to reconsider the usefulness of broad identity markers such as armenian, muslim, albanian, christian, or arab. t‘ovma saw christianness as the main determinant not just of communal identity, but also of communal loyalties. why, then, are the many varied christian leaders of the caucasus, like abū al-ʿabbās and abū mūsā, fighting on opposite sides? how are these identities performed, if at all, in moments charged by violence and threats of annihilation? ancient to modern times, ed. richard hovannisian (new york: st. martin’s press, 2004), 141. 13. garsoïan, “the arab invasions,” 141. 14. the question of how and why armenian families and provinces appear in arabic sources is another avenue for future research in ʿabbāsid historiography; see, for example, alison vacca, “al-basfurraǧān and banū al-dayrānī: vaspurakan and the arcrunik‘ in arabic sources” (forthcoming). the focus on t‘ovma in this article reflects both the centrality of his account to our understanding of bughā’s campaigns and the placement of bughā’s campaigns at the heart of the history of the acruni house. 71 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) by looking at bughā’s campaign as a case study into the roles and representations of ethnicity, religion, and gender in the expression of medieval caucasian identities, this article offers an alternative reading to the traditional interpretation: caucasian communities were pluralist, fluid, and built on pragmatic, local concerns instead of around any grand sense of ethno-religious solidarity. to explore this campaign as a moment that pitted christians v. muslims or armenians v. arabs buys into medieval “identity-talk”15 and reduces the complexity of medieval social organization into nationalist discourse more familiar to modern readers than to the protagonists of this story. as r. suny points out in his study of the construction of identities in the modern caucasus, “[r]ather than appearing coherent and uniform as it might look from afar, ethnicity at closer range looks fragmented, its cultural content contested and conflicted.”16 in exploring how this played out in a medieval context, modern studies on identity have been particularly useful, including insightful studies of arabness published by p. crone,17 m.c.a. macdonald,18 j. retsö,19 and p. webb;20 of persianness and iranianness by s. savant,21 m. cooperson,22 and r. payne;23 of kurdishness by b. james;24 and of armenianness by b. martin-hisard, n. garsoïan25 and a. redgate,26 as well as broader theoretical approaches 15. ronald grigor suny, “provisional stabilities: the politics of identities in post-soviet eurasia,” quarterly journal: international security 24, no. 3 (1999): 144. “when people talk about identity, however, their language is almost always about unity and internal harmony and tends to naturalize wholeness. it defaults to an earlier understanding of identity as the stable core...but even as ordinary usage tends to homogenize and essentialize identities, theorists of identity insistently claim that as difficult as it is to accept, the apparent and desired wholeness and unity is made up, imagined, to create a provisional stability in a changing world.” he refers to the discourse of wholeness as “identity-talk.” 16. suny, “provisional stabilities,” 139. 17. patricia crone, the nativist prophets of early islamic iran: rural revolt and local zoroastrianism (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2014). 18. michael c. a. macdonald, “arabs, arabias, and arabic before late antiquity,” topoi 16, no. 1 (2009). 19. jan retsö, “the earliest arabs,” orientalia suecana 38-39 (1990). 20. peter webb, imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016). 21. sarah savant, “‘persians’ in early islam,” annales islamologiques 42 (2008). 22. michael cooperson, “‘arabs’ and ‘iranians’: the uses of ethnicity in the early abbasid period,” in islamic cultures, islamic contexts, ed. asad q. ahmed, et al. (leiden: brill, 2014). 23. richard payne, “avoiding ethnicity: uses of the ancient past in late sasanian northern mesopotamia,” in visions of community in the post-roman world: the west, byzantium and the islamic world, 300-1100, ed. walter pohl, clemens gantner, and richard payne (burlington: ashgate, 2012). 24. boris james, “arab ethnonyms (ʿajam, ʿarab, badū and turk): the kurdish case as a paradigm for thinking about differences in the middle ages,” iranian studies 47, no. 5 (2014); “le ‘territoire tribal des kurdes’ et l’aire iraqienne (xe-xiiie siècles): esquisse des recompositions spatiales,” revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée 117-118 (2007). 25. nina garsoïan and bernadette martin-hisard, “unity and diversity in medieval caucasia, 4th–11th centuries,” in languages and cultures of eastern christianity: georgian, ed. stephen rapp and paul crego (burlington: ashgate, 2012). 26. a. e. redgate, “myth and reality: armenian identity in the early middle ages,” national identities 9, no. 4 (2007). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 72 to identity construction. d. nirenberg’s communities of violence (1996) and t. sizgorich’s violence and belief in late antiquity (2009) serve as models for the way that both authors situate the expression of religious identity broadly, but also specifically in the context of medieval conflict. sizgorich, for example, expounds on a seeming paradox: in order to study identity, “one frequently must look past the explanations ancient peoples provide (or seem to provide) for their own behavior, especially insofar as those explanations are contingent upon appeals to what is frequently represented as the ‘essential nature’ of their own identity group.”27 in order to understand the role of religion and ethnicity in the particular context of bughā’s campaign, we have to reassess the layer of interpretation offered in t‘ovma’s account as his own attempt to supply borders for armenian christian identity. with a close reading of the alliances and communities involved in bughā’s campaign, it becomes clear that there was no coherent or unifying concept of armenianness, albanianness, georgianness, or arabness in the caucasus, let alone muslimness or christianness. ethnicity and religion were significant markers of identity, but they were multiform and did not necessarily inform loyalties and allegiances. communities did not emerge from monolithic and universal categories of ethnicity or religion, but from shared concerns localized in specific places and moments in time. communal identity was historically contingent, defined according to the needs and challenges facing small, inchoate, heterogeneous familial groups. the inhabitants of one village would easily ally themselves with the people of a neighboring town even if they did not share a common religion, language, heritage, or ethnicity.28 after all, these markers of identity were malleable: people in the medieval caucasus rewrote their histories and genealogies, learned new languages, and converted to other religions. perhaps more importantly, even when certain markers of identity remain stable, medieval authors frequently do not apply descriptions of ethnicity and religion consistently if these do not advance their narrative agendas. bughā’s campaign serves to illuminate both the localized nature of communal identity and medieval “identity talk,” i.e., the construction of the metanarrative around ethnicity and religion. examining the role of women in the accounts of bughā’s caucasian campaign is one efficient way to reveal localized concepts of communal identity that supersede ethnoreligious affiliations. women, we will see, navigate between and participate in a multiplicity of groups that might otherwise appear as ethnically or religiously uniform. modern studies on the role of gender in medieval identity construction such as s. barton’s conquerors, brides, and concubines (2015) and n. el-cheikh’s women, islam, and abbasid identity (2015) have “investigated the multiple and complex ways in which interfaith sexuality, power, and group identity intersected.”29 el-cheikh, for example, clarifies that “depictions of women, gender relations, and sexuality are at the heart of the cultural construction of identity and 27. thomas sizgorich, violence and belief in late antiquity: militant devotion in christianity and islam (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2014), 22. 28. this fits with mottahedeh’s “acquired loyalties” in būyid iran, namely in that they were contractual “deliberately acquired obligations”; roy mottahedeh, loyalty and leadership in an early islamic society (new york: i.b. tauris, 2001), 40. 29. simon barton, conquerors, brides, and concubines: interfaith relations and social power in medieval iberia (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2015), 144. 73 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) collectivity.”30 approaching the study of identity from a gendered perspective by focusing on the women who forged ties across communities in the ninth-century caucasus reveals the dissonance between imagined and lived communities, thereby offering a more nuanced alternative to the traditional reading of bughā’s campaign in t‘ovma’s ethno-religious absolutes. summary of bughā’s campaign with these concepts and concerns in mind, the goal here is not merely to describe the skirmishes, sieges, and battlegrounds of the various armies involved in bughā’s campaign, but to prepare the subsequent discussion about how medieval authors describe identity in the ʿabbāsid-era caucasus. as such, the following narrative focuses closely on how the extant sources elaborate or obfuscate markers of identity of the main protagonists of this campaign and their communities. for the moment, it also bypasses the lengthy descriptions of martyrdom and refutations of apostasy in t‘ovma’s account. 30. nadia maria el-cheikh, women, islam, and abbasid identity (cambridge: harvard university press, 2015), 8. fig. 1: map of the south caucasus in the third/ninth century. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 74 the rationale for bughā’s campaign in either 234/848-9 or 235/849, al-mutawakkil posted abū saʿīd muḥammad b. yūsuf as governor over armenia. the two most powerful armenian noble houses at the time, the bagratunis (known as banū sinbāṭ in arabic) of ṭārūn/tarōn and the arcrunis (banū al-dayrānī) of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan, refused to allow abū saʿīd into their territories. abū saʿīd returned to samarrāʾ with the tax revenues from armenia and with letters of complaint against the armenian nobility penned by local tačiks. al-mutawakkil assigned troops to force the north to accept his governor, but abū saʿīd died on his return trip. the army passed to abū saʿīd’s son yūsuf, who was able to negotiate with the bagratunis and the arcrunis and sent both patricians back to samarrāʾ to ensure the terms of their agreements. yūsuf’s subsequent death at the hands of al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ on the edge of the bagratuni territory of ṭārūn/ tarōn and zurārid-held ałjnik‘ precipitated the caliphal campaign. the traditional narrative of bughā’s campaign suggests that al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ were infuriated by the captivity of the bagratuni patrician and so killed yūsuf in revenge. al-mutawakkil dispatched bughā to avenge yūsuf and wreak havoc on the armenian noble houses.31 it is, however, not entirely clear whether the authors of our medieval sources recognize al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ as armenians, let alone as kinsmen of the bagratuni family. their name is a derivative of the toponym khoyṭ/xoyt‘, a mountain on the periphery of armenian territory. al-balādhurī explains that al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ “are barbarians (ʿulūj) who go by the name al-arṭān.”32 while this arabic identifier could feasibly refer to the armenian town ardahan in gugark‘, it is rather more likely a calque on the syriac. minorsky includes “the χοθᾱίται [= al-k̲h̲uwayt̲h̲iyya] in the canton of k̲h̲oyt of sāsūn, the orṭāyē [= al-arṭān] in the bend of the euphrates)” among the groups haphazardly bundled under the designation kurds (akrād) in arabic.33 the relationship to kurdish populations is uncertain, though, as the syriac indicates that they are the inhabitants of urartu. in other words, we should assume that al-balādhurī’s , al-arṭān, in fact clarifies that al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ are , i.e., aramean urṭāyē.34 the armenianness of al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ was thus not apparent 31. arcruni, history, 186; patmut‘iwn, 190. see also yovhannēs drasxanakertc‘i, history of armenia, trans. krikor maksoudian (atlanta: scholars press, 1987), 119; hayoc‘ patmut‘iwn (erevan: erevani hamalsarani hratarakč‘ut‘yun, 1996), 120. note that drasxanakertc‘i here conflates abū saʿīd and his son yūsuf. later accounts place some blame on the byzantines, as well: bar hebraeus, the chronography of gregory abû’l faraj, the son of aaron, the hebrew physician, commonly known as bar hebraeus: being the first part of his political history of the world, trans. e. a. wallis budge (piscataway: gorgias press, 2003), 142. 32. aḥmad b. yaḥyā al-balādhurī, kitāb futūḥ al-buldān (leiden: brill, 1866), 211. 33. david neil mackenzie, vladimir minorsky, and thomas bois, “kurds, kurdistān,” in ei2. on the multiple definitions of akrād in the medieval period, see james, “arab ethnonyms,” especially 712. 34. margoliouth defines as the people, urartians, not the place, urartu. “this people is supposed to have been a remnant of aramean autochthones, and to have inhabited the district of anzitene in armenia”; jessie payne margoliouth, supplement to the thesaurus syriacus of r. payne smith (oxford: clarendon press, 1927), 10. nöldeke first identified al-balādhurī’s with the syriac: “der name könnte immerhin mit dem der identisch sein; wir müssten den annehmen, dass theile desselben volkes sich in verschiedenen gegenden des südarmenischen gebirgslandes angesiedelt hätten. wie wir oben sahen, sind ja solche spaltungen bei kurdischen stämmen nichts seltenes; für kurden werden wir aber ein von den armeniern wie von den syrern unterschiedenes volk in dieser noch jezt [sic] hauptsächlich von kurden bewohnten gegend doch am ersten االرطان ܐܘܪܛܝܐ االرطان ܐܘܪܛܝܐ ܐܘܪܛܝܐ 75 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) bughā’s opponents snapshot of the ʿabbāsid caucasian campaign the identity markers supplied here refer to how these protagonists typically appear in medieval sources. bughā’s allies al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 76 to historians writing in arabic. this suggests that the people on the edges of armenia and mesopotamia were perceived as different from the central armenian houses. t‘ovma offers an extended description of al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ and, interestingly, his discussion also presents several challenges to their armenianness. first, he is clear that they are incomprehensible: “their mutual speech is a patchwork of borrowed words.” he even offers a false etymology for their name, as xut‘ in armenian means “obstacle,” which t‘ovma associates with their “obscure and inscrutable speech.” second, he dismisses them as “savage in their habits” and “drinkers of blood,” presumably othering them from his own arcruni society. third, he traces their lineage back to syria, labeling them as “peasants of syria.” he further claims that, “they know the psalms in the old translation of the armenian teachers.” this, as r. thomson points out, likely refers to armenian reliance on christian texts in syriac before the invention of the armenian alphabet.35 the only thing that identifies al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ as armenians in t‘ovma’s text is their loyalty to “their princes,” which modern scholars read as the bagratuni patricians. modern scholars have elaborated on the relationship between the bagratunis and al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ by glossing a corrupted passage of an arabic text. al-yaʿqūbī presents the name of the person responsible for yūsuf’s death, but the text is illegible. houtsma offers with the note “ita cod. veram lectionem ignoro,”36 which ghazarian corrects to to render t‘ovma’s յովնան, a native of khoyṭ/xoyt‘ who “had inflicted severe losses on the royal army” and was later martyred for arguing with al-mutawakkil.37 in fact, during his audience with the caliph, yovnan reportedly boasted about his involvement in yūsuf’s assassination: “[i]n my disdain for you i put your general and his troops to the sword.”38 markwart goes further by identifying yovnan’s father as t‘oṙnik, a bagratuni soldier who fought against bughā on the command of bagarat bagratuni, clarifying that al-yaʿqūbī’s name should read < > .39 if this reconstruction is correct—and there is no evidence to either substantiate or disprove it—we see a clear connection between al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ and the bagratunis by providing a bagratuni father to yūsuf’s khuwaythī murderer. al-ṭabarī claims that al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ “constituted the majority of the inhabitants of armenia.” it seems plausible that he might be conflating al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ with the halten. sicher ist das freilich alles durchaus nicht”; theodor nöldeke, “zwei völker vorderasiens,” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 33, no. 1 (1879): 165. see also josef markwart, südarmenien und die tigrisquellen nach griechischen und arabischen geographen (vienna: mechitharisten-buchdruckerei, 1930), 222 n. 3. 35. arcruni, history, 187-8 and n. 3; patmut‘iwn, 190-92. 36. aḥmad b. abī yaʿqūb b. jaʿfar b. wahb b. wādiḥ al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh (leiden: brill, 1883), 598; the more modern edition of the text (beirut, 2002) offers . 37. re: the identity of yovnan, see ghazarian, “armenien,” 191 n. 2: “für die lesung des namens habe ich keinen anhaltspunkt”; arcruni, history, 253 n. 3 seems reticent to ascribe to markwart’s hypothesis: “this yovnan is not attested elsewhere.” 38. arcruni, history, 253; patmut‘iwn, 294. 39. markwart, südarmenien 298 n. 1; aram ter-łevondyan, “‘hayoc‘ išxanǝ’ arabakan tirapetut‘yun žamanakašrǰanum,” patma-banasirakan handes 2 (1964): 130. we are assuming that the t‘oṙnik mentioned in arcruni, history, 176; patmut‘iwn, 174 is in fact the same t‘oṙnik, father of yovnan. ن يونا ىىوان بــن الىف نيقُتْريونــان بــن بنــوان بــن البــف الىف 77 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) bagratunis here. but al-balādhurī offers another possible interpretation. he suggests that in murdering yūsuf, al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ were acting on behalf of the armenian people in toto. yūsuf, he explains, had sent another caliphal representative named al-ʿalāʾ into al-sīsajān/siwnik‘, where he looted a monastery named dayr al-aqdāḥ, which enraged the armenian patricians, lesser nobility, and chiefs.40 the armenians, spurred on by the looting of the monastery and the imprisonment of bagarat (here: baqrāṭ b. ashūṭ), sent emissaries to convince al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ to rebel and provided them with arms: “they roused them against him because he had carried baqrāṭ off.”41 in this way, the murder of yūsuf becomes a collective pan-armenian effort, including even the region of al-sīsajān/siwnik‘ with its variable relation to armenia; perhaps al-ṭabarī’s “majority” may accordingly refer to the perceived support that other armenians offered al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘. bugha’s campaign against vaspurakan while al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ appear as the main rebels in the arabic texts about bughā’s campaign, t‘ovma instead boasts of the blame of the arcruni family and thereby shifts away from both al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ and the bagratunis. he explains that abū saʿīd’s lieutenant, al-ʿalāʾ, had faced off against ašot arcruni when abū saʿīd first attempted to collect the taxes from armenia. ašot’s forces subsequently defeated and massacred so many local muslims that the widows of arzan/arcn travelled to deliver the news of the conflict to al-mutawakkil “with unveiled faces, bareheaded, and having discarded the natural apparel of women, as is their custom especially for the tačik nations” (տաճկական ազանց). they lamented in the audience of the caliph himself, claiming that ašot alone had wrought the devastation and the rebellion against caliphal power.42 after yūsuf’s death, al-mutawakkil’s advisors suggested that the caliph gather a great army to imprison ašot arcruni, the patrician of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan, after which “all others will easily submit.”43 given that t‘ovma dedicated his book to the son and grandson of this ašot, his interest in establishing the significance of his house is clear. he states unequivocally that ašot “was more glorious and famous than those before him who had been princes of all armenia, those in the east and the north, and especially those in the land of vaspurakan who had been princes in positions of authority.”44 t‘ovma has al-mutawakkil himself rally troops to move against armenia with the exclamation that no one since the rise of islam had “inflicted such embarrassing reverses on us, our nation and army and our generals as has ashot prince of vaspurakan.”45 40. this is not reported in armenian literature with the possible exception of ps.-šapuh bagratuni, see šapuh bagratuni, “the anonymous storyteller (also known as šapuh bagratuni),” trans. robert thomson, revue des etudes arméniennes 21 (1989): 213. he mentions that the tačiks set fire to churches after the death of abū saʿīd. 41. al-balādhurī, futūḥ 211. 42. arcruni, history, 180 except that he renders tačkakan as muslim; patmut‘iwn, 180. 43. arcruni, history, 190; patmut‘iwn, 196. 44. arcruni, history, 174; patmut‘iwn, 170. 45. arcruni, history, 192; patmut‘iwn, 198. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 78 with descriptions brimming with textual borrowing pulled directly from ełišē’s fifthcentury history of the sasanian attack on the caucasus, t‘ovma painstakingly tracks bughā and his lieutenant zīrak through al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan. ašot arcruni, accompanied by nobles of the secondary houses of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan, rallied in the castle nkan. while under siege, some nobles of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan turned against ašot and approached bughā, “destroying the unity of harmonious concord between brothers.”46 these lesser nobles offered ašot to bughā in exchange for clemency, that they should be allowed to remain on their own land. they also warned bughā about gurgēn arcruni, ašot’s brother, who had left al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan but retained the ability to rally arcruni troops against caliphal forces. ašot, recognizing his men’s perfidy, handed himself over to bughā, who sent him to samarrāʾ. al-yaʿqūbī notes that ašot, who appears in arabic as ashūṭ b. ḥamza al-armanī, was decapitated in samarrāʾ, but this is undoubtedly merely transferring the fate of isḥāq b. ismāʿīl, al-yaʿqūbī’s next person of interest, to the arcruni nobleman. armenian sources allow for ašot’s survival and return to armenia. al-ṭabarī, for his part, preserves a story that clarifies that ašot survived bughā’s campaigns and his subsequent imprisonment: al-mutawakkil saw ashūṭ b. ḥamza al-armanī a few days before he [mutawakkil] was killed [247/861]. the caliph grumbled about having an audience with ashūṭ and ordered that he be evicted. when asked whether he was satisfied with ashūṭ’s service, he replied, “yes, indeed, but i dreamt a few nights ago that i had been riding him, when he turned to me, his head becoming like that of a mule, and said to me, ‘how much longer [do you suppose] you will molest us? only a few days remain until the end of your appointed time of fifteen years.’” salamah said: it tallied with the number of days [remaining] of his caliphate.47 this reveals that ashūṭ (ašot arcruni) was at the court in samarrāʾ years after his imprisonment, presumably with his head and body intact, and in the service of al-mutawakkil, who was apparently well pleased with ašūṭ’s service. bughā’s campaign against ašot arcruni in al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan thus reveals the disunity even within the noble houses in armenia. ašot, reportedly the greatest threat that the caliphate had ever faced, was not even able to rally the other nobles of his own province around a banner of armenianness. bughā followed the warning offered by the nobles of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan and turned against gurgēn arcruni, ašot’s brother. gurgēn gathered his troops and sent his mother, hṙip‘simē, to negotiate ašot’s release with bughā, who was camped on the banks of the river zāb/zav. while hṙip‘simē was treated with respect, she was not able to stem the next assault. aided by an angel of god as he prayed and recited psalms, at least as t‘ovma recounts the battle, gurgēn annihilated bughā’s troops at a place aptly called the lake of blood. gurgēn 46. arcruni, history, 201; patmut‘iwn, 210. 47. muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, history of al-ṭabarī, volume 34: incipient decline: the caliphates of al-wathiq, al-mutawakkil, and al-muntasir a.d. 841-863/a.h. 227-248, trans. joel kraemer (albany: suny press, 1989), 183; taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk (leiden: brill, 1893), iii 1463-4. 79 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) was subsequently, and rather incredulously, invited to bughā’s camp where he was named and fêted as the prince of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan in his brother’s stead. this appears as part of a broader plot to reduce the arcruni patrician through artifice when military means proved ineffectual. after three days, bughā forged a letter from al-mutawakkil and claimed that the caliph had demanded the capture of gurgēn. bughā duplicitously imprisoned gurgēn and sent him to samarrāʾ while gurgēn’s soldiers scattered ineffectually throughout al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan. bughā’s campaign against arzan/arcn and khoyṭ/xoyt‘ t‘ovma’s narrative of the ʿabbāsid campaign therefore sends bughā after the arcrunis to retaliate for the murder of yūsuf b. muḥammad, despite the recognition of the guilt of al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ for this crime. the arcruni patrician did not even hold the title prince of armenia, a position that entailed responsibility of keeping locals such as al-khuwaythiyya/ xut‘ in line with caliphal concerns. t‘ovma accordingly devotes significant space to the heroic actions of his patrons’ (and his own) noble house, and yet he never places caliphal troops against the very people whom bughā was sent to chastise. this does not align with arabic accounts of bughā’s caucasian campaign, which retain interest in al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘. al-ṭabarī, for instance, only mentions the arcrunis after bughā neutralized his first target, a local muslim ally of al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘. mūsā b. zurāra, known as abū al-ḥurr (literally: “the father of the freeman”),48 ruled ałjnik‘ from arzan/arcn. in armenian sources, mūsā appears as “musē, son of a hagarite zōrahay.”49 the use of hagarene here is unusual in t‘ovma’s text and he does not use tačik to refer to the zurārids, perhaps subtly implying distance between mūsā and the rest of bughā’s forces. despite the fact that modern scholars uniformly assume that mūsā was arab, neither the arabic nor the armenian sources explicitly identify him as such and he has no known tribal nisba. laurent, canard, and ter-łevondyan suggest that he might have been from the bakr tribe, like the nearby shaybānī amīrs, because mūsā’s son was in close contact with ʿīsā b. shaykh, the leader of diyār bakr.50 there is nothing to support this suggestion, though, and the zurārids claimed close ties to a number of non-arab and/or non-muslim groups in the north, as well. it is rather more likely that the zurārids were either armenian or syrian converts to islam. m. canard notes that “mûsâ b. zurâra fit cause commune avec les princes arméniens, se comportant plus comme un prince arménien que comme un émir arabe.”51 as such, modern scholars are confronted not only with the blurry nature of ethnic groups due to the lack of ethnic identifiers in the medieval texts, but also with the modern assumptions that there is an identifiable difference between armenian and arab comportment. 48. the word “freeman” in an iranian context refers to the nobility: ḥurr (more commonly in plural as aḥrār) in arabic is rendered as azat in armenian and as āzād in persian. in syriac this appears as , but is usually rendered as “the son of the freemen” ( ) instead of “the father of the freemen.” 49. arcruni, history, 175; patmut‘iwn, 172. 50. ter-łevondyan, arab emirates, 42; laurent and canard, l’arménie 391-92. 51. marius canard, “les principautés arabes en arménie,” revue des etudes arméniennes 11 (1976): 198. ܚܐܪܝ ܒܪ ܚܐܪܐ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 80 the zurārids allied with the bagratuni family against bughā. al-ṭabarī explains that: “when yūsuf deported buqrāṭ b. ashūṭ [bagarat bagratuni the son of ašot msaker], the patrikioi (al-baṭāriqa)52 took an oath to kill yūsuf and vowed to shed his blood. mūsā b. zurāra went along with them in this. he was responsible for the daughter of buqrāṭ.”53 mūsā b. zurāra was married to the daughter of bagarat bagratuni and so allied with al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ when they moved against yūsuf b. muḥammad. this verifies that local alliances informed zurārid responses to bughā’s campaign. al-ṭabarī also maps out an itinerary that avoids arcruni territory entirely. bughā “headed for armenia from the direction of the jazīrah. he began in arzan [by attacking] mūsā b. zurārah—he is abū al-ḥurr—and he had sisters and brothers, [namely] ismāʿīl, sulaymān, aḥmad, ʿīsā, muḥammad, and hārūn. bughā deported mūsā b. zurārah to the gate of the caliph”54 and bughā reportedly killed 30,000 zurārid allies in this leg of the campaign. t‘ovma’s perceived battle pitting christian armenians against the ethno-religious “other” and his desire to vaunt his sponsors’ deeds blind him to moments that counter these narratives. accordingly, t‘ovma does not record mūsā’s alliance with the bagratunis or his fate, but instead deploys a caliphal general against an armenian noble because someone else killed a caliphal representative. al-ṭabarī’s version, much more believably, has the added benefit of sending bughā against al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘, while zurārid ałjnik‘ stood en route between al-jazīra and khoyṭ/xoyt‘. after the deportation of the zurārid family to samarrāʾ, bughā turned against al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ themselves. al-ṭabarī clarifies that bughā “proceeded to lay siege in the mountain of al-khuwaythiyya. they constituted the majority of the inhabitants of armenia and were the killers of yūsuf b. muḥammad.”55 during this campaign, bughā’s forces reportedly killed 30,000 of al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ and imprisoned still more. it is only after the subjugation of khoyṭ/xoyt‘ that al-ṭabarī sends bughā against the arcruni capital at albāq (here: aghbagh)/ałbak. bughā’s campaign against tiflīs/tp‘ilisi after the destructive campaign in khoyṭ/xoyt‘, al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ next appear further north as allies of the amīr of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi, isḥāq b. ismāʿīl b. shuʿayb, who appears as sahak the son of ismayēl in armenian. this brings the narrative of bughā’s campaign back into 52. on the appearance of the title patrician and its use in greek (πατρίκιος), armenian (պատրիկ), and arabic ( ), see ter-łevondyan, “hayoc‘ išxanǝ”; karen yuzbašyan, “les titres byzantins en arménie,” in l’arménie et byzance: histoire et culture, ed. nina garsoïan (paris: sorbonne, 1996). 53. al-ṭabarī, history, vol. 34, 114; taʾrīkh, iii 1409. 54. al-ṭabarī, history, vol. 34, 115; taʾrīkh, iii 1409. see also ʿizz al-dīn ʿalī b. muḥammad ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil fī-l-taʾrīkh (beirut: dār ṣādr, 1995), vii 59; ʿ abd al-raḥman b. muḥammad ibn khaldūn, taʾrīkh (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, [1391] 1971), iv 276; aḥmad b. muḥammad ibn miskawayh, tajārib al-umam wa-taʿāqub al-himam (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, [1424] 2003), iv 123. note the prevalence of judeochristian names in the zurārid family. while these names are certainly not unusual among muslim arabs, this might potentially suggest that they were converts who maintained a connection to biblical stories. 55. al-ṭabarī, history, vol. 34, 115 and n. 373; taʾrīkh, iii, 1409; ibn miskawayh, tajārib al-umam iv, 123. بطريــق 81 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) dialogue with t‘ovma’s version, who does not mention al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ but does send bughā north against tiflīs/tp‘ilisi after wintering in dabīl/duin. tiflīs/tp‘ilisi had been functionally independent for decades by the time of bughā’s campaign. ibn khurradādhbih recognizes isḥāq b. ismāʿīl as the lord of armenia ( ) and perhaps this vaunted status encouraged him to ignore bughā’s summons.56 he “was a stocky old man and had a large head. he was tattooed with blue (indigo) markings, and was ruddy, bald, and cross-eyed.”57 isḥāq’s ancestry remains uncertain. al-masʿūdī explains: “i think that he was a qurayshite of banū umayya, or their client”58; he appears most frequently in arabic sources as isḥāq b. ismāʿīl mawlā banī umayya.59 this mawlā status is at least a generation off, as either isḥāq’s father ismāʿīl or his grandfather shuʿayb was a mawlā of the last umayyad caliph marwān b. muḥammad,60 who was the governor of armenia before becoming caliph. modern scholars have assumed that isḥāq was part of “a line of arab amīrs” and conclude that “the amīrate [at tiflīs/tp‘ilisi] had long been a focus of arab power in the caucasus.”61 while later amīrs were arabs, extant sources do not corroborate the claim that isḥāq was. the repeated reference to his family’s mawlā status in lieu of a tribal nisba instead suggests that isḥāq was not perceived as arab. al-yaʿqūbī claims that isḥāq offered money and a pledge of allegiance to the caliph, but refused bughā’s summon to appear before the army personally by claiming that “he did not deviate from obedience [to the caliph].”62 in 238/852-3, bughā set his army against tiflīs/ tp‘ilisi while zīrak moved across the kura river into ṣughdabīl/sagodebeli. most arabic accounts of this siege note the catastrophic use of naphtha against the city made of wood and the high death toll of 50,000. in this leg of the campaign, according to al-ṭabarī, “bughā also sent abū al-ʿabbās al-wārithī al-naṣrānī against the inhabitants of armenia, arab and non-arab alike” ( ).63 bughā sat above the town and watched zīrak and abū al-ʿabbās burn the city and capture isḥāq and his son ʿ amr. we find in this explicit confirmation that bughā’s campaign was against “arab and non-arab alike”; we also find confirmation that armenian troops outside of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan were helping bughā. al-ṭabarī identifies abū al-ʿabbās as a prince (al-wārithī is a translation of the armenian sepuh)64 and a christian (al-naṣrānī) and later clarifies that this refers to none other than sinbāṭ b. ashūṭ, the arabization of smbat aplabas bagratuni, the brother of the deported prince of armenia 56. abū al-qāsim ʿubayd allāh ibn khurradādhbih, kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik (leiden: brill, 1889), 163. 57. al-ṭabarī, history, vol. 34, 123; taʾrīkh, iii 1415; ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil, vii 67. 58. vladimir minorsky, a history of sharvān and darband in the 10th–11th centuries (cambridge: heffer, 1958), 161. 59. ibn khaldūn, taʾrīkh, iv 276; ibn miskawayh, tajārib al-umam, iv 124; ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil, vii 67. 60. clifford edmund bosworth and vladimir minorsky, “al-kurdj,” in ei2. 61. clifford edmund bosworth and david neil mackenzie, “al-ḳabḳ,” ibid; vladimir minorsky, “transcaucasica,” journal asiatique 217 (1930), 60 calls him “l’amīr arabe (ḳuraišite)”. 62. al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, ii 598. 63. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1416.see also ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil, vii 67; ibn miskawayh, tajārib al-umam, iv 124. ibn miskawayh confuses abū al-ʿabbās and isḥāq b. ismāʿīl. minorsky, “transcaucasica,” 61. 64. laurent and canard, l’arménie 406; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1416 changes this to wāthī. صاحــب ارمينيــة عربهــا وعجمهــا al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 82 bagarat bagratuni, the son of ašot msaker, and the sparapet of armenia.65 in other words, bughā rallied turks, arabs, and armenians against a non-arab amīr in tiflīs/tp‘ilisi with muslims and christians are on both sides of the battle lines. when isḥāq b. ismāʿīl was captured, his wife interceded with bughā on his behalf. extant sources do not specify her religion or ethnicity, but do identify her as the daughter of the king of the throne ( ), whom arabic geographical texts identify as christian.66 modern scholars at times recognize the term al-sarīr as an ethnonym,67 though it does not consistently function as such in medieval texts. historians and geographers work instead to explain the name based on connections to the sasanian past with the explanation that either anūshirwān or yazdegerd supplied the eponymous throne (al-sarīr).68 ibn rusta identifies the name of the king as avar ( ), a detail corroborated by al-gardīzī (except as āvāz: ).69 t‘ovma arcruni refers to al-sarīr as awrhazk‘ (աւրհազք), a claim that minorsky parses: -k‘ denotes the nominative plural case, -hrshifted to -rh through metathesis, and the –z constitutes an iranian suffix along the model of lakz and gurz. as such, he recovers *auhar from t‘ovma’s awrhazk‘, signaling the avarness of al-sarīr to confirm ibn rustah and al-gardīzī’s somewhat oblique comments.70 minorsky suggests, though, that al-sarīr might in fact refer to a sixth-century group whom theophylactos simocatta identified as “pseudo-avars” (ψευδάβαροι) who coopted a foreign identity that allowed them unearned prestige.71 again, the study of ethnonyms rests 65. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1416. 66. on the christianity of the inhabitants of the kingdom of the throne, see abū isḥāq ibrāhīm b. muḥammad al-iṣṭakhrī, kitāb al-masālik wa al-mamālik (leiden: brill, 1927), 223; josef markwart, osteuropäische und ostasiatische streifzüge: ethnologische und historisch-topographische studien zur geschichte des 9. und 10. jahrhunderts (ca. 840-940) (leipzig: weicher, 1903), 423. ibn rusta explains that the fortress population is christian, but the rest are not. he also tells of the ruler of ḥaydān who prays with the muslims on fridays, the jews on saturdays, and the christians on sundays just to cover his bases; abū ʿalī aḥmad b. ʿumar ibn rusta, kitāb al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa (leiden: brill, 1892), 147-8. 67. david testen, “an early reference to the avars reconsidered,” the annual of the society for the study of caucasia 6-7 (1994-6), 3. 68. abū al-ḥasan ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn al-masʿūdī, les prairies d’or: texte et traduction [murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawāhir] (paris: l’imprimerie impériale, 1861-1877), 4-5; al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, ii 382; al-balādhurī, futūḥ, 196. 69. ibn rusta, kitāb al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 147. minorsky notes elsewhere that “this name does not cover the local population,” remarking that this is meant to refer to the king of al-sarīr alone; minorsky, sharvān 168 n. 7. abū saʿīd ʿabd al-ḥayy b. ḍaḥḥāk b. maḥmūd al-gardīzī, zayn al-akhbār [taʾrīkh gardīzī] (tihrān: dunyā-yi kitāb, 1363 [1984]), 594. a more convoluted thread in the discussion of the avarness of al-sarīr is al-balādhurī’s title alternatively rendered as , , or ; for a detailed treatment of this problem, see testen, “early reference.” 70. ḥudūd al-ʿālam, the regions of the world, a persian geography, 372ah-982ad, trans. vladimir minorsky (cambridge: ejw gibb memorial, 1982), 447-8 and note 2; markwart, streifzüge, 496. thomson renders this as apkhaz with the note: “the text of patkanean reads awṙhazk‘. brosset renders ‘awars,’ patkanean suggests ‘perhaps apkhaz,’ and vardanyan renders ‘abkhaz.’ a corruption wṙ from p‘ in armenian is not implausible”; arcruni, history, 240 and note 6. 71. minorsky is referring to the avar attack on constantinople in theophylact simocatta, the history of theophylact simocatta, trans. mary whitby and michael whitby (oxford: clarendon press, 1986), 23; صاحــب الســرير وملكهــم يســمَّى اوار وملــك ايشــانرا آواز خواننــد وهرارزانشــاه وهرراوارنشــاه وهراررانشــاه 83 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) on shaky ground and, as minorsky concludes, “[i]t must be remembered that the evidence for the distinction of the true avars and pseudo-avars […] is rather frail” but that al-sarīr “could have usurped a name which did not strictly belong to them.”72 we might take this a step further to recognize that medieval caucasian avarness as a whole is a somewhat tenuous concept. this case demonstrates the contested nature of ethnic identity, a reminder that the distinction between “true” and “pseudo” avars is a product of both medieval claims and modern concern about fitting peoples into recognizable boxes. during the siege of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi, the potentially avar, presumably christian wife of isḥāq b. ismāʿīl was fortified in ṣughdabīl/sagodebeli and protected by al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘.73 according to t‘ovma, she came unveiled and distraught before bughā to beg for isḥāq’s life, but bughā ordered isḥāq to be crucified near the kura river and sent his head on to samarrāʾ so that he could be free to marry his widow.74 isḥāq’s wife announced that she would take her complaints to al-mutawakkil: “for my sake, you killed my lord. i am not content to be your wife but the great caliph’s [wife].”75 bughā did eventually send her on to the caliph, who married her and heard her complaints. this, t‘ovma explains, was the eventual cause for bughā’s death. al-mutawakkil was jealous of bughā’s relationship with his wife, but bughā was too popular and successful to kill outright. al-mutawakkil instead arranged his death by dispatching him on an impossible mission in khurāsān with the expectation that bughā would not survive.76 in this way, t‘ovma stresses the significance of the caucasian campaign by constructing a link between bughā’s deeds and his death and, accordingly, rendering the campaign fatal. the siege of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi also introduces a paradox to the story of al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘. the traditional rendition of the story has al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ kill yūsuf b. muḥammad out of vengeance for bagarat bagratuni’s imprisonment. the idea that al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ would guard the wife of isḥāq b. ismāʿīl, then, is particularly odd in the face of smbat bagratuni’s involvement in the siege of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi. if al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ did indeed kill yūsuf in historiarum libri octo (bonn: impensis ed. weberi, 1834), 38. simocatta describes these avars (τοὺς ἀβάρους) as huns (οὖννοι) and refers to their leader as the “chagan of the huns” (τοῖς οὖννοις χαγᾶνος). he does indeed accuse these huns of misappropriating avarness: “these named themselves avars and glorified their leader with the appellation of chagan […] for among the scythian nations that of the avars is said to be the most adept tribe. in point of fact even up to our present times the pseudo-avars (for it is more correct to refer to them thus) are divided in their ancestry…” (189-90 in english; 284 in greek). 72. regions of the world, 448. 73. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1416. 74. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1415; minorsky, sharvān, 25; al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, ii 598; aḥmad b. muḥammad ibn ʿabd rabbihi, al-ʿiqd al-farīd (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1997), ii 10. these recount the arrival of isḥāq’s head in samarrāʾ. al-ṭabarī says that he was crucified on the gate of thorns, but on the page before this statement, al-ṭabarī lists the gates of tiflīs and does not include a gate of thorns. minorsky claims that he was hung on the gate of ṣughd, so this might be ṣughdabīl gate; see minorsky, “transcaucasica,” 62 n. 2 on . on the veil in christian societies of the north, see the georgian martyrology of šušanik in david marshall lane, lives and legends of the georgian saints (london: allen & unwin, 1956). 75. arcruni, history, 239; patmut‘iwn, 272. 76. placed in a christian context, t‘ovma may here be drawing on 2 samuel, comparing al-mutawakkil to king david, bughā to uriah, and the wife of isḥāq, bathsheba. بــاب الحســك al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 84 response to bagarat bagratuni’s imprisonment, their presence on the battlefield arrayed against smbat bagratuni demands additional explanation. if we set aside the interpretation offered for their murder of yūsuf and look at their actions and alliances, another picture of al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ emerges. they murdered a caliphal representative and then allied with a local muslim amīr to battle a caliphal army even though it arrayed them against the bagratunis. despite the rhetoric of both arabic and armenian sources about the unity of the armenians, al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ appear to be more interested in fighting caliphal forces than remaining loyal to the bagratunis. bughā’s campaign against the north caucasus after the siege of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi, bughā’s campaign faltered against the fragmented political landscape of the northern caucasus. most arabic and armenian sources skip straight from tiflīs/tp‘ilisi to albania with the exception of the arabic translation of the darband-nāmeh, which states that “muhammad [b. khālid] had returned to al-bāb, whereas bughā spent the winter in the town of dabīl and then fought the georgians and abkhazians in a number of battles. each time he was victorious, slew many of them and carried away many prisoners and much booty. then he fought (ghazā) the alān and the khazar (khazrān) and was victorious over them and took poll-tax (jizya) from them all.”77 the georgian book of k‘art‘li adds significantly more detail here. after tiflīs/tp‘ilisi burned, t‘ewdosi, the king of the abkhāz/ap‘xaz, challenged bughā’s army. bughā subsequently sent zīrak and bagrat, son of ašot curopalates (bagarat bagratuni the son of ašot msaker, who was already in samarrāʾ according to all other accounts) against the abkhāz/ap‘xaz while he himself moved against the mt‘iuls, men from the mountains of what is now northern georgia. the abkhazian king t‘ewdosi fell to bughā’s troops under the direction of bughā’s lieutenants. on their way back they were opposed at juaris-guerdi by the gardabanians, who inflicted severe losses on their army. when buğa learnt of this, he moved from there and went to čart‘alet‘i, where he stopped. he took hostages from the mt‘iulni, 300 men. he was intending to attack ossetia, so he advanced to c‘xavat‘i. but abulabaz, the erist‘avi of armenia, and guaram, son of ašot, sent a message to the mt‘iulni that they should not let them pass. so they sacrificed their hostages. god helped them, because snow fell. they offered resistance and engaged battle. god gave them the victory, and a numberless host of saracens was slain. their horses fed on azaleas, and many died. but the loss was not apparent from the multitude of the army, because their number was about 120,000.78 with the neutralization of abkhazian forces through the efforts of the caliphal and bagratuni troops, bughā aimed at ossetia and advanced to c‘xavat‘i, northwest of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi. the 77. minorsky, sharvān, 25 (in english) and 3 (in arabic). 78. book of k‘art‘li in robert thomson, rewriting caucasian history: the medieval armenian adaptations of the georgian chronicles: the original georgian texts and the armenian adaptation (oxford: oxford university press, 1996), 261. 85 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) gardabanians here probably refer to the people of the region gardabani, gugark‘ in armenian. if we can move past the image of horses munching on azaleas, the interesting part of this passage is that it demonstrates that “georgian” responses to bughā’s campaign were no more unified than armenian. there was no concept of georgia as modern observers would recognize it,79 even if the blanket term appears in armenian and arabic sources. we are still centuries away from unification under the bagratuni family. georgianness did not rally armies to challenge bughā, but rather the abkhāz/ap‘xaz, gardabanians, and mt‘iuls fought him independently. further, the author of the book of k‘art‘li does not offer any suggestion that religious differences informed these skirmishes. abulabaz, “the erist‘avi of armenia,” is al-ṭabarī’s abū al-ʿabbās, the same smbat aplabas bagratuni who allied with bughā and fought alongside zīrak against tiflīs/tp‘ilisi. here smbat appears instead to undermine bughā’s projected attack on ossetia by convincing the mt‘iuls to resist the caliphal army, even if that meant consigning hundreds of captives to their deaths. there are a few possible, if conjectural, interpretations of this. first, perhaps the author of the book of k‘art‘li is confused about the loyalties involved and makes assumptions about bagratuni allegiances during the campaign. this might explain why the armenian rendition of this text omits this passage. alternatively, we might hypothesize that bagratuni allegiance to bughā was not absolute, indicating that smbat bagratuni’s support occasionally faltered. we would then have to explain why smbat bagratuni supported bughā’s campaigns against other peoples of the caucasus, but not against the mt‘iuls. finally, and perhaps most believably, this might mark a narrative attempt to supply distance between the caliph and bughā. as we will see later, the book of k‘art‘li is the only source to identify bughā as a khazar. it is also the only source that inserts al-mutawakkil into the campaign north of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi: “when the amir-mumin became aware that he [bughā] was negotiating with the khazars, his clansmen, he sent word to bughā that he should leave k‘art‘li to humed, son of xalil [muḥammad b. khālid].”80 with this rendering, smbat’s undermining of bughā’s plan in fact augments his pro-ʿabbāsid agenda, since bughā sought to expand his personal power via collaboration with his khazar kinsmen. accordingly, smbat is proving his loyalty to the caliph by thwarting bughā’s grab for power. aborting the campaign against ossetia, bughā turned back towards albania. he faced al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘ (σαναραῖοι of classical texts), who presented the greatest challenge to the campaign. al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘ were remarkably effective against bughā’s troops, defeating them multiple times in short succession. there is no modern consensus on the territory and origins of al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘, but khākhiṭ/kaxet‘i in georgia and shakkī/ šak‘ē in albania appear regularly.81 al-masʿūdī places them between tiflīs/tp‘ilisi and bāb al-lān and identifies them as christians; while t‘ovma confirms their christian affiliation, he does not locate them exactly. al-masʿūdī also writes that they “claim to be descended from 79. for an overview of the appearance and definition of sak‘art‘velo (georgia) in georgian literature, see stephen rapp, studies in medieval georgian historiography: early texts and eurasian contexts (leuven: peeters, 2004). 80. book of k‘art‘li in thomson, rewriting, 261-62. 81. laurent and canard, l’arménie 62 n. 68 and 63 n. 70; vladimir minorsky, “caucasica iv,” bulletin of soas 15, no. 3 (1953): 506; ghazarian, “armenien,” 220. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 86 the arabs, namely from nizār b. maʿadd b. muḍar, and a branch (fakhdh) of ʿuqayl, settled there since olden times.” minorsky dismisses this out of hand (“the original ts‘anar may have been of chechen origin. they certainly had nothing to do with arab tribes”),82 but we have no way to corroborate or invalidate these claims. the darband-nāmeh merely explains that they lived in georgia (jurzān, which usually refers to k‘art‘li).83 bughā fought al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘ either sixteen or nineteen times in only nine days and his repeated losses were humiliating.84 while t‘ovma does not refer to any outside help, al-yaʿqūbī explains that al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘ turned to byzantium, the khazars, and the saqāliba (slavs) for support against bughā’s attacks. faced with this army, bughā wrote to al-mutawakkil, who sent muḥammad b. khālid al-shaybānī as governor over the north. this appeased al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘ enough to sue for peace.85 laurent and canard note that their main goal was to maintain the kura river as a territorial divide, claiming that “ils ont à cet effet accepté tous les alliés, musulmans ou chrétiens, que l’intérêt du moment leur donnait.”86 laurent and canard’s subsequent list of the allies of al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘ indicates that they were involved in power struggles between various groups of arabs in the north, while al-yaʿqūbī verifies that they were well-connected to other non-georgian, both christian and non-christian, familial groups of the caucasus and beyond. bughā’s campaign against caucasian albania the repeated victories of al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘ in the north pushed bughā back south into caucasian albania. we have comparatively little information on albanian responses to bughā’s campaign because the albanians left no written record of their own unless we count movsēs dasxuranc‘i’s tenth-century compilation, the history of the albanians, which was written in armenian. dasxuranc‘i, though, notes bughā’s campaigns only briefly: “in the fulfillment of the 300th year of the armenian era [28.4.851 – 26.4.852] the christian princes of armenia and albania paid the price for their sins, for in this year they were taken prisoner, cast into irons by the tačiks, exiled from their homes, and sent against their will to baghdad.”87 after his defeat at the hands of al-ṣanāriyya/canark‘, bughā entered bardhʿa/partaw and subsequently attacked the stronghold kithīsh/k‘t‘iš (or: “the fortress of kīsh in the district of al-baylaqān”),88 where he encountered an albanian patrician named abū mūsā ʿīsā b. yūsuf b. [ukht?]89 iṣṭifānūs, whom ibn al-athīr instead identifies as ʿīsā b. mūsā. he appears in 82. minorsky, sharvān, 162; laurent and canard, l’arménie 47 for possible chechen origin. 83. minorsky, sharvān, 23 (in english) and 2 (in arabic). 84. minorsky, sharvān, 19; arcruni, history, 241; patmut‘iwn, 274. 85. al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, ii 598; markwart, südarmenien, 200; minorsky, sharvān, 110 n. 2. 86. laurent and canard, l’arménie 48. 87. movsēs dasxuranc‘i, the history of the caucasian albanians, trans. c. j. f. dowsett (london: oxford university press, 1961), 218, except that he supplies “arabs” for tačiks; patmut‘iwn ałuanic‘ ašxarhi (erevan: erevani hamalsarani hratarakč‘ut‘yun, 1983), 332. 88. ibn khaldūn, taʾrīkh, iv 276. al-ṭabarī explains that kithīsh/k‘t‘iš is 10 farsakhs from al-baylaqān/ p‘aytakaran and 15 farsakhs from bardhʿa/partaw. see minorsky, “caucasica iv,” 513. 89. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1416; ibn miskawayh, tajārib al-umam, iv 124 add the ukht. 87 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) armenian as esayi apumusē, who was “noted as a reader and was known as ‘son of a priest’,”90 a detail confirmed in the georgian book of k‘art‘li, which discusses “a certain priest’s son who had become mt‘avari.”91 declaring it “[an act of] great piety to slay the enemies of god,”92 esayi apumusē promised his men martyrdom should they die facing bughā’s army. as we will see in more detail below, the armenian christians on the battlefield invoked the second coming and placed the battle into the broader story of the end of time. yet the armenian forces were there to support bughā and fight against the albanian forces who rallied under the banner of esayi apumusē. mušeł bagratuni the son of smbat aplabas, whom t‘ovma later acknowledges as one of the naxarars who was not deported to samarrāʾ, led the armenians. esayi apumusē, then, fought bagratuni troops as part of bughā’s army, facing off twenty-eight times over the course of an entire year. they desisted when bughā presented esayi apumusē with a letter from al-mutawakkil. apumusē and his father were subsequently sent to samarrāʾ.93 from arabic sources alone, it seems that bughā’s campaign was even more destructive in the eastern lands (as albania appears in armenian sources) than in armenia itself. yet not all albanian patricians fought bughā’s advance. qiṭrīj, whose name is an arabization of ktrič or ktričen (this also appears as karič if the armenian տ is mistaken for an ա), was the patrician of the albanian stronghold at jardmān/gardman. this prince was “beguiled by the devil” and so collaborated with bughā by turning over vasak, the prince of al-sīsajān/ siwnik‘, “calculating that bugha might favor him for this.”94 his efforts were evidently in vain, as zīrak later conquered jardmān/gardman and took him prisoner.95 again, as in armenia and georgia, there is no sense of ethnic solidarity that might have joined abū mūsā and qiṭrīj into an albanian alliance to preserve “albania,” because power was organized regionally in terms of principalities instead of provincially. nor were the battles drawn by religious affiliation, even though abū mūsā evoked martyrdom and apocalyptic rhetoric to galvanize his troops. bughā’s second campaign against basfurrajān/vaspurakan as bughā campaigned in albania, gurgēn arcruni, the son of apupelč [abū balj], a kinsman of the other gurgēn arcruni who had already been deported to samarrāʾ, occupied the power vacuum in armenia. t‘ovma establishes his credentials as “a scion of senek‘erim and of the mamikoneans from chen,”96 meaning that he claimed descent from two of the most revered 90. arcruni, history, 241-42; patmut‘iwn, 276. 91. book of k‘art‘li in thomson, rewriting, 261. 92. arcruni, history, 243; patmut‘iwn, 278. 93. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1416; history, vol. 34, 124 n. 408; minorsky, “caucasica iv,” 512-14; vardan arewelc‘i, la domination arabe en arménie: extrait de l’histoire universelle de vardan traduit de l’arménien et annoté (louvain: imprimerie j.-b. istas, 1927), 63. 94. drasxanakertc‘i, history, 123; patmut‘iwn, 128. 95. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1416; laurent and canard, l’arménie 149; arewelc‘i, la domination arabe, 63 mentions his imprisonment, but under bughā himself without mention of zīrak. 96. arcruni, history, 256; patmut‘iwn, 300. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 88 armenian noble lines, the arcrunis on his father’s side and the mamikoneans through his mother. gurgēn “acted wisely in not opposing the evil one” (bughā), but instead fled to bagratuniheld sper (modern: i̇spir). while in the west, he defeated byzantine forces and the emperor michael iii personally invited him to cross into byzantine territory, hoping to turn him into an ally of constantinople. gurgēn instead fought byzantine forces, for which bughā himself reportedly offered his “profound thanks.” that said, t‘ovma mentions that bughā’s campaign pitted the caliphal army against byzantine towns: “[some] tačik soldiers from bugha’s army had come to attack the greek forces in the castles. gurgēn opposed them numerous times, inflicting no small loses on the tačik army.”97 at this point, then, three mutually belligerent armies occupied bagratuni territory at close proximity to each other: the byzantines, bughā’s troops (not including bughā himself), and the arcrunis. smbat aplabas, bughā’s bagratuni ally, spoke on gurgēn’s behalf and convinced bughā to see gurgēn as an ally because of his success against the byzantines, but this did not last. to contend with gurgēn, bughā sent a lieutenant named budayl in arabic, butel in armenian, along with the ʿ uthmānids of barkrī/berkri, known in armenian as the ut‘maniks. t‘ovma again presents this in ethno-religious terms: “valiantly distinguishing themselves, the armenian troops battled the foreigners (ընդ այլազգիս) for many drawn-out hours, inflicting great losses on their army.”98 but, yet again, the battle lines were not so clearly drawn. when gurgēn had been off fighting the byzantines and the tačiks, rivals from his own house arose in al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan. accompanying bughā’s forces were other members of the arcruni family who did not embrace gurgēn’s claim to power and so hoped to profit from the disruption by winning al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan. in defeating bughā’s army, gurgēn was also establishing his own rule over “numerous members of his own family, faithless relatives false to their pacts and oaths.”99 gurgēn’s defeat of caliphal forces was also a victory over “numerous members” of arcrunis and the ʿuthmānids. and, again, there were armenian christians on both sides of this conflict. bughā subsequently acknowledged gurgēn’s claim over al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan. after bughā’s departure from armenia, gurgēn had to protect his position against ašot arcruni when he returned from samarrāʾ. with this, he had the help of mūsā b. zurāra’s son, again demonstrating the interrelations between muslim and christian forces of the caucasus. ter-łevondyan, though, adopts t‘ovma’s description of ethno-religious boundaries in his description of muslim-christian relations by offering the ʿuthmānids as a counterpoint: “in the second half of the ninth century, however, the zurārids formed an exception insofar as they supported the armenian naχarars. the ʿuthmānids of berkri, for example, in addition to their support for bughā’s expedition, also began to nourish designs against the armenian naχarars.”100 this overlooks the fact that the ʿuthmānids, precisely through “their support 97. arcruni, history, 259 except that thomson renders tačkac‘ as muslims; patmut‘iwn, 302; laurent and canard, l’arménie 148. 98. arcruni, history, 261 except that thomson renders foreigners as muslims; patmut‘iwn, 306. 99. arcruni, history, 261; patmut‘iwn, 308. 100. ter-łevondyan, arab emirates, 56. 89 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) for bugha’s expedition,” had previously fought alongside arcruni forces as allies arrayed against gurgēn. mixed armies were the norm, such that the close relationship between the zurārids and the arcruni and bagratuni houses cannot be construed as an anomaly. given the power struggles within the arcruni house itself, close relations between some arcruni factions and the neighboring amīrs seems to have been central to bolstering rival claims to power. the immediate aftermath of bughā’s campaign t‘ovma, in his exuberance to extol gurgēn arcruni, subsequently fails to record significant details about bughā’s departure from the caucasus. despite the immense upheaval over the course of three years, bughā’s campaign came to an abrupt halt when t‘ovma switches gears to recount the return of the captives from samarrāʾ. t‘ovma claims that bughā’s goal was “the removal of the armenian magnates from the country.”101 by this standard, the campaign was a resounding success. even smbat aplabas, bughā’s closest armenian ally, ended up in samarrāʾ even if his sons did not. yet bughā’s goals must have been much broader, as he also succeeded in removing the albanian patricians from their territories, as well as the muslim amīrs from arzan/arcn and tiflīs/tp‘ilisi. the campaign cannot therefore be simplified as anti-armenian or anti-christian, despite the interpretations offered by t‘ovma. given the bewildering array of alliances and traitors alike in this dramatic struggle, t‘ovma’s explanation is soothingly and deceptively simple. the goal for the remainder of this paper is to explicate those details that do not make sense in the framework of ethno-religious divisions by proposing that such a perspective merely reflects t‘ovma’s ideal community in lieu of a much more complicated reality. while religion and ethnicity certainly served as markers of communal identity, they did not always inform allegiances, which were forged locally. a closer look at ethnicity, religion, and gender in the construction of communities reveals a certain pragmatism whereby local concerns informed alliances aimed at protecting local power. in the face of external threats, these alliances served to efface differences within multiconfessional and multiethnic groups. ethnicity and communal identity in the medieval caucasus as we saw above, a. ter-łevondyan claims that “the local arabs had contributed in every way to the advance of bugha’s army.”102 compounded by the concern for the armenian nobility and the integrity of armenian land, such a statement draws stark battle lines along ethnic identifiers. ter-łevondyan’s view fairly reflects the descriptions of the campaign as found in t‘ovma arcruni’s history should we render tačik as arab. yet despite this, t‘ovma and other historians passing along information about the ninth-century caucasus confirm 101. arcruni, history, 254; patmut‘iwn, 296. 102. ter-łevondyan, arab emirates, 44. he refers here to the jaḥḥāfids, a group of qaysī arabs who settled in aršarunik‘ and sirāj/širak after marrying into the armenian mamikonean family in the eighth century. al-ṭabarī has sawāda b. ʿabd al-ḥamīd al-jaḥḥāfī advise yūsuf b. muḥammad of bagratuni duplicity, but this is the only reference to the jaḥḥāfids in relation to bughā’s campaigns, making this conclusion suspect. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1409 . al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 90 that the communities involved in bughā’s campaigns do not organize around arabness or armenianness. by employing terms that are deliberately vague or avoiding the ethnic identifiers, medieval authors actually minimize the role of ethnicity in order to account for multiethnic communities. in fact, ethnic identifiers frequently emerge specifically to laud cooperation within multiethnic gatherings, rather than to inscribe differences between various social groups. where ethnonyms are employed as markers of social difference, as with the use of “tačik” to refer to an arab or “elamite” for a turk, these also have religious connotations that fit neatly in the narrative agenda of the medieval authors. the many meanings of the ethnonym tačik modern scholars have struggled to conceptualize ethnonyms in reference to ʿabbāsid-era communities. p. crone, for example, clarifies that “‘arab’ was a word with many meanings. one meaning certainly had to do with descent: a genuine arab (aṣīl, min anfusihim) was a person who descended from an arab tribesman on his or her father’s side. but the word was rarely used to indicate descent alone.” instead, the term could also refer to an umayyad sympathizer, to a “rigid, legalistic scholar,” or even to any convert to islam with passing knowledge of arabic.103 given the changing definition and subjective guidelines for arabness, then, we should be wary of relying on ethnicity as a way to understand the alliances around bughā’s campaign. while families or individuals may well have identified with arabness in the caucasus, we are left with sources that present significant barriers to conceptualizing what that meant. this is particularly important because the word “arab” almost never appears in armenian sources on the campaign. instead, medieval armenian authors typically employ the ambiguous term tačik, whether for some local muslims or for bughā’s troops. the armenian word tačik comes from the middle persian. while harkening back to the arabic , the middle persian tāčīk and the parthian tāžīk refer to arabs (not just those of the ṭāʾī tribe) before the rise of islam and so typically appear in english translation as arab. several modern translations of armenian texts similarly render tačik as “arab” and the term was indeed used as such in pre-islamic armenian literature such as agat‘angełos’s history of the armenians.104 pre-islamic variants of the word tačik also appear in other languages such as georgian, sogdian, sanskrit, and syriac.105 from approximately the fourth century, authors writing in syriac did not necessarily use (ṭayyāyē) to denote ethnicity (ʿarabāyē appears to render arab), but rather lifestyle. some scholars suggest, albeit initiating significant debate, that a 103. crone, nativist prophets; cooperson, “‘arabs’ and ‘iranians,’” 365. 104. heinrich hübschmann, armenische grammatik (leipzig: breitkopf & härtel, 1908), 86-87. 105. john perry, “tajik (i) the ethnonym,” in eir. on the sogdian, see werner sundermann, “an early attestation of the name of the tajiks,” in medioiranica: proceedings of the international colloquium organized by the katholieke universiteit leuven from the 21st to the 23rd of may 1990, ed. wojciech skalmowski and alois van tongerloo (leuven: peeters, 1993), 163. on alternatives to the relationship between the ṭāʾī tribe and tačik, see hans heinrich schaeder, “türkische namen der iranier,” in festschrift friedrich giese, ed. gotthard jäschke (leipzig: otto harrassowwitz, 1941), 19-20. ء طي ܛܝܝܐ 91 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) ṭayyāyē might be understood as a nomad.106 after the rise of islam, the term was applied to muslims, although not clearly relating to their ethnicity or religious affiliation. m. penn has recently suggested that the term was deliberately vague to allow readers to efface markers of difference between the conquered and the conquerors. discussing the bēt ḥālē disputation between a notable and a christian from the 720s, penn notes that “[t]he text called the notable a ṭayyāyē, a son of hagar, or a son of ishmael—all terms that syriac authors could also apply to christians. the text avoided hagarene, which was reserved only for muslims.”107 in syriac, then, the word ṭayyāyē is not necessarily an ethnonym, but rather plastic enough to read difference into social groupings according to the specific circumstances. as a counterpoint, the variant *täžik also entered turkish via the sogdian tāžīk in the eighth century to refer to the muslims involved in the conquest of central asia, who were both arabs and persians. it was typically used to denote muslims irrespective of ethnicity. while many of the täžiks in contact with the turks were likely persians, it is not until the eleventh century with the rise of new persian literature that the term reverts back to an ethnonym, this time to refer to persians.108 again, the word may have also had social implications, separating nomadic and sedentary lifestyles.109 “the distinction between turk and tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the (ideally) nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy.”110 here the meaning of täžik has shifted, such that its use in syriac designated nomadic lifestyle while its use in turkish a few centuries later provided the exact opposite meaning. given the contextually-dependent definition of the word tačik, then, we cannot in good faith organize the analysis of bughā’s campaign around its translation as arab even if earlier armenian authors such as agat‘angełos used it as such. to do so would assume that the meaning remained stagnant in armenian when it was fluid in every other language. in fact, most of the relevant armenian sources employ the term in a more generic sense to mean muslim, not arab.111 t‘ovma, for example, refers to one of the martyrs from bughā’s campaign as a christian convert who was “a tačik and a persian by race” (տաճիկ և ազգաւ պարսիկ), i.e., he was a persian muslim.112 later, he also generalizes about “all the races of the tačiks” (ամենայն ազգքն տաճկաց).113 this suggests that by the tenth century the armenian word 106. judah benzion segal, “arabs in syriac literature before the rise of islam,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 4 (1984): 100. cf: the use of the ethnonyms “kurd” or “arab” to refer to nomads, refuted in james, “arab ethnonyms,” 686; retsö, “earliest arabs,” 132-3; macdonald, “arabs,” 290-1 and 94-7. 107. michael philip penn, envisioning islam: syriac christians and the early muslim world (2015), 73. 108. clifford edmund bosworth, “tādjīk,” in ei2. 109. schaeder, “türkische namen,” 3. 110. perry, “tajik”; schaeder, “türkische namen,” 25 also discusses the use of “turk and tajik” as a phrase like al-ʿarab wa-l-ʿajam to refer to “alle menschen.” 111. thomson typically translates tačik as such. 112. arcruni, history, 207, see also 64 n. 6; patmut‘iwn, 222. 113. arcruni, history, 218 n. 7. thomson glosses this: “here thomas has especially in mind arab settlement,” citing ter-łevondyan and laurent/canard. given the difficulties in pinning down the arabness of local amīrs and the multiplicity of ethnicities t‘ovma includes in the caliphal forces, this interpretation should be revisited. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 92 tačik implied a religious connotation although by comparison to the syriac we might also wonder if the definition of the term is dependent largely on context. the fluidity and narrative function of ethnonyms even without the fluid definition of the armenian term tačik, it would be difficult to read the alliances and loyalties of the main protagonists of this story as ethnically proscribed. our main sources on bughā’s campaign exhibit little interest in defining ethnicity and do not elaborate on ethnic differences. we already saw above that extant sources offer no clear evidence that the amīr of arzan/arcn mūsā b. zurāra or the amīr of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi isḥāq b. ismāʿīl were in fact arabs. there are other local muslim patricians who formed “arab emirates” in armenia who similarly do not consistently appear as arabs in medieval sources. for example, al-yaʿqūbī identifies the jaḥḥāfids as sulamī (hence, arab), but drasxanakertc‘i claims that they were persians, while modern scholars wonder if they might have been kurds.114 the unclaimed and contested claims of ancestry reveal the process of continual rewriting of identity in the medieval period, where our authors apply or withhold ethnonyms depending on circumstances. this inconsistent assignment of ethnonyms demonstrates the flexibility of medieval identity construction, but more importantly, it also served a narrative function. bughā himself serves as an interesting case. almost all medieval sources identify him as a turk, likely from the eastern frontiers of the islamic world. yet while some caucasian sources identify bughā as a turk, two do not. first, a passage in the georgian book of k‘art‘li, omitted from the armenian redaction, suggests that he may instead have been khazar.115 second, an armenian source with a decidedly controversial date of composition instead claims that bughā was “the son of a priest” from a town called mut‘van in the region of albāq/ałbak, the capital of basfurrajān/vaspurakan.116 on the one hand, these could reveal misinformation, disagreements, or simple ignorance in the same way that authors reveal uncertainty about how to group isḥāq b. ismāʿīl or al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘. but bughā’s alternative identities— khazar and armenian—locate him for a caucasian audience, making him local as he allied and battled with other caucasian powers. as we saw above, this may potentially supply distance between bughā and the source of his power (the caliph), which functionally allowed caucasian populations to declare themselves loyal to al-mutawakkil while at the same time battling his general. t‘ovma offers two clearer examples of how ethnonyms can serve a narrative function. first, he recognizes bughā as “a turk by race” (ազգաւ թուրք),117 but he does not employ the term turk consistently. instead, he also frequently refers to the participants in the 114. ter-łevondyan, arab emirates, 34. 115. book of k‘art‘li in thomson, rewriting, 261-62. “but when the amir-mumin [al-mutawakkil] became aware that he was negotiating with the xazars, his clansmen, he sent word to buğa that he should leave k‘art‘li to humed, son of xalil [muḥammad b. khālid].” rewriting, 262 n. 14: “his clansmen: the author equates xazars and turks.” 116. bagratuni, “the anonymous storyteller,” 214. 117. arcruni, history, 193; patmut‘iwn, 194. 93 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) campaign as elamites, a term that, like tačik, claims a number of meanings and so refuses easy categorization. r. thomson explains that later armenian historians employ elamite to refer to turks, but “thomas himself generally uses the expression in a vaguer sense, in combination with other regions of asia.” he clarifies, though, that t‘ovma is probably informed here by biblical precedents such as isaiah 22:6 and 21:2, the later referring in fact to persians instead of turks.118 in choosing to use elamite instead of turk, t‘ovma supplies a gloss to connect his story to the biblical framework, a project that speaks more to his goals than to concern about the ethnic “other.” this places bughā’s campaign in a biblical context for armenian readers, but leaves ethnic identification uncertain because of the difficulty in applying the term elamite to contemporary society. t‘ovma also uses ethnonyms to advance his narrative in his description of the caliphal army. he recognizes the diversity of the caliphal army by placing the explicit suggestion into the mouths of caliphal advisors, who opined that al-mutawakkil should send forces “from all the nations that are under your [caliphal] control.”119 he follows up with a list of participants from “syria and babylonia, turkastan and khuzhastan, media and ela, egypt and as far as inner tachkastan near the borders of sakastan,”120 including “the archers and stalwart bowmen of the elamites and arabians.”121 later, t‘ovma also claims that “bugha despatched soldiers from all nations, from among all magnates and all governors, persians, elamites, babylonians, and arabs, who had come with him to wage war at the command of the caliph and the great general, more than 15,000 men.”122 t‘ovma’s insistence that the caliphal army was pulled from all corners of the caliphate has several possible explanations. it might reflect how diverse the caliphal army actually was, such that the armenian authors cannot summarily identify the troops. arabic sources corroborate that the higher ranks of soldiers were turkish slaves and the infantry under bughā’s command were maghāriba, or north african troops in the service of the ʿabbāsids.123 they appear as małripikk‘ in armenian.124 this could suggest the involvement of berbers or east africans, but most likely refers to qaysī or yamanī arabs from the ḥawf (lit: “edge”), the egyptian district to the east of the nile delta.125 118. arcruni, history, 193 n. 1. 119. arcruni, history, 190; patmut‘iwn, 196. this same idea is repeated in a letter from al-mutawakkil to bughā: history, 217; patmut‘iwn, 236. 120. arcruni, history, 191; patmut‘iwn, 198. 121. arcruni, history, 192-93; patmut‘iwn, 200 (զկապարճաւորս և զկորովիս աղեղնաւորացն ելեմացւոց և արաբացւոց). 122. arcruni, history, 209; patmut‘iwn, 224. 123. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1416; ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil, vii 67 speaking of isḥāq b. ismāʿīl. 124. bagratuni, “the anonymous storyteller,” 214; patmut‘iwn ananun zruc‘agri karcec‘eal šapuh bagratuni (erevan: haykakan ssh gitut‘yunneru akademiayi hratarakč‘ut‘yun, 1971), 147. 125. matthew gordon, the breaking of a thousand swords: a history of the turkish military of samarra (a.h. 200-275/815-889 c.e.) (albany: suny press, 2001), 38. here he is relying on al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, vii 118; ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil, vi 452. the term maghāriba is frequently placed in contrast to the mashāriqa, “easterners,” which frequently referred to turks. it literally means “westerners.” some were freemen, but others were prisoners from al-muʿtaṣim’s campaign in egypt in 214. see hugh kennedy, the armies of the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 94 yet t‘ovma’s list of ethnonyms (“persians, elamites, babylonians, and arabs”) was not meant to cast the campaign as an ethnic conflict, but rather served as an embellishment to vaunt the significance of armenia, i.e., that this matter was so pressing to the caliph that he mustered armies from the entire islamic world, or to suggest the military valor of the armenians, i.e., that it would take the entire caliphate to check the military threat posed by the armenians. the complete absence of ethnonyms (e.g., the zurārids), the variability of ethnic identifiers (e.g., bughā), and the use of ethnonyms as a tool to further the narrative agenda (e.g., elamites) corroborate the conclusions above about the flexibility of the term tačik, namely that our authors allow for malleable constructions of ethnic identity. the “indeterminacy of identity,” as m. cooperson calls it, acts “to destabilize any rigid definition of such ethnonyms such as ‘arab’ and ‘iranian’ and ‘persian.’”126 given the contextual value of ethnonyms of some of the main protagonists examined here, the indeterminacy of identity in the sources about bughā’s campaign constitutes a deliberate attempt at vagueness specifically to avoid the reduction of communities to ethnic monoliths. this cannot imply that ethnicity was either important or unimportant to individuals; rather, there were ways that medieval authors could rewrite or completely ignore ethnic divides in the formation of communities or alliances between communities in the face of conflict. ethnonyms appear and disappear to allow for the creation of communities that fit the narrative agenda of our authors. religion and communal identity in the medieval caucasus many scholars of late antique and early islamic history have honed in on religion in lieu of ethnicity as the primary category of social differentiation. while allowing for the persistence of ethnic identifiers in early islamic iraq, m. morony claims that the societal shifts after the arrival of islam “meant the replacement of other means of identification based on language, occupation, or geographical location by a primary identity based on membership in a religious community.”127 others follow suit, such as sizgorich’s assertion that caliphs: military and society in the early islamic state (london: routledge, 2005), 125-6; patricia crone, slaves on horses: the evolution of the islamic polity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1980), 260 n. 622. the identification of maghāriba as berber troops seems to refer to a later period. see mohamed talbi, “maghāriba,” in ei2; paul walker, “kutāma, kalbids and other westerners: the maghāriba in cairo,” alifbâ: studi araboislamici e mediterranei 22 (2008): 48, identifies the maghāriba in fāṭimid cairo as “arabs as well as berbers, true maghribīs from ifrīqiya [tunisia] along with the ṣiqillīs [silicians] (and possible andalusīs)—that is, anyone from west of egypt.” 126. cooperson, “‘arabs’ and ‘iranians,’” 382. comparable to the “indeterminacy of identity,” r. payne has addressed the avoidance of ethnicity in pre-islamic mesopotamia, also for a narrative reason (for christians “to articulate their social status in terms of their cities and noble lineages”); payne, “avoiding ethnicity,” 207, see also 20. 127. michael morony, “religious communities in late sasanian and early muslim iraq,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 17, no. 2 (1974): 8. while he is primarily concerned with jewish and christian communities in iraq, he extends this to muslims, as well: “although the social realities of muslim arabs in this period have more to do with tribalism, islam contained within itself the concept of a community that replaced the bonds of kinship with a bond of faith. the working out of this concept among muslims in iraq where they forged the bonds of a religious community after the fashion of the people around them lies at the 95 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) “in the premodern mediterranean and near east, every community was, first and foremost, a religious institution.”128 a glance at t‘ovma’s history suggests that these conclusions about the centrality of religious affiliations to identity construction might indeed be transferable to the caucasus. as t‘ovma discusses the conversion of an arcruni patrician to islam as a result of bughā’s campaign, he notes that the stories of apostates no longer belong in his history: “lest i expatiate too long on his shameful error—wicked, selfish, unrepentant, and without scruple— let us eject him from the annals of the princes.”129 t‘ovma’s story, then, revolves specifically around arcruni christians, so we should assume that t‘ovma defined communities around religious conviction instead of ethnicity or even closer familial ties. this is usual for medieval armenian sources; as n. garsoïan points out “they stress the unity of the armenian church, even where this leads them into contradictions.”130 t‘ovma’s account of bughā’s campaign is a study in such contradictions. for all of his rhetoric, we consistently face difficulties in organizing communities around religious convictions. religion was significant to communities of the caucasus, so t‘ovma is not alone in suggesting that religion defined communities. yet t‘ovma’s projection of a christian community working in tandem against the religious “other” cannot withstand scrutiny. throughout bughā’s campaign, christian communities splinter, while christian and muslim communities stand side-by-side. t‘ovma’s descriptions of two moments of the campaign stand out as particularly enlightening due to the religious overtones present in t‘ovma’s descriptions: bughā’s siege of the arcruni patricians in nkan and the bagratuni battle against abū mūsā, the patrician of kithīsh/k‘t‘iš. these demonstrate that the agendas of local patricians did not align with t‘ovma’s religiously-charged expectations. instead, these moments reveal the metanarrative of christianness that t‘ovma used to supply meaning to bughā’s campaign. through his liberal use of ełišē’s fifth-century history of vardan and the armenian wars, t‘ovma emplots bughā’s campaign onto the history of late antique christian persecution, offering a charged interpretation of the campaign rather than its description. fissures within christianness t‘ovma claims that the arcrunis were united before the arrival of bughā. yet the purported unity of the arcrunis, let alone the armenian forces writ large, falls apart on numerous occasions. the conveniently-named vasak131 “came to the caliph bearing letters full of heart of the emergence of an islamic society” (130). 128. sizgorich, violence and belief, 155. 129. arcruni, history, 224; patmut‘iwn, 248. 130. nina garsoïan, “armenia in the fourth century: an attempt to redefine the concepts ‘armenia’ and ‘loyalty,’” revue des etudes arméniennes 8 (1971): 342. 131. vasak siwni was the traitor par excellence in armenian literature, lambasted for siding with the persians at the battle of avarayr in the fifth century. t‘ovma’s audience, who would have been familiar with ełišē and łazar, would have noted the significance of the name vasak here. this is one of the many ways in which t‘ovma’s descriptions of bughā’s campaign serve as a sequel to ełišē. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 96 charges against the nobles living in armenia and piling [blame for] much damage to affairs of state on prince ashot. by their capricious terms these stirred up the caliph in hostile fashion against the prince.”132 bughā would later supply the crown of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan to vasak arcruni as a consolation prize on his way to samarrāʾ, where he converted to islam.133 this vasak is not alone in his plots against ašot. “although ašot, the great prince of the arcruni house, had taken measures to resist the violent bugha with his warriors, yet, his naxarars were not of the same mind with him in this matter.”134 according to t‘ovma, many of the patricians of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan failed to uphold the noble intentions of his hero by “feigning friendship” yet approaching bughā for right of safe passage. “they loved turbulence more than peace, destroying the unity of harmonious concord between brothers, relatives, and friends wherever they found it to exist. so they went out like the traitor of the incarnate saviour.”135 t‘ovma is here lambasting scions of lesser-known families in al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan, the vahevunis and trunis, for collaborating with bughā instead of following ašot arcruni, yet again breaking down the reductive armenian v. arab narrative. specifically, this treachery is described in religious overtones as an act against jesus himself, but unlike the example of vasak there is nothing to suggest that the vahevunis or trunis converted to islam. t‘ovma presents the patricians of al-basfurrajān/vaspurakan as enemies to the christian cause because they did not fight bughā despite the fact that they were christians. this same fracturing of the christian families is found elsewhere in t‘ovma’s descriptions of arcruni responses to bughā’s campaign. when gurgēn son of apupelč faced bughā’s forces, “even the priests among the multitude of fugitives took part in the battle, for it was a spiritual battle and not a physical one; they were fighting for the holy churches and the people of god.”136 gurgēn prayed and recited psalms, and his army was even accompanied by angels: “but not only the valiant armenian heroes fought in that great battle; there were also incorporeal, heavenly hosts fighting with the armenian army.”137 there are two points to keep in mind about this encounter, though. first, we saw above that bughā’s forces were supplemented with both the ʿuthmānids and rival factions of the arcruni family. so some of the enemies arrayed against gurgēn that day were arcruni armenian christians. mixed muslim-christian armies were in fact the norm in this campaign. second, this description is dependent on earlier models of armenian literature (ełišē also has priests fighting for the “armenian christian” cause) that t‘ovma manipulates in order to build borders for armenian christian identity. 132. arcruni, history, 180; patmut‘iwn, 180. 133. laurent and canard, l’arménie, 148. on ašot’s imprisonment, see al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, iii 1410. on vasak’s conversion, see arcruni, history, 224; patmut‘iwn, 248. 134. drasxanakertc‘i, history, 119; patmut‘iwn, 122. 135. arcruni, history, 201; patmut‘iwn, 210-12. 136. arcruni, history, 214; patmut‘iwn, 232. 137. arcruni, history, 214; patmut‘iwn, 232. 97 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) interconfessional cooperation there are plenty of other moments during the campaign, including descriptions of abū mūsā, that confirm the problematic assumptions about christianness as a bond in t‘ovma’s history. as with the example of gurgēn arcruni, t‘ovma has the albanian patrician abū mūsā appeal to religious solidarity: “only let us with united hearts take refuge in god’s help. if it happens that anyone is killed, it will be considered a glorious thing for himself and his clan, and he will receive a martyr’s crown from christ. for it will not be a death of a common sort, but one on behalf of the holy church and god’s people.”138 at the subsequent battle, mušeł the son of smbat aplabas “was stationed in the open on a hill, and stood there watching in fearful and tremendous amazement,”139 contemplating the power of the cross and ruminating on the second coming: he raised his mind to the future coming of christ and the awesome thunderings and crashings that will then occur: the bolts of fire and fearsome consternation on earth, and how the bands of angels will press forward one after the other, and how the lord’s cross will shine forth with awesome rays, and whatever accompanies these at the future coming of christ on the last day.140 t‘ovma’s descriptions of bagratuni veneration of the cross and mušeł’s encouragement of his coreligionists’ battle in defense of christianity obscure the fact that mušeł was actually present at the battle to fight for bughā, not as succor for the christian albanian forces under the command of abū mūsā. the bagratunis, despite their apparent admiration for the devotion of the christian albanians who were fighting the caliphal army, were still putting their swords at bughā’s disposal. at the end of his description of captives in samarrāʾ, t‘ovma specifies that the bagratunis, including mušeł explicitly, were the only nobles left in the north because they had cooperated and heeded bughā’s commands. in fact, these accounts demonstrate repeatedly that multiconfessional armies were the norm throughout the course of bughā’s campaign. the problem, then, lies in reconciling t‘ovma’s construction of communities around religious conviction against the examples he himself provides of christians aiding muslim armies against their christian coreligionists. the crux of this endeavor lies in t‘ovma’s extensive reliance on an earlier armenian history in order to construct armenianness and christianness. ełišē and the metanarrative of persecution t‘ovma’s descriptions of bughā’s campaign are undoubtedly charged with religious expectations. the leaders recite psalms and pray as they battle. they rely on the aid of angels when victorious and are crowned with martyrdom when defeated. yet this focus on religious difference is understandably absent in arabic accounts of the campaign. additionally, 138. arcruni, history, 242; patmut‘iwn, 276. 139. arcruni, history, 247; patmut‘iwn, 284. 140. arcruni, history, 247; patmut‘iwn, 284. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 98 t‘ovma—and other armenian and arabic sources—preserve details to add nuance to this neat narrative of christianness in the caucasus. the borders that t‘ovma constructs between christian and non-christian or armenian and non-armenian are his own. as d. nirenburg reminds us, the choice of language [of persecution] was an active one, made in order to achieve something, made within contexts of conflict and structures of domination, and often contested. thus when medieval people made statements about the consequences of religious difference, they were making claims, not expressing accomplished reality, and these claims were subject to barter and negotiation before they could achieve force in any given situation.141 t‘ovma is making his own claims when he presents the campaign as a confrontation between christians and muslims despite the fact that the protagonists of this campaign did not always find allies among their coreligionists and demonstrated no qualms working across confessional lines. in the process, he borrowed a framework of persecution from ełišē, whose fifth-century armenian history described the sasanian attacks on armenia, georgia, and albania as religiously charged. j. muyldermans was the first modern scholar to notice that t‘ovma repurposed large sections of ełišē’s history to describe al-mutawakkil’s reign,142 but r. thomson has expanded his brief remarks substantially, meticulously marking where t‘ovma borrows and blends discrete phrases or entire passages from ełišē into his account of bugha’s campaign. so, for example, ełišē expounds at great length about the unity of the armenians and their common devotion to the christian cause. while ełišē claims that “up to this point i have not at all hesitated to describe the afflictions of our nation which were cruelly inflicted upon us by the foreign enemies of the truth,” so t‘ovma writing five centuries later could opine that “up to this point we have not hesitated to relate the dangers and tribulations which befell us from the enemies of the truth.”143 t‘ovma’s reliance on ełišē rests mainly on a few main topics: political leaders (al-mutawakkil is fashioned on the model of yazdegerd and bughā on mihrnerseh), ruminations on the unity of the armenian people and their faith, and stories of persecution and martyrdom.144 this depiction of bughā’s campaign as persecution of christians is a way to lend meaning to the story by linking it to one of the foundation narratives of the armenian people, viz., the defeat at avarayr and simultaneously tapping into a universal theme of persecution in early christian literature. by invoking a metanarrative of persecution, individuals no longer 141. david nirenberg, communities of violence, 6. for a similar discussion in an armenian setting, see garsoïan, “armenia,” 342, which separates claims of movsēs xorenac‘i re: “a single, unified armenia” and “the unity of the armenian church” from the evidence offered to the contrary. 142. joseph muyldermans, “un procédé hagiographique,” handēs amsōreay 40 (1926). 143. arcruni, history, 49 and 189; patmut‘iwn, 194; ełišē, the history of vardan and the armenian war, trans. robert thomson (delmar: caravan books), 141; vardani ev hayoc‘ paterazmi masin (erevan: erevani hamalsarani hratarakč‘ut‘yun, 1989). 144. robert thomson has expounded on the relationship between t‘ovma and ełišē in the introduction and notations of the former. 99 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) represent their own transitory interests or local concerns, but rather become transformed into representatives of their faith at large. understood in this way, moments of conflict with other communities became legible as new episodes in an ancient cycle of persecution, in which the survival of the one true community of god upon earth depended upon the capacity of true christians for intransigence and, increasingly, active or even violent resistance.145 conflict thus lends an opportunity for interpretation, a chance to delineate and enforce communal boundaries despite the popular tendency to overlook differences in ethnically and religiously diverse milieux. gender and communal identity in the medieval caucasus while our medieval authors not only divided the world along ethnic and religious borders into their world, they also chronicled the deeds of people who crossed these lines. we have, then, an opportunity to look past the metanarrative and to chip away at the suggestion that ethno-religious solidarity informed medieval loyalties. rather than following t‘ovma’s lead here, we might examine the individuals who do not perform christianity in any recognizable way. in bughā’s campaign, women frequently reveal the dissonance between communal identity as it played out and the imagined ethno-religious solidarity. here we shift from ethnicity and religion—which operate in our texts based on their ability to further our authors’ narratives—to the women who defy these agendas. women as negotiators in bughā’s campaign the political exchanges related to bughā’s campaign demonstrate that individuals, in many cases women, navigated between different ethnic and religious groups, promoting the creation of a local identity not defined in strict sense in either ethnic or religious terms. for example, the bagratunis were related through marriage to the arcrunis, as ašot msaker bagratuni’s daughter hṙip‘simē, sister to both bagarat and smbat bagratuni, was the mother of ašot arcruni. “a woman wise in words and deeds, very intelligent and also pious,” she appeared before yūsuf b. muḥammad and convinced him to make peace with the arcrunis.146 in other words, a christian bagratuni noblewoman approached a muslim khurāsānī mawlā governor on behalf of her arcruni husband’s family to broker terms. she later came before bughā to beg clemency for her son gurgēn and subsequently followed her sons to captivity in samarrāʾ.147 hṙip‘simē demonstrates that women had political clout in the medieval caucasus, while other women in this story not only negotiate terms, but also serve as symbols of the alliances that draw together familial groups of different ethnicities and religions. as such, these women reveal the social power wielded by women as cultural mediators in the medieval caucasus. 145. sizgorich, violence and belief, 274. 146. arcruni, history, 184; patmut‘iwn, 186. 147. arcruni, history, 210; patmut‘iwn, 22. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 100 mūsā b. zurāra married an armenian christian woman, the sister or daughter of bagarat bagratuni. t‘ovma explains how she, like hṙip‘simē, served as an intermediary between muslim and christian armies. before bughā’s arrival in armenia, the bagratunis and the zurārids clashed, which led to the interference of mūsā’s wife to beg her kinsmen to spare the lives of her husband’s men.148 this episode establishes her as a mediator in her own right, walking with immunity between two hostile armies in a way that, presumably, most men could not. she was not only safe, but also an effective negotiator because she belonged, effectively, to both communities. mūsā’s marriage into the bagratuni family therefore offered him immediate gains in local disputes, but it also created lasting ties between an armenian christian and a (syrian? armenian?) muslim family, in practice redrawing the borders of local communities by forging alliances that allowed them to respond as one in defense of local interests despite differences in ethnicity and religion. this dramatically changes local responses to bughā’s campaign. mūsā backed al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘ in their murder of yūsuf, making him complicit in fomenting rebellion against the caliph. al-ṭabarī’s history suggests that he defected because his marital ties to the bagratunis weighed heavier on him than his connection to the caliphal administrators: “when yūsuf deported buqrāṭ b. ashūṭ [bagarat bagratuni the son of ašot masker], the patrikioi took an oath to kill yūsuf and vowed to shed his blood. mūsā b. zurāra went along with them in this. he was responsible for the daughter of buqrāṭ.”149 the fate of the zurārid family rested on mūsā’s decision to ally with the bagratunis instead of bow to caliphal authority. mūsā’s wife is not acting of out of her interests, but rather serves as a textual marker for local loyalties because she is the most visible symbol of the zurāridbagratuni alliance. while there are several other mentions of women intervening in political discussions in the course of bughā’s campaign, both arabic and armenian sources offer the most information about the wife of isḥāq b. ismāʿīl, the amīr of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi. as the daughter of the king of the throne, she similarly served as an intermediary between different kinship groups. in this example, though, the marriage does not (to our knowledge) prompt any demonstrable change in the response to bughā’s campaign. we hear nothing of the king of the throne or his response to bughā’s siege of tiflīs/tp‘ilisi. yet we do find a woman claiming a prominent place in both arabic and armenian accounts of a military siege, negotiating, albeit unsuccessfully, with the religious and ethnic “other” on behalf her husband. she also serves as a reminder of the multiconfessional and multiethnic communities that solidified around local interests. backed by the christian al-khuwaythiyya/xut‘, a (christian? avar?) woman faced a combined force of muslim turks and christian bagratunis in an effort to save her muslim husband. these three women illustrate the close relationship between different ethnic and religious communities by producing a traceable thread to tie together diverse kinship groups in the caucasus. through their marriages, they are able to navigate across religious and/or ethnic boundaries and so serve as the connection between diverse groups looking to ally in defense of local concerns against the outsider. 148. arcruni, history, 177; patmut‘iwn, 174-6. 149. al-ṭabarī, history, vol. 34, 114; taʾrīkh, iii 1409. 101 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) gender, power, and identity construction modern studies on identity and conflict, particularly those written about al-andalus, have established the role of interfaith marriage as a key to understanding boundary construction and maintenance between discrete groups. following pitt-rivers’s study of intermarriage in the hebrew bible, several modern studies on al-andalus suggest that a powerful group would not allow their women to marry an outsider because such a marriage would symbolize their inferiority or their inability to protect their own community. the dominant group marries or enslaves the women of the weak group in an “aggressive strategy” to proclaim their hegemonic power over their neighbors by controlling the reproductive abilities and subsequent children of their weaker neighbors.150 this perspective relies on an assumption that sexual intercourse is an expression of hegemonic power: “penetration symbolizes power. for men of one group to have sex with women of another is an assertion of power over the entire group.”151 as barton claims, “[a]llowing outsiders to engage in sexual relations with a group’s own women could be construed as an act of submission, as a metaphor for external domination.”152 he goes so far as to recognize intermarriage between muslims and christians in al-andalus as “an instrument of psychological warfare”153 and claims that interfaith “sex was, perhaps, the ultimate colonizing gesture.”154 these claims rely heavily on the assimilation of sex and hegemonic power and on the laws and customs dictating that children of mixed marriages belonged to their father’s ethnoreligious community. with the possible exception of the marriage reported between al-mutawakkil and the wife of isḥāq b. ismāʿīl, none of this adequately describes our examples. in the medieval caucasus, the emphasis is not on contesting or displaying power, but on accruing power. it is hard to imagine that the marriage between mūsā b. zurāra and bagarat bagratuni’s daughter signifies an admission that the bagratunis were politically submissive to the amīr of arzan/ arcn. arzan/arcn was not powerful, nor could it have been representative of islamic power.155 the interpretation of interfaith sex as boundary-maintenance in al-andalus relies on sources from a period when islamic power in the peninsula had fallen, or at least collapsed southward, and such boundaries were part of the broader process of societal transformation 150. ragnhild johnsrud zorgati, pluralism in the middle ages: hybrid identities, conversion, and mixed marriages in medieval iberia (new york: routledge, 2012), 160. many of the studies on al-andalus rely on julian alfred pitt-rivers, the fate of shechem: or, the politics of sex: essays in the anthropology of the mediterranean (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1977). in particular, his seventh chapter examines sexual hospitality and marriage patterns in genesis to analyze the relationship between political power and intermarriage between discreet cultural or familial groups. 151. karras, apud. barton, conquerors, brides, and concubines, 39. 152. barton, conquerors, brides, and concubines, 69. 153. barton, conquerors, brides, and concubines, 6. 154. barton, conquerors, brides, and concubines, 41. 155. if the modern theorists on muslim-christian intermarriage have the key to understanding this, it may very well lie in the fact that interfaith marriage in al-andalus tended to involve muwallad families, that is: locals who had converted to islam, instead of arab or berber émigrés. on this, see zorgati, pluralism, 94. this seems to hold true for our examples, as well, given that both muslim amīrs in question were probably not arabs, but rather converts or descendants of converts. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 102 at that particular time. the intermarriages of the medieval caucasus are perhaps more easily compared to the many instances of intermarriage in islamic al-andalus before the expansion of christian power in that they serve as political alliances.156 in the caucasus, interfaith marriage was a way to collapse boundaries by blending discrete communities and to solidify relations between groups of different ethnicities or religious affiliations. intermarriage produced immediate ambassadors in the wives and, later, the children who could traverse both worlds. so, while mūsā b. zurāra’s bagratuni wife could stand between and negotiate with her brother and her husband, the half-bagratuni, half-zurārid son from that union was similarly claimed by both sides. abū al-maghrāʾ, who also appears as abū al-muʿizz in arabic and is known as aplmaxray in armenian, clearly maintained a close relationship with both the armenian noble houses (he married an arcruni woman) and local muslim amīrs (in particular, the nearby banū shaybān). he crosses the ethnoreligious boundaries and appears simultaneously as part of both communities. despite the fact that abū al-maghrāʾ usually appears as a muslim, drasxanakertc‘i claims that he was secretly christian,157 allowing him the religious identifiers that mark him as an insider to both bagratuni and zurārid society. in abū al-maghrāʾ, we find the results of a deliberate blurring of ethnoreligious communities to create a locally organized identity in order to facilitate close alliances between muslims and christians, armenians and others. again, the study of the main alliances responding to bughā’s campaign reveals the significance of local instead of universal markers of medieval identity. agency, belonging, and the flexibility of identity the recognition that women both created and crossed boundaries—the very thing that allows historians like nadia el-cheikh to place women as a central element to the contestation of identity as a whole—presents modern scholars with a promising approach to the role of both women and gender in history and historiography. women mediated between different ethno-religious groups and, in the specific examples associated with bughā’s campaign, this even placed women directly on the battlefield. at the same time, the jump from power to agency requires substantiation. despite the centrality of these women in the history of the campaign—the clear recognition of their political and social power—historians recorded very little about them personally. extant sources do not even preserve the names of the wives of mūsā b. zurāra or isḥāq b. ismāʿīl, let alone speak to their own self-identification as armenian or as avar or to their attachment to any particular religion. modern scholars might hypothesize, for example, that the wife of isḥāq b. ismāʿīl is a christian avar because she is the daughter of ṣāḥib al-sarīr, but this is an inference based on generalized group identity rather than self-referential evidence. did her identity perforce mirror her father’s identity?158 did she see herself as avar? did she remain 156. for examples, see barton, conquerors, brides, and concubines, 105-6; janina m. safran, defining boundaries in al-andalus: muslims, christians, and jews in islamic iberia (ithaca: cornell university press, 2016), 105-06. 157. drasxanakertc‘i, history, 145; patmut‘iwn. 158. eastmond, in his study of tamta, similarly examines the blurred lines between georgianness and 103 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) christian even as she married a muslim man? t‘ovma claims that she wandered the camp unveiled “which was not customary for the women of the tačik people” (տաճկական ազգի կանանց);159 does this mean that she had converted or that she had always been muslim? perhaps she remained christian, but was expected to follow muslim customs as the wife of a powerful amīr. could she, as an individual instead of as a representative of her father’s or husband’s communities, make her own religious or cultural decisions? did she choose to marry isḥāq b. ismāʿīl? she certainly did not choose to marry bughā, but she was subsequently able to demand revenge. historians of al-andalus have also tackled this problem, recognizing the liminality of women in medieval sources even while women stepped over the lines of religious, ethnic, and cultural difference. j. coope, for example, recently noted that “[t]he ideology of gender also created unclear boundaries during the umayyad period. a woman was both part of and not part of her ethnic and religious group.”160 by framing women as outsiders to their own communities instead of allowing them access to multiple communities and the ability to mediate between different communities, these women retain their subaltern position in the world drawn and ruled by men. the primary disconnect between coope’s position and the evidence marshalled here relates to questions of belonging and, again, to power. coope argues that the status of women of al-andalus was akin to dhimmitude, i.e., that they were outsiders even to their own communities, because they were all similarly “a subordinate category of person in sharīʿah” without full legal rights.161 men might change their identities by becoming muslims or arabs through conversion or walāʾ, but women will always retain secondary status.162 this opens a few possible avenues of discussion. first, belonging in an ethnic or religious group is not akin to citizenship, and does not entail or require full legal rights and responsibilities. women might have curtailed rights but still rightfully claim arabness or christianness, etc. further, secondary legal status—as coope herself points out— cannot equate to how power plays out on the ground. even if the political and social systems stacked against them, we might still talk of women’s agency within these structures. the centrality of women in the narratives about bughā’s campaign has little to do with the formal status of women in caucasian society or under armenian or islamic law, but with the ability of élite women to speak to power. as rare as it may be, there are at least some indications that women asserted themselves, meaning that they were not solely pawns in armenianness and, further, the marriage of an armenian woman to men of different ethno-religious affiliations. he claims that we might discuss tamta’s identity based on what we know of her father’s identity; antony eastmond, tamta’s world: the life and encounters of a medieval noblewoman from the middle east to mongolia (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017). 159. arcruni, history, 239 except that thomson supplies “muslims” for tačkakan; patmut‘iwn, 272. 160. jessica a. coope, the most noble of people: religious, ethnic, and gender identity in muslim spain (ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2017), 2. 161. coope, most noble of people, 87. 162. coope, most noble of people, 90. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 104 their fathers’, brothers’, or husbands’ contestations.163 bughā did not technically deport hṙip‘simē arcruni, but rather she followed her sons to samarrāʾ in grief. further, gurgēn the son of apupelč married a widow named helen to gain control of al-zawazān/anjewacik‘ after she not only proposed marriage to him, but ordered him to be quick about it. the wife of isḥāq b. ismāʿīl confronted bughā, and then demanded recompense for her fate from the caliph himself. in short, t‘ovma’s account of the conflict suggests that women claimed their own voices in the caucasus, albeit within the restraints of both a patriarchal society and a hierarchical power structure. in other words, they were constrained not only by their position as women in a male-dominated society, but also by the expectations placed on them due to their social status as wives or daughters of the political élite. yet even with these restrictions, they were actors, not outsiders, in their own multiform communities. if modern scholars cannot create a space for women to claim some modicum of agency, they actively efface those moments when women such as the wives of mūsā b. zurāra or isḥāq b. ismāʿīl effectively shifted (or even ineffectually attempted to shift) the political and military landscape, as we see happening during bughā’s campaign. conclusions the focus on identity in this article is dictated by the role that the campaign currently plays in discussions of medieval armenian history. modern scholars have allowed t‘ovma’s agenda to inform our discussions about the campaign, maintaining his claim that armenian christians defended their armenianness and christianness against the tačiks. this article has challenged this interpretation by using both armenian and arabic sources on the campaign to identify and problematize the metanarrative offered in t‘ovma’s version. it has also explored the campaign in a broader caucasian setting to decentralize the focus on armenia and armenianness for a campaign that stretched much further afield. ethnic differences cannot make sense of this campaign. we focused above on arabness, particularly on the fluidity of the term tačik and our sources’ frequent inability or unwillingness to assert ethnic difference. instead, there are several examples, such as mūsā b. zurāra, isḥāq b. ismāʿīl, and even bughā himself, where our authors obfuscate or completely avoid ethnonyms. the fluidity of ethnonyms suggests that the campaign cannot have mobilized communities based on ethnic solidarity. further, to assume such categorical division between armenian and “other” requires the reader to recategorize the armenians who cooperated with bughā as non-armenians, to brand them as traitors, or to expunge them from the record entirely. yet the armenian allies of bughā such as smbat aplabas bagratuni and vasak arcruni were just as armenian as ašot and gurgēn arcruni. they merely had agendas that arrayed them against the people whom the armenian historical tradition identified as the armenian heroes. religious difference also cannot make sense of this campaign. we frequently find moments when christians and muslims fought their coreligionists, as well as evidence of 163. on agency, coope again refers back to legal definitions: “sharīʿah does not, however, grant women much agency. agency belongs to men, who are responsible for fulfilling their obligations to women and enforcing their obedience”; coope, most noble of people, 117. 105 • alison m. vacca al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) multiconfessional armies. despite t‘ovma’s frequent assertions, no one rallied around christianness or muslimness. bughā deported not just bagarat bagratuni and ašot arcruni, but also mūsā b. zurāra. he beheaded isḥāq b. ismāʿīl. t‘ovma supplied the religious overtones to tap into the metanarrative of christian persecution, but he also revealed details that counter his own narrative. mušeł bagratuni served bughā in the campaign against albanian christians and numerous rival arcrunis joined up with bughā and the ʿuthmānids to battle gurgēn son of apupelč. yet again, their goals, not their families or language or religion, set them apart from the celebrated heroes. firm boundaries around homogenous ethnoreligious communities as constructed in t‘ovma’s account make little sense of the frequently multiconfessional and multiethnic alliances among the communities of the south caucasus. none of this suggests that ethnicity and religion were unimportant, merely flexible and rhetorically useful. there were many ways to be armenian, muslim, albanian, georgian, christian, or arab. while t‘ovma had a clear sense of what armenianness and christianness meant, in reality religion and ethnicity could serve to unify or to divide communities depending on circumstances. instead, this example showcases the flexible nature of identity construction around local concerns, which trump abstract notions of ethnicity or universal religious community. a gendered look at the campaign confirms that ethnic and religious difference was entirely surmountable. to solidify close relations between muslim and christian families of various ethnicities, women crossed borders that medieval and modern authors alike apply to make sense of pluralist environments. ter-łevondyan claims that “[i]t was natural for mūsā [b. zurāra] to be on bad terms with bagarat bagratuni, since he was the feudal lord of the lands immediately adjoining tarōn.”164 this article suggests the opposite conclusion. proximity led to common sets of concerns and, accordingly, alliances across religious and ethnic lines.165 we see this in mūsā’s marriage to a bagratuni woman, in her ability to serve as a mediator in disputes between communities of different religions and ethnicities, and in their son’s acceptance in both of his parents’ communities. above all, we see it in mūsā’s decision to fight against bughā and in the deportation of the entire zurārid family to samarrāʾ. t‘ovma ignores mūsā’s role in the conflict and his fate because these do not add substance to his own reading in ethno-religious absolutes. yet reading t‘ovma alongside arabic sources reveals how bughā’s campaign can serve as a clear exemplum of how local alliances played out against t‘ovma’s expectations in moments of conflict. 164. ter-łevondyan, arab emirates, 42. 165. mottahedeh explains that “consciously shared interests inevitably produced a shared loyalty to guard and promote that interest.” his “loyalties of category” do not fit easily into this example, though, with the possible exception of the aʿyān; mottahedeh, loyalty and leadership, 107. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017) conflict and community in the medieval caucasus • 106 works cited arabic sources al-balādhurī, aḥmad b. yaḥyā. kitāb futūḥ al-buldān. leiden: brill, 1866. ibn ʿabd rabbihi, aḥmad b. muḥammad. al-ʿiqd al-farīd. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1997. ibn al-athīr, ʿizz al-dīn ʿalī b. muḥammad. al-kāmil fī-l-taʾrīkh. beirut: dār ṣādr, 1995. ibn khaldūn, ʿabd al-raḥman b. muḥammad. taʾrīkh. beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, [1391] 1971. ibn khurradādhbih, abū al-qāsim ʿubayd allāh. kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik. leiden: brill, 1889. ibn miskawayh, aḥmad b. muḥammad. tajārib al-umam wa-taʿāqub al-himam. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, [1424] 2003. ibn rusta, abū ʿalī aḥmad b. ʿumar. kitāb al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa. leiden: brill, 1892. al-iṣṭakhrī, abū isḥāq ibrāhīm b. muḥammad. kitāb al-masālik wa al-mamālik. leiden: brill, 1927. al-masʿūdī, abū al-ḥasan ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn. les prairies d’or: texte et traduction [murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawāhir]. paris: l’imprimerie impériale, 1861-1877. al-ṭabarī, muḥammad b. jarīr. history of al-ṭabarī, volume 34: incipient 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routledge, 2012. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 360-365 book review as its title points out, this book by alejandro garcía sanjuán, professor of medieval history at the univers i t y o f h u e l v a a n d o n e o f t h e m o s t prominent scholars of the history of al andalus, deals with jihād in classical islam from a very specific angle: the legal-doctrinal one.1 this perspective is already evident in the introduction, where garcía sanjuán defines jihād as “legitimate war from the islamic perspective” (p. 17).2 and indeed, the sources on which garcía sanjuán bases his book are predominantly legal and doctrinal treatises. in the introduction, the author also makes clear his position on the link between violence and religion—namely, that the latter has been an essential factor in the legitimation of the former, another important element 1. the book is thus in dialog with works such as majid khadduri, war and peace in the law of islām (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1955) and a. m. al-dawoody, the islamic law of war: justifications and regulations (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2011). 2. the english translations of the quoted passages are mine. of the idea of jihād. this point introduces one of the vitally important topics treated in the book: the significance of not including the idea of jihād within the concept of holy war. in addition to outlining his selection of sources, garcía sanjuán specifies in the introduction how he will address the study of jihād. compared to other approaches, especially those adopted by nonspecialists who “proclaim themselves ʿulamāʾ and determine the meaning of these texts by establishing whether the quran is belligerent or not, and whether muḥammad promoted war or peace” (p. 22), garcía sanjuán sets out to let the sources speak for themselves. in this way, he complies with a principle that is consciously present throughout his alejandro garcía sanjuán. yihad: la regulación de la guerra en la doctrina islámica clásica (madrid: marcial pons historia, 2020), 366 pp. isbn 978-84-17945-10-7. price: €26.60 (paper). javier albarrán romanislam, universität hamburg (j.albarran.iruela@gmail.com) © 2021 javier albarrán. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:j.albarran.iruela%40gmail.com?subject= al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 361 • javier albarrán work: “islam belongs to its believers, who are responsible for defining the meaning of their own beliefs” (p. 22). as we will see later, despite its utility as a maxim with which to establish the meaning of a concept in the sources, this is a somewhat risky statement. the first chapter, titled “las bases textuales” (the textual bases), constitutes an excellent analysis not only of the concept of jihād in the quran, the sunna, and the biography of the prophet but also of the main works of islamic law. after a careful examination of the quranic vocabulary related to combat, violence, and warfare, garcía sanjuán addresses the complex question of whether there is a quranic doctrine on war, understood as a set of clear, systematic, and wellarticulated norms. his answer, derived from the study of the quranic text itself as well as of the opinions of various specialists such as patricia crone3 and asma afsaruddin,4 is that the more warlike readings of the holy book emerged after the establishment of the quranic text. by analyzing the opinions of medieval scholars, garcía sanjuán illustrates in a simple but forceful way how classical thinkers took into account the ambiguous meaning of many quranic verses, thus giving voice, as the author has proposed to do, to the sources themselves. also of great interest is the section devoted to the deeds of muḥammad and the formation of the prophetic tradition, w h e r e g a r c í a s a n j u á n a n a l y z e s t h e importance of ḥadīth, but also that of the sīra and the maghāzī, for the establishment 3. patricia crone, “jihad: idea and history,” open democracy (2007). 4. asma afsaruddin, striving in the path of god: jihād and martyrdom in islamic thought (new york: oxford university press, 2013). of the doctrine of jihād. like his discussion of the quranic text, this part includes a brilliant introduction to these genres and the debates around them. the same can be said of the section devoted to the elaboration of fiqh, which also serves as an introduction to the sources used by the author. the second chapter aims to answer the question posed by its title: “¿qué es el yihad?” (what is jihād?). garcía sanjuán’s answer is clear and accurate: despite the diversity of concepts and practices, there is a hegemonic vision within the muslim tradition of how to engage in jihād, and this centers on its connection with war. as garcía sanjuán says, “there are justified reasons to speak of an intense sacralization of the martial dimension of jihad, which allow us to place it [jihād] within the framework of the concept of holy war” (p. 106). one of the main reasons is the direct relationship between the practice of jihād and the salvation of the soul. this does not prevent the author from also discussing, in detail, the nonviolent forms of jihād, which are mainly related to sufism. however, as garcía sanjuán states, it is not possible to establish a dichotomy between the warlike jihād of the ʿulamāʾ and the spiritual jihād of the sufis, since war remained, in works such as that of ibn al-mubārak, conceptualized as a form of asceticism (pp. 109–10). t h i s c h a p t e r a l s o d i s c u s s e s t h e important relationship between ḥisba and jihād through the practice of takfīr. here, garcía sanjuán studies what he calls “sectarian jihād,” jihād carried out al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) alejandro garcía sanjuán’s yihad: la regulación de la guerra • 362 against other muslims. he illustrates this section with examples from the islamic west, such as the case of the almohads, and compares this reality with that of the crusades launched against christians who were considered heretics. this interesting cross-cultural perspective could have been developed by the author also in other cases. n e x t , g a r c í a s a n j u á n a n a l y z e s a recurring but necessary theme in this type of work: that of the place of jihād in the hierarchy of islamic beliefs, and what type of duty it is. he also addresses another key issue, which is that the notion of holy war in islam should not be limited to the idea of jihād but should also encompass other concepts, such as ribāṭ, fatḥ, and shahāda. this point is relevant for future research on the idea of holy war in the islamic world from a holistic perspective. garcía sanjuán concludes that the notion of fatḥ (divinely sanctioned conquest) constitutes the highest expression of the sacralization of war in islam, even more so than jihād, since this notion casts god as the subject of the action. however, and despite agreeing with the author on the importance of fatḥ to the sacralization of war in islam, one may object that the agent of fatḥ is not always god. as just one example, ibn abī zarʿ, in his rawḍ al-qirṭās, reports that the almohad caliph ʿabd al-muʾmin conquered (fataḥa) all of the maghrib.5 conversely, god appears as the subject of warfare also in other concepts, such as naṣr 5. ibn abī zarʿ, kitāb al-anīs al-muṭrib rawḍ al-qirṭās fī akhbār mulūk al-maghrib wa-taʾrīkh madīnat fās (rabat: dār al-manṣūr, 1972), 204. 6. see, for example, m. a. makki, “wathāʾiq taʾrījiyya yadīda ʿ an ʿ aṣr al-murābiṭīn (documentos inéditos de la época almorávide),” revista del instituto de estudios islámicos 7/8 (1959–60): 109–98 (letter no. 2). 7. see, for example, dominique urvoy, “the question of divine help in the jihād,” in violence in islamic thought from the qurʾān to the mongols, ed. robert gleave and istván kristó-nagy, 27–32 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2015). ( d i v i n e a i d ) . 6 w h a t w e f i n d i n t h e sources, to return to garcía sanjuán’s approach, is a concept of the sacralization o f w a r m a n i f e s t e d t h r o u g h v a r i o u s complementary terms. undoubtedly, the manifestation of god in the contexts of jihād, especially through “his help” (naṣr), is one of the main features of holy war.7 this chapter ends with another interesting terminological analysis focused on the interruption of hostilities. the t hird c hap t er, t it led “¿cu áles son los límites de la práctica del yihad?” (what are the limits to the practice of jihād?), focuses on the significant islamic legal corpus related to ius in bello, that is, the behavior of combatants in war. as garcía sanjuán says, the limits imposed on the practice of jihād are a fundamental element of the classical notion of jihād. the chapter analyzes, in depth and with an impeccable use of sources, issues such as the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, protected groups, the treatment of prisoners, the use of weapons of indiscriminate destruction, destruction of property, and self-harm and martyrdom. the extensive elaboration of these issues in islamic legal and doctrinal treatises leads garcía sanjuán to consider fiqh the first great legal system to contain a specific doctrine of ius in bello, thus anticipating m o d e r n p u b l i c i n t e r n a t i o n a l l a w b y several centuries. here a brief reference to the theory of just war, at the time under development and revision in both al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 363 • javier albarrán the greco-roman and western medieval traditions as well as in islamic thought,8 would have been of interest to demonstrate that just-war theory also developed a ius in bello doctrine, even though it did not reach the level of normative development p r e s e n t i n f i q h . f r e d e r i c k r u s s e l l ’ s definition of this theory highlights the overlap: “content with the achievement of more concrete political objectives, the just war stops short of countenancing the utter destruction of the adversaries and tends to limit the incidence of violence by codes of right conduct, of non-combatant immunity and by other humanitarian restraints.”9 the fourth and final chapter of the book is the most innovative of all, at least from the point of view of the posed question: “¿por qué el yihad ha sido un c o n c e p t o p o l é m i c o y t e r g i v e r s a d o ? ” (why has jihād been a controversial and distorted concept?). this chapter—which is connected to other seminal works of historiographical criticism written by the author10—analyzes the different ways in which the conceptualization of jihād has been adulterated, especially as a result of the fall of the iron curtain, the appearance of the theory of clash of civilizations, and the growing accentuation of the role of islamist radicalism in international politics. garcía sanjuán denounces the 8. see, for example, james turner johnson and john kelsay, eds., just war and jihad: historical and theoretical perspectives on war and peace in western and islamic traditions (westport, ct: greenwood press, 1991), and john kelsay, arguing the just war in islam (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2007). 9. frederick russell, the just war in the middle ages (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1975). 10. see, for example, alejandro garcía sanjuán, la conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado: del catastrofismo al negacionismo (madrid: marcial pons historia, 2013). 11. antonio elorza, “anatomía de la yihad en el corán y los hadices,” in el nuevo terrorismo islamista: del 11-s al 11-m, ed. fernando reinares and antonio elorza, 269–94 (madrid: temas de hoy, 2004). 12. see, for example, thomas sizgorich, violence and belief in late antiquity: militant devotion in christianity and islam (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2009). 13. see, for example, jan assmann, die mosaische unterscheidung oder der preis des monotheismus mainstream media’s identification of islam with terrorism through a manipulation of the idea of jihād, evident in the writings of nonspecialists who “proclaim themselves i s l a m i c s c h o l a r s , ” s u c h a s a n t o n i o elorza,11 and he traces the genealogy of this islamophobic perspective from the medieval polemic tradition, paying special attention to the spanish case—an example of great importance due to the islamic past of the iberian peninsula. following the approaches laid out in the introduction, garcía sanjuán emphasizes that “the role of religious texts in the analysis of violence should not be placed on the level of causes, but rather on that of its justification or legitimation” (p. 294), a point that serves as a preamble to a refutation of what he calls “the fallacy of islamic exceptionalism” (pp. 294–95), that is, the erroneous idea that islam is a violent religion per se. however, it would have been interesting if, when dismantling this fallacy, the author had referred to some of the studies that have tried to contextualize the rise of islam within the framework of late antiquity and the ideas of religious violence that were circulating at the time.12 likewise, inserting garcía sanjuán’s considerations into the broader debate on the relationship between violence and religion would have been fruitful.13 within al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) alejandro garcía sanjuán’s yihad: la regulación de la guerra • 364 his discussion of the misrepresentation of jihād, garcía sanjuán also rightly includes those authors who, from a confessional and apologetic perspective, have tried to separate the “historical” idea of jihād from any warlike vision.14 this book is, therefore, an exceptional exercise in close reading, scholarship, and historiographical practice. as such, it raises a series of questions for the interested reader that, more by way of dialogue than minor criticism, i would now like to point out. in the first place, although garcía sanjuán reiterates throughout the book the conclusion that the historically hegemonic aspect of jihād is undoubtedly that of holy war, sometimes it seems that he is reluctant to use this notion of sacralized violence, preferring to employ definitions such as the abovementioned “legitimate w a r f r o m t h e i s l a m i c p e r s p e c t i v e ” (p. 17). without being wrong, this framing is, in the view of the present reviewer, not entirely clear, since jihād is not the only “legitimate” war within the islamic tradition.15 more precisely, within the islamic tradition it is the sacralization of jihād that differentiates it from other types (munich: carl hanser verlag, 2003) and william t. cavanaugh, the myth of religious violence: secular ideology and the roots of modern conflict (oxford: oxford university press, 2009). 14. a clear example is the work of louay fatoohi, who analyzes the quran exclusively, highlighting the spiritual vision of jihād and ignoring the fact that it was the medieval ʿulamāʾ themselves who interpreted the idea within a warlike framework: l. fatoohi, jihad in the qur’an: the truth from the source (birmingham: luna plena, 2009). 15. see, for example, khaled abou el fadl, rebellion and violence in islamic law (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001). 16. on the other hand, afsaruddin’s work, focused on quranic exegesis, could be used as another example of studies that have misrepresented the notion of jihād, in this case to downplay its warlike character. see christopher melchert’s review of afsaruddin’s book in review of middle east studies 49, no. 2 (2015): 175–78. as melchert states, “a natural concern of an historian is what islam has been like, of a theologian what islam ought to be like. this book tries to enlist an historical survey in aid of a theological argument. perhaps theologians will find it unusually scholarly. as an historian, i find it disappointingly unrigorous.” on the early quranic exegetical sources regarding jihād, see andrew rippin, “reading the qurʾān on jihād: two early exegetical texts,” in gleave and kristó-nagy, violence in islamic thought, 33–48. of legitimate wars (such as those waged against rebels), through, for example, its salvific character, as garcía sanjuán rightly establishes. second, as noted earlier, the principle established by garcía sanjuán in the introduction—that islam belongs to its believers, who ought to be the ones to define their beliefs—is somewhat risky. i believe that the interpretation, for example, of the quran in its historical context is not incompatible with the analysis of what the medieval ʿulamāʾ said about the quranic text, even though such interpretation can yield results that differ from those enunciated by muslim believers. following garcía sanjuán’s premise, many of the studies on early and medieval islam that he quotes would be invalid. for example, reaching a conclusion such as afsaruddin’s, when she says that the warlike reading of jihād constitutes a “ c o n s i d e r a b l e d e v i a t i o n ” f r o m i t s quranic meaning, could not be deemed methodologically valid. 16 how can she correct and judge the medieval ʿulamāʾ? the problem with authors such as elorza is not their “self-proclamation” as ʿulamāʾ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 365 • javier albarrán and their interpretation of the quran despite not being muslims, but rather the decontextualized way in which they carry out their interpretation and their lack of training and specialization for this task, as most of them lack any knowledge of the arabic language or the islamic exegetical tradition. third, and given the legal-doctrinal a p p r o a c h o f t h e b o o k , i t p r e s e n t s a perspective that could be further nuanced, a t s o m e p o i n t s , b y t h e u s e o f o t h e r sources, such as chronicles or biographical dictionaries. a clear example concerns the limits to the practice of jihād, which are greatly blurred if we depart from the purely legal approach. a wide selection of sources and different perspectives is essential in a study on a broad notion such as jihād, and thus brief reference to the multidimensional perspective provided by other sources could have been helpful to the reader. in the same vein, sometimes a better contextualization of the authors and sources analyzed could have been useful for a better understanding of the approaches and meanings they propose. an illustrative example is that of ibn ḥazm, whose vision of jihād should, i think, be attributed not only to his ẓāhirism but also to the threatening situation that al-andalus was facing in the eleventh century. garcía sanjuán rightly highlights 17. for example, he is one of the creators and editors of the open access online magazine on andalusi history al-andalus y la historia: https://www.alandalusylahistoria.com/. he is also a regular contributor to many newspapers; see, for example, https://www.infolibre.es/noticias/opinion/plaza_publica/2021/02/15/ convivencia_invasion_genocidio_pasado_peninsular_116649_2003.html. 18. see, for example, javier albarrán, ejércitos benditos: yihad y memoria en al-andalus (siglos x–xiii) (granada: universidad de granada, 2020) and josep suñé, guerra, ejército y fiscalidad en al-andalus (ss. viii– xii): de la hegemonía musulmana a la decadencia (madrid: la ergástula, 2020). this issue when talking, for example, of how pilgrimage and jihād are equated in the texts of ibn rushd al-jadd. these points notwithstanding, this is an outstanding book written by one of the leading spanish scholars of islamic studies and islamic history, and its publication is undoubtedly a milestone in the analysis of jihād, for three main reasons. the first is the book’s indubitable meticulousness and accuracy in approaching its sources, not an easy task considering the amount and complexity of islamic legal-doctrinal literature. in this sense, it is also worth mentioning the author’s comprehensive use of secondary literature. the second reason is that the author adds to his rigor a clarity of expression and explanation as well as a capacity for synthesis, allowing the book to be directed to a wider public, in line with the commitment to society that garcía sanjuán has always exhibited in his work as a historian.17 third, and relatedly, this work fills in a rather astonishing gap: it is the first academic monograph in spanish to systematically address the concept of jihād. fortunately, in the last year other books on the topic, likewise written from a historical perspective, have been published, thus beginning to fill this gap.18 garcía sanjuán’s book, therefore, has opened a line of research that will hopefully be followed in the coming years. https://www.alandalusylahistoria.com/ https://www.infolibre.es/noticias/opinion/plaza_publica/2021/02/15/convivencia_invasion_genocidio_pasado_peninsular_116649_2003.html https://www.infolibre.es/noticias/opinion/plaza_publica/2021/02/15/convivencia_invasion_genocidio_pasado_peninsular_116649_2003.html al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019): 40-111 reacting to muḥammad: three early islamic poets in the kitāb al-aghānī * pamela klasova bowdoin college (pklasova@bowdoin.edu) “nothing is like the times of our [old] abode [. . .]! now, chains have encircled [our] necks / and the youth has become like a middle-aged man, saying only the right things (laysa bi-qāʾil siwā al-ḥaqq),”1 noted abū khirāsh bitterly in his poem. the poet, commenting on the changes that the prophet muḥammad and his community had brought about, hereby abstract this article investigates how the secular arabic poetic tradition interacted with the new religious rhetoric of emergent islam. concretely, it deals with the verses and legacies of three poets contemporary to muḥammad who converted to islam, yet protested its pietistic rhetoric. abū khirāsh al-hudhalī, abū miḥjan al-thaqafī, and suḥaym, the slave of the banū al-ḥasḥās, all lived in the ḥijāz and witnessed the formation of muḥammad’s movement up close. the first aim of the article is to listen to their reactions. because the three poets were not directly involved in the promotion of the new religion, nor were they in an open struggle against it, their testimony is especially valuable for its insight into the reception of the emergent islamic movement among arab tribes in the ḥijāz, beyond muḥammad’s close community. the second aim is to follow the later reception of the poets and their incorporation into the arabo-islamic canon through an examination of the narratives (akhbār) that accompany the verses in abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī’s (d. 356/967) kitāb al-aghānī, the underlying assumption being that these akhbār are secondary to the verses. besides these two main points, an examination of the interplay between the verses and the akhbār also establishes the importance of mukhaḍram poetry as a historical source and exposes the multilayered nature of the poets’ akhbār. * i would like to thank all the scholars who have contributed to this article. it began years ago as a paper i wrote for a graduate seminar with suzanne p. stetkevych, who has taught me a great deal about classical arabic poetry, and it was inspired by the excellent essay of jaroslav stetkevych, “a qaṣīdah by ibn muqbil: the deeper reaches of lyricism and experience in a mukhaḍram poem; an essay in three steps,” journal of arabic literature 37, no. 3 (2006): 303–354. geert jan van gelder provided detailed comments on an early draft. i also thank the three anonymous reviewers and antoine borrut and matthew gordon, the editors of al-uṣūr al-wusṭā, for their detailed and helpful feedback. i am grateful to abdallah soufan, who offered insight on many specific points; in return, i dedicate the article to him. all faults, of course, are mine only. 1. abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās (beirut: dār ṣādir, 2008), 21:151–152. i have mailto:pklasova%40bowdoin.edu?subject= 41 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) condemned the new morality that he perceived as overbearing. his two verses employ a striking comparison, likening the emerging islamic discourse to chains around one’s neck. they also paint a forbidding image of a young man who, because of the new moralizing discourse, has become bereft of the exuberance of youth and sounds like a much older person, saying “only the right things.”1abū khirāsh hailed from the environs of mecca and witnessed the impact of the emergent islam on his fellow tribesmen. he belonged to the generation of poets who lived in the time of muḥammad’s prophecy, whom the arabic tradition called the mukhaḍramūn, “straddlers,”2 because they straddled the periods of jāhiliyya and islam. as such, the mukhaḍramūn provide an invaluable insight into the fascinating transitional period during which islam, or perhaps more precisely the “believers’ movement,” to use fred m. donner’s term,3 first appeared and gradually established itself in seventh-century arabia. great transitional periods determine the course of history for centuries to come; they also contain the personal dramas of individuals such as abū khirāsh who saw a world familiar to them suddenly rejected as wrong and misguided. the poet’s testimony reflects the voice of someone who did not actively participate in the new movement and remained on its margins. in this regard, abū khirāsh is similar to the two other mukhaḍramūn included in this study, abū miḥjan al-thaqafī and suḥaym, the slave of the banū al-ḥasḥās.4 the three poets represent different social groups—abū khirāsh was a bedouin, abū miḥjan an urbanite, and suḥaym a black slave—but they share a similar position vis-à-vis muḥammad’s translated laysa bi-qāʾil siwā al-ḥaqq as “saying only the right things” rather than “saying only the truth” to stress that the remark does not refer only to an intellectual position but rather implies a more general attitude. we may understand it as the early islamic equivant of “political correctness” in today’s parlance. al-ḥaqq should be taken here as the opposite of bāṭil, wrongness or impiety. for the entire poem and its translation, see the appendix, 1.a (the numbers and letters in the appendix refer to the poets and poem selections, not to pages.) all translations in this article are mine unless otherwise stated. 2. this is the primary use of the term mukhaḍramūn. it was later also applied to the poets of the second/ eighth century who straddled the umayyad and ʿ abbāsid eras. these later poets were usually called mukhaḍramū al-dawlatayn. the term also has a technical sense in ḥadīth. see renate jacobi, “mukhaḍram,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; stetkevych, “qaṣīdah by ibn muqbil,” 304–305. 3. see fred m. donner, muhammad and the believers: at the origins of islam (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2010), esp. 56ff. 4. though the three poets are well-known figures in the arabic literary tradition, they have received scant attention in modern western scholarship. there is an ei2 entry on abū khirāsh written by charles pellat, and tzvetan theophanov uses abū khirāsh and his poetry to challenge suzanne stetkevych’s vision of the poetry of brigands as a failed rite of passage. tzvetan theophanov, “the dīwān al-hudhaliyyīn and the rite de passage manqué,” studies in arabic and islam: proceedings of the 19th congress, halle 1998, ed. stefan leder, 337–346 (sterling, va: peeters, 2002); cf. suzanne p. stetkevych, the mute immortals speak: pre-islamic poetry and the poetics of ritual (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1993), part 2. more recently, nathaniel a. miller mentions abū khirāsh and his poetry on various occasions in his dissertation on the dīwān of the banū hudhayl. nathaniel a. miller, “tribal poetics in early arabic culture” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2016). abū miḥjan, too, has a short entry in the ei2: n. rhodokanakis and ch. pellat, “abū miḥdja̲n”, in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. more scholars have dealt with abū miḥjan, especially with respect to his encounter with the caliph ʿumar, who punished him for drinking wine. see, for example, sean anthony, “the domestic origins of imprisonment: an inquiry into an early islamic institution,” journal of the american oriental society 129, no. 4 (2009): 592. as for suḥaym, he is also the subject of a short ei2 entry, written by a. arazi. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 42 community. all three poets lived in the ḥijāz and consequently witnessed the formation of the believers’ movement up close. though they accepted its authority (and are considered muslims by the tradition, as evidenced in kitāb al-aghānī), they repeatedly violated the movement’s norms and every so often rebelled against its values through their poetry. most importantly, they were no ideologues, in the sense that they were neither directly involved in the promotion of muḥammad’s message nor engaged in an open struggle against it. when i call them marginal, i thus refer to their marginal position vis-à-vis the active currents of the new islamic movement. one goal of this article is to examine the verses of the three poets in order to explore their reactions to the spread of muḥammad’s message.5 how did they react to the world changing in front of their eyes? what were the points on which their world views clashed with muḥammad’s? the perspective of these three poets is unique precisely due to their position at the margins of his movement, but not outside of it. as such, their perspective differs from that of poets in the service of the new community, such as ḥassān b. thābit, the prophet’s personal poet; from that of the mushrikūn poets who challenged muḥammad; and from that of the narrators of later accounts about this period, who were writing from a temporal distance, at a time when islam had already prevailed. the mukhaḍramūn poets’ complaints about the impact of the new ideology on their personal lives provide a window into the reception of the emergent islamic movement among arab tribes in the ḥijāz beyond muḥammad’s close community. a second goal of the article is to study the narratives (akhbār) that accompany this poetry to gain insight into the reception of the mukhaḍramūn’s verses. i focus on the akhbār in abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī’s (d. 356/967) kitāb al-aghānī (“book of songs”).6 at first sight, the akhbār provide the reader with the context of the verses, but as i show, they are far from mere biographical footnotes. rather, they have great hermeneutical value because they record the attempts of later muslims to interpret the verses. therefore, i am not interested so much in what happened (because that is often impossible to ascertain) as in how it was remembered.7 i analyze the various functions of the akhbār and call attention to the occasional discrepancies between the akhbār and the poetry. i explain the existence of these discrepancies as the result of the interpretative efforts of later narrators and collectors. i assume that some sentiments expressed in the poetry proved a challenge for these men, and they attempted to reconcile these sentiments with their islamic worldview 5. the title “reacting to muḥammad” should thus be read as “reacting to the changes that muḥammad brought about” rather than reacting directly to his persona. 6. on kitāb al-aghānī, its overall composition, and its value as a literary work, see hilary kilpatrick, making the great book of songs: compilation and the author’s craft in abū l-faraj al-iṣbahānī’s “kitāb al-aghānī” (new york: routledge, 2003). kilpatrick also provides an overview of modern research on the work (pp. 1–14). on al-iṣfahānī’s profiles of the poets, see kilpatrick, “abū l-faraǧ’s profiles of poets: a 4th/10th century essay at the history and sociology of arabic literature,” arabica 44 (1997): 94–128. on the sources of kitāb al-aghānī, see note 27 below. 7. i am inspired in this regard by the work of antoine borrut and by his bringing of scholarship on memory into the field of islamic studies. see, most importantly, his entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leiden: brill, 2011), esp. 168–204. 43 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) by means of the akhbār. the akhbār, then, served to modify the original meaning of the poetry that they frame and to mitigate its subversive effects. in this way akhbār reveal how later audiences reinterpreted the memories of the coming of islam that this early poetry captures. this article thus seeks, first, to shed light on the reception of muḥammad’s revelation among certain segments of society marginal to the new believers’ movement, as embodied in the work of three recalcitrant poets from the ḥijāz, and, second, to make plain the processes through which these early sentiments and figures were readjusted to fit later islamic sensibilities through literary akhbār. besides these two main points, an examination of the interplay between the mukhaḍramūn’s poetry and akhbār in the kitāb al-aghānī also establishes the importance of such poetry as a historical source, provides an argument in support of its authenticity—insofar as we can speak of “authenticity” in the oral(-cumwritten) context of early islamic poetry—and exposes the multilayered nature of the poets’ legacy. i elaborate on these side arguments in the concluding remarks. the next section introduces the world, poetry, and akhbār of the mukhaḍramūn. 1. the mukhaḍramūn: their world, poetry, and akhbār the mukhaḍramūn, the poetic “straddlers,” lived a precarious existence.8 born and raised in one world, they witnessed its fading and the gradual establishment of a new one. muḥammad’s religious message and political victory had far-reaching consequences not only for the political landscape of the region but also for the private lives of individuals. the submission to god and the piety (taqwā) that he called for became the requirements of the new society that was quickly taking shape. the world that these poets and the generations of poets before them had extolled in their poetry was suddenly rejected as the jāhiliyya, usually but not adequately translated as “the age of ignorance” and infused with connotations of falsehood and unbelief (q 3:154; 5:50; 33:33; 48:26).9 jaroslav stetkevych has stressed the liminality of this period, underlined by the various meanings of the root kh-ḍ-r-m as “to cut in halves,” “to cut a camel’s ear,” and “to mix,” and eloquently explained that the grasping of the world of the mukhaḍramūn requires a movement adrift, away from even the most totemically understood “split ear” of the archaic camel, away from a very “old beginning,” before that beginning was called 8. for a discussion of mukhaḍram poetry, see j. stetkevych’s “qaṣīdah by ibn muqbil” and his “sacrifice and redemption in early islamic poetry: al-ḥuṭayʾah’s ‘wretched hunter,’” journal of arabic literature 31, no. 2 (2000): 89–120; revised version published as “sacrifice and redemption: the transformation of an archaic theme in al-ḥuṭayʾah” (ch. 5) in his the hunt in arabic poetry: from heroic to lyric to metapoetic (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2016), 57–87. see also suzanne p. stetkevych, “pre-islamic panegyric and the poetics of redemption,” in reorientations: arabic and persian poetry, ed. suzanne pinckney stetkevych, 1–57 (bloomington: indiana university press, 1994); james e. montgomery, the vagaries of the qaṣīdah: the tradition and practice of early arabic poetry (cambridge: e. j. w. gibb memorial trust, 1997), 209–258. for further bibliography, see montgomery, vagaries of the qaṣīdah, 210, n. 285. 9. the classical article on the concept of jāhiliyya is ignaz goldziher, “was ist unter ‘al-ǵâhilijja’ zu verstehen?,” in ignaz goldziher, muhammedanische studien (halle: max niemeyer, 1889), 1:219–228. see also note 158 below. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 44 al-jāhiliyyah, now pronounced with sudden declarative force to be a very “old past” and, therefore, of being “invalid”—while yet being “everything.”10 to a large extent, the poetry of the mukhaḍramūn represents a continuation of jāhilī poetics, which at times clashed with the rhetoric of the new religious movement.11 the poetry of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym, too, is close to pagan pre-islamic poetry, the main difference being the comments of the three men on the world changing around them.12 it should be noted, however, that their poetry offers little insight into their religious beliefs. their complaints relate to a general change in moral codes and a break with past customs rather than any particular doctrine or the inability to engage in concrete religious practices. the lives and verses of the three men demonstrate that in their time, divisions between pagans or “associators” (mushrikūn), on the one hand, and muslims or “believers” (muʾminūn), on the other, reflected more a sociopolitical reality (i.e., allegiance to the believers’ movement or lack thereof) than an essential difference in worldviews. take the case of abū khirāsh, for instance. before his tribe, the hudhayl, converted collectively to the new religion in the aftermath of the conquest of mecca in 8/629, he is said to have fought against the prophet. in his poetry, abū khirāsh—nominally a believer—bewails the supremacy of the prophet’s tribe, the quraysh, because it prevents him from carrying out an act of vengeance, which he sees as his ancient right. what do i mean by jāhilī poetics? for the purposes of this article, i will use the term “poetic jāhiliyya” to refer to the dominant discourse of pre-islamic poetry and the heroic value system that permeates most of its famous odes. i want to state explicitly that, by the poetic jāhiliyya, i do not mean the overall reality of pre-islamic arabia, as it is hard to say what part of the population adhered to these values. the following six lines from the famous muʿallaqa of ṭarafa, one of the seven “suspended odes” as translated by j. a. arberry, capture perfectly the defiant spirit of this discourse:13 if you can’t avert from me the fate that surely awaits me then pray leave me to hasten it on with what money i’ve got. but for three things, that are the joy of a young fellow i assure you i wouldn’t care when my deathbed visitors arrive— first, to forestall my charming critics with a good swig of crimson wine that foams when the water is mingled in; second, to wheel at the call of the beleaguered a curved-shanked steed streaking like the wolf of the thicket you’ve startled lapping the water; 10. j. stetkevych, “qaṣīdah by ibn muqbil,” 308. 11. renate jacobi (quoted in montgomery, vagaries of the qaṣīdah, 210) points out that mukhaḍram poetry deviates from the early tradition in a number of formal and conceptual elements. in this article, however, i focus only on the poetry’s contents, not on its stylistics. 12. as jaroslav stetkevych has shown in his study of ibn muqbil, the mukhaḍram poet can also display a profound nostalgia for the “good old days” of the jāhiliyya. stetkevych, “qaṣīdah by ibn muqbil.” 13. ṭarafa was a pre-islamic, sixth-century poet from the tribe of bakr and the region of baḥrayn, one of those who recited their poetry at the court of ʿamr b. hind (d. ca. 9/568) in ḥīra. 45 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) and third, to curtail the day of showers, such an admirable season dallying with a ripe wench under the pole-propped tent, her anklets and her bracelets seemingly hung on the boughs of a pliant, unriven gum-tree or a castor-shrub.14 ṭarafa celebrates the enjoyment of wine, amorous adventures, and fighting—themes that are repeated across heroic pre-islamic poetry. these themes, however, should not be considered values in themselves. rather, as the first line of this excerpt hints, they convey the poet’s expression of his heroic refusal to bow to the power of the unpredictable fate. the celebration of wine, amorous adventures, and fighting should be understood as a proclamation of defiance in the face of death. he is aware that fate can strike at any time and so dares it to hasten with his unrestrained life. this uninhibited spirit spills over to interpersonal relationships, and so, for instance, extreme generosity is praised in jāhilī poetry even if it endangers one’s life. the implicit logic is that we will die in any case; all that can survive is our name and the memory of our honorable deeds perpetuated in poetry. admittedly, the rich body of pre-islamic poetry is heterogeneous. it displays a range of themes as various scholars have noted. so, for example, nathaniel a. miller has demonstrated that pre-islamic poetry shows regional differences.15 suzanne stetkevych has pointed to what she terms “proto-islamic” themes in the verses of zuhayr b. abī salmā and labīd.16 and james e. montgomery has suggested two or three types of the relationship between early arabic poetry and islam: the submission of the jāhilī ode to islam, the synthesis of the two, and the coexistence of the two.17 yet the defiant spirit pervades most pre-islamic odes, whether they display some proto-islamic elements or not. on the whole, the “poetic jāhiliyya” was ruled by the chaotic, arbitrary, and amoral fate (dahr, manāyā) that strikes purposelessly, erasing both individuals and entire civilizations; the pre-islamic poet becomes the hero confronting fate with an impassive face and fighting for earthly fame and virtue either for himself or for his tribe. i show below that the verses of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym embrace the same heroic and defiant perspective as does ṭarafa’s muʿallaqa, a perspective that clashed with muḥammad’s teachings. the sentiment of individual rebellion against the arbitrariness of 14. see a. j. arberry, the seven odes: the first chapter in arabic literature (london: george allen and unwin, 1957), 86. for the arabic original, see the appendix, 4. 15. miller has drawn attention to the differences between the ḥijāzī and najdī corpora of pre-islamic poetry and criticized scholars for treating najdī examples as representative of pre-islamic poetry as a whole. he points out that the salient characteristics of najdī poetry—praise, poetry, tripartite qaṣīdas, and equestrian boasting— have been turned into characteristic features of pre-islamic poetry in general even though they are missing from the dīwān, a typical representative of ḥijāzī poetry. miller, “tribal poetics,” 6. 16. see stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 42–45, 50–54, 284–285; suzanne stetkevych, the mantle odes: arabic praise poems to the prophet muḥammad (bloomington: indiana university press, 2010), 28–30. 17. see james e. montgomery, “sundry observations on the fate of poetry in the early islamic period,” in tradition and modernity in arabic language and literature, ed. j. r. smart, 49-60 (london: routledge, 1996), 54-57. for an extended version of this article see montgomery, the vagaries of the qaṣīdah, 209-257. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 46 fate has a parallel in the biblical statement, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,”18 which is frowned upon in christianity. the ideology introduced by muḥammad had little room for the individual heroically confronting fate (understood as the jāhilī amoral force). islam, like judaism and christianity before it, rejected this worldview and replaced the arbitrary fate with a wise and all-knowing creator. instead of promoting earthly honor and fame, the new religion commanded its followers to direct their lives to the afterlife and substituted the hope of salvation for the heroic defiance of death itself. salvation and status were now to be attained through righteous behavior and piety,19 exemplified by the figure of the young man who, much to abū khirāsh’s distaste, says only “the right things.” all fighting was to be collective, undertaken in the name of god and for a higher good. the jāhilī worldview was rejected and so were its main bearers, the poets, as the famous qurʾānic verse sūrat al-shuʿarāʾ indicates.20 geert jan van gelder has described the coming of islam as a transition between two kinds of ethos: that of islam, based on guilt, and that of pre-islamic times, based on honor and shame.21 guilt is related to the morality deplored by abū khirāsh. this morality—focused on the individual’s accountability to god—implies remorse, though as van gelder explains, to new converts it may have meant only liability to punishment.22 admittedly, these models do not exist in societies in their pure forms, nor did islam at that time—in the form we know it from later sources. but the verses of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym reveal that the poets perceived some elements of the new morality as oppressive. to be clear, i am not making the claim that islamic society sprang into existence fully fledged. quite the opposite: i show the frictions that accompanied the gradual process of 18. the saying appears in four variants in the bible (ecclesiastes 8:15; luke 12:19; isaiah 22:13; corinthians 15:32), and in most of these its sentiment is reprimanded. the first version of the saying appears in ecclesiastes, which seems to endorse it, but the statement comes from the mouth of qoheleth, who does not recognize any life beyond the present one, and as such it must be rejected. 19. fred donner has emphasized and evidenced the centrality of piety in islam in his writings; see, for example, his muhammad and the believers, 61–68. 20. the qurʾānic condemnation in sūrat al-shuʿarāʾ ends as follows: “and the poets—it is those straying in evil, who follow them / seest thou not that they wander distracted in every valley? / and that they say what they practice not? / except those who believe, work righteousness, engage much in the remembrance of god, and defend themselves after they are unjustly attacked. and soon will the unjust assailants know what vicissitudes their affairs will take!” (q 26: 224–27). all qurʾānic translations are based on yusuf ali’s translation, but i substitute “god” for his “allah.” for a detailed discussion of these verses and the controversies that surround them see montgomery, vagaries of the qaṣīdah, 210-216. for references to scholarship dealing with them see montgomery, vagaries of the qaṣīdah, 210, n. 286, and alan jones, “poetry and the poets,” in encyclopaedia of the qurʾān. 21. for a discussion of the two types of societies within the islamic, see geert jan van gelder, the bad and the ugly: attitudes towards invective poetry (hijāʾ) in classical arabic literature (leiden: brill, 1988), 13ff. van gelder draws on george fenwick jones, honor in german literature. the terms “guilt culture” and “shame culture” were popularized in ruth benedict, the chrysanthemum and the sword: patterns of japanese culture (boston: houghton mifflin, 1946), but a full bibliography on the topic would be too long to include here. cf. timothy winter, “honor,” in encyclopaedia of the qurʾān. 22. van gelder, bad and ugly, 13. 47 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) transformation. a clash between the two worldviews is clearly expressed in the qurʾān itself: while the unbelievers got up in their hearts heat and cant—the heat and cant of [the pagan age of] ignorance (ḥammiyyat jāhiliyya)—god sent down his tranquility to his messenger and to the believers, and made them stick close to the command of selfrestraint. (q 48:26) the “heat and cant” of the jāhiliyya stands precisely for the defiant spirit found in pre-islamic poetry, the same spirit to which the three mukhaḍramūn also ascribed, although they were no unbelievers but newly converted members of the believers’ movement. the second type of material discussed in this article consists of akhbār of the three poets in the fourth/tenth-century kitāb al-aghānī. the akhbār ostensibly provide a biographical and historical context for excerpts of poetry, clarifying the situations in which the verses were recited. scholars have shown, however, that literary akhbār cannot be taken at face value as impartial historical material.23 suzanne stetkevych, for one, has emphasized throughout her work the interpretative value of akhbār. she has analyzed the role of akhbār in constructing poets’ mythic and folkloric personalities, which reveal how these figures were remembered centuries after their deaths.24 she also points out that the akhbār provide an evaluation of the poetry and its performance. thus the poems and the akhbār combined provide a basis for understanding the process through which pre-islamic poetry was “transmitted, preserved, selected, and molded by muslim hands into a literary corpus and a cultural construct that served to advance the interests of an arabo-islamic political, religious, and literary-cultural hegemony.”25 this is how i use the akhbār here—to reflect on the later transmission and reception process of, in this case, the poetry of the three mukhaḍramūn. more specifically, my focus is on the occasional discrepancies between the poetry and the akhbār. as much as the verses of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym breathe the spirit of the poetic jāhiliyya, their akhbār, on many occasions, show an unmistakably islamic character. the reason for this, i argue, is that later audiences equipped the mukhaḍram poetry with narratives that were meant to make sense of this poetry within their islamic framework. in this regard, it is important that the three poets were seen as muslims. the 23. beyond the genre of akhbār accompanying poetry, letizia osti has discussed how different compilers mixed and edited akhbār to evaluate the scholar al-ṣūlī (d. 335/947); see letizia osti, “tailors of stories: biographers and the lives of the khabar,” synergies monde arabe 6 (2009): 283–291. fedwa malti-douglas has traced the functions of a group of akhbār in different genres in “texts and tortures: the reign of al-muʿtadid and the construction of historical meaning,” arabica 46 (1999): 313–336. on khabar in general, see stefan leder, “the literary use of khabar: a basic form of historical writing,” in the byzantine and early islamic near east, vol. 1, problems in the literary source material, ed. averil cameron and lawrence i. conrad, 277–315 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1999). 24. see especially suzanne p. stetkevych, “archetype and attribution in early arabic poetry: al-shanfarā and the lāmiyyat al-ʿarab,” international journal of middle east studies 18, no. 3 (1986): 361–390. 25. suzanne p. stetkevych, the poetics of islamic legitimacy: myth, gender, and ceremony in the classical arabic ode (bloomington: indiana university press, 2003). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 48 generation of muslims that overlapped with the prophet and the first caliphs has a special place in islamic memory and a continuing relevance for muslims’ conceptions of their origins. however, there is a temporal and epistemic gap between the poets and their later audiences. we have to remember that the poetry and the akhbār have been preserved in much later sources. abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym lived in the first/seventh century, but abū al-faraj, our main source, wrote his kitāb al-aghānī in the fourth/tenth century, although he depended on earlier written sources. his work thus represents the culmination of a process three centuries long during which different people were narrating the verses, imagining their circumstances, and embroidering them with stories.26 abū al-faraj recorded many chains of transmissions (isnāds) for his reports, and various scholars have discussed his use of sources.27 my emphasis is not on the individual transmitters or their methods of transmission (oral vs. written) but rather on the transformed world in which these narrators lived and that conditioned them to reinterpret old poetry according to new sensibilities. i contend that the disharmony between the akhbār and the poetry to which i draw attention is indicative of the multilayered chronology of the preserved material. (i will attempt to sort out the possible layers in my concluding remarks; for now, let us treat the akhbār as one body of material to make clear the contrast between them and the poetry.) although poetry may have been subject to later editing, the variants of early poems suggest that such editing was minor and that the poetry remained largely stable. the differences indicate reliable oral transmission: they consist mainly of variances in the order of lines or of individual words, as the meter and rhyme helped the stability of the verse. admittedly, this observation pertains chiefly to long poems; many twoor four-line verses could have easily been created later on to embellish narratives.28 speaking generally on the issue of the 26. abū khirāsh’s poetry was also preserved in an earlier dīwān known as sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn (cairo: maktabat al-ʿurūba, 1965) by the third/ninth-century scholar abū saʿīd al-sukkarī. tribal dīwāns like this one focus mainly on poetry and contain only a few akhbār. abū miḥjan also has a medieval dīwān compiled by the fourth/tenth-century scholar abū hilāl al-ʿaskarī. suḥaym’s dīwān was edited from different version likewise compiled in the fourth/tenth century. see abū miḥjan, dīwān abī miḥjan wa-sharḥuh, ed. abū hilāl [al-ʿaskarī] (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-azhār, n.d.); suḥaym ʿabd banī al-hasḥās, dīwān suḥaym ʿabd banī al-ḥasḥās, ed. ʿabd al-ʿazīz al-maymanī (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1950). 27. the first to raise the issue of the sources of kitāb al-aghānī was régis blachère, who believed that abū al-faraj drew mainly on written sources. after him, leon zolondek argued that we need to focus on the “collector sources” who first collected the reports about a given poet. manfred fleischhammer conducted the most detailed study of kitāb al-aghānī’s sources and identified all of its 150 informants in his die quellen des “kitāb al-aġānī” (wiesbaden: otto harrassowitz, 2004). kilpatrick has also dealt with the sources of kitāb al-aghānī in her monograph. see kilpatrick, making the great book of songs, 1–14; régis blachère, histoire de la littérature arabe (paris: maisonneuve, 1952), 135; leon zolondek, “the sources of the kitāb al-aġānī,” arabica 8, no. 3 (1961): 294–308. 28. in this context it is also relevant to mention the distinction that wolfhart heinrichs has drawn between action poems and commentary poems. wolfhart heinrichs, “prosimetrical genres in classical arabic literature,” in prosimetrum: crosscultural perspectives on narrative in prose and verse, ed. joseph harris and karl reichl, 249–76 (woodbridge: boydell and brewer, 1997). action poems, defined as poems that form the core of narrative units, would seem to be primary in meaning and chronology, whereas commentary poems, serving as embellishment of the narratives they accompany, would be secondary. 49 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) authenticity of pre-islamic poetry, james monroe concluded: pre-islamic poetry should on the whole be viewed as authentic as long as it is clearly understood that what has been preserved of it is probably not an exact recording of what a great poet once said, but a fairly close picture of it, distorted by the vicissitudes of an oral transmission in which both memorization and “de-paganization” were operative and further complicated by a tradition of scribal correction.29 memorization, as i have already noted, could be a reliable means of transmission, and “de-paganization” seems to have been operative mainly on the surface (e.g., through altering the names of deities). so in cases of discrepancy between poetry and akhbār, i take the poetry to be the earlier source. the akhbār, which in my understanding reflect the attempts of later audiences to interpret the old poetry, offer an insight into the multiple layers of collecting, writing, and organizing the past. their examination reveals, broadly speaking, two ways in which later generations integrated the unruly poets within an islamic framework: they transformed them into either islamic heroes or deterring cases. abū khirāsh, discussed in the next section, falls into the first category. 2. abū khirāsh al-hudhalī: from brigand to martyr abū khirāsh, or khuwaylid b. murra, was a mukhaḍram master poet (lit. “stallion,” faḥl)30 from the hudhayl tribe. the hudhayl lived in the environs of mecca and al-ṭāʾif, and during the war between the prophet muḥammad and the quraysh they sided with the quraysh and converted to islam only after the latter were defeated in 8/629–30. both the poetry and the akhbār of abū khirāsh indicate that he actively fought against the prophet, which may also explain his lasting aversion to muḥammad’s message, expressed most poignantly in the verses quoted at the beginning of this article. aside from being a poet, abū khirāsh was also a brigand. in both respects he was an exemplary member of his tribe. the hudhayl were famous for their poetry; the ʿayniyya elegy of abū dhuʾayb for his five sons became immortal.31 they were equally famous for their brigandry (ṣaʿlaka). the term ṣuʿlūk is most famously used for pre-islamic heroic poets such as al-shanfarāʾ, who abandoned his tribe, attacked his own kinsmen, and composed verses about his bravery vis-à-vis both desert animals and men. so it may seem surprising that the kitāb al-aghānī would call the mukhaḍram abū khirāsh, a loyal member of his tribe, a ṣaʿlūk. it should be noted, however, that ṣaʿālīk are found in history until the end 29. james t. monroe, “oral composition in pre-islamic poetry,” journal of arabic literature 3 (1972): 41. 30. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:147. ibn sallām does not mention him among fuḥūl. 31. for the arabic text of abū dhuʾayb’sʿayniyya, see al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 4–41. the poem is also found in al-mufaḍḍal al-ḍabbī, al-mufaḍḍaliyyāt, with the commentary of al-anbārī, ed. charles james lyall (beirut: matbaʿat al-ābāʾ al-yasūʿiyyīn, 1930), 849–92. on the hudhayl, see g. rentz, “hudhayl,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; kirill dmitriev, “hudhayl, banū,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed. the dīwān of their poetry is the only one preserved among the old tribal dīwāns. that the pride of the hudhalīs remains strong today is indicated by the forum “majālis qabīlat hudhayl,” where the contemporary members of the tribe share their tribal poetry and legends: http://www.hothle.com. http://www.hothle.com al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 50 of the umayyad period32 and that even some famous pre-islamic ṣaʿālīk such as taʾabbaṭa sharran and ʿurwa b. ward remained integrated within their tribes.33 furthermore, as albert arazi has noted, one category of people identified as ṣaʿālīk consisted of groups of individuals who had opted for brigandry as a means of survival, such as the hudhayl.34 a characteristic feature of ṣaʿālīk was their prowess as runners, which they needed during their raids. al-shanfarāʾ’s ability to run fast even became proverbial.35 referring to the brigand lifestyle, al-aṣmaʿī commented about the hudhayl: “if a hudhalī is not a poet, nor can run fast, nor can shoot arrows, he is worthless.”36 and it may not be a coincidence that the root h-dh-l has to do with running swiftly.37 abū khirāsh’s fleet-footedness is a theme that runs through his poetry and akhbār and thus functions to reinforce his image as a brigand. abū khirāsh is said to have run faster than the horses during his tribe’s raids and wars.38 a khabar narrates, for instance, that when abū khirāsh came to mecca, he dared the rich qurashī leader al-walīd b. al-mughīra (d. 1/622 or 623) to give abū khirāsh his race horses if the poet proved able to run faster than they did. according to the story, abū khirāsh won both the race and the horses.39 so although he was an integral member of his tribe, abū khirāsh is a famous example of early islamic ṣaʿālīk. the brigand’s life was filled with endless tribal feuds, which inevitably lead to the loss of his beloved ones and demands for blood vengeance. abū khirāsh composed many elegies for his friends and brothers. his akhbār tell us that he had ten brothers, all of whom died before him, and narrate the violent deaths of some of them. the following poem is abū khirāsh’s elegy for his brother ʿurwa. in it, the poet rejects the reproaches of ʿurwa’s wife umayma that he has forgotten the deceased, declaring the depth of his sorrow: by my life, my appearance has made umayma worried; she doesn’t see much of me. she says: “i see him [abū khirāsh] having a good time after the death of ʿurwa.” if only you [umayma] knew how great an affliction this is [to me.] do not believe that i forgot the loss, umayma; yet my patience is a virtue. don’t you know that before us the pure brothers mālik and ʿaqīl were separated? 32. a. arazi, “al-shanfarāʾ,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; arazi, “ṣuʿlūk,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 33. a. arazi, “taʾabbaṭa sharran,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 34. arazi, “ṣuʿlūk.” 35. arazi, “al-shanfarāʾ.” other ṣaʿālīk, such as taʾabbaṭa sharran and ʿamr b. barrāq, were also known to be able to run fast. stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 102. 36. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:149. 37. see lisān al-ʿarab, s.v. “h-dh-l.” 38. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:147. 39. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:149. 51 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) the view of our now-emptied home and resting place still disturbs me and robs me of my patience. and so does the fact that i embrace every morning light with a deep, heavy sigh . . .40 to illustrate the kind of relationship he had with his brother, the poet draws on arabian mythology. two brothers, mālik and ʿaqīl, legendary boon companions of a pre-islamic king of al-ḥīra, jadhīmat al-abrash, became proverbial for their lasting and deep friendship.41 abū khirāsh further instructs umayma to have patience, which, he assures her, is painful for him, too. every morning he opens his eyes with a heart heavy over the emptiness of his house after ʿurwa’s departure. this and other elegies composed by abū khirāsh for his brothers and companions as well as narratives about his death from a snakebite add up to an image of a poetic figure no less heroic and tragic than abū dhuʾayb. they portray abū khirāsh as a true heir to the world of the poetic jāhiliyya, with a life full of tribal feuds and death. abū khirāsh’s close relationship to the jāhilī world is even more explicit in his elegy for the custodian of the shrine of the female divinity al-ʿuzzā. here, the poet fondly recalls the hospitality that the custodian, called dubayya, once showed him.42 for the study of this transitional moment in history, it is significant that dubayya was killed and the shrine of al-ʿuzzā was destroyed, allegedly by khālid b. al-walīd acting on muḥammad’s direct orders. ibn al-kalbī places this event in the year in which the prophet conquered mecca (8/629–30),43 the same year in which the hudhayl submitted to his rule. abū khirāsh’s loyalties could not be more divided, as his tribe has just pledged obedience to muḥammad, their former enemy. in the following verses abū khirāsh mourns dubayya through the image of a wine gathering from which dubayya is missing: what is wrong with dubayya? for days, i have not seen him amid the wine-bibbers; he drew not nigh, he did not appear. if he were living he would have come with a cup of the banū haṭif make, filled with bacchus oil. generous and noble is he; no sooner his wine cups are filled than they become empty, like an old tank full of holes in the midst of winter. suqam has become desolate, deserted by all of its friends, except the wild beasts and the wind which blows through the evergreen trees.44 40. see al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:159; see also al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1189–95 (twenty-four lines rather than six). for the arabic, see the appendix, 1.c. 41. al-ṭabarī, for example, narrates a story about mālik and ʿaqīl and mentions their occurrence in this verse as well as in that by mutammim b. nuwayra, another mukhaḍram poet who was famous for his elegies for his brother mālik. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1879–90), 1:755. 42. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:150. 43. ibn al-kalbī, book of idols, trans. nabih amin faris (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1952), 21. 44. this is the translation of nabih amin faris in ibn al-kalbī’s book of idols, 22. see also al-iṣfahānī, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 52 when abū khirāsh realizes that dubayya is missing among the wine-drinkers, he immediately knows that something bad has happened to the custodian. the poet recalls dubayya’s generosity (describing him as kābī al-ramād, “the one who spreads ashes,” implying that he frequently cooks and shares meals with others) and his vigor in drinking. dubayya would, according to abū khirāsh, generously offer wine to his guests even in the winter, when no one has much food or drink to spare, and his cups seem bottomless, “like an old tank full of holes.” but now that dubayya is dead, the poet replaces the image of generosity and drinking with a scene of the desolate dwelling of the deceased, haunted by wild beasts and the howling wind. the themes of a drinking party, extreme generosity, and especially a pagan shrine root the verse in the poetic jāhiliyya; yet the historical circumstances place it in the islamic era. another elegy by abū khirāsh, which i quoted at the beginning of this article and which i now discuss in greater detail, addresses this liminality directly. “jamīl b. maʿmar grieved my guests . . .” in his elegy for his close friend zuhayr b. al-ʿajwa, as in the previous poem, abū khirāsh celebrates a man killed by one of muḥammad’s companions. zuhayr had been taken captive during the battle of ḥunayn (8/630) and had then been killed by a companion of the prophet called jamīl b. maʿmar.45 these details place the poem and the poet in the midst of the events surrounding the rise of muḥammad’s community. the accompanying story ascribes the killing not to a clash between a believer and his opponent but to an older “hatred between them from the time of jāhiliyya.”46 the elegy appears in the kitāb al-aghānī in the following form: jamīl b. maʿmar grieved my guests with the slaughter of a munificent man with whom widows sought refuge; whose sword-belt was long, who was not corpulent, and whose sword-straps moved about on his body [as he was slender] when he stood up; in whose house a stranger would take shelter in wintertime, even a destitute man dressed in worn-out rags, in need to feed his family, who—suffering from cold, chased by the evening wind that made him call out for help—went to him [zuhayr]; whose hands almost lose his cloak when the north winds blow in his face. so what is the matter with the people of his tribe that they did not collapse when such a wise and noble man departed? and i swear, had you not found him tied up, thirsty hyenas would have come to drink your blood where the wādī bends. al-aghānī, 21:150–151. 45. this jamīl b. maʿmar is not to be confused with the poet jamīl b. maʿmar, also known as jamīl buthayna. 46. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:210; al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1221. 53 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) then jamīl would have been the one among his people slain most ignominiously. but a man’s concern is his opponent’s back [i.e., zuhayr was slain unfairly]. nothing is like the times of our [old] abode, umm mālik! now, chains have encircled [our] necks, and the youth has become like a middle-aged man, saying only the right things; the railing women are relieved. but i have not forgotten our days and nights together at ḥalya when we met with the ones that we desired. (and our sincere friends now seem as if someone were pouring [sand] on them by a graveyard [i.e. burying them alive].)47 at the beginning of the elegy, abū khirāsh identifies jamīl b. maʿmar as the culprit behind zuhayr’s death. to show the greatness of this loss, the poet glorifies zuhayr’s generosity and majestic appearance. he mentions that zuhayr used to offer shelter to the most fragile members of society: widows, strangers, and beggars. he also emphasizes zuhayr’s height by pointing to the length of his sword-belt (tall men wear long sword-belts) and describing him as “not corpulent,” reinforcing his words with the image of his sword-straps “moving about on his body when he stood up.” zuhayr’s noble presence contrasts with the destitution of a beggar who, dressed only in old rags, walks in the freezing and windy night crying out for zuhayr’s help. the poem then juxtaposes another jāhilī heroic feature of zuhayr, bravery, with the cowardice of his killers from muḥammad’s community. abū khirāsh claims that the latter were able to slay zuhayr only because they found him with his hands bound. had they encountered him unfettered, zuhayr would have slaughtered them, leaving their blood as if a drink for thirsty hyenas. abū khirāsh further stresses the unfairness of zuhayr’s slaying in captivity by quoting what seems like tribal wisdom about human insidiousness: “a man’s concern is his opponent’s back.” the verses that opened this article appear toward the end of the elegy. with their references to chains encircling the poet’s neck and the premature sapping of youthful exuberance, they directly reject the moralistic spirit of muḥammad’s message. although the poet’s nostalgic appeal to the “days of [his old] abode” could be a standard motif found in the nasīb (amatory prelude) of the traditional qaṣīda, the image of chains and the new theme of correctness (al-ḥaqq) read like a direct comment on the rise of the new religious community and a complaint about its moralizing tone—a subtext strengthened by the tradition’s identification of jamīl, the murderer mentioned in the poem, as a companion of the prophet. given the agreement between the verses and the akhbār, we can consider the poem an eyewitness testimony of the impact of muḥammad’s mission on the lives of his contemporaries. 47. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī 21:151–152; cf. al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1221–1223. for the whole poem in the arabic original as recorded in the aghānī, see the appendix, 1.a. the last line appears only in al-sukkarī’s sharḥ, so i include it here in parentheses. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 54 it is not difficult to guess what abū khirāsh would prefer the young men of his tribe to talk about instead of “the right things”: bravery and comradery in fighting, winedrinking, generosity, and other tribal values of the past. the phrase “the railing women are relieved” is a reference to jāhilī poetry’s traditional theme of railing women (ʿawādhil) who reproach and blame the poet for his extensive drinking and extreme generosity. in jaroslav stetkevych’s description, the railing woman “is the reckless warrior’s and fameseeker’s sobering, reminding, and warning voice ‘of reason,’ mostly social and domestic. she is, therefore, the counter-heroic, interest-oriented element in the earliest arabic poetry.”48 now, as abū khirāsh sourly notes, the ʿawādhil can be content. the new era has suppressed the heroism and exuberance of the past. these lines force a reconsideration of the entire poem. even the seemingly pure jāhilī part is to be understood from the perspective of a mukhaḍram, living at the threshold between the familiar past and the unknown future. in this light, zuhayr functions not only as a traditional hero but also as a symbol of the bygone era of jāhiliyya. two further lines support this reading. in one, the poet, having extolled the hero’s generosity and bravery, asks a rhetorical question: “so what is the matter with the people of his tribe that they did not collapse when such a wise and noble man departed?” in other words, he questions how zuhayr’s tribesmen can go on living in a world from which zuhayr and his like are absent. this sentiment is presented even more clearly in the last line of the poem, a line that—most interestingly—does not appear in the kitāb al-aghānī but is included only in al-sukkarī’s version of the poem: “and our sincere friends (ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ) now seem as if someone were pouring [sand] on them by a graveyard.”49 the line movingly evokes a bygone past, a world that has vanished. the mention of ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ is, of course, not a reference to the mysterious, much later authors of a philosophical compendium of sciences, the brethren of purity, but a memory of the poet’s comrades or, perhaps, honorable ancestors who lived by the values of the world that is now fading. like zuhayr, these “sincere friends” symbolize the pre-islamic hero and the ancestral customs. and like him, they are dead. more importantly, their memory, too, is slowly falling into oblivion. the poet expresses this process of forgetting through the image of these friends being buried in sand, in a place hidden from the eyes of the community—by a graveyard. closely examined, the poem is not only an elegy for abū khirāsh’s dead friend but also a swan song of the jāhiliyya. blood vengeance (thaʾr) in abū khirāsh’s world in a world in which abū khirāsh’s close associates were dying one after another, retribution was crucial. the theme of blood vengeance permeates abū khirāsh’s poetry and akhbār, as he repeatedly swears to avenge the deaths of his friends and brothers and boasts about his successes in doing so. in the case of zuhayr, however, this order of things is interrupted. for, as another elegy for zuhayr attests, the victory of muḥammad’s 48. stetkevych, “qaṣīdah by ibn muqbil,” 324. for a bibliography on the ʿādhila motif (and some controversy around it), see ibid., n. 40, and further jaroslav stetkevych, the zephyrs of najd (chicago: university of chicago press, 1993), 244, n. 48. 49. al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1223. 55 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) community made the appropriate blood vengeance impossible. in the first line of this excerpt, abū khirāsh reports having had a premonition of zuhayr’s death; in the second line, he expresses his frustration at his current inability to take revenge: would i be saying every single night: “may he not depart, the one killed by jamīl?” i never used to doubt that if the quraysh killed one of us we would take vengeance [lit. they would be killed for our killed]. and so i remain with a burning thirst, as long as you rule and prosper, until you are killed.50 whereas in the past the poet would always have been able to avenge a loved one even if he or she had been killed by the powerful quraysh, now that abū khirāsh’s tribe has pledged its allegiance to muḥammad, this option to exercise an old right has been taken away from him. like many others, abū khirāsh belonged nominally to the community of believers but was steeped in the honor system in which blood vengeance played a central role. in his circles, the failure to avenge one’s kin, as when blood money (diya) is accepted, constitutes grounds for mockery. so when abū khirāsh’s brother al-abaḥḥ—also a poet—swears to take revenge on sārī b. zunaym for the killing of another brother of theirs but then accepts diya instead, sārī derides al-abaḥḥ: “you took his blood money and you put aside his matter with the banū tamīm for a couple of starved camels.”51 returning to the verses above, the poet’s way of referring to muḥammad’s community as “the quraysh” is interesting because it suggests that he did not consider it a new religious movement but simply a victorious tribe. abū khirāsh’s description of his exasperation at his inability to exercise thaʾr as a “burning thirst” is another noteworthy element of the poem. it indicates that vengeance goes beyond an honorable duty and rather constitutes—like thirst—a physical necessity. similarly, al-abaḥḥ describes thaʾr as “calming” (munīm),52 suggesting that only when revenge has been taken can one regain peace. elsewhere, abū khirāsh expresses his thirst for blood thus: my thirsty lips, this is no sheep’s milk. instead, it is a gathering of young men, each with a refined spearhead, heated up [and yearning for blood].53 the poet warns his lips that they will quench their thirst not with milk but with blood. his enemies’ spearheads are similarly bloodthirsty. suzanne stetkevych has connected the same imagery of drinking lances in a poem by taʾabbaṭa sharran to the ritual of sacrifice, explaining that, like sacrifice, “the killing of the enemy in blood vengeance is perceived as 50. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:152; see also al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1229. for the arabic original, see the appendix, 1.b. 51. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:158, and al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 668. 52. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:158. 53. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:156; appendix, 1.d. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 56 revitalizing the kin.”54 more broadly, building on the work of the anthropologist arnold van gennep and the sociologists marcel mauss and henri hubert, stetkevych argues that blood vengeance in jāhilī poetry “performs the function of a rite of passage or of sacrifice” in that it represents the transition of the avenger from one ritual state to another.55 thaʾr had an important social function in pre-islamic arabia. robert hoyland has noted that the threat of destructive retaliation in fact made the arabs hesitate before they killed someone, and in this way it contributed to keeping order.56 it is natural that in a society that lacks a more universal state authority, the family and the tribe must protect a person’s life. the role of blood vengeance in maintaining order in society and preventing its disintegration has been observed in other times and societies as well. plato, for instance, contends in his laws that a potential murderer “in dread of such vengeances from heaven [. . .] should refrain himself.”57 in certain aboriginal cultures in australia, a ritualized version of the blood feud had a conciliating effect. when a killing took place, the two kin groups would hurl spears at each other, and once blood had been spilled and the blood vengeance satisfied, they would return to peaceful coexistence.58 in the european context, the long tradition of dueling, fueled partially by ideas of chivalry born in the frankish lands of northwestern europe, serves as another parallel.59 like thaʾr, dueling was connected to notions of the honor of the individual and the class that he represented, and, as v. g. kiernan points out, it reduced feuds “to symbolic proportions, confined them to individuals, and required only a limited number of victims.”60 even in modern-day upper egypt, a region still connected to the practice of thaʾr,61 substitutive rites are carried out that elucidate the institution’s sacrificial nature and importance in maintaining social order. in some cases, the shroud of the deceased is spread on the floor and a sheep is sacrificed as an alternative. from this larger perspective, abū khirāsh’s celebration of the virtue of thaʾr is not merely an empty boast but rather a proclamation of allegiance, perhaps unconscious, to an ancient cultural model that transcends temporal and geographical boundaries. in both ancient 54. stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 65. 55. the rite of passage has been theorized by van gennep as (1) a “rite of separation” of the initiate from society, (2) a marginal state in which the initiate is temporarily outside society, and (3) a “rite of aggregation” in which he/she is brought back into society and a new social role. see edmund leach, “against genres: are parables lights set in candlesticks or put under a bushel?,” in structuralist interpretations of biblical myth, ed. edmund leach and d. alan aycock, 89–112 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983), 99, quoted in stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 56. 56. robert g. hoyland, arabia and the arabs: from the bronze age to the coming of islam (london: routledge, 2001), 113–114. 57. plato, laws, 9:872e, 873a. 58. jack david eller, introducing anthropology of religion: culture to the ultimate (new york: routledge, 2007), 114. 59. v. g. kiernan, the duel in european history (oxford: oxford university press, 1988), 1. 60. kiernan, duel in european history, 12. 61. it should be noted that the image of upper egypt as a traditional, backward society in which thaʾr is still practiced is partially created and perpetuated by modern egyptian television shows, such as aunt ṣafiyya and the monastery (based on bahāʾ ṭāhir’s novel) and revenge. see lila abu-lughod, dramas of nationhood: the politics of television in egypt (chicago: university of chicago press, 2005), 180–181. 57 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) and modern societies that rely on the law of blood vengeance, the failure to avenge blood may be perceived as a path to social dissolution. the ritual and sacrificial significance of blood vengeance and its social function are key to understanding the profound break with the past that muḥammad’s banishment of the practice of thaʾr represented and that abū khirāsh lamented in his poem. however, vengeance could also spiral out of control and lead to excessive bloodshed. thaʾr as could erase entire families and tribes, as a khabar involving abū khirāsh’s family illustrates. according to the story, the banū liḥyān killed a protégé (jār) of one of abū khirāsh’s brothers, abū jundub, “whom his people called ill-omened.”62 abū jundub went to mecca, performed the rituals of the pilgrimage, gathered all the reprobates (khulaʿāʾ) present, and “killed many of their [banū liḥyān’s] men and took captive many of their women and children.”63 the most famous example of the destructive power of thaʾr remains the legendary al-basūs war between the tribes bakr and taghlib, which supposedly started over a killed camel and continued for forty years. muḥammad’s community was aware of this danger; muḥammad feared thaʾr as antiestablishment force and as an expression of tribalʿaṣabiyya and ruled strongly against it. the famous “farewell oration” (khuṭbat al-widāʿ) ascribed to muḥammad contains an explicit prohibition of thaʾr: “the blood [revenge] of the jāhiliyya is void” (wa-inna dimāʾ al-jāhiliyya mawḍūʿa).64 notwithstanding the possible later origin of this speech,65 it shows that the early islamic community saw thaʾr as an important and dangerous matter. the qurʾān, a contemporary source, admonishes against taking revenge on anyone beyond the perpetrator of a crime. this condoned substitute practice is called qiṣāṣ:66 [do not] take life which god has made sacred―except for just cause. and if anyone is slain wrongfully, we have given his heir authority [to demand qiṣāṣ or to forgive]: but let him not exceed bounds in the matter of taking life. (q 17:33; my emphasis) but even in the case of this limited “just” punishment, the qurʾān encourages forgiveness. in a similarly phrased verse, it adds that “if anyone saved a life it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people” (q 5:32). the new community rejected the ancient law as barbaric. furthermore, thaʾr must be understood as a part of a broader view of warfare and of the individual’s role therein, which was to be irreversibly changed. although it represented a deadly threat to society, thaʾr also emphasized the value of individual life because it provided a strong incentive not to kill. the death of just one person could result in the 62. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:161. 63. al-iṣfahānī, alaghānī, 21:161; or so the narrators of the aghānī imagine the incident that abū jundub mentions in his fakhr verses. 64. al-jāḥiz, kitāb al-bayān wa-l-tabyīn, ed. ʿabd al-salām hārūn (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1998), 2:31. 65. generally, on the debates concerning the authenticity of classical arabic oratory, see pamela klasova, “empire through language: al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf al-thaqafī and the power of oratory in umayyad iraq” (phd diss., georgetown university, 2018). the conclusions of this dissertation, however, concern only umayyad oratory, and i make no claims about the authenticy of speeches ascribed to muḥammad. 66. j. schacht, “ḳiṣāṣ,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 58 annihilation of a whole tribe. this appreciation of individual life also comes through in jāhilī poetry in the rhetorical device of inṣāf, which highlights the qualities of the enemy. to praise one’s enemy—since a weak enemy is not worth fighting—is a form of praising oneself, and as suzanne stetkevych points out, this device was often associated with blood vengeance.67 in a parallel to the idea of equal enemies in inṣāf, according to the law of blood vengeance it was not enough to kill the killer: the subject of the retribution had to be the victim’s equal. if the killer was not such a person, additional people belonging to the killer’s kin would be killed. inṣāf—widely used in the poetics of war in general—aptly illustrates the jāhilī conception of warfare, in which the enemy is seen as an equal. perhaps the most famous image of two warriors confronting each other in battle is captured in an elegy by abū khirāsh’s fellow hudhalī abū dhuʾayb.68 in the jāhilī poetic imagination, wars, however cruel, also provided a space to demonstrate one’s courage and achieve glory. the poetic jāhiliyya, with its strong shame/honor element, presented tribal wars in terms of a competition for honor and glory. johan huizinga, in his homo ludens, exposed the affinity between war and play, explaining that especially in archaic societies, both were conceived of as a contest for glory. huizinga sees the playful quality of war as transformative: it turns bloody violence into a cultural phenomenon that provides strong incentives for a civilization, informing it with ideas of chivalry and honor.69 fittingly, montgomery watt has noted that “raiding is the ‘national sport’ of the arabs.”70 jāhilī poetry conveys precisely this image of war, in which people fight not only out of necessity and for material gain but also for the noble strife itself. war equals excitement. we saw this excitement for war already in abū khirāsh’s first elegy for zuhayr. elsewhere, abū khirāsh says, “so we incite those who rise up against them, for we say that the soul heals only at igniting war.”71 the frenzy of battle that possesses the soul can be healed only by taking up arms. this perception of war as play was to change substantially with muḥammad’s ascendancy and the fast-paced building of the early islamic state. the scale of wars grew beyond what many of the inhabitants of arabia could imagine, and their very conception was transformed. as a means to achieving a higher good, war became an ideological enterprise. the existence of a higher good and the dichotomy of right and wrong (lamented by abū khirāsh, as seen earlier) automatically turned the enemy into a villain. islamic wars were waged in the name of islam, and as a consequence their opponents were dehumanized as infidels and no longer seen as equals. the play quality of war, as huizinga explains, can be retained only as long as war takes place within a sphere whose members regard each other as equals, and with islam’s recasting of warfare in moral terms, this quality was lost. in the course of the islamic conquests, men fought and died in great numbers and the value of 67. stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 63. for a collection of munṣifāt, see ʿabd al-muʿīn al-mulūḥī, al-munṣifāt (damascus: ministery of culture, 1967). 68. al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 4–41; al-mufaḍḍal al-ḍabbī, al-mufaḍḍaliyyāt, 849–892. 69. see “play and war” in johan huizinga, homo ludens (new york: j. and j. harper, 1970), 110–126. 70. william montgomery watt, muhammad at mecca (1953; repr., oxford: oxford university press, 1960), 17. 71. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:153; al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1204. 59 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) individual life diminished. various anecdotes testify to the shock experienced by the first generation of muslims who saw great numbers of people die on the battlefield. to give one example, al-ṭabarī narrates that a group of arab muslims who had converted to islam from christianity were so appalled by the merciless bloodshed and general low morals they witnessed during the battle of ṣiffīn that they decided to return to christianity.72 to what extent abū khirāsh was aware of these crucial ideological changes is hard to tell. though he was probably not able to put his finger on their exact nature, his annoyance is palpable. the following poem illustrates how the conquests impacted his life and what he thought of the muhājirūn, a term that in this context refers to muslim soldiers:73 [a thirsty man, i.e., the poet] calls him [his son khirāsh] to give him his evening drink, but he doesn’t come; the boy has truly become foolish. and he [the poet] receives his cup back, empty, as if the tears of his eyes were pearls. in the morning, in the evening, between him and his cup-bearer [son] are the black mountains of syria, as though burnt with fire. know, khirāsh, that only meager good awaits the muhājir after his hijra. i saw you wishing for goodness (birr) without me, like a dog daubed with blood to make it seem that he has hunted, although he has not.74 in these lines, the poet bewails his abandonment in his old age. his son is campaigning with the muslim army far from mecca, further than the mountains of syria, and there is no one to hand him his drink. his complaint sheds light on a larger social issue of the time: the demands of the established muslim state and army disrupted traditional bonds within families. hitherto, sons had been expected to take care of their aging parents, but now young men like khirāsh had become muhājirūn, muslim soldiers. putting aside his loneliness and sense of abandonment, abū khirāsh clearly disapproves of his son’s career choice. his words “only meager good awaits the muhājir after his hijra” (khayr al-muhājir baʿd hijratihi zahīd) offer a contemporary critique of the nascent muslim army. it is vital to understand the significance of the notion of birr that appears in the last verse, for it is presented in the poem as the main value of the muslim soldiers. birr, a 72. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 5:125. 73. the term muhājir has two meanings. on the one hand, it refers to an individual who joined muḥammad during his emigration (hijra) from mecca to medina; on the other, it denotes someone who, at the time of the conquests, abandoned his home, registered in the dīwān to receive a regular stipend, and joined the army in a garrison city. for a discussion of this term, see patricia crone, “the first-century concept of ‘hiǧra,’” arabica 41 (1994): 352–87; khalil athamina, “aʿrāb and muhājirūn in the environment of amṣār,” studia islamica 66 (1987): 5–25. 74. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:162; appendix, 1.e. geert jan van gelder noted in private communication that maḥṣūr in this edition may be a misreading of makhḍūb. al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1243, has this line with a different text: ka-makhḍūbi l-labbāni wa-lā yaṣīdū. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 60 qurʾānic concept usually translated as piety or godliness, has three different connotations relevant to the present context. edward lane, in his lexicon, gives as the first meaning of birr general goodness: barra means to be pious, kind, or good. the second connotation is related to material goods as recompense. so barrat bī silʿatuh means “his article was easy of sale to me,” that is, it recompensed me by its high price for my care of it. in this regard, it may also be pertinent that burr is “wheat.” the third connotation of birr is most intriguing given its use in abū khirāsh’s text: the phrase birr al-wālidayn refers to filial piety and to obedience to one’s parents. in consideration of the full meaning of birr, the poet’s words “i saw you wishing for birr without me” should be read as a subversion of the concept in whose name the muslim soldiers fought. to abū khirāsh, birr stands not for godliness or piety toward god but primarily for obedience to one’s father, expressed by lavishing him with goods as an honorable son does. we can understand abū khirāsh’s argument to be that all the material gain that his son may attain in the muslim army is useless, because he will not use it to fulfill his duty to his father. the second hemistich of the last verse, in which abū khirāsh compares his son to “a dog daubed with blood to make it seem that he has hunted, although he has not,” reveals the poet’s contempt for his son’s dubious claims as warrior and, by extension, the claims of the muslim army he represents. the comparison to a hunting dog is a variation on a proverb about a dog whose throat and chest have been daubed with blood to make it look as if he has hunted successfully. in other words, the dog is held to be something that it is not. abū khirāsh uses the proverb in relation to khirāsh and the other muhājirūn to say that despite all appearances, they are no warriors. as a brigand who has sung of battles and heroic fights, the poet has his own conception of the heroic warrior. the new state, however, has turned the heroic warrior of the poetic jāhiliyya into a soldier of god and replaced individual glory with piety. abū khirāsh’s poetry shows that its author is acutely aware of these shifts and does not hesitate to criticize them. the lines thus convey not only the poet’s complaint about his son’s absence but also his criticism of the son’s chosen lifestyle and social circles. abū khirāsh in the akhbār this section turns to the akhbār about abū khirāsh in the kitāb al-aghānī as a way to understand how later generations dealt with the jāhilī ethos and the occasionally anti-islamic tone of the poet’s verses. it is here that the interplay between poetry and akhbār comes to the fore, elucidating how the persona of abū khirāsh was transformed in islamic memory from an unruly brigand to an islamic martyr. but first, a few words on the provenance of these akhbār are in order. a glance at the chains of narrators (isnāds) of the akhbār reveals that abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī took most of his material from al-sukkarī. abū saʿīd al-ḥasan b. al-ḥusayn al-sukkarī (d. 275/888) was a famous philologist who assembled the only extant dīwān of tribal poetry that has come down to us—the dīwān of the hudhalīs, the tribe of abū khirāsh. it is noteworthy that the isnāds of these akhbār do not go all the way to the poets but end with early ʿabbāsid philologists such as ibn al-aʿrābī (d. 231/845), abū ʿubayda (d. 209/824– 25), and abū ʿamr al-shaybānī (d. 206/821). another important early ʿabbāsid philologist 61 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) often mentioned as the last narrator (not through al-sukkarī’s isnāds) is al-aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828). all these men were philologists and grammarians in basra and kufa who narrated much poetry and akhbār of the past, claiming that they had visited the tribes and had thus received much of their material directly from the bedouins.75 the absence of longer isnāds may indicate different things. the akhbār are literary material, not ḥadīth, and as such they possess less of the authority required for, for example, the grounding of legal opinions, for which uninterrupted isnāds to the original sources would be necessary. the fact that the isnāds end with early ʿabbāsid philologists may mean either that these men collected the stories orally from the bedouins, as they claimed, or that they recorded them from earlier written sources.76 although the transmission process of the akhbār cannot be traced with certainty, i will suggest its probable stages in my concluding remarks. the mechanisms through which the akhbār deal with the poetry of the unruly mukhaḍram poet can be enumerated as follows. 1. narrativization and dramatization: the most common technique of the akhbār is to develop the themes brought up in the poems into narratives. they fill in the gaps. at the beginning of abū khirāsh’s entry in the kitāb al-aghānī, for example, a long narrative introduces abū khirāsh’s boast in verse about his escape from his enemies. the khabar details his escape, adds suspense, and celebrates abū khirāsh’s heroic ability to run faster than anyone else.77 as we will see below, the akhbār on occasion introduce new narrative elements not present in the verses. the akhbār also dramatize abū khirāsh’s poetry by connecting his persona to salient figures of his age. we have already encountered him with al-walīd b. al-mughīra, the father of the great muslim army commander khālid b. al-walīd, chief of the qurashī clan of banū makhzūm and thus one of the most powerful men in mecca. a second instance has abū khirāsh meet the caliph ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb. he pleads with the caliph to let his son khirāsh return from the army. when ʿumar hears abū khirāsh’s poetic lament about his loneliness and the distance that divides his son from him, he orders khirāsh to go home and rules that any soldier with an elderly father can enter the army only with his father’s permission.78 neither of these encounters is mentioned in abū khirāsh’s poetry, and we can thus only speculate about their historicity. but whether or not the encounters happened, it is worth considering why they were narrated. in the case of the story involving ʿumar, the intent may be symbolic. the narrative may be the result of a later act of memory that linked a 75. abū ʿamr b. al-ʿalāʾ, the teacher of abū ʿubayda, and al-aṣmaʿī are said to have developed the method of collecting material directly from the bedouins as the pure carriers of the arab tradition. whether or not this was the main method, the speech of the bedouins had cultural authority. for example, ibn al-aʿrābī reportedly claimed—as part of the kufan vs. basran rivalry among the grammarians—that he had heard a thousand bedouins pronounce a particular word differently compared to al-aṣmaʿī. al-dhahabī, siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1985), 10:687. 76. for a discussion of the sources of the kitāb al-aghānī, see note 27 above. 77. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:147–149. 78. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:162. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 62 concrete policy of protecting families to the verses of a brigand bemoaning the loss of his son for military service. 2. exculpation: the akhbār, which usually comment on the salient motifs in poems, are conspicuously silent with regard to the most problematic verses. take, for example, the two elegies for zuhayr discussed above. the poet’s grievances with the moralizing youth and his frustration with the impossibility of seeking vengeance on the quraysh are ignored, a silence i consider deliberate. an even more important strategy of exculpation is the manipulation of abū khirāsh’s conversion chronology. this is where the organization of the akhbār in abū khirāsh’s entry comes into play. the entry begins with a long narrative about the poet’s heroic escape and almost mythical fleet-footedness, then moves to the stories that connect him with the custodian of the pagan shrine of al-ʿuzzā and continues with narratives about tribal feuds— his own as well as his brothers’. it is only toward the end of the entry that abū khirāsh’s conversion is mentioned. this ordering reflects a narrative strategy that implies that he recited most of his poetry while still a pagan, which, in turn, would exculpate him for his un-islamic outlook and allow for his later transformation to a righteous, exemplary muslim. however, the chronology of events and abū khirāsh’s references to islam, discussed above, indicate that he had already converted by the time of their writing. his conversion is described laconically: “he submitted to islam and his islam was good,”79 a typical formula used for the mukhaḍramūn. in abū khirāsh’s case, it simply conveys his tribe’s collective pledge of allegiance to the prophet after the conquest of mecca in 8/630. however, in al-iṣfahānī’s entry, the moment of conversion acquires importance because it separates the preceding, “pagan” akhbār from the islamizing end of the entry, to which we will now turn our attention. 3. islamization: the most obvious example of an attempt to paint the poet in more islamic colors is a khabar that concludes the entry. the khabar shows abū khirāsh selflessly setting out to bring water for yemeni ḥajj pilgrims. a snake bites the poet on his way back, but he manages to return with water for his guests and then dies without telling them about his fatal wound. when the caliph ʿumar hears the news, he reprimands the pilgrims for demanding the excessive favors that led to a muslim’s death and orders them to pay the diya. nothing of this detailed narrative—save for the snakebite—appears in the verses that the khabar accompanies: the fates (manāyā) are ever-victorious over man; they climb up every hill. by your life, snake of the lowlands of anf, you destroyed a leg that leaves behind a severe loss for the companions. / . . . / oh snake of the lowlands of anf, you destroyed a leg full of munificence for the companions. 79. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:162: aslama abū khirāsh fa-ḥasuna islāmuh. 63 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) between buṣrā and ṣanʿāʾ, it did not leave a single enemy unavenged.80 it is fair to acknowledge that the story of the poet’s death by snakebite could be a topos—a poetic imagining of the brigand’s death. of the various ways in which one might die—such as in bed or on a horse in battle—a lethal snakebite is a cause of death appropriate for a brigand who moves through the desert on foot. the famous umayyad brigand mālik b. al-rayb is also occasionally said to have died this way, which supports the association of death by snakebite with brigandry.81 whether a poem attributed later to abū khirāsh or his own authentic production, these verses contain the typically jāhilī belief in the unpredictable nature of fate, which lurks at every corner, ready to take down a man, along with the jāhilī theme of bravery in the face of this reckless force. addressing the snake, his killer, abū khirāsh refers to himself synecdochally as a leg because he takes pride in his fleet-footedness—a typical brigand quality, as discussed earlier. he exults in his ability to inflict harm on his enemies and swears that he did not spare the life of a single enemy who had spilled the blood of his kinfolk “between buṣrā [in syria] and ṣanʿā [in yemen]”—that is, in the whole of the ḥijāz. whenever the law of thaʾr had called, he had answered its call. the discrepancy between the verses and the narratives that accompany them is clear in this case. the dying poet, in his final words, evokes unmistakably jāhilī tribal themes; in contrast, the akhbār depict him as a muslim quasi-martyr who died serving muslim pilgrims. ʿumar’s presence in the story strengthens abū khirāsh’s new islamic aura and at the same time illustrates an essential misunderstanding in terms of values. whereas ʿumar punishes the pilgrims for asking for favors to which they were not entitled, for abū khirāsh hospitality was a sacred duty, as seen in a previous poem. on a more symbolic level, the inclusion of an account in which the muslim caliph enforces the payment of blood money (diya) at the end of a chapter steeped in the heat of vengeance may not be an accident. it may symbolize the transition of authority from tribal law to the caliph and from pagan blood vengeance to a more islamic form of compensation. overall, abū khirāsh’s akhbār can be read as carrying the poet from his jāhilī existence into islam, thus transforming his life story into an epic conversion narrative. as we have seen, the akhbār are more than just biographical notes. they have various functions—they dramatize and expand on the themes of abū khirāsh’s verses; they raise his place in islamic history; they exculpate the poet for his jāhilī existence; and they transform him into a muslim martyr. and so, they reveal how later audiences interpreted the old poetry. in the case of the second poet, abū miḥjan, who mainly spoke about wine and drinking parties, they facilitate his transformation into an exemplary muslim warrior. 80. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:163; appendix, 1.f. 81. al-aghānī is silent about mālik’s death. most sources, such as al-baghdādī in his khizāna, al-bakrī in his muʿjam mā istaʿjam, and ibn ʿabd rabbih in al-ʿiqd al-farīd, record that mālik was pierced (ṭuʿin). only abū zayd al-qurashī in jamjarat ashʿār al-ʿarab claims that he was bitten by a snake. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 64 3. abū miḥjan al-thaqafī: from drunkard to muslim warrior the second of the three mukhaḍramūn, abū miḥjan, attained fame as a wine poet and acclaimed warrior.82 he was a member of thaqīf, a major tribe in al-ṭāʾif, the sister city of mecca. abū miḥjan’s poetry features the themes of wine, exile, imprisonment, and war; akhbār about him offer a view into a life full of unexpected twists. abū miḥjan reportedly first proved his warrior qualities in the battle of al-ṭāʾif (8/630) against muḥammad’s army, in the course of which he wounded one of abū bakr’s sons. this story underlines his liminal position between the jāhiliyya and islam. in the islamic period, abū miḥjan continued to drink excessively and to recite wine poetry until the caliph ʿumar ordered him to be flogged and sent him to distant exile, from which the poet escaped. he joined the army of saʿd b. abī waqqāṣ (d. between 50/670–71 and 58/677), a muslim commander on campaign against sasanian forces. saʿd imprisoned abū miḥjan at ʿumar’s command, but when the muslim forces faltered in the battle of al-qādisiyya (15/636),83 the poet convinced saʿd to set him free. he then fought heroically on the muslim side. “when i die, bury me by the trunk of a grapevine . . .” abū miḥjan’s poetry is steeped in wine-related imagery, as is evident in his famous verses: when i die, bury me by the trunk of a grapevine, so that its roots may water my bones after my death. do not bury me in the desert, for i fear that when i die [there] i will not taste it [the wine]. may my grave be watered by the wine of al-ḥuṣṣ, for i am its captive after i was the one carrying it along.84 the poem is framed as a testament. abū miḥjan asks to be buried close to a grapevine that would quench his thirst for wine, fearing the absence of the sweet drink in the afterlife. he dreams about grapevine roots watering his grave and declares the power that wine has over him: even if he once had it under his control, he eventually became its captive. such a declaration of loyalty to drink was a scandalous act at the time. it is true that wine poetry came to form an important element of islamic culture,85 but this was a later development. during the lifetime of abū miḥjan, both wine and poetry were still finding their place in society, as their qurʾānic denouncement was very recent. poetry that celebrated wine must still have been seen as an affront to the new social order. 82. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:5–14. abū miḥjan also has his own dīwān: dīwān abī miḥjan. 83. n. rhodokanakis and ch. pellat, “abū miḥdjan,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 84. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:9; appendix, 2.a. al-ḥuṣṣ is a place in syria, near homs, mainly famous for being mentioned in this poem. 85. shahab ahmed, what is islam? the importance of being islamic (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016), 57–71. 65 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) wine in the world of abū miḥjan the qurʾān forbids the drinking of wine and proclaims it a sin with the following words: they ask thee concerning wine and gambling (maysir). say: “in them is great sin, and some profit for men; but the sin is greater than the profit.” (q 2:219) o ye who believe! intoxicants and gambling (maysir), [dedication of] stones, and [divination by] arrows are an abomination of satan’s handiwork: eschew such [abomination], that ye may prosper. (q 5:90) the prohibition of wine represented another profound break with the poetic jāhiliyya, in which the celebration of wine (often paired with women) constituted a classic motif, as seen in ṭarafa’s muʿallaqa. wine was not only a tool of entertainment; it was also intimately connected with pagan beliefs in fate and the pursuit of specific religious practices.86 the second of these qurʾānic verses illustrates the connection by juxtaposing intoxicants with maysir (a game of chance involving arrows), the dedication of stones, and divination. another qurʾānic verse warns the believers not to come drunk to prayer, intimating that drunkenness was a common phenomenon in mecca in muḥammad’s time: “o ye who believe! approach not prayers with a mind befogged (wa-antum sukārā), until ye can understand all that ye say” (q 4:43).87 whether because of the symbolical connection of wine with the pagan world or because of the inappropriate behavior of inebriated companions during prayer, muḥammad’s mission challenged an important element of the familiar jāhilī world. abū miḥjan sometimes comments directly on the status of wine. the wine poem quoted earlier conveys fear of the lack of wine after death. this fear may represent distrust in the qurʾānic promise of “rivers of wine” (q 47:15) in paradise. another possibility is that the poet in fact alludes to the wine of paradise but proclaims his preference for earthly wine. in another poem, abū miḥjan addresses the prohibition of wine explicitly: though now wine has become rare and forbidden, and islam and unease (ḥaraj) have come between it and me, back then, i used to . . .88 here the poet comments on the changes he is witnessing in society: islam has forbidden wine, and as a consequence wine has become rare. what is more, the islamic prohibition has given rise to feelings of unease (ḥaraj). in the verses that follow, abū miḥjan contrasts this situation with his many memories of wine-drinking in the jāhiliyya, accompanied by 86. sacrificial offerings using wine were well known in the ancient near east. see w. heimpel, “libation,” reallexikon der assyriologie 7 (1987–90): 1–5. w. montgomery watt, for example, put forward the hypothesis that the prohibition of wine stemmed from its relation with maysir, which might have some connection with pagan religion. watt, muhammad at medina (oxford: oxford university press, 1962), 298. 87. a. j. wensinck, “khamr,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 88. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:10. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 66 the sensual tone of a beautiful female server’s voice.89 abū miḥjan’s experience of ḥaraj resembles abū khirāsh’s annoyance with the stifling nature of the new islamic morality. this ḥaraj that comes from god (referred to as al-raḥmān) returns in another of abū miḥjan’s poems. this time, the ḥaraj intervenes between him and shamūs, which, according to the accompanying khabar, is a woman whom he saw as he was planting beans in medina.90 it should, however, be noted that shamūs is also a word for wine. i have translated it here as a reference to a woman: i looked at shamūs, but the great unease (ḥaraj) from the all-merciful (al-raḥmān) stands between us.91 whether the object of the poet’s desire is wine or a woman, in this poem as in the previous one ḥaraj hinders the desire’s fulfillment. the qurʾān, too, uses the term ḥaraj, but in the opposite context—to admonish the believers not to feel ḥaraj when receiving god’s message, marrying the wives of their adoptive sons, acknowledging an inability to give alms, and so on.92 through its employment of ḥaraj, the qurʾān seeks to emphasize that god does not burden his believers with unease: he is the sole law-giver, and they should not feel uneasy about doing something that is not forbidden. the poet thus turns the islamic rhetoric upside down when he points to the unease, or moral scruples, that the new religion has caused him. in the following poem, abū miḥjan clearly identifies the caliph as the one responsible for the sad state of wine in the present: have you not seen that fate makes a young man fall, that a man cannot avert his destiny? i endured the blows of fate, unjust in its judgment, and i did not fear and i was not a coward. indeed, i was endowed with fortitude when my brothers died, but i cannot refrain from wine for a single day! the commander of the believers put it to death, so its true friends now weep around the wine presses.93 these lines begin with the traditional jāhilī theme of the might and inevitability of fate and with the poet’s boasting about his ability to endure its blows. but then abū miḥjan 89. for the first four lines of the poem, see the appendix, 2.b. 90. this is how the khabar interprets the second line of the poem, in which the poet complains that he did not expect to come to medina and plant beans. (“among the people who came to medina, i used to consider myself someone could most certainly dispense with planting beans.”) although an urbanite, abū miḥjan does not seem to have worked much in ṭāʾif. especially agricultural work was considered among the arabs as not appropriate for them and this sentiment is evident in this verse. see al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:6; appendix, 2.c. 91. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:6; appendix, 2.c. 92. the word appears in the qurʾān fifteen times. for examples, see q 4:65; 5:6; 7:2; 9:91; 22:78; 24:61; 33:37, 38, 50; 48:17. 93. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:13; appendix, 2.f. َحَرج 67 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) proclaims that although he can restrain himself on such tragic occasions as the death of his brothers, he cannot, even for a single day, restrain his desire for wine. he accuses the caliph of having “put it [wine] to death” and then paints a somber image of drinkers wandering around the defunct wine presses, mourning the sweet drink. exile, imprisonment, and war in abū miḥjan’s poetry in addition to the glorification of wine, abū miḥjan also dedicated many verses to the themes of exile, imprisonment, and war. according to the akhbār, he was exiled to the island of ḥaḍawḍā, which is known in the islamic tradition as a place of exile. the location of ḥaḍawḍā is not clear, nor can we be sure that it was an island, but its appearance in abū miḥjan’s poetry indicates that there was indeed a designated place of exile in early islam.94 in these verses, addressed to the caliph ʿumar (abū ḥafs), the poet mentions his exile when he complains about a boat and sailing on the sea (or lake).95 though the main purpose of the poem is to boast of the poet’s warrior skills, it also shows that the sailing experience left its mark on the native of the ḥijāz desert: praise be to god, who saved and delivered me from ibn jahrāʾ when the boat (būṣī)96 ran aground. who takes it upon himself to sail the sea with the būṣī as his vessel to al-ḥaḍawḍā: what a terrible boat he has chosen! let abū ḥafs, the worshipper of god, promptly know, whether he is at war or at peace, that i attack the first horse of the enemy when others are afraid, and i capture the enemy’s horse under my banner. i plunge into the tumult of war and my iron armor protects me when others lag behind.97 the poem strikes a defiant tone: abū miḥjan praises god, who allowed him to escape his jailers, and invites people to inform the caliph ʿumar about his qualities as a warrior and his bravery in war. he provides evidence of his bravery by depicting a scene in which he fearlessly attacks the first fighter in the enemy’s army, kills him, and seizes his horse. in such battle poetics we recognize, yet again, the traditional values inherited from the poetic jāhiliyya. the presence of ʿumar in the poem suggests that it may have been indeed he who 94. it is not entirely clear where this island was located and whether it existed at all. according to yāqūt, it is not an island but “a mountainous region (jabal) in the west, to which the pre-islamic arabs used to banish outcasts.” he also mentions a certain al-ḥāzimī, who said that ḥuḍūḍ (or ḥaḍūḍ)—without ā—was an island. however, if ḥaḍawḍā were a mountain, it would be difficult to explain abū miḥjan’s mention of the sea (baḥr) and a boat (būṣī) in connection with his sojourn there. in modern-day saudi arabia, the name is used for a mountain range in the region of al-jawf. interestingly, there is a large lake in this region; if this is the place that abū miḥjan talks about, the lake could explain his references to boats and the “sea.” 95. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:5–6. 96. lisān al-ʿarab identifies būṣī as a persian loanword. 97. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:5–6; appendix, 2.d. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 68 sent the poet to exile. abū miḥjan was an urban poet, hailing from the city of al-ṭāʾif, and he appears to have been closer to the establishment than was abū khirāsh. in any case, in these verses abū miḥjan openly addresses the caliph, showing off his valor in battle. as if trying to start a new chapter in their relationship, the poet wants to prove to the caliph that his service is invaluable. another poem, this one related to abū miḥjan’s time in saʿd b. abī waqqāṣ’s army and his imprisonment in that period, has a similar rhetorical goal, despite its much more humble and apologetic tone. it attempts to convince someone with authority over the poet to forget about the wine incident and set him free. the poem begins with a description of the poet’s miserable captivity and ends with his promise that he will stop drinking if he is granted freedom: it is sad enough that horses are drumming the ground with their hooves, loaded with spears, while i am left tied in chains. when i stand the iron tortures me, and the doors were closed behind me; doors that [made such a deafening noise that it] would drown out anyone’s calling. i was once a wealthy man with many brothers, but they abandoned me. i have no brother now. every morning i have to deal with the tightly locked shackle; it has devoured my body and worn me out. what a great man i am! left behind, tied up, while my family and tribesmen neglect me. barred from the reignited war, while others display their glorious deeds. by god, i vow that i will not breach his law and i will no longer visit the taverns, if i am set free.98 abū miḥjan here poignantly describes two kinds of suffering. the first is psychological: he cannot join the battle and attain warrior glory, while “others display their glorious deeds.” the second form of suffering is physical: the iron chains torture him with his every move and wear him down. a striking image is his memory of the deafening sound of the doors closing behind him, a sound so loud that it drowns out human screams. al-iṣfahānī records that abū miḥjan was held in the palace (qaṣr);99 al-masʿūdī specifies that at that point saʿd resided in ḥisn al-ʿudhayb and that he kept abū miḥjan in the lower part of his palace there.100 in addition, the poet repeatedly complains that he was abandoned by his family and tribe, a comment related to a general dissolution of tribal bonds. he sarcastically calls himself “a great man,” one who is tied up and abandoned by his kin; he laments that he 98. aliṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:8; appendix, 2.e. 99. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:7. 100. al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. charles pellat (beirut: l’université libanaise, 1965–73), 3:58, quoted in anthony, “domestic origins of imprisonment,” 592. 69 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) used to have many brothers but now has none, and his family and tribesmen have cast him off. as in abū khirāsh’s poems, the establishment, represented in this case by saʿd b. abī waqqāṣ, prevents the tribe from carrying out the ancient duty of protecting its member. abū miḥjan’s verses offer a unique insight into the feelings of early muslim prisoners. imprisonment, as a state practice, appears to have spread quickly in early islamic society.101 sean anthony has described the shift of incarceration in early islam from the domestic sphere to a more formalized state institution. according to anthony, “no evidence survives attesting to the existence of formal prisons in this region before the islamic conquests,”102 and the earliest mentions of prison constructions seem to fall in ʿumar’s reign103—which is also the lifetime of abū miḥjan, who, as we have seen, experienced both exile and imprisonment (albeit in domestic style).104 however, already during the rule of al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf (r. 75–95/694–714) as governor of iraq and the east, the sources attest to a widespread use of prisons. ibn ʿasākir, for instance, narrates on the authority of al-aṣmaʿī and others that when al-ḥajjāj died, 33,000 people were freed from his prisons.105 the exaggerated number aside, the reference suggests that by the beginning of the second/eighth century, prisons had become a central institution of the state. abū miḥjan’s testimony indicates that already in the early days of the caliphate, the islamic community had a designated place of banishment—the somewhat enigmatic ḥaḍawḍā.106 and it conveys first-hand experience of imprisonment and the resulting despair in the early islamic period. it is in this condition of despair that the poet pledges to give up wine in exchange for freedom. on the whole, therefore, abū miḥjan’s poetry displays a deep allegiance to jāhilī themes and sentiments. he professes his love of wine, boasts of his bravery, and laments his banishment and imprisonment. his eventual forswearing of wine takes place only under strain. this is the image of abū miḥjan that emerges from his poetry; the akhbār, however, offer a very different one. abū miḥjan in the akhbār an examination of the akhbār in relation to the verses they accompany shows that the akhbār wrestle with the legacy of abū miḥjan in different ways. in what follows, i discuss how the drunkard poet is—through the workings of the akhbār—both punished and exculpated, and finally endowed with the aura of a heroic muslim warrior. it should be noted that the earliest recorded narrators of the akhbār, that is, the names at the ends 101. for a bibliography on carceral practices in early islam, see anthony, “domestic origins of imprisonment,” 574, n. 13. 102. anthony, “domestic origins of imprisonment,” 575. 103. anthony, “domestic origins of imprisonment,” 586. 104. for anthony’s discussion of abū miḥjan’s material, see his “domestic origins of imprisonment,” 590. 105. ibn ʿasākir, tārīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. ʿumar b. gharāma al-ʿamrawī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1995–2000), 12:184. on al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf, see klasova, “empire through language.” 106. see note 94 above. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 70 of their isnāds, belong to the same generation of early ʿabbāsid philologists, akhbārīs, and historians as do the narrators of abū khirāsh’s akhbār.107 1. islamization: as in the case of abū khirāsh, the akhbār about abū miḥjan construct an islamic image of the poet. one technique is to emphasize abū miḥjan’s repentence for his drinking and his renouncement of wine later in life. in his poetry, we see a hint of renouncement only when he needs to get out of prison. but the narratives find a way to argue for a more substantial change of mind, even if this requires reinterpreting the verses. a good example of this strategy appears in connection with the verses quoted earlier, in which abū miḥjan observes that “now wine has become rare and forbidden.” these verses open a long poem (not quoted in the aghānī in full) whose nasīb reeks of nostalgia for the happy days of drinking. by contrast, the accompanying narrative carries a decidedly more islamic flair. it recounts that after abū miḥjan’s heroic performance in the battle at al-qādisiyya the muslim commander saʿd refused to implement the ḥadd punishment on him. this is when the poet decided to renounce wine. in the khabar, abū miḥjan explains that whereas previously the ḥadd punishment had purified him of his guilt, now he would have to carry his sins until the day of judgment.108 the narrative echoes famous ḥadīths about people who begged the prophet to punish them for their sins in order to cleanse their souls.109 its rhetoric may also remind us of plato’s gorgias, in which socrates argues that the wrongdoer is better off when he is punished, because the punishment relieves his soul of the disease of injustice.110 but this seems like an overly moral concern to come from a poet who, in his most famous verse, dreads the absence of wine after death. the idea that he renounced wine because he was deprived of the punishment for drinking is not consistent with the spirit of his poetry as a whole and should thus be ascribed to later narrators trying to boost abū miḥjan’s islamic credentials. admittedly, abū miḥjan’s renouncement of wine is supported by straightforwardly moralistic verses attributed to him. yet we have reason to suspect that these verses were ascribed to him later precisely to polish his image as a muslim. to give an example, the aghānī quotes two lines in which abū miḥjan rejects wine 107. one of al-iṣfahānī’s main sources for abū miḥjan’s material is the kufan philologist ibn al-aʿrābī, whose source, in turn, was his teacher (and father-in-law) al-mufaḍḍal al-ḍabbī (d. ca. 164/781). ibn al-aʿrābī was a contemporary of the basran scholars al-aṣmaʿī and abū ʿubayda, whereas al-mufaḍḍal al-ḍabbī was a contemporary of their teacher abū ʿamr b. al-ʿalāʾ. other sources include the historians al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923) and al-madāʾinī (d. 228/843), the akhbārī al-haytham b. ʿadī (d. ca. 209/821), and the adīb ibn qutayba (d. 276/889). 108. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:10, 12. 109. one ḥadīth tells of a man by the name of māʿiẓ who comes to the prophet and asks the latter to purify him because he has sinned by engaging in illicit intercourse. the prophet rejects the man’s confession two times and then inquires about his mental health. when the man comes and asks for punishment for the third time, the prophet orders that he be stoned for his crime. a similar episode takes placewith a woman from ghāmid, but the woman is pregnant. the prophet insists on waiting until the child is old enough to survive without her and then has her stoned. these ḥadīths illustrate the devotion and piety of muslims who sinned but repented. see muslim, ṣaḥīḥ (beirut), no. 2087; abū dāwūd, al-sunan (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, ah 1430), 4442, and others. 110. plato, gorgias, 472eff. 71 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) because it “has qualities that destroy the mild-tempered man (ḥalīm).”111 ḥilm (forbearance, sobriety) is a value that is embraced and promoted in islam and is seen as opposed to the pre-islamic jahl (ignorance, fierceness).112 however, although most of the verses attributed to him in the aghānī can also be found in his dīwān, such is not the case with these lines. conversely, similar moralistic verses appear in abū miḥjan’s dīwān but are absent from the aghānī. this asymmetry indicates that these two pairs of moralistic verses were probably added at a later stage.113 in islamizing the poet, the akhbār also present him as an examplary islamic warrior. they describe, in detail, his heroic deeds at the battle of al-qādisiyya. in these narratives, the poet escapes from saʿd’s prison with the help of saʿd’s wife, takes saʿd’s horse, and rides to the battlefield. he fights so valiantly that several akhbār compare him to the leader of the muslim army at al-qādisiyya, hishām b. ʿutba, as well as to khiḍr (sometimes equated with st. george)114 and even to angels.115 after the battle, abū miḥjan returns to his cell and chains. in this framing, abū miḥjan’s life story transforms into an odyssey from transgression and banishment to islamic glory and submission to the establishment. it offers a moral example of an intractable drunkard who repents and turns into an islamic warrior. i do not mean to suggest that abū miḥjan did not take part in the battle of al-qādisiyya; my point is merely that the akhbār exaggerate his participation. abū miḥjan himself refers to the battle (as laylat qādis) in his fakhr verses, which form the basis for this long narrative,116 but a comment by abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī is telling: “the battle of aghwāth, the battle of armāth, and the battle of al-katāʾib were famous battles [at al-qādisiyya], and narratives about them are very long. but there is no mention of abū miḥjan in this material, except for what we report here.”117 yet these few akhbār succeed in transforming a poet who dedicated his life to praising wine into a model soldier in the cause of islam. even today, leaders of islamist groups—including the leader of a lebanese terrorist group,118 an al-qaeda suicide bomber,119 and an aḥrār al-shām commander120—choose the name abū 111. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:12; appendix, 2.g. 112. for a discussion of ḥilm and jahl, see, for instance, jaroslav stetkevych, muḥammad and the golden bough (bloomington: indiana university press, 1996), 5–12. 113. see abū miḥjan, dīwān, 16, and the appendix, 2.h. 114. a. j. wensinck, “al-khaḍir,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 115. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:8. 116. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:9. 117. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:7. 118. aḥmad ʿabd al-karīm al-saʿdī (b. 1969) was the leader of the lebanese group al-anṣār, which is considered a branch of al-qaeda. this “abū miḥjan” has been accused of the murder of the well-known lebanese shaykh nizār al-ḥalabī and has a wikipedia entry in arabic. 119. on february 29, 2012, the al-qaeda suicide bomber abu miḥjan al-sayārī caused the deaths of twenty-one guards at a presidential palace in yemen. hakim almasmari, “al qaeda claims responsibility for deadly yemen attack,” cnn, february 29, 2012, http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/29/world/meast/al-qaedayemen-attack/. 120. aḥrār al-shām is a syrian opposition group; “commander abu mihjan of the group ahraar-ul-sham” http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/29/world/meast/al-qaeda-yemen-attack/ http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/29/world/meast/al-qaeda-yemen-attack/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 72 miḥjan as their nom de guerre. one such contemporary fighter, from the ranks of al-qaeda in the islamic maghreb (aqim), who gave a lecture at a two-day jihad seminar held by the organization and urged muslims to wage war against the “crusader [that is, christian] minority” in the sahara, was known as “abū miḥjan the nigerian,” and he delivered his lecture in the hausa language.121 the legacy of abū miḥjan has thus spread far and wide and is represented in multiple languages. 2. exculpation: as in the case of abū khirāsh, the akhbār find excuses for abū miḥjan’s scandalous verses. if with abū khirāsh the solution lay in chronology, with abū miḥjan it consists in drawing a clear line between speech and deed. a khabar in which the poet outlines the reason for his imprisonment subtly plays with arguments about the nature of poetry. abū miḥjan is reported to have explained his imprisonment thus: “by god, he did not imprison me for eating or drinking a forbidden substance. but i used to drink wine in the jāhiliyya, and i am a poet onto whose tongue poetry would creep, and at times the tongue would spit it out.”122 in other words, the poet claims that he no longer drank wine in reality but merely recited verses about it. furthermore, he argues that he does not have full control over what he says because he is a poet (imruʾ shāʿir) and verses sometimes crept onto his tongue, as if of their own will. the idea that poetry has powers of its own is related to the traditional view of eloquent speech as the result of a natural, spontaneous process, almost an inspiration. a definition of eloquence that al-jāḥiẓ, in his kitāb al-bayān wa-l-tabyīn, attributes to an esteemed orator from the famously well-spoken tribe of ʿabd al-qays illustrates this idea of the involuntariness of the creative process: “[eloquence] is something that excites our hearts (ṣudūranā), which then throw it on our tongues.”123 in abū miḥjan’s case, the akhbār use this conception of poetry to absolve the poet of blame: he could not control himself. the poet turns into a victim of his own poetry and of the jāhilī past. the same argument about the difference between speech and deed is used elsewhere in the entry. in one khabar, after the battle at al-qādisiyya, saʿd promises abū miḥjan that he will not blame the poet for anything he says, unless he carries it out. abū miḥjan answers: “surely, by god, i will not follow my tongue to any evil deed.”124 again, this story presents abū miḥjan as a good and obedient muslim despite his immoral poetry. in another khabar, ʿumar reacts furiously to the poet’s verses, quoted earlier, about his inability to abandon wine. the caliph commands that abū miḥjan’s punishment be increased, but ʿalī steps in and reminds ʿumar of the qurʾānic verse: “and that they say what they practice not” (q 26:226). this verse, mentioned earlier,125 warns people about poets precisely because they is mentioned, for example, on an al-qaeda-affiliated website: https://almuwahideenmedia.wordpress. com/2015/06/. accessed may 16, 2017. 121. see yossef bodansky, “the boko haram and nigerian jihadism,” ispsw strategy series: focus on defense and international security 318 (2015): 8. 122. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:9. 123. al-jāḥiz, al-bayān wa-l-tabyīn, 1:96. 124. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:9. 125. see note 20 above. https://almuwahideenmedia.wordpress.com/2015/06/ https://almuwahideenmedia.wordpress.com/2015/06/ 73 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) say something else than what they do. here, by contrast, the same verse is used to improve abū miḥjan’s image, suggesting that since poets usually do not translate their words into action, his provocative poems should not be taken seriously. the story thus provides an instance in which a qurʾānic verse, originally meant as a condemnation of poetry, later helped to include some unruly poetry into the arabic literary canon. in sum, even though the central themes of abū miḥjan’s poetry are wine, exile, prison, and war, and even though they express a certain unease with the islamic moral code, the accompanying akhbār stress his renouncement of drink and his jihad for islam. they make a strong distinction between the poet’s actions and his words, implying that even if he sang about wine, it does not have to mean that he also drank it. the akhbār transform the poet, once exiled and imprisoned for his drinking excesses and wine poetry, into the ideal of an islamic warrior and a muslim hero. notwithstanding their edifying tone, however, the akhbār can at times also display jovial indulgence in the jāhilī aspects of the poet’s persona. haytham b. ʿadī records that a person passing by abū miḥjan’s grave in azerbaijan saw three branches of a grapevine growing on it, all bearing fruit. the poet’s plea for wine after death was fulfilled. as a thaqafī, abū miḥjan was the most urban of the three poets and the closest to the establishment, however strained his relationship with it was. he possibly met both ʿumar and saʿd and also composed elegies for some of the warriors who fought in the wars with the sasanians. but he was certainly not speaking from the center of the early islamic community: his poetry offended islamic morality, perpetuated the poetics of the rejected jāhiliyya, and at times expressed unease with the changes introduced by islam. abū miḥjan himself did not acquire any position of power or influence; he was not patronized, he clashed with the status quo on multiple occasions, and he was exiled and imprisoned. the third poet to be discussed in this article represents a perspective even more marginal than those of the urban abū miḥjan and the bedouin abū khirāsh. the inferior position of suḥaym, a black slave, not only was reflected in his poetic production but also determined his view on the transition to islam. 4. suḥaym, the slave of the banū al-ḥasḥās: a sinner punished suḥaym, or “blackie,” was one of the so-called crows of the arabs (aghribat al-͑arab).126 he was a black abyssinian or nubian slave,127 bought and collectively owned by the banū al-ḥasḥās, one of the subtribes of asad. he is mostly famous for his erotic poetry (tashbīb). he is said to have spoken arabic with an accent due to his non-arab background128 and to 126. aghribat al͑arab were early arabic poets of african descent, the most famous being ͑antara b. shaddād. for more information about them, see ʿabduh badawī, al-shu ͑arāʾ al-sūd wa-khaṣāʾiṣuhum fī al-shiʿr al͑arabī (cairo: al-hayʾa al-miṣriyya al-ʿāmma li-l-kitāb, 1973), and bernard lewis, “the crows of the arabs,” critical inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 88–97. 127. bernard lewis leans toward suḥaym’s having nubian rather than ethiopian origins because of a report that says that he was branded on his face. lewis, “crows of the arabs,” 94. 128. abū ʿubayda records that when suḥaym wanted to express approval of his own verses, he said, “ahshantu wa-llāhi,” instead of “aḥsantu wa-llāhi,” that is, he mispronounced ḥāʾ (ح) and sīn (س). al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:213. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 74 have been “ugly as a dog.”129 his lowly origin cast shadow on his whole life and determined its tragic unfolding. suḥaym never succeeded in either joining the caliphal entourage or ridding himself of his slave status within his tribe, despite the numerous attempts recorded in his verses and akhbār. according to one story, an agent of the caliph ʿuthmān bought the famed slave-poet for his master, but the caliph sent him back because of his mistrust of slave-poets.130 another khabar portrays suḥaym reciting a moralistic verse in front of ʿumar in the hope of a reward, but the caliph rejects his poem. if suḥaym indeed tried to enter the caliph’s circle, he failed; he never attained any position of power, dignity, or wealth. however, suḥaym’s poetry suggests that his failure to reach the status of a free man was the true tragedy of his life. i first present the most salient examples of suḥaym’s erotic poetry, then discuss how his poetry interacted with islam, and finally interpret his boasting about his sexual conquests as defiance against his tribe and against the inferior position he held within it. carnal love in suḥaym’s poetry already in what was reportedly his first verse, suḥaym fashions himself a black casanova: i describe herbage whose flora is beautiful, like an abyssinian surrounded by girls.131 the akhbār claim that he uttered this line when he returned from a scouting mission, his tribe having sent him to assess the fertility of a new location. instead of reporting on the conditions, he boasted about his ability to attract women. suḥaym’s depiction of women is of particular interest. his heroines differ greatly from the typical beloved of the nostalgic nasīb (which he did not use).132 they are women of flesh and bone, who initiate love affairs. they are typically scantily dressed and lust for the poet: even an egg held tightly by a male ostrich who lifts his breast as he is protecting it is not more beautiful than she on the day when she asked: “are you leaving with the riders or are you staying with us for some nights?” a cold north wind started blowing at the end of the night, and we did not have any clothes but her cloak and my robe. 129. suḥaym mentions in a verse that some women compared him to a dog. al-iṣfahānī attributes this comparison to his ugliness. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:215. 130. ʿuthmān reportedly said: “slave-poets, when full, recite erotic poetry about their [masters’] women and, when hungry, invective poems against them.” al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:214. a similar statement appears again later, but instead of slave-poets (ahl al-ʿabd al-shāʿir) it speaks of poets in general. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:215. 131. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:214. 132. a. arazi, “suḥaym,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed. 75 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) and my cloak retained the sweet scent of her clothes for a whole year until it wore out.133 the first line compares the poet’s lover to an “egg held tightly by a male ostrich,” that is, a protected, precious object. this is a usual image in pre-islamic poetry. it appears, for example, in imruʾ al-qays’s famous muʿallaqa, where the poet’s beloved is described as “an egg of the curtained quarters,”134 a description that conveys the meanings of delicacy and purity and, as suzanne stetkevych has put it, “a description of the pale complexion of the woman who is constantly veiled and secluded.”135 we will return to the theme of the women’s whiteness below; for now let us focus on the role of suḥaym’s social status with respect to his amorous escapades. unlike imruʾ al-qays, suḥaym was no prince; as a slave, he stood at the opposite end of the social hierarchy. seizing a woman, the delicate white egg, from her protected shelter would have constituted an affront to tribal society by itself. but in suḥaym’s case the affront was even graver because of his slave social status. in the second verse, suḥaym’s lover invites the poet to enter her private chambers and spend the night with her. the whole ambience is highly sensual, with the lovers being scarcely dressed by the end of the night. the last image is powerful: even once they have separated, the woman’s scent stays with the poet for an entire year. the version that al-iṣfahānī includes is only a short song text (ṣawt), representing a few lines (8, 11, 19–20) of a much longer poem of ninety-one lines that is recorded in suḥaym’s dīwān.136 the kitāb al-aghānī, after all, is a “book of songs,” and al-iṣfahānī’s selection of verses was determined by the popularity of the songs based on the poems. this poem is, in fact, relatively moderate in comparison with other verses. al-iṣfahānī, for example, also includes a poem in which suḥaym describes the private parts of one of his ladies: oh [that] memory, why do you remember her now, when you are leaving? [the memory] of every white [woman] who has private parts like the swaying hump of a young she-camel.137 as if to drive away an uncomfortable memory of an encounter with a lover, the poet recalls the event in detail, comparing his lover’s private parts to a camel’s hump. (again, note the use of the color white in the description.) other editions of the poem have the word “buttocks” (kafal) instead of “private parts” (kaʿthab),138 which better fits the comparison 133. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:211–12; appendix, 3.a. 134. stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 251, 267. 135. stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 267. 136. suḥaym, dīwān, 16–33. 137. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:216; appendix, 3.b. 138. i am using the edition of al-aghānī by iḥsān ʿabbās; the earlier egyptian edition and the dīwān both have kafal. see al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī (cairo: al-hayʾa al-miṣriyya, 1992), 22:308; suḥaym, dīwān, 34. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 76 and the adjective “swaying.” in either case, depicting a muslim woman’s physique was considered an outrageous act. such an image was meant to shock. suḥaym does not hold back in the following verse either. he describes the sexual act explicitly. the akhbār confirm the scandalized reception of the verse when they comment that on its basis the caliph ʿumar predicted that the poet would meet a violent death. she offers me her head as a pillow, embraces me with her wrist, while her legs are behind me.139 why such graphic language? clearly, the poem represents rebellion against some social order. in what follows i explore two possible targets: the emergent islamic community and suḥaym’s more immediate tribal society. “grey hair and islam are enough to restrain a man” we need to return, once again, to the value attached to piety as the core of muḥammad’s message to appreciate the effect of suḥaym’s words. the pietistic framework of islam promoted chastity and moderation in sexual relationships and insisted on their regulation through stricter marital laws. the ḥadd punishment for adultery (zināʾ) illustrates the tightening social morality of early islam: it could range from a temporary banishment to stoning. and although the qurʾān does not mention the punishment of stoning for zināʾ it does disapprove of the promiscuity of the time and repeatedly condemns unlawful sexual intercourse.140 for such newly minted islamic sensibilities, suḥaym’s verses describing his amorous escapades in great detail were scandalous. the entry in the kitāb al-aghānī quotes suḥaym speaking directly about islam only in the following verse: grey hair and islam are enough to restrain a man.141 although the line occurs in the kitāb al-aghānī independently, it forms part of the opening line of a ninety-one-verse qaṣīda, some sections of which appear elsewhere in the aghānī, albeit in fragmented form. the long ode begins with an introductory nasīb in which the poet bids farewell to his beloved and to the passion they shared.142 he associates islam with old age, because like old age it prevents a man from enjoying amorous play. the sentiment echoes abū khirāsh’s complaint that the youth of his time indulge in moralistic rhetoric as if they were old men, as well as abū miḥjan’s objection to islam as a source of unease. suḥaym, like abū khirāsh and abū miḥjan, understands islam as an obstacle that separates him from pleasure. 139. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:214–215. 140. see, for example, q 24:33; 17:32; 25:68–69. see also r. peters, “zināʾ,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 141. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:215; appendix, 3.e. 142. the entire line reads: “bid farewell to ʿumayra, if you are prepared to leave in the morning [to fight], for grey hair and islam are enough to restrain a man [from youthful passion].” suḥaym, dīwān, 16. the entire poem in the dīwān covers pp. 16–33. 77 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) other verses by suḥaym that are not present in the kitāb al-aghānī mention the prophet muḥammad himself: i saw that the fates fear not even muḥammad or anyone else, and that they do not let anyone live forever. i see no one who lives forever despite fate, nor anyone remaining alive without death’s lying in wait for him.143 in spite of his reference to the prophet, suḥaym’s attitude is deeply entrenched in the poetic jāhiliyya: the fates, the master of the world, “fear not even muḥammad or anyone else.” at the same time, these verses should not be seen as anti-islamic. suḥaym simply wants to emphasize the power of fate by pointing out that it erases even people as magnificent as muḥammad. islamic doctrine stresses that the prophet himself was only a human being in order to emphasize the oneness of god; suḥaym does precisely the same to emphasize the power of fate. this is noteworthy for the poet treats muḥammad in a manner similar to the way in which great men of the past were treated in early arabic poetry with its frequent use of the ubi sunt motif. ubi sunt is a nostalgic literary meditation on the transcience of life. in its arabic version it often uses the great leaders and kings of the past, now dead and with their peoples having been dispersed, to make the point that nothing lasts in this world. suḥaym’s verses, then, express admiration for the prophet while maintaining a jāhilī worldview. the poet’s favorable attitude toward muḥammad, if authentic, suggests that the defiant tone and explicit eroticism in his verses may be primarily directed at another target—namely, the tribal society that denied him the rights and dignity of a free man. sex, race, and defiance against one’s tribe suḥaym’s bawdy verses are, in my reading, primarily intended as an insult (hijāʾ)144 against his own tribe, in reaction to his failure to negotiate a better social position for himself. this is where race comes in. the detail of the women’s white skin, noted above, is relevant because it identifies the class that they represent—free arab tribesmen. suḥaym’s love conquests can be understood symbolically as his attempt to retaliate against the tribe that denied him a dignified existence. elsewhere, he speaks openly of his hope to improve his social standing: the poems of the slave of the banū al-ḥasḥās outweigh a noble origin and wealth. though i am a slave, my soul is free by virtue of its nobility; though black by color, i am white of character.145 the poet’s verses constitute an early comment on racial dynamics: he argues that despite his black skin color, his soul and character are those of a free white man. suḥaym’s 143. suḥaym, dīwān, 40; appendix, 3.d. 144. on the genre of hijāʾ, see van gelder, bad and ugly. 145. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:214; appendix, 3.c. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 78 argumentation shows how deeply racial categories were ingrained in people’s minds at the time, for he tries to prove not that all people are equal but that he—in the depths of his soul—is in essence white. a less explicit attempt to persuade the tribesmen to accept him as an equal member can be seen in other poems, which celebrate the battles of asad. the motif of a black slave hoping to become a free man is reminiscent of the pre-islamic heroic poet ʿantara. ʿantara’s mother was an abyssinian slave, and he allegedly earned his freedom after demonstrating bravery in battle. in suḥaym’s case, however, all his poetic efforts to become an equal member of his society seem to have come to nought. and so the poet rebelled against the unjust tribal society. the akhbār provide important indications that suḥaym’s poetry was understood as tribal hijāʾ, when they claim that his tribe ultimately killed him over his poetry. this means that the poems must have been interpreted as insults to the tribe’s pride. regardless of how the poet actually died, these narratives thus shed light on the goal (gharad) of his poetry. the following verses are reported to have instigated the chain of events that led to suḥaym’s death: how many dresses of double-threaded cloth did we tear apart and how many veils [we pulled] from eyes that were not drowsy. when a robe is torn off the veil goes with it, [and we continued] in this way until all of us were bare-skinned.146 in this scene, the poet and his lady, identified as a ṣubayrī147 girl, remove their robes and her veil so passionately that they tear them apart, emerging completely naked. the akhbār report that rumors about suḥaym and the girl reached his master. he spied on suḥaym and heard him recite the lewd verse about a white woman’s private parts/buttocks quoted earlier. at that point, the tribe decided to punish suḥaym, but one of its girls ran to warn him. the girl’s arrival prompted the following verse, in which suḥaym contemplates whether he should keep his affair with the girl hidden: should she be kept a secret? may you be greeted despite the distance by him who became infatuated with your love. he then answers his own question: and you wouldn’t have been kept a secret, if you did a disgraceful deed, daughter of the tribe, nor if we engaged in a forbidden act. the poet declares that it is not his custom to hide his affairs and proves his point by boasting about his conquests within the tribe: [for] many a girl like you i took out from the curtained quarters of her mother to a party where she would trail her striped robe.148 146. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:216; appendix, 3.f. 147. strangely, this tribe is related to tamīm and not to asad, the poet’s tribe. 148. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:217; appendix, 3.g. 79 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) he makes it clear that he seduced girls against the wishes of their mothers and literally snatched them from their homes. the akhbār portray him as defiant, as unwilling to renounce his lewd poetry even when his life is at stake. when suḥaym is led to his execution and a former lover among the bystanders mocks him, he retorts with a bawdy image of penetration: now you are mocking me, but how many a night i left you spread open, like a garment.149 the image is explicit: a woman “spread open like a garment” speaks for itself. but the climax of suḥaym’s hijāʾ is still to come: fasten the bonds on your slave lest he escape you (yuflitkum), for surely life is close to death, indeed, once sweat and scent dripped from the foreheads of your girls (fatātikum) onto the bed’s surface.150 according to the akhbār, suḥaym exclaimed these lines when facing his imminent death. his principal sin was his defiance of the tribal customs and fearlessness of it. 151 the tribe was the main target of his hostility. it is impossible to ascertain whether this is in fact what happened, but, more importantly, the akhbār show that later readers understood these verses as the pinnacle of suḥaym’s provocation. in the poem, he challenges the tribesmen to fasten the bonds on his hands and insults them by attacking the honor of their women. he claims that “sweat and scent dripped” from the girls’ foreheads, implying sexual intercourse. by targeting the tribe’s women, he is undermining the honor of the tribe as a whole in retaliation for his failed attempts to ascend the social ladder. that suḥaym’s true target is his tribe can also be seen from his use of the second-person plural (-kum), because it shows that he is directly addressing his audience, the tribe (“lest he escape you”; “your girls”). suḥaym, like ʿantara b. shaddād before him, protested his inferior position within the tribe, caused by his black skin and his slave status. but unlike ʿantara, suḥaym never, as far as we can tell, achieved the status of a free man, and he voiced the resulting bitterness and defiance in his poetry. suḥaym’s poetry, i argue, was thus aimed primarily at this tribe. its openly licentious tone, however, was inconsistent with the ethos of the new islamic community. the following section looks at how the akhbār dealt with this unruly figure. suḥaym in the akhbār the akhbār both islamize and punish the slave-poet—both mechanisms that we have already seen at work on abū miḥjan. in suḥaym’s case, however, the emphasis seems to 149. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:217; appendix, 3.h. 150. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:217; appendix, 3.i. see also muḥammad b. hāshim al-khālidī and saʿīd b. hāshim al-khālidī, al-ashbāh wa-l-naẓāʾir (cairo: lajnat al-taʿlīf wa-l-tarjama wa-l-nashr, 1958–65), 2:25–26, on the line qad aḥsana l-kināya ʿan al-jimāʿ. 151. two lines from a poem referred above also reinforce the theme that the poet does not fear the tribesmen who are threatening him. see lines 5 and 6 in appendix, 3.g. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 80 be on the latter strategy. again, the earliest narrators of these akhbār belong to the same generation of ʿabbāsid scholars.152 1. islamization: as in the previous cases, the akhbār attempt to islamize the poet, which sometimes results in twisting the meaning of his poetry. the akhbār’s treatment of the verse “grey hair and islam are enough to restrain a man” is illustrative in this regard. as noted earlier, these words form the opening to a sensual poem in which the poet remembers his past amorous adventures and sets them against the restrictive reality of islam. the akhbār, however, offer a very different interpretation. they depict suḥaym reciting the line before the caliph ʿumar as praise of islam in the hope of a reward. but the caliph tells him: “if you had placed islam before grey hair i would have rewarded you.” the verse became so famous that it was adapted into an anachronistic153 prophetic ḥadīth in which the prophet quotes suḥaym but reverses the order of the two items (“islam and grey hair” instead of “grey hair and islam”), thereby breaking the rules of the meter. the prophet is unable to recite the line properly even after abū bakr corrects him, whereupon the latter exclaims: “i bear witness that you are god’s messenger!” this is a reference to the qurʾānic argument (q. 36:69) that god’s messenger is no poet but simply a true, inspired prophet.154 this ḥadīth reveals that later generations interpreted suḥaym’s verse as praise for islam and as a sign of his repentance for his past scandalous behavior. the narrative thus transforms a nostalgic reference to pre-islamic amorous pleasures into evidence of penitence. in the process, the black slave suḥaym becomes a powerful model for all muslims who have sinned. 2. punishment: at the same time, the akhbār highlight harsh punishment of suḥaym’s sins to provide a deterring example. suḥaym’s poetry is naturally largely silent on his death, but the narratives about his life revel in the details of his bold defiance and violent death. they report that suḥaym was killed in the most miserable way: the tribesmen murdered him and (contrary to islamic precepts) burned his body. according to the variant telling of ibn daʾb, the tribesmen dug a trench, threw suḥaym in it, and burned him alive.155 the word “trench” (ukhdūd) may have resonated in the minds of the audience with the qurʾānic mention of the “people of the trench” (aṣhāb al-ukhdūd; q. 85:4–8). they are generally believed to have been the christian martyrs of najrān, whom the judaizing king of ḥimyar, dhū nuwās, burned to death around 520 ce.156 the description of suḥaym’s death may thus allude to the tragic fate of the famous christian martyrs. 152. two names that recur often in these reports are abū ʿubayda, mentioned earlier, and ibn al-mājishūn (d. 185/801), who moved in medinese circles but was a contemporary of most of the other transmitters. 153. the story does not fit suḥaym’s life chronologically, since he lived and earned his fame during the reigns of ʿumar and ʿuthmān. 154. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:213. 155. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:217. 156. on the martyrs of najrān see i. shahîd, “nadjrān,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; shahid, the martyrs of najran: new documents (brussels: société des bollandistes, 1971); monferrer sala, juan pedro, redefining history on pre-islamic accounts: the arabic recension of the martyrs of najrân (piscataway, nj: gorgias press, 2010). 81 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) therefore, if suḥaym’s verses themselves speak of his class and racial struggle, his akhbār are more interested in finding a place for his poetry within the framework of islamic adab. irrespective of suḥaym’s true life story, a poet who violated the norms of the new society in such a conspicuous way could not have been allowed to succeed with his obscenity, excesses, and defiance. although he ultimately fell victim to pre-islamic tribal customary law (if we are to believe the akhbār), his literary death happened in the name of the new world order. suḥaym’s poetry disrupted the new islamic ethics and the message of moderation, and as such it had to be restrained. why was suḥaym not redeemed through the workings of the akhbār, as abū khirāsh and abū miḥjan were? an explanation may lie in the fact that his lewd language was aimed directly at his tribe. the affront to tribal values was all the more serious because suḥaym, in contrast to, say, imruʾ al-qays, was a black slave and thus at the bottom of the tribal social hierarchy. therefore, we can imagine that whereas the later tribal narrators (ruwāt) of hudhayl and thaqīf were interested in redeeming their poets, those of the banū al-ḥasḥās were not keen on rehabilitating theirs. however, despite their harshness toward the poet, the akhbār show a modicum of empathy in the end. having turned suḥaym into a discouraging example of a punished sinner, they finally also make him victorious: although he was killed, the slave still managed to bring shame on the tribe of his killers. 5. concluding remarks this study has addressed two main questions: what can the poems of abū khirāsh al-hudhalī, abū miḥjan al-thaqafī, and suḥaym, the slave of the banū al-ḥasḥās, tell us about the period of the coming of islam in the ḥijāz? and how did later audiences receive these three poets? i have examined the entries for the three poets in al-iṣfahānī’s kitāb al-aghānī and highlighted two types of tension that help answer these questions—first, a historical tension between the worldview of the poets and the emergent islamic ideology, and second, a historiographical tension between the poetry and the accompanying akhbār in al-iṣfahānī’s entries. i have argued that this second tension results from the fact that whereas the poetry, for the most part, reflects the reactions of the poets themselves, the akhbār should be mainly understood as the attempts of later audiences to interpret the earlier poems. as such, the poetry can answer the former question and the akhbār the latter. in these concluding remarks i recapitulate my analysis of the poets’ verses; consider two important side arguments regarding the historical value of mukhaḍram poetry that my analysis implies; and offer a rough sketch of the possible stages of the transmission of this poetry’s akhbār. the poetic legacy of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym an examination of the poetry of the three mukhaḍram poets reveals a worldview that was, in many ways, incompatible with the ethics of the gradually emerging islamic religion and akin to the poetic jāhiliyya, the principal discourse of pre-islamic poetry. the poetic jāhiliyya emphasized the present moment, whereas muḥammad’s new salvation model centered on the afterlife. similarly, abū khirāsh’s reckless and constant fighting al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 82 for the sake of tribal loyalty and honor stood in contrast to the new way of waging war— organized, controlled, and motivated by a higher good. abū miḥjan’s celebration of wine, drinking parties, and loyalty to the drink clashed with the islamic prohibition of wine and the prescription of restraint and moderation in life. and suḥaym’s detailed descriptions of women and his erotic encounters with them were incongruous with both the newly proclaimed islamic moral code and the laws of tribal honor. the poets’ sentiments, however, went beyond superficial hedonism. they bespoke belief in a merciless and unpredictable fate that cast its shadow on all living beings and a conviction that all that humans could do was to heroically stand up to it. in a world without the prospect of salvation, heroic poetry— which memorialized human bravery—was the only means by which to achieve immortality. its tragic undertones may have had a profound emotional and purifying effect, in the sense of aristotelian katharsis, on those who listened to it.157 furthermore, the three poets comment directly on the new world in which they find themselves, most commonly expressing unease (ḥaraj) with it. they were indeed mukhaḍramūn, “split” or “cut in half” between two worlds, belonging to both and neither at the same time. in a sense, their vivid recall of the golden days of the jāhiliyya can be considered a political act and a poetic rebellion at a time when a powerful new ideology, one whose worldview was contrary to this poetry, was establishing itself. suḥaym’s poetry displays an additional layer of defiance related to his inferior social standing within his tribe. through his poetry, the black slave-poet attempted to improve his status, and when he failed, he attacked the honor of the tribe’s women with his verses. while the mukhaḍramūn’s poetry is still jāhilī in spirit, its context is pronouncedly islamic, which is what makes it so fascinating. a question inevitably arises: to what extent is the poetic jāhiliyya representative of the reality of pre-islamic and early islamic arabia? although the two are traditionally equated, this representation is misleading. scholars such as rina drory and peter webb have noted that the jāhiliyya as a concept was constructed in the islamic era and crystallized during its first centuries.158 it is absolutely not the point of this study to present the early muslim poets and their society as “tribal, pagan, and barbaric,” notions that, according to webb’s critique, tend to guide scholarly treatment of the jāhiliyya.159 although the three poets do express tribal values, their occasional hedonism is not “barbaric” but underlined by a deeper existential(ist) framework. finally, they were no “pagans,” at least according to the 157. i am referring to aristotle’s discussion of tragedy and its cathartic possibilities in his poetics: “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, [. . .], performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification [katharsis] of such emotions.” aristotle, poetics, 49b27f. 158. for varying accounts of the changing image of the jāhiliyya, see rina drory, “the abbasid construction of the jahiliyya: cultural authority in the making,” studia islamica 83 (1996): 33–49, esp. 35; peter a. webb, imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016), 255–70; webb, “creating arab origins: muslim constructions of al-jāhiliyya and arab history” (phd thesis, school of oriental and african studies, 2014); webb, “al-jāhiliyya: uncertain times of uncertain meanings,” der islam 91, no. 1 (2014): 69–94. 159. webb, “creating arab origins,” 16. 83 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) muslim tradition. judging by their poetry, they were simply not particularly interested by religion or, at times, were annoyed by it. besides, i want to stress that the jāhilī sentiments represent only one among various competing cultural models. different monotheistic trends, as is now generally accepted, were far stronger in pre-islamic arabia than the muslim tradition suggests.160 it is impossible to determine what part of the population engaged in the production and reception of this type of poetry at the time of islam’s emergence. we know that in the sixth century poets such as ṭarafa could achieve high social status and wealth by reciting their poetry at the court in ḥīra, but by the time of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym the court in ḥīra had been silent for decades.161 though poetry most likely still played an important social role, christianity and judaism were well established in the regions adjacent to pre-islamic arabia, and these monotheists did not leave behind a body of literature that would be comparable to the body of jāhilī poetry. furthermore, poetry may be group-specific and may reflect mainly the ideals of arabian nomads and seminomads, not those of the urban populations of the arabian peninsula.162 establishing the actual spread of the ideals of the poetic jāhiliyya among the inhabitants of pre-islamic arabia is beyond the scope of this paper, but we can nonetheless identify two likely reasons these ideals were later selected to represent the “original” arabic culture: the scarcity of sources to have come down to us from this period and the deliberate later reconstructions of the jāhiliyya. an instructive comparison is the case of a community of italian peasants, described by carlo levi and used by james fentress and chris wickham to illustrate the formation of class and group memories.163 in the year 1936, the peasants did not remember much of the first world war but passionately recalled brigand clashes almost seventy years earlier, which were significant for their community. if the history of the late nineteenth 160. even the mushrikūn, the qurʾānic opponents of muḥammad whom the tradition sees as “polytheists” or “associators,” have now been recast as monotheists, most famously by gerald hawting. patricia crone, agreeing with him, concluded: “if we base ourselves on the evidence of the qurʾān alone, the mushrikūn were monotheists who worshipped the same god as the messenger, but who also venerated lesser divine beings indiscriminately called gods and angels, including some identifiable as arabian deities, and perhaps also in some cases the sun and the moon. the mushrikūn saw the lesser divine beings as mediators between themselves and god, sometimes apparently only venerating one mediator figure, at other times several, sometimes including female ones.” see gerald r. hawting, the idea of idolatry and the emergence of islam: from polemic to history (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999); patricia crone, collected studies in three volumes, vol. 1, the qurʾānic pagans and related matters, ed. hanna siurua (leiden: brill, 2016), 77. chase robinson has pointed out that the emergence of various prophetic figures, the most notorious being musaylima b. ḥabīb, confirms the general rise in monotheism in this period. chase f. robinson, “the rise of islam, 600–705,” in new cambridge history of islam, vol. 1, ed. chase f. robinson, 171–225 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010). on monotheism before islam, see aziz al-azmeh, the emergence of islam in late antiquity (cambridge, cambridge university press, 2014). 161. khosrow ii, the last sasanian king, annexed ḥīra to his empire in 602 ce. 162. michael lecker, “pre-islamic arabia,” in new cambridge history of islam, vol. 1, ed. chase f. robinson, 153–170 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010). hoyland has also suggested that arab identity was drawn mainly from tribal values, for the city, although strong in religion, was weak in identity. hoyland, arabia and the arabs, 242. 163. see james fentress and chris wickham, social memory (oxford: blackwell, 1992), 87–88, and carlo levi, christ stopped at eboli, trans. francis frenaye (london: cassell, 1948), 137. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 84 and early twentieth centuries were written on the basis of their memories, the first world war would appear a minor event in comparison to the war of the italian brigands. the peasants thus passed on what had meaning for their group and what legitimized their present. similarly, pre-islamic poetry may have originally reflected the memories of one group and may have been chosen only later to bolster the collective identity of the new muslim society. the historical value of mukhaḍram poetry my analysis gives rise to two important side arguments concerning the historical value of mukhaḍram poetry. the first is that mukhaḍram poetry is a fruitful source for the study of early islam, as demonstrated by their historically bounded engagement with emergent islam, on which this article focuses. yet mukhaḍram poetry is still a largely underexplored field. in addition to elucidating the sentiments of some early muslims about the rapid spread of muḥammad’s message, this study illustrates the historiographical value of this poetry in other areas as well. with regard to key concepts of the time, one of suḥaym’s long odes offers a rare extra-qurʾānic example of the term “islam” used for a belief system.164 on a broader level, the poetry of these three poets provides arguments against the skeptical revisionist position that doubts that mecca and medina were the true birthplace of the believers’ movement.165 as noted earlier, the three poets belonged to tribes that lived in the hinterland of the two cities. since the poets’ direct commentary on the impact of this movement suggests their closeness to it, it also places the movement squarely in this region. furthermore, mukhaḍram poetry provides an important insight into how individuals reacted to the changes that were taking place in society, and the sentiments it expresses contribute to our knowledge of the temporal and social context from which it emerged. naturally, not all contemporary reactions to muḥammad’s message were negative; the most famous example of poetic cooptation may be kaʿb b. zuhayr’s famous mantle ode, “suʿād has departed” (bānat suʿādu)—a panegyric poem that kaʿb is said to have presented to the prophet on the occasion of his conversion to islam.166 the difference between kaʿb’s poem and, say, abū khirāsh’s work is that the latter could not expect a reward for his verses from muḥammad’s community. in either case, their divergent voices represent the mixed reactions to the ascendancy of islam, adding nuance to our understanding of the process. whereas muslim narratives depict muḥammad’s prophecy as a decisive break with the pagan jāhiliyya, revisionist scholars have downplayed muḥammad’s role, depicting islam as emerging gradually from the cultural milieu of the judeo-christian 164. in the line “grey hair and islam are enough to restrain a man.” 165. for a concise account of the skeptical approach, see fred m. donner, narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton, nj: darwin press, 2006), 20–25. although some important revisionists have altered and refined their views over time, questions about the location of the qurʾānic community remain to be resolved. see, for instance, patricia crone, “how did the quranic pagans make a living?” in crone, collected studies in three volumes, 1:1–20, esp. 12; gerald r. hawting, “pre-islamic arabia and the qurʾān,” in encyclopaedia of the qurʾān. 166. for an analysis of the poem, see stetkevych, poetics of islamic legitimacy, 48–79. 85 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) late antiquity.167 but even in nonrevisionist scholarship it has become commonplace to emphasize continuities rather than discontinuities, often fueled by the wish to see islam as part of the larger late antique world and not as an isolated phenomenon.168 aziz al-azmeh has recently sketched a middle way, arguing for a model of islam in late antiquity in which islam remains an autochthonous cultural product of arabia but at the same time represents the culmination of long-term processes that the peninsula shared with the rest of the late antique world.169 to stress the continuities and the embeddedness of the early islamic state in the larger late antique world is extremely important; yet equally important for understanding this period is to pay attention to the tensions that muḥammad’s prophecy generated among his contemporaries, such as those that can be sensed in the the poetry of the three mukhaḍramūn. the fact that the three men were poets is relevant because they were carriers of the values of the now-rejected cultural model of the poetic jāhiliyya. therefore, the poetry of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym provides a window into a clash of competing cultural models and reveals how some marginal early muslims from the ḥijāz of the first/seventh century reacted to the epoch-making developments around them. especially in view of the scarcity of early islamic sources, we cannot afford to ignore their voices and the voices of others like them. the second side argument arises from my analysis of the discrepancy between the poetry and the akhbār. this discrepancy provides further arguments in favor of the stability and historicity of this ancient (i.e., jāhilī and mukhaḍram) poetry. the question of the authenticity of this poetry has been debated for more than a century.170 in 1925, the british orientalist d. s. margoliouth and the egyptian scholar ṭāhā ḥusayn published influential studies in which they undermined the authenticity of pre-islamic arabic poetry.171 they based their respective arguments on the poetry’s contents and language, claiming that the 167. the two most influential revisionist books, which changed the face of the field, are john wansbrough, the sectarian milieu (1978) and michael cook and patricia crone, hagarism (1977). 168. peter brown, the founder of this field of study, included the islamic umayyad period in late antiquity. peter brown, the world of late antiquity: ad 150–750 (london: thames and hudson, 1971). see also michael g. morony, iraq after the muslim conquest (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1984); robert hoyland, “early islam as a late antique religion,” in the oxford handbook of late antiquity, ed. scott fitzgerald johnson, 1053–77 (oxford: oxford university press, 2016). see also hoyland, in god’s path: the arab conquests and the creation of an islamic empire (oxford: oxford university press, 2015). 169. al-azmeh, emergence of islam. 170. it should be pointed out that this debate concerns only pre-islamic and early islamic poetry; there is consensus with regard to the authenticity of umayyad poetry. even d. s. margoliouth, in his famous 1925 article of 1925, mentions that “it would be difficult to shake the genuineness of those [dīwāns] of the umayyad poets.” d. s. margoliouth, “the origins of arabic poetry,” journal of the royal asiatic society of great britain and ireland 57, no. 3 (1925): 446. chase robinson, among other recent scholars, has drawn on umayyad poetry as a primary source in his ʿabd al-malik (new york: oneworld, 2012). salih said agha and tarif khalidi called poetry “perhaps the most primary of arabic sources” in “poetry and identity in the umayyad age,” al-abḥāth 50–51 (2002–3): 55. on the historical value of poetry see also saleh said agha, ramzi baalbaki, and tarif khalidi, eds. poetry and history: the value of poetry in reconstructing arab history (beirut: american university of beirut press, 2011). 171. margoliouth, “origins of arabic poetry”; ṭāhā ḥusayn, fī al-shiʿr al-jāhilī (cairo: dār al-kutub, 1926). a. j. arberry lays out the discussion clearly and sums up the counterarguments made in his seven odes, 228–245. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 86 so-called jāhilī poetry did not reflect the polytheistic world of the pre-islamic poets but rather an islamic environment and that all these poems from different parts of arabia could not have been written in the language of the qurʾān and the quraysh. many have attempted to refute the two scholars’ claims, most notably nāṣir al-dīn al-asad, who in his 1956 study focused on the transmission of poetry that he deemed to have had a larger written element than previously thought.172 later, in the 1970s, james t. monroe and michael zwettler provided a new understanding of the issue with the help of parry-lord’s oral-formulaic theory.173 in their older work on homer, milman parry and a. b. lord had argued that oral and written poetry can be distinguished from one another by their particular use of formulas: oral poetry is formulaic, while written verse is not. monroe and zwettler’s turn to oral-formulaic theory revised the discussion about the authenticity of ancient arabic poetry by recharacterizing orality as a mode to be studied on its own terms. the oral poet masters a large repertoire of themes, motifs, proper names, and formulas and recreates—that is, improvises—the poems with each new performance, which explains the resulting different versions of the poem. the poems are fluid, and the search for an “original text” is therefore pointless, as all of the versions are equally “authentic.” as quoted earlier, monroe nevertheless claimed that pre-islamic poetry represents “a fairly close picture” of what was orally transmitted. gregor schoeler, in turn, presented the most influential critique of monroe and zwettler’s application of oralformulaic theory to pre-islamic arabic poetry.174 he postulated, like al-asad, the pre-islamic existence of writing and written collections of poems already early on and rejected the idea that the great poems were largely improvised.175 though schoeler’s main theoretical contribution lies in a fresh understanding of the oral and written modes as coexisting and in the division of written “texts” into hypomnēmata and syngrammata, his refutation of the importance of improvisation and his argument for early writing further support the perception of pre-islamic arabic poetry as stable.176 the poetry of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym examined in this article informs the debate regarding the stability and historicity of the poetry of this period in two ways. first, its direct engagement with emergent islam places it historically. it would be absurd to 172. naṣīr al-dīn al-asad, maṣādir al-shiʿr al-jāhilī wa-qīmatuhā al-tārīkhiyya (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1962; first ed. 1956). al-asad produced the most detailed account of the rāwī and collected much evidence about the spread of writing in pre-islamic arabia and the existence of written collections of poetry in the first centuries of islam. he relied on stories about the transmitters of poetry, their work, and their study circles, and on comments about writing found in the poetry itself. a particularly convincing part of his argument is his comparison of different versions of poems, which can be explained only with reference to written transmission (pp. 176–178). 173. monroe, “oral composition in pre-islamic poetry, and zwettler, the oral tradition of classical arabic poetry.” 174. for a critique of zwettler (and monroe), see gregor schoeler, the oral and the written in early islam, trans. uwe vagelpohl, ed. james montgomery (london: routledge, 2006), 87–110 (chap. 4). 175. see schoeler, oral and written, 62–86 (chap. 3). 176. with regard to schoeler’s critique of monroe and zwettler, it is fair to point out that monroe himself observed that pre-islamic poetry is characterized by “a far greater textual stability” than the oral epic that served as his point of reference. monroe, “oral composition in pre-islamic poetry,” 40. 87 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) suppose that later narrators fabricated verses with an anti-islamic flair and ascribed them to poets whom they saw as muslims. second, the fact that the poetry expresses values that differ from those of the akhbār that accompany the poems suggests that the two bodies of literature come from different periods. the mukhaḍramūn poetry’s spirit, themes, and unease with the new religion point to a very early date, whereas the akhbār’s occasionally moralizing tone and misinterpretation of the verses are signs of a later reception of this poetry by an already islamized audience. a different understanding of the ideological rift between the poetry and the akhbār is hard to maintain, for if we were to assume that both were fabricated later, as has once been claimed, would we not likewise expect that they would be in harmony with each other? the transmission of the akhbār this study has addressed the ways in which later audiences absorbed the verses of the mukhaḍramūn by focusing on the akhbār about them. consequently, we must ask what can be said about the transmission history of the akhbār. how did the memory of the unruly poets emerge, find its way to scholars, coalesce into larger narrative units, and acquire the archetypal contours that we have observed here (muslim martyr, muslim warrior, punished sinner)? i have examined specifically the akhbār in al-iṣfahānī’s kitāb al-aghānī and highlighted the occasional discrepancies between the akhbār and the poetry. on the basis of these divergences, i have argued that the akhbār both recorded and mediated the reception of the three mukhaḍramūn and their legacy after their poetry had already been stabilized. for the purposes of this argument, i have treated the akhbār as a homogenous body of material. now, however, it is time to admit that such homogeneity is an illusion. many factors point to a long and unwieldy process of collection. in what follows, i mention some of these factors and provide a possible sketch of the akhbār’s collection and transmission. the possible agents of this process are presented here in reverse chronological order: 1. fourth/tenth century: abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī and his kitāb al-aghānī 2. late second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries: early ʿabbāsid scholars 3. early second/eighth century: umayyad scholars 4. first/seventh century: living tradition/social memory/communicative memory 1. fourth/tenth century: abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī and his kitāb al-aghānī. the organization of the aghānī’s entries as a whole offers insight into the work of an author harmonizing and interpreting his material. to be clear, i do not want to imply that abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī fabricated the akhbār that he included in his work. as already noted, he relied on earlier sources, which he meticulously quotes. but his auctorial intervention in the selection of the akhbār, their organization (an act that automatically participates in interpreting and creating their meaning), and his own occasional comments is clear. an illustrative example is al-iṣfahānī’s placement of the mention of abū khirāsh’s conversion to islam (“he converted to islam and his islam was good”) at the end of his biography, which creates the semblance of a deliberate chronology. through such organization of the akhbār, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 88 al-iṣfahānī implies that the poet engaged in his blood feuds and composed his anti-islamic verses before converting to islam and that, by virtue of his conversion, he subsequently rejected his jāhilī past. 2. late second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries: early ʿabbāsid scholars. most of the isnāds that accompany abū khirāsh’s, abū miḥjan’s, and suḥaym’s poetry end with this generation of scholars. at first glance, this fact leaves us with two possibilities: either these scholars created the akhbār as a way of embellishing and making sense of the old poetry, or they, as they claim, recorded a living oral tribal tradition. but we have reason to believe that there is yet another, third, option: that the ʿabbāsid scholars were drawing on an older umayyad scholarly literary tradition. i contend that the absence of oral informants or earlier umayyad scholars from the isnāds may be explained by a methodological shift in early ʿabbāsid scholarship rather than by the nonexistence of such earlier transmitters. in actuality, the akhbār are surely the result of a mix of all these possible scenarios. however, the first possibility (ʿabbāsid creation of the akhbār) is likely to have been a rare phenomenon at this relatively late stage, when expertise in poetry was already established and reliability and precision were already scholarly trademarks, as the famous story about al-mufaḍḍal al-ḍabbī and al-ḥammād al-rāwiya at al-mahdī’s court illustrates.177 therefore, i believe that most of the akhbār existed in some form already in the umayyad era and were transmitted either as living tribal lore or through the umayyad scholarly tradition. the methodology of scholars underwent a major change in the ʿabbāsid period, most easily noticeable in the new emphasis on collecting material directly from the bedouins through personal visits. abū ʿamr b. al-ʿalāʾ (d. ca. 154/771) is seen as the first pioneer of this approach.178 according to the kufan grammarian thaʿlab, his namesake, abū ʿamr al-shaybānī (d. 206/821), likewise used to go to the desert with two big inkwells and would not return until they were empty.179 many of the early ʿabbāsid scholars with whom abū al-faraj’s isnāds usually end, including al-aṣmaʿī, abū ubayda, and abū ʿamr al-shaybānī, belonged to abū ʿamr b. al-ʿalāʾ’s circle. appreciating the broader significance of this methodological shift is, in my view, more important for our understanding of scholarly society at that time than is determining whether al-aṣmaʿī and the others recorded and 177. the caliph al-mahdī rewarded al-mufaḍḍal al-ḍabbī over al-ḥammād al-rāwiya and revoked the latter’s status as a transmitter because he had added a few lines to an ancient poem. al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 6:89–91. on the emergence of the scholars’ authoritative expertise in poetry, see drory, “abbasid construction of the jahiliyya.” drory and suzanne stetkevych also mention the story of al-mahdī, and stetkevych uses it to discuss the parameters of scholarly reputation and honesty. suzanne stetkevych, abū tammām and the poetics of the ʿabbāsid age (leiden: brill, 1991), 246. for other, similar stories, see also ilse lichtenstädter, “al-mufaḍḍal al-ḍabbī,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 178. for more details about the collection process, see gregor schoeler, the genesis of literature in islam: from the aural to the read (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2011); beatrice gruendler, “early arabic philologists: poetry’s friends or foes?,” in world philology, ed. sheldon pollock, benjamin a. elman, and ku-min kevin chang, 92–113 (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2015); stetkevych, abū tammām, 241–256; ignaz goldziher, “some notes on the dîwâns of the arabic tribes,” journal of the royal asiatic society of great britain and ireland 29 (1897): 325–334. 179. al-asad, maṣādir, 193. 89 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) transmitted their material orally or in written form, which is what modern scholars investigating the transmission of early islamic material have mainly focused on.180 the methodological transition is related to the invention of expertise in poetry (al-ʿilm bi-l-shiʿr) as a legitimate field of learning and to the creation of a “body of authorized knowledge,” a process described by drory. in drory’s depiction, the transition entailed the scholars’ assumption of professional authority over ancient poetry from the hands of poets and transmitters.181 i disagree with drory’s excellent article on one point: its linear chronology. admittedly, drory herself rejects simple linearity in the three-stage transfer of authority on poetry (1. poets; 2. transmitters; 3. scholars), preferring instead to see the process as a competition of power between these three groups. still, her conclusions suggest that scholars of poetry emerged as a group claiming independent professional authority in ancient arab poetry only in the last quarter of the second/eighth century.182 i contend, however, that scholars claimed expertise in this field already in the umayyad period and that we should therefore see the main question about this particular moment as consisting not of who (poets, transmitters, scholars) but of how (method). the creation of a body of authorized knowledge and the emphasis on recording living tribal lore points to a shift in the method of scholarship that took place among the ʿabbāsid scholars. a report quoted by al-asad is illustrative of the shift. it records ibn salām al-jumaḥī (d. 231–32/845–46) complaining about earlier scholars who relied solely on written sources and did not corroborate their material orally with a teacher: “people passed it on from book to book; they did not take it from the people of the desert and did not show it to their scholars.”183 famously, ibn hishām (d. 218/833), in his redaction of the sīra, or biography, of the prophet, expressed many misgivings about the authenticity of the materials used by his predecessor in this undertaking, ibn iṣḥāq (d. ca. 150–59/761–70).184 these and similar reports suggest that ʿabbāsid scholars, with their new methodology, looked at some earlier scholars as dilettantes who had collected material indiscriminately. the ʿabbāsid scholars may thus have deemed it unnecessary to quote earlier scholars who had not adhered to their “scientific” method. what is more, they may have preferred to claim that they had heard their material directly from bedouins, because that was what 180. the use of oral vs. written modes in the transmission of early islamic material has been discussed in modern scholarship since goldziher’s muhammedanische studien (1889–1890), which pointed to the oral tradition to argue that the ḥadīths are a product of later centuries. for a survey of scholars who followed goldziher’s lead, see donner, narratives of islamic origins, 13ff. from a different perspective, michael cook tackles the early islamic preference for oral transmission of ḥadīths in his “the opponents of the writing of tradition in early islam,” arabica 44 (1997): 437–530. in his influential recent works on the transmission of early islamic texts, gregor schoeler blurs the strict distinction between the oral and written modes, but he retains them as the two main operative categories. see his oral and written and genesis of literature. 181. drory, “abbasid construction of the jahiliyya,” 46. 182. drory, “abbasid construction of the jahiliyya,” 42–43. 183. al-asad, maṣādir, 195. 184. with regard to ibn hishām’s complaints about ibn iṣḥāq, the modern editor of the sīra, alfred guillaume, makes the following comment: “doubts and misgivings about the authenticity of the poems in the sīra are expressed so often by i.h. that no reference to them need be given here.” ibn iṣḥāq and ibn hishām, the life of muḥammad, ed. and trans. alfred guillaume (oxford: oxford university press, 1955), xxv. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 90 counted for science at this time. even in such cases, they would name their informants only occasionally—mostly if they were part of the story. the method of visiting tribes and collecting their lore further signals a turn in the relationship between the scholars and their object of study. as drory concludes, “from a living tradition [. . .] the texts of ancient poetry became like archival documents, representing the tableau of distant past.”185 the word “distant” is key. by this time, the urban scholars of basra, kufa, and baghdad had become estranged from the world of ancient poetry, and a distance had opened up between them and their subject.186 traveling through the desert in search of “native informants” for old poetry and akhbār, they can be compared to modern ethnographers. the distance between observer and observed and the processes of selecting, recombining, and harmonizing the material entail unequal power dynamics between the scholars and their informants, much discussed in modern ethnographic writing but still waiting to be explored in the case of the early ʿabbāsid scholars.187 this case is further complicated by the scholars’ ambivalent attitudes toward the bedouins, who, over time, were transformed from marginalized secondary citizens to symbols of the great arab past.188 for the purposes of this article, however, we can simply conclude that the distance and unequal authority account for the observed discrepancies between the poetry and its commentaries and for the liberties that the scholars took in interpreting the old material according to their own sensibilities. 3. early second/eighth century: umayyad scholars. although poetry is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of umayyad scholars, we have reason to believe that these scholars did, in fact, engage in the collection and transmission of poetry and its akhbār and, what is more, did so with institutional backing. the reason this scenario seems counterintuitive lies in the long-assumed paradigm of pious umayyad scholars vs. impious umayyad rulers and in the presumption that islamic piety has little patience with old arabic poetry. this paradigm has, however, been disproved, most recently by steven judd, who has argued that scholarly culture was much more developed and much more intertwined with state structures than traditionally thought.189 with regard to poetry specifically, goldziher, in an early study, collected narratives testifying to the eagerness of the umayyads to preserve both poetry and akhbār.190 ruth mackensen has argued that literary activities took 185. drory, “abbasid construction of the jahiliyya,” 48. 186. for an earlier discussion of the relationship between the poet and the scholar see h. a. r. gibb, “arab poet and arabic philologist,” bulleting of the school of oriental and african studies 12, no. 3/4 (1948): 574–578. 187. for a felicitous comparison of a late antique text (the babylonian talmud) with modern ethnographical writings and their respective representations of authority, see james a. redfield, “redacting culture: ethnographic authority in the talmudic arrival scene,” jewish social studies 22, no. 1 (2016): 29–80. 188. a key article on the topic is athamina, “aʿrāb and muhājirūn.” for a recent treatment of the issue of the bedouinization of arabness and a relevant bibliography, see webb, imagining the arabs, 294ff. 189. steven c. judd, religious scholars and the umayyads: piety-minded supporters of the marwānid caliphate (london: routledge, 2014). on state-sponsored umayyad historical writing, see borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 33–60. 190. see goldziher, “notes on the dîwâns.” see also al-asad, maṣādir, 197. 91 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) place in that period on a much greater scale than the tradition acknowledges; and al-asad, schoeler, and others have shown that writing and written texts played a larger role in the transmission of poetry than was once believed.191 all of this indicates that poetry and the akhbār that accompany it were collected, transmitted, and recorded during the umayyad period. furthermore, a number of anecdotes seem to suggest that the umayyad rulers themselves were concerned with collecting literary material. for instance, abū ʿubayda (and al-aṣmaʿī in a similar story) narrates that when the umayyads disagreed about a certain verse or khabar they would send a messenger to iraq to seek an authoritative answer, and that a day would not pass without a messenger from the umayyads knocking on the door of the famous scholar qatāda (d. 118/736).192 regardless of its historicity, the anecdote is instructive in two ways: first, it portrays the umayyads’ concern for knowledge of poetry and akhbār, and second, it shows that the recognized authority on the subject was an urban scholar in iraq rather than bedouins in the desert. in the umayyad period, it seems that expertise in poetry and akhbār was not only the domain of the exotic bedouins in the desert but at least equally the prerogative of urban scholars. the distance between the scholars and their object of study was much smaller than it came to be in the ʿabbāsid period. at the same time, poetry and its akhbār were recited, enjoyed, and transmitted well beyond the scholarly circles, whether in the city or in the desert. we should not forget that the layout of the umayyad garrison cities had the inhabitants distributed according to their tribal affiliation, and they could thus continue to share and transmit their literary lore. poetry and akhbār in the umayyad period were, to a large extent, still a “living tradition,” in drory’s words. this observation applies also to the earliest stage in the process of the akhbār’s collection, to which we now turn our attention. 4. first/seventh century: living tradition/social memory/communicative memory. the core of the akhbār, then, originates in a time when it constituted a living tradition, comprising circles wider than those of the poets and the transmitters alone and including also the akhbār’s audiences and secondary, anonymous narrators. al-asad refers to this period as one of al-tadwīn bi-l-ʿāmma, “the writing down [of the tradition] by the general population” and specifically by ruwāt about whose lives we know little.193 given the obscurity of this stage in the spread of the akhbār, it may be productive to consider what we know of the workings of memory in general. the early stage is characterized by what aleida assmann called “social memory,” and jan assmann, “communicative memory.” this type of organic collective memory stays alive for eighty to a hundred years 191. ruth stellhorn mackensen, “arabic books and libraries in the umaiyad period,” american journal of semitic languages and literatures 52, no. 4 (1936): 245–253; mackensen, “arabic books and libraries in the umaiyad period (continued),” american journal of semitic languages and literatures, 53, no. 4 (1937): 239–250; mackensen, “arabic books and libraries in the umaiyad period (concluded),” american journal of semitic languages and literatures 54, no. 1/4 (1937): 41–61; al-asad, maṣādir; schoeler, oral and written; schoeler, genesis of literature. 192. goldziher, “notes on the dîwâns,” 326, n. 4. 193. see al-asad, maṣādir, chap. 3. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 92 and is handed down through direct communication. it constitutes the intermediate step between individual memory, which vanishes quickly, and the lasting cultural memory that is supported though symbolic practices and material representations.194 the earliest akhbār should be seen primarily as products of the natural human inclination to storytelling, which at the same time helped preserve the poetry in memory. as the verses were recited and passed from one narrator to another, so were the stories attached to them, because “a story is a sort of natural container for memory; a way of sequencing a set of images, through logical and semantic connections, into a shape which is, itself, easy to retain in memory.”195 therefore, we should not see the akhbār simply as conscious manipulations of the material (though at times they may have been just that) but also as testimonies to the popular absorption of poetry within the structures of the social and communicative memory of early islamic audiences, a process that at times produced clear discrepancies. to summarize: i have treated the akhbār as a window into the multilayered process of the transmission of cultural heritage and the readjustments and reinterpretations that happen along the way. later narrators, collectors, and commentators in these various periods lived in an age and a milieu that differed from those of the mukhaḍram poets, and they approached the latter’s poetry from their own perspective. some akhbār redeemed the defiant poets by emphasizing their repentance and concern for islam (abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, suḥaym), by keeping silent about their anti-islamic verses (abū khirāsh), or by turning them into muslim warriors (abū miḥjan) or muslim martyrs (abū khirāsh). others emphasized the poet’s violent death and eternal disgrace (suḥaym) to convey a message of warning to obstinate sinners. another technique of accommodation observed here was the drawing of a sharp line between a poet’s deeds and his poetry, supported by a qurʾānic verse; this strategy gave legitimacy to the preservation of even potentially scandalous verses. the organization of the akhbār in al-iṣfahānī’s compilation also proved significant in shaping a poet’s later image and mitigating his un-islamic demeanor (abū khirāsh). although in this article i have focused on these tensions, it is clear that the later narrators also cherished the aesthetic of the old poetry and often made efforts to portray the poets candidly in their own contexts. the multifarious and often dialectical forces of later storytelling continued to mold the images of abū khirāsh, abū miḥjan, and suḥaym and to reinterpret their poetry. at the same time, they made space for these three poets and their poetry in the arabo-islamic literary canon. 194. marek tamm, “beyond history and memory: new perspective in memory studies,” history compass 11, no. 6 (2013): 462. 195. fentress and wickham, social memory, 50. 93 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) appendix 1. abū khirāsh al-hudhalī a) elegy on zuhayr (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:151–152, meter: ṭawīl)4 1. jamīl b. maʿmar grieved my guests with the slaughter of a munificent man with whom widows sought refuge; 2. whose sword-belt was long, who was not corpulent, and whose sword-straps moved about on his body [as he was slender] when he stood up; 3. in whose house a stranger would take shelter in wintertime, even a destitute man dressed in worn-out rags, in need to feed his family, 4. who—suffering from cold, chased by the evening wind that made him call out for help—went to him [zuhayr]; 5. whose hands almost lose his cloak when the north winds blow in his face. 6. so what is the matter with the people of his tribe that they did not collapse when such a wise and noble man departed? 1. فّجــع أصحابــي جميــُل بــن معَمــٍر بــذي َفَجــٍر تــأوي إليــه األراِمــُل 2. طويــُل ِنجــاِد الّســيف ليــس بَحْيــدرٍ إذا قــام واســتنَّت عليــه الحماِئــُل1 3. إلــى َبيِتــِه يــأوي الغريــُب إذا شــتا وُمهَتِلــٌك بالــي الّدريَســيِن عاِئــُل2 4. تــروََّح مقــروًرا وراحــت عشــّيٌة لهــا َحــَدٌب تحتثُّــه ُفيواِئــُل 5. تــكاد يــداه ُتســِلمان رداَءه مــن الُقــّر لّمــا اســتقبلْته الّشــمائُل عــوا وقــد خــّف منهــا الّلوذعــيُّ الُحالحــُل 6. فمــا بــاُل أهــِل الــّدار لــم يتصدَّ 7. فُأقِســُم لــو القيتَــه غيــَر موثَــٍق آلبــك بالِجــزع الّضبــاُع الّنواهــُل 8. لظــّل جميــٌل َأســوَأ القــوم َتّلــًة َولكــنَّ َظهــَر الِقــْرِن للَمــرء شــاغُل 9. فليــس كعهــِد الــّدار يــا أمَّ مالــٍك ولكــْن أحاطــت بالّرقــاب الّسالســُل 10. وعــاد الفتــى كالكهــل ليــس بقائــلٍ ســوى الحــقِّ شــيًئا فاســتراح العــواذُل 11. ولــم أْنــَس أّياًمــا لنــا وليالًيــا ِبَحلَيــَة إْذ نلَقــى بهــا مــا نحــاوُل )فأصَبــَح إخــواُن الّصفــاِء كأّنمــا أهــال علْيِهــم جاِنــَب التُّــْرِب هائــُل(3 1. al-sukkarī’s version prefers to cast zuhayr as not short rather than not plump. al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1223. 2. al-sukkarī’s version adds a line here: “for surely, had you met him in battle, you would have fought him or he would have fought you.” 3. this last verse appears only in al-sukkarī’s version. 4. cf. al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1221–1223. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 94 7. and i swear, had you not found him tied up, thirsty hyenas would have come to drink your blood where the wādī bends. 8. then jamīl would have been the one among his people slain most ignominiously. but a man’s concern is his opponent’s back [i.e., zuhayr was slain unfairly]. 9. nothing is like the times of our [old] abode, umm mālik! now, chains have encircled [our] necks, 10. and the youth has become like a middle-aged man, saying only the right things; the railing women are relieved. 11. but i have not forgotten our days and nights together at ḥalya when we met with the ones that we desired. (and our sincere friends now seem as if someone were pouring [sand] on them by a graveyard [i.e. burying them alive].) b) second elegy on zuhayr (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:152, meter: ṭawīl)5 1. would i be saying every single night: “may he not depart, the one killed by jamīl?” 2. i never used to doubt that if the quraysh killed one of us we would take vengeance [lit. they would be killed for our killed]. 3. and so i remain with a burning thirst, as long as you rule and prosper, until you are killed c) elegy on abū khirāsh’s brother ʿurwa مــن الّدهــر ال يبَعــْد قتيــُل جميــِل 1. َأفــي كلِّ ممَســى ليلــٍة أنــا قائــٌل قريــٌش ولّمــا ُيقتلــوا بقتيــِل 2. فمــا كنــُت أخشــى أن تصيــَب دماَءنــا مــدى الّدهــر حتــى ُتقَتلــوا ِبَغِليــِل 3. فأبــرُح مــا ُأمِّرتُــُم وَعَمرتُــُم 5. cf. al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1229. نَّ َثوائــي ِعنَدهــا َلَقليــلُ َواِإ 1. َلَعمــري َلَقــد راَعــت ُأَميَمــَة َطلَعتــي َوذِلــَك ُرزٌء َلــو َعِلمــِت َجليــُل 2. َوَقاَلــت ُأراُه َبعــَد ُعــرَوَة الِهًيــا َولِكــنَّ َصبــري يــا ُأَميــَم َجميــُل 3. َفــال َتحَســبي َأّنــي َتناَســيُت فقــَدُه َنِديَمــا َصفــاٍء ماِلــٌك َوَعقيــُل َق َقبَلنــا 4. َأَلــم َتعَلمــي َأن َقــد َتَفــرَّ 95 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) (al-iṣfhānī, al-aghānī, 21:159, meter: ṭawīl)6 1. by my life, my appearance has made umayma worried; she doesn’t see much of me. 2. she says: “i see him having a good time after the death of ʿurwa.” if only you knew how great an affliction this is [to me]. 3. do not believe that i forgot the loss, umayma; yet my patience is a virtue. 4. don’t you know that before us the pure brothers mālik and ʿaqīl were separated? 5. the view of our now-emptied home and resting place still disturbs me and robs me of my patience. 6. and so does the fact that i embrace every morning light with a deep, heavy sigh . . . d) my thirsty lips (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:156, meter: manhūk al-munsariḥ) 1. my thirsty lips, 2. this is no sheep’s milk. 3. instead, it is a gathering of young men, 4. each with a refined spearhead, heated up [and yearning for blood]. e) khirāsh in the muslim army َمبيــٌت َلنــا فيمــا َخــال َوَمقيــلُ 5. َأبــى الصَّبــَر َأّنــي ال َيــزاُل َيِهيُجنــي ُيعاِوُدنــي ُقطــٌع َعَلــيَّ َثقيــُل 6. َوَأّنــي ِإذا مــا الصُّبــُح آَنســُت َضــوَءهُ 6. cf. al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 1189. 1. إليــِك أمَّ ِذّبــاْن 2. مــا ذاك مــن حلــِب الّضــاْن 3. لكــن ِمصــاع الِفتيــاْن 4. ِبــكّل ِليــٍن َحــّراْن وال يأِتــي لقــد َســُفه الوليــُد 1. ُيناديــه لَيْغِبَقــه َكِليــٌب كأّن دمــوَع عينيــه الَفريــد 2. فــردَّ إنــاَءه ال شــيَء فيــه جبــاٌل مــن ِحــراِر الشــام ُســود 3. وأصبــَح دون غابِقــه وأمســى al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 96 (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:162, meter: wāfir) 1. [a thirsty man, i.e., the poet] calls him [his son khrāsh] to give him his evening drink, but he doesn’t come; the boy has truly become foolish. 2. and he [the poet] receives his cup back, empty, as if the tears of his eyes were pearls. 3. in the morning, in the evening, between him and his cup-bearer [son] are the black mountains of syria, as though burnt with fire. 4. know, khirāsh, that only meager good awaits the muhājir after his hijra. 5. i saw you wishing for goodness without me, like a dog daubed with blood to make it seem that he has hunted, although he has not. f) by your life, snake (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 21:163, meter: wāfir) 1. the fates are ever-victorious over man; they climb up every hill. 2. by your life, snake of the lowlands of anf, you destroyed a leg that leaves behind a severe loss for the companions. . . . 1. oh snake of the lowlands of anf, you destroyed a leg full of munificence for the companions. 2. between buṣrā and ṣanʿāʾ, it did not leave a single enemy unavenged. ــــمهاجر بعــد هجرتــه زهيــد 4. أال فاعلــم ِخــراُش بــأّن خيــَر الـــ كمحصــور اللَّبــان وال يصيــد 5. رأيتــك وابتغــاَء الِبــرِّ دونــي نســان تطُلــع كلَّ نجــِد علــى اإل 1. لعمــُرَك والمنايــا غالبــاٌت علــى األصحــاب ســاًقا ذاَت فقــِد 2. لقــد أهلكــِت حّيــَة بطــِن أنــٍف ... علــى األصحــاب ســاًقا ذاَت فضــِل 1. لقــد أهلكــِت حّيــَة بطــن أنــٍف إلــى صنعــاَء يطلُبــُه بَذْحــِل ا بيــن ُبصــرى 2. فمــا تركــْت عــدوًّ 97 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 2. abū miḥjan al-thaqafī a) when i die bury me (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:9, meter: ṭawīl) 1. when i die, bury me by the trunk of a grapevine, so that its roots may water my bones after my death. 2. do not bury me in the desert, for i fear that when i die [there] i will not taste it [the wine]. 3. may my grave be watered by the wine of al-ḥuṣṣ, for i am its captive after i was the one carrying it along. b) forbidden wine-drinking (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:10, meter: basīṭ) 1. though now wine has become rare and forbidden, and islam and unease have come between it and me, 2. back then, i used to drink from the morning, sometimes pure, and other times i used to drink my fill, and at times i am excited and at times i mix the wine [with water]. 3. above my head would stand a young, tender, and soft woman, and when she raised her voice it was an amorous gesture. 4. at times she would talk in a high-pitched voice and at times she would deepen it, like the garden flies making a buzzing sound. 1. إذا ِمــتُّ فادِفّنــي إلــى أصــل َكرمــٍة تُــرّوي ِعظامــي بعــَد َموتــي ُعروُقهــا 2. وال تدفَنّنــي فــي الَفــالة فإّننــي أخــاُف إذا مــا ِمــّت أاّل أُذوُقهــا أســيٌر لهــا مــن بعــد مــا قــد أســوُقها 3. لُيــروى بخمــر الُحــصِّ لحمــي َفإّننــي وحــال مــن دونهــا اإلســالُم والَحـــَرُج ت وقــد ُمِنَعــْت 1. إن كانــت الخمــُر قــد عــزَّ 2. فقــد ُأباِكُرهــا ِصْرفـًــا وأشــربها7 ِريًّــا وأطــرب أحـياًنـــا وأمـتـــِزُج 3. وقــد تقــوُم علــى رأســـي ُمـَنـعَـّــمٌة َخــوٌد إذا َرَفعــت فــي صوتهــا ُغُنـــُج وضــِة الـَهـــِزُج كمــا َيِطــنُّ ُذبــاُب الرَّ ــوَت أحياًنــا وتخـِفـُضـــه 4. ُتَرفِّــُع الصَّ 7. though i generally rely on the aghānī, this word is from abū miḥjan’s dīwān, as the aghānī has amzujuhā. see abū miḥjan, dīwān abī miḥjan, 20. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 98 c) forbidden love (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:6, meter: kāmil) 1. i looked at shamūs, but the great unease from the all-merciful stands between us. 2. among the people who came to medina, i used to consider myself someone could most certainly dispense with planting beans. d) about al-ḥaḍawḍā (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:5–6, meter: basīṭ) 1. praise be to god, who saved and delivered me from ibn jahrāʾ when the boat (būṣī) ran aground. 2. who takes it upon himself to sail the sea with the būṣī as his vessel to al-ḥaḍawḍā: what a terrible boat he has chosen! 3. let abū ḥafs, the worshipper of god, promptly know, whether he is at war or at peace, 4. that i attack the first horse of the enemy when others are afraid, and i capture the enemy’s horse under my banner. 5. i plunge into the tumult of war and my iron armor protects me when others lag behind. e) imprisonment during battle َحــَرٌج مــن الّرحمــن غيــُر قليــِل 1. ولقــد نظــرُت إلــى الشَّــموِس ودونهــا َوَرَد المدينــَة عــن زراعــة فــوِل 2. قــد كنــُت أحســُبني كأغنــى واحــٍد 1. الحمــد هلل نّجانــي وخّلَصنــي مــن ابــن َجهــراَء والبوصــيُّ قــد ُحِبســا 2. مــن َيجَشــِم البحــَر والبوصــيُّ َمركُبــه إلــى َحَضوضــى َفِبئــَس الَمركــُب الَتَمســا لــه إذا مــا غــاَر أو َجلَســا 3. أبلــْغ َلَديــك أبــا َحفــٍص ُمَغلَغلــًة عبــَد اإل 4. أّنــي َأُكــرُّ علــى األولــى إذا َفِزعــوا يوًمــا وأحِبــس تحــت الّرايــِة الَفَرســا 5. أغشــى الِهيــاَج وتغشــاني ُمضاَعفــةٌ مــن الَحديــِد إذا مــا بعُضهــم َخنســا 1. َكفــى َحزًنــا أن تَــرِدَي الخيــُل بالَقنــا وُأتــَرَك مشــدوًدا علــيَّ ِوثاِقيــا 2. إذا ُقمــُت َعّنانــي الحديــُد وُغّلَقــت مصاريــُع مــن دونــي ُتِصــمُّ الُمناِديــا خــوٍة فقــد تركونــي واحــًدا ال أخــا ِليــا 3. وقــد كنــُت ذا مــاٍل كثيــٍر واإ 4. وقــد شــفَّ ِجســمي أّننــي كلَّ شــارقٍ ُأعاِلــج َكْبــاًل ُمصمتًــا قــد َبراِنيــا 5. فِللَّــه َدّري يــوَم ُأتــرُك موَثًقــا وَتذَهــل عّنــي ُأســرتي وِرجاليــا 99 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:8, meter: ṭawīl) 1. it is sad enough that horses are drumming the ground with their hooves, loaded with spears, while i am left tied in chains. 2. when i stand the iron tortures me, and the doors were closed behind me; doors that [made such a deafening noise that it] would drown out anyone’s calling. 3. i was once a wealthy man with many brothers, but they abandoned me. i have no brother now. 4. every morning i have to deal with tightly locked shackle; it has devoured my body and worn me out. 5. what a great man i am! left behind, tied up, while my family and tribesmen neglect me. 6. barred from the reignited war, while others display their glorious deeds. 7. by god, i vow that i will not breach his law and i will no longer visit the taverns, if i am set free. f) patience (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:13, meter: ṭawīl) 1. have you not seen that fate makes a young man fall, that a man cannot avert his destiny? 2. i endured the blows of fate, unjust in its judgment, and i did not fear and i was not a coward. 3. indeed, i was endowed with fortitude when my brothers died, but i cannot refrain from wine for a single day! 4. the commander of the believers put it to death, so its true friends now weep around the wine presses. عمــاُل غيــري يــوم ذاَك الَعواليــا 6. حبيًســا عــن الَحــرِب الَعــواِن وقــد بــدت واإ 7. وهلل َعْهــٌد ال أخيــُس بَعهــده لئــن ُفِرجــت أاّل أزوَر الحواِنيــا 1. ألــم تــَر أنَّ الدهــَر يعثُــر بالفتــى وال يســتطيع المــرُء صــرَف الَمقــادرِ 2. صبــرُت فلــم أجــزع ولــم أُك كائًعــا لحــادث دهــٍر فــي الُحكومــة جائــِر ّنــي لــذو َصبــٍر وقــد مــات إخوتــي ولســت عــن الّصهبــاء يوًمــا بصابــِر 3. واإ ُنهــا يبكــون حــول الَمعاِصــِر 4. رماهــا أميــُر المؤمنيــن بحتِفهــا فُخاّل al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 100 g) forswearing wine i (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 19:12, meter: wāfir) 1. i considered wine to be good, yet it has qualities that destroy the mild-tempered man. 2. and by god, i will not drink it any more in my life, and neither shall i give it to a drinking companion to drink. h) forswearing wine ii (dīwān abī miḥjan, 16, meter: ṭawīl) 1. people say that drinking wine is as if one were granted spoils. 2. i told them: “you lied out of ignorance; did you not see that a reasonable man who drank it became silly after drinking it?” 3. suḥaym ʿabd banī ḥasḥās a) the smell of her clothes (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:211–212, meter: ṭawīl) 1. even an egg held tightly by a male ostrich who lifts his breast as he is protecting it 2. is not more beautiful than she on the day when she asked: “are you leaving with the riders or are you staying with us for some nights?” 3. a cold north wind started blowing at the end of the night, and we did not have any clothes but her cloak and my robe. 4. and my cloak retained the sweet scent of her clothes for a whole year until it wore out. مناِقــُب ُتهِلــك الّرجــل الَحليمــا 1. رأيــُت الَخمــر صالحــًة وفيهــا وال أســقي بهــا أبــًدا َنديمــا 2. فــال واهلل أشــرُبها َحياتــي إذا القــوُم نالوهــا أصابــوا الَغنائمــا 1. يقــوُل أنــاٌس اشــرِب الَخمــر إّنهــا أخاهــا ســفيًها بعدمــا كان حالمــا 2. فقلــُت لهــم جهــاًل كذبتــم ألــم تــروا ويرفــُع عنهــا ُجؤُجــًؤا ُمتجـافـــيا 1. فمــا بيضــٌة بــات الّظليــُم يحـفُّـهـــا كــب أم ثــاٍو لدينــا لـياِلـــيا؟ مــع الرَّ 2. بأحســَن منهــا يــوم قالــْت: أظاعـــنٌ 3. وهبَّــت شــماٌل آخــَر الّلـــيل قـَــّرٌة وال ثـــوَب إالَّ بـُرُدهـــا وردائيــا 4. ومــازال ُبــردي طيًِّبــا مــن ثياِبـهـــا إلــى الحــول حتــى أنَهــَج الثّــوُب باِليــا 101 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) b) swaying hump of a young she-camel (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:216, meter: sarīʿ) 1. oh [that] memory, why do you remember her now, when you are leaving? 2. [the memory] of every white [woman] who has private parts large like the swaying hump of a young she-camel. c) black and white (al-aghānī, 22:214, meter: basīṭ) 1. the poems of the slave of the banū al-ḥasḥās outweigh a noble origin and wealth. 2. though i am a slave, my soul is free by virtue of its nobility; though black by color, i am white of character.” d) fate does not fear even muḥammad (dīwān suḥaym, 40, meter: ṭawīl) 1. i saw that the fates fear not even muḥammad or anyone else, and that they do not let anyone live forever. 2. i see no one who lives forever despite fate, nor anyone remaining alive without death’s lying in wait for him. 1. يــا ِذكــرًة مــا لــَك فــي الحاضــرِ تذُكُرهــا وأنــَت فــي الّصــادِر 2. مــن كّل بيضــاَء لهــا كعثــٌب مثــُل َســنام البكــرة المائــِر عنــد الفخــاِر مقــام األصــِل والــَوِرِق 1. أشــعاُر عبــد بنــي الحســحاس ُقمــَن لــه أو أســوَد الّلــون إّنــي أبيــُض الُخلُــِق 2. إن كنــُت عبــًدا فنفســي حــّرٌة َكَرًمــا 1. رأيــُت المنايــا لــم تهبــَن محّمــدا وال أحــًدا ولــم يدعــَن مخّلــدا 2. أال ال أرى علــى المنــون مخّلــدا وال باقًيــا إاّل لــه المــوت مرصــدا al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 102 e) grey hair and islam (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:213, 215 for only the “kafā . . . nāhiyā” part; dīwān suḥaym, 16–17, meter: ṭawīl) 1. bid farewell to ʿumayra if you are prepared to leave in the morning [to fight], for grey hair and islam are enough to restrain a man. 2. [i recall my] obsession with her during the time we spent together, comforting each other, in a relationship that was sometimes hidden and other times shown. f) ṣubayrī girls (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:216, meter: ṭawīl) 1. it is as if the women of ṣubayr, on the day that they met us, were gazelles whose necks were bent in their coverts. 2. how many dresses of double-threaded cloth did we tear apart and how many veils [we pulled] from eyes that was not drowsy. 3. when a robe is torn off the veil goes with it, [and we continued] in this way until all of us were bare-skinned. g) should she be kept a secret? (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:217, meter: ṭawīl) ع إن تجّهــزت غاِديــا كفــى الّشــيُب واإلســالُم للمــرِء ناهَيــا 1. ُعميــرَة ودِّ لــةً عالقــَة حــبٍّ ُمستِســرًّا وباِدَيــا 2. جنوًنــا بهــا فيمــا اعتشــرنا عال ظبــاٌء حنــت أعناَقهــا فــي المكاِنــِس ــاِت يــوَم لقيَننــا 1. كأن الّصبيرّي ومــن برقــٍع عــن طفلــٍة غيــِر ناعــِس 2. فكــم قــد َشــققنا مــن رداٍء ُمنيَّــٍر علــى ذاك حتــى كّلنــا غيــُر البــِس 3. إذا ُشــقَّ بــرٌد ُشــقَّ بالبــرد ُبرقُــٌع 1. أُتكَتــم حّييُتــم علــى الّنــأي ُتكـتـَمـــا تحّيــَة مــن أمســى بحبِّــِك ُمغَرمـــا 2. ومــا ُتكتـمـــين إن أتـــيِت َدنـِــيًَّة وال إن ركبنــا يابنــَة القــوم َمحرمــا 3. ومثِلــِك قــد أبــرزُت مــن ِخــدِر أّمهــا إلــى مجلــٍس تجــرُّ ُبــرًدا ُمسّهمـــا ــا مــن الّســتِر تخشــى أهَلهــا أن َتكّلمــا 4. وماشــيٍة َمشــَي القطــاة اتَّبعتُـهـ مـــا 5. فقالــت: صــٍه يــا ويــَح غيــرك إّننــي ســمعت حديًثــا بينهــم َيقطــُر الدَّ مــا ولــم أخــَش هــذا الّليــل أن يتصرَّ 6. فنفضــُت ثوبيهــا ونظــرت حولهـــا ــا مــن وقــوٍف تحطَّمــا وألقــط رضًّ ــا ــاب مـبـيتَـهـ 7. ُأعّفــي بآثــار الثّي 103 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) 1. should she be kept a secret? may you be greeted despite the distance by him who became infatuated with your love. 2. and you wouldn’t have been kept a secret, if you did a disgraceful deed, daughter of the tribe, nor if we engaged in a forbidden act. 3. [for] many a girl like you i took out from the curtained quarters of her mother to a party where she would trail her striped robe. 4. many a girl walking like a sound-grouse i have observed from behind a curtain, for their family worried that they might speak to me. 5. and she said: “shh, woe onto other than you! for i overheard a conversation among them that dripped with blood.” 6. so i dusted off her clothes and i looked around her and i did not fear that the night would pass 7. while wiping the traces off her clothes in our overnight shelter and gathering the fragments of her bracelets. h) now you are mocking me (al-iṣfahānī, al-aghānī, 22:217, meter: ṭawīl) 1. now you are mocking me, but how many a night i left you spread open, like a garment. i) sweat and scent (al-aghānī, 22:217, meter: kāmil) 1. fasten the bonds on your slave lest he escape you, for surely life is close to death, 2. indeed, once sweat and scent dripped from the foreheads of your girls onto the bed’s surface. تركُتــِك فيهــا كالَقبــاء المفــرَِّج 1. فــإن تضحكــي مّنــي فيــا ُرّب ليلــٍة 1. ُشــّدوا وثــاَق العبــد ال ُيفِلْتُكــمُ إّن الحيــاَة مــن الممــاِت قريــُب 2. فلقــد تحــّدر مــن جبيــن فتاتُكــمْ َعــَرٌق َعلــى َمتــِن الفــراش َوِطيــُب al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) reacting to muḥammad • 104 4. ṭarafa (translation from arberry, seven odes, 86, meter: ṭawīl) 1. if you can’t avert from me the fate that surely awaits me / then pray leave me to hasten it on with what money i’ve got. 2. but for three things, that are the joy of a young fellow / i assure you i wouldn’t care when my deathbed visitors arrive— 3. first, to forestall my charming critics with a good swig of crimson wine / that foams when the water is mingled in; 4. second, to wheel at the call of the beleaguered a curved-shanked steed / streaking like the wolf of the thicket you’ve startled lapping the water; 5. and third, to curtail the day of showers, such an admirable season / dallying with a ripe wench under the pole-propped tent, 6. her anklets and her bracelets seemingly hung on the boughs / of a pliant, unriven gum-tree or a castor-shrub. َفَدْعِنـــي ُأَباِدْرَهــا ِبَمــا َمَلَكــْت َيـــِدي 1. فـــإْن ُكْنــَت اَل َتْســِطيُع َدْفــَع َمِنيَِّتـــي ِدي َك َلــْم َأْحِفــْل َمتَــى َقــاَم ُعـــوَّ َوَجـــدِّ 2. َوَلـــْواَل ثَــالٌث ُهــنَّ ِمــْن ِعيَشــِة الَفتَـــى ُكَمْيـــٍت َمَتــى َمــا ُتْعــَل ِبالَمــاِء ُتْزِبــــِد ــٍة 3. َفِمْنُهـــنَّ َسْبِقـــي الَعــاِذالِت ِبَشْرَبـ ِد َكِسيـــِد الَغَضـــا َنبَّْهتَـــُه الُمتَـــورِّ 4. َوَكــرِّي ِإَذا َنــاَدى الُمَضــاُف ُمَجنَّبـًـــا ِبَبْهَكَنـــٍة َتْحـــَت الِخَبـــاِء الُمَعمَّـــِد ْجــُن ُمْعِجــٌب ْجــِن والدَّ 5. وَتْقِصيــُر َيــْوِم الدَّ ـــِد َعَلــى ُعَشـــٍر َأْو ِخــْرَوٍع َلــْم ُيَخضَّ َماِليــَج ُعلَِّقـــْت 6. َكـــَأنَّ الُبـــِريَن والدَّ 105 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 27 (2019) bibliography abu-lughod, lila. dramas of nationhood: the politics of television in egypt. chicago: university of chicago 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“al-khaḍir.” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. ———. “khamr.” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. winter, timothy. “honor.” in encyclopaedia of the qurʾān. zolondek, leon. “the sources of the kitāb al-aġānī.” arabica 8, no. 3 (1961): 294–308. zwettler, michael. the oral tradition of classical arabic poetry: its character and implications. columbus, oh: the ohio state university press, 1978. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 346-375 the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ: documentary life cycles, archival spaces, and the importance of documents lying around* daisy livingston university of hamburg, cluster of excellence “understanding written artefacts” (daisy.livingston@uni-hamburg.de) abstract this article follows prevailing trends in research on the archival practices of the premodern middle east by emphasizing the importance of documentary life cycles. specifically, it examines the afterlives of a microsample of documents from an underexplored historical context: the administration of amirs who held iqṭāʿ land grants in areas of egypt outside cairo. though iqṭāʿ holders (muqṭaʿs) were key administrative actors in the mamluk sultanate, we know little about their activities on the ground. the material investigated here is related to the administration of justice in far-flung districts of egypt, one of the less-known roles of these muqṭaʿs, and is preserved in the papyrus collection of the austrian national library in vienna. contextualizing the documents by relating them to the activities of several named amirs, i delineate three stages in the documents’ afterlives: archiving, reuse, and disposal. i rely on the materiality of the documents, an indispensable tool for identifying the more enigmatic aspects of documentary life cycles. i then turn to reflect on what these afterlives can tell us about the archival spaces of this administrative setting. by examining the muqṭaʿs’ paperwork, i highlight shifts in meaning that documents underwent over time, calling attention to the phenomenon of casual storage, or “documents lying around.” * first and foremost, many thanks to michael cook and to all faculty and student members of the holberg seminar on islamic history. the opportunity to have you all read and comment on my writing was invaluable, and a real intellectual highlight of my phd research. the research presented in this article was supported by a bloomsbury colleges phd studentship, a doctoral scholarship from the annemarie schimmel kolleg “history and society in the mamluk era (c. 1250–1517),” university of bonn, and by the cluster of excellence “understanding written artefacts: material, interaction and transmission in manuscript cultures,” funded by the german research foundation (deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft, dfg) at the centre for the study of manuscript cultures (csmc) at the university of hamburg. i am grateful to konrad hirschler, roy fischel, and filippo de vivo for commenting on earlier versions, and to marina rustow for sharing then unpublished material with me. a version of this article was presented at the international conference “material culture methods in the middle islamic periods” at the annemarie schimmel kolleg, university of bonn, december 8–10, 2017. thanks to the participants who offered constructive feedback. finally, thanks to my three anonymous reviewers for their incisive suggestions. © 2020 daisy livingston. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:daisy.livingston%40uni-hamburg.de?subject= 347 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) introduction in the governing of the territories of the mamluk sultanate, iqṭāʿ land grants allotted to individual amirs played a fundamental role. each iqṭāʿ holder, or muqṭaʿ, was granted the temporary right to collect tax revenue from the land he held, in return for military service. in spite of the importance of muqṭaʿs for the administration of the mamluk realm, we know surprisingly little about how this system functioned on the ground, particularly at the lower levels of administration. contemporary chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and administrative and chancery manuals provide substantial information on the functioning of the iqṭāʿ system under mamluk rule.1 nonetheless, like much of the contemporary narrative literature, they maintain an elite focus and manifest a tangible “urban tunnel vision.”2 the muqṭaʿs named in such narratives are usually holders of high government office, often recipients of multiple iqṭāʿs in far-flung mamluk territories, and distant from the management of affairs on the ground.3 the day-to-day activity of administering these regions, as well as the documents and paperwork it inevitably generated, thus remain mysterious. surviving documentary traces originating in these settings have so far largely not been explored. this article aims to fill this gap by exploring the documentary activities of lower-ranking iqṭāʿ-holding amirs in regions of mamluk egypt outside the capital of cairo. the documentary practices of muqṭaʿs, and particularly their archiving activities, have attracted some prior scholarly interest. in his study of archival practices in the mamluk administration, konrad hirschler highlighted the significance of these amirs’ offices (sing. dīwān), not only as the “main administrative partner” to the central state apparatus in cairo but as one of its primary archival partners, too.4 these dīwāns, though rather poorly documented in the contemporary literature, appear to have been the institution through which amirs managed their iqṭāʿs.5 hirschler thus argued for the decentering of archival practices in the mamluk state, highlighting the amir’s dīwān at the site of the iqṭāʿ as an important location where documents were produced, used, and preserved. 1. tsugitaka sato, state and rural society in medieval islam: sultans, muqtaʻs, and fallahun (leiden: brill, 1997); hassanein rabie, the financial system of egypt ah 564–741/ad 1169–1341 (oxford: oxford university press, 1972); jean-claude garcin, un centre musulman de la haute-égypte médiévale, qūṣ (cairo: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1976), esp. 231–86. see also, though with an earlier focus, claude cahen, “l’évolution de l’iqṭaʿ du ixe au xii siècle: contribution à une histoire comparée des sociétés médiévales,” annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations 8, no. 1 (1953): 25–52; and, more recently, yossef rapoport, rural economy and tribal society in islamic egypt: a study of al-nābulusī’s “villages of the fayyum” (turnhout: brepols, 2018), esp. 143–70. 2. this apt phrase is borrowed from konrad hirschler, “studying mamluk historiography: from sourcecriticism to the cultural turn,” in ubi sumus? quo vademus? mamluk studies—state of the art, ed. stephan conermann, 159–86 (göttingen: bonn university press, 2013), 169. 3. see, for instance, the examples listed in rabie, financial system, 46–47. for the hierarchy of muqṭaʿs, albeit in the ayyūbid period, see rapoport, rural economy, 149–55. 4. konrad hirschler, “from archive to archival practices: rethinking the preservation of mamlūk administrative documents,” journal of the american oriental society 136, no. 1 (2016): 21–26. 5. rabie, financial system, 64–68; sato, state and rural society, 87–91. see also references to the secretaries (kuttāb) of muqṭaʿs: rapoport, rural economy, 157. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 348 this emphasis on the paperwork of mamluk state actors reflects a recent renewal of scholarly interest in the archival history of the premodern middle east. shifting away from a fixed and institutional idea of “the archive” toward a more flexible conceptualization of practices, this trend has served to problematize the oft-presumed paucity of surviving documents from the pre-ottoman period.6 prominent in such studies is a new appreciation of the life cycles of documents. the phenomenon of document reuse, for instance, has been highlighted as a practice with profound implications for understanding archiving. reuse practices shed light on the shifting meanings attributed to documents over time, their potentially declining archival value, and the practical and symbolic ways in which they were used.7 scholarly discussions of archiving place emphasis on the “afterlives” of documents, emphasizing the shifts that documents underwent after fulfilling their immediate functional purposes.8 taking these discussions further still, marina rustow’s recent work on fatimid state documents preserved in the cairo geniza argues for the reconstruction of an entire “documentary ecology.” she contends that the archival uses of documents are only to be fully understood within the broader range of processes in which documents played a part, including the “migration” of documents to new sites and uses and the documents’ disposal.9 it is thus increasingly clear that by exploring this entire “ecology,” and not just moments of clear archival preservation, we can work toward a more profound understanding of the archival and wider documentary cultures prevailing in the societies we study. in this article, i sustain this approach, applying it to a different corpus: original documents stemming from the activities of mamluk muqṭaʿs. these documents are preserved in the papyrus collection (papyrussammlung) of the austrian national library in vienna. they are mostly endorsed petitions or decrees, which shed light on the role muqṭaʿs played in the administration of justice in the regions over which they had authority. werner diem published a number of these documents in his volume of so-called “official letters” 6. see, e.g., frédéric bauden, “du destin des archives en islam: analyse des données et éléments de réponse,” in la correspondance entre souverains, princes et cités-états: approches croisées entre l’orient musulman, l’occident latin et byzance (xiiie–début xvie siècle), ed. denise aigle and stéphane péquignot, 27–49 (turnhout: brepols, 2013); petra sijpesteijn, “the archival mind in early islamic egypt: two arabic papyri,” in from al-andalus to khurasan: documents from the medieval muslim world, ed. petra sijpesteijn et al., 163–86 (leiden: brill, 2007); julien loiseau, “le silence des archives: conservation documentaire et historiographie de l’état dans le sultanat mamelouk (xiiie–xvi siècle),” in l’autorité de l’écrit au moyen âge: orient-occident, ed. société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public (shmesp), 285–98 (paris: publications de la sorbonne, 2009); tamer el-leithy, “living documents, dying archives: towards a historical anthropology of medieval arabic archives,” al-qanṭara 32, no. 2 (2011): 389–434; maaike van berkel, “reconstructing archival practices in abbasid baghdad,” journal of abbasid studies 1 (2014): 7–22; hirschler, “from archive to archival practices”; marina rustow, the lost archive: traces of a caliphate in a cairo synagogue (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2020); daisy livingston, “managing paperwork in mamlūk egypt (c. 1250–1517): a documentary approach to archival practices” (phd diss., soas, university of london, 2019). 7. frédéric bauden, “the recovery of mamlūk chancery documents in an unsuspected place,” in the mamluks in egyptian and syrian politics and society, ed. michael winter and amalia levanoni, 59–76 (leiden: brill, 2004); konrad hirschler, “document reuse in medieval arabic manuscripts,” comparative oriental manuscript studies bulletin 3, no. 1 (2017): 33–44. 8. e.g., el-leithy, “living documents,” 426. 9. rustow, lost archive, esp. 6. 349 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) (amtliche briefe), where he flagged the connections of multiple documents to individual named amirs, extrapolating that they represent the traces of document collections that were at some point archived together.10 these published documents formed some of the key sources hirschler used to assert the archival importance of the amir’s dīwān.11 the specific archival and documentary practices attested by the original material have not, however, earned comment. in this article, i address this by exploring the life cycles of these documents. i identify “dossiers” of documents issued by the same few amirs—groups of documents that belonged, at one stage, to the broader documentation of an amir’s dīwān.12 in addition, i consider further individual documents that belong to the same genres and administrative milieus. the article has two main goals: first, to contribute to the ongoing broader discussion of documentary life cycles, and second, to add further substance to our understanding of mamluk iqṭāʿ holders’ administrative activities and the roles played by their offices outside the capital in the generation and preservation of paperwork. the origin of the material in the vienna collection poses some difficulties, particularly for those interested in practices of archiving. this collection owes its origins to the massive upsurge of interest in egyptian antiquities that developed during the nineteenth century alongside european colonial intervention in the country. mounting “archaeological fervor” led to increasing efforts to gain control of archaeological sites, especially after the british occupation, and many documents obtained from these sites were shipped to european collections.13 the vienna collection was supplied by documents that emerged from several large archaeological finds, notably those in the fayyūm oasis, around 80 km southwest of cairo, and in the district of ashmūnayn, located in the nile valley around 300 km south of the capital.14 subsequent excavations continued to produce large numbers of documents, many of them derived from these same two locales, and the collection was also fed by the flourishing antiquities market.15 the collection thus contains an enormous number 10. werner diem, arabische amtliche briefe des 10. bis 16 jahrhunderts aus der österreichischen nationalbibliothek in wien (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1996), 3. 11. hirschler, “from archive to archival practices,” 21–26. 12. my use of the term “dossier” is close to that recently proposed by jean-luc fournet, who defined it as a “subset” of a contemporary archive: jean-luc fournet, “archives and libraries in greco-roman egypt,” in manuscripts and archives: comparative views on record-keeping, ed. alessandro bausi et al., 171–99 (berlin: de gruyter, 2018). this departs from earlier definitions, which see dossiers as corpora brought together by modern scholars. see katelijn vandorpe, “archives and dossiers,” in the oxford handbook of papyrology, ed. roger s. bagnall, 216–55 (oxford: oxford university press, 2009), 218. 13. hélène cuvigny, “the finds of papyri: the archaeology of papyrology,” in bagnall, oxford handbook of papyrology, 30–58, esp. 30–38. 14. for the find and acquisition history of the collection, see helene loebenstein, “‘papyrus erzherzog rainer’: zur papyrussammlung der österreichischen nationalbibliothek; 100 jahre sammeln, bewahren, edieren,” in die papyrussammlung der österreichischen nationalbibliothek: katalog der sonderausstellung 100 jahre papyrus erzherzog rainer, ed. helene loebenstein and hermann harrauer, 3–39 (vienna: österreichische nationalbibliothek, 1983), esp. 4–6, 27. 15. for a recent study of the vagaries of the nineteenthand early twentieth-century antiquities market, albeit with an egyptological focus, see fredrik hagen and kim ryholt, the antiquities trade in egypt 1880–1930: the h. o. lange papers (copenhagen: det kongelige danske videnskabernes selskab, 2018), esp. 164–82. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 350 of documents and fragments, including well over 30,000 arabic paper documents, many of which are difficult or impossible to contextualize geographically. complicating this unpromising situation further, large numbers of nineteenthand twentieth-century egyptian documents were found in excavations of ancient and medieval rubbish heaps, where the documents had been disposed of by their medieval or ancient owners. such origins hardly seem indicative of careful archiving by the documents’ original custodians. despite this, these excavations tended to unearth documents in bulk, and some collections of papers were found in baskets, suggesting that they were brought to the rubbish heap en masse to be disposed of.16 the implication is that the documents were accumulated before being at some point deemed useless or irrelevant and thrown away. there is no direct evidence that the particular documents i examine in this article were unearthed from such a rubbish heap. nonetheless, given the history of the vienna collection, this is probably the kind of backdrop that we should envisage for their preservation to the modern day.17 the preservation context of these documents is therefore inescapably problematic. it dictates methodological necessities that can limit our ability to draw firm conclusions, and we must exercise constant caution, for instance when dating and ascribing provenance to documents. despite this, i contend that the documents’ problematic provenance also raises valuable possibilities. their apparently accidental preservation and the deliberate method of their disposal serve to highlight the non-static nature of these documents, revealing a progression through multiple stages over the course of their lives. unlike material that has been carefully looked after over the course of the intervening centuries, these documents demonstrate traces of use, reuse, and abandonment; care and also lack of care. they thus offer us a relatively complete picture of the treatment of documents by the various individuals and institutions that were involved in their contemporary creation, use, and archiving. like the geniza documents in rustow’s recent study, these documents offer a full view of a messy documentary life cycle, unobstructed by processes of archival rationalization.18 rather than attempting to identify specific archival sites or formal archival practices that in this corpus may be unrecoverable, in what follows i use these documents to comment on the larger documentary ecology, to borrow rustow’s expression. specifically, i explore the afterlives of these documents: the stages they went through after their initial production and use. in this enterprise, the materiality of the extant documents represents my most valuable methodological tool. in the first section i delineate the corpus under consideration, through which we can gain some grasp of the historical and administrative backdrop to the documents and their life cycles. i then identify and explore in turn three stages of the documents’ afterlives: their archiving, their reuse, and their eventual disposal. finally, i offer some reflections on what this life cycle can tell us about the nature of the spaces in which such documents were preserved. ultimately, i argue that the afterlives of 16. cuvigny, “finds of papyri,” 50–53. 17. the archaeological origins of many of these documents are clearly perceptible in the soil that still adheres to their surfaces. 18. rustow, lost archive, e.g., 8, 54. 351 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) these documents reveal a continual shifting in the value attributed to documents by their custodians, manifest above all in the material ways in which they were used and preserved. reflecting on the potential of these afterlives to shed light on the archival spaces of the muqṭaʿ’s administration, i highlight the phenomenon of casual storage, which i term in this article “documents lying around,” the significance of which extends beyond this small corpus. in the analysis of a corpus such as this one, one cannot avoid some speculation. i would nonetheless argue that this kind of analysis, even if speculative, is an indispensable tool. without allowing conjecture, source material of this nature, which is not only highly understudied19 but also fragmentary and difficult to contextualize, would simply remain untapped. instead of offering firm conclusions, i thus aim to flag the phenomena these documents reveal, and in so doing to flesh out our meager understanding of the documentary and archival contexts in which their lives played out. for the purposes of this special dossier it seems to me fitting to contribute something with many empty holes, which i have no doubt michael cook, and all the members of the holberg seminar, would have risen to the task of filling. the muqṭaʿs’ documents and their afterlives the documents used in this article are connected to processes of petition and response. petitions were submitted to amirs to lodge requests or complaints, and amirs responded in one of two ways: by endorsing the petition with a rescript, that is, an official response drafted on the reverse side of the petition; or with a decree written on a separate support. documents of these genres are, compared with many of the other genres held in the vienna collection, relatively easy to contextualize. where the full text of a petition or decree survives, place-names are often included. when the names of amirs can be found, the practice of deriving honorific nisbas from the names of the sultans they served sometimes makes it possible to date documents to a particular sultan’s reign.20 in addition, the naming of amirs allows us to identify dossiers of documents issued by the same amir. the dossiers i am using thus consist of sets of decrees and endorsed petitions that can be firmly connected to one or several individual amirs, with most datable examples originating around the turn of the eighth/fourteenth century. the most substantial such dossier (the al-azkā dossier) contains a group of decrees issued on the authority of a certain jamāl al-dīn yūsuf al-azkā along with documents issued by his two sons, bahāʾ al-dīn aḥmad b. al-azkā and ʿalā al-dīn ʿalī b. al-azkā.21 many of these decrees are written on the verso of the petitions to which they respond, and the place-names that are mentioned refer to 19. the arabic papyrology research community has largely focused on the early islamic period in egypt, meaning that later arabic material represents one of the most underutilized parts of the vienna collection. 20. diem, arabische amtliche briefe, 7–8. 21. in the catalog for the exhibition of the vienna collection that took place in 1894, josef von karabacek read this signature as the nisba al-karakī: josef von karabacek, papyrus erzherzog rainer: führer durch die ausstellung (vienna: hölder, 1894); diem offered the reading al-azkā instead: diem, arabische amtliche briefe, 240. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 352 locations within the district of ashmūnayn. the respective titles of these three individuals, al-malakī al-nāṣirī for yūsuf and aḥmad and al-malakī al-muẓaffarī for ʿalī, allow these documents to be dated to the period of the second sultanate of al-nāṣir muḥammad (698– 708/1299–1309) and that of his successor al-muẓaffar baybars ii (708–9/1309–10).22 diem edited ten documents connected to these three related individuals.23 i was able to identify several more documents belonging to this dossier among the unpublished material in the vienna collection. these include four documents issued by yūsuf,24 three by aḥmad,25 and one by ʿalī,26 all identifiable on the basis of their distinctively written signatures and official titles. the entire dossier thus comprises eighteen documents, a substantial number considering the challenges of connecting documents within the vienna collection. the collection also contains several other, much smaller dossiers of similar documents: three documents connected to a certain bahāʾ al-dīn, also based in ashmūnayn, probably around the same time (the bahāʾ al-dīn dossier),27 and a later dossier of an amir known as al-būshī based in the fayyūm region.28 these dossiers are complemented by a more disparate and unwieldy set of documents that represent similar genres, also recording the administrative activities of amirs, but that cannot be so easily connected to each another and are often fragmentary. through familiarity with better-preserved and contextualized examples of documents, one begins to recognize the documentary features, formulary, and scripts of these genres, which eventually makes it possible to incorporate these decontextualized or fragmentary examples within the corpus. locating the surviving dossiers against the background of larger numbers of similar though less easily contextualized documents allows us to extend arguments beyond the individual samples surviving in the dossiers and to identify the wider currency of the practices they reveal.29 these extant documents, though clearly constituting just a micro-sample, provide important evidence of the activities of amirs in local administration. it should be noted that the majority of these documents do not explicitly specify that the amir in question held an iqṭāʿ. nonetheless, the details of the amirs’ responsibilities and activities that emerge from the documents, as well as the wider picture of the various agents in the region with whom they communicated, suggest strongly that they were indeed muqṭaʿs, as they tally closely 22. diem, arabische amtliche briefe, 240–42. 23. a ch 12502; 25677; 10809; 15499; 11584; 25676; 25674; 23075; 16220; 2007. published in ibid., nos. 50–59. 24. a ch 12503; 15915; 25672; 25675. diem briefly notes the details of these four documents in his introduction to yūsuf al-azkā’s documents but does not deem them worthy of full critical edition, no doubt because of their fragmentary nature. ibid., 240. 25. a ch 6249; 12531; 25966. 26. a ch 6239. 27. a ch 366; 5864; 25673c. the latter document is published in diem, arabische amtliche briefe, no. 6. for a more detailed exposé of these dossiers see livingston, “managing paperwork,” 169–73, 256–60. 28. a ch 17306; 24993. published in diem, arabische amtliche briefe, nos. 7—8. 29. a full list of the documents that i have consulted in the writing of this article can be found at the beginning of the bibliography. 353 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) with accounts in the contemporary narrative literature.30 the amirs who appear in these documents are almost certainly rather junior, unlike the high-ranking muqṭaʿs who surface in other contemporary sources.31 the surviving documents are particularly expansive on the role of these amirs in the administration of justice, an aspect of the muqṭaʿ’s activities about which we know little from the contemporary literature. many of the petitions, for instance, show locals complaining of crimes against them—cases of murder32 and theft33— and requesting that the amir begin the process of securing justice. the documents in the al-azkā and bahāʾ al-dīn dossiers show the amirs responding to petitioners in villages scattered around the administrative district of ashmūnayn, presumably the locales where they held iqṭāʿ units.34 the dossiers and individual documents are thus fertile ground for explorations of the involvement of muqṭaʿs in the day-to-day concerns of local communities, particularly among the lower ranks about which less in known from the narrative and administrative literature. the documentary lives that i seek to examine through this corpus strongly reflect the geographical realities of iqṭāʿ holding. they seem to have been documents whose raison d’être was mobility.35 petitions were ordinarily drawn up outside the sphere of the amirs and their dīwāns on behalf of petitioners, while the responding decrees would be written by the amirs’ secretaries or scribes. this much is clear from the different scripts used for the petitions and their responding decrees: whereas petitions are mostly written in legible and practiced handwriting, they are not the chancery-trained hands used for the responding decrees, some of which seem to have been written by the same unnamed individuals (compare recto and verso on fig. 1).36 after their initial submission, then, the lives of these documents converged in the amirs’ administrative circles. responding decrees were not addressed to the petitioners themselves. instead, the amirs usually addressed local shaykhs or representatives, who were charged with acting on the amirs’ commands, summoning those accused of crimes to meet justice or compelling recalcitrant peasants to pay taxes of various kinds. as hirschler has argued, the address of these decrees implies that the documents, though centered on the amir’s dīwān, “circulated” within broader administrative networks in which the amirs were active.37 traces of their intrinsic mobility survive in peculiar remarks written in their margins, which usually specify an individual charged with their delivery. at times the note refers to “a soldier as messenger” (jundī rasūl 30. livingston, “managing paperwork,” 169–79; hirschler, “from archive to archival practices,” 25–26. see also rapoport, rural economy, 144. 31. for the hierarchy of muqṭaʿs, albeit in an ayyubid context, see rapoport, rural economy, esp. 149–55. 32. a ch 16220. 33. a ch 366; 12502; 25676. 34. for the distribution of iqṭāʿ units, see rapoport, rural economy, 144–49. 35. processes of petition and response are, of course, always to some extent characterized by mobility. for decrees, for instance, see rustow, lost archive, e.g., 267–68. 36. see similar comments on the scripts of fatimid petitions: marina rustow, “the fatimid petition,” jewish history 32 (2019): 351–72. 37. hirschler, “from archive to archival practices,” 26. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 354 or jundī sāʿī);38 others mention simply “a soldier” (jundī),39 “a young soldier” (jundī ṣabīy),40 or just “a messenger” (sāʿī).41 this feature is present in both the dossiers identified above and in several individual documents and fragments from both ashmūnayn and fayyūm, and it thus seems to represent part of a consistent documentary procedure used in the dīwāns of amirs in different parts of egypt. whether the surviving original documents were themselves sent out to the amirs’ various contacts is not clear. these documents might instead be the “archival” copies, with the marginal delivery notes representing official verification that copies had in fact been sent out to the relevant personnel.42 either way, these documentary practices highlight the dispersed geographical realities of the muqṭaʿs’ administration. figure 1: endorsed petition from the al-azkā dossier containing yūsuf al-azkā’s distinctive signature (a ch 25677); petition on recto (left) and rescript on verso (right). (photograph: papyrussammlung, österreichische nationalbibliothek) 38. jundī rasūl in two of the three documents in the bahāʾ al-dīn dossier; also in a ch 16196. i suspect that this latter document also belongs to the bahāʾ al-dīn dossier, though it is too fragmentary to allow confirmation. jundī sāʿī in one document in the al-azkā dossier: a ch 16220. diem’s translation reads “ein soldat als bote/ eilbote”: e.g., diem, arabische amtliche briefe, 271. 39. a ch 17306. 40. a ch 12495. 41. a ch 25677. see fig. 1, above. the pen stroke below sāʿī may be a rāʾ (ر) , perhaps an abbreviation of rasūl. 42. the addition of these delivery remarks seems to serve a kind of verification purpose, being added to the support in the same thick pen used for the amir’s signature. see livingston, “managing paperwork,” 193–94. 355 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the textual content of this corpus of endorsed petitions and decrees thus reveals an extended documentary life cycle. nevertheless, none of the stages i have discussed—the submission of the petition, the response in the decree, the “circulation” among the amir’s administrative partners in the region—can be considered part of the documents’ afterlives, the focus of this article. afterlife can be an ambiguous term. the responses drafted on the verso of the petitions might, after all, be considered to belong to the afterlife of the original documents.43 i contend, however, that the rescript represented an intrinsic function of the initial text, despite constituting a separate phase in the document’s material life.44 it was not, therefore, part of its afterlife. in this article, i use the term afterlife to refer to all stages that took place after the completion of the initial functions for which the textual content of the document was produced. in the case of the decrees issued by amirs, this function was essentially a communicative one, ordering others to implement the decisions they had made.45 once this was done, the main purpose of the document was fulfilled, and it is from this point onward that we can speak of its afterlife. to glimpse these stages, we must leave the textual content behind, looking instead to the documents’ materiality. if we combine all the stages that are visible within the corpus used here, i see the typical life cycle of a single document to be made up of the following phases: 1) the drawing up of the petition. this took place outside the amir’s dīwān. the petition was then presented to the amir. 2) the drawing up of the responding decree on the verso of the petition. this was carried out by the scribes in the amir’s dīwān, visible to us from the trained, if highly cursive, chancery-style hands used. 3) the circulation of the decree, or a copy thereof, among the amir’s relevant contacts in the region. 4) the document’s archiving. 5) the reuse of the document’s material support. 6) the document’s deliberate destruction and disposal. 7) preservation until the modern day. 43. christian sassmannshausen, for instance, defines the use of late ottoman sijills in a court setting as an afterlife, even though this could be considered one of the main purposes for which such documents were produced. christian sassmannshausen, “mapping sijill landscapes: family monitoring and legal procedure in late ottoman tripoli,” in lire et écrire l’histoire ottomane, ed. vanessa guéno and stefan knost, 173–206 (beirut: institut français du proche-orient, 2015), 180–81. 44. that is, through the addition of a new text on its verso. 45. see also christian müller, der kadi und seine zeugen: studie der mamlukischen ḥaram-dokumente aus jerusalem (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2013), 137–40. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 356 this outline is clearly schematic and does not address the transitions between the different phases, discussed below. not all documents found within the corpus underwent every one of these stages. not all decrees were drafted on the verso of a petition; in such cases stage 2 represents the beginning of a document’s life. many of the documents do not display clear signs of reuse (stage 5), and some do not show signs of deliberate disposal (stage 6). nonetheless, each of these stages emerges with some clarity within the corpus, and several extant documents exhibit evidence of them all. according to the definition i have adopted, stages 4–7 constitute the document’s afterlife. stage 7, its preservation until the modern day, represents the broad backdrop against which we must situate each document’s survival. though it offers our firmest evidence that dossiers were at some point preserved together, it provides only limited insights into the documents’ contemporary lives. it is therefore the three penultimate stages (4–6) that constitute the focus of the next part of this article. i address these stages in turn, exploring the material features the documents provide as evidence for each: the deliberate archiving of documents, their reuse, and their eventual disposal. archiving: the “bundle archive” the deliberate archiving of the petitions and decrees that make up this corpus is undoubtedly the most intangible phase in the documents’ lives. the documents do not show signs of archiving comparable to those that mark other extant documentary corpora. they do not contain the traces of formal recordkeeping in separate register archives that can be found on decrees issued by the chanceries of the mamluk sultans and their predecessors.46 nor do they display any other notable traces of techniques designed to assist in their systematic storage and later retrieval, such as the archival filing notes present on legal documents from the ḥaram al-sharīf corpus of seventh-/fourteenth-century jerusalem47 or on deeds related to waqf endowments from mamluk cairo.48 it may be tempting, then, to suggest that these documents were simply not archived at all. such an argument ex silentio is, however, problematic. the fact that we know little about the muqṭaʿs’ administration as an archival context does not mean that it was not one. 46. for a concise discussion of registration in fatimid chancery decrees, see samuel m. stern, fāṭimid decrees: original documents from the fāṭimid chancery (london: faber and faber, 1964), 166–75; geoffrey khan, “a copy of a decree from the archives of the fāṭimid chancery in egypt,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 49, no. 3 (1986): 439–453, esp. 451; rustow, lost archive, esp. 349–52, 368–77. for mamluk documents, see samuel m. stern, “petitions from the mamlūk period (notes on the mamlūk documents from sinai),” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 29, no. 2 (1966): 247–49; malika dekkiche, “le caire: carrefour des ambassades; étude historique et diplomatique de la correspondance échangée entre les sultans mamlouks circassiens et les souverains timourides et turcomans (qara qoyunlu–qaramanides) au xve s. d’après le ms. ar. 4440 (bnf, paris)” (phd diss., university of liège, 2011), 389–90. for register archives in mamluk cairo, see hirschler, “from archive to archival practices,” 12–17. 47. see müller, der kadi, e.g., 197–98; livingston, “managing paperwork,” esp. 141–46. 48. livingston, “managing paperwork,” esp. 71–72; daisy livingston, “documentary constellations in latemamlūk cairo: propertyand waqf-related archiving on the eve of the ottoman conquest of egypt,” itinerario, forthcoming. 357 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) in my view, these documents are, in fact, better viewed against the background of other, simpler methods of archiving that are well attested across the papyrological corpus: what i designate “bundle archives.” as the name suggests, these are collections of documents in which each piece was tightly folded and which were held together by various means. bundle archiving seems to have been particularly common for collections of documents that might be termed family or business archives.49 one particularly well-contextualized example is the recently published archive of the banū bifām, an eleventh-century christian landowning family living in the fayyūm region. this archive, containing arabic legal documents, tax receipts, and business letters, was unearthed in the excavation of the naqlūn monastery in eastern fayyūm, situated in domestic buildings adjoining the church.50 the legal deeds that were written on parchment were rolled and stored within a leather pouch, while the tax receipts, business letters, and remaining legal documents that were written on paper were found in four small bundles of tightly folded documents, each wrapped in a strip of linen. the packages of documents were themselves preserved in a large earthenware jar.51 few papyrological documents have been unearthed in such well-defined archival circumstances. these archival techniques nonetheless provide a possible indicator of the way less easily contextualized documents may have been kept. this is because bundle archiving left material traces on the documents, many of which are still visible today. the large corpus of seventh-/thirteenth-century business letters, notes, and accounts found in the excavation of a house in quṣayr al-qadīm on the red sea coast offers a revealing example. these documents relate closely to the activities of a family of businessmen and thus appear to have been part of a household business archive. though discovered in a state that strongly suggests their deliberate disposal, several of the individual documents show signs of tight folding and some were even discovered tied with a cord.52 though the folding of documents was also related to their delivery, with addresses of letters often written on the outside of the folded document, the survival of bundles demonstrates that documents were also preserved in this state. the archival evidence from the banū bifām and that gleaned from the quṣayr documents show that archival practices of this somewhat informal variety prevailed in family, household, and business settings. the material traces that bundle archiving left behind are shared by documents in all the amirs’ dossiers examined here as well as by many of the other individual documents and fragments emerging from this administrative context. almost all of these documents show signs of having been tightly horizontally folded, and given the patterns of accidental damage such as wormholes on the documents, it is certain that many were preserved folded (traces of horizontal folding are visible in fig. 1 above). the implication, then, is that the amirs also kept bundle archives. 49. see, for instance, fournet, “archives and libraries,” 178. 50. christian gaubert and jean-michel mouton, hommes et villages du fayyoum dans la documentation papyrologique arabe (xe–xie siècles) (geneva: droz, 2014), 3–11. 51. ibid., 5–6; see also images of the bundles, 305–6. 52. li guo, commerce, culture, and community in a red sea port in the thirteenth century: the arabic documents from quseir (leiden: brill, 2004), esp. 108, 113, 115 (plates 2–3). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 358 this method of archiving, though apparently rather informal, was presumably well suited to the purposes of muqṭaʿs, whose careers in regions such as ashmūnayn and fayyūm were by their very nature peripatetic and time-limited. iqṭāʿs were, at least theoretically, not inheritable,53 and amirs were usually granted multiple small portions in different locales.54 bundle archives would have been easy to transport from place to place or to preserve in an office, however rudimentary. this method of archiving also corresponded to the function of these particular documents, which was an immediate, communicative one. the need to refer to the documents after the commands they contained had been carried out was probably limited.55 ease of access was not, therefore, a priority in a bundle archive of this kind of material. endorsements of petitions were certainly not the only kind of documentation used in the amir’s dīwān, which would also have had to deal with records related to the amirs’ other responsibilities, such as tax collection and the distribution of seed.56 nonetheless, the immediacy and overwhelmingly practical value of the petition and decree genres goes some way toward explaining the archival practices that we witness in such documents, determined above all by short-term needs. the reuse of paper: blazons and snowflakes evidence for the next stage in the documents’ lives comes in the form of traces of reuse. by the term “reuse” i refer, above all, to the secondary use of the paper supports on which documents were originally written. like the concept of a document’s afterlife, the concept of reuse has potential to be a rather ambiguous one. if defined broadly, it could cover an enormous variety of practices occurring at various stages in a document’s life. this could include predictable reuses that were part of the normative practices of producing these genres of documents, such as the writing of a decree on the verso of an already-written petition. it also, however, includes less predictable reuses, which appear to have no clear connection to the documents’ initial uses. this second kind of reuse can be roughly equated with the “recycling” of documents, also discussed in the scholarly literature, which implies 53. they were, however, sometimes handed down from father to son. for a concise discussion of this issue, see yossef rapoport, marriage, money and divorce in medieval islamic society (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2005), 21–22; rabie, financial system, 59–60; jo van steenbergen, order out of chaos: patronage, conflict and mamluk socio-political culture, 1341–1382 (leiden: brill, 2006), 78–82. research on this question has largely focused on individuals who were probably higher up the social ladder than were the amirs discussed in this article. see, e.g., ulrich haarmann, “the sons of mamluks as fief-holders in late medieval egypt,” in land tenure and social transformation in the middle east, ed. tarif khalidi, 141–68 (beirut: american university of beirut press, 1984); ulrich haarmann, “joseph’s law: the careers and activities of mamluk descendants before the ottoman conquest of egypt,” in the mamluks in egyptian politics and society, ed. thomas philipp and ulrich haarmann, 55–84 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998) . 54. see, e.g., rapoport, rural economy, esp. 149–50. 55. rustow has likewise noted the “short contractual time” of fatimid decrees: rustow, lost archive, e.g., 317. 56. sato, state and rural society, 84–91; rapoport, rural economy, 155–64. 359 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the complete repurposing of a document and its support.57 it is these kinds of reuse that are the most valuable for conceptualizing the life cycles of documents, as they reveal what happened to a document after it had performed the function for which it was initially produced. this form of reuse is the focus of the following section. the documents emerging from the amirs’ administration attest to a diverse and creative set of reuse practices. though the corpus thus seems an ideal place to explore the question of reuse, its diversity poses some challenges, not least because it is rarely clear what function the reuses served. perhaps the most fascinating, if puzzling, example is a single fragmentary document from the al-azkā dossier.58 the recto of this document contains two lines of a petition regarding the dispatch of four camel-couriers from the village of itlīdim, 13 km north of ashmūnayn, while the verso contains the responding decree, issued by aḥmad b. al-azkā. at a later date, the text of the petition was largely obscured by the addition of an illustrated blazon, containing an image of a sword on an upside-down-teardrop-shaped field whose central section was colored with red paint. on the verso, the text of the decree was covered by a circular decoration. though the exact form of the decoration is difficult to discern as much of the paint has flaked away, it contains a circular border in red with a black design in the middle against a background of gold or ochre paint (see fig. 2). figure 2: endorsed petition from the al-azkā dossier containing an illustrated blazon (a ch 23075), recto (left) and verso (right). (photograph: papyrussammlung, österreichische nationalbibliothek) the artistic reuse of this endorsed petition is curious. although doodles of various sorts appear with some regularity in the documents and fragments of the vienna collection, this example is evidently not a casual scribble. the use of colored paint and the quality of the 57. el-leithy, “living documents”; hirschler, “from archive to archival practices”; rustow, lost archive. the concept of “recycling” can be somewhat dismissive, packaging together the full range of reuse practices in a way that might obscure differences in practice and motivation. it is for this reason that i avoid it in the following section. see, for instance, criticism of the concept in hirschler, “document reuse,” 38. 58. a ch 23075. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 360 execution indicate that it followed a thought-out design and was produced with a specific purpose in mind. the presence of the military blazon is especially noteworthy.59 for one, it highlights the intrinsically military nature of the amir’s administration; the iqṭāʿ was, after all, first and foremost a method of paying for the armies that the sultan relied on to fight his military campaigns. bethany walker has highlighted the importance of blazons as visible emblems of legitimacy within the mamluk social hierarchy, especially from the early eighth/fourteenth century onward—contemporary, in fact, with the career of aḥmad b. al-azkā.60 the blazon here brands the paperwork with a military identity, confirming the connection between the authority invested in the documentation and the person of the amir. this strongly suggests that the reuse of this document took place within the same documentary setting that initially issued the decree it contains, that is, the amir’s own dīwān. the blazon itself also provides indications of the time frame that we should envision for this particular example of reuse. the upside-down-teardrop-shaped field of the blazon is characteristic of those used by amirs who paid allegiance to the sultan al-nāṣir muḥammad.61 aḥmad b. al-azkā, to whom the initial petition was addressed, was himself in the service of this same sultan, as we know from his nisba. diem dated the document to al-nāṣir muḥammad’s second reign: 698–708/1299–1309. although we cannot determine whether the blazon belonged to aḥmad, we can nonetheless be sure that both the production of the document and the addition of the blazon occurred within al-nāṣir muḥammad’s reign.62 we should probably not, therefore, envisage the period of this document’s archival preservation between its initial use and its reuse as a very extended one. the appearance of the blazon allows us, to some degree, to locate the reuse of this document temporally as well as spatially. these reflections do not, however, explain the reasons behind this creative reuse. what was the function of this attractively decorated piece of paper? it was evidently not a use for which the presence of legible traces of a rather mundane petition and its responding decree represented a hindrance. despite this, some lengths were gone to in order to invest this small fragment with the visual trappings of military prestige. perhaps the document should be interpreted as a practice illumination exercise, preparing images that were to adorn a 59. for a general discussion of mamluk-era heraldic blazons, see l. a. mayer, saracenic heraldry: a survey (oxford: clarendon press, 1933). see also nasser rabbat, “rank,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; bethany walker, “the ceramic correlates of decline in the mamluk sultanate: an analysis of late medieval sgraffito wares” (phd diss., university of toronto, 1998), 223–25; bethany walker, “ceramic evidence for political transitions in early mamluk egypt,” mamlūk studies review 8, no. 1 (2004): 54–68; doris behrens-abouseif, cairo of the mamluks: a history of the architecture and its culture (london: i. b. tauris, 2007), 38–39. 60. walker, “ceramic correlates of decline,” 254–55; walker, “ceramic evidence,” 68. 61. rachel ward pointed this out in her conference presentation “allegiance by design: mamluk blazons” at the international conference “material culture methods in the middle islamic period,” annemarie schimmel kolleg, university of bonn, december 9, 2017. 62. however, we cannot be certain which reign. his final reign stretched over more than thirty years: 709–41/1310–41. aḥmad b. al-azkā’s father, yūsuf, was also in the service of the same sultan, but it is not clear from the extant documents whether his son took over his position, or whether they were active during the same period. we cannot, therefore, limit the period any further. 361 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) more illustrious object. alternatively, the folding visible on the document suggests that it may have been intended for a more material use: to be wrapped around another object. the folding illustrated in the mock-up in fig. 3 is vertical rather than the more usual horizontal.63 it centers on the two roughly circular designs on the recto and the verso, meaning that when the document was folded one of these images would have been visible on the outside. the design on the verso was added to the document when its left side was folded, so the left-hand segment of the circular pattern appears on the recto of the unfolded document, to the right of the blazon (see fig. 3a, b, and c).64 the placement of the image across both sides of the paper is improbable, were this a simple example of painting practice. it is tempting to suggest, then, that it might have been used to wrap another folded document or a bundle thereof—serving as a label by which a small bundle archive was marked with the blazon of the amir. any object wrapped up with this document would have to have been roughly the size and shape of a folded document. this one instance of creative document reuse offers an exceptional and surprising insight into the potential range of repurposing that documents underwent. figure 3: mock-up of vertical folding pattern on a ch 23075; (a) recto, (b) verso, (c) folding of recto, (d) recto folded, (e) verso folded. (images by author) 63. original horizontal folding is also visible. 64. diem also described this physical layout, though he offered no comment on how these images should be interpreted. diem, arabische amtliche briefe, 266. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 362 it is also among the documents issued by aḥmad b. al-azkā that we find another kind of documentary reuse: the cutting of documents into shapes. this is, in fact, a reuse practice that appears with some prominence in the vienna collection at large. the document in question is another of aḥmad’s endorsed petitions, this time dealing with the murder of a woman by her husband.65 at some point, this document was cut into a triangular wedge shape, with a fold down the middle, and a large hole was pierced through the upper part of it (see fig. 4). as with the blazon document, it is not clear what function the cutting of the document into this shape might have served. with the cutting of documents, we must be particularly careful in drawing conclusions, as it is impossible to establish when such reuse might have occurred. it could, in fact, represent the work of modern antiquities dealers. one mamluk-era summons to the ashmūnayn qāḍī court, for instance, has a peculiar diagonal cut across the bottom of the sheet of paper, which diem suggested could have been made by a modern dealer to even out the damaged edges common to documents in the papyrological corpus.66 such “tidying up” of damaged documents does not seem to me to represent the same phenomenon as the practice of reshaping old documents into new forms, which is extremely widespread in the vienna collection and thus seems to preclude an explanation based on modern interference. figure 4: endorsed petition from the al-azkā dossier cut into a wedge shape (a ch 16220), recto (left) and verso (right). (photograph: papyrussammlung, österreichische nationalbibliothek) one of the major problems with cut-up documents is that thanks to their diminutive size, they furnish us with a smaller amount of text from which to glean context—to identify scripts or document types for dating purposes or to establish provenance. this is not always, however, an insurmountable obstacle. for instance, there are several other wedgeshaped documents or fragments thereof containing mamluk-era chancery-style scripts that 65. a ch 16220. 66. diem, arabische amtliche briefe, no. 78. 363 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) are similar to those found in the amirs’ dossiers.67 the careful cutting of these documents suggests that they were intended for quite a precise purpose, though the specificities elude us. beyond the wedge-shaped documents, more complex shaping is also visible. one document, probably originally an endorsed petition, was cut into an elaborate mirrorimage fleur-de-lis shape (see fig. 5).68 another was cut into a heart shape.69 yet others were fashioned into forms similar to paper “snowflakes,” small pieces being cut out of a folded piece of paper multiple layers at a time.70 it is difficult to get a meaningful grasp of this particular kind of document reuse. the wedge shapes bear superficial similarities to fragments of documents that were found reused as arrow flights during the excavation of the citadel of damascus. these documents too were cut into triangular wedge shapes, in this case designed to improve the aerodynamic qualities of an airborne arrow or crossbow bolt.71 there is no evidence to suggest that the vienna documents were used in such a way.72 nonetheless, this usage alerts us to the possibly eclectic range of reuses to which old documents were put and at which the cut-up documents in the vienna collection may hint. these documents may, for instance, have been cut up to provide structural or decorative figure 5: endorsed petition (?) cut into a fleur-de-lis shape (a ch 25002a), recto (probably upper) and verso (probably lower). (photograph: papyrussammlung, österreichische nationalbibliothek) 67. a ch 2434; 2143; 3196. 68. a ch 25002a. 69. a ch 25610. the function of the original document is unclear. 70. a ch 25611; 25655. the context of the first of these is entirely uncertain; the second is almost certainly from the mamluk era. 71. david nicolle, late mamlūk military equipment (damascus: institut français du proche-orient, 2011), esp. 151–65, 315. 72. david nicolle, who first flagged this particular reuse phenomenon in the damascus material, considered it unlikely that the wedge-shaped documents i found within the vienna collection were used for this purpose; personal communication. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 364 elements of book bindings or other objects.73 alternatively, they may represent the random fiddling of bored or procrastinating scribes in the amir’s dīwān. whatever the reality, the evidence of reuse that such documents offer provides yet another tantalizing glimpse into their complex and multifaceted life cycles. the methods of reuse discussed here differ in two significant ways from those that have earned prominence in previous scholarly literature. first, most scholarship on the subject has emphasized textual reuses of documents; that is, cases in which an old document was used as a support for later written texts. this category includes the reuse of complete documents in the manufacture of manuscripts, such as in al-maqrīzī’s autograph manuscript identified by frédéric bauden and in the damascene majmūʿ manuscripts investigated by hirschler.74 in these cases, old documents, some of which contained a considerable amount of blank paper, were used to build manuscript quires. aside from these examples, probably the most famous example of the textual reuse of old documents is the cairo geniza. the main explanatory logic behind the preservation of many arabic documents in the geniza is their reuse by jewish scribes for the writing of hebrew-script liturgical and scriptural texts.75 the older documents thus became a new writing support for texts that did not require a clean, new surface.76 examples of this kind of textual reuse can almost certainly be found within the vienna collection, though few appear in the corpus examined here. some documents containing texts of these administrative genres might be classified as scrap paper, containing drafts of documents or brief notes, though this represents a rather different phenomenon from the textual reuse of older documents.77 in such cases, the document may have begun its life as scrap paper. the nontextual reuses identified above are challenging to interpret, but they serve to highlight a broader range of document reuses than has previously earned comment. the second major difference between the reuse practices examined in this article and the other, better-known examples is that most of the latter have been found reused “in an unsuspected place,” to borrow bauden’s expression.78 that is, the context of their reuse is separate from that of their production and initial use. they were reused outside the 73. such as examples found in bindings for quire supports, sewing guards, and binding filler: hirschler, “document reuse,” 36; rustow, lost archive, 86. more obscurely, mamluk-period documents have been found sewn into the lining of headgear, probably to stiffen the fabric. see, for instance, documents held in the museum of islamic art in berlin (inv. no. i. 6374) and in the metropolitan museum of art in new york (accession no. 46.156.11b). thanks to miriam kühn, irina seekamp, and shireen el kassem for drawing my attention to this material. 74. bauden, “mamlūk chancery documents”; hirschler, “document reuse.” 75. rustow, lost archive, e.g., 7–8, 383. 76. reuse was also sometimes dictated by motivations beyond material practicality. see, e.g., hirschler, “document reuse,” 38–39. 77. one example is a decree issued by the amir and dawādār sayf al-dīn tūghān whose verso contains a drafted receipt as well as a series of intriguing notes relating, if my reading is correct, to various mosques and other pious institution in cairo: a ch 8984. diem edited the recto of this document and also offered a reading of the text of the receipt on the verso: diem, arabische amtliche briefe, no. 4. 78. bauden, “mamlūk chancery documents.” 365 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) setting of their original archiving. for the corpus examined here, on the other hand, the reuses i have identified seem likely to have occurred within the same setting that received and subsequently archived the original documents: the amir’s dīwān. this conclusion is most strikingly illustrated by the blazon document but can, i believe, be extended to other documents whose long-term preservation together, and with the blazon document, implies shared origins in a common site. the difference in the locale of reuse between this and previously discussed corpora is not indicative of the existence of an entirely unique range of reuse practices occurring in the muqṭaʿs’ administration. rather, the documents examined here simply represent a corpus of reused material the like of which has not survived within other collections.79 documents from an amir’s dīwān may have been extracted for reuse outside this immediate setting, perhaps also for textual reuses like the better-known examples, but such documents were not then preserved alongside this corpus. it is worth pointing out that the documents that survived in this setting were potentially of limited use for textual reuse, being too small to offer substantial writing surfaces. though any assertions about the site of these documents’ reuse must remain tentative, the corpus seems to me to represent the flotsam and jetsam of a functioning office. the material examined here thus highlights the fact that documents could progress through multiple life stages even within a single space or administrative domain. the discovery of documents in surprising locations seemingly distant from the initial sites of their production and archiving is tantalizing, compelling historians to solve real mysteries in the documents’ life cycles. nonetheless, the recognition of extended archival life cycles should not be confined to the investigation of such dramatic shifts. the reuse practices identified here allow us to trace the documents’ evolution, even within a single setting, from records important for their textual content to objects of primarily material significance. although the text of the original documents may have continued to hold some meaning, it was the physicality of these documents, that is, their material support, that offered the most promise and value to those intent on their reuse. the eccentric reuses that we see within this corpus, then, bear witness to the gradually shifting value that the documents assumed at different stages in their extended life cycles. destruction and disposal in the final stage of the documents’ lives, it seems neither their textual nor their material value was significant enough to justify their continued preservation. at this point, the documents were deliberately destroyed and disposed of. we do not have direct evidence that the specific documents discussed here came to light through excavations of medieval rubbish heaps, but their materiality shows clear traces of deliberate destruction. almost all the decrees and endorsed petitions were ripped, cut, or shredded. for many of the documents in the corpus, only the top half has been located within the collection. it is possible that many of the bottom halves are also contained in the collection, but in the absence of the amirs’ distinctive signatures that adorn the top parts they are more 79. except, for instance, in geniza-like collections. see more below. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 366 challenging to identify.80 it seems that the documents were destroyed in a relatively systematic way by being either torn in half or shredded into strips.81 disposal indicates that a document’s custodian made a conscious decision that there was no further need to preserve it. nonetheless, the deliberate way in which the disposal was carried out also reveals something about the perceived value of the document’s content. the picture that has emerged so far of these documents’ life cycles suggests that the matters they dealt with were trivial from the point of view of the mamluk administration. the deliberate destruction of documents, however, implies that their content still maintained some importance.82 the need to rip the documents at the time of their disposal points to a fear that they retained some value: perhaps their content was deemed confidential, or there was a risk of forgery or other reuse not considered suitable for such documentation. this anxiety is clearer in the case of legal documents, since spurious claims made on the basis of out-of-date or counterfeit documentation might have led to real problems in the courts. such concerns would also have been relevant in an administrative context, where documents containing details pertaining to taxation and criminal justice would have required similarly tactful handling.83 alternatively, the shredding of documents might not reflect perceptions of the documents’ content so much as represent a symbolic act of disposal. instances of such symbolic practices can be found elsewhere, for instance in the damascus papers, which include several marriage contracts that were ripped up at the time of divorce, with divorce documents composed on the verso of the remaining half.84 in such cases, the tearing of the document in half seems to represent not the termination of the validity of the document’s text but the breaking of the legal ties binding the husband and wife—a symbolic destruction that extended beyond the document itself to reflect the social reality of the legal situation recorded in it.85 it is not clear whether we witness such direct symbolism within the corpus examined here. the documents in an amir’s dīwān might have taken on a certain emblematic role, echoing the social capital that holding an iqṭāʿ endowed upon a lowerranking amir. perhaps the ripping up of these documents represented the end of an amir’s tenure as muqṭaʿ and the corresponding decommissioning of his archive, or the accession 80. there are some fragments within the corpus examined here that do not contain the signature; e.g., a ch 5156; 5847; 6467; 16196. only two of the documents in the al-azkā dossier, a ch 12502 and 25677, and two in the bahāʾ al-dīn dossier, a ch 366 and 25673c, preserve the full length of the document. 81. in this way, this corpus shows similarities with the quṣayr corpus, many of whose documents were ripped up “by human hand” or “kneaded into a paper ball of sorts and then tossed away”; guo, commerce, culture, and community, 104. 82. see, e.g., rustow, lost archive, 412–13. 83. see, for instance, the destruction of dates in decrees from the fatimid chancery: ibid., 296–97. 84. jean-michel mouton, dominique sourdel, and janine sourdel-thomine, mariage et séparation à damas au moyen âge: un corpus de 62 documents juridiques inédits entre 337/948 et 698/1299 (paris: académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2013), nos. 6, 38, 35. 85. the significance of marriage contracts as bearers of social and economic, as well as legal, status is discussed in rapoport, marriage, money, and divorce, 54–55. 367 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) of a different amir to the role.86 alternatively, we might interpret the deliberate shredding of documents as simply symbolic of the moment of disposal, rather as one might shred revision notes after sitting an exam. whether done to prevent the reconstruction of the text or for more symbolic purposes, shredding can be seen as a conscious marker of the document’s shift to another life stage, in which its archival value was ultimately lost. archival spaces: documents lying around? although the three life stages examined above emerge quite clearly in the corpus examined here, significant questions remain about some of the more concrete aspects of the documents’ progression through these phases. the identification of extended documentary afterlives and the material ways in which the stages of these lives remain visible on the documents highlight the need to identify the physical spaces in which these lives played out. the preservation of documents, insofar as they constitute physical objects, necessarily requires physical spaces. though the specific physical sites of these documents’ medieval preservation are now lost to us, in the remainder of this article i explore the implications of their life cycles for understanding contemporary archival spaces. the first point to note is that the documents provide insights into the nature of the amir’s dīwān itself. the spaces in which they were drawn up constituted reasonably elaborate offices, suited to dealing with the paperwork that the amir’s administrative roles entailed and boasting a well-trained and skillful staff. this is evident, first of all, in the pervasive presence of consistent cursive chancery-style scripts and in the amirs’ attractively written calligraphic signatures. beyond this, the blazon document reveals that resources and skills for illumination were also cultivated within these spaces—expertise that is unexpected within such a low-level administrative milieu. the amirs’ administrative apparatus was clearly not merely practical and rudimentary. document production and reuse took place in spaces that were fit for purpose, characterized by the presence of skilled scribal, even artistic, personnel. the life cycles of the documents and especially the patterns of their reuse also shed some light on their longer-term preservation status. it appears that much of this material went through a phase of simply “lying around” before its deliberate disposal, a period of casual storage that was not necessarily deliberately calculated by the documents’ custodians. in this state, the documents gradually lost their archival value as the perceived necessity of preserving their textual content progressively declined. by the time of their reuse, the material value of these old documents overshadowed their textual value to such an extent that reuse invested them only with new material meanings, not with textual ones. though the notion may appear rather vague, documents lying around are, in fact, profoundly important for understanding the nature of archival spaces in this milieu. these documents remained in a space, either deliberately deposited and kept or simply left there, long enough for their perceived value and meaning to transform. casual bundle archives containing documents whose texts were of relatively immediate value and whose long-term preservation may have been of limited functional use might have been particularly prone 86. thanks to yossef rapoport for this suggestion. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 368 to this treatment. one can imagine such bundles kept on the shelves or the floor of a functioning office until such time as a clear-out took place or office staff requiring scrap paper saw fit to mine them for resources. the lying-around stage should, then, be envisaged as an important part of the spatial and temporal backdrop to the progressing life cycles of the documents. the most fitting point of reference for documents lying around within this historical milieu is, of course, the cairo geniza and the wider canvas of geniza-like practices prevalent within the medieval (as well as ancient and modern) middle east.87 in genizas, documents lie around, sometimes for centuries. indeed, that is theoretically the whole point of a geniza: preserving texts simply because it was not considered acceptable to destroy them, rather than because of a perceived functional value.88 it is this element of geniza-like practices that has led to their characterization as “counter-archival,” which highlights the fact that preservation in such depositories has no implications for the perceived archival value or future accessibility of their contents.89 the comparison of archaeologically unearthed material with geniza collections is not new.90 mark cohen, for instance, has suggested that the quṣayr documents might be interpreted as an “islamic geniza” owing to the physical state in which the documents were found, which indicated that they had been deliberately shredded.91 as we have already seen, the condition in which the quṣayr documents were unearthed is not so different from that of the corpus examined here. should we, then, see this corpus as constituting part of a geniza-like collection? what does this perspective imply for our understanding of the space in which the documents’ lives were played out? certainly, the documents lay around somewhere: in a functioning office, a cupboard or storehouse, or perhaps even a dedicated geniza-like space designed more for the documents’ entombment than for their accessibility. it is even possible that the documents were ultimately disposed of in a geniza-like depository, rather than being thrown onto a communal rubbish heap. in view of the ambiguities of the documents’ modern discovery, it is possible that they remained in such a depository until they were unearthed from its ruins. nineteenth-century archaeological excavations occurred alongside extensive digging for fertilizer (sibākh) by egyptian farmers, an activity that also furnished documents for the antiquities market and often entailed the destruction of medieval buildings, whose organic 87. joseph sadan, “genizah and genizah-like practices in islamic and jewish traditions: customs concerning the disposal of worn-out sacred books in the middle ages, according to an ottoman source,” bibliotheca orientalis 43, no. 1–2 (1986): 36–58; mark r. cohen, “geniza for islamicists, islamic geniza, and the ‘new cairo geniza,’” harvard middle eastern and islamic review 7 (2006): 129–45. 88. sadan, “genizah-like practices,” 36–58. for a welcome reappraisal of the motivations, both religious and social, behind geniza-like depositories, see rustow, lost archive, 29–31. 89. hirschler, “from archive to archival practices,” esp. 3–7; jürgen paul, “archival practices in the muslim world prior to 1500,” in bausi et al., manuscripts and archives, 339–60. 90. and, indeed, the other way round: marina rustow, heresy and the politics of community: the jews of the fatimid caliphate (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2008), xx–xxi. 91. cohen, “geniza for islamicists,” 138. 369 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) construction materials served as excellent compost.92 given the nature of the vienna collection, hypotheses regarding its documents’ contemporary preservation and disposal must remain conjecture. nonetheless, the ambiguous status of documents preserved in geniza-like depositories offers a fitting backdrop against which to frame and historically contextualize the phenomenon of documents lying around. this kind of casual storage shows that it is the point in time when the documents lose their archival value that can reveal the most profound insights into the physical spaces they inhabited. this is because such moments left material traces on the documents, such as evidence of reuse or destruction, which by their very nature encourage us to situate them within a physical world. in addition, the recognition that periods of lying around may have punctuated the progression of these documents’ life cycles highlights the human factors influencing archival preservation. not all of these can be understood as well-planned, calculated, or deliberate.93 from the little we know about it, the amir’s dīwān seems just the kind of setting in which one might expect piles or bundles of documents to lie around and be ignored, gradually forgotten about, and later rediscovered. we should, then, seek to understand the archival spaces of the muqṭaʿs’ administration as such multifunctional sites of administrative and documentary activity in which the lives of documents sometimes haphazardly progressed. conclusion in this article, i have relied primarily on the tool of materiality to examine the afterlives of documents pertaining to the administration of low-ranking mamluk muqṭaʿs in parts of egypt distant from the political capital. in examining this small corpus of decrees and endorsed petitions my aim has not been to provide a definitive interpretation but instead to explore the documentary ecologies prevailing in this underexplored administrative milieu. the preservation context of the material in the vienna collection makes it challenging, even impossible, to test many of the assertions i have made, and it is important to acknowledge that there are aspects of these documents’ lives of which we can never be certain. even so, i have shown that it is possible to outline the gradual progression of the documents through various life stages in spite of the fragmentary nature of this corpus, or indeed because of it. the documents’ afterlives reveal the shifting values attributed to documents at different stages of their lives. documents initially preserved in bundle archives for the text they contained gradually took on a greater material significance, their supports offering raw material for a range of enigmatic reuses. later, the deliberate shredding of much of the material indicates the symbolic end of one period of preservation or use, to be followed 92. cuvigny, “finds of papyri,” esp. 32–35. compare also with the quṣayr documents, which were unearthed in the excavation of a house. guo, commerce, culture, and community, xi–xii, 1–28. 93. it is instructive here to cite the archivist terry cook, who has flagged the way in which “archivists have … traditionally masked much of the messiness of records … from researchers, presenting instead a well-organized, rationalized, monolithic view of record collection … that very often never existed that way in operational reality …”; terry cook, “the archive(s) is a foreign country: historians, archivists, and the changing archival landscape,” canadian historical review 90, no. 3 (2009): 527–28. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the paperwork of a mamluk muqṭaʿ • 370 by their disposal or discarding. the material way in which such shifts manifest on the documents foregrounds the physical aspects of documentary life cycles. this allows us to characterize the archival spaces utilized by the actors involved in administration. the mamluk amir’s dīwān emerges as a multifunctional administrative space. well equipped and served by highly trained personnel, the dīwān was both an active office and a site of document storage, representing the spatial backdrop against which we witness the unfolding of these documents’ lives. identifying the life cycles of the documents is therefore valuable not only for its own sake but also for shedding further light on the still-mysterious documentary activities of mamluk muqṭaʿs. the ordinarily overlooked moments in which documents were “lying around” have emerged as key to understanding these archival spaces. comparable to discussions surrounding geniza-like practices, this phenomenon of casual storage encourages us to envisage various possible modes of preservation for these documents. documents lying around can perhaps even offer a different way of thinking about genizas, moving beyond the characterization of such practices as simply “counter-archival.” “counter-archival” speaks above all to a scholarly endeavor to discern whether a document or collection is or is not an “archive” or, at the very least, “archival.” as this article has tried to show, a more rewarding task is to investigate the full documentary ecology, the broader culture of documentation that prevailed in a particular historical and administrative context.94 i argue that documents lying around are an important part of this ecology. they reveal the transitions in the meaning granted to documents over the course of their complex lives within the context of physical spaces whose characteristics were determined by specific human needs and activities. above all, documents lying around bring to the fore the potential ambiguity of a document’s value, even to its custodians. the producers, keepers, and reusers of documents may have been uncertain as to whether preservation was, or was going to become, necessary or profitable. rustow’s characterization of geniza-preserved documents as “in limbo” is thus a useful one, and it can be applied well beyond the corpus for which she intended it.95 this limbo might be seen to refer not only to an intermediate stage between calculated archival preservation and definitive disposal or destruction but also to a state of uncertainty about the potential textual or material value of a document among the people in whose functional space it lay around. we witness what might be designated incidental archiving, whereby documents were kept long-term as a by-product of the preservation and daily use of other documents within the same spaces. documents lying around may, ultimately, be key to avoiding an overly motive-driven and rationalistic view of archival practices, emphasizing instead the contingencies of circumstance and the potentially significant impact of human uncertainty. 94. for the question of “archives” versus “cultures of documentation,” see james pickett and paolo sartori, “from the archetypical archive to cultures of documentation,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 62 (2019): 773–98. 95. rustow, lost archive, e.g., 1–2, 402. 371 • daisy livingston al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) bibliography sources documents from the vienna papyrus collection are cited using the abbreviation 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vandorpe, katelijn. “archives and dossiers.” in the oxford handbook of papyrology, edited by roger s. bagnall, 216–55. oxford: oxford university press, 2009. walker, bethany. “the ceramic correlates of decline in the mamluk sultanate: an analysis of late medieval sgraffito wares.” phd dissertation, university of toronto, 1998. ———. “ceramic evidence for political transitions in early mamluk egypt.” mamlūk studies review 8, no. 1 (2004): 1–114. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 116-149 the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession and the origins of ḥijāzī opposition* abed el-rahman tayyara cleveland state university (a.tayyara@csuohio.edu) 1. introduction the establishment of the umayyad caliphate by muʿāwiya b. abī sufyān (r. 41–60/661– 680) represents a new stage in early islamic history. not only did he come to power under contentious circumstances, but he also initiated disputed religio-political transformations.1 * this article is dedicated to my parents (arifa and mahmud) for their endless love and support. 1. on muʿāwiya’s introduction of new religious rituals, see al-maqdisī, kitāb al-badʾ wa-l-taʾrīkh (beirut: maktabat khayyāṭ, n.d.), 6:5–6; abdesselam cheddadi, les arabes et l’appropriation de l’histoire: émergences © 2020 abed el-rahman tayyara. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercialnoderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. abstract this article concerns early representations in arabic-islamic sources of ḥijāzī opposition to the dynastic succession initiated by muʿāwiya b. abī sufyān shortly before his death in 41/661. the study emphasizes the importance of qurʾānic exegesis for understanding the origin of the ḥijāzī-umayyad debate over rightful caliphal succession. it also demonstrates that examining how this episode is depicted in various literary genres offers a wider perspective on the construction of historical narratives in terms of provenance, protagonists, and objectives. the analysis of tafsīr interpretations of q 46:17, which serve as the article’s underpinning, reveals that the umayyad court promoted the view that ʿabd al-raḥmān b. abī bakr was the rebellious son mentioned in this verse. depictions of this dispute in the ḥadīth, ansāb, and adab genres clearly connect marwān b. alḥakam with this interpretation after ʿabd al-raḥmān questioned muʿāwiya’s appointment of his son yazīd as his successor. the portrayals of the ḥijāzī-umayyad debate in taʾrīkh accounts represent a different perspective, one that shows a transition from a tribal and provincial setting to a broader caliphal political framework. the gradual shift from a reliance on medinan transmitters to a focus on iraqi authorities testifies to this orientation, as does the appearance of new leading protagonists. ʿabd al-raḥmān’s central role as a leader of the ḥijāzī opposition to the umayyads in the tafsīr, ḥadīth, and adab literature becomes secondary and overshadowed by other ḥijāzī figures, particularly ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr. mailto:a.tayyara%40csuohio.edu?subject= 117 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) his most controversial venture was turning the office of the caliph into a dynastic monarchy by asking muslims to pledge allegiance to his oldest son yazīd (r. 60–64/680–683). this shift also brought about modifications to the succession traditions established by previous caliphs,2 particularly abū bakr al-ṣiddīq (r. 11–13/632–634) and ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb (r. 13–23/634–644). besides hereditary succession, muʿāwiya also introduced changes to the accession ritual3 and the oath of allegiance (bayʿa) ceremony.4 thus, the question of rightful succession and legitimate leadership lay at the center of islamic religio-political discourses. the main opposition to muʿāwiya’s plan for dynastic succession came from the ḥijāz,5 and it was spearheaded particularly by medinan leaders. in response, the umayyads adopted certain strategies to silence opposition: they used force and constructed counternarratives6 that could bestow religio-political legitimacy upon their caliphate.7 this article examines portrayals of the ḥijāzī opposition to muʿāwiya’s initiation of dynastic succession in early islamic sources from different literary perspectives. it pivots around the analysis of early interpretations of qurʾān 46:17, seeking to identify connections between the umayyad-ḥijāzī dispute over succession and the circulation of competing interpretations regarding the identity of the rebellious son mentioned in this verse. it also et premiers développements de l’historiographie jusqu’au ii/viii siècle (paris: sindbad-actes sud, 2004), 38; najam haider, “muʿāwiya in ḥijāz: the study of a tradition,” in law and tradition in classical islamic thought: studies in honor of professor hossein modarressi, ed. michael cook et al., 43–64 (new york: palgrave, 2013). 2. hugh kennedy, caliphate: a history of an idea (new york: basic books, 2016), 34–38; andrew marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy: accession and succession in the first muslim empire (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009), 81–83; stephen humphreys, muʿawiya ibn abi sufyan: from arabia to empire (oxford: oneworld, 2006), 98–101; khaled keshk, the historians’ muʿāwiya: the depiction of muʿāwiya in the early islamic sources (saarbrücken: verlag dr. müller, 2008), 142–75. 3. muʿāwiya’s accession ritual was a combination of roman christian kingship and ḥijāzī religio-political traditions. see marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy, 89–90. 4. since the inception of the caliphate the bayʿa served as the central ritual through which muslim dignitaries and tribal leaders pledged allegiance to the newly elected caliph. turning the caliphate into a hereditary position, the umayyads introduced the institution of wilāyat al-ʿahd (succession). in doing so, they transformed the bayʿa “from a consensus-based, tribal custom into an instrument of monarchic power.” marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy, 40–44, 83. 5. for a good discussion on this phase of islamic history, see humphreys, muʿawiya ibn abi sufyan, 77–84; matthew gordon, the rise of islam (westport, ct: greenwood press, 2005), 33–35; mizrap polat, der umwandlungsprozess vom kalifat zur dynastie: regierungspolitik und religion beim ersten umayyadenherrscher muʿāwiya ibn abī sufyān (frankfurt am main: peter lang, 1999), 56–65; gerald hawting, the first dynasty of islam: the umayyad caliphate, ad 661–750 (carbondale: southern illinois press, 1987), 34–35. 6. for the use of the past and genealogy, see cheddadi, les arabes, 55–63. 7. for discussions on the umayyads’ concept of caliphate (khilāfa) and the religious foundations of their political power, see patricia crone and martin hinds, god’s caliph: religious authority in the first centuries of islam (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1986), 24–42, 58–80; uri rubin, “prophets and caliphs: the biblical foundation of the umayyad authority,” in method and theory in the study of islamic origins, ed. herbert berg, 87–99 (leiden: brill, 2003); fred donner, “umayyad efforts at legitimization: the umayyads’ silent heritage,” in umayyad legacies: medieval memories from syria to spain, ed. antoine borrut and paul cobb, 187–211 (leiden: brill, 2010); wadad al-qadi, “the religious foundation of late umayyad ideology and practice,” in the articulation of early islamic state structures, ed. fred donner, 37–79 (aldershot: ashgate, 2012). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 118 explores how the interplay between these qurʾānic commentaries and other literary genres can enhance our understanding of the dynamics affecting narrative construction in terms of arrangements, settings, main characters, motives, and objectives. this study thereby touches on a number of topics pertinent to the study of the formative period of islam. such is the case with power relationships between the umayyad central government and regional ḥijāzī leadership,8 the emergence of new islamic religious elite,9 and the transmission of reports from the ḥijāz (particularly medina) to other centers of learning, such as basra and kufa.10 the examination of these themes also offers insights into the evolution of early islamic historical writing. methodologically, the article rests primarily on a source-critical comparative analysis of relevant reports. the evaluation of the chains of transmission (isnāds) and relevant biographical details about the narrators as well as about some protagonists are essential to a full appreciation of the provenance, evolution, and reliability of these reports. diverse literary genres, such as qurʾānic exegesis (tafsīr), prophetic tradition (ḥadīth), belles-lettres (adab), and historical narratives (akhbār), are vital to this study. before we analyze the different views of q 46:17 presented in the commentaries, a few words ought to be said about modern scholarship on the umayyad period. 2. the umayyads in modern scholarship the umayyad caliphate represents a significant stage in the formative period of islam and one that is regarded as controversial by modern scholars. the complexity of this subject stems from the nature of the early islamic sources, which are not contemporaneous to the events they purport to describe. two major procedural premises inform modern scholarship on this period, the first of which concerns the question of the authenticity of early islamic traditions. second, scholars differ on the methodological approaches and strategies best suited to investigating this stage of islamic history. this debate permeates all areas of islamic studies, including qurʾānic studies,11 qurʾānic exegesis,12 prophetic 8. for discussion on the relations between caliphs and ḥijāzī elites during the second/eighth century, see harry munt, “caliphal imperialism and hijazi elites in the second/eighth century,” al-masāq 28 (2016): 6–21. 9. asad ahmed applies matrilineal lineages to examine the sociopolitical networks that five ḥijāzī families developed during the umayyad and eary abbasid period. see the religious elite of the early islamic hijaz: five prosopographical case studies (oxford, 2011). 10. medina was the first center of learning in islam, and many companions and successors moved from there to the two iraqi cities of kufa and basra. scott lucas, constructive critics, ḥadīth literature, and the articulation of sunnī islam: the legacy of the generation of ibn saʿd, ibn maʿīn, and ibn ḥanbal (leiden: brill, 2004), 221–37, 332–58. 11. angelika neuwirth, “qurʾan and history: a disputed relationship; some reflections on qurʾanic history and history of the qurʾan,” journal of qurʾānic studies 5, no. 1 (2003): 1–18, esp. 1–11. 12. for an informative discussion about this debate, see harald motzki, analysing muslim traditions: studies in legal, exegetical and maghāzī ḥadīth (leiden: brill, 2010), 231–303; idem, “the question of the authenticity of muslim traditions reconsidered: a review article,” in method and theory, ed. herbert berg, 211–57; herbert berg, the development of exegesis in early islam: the authenticity of muslim literature from the formative period (richmond: curzon, 2003), 6–64; c. h. m. versteegh, arabic grammar and qurʾānic exegesis in early islam (leiden: brill, 1993), 41–61. 119 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) tradition, jurisprudence,13 and historical narratives.14 besides the question of the reliability of the sources, scholars of the umayyad caliphate face two additional obstacles. the first is that almost all materials available on the umayyads were composed during the caliphate of their sworn enemies, the abbasids. hence, the construction of the umayyads’ historical memory was greatly inspired by an abbasid ideological agenda that manipulated authors’ historical objectives. second, these abbasidinspired portrayals of the umayyads, being composed in iraq, were geographically distant from the center of the umayyad caliphate.15 modern scholars, therefore, have to resort to more effective methodologies and strategies for a better understanding of the umayyad period.16 the application of different genres to illuminate the umayyad-ḥijāzī dispute over hereditary succession is this article’s methodological contribution. 3. who is the rebellious son in qurʾān 46:17? this section considers divergent views on the identity of the rebellious son in early commentaries on qurʾān 46:17 (sūrat al-aḥqāf). the verse reads: the one who said to his parents: “uff to you; are you promising me that i will be raised up when generations before me had already passed while they cried for the help of god?” [the parents’ response:] “woe to you! believe! indeed, the promise of god is true.” but he said: “these are nothing but the tales of previous generations.” the verse depicts a disobedient son whom his devout parents are entreating to renounce paganism and embrace the path of god. the son not only rudely defies these appeals but also dismisses the imminence of the day of judgment as a worthless tale of the ancients. besides the theme of infidelity (kufr), the verse emphasizes rebelliousness to parents (ʿuqūq), which amounts to a grave sin in islam.17 the qurʾānic exegetical tradition is full of references to this verse, seemingly, as we shall see, for its political implications. we ought to remember 13. harald motzki, the origins of islamic jurisprudence: meccan fiqh before the classical schools, trans. marion katz (leiden: brill, 2002), 1–49. 14. fred donner, narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1998), 1–31; albrecht noth and lawrence conrad, the early arabic historical tradition: a sourcecritical study, trans. michael bonner (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1994), 2–25. 15. steven judd, religious scholars and the umayyads: piety-minded supporters of the marwānid caliphate (london: routledge, 2014), 3–20; antoine borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–909) (leiden: brill, 2011), 11–37; idem, “the future of the past: historical writing in early islamic syria and the umayyad memory,” in power, patronage, and memory in early islam, ed. alain george and andrew marsham, 275–300 (oxford: oxford university press, 2018). 16. tayeb el-hibri, “the redemption of umayyad memory by the ʿ abbāsids,” journal of near eastern studies 61, no. 4 (2002): 241–65; antoine borrut, “la memoria omeyyade: les omeyyades entre souvenir et oubli dans les sources narratives islamiques,” in borrut and cobb, umayyad legacies, 25–61, esp. 33–35. 17. the qurʾān and the ḥadīth literature are full of admonitory references to rebelliousness to parents. see qurʾān 2:83; 4:36; 17:23–24; 29:6; 29:14; 31:14; 46:15. see also ʿabd al-razzāq al-ṣanʿānī, al-muṣannaf (beirut: al-majlis al-ʿilmī, 1983), 11:163–67; al-bukhārī, ṣaḥīḥ al-bukhārī, ed. aḥmad shākir and muḥammad ʿabd al-bāqī (cairo: dār ibn al-haytham, 2004), 707–8 (nos. 5975–77). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 120 that the early tafsīr tradition emerged initially to provide brief lexical explanations and clarity regarding syntactical ambiguities in selected qurʾānic verses.18 the use of qurʾānic exegesis to gain political profit seems to have arisen at a later stage.19 early qurʾānic commentaries on q 46:17, which can be traced back as early as to the mid-second/eighth century, center on the identity of the rebellious son in this verse. the first of four major interpretations identifies the disobedient son as ʿabd al-raḥmān b. abī bakr (d. 53/673). this view, henceforth referred to as the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative, is the preponderant one in the commentaries. the second interpretation reflects early counterreports to the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. the third view associates the disobedient son in q 46:17 with other sons of abū bakr. the fourth position sees the rebellious son as a broad concept, unconnected to any specific individual. an examination of the transmission of these views contributes to understanding their provenance and evolution. the authorities affiliated with these interpretations are, as we shall see, absent from commentaries composed before the beginning of the third/ninth century, particularly in presentations of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. identifying the authorities for these competing views involves dealing with a number of contradictions and inconsistencies, especially as few of these tafsīr accounts provide full isnāds. finally, basran scholars, who maintained scholarly connections with medinan authorities, are notably present in the transmission histories of these reports. the following subsections offer a detailed analysis of the origins and evolution of the four interpretations of q 46:17. 3.1 the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative the identification of ʿabd al-raḥmān b. abī bakr with the rebellious son in q 46:17 is, as previously mentioned, the predominant view in early islamic tafsīr works. given his centrality to these interpretations, it is instructive first to outline his biography. he was the oldest son of the first caliph, abū bakr, and the full brother of ʿāʾisha (d. 58/678), the prophet’s wife. he had also two half-brothers, ʿabd allāh (d. 8/630) and muḥammad (d. 38/658), and two half-sisters, asmāʾ (d. 73/692) and umm kulthūm. ʿabd al-raḥmān’s pre-islamic past somewhat tarnished his biographical image. first, during the battles of badr and uḥud he sided with the quraysh against the muslims, and he even sought to meet his 18. there is debate among modern scholars about how and when the tafsīr tradition began. some trace its genesis to ibn ʿabbās (d. 67/687). however, others consider him a mythical figure and they place the beginning of the exegetical tradition somewhere in the second/eighth century. claude gilliot, “the beginnings of qurʾanic exegesis,” in the qurʾan: formative interpretation, ed. andrew rippin, 1–27 (aldershot: ashgate variorum, 1999); motzki, analysing muslim traditions, 231–303; fred leemhuis, “ origins and early development of the tafsīr tradition,” in approaches to the history of the interpretation of the qurʾān, ed. andrew rippin, 13–30 (piscataway, nj: gorgias press, 2013). 19. versteegh, arabic grammar, 63–65, 84–89; gilliot, “beginnings of qurʾanic exegesis,” 20–22; y. goldfeld, “the development of theory on qurʾānic exegesis in islamic scholarship,” studia islamica 67 (1988): 5–27, esp. especially 14–16; idem, “discussion and debate in early commentaries of the qurʾān,” in with reverence for the word: medieval scriptural exegesis in judaism, christianity, and islam, ed. jane mcauliffe et al., 320–28 (oxford: oxford university press, 2003). 121 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) father in a duel at badr, which was prevented thanks to the prophet’s intervention.20 second, he converted to islam relatively late, around the time of the signing of the ḥudaybiya treaty in 6/628. finally, islamic sources refer to ʿabd al-raḥmān’s passionate love of a ghassānid woman named laylā, the daughter of al-jūdiyy. he is reported to have been so consumed by his passion that he composed amatory verses for the woman, which reverberate in the islamic sources.21 this biographical background elucidates ʿabd al-raḥmān’s blackened image in terms of religiosity, earnestness, and precedence in islam. perhaps his past made him an easy target of criticism for his detractors, especially since he was the oldest son of the first caliph who served as a model of devotion and legitimate rulership. ʿabd al-raḥmān’s biography provides the justification for his identification as the disobedient son in q 46:17 in ibn ʿaṭiyya al-andalusī’s (d. 541/1146) tafsīr work, which justifies the identification on three grounds: ʿabd al-raḥmān’s siding with the quraysh against the muslims at badr, seeking to fight his father in a duel, and being the oldest but weak-willed son of the first caliph.22 muqātil b. sulaymān’s (d.150/767) tafsīr, considered the first still extant exegesis to provide comprehensive commentary on the entire qurʾān, contains the earliest reference to the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative.23 muqātil’s teachers included mujāhid b. jabr (d.104/722) and ibn shihāb al-zuhrī (d. 124/741–742).24 many subsequent scholars viewed muqātil as a controversial figure and an unreliable ḥadīth transmitter and exegete.25 the absence of isnāds in his tafsīr raised suspicions among many scholars regarding the reliability of his work.26 muqātil’s interpretation of q 46:17, presented without an authority, names ʿabd al-raḥmān as the rebellious son. echoing the qurʾānic narrative, he also relates that ʿabd al-raḥmān’s parents, abū bakr and umm rūmān bt. ʿamr b. ʿāmir27 (d. 6/628),28 worked to convince him to embrace islam, but their efforts were to no avail. ʿabd al-raḥmān not only denied the day of judgment but also claimed that none of the deceased qurayshite 20. al-wāqidī, kitāb al-maghāzī, ed. m. jones (london: oxford university press, 1966), 1:257. 21. al-zubayrī, kitāb nasab quraysh, ed. evariste lévi-provençal (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1976), 276; ibn abī khaythama, al-taʾrīkh al-kabīr, ed. ṣalāḥ hilāl (cairo: al-fārūq al-ḥadītha li-l-nashr, 2006), 2:882–84. 22. ibn ʿaṭiyya, al-muḥarrar al-wajīz fī tafsīr al-qurʾān al-ʿazīz, ed. ʿabd al-salām muḥammad (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2001), 5:99. 23. nicolai sinai, “the qurʾanic commentary of muqātil b. sulaymān and the evolution of early tafsīr literature,” in tafsīr and islamic intellectual history: exploring the boundaries of a genre, ed. andreas görke and johanna pink, 113–43 (london: oxford university press, 2014), 113; kees versteegh, “grammar and exegesis: the origins of kufan grammar and the tafsīr muqātil,” der islam 67 (1990): 206–42, 207–9. 24. ibn khallikān, wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās (beirut: dār ṣādir, 2005), 5: 255. 25. al-baghdādī, taʾrīkh madīnat baghdād, ed. bashshār maʿrūf (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 2001), 15:208–19; ibn khallikān, wafayāt, 5:256–57; sinai, “qurʾanic commentary,” 113–14. 26. al-baghdādī, taʾrīkh, 15:208–13. 27. he appears in other sources as ʿ āmir b. ʿ uwaymir. see al-zubayrī, kitāb nasab quraysh, 276; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās (beirut: franz steiner, 1996), 5:169. 28. umm rūmān was from the tribe of kināna. al-balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ʿabbās, 5:167–68. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 122 dignitaries, such as ʿabd allāh b. jadʿān, ʿuthmān b. ʿamr, and ʿāmir b. ʿamr,29 would make it back from the dead.30 a similar presentation of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative appears in the tafsīr works of al-farrāʾ (d. 207/822),31 hūd b. muḥakkam al-hawwārī (d. ca. 280/893),32 and ibn abī zamanīn (d. 399/1009).33 however, unlike muqātil and hūd, the other two commentators include other views regarding the identity of the disobedient son, which will be discussed later. ʿabd al-razzāq b. hammām al-ṣanʿānī’s (d. 211/827) tafsīr34 seems to be the earliest work to present the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative along with its transmitters. it is worth noting that his account includes other interpretations as well, which will be examined later. ʿabd al-razzāq traces the ʿabd al-raḥmān version through his teacher, maʿmar b. rāshid (d. 153/770),35 back to the basran qatāda b. diʿāma al-sadūsī (d. 117/735) and the kufan muḥammad b. ṣāʾib al-kalbī (d. 146/767). more than other scholars, qatāda is associated with the transmission of commentaries on q 46:17, particularly the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. a few biographical details about qatāda, therefore, are useful for understanding his role in the debate. qatāda occupies a conspicuous place in islamic traditions as a knowledgeable expert on language, genealogy, tafsīr, and ḥadīth literature.36 he was among the prominent successors who contributed to the evolution of the tafsīr tradition. his famous teachers included the medinan saʿīd b. al-musayyib (d. 94/715) and ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 110/728).37 qatāda had many students, the closest of whom was maʿmar b. rāshid,38 who also studied for many years with 29. these were some of the tribe’s notables in pre-islamic meccan society. al-sadūsī, kitāb ḥadhf man nasaba quraysh, ed. ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-munajjid (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-jadīd, 1976), 76–77. 30. muqātil b. sulymān, tafsīr, ed. ʿabd allāh shiḥāta (beirut: muʾassasat al-tārīkh al-ʿarabī, 2002), 4:21–22. 31. al-farrāʾ, maʿānī al-qurʾān, ed. muḥammad al-najjār and aḥmad najātī (beirut: dār ʿālam al-kutub, 1983), 3:53–54. 32. hūd b. muḥakkam al-hawwārī, tafsīr kitāb allāh al-ʿazīz, ed. balḥāj sharīfī (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1990), 4:149. 33. ibn abī zamanīn, tafsīr al-qurʾān al-ʿazīz, ed. ḥusayn ʿukāsha and muḥammad al-kanz (cairo: al-fārūq al-ḥadītha li-l-ṭibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 2002), 4:227. 34. fuat sezgin argues that this work is basically a modification of the work of his teacher maʿmar b. rāshid (d. 154/770). see sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums (leiden: brill, 1967), 1:99. 35. ʿabd al-razzāq relies heavily on maʿmar b. rāshid, especially in his tafsīr and his muṣannaf. ibn rāshid was a native of basra and was a student of a number of renowned scholars, such as ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 110/728), qatāda (d. 117/735), and al-zuhrī (d. 124/741–42). see maʿmar b. rāshid, the expeditions: an early biography of muḥammad, ed. and trans. sean anthony (new york: nyu press, 2014), xix–xxiv; nicolet boekhoff-van der voort, “the kitāb al-maghāzī of ʿabd al-razzāq b. hammām al-ṣanʿānī: searching for earlier source-material,” in the transmission and dynamics of the textual sources of islam: essays in honour of harald motzki, ed. nicolet boekhoff-van der voort, kees versteegh, and joas wagemakers, 27–48 (leiden: brill, 2011), 30–31. 36. al-dāwūdī, ṭabaqāt al-mufassirīn (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1983), 2:47–48; abdulrahman al-salimi, early islamic law in basra in the 2nd/8th century: aqwāl qatāda b. diʿāma al-sadūsī (leiden: brill, 2018), 4. 37. suleiman mourad mentions that qatāda was one of the most renowned students of ḥasan al-baṣrī. see mourad, early islam between myth and history: al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 110 h/728 ce) and the formation of his legacy in classical islamic scholarship (leiden: brill, 2006), 47. 38. maʿmar b. rāshid, expeditions, xxiii. 123 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) al-zuhrī.39 however, some muslim scholars criticized qatāda for being an untrustworthy ḥadīth transmitter40and for his failure to provide isnāds in his tafsīr.41 like other prominent scholars, qatāda was involved in theological controversies with far-reaching political implications for umayyad politics. for example, there are contradictory reports about the extent to which he professed qadarite beliefs.42 however, there are some allusions to the good relations that qatāda maintained with the umayyad rulers.43 for example, ibn khallikān (d. 681/1282) relates that umayyad emissaries frequented qatāda’s house, seeking his expertise on different matters.44 the umayyads’ recruitment of well-known religious scholars to promote their religio-political propaganda45 and counter the criticisms of their enemies (such as ibn al-zubayr)46 was common practice.47 more importantly, qatāda’s connection with the umayyads surfaces in later commentaries on q 46:17. for example, al-samarqandī (d. 375/985) portrays marwān b. al-ḥakam (r. 64–65/684–85) as the mastermind behind the circulation of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative, but without explaining his motives.48 the same report is found in the tafsīr works of ibn ʿaṭiyya and abū ḥayyān (d. 745/1344),49 who also provide more details about the dispute’s background.50 they relate that marwān initiated the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative when he served as the governor of medina and lobbied for the appointment of yazīd as muʿāwiya’s successor. both assert that qatāda espoused marwān’s interpretation of q 46:17. a detailed discussion of marwān’s involvement in the circulation of the ʿabd al-raḥmān version follows later in this article. 39. motzki, analysing muslim traditions, 4–11. 40. al-salimi, early islamic law, 5–7. 41. ibn ḥajar, tahdhīb al-tahdhīb, ed. ʿaṭā muṣṭafā ʿabd al-qādir (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1994), 8:307. 42. ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, ed. muḥammad ʿaṭā (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1997), 7:171–73; al-mizzī, tahdhīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl, ed. bashshār maʿrūf (muʾassasat al-risāla, 1992), 23:498–517; sezgin, geschichte, 1:31–32; al-salimi, early islamic law, 7–8. the qadarites were a sect that endorsed the doctrine of free will based on the notion that all individuals are responsible before god for their actions. the sect was perceived as a threat by the umayyad authorities. josef van ess, theologie und gesellschaft im 2. und 3. jahrhundert hidschra: eine geschichte des religiösen denkens im frühen islam (berlin: w. de gruyter, 1991–97), 1:72–117. 43. judd, religious scholars, 39–90. 44. ibn khallikān, wafayāt, 4:85–86. 45. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 42–49. 46. wilferd madelung, “ʿabd allāh ibn al-zubayr the mulḥid,” in madelung, studies in medieval muslim thought and history, ed. sabine schmidtke (burlington, vt: ashgate variorum, 2013), no. 17. 47. judd, religious scholars, 39–90. 48. ibn ʿaṭiyya, muḥarrar, 5:98–99. 49. abū ḥayyān al-andalusī, al-baḥr al-muḥīṭ fī al-tafsīr, ed. ʿādil ʿabd al-mawjūd et al. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1993), 8:61–62. 50. al-samarqandī, baḥr al-ʿulūm, ed. ʿalī muʿawwaḍ, ʿādil ʿabd al-mawjūd, and aḥmad al-nūtī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1993), 3:233. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 124 the name of muḥammad al-kalbī makes infrequent but contradictory appearances in the transmission of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. for example, al-jurjānī (d. 471/1078) traces the narrative back to al-kalbī,51 whereas fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī’s (d. 606/1209–1210) uses al-kalbī as an authority to deny that ʿabd al-raḥmān was the disobedient son in the verse.52 the incorporation of al-kalbī by some commentators stems from his prominence as an early scholar. besides his expertise in genealogy, philology, arab-islamic history, and biblical materials, al-kalbī also reportedly authored an early comprehensive tafsīr work. although his reliability as both a qurʾānic exegete and a ḥadīth transmitter was questioned by many muslim scholars,53 the attribution of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative to him seems to have been intended to strengthen the validity and the circulation of this view by connecting it to a well-known exegete. the same motivation appears in the affiliation of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative with other prominent tafsīr scholars, such as the kufan al-suddī (d. 128/745). al-suddī, a ḥadīth scholar, played a major role in the evolution of the tafsīr tradition during the umayyad caliphate. he was one of ibn ʿabbās’s (d. 68/687) students and authored one of the earliest tafsīr works.54 however, like other leading scholars active during the umayyad caliphate, al-suddī found his reliability as a ḥadīth transmitter subjected to criticism by some biographers. some scholars even accused him of being a shiʿite and of attacking the first two caliphs.55 the attribution of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative to al-suddī is presented without isnāds in the commentaries of ibn abī ḥātim al-rāzī (d. 327/938),56 al-māwardī (d. 450/1058),57 and al-suyūṭī (d. 911/1505).58 in some later commentaries on q 46:17, al-suddī figures as an authority on the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative alongside other early prominent basran or meccan tafsīr experts. for example, al-ṭabrisī (d. 548/1153) presents this view, though without a complete isnād, on the authority of al-suddī, ibn ʿabbās, abū al-ʿāliya al-riyāḥī (d. ca. 93/712),59 and mujāhid b. jabr.60 both al-suddī and qatāda feature as the originators of the ʿabd al-raḥmān 51. al-jurjānī, darj al-durar fī tafsīr al-āy wa-l-suwar, ed. ṭalʿat al-farḥān and muḥammad shakkūr (amman: dār al-fikr, 2009), 2:566. 52. fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī, mafātīḥ al-ghayb (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1981), 18:23. 53. ibn al-nadīm, fihrist, ed. ʿalī ṭawīl (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1996), 152–53; ibn ḥajar, tahdhīb, 1:417; 9:178–79; al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 25:250; sezgin, geschichte, 1:34–35. 54. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, 6:318; al-suyūṭī, al-itqān fī ʿulūm al-qurʾān, ed. shuʿayb al-arnaʾūṭ (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 2008), 786–87; al-dāwūdī, ṭabaqāt, 1:110; sezgin, geschichte, 1:32–33. 55. al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 3:132–38. 56. ibn abī ḥātim al-rāzī, tafsīr al-qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, ed. asʿad al-ṭayyib (riyadh: maktabat nizār al-bāz, 1997), 10:3295–96. 57. al-māwardī, al-nukat wa-l-ʿuyūn, tafsīr al-māwardī, ed. al-sayyid b. ʿabd al-raḥīm (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya and muʾassasat al-kutub al-thaqāfiyya, 1992), 5:280. 58. al-suyūṭī, al-durr al-manthūr fī al-tafsīr bi-l-maʾthūr, ed. ʿabd allāh al-turkī (cairo: markaz hajr li-lbuḥūth wa-l-dirāsāt al-ʿarabiyya wa-l-islāmiyya, 2003), 13:329. 59. his name was rufayʿ b. mihrān and he was a prominent basran expert on qurʾānic exegesis and a student of ibn ʿabbās. al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 3:249–52. 60. al-ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1997), 9:109. 125 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) narrative in al-qurṭubī’s (d. 671/1273) tafsīr.61 the prominent place that ibn ʿabbās occupies in the evolution of the islamic ḥadīth and tafsīr traditions is undeniable.62 his inclusion in the discussion on the identity of the rebellious son in q 46:17, therefore, should come as no surprise. the use of ibn ʿabbās as an authority reflects efforts to increase the probability of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative, seemingly in reaction to attempts to refute its authenticity.63 ibn al-jawzī’s (d. 597/1201) zād al-masīr presents a good example of this orientation: he cites ibn ʿabbās as originating the view that ʿabd al-raḥmān is the disobedient son, but he claims that the exchange described in the verse occurred before ʿabd al-raḥmān’s conversion to islam.64 the attribution of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative to early prominent basran and ḥijāzī tafsīr authorities suggests that this view was the dominant interpretation in early commentaries on q 46:17, which made refuting it more difficult. 3.2 early alternatives to the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative early efforts to refute the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative are found in the commentaries of al-farrāʾ, ʿabd al-razzāq, and al-nasāʾī (d. 303/915). al-farrāʾ bases his refutation on the lexical interpretation of q 46:18. he contends that the rebellious son in q 46:17 is not ʿabd al-raḥmān, but rather his forefathers.65 later exegetes, such as al-zajjāj (d. 311/923),66 makkī b. abī ṭālib (d. 437/1045),67 al-ṭūsī (d. 460/1050),68 and al-samʿānī (d. 562/1167)69 share this view, adding further details that will be discussed later. in ʿabd al-razzāq’s account, his father, hammām, told him that mīnāʾ b. abī mīnāʾ al-zuhrī70 heard ʿāʾisha bt. abī bakr deny the association of ʿabd al-raḥmān with the disobedient son in q 46:17. she claimed, adds ʿabd al-razzāq, that the verse concerned someone else (fulān) instead and mentioned a name, which is is not specified in this report.71 no details, however, are given about the background against which ʿāʾisha defended her brother. notably, in ʿabd al-razzāq’s version, ʿāʾisha appears as the main authority for refuting the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. besides being the prophet’s wife and abū bakr’s 61. al-qurṭubī, al-jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-qurʾān, ed. ʿ abd al-razzāq al-mahdī (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 2007), 15:169. 62. al-suyūṭī, itqān, 783-85; gilliot, “beginnings of qurʾanic exegesis,” 7–13. 63. al-suyūṭī questions the reliability of many tafsīr reports traced back to ibn ʿabbās. al-itqān, 785-88. 64. ibn al-jawzī, zād al-masīr fī ʿilm al-tafsīr, ed. ʿabd al-razzāq al-mahdī (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 2010), 4:109. 65. al-farrāʾ, maʿānī, 3:53–54. 66. al-zajjāj, maʿānī al-qurʾān, ed. ʿabd al-jalīl shalabī (beirut: ʿālam al-kutub, 1988), 4: 443–44. 67. makkī b. abī ṭālib, al-hidāya ilā bulūgh al-nihāya (sharjah: kulliyyat al-sharīʿa wa-l-dirāsāt al-islāmiyya, jāmiʿat al-shāriqa, 2008), 11: 345. 68. al-ṭūsī, al-tibyān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, ed. aḥmad al-ʿāmilī (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, n.d.), 9:279. 69. al-samʿānī, tafsīr al-qurʾān, ed. ghunaym b. ghunaym (riyadh: dār al-waṭan, 1997), 5:155. 70. mīnāʾ, who was the mawlā of ʿabd al-raḥmān b. ʿawf (d. 32/653), was considered by many scholars to be an untrustworthy ḥadīth transmitter. see al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 29:245–48; ibn ḥajar, tahdhīb, 15:354. 71. ʿabd al-razzāq, tafsīr, 3:201. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 126 daughter, she also played a major role in the religious and political life of the early islamic community.72 her presence in the interpretations of q 46:17 was crucial in clearing ʿabd al-raḥmān of the accusation. ʿabd al-razzāq’s account also indicates that the attempts to disassociate ʿabd al-raḥmān from the rebellious son not only appeared later but also were widely circulated. this theory is supported by the fact that the man whom ʿāʾisha identified as the disobedient son in q 46:17 remained anonymous in ʿabd al-razzāq’s work as in all later tafsīr works. al-nasāʾī’s interpretation is an abbreviated version of his treatment of this topic in the sunan, discussed in the next section. he offers an account similar to that of ʿabd al-razzāq but adds important details about the political background of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. he traces his report back to the medinan muḥammad b. ziyād (d. 120/745), who transmitted ḥadīths on the authority of ʿāʾisha, ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar (d. 73/692–693), and ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr (d. 73/692).73 the isnād consists of the following basran transmitters: ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn al-darhamī (d. 253/867) → umayya b. khālid (d. 200/816) → shuʿba b. al-hajjāj (d. 160/776). al-nasāʾī relates that marwān was behind the circulation of this view after ʿabd al-raḥmān disputed yazīd’s appointment as muʿāwiya’s successor and accused the umayyads of turning the caliphate into hereditary rule. coming to her brother’s defense, ʿāʾisha appears here as a counterauthority to marwān’s claim, accusing him of fabrication.74 3. 3 the affiliation of ʿabd al-raḥmān’s brothers with the disobedient son interpretations that identify the rebellious son in q 46:17 with other sons of abū bakr come in two versions: one points to an unspecified brother of ʿabd al-raḥmān, the other to ʿabd allāh b. abī bakr (d. 8/630). i believe that these interpretations reflect later efforts to deflect blame from ʿabd al-raḥmān. al-ṭabarī (d. 311/923) seems to have been the first exegete to suggest that the disobedient son in the verse is an unspecified son of abū bakr.75 he transmits this report on the authority of ibn ʿabbās with an isnād that includes muḥammad b. saʿd76 and members of his family.77 absent from this account is any mention of ʿabd al-raḥmān. al-ṭabarī’s interpretation reappears in some later commentaries on 72. being the prophet’s favorite wife and abū bakr’s daughter, ʿ āʾisha played a major role in the transmission of prophetic knowledge and early islamic political debates, particularly in the context of the first civil war. see bruce lawrence, the quran: a biography (new york: atlantic monthly press, 2006), 50–61; denise spellberg, politics, gender, and the islamic past: the legacy of ʿaʾisha bint abi bakr (new york: columbia university press, 1994), 101–32. 73. al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 25: 217-219. 74. al-nasāʾī, tafsīr, ed. sayyid al-jalīmī and ṣabrī al-shāfiʿī (cairo: maktabat al-sunna, 1990), 2:290. 75. al-ṭabarī, jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-qurʾān, ed. ʿabd allāh al-turkī (cairo: hajar, 2001), 21:144. 76. there is a debate about the identity of this person. berg equates him with ibn saʿd (d. 230/845), the author of the ṭabaqāt, whereas motzki identifies him as muḥammad b. saʿd b. muḥammad b. al-ḥasan b. ʿaṭiyya al-ʿawfī (d. 276/889). see berg, “competing paradigms,” 272; motzki, analysing muslim traditions, 246. 77. berg considers the family isnād “eclectic.” see berg, “competing paradigms,” 272. 127 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) q 46:17, such as those of makkī b. abī ṭālib,78 ibn ʿaṭiyya,79 al-suyūṭī,80 and ibn kathīr (d. 774/1373).81 unlike al-ṭabarī, however, these scholars also include the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative in their accounts. this significant divergence suggests that al-ṭabarī omitted it intentionally because of its controversial nature or its lack of an isnād. an elaboration on this conjecture appears in the following subsection. the interpretation that the disobedient son in q 46:17 is ʿabd allāh b. abī bakr appears first in the tafsīr works of al-thaʿlabī82 (d. 427/1035) and al-māwardī.83 al-thaʿlabī traces this version back to ibn ʿabbās, abū al-ʿāliya al-riyāḥī, al-suddī, and mujāhid b. jabr, whereas al-māwardī presents mujāhid as the only authority. the association of mujāhid with the circulation of this view is notable in later commentaries, such as those of al-baghawī (d. 516/1122),84 al-qurṭubī,85 ibn al-jawzī,86 and ibn kathīr.87 as student of ibn ʿabbās, mujāhid was a prominent meccan ḥadīth expert who authored an early qurʾānic commentary. his involvement in doctrinal discussions, such as those of the qadarites of mecca and the murjiʾites of kufa, seems to have soured his relationship with the umayyads.88 this state of affairs begs the question of why other brothers of ʿabd al-raḥmān were incorporated into interpretations of q 46:17. from the little information known about ʿabd allāh, we learn that he was a half-brother of ʿāʾisha and a full brother of asmāʾ, the mother of ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr.89 unlike ʿabd al-raḥmān, ʿabd allāh converted to islam at an early stage and figured prominently in the story of the hijra to medina. ʿabd allāh maintained good relations with his father to the extent that he became an example of an obedient (bārr) son. this is evident in ʿabd allāh’s consent to divorce his wife, ʿātika bt. zayd (d. 52/672), whom he passionately loved, at abū bakr’s request because she was barren 78. makkī b. abī ṭālib, hidāya,11: 345. 79. ibn ʿaṭiyya, muḥarrar, 5:98–99. 80. al-suyūṭī, durr, 13:329. 81. ibn kathīr, tafsīr al-qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, ed. sāmī salāma (riyadh: dār ṭayba, 1999), 7:282. 82. al-thaʿlabī, al-kashf wa-l-bayān, ed. muhammad ʿāshūr (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 2002), 9:13. 83. al-māwardī, nukat, 5:279–80. 84. al-baghawī, tafsīr al-baghawī maʿālim al-tanzīl, ed. muḥammad al-nimr, ʿuthmān ḍamīriyya, and sulaymān al-ḥursh (riyadh: dār ṭayyiba, 1989, 7:258. 85. al-qurṭubī, jāmiʿ, 16:197. 86. ibn al-jawzī, zād, 4:109. 87. ibn kathīr traces this view back to mujāhid along with ibn jurayj (d. 150/767), who was a well-regarded meccan ḥadīth scholar. see tafsīr, 7:283. 88. van ess, theologie und gesellschaft, 2:640–43; claude gilliot, “mujāhid’s exegesis: origins, paths of transmission and development of a meccan exegetical tradition in its human, spiritual and theological environment,” in görke and pink, tafsīr and islamic intellectual history, 63–112, at 65–66. 89. since ʿabd allāh was only a half-brother of ʿāʾisha, the islamic sources provide scarce biographical information about him. see al-balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ʿabbās, 5:176–77; al-ḥākim al-nīsābūrī, al-mustradrak ʿalā al-ṣaḥīḥayn, ed. muṣṭafā ʿaṭā (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2002), 3:542–44. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 128 and deemed a source of distraction to ʿabd allāh.90 he died at a young age, even before his father, without being involved in religious or political controversies. this biographical portrait of ʿabd allāh suggests that there was little benefit to gain from associating him with the disobedient son in q 46:17. at the same time, the absence of muḥammad b. abī bakr from these commentaries is mystifying. muḥammad grew up in the home of ʿalī (r. 35-40/656-661) and maintained close personal and political relations with him. ʿalī appointed him the governor of egypt, and he sided with ʿalī against muʿāwiya in the first civil war. he even met a horrible death for espousing this position.91 these biographical details suggest that the identification of the disobedient son with other sons of abū bakr beyond ʿabd al-raḥmān was not initiated by abū bakr’s opponents. rather, these reports represent further efforts to downgrade the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative and interrupt its circulation. ibn ʿabbās, abū al-ʿāliya al-riyāḥī, al-suddī, and mujāhid are also cited as authorities in two contradictory accounts provided by al-ṭabrisī (who names ʿabd al-raḥmān) and al-thaʿlabī (who points to ʿabd allāh). one needs to remember that ʿabd al-raḥmān had an embarrassing pre-islamic past that increased the difficulty of refuting his opponents’ accusations. 3.4 the rebellious son as an archetype the commentaries of al-zajjāj and al-ṭabarī seem to be the earliest works to present the rebellious son in q 46:17 as a broad concept, without identifying him as a particular person. we start with al-zajjāj, whose interpretation of this verse represents one the earliest accounts to diverge from the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. he acknowledges the ubiquity of this narrative in early qurʾānic exegesis but dismisses it as erroneous, concluding that the most correct (al-aṣaḥḥ) interpretation is that the verse concerns any rebellious and unbelieving son (walad ʿāqq kāfir).92 al-zajjāj’s interpretative argument reverberates in many later tafsīr works, such as those of al-māturīdī (d. 333/944), al-wāḥidī (d. 468/1076),93 fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī,94 al-qurṭubī,95 and ibn kathīr.96 but some of these later accounts also include elaborations on al-zajjāj’s interpretation. for example, al-māturīdī argues that the verse refers to an unspecified man with two sons: one was rebellious (ʿāqq) and the other was obedient (bārr).97 90. al-balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ʿabbās, 5:177. 91. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. wilferd madelung (beirut: klaus schwartz, 2003), 2:349–57; wilferd madelung, the succession to muḥammad: a study of the early caliphate (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1997), 267–68. 92. al-zajjāj, maʿānī, 4:443–44. 93. al-wāḥidī, al-wasīṭ fī tafsīr al-qurʾān al-majīd, ed. ʿādil ʿabd al-mawjūd et al. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1995), 4:109. 94. al-rāzī, mafātīḥ al-ghayb, 28:24. 95. al-qurṭubī, jāmiʿ, 15:169. 96. ibn kathīr, tafsīr, 7:283. 97. al-māturīdī, taʾwīlāt ahl al-sunna, ed. majdī bassalūm (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2005), 248–49. 129 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) al-ṭabarī’s characterization of the rebellious son in q 46:17 as an unidentified figure takes two forms. the first resembles al-zajjāj’s interpretation and holds that the verse speaks of a licentious, unbelieving, disobedient son (al-fājir, al-kāfir, al-ʿāqq li-wālidayhi).98 unlike al-zajjāj, al-ṭabarī traces this interpretation back to al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 110/728), with an isnād that includes the following basran transmitters: muḥammad b. bashshār (d. 252/866) → hawdha b. khalīfa (d. 210/826) → ʿawf al-aʿrābī (d. 146/764). al-baṣrī appears in many commentaries on q 46:17 as the main originator of the view that the disobedient son is an archetype rather than a particular individual, and some biographical information about him is thus in order. al-ḥasan al-baṣrī was a well-regarded successor and an authority on ḥadīth literature and qurʾānic exegesis.99 he was born in medina and later moved to basra, where he established a large circle of pupils,100 the most famous of whom was qatāda. al-baṣrī’s scholarly activities, therefore, explicate the transmission of knowledge from medina to the other centers of islamic learning. however, some scholars questioned his reliability as a ḥadīth transmitter.101 when it comes to al-baṣrī’s involvement in umayyad politics, he seems to have harbored anti-umayyad sentiments but preferred not to express them openly.102 this stance perhaps explains the association of his name in some traditions with the qadarite movement.103 al-ṭabarī’s account on the authority of al-baṣrī echoes in many later tafsīr works, such as those of al-ṭūsī,104 al-māwardī,105 al-baghawī,106 al-zamakhsharī (d. 538/1143–1144),107 al-ṭabrisī,108 ibn ʿaṭiyya,109 ibn al-jawzī,110 al-nīsābūrī (d. 728/1328),111 and al-nasafī (d. 710/1310).112 however, some of these later interpretations vary. for example, al-māwardī argues that the verse is largely aimed at a group of infidels,113 whereas ibn al-jawzī identifies 98. al-ṭabarī, jāmiʿ, 21:145. 99. al-suyūṭī, itqān, 788; al-dāwūdī, ṭabaqāt, 1:150–51. 100. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, 7:115–22; al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 6:95–126. 101. mourad, early islam, 47–51. 102. ibid., 34–43. 103. watt, the formative period of islamic thought (oxford: oneworld, 1988), 100–103; van ess, theologie und gesellschaft, 2:45–50; suleiman, early islam, 161–75. 104. al-ṭūsī, tibyān, 9:279. 105. al-māwardī, nukat, 5:280. 106. al-baghawī, tafsīr, 7:258. 107. al-zamakhsharī, tafsīr al-kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl wa-ʿuyūn al-aqāwīl fī wujūh al-taʾwīl, ed. khalīl shīḥā (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, 2009), 1012. 108. al-ṭabrisī, majmaʿ, 9:109. 109. ibn ʿaṭiyya, muḥarrar, 5:99. 110. ibn al-jawzī, zād, iv, 109. 111. al-nīsābūrī, gharāʾib al-qurʾān wa-raghāʾib al-furqān, ed. ibrāhīm ʿawaḍ (cairo: muṣṭafā al-bābī al-ḥalabī wa-awlāduhu, 1962), 26:11–12. 112. al-nasafī, tafsīr al-nasafī: madārik al-tanzīl wa-ḥaqāʾiq al-taʾwīl, ed. yusūf bidīwī and muḥyī al-dīn mistū (beirut: dār al-kalam al-ṭayyib, 1998), 3:313. 113. al-māwardī, nukat, 5:280. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 130 the concept of a rebellious son with an unspecified group of infidels from the quraysh.114 al-baghawī and al-ṭabrisī name both al-baṣrī and qaṭāda as authorities for the view of the disobedient son as a generic concept. conspicuously absent in al-ṭabarī’s presentation is the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. most likely he left it out intentionally115 because of its lack of isnād or its controversial nature. comparing al-ṭabarī’s account on the authority of al-baṣrī with those of later exegetes further substantiates this conjecture. like al-ṭabarī, these scholars emphasize that the report on the authority of al-baṣrī is the correct interpretation. however, at the same time they use this view as a counterargument to the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. al-ṭabarī relates his second interpretation of the rebellious son verse on the authority of qatāda with an isnād that includes the following basran transmitters: bishr al-mufaḍḍal (d. 186/802) → yazīd b. zurayʿ (d. 182/798) → saʿīd b. abī ʿarūba (d. 156/773). this interpretation claims that the verse pertains to any wicked and debauched slave who is disobedient to his parents (ʿabd sūʾ ʿāqq li-wālidayhi fājir). this view appears in later tafsīr works, such as those of al-naḥḥās (d. 338/949),116 al-thaʿlabī,117 makkī b. abī ṭālib,118 and al-qurṭubī.119 however, some of these scholars, such as al-thaʿlabī and al-qurṭubī, also include al-baṣrī as an authority for this version. the fact that al-ṭabarī relates the first report from al-baṣrī and the second from al-baṣrī’s student, qatāda, indicates that both were probably added to the interpretations of q 46:17 later to diminish the circulation of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. as previously noted, qatāda was seen as the main originator of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative, which explains the need to associate the counternarratives with a senior authority, such as qatāda’s teacher al-baṣrī. the identity of the rebellious son described in q 46:17 was thus debated in qurʾānic exegeses composed between the second half of the second/eighth century and the first half of the fourth/tenth. the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative initially emerged in these commentaries as the predominant interpretation. allusions to the umayyads’ circulation of this narrative to silence ʿabd al-raḥmān’s opposition to themselves are apparent in some versions. counterinterpretations that sought to exonerate ʿabd al-raḥmān by proposing a different identity for the disobedient son arose at a later stage. these efforts took different forms at different times. in the first phase, ʿāʾisha, as the prophet’s wife and abū bakr’s daughter, played a major role in undermining the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. explanations that associated the rebellious son with other sons of abū bakr or with a nonspecific concept constituted further attempts to challenge the dominance of this narrative. 114. ibn al-jawzī, zād, 4:109. 115. for examples of alterations and omissions that al-ṭabarī intentionally made to his sources, see steven judd, “narratives and character development: al-ṭabarī and al-balādhurī on late umayyad history,” in ideas, concepts and methods of portrayal: insights into classical arabic literature and islam, ed. sebastian günther, 209–26 (leiden: brill, 2005). 116. al-naḥḥās, maʿānī al-qurʾān, ed. muḥammad al-ṣābūnī (mecca: jāmiʿat umm al-qurā, 1988), 6:450. 117. al-thaʿlabī, kashf, 9:13. 118. makkī b. abī ṭālib, hidāya, 6846. 119. al-qurṭubī, jāmiʿ, 15:169. 131 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) 4. ʿabd al-raḥmān’s image in ḥadīth, ansāb, and adab works this section has two main objectives. first, it considers the extent to which the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative as presented in other literary genres provides perspectives different from that of tafsīr works. second, it investigates how the information gleaned from non-tafsīr works affects our understanding of the evolution of the ḥijāzī opposition to umayyad hereditary succession. 4.1 the ḥadīth literature early references to the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative in the ḥadīth literature are found in the works of al-bukhārī (d. 256/870)120 and al-nasāʾī. the chains of transmission given by these authors consist of ḥijāzī (particularly medinan) and basran scholars. these isnāds also illustrate the communication of knowledge from the ḥijāz to basra. al-bukhārī traces his report back to yūsuf b. māhak (d. ca. 113/731), a meccan ḥadīth scholar and a transmitter of prophetic reports on the authority of ʿāʾisha and other prominent companions.121 the isnād names the following basran transmitters: mūsā b. ismāʿīl al-tabūdhkī (d. 223/838) → abū ʿuwāna al-waḍḍāḥ (d. 176/792) → abū bishr jaʿfar b. iyās (d. 123–26/743–748). according to the report, when muʿāwiya decided to appoint yazīd his successor, he ordered his governor in the ḥijāz, marwān b. al-ḥakam, to lobby for this idea in medina. marwān announced muʿāwiya’s decree in medina’s congregational mosque and requested the attendees to pledge allegiance (bayʿa) to yazīd as the successor to his father. ʿabd al-raḥmān b. abī bakr emerged as the foremost medinan leader to oppose this move. marwān commanded his guards to arrest ʿabd al-raḥmān, but they were unable to do so after he sought protection in ʿāʾisha’s house. it was at this juncture that marwān declared that ʿabd al-raḥmān was the rebellious son mentioned in q 46:17. al-bukhārī concludes his account by rebutting marwān’s accusation, noting that ʿāʾisha had asserted that nothing had been revealed in the qurʾān about abū bakr’s family except for her exoneration from adultery.122 al-bukhārī’s report is reproduced in many later tafsīr works, such as those of makkī b. abī ṭālib,123 ibn ʿaṭiyya,124 al-nasafī,125 ibn kathīr,126 and ibn ḥajar (d. 852/1449).127 these authors are at pains 120. for a good discussion on the central role that al-bukhārī’s ṣaḥīḥ plays in the evolution of the ḥadīth commentary tradition, see joel blecher, said the prophet of god: hadith commentary across a millennium (oakland: university of california press, 2018), 4–13. 121. he was of persian origin and was considered a reliable transmitter. besides narrating from ʿāʾisha, he narrated ḥadīths on the authority of ibn ʿabbās, abū hurayra (d. 59/681), and muʿāwiya. ibn ḥajar, tahdhīb, 12:421; al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 32:451–52. 122. al-bukhārī, ṣaḥīḥ, 583 (no. 4827). 123. makkī b. abī ṭālib, hidāya, 6845–46. 124. ibn ʿaṭiyya, muḥarrar, 5:99. 125. al-nasafī, madārik, 3:313. 126. ibn kathīr, tafsīr, 7:283. 127. ibn ḥajar, al-iṣāba fī tamyīz al-ṣaḥāba, ed. ʿ ādil ʿ abd al-mawjūd and ʿ alī muʿawwaḍ (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1995), 4:275. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 132 to clear ʿabd al-raḥmān of the accusation of disobedience and to present him as a devout muslim. al-nasāʾī’s account is basically a detailed version of the interpretation of q 46:17 that he provides in his tafsīr. although his report resembles that of al-bukhārī, it includes additional details and has a different isnād. as in his qurʾānic exegesis, al-nasāʾī traces his report back to the medinan muḥammad b. ziyād with an isnād that includes basran transmitters. what is new in al-nasāʾī’s report is his description of the dispute between marwān and ʿabd al-raḥmān over the appointment of yazīd as muʿāwiya’s successor. first, according to al-nasāʾī, marwān argued that muʿāwiya’s order was consistent with the early traditions of caliphal succession inaugurated by the first two caliphs, abū bakr and ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb. second, ʿabd al-raḥmān, opposing marwān’s announcement, accused the umayyads of turning the caliphate into a temporal kingship modeled after the byzantine (hirqiliyya) and persian (qaysariyya) systems of hereditary kingship. in al-nasāʾī’s account, too, the dispute culminated in marwān’s suggestion that ʿabd al-raḥmān was the rebellious son in q 46:17. al-nasāʾī emphasizes ʿāʾisha’s role as a vehement defender of her brother, accusing marwān’s of having fabricated the allegation (i.e., ʿāʾisha claimed it was a fabrication). ʿāʾisha ended her argument by asserting that god’s curse was upon marwān because the prophet had cursed his father, al-ḥakam.128 the anonymity of the person that she associated with the verse is also preserved in al-nasāʾī’s account.129 al-nasāʾī’s details illuminate the circumstances that led to the emergence of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. as in the case of al-bukhārī’s description of the events, the umayyads’ involvement in the initiation and circulation of the narrative is evident. the report also illustrates the umayyads’ use of qurʾānic exegesis to defend themselves against the criticism of their opponents. ʿabd al-raḥmān’s opposition to the umayyads’ idea of monarchic succession generated his association with the rebellious son in q 46:17. furthermore, the reference to the model of rightful caliphal transition inaugurated by abū bakr and ʿumar reflects the rupture represented by the umayyads’ proposed move from the previous tradition of caliphal succession. hence, muʿāwiya’s decision was deviant as well as illegitimate. it is worth noting that islamic sources teem with references to the ideal precedent of caliphal succession instituted by the first two caliphs.130 more importantly, the reference to roman and persian patterns of hereditary succession seems to reflect muslim opposition to muʿāwiya’s introduction of non-arab and non-islamic accession rituals.131 128. al-ḥakam converted to islam unwillingly after the prophet entered mecca, and even the prophet cursed him for his hypocrisy and treachery. see al-balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ʿabbās, 4:255–56, 260–61. 129. al-nasāʾī, kitāb al-sunan al-kubrā, ed. ḥasan shalabī (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 2001), 10:257 (no. 11427). 130. ibn abī shayba, al-muṣannaf, ed. usāma b. muḥammad (cairo: al-farūq al-ḥadītha li-l-ṭibāʿa, 2008), 10:449–56; al-balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ʿabbās, 5:126–27; al-khallāl, al-sunna, ed. ʿaṭiyya al-zahrānī (riyadh: dār al-rāya, 1989), 2:301–8, 372–73. 131. marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy, 90–92. 133 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) al-nasāʾī’s report enjoys wide circulation in many later tafsīr works, such as those of al-zamakhsharī,132 al-thaʿlabī,133 al-qurṭubī,134 and ibn kathīr.135 however, some of these scholars use different isnāds. for example, ibn kathīr associates the report with the following medinan and basran scholars: ʿabd al-razzāq → maʿmar b. rāshid → al-zuhrī → saʿīd b. al-musayyib (d. 94/715).136 al-suyūṭī provides the same report without an isnād on the authority of ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar.137 attributions to these transmitters demonstrate that the ʿabd al-raḥmān version originated in medina and was then circulated to other centers, particularly basra. the conspicuous presence of medinan authorities in these isnāds indicates that the umayyads were mindful of the opposition of the medinan elite, particularly ʿabd al-raḥmān, to the proposed hereditary succession. this orientation is evident in the works of ibn ʿasākir (d. 571/1175) and ibn ḥajar, who trace it via al-zuhrī to ibn al-musayyib. they claim that muʿāwiya sent money to ʿabd al-raḥmān to bribe him, but the latter refused to accept the money.138 4.2 ansāb and adab writings this section assesses the presence of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative in al-balādhurī’s (d. 279/892) ansāb and al-iṣfahānī’s (d. 356/967) kitāb al-aghānī as representatives of the genres of ansāb and adab, respectively.139 al-balādhurī alludes to the narrative uncharacteristically without an isnād, as part of ʿabd al-raḥmān’s biographical portrait. in fact, he opens his account by dismissing the narrative as an erroneous interpretation. to substantiate his argument, al-balādhurī cites ʿāʾisha, alleging that the verse concerns someone other than ʿabd al-raḥmān but again without naming that person.140 he then refers to two mortifying events in ʿabd al-raḥmān’s pre-islamic past. the first was ʿabd al-raḥmān’s participation in the battle of badr against the muslims and his attempt to meet his father in a duel. the second was his ardent love for laylā the ghassānid, whom he later married after syria came under islamic rule.141 to salvage ʿabd al-raḥmān’s image, al-balādhurī declares, “when ʿabd al-raḥmān converted to islam he became a decent muslim and nothing of [his pagan life] remained attached to him.”142 however, al-balādhurī 132. al-zamakhsharī, kashshāf, 1012–13. 133. al-thaʿlabī, kashf, 9:13. 134. al-qurṭubī, jāmiʿ, 16:197–98. 135. ibn kathīr, tafsīr, 7:283–84. 136. ibn kathīr, al-bidāya wa-l-nihāya, ed. ʿabd allāh al-turkī (giza: dār hajr, 1999), 11:330. 137. al-suyūṭī, durr, 13:328. 138. ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. ʿumar al-ʿāmrawī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1996), 35:35; ibn ḥajar, iṣāba, 4:276. 139. on the aghānī’s sources, see alfred-louis de prémare, les fondations de l’islam : entre écriture et histoire (paris: éditions du seuil, 2002), 345–46. 140. al-balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ʿabbās, 5:169–70. 141. ibid., 5:171–72. 142. wa-lammā aslama ḥasuna islāmuhu fa-lam yutaʿallaq ʿalayhi bi-shayʾ. ibid., 5:172. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 134 offers no comment on the possible motives behind the circulation of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative. al-iṣfahānī’s143 discussion of ʿabd al-raḥmān consists of four parts, with the main one addressing his passionate love of laylā. he begins with genealogical information about ʿabd al-raḥmān.144 the second part concerns the date of his conversion to islam, which al-iṣfahānī places before the muslims’ entrance in mecca in 10/630. al-iṣfahānī adds that the conversions of ʿabd al-raḥmān and muʿāwiya occurred at the same time.145 discussion about the association of ʿabd al-raḥmān with the disobedient son of q 46:17 constitutes the third part of al-iṣfahānī’s presentation,146 and in its contents it resembles al-nasāʾī’s treatment. what is different in al-iṣfahānī’s version is primarily the isnād, which includes the following names: aḥmad b. zuhayr b. khaythama (d. 279/893) → his father, zuhayr b. ḥarb (d. 234/849) → wahb b. jarīr (d. 206/821)147 → juwayriyya b. asmāʾ (d. 173/789).148 these scholars were transmitters of both ḥadīth and akhbār who played an important role in the evolution of early islamic historiography. wahb b. jarīr is of great importance here. his reports are considered a good example of the transition from ḥadīthto akhbāroriented narratives.149 we will come back to ibn jarīr’s role in reports regarding the medinan opposition to muʿāwiya’s hereditary succession in the next section. the last part of al-iṣfahānī’s account150 recounts ʿabd al-raḥmān’s amorous relations with laylā. al-iṣfahānī’s use of the verb ustuhyima (to be madly in love) indicates the damaging effect of this story on ʿabd al-raḥmān’s image. unlike al-balādhurī, he provides two isnāds, both of which go through the medinan historian ʿurwa b. al-zubayr (d. 94/712). the first even includes his aunt, ʿāʾisha. ʿurwa, who played a significant role in the emergence of islamic historiography, is reported to have been recruited by the umayyads to confirm their legitimacy.151 an analysis of the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative in ḥadīth, ansāb, and adab writings yields a number of important observations. first, the analysis shows that the umayyads, particularly marwān, initiated the circulation of this view after ʿabd al-raḥmān emerged as the primary medinan leader to oppose muʿāwiya’s plan of hereditary succession. second, the reports that convey the narrative indicate that ʿabd al-raḥmān’s reprehensible jāhilī 143. on his life and works, see hilary kilpatrick, making the great book of songs: compilation and the author’s craft in abū l-faraj al-iṣbahānī’s “kitāb al-aghānī” (london: routledge, 2003), 14–30. 144. al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, ed. ʿabd al-ʿamīr ʿalī muhannā and samīr jābir (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2002), 17:356. 145. ibid., 357. 146. ibid., 357–58. 147. wahb b. jarīr was a famous basran ḥadīth scholar. see ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, 7:298; al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 31:121–24. 148. juwayriyya transmitted reports on the authority of nāfiʿ and al-zuhrī. 149. tobias andersson, early sunnī historiography: aatudy of the the tārīkh of khalīfa b. khayyāṭ (leiden: brill, 2018)111–12. 150. al-iṣfahānī, aghānī, 17:358–61. 151. chase robinson, islamic historiography (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003), 23–24; de prémare, les fondations, 15–16. 135 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) past damaged his reputation and was effectively used by the umayyads as a weapon to criticize him. that he was abū bakr’s oldest son was also significant for the umayyad justification of dynastic succession, which was based on tribal patrimonial considerations. third, the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative attests to the significant role played by the ḥijāzī elite, in general, and the medinan dignitaries, in particular, in challenging the umayyads’ initiation of hereditary succession. fourth, most of the relevant accounts make evident efforts to clear ʿabd al-raḥmān of identification with the rebellious son, typically invoking ʿāʾisha to do so. fifth, the isnāds that accompany these reports testify to the transmission of knowledge from medina to basra. finally, the appearance of historians, such as ʿurwa, ibn jarīr, juwayriyya b. asmāʾ, and ibn khaythama, in their transmission lines indicates a transition in the presentation of the medinan confrontation with the umayyads from provincial arabian politics into a broader imperial context. 5. ʿabd al-raḥmān as an opposition leader in taʾrīkh narratives this section attempts to assess the extent to which the portrayals of the ḥijāzī opposition to muʿāwiya’s dynastic succession in taʾrīkh narratives are different from those found in previous literary genres. ʿabd al-raḥmān’s role as an opposition leader serves here as a yardstick for evaluating these distinctions. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ’s (d. 240/854) taʾrīkh al-khulafāʾ152 is our point of departure. scholars consider this one of the earliest extant taʾrīkh works to reflect on muʿāwiya’s designation of yazīd as his successor. khalīfa, a basran ḥadīth scholar and a historian, established a large circle of well-known students, such as al-bukhārī.153 his presentation of muʿāwiya’s shift to dynastic rule includes three reports, all of which go through the basran wahb b. jarīr back to medinan authorities.154 the isnād of the first report consists of wahb b. jarīr → jarīr b. ḥāzim (d. 175/791–792)155 → al-nuʿmān b. rāshid (d. unknown)156 → al-zuhrī → dhakwān (d.63/683).157 the presence of al-zuhrī, a prominent ḥadīth scholar who contributed considerably to the evolution of islamic historiography, is important.158 he also maintained close relations with some umayyad caliphs. in fact, he was reported to have been forced by the umayyads to alter certain prophetic reports to serve their political interests.159 152. for modern scholarship on this work, see andersson, early sunni historiography, 10–13. 153. ibid., 46–58. 154. according to andersson, basran ḥadīth and akhbār transmitters occupy a place of prominence in khalīfa’s taʾrīkh. see ibid., 105–38. 155. a famous basran ḥadīth scholar. 156. al-nuʿmān was a mawlā of the umayyads. his reliability as a ḥadīth transmitter is questionable. al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 29:445–48. 157. dhakwān was ʿāʾisha’s mawlā and is considered a reliable ḥadīth transmitter. ibid., 8:517–18. 158. robinson, islamic historiography, 25–26; ʿabd al-ʿazīz al-dūrī, baḥth fī nashʾat ʿilm al-tārīkh ʿind al-ʿarab (beirut: dār al-mashriq, 1993), 78–102. 159. in modern scholarship there is a debate about the extent to which the umayyads influenced al-zuhrī’s circulation of certain reports that carried political significance. see borrut, “the future of the past,” 278; al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 136 in the first report,160 khalīfa says that when muʿāwiya decided to appoint yazīd his successor he traveled to mecca for the lesser pilgrimage,161 and from there he went to medina with an army of one thousand syrians. as he was about to enter medina, three prominent leaders, ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar, ʿabd al-raḥmān b. abī bakr, and ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr, left the city in protest. muʿāwiya announced in the congregational mosque that no one was more suited than his son to the position of the caliph. he received the oath of allegiance to yazīd from the attendees without any opposition. back in mecca, he summoned individually each of the three medinan leaders who had absented themselves. meeting first with ibn ʿumar, muʿāwiya accused him of sowing discord among muslims by refusing to pledge allegiance to yazīd. ibn ʿumar denied this charge, arguing that previous caliphs had also had sons and that yazīd was not better than these sons had been. nevertheless, the previous caliphs had eschewed the appointment of their sons as successors in the interest of the islamic community. in addition, ibn ʿumar suggested that muʿāwiya pursue the consensus (ijmāʿ) of the muslim community in the weighty matter of the succession. muʿāwiya then summoned ʿabd al-raḥmān, who also refused to comply with muʿāwiya’s request for allegiance to yazīd and advised him to refer the matter to a council of muslims (shūrā) to avoid opposition. finally, muʿāwiya met ibn al-zubayr, whom he described as an insidious fox.162 he accused ibn al-zubayr of inciting ibn ʿumar and ʿabd al-raḥmān against his decision. ibn al-zubayr, too, rejected muʿāwiya’s demands on the pretext that he could not pledge allegiance concurrently to two caliphs. after the meetings, muʿāwiya falsely announced that the three men supported yazīd’s succession but dismissed the request of his syrian (ahl al-shām) supporters to make the three proclaim their allegiance in public. this turn of events, khalīfa concludes, caused confusion among the muslims regarding whether the three men had really promised their allegiance to yazīd.163 the report emphasizes the themes of legitimate leadership and rightful caliphal succession established by the first two caliphs. the appearance of ibn ʿumar next to ʿabd al-raḥmān helps make the point that if hereditary succession were accepted, either of the two, as the oldest son of a caliph, could have been the caliph. ibn al-zubayr’s appearance, meanwhile reflects the serious future political challenge he posed to the umayyads. the report also shows that the umayyads assigned great importance to the medinan religiopolitical elite when it came to crucial matters of state. the reference to the syrian supporters, who played an important role in upholding muʿāwiya’s designation of yazīd as his successor, reflects the dynamics of a tribal polity.164 khalīfa’s account appears judd, religious scholars, 53–59; michael lecker, “some biographical notes on ibn shihāb al-zuhrī,” journal of semitic studies 41, no. 1 (1996): 22–31; de prémare, les fondations, 321–23. 160. keshk terms this report “the ḥijāz vs. syrocentric version.” see historians’ muʿāwiya, 157–69. 161. according to marsham, the bayʿa in the ḥijāz was associated with the ḥajj or the ʿumra. see rituals of islamic monarchy, 90. 162. in arabic discourse fox signifies negative characteristics, such as treachery, cunning deceitfulness, betrayal, and lack of trust. fox is also associated politically with the word dāhiya, such is the case with ‘amr b. al-ʿᾱṣ (d. 43/663) who is known as dāhiyat al-ʿarab. see ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, 4: 191—95. 163. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh al-khulafāʾ, ed. akram al-ʿumarī (riyadh: dār ṭayba, 1985), 213–14. 164. for the structure of the syrian troops, see marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy, 89–91. 137 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) in later sources, such as those of ibn aʿtham al-kufī165 (d. 314/926),166 ibn ʿabd rabbihi (d. 328/940),167 and al-suyūṭī.168 however, unlike ibn khayyāṭ, these scholars also make reference to interpretations of q 46:17, particularly the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative involving the confrontation between marwān and ʿāʾisha. interestingly, ibn aʿtham, who was a shiʿite sympathizer,169 includes al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī (d. 61/680) in the story and presents him as the first leader with whom muʿāwiya met. he also includes a conversation between ʿāʾisha and muʿāwiya in which she reprimands him for threatening her brother and the three other leaders.170 these distinctions show that khalīfa, as a historian, refrained from dealing with regional narratives in favor of a broader imperial context. the isnād of khalīfa’s second report includes wahb b. jarīr → jarīr b. ḥāzim → ayyūb al-sikhtyānī (d. 131/749) → nāfiʿ (d. 117/726).171 except for nāfiʿ,172 who was a medinan and ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar’s mawlā, the other transmitters were basran. according to this report, muʿāwiya threatened to kill ibn ʿumar if he refused to pledge allegiance to yazīd. however, muʿāwiya denied having made the threat when confronted by ʿabd allāh b. ṣafwān (d. 73/692),173 who came to ibn ʿumar’s aid.174 the emphasis on ibn ʿumar, the oldest son of the second caliph, reflects the view that muʿāwiya’s decision to embrace hereditary succession broke with the model of rightful caliphal transition established by the first two caliphs. khalīfa’s third report175 is transmitted on the authority of wahb b. jarīr and juwayriyya b. asmāʾ, who heard it from the elders of medina. in this report, muʿāwiya, seeking the support of medinan leaders for the appointment of yazīd, first employed conciliatory means to win their hearts. as he was approaching mecca, he allowed al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī, ʿabd al-raḥmān b. abī bakr, ibn ʿumar, and ibn al-zubayr to accompany him. muʿāwiya first pretended to be very respectful of these leaders, praising their virtues and the prominent place they occupied within the quraysh and the islamic community. when they arrived in mecca, he requested that they pledge allegiance to yazīd. in this report as in the first one, ibn al-zubayr emerges as the principal opposition leader, speaking on behalf of the 165. for discussions about the date of his death, see lawrence conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 92–96. 166. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, ed. muḥammad ʿabd al-muʿīd khān et al. (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1388–95/1968–75), 4:232–44. 167. ibn ʿabd rabbihi transmits this report on the authority of al-madāʾinī (d. 225/840). see al-ʿiqd al-farīd, ed. mufīd qumayḥa (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1983), 5:119–20. 168. al-suyūṭī, taʾrīkh al-khulafāʾ, ed. jamāl muṣṭafā (cairo: dār al-fajr li-l-turāth, 1999), 156–57. 169. conrad, “ibn aʿtham,” 112–14. 170. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 4:237–38. 171. ibn ḥajar, tahdhīb, 4:210–11. 172. for discussion about nafīʿ’s role in the transmission of reports and about whether he was a historical figure, see motzki, analysing muslim traditions, 61–124. 173. ibn ṣafwān, who was a prominent umayyad figure, supported ibn al-zubayr’s claim to the caliphate and was killed along with ibn al-zubayr at the end of the siege that the umayyads imposed on mecca. al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 15:125–27. 174. khalīfa, taʾrīkh, 214. 175. keshk labels this report “the ḥijazī centric version.” see historians’ muʿāwiya, 147–54. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 138 other dignitaries. he argued that the muslims would support muʿāwiya only if he were to follow the model of succession established by the prophet, abū bakr, and ʿumar. clarifying this statement, ibn al-zubayr specified three principles of succession: the consensus of the community, avoidance of hereditary succession, and the shūrā. muʿāwiya not only refused to accept these traditions but, claims khalīfa, threatened to kill all four dignitaries if they did not support his son. according to khalīfa, the circumstances gave rise to the impression that the four leaders had acquiesced to muʿāwiya’s request, and the people of medina consequently followed suit.176 this report, like the other two cited by khalīfa, centers on the theme of legitimate caliphal succession and depicts the appointment of yazīd as undermining previous models of accession. new in this report is the appearance of al-ḥusayn, which seems to reflect a later modification, perhaps by shiʿite sympathizers aiming to connect him with the question of legitimate caliphal succession. the works of ibn aʿtham177 and al-maqdisī,178 who likewise emphasize ḥusayn’s role in the debate, also display this orientation. khalīfa’s third report appears in al-ʿaskarī’s (d. 395/1005) kitāb al-awāʾil. the main difference between these accounts is that al-ʿaskarī combines this report with a description of the confrontation between marwān and ʿabd al-raḥmān presented in the interpretation of q 46:17.179 again, khalīfa’s omission of this material demonstrates that he was interested primarily in presenting significant junctures in caliphal history that had far-reaching implications. this orientation is evident in khalīfa’s eschewing of discussions regarding the interpretation of q 46:17, in general, and the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative, in particular. at the same time, he presents ibn al-zubayr as the main opponent of yazīd’s succession, allocating a secondary role to ʿabd al-raḥmān. khalīfa’s placement of muʿāwiya’s hereditary rule within broader caliphal history is repeated in later taʾrīkh works, particularly in early universal histories such as that of al-yaʿqūbī (d. ca. 284/897), who was interested in situating the islamic caliphate within the larger frame of universal history. he mentions muʿāwiya’s appointment of yazīd as his successor only in passing, and without an isnād. like khalīfa, he refers to four ḥijāzī leaders who opposed this move: al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī, ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar, ʿabd al-raḥmān, and ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr. however, al-yaʿqūbī assigns the leading role in the opposition to ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar and ibn al-zubayr, claiming that they considered yazīd immoral and unfit to be the caliph.180 ibn ʿumar, the oldest son of the caliph ʿumar, was known for his piety, while ibn al-zubayr would later pose a major political challenge to the umayyads. 176. khalīfa, taʾrīkh, 215–17. 177. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 4:241–44; cited in keshk, historians’ muʿāwiya, 147–50. 178. al-maqdisī incorporates the first and second reports into one narrative. he also mentions only three medinan leaders: al-ḥusayn, ʿabd al-raḥmān, and ibn al-zubayr. see badʾ, 6:6–7. 179. al-ʿaskarī, kitāb al-awāʾil, ed. muḥammad al-wakīl (cairo: dār al-bashīr li-l-thaqāfa, 1987), 235–36. 180. al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1960), 2:228. for the english translation, see the works of ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī: an english translation, trans. matthew gordon, chase robinson, everett rowson, and michael fishbein (leiden: brill, 2018), 3:904. 139 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a detailed presentation of the ḥijāzī opposition to muʿāwiya’s hereditary succession appears in al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh. like khalīfa, al-ṭabarī locates his discussion of hereditary succession within a broader representation of caliphal history, where the opposition of the medinan leadership to muʿāwiya’s questionable move occupies an important place in al-ṭabarī’s account. what is new in al-ṭabarī’s narrative arrangement is his reliance on predominantly iraqi authorities. citing al-ḥārith b. muḥammad (d. 282/895) and al-madāʾinī (d. 225/840),181 he reports that after the death of ziyād b. abīh (d. 53/673), muʿāwiya declared publicly that in the event of his own death yazīd would be his successor. all muslim leaders but five supported this decision.182 a further report183 on the authority of ʿabd allāh b. ʿawn (d. 151/768), who heard it from a man from nakhla,184 discloses the identity of these leaders:185 they were al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī, ibn ʿumar, ibn al-zubayr, ʿabd al-raḥmān, and ibn ʿabbās. muʿāwiya met separately with the first four and silenced their opposition by persuasion and force.186 al-ṭabarī’s inclusion of ibn ʿabbās here seems to reflect a later redaction influenced by an abbasid political agenda.187 al-ṭabarī concludes his discussion of muʿāwiya’s inauguration of hereditary succession by providing two additional reports, which take the form of political advice that muʿāwiya issued to yazīd on his deathbed, cautioning him about future political challenges. the isnād of the first report includes the kufan scholars hishām al-kalbī (d. 204/819) → abū mikhnaf (d. 157/774) → ʿabd al-malik b. nawfal b. musāḥiq (d. unknown). in this account we see muʿāwiya warning his son about four qurayshite dignitaries: al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī, ʿabd al-raḥmān, ibn ʿumar, and ibn al-zubayr. yet muʿāwiya singled out ibn al-zubayr as the most serious threat to the umayyad caliphate. the same report appears in later works, such as those of ibn al-jawzī,188 ibn kathīr,189 and ibn al-athīr.190 however, these authors question the inclusion of ʿabd al-raḥmān, claiming that he died two years before the event. this 181. on al-madāʾinī’s contributions to early islamic historiography, see robinson, islamic historiography, 28–29. 182. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. muḥammad abū al-faḍl ibrāhīm (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1960), 5:303. 183. julius wellhausen presents these two reports on the authority of al-madāʾinī. see the arab kingdom and its fall, trans. margaret weir (london: curzon press, 1973), 144. 184. ʿabd allāh b. ʿawn was a reliable ḥadīth scholar and qurʾān reciter who maintained close relations with the umayyad rulers and hence held anti-qadarite views. see andersson, early sunni historiography, 129; judd, religious scholars, 62–70. 185. the isnād includes yaʿqūb b. ibrāhīm al-dawraqī (d. 252/866) → ismāʿīl b. ibrāhīm (d. 169/785) → ʿabd allāh b. ʿawn → a man from nakhla. 186. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 5:303–4. 187. marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy, 91–92. 188. ibn al-jawzī, al-muntaẓam fī taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. muḥammad ʿaṭā and muṣṭafā ʿaṭā (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1995), 5:321–22. 189. ibn kathīr, bidāya, 11:391. 190. ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, ed. ʿumar tadmurī (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 2012), 3:120. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 140 discrepancy between al-ṭabarī and later historians gives insight into the process by which later reports were redacted. al-ṭabarī’s second report is transmitted on the authority of the kufan hishām al-kalbī and ʿawāna b. al-ḥakam (d. 147/764). according to this report, after muʿāwiya instructed yazīd on how to deal with the people of the ḥijāz, iraq, and syria, he warned him specifically of the qurayshite leaders mentioned in the previous report, but excluding ʿabd al-raḥmān.191 al-ṭabarī’s reliance on abū mikhnaf192 and ʿawāna, who were important kufan authorities on the history of the early umayyad caliphs,193 represents a transition from medinan authorities to iraqi historical traditions. the new orientation is evident in al-masʿūdī’s (d. 345/954) murūj, which emphasizes the central role of iraqi leaders, particularly al-ḍaḥḥāq b. qays al-fihrī (d. 64/685), in supporting muʿāwiya’s appointment of yazīd as his successor.194 in sum, the portrayals of muʿāwiya’s shift to hereditary succession in early taʾrīkh works differ from those found in other literary genres in terms of the narrative placement and protagonists. instead of presenting the ḥijāzī opposition to muʿāwiya’s decision as a regional conflict, the historians place the dispute within the broader setting of major events and transformations in caliphal history. this is evident in the gradual shift from the use of medinan authorities to reliance on predominantly iraqi sources. another difference lies in the depiction of ʿabd al-raḥmān. in tafsīr, ḥadīth, ansāb, and adab works he appears as the central medinan opposition leader. however, in taʾrīkh narratives his role is secondary, eclipsed by the central role of ibn al-zubayr. 6. conclusions various literary genres treating the ḥijāzī opposition to muʿāwiya’s initiation of dynastic succession offer constructive perspectives on the provenance and evolution of representations of this event. narrative placement, relevance of materials, and political agenda constitute significant variables in the construction of historical narratives. early allusions to the ḥijāzī-umayyad dispute took the form of debates over the identity of the rebellious son in early commentaries on q 46:17. the predominant view that ʿabd al-raḥmān b. abī bakr was the disobedient son originated in umayyad political arguments. early ḥadīth and adab narratives portray marwān b. al-ḥakam as the initiator of the interpretation that ʿabd al-raḥmān was the rebellious son in this verse to discredit him after the latter opposed yazīd’s appointment as muʿāwiya’s successor. an examination of the competing interpretations of the verse suggests two major conclusions. first, the umayyads recruited prominent ḥadīth and tafsīr scholars, such as qatāda, to disseminate the ʿabd al-raḥmān narrative effectively. second, the construction of counterreports to clear ʿabd al-raḥmān’s name—a difficult task—entailed the affiliation of these countervailing views with prominent authorities such as ʿāʾisha and ḥasan al-baṣrī. 191. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 5:322–23. 192. de prémare, les fondations, 364. 193. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 58; donner, narratives, 183, 195; al-dūrī, baḥth, 35–37. 194. al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. charles pellat (beirut: manshūrāt al-jāmiʿa al-lubnāniyya, 1965), 3:217–19. 141 • abed el-rahman tayyara al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) consequently, references to ʿabd al-raḥmān as the leader of the opposition to umayyad dynastic succession provide a yardstick by which to assess the origin and evolution of the ḥijāzī opposition. in tafsīr, ḥadīth, ansāb, and adab sources ʿabd al-raḥmān is presented as the central medinan leader to dispute the umayyad rule of succession. ʿabd al-raḥmān’s disagreeable jāhilī past made him an easy target for umayyad criticism, especially since he was the oldest son of the first caliph. the dispute between the umayyads and the medinan leadership is presented in these genres as regional conflict, with the ḥijāz, particularly medina, serving as the central setting. the significance of medina as the origin of these reports can also be seen in the geographical affiliations of their transmitters. representations of the ḥijāzī-umayyad dispute over hereditary succession in taʾrīkh narratives offer a different perspective compared with those of the abovementioned literary genres. instead of situating the dispute in a provincial setting, these historians placed it within a broader imperial framework that carried far more consequential political meanings. by doing so, they sought to draw attention to important junctures in caliphal history that impacted the construction of historical memory. this distinction is also evident in the gradual shift from reliance on medinan transmitters to an emphasis on iraqi authorities, as well as in the changing identification of the event’s protagonists. the central role that the tafsīr and ḥadīth literature grants to ʿabd al-raḥmān in the ḥijāzī opposition to the umayyads is reduced to a secondary role in the taʾrīkh works, which instead elevate the influence of other ḥijāzī leaders, particularly ibn al-zubayr. it comes as no surprise that discussions about the identity of the rebellious son in q 46:17 are absent in the historical narratives. common to the presentations of the conflict in all genres is muʿāwiya’s mindfulness of the ḥijāzī leadership’s reactions to umayyad institutional innovations. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the rebellious son: umayyad hereditary succession • 142 bibliography abū ḥayyān al-andalusī. al-baḥr al-muḥīṭ fī al-tafsīr. edited by ʿādil ʿabd al-mawjūd and ʿalī muʿawwaḍ. 8 vols. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1993. ahmed, asad. the religious elite of the early islamic hijaz: five prosopographical case studies. oxford, 2011. andersson, tobias. early sunnī historiography: a study of the tārīkh of khalīfa b. khayyāṭ leiden: brill, 2018. al-ʿaskarī. kitāb al-awāʾil. edited by muḥammad al-wakīl. 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“sunni revival.” it is generally assumed that muslim solidarity was constructed through shared piety and an evocation of the pristine islamic past. the hunting epistle of yaghmur b. ʿīsā al-ʿukbarī (d. ca. 558/1163) offers a different perspective on how solidarity was imagined. it depicts a drunken feast, followed by a multiday hunting expedition, followed by a second drunken feast. whereas these inebriated activities are full of fellowship, the return to god-fearing piety at the end of the epistle is marked by loneliness and alienation. reading adab without the framework of the crusades offers an opportunity to rethink the sensibilities of the period while contributing to our knowledge of adab texts written by authors whose works usually do not survive. yaghmur’s epistle is preserved in the adab anthology of ʿimād al-dīn al-iṣfahānī and attributed to an arabized turkish military officer who is otherwise unknown, but the anthologist claims to have edited the epistle, which suggests that yaghmur is actually a coauthor. * this article is dedicated to michael cook as a small token of my appreciation for organizing the holberg seminar and inviting me to participate. the intellectual fruitfulness of our annual meetings, as well as the lasting friendships and solidarities that developed from that seminar, have been crucial to my development as a scholar. this article is testament to that fact. the essay was originally part of a paper that i presented at nyu abu dhabi during a workshop organized by christian mauder, another holbergian. the first part of that paper forms a companion article, which is forthcoming in the journal intellectual history of the islamicate world and is entitled “rethinking poetry as (anti-crusader) propaganda: licentiousness and cross-confessional patronage in the ḫarīdat al-qaṣr.” this article and, to some degree or other, all my scholarly work have also been greatly enriched by a fateful semester in the spring of 2011 during which i took michael’s famous seminar on the islamic scholarly tradition. for the warmth and rigors of those experiences and for much else besides, i am grateful. thanks are also due to guy ron-gilboa, perla alvarez, and the anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments on an earlier draft of this essay. the remaining oversights and errors are entirely my own. © 2020 matthew l. keegan. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:mlkeegan%40barnard.edu?subject= 273 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) we turned against passion and swore ourselves to god-fearing devotion. we took refuge in the realm of right conduct and donned the armor of good behavior. we rectified our past faults and dreaded useless activity. we were afflicted with parting from that company and were driven to estrangement from those companions. . . . this is the story of the passing days (al-ayyām) among humankind and their effects on both elites and common folk. their pleasures are like dreams and their wakefulness is like sleep. may god make us among those who triumph with everlasting paradise. —yaghmur b. ʿ īsā, risāla ṭardiyya, in kharīdat al-qaṣr1 thus ends the hunting epistle (risāla ṭardiyya) attributed to a young military officer in damascus named yaghmur b. ʿīsā al-ʿukbarī (d. ca. 558/1163).2 the epistle, whose problematic authorship is discussed below and which comes to thirty-six pages in print, is an account of a drinking party and a wine-soaked ten-day hunting expedition, followed by a second drinking party that lasts several days. the epistle’s turn to god-fearing devotion and good behavior in its final passage evokes in the narrator a sense of loneliness, nostalgia, and estrangement (ghurba). although the inebriated activities of hunting and feasting are described in the final lines of the epistle as “useless activity” (ḥābiṭ al-ʿamal), they are nevertheless considered occasions of solidarity throughout the rest of the epistle. ascetic piety, by contrast, appears in the passage quoted above as something that leads to a breakdown in companionship. at the same time, yaghmur portrays the period of fellowship, drinking, hunting, and dispersal as an “account of the passing days among humankind” (sīrat al-ayyām fī al-anām). it is therefore not simply a story of yaghmur’s personal experience but a more general account of fleeting pleasures in the face of the terrible triumvirate of time (al-zamān), fickle fortune (al-dahr), and the passing days (al-ayyām).3 yaghmur’s epistle begins by urging the reader to face the uncertainties of fate (al-qadar) by seizing the day (ightinām al-ʿumr), but it ends with the recognition that all 1. ʿ imād al-dīn al-iṣfahānī, kharīdat al-qaṣr wa-jarīdat ahl al-ʿaṣr (levant), ed. s. fayṣal (damascus: al-maṭbaʿa al-hāshimiyya, 1955), 1:389. the kharīda is modeled on earlier, geographically organized adab anthologies and is divided into four unequal sections by ʿimād al-dīn himself: (1) baghdad and its environs, (2) the persian east, including iṣfahān and khurāsān, (3) the levant (al-shām), which includes mosul and the arabian peninsula, and (4) egypt and the west (al-maghrib), including sicily. teams from iraq, iran, syria, egypt, and tunisia have edited the anthology piecemeal over the course of decades, between 1951 and 1999, each addressing the portion of the anthology that covers their own region. i cite the kharīda throughout the article by noting the region of the edition in parentheses (iraq, levant, east, egypt, or west). for the geographically organized anthology of al-thaʿālibī (d. 429/1039) and the history of adab anthologies more generally, see b. orfali, the anthologist’s art: abū manṣūr al-thaʿālibī and his “yatīmat al-dahr” (leiden: brill, 2016). 2. although the edition of the text has ʿimād al-dīn say that yaghmur’s death took place in 508 or 509, this is impossible. kharīda (levant), 1:354. ʿimād al-dīn met yaghmur when he visited damascus in 562/1166–67 or 571/1175–76, and he apparently completed the kharīda in 572/1176–77. thus, as jaakko hämeen-anttila has pointed out, yaghmur must have died either in 568–69/1172–74 or in 558–59/1162–64. j. hämeen-anttila, maqama: a history of a genre (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2002), 214. 3. i use capitalized translations in instances in which i take the words to be personified. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 274 things come to an end and that the pleasures of this earthly life are as though they were in a dream. at first glance, yaghmur’s epistle seems to be negotiating two diametrically opposed responses to the shortness of human life: one can either seize the day or turn to asceticism in hope for the next life. on closer inspection, however, the two responses are not truly opposed to one another in the epistle but rather temporally mediated. there is a time to seize the day and enjoy the pleasures of life with one’s companions, and there is a time for turning to righteous conduct. the loneliness that comes along with asceticism and good behavior suggests that social solidarity is undergirded by shared pleasures rather than shared piety. at the same time, the concern for islam and the next life is never truly absent, even as the characters in the epistle indulge in earthly pleasures, which are described as a kind of earthly version of islamic paradise. yaghmur’s epistle was written sometime in the latter half of what i call the “long sixth/ twelfth century,” a term that i have coined to refer to the century and a half between the frankish conquest of jerusalem in 492/1099 and the fall of baghdad to the mongols in 656/1258. the history of this period is well known because it is the era of the crusades. by contrast, the adab of the long sixth/twelfth century has received scant attention, perhaps because it sits awkwardly between the lifetime of al-ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122) and the mamluk period.4 al-ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt were once the boundary beyond which scholars of classical arabic literature deigned not to tread because of the supposed decadence and dullness of the material found in the later, “postclassical” period. although scholars of mamluk-era adab have successfully revitalized interest in the so-called decadent period, the long sixth/ twelfth century remains largely unstudied.5 the major exception to this trend is the adab (both poetry and prose) written about the crusades. for example, the kitāb al-iʿtibār (book of contemplation) of usāma b. munqidh (d. 584/1188) has been translated into english twice in the past century precisely because it is a source for the muslim response to the crusades, but major adab figures such as al-wahrānī (d. 565/1179) and bulbul al-gharām al-ḥājirī (d. 632/1235) are scarcely recognizable, even among specialists in classical arabic.6 4. s. von hees, ed., inḥiṭāṭ—the decline paradigm: its influence and persistence in the writing of arab cultural history (würzburg: ergon, 2017); m. cooperson, “the abbasid ‘golden age’: an excavation,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 25 (2017): 41–65. these two recent sources and the bibliographies they supply suggest the fruitfulness of this reevaluation. 5. t. bauer, “‘ayna hādhā min al-mutanabbī!’: toward an aesthetic of mamluk literature,” mamlūk studies review 17 (2013): 5–22. 6. nizar hermes has made a similar point regarding ibn al-qaysarānī (d. 548/1153), whom modern scholars tend not to recognize even though he was one of the most famous and important poets of his era. n. hermes, “the poet(ry) of frankish enchantment: the ifranjiyyāt of ibn qaysarānī,” middle eastern literatures 20 (2017): 267–87. the translations of usāma b. munqidh are the book of contemplation, trans. p. cobb (london: penguin books, 2008), and an arab-syrian gentleman and warrior in the period of the crusades, trans. p. k. hitti (new york: columbia university press, 1929), reprinted several times. a small amount of work has been done on al-wahrānī; e.g., e. k. rowson, “parody in arabic adab: the rasāʾil of al-wahrānī” (unpublished paper); h. fähndrich, “parodie im ‘mittelalter’: aus einem werk des m. b. muḥriz al-wahrānī (gest. 1179–80),” in festschrift ewald wagner zum 65. geburtstag, ed. w. heinrichs and g. schoeler, 439–46 (beirut: franz steiner, 1994); al-wahrānī, manāmāt al-wahrānī wa-maqāmātuhu wa-rasāʾiluhu, ed. i. shaʿlān and m. naghash (köln: 275 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the euro-american fixation with the crusades creates both a selection bias in favor of crusade-related material and an incitement to a particular mode of discourse about the crusades to the exclusion of other cultural and political concerns. one of the assumptions underpinning the modern discourse on the long sixth/twelfth century is that islamic political ideology in this period was constructed and reinforced through a commitment to ascetic piety and to an imagined community rooted in the early islamic past. summing up several scholarly contributions on this topic, daniella talmon-heller states that scholars have established “a firm link between personal piety and enlistment to the defense of dar al-islam.”7 solidarity in the era of the crusades has thus generally been imagined as a kind of “moralistic community” that was established through “propaganda” focused on “asceticism, humility . . . and sincere personal religiosity.”8 given these assumptions about the centrality of personal piety in the counter-crusade, there is a tendency to read the adab of the period either as propaganda or as an expression of the “sunni revival.” although the framework of the sunni revival has been called into question, there remains a tendency to see the long sixth/twelfth century as an age of religious fervor.9 in particular, scholars have trained their attention on texts that urge ascetic piety and seek to portray counter-crusading heroes such as saladin as ascetic warriors. i have argued against using the term “propaganda” and its conceptual apparatus in a companion article entitled “rethinking poetry as (anti-crusader) propaganda.” propaganda and related terms like censorship do not effectively capture the ways in which poetry circulated as an elite discourse during this period, and they do not take account of the wide variety of topics addressed in adab. a survey of the era’s poetry suggests that this was not an age that was single-mindedly focused on the counter-crusade and the sunni revival but one that was full of shiʿite poets, cross-confessional patronage networks, and licentious poetry.10 yaghmur’s epistle represents a further opportunity to rethink the adab production of this period because yaghmur foregrounds the rather un-ascetic behaviors of drinking and hunting. the epistle is preserved in ʿimād al-dīn al-iṣfahānī’s (d. 597/1201) massive adab anthology, kharīdat al-qaṣr wa-jarīdat ahl al-ʿaṣr (the palace’s perfect pearl and the register manshūrāt al-jamal, 1998). it should be noted that the date of the author’s death on the cover of this edition is given as 1575 ce, which is incorrect. 7. d. talmon-heller, “historical motifs in the writing of muslim authors of the crusading era,” in the crusader world, ed. a. boas, 378–90 (new york: routledge, 2016), 378. surveys of this material can also be found in o. latiff, the cutting edge of the poet’s sword: muslim poetic responses to the crusades (leiden: brill, 2017). 8. talmon-heller, “historical motifs,” 385. for a more detailed discussion of this point, see keegan, “rethinking poetry.” 9. a. c. s. peacock summarizes this brand of revisionist scholarship and demonstrates that the seljuks were pragmatists who, whatever their personal feelings, did not seek to enforce religious conformity. sunni factionalism seems to have presented a bigger problem than sectarian disputes did. peacock, the great seljuk empire (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2015), 247–85. stephennie mulder has offered a cogent critique of a sectarian paradigm for reading ʿ alid shrines in the long sixth/twelfth century, but due to her focus on certain kinds of sources and materials, she characterizes the atmosphere of the age as one of religious excitement. mulder, shrines of the ʿalids in medieval syria (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014), 3–4. 10. keegan, “rethinking poetry.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 276 of the people of the present age), which covers sixteen volumes in print and is devoted almost exclusively to poetry. ʿimād al-dīn calls yaghmur an “arabized turk (min muwalladī al-atrāk) and one of damascus’s well-known military men (umarāʾihā al-maʿrūfīn).”11 what this epistle apparently represents is a text originally composed by someone who was part of a broader military elite but who was marginal to the world of adab and arabic scholarship. we seem to have no other record of this yaghmur, a level of obscurity to which i will return below.12 of course, one can easily find medieval sources that laud the ascetic piety of muslim warriors or of counter-crusaders like saladin (d. 589/1193) and nūr al-dīn (d. 569/1174). a chronicle like abū shāma’s (d. 665/1268) kitāb al-rawḍatayn fī akhbār al-dawlatayn al-nūriyya wa-l-ṣalāḥiyya portrays these two rulers as entirely devoted to austere piety and the pursuit of jihad. for example, abū shāma relates the story of a certain pious recluse who asked nūr al-dīn why he played polo, saying, “i did not think that you would engage in frivolity and play, and torture your horses without some religious benefit (fāʾida dīniyya).”13 nūr al-dīn explains that in the seasons when they are not actively waging jihad, the horses become listless and lose the ability to charge and retreat in battle unless they are made to exercise. through this anecdote, the historian abū shāma cultivates an image of nūr al-dīn in which activities that might be associated with rest, amusement, and pleasure are all inscribed within an economy of the fāʾida dīniyya. ʿimād al-dīn al-iṣfahānī, the anthologist who included yaghmur’s epistle in his kharīda, also participated in this form of ascetic image cultivation on behalf of his patrons. for instance, ʿimād al-dīn composed the following quatrain in the voice of his patron nūr al-dīn upon the latter’s request: i vow that i have no goal except jihad. repose in anything else is burden for me. striving achieves nothing without seriousness (jidd). life without the seriousness of jihad is a [mere] game.14 these snapshots of ascetic fervor insist upon subordinating amusement, idleness, and pleasure to the goals of jihad. by stark contrast, yaghmur’s epistle considers pleasure and piety to be compatible impulses that are suitable for different moments or stages of life. hunting and drinking with one’s companions are not conceived of as part of a 11. kharīda (levant), 1:354. 12. hämeen-anttila also discusses the tantalizing possibility of identifying this yaghmur with another yaghmur who died around the same time and whom ibn ʿasākir calls al-faqīh al-muqriʾ. were such an identification confirmed, it would shed yet further light on the mock-asceticism of this epistle. hämeen-anttila, maqama, 214. 13. abū shāma, kitāb al-rawḍatayn fī akhbār al-dawlatayn al-nūriyya wa-l-ṣalāḥiyya, ed. i. al-zaybaq (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1998), 1:35. 14. abū shāma, kitāb al-rawḍatayn, 2:242. translated somewhat differently in c. hillenbrand, “jihad poetry in the age of the crusades,” in crusades: medieval worlds in conflict, ed. t.f. madden, j.l. naus, and v. ryan, 9-24 (surrey: ashgate, 2010), 14. the ideal of the chivalric muslim warrior who is both brave and chaste is also a feature of the futuwwa and ʿayyārī ideologies discussed in d. tor, violent order: warfare, chivalry, and the ʿayyār phenomenon in the medieval islamic world (würzburg: ergon, 2007), 246–51. 277 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) fāʾida dīniyya, either as military exercises that support jihad or as a way of reinforcing the solidarity needed for the battlefield. instead, yaghmur’s hunting epistle portrays pleasure and solidarity as virtues in themselves. in yaghmur’s epistle, companionship and social solidarity are ideals that are best achieved through imbibing wine, inebriation, licentiousness (khalāʿa), homoerotic liaisons, and hunting. in the remainder of this article, i offer a brief introduction to yaghmur’s identity and a few preliminary remarks on the place of this epistle in the history of adab, followed by an exposition and analysis of this remarkable and moving epistle. yaghmur and the coauthored epistle everything we know for certain about yaghmur’s life is derived from ʿimād al-dīn’s biographical entry, which precedes the epistle. ʿimād al-dīn tells us that he met the young man in damascus and praises him for his bravery and his intellect, while mourning the fact that he died so young.15 ʿimād al-dīn says that he came across an autograph copy of the hunting epistle after yaghmur’s death, and he lists the epistle’s themes to introduce the text to the reader. ʿimād al-dīn also states that he revised the text before including it in the anthology: i found his epistle, written in his hand, in which he discusses what pertains to brotherly fellowship, weariness of the age, incitement to seize opportunities, descriptions of the hunt and setting snares, drinking wine, and the fickleness of the passing days. i revised it, corrected it, shortened it, set it right, crowned it, and adorned it [with rhyming prose]. i presented its prose and its poetry according to what suited my choice and revived his memory by presenting it.16 ʿimād al-dīn’s discussion of his extensive revisions, abridgments, and emendations calls into question the extent to which yaghmur can be considered the “author” of the epistle. at the very least, we must consider it coauthored, since yaghmur’s original composition has been reshaped to some unknown degree by ʿimād al-dīn. it may be that yaghmur originally wrote the epistle in so-called middle arabic, a register of language that does not follows all the grammatical conventions of the high qurʾānic or classical arabic. his status as a non-arab who had achieved some level of assimilation into arabic culture is marked by his identification as a muwallad, and thus he might not (at least in ʿimād al-dīn’s view) have been a true master of arabic.17 alternatively, the epistle may have been written in a plain style of classical arabic that lacked the level of rhyming prose (sajʿ) that was in fashion at 15. kharīda (levant), 1:354. 16. ibid. 17. my thanks are due to rachel schine for her insights on the meaning of this term. وجــدُت رســالًة لــه بخطــه ذكــر فيهــا مــا يتضمــن ُمعاشــرة اإلخــوان وتعــب الزمــان والحــّث علــى اغتنــام الُفــَرص ووصــف الصيــد والقنــص وُشــرب الُمــدام وتقلــب األيــام. ونّقحناهــا وصححناهــا وحذفنــا منهــا وأصلحناهــا وكّللناهــا ورّصعناهــا وأوردنــا منهــا مــا وقــع االختيــار عليــه نظمــًا ونثــًرا وأحيينــا لــه بإيرادهــا ذكــرا. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 278 the time. when ʿimād al-dīn states that he “adorned” the epistle (raṣṣaʿnāhā), he is likely referring to his use of the intricate form of rhyming prose known as sajʿ muraṣṣaʿ in which entire phrases are quantitatively paralleled. ordinary sajʿ could be limited to rhyming words at the end of each phrase.18 it is also worth considering the possibility that yaghmur was not a real person at all but simply someone whom ʿimād al-dīn invented in order to compose an epistle of his own invention. the trope of a “found text” is well known from cases like don quixote by cervantes (d. 1616 ce), and it is also found in arabic literature in, for example, the risālat al-qiyān (epistle on the singing girls) of al-jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868) and in an epistle entitled waqʿat al-aṭibbāʾ (the battle of the physicians) by ibn buṭlān (d. 458/1066), an edition of which is currently being prepared for publication by ignacio sánchez.19 if ʿimād al-dīn did invent the epistle and its author, then what we have is an author imagining himself as an arabized turkish officer through pseudepigraphy, but he does not give any hint of this fabrication. the kharīda’s explicit aim of compilation and memorialization suggests that when ʿimād al-dīn says he met the author and found an autograph manuscript of the epistle, he really means it. he regularly informs the reader of how and in what form he encountered the texts he anthologizes, and he also includes some details about his personal encounters with the authors, as he does here. in this sense, ʿimād al-dīn is a distinct and frequent presence in his anthology and does not disappear behind the material he anthologizes, as many anthologizers seem to do.20 the fact that yaghmur’s biography was not included in other biographical compendia or anthologies is hardly proof that he did not exist, given that ʿimād al-dīn anthologizes several authors who are otherwise unknown and who belong to social classes whose discursive production would not have been preserved as part of adab in earlier eras. for example, the kharīda contains poems by an unnamed love-poet (ghazzāl) who is described as a member of the sub-elites (ʿawāmm) of baghdad, and by a one-eyed damascene hawker of goods (bāʾiʿ) who writes a poem about wanting to be left alone.21 yaghmur’s inclusion in the anthology can be seen as part of the widening purview of adab anthologies in this period, which reflected the proclivities of the anthologizers. in fact, yaghmur’s epistle is not the only example in the kharīda of the anthologizer engaging in abridgment and emendation of a longer prose work. the entry that precedes yaghmur’s contains an epistle that ʿimād al-dīn claims to have abridged (ikhtaṣartuhā), although he does not say that he corrected or upgraded the language. this other epistle, entitled al-nasr wa-l-bulbul (the eagle and the nightingale), is a kind of pious allegory by 18. d. stewart, “sajʿ in the qurʾān: prosody and structure,” journal of arabic literature 21 (1990): 101–39, at 131–32. 19. h. mancing, “cide hamete benengeli vs. migue de cervantes: the metafictional dialectic of don quixote,” cervantes: bulletin of the cervantes society of america 1 (1981): 63–81. j. e. montgomery, “beeston and the singing-girls,” proceedings of the seminar for arabian studies 36 (2006): 17–24, at 20. i am grateful to ignacio sánchez for bringing this epistle to my attention and for sharing a preliminary draft of his edition. 20. on this question, see a. ghersetti, “a pre-modern anthologist at work: the case of muḥammad b. ibrāhīm al-waṭwāṭ (d. 718/1318),” in concepts of authorship in pre-modern arabic texts, ed. l. behzadi and j. hämeen-anttila, 23–46 (bamberg: university of bamberg press, 2015), 27–30. 21. kharīda (iraq), 2:323; kharīda (levant), 1:271–72. 279 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) al-muhadhdhib al-dimashqī, a damascene preacher of the sixth/twelfth century.22 at the end of the allegorical epistle, ʿimād al-dīn seems almost apologetic about its hortatory quality, saying: “this epistle ends with a sermonizing section (faṣl waʿẓī), which is not the task of the book (laysa min sharṭ al-kitāb).”23 this comment sheds light on how ʿimād al-dīn conceived of his kharīda and tells us something of his editorial practice. apparently, the kharīda was not designed to be a sermonizing work. however, ʿimād al-dīn is willing to leave intact a sermonizing section in al-nasr wa-l-bulbul, even as he abridges that same epistle in other ways. in other words, the act of anthologizing includes editing but not eliminating material that is deemed to lie outside the boundaries of the book’s tone, task, or genre. if we take ʿimād al-dīn at his word, yaghmur’s epistle is a coauthored text. it is impossible to know how much each coauthor contributed to the version we have in the kharīda, although ʿimād al-dīn’s comments suggest that he has mainly altered the formal aspects of the text while maintaining (if sometimes rearranging) the plot and thematic content set down by yaghmur. if i am right in supposing that the epistle is not ʿimād al-dīn’s pseudepigraphic forgery, what we have is a remarkable example of adab composed by a military man whose participation in adab was of the more amateur variety, rather than that of an adīb. the epistle is likely just a tiny drop in a boundless ocean of adab that did not survive because it was not written by the elite producers of adab. the kharīda thus marks an early phase in an ongoing trend in which anthologies expanded their scope. a similar process can be seen in konrad hirschler’s study of reading certificates (samāʿāt), and these certificates reveal an increasing interest in documenting readers with nonscholarly backgrounds.24 although there is certainly evidence of hostility to the entry of sub-elites into elite spheres such as adab, these polemics had little impact on the practice of including nonscholarly readers in samāʿāt. in a similar fashion, the kharīda includes a wider range of voices than earlier anthologies do, which seems to reflect a growing elite interest in the discursive participation of previously invisible authors.25 the social transformations of education and adab in this period thus led to the blurring and intermingling of elites and literate sub-elites in the samāʿāt and the anthology. it seems likely that authors who were not specialists in the adab tradition also produced and circulated their works in earlier periods but that much of it did not survive. as adam talib has argued with reference to poetry, the past preserved by adab anthologies is a “gilded cage” that can be deceptive, a point that is equally applicable to prose: 22. kharīda (levant), 1:340. 23. ibid., 1:353. 24. k. hirschler, the written word in the medieval arabic lands (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2012), 60–70. 25. t. bauer, “mamluk literature: misunderstandings and new approaches,” mamlūk studies review 9, no. 2 (2005): 105–32, at 109–11; t. herzog, “composition and worldview of some bourgeois and petit-bourgeois mamluk adab-encyclopedias,” mamlūk studies review 17 (2013): 100–129, at 105–6. the normative reaction against including nonscholarly readers in reading certificates “had little influence on the praxis of knowledge transmission,” but elite hostility to certain genres of writing that were seen as non-elite persisted. hirschler, written word, 68 and 164–93. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 280 we must not allow the colossal volume of anthologized material to dupe us into thinking that it is everything. . . . if ours is an anthological literary history, then it is also true that for the study of classical arabic poetry, the extra-anthological has been irrevocably lost. whatever texts and whichever poets failed to make it aboard these anthological arks—whether because they were deliberately excluded or because they inhabited literary worlds that were for all intents and purposes sealed off from what we have to presume were the more elite worlds in which anthologists circulated—that extra-anthological past is undiscoverable today.26 perhaps yaghmur’s epistle represents a fragment of a more widespread kind of adab that is otherwise lost, or perhaps this very notion that we have evidence of lost adab is a case of the anthology duping us into thinking we can see beyond the gilded cage. in either case, it should be remembered that our encounter with yaghmur’s epistle is at least doubly mediated. it is mediated firstly by ʿimād al-dīn’s editorial interventions and secondly by the framework of the crusades that overwhelms the modern study of the long sixth/twelfth century. although it is impossible to recover the extra-anthological past, the study of a text that seems to have just barely made it aboard the anthological ark can perhaps shed light on some overlooked aspects of adab’s history. for example, yaghmur’s identity as an “arabized turk” and as one of the “well-known military men” of damascus puts his work into a category of adab produced by the turkic military elite.27 the role of this “non-arab” group in the production of adab and the role of courts dominated by a non-arab elite have often been dismissed or diminished.28 yaghmur’s epistle may have had a very limited circulation, given that ʿimād al-dīn found it in what may have always been a unique manuscript, written in the author’s own hand. the text is not known to survive independently of the kharīda, which means that it would have probably flickered out of existence without ʿimād al-dīn’s intervention. however, it is likely part of a broader phenomenon of ephemeral texts by nonscholarly and non-arab authors. in spite of yaghmur’s status as a marginal participant in adab, this elite soldier’s epistle clearly draws in sophisticated and original ways on both the poetic tradition of hunting odes (qaṣāʾid ṭardiyya) and the narrative maqāma tradition. the poet abū firās al-ḥamdānī (d. 357/968) experimented with lengthening and narrativizing the hunting ode when he composed a 136-line urjūza muzdawija (a poem in rhyming couplets in the looser metrical 26. a. talib, review of the anthologist’s art: abū manṣūr al-thaʿālibī and his “yatīmat al-dahr” by bilal orfali, journal of the american oriental society 139 (2019): 251–53, at 253. 27. kharīda (levant), 1:354. 28. the major exceptions are b. flemming, “literary activities in mamluk halls and barracks,” studies in memory of gaston wiet, ed. m. rosen-ayalon, 249–60 (jerusalem: hebrew university of jerusalem, 1977); u. haarmann, “arabic in speech, turkish in language: mamluks and their sons in the intellectual life of fourteenth-century egypt and syria,” journal of semitic studies 33 (1988): 81–114; j. van steenbergen, “qalāwūnid discourse, elite communication, and the mamluk cultural matrix: interpreting a 14th-century panegyric,” journal of arabic literature 43 (2012): 1–28; c. mauder, gelehrte krieger: die mamluken als träger arabischsprachiger bildung nach al-ṣafadī, al-maqrīzī und weiteren quellen (hildesheim: georg olms, 2012); c. mauder and c. markiewicz, “a new source on the social gatherings (majālis) of the mamluk sulṭān qānṣawh al-ghawrī,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 145–48. 281 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) form of rajaz), which describes a single day’s hunt in elaborate detail. al-ḥamdānī’s poem begins by referring to the treachery of the passing days and fickle fortune, and it ends with a seven-day-long feast of wine and meat.29 these are also themes that yaghmur’s rhyming prose epistle includes and dwells on at greater length. abū firās’s muzdawija ṭardiyya was therefore not, as jaroslav stetkevych has suggested, a “historical non sequitur—a never repeated formal curiosity.”30 in fact, the muzdawija ṭardiyya found fertile ground in the mamluk period, as thomas bauer’s study of ibn faḍl allāh’s (d. 749/1349) muzdawija has shown. furthermore, the cognate narrative genre of the risāla ṭardiyya seems to have thrived both in the long sixth/twelfth century and in the mamluk period.31 at the same time, yaghmur’s narrative bears certain similarities to the maqāma genre. as jaakko hämeen-anttila has pointed out regarding yaghmur’s epistle, “had it been written some five centuries later, it would probably have been called maqāmat al-ṭard.”32 its protagonists are, after all, the elegant and eloquent men who are so familiar from the maqāma tradition, but the narrative here is longer than in a typical maqāma and revolves around the themes of hunting and inebriated solidarity in the face of fickle fortune. it is to this narrative itself that we now turn. yaghmur’s epistle: inebriated solidarity yaghmur’s prosimetric hunting epistle begins with a nonnarrative prologue and then launches into the story of a group of companions who engage in a drinking party and then set off on a multiday hunt that also involves a good deal of drinking. at the end of the hunt, they indulge in a second bout of drunken revelry. the epistle can usefully be divided into five unequal movements: (1) the nonnarrative encomium to youth and wine; (2) the narrator’s companions introduced; (3) the drinking party and a mock sermon; (4) the journey, the hunt, and the second revel; (5) the repentance. the repentance and the mock sermon during the drinking party mark intrusions of ascetic piety into a world of dissolute behavior, but they also mark the moments in which group solidarity breaks down. the vocabulary of islam (but not of asceticism) appears elsewhere, too, but it is less disruptive to group solidarity. in the opening movement, the first-person narrator and persona of the author praises youth (ṣibā) as the soul of companionship. he describes the ideal brother-companion as someone who is generous, intelligent, powerful, possessed of youthful passion (ṣabwa), and slow to anger. the narrator says that youth itself urges us to “seize the day” (ightinām al-ʿumr) 29. j. stetkevych, the hunt in arabic poetry: from heroic to lyric to metapoetic (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2016), 205–22. 30. stetkevych, hunt in arabic poetry, 185. 31. t. bauer, “the dawādār’s hunting party: a mamluk muzdawija ṭardiyya, probably by shihāb al-dīn ibn faḍl allāh,” in o ye gentlemen: arabic studies on science and literary culture in honour of remke kruk, ed. a. vrolijk and j. p. hogendijk, 291–312 (leiden: brill, 2007). 32. hämeen-anttila, maqama, 215. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 282 because this world is fickle and inconstant.33 wine—and lots of it—is the appropriate response to and revenge against the vicissitudes of this world. the one who resides in [this world (al-dunyā)] has no abode, and there is no revenge for anyone against its vicissitudes except passing around the ruddy red drink at dawn and at dusk to rid his heart of care with the purity of wine, making his goblet the largest one, hastening in the morning to his wine jug and his wine merchant, and turning in the evening to his oud and his flute.34 rather than waiting for the next world (al-ākhira), yaghmur urges his reader: carpe diem! the poignancy of this introduction is heightened by the fact that the author died so young. as ʿimād al-dīn says of yaghmur, “fate (al-qadar) brought about the waning of his brilliant star and the stumbling of his galloping steed.”35 the awful consequences wrought by the vicissitudes of fate and the inconstancy of time are therefore brought into stark relief in the kharīda by the reader’s foreknowledge of the author’s early demise. in the epistle’s second movement, the narrator introduces his companions and their habits. he tells us that god granted him noble companions (fataḥa allāhu lī bi-sāda umarāʾ).36 these generous companions act as a bulwark against the vagaries of time, “granting sanctuary when the passing days are unjust (yujīrūn idhā jārat al-ayyām).”37 their friendship is based on an intimacy that allows for indulgence in licentiousness and iniquity: when our passions aligned and our doubts dissipated, we began to pass around the wine. we followed nights of revelry with days, not recovering from the morning draught or the evening draught. we had no loathing for licentiousness or iniquities among the melody of stringed instruments and the heavily laden wine jugs, as we settled down in a secluded spot to sip wine. the easy flow of affection and concord among us and the casting aside of discomfort and formality led us to distribute our nights and days among ourselves.38 33. kharīda (levant), 1:355. 34. ibid., 1:356. 35. ibid., 1:354. 36. ibid., 1:357. 37. ibid. 38. ibid., 1:358. الهــّم لَصــرف واإلمســاء اإلصبــاح فــي الصهبــاء بمداومــة إال انتقــام َصْرفهــا مــن للمنتقــم وال ُمقــام بهــا للُمقيــم وليــس عــن قلبــه بِصــْرف الــراح وجْعــل قدحــه الكبيــر مــن األقــداح ومباكــرة دّنــه وخّمــارة وُمراوحــة ُعــوده ومزمــاره. َصبــوح مــن ُنفيــق ال واأليــام فيهــا الليالــي وأتبعنــا الُمــدام اســتدامة فــي شــرعنا الُشــُبهات وزالــت الَشــَهوات اتفقــت فلمــا للخلــوة منــزاًل مســتوطنين راووق وَدْلــف أوتــاٍر نغــم بيــن مــا وفســوق خالعــة مــن نســأم وال وَغبــوق والليالــي األيــام قســمنا أن والتكلُّــف الُكلفــة واّطــراح والتأُلــف اأُللفــة اقتــراح مــن بيننــا مــا فاقتضــى القهــوة وارتشــاف أقســاًما. بيننــا 283 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) friendship and solidarity with one’s fellows are presented here as a way of protecting oneself from the vicissitudes of time and the injustice of fate. this form of solidarity is based not on a shared religious sensibility but on communal vice and a willingness to engage in licentiousness (khalāʿa) and iniquities (fusūq) together. in contrast to this social protection against injustice, the rogue-tricksters of the classical maqāma protect themselves against the injustices of the world by relying on their own wits. in the maqāmas of al-hamadhānī (d. 395/1008) and al-ḥarīrī, the rogue-trickster often excuses his deceptions with reference to the injustices of time. for example, in al-hamadhānī’s al-maqāma al-qirdiyya (the imposture of the monkey), the narrator witnesses a man putting on a show with a dancing monkey. when he finds that the monkey trainer is none other than his old friend, the rogue abū al-fatḥ al-iskandarī, he asks, “what is all this baseness? shame on you!” al-iskandarī replies: the fault belongs to the passing days and not to me, so censure the calamitous nights. with foolishness i gained what i desired, and i swaggered along in my lovely garments.39 in al-ḥarīrī’s maqāma collection, the eloquent rogue abū zayd al-sarūjī sometimes makes more explicit reference to the problem of politics, noting that fickle fortune (al-dahr) has given power to deficient people (ahl al-naqīṣa).40 his response to this unjust political environment is to use his eloquence and erudition to trick the ignorant and relieve them of their money. the success of his tricks is predicated upon adjusting his discourse to the context of the performance: i wore attire appropriate for every time and was on intimate terms with its alternating states—happiness and misery. i dealt with each companion according to what suited him to give my companion pleasure. with the transmitters of tales, i pass ’round speech, and among those who pour out wine, i pass ’round the cups. 39. al-hamadhānī, maqāmāt abī al-faḍl al-hamadhānī, ed. y. al-nabhānī (istanbul: maṭbaʿat al-jawāʾib, 1881 [1298]), 32. 40. al-ḥarīrī, kitāb al-maqāmāt li-l-shaykh al-ʿālim abī muḥammad al-qāsim b. ʿ alī b. muḥammad b. ʿ uthmān al-ḥarīrī maʿa sharḥ mukhtār taʾlīf al-ʿabd al-ḥaqīr aṣghar ʿibād allāh silwistarā disāsī, ed. a. i. silvestre de sacy, rev. m. reinaud and m. derenbourg, 2nd ed. (paris: imprimerie royale, 1847), 1:21. فاعتــب علــى صــرف الليالــي الذنــب لأليــام ال لــي ورفلــت فــي حلــل الجمــال بالحمــق ادركــت المنــى والبســُت َصْرَفيــِه ُنعَمــى وُبْؤســا لبســُت لــكل زمــان َلُبوســا الجليســا أَلُروق يالئمــه وعاشــرُت ُكّل جليــِس بمــا وبيــن الُســقاة أديــر الُكُؤوســا فعنــد الــُرواة أديــر الــكالم وطــوًرا بَلهــوي أُســّر النفوســا وطــوًرا بوعظــي ُأســيل الدمــوع al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 284 sometimes, with my exhortation, i make tears flow, and sometimes, with my playfulness, i make souls rejoice.41 in the maqāmas of al-ḥarīrī and al-hamadhānī, the passage of time leads to the alternation between the two states of happiness and misery. the trickster is able to preserve his own safety and comfort in spite of this uncertainty only by taking advantage of the gullibility of others and by adjusting his own comportment to fit the context. the “companion” (jalīs) to whom abū zayd refers in the lines quoted above is both his audience and his victim. whereas the maqāma’s trickster skillfully manages to thrive in an uncertain world, yaghmur’s narrator finds refuge from time and its vicissitudes in his companions, who revel in licentiousness and frivolity. their refusal to consider the economy of the fāʾida dīniyya is the condition of possibility for their solidarity. the aim of the narrator and his companions in yaghmur’s epistle is not to take advantage of the ignorant in society but to surround themselves with like-minded fellows whose mutual generosity protects each from hardship. a further difference with the maqāmas of al-hamadhānī and al-ḥarīrī can be found in the role of the narrators. in the maqāmas, ʿīsā b. hishām and al-ḥārith b. hammām occasionally express shock and dismay at the tricksters’ dissolute behavior, even as they also travel with them and participate in their ruses. in yaghmur’s epistle, the first-person narrator is the one who expresses his sincere admiration for the licentious life. one does not get the sense that licentiousness is a subversive anti-norm that is being presented to the reader so that it can be condemned. nor does this licentious behavior situate the epistle outside of islam, as shall be seen below. the licentious and iniquitous behavior of this intimate group of muslim gentlemen is put forward as the highest ideal of fellowship, and each member takes a turn to put on a lavish feast, suggesting a high level of material wealth. the matter of feasting brings us to the third movement in the epistle: the islamic drinking party in which a certain nameless, generous gentleman in the group takes his turn to host his comrades. the party begins with a heavenly scene full of boys, women, and wine, all of which evokes the imagery of paradise. the pleasures of the hereafter become part of the here and now. a beautiful slave boy (ghulām) invites the guests into the house, and a second slave boy, even more beautiful than the first, invites them to drink. the second boy declares himself the messenger (rasūl) from the daughter of the vine, the bringer of happiness that is found in goblets. in other words, he is wine’s prophet.42 drinking and music follow, and the guests are surrounded by “the houris and the boys” of paradise, suggestive of the erotic potential of both the male and the female companions of the afterlife.43 the activities described are quite distinct from the ascetic notions of how to be islamic, but this drinking party is a thoroughly islamic one in shahab ahmed’s sense. that is, it is a hermeneutical engagement in islamic meaning-making that explores paradox and contradiction within the textual and contextual expressions of muslims’ lived realities.44 41. ibid., 420. 42. kharīda (levant), 1:360. 43. ibid., 1:361. 44. s. ahmed, what is islam? the importance of being islamic (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016), 165 and 409. 285 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) as the night goes on and the wine takes its hold on the guests, a pleasurable languor sets in, with poetry and stories being recalled and recited. suddenly the leader of the group—perhaps the generous host himself—stands up and acts as a preacher (qāma fīnā sayyid al-qawm khaṭīban). he begins to reproach the others for “taking pleasure in what the miserly hand of time has granted you and delighting in this [earthly] abode before the departure [of death].”45 this preacher is not a pious gate-crasher reminding the assembled guests of their religious duties. rather, he is quite drunk and having a bit of fun by pretending asceticism. having confused his friends, he pauses and takes a large tankard in his hand, looking askance at it. he contemplates it for a moment, prolonging his audience’s bewildered anticipation. the drunk preacher then changes his tune and launches into a short poem in praise of wine. he urges his friends to “seize life and drink it up like aged wine.” then, with a tongue that has been loosened by intoxication (bi-lisān qad aṭlaqathu al-nashwa), he harangues the crowd to stop chattering and drink: “busy yourselves with wine instead of reciting poetry!”46 the character of the preacher-host who turns quickly from asceticism to revelry recalls the figure of the gate-crasher in the ḥikāyat abī al-qāsim al-baghdādī of abū al-muṭahhar al-azdī (fl. late fourth/tenth century). al-azdī’s main protagonist is called abū al-qāsim, giving the name to the text itself, and he begins by pretending to be an ascetic lecturing the revelers at a party. like the preacher in yaghmur’s epistle, abū al-qāsim takes long breaks in his harangue, making people think that he has finished. unlike yaghmur’s preacher, abū al-qāsim resumes his preaching over and over again until one of the braver revelers addresses him: “o abū al-qāsim! that is all fine and good, but everyone in the group drinks and fucks (mā fī al-qawm illā man yashrab wa-yanīk)!”47 abū al-qāsim smiles when he hears this and quickly changes his tune from asceticism to obscenity (mujūn): “you swear by god it is the truth? [you are] cuckolds and slapstick jesters? sons of coitus and pillowplay? followers of the grilled [foods] and the baked? worshippers of the wine cup and the goblet?”48 abū al-qāsim then acts as the evening’s entertainment, regaling the revelers with entertaining and licentious discourse that is full of insults, jest, and obscenity. he gets increasingly drunk over the course of the evening and eventually passes out. by contrast, yaghmur’s preacher pretends asceticism after he has already become drunk, and the ascetic performance seems to be part of the evening’s entertainment. the sermon itself operates as a kind of prank. it is clear that yaghmur’s epistle draws on the tropes and themes of previous works of adab, such as the maqāma and the ḥikāyat abī al-qāsim, all the while creatively recasting them to fit within the narrative hunting epistle. yaghmur’s drunk preacher, having given up his momentary performance of piety, encourages his guests to relax, drink, and stay the night. his sudden reversal indexes the 45. kharīda (levant), 1:362. 46. ibid., 1:363. 47. al-azdī, ḥikāyat abī al-qāsim al-baghdādī, ed. a. mez (heidelberg: carl winter’s universitätsbuchhandlung, 1902), 6. for a slightly different translation, see e. selove, ḥikāyat abī al-qāsim: a literary banquet (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016), 36. 48. al-azdī, ḥikāyat abī al-qāsim, 6. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 286 two possible ethical responses to the shortness of life, mentioned earlier. one may respond by seizing the day and living for the moment or by focusing one’s mind entirely on the hereafter. an awareness of mortality produces both reactions, and these two reactions coexist unproblematically, as thomas bauer has shown.49 however, it would be hard to consider this inebriated preacher’s performance secular or separate from islam, even if (or precisely because) it would offend the sensibilities of some muslims. indeed, both the preacher’s harangue and the description of the drinking party draw upon an islamic vocabulary. when the call to the dawn prayer rings out and the birds begin chirping, the companions are quite hung over. they prepare for breakfast, speaking to one another in gestures to avoid raising their voices and aggravating their hangovers. then, suddenly, a messenger (mukhabbir) arrives and knocks on the door to tell them that a hunt is afoot.50 thus begins the fourth movement of the epistle, which consists of the journey to the hunt and the hunt itself. it begins with a parade of horses, followed by a day of travel to seek the hunt, during which they continue drinking so that “our day had not reached its midpoint before we healed our hangovers with wine (inkasara bi-l-khamr khumārunā).”51 when they finally dismount at dusk, a scene of sublimated eroticism unfolds, hinted at in the beginning of the stormy evening and at the end. when the men dismount from their horses, they “embrace the beloveds” (muqārafat al-ḥabāʾib).”52 according to the lisān al-ʿarab of ibn manẓūr (d. 711/1311), the term muqārafa refers to sexual intercourse (jimāʿ) between a man and a woman, which suggests that there is an overtly sexual component to this evening embrace.53 the companions eat and go to bed. while they are ostensibly asleep, a storm rolls in, bringing with it wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, all of which are described in exquisite detail. two details in particular stand out and add complexity to this passionate and euphemistic storm. the first detail is that the narrator describes the plants responding to the life-giving rain as “an indication of the oneness of the living, the eternal,” referring to names of god, and he later says that the rainwater comes from the river kawthar in paradise.54 the second detail worthy of note is a lengthy personification of trees blowing in the wind. the narrator compares the trees to drunkards who cannot stand up straight, saying that they draw near one another as if to hug and kiss, and this description seems to evoke the carousing of the companions themselves. even more suggestive of the storm’s eroticism is how each tree branch (qaḍīb) bends toward another branch “like a lover embracing a beloved.”55 the image of the beloved as a slender branch is common, especially in homoerotic poetry, but the word qaḍīb can 49. t. bauer, “raffinement und frömmigkeit: säkulare poesie islamischer religionsgelehrter der späten abbasidenzeit,” asiatische studien/études asiatiques 2 (1996): 275–95. 50. kharīda (levant), 1:364. 51. ibid., 1:366. 52. ibid. 53. ibn manẓūr, lisān al-ʿarab (beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d.), 9:281. 54. kharīda (levant), 1:367–68. 55. ibid., 1:367. 287 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) also refer to the penis. the phallic allusion and the erotic metaphors used to describe the storm accentuate the tempest’s sexual potentiality. as a way of concluding the storm, the narrator turns his attention back to his companions, saying: “we spent our night this way, and we obtained our desire” (fa-bitnā bihā laylatanā wa-nilnā umniyyatanā).56 bookending the storm with these two references to sexual activity and sexual satisfaction suggests that the storm functions as a euphemism for a night of passion. this storm is therefore both a way of expressing the sexual activities taking place and a way of bearing witness to the oneness of the creator through the spectacle of the creation. when morning comes, the company is invited to drink once more, but they are impatient for the hunt. they depart for their first day, the account of which includes an intricate description of each kind of prey. these hunting scenes make up by far the longest portion of the work, and they require a more detailed account than can be offered here. the catalogue of hunted animals is clearly a response to the narrative ṭardiyya tradition that would also find expression in the mamluk period. at the same time, it seems likely that the idealized portrayal of hunting found in this epistle was part of a broader ideal of gentlemanly behavior. figure 1: the barberini vase, louvre museum, paris. (photo by matthew l. keegan, with permission of the louvre.) consider, for example, the barberini vase, an ayyubid-era copper-alloy vase with inscriptions and figural medallions.57 it was made for an ayyubid ruler during the last decades of the long sixth/twelfth century and now belongs to the louvre in paris. the engraved medallions depict hunting scenes and, in one case, two men practicing swordplay with one another. geese, rabbits, deer, and a lion are all targets of the hunt, as if the vase 56. ibid., 1:368. 57. for a brief description of the vase, see “vase with the name of ayyubid sultan salah al-din yusuf, known as the barberini vase,” louvre website, https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/vase-name-ayyubid-sultansalah-al-din-yusuf-known-%e2%80%9cbarberini-vase%e2%80%9d (accessed june 29, 2020). https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/vase-name-ayyubid-sultan-salah-al-din-yusuf-known-%e2%80%9cbarberini-vase%e2%80%9d https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/vase-name-ayyubid-sultan-salah-al-din-yusuf-known-%e2%80%9cbarberini-vase%e2%80%9d al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 288 were a hunting poem etched in bronze. the military exercise that is depicted in one roundel might imply that these scenes cast hunting as a militaristic activity that is designed to train soldiers for jihad, but this vessel is likely better contextualized within yaghmur’s world of inebriated solidarity. this supposition is reinforced by the inscription on the base, which reads: “for the wine cellar (sharābkhāna) of al-malik al-ẓāhir.”58 returning to yaghmur’s epistle, the adventure of the drinking and hunting party lasts for ten days.59 at the end of the first day of hunting, the night is spent with “each lover lying with (ḍājaʿa) a beloved,” and we are given to believe that the following days and nights are no different.60 after ten days of hunting and drinking, the narrator informs us that the group has become bored with their activities. they also seem to reflect on the bloodshed they have recently committed. we said: how long will bloodshed and the murder of the beautiful beasts last? how long will we sunder beloveds and notch the arrow of separation between allies? do we trust in the fates? have we forgotten the successive turning of nights into days? are we secure from being stricken by that which we have wrought [on others] and from being afflicted by the talons and teeth of time? in this passage, there is a clear sense of regret about the hunting of animals who are referred to as dumā, a term that refers to adorned images or idols, but which is also used for beautiful, well-fed animals.61 whereas the narrator’s companions had been enthusiastic about the hunt earlier in the epistle, they have now soured on the affair through the realization that they, like the animals they have slaughtered, are hunted. the ruthless hunter of humankind is time, which the narrator describes as an animal with talons and teeth. by imagining time as an animal who hunts humans, the companions imaginatively reverse the violent slaughter that they have recently carried out and consider the animal experience of loss as if it were their own. in this way, the hunters come to recognize their own mortality with a vividness that the mock sermon could not achieve. with this change of heart, the band of brethren make their way back to settled society (al-ʿumrān). they come upon a peaceful garden, which leads them to a beautiful castle where they begin again to drink and enjoy the company of beautiful lads, all of which lasts an undetermined amount of time.62 the fifth and final movement of the epistle finds the author and his companions turning to godly piety. the movement consists of only a few short lines. although i have called it a repentance, it is marked not by the triumph of shared religious solidarity but by a feeling of sadness, nostalgia, and alienation. the end of the inebriated feasting and hunting leads 58. “vase with the name of salah al-din.” 59. kharīda (levant), 1:364–88. 60. ibid., 1:387. 61. ibn manẓūr, lisān al-ʿarab, 14:271. 62. kharīda (levant), 1:387–89. وثقنــا فهــل االحــالف. إلــى البيــن ســهم ق وُنفــوِّ ااُلاّلف بيــن نفــُرق وحتّــام بالُدمــى والفتــك الّدمــا ســفك متــى إلــى قلنــا: باألقــدار ونســينا تقلُّــب الليــل والنهــار، وهــل أِمّنــا أن ُنصــاب بمــا أَصْبنــا بــه، وُنْنتــاب بُظُفــر الزمــان ونابــه. 289 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) to the demise of companionship (ṣuḥba) and the beginning of estrangement (ghurba), as the companions scatter into the countryside. the entire fifth movement, most of which was quoted at the beginning of this article, reads as follows: we continued on in that way until the new moon of the month of rajab appeared. we turned against passion and swore ourselves to god-fearing devotion. we took refuge in the realm of right conduct and donned the armor of good behavior. we rectified our past faults and dreaded useless activity. we were afflicted with parting from that company and were driven to estrangement from those companions. we scattered across the lands, dispersing in the valleys and the highlands. this is the story of the passing days among humankind and their effects on both elites and common folk. their pleasures are like dreams and their wakefulness is like sleep. may god make us among those who triumph with everlasting paradise.63 these final sentences of the epistle bring us back to the question of frivolity. yaghmur describes an abandonment of “useless activity” (ḥābiṭ al-ʿamal), which is more or less what abū shāma found so objectionable when he transmitted the anecdote about nūr al-dīn playing polo. in that case, the subordination of polo to the logic of jihad prevented it from being useless. in yaghmur’s epistle, the hunt is an example of “useless activity” that cannot be incorporated into the economy of the fāʾida dīniyya that, nūr al-dīn claims, pertains to polo. yaghmur does not express a single-minded devotion to piety, asceticism, and jihad. rather, he presents asceticism as a period of life that comes after youthful companionship has faded away. the two impulses of licentiousness and asceticism are mediated temporally, such that there is a time for seizing the day, and there is a time for devoting oneself to the hereafter. yaghmur’s rather pessimistic view of asceticism complicates the assumption that the fighting men of the crusader period were driven by ascetic piety and the imagery of a pristine islamic past. modern depictions of islamic politics are haunted by a distinctively salafi imaginary in which the early islamic past is the primary basis for solidarity. although one can certainly find muslim scholars expressing the idea that all activity ought to be interpreted in light of its fāʾida dīniyya, it is far from certain that such ideas roused the sentiments of the men tasked with fighting. yaghmur’s epistle expresses an awareness of the ascetic ideal, but it comes in for mockery and is associated with the breakdown of idealized, inebriated solidarity. an even more sardonic view of asceticism is found in the work of ʿarqala al-kalbī (d. ca. 567/1171–72), a licentious shiʿite poet who was a boon companion to saladin and considered himself the abū nuwās (d. ca. 200/815) of his age.64 63. ibid., 1:389. 64. ibid., 1:209. for a fuller treatment of ʿarqala, see keegan, “rethinking poetry.” َصــْوب وانتجعنــا الُتقــى وحالفنــا الهــوى فخالفنــا الهــالل غــرة رجــب مــن اســُتهّلت حتــى الحــال تلــك علــى زلنــا ومــا وُدفعنــا بالفرقــة الرفقــة تلــك مــن وُمنينــا العمــل حابــط وِخْفنــا الزلــل فــارط واســتدركنا الثــّواب ثــوب واّدرْعنــا الصــواب مــن تلــك الصحبــة إلــى الُغربــة وتفّرقنــا فــي البــالد وتشــّتتنا فــي األغــوار واألنجــاد. وهــذه ســيرة األيــام فــي األنــام وِفعالهــا بالخــاص والعــام لذتهــا كاألحــالم يقظتهــا كالمنــام جعلنــا هللا مــن الفائزيــن بالخلــود فــي دار الســالم. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 290 in one of ʿarqala’s poems, he claims that asceticism is inspired not by piety but by a lack of material resources: shun the world if it shuns you, standing haughty and aloof! you do not find a youth renouncing worldly pleasures, unless the world has already forsaken him.65 asceticism is, for ʿarqala, a way of dealing with a world that has not provided plentifully. it is also noteworthy that ʿarqala identifies youth as the natural period in which to indulge in enjoyment and pleasure, unless circumstances prevent one from that enjoyment. conclusion the activities of the hunt, the lengthy drinking party, and the homoerotic interludes in yaghmur’s epistle do not participate in the economy of the fāʾida dīniyya that abū shāma demands but rather uphold the inebriated solidarity of the hunt. it should be emphasized that the activities of this fortnight’s bender are not truly “useless,” as the epistle’s repentant conclusion suggests. apparently useless activities such as drinking, hunting, and homoerotic activity seem to be a key part of the social glue that holds together this company of elite military men in the hunt and, one imagines, on the battlefield, regardless of the foe. men such as yaghmur were, after all, precisely the kind of men one would expect to fight the franks or rival muslims. if he or his anthologist-editor had wished to foreground the threat of the crusaders and the importance of piety for unifying muslim warriors, then he certainly could have done so. it is, of course, possible that many people were motivated to fight the franks out of their devotion to islam, but that does not necessarily entail ascetic piety. we risk projecting a salafi imaginary onto these muslims who might have found solidarity in the gentlemanly activities of wine parties and hunting. in the epistle, evocations of ascetic piety are mocked, as in the case of the intoxicated preacher, or they are the cause of disunity, as they are in the fifth movement of the epistle. however, more complex and playful mobilizations of islamic language take place in the islamic drinking party and the tempest. the epistle’s playful engagements with islamic norms produce intimate social bonds that would have been crucial in the zengid and ayyubid worlds of confederated politics. thinking about adab without insisting on the framework of the crusades makes visible the complexities of the long sixth/twelfth century through texts like yaghmur’s epistle. the long sixth/twelfth century was not an era dominated by asceticism and religious fervor but one in which multiple conceptions of normative behavior circulated, often among the same people who portrayed their sovereigns as ascetics and their age as full of pious devotion. for example, ʿimād al-dīn celebrated saladin’s revival of a pristine past in his 65. kharīda (levant), 1:228. عنــك بإكبــاٍر وتنزيــِه ــْب عــن الدنيــا إذا جنَّبــْت جنِّ إن لــم تكــن قــد زِهــدْت فيــِه. فمــا تــرى فيهــا فتــًى زاهــًدا 291 • matthew l. keegan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) panegyric poetry and prose, but when it came to the kharīda, he did not see a problem with including yaghmur’s epistle or ʿarqala’s poetry. the inclusion in the kharīda of both sorts of material suggests that this epistle does not express the ethos of a “counter-public” that resisted the pietistic discourses of the day. rather, the scenes of drinking, homoeroticism, and hunting seem to have been part of a normative conception of these behaviors that was islamic in shahab ahmed’s sense.66 hints of this muslim warrior ethos that centered on wine and companionship can also be found in portions of usāma b. munqidh’s book of contemplation. for example, usāma mentions a certain ʿalī b. faraj who lost a leg to infection, had it amputated, and kept fighting the franks. in spite of his strength and bravery, usāma calls this ʿalī a light-hearted man who invited his friends to his home to eat and drink wine. as a joke, it seems, ʿalī implied that he had wine and food to offer them, but when they arrived, he told them to go back and bring provisions themselves because, in fact, he had none.67 a more apt example is that of najm al-dīn īlghāzī (d. 516/1122), the seljuk governor and warrior who defeated the franks at tell ʿafrīn in 513/1119. usāma tells us that he would be drunk for twenty days at a time.68 a salafi imaginary of the sixth/twelfth century cannot take account of these values without transforming them into subversions of an official ideology. but the elite normative ideas seem to have been much more complex and fragmented than is sometimes appreciated.69 if the atmosphere of the age had required asceticism or a direct link between fighting the franks and a commitment to personal piety, one would imagine that ʿimād al-dīn would have edited this epistle or removed it entirely. but although he claims to have edited and shortened yaghmur’s epistle to fit with the linguistic norms of his day, he appears to have seen no need to remove the rather dim view of austere asceticism expressed in it, much less the drinking and the homoeroticism. yaghmur and his editor seem comfortable with embracing, within an islamic framework, the alternation of raucous, wine-soaked solidarity on the one hand and alienated asceticism on the other. there were multiple conceptualizations of the relationship between islam, austerity, solidarity, and revelry in this period. this epistle expresses one of them. one may wonder to what extent yaghmur’s epistle reflected his lived experience. did he thrive in the context of inebriated solidarity, as the narrator of his epistle does? this 66. ahmed, what is islam? 67. usāma b. munqidh, kitāb al-iʿtibār, ed. ʿa. al-ashtar (beirut: al-maktab al-islāmī, 2003), 238. the story differs slightly in the translation, perhaps reflecting a different edition; compare usāma b. munqidh, book of contemplation, 159. 68. usāma b. munqidh, kitāb al-iʿtibār, 203–4; usāma b. munqidh, book of contemplation, 131. 69. the work of samuli schielke also discusses (albeit in a modern context) the ambivalence and temporally mediated attitudes toward piety in everyday life. as he points out, “focusing on the very pious in moments when they are being very pious (in mosque study groups, for example) risks taking those moments when people talk about religion as religious persons . . . as the paradigmatic ones, and thus unwittingly reproducing the particular ideological aspiration of islamist and islamic revivalist movements: the privileging of islam as the supreme guideline of all fields of life.” s. schielke, “second thoughts about the anthropology of islam, or how to make sense of grand schemes in everyday life,” zmo working papers 2 (2010): 1–16, at 2. see also s. schielke, “ambivalent commitments: troubles of morality, religiosity, and aspiration among young egyptians,” journal of religion in africa 39 (2009): 158–85. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) adab without the crusades: inebriated solidarity • 292 coauthored epistle is not, to be sure, straightforwardly autobiographical. it draws on and creatively refigures the tropes of the maqāma, the hunting poem, and the stories of false asceticism such as the ḥikāyat abī l-qāsim al-baghdādī and the stories of abū nuwās. even if the epistle that survives in the kharīda is more ʿimād al-dīn than yaghmur, its very presence in the kharīda is significant. it shows that adab, even though it was an elite discourse, made a show of including new participants who fell outside the typical scholarly classes who produced adab.70 although yaghmur’s epistle responds to the adab tradition, there are certainly features in it that may also have lined up with yaghmur’s lived experience. it is possible to see this epistle as the expression of a young military man’s imaginative depiction of elite companionship. it is, like much 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wa-maqāmātuhu wa-rasāʾiluhu. edited by i. shaʿlān and m. naghash. köln: manshūrāt al-jamal, 1998. https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/vase-name-ayyubid-sultan-salah-al-din-yusuf-known-%e2%80%9cbarberini-vase%e2%80%9d https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/vase-name-ayyubid-sultan-salah-al-din-yusuf-known-%e2%80%9cbarberini-vase%e2%80%9d al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 303-322 “what does it matter the story is false, if the feeling it raises is true?”1 abstract this article presents a critical review of the feeling of history, a recent work by the american anthropologist charles hirschkind. in this book, the author treats andalucismo, a political movement that arose in modern andalusia early in the twentieth century and was chiefly characterized by an extremely positive view of the islamic iberian past (al-andalus)—a tendency that is certainly unusual in spain and goes against the prevalent spanish nationalism. in his book, hirschkind not only develops an uncritical view of andalucismo and its intrinsically emotional reading of the past but also legitimizes a rather farfetched conflation of modern andalusia and al-andalus. moreover, he offers an extremely shallow and unnuanced reading of current spanish scholarship on the middle ages, branding it wholesale as an heir to francoism. he also lends legitimacy to those who call into question the origin of al-andalus in the islamic conquest of 711 ce—representatives of an unscholarly approach that has been largely dismissed by academic outlets since the 1970s. burdened by heavy ideological prejudices and hampered by the author’s limited knowledge of the most recent academic historiographic debates in the field of iberian medieval studies, the book represents a failed attempt to present the anglophone readership with a consistent introduction to andalusian nationalism together with a critical appraisal of the andalusian nationalist interpretation of the medieval iberian past. feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo charles hirschkind. the feeling of history: islam, romanticism, and andalusia (chicago: university of chicago press, 2021). isbn 978-02-2674-695-1. price: $27.50 (paper), $95.00 (cloth). alejandro garcía-sanjuán university of huelva (spain) (sanjuan@uhu.es) introduction1 as in many other modern states, diverse national feelings coexist in today’s spain. although many spaniards would be reluctant to admit it, spanish identity shapes the mainstream nationalist feeling in the country. spanish nationalism reached its most radical expression during the forty years of francoist dictatorship (1936–1975), when the regime 1. “qué importa que la historia sea falsa, si el sentimiento que provoca es verdadero?” el roto, el país, april 9, 2014. © 2021 alejandro garcía-sanjuán. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercialnoderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. review essay mailto:sanjuan%40uhu.es?subject= 304 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) sought to turn spain into “one, great, and free” nation, as its official motto declared. francoist nationalism, usually known as national catholicism, banished any other form of collective identity in the country. small wonder, then, that in august 1936, upon the outbreak of the civil war, francoist forces arrested and killed in seville the founder of andalusian nationalism (andalucismo), blas infante. franco’s demise in 1975 and the passing of the 1978 constitution ushered spain into its current democratic period, which brought with it a new territorial structure, made up of so-called autonomous communities. with their own parliaments and institutions, the new autonomías emerged as a suitable framework in which different local national feelings, marginalized and harshly repressed by the franco regime, could thrive. although andalucismo reached its peak in the years of the spanish “transition” to democracy (1975– 82), it never achieved strong popular support or significant scholarly legitimacy. to the best of my knowledge, hirschkind’s the feeling of history: islam, romanticism, and andalusia (chicago: university of chicago press, 2021), represents the most substantial academic legitimation so far of this local form of nationalism in spain. in what follows, i lay out why i find this book deeply troublesome and disappointing. before proceeding any further, however, i have to make clear my specific goals in this essay. virtually every book is open to criticism from different perspectives; i will limit myself here to issues that concern me as a historian and a medievalist. more specifically, i wish to draw the reader’s attention to hirschkind’s misguided and distorted portrayal of spanish scholarship on the middle ages and to the way his book, in line with recent precedents, lends legitimacy to an old and well-known academic fraud about the origins of al-andalus. from al-andalus to andalusia: andalucismo the case of andalucismo is peculiar insofar as it represents the only form of iberian nationalism that looks to al-andalus for the historical grounding of its collective identity. drawing on the etymological connection between andalusia and al-andalus, blas infante sketched a historical account according to which the castilian conquerors (the “spaniards”) had stripped the “andalusians” of their country and their national identity since the thirteenth century. it goes without saying that al-andalus and andalusia are radically different historical realities, and therefore that conflating the people of al-andalus with modern andalusians represents a serious mistake. but such conflation is part of any national narrative’s mythology. like any other nationalism, andalucismo looks at the past through a rather emotional lens. analyzing and explaining its relationship to the past represents a relevant scholarly subject that helps us answer significant questions about the reception of al-andalus and the medieval iberian past in modern spain and andalusia. however, studying, explaining, and understanding a phenomenon is very different from assuming and legitimizing particular theories about it. here lies one of the the main problems with the feeling of history: it is a book that not only examines but fully embraces andalucismo. what it offers, therefore, is not just a scholarly presentation of andalucismo but a study that draws on the andalusian nationalist approach to the past. in other words, hirschkind embarks on a full legitimation al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 305 of the andalusian nationalist envisioning of al-andalus and endorses this approach as a valid and legitimate counternarrative to the traditional spanish nationalist account of medieval iberia. far from shattering myths, however, the feeling of history proves that there is no valid alternative to carefully crafted historical knowledge when it comes to dismantling deeply ingrained myths about the past. drawing on the writings of the philosopher and activist w. e. b. du bois (1868–63), the philosopher ludwig wittgenstein (1889–1951), and ananda abeysekara (an expert on buddhist studies), the book’s introduction develops a methodological framework intended to justify emotional history as a valid and legitimate academic approach to the past as historical knowledge. hirschkind points out that “our relation to a given past may not be one of indifference or neutrality . . . it may rather be affectively structured in a way that asks of us a unique attunement and response.”2 emotional envisionings of the past are radically opposed to the academic study of history: historical knowledge is built not on feelings but on documents, data, and sources. emotions and feelings are legitimate objects of study for historians, but not legitimate methodological approaches for the academic study of history. in other words, the history of emotions is one thing, and emotional history is another. a twenty-first-century academic work by a social scientist (certainly not a historian) endorsing and justifying an emotional and therefore nonacademic approach to the past is not just a striking novelty but an indication of a much more worrying issue: unscientific tendencies are making their way into academia. i intend to show below that lending academic legitimacy to an emotional approach to the past represents a huge scholarly mistake. arguably the most glaring evidence for this in the feeling of history lies in hirschkind’s ideas about current spanish historiography and, in particular, in his utterly uncritical approach to negationism. it has been frequently said that nationalism could not exist without a particular historical narrative. in this respect, andalucismo suffered from extreme intellectual indigence until the mid-1970s. a notary by training, infante was never able to produce a well-grounded presentation of the andalusian people’s historical evolution. but building a suggestive national project requires a consistent national account, and this is where ignacio olagüe’s (1903–74) outlandish narrative about the origins of al-andalus came in handy for andalusian nationalists.3 the story of this amateur historian has been told many times, 4 especially after the 2006 book historia general de al ándalus lent, for the first time, scholarly legitimacy to his ideas.5 this review is not the right place to retell that story at length: 2. hirschkind, feeling of history, 23. 3. i. olagüe, les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’espagne (paris: flammarion, 1969); idem, la revolución islámica en occidente (madrid: fundación juan march, 1974). 4. a. garcía-sanjuán, “denying the islamic conquest of iberia, a historiographical fraud,” journal of medieval iberian studies 11, no. 3 (2019): 306–22. 5. e. gonzález ferrín, historia general de al ándalus (córdoba: almuzara, 2006); idem, cuando fuimos árabes (córdoba: almuzara, 2017). see also gonzález ferrín’s rather enthusiastic presentation of olagüe’s work in a recent online interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrqef9vige. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrqef9vige 306 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) seasoned specialists from spain (p. martínez montávez), france (r. le tourneau, p. guichard), and the united states (j. t. monroe) have unequivocally refuted olagüe’s claims.6 in a nutshell, olagüe argued (only rarely attempting to prove his claims) that the arab and islamic conquest of iberia in 711 ce never happened. instead, he contended, after a civil war that destroyed the visigothic kingdom early in the eighth century, a slow, smooth, and rather unnoticeable process gradually turned the local unitarian arians into fullfledged muslims. therefore, according to olagüe, al-andalus was the product of local, not foreign, forces. this nativism made olagüe’s approach irresistible to andalusian nationalists in the 1970s and 1980s. it also explains why, as hirschkind acknowledges,7 olagüe’s thesis fascinated the many local andalusian converts to islam in the late 1970s: he provided them with a local islam of their own. an english-language book on andalucismo could have been an excellent opportunity to offer an international scholarly audience a clear picture of the origins and evolution of this peculiar form of nationalism. it could likewise have provided a suitable framework for developing a more nuanced and historically contextualized understanding of how the brainchild of olagüe, a follower of fascism, could, many decades later, thrive in a radically different ideological context—in other words, how olagüe’s negationism (that is, denial of the historicity of the 711 islamic conquest of iberia) ended up legitimizing a reading of the past narrowly associated with a form of nationalism that was diametrically opposed to the kind of radical spanish nationalism that had originally inspired olagüe. let us remember that infante, the founder of andalucismo, died at the hands of francoist fascists, and that olagüe’s fascist beliefs in the 1920s and the 1930s played a key role in shaping his revisionist approach to spanish history.8 it is no wonder that olagüe’s closest friends, who were fascists, enthusiastically welcomed his earliest historical contribution, which included a moving personal dedication to his beloved friend ramiro ledesma ramos (1905–36), the founder of the oldest spanish political fascist organization who was killed in madrid upon the outbreak of the civil war9. nothing of this history, however, is to be found in hirschkind’s book. instead of adopting a critical approach to infante’s thinking and olagüe’s fantasies (which survive in their academic proxies), the book is even more explicit and unapologetic in its legitimation of negationism than its american precedents were.10 in 1975, j. t. monroe described olagüe’s 6. for an extensive review of the opinions of the aforementioned authors as well as others, see a. garcíasanjuán, la conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado, 2nd ed. (madrid: marcial pons, 2019), 138–54. 7. hirschkind, feeling of history, 86. 8. m. fierro, “al-andalus en el pensamiento fascista español: la revolución islámica en occidente, de ignacio olagüe,” in andalus, españa: historiografías en contraste, siglos xvii–xxi, ed. m. marín (madrid: casa de velázquez and csic, 2009), 325–50. 9. a. garcía-sanjuán, “ignacio olagüe y el origen de al-andalus: génesis y edición del proyecto negacionista”, revista de estudios internacionales mediterráneos 24 (2018): 173–98. 10. k. b. wolf, “negating negationism,” pomona faculty publications and research 394 (2014), http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_fac_pub/394; idem, “myth, history, and the origins of al-andalus: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_fac_pub/394 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 307 les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’espagne as “not a scholarly work” and branded olagüe’s approach anti-semitic.11 as an amateur historian, olagüe could not be expected to possess full command over either the historical sources or the extant scholarship about the origins of al-andalus. however, the same lenience cannot be extended to his current scholarly followers, and this is why in 2013 i went a step further than monroe did and called the reengineering of olagüe’s original negationism not just unscholarly but a scholarly fraud. it is striking, then, that this new negationism has continued to gain traction in sectors of american scholarship over the past years. misunderstanding spanish historical writing a few words of clarification concerning the notion of negationism are in order. in my 2013 monograph i gave the name “negationism” to olagüe’s ideas. being aware of the nazi parallel, i declared explicitly that i did not mean to draw a moral equivalence between the two phenomena.12 ignoring this explicit statement, hirschkind claims: “in comparing gonzález ferrín’s work to the discourse of holocaust denial, the term negationism’s primary referent, garcía sanjuán invites us to view the text as a morally reprehensible act of historical distortion.”13 like others before him,14 hirschkind is here rehearsing an extremely simplistic argument. although there is an obvious moral difference between doubting the holocaust and calling into question historical events twelve centuries ago, it is indisputable that the term negationism has over the last few years been applied to positions on many issues other than the nazi genocide. according to the sociologist keith kahn-harris, in recent years, the term has been used to describe a number of fields of “scholarship,” whose scholars engage in audacious projects to hold back, against seemingly insurmountable odds, the findings of an avalanche of research. they argue that the holocaust (and other genocides) never happened, that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a myth, that aids either does not exist or is unrelated to hiv, that evolution is a scientific impossibility, and that all manner of other scientific and historical orthodoxies must be rejected.15 a historiographical essay,” journal of medieval iberian studies 11, no. 3 (2019): 378–401; h. fancy, “the new convivencia,” journal of medieval iberian studies 11, no. 3 (2019): 295–305. 11. j. t. monroe, review of les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’espagne, by i. olagüe, international journal of middle east studies 6, no. 3 (1975): 347–48. 12. garcía-sanjuán, la conquista islámica, 80: “no pretendo establecer una equiparación moral entre ellos.” 13. hirschkind, feeling of history, 91. 14. wolf, “negating negationism”; j. lorenzo, review of la conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado, by a. garcía sanjuán, medieval encounters 20 (1014): 273–75. see my reply to lorenzo: a. garcía-sanjuán, “response to: jesús lorenzo,” medieval encounters 21 (2015): 136–38. 15. k. kahn-harris, “denialism: what drives people to reject the truth,” guardian, august 3, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth 308 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) in other words, “negationism” refers to all challenges to knowledge that is based on the interpretation of empirical and reliable evidence through recognized methodologies. calling into question such well-researched and well-known historical processes as the islamic conquest of iberia fits this label well. indeed, wikipedia deems the denial of the islamic conquest of iberia a form of historical negationism alongside denial of the holocaust and other episodes in more recent history.16 let us now focus on hirschkind’s reading of current spanish historical writing. according to him, by rejecting negationism, spanish historians today ironically share views held by francoists. the second chapter of the book (“the difficult convivencia of spanish history”) opens with the bold statement that medieval iberian studies is “a field entrusted to maintain order over the inconvenient and unwieldy eight hundred years of muslim rule on the peninsula.”17 even more explicitly, when discussing maribel fierro’s approach to negationist literature, hirschkind declares: “spanish arabism remains haunted by early associations with and accommodations made under national catholicism.”18 i am anything but uncritical of my own discipline. in fact, over the last ten years, i have made academic outlets that continue to cling to the francoist tradition a focal point of my scholarship.19 i firmly believe that we are currently witnessing in spain an insufficient academic reaction to an all-out offensive by the far right to resuscitate the francoist, national catholic narrative of the reconquista. however, hirschkind’s unnuanced tarring of the entire field of spanish medieval and arabic studies with the same brush is a gross oversimplification. a close reading of the book shows that hirschkind’s grim outlook on spanish historical writing is the result not of a careful and comprehensive appraisal but of a reckless and dramatically mistaken decision: taking negationism as a reliable map for his journey through medieval iberian scholarship’s troubled waters. misinterpreting negationist academic literature the unfortunate consequences of this decision are not difficult to ascertain. first and foremost, hirschkind’s perception of negationism is unrealistic and farfetched. the informed reader will be surprised by the claim that gonzález ferrín’s writings on the origins of al-andalus are “based on a rereading of the limited historical evidence currently 16. “historical negationism,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/historical_negationism. 17. hirschkind, feeling of history, 69. 18. ibid., 88. 19. a. garcía-sanjuán, “la persistencia del discurso nacionalcatólico sobre el medievo peninsular en la historiografía española actual,” historiografías: revista de historia y teoría 12 (2016): 132–53; idem, “al-andalus en la historiografía nacionalcatólica española: claudio sánchez-albornoz,” ehumanista 37 (2017): 305–28; idem, “rejecting al-andalus, exalting the reconquista: historical memory in contemporary spain,” journal of medieval iberian studies 10–11 (2018): 127–45; idem, “cómo desactivar una bomba historiográfica: la pervivencia actual del paradigma de la reconquista,” in la reconquista. ideología y justificación de la guerra santa peninsular, ed. c. de ayala and s. palacios, 99–119 (madrid: la ergástula, 2019); idem, “weaponizing historical knowledge: the notion of reconquista in spanish nationalism,” imago temporis: medium aevum 14 (2020): 133–62. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/historical_negationism al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 309 available.”20 hirschkind exhibits both a complete ignorance of the historical sources and a gullible attitude toward negationist literature, as when he reports uncritically that “according to gonzález ferrín, the conflicting views in this particular debate devolve almost entirely on the interpretation of two coins.”21 like any other form of negationism, denial of the islamic conquest of iberia relies on disregard of the empirical evidence, and an overriding disdain for historical sources thus represents its most salient feature. much ink has been spilled over the last fifty years on exposing the sham that this approach represents. although hirschkind ignores most of the academic literature on negationism, he draws extensively on fierro’s 2009 article and on my 2013 monograph.22 consequently, his appraisal of gonzález ferrín’s alleged “rereading” of the sources suggests that he either has decided to ignore the critics he cites or simply does not understand what negationism really is. hirschkind’s further remarks confirm his strikingly shallow understanding of negationism. he writes, for example: “while gonzález ferrín’s downplaying of the military dimension of the arrival of islam in iberia is certainly unconventional, many parts of his narrative on the porosity and slow consolidation of islam during the eighth and ninth centuries have gained increasing acceptance in recent decades.”23 for starters, casting as merely “unconventional” a scholarly fraud consistently and explicitly rejected by professional historians for the past half-century points to a clear failure to grasp the true nature of negationism. second, claiming that denialist literature “downplays” the military dimension of the arrival of islam is inaccurate, as gonzález ferrín actually denies it altogether. further, the latter claims that what arrived in iberia in 711 was not islam but something that he calls, in his distinctly abstruse and pretentious style, “another variety of unmistakable prior recognition” (“otra variedad de indudable reconocimiento previo”)—a phrase that sounds as meaningless in english as it does in its original spanish.24 this is just one of many examples of the empty verbiage that characterizes negationism. i wonder whether scholars would dare to indulge and legitimize negationism so openly in connection with a different historical event, such as the 1620 arrival of the pilgrims in what is today massachusetts. the possibility of such absurdity was raised already forty-five years ago by monroe in his review of olagüe: the reader, left exhausted and suspicious over the political and chauvinistic motives of the author, is likely to wonder whether mr olagüe will continue in this line of research, and eventually show that the romans never conquered the mediterranean basin, that the normans never invaded england, and so on. will he perhaps even show that the spanish never conquered an empire in america?25 20. hirschkind, feeling of history, 74. 21. ibid., 177. 22. ibid., 86–95. 23. ibid., 95. 24. gonzález ferrín, historia general de al ándalus, 185. 25. monroe, review of olagüe, 348. 310 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) on the other hand, i would have been grateful to hirschkind for taking the trouble to clarify which specific parts of scholarly negationism have gained “increasing acceptance” in recent decades and what the evidence for this acceptance is. i am not aware of any specialist in early islam or the history of al-andalus ready to endorse gonzález ferrín’s claim that islam “as such,” or “full-fledged” islam (whatever that means), did not exist before the year 80026 (in hirschkind’s words, “before the ninth century, islam has yet to coalesce into a distinct civilization”27); that the arab governor of qayrawan, mūsā b. nuṣayr, was a mere “personification” (“una personificación”);28 or that the name muḥammad does not appear in the 98/716–17 bilingual dinar struck in spania/al-andalus,29 to mention just a few of the most blatantly unfounded negationist claims. for hirschkind, however, my pointing out of these features serves to make my account of negationism “highly distorted.”30 one is similarly left to wonder which precise parts of negationism “cohere with current historical research.”31 if we look at the most recent and reliable revisionist academic literature about early islam, negationism clearly does not fit in. fred donner, for example, has argued that “during the late first century ah/seventh century c.e. and early second century ah/eighth century c.e., the believers’ movement evolved into the religion we now know as islam.”32 largely in accordance with the traditional account, donner asserts that what he calls “the believers’ movement” expanded rapidly upon muḥammad’s demise through military conquests, and he devotes a full chapter (“the expansion of the community of believers”) to these conquests. the mainstream nonrevisionist academic literature pleads for an even earlier origin of islam; indeed, in 1981, donner himself devoted a book-length study to the early islamic conquests. so it is difficult to identify any part of the academic denialist literature that would “cohere with current historical research” on early islam, whether revisionist or nonrevisionist. the reason is simple: as pointed out years ago by guichard, monroe, and others, and much to the chagrin of its current proponents and followers, negationism does not meet academic standards. the same applies to negationist claims about the process of the quran’s canonization. gonzález ferrín recently published an article in a volume edited by carlos segovia in which 26. gonzález ferrín, cuando fuimos árabes, 235. 27. hirschkind, feeling of history, 82. 28. gonzález ferrín, historia general de al ándalus, 179. according to the dictionary of the royal spanish academy, “personificación” entails the attribution of the features of rational beings to things that are irrational, inanimate, disembodied, or abstract. it is not clear in which of these categories gonzález ferrín means to place mūsā b. nuṣayr. the latter three do not fit well an entity mentioned by his personal name in written documents, literary sources, and coins; see the recent article by y. benhima and p. guichard, “mûsâ ibn nusayr: retour sur l’histoire et le pouvoir d’un gouverneur omeyyade en occident musulmán,” bulletin d’études orientales 66 (2017): 97–116. nor is it evident on what grounds mūsā b. nuṣayr could be branded an irrational being. 29. gonzález ferrín, historia general de al ándalus, 194. 30. hirschkind, feeling of history, 92. 31. ibid., 93. 32. f. donner, muhammad and the believers: at the origins of islam (cambridge, ma: belknap press, 2010), 194–95. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 311 he argued that the quran was compiled only after 800 ce. in a twitter thread, marijn van putten exclaims that the article “makes me feel like we have stepped into a time machine, all progress of the past decades is ignored.”33 reviewing gonzález ferrín’s handling of the relevant manuscript evidence, van putten concludes that “it’s rather clear that he has never actually looked at any of these manuscripts, otherwise he would not suggest something so absurd. and indeed, his discussion on early manuscripts makes it quite clear he is utterly clueless about them.”34. segovia and gonzález ferrín are close collaborators, and nora k. schmid’s review of segovia’s the quranic noah (2015) indicates that segovia and gonzález ferrín share the same ungrounded approach to the origins of islam.35 both van putten and schmid point out that even as negationism gains visibility through international scholarly outlets, its pushing of standard academic boundaries is becoming increasingly clear.36 as noted earlier, academic negationism regarding the islamic conquest of iberia first surfaced in spain, and consequently spanish scholars were the first to address it. their work, however, has not always been duly acknowledged, at least not as much as in other cases. in this regard, it is worth recalling the enthusiastic reaction provoked by the “surgical dissection” of van putten’s thread.37 by contrast, when dealing with the much more exhaustive and comprehensive rebuttals of negationism written by spanish critics and published in scholarly venues (not on social media), hussein fancy was much more lukewarm in his response.38 the justification for this stark contrast is not evident. not being a specialist in medieval studies, hirschkind appears unable to understand a scholarly debate largely alien to his professional training. as a result, he is forced to rely on others’ opinions. his main guide in navigating the choppy waters of iberian medieval historiography is kenneth b. wolf’s review of my 2013 monograph, in which wolf offered a largely uncritical portrait of gonzález ferrín’s negationism.39 wolf’s role needs to be carefully considered, since he not only introduced academic negationism to american scholarship but did so by granting gonzález ferrín the academic credentials that most specialists have never accorded him. to set the record straight: negationism has never 33. m. van putten (@phdnix), twitter thread, december 6, 2020, https://twitter.com/phdnix/ status/1335676197498478593. van putten is referring to e. gonzález ferrín, “what do we mean by the qurʾān: on origins, fragments, and inter-narrative identity,” in remapping emergent islam: texts, social contexts, and ideological trajectories, ed. c. a. segovia, 221–44 (amsterdam: university of amsterdam press, 2020). 34. van putten, twitter thread, december 6, 2020. 35. n. k. schmid, review of the quranic noah and the making of the islamic prophet: a study of intertextuality and religious identity formation in late antiquity, by c. a. segovia, der islam 97, no. 2 (2020): 617–22. 36. gonzález ferrín, cuando fuimos árabes, 62, disingenuously complains about the spanish academe’s positivism and lack of openness to what he calls “interpretive novelty” (“novedad interpretativa”). 37. https://twitter.com/phdnix/status/1335676197498478593. 38. fancy, “new convivencia.” 39. see wolf, “negating negationism” and “myth, history, and the origins of al-andalus,” as well as my reply to wolf: a. garcía-sanjuán, “la tergiversación del pasado y la función social del conocimiento histórico,” revista de libros, july 9, 2014: https://www.revistadelibros.com/discusion/la-tergiversacion-del-pasado-yla-funcion-social-del-conocimiento-historico. hirschkind ignores this latter publication. https://twitter.com/phdnix/status/1335676197498478593 https://twitter.com/phdnix/status/1335676197498478593 https://twitter.com/phdnix/status/1335676197498478593 https://www.revistadelibros.com/discusion/la-tergiversacion-del-pasado-y-la-funcion-social-del-conocimiento-historico https://www.revistadelibros.com/discusion/la-tergiversacion-del-pasado-y-la-funcion-social-del-conocimiento-historico 312 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) been regarded as a valid academic approach in spanish scholarship, and there is no debate on this point.40 for its part, academic negationism has never responded to its critics. its sole response has consisted of scorning them as promoters of a smear campaign aimed at discrediting olagüe’s followers. given the unambiguous rejection of negationism by the experts, one wonders about the reason behind the growing number of american scholars (wolf, then fancy, and now hirschkind) willing to take seriously negationism as an academic approach. it is galling to witness the scholarly legitimation of telling of the past that no expert has ever considered worthy of the slightest academic credit. contradicting this consensus of nearly fifty years and following the precedent set by wolf in 2014, hirschkind argues that however questionable it is, negationism nonetheless merits academic consideration. addressing my critique, he alleges that my “determination to demolish gonzález-ferrín’s credibility” has led me to “misrepresent or too readily dismiss the serious aspects of the latter’s work.”41 i do not believe that gonzález ferrín needs my help to demolish his scholarly credibility, but i do wonder what those “serious aspects” are. luis molina, a seasoned and highly regarded arabist and one of the leading experts on andalusi arabic, went so far as to dismiss gonzález ferrín’s work as “bullshit”42— an exceptionally harsh public assessment by one scholar of another’s work, and one that conveys the vehemence with which spanish scholars reject negationism’s academic pretensions. strikingly, hirschkind ignores not only almost the entirety of spanish academic literature about negationism but likewise much of the recent and rich anglophone scholarly production on andalucismo. for instance, he never mentions the books of christina civantos43 and jose luis venegas,44 and his references to eric calderwood’s important work45 are not particularly substantive. because he avoids dialogue with these authors, hirschkind does not pay sufficient attention to political andalucismo and, as a result, downplays the 40. the same is true also of other european scholarly traditions, especially the french; apart from the pioneering work of p. guichard, “les arabes ont bien envahi l’espagne: les structures sociales de l’espagne musulmane,” annales: histoire, sciences sociales 6 (1974): 1483–513, see the much more recent article by p. guichard and p. sénac, “les débuts d’al-andalus: des textes, des monnaies et des sceaux,” le moyen âge 128, no. 3–4 (2020): 511–37, where, quoting gonzález ferrín, they decry the “inanity” of publications casting doubt on the reality of the arab conquest. 41. hirschkind, feeling of history, 92. 42. l. molina, review of la conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado, by a. garcía-sanjuán, medievalismo 25 (2015): 455–59. hirschkind ignores both this review and a previous contribution by the same author on the same topic: l. molina, “la conquista de al-andalus, tergiversada: ¿mala ciencia, ensayo, ficción?,” revista de libros, september 1, 2014, https://www.revistadelibros.com/ discusion/la-conquista-de-al-andalus-tergiversadamala-ciencia-ensayo-ficcion. 43. c. civantos, the afterlife of al-andalus: muslim iberia in contemporary arab and hispanic narratives (albany: state university of new york press, 2017). 44. j. l. venegas, the sublime south: andalusia, orientalism, and the making of modern spain (evanston, il: northwestern university press, 2018). 45. e. calderwood, colonial al-andalus: spain and the making of modern moroccan culture (cambridge, ma: belknap press, 2018). https://www.revistadelibros.com/discusion/la-conquista-de-al-andalus-tergiversadamala-ciencia-ensayo-ficcion https://www.revistadelibros.com/discusion/la-conquista-de-al-andalus-tergiversadamala-ciencia-ensayo-ficcion al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 313 fact that the andalucistas are responding to spanish nationalism and complex regional dynamics (e.g., the competitive relationship between andalusia and catalonia). misinterpreting national catholic scholarship another claim put forward in hirschkind’s book is that the mere fact of acknowledging the 711 islamic conquest of iberia, and therefore rejecting negationism leads, in effect, to national catholicism:46 garcía sanjuán’s campaign to discredit every aspect of the negationist thesis leads him not only to undervalue the parts of the thesis that cohere with current historical research but to seemingly embrace much of the conventional account propounded by national catholicism, a view that garcía sanjuán explicitly rejects as a nationalist myth. . . . the fact that scholars who are acutely attuned to the dangers of spanish nationalism end up reaffirming some of the more problematic tenets of nationalist historiography (islam as a violent intruder into iberia, erasure of the arab contribution to building what eventually becomes europe) points to the political and ideological pressures under which historians of the period labor.47 it is true that vox, the new brand of the spanish far right, has slammed gonzález ferrín for questioning the islamic conquest, called him “muslim-friendly,” and charged him with “whitewashing spain’s history.”48 but that does not absolve negationism of its scholarly weaknesses. in fact, the narrative of andalucismo, just like its apparent antipode, the traditional conservative account, relies on the perception of an unbroken historical continuity; from its perspective, in hirschkind’s words, al-andalus and modern spain and portugal “cohere in a single continuous development.”49 on the other side, claudio sánchez-albornoz, the main proponent of traditional spanish nationalist historical writing, once declared that ibn ḥazm represents “the moorish link in the chain binding seneca 46. gonzález ferrín, cuando fuimos árabes, 237: “the islamic conquest of the iberian peninsula is not just a historicist dogma but also a national catholic requirement” (“la conquista islámica de la península ibérica no es sólo un dogma historicista, es también un requerimiento nacionalcatólico”). 47. hirschkind, feeling of history, 93. 48. on march 5, 2018, vox tweeted, “the islamophile emilio gonzález ferrín, falsifying the history of spain, whitewashing islam, and asserting in @el_pais [newspaper] that there was neither an islamic invasion of the iberian peninsula in 711 nor a christian reconquest . . . post-truth = the new lie” (“el islamófilo emilio gonzález ferrín falseando la historia de españa, blanqueando el islam y defendiendo en @el_pais que ni hubo invasión islámica de la península ibérica en el año 711 ni tampoco una reconquista cristiana . . . la posverdad = la nueva mentira”); https://twitter.com/voxnoticias_es/status/970653678289018881. vox was reacting to a report in el país about gonzález ferrín’s cuando fuimos árabes: p. rodríguez blanco, “cuando fuimos árabes: la posverdad sobre al andalus,” el país, march 6, 2018, https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/04/hechos/1520120370_739370. html. the same newspaper, however, later took a more critical stance: p. rodríguez blanco, “el ‘fraude’ que intenta tergiversar la historia de al-andalus,” el país, april 9, 2018, https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/04/06/ hechos/1523043230_705992.html. 49. hirschkind, feeling of history, 1. https://twitter.com/voxnoticias_es/status/970653678289018881 https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/04/hechos/1520120370_739370.html https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/04/hechos/1520120370_739370.html https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/04/06/hechos/1523043230_705992.html https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/04/06/hechos/1523043230_705992.html 314 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) and unamuno.”50 emotional history is the hallmark of every nationalist approach to the past. although andalucismo and national catholicism obviously diverge in their respective approaches to medieval iberia, at core they are more alike than they are different, which can hardly be seen as just a fluke. the suggestion that rejecting negationism amounts to endorsing national catholicism is absurd. are guichard, monroe, and all the scholars who rejected negationism fifty years ago to be seen as national catholic proxies? what is to be done with the islamic conquests of, say, syria, egypt, or the sassanid empire, to mention just a few of the territories targeted by the arab conquerors before their 711 arrival in iberia? are these conquests likewise just part of a national catholic myth? should walter kaegi,51 hugh kennedy,52 and robert hoyland,53 among other highly regarded specialists on the early islamic conquests, also be considered advocates of national catholicism? the origin of al-andalus is inextricably intertwined with the seventh-century islamic expansion, so questioning part of the process entails questioning all of it. portraying the islamic conquest of iberia as merely an element of a national catholic narrative exemplifies the potentially toxic effects of the uncontrolled consumption of emotional history, especially by nonspecialist audiences but even by scholarly ones. but this is not the most serious problem raised by the feeling of history. concealing the islamic past: a conspiracy theory hirschkind’s book opens with the following statement: “the argument i explore here can be simply stated: medieval muslim iberia did not disappear from history with the seizure of granada in 1492 by christian armies, as our history books have it. rather, forced into hiding, it continued on as an invisible warp within the fabric of spanish society” (emphasis mine). later, in the conclusion, hirschkind argues that andalucismo deserves our attention, among other reasons, “for the way it brings to light a past left in darkness” (emphasis mine).54 early in the nineteenth century, spanish scholars of arabic studies inaugurated a strong scholarly tradition focused almost exclusively on the history of al-andalus, and since that time, thousands of publications have appeared, in spain and elsewhere, on this topic. although it is true that medieval studies in spain has largely ignored (but not concealed) al-andalus, a growing number of historians and archaeologists currently work in this academic field. over the last four decades, public authorities have funded dozens of research projects in spain aimed at producing deeper and more refined knowledge of al-andalus. 50. c. sánchez-albornoz, el islam de españa y el occidente (madrid: espasa-calpe, 1965), 113. 51. w. kaegi, byzantium and the early islamic conquests (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992); idem, muslim expansion and byzantine collapse in north africa (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010). 52. h. kennedy, the great arab conquests: how the spread of islam changed the world we live in (london: weidenfeld and nicolson, 2007). 53. r. g. hoyland, in god’s path: the arab conquest and the creation of an islamic empire (oxford: oxford university press, 2015). 54. hirschkind, feeling of history, 1 and 159. ˇ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 315 a good number of islamic monuments in spain are open to visitors, and public exhibitions displaying all kinds of objects and artifacts crafted in al-andalus are held regularly in different countries. in light of all this activity, how and when has the islamic iberian past been “forced into hiding”? to the best of my knowledge, there is a single instance of a deliberate plan to conceal the islamic iberian past: the mosque of córdoba. in the last few years, especially since the 2006 claim on the building’s legal ownership made by the catholic church, the bishopric of córdoba has taken a series of decisions clearly aimed at blurring the building’s islamic past, chief among them attempts to remove the word “mezquita” from its official name.55 some of the scholars scorned by hirschkind as mere national catholic proxies (see below) have been among the most vocal in condemning this trend. this is particularly true of the historian eduardo manzano of the consejo superior de investigaciones científicas (csic), who authored a remarkably insightful op-ed pointing out that “the misappropriation of the building has prompted the kidnapping of its memory.”56 not long after its publication, manzano’s opinion piece turned into a manifesto for the public ownership of the building, and it was signed by more than one hundred scholars from more than thirty research institutions.57 unsurprisingly, hirschkind overlooks both manzano’s contribution and its scholarly repercussions.58 readers may decide for themselves whether this omission amounts to concealment or reflects simple ignorance. beyond the singular case of the mosque, hirschkind’s opening remark points to the realm of conspiracy theories. the same approach lay at the heart of olagüe’s denialist ideas: he repeatedly suggested that historians had deliberately decided to ignore issues that would force reconsideration of the existing knowledge about al-andalus.59 in fact, however, it was olagüe himself who concealed historical evidence that contradicted his fantasies, as i have shown in detail elsewhere.60 more recently, gonzález ferrín, olagüe’s most outstanding pupil, has taken up this line of argument, referring repeatedly to an “official” history—presumably juxtaposed with a concealed “real” one.61 he has also proven willing to apply this approach beyond the limits 55. e. calderwood, “the reconquista of the mosque of córdoba,” foreign policy, april 10, 2015, https:// foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/10/the-reconquista-of-the-mosque-of-cordoba-spain-catholic-church-islam/. 56. e. manzano, “el affaire de la mezquita de córdoba,” el país, april 14, 2015, https://elpais.com/ elpais/2015/02/05/opinion/1423137778_840752.html. 57. c. morán, “cien expertos critican la situación de la mezquita de córdoba,” el país, november 3, 2015, https://elpais.com/politica/2015/11/03/actualidad/1446553126_305752.html. 58. hirschkind, feeling of history, 59–63. 59. olagüe, la revolución islámica, 16 (“ignorándolos y no hablando de ellos, en un común y tácito acuerdo, han preferido los historiadores dejar a los españoles dormir durante varios siglos”); 274 (“la mayoría de los historiadores han generalmente olvidado o se han cuidado muy mucho de recordar”); 451 (“los historiadores no habían tenido la valentía de declarar”). 60. garcía-sanjuán, la conquista islámica, 243–63. 61. e. gonzález ferrín, “historiología del islam y al-andalus, entre el post-orientalismo y la historia oficial,” imago crítica 3 (2011): 71; idem, “711: historiología de una conquista,” in al-andalus y el mundo árabe (711–2011): visiones desde el arabismo, 67–90 (granada: sociedad española de estudios árabes, 2012), 70. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/10/the-reconquista-of-the-mosque-of-cordoba-spain-catholic-churchhttps://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/10/the-reconquista-of-the-mosque-of-cordoba-spain-catholic-church316 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) of the islamic iberian past: a few years ago, he expressed support for the most unhinged conspiracy theory in recent spanish history, according to which the 2004 bombings in madrid were the work not of al-qaeda but of the basque terrorist organization eta.62 it is thus hardly surprising that gonzález ferrín would promote the idea of a conspiracy against himself in order to explain the heavy scholarly criticism to which he has been subjected. gonzález ferrín’s allegation of a conspiracy is based on two false claims. first, he claims that his critics label him a fascist because of his support for ideas originally put forward by the fascist olagüe.63 as evidence of this claim he cites four authors—but none of them in fact calls him a fascist.64 to the contrary, two of them, rodríguez-mediano65 and fierro,66 explicitly distinguish him ideologically from olagüe. the second false claim is that the csic is a national catholic institution and leads the smear campaign against gonzález ferrín: “spanish medievalism is fed by the csic, a francoist construction that has inherited national catholic sentiment.”67. here, too, hirschkind uncritically accepts gonzález ferrín’s arguments and freely endorses the idea of a national catholic plot led by the csic: “numerous authors have insinuated that despite gonzález ferrín’s long-standing support for leftist causes, he is a falangist in disguise. much of the campaign against him (though not all, by any means) has been waged by the department of jewish and islamic studies at csic in madrid.”68 who are these “numerous authors,” and where is the evidence of their “campaign”? accusing some scholars of plotting against another is a extremely serious step, and it is 62. e. gonzález ferrín, “el 11-m fue un atentado de eta,” abc, june 20, 2004. the conservative government led by jose maria aznar first advanced this theory in the aftermath of the attacks, and ever since it has been consistently upheld by most far-right outlets in spain. 63. e. gonzález ferrín, “el islam y su expansión en occidente: efectos tomados como causas,” in frontera inferior de al-andalus: la lusitania tras la presencia islámica (713–756 d.c./94–138 h), ed. b. franco moreno, 29–52 (mérida: consorcio ciudad monumental histórico-artística y arqueológica, 2015), 37: “since olagüe was a falangist and denied the invasion, everyone who denies the invasion is a falangist” (“como olagüe era falangista y negó la invasión, todo aquel que niegue la invasión es falangista”). 64. f. rodríguez-mediano, “culture, identity and civilization: the arabs and islam in the history of spain,” in islam and the politics of culture in europe: memory, aesthetics, art, ed. f. peter et al., 41–60 (bielefeld: transcript, 2013); fierro, “al-andalus en el pensamiento fascista”; e. manzano, “algunas reflexiones sobre el 711,” awraq 3 (2011): 3–20; garcía-sanjuán, la conquista islámica. 65. rodríguez-mediano, “culture, identity and civilization”, 56: “from a viewpoint clearly opposed to the fascist ideology of olagüe, ferrín postulates a similar argument about the nonexistence of the conquest” (emphasis mine). 66. m. fierro, “al-andalus, convivencia e islam: mucho ruido y pocas nueces,” revista de libros, october 17, 2018: “no one doubts that gonzález ferrín is inspired by olagüe’s book, but this does not imply that he shares his political ideas: as he himself affirms, ideas often travel along unexpected paths” (“nadie duda que gonzález ferrín se inspirase en el libro de olagüe, y ello no implica que comulgara con sus ideas políticas: como él mismo afirma, las ideas viajan a menudo por caminos insospechados”). 67. j. lópez astilleros, “gonzález ferrín: mi única idea sobre al andalus es su continuidad cultural,” público, november 2, 2018, https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/16363/gonzalez-ferrin-mi-unica-ideasobre-al-andalus-es-su-continuidad-cultural/. 68. hirschkind, feeling of history, 175. https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/16363/gonzalez-ferrin-mi-unica-idea-sobre-al-andalus-es-su-continuidad-cultural/ https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/16363/gonzalez-ferrin-mi-unica-idea-sobre-al-andalus-es-su-continuidad-cultural/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 317 more serious still when done without providing any names a single piece of evidence in support of the allegation. meanwhile, even if the csic had started out as a francoist institution (it was founded in 1941), the large group of medievalist historians, arabists, and islamicists currently working under its auspices in madrid, barcelona, and granada can hardly be described as francoist proxies.69 some of its members are not just uncritical of the origins of their own institution but among the most vocal critics of conservative scholarship in general.70 casting them as inheritors of national catholicism involves an obvious untruth and represents another clear indication of the extremely problematic relationship of negationism with actual evidence. obviously, the problem here is not the francoist origin of csic but the fact that some csic members (especially fierro, manzano, and molina) are among the most vocal critics of negationism.71 gonzález ferrín’s denunciation of csic fits uneasily with his declared commitment to karl popper’s maxim of “understanding the world as a sum of individuals, not of collectivities.”72 by scorning the csic as a whole, he declines to extend the basic privilege of being seen as individuals to the members of the csic. and by insisting that the csic remains captive to its national catholic origins more than forty-five years after franco’s demise, he provides a convenient explanation for its members’ rejection of his ideas: its members necessarily hate gonzález ferrín, like they hate américo castro.73 the contradiction inherent in gonzález ferrín’s claims is quite obvious: if the csic were indeed a francoist and national catholic institution, why would its members wage a campaign to denounce someone as a fascist? it simply makes no sense. in any case, none of his critics at the csic has ever described gonzález ferrín as a fascist, nor is there any campaign to discredit him as one. instead, as noted earlier, some of his critics have explicitly highlighted the ideological differences between him and the fascist olagüe. 69. ibid., 77: “an institution founded by the franco regime and still subject to its looming shadow.” 70. e. manzano, “la construcción histórica del pasado nacional,” in la gestión de la memoria: la historia de españa al servicio del poder, ed. j. s. pérez garzón et al., 33–62 (barcelona: crítica, 2000); idem, review of al-andalus contra españa, by s. fanjul, hispania 61/3, no. 209 (2001): 1161–64; idem, “de cómo la historia se ha convertido en una disciplina al servicio de los intereses conservadores,” in hispania, al-ándalus, españa: nacionalismo e identidad en el medievo peninsular, ed. m. fierro and a. garcía-sanjuán, 47–56 (madrid: marcial pons, 2020); f. rodríguez-mediano, “al-ándalus y la batalla del presente,” in fierro and garcíasanjuán, hispania, al-ándalus, españa, 23–32; fierro, “al-andalus, convivencia e islam”; idem, review of the myth of the andalusian paradise: muslims, christians, and jews under islamic rule in medieval spain, by d. fernández-morera, al-qanṭara 39, no. 1 (2018): 248–53. hirschkind ignores all of these publications. 71. see fierro, “al-andalus en el pensamiento fascista”; molina, review of garcía-sanjuán, la conquista islámica; idem, “la conquista de al-andalus, tergiversada”; e. manzano, “de como los árabes realmente invadieron hispania,” al-qanṭara 35, no. 1 (2014): 311–19; idem, “¿realmente invadieron los árabes hispania?,” el país, february 13, 2014, https://blogs.elpais.com/historias/2014/02/invasionhispania.html. 72. gonzález ferrín, cuando fuimos árabes, 86: “mi convencido seguimiento de karl r. popper y la necesidad de comprender el mundo como suma de individualidades, no de colectividades.” 73. gonzález ferrín, cuando fuimos árabes, 85: “el odio del csic a la obra de castro.” see the recent article by m. garcía-arenal, “américo castro en estados unidos,” boletín de la institución libre de enseñanza 119–20 (december 2020): 287–300, the latest evidence of the steady interest in castro among csic scholars. 318 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) gonzález ferrín’s academic peers do not “have it in for him”; the reason for the torrent of criticism he has been subjected to in spain for fifteen years now74 is not that he has adopted the ideas of a fascist pseudo-historian but that by advocating them he—like hirschkind after him—has lent academic legitimacy to a well-known (and well-worn) scholarly fraud. final remarks the feeling of history is an academic book that gives international support to pseudoacademic ideas largely discredited among specialists over the last forty-five years and that makes sweeping and simplistic overgeneralizations about spanish scholarship that include glaring untruths and false accusations. hirschkind does not limit himself to exposing and analyzing the historical and social phenomenon of andalucismo. instead, he fully embraces it (as he is well aware, noting that “the result may appear to some as partisan”). the most compelling evidence of the partisan nature of his approach lies in his unmitigated scorn for historical knowledge as a form of rational understanding of the past. hirschkind alleges an intentional cover-up of al-andalus, denigrates historians as francoist proxies, and gives fuel to a well-known historiographical fraud. science and scholarship promote rationality, not emotions, in order to understand human societies. disregarding his obligations as a scholar and a social scientist, hirschkind subscribes to a deeply reactionary tendency that promotes an emotional approach to the past as the basis for the construction of collective identity. hirschkind’s legitimation of emotional appeals to the past raises the question whether he would be willing to take the same stance on phenomena similar to andalucismo. for instance, would he legitimize the highly emotional envisioning of the medieval christian past currently advocated by far-right organizations and groups in the usa and elsewhere? or would he argue that emotional approaches to the past must be allowed only selectively? once pandora’s box is open, who can control or close it? history is a highly flammable product, and the least a social scientist should do is handle it very carefully. lending academic legitimacy to emotional (nationalist) views of the past is not only a huge scholarly mistake that involves unacceptable distortion of the past but also a dangerous and thoughtless frivolity. as a scholar and a historian, i must confess that the feeling of history left me feeling really bad. 74. a. garcía-sanjuán, review of historia general de al ándalus, by e. gonzález ferrín, medievalismo 16 (2006): 327–32. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 319 bibliography benhima, y., and p. guichard. “mûsâ ibn nusayr: retour sur l’histoire et le pouvoir d’un gouverneur omeyyade en occident musulmán.” bulletin d’études orientales 66 (2017): 97–116. calderwood, e. colonial al-andalus: spain and the making of modern moroccan culture. cambridge, ma: belknap press, 2018. ———. “the reconquista of the mosque of córdoba.” foreign policy, april 10, 2015. https:// foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/10/the-reconquista-of-the-mosque-of-cordoba-spaincatholic-church-islam/. civantos, c. the afterlife of al-andalus: muslim iberia in contemporary arab and hispanic narratives. albany: state university of new 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árabes. córdoba: almuzara, 2017. ———. historia general de al ándalus. córdoba: almuzara, 2006. ———. “historiología del islam y al-andalus, entre el post-orientalismo y la historia oficial.” imago crítica 3 (2011): 57–73. ———. “el islam y su expansión en occidente: efectos tomados como causas.” in frontera inferior de al-andalus: la lusitania tras la presencia islámica (713–756 d.c./94–138 h), edited by b. franco moreno, 29–52. mérida: consorcio ciudad monumental históricoartística y arqueológica, 2015. ———. “what do we mean by the qurʾān: on origins, fragments, and inter-narrative identity.” in remapping emergent islam: texts, social contexts, and ideological trajectories, edited by c. a. segovia, 221–44. amsterdam: university of amsterdam press, 2020. guichard, p. “les arabes ont bien envahi l’espagne: les structures sociales de l’espagne musulmane.” annales: histoire, sciences sociales 6 (1974): 1483–513. ——— and p. sénac. “les débuts d’al-andalus: des textes, des monnaies et des sceaux.” le moyen âge 126, no. 3–4 (2020): 511–37. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) feeling bad about emotional history: the case of andalucismo • 321 hirschkind, c. the feeling of history: islam, romanticism, and andalusia. chicago: university of chicago press, 2021. hoyland, r. g. in god’s path: the arab conquest and the creation of an islamic empire. oxford: oxford university press, 2015. kaegi, w. byzantium and the early islamic conquests. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992. ———. muslim expansion and byzantine collapse in north africa. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. kahn-harris, k. “denialism: what drives people to reject the truth.” guardian, august 3, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drivespeople-to-reject-the-truth. kennedy, h. the great arab conquests: how the spread of islam changed the world we live in. london: weidenfeld and nicolson, 2007. lópez astilleros, j. “gonzález ferrín: mi única idea sobre al andalus es su 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árabes realmente invadieron hispania.” al-qanṭara 35, no. 1 (2014): 311–19. ———. “¿realmente invadieron los árabes hispania?” el país, february 13, 2014. https://blogs. elpais.com/historias/2014/02/invasionhispania.html. ———. review of al-andalus contra españa, by s. fanjul. hispania 61/3, no. 209 (2001): 1161–64. https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/16363/gonzalez-ferrin-mi-unica-idea-sobre-al-andalus-es-su-continuidad-cultural/ https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/16363/gonzalez-ferrin-mi-unica-idea-sobre-al-andalus-es-su-continuidad-cultural/ https://elpais.com/elpais/2015/02/05/opinion/1423137778_840752.html https://elpais.com/elpais/2015/02/05/opinion/1423137778_840752.html 322 • alejandro garcía-sanjuán al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) molina, l. “la conquista de al-andalus, tergiversada: ¿mala ciencia, ensayo, ficción?” revista de libros, september 1, 2014. https://www.revistadelibros.com/discusion/la-conquistade-al-andalus-tergiversadamala-ciencia-ensayo-ficcion. ———. review of a. la conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado, by a. garcía-sanjuán. medievalismo 25 (2015): 455–59. monroe, j. t. review of les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’espagne, by i. olagüe. international journal of middle east studies 6, no. 3 (1975): 347–48. morán, c. “cien expertos critican la situación de la mezquita de córdoba.” el país, november 3, 2015. https://elpais.com/politica/2015/11/03/actualidad/1446553126_305752.html. olagüe, i. les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’espagne. paris: flammarion, 1969. ———. la revolución islámica en occidente. madrid: fundación juan march, 1974. rodríguez blanco, p. “cuando fuimos árabes: la posverdad sobre al andalus.” el país, march 6, 2018. https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/03/04/hechos/1520120370_739370.html. ———. “el ‘fraude’ que intenta tergiversar la historia de al-andalus.” el país, april 9, 2018. https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/04/06/hechos/1523043230_705992.html. rodríguez-mediano, f. “al-ándalus y la batalla del presente.” in hispania, al-ándalus, españa: nacionalismo e identidad en el medievo peninsular, edited by m. fierro and a. garcíasanjuán, 23–32. madrid: marcial pons, 2020. ———. “culture, identity and civilization: the arabs and islam in the history of spain.” in islam and the politics of culture in europe: memory, aesthetics, art, edited by f. peter et al., 41–60. bielefeld: transcript, 2013. sánchez-albornoz, c. el islam de españa y el occidente. madrid: espasa-calpe, 1965. schmid, n. k. review of the quranic noah and the making of the islamic prophet: a study of intertextuality and religious identity formation in late antiquity, by c. a. segovia. der islam 97, no. 2 (2020): 617–22. venegas, j. l. the sublime south: andalusia, orientalism, and the making of modern spain. evanston, il: northwestern university press, 2018. wolf, k. b. “myth, history, and the origins of al-andalus: a historiographical essay.” journal of medieval iberian studies 11, no. 3 (2019): 378–401. ———. “negating negationism.” pomona faculty publications and research 394 (2014). http:// scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_fac_pub/394. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 45-73 who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? luke treadwell university of oxford (luke.treadwell@orinst.ox.ac.uk) 1. introduction who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? this question generated much scholarly interest for a couple of decades after togan’s discovery of the mashhad manuscript in 1923.1 two russian historians, krachkovskiǐ and kovalevskiǐ, were particularly attentive to the issue in the first half of the twentieth century, but thereafter interest in the topic declined. the attempt to identify the miscellany’s “editors” and understand their motivation seems to have reached an impasse in the middle of the century. at the same time, the rich complexities of the miscellany’s constituent texts became increasingly evident as their 1. in this paper, the term “mashhad manuscript” is used to refer to manuscript no. 5229 in the library of the astane quds shrine (i.e., the imam reza shrine in mashhad), which has been provisionally dated to the seventh/ thirteenth century, while the term “mashhad miscellany” is applied to the compilation of texts (the majmūʿa) that was assembled in the second half of the fourth/tenth century. © 2020 luke treadwell. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. abstract the identity of the editors of the mashhad miscellany generated considerable scholarly debate for a couple of decades after togan’s discovery of the mashhad manuscript in 1923, but interest in the topic declined after the middle of the century. in the last seventy years, it is the miscellany’s four texts, in particular the kitāb of ibn faḍlān, that have monopolized scholarly attention. this paper reopens the file on the mysterious editors in the belief that their role remains the key to understanding the majmūʿa as well as its component texts. it reexamines the paratextual apparatus with which the editors framed the miscellany and concludes that the editors did not belong to the mashriqī literary elite as earlier scholars maintained. the “editors” were in all probability not men of flesh and blood, but the fictional creations of the traveler, poet, and nadīm abū dulaf al-khazrajī, author of the miscellany’s two risālas. his role as the mastermind of the mashhad miscellany compels us to reevaluate the miscellany’s literary context and to think again about the provenance, structure, and contents of its four texts. mailto:luke.treadwell%40orinst.ox.ac.uk?subject= 46 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) details were pored over, their language scrutinized, and their literary context elucidated. this paper will reopen the file on the two mysterious “editors,” building on the insights produced by russian scholarship and the remarks made by the few scholars (including minorsky and miquel) who have pursued the issue since. although all contributors to the debate have had worthwhile points to make, as this study will demonstrate, none of the hitherto proposed reconstructions of the miscellany’s genesis is compelling. to start afresh, i will return to krachkovskiǐ and kovalevskiǐ and reexamine their careful analysis of the paratextual apparatus with which the editors framed the miscellany. this apparatus includes both the introductory remarks with which they prefaced the miscellany’s texts and the critical comments that they inserted in the risālas of abū dulaf. the introductory remarks (henceforth referred to as the five “linking passages,” or lps), are the key to unlocking the identity and intentions of the person(s) who compiled the miscellany. as i will attempt to demonstrate, the editors were not, as earlier scholars have maintained, members of the mashriqī literary elite but fictional creations of the real compiler and editor of the miscellany, abū dulaf al-khazrajī, author of the miscellany’s two risālas.2 the argument that follows requires some background knowledge of the historiography, structure, and contents of the miscellany. i begin with an overview of the study of the mashhad manuscript (section 2), followed by a description of each of the texts (section 3), a translation and analysis of the editorial linking passages (sections 4 and 5), an examination of a unique and anomalous passage on the “towns of the turks” at the end of ibn al-faqīh’s book (section 6), and, finally, some notes on the literary biography of abū dulaf al-khazrajī. 2. the study of the mashhad manuscript in 1924, zaki velidi togan published a note about an anonymous, acephalous manuscript in the library of the imam reza shrine in mashhad that contained four texts.3 they included an extended version of the second half of ibn al-faqīh’s kitāb al-buldān;4 two risālas describing lengthy journeys, the first through central asia and al-hind and the second across iran, both undertaken by their author, abū dulaf al-khazrajī; and the kitāb of ibn faḍlān, the envoy who accompanied a caliphal mission from baghdad to the court of the ruler of bulghār on the river volga in 309–10/921–23.5 the editors inform us that the buldān was already a well-known text in ibn al-faqīh’s lifetime, whereas the other three 2. in sections 2–4 of this paper, frequent reference will be made to the (two) “editors” of the miscellany, whose identity modern scholars have investigated. from the final paragraph of section 5 onward, reference will be made to abū dulaf as the editor of the miscellany. 3. a. z. validov (togan), “meshkhedskaya rukopis’ ibni-l’-fakikha,” izvestiia rossiǐkoǐ akademii nauk (1924): 237–48. 4. no manuscript of the book bears a title page or preface. ibn al-nadīm called the book kitāb al-buldān, while its title in the mashhad manuscript is given as kitāb akhbār al-buldān; f. sezgin et al., eds., majmūʿa fī al-jughrāfiyya: mimmā allafahu ibn al-faqīh wa-ibn faḍlān wa-abū dulaf al-khazrajī (frankfurt: maʿhad taʾrīkh al-ʿulūm al-ʿarabiyya wa-l-islāmiyya, 1987), 347. 5. for the purposes of clarity and brevity, the term kitāb is applied to ibn faḍlān’s text in this paper, while abū dulaf ’s texts are referred to as the first and second risālas and ibn al-faqīh’s book as the (kitāb akhbār al-) buldān. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 47 texts were by unknown authors (see section 4). both the kitāb and the risālas were heavily cited by yāqūt al-ḥamawī (d. 626/1229) in his voluminous gazetteer of the islamic world, the muʿjam al-buldān, and were thus known, if only in partial form, to western scholars for several decades before the publication of the mashhad manuscript.6 of the four texts, ibn faḍlān’s kitāb has received the lion’s share of attention since togan’s discovery. togan himself published the first major study in 1939, the same year in which krachkovskiǐ published a commentary and translation, alongside a facsimile reproduction of the text itself.7 in his commentary, krachkovskiǐ made an observation that is crucial to the argument presented in this paper: he pointed out that the editors of the miscellany were identical with the two patrons to whom abū dulaf sent copies of his risālas.8 the editors wrote short introductions to the risālas in which they cited abū dulaf ’s dedicatory prefaces. they also inserted several critical comments in the texts of the risālas in which they expressed doubts about the reliability of certain passages in his account (see below, section 3). a third translation of and comprehensive commentary on the kitāb was written by kovalevskiǐ in 1959.9 since that date, many new translations have appeared in several languages, as well as a great many academic papers on the literary aspects of the kitāb, the personality and background of its author, the political context of his mission, and the wider context of premodern travel literature within which his travelogue should be read.10 the publication of the miscellany spurred interest in abū dulaf ’s texts as well, even if at a slower rate, yielding editions and translations of both his risālas, but fewer studies.11 6. yāqūt, muʿjam al-buldān (beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d.). 7. z. v. togan, ibn faḍlān’s reisebericht (leipzig: brockhaus, 1939); i. yu. krachkovskiǐ, puteshestvie ibn-faḍlāna na volgu (perevod i kommentariǐ) (moscow: izdatelstvo akademii nauk sssr, 1939). ritter stated, without giving his sources, that kovalevskiǐ was the author of the translation and commentary that appeared under krachkovskiǐ’s name in 1939; see h. ritter, “zum text von ibn faḍlān’s reisebericht,” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 9 (1942): 98–99. 8. in reference to the first risāla, the editors write (in lp3), kataba ilaynā abū dulaf … fī dhikr mā shāhadahu wa-raʾāhu fī balad al-turk wa-l-hind wa-l-ṣīn (“abū dulaf wrote to us mentioning what he witnessed and saw in the lands of the turk, india, and china”); see section 4. 9. a. p. kovaleskiǐ, kniga akhmeda ibn-faḍlāna o ego puteshestvii na volgu v. 921–922 gg. (stat’i, perevody i kommentarii) (kharkov: izdatelstvo gos. universiteta im. a. m. gori’kogo, 1956). 10. for a convenient summary of the literature, see j. e. montgomery, “mission to the volga,” in two arabic travel books, ed. p. f. kennedy and s. m. toorawa (new york: new york university press, 2014), 285–297 (“further reading”). see also the forthcoming publication of the papers of a conference on ibn faḍlān held in oxford in 2016: j. shepard and w. l. treadwell, eds., muslims on the volga: diplomacy and islam in the world of ibn faḍlān (london: i. b. tauris, 2021) and the catalogue of a major exhibition organized in kazan published as a. i. torgoev, ed., puteshestvie ibn faḍlāna: volzhskiǐ put’ ot bagdada do bulgara (moscow: dom mardzhani, 2016). 11. for a german translation of and commentary on the first risāla, see a. von rohr-sauer, des abū dulaf bericht über seine reise nach turkestān, china und indien: neu übersetzt und untersucht (bonn: bonner universitäts buchdruckerei, 1939); for an edition and annotated english translation of the second risāla, see v. minorsky, abū dulaf miṣʿar ibn muhalhil’s travels in iran (circa a.d. 950) (cairo: cairo university press, 1955). for an edition and annotated russian translation of the second risāla, see p. g. bulgakov, vtoraya zapiska abu dulafa (moscow: izdatelstvo vostochnoĭ literatury, 1960); for articles on the second risāla, see i. yu. krachkovskiǐ, “vtoraya zapiska abū dulafa v geograficheskom slovare iāḳūta (azerbaǐzhan, armeniya, iran),” 48 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) abū dulaf ’s travelogues did not hold the same allure for modern readers as ibn faḍlān’s narrative did, being uneven in style and lacking the immediacy of the first-person voice and the minute attention to the behaviors of steppe peoples that make the latter’s account such a riveting read. abū dulaf ’s first risāla has long been perceived to be a caricature of the travel genre (see section 3),12 although the second risāla has attracted less criticism. on the whole, however, whereas ibn faḍlān has become a star of arabic literature, particularly in twenty-first-century scholarship, abū dulaf has been largely neglected over the past half century. as for ibn al-faqīh, whose text opens the miscellany and takes up the bulk of the manuscript, difficulties in gaining access to a reproduction of the whole manuscript, as well as the evident disorder among the disbound folios of the manuscript, were noted by pellat in 1973 in his foreword to the posthumous publication of massé’s french translation of the abridged version of the work.13 a facsimile edition of the manuscript eventually appeared under the supervision of fuat sezgin in 1987 (which, however, omitted the crucial first folio of the manuscript).14 an edition of the whole of ibn al-faqīh’s work, which combines de goeje’s abridged edition and the version in the mashhad manuscript, was published by yūsuf al-hādī in 2009.15 3. description of the texts in the miscellany the first text, which is the second part of ibn al-faqīh al-hamadhānī’s kitāb al-buldān, is by far the longest of the four.16 it comprises an extended version of ibn al-faqīh’s book, which is otherwise known only from de goeje’s abridged edition. supplementary information supplied by this text, not present in the mukhtaṣar, includes additional chapters on wāṣiṭ, nabaṭiyya, baghdad, samarra, the sawād, al-ahwāz, the kharāj of khurasan, the turks, and the titles of the turks and their neighbors in the mashriq.17 the miscellany’s text may have been the second of two volumes prepared by the editors, the first volume having contained ibn al-faqīh’s material on the western islamic world (the maghrib), but no trace of the first volume has ever been found.18 izvestiia akademii nauk azerbaizhanskoi ssr 8 (1949): 65–77, repr. in izbrannye sochineniia, ed. v. i. beliaev and g. v. tsereteli, 6 vols., 1:280–92 (moscow: izdatelstvo akademii nauk sssr, 1955), and v. minorsky, “la deuxième risāla d’abū-dulaf,” oriens 5, no. 1 (1952): 23–27. 12. see, for example, a. miquel, la géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e siècle (paris: éditions de l’ehess, 2001), 3:139–45. 13. h. massé, trans., abrégé du livre du pays (damascus: institut français de damas, 1973), vi–vii; ibn al-faqīh, mukhtaṣar kitāb al-buldān, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1885). 14. sezgin, majmūʿa. for an image of the missing first folio, see the final page of this paper. 15. ibn al-faqīh, kitāb al-buldān, ed. y. al-hādī, 2nd ed. (beirut: ʿālam al-kutub, 2009). 16. it takes up 347 pages in sezgin’s facsimile (sezgin, majmūʿa). 17. for a summary of the differences between the two versions of the buldān, see a. b. khalidov, “ebn al-faqīh, abū bakr aḥmad,” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed., updated 2011. 18. the first line of the book begins hādha baqiyyat al-qawl fī al-ʿirāq … (“this is what remains to be said about iraq …”); see lp1 in section 4. this phrase could mean that the “remainder” referred to is the second part of the book, which followed an earlier volume on the maghrib. alternatively, the reference to “what remains” could conceivably have been to the extra information contained in the miscellany’s version that supplemented al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 49 the three other texts in the miscellany are much shorter than the buldān. they are not geographies but rather travelogues whose authors claim to have traveled through the regions that they describe. abū dulaf ’s first risāla tells the story of his journey to the court of the king of “china” (al-ṣīn, probably the uighur ruler of qocho) in the company of an embassy that was dispatched in 330/941 by the samanid amir naṣr ii (r. 301–31/913–42) to escort the king’s daughter back to bukhara, where she was to marry naṣr’s son.19 the journey begins with brief descriptions of the social, political, and dietary conditions of the central asian tribes through whose territory he passed, before his arrival in the capital city of sandābīl, which he describes as a great walled conurbation crisscrossed by canals with windmills on their banks. the tribes are succinctly described in formulaic terms, often with a deliberate inflection toward parody. although he narrates his journey in the first person, abū dulaf does not write about his own experience of the journey or his personal encounters with the turks. in sandābīl, the author claims to have met the king and answered his questions about the dār al-islām, but he then left the embassy and returned to bukhara by himself via the malay peninsula, india, sind, and sistan. both the outward and return legs of his journey follow implausibly long and circuitous routes that frequently zigzag and backtrack across the regions they cover, some deviations adding several extra hundred kilometres to the journey for no discernible purpose. the description of the return journey is looser and less stylistically homogeneous than his earlier account of the turkish territories, including quite extensive comments on mineralogy and flora, as well as remarks on towns and their buildings and the monetary and sartorial customs of their residents. although less obviously a parody than the outward leg, the return journey is full of tall tales and unlikely assertions and has been described as a mishmash of materials borrowed from unnamed sources.20 the second risāla describes a journey that takes the narrator all over the southern caucasus on a meandering route from takht-i sulaymān to tiflis to ardabil to erzurum and then to khānaqīn, whence he sets out on an easterly course that takes him across the iranian plateau to tus. from there he returns in a southwesterly direction, finishing up in al-ahwāz. the reason for the journey is not given and the narrator is barely present in the text, even though he occasionally makes comments in the first person. the text contains frequent references to mineralogy and flora and reveals the author’s interest in folktales and popular interpretations of natural phenomena, as well as his curiosity about ancient buildings of the sasanian era. on the whole, the “journey” sounds more like a compilation of field notes than a description of a traveled road.21 both risālas are notable for their inclusion of several critical comments written by the editors, two of them in the first and three in the second risāla. the following table lists the comments. an abridged version, which was probably similar to the mukhtaṣar edited by de goeje. 19. see w. l. treadwell, a history of the sāmānids: the first islamic dynasty of central asia (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, forthcoming in 2021), for the identification of sandābīl with qocho. 20. miquel, géographie humaine 3:140, n. 4. 21. see minorsky, travels in iran, for a detailed commentary on the second risāla. 50 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) table 1: critical comments inserted in the risālas by the editors.22 comment no. risāla page no. in sezgin’s facsimile22 text to which the critical comment relates 1 first risāla 356 (muʿjam 3:445) description of the funeral of the samanid amir, naṣr ii, the date of whose death was foretold at birth. on the appointed day, naṣr proceeded with his notables and household to his tomb, entered it, and died therein. 2 first risāla 361 (muʿjam 3:447) the height of the idol in the temple of multān, which abū dulaf gives as one hundred cubits. 3 second risāla 363 (travels in iran, 2) a report on the fire temple in shīz near marāgha, on the dome of which there was a silver crescent. 4 second risāla 374 (travels in iran, 14) a building plot in qarmīsīn, which, when excavated, revealed the remains of an older construction that exactly matched the plan of the new house that was to be built on the site. 5 second risāla 379–80 (travels in iran, 20) a prosperous and generous zoroastrian purveyor of supplies to the army of rayy who never refused anyone who asked him for wine. comment no. 1: after the description of naṣr’s funeral, which follows the story of the daughter of the uighur king who was brought to bukhara as a bride for naṣr’s son, the editors state that they doubt the truth of this passage. they explain that their informant, the author (abū dulaf), “occasionally mentioned something for which he asked god not to take him to account/blame him.”23 comment no. 2: the editors dismiss abū dulaf ’s figure of one hundred cubits for the height of the idol in favor of the lower figure of twenty cubits given by al-madāʾinī in his futūḥ al-sind wa-l-hind.24 22. reference is also made (in brackets) to yāqūt’s muʿjam (first risāla) and the arabic text of minorsky’s travels in iran (second risāla). 23. for the clearest version of the text, which is obscured by copyist’s errors in the mashhad manuscript, see yāqūt’s muʿjam, 3:452: naḥnu nashukku fī ṣiḥḥat hādhā al-khabar li-anna muḥaddithanā bihi rubbamā kāna dhakara shayʾan fa-saʾala allāha an lā yuʾākhidhahu bi-mā qāla.the story of naṣr’s entombment may have been a popular tale that grew up around the construction of the famous samanid mausoleum in bukhara, said to have been built by naṣr to house the remains of his grandfather ismāʿīl b. aḥmad (d. 295/907) and to have served as his own shrine as well. see s. blair, the monumental inscriptions from early islamic iran and transoxiana (leiden: brill, 1991), 25–29. 24. the editors state, again, nashukku fī ṣiḥḥat hādhā al-khabar (“we doubt the truth of this report”). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 51 comment no. 3: the editors brand abū dulaf ’s description of the fire temple an exaggeration, although it is not entirely clear which part of the description has prompted their criticism.25 comment no. 4: the editors express their skepticism about the claimed resemblance between the uncovered remains of the old building and the new building.26 comment no. 5: the editors dismiss the account of the extreme generosity of the provisions merchant as another of abū dulaf ’s inventions.27 these editorial interventions are puzzling. the editors made no comments on the texts of ibn al-faqīh and ibn faḍlān; why should they have chosen to comment only on the work of their protégé? it is also curious that the editors retained their comments in the text of the risālas when they had them copied into the miscellany. of what benefit to the reader did they expect their critical comments to be? moreover, it is interesting to note that abū dulaf himself was aware of his own reputation for hyperbole: after a note on the enormous size of the rhubarb plants he saw when in the city of nishapur, he wrote, “my readers will take this for an exaggeration on my part, but i have stated only what i have witnessed and seen.”28 it is as though abū dulaf was presciently aware of the editors’ sensitivity about his tendency to be economical with the truth—yet how could this have been so, given that when he wrote this remark, he cannot have been apprised of the editors’ intention to expose him? taken all together, the editors’ criticisms, though robust, are not entirely damning of abū dulaf ’s credibility. they are focused on five rather marginal points, none of which is integral to the core of abū dulaf ’s narrative. at the same time, the editors are silent about glaring lapses in narrative objectivity, such as abū dulaf ’s description of the turkish tribes at the beginning of the first risāla. i return to these conundrums when i discuss the question of the editors’ identity (see section 5). ibn faḍlān’s narrative stands in marked contrast to the risālas. the scene is set with a presentation of the dramatis personae who organized and took part in the mission to the court of the bulghār king. from the moment the embassy sets out from the capital, the reader has the sense that the author really did experience the discomforts of the road, the harshness of the climate, and the fears and exhilaration of traveling in unknown regions.29 the text, like abū dulaf ’s first risāla, falls into two parts. the first is the record of ibn faḍlān’s journey from baghdad to bulghār, which is clearly marked by the stopping points where the embassy alighted, and punctuated by encounters with naṣr ii and the 25. the editors remark, wa-hādhā al-qawl ayḍan min ziyādāt abī dulaf (“this statement is also one of abū dulaf ’s exaggerations”). 26. the editors write, wa-hādhā al-khabar ayḍan naẓunnuhu min wahm abī dulaf (“we consider this report, too, to be one of abū dulaf ’s fancies”). 27. wa-hādhā al-khabar naẓunnuhu ayḍan baʿḍa hānāt abī dulaf (“we also consider this report one of abū dulaf ’s whimsies”). 28. wa-yastaʿẓimu hādhā min qawlī man yasmaʿuhu wa-mā qultu illā mā shāhadtu wa-raʾaytu; minorsky, travels in iran, ar. text 27; trans., 59–60 = sezgin, majmūʿa, 386. 29. see miquel, géographie humaine, 3:138. 52 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) khwārazmshāh. it is full of sharply observed remarks on the turkic peoples the author encountered en route, particularly the ghuzz chiefs to whom the envoys delivered messages from the abbasid court.30 once in bulghār, the envoys endured two unsettling and intimidating audiences with the king, who scolded them for failing to deliver the funds he had been assured he would receive from the caliph. after the meetings with their host, the story of the embassy comes to an end; thereafter the reader hears nothing about the mission’s fate and is left to assume, given their initial reception, that it was not a happy one. the second part of the kitāb presents twenty-two “marvels” (ʿajāʾib) that ibn faḍlān witnessed in bulghār, where he must have remained for a while after meeting the king. these marvels are mostly not “wonders” in the sense of unbelievable occurrences, but rather accounts of the customs and practices of the turkic peoples and the rus’ merchants who traded with them, as well as various natural phenomena—faunal, floral, and meteorological.31 although the text of the mashhad manuscript ends abruptly a few lines into the final section, which is on the khazars, yāqūt supplies the full text of ibn faḍlān’s final entry in his muʿjam.32 unlike abū dulaf, ibn faḍlān seems not to have written about his return journey, although yāqūt states several times that he did return to the abbasid capital.33 ibn faḍlān’s kitāb has been much discussed over the past century and a half. prior to the discovery of the mashhad manuscript, scholarly opinion had been divided between skeptics such as marquart, who believed that ibn faḍlān had never traveled to bulghār, and others who were persuaded that he had indeed experienced what he wrote about.34 after the full version of the text in the miscellany was published, most scholars accepted as credible ibn faḍlān’s claim to have experienced firsthand what he recorded in the kitāb. doubts persisted, however, over some aspects of his account and the difficulty of pinpointing exactly why and where the kitāb had been written. the internal structure of the narrative, the structural disjunction between the first and second parts of the narrative, the occasional abrupt change of subject matter, the apparent truncation of the text, and an unsettling “doppler” or “echo” effect, which results in similar observations being recorded of different peoples—such anomalies and inconsistencies, together with the author’s absence from the historical record and the lack of interest shown by contemporary authors in his text, 30. montgomery, “mission to the volga,” 210–11. 31. see j. e. montgomery, “travelling autopsies: ibn faḍlān and the bulghār,” middle eastern literatures 7, no. 1 (2004): 3–32. 32. for the full text, see togan, reisebericht, 43–45 (arabic text). see also j. e. montgomery, “where is the real ibn faḍlān?,” in shepard and treadwell, eds., muslims on the volga. 33. yāqūt prefaces several of the entries in the muʿjam that he extracted from ibn faḍlān’s text with the following sentence (and variations thereof): qaraʾtu risālatan ʿamilahā aḥmad b. faḍlān … rasūl al-muqtadir bi-llāh … dhakara fīhā mā shāhadahu mundhu infaṣala min baghdād ilā an ʿāda ilayhā (“i read an epistle written by aḥmad b. faḍlān … the envoy of al-muqtadir bi-llāh … in which he recorded what he witnessed from the time he left baghdad to the time that he returned to the city”); yāqūt, muʿjam, 1:486, entry on “bulghār.” see also yāqūt’s entries on the bāshghird (1:322), khwārazm (2:397), and the rūs’ (3:79). 34. kovalevskiǐ, kniga, 39. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 53 continue to nourish doubts about the veracity of the account.35 in recent decades, however, the kitāb has been hailed by medievalists from different disciplines for the light it throws on the steppe peoples and for the insights it provides into the ethnic composition of the early rus’. confidence in the reliability of the information provided by ibn faḍlān continues to grow, as some of his more bizarre observations have been corroborated by recently discovered archaeological and ethnographic data,36 while doubts about the narrative’s structure and the context of its production have faded into the background. ibn faḍlān’s account has even been praised as a rare example of the art of reportage in early arabic literature.37 ibn faḍlān has become, in the eyes of many modern readers, a heroic figure, who is celebrated not only for his exceptional skill as a social observer and his dogged and impartial recording of what he saw but also for his quiet endurance of adversity and his human qualities.38 4. the compilation of the miscellany and the editorial “linking passages” in the decades after the discovery of the mashhad manuscript, russian scholars paid close attention to the question of the editors’ identity and their reasons for compiling the miscellany.39 kovalevskiǐ addressed the question of how and where the kitāb and the risālas were written and how these texts came into the possession of the editors.40 in his view, both ibn faḍlān and abū dulaf wrote their texts in iraq. kovalevskiǐ accepts yāqūt’s statement that ibn faḍlān returned from bulghār to baghdad and assumes that the kitāb was written as an official report shortly afterward. a copy of the report found its way (by means unexplained) to bukhara, where it came into the possession of two erudite noblemen. abū dulaf, for his part, presented his risālas to the famous buyid vizier al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād at some time early in the second half of the fourth/tenth century, a full three decades or more after ibn faḍlān had written the kitāb.41 his risālas, like the kitāb, also ended up in bukhara: abū dulaf sent copies of them to former patrons of his in the city, who happened to be the very same noblemen who had earlier come into possession of ibn faḍlān’s kitāb. at some point in the second half of the fourth/tenth century, these two bukharan noblemen— 35. for an analysis of these problems, see w. l. treadwell, “ibn faḍlān and the mashhad miscellany” (forthcoming). 36. see j.-c. ducène, l’europe et les géographes arabes du moyen âge (paris: cnrs éditions, 2017), 139–40, for a summary of the corroborating evidence for ibn faḍlān’s description of the funeral of the rus’ chief. 37. see a translation of the funeral of the rus’ chief in j. carey, ed., faber book of reportage (london: faber, 1989), 25–28. 38. see, e.g., the introduction to montgomery, “mission to the volga,” 171: “i find ibn faḍlān the most honest of authors writing in the classical arabic tradition. his humanity and honesty keeps this text fresh and alive for each new generation of readers fortunate enough to share in its treasures.” 39. for krachkovskiǐ’s translation of four “linking passages” (lp1–4), see krachkovskiǐ, puteshestvie, 26–29. see also kovalevskiǐ, kniga, 47–48. 40. kovalevskiǐ, kniga, 47. 41. minorsky points out that the second risāla cannot have been written before the year 348/959: see minorsky, travels in iran, 5. 54 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) kovalevskiǐ suggests they were members of the balʿamī family—were engaged in making a fair copy of ibn al-faqīh’s geography (for reasons unexplained), and they decided to append to it the risālas and the kitāb. they had the full text of the risālas copied into the miscellany but created an abbreviated version of ibn faḍlān’s text, considering the kitāb overlong since, in their opinion, it contained information that would have been of little interest to bukharan readers. in proposing this conjectural and rather tenuous reconstruction of the genesis of the miscellany, kovalevskiǐ managed to account for the work’s eastern provenance and for the widespread view, which he shared, that there existed a longer original version of ibn faḍlān’s text of which the miscellany’s version was an abridgment.42 however, his explanation took little note of the contents of the linking passages and did not tackle the question of why the editors compiled these texts in a single volume. further thoughts on the question of the patrons’ identity and the process of the compilation of the miscellany were offered by minorsky and miquel.43 minorsky rejected kovalevskiǐ’s proposal that abū dulaf ’s patron was al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād but concluded that he wrote the text in either iran or mesopotamia. minorsky was also interested in the critical comments inserted in the risālas by the editors but did not speculate on the editors’ reasons for retaining their criticisms in the miscellany beyond stating that they obviously considered abū dulaf an unreliable source. miquel accounted for the bizarre mixture of fiction and fantasy in the first risāla with the suggestion that the patrons must have commissioned abū dulaf to write the two texts. he argued that abū dulaf ’s first risāla was a response to their request for a picaresque account that combined observed facts and adab-like flourishes, while the second was closer to abū dulaf ’s preferred style of writing and reflected his interest in mineralogy, botany, and architecture. miquel’s theory addressed the particular styles of abū dulaf ’s writing but did not comment on the editorial linking passages. it is to these linking passages that we now turn. the following table lists the five passages along with the four main texts, their authors, and their place in sezgin’s facsimile of the mashhad manuscript, and provides brief comments on their contents (see the next page). 42. kovalevskiǐ, kniga, 41–49. 43. minorsky, travels in iran, 23–26; miquel, géographie humaine, 139–41. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 55 table 2: linking passages and texts in the miscellany. linking passage (lp1–5) or main text (t1–4) author(s) page no. in sezgin’s facsimile comment lp1 the editors of the miscellany missing (see figure 1 below for an image of the first folio of the mashhad manuscript on which lp1 appears) lp1 serves as a combined table of contents and foreword. it begins with a description of the contents of t1, followed by brief summaries of t2–t4. t1 ibn al-faqīh alhamadhānī 2–347 the text is an extended version of those chapters of the geography that deal with iraq, iran, and the mashriq. lp2 the editors of the miscellany 347 brief descriptions of t2–t4 (similar to lp1) lp3 abū dulaf 347 dedication preceding the first risāla, written by abū dulaf and reproduced by the editors of the miscellany. t2 abū dulaf 347–62 abū dulaf’s first risāla, a record of his journey to the court of the king of china and his return to bukhara via india. lp4 abū dulaf 362 dedication preceding the second risāla, written by abū dulaf and reproduced by the editors of the miscellany. t3 abū dulaf 362–90 abū dulaf’s second risāla, a description of his travels in the caucasus and iran. lp5 the editors of the miscellany 390–91 brief introduction to ibn faḍlān’s kitāb t4 ibn faḍlān 391–420 description of ibn faḍlān’s journey from baghdad to bulghār the linking passages read as follows: lp1 (see fig. 1): the book begins with bism allāh rabb al-ʿālamīn wa-ṣallā allāh ʿalā nabīhi wa-ālihi ajmaʿīn al-ṭāhirīn hādhā baqiyyat al-qawl ʿalā al-ʿirāq wa-l-baṣra. the editors then list the section headings of ibn al-faqīh’s book as follows: iraq and basra, ubulla, al-baṭāʾiḥ, wāsiṭ, nabaṭ, al-khūz, baghdad, kuwar dijla, samarra (surra man rāʾa), the raising of kharāj, al-ahwāz, fāris and its towns, al-jabal, qirmīsīn, shabdīz, hamadhān and nihāwand, iṣfahān, qumm, rayy, dunbāvand, baywarāsaf, qazwīn, 56 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) abhar, zinjān, tabaristan, and khurasan and its towns and stories (akhbār). the final section is on the turks and their akhbār, tribes, and customs (sharāʾiʿihim).44 thereafter the text continues: we say: i have added to what aḥmad b. muḥammad al-hamadhānī [ibn al-faqīh] has written (uḍīfu ilā mā ṣannafahu) at the end of his book (fī ākhir kitābihi), two letters/ treatises (risālatayn), both of them written to us by abū dulaf masʿūd [sic, for miṣʿar] b. al-muhalhil. in one of them he mentions reports about the turks and china based on his experience of them (bi-mushāhadatihi dhālika). the other [risāla] includes things that he saw with his own eyes and witnessed (raʾāhā wa-shāhadahā) in a number of countries. to that [abū dulaf ’s risālas] we have added a book written by aḥmad b. faḍlān b. rāshid b. ḥamad [sic], client of muḥammad b. sulaymān al-hāshimī, [containing] reports about the turks, the khazars, the rus’, the ṣaqāliba, and the bāshghirds, drawing on what he came across and looked at [with his own eyes] (mimma waqafa ʿalayhi wa-naẓara ilayhi). for al-muqtadir bi-llāh sent him to the land of the ṣaqāliba in 309[/921] at the request of their king, [who made this request] because he had a desire for islam. [in his book] he related everything that he witnessed in these lands (mā shāhada fī[?] hādhihi al-buldān) and that which was reported to him (wa-mā [?] nuqila ilayhi).45 lp2: we will mention [reading dhakarnā naḥnu for dhakara naḥnu in the text] in this place/ these places [i.e., in what follows] certain reports on countries that have never been mentioned before (dhakarnā naḥnu fī hādhā al-mawāḍiʿ ashyāʾ min akhbār al-buldān lam yudhkar). among them are two risālas written to/for us (katabahumā ilaynā) by abū dulaf miṣʿar b. al-muhalhil al-banāzaʿī [sic, for yanbūʿī]. in one of them he relates the stories (akhbār) of the turks and india and other countries from his own experience of [them] (bi-mushāhadatihi dhālika). in the other [he writes about] things that he has seen and witnessed (raʾāhā wa-shāhadahā) in a number of countries (buldān). they deserve to be set down in this book, for they are of this kind [of writing] (min fannihi). also of this kind [of writing] is a book put together by aḥmad b. faḍlān b. al-ʿabbās b. rāshid b. ḥammād, mawlā of muḥammad b. sulaymān al-hāshimī, concerning the akhbār of the turks, the khazars, the rus’, the ṣaqāliba, and the bāshghirds and others that he came across and looked at [with his own eyes] (mimmā waqafa ʿalayhi wa-naẓara ilayhi). al-muqtadir bi-llāh sent him to the land of the ṣaqāliba in 309[/921] at the invitation of their king, because he had a desire for islam (bi-istidʿā malikihim dhālika raghbatan minhu fī al-islām). he related everything that he witnessed in these lands with his own eyes (jamīʿ mā shāhadahā fī hādhihi al-buldān bi-muʿāyanatihi wa-naẓarihi). 44. these section headings differ a little from those in the text itself, giving slightly more detail in several cases while omitting one or two headings that occur in the text (such as the sections titled “the sawād of iraq” and “buildings and their special characteristics and marvels”: see ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 377 and 430). 45. the final sentence is obscure in the mashhad manuscript. the translation is based on kahle’s and krachkovskiǐ ’s reconstructions: p. kahle, “islamische quellen zum chinesischen porzellan,” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft, n.s., 13 [88] (1934): 1–45; krachkovskiǐ, puteshestvie, 28. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 57 lp3: the first risāla: abū dulaf masʿūd [sic] b. al-muhalhil al-banāzaʿī [sic, for al-yanbūʿī] wrote [this] for/to us, telling us what he had witnessed and seen (dhikr mā shāhadahu wa-raʾāhu) in the lands of the turks and india and china. he said: “when i saw you both, my lords (to whom i am but a slave, may god lengthen your days), craving writing and addicted to composition (lahijayni bi-l-taʾlīf mūlaʿayni bi-l-taṣnīf), i did not wish to deprive your store of wisdom of anything that i had personally witnessed (waqaʿat ilayya mushāhadatuhu [text has mushāhadatuhumā]) or any wonder that fate had thrown across my path… lp4: the second risāla, which he [abū dulaf] sent to us after the one that we have transcribed (katabnāhā)46—abū dulaf writes: “praise be to god … i prepared for you both … a summary of my journey, which was from bukhara to china … and from there to india. … in that account i mentioned some of the wonders of the countries i entered and the tribes i passed by. i did not make my account long for fear of prolixity. now i see fit to prepare a shortened version (tajrīd) of a worthy epistle encompassing the greater part of what i witnessed (ʿāmmat mā shāhadtuhu) and encompassing most of what i personally observed (akthar mā ʿāyantuhu), so that the perspicacious might benefit from it.” lp5: this is the written account of aḥmad b. faḍlān b. al-ʿabbās b. rāshid b. ḥammād, the envoy (rasūl) of al-muqtadir to the king of the ṣaqāliba. his patron was muḥammad b. sulaymān. in it he records what he witnessed (mā shāhada) in the lands of the turks, the khazars, the rus’, the ṣaqāliba, the bāshghirds, and other peoples. it includes reports of their customs, stories about their kings, and many other matters pertaining to them. 5. what do the linking passages tell us about the editors’ agenda—and their identity? the first four linking passages are written in the first-person voice, while the fifth is related by an anonymous narrator. lp5 refers to ibn faḍlān in the third person and alludes to the common theme of “eyewitness observation” that is also found in its predecessors. it is reasonable, therefore, to conclude that since it cannot have formed part of the kitāb, it was most likely written by the editors as well. the linking passages convey two important messages to the reader: first, that all four texts are of the same kind or genre and belong together in the book for this reason; and second, that abū dulaf and ibn faḍlān’s texts are both eyewitness reports—in other words, records of direct observations that the authors personally saw and put down in writing. the claim that the four texts belong together because they all represent the same kind of writing appears in two consecutive statements in lp2. the first refers to abū dulaf ’s risālas, 46. the primary meaning of the verb kataba is, of course, to write rather than to transcribe. see section 6 for a discussion regarding the meaning of the word in this context. 58 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) stating: “they deserve to be set down in this book, for they are of the kind [of writing that is in this book]’ (inna ḥaqqahā an … narsuma[hā] fī hādhā al-kitāb idh kānat min fannihi). what did the editors mean by this assertion? they claimed that both abū dulaf and ibn faḍlān were unknown authors who provided new information (ashyāʾ min akhbār al-buldān lam yudhkar). the link they make with ibn al-faqīh’s book appears to lie in the title that they give to the latter, kitāb akhbār al-buldān. their claim amounts to the assertion that all three authors convey information about different regions of the world. the editors do not discuss the fact that each of these three shorter texts differs from ibn al-faqīh’s book in many respects; organization, content and voice (firstversus third-person) being among the most important, let alone the dissimilarity between the geographical work of an erudite writer and the narratives of two travelers. the editors also underline the fact that the three new texts are all “eyewitness testimonies” of events, phenomena, and peoples that the authors observed directly in the course of their journeys. the key term used to convey the idea of witnessing, in the sense of the author’s being present in person when the described event occurred, is mushāhada. this is a word that is used in islamic law to refer to the testimony that a court witness provides to the judge. it appears in all five linking passages, often in combination with a verb referring to the act of seeing or looking at what transpired (raʾā, naẓara ilā). the point that is emphasized by the consistent use of mushāhada/shāhada is that the authors convey what they actually experienced, thus explicitly ruling out the possibility that they invented what they describe. the assertion of this common characteristic of the three texts implies parity between abū dulaf ’s and ibn faḍlān’s writings. in ibn faḍlān’s case, the claim that his text was the fruit of eyewitness observation appears justified, given the accuracy and emotional transparency of his narrative. although they stress the role of direct observation, the editors also acknowledge at one point that ibn faḍlān included information that had been related to him by other parties (see mā nuqila ilayhi, the final phrase in lp1). ibn faḍlān himself frequently notes information that he heard from his bulghār hosts and his translators, such as the remarks made to him by the ghulām takīn, who accompanied the mission.47 in abū dulaf ’s case, by contrast, the claim to eyewitness observation lacks credibility. granted, he claims that he has tried to be concise when writing both risālas in order to avoid prolixity;48 and the abbreviation of the texts, it might be surmised, could have resulted in the attenuation of the autobiographical voice. furthermore, much of the botanical, mineralogical, architectural, and historical information he supplies, especially in the second risāla, has the ring of truth and might have been the fruit of his personal knowledge, garnered from the many journeys he took across iran. but his narrative has none of the immediacy of ibn faḍlān’s kitāb, since the author’s voice is only rarely heard in the first person and, moreover, he often appears to be writing with his tongue firmly in 47. for example, takīn informed ibn faḍlān about the giant who lived in bulghār; see montgomery, “mission to the volga,” 232–33). 48. see lp4: “i did not make my account [in the first risāla] long for fear of prolixity. now i see fit to prepare a shortened version (tajrīd) [of the second risāla].” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 59 his cheek, particularly when discussing the turkish pastoralists whom he encountered at the beginning of the first risāla (see section 6). the second risāla depicts a journey without a stated purpose; the reader is not informed why the narrator chose the routes that he did, whether he completed the lengthy course in one attempt, or whether his account is a composite of many individual expeditions. in addition, the itineraries followed in both risālas, especially the first, are wayward and prolonged. finally, abū dulaf ’s own claim, in linking passages 3 and 4, that he wrote down what he personally observed on his travels is contradicted by the editors’ criticisms of his text. the question is why both abū dulaf and the editors were so insistent on the claim of eyewitness testimony in respect of two texts in which it appears to be lacking. while the indulgent reader may chalk abū dulaf ’s own claims of mushāhada up to authorial vanity and a desire to be seen for the kind of writer that he clearly was not, the editors’ approbation is more difficult to account for. they did, after all, insert critical comments at points where they judged the author to have exaggerated or made things up. the explanation may be that the editors were determined to boost their protégé’s credibility and to raise his work to parity with ibn faḍlān’s more persuasive narrative by claiming that both works were “of the same kind.” could the editors’ decision to append the three unknown texts to ibn al-faqīh’s wellknown book have been simply an imaginative way of bringing the three texts to a wider reading public? perhaps the editors were really bona fide lovers of good literature (as abū dulaf claims they were in lp4) who wished to publicize newly discovered talent. were their criticisms of abū dulaf ’s risālas intended as lighthearted rebukes for minor infractions of the high standards of truthfulness that they expected of him? did they believe, in spite of their criticisms, that abū dulaf was a genuine traveler who had accompanied the embassy and recorded all that he saw en route, only to stray into occasional hyperbole when writing up his adventures? if so, one might see the relative infrequency of their criticisms as a tacit acknowledgment of the truthfulness and accuracy of all the passages that they let pass without comment, including abū dulaf ’s descriptions of the central asian turkish tribes at the beginning of the risāla. an open-minded reading that gives the benefit of the doubt to the editors’ sincerity cannot be dismissed out of hand. but it severely strains the reader’s credulity. alternatively, should we assume that they were willing accomplices in abū dulaf ’s hoax, notwithstanding their demonstration of critical rigor? did they deliberately aid and abet their protégé by identifying just a few minor lapses so as to reassure the reader that the remainder of his text had passed their scrutiny? if they were indeed figures of literary repute, it is unlikely that they would have connived in this way. the members of the elite to which they allegedly belonged were generally happy to indulge the subversion of norms by their nudamāʾ because they enjoyed the entertainment, but they were less likely to have taken a leading role in a literary scam on a nadīm’s behalf, which might carry reputational risk. all the more so if, as kovalevskiǐ suggests, they had not been in touch with their protégé for several years and were no longer part of his immediate cultural milieu. even if abū dulaf did not present the risālas in the first instance to the ṣāḥib, as kovalevskiǐ suggests, but rather to his two bukharan 60 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) patrons, the point about patronal constraint retains its force. the diversions of the majālis of eminent men were considered to be private business, enjoyed for the purposes of relaxation among a restricted circle of boon companions. privileged patrons paid others to fool around and titillate them, but as a rule it was the nudamāʾ who cooked up elaborate hoaxes and told off-color jokes to amuse the patron, not vice versa. if there was only a single mind behind this elaborate literary construction—the muted stropping of occam’s razor being distinctly audible by this stage of our investigation—the finger of suspicion must fall on the person who stood to gain from its success: abū dulaf himself. could it have been abū dulaf who compiled the miscellany and invented the fictive personae of the editors/patrons to boost the reputation of his own texts? his attempt to pass off both the parodic first risāla and the rather more pedestrian second risāla as shining examples of eyewitness reportage constituted a dual assault on the notion of mushāhada that was promoted by the linking passages. given the difficulties of persuading others of the truth of individually observed experiences in far-off corners of the world, such playful nonsense may well have amused the real dedicatee of the miscellany (who could have been the ṣāḥib or someone of similar stature).49 yet if abū dulaf ’s goal was to promote his own work, why did he go to the trouble of copying out an extended version of ibn faqīh’s book, or at least half of it, as the foil for his hoax? perhaps the miscellany’s version of the buldān was a gift he offered his patron in expectation of a reward. since there was probably more than one version of ibn al-faqīh’s book in circulation in the years after its composition, the presentation of a rare edition of it to a bibliophile would be regarded as a valuable gift.50 a well-connected poet like abū dulaf, who was a friend of the great bibliographer ibn al-nadīm51 and probably had a large network of bookish contacts stretching from baghdad to bukhara, must have known where the rare copies of famous books were to be found. but there is a more significant reason why abū dulaf may have selected this particular version of the buldān as the principal text of the miscellany. for at the end of the buldān, there is an anomalous section on the towns of the turks, which seems quite out of place. it has none of the refinement of ibn al-faqīh’s style and its tone is sombre and harsh: the author describes the turks as barbarians who lack all the graces of civilized nations and spend their lives in conflict with one another. the remarkable feature of this section is that although it stands out from the rest of the book to which it belongs, it bears a strong 49. see montgomery, “travelling autopsies,” 19: “in a society in which authority is generated through, and embodied in, textual sources (or oral versions with comparable status), the problem for the traveller or the empirical scientist is the endowment of experience and experiment with appropriate authority.” 50. for recent suggestions that well-known books, such as ibn khurradādhbih’s masālik, probably existed in multiple versions during the lifetimes of their authors, see the following: j. e. montgomery, “serendipity, resistance and multivalency: ibn khurradādhbih’s kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik,” in on fiction and adab in medieval arabic literature, ed. p. f. kennedy (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2005), 177–230; t. zadeh, mapping frontiers across medieval islam: geography, translation and the ʿabbasid empire (london: i. b. tauris, 2017); t. zadeh, “of mummies, poets and water nymphs: tracing the codicological limits of ibn khurradādhbih’s geography,” in ʿabbāsid studies 4, ed. m. bernards, 8–75 (warminster: gibb memorial trust, 2013). 51. see b. dodge, trans., the fihrist of al-nadīm: a tenth-century survey of muslim culture 2 (new york: columbia university press, 1970), 829–30, for abū dulaf’s acquaintance with ibn al-nadīm. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 61 stylistic resemblance to the first part of abū dulaf ’s first risāla, which follows directly after the buldān in the miscellany. the link between the last pages of ibn al-faqīh’s buldān and the first risāla appears to have been deliberately signalled in the first of the editorial “linking passages”.52 as already noted, is also precisely at the juncture between these two texts that lp2 includes the enigmatic statement, ‘they [i.e., the risālas] deserve to be set down in this book, for they are of this kind [of writing] (see section 4). it seems that here, in the resemblance between these two adjacent texts, we may have an explanation for the oblique claim made by the “editors.” we turn now to a detailed analysis of the issue. 6. the section on the turkish towns in the buldān and the first part of abū dulaf ’s first risāla the remarkable but hitherto little studied section of the buldān in question is entitled “some of the towns of the turks and their marvels” (dhikr baʿḍ mudun al-atrāk wa-ʿajāʾibihā).53 it is located near the very end of the book, in the chapter devoted to the turks.54 i will briefly summarize the chapter in which it appears before highlighting the anomalous characteristics that distinguish the section on the turkish towns. i will then compare this section on the settled turks in the buldān with abū dulaf ’s description of the pastoralist turks among whom he traveled on his journey to the court of the “king of china.” the chapter on the turks opens in a manner typical of ibn al-faqīh with several ḥadīths, related by the prophet and his companions. these include warnings of the turks’ predicted domination of the world at the end of times. the introduction is followed by a list of turkish tribes, which includes the qarluq (kharlukh), the badhakshiyya, the ghuzz, the toghuzghuz, the kimak (kīmāk), the pechenegs (bāshnākiyya), and the shariyya. of these, the badhakshiyya is not found in any other sources on the turks.55 after the list, the author provides a series of short notes and brief anecdotes in the witty, elegant style of the rest of the buldān. they include a summary of an encounter between an umayyad envoy and the turkish king whom the envoy had been sent to convert as well as short notes on an impregnable turkish town, the fecundity of turkish ewes, a turkish ritual for the swearing of oaths, turkish family culture, and the availability of khutū (variously translated as the horn of the rhinoceros, the walrus, or the narwhal) in their lands. these brief and randomly sequenced notices are standard fare for ibn al-faqīh. they are followed by two 52. the relevant phrase in lp1 is uḍīfu ilā mā ṣannafahu fī ākhir kitābihi risālatayn (“i have added two risālas to that which he (ibn al-faqīh) composed at the end of his book”). the allusion to the end of ibn al-faqīh’s book is surely a reference to the passage on the turkish towns, which forms the last section of the buldān. the editor is here, exceptionally, speaking in the first-person singular. 53. see ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 643–48, and 34–37 for al-hādī’s commentary on the section. 54. for the chapter on the turks (al-qawl fī al-turk) see ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 633–49. the mukhtaṣar has a much-abbreviated version of this chapter that occurs, without a specific heading, in the final couple of pages in the chapter on khurasan (al-qawl fī khurāsān); ibn al-faqīh, mukhtaṣar, 314–30. 55. the “badhakshiyya” may be a corruption of al-adhkahiyya, the ädhgish or ägdhish/igdish, noted in several accounts and commented on by kāshgharī (professor peter golden, personal communication, february 2019). 62 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) longer passages, the first a description of tamīm b. bahr al-muṭṭawwiʿī’s journey to the uighur capital56 and the second a secretary’s report on the samanid ruler ismāʿīl b. aḥmad’s (d. 295/907) terrifying encounter with turkish shamans who used a “rainstone” to summon up a storm that threatened to overwhelm his army. the section on the turkish towns appears next, and it is in turn followed by the final pages of the book, which contain a list of the titles of the turkish rulers and their neighbors.57 the original source of much of the information in ibn al-faqīh’s chapter on the turks was ibn khurradādhbih’s al-masālik wa-l-mamālik.58 however, the section on the turkish towns does not occur in any of the known manuscripts of ibn al-khurradādhbih’s book. ibn al-faqīh reports it on the authority of one saʿīd b. al-ḥasan al-samarqandī.59 how his account came to be included in the miscellany’s version of the buldān is not known, although it is likely that it came from an eastern source.60 the section stands out for the contrast it provides with the rest of ibn al-faqīh’s geography. it is syntactically uncomplex, crude, and direct, and it lacks any ḥadīth or qurʾan references. in contrast to the whimsical style that characterizes much of the rest of the buldān, in this section satire and caricature come to the fore. short sentences and simple grammatical structures are used to describe the turkish population as irredeemably barbaric and uncultured. incest, adultery, public sex, a lust for fighting, religious deviancy, and improper treatment of the dead are among the main themes. lurking behind these lurid tales is the recurrent impression that the author is not reporting factual data on the turkish town-dwellers but indulging in a measure of black humor: his pointed remarks and glib juxtapositions discourage the reader from taking his report at face value. the description of the second named town in the list serves as a representative example: another of their towns is called ḥ.y.w.s. it is a large town close to al-shash.61 its people follow no religion and are the worst of god’s creatures. they conduct raids upon each other, and the stronger kill the weak. a brother is not safe from his brother nor a father from his sons. they eat all kinds of animals. illicit sexual intercourse is widespread among them. a man might enter the dwelling of another and bed his wife while the 56. see v. minorsky, “tamīm b. baḥr’s journey to the uyghurs,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 12, no. 2 (1948): 275–305. 57. brief references to some of this material on the turks, including the rainstone and the list of titles, appear in the chapter on khurasan in the abridged version of ibn al-faqīh’s book (ibn al-faqīh, mukhtaṣar, 329). 58. see ibn khurradādhbih, al-masālik, 31 and 39–40. 59. ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 643. 60. see zadeh, “of mummies,” 51, who notes that ibn al-nadīm’s fihrist states that ibn al-faqīh “ripped off” (salakha) al-jayhānī’s geography; see ibn al-nadīm, fihrist, ed. ayman fuʾād sayyid, (london: muʾassasat al-furqān li-l-turāth al-islāmī, 2009), 1:473–74 (= ed. dodge, 1:337). could it be that the section on the turkish towns under discussion here was originally in al-jayhānī’s masālik? perhaps saʿīd b. al-ḥasan was one of al-jayhānī’s informants on the world of the turks. see gardīzī’s zayn al-akhbār, translated into english by c. e. bosworth, as the ornament of histories: a history of the eastern islamic lands ad 650–1041; the persian text of abū saʿīd ʿabd al-ḥayy gardīzī (london: i. b. tauris, 2018), 57, for the remark that al-jayhānī got his information from a network of informants who had knowledge of the eurasian steppelands. 61. al-shash is located on the site of modern-day tashkent. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 63 householder looks on, neither expressing anger nor censuring what he sees. they are not courageous, but they are good-looking: most of their men are effeminate and drink blood. in the middle of their town is a large lake; when one of them dies, he is thrown in the lake.62 of the remaining nine towns (named d.y, s.w.r, j.r.y.s.m [= jarīsam, juraysim?], aghras, karshīm, d.k.s, kīsāh, dānī, and s.k.w.b), seven are described in similarly negative terms. aghras and d.k.s are treated more favorably, although the religious gullibility of the people of aghras is described in comic fashion. they are said to have claimed that they worshipped their idols because the latter were sinless and able to intercede on their behalf with their god, and that that their huge idol temple descended, fully formed, straight out of the sky into their town. in general, however, the text portrays the turks as the sort of mysterious and grotesque figures one might expect to find at the ends of the earth, something like the creatures who lived on the other side of alexander’s wall, which divided the barbarian from the inhabited world.63 the ironic tone, the short sentences (perhaps intended to sound like notes written by a weary traveler on the road), and the simple syntax are features of this section. none of the towns bears a name that can be related to any known settlement in the region.64 as we have noted, the section is remarkable not only for the contrast it forms with the rest of the buldān but also for the similarities it displays with the first part of abū dulaf ’s risāla, which follows it. the final pages of the buldān satirize the settled turks, just as abū dulaf mocks the turkish tribes among whom he traveled. yet whereas the turkish towns in the buldān are described in dark tones, abū dulaf inclines toward lighthearted absurdity. in one case, two passages dealing with near-homonymous names (baghrāj in the risāla and aghras in the buldān) appear to mirror each other to some degree. the passage on the baghrāj deserves to be quoted in full: then we left [the jikil] and entered [the territory of] the tribe known as the baghrāj. they have whiskers but no beards. they make good use of their weapons, both as mounted warriors and as foot soldiers. they have a great ruler (malik), of whom is it said that he is an ʿalid. [it is said that he is] a descendant of yaḥyā b. zayd65 and that he has a golden book on the back of which are poetic verses that elegize zayd. they worship this book. for them, zayd is the king (malik) of the arabs and ʿalī b. abī ṭālib, may god be pleased with him, is the god (ilāh) of the arabs. they appoint their rulers only from among the progeny of this ʿalid. when they turn their faces to the sky, they 62. ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 643–44. 63. see al-ṭabarī’s description of the three types of creature among the people of gog and magog in his tafsīr: e. von donzel and c. ott, “yādjūdj wa-mādjūdj,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. (leiden: brill online, 2012). 64. al-hādī identifies the town of s.k.w.b as pskov in western russia, but the attribution is not persuasive; see ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 34–37. 65. a descendant of the prophet and the progenitor of the zaydī shīʿī sect, yaḥyā was a rebel whose fame endured in the mashriq; see w. madelung, “yaḥyā b. zayd,” encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. (leiden: brill online, 2012). 64 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) open their mouths and gaze upward and say: “the god of the arabs descends from [the sky] and ascends [to it].” the marvel of the progeny of zayd whom they make their kings is that they have beards, huge noses, and enormous eyes. their food is millet and the meat of the ram. there is neither a cow nor a goat in their land. they wear only felts. we traveled among them for a month in fear and dread, and gave them a tenth of everything we had with us…66 abū dulaf notes that the baghrāj, whose kings were all of ʿalid descent, considered ʿalī b. abī ṭālib the god of the arabs. they believed, moreover, that the “marvel” (ʿajība) of their kings lay in the fact that the kings were bearded, whereas his subjects had only whiskers, without beards. like the people of aghras in the buldān, they claimed direct communication between heaven and earth. whereas the people of aghras believed that their idol temple descended from heaven, the baghrāj had the habit of staring up at the sky, open-mouthed, for they held that ʿalī descended from the heavens and returned there. in addition to this direct parallel, there is a pool of common terms and descriptions used for the turks in both works: some are described as savages (hamaj);67 others conduct raids upon their neighbours;68 some drink wine; and several follow deviant sexual practices.69 when read in sequence, the two passages create a bridge, a transitional zone, in which the reader is taken from the discussion of the settled turks to the pastoralist turks, so that the risāla forms a complement to the buldān, providing contextual as well as tonal continuity. were it not for the parodic elements in both texts and correspondences such as those between the passages on the aghras and the baghrāj, one might still be inclined to give abū dulaf the benefit of the doubt and accept that the record of his experiences in the steppe happened to complement saʿīd b. al-ḥasan’s observations on the turkish towns so neatly that he was inspired to place his risāla in the miscellany at this point. but neither text reads like an objective eyewitness report. given the fact that the risāla must have been written after the buldān, the most plausible explanation is that abū dulaf constructed the first part of the risāla in such a way as to allow him to make the claim, as the author of the first two linking passages, that his risāla formed a worthy complement to the buldān. the suggested linkage of the two texts may sound obscure and tenuous to a degree, but this was the kind of literary trickery that abū dulaf enjoyed—as we will see from a brief summary of his professional biography. 7. the professional biography of abū dulaf al-khazrajī the argument that abū dulaf compiled the miscellany as a literary hoax has thus far relied exclusively on textual analysis. but in addition to the evidence of the miscellany 66. sezgin, majmūʿa, 349–50. 67. the inhabitants of j.r.y.s.m (ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 645) and the bajanāk (yāqūt, muʿjam 3:441) are described as hamaj (savages). 68. mutual raiding (the same phrase is used in both sources – yughīru baʿḍuhum ʿalā baʿḍin) was practised by the inhabitants of h.y.w.s. (ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 643) and the bajanāk (yāqūt, muʿjam 3: 441). 69. sexual deviancy was ascribed to the inhabitants of h.y.w.s and d.k.s (among other towns) (ibn al-faqīh, buldān, 644–645) and to the jikil and bajanāk tribes ((yāqūt, muʿjam 3:441). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 65 itself, we are fortunate in knowing quite a bit about abū dulaf ’s professional biography as a poet, nadīm, traveler, and trickster. from these glimpses into his activities at the courts of his real patrons, we are able to reconstruct the outlines of a career in which he sought monetary reward for public performances and other services that he provided for the wealthiest members of the political and scribal elite of iran. abū dulaf was a notorious itinerant entertainer, with a fondness for playing tricks on his audience and his patrons and a reputation for hyperbole and quackery.70 he was what might be called a “professional scoundrel,” who thrived by delighting, shocking, and exasperating his wealthy patrons with his wit and naughtiness. he moved from one majlis to another throughout his long life, bantering, pontificating, and scandalizing wherever he went, and died some time in the second half of the fourth/tenth century.71 all of his securely identifiable patrons were associated with various buyid courts in rayy, iṣfahān, and shīrāz. they included the viziers ibn al-ʿamīd and al-sāḥib b. ʿabbād, as well as the great buyid ruler ʿaḍud al-dawla (d. 371/981).72 although we have no direct evidence of his association with the samanid and saffarid elites, given his knowledge of the samanid and saffarid courts it is probable that he was also a popular figure in the salons of the mashriq. abū dulaf adopted the persona of a wandering poet, of no fixed abode.73 his peripatetic existence allowed him to traverse the social boundaries that divided the educated elites from the vast and growing urban “underworld” of the islamic city. he claimed intimate knowledge of the so-called banū sāsān, the urban underclass vividly brought to life by edmund bosworth in his dazzling monograph on the “medieval islamic underworld.”74 these men (and a few women) made their living by indulging in all sorts of deceitful and foul practices involving fraud, impersonation, and self-mutilation, by which means they exploited the good will and charitable inclinations of their fellow citizens. abū dulaf contributed to the well-established literary subgenre of sukhf (shameless scurrility), in which men of letters delighted in giving detailed descriptions of the horrifying lengths to which tricksters and scoundrels would go in order to make a living. al-jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868) devoted a part of his “book of misers” (kitāb al-bukhalāʾ) to the story of khālid b. yazīd, the leader of the beggars (mukaddūn) in basra, in whose biography the perpetrators of various 70. see c. e. bosworth, the medieval islamic underworld: the banū sāsān in arabic society and literature (leiden: brill, 1976), 1:58–60, for the dangerously inept medical advice he offered the vizier ibn al-ʿamīd and the vizier’s dismissive rejection of his claim to descent from the famous physician abū bakr al-rāzī. 71. see r. bulliet, “abū dolaf al-yanbūʿī,” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed., updated 2011. he died in his late eighties, according to al-thaʿālibī (see bosworth, islamic underworld, 1:76). 72. see c. cahen, “ibn al-ʿamīd,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; c. cahen and c. pellat, “ibn ʿabbād,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; and especially m. pomerantz, licit magic: the life and letters of al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād (d. 385/995) (leiden: brill, 2018) for an excellent discussion of the literary accomplishments of al-sāḥib b.ʿabbād, which, however, says little about the latter’s predilection for the kind of lighthearted banter in which abū dulaf specialized. for the reward given him by ʿaḍud al-dawla for besting an opponent in a humorous exchange of invective, see below. 73. ibn al-nadīm calls him a “globe-trotter” (jawwāla), probably alluding to his tendency to move from one court to another (or perhaps in ironic reference to his frenetic itineraries in the first risāla?); minorsky, travels in iran, 6. 74. bosworth, islamic underworld. 66 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) kinds of hideous and unseemly acts of deception are described. some years later, the qāḍī abū al-ʿanbas al-ṣaymarī (d. 275/888), perhaps taking his cue from al-jāḥiẓ, wrote several now lost treatises on behaviors regarded as aberrant, including pimping, prostitution, masturbation, and pederasty, that were listed by ibn al-nadīm.75 this zany literary output earned al-ṣaymarī the posthumous honor of having a maqāma written in his name by badīʿ al-zamān al-hamadhānī.76 abū dulaf ’s contribution to the field was a long poem, the qasīda sāsāniyya, which he wrote for al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād. in it he listed in gory detail the working practices of many different classes of scandalous charlatans, including, for good measure, the reigning caliph, al-muṭīʿ li-llāh (d. 363/974), whom he portrayed as an impoverished beggar searching for crumbs at the table of his buyid masters.77 the poem celebrates the figure of the wandering “beggar lord,” voiced in the first person by the poet, who takes on the task of introducing each of the poem’s disreputable characters. the poet takes aim at the ostentatiously pious, targeting the claimants to membership of the prophet’s family and the long-bearded shaykh in the same breath as the self-mutilating beggar, so that both parties, the allegedly devout and the doggedly salacious, are brought down to the same level.78 the poem’s exposure of licentious indulgence is often taken to an extreme.79 the qasīda sāsāniyya is significant for our purposes by dint of its form as much as by its racy content, because abū dulaf inserted within the poem an interlinear gloss, which he used to amplify his scurrilous poem with asides detailing the banū sāsān’s most repulsive practices and to supply explanations of the recherché terms used by them.80 like al-ṣaymarī, abū dulaf may have taken his cue from al-jāḥiẓ, for the “book of misers” also displays a keen interest in the explication of the rare and refined terminology used by the book’s gallery of rogues. the glossary in abū dulaf ’s poem provides evidence of his taste for intertextual intervention that may be compared with the paratextual framework of the mashhad miscellany. both devices, that in the poem and that in the prose work, attest to abū dulaf ’s proclivity for multilayered textual productions, which is also evident in the interjections of his “patrons” in the risālas and in the fluid notion of authorial personality that characterizes these works. 75. bosworth, islamic underworld, 1:31. 76. bosworth, islamic underworld, 1:31. for abū dulaf ’s posthumous association with the maqāma genre, see bosworth, islamic underworld, 1:79, citing al-thaʿālibī’s yatīmat al-dahr. al-thaʿālibī notes that badīʿ al-zamān put some of abū dulaf’s poetry into the mouth of the protagonist of his maqāma, abū al-fatḥ al-iskandarī. 77. bosworth, islamic underworld, 1:76. 78. see, for example, verses 52–53 in bosworth, islamic underworld, 2:196–97: “and the one who lifts up his voice during the prayers in the mosque, in the mornings and in the afternoon. / and the one who feigns an internal discharge, or who showers the passers-by with his urine, or who farts in the mosque and makes a nuisance of himself, thus wheedling money out of people.” 79. see, for example, verses 25–26 in bosworth, islamic underworld, 2:192: “our company includes every person avid for copulation, for vulvas and anuses indifferently. / and of our number is every person who masturbates, with a swollen penis, a formidable weapon.” 80. see, for example, the gloss to verse 53 in bosworth, islamic underworld, 2:197: “dashshasha is when he inserts a porridge-like substance into his rectum, taking it as a clyster. he then goes to sleep by the roadside and the substance oozes out of his anus like the wheaten porridge dashīsha …” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 67 abū dulaf was probably not the first writer in the classical period to have adopted a fictive identity in the person of the editors of the risālas. al-jāḥiẓ himself, whose literary skills abū dulaf admired and emulated, may have invented the figure of an anonymous critic whom he addresses at the beginning of the kitāb al-ḥayawān.81 he appears to have created this virtual critic as a foil to allow him to show off the merits of his earlier works and to preempt criticism of the kitāb al-ḥayawān.82 as for abū dulaf, it seems he may even have laid a couple of oblique clues to the true identity of the “editors” in the dedications that he wrote to his two patrons at the beginning of his risālas. the evidence is tantalizingly thin but worth noting, given abū dulaf ’s demonstrated taste for literary horseplay.83 abū dulaf lived by his literary accomplishments and performances.84 like many nudamāʾ who attended the courts of wealthy patrons, he declaimed and wrote prose and poetry in the expectation of financial reward. for an extempore performance in which he reeled off a long list of exotic luxuries from different regions of the world, he received a gift in coin and the sardonic title of shāhanshāh from none other than the great buyid king ʿaḍud al-dawla.85 he presented the qaṣīda sāsāniyya to the sāḥib, accompanied by the explanatory gloss to help him understand the more recondite words and phrases employed and to squeeze every last drop of smut and scatological excess from the text, and he obtained a generous reward for his endeavor.86 it is quite possible that the miscellany was put together by abū dulaf for similar reasons—as an elaborate plaything designed to elicit a monetary reward. the miscellany, like the qaṣīda, was a rich and complex offering. ibn al-faqīh’s text, written over half a century earlier and admired throughout the islamic world, appears in a version that is still today unique and may in abū dulaf ’s time have been a rarity. the three new texts represented a full spectrum of variants within the loose category of eyewitness reportage: from the subversive parody and patent artifice of the risālas to the precise detail and personal drama of the kitāb, they presented a pleasingly distorting series of perspectives on the fraught nature of the processes of direct eyewitness testimony (mushāhada), a theme 81. j. e. montgomery, al-jāḥiẓ: in praise of books (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2013), 224–38. in his section on the “enigma of the addressee,” montgomery lists eight possible options in relation to the kitāb al-ḥayawān, of which the sixth is that “the address may be a rhetorical device, a fictive conceit.” 82. g. schoeler, the genesis of literature in islam: from the aural to the read (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009), 101–2. 83. first, in lp3, abū dulaf praises his patrons, saying they were “craving writing and addicted to composition” (lahijayni bi-l-taʾlīf mūlaʿayni bi-l-taṣnīf). although the context demands that taṣnīf be understood as the (result of) composition, i.e., written text(s), the word is normally used to refer to the process of writing a text, that is, the job of the author. could it be that abū dulaf is using this ambiguity to hint at the patrons’ composition of the risāla? in the same vein, in lp4, it appears that the two “editors” make a covert admission to being the authors of the second risāla. the admission hangs on the interpretation of the word katabnāhā (“we wrote it [the risāla]”), which an initial reading would suggest should be read as “we [physically] wrote it [out],” i.e., had it copied into the miscellany, but taken in a literal sense would mean “we authored it.” 84. see al-thaʿālibī’s comment that abū dulaf liked to keep “his knife well sharpened in begging for gifts”; bosworth, islamic underworld, 1:76. 85. c. e. bosworth, the “laṭāʾif al-maʿārif” of thaʿālibī: the book of curious and entertaining information (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1968), 145–46. 86. bosworth, islamic underworld, 1:76, citing al-thaʿālibī’s yatīmat al-dahr. 68 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) insistently promoted by the book’s “editors.” the identification of the latter as abū dulaf himself is the puzzle at the core of book, a puzzle that was surely designed to be solved by an attentive reader. if and when the penny dropped, abū dulaf must have hoped that his patron would chuckle at his audacity and throw him a bag of coins. 8. further thoughts several questions remain to be addressed relating to abū dulaf ’s role as the editor of the miscellany. on the one hand, the above account has largely avoided examination of the intellectual and cultural background of the text, both the literary world at large and the majālis of his patrons, particularly al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād. the recent studies of james montgomery and travis zadeh, in particular, raise important issues concerning the emergence of travel accounts in the third–fourth/ninth–tenth centuries that are pertinent to the study of the miscellany and to the literary status, production, and reception of the kitāb.87 recent readings of the kitāb have been strongly influenced by the strident insistence of the editorial linking passages that the text was the fruit of the eyewitness observations of its author. however, if the linking passages were concocted by abū dulaf primarily for the purpose of boosting the credibility of his own texts, the reader should be careful to distinguish between what ibn faḍlān claimed to have written and what his editor said he had written. the reader is primed by the linking passages to think of ibn faḍlān as the paragon of truthful reporting, but although ibn faḍlān frequently makes reference to what he saw, he does not fetishize his role as an eyewitness observer as does the faber book of reportage, which cites his description of the rus’ chief ’s funeral as an outstanding example of the medieval reporter’s art. we should perhaps allow him his few exaggerations and inventions without trying too hard to excuse him for his perceived shortcomings as a reporter.88 since the work’s discovery in the miscellany in the early twentieth century, it could be said that the kitāb has been treated more like a modern text than a medieval text. for example, the comparative accounts to which montgomery has referred in an effort to elucidate the mysteries of the kitāb include several dating to the period of eighteenthand nineteenth-century european colonialism, the circumstances of which were a far cry from the early islamic exploration of the eurasian steppelands.89 both the kitāb and the risālas should, as far as possible, be restored to their original context by returning them to their 87. in addition to the works listed in the bibliography, see also j. e. montgomery’s “ibn faḍlān and the rūsiyyah,” journal of arabic and islamic studies 3 (2000): 1–25. 88. see montgomery’s perceptive comments on john carey’s definition of “good reportage” apropos of his inclusion of ibn faḍlān’s description of the rus’ chief’s funeral in the faber book of reportage: j. e. montgomery, “pyrrhic scepticism and the conquest of disorder: prolegomenon to the study of ibn faḍlān,” in problems in arabic literature, ed. m. maroth, 43–89 (piliscsaba: avicenna institute of middle eastern studies, 2004), 44–51. 89. for example, taking his cue from g. obeyesekere’s 1998 study of accounts of fijian cannibalism, montgomery suggests that the bulghār and the rus’ may have exaggerated the terrors of the northern lights and the funerary customs of the rus’, respectively, in an attempt to intimidate their muslim visitors (“pyrrhic scepticism,” 72–73). this interpretation could arguably be said to reflect a notion of bilateral colonial-era relations that had no parallel in fourth/tenth-century eurasian steppelands. the topic merits further discussion. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 69 proper place as component elements of abū dulaf ’s majmūʿa. it would also be worthwhile to reconsider the reception of all three texts by yāqūt, the first author who cited them extensively, and to gauge how far his interpretation of both texts, as well as that of later writers, was affected by the editorial commentary.90 a second set of questions relates to the nature and purpose of the mission to bulghār, long considered an “abbasid” embassy. various unresolved anomalies in the story of the mission remain, principally its extraordinary failure to achieve its most important task—the delivery of the promised funds to the king of bulghār. the case for seeing the mission not as an official caliphal enterprise but as a private project undertaken by a band of entrepreneurs who wished to use their status as caliphal envoys to challenge samanid/khwarazmian authority over the bulghār was first laid out by the khwārazmshāh when he met ibn faḍlān and his fellow emissaries in his capital city.91 the khwarazmian ruler identified takīn the ghulām, ibn faḍlān’s interpreter, as the main plotter. indeed, takīn’s blithe confidence in recommending that the mission push on to bulghār in spite of the lack of funds suggests that he was determined to complete the journey, come what may, because to abandon the mission would have fatally undermined his scheme.92 the idea deserves closer scrutiny than it has received until now. if there were any substance to it, one would have to ask what the extent of ibn faḍlān’s involvement in the plot was. the answer to this question must surely be that even if he was not complicit, he probably knew about it from the start and accepted his appointment to the embassy in the knowledge that he was joining a dubious enterprise. his compromised position most likely had a material effect on why, how, and where he produced the kitāb, which in turn may have been a significant factor in its inclusion in the miscellany.93 finally, much remains to be explored in relation to abū dulaf and his place in the classical arabic literary canon. the risālas merit closer attention than it has been possible to give them here. furthermore, abū dulaf ’s role as a literary hoaxer of the first order gives pause to think again about badīʿ al-zamān al-hamadhānī’s remark that he put some of abū dulaf ’s material into the mouth of his own protagonists in one of his maqāmas.94 the proposition that he was the compiler and editor of the miscellany strengthens the case that he prefigured the heroes of the maqāma not only in his lifestyle but also in his literary production. many of the elements for which the classical maqāma is well known are reflected in abū dulaf’s editorial role, as well as his extant poetry and prose. the itinerant hero who is also a trickster, the penchant for picaresque humor, the fictionalization of reality, the episodicity 90. these themes will be pursued in w. l. treadwell, “ibn faḍlān and the mashhad miscellany.” 91. montgomery, “mission to the volga,” 194–97. 92. for takīn’s extraordinary indifference to the perceived danger of arriving penniless in bulghār, see montgomery, “mission to the volga,” 198–99: “i [ibn faḍlān] said to them [takīn and bārs] …– ‘you will be at the court of a non-arab king, and he will demand that you pay this sum.’ ‘don’t worry about it,’ they replied, ‘he will not ask us for them [the coins].’ “he will demand that you produce them. i know it,’ i warned. but they paid no heed.” 93. see w. l. treadwell, “the ‘ʿabbasid’ mission to the bulghār court (309–310/921–922) reconsidered,” (forthcoming). 94. bosworth, islamic underworld, 1:79. 70 • luke treadwell al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) of the constituent stories that make up the whole: these are all present in abū dulaf ’s works as well.95 fiction as a staple element of classical arabic literature is said to have arrived only with the development of the early maqāma. abū dulaf seems to have played an important role in anticipating this process by embodying and elaborating the character of the roguish narrator before it secured universal recognition in the maqāma genre. figure 1: the first folio of the mashhad manuscript (missing in sezgin’s facsimile edition), which opens with ‘linking passage no. 1’ (by permission of the prussian state library, berlin). 95. the only element missing from abū dulaf ’s work is the use of sajʿ. for the characteristics of the maqāma, see j. hämeen-anttila, maqāma: a history of a genre (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2002); c. brockelmann and c. pellat, “maḳāma,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 71 bibliography blair, sheila. the monumental inscriptions from early islamic iran and transoxiana. leiden: brill, 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al-faqīh, abū bakr aḥmad.” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed. updated 2011. kovalevskiǐ, a. p. kniga akhmeda ibn-faḍlāna o ego puteshestvii na volgu v. 921–922 gg. (stat’i, perevody i kommentarii). kharkov: izdatelstvo gos. universiteta im. a.m. gori’kogo, 1956. krachkovskiǐ, i. yu. puteshestvie ibn-faḍlāna na volgu (perevod i kommentariǐ. moscow: izdatelstvo akademii nauk sssr, 1939. ———. “vtoraya zapiska abū dulafa v geograficheskom slovare iāḳūta (azerbaǐzhan, armeniya, iran).” izvestiia akademii nauk azerbaizhanskoi ssr 8 (1949): 65–77. reprinted in izbrannye sochineniia, edited by v. i. beliaev and g. v. tsereteli, 6 vols., 1:280–92. moscow: izdatelstvo akademii nauk sssr, 1955. madelung, w. “yaḥyā b. zayd.” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. leiden: brill online, 2012. massé, h., trans. abrégé du livre du pays. damascus: institut français de damas, 1973. minorsky, v. abū dulaf miṣʿar ibn muhalhil’s travels in iran (circa a.d. 950). cairo: cairo university press, 1955. ———. “la deuxième risāla d’abū-dulaf.” oriens 5, no. 1 (1952): 23–27. ———. “tamīm b. baḥr’s journey to the uyghurs.” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 12, no. 2 (1948): 275–305. miquel, a. la géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e siècle. 3 vols. paris: éditions de l’ehess, 2001. montgomery, j. e. al-jāḥiẓ: in praise of books. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2013. ———. “ibn faḍlān and the rūsiyyah.” journal of arabic and islamic studies 3 (2000): 1–25. ———. “mission to the volga.” in two arabic travel books, edited by p. f. kennedy and s. m. toorawa. new york: new york university press, 2014. ———. “pyrrhic scepticism and the conquest of disorder: prolegomenon to the study of ibn faḍlān.” in problems in arabic literature, edited by m. maroth, 43–89. piliscsaba: avicenna institute of middle east studies, 2004. ———. “serendipity, resistance and multivalency: ibn khurradādhbih’s kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik.” in on fiction and adab in medieval arabic literature, edited by p. f. kennedy, 177–230. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2005. ———. “travelling autopsies: ibn faḍlān and the bulghār.” middle eastern literatures 7, no. 1 (2004): 3–32. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) who compiled and edited the mashhad miscellany? • 73 ———. “where is the real ibn faḍlān?” in muslims on the volga: diplomacy and islam in the age of ibn faḍlān, edited by j. shepard and w. l. treadwell. london: i. b. tauris, forthcoming in 2021. pomerantz, m. licit magic: the life and letters of al-ṣāḥib b. ʿabbād (d. 385/995). leiden: brill, 2018. ritter, h. “zum text von ibn faḍlān’s reisebericht.” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 96 (1942): 98–126. rohr-sauer, a. von. des abū dulaf bericht über seine reise nach turkestān, china und indien: neu übersetzt und untersucht. bonn: bonner universitäts buchdruckerei, 1939. schoeler, g. the genesis of literature in islam: from the aural to the read. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009. sezgin, f., et al. eds., majmūʿa fī al-jughrāfiyya: mimmā allafahu ibn al-faqīh wa-ibn faḍlān wa-abū dulaf al-khazrajī. frankfurt: maʿhad taʾrīkh al-ʿulūm al-ʿarabiyya wa-l-islāmiyya, 1987. shepard, j., and w. l. treadwell, eds., muslims on the volga: diplomacy and islam in the world of ibn faḍlān. london: i. b. tauris, forthcoming in 2021. togan, z. v. ibn faḍlān’s reisebericht. leipzig: brockhaus, 1939. torgoev, a. i., ed. puteshestvie ibn faḍlāna: volzhskiǐ put’ ot bagdada do bulgara. moscow: dom mardzhani, 2016. treadwell, w. l. “the ‘ʿabbasid’ mission to the bulghār court (309–310/921–922) reconsidered.” forthcoming. ———. a history of the sāmānids: the first islamic dynasty of central asia. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, forthcoming in 2021. ———. “ibn faḍlān and the mashhad miscellany.” forthcoming. validov (togan), a. z. “meshkhedskaya rukopis’ ibni-l’-fakikha.” izvestiia rossiǐkoǐ akademii nauk (1924): 237–48. yāqūt. muʿjam al-buldān. beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d. zadeh, t. mapping frontiers across medieval islam: geography, translation and the ʿabbasid empire. london: i. b. tauris, 2017. ———. ‘of mummies, poets and water nymphs: tracing the codicological limits of ibn khurradādhbih’s geography. in ʿabbāsid studies 4, edited by m. bernards, 8–75. warminster: gibb memorial trust, 2013. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 87-125 ibn aʿtham and his history * editor’s introduction the editors of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā are delighted to publish this long-awaited piece by lawrence i. conrad on ibn aʿtham al-kūfī and his kitāb al-futūḥ. the article was written on the basis of two papers presented in 1992 (see initial note) and subsequently prepared for publication. it has circulated among colleagues, but, for various reasons, never appeared in print. professor conrad, with characteristic generosity, has given us permission to publish the text. it stands as a monumental piece of scholarship and the most comprehensive study on the subject to date. by way of introduction, a few historiographical comments are in order. limited attention has been devoted to ibn aʿtham since the early 1990s. conrad himself wrote a brief entry for the routledge encyclopedia of arabic literature [london and new york: routledge, 1998, 314], summarizing his findings and arguing that ibn aʿtham flourished in the early third/ninth century. there he rejects ibn aʿtham’s conventional death date of 314/926-7 as “an old orientalist error.” conrad went on to advocate for the earlier date in subsequent publications (e.g., “heraclius in early islamic kerygma,” in g.j. reinink and b.h. stolte (eds.), the reign of heraclius (610-641): crisis and confrontation [leuven: peeters, 2002], 132). this view was adopted by several scholars and corroborated on the basis of the content of the work. (see in particular a. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72-193/692-809) [leiden: brill, 2011], index; e. daniel, “ketāb alfotūḥ,” encyclopaedia iranica online, 2012 [http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ketab-al-fotuh]; j. scheiner, “writing the history of the futūḥ: the futūḥ-works by al-azdī, ibn aʿtham, and al-wāqidī,” in p.m. cobb (ed.), the lineaments of islam: studies in honor of fred mcgraw donner [leiden: brill, 2012], 151-176). conrad’s early dating of ibn aʿtham has been challenged recently by ilkka lindstedt (“al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla and the death of ibrāhīm al-imām,” in i. lindstedt et al. (eds.), case studies in transmission [münster: ugarit-verlag, 2014], esp. 118-123; and “sources for the biography of the historian ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” in jaakko hämeen-anttila, petteri koskikallio, and ilkka lindstedt (eds.), proceedings of union européenne des arabisants et islamisants 27, helsinki, june 2nd-6th, 2014 [leuven: peeters, forthcoming]). on the basis of new biographical evidence, lindstedt argues that ibn aʿtham actually flourished in the late third/ninth-early fourth/tenth century. mónika schönléber, a doctoral candidate at pázmány péter catholic university (budapest), is preparing a critical edition of the first portion of the kitāb al-futūḥ, and her work will help clarify the complex history of the text (see, for now, her “notes on the textual tradition of ibn aʿtham’s kitāb al-futūḥ,” in jaakko hämeen-anttila, petteri koskikallio, and ilkka lindstedt (eds.), proceedings of union européenne des arabisants et islamisants 27, helsinki, june 2nd-6th, 2014 [leuven: peeters, forthcoming]). regardless of whether one accepts it as an early third/ninth-century text or a product of the late third/ ninth-early fourth/tenth century, the kitāb al-futūḥ stands as an invaluable source. it is hoped that the publication of conrad’s meticulous and elegant study will foster more research on what remains a much-neglected text. we publish the text below in its original form. — antoine borrut lawrence i. conrad university of hamburg 88 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) it is probably a general rule of thumb that the larger and earlier an islamic historical text is, the more likely it is to attract the attention of modern scholars. if this is so, then the rule’s most glaring exception is the kitāb al-futūḥ of abū muḥammad aḥmad ibn aʿtham al-kūfī. though a work of considerable bulk, running to over 2700 pages in the hyderabad edition,1 a text which covers many aspects of the first 250 years of islamic history, and one which has been known since the mid-nineteenth century, at least in its persian translation, the kitāb al-futūḥ has never enjoyed the attention one might have expected it to receive. one reason for this is surely that ibn aʿtham has had, since the days of brockelmann, a bad reputation as a purveyor of—to use his phrasing—“a fanciful history” written from a shīʿī viewpoint.2 this tends to invite the conclusion that a careful reading of the kitāb al-futūḥ would be a waste of time; but to this one might easily reply that regardless of whether a work strikes modern observers as good or bad history, it may reveal much about its cultural tradition and thus—for that reason alone—prove to be eminently worthy of investigation. in passing it must be said that irrespective of the extent to which it can or cannot be made to give up “historical facts”, this fascinating text has much to tell us about how history was perceived and transmitted in early islamic times. in my remarks here, however, i will address only a limited number of points central to further work on the text. on some questions, including that of who ibn aʿtham himself was, the complexities of the extant material allow details to emerge only in rather piecemeal fashion, and an attempt will be made at the end of this study to summarize conclusions that have been drawn at various earlier points. it must be conceded from the outset that the basis for historiographical study of this history is not ideal. as with the taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk of al-ṭabarī (wr. 303/915), the textual tradition of the kitāb al-futūḥ of ibn aʿtham consists of a number of incomplete arabic mss and a later persian translation which sometimes manifests important discrepancies from the wording of the arabic. coverage of the text, as presented in the hyderabad edition, can be summarized as follows:3 * this study arises from two different papers presented at the annual meeting of the american oriental society, cambridge, mass., on 29 march 1992, and at leiden university on 20 may 1992. i am grateful to the participants in those sessions for their valuable discussion, and especially to professors fred m. donner and wadād al-qāḍī for their comments and suggestions. 1. ibn aʿtham al-kūfī, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. muḥammad ʿabd al-muʿīd khān et al. (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmānīya, 1388-95/1968-75) in eight vol umes. the recent three-volume edition by suhayl zakkār (damascus: dār al-fikr, 1412/1992) appeared too late to be taken into consideration here, but does not, in any case, replace the hyderabad edition. zakkār’s work does not use the gotha ms, and so is missing the first 485 pages of the hyderabad text; it also takes no account of the persian translation, and thus fails to notice many lacunae. the apparatus criticus cites qurʾānic quotations, draws attention to significant passages in a few parallel works, and provides some useful explanations of terms, but is very weak where consideration of variant readings is concerned. 2. gal, si, 220; ei1, ii, 364b. 3. in addition to these mss, ambrosiana h-129, copied in 627/1230 and not used by the hyderabad editors, covers the text from the conquest of al-rayy and al-dastabā (ii, 62:12) to the murder of ʿalī ibn abī ṭālib (iv, 147ult). see eugenio griffini, “nuovi testi arabo—siculi”, in centenaria della nascita di michele al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 89 ms siglum text covered gotha 1592 al-aṣl i, 1:1-ii, 146ult. ahmet iii 2956 al-aṣl ii, 147:1-viii, 354:7 (end) chester beatty 3272 d ii, 147:1-vi, 100:3 mingana 572 br iii, 108ult-vi, 97:11 persian translation al-tarjama i, 1:1-v, 251:34 it can immediately be seen that the first part of the book, extending to almost 500 pages, is fully attested only by the gotha ms; at the end, only the ahmet iii codex extends past the first third of volume vi. when one adds to this the fact that the chester beatty ms is clearly a descendent of the ahmet iii exemplar, it becomes clear that through the majority of the book, the manuscript tradition provides rather thin testimony for the fixing of the text. this problem is rendered more serious by other difficulties. loss of single or multiple folios, and even of entire signatures, has resulted in a number of major gaps in the arabic text,5 and other shorter lacunae are numerous. quite often one encounters passages where an erasure, probably to delete an incorrectly copied word or phrase, has been left unfilled. passages in verse have perhaps suffered worst: poems surviving in the persian translation are in the arabic often dropped entirely, or represented only by the maṭlaʿ or some other illustrative verse. though some clarification of this problem can be proposed, it is still not entirely clear how the persian text can be used to check the arabic, since there seem to exist multiple versions of this persian rendering. some of these and other difficulties will return to our attention below. at this point it will suffice to observe that while the hyderabad edition usually draws the reader’s attention to such problems, it seldom resolves them in a way conducive to a critical historiographical assessment of the arabic text. amari (palermo: virzì, 1910), i, 402-15. the bankipore ms khuda bakhsh 1042, copied in 1278/1861, contains an ʿalid version of saqīfat banī sāʿida and the election of abū bakr, an account of the ridda wars, and a few pages on the conquest of iraq; the ms has recently been described by muḥammad ḥamīd allāh as “the unique manuscript” of the kitāb al-ridda of al-wāqidī (d. 207/823), in the recension of ibn aʿtham, and published as such in his kitāb al-ridda wa-nubdha min futūḥ al-ʿiraq (paris: editions tougui, 1409/1989). but a decade earlier two other scholars had already independently noticed that this was nothing more than an extract from ibn aʿtham’s own history (= hyderabad ed. i, 2:5-96:6, ending in the midst of a long lacuna in the gotha ms); see fred m. donner, “the bakr b. wāʾil tribes and politics in northeastern arabia on the eve of islam,” studia islamica 51 (1980), 16 n. 2; and miklos muranyi’s publication of the section on the election of abū bakr in his “ein neuer bericht über die wahl des ersten kalifen abū bakr,” arabica 25 (1978), 233-60. ḥamīd allāh’s publication is nevertheless useful, for reasons which will emerge below, and here it will be referred to as “ibn aʿtham, bankipore text”. 4. the recension of the persian translation available to me (see n. 42 below) begins somewhat differently than the arabic, but this discrepancy is not noticed in the hyderabad edition, which usually does comment on such anomalies, but uses a different edition of the persian text. 5. the most serious of these are at i, 5:4-5, 91:2-100:1, 318:7-324:1, 334:2-349:1; ii, 95:2-107:1, 193:3-208:1; iv, 206:6-209:1. the first of these lacunae, and part of the second, have been filled by ibn aʿtham, bankipore text, 22:10-42:2 (cf. muranyi, “ein neuer bericht,” 239-47), 128:9-137ult. 90 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) date of composition a fundamental point of departure is that of when the author lived and when he wrote his history. the difficulty here is that as a historical personality ibn aʿtham was almost entirely unknown to later writers. yāqūt (d. 626/1229), the only medieval biographer who has original information on him, will return to our attention below. here we may simply note that he knows nothing about ibn aʿtham’s life or date of death, and can offer little information beyond what might be gained by perusing his works (e.g. knowledge of ibn aʿtham’s shīʿī sympathies) or by consulting a rijāl al-sanad compendium (i.e. his reputation among ḥadīth transmitters as ḍaʿīf).6 ibn ṭāwūs (d. 664/1266) refers to him by name and quotes from the kitāb al-futūḥ, but seems to know nothing about him personally.7 al-ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) and ibn ḥajar (d. 852/1449) both have entries for ibn aʿtham, but all of their information comes from yāqūt.8 the copyist of the ahmet iii ms, writing in 873/146869, refers to our author as ibn aʿtham “al-kindī”, thus suggesting his membership of the southern tribe of kinda, but this is almost certainly a misreading of “al-kūfī”.9 ḥājjī khalīfa (d. 1067/1657) mentions ibn aʿtham twice in his kashf al-ẓunūn, but he has no personal details about him and simply describes him as the author of a futūḥ book translated by al-mustawfī, to whom we shall return below.10 here we have to do with conclusions reached only on the basis of access to a subject’s book, in this case the persian translation of the kitāb al-futūḥ. al-majlisī (d. 1110/1697) also made use of the work in his vast compendium of shīʿī traditions, but seems not to have known anything about its author.11 this dearth of information has not deterred modern scholarship from offering a range of possibilities for the period to which ibn aʿtham belongs. an early attempt to establish the identity of ibn aʿtham was made by william nassau lees, one of the first western editors of futūḥ texts. in the introduction to his editio princeps of the pseudo-wāqidī futūḥ al-shām, lees proposed that ibn aʿtham was to be identified as abū muḥammad aḥmad ibn ʿāṣim al-balkhī a muḥaddith who died in 227/841-42.12 but for several reasons this argument, such as it is, must be rejected. first, it is at least curious, if aḥmad ibn ʿāṣim is our author, that none of the many accounts of him mentions that this man was the author 6. yāqūt, irshād al-arīb ilā maʿrifat al-adīb, ed. d.s. margoliouth, 2nd ed. (leiden: e.j. brill, 1923-31), i, 379:1-8, no. 104. 7. ibn ṭāwūs, kashf al-maḥajja li-thamarat al-muhja (najaf, 1370/1950), 57, cited in etan kohlberg, a medieval muslim scholar at work: ibn ṭāwūs and his library (leiden: e.j. brill, 1992), 358-59, with the observation that this passage is not to be found in the arabic text we have today. 8. al-ṣafadī, al-wāfī bi-l-wafayāt, vi, ed. sven dedering (wiesbaden: franz steiner verlag, 1972), 256:7-11 no. 2740; ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, lisān al-mīzān (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-niẓāmīya, ah 1329-31), i, 138:16-18 no. 433. 9. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ,vi, 100 n. 4; viii, 354 n. 7. 10. ḥājjī khalīfa, kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-al-funūn, ed. şerefettin yaltkaya and kilisi rifat bilge (istanbul: maarıf matbaası, 1941-47), ii, 1237:15, 1239:27-29. 11. al-majlisī, biḥār al-anwār (beirut: muʾassasat al-wafāʾ, 1403/1983), 1, 25:9. 12. the conquest of syria commonly ascribed to aboo ʿabd allah mohammad b. ʿomar al-wáqidí, ed. w. nassau lees (calcutta: f. carbery, 1854-60), i, vii. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 91 of a book—of any description. such information is routinely given in the various types of biographical compendia. second, while the name aḥmad was not yet common in the second and third centuries ah, the kunya abū muḥammad certainly was, and the fact that two aḥmads shared the same kunya in no way suggests, much less proves (as lees seemed to believe), that they were one and the same person. indeed, the case for the opposite conclusion is compelling. aḥmad ibn ʿāṣim al-balkhī is the subject of numerous notices in rijāl al-sanad compendia and is named as one of the authorities cited by al-bukhārī (d. 256/870),13 but nowhere is there any hint of a father or grandfather named aʿtham, i.e. some ancestor who would account for why the aḥmad ibn ʿāṣim of the rijāl compendia would be called aḥmad ibn aʿtham in the kitāb al-futūḥ. similarly, no one with any information on ibn aʿtham mentions an ancestor named ʿāṣim. as the two names are not orthographically similar, this discrepancy clearly establishes that no case can be made for the argument that the two names refer, as lees thought, to the same historical figure. in fact, such an identification is precluded by the fact that aḥmad ibn ʿāṣim, as an informant of al-bukhārī, must have been a sunnī muḥaddith. as we shall see below, however, the author of the kitāb al-futūḥ was a strident shīʿī; when he cites ḥadīth, he almost exclusively quotes ʿalid legitimist, shīʿī, and virulently anti-umayyad traditions from the prophet and the imams. while one must guard against the temptation to project back into early islamic times sunnī/shīʿī differences which only emerged later,14 most of ibn aʿtham’s traditions clearly comprise material which no authority of al-bukhārī would have taken seriously, much less transmitted. in his work on arabic historians, wüstenfeld gives the date of ibn aʿtham’s death as ah 1003 (= ad 1594-95),15 which is the date cited in flügel’s edition of ḥājjī khalīfa.16 but in the more recent and far superior istanbul edition of the kashf al-ẓunūn, based on the author’s autograph, the space for the date is left blank; the date in flügel’s edition may well have been erroneously carried up from the next entry below it, where the text in question is also by an author said to have died in ah 1003. further, such a date is impossible since, as we shall see momentarily, ibn aʿtham’s futūḥ had already been translated into persian four centuries earlier. 13. see, for example, al-bukhārī (d. 256/870), al-taʾrīkh al-kabīr (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmānīya, ah 1360-64), 1.2,6:3-4 no. 1500; ibn abī ḥātim (d. 327/938), al-jarḥ wa-al-taʿdīl (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmānīya, 1371-73/1952-53), i.1, 66: 10-11 no. 118; ibn ḥibbān al-bustī (d. 354/965), kitāb al-thiqāt (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmānīya, 1393-1403/1973-83), viii, 12: 3-4; al mizzī (d. 742/1341), tahdhīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl, ed. bashshār ʿawwād maʿrūf (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1985/1306-proceeding), i, 363: 2-0 no. 55; al-dhahabī (d. 748/1348), mizān al-iʿtidāl, ed. ʿalī muḥammad al-bijāwī (cairo: īsā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1382/1963), i, 106: 2-4; ibn ḥajar, tahdhīb al-tahdhīb (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-niẓāmīya, ah 1325-27), i, 46: 4-11 no. 76. 14. on this problem, see andrew rippin, muslims: their religious beliefs and practices, i: the formative period (london: routledge, 1990), 103-16. 15. ferdinand wüstenfeld, die geschichtschreiber der araber und ihre werke (göttingen: dieterische verlags-buchhandlung, 1882), 253 no. 541. 16. ḥājjī khalīfa, kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-al-funūn, ed. gustav flügel (london: oriental translation fund, 1835-58), iv, 380: 5-6 no. 8907. 92 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) this date is in any case not the one usually cited. most modern scholarship gives the year of ibn aʿtham’s death as ca. 314/926-27: this is the date one finds not only on the title page of the hyderabad edition itself, but also in studies pertaining to ibn aʿtham by, for example, rieu,17 brockelmann,18 griffini,19 storey,”20 massé,21 al-amīn,22 al-ṭihrānī,23 cahen,24 togan,25 fuat sezgin,26 zirikli,27 muranyi,28 and ursula sezgin.29 the apparent security of this death date is reflected in the comments of brockelmann, who asserts that it is the only information we know about ibn aʿtham,30 and massé, who refers to ibn aʿtham as a contemporary of al-ṭabarī and observes that “il est généralement admis que l’historien arabe ibn aʿtham composa ses ouvrages sous le règne du calife moqtadir et qu’il mourut en 314/926”.31 here too, however, the ascription is entirely baseless. all scholarship after the publication of brockelmann’s monumental geschichte der arabischen literatur quite naturally takes the date from him, but brockelmann himself, as well as rieu and storey, have it not from any medieval authority, but from a curious bibliography of medieval islamic texts compiled in st. petersburg in 1845 by c.m. frähn.32 as is well-known, russia in this period was beginning to harbor imperial designs on territories in central asia, and 17. charles rieu, catalogue of the persian manuscripts in the british museum (london: british museum, 1879-83), i, 151a. 18. gal, si, 220; ei1, ii, 364b. 19. griffini, “nuovi testi arabo-siculi,” 407; idem, “die jüngste ambrosianische sammlung arabischer handschriften,” zdmg 69 (1915), 77. 20. see c.a. storey, persian literature: a bio-bibliographical survey (london: royal asiatic society, 1927-proceeding), i.1, 207 no. 261. 21. henri massé, “la chronique d’ibn aʿtham et la conquête de l’ifriqiya,”, in william marçais, ed., mélanges offerts à gaudefroy-demombynes par ses amis et anciens élèves (cairo: institut francais d’archéologie orientale, 1935-45), 85. 22. muḥsin al-amīn, aʿyān al-shīʿa (damascus: maṭbaʿat ibn zaydūn, 1353-65/1935-46), vii, 428-29. 23. āghā buzurg al-ṭihrānī, al-dharīʿa ila taṣānīf al-shīʿa (najaf: maṭbaʿat al-ghazzī, 1355-98/1936-78), iii, 220. 24. claude cahen, “les chroniques arabes concernant la syrie, l’egypte et la mésopotamie de la conquête arabe à la conquête ottomane dans les bibliothèques d’istanbul,” rei 10 (1936), 335. 25. zeki velidi togan, art. “ibn aʾsemülkûfî” in islam ansiklopedisi, ed. a. adivar et al. (istanbul: maarif matbaasi, 1940-86), v, 702a. 26. gas i, 329. 27. khayr al-dīn al-ziriklī, al-aʿlām, 3rd ed. (beirut: dar al-ʿilm li-al-malāyīn, 1969), i, 96b. 28. muranyi, “ein neuer bericht,” 234. 29. ursula sezgin, “abū mikhnaf, ibrāhīm b. hilāl aṯ-ṯaqafī und muḥammad b. aʿtam al-kūfī über ġārāt,” zdmg 131 (1981), wissenschaftliche nachrichten, *1. 30. ei1, ii, 364b. 31. massé, “la chronique d’ibn aʿtham,” 85. 32. c.-m frähn, indications bibliographiques relatives pour la plupart à la littérature historico— géographique des arabes, des persans et des turcs (st. petersburg: académie impériale des sciences, 1845), 16 no. 53. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 93 in expectation of the usual fruits of conquest, frähn compiled for the russian academy of sciences what amounted to a wish-list of desirable historical and geographical texts. the work is addressed to “nos employés et voyageurs en asie” on the assumption that important manuscript treasures could be gained for the academy by watchful officials and travelers.33 frähn’s inventory was essentially derived from the kashf al-ẓunūn,34 and most of the books he lists are lost. as would be expected for a work of this period, frähn’s list is full of mistakes and erroneous conjectures. where ibn aʿtham is concerned, the death date of 314/926-27 is proposed as a guess—with a question mark after it—and no corroborating evidence is cited. in fact, it seems that no such evidence exists. here the point of importance is that all modern scholarship citing this date has it ultimately—and only—from frähn: it has no foundation in the primary source material relevant to the subject of our inquiry. a third date was first noticed independently by c.a. storey35 and ʿabd allāh mukhliṣ,36 was subsequently rejected by āghā buzurg al-ṭihrānī,37 and has more recently been upheld by m.a. shaban in his encyclopaedia of islam article on ibn aʿtham38 and in further detail in his introduction to his book on the ʿabbāsid revolution.39 the source for this date is the introduction to the persian translation of the kitāb al-futūḥ, extant in numerous manuscripts40 and printed in india several times in the nineteenth century. the translator was muḥammad ibn aḥmad al-mustawfī al-harawī, and in his eloquent but verbose introduction he provides some details important to the background for his work. these may be summarized as follows: having spent his career serving great men, he says, he had hoped to retire to a life of pious seclusion; but as he had no secure source of income, this proved impossible. then a powerful but unnamed political figure (referred to. as ṣāḥib al-sayf wa-al-qalam, in arabic, plus many other honorific titles) took him in, and al-mustawfī enjoyed some years of esteem and wealth. in ah 596 (= ad 1199-1200) this patron summoned him to tāybād,41 where al-mustawfī was honored with further generous patronage and was welcomed into the circle of seven most learned (but again unnamed) scholars. one day, when his patron was present, a member of the assembled company recited some anecdotes from the kitāb-i futūḥ of khavāja ibn aʿtham, who had written this book in ah 204 (= ad 819-20); the patron was so impressed that he asked al-mustawfī to 33. ibid., xxvii. 34. ibid., xxxvii—xxxix. 35. storey, persian literature, 1.2, 1260, in the corrections to his main text. 36. ʿabd allāh mukhliṣ, “taʾrīkh ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” majallat al-majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿarabī 6 (1926), 142-43. 37. āghā buzurg al-ṭihrānī, al-dharīʿa ilā taṣānīf al-shīʿa, iii, 221. his argument is the fairly obvious one that a historian who wrote a history in ah 204 could not still have been active more than 100 years later, in the reign of al-muqtadir. see below. 38. m.a. shaban, art. “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī” in ei2, iii (leiden: e.j. brill, 1971), 723a. 39. ibid., the ʿabbāsid revolution (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1970), xviii. 40. see storey, persian literature, i.1, 208-209. 41. i.e. tāyābādh in the region of herat. see yāqūt, muʿjam al-buldān (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1374-76/1955-57), ii, 9b. 94 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) translate the entire work into persian. though elderly, pressed with family responsibilities, and troubled with the cares of difficult times, the latter took into consideration the spectacular merits of the book and thus agreed to undertake the translation.42 other information indicates that he died before he could finish the task, and that the work was completed by a colleague, muḥammad ibn aḥmad ibn abī bakr al-kātib al-mābarnābādī.43 among the currently extant persian manuscripts, the date of ah 204 seems to appear in very few codices,44 which may raise the question of whether or not this information is to be trusted. but in al-mustawfī’s day no useful purpose would have been served by forging it: in ah 596 there would have been nothing remarkable about knowing (or claiming) that ibn aʿtham had written his kitāb al-futūḥ in ah 204, and someone inventing a date would not have done so without some further purpose in mind—for example, to establish some specific connection with one of the shīʿī imāms. but in al-mustawfī’s introduction the date is simply stated in passing, without being pursued to some further point. it is also worth asking how this information came to be known to him and no one else. one can never be absolutely certain on such matters, of course, but the most likely explanation is that this detail was mentioned in the colophon of the arabic ms from which al-mustawfī worked. in any case, there is no immediate reason for doubting that this information comes from al-mustawfī, or for suspecting a priori that such a date for the composition of the kitāb al-futūḥ is spurious. support for this date may be found in yaqūt’s tarjama of ibn aʿtham, in which a certain abū ʿalī al-ḥusayn ibn aḥmad al-sallāmī al-bayhaqī quotes two lines of verse which he says were recited to him by “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī”.45 unfortunately, there appear to be several al-sallāmīs with very similar names, who were variously quoted by al-thaʿālibī (d. 429/1038), al-gardizī (wr. ca. 442/1050), ibn mākūlā (d. 473/1081), ibn al-athīr (d. 630/1233), al-juwaynī (wr. 658/1260), ibn khallikān (d. 681/1282), and al-yāfiʿī (d. 738/1367). one of these al-sallāmīs was the well-known historian of khurāsān;46 little personal information is available concerning him, but on the basis of details provided by al-thaʿālibī his date of death must be placed after 365/975.47 42. al-mustawfī, tarjama-i kitāb al-futūḥ (bombay: chāpkhānē muḥammad-i, ah 1305), 1:4-2:15. 43. see massé, “la chronique d’ibn aʿtham,” 85; togan, “ibn aʿsemülkûfî,” 702b. 44. it is worth noting that while a number of persian manuscripts were catalogued prior to the appearance of storey’s persian literature, no date but that suggested by frähn was given for the composition of the kitāb al-futūḥ, until storey (i.2, 1260) noted the date of ah 204 in a catalogue of mashhad persian mss which had just come to his attention. several bombay lithographs, however, include this date in their texts of the introduction, and do not seem to be copying one from the other, which suggests that several mss available in bombay also bore the date of ah 204 for the composition of the text. 45. yāqūt, irshād al-arīb, i, 379:5-8. these verses celebrate the value of a forgiving friend. 46. see w. barthold, turkestan down to the mongol invasion, 3rd ed. (london: e.j.w. gibb memorial trust, 1968), 10-11; franz rosenthal, a history of muslim historiography, 2nd ed. (leiden: e.j. brill, 1968), 321 n. 7. 47. al-thaʿālibī, yatīmat al-dahr, ed. muḥyī al-dīn ʿabd al-ḥamīd (cairo: maktabat al-ḥusayn al-tijārīya, 1366/1947), iv, 95:8-16. it does not seem to have been noticed that at the end of this notice, al-thaʿālibī refers to two verses by al-sallāmī and then says: “i did not hear the two verses from him, but rather only found them in a copy of his [book]”. the implication of this statement is clearly that al-thaʿālibī anticipated that his audience would suppose that he had heard the verses from the author himself; this in turn suggests that he al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 95 this does not seem to connect with anything else which is known about ibn aʿtham or his history. another al-sallāmī (or al-salāmī), however, was an obscure faqīh in baghdad whose career may be assigned to the first half of the third/ninth century.48 a scholar of this period could easily have heard, in his student days, poetry from an author who finished a history in ah 204; and on the assumption that this history was not necessarily written in the last years of its author’s life, it is possible that the two men were colleagues in baghdad. in terms of genre formation, the compilation of such as text as the kitāb al-futūḥ, reflects one of the well-known features of early arabic historiography: topical monographs of the second century ah providing the building blocks for, and ultimately giving way to, the comprehensive histories of the third. ibn aʿtham’s book was a shīʿī manifestation of the sort of work one often encounters in this period, and it comes as no surprise to find such a text appearing at the beginning of the third century ah. once largely limited to medina and al-kūfa, the shīʿa had by this time established a significant presence for themselves in baghdad,49 where such developments as the shuʿūbīya controversy, the rise of the muʿtazila, the miḥna, and the foundation of the bayt al-ḥikma would in the very near future demonstrate the depth, range, and intensity of the cultural foment that prevailed in the capital in this formative era.50 ibn aʿtham’s history represented his effort to set before muslims at large his own growing community’s views on the live historical issues under discussion in his day, and to do so with an extended account of the islamic past. a composition date of 204/819-20 also finds at least some direct support in the arabic text. at the beginning of one of his sections, ibn aʿtham says: “jaʿfar ibn muḥammad used to say to my father…”51 as this jaʿfar figures in isnāds in the text, and in them occupies key positions where the imāms would be quoted in shīʿī ḥadīth,52 he can be none other than the sixth imam, jaʿfar al-ṣādiq (d. 148/765); it is perfectly plausible that the son of one of his students or tradents should have written a historical work 54 years after the imām’s could have done so—i.e. that al-sallāmī was his older contemporary. as al-thaʿālibī was born in 350/961 (gal, i, 284), it is unlikely that he would have been hearing poetry from al-sallāmī before about 365/975. this year can thus be taken as approximating the earliest possible death date for this al-sallāmī. 48. abū al-ḥusayn al-rāzī (d. 347/958) reports details about a certain maḥmūd al-miṣrī who was a student of ibn hishām (d. 218/834), saw al-shāfiʿī (d. 804/820) as a boy, and heard a story about al-shāfiʿī majlis from one of his students (yāqūt, irshād al-arīb, iv, 379:14-380:4). this maḥmūd was thus probably born ca. 195/810, and engaged in studies through ca. 225/840. he refers to hearing al-sallāmī speak about al-aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828) at second remove, so a floruit of ca. 220-40/835-55 may be set for al-sallāmī himself. this would also fit a report (ibid., i, 392:14-393:1) of al-sallāmī reciting poetry to the poet jaḥẓa (224-326/839-938), on the one hand, and having information about the wazīr aḥmad ibn abī khālid (d. 211/827) at second remove (ibid., i, 118:14119:4), on the other. 49. see etan kohlberg, “imam and community in the pre-ghayba period,” in said amir arjomand, ed., authority and political culture in shiʿism (albany: state university of new york press, 1988), 37. 50. for further discussion of the response of literature to controversies prevailing in society at large, see lawrence i. conrad, “arab-islamic medicine,” in w.f. bynum and roy porter, eds., companion encyclopaedia in the history of medicine (london: routledge, 1993), 686-93; and more generally, m. rekaya, art. “al-maʾmūn” in ei2, vi (leiden: e.j. brill, 1991), 331-39. 51. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ii, 92ult. 52. cf. ibid., ii, 390:3. 96 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) death. this line of investigation leads into the difficult issue of ibn aʿtham’s informants, however, and this problem requires some prior consideration of the structure of the work as a whole. the structure of the kitāb al-futūḥ a read through ibn aʿtham’s history will leave no doubt that he was a fervent supporter of the shīʿa, not only in their legitimist claims to the caliphate, but also in their early doctrines concerning the religious knowledge of the imāms, and in their highly emotional focus on the sufferings and travails of the ʿalid line under the umayyads.ʿalī ibn abī ṭālib is upheld as the prophet’s paternal cousin, the first male convert to islam, a brave warrior, and an upright man; along more religious lines, he is described as free from error, passion, or fault, and as muḥammad’s waṣī and the heir to his knowledge.53 he was the candidate most deserving of the caliphate after muḥammad’s death, and was deprived of his right on entirely specious grounds.54 of al-ḥusayn, it is stated that he was “the most excellent of the progeny of the prophets” and the bearer of muḥammad’s staff (qaḍīb), and that the rendering of support to him was as much a personal religious duty as were prayer and almsgiving.55 foreknowledge of his death is bestowed upon muḥammad, fāṭima, and ʿalī through vivid dreams, visions, and visitations by angels, and is linked with the events of the apocalypse.56 supernatural phenomena and eschatological predictions are routinely evoked. even the stars in the heavens and the plants on the earth weep at karbalāʾ, for example, and a jewish soothsayer pours abuse on the umayyads when al-ḥusayn is killed: had moses left one of his descendants among the present-day jews, he says, they would have worshipped him rather than god, but the prophet had no sooner departed from the arabs than they pounced upon his son (sic.) and killed him; he warns that the torah decrees that anyone who kills the progeny of a prophet will forever after meet with defeat and upon his death will be roasted in the flames of hell.57 it is important to bear in mind that the shīʿī emphasis of the text is not a matter of overtones or coloring, but rather of intense emotional involvement on the part of the author, and no small degree of polemic. ibn aʿtham himself was concerned about how his work would be received, and expressed anxiety to his patron (on whom more will be said below) over the possibility that his work would be mistaken for a rāfiḍī tract, and so bring them both into difficulty.58 in light of his shīʿī emphasis, it is quite striking to see how frequently this perspective is directly contradicted elsewhere in the text. in the first volume, on the ridda wars and the 53. ibid., 11, 466:11-18; iii, 57:3, 74:1-12, 264:3-5. many other examples of this kind could of course be adduced. 54. ibn aʿtham, bankipore text, 28:21-30:4 (= muranyi, “ein neuer bericht,” 24647, lines 166-203 of the arabic text). 55. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, v, 13:2, 16:17, 39:10-13. 56. ibid., ii, 4650.4-466:10; iv, 210:15-224:10. 57. ibid., iv, 222:10-223:5; v, 246:7-247:6. 58. ibn aʿtham, bankipore text, 30:5-8. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 97 early conquests, abū bakr is on almost 80 occasions referred to as al-ṣiddīq or khalīfat rasūl allāh. in one report, a tribesman of tamīm argues that the prophet gave no one knowledge for the sake of which others might follow him, and recites a verse pointing out that while muḥammad deserved obedience, he appointed no successor to whom this obedience should then be transferred. these ideal openings for advancing shīʿī or ʿalid counterclaims are all missed, however, and the report ends with the thoroughly sunnī argument that rejection of abū bakr’s caliphate is tantamount to kufr.59 elsewhere, a conversation between abū bakr and ʿumar concedes that ʿalī is “a fair man acceptable to most of the people in view of his virtue, courage, close relationship to the prophet, learning, sagacity, and the gentleness he shows in endeavors he undertakes”; but at the same time, it concludes that his gentleness makes him unsuited to military leadership.60 obedience to ʿumar is obligatory, even if one doubts his judgment, because he is amīr al-muʾminīn, and ʿalī himself exalts ʿumar’s merits, heaps praises upon him, calls him al-fārūq, and takes charge of his burial arrangements.61 in a poem in which a meccan comments on the failure of ibn al-zubayr to practice what he preaches, the poet upholds the conduct of ʿumar as al-fārūq and aligns himself with the sunna of abū bakr, whom he calls ṣiddīq al-nabī.62 the phenomenon of a history which speaks with numerous voices is absolutely typical of early arabic historiography, as noth has conclusively shown, and betrays the origins of such texts. these were not original essays composed by single authors, whose own personal conceptions of the past would then be reflected in them, but rather were compilations based ultimately on large numbers of short reports set into circulation, transmitted, and recast by many people over long periods of time. it is this essentially compilatory character which accounts for the contradictions and discrepancies, even on fundamental issues, which one repeatedly encounters in these works.63 the kitāb al-futūḥ is in many ways typical of these patterns of compilation, but whereas authors often wove their source materials together in such a way that signs of the process of compilation were rendered fairly subtle, ibn aʿtham made no effort to produce a history which would read as a unitary whole. the arrangement of material (especially in the first two thirds of the book) is, largely the product of selecting monographs on various subjects and linking them end-to-end. breaks marking the transition from one source to another are not smoothed out or disguised, but overtly signaled. in a few cases this is done with collective isnāds (to which we shall return below), but most frequently it take the form of headings, some of which announce recourse to a new source with the word ibtidāʾ followed by the new subject. 59. ibid., 1,60:8-61:17. 60. ibid., i, 72:1-11. 61. ibid., i, 218:3-6; ii, 92ult-93:11. 62. ibid., v, 288:10. 63. see albrecht noth, “der charakter der ersten grössen sammlungen von nachrichten zur frühen kalifenzeit,” der islam 47 (1971), 168-99; idem, quellenkritische studien zu themen, formen and tendenzen frühislamischer geschichtsüberlieferung, i. themen und formen (bonn: orientalische seminar der universität bonn, 1973), 10-28; stefan leder, das korpus al-haiṯam ibn ʿadī (st. 207/822). herkunft, überlieferung, gestalt früher texte der aḫbar literatur (frankfurt: vittorio klostermann, 1991). 98 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) the main sources for the text appear to consist of a limited number of monographs of the type usually ascribed to the akhbārīs of the second century ah.64 ibn aʿtham’s account of the election of abū bakr, for example, seems to be based on one earlier ʿalid kitāb al-saqīfa, which he refers to as riwāyat al-ʿulamāʾ,65 and terminates with remarks suggesting that he has reached a point where his source also ends.66 his narrative on the ridda also appears to be a summary from a single source;67 it ends with a doxology which can only have come from a written monograph source, and which typifies ibn aʿtham’s disinterest in smoothing out the rough edges as he shifted to a new subject to be covered from a new source: inqaḍat akhbār al-ridda ʿan ākhirihī bi-ḥamd allāh wa-mannihi wa-ḥusn taysīrihi wa-bi-ʿawnihi wa-ṣallā allāh ʿalā sayyidinā muḥammad wa-ʿalā ālihi wa-ṣaḥbihi wa-sallama taslīman kathīran.68 his treatment of the early conquests, which immediately follows, seems to have involved the interweaving of two texts: a futūḥ al-shām textually related to the futūḥ al-shām of al-azdī (fl. ca. 180/796),69 and a futūḥ al-ʿirāq.70 other futūḥ works are also in evidence for later periods, for example, concerning the conquest of khurāsān, armenia,71 the mediterranean islands,72 and probably also egypt.73 64. on the themes of interest to these akhbārīs, see noth, quellenkritische studien, 29-58. the term akhbārī is a convenient substitute for the perhaps inappropriate term “historian”, but it must be borne in mind that the authorities in question are not known to have called themselves akhbārīyūn, and that this term is first attested in the fihrist of al-nadīm (wr. ca. 377/987). see stefan leder, “the literary use of the khabar: a basic form of historical writing,” in averil cameron and lawrence i. conrad, eds., the byzantine and early islamic near east, i: problems in. the literary source material (princeton: darwin press, 1992), 314 n. 165. 65. see ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, i, 2:3-5:4, with the lacuna filled by the bankipore text, 20:16-30:8 (= muranyi, “ein neuer bericht,” 239-47). the title for this narrative is typical: dhikr ibtidāʾ saqīfat banī sāʿida wa-ma kana min al-muhājirīn wa-al-anṣār (the bankipore text, 21:1, simply has akhbār saqīfa banī sāʿida). 66. see below, p. xx (near note 134). 67. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, 5:5-89:17 is defective; for the complete text, see the bankipore text, 30:9125ult. 68. kitāb al-futūḥ, i, 89:16-17; = bankipore text, 125:7-8. 69. see al-azdī, futūḥ al-shām, ed. william nassau lees (calcutta: baptist mission press, 1854). on this work, see my “al-azdī’s history of the arab conquests in bilād al-shām: some historiographical observations,” in muḥammad ʿadnān al-bakhīt, ed., proceedings of the second symposium on the history of bilād al-shām during the early islamic period up to 40 ah/640 ad (amman: university of jordan, 1987), i, 28-62. 70. on the early futūḥ monographs, see noth, quellenkritische studien, 32-34. 71. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ii, 108:1-116:12. 72. ibid., ii, 117:14-146:11, with some interpolations. on this material, see griffini, “nuovi testi arabosiculi,” 402-15, especially on sicily; lawrence i. conrad, “the conquest of arwād: a source-critical study in the historiography of the early medieval near east,” in cameron and conrad, eds., the byzantine and early islamic near east, i, 317-401. note the curious way in which ibn aʿtham attempts to make the transition to this work from the preceding account of campaigns in armenia by inserting a brief description of an ethiopian maritime raid on baʿḍ sawāḥil al-muslimīn and resulting muslim deliberations on how to respond (ii, 116:13117:13), as if the maritime campaigns in the mediterranean could somehow be seen as the repercussions of this raid. 73. there seems to be a major lacuna where an account of egypt would have stood. volume i, most of which is attested only by the gotha ms, suddenly breaks off as ʿumar is about to write to ʿiyāḍ ibn ghanm al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 99 in later volumes, accounts of the murder of ʿuthmān, the battle of ṣiffīn, and the uprising of al-ḥusayn are all prefaced with isnāds indicating that for these important events ibn aʿtham collected a number of works and drew on all of them to produce a single narrative covering the issues and details he wished to include: “i have combined what have heard of their accounts, despite their differences in wording, and have compiled [this material] uniformly into a single narrative”.74 there are many other areas, however, where important events appear to have been treated on the basis of either one or a very few monograph sources: the murder of ʿumar ibn al-khaṭṭāb,75 the ghārāt,76 and the advent of the ʿabbāsids,77 for example. but even in such cases as these, the task of harmonizing information from sources was not one to which ibn aʿtham paid much attention. for his account of the rebellion of zayd ibn ʿalī (d. 122/740), for example, he seems to have had two sources. setting out on the basis of one of them, he begins with a heading: dhikr wilāyat yūsuf ibn ʿumar al-thaqafī al-ʿirāq wa-ibtidāʾ amr zayd ibn ʿalī ibn al-ḥusayn wa-maqtalihi.78 but within three pages he finds that he needs to use material from the other source; he thus begins again from a somewhat different approach, complete with a new heading on exactly the same subject: ibtidāʾ khabar zayd ibn ʿalī ibn al-ḥusayn raḍiya, allāh ʿanhum.79 to this string of only superficially integrated sources ibn aʿtham has added numerous “interpolations”. this term is used advisedly, since there is again nothing subtle about these additions, which often represent significant digressions. a heading or an isnād announces the beginning of the interpolation, and the end is frequently signaled with a phrase advising the reader that ibn aʿtham will now return to his main source or subject: thumma rajaʿna ilā ḥadīth..., thumma rajaʿna ilā al-ḥadīth al-awwal, thumma rajaʿna ilā al-khabar, and so forth.80 on one occasion, it could hardly be made clearer that an account is being interpolated into the main narrative from some other source: wa-hādhā dākhil fī (p. 334:1), and resumes with ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ about to march against the berbers (p. 349:1). the persian text provided by the hyderabad editors includes some details relevant to egypt (pp. 346:16-349:11), but it is unlikely that this is all ibn aʿtham could say or wished to say about this important subject. 74. ibid., ii, 149:2-3, 345:7-9. cf. iv, 210:13-14. 75. ibid., ii, 83:4-95:1, ending in a major lacuna. 76. ibid., iv, 36:10-37:2. the section is entitled ibtidāʾ dhikr al-ghārāt baʿda siffīn, and opens with an isnād identifying this material as taken from the work of abū mikhnaf (d. 157/774) on the subject. cf. ursula sezgin, abū miḫnaf. ein beitrag zur historiographie der umaiyadischen zeit (leiden: e.j. brill, 1971), 56-58; idem, “abū miḫnaf… über ġārāt,” 445-46. 77. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii, 153pu-211pu. this section begins with the heading: wa-hādhā ibtidāʾ khabar abī muslim min awwalihi; no source other than the akhbārī al-madāʾinī is mentioned, but he is named twelve times (pp. 159:9-10, 160:9-10, 190:4, 17, 192:4, 14, 195:7, 196:7, 202:3, 205:6, 206:12, 207pu), and ibn aʿtham’s source here was probably a history by this writer. 78. ibid., viii, 108:3-4. 79. ibid., viii, 110:15. 80. ibid., i, 114:6, 271:9; 11, 12:16, 18:9, 81:2, 467:1, 470:10, 472pu, 487:11, 493:11; iii, 85:6, 93pu, 105:8, 135:11, 145:12, 169:12, 207:12, 317:4; iv, 224:11; v, 269:9; vi, 158:5; vii, 51:4, 107:11, 231:1, for some of the more obvious examples. 100 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ḥadīth al-azāriqa.81 that sources and new information should be so roughly integrated suggests no particular skill as an akhbārī. and if we examine the interpolations to see what it was that ibn aʿtham sought to add to his sources, this conclusion is quickly confirmed. in many cases, his major interpolations are the stuff of popular folklore and pious legend. in his account of the conquest of syria, for example, he intervenes with a long aside on al-hilqām ibn al-ḥārith, a warrior in yemen in jāhilīya times who bests the most outstanding arab champions and proves to be a better fighter than a thousand men; eventually he converts to islam and fights on the muslim side in syria.82 there are extraordinary stories of leading muslim warriors debating with byzantine generals, and even heraclius himself; one has muslims going to antioch, where they confront heraclius and jabala ibn al-ayham, find that their conquests are predicted in the new testament, and discover that the emperor has in his possession a casket (tābūt) containing pictures of the prophets, including muhammad.83 there are also late umayyad accounts encouraging the jihād against byzantium—for example, relating at length how “the ten penitant youths of medina” gave up the joys of their jawārī to march off to fight the rūm when they heard that the caliph ʿabd al-malik (r. 65-86/685-705) was organizing an expedition.84 iraq receives less attention of this kind, but also attracts some remarkable tales. in one, yazdagird goes out to hunt and pursues an onager into the desert; when the onager has led him beyond earshot of his retinue, it turns to him and, “with god’s permission”, warns him to believe in his lord and to refrain from kufr, otherwise he will lose his kingdom. the terrified ruler flees back to his palace and reports what has happened to his mōbadhs and his asāwira, who straightaway conclude that the doom foretold by the onager could only befall him at the hands of the arabs currently active in his domains.85 historical accounts are sometimes interrupted with faḍāʾil material on, for example, the congregational mosque of al-kūfa, the province of khurāsān, and even ʿumar ibn al-khaṭṭāb.86 the supernatural element is often prominent: encounters with hawātif are described,87 and where shīʿī foci of piety and devotion are concerned there are frequent evocations of angelic visitations.88 the shīʿī tenor, of course, also arises in other ways in ibn aʿtham’s interpolations. traditions of the prophet have it that muḥammad forbade that any candidate of the sufyānid line should assume the caliphate, cautioned the believers to separate muʿāwiya and ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ anytime they are seen together (“they will not be sitting together pondering anything good”), and commanded that if they see muʿāwiya 81. ibid., vii, 52:5-7. 82. ibid., i, 104:12-114:6. on the “thousandman”, the hazārmard of persian tradition, see noth, quellenkritische studien, 152. 83. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, i, 126:1-132:5. 84. see ibid., vii, 171:1-184:1, referred to in the heading as a khabar ḥasan. 85. ibid., i, 161:13-162:6. 86. ibid., 1, 286:17-288:11; ii, 78:1-81:1, 92:16-94:8. 87. e.g. ibid., i, 249ult-253:5, two especially interesting cases. 88. e.g. ibid., iv, 210ult-224:10, a series of stories on such matters. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 101 “on my minbar”, they should slit him open from belly to spine.89 pious narratives describe al-ḥusayn’s distress as he bends over his mortally wounded father, weeping and calling down curses on ibn muljam, while ʿalī himself tries to calm his son and assures him that “what is ordained will come”.90 muʿāwiya is the subject of numerous moralizing or entertaining anecdotes promoting ʿalid or shīʿī positions;91 and zaynab, “so eloquent that it was as if she were speaking through the mouth of her father,” upbraids the kūfans after karbalāʾ.92 all this was, of course, the stock and trade of the early muslim qāṣṣ, and there can be little doubt that ibn aʿtham was just such a pious storyteller, in this case from a shīʿī perspective. as such, his interest was not so much in the final shape of his history, or the extent to which it did or did not hold together as a whole, as it was in the various discrete contents of the work and the themes they could be used to illustrate. sources were selected for their “qiṣaṣ-appeal” and didactic merit, and to the resulting mélange were added other reports and tales which he happened to know. in fact, it is likely that the transitional phrases and headings which strike the modern reader as crude and indicative of poor integration in many cases reflect a subtler purpose: as these transition points were so obvious, the reader could not fail to distinguish stories introduced by ibn aʿtham, and thus to be credited to his talents as a qāṣṣ, from those which were already present in his main monograph sources. further, stories from such a loosely assembled text could easily be extracted and related separately. to judge from his book, ibn aʿtham must have done this many times himself with his own sources and materials, and it is from the recitation of precisely such excerpts that his kitāb al-futūḥ came to the attention of the later unknown figure who commissioned al-mustawfī’s translation.93 once ibn aʿtham is recognized as a qāṣṣ, and of the shīʿa into the bargain, the question of why he is such an obscure figure immediately becomes clearer. he was not a scholar of sunnī or shīʿī ḥadīth, and did not pursue a line of studies which would have attracted students to himself. and in his own day his work was probably not esteemed as much more than what it really was, a loose compendium of material which, while including historical works among its sources, was assembled with popular preaching and storytelling in mind. with no great work to preserve the memory of his name, or students to cite him in their silsilas, he quickly faded to anonymity and did not attract the attention of later compilers of biographical literature. even among sunnī muḥaddithūn, who predictably dismissed him as ḍaʿīf, he gained so little notice that he appears in none of the extant rijal al-sanad or 89. ibid., ii, 390:3-8; v, 24:12-13. 90. ibid., ii 466:11-18. the medieval reader would of course have realized instantly the powerful import of this statement—it applied not only to ʿalī, but to al-ḥusayn as well. 91. ibid., iii, 89:3-93:9, 101:4-105:7, 134:1-135:10, 142:9-145:11, 204:11-207:10. the same basic narrative form prevails in these tales: “after that”, as muʿāwiya and his courtiers sit in his majlis, someone asks leave to enter and is admitted; a repartee follows, usually with liberal citation of poetry. 92. ibid., v, 222:4-226:2. 93. see al-mustawfī, tarjama-i kitāb al-futūḥ, 2:3. 102 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ḍuʿafāʾ works.94 the transparent way in which ibn aʿtham uses sources to compile his history invites the conclusion that it would be an easy matter to recover these sources from the kitāb al-futūḥ. but recent research has shown that the works of the akhbārīs betray a significant creative dimension; compilers not only collected and assembled material, but also reshaped and revised it to suit their own needs and interests.95 as a result, blocks of text attributed to a certain author do not necessarily represent the text exactly as that author left it, and any effort to recover a lost source thus becomes a most painstaking and difficult task. a qāṣṣ like ibn aʿtham would have been no less likely to have engaged in such revision, and there are in fact obvious signs of this in his history. a useful illustration is his account of the “thousandman” al-hilqām ibn al-ḥārith.96 the story begins by describing how the arabs in days of yore used to raid and kill one another, their greatest warriors being ʿāmir ibn ṭufayl al-ʿāmirī, ʿantara ibn shaddād al-ʿabsī, and al-ʿabbās ibn mirdās al-sulamī. on one occasion, these three, accompanied by a thousand of the finest warriors of qays, set out on an expedition in which they wreaked great slaughter, defeated every foe they encountered, and won much booty. they then decided to return home, and when they arrived, they each in turn recited verse in which they boasted of their exploits to the people. in the original story, the poetry would of course have been cited at length, but here not a line of it appears; ibn aʿtham simply states the order in which the three warriors spoke, betraying with repeated recourse to an introductory qāla the fact that he has dropped all of the verses.97 another qāla then introduces the statement that “they continued on with the booty and goods until they came to a wadi near the land of yemen…”, which marks another gap, since we have just been told that the intent of the warriors had been to return home.98 when they confront al-hilqām, the combatants are all said to have recited rajaz verses (wa-huwa yartajizu) as they came forth to fight, but whereas the original story would surely have cited these verses, ibn aʿtham again drops them entirely.99 close analysis of his history would provide a sharper picture of how ibn aʿtham handled his material, but for present purposes it is already clear that he did not simply copy out what was available to him. like other authors of his day, he considered it entirely legitimate to engage in revision. for modern historians, this means that the kitāb al-futūḥ must be regarded not only in terms of numerous major sections com prised of older sources and interrupted by various interpolations and asides, but also with a view to the possibility of changes and revisions by ibn aʿtham to both types of material. and as will be seen below, it is further possible that revision was undertaken again, once the first two thirds of 94. our only indication that he was noticed at all appears in a negative comment on his reliability in yāqūt, irshād al-arīb, 1, 379:2: wa-huwa ʿinda aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth ḍaʿīf. yāqūt’s source for this observation is unknown. 95. see leder, korpus al-haiṯam ibn ʿadī, 8-14; conrad, “the conquest of arwād,” 391-95. 96. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, i, 104:12-114:6. 97. ibid., i, 105:6-9. 98. ibid., i, 105:10-11. 99. ibid., i,108pu-109pu. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 103 the text had already been finished. continuations of the text in the third/ninth century the abrupt transitions, digressions, and discontinuities in the text, together with the formulae used to mark them, highlight some very important aspects of the structure of the work as a whole. but at the same time, they have served to obscure the most important transition of all. in his account of the caliphate of al-rashīd (r. 170-93/786-809), ibn aʿtham provides only three paragraphs on this ruler before the appearance of the terminating sentence: tamma kitāb al-futūḥ.100 that is, the text as composed by ibn aʿtham ends at this point, and the rest of the work as we have it today comprises a continuation, or dhayl. confirmation of this comes from the account of ibn aʿtham by yāqūt, who describes as follows the material available to him: he wrote... a kitāb al-futūḥ, a well-known work in which he discusses [events] to the days of al-rashīd, and a kitāb al-taʾrīkh [extending] to the end of the days of al-muqtadir and beginning with the days of al-maʾmūn, such that it is practically a continuation (dhayl) of the former. i have seen both books.101 this suggestion of two histories, one continuing the other, points to a common phenomenon in arabic literature,102 but it is very unlikely that ibn aʿtham intended that the main text should terminate the way it does. he provides a domestic anecdote, refers to the size and complexity of the ʿabbāsid court and bureaucracy under al-rashīd, and describes the immense wealth gained by this caliph, and with that the text just stops. there are no concluding eulogies or praises of god and the prophet, as one often finds at the end of an islamic text, and there is no apparent reason for why the book should terminate at this point. one may thus conclude that ibn aʿtham was suddenly unable to proceed any further, and although we cannot “know” what it was that cut short his work, his death would of course be one plausible explanation. if the kitāb al-futūḥ ended at this point, then the material following must belong to some other work, and there immediately arises the question of whether this last section is the kitāb al-taʾrīkh seen by yāqūt. in all likelihood it is. this new section devotes 99 pages to the ʿabbāsid caliphate, beginning in the reign of al-rashīd, in much the same way that the kitāb al-futūḥ had covered, at much greater length, the history of earlier times. its function is precisely that of a dhayl, as yāqūt observed, although it is uncertain whether the title he gives it was the original one (assuming that there was an original one). yāqūt’s reference to seeing “both books” (al-kitābayn) could be taken as meaning texts in two separate mss, but it is at least as likely, and perhaps more so, that what he had was very similar to what survives today: a history with its dhayl continuing on in the same ms, but with a title provided to announce the beginning of the new work. 100. ibid., viii, 244ult. 101. yāqūt, irshād al-arīb, i, 379:2-5. 102. see caesar e. farah, the dhayl in medieval arabic historiography (new haven: american oriental society, 1967). 104 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) one point on which yāqūt errs, however, is his assumption that the kitāb al-taʾrīkh (as the dhayl will henceforth be called here) was the work of ibn aʿtham. it is immediately clear how he arrived at this conclusion: the dhayl opens with an isnād which begins ḥaddathanī abū muḥammad, and abū muḥammad was the kunya of ibn aʿtham. further, the continuator followed the example set by ibn aʿtham in offering only loosely integrated materials, making extensive use of headings or isnāds to mark separate narratives, and continuing the popular tenor of the original in his dhayl. it was thus an easy matter to conclude that both parts of the text had been composed by ibn aʿtham. there are, however, a number of clear indications that the dhayl cannot be the work of ibn aʿtham. this is, of course, already the working hypothesis with which we must begin: if ibn aʿtham was unable to complete the kitāb al-futūḥ, then the material following on where it breaks off is not likely to be his. the reference to “abū muḥammad” in the isnād opening the dhayl of course proves nothing, since this kunya was a very common one. direct indication of a change in authorship arises in the fact that as one moves to the kitāb al-taʾrīkh, the interest in shīʿī issues disappears. ibn aʿtham had pursued such matters not just to the time of karbalāʾ, but beyond this, if with much decreased intensity, to later affairs of special concern to the shīʿa. the pro-ʿalid poet al-kumayt (d. 126/743), for example, receives considerable attention,103 as do the risings of zayd ibn ʿalī (d. 122/740) and his son yaḥyā (d. 125/743).104 this stands in sharp contrast to the situation in the dhayl, which has not a word to say about any of the persecutions suffered by the ʿalids and their supporters under the early ʿabbāsids, nor of the bayʿa sworn to ʿalī al-riḍā in 201/816, or of his death under obscure circumstances in 203/818. it is true that no historian would have failed to recognize such subjects as sensitive areas of discussion, but while this would explain a lack of any effort to lay blame at the door of the ruling house, it does not account for the way in which the dhayl entirely ignores the ʿalids and the shīʿa.105 also revealing is the fact that while the kitāb al-futūḥ occasionally betrays its use of a source or sources written according to some basic annalistic principle,106 it more usually relies, as we have already seen, upon the sort of akhbārī-style topical monographs that were in circulation in the late second century ah. the kitāb al-taʾrīkh, on the other hand, is based on materials which reflect a much more developed stage in the evolution of arabic historical writing, organized according to reigns of caliphs or annalistic chronology. the author of the kitāb al-taʾrīkh routinely cites the dates of important events to the day, uses such introductory formulae of the annalistic tradition as fa-lamma dakhalat sana...,107 ends the section on each caliph with sīrat al-khulafāʾ material setting forth the ruler’s physical 103. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii, 82:6-97:13. 104. ibid., viii, 108:3-129ult. 105. on these matters, more will be said below. 106. see, e.g., ibid., viii, 82:4, stating “and in that year kumayt ibn zayd al-asadī was imprisoned”, although the year in question has not been mentioned earlier. 107. on the annalistic organization of historical texts according to the hijra reckoning as a secondary development, see noth, quellenkritische studien, 40-44. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 105 appearance, moral demeanor, and culture,108 and sometimes shows concern for identifying the leader of the annual pilgrimage.109 after the passage announcing the end of the kitāb al-futūḥ, the text continues with twenty pages on the reign of al-rashīd, almost half of them dealing with the caliph’s relations with al-shāfiʿī.110 this material on al-shāfiʿī is introduced by isnāds citing as their immediate informant “abū muḥammad”, which at first glance, as we have seen, may seem to refer to ibn aʿtham; in fact, al-majlisī took this to indicate that ibn aʿtham was himself a shāfiʿī.111 but this is certainly not the case, nor is it possible that these reports could even have been known to our author, or to anyone else of his time. al-shāfiʿī is described as al-imām, the sunna of the prophet is treated as an already established keystone in some “shāfiʿī” system, and the master’s death is described as an occasion for much grief among a large throng of followers. while it may be conceded that al-shāfiʿī enjoyed prestige and influence in his own lifetime, and that the collection and dissemination of his teachings began very soon after his death,112 the material here clearly presupposes the existence of a shāfiʿī madhhab in a form sufficiently coherent to make the master the subject of considerable veneration. now, as we shall see below, ibn aʿtham was probably working on the kitāb al-futūḥ after ah 204, which is both the date given by al-mustawfī for the completion of the arabic text and the year of al-shāfiʿī’s death. but as his father had been a student of jaʿfar al-ṣādiq, it is unlikely that ibn aʿtham lived long enough past ah 204 for accounts referring to al-shāfiʿī in this way to have been in circulation in his day.113 if there be any doubts about this, they are dispelled by the fact that one of the two akhbār on al-shāfiʿī is cited on the authority of al-mubarrad,114 who died in 285/898, almost eighty years after the benchmark date of ah 204 for ibn aʿtham’s work on the kitāb al-futūḥ. the isnād citing him begins with the name of “abū muḥammad”, who has the account of al-mubarrad through “one of the men of learning”, which indicates that the kunya “abū muḥammad” here, and probably also in the isnād at the beginning of the dhayl, refers to someone who lived at least a decade or so after al-mubarrad. the text which yāqūt knew as the kitāb al-taʾrīkh is thus a dhayl composed no earlier 108. noth (ibid., 37-38) regards the theme of sirāt al-khulafāʾ as primary, in that it does not in any manifest way derive from some other theme, but while this may be the case, the presumptions (e.g. the caliph as the center of political authority) and articulation (e.g. knowledge of minute personal details) of the theme suggest a perhaps relatively late development. 109. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii, 253:1-2, 272ult-273:1, 275:7-276:9, 298:4, 300:5, 307pu-308:2, 317:12, 321:1, 322:11-12, 323:9, 13, 325:4-5, 330:15-16, 18, 339ult-343:11, 346:13, 352:13-14, 354:14-15. 110. ibid., viii, 245:1-263:10. 111. al-amīn, aʿyān al-shīʿa, vii, 429. i have not seen the passage in the biḥār al-anwār to which al-amin refers. 112. al-rabīʿ ibn sulaymān al-murādī (d. 270/883-84) was already transmitting the kitāb al-umm in egypt in 207/822-23, only three years after the master’s death. see al-shāfiʿī, kitāb al-umm (cairo: al-maṭbaʿa al-amīrīya al-kubrā, ah 1321), ii, 93:19. 113. on the rise of the shāfiʿī madhdhab, see heinz halm, die ausbreitung der šāfiʿitischen rechtsschule von den anfängen bis zum 8./14. jahrhundert (wiesbaden: ludwig reichert, 1974), 15-31. 114. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii, 252:8-9. 106 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) than the very end of the third/ninth century, which is far too late to have be written by ibn aʿtham. further, it is not the work of a single continuator. having just related some developments pertaining to al-rashīd’s joint nomination of his sons muḥammad (the future caliph al-amīn) and ʿabd allāh (al-maʾmūn) to the caliphate, the text again confronts us with an abrupt and unexpected turn of direction: these are some fine narratives concerning al-rashīd which i wrote down on the authority of a certain litterateur and added them in your [copy of the] book (wa-alḥaqtuhā bi-kitābika) so that you might peruse them, for they really are choice tales.115 this is followed by four akhbār, all anecdotes focusing on the impressive education and overall worthiness of al-rashīd’s sons (especially muḥammad),116 and concluding with the heading: thumma rajaʿna ilā al-khabar al-awwal min amr al-rashīd wa-ibnayhi muḥammad wa-ʿabd allāh,117 indicating a return to his point of departure in the basic text of the dhayl. upon initial reflection the reference to “your book” may seem to be addressed to the unknown author of the kitāb al-taʾrīkh, i.e. by a student or younger protégé. but a closer look will reveal that this is unlikely. the language, suggesting that the writer has taken the liberty of adding material from someone else so that the person addressed might thereby learn something, would be outrageous presumption if addressed by a student to his teacher. on the other hand, it is absolutely typical of how writers of the third century ah and later would posture before a patron. the phrase bi-kitābika, literally “in your book”, would thus mean “in your [copy of the] book”, an entirely acceptable sense for such a phrase. the material introduced by this heading thus marks the beginning of an interpolation by some scribe copying the text for a patron or client. this interpolation clearly extends only to the end of the fourth anecdote, as the scribe is at pains to advise the reader—to whit, his patron—that he is now returning the text to its original subject, the prelude to the conflict between al-amīn and al-maʾmūn. in introducing this section, he follows ibn aʿtham’s own method in the main body of the book, and in closing it he uses the same 115. ibid., viii, 263:11-43. 116. the anecdotes consist of the following tales: 1) ʿalī ibn ḥamza al-kisāʾī (d. 189/865) reports on how, in 183/799, he was asked by al-rashīd to examine his sons to see how well they had been educated. the examination is followed by praises for the caliph and his son, and interspersed with verses of poetry and comments on grammar. 2) khalaf al-aḥmar (d. ca. 180/796) tells how he was charged by al-rashīd to tutor muḥammad. as the caliph’s demands were quite stern, the instruction was very demanding. muḥammad complained to khāliṣa, his mother’s slave attendant; she asked khalaf to relent, but he refused. 3) this links with the second anecdote, and here khāliṣa tells khalaf how zubayda, muḥammad’s mother, had an ominous dream about him. despite the reassurances of astrologers and dream interpreters, she continues to be anxious about the dream’s meaning and its import for her son. 4) the section closes with an anecdote related by the future ḥājib of al-amīn, al-ʿabbās ibn al-faḍl ibn al-rabīʿ, on the prince and his educational training. the tale stresses that as muḥammad shares the prophet’s name and his epithet al-amīn (quraysh, he says, called the prophet by this name before the mabʿath), he may be the amīr whom the ʿulamāʾ say will come to spread justice, revive the sunna, and stamp out oppression. 117. ibid., viii, 272:15-16. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 107 technique (a heading) and wording (thumma rajaʿna ilā...). that is, having recognized how ibn aʿtham had worked interpolations into the framework of his sources in the kitāb al-futūḥ, the scribe proceeded to add material to the dhayl in the very same way. it is also possible that this same scribe (or some other one, for that matter) made similar additions elsewhere in the text, but in such a way that the interpolation does not draw immediate notice. such activity, of course, would not necessarily be limited to the dhayl. in the main body of the kitāb al-futūḥ (i.e. before the beginning of the dhayl), one of al-mansūr’s daughters tells a tale of how her grandmother, pregnant with the future caliph, dreamed that a lion came forth from her and received the homage of all the other predatory beasts.118 as it happens, the immediate informant for this story is al-ḥasan ibn al-ḥubāb al-muqriʾ al-baghdādī, who died in baghdād in 301/914.119 assuming that this figure was an informant of the scribe, this latter person’s interpolations into the book could be dated roughly to the first half of the fourth century ah. the problem with this proposition, however, is that the arabic text is clearly defective right where the interpolation from al-ḥasan ibn al-ḥubāb begins, and this anomalous passage may well have been just a marginal note in the ms which was copied into the main body of the text by mistake.120 if this was an interpolation by the scribe, it seems to have been a exceptional case; there are no other similarly obvious instances of such additions within the main body of the kitāb al-futūḥ. once the dhayl returns to its original author, it continues for 82 pages and covers the death of al-rashīd, the caliphates of al-amīn (r. 193-98/809-13) and al-maʾmūn (r. 198-218/813-33), and the first half of the caliphate of al-muʿtaṣim (r. 218-27/833-42).121 this material includes narratives for numerous events of this period, but again in a highly incidental fashion. for the reign of al-muʿtaṣim it provides only brief references to the foundation of sāmarrāʾ in 220/835 and two versions of the defeat and execution of bābak in 222/837. at this point the text suddenly states: the length of his caliphate was the same as that of shīrawayh, son of kisrā, murderer of his father. he lived to the age of 24, and his death took place in sāmarrāʾ in al-qaṣr al-muhadhdhab (sic.).122 this of course can have nothing to do with al-muʿtaṣim, who died after a reign of eight and a half years at the age of 46 or 47.123 the comparison is rather the well-known one between the six-month reign of the sasanian ruler shīrawayh and the six-month reign 118. ibid., viii, 211ult-212:4. 119. see al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī (d. 463/1071), taʾrīkh baghdād (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1349/1931), viii, 301:4-302:2, no. 3813. 120. there are, in fact, a number of marginal notes in mss of this work, some of them quite long and providing supplementary material relevant to the topics under discussion in the main text. 121. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii, 263:11-353ult. 122. ibid., viii, 353:1-3. 123. see al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923), taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk, ed. m.j. de goeje et al. (leiden: e.j. brill, 18791901), iii, 1323pu-1324:4. 108 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) of al-muntaṣir 247-48/861-62), who did in fact die at the al-qaṣr al-muḥdath palace in sāmarrāʾ at the age of 24 or 25.124 ibn aʿtham’s identification of the caliph’s deathplace as al-qaṣr al-muhadhdhab may easily be dismissed as a manifest error by the scribe or modern editor.125 for present purposes the import of all this is that the kitāb al-taʾrīkh fails to say a word about the caliphates of al-wāthiq (r. 227-32/842-47) and al-mutawakkil (r. 232-47/847-61), and this seems to mark a further break and a new stage in the elaboration of the text. that a different hand is at work where the narrative resumes is also indicated by the fact that while the earlier material consisted of detailed narrative, this new stage comprises only a brief summary of caliphal chronology, providing nothing but accession and death dates and ending with the abdication of al-mustaʿīn in 252/866. as nothing is said about the end of the three-year reign of his successor al-muʿtazz (r. 252-55/866-69), it would at first seem that this final stage was the work of someone writing in the brief reign of this caliph. but this is of course impossible. if the author of the kitāb al-taʾrīkh was writing late enough to cite an isnād in which al-mubarrad (d. 285/898) figures at third remove, which would mean that al-mubarrad was probably long since deceased by that author’s time, then in the party responsible for extending the dhayl even further we cannot be dealing with someone who could have been active in the 250s/860s. here we may return to yāqūt’s comment that the manuscript he saw extended to the reign of al-muqtadir (r. 95-320/908-32). this suggests that the text as we have it is defective at the end. the extent of the lost material is difficult to judge, and would depend on how long into the caliphate of al-muʿtaṣim the detailed content of ibn aʿtham’s continuator, the author of the kitāb al-taʾrīkh, extended. an attractive hypothesis would be that as so often happened with medieval mss, only the last folio was damaged, with loss of text to both recto and verso, most likely to the lower half of the page. if this was the case, then only some lines of text would have been affected. circumstantial support for this explanation may be seen in the fact that the text at this point offers only a few key dates, and so would not have required more than a few lines to reach the reign of al-muqtadir. for present purposes the important point is that what stands at the end of the extant text is not really its proper end, but rather a fragment probably representing the only legible part of a damaged terminus. had this damage not occurred, our text would probably accord with yāqūt’s description of a text extending to the time of al-muqtadir. the gap may have existed only in the textual transmission underlying the ahmet iii ms, but as there is no other manuscript material for this part of the text, it is impossible to pursue this matter further. development within ibn aʿtham’s text we may now turn our attention to a major problem within the original kitāb al-futūḥ. as we have seen, the text for which ibn aʿtham himself was responsible extends only to 124. ibid., iii, 1498:8-13. 125. on al-qaṣr al-muḥdath, see ernst herzfeld, geschichte der stadt samarra (hamburg: verlag von eckardt und messtorff, 1948), 216, 227. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 109 the opening passages concerning the caliphate of al-rashīd. but this does not tally with the persian translation, which ends with the immediate aftermath of karbalāʾ. the discrepancy cannot be attributed to al-mustawfī’s use of an incomplete arabic ms, since he knows that the arabic text was written in ah 204. as this sort of information would almost certainly have been provided in a terminal colophon, his arabic ms must have been complete up to and including this colophon. nor can an explanation be sought in an incomplete persian translation, since, as we have seen above, al-mustawfī’s rendering was finished after his death by al-mābarnābādī. one must conclude, then, that an arabic ms of the kitāb al futūḥ, complete to a terminal colophon dated ah 204, was translated in its entirely into persian; and this, in turn, suggests that at first ibn aʿtham brought his text down only as far as karbalāʾ. turning to the arabic text as we have it today, the factors at work here may be explained in terms of the author’s motives and aims in compiling his book. it is amply clear that while ibn aʿtham may have brought no particular skill as a compiler to his task, he did have some overarching agenda in mind. this is hinted at in several passages in the book itself. in volume viii, at the end of his account of a khārijite rebellion against the umayyad caliph marwān ibn muḥammad, ibn aʿtham observes that the demise of the umayyad regime was close at hand and then suddenly states: this then—may god honor you—is the last of the futūḥ, and after this we begin with akhbār on naṣr ibn sayyār, al-kirmānī, and abū muslim al-khawlānī al-khurāsānī.126 this is followed by a major heading: ibtidaʾ khabar khurāsān maʿa naṣr ibn sayyār wa-judayʿ ibn ʿalī al-kirmanī wa-abī muslim ʿabd al-raḥmān ibn muslim, which introduces the continuation of the text from the point where ibn aʿtham had just broken off. from this it would seem that he considered it difficult to carry the theme of futūḥ past the campaigns and expeditions of the later umayyads, and hence felt a bit self-conscious at continuing his kitāb al-futūḥ into an era in which the specific theme of futūḥ could no longer be the primary concern. this solicitude for the integrity of some notion of futūḥ emerges again in his account of the reign of al-mahdī (r. 158-69/775-85), where the text advises the reader that “concerning al-mahdī there are narratives (akhbār) and fireside tales (asmār) which are not relevant to the subject of futūḥ”.127 that is, ibn aʿtham considers that he is still writing on the subject of futūḥ and the irrelevance of the accounts in question to this topic is the reason why ibn aʿtham is not going to cite them here. exactly what this notion of futūḥ was is difficult to judge, but may be viewed in relation to the fact that by the dawn of the third century ah, muslim audiences were accustomed to the presentation of futūḥ within the framework of islamic salvation history: military conflict was a means through which the will and plan of god were realized on earth, with the outcome establishing the divinely ordained order, and, at the same time, rewarding the righteous and god-fearing and punishing their enemies and opponents.128 the archetypical 126. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, viii, 145:17-18. 127. ibid., viii, 239:8-9. 128. for the general background to such writing, see john wansbrough, the sectarian. milieu: content 110 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) paradigm for this was the conquest of syria, which not only established true religion in a new land, but also, on the one hand, rewarded the muslims for responding to god’s summons to believe in him and abandon their old pagan ways, and on the other, punished the rūm for their tyranny, injustice, and above all, disbelief.129 to an audience already familiar with such paradigms, ibn aʿtham offered a popular history which situated the shīʿī case against a backdrop of military conflict: just as god’s will had been worked out in the conquests which achieved the expansion of islam, so also it would be in the strife which marked the course of the umayyad caliphate, continued to plague the ʿabbāsids, and repeatedly had dire consequences for the shīʿa and the ʿalid line. pursuing such a comprehensive view of history in terms of futūḥ, would only be meaningful, of course, if it could be brought to a satisfactory conclusion: that is, where in ibn aʿtham’s scheme of things was the al-yarmūk required to mark the fruition of divine design? this was surely not to be seen in the debacle at karbalāʾ, where the persian translation ends, much less in the reign of al-rashīd, where the author’s original arabic terminates. if we attach primary significance to the year ah 204 itself, rather than to the point reached in the text by that time, a very attractive hypothesis immediately arises for our consideration. only six weeks into this year (ṣafar 204/august 819), the triumphant entry of al-maʾmūn into baghdad marked the end of a decade of terrible civil war which had brought much destruction and suffering to the capital itself. the question of the greater meaning and import of a communal history marked by continual military strife was thus one that must have been on the minds of many as the war entered its final stages and then gave way to recovery and the re-establishment of order. but at a key point in the conflict, an event of particular importance to the shīʿa also occurred. in 201/816-17, al-maʾmūn had the eighth imam, ʿalī ibn mūsā, taken to his residence at marw, and there proclaimed him his successor to the caliphate with the title of al-riḍā. the imam was married to one of al-maʾmūm’s daughters, and the black banners of the ʿabbāsid house were replaced by the green ones of the line of the prophet. to the expanding shīʿī community back in baghdad, this move must have come as a complete surprise: al-maʾmūn’s ʿalid proclivities were not unknown, but ʿalī ibn mūsā was far older than the caliph, and hitherto he had been living a secluded life of quiet devotion to scholarship in medina.130 the impact of the announcement would in any case have been enormous; after more than 150 years of rule by usurpers, the rightful reunion of political and religious authority in the person of the and composition of islamic salvation history (oxford: oxford university press, 1978), esp. 1-49; and more generally, bernd radtke, weltgeschichte und weltbeschreibung im mittelalterlichen islam (stuttgart: franz steiner verlag, 1992), 160-68. 129. see conrad, “al-azdī’s history of the arab conquests,” 39-40, esp. n. 46; idem, “conquest of arwād,” 369-70. 130. see francesco gabrieli, al-maʾmūn e gli ʿalidi (leipzig: eduard pfeiffer, 1929), 29-47; dominique sourdel, “la politique religieuse du calife ‘abbâside al-ma’mûn,” revue des études islamiques 30 (1962), 27-48; tilman nagel, staat und glaubensgemeinschaft im islam. geschichte der politischen ordnungsvorstellungen der muslime (zurich and munich: artemis verlag, 1981), i, 170-84; hugh kennedy, the early abbasid caliphate: a political history (london: groom helm, 1981), 157-61. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 111 imam could at last be realistically anticipated. to a qāṣṣ and aspiring author like ibn aʿtham, the prospect of the accession of the imam to the caliphate would have been especially significant. the violent repression which had periodically been brought to bear against advocates of shīʿī claims under earlier ʿabbāsid caliphs131 would not have encouraged the production of a shīʿī view of islamic history, however crudely pieced together it may have been. this is not to suggest that pro-shīʿī literature had not been produced in earlier years—it certainly had, and much of it was in fact used by ibn aʿtham. but the invective in such literature had been reserved for the umayyads, who had been overthrown by the ʿabbāsids and could easily be vilified without consideration for the consequences. a comprehensive history, however, would carry the narrative into the ʿabbāsid caliphate and ibn aʿtham’s own contemporary period, where the prevailing mood of the times would not have encouraged the composition of a history focusing on the ʿalids and the shīʿa, which by al-maʾmūn’s reign had already suffered major repression. the proclamation of ʿalī al-riḍā as walī al-ʿahd, however, not only signaled that the way was clear for a general exposition of the history which had brought the umma to the brink of this great event, but also provided a culminating point with which a narrative could most appropriately end: the theme of futūḥ, articulated from the ridda wars through the early islamic conquests, the travails of the ʿalid family, and the further expansion of islam under the umayyads, and ending with the great civil war between al-maʾmūn and al-amīn, would climax in the dramatic fulfillment of divine plan with the promise of a caliphate which would bring shīʿī aspirations to fruition.132 to whom would such a history have been directed? any number of possibilities could be advanced, but an especially revealing passage at the end of ibn aʿtham’s discussion of the election of abū bakr at the saqīfa banī sāʿida narrows the options down significantly. here our author concludes the section as follows: this, may god honor you, is what happened at the saqīfat banī sāʿida. this is the recension of the religious scholars, and here i have not wished to write down anything of the additions [introduced by] the rāfiḍa; for were this book to fall into the hands of someone other than yourself, it could have certain implications even for you, may god preserve you.133 the first thing this passage establishes is that the kitāb al-futūḥ was a commissioned work: ibn aʿtham did not proceed at his own initiative, but was working for a patron. but who was the patron? ḥamīd allāh, who thought the bankipore text was the kitāb al-ridda of al-wāqidī, suggested that this passage might have been addressed to the caliph al-maʾmūn.134 this could as easily be proposed with respect to ibn aʿtham, but cannot 131. for a summary, see bernard lewis, art. “ʿalids” in ei2, i (leiden: e.j. brill, 1960), i, 402b. 132. it goes without saying, of course, that many would have observed that ʿalī al-riḍā, being older than al-maʾmūn in the first place, might never accede to the throne, and that even if he did, no commitments had been made to the legitimacy of continuing ʿalid claims after his death. 133. ibn aʿtham, bankipore text, 31:5-8; = muranyi, “ein neuer bericht,” 247:204 206. 134. ibn aʿtham, bankipore text, 30 n. 2. 112 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) be the case where a work finished in ah 204 is concerned, since ibn aʿtham must have begun work on the text much earlier, i.e. when al-maʾmūn was far away to the east and preoccupied with much more important matters. on the other hand, the passage could have been addressed to a high-ranking official among the caliph’s supporters in baghdad. such an official, whose identity seems beyond reach, would have merited the honorifics which ibn aʿtham addresses to him, and at the same time would have shared the author’s concern lest they both come to be associated with a text taken for a rāfiḍī tract. in a circumstantial fashion, the possibility of such patronage is supported by the fact that ibn aʿtham did, as we shall see, have close contacts with numerous personalities who had been members of the imperial entourage under earlier ʿabbāsid caliphs. these concerns soon became moot, however, for ibn aʿtham’s enterprise to fashion a popular history promoting a shīʿī vision of the islamic past would have suffered a devastating blow in shaʿbān 203/september—october 818, when ʿalī al-riḍā suddenly died under suspicious circumstances in ṭūs. the arrival of the news in baghdad some weeks later would have rendered any history conceived along these lines pointless, and it would thus come as no surprise to find the author of such a work abandoning his task, at least for the time being. if one searches for a telltale caesura in the kitāb al-futūḥ, it clearly appears after karbalāʾ. the text up to this point reflects all the zeal and fervor which one would expect from a qāṣṣ writing in the aftermath of ʿalī al-riḍā’s appointment as walī al-ʿahd, and the fact that this ends with karbalāʾ, and that the persian translation also ends there, simply indicates the point at which the dramatic setback represented by the death of ʿalī al-riḍā compelled ibn aʿtham to suspend work on his book. that is, the text available to ai-mustawfīi 400 years later was a full copy of the book as ibn aʿtham left it in ah 204—a first recension, as it were. if this hypothesis is valid, then the remainder of the text, up to the reign of al-rashīd, must represent later work by ibn aʿtham, and in it we should expect to see signs of the difficulties encountered in continuing a work when its original plan and aim had been irretrievably compromised. this is plainly in evidence in the remainder of the kitāb al-futūḥ after karbalāʾ. the former zeal is gone, and while developments relevant to the shīʿa continue to be discussed, they suggest no particular interpretation; the imāms themselves seem deliberately to be avoided, the oppressive measures taken against the shīʿa by al-manṣūr (r. 136-58/754-75) and al-hādī (r. 169-70/785-s6) go unnoticed, and ʿalid rebellions against the ʿabbāsids are passed over in silence. one might readily see why ibn aʿtham, writing at the seat of the ʿabbāsid caliphate, might hesitate to treat such events with the zeal with which he had taken up earlier developments, but it is nevertheless noteworthy that his attitude toward the history of his own community becomes so ambivalent that al-majlisī, using the kitāb al-futūḥ 900 years later, took him for a sunnī and included him among the mukhālifūn, whom he says he will cite in order to refute them.135 and as the passages cited above clearly show, even the theme of futūḥ itself seems to have become difficult for ibn aʿtham to sustain. 135. al-majlisī, biḥār al-anwār, i, 24:13, 25:9. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 113 it is also noteworthy that in several significant ways karbalāʾ marks a shift in ibn aʿtham’s technique as a historical writer. as observed above, the kitāb al-futūḥ is a compilation largely achieved by copying earlier monographs on major subjects one after the other, literally end to end. while this tendency may be seen both before and after karbalāʾ, it is most pronounced in the first part of the book, where almost all of the text has obviously come directly from topical monographs: works on the saqīfa banī sāʿida, the futūḥ in various regions, the murder of ʿuthmān, ṣiffīn, nahrawān, the abdication of al-ḥasan, and the events leading up to karbalāʾ. aside from ibn aʿtham’s own interpolations, “filler” on matters of lesser concern, taken from other written sources, is very limited—hardly more than ten percent of the text. after karbalāʾ the material becomes far more varied, and specialized monographs, while still prominent, are nowhere near as dominant in their role as sources. in part this reflects the fact that in terms of the developing historical consciousness of the shīʿa, such events as ṣiffīn and karbalāʾ were far more important than anything which was to follow. but the shift after karbalāʾ is not just away from extended quotation from long monographs on issues relevant to the shīʿa, but away from extended quotation from long monographs in general, and so suggests the changed working method of a writer returning to a task he had set aside for some time. related to this is ibn aʿtham’s use of the isnād. this question will be pursued below, but here it is worth observing that karbalāʾ marks a dramatic shift in our author’s method of citing authorities. prior to this benchmark in the text, he cites long collective isnāds for the most important extended narratives taken from his monograph sources, but hardly ever gives isnāds for brief individual akhbār. after karbalāʾ this pattern is reversed: the collective isnād is never used, while the number of isnāds for individual reports, though still modest in absolute terms, rises dramatically in comparison to the number given earlier. this interpretation of the extant textual evidence and its historical context has a number of important implications. first, and most obviously, the composition date of ah 204 refers only to the arabic text down to the account of karbalāʾ and its immediate aftermath; the rest was composed at some later time. unfortunately, the dearth of personal information about ibn aʿtham allows us minimal grounds for estimating how much later this continued work could have occurred. as has been observed several times already, our author’s father was a student of jaʿfar al-ṣādiq, who died in 148/765. if one takes into consideration bulliet’s argument that medieval islamic education largely involved the teaching of the very young by the very old,136 then it must be conceded that ibn aʿtham may still have been active in the 220s and 230s ah and that work on his history could have continued as late as this. second, if ibn aʿtham abandoned work on his history in ah 204, once he had reached karbalāʾ, and then resumed work later, the question arises of whether his extension of 136. richard w. bulliet, “the age structure of medieval islamic education,” studia islamica 57 (1983), 105-17. 114 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) the text was accompanied by revision of the part already completed. this is what one would expect in any case, and later revision of the arabic text up to volume v, 251 of the hyderabad edition would explain why, for example, the persian translation by al-mustawfī contains so much material, especially arabic verse, which is lacking in the arabic text. in such a situation the persian translation becomes extremely important, as the sole surviving comprehensive witness to the first recension of the arabic text as it stood in ah 204. a critical edition of this persian text is thus to be encouraged as a contribution of considerable potential value; until one is available, the question of possible revision of the first arabic recension cannot be addressed in any serious way. use of the isnād the kitāb al-futūḥ poses serious problems where proper names are concerned. throughout the book, both in the text and in the isnāds, names are often badly garbled or completely different from what one finds in parallel passages in other works, and the hyderabad edition often compounds the confusion by adding its own mistakes or engaging in hypercorrection, on the assumption that the forms of names in other printed texts must be the “correct” ones: e.g. bishr ibn ḥarīm in the mss is “corrected” to khuzayma al-asadī in the edition, al-raqqa becomes al-ruṣāfa, mūsā al-hāshimī is replaced by ʿalī ibn ʿīsā ibn māhān, and ibrāhīm ibn muḥammad al-ghassānī appears as al-sarī ibn manṣūr al-shaybānī.137 the isnāds in the text are often confused, and while some of the errors can be corrected fairly easily, others pose very difficult problems indeed. and rather than assist with such difficulties, the persian translation often compounds them; where the arabic has asīd ibn ʿalqama, for example, the persian has rashīd ibn ʿabd allāh al-azdī.138 some of the confusion may be put down to the process of textual transmission, or perhaps to ibn aʿtham’s revision of his first recension; but from what we have already seen above, it would be a mistake to presume that ibn aʿtham took the isnād any more seriously than he did other aspects of the formal akhbārī’s craft. as a qāṣṣ, he legitimated his work in the eyes of his audience not by proofs of ability as a textual critic, but through the power of his stories to moralize, entertain, or teach didactic points. the question of ibn aʿtham’s use of the isnād thus becomes very complicated when studied in detail, especially where investigation of his sources is concerned. this topic is being pursued elsewhere,139 however, and here discussion will be limited to those areas which can inform us on matters already raised above. ibn aʿtham does not deploy the isnād in any consistent fashion in his text, and it is certainly not the case that he “belongs to the classical school of islamic history writing, basing himself on akhbār introduced by their isnads”.140 indeed, isnāds are rarely given 137. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, v, 222:5; viii, 217:3, 259:11-12, 312:3. 138. ibid., i, 249ult. 139. see n. 64 above. 140. see hugh kennedy, the prophet and the age of the caliphates: the islamic near east from the sixth to the eleventh century (london: longman, 1986), 362-63. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 115 through the first five volumes of the kitāb al-futūḥ to karbalāʾ, and collecting them does not in itself offer a conspectus of ibn aʿthām’s sources. his usage of the isnād may best be assessed in terms of the two types he offers in the two recensions of his text, as identified above, and as these attestations of authority serve very different purposes, they may be discussed separately. collective isnāds there are four collective isnāds supporting long sections of text on major topics which would have been covered in early akhbārī monographs, and these name authorities for extended blocks of text on the election of abu bakr,141 the caliphate of ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān,142 the battle of ṣiffīn,143 and the events leading up to the death of al-ḥusayn at karbalāʾ.144 a fifth isnād cites a single chain of informants for the ghārāt.145 it will immediately be seen that these isnāds all support material of special importance to the shīʿa, and that all fall within the first recension of the text. this would indicate that here, at least, ibn aʿtham felt the need for some formal verification of his authorities. unfortunately, these isnāds are in varying states of disarray. at the cost of considerable time and effort, one can often put such matters right, but here the problem is compounded by the fact that ibn aʿtham’s chains of authorities include so many obscure or unknown persons for whom external evidence allows us to propose no floruit. at this point, all that can be said is that even when ibn aʿtham does cite authorities, he is highly erratic and shows no concern for the for mal criteria of isnād criticism which were well-established by the third century ah. nuʿaym ibn muzāḥim al-minqarī, presumably the brother of the better-known naṣr ibn muzāḥim al-minqarī (d. 212/827),146 is twice cited by ibn aʿtham as a direct oral informant (ḥaddathanī…),147 but, in the other two collective isnāds, another informant stands between him and our author.148 hishām ibn al-kalbī (d. 204/819) is cited once directly,149 but twice through abū yaʿqūb isḥāq ibn yūsuf al-fazārī.150 materials from al-madāʾinī (d. 228/843) are handled in a particularly inconsistent fashion. 141. see bankipore text, 19:3-11; cf. also muranyi, “ein neuer bericht,” 236. 142. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ii, 147:3-149:3. the ahmet iii and chester beatty mss open with this isnād, and shaban (ʿabbāsid revolution, xviii) thus took it as identifying the sources for the kitāb al-futūh as a whole. 143. ibid., ii, 344:10-345:9. 144. ibid., iv, 209:4-210:14. 145. ibid., iv, 36ult-37:2, following immediately on after the heading: ibtidāʾ dhikr al-ghārāt baʿda ṣiffīn. 146. muranyi (“ein neuer bericht,” 237) considers that where nuʿaym’s name is given, it is actually naṣr who is meant. this is unlikely. the form nuʿaym consistently appears as such in the text (see the next two notes), with no discrepancies among the mss, and in one case the two brothers and naṣr’s son al-ḥasan all appear in the same collective isnād (ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ii, 344:2, 345:4). 147. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ii, 147ult, 344:12. 148. ibn aʿtham, bankipore text, 19:5-6 (= muranyi, “ein neuer bericht,” 236); idem, kitāb al-futūḥ, iv, 209:7-8. 149. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ii, 344ult-345:1. 150. ibid., ii, 147ult-148:1, 342:4-5. 116 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) in a collective isnād for the caliphate of ʿuthmān, he is named as a direct oral informant and referred to as abū al-ḥasan ʿalī ibn muḥammad al-qurashī,151 while in a secondrecension isnād for the uprising of muṣʿab ibn al-zubayr in al-baṣra during the second civil war, ibn aʿtham cites al-madāʾinī’s material through ʿabd allāh ibn muḥammad al-balawī.152 elsewhere, however, our author is satisfied to quote, as we have already seen, from one of al-madāʾinī’s books.153 examples of such patterns could be pursued further, but it is already clear that while ibn aʿtham makes use of collective isnāds, even these betray his disinterest in the critical considerations which isnāds were used to address in the first place. to have unnecessary links in his isnāds, or to quote from a book or second-hand informant when the author was personally known and accessible to him, did not seem to trouble him. he was willing to cite anyone who was available and who had interesting material to offer; indeed, a list of his immediate informants makes sense only if one recognizes it not as a group of teachers or authorities of the generation prior to his, but rather as a general collection of informants active at the time the kitāb al-futūḥ was written. it is true, of course, that matters of isnād criticism were far more important in the field of ḥadīth, where the transmission of the words, deeds, and sanctions of the prophet were at stake, than they were in akhbār. but this is not the point at issue here. the features discussed above demonstrate that ibn aʿtham did not handle isnāds with critical considerations in mind, and consequently, that one cannot assess them in terms of the formal critical principles which we know prevailed in his day. when we add to this problem his frequent citation (as in isnāds for individual reports) of unknown informants, his references to names which could refer to numerous persons,154 and the highly defective editorial state of many of the chains, it becomes amply clear that at present it is difficult to do much with these isnāds. two rather limited conclusions, however, can be drawn from them at this time. first, the death dates of the identifiable informants with whom he had direct personal contact range from 201/816 for ʿalī ibn ʿāṣim ibn suhayb155 to 228/843 for al-madāʾinī. a first recension completed in 204/819-20 could easily have made use of information from 151. ibid., ii, 147:3-4. the ahmet iii and chester beatty mss read abū al-ḥusayn for abū al-ḥasan, but the chester beatty text is based on that of the ahmet iii ms, and as shaban (ʿabbāsid revolution, xviii) argues, this reading may be dismissed as a scribal error. al-madāʾinī’s correct kunya is given elsewhere in the text (vi, 253ult-254:1), where he is again called “al-qurashī”, as he is also, for example, in ibn saʿd (d. 230/844), kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. eduard sachau et al. (leiden: e.j. brill, 1904-40), 1.2, 30ult. as al-madāʾinī was in fact a mawlā of quraysh (also as observed by shaban), it is not unusual that some tradents should have referred to him by the laqab al-qurashī rather than al-madāʾinī. 152. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, vi, 253ult-254:1. 153. see n. 76 above. 154. cf. leder, korpus al-haiṯam ibn ʿadī, 41-42; g.h.a. juynboll, muslim tradition: studies in chronology, provenance and authorship of early ḥadīth (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983), 146-59. 155. see al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, taʾrīkh baghdād, xi, 446:6-458:5, no. 6348; also gas, i, 97. this tradent was born in 105/723, and so was a very old man when he died; his transmission of material to ibn aʿtham could have occurred almost anytime within the latter’s career. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 117 all these authorities, but of particular interest is the fact that ibn aʿtham appears to have relied upon both older contemporaries who had already died by the time he began the kitāb al-futūḥ, and younger colleagues who were to remain active for many more years. second, he quotes from numerous sunni authorities, although the collective isnāds are all used to support long texts promoting the shīʿī view of important historical events. indeed, the part of the long collective isnād for karbalāʾ which cites the shīʿī imams156 does so with no special honorifics, and appears only after four other more mainstream chains of authorities have been given, and with others yet to come. this appears to comprise an attempt to present distinctly shīʿī material as representative of some broader perspective on the early decades of islamic history, and addresses the question of why ibn aʿtham provides these collective isnāds in the first place. for him, these were devices through which he could propose that the emerging shīʿī view of key events was an entirely legitimate islamic view with which various non-shīʿī authorities—scholars whom he knew personally—agreed on numerous points. an investigation of the extent to which he actu ally used material from the various authorities he names could prove most revealing. in his account of karbalāʾ, for example, the complex collective isnād introducing the section cites some of the most famous akhbārīs of his day, including authors known to have written on karbalāʾ; and as their narratives on this subject were used by such later historians as al-ṭabarī, it is possible to check the extent to which ibn aʿtham really made use of their works. what follows this isnād, however, is an account quite unlike what one finds in al-ṭabarī, but textually very similar to (and perhaps the source of?) the later maqtal al-ḥusayn of al-khwārizmī (d. 568/1172).157 isnāds for individual akhbār where individual akhbār are concerned, the frequency with which ibn aʿtham uses the isnād is most interesting. there are only nineteen isnāds for individual reports in the part of the text covered by the first recension, and in some places one can read for hundreds of pages without encountering an isnād. in part this can be explained by the fact that he was using the sources already named in a collective isnād to construct an extended account of a single major event, and so considered it unnecessary to name the same authorities again for individual reports within that extended account. but in numerous places this explanation cannot be invoked, and here the interpolations are illustrative. of the many opportunities where ibn aʿtham at least could have used an isnād to claim specific and unequivocal credit himself for a particular story or piece of information, i.e. by stating qāla abū muḥammad, he takes advantage of only one.158 considering that this pattern prevails through more than 1600 pages of arabic text, it may be taken as, first, indicating that ibn aʿtham did not see the isnād as a means to legitimate individual reports or add prestige or authority to their contents, and second, further confirming that not all that many 156. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, iv, 209ult-210:1. 157. muwaffaq ibn aḥmad al-bakrī al-khwārizmī, maqtal al-ḥusayn, ed. muḥammad al-samāwī (najaf: maṭbaʿat al-zahrāʾ, 1367/1947). see gal, si, 549, and the relevant nachtrag (si, 967). 158. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, iii, 304ult. 118 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) individual reports were being incorporated into this part of the book in the first place. in the post-karbalāʾ part of the text, however, individual isnāds suddenly become more frequent. there are sixteen in volumes vi and vii (i.e. none in the concluding parts of volume v): one is a multiple-link silsila from al-balawī through al-madāʾinī and two prior authorities to al-shaʿbī (d. 103/721),159 one cites al-madāʾinī on his own,160 two refer to the general category of ahl al-ʿilm,161 and the others name al-haytham ibn ʿadī (d. 207/822) or earlier tradents who normally figure in al-haytham’s isnāds in the kitāb al-futūḥ.162 in volume viii this number rises to 26 (up to the point where ibn aʿtham’s own text ends); and with the exception of thirteen references to al-madāʾinī,163 these isnāds never refer to the same informant more than once. while this is a marked increase over the rate of citation evident in the first part of the book, 42 isnāds through over 700 pages of text still reflects an attitude in which the device counts for very little. to this one could object, of course, that some of the early akhbārīs who compiled very worthy historical works also showed little or no concern for the isnād. ibn aʿtham’s indifference in this matter could thus be regarded as following a pattern quite common among these early akhbārīs, and manifest in such works as the ayyām al-ʿarab of abū ʿubayda (d. 210/825)164 and the futūḥ khurāsān of al-madāʾinī.165 but such a comparison is misleading, and to see why we need only consider the materials which ibn aʿtham uses an isnād to support. the kinds of reports for which isnāds are given at first seem quite diverse. in some cases, the structure of the narrative requires one: in first-person accounts, for example, or in accounts in which an informant states something like “i asked nn about...”, to name an informant is to identify a character in the story, and an isnād is accordingly provided for that purpose.166 in a few cases, an isnād is used to alert the reader to the fact that the information comes from the shīʿī imāms,167 or to name an authority for a precise piece of information, e.g. the exact date for the murder of ʿuthmān and his age at the time,168 or the 159. ibid., vi, 253ult-254:1. 160. ibid., vii, 278:11. 161. ibid., vi, 161:2, 279:11. 162. ibid., vii, 52:8, 107:11-13, 109:3, 9, 11, 110:5, 111:3, 124:2, 131:13, 138:13, 145:10-11, 171:2, 7. 163. ibid., viii, 159:9-10, 160:9-10, 190:4, 17, 192:4, 14, 195:7-8, 196:7, 202:3, 205:6, 206:12, 207pu, 218:10. 164. the extensive fragments quoted from this book by later authors have been collected and studied in an excellent two-volume work by ʿādil jāsim al-bayātī, kitāb ayyām al-ʿarāb qabla al-islām (beirut: ʿālam al-kutub and maktabat al-nahḍa al-ʿarabīya, 1407/1987). 165. see gernot rotter, “zur überlieferung einiger historischer werke madāʾinīs in ṭabarīs annalen,” oriens 23-24 (1974), 103-33; lawrence i. conrad, “notes on al-ṭabarī’s history of the caliphate of hishām ibn ʿabd al-malik,” journal of the royal asiatic society, third series, 3 (1993), 1-2. 166. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, i, 249ult-250:1, 252:4, 286ult; ii, 342:4-6, 390:3, 466:11; iv, 210ult-211:3, 212:6, 217:11 (returning to the narrative begun at 212:6), 222:10; v, 222:5; vi, 253ult-254:1; viii, 94:5, 95:10, 96:7-8. 167. ibid., ii, 92ult, 390:3. 168. ibid., ii, 241:5. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 119 number of those killed at al-jamal.169 in some places, informants are named for a cluster of reports on a particular subject: for instance, heavenly predictions of karbalāʾ,170 the rebellion of ibn al-ashʿath,171 the travails of al-kumayt,172 and the affairs of al-saffāḥ.173 the impression of diversity continues if one considers the personalities cited and the way ibn aʿtham quotes them. of the 68 authorities named in individual isnāds in the kitāb al-futūḥ, 56 (i.e. over 80 percent) are cited only once through the entire length of the book. beyond this, what ibn aʿtham most frequently offers is not a proper “chain” of authorities, but rather a single name (qāla fulān) which serves to introduce a report. but there appears to be no coherent pattern for the selection of individuals to be named in such isnāds. on occasion, the authority is someone from whom ibn aʿtham may in fact have heard the report, but most often the person named proves to have lived long before ibn aʿtham’s lifetime, or at least too early to have passed information on to him personally. also, it is difficult to explain the isnāds in terms of the importance of supported material: not even citations of shīʿī ḥadīth are consistently introduced by isnāds. the key to understanding the deployment of these isnāds lies in recognizing them as, for the most part, devices used by ibn aʿtham to mark interpolations, as observed above. in some cases this is obvious. the removal of the fourteen pages of reports introduced by isnāds at the beginning of the account of karbalāʾ, for example, simply brings the reader to the real beginning of the account in ibn aʿtham’s main source; and lest there be any doubt, ibn aʿtham announces the fact: thumma rajaʿna ilā al-khabar al-awwal.174 here the character of his heading as a mere cliché is readily apparent: he obviously cannot be “returning” to his “first account” when that “first account” has not even begun yet; the heading simply marks the end of a series of interpolated anecdotes. in many cases the persons cited are utterly obscure individuals, known to us only because their names also appear in some other work. here again it would seem that ibn aʿtham was simply using isnāds as markers, and not to appeal to his audience’s sense of authority or to serve some critical scholarly purposes. it is certainly clear that he had no intention of authoring a book in which systematic consideration of the authority for specific accounts would be a task taken seriously, and this fact sets him far apart from the more serious historical akhbārīs, irrespective of whether or not they too used the isnād. but why, we might ask, should there be a sudden increase in the use of the isnād in volumes vi-viii? at least a partial answer suggests itself once it is understood that this is all material added in the course of the second recension of the text. collective isnāds 169. ibid., ii, 342:4-6. 170. ibid., iv, 210ult-211:3, 212:6, 213:7, 215:6, 217:11, 222pu. 171. ibid., vii, 124:2, 131:13, 138:13, 145:10-11. these reports all come from al-haytham ibn ʿadī, and as this author is not known to have written any separate work on ibn al-ashʿath, these citations probably indicate access to one of al-haytham’s more comprehensive histories. 172. ibid., viii, 94:5, 95:10, 96:8-9. 173. ibid., viii, 190:4, 17, 192:4, 14, 195:7-8, 196:7, 202:3, 205:6, 206:12, 207pu, all from al-madāʾinī. as indicated above (see n. 75), ibn aʿtham seems to have used a monograph by al-madāʾinī which dealt with the reign of the first ʿabbāsid caliph in detail. 174. ibid., iv, 210ult-224:11. 120 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) are entirely absent here, and large monographs are used for fewer extended narratives. larger numbers of individual accounts from a variety of sources were thus being used, and as collective isnāds were no longer being used to specify sources, occasions where doing so for individual reports were very much more numerous. but as the text had now lost its vital sense of purpose, ibn aʿtham shifted to a sporadic pattern of naming authorities, only doing so in such cases where it was a matter of some interest to him. his motives in this regard appear to relate to the fact that as the text approaches his own lifetime, the number of isnāds dramatically increases: ibn aʿtham had more comments of his own to inject, and thus more interest in citing authorities. here the situation becomes clear if one looks at the persons from whom he takes information at this point. a number of these personalities were mawālī or companions of the caliphs al-mahdī and al-manṣūr,175 which suggests that ibn aʿtham himself moved in baghdadi circles which had been close to the center of power in the second half of the second century ah. his répertoire of imperial anecdotes about the early ʿabbāsids may thus reflect material actually in circulation in court circles in the late second century, and his connections with figures who had known al-manṣūr and al-mahdī further strengthens the case for accepting al-mustawfī’s date of ah 204 for the completion of the first recension of the text: any number of persons who had been court figures during the reigns of these two caliphs would, in their old age, have been accessible to an author active at the turn of the century or shortly thereafter, and who subsequently returned to his work some years later. it is also worth noting that the dhayl continues this citation of court figures,176 which suggests that this part of the text was also written by an author in baghdad with close ties to the ʿabbāsid court before its transfer to sāmarrāʾ in 220/835. another interesting question is why ibn aʿtham marks some interpolations with isnāds, and others only with descriptive headings. while it is impossible to speak with certainty on such a subjective matter, the distinction here may to some extent be one between written and oral sources. the difference between the two is not so simple as has often been thought, and so must be regarded with caution.177 still, it can be said that reports in the kitāb al-futūḥ which are supported by individual isnāds tend to be short akhbār, and can often be linked with known literary works. the accounts introduced with descriptive headings, on the other hand, are more often long popular tales full of imaginary and supernatural elements and usually very moralizing, and absolutely typical of old qiṣaṣ lore which one would expect to have circulated orally. 175. ibid., viii, 212:5 (mawlā of al-manṣūr), 238ult (ṣāḥib of al-mansur), 239pu, 240:8 (companion of al-mahdī), 242:4-5 (two mawālī of al-mahdī). 176. ibid., viii, 263:14-15 (the tutor of al-rashīd’s sons), 266ult (the tutor of muḥammad al-amīn), 270:6 (the future ḥājib of al-amīn), 275:10:41 (a mutawallī amr al-sūq under al-rashīd), 277:6-7 (a chess partner of al-rashīd), 295:1-2 (a sub-attendant of al-amīn, waṣīf khādim al-amīn). 177. a seminal series of studies on this question has recently been published by gregor schoeler. see his “die frage der schriftlichen oder mündlichen überlieferung der wissenschaften im frühen islam,” der islam 62 (1985), 201-230; “weiteres zur frage der schriftlichen oder müindlichen überlieferung der wissenschaften im islam,” der islam 66 (1989), 38-67; “mündliche thora und ḥadīṯ,” der islam 66 (l989), 213-251; “schreiben und veröffentlichen. zu verwendung und funktion der schrift in den ersten islamischen jahrhundert,” der islam 69 (1992), 1-43. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 121 ibn aʿtham and his history some important features of ibn aʿtham’s life and work have been discussed in the pages above, and before addressing a concluding question it may be well to summarize what has emerged so far. ibn aʿtham was the son of one of the students or tradents of the sixth imam, jaʿfar al-ṣādiq, and grew up in the mid-second century ah. he composed some poetry, as did many in his day, but his special interest lay in popular preaching and storytelling; many of the accounts he related in his capacity as a qāṣṣ were of general interest to muslims, but his perspective on key issues was specifically shīʿī. he had connections with a number of tradents and compilers who already were or would later become well-known for their literary accomplishments in historical studies, and with court figures who had stories to tell about the reigns of past ʿabbāsid caliphs. early in the caliphate of al-maʾmūn, and with the support of an unknown but highly placed patron, he assembled a history by cobbling together a number of existing monographs by other authors, revising as he saw fit and adding numerous interpolations which he had both from other written sources and from oral informants. one can with no particular difficulty harmonize al-mustawfī’s use of a kitāb al-futūḥ extending to karbalāʾ and written in 204/819-20, an extant text continuing to the abdication of al-mustaʿīn in 252/866, and yāqūt’s reference to two histories ending, respectively, with the reigns of al-rashīd and al-muqtadir. first, al-mustawfī’s statement that his translation was based on an arabic text composed in ah 204 refers to a first recension of the book, one which had proceeded as far as karbalāʾ when work was abruptly suspended. a hypothesis which fits the available evidence, and perhaps best clarifies a number of other questions, is that ibn aʿtham, working during the new stage of disorder which followed the overthrow and execution of al-amīn, had set out to compile a history which would see in the suddenly presented prospects of an ʿalid caliphate the fulfillment of divine promise and the climax of futūḥ itself. but with the death of ʿalī al-riḍā in 203/818, the raison d’être of such a book vanished, and ibn aʿtham’s work on it thus temporarily ceased shortly thereafter, in 204/819. it was a copy of this first recension that eventually made its way to tāyābādh in the east, where a session featuring readings from it led an unknown political figure to commission al-mustawfī to begin a persian translation in 596/1199-1200. this work was still incomplete at the time of al-mustawfī’s death, and was finished by a colleague. at some unknown point, ibn aʿtham resumed work on his history, but without the zealous sense of purpose that had inspired him earlier. this second recension was brought down to the caliphate of al-rashīd, where it stops in a decidedly unsatisfactory fashion. whether this was due to the death of the author, or the simple abandonment of an enterprise which no longer inspired him, is impossible to say. it is also unclear to what extent ibn aʿtham took this as an opportunity to revise what he had already completed in ah 204, although at least some such revision seems very likely. there is nothing in the second recension to indicate when work on it ceased, but allowing for the possibility that 122 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) jaʿfar al-ṣādiq was very old when he taught ibn aʿtham’s father, who may then have been young, and positing the same in the father’s transmission to ibn aʿtham himself, it is conceivable that our author was still alive in the 220s or even 230s ah. shortly after the end of the third/ninth century, this second recension of the kitāb al-futūḥ came to the attention of a later sunnī writer, who continued the text at least as far as the defeat of bābak in 222/837 and some uncertain distance further into the caliphate of al-muʿtaṣim. this was the work which yāqūt called the kitāb al-taʾrīkh and also attributed to ibn aʿtham. if the proposal made above for damage limited to a final folio is correct, this continuation could not have extended more than a page beyond its present terminus. if the proposal is wrong—that is, if there were numerous folios missing at the end of the dhayl— then the continuator could have written a great deal covering events up through the brief reign of al-muntaṣir in 247-48/861-62. this continuation was then itself continued by a brief chronology from the death of al-muntaṣir to the reign of al-muqtadir. the same damage which affected the end of the kitāb al-taʾrīkh also affected the end of the final chronology, hence our suspicion that these damaged sections were on the recto and verso of the same folio, and thus that the lost text is in both cases less than a page. in the case of the terminal chronology, the lost material probably consisted only of a few dates from the abdication of al-mustaʿīn to the reign of al-muqtadir. at some point a scribe also copied a series of anecdotes into a patron’s copy; this same scribe may also have made additions to the main body of the kitāb al-futūḥ, although evidence for this is very limited and can easily be accounted for otherwise. this would explain yāqūt’s reference to a text coming down to the reign of al-muqtadir and to two books which were so similar that one seemed to be the extension of the other. what we now have represents a text damaged at the very end, but otherwise identical to what yāqūt saw, and an extended version of the kitāb al-futūḥ as ibn aʿtham had originally left it. this original text may itself be viewed as representing two stages of work by the author. the first recension extended to karbalāʾ and is now accessible through the persian translation by al-mustawfī; the second recension, which involved the revision of the first and its extension to the reign of al-rashīd, is what we have today in at least most of the extant arabic mss and the hyderabad edition. in closing this study, it may be asked how the conclusions reached above affect the usefulness of the kitāb al-futūḥ to modern scholarship. viewed from a historiographical perspective, ibn aʿtham’s place in the generation of the akhbārīs of the late second and early third centuries ah establishes his kitāb al-futūḥ as a source of valuable insights on arabic historical writing in this period. there are many lines of investigation which might profitably be pursued in future research, and, by way of illustration, attention may here be drawn to a particularly important one—the role of qiṣaṣ and other popular lore. it has long been known that some of this material is of very early origin, but it has often been assumed, and argued, that from the beginning it comprised a literary category separate from history and looked down upon by the “serious historians” of the second half of the second century ah.178 but these authors are in turn known to us almost exclusively through 178. see, e.g., rosenthal, a history of muslim historiography, 186-93; a.a. duri, the rise of historical al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 123 the even more “serious” historians of the third century, and it begs important questions to observe the relatively minor role of qiṣaṣ quoted from the early authorities in such later works, and from this to conclude that historical writing per se was always as critical as these works seem to indicate. the kitāb al-futūḥ demonstrates how easily a gag could enter the field in early ʿabbāsid times, and with clear expectations of public acceptance: ibn aʿtham would have not compiled his history the way he did if the public conception in his day of what history was all about would have resulted in the rejection and repudiation of his work. the ultimate obscurity of his book thus has less to do with his shortcomings as viewed in his own times, than with the major changes in attitudes toward historical writing which occurred in the course of the third century, as well as other factors which have little to with whether or not he wrote “good history”. by comparing ibn aʿtham to other early sources, which bear some of the same popular tales, it can easily be seen that this material was not distinct and separate from historical writing in the second century, but rather, closely intertwined and bound up with it.179 while ibn aʿtham’s work may embody a more popular folkloric element than that which is discernible among other akhbārīs whose historical works survive only in later quotations, he was an akhbārī all the same,180 and his history offers a unique opportunity for exploration of the ways in which folkloric elements contributed to early arabic historiography, and then were gradually marginalized.181 at a broader level, this is precisely the sort of process one must expect. an emerging political, social, and religious community does not possess a sophisticated sense of history and historical writing from the beginning, any more than it possesses a fully developed theology from the beginning. both evolve gradually, as more mature thinking replaces older formulations which, however satisfactory they may have been in the past, eventually come to be regarded as primitive and inappropriate. it has recently been argued that while it is certainly possible to define and study the genre of writing subsumed under the rubric of qiṣaṣ, which refers in particular to legends and myths of ancient prophets, it is problematic to extend this category to include other accounts which also bear this kind of “popular” imprint, and then to suppose that such an exercise in terminology tells us anything about the origins of the reports or addresses the question of their factual truth. accounts regarded as qiṣaṣ may contain authentic historical information, while ostensibly sensible akhbār may contain sheer inventions.182 the kitāb al-futūḥ provides innumerable illustrations of the importance of this observation, and writing among the arabs, ed. and trans. lawrence i. conrad (princeton: princeton university press, 1983), 122-35. 179. see, for example, some of the tales in al-azdī’s futūḥ al-shām. as many of these also appear in ibn aʿtham’s text, which is related to that of al-azdī, but not taken from it, one must conclude that these tales were already present in the source common to both authors, and so must already have found a place in the futūḥ tradition by the mid-second century ah. 180. yāqūt, who saw his work, concedes him not only this title, but also that of muʾarrikh; see irshād al-arīb, 1, 379:1-2. 181. for the context of such a process, see conrad, “the conquest of arwād,” 386-99. 182. leder, “literary use of the khabar,” 311-12. 124 • lawrence i. conrad al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) while it is true that ibn aʿtham had embellished his history with great amounts of baseless popular lore, this does not disqualify him as a historical source. in the first instance, his reports, even where manifestly untrue, are often important in ways untouched by their basis in fact (or lack thereof). massé, for example, devoted a study to ibn aʿtham’s account of the conquest of ifrīqiya, and arrived at the conclusion that here our author is probably not to be believed.183 but for historiographical purposes the same text reveals much about how topoi and narrative schema were deployed in historical writing, and for the cultural historian it highlights the lively interest in futūḥ which clearly prevailed in ibn aʿtham’s day. that this interest encompassed a broad range of material, and not just what modern scholars would regard as sober factual narrative, is surely a matter of crucial concern to any effort to establish the historical course of the islamic conquests in north africa. of special interest in this regard are ibn aʿtham’s tales about dialogues, debates, and disputes between byzantine dignitaries and early muslims. some of these tales are likely to be inventions of the early ʿabbāsid period itself, when large-scale summer raids into byzantine territory were undertaken on a regular basis, but others appear to be much older. the account (referred to above) of an encounter with heraclius himself in antioch has as its climax the discovery that the emperor’s casket, full of pictures of the prophets, includes a picture of muḥammad.184 such a report, innocent of even the slightest iconoclastic sensitivities, would seem to substantiate king’s argument that traditional scholarly views on the iconoclastic tendencies of the early muslims have been exaggerated.185 it also needs to be said that for establishing historical fact the kitāb al-futūḥ is still a source of some importance. two examples may serve to illustrate this point. in ibn aʿtham’s account of the early islamic conquests, the familiar topological paradigm of the futūḥ tradition is violated in startling fashion by a novel explanation for the onset of arab campaigns in iraq. as ibn aʿtham’s source has it, the tribe of rabīʿa, of the banū shaybān, was obliged by drought in arabia to migrate to iraqi territory, where the local sasanian authorities granted them permission to graze their herds on promise of their good behavior. but the presence of these tribal elements eventually led to friction, which the rabīʿa quite naturally interpreted as unwarranted reneging on an agreed arrangement. when they called on their kinsmen elsewhere for support, the crisis quickly escalated.186 this report is innocent of any awareness of the decisive role of great generals, or of a central authority directing all operations from far-off medina. nor does it comprise tribal fakhr, since it does not go on to award rabīʿa special credit for success in iraq. it may well represent the survival of an accurate account of how tribal movements along the sasanian frontier gradually led to violent confrontation, with no role played by the caliph ʿumar ibn 183. massé, “la chronique d’ibn aʿtham,” esp. 89-90. 184. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, i, 130:9-131ult. 185. see g.r.d. king, “islam, iconoclasm, and the declaration of doctrine,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 48 (1985), 267-77. 186. ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, 1, 88:7-89:6. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn aʿtham and his history • 125 al-khaṭṭāb, or even by an eminent muslim commander. similarly, it is well-known that in the tense first year of the caliphate of yazīd ibn muʿāwiya, the unfolding political crisis focused on yazīd’s efforts to compel a small circle of leading muslims to pledge their allegiance to him. but the religious eminence of these individuals notwithstanding, it is not clear why this should have been so important. the key seems to be provided by ibn aʿtham’s version of the terms under which al-ḥasan ibn ʿalī had earlier renounced his claim to the caliphate: one of the provisions mentioned by ibn aʿtham,187 but not by al-ṭabarī, was that muʿāwiya agreed that he would not himself appoint a successor to the caliphate, but rather would leave this decision to a shūrā of leading muslims. the formation of such a committee would have been reminiscent of that convened by ʿumar, and had it ever met, it would have included precisely the personalities whom yazīd now sought to pressure into acknowledging him; the new caliph probably wished to convene the shūrā as a means of legitimating his rule, but knew that left to its own devices it was unlikely to name an umayyad—and certainly not him—as caliph. the provision for a shūrā is also mentioned by al-balādhurī (d. 279/892)188 and ibn abī al-ḥadīd (d. 656/1258),189 both of whom take their information from al-madāʾinī; ibn aʿtham also makes frequent reference to al-madāʾinī, and was in any case his contemporary. the shūrā stipulation was thus commonly known a century before al-ṭabarī wrote, and offers a cogent explanation for an issue crucial to our understanding of the crisis that arose on yazīd’s succession.190 it is to be observed that here, as in many other places, ibn aʿtham used sources identical or similar to those available to such later historians as al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī. if there is any single compelling argument for closer attention to the kitāb al-futūḥ, it lies in the simple fact that all of our historical sources for early islam are of essentially compilatory origin. ibn aʿtham offers a valuable opportunity to observe the variety and scope of the second-century compilations upon which all of our knowledge ultimately rests; and while some of the problems posed by these compilations are particularly easy to discern in his text, the implications of these difficulties are relevant not just to his history alone, but more generally to the entire range of later works for which the early compilations comprised almost exclusive sources of information. no other history as broad in scope as the kitāb al futūḥ has survived from the dawn of the third century ah, and for both historical and historiographical questions its testimony is of importance throughout the range of the topics it covers. 187. ibid., iv, 159pu-160:1. 188. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ii, ed. muḥammad bāqir al-maḥmūdī (beirut: dār al-taʿāruf, 1397/1977), 42:2-3. 189. ibn abi al-ḥadīd, sharḥ nahj al-balāgha, ed. muḥammad abū al-faḍl ibrāhīm (cairo: ʿīsā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1959-64), xvi, 22ult. 190. cf. s. husain m. jafri, origins and early development of shiʿa islam (london: longman’s, 1979), 152-53. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 500-515 abstract this article focuses on the confrontation that broke out sometime in 709 or 710 ce between a hundred men led by members of the banū fahm and the umayyad governor of egypt, qurra b. sharīk. after presenting the case in question, the article explains who participated in the conflict, what their motives and expectations were, and how the failure of these expectations resulted in the confrontation with the governor and his troops. i suggest that although early muslim historians depicted the conflict in religious terms, it was also a result of the specific power dynamics between the governor and provincial arab elites and of competition over the material and social privileges of elite families in egypt. introduction in 709 or 710 ce, a group of egyptian arab notables conspired to assassinate the umayyad governor qurra b. sharīk (in office 709–14 ce). the governor, however, found out about the plan and had the leaders of the conspiracy killed. competition between provincial elites and governors was one of the most frequent sources of discord in the umayyad period. such tensions sometimes led to the peaceful replacement of the governor, but they could also trigger confrontations aimed at deposing the governor (when initiated by elites) or at suppressing opposition in the provinces (when initiated by governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt: a case study of one “rebellion” (709–10 ce)* alon dar universität hamburg (alon.dar@uni-hamburg.de) * the research for this article was carried out within the framework of two different research groups. the first was supported by the european research council under grant number 683194. the second was the emmy noether research group “social contexts of rebellion in the early islamic period” based at the university of hamburg and funded by the german research foundation (dfg). i thank petra m. sijpesteijn, hannah-lena hagemann, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this journal for their useful comments. all remaining mistakes are of course my own responsibility. © 2022 alon dar. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 501 • alon dar al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the governor).1 the planned murder of the governor qurra is reported in three later sources that portray the conflict in religious and ideological terms. taking into account the complicated relationship between caliphs, governors, and provincial elites in the umayyad period, this paper uses the identity and motives of the plotters to examine the different layers of the confrontation, from its direct cause to underlying developments, as well as its subsequent treatment in arabic chronicles in light of social, political, and religious factors. i argue that although the arabic chronicles allude to religious and ideological strife as the cause of the confrontation, the social and political context of the event suggests an alternative explanation: that the violence was the reaction of members of a disgruntled tribe to changes that the governor had implemented in the administration of the province, and that their reaction was an attempt not to change the entire political system but rather to correct one element in it. religious motives behind the rebellion the confrontation between qurra b. sharīk and some arab notables in egypt is recounted in three sources.2 the authors of all three texts were egyptian and therefore had an interest in preserving egyptian history. two of the sources date to the tenth century, whereas the third one is originating from the much later mamlūk period. i will summarize the three versions of the story and consider the significance of the differences between them but i will mainly focus on one version: that of al-kindī (d. 961 ce). ibn yūnus (d. 958 ce) compiled two biographical volumes on notable personae in egypt. one is dedicated to egyptians and the other to visitors to the province. his work, known as the history of ibn yūnus, does not survive as a whole, but it has been assembled and edited on the basis of citations in other works.3 in his section on qurra’s governorship, ibn yūnus reports, citing the authority of ḥukaym b. ʿabd allāh b. qays, that it was the ibāḍiyya, well known for their strict upholding of qurʾānic piety, who plotted to kill the governor because qurra was behaving in a nonreligious manner. at a time when the mosque in fusṭāṭ was under construction (712 ce), the governor would use it to party: when the craftsmen left the building, qurra b. sharīk would call for wine, percussion, and drums, and would drink wine in the mosque all night long, saying: “ours is the night, and theirs is the day.” he was the worst of god’s creation; the ʿibāḍiyya decided 1. see the discussion on this dynamic in p. cobb, white banners: contention in ʿabbasid syria, 750–880 (albany: state university of new york press, 2001), 13–23. 2. i use the term “arab” here to refer to the groups and individuals (and their descendants) who came out of arabia and settled in egypt after the conquests of the 640s ce. i adopt this broad definition in order to highlight the role that pre-islamic social and political bonds such as tribal affiliation played well into the eighth century and beyond, as discussed below. 3. ibn yūnus, taʾrīkh ibn yūnus al-miṣrī, ed. ʿa. f. f. ʿabd al-fattāḥ (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2000); f. rosenthal, “ibn yūnus,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online). insightful discussion on ibn yūnus’s historical venture can be found in s. bouderbala, “ǧund miṣr: étude de l’administration militaire dans l’égypte des débuts de l’islam 21/642–218/833” (phd diss., université de paris 1–panthéon-sorbonne, 2008), 57–69. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt • 502 to kill him, and they made an oath to assassinate him. he [qurra] was informed of that [plan] and killed them.4 ibn taghrī birdī (d. 1470 ce) also mentions this episode in his al-nujūm al-ẓāhira, which covers the history of egypt from its conquest to his time.5 his account is similar to that of ibn yūnus, with the only difference concerning the rebels’ identity: whereas ibn yūnus calls them ʿibāḍiyya, ibn taghrī birdī identifies them as azāriqa.6 both thus pin the blame on groups well known to oppose the government.7 however, the two historians’ identifications are, interestingly, rather far apart. the azāriqa are generally considered to have been much more extremist and more liable to take up arms against rulers then the ibāḍiyya were.8 on the other hand, it would be very surprising to find azāriqa in egypt at this time, as they are generally known to have been active in the maghreb and iraq in this period.9 qurra earned a reputation as a bad and tyrannical ruler in islamic historiography, and he was reportedly hated by the caliph ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz (r. 717–20 ce). thus, we are told that when the news of qurra’s death arrived at the caliph’s court in 715 ce, its arrival coincided with the announcement of the death of al-ḥajjāj (the governor of iraq 694–715 ce), and ʿumar rejoiced at both pieces of news.10 in another report, ʿumar criticizes his predecessor al-walīd (r. 705–15 ce) for having appointed qurra and allowed his un-islamic behavior.11 positioning qurra alongside the notorious al-ḥajjāj and casting him as the enemy of ʿumar, the most pious umayyad caliph, demonstrate a historiographical tendency to depict qurra as an unjust tyrant, which might help explain historians’ choice to portray opposition to qurra in religious terms. another window on this event is provided by the account in al-kindī’s kitāb al-wulāt. a contemporary of ibn yūnus, al-kindī collected stories and narratives about egypt’s governors and chief qāḍīs. his book is a valuable source for understanding the province’s 4. ibn yūnus, taʾrīkh, 1:186: وإن قــرة بــن شــريك كان إذا انصــرف الصنـّـاع مــن بنــاء المســجد، دخــل المســجد، ودعــا بالخمــر والطّبــل والمزمــار، فشــرب، ويقــول: لنــا الليــل، ولهم النهار. وكان قرة بن شريك من أظلم خلق هللا، وهّمت اإلباضية بقتله والفتك به، وتبايعوا على ذلك، فبلغه ذلك، فقتلهم 5. ibn taghrī birdī, al-nujūm al-ẓāhira fī mulūk miṣr wa-l-qāhira, ed. w. popper (cairo: dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1929–56). 6. ibn taghrī birdī, al-nujūm, 1:218. 7. j. wilkinson, ibâḍism: origins and early development in oman (oxford: oxford university press, 2010), 122–23; a. gaiser, shurāt legends, ibāḍī identities: martyrdom, asceticism, and the making of an early islamic community (columbia: university of south carolina press, 2016), 3; k. lewinstein, “azāriqa,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. k. fleet et al. (leiden: brill online). 8. wilkinson, ibâḍism, 2–3; gaiser, shurāt legends, 68. 9. gaiser, shurāt legends, 115; e. savage, “survival through alliance: the establishment of the ibāḍiyya,” british journal of middle eastern studies 17, no. 1 (1990): 5–15, at 10. nabia abbott already noted the improbability that either group was present in egypt at that time: n. abbott, the kurrah papyri from aphrodito in the oriental institute (chicago: university of chicago press, 1938), 62–63. 10. see, for example, sibṭ b. al-jawzī, mirʾāt al-zamān, ed. muhammad barakāt et al. (damascus: dār al-risāla, 2013), 10:102; ibn taghrī birdī, al-nujūm, 1:218; ibn ʿ asākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. ʿ u. al-ʿamrawī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1995), 49:309. 11. sibṭ b. al-jawzī, mirʾāt al-zamān, 10:102. 503 • alon dar al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) administrative apparatus and social and political life in fusṭāṭ, as it reports the appointments and sackings of important office holders such as the ṣāḥib al-shurṭa.12. although al-kindī also uses terms with religious connotations, his account of the plot to assassinate qurra differs in key respects from those of ibn taghrī birdī and ibn yūnus. much like ibn taghrī birdī and ibn yūnus, al-kindī refers to the conspirators with a term that is associated with khārijism: shurāt (شــراة). this term is more general than the previous two, as it used for all types of khārijite rebel groups, including the azāriqa and the ʿ ibāḍiyya.13 is it possible that the rebels were in fact part of, or related to, a khārijite group and that their motive to assassinate the governor was therefore ideological, rooted in a fundamental rejection of the caliph’s authority and that of his recognized agents? what indications do we have in al-kindī’s version of the story that the governor’s opponents were indeed khārijites? al-kindī’s version, quoted in full below, is more elaborate than those of ibn yūnus and ibn taghrī birdī. first, he dates the confrontation to the ah year 91 (709 or 710 ce). second, he writes that there were altogether about a hundred rebels. and third, he gives us the names and tribal affiliations of three of the rebel leaders, including the agreed commander (raʾīs) of the rebellion—al-muhājir b. abī muthanna, who was, in al-kindī’s words, “one of the banū fahm.”14 al-muhājir and the other two leaders are, moreover, identified as belonging to the banū tujīb, to which the fahmīs also belonged. it remains difficult to determine the plotters’ ideological identities with certainty. what is clear, however, is that by the tenth century ce, stories circulated attributing the confrontation to the governor’s unreligious behavior as reported in ibn yūnus’s and ibn taghrī birdī’s accounts, and all three historians use terms that are related to khārijite groups. however, the label “khārijite” is often applied to any kind of rebellious movement in the historical sources because of the khārijites’ identification as the opponents of the state par excellence.15 we should also recognize the image of qurra as a tyrannical governor in islamic historiography. bearing all this in mind, i propose a further explanatory layer in the clash. although the conspirators’ opposition might have been cast in religious and ideological terms, even perhaps by themselves, an examination of the social and political background of the rebels takes us beyond religious motives and allows us to see them as political actors. in what follows, i consider possible other explanations and contributing factors behind this event. 12. al-kindī, kitāb al-wulāt wa-kitāb al-qudāt, ed. r. guest (london: luzac, 1912), 65. on al-kindī, see m. tillier, al-kindî: histoire des cadis égyptiens (paris: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2012), 2–4; bouderbala, “ǧund miṣr,” 47–57. 13. see the discussion on this term in gaiser, shurāt legends, 1–3. 14. i was not able to identify this person or confirm his background in other sources. 15. h.-l. hagemann, the khārijites in early islamic historical tradition (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2022), 73, 158; h.-l. hagemann and p. verkinderen, “kharijism in the umayyad period,” in the umayyad world, ed. a. marsham, 489–517 (abingdon: routledge, 2020), 501. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt • 504 the revolt the sociopolitical dimension of the conflict is evident in al-kindī’s description of the events, which diverges in this respect from the versions of ibn yūnus and ibn taghrī birdī. al-kindī omits any mention of the governor’s misbehavior. conversely, he includes more information on the rebels, including their numbers and the identities of their leaders. his account thus provides insight into the power dynamics in the province. according to al-kindī, shortly after his arrival in egypt, qurra had appointed a member of the banū fahm, ʿabd al-malik b. rifāʿa, to succeed his uncle as commander of the shurṭa, that is, the chief of police. after about one year we are told that another person took over the position— ʿabd al-raḥmān b. muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj, who had already served in that position during the governorship of ʿabd al-ʿazīz (in office 685-705 ce).16 here is al-kindī’s description of the events: qurra went out to alexandria and appointed over the shurṭa ʿabd al-raḥmān b. muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj in the year 91 [709 or 710 ce]. thereafter, the shurāt in alexandria made a pact to kill qurra. and their leader was al-muhājir b. abī al-muthanna al-tujībī, one of the banū fahm b. idhāh b. ʿadī al-tujībī, and among them was also ibn abī arṭāt al-tujībī, and they were about a hundred [men altogether]. and they agreed to appoint [as their leader] ibn abī al-muthanna in the lighthouse of alexandria. close to them was a man whose nickname was abū sulaymān, and he informed qurra of their plans, and he [qurra] came to them before they dispersed and ordered their arrest at the base of the lighthouse of alexandria (amara fī ḥabsihim fī aṣl minārat al-iskandariyya). and qurra assembled the notables (wujūh) of the jund (military forces of the province), turned to them, asked them, and consulted them [on the matter]. they agreed, and he killed them [i.e., the rebel leaders]. a man who supported the rebels passed by. he went to abū sulaymān and killed him. and when yazīd b. abī ḥabīb wanted to talk about something that should remain hidden from the ruler, he would look around and say: “beware of abī sulaymān.” then one day he said: “all people are abū sulaymān.”17 al-kindī’s account is straightforward. governor qurra replaced the head of police, ibn rifāʿa of the banū fahm, with ʿabd al-raḥmān b. muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj, who belonged to a different family within the clan of tujīb. subsequently, about a hundred men gathered at alexandria’s lighthouse to discuss how to react. using the governor’s visit to alexandria as an opportunity, they decided to assassinate the governor and appointed leaders to carry out this act—all members of the banū fahm. unfortunately for them, their plans were exposed by a certain abū sulaymān, whose identity is otherwise unknown. the governor, now aware of the plot, rushed to arrest them. qurra then gathered the province’s arab notables to judge the conspirators, and at the former’s advice he killed the rebel leaders. but the main interest in al-kindī’s version is the light it sheds on the complicated sociopolitical interactions among the arab rulers of egypt. it is clear that sacking the chief 16. al-kindī, wulāt, 65. 17. ibid., 64. 505 • alon dar al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) of police was not a decision that the governor should take lightly. in fact, such a seemingly simple replacement of a holder of public office could trigger extreme events, such as the killing of the ruling governor. below i will discuss in more detail why the banū fahm might have experienced this as a direct affront, but first let us first turn to understand who were the actors in this event. local arab notable competition qurra b. sharīk arrived at the mosque of fusṭāṭ in 709 ce to take up the governorship of egypt. he was an outsider to the province; he hailed from a qaysī tribe in syria and was related to the caliph al-walīd’s mother.18 his arrival came as a surprise to the members of the provincial elite present at the mosque, as they had not been informed of the upcoming change of governor. al-kindī and ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam (d. 871 ce) recount qurra’s arrival in the province with minor differences, and both agree on the basic course of events: qurra and his two companions dismounted their horses, entered the mosque, and prayed there in the governor’s spot. the current governor, ʿabd allāh b. ʿabd al-malik, was away from the capital at the time. qurra and his companions were immediately confronted by the guard at the mosque and some of the governor’s men, who demanded that they pray elsewhere. the short discussion between qurra and the guards ended with the arrival on the scene of a member of the banū fahm. this person acknowledged qurra as the new governor, and in response qurra recited a poem praising the banū fahm. the identity of the fahmī who acknowledged qurra is unclear: ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam claims that it was ʿabd al-aʿlā b. khālid al-fahmī, the chief of police who had been appointed viceroy of fusṭāṭ in the governor’s absence, whereas al-kindī suggests that it was ibn rifāʿa, adding that he did so without permission.19 the relations between qurra and the banū fahm, however, deteriorated quickly. a year later, al-kindī tells us, the confrontation between these two sides broke out. but before returning to that event, let us discuss who the banū fahm were. the banū fahm was one of several families that made up what we can call the arabmuslim elite of egypt (wujūh). the family had arrived in egypt as part of the great arab conquests of the mid-seventh century and had settled in fusṭāṭ.20 as early settlers in egypt, the tribe, along with several others, was familiar with and integrated into the provincial political and administrative system put in place by the conquerors. this made the banū fahm a valuable asset for the governor, and fahmīs seem to have played an important role in the province under ʿabd allāh b. ʿabd al-malik. as suggested by the account of qurra’s 18. on qurra, see c. e bosworth, “ḳurra b. s̲h̲arīk,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; abbott, kurrah papyri, 57–70; a.papaconstantinou, "the rhetoric of power and the voice of reason: tensions between central and local in the correspondence of qurra ibn sharīk,” in official epistolography and the language(s) of power. proceedings of the 1st international conference of the research network imperium and officium: comparative studies in ancient bureaucracy and officialdom, university of vienna, 10-12 november 2010, ed. s. procházka, l. reinfandt, and s. tost, 267-281 (vienna: österreichische akademie der wissenschaften, 2015). i thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out the connection. 19. al-kindī, wulāt, 62; ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, the history of the conquest of egypt, north africa, and spain, known as futūh misr of ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, ed. c. torrey (new haven, ct: yale university press, 1922), 238. 20. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, history, 111. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt • 506 arrival, some fahmīs served in key positions as ṣaḥib al-shurṭa and viceroy of fusṭāṭ and enjoyed the governor’s trust.21 the second important provincial family relevant to this story is that of ʿabd al-malik b. muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj, also from the clan of tujīb. this family’s ancestor, muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj, was a famous general who participated in the conquests of syria, palestine, and egypt and led various expeditions into north africa. he was also known as a supporter of the caliph ʿuthmān (r. 644–56 ce) and as the one who captured and murdered (in a somewhat horrifying fashion) muḥammad b. abī bakr, the designated governor sent to egypt by the subsequent caliph alī b. abī ṭālib in 658 ce. muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj’s role as a military leader probably meant that in cases of necessity, he could mobilize troops from the jund.22 the conquests had brought muʿāwiya great wealth. when he led the military campaign to ifrīqiya in 655 ce, he took one-fifth of the booty for himself and handed out to the soldiers half of the total booty collected in a show of gratitude (nāfila). after the foundation of the umayyad caliphate, muʿāwiya’s influence in the province grew further, as he was one of the closest companions of the governor maslama b. mukhallad who ruled over egypt from 667 ce until his death in 672 ce. he was obviously one of the most powerful individuals in umayyad egypt and acted on his position of social and political prestige. muʿāwiya’s descendants benefited from his achievements and used their high status in the province to embark on administrative and political careers. muʿāwiya’s son, ʿabd al-raḥmān, served simultaneously as ṣāḥib al-shurṭa and as chief qāḍī under the governorship of ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. marwān (in office 685–705 ce).23 he lost both positions when his patron died and the caliph ʿabd al-malik sent his son, ʿabd allāh, to the province with orders to replace anyone in the administration who was still loyal to ʿabd al-ʿazīz.24 ʿabd al-raḥmān’s political and administrative career was not over, however, as he was later reinstated as ṣāḥib al-shurṭa under the governorship of qurra b. sharīk. it was under the latter’s governorship that the family regained control over egypt’s most important offices (other than that of the governor himself). indeed, qurra appointed muʿāwiya’s son ʿabd al-raḥmān b. muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj to the office of chief qāḍī.25 this same muʿāwiya b. ʿabd al-raḥmān later became one of two final candidates for the office of governor when ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz was appointed caliph.26 two members of the family, ʿabd al-waḥīd and ʿabd allāh b. ʿabd al-raḥmān, served as chief qaḍī and ṣāḥib al-shurṭa, respectively, under the caliphate of the last umayyad caliph, marwān.27 when the abbasids took over the province, ʿabd allāh continued to serve as the head of police for a brief period. in 760 ce he was reinstated in office for nine years, and eventually he was appointed governor 21. ibid., 239; al-kindī, wulāt, 58. 22. c. pellat, “muʿāwiya b. ḥudayd̲j̲,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 23. on this person, see al-maqrīzī, kitāb al-muqaffā al-kabīr, ed. m. al-yaʿlāwī (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1991), 4:101 and 6:52; ibn yūnus, taʾrīkh, 1:313–14. 24. i discuss this event below. 25. al-kindī, wulāt, 64; ibn yūnus, taʾrīkh, 1:212–13. 26. al-kindī, wulāt, 65. 27. ibn yūnus, taʾrīkh, 1:328. 507 • alon dar al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) of the province until his death in 772 ce.28 ʿabd allāh’s son hāshim also became ṣāḥib al-shurṭa, and the position remained in the hands of members of the same tribe for one more generation when hāshim’s son hubayra took over the job.29 the banū muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj lost their importance only in the beginning of the ninth century ce, when the province was divided as a consequence of the fight over the caliphate in baghdad between al-maʾmūn and al-amīn. in the year 816 a mob attacked their family’s estate in alexandria and killed most of its members, an act that seems to have put an end to banū muʿāwiya’s long influence in the province.30 this family, much like the banū fahm, enjoyed various aspects of elite status: respected lineage, great resources, and political influence.31 the coexistence of elite families in egypt meant that provincial governors had to balance a complex and delicate sociopolitical arrangement. in fact, it is this intra-elite and elite-governor competition that forms the background to our story. on the one hand, the members of the elite were potentially valuable allies, as they enjoyed access to land, military power, and prestige as well as knowledge that was crucial in helping the governor maintain a level of cooperation between the court and the province’s arab elite. on the other hand, it was precisely these advantages that could pose a threat to the governors in the province. if not handled correctly, local notables could become an opposition to the governor, participating in revolts and risking his authority. it was thus one of the governor’s main tasks to deal, negotiate, and work with these actors.32 the provincial notables expected to preserve their roles and privileges in the political system by holding high positions and offices such as that of the police chief that provided them with added social prestige, access to the governor’s and caliph’s courts, and financial benefits. for our purposes here, it is important to observe how this group acted and to recognize that rebellion was one option within a wide spectrum of possible actions. with this in mind, i will now discuss the immediate trigger of the rebellion as well as its broader causes. an insult the immediate cause of the banū fahm’s act of rebellion might have been the removal of a fahmī from the office of ṣāḥib al-shurṭa by the order of qurra b. sharīk. this office was one of the most important positions in the political system of egypt at the beginning of the eighth century and the governor needed loyal people to fill it, as the police chief’s armed forces served as the governor’s guards and maintained order in the province. being 28. al-kindī, wulāt, 88, 241. 29. ibid., 92, 119. 30. see summaries on this family in h. kennedy, “central government and provincial élites in the early ʿabbāsid caliphate,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 44, no. 1 (1981): 26–38, at 35–36; and h. kennedy, “egypt as a province in the islamic caliphate, 641–868,” in the cambridge history of egypt, vol. 1, islamic egypt, 640–1517, ed. c. f. petry, 62–85 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998), at 66–70, 81–82. 31. see the discussion in h.-l. hagemann, k. mewes, and p. verkinderen, “studying elites in early islamic history: concepts and terminology,” in transregional and regional elites: connecting the early islamic empire, ed. s. heidemann and h.-l. hagemann, 17–46 (berlin: de gruyter, 2020); and in particular the general definition at 30–31. 32. on this issue, see also cobb, white banners, 13–23. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt • 508 the head of the shurṭa was thus a very high position, since it provided access to great power.33 as we have seen, the need for personal loyalty and reliance on local arab elites were common challenges for all provincial governors in egypt but a particularly pressing one for a governor such as qurra, who came from outside the province and could not rely on his own tribe for support in case of immediate need.34 the story of qurra’s arrival shows how important the wujūh were in establishing the governor’s authority. the symbolic act of praying in the governor’s space in the mosque could be completed only after the local tribes’ formal acknowledgment of the new governor. the governor’s recitation of a poem praising the banū fahm suggests that he wanted to flatter the family from the beginning and to establish close ties with it. at this stage, then, the governor was apparently trying to bring it closer as he needed its support to establish himself in egypt. al-kindī’s narrative does not expand on the change of personnel, but we can conjecture that one of the following things had happened: either qurra preferred ʿabd al-raḥmān over ʿabd al-malik b. rifāʿa or he wanted for whatever reason to show his dissatisfaction with the latter. but his replacement of the police chief could also be explained as a sign of a shift in alliances from one tribal group to another. i would suggest that the personnel change probably contributed to the drastic and dangerous decision to kill the governor taken by members of the fahmī tribe, who would have seen the tribe’s loss of this prestigious office as a crucial blow, one that justified a conspiracy against the caliph-appointed governor. they were willing to take this step even though they were aware of the risks it carried, including to their very lives—which they indeed ended up forfeiting. why was losing the office of ṣāḥib al-shurṭa seen as such a crucial injury by the fahmīs, worth risking so much for? the importance of the office was due to two main factors. the first one was resources: the office offered financial benefits and opportunities to its holder, and it provided social prestige, as explained above. the second reason was the tribe’s place in the sociopolitical hierarchy in the province. in an environment of competition over offices, resources, and prestige, losing a key office signified a setback in this competition and thus threatened the fabric of the arrangement. the fact that qurra called the arab elite together to consult on the fate of the rebels points precisely to this broader danger for the fahmī family. we can reconstruct the changing trajectories of arab elite families in egypt as follows. when qurra first came to the province, he kept the old structure in place, relying on the banū fahm’s support and rewarding it with important positions. but once he had assessed 33. on this role, see kennedy, “central government,” 37; m. ebstein, “shurṭa chiefs in basra in the umayyad period: a prosopographical study,” al-qanṭara 31, no. 1 (2010): 103–47, at 120–22; a. m. rashid, “the role of the shurṭa in early islam” (phd thesis, edinburgh university, 1983); f. m. donner, “the shurṭa in early umayyad syria,” in the fourth international conference on the history of bilad al-sham during the umayyad period: proceedings of the third symposium on the history of bilad al-sham, ed. m. a. al-bakhit and r. schick, 2:247–62 (amman: university of jordan, 1989); and h. kennedy, the armies of the caliphs: military and society in the early islamic state (new york: routledge, 2013), 13–14, 35, 37. for the shurṭa in egypt, see m. s. a. mikhail, from byzantine to islamic egypt: religion, identity and politics after the arab conquest (london: i. b. tauris, 2014), 139–43. 34. as noted earlier, qurra came from syria. on the implications of an outside governor, see kennedy, “central government,” 26–30; idem, “egypt as a province,” 65–66. 509 • alon dar al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the power relations in the province, he implemented his own strategy vis-à-vis the local elite families by forming new alliances and reshuffling the relative positions of the notables who made up the military and administrative elites. in fact, it is conceivable that it was in the new governor’s interest to break the power of the banū fahm, whose position had clearly remained strong for a long time, and to elevate instead another family, which had lost its position in the preceding years. the disproportionate power that the single family of the banū fahm had gained would have made it harder for the governor to act freely, seriously curtailing his own influence. qurra’s appointment of a member of the muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj family to the powerful office of ṣāḥib al-shurṭa can thus be seen as a way both to undermine the banū fahm’s position and to increase the standing of the banū muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj. bringing in other elite members to witness and even be complicit in this change in the hierarchy reinforced qurra’s decision. one way in which the governor could keep the political situation under control was exactly by playing on the existing rivalries and turning competing families against each other. in all three versions, the story about the conspiracy to kill qurra ends with the governor’s triumph over the rebels. he finds out about the rebels’ plans, thereby saving his own life, and as he punishes the rebel leaders, his policy of undermining the position of the banū fahm by taking the office of the ṣāḥib al-shurṭa away from them remains unaltered. on the one hand, then, the narrative of al-kindī serves to demonstrate the victory of the governor over local elites who overplayed their hand, while on the other it illustrates those elites’ powerful position, which was a factor that every governor had to reckon with. three key factors stood in the background of the banū fahm’s rebellion. the first was the power held by provincial elites. this case clearly shows the potential risk to the governor involved in encroaching on the local elite’s position. as the story shows, a single tribe could put together a considerable opposition force and pose a real threat to the governor’s rule when the tribe’s members felt their position was in danger. through their access to weapons, wealth, and the governor’s circle of close associates, the actions of disgruntled local elites could have an impact far beyond their own immediate tribal context. moreover, the fahmīs’ plan to assassinate the governor constituted a forced intervention in the governance structure of the caliphate. it threatened not only the governor’s authority but also that of the caliph, who was the governor’s direct superior and the one responsible for his appointment. the egyptian notables’ desire to exert control over provincial appointments and thus over the province’s considerable resources was a major issue confronting appointed governors. when the new governor of egypt, saʿīd b. yazīd (in office 681–83 ce), arrived in the province, some local arab families reacted with dismay: “may god forgive the amīr al‐muʾminīn; there are among us a hundred men like you from whom he could have appointed one [to rule] over us [instead of you]!”35 the local arab elite was thus a force to reckon with for the governor, and controlling it through alliances, as well as generally balancing its power, was a constant concern. the second factor was the governor’s cooperation with other notable arab tribesmen. 35. p. m. sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state: the world of a mid-eighth-century egyptian official (oxford: oxford university press, 2013), 62 n. 99. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt • 510 when deciding how to punish the rebels, the governor assembled the members of the arab elite and consulted them on the matter. on the one hand, this shows that the governor still relied on their cooperation to handle such a dramatic situation. he could not make a decision without taking their opinions into account. on the other hand, qurra’s appeal to the wujūh shows that he was able to mobilize them: the notables came when the governor called for them. by consulting them, the governor created a special relation of interdependence between himself and loyal wujūh that juxtaposed the latter with the rebellious banū fahm. their role in determining the verdict of the rebellious leaders made the wujūh complicit and placed them firmly in the governor’s camp against one of the most powerful and prestigious families among them. finally, involving the wujūh allowed the governor to turn the fahmī rebellion and the dramatic consequences for the rebel leadership into an example for the rest of the arab community. whatever the governor was attempting to achieve, we are left with the impression that the presence of the other elite families as participants and audience was a necessary and strategic element, precisely because of the extent to which the sociopolitical arrangement of the province depended on them. the third contributing factor was formed by the structures and social practices of the arab tribesmen in the province. this case allows us to better understand how the tribes worked as political actors and what kind of decision-making process they employed. the banū fahm’s gathering in alexandria to decide on an appropriate response to the deposition of ʿabd al-malik b. rifāʿa is illuminating for a number of reasons. first, it shows that tribes were lively political and social units that decided on collective actions in gatherings at which, we can imagine, different views and perspectives were put forward. the banū fahm had its own majlis (gathering place), which gathered at important moments to decide on the best course of action. for example, when the same ʿabd al-malik b. rifāʿa was later removed from his position as governor by ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz in favor of a member of the qays tribe, he is said to have gone over to the majlis of the qays in the mosque and congratulated the new governor.36 it is interesting to note that on this occasion, ibn rifāʿa retired from the position quietly, without any protests or attempts to contest the decision. this shows that the provincial elites (or the tribal councils) acted in accordance with their judgment of each specific situation. what is more, it shows that systems such as the tribal majlis, which had existed already in pre-islamic times, still played a role in events during the umayyad period alongside institutions of imperial administration and governance.37 another important point to note is that this was not the end of the story of the banū fahm. the tribe still had its supporters, and one of these supporters took revenge by killing abū sulaymān, the man who had informed qurra of the fahmīs’ intention to assassinate him. and as already noted, when qurra died in office about four years later, he was 36. al-kindī, wulāt, 68. 37. for the functioning of tribal councils in pre-islamic times, see, for example, the gathering of the quraysh in mecca to decide on how to deal with the emerging muslim community: ibn isḥāq, the life of muhammad: a translation of ibn isḥāq’s sīrat rasūl allāh, ed. a. guillaume (oxford: oxford university press, 1967), 166–67. for other roles of tribes and their importance, see, for example, the distribution of money to orphans and widows: al-kindī, wulāt, 304. for an overview of this office and its importance, see p. crone, “ʿarīf,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed. 511 • alon dar al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) succeeded as governor by the same ʿabd al-malik b. rifāʿa whom he had dismissed from the office of ṣāḥib al-shurṭa. although we do not know whether ibn rifāʿa had supported the plot to assassinate the governor, clearly his career had not been ended by his membership in a rebellious family. moreover, as the contributions of hannah-lena hagemann, reza huseini, and petra m. sijpesteijn in this dossier show, although the leaders of rebellions were often punished severely, the rank and file and even lower military leaders typically walked free. we even often find members of important arab families joining multiple successive rebellions. at first sight, such recidivism could be seen as a sign of a weak caliph facing powerful provincial elites. however, it can also be interpreted as an indication that rebellions were not necessarily perceived as challenging the system or the caliph himself. to understand this point, we can turn to a very similar case in north africa, in which members of the provincial elite killed the governor whom the caliph had sent. immediately after assassinating the governor, they sent a letter to the caliph, expressing their loyalty to him despite their act.38 here, again, it is tempting to analyze the case as a matter of “weak” or “strong” government, but it is important to recognize that plots to kill governors were dealt with depending on the power relations in the particular situation and that the umayyad political system allowed the reintegration of rebels, even at the very high position of provincial governor. rebellions and other mechanisms keeping in mind the risk involved in the assassination of a governor, we should ask what other options the rebels might have had to deal with the threat facing them. just a few years before the fahmī rebellion, a very similar case of a dispute between the governor and the provincial elite was handled very differently by qurra’s predecessor, ʿabd allāh b. ʿabd al-malik. ʿabd allāh arrived in egypt in 705 ce with instructions from his father, the caliph, to replace all provincial administrators who were suspected of being loyal to the caliph’s brother and rival for the caliphate, ʿabd al-ʿazīz. accordingly, ʿabd allāh tried to dismiss the head of police, muʿāwiya b. ḥudayj.39 but this proved a much harder task than the caliph had expected, as muʿāwiya appears to have been too powerful to be simply removed from his position. after failing to come up with a sufficient formal reason for deposition, ʿabd allāh finally doubled muʿāwiya’s stipend and appointed him viceroy of alexandria. this episode illustrates the complex power play between governors and provincial elites, in which the removal of an influential notable from his position may prove too hard for a governor. what is more, it shows that governors had various ways of resolving disputes and that disputes did not necessarily have to end in a violent confrontation. from sijpesteijn’s analysis of the rebellion of ibn al-jārūd in iraq we also learn of the ways in which provincial 38. al-jahshiyārī, al-wuzarāʾ wa-l-kuttāb, ed. m. al-saqqā et al. (cairo: muṣṭafā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1983), 57; al-ṭabarī, the empire in transition: the caliphates of sulayman, ʿumar, and yazid, ad 715–724/ah 97–105, trans. d. s. powers, vol. 24 of the history of al-ṭabarī, ed. e. yarshater (albany: state university of new york press, 1989), 165. 39. on the competition between the caliph and his brother, see: p. m. sijpesteijn, “an early umayyad papyrus invitation for the ḥajj,” journal of near eastern studies 73, no. 2 (2014): 179–90, at 188–90. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt • 512 elites could go over the governor’s head and negotiate with the caliph directly by sending messages to the caliph and demanding the replacement of a certain governor—a not uncommon practice.40 another option that provincial elites could have employed was to meet directly with the caliph. this option was exercised by the abovementioned maslama b. mukhallad, who in 667–68 went to the caliph to complain about the governor of egypt and ended up as the governor himself, according to al-kindī.41 although the right to go and meet the caliph without participating in an official delegation (wafd) might have been a privilege reserved for the very few, provincial elites could send letters or use other channels to complain about governors.42 violent confrontation, in other words, could often have been avoided. violence usually signaled the failure of other efforts to resolve a problem or the inability of the sides to reach agreement. both governors and provincial elites could have used other existing mechanisms and practices to resolve disagreements before turning to armed confrontation. conclusion this article focused on the confrontation that broke out sometime in 709 or 710 ce between a hundred men led by members of the banū fahm and the umayyad governor of egypt, qurra b. sharīk. some sources attribute the rebellion to ideological or religious motives, but i argue that what we know about the social and political situation in the province in the beginning of the eighth century prompts us to look for alternative explanations. drawing on al-kindī’s account of the events, i identify competition among elite families in egypt over material and social privileges as a potential trigger to the act of rebellion. although we cannot be certain of what the motives of the plotters were, i contend that sociopolitical factors and identities (such as tribal affiliation and membership in the elite) played an important role alongside possible ideological or religious objections in the rebels’ decision to assassinate the governor. revolts, then, were an outcome of governors’ reliance on provincial elites to run the province, which resulted in elites’ expecting to hold several privileges and offices. when these expectations were not met, elites had the ability to act against the government. the aim of the banū fahm’s rebellion was thus both to change the current situation and to communicate displeasure with it. however, i would argue that the conspiracy reflected not dissatisfaction with the system as a whole but rather a specific act undertaken to get rid of a governor who had stripped the family of a privileged position it had grown accustomed to holding. the governor, in turn, perceived the gathering of the tribe and its collective decision to kill him as rebellious acts that deserved to be punished by death. 40. see, for example, petra sijpesteijn’s contribution in this issue. 41. al-kindī, wulāt, 31. 42. see the case of ayyūb, in which the caliph ʿ umar b. ʿ abd al-ʿazīz received complaints about the governor; ibid., 69. 513 • alon dar al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) bibliography primary sources al-balādhurī. ansāb al-ashrāf. edited by w. ahlwardt as anonyme arabische chronik, vol. 11. greifswald: hinrichs, 1883. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam. the history of the conquest of egypt, north africa, and spain, known as futūh misr of ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam. edited by c. torrey. new haven, ct: yale 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official. oxford: oxford university press, 2013. tillier, m. al-kindî: histoire des cadis égyptiens. paris: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2012. wilkinson, j. ibâḍism: origins and early development in oman. oxford: oxford university press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_5282 http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_3412 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 376-408 abstract people identified as persians constituted one of the most prominent groups of nonlocal inhabitants in mamluk egypt, and earlier scholarship has paid considerable attention to egyptian-persian relations. nevertheless, the determining factors that made someone persian in mamluk egyptian contexts remain poorly understood. accounts of the majālis, or learned salons, convened by the penultimate mamluk sultan qāniṣawh al-ghawrī (r. 906–922/1501–1516) offer a unique opportunity to examine which factors, agents, and motivations were decisive in the construction of what it meant to be persian during the late mamluk period. an examination of these sources demonstrates that language, cultural capital, and region of origin were the most important elements in the process of persian identity construction at al-ghawrī’s court. the key actors in this process were persons who identified themselves as persians and sought to make strategic use of the benefits their identity could entail within the patronage context of al-ghawrī’s court. in contrast to what is known about other ethnic identities within the mamluk sultanate, neither persons who identified as persians nor their local interlocutors considered ancestry a defining factor of being persian. * an earlier version of this article, written with the support of the german national academic foundation, was presented at the second conference of the school of mamluk studies in liège, belgium, in june 2015. i would like to thank my co-panelists christopher bahl, konrad hirschler, and josephine van den bent as well as the participants in the conference for their helpful input and feedback. i am, moreover, grateful to the editors of the present special dossier and the anonymous reviewers for their corrections and suggestions. the present article builds on, quotes parts of, and uses material also discussed in my forthcoming book in the sultan’s salon: learning, religion and rulership at the mamluk court of qāniṣawh al-ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) (leiden: brill, forthcoming). being persian in late mamluk egypt: the construction and significance of persian ethnic identity in the salons of sultan qāniṣawh al-ghawrī (r. 906–922/1501–1516)* christian mauder university of bergen (christian.mauder@uib.no) introduction at the beginning of an article entitled “pharaonic history in medieval egypt,” published in 1983, michael cook asked whether there was something that could be considered an © 2020 christian mauder. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:christian.mauder%40yale.edu?subject= 377 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) egyptian identity during what he called the medieval period.1 cook’s approach to this question focused on whether, and to what degree, premodern egyptian muslims knew about and identified with the pre-islamic, in particular pharaonic, history of the country they inhabited. although cook concluded that there was little evidence in favor of the assumption that what premodern egyptian muslims knew about pharaonic times formed a significant part of their identity,2 the guiding question of his article still deserves attention. one alternative way to approach it is to ask how the premodern muslim inhabitants of egypt constructed the identity of those whom they perceived as others—that is, foreigners or non-egyptians. in his article, cook repeatedly contrasted the egyptian case with the iranian one3— a comparison that would probably have made sense also to the inhabitants of mamluk egypt, given that they came into direct contact with iranians often enough. as carl petry noted, immigrants to cairo from iran and its environs were outnumbered only by those from syria and palestine. he argued that “iranians, in fact, attained a preeminence in the cairene elite disproportionate to their [. . .] numbers. they remained conscious exponents of the persian intellectual tradition in cairo and were respected for this by their contemporaries.”4 when first published, petry’s findings were particularly noteworthy because they refuted an earlier view of the mamluk sultanate, in general, and egypt, in particular, as unaffected by political, intellectual, and cultural developments in the mongol and post-mongol iranian lands.5 this recognition of the importance of the entanglements between greater iran and the mamluk sultanate notwithstanding, mamlukists studying persian-mamluk interactions have so far largely focused on military, economic, and diplomatic encounters6 or on the 1. m. cook, “pharaonic history in medieval egypt,” studia islamica 57 (1983): 67–103, at 67. 2. cook, “pharaonic history,” 99–100. see also the older study referenced in cook’s article: u. haarmann, “regional sentiment in medieval islamic egypt,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 43, no. 1 (1980): 55–66. 3. cook, “pharaonic history,” 68, 90, 100–101. see also haarmann, “regional sentiment,” 56–57. 4. c. petry, the civilian elite of cairo in the later middle ages (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1981), 61, 67–68. 5. e.g., u. haarmann, “miṣr: 5. the mamlūk period 1250–1517,” in the encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. j. bearman et al., 7:164–177 (leiden: brill, 1960–2009), 165. 6. given the recent boom in the study of mamluk diplomacy, the following list of relevant studies does not claim to be exhaustive: m. ağalarlı, “xvi. yüzyılın başlarında safevi devletiyle memlük devleti arasında siyasi i̇lişkilere genel bir bakiş,” uşak üniversitesi sosyal bilimler dergisi 3, no. 2 (2010): 124–135; r. amitai, mongols and mamluks: the mamluk-īlkhānid war, 1260–1281 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1995); multiple contributions in r. amitai, ed., the mongols in the islamic lands: studies in the history of the ilkhanate (aldershot, ashgate variorum, 2007); r. amitai, holy war and rapprochement: studies in the relations between the mamluk sultanate and the mongol ilkhanate (1260–1335) (turnhout: brepols, 2013); a. f. broadbridge, kingship and ideology in the islamic and mongol worlds (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2008); w. w. clifford, “some observations on the course of mamluk-safavid relations (1502–1516/908–922): i and ii,” der islam 70 (1993): 245–278; m. dekkiche, “le caire: carrefour des ambassades; étude historique et diplomatique de la correspondance échangée entre les sultans mamlouks circassiens et les souverains timourides et turcomans (qara-qoyunlu-qaramanides) au xve s. d’après le ms. ar 4440 (bnf, paris)” (phd diss., university of liège, 2011); m. dekkiche, “new source, new debate: re-evaluation of the mamluk-timurid struggle for religious supremacy al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 378 presence in mamluk lands of individual figures, texts, objects, cultural techniques, practices, or bodies of knowledge that were considered persian in one way or another.7 yet rarely, if at all, have scholars asked what the term “persian” and its arabic equivalents, such as fārisī or ʿajamī, actually meant in mamluk contexts.8 in the hijaz (paris, bnf ms ar. 4440),” mamlūk studies review 18 (2014–15): 247–272; c. mauder, “a severed head, a poetry slam, and a shiʿī visiting al-shāfiʿī’s tomb: symbolic and literary communication in mamluk-safawid diplomatic encounters,” in studies on the mamluk sultanate (1250–1517): proceedings of a german-japanese workshop held at tokyo, november 5–6, 2016, ed. s. conermann and t. miura (göttingen: bonn university press, forthcoming); m. melvin-koushki, “the delicate art of aggression: uzun hasan’s fathnama to qaytbay of 1469,” iranian studies 44, no. 2 (2011): 193–214; h. rabie, “political relations between the safavids of persia and the mamluks of egypt and syria in the early sixteenth century,” journal of the american research center in egypt 15 (1978): 75–81; and most recently the pertinent contributions in f. bauden and m. dekkiche, eds., mamluk cairo, a crossroads for embassies: studies on diplomacy and diplomatics (leiden: brill, 2019); r. amitai and s. conermann, eds., the mamluk sultanate from the perspective of regional and world history (göttingen: bonn university press, 2019). 7. see, e.g., d. behrens-abouseif, “sultan al-ghawrī and the arts,” mamlūk studies review 6 (2002): 71–94, at 75, 82–83, 85; a. bodrogligeti, a fourteenth century turkic translation of saʿdī’s “gulistān”: sayf-i sarāyī’s “gulistān biʾt-turkī” (bloomington: indiana university press, 1969); j. eckmann, “the mamluk-kipchak literature,” central asiatic journal 8 (1963): 304–319, at 307–309, 317; k. d’hulster, “some notes on sayf-sarāyī’s gülistān bi t-türkī,” in egypt and syria in the fatimid, ayyubid and mamluk eras v, ed. u. vermeulen and k. d’hulster, 451–70 (leuven: peeters, 2007); k. d’hulster, “‘sitting with ottomans and standing with persians’: the šāhnāme-yi türkī as a highlight of mamluk court culture,” in egypt and syria in the fatimid, ayyubid and mamluk eras vi, ed. u. vermeulen and k. d’hulster, 229–256 (leuven: peeters, 2010); b. flemming, “šerīf, sultan ġavrī und die ,perser‘,” der islam 45 (1969): 81–93; y. frenkel, is there a mamlūk culture? (berlin: eb-verlag, 2014), 29–30; y. frenkel, “the mamlūk sultanate and its neighbors: economic, social and cultural entanglements,” in amitai and conermann, mamluk sultanate, 39–60, at 43–45; u. haarmann, “yeomanly arrogance and righteous rule: faẓl allāh rūzbihān khunjī and the mamluks of egypt,” in iran and iranian studies: essays in honor of iraj afshar, ed. k. eslami, 109–124 (princeton, nj: zagros, 1998); u. haarmann, “the late triumph of the persian bow: critical voices on the mamluk monopoly on weaponry,” in the mamluks in egyptian politics and society, ed. t. philipp and u. haarmann, 174–187 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998), 183–187; a. schimmel, “some glimpses of the religious life in egypt during the later mamluk period,” islamic studies 4 (1965): 353–392, at 378. 8. more research has been done on other ethnic identities in the mamluk sultanate. see, e.g., s. conermann, “volk, ethnie oder stamm? die kurden aus mamlukischer sicht,” in mamlukica: studies on the history and society of the mamluk period, ed. s. conermann, 317–57 (göttingen: bonn university press, 2013); r. irwin, “how circassian were the circassian mamluks?,” in amitai and conermann, mamluk sultanate, 109–122; b. lellouch, “qu’est-ce qu’un turc? (égypte, syrie, xvie siècle),” european journal of turkish studies (2013): 1–20; j. loiseau, les mamelouks xiiie–xvie siècle: une expérience du pouvoir dans l’islam médiéval (paris: éditions du seuil, 2014), 173–203; k. yosef, ethnic groups, social relationships and dynasty in the mamluk sultanate (bonn: annemarie-schimmel-kolleg, 2012), especially 3–4; j. van den bent, “none of the kings on earth is their equal in ʿaṣabiyya: the mongols in ibn khaldūn’s works,” al-masāq 28, no. 2 (2016): 171–186; j. van den bent, “mongols in mamluk eyes: representing ethnic others in the medieval middle east” (phd diss. university of amsterdam, 2020); k. yosef, “dawlat al-atrāk or dawlat al-mamālīk: ethnic origin or slave origin as the defining characteristic of the ruling elite in the mamlūk sultanate,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 39 (2012): 387–410; k. yosef, “cross-boundary hatred: (changing) attitudes towards mongol and ‘christian’ mamlūks in the mamluk sultanate,” in amitai and conermann, mamluk sultanate, 149–214; frenkel, “neighbors,” 45–48. on persia and persian identities in the early islamicate period, see s. b. savant, the new muslims of post-conquest iran: tradition, memory, and conversion (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2013); on how muslims of the early ʿabbasid period remembered pre-islamic persia and its conquest, see s. savran, arabs and iranians in the 379 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the present article seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the persian presence in mamluk egyptian society, in general, and in cairo-based late mamluk court life, in particular. to this end, it elucidates first and foremost how key figures in a late mamluk court understood and constructed persian ethnic identity. behind this question stands a concept of identity that is informed by insights from research on ethnicity in other premodern societies, especially in late antique and medieval europe. these studies indicate that ethnic identity is not a fixed and naturally given quality but the result of constructive social processes of labeling and negotiation in which both the labeled person or group and others can partake. such relational processes typically occur when different groups separated by cultural, linguistic, or other boundaries come into contact and interact with each other. in these processes, various agents can attribute different ethnic identities to one and the same person or group in different contexts and at different times. these identities, in turn, can entail a multitude of social, legal, and political consequences, and they should be seen as both situational and strategic.9 the social significance of ethnic identities is based on their shared recognition and acceptance as true. as peter webb puts it: “ethnicities must be believed in to become real.”10 various factors contribute to the construction of an ethnic identity. in latin medieval europe, membership in a group defined through blood ties and shared ancestry (gens), legal traditions (leges), language (lingua), and customs (mores) were often seen as characterizing ethnic groups, although european nationalists from the nineteenth century onward typically focused primarily on the aspect of blood ties.11 another important observation islamic conquest narrative: memory and identity construction in islamic historiography, 750–1050 (london: routledge, 2018); and on ethnonyms for persians in non-persian languages, see o. kommer, s. liccardo, and a. nowak, “comparative approaches to ethnonyms: the case of the persians,” hungarian historical review 7, no. 1 (2018): 18–56. 9. r. bartlett, “medieval and modern concepts of race and ethnicity,” journal of medieval and early modern studies 31, no. 1 (2001), 39–56, at 40, 42; t. reuter, “whose race, whose ethnicity? recent medievalists’ discussions of identity,” in medieval polities and modern mentalities, ed. j. l. nelson, 100–108 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006), 101, 103; j. a. armstrong, nations before nationalism (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1982), 4–6. see also p. geary, “ethnic identity as a situational construct in the early middle ages,” mitteilungen der anthropologischen gesellschaft in wien 113 (1983): 15–26, at 18, 21; w. pohl, “telling the difference: signs of ethnic identity,” in strategies of distinction: the construction of ethnic communities, 300–800, ed. w. pohl and h. reimitz, 17–69 (leiden: brill, 1998), 21–22; f. barth, “introduction,” in ethnic groups and boundaries, ed. f. barth, 9–38 (boston: little, brown and company, 1969), 9–10, 13–16, 33–34; n. adlparvar and m. tadros, “the evolution of ethnicity theory: intersectionality, geopolitics and development,” ids bulletin 47 (2016): 123–136, at 125–126. 10. p. webb, imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016), 11. 11. bartlett, “concepts,” 44–54. see also geary, “construct,” 17–21; w. pohl, die völkerwanderung: eroberung und integration (stuttgart: kohlhammer, 2002), 17–18; w. pohl, “introduction: strategies of distinction,” in pohl and reimitz, strategies of distinction, 1–15, at 4, 7–9; w. pohl, “introduction: ethnicity, religion and empire,” in visions of community in the post-roman world: the west, byzantium and the islamic world, 300–1100, ed. w. pohl, c. gantner, and r. payne, 1–23 (farnham: ashgate, 2012), 9–10; w. pohl, “introduction: strategies of identification: a methodological profile,” in strategies of identification: ethnicity and religion in early medieval europe, ed. w. pohl and g. heydemann, 1–64 (turnhout: brepols, 2013), 3, 6–8, 10; pohl, “telling,” 17–19, 22–61. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 380 from the european context is that the attribution of specific ethnic identities is often especially pronounced in the case of high-ranking political actors. as timothy reuter put it: “ethnicity appears to have lit up in the presence of rulers in much the same way as fluorescent clothing does in the presence of street lighting.”12 given that these insights have been obtained through the study of european societies, we cannot tacitly assume that they necessarily apply also to ethnic groups beyond the indistinct borders of europe. however, peter webb’s recent work on arab ethnicity has demonstrated that theoretical findings derived from the study of european ethnicities can be fruitfully applied to islamicate contexts.13 moreover, earlier research on the specific case of premodern persian identity suggests that many of the factors that historians of late antique and medieval europe have identified as defining ethnic identities also play a role in the persian case.14 this is perhaps most obvious for what medieval european sources call lingua. in his much noted monograph die „persophonie“: regionalität, identität und sprachkontakt in der geschichte asiens, bert g. fragner argues forcefully for the importance of language as a constitutive factor of persian identity and a persian cultural sphere.15 his point of view is in accord with our knowledge about ethnicity in the greater mediterranean world more broadly16 and with the findings of other specialists in premodern persian history.17 it thus seems worthwhile to explore whether and to what degree other insights derived from the study of premodern european ethnicities can likewise be applied to the persian case. a noteworthy similarity between publications on ethnicity in europe and those on the islamicate world is that they often remain on a rather general level and relatively rarely engage with the construction of particular ethnic identities in a specific time and place.18 in this, they reflect the fact that the construction of specific ethnic identities in premodern societies often evades historical analysis because of a lack of appropriate sources.19 we are thus fortunate to have at our disposal a set of texts that allows a deeper understanding of the 12. reuter, “race,” 103–104. see also geary, “construct,” 23–25. 13. webb, imagining, especially 4, 9–15. for an earlier study likewise arguing for the applicability of findings on ethnicity in europe to the islamicate world, see armstrong, nations, especially 3, and for comparative reflections on ethnicity in europe and the islamicate world, see pohl, “ethnicity.” 14. see, e.g., savant, muslims, whose primary theoretical focus, however, is “memory” rather than “ethnicity.” 15. b. g. fragner, die „persophonie“: regionalität, identität und sprachkontakt in der geschichte asiens (berlin: das arabische buch, 1999), especially 16–23. 16. e.g., h. barker, that most precious merchandise: the mediterranean trade in black sea slaves (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2019), 41–45. 17. e.g., m. cooperson, “‘arabs’ and ‘iranians’: the uses of ethnicity in the early abbasid period,” in islamic cultures, islamic contexts: essays in honor of professor patricia crone, ed. a. q. ahmed et al., 364–382 (leiden: brill, 2015), 368–375, 377, 382; a. amanat, “remembering the persianate,” in the persianate world: rethinking a shared sphere, ed. a. amanat and a. ashraf, 15–62 (leiden: brill, 2019), 32–41. on the connection between language and (ethnic) identity, see in detail m. bucholtz and k. hall, “language and identity,” in a companion to linguistic anthropology, ed. a. duranti, 369–94 (malden: blackwell, 2004), especially 371–374. 18. on arguments for the usefulness of broader general approaches, see, e.g., armstrong, nations, 3–4; and on the need to study ethnicities in a specific time and place, see webb, imagining, 7. 19. geary, “construct,” 21. see also reuter, “race,” 101. 381 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) construction and the significance of persian ethnic identity at a late mamluk court—namely, the literary representations of the majālis, or learned salons, convened by the penultimate mamluk sultan qāniṣawh al-ghawrī (r. 906–922/1501–1516). they repeatedly attest to the prominent roles played by persons, texts, and cultural techniques labeled “persian” in the life of his court in general, as earlier scholarship has already noted.20 however, the deep insights that these sources offer into late mamluk processes of constructing, claiming, and affirming ethnic identities have so far largely escaped scholarly attention. the present article seeks to shed light on these processes within a specific and comparatively well-documented social context. following a short synopsis of the historical background and the available sources, i aim to answer to the following questions: what made a person persian in al-ghawrī’s majālis? who could make someone persian? and why would one want to be persian? in particular, the article shows that language, cultural capital, and region of origin were the most important factors in the process of persian identity construction at this late mamluk court. the key actors in this process were persons who identified themselves as persians and sought to make strategic use of the benefits that their identity could entail within the patronage context of al-ghawrī’s court.21 historical background and sources the late mamluk sultan qāniṣawh al-ghawrī (also sometimes erroneously spelled “qānṣūh al-ghūrī”) is today best known as the loser of the battle of marj dābiq of 922/1516, in which he met his death after witnessing the invading ottoman forces rout the mamluk army north of aleppo—an event that heralded the complete conquest of the mamluk realm at the hands of selīm the grim one year later. thanks to the work of carl petry, albrecht fuess, and others, historians with an interest in the mamluk sultanate are today also aware of the innovative means through which al-ghawrī sought to adjust the political, fiscal, and military structures of the mamluk sultanate to address the domestic and transregional challenges of the early tenth/sixteenth century, such as the rise of the safawids, the expansion of the ottoman empire, and the sudden appearance of portuguese ships in the vicinity of the arabian peninsula. in response, al-ghawrī significantly expanded the number of firearms available to the mamluk army, experimented with disentangling late mamluk patterns of landholding from the structure of the military, and established revolving sources of funds reserved for his personal use by manipulating religious endowments, among other actions.22 20. see, e.g., r. irwin, “the political thinking of the ‘virtuous ruler,’ qansuh al-ghawri,” mamlūk studies review 12, no. 1 (2008): 37–49; d’hulster, “‘sitting’”; flemming, “šerif”; b. flemming, “aus den nachtgesprächen sultan ġaurīs,” in folia rara: wolfgang voigt lxv. diem natalem celebranti ab amicis et catalogorum codicum orientalium conscribendorum collegis dedicata, ed. h. franke, w. heissig, and w. treue, 22–28 (wiesbaden: steiner, 1976); behrens-abouseif, “arts,” 73. 21. on the related topic of ottoman turkish elements in the majālis, see c. mauder, “ottomanization before the conquest? mamluk-ottoman religious and cultural entanglements in the courtly salons of qāniṣawh al-ghawrī and post-conquest gatherings,” in the mamluk-ottoman transition: continuity and change in egypt and bilad al-sham in the sixteenth century ii, ed. s. conermann and g. şen (göttingen: bonn university press, forthcoming). 22. see especially a. fuess,“dreikampf um die macht zwischen osmanen, mamlūken und safawiden al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 382 concomitantly and, as i argue, complementarily to these innovative steps in the realm of state organization, al-ghawrī engaged in multiple large-scale projects of patronage. best known among these is the construction of several buildings, including his lavish funeral complex in the heart of cairo, which integrated novel architectural elements originating from the islamicate east into a mamluk framework of sultanic architecture.23 moreover, al-ghawrī made a name for himself as the sponsor of the first complete versified translation of the persian verse epos shāhnāma into turkish, a project to which i will return below.24 less well known, at least until recently, is al-ghawrī’s practice of convening majālis at the cairo citadel once to several times a week. at these sessions he discussed scholarly, religious, and at times also political issues with members of the local scholarly establishment, administrative officials, itinerant scholars, litterateurs, envoys, and foreign dignitaries as well as marginal figures such as musicians and jesters. in terms of scholarly disciplines, questions of islamic law clearly predominated, followed by quranic exegesis, creedal and rational theology, stories about the prophets before muḥammad, various forms of poetry and prose literature, prophetic traditions and accounts of the life of the prophet, non-prophetic history, philosophy, and various other fields of knowledge, including the natural sciences.25 although references to al-ghawrī’s majālis appear in various late mamluk and postmamluk sources,26 most of our data about these events stem from three late mamluk works (1500–1517): warum blieben die mamlūken auf der strecke?,” in die mamlūken: studien zu ihrer geschichte und kultur; zum gedenken an ulrich haarmann (1942–1999), ed. s. conermann and a. pistor-hatam, 239–250 (schenefeld: eb-verlag, 2003); a. fuess, “les janissaires, les mamelouks et les armes à feu: une comparaison des systèmes militaires ottoman et mamelouk à partir du milieu du xve siècle,” turcica 41 (2009): 209–227; c. petry, twilight of majesty: the reigns of the mamlūk sultans al-ashrāf qāytbāy and qanṣūh al-ghawrī in egypt (seattle: university of washington press, 1993); c. petry, protectors or praetorians? the last mamlūk sultans and egypt’s waning as a great power (albany: state university of new york press, 1994). 23. k. a. alhamzah, late mamluk patronage: qansuh al-ghūrī’s waqfs and his foundations in cairo (boca raton, fl: universal publishers, 2009); behrens-abouseif, “arts,” 79–84. 24. on this translation, see, e.g., flemming, “šerif”; d’hulster, “‘sitting’” (with detailed references to earlier studies); a. zaja̧czkowski, “treny filozofów na śmierć iskendera: podług mamelucko-tureckiej wersji šāh-nāme,” rocznik orientalistyczny 28, no. 2 (1965): 13–57; a. zaja̧czkowski, “la plus ancienne traduction turque (en vers) du šāh-nāme de l’état mamelouk d’égypte (xv–xvie siècles),” türk dili araştırmalari yıllığı belleten (1966): 51–63; a. zaja̧czkowski, “şeh-name’nin ilk türkçe manzumesinde atasözleri ve deylimler (özet),” in xi. türk dil kurultayinda okunan bilimsel bildiriler 1966, ed. türk dil kurumu, 1–7 (ankara: türk tarih kurumu basımevi, 1968); s. bağci, “from translated word to translated image: the illustrated şehnâme-i türkî copies,” muqarnas 17 (2000): 162–176; n. atasoy, “un manuscrit mamlūk illustré du šāhnāma,” revue des études islamiques 37 (1969): 151–58. for editions, see a. zaja̧czkowski, ed., turecka wersja šāh-nāme z egiptu mameluckiego (warsaw: państwowe wydawn, 1965); z. kültüral and l. beyreli, eds., şerîfî şehnâme çevirisi (ankara: türk dil kurumu, 1999). 25. see, in detail, mauder, salon, chap. 4. 26. e.g., kültüral and beyreli, şehnāme çevrisi, 1990–1992; muḥammad b. aḥmad ibn iyās al-ḥanafī, die chronik des ibn ijās: mujallad 5, min sana 922 ilā sana 928 h. (1516–1522), 2nd ed., ed. m. muṣṭafā (wiesbaden: steiner, 1961), 89; muḥammad b. ibrāhīm ibn al-ḥanbalī, durr al-ḥabab fī tārīkh aʿyān ḥalab, ed. m. m. al-fākhūrī and y. ʿabbāra (damascus: manshūrāt wizārat al-thaqāfa, 1972–1973), 2(1):48; muṣṭafā ʿalī, the ottoman gentleman of the sixteenth century: mustafa âli’s “mevaʾidüʾn-nefaʾis fi kavaʿidiʾl-mecalis”; 383 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) claiming to constitute eyewitness accounts of what was said and done during the meetings.27 two of these works, nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya fī ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-qurʾāniyya by one ḥusayn b. muḥammad al-ḥusaynī, known as al-sharīf, and al-kawkab al-durrī fī masāʾil al-ghawrī of unknown authorship, have been known to scholarship since the mid-twentieth century and are available in incomplete editions.28 the third, likewise anonymous, account of the majālis, al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya fī al-nawādir al-ghawriyya, was rediscovered only recently, as announced in the present journal.29 each of the three sources exhibits a distinct thematic and chronological focus, but their accounts of the majālis are remarkably consistent. in the case of al-kawkab al-durrī and al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya, this consistency is the result of textual interdependence between the two texts, which could share the same (presently unknown) author. nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya, however, is not textually related to the other two works and thus represents an independent literary tradition of writing about al-ghawrī’s majālis. the fact that its account of the sultan’s salons nevertheless largely agrees in content, though typically not in wording (beyond five dozen instances), allows the conclusion that both literary traditions about al-ghawrī’s salons are based on and reflect what took place during these meetings. it is therefore justified to use these texts as historical sources on late mamluk court culture, including the identities of its participants.30 when relying on the accounts of al-ghawrī’s majālis for historical information, we nevertheless have to bear in mind who wrote them, and for what reasons. the fact that we know almost nothing about the author(s) of the two anonymous works al-kawkab al-durrī and al-ʿuqūd al-jawhariyya makes answering these questions particularly difficult, as i show elsewhere.31 for the purposes of the present article, we therefore focus on al-sharīf’s nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya, which is also the source that provides the most information on persian ethnic identity at al-ghawrī’s court. even in al-sharīf’s case, all that we know about him and his work comes from the text itself, as other mamluk authors, according to our present knowledge, found neither him “tables of delicacies concerning the rules of social gatherings,” ed. and trans. d. s. brookes (cambridge, ma: harvard university, department of near eastern languages and civilizations, 2003), 95. 27. on these texts in detail, see mauder, salon, chap. 3.1. 28. the first publication providing detailed information on the works was m. awad, “sultan al-ghawri: his place in literature and learning (three books written under his patronage),” in actes du xxe congrès international des orientalistes: bruxelles 5–10. september 1938, 321–322 (louvain: bureaux du muséon, 1940). the edition of both texts—ʿa. ʿazzām, ed., majālis al-sulṭān al-ghawrī: ṣafaḥāt min tārīkh miṣr min al-qarn al-ʿāshir al-hijrī (cairo: maṭbaʿat lajnat al-taʾlīf wa-l-tarjama wa-l-nashr, 1941)—has been reprinted several times. the unicum manuscripts of the texts are ms istanbul, topkapı sarayı kütüphanesi, ahmet iii 2680 (nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya) and ms istanbul, topkapı sarayı kütüphanesi, ahmet iii 1377 (al-kawkab al-durrī). hereinafter, references to the manuscripts of the two works are preceded by “(ms)” and use the pagination in the manuscripts. page numbers in the edition are indicated by “(ed. ʿazzām).” all quotations for which references to both the edition and the manuscripts are given are based on the manuscripts. 29. c. mauder and c. a. markiewicz, “a new source on the social gatherings (majālis) of the mamluk sultan qānṣawh al-ghawrī,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 145–148. all quotations from this work refer to the two-volume unicum manuscript ms istanbul, süleymaniye yazma eser kütüphanesi, ayasofya 3312 and 3313. 30. see mauder, salon, chap. 3.1.5. 31. see mauder, salon, chaps. 3.1.2 and 3.1.3. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 384 nor his work worthy of mention.32 this might have to do with his origins. al-sharīf was an outsider who hailed from the bilād al-ʿajam (lands of the persians).33 his work reveals that he was literate in persian, turkish, and arabic, although his knowledge of arabic was somewhat imperfect, if we are to judge from the numerous linguistic peculiarities that nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya exhibits. learned in ḥanafī jurisprudence, al-sharīf seems to have come to cairo in the period of political instability in greater iran that saw the rise to power of the shīʿī safawids, and it seems plausible that his decision to leave his homeland was connected to the political, economic, religious, and social transformations that characterized the turn from the ninth/fifteenth to the tenth/sixteenth century.34 al-sharīf moved to cairo, where he managed to attract the attention of sultan al-ghawrī, who made him a member of his majālis. according to his work, this step must have taken place in or before ramaḍān 910/ february 1505.35 over the subsequent months, up to shaʿbān 911/december 1505,36 al-sharīf was a regular, and, if we are to trust his text, very active participant in the sultan’s majālis, as his work, which is written from a first-person perspective, attributes to him the secondlargest number of recorded contributions to the majālis discussions. only the sultan himself is portrayed as engaging more actively in the discussions. in addition to being a regular member of the sultan’s circle, al-sharīf also benefited from al-ghawrī’s patronage by being appointed to the paid position of a sufi in the latter’s funeral complex.37 yet al-sharīf’s position as the ruler’s client, and the benefits that came with it, were highly dependent on the sultan’s favor, as became clear during a series of debates about a question of quranic exegesis in which al-sharīf so vehemently defended his opinions against the majority of the participants that tensions grew to the point where the sultan summarily banished all those present, including al-sharīf, from his presence and temporarily discontinued the holding of majālis.38 in reaction to this development, 32. for more on what is known about this text and its author, see mauder, salon, chap. 3.1.1. 33. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 221; (ed. ʿazzām) 101. on the translation of ʿajam as “persian” in the present context, see below. 34. on the emigration of iranian sunnis in the period of the safawid rise to power, see, e.g., e. glassen, “krisenbewusstsein und heilserwartung in der islamischen welt zu beginn der neuzeit,” in die islamische welt zwischen mittelalter und neuzeit: festschrift für hans robert roemer zum 65. geburtstag, ed. u. haarmann and p. bachmann, 167–79 (wiesbaden: steiner, 1979), 175; b. flemming, “turks: turkish literature of the golden horde and of the mamlūks,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., 10:716–18, at 718; l. berger, gesellschaft und individuum in damaskus 1550–1791: kultur, recht und politik in muslimischen gesellschaften (würzburg: ergon, 2007), 161–63. 35. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 3, 6; (ed. ʿazzām) 2, 5. 36. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 263; (ed. ʿazzām) 141. 37. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 115; (ed. ʿazzām) 36. see also behrens-abouseif, “arts,” 77; flemming, “nachtgesprächen,” 24. on al-ghawrī’s relationship with sufi communities, see also c. mauder, “der sultan, sein geschwätziger barbier und die sufis: ibn iyās über den fall des kamāl ad-dīn b. šams im kairo des 16. jahrhunderts,” in macht bei hofe: narrative darstellungen in ausgewählten quellen; ein interdisziplinärer reader, ed. s. conermann and a. kollatz, 79–98 (berlin: eb-verlag, 2020). 38. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 259–68; (ed. ʿ azzām) 135–144. on this debate, see also mauder, salon, chap. 4.2.2; c. mauder, “does a mamluk sultan hold religious authority? quranic exegesis and hadith studies in late mamluk courtly majālis,” intellectual history of the islamicate world (forthcoming). 385 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) which posed a direct threat to al-sharīf ’s newly found influence and livelihood, he presented the ruler with his work nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya, which, after a detailed chronological account of the majālis in which al-sharīf participated in 910–911/1505, ends with a plea for the sultan’s forgiveness.39 whether al-sharīf succeeded in his attempt to regain the sultan’s favor by penning a literary work is unknown, but the information we have about him and his work makes it clear that we have to understand it as part of a strategic effort to regain and maintain sultanic patronage in a time of political turmoil and personal insecurity. we must also bear this fact in mind when we examine how al-sharīf, as an immigrant from the “lands of the persians,” addresses and portrays persian ethnicity, especially when we discuss below the question of why one would want to be persian as a member of al-ghawrī’s court. al-sharīf was certainly not the first person from the islamicate east who came to egypt in hope of a better life. earlier periods of mamluk history, including especially the eighth/ fourteenth century with the long third reign of al-nāṣir muḥammad (r. 709–741/1310–1341) and the reigns of barqūq (r. 784–792/1382–1389 and 793–802/1390–1399), likewise saw extensive migration to cairo by persians, some of whom attained high office and rank.40 yet al-sharīf’s predecessors often had to face strong anti-persian stereotypes in egypt, as petry and others have shown. persians were seen as openly or clandestinely siding with religious communities understood to be deviant, including antinomian sufi groups.41 mamluk sultans sometimes even ordered all persians to leave cairo under threat of capital punishment, regarding them as possible traitors or supporters of rival foreign powers. in times of crisis, graffiti throughout the city called for the killing of all persians found therein 39. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 268–70; (ed. ʿazzām) 145–46. 40. on persians in the mamluk realm during the eighth/fourteenth century, see, e.g., o. amir, “niẓām al-dīn yaḥyā al-ṭayyārī: an artist in the court of the ilkhans and mamluks,” asiatische studien 71, no. 4 (2018): 1075– 1091; e. i. binbaş, intellectual networks in timurid iran: sharaf al-dīn ʿalī yazdī and the islamicate republic of letters (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016), especially 112–136; u. haarmann, “arabic in speech, turkish in lineage: mamluks and their sons in the intellectual life of fourteenth-century egypt and syria,” journal of semitic studies 33, no. 1 (1988): 81–114, at 92; c. juvin, “a mamluk qurʾānic ǧuzʾ and its connection with amīr ʿabd al-qādir al-ǧazāʾirī,” journal of islamic manuscripts 10 (2019): 105–135, at 111, 115–116; a. levanoni, “a supplementary source for the study of mamluk social history: the taqārīẓ,” arabica 60 (2013): 146–177, at 170–173, 175; m. melvin-koushki, “how to rule the world: occult-scientific manuals of the early modern persian cosmopolis,” journal of persianate studies 11 (2018): 140–154, at 150; m. melvin-koushki, “in defense of geomancy: šaraf al-dīn yazdī rebuts ibn ḫaldūn’s critique of the occult sciences,” arabica 64 (2017): 346–403, passim; m. melvin-koushki, “powers of one: the mathematicalization of the occult sciences in the high persianate tradition,” intellectual history of the islamicate world 5 (2017): 127–199, at 131–132; m. melvinkoushki, “imperial talismanic love: ibn turka’s debate of feast and fight (1426) as philosophical romance and lettrist mirror for timurid princes,” der islam 96, no. 1 (2019): 42–86, passim; j. van steenbergen, “the amir yalbughā al-khāṣṣakī, the qalāwūnid sultanate, and the cultural matrix of mamlūk society: a reassessment of mamlūk politics in the 1360s,” journal of the american oriental society 131, no. 3 (2011): 423–443, at 440; yosef, “hatred,” 179–180. for a particularly well-documented case from the early ninth/fifteenth century, see c. petry, “‘travel patterns of medieval notables in the near east’ reconsidered: contrasting trajectories, interconnected networks,” in everything is on the move: the mamluk empire as a node in (trans-)regional networks, ed. s. conermann, 165–179 (göttingen: bonn university press, 2014), 170–173. for the broader context, petry’s early groundbreaking study, civilian elite, especially 61–68, is still of fundamental importance. 41. for a reflection of this view in the majālis accounts, see al-ʿuqūd, 2: fol. 46v. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 386 in the name of islam. locals particularly disliked those persians who had managed to enter the highest echelons of the mamluk ruling apparatus.42 against this background, the case of persians at al-ghawrī’s court is particularly noteworthy, as it seems to point to markedly different and, as far as we can say, less hostile ways in which mamluk egyptians and their persian interlocutors perceived and interacted with each other. who could make someone persian? on the basis of the three majālis accounts, we can identify three key factors in the construction of persian ethnic identity in al-ghawrī’s majālis: first, proficiency in the persian language; second, mastery of knowledge as well cultural techniques understood to be persian; and third, a persian place of origin that was indicated, among other things, through proper names. to members of al-ghawrī’s court, being persian meant first and foremost that one could speak persian. to be sure, persians were not the only ones who knew this language. for example, sultan al-ghawrī himself claimed to have a good command of persian, among other languages such as arabic, turkish, and circassian.43 the fact that the corpus of poetry attributed to the sultan includes some persian verses lends credibility to this claim.44 yet what distinguished persian native speakers from others was their higher level of language proficiency, including a broader vocabulary that outshone even that of the sultan, who had to accept the superior knowledge of native speakers, although a source from his court credits him with knowing persian better than a persian.45 a case in point is a situation described in al-sharīf’s nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya at which a sweetmeat made of flour and honey known as fālūdaj in arabic was served. interested in improving his persian vocabulary, the sultan asked al-sharīf, the first person-narrator of the work who, as we have seen, hailed from the “lands of the persians,” what the dish was called in persian. the latter told him that its persian name was pālūda.46 that al-sharīf was of persian-speaking background is confirmed not only by his knowledge of the niceties of persian vocabulary but also by the abovementioned linguistic 42. c. petry, the criminal underworld in a medieval islamic society: narratives from cairo and damascus under the mamluks (chicago: middle east documentation center, 2012), 260–262. see also petry, “‘travel patterns,” 173–74; l. fernandes, “mamluk politics and education: the evidence from two fourteenth century waqfiyya,” annales islamologiques 23 (1987): 87–98, at 96. 43. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 257; (ed. ʿazzām) 132–133. 44. e.g., m. yalçın, ed. and trans., the dîvân of qânsûh al-ghûrî: kansu gavri divanı (istanbul: bay, 2002), 76–78. on the poems attributed to the sultan, with references to earlier studies, see c. mauder, “legitimating sultanic rule in arabic, turkish, and persian: late mamluk rulers as authors of religious poetry,” in rulers as authors in the islamic world: knowledge, authority and legitimacy, ed. m. fierro, s. brentjes, and t. seidensticker (leiden: brill, forthcoming). 45. flemming, “šerīf,” 84; d’hulster, “‘sitting,’” 249. 46. a “kind of sweet beverage made of water, flour and honey (according to others, a mixture of grated apples with sugar and cardamoms)”; f. steingass, persian-english dictionary: including the arabic words and phrases to be met with in persian literature, 3rd ed. (london: kegan paul, 1947), 233. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 253; (ed. ʿazzām) 131. see also flemming, “nachtgesprächen,” 25. 387 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) peculiarities in his work, which, while not in line with the rules of classical arabic, are perfectly understandable from a native speaker of persian who had learned arabic as a second language. even the title of the work, nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya fī ḥaqāʾiq asrār al-qurʾāniyya instead of nafāʾis al-majālis al-sulṭāniyya fī ḥaqāʾiq al-asrār al-qurʾāniyya, indicates a less than perfect command of classical arabic. it seems possible that the author considered the first two words of both parts of the title to be connected not through an arabic iḍāfa or genitive construction, which would have required the second element to be in the status determinativus, but rather by means of a persian eẓāfe as nafāʾis-i majālis and ḥaqāʾiq-i asrār.47 further examples of the same feature can be found throughout the text.48 furthermore, the author does not consistently feminize adjectives referring to things in the plural,49 uses unidiomatic phrases that seem to constitute largely verbatim translations of persian expressions,50 and employs persian words in otherwise arabic passages for no apparent reason.51 taken together, these observations strongly suggest that al-sharīf ’s arabic was heavily influenced by his native persian. these particularities of his arabic, however, apparently did not diminish al-sharīf’s standing in the sultan’s salons, where he was valued for his persian language skills, which formed part of his identity. as mentioned earlier, modern sociological and historical research supports the idea that language is a crucial element in the construction of identity. the same view was also voiced in al-ghawrī’s salons. in a discussion about proper behavior in the presence of rulers, one of the majālis attendees narrated an anecdote about how the famous philosopher al-fārābī (d. 339/950) had insulted the ḥamdānid ruler sayf al-dawla (r. 333–356/945–967) by claiming a seat above that of the ruler in the latter’s majlis. when sayf al-dawla’s retainers thereupon planned to kill al-fārābī and discussed their scheme in his presence in persian (al-lisān al-ʿajamī), al-fārābī interrupted them in the same language and told them to wait until the majlis had ended. in the ensuing debates, the philosopher bested all the assembled scholars, thus proving himself worthy of the place he had claimed at the outset and averting the retainers’ punishment.52 after narrating this story, nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya credits al-ghawrī with making the following comment about it: “the only thing that saved al-fārābī from being killed at sayf al-dawla’s [court] was the persian language. therefore, it is said: ‘a human being’s language (lisān) is [his] second self.’”53 it is difficult to imagine a more clear-cut statement about the relationship between language and identity as understood by members of al-ghawrī’s court. 47. my thanks to thomas bauer (münster) for pointing this out to me. we do not know whether al-sharīf sought to allude with this title to the anthology majālis al-nafāʾis by mīr ʿalī shīr nawāʾī (d. 906/1501), on which see, e.g., c. g. lingwood, politics, poetry, and sufism in medieval iran: new perspectives on jāmī’s “salāmān va absāl” (leiden: brill, 2014), 32–33. 48. on this point, see also ʿazzām, majālis, 49; d’hulster, “‘sitting,’” 239. 49. e.g., al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 4, 157. 50. see, e.g., the editor’s comments on al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 157; (ed. ʿazzām) 60; (ms) 165; (ed. ʿazzām) 61; (ms) 174; (ed. ʿazzām) 68; (ms) 194; (ed. ʿazzām) 80. 51. e.g., al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 247, 273; (ed. ʿazzām) 126, 141. 52. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 252; (ed. ʿazzām) 129. 53. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 253; (ed. ʿazzām) 129. ˇ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 388 the ambiguous phrase al-lisān al-ʿajamī, which repeatedly appears in the majālis accounts and literally means “the non-arabic language,” typically denotes what is understood in english as “persian,” a point that becomes clear in a majālis debate about the language skills of the prophet muḥammad, as narrated in nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya.54 when the first-person narrator—possibly in an attempt to boost the prestige of his mother tongue— affirmed that the prophet had known ʿajamī, al-ghawrī objected and stated that one had to differentiate between the two meanings of ʿajamī: it could denote either the persian (fārisī) language or any language spoken by non-arabs, such as turks or indians. relevant in the present case was the former meaning, and one had to acknowledge that there was no clear evidence that the prophet ever spoke persian.55 in addition to shedding light on the connection between prophetic history and linguistic identity, this passage also exemplifies the common trait of the sources on al-ghawrī’s majālis to refer to the persian language as fārisī only when necessary for reasons of clarity or disambiguation; otherwise, the term ʿajamī predominates. the latter is also clearly the more important term to denote persian ethnic identity, whereas fārisī is used primarily as a linguistic label.56 yet although the prophet apparently did not know persian in the sense of fārisī, as a language of literary and religious significance it did enjoy a special status among the members of al-ghawrī’s court. it was exalted above all other languages except arabic in that, according to the ḥanafī legal school, it was permissible to perform one’s ritual prayers in either persian or arabic, as confirmed in the course of one of the many legal discussions during the majālis.57 moreover, right after his account of the debate about the prophet’s language skills, al-sharīf added the following aphorism he attributed to al-ṣāḥib ibn ʿabbād (d. 385/995): “arabic is eloquence (faṣāḥa), persian is gracefulness (malāḥa), turkish is rulership (siyāsa), and the rest is filth (najāsa)”58—a noteworthy statement from a man whose patron confidently identified as a circassian native speaker. it clearly underscores the prestige associated with persian at the late mamluk court. this attribution of special qualities to the persian language leads us to the second key factor defining persian ethnic identity in the majālis texts: the mastery of knowledge and cultural techniques—that is, cultural capital—that were understood as specifically persian.59 54. for another interpretation of the term ʿ ajam as meaning both persians and turcomans from greater iran in the present context, see flemming, “šerīf,” 84; behrens-abouseif, “arts,” 73. 55. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 81–82. on this passage, see also flemming, “nachtgesprächen,” 25. 56. on fārisī and ʿajamī, see also, e.g., t. e. zadeh, the vernacular qur’an: translation and the rise of persian exegesis (oxford: oxford university press, 2012), 73; savant, muslims, 9, 148. 57. al-kawkab, (ms) 11–12; (ed. ʿazzām) 10–11. on this ḥanafī position, see zadeh, vernacular qur’an, 1–2, 53–63, 66–73, 92–93, 103–119, 122–23, 162–163, 288–290, 476–478. on the dissenting opinion of the other schools of law, see zadeh, vernacular qur’an, 72–80, 104, 123–126. 58. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 82. on this passage, see also flemming, “nachtgesprächen,” 25. i have not been able to locate this saying in any of ibn ʿabbād’s available writings. on the negative connotations of persian in arabic literature, see zadeh, vernacular qur’an, 74–76. 59. on this type of cultural capital as typically persian, see also, e.g., l. richter-bernburg, “linguistic shuʿūbīya and early neo-persian prose,” journal of the american oriental society 94, no. 1 (1974): 55–64, at 59–60; amanat, “remembering the persianate,” 29–32. 389 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) persians were expected to be well versed in the history of the pre-islamic iranian kings and the political wisdom associated with them. throughout his account of the majālis, al-sharīf showcases his familiarity with the deeds and sayings of the iranian kings anūshīrwān, shāpūr, ardashīr, and the wise wazīr buzurgmihr. often these figures were used to communicate mirrors-for-princes material. for example, ardashīr was quoted with the famous maxim of persian political thought that religion (dīn) and kingship (mulk) were twins,60 while king anūshīrwān was credited with the aphorism that it was better to treat one’s subjects well than it was to command many soldiers.61 although little of this material was connected to traditions perceived as genuinely islamic, majālis participants sometimes discussed connections between quranic visions of history and the persian pre-islamic past, for example, when they debated the relationship between the prophet noah and gayūmarth, the first human being according to the avesta.62 material about ancient iran, its kings, and its mythology was presented in the majālis almost exclusively by those identified as persians. the only clear exception is sultan al-ghawrī himself, who, despite his circassian origins, is portrayed as highly knowledgeable in ancient iranian lore. this applies especially to everything related to the persian shāhnāma, of which al-ghawrī, as we recall, commissioned a turkish translation. in the accounts of his majālis, and especially those of a session held in celebration of the completion of the translation,63 al-ghawrī is credited with quoting at length anecdotes about the original context of the shāhnāma and about its author’s patron, maḥmūd of ghazna (r. 388–421/998– 1030). of particular interest here is a story about the stinginess of maḥmūd’s reward for firdawsī for his composition of the shāhnāma and the latter’s retribution in the form of satiric verses inserted into the work.64 although this anecdote is widely attested in different versions in persian literature,65 its inclusion in an arabic work from the mamluk period is noteworthy. what is more, the rather simple arabic in which the anecdote is narrated and its close similarity to the persian version included in aḥmad b. ʿumar al-samarqandī’s (d. after 556/1161) collection of anecdotes, chahār maqāla,66 suggests that we are most likely dealing here with an ad hoc translation or a paraphrasing re-narration of an originally 60. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 164. 61. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 243; (ed. ʿazzām) 122. for further examples from this work, see al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 4, 21, 33, 49, 51–52, 61, 66–67, 84, 92, 105, 133, 140, 142–143, 146–147, 155–156, 159, 161–162, 170–171, 183, 212–213, 227–228, 235–237, 247; (ed. ʿazzām) 2, 23, 58, 65–66, 74, 107–109, 114–115, 126; and for examples from the other majālis accounts, see al-kawkab, (ms) 4–6, 189–190; (ed. ʿazzām) 2–4, 62–63; al-ʿuqūd, 1: fol. 86r–86v; 2: fols. 10r, 16r, 38v. see also irwin, “thinking,” 43–46. on the engagement of the majālis participants with historical material in general, see c. mauder, “‘and they read in that night books of history’: consuming, discussing, and producing texts about the past in al-ghawrī’s majālis as social practices,” in new readings in arabic historiography from late medieval egypt and syria, ed. j. van steenbergen (leiden: brill, forthcoming). 62. al-kawkab, (ed. ʿazzām) 90. 63. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 195–199; (ed. ʿazzām) 81–84. 64. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 195–196; (ed. ʿazzām) 81–82. 65. see, in detail, a. khāṭibī, āyā firdawsī maḥmūd-i ghaznavī rā hajv guft? hajv’nāmah-i mansūb bih firdawsī: bar’rasī-yi taḥlīlī, taṣḥīḥ-i intiqādī, va sharḥ-i bayt’hā (tehran: pardīs-i dānish, 2016). 66. aḥmad b. ʿumar b. ʿalī al-samarqandī, chahār maqāla, ed. m. muḥammad (leiden: brill, 1910), 48–51. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 390 persian anecdote in an arabic-speaking context. as we have seen, al-ghawrī’s court society included individuals who had the necessary language skills to produce such translations and re-narrations. the participants of the majālis seemed to take it almost for granted that persians were familiar with the glorious history of iranian kings and therefore did not refer explicitly to this important element of persian identity. what they did address directly, however, was persian proficiency in a second field of knowledge and cultural techniques: the creative interplay of learning and entertainment typical of the majālis of persian rulers of their day. as previous scholarship has already noted, persian court culture was an important point of reference for al-ghawrī and those around him in their efforts to stage a court life on par with that of their islamicate neighbors.67 therefore, information on how past and present persian rulers held court was highly valued in the majālis. note, for example, the following instance, in which al-ghawrī asked al-sharīf to compare his experiences in cairo to other majālis he had attended: “question: our lord the sultan said: ‘you have attended the majālis of the persian sultans (salāṭīn al-ʿajam) and you have seen our majālis.’ answer: ‘yes, but before long the former became irksome to me, because they indulged themselves all day in wine and music.’”68 although al-sharīf here cast the majālis of the persian rulers in an unfavorable light, much of what happened in them set a pattern for the majālis in the mamluk capital. learned discussions that had taken place in front of the timurids of herat69 or the rulers of tabrīz70 or shirvān71 were taken as models, continued, and at times quoted at the cairo citadel. when al-ghawrī, for example, asked where the nisba “al-shāfiʿī” came from, al-sharīf replied with reference to the timurid ruler shahrukh (r. 807–850/1405–1447): “sultan shahrukh asked the very same question in persian.” he then narrated the anecdote about al-shāfiʿī’s alleged eponymous intercession (shafāʿa) that had been told to shahrukh.72 moreover, participants shared highlights of persian literature, including texts such as saʿdī’s (d. 691/1292) gulistān.73 pride of place was accorded to persian poetry by the contemporary timurid sultan ḥusayn bayqarā (r. 875–912/1470–1506), whom the persian participants in al-ghawrī’s majālis presented as a praiseworthy model of educated rulership.74 67. irwin, “thinking,” 40–41. for the broader context, see also d. behrens-abouseif, “the citadel of cairo: stage for mamluk ceremonial,” annales islamologiques 24 (1989): 25–79, at 30; h. t. norris, “aspects of the influence of nesimi’s hurufi verse, and his martyrdom, in the arab east between the 16th and 18th centuries,” in syncrétismes et hérésies dans l’orient seldjoukide et ottoman (xive–xviiie siècle): actes du colloque du collège de france, octobre 2001, ed. g. veinstein, 163–82 (paris: peeters, 2005), 163–164. 68. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 224; (ed. ʿazzām) 105. 69. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 13–14; (ed. ʿazzām) 12–13. 70. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 174–175; (ed. ʿazzām) 68–70. 71. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 17–18; (ed. ʿazzām) 17; al-kawkab, (ms) 302; (ed. ʿazzām) 87. 72. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 13–14; (ed. ʿazzām) 12–13. 73. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 204–205; (ed. ʿazzām) 89. see also (ms) 145–46; (ed. ʿazzām) 56. on the reception of the gulistān in the mamluk sultanate, see also d’hulster, “notes” (with references to earlier studies); bodrogligeti, translation. 74. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 152–153, 258; (ed. ʿazzām) 134. see also al-ʿuqūd, 2: fol. 38r-38v; flemming, 391 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) that the classics of persian poetry likewise enjoyed popularity at al-ghawrī’s court is confirmed by the poems attributed to the sultan, which include intertextual references to works by luminaries such as niẓāmī (d. before 613/1217) and ḥāfiẓ (d. 792/1390).75 the third decisive factor in the construction of persian identity in the majālis was a person’s place of origin. members of al-ghawrī’s circle perceived the non-mamluk, muslimruled world as consisting of multiple sultanates that in turn formed overarching regions such as the maghrib, anatolia (bilād al-rūm), yemen, and the lands of the persians (bilād al-ʿajam).76 the latter encompassed, among others, the territories ruled by the timurid shahrukh77 and the qarā qoyunlu muẓaffar al-dīn jahānshāh b. yūsuf (r. 841–872/1438– 1467).78 at least one member of the majālis indicated his region of origin by stating simply that he had been born in the bilād al-ʿajam,79 but in most cases we must rely on onomastic evidence as a prime indicator. this is hardly surprising, since participants in the majālis typically communicated important aspects of their personal identities through their names, including ancestry, place of residence, legal allegiance, and ethnic origin.80 although no majālis participant appears in the available accounts with an unambiguous nisba such as “al-ʿajamī” or even “al-fārisī,” some names clearly point to persian origins. an example is a certain ghiyāth al-dīn dihdār, who attended at least one of the sultan’s meetings in shawwāl 910/march 1505. his laqab “ghiyāth al-dīn” is rather unusual within a mamluk context and immediately raises the question of his provenance. “dihdār,” meaning “village headman”81 in persian, in turn clearly points to a persian background, as does the distinctive persian form of the writing of the name in the unicum manuscript of nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya, where the hāʾ remains unconnected to the second dāl. we are fortunate to have access to additional information about the origins of ghiyāth al-dīn dihdār in the array of biographical writings that circulates under the name of mīr ʿalī shīr nawāʾī (d. 906/1501). these texts include information about a man of exactly the same name who hailed from azerbaijan, was knowledgeable about the quran and persian poetry, and served in khurāsān as a boon companion of the timurid ḥusayn bayqarā.82 given the exact match in name, period, and social context, it seems highly plausible that the ghiyāth al-dīn dihdār known from the timurid biographical tradition is the same as the “nachtgesprächen,” 25; r. irwin, night and horses and the desert: the penguin anthology of classical arabic literature (london: penguin, 2000), 441; irwin, “thinking,” 40–41. 75. yalçın, dîvân, 129, 133. see also flemming, “nachtgesprächen,” 23. 76. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 221, 232; (ed. ʿazzām) 101, 113. for the mamluk view of the islamicate world according to diplomatic sources, see also m. dekkiche, “diplomatics, or another way to see the world,” in bauden and dekkiche, mamluk cairo, 185–213; on the lands of the persians, see yosef, “hatred,” 178–179. 77. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 13; (ed. ʿazzām) 13. 78. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 221; (ed. ʿazzām) 101–102. 79. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 221, 223–24; (ed. ʿazzām) 101, 104–105. 80. on names and ethnic identity, see pohl, “distinction,” 10. 81. h. f. j. junker and b. alavi, persisch-deutsches wörterbuch, 9th ed. (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2002), 335. 82. mīr ʿalī shīr nawāʾī, majālis al-nafāʾis, ed. ʿa. a. ḥikmat (tehran: chāpkhāna-yi bānk-i millī īrān, 1945), 99; s. niyāz kirmānī, ḥāfiẓ-shināsī (tehran: intishārāt-i pāzanj, 1987), 7:51–52. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 392 one mentioned by al-sharīf in nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya. if this identification is correct, we may furthermore assume that ghiyāth al-dīn dihdār’s relocation to cairo reflected his search for a new patron in the wake of the disintegration of the timurid realm and the rise of the shīʿī safawids, which, as mentioned earlier, is known to have driven many learned sunnis out of greater iran and into neighboring regions, including the mamluk sultanate. in his new social environment at the mamluk court, his name clearly identified him as a persian in the sense of someone who came from a persian place of origin. the important role of territorial factors in the construction of persian identity in mamluk cairo is not entirely surprising, given that earlier scholarship about what it meant to be persian in premodern islamicate societies has already pointed to the significance of such factors. in his now classic study on the social history of the shuʿūbiyya movement under the early ʿabbasids, roy p. mottahedeh speaks of the “territorial understanding of peoplehood among the non-arabs”83 in general, and among persians in particular.84 similarly, ahmad ashraf notes, concerning the identity of iranians during the islamicate middle period, that it “was largely drawn from their territorial ties. they were identified, for the most part, with their places of birth or residence.”85 it appears that these observations about the prominent role of regional parameters apply not only to the persian-speakers of iran, but also to those who came to egypt.86 a factor notably absent in our sources from the construction of the persian ethnic identity of ghiyāth al-dīn dihdār and others who shared the same background is ancestry. this finding stands in contrast to both the medieval european situation and what we know about the construction of other ethnic identities at al-ghawrī’s court, such as the circassian one, which was explicitly defined in terms of lineage (aṣl) and offspring (nasl).87 however, to the majālis participants, it seemed to be rather unimportant who a persian’s forefathers had been.88 indeed, ḥusayn b. muḥammad al-ḥusaynī, who appears in his nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya almost as the spokesperson of the persian members of al-ghawrī’s salon, was in terms of his lineage labeled a sharīf, or descendant of the prophet muḥammad, and thus was 83. r. p. mottahedeh, “the shuʿûbîyah controversy and the social history of early islamic iran,” international journal of middle east studies 7 (1976): 161–182, at 171. 84. see, in detail, mottahedeh, “controversy,” 167–173, 181. 85. a. ashraf, “iranian identity iii: medieval islamic period,” in encyclopædia iranica, online ed., ed. e. yarshater (http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iranian-identity-iii-medieval-islamic-period, last updated march 30, 2012). on the importance of regional origin for persian identity, see also fragner, „persophonie“, 11–16, 20–21. 86. on the relationship between geographical origin and ethnic identity in general, see, e.g., geary, “construct,” 18–19, 23; pohl, “identification,” 16–17. 87. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 200; (ed. ʿazzām) 85. 88. this finding stands in contrast to the general importance of genealogy in islamicate societies. see, e.g., s. b. savant and h. de felipe, “introduction,” in genealogy and knowledge in muslim societies: understanding the past, ed. s. b. savant and h. de felipe, 1–7 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014), 1–4; cooperson, “‘arabs,’” 369–370, 372, 375–376, 382. on different versions of the genealogy of the persians in islamicate learning, see s. b. savant, “genealogy and ethnogenesis in al-mas‘udi’s muruj al-dhahab,” in savant and de felipe, genealogy and knowledge, 115–129; s. b. savant, “isaac as the persians’ ishmael: pride and the pre-islamic past in ninth and tenth-century islam,” comparative islamic studies 2 (2006): 5–25; savant, muslims, 31–60. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iranian-identity-iii-medieval-islamic-period 393 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) understood to be of at least partly arab ancestry. according to nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya, his status as a sharīf was at times a mixed blessing for al-ḥusaynī, as it prevented him from traveling through territories inhabited by kurdish tribes. allegedly, these tribesmen were in the habit of killing sharīfs passing through their lands in order to use their remains for religious practices.89 moreover, sultan al-ghawrī stipulated that in accordance with islamic law, al-ḥusaynī as a sharīf was not allowed to accept alms (ṣadaqa).90 these negative implications notwithstanding, the finding that al-sharīf could be a persian and a sharīf at the same time accords with the theoretical insight mentioned earlier—that a person can hold multiple ethnic identities in different contexts. this relative lack of interest in ancestral origins might also explain why the term jins (pl. ajnās) that features very prominently in other mamluk sources that address issues of ethnicity does not hold an important place in the majālis accounts as far as the construction of persian identity is concerned. josephine van den bent’s groundbreaking work on mongol ethnicity has shown that mamluk authors could use the term jins to refer to subgroups within a certain ethnic group, although the meaning of the term clearly went beyond that of aṣl.91 on the basis of van den bent’s findings, one may conclude that jins could refer both to larger ethnic groups such as the turks or the mongols and to smaller units within these groups that were seen as sharing a common ancestry. at least to the authors of the accounts of al-ghawrī’s majālis, such ancestral subdivisions or ajnās among the persians seem to have been of little interest, and they hence did not use the technical term jins to discuss them. this fact lends further credibility to the interpretation that ancestry was not a prime factor in the construction of persian ethnicity at al-ghawrī’s court. who could make someone a persian? now that we have examined the decisive factors in the construction of persian ethnic identity in al-ghawrī’s majālis, we must ask who could label someone a persian. put differently, how can we describe the interplay between self-labeling and the influence of others when it comes to the construction of persian identity in al-ghawrī’s majālis?92 one might expect that, being foreigners from a distant land, people identified or identifying as persians would inhabit a marginal social position that would prevent them from constructing and affirming their own ethnic identity. as a result, persians would be subject to heteronomous labeling processes they could not control. as it turns out, however, nothing could be further from the truth, according to the picture painted by the sources on al-ghawrī’s majālis. the persians of high standing who participated in al-ghawrī’s meetings appear in these texts as confidently defining, affirming, enacting, and, when necessary, defending their identity with regard to all three of the 89. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 203–204; (ed. ʿ azzām) 88. on al-sharīf’s lineage, see also ʿ azzām, majālis, 48. yosef, “hatred,” 179, shows that persons of mongol descent were labeled “persians” in mamluk sources. 90. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 217; (ed. ʿazzām) 98. 91. van den bent, “mongols,” 30–31. see also yosef, “hatred,” 174; yosef, “dawlat al-atrāk,” 394–395. on jins in the broader context of the theory of ethnicity, see pohl, “ethnicity,” 12. 92. on the importance of this question in the study of islamicate ethnicities, see webb, imagining, 14–15. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 394 previously identified key factors. in the area of persian language proficiency, they not only feature as natural experts on persian vocabulary and literature, as seen earlier, but also define and uphold the cultural significance of their native language. note the following case, in which al-sharīf confidently underlines the status of persian as a royal language on par with the turkish dialects spoken by members of the mamluk military elite: “the kings of persia (mulūk al-fars) spoke turkish (al-turkī) on days of war, pahlavi (al-fahlawī) when commanding and forbidding, and persian (al-fārisī) when partying and socializing.”93 although our sources do not contain any evidence of persians belittling the special status of arabic as the language of the quran, there can be no doubt that, as speakers of a prestigious language, this group of foreign participants forcefully asserted and defined their place in the sultan’s majālis. the situation is similar for the second factor, mastery of knowledge and cultural techniques viewed as persian. the persian participants identified in our sources appear as vigorous advocates of their native tradition of political thought and rulership. its emblematic figures, such as king anūshīrwān, received ample praise, to the point that it was accepted as common knowledge that he would not receive punishment in the hereafter, although he had led the life of a polytheist (mushrik).94 these displays of respect for the persian royal tradition could reach levels at which they annoyed local mamluk interlocutors, who were at times weary of the constant comparisons between their own achievements and those of the famous rulers of greater iran, both ancient and contemporaneous. in al-kawkab al-durrī, we read the following anecdote about al-ghawrī’s predecessor, sultan al-malik al-ashraf barsbāy (r. 825–841/1422–1438): it has been narrated about a descendant of the mamluk slave soldiers (shakhṣ min awlād al-nās) that he traveled during his [barsbāy’s] time to herat. when he returned to egypt, he mentioned every day the greatness of shāhrukh and [the persians’] numbers and possessions. news [about him] then reached the sultan. he summoned [the man] and said: “o so-and-so, if you mention again this story about the lands of the persians and their kingdom, i will cut [your] tongue off. have you come here from the land of the persians only to strike fear among my army?”95 notwithstanding this cautionary anecdote, which seems to have been narrated by a learned egyptian, the persian members of al-ghawrī’s salons could generally expect a favorable reception for the distinct knowledge and cultural techniques associated with their origin. moreover, they apparently enjoyed a kind of quasi-monopoly over these forms of cultural capital, given that the only person not clearly identified as a persian in our sources who regularly expounded persian historical and political narratives was sultan al-ghawrī himself—a fact that underscores the high social status attributed to persians. 93. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 258–259; (ed. ʿ azzām) 134. on this passage, see also flemming, “nachtgesprächen,” 25, who interprets fahlawī as “dialect, vernacular.” 94. al-kawkab, (ms) 90. 95. al-ʿuqūd, 2: fol. 50r. 395 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) with regard to their home region, our sources document a similar level of commitment to and pride in their origins among the persian members of the majālis. they saw their place of origin as a decisive element of their identity, and they defended it vehemently against anyone who tried to belittle it. this was obvious in a debate during the majālis in which a person of apparently local egyptian background argued that all legal transactions, including marriages, that had been contracted in the territories of persian rulers were void, as the latter had not been invested by the ʿabbasid caliphs of cairo. the implications of this view were far-reaching, since it entailed that all children born in persian lands were illegitimate. the persians’ reaction to the claim was severe. one of the persian participants even openly challenged the legitimacy of the ʿabbasids by referring to a ḥadīth according to which the caliphate would last only thirty years after the prophet’s death.96 taken together, our sources clearly depict the persian participants in al-ghawrī’s majālis as an ethnic group whose members, rather than being subjected to processes of heteronomous labeling, confidently exercised agency in their affirmation of their own identity with reference to its three constitutive factors of language, cultural capital, and region of origin.97 however, these affirmations did not necessarily take place against the background of positive evaluations of the persian lands and their inhabitants, as the debate about the legitimacy of persia-born children shows. why, then, were members of al-ghawrī’s majālis so eager to label themselves as persians? why would one want to be persian? given that recent research on processes of ethnic labeling tells us that ethnic identities are both situational and strategic,98 any explanation that locates the reason for the persians’ affirming their identity in al-ghawrī’s majālis simply in their “being persian” appears overly simplistic. instead, we have to ask what meanings persian ethnic identity carried in the social context of al-ghawrī’s salons, with regard to both late mamluk cairo in general and the sultanic court in particular. as discussed above, earlier periods of mamluk history had seen the spread of strong anti-persian stereotypes and even episodes of government-supported violence against persians. compared to that earlier situation, al-ghawrī’s court must have seemed a safe haven to persians who came to cairo in the early tenth/sixteenth century. several contemporaneous historiographers noted the sultan’s unusual inclination toward men from the islamicate east. the chronicler ibn iyās (d. after 928/1522), for example, writes that al-ghawrī “was favorably disposed toward (yamīl ilā) the sons of the persians.”99 96. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 220–225; (ed. ʿazzām) 100–107. on the context, see also irwin, “thinking,” 46–47; mauder, salon, chap. 6.2.3. other demonstrations of esteem for the persian lands could be less confrontational, as when the majālis participants agreed that the persian ant (al-naml al-fārisī) was the strongest animal on earth as it could lift items sixty times its own weight; see al-kawkab, (ms) 61. 97. on agency in the claiming of ethnic identities, see pohl, “identification,” 12. 98. in this context, see also geary, “construct,” 25, on the idea that ethnic identities are expressed for specific reasons. 99. ibn iyās, chronik, 88. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 396 in his biographical dictionary, muḥammad ibn al-hanbalī (d. 971/1563) writes at length about al-ghawrī’s closeness to an unnamed persian confidant who allegedly inspired in him love for the persian ruler shāh ismāʿīl.100 other aspects of al-ghawrī’s interest in all things persian, such as his sponsoring of the translation of the shāhnāma or his writing of persian verses, were noted above. we also know that al-ghawrī was the only mamluk ruler to have himself referred to with the persian title “king of kings,” or shāhanshāh,101 and described as “exercising the rule of kisrā” in panegyric and epistolary sources.102 it is thus not surprising that robert irwin concludes that al-ghawrī was “famous [. . .] for the favor he showed to persian and persian-speaking religious figures and literati,”103 while doris behrens-abouseif notes that “[o]ne of the features of al-ghawrī’s court life was his predilection for the aʿjām, who were numerous in his entourage.”104 while al-ghawrī’s interest in persian culture and its bearers is certainly not unprecedented among mamluk rulers, the extent to which it resulted in actual patronage projects, the attention it received among contemporaneous historiographers, and the fact that it translated into the sultan himself actively composing persian poetry make it particularly noteworthy. moreover, the sultan seems to have regarded the ancient “mythological” persians and their culture as portrayed, for example, in the shāhnāma as closely connected to the living and breathing persians of his own time.105 although the latter were, of course, not identical to the former, it appears that the ruler perceived the persians of his time as cultural heirs of and natural experts on their famed forefathers of old. hence they were also well qualified to support and orchestrate his efforts to present himself as the shāhanshāh of his time. given the sultan’s interests in persian culture and in the ethnic groups perceived as its representatives, it is not surprising that persians would migrate to cairo and seek patronage at al-ghawrī’s court, especially in light of the political turmoil infesting their home region. for at least some of them, the sultan’s fondness for persian literature and learning gave rise to benefits in the form of profitable assignments and positions. the sultan not only rewarded the translator of the persian shāhnāma generously upon completion of the work but also appointed him in 908/1503 to the lucrative post of shaykh and mudarris of ḥanafī jurisprudence in the mosque of muʾayyad shaykh.106 al-sharīf, the persian author of nafāʾis majālis al-sulṭāniyya, received a paid position as a sufi in the sultan’s funeral complex, as we have seen. in addition, he was later able to negotiate a significant pay raise during one of 100. ibn al-ḥanbalī, durr, ii.1, 48–49. 101. b. qurqūt, al-wathāʾiq al-ʿarabiyya fī dār al-maḥfūẓāt bi-madīnat dūbrūfnīk (cairo: al-majlis al-aʿlā li-l-thaqāfa, 2008), 135. 102. al-ʿuqūd, 2: fol. 107r. 103. irwin, “thinking,” 39. 104. behrens-abouseif, “arts,” 73. see also d’hulster, “‘sitting,’” passim; y. frenkel, “the mamluks among the nations: a medieval sultanate in its global context,” in conermann, everything is on the move, 61–79, at 69; alhamzah, patronage, 38; e. geoffroy, le soufisme en égypte et en syrie sous les derniers mamelouks et les premiers ottomans: orientations spirituelles et enjeux culturels (damascus: institut français de damas, 1995), 214; flemming, “šerīf,” 82–84; flemming, “nachtgesprächen,” 24. 105. on this typical perception of ethnic identities as stable across time, see also pohl, “identification,” 5. 106. flemming, “šerif,” 87, 89–90; flemming, “nachtgesprächen,” 24. see also d’hulster, “‘sitting,’” 238–239. 397 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the majālis meetings by threatening to leave cairo sooner than originally planned to go on the pilgrimage.107 these two examples stand out for their particularly detailed level of documentation in our sources, but the evidence from the historiographical literature indicates that they formed part of a larger pattern of patronage that al-ghawrī was willing to provide to welllettered persians who came to his court. hence, it is understandable why, in al-ghawrī’s presence, persian identity “lit up [. . .] in much the same way as fluorescent clothing does in the presence of street lighting,”108 to recall reuter’s formulation. for persians, highlighting their ethnic identity when interacting with the sultan was a wise choice, as they could be optimistic that it would be to their advantage economically and in terms of social status— even within the otherwise sometimes hostile climate of mamluk cairo. taking this line of argumentation one step further, we may also assume that the sultan’s interests and the cultural climate at his court constituted an important reason individuals such as al-sharīf or the abovementioned ghiyāth al-dīn dihdār chose to focus in their selfrepresentation on their ethnic identity rather than other characteristics that might have qualified them as potential recipients of patronage in other social contexts. ghiyāth al-dīn dihdār, for example, was, as mentioned above, a noted scholar of the quranic sciences, yet this expertise seems to have played no discernible role in his status as a participant in the sultan’s majālis, possibly because in the competitive world of patronage in late mamluk cairo, quranic learning was in much greater supply than were the forms of cultural capital associated with persian ethnicity. similarly, neither al-sharīf’s work nor his contributions to the sultan’s majālis were, as far as we can discern, primarily intended to underline his ḥanafī legal learning or his prophetic lineage—both of which were likewise potentially valuable on the patronage market. instead, he foregrounded his persian background and the skills that were seen as connected to it. we can thus conclude that for persians at al-ghawrī’s court, such as al-sharīf and ghiyāth al-dīn, emphasizing their persian ethnic identity was a strategic decision not only in the sense that they undertook it at all but also in the degree that they chose to highlight this aspect of their identity and the cultural capital that came with it relative to other qualities and abilities they possessed. this finding suggests that when studying ethnic identities in mamluk society, scholars should not focus exclusively on the ways in which they were constructed and performed but also analyze how, when, and why ethnicity came to the fore in relation to other, intersecting aspects of personal and collective identity.109 with regard to the sultan, it stands to reason that, in acting as a patron to persian scholars and littérateurs, al-ghawrī did not just follow his personal whims, or at least did not do so exclusively. as demonstrated in detail elsewhere, sultan al-ghawrī and those around him were very much aware that early tenth/sixteenth-century mamluk sultanic rule was undergoing a manifest crisis caused by both domestic factors, such as the 107. al-sharīf, nafāʾis, (ms) 205–206; (ed. ʿazzām) 90–91. 108. reuter, “race,” 103–104. 109. for the insight that ethnicity can hardly ever be studied on its own, see also pohl, “ethnicity,” 12; pohl, “identification,” 26, 50; adlparvar and tadros, “evolution,” 128, 133. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 398 pronounced contraction of the mamluk economy and the extended succession conflicts preceding al-ghawrī’s investiture, and transregional developments, such as the rise of the rival safawids and ottomans, who combined far-reaching claims to legitimate leadership with military successes and a lively court culture.110 against this background, al-ghawrī and the members of his court sought to demonstrate that despite all their internal problems, the mamluks were still a power to be reckoned with, particularly in terms of cultural patronage. projects such as the translation of the shāhnāma and the cultivation of a circle of learned foreigners well versed in persian court culture constituted promising strategies to attain this goal, especially since these endeavors would be more readily understandable to the mamluks’ transregional interlocutors and competitors than would more distinctly mamluk cultural undertakings.111 we can thus interpret the flocking of persians who openly performed their ethnic identity to al-ghawrī’s court as a mutually beneficial situation in which al-ghawrī gained cultural prestige through the persians’ presence and activities while the latter benefited from the sultan’s generosity. conclusion as ulrich haarmann noted many years ago, a “cosmopolitan atmosphere”112 and an “intercultural perspective”113 were important features of late mamluk court culture. but even in this cosmopolitan atmosphere, ethnic identities did matter, as the case of the persian participants in the majālis of sultan al-ghawrī exemplifies. language, cultural capital, and place of origin—but, remarkably, not ancestry—were important factors in the construction of their identity. persians themselves used these criteria to confidently affirm their identity, which could provide them with a number of social and economic benefits under al-ghawrī’s rule. for the sultan, the presence of persians at his court was an important aspect of his politically inspired program of cultural patronage. further research may shed light on how these results relate to the construction of ethnic identities in other islamicate social contexts. studies of court culture seem to be a particularly promising starting point in this regard, as ethnic identities are known to have been of special importance in the elite circles of premodern societies. it seems promising to examine, inter alia, how egyptian and syrian identities were constructed and performed in mamluk courtly circles, where men born within the sultanate necessarily had to interact with people whose origins lay elsewhere. future research will also have to ask whether language, cultural capital, and place of origin were constitutive of these and other identities in diverse islamicate contexts, or whether other factors, such as ancestry, legal traditions, or religious loyalties, played more important roles. 110. see mauder, salon, chap. 6.1. 111. for a similar interpretation, see behrens-abouseif, “arts,” 84–86; c. markiewicz, the crisis of kingship in late medieval islam: persian emigres and the making of ottoman sovereignty (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019), 109–110. 112. haarmann, “miṣr,” 175. see also d’hulster, “‘sitting,’” 229; markiewicz, crisis, 108. 113. haarmann, “arabic in speech,” 85. 399 • christian mauder al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) another worthwhile next step in light of the current state of research about mamluk society would be to compare the ways in which persian identity was constructed and performed with the construction and performance of other ethnic identities that have already received scholarly attention, such as the mongol, turkish, and kurdish ones. preliminary findings suggest that the means and strategies through which these identities were claimed and perceived differed in each specific case, with variance in, for example, the importance attributed to common ancestry or the significance of internal divisions within ethnic groups. thus, instead of studying “ethnicity” in mamluk society in general, scholars should adopt an approach that analyzes specific “ethnicities” individually in a given time and space and then use their findings to develop a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of mamluk society.114 it is clear, however, that within the field of mamluk history and beyond, the question of how premodern inhabitants of the islamicate world constructed and affirmed their respective identities remains as relevant today as it was more than thirty-five years ago when michael cook posed it. 114. on this need to study each case of the construction of ethnic identity separately, see also cooperson, “‘arabs,’” 383. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) being persian in late mamluk egypt • 400 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umayyad army,” 469-499. • alon dar, “governors and provincial elites in umayyad egypt: a case study of one ‘rebellion’ (709–10 ce),” 500-515. • said reza huseini, “the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj (116– 28/734–46): the local perspective,” 516-553. • ayşegül şimşek, “portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion: the case of abū ḥanīfa,” 554-572. • philip grant, “ entangled symbols: silk and the material semiosis of the zanj rebellion (869–83),” 573-602. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 436-444 this thematic dossier is a product of the ongoing research project “embedding conquest: naturalising muslim rule in the early islamic empire (600–1000 ce)” (emco), financed by the european research council. emco examines how interdependent relationships between individuals and groups contributed to the early caliphate’s longevity and success. one way to understand how these relationships functioned—including what expectations of rights and responsibilities they produced; how they were established, maintained, broken, and restored; who was involved in making and entitled to make decisions about their character, range, and limits; and who felt ownership over them—is to trace what happened when such relationships were tested and threatened in moments of crisis. rebellions and violent uprisings form an obvious instance of such moments of crisis. this dossier arose from a workshop1 that examined social interdependency in the early caliphate through the lens of rebellions. acts of rebellion the caliphate experienced many challenges in the first centuries of its existence. keeping together a conglomerate of diverse ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious populations in a variety of geographical and climatological conditions generated a wide variety of tensions. these tensions manifested themselves in a multiplicity of confrontations between state 1. “acts of rebellions and revolts in the early caliphate,” leiden, november 7–8, 2019; https://emco. hcommons.org/events/event/workshop-acts-of-rebellion-in-the-early-islamic-empire/. introduction alon dar and petra m. sijpesteijn (alon.dar@uni-hamburg.de and p.m.sijpesteijn@hum.leidenuniv.nl) © 2022 alon dar and petra sijpesteijn. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercialnoderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. https://emco.hcommons.org/events/event/workshop-acts-of-rebellion-in-the-early-islamic-empire/ https://emco.hcommons.org/events/event/workshop-acts-of-rebellion-in-the-early-islamic-empire/ mailto:alon.dar%40uni-hamburg.de?subject= mailto:p.m.sijpesteijn%40hum.leidenuniv.nl?subject= 437 • alon dar and petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) introduction • 438 agents and those living under their rule that left their mark in literary texts, documents, and material evidence.2 generally, scholars have considered rebellions in the early islamic world in terms of religious and ideological confrontations, juristic debate, and historiographical presentation—that is, how rebellions were remembered and told throughout history.3 building on this work, the articles in this dossier address the phenomenon of rebellions by focusing on case studies that illuminate their multifaceted nature as intersections of various domains, including law, politics, kinship, economics, material culture, and religion. they thus consider rebellions as reflections of social relationships in all their facets and their outbreaks as the result of a (perceived) failure of the rights and responsibilities that were expected to flow from such relationships. such an approach allows us to highlight a variety of underlying explanatory factors for rebellions from the social, political, cultural, fiscal, and environmental to the religious, juristic, and ethical. rebellions addressed multiple issues at once, regularly bringing together diverse groups and individuals who were joined through relations of dependency to one another and to the holders of power. in taking this approach, the articles in the dossier draw on methodological insights developed in scholarship on rebellions in other parts of the world, where a focus on the agency of rebels and their multiple and diverse agendas significantly changes how such movements are understood.4 the study of rebellions on the basis of historical sources is, however, complicated. the fact that narrative sources are often written post factum and influenced by later agendas and conceptions about the past is a well-known predicament. in the case of rebellions the 2. coins are the main material source that has been used in the study of rebellions. see l. treadwell, “ʿabd al-malik’s coinage reforms: the role of the damascus mint,” revue numismatique 165 (2009): 357–81; t. bernheimer, “the revolt of ʿabdallah b. muʿawiya, ah 127–130: a reconsideration through the coinage,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 69 (2006): 381–93. papyri occasionally make mention of rebellions, but they have not been used in a systematic way. see g. levi della vida, “a papyrus reference to the damietta raid of 853,” byzantion 17 (1944): 212–22; c. j. kraemer, excavations at nessana: non-literary papyri, vol. 3 (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1958), 112–14. there are ongoing archaeological excavations at centers of rebellion such as al-mahdiyya in tunisia, which served the fatimids, humayma in jordan, where the ʿabbasid family was holding out (https://www.queensu.ca/classics/archaeology/faculty-directed-field-work/ humayma-excavation-project), and alamut in iran, which was home to the nizaris (excavated by the university of tehran). 3. see, for recent treatments, a. elad, the rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya in 145/762: ṭālibīs and early ʿ abbāsīs in conflict (leiden: brill, 2015); k. abou el fadl, rebellion and violence in islamic law (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001); h. keaney, medieval islamic historiography: remembering rebellion (new york: routledge, 2013); n. haider, the rebel and the imam in early islam: explorations in muslim historiography (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019); p. lantschner, “invoking and constructing legitimacy: rebels in the late medieval european and islamic worlds,” in the routledge history handbook of medieval rebellions, ed. j. firnhaber-baker and d. schonaers, 168–88 (milton park: routledge, 2017). for more sociopolitical analyses of rebellions, see p. cobb, white banners: contention in ʿabbasid syria, 750–880 (albany: state university of new york press, 2001); y. lev, “coptic rebellions and the islamization of medieval egypt (8th–10th century): medieval and modern perceptions,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 39 (2012): 303–44. 4. j. firnhaber-baker, “introduction: medieval revolt in context,” in firnhaber-baker and schonaers, routledge history handbook, 1–15, at 1; j. c. magalhães de oliveira, “late antiquity: the age of crowds?” past and present 249 (2020): 3–52. https://www.academia.edu/7118838/the_revolt_of_abdallah_b_mu_awiya_ah_127_130_a_reconsideration_through_the_coinage https://www.queensu.ca/classics/archaeology/faculty-directed-field-work/humayma-excavation-project https://www.queensu.ca/classics/archaeology/faculty-directed-field-work/humayma-excavation-project al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) introduction • 438 situation is even more problematic. the sources, reflecting the established authorities’ point of view, are quick to label the ruler’s opponents as “rebels” and to define expressions of dissent as “rebellious.” conversely, violent movements that succeed in toppling the state and establishing their own authority are not characterized as rebellions in our sources, since the latter were mostly written under the new regimes. furthermore, as şimşek shows in the case of abū ḥanīfa, subsequent generations worked out their own attitudes towards rebellions through competing representations of how major figures in the early caliphate approached the topic. a further complication is the ambiguous language employed to describe uprisings: the sources use multiple words whose meaning is mostly retrievable only from the context. instead of looking for characteristic (arabic) terms or fixed qualities to present a definition of rebellion or a set of standard traits and attributes, we use “rebellions” as an umbrella term to denote a set of human actions and behaviors that are manifest in confrontations with the authorities—that is, the state and its representatives—and in which violence (or the threat of it) is imminent. rebellion and related phenomena (uprisings, revolts, resistance, armed negotiation, contention, confrontation, mutiny, kidnappings, assassinations) challenge existing power relationships. crucially, this dossier maintains that rebellions need not necessarily be aimed at overturning the social and political order. there obviously were such movements, and they have understandably received much attention: the ʿabbasids, fatimids, qarāmiṭa and different kharijite movements all sought to upend the status quo. such rebellions required long and careful preparation and organization. the acts of rebellion that are discussed in these papers, by contrast, show that some rebellions aimed not to destroy but rather to restore relationships, albeit in a way that fit the rebels’ expectations. such rebellions did not intend to end interactions but rather sought to maintain bonds in order to communicate grievances and thereby negotiate a different relationship.5 the threat and practice of violence were part of this communication, and negotiations could turn into full-fledged disruptive and brutal rebellions.6 therefore, the contributions to this dossier explore the dynamics between individuals, groups, and institutions that underpinned certain rebellions and highlight what these can tell us about the social and political structures of the caliphate. our use of the term “acts of rebellion” in the title of this dossier indeed stresses the dynamic and diverse nature of opposition movements and expressions of dissent. 5. c. wickham, “looking forward: peasant revolts in europe, 600–1200,” in firnhaber-baker and schonaers, routledge history handbook, 155–67, at 155–56; e. s. gruen, “when is a revolt not a revolt? a case for contingency,” in revolt and resistance in the ancient classical world and near east: in the crucible of empire, ed. j.j. collins and j.g. manning, 10–37 (leiden: brill, 2016). 6. this is what distinguishes rebellions from other venues to present grievances and demands for or expressions of disappointment with existing conditions supposedly providing social justice such as petitions, maẓālim, qāḍī and community courts. for such mechanisms, see for example m. rustow, the lost archive. traces of a caliphate in a cairo synagogue (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2020) and p. sijpesteijn, “good governance in theory and practice: comparing abū yūsuf’s kitāb al-khārāj with papyri,” in the historian of islam at work: essays in honor of hugh n. kennedy, ed. m. van berkel and l. osti, 183–200 (leiden: brill, 2022). 439 • alon dar and petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) introduction • 440 while acknowledging the diverse immediate and long-term causes of individual rebellions, the articles bring out two major themes. first, considering rebellions as products of the societies in which they arose automatically raises the question what motivated people to join them and how rebel leaders mobilized support for their movements. as reflections of society, rebellions could appeal to a variety of interests that, on the one hand, served to create a distance between the rebels and their opponents but, on the other, could help cement alliances between diverse groups in the rebel camp. the second major theme concerns the ways in which rebellions functioned within existing political, social, and military frameworks. rebels negotiated, set ultimatums, offered safe-conducts, strategized, brokered, and exchanged diplomatic messengers and negotiators, interacting with and operating very much like their opponents serving in state offices. the function of rebellions to communicate grievances and to reset the conditions for a renegotiation of relationships with the authorities is especially striking in this respect. conversely, the authorities showed an interest in integrating rebels, obviously after appropriate punishment of the rebel leaders or key participants in the movement, quickly and fully into the existing system. as such individuals can be encountered in subsequent opposition movements having joined rebellions, being rehabilitated and rising in revolt in consecutive cycles. indeed, an important observation is that rebellions often had one or more moments at which reconciliation, with due compromise on both sides, was possible. rebellions and social relations one central goal of this dossier is to understand why people chose to participate in rebellions. confronting the authorities was risky. participating in a rebellion could and, as several cases discussed here attest, did result in imprisonment, material or financial losses, expulsion, and death. as dar shows, arab provincial elites in egypt decided to plan an assassination of the umayyad governor only after extensive consultation. and abū ḥanīfa, fearing the consequences of open support of the ʿalids, preferred to contribute to their cause in secret, according to some sources discussed by şimşek. whatever the specific intentions of the various groups of rebels, it is clear that they were all motivated in some way or another by the sense that their expectations—based on their position and their relationships with other groups and individuals in society and the rights and responsibilities that flowed from these—had been thwarted. the contributions by dar, sijpesteijn, and huseini all show local elites’ interests clashing with those of central authorities within a long-term process of realigning the relationship between central control and local governance. that these cases unfolded at either end of the umayyad caliphate shows how rebellions could be driven by empire-wide political changes. abū ḥanīfa’s alleged support of the ʿalid revolts was motivated by the duty to stand up against tyrannical rulers (şimşek). another value system that that rebels often invoked is religion: rebels are often said to have accused government officials of having broken god’s law (hagemann, huseini). a final potential connector was kinship. the role of familial relations and tribal affiliations is central in most of our case studies. dar demonstrates that the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) introduction • 440 banū fahm took the lead in planning to assassinate the governor of egypt. in the case of the rebellion of ibn al-jārūd in iraq, which sijpesteijn discusses, the sources present tribal factionalism as a crucial factor in people’s choosing which side to join in the confrontation. hagemann examines “tribal networks of rebellion” in the form of certain tribes and families that joined various iraqi anti-umayyad rebellions. rebel leaders could be very successful in bringing otherwise competing groups together. creating a common enemy was an effective and commonly applied method (sijpesteijn, huseini, hagemann). rebellions could offer an opportunity to gain financial advantages and social license. material benefits and symbols of power were a powerful catalyst to unite rebels, especially when existing privileges were taken away (dar, sijpesteijn), but also when the lack of material and symbolic expressions of power was especially keenly experienced (grant). beyond social conditions and human relations, the natural and built environment played a role in the course of rebellions. as huseini shows, al-ḥārith b. surayj’s rebellion benefited from khurasan’s unique environmental conditions and its location far away from the caliphal center. khurasan’s mountains offered safe hiding places where rebels could regroup and recharge. in the case of the banū fahm’s revolt, examined by dar, the urban landscape, in this case the lighthouse in alexandria, served as a meeting point where the rebels could plot in secret and unnoticed by the authorities. in the zanj rebellion, discussed by grant, the parading atop fortification walls of beautifully dressed and decorated former rebels who had defected to the abbasids played an important role in undermining the remaining rebels’ morale. the physical, natural and built, theater where rebellions took place as alluded to in these contributions seems an especially fruitful venue for future exploration in rebellion studies.7 going against the system? contrary to common perception, most rebels operated as participants in or stakeholders of the caliphate, upholding existing governance structures and rules of law and order. the zanj rebels’ main objective was to become fully integrated into the existing value system and hierarchical governance structure (grant). even violent acts against government agents as described by sijpesteijn and dar were not attacks on the system, but rather attempts at repairing it. in these cases the rebels did not want to change or replace the system of local rulers representing central control, or even the existing mechanisms through which local rulers were appointed. rather, they were interested in replacing one particular cog in the machinery of governance, an—in their eyes—malfunctioning element that was disturbing an otherwise acceptable system. 7. see especially the analysis of the role played by the architecture of the bathhouse or the urban fabric in accounts of assassinations in abbasid bagdad or conflicts between tribal factions in seventh-century kufa explored by taryn marashi (“political undercurrents: justice and interpersonal hostilities in the abbasid bathhouse,” in expectations of justice in the islamicate medieval world, ed. f. kootstra, b. kristiansen, and p. m. sijpesteijn [forthcoming]) and georg leube (“local elites during two fitnas: al-ashʿath b. qays, muḥammad b. al-ashʿath and the quarter of kinda in 7th-century kufa,” in the ties that bind: mechanisms of social dependency in the early islamic empire, ed. e. hayes and p. m. sijpesteijn [forthcoming]) respectively. 441 • alon dar and petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) introduction • 442 in other ways, too, rebels participated in the governance structures and rules of state upheld by their opponents. they sent negotiators, offered ultimatums, and surrendered after negotiating deals for their supporters, like accomplished diplomats (sijpesteijn). the rebellious governors in khurasan discussed by hagemann and huseini maintained negotiations during their rebellions through letters exchanged between the rebels and the caliph. in short, rebels were not opposed to communicating via existing and wellestablished channels of exchange either before, during, or after military conflict. consequently, rebellions rarely followed a linear pattern of escalation. instead, both sides had access to potential exit points and actions that could put an end to the conflict. as grant shows, the successful armed uprising of the zanj was eventually ended not through military victory on the battlefield but rather by the granting of material gifts endowed with heavy symbolism in the form of silk robes. in this model, open and violent rebellion constituted not an end to communication with higher powers but another means of negotiation open to individuals and groups with a grievance. rebellions, then, were an instrument through which displeasure was conveyed, marking another point on a spectrum of interactions with state functionaries. locating rebellions within a continuum of communications between different parties in the caliphate puts the punitive consequences of rebellions in a different light as well. in general, only the leaders of rebellions were punished by the authorities. the majority of the people who participated in rebellions rarely suffered immediate negative consequences. in the case of the iraqi rebellion of ibn al-jārūd, it was only the leaders who were executed and crucified (sijpesteijn). in egypt, the governor qurra b. sharīk executed only three out of the hundred men who had been plotting his murder (dar). important rebels often received safeconducts (sing. amān) from highly placed government officials or governors or even from the caliph himself (hagemann, sijpesteijn). this shows that rebels maintained networks in government circles to which they could turn when needed. it also indicates that the state was more interested in keeping these highly placed individuals on board than it was in annihilating them. most interestingly, it is clear that joining a rebellion did not mean the end of one’s political activity. there are numerous cases of rebels joining subsequent uprisings. an example is ibn al-jārūd, who joined multiple anti-umayyad movements, starting with ʿalī’s war against muʿāwiya, followed by ibn al-zubayr’s fight against ʿabd al-malik, and who finally led his own rebellion against the governor al-ḥajjāj (sijpesteijn). the rebel leader muṭarrif b. al-mughīra could similarly count on several “professional” rebels who had obviously received pardons for past acts of insubordination and continued to enjoy high positions and status in the empire after their defeats (hagemann). al-ḥārith likewise drew into his revolt members of the local elite who had forcibly expressed their dissatisfaction with central umayyad rule on several previous occasions. they had evidently been rehabilitated after each uprising they had joined, maintaining important positions in the local administrative and government infrastructure. other groups who joined al-ḥārith’s rebellion later protested encroachments on their positions and status via other channels and in other movements (huseini). abū ḥanīfa’s alleged support of the rebellion of ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh in 145/762 did not stop the caliph al-manṣūr from offering the jurist the office al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) introduction • 442 of qāḍī of kufa immediately after the suppression of the rebellion (şimşek). surveying the acts of rebellion in the case studies presented here makes it clear that their participants were, whether collectively or individually, motivated by diverse dissatisfactions, motives, and programs. moreover, their objectives could develop or change as the events unfolded in response to military confrontations, political incidents, or ideological debates. conversely, the reasons behind rebellions could be and often were addressed during the conflict, potentially preventing or interrupting the outbreak of violence. violence or the threat thereof nevertheless forms a defining backdrop to all the instances that are discussed. this dossier thus makes two major interventions in scholarship on rebellions. it shows, first, that acts of rebellion do not move teleologically toward a certain outcome focused on one particular purpose, but rather are expressions of complex and contingent social relationships. second, rebellions are instruments of power that fully participate in the political system instead of striving to break down the existing order and channels of communication. after this brief overview of some common features of the rebellions presented in this issue and some suggestions for evaluating and “reading” these uprisings anew, it is now time to turn to the case studies themselves. 443 • alon dar and petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) introduction • 444 bibliography abou el fadl, k. rebellion and violence in islamic law. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001. bernheimer, t. “the revolt of ʿ abdallah b. muʿawiya, ah 127–130: a reconsideration through the coinage.” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 69 (2006): 381–93. cobb, p. white banners: contention in ʿabbasid syria, 750–880. albany: state university of new york press, 2001. elad, a. the rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya in 145/762: ṭālibīs and early ʿabbāsīs in conflict. leiden: brill, 2015. firnhaber-baker, j. “introduction: medieval revolt in context.” in the routledge history handbook of medieval rebellions, edited by j. firnhaber-baker and d. schonaers, 1–15. milton park: routledge, 2017. gruen, e. s. “when is a revolt not a revolt? a case for contingency.” in revolt and resistance in the ancient classical world and near east: in the crucible of empire, edited by j.j. collins and j.g. manning, 10–37. leiden: brill, 2016. haider, n. the rebel and the imam in early islam: explorations in muslim historiography. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. keaney, h. medieval islamic historiography: remembering rebellion. new york: routledge, 2013. kraemer, c. j. excavations at nessana: non-literary papyri. vol. 3. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1958. lantschner, p. “invoking and constructing legitimacy: rebels in the late medieval european and islamic worlds.” in the routledge history handbook of medieval rebellions, edited by j. firnhaber-baker and d. schonaers, 168–88. milton park: routledge, 2017. leube, georg. “local elites during two fitnas: al-ashʿath b. qays, muḥammad b. al-ashʿath and the quarter of kinda in 7th-century kufa.” in the ties that bind: mechanisms of social dependency in the early islamic empire, edited by e. hayes and p. m. sijpesteijn, forthcoming. lev, y. “coptic rebellions and the islamization of medieval egypt (8th–10th century): medieval and modern perceptions.” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 39 (2012): 303–44. levi della vida, g. “a papyrus reference to the damietta raid of 853.” byzantion 17 (1944): 212–22. magalhães de oliveira, j. c. “late antiquity: the age of crowds?” past and present 249 (2020): 3–52. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) introduction • 444 marashi, taryn. “political undercurrents: justice and interpersonal hostilities in the abbasid bathhouse.” in expectations of justice in the islamicate medieval world, edited by f. kootstra, b. kristiansen, and p. m. sijpesteijn, forthcoming. rustow, m. the lost archive. traces of a caliphate in a cairo synagogue. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2020. sijpesteijn, p. m. “good governance in theory and practice: comparing abū yūsuf’s kitāb al-khārāj with papyri.” in the historian of islam at work: essays in honor of hugh n. kennedy, edited by m. van berkel and l. osti, 183–200. leiden: brill, 2022. treadwell, l. “ʿabd al-malik’s coinage reforms: the role of the damascus mint.” revue numismatique 165 (2009): 357–81. wickham, c. “looking forward: peasant revolts in europe, 600–1200.” in the routledge history handbook of medieval rebellions, edited by j. firnhaber-baker and d. schonaers, 155–67. milton park: routledge, 2017. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 47-78 introduction the near east section of the library of congress, washington, dc, houses a little-explored collection of arabic documents, including several originating from the provincial milieu of egypt’s fayyūm oasis during the medieval period.1 among these items is a small leaf of * i would like to thank marina rustow, mathieu tillier, and naïm vanthieghem for advice on reading and interpreting the document under study; oded zinger for his thorough comments on an earlier draft; and claire dekle and muhannad salhi for help with the library of congress’s arabic document collection. i am also deeply appreciative of the two anonymous reviewers’ comments, which greatly improved the document edition and sharpened my analysis. 1. see n. vanthieghem and l. weitz, “monks, monasteries, and muslim scribes: three parchment house the long arm of the provincial law: a custody battle in a qāḍī petition from the medieval fayyūm* lev weitz catholic university of america (weitz@cua.edu) abstract this article presents an edition, translation, and study of a short arabic petition to a qāḍī and the rescript issued in response. the two texts, originating from egypt’s fayyūm oasis and dateable to the fourth/tenth or fifth/ eleventh century, are preserved incompletely on both sides of a single leaf of paper now in the holdings of the near east section of the library of congress, washington, dc. this document’s genre plus its place of origin make it noteworthy. although scholars have devoted a good deal of attention to medieval arabic petitions, especially those addressed to high-ranking figures of the fatimid, ayyubid, and mamluk states, the low-register provincial sort that the document at hand exemplifies remains understudied. by comparing this petition to other such documents, i flesh out the features of this common documentary tool used to seek aid and patronage in medieval arabic-speaking societies. furthermore, the people and places this document concerns are attested in other documents, which allows us to draw connections between this petition and the wider social world of the medieval fayyūm and to sketch a basic outline of the workings of a provincial qāḍī court. through the petition, i sketch two kinds of interconnected stories: the human stories of a father trying to care for his daughter and of a provincial family of legal functionaries in the egyptian countryside, and the historical story of the role played by legal documents and institutions in structuring medieval social life. © 2022 lev weitz. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 48 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 49 paper containing a petition to a qāḍī and the rescript issued in response, both dateable to the fourth/tenth or fifth/eleventh century. despite this document’s modest provincial origins, the edition, translation, and study of it presented here shed new light on two notable areas: the infrastructure of islamic law in the medieval egyptian countryside and the development of the arabic petition as a tool of medieval administrative practice. the petition under study provides one of the few explicit documentary attestations of a provincial qāḍī in the late abbasid or fatimid period; moreover, the people and places it concerns are fortuitously attested in other contemporary documents. we are thus able to draw connections between this petition and the wider society of the medieval fayyūm; to sketch a basic outline of the workings of the rural court that dealt with the petition’s business, particularly by tracing five generations of a lineage of court scribes and witnesses; and to offer some informed speculation on the madhhab affiliation and decision-making of a medieval provincial judge. the genre of this document deserves scrutiny as well. although scholars have given considerable attention to arabic petitions addressed to grandees of the fatimid, ayyubid, and mamluk states, the low-register provincial sort that the present document exemplifies remains understudied. comparison to other such documents allows us to flesh out the features of this documentary tool, used commonly throughout the medieval arabophone islamic world to seek aid and patronage. what appears at first glance to be a fragmentary, obdurate document reveals a surprising richness. it allows us to trace two sorts of interwoven stories: the human ones of a downon-his-luck father trying to care for his daughter and of a family of provincial legal functionaries, and the historical ones of the role played by legal documents and institutions in structuring medieval social life. edition petition to a qāḍī and the qāḍī’s rescript concerning the custody of a minor child an unnamed man requests the help of a qāḍī and his delegate, ibrāhīm b. rizq, in removing the petitioner’s minor daughter from the custody of his deceased wife’s mother. the qāḍī responds. p. washington libr. of congress inv. ar. 95 ṭuṭūn (?) 10.8 × 24 cm fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh century light brown paper. the right and left margins are preserved. the top margin is partially preserved, but the bottom of the sheet has been lost. a number of small and several larger holes pockmark the interior of the sheet. regular horizontal creases occurring approximately every ten centimeters suggest that the sheet has been rolled and then flattened.2 sales from the 4th/10th-century fayyūm,” arabica 67 (2020): 461–501. 2. my thanks are due to clair dekle, senior book conservator at the library of congress, for providing photographs of the document. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 49 the text of the document is in two hands. the first hand composed the petition on the entirety of the recto side and roughly two-thirds of the verso in a black ink with a thick ductus. diacritics are infrequent and inconsistent. when continuing the text from the recto onto the verso, the scribe turned the sheet over the short edge such that the top of the verso side corresponds to the bottom of the recto. the second hand then rotated the sheet to begin the rescript, the response to the petition, from the bottom of the verso side. this hand is smaller, somewhat more angular, and appears more rushed than the first hand. the rescript is written in a black ink; the text is not as well preserved because of the ink’s fading, discoloration, and damage to this portion of the sheet.3 (1st hand) بسم الـله الرحمن ]1[ الر]حيم توكلـ[ـت على الـله اعلم سيدي القاضي اطال الـله بقاه ]2[ وادام عاله وكبت اعداه ان لي ]3[ بنت ماتت امها عنها وهي بنت ]4[ شهر وسلـ]ـمـ[ـتها لـ]ـسـ[ـتها من امها ]5[ واجريت عليها ا]لنفقة مـ[ـن خمس ]6[ سنين ودخلت السادسة وانا ]7[ رجل مسكن ما يمكني النفقة عليها ]8[ ]9[ عند ستها فان راى سيدي القاضي ]10[ اراه الـله مجابه يتطول بالتوقيع ]11[ الى خليفته بىططون ابرهيم بن رزق ]12[ يسلم الي بنتي حتى اجعلها عند والدتي ]13[ وهي ستها من ابوها تكون ]14[ ]. . . . . . . . . . . .[ . . . .ـن 3. brackets in the edition and translation denote my suggested restorations of lacunae in the text. parentheses in the edition denote my expansion of an abbreviated word form. parentheses in the translation denote discretionary editorial additions for clarity. figure 1: p. washington libr. of congress inv. ar. 95 recto 50 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 51 ]1[ (1st hand) خليفة سيدي القاضي ادام الـله عزه ]2[ عند من يثق به حتى تكبر ]3[ الصبية ويكمل عقلها ]4[ بتسلمه فاعرفت سيدي القاضي كبت اللله ]5[ اعداه ذلك ليقف عليه ويعلمه ]6[ ان شا الـله حسبنا الـله ونعم الوكيل ]7[ (2nd hand) انشا اللـ]ـه البرهيـ[ـم ]بـ[ـن علي اكرمك الـله تقف على ما ذكر هذا الـ]ـر[ ]8[ جل من ابنتـ]ـه[ في عجز جدتها من امها وهي اوال بحـ]ـضـ[ـا]نتهـ[ـا ]9[ واكشف؟ ]. .[ . . . . . عـ . . . . ]. . . . .[ ]10[ ورىىىه ].[ منها . . . . . الرجل . . . .. . . ]11[ وان ضرعت النفقة عليها ابتع من رجلها وانفق عليها ]12[ عند جدتها فاعلم ذالك ا]ن[ شا الـله والـله حـ)ـسبـ(ـي ونعم الوكـ]يـ[ـل ]13[ وصلى الـله على محمد النبي واله وسلم recto ]1[ ىَسم ]ـىن ]12[ والدىَى ]11[ ررق ]10[ ىالىوقىع محابه ]9[ سىَها ]8[ سنيں ]7[ القاصى ]2 verso ]2[ ٰىكىر ]الصبى ]3 translation recto ]1[ (1st hand) in the name of god, the merciful, the c[ompassionate! i place trus]t in god. ]2[ i inform my master the judge, may god prolong his life, ]3[ perpetuate his exaltedness, and crush his enemies, that i have ]4[ a daughter whose mother died when she was [5] one month old. i deli[v]ered her (to reside) with her maternal [gr]andmother, ]6[ and have provided her [support fo]r five ]7[ years. but the sixth has begun with me ]8[ a poor man, unable to provide her support ]9[ at her grandmother’s. if my master the judge should see fit— ]10[ may god show him his answer—(to) demonstrate magnanimity in his rescript figure 2: p. washington libr. of congress inv. ar. 95 verso al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 51 ]11[ to his delegate in ṭuṭūn, ibrāhīm b. rizq, ]12[ let him deliver my daughter to me until i may place her with my mother, ]13[ her paternal grandmother, who is ]14[ [. . . . . . . . . . . .] . . . . . verso ]1[ (1st hand) the delegate of my master the judge, may god perpetuate his might, ]2[ with someone in whom he trusts, until ]3[ the girl comes of age and her mind is fully formed ]4[ in his safekeeping. i have informed my master the judge, may god crush [5] his enemies, of this so that he might take cognizance of it and know of it, ]6[ if god wills. god is our sufficiency. what an excellent keeper is he! ]7[ (2nd hand) go[d] willing, [to ibrāhī]m [son] of ʿalī, may god honor him. may you take cognizance of what this [m]an describes ]8[ of ]his[ daughter concerning the incapacity of her maternal grandmother, who has first right to cu[st]od[y of her.] ]9[ uncover (?) [. . ]. . . . . . . . . . . . [. . . . . . . . . .] ]10[ . . . . . [.] from her . . . . . the man . . . . . . . . . . . . ]11[ if she begs for support for her, buy (something) from her (father) and provide (it) to her ]12[ at her grandmother(’s abode). take cognizance of the foregoing, god [w]illing. god is my sufficiency. what an excellent k[ee]per is he! ]13[ may god bless and keep muḥammad the prophet and his family. commentary recto ]1[ [tawakkal]tu ʿ alā allāh compare p.cair.arab. 37; p.transmission 4; p.vente appendix 2; cpr xxi 74, 78.4 this addition to the opening invocation is sometimes placed above the basmala. ]2[ uʿlim a formulaic introduction to the exposition of the petition; see the discussion below. [2–3] aṭāla allāh baqāʾahu wa-adāma ʿalāʾahu wa-kabata aʿdāʾahu a common blessing in petitions; see the discussion below. [5] li-[s]ittihā for sitt as “grandmother,” see j. g. hava, arabic-english dictionary (beirut: catholic press, 1899), 300. 4. all references to documents in this article follow the system of the international society for arabic papyrology (see https://www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/isap/isap_checklist/index.html) and the arabic papyrology database (https://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/apd/project.jsp). i have used both extensively to identify, collate, and compare relevant documents. 52 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 53 ]8[ miskīn reading the rasm مسكں as مسكين. yumkinnī properly يمكنني, yumkinunī, rather than يمكني. ]9[ fa-in raʾā a formulaic opening to the petitioner’s request; see the discussion below. ]10[ arāhu allāh mujābahu i am unaware of other attestations of this formula. in later mamluk petitions, mujāb, “it is granted,” is a standard response in rescripts granting the petition’s request. see p.st.catherine i 13 b and c = p.sternmamlukpetitions 2 and 3. another possible reading is addāhu allāh mujābahu, “may god give him to grant it.” yataṭawwal properly, we would expect the particle an to precede yataṭawwal. for an example in a letter of the formula fa-in raʾā . . . an yataṭawwal, “should [the recipient] see fit to offer his magnanimity to answer the request,” see cpr xxxii 6.2. tawqīʿ a rescript, that is, a decision written on and in response to a petition. see m. rustow, the lost archive: traces of a caliphate in a cairo synagogue (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2020), 370–71. other references to rescripts within the text of fatimid and ayyubid petitions and requests include p.vind.arab. iii 30.12; p.genizahcambr. 95r.7; p.rustowpetition. 12. ]11[ khalīfatihi bi-ṭuṭūn ibrāhīm b. rizq on the office of the delegate, the location, and the identity of ibrāhīm, see the discussion below. a superfluous tooth follows the bāʾ in bi-ṭuṭūn. verso ]4[ bi-tasallumih the rasm ىىسلمه is clear but the interpretation is uncertain. one might have expected يتسلمها yatasallamahā, suggesting that if the judge has a trustworthy guardian in mind, “let him receive her [the daughter],” but the rasm will not allow that reading. allāh the scribe has mistakenly added a third lām. [4–5] fa-aʿraftu . . . dhālika li-yaqif ʿalayhi wa-yaʿlimahu in shāʾa allāh for the formula “i have informed you so that you might know,” addressed to someone of higher rank, as in this document, see the letter concerning fiscal administration cpr xxxii 12.6. for the verbal phrase waqafa ʿalā in the sense used here, see p.genizahcambr. 95l.2–4. ]6[ ḥasbunā allāh wa-niʿm al-wakīl this formula, very common in the documentary record, was used by scribes to fill the final line of a document to the left-hand margin. see y. rāġib, actes de vente d’esclaves et d’animaux d’égypte médiévale (cairo: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2002–6), 2:4, §10. ]7[ inshāʾa all[āh li-ibrāhī]m [ib]n ʿalī this reading is speculative. the rasm على is clear enough and one ibrāhīm b. ʿalī b. rizq is known from other documents (see the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 53 discussion below). the reading here would thus mean that ibrāhīm b. rizq, the qāḍī’s delegate named in recto l. 11, was the recipient of the rescript and charged with carrying out its order. [7–8] taqif ʿalā mā dhakara hādhā al-[r]ajul for the phrase li-yaqif ʿalā, “let [so-and-so] take cognizance of,” used to deliver an instruction to the recipient of a rescript to a petition just as the formula is here, see p.genizahcambr. 95l .2–4. ]12[ wa-allāh ḥa(sb)ī wa-niʿm al-wak[ī]l if this reading is correct, this formula is an anomalous version of the standard one found in l. 6. another possible reading, similarly unattested, would read the first half of the phrase as ــي ــله ح wa-allāh والـ ḥayy, “god is the living one.” the story the protagonist of the story laid out in this document is the father of a young girl. his petition, likely written by a scribe he has commissioned, requests redress from a qāḍī for the predicament in which the father finds himself. he relates that when his daughter was only a month old, her mother, assuredly the petitioner’s wife, died. he then handed the child over to the girl’s maternal grandmother (li-sittihā min ummihā) for caretaking. the petitioner states that he has been furnishing maintenance (nafaqa) for his daughter for the last five years. as the sixth year of the girl’s life begins, however, the petitioner claims to be too poor to continue providing support as long as the girl lives with his former motherin-law. the petitioner therefore asks for help from the qāḍī and from the latter’s delegate to the village of ṭuṭūn, ibrāhīm b. rizq, in facilitating the transfer of the girl from the custody of her maternal grandmother to that of the petitioner’s own mother, or perhaps to a courtappointed guardian—the lacunae in the document render the final details of the request unclear. the rescript—the judge’s response to the petition, written on the bottom half of the document’s verso side by either the judge or another scribe—is unfortunately more difficult to read and interpret. it appears to be addressed to the judge’s delegate, who is ordered to look into the case and, following several illegible passages, to procure material support for the girl at her grandmother’s home; which grandmother is meant here we cannot say. the petition is undated, and we have the name of neither the petitioner nor the judge. but the document’s formal features and the two proper names that do appear in the text, ṭuṭūn and the qāḍī’s delegate ibrāhīm, allow us to make some educated inferences about the document’s origins and to explore the institutional and social context in which it was produced: a provincial court in egypt’s fayyūm oasis, likely during the first half-century following the fatimid conquest of 359/969. the setting ṭuṭūn is a familiar locale in the arabic documentary record of medieval egypt. a mostly christian village lying at the southern edge of the fayyūm, ṭuṭūn produced a considerable number of legal and other documents, dating especially between the third/ninth and fifth/ 54 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 55 eleventh centuries, that have survived to the present.5 the petitioner’s daughter and her maternal grandmother must have resided in ṭuṭūn, since the petitioner asks that the judge’s delegate in that village secure and deliver his daughter to him. the document does not identify the judge’s location, but two possibilities present themselves: madīnat al-fayyūm, the provincial capital, and ṭalīt, a village about four kilometers west of ṭuṭūn.6 i prefer the latter interpretation, which requires further discussion that i pursue in the following section. we know nothing of the circumstances of the document’s discovery,7 so whether it was excavated in the vicinity of ṭuṭūn or elsewhere and who retained possession of it after its drafting remain uncertain. we might speculate that ibrāhīm b. rizq held on to the document, since he would have been charged with carrying out the order in the rescript. although we have no date for the petition, we are fortunate that ibrāhīm b. rizq appears in a number of other ṭuṭūn-related documents and that plenty of other arabic petitions are extant to compare to ours. as we will see, these allow us to locate our petition between the latter half of the fourth/tenth century (most likely after the fatimid conquest of egypt in 359/969) and the mid-fifth/eleventh. our document and its comparanda can also help us partially reconstruct the islamic judicial infrastructure of the rural district around ṭuṭūn and the locals who worked in it—a notable contribution, as provincial administrative history is particularly difficult to trace in this period. the khalīfa and the qāḍī the petition mentions holders of two judicial positions, the khalīfa and the qāḍī. the term khalīfa appears relatively early in egypt’s papyrological record to designate individuals delegated some judicial power by a higher authority.8 so, for example, a papyrus of the 210s/820s calls one ḥasan b. yaʿqūb “the khalīfa of yaḥyā b. saʿīd, [who is] the khalīfa of the qāḍī ʿīsā b. al-munkadir, in the fayyūm.”9 ʿīsā was the chief judge of egypt with his seat in fustat; we therefore understand ḥasan in this example to have been the fayyūm’s main local judicial figure by virtue of the authority delegated down the chain to him from ʿīsā. 5. see c. gaubert and j.-m. mouton, hommes et villages du fayyoum dans la documentation papyrologique arabe (xe–xie siècles) (geneva: librairie droz, 2014), 231–35; y. rapoport, rural economy and tribal society in islamic egypt: a study of al-nābulusī’s “villages of the fayyum” (turnhout: brepols, 2018), 43–47; l. weitz, “islamic law on the provincial margins: christian patrons and muslim notaries in upper egypt, 2nd–5th/8th– 11th centuries,” islamic law and society 27 (2020): 5–52; m. j. shomali, “arabic legal documents from the fatimid period and their historical background” (phd thesis, university of cambridge, 2020). 6. see the map in gaubert and mouton, hommes et villages, 299, and the discussion in m. tillier and n. vanthieghem, “la rançon du serment: un accord à l’amiable au tribunal fatimide de ṭalīt,” revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée 140 (2016): 53–72, at 59–60. 7. the document belongs to a collection that the library of congress purchased from the cairo dealer au bouqiniste orientale, likely in the late 1940s or early 1950s. see vanthieghem and weitz, “monks, monasteries, and muslim scribes,” 463, n. 5. 8. see m. tillier, l’invention du cadi: la justice des musulmans, des juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’islam (paris: publications de la sorbonne, 2017), 40–41. 9. p.sijpesteijndelegation. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 55 ibrāhīm b. rizq appears to have enjoyed delegated judicial powers of an even more localized nature, limited to the village of ṭuṭūn. indeed, there are other examples of probable village-level judicial delegates elsewhere in the southern fayyūm, designated by slightly different formulations: a “representative [of justice] in uqlūl” (al-mustakhlaf bi-uqlūl), witness to a document of 415/1024; a “holder of the right to justice (al-mustaḥiqq al-ḥukm) in uqlūl,” 417/1026; and another “representative of justice” (al-mustakhlaf ʿalā al-ḥukm) in barbanūda, 421/1030.10 what these individuals’ precise powers were is not certain, and we should think of khalīfa as a loose term that might connote a host of duties, not as a designation of a uniform office.11 in the case of our petition, at least, ibrāhīm’s position involved carrying out the order of a higher authority rather than issuing a judgment himself. who is the qāḍī to whom the petition is addressed and from whom ibrāhīm’s powers derive? given the small size and generally inelegant form of the petition (discussed below), we cannot be dealing with egypt’s chief qāḍī in fustat or cairo; a provincial judge based in the fayyūm is much more probable. thus, one possibility is that the petition is addressed to the qāḍī of the provincial capital, madīnat al-fayyūm. a second interpretation is that the qāḍī in question occupied a judgeship in ṭuṭūn’s neighboring village of ṭalīt. we know ṭalīt to have been home to a majlis al-ḥukm by the early fifth/eleventh century, as this tribunal is named in a dispute settlement that the majlis produced in 404/1013–14.12 though that document gives no title for the presiding authority, its contents indicate that the remit of the majlis stretched beyond ṭalīt itself into the surrounding region, as one of the litigants is identified as a resident of ṭuṭūn (the other gets no geographical nisba).13 in view of the fact that multiple judicial delegates are attested in nearby villages, it is reasonable to think that a formal court serving the surrounding district would have been home to an official with a higher rank than that of a village-level khalīfa. furthermore, another majlis al-ḥukm attested in contemporary documents was located in a town, al-ushmūnayn,14 that we know was the seat of a qāḍī.15 adding these observations together, it is conceivable that the qāḍī of our petition sat in ṭalīt.16 if he did, 10. p.transmission 3; p.vanthieghemarabisation; chrest.khoury ii 19. 11. on a qāḍī who is the khalīfa of another qāḍī in al-ushmūnayn, see d. livingston, “life in the egyptian valley under ikhshīdid and fāṭimid rule: insights from documentary sources,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 61 (2018): 426–60, at 443–44. 12. p.tillierrancon. 13. the defendant is one sūrus b. jirja al-ṭuṭūnī. chrest.khoury i 39, a quittance between a resident of ṭalīt and another of buljusūq, is another example of multi-village business that i consider likely to have been a product of ṭalīt’s majlis. 14. judicial summonses to the majlis al-ḥukm in al-ushmūnayn include chrest.khoury i 78, 79; chrest. khoury ii 32, 33; p.grohmannurkunden 7. 15. fourth/tenth-century petitions from al-ushmūnayn addressed to a qāḍī include p.heid.arab. iii 28 and chrest.khoury i 81. p.cair.arab. 45, a marriage contract of 461/1069, names al-ushmūnayn’s current qāḍī. 16. m. tillier and n. vanthieghem also conclude that there is a good possibility that a qāḍī sat in ṭalīt. see “la rançon,” 61; “un reçu de paiement pour une vente immobilière à terme,” chronique d’egypte 93 (2018): 421–31, at 421–22. 56 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 57 this village judge presumably had jurisdiction over some stretch of the southern fayyūm while remaining subordinate to the qāḍī of madīnat al-fayyūm. i incline to the view that ṭalīt indeed hosted our document’s qāḍī, largely because i find the overall roughness of the petition—its small size, spelling mistakes, and brusque rescript—suggestive of distance from a more prestigious court setting in the national or provincial capital. but the evidence for a qāḍīship in ṭalīt is ultimately circumstantial, and we cannot rule out the possibility that the petition was destined for the eyes of a judge in madīnat al-fayyūm. it appears more certain that ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm was a local center of judicial activity and that, whatever the title of its chief authority, ṭuṭūn-related matters fell under its purview. in addition to the documented appearance of a ṭuṭūnite litigant at ṭalīt discussed above, the almost exclusively coptic and biblical names of the residents of ṭuṭūn found in documents related to the village give the impression that it was mostly christian into the second half of the fifth/eleventh century, which militates against the likelihood that it hosted its own islamic legal assembly.17 i thus consider it probable that ibrāhīm was associated with ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm. perhaps he was made khalīfa for ṭuṭūn by the ṭalīt majlis; perhaps he himself presided over the majlis by virtue of delegated authority from a higher qāḍī, and that remit included responsibility for ṭuṭūn as well. i develop this inference of an association between ṭalīt’s islamic tribunal and the khalīfa ibrāhīm, as well as his broader lineage, in the following section. finally, wherever our petition’s addressee had his seat, it is worth noting that the document remains one of the earliest attestations of a judicial official in the fayyūm bearing the title of qāḍī.18 if he was indeed the qāḍī of ṭalīt, we have one of the only documentary attestations of that title outside of a major city or provincial capital. mathieu tillier has argued that egypt’s islamic court system began to expand into the provinces and rural areas beginning perhaps in the third/ninth century;19 although the paper trail left by that process has provided most of the medieval legal documents available for us to study today, explicit mentions of qāḍīs securely locatable in the provinces are few and far between.20 we may now add the fayyūmī qāḍī of our petition to those few other references. ibrāhīm and the banū rizq the evidence for the identity of our qāḍī ends at the inferred location of his seat, but a number of other documents allow us to say more about the khalīfa ibrāhīm and, by extension, the human infrastructure of his local judicial institution—the group of scribes and witnesses who supported its work. we would not expect a judge’s delegate to a village at the desert’s edge to enjoy a prominent place in the historical record, but ibrāhīm’s nasab 17. see, for the same argument, tillier and vanthieghem, “la rançon,” 59–60. cf. shomali, “arabic legal documents,” 132–35. 18. p.fay.villages 37 and 40, two late fourth/tenthto early fifth/eleventh-century letters from damūya in the vicinity of the fayyūm, mention qāḍīs. 19. m. tillier, l’invention, 114–35. 20. see the documents cited in notes 15 and 18 above. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 57 “ibn rizq” crops up a number of times in the arabic documentation of his home region.21 tracing this family name through the documents suggests that ibrāhīm and his family belonged to a provincial muslim literate class and maintained traditions of service to their local islamic institutions. perhaps constituting a petty elite, local lineages such as the banū rizq provided the ranks of witnesses and scribes that kept the business of village courts humming. we first encounter the descendants of a certain rizq as witnesses to two of the earliest extant arabic legal documents related to ṭuṭūn, deeds of purchase dated 268/881 and 272/886. al-ḥasan b. rizq, four of his sons, and one nephew affixed their witness signatures to the former; the same al-ḥasan, four sons, a nephew, a grandnephew, and perhaps a grandson signed the latter.22 the latest attestations of the “ibn rizq” nasab come nearly two hundred years later in a corpus of legal documents dated between 405/1014 and 456/1064. in these, all concerning individuals from southern fayyūm settlements, one al-ḥasan b. ibrāhīm b. rizq has signed his name and added a note of registration in the upper margin.23 this al-ḥasan cannot be the grandson of the same rizq whose grandchildren lived two centuries earlier, but he was indeed rizq’s descendant: eleven years before the younger al-ḥasan appears as a document registrant, his witness signature on a deed of manumission gives his full genealogy, al-ḥasan b. ibrāhīm b. ʿalī b. jibrīl b. al-ḥasan b. rizq.24 the fifth/eleventh-century al-ḥasan was thus the great-great-grandson of his third/ninth-century namesake, and his signature indicates that ibn rizq had become the clan nasab of a broader lineage descended from that common ancestor. the banū rizq evidently passed on a commitment to serve their local islamic legal institutions from one generation to the next, as a survey of documents from the southern fayyūm turns up at least thirteen members of this lineage who appear as witnesses or document registrants (see table 1). following tillier and naïm vanthieghem, i would suggest that these individuals were closely associated with ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm and perhaps resided in that village.25 with one exception, the descendants of rizq appear as witnesses exclusively in documents related to residents of ṭuṭūn; as mentioned above, 21. noted in tillier and vanthieghem, “la rançon,” 60; shomali, “arabic legal documents,” 147–48. 22. p.fahmitaaqud 4, 5. 23. p.berl.arab. i 22; chrest.khoury i 39; chrest.khoury ii 20; cpr xxvi 10; p.shomali 1–3, 5–7, 8–9; p.tillierrecu; p. utah 850r (unpublished). see also a. grohmann, einführung und chrestomathie zur arabischen papyruskunde (prague: státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1954), 121–24. note that p.tillierrecu does not mention explicit toponyms or geographical nisbas. p. utah 850r concerns parties from ṭuṭūn, but the date is illegible. 24. p.cair.arab. 37 (393/1003). 25. tillier and vanthieghem, “la rançon,” 60. cf. shomali, “arabic legal documents,” 139–41. note that p.shomali 1.10 describes a manor or pavilion, jawsaq, that lies in ṭuṭūn and belongs to ṭāhir b. al-ḥasan b. rizq. if this is the same individual who signed p.fahmitaaqud 4 (268/881), he can no longer have been alive when p.shomali 1 (405/1014) was drafted; perhaps “ṭāhir’s manor” was the customary moniker given to this property. it is, in any case, evidence that at least some of the banū rizq owned property and might have resided in ṭuṭūn at some point, but it hardly proves that the clan as a whole did. 58 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 59 table 1. members of the banū rizq attested in legal documents name documents (date) al-ḥasan b. rizq p.fahmitaaqud 4 (268/881), 5 (272/886) dāwūd b. al-ḥasan b. rizq p.fahmitaaqud 4, 5 ṭāhir b. al-ḥasan b. rizq p.fahmitaaqud 4, 5 isḥāq b. sulaymān b. rizq p.fahmitaaqud 4, 5 hārūn b. al-ḥasan b. rizq p.fahmitaaqud 4, 6 (293/906) ʿīsā b. isḥāq b. sulaymān [b. rizq] p.fahmitaaqud 5*26 yaʿqūb b. al-ḥasan b. rizq p.fahmitaaqud 5 sulaymān b. yaʿqūb [b. al-ḥasan b. rizq] p.fahmitaaqud 5* aḥmad b. al-ḥasan b. rizq p.fahmitaaqud 4, 5, 6 ibrāhīm b. aḥmad [b. al-ḥasan] b. rizq27 p.cair.arab. 58* (341/952), 59* (341/953), 119 (348/960); p. berl. inv. 9159* (unpublished, 346/961);28 p.fahmitaaqud 9 (353/964) ʿalī b. jibrīl [b. al-ḥasan] b. rizq29 p.frantz-murphycomparison i 1* (350/961), 2* (352/963); p.vente 9 = chrest.khoury i 53 (372/983) ibrāhīm b. ʿalī [b. jibrīl b. al-ḥasan b. rizq] p.cair.arab. 37* (393/1003)30 al-ḥasan b. ibrāhīm b. ʿalī b. jibrīl b. al-ḥasan b. rizq p.cair.arab. 37; p.shomali 1 (405/1014); p.berl.arab i 22 (407/1016); p.shomali 2 (417/1026), 3 (430/1038); p.tillierrecu (447/1055); cpr xxvi 10 (451/1059); p.shomali 5 (454/1062), 7 (455/1063), 8–9 (456/1064); chrest.khoury i 39 (456/1064); chrest.khoury ii 20 (456/1064); p. utah 850r (date illegible) 26. asterisks indicate that the ibn rizq nasab does not appear in the individual’s signature, but internal and cross-document comparison makes his belonging to the family likely. 27. ibrāhīm b. aḥmad added the ibn rizq nasab to his signature in p.cair.arab. 119 and p.fahmitaaqud 9 (the editor erroneously reads rajab for rizq; see the plate) but not in the other documents. grohmann’s notes to p.cair.arab. 58.15, 59.14, and 119.13 suggest that we are dealing with the same individual on all these documents because of the similarity of the hand. 28. see grohmann’s notes to p.cair.arab. 58.15 and 119.13. 29. ʿalī b. rizq signed on p.vente 9. he is plausibly the same individual as ʿalī b. jibrīl b. al-ḥasan b. rizq, the grandfather of al-ḥasan b. ibrāhīm in al-ḥasan’s genealogically complete signature to p.cair.arab. 37. i am therefore inclined to identify him also with the ʿalī b. jibrīl of p.frantz-murphycomparison i 1 and 2, though this identification is not definite. the published document images are too indistinct to compare the hands effectively. 30. ibrāhīm b. ʿalī signed as the registrant in the upper margin of this document. it is not a stretch to presume that he is the father of al-ḥasan b. ibrāhīm, the document’s first witness and scribe. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 59 the christian character of ṭuṭūn gives one to suspect that ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm served as the local center of islamic legal services for its neighboring village.31 we can thus imagine that ṭuṭūnites would have made the short four-kilometer walk to ṭalīt to get their legal documents drawn up and registered, and there encountered the banū rizq and other locals who served the court.32 no doubt more members of this family will turn up as more documents are published and studied.33 overall, the banū rizq’s literacy and connections to their local court suggest that they constituted part of the muslim civilian elite of the southern fayyūm. it is not particularly surprising to find a specialized craft and social role—here, scribal literacy and service to the court—passed down through the generations of a single lineage. but the banū rizq provide us a picture of this social phenomenon that is especially evocative for its smallscale character. we more typically encounter scribal dynasties in chronicles of the abbasid chancery or in mamluk biographical dictionaries; here we have one in the handwriting of five generations of provincial scribes. in this regard, the banū rizq’s documents reveal noteworthy details of the workings of a provincial islamic court. every member of the family listed in table 1 had at least basic scribal literacy, because their witness testimonies note that they wrote in their own hands, with one exception: the patriarch al-ḥasan b. rizq, whose sons dāwūd and aḥmad “wrote for him . . . at his command and in his presence” (kataba ʿanhu . . . bi-amrihi wa-maḥḍarih).34 even if al-ḥasan never learned to write arabic, his descendants consistently cultivated that skill and source of social capital. at least some of them received more advanced scribal training as well; they not only signed legal documents as witnesses but also drafted some of our extant examples.35 still others among the banū rizq achieved enough prominence to fill judicial roles more elevated than those of scribe and witness. the ibrāhīm of our petition was a qāḍī’s delegate. two members of the lineage appear as document registrants, signing and adding a note of validation to their respective documents’ upper margins.36 this was the practice when a 31. this hypothesis is strengthened by our one example of a witness explicitly identified as hailing from ṭuṭūn, abū al-ʿulā b. ḥudayj al-tuṭūnī, on p.shomali 3. geographical nisbas are uncommon in witness signatures and likely to signify an individual who is nonlocal or unfamiliar to the court, especially when someone else writes for the witness, as in this case (though we do admittedly find one witness calling himself al-ṭalītī on the ṭalīt dispute settlement p.tillierrancon). if one witness had to be identified as a ṭuṭūnite, it is likely that the others did not share that characteristic. 32. see similarly livingston, “life in the egyptian valley,” 448–50. 33. three further likely candidates include yūsuf b. hārūn, who signed as a witness alongside his probable father hārūn b. al-ḥasan b. rizq on p.fahmitaaqud 6; yūsuf’s brother hubayra b. hārūn b. al-ḥasan, who signed alongside yūsuf on p.vanthieghemmonks 1 and independently on p.fahmitaaqud 7; and yūsuf’s son ʿabd al-ṣamad b. yūsuf b. hārūn, witness to p.cair.arab. 57 and 119, chrest.khoury i 57, and p.vente 9. 34. p.fahmitaaqud 4.23, 5.34. this is a standard phrase for hypograph arabic witness testimonies. 35. al-ḥasan’s son dāwūd was clearly the scribe of p.fahmitaaqud 4 and perhaps of 5; three generations later, al-ḥasan b. ibrāhīm drafted p.cair.arab. 37. grohmann’s notes on the last state that the main hand and that of the first witness, al-ḥasan, are different, but the plate image very clearly suggests otherwise to me. 36. ibrāhīm b. ʿ alī and his son al-ḥasan; see each of their documents in table 1. a typical registration formula, of which several are attested, is “this [document] has been validated before me (ṣaḥḥa dhālika ʿindī). al-ḥasan 60 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 61 document was copied into a court’s register and thereby endowed with probative value.37 attaching the validation note was most likely the prerogative of the judge himself, one of his representatives, or at least a senior scribe (the registration notes are usually in a different hand than that of a given document’s main drafter).38 in fact, the documentary remains of al-ḥasan the younger’s activities offer a suggestive outline of the steadily ascending career a provincial scribe might hope to enjoy, and they demonstrate the role literate, petty notables such as the banū rizq could play in running a provincial islamic court. we first meet al-ḥasan in 393/1003 drafting the deed of manumission p.cair.arab. 37 and signing as the first witness. his father, ibrāhīm (probably our document’s khalīfa, on which more below), signs as the registrant, so al-ḥasan must have grown up with a paternal exemplar of a court servant. p.cair.arab. 37 is written in an eminently clear, deliberate hand with large letter shapes and plenty of diacritical points, and i am tempted to see in these characteristics a young, enthusiastic scribe new to the professional practice of his craft. al-ḥasan’s inclusion of a five-generation genealogy in his witness signature likewise suggests a youthful earnestness. at some later point, al-ḥasan began to play a judicial role comparable to his father’s: in each of his documents that postdate p.cair.arab. 37 he signs as the registrant rather than as a witness. his hand becomes tighter, as we might expect after years of composing legal formulae, but remains recognizably that of the younger man.39 indeed, al-ḥasan apparently worked in and around his local court for quite a long time; of the thirteen documents that he registered of which i am aware, the earliest is dated 405/1014 and the latest 456/1064. one, in particular, suggests that al-ḥasan eventually attained a high regional judicial post, likely the qāḍīship or whatever senior position ṭalīt’s majlis al-ḥukm hosted. chrest.khoury i 39 of 456/1064 is a quittance for a debt between two individuals, one from ṭalīt and the other from the nearby village of buljusūq. all other documents with geographical indicators in which the banū rizq appear concern individuals from ṭuṭūn.40 as noted above, i surmise that the ṭuṭūnites went to ṭalīt to have their legal documents drawn up, and this explains the concentration of particular witnesses in those deeds. but al-ḥasan bucks the trend in chrest.khoury i 39: because he presided over a transaction involving parties from multiple other villages (including ṭalīt), it is not unreasonable to think that he had by that time become a higher judicial official with responsibility for a wider district.41 if this inference is correct, al-ḥasan b. ibrāhīm’s activities exemplify nicely the possible career arc of a provincial legal scribe, from witness and document drafter to registrant and judge of b. ibrāhīm b. rizq wrote [this] in his hand (bi-khaṭṭih)” (cpr xxvi 10.1–2). 37. rāġib, actes, 2:116–20. 38. see tillier and vanthieghem, “un reçu,” 421, n. 5. the practice appears to have been different in the village of damūya just outside the entrance to the fayyūm, where the drafter of the legal documents p.fay. villages 5–27 was also the one to register them. 39. a distinctive final nūn, for example, remains evident in al-ḥasan’s signature on p.tillierrecu. 40. p.cair.arab. 37 and p.tillierrecu include no nisbas or other geographical indicators. i have not seen the unpublished p. berl. inv. 9159. 41. the same conclusion is offered in tillier and vanthieghem, “un reçu,” 422. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 61 some sort. sons of other generations of the banū rizq may well have followed a path similar to his. overall, situating our petition in the context of related documents gives us an evocative glimpse of the structure of a minor provincial court. its regular workings leaned on local families with traditions of scribal learning like the banū rizq; witnesses, scribes, higher judicial officials, and maybe even judges themselves were drawn from their ranks. the ibrāhīm b. rizq of our petition fits this pattern in his service to the court as a judge’s delegate, but we must contend with a bit of uncertainty about his identity. if my reconstruction of the damaged rescript text is correct, the khalīfa was ibrāhīm b. ʿalī b. rizq, al-ḥasan the younger’s father who registered the manumission of 393/1003. but we should note that ibrāhīm b. aḥmad b. rizq, who appears several times as a witness in the mid-fourth/tenth century, is another possibility. which ibrāhīm we decide on thus also affects the dating of the document. but here we are fortunate to have additional data in the form of the petition’s diplomatics. recent work on petitions from the fatimid caliphate has revealed much about the development of this genre. with these insights in mind, several formulaic and physical features of our petition suggest that it was produced in the later fourth/tenth century at the earliest, after the advent of the fatimids in egypt, and thus that ibrāhīm b. ʿalī was indeed our qāḍī’s khalīfa in ṭuṭūn. a close look at these same features can, in turn, shed further light on the development of the arabic petition as a genre. the diplomatics of the petition two kinds of arabic petitions, both different from ours, have received a good degree of attention from scholars: petitions on papyrus from the first three islamic centuries that are formally similar to letters, and generically distinctive paper petitions of the fatimid, ayyubid, and mamluk periods addressed to high-ranking state authorities.42 marina rustow has recently made a compelling case that the evolution of the arabic petition from the epistolary to the later form was programmatic rather than haphazard, an insight with consequences for the interpretation of the present document. in brief, rustow argues that the fatimids overhauled the egyptian capital’s central chancery after they conquered the country in 359/969, instituting new script styles and document formats inspired by the 42. on early petitions, see especially g. khan, “the historical development of the structure of medieval arabic petitions,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 53 (1990): 8–30. on fatimid paper petitions, see now rustow, lost archive, 113–244, and the works of s. d. goitein and s. m. stern discussed therein. on ayyubid and mamluk petitions, see d. p. little, “five petitions and consequential decrees from late fourteenth century jerusalem,” al-majalla al-ʿarabiyya li-l-ʿulūm al-insāniyya 54 (1996): 348–96; idem, “two petitions and consequential court records from the ḥaram collection,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 25 (2001): 171–94; d. s. richards, “a mamlūk petition and a report from the dīwān al-jaysh,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 40 (1977): 1–14; idem, “a doctor’s petition for a salaried post in saladin’s hospital,” social history of medicine 5 (1992): 297–306; idem, “a petition for an iqtāʿ addressed to saladin or al-ʿādil,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 55 (1992): 98–105; s. m. stern, “petitions from the ayyūbid period,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 27 (1964): 1–32; idem, “petitions from the mamlūk period (notes on the mamlūk documents from sinai),” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 29 (1966): 233–76. 62 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 63 imperial grandeur of eastern abbasid chancery practice. one outcome of this overhaul was that the petition, an important technology of state that linked subjects, lower-level officials, and rulers in relationships of patronage and oversight, became a “distinctive genre, with dedicated formulary and specific, grand formatting,” including both a “curvilinear, proportioned” script new to egypt and a particular style of line shape and spacing.43 these features set the new fatimid state petition drafted by scribes close to cairo’s chancery apart from the earlier arabic petitions, which had been almost indistinguishable from regular letters. how does the present document fit into these developments? it appears to fall between the new high chancery style and the older epistolary one, and it thus belongs to an intermediate category that so far has received little attention from scholars. certain of the document’s features exhibit a resemblance to rustow’s fatimid state petitions, which supports dating the document to the early fatimid period (and identifying ibrāhīm b. ʿalī as its khalīfa). others are holdovers from the older epistolary petition style or are shared with contemporary letters but not with the high state petitions. overall, we should understand our document as exemplifying a rough category—not a coherent genre—of lower-register petition writing that carried on alongside the high chancery style after the fatimid reforms. petitions of this kind originated or circulated at some degree of remove from the palace chancery context of rustow’s archetypal fatimid state documents;44 they absorbed some high-style elements while retaining epistolary features as well. i will illustrate this rough documentary category by examining several of our petition’s key formulaic and physical features and comparing them to those of other pertinent documents,45 and then circle back around with the resulting insights to the question of the document’s date of origin. the most basic formal element of our petition to note is its material: paper. this essential feature locates the document in the 300s/900s at the earliest, as paper replaced papyrus as egypt’s main writing support during that century.46 several of the document’s key formulae, on the other hand, are clear carryovers from the epistolary petitionary style of earlier centuries. one such feature is the raʾy clause, the formula that uses some form of the root r-ʾ-y to express the petitioner’s request for assistance. our document features a simple, tried and true version of the clause: “if [the addressee] should see fit (fa-in raʾā), ]let him 43. m. rustow, “the fatimid petition,” jewish history 32 (2019): 351–72, at 351–52. 44. note that state petitions were not chancery documents proper because they were produced outside the palace and sent to it rather than in the course of the palace chancery’s regular business. but their formal features place them clearly in the broader family of state documents. rustow, lost archive, 102. 45. i collated a corpus of low-register petitions for comparison by reviewing all texts on paper of the fourth– fifth/tenth–eleventh centuries described as petitions in the arabic papyrology database (accessed 27 may 2020) and filtering out high state petitions from cairo to caliphs and viziers, settling on the following eleven documents: p.berl.arab. ii 82; p.fay.villages 44; p.heid.arab. iii 28r; p.rustowpetition; p.vind.arab. ii 32; p.vind. arab. iii 38, 40, 41, 47r, 66. (p.vind.arab. iii 64, identified as fourth/tenth century in the database, must be later; see rustow, lost archive, 491, n. 29.) many and possibly all these documents are of provincial origin. this document set does not include the metropolitan petitions to mid-level or sub-royal officials p.genizahcambr. 93-98, though these share some features with the low-register corpus, as we will see below. 46. rustow, lost archive, 113. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 63 do the following]” (recto ll. 9–10). this simple formula is found on early papyrus petitions and some later paper ones,47 all of which are addressed to subroyal dignitaries; high fatimid petitions to caliphs and viziers, by contrast, use newer, more syntactically complex versions of the raʾy formula.48 in a similar category is the verb uʿlim, “i inform,” used as a blunt introduction to the exposition of the petitioner’s problem (recto l. 2). this is a quintessentially cross-genre epistolary petitionary formula—it is found in both letters and petitions from the third/ninth century into the fifth/eleventh.49 like the simple raʾy formula, it is attested in petitions to subcaliphal dignitaries and often in provincial contexts.50 it is not found in metropolitan fatimid petitions, which prefer more oblique, less presumptuous expository introductions.51 by contrast, a third formula of note that features in our petition appears to be a later development shared with petitions drafted in cairo (as well as some letters). it thus represents a new, higher-style element adopted in this low-register petition. the formula in question opens the petition with a tripartite blessing on the addressee, “may god prolong (aṭāla) his life, perpetuate (adāma) his exaltedness, and crush (kabata) his enemies.” the tripartite phrasing is manifestly formulaic; slight variations in the objects of the verbs are attested,52 but all iterations follow the aṭāla-adāma-kabata order. the formula appears to be a new usage in the era of paper. although each of the three elements is attested individually in some form in early papyrus documents,53 in the published record the tripartite combination occurs only from the fourth/tenth century onward. 47. the many papyrus examples include p.kratchkovski; p.khanpetitions 1–3. for paper examples, dateable by their hands to the fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh centuries, see p.berl.arab. ii 82; p.genizahcambr. 93, 94 (both cairo); p.vind.arab. iii 66 (qāḍī). here and in the following notes, i give the rank of the addressee and the provenance of the document, if available, in parentheses. 48. see khan, “historical development,” 18–24. 49. papyrus letters (among many): p.khalili i 24; p.joysorrow 41. paper letters and private requests: p.berl. arab. ii 69; p.vind.arab. ii 3; p.diemprivatbriefe 1. 50. papyrus petitions: p.khanpetitions 1, 2, 3r, 3v; p.ryl.arab i i 2. paper petitions: p.heid.arab. iii (qāḍī, al-ushmūnayn); p.vind.arab. iii 41 (ʿāmil [financial administrator]), 47r (qāʾid [governor]). p.rustowpetition uses uʿlim to address sitt al-mulk, the sister and regent of the fatimid caliph; the fayyūmī scribe appears to have been unaware of any problem with using a low-register phrase that a cairene would almost certainly not have employed to address a member of the caliphal house. see the discussion in m. rustow, “famine, state extraction and subjects’ rights in fatimid egypt: a petition to the princess sitt al-mulk from the cairo geniza,” unpublished manuscript, which i thank the author for sharing with me. 51. e.g. p.rustowwoman; p.genizahcambr. 74, among others. this matter is discussed in rustow, “famine.” 52. we find two rhyming options for the “exaltedness—enemy/enemies” sequence, either ʿuluww and ʿaduww or aʿlāʾ and aʿdāʾ. sometimes “might” (ʿizz) or “beneficence” (naʿmāʾ) takes the place of “exaltedness” in the second element. in many examples, additional direct objects are added to the second or third element, and sometimes verbal elements are appended to the tripartite core. see diem’s discussion of the variants in his notes to p.vind.arab. i 7.2–4. 53. the elements aṭāla allāh baqāʾaand adāma allāh . . . , “may god prolong [the addressee’s] life” and “perpetuate [some attribute of the addressee’s],” are ubiquitous. i am aware of a solitary early example of element 3, kabata ]allāh[ aʿdāʾa(“may [god] crush [the addressee’s] enemies”): p.khanpetitions 1. “exaltedness” (ʿalāʾ or ʿ uluww) as the object of the verb adāma appears in independent attestations of the second element only from the fourth/tenth century onward; see p.rustowwoman and p.genizahcambr. 72. 64 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 65 this tripartite blessing appears in two contexts: private letters and petitions to subcaliphal officials.54 notably, several of those petitions come from cairo, probably from the hands of scribes closely connected to the chancery.55 it therefore seems that the tripartite blessing may have originated as a metropolitan chancery address for officials below the rank of caliph that subsequently filtered down into private epistolary and low-register petitionary style. whether or not this hypothesis is correct, the fact that our provincial qāḍī petition exhibits both this newer metropolitan feature and earlier epistolary ones points to its hybrid character. we find a similar mixture in the physical and visual features of the document—its material, size and shape, script style, and text layout. the smaller and rougher brown paper, the absence of the petitioner’s name in the upper left-hand corner,56 the cramped line spacing, and the thick, inelegant ductus indicate that we are far from the palace chancery; a cairene scribe might have chuckled at features redolent to him of the fayyūm boondocks. our qāḍī’s rescript, which i have left aside until now because of its poor state of preservation, may have elicited a similar reaction, as its legible portions suggest an older, provincial hand. those same features are suggestive, in turn, of less formal, more immediate social relationships—the qāḍī to whom the scribe was writing was probably not a distant, awesome authority whom he needed to address with all the extravagance of metropolitan chancery style, but a somewhat familiar personality. other graphic elements of our petition, on the other hand, suggest that the document’s provincial scribe was at least partially aware of the high style that rustow associates with fatimid state documents and that he sought to emulate it (either earnestly and not very well, half-heartedly, or perhaps even in jest). these features relate to line layouts and letter shapes. some of the petition’s lines exhibit hanging baselines—that is, individual words are written at an angle rather than parallel to the overall line of writing, which causes successive words to nest in the laps of preceding ones.57 this feature is evident, for example, at the beginning of the document in uʿlim sayyidī al-qāḍī on the second recto line. it is most pronounced at the ends of some lines (most obviously recto lines 2, 7, 8, and 9, and verso 54. letters: cpr xxxii 4, 12; p.berl.arab. ii 69, 81; p.diemprivatbriefe 1; p.heid.arab. iii 26; p.vind.arab. i 7, 16; p.vind.arab. ii 35; p.vind.arab. iii 21, 25r, 26r, 29r. petitions originating in the provinces: p.fay.villages 44 (qāḍī, fayyūm); p.heid.arab. ii 28r (al-ushmūnayn); p.vind.arab. iii 38, 40 (both al-ushmūnayn). petitions in cairo/fustat: p.genizahcambr. 93 (amīr), 95r (qāḍī), 96, 97 (qāʾid), 98 i and ii (qāḍī); p. washington libr. of congress inv. ar. 111 (vizier). on elaborate opening blessings for viziers and caliphs, see khan, “historical development,” 26–30. 55. see the previous note. we should not think that every scribe of a petition from cairo/fustat necessarily worked in the palace chancery and knew the chancery style inside and out. but it is still reasonable to expect basic elements of the high chancery style to appear in petitions originating in the capital. for example, the unpublished petition to a vizier in p. washington libr. of congress inv. ar. 111 clearly shows a chancery-style hand (and uses the tripartite opening blessing). 56. see rustow, “fatimid petition,” 360, n. 8. 57. e. m. grob, documentary arabic private and business letters on papyrus: form and function, content and context (berlin: de gruyter, 2010), 166–70; rustow, lost archive, 169–72. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 65 lines 1 and 4), which gives them hints of the upward-slanting, boat shape that rustow sees as distinctive of fatimid state petitions.58 of the document’s letter shapes, some appear in evidently older forms typical of provincial hands, such as the alif with a foot (in bi-l-tawqīʿ, recto l. 10).59 other letters, however, begin to approach curvilinear shapes at least comparable to those of the chancery style: a fully rounded bowl for final nūn and qāf;60 a two-stroke rather than “double-hairpin” kāf;61 a vertical rather than slanted-stroke ṭāʾ;62 and the ḥāʾ rasm, which is sometimes a “dull hairpin” but other times involves a greater flourish of the pen.63 notably, the combination of high chancery and older graphic elements that i have identified in our document is also evident in other little-studied petitions from provincial contexts of the fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh century. a fayyūmic petition dateable to 411–14/1021–24 and addressed to the caliph’s sister sitt al-mulk lacks boat lines and a curvilinear script but gives a tarjama, the petitioner’s name, in the upper left-hand corner as a petition written by a metropolitan chancery scribe would do. an example addressed to an unnamed shaykh in al-ushmūnayn follows the chancery style more closely by including a tarjama, upward-slanting lines, and wider line spacing. a petitionary epistle addressed to a qāḍī in the vicinity of the fayyūm includes a tarjama and upward-slanting, semi-boat shapes for the first few lines before the writer abandons the effort. a petition of uncertain provenance addressed to a financial administrator (ʿāmil) is generous with its line spacing but eschews boat-shaping.64 hybridity is thus the common denominator in the graphic as well as formulaic elements of provincial petitions in this period.65 we are dealing, in sum, with a rough petitionary form that lies between the earlier epistolary style and rustow’s fatimid state one, an amorphous category that we can label heuristically the “low-register paper petition.” documents that 58. as halting and inelegant as the layout of our document is, it is nonetheless closer to the palace chancery style in this respect than is at least one petition that we suspect actually made it to the palace: p.rustowpetition, addressed from the fayyūm to sitt al-mulk. 59. see also the open final nūn (e.g., in, recto l. 3); the full loop for final hāʾ/tāʾ marbūṭa (al-sādisa, recto l. 7); and the toothless ṣād (al-ṣabiya, verso l. 3). on script styles and letter shapes, see grob, letters on papyrus, 159–206; rustow, “fatimid petition,” 366; rustow, lost archive, 160–206. 60. min, fa-in, rizq, takūn, yathiq; recto ll. 5, 9, 11, 13; verso l. 2. 61. kabata, yumkinnī, takūn; recto ll. 3, 8, 13. 62. yataṭawwal, bi-ṭuṭūn; recto ll. 10, 11. 63. ḥattā ajʿalahā, ḥattā, ḥasbunā; recto l. 12; verso ll. 2, 6. 64. these documents are, respectively, p.rustowpetition, p.vind.arab. iii 40, p.fay.villages 44, and p.vind. arab. iii 41. the petitioner of the last calls himself a kutāmī, which the editor understands to mean a resident of the village of kutāma in the delta but which might denote instead a member of the berber kutāma tribe. 65. how provincial scribes would have acquired familiarity with the metropolitan style deserves further study. rustow suggests that the fatimids invested in training functionaries in the new scribal styles even in the provinces (lost archive, 242). perhaps anyone associated with state administrative organs, including sharīʿa courts, would have received some such training as fatimid rule got up and running, and this was then passed on to succeeding generations of scribes. that provincials may not have viewed the new style with the same reverence as did metropolitan chancery scribes, for whom good style was a hallmark of a “guild identity” (lost archive, 100), could account for its incomplete dissemination outside the capital. 66 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 67 fit this category were usually produced by scribes outside the immediate orbit of the palace chancery, addressed to subroyal dignitaries, and inflected to varying degrees by older petitionary, newer epistolary, and high chancery usages. i have labeled this category “paper” rather than “fatimid” petitions because even those of its features that appear to be new to the 300s/900s, such as the tripartite opening blessing, may predate the fatimid overhaul of the egyptian chancery at the latter end of that century. nonetheless, in the case of our petition, i am inclined to date the document to the fatimid period on the basis especially of the graphic elements—hanging baselines and boat-shaped lines—that rustow sees as emblematic of the high fatimid style. such a dating, in turn, gives added weight to the identification of the document’s khalīfa as ibrāhīm b. ʿalī b. rizq, active after the fatimid conquest of egypt, rather than ibrāhīm b. aḥmad, active before it. on this basis, i propose 390/1000 as an approximate date for the document. and in this direction, the petition’s formulae offer one more interesting morsel of evidence. after the basmala of the opening invocation, the scribe adds tawakkaltu ʿalā allāh, “i place trust in god.” this extended invocation is not overly common in the published documentary record; i have found only two other examples in the legal documents of the southern fayyūm, one of which is the deed of manumission drafted by al-ḥasan b. ibrāhīm b. ʿalī and registered by his father.66 a coincidence? the respective hands of the manumission and our petition are largely dissimilar, although that need not be decisive if the drafter of the petition was imitating a less familiar metropolitan style. perhaps the tawakkul invocation was a family usage, and the scribe of our petition was either the khalīfa himself or his son, al-ḥasan the longtime court servant. father, daughter, and the long arm of the law the question of who drafted the petition brings us back to the human heart of our story, the petitioner trying to alleviate the financial problems bedeviling him, his daughter, and a mother-in-law with whom he was probably at loggerheads. it also returns us to the workings of the provincial court, since in order for the petitioner to achieve his aims, the text of the petition had to render his problems legible and actionable in the legal framework within which the qāḍī operated. unfortunately, the text is incomplete to the degree that we can reconstruct neither the full facts of the case nor the qāḍī’s ruling. nonetheless, we can describe the rough outline of the case in search of the story within it, and we can compare the case to prescriptive works of law to hazard some guesses regarding the madhhab affiliations of the provincial judiciary involved and the ultimate outcome of the case. we do not know which school of islamic law our petition’s qāḍī adhered to, if he followed any of them with particular fidelity. in general, we would expect the mālikī school to have been best represented in the egyptian provinces, but it is possible that the shāfiʿīs, and perhaps even the ḥanafīs and the ismāʿīlīs (the latter only after the establishment of the fatimids), had a presence there as well.67 given the uncertainty regarding the qāḍī’s 66. the other is p.transmission 4, uqlūl, 418/1027. the invocation is attested elsewhere in p.vente appendix 2 (asyūṭ) and in cpr xxi 74, 78 (tax quittances from the first half of the third/ninth century). 67. worth mentioning here is the unpublished paper deed of sale p. cambr. ul inv. michael. charta b 87, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 67 affiliation, the following examination touches on the opinions of each of these schools, though the ismāʿīlīs are left aside for lack of any extensive discussion of the relevant legal problems in the extant fatimid lawbooks. two principal areas of islamic family law bear on the facts of the case as the petition presents them: the custody of minor children and the obligation to provide material support (nafaqa) for minor dependents. regarding the former, the petition’s narrative suggests that the father’s actions so far had accorded precisely with the islamic law of custody. majority views across the islamic legal schools prescribe that mothers have first right to take custody of and raise young children; if a child’s mother dies or is unfit to provide care, her own mother is next in line and takes precedence over the father and various other relations. the islamic legal schools differ as to when an offspring moves out of the “tender years” and into an age of moral formation when the father reenters the picture as a potential custodian, but all would agree that the petitioner’s six-year-old daughter was still within the former category.68 so, in placing his daughter with her maternal grandmother after the death of his wife, the unnamed petitioner did exactly what islamic law imagines he should have done in such a situation. things get more complicated with the question of maintenance. the petitioner had been providing material support for his daughter for several years preceding the petition, as islamic law expects of the fathers of minor children.69 but in the petition he avers that something has recently changed and he no longer has the means to support his daughter in her current custodial circumstances. he appears to suggest that the support would be within his means if his own mother took custody of the child. why that should be so is not immediately clear, but we can imagine several possible scenarios. perhaps the petitioner’s mother-in-law expected an additional wage for herself beyond what sufficed for the child’s needs; perhaps she expected cash payments but specie was difficult to come by in a rural area; perhaps the petitioner shared a dwelling with his mother, so bringing his daughter to her would have meant taking his daughter himself (and avoiding additional rent costs).70 the parties to which include two brothers from ṭalīt identified with the nisba al-shāfiʿayn, “the shāfiʿīs.” this document, dateable formally and paleographically to the fourth–fifth/tenth–eleventh centuries, confirms the presence of at least some shāfiʿīs in the southern fayyūm. it may also suggest that shāfiʿī affiliation was uncommon enough to merit a distinguishing nisba. i thank naïm vanthieghem for pointing me to this document and sharing an image of it. 68. see generally a. f. ibrahim, child custody in islamic law: theory and practice in egypt since the sixteenth century (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018), 64–71; ibn qudāma, al-mughnī, ed. ʿabd allāh b. ʿabd al-muḥsin al-turkī and ʿ abd al-fattāḥ muḥammad al-hulw (cairo: hajr, 1986), 11:412–16, 422–23. specifically for the mālikīs, see saḥnūn al-tanūkhī, al-mudawwana al-kubrā (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-saʿāda, 1322/1905–6; reprint, [riyadh]: wizārat al-shuʾūn al-islāmiyya wa-l-awqāf wa-l-daʿwa wa-l-irshād, n.d.), 5:38–40 (maternal custody until age of marriage); for the shāfiʿīs, see muḥyī al-dīn al-nawawī, minhāj al-ṭālibīn wa-ʿumdat al-muftīn, ed. muḥammad muḥammad ṭāhir shaʿbān (beirut: dār al-minhāj, 2005), 466 (until age of discretion); for the ḥanafīs, see al-marghīnānī, al-hidāya sharḥ bidāyat al-mubtadī, ed. sāʾid bakdāsh (medina: dār al-sirāj, 2019), 3:357–58 (until start of menstruation). 69. ibrahim, child custody, 84–87; ibn qudāma, mughnī, 11:372–74. 70. i thank oded zinger for the latter two suggestions. 68 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 69 overall, the petition depicts for the judge a financial situation made untenable by the conflicting legal imperatives of the maternal grandmother’s right to custody and the father’s obligation to provide material support. the petitioner seeks redress by asking the judge to rule that the latter imperative outweighs the former: removing the child from her maternal grandmother’s custody would allow the father to continue to fulfill his obligation of support. my reading of the rescript indicates that the qāḍī ordered ibrāhīm to look into the maternal grandmother’s “incapacity” (ʿajz)—perhaps her inability to care for the child without the burdensome payments the father had to provide? the end of the rescript then suggests that the daughter should wind up with one of the grandmothers, but which one the judge meant we cannot tell. a survey of medieval fiqh and fatwā literature turns up mixed results and rulings that leave open the possibility of this case’s going either way, although an overall trend toward privileging the father’s position is discernible. consider first the petition’s implication that the father’s maintenance costs depend on the identity of the custodian. some jurists might object that the child’s needs are the child’s needs and that these should not change from one grandmother’s house to that of another. this position appears to find support among some early mālikī authorities, who state that the grandmother has no right to recompense (ajr) for providing custody even if the father could afford it;71 he owes only the child’s nafaqa. the egyptian ḥanafī al-ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933) offers a similar ruling.72 we might imagine that a judge who followed the logic of these opinions would deny both any demands for additional payments by the maternal grandmother and the father’s request to end her custody of the child. but another prominent mālikī opinion holds to the contrary that the father of a child who has been taken in by her maternal grandmother must provide for the child’s housing (suknā) in addition to her food and clothing.73 the shāfiʿī school came to maintain in similar terms that the father owes a wage (maʾūna, muʾna) to the custodian.74 we would expect a 71. ibn abī zayd al-qayrawānī, al-nawādir wa-l-ziyādāt ʿalā mā fī al-mudawwana min ghayrihā min al-ummahāt, ed. muḥammad al-amīn būkhubza (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1999), 5:58, drawn from ibn al-mawwāz. the same opinion with different phrasing is attributed to ashhab b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz (d. 204/819) and drawn from the andalusian collection al-ʿutbiyya in ibn yūnus al-ṣiqillī, al-jāmiʿ li-masāʾil al-mudawwana, ed. ḥamdān b. ʿabd allāh b. idrīs al-shamrī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 2013), 9:516. see, with further discussion, ibn rushd al-jadd, al-bayān wa-l-taḥṣīl, ed. muḥammad ḥujjī, 2nd ed. (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1988), 5:376–77. 72. abū jaʿfar al-ṭaḥāwī and abū bakr al-jaṣṣāṣ, mukhtaṣar ikhtilāf al-ʿulamāʾ, ed. ʿabd allāh nadhīr aḥmad (beirut: dār al-bashāʾir al-islāmiyya, 2014), 2:460–61. al-ṭaḥāwī states that a custodian may not take rent payments (ujrat al-manzil) from the property (māl) of the ward. the phrasing indicates that the child in this example has inherited his own property and is not receiving nafaqa from his father, who may be deceased, so al-ṭaḥāwī does not actually specify whether a living father owes wages to a custodian beyond the child’s nafaqa. al-ṭaḥāwī goes on to say, however, that “others” aver that the custodian is due rent either from the ward’s property or from the nafaqa the ward is receiving. by contrasting this second opinion with the first, al-ṭaḥāwī implies that his favored opinion does not make custodian’s wages obligatory on the father. 73. saḥnūn, mudawwana, 5:44. for further discussion, see ibn rushd al-jadd, al-muqaddamāt al-mumahhidāt, ed. muḥammad ḥujjī (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1988), 1:570–71; ibrahim, child custody, 58–63. 74. interestingly, al-ṭaḥāwī comments that the opinion that the custodian is due rent money “has been related from al-shāfiʿī, but i have not found a narration of this” (ḥukiya dhālika ʿan al-shāfiʿī wa-lam najidhu riwāyatan; al-ṭaḥāwī and al-jaṣṣāṣ, ikhtilāf, 2:461). neither have i. a survey of the chapters on custody in al-shāfiʿī’s umm (muḥammad b. idrīs al-shāfiʿī, al-umm, ed. rifʿat fawzī ʿabd al-muṭṭalib [al-manṣūra: dār al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 69 judge bearing these opinions in mind to acknowledge that different custodians might place different cost burdens on the father. would such a judge have pressed this line of reasoning further and allowed a father to remove a minor child from the care of her maternal grandmother, the custodian of first right, for reasons of financial exigency? this precise question does not come up in the early foundational works of the madhhabs so far as i have been able to see, but similar cases receive attention in later furūʿ and fatwā works. opinions are mixed, but the overall trajectory tends toward allowing a father to intervene in and change his minor child’s custody situation if doing so eases a financial burden. a fatwā of the mālikī ibn sirāj al-andalusī (d. 456/1064) describes the case of an orphan living with his maternal grandmother who wants to sell the ward’s last remaining property to pay for his upkeep; the paternal grandmother offers to raise and provide for the child herself to keep the property intact. ibn sirāj reports differing opinions, some prioritizing the maternal grandmother’s right to custody and others the best care for the ward (al-rifq bi-l-maḥḍūn). for his part, ibn sirāj leans toward the latter option, which he puts forward to support his answer to another fatwā request that is remarkably similar to our case. the maternal grandmother of a girl whose mother died has had custody for six years, at which point the girl’s property, presumably what she inherited from her mother, is almost used up; the father, lacking means himself, wants to bring the girl to his own mother, who will provide for and raise her. ibn sirāj prefers that he do so to prevent the girl’s impoverishment.75 along similar lines, a sixth/twelfth-century mālikī commentary work by ibn rushd al-jadd (d. 520/1126) allows a father to remove his children from the care of their maternal grandmother to that of his own relatives if the grandmother will not provide custody for free (an taḥḍunahum bi-ghayr shayʾ).76 i have been unable to find an opinion in a medieval shāfiʿī work as directly related to our case as the mālikī fatwās are, but the discussion in al-juwaynī’s (d. 478/1085) nihāyat al-maṭlab of the custody rights of a mother who requests a wage is relevant. al-juwaynī recognizes one view, among others, that affirms that custody is no different whether provided by a child’s mother or by someone else, built on the primary opinion that breastfeeding by a mother is not preferable to that by a volunteer (mutabarriʿa) wet nurse if the mother demands a wage for her labor.77 this opinion would appear to leave room for al-wafāʾ, 2008], 6:238–420) and the abridgment of al-muzanī (abū ibrāhīm al-muzanī, mukhtaṣar al-muzanī, ed. muḥammad ʿabd al-qādir shāhīn [beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1998], 309–10) confirms that no such opinion is found there. but the classical shāfiʿī commentarial tradition based on al-muzanī takes it as mostly uncontroversial that the custodian is indeed due a wage. see, e.g., imām al-ḥaramayn al-juwaynī, nihāyat al-maṭlab fī dirāyat al-madhhab, ed. ʿabd al-ʿaẓīm maḥmūd al-dīb (jedda: dār al-minhāj li-l-nashr wa-l-tawzīʿ, 2007), 15:566; abū ḥāmid al-ghazālī, al-wajīz fī fiqh al-imām al-shāfiʿī, ed. ʿalī muʿawwaḍ and ʿādil ʿabd al-mawjūd (beirut: dār al-arqam, 1997), 2:123; abū al-qāsim al-rāfiʿī, al-ʿazīz sharḥ al-wajīz, ed. muʿawwaḍ and ʿabd al-mawjūd (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1997), 10:87; muḥyī al-dīn al-nawawī, rawḍat al-ṭālibīn, ed. muʿawwaḍ and ʿabd al-mawjūd (riyadh: dār ʿālam al-kutub, 2003), 6:504. 75. recorded in abū al-ʿabbās al-wansharīsī, al-miʿyār al-muʿrib wa-l-jāmiʿ al-mughrib ʿan fatāwā ahl ifrīqiyya wa-l-andalus wa-l-maghrib, ed. muḥammad ḥujjī (rabat: wizārat al-awqāf wa-l-shuʾūn al-islāmiyya li-l-mamlaka al-maghribiyya, 1981–83), 4:48–49. 76. ibn rushd, bayān, 5:376. 77. see al-juwaynī, nihāya, 15:539–40, no. 10,218, and 566–67, no. 10,248. 70 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 71 a shāfiʿī judge to allow a father to take over custody decisions in cases of financial exigency. i have been unable to find further discussion of this issue in medieval shāfiʿī sources,78 but at some point middle eastern shāfiʿīs adopted explicitly a position that would have favored our petitioner: the twelfth/eighteenth-century fatwā collection of al-khalīlī (d. 1147/1734– 35) includes multiple opinions affirming that a paternal grandmother who demands no wage has priority of custody over a maternal one who requests to be paid.79 among the ḥanafīs, i have found no discussions of wages owed to custodians (as opposed to wet nurses) in al-shaybānī’s (d. 189/804) foundational works or the major classical compendium of al-sarakhsī (d. 483/1090).80 but split opinions start to crop up in ḥanafī sources thereafter. the fatāwā of qāḍīkhān (d. 592/1196) takes up the case of a divorced mother who asks for a wage (ujra) on top of the support her impoverished ex-husband provides the child. the father’s sister offers to “raise the child with her own resources without recompense” (turabbī al-walad bi-mālihā majānan). qāḍīkhān notes that opinions differ but declares that the correct one is that the mother be offered custody with no wage; if she refuses, the child goes to the paternal aunt.81 a few centuries later, a responsum of the egyptian ḥanafī ibn quṭlūbughā (d. 879/1474) dealing with a nearly identical case gives the same ruling as qāḍīkhān’s while also citing another jurist’s contradictory opinion privileging the mother’s right to custody.82 ultimately, the ḥanafī tradition in the arab lands looks to have followed qāḍīkhān and ibn quṭlūbughā, affirming that wages are due for the provision of custody and allowing in situations of financial exigency the removal of children from custodians who would otherwise have first right of custody.83 the upshot of the foregoing discussion is that each of the islamic legal schools relevant to an examination of early fatimid egypt considered the maternal grandmother to have first right of custody of a motherless child; but each also developed opinions that would have been favorable to an impoverished father’s desire to remove his child from the care of an otherwise rightful custodian if he was unable to afford the cost of that custody arrangement. lacking the full text of the rescript, we can say only that the judge in our case might have ruled either way, though the overall trajectory of the discussions in the legal sources leads one to suspect that the case ended in the father’s favor. 78. including furūʿ works as well as the fatwā collections of ibn al-ṣalāḥ, al-nawawī, al-subkī, and ibn ḥajar al-haytamī. 79. muḥammad al-khalīlī, fatāwā al-khalīlī (egypt: n.p., n.d.), 2:134, 136. 80. muḥammad b. al-ḥasan al-shaybānī, al-aṣl, ed. muḥammad būynūkālin (qatar: wizārat al-awqāf, 2012), 4:544–49, 10:348–54; shams al-dīn al-sarakhsī, kitāb al-mabsūṭ (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, n.d.), 5:207–13. 81. fakhr al-dīn qāḍīkhān, fatāwā qāḍīkhān, ed. sālim muṣṭafā al-badrī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2009), 1:367. 82. qāsim ibn quṭlūbughā, majmūʿat al-rasāʾil, ed. ʿabd al-ḥamīd muḥammad al-darwīsh and ʿabd al-ʿalīm muḥammad al-darwīsh (damascus: dār al-nawādir, 2013), 709–10. 83. for examples, see j. e. tucker, in the house of the law: gender and islamic law in ottoman syria and palestine (berkeley: university of california press, 1998), 126; shihāb al-dīn al-shilbī, ḥāshiyat al-shilbī, on the margins of fakhr al-dīn al-zaylaʿī, tabyīn al-ḥaqāʾiq sharḥ kanz al-daqāʾiq (būlāq: al-maṭbaʿa al-kubrā al-amīriyya, 1314/1896–97), 3:46; ibn ʿābidīn, al-ʿuqūd al-durriyya fī tanqīḥ al-fatāwā al-ḥāmidiyya (n.p.: n.p., n.d.), 1:58–60. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 71 in speculating on the course of our case, we have so far proceeded on the assumption that the petitioner’s claims and stated aims were truthful. it is possible, however, that he was simply at odds with his mother-in-law or concerned about his daughter for emotional or other nonmaterial reasons and pleaded poverty as a strategy to regain custody. this possibility could have been behind the suggestion at the end of the petition of a trustee of the court as another option for a custodian: was the father trying to get his daughter away from her maternal grandmother at any cost? the relationship between father and mother-in-law brings us to a final question: to which religions did the parties involved in the case belong? as noted earlier, the documentary record indicates that ṭuṭūn was a largely christian village into the fifth/eleventh century. if our petition follows this pattern and concerns a christian family, the father was nonetheless apparently willing to seek remedies from a muslim judge. the many extant arabic-islamic deeds and contracts from ṭuṭūn and elsewhere demonstrate that christians in late abbasid and fatimid egypt routinely made use of muslim courts and scribes for commercial and property business,84 but there is much less evidence of fayyūmī christians litigating intracommunal or family disputes before muslim judges. two arabic documents acknowledging the apportionment of inheritances among ṭuṭūnite christian families may have been generated by litigation of this kind;85 if all the parties described in our petition were christian, we have a new piece of evidence in this direction. also of interest would be the fact that the custody and child-rearing practices of a christian family accorded precisely with islamic legal prescriptions. perhaps placing the motherless child with the maternal grandmother had long been customary across the religious communities, or perhaps it had developed from an islamic legal prescription into a regional custom.86 another possibility is that the deceased mother came from a christian family of ṭuṭūn while the father was muslim (the fact that the father asks for the help of the khalīfa in securing his daughter may indicate that he did not reside in the village). if this was the case, it is unsurprising to find the father petitioning a muslim qāḍī for assistance. such a scenario would also have implications for the judge’s treatment of the case depending on his madhhab affiliation, since we would be dealing with a muslim child (following the religion of her father) in the custody of a christian grandmother. the ḥanafīs and most mālikīs allowed christian, jewish, and even zoroastrian custodians to care for muslim children before the age of moral and religious formation; the shāfiʿīs and some mālikīs did not.87 84. weitz, “islamic law.” 85. p.hamb.arab. i 1; cpr xxvi 10. 86. major medieval copto-arabic books of canon law, including the sixth/twelfth-century majmūʿ al-qawānīn of patriarch ghubriyāl ii b. turayk and the seventh/thirteenth-century al-majmūʿ al-ṣafawī of al-ṣafī b. al-ʿassāl, appear not to treat the law of custody. 87. ibrahim, child custody, 78–79; ibn qudāma, mughnī, 11:412–13; al-sarakhsī, mabsūṭ, 5:210; khalīl b. isḥāq al-jundī, al-tawḍīḥ fī sharḥ al-mukhtaṣar al-faraʿī li-ibn al-ḥājib, ed. aḥmad b. ʿabd al-karīm najīb (dublin: markaz najībawayh li-l-makhṭūṭāt wa-khidmat al-turāth, 2008), 5:177–78; al-nawawī, minhāj, 465. 72 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 73 finally, perhaps both the father and the mother belonged to the little-attested muslim community of fatimid ṭuṭūn.88 conclusion our knowledge of the petitioner’s and his daughter’s circumstances ends at the margins of our document. where the daughter spent the rest of her childhood remains uncertain, and we can only hope that the father acted with good intent in trying to win custody from his deceased wife’s mother. but set amid the considerable documentary evidence extant from the medieval southern fayyūm, this petition and its rescript reveal a surprising amount about both the structures of a provincial egyptian judiciary and the development of the arabic petition, a medieval technology vital to constructing relationships between subjects, administrators, and rulers. the khalīfa involved in the case was likely associated with an islamic majlis al-ḥukm in the village of ṭalīt, and the qāḍī may have been as well (though this is less certain). if this interpretation is correct, the court activity in ṭalīt attested by our document highlights just how extensive was the growth of egypt’s islamic judiciary in the later abbasid and fatimid periods. provincial judicial institutions must have been supported by a local petty literate class of scribes and witnesses; the khalīfa ibrāhīm’s family, the banū rizq, belonged to precisely this class, and we can trace their activities in service to their court for nearly two centuries. though ibrāhīm b. rizq may have plied his trade near the desert edge of a rural province, his professional world was not disconnected from wider developments in law, scribal culture, and administration. the diplomatics of this petition suggest that its scribe had taken some influence from the new, high style of petition writing practiced in the orbit of the fatimid chancery in cairo. indeed, the mixture of old and new formal features that we find in the document helps us date it to the first century of fatimid rule. that mixture also allows us to identify a little-studied, low-register form of petition writing—continuing in certain ways the old arabic epistolary genre and coexisting with the high fatimid style— that our document exemplifies. ultimately, our petition was a tool, a physical record of text that the petitioner planned to use in the furtherance of his interests. we may hope that things turned out well enough for him and his daughter. as more documents from the village world of the fatimid fayyūm are identified and studied, perhaps one or both of them will reappear and we will be able to follow their stories further. 88. two individuals identified as ṭuṭūnites who bear apparently arabic muslim names are found in p.cair. arab. 59.2 and p.shomali 3 witnesses.1. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 73 bibliography studies and published texts gaubert, c., and j.-m. mouton. hommes et villages du fayyoum dans la documentation papyrologique arabe (xe–xie siècles). geneva: librairie droz, 2014. al-ghazālī, abū ḥāmid. al-wajīz fī fiqh al-imām al-shāfiʿī. 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tribunal fatimide de ṭalīt.” revue des mondes musulmans et de la méditerranée 140 (2016): 53–72. tucker, j. e. in the house of the law: gender and islamic law in ottoman syria and palestine. berkeley: university of california press, 1998. vanthieghem, n., and l. weitz. “monks, monasteries, and muslim scribes: three parchment house sales from the 4th/10th-century fayyūm.” arabica 67 (2020): 461–501. 76 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 77 al-wansharīsī, abū al-ʿabbās. al-miʿyār al-muʿrib wa-l-jāmiʿ al-mughrib ʿan fatāwā ahl ifrīqiyya wa-l-andalus wa-l-maghrib. edited by muḥammad ḥujjī. rabat: wizārat al-awqāf wa-l-shuʾūn al-islāmiyya li-l-mamlaka al-maghribiyya, 1981–83. weitz, l. “islamic law on the provincial margins: christian patrons and muslim notaries in upper egypt, 2nd–5th/8th–11th centuries.” islamic law and society 27 (2020): 5–52. document editions chrest.khoury i = khoury, r. g., and a. grohmann, eds. chrestomathie de papyrologie arabe. leiden: brill, 1993. chrest.khoury ii = khoury, r. g., and a. grohmann, eds. papyrologische studien: zum privaten und gesellschaftlichen leben in den ersten islamischen jahrhunderten. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1995. p.berl.arab i = abel, l., ed. ägyptische urkunden aus den königlichen museen zu berlin: arabische urkunden. berlin: weidmann, 1896-1900. p.berl.arab. ii = diem, w., ed. arabische briefe des 7. bis 13. jahrhunderts aus den staatlichen museen zu berlin. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1997. p.cair.arab. = grohmann, a., ed. arabic papyri in the egyptian library. cairo: egyptian library press, 1934-62. p.diemprivatbriefe = diem, w. “zwei arabische privatbriefe aus dem ägyptischen museum in kairo.” zeitschrift für arabische linguistik 25 (1993): 148-53. p.fahmitaaqud = fahmī muḥammad, ʿ abd al-raḥmān. “wathāʾiq li-l-taʿāqud min fajr al-islām fī miṣr.” bulletin de l’institut d’égypte 54 (1972/3): 1-58. p.fay.villages = gaubert and mouton, hommes et villages. p.frantz-murphycomparison i = frantz-murphy, g. “a comparison of the arabic and earlier egyptian contract formularies, part i: the arabic contracts from egypt.” journal of near eastern studies 40 (1981): 203-25. p.genizahcambr. = khan, g., ed. arabic legal and administrative documents in the cambridge genizah collections. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1993. p.grohmannurkunden = grohmann, a. “einige bemerkenswerte urkunden aus der sammlung der papyrus erzherzog rainer an der nationalbibliothek zu wien.” archorient 18 (1950): 80-119. p.hamb.arab. i = dietrich, a., ed. arabische papyri aus der papyrussammlung der hamburger staats-und universitäts-bibliothek. leipzig: f.a. brockhaus, 1937. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 77 p.heid.arab. iii = diem, w., ed. arabische briefe auf papier aus der heidelberger papyrussammlung. heidelberg: winter, 2013. p.joysorrow = younes, k. m. “joy and sorrow in early muslim egypt: arabic papyrus letters; text and content.” phd thesis, leiden university, 2013. p.khalili i = khan, g., ed. arabic papyri: selected material from the khalili collection. oxford: azimuth editions, 1992. p.khanpetitions = khan, “historical development.” p.kratchkovski = kračkovskaya, v. a. and kračkovskij, i. j. “le plus ancient document arabe de l’asie centrale.” in sogdiiskii sbornik, 52-90. leningrad: izdatel’stvo akademii nauk sssr, 1934. p.rustowpetition = rustow, “fatimid petition.” p.rustowwoman = rustow, m. “a petition to a woman at the fatimid court (413–414 a.h./1022–23 c.e.).” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 73 (2010): 1-27. p.ryl.arab i = margoliouth, d. s. catalogue of the arabic papyri in the john rylands library manchester. manchester: manchester university press, 1933. p.shomali = shomali, “arabic legal documents.” p.sijpesteijndelegation = sijpesteijn, p. m. “delegation of judicial power in abbasid egypt.” in legal documents as sources for the history of muslim societies: studies in honour of rudolph peters, edited by m. van berkel, l. buskens, and p. m. sijpesteijn, 61-84. leiden: brill, 2017. p.st.catherine i = ernst, h., ed. die mamlukischen sultansurkunden des sinai-klosters. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1960. p.sternmamlukpetitions = stern, “petitions from the mamlūk period.” p.tillierrancon = tillier and vanthieghem, “la rançon.” p.tillierrecu = tillier and vanthieghem, “un reçu.” p.transmission = rāġib, y., ed. transmission de biens, mariage et répudiation à uqlūl, village du fayyoum, au ve/xie siècle. cairo: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2016. p.vanthieghemarabisation = vanthieghem, n. “l’arabisation des coptes: un témoin inédit.” in egypt and syria in the fatimid, ayyubid and mamluk eras viii, edited by u. vermeulen, k. d’hulster, and j. van steenbergen, 121-31. leuven: peeters, 2016. p.vanthieghemmonks = vanthieghem and weitz, “monks, monasteries, and muslim scribes.” p.vente = rāġib, actes. 78 • lev weitz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the long arm of the provincial law • 78 p.vind.arab. i = diem, w., ed. arabische geschäfsbriefe des 10. bis 14. jahrhunderts aus der österreichischen nationalbibliothek in wien. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1995. p.vind.arab. ii = diem, w., ed. arabische privatbriefe des 9. bis 15. jahrhunderts aus der österreichischen nationalbibliothek in wien. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1996. p.vind.arab. iii = diem, w., ed. arabische amtliche briefe des 10. bis 16. jahrhunderts aus der österreichischen nationalbibliothek in wien. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1996. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 179-217 clifford edmund bosworth: an updated bibliography with the passing of edmund bosworth on february 28, 2015, the world lost one of the greatest historians of the islamic middle east of the last half century. in terms of scholarly output, he was undoubtedly the most prolific one. until now, the indispensable guide to professor bosworth’s works has been the bibliography that introduces the two-volume festschrift published in his honor fifteen years ago: ian richard netton (ed.), studies in honour of clifford edmund bosworth. i. hunter of the east: arabic and semitic studies, leiden 2000, pp. xiii–xxxv.1 as helpful as that list of publications has been, it is only complete through 1998 and includes but a handful of forthcoming works “in the press” as of that date. the time therefore seemed appropriate for an update to professor bosworth’s bibliography with additional items published to date. for the years 1959 through 1998, i have followed the publication list, item numbering and general formatting of the original bibliography, with a number of additions and corrections. for example, i have identified a total of forty-five articles from the encyclopaedia of islam that had been previously omitted, and these are now included under the appropriate year and volume. when a missing publication has been added, i have marked it “(a)” so as not to affect the overall numbering scheme. in addition, those articles reprinted in a later collected volume have now been given an appropriate cross-reference. i have made a fairly diligent search for new materials and hope that the result is reasonably comprehensive, although, given the vast scale of professor bosworth’s published output, i am aware that there are likely many oversights.2 this updated bibliography is offered with gratitude in memory of one of the most distinguished scholars of our age. — michael o’neal washington, d.c., october 2015 (michael.p.oneal@gmail.com) 1. those portions of the original bibliography incorporated into this update are reproduced here by kind permission of messrs. brill. 2. sincere thanks to kristian girling for calling my attention to item 343, which was professor bosworth’s 2012 update to item 136. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 180 abbreviations ahr american historical review, washington, d.c. aoash acta orientalia academiae scientiarum hungaricae¸ budapest azure azure. the review of arab arts and culture, london beo bulletin d’études orientales, damascus bior bibliotheca orientalis, leiden bjmes british journal of middle eastern studies, durham, abingdon bjrul bulletin of the john rylands university library, manchester bsoas bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies, london bull. bsmes bulletin of the british society for middle east studies, oxford, exeter caj central asiatic journal, the hague, wiesbaden ct cahiers de tunisie, tunis dma dictionary of the middle ages, new york ehr english historical review, london ei1 encyclopaedia of islam, leiden 1913–36 ei2 encyclopaedia of islam, new edn., leiden 1954–2006 ei3 encyclopaedia of islam three, leiden 2007– eir encyclopædia iranica, new york, london, cosa mesa, calif. ew east and west, rome ga graeco-arabica, athens gms gibb memorial series, london ijmes international journal of middle east studies, cambridge ios israel oriental studies, tel aviv iq the islamic quarterly, london iran, jbips iran, journal of the british institute of persian studies, london is iranian studies, abingdon ismeo istituto italiano per il medio ed estremo orientale, rome isl. der islam, berlin ja journal asiatique, paris jah journal of asian history, wiesbaden jaos journal of the american oriental society, new haven, conn. jesho journal of the economic and social history of the orient, leiden jis journal of islamic studies, oxford jnes journal of near eastern studies, chicago joas journal of oriental and african studies, athens jras journal of the royal asiatic society, london jss journal of semitic studies, manchester mej middle east journal, washington, d.c. mesa bull. middle east studies association bulletin, tuscon mw the muslim world, hartford, conn. olz orientalistische literaturzeitung, berlin st. ir. studia iranica, paris and leiden in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 181 tls the times literary supplement, london zdmg zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft, wiesbaden 1959 1. ei2 vol. i, art. “bahrāʾ”. 1960 2. “the rise of the karāmiyyah in khurasan”, mw, l (1960), 5–14. reprinted in item 104, art. i. 3. “ghaznevid military organisation”, isl., xxxvi (1960) [1961], 37–77. persian tr. sarwar humāyūn, tashkīlāt-i niẓāmī-yi ghaznaviyān, anjuman-i tārīkh-i afghānistān, kabul 1342/1963, pp. 64. 4. ei2 vol. i, arts. “biʾr maʿūna”; “al-bishr”; “buʿāth”; “buzākha”. 1961 4(a). “the transition from ghaznavid to seljuq rule in the islamic east”, phd thesis, the university of edinburgh 1961, pp. viii + 548. 5. “the early islamic history of ghūr”, caj, vi (1961), 116–33. reprinted in item 104, art. ix. 1962 6. “the imperial policy of the early ghaznawids”, islamic studies. journal of the central institute of islamic research, karachi, i/3 (1962), 49–82. reprinted in item 104, art. xi. 7. ei2 vol. ii, art. “djaʿda (ʿāmir)”. 8. review of h.l. gottschalk, al-malik al-kāmil von egypten und seine zeit, wiesbaden 1958, in jras, new ser., 94/1–2 (1962), 86. 1963 9. the ghaznavids, their empire in afghanistan and eastern iran 994:1040, edinburgh university press 1963, pp. xii + 331. reprinted munshiram manoharlal, delhi 1992. 2nd edn., with updated bibliography, libraire du liban, beirut 1973, pp. xii + 335. persian tr. ḥasan anūshih, tārīkh-i ghaznaviyān, 2 vols., tehran 1372/1993, repr. 1381/2002. 10. “a turco-mongol practice amongst the early ghaznavids?”, caj, vii (1962), 347–40. reprinted in item 104, art. xii. 11. “the titulature of the early ghaznavids”, oriens, xv (1962), 210–33. reprinted in item 104, art. x. 12. “the section on codes and their decipherment in qalqashandī’s ṣubḥ al-aʿshā”, jss, viii/1 (1963), 17–33. reprinted in item 135, art. xiii. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 182 13. “early sources for the history of the first four ghaznavid sultans (977–1041)”, iq, vii (1963), 3–22. reprinted in item 104, art. xiii. 14. “a pioneer arabic encyclopedia of the sciences: al khwārizmī’s keys of the sciences”, isis, liv/1 (1963), 97–111. reprinted in item 135, art. i. 15. “some historical gleanings from the section on symbolic actions in qalqašandī’s ṣubḥ al-aʿšā”, arabica, x/2 (1963), 148–53. reprinted in item 240, art. ix. 16. ei2 vol. ii, art. “djudhām”. 17. reviews of u. heyd (ed.), studies in islamic history and civilisation, scripta hierosylimitana ix, jerusalem 1961, in jss, viii/1 (1963), 116–19; e.e. elder and w. mc e. miller (ed. and tr.), al-kitāb al-aqdas or the most holy book of mīrzā ḥusayn ʿalī bahāʾu’llāh, in jras, new ser., xcv/1–2 (1963), 93–4; g.e. von grunebaum, modern islam, the search for cultural identity, berkeley and los angeles 1962, in jras, new ser., xcv/1–2 (1963), 114–15. 1964 18. “on the chronology of the ziyārids in gurgān and ṭabaristān”, isl., xl (1964), 25–34. reprinted in item 104, art. ii. 19. “a maqāma on secretaryship: al-qalqashandī’s al-kawākib al-durriyya fī ’l-manāqib al-badriyya”, bsoas, xxvii/2 (1964), 291–8. reprinted in item 135, art. xiv. 20. “some new manuscripts of al-khwārizmī’s mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm”, jss, ix/2 (1964), 341–5. 21. ei2 vol. ii, art. “fīl. as beasts of war”. 22. reviews of k.a. faruki, islamic jurisprudence, karachi, 1382/1962, in jras, new ser., xcvi/1 (1964), 75–6; l. binder, iran, political development in a changing nation, berkeley and los angeles 1962, in man, no. 160 (july–august 1964), 127–8. 1965 23. “language reform and nationalism in modern turkey, a brief conspectus”, mw, lv (1965), 58–65, 117–24. 24. “notes on the pre-ghaznavid history of eastern afghanistan”, iq, ix (1965), 12–24. reprinted in item 104, art. xiv. 25. “an embassy to maḥmūd of ghazna recorded in qāḍī ibn az-zubair’s kitāb adh-dhakhāʾir wa ’t-tuḥaf”, jaos, lxxxv (1965), 404–7. reprinted in item 104, art. xv. 26. (with sir gerard clauson) “al-xwārazmī on the peoples of central asia”, jras, new ser., xcvii/1 (1965), 2–12. reprinted in item 104, art. xx. reprinted as ch. 7 in the turks in the early islamic world, item 312, 167–78. 27. ei2 vol. ii, arts. “ghazna”; “ghulām. ii. persia”; “ghūr”; “ghūrids”. 28. reviews of r.h. davison, reform in the ottoman empire 1856–1876, princeton 1963, in iq, ix (1965), 56–8; a. pacheco, historia de jacob xalabin, barcelona 1964, in iq, ix (1965), 58–60; j.j. saunders, a history of mediaeval islam, london 1965, in jras, new ser., xcvii/2 (1965), 149–50; s.m. stern, fāṭimid decrees, original documents from the fāṭimid chancery, london 1964, in jss, x/2 (1965), 303–5. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 183 1966 29. “maḥmūd of ghazna in contemporary eyes and later persian literature”, iran, jbips, iv (1966), 85–92. reprinted in item 104, art. xvi. 30. ei2 vol. iii, arts. “ḥādjib. iii. eastern dynasties”; “ḥarb. v. persia”. 31. review of g. scarcia, ṣifat-nāma-yi darvīš muḥammad ḫān-i ġāzī. cronaca di una crociata musulmana contro i kafiri di laġmān nell’anno 1582, serie orientale roma xxxii, ismeo, rome 1965, in ew, new ser., xvi (1966), 340–2. 1967 32. the islamic dynasties. a chronological and genealogical handbook, islamic surveys 5, edinburgh university press 1967, pp. xviii + 245. french tr. yves thoraval, les dynasties musulmans, paris 1966. russian tr. p.a. gryaznevich, musulmanskie dynastii. spravochnik po khronologii i genealogii, moscow 1971. persian tr. farīdūn badrāʾī, silsilahā-yi khāndānhā-yi islāmī, tehran 1350/1971, repr. 1371/1992. turkish tr. erdoğan merçil and mehmet i̇pşirli, i̇slâm devletleri tarihi (kronoloji ve soykütüğü elkitabı), istanbul 1980. arabic tr. ḥusayn ʿalī al-labūdī, al-usar al-ḥākima fi ’l-islām. dirāsa fi ’l-taʾrīkh wa ’l-ansāb, kuwait 1992. javanese tr. ilyas hasan, dinasti-dinasti islam, bandung 1993. 33. “military organisation under the būyids of persia and iraq”, oriens, xviii–xix (1965–6), 143–67. reprinted in item 104, art. iii. 34. ei2 vol. iii, arts. “hiba. 1. the caliphate”; “hindūshāhīs”; “ḥiṣār. iii. persia”. 35. reviews of j.w. spain, the pathan borderland, the hague 1963, in oriens, xviii–xix (1965–6), 441–3; m. klimburg, afghanistan, das land im historischen spannungsfeld mittelasiens, vienna and munich 1966, in jras, new ser., xcix/1 (1967), 38–9; k. jahn, rashīd al-dīn’s history of india, the hague 1965, in jras, new ser., xcix/1 (1967), 44–5; a. bombaci, the kufic inscription in persian verses in the court of the royal palace of masʿūd iii at ghazni, ismeo, centro studi e scavi archeologici in asia, reports and memoirs v, rome 1966, in ew, new ser., xvii (1967), 126–7; j.a. boyle, grammar of modern persian, wiesbaden 1966, in jss, xii/2 (1967), 325–6. 1968 36. sīstān under the arabs, from the islamic conquest to the rise of the ṣaffārids (30–250/651– 864), ismeo, centro studi e scavi in asia, reports and memoirs xi, rome 1968, pp. xi + 145. 37. the book of curious and entertaining information. the laṭāʾif al-maʿārif of thaʿālibī. translated with an introduction and notes, edinburgh university press 1968, pp. ix + 164. 38. “the political and dynastic history of the iranian world 1000–1217”, ch. 1 in j.a. boyle (ed.), the cambridge history of iran. v. the saljuq and mongol periods, cambridge 1968, 1–202. 39. w. barthold, turkestan down to the mongol invasion, 3rd edn. with an additional in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 184 chapter hitherto unpublished in english translated by mrs. t. minorsky and edited by c.e. bosworth, and with further addenda and corrigenda by c.e. bosworth, gms, n.s. v, london 1968, pp. xxxii + 573. 40. “the development of persian culture under the early ghaznavids”, iran, jbips, vi (1968), 33–44. reprinted in item 104, art. xviii. 41. “the armies of the ṣaffārids”, bsoas, xxxi/3 (1968), 534–54. reprinted in item 104, art. xvii. arabic tr. a.j. nājī, “jaysh al-ṣaffāriyyīn”, in majallat kulliyyat al-ādāb, jāmiʿat baghdād (1972), no. 7, 189–261. 42. reviews of m.c. bateson, arabic language handbook, washington, d.c. 1967, in jss, xiii/2 (1968), 311–13; atti del terzo congresso di studi arabi e islamici, ravello 1–6 settembre 1966, naples 1967, in jss, xiii/2 (1968), 315–16; s.m. stern (ed.), documents from islamic chanceries, oxford 1965, in jras, new ser., c/2 (1968), 181. 1969 43. “the ṭāhirids and arabic culture”, jss, xiv/1 (1969), 45–79. reprinted in item 135, art. ii. 44. “the ṭāhirids and persian literature,” iran, jbips, vii (1969), 103–6. reprinted in item 104, art. iv. 45. “abū ʿ abdallāh al-khwārazmī on the technical terms of the secretary’s art: a contribution to the administrative history of mediaeval islam”, jesho, xii/2 (1969), 113–64. reprinted in item 135, art. xv. 46. “an alleged embassy from the emperor of china to the amīr naṣr b. aḥmad: a contribution to sāmānid military history”, in mujtaba minovi and iraj afshar (eds.), yād-nāma-yi īrānī-yi minorsky, tehran 1969, 17–29. reprinted in item 104, art. xxii. 47. ei2 vol. iii, art. “īdhādj or māl-amīr”. 48. reviews of h. horst, die staatsverwaltung der grossselğūqen und ḫorazmšāhs (1038– 1231): eine untersuchung nach urkundenformularen der zeit, wiesbaden 1964, in oriens, xx (1967) [publ. 1969], 242–4; c. hechaïme, louis cheikho et son livre «le christianisme et la littérature chrétienne en arabie avant l’islam», beirut 1967, in jss, xiv/1 (1969), 136–8; f. abbott, islam and pakistan, oxford and ithaca 1968, and w. montgomery watt, what is islam?, london 1968, in asian review, ii/2 (january 1969), 162–4. 1970 49. v. minorsky, ḥudūd al-ʿālam. the regions of the world, a persian geography 372 a.h.–982 a.d., 2nd edn., with the preface by v.v. barthold translated from the russian and with additional material by the late professor minorsky, edited by c.e. bosworth, gms, n.s. xi, london 1970, repr. 1982, 2015, pp. lxxxiii + 524. 50. “a propos de l’article de mohamed khadr, ‘deux actes de waqf d’un qaraḫānide d’asie centrale’”, ja, cclvi (1968) [publ. 1970], 449–53. reprinted in item 104, art. xxi. 51. “an early arabic mirror for princes: ṭāhir dhū l-yamīnain’s epistle to his son ʿabdallāh (206/821)”, jnes, xxix (1970), 25–41. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 185 52. “dailamīs in central iran: the kākūyids of jibāl and yazd”, iran, jbips, viii (1970), 73–95. reprinted in item 104, art. v. 53. “a dramatisation of the prophet muhammad’s life: henri de bornier’s mahomet”, numen, xvii/2 (1970), 105–17. reprinted as ch. 8 in eastward ho!, item 340, 95–108. 54. arts. on islamic history and historical geography in the encyclopedia americana. for a partial list of articles, see item 149. 55. ei2 vol. iii, arts. “ikhshīd”; “ilek-khāns or ḳarakhānids”; “ildeñizids or eldigüzids”; “ili”; “ilyāsids”; “inʿām”. 56. obituary: s.m. stern, iran, jbips, viii (1970), ix. 57. reviews of r.m.n.e. elahie, the life and works of yâqût al-hamawî, lahore 1965, in ijmes, i (1970), 184–6; muhammad shafi, wāmiq-o-adhrā, lahore 1967, in ijmes, i (1970), 186–7; f. sezgin, geschichte der arabischen schriftums, band i. qurʾānwissenschaften – ḥadīt – geschichte – fiqh – dogmatik – mystik, bis ca. 430 h., leiden 1967, in jss, xv/1 (1970), 130–4; a.k. sanjian, colophons of armenian manuscripts 1301–1480, cambridge, mass. 1979, in jss, xv/1 (1970), 142–3; d. and j. sourdel, la civilisation de l’islam classique, paris 1968, in jss, xv/2 (1970), 270–1; s.j. shaw (ed.), international journal of middle east studies, i/1 (1970), in jss, xv/2 (1970), 271–2. 1971 58. iran and islam. in memory of the late vladimir minorsky, edited by c.e. bosworth, edinburgh university press 1971, pp. xvi + 574. 59. “the banū ilyās of kirmān (320–57/932–68)”, in c.e. bosworth (ed.), iran and islam. in memory of the late vladimir minorsky, edinburgh university press 1971, 107–24. reprinted in item 104, art. vi. 60. “the turks in the islamic lands up to the mid-11th century”, in cl. cahen (ed.), philologiae turciae fundamenta, iii, wiesbaden 1970 [publ. 1971], 1–20. reprinted as ch. 9 in the turks in the early islamic world, item 312, 193–212. 61. “manuscripts of thaʿālibī’s yatīmat ad-dahr in the süleymaniye library, istanbul”, jss, xvi/1 (1971), 41–9. 62. two arts. on turkish personages in the mcgraw-hill encyclopedia of world biography. 63. reviews of k.m. röhrborn, provinzen und zentralgewalt persiens im 16. und 17. jahrhundert, berlin 1966, in oriens, xx (1968–9) [publ. 1971], 459–60; a. mansour, in a new light, london 1969, in european judaism, v (winter 1970–1), 51; h.j. kissling et alii, the muslim world, a historical survey. part iii. the last great muslim empires, leiden 1969, in mej, xxv (winter 1971), 106–7; p.m. holt, a.k.s. lambton and b. lewis (eds.), the cambridge history of islam, 2 vols., cambridge 1970, in south asian review, v/1 (october 1971), 79–81; e. wiedemann, aufsätze zur arabischen wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2 vols., hildesheim 1970, in jss, xvi/2 (1971), 277–8; kuthayyir ʿazza, dīwān, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās, beirut 1971, and al-ṣanawbarī, dīwān, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās, beirut 1970, in jss, xvi/2 (1971), 278–9; h. loebenstein, katalog der arabischer handschriften der österreichischen nationalbibliothek. neuerwerbungen 1868–1968, teil i, vienna 1970, in jss, xvi/2 (1971), 281–2. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 186 1972 64. “introduction”, in j.l. burckhardt, arabic proverbs; or, the manners and customs of the modern egyptians, illustrated from their proverbial sayings current at cairo, repr. curzon press, london, and rowan and littlefield, totowa n.j. 1972, repr. london 1984, i–iii. 65. “christian and jewish religious dignitaries in mamlūk egypt and syria: qalqashandī’s information on their hierarchy, titulature and appointment”, ijmes, iii (1972), 59–74, 199–216. reprinted in item 135, art. xvi. 66. “some correspondence in the john rylands university library concerning john lewis burckhardt and lady hester stanhope’s physician”, bjrul, lv/1 (autumn 1972), 33–59. 67. “rajāʾ ibn ḥaywa al-kindī and the umayyad caliphs”, iq, xvi (1972), 36–80. reprinted in item 135, art. iii. reprinted as ch. 5 in f.m. donner (ed.), the articulation of early islamic state structures, the formation of the classical islamic world, vi, farnham, surrey 2012, 89–134. 68. “ṣanawbarī’s elegy on the pilgrims slain in the carmathian attack on mecca (317/930): a literary and historical study”, arabica, xix (1972), 222–39. reprinted in item 135, art. iv. 69. “william lithgow: a seventeenth century traveller in the near east”, memoirs and proceedings of the manchester literary and philosophical society, cxiv (1971–2), no. 1 [publ. 1972], 1–21. 70. “islamic history”, in d. hopwood and d. grimwood jones (eds.), middle east libraries committee. middle east and islam. a bibliographical introduction, zug-london 1972, 55–72. 71. reviews of h. busse, chalif und grosskönig, die buyiden im iraq (945–1055), beirut 1969, in al-abḥāth, beirut, xxii (1969) [publ. 1972], 103–7; e.i.j. rosenthal, studia semitica, 2 vols., cambridge 1971, in iq, xv (1971) [publ. 1972], 143–5; a.a. abd dixon, the umayyad caliphate 65–86/684–705 (a political study), london 1971, in iq, xv (1971) [publ. 1972], 208–10; m.a. shaban, islamic history a.d. 600–750 (a.h. 132), a new interpretation, cambridge 1971, in iq, xvi (1972), 105–7; g. vitestam, kanz al-mulūk fī kaifiyyat as-sulūk . . . ascribed to sibṭ ibn al-djauzī, lund 1970, in jnes, xxxi (1972), 61–3; serie onomasticon arabicum, parts 1–3, paris 1971, in jss, xvii/1 (1972), 154–6; j. penrice, a dictionary and glossary of the kor-ân, repr. london 1971, in jss, xvii/1 (1972), 161–2; h.s. karmi, al-manar, an arabic-english dictionary, london and beirut 1970, in jss, xvii/2 (1972), 276; f. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schriftums, band iii. medizin – pharmazie – zoologie – tierheilkunde bis ca. 430 h., leiden 1970; band iv. alchimie – chemie – botanik – agrikultur bis ca. 430 h., leiden 1971, in jss, xvii/2 (1972), 277–9. 1973 72. [errant duplication of item 70] 73. “barbarian incursions: the coming of the turks into the islamic world”, in d.s. richards in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 187 (ed.), islamic civilisation 950–1150, papers on islamic history iii, oxford 1973, 1–16. reprinted in item 104, art. xxiii. reprinted as ch. 10 in the turks in the early islamic world, item 312, 213–28. 74. “a mamlūk text on the orthographical distinction of ḍād and ẓāʾ”, parole de l’orient, kaslik, lebanon, iii/1 (1972) [publ. 1973], 153–69; also in j.m. barral (ed.), orientalia hispanica, sive studia f.m. pareja octogenario dicata, i, arabo-islamica, pars prior, leiden 1974, 135–49. 75. “the heritage of rulership in early islamic iran and the search for dynastic connections with the past”, iran, jbips, xi (1973), 51–62; also in is, xi (1978), 7–34. reprinted in item 104, art. vii. 76. “the tomb in cairo of john lewis burckhardt”, jss, xviii/2 (1973), 259–66. reprinted as ch. 6 in eastward ho!, item 340, 69–78. 77. “ʿubaidallāh b. abī bakra and the ‘army of destruction’ in zābulistān (79/698)”, isl., l (1973), 268–83. reprinted in item 104, art. xix. 77(a). “foreword”, in w.j. pendergast (tr.), the maqámát of badíʿ al-zamaán al-hamadhání, london 1973, vii–x. 78. ei2 vol. iv, arts. “isfarāyīn”; “ismāʿīl b. aḥmad”; “ismāʿīl b. nūḥ”; “ismāʿīl b. sebüktigin”; “ispahbadh”; “ispahsālār, sipahsālār”; “iṣṭabl. v. persia”. 79. reviews of j. carmichael, the shaping of the arabs: a study in ethnic identity, london 1969, in jras, new ser., civ/1 (1972) [publ. 1973], 61; j. aubin (ed.), le monde iranien et l’islam, i, geneva and paris 1971, in jras, new ser., cv/2 (1973), 169–70; s. digby, war-horse and elephant in the delhi sultanate: a study of military supplies, oxford 1971, in jras, new ser., cv/2 (1973), 178–9; israel oriental studies, jerusalem, i (1971), in jss, xviii/1 (1973), 169–74 (with t. muraoka); m.s. swartz, ibn al-jawzī’s kitāb al-quṣṣāṣ wa ’l-mudhakkirīn, beirut 1971, in jss, xviii/1 (1973), 178–81; h. rabie, the financial system of egypt a.h. 564–741/a.d. 1169–1341, oxford 1972, in ehr, lxxxviii, no. 348 (1973), 618–19; m. gaudefroy-demombynes, mahomet, 2nd edn., paris 1969, in olz, lxviii/7–8 (1973), 375; p.m. holt, a.k.s. lambton and b. lewis (eds.), the cambridge history of islam, 2 vols., cambridge 1970, in iq, xvi (1972) [publ. 1973], 205–9; f. rosenthal, the herb. hashish versus medieval muslim society, leiden 1971, in iq, xvi (1972) [publ. 1973], 209–11. 1974 80. the legacy of islam, 2nd edn., edited by the late joseph schacht with c.e. bosworth, oxford 1974. arabic tr. muḥammad zuhayr al-samhūrī et alii, turāth al-islām, 3 vols., kuwait 1978, repr. 1998. german tr. das vermächtnis des islams, zurich, munich 1980. 81. “islamic frontiers in africa and asia. (b) central asia”, in j. schacht with c.e. bosworth (eds.), the legacy of islam, 2nd edn., oxford 1974, 116–30. 82. encyclopaedia britannica, 15th edn., chicago 1974, macropaedia, iii, 623–45, art. “caliphate, empire of the”. 83. “the qurʾanic prophet shuʿaib and ibn taimiyya’s epistle concerning him”, le muséon, lxxxvii (1974), 425–40. reprinted in item 135, art. v. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 188 83(a). “jewish elements in the banū sāsān”, in international conference on jewish communitites in muslim lands, 31 march–3 april, 1974, yad izhak ben-zvi, institute of asian and african studies, the hebrew university of jerusalem 1974. see also item 107. 84. obituary: “sir gerard clauson (1891–1973)”, in bull. bsmes, i/1 (1974), 39–40. 84(a). “foreword”, in m.z. khan (tr.), gardens of the righteous: riyadh as-salihin of imam nawawi, london 1974, vii–viii. reprinted london, totowa, n.j. 1975; tilford 1996. 85. ei2 vol. iv, arts. “istiʿrāḍ, ʿarḍ”; “al-ḳabḳ”; “kābul”; “kābulistān”; “ḳābūs b. wushmagīr b. ziyār”. 86. reviews of l.w. adamec, afghanistan 1900–1923, a diplomatic history, berkeley and los angeles 1967, in oriens, xxiii–xxiv (1970) [publ. 1974], 542–4; s.d. goitein, a mediterranean society. the jewish societies of the arab world as portrayed in the documents of the cairo geniza, i, economic foundations, berkeley and los angeles and cambridge 1967, in olz, lxix/3–4 (1974), 168–9; p.m. holt, studies in the history of the near east, london 1973, in bsoas, xxx (1974), 223; ḥasan-i fasāʾī, fārs-nāma-yi nāṣirī, tr. h. busse, history of persia under qājār rule, new york and london 1972, in iq, xvii (1973) [publ. 1974], 102–4; h. gaube, arabosasanidische numismatik, handbuch der mittelasiatischen numismatik bd. ii, brunswick 1973, in jss, xix/1 (1974), 135–7; j.d. pearson and a. walsh (compilers), index islamicus, third supplement 1966–70, london 1972, in jss, xix/2 (1974), 319–20; sir hamilton gibb, the life of saladin from the works of ʿimād al-dīn and bahāʾ al-dīn, oxford 1973, in jss, xix/2 (1974), 320; thābit b. sinān et alii, taʾrīkh akhbār al-qarāmiṭa, ed. suhayl zakkār, beirut 1391/1971, in al-abḥāth, xxiv (1971) [publ. 1974], 148–9. 1975 87. a catalogue of accessions to the arabic manuscripts in the john rylands university library of manchester, with indices, manchester 1974 [publ. 1975], pp. 85. 88. “the ṭāhirids and ṣaffārids” and “the early ghaznavids”, ch. 3 and ch. 5 in r.n. frye (ed.), the cambridge history of iran. iv. from the arab invasion to the saljuqs, cambridge 1975, 90–135 and 162–97. 89. “recruitment, muster, and review in medieval islamic armies”, in v.j. parry and m.e. yapp (eds.), war, technology and society in the middle east, london 1975, 59–77. 90. “henry salt, consul in egypt 1816–27 and pioneer egyptologist”, bjrul, lvii (autumn 1974) [publ. 1975], 69–91. reprinted as ch. 4 in eastward ho!, item 340, 37–58. 90(a). “william lithgow of lanark’s travels in syria and palestine, 1611–1612”, jss, xx/2 (1975), 219–35. 91. ei2 vol. iv, arts. “kāfiristān”; “kākūyids”; “al-ḳalḳashandī”; “ḳandahār”; “ḳanghlı̊”; “kannanūr”; “kānpur”; “ḳarā bāgh”; “ḳarā khiṭāy”; “ḳarā-köl”. 92. reviews of h. gaube, ein arabischer palast in südsyrien, ḫirbet el-baiḍa, beirut 1974, in jss, xx/1 (1975), 130–1; b. lewis, race and color in islam, new york 1971, in jss, xx/1 (1975), 133; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, iva, ed. m. schloessinger and m.j. kister, jerusalem 1971, in in jss, xx/2 (1975), 270–1; d.k. kouymjian (ed.), near eastern numismatics, iconography, epigraphy and history. studies in honor of george c. miles, in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 189 beirut 1974, in jss, xx/2 (1975), 281–3; j. riley-smith, the feudal nobility and the kingdom of jerusalem, london 1973, in iq, xvii (1973) [publ. 1975], 185–7; h. gaube, die südpersische provinz arrağān/kūh gīlūyeh, vienna 1973, in iq, xvii (1973) [publ. 1975], 184–5; r.w. bulliet, the patricians of nishapur, a study in medieval islamic social history, cambridge, mass. and london 1972, in iq, xviii (1974) [publ. 1975], 47–8; b. lewis (ed. and tr.), islam, from the prophet muhammad to the capture of constantinople. i. politics and war. ii. religion and society, new york 1974, in iq, xviii (1974) [publ. 1975], 48–50; sir george robertson, the kafirs of the hindu-kush, repr. karachi 1974, in iq, xviii (1974) [publ. 1975], 50–1. 1976 93. the mediaeval islamic underworld, the banū sāsān in arabic society and literature, part 1. the banū sāsān in arabic life and lore, leiden 1976, pp. xiv + 1–179 + *11, part 2. the arabic jargon texts. the qaṣīda sāsāniyyas of abū dulaf and ṣafī d-dīn, leiden 1976, pp. vii + 181–361 (english), pp. 1–100 (arabic) + 4 pp. facsimiles. 93(a). “introduction”, in g.e. von grunebaum, muhammadan festivals, london and totowa, n.j. 1951, repr. 1976, iii–v. reprinted new york 1988. 94. “the historical background of islamic civilisation”, ch. 2 in r.m. savory (ed.), introduction to islamic civilisation, cambridge 1976, 15–31. 95. “armies of the prophet: strategy, tactics and weapons in islamic warfare”, ch. 8 in b. lewis (ed.), the world of islam. faith, people, culture, london and new york 1976, 201–24. 96. “the khwarazmian historical background to bīrūnī’s life”, in the commemoration volume of biruni international congress in tehran. b. english and french papers, tehran 1976, 11–27. 97. “the kūfichīs or qufṣ in persian history”, in iran, jbips, xiv (1976), 9–17. reprinted in item 104, art. viii. 98. “the prophet vindicated: a restoration treatise on islam and muḥammad”, religion, a journal of religion and religions, vi (1976), 1–12. reprinted as ch. 3 in eastward ho!, item 340, 23–36. 99. “the arabic manuscripts in chetham’s library, manchester”, jss, xxi/1–2 (1976), 99–108. 100. “rudyard kipling in india”, arbeitspapiere, betriebswirtschaftliches institut der friedrich-alexander universität erlangen-nürnberg, 1976, pp. 25. 101. ei2 vol. iv, arts. “ḳarluḳ”; “karrāmiyya”; “karūkh”; “al-ḳāshānī”; “kath” “ḳāwurd”; “ḳāwūs, banū”; “kay kāʾūs b. iskandar”; “kerč”. 102. reviews of j. prušek, dictionary of oriental literatures, 3 vols., london 1974, in jss, xxi/1–2 (1976), 205–6; j.d. pearson, a bibliography of pre-islamic persia, london 1975, in jss, xxi/1–2 (1976), 206–7; f. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schriftums, band v. mathematik bis ca. 430 h., leiden 1974, in jss, xxi/1–2 (1976), 214; f.e. peters, allah’s commonwealth, new york 1973, in jss, xxi/1–2 (1976), 228. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 190 1977 103. the later ghaznavids, splendour and decay. the dynasty in afghanistan and northern india 1040–1186, edinburgh and new york 1977, pp. vi + 196. reprinted munshiram manoharlal, delhi 1992. persian tr. ḥasan anūshih, tārīkh-i ghaznaviyān, 2 vols., tehran 1372/1993, repr. 1381/2002. 104. the medieval history of iran, afghanistan and central asia, variorum reprints, london 1977, pp. iv + 374. reprints of items 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 18, 24, 25, 26, 29, 33, 40, 41, 44, 46, 50, 52, 59, 73, 75, 77 and 97. 105. “orientalism and orientalists”, in d. grimwood-jones et alii (eds.), arabic islamic bibliography. the middle east library committee guide, hassocks, sussex 1977, 148–56. 106. “al-jabartī and the frankish archaeologists”, ijmes, viii/2 (1977), 229–36. reprinted as ch. 5 in eastward ho!, item 340, 59–68. 107. “jewish elements in the banū sāsān”, bior, xxxiii/5–6 (sept.–nov. 1976) [1977], 289–94. reprinted in item 135, art. vi. 108. “the tübingen atlas of the near east”, bull. bsmes, iv (1977), 115–16. 108(a). “preface”, in maulana muhammad ali, a manual of hadith, london 1977, v–viii. reprinted new york 1988. 109. ei2 vol. iv, arts. “khwāf”; “khaladj i. history”; “khalkhāl”. 110. reviews of m. mitchiner, the multiple dirhems of medieval afghanistan, sanderstead 1973, in jras, new ser., cix/1 (1977), 124–5; ch. pellat, ibn al-muqaffaʿ, mort vers 140/757, «conseiller» du calife, paris 1976, in jss, xxii/2 (1977), 233–4; f. sezgin, geschichte des islamischen schriftums, band ii. poesie bis ca. 430 h., leiden 1975, in jss, xxii/2 (1977), 234–5; t. burckhardt, art of islam: language and meaning, and a. parman, geometric concepts in islamic art, london 1976, in jss, xxii/2 (1977), 245–7; r. attal (ed.), a bibliography of the writings of professor shelomo dov goitein, jerusalem 1975, in jss, xxii/2 (1977), 247; e. ashtor, a social and economic history of the near east in the middle ages, london 1976, in ehr, xcii, no. 364 (1977), 638–9; w. behn, the kurds in iran, a selected and annotated bibliography, london and munich 1977, in bull. bsmes, iv (1977), 121–2; m.a. shaban, islamic history, a new interpretation. 2. a.d. 750–1055 (a.h. 132–448), cambridge 1976, in tls (21.7.77), 84. 1978 111. “william lithgow of lanark’s travels in north africa, 1615–16”, jss, xxiii/2 (1978) [= studies in honour of f.f. bruce], 199–215. 112. “al-ḫwārazmī on theology and sects: the chapter on kalām in the mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm”, beo, xxix (1977) [1978] [= mélanges offerts à henri laoust], 85–95. reprinted in item 135, art. vii. 113. ei2 vol. iv, arts. “khārān”; “khwārazm”; “khwārazm-shāhs”; “khāṣṣ oda”; “khaybar”; “khayma. iv. in central asia”; “khayrpūr”; “khāzin”; “al-khazradjī”. 114. reviews of j. sadan, le mobilier au proche orient médiéval, leiden 1976, in jss, xxiii/1 (1978), 141–2; m.w. dols, the black death in the middle east, princeton 1977, in mesa in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 191 bull., xii (1978), 41–2. 1979 115. “al-maqrīzī’s exposition of the formative period in islamic history and its cosmic significance: the kitāb an-nizāʿ wa ’t-takhāṣum”, in a.t. welch and p. cachia (eds.), islam: past influence and present challenge. in honour of william montgomery watt, edinburgh 1979, 93–104. reprinted in item 135, art. ix. 116. “the ‘protected people’ (christians and jews) in medieval egypt and syria”, bjrul, lxii/1 (autumn 1979), 11–36. reprinted in item 240, art. vii. 117. “the interaction of arabic and persian culture in the 10th and 11th centuries”, al-abḥāth, xxvii (1978–9) [1979], 59–75. reprinted in item 135, art. viii. 118. obituary: “professor j.a. boyle”, in iran, jbips, xvii (1979), i–ix. 119. ei2 vol. v, arts. “khērla”; “khoḳand”; “khōst”; “khudjand(a)”; “khudjistān”; “khuldābād”; “khulm”; “khurāsān”; “khuttalān”; “kilāt, kalāt, kelāt”; “kimäk”; “ḳimār”. 120. reviews of d. grimwood-jones, d. hopwood and j.d. pearson (eds.), arabic islamic bibliography, hassocks, sussex and highland, n.j. 1977, in jss, xxiv/1 (1979), 134; a.j. cameron, abû dharr al-ghifârî. an examination of his place in the hagiography of islam, london 1973, in jss, xxiv/1 (1979), 145–6; j.d. pearson (compiler), index islamicus, fourth supplement 1971–1975, london 1977, in jss, xxiv/2 (1979), 318; j. landau, abdul-hamid’s palestine, jerusalem 1979, in bsoas, xlii (1979), 591; “man’s religious quest: a review of open university materials, section on islam”, in religion, ix (1979), 132–5; g. lenczowski (ed.), iran under the pahlavis, stanford 1978, in international journal: canada’s journal of global policy analysis, xxxiv/3 (september 1979), 512–13; g. meiseles, reference literature to arabic studies, a bibliographical guide, tel aviv 1978, in bull. bsmes, vi (1979), 138–40. 1980 121. the persian gulf states. a general survey, edited by c.e. bosworth, r.m. burrell, k. mclachlan and r.m. savory, general editor a.j. cottrell, baltimore and london 1980, pp. xxxiv + 695. section by c.e. bosworth: “the nomenclature of the persian gulf”, xvii– xxxiv. 122. “the poetical citations in baihaqi’s taʾrīkh-i masʿūdī”, xx. deutschen orientalistentag . . . 1977 in erlangen. vorträge = suppl. iv to zdmg, wiesbaden 1980, 41–56. reprinted in item 240, art. xxi. 123. “the influence of arabic literature on english literature”, azure, no. 5 (spring 1980), 14–19. arabic tr., “taʾthīr al-adab al-ʿarabī fī ’l-adab al-inkilīzī”, al-maʿrifa, damascus, nos. 191–2 (february 1978), 199–215. 123(a). “preface”, in r. israeli, muslims in china. a study in cultural confrontation, london 1980, 1–2. 124. ei2 vol. v, arts. “kish”; “ḳı̊shlaḳ”; “ḳisma”; “ḳı̊z”; “ḳı̊zı̊l”; “ḳum”; “kōhāt”; “kōŕā or kōŕā djahānābād”; “körfüz”; “kötwāl”; “koyl, koil”; “ḳozan-oghulları̊”; “ḳubadhiyān”; in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 192 “ḳūčān”; “ḳufṣ”; “kūh-i bābā”; “ḳuhrūd”; “ḳul”; “ḳūla”; “kūlam”; “ḳuldja”; “kumīdjīs”; “ḳūmis”. supplement: “ʿabd al-raḥmān b. ḥassān”; “abu ’l-ʿamaythal”; “arghiyān”; “aʿyāṣ”; “bādgīr”; “bādhām, bādhān”; “al-badhdh”; “bahāʾ al-dawla wa-ḍiyāʾ al-milla, abū naṣr fīrūz”; “bānīdjūrids”; “bāriz, djabal”. 125. reviews of a.j. butler, the arab conquest of egypt and the last thirty years of the roman dominion, 2nd edn., oxford 1978, in jss, xxv/1 (1980), 126–7; qāsim al-sāmarrāʾī (ed.), al-thaʿālibī, laṭāʾif al-ẓurafāʾ, leiden 1978, in jss, xxv/1 (1980), 136–7; j. brugman and f. schröder, arabic studies in the netherlands, leiden 1979, in jss, xxv/2 (1980), 303–4; m. van berchem, opera minora, 2 vols., geneva 1978, in bsoas, xliii (1980), 139–40; j. richard, la papauté et les missions d’orient au moyen âge (xiii–xiv siècles), rome 1977, in ehr, xcv, no. 375 (april 1980), 410; f. rosenthal, gambling in islam, leiden 1975, in olz, lxxv/5 (1980), 468–9; j. lassner, the shaping of ʿabbasid rule, princeton 1980, in tls (19.9.80), 1042. 1981 126. al-maqrīzī’s “book of contention and strife concerning the relations between the banū umayya and the banū hāshim”, jss monograph no. 3, manchester n.d. [1981]. 127. “the terminology of the history of the arabs in the jāhiliyya, according to khwārazmī’s ‘keys of the sciences’”, in s. morag, i. ben-ami and n.a. stillman (eds.), studies in judaism and islam presented to shelomo dov goitein on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, jerusalem 1981, english vol., 27–43. reprinted in item 135, art. x. 128. “al-maqrīzī’s epistle ‘concerning what has come down to us about the banū umayya and the banū ’l-ʿabbās’”, in widād al-qāḍī (ed.), studia arabica et islamica. festschrift for iḥsān ʿabbās on his sixtieth birthday, beirut 1981, 39–45. reprinted in item 135, art. xi. 129. “the rulers of chaghāniyān in early islamic times”, iran, jbips, xix (1981), 1–20. reprinted in item 240, art. xx. 130. “a mediaeval islamic prototype of the fountain-pen?”, jss, xxvi/2 (1981), 229–34. reprinted in item 135, art. xii. 131. “some observations on jerusalem arabic inscriptions (ad levant xi (1979), 112–37)”, levant, xiii (1981), 266–7. 132. ei2 vol. v, arts. “ḳun”; “ḳunduz”; “al-ḳunfudha”; “ḳunghrāt”; “al-kurdj”; “ḳurḥ”; “ḳurra b. sharīk”; “kurram”. supplement: “bashkard, bashākard”; “biyār, al-biyār”; “buḳʿa”; “dabīr”; “dabūsiyya”; “dandānḳān”; “dhāt al-ṣawārī”; “dhikrīs”; “djādjarm”; “djalālābād”; “djand”. 133. art. “bettlerwesen. iv. islamische welt”, lexikon des mittelalters, band 2, lieferung i, munich 1981. 134. reviews of afaf lutfi al-sayyid marsot (ed.), society and the sexes in medieval islam, malibu 1979, in jras, new ser., cxiii/1 (1981), 77–8; b.g. bloomfield (ed.), middle east studies and libraries. a felicitation volume for professor j.d. pearson, london 1980, in jras, new ser., cxiii/2 (1981), 207; m.j.l. young, catalogue of oriental manuscripts, vii, leeds [1979–80], in jss, xxvi/1 (1981), 141; f. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 193 schriftums, band vi. astronomie bis ca. 430 h., leiden 1978, in jss, xxvi/1 (1981), 141–2; b. lewin, a vocabulatry of the hudailian poems, gothenburg 1978, in jss, xxvi/1 (1981), 147–8; j.s. trimingham, the influence of islam upon africa, 2nd edn., london, new york and beirut 1980, in jss, xxvi/1 (1981), 167; (with m.e.j. richardson) r.y. ebied and m.j.l. young (eds.), oriental studies presented to benedikt s.j. isserlin by friends and colleagues on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, 25 february 1976, leiden 1980, in jss, xxvi/2 (1981), 324–5; d. ayalon, the mamlūk military society. collected studies, london 1979, in jss, xxvi/2 (1981), 337; taha hussein, an egyptian childhood. the autobiography of taha hussein, tr. e.h. paxton, london and washington, d.c. 1981, in jss, xxvi/2 (1981), 340; m. al-ṭāhir al-jarrārī, majallat al-buḥūth al-taʾrīkhiyya (“journal for historical research”), tripoli, libya, ii/2 (july 1980), in jss, xxvi/2 (1981), 340; h. gaube, arabische inschriften aus syrien, beirut and wiesbaden 1978, in bsoas, xliv (1981), 369–70; e.m. sartain, jalāl al-dīn al-suyūṭī. i. biography and background. ii. “al-taḥadduth bi niʿmat allāh”, cambridge 1975, in olz, lxxvi/3 (1981), 266–8; d. metlizki, the matter of araby in mediaeval england, new haven and london 1977, in olz, lxxvi/6 (1981), 564–5; a.g. walls and amal abu ’l-hajj, arabic inscriptions in jerusalem, a handlist and maps, london 1980, in azure, no. 8 (1981), 43. 1982 135. medieval arabic culture and administration, variorum reprints, london 1982, pp. iii + 358. reprints of items 12, 14, 19, 43, 45, 65, 67, 68, 83, 107, 112, 115, 117, 127, 128 and 130. 136. “the concept of dhimma in early islam”, in b. braude and b. lewis (eds.), christians and jews in the ottoman empire, the functioning of a plural society. i. the central lands, new york and london 1982, 37–51. reprinted in item 240, art. vi. reprinted and updated in item 343. 137. “james elroy flecker’s vision of the east”, azure, no. 11 (1982), 10–14. 137(a). “preface”, in v. minorsky, medieval iran and its neighbours, variorum reprints, london 1982, i–ii. 138. ei2 vol. v, arts. “ḳusdār”; “kutāhiya”; ḳutayba b. muslim”; “ḳutham b. al-ʿabbās”; “kwat́t́a”; “lāhīdjān. 1. a town in the caspian coastal province of gīlān”; “laḳab”. supplement: “djirga”; “ekinči b. ḳočkar”; “eličpur”; “fakhr-i mudabbir”; “faḳīr of ipi”; “fasāʾī”; “fayd”; “firrīm”; “al-ghiṭrīf b. ʿaṭāʾ”; “gūmāl”; “al-ghazzī”; “gurčānī”; “hazāradjāt”; “hazāras”; “ḥudūd al-ʿālam”; “al-ḥusaynī”; “ibn al-balkhī”; “ibn dārust”; ‘ibn farīghūn”; “ibn nāẓir al-djaysh”; “ibn saʿdān”; “īlāḳ”. 139. eir vol. i, arts. “āb-e istāda”; “ābāda”; “abarqūh. i. history”; “abaskūn”; “abbasid caliphate in iran”; “ʿabd-al-ḥamid b. aḥmad b.ʿabd-al-ṣamad širāzi”; “ʿabd-al-malek b. nūḥ”; “ʿabd-al-malek b. nūḥ b. naṣr”; “ʿabd-al-rašīd, abū manṣūr”; “ʿabd-al-razzāq b. aḥmad b. ḥasan meymandi”; “ʿabdallāh b. ṭāher”; “ʿābedī”; “abhar”; “abharī”; “abīvard”. 140. dma vol. i, arts. “alamūt”; “alptigin”. 141. reviews of g.e. von grunebaum, themes in medieval arabic literature, ed. d.s. wilson, london 1981, in jras, new ser., cxiv/1 (1982), 55; r. peters (ed.), proceedings of the in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 194 ninth congress of the union européenne des arabisants et islamisants, amsterdam, 1st to 7th september 1978, leiden 1981, in jras, new ser., cxiv/2 (1982), 191; p.b. golden, khazar studies. an historico-philological enquiry into the origins of the khazars, budapest 1980, in bsoas, xlv (1982), 179; d. pipes, slave soldiers and islam. the genesis of a military system, new haven 1981, in ahr, lxxxvii/1 (april 1982), 508–9; occident et orient au xe siècle. actes du ixe congrès de la société des historiens médiévistes . . . (dijon, 2–4 juin 1978), paris 1979, in ehr, xcvii, no. 383 (april 1982), 401–2. 1983 142. “iran and the arabs before islam”, ch. 16 in e. yarshater (ed.), the cambridge history of iran. iii. the seleucid, parthian and sasanian periods, cambridge 1983, i, 593–612. 143. “the persian impact on arabic literature”, ch. 23 in a.f.l. beeston, t.m. johnstone, r.b. serjeant and g.r. smith (eds.), the cambridge history of arabic literature. arabic literature to the end of the umayyad period, cambridge 1983, 483–96. 144. “ğihād in afghanistan and muslim india”, in j.l. kraemer and i. alon (eds.), religion and government in the world of islam. proceedings of the colloquium held at tel aviv university 3–5 june 1979 (= ios, x (1980) [publ. 1983]), 149–57. 145. “william lithgow of lanark’s travels in greece and turkey, 1609–11”, bjrul, lxv/2 (spring 1983), 8–36. 146. ei2 vol. v, arts. “lamghānāt”; “lanbasar”; “las bēla”; “lashkar-i bāzār”; “lawḥ”; “linga”; liṣṣ”. 147. eir vol. i, arts. “abnāʾ”; “abū aḥmad b. abī bakr”; “abū ’l-ʿalāʾ ʿaṭāʾ”; “abū ʿalī aḥmad b. šādān”; “abū ʿ alī dāmghānī”; “abū bakr b. ṣāleḥ”; “abū esḥāq ebrāhīm”; “abu ’l-fatḥ yūsof”; “abu ’l-fazl tāj al-dīn”; “abu ’l-ḥasan esfarāʾinī”; “abu ’l-ḥasan kāteb”; “abū kālījār garšāsp i and ii”; “abū manṣūr farāmarz”; “abū naṣr aḥmad”; “abū naṣr fāmī”; “abū naṣr fārsī”; “abū ʿobayda maʿmar”; “abu ’l-qāsem ʿalī b. ḥasan”; “abū sahl kojanda”; “abū ṣāleḥ manṣūr b. esḥāq”; “ādāb al-ḥarb wa ’l-šajāʿa”; “adab al-kāteb”. 148. dma vol. iii, art. “commander of the faithful”. 149. arts. on islamic history and historical geography in the encyclopedia americana. partial listing includes: “hormuz”; “il-khans”; “isfahan”; “kaaba”; “kabul”; “kandahar”; “kara korum”; “karakhanids”; “karbalā’”; “kārūn river”; “kāshān”; “kashgar”; “kazvin”; “kerman” [province]; “kerman” [city]; “kermanshah” [province]; “kermanshah” [city]; “khālid ibn al-walīd”; “khurasan” [modern district]; “khurasan” [historical region]; “khuzistan”; “khwarizm”; “khwarizm-shahs”; “kindi, abu yusuf yaqub al-”; “laristan”; “tenth century. 2. the islamic world”; “thirteenth century. 2. the islamic world”; et alia. see also item 54 above. 150. reviews of k. seger, potrait of a palestinian village. the photographs of hilma granqvist, london 1981, in jss, xxviii/1 (1983), 207; c.h. beckingham, between islam and christendom, leiden 1983, in jss, xxviii/2 (1983), 381–2; r. israeli (ed.), the public diary of president sadat, 3 parts, leiden 1979, in jss, xxviii/2 (1983), 388–9; j.d. pearson (compiler), index islamicus 1976–80, 2 vols., london 1983, in jss, xxviii/2 (1983), 389; chr. décobert and d. gril, linteaux à épigraphes à l’oasis de dakhla (= suppl. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 195 aux annales islamologiques, cahier no. 1), cairo 1981, in jras, new ser., cxv/1 (1983), 103; b. lewis, the muslim discovery of europe, london 1982, in jras, new ser., cxv/2 (1983), 303–4; g. makdisi, the rise of colleges: institutions of learning in islam and the west, edinburgh 1981, in jras, new ser., cxv/2 (1983), 304–5; h. kennedy, the abbasid caliphate, a political history, london and totowa, n.j. 1981, in ehr, xcviii, no. 388 (july 1983), 652–3; h.h. roemer and a. noth (eds.), studien zur geschichte und kultur des vorderen orients. festschrift für bertold spuler zum siebzigsten geburtstag, leiden 1981, in mesa bull., xvii/1 (july 1983), 68; s.j. staffa, conquest and fusion. the social evolution of cairo a.d. 642–1850, leiden 1977, in olz, lxxviii/1 (1983), 58–9; h.r. idris and k. röhrborn, regierung und verwaltung des vorderen orients in islamischer zeit (= hdbuch. der orientalistik, abt. 1, bd. 6, abschn. 5, teil 1), in olz, lxxviii/5 (1983), 476. 1984 151. qajar iran, political, social and cultural change 1800–1925. studies presented to professor l.p. elwell-sutton, edited by edmund bosworth and carole hillenbrand, edinburgh university press, edinburg 1984, pp. xxv + 414. reprinted mazda publishers, costa mesa, calif. 1992. section by c.e. bosworth: “foreword”, xiii–xvi. 152. w. barthold, an historical geography of iran, translated by svat soucek, edited by c.e. bosworth, modern classics in near eastern studies, princeton university press, princeton 1984, pp. xv + 285. section by c.e. bosworth: “editor’s introduction”, ix–xv. 153. “madyan shuʿayb in pre-islamic and early islamic lore and history”, jss, xxix/1 (1984), 53–64. reprinted in item 240, art. i. 154. “an early persian ṣūfī: shaykh abū saʿīd of mayhanah”, in r.m. savory and d.a. agius (eds.), logos islamikos. studia islamica in honorem georgii michaelis wickens, pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, toronto 1984, 79–96. reprinted in item 240, art. xxiii. 155. “the coming of islam to afghanistan”, in y. friedmann (ed.), islam in asia. i. south asia, jerusalem 1984, 1–22. reprinted in item 240, art. xvi. 156. “les études islamiques et historiques en grande-bretagne, aux etats-unis et au canada”, ct, xxx, nos. 121–2 (1982) [publ. 1984], 235–50. 157. the penguin dictionary of religions, ed. j.r. hinnells, allen lane, london 1984, arts. on islam: “abraham (in islam)”; “africa, islam in”; “ahmadis”; “akhira”; “akhlaq”; “al-azhar”; “ʿali, ʿalids”; “allah”; “anti-christ (in islam)”; “ʿaqida”; “art (in islam)”; “ayatullah”; “babis”; “bahaʾis”; “bismillah, basmala”; “black muslims”; “calendar (in islam)”; “caliph, caliphate”; “china and central asia, islam in”; “dhanb”; “dhimmis”; “din”; “druzes (druses)”; “falsafa”; “fatalism (in islam)”; “fatiha”; “fiqh”; “firqa”; “friday (in islam)”; “hadith”; “hajj”; “hanif”; “haramain”; “hilal”; “ʿid”; “ijmaʿ”; “imam”; “iman”; “insan”; “islam”; “islamic dynasties”; “islamic modernism”; “ismaʿilis”; “jahiliyya”; “jerusalem (in islam)”; “jihad”; “jinn”; “kalam”; “khalq”; “kharijites”; “madrasa”; “mahdi”; “malaʾika”; “marʾa”; “marriage and divorce (in islam)”; “mashhad”; “mosque”; “muhammad”; “music (in islam)”; “nabi”; “pan-islamism”; “passion play (in islam)”; “pillars of islam”; “qadi”; “qiyama”; “qurʾan (koran)”; “ruh”; “salat”; “sanusis”; in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 196 “satan (in islam)”; “saum”; “shahada”; “shaikh”; “shariʿa”; “shiʿism”; “slavery (in islam)”; “south asia, islam in”; “south-east asia, islam in”; “sufi institutions”; “sufi orders”; “sufism, sufis”; “sunna”; “tahara”; “ulema, ʿulamaʾ”; “veiling (in islam)”; “wahhabis”; “wali”; “waqf”; “west, islam in the”; “wine-drinking (in islam)”. 158. ei2 vol. v, arts. “mā warāʾ al-nahr. 2. hisotry”; “maʿalthāya”. 159. eir vol. i, arts. “afšīn”; “aḥmad b. asad”; “aḥmad b. fażlān”; “aḥmad b. moḥammad b. kalaf”; “aḥmad b. moḥammad b. ṭāher”; “aḥmad b. neẓām al-molk”; “aḥmad b. qodām”; “aḥmad b. sahl b. hāšem”; “aḥmad inaltigin”; “aḥmad kojestānī”; “aḥmad šīrāzī”; “aḥrār”; “aḥsan al-taqāsem”; “ahvāz. i. history”; “ʿajāʾeb al-maklūqāt. i. arabic works”; “ʿajam”; “akbār al-dawla al-saljūqīya”; “al-akbār al-ṭewāl”; “aklāt. i. history”; “aksīkat”; “āl-e afrāsīāb”; “āl-e afrīḡ”; “āl-e borhān”; “āl-e elyās”; “āl-e farīḡūn”; “āl-e maʾmūn”; “āl-e moḥtāj”; “ʿalāʾ al-dawla ʿ alī”; “ʿalāʾ al-dawla moḥammad”; “ʿalāʾ al-dīn ʿalī”; “ʿalāʾ al-dīn atsïz”; “ʿalāʾ al-dīn ḥosayn jahānsūz”; “ʿalāʾ al-dīn moḥammad”. 160. review of ʿabd al-raḥmān m. ʿabd al-tawwāb, stèles islamiques de la nécropole d’assouan, ii (nos. 151–300), cairo 1982, in jras, new ser., cxvi/1 (1984), 124–5. 1985 161. ei2 vol. v, arts. “maʾāthir al-umarāʾ”; “mābeyn”; “madhḥidj”; “maḍīra”; “madjd al-dawla”; “madyan shuʿayb”; “māhīm”; “mahisur. i. geography and history”. 162. eir vol. i, arts. “ʿalī b. farāmarz”; “ʿalī b. ḥarb”; “ʿalī b. maʾmūn”; “ʿalī b. masʿūd”; “ʿalī b. ʿobaydallāh”; “ʿalī qarīb”; “ʿalītigin”; “alptigin”; “altuntaš”’ “ʿāmel”; “ʿamīd, abu ʿabdallāh”; “amīr”; “amīr-i ḥaras”; “amīr al-omarāʾ. i. the early period”; “amīrak bayhaqī”; “āmol. i. history”; “āmol (āmūya)”; “ʿamr b. layt”; “ʿamr b. yaʿqūb”. 163. dma vol. v, arts. “games, islamic”; “ghāzān (khan), mahmūd”; “ghaznavids”; “ghūrids”. vol. vi, art. “islamic administration”. 164. reviews of b.b. shahriyār, the book of wonders of india, mainland, sea and islands, ed. and tr. g.s.p. freeman-grenville, london 1981, in jss, xxx/2 (1985), 332; d.o. morgan (ed.), medieval historical writing in the christian and islamic worlds, london 1982, in jras, new ser., cxvii/1 (1985), 77–8; p.m. holt (tr.), the memoirs of a syrian prince. abu ’l-fidāʾ, sultan of ḥamāh (672–732/1273–1331), wiesbaden 1983, in jras, new ser., cxvii/2 (1985), 193–4; b.d. metcalf (ed.), moral conduct and authority. the place of adab in south asian islam, berkeley, los angeles and london 1984, in asian affairs, xvi (1985), 319–20. 1986 165. “the land of palestine in the late ottoman period as mirrored in western guide books”, bull. bsmes, xiii/1 (1986), 36–44. reprinted as ch. 9 in eastward ho!, item 340, 109–24. 166. “islamic history”, in p. auchterlonie (ed.), middle east libraries committee. middle east and islam. a bibliographical introduction, supplement 1977–1983, zug 1986, 29–33. 167. ei2 vol. vi, arts. “maḥmūd b. muḥammad b. malik-shāh”; “maḥmūd b. sebüktigin”; “maḥmūd yalawač”; “māhūr” (with j. burton-page); “maḳān b. kākī”. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 197 168. eir vol. ii, arts. “anārak”; “anbār”; “ʿanbarī”; “ʿanbarīān”; “andejān”; “anūšervān b. kāled”; “anūšervān b. manūčehr”; “anūštigin garčaʾī”; “ʿaqdā”; “ʿarab. i. arabs and iran in the pre-islamic period”; “arāk. i. history”; “araxes river. ii. historical perspective”; “ardabīl. i. history of ardabīl”; “ardakān-e fārs”; “ardakān-e yazd”; “ardašīr-e korra”; “ʿāreż”; “army. ii. islamic, to the mongol period”; “arrān”. 169. dma vol. vii, art. “kurds”. 170. reviews of yūsuf rāġib, marchands d’étoffes du fayyoum au iiie à ixe siècle d’après leur archives (actes et lettres). i. les actes des banū ʿabd al-muʾmin, cairo 1982, in olz, lxxxi/5 (1986), 484–5; m. strohmeier, seldschukische geschichte und türkische geschichtswissenschaft. die seldschuken im urteil moderner türkischer historiker, berlin 1984, in mesa bull., xx (1986), 84–5. 1987 171. the history of al-ṭabarī. an annotated translation. vol. xxxii. the reunification of the ʿabbāsid caliphate. the caliphate of al-maʾmūn a.d. 812–833/a.h. 198–213, state university of new york press, albany 1987, pp. xvii + 281. 172. “introduction”, in e.w. lane, arabian society in the middle ages. studies from the thousand and one nights, repr. curzon press, london, and humanities press, totowa n.j. 1987, v–vii. 173. “introduction”, in r.a. nicholson, translations of eastern poetry and prose, repr. curzon press, london, and humanities press, totowa n.j. 1987, vii–ix. 174. “james elroy flecker: poet, diplomat, orientalist”, bjrul, lxix/2 (spring 1987), 359–78. reprinted as ch. 14 in eastward ho!, item 340, 221–43. 175. “the byzantine defence system in asia minor and the first arab incursions”, in m.a. bakhit (ed.), proceedings of the second symposium on the history of bilād al-shām during the early islamic period up to 40 a.h./660 a.d. the fourth international conference on the history of bilād al-shām (english and french papers), i, amman 1987, 116–24. reprinted in item 240, art. xi. 176. ei2 vol. vi, arts. “makka. 2. from the ʿabbāsid to the modern period” (with a.j. wensinck); “makrān”; “al-malik al-ʿazīz”; “al-malik al-raḥīm”; “malik-shāh”; “maʾmūn b. muḥammad”. 177. eir vol. ii, arts. “ʿarż, dīvān-e”; “arzenjān”; “asad b. sāmānkodā”; “asadābād”; “ašʿarī”; “asāwera”; “asb. iv. in afghanistan”; “asfār b. šīrūya”; “asfezār”; “asfījāb”; “ʿaskar mokram”; “astarābād. i. history”; “aštīān”; “ātār al-belād”. vol. iii, arts. “atrak”; “atsïz ḡarčaʾī”; “āva”. 178. reviews of shaika haya ali al khalifa and m. rice (eds.), bahrain through the ages: the archaeology, london and new york 1986, in archaeology today (march 1987), 46; ʿafīf ʿabd al-raḥmān, muʿjam al-shuʿarāʾ al-jāhiliyyīn wa ’l-mukhaḍramīn, [beirut] 1403/1983, and muʿjam al-amthāl al-ʿarabiyya al-qadīma, [beirut], 1405/1985, in jss, xxxii/1 (1987), 219–20; a. hebbo, die fremdwörter in der arabischer prophetenbiographie des ibn hischam (gest. 218/834), frankfurt 1984, in jss, xxxii/1 (1987), 220–1; f. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schriftums, band ix. grammatik, bis ca. 430 h., leiden 1984, in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 198 in jss, xxxii/2 (1987), 384–5; p. clark, marmaduke pickthall, british muslim, london 1986, and m. pickthall, saïd the fisherman, in jss, xxxii/2 (1987), 395–6. 1988 179. “the arabic manuscripts”, in m. gibson and s.m. wright (eds.), joseph mayer of liverpool, 1803–1886, society of antiquaries of london, occasional papers (new series), xi, london 1988, 162–4. 180. ei2 vol. vi, arts. “mangrōl”; “mānī b. fāttik”; “manōhar”; “marāfiḳ”; “marand” (with v. minorsky). 181. eir vol. iii, arts. “āzādbeh b. bānegān”; “āzādvār”; “azerbaijan. iv. islamic history to 1941”; “baban”; “bādḡīs”; “bāfq”; “bahrāmšāh”; “bājarrān”; “bākarz”; “balādorī”; “balʿamī, abu’l-fażl moḥammad”; “balāsagān. ii. in islamic times”; “balāsāḡūn. ii. in the islamic period”; “balāsānī”; “balk. ii. history from the arab conquest to the mongols”; “banākat”; “banū sāsān”; “barda and bardadārī. iii. in the islamic period up to the mongol invasion. v. military slavery in islamic iran”; “bardaʿa”. 182. dma vol. x, art. “saffārids”. vol. xi, arts. “sebüktigin”; “seljuks of rūm”; “tāhir ibn al-husain”; “tāhirids”. 183. reviews of ʿabd al-raḥmān m. ʿabd al-tawwāb, stèles islamiques de la nécropole d’assouan, iii (nos. 301–450), cairo 1986, in jras, new ser., cxx/1 (1988), 170–1; j.j. witkam (ed.), manuscripts of the middle east. a journal devoted to the study of handwritten materials of the middle east, i, leiden 1986, in jss, xxxiii/2 (1988), 314–17; widād al-qāḍī, bishr b. abi ’l-kubār al-balawī, numūdhaj min al-nathr al-fannī al-mubakkir fi ’l-yaman, beirut 1405/1985, in jss, xxxiii/2 (1988), 318–19; m.h. burgoyne, with d.s. richards, mamluk jerusalem. an architectural study, london 1986, in jss, xxxiii/2 (1988), 349–51; m.d. yusuf, economic survey of syria during the tenth and eleventh centuries, berlin 1985, in olz, lxxxiii/6 (1988), 698–9; g.r. hawting, the first dynasty of islam. the umayyad caliphate 661–750, london 1986, in bull. bsmes, xiv (1988), 195–6; k.n. chaudhuri, trade and civilisation in the indian ocean. an economic history from the rise of islam to 1750, cambridge 1985, in bull. bsmes, xiv (1988), 197–8. 1989 184. bahāʾ al-dīn ʿamilī and his literary anthologies, jss monograph no. 10, manchester 1989, pp. ix + 128. 185. the history of al-ṭabarī. an annotated translation. vol. xxx. the ʿabbāsid caliphate in equilibrium. the caliphates of mūsā al-hādī and hārūn al-rashīd a.d. 785–809/a.h. 169–193, state university of new york press, albany 1989, pp. xxvii + 365. 185(a). the islamic world, from classical to modern times. essays in honor of bernard lewis, edited by c.e. bosworth, c. issawi, r. savory and a.l. udovitch, princeton 1989, p. xxv + 915. section by c.e. bosworth: see item 188 below. 186. “a note on taʿarrub in early islam”, jss, xxxiv/2 (1989) (published to celebrate the seventieth birthday of edward ullendorff), 355–62. reprinted in item 240, art. ii. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 199 187. “al-khwārazmī on the secular and religious titles of the byzantines and christians”, ct, xxxv/139–40 (1987) [1989] (numéro spécial. mélanges charles pellat), 28–36. reprinted in item 240, art. x. 188. “a janissary poet of sixteenth-century damascus: māmayya al-rūmī”, in c.e. bosworth, c. issawi, r. savory and a.l. udovitch (eds.), the islamic world, from classical to modern times. essays in honor of bernard lewis, princeton 1989, 451–66. 189. “the intrepid victorian lady in persia: mrs. isabella bishop’s travels in luristan and kurdistan, 1890”, iran, jbips, xxviii (1989), 87–101. reprinted as ch. 11 in eastward ho!, item 340, 145–77. 190. “the sword of islam threatens the pen of moslem critics”, newsday, melville, long island, n.y. (27.2.89). 191. obituary: “martin hinds, 1941–1988”, in bull. bsmes, xvi (1989), 118–20. 192. ei2, vol. vi, arts. “mardāwīdj b. ziyār”; “mārdīn. 2. the ottoman and modern periods” (with v. minorsky); “marghīnān”; “marḥalla”; “marw al-rūdh”; “marw al-shāhidjān” (with a.yu. yakubovskii); “marwān i b. al-ḥākam”; “marwānids”; “al-marwazī, al-sukkarī”; “al-marwazī, sharaf al-zamān ṭāhir”; “mashhad”; “al-masīḥ” (with a.j. wensinck); “maʾṣir”; “masʿūd b. maḥmūd”; “masʿūd b. muḥammad b. malik-shah”; “masʿūd beg”; “mawdūd b. masʿūd”. 193. eir vol. iii, arts. “barīd”; “barkīāroq”; “barskān”; “bayhaq”; “bayhaqī, ebrāhīm b. moḥammad”; “baylaqān”; “baytuz”; “bayżā”; “begging. i. in the early centuries of the islamic period”; “begtoḡdï”; “begtuzun”; “bīār”; “bilgetigin”; “bird, isabella l.”. vol. iv, “bīrūnī, abū rayḥān. i. life”; “bīsotūn, abū manṣūr”; “boḡrā khan”; “bojnūrd. ii. history”; “böri”; “bū ḥalīm šaybānī”; “bukhara. ii. from the arab invasions to the mongols”. 194. dma, vol. xii, arts. “transoxania”; “yaʿqūb ibn laith”. 195. reviews of w. eilers, iranische ortsnamenstudien, vienna 1987, in jras, new ser., cxxi/1 (1989), 153–4; w.d. kubiak, al-fustat. its foundation and early development, cairo 1987, in bull. bsmes, xvi (1989), 57; u. haarmann (ed.), geschichter der arabischen welt, munich 1987, in bull. bsmes, xvi (1989), 87; e. rotter, abendland und sarazener: des okzidentale araberbild in seine enstehung im frühmittelalter, berlin and new york 1986, in bull. bsmes, xvi (1989), 87; v. christides, the conquest of crete by the arabs (ca. 824), athens 1984, in olz, lxxxiv/5 (1989), 568–70. 1990 196. “al-khwārazmī on various faiths and sects, chiefly iranian”, in textes et mémoires. vol. xvi. iranica varia. papers in honor of professor ehsan yarshater, leiden 1990, 10–19. reprinted in item 240, art. xviii. 197. ei2 vol. vi, arts. “al-mawṣil. 1. history up to 1900” (with e. honigmann); “mawsim” (with a.j. wensinck); “maybud”; “al-maybudī”; “mayhana”; “maymana”; “maymandī” (with m. nāẓim); “maymūn-diz”; “māzandarān” (with r. vasmer); “mazār-i sharīf”; “mazyad, banū”; “merzifūn” (with f. babinger). vol. vii, arts. “mihrān”; “mīkālīs”; “mikhlāf”; “milla” (with f. buhl); “mīr djumla”; “mīr ḳāsim ʿalī”; “al-mirbāṭ”. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 200 198. eir vol. iv, arts. “čāč”; “čaḡānīān”; “čaḡānrūd”; “čaḡrī beg b. dāwūd”; “capital cities. ii. in islamic times”. vol. v, art. “čašnīgīr”. 199. reviews of ihsān ʿabbās, shadharāt min kutub mafqūda fi ’l-taʾrīkh, beirut 1408/1988, in jss, xxxv/1 (1990), 164–6; j.j. witkam (ed.), manuscripts of the middle east . . ., ii, leiden 1987, in jss, xxxv/2 (1990), 375–6; w.h. behn (compiler), index islamicus 1665– 1905. a bibliography of articles on islamic subjects in periodicals and other collective publications, millersville, pa. 1988, in jss, xxxv/2 (1990), 378–9; a. photopoulos (ed.), journal of oriental and african studies, vol. i, athens 1989, in bull. bsmes, xvii (1990), 62; d.n. maclean, religion and society in arab sind, leiden 1989, in bull. bsmes, xvii (1990), 62–3. 1991 200. the history of al-ṭabarī. an annotated translation. vol. xxxiii. storm and stress along the northern frontiers of the ʿabbāsid caliphate, state university of new york press, albany 1991, pp. xxi + 239. 201. a commentary on the qurʾān . . . prepared by richard bell. vol. 1. surahs i–xxiv. vol. 2. surahs xxv–cxiv, edited by c.e. bosworth and m.e.j. richardson, 2 vols., jss monograph no. 14, manchester 1991, pp. xxii + 608, 603. 202. “administrative literature”, ch. 10 in m.j.l. young, j.d. latham and r.b. serjeant (eds.), the cambridge history of arabic literature. religion, learning and science in the ʿ abbāsid period, cambridge 1990 [publ. 1991], 155–67. 203. “ghars al-niʿma [b.] hilāl al-ṣābiʾ’s kitāb al-hafawāt al-nādira and būyid history”, in a. jones (ed.), arabicus felix, luminosus britannicus. essays in honour of a.f.l. beeston on his eightieth birthday, reading 1991, 129–41. reprinted in item 240, art. viii. 204. “farrukhī’s elegy on maḥmūd of ghazna”, iran, jbips, xxix (1991), 43–9. reprinted in item 240, art. xxii. 205. “some remarks on the terminology of irrigation practices and hydraulic construction in the eastern arab and iranian worlds in the third–fifth centuries a.h.”, jis, ii/1 (1991), 78–85. reprinted in item 240, art. iii. 206. who’s who of world religions, ed. j.r. hinnells, london 1991, repr. london 1996, arts. “abū bakr”; “ʿāʾisha”; “atatürk, mustafa kemal”; “al-bīrūnī, abū rayḥān”; “ibn isḥāq”; “ibn khaldūn”; “ibn saʿd”; “ibn ṭufayl”; “al-jāḥiẓ, abū ʿuthmān ʿamr”; “khadīja”; “al-suyūṭī, jalāl al-dīn”; “ʿumar ibn al-khaṭṭāb”; “ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān”. 207. obituary: “joan allgrove 1928–1991”, in iran, jbips, xxix (1991), v. 208. ei2 vol. vii, arts. “misāḥa. 1. in the central islamic lands”; “miskīn” (with f. buhl); “miṣr. a. the eponym of egypt, b. the early islamic camps developing out of the armed camps and the metropolises of the conquered provinces”; “mīthāḳ”; “miyāna”; “miẓalla. 1. in the ʿabbāsid and fāṭimid caliphates”; “al-mizza”; “mogholistān”; “moghols”; “mohmand” (with c.c. davies); “al-muhallabī” (with k.v. zetterstéen); “muʿammā”; “muʿāwiya ii”; “muʾayyid al-dawla”; “mudawwara”; “mudjāhid. 2. in muslim indian usage”; “mughals. 5. commerce and european trade connections with mughal india” (with w.h. moreland); “al-muhallabī, abū muḥammad al-ḥasan” (with k.v. zetterstéen); “muḥammad b. ʿabd in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 201 allāh b. ṭāhir” (with k.v. zetterstéen); “muḥammad b. hindū-shāh”; “muḥammad b. maḥmūd b. muḥammad b. malik-shāh”; “muḥammad b. maḥmūd b. sebüktigin”; “muḥammad b. malik-shāh”; “muḥammad b. waṣīf”; “muḥammad bakhtiyār khaldjī”; “muḥammad bāḳir”; “muḥammad farīd bey”; “muḥammad shāh b. djahān-shāh”; “al-muḥillūn”; “al-muhtadī” (k.v. zetterstéen); “muḥtādjids”; “mukārī”; “muḳāsama. i. in the caliphate”; “muḳāṭaʿa. i. in the mediaeval caliphate”. 209. eir vol. v, arts. “central asia. iv. in the islamic period up to the mongols”; “češt”. 210. reviews of s.a. al-durūbī (ed.), sharḥ maqāmāt jalāl al-dīn al-suyūṭī, beirut 1409/1989, in jss, xxxvi/1 (1991), 185–6; a. schimmel, islamic names, edinburgh 1989, in jss, xxxvi/2 (1991), 364–5; s.s. alvi (tr.), advice on the art of governance: mauʿizahjahāngīrī of muhammad bāqir najm-i sānī, an indo-muslim mirror for princes, in bull. bsmes, xvii (1990) [1991], 222–3; y.m. choueiri, arab history and the nation state. a study in modern arab historiography 1820–1980, london 1989, in bull. bsmes, xviii (1991), 110–11; p. lunde and c. stone (ed. and tr.), the meadows of gold: the abbasids, london and new york 1989, in bull. bsmes, xviii (1991), 139–40; r. eisener, zwischen faktum und fiktion. eine studie zum umayyadenkalifen sulaimān b. ʿabdalmalik und seinem bild in der quellen, wiesbaden 1987, in olz, lxxxv/4 (1990) [publ. 1991], 446–8; g.c. kozlowski, muslim endowments and society in british india, cambridge 1985, in isl., lxviii (1991), 154–6; i. shahîd, byzantium and the arabs in the fifth century, dumbarton oaks, washington, d.c. 1989, in ahr, xcvi/4 (october 1991), 1179–80. 1992 211. “the city of tarsus and the arab-byzantine frontier in early and middle ʿ abbāsid times”, oriens, xxxiii (1992), 268–86. reprinted in item 240, art. xiv. 212. “byzantium and the syrian frontier in the early abbasid period”, in bilād al-shām during the abbasid period . . . proceedings of the fifth international conference on the history of bilād al-shām . . . 1410/1990, english and french section, ed. m.a. bakhit and r. schick, amman 1412/1991 [1992], 54–62. reprinted in item 240, art. xii. 213. “the early islamic period of iranian history: an overview”, arab journal for the humanities, kuwait vol. xxxix, 10th year (1992), 386–400. 214. “greeks and arabs: clash and concord between two world civilisations”, in euro-arab understanding and cultural exchange, euro-arab seminar organised by the secretarygeneral of the council of europe, strasbourg, 14–15 november 1991. contributions [strasbourg 1992], 63–9. 215. ei2 vol. vii, arts. “mukhattam”; “al-muḳtadir” (with k.v. zetterstéen); “al-muktafī” (with k.v. zetterstéen); “munādī”; “munādjāt”; “mungīr”; “muʾnis dede derwīsh”; “muʾnis al-faḥl”; “munshī”; “munṣif”; “al-muntaṣir”; “murādābād” (with j. allen); “murghāb”; “murīd”; “al-mūriyānī”; “murshid”; “al-muṣʿabī”; “muṣādara. 2. in the administrative terminology of the mediaeval islamic caliphate”; “musāwāt”; “musawwida”; “mūsh” (with j.h. kramers); “al-mushaḳḳar”; “mushīr al-dawla”; “mushrif. 1. in the arab and persian lands”; “muṣṭafa pasha, bayraḳdār” (with j.h. kramers); “al-mustaʿīn” (with k.v. zetterstéen); “al-mustakfī”; “mustakhridj”; “mustawfī” (with r. levy); “müstethnā in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 202 eyāletler”; “al-muʿtaṣim bi ’llāh”; “mutaṭawwiʿa”; “al-muʿtazz bi ’llāh”; “al-muṭīʿ li ’llāh”; “al-muttaḳī li ’llāh”; “muwāḍaʿa”; “al-muwaḳḳar”; “muẓaffarpur”; “nābulus” (with f. buhl); “al-nadjaf” (with e. honigmann); “nadjīb al-dawla”; “nadjībābād”; “nāgawr” (with j. burton-page); “nahr. 1. in the middle east”; “nāʾīn”; “nakhčiwān” (with v. minorsky); “naḳīb. 1. in early islamic history”; “nangrahār”; “narāḳ”; “narmāshīr”; “narshakhī”; “nasā”; “nashīṭ”; “naṣībīn” (with e. honigmann); “naṣīḥat al-mulūk”; “al-nāṣira” (with f. buhl); “naṣr b. aḥmad b. ismāʿīl”; “naṣr b. muzāḥim”; “naṣr b. sayyār”; “naṣr b. shabath”; “naṭanz”; “nawbandadjān”; “nawrūz. 1. in the islamic heartlands” (with r. levy); “nawwāb”; “nayrīz”. 216. eir vol. v, arts. “chorasmia. ii. in islamic times”; “codes”. 217. reviews of p.a. andrews (ed.), ethnic groups in the republic of turkey, beihefte zum tübinger atlas des vorderen orients, reihe b: geisteswissenschaften, nr. 60, wiesbaden 1989, in jras, 3rd ser., ii (1992), 79–80; d. sinor (ed.), the cambridge history of early inner asia, cambridge 1990, in jras, 3rd ser., ii (1992), 123–4; l. fernandes, the evolution of a sufi institution in mamluk egypt. the khankah, berlin 1988, in olz, lxxxvi/5 (1991), 534–5; k.n. chaudhuri, asia before europe. economy and civilisation of the indian ocean from the rise of islam to 1750, cambridge 1990, in bsoas, lv (1992), 345–6. 1993 218. “byzantium and the arabs: war and peace between two world civilisations”, joas, iii–iv (1991–2) [1993], 1–23. reprinted in item 240, art. xiii. 219. “abū ʿamr ʿuthmān al-ṭarsūsī’s siyar al-thughūr and the last years of arab rule in tarsus (fourth/tenth century)”, ga, v (1993) (= fourth international congress on graeco-oriental and graeco-african studies), 183–95. reprinted in item 240, art. xv. 220. “bahāʾ al-dīn ʿāmilī in the two worlds of the ottomans and safavids”, in convegno sul thema la shiʿa nell’ impero ottomano (roma, 15 aprile 1991), accad. nazionale dei lincei, fondazione leone caetani, rome 1993, 85–105. 221. “the hon. george nathaniel curzon’s travels in russian central asia and persia”, iran, jbips, xxxi (1993), 127–36. reprinted as ch. 13 in eastward ho!, item 340, 197–219. 222. (with gert rispling) “an ʿayyār coin from sīstān”, jras, 3rd ser., iii/2 (1993), 215–17. reprinted in item 240, art. xvii. 223. ei2 vol. viii, arts. “nicobars”; “nihāwandī”; “nīshāpūr” (with e. honigmann); “nīshāpūrī”; “nithār. (a.)”; “nīzak, ṭarkhān”; “niẓām”; “niẓām al-mulk” (with h. bowen); “niẓām al-mulk čīn kilič khān”; “niẓām-i djedīd” (with f. babinger); “niẓāmiyya”; “nūba. 2. history. (b) from the ayyūbid period to the 16th century” (with s. hillelson); “nūḥ (i) b. naṣr b. aḥmad”; “nūḥ (ii) b. manṣūr b. nūḥ”; “nūn. 2. in turkish”; “nūr al-dīn arslān shāh”; “al-nūsharī”; “nuṣratābād”; “al-nuwayrī, muḥammad b. al-ḳāsim”; “ob”; “oghul” (with f. babinger); “ordu. 1. in early turkish and then islamic usage”; “ordūbād”; “orkhon”; “orta”; “ʿot̲h̲mānli̊. i. political and dynastic history. 1. general survey and chronology of the dynasty; iv. religious life”; “ötüken”; “özbeg b. muḥammad pahlawān”; “özkend”; “pāʾ” (with r. levy); “pādishāh” (with f. babinger); “pahlawān”; “palānpūr”; “pamirs”; “pandjhīr”; “pāndúʾa” (with c.c. davies); “parendā”; in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 203 “pānīpat”; “parwīz, khusraw (ii)”; “paṭrīk”; “payās”; “payghū”; “penče”; “pendjik”; “peshāwar” (with c.c. davies); “philby, h.st.j.”; “pickthall, m.m.”; “pīr. 1. in the persian and turkish worlds”; “pīrī-zāde”; “pīshdādids”; “pishpek”; “posta. 1.”; “pūst-neshīn”; “rādjā ganesh”; “radjʿiyya”; “rādjmahāl”. 224. eir vol. vi, art. “courts and courtiers. iii. in the islamic period to the mongol conquest”. 225. reviews of m. hinds, an early islamic family from oman. al-ʿawtabī’s account of the muhallabids, manchester 1991, in joas, iii–iv (1991–2) [1993], 258; r.l. canfield (ed.), turko-persia in historical perspective, cambridge 1991, in jis, i/4 (1993), 97–9; r.e. dunn, the adventures of ibn battuta, a muslim traveller of the fourteenth century, berkeley, los angeles and london 1986, in jis, i/4 (1993), 109–10; ʿaḍud al-dīn ʿabd al-raḥmān al-ījī, risālat adab al-baʿth wa ’l-munāẓara, ed. mūʾil yūsuf ʿizz al-dīn, riyāḍ 1412/1991, in al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā, bull. of middle east medievalists, v/1 (1993), 21; r.b. serjeant, customary and sharīʿah law in arabian society, variorum, london 1991, in jras, 3rd ser., iii (1993), 118; d.e.p. jackson et alii (eds.), occasional papers of the school of abbasid studies, university of st. andrews, no. 2, edinburgh 1988, in jss, xxxviii (1993), 167–8; g.j. roper (compiler and ed.), index islamicus 1981–1985, 2 vols., in jss, xxxviii (1993), 171–2; m. gil, a history of palestine 634–1099, cambridge 1992, in ehr, cviii, no. 428 (1993), 668–70; s. moreh, live theatre and dramatic literature in the medieval arabic world, edinburgh 1992, in tls (15.1.93); r. williams, the first thousand penguins, a bibliographical checklist, dragonby, lincs. 1987, and idem, pan books, 1945–1955, a bibliographical checklist, dragonby 1990, in analytical and enumerative bibliography, northern illinois university, dekalb, ill., v/2 (1991) [1993], 115–20. 1994 226. the history of the saffarids of sistan and the maliks of nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542–3), columbia lectures on iranian studies 8, costa mesa and new york 1994, pp. xxvi + 525. turkish tr. of ch. vii by h. doğan, “saffâri i̇mparatorluğu’nun yapısı ve yönetimi”, e-makâlât mezhep araştırmaları, vi/1 (2013), 123–45. 227. “abū ḥafṣ ʿumar al-kirmānī and the rise of the barmakids”, bsoas, lvii (1994), 268–82. reprinted in item 240, art. iv. 228. “rulers of makrān and quṣdār in the early islamic period”, st. ir., xxiii (1994), 199–209. reprinted in item 240, art. xix. 229. “arab attacks on rhodes in the pre-ottoman period” (eng. and greek tr.), in rodos 2400. diethnes synedrio, 1993, rhodian historical society, rhodes 1994, 205–15. 230. “seductive orient voices. arabic influences in the art and letters of 19th century britain”, in m. barbot (ed.), 1492. l’héritage culturel arabe in europe. actes du colloque international organisé par le g.e.o. (strasbourg) et le c.r.e.l. (mulhouse) (strasbourgmulhouse, 6–8 octobre 1992), strasbourg 1994, 24–33. 231. “irish and british contributions to arabic and islamic studies since 1800”, in k.j. cathcart (ed.), the edward hincks bicentenary lectures, dublin 1994, 178–94. 232. ei2 vol. viii, arts. “rāfiʿ b. hart̲h̲ama”; “rāfiʿ b. al-layt̲h̲ b. naṣr b. sayyār”; “rafsandjān”; “raghūsa. 2. history after 1800”; “rāʾiḳa”; “raʾīs. 2. in the sense of ‘mayor’ in the in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 204 eastern islamic lands”; “raʿiyya. 2. in the mediaeval islamic world”; “rām-hurmuz” (with v. minorsky); “rāṇā sāṇgā”; “rangoon”; “rasht” (with b. nikitine); “al-rass”; “rāwalpindi” (with c.c. davies); “rawāndiz” (with b. nikitine); “rawshaniyya” (with d.s. margoliouth); “rawwādids”; “rāyčur”; “al-rayy. 2. archaeological monuments” (with v. minorsky); “riḍā”; “riḍwān b. tutush”; “rifāʿiyya”; “rizḳ. 1. as a theological concept; 3. in military terminology”; “rūdhbār”; “rūdhrāwar”; “al-rūdhrāwarī”; “al-ruhā” (with e. honigmann); “al-rukhkhadj”; “rukn al-dawla” (with h. bowen); “rukn al-dīn bārbak shāh”; “rūm. 2. relations between the islamic powers and the byzantines”; “rūm ḳalʿesi” (with e. honigmann); “rūpiyya” (with j. allan); “al-ruṣāfa. 1. and 2.”; “rustāḳ”; “rūznāma”; “saʿādat ʿalī khān” (with c.c. davies); “ṣabandja”; “sabīl. 1. as a religious concept”; “sābūr b. ardashīr”; “sabzawār”; “saʿd (i) b. zangī” (with t.w. haig); “sādjids”; “ṣadr. 1. in transoxania”. 233. eir vol. vi, arts. “dandānqān”; “dargazīnī”; “dawā(t)dār”; “dawraq”; “dayr al-ʿāqūl”; “daysam kordī”; “dehestān”; “dehestānī”. 234. reviews of h. halm, das reich des mahdi, in olz, lxxxix/1 (1994), 70–1; f.a. nizami (ed.), journal of islamic studies, oxford, i (1990), in jss, xxxix/2 (1994), 391; r. maringuzmán, popular dimensions of the ʿabbasid revolution. a case study of medieval islamic social history, cambridge, mass. 1990, in arabica, xli (1994), 134–5; w.e. kaegi, byzantium and the early islamic conquets, cambridge 1992, in bjmes, xxi (1994), 252–3. 1995 235. “e.g. browne and his a year amongst the persians”, iran, jbips, xxxiii (1995), 115–22. reprinted as ch. 12 in eastward ho!, item 340, 179–96. 236. ei2 vol. viii, arts. “ṣaff. 1. in religious practice, 2. in military organisation”; “ṣaffārids”; “safīd kūh”; “safīd rūd”; “safīna. 1. in the pre-modern period. (a) pre-islamic and early islamic aspects (with h. kindermann), (b) the mediterranean, (c), the mesopotamiankhūzistān river systems, (d) the arabian sea and indian ocean shores”; “sahāranpūr” (with t.w. haig); “al-sahmī”; “saʿīd b. al-ʿāṣ”; “saʿīd pasha”; “ṣāʾifa. 1. in the arabbyzantine warfare”; “al-ṣaḳāliba. 2. in the central lands of the caliphate”; “saḳḳiz”; “salama b. dīnār”; “sālār” (with v.f. büchner); “saldjūḳids. i. historical significance, ii. origins and early history, iii. the various branches, v. administrative, social and economic history, vii. literature. 2. in anatolia”; “salghurids”; “al-ṣāliḥiyya”; “al-sallāmī”; “salm b. ziyād b. abīhi”; “salmās”; “sāmānids. 1. history, literary life and economic activity”; “samarḳand” (with h.h. schaeder); “al-samāwa”; “al-samhūdī”; “samrū begam” (with s. digby); “ṣamṣām al-dawla”. vol. ix, “sanandadj” (with v. minorsky); “sandābil”; “sandja”; “sandjar”; “saracens. 2. in mediaeval european usage”; “sarakhs”; “sarandīb”; “sārangpur”; “sarāparda”; “sardāb”; “sardhanā”; “sarḥadd”; “sarhang”; “sārī”; “sarūdj” (with m. plessner); “sarwistān”; “sāsān, banū”; “sāwa” (with v. minorsky); “sāwdj-bulāḳ” (with v. minorsky); “sawdji̊, sawdjī” (with f. babinger); “sayābidja”; “ṣaymara”; “sayyid”; “sebüktigin”; “shabānkāra” (with v.f. büchner); “shabānkāraʾī” (with p. jackson); “al-shābushtī”; “shaddādids”; “shāh malik”; “shāh rūd”. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 205 237. eir vol. vii, art. “derham b. nażr”. 238. reviews of o. hulec and m. mendel (eds.), threefold wisdom: islam, the arab world and africa. papers in honour of ivan hrbek, prague 1993, in jss, xl/1 (1995), 189–90; a.h. jutzi (ed.), in search of sir richard burton. papers from a huntington library symposium, san marino, calif. 1993, in jss, xl/2 (1995), 392; t. naff (ed.), paths to the middle east: ten scholars look back, albany 1993, in jras, 3rd ser., v (1995), 93–4; r.b. serjeant, r.l. bidwell and g. rex smith, new arabian studies, i, exeter 1993, in jras, 3rd ser., v (1995), 266–7; s. ray, bairam khan, karachi 1992, jras, 3rd ser., v (1995), 303–4; f. daftary, the assassin legends. myths of the ismaʿilis, london 1994, in ga, vi (1995), 367–9; faḍlullāh b. rūzbihān khunjī iṣfahānī, tārīkh-i ʿālam-ārā-yi amīnī, text ed. j.e. woods, abridged tr. v. minorsky, london 1992, in jaos, cxv (1995), 555; a. fodor and a. shivtiel (eds.), proceedings of the colloquium on popular customs and the monotheistic religions in the middle east and north africa, budapest, 19th–25th september 1993, budapest 1994, in olz, xc/2 (1995), 187–8. 1996 239. the new islamic dynasties. a chronological and genealogical manual, edinburgh university press and columbia university press 1996, pp. xxvi + 389. turkish tr. doğuşundan günümüze i̇slâm devletleri. devletler, prenslikler, hanedanlıkar kronolojik soykütüğü, istanbul 2005. 240. the arabs, byzantium and iran. studies in early islamic history and culture, variorum reprints, aldershot 1996, pp. xii + 320. reprints of items 15, 116, 122, 129, 136, 153, 154, 155, 175, 186, 187, 196, 203, 204, 205, 211, 212, 218, 219, 222, 227, 228 and 242. 241. “arab attacks on rhodes in the pre-ottoman period”, jras, 3rd ser., vi (1996), 157–64. 242. “notes on the lives of some ʿabbāsid princes and descendants”, the maghrib review, xix/3–4 (1994) [1996] (hommage à andré miquel), 277–84. reprinted in item 240, art. v. 243. “the ismaʿilis of quhistān and the maliks of nīmrūz or sīstān”, in f. daftary (ed.), mediaeval ismaʿili history and thought, cambridge 1996, 221–9. 244. “arabic influences in the literature of nineteenth and early twentieth century britain”, in j.r. smart (ed.), tradition and modernity in arabic language and literature, richmond, surrey 1996, 155–64. 245. “islam in central asia and the caucasus”, in a.a. nanji (ed.), the muslim almanac. a reference work on the history, faith, culture, and peoples of islam, gale research inc., detroit 1996, 83–9. 246. arts. on mediaeval islamic personages in a.g.c. savvides (ed.), enkyklopaidiko prosōprographiko lexiko vyzantinēs historias kai politismou / encyclopaedic prosopographical lexicon of byzantine history and civilisation, i, aamr–alphios, athens 1996. 247. ei2 vol. ix, arts. “shahrazūr”; “shakarkhelda”; “shakkī” (with v. minorsky); “al-shām, al-shaʾm. 1. geography, 2. history (a) to 1918 (with h. lammens). (b) from the end of the first world war to the end of the mandate”; “shammākha”; “shāpūr”; “shār”; “sharaf in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 206 al-dīn ʿalī yazdī”; “sharīf pasha” (with j.h. kramers); “shehir ketkhüdāsi̊”; “shikārī” (with t.w. haig); “shimshāṭ”; “shīrwān” (with w. barthold); “shīrwān shāh” (with w. barthold); “shīth” (with cl. huart); “shīz” (with j. ruska); “shōlāpur”; “shughnān”; “shūl”; “shūmān”; “shūrā. 1. in early islamic history”; “shuraḥbīl b. ḥasana”; “shushtar” (with j.h. kramers); “shuwa. 1. history”; “sībī”; “sidhpūr”; “si̊ghnāḳ”; “siʿird. 1. history (a) the pre-ottoman period”; “sikandar b. ḳuṭb al-dīn hindāl, called butshikan”; “sikhs. 1. general. 4. history after 1849”; “sikka. 1. legal and constitutional aspects”. 248. eir vol. vii, arts. “dīnār, malek”; “dīnavar”; “dīwān. ii. government office”; “ebn abī ṭāher ṭayfūr”. 249. reviews of r. curiel and r. gyselen (eds.), itinéraires d’orient. hommages à claude cahen, in jras, 3rd ser., vi (1996), 83–7; w. floor, the dutch east indies company (voc) and diewel-sind (pakistan) in the 17th and 18th centuries (based on original dutch records), karachi-islamabad 1993–4, in jras, 3rd ser., vi (1996), 121–2; r.l. bidwell, g.r. smith and j.r. smart (eds.), new arabian studies, ii, exeter 1994, in jras, 3rd ser., vi (1996), 233–4; j. aubin and j. calmard (eds.), européens en orient au xviiie siècle, paris 1994, in jras, 3rd ser., vi (1996), 250–1; s. moosvi (tr. and ed.), episodes in the life of akbar. contemporary records and reminiscences, new delhi 1994, in jras, 3rd ser., vi (1996), 266–7; w.m. watt (tr.), islamic creeds, a selection, edinburgh 1994, in jss, xli/1 (1996), 197; the byzantine and early islamic near east. i. problems in the literary source material. papers of the first workshop on late antiquity and early islam, princeton 1992, in jss, xli/2 (1996), 348–50; b. radtke, weltgeschichte und weltbeschreibung im mittelalterichen islam, beiruter texte und studien, bd. 51, stuttgart 1992, in jss, xli/2 (1996), 354–6; g.s.p. freeman-grenville, the islamic and christian calendars a.d. 622–2222 (a.h. 1–1650). a complete guide for converting christian and islamic dates and dates of festivals, reading 1995, in jss, xli/2 (1996), 378–80. 1997 250. “the study of islam in british scholarship”, in a. nanji (ed.), mapping islamic studies. genealogy, continuity and change, berlin-new york 1997, 45–67. 251. “thaʿālibī’s information on the turks”, in r. vesely and e. gombár (eds.), zafar nāme. memorial volume of felix tauer, prague 1996 [1997], 61–6. 251(a). “foreword”, in t.k. el-azhari, saljūqs of syria during the crusades, 463–549 a.h./1070– 1154 a.d., berlin 1997, 1–2. 252. articles on islamic personages in a.g.c. savvides (ed.), enkyklopaidiko prosōprographiko lexiko vyzantinēs historias kai politismou, ii, alphios–antiocheus, athens 1997. 253. ei2 vol. ix, arts. “simaw”; “sīmdjūrids”; “simnān”; “al-ṣīn. 1. the name. 2. the present distribution of muslims in china and a characterisation of islam there. 3. geographical and historical information to the year ca. a.d. 1050” (with m. hartmann); “sind. 1. history in the pre-modern period” (with t.w. haig); “sindābūr”; “sindān”; “sipāhī. 1. in the ottoman empire”; “si̊r daryā. 1. in the early and mediaevel period” (with w. barthold); “al-sīradjān”; “sīrāf”; “sirhind”; “sīstān”; “siwri ḥiṣār” (with j.h. kramers); “siyālkūt” (with t.w. haig); “al-siyālkūtī”; “siyāsa. 1. in the sense of statecraft”; “ṣofta”; in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 207 “śrīrangapat́t́anam”; “su”; “ṣu bashi̊” (with j.h. kramers); “subayta”; “al-subkī” (with j. schacht); “sudjān rāy bhandārī” (with mohammed shafi); “ṣūfiyāna”; “sufyānids”; “al-ṣughd” (with w. barthold); “sulaymān [mountains]”; “sulaymān b. ʿ alī b. ʿ abd allāh”; “sulaymān b. yaḥyā”; “sulaymāniyya. 2. since 1920”; “suleymān čelebi”; “sulṭān. 1. in early islamic usage and in the central lands of islam” (with j.h. kramers); “sulṭān al-dawla”; “sulṭānābād”; “sulṭāniyya. 1. history” (with v. minorsky); “sūmanāt”; “sumatra”; “sumerā or sumrā”; “sūrat” (with t.w. haig); “sūrs or sūrīs”; “al-sūs” (with m. streck); “sūyāb”; “swāt”. 254. eir vol. viii, arts. “ebn bābā kāšānī”; “ebn al-balkī”; “ebn dārost, majd al-wozarā moḥammad”; “ebn dārost, tāj al-molk abu ’l-ḡanāʾem”; “ebn fūlād”; “ebn karmīl”; “ebn kordādbeh”; “ebn morsal”; “ebn rosta”; “ebrāhīm b. masʿūd”; “ebrāhīm inal”. 255. reviews of a. elad, medieval jerusalem and islamic worship: holy places, ceremonies, pilgrimage, leiden, etc. 1995, in bsoas, lx (1997), 132–3; r. amitai-preiss, mongols and mamluks. the mamluk-ilkhānid war, 1260–1281, cambridge 1995, in jis, viii (1997), 99–102; h.a.r. gibb and c.f. beckingham (trs.), the travels of ibn baṭṭūṭa a.d. 1325–1354, vol. iv, hakluyt society, london 1994, in jss, xlii/1 (1997), 191–2; m. hiskett, the course of islam in africa, edinburgh 1994, in jss, xlii/1 (1997), 195–6; m. shatzmiller, labour in the medieval islamic world, leiden 1994, in jss, xlii/2 (1997), 438–9; d. deweese, islamization and native religion in the golden horde: baba tükles and conversion to islam in historical and epic tradition, university park, pa. 1994, in jah, xxx (1997), 61–2; g.r. smith, j.r. smart and b.r. pridham (eds.), new arabian studies, iii, exeter 1996, in jras, 3rd ser., vii/2 (1997), 287–8; louis alexandre olivier de corancez, tr. e. tabet, introd. r.m. burrell, the history of the wahabis from their origin until the end of 1809. the founders of saudi arabia, reading 1995, in jras, 3rd ser., vii/2 (1997), 296–7. 1998 256. m.s. asimov and c.e. bosworth (eds.), history of civilizations of central asia. vol. iv. the age of achievement: a.d. 750 to the end of the fifteenth century. part 1. the historical, social and economic setting, unesco, paris 1998, pp. 485. sections by c.e. bosworth: introduction, 19–21; ch. 1, pt. 1, “the appearance of the arabs in central asia under the umayyads and the establishment of islam”, 23–5; ch. 4, “the ghaznavids”, 95–117; ch. 7, “the seljuqs and the khwarazm shahs. pt. 2, the consolidation of the seljuq sultanate in iran (1055–1118)”, and pt. 3, “the eastern seljuq sultanate (1118–57) and the rise and florescence of the khwarazm shahs of anūshtegin’s line up to the appearance of the mongols (1097–1219)”, 155–76; ch. 14, “the delhi sultanate”, pt. 2, “the delhi sultanate, 1316–1526”, 279–91; conclusion, 421. 256(a). “the persian contribution to islamic historiography in the pre-mongol period”, ch. 6 in r.g. hovannisian and g. sabagh (eds.), the persian presence in the islamic world, cambridge 1998, 218–36. 257. encyclopedia of arabic literature, ed. j.s. meisami and p. starkey, routledge and kegan paul, london and new york, 2 vols. 1998, arts. “abū al-ʽamaythal (d. 240/854)”; “abū dulaf (fourth/tenth century)”; “abū zayd al-balkhī, aḥmad (c.235–322/c.849–934)”; in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 208 “aḥmad ibn mājid (late ninth-early tenth/late fifteenth-early sixteenth century)”; “alexander the great”; “ʽalī ibn abī ṭālib (d. 40/660)”; “al-ʽāmilī, bahā’ al-dīn (953– 1030/1547–1621)”; “al-ʽattābī, kulthūm ibn ʽamr (d. 208 or 220/823 or 835)”; “al-būṣīrī (608–c.694/1212–c.1294)”; “būyids”; “ibn abī uṣaybʽa (c.590–668/c.1194–1270)”; “ibn ʽasākir (499–571/1105–76)”; “ibn faḍl allāh al-ʽumar”; “ibn faḍlān, aḥmad (fl. early fourth/tenth century)”; “ibn farīghūn, shaʽyā (?)”; “ibn taymiyya (661–728/1263– 1328)”; “ibn ẓafar al-siqillī (497–565 or 68/1104–70 or 1172–3)”; “al-khafājī, aḥmad ibn muḥammad (c.979–1069/c.1571–1658)”; “khuṭba”; “al-maghribī, al-ḥusayn ibn ̔ alī (370– 418/981–1027)”; “manāqib literature”;“mawālī (sing. mawlā)”; “mihrajān”; “mirrors for princes” “al-muhallabī, al-ḥasan ibn muḥammad (291–352/903–63)”; “al-muḥibbī (1061–1111/1651–99)”; “nahj al-balāgha (the way of eloquence)”; “nayrūz”; “persia, culture and literature”; “persian literature, relations with arabic”; “al-qāḍī al-nuʽmān (d. 363/974)”; “al-qalqashandī (756–821/1355–1418)”; “ṣaffārids”; “ṣafī al-dīn al-ḥillī (667–c.750/1278–c.1349)”; “sahl ibn hārūn (d. 215/830)”; “al-sakhāwī (830–902/1427– 97)”; “secretaries”; “shuʽūbiyya”; “sibt ibn al-jawzī (581 or 582–654/1185 or 1186–1256)”; “al-tahānawī (d. after 1158/1745)”; “travel literature”. 258. enkyklopaidiko prosōprographiko lexiko vyzantinēs historias kai politismou, ed. a.g.c. savvides, iii, antiochos–apsimaros, athens 1998, art. “adoud al-daoula [ʿaḍud al-dawla]”. 259. ei2 vol. x, arts. “taʿarrub”; “al-ṭabarī”; “ṭabaristān”; “ṭabarsarān”; “ṭabas”; “tabrīz. i. geography and history” (with v. minorsky); “tādj al-dīn yildiz”; “tādjīk. i. etymology and early linguistic development of the term”; “tadjmīr”; “tadmur”; “ṭāhir b. al-ḥusayn”; “ṭāhirids. i.”; “ṭahmāsp. ii.”; “ṭahmūrath”; “taḥṣīl”; “al-ṭāʾiʿ li-amr allāh” (with k.v. zetterstéen); “takht-i ṭawūs”; “takrīt” (with j.h. kramers); “taḳsīṭ”; “ṭālaḳān. 1, 2”; “ṭalḥat al-ṭalaḥāt”; “tālīkōt́ā”; “tālish” (with e. yarshater); “tamīm b. baḥr al-muṭṭawwiʿ”; “ṭārābī, maḥmūd”; “ṭarābulus al-gharb. 5. from 1835 to the present day”; “ṭarābulus (or aṭrābulus) al-shām. 1. history up to the mamlūk period” (with f. buhl); “ṭarāz”; “tardjumān”; “ṭarsūs”; “al-ṭarsūsī”; “ṭarṭūs” (with e. honigmann); “ṭārum” (with v. minorsky). 260. eir vol. viii, “elwell-sutton, laurence paul”; “ʿemād al-dawla, abu ’l-ḥasan ʿalī”; “ʿemād al-dīn marzbān”; “eqlīd”; “ʿerāq-e ʿajam(ī)”; “esfarāyen”; “eškāš(e)m”; “esmāʿīl b. seboktegīn”; “esmāʿīl, b. aḥmad b. asad sāmānī, abū ebrāhīm”. 261. reviews of a. mcnicoll and w. ball et alii, excavations at kandahar 1974 and 1975. the first two sessions at shahr-i kohna (old kandahar) conducted by the british institute of afghan studies, oxford 1996, in jras, 3rd ser., viii/1 (1998), 111–13; j.-m. mouton, damas et sa principauté sous les saljoukides et les bourides (468–549/1076–1154): vie politique et religieuse, cairo 1994, in jras, 3rd ser., viii/2 (1998), 263–5; h.a. zubairi (ed.), dr. ishtiaq husain qureshi memorial volume ii, karachi 1994, in jras, 3rd ser., viii/2 (1998), 275–6; a. burton, the bukharans. a dynastic, diplomatic and commercial history 1550–1702, london 1997, in jis, ix (1998), 305–7; s. shaked, from zoroastrian iran to islam. studies in religious history and intercultural contacts, aldershot 1995, in jss, xliii/1 (1998), 188–9; a. fodor (ed.), proceedings of the 14th congress of the union européenne des arabisants et islamisants, budapest, 29th august–3rd september 1988, in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 209 part i, budapest 1995, in jss, xliii/2 (1998), 405–6; m. carney, britain in pictures. a history and bibliography, london 1995, in analytical and enumerative bibliography, northern illinois university, dekalb, ill., n.s. ix (1995) [1998], 254–7; r. chenciner, daghestan, tradition and survival, richmond 1997, in art. “beyond the mountains”, tls (31.7.98), 27; and in joas, ix (1997–8), 159–61. 262. obituary: “professor charles beckingham”, the daily telegraph (14.10.98). 1999 263. the history of al-ṭabarī. an annotated translation. vol. v. the sāsānids, the byzantines, the lahkmids, and yemen, translated and annotated by c.e. bosworth, bibliotheca persica, state university of new york press, albany 1999, pp. xxiv + 458. [the numbering system of the original bibliography is superseded after this point.] 264. obituary: “professor c. e. beckingham, fba (1914–1998)”, jss, xliv/1 (1999), vii–viii. 265. ei2 vol. x, arts. “tashkent. 1. history till 1895 (with w. barthold)”; “tat. 1. historical development of the term”; “tawḳīʿ” (with f. babinger); “tawwadj”; “taymāʾ”; “tekish”; “terek” (with w. barthold); “terken khātūn”; “al-thaʿālibī, abū manṣūr”; “thālnēr”; “thānā”; “t́hānesar”; “t́hat́t́ā”; “al-thughūr. 1. in the arab-byzantine frontier region”; “tibesti”; “tidjāra. 1. introductory remarks”; “tiflīs” (with v. minorsky); “tigin”; “tihrān. i tihrān, a city of nothern persia, 1. geographical position. ii. the former name of a village or small town in the modern province of iṣfahān”; “tilsam” (with b. carra de vaux and j. ruska); “tīmūrtāsh oghullari̊” (with f. babinger); “ṭīn”; “ṭoghri̊l”; “ṭoghri̊l (i) beg”; “ṭoghri̊l (iii)” (with m.t. houtsma); “tonk”; “tubbat. 1. the history and geography of tibet in islamic sources of the pre-modern period” (with w. barthold); “tugh”; “tughra. 1. origin of the term. 2. history. (a) in the central islamic lands before the ottomans”; “tukarōʾī”; “ṭukhāristān” (with w. barthold); “ṭulaḳāʾ”; “tūn”; “ṭunb”; “tunganistan”; “tungans”; “al-ṭūr” (with e. honigmann); “ṭūr ʿ abdīn” (with m. streck); “turaba”. 266. eir vol. ix, arts. “fāʾeq kāṣṣa, abu’l-ḥasan”; “fakr-al-molk, abu’l-fatḥ moẓaffar”; “fārāb”; “farāva”; “fāres”; “farḡāna. ii. in the islamic period”; “farrokzād, abū šojāʿ”; “fatḥ-nāma”; “fażl, b. sahl b. zādānfarrūk”. 267. reviews of a. cameron (ed.), the byzantine and early islamic near east, iii. states, resources and armies, princeton 1995, in jss, xliv/2 (1999), 323–5; r. schick, the christian communities of palestine from byzantine to islamic rule. a historical and archaeological study, princeton 1995, in jss, xliv/2 (1999), 326–8. 2000 268. history of civilizations of central asia. vol. iv. the age of achievement: a.d. 750 to the end of the fifteenth century. part 2, the achievements, unesco, paris 2000, pp. 700. sections by c.e. bosworth: “introduction”, 27–30; ch. 4, pt. 1, “legal, political in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 210 and historical sciences: legal and political sciences in the eastern iranian world and central asia in the pre-mongol period”, 133–42; ch. 4, pt. 2, “arabic, persian and turkish historiography in the eastern iranian world”, 142–52; “conclusion”, 615–6. 269. “two pioneers of the silk road: aurel stein and sven hedin”, ga, vii–viii (2000), 31–44. 270. “sistan and its local histories”, is, xxiii/1–2 (2000), 31–43. 271. “libya in islamic history”, the journal of libyan studies, i/2 (2000), 6–16. italian tr. f. cresti, “la libia nella storia del mondo islamico”, in la libia tra mediterraneo e mondo islamico. atti del convegno di catania, la libia tra mediterraneo e mondo islamico, studi e tendenze della ricerca sulla libia contemporanea, storia e società, catania, facoltà di scienze politiche, 1–2 dicembre 2000: aggiornamenti e approfondimenti, ed. f. cresti, milan 2006, xxxi–xliii. 272. ei2 vol. x, arts. “turbat-i [shaykh-i] djām”; “turgay” (with w. barthold); “turkistān. 1. as a designation for the central asian lands to the north of modern persia and afghānistān (with w. barthold). 2. as a designation for the largely turkish part of northern afghānistān lying to the south of the oxus”; “türkmen čay (i̊)” (with v. minorsky); “ṭurshīz” (with c.l. huart); “ṭūs. 2. monuments”; “tutush (i) b. alp arslan”; “ubāgh”; “ʿubayd allāh b. abī bakra”; “ʿubayd allāh b. al-ʿabbās”; “uččh. 1. history”; “ʿūd. i. in daily life. 2. ʿūd wood in mediaeval islamic economic and social history”; “udgīr”; “ʿudjayf b. ʿ anbasa”; “udjdjayn”; “ʿuḳaylids”; “al-ʿulā”; “ʿumān. 1. geography”; “umayya” (with g. levi della vida); “umm al-ḳurā”; “al-urdunn. 1. the river” (with f. buhl); “ürgenč”; “urmiya” (with v. minorsky); “ʿurwa b. masʿūd”; “ustān”; “ustāndār”; “ʿutayba” (with h. kindermann); “ʿutba b. ghazwān”; “al-ʿutbī”; “utrār”; “uways”; “uzun ḥasan” (with v. minorsky). vol. xi, arts. “vidjayanagara”; “wādī ḥalfā”; “wahb”; “wahriz”; “wakhān” (with v. minorsky); “wakhsh”. 273. eir vol. x, arts. “fūšanj”; “ganja”; “ḡarčestān”; “gardīzī, abū saʿīd ʿabd-al-ḥayy”. 274. reviews of g.r. smith, j.r. smart and b.r. pridham (eds.), new arabian studies, iv, in jras, 3rd ser., x/1 (2000), 103–4; shīr muḥammad mīrāb mūnis and muḥammad rizā mīrāb āgahī, firdaws al-iqbāl, history of khorezm, tr. y. bregel, leiden 1999, in jras, 3rd ser., x/3 (2000), 402–5. 2001 275. a century of british orientalists 1902–2001, edited with an introduction by c.e. bosworth, oxford and new york, 2001, pp. 264. sections by c.e. bosworth: “introduction”, 1–7; “edward granville browne 1862–1926”, 75–86; “gerard leslie makins clauson 1891– 1974”, 89–100; “vladimir fed’orovich minorsky 1877–1966”, 203–18. 276. k.a. luther (tr.), the history of the seljuq turks from the jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh: an ilkhanid adaption of the saljūq-nāma of ẓahīr al-dīn nīshāpūrī, edited by c.e. bosworth, richmond 2001, pp. xiii + 189. section by c.e. bosworth: “editor’s preface and acknowledgements”, xiii–x. 277. “the army of the ghaznavids”, in j.j.l. gommans and d.h.a. kholff (eds.), warfare and weaponry in south asia, 1000–1800, delhi 2001, 153–84. 278. “notes on some turkish names in abu ’l-faḍl bayhaqī’s tārīkh-i masʿūdī”, oriens xxxvi in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 211 (2001), 299–313. 279. the oxford companion to military history, ed. r. holmes, h. strachan, c. bellamy and h. bicheno, oxford and new york, 2001, arts. “akbar ‘the great’”; “atatürk, gen mustafa kemal”; “aurangzeb”; “babur, emperor”; “dervishes”; “jihad”; “karbalaʾ, battle of”; “muhammad ali, pasha”; “panipat, battle of”; “persia, german activity in”; “shamyl”; “turks, seljuk and ottoman”; “vienna, sieges of”. 280. ei2 vol. xi, arts. “al-walīd b. ʿuḳba”; “walwālīdj”; “wān. 1. the lake, 2. the town” (with v. minorsky); “warāmīn”; “warangal”; “al-warkāʾ”; “al-wāthiḳ bi ’llāh” (with k.v. zetterstéen and e. van donzel); “al-wāthiḳī”; “wayhind”; “waẓīfa. 1. as an administrative term”; “wenedik. 1. in earlier islamic times”; “wezīr köprü”; “wize”; “wufūd. 2. in the early caliphate” (with a. savvides); “wushmgīr b. ziyār”; “yabghu”; “yada tash”; “yāfā” (with f. buhl); “yaghma”; “yaḥyā b. akt̲h̲am”; “yaʿḳūb b. al-layt̲h̲”; “yārkand”; “yarmūk. 1. geography”; “yāsā. 2. amongst the mamlūks”; “yashm. 1. in islamic history”; “yayi̊ḳ”; “yaylaḳ”; “yazīd b. abī sufyān”; “yeñi shehir”; “yeshil i̊rmak”; “yeti su”; “yoghurt”; “yulbārs khān”; “yūsuf al-barm”; “yūsuf b. abi ’l-sādj dīwdād”; “yūsufī” (with e. berthels); “al-zāb”; “zābul, zābulistān”; “zāhidān”; “ẓahīr al-dīn marʿashī”; “zaḳḳūm”; “zamakhshar”; “zamīndāwar”; “zamm”; “zandjān”. 281. eir arts. “ghaznavids”; “ghurids”; “gibb memorial series”. 282. reviews of f. robinson, the cambridge illustrated history of the islamic world, new york 1996, in middle eastern studies, xxxvii/1 (2001), 244–5; c.f. petry (ed.), the cambridge history of egypt. i. islamic egypt, 640–1517, cambridge 1998, in jis, xii/3 (2001), 331–3; s.s. blair, islamic inscriptions, edinburgh 1998, in jss, xli/1 (2001), 192–4. 2002 283. “une aristocrate anglaise en exil volontaire: lady hester stanhope en syrie et au liban, 1813–1839”, in m-é. palmier-chatelain and p. lavagne d’ortigue (eds.), l’orient des femmes, lyon 2002, 173–83. 284. “two pioneers of central asian exploration: sir aurel stein and sven hedin,” in é.m. jeremiás (ed.), irano-turkish cultural contacts in the 11th–17th centuries, acta et studia i, piliscaba, hungary 2002, 17–32. slightly enlarged text reprinted as ch. 15 in eastward ho!, item 340, 245–63. 285. “introduction”, in g. clauson, studies in turkic and mongolian linguistics, 2nd edn., london 2002, xix–xxvii. 286. “the sarḥadd region of persian baluchistan: from mediaeval islamic times to the mid-twentieth century”, st. ir., xxxi/1 (2002), 79–102. 287. ei2 vol. xi, arts. “zarafshān”; “zarang”; “zāwa”; “zawāra”; “zawdj. 1. etymology and early usage”; “zayn al-ʿābidīn”; “zaynab bt. djaḥsh”; “zaynab bt. khuzayma”; “al-zaynabī”; “zaytūn”; “zirih”; “ziyād b. ṣāliḥ al-khuzāʿī”; “al-ziyādī”; “ziyārids”; “zuhayr b. ḥarb”; “zuhra”; “zūn”; “zunbīl”; “al-zuṭṭ”. 288. eir arts. “gorgān. vi. history from the rise of islam to the beginning of the safavid period”; “gorzevān”; “gowhar-āʾīn, saʿd-al-dawla”; “gowhar kātun”; “ḡozz. ii. tribe”; “ḥājeb i. in the medieval islamic period”; “ḡur”; “manṣur b. nuḥ. i. manṣur (i) b. nuḥ (i), and ii. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 212 manṣur (ii) b. nuḥ (ii) b. manṣur (i)”; “meskavayh, abu ʿali aḥmad”; “moḥammad b. ʿabd-allah”; “naṣr (i) b. aḥmad (i) b. esmāʾīl”; “nuḥ (ii) b. manṣur (i)”; “obolla”; “onṣor al-maʿāli”; “ordubād”; “ostovā”; “ošnuya”; “otrār”; “yaʿqub b. layt b. moʿaddal”. 289. review of d. ayalon, eunuchs, caliphs and sultans. a study in power relationships, jerusalem 1999, in jras, 3rd ser., xii/3 (2002), 357–9. 2003 290. “introduction”, in h. mashita (ed.), theology, ethics and metaphysics: royal asiatic society classics of islam, london and new york, 2003, vol. i, ix–xxi. 291. “foreword”, in m.i. marcinkowski (tr.), persian historiography and geography. berthold spuler on major works produced in iran, the caucasus, central asia, india and early ottoman turkey, singapore 2003, vii–viii. 292. “forward”, in c. marcinkowski (tr.), measures and weights in the islamic world. an english translation of professor walther hinz’s handbook ‘islamische maße und gewichte’, kuala lumpur 2003. 293. obituary: “ronald whitaker ferrier 1929–2003”, iran, jbips, xli (2003), v–vi. 294. ei2, supplement: “irič”; “irtish”; “isfīdjāb”; “isfizārī”; “ishkāshim”; “ishtīkhān”; “iskandar khān b. djānī beg”; “ḳadamgāh”; “ḳāʾin”; “kalikat”; “khawla bt. ḥakīm”; “al-khulafāʾ al-rāshidūn”; “al-khuld”; “konkan”; “küčük ʿalī oghullari̊”; “lālā”; “māʾ. 10. irrigation in transoxania”; “madura, madurāʾī”. 295. eir vol. xi, art. “ḥamza b. ādarak”. vol. xii, arts. “ḥarrān”; “hārun al-rašid”; “hārun b. altuntaš”; “hazāraspids”; “helmand river. iii. in the medieval period”; “hendušāh b. sanjar”; “ḥira”. 2004 296. “william lithgow of lanark’s travels in hungary, transylvania and poland, 1616”, in c. mccarthy and j.f. healey (eds.), biblical and near eastern essays. studies in honour of kevin j. cathcart, london and new york 2004, 298–312. 297. “an oriental samuel pepys? abu’l-faḍl bayhaqī’s memoirs on court life in eastern iran and afghanistan, 1030–1041, jras, 3rd ser., xiv/1 (april 2004), 13–25. 298. “wasit: the rise and disappearance of a great islamic city”, ga, ix–x (2004), 69–88. 299. oxford dictionary of national biography, ed. h.c.g. matthew and b. harrison, oxford and new york 2004, vol. xxxviii, 360–1, art. “minorsky, vladimir fyodorovich”. 300. ei2, supplement: “maʿrūf balkhī”; “mihmān”; “muḥallil”; “muḥammad ḥākim mīrzā”; “muḥammad ṣāliḥ kańbō lāhawrī”; “muḥammad zamān mīrzā”; “nandana”; “prester john”; “radjaʾ b. ḥaywa”; “rādjasthān. 1. geography and habitat, 2. ethnology”; “rāfiʿ al-daradjāt”; “rohtak”; “rūshanī, dede ʿ umar”; “ṣakk”; “sanad”; “sarkār”; “ṣawladjān”; “silāḥ. 1. the pre-islamic period”; “ʿukbarā”. 301. eir vol. xii, arts. “ḥodud al-ʿālam”; “il-arslān”; “ïnānč kātun”; “india. v. political and cultural relations: medieval period to the 13th century”; “minorsky, vladimir fed’orovich”. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 213 302. reviews of n. sharp, h.b. dehqani-tafti, norman sharp’s persian designs, basingstoke 2001, in is, xxxvii/2 (2004), 351–2; z. szombathy, the roots of arabic genealogy. a study in historical anthropology. 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z. lockman, contending visions of the middle east. the history and politics of orientalism, new york 2004, in art. “grounds for optimism”, tls (14.4.06). 2007 in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 214 311. historic cities of the islamic world, edited by c.e. bosworth, leiden and boston 2007, p. xiii + 583. includes minor supplemental information and updated bibliographies on various previously published ei2 articles, including several by bosworth; but also with substantial additions to other entries, such that they should now be considered co-authored by bosworth and the person(s) indicated: “alexandria (al-iskandariyya; in ei1, al-iskandarīya)” with s. labib and r. guest; “algiers (al-djazāʾir)” with r. le tourneau; “amman (ʿammān)” with g.l. harding; “ankara (anḳara)” with f. taeschner; “baku (bākū)” with d.m. dunlop and a. bennigsen; “beirut (bayrūt)” with n. elisséef; “dacca (d́hākā)” with a.h. dani; “ghazna (ghazna)”; “haifa (ḥayfā)” with ed.; “hamadan (hamadhān)” with r.n. frye; “herat (harāt)” with r.n. frye; “kabul (kābul)”; “kandahar (ḳandahār)”; “mecca (makka)” with w.m. watt, a.j. wensinck and r.b. winder; “merv (marw al-shāhidjān)” with a.yu. yakubovskii; “mosul (al-mawṣil)” with e. honigmann and p. slugett; “najaf (al-nadjaf)” with e. honigmann; “nishapur (nīshāpūr)” with e. honigmann; “palmyra (tadmur)”; “peshawar (peshāwar)” with c.c. davies; “ray (al-rayy)” with v. minorsky; “samarqand (samarḳand)” with h.h. schaeder and y. crowe; “tabriz (tabrīz)” with v. minorsky and s.s. blair; “tashkent (tashkent)” with w. barthold and c. poujol; “tehran (ṭihrān)” with v. minorsky, j. calmard and b. hourcade; “tripoli, in lebanon (ṭarābulus al-shām)” with f. buhl and m. lavergne; “tripoli, in libya (ṭarābulus al-gharb)” with v. christides, g. oman and r. mantran. 312. the turks in the early islamic world, edited by c.e. bosworth, the formation of the classical islamic world, ix, gen. ed. lawrence i. conrad, aldershot 2007, pp. liii + 351. includes reprints of items 26, 60 and 73. previously unpublished section: “introduction: the coming of the turks into the islamic world”, xiii–liii. 313. ei3 arts. “ʿabdallāh b. ṭāhir”; “argots”. 314. eir art. “jabḡuya. ii. in islamic sources”. 315. reviews of m.y. ṣiddīq, riḥla maʿa l-nuqūsh al-kitābiyya al-islāmiyya fī bilād al-banghāl / an epigraphical journey through muslim bengal, damascus 2004, in jras, 3rd ser., xvii/3 (2007), 343–4; f. de blois, persian literature, a bio-bibliographical survey. vol. v. poetry of the pre-mongol period, abingdon 2004, in jras, 3rd ser., xvii/3 (2007), 334–5; i. shahîd, byzantium and the arabs: late antiquity i, brussels 2005, in jss, lii/2 (2007), 405–7. 2008 316. “the appearance and establishment of islam in afghanistan”, in é. de la vassière (ed.), islamisation de l’asie centrale: processus locaux d’acculturation du viie au xie siècle, studia iranica cahier xxxix, paris 2008, 97–114. 317. eir vol. xiv, “jalāl-al-din kvārazmšāh (i) mengübirni”; “jand”; “jebāl”. 318. reviews of v. christides, the image of cyprus in the arabic sources, nicosia 2006, in byzantinische zeitschrift, c/2 (2008), 830–2; j. pfeiffer and s.a. quinn with e. tucker (eds.), history and historiography of post-mongol central asia and the middle east. studies in honor of john e. wood, wiesbaden 2006, in jis, ix/2 (2008), 260–3; e. karsh, http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/byzs.2008.100.issue-2/byzs.2008.830/byzs.2008.830.xml in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 215 islamic imperialism. a history, 2006, in art. “empires of the east”, tls, (11.1.08). 2009 319. “the persistent older heritage in the medieval iranian lands”, ch. 3 in v.s. curtis and s. stewart (eds.), the rise of islam, the idea of iran 4, london and new york, 2009, 30–43. 320. “sir thomas glover, english ambassador and consul in istanbul, 1606–11”, in j.p. monferrer-sala, v. christides and t. papadopoullos (eds.), east and west: essays on byzantine and arab worlds in the middle ages, piscatway, n.j. 2009, 269–75. slightly enlarged text reprinted as ch. 1 in eastward ho!, item 340, 1–10. 321. ei3 arts. “abū l-sāj”; “ʿamīd”. 322. eir vol. xv, arts. “jovayn”; “jowzjān”; “kharijites in persia”; “khwarazmshahs. i. descendants of the line of anuštigin”; “kojestāni, aḥmad b. ʿabd-allāh”; “kondori, moḥammad b. manṣur”; “kottal”; “maʾmun”; “tekiš b. il arslān”; “terken kātun”. 2010 323. “the steppe peoples in the islamic world”, ch. 1 in d.o. morgan and a. reid (eds.), the new cambridge history of islam. vol. 3. the eastern islamic world: eleventh to eighteenth centuries, cambridge 2010, 21–77. 324. “additions to the new islamic dynasties”, ch. 2 in y. suleiman (ed), living islamic history. studies in honour of professor carole hillenbrand, edinburgh 2010, 14–31. 325. “historical information from ibn funduq’s tarikh-i bayhaq (563/1167–68)”, iran, jbips, xlviii (2010), 81–106. 326. ei3 arts. “balāsāghūn”; “bahrām shāh b. masʿūd yamīn al-dawla”. 327. eir arts. “barḡaši, abu’l moẓaffar moḥammad b. ebrahim”; “ebn baqiya”; “ebn mafana”; “kākuyids”; “kalaf b. aḥmad”; “kānom”; “menhāj-e serāj”; “nishapur i. historical geography and history to the beginning of the 20th century”; “ʿotbi”; “saffarids”; “ṭabaqāt-e nāṣerī”; “ziyarids”. 328. reviews of c. lange, justice, punishment and the medieval muslim imagination, cambridge 2008, in jis, xxi/1 (2010), 126–8; h. norris, islam in the baltic. europe’s early muslim community, london 2009, in jras, 3rd ser., xx/2 (2010), 223–5; g. kahn, arabic documents from early islamic khurasan, studies in the khalili collection v, london 2007, in jss, lv/2 (2010), 618–20. 2011 329. the history of beyhaqi (the history of sultan masʿud of ghazna, 1030–1041) by abu’lfażl beyhaqi, translated by c.e. bosworth, revised by m. ashtiany, 3 vols., boston and cambridge, mass. 2011, pp. lxx + 476 + vi + 400 + 472. 330. the ornament of histories. a history of the eastern islamic lands ad 650–1041. the original text of abū saʿīd ʿabd al-ḥayy gardīzī translated and edited, translated by c.e. bosworth, london 2011, pp. xii + 169. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 216 331. the history of the seljuq state. a translation with commentary of the akhbār al-dawla al-saljūqiyya, translated by c.e. bosworth, london 2011, pp. xi + 182. 332. “further notes on the turkish names in abu’l-faḍl bayhaqī’s tārīkh-i masʿūdī”, ch. 18 in o. alí-de-unzaga, fortresses of the intellect. ismaili and other islamic studies in honour of farhad daftary, london and new york 2011, 443–52. 333. “the origins of the seljuqs”, in c. lange and s. mecit (eds.), the seljuqs. politics, society and culture, edinburgh 2011, 13–21. 334. “iran and afghanistan in contact and interaction through the ages”, ch. 6 in p. chelkowski (ed.), the gift of persian culture: its continuity and influence in history, salt lake city 2011, 95–114. 335. “george strachan of the mearns: middle east traveller and pioneer collector of arabic and persian manuscripts”, ga, xi (2011), 189–98. reprinted as ch. 2 in eastward ho!, item 340, 11–21. 336. “a medical man in the persia of nāṣir al-dīn shāh: c.j. wills’ reminiscences of his fifteen years’ work in the persian provinces, 1866–81”, iran, jbips, xlix (2011), 149–58. reprinted as ch. 10 in eastward ho!, item 340, 125–43. 337. ei3 arts. “alptikin (alptegīn)”; “akhlāṭ”. 338. eir arts. “makrān”; “mā warāʾ al-nahr”; “qofs”; “šervān”; “šervānšahs”; “sistān. ii. in the islamic period”; “tārik-e sistān”; “ṭurān”. 339. reviews of a.k. bennison, the great caliphs. the golden age of the ʿabbasid empire, london 2009, in jss, xxii/2 (2011), 257–9; j.l. esposito (ed.), the oxford encyclopedia of the islamic world, 6 vols., oxford 2009, in art. “andalusia and xinkiang”, tls (4.2.11). 2012 340. eastward ho! diplomats, travelers and interpreters of the middle east and beyond, 1600–1940, london 2012, pp. xxvii + 280. includes reprints of items 53, 76, 90, 98, 106, 165, 174, 189, 221, 235, 284, 320, 335 and 336. previously unpublished section: ch. 7, “william burckhardt barker and the derebeys of cilicia”, 79–94. 341. “notes on some turkish personal names in seljūq military history”, isl., lxxxix/2 (2012), 97–110. 342. “studies on the jazīra. iii. the history of al-raqqa by al-qushayrī”, jis, xxiii/3 (2012), 287–93. 343. “the concept of dhimma in early islam”, in m. grey, d. macpherson, a. o’mahony, and c. south (eds.), living stones yearbook 2012, [london] 2012, 143–64. reprint of and update to item 136. 344. eir arts. “kāṣṣ beg”; “lakhmids”; “maḥmud b. sebüktegin”; “masʿud (iii) b. ebrāhim”; “mawdud b. masʿud”; “sebüktegin”. 345. reviews of i. shahîd, byzantium and the arabs in the sixth century. vol. ii part 2: economic, social, and cultural history, washington, d.c. 2009, in jss, lvii/2 (2012), 431–4; a.c.s. peacock, early seljūq history: a new interpretation, london and new york 2010, in jis, xxiv (2012), 86–88. in memoriam: clifford edmund bosworth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 217 2013 346. “recent contributions to the history of the early ghaznavids and seljuqs”, ch. 6 in r. hillenbrand, a.c.s. peacock and f. abdullaeva (eds.), ferdowsi, the mongols and the history of iran: art, literature and culture from early islam to qajar persia. studies in honour of charles melville, london 2013, 46–51. 347. ei3 art. “gardizi”. 348. eir arts. “kātun”; “kerman. iv. from the islamic conquest to the coming of the mongols”; “kosrow malek”; “kosrowšāh b. bahrāmšāh”; “lakhmids”; “mosaferids”; “nakjavān”; “nehavand”; “šakki”. 349. review of r.e. margariti, a. sabra and p.m. sijpesteijn (eds.), histories of the middle east. studies in middle eastern society, economy and law in honor of a. l. udovitch, leiden and boston 2011), in jis, xxiv/2 (2013), 220–3. 2014 350. “charles pellat and the encyclopaedia of islam: a personal reminiscence”, ch. 9 in r. gleave (ed.), books and bibliophiles. studies in honour of paul auchterlonie on the bio-bibliography of the muslim world, cambridge 2014, 104–8. 351. eir arts. “lanbasar”; “le strange, guy”. 352. reviews of david waines, the odyssey of ibn battuta: uncommon tales of a medieval adventurer, london 2012, in jis, xxv/3 (2014), 368–70; a.c.s. peacock and s.n. yıldız, the seljuks of anatolia. court and society in the medieval middle east, new york 2013, in ahr, cxix/3 (june 2014), 1016–8; g.w. bowersock, the throne of adulis. red sea wars on the eve of islam, new york 2013, in jis, xxv/3 (2014), 356–7. 2015 353. “the ghurids in khurasan”, ch. 10 in a.c.s. peacock and d.g. tor (eds.), medieval central asia and the persianate world. iranian tradition and islamic civilisation, london 2015, 210–21. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 445-468 abstract this article reassesses the “khārijite” rebellion of muṭarrif b. al-mughīra b. shuʿba al-thaqafī in 77/696–97 and recontextualizes it within a different “category” of revolt. analyzing both the history and the historiography of this uprising, the article argues that muṭarrif’s rebellion is best understood not within a khārijite framework, but rather as part of a series of revolts carried out by other iraqi tribal notables (ashrāf) in the same period. this reevaluation is based, for example, on the composition of muṭarrif’s following, which shows clear connections with other important iraqi/eastern leaders, such as muṣʿab b. al-zubayr, ibn al-ashʿath, and yazīd b. almuhallab. these connections, observable in other structural patterns common to marwānid-era rebellions as well, point to a similarity of grievances, reactions, and aims whose salience far exceeded the context of individual revolts. more broadly, this article also seeks to challenge the received scholarly understanding of khārijism and to question its usefulness as a category of historical analysis, suggesting instead different approaches to a renewed engagement with this phenomenon. the khārijites (ar. al-khawārij) are perhaps the most notorious rebels and heretics in early islamic history. their origin is traced back to the first civil war (fitna) of the muslim community in 35–40/656–61, in the course of which they denounced the main parties to the conflict as unbelievers and dissociated from them both spiritually and physically. ­­was­muṭarrif­b.­al-mughīra­al-thaqafī­a­khārijite? rebellion­in­the­early­marwānid­period* hannah-lena hagemann universität hamburg (hannah-lena.hagemann@uni-hamburg.de) * the research for this article was carried out in the framework of the emmy noether research group “social contexts of rebellion in the early islamic period” based at the university of hamburg and funded by the german research foundation (dfg, project number 437229168). the article is based on a conference paper i gave at leiden in november 2019 as part of the “acts of rebellions” workshop organized by the embedding conquest team led by petra sijpesteijn. my thanks to alon dar and the whole team for inviting me, and to said reza huseini, petra sijpesteijn, philip grant, and alon dar for their insightful comments on the original draft. i am also indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for their astute remarks and observations—this paper is much the better for them! all remaining errors of interpretation or fact are, of course, my own. © 2022 hannah-lena hagemann. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercialnoderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 446 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 447 their history is difficult to reconstruct because the extant source material is late and fragmentary, a problem for early islamic history in general that is exacerbated here by the lack of surviving khārijite works. excepting perhaps some poetry and a few speeches (questions of authenticity and attribution remain thorny), what we know about them is largely dependent on hostile outside sources, which has had a lasting effect on their image in the islamic tradition and modern scholarship alike.1 what, then, makes a khārijite a khārijite? at first glance, the defining characteristics of khārijism seem evident: excessive piety, based on a strict understanding of the letter of the law; the willingness to use equally excessive violence against opponents; and, as a result, an unfortunate penchant for considering those who did not share their views unbelievers whose blood was licit to shed. remaining true to god’s will meant a constant battle against these unbelievers, and so khārijite doctrine, as presented in the (mainly sunnī) islamic tradition and reproduced in modern scholarship, posed a serious threat to the social and political fabric of empire because of its inherent rebellious potential, even if historical khārijism in its militant form largely did not survive the eighth century ce. the resulting stock image of the khārijite as a violent fanatic motivated by excessive devotion to a godly life has dehistoricized the treatment of khārijite rebellions. at a closer look, this particular “category” of rebellion appears to serve as a container term for very different phenomena whose connections are often dubious; it frequently tells us little about why a particular revolt has been labeled “khārijite.” in fact, we may have to question the category altogether: not only is there little coherence among the many different khārijite rebellions of the seventh to ninth centuries ce, but the core of what khārijism is supposed to be about is also diffuse at best. the lowest common denominator appears to have been the rejection of both ʿuthmān and ʿalī, the prophet’s third and fourth “rightly guided” successors, as well as the rejection of claims to exclusive rights to the caliphate by quraysh, the prophet’s tribe. coupled with this was a pronounced puritanism that centered an ethos of militant piety and rigid standards for personal piety, especially concerning the leaders of khārijite factions. but these criteria—including rejection of the notion that the caliphate should be restricted to quraysh—were not unique to the khawārij. moreover, there is a distinct tribal element to such revolts in the umayyad era, at least, that raises doubts as to the purely religious motivations of these rebels, and there are enough instances of “khārijite” insurgents not fitting the mold that we should reassess the phenomenon entirely: closer scrutiny might lead us to view these rebels in a different and perhaps more easily explainable light.2 1. for an introduction to the history of and scholarship on the khārijites, see h.-l. hagemann and p. verkinderen, “kharijism in the umayyad period,” in the umayyad world, ed. andrew marsham, 489–517 (london: routledge, 2020). for the source issues more specifically, see ibid., 490–93, and h.-l. hagemann, the khārijites in early islamic historical tradition: heroes and villains (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2021), 6–8 and the notes thereto. 2. for a problematization of this issue, see a. gaiser, “tradition, text and taxonomy at the origins of the ibāḍī movement: a study in critical approaches to early ibāḍism,” paper presented at the tenth conference on ibadi studies, toronto, june 16–19, 2019 (i am very grateful to the author for making his draft paper available to me); hagemann and verkinderen, “kharijism,” 493–97, 501–2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 447 a good example, and the case study of this paper, is the rebellion of muṭarrif b. al-mughīra b. shuʿba al-thaqafī. muṭarrif was governor of al-madāʾin3 at the time of his uprising in the mid-690s ce and a well-established member of the muslim elite. his entanglement with the khārijite leader shabīb b. yazīd al-shaybānī is a curious episode that is often absent from accounts of shabīb’s adventures. muṭarrif has frequently been depicted as a khārijite, or at least as allied to shabīb’s khawārij, but as we shall see, the case is rather more complicated. the most detailed account of his revolt is found in al-ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) taʾrīkh, which will serve as the main narrative template here, although it is not the earliest. other fairly comprehensive portrayals are preserved by al-balādhurī (d. ca. 279/892; the earliest extant depiction of this revolt),4 miskawayh (d. ca. 421/1030), ibn al-jawzī (d. 597/1201), ibn al-athīr (d. 630/1233), ṣibt b. al-jawzī (d. 654/1256), and al-nuwayrī (d. 733/1333). this article aims to remedy the current lack of a thorough study of muṭarrif and his rebellion. the first section will summarize the revolt as presented by al-ṭabarī and survey the information available on muṭarrif in the islamic (historical) tradition more broadly. the second section will analyze the background of muṭarrif’s rebellion and discuss the interpretations offered in previous scholarship. i will argue for a rereading of his rebellion as belonging to a different “category” of revolt, highlighting notable connections with important other uprisings in the process. section 3 is historiographical and will look at how the sources approach muṭarrif and in what ways they differ in their depictions of his revolt. the article will conclude with some suggestions as to how future scholarship might usefully approach the study of rebellions labeled “khārijite” specifically and the issue of revolt in the early islamic period more generally. 3. al-madāʾin is the arab-muslim name for the former sasanian capital ctesiphon, a metropolis comprising several cities (whence al-madāʾin, “the cities”), located on the tigris approximately 35 kilometers southeast of modern baghdad. in the early islamic period, it was part of the conquered territory administered from kūfa. 4. al-zubayr b. bakkār’s (d. 256/870) al-akhbār al-muwaffaqiyyāt appears to be the earliest work to mention muṭarrif, but it does not recount his revolt; see ibn bakkār, al-akhbār al-muwaffaqiyyāt, ed. sāmī makkī al-ʿānī, 2nd ed. (beirut: ʿālam al-kutub, 1996), 462. ibn saʿd (d. 230/845) only names four other sons of al-mughīra, two of whom (ʿurwa and ḥamza) are rather well known and in ḥamza’s case connected with muṭarrif’s revolt; ibn saʿd, kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. ʿalī muḥammad ʿumar (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 2001), 8:387–88. the information he provides on them is scarce, however. ʿurwa is mentioned as governor of kūfa, transmitter from his father and “the best of his family” (kāna khayra ahli dhālik al-bayt). the others warrant only a one-liner each, stating that they transmitted from their father. likewise, khalīfa b. khayyāṭ’s (d. 240/854) taʾrīkh, ed. akram ḍiyāʾ al-ʿumarī, 2nd ed. (riyadh: dār ṭayba, 1985), does not mention muṭarrif but talks about ʿurwa as governor of kūfa on three different occasions over a very wide date range that might indicate somewhat jumbled information: once in the year 50/670 (during muʿāwiya’s reign) as successor of his father upon the latter’s death (p. 210), once in 75/694–95 under ʿabd al-malik (p. 294), and once in 95/713–14 under al-walīd (p. 310). alternatives are given in the first two cases, with ziyād b. abīhi the broadly agreed-upon successor of ʿurwa’s father, al-mughīra. the appointment of 75/694–95 is the most supported by the sources overall, although a report in al-balādhurī’s ansāb mentions ʿurwa’s governorship of kūfa before ziyād’s appointment; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. suhayl zakkār and riyāḍ ziriklī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1996), 13:351. no further information is given on ʿurwa in khalīfa’s taʾrīkh. his ṭabaqāt does not mention muṭarrif either and gives no information on the brothers apart from ʿ urwa and ḥamza’s parentage; ibn khayyāṭ, kitāb al-ṭabaqāt, ed. akram ḍiyāʾ al-ʿumarī (baghdad: maṭbaʿat al-ʿānī, 1967), 155. 448 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 449 the­rebellion­of­muṭarrif­b.­al-mughīra­(77/696–97)­according­to­al-ṭabarī5 muṭarrif is first mentioned in the context of shabīb’s khārijite rebellion in the mid-690s ce, during which time the governor of iraq (then based at kūfa), al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf (d. 95/714), appointed muṭarrif as governor of al-madāʾin. when muṭarrif learned that shabīb was approaching the city, he wrote to al-ḥajjāj to ask for reinforcements.6 at some point after the arrival of the reinforcements, shabīb crossed the tigris and reached bahurasīr (western al-madāʾin), whereupon muṭarrif cut the remaining bridge between them. so far, so good. but then the story takes an unexpected turn: muṭarrif asked shabīb to send over some of his companions so that they could study the qurʾān together and debate shabīb’s agenda. shabīb agreed to this, hostages were exchanged, and four days of discussion followed.7 al-ṭabarī preserves two versions of this debate. the first occurs in a short section on muṭarrif that is not part of al-ṭabarī’s main account of the rebellion and consists of the brief statement that muṭarrif and shabīb did not agree on anything.8 the second version of the debate is placed within the main account of muṭarrif’s revolt; it is much more detailed and tells a somewhat different story, as the following will show.9 notably, both reports are narrated on the authority of abū mikhnaf. according to the main account, muṭarrif received shabīb’s envoys and inquired about their beliefs and demands. he was told the following: “we call to the book of god and the sunna of his prophet. we object to the expropriation of the spoils, the failure to apply the ḥudūd, and rule through oppression.”10 muṭarrif agreed wholeheartedly with these (rather general) statements, but an alliance between him and the khārijites ultimately failed because they could not agree on the criteria and mode of election of the caliph. the khawārij insisted that leadership should be held by the most virtuous of men, regardless of his ancestry. muṭarrif, however, advocated for a shūrā (a “consultative council”) like that convened by muḥammad’s second successor, ʿumar i (d. 23/644), on his deathbed in order to choose the new ruler; this shūrā, muṭarrif said, should be restricted to quraysh. he argued that opposition to al-ḥajjāj and the umayyad caliph ʿabd al-malik would garner 5. the main version of the report on muṭarrif’s revolt covers about twenty pages in al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. michael jan de goeje et al., 3 parts in 16 vols. (leiden: brill, 1879–1901), 2:979–1003. a brief account of muṭarrif’s engagement with shabīb is also found earlier in al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:946–48. this brief earlier report mentions the reasoning behind muṭarrif’s decision to revolt (fear of al-ḥajjāj) but does not go into detail regarding the rebellion itself, as the main focus of the account is on shabīb. 6. one of the commanders sent by al-ḥajjāj as backup was sabra b. ʿabd al-raḥmān b. mikhnaf, whose father had died in battle against the azāriqa (al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:855–56). sabra was a second cousin of abū mikhnaf, al-ṭabarī’s source for the muṭarrif account. 7. a similar pattern is apparent in the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj, discussed in this issue by reza huseini. al-ḥārith arrested the delegation that had been sent to him after their debate, and he himself was the rebel (unlike muṭarrif at this stage), but it is worth noting that debate between the opposing parties seems to have been part of the conflict resolution toolkit employed in this period. my thanks to reza for pointing out this commonality. 8. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:947. 9. ibid., 2:983–87. 10. ibid., 2:984. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 449 more support if the people knew that the rebels sought to have the arabs elect al-riḍā min quraysh (‘the approved one from quraysh’).11 the khārijite envoys, for their part, were appalled at this suggestion of a policy change and left muṭarrif. shabīb tried to convince him that quraysh did not have a better claim to rule than anyone else did, but muṭarrif continued to assert election by shūrā and membership of quraysh as the only legitimate criteria. the negotiations with shabīb eventually failed,12 but having been inspired by the insurgents, muṭarrif now felt that he could no longer fake obedience to the umayyads, “these oppressors.”13 this decision is interjected quite abruptly in the story—so far, there has been no indication that muṭarrif was dissatisfied with al-ḥajjāj or ʿabd al-malik. other sources have muṭarrif transmit an account in which he accompanies his father, al-mughīra, to the court of muʿāwiya and which shows al-mughīra to have an ambiguous, if not outright negative, opinion of the caliph.14 but this particular report is not included by al-ṭabarī, and there is no clear explanation for muṭarrif’s sudden dissatisfaction with ʿabd al-malik and al-ḥajjāj in the account of his revolt, either. it should be noted, however, that al-ṭabarī’s narrative does propose a further trigger for muṭarrif’s revolt: even though no alliance was forged between him and shabīb, muṭarrif feared very strongly that al-ḥajjāj would nonetheless punish him for debating with the khārijites. he therefore called his confidants (ahl thiqātihi wa-ahl naṣāʾiḥihi) and informed them of his plan to rebel independently in anticipation of al-ḥajjāj’s reaction. they, too, were afraid of al-ḥajjāj and so advised muṭarrif to leave al-madāʾin. he gathered his men and went to al-daskara, northeast of al-madāʾin, where he finally revealed to them his intentions. the two commanders whom al-ḥajjāj had sent along with some troops to help muṭarrif fight shabīb pretended to agree with him, but they left in secret and brought al-ḥajjāj news of muṭarrif’s uprising.15 these two explanations are not mutually exclusive, but it is possible that they reflect originally separate narratives; the first has muṭarrif in a proactive role, whereas he appears timid and on the defensive in the second. what the accounts of muṭarrif’s rebellion do not state explicitly but what certainly also played a role in kicking off the revolt was timing. the year 77/696–97 saw plenty of upheaval, with the uprising of shabīb in iraq and the continuous insurgency of the azāriqa in iran, which had been going strong for about a decade at that point; there had also been at least one other serious iraqi revolt shortly before the outbreak of muṭarrif’s rebellion.16 this was a period of unrest, and al-ḥajjāj’s attention was split between several different conflicts, meaning that muṭarrif chose a good moment to break with the umayyads. 11. ibid. 12. ibid., 2:985–86. 13. ibid., 2:987. 14. ibn bakkār, akhbār, 462; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. charles pellat (beirut: al-jāmiʿa al-lubnāniyya, 1966–79), 4:338–39. 15. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:986–89. 16. see below. 450 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 451 from al-daskara, muṭarrif set out for al-jibāl in western iran and collected supporters along the way. he first reached ḥulwān; al-ḥajjāj’s governor in the city (suwayd b. ʿabd al-raḥmān al-saʿdī) was unwilling to fight muṭarrif but feared al-ḥajjāj’s wrath and so engaged muṭarrif half-heartedly until they came to an agreement that had muṭarrif move on.17 muṭarrif fought and killed some kurds, then made his way to hamadhān but deliberately avoided entering the territory because the governor was his brother ḥamza, whom he tried to protect from al-ḥajjāj’s anger. however, he petitioned his brother for supplies, which he received, although ḥamza was utterly dismayed at his brother’s antics.18 with good reason, it turns out: when al-ḥajjāj was informed of ḥamza’s support, he ordered ḥamza’s own shurṭa (‘police or security force’) chief to arrest him,19 and ḥamza may have died in prison.20 having moved on from the region of hamadhān, muṭarrif finally reached qum and qāshān, which were considered safe from al-ḥajjāj’s reach.21 from there, muṭarrif sent letters to al-rayy to gather support for his cause, described as opposition to injustice and implementation of properly islamic rule, and a significant number of men joined him. he also sent out his own agents (ʿummāl) to collect taxes.22 the resistance he encountered up to this point was limited, presumably because al-ḥajjāj was busy with shabīb and a large portion of the army under the general al-muhallab was engaged in combating the azraqī khārijites led by qaṭarī b. al-fujāʾa. the lack of local resistance may have been due to the fact that the region was at that time still predominantly non-muslim; to the zoroastrian and christian inhabitants of the area, it probably did not matter who collected the taxes. the accounts of muṭarrif’s activities in this region are almost entirely focused on 17. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:989–91. 18. ibid., 2:991–92. 19. ibid., 2:994–95. 20. as stated explicitly in al-balādhurī, ansāb, 7:401. the other sources do not mention this, however, and at least one report has ḥamza reappear in the rebellion of ibn al-ashʿath. see below. 21. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:992; ṣibt b. al-jawzī, mirʾāt al-zamān, ed. kāmil salmān al-jubūrī et al. (beirut: al-risāla al-ʿālamiyya, 2013), 9:224. the region of qum, in particular, was a popular refuge for rebels and discontented subjects, not least because of its geography: it was a mountainous region, and it was very difficult to retrieve someone who did not want to be found once that person had reached qum’s salt desert. for instance, the banū ashʿar, supporters of the rebellion of ibn al-ashʿath, fled to qum after the revolt’s failure to escape al-ḥajjāj’s wrath and ultimately settled there with the support of the local zoroastrian community. see al-ashʿarī al-qummī, tārīkh-i qum, ed. jalāl al-dīn ṭihrānī (tehran: intishārāt-i tūs, 1982), 242, 245–46, 258–60, 262–65. j. calmard’s entry “ḳum,” in the encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), relates al-ḥajjāj’s persecution of the banū ashʿar to their shīʿī sympathies; the tārīkh-i qum mentions their support for an ʿalid revolt as well (p. 242), but the account is seriously confused (the dating does not work out: the revolt it refers to is that of zayd b. ʿalī [d. 122/740], who rebelled long after al-ḥajjāj’s death in 95/714). later on, however, the tārīkh-i qum itself states specifically that the reason for al-ḥajjāj’s enmity was the tribe’s support of ibn al-ashʿath and that this explanation is to be preferred (p. 264); indeed, it fits the context and timing far better. the work mentions further rebels and people who had fallen foul of the authorities fleeing to qum, such as saʿīd b. jubayr (p. 38) and troops scattered after a battle between al-muhallab and qaṭarī (although qaṭarī’s men are here confused with al-muhallab’s soldiers; pp. 66–67). against this background, it is all the more striking that the work does not mention muṭarrif’s uprising. i owe my insight into the tārīkh-i qum to reza huseini. 22. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:992–94. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 451 his interactions with his supporters and the government armies sent against him, making it difficult to piece together an accurate picture of the situation on the ground. the end, however, came when the governor of iṣfahān eventually asked al-ḥajjāj to send a much larger army against muṭarrif’s troops because of growing support for him. following a long and fierce final battle, muṭarrif was killed and his supporters scattered. in the aftermath of the rebellion, various tribal groups tried—often successfully—to intercede (shafaʿa) for those of their people who had participated in the revolt, while some other survivors enjoyed the support of highly placed individuals and so were given safeconducts.23 these negotiations involved the governors of al-rayy and iṣfahān, who had led the battle against muṭarrif, although in one case al-ḥajjāj appears to have given instructions regarding one of the surviving rebels that meant his request for a safe-conduct was denied; the request was eventually approved when a new governor of al-rayy was appointed.24 these reports indicate that the treatment of rebels was generally within the purview of local governors rather than determined exclusively by the superordinate governor al-ḥajjāj. what­do­we­know­about­muṭarrif? apart from muṭarrif’s rebellion, which the pre-eleventh-century ce works that mention him often do not address,25 he remains a largely obscure figure. he does not appear to have left behind any offspring,26 and little else is known about his personal life.27 muṭarrif’s family belonged to thaqīf and was among the tribal notables of kūfa; his father, al-mughīra, had been muʿāwiya’s governor of the city and was renowned for his fairness. al-mughīra’s sons are likewise described as noble and righteous people.28 the family was of the same tribe as al-ḥajjāj himself, and its umayyad sympathies were well known.29 when al-ḥajjāj came to kūfa to take up his governorship, he gave muṭarrif and his brothers important positions 23. ibid., 2:994–1003; ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, ed. ʿ umar ʿ abd al-salām tadmurī (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1997), 3:467; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 7:403. 24. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:1001–2. 25. al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī are the only pre-eleventh-century ce authors to discuss his rebellion. sources that mention muṭarrif but say nothing about his revolt include ibn bakkār, akhbār; ibn abī al-dunyā, al-ishrāf fī manāzil al-ashrāf, ed. najam ʿabd al-raḥmān khalaf (riyādh: maktabat al-rushd, 1990); and al-masʿūdī, murūj. among the later sources, miskawayh and ibn kathīr are exceptions in passing over muṭarrif’s revolt entirely; in miskawayh’s case, the omission is due to his particular take on muṭarrif’s dealings with shabīb, for which see below. ibn ʿidhārī gives only one line to this rebellion in kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib fī akhbār al-andalus wa-lmaghrib, ed. évariste lévi-provencal and georges s. colin, 3rd ed. (beirut: dār al-thaqāfa, 1983), 1:34, which is probably due to his geographical focus (north africa). the other works considered here that postdate the tenth century ce and address muṭarrif give fairly detailed accounts of his uprising. 26. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 13:352. 27. for the potential issue of his paternity, see below. 28. wellhausen’s pejorative remark that muṭarrif did not resemble his father much (presumably referring here to al-mughīra’s qualities such as loyalty, shrewdness, integrity, and strength of character) is not supported by the sources. j. wellhausen, die religiös-politischen oppositionsparteien im alten islam (berlin: weidmann, 1901), 45. 29. see, e.g., m. a. shaban, islamic history: a new interpretation, vol. 1, a.d. 600–750 (a.h. 132) (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1971), 108: al-mughīra’s “loyalty to the umayyads was almost exemplary.” 452 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 453 precisely because of these factors. muṭarrif was appointed governor over al-madāʾin, his brother ʿurwa governor over kūfa30 and thus al-ḥajjāj’s steward, and his brother ḥamza governor over hamadhān.31 muṭarrif, in particular, is said to have been highly esteemed by al-ḥajjāj32 and his credentials were excellent, as acknowledged by the inhabitants of al-madāʾin among many others.33 all three brothers are said to have done an exemplary job; by all accounts, this was a family whose support of the umayyads had paid off.34 if we investigate muṭarrif’s family further, however, some fissures are revealed. al-mughīra was not quite as exemplary in his loyalty to the umayyads as is sometimes stated. several reports record his critical stance on muʿāwiya and the umayyad regime more generally. as mentioned, one such occasion is narrated on the authority of muṭarrif himself; the report appears already in the earliest source we have for muṭarrif (ibn bakkār’s al-akhbār al-muwaffaqiyāt), and the incident is listed by al-masʿūdī as one factor that led to al-maʾmūn’s decision to have muʿāwiya cursed from the pulpit.35 the evidence for muṭarrif’s brothers is mixed as well. they clearly enjoyed al-ḥajjāj’s favor, at least for a while, and ʿabd al-malik reportedly had a high opinion of ʿurwa b. al-mughīra, in particular.36 but we also have a number of accounts that illustrate the brothers’ contentious relationship with the umayyads generally and with al-ḥajjāj specifically. ʿurwa b. al-mughīra, for instance, is mentioned among the companions of muṣʿab b. al-zubayr, who from the mid-680s ce served as governor of iraq for his brother ʿabd allāh (ibn al-zubayr; d. 72/692), a caliphal contender and a rival of the umayyads. ʿurwa apparently accompanied muṣʿab into the final zubayrid battle against ʿabd al-malik in iraq, at maskin in 71/690–91, which saw the end of muṣʿab.37 this does not fit all that well with the image of a pro-umayyad family. the most damning evidence, however, is an account of al-ḥajjāj beating ʿurwa to death for his perceived disloyalty. ʿabd al-malik had apparently written to ʿurwa and another man to inquire about al-ḥajjāj’s conduct as a governor. the other man showed al-ḥajjāj the letter and let him dictate the reply. ʿurwa, by contrast, replied honestly, and his depiction of al-ḥajjāj was less than flattering. ʿabd al-malik thereupon sent ʿurwa’s letter to al-ḥajjāj, who retaliated by whipping ʿurwa until he died.38 30. there is some confusion over when, exactly, ʿurwa served as governor of the city. see n. 4 above. 31. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 13:351 has ḥamza appointed over the ṣadaqa of kūfa and its environs at some point during al-ḥajjāj’s tenure, but this is a rare variant and of course does not contradict the reports of his governorship of hamadhān. 32. ibn abī al-dunyā, ishrāf, 245. 33. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:979–81. 34. e.g., al-balādhurī, ansāb, 7:397; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:873, 916, 979–81; ibn al-jawzī, al-muntaẓam fī taʾrīkh al-umam wa-l-mulūk, ed. muḥammad ʿabd al-qādir ʿaṭā and muṣṭafā ʿabd al-qādir ʿaṭā (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1992), 6:192–93; ibn al-athīr, kāmil, 3:465; ibn kathīr, al-bidāya wa-l-nihāya, ed. ʿabd allāh b. ʿabd al-muḥsin al-turkī (giza: dār hajr, 1997–99), 12:279, 411; sibt b. al-jawzī, mirʾāt, 9:222. 35. ibn bakkār, akhbār, 462; al-masʿūdī, murūj, 4:338–39. al-masʿūdī explicitly references al-zubayr b. bakkār’s report in his own rendering. for other reports of al-mughīra’s ambivalence regarding the umayyads, see, e.g., al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:38–39. 36. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 7:397, 404. 37. ibn bakkār, akhbār, 439; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:804. 38. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 7:397, 404; 13:351. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 453 it goes without saying that such stories need to be approached with caution. the account of ʿurwa’s killing, in particular, is full of literary motifs and odd plot lines (e.g., why would ʿabd al-malik send ʿurwa’s letter to al-ḥajjāj in view of its contents and the fact that he supposedly held ʿurwa in high esteem?). this is not unexpected, of course, but makes it difficult to weigh the historicity of the account. another report simply has al-ḥajjāj replace ʿurwa as governor of kūfa the year after the failure of muṭarrif’s revolt (78/697–98),39 although it is possible that the whipping episode happened later; as it appears to be unique to al-balādhurī, who does not give a date, it is impossible to tell. according to a late source, ibn kathīr’s bidāya, ʿurwa died in kūfa in 87/706–7 (after the death of ʿabd al-malik), but the source says nothing about any kind of conflict between ʿurwa and al-ḥajjāj.40 yet another account has ʿurwa still alive in 95/713–14 and serving as governor of kūfa.41 there is less explicit information about muṭarrif’s brother ḥamza b. al-mughīra if we leave aside his material support for muṭarrif’s rebellion, which may have been due to brotherly sentiment rather than enthusiasm for the endeavor.42 like muṭarrif, he is portrayed as being afraid of al-ḥajjāj’s notorious temper, which indicates at least some wariness toward ʿabd al-malik’s viceroy.43 other reports depict al-ḥajjāj as suspicious of ḥamza’s loyalties following his appointment as governor.44 long before muṭarrif’s rebellion, ḥamza also reportedly counseled his maternal uncle ʿumar b. saʿd b. abī waqqās against obeying ʿubayd allāh b. ziyād’s order to march against al-ḥusayn, impressing upon him that losing all earthly riches and authority (ʿumar had just been appointed governor by ʿubayd allāh) was preferable to meeting his maker with the blood of the prophet’s grandson on his hands.45 as is well known, ḥamza’s pleas ultimately went unheeded. it is possible that al-ḥajjāj was well aware of the family’s spotty history with the umayyads and sought to neutralize the threat by co-opting the brothers into the system of rule established after ʿabd al-malik’s victory over ibn al-zubayr. the fact that they belonged to his own tribe may have been a deciding factor. but as we have seen, this strategy did not pan out; even if we assume that al-balādhurī’s account of ʿurwa being beaten to death is fictional, muṭarrif and ḥamza eventually turned against al-ḥajjāj. why? 39. ibn al-jawzī, muntaẓam, 6:199. 40. ibn kathīr, bidāya, 12:411. this is the earliest source i have come across that gives a concrete death date for ʿurwa. 41. ibn khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh, 310. 42. as seen earlier, ḥamza was in fact deeply distressed about muṭarrif’s rebellion as he foresaw its bitter end. see the references in the following note. 43. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:991–92; ibn al-jawzī, muntaẓam, 6:192–93; ibn al-athīr, kāmil, 3:467, repeated in al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-ʿarab fī funūn al-adab (cairo: dār al-kutub wa-l-wathāʾiq al-qawmiyya, 1423 [2002–3]), 21:195. 44. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:995; ibn al-athīr, kāmil, 3:467 (repeated in al-nuwayrī, nihāya, 21:195). 45. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:308–9. 454 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 455 the­background­to­muṭarrif’s­rebellion as noted, little research has been conducted on muṭarrif’s uprising. some older works of scholarship mention the revolt but do not analyze it in detail.46 shaban and crone address it, but again only superficially.47 more recent overviews of umayyad or early islamic history, such as those by hawting and kennedy,48 leave it out entirely. views on muṭarrif’s intentions and thus the nature of his rebellion diverge somewhat, which is not surprising given the portrayal of his rebellion in the sources,49 but most studies place him in the context of khārijism, with emphasis on his “piety” a close second. many consider him a straightforward khārijite, or at least an ally and sympathizer.50 some contend that muṭarrif and shabīb shared certain views about the illegitimacy of ʿabd al-malik and al-ḥajjāj, but they do not explicitly call muṭarrif himself a khārijite, although they grant that he may have been motivated by piety (as is also often assumed for the khawārij).51 wellhausen argued that muṭarrif may have had strong khārijite inclinations (“starke charigitische anwandlungen”) but did not act on them because he refused to be subordinate to shabīb. as he did not want to fight shabīb, either, he withdrew from al-madāʾin.52 van vloten is a notable exception in that his very brief reference to muṭarrif’s revolt does not mention the khārijites at all; he describes the rebellion as an attempt to establish just government, the reformatory drive of which was later taken up by the umayyad caliph ʿumar ii, another figure with a reputation for great piety.53 46. ʿa. dixon, in the umayyad caliphate 65–86/684–705: a political study (london: luzac, 1971), 194, gives a brief overview of scholarly opinions on muṭarrif, but he appears to have misunderstood two of the three views he summarizes, those of weil and van vloten. weil did not in fact consider muṭarrif a follower of shabīb (see n. 51 below); dixon used the english translation (which i have not seen) of weil’s originally german work, so perhaps weil’s statements were mistranslated? on van vloten, see below. 47. see below. 48. g. hawting, the first dynasty of islam: the umayyad caliphate ad 661–750 (london: croom helm, 1986); h. kennedy, the prophet and the age of the caliphates, 2nd ed. (harlow: pearson longman, 2004). 49. on this, see the following section. 50. see, e.g., a. dietrich, “al-ḥadjdjādj b. yūsuf,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. (muṭarrif does not have his own entry in the second edition of the encyclopaedia of islam; hopefully one is forthcoming in the third edition); j. givony, “the murjiʾa and the theological school of abū ḥanīfa: a historical and ideological study” (phd thesis, university of edinburgh, 1977), 53, 65; b. spuler, iran in the early islamic period (leiden: brill, 2015), 20; p. crone, slaves on horses: the evolution of the islamic polity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1980), 8, 133; d. pipes, slave soldiers and islam: the genesis of a military system (new haven, ct: yale university press, 1981), 122. 51. g. weil, geschichte der chalifen, vol. 1 (mannheim: friedrich bassermann, 1846), 442–43; dixon, umayyad caliphate, 194–95 (on p. 191, however, dixon also states that muṭarrif’s revolt was “associated with the khārijites,” and he includes muṭarrif in the chapter on khārijite revolts); p. crone and m. hinds, god’s caliph: religious authority in the first centuries of islam (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003), 60–61. 52. wellhausen, oppositionsparteien, 45. wellhausen says nothing more about muṭarrif and does not address his rebellion, either. his das arabische reich does not mention muṭarrif at all. 53. g. van vloten, recherches sur la domination arabe, le chiitisme et les croyances messianiques sous le khalifat des omayades (amsterdam: johannes müller, 1894), 26–27. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 455 the explanation that turns on muṭarrif’s supposed piety is problematic for a number of reasons. piety is not, per se, a reason for rebellion: plenty of other pious people did not turn to rebellion, after all, and the question of the legitimacy of armed resistance against an unjust ruler was hotly debated in scholarly circles.54 more importantly, however, this particular explanation tends to reflect the widespread image of the umayyads as impious and unjust. recent scholarship has called this depiction into question and shown that the umayyads in fact enjoyed the support of many scholars renowned for their piety,55 so “pious opposition” to the umayyads is not self-explanatory. and finally, although muṭarrif is portrayed as a just and honorable man, he is in fact not depicted as exceptionally pious. muṭarrif’s association with khārijism as it is commonly conceived in both sources and scholarship is questionable as well. although he is shown to agree with shabīb’s envoys on a number of points, these are rather general and phrased so as to be acceptable to almost anyone. who would object to opposing tyranny or approve of the expropriation of spoils? in insisting on shūrā and qurashī prerogative, muṭarrif also diverges sharply from khārijite doctrine as presented in the sources. true, the language of muṭarrif’s letters and speeches is indeed “khārijite” in its focus on jihād against oppressors, as demonstrated in this missive to the people of al-rayy: “we summon you to the book of god and the sunnah of his prophet, and to jihād against him who has obstinately rejected the truth, expropriated the spoils, and abandoned the judgment of the book… and no one can obtain god’s good pleasure except by adhering steadfastly to god’s command and waging jihād against god’s enemies.”56 but muṭarrif never proclaims the khārijite lā ḥukma watchword (lā ḥukma illā li-llāh, ‘judgment is god’s alone’), and the foci of his discontent are very clearly al-ḥajjāj and (to a smaller degree) ʿabd al-malik, not his fellow muslims. not a word is said about his declaring them unbelievers. indeed, before his final battle with the syrian troops, when muṭarrif addresses them in hopes of winning them over, he calls them “people of our qibla, people of our religion, people of our daʿwa,”57 and earlier, when he had declared his intention to rebel in front of his men, he had told those who disagreed with him to simply go on their way.58 we hear nothing about his waylaying ordinary people to interrogate them on their religio-political beliefs or about acts of extreme piety; there are no exhortative poems declaring his contempt for the material world, no condemnations of ʿalī or muʿāwiya or the arbitration at ṣiffīn, no references to any khārijite forebears, no secession from a sinful umma—in short, none of the behaviors or beliefs associated with khārijism are readily observable in muṭarrif’s rebellion. that later sources, in particular, nonetheless consider him a khārijite may have to do with an increasingly generalized and stereotyped 54. see, e.g., b. lewis, “on the quietist and activist traditions in islamic political writing,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 49, no. 1 (1986): 141–47; k. abou el fadl, rebellion and violence in islamic law (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001). 55. see, e.g., s. judd, religious scholars and the umayyads: piety-minded supporters of the marwānid caliphate (london: routledge, 2014). 56. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:993; translation by e. k. rowson, the marwānid restoration, vol. 22 of the history of al-ṭabarī, ed. e. yarshater (albany: state university of new york press, 1989), 140. 57. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:998. 58. ibid., 2:988–89. 456 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 457 understanding of khārijism, reflected, for instance, in the definition of the twelfth-century ce scholar al-shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), who held that anyone who rebels against a rightful leader at any point in time is a khārijite.59 muṭarrif’s brief association with shabīb surely did not help his image, either. a more promising angle for understanding the background to muṭarrif’s revolt is suggested in shaban’s work. he argues that muṭarrif, like many other iraqis, was opposed to the umayyad policy of stationing syrians in iraq and to the increasing concentration of authority in the office and person of the caliph. in shaban’s view, muṭarrif’s rebellion pursued the explicit aim of reinstalling the medinan regime that had granted the provinces far-reaching autonomy.60 the problem is that shaban’s interpretation is not all that clearly supported by the passages from al-ṭabarī he cites,61 and none of the other sources considered here support it either. shaban himself states a little later that the establishment of a permanent syrian garrison in iraq happened in reaction to muṭarrif and other iraqi revolts;62 indeed, the first syrian troops to be used in iraq were not an established garrison but a strike force against shabīb, which was deployed in the year of muṭarrif’s rebellion.63 likewise, he shows that the “increasingly powerful office of the amīr al-muʾminīn” is a development that stands at the end of ʿabd al-malik’s reign rather than marking the immediate post-fitna years.64 shaban’s claim that muṭarrif and shabīb had nothing in common65 is bold at first sight; rhetorically, muṭarrif closely resembles shabīb and other khārijites apart from his insistence on a shūrā to elect a qurashī caliph. this rhetoric reflects narrative standardization, however, in that the issues raised—the call to the book of god and the sunna, resistance to the expropriation of the spoils and unjust rule, a focus on jihād—are repeated over and over again by scores of khārijite and other rebels of the early islamic period.66 if we understand such statements as opposition to centralized rule and to a syrian presence in iraq, we need to explain why rebels long before and long after the reforms of ʿabd al-malik took effect expressed themselves in exactly the same language (or are said to have done so). shaban’s depiction of muṭarrif’s intentions nonetheless nudges us in a fruitful direction. particularly helpful is his contention that the revolt of another iraqi tribal notable and former governor of khurāsān, yazīd b. al-muhallab, in 102/720 reflects the same resentment as that expressed by muṭarrif.67 in fact, both of these revolts share similarities with other 59. al-shahrastānī, kitāb al-milal wa-l-niḥal, ed. muḥammad sayyid kīlānī (cairo: muṣṭafā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1961), 1:114. 60. shaban, islamic history, 108, 125. 61. that is, al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:984, 988, 993. 62. shaban, islamic history, 109–13. 63. crone, slaves, 228–29. 64. shaban, islamic history, 109–13; the quotation is on p. 113. 65. ibid., 108. 66. crone and hinds, god’s caliph, 58–96; abou el fadl, rebellion, 129; hagemann, khārijites, 98, 198, and n. 174 thereto. 67. shaban, islamic history, 125. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 457 such rebellions that point to a common pattern. scholarship has so far not made these connections explicit, so the following section will be dedicated to drawing them out.68 tribal­networks­of­rebellion? one of al-balādhurī’s reports states unequivocally that muṭarrif was not a khārijite but rather of the same opinion as those qurrāʾ (qurʾān reciters, or perhaps more generally “men of religion”) who participated in the rebellion of ibn al-ashʿath at the turn of the eighth century ce.69 dixon picked up on this point, but he focused on the qurrāʾ part, which led him to conclude that muṭarrif was a “fanatical muslim who wanted to reject the oppressors of the pious.”70 this reading of muṭarrif is not sustainable. the reference to ibn al-ashʿath, i would argue, is more significant for our understanding of muṭarrif’s rebellion. muṭarrif died in 77/697 and thus cannot have been a participant in ibn al-ashʿath’s rebellion, but there are a number of commonalities between muṭarrif, ibn al-ashʿath, and ibn al-muhallab. in each case we have a tribal notable with a strong following among the iraqis (some of them tribal notables themselves71) and an eastern focus, a former pillar of the establishment and a protégé or ally of al-ḥajjāj from an eminent family, who turns or is turned (depending on the reading) against the very system that put him in his prominent position in the first place. one marker of this connection is a considerable overlap in terms of personnel, which illuminates yet another connection that actually predates muṭarrif’s rebellion significantly: as we saw above, muṭarrif’s brother ʿurwa had been a companion of muṣʿab b. al-zubayr, and some of muṭarrif’s followers, such as al-ḥajjāj b. jāriya al-khathʿamī72 and al-naḍr b. ṣāliḥ al-ʿabsī, had also fought for muṣʿab.73 they subsequently went on to support muṭarrif, and some of them further moved on to ibn al-ashʿath; ibn jāriya, for instance, was one of his commanders at the final battle between ibn al-ashʿath and al-ḥajjāj at dayr jamājim.74 he must have survived, as he then reappears among the troops of yazīd b. al-muhallab in 98/716–17 (before the outbreak of yazīd’s rebellion) when the latter was campaigning in jurjān and ṭabaristān.75 muṭarrif’s brother ḥamza is named among the followers of ibn 68. dixon in umayyad caliphate, 194, states that van vloten considered muṭarrif in the context of the revolts of other tribal leaders, but although the latter’s work discusses ibn al-ashʿath immediately before turning to muṭarrif, he does not draw a connection between the two or between muṭarrif and other such rebellions. 69. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 7:404; see also p. 395, 397. 70. dixon, umayyad caliphate, 194. 71. this applies to muṭarrif’s companion abū zuhayr al-naḍr b. ṣāliḥ al-ʿabsī, for instance, a descendant of the famous pre-islamic ʿabsī leader zuhayr b. jadhīma (ṣibt b. al-jawzī, mirʾāt, 9:222) and on whose authority much of abū mikhnaf’s account of muṭarrif’s rebellion in al-ṭabarī is transmitted. 72. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:773–74. 73. he was part of the zubayrid troops who fought the azāriqa at jayy (iṣfahān) in 68/687–88. ibid., 2:764. 74. ibid., 2:1076; al-dhahabī, taʾrīkh al-islām, ed. ʿ umar ʿ abd al-salām tadmurī (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1987–2000), 6:10. 75. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:1319–20. 458 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 459 al-ashʿath in at least one account.76 yet another former supporter of muṭarrif, bukayr b. hārūn al-bajalī, may also have been involved with ibn al-ashʿath’s rebellion.77 ibn al-ashʿath himself had fought alongside muṣʿab against the pro-ʿalid rebel al-mukhtār (d. 67/687) in the mid-680s ce.78 at the end of the chain, a portion of ibn al-ashʿath’s supporters and family members is found in the rebel army of yazīd b. al-muhallab twenty years later.79 such patterns are very common beyond the context of muṭarrif’s revolt. ibrāhīm b. al-ashtar al-nakhāʿī, for instance, had fought for al-mukhtār before he joined the zubayrids and died alongside muṣʿab in battle against the umayyads in 71/691.80 his son later participated in the uprising of yazīd b. al-muhallab.81 muṭarrif’s rebellion fits into the same framework as the revolts of ibn al-ashʿath and yazīd, so it makes sense to explain it in similar terms as well. the only monograph-length study of ibn al-ashʿath’s rebellion in western scholarship was published in 1977 and makes much of the support he received from the qurrāʾ, who are held responsible for the religious “radicalization” of his program.82 more recent scholarship has argued against this view and focuses on issues such as syrian-iraqi rivalries and al-ḥajjāj’s reduction of military stipends.83 the revolt of yazīd b. al-muhallab has been interpreted along the same lines;84 a monograph-length study of his rebellion remains a desideratum. the issue of military pay, in particular, appears to have been a major factor in the rebellion of another iraqi tribal notable against al-ḥajjāj shortly before muṭarrif’s revolt—that of ibn al-jārūd, which culminated in the battle of rustaqābādh. again, some of ibn al-jārūd’s supporters and family members later reappear among ibn al-ashʿath’s rebels.85 76. r. sayed, die revolte des ibn al-ashʿaṯ und die koranleser: ein beitrag zur religionsund sozialgeschichte der frühen umayyadenzeit (freiburg: klaus schwarz, 1977), 240. we hear nothing about how he managed to escape his prison in hamadhān, however, and as we saw, another report has him die there. 77. ibn khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh, 288 states that he was killed in 82/701–2 by qutayba b. muslim. qutayba had fought against ibn al-ashʿath, and ibn khayyāṭ has this as the year in which the final battles between ibn al-ashʿath and al-ḥajjāj’s troops took place. the passage in question comes at the end of a longer section on ibn al-ashʿath’s uprising and those who participated in it. bukayr’s killing is mentioned in the immediately following brief section on qutayba’s campaigns against another rebel, ʿamr b. abī al-ṣalt. this ʿamr can presumably be identified as ʿumar b. abī al-ṣalt b. kanāra, the grandson of an iranian notable who came to an agreement with the muslim conquerors in 31/651–52. as part of this peace treaty, kanāra’s son abū al-ṣalt was given to the muslims as a hostage. he was later manumitted, and the family may have retained (the memory of) its pre-islamic status: abū al-ṣalt’s son ʿumar is called a dihqān in al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh. ʿumar rebelled against the umayyads and in 82/701 took al-rayy, where he was joined by the remnants of ibn al-ashʿath’s troops, possibly including bukayr, after their defeat at maskin in the same year. ʿumar’s revolt was suppressed by qutayba b. muslim, and the survivors fled to sīstān. see al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:2886–87 and 2:1019–20, 1118–19. 78. l. veccia vaglieri, “ibn al-ashʿath,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 79. crone, slaves, 111; sayed, revolte, 363, 366. 80. e. daniel, “ibrāhīm b. al-ashtar,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. k. fleet et al. (leiden: brill online). 81. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:1397. 82. sayed, revolte, e.g., 213, 342–48. 83. hawting, first dynasty, 67–69; c. e. bosworth, sistan under the arabs (rome: ismeo, 1968), 60. 84. kennedy, prophet, 105–8. 85. crone, slaves, 115. on ibn al-jārūd, see also petra sijpesteijn’s contribution in this issue. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 459 compared to muṣʿab’s activities and the rebellions of ibn al-ashʿath and yazīd, muṭarrif’s revolt is more poorly documented, but the outlined patterns indicate that it fits into a similar framework. crone called this confluence of protagonists a “muddle [that] culminates in the muṭarrif affair where all the participants are brought together in unlikely constellations.”86 it appears, however, that these constellations are not so much unlikely as they are evidence of a similarity of grievances, reactions, and aims. muṭarrif’s rebellion is not coherent in the khārijite setting in which it is usually perceived, but it fits seamlessly into the context of iraqi ashrāfī revolts of the marwānid era. this point illustrates the importance of looking beyond standardized pious rhetoric, especially in the case of “khārijite” rebellions. finally, muṣʿab’s tenure in iraq has also not been subject to in-depth research yet; further study may reveal similar patterns and perhaps suggest a recasting of his battles against ʿabd al-malik not just as part of the overall zubayrid-marwānid conflict, but as an expression of specifically iraqi/eastern interests as well. historiographical­observations there is a lot to unpack in the muṭarrif story from a historiographical point of view, both because the accounts are rife with topoi and literary devices and because the sources differ sometimes substantially in how they portray his revolt. previous studies of muṭarrif’s revolt, however brief, are usually based on al-ṭabarī and/or al-balādhurī’s account, with the latter being less prominent. a historiographical investigation of these two narratives has not been undertaken yet; later sources are usually not even taken into account. this is unfortunate because a diachronic analysis of the muṭarrif story reveals interesting patterns and breaks alike. a full study of the revolt’s historiography is beyond the scope of this paper, so the following will focus on some of the major features of and variations in the representation of muṭarrif’s rebellion. the main point of contention seems to have been the question of muṭarrif’s khārijism. the spectrum of opinions displayed by the sources ranges from a clear pronouncement of his khārijite affiliation to an equally clear denial,87 with many less explicit accounts somewhere in between. let us begin with the two earliest comprehensive portrayals of muṭarrif’s uprising, those of al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī. muṭarrif’s affiliation with khārijism is somewhat ambiguous in al-ṭabarī’s version. as we saw, muṭarrif is shown to have agreed with the khārijites on all but one major point, and he is made to express himself in paradigmatically khārijite language. al-ṭabarī’s account also displays more subtle ways of associating muṭarrif with khārijism, such as the reference to al-daskara as the place where he declared his rebellion openly: shabīb had just passed through it, and the town had a reputation as khārijite territory well into the ninth century ce.88 moreover, al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh places the account 86. crone, slaves, 229. 87. muṭarrif a khārijite: sibt b. al-jawzī, mirʾāt, 9:213; implied in ibn al-athīr, kāmil, 3:467–68; al-nuwayrī, nihāya, 21:196 (muṭarrif’s story concludes with “thus end the reports on the khārijites”). muṭarrif not a khārijite: al-balādhurī, ansāb, 7:397, 404; miskawayh, tajārib al-umam, ed. abū al-qāsim imāmī, 2nd ed. (tehran: surūsh, 2000), 2:301. 88. a. a. duri, “daskara,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 460 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 461 of muṭarrif’s revolt directly after the death of shabīb and before the final remarks on the defeat of the last azraqī faction of the khawārij, which implies a khārijite context for his rebellion. on the other hand, muṭarrif’s commitment to shūrā and qurashī prerogative distinguishes him very clearly from shabīb and the khawārij in general. most importantly, al-ṭabarī’s account never calls him a khārijite explicitly. muṭarrif does not declare the lā ḥukma slogan, he is not depicted as particularly pious, he is not joined by and does not join other khārijite groups, and in the shorter version of the muṭarrif story shabīb is said to repudiate any obligations between them when it becomes clear that muṭarrif—described here as the only political actor able to frustrate shabīb’s plans—does not agree with him.89 moreover, having heard of the battle between shabīb and al-ḥajjāj in kūfa, muṭarrif inquires about the outcome with one of his men, who replies that he “was hoping that shabīb would win; even if he was in error, he would be killing another in error [al-ḥajjāj].” the implication of this account is that muṭarrif shares that view.90 there is also a narrative shift in the accounts that discuss muṭarrif’s interactions with the khārijites at some length: instead of stressing the similarities between muṭarrif and shabīb, they foreground the one issue on which they disagree, namely, the correct election process for the legitimate leader; muṭarrif’s view here reflects the broad sunnī consensus of later periods. al-ṭabarī’s version emphasizes that muṭarrif himself recognized that shabīb would never follow him because of their differences on the question of legitimate leadership.91 his khārijism is thus called into question and at least a partial vindication of his revolt is attempted. al-balādhurī’s portrayal of muṭarrif illustrates this tendency even more clearly. his account is similar to al-ṭabarī’s in terms of broad outline and chronology, but al-balādhurī includes a number of elements that are entirely missing from al-ṭabarī, while dropping others that al-ṭabarī chose to mention. their material is also transmitted on different authorities: al-ṭabarī uses abū mikhnaf (d. 157/774) almost exclusively, whereas al-balādhurī names several authorities, especially ibn al-kalbī (d. 204 or 206/819 or 821), who, however, seems to have relied on abū mikhnaf. the reports exhibit telling differences that may be attributed to the generations of abū mikhnaf or ibn al-kalbī but are more likely the result of distinct authorial choices on the part of al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī. al-balādhurī clearly had access to at least some of abū mikhnaf’s material, as he quotes the latter in both the futūḥ al-buldān and the ansāb, but it is equally clear that he chose not to use much of this material when discussing subjects such as early khārijism, which in al-ṭabarī’s work is largely covered on the authority of abū mikhnaf. al-balādhurī’s account lacks many of the rhetorical features employed by al-ṭabarī, such as muṭarrif’s speeches and letters, which, as demonstrated earlier, are really quite khārijite in tone. what al-balādhurī’s portrayal, like al-ṭabarī’s, does underline is muṭarrif’s 89. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:947–48. 90. ibid., 2:992; the translation is rowson’s in marwānid restoration, 139. 91. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:987. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 461 insistence on shūrā and qurashī leadership.92 the effect is that muṭarrif’s alleged khārijism appears even more muted in al-balādhurī’s account than it does in al-ṭabarī’s. in fact, as noted, al-balādhurī preserves a statement that specifically denies muṭarrif’s khārijism and connects him to a later ashrāfī rebellion: “some people said that muṭarrif held the same views as the khawārij, but this is not true. he held the same views as those of the qurrāʾ who rebelled with ibn al-ashʿath.”93 the ansāb’s account is also keen to stress that al-ḥajjāj is ultimately to blame for the disaster that was muṭarrif’s revolt. episodes such as al-ḥajjāj’s gruesome murder of muṭarrif’s brother ʿurwa paint him in a terrible light. moreover, the story of muṭarrif’s rebellion proper begins with a report in which al-ḥajjāj implies that ʿabd al-malik may be more beloved than the prophets. muṭarrif is outraged and calls al-ḥajjāj an unbeliever whose killing is lawful. a few lines down, another report has al-ḥajjāj state unambiguously that ʿabd al-malik is more beloved by god than the prophets were. muṭarrif is shown to reject the words, but instead of confronting al-ḥajjāj, he just carries on “refuting what must be refuted” (inkār al-munkar), that is, living a righteous life. this version thus distances him from his more “khārijite” reaction in the first report, and the account accordingly concludes that muṭarrif was not a khārijite.94 needless to say, the impression of al-ḥajjāj created by these accounts is highly unfavorable. that this is intentional is indicated by the fact that both episodes—al-ḥajjāj’s killing muṭarrif’s brother and declaring ʿabd al-malik superior to the prophets—are unique to al-balādhurī. given the length of al-ṭabarī’s account of muṭarrif and the fact that the material was most likely available to him, it is striking that these stories are largely absent from his taʾrīkh. the report of al-ḥajjāj’s killing ʿurwa, for instance, is quoted by al-balādhurī on the authority of ibn al-kalbī > abū mikhnaf. al-ṭabarī does not include this episode even though he relies exclusively on abū mikhnaf for the story of muṭarrif’s rebellion, as we have seen, which again implies deliberate authorial choice. al-ṭabarī does stress repeatedly that al-ḥajjāj was widely feared because of his harshness and that this fear caused otherwise good people to make hasty, unwise decisions. but al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh emphasizes the importance of keeping community and empire together, and so the framing of muṭarrif's rebellion is different in the two works. al-balādhurī is much more apologetic about muṭarrif’s actions and essentially dilutes—or occasionally outright denies—muṭarrif’s khārijism. placement, too, is important here: unlike al-ṭabarī, al-balādhurī includes muṭarrif’s rebellion in his section on al-ḥajjāj (min akhbār al-ḥajjāj) rather than in the following chapter on khārijism during ʿabd al-malik’s reign. the notion that al-balādhurī’s and al-ṭabarī’s accounts of muṭarrif are largely the same95 is thus correct only if we consider the basic information and sequence of events alone. perhaps the most intriguing case among our sources, however, is that of miskawayh, who solved the problem of muṭarrif’s rebellion in a rather unique way. the title of his 92. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 7:400. 93. ibid., 7:404; see also p. 397. 94. ibid., 7:397. 95. as maintained by rowson, marwānid restoration, 128, n. 475; dixon, umayyad caliphate, 191. 462 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 463 account already indicates his approach: “the stratagem of muṭarrif with which he deceived shabīb until he had diverted him from his course” (makīdat li-l-muṭarrif b. al-mughīra kāda bihā shabīban ḥattā ḥabasahu ʿan wajhihi).96 miskawayh’s narrative follows the others as far as muṭarrif’s asking shabīb for envoys to hold a debate. he mentions the drawn-out discussion and reports that the two sides disagreed on everything. this is where it gets really interesting, because in miskawayh’s version shabīb then realizes that muṭarrif’s request for a debate had been only a ruse to delay the khārijites until the forces deployed by al-ḥajjāj could catch up to them, whereupon he leaves with due haste.97 the entire remainder of muṭarrif’s story, most significantly his rebellion, is absent from miskawayh’s work, which also means that there is nothing on muṭarrif’s brothers other than a short reference to ʿurwa as al-ḥajjāj’s deputy in kūfa and as the commander of his troops during the prolonged fight against shabīb.98 miskawayh thus casts muṭarrif as an explicit opponent of the khārijites and an ally of al-ḥajjāj. most sources after miskawayh tend to follow the main strands of the muṭarrif tradition as found in al-ṭabarī rather than in al-balādhurī. ibn kathīr follows miskawayh in that he does not address muṭarrif’s revolt at all and renders the brothers as supporters of the umayyads.99 overall, however, later sources seem to be more comfortable with presenting muṭarrif as a khārijite than even al-ṭabarī was; ṣibt b. al-jawzī, for instance, announces muṭarrif’s rebellion with the words “in this year muṭarrif rebelled against al-ḥajjāj, repudiated ʿabd al-malik, and followed khārijism” (wa-fīhā kharaja muṭarrif b. al-mughīra b. shuʿba wa-khalaʿa ʿabd al-malik wa-raʾā raʾy al-khawārij).100 that muṭarrif’s religio-political stance and legacy were uncertain is further indicated by an intriguing report transmitted by both ibn al-athīr and al-nuwayrī. according to this report, al-ḥajjāj claimed that muṭarrif was actually the son not of al-mughīra but of maṣqala b. sabra al-shaybānī.101 understanding the significance of this statement requires some knowledge of arab tribal relations and early khārijite history. as mentioned above, muṭarrif’s family and al-ḥajjāj belonged to the same tribe, thaqīf, which belonged to qays ʿaylān. the shaybānīs belonged to bakr b. wāʾil, which, in turn, was part of the rabīʿa confederation. the statement attributed to al-ḥajjāj draws attention to the fact that there were plenty of rabīʿa tribesmen among the khārijites; the shaybānīs, in particular, were notorious for producing khārijites (including shabīb). qays ʿaylān, by contrast, was not known for khārijite sympathies. the twofold implication of the claim is that muṭarrif was indeed a khārijite and that he therefore cannot have been a member of thaqīf. this 96. miskawayh, tajārib, 2:301. 97. ibid., 2:301–2. 98. ibid., 2:281–82, 310. 99. ibn kathīr, bidāya, 12:261, 271, 279. 100. ṣibt b. al-jawzī, mirʾāt, 9:213; the account of the rebellion begins on p. 222. 101. ibn al-athīr, kāmil, 3:467–68; al-nuwayrī, nihāya, 21:196. al-nuwayrī’s account of muṭarrif, including his alleged shaybānī paternity, is almost verbatim the same as ibn al-athīr’s and so does not represent an independent source. maṣqala b. sabra is otherwise unknown, as far as i can tell; the key point here is his particular tribal membership. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 463 particular way of associating muṭarrif with khārijism, or perhaps rather with rebellion, is found in only one earlier source. al-balādhurī mentions a conflict between al-mughīra and maṣqala b. sabra over a slave girl, of which he transmits different versions. among these, one report states that al-ḥajjāj claimed that muṭarrif was in fact maṣqala’s son and thus of bakr b. wāʾil instead of thaqīf because of his rebellion against the government (law kāna min thaqīf lam yakhruj ʿalā al-sulṭān); khārijites are not expressly mentioned here.102 another variant, however, which is told at a different point in the text of the ansāb, says that maṣqala’s former slave girl was the mother of ʿurwa b. al-mughīra, not of muṭarrif. but ʿurwa’s paternity is not questioned, and in any case this version does not affect muṭarrif’s tribal membership.103 al-ṭabarī, despite his detailed rendering of muṭarrif’s rebellion, does not include this story. in al-balādhurī’s ansāb, it is not told in the context of muṭarrif’s revolt. but in both ibn al-athīr’s and al-nuwayrī’s works it carries the specific reference to khārijism and concludes the section on muṭarrif, a placement that further underlines his association with the khawārij. conclusion­ this article has sought to make two main points. the first, and major, one pertains to our understanding of khārijism and its markers in the early islamic period. the second point, a corollary of the first, entails the recontextualization of the case study of this paper as belonging to a different “category” of rebellion and in the process draws attention to personal/personnel links between various ashrāfī revolts that indicate larger historical patterns and processes at play. was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra a khārijite? i would contend that the answer depends entirely on what we understand khārijism to be. as noted earlier, khārijism seems to be something of a catch-all term that may not hold up under close scrutiny. on a very basic level, virtually all revolts labeled khārijite appear to have been motivated by resentment of a government considered unjust, and in that sense muṭarrif was, perhaps, indeed a khārijite. but this very basic definition would apply to almost all rebellions, which renders the category pointless, and the use of “khārijite” as a blanket term also obscures the different motivations behind many of these revolts. two factors have contributed to the term’s conceptual fuzziness. first, the sources’ employment of certain standard phrases and images implies a false continuity from one revolt to the next. the call to the book of god and the sunna of muḥammad and the objections to the misuse of spoils and unjust rule are khārijite fundamentals, but this is also standard rebel language in the early islamic period and does not say much about the specific ideological stance of particular rebels, all of whom had their own ideas of what they meant by these slogans.104 the same goes for muṭarrif’s call to “al-riḍā,” which in umayyad times 102. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 13:349. 103. ibid., 7:397. elsewhere, however, he states that ʿurwa’s mother was the same as his brother ḥamza’s, namely, ḥafṣa bt. saʿd b. abī waqqāṣ; ibid., 13:351. 104. see above, n. 66. 464 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 465 was a common reference, usually in combination with the call for shūrā.105 moreover, the main points made by shabīb’s khārijites with which muṭarrif agreed—properly islamic rule, opposition to injustice, fair use of the spoils—are not actually offensive, let alone heretical. it is thus necessary to look beyond the particular language used and the sentiments invoked. second, heresiographical categories and distinctions crystallized only much later, well beyond the ninth century ce. there is a well-known tendency in the source material, however, to apply these categories and distinctions to much earlier figures and contexts as well, even though they often fit these only uneasily. that “khārijite” came to mean “rebel” in general further complicated the situation. in light of all this, then, how useful is the term “khārijite” for analyzing rebellion in the early islamic period? if we want to understand what khārijism actually was (or was not), a useful first step may be to distinguish between two broad phenomena that overlap only in part. the first is khārijism as a pietist intellectual tradition that considered strict adherence to the word of god the sole basis for a just society and therefore condemned what it saw as the corruption of that ideal by the rulers of the day. adherents of this tradition were usually quietist, if not always pacifist, and moved in the same or similar circles as other scholars of their time, as part of the “general religious movement,” in watt’s term.106 the second phenomenon consists of a wide variety of violent uprisings directed against early islamic authorities, all labeled “khārijite” by the sources. these two forms of khārijism (“intellectual”/“ideological” vs. “historical”) overlap in part, but the extent to which they tend to be conflated uncritically in sources and scholarship alike has had problematic results, not least because it automatically ascribes the same religious motivation to highly diverse phenomena.107 what we need is an extensive reevaluation of khārijism, and for this goal, detailed studies of the second (“historical”) phenomenon appear more promising. these will require comprehensive investigation of the sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and prosopographical contexts of individual “khārijite” rebellions, instead of focusing mainly or exclusively on the “sectarian” issue; as argued above, militant piety may sometimes have been a contributing factor, but only rarely was it the sole reason for a rebellion. this approach is particularly important in the case of revolts that are difficult to categorize, of which muṭarrif’s was far from the only one. the uprising of al-khirrīt b. rāshid against ʿalī b. abī ṭālib, for instance, similarly bears many of the hallmarks of khārijism but does not fit the pattern in other ways. like muṭarrif, al-khirrīt called for a shūrā, and he was a tribal leader as well.108 wilkinson called his rebellion a khārijite revolt “of the wrong type” (from an ibāḍī 105. p. crone, “on the meaning of the ʿ abbasid call to al-riḍā,” in the islamic world from classical to modern times: essays in honor of bernard lewis, ed. c. e. bosworth et al., 95–111 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1989). of note, yazīd b. al-muhallab, too, called for al-riḍā and shūrā, as did ibn al-zubayr and the rebels al-mukhtār and al-ḥārith b. surayj (for the latter, see huseini’s contribution in this issue). see ibid., 97–98. 106. w. m. watt, the formative period of islamic thought (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1973). figures such as the famous scholar jābir b. zayd, who is claimed by both ibāḍīs (who consider him one of their first imāms) and (proto-)sunnīs, is a good example of this phenomenon. 107. for a more detailed discussion of this point, see hagemann and verkinderen, “kharijism,” 501–2. 108. for an overview, see c. pellat, “al-khirrīt,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; for a more detailed al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 465 perspective, presumably),109 but al-khirrīt’s case may warrant reassessment, too. what does a khārijite revolt “of the right kind” look like outside the ibāḍī ideal type? indeed, the main question is whether we can identify particular patterns or criteria that distinguish “khārijite” rebellions from other revolts, and here the study of socioeconomic and prosopographical contexts is particularly important. my reexamination of muṭarrif’s rebellion, though a single case study, has shown how fruitful this approach can be. i have argued that his uprising makes more sense in the context of the iraqi ashrāfī revolts of the late first/seventh and early second/eighth centuries; its miscategorization as a khārijite revolt is useful in that it allows us to begin narrowing down what khārijism was or was not, while simultaneously making suggestions about other categories of rebellion. such analyses should be expanded.110 the fact that muṭarrif’s rebellion, but also the one led by al-khirrīt, for instance, can simultaneously look like a khārijite as well as an ashrāfī revolt has to do, on the one hand, with historiographical patterning and authorial choices: muṭarrif’s khārijism can be muted or enhanced by a particular phrasing or placement, and the story seems to be at least as much about the figure of al-ḥajjāj as focal point (and instigator?) of iraqi complaints as it is about muṭarrif himself. on the other hand, the ambiguous appearance of such revolts is also a result of the very real overlap of people and networks of rebellion. these might indicate shared grievances that were and remained salient well beyond the contexts of individual revolts. studies such as that pursued here might thus be able to both clarify some of the terminological and contextual complexities in rebellion narratives and give us further insight into power structures and struggles as they pertained to early islamic society more generally. treatment, see j. c. wilkinson, ibāḍism: origins and early development in oman (oxford: oxford university press, 2010), 145–47. 109. wilkinson, ibāḍism, 145. 110. my hamburg project studies four such “categories” (ashrāfī, khārijite, pro-ʿalid, and non-muslim/ mixed rebellions). over the next several years, we aim to hone in on precisely such personal, tribal, regional, economic, and other connections as indicators of shared interests, ways of expressing dissent, and (self-) positioning within power structures. 466 • hannah-lena hagemann al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? • 467 bibliography sources al-ashʿarī al-qummī. tārīkh-i qum. edited by jalāl al-dīn ṭihrānī. tehran: intishārāt-i tūs, 1982. al-balādhurī. ansāb al-ashrāf. edited by suhayl zakkār and riyāḍ ziriklī. beirut: dār al-fikr, 1996. al-dhahabī. taʾrīkh al-islām. edited by ʿumar ʿabd al-salām tadmurī. beirut: dār al-kitāb 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pipes, d. slave soldiers and islam: the genesis of a military system. new haven, ct: yale university press, 1981. rowson, e. k., trans. the marwānid restoration. vol. 22 of the history of al-ṭabarī, edited by e. yarshater. albany: state university of new york press, 1989. sayed, r. die revolte des ibn al-ashʿaṯ und die koranleser: ein beitrag zur religionsund sozialgeschichte der frühen umayyadenzeit. freiburg: klaus schwarz, 1977. shaban, m. a. islamic history: a new interpretation. vol. 1, a.d. 600–750 (a.h. 132). cambridge: cambridge university press, 1971. spuler, b. iran in the early islamic period. leiden: brill, 2015. van vloten, g. recherches sur la domination arabe, le chiitisme et les croyances messianiques sous le khalifat des omayades. amsterdam: johannes müller, 1894. watt, w. m. the formative period of islamic thought. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1973. weil, g. geschichte der chalifen. vol. 1. mannheim: friedrich bassermann, 1846. wellhausen, j. das arabische reich und sein sturz. berlin: georg reimer, 1902. ———. die religiös-politischen oppositionsparteien im alten islam. berlin: weidmann, 1901. wilkinson, j. c. ibāḍism: origin and early development in oman. oxford: oxford university press, 2010. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 554-572 abstract even though there is a consensus among muslim scholars that rebellion without valid grounds is not acceptable, they have disagreed on the permissibility of rebellion against an unjust ruler. abū ḥanīfa has a pivotal place in these debates, as he is the eponym of a law school that first dedicated a special chapter to rebellion (baghy) in its legal texts. interestingly, however, the views attributed to him on the topic are inconsistent: some sources claim that abū ḥanīfa acknowledged the legitimacy of even an unjust ruler’s rule on the grounds of avoiding unrest (fitna). other sources argue that he supported armed struggle against unjust rulers to fulfill the principle of al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar (enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong). abū ḥanīfa’s connection to some of the major revolts of his day against the umayyads or the abbasids is also contested. the aim of this paper is to collect and evaluate the diverse references to abū ḥanīfa’s views on rebellion in a variety of sources and to examine the motives behind these conflicting narratives. in conclusion, i argue that a quietist image of abū ḥanīfa seems to have gained popularity over time, but it is outweighed by reports about abū ḥanīfa’s support for movements against unjust rulers. the legality of rebellions raised fierce debates among early muslim scholars because rebels often made religious claims to power in addition to articulating political and social grievances. when the islamic sciences started to crystallize in the second century ah and the first legal and theological texts were written, muslim society had already witnessed some serious ʿalid and kharijite resistance movements. this period also portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion: the case of abū ḥanīfa* ayşegül şimşek marmara university (aysegul.simsek@marmara.edu.tr) * i would like to thank the emco team and the participants of the “acts of rebellions and revolts in the early islamic empire” workshop for their valuable contributions to this article. i owe a debt of gratitude to petra sijpesteijn, hannah-lena hagemann, and philip grant for their insightful comments on an early draft. finally, i am grateful for the editors’ and anonymous reviewers’ efforts, comments, and the additional sources they recommended for improving this article. © 2022 ayşegül şimşek. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:aysegul.simsek%40marmara.edu.tr?subject= 555 • ayşegül şimşek al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) saw the end of umayyad rule and the transfer of the caliphate to the abbasids. naturally, people sought answers about the legality of rebellions against unjust rulers from authoritative figures such as the kufan scholar abū ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), eponym of the ḥanafī school of law. however, abū ḥanīfa has been ascribed various and sometimes contradictory opinions about rebellions. subsequent scholars updated abū ḥanīfa’s depiction and his supposed views on how to deal with an unjust ruler to fit the debates of their own times and their own agendas. as a consequence, it is not possible to retrieve abū ḥanīfa’s actual views on the legality of rebellions against unjust rulers with absolute certainty, but it is possible to reconstruct how the views attributed to him evolved over time. that is what this article aims to do. the earliest references to rebellion in islamic law texts can be found in the discussions of baghy. even though modern scholarship generally translates baghy simply as rebellion for practical purposes, it has a more specific meaning in the terminology of islamic law. it refers to the status of a muslim group that starts a war against the imam assuming that it has a just cause although in fact it does not.1 starting with al-ḥasan al-shaybānī’s (d. 189/805) kitāb al-aṣl, baghy was formulated as an independent category and had a separate chapter in ḥanafī fiqh texts.2 kitāb al-aṣl is one of the earliest islamic legal texts, and in it al-shaybānī aims to collect his master abū ḥanīfa’s teachings. ḥanafī scholars regard it as one of the key sources on abū ḥanīfa’s legal opinions. of course, al-shaybānī’s own contribution to the text is undeniable. but even though we cannot attribute the whole content of kitāb al-aṣl to abū ḥanīfa, the existence of a special chapter on baghy in it at least indicates that rebellion was a topic discussed in abū ḥanīfa’s teaching circle. however, despite containing detailed judgments regarding rebels before, during, and after a rebellion, kitāb al-aṣl does not 1. such a group is called bughā, and a member of the group is a bāghī. 2. see muḥammad b. al-ḥasan al-shaybānī, al-aṣl, ed. m. boynukalın (beirut: dār ibn ḥazm, 2012). however, khaled abou el fadl argues that “the first systematic exposition on the law of rebellion is that by al-shāfiʿī”; k. abou el fadl, rebellion and violence in islamic law (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001), 147. abou el fadl contends that the aṣl’s chapter on siyar, which includes the section on baghy, could not have been written by al-shaybānī in its complete form and additions must have been made to it in the later centuries. the chapter on siyar is absent from most copies of kitāb al-aṣl, and the earliest copy to include the chapter on siyar is from 638/1240 (abou el fadl, rebellion and violence, 144–45). i disagree; i believe that even though kitāb al-aṣl was not exempt from revisions, it still presents the first example of a systematic discussion of baghy for several reasons. first, some of al-shāfiʿī’s views give a strong impression of having been formulated against an already advanced ḥanafī discourse. more importantly, there is no copy of kitāb al-aṣl that contains all chapters of the book; see m. boynukalın, i̇mam muhammed b. hasan eş-şeybânî’nin kitâbü’l-asl adlı eserinin tanıtımı ve fıkıh usulü açısından tahlili (istanbul: ocak yayıncılık, 2009), 149. however, this situation is not unique to kitāb al-aṣl, nor should it be a reason to question the work’s originality: the chapters of many early texts were written individually and assembled only at a later date. even if the earliest extant version of the chapter on siyar is from 1240 ce, the text we have today must, for the most part, have been in circulation prior to that because plenty of citations from al-shaybānī’s siyar appear in earlier texts. i owe this argument to abdulkadir yılmaz. for more information about the siyar chapter in kitāb al-aṣl, see a. yılmaz, “hanefi mezhebinin rical ve kitabiyatına dair bazı tetkikat,” rıhle dergisi, no. 11 (2011): 61–66, at 61–62. for further discussion on the originality of the baghy chapter in kitāb al-aṣl, see n. badawi, islamic jurisprudence on the regulation of armed conflict (leiden: brill, 2020), 23–24. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion • 556 address the question of whether it is permissible to revolt against unjust rulers. discussions of this topic are also surprisingly rare in later ḥanafī legal texts. this is mostly because obedience to the ruler was regarded as a reflection of obedience to god, so such discussions are usually found in books on creed and theology and, less frequently, in works of qurʾānic exegesis. the scarcity of mentions of the issue in legal works might also indicate that jurists deemed it a sensitive subject. consequently, we do not find references to abū ḥanīfa’s opinions on the legitimacy of rebellion in legal texts and thus need to change our focus to other genres. the first place where we encounter abū ḥanīfa’s views on rebellions is in fiqh absaṭ, one of the brief works on theology directly attributed to him. fiqh absaṭ contains significant references to rebellion in the passages that discuss the principle of al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar (enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong). according to the text, abū ḥanīfa regards al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar as a duty imposed by god. he disapproves, however, of rising in rebellion as a way of performing this duty. this is because he considers the loss of lives and property that rebellion would inevitably cause within the muslim community unacceptable. therefore, even if the community is led by an unjust ruler, rebellion is not allowed.3 after all, even if some of its members are unjust, the community always contains also some just people. instead, then, one should fight with the community, even if under an unjust ruler, against rebels (ahl al-baghy). if one happens to live in the community of the rebels, one should leave it, as god’s land is vast.4 there are several points in this passage that are worthy of attention. first, according to the text, abū ḥanīfa rules out the possibility of legitimate armed resistance against a muslim ruler in any situation by excluding it from the scope of enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong. in addition, through a sudden shift, he strips this duty from the rebels and assigns it instead to muslims to use against the rebellious party. more importantly, he does not limit the obligation to fight rebellions to scenarios that feature a just imam but explicitly states that one should fight rebels even if the ruler is unjust. the key point of abū ḥanīfa’s argument is that as long as the community is just, the shortcomings of the imam must be tolerated. conversely, if the community is rebellious, one should sever one’s connection with it. according to the text, abū ḥanīfa thus clearly recognizes the legitimacy of even unjust rulers and prohibits the taking up of arms against them in rebellion. at first glance, fiqh absaṭ gives the impression of constituting a definitive source on abū ḥanīfa’s views, and it offers a clear picture of his stance regarding rebellions. however, modern scholarship has concluded that the text is not in fact the work of abū ḥanīfa, and there are serious suspicions about the extent to which it represents his authentic views. the title fiqh absaṭ itself reflects a late intervention. fiqh akbar is the name of a creedal text attributed to abū ḥanīfa that is transmitted in two versions via two different narrators: one via abū ḥanīfa’s son ḥammād (d. 176/793), the other via his murjiʿite student abū muṭīʿ al-balkhī (d. 199/814). the title fiqh absaṭ was first used for abū muṭīʿ al-balkhī’s narration 3. abū ḥanīfa al-nuʿmān b. thābit, al-fiqh al-akbar, ed. m. b. ʿa. r. al-khumayyis (ajman: maktabat al-furqān, 1999), 108. 4. ibid., 131–32. 557 • ayşegül şimşek al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) by the ottoman scholar and qadi beyāzīzāde ahmed efendi (d. 1098/1687) to differentiate the two versions, and this name subsequently gained popularity.5 however, the fact that the titles fiqh akbar and fiqh absaṭ are used interchangeably in some sources and archives has caused some confusion in modern scholarship. a. j. wensinck refers to the two versions of the text as fiqh akbar i and fiqh akbar ii but also mentions fiqh absaṭ as a separate work. wensinck argues that the commentator of fiqh akbar i probably took the text from fiqh absaṭ, and he concludes that even though the author is not abū ḥanīfa himself, the text largely contains his genuine teachings.6 montgomery watt agrees with wensinck, holding that fiqh akbar i cannot have been written much later than abū ḥanīfa’s lifetime and that it is likely to be a reliable source for his opinions.7 on the other hand, with reference to fuat sezgin, josef van ess points out that wensinck’s assumption that there are three separate texts—fiqh akbar i, fiqh akbar ii, and fiqh absaṭ—is incorrect. there are only two texts, and what wensinck calls fiqh akbar i is actually none other than fiqh absaṭ. van ess argues that fiqh absaṭ was edited mainly by abū muṭīʿ al-balkhī rather than abū ḥanīfa, and he disagrees with wensinck about attributing all statements of abū muṭīʿ to his teacher. even though he might have visited abū ḥanīfa in kufa and done his best to preserve the latter’s ideas, abū muṭīʿ primarily represented an early ḥanafī perspective associated with eastern iran, as he lived in balkh, and his influence over the text cannot be ignored.8 in addition, van ess argues that the text was probably exposed to further revisions that can be disentangled only by investigating the context of each statement,9 and one should be careful in dealing with the work’s unique contents.10 ultimately, van ess suggests that fiqh akbar i (i.e., fiqh absaṭ) should not be considered a work by abū ḥanīfa.11 similarly, ulrich rudolph asserts that the characteristics of the text demonstrate that it should not be ascribed to abū ḥanīfa and instead must have been written by a student.12 he adds that further revisions were almost unavoidable, since the text was subject to intensive engagement in subsequent centuries, and it might even have been adapted to the changing understandings of later generations.13 5. ş. gölcük and a. bebek, “el-fıkhu’l-ekber,” in türkiye diyanet vakfı i̇slâm ansiklopedisi (di̇a), 12:544–45 (istanbul: türkiye diyanet vakfı, 1995), at 544–47. 6. a. j. wensinck, the muslim creed: its genesis and historical development (new york: routledge, 2008), 122–23. 7. w. m. watt, the formative period of islamic thought (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1973), 132. 8. j. van ess, “kritisches zum fiqh akbar,” in kleine schriften, ed. h. biesterfeldt, 749–62 (leiden: brill, 2018), at 751–53. see also j. van ess, theology and society in the second and third centuries of the hijra: a history of religious thought in early islam, trans. j. o’kane (leiden: brill, 2017), 1:237–38. 9. van ess, “kritisches,” 755. 10. van ess, theology and society, 1:221–22. 11. ibid., 1:241. 12. u. rudolph, al-māturīdī and the development of sunnī theology in samarqand, trans. r. adem (leiden: brill, 2015), 55. 13. rudolph, al-māturīdī, 57–58. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion • 558 because there are strong indications that fiqh absaṭ was produced mainly after abū ḥanīfa, it is impossible to regard it as a conclusive statement of his opinions on rebellion. as van ess proposes, the arguments it contains must be examined within their own contexts to identify any revisions that might have been made to them. van ess himself does just this and concludes that the section in fiqh absaṭ about siding with the just community and the unjust ruler against rebels is a later addition.14 as i will show below when tracing the relevant opinions attributed to abū ḥanīfa in other sources, van ess’s conclusions about the section on rebellion in fiqh absaṭ are justified. when later ḥanafī scholars discussed the issue of rebellion versus obedience in their works, they did not necessarily make mention of abū ḥanīfa. in fact, there are only a few sources that contain direct references to abū ḥanīfa’s position regarding rebellion. al-jaṣṣāṣ (d. 370/981) is the earliest among them, and he puts the greatest emphasis on abū ḥanīfa in this context. in addition, he offers a rather different image of abū ḥanīfa’s stance on rebellions compared to fiqh absaṭ. in his aḥkām al-qurʾān, when commenting on the phrase “my promise does not include the oppressors” (lā yanālu ʿahdī al-ẓālimīn) from verse 2:124, al-jaṣṣāṣ states that the imamate of an immoral person (fāsiq) is invalid and that obedience to him is not required. he then proceeds to explain that there is an incorrect perception that abū ḥanīfa supposedly permitted the imamate and caliphate of a fāsiq, even though he did not accept rulings issued by a fāsiq judge. al-jaṣṣāṣ calls out a theologian named zurqān (d. 278/891)15 as the source of this misinformation, labeling him a liar and someone whose narrations are not to be trusted. according to al-jaṣṣāṣ, abū ḥanīfa did not differentiate between a judge and the caliph and believed that justice (ʿadāla) was a requirement of office for both. to support his point, al-jaṣṣāṣ refers to specific events in abū ḥanīfa’s life. when the umayyad governor ibn hubayra (d. 133/750) and, later, the abbasid caliph abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr (r. 136–58/754–75) demanded that abū ḥanīfa take up the post of a judge, he refused, enduring persecution and imprisonment as a consequence.16 a scholar’s refusal to accept a position in service of the authorities is a standard feature of meritorious biographies, but al-jaṣṣās uses these anecdotes to make the specific point that abū ḥanīfa rejected the legitimacy of unjust rulers by refusing to serve them. al-jaṣṣās adds that abū ḥanīfa is famous for his opinion that fighting injustice and unjust rulers, even with violence, is necessary. he quotes al-awzāʿī (d. 157/774) as saying: “we tolerated abū ḥanīfa about everything until he brought us the sword [i.e., fighting injustice]; then we did not tolerate him anymore.”17 al-jaṣṣāṣ explains that abū ḥanīfa considered enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong an obligation; if it could not be fulfilled verbally, the duty extended to the use of the sword. to support this view, al-jaṣṣāṣ invokes 14. van ess, “kritisches,” 760. 15. abū yaʿlā muḥammad al-mismaʿī zurqān (d. 278/891) is the author of a kitāb al-maqālāt. see d. thomas, “heresiographical works,” in encyclopedia of islamic civilization and religion, ed. i. r. netton, 226–29 (new york: routledge, 2008), at 226. 16. abū bakr al-jaṣṣāṣ, aḥkām al-qurʾān, ed. m. ṣ. al-qamḥāwī (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1985), 1:86. 17. ibid. 559 • ayşegül şimşek al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) an incident that took place between abū ḥanīfa and his friend ibrāhīm b. maymūn al-ṣāʾigh al-marwazī (d. 131/749).18 he narrates that when ibrāhīm al-ṣāʾigh asked abū ḥanīfa about the principle of enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong, abū ḥanīfa admitted that it was indeed obligatory and quoted the following hadith to him: “the greatest martyr is ḥamza b. ʿabd al-muṭṭalib19 and a man who stands up against an unjust imam, commands him to do right, forbids him to do wrong, and gets killed for it.” following this conversation, ibrāhīm al-ṣāʾigh returned to marw and criticized the abbasid representative abū muslim (d. 137/755) for the injustices and bloodshed he had committed. after enduring ibrāhīm for a while, abū muslim finally killed him.20 al-jaṣṣāṣ provides a further argument to support his claim—namely, that abū ḥanīfa himself used to support rebels actively. he mentions that abū ḥanīfa was famous for supporting the revolutionary zayd b. ʿalī (d. 122/740) by helping him financially and secretly giving fatwas urging people to join him. he also supported the movement of the brothers muḥammad (d. 145/762) and ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh (d. 145/763). consequently, al-jaṣṣāṣ declares that accusing abū ḥanīfa of accepting the imamate of a fāsiq is a grave mistake, if not an intentional lie.21 18. ibrāhīm al-ṣāʾigh was a khorasanian murjiʾite. with some other murjiʾite figures, he attended abū muslim’s gatherings in the last years of the umayyad period. even though abū muslim’s discourse impressed them at first, he lost their support when he revealed that he was an abbasid propagandist. see s. kutlu, türklerin i̇slamlaşma sürecinde mürcie ve tesirleri, 2nd ed. (ankara: türkiye diyanet vakfı, 2002), 198–99. 19. the prophet’s paternal uncle, who was killed in the battle of uḥud. see n. haider, “ḥamza b. ʿabd al-muṭṭalib,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. kate fleet et al. (leiden: brill online). 20. al-qurashī (d. 775/1373) provides a more detailed report: when abū ḥanīfa learned that ibrāhīm al-ṣāʾigh had been killed, he cried so much that the people around him worried that he would die. abū ḥanīfa then explained that ibrāhīm was a man of sound mind but that he, abū ḥanīfa, had been afraid that his friend would end up this way. according to abū ḥanīfa, ibrāhīm devoted himself to obedience to god. he used to visit abū ḥanīfa and ask him questions. on one such occasion, he asked him about enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong. when they agreed that this was a religious obligation, ibrāhīm asked him for his hand so that he could pledge allegiance to him. abū ḥanīfa recounted that the world went dark when he heard this because ibrāhīm had invited him to a divine obligation, but he had to turn it down. then he explained to ibrāhīm that if a man tried to do this—that is, stand up to injustice— alone, he would get killed uselessly. such a step should be taken only in the presence of a reliable leader and companions. even the prophets could not do it by themselves without getting help from heaven. attempting to undertake the task alone would mean hastening one’s own death. thus, ibrāhīm’s move to make abū ḥanīfa the leader of an anti-abbasid rebellion failed, but he did not give up his determination to perform the duty himself. he stood up to abū muslim alone, and as abū ḥanīfa had correctly predicted, he got killed because of his solitary opposition. see abū muḥammad ʿabd al-qādir al-qurashī, al-jawāhir al-muḍiyya fī ṭabaqāt al-ḥanafīyya (karachi: mīr muḥammad kutubkhāna, n.d.), 1:49–50. on the basis of al-ṣāʾigh’s case, saadia tabassum argues that abū ḥanīfa approved the removal of unjust rulers, provided “that the rebels could offer the alternative leadership which fulfilled the conditions prescribed by the law; that the rebels have enough power to replace the government; and that the bloodshed caused by rebellion is a lesser evil as compared to the continued existence of the unjust ruler”; s. tabassum, “discourse on the legality of rebellion in the ḥanafi jurisprudence,” peshawar islamicus 8, no. 2 (2017): 15–30, at 20. for a detailed analysis of al-ṣāʾigh’s case, see m. cook, commanding right and forbidding wrong in islamic thought (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004), 3–10. 21. al-jaṣṣāṣ, aḥkām al-qurʾān, 1:87. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion • 560 the difference between the image of abū ḥanīfa described by al-jaṣṣāṣ and the one in fiqh absaṭ is quite striking. in fiqh absaṭ, abū ḥanīfa not only denies that armed rebellion could follow from the command to enjoin the right and forbid the wrong, but also demands that people fight on the side of the community under the ruler even if he is unjust. al-jaṣṣāṣ, by contrast, presents an abū ḥanīfa who justified taking up arms against unjust rulers and who in practice supported and promoted rebellions. it is significant that al-jaṣṣāṣ is obviously aware of the claim that abū ḥanīfa acknowledged the caliphate of unjust rulers, but he does not mention fiqh absaṭ at all. instead, he names an unfamiliar theologian, zurqān, as the source of this allegedly false information. it is unlikely that he would have been unaware of fiqh absaṭ and the arguments it contained in his time, or that he was aware of them but chose to cite zurqān instead. the absence of any reference to the work thus further strengthens the conclusion that the part in fiqh absaṭ in which abū ḥanīfa is said to acknowledge the unjust imam is a later insertion, as van ess, too, argues. al-jaṣṣāṣ’s emphasis on the duty of enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong can be explained by his muʿtazilite tendencies, as it is one of the core principles of the muʿtazila. according to him, it is such an important duty that to fulfill it, abū ḥanīfa accepted the use of force in the form of armed rebellion. another scholar who makes similar arguments is the muʿtazilite ḥanafī al-zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144). like al-jaṣṣāṣ, he supports his interpretation of abū ḥanīfa’s approval of armed rebellion against unjust rulers by mentioning abū ḥanīfa’s assistance of several rebellious movements.22 however, this image of abū ḥanīfa cannot simply be reduced to a muʿtazilite impulse that started with al-jaṣṣāṣ and was later supported by al-zamakhsharī, because even a century before al-jaṣṣāṣ, we find the same claim in one of the earliest ḥanbalī texts. in ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad b. ḥanbal’s (d. 290/903) kitāb al-sunna, two of abū ḥanīfa’s students, ibn al-mubārak (d. 181/797) and abū yūsuf (d. 182/798), state that abū ḥanīfa approved the sword (yarā al-sayf).23 although the statement is succinct, it is specifically used to refer to taking up arms in the muslim community. the image of the activist abū ḥanīfa was, however, by no means the dominant narrative within the ḥanafī school. the earliest firmly datable attestation of a quietist attitude ascribed to abū ḥanīfa is al-jaṣṣāṣ’s claim that zurqān supported this false interpretation. beyond the quietism interpolated into fiqh abṣat, whose date cannot be determined, some later sources unquestioningly attribute similar views to abū ḥanīfa and his immediate circle. for example, abū al-yusr al-bazdawī (d. 493/1100), who lived about a century after al-jaṣṣāṣ, asserts that all of abū ḥanīfa’s companions believed that an unjust imam did not need to be dismissed.24 a later claim comes from ibn al-humām (d. 861/1457), who states 22. abū al-qāsim maḥmūd b. ʿumar al-zamakhsharī, al-kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq ghawāmiḍ al-tanzīl, 3rd ed. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿarabī, 1407/1986–87), 1:184. 23. ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad b. ḥanbal, kitāb al-sunna, ed. m. b. s. al-qaḥṭānī (dammam: dār ibn al-qayyim, 1986), 1:181–82. see also b. zawadi, “imam abu hanifah (d. 148 a.h.)—regarding rebellion against unjust rulers” unpublished paper, accessed september 4, 2021, https://www.academia.edu/25169471/imam_ abu_hanifah_d_148_a_h_regarding_rebellion_against_unjust_rulers. 24. abū al-yusr al-bazdawī, uṣūl al-dīn, ed. h. p. linss (cairo: al-maktaba al-azhariyya li-l-turāth, 2003), 196. https://www.academia.edu/25169471/imam_abu_hanifah_d_148_a_h_regarding_rebellion_against_unjust_rulers https://www.academia.edu/25169471/imam_abu_hanifah_d_148_a_h_regarding_rebellion_against_unjust_rulers 561 • ayşegül şimşek al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) that abū ḥanīfa and the ḥanafīs did not consider justice among the necessary preconditions of authority (walāya). it is disliked but still permissible for a fāsiq to lead the community, though if he becomes unjust after acquiring the position, he deserves to be dismissed from it unless the dismissal would cause unrest (fitna). one must invite such a ruler to righteousness, but it is not permissible to revolt against him even if he does not comply.25 as mentioned earlier, although abū ḥanīfa is the eponym of the ḥanafī school, references to his position regarding the legitimacy of rebellion against unjust rulers in ḥanafī texts are rather scarce.26 nevertheless, two distinct personae can be identified in our limited sources. on the one hand, there is the presentation of a quietist abū ḥanīfa who rejects the permissibility of rising in revolt, even against an unjust ruler; this is the persona portrayed by al-bazdawī and ibn al-humām, and it is also present in fiqh absaṭ.27 on the other hand, we have the image of abū ḥanīfa as an activist who supported the necessity of armed resistance to an unjust ruler who refused to answer the call to enjoin the right and forbid the wrong, as discussed appreciatively by al-jaṣṣāṣ and al-zamakhsharī. this image of abū ḥanīfa is also indirectly confirmed by early ḥanbalīs who vilify him for it. al-jaṣṣāṣ’s activist argument, especially his claim of abū ḥanīfa’s support for rebellions, relies heavily on specific events in abū ḥanīfa’s lifetime. to test al-jaṣṣāṣ’s claim that abū ḥanīfa’s support for rebellions was well known, we must investigate other sources on these specific events. the cases that will be examined in the following pages are zayd b. ʿalī’s rebellion against the umayyads and the rebellions of the brothers muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh and ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh against the abbasids. i do not intend to delve into the details of these movements and confine myself mainly to the reports about abū ḥanīfa’s involvement in them. nor am i primarily concerned about the authenticity of these reports. rather, my aim is to analyze the coherence of the two opposing images of abū ḥanīfa with reference to historical narratives. abū ḥanīfa and zayd b. ʿalī’s rebellion abū ḥanīfa witnessed zayd b. ʿalī’s uprising against the umayyad caliph hishām b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 105–25/724–43) in the year 122/740 in his hometown, kufa. zayd was the grandson of ḥusayn b. ʿalī, i.e., a great-grandson of the prophet. there are several reports about the reasons that led zayd to start a rebellion, but most of them mention that khālid b. 25. kamāl al-dīn b. abī sharīf, kitāb al-musāmara fī sharḥ al-musāyara, 2nd ed. (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-saʿāda, 1347/1928–29), 2:166–67. 26. several ḥanafī texts do mention that abū ḥanīfa recommended staying at home during civil unrest, but that opinion seems to refer to the context of a just ruler versus wrongful rebels or khārijites. these debates lie outside the scope of the present paper. for some examples, see abū bakr shams al-aʾimma al-sarakhsī, kitāb al-mabsūṭ (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, 1993), 10:124; farīd al-dīn ʿālim b. ʿalāʾ al-andarpatī, al-fatāwā al-tatarkhāniyya, ed. sh. a. al-qāsimī (deoband: maktabat al-zakariyyā, 2014), 7:169; kamāl al-dīn muḥammad b. al-humām, fatḥ al-qadīr, ed. ʿa. r. gh. al-mahdī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2003), 6:96. 27. bassam zawadi notes that the image of abū ḥanīfa presented by al-bazdawī and ibn al-humām has led some to believe that abū ḥanīfa revised his views on rebellion before his death, but zawadi does not consider this a plausible explanation. see zawadi, “imam abu hanifah.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion • 562 ʿabd allāh al-qasrī (d. 126/743), during his governorship of iraq, gave a considerable amount of gifts or money to zayd and some of his relatives, and that caliph hishām interrogated zayd when he was informed about this.28 another set of reports mentions that zayd and his cousin had a disagreement about the endowments (awqāf) that the family had inherited from ʿalī b. abī ṭālib and the case was again brought to hishām.29 either way, hishām’s ill-treatment of and demeaning behavior toward zayd ignited the rebellion. however, according to the historian al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923), zayd himself identifed the following reasons behind his call to action: we summon you to the book of god and the sunna of his prophet, and to wage war against those who act tyrannically, to defend those who have been oppressed, to give pensions to those who have been deprived of them, to distribute this booty (fayʾ) equally among those who are entitled to it, to make restitution to those who have been wronged, to bring home those who have been detained on the frontiers, and to help the ahl al-bayt against those who have opposed us and disregard[ed] our just cause.30 according to this report, the motive behind the rebellion was the injustices committed by the umayyads against some members of society and the ahl al-bayt (descendants of the prophet) in particular. zayd b. ʿalī chose kufa as the center of his movement to meet these objectives because of the encouragement of the kufans.31 several relatives of zayd warned him not to trust the kufans because they had betrayed his grandfather ḥusayn b. ʿalī.32 but zayd did not heed these warnings, and as his relatives predicted, very few people ultimately stood by his side. zayd was killed, and his rebellion failed in 122/740.33 even though zayd’s rebellion was not successful in the end, the sources list some ʿulamāʾ who were sympathetic to zayd’s cause, and they include abū ḥanīfa in the list.34 some also mention that abū ḥanīfa was zayd’s student and consider his support for zayd a natural result of this connection.35 however, eren gündüz argues that even though zayd and 28. abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, tārīkh al-umam wa-l-mulūk, ed. a. ṣ. al-karmī (riyadh: bayt al-afkār al-dawliyya, n.d.), 1369–70. 29. ibid., 1370–71. 30. abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, the history of al-ṭabarī, vol. 26, the waning of the umayyad caliphate, trans. c. hillenbrand (albany: state university of new york press, 1989), 23; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 1373. i would like to thank hannah-lena hagemann for drawing my attention to the fact that almost identical phrases are used by historians in connection with different rebellions, as illustrated by her article on muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī in this issue. 31. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 1371–72. 32. ibid., 1371–73; abū al-ḥasan al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. k. ḥ. marʿī (beirut: al-maktaba al-ʿaṣriyya, 2005), 3:170. 33. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 1379; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 3:171; ibn al-ʿimād al-ḥanbalī, shadharāt al-dhahab fī akhbār man dhahab, ed. ʿa. q. al-arnāʾūṭ and m. al-arnāʾūṭ (beirut: dār ibn kathīr, 1988), 2:92–93. 34. abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭalibiyyīn, ed. k. al-muẓaffar, 2nd ed. (najaf: al-maṭbaʿa al-ḥaydariyya, 1965), 98–101; ibn al-ʿimād, shadharāt al-dhahab, 2:92. 35. see, for example, j. givony, “the murjiʾa and the theological school of abū ḥanīfa: a historical and 563 • ayşegül şimşek al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) abū ḥanīfa were indeed acquainted, there was no master-student relationship between the two, as abū ḥanīfa was already a renowned scholar when he first met zayd in kufa.36 this would make abū ḥanīfa’s support for zayd’s uprising even more significant in terms of his stance on rebellions against unjust rulers, as it would constitute not just a favor to a mentor but an indication of his belief in the legitimacy of the movement. such an interpretation is supported by reports about the conversation that took place between abū ḥanīfa and the messenger whom zayd sent to him at the beginning of his rebellion. according to one report, abū ḥanīfa asked the messenger first and foremost about the fuqahāʾ (muslim jurists) who had joined zayd. when the messenger told him the names, abū ḥanīfa entrusted him with a fair amount of money and asked him to pass the following message to zayd: “i have aid and power for you in the jihad against your enemy. you and your companions should use it [to buy] riding animals and weapons.” the messenger then carried the money to zayd, and zayd accepted it.37 according to another report, abū ḥanīfa told the messenger: “if i knew that people would not leave him as they left his father [i.e., his grandfather ḥusayn b. ʿalī], i would fight on his side because he is the just imam. still, i will help him with my property.” he then gave the messenger ten thousand dirhams and requested that his excuse be conveyed to zayd.38 in another account, the amount of money he sent to zayd is thirty thousand dirhams.39 the sources offer a variety of reasons to explain why abū ḥanīfa did not support zayd by active participation in his revolt beyond the abovementioned doubts he entertained about the rebellion’s ultimate success. al-qurashī (d. 775/1373) narrates that abū ḥanīfa could not join the rebellion because he was ill.40 according to another account in the same source, abū ḥanīfa had said that zayd’s uprising resembled the prophet’s standing up against meccan rule in the battle of badr, prompting someone to ask why he had not joined zayd himself if this was how he saw zayd’s cause. abū ḥanīfa explained that he was responsible for guarding a great number of goods that people had entrusted to him. he had asked ibn abī laylā (d. 148/765) to take over this responsibility, but he had refused. abū ḥanīfa was supposedly afraid of dying before being able to return the goods to their owners. nevertheless, after zayd’s death in battle abū ḥanīfa reportedly cried whenever he remembered zayd.41 ideological study” (phd thesis, university of edinburgh, 1977), 231–32. 36. e. gündüz, “the relationship between abū ḥanīfa and zayd ibn ʿalī: an assessment in the context of an account in al-majmūʿ al-fiqhī,” ilahiyat studies 2, no. 2 (2011): 189–213, at 203–9. 37. al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 99–100. 38. al-qurashī, al-jawāhir al-muḍiyya, 1:496. 39. ibn al-ʿimād, shadharāt al-dhahab, 2:92. 40. al-qurashī, al-jawāhir al-muḍiyya, 1:496. 41. ibid. according to cem zorlu, this report’s authenticity is doubtful for several reasons. first, a comparison between the battle of badr and zayd’s uprising seems like an exaggeration. second, abū ḥanīfa was not on good terms with ibn abī laylā and could easily have found someone else he could trust instead of him. besides, ibn abī laylā was serving as the qadi of kufa at that time. thus, asking a state agent for help to join a rebellion against the government is irrational. see c. zorlu, âlim ve muhalif: i̇mam-ı azam ebu hanife’nin siyasî otorite karşısındaki tutumu, 2nd ed. (istanbul: i̇z yayıncılık, 2013), 137–38. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion • 564 how should we judge these reports about abū ḥanīfa’s secret support for zayd’s ʿalid revolt against the umayyads? even though they offer different explanations for abū ḥanīfa’s unwillingness to fight openly alongside zayd b. ʿalī, they all agree that abū ḥanīfa supported zayd financially and acknowledged the rightfulness of his uprising. however, none of these sources can offer verifiable evidence of abū ḥanīfa’s participation. support in secret leaves few traces because its purpose is precisely to remain invisible. this might also explain why abū ḥanīfa suffered no consequences for his support for the revolt: his assistance remained secret or at least hidden enough for the umayyad authorities to tolerate it tacitly. it is striking that the reports that agree with al-jaṣṣāṣ’s interpretation of abū ḥanīfa’s role stem not only from ḥanafī sources but also from sources of different backgrounds. for example, among the authors cited here, al-qurashī was a ḥanafī whereas ibn al-ʿimād was a ḥanbalī. abū ḥanīfa’s support for zayd is acknowledged even in a shīʿite source. muḥammad b. jaʿfar al-ṣādiq (d. 203/818), who himself started a rebellion against the abbasid caliph al-maʿmūn in the year 200/815, is reported to have said: “god bless abū ḥanīfa. he proved his love for us by helping zayd b. ʿalī.”42 conversely, we might wonder whether the support of a public figure such as abū ḥanīfa, as reported in these sources, could have been kept a secret from the umayyads or could have been countenanced by the authorities without immediate repercussions.43 the sources that report abū ḥanīfa’s secret support seem almost wishful for his participation, offering rather far-fetched and less than convincing justifications for his lack of active involvement, such as being ill or being a trustee. they also do not explain why abū ḥanīfa needed to be secretive in his support for zayd. if he was willing to fight alongside zayd but was not able to do so for such contingent reasons, he could at least have declared his allegiance openly. in comparison, the report that explains abū ḥanīfa’s secrecy and unwillingness in terms of his doubts about the success of the undertaking provides a more plausible reason and is corroborated by the accounts about zayd’s relatives’ predicting his failure. in short, although it is impossible to establish the degree and form of abū ḥanīfa’s support for zayd’s revolt with certainty, the formulation of the reports shows that these writers leaned toward the idea of a somewhat politically activist abū ḥanīfa. moreover, in view of the variety of their affiliations, it is hard to claim that these sources had a common interest in presenting abū ḥanīfa in a certain way. as khaled abou el fadl puts it, “these reports are, for the most part, ahistorical but it would not be surprising if abū ḥanīfa did, in fact, sympathize with zayd’s rebellion but refrained from a public endorsement because he was sure that it would fail.”44 42. al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 99; zorlu, âlim ve muhalif, 135. 43. van ess mentions that the governor gave abū ḥanīfa a serious warning at the time of zayd’s revolt. he adds, however, that later idealization makes it hard to discern the link between these cases. van ess, theology and society, 1:215. 44. abou el fadl, rebellion and violence, 73. 565 • ayşegül şimşek al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) abū ḥanīfa and the rebellions of muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh al-nafs al-zakiyya and ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh whereas abū ḥanīfa’s support for zayd’s rebellion cannot be confirmed, it is more likely that he got involved openly in the ʿalid revolt of ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh b. al-ḥasan b. ʿalī (d. 145/763) and even that this involvement was the cause of abū ḥanīfa’s death by torture in the abbasid caliph’s prison. not long after ibrāhīm al-ṣāʾigh’s abovementioned feeble effort to criticize abū muslim, the abbasids faced a much more severe threat from the brothers muḥammad and ibrāhīm, sons of ʿabd allāh b. al-ḥasan and great-grandsons of the prophet muḥammad. the abbasids’ propaganda had been based on the call to transfer the caliphate back to the prophet’s family, and this call had garnered them the ʿalids’ support. however, soon after the abbasids came to power, it became evident that they had no intention of giving any political authority to the ʿalid family.45 against this background, the two brothers were motivated to rise in revolt against the second abbasid caliph, abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr.46 as teresa bernheimer points out with reference to the historian al-masʿūdī (d. 345/956), the importance of the brothers’ attempt lies in the fact that “it set for the first time one branch of the prophet’s family against another.”47 muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh, also known as al-nafs al-zakiyya (“the pure soul”),48 revolted in medina in 145/76249 and was soon followed in rebellion by his brother ibrāhīm in basra.50 the brothers had probably planned to start the rebellion together, but abū jaʿfar’s strategy forced them to act separately. muḥammad was forced to face abū jaʿfar’s army with very few of his followers, and he was killed during the battle.51 from this point on, ibrāhīm was compelled to undertake the mission alone. however, even though he posed a more serious threat to the abbasids than his brother had done,52 he could not overcome abū jaʿfar’s forces, and he, too, was killed in the same year.53 these rebellions also resulted in the deaths 45. t. bernheimer, the ʿalids: the first family of islam, 750–1200 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2013), 4. 46. patricia crone argues that the famous hāshimite slogan al-riḍā min ahl al-bayt meant that the hāshimite house did not have a specific abbasid, as opposed to ʿalid, caliphal candidate, and instead campaigned for a communal agreement, i.e., a shūrā, within the prophet’s family. she calls attention to accounts about an attempt at such an agreement in al-abwāʾ before the revolution, where several ʿ alid and abbasid figures acknowledged al-nafs al-zakiyya’s leadership. reportedly, the future abbasid caliph abū jaʿfar was among the participants. p. crone, “on the meaning of the ʿ abbasid call to al-riḍā,” in the islamic world from classical to modern times: essays in honor of bernard lewis, ed. c. e. bosworth, c. issawi, r. savory, and a. l. udovich, 95–111 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1989), at 99-100. the authenticity of this report is disputed, but if it is true, it reveals one of the major reasons behind the two brothers’ revolts. 47. bernheimer, ʿalids, 5; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 4:250. 48. for a detailed discussion of this title, see a. elad, the rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya in 145/762: ṭālibīs and early ʿabbāsīs in conflict (leiden: brill, 2016), 36–44. 49. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 1525; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 3:245. 50. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 1550; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 3:245. 51. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 1534–37; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 3:245. 52. h. kennedy, the early abbasid caliphate: a political history (new york: routledge, 2016), 68. 53. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 1560; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 3:246. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion • 566 of various members of the ḥasanid family, including ʿabd allāh b. al-ḥasan, the father of muḥammad and ibrāhīm. however, most of them did not die on the battlefield; they were tortured to death in prison for refusing to turn the brothers in.54 almost all prominent scholars of the time, including abū ḥanīfa, are reported to have been in favor of these revolts.55 it is significant that abū ḥanīfa is associated predominantly with ibrāhīm’s rebellion rather than with muḥammad’s. this is most likely because ibrāhīm revolted in basra, a city that is closer to abū ḥanīfa’s hometown, kufa, than is the center of muḥammad’s revolt, medina.56 it is noted in numerous reports that abū ḥanīfa not only supported ibrāhīm’s revolt but also encouraged people to actively participate in it.57 in contrast to zayd b. ʿalī’s rebellion, which abū ḥanīfa is reported to have aided in secret, he apparently did not feel the need to hide his fervent support for ibrāhīm’s movement. in a widely circulated report, abū ḥanīfa’s well-known student zufar b. al-hudhayl (d. 158/775) expresses distress over his mentor’s open support for ibrāhīm’s rebellion and the fatwas he issued in favor of it: “by god, you will not end this until the rope is fastened to our necks.”58 zufar’s warning is noteworthy because the sources use it to demonstrate the level that abū ḥanīfa’s support reached and the concerns it caused among his closest acquaintances. according to some reports, abū ḥanīfa’s support for the cause was not limited to encouraging people to revolt with ibrāhīm; he also discouraged opponents of the revolt, as in a story about caliph abū jaʿfar’s commander al-ḥasan b. qaḥṭaba (d. 181/797). when al-ḥasan supposedly felt remorse for the misdeeds he had committed in that role, he asked abū ḥanīfa whether god would accept his repentance and forgive him. abū ḥanīfa replied that if al-ḥasan were ever in a position to decide between the life of an innocent person and his own life and he chose himself (i.e., he chose to die instead of killing an innocent person), god would forgive him. reportedly, al-ḥasan b. qaḥṭaba thereupon took an oath to never kill a muslim again. after this encounter, ibrāhīm’s rebellion in basra broke out, and abū jaʿfar ordered al-ḥasan to lead the army against ibrāhīm’s forces. when al-ḥasan informed abū ḥanīfa about this and asked for his advice, abū ḥanīfa reminded him that it was time for him to prove the sincerity of his repentance. consequently, and much to abū jaʿfar’s annoyance, al-ḥasan refused to lead the army against ibrāhīm. abū jaʿfar investigated the reason behind al-ḥasan’s odd behavior and learned that he had been visiting abū ḥanīfa.59 according to this report, even among abū jaʿfar’s high-ranking officials some individuals 54. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 1519–23; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 3:247–48. 55. for a list of the ʿulamāʾ who supported muḥammad’s rebellion, see elad, rebellion, 363–73; and for ibrāhīm’s rebellion, see zorlu, âlim ve muhalif, 238–39. 56. zorlu, âlim ve muhalif, 269. 57. see, for example, al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 242, 251. 58. ibn abī al-ʿawwām al-saʿdī, faḍāʾil abī ḥanīfa wa-akhbāruhu wa-manāqibuh, ed. l. r. al-bahrāʾijī al-qāsimī (mecca: al-maktaba al-imdādiyya, 2010), 114–15; abū bakr al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, tārīkh madīnat al-salām, ed. b. ʿa. maʿrūf (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 2001), 15:452; al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 240; abū ʿumar jamāl al-dīn b. ʿabd al-barr al-namarī, al-intiqāʾ fī faḍāʾil al-aʾimma al-thalātha al-fuqahāʾ, ed. ʿa. f. abū ghudda (beirut: maktab al-maṭbūʿāt al-islāmiyya, 1997), 323; abū ʿabd allāh al-ṣaymarī, akhbār abī ḥanīfa wa-aṣḥābih, 2nd ed. (beirut: ʿālam al-kutub, 1985), 92. 59. al-qurashī, al-jawāhir al-muḍiyya, 2:503. 567 • ayşegül şimşek al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) doubted the legitimacy of his rule. what is more, abū ḥanīfa seemed willing to use his influence to encourage such a view of the caliph’s position. a third way in which the reports suggest that abū ḥanīfa was involved in ibrāhīm’s rebellion was by providing strategic guidance. according to one report, he wrote a letter to ibrāhīm and recommended that he secretly move the center of his movement to kufa, as zayd b. ʿalī’s followers were ready to help him there. he also informed ibrāhīm that his shīʿite followers were planning to abduct abū jaʿfar and bring him to ibrāhīm.60 a different report claims that abū ḥanīfa wrote to ibrāhīm a detailed description of the principles he should follow in the fight against abū jaʿfar’s army and made a significant comparison: he told ibrāhīm that if he gained an advantage in the battle over his enemies, he should treat them as his father (i.e., his great-grandfather ʿalī) treated his opponents in the battle of ṣiffīn, and not as he treated them in the battle of the camel. according to abū ḥanīfa, the difference between these two battles was that at ṣiffīn, ʿalī’s opponents had a backup group (fiʾa) that was able to assist them when they needed help, whereas in the battle of the camel they did not have one. thus, ʿalī killed the wounded and chased the fugitives at ṣiffīn, but he spared their lives after the battle of the camel. abū ḥanīfa suggested that because abū jaʿfar’s army had backup forces, ibrāhīm should kill the wounded and the fugitives as ʿalī had done.61 even though abū ḥanīfa’s letter seems merely to give ibrāhīm tactical advice, it bore dire consequences for its author. it is reported that abū jaʿfar got hold of the letter and became aware of abū ḥanīfa’s critical support for the revolt. to test him further, he wrote a forged letter to abū ḥanīfa using ibrāhīm’s name. unaware of the deception, abū ḥanīfa wrote an uncensored letter back.62 abū jaʿfar’s knowledge of abū ḥanīfa’s support for ibrāhīm’s rebellion is most probably responsible for abū ḥanīfa’s death. the sources do not indicate that abū jaʿfar punished abū ḥanīfa immediately after the rebellion had been suppressed. instead, according to various reports, he first asked abū ḥanīfa to be the qadi of kufa after the death of the former qadi, ibn abī laylā, and when abū ḥanīfa did not comply, the caliph had him imprisoned and tortured until he died.63 the reports about abū jaʿfar’s offer of the judgeship to abū ḥanīfa may seem suspicious, as one would not expect the 60. al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 243. if there was indeed such a letter, it shows that abū ḥanīfa maintained his connection with zayd b. ʿalī’s supporters even after the end of the latter’s revolt and was well aware of their plans. it is also worth noting that the revolts of zayd b. ʿalī and the two brothers are somewhat connected in the sense that they were supported by similar groups. al-nafs al-zakiyya is considered a zaydī imam, and his rebellion is often regarded as a zaydī movement (elad, rebellion, 46–47). additionally, zayd b. ʿalī’s sons were reportedly actively involved in the revolt of the brothers; see al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 186, 258; n. haider, the origins of the shīʿa: identity, ritual, and sacred space in eighth-century kūfa (new york: cambridge university press, 2011), 204. 61. al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 243–44; abū al-ʿabbās jamāl al-dīn b. ʿinaba, ʿumdat al-ṭālib fī ansāb āl abī ṭālib, ed. m. ḥ. āl al-ṭāliqānī, 2nd ed. (najaf: al-maṭbaʿa al-ḥaydariyya, 1961), 109. 62. al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 244; ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-intiqāʾ, 324. 63. for various reports about abū ḥanīfa’s death, see ibn abī al-ʿawwām, faḍāʾil abī ḥanīfa, 69–70; ibn ḥajar al-haytamī, al-khayrāt al-ḥisān fī manāqib al-imām abī ḥanīfa al-nuʿmān (damascus: dār al-hudā wa-l-rashād, 2007), 144–46, 151; al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, tārīkh, 15:450–52; al-ṣaymarī, akhbār abī ḥanīfa, 92–93; al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, 244; al-qurashī, al-jawāhir al-muḍiyya, 2:503. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) portrait of a jurist between obedience and rebellion • 568 caliph to be keen to appoint as judge someone known to have been supportive of a recent revolt.64 in this respect, the shāfiʿī scholar ibn ḥajar al-haytamī (d. 974/1567) provides an insight into abū jaʿfar’s possible motives. he narrates that, according to some, abū ḥanīfa’s refusal of the post did not justify killing him, and the real reason behind his execution was his involvement in ibrāhīm’s movement. abū jaʿfar was afraid of abū ḥanīfa’s inclination toward ibrāhīm because abū ḥanīfa was a prominent individual with a large fortune he had earned from trade. after the rebellion, abū jaʿfar did not dare kill him without an excuse, so he offered abū ḥanīfa the position knowing that abū ḥanīfa would not accept it.65 in other words, even if, as reported, the caliph offered abū ḥanīfa the judgeship, it is unlikely that his involvement in the rebellion had been forgotten; instead, the appointment could have been seen as a way to publicly co-opt abū ḥanīfa for the cause of abbasid legitimacy. in this case, abū ḥanīfa’s alleged refusal of the post would have been seen as a public rejection of abbasid authority. indeed, if abū ḥanīfa’s sole crime had been refusing the judgeship, imprisonment and torture would have been much too severe a punishment. everything points to the real reason being the caliph’s wish to punish abū ḥanīfa for his support of the rebellion. to summarize, several sources claim that abū ḥanīfa was involved in or, at the very least, supportive of the revolts of ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh and his brother muḥammad. these sources, again, reflect diverse backgrounds and are not uniform in their tone or implications. compared to the accounts about zayd b. ʿalī’s rebellion, these are both more detailed and more confident about abū ḥanīfa’s partiality for the brothers’ movement. abū ḥanīfa might, in fact, have shown his support more explicitly in the latter case because the brothers’ revolts were better organized than zayd’s had been and had higher chances of success. it is likely that because of this explicit support, abū ḥanīfa provoked caliph abū jaʿfar’s wrath and was eventually killed. conclusion this paper has examined conflicting narratives about abū ḥanīfa’s opinions on rebellion versus obedience to unjust rulers. abū ḥanīfa lived through some of the most ambitious revolts against the umayyad and abbasid authorities, and hints of his approach to baghy in his student al-shaybānī’s (d. 189/805) kitāb al-aṣl constitute one of the earliest discussions of the legal repercussions of rebellion among muslim jurists. however, whether abū ḥanīfa permitted rebellion against unjust rulers or defended obedience to them is not quite clear. on the basis of fiqh absaṭ, a work that is attributed to abū ḥanīfa but in which the relevant passages date from a noticeably later time, some ḥanafī scholars depict him as someone who accepted the rule of the unjust and thus opposed rebellion regardless of the ruler’s actions. on the other hand, certain ḥanafī scholars with muʿtazilite tendencies, such as al-jaṣṣāṣ, objected to this image of abū ḥanīfa and claimed that far from recognizing the legitimacy of unjust rulers, he regarded armed rebellion against such rulers as a means of performing 64. van ess thinks that abū ḥanīfa’s imprisonment was probably caused by his support for the brothers’ revolt and had nothing to do with his refusal to serve as a judge. van ess, theology and society, 1:214, 241. 65. al-haytamī, al-khayrāt al-ḥisān, 151–52. 569 • ayşegül şimşek al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the duty of enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong. al-jaṣṣāṣ further argued that abū ḥanīfa did not hesitate to put his beliefs into practice, as he actively supported the revolt of zayd b. ʿalī against umayyad rule in 122/740 and the revolts of the brothers muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh (al-nafs al-zakiyya) and ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh against abbasid rule in 145/762–63. several historical and biographical sources by authors from various backgrounds confirm abū ḥanīfa’s involvement in these rebellions, especially his open support for ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh’s revolt and his consequent death by torture in caliph abū jaʿfar’s prison. these sources are, of course, not exempt from questions concerning their historicity. but although it is difficult to establish definitively what abū ḥanīfa’s views on rebellion against unjust 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https://www.academia.edu/25169471/imam_abu_hanifah_d_148_a_h_regarding_rebellion_against_unjust_rulers https://www.academia.edu/25169471/imam_abu_hanifah_d_148_a_h_regarding_rebellion_against_unjust_rulers al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 81-111 created after, from, and for the man? development of premodern shiʿi exegetic discourse on the creation of woman* katja von schöneman university of helsinki, finland (katja.von.schoneman@helsinki.fi) introduction: the creation of woman in the quran and the islamic interpretive tradition there is no unitary passage describing the creation of humankind in the quran. instead, individual verses in several chapters give hints about the creation of the primordial human beings, adam (ādam) and his spouse. the quran describes humankind as created from clay, mud, dust, or fluid,1 and from a single soul.2 five verses also mention the creation of * i wish to express my gratitude to ilkka lindstedt, mulki al-sharmani, and amina inloes for their precious comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1. q 6:2 (clay); 7:12 (clay); 15:26 (clay, mud); 15:28 (clay, mud); 16:4 (drop); 22:5 (dust/drop); 23:12 (clay); 25:54 (water); 32:7 (clay); 35:11 (dust/drop); 38:71 (clay); 40:67 (dust/drop); 55:14 (clay); 76:2 (drop); and 86:6 (water). 2. q 4:1; 6:98; 7:189; 31:28; and 39:6. abstract this article examines the diachronic development of shiʿi exegetic discourse on the sentence khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida wa-khalaqa minhā zawjahā (“created you from a single soul and created its mate from it”) in the quranic verse 4:1, customarily read as describing the creation of the first couple, adam and eve. applying feminist discourse analysis and focusing on the arabic-language commentaries of twelve premodern imāmī exegetes from the third/ninth to the eleventh/seventeenth century, my study reveals that the medieval commentary material both accumulated and transformed along a hermeneutical trajectory comprising three distinctive discursive stages. the first stage established the lore on eve’s creation in dismissive terms, and the second strengthened these misogynous views to make the potential substance of eve’s creation even more negligible. this concept was further expanded in the third discursive stage, in which the weak woman, inclined toward the material and the corporal, was seen as created to provide service and entertainment for the man. her creation was thus used to justify gender hierarchy, even the seclusion of women. © 2021 katja von schöneman. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:katja.von.schoneman%40helsinki.fi?subject= 82 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the first human’s mate.3 the best-known one, often understood as the portrayal of human creation, is found in the beginning of sūrat al-nisāʾ, “chapter of women,” which depicts the creation of people from a single soul, nafs wāḥida, and the creation from it of its mate, zawj, so that they would multiply into numerous men and women.4 however, none of these passages explicitly address the creation of the first woman, later named as eve (arabicized as ḥawwāʾ) in the islamic interpretive tradition. furthermore, the quran does not clarify either the way or the substance from which the first woman was created. quranic exegesis, tafsīr, developed rapidly during the first centuries of islam. this interpretive knowledge was constructed from a variety of sources and eventually compiled into literary format by muslim exegetes (mufassirūn). prophetic traditions, or hadiths, highly valued especially in sunni islam, were often used to explain the scripture. in shiʿi exegesis, the emphasis was first on taʾwīl, the shedding of light on the esoteric (bāṭin) meaning of the exoteric (ẓāhir) part of the scripture; this spiritual exegesis was often sectarian and political. the imāmī (i.e., twelver) interpretive tradition imbibed the tafsīr style prevalent in sunni exegesis, and narrations (sg. khabar; pl. akhbār) from the infallible imams became the core of shiʿi interpretation.5 these narrations were used systematically to explain the quranic message particularly in tradition-based exegesis, tafsīr bi-l-maʾthūr.6 premodern exegetes kept building upon earlier exegetic knowledge, so the interpretative knowledge both accumulated and transformed in their quranic commentaries.7 the lore 3. q 4:1; 7:189; 30:21; 39:6; and 42:11. 4. “o mankind! be wary of your lord, who created you from a single soul and created its mate from it (khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida wa-khalaqa minhā zawjahā), and from the two of them, scattered numerous men and women”; q 4:1 in the qurʾān, trans.ʿali qulī qarāʾī (london: islamic college for advanced studies press, 2004), 105. the word nafs, “soul,” in the verse is grammatically feminine, whereas the word zawj, “mate,” is masculine—so grammatically speaking, god created a feminine soul and from her/it he created her/its masculine mate. for details, see r. hassan, “made from adam’s rib? the woman’s creation question,” al-mushir 27 (1985): 124–55. 5. m. pregill, “exegesis,” in routledge handbook on early islam, ed. h. berg, 98–125 (abingdon: routledge, 2018), 105–9; s. rizvi, “twelver shīʿī exegesis,” in the oxford handbook of qur’anic studies, ed. m. a. abdel haleem and m. a. a. shah, 708–20 (oxford: oxford university press, 2020); d. steigerwald, “twelver shīʿī taʾwīl,” in the blackwell companion to the qurʾān, ed. a. rippin, 372–85 (hoboken, nj: wiley, 2006). these narrations were also folded into codices, specifically the compilation known as al-kutub al-arbaʿa, “the four books.” one of these four collections of traditions is man lā yahḍuruhu al-faqīh by shaykh al-ṣadūq (d. 381/991), perhaps better known as ibn bābawayh. he also wrote ʿilal al-sharāʾiʿ wa-l-aḥkām wa-l-asbāb, which is repeatedly cited in connection with the exegetic accounts examined in this article. for more information, see r. gleave, “between ḥadīth and fiqh: the ‘canonical’ imāmī collections of akhbār,” islamic law and society 8 (2001): 350–82. shiʿi hadiths concerning the creation of woman are comprehensively discussed by a. inloes in women in shi’ism: ancient stories, modern ideologies (piscataway, nj: gorgias press, 2020), 57–136. 6. steigerwald, “twelver shīʿī taʾwīl,” 380–82. tafsīr bi-l-maʾthūr was also characteristic of sunni exegesis of the time. this approach represents the first of the two major schools in later imāmī theology, akhbārī and uṣūlī, of which the latter gives more space for ijtihād, or personal reasoning (see, e.g., steigerwald, “twelver shīʿī taʾwīl,” 380–81). admittedly, this is a simplification of the origins of tafsīr literature, for further discussion on which see, e.g., n. sinai, “the qur’anic commentary of muqātil b. sulaymān and the evolution of early tafsīr literature,” in tafsīr and islamic intellectual history: exploring the boundaries of a genre, ed. a. görke and j. pink (oxford: oxford university press, 2014), 113–43. 7. pregill, “exegesis,” 108. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 83 of coexisting cultures and religions naturally affected this process. for instance, muslim scholars seem to have been familiar with biblical narratives, and some details—such as the hebrew bible’s depiction of the substance of eve’s creation as one of adam’s ribs—were absorbed into the islamic interpretive tradition.8 in addition, the selection of traditions in each compilation was determined by individual choices, reflecting the exegete’s own context and concerns. the development of the islamic interpretive tradition with respect to the creation of woman has been previously studied, although often with only marginal remarks concerning the shiʿi tradition.9 individual premodern imāmī scholars’ exegetic accounts addressing this topic have been referred to in a number of studies,10 and the matter has been examined focusing on exegetic material outside the tafsīr literature.11 furthermore, modern shiʿi exegeses concerning the creation of woman have been addressed sporadically.12 eve in imāmī commentaries has also been dealt with in some studies focusing on the early events 8. see, e.g., k. bauer, “room for interpretation: qur’anic exegesis and gender” (phd diss., princeton university, 2008), 29–31; c. bronson, “imagining the primal woman: islamic selves of eve” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2012), 124; eadem, “eve in the formative period of islamic exegesis: intertextual boundaries and hermeneutic demarcation,” in görke and pink, tafsīr and islamic intellectual history, 27–61, at 30–34; hassan, “made from adam’s rib”; eadem, “the issue of woman-man equality in the islamic tradition,” in women’s and men’s liberation, ed. l. grob et al., 65–82 (new york: greenwood press, 1991), available at http://riffathassan. info/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/the_issue_of_woman-man_equality_in_the_islamic_tradition1.pdf; pregill, “exegesis,” 105–8; r. tottoli, “the corpora of isrāʾīliyyāt,” in abdel haleem and shah, oxford handbook of qur’anic studies, 682–92. 9. bauer, “room for interpretation,” 24–57; eadem, gender hierarchy in the qurʾān: medieval interpretations, modern responses (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015), 101–36; bronson, “imagining the primal woman,” 107–57; hassan, “made from adam’s rib,” 124–55; r. osman, female personalities in the qur’an and sunna: examining the major sources of imami shi‘i islam (new york: routledge, 2015), 15–42; k. von schöneman, “‘confine your women!’: diachronic development of islamic interpretive discourse on the creation of woman,” hawwa (published online ahead of print, october 2020, https://doi.org/10.1163/15692086-bja10010): 1–45; b. stowasser, women in the quran: traditions and interpretation (new york: oxford university press, 1996), 25–38. 10. h. arpaguş, “the position of woman in the creation: a qur’anic perspective,” in muslima theology: the voices of muslim women theologians, ed. e. aslan et al., 115–32 (frankfurt am main: peter lang, 2013); bauer, gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 123–29; a. geissinger, gender and muslim construction of exegetical authority: a rereading of the classical genre of qur’an commentary (leiden: brill, 2015), 39–41; k. kueny, “reproducing power: qurʾānic anthropogonies in comparison,” in the lineaments of islam: studies in honor of fred mcgraw donner, ed. p. m. cobb, 235–60 (leiden: brill, 2012); j. smith and y. haddad, “eve: islamic image of woman,” women’s studies international forum 5 (1992), 135–44. in addition, fāṭimid ismāʿīlī interpretations have been addressed in k. bauer, “spiritual hierarchy and gender hierarchy in fāṭimid ismāʿīlī interpretations of the qur’an,” journal of qur’anic studies 14 (2012): 29–46. 11. m. dhala, “five foundational women in the qur’an: reading their stories from a shia female perspective,” berkeley journal of religion and theology 5 (2019): 3–26; z. hadromi-allouche, “creating eve: feminine fertility in medieval islamic narratives of eve and adam,” in in the arms of biblical women, ed. j. greene and m. caspi, 27–64 (piscataway, nj: gorgias press, 2013); inloes, women in shi’ism, 57–136; m. kister, “adam: a study of some legends in ‘tafsir’ and ‘hadit’ literature,” israel oriental studies 13 (1993): 113–74, at 143–47; idem, “legends in tafsīr and ḥadīth literature: the creation of ādam and related stories,” in approaches to the history of the interpretation of the qurʾān, ed. a. rippin, 82–114 (piscataway, nj: gorgias press, 2013), 110–14. 12. arpaguş, “position of woman,” 115–32; s. hasyim, understanding women in islam: an indonesian perspective (jakarta: solstice, 2006), 25–51. http://riffathassan.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/the_issue_of_woman-man_equality_in_the_islamic_tradition1.pdf http://riffathassan.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/the_issue_of_woman-man_equality_in_the_islamic_tradition1.pdf https://doi.org/10.1163/15692086-bja10010 84 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) of humankind after the creation of woman.13 however, most studies addressing the primal woman and her creation in the islamic interpretive tradition discuss exclusively the sunni tradition.14 the diachronic development of imāmī exegesis is considered in only a few studies.15 of these, karen bauer’s work provides an important discussion regarding the exegetic trends in imāmī interpretation. material and methods this study explores the evolution of the exegetic discourse concerning the creation of woman in premodern imāmī commentaries on the quran. i identified a total of thirteen verse-by-verse commentaries, as opposed to works of thematic exegesis, in arabic that address the sentence khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida wa-khalaqa minhā zawjahā in the first verse of sūrat al-nisāʾ (q 4:1). my search spanned the period from the third/ninth to the eleventh/seventeenth century—that is, from the formative period of shiʿi islam up to the beginning of the modern era. my primary sources consist of the works of twelve premodern imāmī scholars: furāt al-kūfī (d. early fourth/tenth century), ʿalī b. ibrāhīm al-qummī (d. after 307/919), muḥammad b. masʿūd al-ʿayyāshī (d. 319/932), abū jaʿfar muḥammad al-ṭūsī (d. 460/1067), abū ʿalī al-faḍl al-ṭabrisī (d. 548/1153—two separate commentaries), muḥammad al-shaybānī (d. seventh/thirteenth century), abū al-fayḍ al-nākūrī (d. 1004/1595), ʿabd ʿalī b. jumʿa al-ʿarūsī al-ḥuwayzī (d. between 1080/1669 and 1105/1693),16 muḥsin al-fayḍ al-kāshānī (d. 1091/1680), hāshim al-baḥrānī (d. 1107/1696), nūr al-dīn al-kāshānī (d. 1115/1703), and mīrzā muḥammad al-mashhadī (d. 1125/1713). given the discursive nature of quranic commentaries, it is justifiable to focus on commentaries in a single language; therefore, i selected only arabic-language works and excluded premodern persian commentaries, a few of which exist in verse-by-verse format.17 i found no verse-by 13. h. abugideiri, “allegorical gender: the figure of eve revisited,” american journal of islamic social sciences 13 (1996): 518–36; k. ruffle, “an even better creation: the role of adam and eve in shiʿi narratives about fatimah al-zahra,” journal of the american academy of religion 81 (2013): 791–819. 14. for a concise review on this literature, see von schöneman, “‘confine your women!,’” 14–15. 15. bauer, “room for interpretation” and gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 101–36; bronson, “imagining the primal woman”; and “eve in the formative period.” bauer examines the commentaries of three imāmī exegetes and mentions four others in connection with her analyses. bronson, on the other hand, focuses on formative sunni exegesis. the most comprehensive excursions into the shiʿi interpretive tradition concerning the creation of woman are provided by inloes (women in shi’ism, 57–136) and osman (female personalities, 15–42). 16. some studies (e.g., those of bauer and osman) report a much later date for his death, but my estimate is based on comprehensive research performed by todd lawson, reported in his “akhbārī shiʿī approaches to tafsīr,” in approaches to the qurʾān, ed. g. r. hawting and a. shareef, 173–210 (london: routledge, 1993). this detail is significant in evaluating the interrelation between the commentaries in the third discursive stage of my study, since lawson’s dating makes al-ḥuwayzī’s the first commentary in this stage. bauer ascribes—mistakenly, i believe—to muḥsin al-fayḍ al-kāshānī many traditions that seem to have been first presented by al-ḥuwayzī. 17. two of them—abū al-futūḥ al-rāzī’s (d. sixth/twelfth century) rawḍ al-jinān wa-rawḥ al-janān and mullā fatḥ allāh kāshānī’s (d. 988/1580) manhaj al-ṣādiqīn fī ilzām al-mukhālifīn—have been consulted for reference. however, they do not add much to the specific narrative concerning the creation of woman. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 85 verse arabic commentary literature representing other branches of shiʿi islam from this time period.18 all translations from arabic into english provided in the analyses are mine. the methodological framework of the present study can be defined as feminist discourse analysis, influenced by both poststructuralist and social constructionist thought. according to the latter, the way people understand the categories and concepts of the world is determined by time and place—that is, by their socially constructed cultural context.19 gender can be seen as a social construct built through discourse, whether spoken or written.20 dominant gender ideologies are formed and sustained within particular communities,21 including premodern muslim societies. in poststructuralist thought, meanings expressed by language are unsettled, so they transform diachronically and in close connection with the social context of their use.22 the process of meaning-making creates, preserves, and modifies representations of power,23 presumably in conjunction with gender asymmetry as well. both contextuality and plasticity are substantial aspects in this article, as it examines literature composed centuries ago in a specific religious community yet based on an interpretive tradition formed over a long period of time. an essential starting point of my analysis is the fact that these exegetic texts were not born in a vacuum. instead, they were produced in the midst 18. it should be noted that the theme of human creation has also been addressed in some thematic commentaries, not only in the verse-by-verse ones included in this study. 19. v. burr, social constructionism, 3rd ed. (london: routledge, 2015), 1–4. 20. j. sunderland, gendered discourses (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2004), 11. feminism as a theory and a method is related to consciousness of patriarchy, sexism, and social justice, in particular. for feminist approaches to the study of religion, in general, see sue morgan’s thorough review on the topic in “feminist approaches,” in approaches to the study of religion, ed. p. connolly, 42–72 (london: continuum, 1999). she defines a feminist approach as a “critical transformation” of theoretical perspectives that introduces gender as a primary analytical category. the critical dimension of such inquiry addresses “religion with its historical perpetuation of unjust, exclusionary practices that have legitimated male superiority in every social domain.” morgan correctly notes that feminism is not a homogenous concept; instead, it comprises a vast range of perspectives. what is common to these approaches, however, is the critique of patriarchy—that is, institutionalized systems of male dominance (morgan, “feminist approaches,” 42–43). 21. see, e.g., m. lazar, “feminist critical discourse analysis: articulating a feminist discourse praxis 1,” critical discourse studies 4 (2007): 141–64, at 147. a feminist approach to examining premodern islamic texts has been described by sa‘diyya shaikh in connection with her study on certain hadiths as one that addresses muslim religio-cultural texts representing “dominant conceptions of gender and the category of woman” within the premodern muslim legacy and examines how they later become ideologically useful in determining “religious ideals of gender”; s. shaikh, “knowledge, women and gender in the ḥadīth: a feminist interpretation,” islam and christian-muslim relations 15 (2004): 99–108, at 100. in this study, the feminist dimension is about rendering gender ideology transparent and concomitantly providing a forum for feminist hermeneutics, that is, for tracing and deconstructing patriarchy in religious texts by exploring the narratives and discourses used to construct, embody, and sustain gender hierarchy. for feminist hermeneutics in islamic studies, see, e.g., n. jeenah, “towards an islamic feminist hermeneutic,” journal for islamic studies 21 (2008): 36–70. 22. burr, social constructionism, 61–63; n. fairclough, critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language (london: longman, 1995), 189. 23. n. fairclough, analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research (london: taylor and francis, 2004), 9. 86 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) of eloquent communication between the islamic interpretive tradition and lived religion, albeit admittedly among the scholarly elite. the concept of “discourse” can be defined, for instance, as a way to observe how the world is (re)constructed by language use.24 discourse can normalize perceptions of gender by,25 for example, creating and sustaining inequality or upholding unjust categorizations. language use is always located in a particular time and space, so discourse is both engendered and construed historically.26 it is also intertextual by nature.27 in the present article, i examine these aspects by identifying the evolution of muslim exegetic discourse as a way of constructing, embodying, and sustaining gender hierarchy in a certain form of language use and a distinctive genre of texts: tafsīr.28 discourse analysis is not a fixed approach with concrete analytical utensils. it is better characterized as providing a multidisciplinary framework for exploring discursive praxes influencing or representing social structures. this is done by combining textual analysis with other forms of social studies.29 the focal point is typically the ways in which power and inequality manifest in and are constituted by the discourse of a given context; thus, discourse analysis may serve as a tool in finding injurious rhetoric concerning gender matters.30 power is an important concept in this study, as i seek to identify the exegetic features employed to preserve gender-based social inequality in muslim scholarly discourse. the framework of discourse analysis has been recently used in many fields of academia, including religious studies.31 for instance, it has been utilized to address the way biblical interpretations are formed and discussed in a specific context, as well as the subjectivity of the interpreter.32 discourse analysis has also been applied to quranic studies, particularly in comparing translations that are thought to necessarily represent the translators’ interpre-tations,33 and in research on the shiʿi interpretive tradition 24. sunderland, gendered discourses, 6–7. 25. j. butler, bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex” (abingdon: routledge, 1993), 1. 26. r. wodak, “what cda is about: a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments,” in methods of critical discourse analysis, ed. r. wodak and m. meyer, 1–13 (london: sage, 2001). 27. r. wodak, gender and discourse (london: sage, 1997), 6. 28. every text is language use, and as such a potential target of discourse-analytic exploration. 29. n. fairclough, discourse and social change (cambridge: polity press, 1992), 12–36. 30. sunderland, gendered discourses, 11. 31. e.g., t. hjelm, “discourse analysis,” in the routledge handbook of research methods in the study of religion, ed. s. engler and m. stausberg, 134–50 (abingdon: routledge, 2011). 32. t. warhol, “gender constructions and biblical exegesis: lessons from a divinity school seminar,” in language and religious identity: women in discourse, ed. a. jule, 50–72 (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2007), 51–52; for an illustrative case study of the phenomenon, see the entire article by warhol. 33. e.g., d. t. bazargani, “a comparative study on two translations of the holy qur’an: a critical discourse analysis approach,” translation studies 12 (2015): 49–64; a. sideeg, “traces of ideology in translating the qurān into english: a critical discourse analysis of six cases across twenty versions,” international journal of applied linguistics and english literature 4 (2015): 214–26. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 87 outside the genre of tafsīr.34 tafsīr has in fact been characterized as discourse analysis by its very nature.35 aiming to evaluate the diachronic development of the exegetic discourse identifiable in quranic commentaries, my study also benefits from a genealogical approach. this use of the concept of genealogy was introduced by friedrich nietzsche and later made famous in reconstructing historical trajectories by michel foucault.36 genealogy tackles the role of power in shaping human understanding, further improving the discourse-analytic framework when applied to historical literary sources, in particular.37 every new text is affected by other texts cultivated before it. tafsīr has been described as an inherently genealogical tradition,38 and genealogical discourse analysis has been used to examine both sunni islamic and jewish interpretive traditions.39 it is thus reasonable to assume that it would be useful also for investigating the evolution of imāmī discourse on the creation of woman. this study strives to demonstrate the all-encompassing patriarchal ethos of the premodern interpretive tradition by pointing out notions that represent and generate the gender-based hegemony prevalent in the exegetes’ context. first, i uncover the content and linguistic features of the interpretative accounts likely to portray gender aspects and attitudes. second, as a particular account is naturally a product of material selection, i discuss the narrations chosen by the exegetes in conjunction with preceding commentaries, carefully noting their individual opinions. third, i track the accrual of misogynous details during the development of the interpretive discourse on the creation of woman. importantly, my study develops the previous application of genealogical and discourseanalytic methodology by omaima abou-bakr in connection with another quranic verse.40 i have elsewhere applied this approach to sunni and jewish exegetic discourses regarding 34. e.g., s. rizwan, “religion, ideology and discourse: a critical discourse analysis of majlis-e-hussain,” journal of islamic and middle eastern multidisciplinary studies 1 (2011): 1–35; f. jawad and n. othman, “a critical discourse analysis of risalat al-huquq of imam ali al-sajjad,” majallat al-ʿulūm al-insāniyya 24 (2017): 50–69. 35. m. nordin, “‘ilm al-tafsir and critical discourse analysis: a methodological comparison,” journal of language studies 15 (2015): 129–42. 36. m. saar, “genealogy and subjectivity,” european journal of philosophy 10 (2002): 231–45, at 231–33; gary gutting, foucault: a very short introduction (oxford: oxford university press, 2005), 50–58. 37. s. anaïs, “genealogy and critical discourse analysis in conversation: texts, discourse, critique,” critical discourse studies 10 (2013): 123–35. 38. w. saleh, the formation of the classical tafsīr tradition: the qurʾān commentary of al-thaʿlabī (boston: brill, 2004), 14–16. 39. o. abou-bakr, “the interpretive legacy of qiwamah as exegetical construct,” in men in charge? rethinking authority in muslim legal tradition, ed. m. al-sharmani et al., 44–64 (oxford: oneworld, 2015); von schöneman, “‘confine your women!’”; eadem, “evolution of rabbinic discourse on the creation of woman in late antiquity” (ma thesis, university of helsinki, 2019), available at https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/306271. 40. abou-bakr, “interpretive legacy.” abou-bakr examines the accumulation of gender notions in exegeses on the first part of the quranic verse 4:34 and the evolution of the original term qawwāmūn into the patriarchal construct of qiwāma within the evolving chronological context of quranic commentaries representing different tafsīr approaches. https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/306271 88 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the creation of woman.41 i will demonstrate the significance of this methodology in highlighting the genealogical character of the imāmī exegetic discourse—that is, the ways in which layers of interpretation are built upon one another and shifts and additions take place within the boundaries of the interpretive community. analysis: development of imāmī exegetic discourse 1. setting the scene: constituting the imāmī tradition corpus (third–fourth/ninth–tenth centuries) the development of imāmī exegesis concerning the creation of woman can be roughly divided into three distinct discursive stages defined, respectively, by the constituting of the shiʿi exegetic corpus, reassertion of the interpretive tradition, and affluent hermeneutics and augmentations. the first stage represents the formative, “preclassical” period of imāmī tafsīr, and it is preserved in the compilations of the second-generation exegetes, who lived in the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. the three pre-buyid exegetes, who exemplify this first discursive stage, are furāt al-kūfī, ʿalī b. ibrāhīm al-qummī, and muḥammad b. masʿūd al-ʿayyāshī. they transmitted traditions from the disciples of the infallible imams of twelver shiʿi islam, generally without adding their own comments. the first discursive stage established the core of imāmī interpretations of the quranic verse at issue. in his commentary, al-kūfī offers a singular interpretation of q 4:1 that reflects the efforts at the time to establish the identity of the imāmī community. ʿalī b. ibrāhīm al-qummī, by contrast, presents only the view known mainly from the sunni interpretive tradition: eve was created from the lowest rib of adam. finally, al-ʿayyāshī explains the same passage with reference to several traditions according to which eve was created in diminutive terms either from adam’s smallest rib or from a leftover portion of the clay used to fashion him. she was created from adam, which makes her hanker after men. this is, for al-ʿayyāshī, the reason to keep women indoors. in what follows, i will elaborate on the interpretations of each exegete. 1.1. abū al-qāsim furāt b. ibrāhīm b. furāt al-kūfī (d. early fourth/tenth century) the compilation known as tafsīr furāt al-kūfī represents tradition-based exegesis: its narrations generally go back to the fifth and sixth imams as well as the disciples of the first imam, ʿalī b. abī ṭālib (d. 40/661).42 it was authored at the end of the third/ninth century by furāt al-kūfī, an important shiʿi hadith scholar and exegete, albeit apparently the least known of the commentators from this discursive stage.43 the commentary reflects the author’s association with esoteric mysticism, which is evident in the following account as well. 41. von schöneman, “‘confine your women!’”; eadem, “evolution of rabbinic discourse.” 42. m. bar-asher, scripture and exegesis in early imami-shiism (boston: brill, 1999), 29–32. 43. m. a. amir-moezzi, “furāt b. furāt al-kūfī,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. k. fleet et al. (leiden: brill online). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 89 furāt al-kūfī presents one long tradition with a thorough isnād (chain of transmitters) concerning q 4:1. it begins with a narration allegedly transmitted from the sixth imam, jaʿfar b. muḥammad al-ṣādiq (d. 148/765), and originally attributed to no less than the prophet himself: “god created me and the people of my house from a piece of clay” (khalaqanī wa-ahl baytī min ṭīna). it further describes this ahl al-bayt, here referring to the shiʿa, as illuminating the world with the light they have preserved since the creation. the tradition then warns the faithful against going astray and reminds them of the reward in the hereafter.44 this interpretation is a remarkable deviation from those presented in other quranic commentaries of the time, particularly in that it does not connect the original verse with the creation of the primordial couple, adam and eve. instead, it associates the passage with the creation of ahl al-bayt, apparently reflecting the author’s context, which was dominated by the formation of the concept of imāmiyya between the minor and major occultations of the twelfth imam (264–329/874–941) and the central role of al-kūfī’s home city of kufa as a firm imāmī stronghold with a distinctive religious literature.45 al-kūfī does not, however, elaborate on this theme explicitly. instead, his account—and the discussion that follows it—connects the creation with righteousness, guidance, and salvation. furthermore, it mentions the substance of human creation as “clay” (ṭīna).46 however, al-kūfī does not distinguish between different phases of human creation, and he thus does not address the creation of woman specifically. 1.2. abū al-ḥasan ʿalī b. ibrāhīm al-qummī (d. after 307/919) ʿalī b. ibrāhīm al-qummī was a multitalented scholar who authored about a dozen books, the most important one being his tradition-based exegesis. al-qummī’s interpretation of q 4:1 is brief, as is his tafsīr in general. he laconically states that khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida refers to the creation of adam, whereas khalaqa minhā zawjahā refers to that of eve, and that the latter was created from the former’s lowest rib (min asfal aḍlāʿihi).47 the terminology chosen resembles that of ibn abī ḥātim (d. 327/938), a contemporary sunni commentator, who also specified that the rib in question was the lowest one.48 it is remarkable that by tracing eve to adam’s rib, al-qummī diverges from most other imāmī sources, which opt for “clay” as the origin of woman, as i will show below. in fact, it seems 44. furāt al-kūfī, tafsīr furāt al-kūfī, ed. m. al-kāẓim (beirut: muʾassasat al-tārīkh al-ʿarabī, 2011), 1:101–2. in this edition, the traditions have been organized according to quranic verses. 45. bar-asher, scripture and exegesis, 6–9; for an extensive introduction to the time period and the pre-buyid exegetes representing the era, see the entire study. 46. interestingly, this tradition evokes the well-known imāmī conception of the different locations of clay— represented by the quranic terms ʿilliyyūn and sijjīn—used for the creation of the imams and their enemies; see, e.g., m. a. amir-moezzi, the divine guide in early shi’ism: the sources of esotericism in islam (albany: state university of new york press, 1994), 38–41. 47. ʿalī b. ibrāhīm al-qummī, tafsīr al-qummī, ed. ṭ. al-mūsawī al-jazāʾirī (najaf: maṭbaʿat al-najaf, 1966), 1:130. 48. cf. ibn abī ḥātim al-rāzī, tafsīr al-qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, ed. a. m. al-ṭayyib (mecca: maktabat nizār muṣṭafā al-bāz, 1999), 3:852. 90 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) that his understanding of this quranic verse is mainly influenced by sunni conceptions of its meaning. unlike his contemporary al-kūfī, al-qummī does not use his explication of this particular passage to promote the development of imāmī identity. however, in many other parts of his commentary, al-qummī emphasizes the superiority of the prophet’s family and his descendants, as well as the infallible imams, hence affirming the core of imāmī ideology.49 1.3. abū al-naḍr muḥammad b. masʿūd al-ʿayyāshī (d. 319/932) the third exegete of this discursive stage, muḥammad b. masʿūd al-ʿayyāshī, made important contributions to imāmī jurisprudence and hadith studies as well as arabic literature. his most famous work, extensively cited by later exegetes, is his tafsīr, which was written during the early fourth/tenth century.50 his agenda is characterized by polemics against rational, or opinion-based, interpretation of the quran (tafsīr bi-l-raʾy).51 the style of tafsīr al-ʿayyāshī clearly follows tradition-based exegesis and has much in common with the exegesis of the legendary sunni scholar of the time, abū jaʿfar muḥammad al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923). the main difference lies in the chains of transmitters: al-ʿayyāshī’s seem to be sect-selective, pointing to the emergence of this feature already at such an early stage of islamic history. in the beginning of his interpretation of the passage, al-ʿayyāshī cites a tradition ascribed to imam ʿalī. according to this tradition, eve was created from a tiny rib in adam’s side (quṣayrā janb ādam), which was actually the smallest rib (al-ḍilʿ al-aṣghar), when he was resting.52 both the term quṣayrā, a diminutive form of qaṣīr (“short”), and the idea of adam sleeping while eve is being formed are also present in al-ṭabarī’s commentary on the same quranic passage.53 adding diminutive elements to the narrative clearly presents eve as an inferior being as compared to adam. this tradition also appends details from the biblical garden of eden narrative, which was quite common among contemporary sunni commentators, indicating that scholarly works circulated freely and widely at this point of sectarian development. al-ʿayyāshī then cites the sixth imam, jaʿfar b. muḥammad al-ṣādiq: “god created adam from water and clay, so the zeal (himma) of his son is in water and clay. god created eve from adam, so men are the zeal of women (fa-himmat al-nisāʾ al-rijāl). so, fortify them [fem.] in the[ir] homes (ḥaṣṣinūhunna fī al-buyūt)!”54 notably, this narration resembles 49. bar-asher, scripture and exegesis, 39–45. 50. bar-asher, scripture and exegesis, 56–63. 51. j. mcauliffe, “quranic hermeneutics: the views of al-ṭabarī and ibn kathīr,” in rippin, approaches to the history, 46–62, at 48. 52. muḥammad b. masʿūd al-ʿayyāshī, tafsīr al-ʿayyāshī, ed. h. rasūlī maḥallātī (beirut: muʾassasat al-aʿlamī, 1991), 1:241. 53. abū jaʿfar muḥammad al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923), jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-qurʾān (cairo: dār hijr, 2001), 6:341. 54. tafsīr al-ʿayyāshī, 1:241. cf. bauer’s translation in gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 124. the zeal of men for water and clay possibly refers to agriculture. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 91 a tradition that was probably initiated in early classical sunni exegesis by ibn abī ḥātim and that reappears more than 400 years later in the influential commentaries of ibn kathīr (d. 774/1373) and jalāl al-dīn al-suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), which recommend keeping women indoors on the basis of similar reasoning.55 it is also repeated in the shiʿi tradition after al-ʿayyāshī by, for example, al-ḥuwayzī, muḥsin al-fayḍ, and al-baḥrānī in the eleventh/ seventeenth century, as will be seen below. the next two traditions cited in al-ʿayyāshī’s work, which consolidate the understanding of q 4:1 in connection with human creation and the primordial beings, depict an ideal of marriage, often seen as one between first cousins. although the vivid stories about the respective marriages of adam’s sons with a houri and a jinn and the subsequent marriage between the respective offspring of the two unions do not add details on the matter of female creation, they reveal a major endeavor of the imāmī exegetic corpus on this particular quranic verse: to solve the logical puzzle concerning the procreation of adam’s children. the matter was further elaborated upon in subsequent shiʿi commentaries, but this topic lies outside the focus of my article and is thus not discussed here. the final tradition al-ʿayyāshī’s commentary introduces is an alternative view, attributed to the fifth imam, abū jaʿfar al-bāqir (d. 114/732), concerning the material from which eve was created. the imam is quoted as saying that when people say that god created her from one of adam’s ribs (min ḍilʿ min aḍlāʿ ādam), they are lying. the imam marvels at the claim: as if god were incapable of creating her from anything but a rib! a similar speculation was later presented by the sunni commentator fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī (d. 606/1210) in his al-tafsīr al-kabīr, arguing that since god is capable of creating adam from dust, he must be capable of creating eve from dust as well,56 but this argument was not commonly reproduced in later sunni commentaries. in the shiʿi interpretive tradition, however, it was widely known and has been often repeated since. al-ʿayyāshī goes on to quote a statement from the prophet, transmitted by imam al-bāqir from a member of ahl al-bayt: “god, blessed and high, took a handful of clay and mixed it with his right hand—and both of his hands are right [hands]—and created adam from it. and there was some leftover clay (faḍalat faḍla min al-ṭīn), from which he created eve.”57 al-ʿayyāshī’s interpretation of q 4:1 represents the beginning of a long-lasting tension in imāmī exegesis between two incompatible views, each supported by traditions attributed to the imams: eve was created from a rib or from the same clay as adam. although some 55. cf. ibn abī ḥātim, tafsīr, 3:852; ʿimād al-dīn ismāʿīl b. kathīr, tafsīr al-qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm, ed. m. s. muḥammad et al. (cairo: muʾassasat qurṭuba, 2000), 3:333; and jalāl al-dīn al-suyūṭī, al-durr al-manthūr fī tafsīr al-maʾthūr, ed. ʿa. m. al-turkī (cairo: markaz al-ḥajr, 2003), 4:209. osman cites an editorial note from a shiʿi hadith collection according to which this might have been meant allegorically: “houses” actually mean “husbands”—women should be made safe through marriage so that their inborn zeal toward men would not lead them away from the right path (osman, female personalities, 28). inloes gives an insightful summary of the features of this tradition in her women in shi’ism, 81. 56. cf. fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī, al-tafsīr al-kabīr wa-mafātīḥ al-ghayb (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1981), 9:167. it is possible that al-rāzī was influenced by shiʿi thought, which his commentary may also reflect. 57. tafsīr al-ʿayyāshī, 1:242. cf. bauer’s translation of a similar passage in gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 124. 92 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) individual exegetes endorsed one or the other of these views, imāmī commentators generally remained silent on the matter until the eleventh/seventeenth century.58 meanwhile, the sunni interpretive tradition stuck firmly to the view that the initial soul was adam and the mate made from it was eve, created from adam’s rib.59 it is tempting to speculate that the imāmī exegetes who opted for the clay explanation—instead of the rib theory favored by the sunnis—sought deliberately to distinguish imāmī exegesis from its sunni counterpart. this position may have been part of the distinct imāmī identity that took shape in the period between the occultations of the twelfth imam. 2. reasserting the interpretive tradition (fifth–seventh/eleventh–thirteenth centuries) the classical period of imāmī exegesis, represented by the third generation of exegetes, encompasses the span from the fifth/eleventh to the seventh/thirteenth century. shiʿi commentators—including the three exegetes studied from this period, namely, abū jaʿfar muḥammad al-ṭūsī, abū ʿalī al-faḍl al-ṭabrisī, and muḥammad al-shaybānī—drew on previous traditions, sunni and shiʿi alike, in their work.60 this phase constitutes the second discursive stage of imāmī exegesis on the creation of woman, and it is defined by efforts to entrench the views on the matter articulated in the first stage. the scholars of this period worked in an environment that can be seen as the golden age of the shiʿa, during and after the reigns of the buyid (322–447/934–1062) and fatimid (297–555/909–1171) dynasties, and it is plausible that they felt quite free to express their doctrinal beliefs in their scholarly works. nevertheless, in their writings the tiny rib allegedly used for the creation of woman is not only the lowest and smallest one, as in the preceding stage, but sinister and the farthest one as well. in addition, the rib is further described as crooked, and its crookedness symbolizes the wariness with which men should deal with women. the following sections elucidate the details of each commentary’s account. 2.1. abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. ḥasan al-ṭūsī (d. 460/1067) abū jaʿfar muḥammad al-ṭūsī is one of the most influential shiʿi scholars of all time. besides being a prolific writer, he is also considered the founder of imāmī jurisprudence. he worked under the shiʿi-favoring buyid dynasty and authored two of the four most famous imāmī hadith collections.61 in his quranic commentary, al-tibyān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, al-ṭūsī starts his explication on verse q 4:1 with matters pertaining to the latter part of the verse. he then proceeds to the passage of interest here, asserting that according to all commentators, god created his creation from a single soul, and this soul was adam. 58. bauer, “room for interpretation,” 39; eadem, gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 125. 59. e.g., von schöneman, “‘confine your women!’” 60. ayoub, “the speaking qurʾān and the silent qurʾān: a study of the principles and development of imāmī tafsīr,” in rippin, approaches to the history, 177–98, at 185. for a thorough introduction to the era and the context of these exegetes, see c. baker, medieval islamic sectarianism (amsterdam: arc humanities press, 2019). 61. i.e., al-kutub al-arbaʿa; m. a. amir-moezzi, “al-ṭūsī, muḥammad b. al-ḥasan,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. j. bearman et al., 10:745–46 (leiden: brill, 1954–2009). for an introduction to the buyid dynasty, see baker, medieval islamic sectarianism, 1–15. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 93 al-ṭūsī goes on to say that god’s saying khalaqa minhā zawjahā refers to eve, and he claims that most commentators subscribe to the view that she was created from one of adam’s ribs.62 interestingly, al-ṭūsī appeals to an existing scholarly consensus, possibly encompassing sunni as well as shiʿi commentators, which may seem surprising given his imāmī-majority context. next, al-ṭūsī quotes a tradition from imam al-bāqir: god created woman from a leftover of the clay from which he had created adam. he then argues that although the term “soul” is grammatically feminine, its meaning here is masculine, and the masculine form of the phrase—nafs wāḥid—would be correct, as well.63 al-ṭūsī thus seems to settle on the interpretation that the woman, too, was created from clay, albeit only a leftover portion of it. the concept of leftover material was already introduced in al-ʿayyāshī’s interpretation, but al-ṭūsī confirms this imāmī conception by allowing potential alterations to the grammatical structure of the quranic text, concomitantly emphasizing the primacy of a male being. 2.2. abū ʿalī al-faḍl b. al-ḥasan al-ṭabrisī (d. 548/1153) al-ṭabrisī is perhaps the best known premodern shiʿi exegete. although his main teacher was a student of al-ṭūsī, he was also taught by sunni scholars. al-ṭabrisī wrote two commentaries, of which the briefer one is called jawāmiʿ al-jāmiʿ fī tafsīr al-qurʾān al-majīd. concerning q 4:1, the commentary addresses the soul, nafs, which god brought into being from soil, subsequently creating eve from one of its ribs. al-ṭabrisī also quotes a saying by the prophet, according to which god created people from adam’s soul and then created their mother, eve, from it.64 it is noteworthy that al-ṭabrisī uses a feminine suffix (-hā) for “it,” most likely referring to the feminine noun nafs. the more comprehensive of al-ṭabrisī’s quran commentaries, majmaʿ al-bayān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, is probably the most authoritative premodern imāmī commentary.65 after elaborating at length on other parts of verse q 4:1, following quite closely the commentary of al-ṭūsī, al-ṭabrisī presents a tradition explicating the passage khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida. he states that according to all interpreters, the “soul” denotes adam, despite the feminine form of the word, and as evidence he quotes the words of a poet: your father is a successor whom another bore (abūka khalīfa waladathu ukhrā), and you are the successor of that perfection (wa-anta khalīfat dhāka al-kamāl).66 62. abū jaʿfar muḥammad al-ṭūsī, al-tibyān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, ed. a. sh. al-amīn and a. ḥ. qaṣīr (najaf: maktabat al-amīn, 1989), 3:99. 63. al-ṭūsī, al-tibyān, 3:99; cf. tafsīr al-ʿayyāshī, 1:242. correspondingly in sunni tafsīr, e.g., al-ṭabarī, jāmiʿ al-bayān, 6:339–40. 64. faḍl b. al-ḥasan al-ṭabrisī, jawāmiʿ al-jāmiʿ fī tafsīr al-qurʾān al-majīd (qum: muʾassasat al-nashr al-islāmī, 2003), 1:368. 65. e. kohlberg, “al-ṭabrisī (ṭabarsī), amīn al-dīn,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., 10:40–41. for extensive information both on majmaʿ al-bayān and on its author, see b. fudge, qur’anic hermeneutics: al-tabrisi and the craft of commentary (london: routledge, 2012). 66. faḍl b. al-ḥasan al-ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān (beirut: dār al-murtaḍā, 2006), 3:7. 94 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the feminine-looking noun for “successor,” khalīfa,67 is used in connection with the grammatically masculine “father,” abū, and the masculine second-person pronoun anta. that the addressee is masculine is confirmed by the use of the masculine suffix -hu in the first sentence.68 like al-ṭūsī, al-ṭabrisī points out that a masculine attribute, wāḥid, for the single soul would have been correct as well.69 al-ṭabrisī then asserts that most commentators agree that khalaqa minhā zawjahā means that eve was created from one of adam’s ribs. this interpretation, he claims, is further supported by a saying of the prophet: “the woman was created from a rib (khuliqat al-marʾa min ḍilʿ). if you straighten it, you break her, but if you leave her crooked, you will find her pleasant (istamtaʿta bihā).”70 this narration is remarkably similar to that repeated in sunni commentaries in that al-ṭabrisī’s exegesis also contains modified versions of some sunni hadiths whose reliability and soundness, however, have been heavily criticized by the muslim feminist scholar riffat hassan.71 the tradition depicts women as disconsolately crooked, perhaps even as persons with contorted morality. in sum, although al-ṭabrisī follows his predecessor al-ṭūsī quite closely, he ends with a statement indicating that the substance of eve’s creation was the lowest rib of adam.72 it is noteworthy that although al-ṭabrisī was working in an environment shaped by shiʿi domination in iran, he concludes his explication of q 4:1 with this apparently sunni claim. this marks as a clear shift in the conception of the primordial couple’s creation, and it contributes to the consolidation of the image of woman as derivative and subordinate. it is possible that this shift reflects the supposed “sunni revival” that followed the so-called shiʿi century,73 and that the political environment of sunni resurgence might have pushed imāmī exegetes to take sunni conceptions more emphatically into account. 67. feminine-looking since it concludes in a tāʾ marbūṭa. 68. in fact, the first part of the poem is also cited by sunni exegetes in support of similar reasoning; see, e.g., al-ṭabarī, jāmiʿ al-bayān, 6:339–40; abū al-ḥasan ʿalī b. aḥmad al-wāḥidī (d. 468/1076), tafsīr al-basīṭ (riyadh: wizārat al-taʿlīm al-ʿālī, 2010), 6:281; al-rāzī, al-tafsīr al-kabīr, 9:166. 69. al-ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān, 3:7; cf. al-ṭūsī, al-tibyān, 3:99. 70. al-ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān, 3:7. for similar passages in sunni exegeses of the time, see, e.g., al-wāḥidī, tafsīr al-basīṭ, 6:282; al-rāzī, al-tafsīr al-kabīr, 9:167. a comparable tradition, which notes that the woman is “like a rib,” can also be found among shiʿi traditions, albeit not in connection with the creation. for example, abū jaʿfar al-kulaynī (d. 329/941) and ibn bābawayh attribute this comment to the prophet as reported by the sixth imam: muḥammad b. yaʿqūb al-kulaynī, al-kāfī (tehran: dār al-kutub al-islāmiyya, 1947), 5:513; muḥammad b. ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn b. bābāwayh al-qummī, man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh (qum: jamāʿat al-mudarrisīn fī al-ḥawza al-ʿilmiyya, 1885), 3:439–40. interestingly, as inloes notes (women in shi’ism, 62), ibn bābawayh expresses doubt in the report’s soundness . 71. hassan, “made from adam’s rib”; cf. al-wāḥidī, tafsīr al-basīṭ, 6:281; al-rāzī, al-tafsīr al-kabīr, 9:167; muḥammad b. aḥmad al-qurṭubī, al-jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-qurʾān (beirut: al-risāla, 2000), 6:6. osman argues that the view of woman as irredeemably crooked is fundamentally against the quran and its verse 95:4, which says that humans have been created fī aḥsan taqwīm, “in the best of forms” (osman, female personalities, 27–28). 72. al-ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān, 3:7; cf. al-ṭūsī, al-tibyān, 3:99. 73. for a concise introduction to these somewhat debated concepts, see baker, medieval islamic sectarianism, 1–15. for the broader debate regarding the concept of a “sunni revival,” see s. mulder, the shrines of the ‘alids in medieval syria (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014), 16, n. 16. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 95 2.3. muḥammad b. al-ḥasan al-shaybānī (d. seventh/thirteenth century) muḥammad b. al-ḥasan al-shaybānī is a little-celebrated character among premodern shiʿi exegetes. in fact, the manuscript attributed to him does not mention his name at all. however, his name and his authorship of the book bearing the title nahj al-bayān ʿan kashf maʿānī al-qurʾān is given in another contemporary work.74 in his quranic commentary, al-shaybānī interprets the passage in question rather briefly. he first states, citing imam al-ṣādiq, that khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida means that humankind was created “from adam,” who was thus named because he was created from the surface of the earth (adīm al-arḍ).75 next, al-shaybānī interprets khalaqa minhā zawjahā as referring to eve. she was named ḥawwāʾ because she was created from a living thing (ḥayy). according to al-shaybānī, god created her from a rib on adam’s left side (ḍilʿ al-yasār), and this tiny rib was among the last ones (al-quṣayrā ākhir al-aḍlāʿ). furthermore, eve was called “a woman” (imraʾa) because she was created from the man (al-marʾ).76 the diminutive term quṣayrā in al-shaybānī’s account was also used by al-ʿayyāshī a few hundred years earlier; in addition, it is frequently repeated in medieval sunni commentaries. by contrast, al-shaybānī’s use of yasār is not replicated in any other commentary analyzed here. this is thus the first, but not the last, account to specify that the tiny rib from which eve was created came from adam’s left side and to describe it in sinister and negative terms. furthermore, the rib’s being one of the last ones, ākhir al-aḍlāʿ, is a novel elaboration, although many other dismissive attributes have already been applied by this stage of the interpretive discourse. notably, both the arabic term used for “woman” and eve’s proper name are explained by her derivative creation from the man. together, these discursive features serve to consolidate an understanding of women as fundamentally reliant on and subservient to men. this view could reflect the sunni shift in middle eastern power relations in this period after the transient success of shiʿi thought among the leaders. 3. blossoming of the lore: an affluence of hermeneutics (tenth–eleventh/sixteenth– seventeenth centuries) the concept of eve’s creation is elaborated and expanded on in the third discursive stage of imāmī exegetic discourse, examined here through the explications of abū al-fayḍ al-nākūrī, ʿabd ʿalī b. jumʿa al-ʿarūsī al-ḥuwayzī, muḥsin al-fayḍ al-kāshānī, hāshim al-baḥrānī, nūr al-dīn al-kāshānī, and mīrzā muḥammad al-mashhadī, most of whom worked under the rising safavid dynasty, which adopted imāmī doctrine as the state religion. the commentaries produced in this majority context are often polemical, accentuating sectarian 74. ḥ. dargāhī, introduction to muḥammad b. al-ḥasan al-shaybānī, nahj al-bayān ʿ an kashf maʿānī al-qurʾān, ed. ḥ. dargāhī (qum: nashr al-hādī, 1958–99), 1:ḥāʾ. 75. al-shaybānī, nahj al-bayān, 2:108. 76. al-shaybānī, nahj al-bayān, 2:108. the word imraʾa, translated as “woman,” can be read as a derivative of the word marʾ used, in this sentence, for “man.” this tradition is also presented by the sunni exegete abū al-layth al-samarqandī in his baḥr al-ʿulūm, ed. ʿa. m. muʿawwad et al. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1993), 1:328–29. the reasoning resembles that seen in genesis 2:23, in which the primal man names the newly born female creature a “woman” (heb. ishsha) because she was taken from “man” (heb. ish). 96 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) elements. the accounts of the creation of woman presented by these exegetes frequently develop the previously constructed narrative further, mainly by introducing misogynous conclusions concerning the status of women. they also add dismissive attributes to the rib they portray as eve’s origin and assert that she was made to satisfy adam’s diverse desires— to provide him with entertainment, service, and sexual favors. moreover, muḥsin al-fayḍ reconciles the competing views regarding the substance of eve’s creation by pointing out that the respective essences of men and women are fundamentally different, hence probably strengthening the late safavid tendency toward gender segregation. details regarding eve’s creation from an interior and sinister part of adam are used to justify the gendered duties and rights of women and men. the following sections analyze the interpretations provided by the six exegetes from this discursive stage in detail. 3.1. abū al-fayḍ al-fayḍī al-nākūrī (d. 1004/1595) al-nākūrī was an indian polymath who made diverse contributions to politics, poetry, study of history, and exegetics.77 his quranic commentary, called sawāṭiʿ al-ilhām fī tafsīr kalām al-malik al-ʿallām, comments on the relevant quranic passage quite briefly. al-nākūrī states that khalaqakum means “he formed you” (ṣawwarakum), and min nafs wāḥida means that people have a single origin, “your father adam.” khalaqa minhā zawjahā, according to al-nākūrī, indicates that adam’s spouse is “your mother eve,” and she was born of adam’s shoulder blade, milāṭ ādam.78 al-nākūrī’s specification of a shoulder blade as eve’s origin is a remarkable deviation from all other traditions, which claim she was fashioned from a rib, but it, too, traces eve’s substance to one of adam’s bones. the shoulder blade claim does not, to my knowledge, have a parallel in the texts of any abrahamic religion. however, this peculiar detail is not repeated in later exegetic accounts. it is possible that it reflects the context of the author, who lived in the borderland of islamic civilization. 3.2. ʿabd ʿalī b. jumʿa al-ʿarūsī al-ḥuwayzī (d. between 1080/1669 and 1105/1693) ʿabd ʿalī al-ḥuwayzī was a hadith scholar and exegete who was based in shiraz, a major iranian city under safavid rule.79 he held the view that traditions are essential to understanding the meaning of the quran, and he is believed to have initiated the akhbārī method of tafsīr.80 thus, al-ḥuwayzī inaugurates a series of several exegetes identified as representatives of the so-called akhbārī school of exegesis.81 his tafsīr nūr al-thaqalayn, completed by 1065/1655, contains a vast variety of traditions, including several on the 77. m. al-shīrāzī, introduction to abū al-fayḍ al-nākūrī, sawāṭiʿ al-ilhām fī tafsīr kalām al-malik al-ʿallām, ed. m. al-shīrāzī (iran: n.p., 1996), 1:113–17. 78. al-nākūrī, sawāṭiʿ al-ilhām, 2:6. 79. for an extensive introduction to the safavid dynasty, see a. newman, safavid iran: rebirth of a persian empire (london: i. b. tauris, 2006). 80. lawson, “akhbārī shiʿī approaches to tafsīr,” 178–80. 81. r. gleave, scripturalist islam: the history and doctrines of the akhbārī shīʿī school (leiden: brill, 2007), 154. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 97 matter of human creation as discussed in q 4:1. it is the most meticulous of the premodern shiʿi commentaries analyzed in this study. al-ḥuwayzī begins his discussion with a tradition claiming that the name of eve as well as the arabic word for woman (imraʾa) are dependent on her derivative creation, as already argued by al-shaybānī hundreds of years earlier,82 and that women were called “women” (nisāʾ) because there was no intimacy (uns) for adam except for eve.83 like many other exegetes, al-ḥuwayzī repeats earlier traditions from tafsīr al-ʿayyāshī and elaborates at length on the procreation of the first couple’s children, mainly providing evidence against the possibility that sibling marriage was involved. returning to the details of human creation, al-ḥuwayzī adds new attributes to the rib from which eve was made via a narration ascribed to imam al-ṣādiq: eve was created from adam’s farthest left-hand rib (ḍilʿ ādam al-yusrā al-aqṣā).84 with the added attribute aqṣā, the first woman becomes even more marginal. notably, al-ḥuwayzī also uses the attribute yusrā, which is usually interpreted and translated as “left” but which also has a potential negative connotation as sinister.85 in the narration, the imam goes on to criticize theologians who insinuate that god did not have the ability to create a spouse for adam from anything but his rib— which implies that adam married a part of himself.86 instead, the imam describes eve’s creation thus: when god—blessed and exalted be he—created adam from clay, he asked the angels [to prostrate before adam], so they prostrated before him. god cast a slumber upon him, and then he contrived (ibtadaʿa) a creation for him [adam], making her in the hole between his knees (jaʿalahā fī mawḍiʿ al-nuqra allatī bayna rukbatayhi). this is why the woman is subordinate to the man (tabaʿ li-l-rajul).87 the verb jaʿala in this passage can be understood to denote the creation of something from a preexisting thing, so a reader may get the impression that the first woman was extracted from the man, further strengthening the idea of male primality, even supremacy.88 most importantly, the narration adds new details: the first woman was made in a mysterious 82. ʿabd ʿalī al-ḥuwayzī, tafsīr nūr al-thaqalayn, ed. h. al-rasūlī al-maḥallātī (qum: maṭbaʿat al-ʿilmiyya, 1980), 1:429; cf. al-shaybānī, nahj al-bayān, 2:108. 83. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:430; the words “women” and “intimacy” share two consonants, nūn and sīn. 84. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:430. 85. for the negative connotation, see q 90:8–20. 86. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:430; cf. tafsīr al-ʿayyāshī, 1:242. elsewhere in his commentary al-ḥuwayzī suggests that the rib narrative is weak, as noted by osman (female personalities, 17). 87. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:430–31. cf. bauer’s translation of a similar passage from muḥsin al-fayḍ al-kāshānī’s commentary in gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 126. 88. see a. wadud, qurʼan and woman: rereading the sacred text from a woman’s perspective (new york: oxford university press, 1999), 18–19. osman seems to disagree on the basis of another meaning of jaʿala, “to change something from its previous state” (osman, female personalities, 38, n. 35). however, zohar hadromiallouche reads a similar passage, also attributed to imam al-ṣādiq, in quṭb al-dīn al-rāwandī’s (d. 573/1177) qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ to mean that the creation of eve was a totally new creation (hadromi-allouche, “creating eve,” 38). 98 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) place associated with the man, and this origin is closely connected to her position in society. the creation of the first woman is thus used to justify the oppression of all women. the peculiar narration goes on to describe adam and eve meeting one another and the purpose of her creation: adam said thereupon: o lord, who is this good creation, who kept me company and whom i look at? god said: o adam, this is my servant (amatī) eve; would you like her to be with you so that she may entertain you (tuʾnisuka), speak with you, and carry out your command (taʾtamiru li-amrika)? [adam] said: yes, lord, and for that i owe you thanks and praise. god, glorious and almighty, said: ask me for her hand as she is my servant, and she is also suitable for you as a spouse for [your] desire[s] (zawja li-l-shahwa). then god set desire in him, and before that he had taught adam the knowledge.89 the purpose of the creation of woman thus seems to be to provide entertainment and service for the man. she is the object of the man’s lust, and she lacks knowledge. according to rawand osman, this distinction has given rise to the view that adam is the higher soul and eve is the lower one. this interpretation, osman argues, is contrary to the original quranic meaning of nafs. she further proposes that the depiction of the spouses in this narrative does not represent the quranic meaning of zawj, which refers to an equal spouse.90 the story continues: [adam] said: o lord, i ask you for her hand. and what is your wish (riḍāka) concerning this? [god] said: my wish is that you teach her the characteristics of my religion. [adam] said: i owe you that if you wish that, o lord! [god] said: i wished it and i married her to you, so she is joined to you. [adam] said: come to me! she said: no; you come to me! so god, glorious and almighty, ordered adam to go to her and he went. had he not done it, the women would go to ask [for men’s] hand[s] for themselves.91 eve’s insistence that adam go to her matches the conventional practice of patriarchal traditions, in which it is generally the man who goes to the woman to propose marriage. at the same time, this detail provides a rationale for the customs of its context: women are not to initiate matrimonial proposals, purely because of the events during the creation. in addition, this tradition contains the key elements of an islamic marriage—a dower 89. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:431. cf. bauer, gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 126. the eleventh/seventeenthcentury imāmī scholar al-majlisī (d. 1111/1698) gives a similar account in his monumental collection of imāmī traditions, most likely influencing subsequent quranic interpretations, although with some differences: god created eve in adam’s shape and showed her to him when he was asleep—this was the first dream on earth. when adam woke up, eve was sitting close to his head. when he asked who she was, god identified her as the person adam had seen in his dream. muḥammad bāqir al-majlisī, biḥār al-anwār: al-jāmiʿa li-durar akhbār al-aʾimma al-aṭhār (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1983), 11:115. 90. osman, female personalities, 25. in addition, inloes argues that the terminology clearly connects eve to slavery (women in shi’ism, 87). 91. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:431. cf. bauer, gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 126. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 99 (teaching religion) and a guardian (god). the presence of elements reflecting gender hierarchy in this tradition prompted amina inloes to characterize it as an instance of “ʿabbāsid-style slave-wife barter.”92 it is indeed surprising that this tradition, attributed to one of the most frequently cited imams, is not taken into account in any of the previous commentaries. a bit later in his commentary, al-ḥuwayzī quotes a prophetic tradition according to which the messenger of god was asked whether adam was created from eve or eve from adam, and he responded: eve was created from adam; had adam been created from eve, divorce would be in the hands of women, not of men. so, was she created from his entirety or from some [part] of him? from some [part] of him; had she been created from his entirety, women could be punished like men are. and from his exterior or his interior? from the interior; had she been created from his exterior, the women would be unveiled like the men are. therefore, women became covered. and from his right or his left (shimālihi)? from his left; had she been created from his right, the female’s part of the inheritance would be like that of the male. therefore, it became a portion for women and two portions for men. and the testimony of two women is like that of one man. so from what was she created? he said: from the clay that was left over from his left-hand rib (min al-ṭīna allatī faḍalat min ḍilʿihi al-aysar).93 al-ḥuwayzī is the first commentator thus far to use the word shimāl for the left side.94 he also uses the word aysar, which can be translated to mean “left” as well as “more negligible”; the latter translation adds a negative nuance to the depiction of women. significantly, this narration also seems to justify the hierarchical duties and rights of men and women, which may be considered the very basis of gender inequality. it also further diminishes the substance of eve’s creation: it is here the leftover clay from the creation of adam’s left-hand rib, not the whole of adam. this tradition, like the next one, encapsulates the imāmī views on the creation of woman by encompassing the key elements of the clay, the rib, and the secondary creation of the woman.95 in fact, it has been suggested that being created from such leftovers can be read as worse than being created from a rib.96 according to a tradition attributed to imam ʿalī, men were created from the earth, so they are interested in the earth, whereas women were created from men, so their interest is in men. ʿalī thus declares: “imprison your women, o community of men!” (fa-iḥbisū nisāʾakum yā maʿāshir al-rijāl). some earlier imāmī commentaries already conveyed a similar command, but al-ḥuwayzī’s is the first imāmī commentary to use the same verb, 92. inloes, women in shi’ism, 69; see also her summary of the tradition’s misogynous elements at 74–75. for bauer’s discussion on a similar passage, see “room for interpretation,” 43; gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 127. 93. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:434. 94. at least one sunni commentator uses the same term; see abū ḥayyān al-andalusī, tafsīr al-baḥr al-muḥīṭ, ed. a. ʿabd al-mawjūd et al. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2001), 3:163. 95. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:434. 96. inloes, women in shi’ism, 128. 100 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) ḥabasa, that appears in several sunni commentaries.97 the overlap may indicate the fluidity of exegetic networks, which may have been less sect-selective than we tend to assume. invoking an alternative version of an earlier tradition calling for the seclusion of women may also reflect the observed trend toward the imposition of more restrictions on women during the second half of the safavid era, possibly because of increasing urbanization and clericalization.98 3.3. muḥammad b. murtaḍā muḥsin fayḍ al-kāshānī (d. 1091/1680) mullā muḥsin al-fayḍ al-kāshānī is a well-known religious scholar of safavid iran. he was also the son-in-law of the influential imāmī philosopher mullā ṣadrā (d. 1050/1635), who may have influenced mullā muḥsin’s conceptions of gender. he studied various islamic disciplines and later produced a wide variety of religious literature, including a multivolume quranic commentary called kitāb al-ṣāfī fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, which he completed in 1075/1664.99 his interpretation of the relevant sentence in q 4:1 starts with the assertion that min nafs wāḥida means adam, and khalaqa minhā zawjahā means eve. muḥsin then invokes a long list of previous traditions on the matter, including contradictory traditions mentioning either a rib or leftover clay as the substance of female creation.100 many of these accounts echo the hebrew bible, which seems to have influenced the islamic—including shiʿi—interpretive tradition in relation to the story of human creation.101 muḥsin al-fayḍ also reproduces a long narration very similar to that previously provided by al-ḥuwayzī in which god creates eve in the hole between adam’s hips (bayna warkayhi) to serve and entertain adam.102 although the location of the hole in muḥsin al-fayḍ’s account differs 97. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:434; cf. ibn abī ḥātim, tafsīr, 3:852; ibn kathīr, tafsīr, 3:333; al-suyūṭī, al-durr al-manthūr, 4:209. this tradition, with the same verb, can already be found in the fourth/tenth-century compilation al-kāfī, but somewhat surprisingly it does not appear in imāmī exegetic material before al-ḥuwayzī. 98. r. matthee, “from the battlefield to the harem: did women’s seclusion increase from early to late safavid times?,” in new perspectives on safavid iran: empire and society, ed. c. mitchell, 99–120 (london: routledge, 2010), 110. however, matthee notes that the conventional conception of women’s diminishing public role during this period should be revisited and the complexity of the issue acknowledged. 99. w. c. chittick, “muḥsin-i fayḍ-i kāshānī,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., 7:475–76. 100. muḥammad b. murtaḍā al-fayḍ al-kāshānī, kitāb al-ṣāfī fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, ed. m. al-ḥusaynī al-amīnī (tehran: dār al-kutub al-islāmiyya, 1998), 2:175–76. 101. in fact, the biblical garden narrative is even more clearly present in a persian commentary on q 4:1, in which mullā fatḥ allāh kāshānī (d. 988/1580) explains that “when god most high created adam and brought him to paradise, he did not have, in the midst of emptiness, anyone of the same species with whom to socialize, although there were houris and servant boys of clean disposition in paradise. he asked god most high for someone of the same species. god put him into a deep sleep and commanded gabriel to take out a bone from his left side. and he created eve out of this bone.” fatḥ allāh kāshānī, manhaj al-ṣādiqīn fī ilzām al-mukhālifīn (tehran: čāpkhāna-yi muḥammad ḥasan ʿilmī, 1917), 2:416; translation by ilkka lindstedt. adam’s loneliness and his apparent need for a woman—as well as the process of her making—are here depicted in a way that resembles the biblical creation narrative (genesis 2:18–22). however, here gabriel acts as a mediator of the “bone,” which kāshānī identifies as a rib earlier in his explication, and in this account there were other humanlike creatures with adam before the creation of woman. 102. muḥsin al-fayḍ, al-ṣāfī, 2:176; cf. al-ḥuwayzī, nūr, 1:430–31. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 101 slightly from that in al-ḥuwayzī’s, both convey the idea that the woman is inferior to the man because of her derivative creation. however, mullā muḥsin also provides his own opinions and editorial comments on the traditions he cites. he quotes the abovementioned tradition according to which eve was created from adam’s insides on the left side and from the clay that was left over from the creation of his left-hand rib. interestingly, he concludes that this explains why men have one rib fewer than women do.103 as is nowadays known, this claim is in fact false, but its inclusion in the commentary demonstrates bauer’s point that exegeses are firmly dependent on the knowledge of their time.104 furthermore, in order to harmonize the somewhat contradictory views regarding the origin of the first woman and the substance of her creation, muḥsin al-fayḍ finally—and uniquely—gives his own opinion on the matter: i say: what has been reported to us—that she was created from his left-hand rib—is an indication that the bodily, animalistic tendency (al-jiha al-jusmāniyya al-ḥayawāniyya) is stronger in women than it is in men, and the spiritual, angelic tendency (al-jiha al-rūḥāniyya al-malakiyya) is contrary to it. this is because “the right” alludes to the spiritual, heavenly world, and “the left” alludes to the bodily realm. the “clay” is an expression of the corporeal substance, and “the right” is an expression of the spiritual substance, and there is no corporeal world (mulk) without a spiritual world (malakūt). this is the meaning of his [the imam’s] saying “both of his hands are right [hands].” so the left-hand rib missing from adam is a metaphor for some of the desires that grow from bodily dominance, which is [typically] from the physical world (khalq), and they are the leftover clay extracted from his [adam’s] interior, which became the substance of eve’s creation. it is pointed out in the tradition that in men the side of spirituality and command is stronger than the side of corporeality and physicality, unlike in women. so what is apparent is a sign of what is hidden, and this is the secret of the deficiency in male bodies in relation to women. god’s secrets are not achieved except by the people of the secret [i.e., the enlightened], so disbelief in the words of the infallible [imams]— peace be upon them—is due to the understanding of the sunnis (al-ʿāmma), which is based on the apparent [meaning] and disregards the origin of the tradition.105 muḥsin al-fayḍ may be acknowledged for his effort to reconcile the somewhat contradictory claims regarding the substance from which the first woman was created.106 however, his 103. muḥsin al-fayḍ, al-ṣāfī, 2:177–78. there is also another tradition in the imāmī hadith corpus that suggests that men have fewer ribs than women do; see inloes, women in shi’ism, 129–30. 104. bauer, “room for interpretation,” 52; eadem, gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 127. 105. muḥsin al-fayḍ, al-ṣāfī, 2:178. cf. bauer’s translation of the same passage in gender hierarchy in the qurʾān, 128–29. similarly, in fāṭimid ismāʿīlī interpretations, the creation of adam and eve is understood metaphorically, as described by bauer, “spiritual hierarchy.” 106. another kind of harmonizing effort is evident in al-majlisī’s collection of traditions (biḥār al-anwār, 11:116), which suggests that imāmī scholars endorsed the idea that woman was created from a rib only as an expression of taqiyya, precautionary dissimulation permitted to evade persecution. in fact, al-majlisī identifies the rib narrative as a sunni tradition, though he notes that it is also present in “our tradition” (biḥār al-anwār, 11:222). al-majlisī may have played a direct role in the trend toward greater gender segregation in the late 102 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) elucidation serves to confirm the presumptions of the time: men are strong, whereas women are weak; men are spiritual, whereas women are profane, even mundane. other potential views on the matter are presented in sectarian terms. besides emphasizing sectarian distinctions, mullā muḥsin’s explanation of q 4:1 thus also provides evidence in support of gender segregation—women are simply the other, fundamentally different from men. this perspective is very much in line with societal developments at the time, as the visibility of women in society clearly shrank. as osman points out, it is nearly preposterous that the same tale that the imams had strongly rejected could suddenly be seen as a calculated metaphor,107 but apparently it served well the interests of the author—or those of the elite around him. 3.4. hāshim b. sulaymān al-baḥrānī (d. 1107/1696) hāshim al-baḥrānī is known as an akhbārī-affiliated commentator. in his al-burhān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, completed in 1094/1683 and closely based on traditions, he repeats many of the narrations already provided in ʿabd ʿalī al-ḥuwayzī’s nūr al-thaqalayn and muḥsin al-fayḍ’s al-ṣāfī, though he generally cites them without further discussion.108 this is also the approach he adopts in connection with the passage of interest in this study. for example, al-baḥrānī presents traditions according to which the name of eve and the word for “woman” are derivative of man, in one way or another.109 he also reproduces the already mentioned traditions about women’s intrinsic lust for men, which justifies women’s seclusion, and the contriving of a female creature for adam in the hole between his hips, which established the woman as subordinate to the man.110 nevertheless, as with all exegetes, the personal selection of the traditions to include constitutes a form of interpretation and an editorial statement. 3.5. nūr al-dīn muḥammad b. murtaḍā al-kāshānī (d. 1115/1703) nūr al-dīn muḥammad al-kāshānī was a pupil of muḥsin al-fayḍ.111 however, his akhbārī-style tafsīr al-muʿīn discusses the passage in question only briefly. like many other commentaries, it affirms that khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida means adam, and khalaqa minhā zawjahā means eve. however, unlike some others, nūr al-dīn’s commentary does not present any alternative interpretations of the substance of eve’s creation: he states that eve was created from the leftover clay of adam and that she is consequently dependent on him.112 safavid period, as noted by matthee, “from the battlefield to the harem,” 98, citing earlier literature. 107. osman, female personalities, 27. 108. gleave, scripturalist islam, 226; lawson, “akhbārī shiʿī approaches to tafsīr,” 187–88. 109. hāshim b. sulaymān al-baḥrānī, al-burhān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān (beirut: muʾassasat al-aʿlamī, 2006), 3:153. 110. al-baḥrānī, al-burhān, 3:154–56. 111. gleave, scripturalist islam, 170. 112. nūr al-dīn muḥammad al-kāshānī, tafsīr al-muʿīn, ed. ḥ. dargāhī (qum: maktabat āyat allāh al-ʿuẓmā al-marʿashī, n.d.), 1:204. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 103 3.6. muḥammad b. muḥammad riḍā al-qummī al-mashhadī (d. 1125/1713) mīrzā muḥammad al-mashhadī’s quranic commentary kanz al-daqāʾiq wa-baḥr al-gharāʾib was possibly completed in the middle of the eleventh/seventeenth century. he was a student of mullā muḥsin al-fayḍ, which explains why most of the traditions he includes come from the latter’s al-ṣāfī. however, not much is known about mīrzā muḥammad himself.113 his discussion of q 4:1 begins by identifying the subject of khalaqakum min nafs wāḥida as adam. he then gives two possible explanations for wa-khalaqa minhā zawjahā: either god created humanity from a single person (min shakhṣ wāḥid) and eve from the leftover clay of the soul, or she was created from the single soul from which god created its mate. both the terminology and the idea seem similar to those of al-ṭabrisī half a millennium earlier.114 however, the expression “from a single person” is unique. it may reflect the author’s understanding of the first person, adam, as being the soul and simultaneously serving as the origin of human creation. mīrzā muḥammad further cites several other traditions quoted by the imāmī exegetes discussed above.115 in fact, certain narrations are repeated by almost all the exegetes of this discursive stage, and they seem to constitute the main innovation in their commentaries. mīrzā muḥammad is not an exception. he mainly lists earlier narrations on the topic without providing his own interpretation. the third discursive stage is characterized by numerous elaborations on the lore concerning eve’s creation, emphasizing the otherness of women and the need for their seclusion, in particular. this tendency is likely to represent societal developments in the safavid period, which saw women’s visibility diminish and restrictions on their freedom expand. in addition to invoking the gendered characteristics and duties of women, the commentaries frequently bring up sectarian elements, thus reflecting the political environment of their authors. conclusion this study has examined the evolution of the twelver shiʿi interpretive tradition, which largely relies on the lore ascribed to the infallible imams. its focus was the quranic verse almost invariably understood as describing the creation of the primordial couple, adam and eve. i analyzed the diachronic development of the imāmī exegetic discourse within the theoretical framework of feminist discourse analysis, which is aimed at uncovering power structures, especially gender hierarchies. my gender-sensitive analysis highlighted several misogynous elements and identified the patriarchal ethos apparent at every stage of the interpretive trajectory, in the course of which the creation of woman was first conceptualized as occurring after and from the man, later also for the man. importantly, i showed that the construction of gender ideology in the interpretive tradition can be explicated through a genealogical methodology that traces the beginning, developments, 113. bauer, “room for interpretation,” 209. 114. muḥammad b. muḥammad riḍā al-qummī al-mashhadī, tafsīr kanz al-daqāʾiq wa-baḥr al-gharāʾib, ed. ḥ. dargāhī (tehran: shams al-ḍuḥā, 1968), 3:315; cf. al-ṭabrisī, jawāmiʿ al-jāmiʿ, 1:368. 115. mīrzā muḥammad, kanz al-daqāʾiq, 3:316–18. 104 • katja von schöneman al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) and shifts of the discourse, hence giving us a more systematic perspective on imāmī exegesis. interestingly, the discursive stages identified in this study are not directly dependent on the religious tradition, sect, or quranic verse,116 although the features of imāmī exegeses within each stage seem to reflect the political and sectarian circumstances of the exegetes as well as their doctrinal beliefs. the first discursive stage in the development of imāmī exegetic discourse on the creation of woman took shape in the formative period of shiʿi tafsīr during the third–fourth/ninth– tenth centuries and reflected the formation of a distinct imāmī identity in this period. this stage was defined by the establishment of the corpus of traditions on the matter. eve’s creation was defined in dismissive terms: she was born of either adam’s smallest and lowest rib or leftover clay from his creation. because of her derivative creation, these traditions argued, the woman is so promiscuous that she has to be kept indoors. the second discursive stage coincided with the classical period of imāmī exegesis between the fifth/ eleventh and seventh/thirteenth centuries—that is, during and shortly after the shiʿi golden age, when scholars were free to express imāmī doctrines. in this stage, the standard views on eve were consolidated, and the prominence of the claimed substance of her creation, adam’s rib, was further minimized. in addition, the already insignificant rib was described as crooked, implying the obliquity of women themselves. this dismissive view of eve’s creation was expanded on during the third discursive stage of imāmī exegetic discourse in the tenth/sixteenth to eleventh/seventeenth centuries under the flourishing safavid dynasty. this broader political context may explain the fact that the exegetes of this stage often highlight sectarian elements in their interpretations. speculation over the pejorative attributes of the rib or over eve’s possible alternative (though still derivative) origins was widespread, and the woman was depicted as weak, inclined toward the material and the corporal, and made for the man, to serve him in various ways. the circumstances of her creation were used to justify gender hierarchy, even the seclusion of women, a practice that seems to have grown in popularity in late safavid society. the content of imāmī exegesis regarding the creation of woman diverges from the sunni interpretive tradition to some extent,117 although the commentaries offer evidence of the wide circulation of scholarly writings: twelver shiʿi commentators frequently refer to sunni traditions and conceptions or at least to a putative transsectarian consensus. many of the imāmī exegetes claim that most scholars—by which they probably mean also sunni ones— opt for adam’s rib as the substance from which the first woman was created; most of these imāmī exegetes even seem to consider this primarily sunni tradition correct. the rib theory may have been so dominant in the intellectual context of these scholars that it simply could not be ignored, and it is likely that contextual phenomena sometimes forced the exegetes to take sunni views into account more centrally than they might have otherwise done. almost all of the commentators discussed here also bring up an alternative tradition attributed to the fifth imam, abū jaʿfar al-bāqir, according to which the material of eve’s 116. cf. von schöneman, “evolution of rabbinic discourse”; eadem, “‘confine your women!’”; and aboubakr, “interpretive legacy of qiwamah,” respectively. 117. cf. von schöneman, “‘confine your women!’” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) created after, from, and for the man? • 105 creation was not a rib but clay left over from adam’s creation, an explanation that seems to be particular to the shiʿi interpretive tradition. from a gender-sensitive perspective, however, the difference between the two theories is limited: in both, the woman is a by-product of the man. furthermore, a narration from the sixth imam, abū ʿabd allāh al-ṣādiq, reduces the material even further, specifying that eve was made of a leftover portion from the creation of adam’s rib. thus, regardless of the details, the implications of the various accounts for the status of women are remarkably similar: women are derivative, dependent, subordinate, and comprehensively problematic. moreover, the diachronic development of this discourse points to a corresponding genealogical trajectory: the core of the traditions on the 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1999. al-wāḥidī, abū al-ḥasan ʿalī b. aḥmad. tafsīr al-basīṭ. riyadh: wizārat al-taʿlīm al-ʿālī, 2010. warhol, t. “gender constructions and biblical exegesis: lessons from a divinity school seminar.” in language and religious identity: women in discourse, edited by a. jule, 50–72. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2007. wodak, r. gender and discourse. london: sage, 1997. ———. “what cda is about: a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments.” in methods of critical discourse analysis, edited by r. wodak and m. meyer, 1–13. london: sage, 2001. introduction when he arrived in alexandria on dhū al-qaʿda 29, 578/march 26, 1183, and had passed through the city’s chaotic customs, the well-known traveler ibn jubayr gazed at the city’s architecture. never had he seen, he notes in his travelogue, “a city with broader streets and higher buildings, more ancient and more densely populated” than alexandria.1 he also marveled at ancient monuments and well-known characteristics of the city’s architecture, such as the famous lighthouse, the presence of cisterns, and the abundant use of marble. but what struck him most were “the colleges and watchtowers” built for those who traveled to alexandria in pursuit of knowledge or a pious lifestyle. each of these visitors, he writes, “will find a house to live in, a college to learn the art he wishes to learn, and an allowance * i would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier version of this article. remaining mistakes are, of course, my own. 1. ibn jubayr, riḥlat ibn jubayr (beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d.), 13–14. © 2020 jelle bruning. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria* jelle bruning leiden university (j.bruning@hum.leidenuniv.nl) abstract this article offers an edition, translation, and study of a hitherto unknown text about ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria. the author, one abū khuzayma muḥammad b. ʿabd al-wahhāb, gives a short yet rich description of the city based as much on alexandria’s real cityscape as on legends. the text treats famous monuments, such as the city’s lighthouse and the column of the pillars, as well as less well-known buildings, such as mosques, colleges, watchtowers, and gates. an analysis of the account leads to the conclusion that its author wrote the account in order to mobilize muslims for the defense of the city against frankish or byzantine attacks on alexandria or egypt’s mediterranean coast in general. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 74-115 mailto:j.bruning%40hum.leidenuniv.nl?subject= 75 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) that enables him to sustain himself.”2 he credits egypt’s sultan, saladin (r. 567–89/1171–93), with this concern for the wellbeing of “those foreigners who have come from remote places”3 and thus illustrates saladin’s great interest in the city’s defensive and religious architecture.4 one foreigner who claims to have had first-hand experience with this system is an otherwise unknown man from khurāsān named abū khuzayma muḥammad b. ʿabd al-wahhāb. he reports having visited alexandria in the second half of the sixth/twelfth century in order to practice ribāṭ, pious defensive warfare.5 a short account of his stay in alexandria has been preserved in a number of manuscripts, in which it appears after a late fourth/tenth-century book on the city’s religious virtues, ibn al-ṣabbāgh’s faḍāʾil al-iskandariyya.6 ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s account offers a rich description of alexandria and often complements information found in ayyubid or early mamluk descriptions of the city, such as those by benjamin of tudela (wr. ca. 565/1170), ibn jumayʿ (d. 594/1198), al-ʿabdarī (fl. late seventh/thirteenth century), and ibn baṭṭūṭa (d. 770/1368–69 or 779/1377), or in documents preserved in the cairo genizah.7 as we shall see, it also offers a unique window onto localized reactions to foreign attacks on egypt’s mediterranean coast in this period. this article presents an edition and translation of ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s account together with an analysis of its contents. the account is not a straightforward text about alexandria. some toponyms or names of buildings are garbled; the name and patronymic of ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s son, who transmitted the text (see para. 2), have been reversed;8 the order of the paragraphs is not 2. ibid., 15. 3. ibid., 15–17. 4. see doris behrens-abouseif, “topographie d’alexandrie médiévale,” in alexandrie médiévale 2, ed. christian décobert, 113–26 (cairo: ifao, 2002), 116–18. 5. admittedly, this is a very loose rendering of the term ribāṭ. in the period under consideration, ribāṭ referred to a form of religious activism that usually involved asceticism and defending the frontiers of the realm of islam. at the same time, the term referred to a place (not a specific type of edifice) where those who practiced ribāṭ (murābiṭūn) lived. good discussions of the term, taking into account historical developments and geographical diversity, are christophe picard and antoine borrut, “râbata, ribât, râbita: une institution à reconsidérer,” in chrétiens et musulmans en méditerranée médiévale (viiie–xiiie siècle): échanges et contacts, ed. nicolas prouteau and philippe sénac, 33–65 (poitiers: université de poitiers, centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale, 2003), and ei2, s.v. “ribāṭ.” 6. i am currently preparing an edition of this book. 7. benjamin of tudela, the itinerary of benjamin of tudela, ed. and trans. marcus n. adler (london: henry frowde/oxford: oxford university press, 1907), 74–77; ibn jumayʿ, ṭabʿ al-iskandariyya, ed. murayzin s. ʿasīrī and saʿd ʿa. al-bushrī (mecca: markaz al-buḥūth wa-iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-islāmī, 1997), passim; al-ʿabdarī, al-riḥla al-maghribiyya, ed. saʿd bū falāqa (bona [ʿanāba], algeria: manshūrāt būna li-l-buḥūth wa-l-dirāsāt, 1428/2007), 139–48; ibn baṭṭūṭa, tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār fī gharāʾib al-amṣār wa-ʿajāʾib al-asfār, ed. ʿabd al-hādī al-tāzī (rabat: akādīmiyyat al-mamlaka al-maghribiyya, 1417/1997), 1:179–92. see miriam frenkel, “medieval alexandria: life in a port city,” al-masāq 26, no. 1 (2014): 5–35 for a good overview of the information some of these authors and genizah documents present. 8. the account calls the son “muḥammad b. khuzayma” (para. 2) instead of khuzayma b. muḥammad. perhaps a copyist confused the son with muḥammad (b. isḥāq) ibn khuzayma (d. 311/924), a prominent traditionist from khurāsān known to have visited egypt. for the traditionist, see ei3, s.v. “ibn khuzayma.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 76 entirely logical; and at times, the text is vague, cryptic, or even self-contradictory. what is more, whereas the author presents the text as an eyewitness account of ayyubid alexandria, using his alleged rounds through the city with alexandria’s garrison as a literary frame in order to give the text authority,9 some passages are clearly based on legends surrounding the city’s ancient monuments. an analysis of the account’s contents, offered below, shows that the text should be read not as a personal history but rather as a highly stylized call for the defense of alexandria against non-muslim attacks. after a short opening paragraph that refers to one of the merits of ribāṭ performance in general, the account starts by praising alexandria’s defenses and islamic virtues (paras. 2–5). the text then describes the recent destruction of part of this praiseworthy city’s architecture at the hands of one uhrayqil (paras. 6–9), whom i identify as representing islam’s apocalyptic archenemy. paragraph 8 combines these themes: it includes information about the malicious activity of uhrayqil but also mentions some of the city’s noteworthy islamic institutions. together, these themes emphasize the present need to defend alexandria. at the end of the account (para. 10), the author brings his text’s two themes together and reminds the reader of the ease and spiritual benefits of ribāṭ performance in alexandria. text and translation at present, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s account is known to exist in the following three manuscripts, here preceded with the sigla used throughout this article: a1 = maktabat al-azhar (cairo), inv. khuṣūṣa 1374/ʿumūma 42050 ādāb wa-faḍāʾil, jawharī. the text is found on folios 21r–25v. the date and place of the manuscript’s production and the name of the copyist are unknown. folio 1r contains a waqf statement written in a different hand and dated dhū al-qaʿda 17, 1176/may 30, 1763. a2 = maktabat al-azhar, inv. khuṣūṣa 1923/ʿumūma 54924 ādāb wa-faḍāʾil. this is a modern copy of manuscript a1 dated rabīʿ i 1367/january 1948. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s text appears on folios 29r–36r. in a few instances, the text of this manuscript differs from that of manuscript a1. a transcription of this manuscript (with misread passages) circulates on the internet and has been entered into the online text database al-maktaba al-shāmila al-ḥadītha.10 st = staatsbibliothek (berlin), inv. sprenger 197, folios 17r–20v. this is an almost fully vocalized manuscript. the date and place of its production as well as the name of its copyist are unknown. a transcription of this manuscript with some differences in the text and its vocalization has been entered into al-maktaba al-shāmila al-ḥadītha.11 9. for this literary strategy, see zayde antrim, routes and realms: the power of place in the early islamic world (oxford: oxford university press, 2012), 2–3, 62–70. 10. see https://al-maktaba.org/book/11797; the account starts at the bottom of page 22 of the transcription. 11. see https://al-maktaba.org/book/30242; the account starts on page 66 of the transcription. 77 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) in all three manuscripts, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s account follows ibn al-ṣabbāgh’s faḍāʾil al-iskandariyya. a fourth manuscript originally also contained the text after ibn al-ṣabbāgh’s work: dār al-kutub wa-l-wathāʾiq al-qawmiyya (cairo), inv. 1485 taʾrīkh taymūr. some time after 1974, pages 23 to 38 of this manuscript got detached from the codex and were subsequently lost.12 today, this manuscript ends halfway through ibn al-ṣabbāgh’s text. fortunately, traces of the writing on page 38 can still be seen on the manuscript’s very last page (39), which has been glued to a new flyleaf and, for that reason, stuck to the cover when the other pages broke off. on that last page, traces of the following words are legible: (lines 2–3) المعروفة با]ه‍[‍ر]يقل (line 5, with vocalization) َدوِّر‍الم‍]‍را[ة (lines 5–6) ا[لم‍]‍دين‍[‍ة‍اعلم‍الخا]ز[ند]ار‍‍‍ (lines 7–8) وكن‍[‍ا‍نتفرج‍على .(line 9) لل‍[‍خير‍]ف‍[‍اعلين these words belong unmistakably to the end of ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s text; compare with paragraphs 9 and 10 of the edition below. the copies of the text preserved in manuscripts a1, a2, and st regularly exhibit features of middle arabic. for example, the rules of classical arabic regarding the concord between numerals and counted nouns are not always followed: (para. 1, only in manuscripts a1 and st, corrected in a2) خمسة‍وعشرين‍صالة (para. 5) اثني‍عشر‍ألف‍محراب (para. 8) سبع‍محارس (para. 9) سبع‍عقود 13.(para. 9) سبع‍وعشرون‍ذراًعا the manuscripts also frequently exhibit a lack of concord between a noun and a resumptive pronoun: عامودان‍مربعان‍...‍مصور‍عليها‍أرهاط‍...‍طول‍كل‍عامود‍منها‍سبعون‍ذراًعا (para. 5, only in manuscripts a1 and a2)14 (para. 6) حوض‍...‍منقوش‍عليها‍شخوص (para. 8) والباب‍الغربي‍...‍ذكر‍أن‍بها‍...‍ألف‍وأربعمائة‍شهيد (para. 8) الزلط‍األسود‍...‍يرصدها 15.(para. 8) مركب‍...‍بها مائة‍صبط 12. an unpublished typescript catalog entitled qāʾima bi-ḥaṣr al-makhṭūṭāt al-ʿarabiyya bi-dār al-kutub wa-l-wathāʾiq al-qawmiyya, dated march 1974 and available in the dār al-kutub, still states (20:1744) that the manuscript has thirty-eight written pages. 13. joshua blau, a grammar of christian arabic based mainly on south-palestinian texts from the first millennium (louvain: secrétariat du corpussco, 1966–67), 2:366 and 369. 14. for -hā referring to duals, see ibid., 1:214. 15. see also the unclear reference in لكل‍باب‍منهم‍ثالثة‍لوالب (para. 9). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 78 once, -humā denotes the plural: رماة‍...‍يرمي‍أحدهما‍على سبعة‍أميال (para. 8).16 plurals designating humans sometimes accompany a verb in the feminine singular: (para. 1) تشيله‍البوابين‍‍‍ (para. 3) فحملتني‍الخدام‍‍‍‍ (para. 8) حطابون‍تكتب‍على‍الفتاوى‍‍‍‍ 17.(para. 8) رماة‍ترمي‍بالقسي‍‍‍ t h e n ū n o f t h e p l u r a l e n d i n g o f t h e i m p e r f e c t i n d i c a t i v e i s d r o p p e d t w i c e : 18 in the.(para. 6) ويكثروا‍الصراخ and (para. 4, only in manuscript st) وفي‍كل‍يوم‍يفعلوا‍بأمير‍كذا first paragraph, the nūn is preserved in the construct state of the dual: 19. بألفين‍صالة in manuscript a1, the ending -īna of the sound masculine plural once replaces -ūna in the nominative: تشيله‍البوابين (para. 1).20 the use of participles is frequently unidiomatic: b i i n s t e a d o f f ī i n ) بالمحرم p a r a . 2 , o n l y i n m a n u s c r i p t s a 1 a n d a 2 ) a n d ذخيرة بالحوض‍ للمدينة 21 liinstead of ilā in;(para. 5) إن‍ ‍... مركب‍ 22 biand fī;(para. 8) تأتي‍ instead of liin وفي‍كل‍ولي‍وظيفة and قلة‍الملك‍...‍بها‍باب (both para. 5); min used to express possession instead of annexation via the construct state in الباب‍الشرقي‍منها, “its eastern gate” (para. 2).23 in paragraph 4, wa-lā continues a positive sentence and negates a verb in the perfect: 24. خرجنا‍وال‍زلنا‍بالمدينة‍دائرين once a definite word is written without an article: 25 in what is perhaps more a stylistic feature,26.(para. 8; cf. manuscript st) باب‍األخضر‍الكبير the text also regularly isolates the natural subject, especially after the word kull; e.g., وكل‍خراج‍يأتي‍إلى‍الملك‍يأمر‍بصرف‍ثلثه (para. 5). interestingly, manuscript st sometimes exhibits features of middle arabic where manuscripts a1 and a2 do not. especially noteworthy is the spelling of the following two words, which disagrees with the rules of classical arabic and suggests that colloquial arabic influenced this copy of the text in the course of its transmission: فرديت instead of فرددت (para. 3) and وتنضيفه instead of وتنظيفه (para. 8).27 manuscript st also has الصور instead of in paragraph 5. the spelling of this word is possibly corrected in manuscripts a1 and السور a2 because all manuscripts spell al-sūr with a ṣād in paragraph 8.28 further, manuscript st writes فنظنوا in scriptio plena (para. 8) instead of فنظن . in manuscript st, too, a tanwīn 16. blau, grammar, 1:134–35. 17. encyclopedia of arabic language and linguistics, s.v. “middle arabic” (pp. 221–22). 18. blau, grammar, 2:259–60, 268–69. 19. ibid., 1:222–23. 20. encyclopedia of arabic language and linguistics, s.v. “middle arabic” (p. 220). 21. blau, grammar, 1:242. 22. ibid., 1:251. 23. ibid., 2:423. 24. ibid., 2:302–3. 25. encyclopedia of arabic language and linguistics, s.v. “middle arabic” (p. 220). 26. for isolation of the natural subject in classical arabic, see the references in blau, grammar, 3:471, n. 5. 27. ibid., 1:113–14. 28. ibid., 1:111–12. 79 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) alif twice marks a circumstantial clause: بابه‍صغير‍مصفًحا and فإذا‍أنا‍بخندق‍مآلًنا‍بالماء (both in para. 2).29 in disagreement with classical arabic, manuscript st has the tendency to privilege indefinite singular nouns in the accusative after numerals: مائة‍ديناًرا (para. 3) and 30 once, manuscript st preserves the nūn of the plural ending in the.(para. 9) ثمانية‍آالف‍مياًل construct state: لبوابين‍المدينة (para. 3).31 in deference to the manuscript copies of the text, such features of middle arabic have been left unchanged in the edition below. manuscript a1 forms the base text of the edition. in case of an evident copyist mistake (such as the accidental omission of a word, a spelling mistake, or a dittography), i have privileged manuscripts a2 and/or st. the apparatus indicates variant readings in the manuscripts and when a manuscript other than a1 has been given preference in the edition. i have divided the text into paragraphs in order to facilitate referencing and added some punctuation for ease of reading. edition بسم‍الل‍ه‍الرحمن‍الرحيم وصلى‍الل‍ه‍على‍سيدنا‍محمد32 ‍‍‍‍‍‍دل‍الحديث‍الصحيح‍بمفهومه‍33أن‍صالة‍المرابط‍ببلد‍الرباط‍بألفين‍صالة‍وخمسة34 وعشرين‍صالة. ‍‍‍‍‍وعن‍محمد‍بن‍خزيمة‍عن‍أبيه‍أنه‍قال:‍سمعت‍ذلك‍فقصدُت‍المرابطة‍بالمحرم‍باإلسكندرية35 من‍شهور‍ سنة‍ستين‍وخمسمائة‍في‍زمن‍|‍والية‍السيد‍أيوب‍الكردي‍رحمه‍الل‍ه36،‍فأتيت‍إليها‍فنظرت‍بياضها‍المًعا‍ رأيته‍من‍أربعة‍وعشرين‍37مياًل‍عند‍الصباح،‍فلما‍وصلت‍المدينة‍وجدت‍الباب‍الشرقي‍منها‍مفتوًحا‍بابه‍ ‍صغير‍مصفح‍38بالحديد‍يصعد‍المدينة‍39منه‍بقنطرة‍من‍خشب‍وعند‍آخر‍النهار‍تشيله‍البوابين‍40باآلالت41،‍ 29. ibid., 2:332–33. 30. ibid., 2:377. 31. encyclopedia of arabic language and linguistics, s.v. “middle arabic” (p. 220). 32. instead of وصلى‍الل‍ه‍على‍سيدنا‍محمد , st has وصلى‍الل‍ه‍على‍سيدنا‍محمد‍وعلى‍آله‍وصحبه‍وسلم‍. 33. st: بمفهوم‍ 34. a2: وخمس‍ 35. instead of بالمحرم‍باإلسكندرية , st has باإلسكندرية‍في‍محرم‍الحرام‍. 36. om. st: رحمه‍الل‍ه 37. st: عشر 38. st: مصفًحا 39. st: للمدينة 40. a2 and st: البوابون 41. st: باآللة a2 29v a1 21r / a2 29r / st 17r [¶1] [¶2] fol. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 80 فطلبت‍الدخول‍للمدينة‍فمنعت‍|‍من‍ذلك‍إلى‍ثالثة‍أيام،‍فإذا‍أنا‍42بخندق‍مآلن‍43بالماء‍محيط‍بالمدينة‍عرضه‍ عشرة‍أذرع‍وبه‍صيادون‍يصطادون‍|‍السمك. ‍‍‍‍‍فقلت‍للبوابين‍بالمدينة44:‍أريد‍الدخول،‍فقال‍كبيرهم:‍أال‍45نستشير‍الملك؟‍فاستشاروا‍وقالوا‍لي:‍ما‍ ‍تريد‍بالدخول؟‍فقلت:‍أريد‍المرابطة‍بها،‍فحملوني‍إلى‍الملك‍46وأوقفت‍47بين‍يديه‍فإذا‍هو‍رجل‍كبير‍السن |‍فسلمت‍عليه‍فرد‍علي‍السالم‍وقال‍لي:‍ما‍اسمك؟‍فقلت:‍محمد‍بن‍عبد‍الوهاب،‍فقال:‍وما‍كنيتك؟‍فقلت:‍أبو‍ خزيمة،‍فقال48:‍وما‍هي‍بلدك؟‍فقلت:‍خراسان،‍فقال:‍في‍أي‍شيء‍جئت؟‍فقلت:‍أيها‍الملك‍المهاب‍سمعت‍أن‍ كل‍من‍رابط‍باإلسكندرية‍له‍من‍األجر‍كذا‍وكذا‍فطلبت‍المرابطة‍بها،‍فتركني‍واقًفا‍وبيده‍قرطاس‍وسألني‍ثانًيا‍ فرددت‍49عليه‍ذلك‍وسألني‍50ثالًثا‍فرددت‍51عليه‍ذلك‍فناداني‍رابًعا‍أزعجني‍بصوته‍وقال‍لي:‍تريد‍المرابطة؟‍ قلت52:‍نعم،‍فحملتني‍الخدام‍إلى‍محل‍فيه‍فرش‍53ورتب‍لي‍طعاًما‍وشراًبا‍مثل‍العسكر‍54وال‍زالوا‍|‍يمثلوني‍بين‍ يدي‍الملك‍ثالثة‍55أيام‍ويسألوني‍56كل‍57يوم‍أربع‍مرات‍فنرد‍عليه‍مقالتي‍األولى‍ثم‍بعد‍ذلك‍قال‍|‍لي:‍أتريد‍58 ‍المرابطة؟‍|‍فقلت‍له:‍نعم،‍فقال‍لي59:‍إن‍بالمدينة‍ثالثمائة‍وستون‍60أميًرا‍تحت‍يد‍كل‍أمير‍ثالثمائة‍وستون‍نفًرا‍ 42. om. st. 43. st: مآلًنا 44. instead of للبوابين‍بالمدينة , st has لبوابين‍المدينة. 45. st: إلى‍أن 46. a1 and a2 lack the words:  الملك إلى‍ فحملوني‍ بها،‍ المرابطة‍ أريد‍ فقلت:‍ بالدخول؟‍ تريد‍ ما‍ لي:‍ وقالوا‍ this . فاستشاروا‍ is possibly a homoioteleuton: the last word before the omission, الملك, is the last of the omitted words, too. the words have been copied from st. 47. the copyist of manuscript st left this word unvocalized. 48. st: فقال‍لي 49. st: فرديت 50. st: فتركني‍وسألني 51. st: فرديت 52. st: فقلت 53. st: فراش 54. st: عساكر‍الملك 55. st: ثالث 56. st: ويسألني 57. st: في‍كل 58. st: تريد 59. om. st. 60. st: وستين [¶3] st 17v a1 21v a2 30r a2 30v a1 22r st 18r 81 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) وكل‍أمير‍له‍يوم‍وليلة‍يحرس‍حول‍المدينة،‍فسأل‍عن‍أمير‍النوبة‍فأحضر‍بين‍يديه‍فسلمني‍إليه‍فكتبني‍في‍ دفتر‍61وسلمني‍فرًسا‍62تساوي‍في‍ثمنها‍مائة‍دينار‍63وسيًفا‍هندًيا‍ورمًحا‍خطًيا. ‍‍‍‍‍فلما‍أن‍صلى‍األمير‍العصر‍جهز‍64الخيل‍وشد‍65الرحال‍66وسالحاتها‍وأسنتها‍وخرجنا‍من‍عند‍باب‍ الملك‍البسين‍الزرد‍والخوذ‍وآلة‍الحرب‍|‍وكتبة‍يكتبون‍في‍العساكر‍67كل‍أحد‍باسمه‍إلى‍أن‍‍68كتبوا‍ثالثمائة‍ وستين‍رجاًل‍كلهم‍راكبون‍الخيول،‍فخرجنا‍وال‍زلنا‍بالمدينة‍دائرين‍إلى‍الصباح،‍فُضِرَبْت‍طشطخانة‍الملك‍فدخلنا‍ فنقدونا‍69وكتبونا‍ثانًيا،‍وفي‍كل‍يوم‍يفعلون‍بكل‍أمير‍70كذا‍على‍عدد‍أيام‍السنة،‍فكان‍يخص‍كل‍أمير‍في‍السنة‍ نوبة‍واحدة. ‍‍‍‍‍وكنا‍نزور‍األولياء‍ونتعاهد‍المساجد‍71فرأيت‍بها‍ثمانمائة‍مسجًدا‍72محراًبا،‍وذكر‍لنا‍أنه‍كان‍|‍بالمدينة‍ اثني‍عشر‍ألف‍محراب‍وبها‍مائة‍وتسعون‍خطبة‍وفي‍كل‍ولي‍وظيفة‍في‍يوم‍معين،‍وأزقة‍المدينة‍مفروشة‍ بالرخام‍الهيصمي‍عالية‍البناء‍||‍شديدة‍البياض‍ال‍تبطل‍العمارة‍من‍أسوارها‍على‍الدوام،‍وكل‍خراج‍يأتي‍ إلى‍الملك‍يأمر‍بصرف‍ثلثه‍في‍عمارة‍السور73،‍بها‍ثالثمائة‍وستون‍قلة‍مبيضة‍مرسومة‍بماء‍الذهب‍باسم‍ الملك‍وكل‍وزير‍للملك‍قلته‍مبيضة‍بالزلط‍الهيصمي74،‍وكانت‍قلة‍الملك‍في‍الجانب‍البحري‍وبها‍باب‍75يفتح‍ ‍شرقًيا‍وآخر‍قبلًيا‍وعلى‍الباب‍القبلي‍عامودان‍مربعان‍76من‍الزلط‍األحمر‍مصور‍عليها‍77أرهاط‍وشخوص‍ 61. st: دفتره 62. a2: ترسا 63. st: ديناًرا 64. st: جهزت 65. st: شدت 66. st: الرجال 67. st: العسكر 68. om. st. 69. a2: فتفدونا 70. instead of يفعلون‍بكل‍أمير , st has يفعلوا‍بأمير‍. 71. st: المساجد‍بها 72. om. st. 73. st: الصور 74. instead of قلته‍مبيضة‍بالزلط‍الهيصمي , st has قلة‍مبنية‍بالزلط‍الهيصم‍. 75. instead of وبها‍باب , st has وبابها‍. 76. the words عامودان‍مربعان appear in st. a1 and a2 have ن‍مربعان .عامر‍واإ 77. st: عليهما a2 31r a1 22v a2 31v / st 18v [¶4] [¶5] al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 82 ملوك‍78طول‍79كل‍عامود‍منها‍80سبعون‍ذراًعا‍وهما‍متساويان‍في‍طولهما‍بينهما‍فسحة‍طولها‍81سبعة‍عشر‍ ذراًعا‍وعليها‍شبكة‍من‍نحاس. ‍‍‍‍‍وذكر‍لنا‍بعض‍اإلخوان‍|‍أنه‍كان‍في‍سابق‍|‍الزمان‍استخدام‍الصور‍المنقوشة‍82على‍العامودين83،‍ إذا‍أتى‍عدو‍على‍84المدينة‍يرى‍85كل‍صورة‍يصعد‍إليها‍من‍البحر‍صورتها‍ويكثروا‍86الصراخ‍في‍جانب‍ البحر‍فتعرف‍الناس‍بذلك،‍وبين‍العامودين‍حوض‍من‍الزلط‍األسود‍منقوش‍عليها‍87شخوص‍وأرهاط‍ومراكب‍ ودواب‍وأشكال‍على‍صفات‍مختلفة‍وهو‍مغًطا‍88مسبوك‍عليه‍بالرصاص،‍وكان‍إذا‍أتى‍المدينة‍89عدو‍يفور‍ من‍الحوض‍ماء‍وينظر‍90إلى‍الحوض‍فترى‍كل‍صورة‍في‍الحوض‍صفتها‍طالعة‍|‍إلى‍البحر،‍وذكروا‍91أن‍ الحوض‍كان‍به‍مدفوًنا‍|‍حكيمه‍الذي‍احتكمه‍فلما‍92أخذت‍المدينة‍من‍أهريقل‍أرسل‍جاسوًسا‍في‍صفة‍راهب‍ بأموال‍كثيرة‍93ودخل‍إلى‍المدينة‍وتوصل‍94إلى‍ملكها‍فقال‍له:‍إن‍بالحوض‍ذخيرة‍من‍ذخائر‍الحكماء،‍وحسن‍ له‍فتحه‍95ففتحه‍الملك‍96فبطل‍استخدامه. 78. om. st. 79. so in st. a1 and a2: ملوك 80. st: منهما 81. after this word, the copyist of a1 mistakenly rewrote the words: سبعون‍ذراًعا‍وهما‍متساويان‍في‍طولهما‍بينهم‍فسحة‍طولها manuscript a2’s copyist copied this dittography. these extra words are not found in st. 82. st: المنعوشة 83. st: العامودين‍المذكورين 84. st: إلى 85. so in a1 and a2. st: يرا 86. st: يكثر 87. st: عليه 88. a2: مغطى 89. st: إلى‍المدينة 90. a2: وتنظر 91. st: وذكر 92. st: فلما‍أن 93. instead of في‍صفة‍راهب‍بأموال‍كثيرة , st has بأموال‍. 94. st: فتوصل 95. instead of له‍فتحه , st has فتحه‍للملك‍. 96. instead of ففتحه‍الملك , st has فأمر‍بفتحه‍فُفِتَح‍; cf. the end of paragraph 7. [¶6] a1 23ra2 32r a2 32v st 19r 83 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ‍‍‍‍‍‍وذكروا‍97أيًضا‍أن‍98بقرب‍كوم‍إيماس‍|‍وجامع‍السلسلة‍99بحري‍طرف‍الكوم‍قصر‍مغلق‍100وعليه‍غلق‍ كبير‍101فلم‍أزل‍أسأل‍عن‍ذلك،‍قال‍بعضهم‍102إنه‍كان‍به‍رصد‍األتربة103،‍كل‍من‍رمى‍على‍بابه‍104كناسة‍ يصبح‍يراها‍على‍كوم‍إيماس،‍فال‍يزال‍105الملعون‍جاسوس‍أهريقل‍يحسن‍للملك‍فتح‍ذلك‍المكان‍فأمر‍بفتحه‍ ففتح‍فوجد‍به‍مكنسة‍من‍نحاس‍|‍على‍زلطة‍سوداء،‍فلما‍أن‍فتح‍بطلت‍حركة‍106ذلك. ‍‍‍‍‍وباب‍المدينة‍الشرقي‍الذي‍يسمى‍باب‍محمد‍صلى‍الل‍ه‍عليه‍وسلم‍كان‍سكًنا‍107للوزير‍الكبير‍فنام‍ليلة‍ فرأى‍في‍منامه‍أن‍بالباب‍شهداء‍استشهدوا‍بالوقعة‍108ودفنوا‍به‍فشكوا‍من‍دوس‍النعال‍فلما‍أصبح‍الصباح‍109 ذكر‍ذلك‍للملك‍110فأمر‍بسده‍وبفتح‍باب‍األخضر‍111الكبير‍وكان‍الملك‍يعمل‍به‍مولًدا‍112في‍كل‍ليلة‍جمعة،‍ والباب‍الغربي‍الذي‍قتل‍فيه‍ابن‍الملك‍أهريقل‍|‍ذكر‍أن‍بها‍113من‍المسلمين‍|‍ألف‍وأربعمائة‍شهيد،‍وأما‍الباب‍ الثاني‍114فهو‍لوزيره‍الثاني‍115|‍فكنا‍ليلة‍تكون‍نوبتنا‍نسمع‍مجالس‍الذكر‍كضجيج‍الحج‍فنظن‍116أن‍الوقعة‍ بالمدينة،‍وبها‍مائة‍وثمانون‍مدرسة‍لطلب‍العلم‍حتى‍كان‍بالمدينة‍حطابون‍تكتب‍على‍الفتاوى‍وال‍ترى‍في‍ المدينة‍117تراًبا‍وال‍حصوة‍118وال‍يعلوها‍دخان،‍وفي‍كل‍عام‍تأتي‍مركب‍من‍أهريقل‍للمدينة‍بها‍مائة‍صبط‍119 97. st: وذكر 98. st: أنه‍كان 99. st: العسلية 100. instead of قصر‍مغلق , st has قصًرا‍معلًقا‍. 101. st: كثير 102. instead of قال‍بعضهم , st has فقال‍لي‍بعض‍الناس‍. 103. st: لنقل‍األتربة 104. st: باب‍داره 105. st: زال 106. a2: هركة 107. instead of كان‍سكًنا , a2 has كا‍سكنى‍. 108. st: في‍الوقعة 109. instead of فلما‍أصبح‍الصباح , st has فلما‍أن‍أصبح‍. 110. st: للملك‍يوسف 111. st: الخضر 112. st: موالد 113. st: به 114. st lacks the words وأما‍الباب‍الثاني . 115. instead of لوزيره‍الثاني , st has لوزير‍ثاني‍. 116. st: فنظنوا 117. st: أزقة‍المدينة 118. st: حصًوا 119. st: صنداد‍. see also note 208 below. a2 33r st 19v a2 33v a1 24r [¶8] [¶7] a1 23v al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 84 حاملين‍الزلط‍األسود‍منكسين‍الروس‍يرصدونها‍120بداخل‍الصور‍121ومعهم‍هدايا‍وذلك‍كله‍ألجل‍زيارتهم‍ كنيسة‍ولد‍أهريقل‍التي‍قتل‍بها‍وهي‍بوسط‍البلد‍ولها‍شهرة‍بعمارتها‍122وبنائها‍بقرب‍مسجد‍يقال‍له‍َقْيُلواَل‍123في‍ الصف‍124القبلي‍يصعد‍إليه‍بسلم‍من‍|‍هيصم‍وهو‍مشهور‍بكثرة‍العلماء،‍وبها‍مسجد‍يعرف‍125بابن‍عوف‍به‍ ستون‍شهيًدا‍دفنوا‍به،‍وبها‍126مسجد‍في‍الجانب‍الغربي‍يسمى‍بالعمري‍وآخر‍البن‍عوف‍وآخر‍بالباب‍الشرقي‍ يسمى‍بالفخرية‍127به‍ستون‍من‍طلبة‍العلم،‍|‍وبالمدينة‍من‍الجانب‍البحري‍سبع‍محارس‍عالية‍البناء‍بها‍رماة‍ ترمي‍بالقسي‍يرمي‍أحدهما‍على‍سبعة‍أميال،‍وفي‍الجانب‍الغربي‍باب‍يسمى‍باب‍البركة‍وباب‍الخضر‍عليه‍ السالم‍يزوره‍الملك‍كل‍128يوم‍جمعة‍|‍ويتصدق‍فيه‍بخير‍كثير،‍والجامع‍الكبير‍يسمى‍129بجامع‍الغرباء‍به‍ ثالث‍مائة‍130مجاور‍لطلب‍العلم‍وفي‍ركنه‍البحري‍منزل‍عمرو‍بن‍العاص‍لما‍|‍رمى‍بالمنجنيق‍حين‍أخذت‍ المدينة،‍وبظاهر‍المدينة‍مسجد‍يعرف‍بجامع‍السارية‍بجانبه‍عامود‍كبير‍وآخر‍صغير،‍وذكروا‍131أن‍العامود‍ إشارة‍كنز،‍وكان‍الملك‍في‍زمن‍الشتاء‍وزمن‍الزهورات‍يأمر‍بنصب‍الصيوان‍تحت‍العامود‍الكبير‍132ويخرج‍ الملك‍وينصب‍133البيارق‍على‍األسوار‍خضر‍وبيض‍وحمر‍ومفترجات‍ويأمر‍الملك‍في‍ذلك‍الوقت‍بفتح‍الخليج‍ ‍وتنظيفه‍134حتى‍يبان‍قاعه‍ألنه‍مرخم‍بالهيصم،‍وفي‍زمن‍النيل‍تجيء‍المراكب‍فيه‍وتطلع‍الناس‍للمفترجات |‍والبيع‍والشراء‍والتنزه‍إلى‍أيام‍عديدة،‍وبأبواب‍مساجدها‍قناديل‍معلقة‍|‍حتى‍إذا‍كان‍الليل‍135يحتاج‍أحد‍إلى‍ شيء‍وقع‍منه‍يراه. 120. st: يرصونها 121. so in all manuscripts; lege السور. 122. st: بعمادها 123. st: قيليال 124. om. st. 125. om. a1 and a2. 126. st: به 127. st: بالفخر 128. st: في‍كل 129. st: يعرف 130. instead of ثالث‍مائة , st has ثالثمائة‍. 131. st: وذكر 132. om. st. 133. st: وتنصب 134. st: وتنضيفه 135. st: باليل a2 34r a1 24v st 20r a2 34v a1 25ra2 35r 85 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ‍‍‍‍وظاهر‍136المدينة‍من‍الجانب‍البحري‍على‍خمسة‍أميال‍137منارة‍في‍البحر‍138خراب‍بها‍سبع‍عقود‍ أسفلها‍تعلوها‍خمسة‍عقود‍تعلوها‍ثالثة‍عقود‍يعلوها‍عقد‍واحد،‍طول‍كل‍عقد‍من‍العقود‍139األولى‍سبع‍140 وعشرون‍ذراًعا‍بذراع‍العمل‍وعرضه‍كذلك،‍وفي‍وسطه‍منارة‍مربعة‍األركان‍|‍يصعد‍إليها‍بتسعة‍وتسعين‍141 سلًما‍طول‍142كل‍سلم‍أربعون‍ذراًعا‍وعرضه‍كذلك‍من‍النحاس‍األصفر،‍منقوش‍عليه‍شخوص‍وأرهاط143،‍ من‍ مرآة‍ األربعة‍ األبواب‍ وخلف‍ كالرعد،‍ دوي‍146 لها‍ يسمع‍145 ُفِرك‍144 إذا‍ لوالب‍ ثالثة‍ منهم‍ باب‍ ‍لكل‍ |‍هانبذان‍147مزينة‍بالذهب‍وفوقها‍علم‍من‍فضة‍يدور‍معها‍أينما‍148دارت،‍فإذا‍كانت‍الشمس‍شرًقا‍أو‍غرًبا‍تدور‍ باآلالت‍149إلى‍ناحيتها،‍فيرى‍من‍فيها‍من‍قابلها‍من‍مسيرة‍150ثمانية‍آالف‍ميل‍151|‍مكتوب‍عليها‍ذلك،‍ولكن‍ وجدناها‍معطلة‍باقية‍على‍تلك‍الصورة152،‍وذكروا‍153أن‍سبب‍تعطيلها‍أن‍ولد‍أهريقل‍154لما‍155أتى‍إلى‍156الثغر‍ ‍عند‍الوقعة‍المعروفة‍بأهريقل‍وكان‍لما‍تحول‍المرآة‍إلى‍ناحيته‍فيرى‍ما‍يجري‍في‍المدينة‍وكان‍أهريقل‍أوصى ‍لولده‍157وقال‍له‍إذا‍كان‍القتال‍دور‍المرآة‍نحوي‍ألرى‍ما‍أنت‍فيه،‍فلما‍158وصل‍المدينة‍أعلم‍الخازندار‍159بذلك‍ 136. st: وبظاهر 137. st: أميال‍من‍المدينة 138. st omits the words في‍البحر . 139. st: ذلك‍العقود 140. st: سبعة 141. st: وتسعون 142. so in st. om. a1 and a2. 143. instead of شخوص‍وأرهاط , st has أرهاط‍وشخوص‍. 144. st: فركت 145. st: تسمع 146. st: دوًيا 147. st: هانيدان 148. st: أين 149. st: باآللة 150. st: مسير 151. st: مياًل 152. st: الصفة 153. st: وذكر 154. so in st. a1 and a2: هرقيل 155. st: لما‍أن 156. om. st. 157. st: ولده 158. st: فلما‍أن 159. st: الخازن st 20v a2 35v a1 25v [¶9] al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 86 فلما‍160وقع‍الحرب‍قتل‍ابن‍أهريقل‍|‍وأسر‍161قومه‍فبطل‍الخازندار‍162حركتها‍وفر‍هارًبا‍وكنا‍نتفرج‍على‍ذلك. ‍‍‍‍‍‍‍وأقمت‍بها‍أربعين‍سنة‍163كأنها‍أربعين‍164يوًما،‍فيا‍لها‍من‍مدينة،‍بها‍حدائق‍وماء‍رائق‍وأهلها‍للخير‍ فاعلين،‍ال‍تبطل‍القراءة‍منها‍وال‍طلب‍العلم‍ال‍لياًل‍وال‍نهاًرا‍إيماًنا‍ساطًعا‍ونوًرا‍المًعا،‍بها‍أولياء‍أسرارهم‍ واضحة‍وكراماتهم‍باهرة‍وأقوالهم‍صحيحة،‍أعاد‍الل‍ه‍علينا‍من‍بركاتهم‍165ونفعنا‍بمددهم‍أجمعين167.166 translation in name of god, the merciful and compassionate. may god bless our lord muḥammad.168 [¶1] in the sense in which it is [commonly] understood, a sound tradition indicates that a murābiṭ’s prayer in a town in which ribāṭ is practiced equals two thousand and twenty-five prayers.169 [¶2] on the authority of muḥammad b. khuzayma,170 who cited his father, who said: i heard that [tradition] and so [decided to] pursue ribāṭ in alexandria in muḥarram171 of the year five hundred sixty172 during the governorship of the lord ayyūb al-kurdī, may god have mercy upon him. i went there, and in the morning i saw the city’s brilliant whiteness from a distance of twenty-four173 miles. when i reached the city i found its eastern gate opened. it has a small gate plated with iron. from it, one enters the city via a wooden bridge. at the end of the day, the gatekeepers raise 160. st: فلما‍أن 161. st: وأسرت 162. st: الخازن 163. instead of وأقمت‍بها‍أربعين‍سنة , st has وأقمت‍بالمدينة‍أربعون‍عاًما . 164. st: أربعون 165. st: بركات‍الجميع 166. om. st. 167. ad. st.: أمين‍والحمد‍لل‍ه‍رب‍العالمين 168. st: “may god bless our lord muḥammad, his family, and his companions, and grant him peace.” 169. i have been unable to find this tradition in ḥadīth works. similar traditions do exist. see, e.g., two traditions in al-mundhirī, al-targhīb wa-l-tarhīb min al-ḥadīth al-sharīf, ed. muṣṭafā m. ʿ imāra (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1388/1968), 2:246 (nos. 16 and 17): “a murābiṭ’s prayer equals five hundred prayers” (inna ṣalāt al-murābiṭ taʿdil khamasmiʾa ṣalāt) and “a prayer in ribāṭ territory equals two million prayers” (al-ṣalāt bi-arḍ al-ribāṭ bi-alfay alf ṣalāt). 170. see note 8 above. 171. st: “in alexandria in the sacred [month of] muḥarram” 172. november–december 1164 173. st: “fourteen” a2 36r [¶10] 87 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) it with the help of machines.174 i sought to enter the city but for three days i was refused. there i was, at a moat, filled with water, that surrounded the city. it was ten cubits wide, and fishermen were catching fish in it. [¶3] i said to the city’s gatekeepers, “i wish to enter.” their headman said, “shouldn’t we seek council from the king?” after seeking council, they asked me, “why do you want to enter?” i said, “i wish to engage in ribāṭ in the city.” they then took me to the king. standing175 before him, i was surprised to see that he was an old man. i greeted him, and he returned the greeting and asked, “what is your name?” i replied, “muḥammad b. ʿabd al-wahhāb.” he asked, “what is your kunya?” “abū khuzayma,” i answered. then he asked,176 “what is your country?” i said, “khurāsān.” he asked, “why have you come?” i said, “o revered king! i have heard that such-and-such will be the wage of anyone who performs ribāṭ in alexandria. for that reason i have come to pursue ribāṭ here.” he left me, holding a piece of paper in his hand and leaving me standing [there]. he then interrogated me a second time and i gave him the same answers. he interrogated me177 a third time and i gave him the same answers. the fourth time he shouted at me, his voice leaving me shaken. he asked me, “you wish to perform ribāṭ?” i answered, “indeed.” then the servants brought me to a place with furniture and assigned to me food and drink like the soldiery.178 for three days they did not cease to bring me before the king, and they interrogated me four times each day. i gave him my initial answers. after that, he asked me, “do you wish to engage in ribāṭ?” i answered, “i do.” he then said, “there are three hundred and sixty commanders in the city, each of whom commands three hundred and sixty individuals. each commander patrols the city one day and night [of the year].” then he asked after the commander whose turn it was and summoned him. he assigned me to him and registered me in an account book.179 he gave me a horse, the price of which equaled one hundred dinars, an indian sword, and a spear from al-khaṭṭ.180 [¶4] after the commander had performed the afternoon prayer, he fitted out the horsemen, saddled the riding beasts, and fixed their weapons and spearheads.181 174. st: “a machine” 175. i interpret the arabic not as a passive of form iv, ūqiftu (“i was made to stand”), but as a form iv with the meaning of form i. this is a frequently attested feature of middle arabic; see blau, grammar, 1:157–63, and encyclopedia of arabic language and linguistics, s.v. “middle arabic” (page 221). see also note 47 above. 176. st: “then he asked me” 177. st: “he left me and interrogated me” 178. st: “the king’s soldiery” 179. st: “his account book” 180. for the meaning of khaṭṭī here, see edward w. lane, an arabic-english lexicon derived from the best and most copious eastern sources (london: williams and norgate, 1863–93), 2:760. according to yāqūt al-rūmī, muʿjam al-buldān (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1397/1977), 2:378, al-khaṭṭ denotes the coasts of ʿumān and al-baḥrayn. 181. it is unclear to what the possessive -hā in silāḥātahā (sic) and asinnatahā refers. in the current translation, i have understood it to be a general reference to the horsemen. if it refers to the riding beasts, it is also possible to translate “the weapons and spearheads they were carrying.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 88 we departed from the king’s gate, wearing a coat of mail, a helmet, and fighting equipment, while scribes registered the troops,182 each individual by name, until they had registered three hundred and sixty men, each riding a horse. we departed and patrolled the city until morning. we [finally] reached the king’s ṭishṭakhāna.183 we entered, and they paid and registered us again. this they did each day of the year for each commander. each commander was assigned one rotation per year. [¶5] we regularly visited the saints and frequented mosques. i saw eight hundred mosques, places of worship,184 in the city. we were informed that there are [in fact] twelve thousand places of worship in the city and [that each friday] one hundred and ninety sermons [are delivered] there. each saint is charged [with giving a sermon] on a specific day. the city’s lanes are paved with hard, white marble;185 they are [lined with] tall buildings and are bright white. the construction of its [i.e., the city’s] walls is never impaired. the king orders a third of all the taxes that he collects to be spent on repairing the city walls. there are three hundred and sixty towers that are whitewashed and decorated with the king’s name written in gold ink. the tower of each of the king’s viziers has been whitened186 with white stones. the king’s tower stood in the northern part. it had a gate that opened toward the east and one that opened toward the south. two rectangular columns, made of red stone,187 stood in front of the southern gate. they were decorated with images of groups of kings188 and individuals. the height of each of the columns was seventy cubits;189 they were equal in height.190 between them was a court, seventeen cubits long, roofed over with a copper lattice. 182. ar. al-ʿasākir; st: “the army” (al-ʿaskar). 183. a ṭishṭakhāna, more commonly spelled ṭishtakhānāh (طشــتخاناه), was a room or building where the sultan’s cloths, cushions, and carpets were washed and stored. see reinhart dozy, supplément aux dictionnaires arabes, 2nd ed. (leiden: e. j. brill/paris: maisonneuve, 1927), 2:44. al-qalqashandī writes that in addition to textiles, the sultan’s swords, too, were kept there; ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī ṣināʿat al-inshāʾ, ed. muḥammad q. al-baqlī (cairo: maṭbaʿat dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1331–38/1913–19), 4:10. 184. ar. masjidan miḥrāban (in a1 and a2); manuscript st only has miḥrāban, “places of worship.” i have translated the asyndetic apposition of miḥrāban to masjidan in a1 and a2 as a permutative (badal; see william wright, arabic grammar, 3rd ed. [cambridge: cambridge university press, 1896–1898], 2:284–85), interpreting the two words as near synonyms. 185. ar. al-rukhām al-hayṣamī. dictionaries point at the smoothness and solidity of the type of stone called hayṣam. see, e.g., ibn manẓūr, lisān al-ʿarab (bulaq: al-maṭbaʿa al-amīriyya, 1300–1308/1883–91), 16:96. al-hamdānī, ṣifat jazīrat al-ʿarab, ed. david h. müller (leiden: e. j. brill, 1884–91), 1:202, gives the following definition: “a stone that resembles marble but is whiter.” 186. st: “built” 187. ar. zalaṭ, lit. “pebbles” or “little pieces of stone.” 188. ar. shukhūṣ mulūk; st: “people” (shukhūṣ). 189. seventy cubits equals 37.83 meters. 190. the columns are most probably cleopatra’s needles. 89 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) [¶6] some of our brothers mentioned to us that in the past, people made use of the images engraved on the columns.191 when an enemy arrived at the city, he would see the likeness of each image he approached from the sea. there would be much shouting at the shore, and thus the people would come to know of that [i.e., the enemy’s arrival]. between the two columns is a basin made of black stones engraved with individuals, groups of people, ships, animals, and different shapes. it is covered with a sheath of lead.192 water would gush forth from the basin when an enemy arrived at the city. he would look at the basin and then see the likeness of each of the basin’s images rising upon the sea.193 they stated that a wise man who was in charge of the basin was buried in it. when uhrayqil194 lost the city, he sent a spy in the guise of a monk with a large sum of money. he entered the city, gained access to the king and said to him, “one of the wise men’s treasures lies in the basin.” he tempted him195 to open it. the king opened it196 and thereby made it unusable. [¶7] they also reported that near kawm īmās and the mosque of the chain,197 to the north of the hill, there is a fortress locked198 with a large lock.199 i kept asking about it. some of them said200 that it possessed a talisman used against dust.201 anyone who threw sweepings against its gate202 would find them the following morning on kawm īmās. the accursed spy of uhrayqil ceaselessly tempted the king to open that place. he [i.e., the king] ordered it to be opened and found there a copper broom on a black stone. once it was opened it ceased to operate. [¶8] the city’s eastern gate, called the gate of muḥammad, god bless him and grant him peace, is the residence of the chief vizier. one night, in his sleep, he dreamt that there were martyrs at the gate who had fallen during the battle203 and been buried there. they complained about [being humiliated by] being trodden on. the 191. st: “the mentioned columns” 192. lit. “with melted lead” 193. i read yarā instead of tarā on the basis of the text’s similar wording and syntax a few lines earlier. the copyists grappled with the words yanẓur and tarā. the copyist of a2 chose not to follow manuscript a1 and read tanẓur instead of yanẓur, interpreting the text as “you would look at the basin and then see the likeness of …” the copyist of manuscript st changed his initial vocalization of yanẓur into yunẓar and seems to have interpreted the text as “the basin would be looked at, and you would then see the likeness of …” 194. for the identity of uhrayqil, see below at notes 267–68. 195. st: “the king” 196. st: “he ordered it to be opened and it was opened” 197. st: “ʿasaliyya mosque” 198. st: “a hanging fortress” 199. st: “many locks” 200. st: “so some people said to me” 201. st: “a talisman for the transfer of dust” 202. st: “the gate of his house” 203. for this apocalyptic battle, see below at note 270. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 90 next morning he reported this to the king,204 who ordered it [i.e., the gate] to be closed205 and the great green gate206 to be opened. each friday evening, the king organized a festival there. it is said that at the western gate, where the son of king uhrayqil was killed, there are [buried] fourteen hundred muslim martyrs. as to [this] second gate, it belongs to his [i.e., the king’s] second vizier. one night, when it was our turn [to patrol], we heard dhikr sessions as loud as [festivities celebrating] the hajj such that we thought that the battle was taking place in the city. there are one hundred and eighty colleges for the pursuit of knowledge in the city, to the point that there were firewood vendors in the city writing on [sheets of paper used for] fatwas. one never saw any dust or pebbles in the city207 nor smoke in the air. each year, uhrayqil sends a ship to the city with a hundred silent men208 carrying black stones, their heads bowed. they lay them on the ground within the circuit of the city wall. they [also] bring gifts. [they do] all of that in order to visit the church of uhrayqil’s son, which is where he was killed. it stands in the center of the city and is famous for its architecture.209 it was built just south of a mosque called qaylūlā,210 which can be reached by way of a staircase of white stone. it is famous for its many scholars. there is a mosque known as ibn ʿawf. sixty martyrs are buried there. in the western part of the city, there is a mosque called al-ʿamrī211 and another one belonging to ibn ʿawf.212 another [mosque] stands at the eastern gate. it is called al-fakhriyya213 and houses sixty students. in the north of the city, there are seven tall 204. st: “the king yūsuf” 205. note that the ayyubid ibn jumayʿ (ṭabʿ al-iskandariyya, 55) writes that the rosetta gate is closed. 206. st: “al-khiḍr’s gate” 207. st: “the city’s lanes” 208. manuscripts a1 and a2 have ṣ.b.ṭ, whose meaning i have been unable to determine. here, i interpret it as sabt; see lane, lexicon, 4:1288. manuscript st has ṣ.n.d.ʾ.d, which may be related to ṣindīd, “chief” or “brave man.” 209. st: “for its columns” 210. st: “qaylīlā” 211. i prefer to interpret the name of this mosque as “al-ʿamrī,” referring to the mosque ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ built after conquering alexandria in 21/642. see the similar use of this nisba in, e.g., al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, ed. aḥmad zakī bāshā et al. (cairo: maṭbaʿat dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya/al-hayʾa al-miṣriyya al-ʿāmma li-l-kitāb, 1342–1418/1923–97), 19:319 in reference to the mosque of ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ in fusṭāṭ. considering the explicit western location of the mosque mentioned here, it seems less likely that the text refers to the mosque known as al-jāmiʿ al-ʿimarī, located on today’s shāriʿ abī dardāʾ. the text would probably have considered this to have lain in the southern part of the city. 212. see al-nuwayrī, kitāb al-ilmām bi-l-iʿlām fī-mā jarat bihi al-aḥkām wa-l-umūr al-maqḍiyya fī waqʿat al-iskandariyya, ed. étienne combe and ʿ azīz s. ʿ aṭiyya (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1968–76), 4:45, who writes that it was customary to appoint a descendant of the companion ʿabd al-raḥmān b. ʿawf as the western mosque’s overseer. 213. st: “al-fakhr.” this is the fakhr or fakhriyya college. al-nuwayrī writes that during pierre de lusignan’s sack of alexandria in 767/1365, european raiders “set fire to the gate of the fakhr college, located near the rosetta gate” (al-ilmām, 2:166). see also ʿabd al-ʿazīz sālim, taʾrīkh al-iskandariyya wa-ḥaḍāratihā fī al-ʿaṣr al-islāmī (alexandria: muʾassasat shabāb al-jāmiʿa, 1982), 477. 91 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) watchtowers where archers are stationed, each of whom can shoot up to seven miles. in the western part of the city is a gate called the gate of blessing and al-khiḍr’s gate, peace be upon him. the king visits it each friday and spends much charity on it. the large congregational mosque is called214 the strangers’ mosque. it has three hundred resident students. in its northern corner is where ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ stayed when he fired mangonels when the city was taken. outside the city is a mosque known as the mosque of the pillar. next to it stand two columns, one large and one small.215 they say that the column marks [the location of] a treasure. in the winter and spring,216 the king orders a large tent to be set up at the base of the large column. the king goes out and has green, white, and red banners hung on the walls and places [built] for amusement. this is also the time when the king orders the opening of the canal and has it cleaned until its bottom is clearly visible because it is paved with white marble. ships come [to the city] via the canal during the period of the nile flood. over many days, people visit the places for amusement and engage in buying and selling or stroll. at the gates of the city’s mosques are hung so many lamps that someone who has dropped something at night will easily find it. [¶9] five miles north of the city stands a ruined lighthouse in the sea. there are seven vaults, on top of which stand five vaults, on top of which three vaults, on top of which one vault. the height and width of each of the first [i.e., lowest] vaults217 is twenty-seven practical cubits.218 at its center stands a rectangular lighthouse, which one ascends via ninety-nine stairs. the height and width of each stair is forty cubits. it is made of yellow copper and engraved with individuals and groups of people. each of their [sic] doors has three pipes, which make a thunderous sound when they are turned.219 behind the four doors is a mirror made of …220 and decorated with gold. on top of it stands a silver banner, which turns in whatever direction the mirror turns. when the sun is in the east or the west, it is turned in that direction with the help of devices. whoever is inside can see someone opposite at a distance of up to eight thousand miles. that is what is written about it. we found it inoperative [but] still matching that description. it is said that the reason that it no longer operated is that 214. st: “is known as” 215. the large pillar is the so-called column of the pillars (ʿamūd al-sawārī; diocletian’s column/pompey’s pillar), which appears in nearly all descriptions of the city. like our text, al-harawī, kitāb al-ishārāt ilā maʿrifat al-ziyārāt, ed. janine sourdel-thomine, guide des lieux de pèlerinage (damascus: institut français de damas, 1953), 47, locates a mosque of the pillar near the column of the pillars. 216. lit. “when the flowers bloom”; cf. persian bahār. 217. st: “those first vaults” 218. a practical cubit (dhirāʿ al-ʿamal) equals 66.5 centimeters; see walther hinz, islamische masse und gewichte umgerechnet ins metrische system (leiden: e. j. brill, 1955), 55. twenty-seven practical cubits equals 17.955 meters. 219. or “rubbed” 220. manuscripts a1 and a2 have h.ʾ.n.b.dh.ʾ.n here and manuscript st has h.ʾ.n.y.d.ʾ.n. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 92 the son of uhrayqil, when he came to the fortified city221 during the battle known as uhrayqil, saw what was happening in the city when the mirror was turned in his direction. uhrayqil had enjoined his son, saying, “when the fighting starts, turn the mirror in my direction so that i see what you are doing.” so, when he reached the city, he informed the treasurer about this. when the battle ensued, uhrayqil’s son was killed and his people made captive. the treasurer destroyed its [i.e., the mirror’s] ability to move and fled. we witnessed that. [¶10] i stayed there222 for forty years, [which felt] like forty days. oh, what a city! there one finds gardens and pure water. its inhabitants do only what is good. they unceasingly recite the qurʾān and pursue knowledge, day or night. their faith illuminates and an inner light shines forth. there one finds saints whose secrets are clear, whose miracles are overwhelming, and whose sayings are correct. may god renew to us their blessings223 and make us benefit by the support of them all!224 the account’s date having established the text, we are now in a position to analyze the account’s contents. before we do so, some words on the date of its composition are in order. at the beginning of the text, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb writes that he arrived in alexandria in the month of muḥarram in the year 560 (november–december 1164), during the governorship of one ayyūb al-kurdī (para. 2). this governor is not mentioned among the city’s governors in accounts by muslim historians of the turbulent last years of the fatimid caliphate.225 perhaps the 221. ar. thaghr, a word that can mean “fortified city” as well as “frontier” and is often associated with jihād. for discussions of this term, see ralph w. brauer, boundaries and frontiers in medieval muslim geography (philadelphia: the american philosophical society, 1995), 14, and asa eger, “ḥiṣn, ribāṭ, thaghr or qaṣr? semantics and systems of frontier fortifications in the early islamic period,” in the lineaments of islam: studies in honor of fred mcgraw donner, ed. paul m. cobb, 427–55 (leiden: brill, 2012), 437–40. medieval muslim authors frequently called alexandria a thaghr. see ei2, s.v. “al-thughūr,” and ei3, s.v. “alexandria.” 222. st: “in the city” 223. st: “the blessings of all people” 224. st adds: “amen! praise be to god, lord of the worlds!” 225. if the text refers to a historical person, he may have been a successor of the popular amīr murtafiʿ b. faḥl (or mujallā), better known as al-khalwāṣ, whom the fatimid grand vizier ḍirghām appointed over alexandria in an attempt to strengthen his own power base in cairo and who was killed on rabīʿ ii 8, 559/march 5, 1164. see claude cahen, “un récit inédit du vizirat de dirghām,” annales islamologiques 8 (1969): 27–46, at 41–42; al-maqrīzī, ittiʿāẓ al-ḥunafāʾ bi-akhbār al-aʾimma al-fāṭimiyyīn al-khulafāʾ, ed. jamāl al-dīn al-shayyāl (cairo: al-majlis al-aʿlā li-l-shuʾūn al-islāmiyya, 1416/1996), 3:262, 264; al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 28:332; ʿumāra al-yamanī, al-nukat al-ʿaṣriyya fī akhbār al-wuzarāʾ al-miṣriyya, ed. hartwig derenbourg in ʿoumara du yémen: sa vie et son oeuvre, vol. 1: autobiographie et récits sur les vizirs d’égypte (paris: ernest leroux, 1897), 140–44; cf. the dating in ʿimād al-dīn al-iṣfahānī (attr.), al-bustān al-jāmiʿ li-jamīʿ tawārīkh ahl al-zamān, ed. ʿumar ʿa. tadmurī (beirut: al-maktaba al-ʿaṣriyya, 1423/2002), 385. in mid-562/early 1167, historians report, najm al-dīn ibn maṣāl (d. 574/1178), son of a well-known and homonymous vizier (on whom see ei2, s.v. “ibn maṣāl”), was governor of alexandria. see ibn abī ṭayy, cited in abū shāma, kitāb al-rawḍatayn fī akhbār al-dawlatayn al-nūriyya wa-l-ṣalāḥiyya, ed. ibrāhīm al-zaybaq (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1418/1997), 2:96; al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 28:336–37; al-maqrīzī, al-mawāʿiẓ wa-l-iʿtibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār, ed. ayman f. sayyid 93 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) date is corrupted and should be read as 562/1167, when saladin (yūsuf b. ayyūb al-kurdī) briefly controlled alexandria on behalf of his uncle, the zengid commander shīrkūh,226 or as 565/1169, when saladin’s father, najm al-dīn ayyūb al-kurdī, received alexandria as an iqṭāʿ.227 at the end of the text, our author writes that he stayed in alexandria for forty years (para. 10). this suggests that he composed the text around 600/1203–4. however, these words cannot be accepted uncritically. the number forty is often used in a symbolic way, usually to indicate a great multitude or divine presence.228 here, the author seems to address the reader’s religio-activist sentiments. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s claim to have conducted ribāṭ in alexandria “for forty years, [which felt] like forty days” evokes the many traditions on the virtues of performing ribāṭ in alexandria for forty days or nights. one such tradition, recorded in ibn al-ṣabbāgh’s faḍāʾil al-iskandariyya, for example, has the meccan scholar ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. abī rawwād (d. 159/775–76) say: “for sixty years, i resided near god’s sacred house [i.e., the kaʿba], living a pious and ascetic life. but would god have granted me the possibility to depart for alexandria in order to engage in ribāṭ there for forty nights, i would have preferred that over the sixty years of pious life near god’s house.”229 other traditions state that performing ribāṭ in alexandria for the duration of forty days or nights is better than sixty pilgrimages in addition to the hajj and frees the murābiṭ from punishment after death.230 many traditions recommend a forty-day period of ribāṭ in other coastal regions.231 like the reports on alexandria, they agree with a reportedly prophetic tradition saying that “a full period of ribāṭ consists of forty days,”232 which many (london: al-furqān islamic heritage foundation, 2002–3), 1:472; ʿimād al-dīn al-iṣfahānī, al-bustān, 393. ayyūb al-kurdī, then, may have governed the city between 559/1164 and 562/1167. 226. abū shāma, al-rawḍatayn, 2:13, 98; al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 28:336–37. note that manuscript st identifies alexandria’s governor elsewhere as a certain yūsuf; see note 110 of the edition. 227. al-maqrīzī, kitāb al-muqaffā al-kabīr, ed. muḥammad al-yaʿlāwī (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1411/1991), 2:380 (no. 896). 228. lawrence i. conrad, “abraha and muḥammad: some observations apropos of chronology and literary topoi in the early arabic historical tradition,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 50, no. 2 (1987): 225–40, at 230–32. 229. ibn al-ṣabbāgh, faḍāʾil al-iskandariyya, ed. jelle bruning (in preparation), no. 9. 230. ibid., nos. 4, 5, 7, 27, and 38. 231. see suliman bashear, “apocalyptic and other materials on early muslim-byzantine wars: a review of arabic sources,” journal of the royal asiatic society, 3rd ser., 1, no. 2 (1991): 173–207, at 194–95, for such traditions concerning ribāṭ on the syrian coast. 232. most sources refer to ibn abī shayba, al-kitāb al-muṣannaf fī al-aḥādīth wa-l-āthār, ed. ʿabd al-khāliq al-afghānī, sayyid yūsuf ʿalī, and mukhtār aḥmad al-nadwī (hyderabad: n.p./mumbai: al-dār al-salafiyya, 1386–1403/1966–83), 5:328 = ed. muḥammad ʿa. shāhīn (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1416/1995), 4:225 (nos. 19449–50), and al-ṭabarānī, al-muʿjam al-kabīr, ed. ḥamdī ʿa. al-salafī (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1344/2001–2), 8:133 (no. 7606). see also al-suyūṭī, jāmiʿ al-aḥādīth: al-jāmiʿ al-ṣaghīr wa-zawāʾiduhu wa-l-jāmiʿ al-kabīr, ed. ʿabbās a. ṣaqr and aḥmad ʿabd al-jawwād (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1414/1994), 4:127 (no. 10604), and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 94 scholars knew, although not all accepted its historicity.233 our author’s claim to a forty-year residence in alexandria is, most likely, part of his rhetoric to convince the reader of the virtues of ribāṭ in alexandria and cannot be taken at face value. in fact, circumstantial evidence from ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s description of the city makes it very likely that the text dates to the late ayyubid or early mamluk period. first, the account clearly postdates the foundation of alexandria’s ʿawfiyya college by the fatimid vizier riḍwān b. walakhshī in 532/1137–38 on the city’s main east-west street, the maḥajja.234 although he calls it a mosque,235 ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb refers to this college in paragraph 8. references to this college in historical sources decline after the death of its first professor and eponym, abū ṭāhir ibn ʿawf, in 581/1185. importantly, it is highly unlikely, as gary leiser has noted, that the college’s initial fame, if not its existence, endured into the mamluk period.236 second, the author’s identification of the city’s main congregational mosque as “the strangers’ mosque” (jāmiʿ al-ghurabāʾ, para. 8) supports a date of composition between the mid-sixth/twelfth and early eighth/fourteenth century. without doubt, what is meant here is the western mosque (al-jāmiʿ al-gharbī), one of the city’s two main mosques after the fatimid caliph al-ḥākim built the mosque of al-ʿaṭṭārīn in 404/1013 in the center of the city.237 (in the course of the text’s transmission, the word al-ghurabāʾ must have replaced its near homograph al-gharbī.) the western mosque stood in the northwestern part of the city in the immediate vicinity of the city’s oldest mosque, built by the conqueror ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ in the early 20s/640s.238 the text’s association of the strangers’ mosque with ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ (its northern corner being described as “where ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ stayed when he fired mangonels when the city was taken”) further supports its identification with the western mosque. what is relevant for the dating of our text is that muslim historians report that saladin (re)built the western mosque and made it the city’s sole congregational mosque by prohibiting delivery of friday sermons in the fatimid mosque of al-ʿaṭṭārīn.239 the text al-muttaqī al-hindī, kanz al-ʿummāl fī sunan al-aqwāl wa-l-afʿāl, ed. ṣafwat al-saqqā and bakrī al-ḥayyānī (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1405–7/1985–86), 8:531 (no. 24014). 233. the mālikī ibn abī zayd al-qayrawānī, in al-nawādir wa-l-ziyādāt ʿ alā mā fī al-mudawwana min ghayrihā min al-ummahāt, ed. muḥammad amīn būkhubza (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1999), 3:15, and the ḥanbalī ibn qudāma, in al-mughnī, ed. ʿabd allāh b. ʿabd al-muḥsin al-turkī and ʿabd al-fattāḥ m. al-ḥilw (riyadh: dār ʿālam al-kutub, 1417/1997), 13:18–25, include the tradition in their discussions on ribāṭ. al-sakhāwī, al-ajwiba al-murḍiya, ed. muḥammad i. m. ibrāhīm (riyadh: dār al-rāya, 1418/1997–98), 1:126, notes that the isnād includes a rejected transmitter. 234. paul e. walker, “fāṭimid alexandria as an entrepôt in the east-west exchange of islamic scholarship,” al-masāq 26, no. 1 (2014): 36–48, at 38–39. for the college’s location on the maḥajja, see al-qalqashandī, ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, 10:458. 235. see ibn jubayr, riḥla, 17, for the multifunctional nature of some of alexandria’s mosques. 236. gary leiser, “the restoration of sunnism in egypt: madrasas and mudarrisūn, 495–647/1101–1249” (phd diss., university of pennsylvania, 1976), 148–51, esp. 150–51. see also walker, “fāṭimid alexandria,” 47–48. 237. behrens-abouseif, “topographie d’alexandrie,” 116–18 and 121–23. 238. ibid., 114 and 117. 239. al-nuwayrī, al-ilmām, 4:40; al-maqrīzī, ittiʿāẓ, 2:321. 95 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) seems to refer to this situation. it is unaware of the mamluk sultan al-nāṣir muḥammad’s reintroduction of the (now sunni) friday sermon in the mosque of al-ʿaṭṭārīn in 731/1330,240 after which alexandria had two congregational mosques. third and last, our author’s description of alexandria’s famous lighthouse narrows down the possible date of text’s composition considerably. he writes about “a rectangular lighthouse” that is no longer fully functional (para. 9). for centuries the lighthouse had a three-level composition, but by the late seventh/thirteenth century it is known to have lost its two upper structures; only its first, rectangular tier still stood.241 the latest known author to describe the lighthouse as a three-story building is yāqūt al-rūmī, who wrote ca. 622/1225. later authors mention only a rectangular single-story tower.242 the lighthouse did not survive into the second half of the eighth/fourteenth century. when ibn baṭṭūṭa visited alexandria in 750/1349–50, he saw the lighthouse fully in ruins.243 taken together, these three features of ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s description of alexandria leave little room for doubt that we are dealing with a text written between 622/1225 and 731/1330. the account’s reference to the ʿawfiyya college makes a date of composition before the eighth/ fourteenth century most likely. analysis: a call for the defense of alexandria alexandria’s defenses and islamic virtues as noted earlier, this ayyubid or early mamluk text ascribes to alexandria a special place in the realm of islam and calls for its defense. in order to mobilize muslims to perform ribāṭ in alexandria, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb first argues that the city stands out for its defenses and islamic virtues (paras. 2–5, 8). he starts with a hyperbolic description of alexandria’s fortifications and garrison, combining fact and fiction. an account of his difficult entry into the city allows our author to describe in detail the city’s eastern gate, which he calls the gate of muḥammad.244 he describes it as “a small gate plated with iron” reached by crossing a heavy drawbridge over a moat that protected the city. the gatekeepers, he writes, refused to let him enter the city without official permission to do so (para. 2). this account agrees with contemporary descriptions of alexandria. writing in 688/1289, the north african pilgrim al-ʿabdarī, for example, describes the doors of the city’s gates as “most precisely and perfectly plated with iron, on both the inside and the outside.”245 the mamluk historian ibn shāhīn al-ẓāhirī, writing ca. 857/1453, similarly notes that “each gate [in alexandria’s 240. al-nuwayrī, al-ilmām, 4:40. 241. doris behrens-abouseif, “the islamic history of the lighthouse of alexandria,” muqarnas 23 (2006): 1–14, at 8. 242. ibid., 7–8. 243. ibn baṭṭūṭa, tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār, 1:181. 244. see paragraph 8. this name for the city’s eastern gate, which was more commonly known as rosetta gate, is also found in works on alexandria’s religious virtues: ibn al-ṣabbāgh, faḍāʾil al-iskandariyya, no. 9, and al-risāla al-ʿawfiyya fī faḍl al-iskandariyya, cited in ibn duqmāq, kitāb al-intiṣār li-wāsiṭat ʿiqd al-amṣār, ed. karl vollers (cairo: al-maṭbaʿa al-amīriyya, 1309–14/1893–96), 5:117–18. 245. al-ʿabdarī, al-riḥla al-maghribiyya, 140. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 96 city walls] has three iron doors.” like our author, he also writes that a moat surrounds the city, and that the moat was filled with water from the mediterranean in the event of an attack.246 al-nuwayrī (d. 775/1372) confirms this moat’s existence in ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s time.247 some references to the city’s defenses elsewhere in the text, such as the “seven tall watchtowers” our author locates in the north of the city (para. 8), also agree with what is known about alexandria’s seventh/thirteenthor eighth/fourteenth-century cityscape.248 but his emphatic description of the city’s inaccessibility—not only the fortifications and the steadfast gatekeepers, but also the repeated interrogations to which the city’s governor allegedly subjected him (para. 3)—serves to highlight the exclusiveness of alexandria as a location of ribāṭ performance. in fact, the text’s opening paragraphs describe ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s enlisting in alexandria’s garrison as an initiation into a brotherhood of companions-in-arms. the governor’s severe interrogations form a liminal stage our author had to pass through in order to join the garrison. once he had successfully endured these interrogations, the governor is said to have assigned him to an army unit and to have given him expensive weapons and a horse (para. 3). here, our author evidently weaves fictional elements into his text. in reality, voluntary warriors were not registered into army units but supported ayyubid and early mamluk armies as auxiliary forces.249 they were not on a military payroll but were paid from the alms tax (ṣadaqa) and may have received a part of the war booty.250 in alexandria, volunteer warriors are known to have joined religious (often sufi) communities, many of which preferred not to receive financial support from the state and lived in ribāṭs located on the coast, in the city wall’s towers, or in religiously meaningful locations, such as in or near the lighthouse.251 246. al-ẓāhirī, zubdat kashf al-mamālik wa-bayān al-ṭuruq wa-l-masālik, ed. paul ravaisse (paris: imprimerie nationale, 1894), 39. 247. al-nuwayrī, al-ilmām, 3:212–14, esp. 213. 248. for these or similar watchtowers, called ribāṭs, see ibn rusta, kitāb al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, ed. michael jan de goeje (leiden: e. j. brill, 1892), 118; isḥāq b. al-ḥusayn, ākām al-marjān fī dhikr al-madāʾin al-mashhūra fī kull makān, ed. fahmī saʿd (beirut: ʿālam al-kutub, 1408/1988), 86; and al-nuwayrī, al-ilmām, 2:131–32, 152. as noted above, ibn jubayr, too, saw watchtowers in the city, but he does not specify their location. see ibn jubayr, riḥla, 15. 249. hamilton a. r. gibb, studies on the civilization of islam, ed. stanford j. shaw and william r. polk (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1982), 83–85; reuven amitai, “foot soldiers, militiamen and volunteers in the early mamluk army,” in texts, documents and artefacts: islamic studies in honour of d. s. richards, ed. chase f. robinson, 233–49 (leiden: brill, 2003). 250. abbès zouache, armées et combats en syrie (491/1098–569/1174): analyse comparée des chroniques médiévales latines et arabes (damascus: ifpo, 2008), 305, 308. 251. al-bakrī, kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, ed. adriaan p. van leeuwen and andré ferré (tunis: al-dār al-ʿarabiyya li-l-kitāb/al-muʾassasa al-waṭaniyya li-l-tarjama wa-l-taḥqīq wa-l-dirāsāt “bayt al-ḥikma,” 1992), 2:634 (§ 1058). see also the preceding notes and éric geoffroy, “les milieux de la mystique musulmane à alexandrie aux xiiie et xive siècles,” in alexandrie médiévale 2, ed. christian décobert, 169–80 (cairo: ifao, 2002), 170–71; nathan hofer, the popularisation of sufism in ayyubid and mamluk egypt, 1173–1325 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2015), 52. 97 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) part of the initiation, too, was that the governor reportedly explained to ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb the garrison’s organization. the governor informed him that “[t]here are three hundred and sixty commanders in the city, each of whom commands three hundred and sixty individuals” (para. 3). again, these words do not reflect alexandria’s military organization around the turn of the eighth/fourteenth century. the city’s governor himself, for example, held the rank of “amīr of forty”; that is, he was entitled to the service of forty horsemen (the city probably also housed auxiliary forces who fell under the governor’s command).252 the governor’s statement that “[e]ach commander patrols the city one day and night [of the year]” (see also para. 4) reveals the numerical symbolism in these words. using the number 360, these passages convey the image of a city enjoying the year-round protection of a large garrison.253 paragraph 5, which emphasizes the governor’s concern for the city’s protection, drives the text’s symbolism home when it states that the city walls have “three hundred and sixty towers that are … decorated with the king’s name written in gold ink.” these passages concerning alexandria’s defenses serve more than one purpose. they describe alexandria as a well-fortified city and its garrison as a military organization whose spiritual benefits (see para. 1) are restricted to those muslims who are sincerely devoted to the city’s protection. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb ascribes the state of the city’s fortifications and the size of its garrison to the local governor’s commitment to protecting the city. it is perhaps not a coincidence that he identifies this governor as “ayyūb al-kurdī” (para. 2). thus, he evokes the legacy of ayyubid rule over alexandria, especially that of saladin, whose patronage of the city’s defenses and especially his restoration of alexandria’s walls is well known.254 in addition to praising the city’s defenses, the account also portrays alexandria as a thoroughly islamic city. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb again combines fact and fiction and uses his rounds as a literary frame. he stresses, for example, the city’s large number of mosques and writes that he “saw in the city eight hundred mosques” (para. 5). that he includes this observation in his account is understandable: alexandria was famous for its many mosques.255 when he visited alexandria in 578/1183, ibn jubayr noted that there could be as many as four or five mosques in one place. he also writes that because of their omnipresence, various estimates of the total number of mosques in the city circulated.256 ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb himself writes, for instance, that people told him that the city counted 12,000 mosques (para. 5). al-harawī (d. 611/1215) also mentions various estimates. whereas 252. martina müller-wiener, eine stadtgeschichte alexandrias von 564/1169 bis in die mitte des 9./15. jahrhunderts: verwaltung und innerstädtische organisationsformen (berlin: klaus schwarz verlag, 1992), 97. 253. annemarie schimmel, the mystery of numbers (oxford: oxford university press, 1993), 276. 254. doris behrens-abouseif, “notes sur l’architecture musulmane d’alexandrie,” in alexandrie médiévale 1, ed. christian décobert and jean-yves empereur, 101–14 (cairo: ifao, 1998), 102–3; müller-wiener, eine stadtgeschichte, 14, 16. 255. see also ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr wa-akhbāruhā, ed. charles c. torrey (new haven, ct: yale university press, 1922), 41–42, partially copied in al-suyūṭī, ḥusn al-muḥāḍara fī taʾrīkh miṣr wa-l-qāhira, ed. muḥammad a. ibrāhīm (cairo: dār iḥyāʾ al-kutub al-ʿarabiyya, 1387/1967–68), 1:85. 256. ibn jubayr, riḥla, 17. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 98 one of his sources maintained that there are 20,000 mosques in alexandria, ibn munqidh told him that their number is 12,000.257 likewise, ibn jubayr says he heard people claim the city houses 12,000 mosques but also notes that others maintained that there are 8,000 mosques in alexandria.258 no doubt, these are not real estimates but rather express reverence for alexandria’s islamic character. stressing the large number of mosques in a city was quite a common literary strategy that can be found in discussions concerning other cities as well.259 in addition to showcasing alexandria’s many mosques, the account emphasizes the city’s many and esteemed religious authorities. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb writes in detail about alexandria’s scholars and their colleges, of which he mentions some by name and notes the number of students they attract (para. 8).260 he is even more interested in sufism, which flourished in alexandria at the time when he composed the account and often involved (temporary) ribāṭ performance.261 indeed, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb claims to have heard “dhikr sessions as loud as [festivities celebrating] the hajj, such that we thought that the [apocalyptic] battle was taking place in the city” (para. 8). he also highlights the presence of many sufi masters and writes that it is only these sufi masters who deliver friday sermons in alexandria’s congregational mosques (para. 5). throughout the year, then, the city’s muslim community enjoys not only the alleged protection of 360 commanders and their troops but also the year-round religious guidance of those who have access to esoteric knowledge or “secrets” (para. 10) of their religion. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb also points to religiously significant sites in alexandria and highlights noteworthy features of its real cityscape. for example, he refers to veneration of the city’s western gate, called the green gate (al-bāb al-akhḍar), and the nearby graves of “fourteen hundred muslim martyrs” who gave their lives for the cause of islam (para. 8). although this number of graves must probably be taken with a grain of salt, our author clearly refers to the cemetery of waʿla, which was, in ibn khallikān’s (d. 681/1282) words, “a graveyard within the circuit of the walls at the green gate where a good number of pious muslims… are buried.”262 our author writes that each friday evening alexandria’s ruler used to organize a religious festival at the green gate (para. 8). other sources confirm that the green gate was a site of religious significance. al-harawī notes, for instance, that people visit the gate for religious purposes.263 abū al-fidāʾ (d. 732/1331) and ibn baṭṭūṭa write that the green gate is opened only on fridays.264 other authors provide an etymology for the gate’s 257. al-harawī, al-ishārāt, 47–48, paraphrased in al-ẓāhirī, zubda, 40. 258. ibn jubayr, riḥla, 17. 259. antrim, routes and realms, 74–75, with notes 64–65. 260. for the ʿawfiyya college, see above. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb also mentions a fakhriyya or fakhr college, located near alexandria’s eastern gate and housing sixty students (para. 8); see note 213 above. 261. geoffroy, “les milieux.” 262. ibn khallikān, wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1397– 98/1977–78), 1:106. 263. al-harawī, al-ishārāt, 50. 264. abū al-fidāʾ, taqwīm al-buldān, ed. joseph t. reinaud and william mac guckin de slane, géographie d’aboulféda: texte arabe (paris: l’imprimerie royale, 1840), 105; ibn baṭṭūṭa, tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār, 1:179. 99 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) name that connects it with the age of prophets. the probably eighth/fourteenth-century or later futūḥ miṣr wa-l-iskandariyya derives the gate’s name from al-khiḍr, the name of a qurʾānic servant of god with which the name of the gate shares its grammatical root (kh-ḍ-r).265 possibly attesting to the antiquity of the green gate’s association with al-khiḍr, the third/ninth-century historian ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam (d. 257/871) locates a “mosque of dhū al-qarnayn or al-khiḍr at the city gate when you exit through the gate.”266 in light of the religious meaning placed upon the green gate and its venerated surroundings, it is not surprising that ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb writes that in the west of the city stands “a gate called the gate of blessing and al-khiḍr’s gate,” which alexandria’s ruler visits each friday and to which he devotes considerable charity (para. 8). most likely, these are alternative names for the green gate. by describing alexandria as possessing sturdy city walls and gates, a large and committed garrison, numerous mosques, colleges, and religious authorities, and venerated architecture in the first part of the account, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb depicts the city as a true bastion of islam worthy of being defended. fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecies from paragraph 6 onward, however, the text becomes grim. it describes the destruction of ancient monuments that once had supernatural qualities and protected alexandria against enemy attacks. in contrast to earlier passages, which extoll the qualities of alexandria’s fortifications, those concerning these monuments highlight breaches in the city’s defenses. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb does not fail to identify the source of this destruction and ascribes it to the activity of one uhrayqil and his son. uhrayqil is a diminutive form of hiraql, that is, a pejorative reference to the byzantine emperor heraclius (r. 610–41) and his offspring. although muslim historical tradition generally offers a favorable view of this emperor,267 in religious and especially apocalyptic literature the heraclian dynasty represents islam’s archenemy who will initiate battles heralding the end of time.268 muslim apocalyptic literature holds that in one or two such battles, muslims will fight this enemy in alexandria, but the battles will nonetheless lead to the city’s total destruction.269 our author 265. pseudo-al-wāqidī, futūḥ miṣr wa-l-iskandariyya, ed. hendrik a. hamaker (leiden: s. and j. luchtmans, 1825), 117–18. for the date of this text, see christian décobert, “la prise de maryût par les arabes: conquête et conversion religieuse,” in alexandrie médiévale 3, ed. jean-yves empereur and christian décobert, 145–70 (cairo: ifao, 2008), 146–50. 266. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 41, copied in al-suyūṭī, ḥusn al-muḥāḍara, 1:85. 267. lawrence i. conrad, “heraclius in early islamic kerygma,” in the reign of heraclius (610–641): crisis and confrontation, ed. gerrit j. reinink and bernard h. stolte, 113–56 (leuven: peeters, 2002); nadia el-cheikh, “muḥammad and heraclius: a study in legitimacy,” studia islamica 89 (1999): 5–21; and walter e. kaegi, byzantium and the early islamic conquests (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992), 14–17. 268. michael cook, “the heraclian dynasty in muslim eschatology,” al-qanṭara 13 (1992): 3–23, and idem, princeton papers in near eastern studies 1 (1992): 23–47, at 30–32. 269. jelle bruning, “the destruction of alexandria: religious imagery and local identity in early islamic egypt,” in egypt and the eastern mediterranean world: from constantinople to baghdad, 500-1000 ce, ed. jelle bruning, janneke h. m. de jong, and petra m. sijpesteijn (forthcoming). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 100 believes that these eschatological prophecies are now unfolding and presents the activity of uhrayqil and his son as direct evidence. he writes about people who died for the cause of islam during “the battle” (al-waqʿa, para. 8), a clear reference to the so-called battle of alexandria (waqʿat or malḥamat al-iskandariyya) frequently mentioned in apocalyptic lore.270 later in the account, he claims to have witnessed “the battle known as uhrayqil,” which caused severe damage to the city’s lighthouse (para. 9). although uhrayqil’s son died during this battle, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb describes the apocalyptic threat as real and permanent: “each year,” he writes, “uhrayqil sends … a hundred silent men” who are able to reach the city’s central quarters and show reverence for uhrayqil’s deceased son (para. 8). thus, the author stresses the contemporary urgency of defending islam in alexandria. our author locates this destruction at meaningful sites and uses literary themes known from other literature about alexandria when describing the sites’ destruction. for example, he mentions the existence of “a fortress locked with a large lock [or, many locks]” that had protected a wondrous copper broom (para. 7). he locates this fortress in the northeast of the city: it stands to the north of a hill called kawm īmās and near an otherwise unknown mosque of the chain.271 the hill he refers to is probably kawm al-dīmās. muslim authors from the sixth/twelfth century and later know this hill, which they call simply al-dīmās,272 as a graveyard in which a number of prominent scholars were interred.273 al-dīmās was a site of some religious significance. the graveyard facilitated performance of burial rituals for those who were buried elsewhere. in his muʿjam al-safar, al-silafī writes that during the burial of the alexandrian qāḍī aḥmad b. ʿabd al-majīd al-kinānī in 529/1135, a large crowd 270. e.g., nuʿaym b. ḥammād, kitāb al-fitan wa-l-malāḥim, ed. majdī b. m. b. s. al-shawrī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1423/2002), 351–53 (nos. 1310-12); ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. ʿumar b. gh. al-ʿamrawī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1415–21/1995–2000), 12:444–45 (no. 1269), 68:227–28 (no. 9234); al-risāla al-ʿawfiyya fī faḍl al-iskandariyya in ibn duqmāq, kitāb al-intiṣār, 5:116–17. 271. this mosque’s name, mosque of the chain (jāmiʿ al-silsila), recalls a name given to the western harbor, “harbor of the chain” (baḥr al-silsila in al-nuwayrī, al-ilmām, e.g., 1:112; marsā al-silsila in leo africanus, description de l’afrique, trans. alexis épaulard [paris: librairie d’amérique et d’orient, 1956], 2:496). étienne combe, in a review of the crusades in the later middle ages, by ʿazīz s. ʿaṭiyya, in bulletin de la société royale d’archéologie d’alexandrie 32 (1938): 205–8, at 207–8 (referring to al-nuwayrī, al-ilmām, 3:214), rightly notes that this toponym dates to the mid-eighth/fourteenth century. hence, it is unlikely to be related to our author’s mosque of the chain. today, al-silsila is the name of the promontory east of the city’s eastern harbor (ancient akra lochias). but although tenth/sixteenth-century sources refer, in addition to the harbor of the chain, also to a gate of the chain (étienne combe, “notes de topographie et d’histoire alexandrine,” bulletin de la société royale d’archéologie d’alexandrie 36 [1946]: 120–45, at 121–22), i found no information that verifies the existence of ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s mosque of the chain. note that manuscript st calls this mosque the ʿasaliyya mosque, also unknown. 272. for the identification of al-dīmās with one of alexandria’s two hills, see notes 275 and 276 below. 273. al-ʿaynī, ʿiqd al-jumān fī taʾrīkh ahl al-zamān, vol. 2: ʿaṣr salāṭīn al-mamālīk, ed. muḥammad m. amīn (cairo: maṭbaʿat dār al-kutub wa-l-wathāʾiq al-qawmiyya, 1431/2010), 2/2:108; al-fāsī, al-ʿiqd al-thamīn fī taʾrīkh al-balad al-amīn, ed. muḥammad ḥ. al-fiqqī, fuʾād sayyid, and maḥmūd m. al-ṭanāḥī (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-sunna al-muḥammadiyya, 1381–1406/1962–86), 2:241; ibn taghrī birdī, al-nujūm al-zāhira fī mulūk miṣr wa-l-qāhira (cairo: maṭbaʿat dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1929–72), 11:194; al-silafī, muʿjam al-safar, ed. ʿabd allāh ʿu. al-bārūdī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1414/1993), 259, 260, 315, 464. 101 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) “prayed over him in the graveyard of al-dīmās” although the qāḍī himself was laid to rest in a private garden neighboring the graveyard.274 al-dīmās also housed venerated religious architecture. in his book on pilgrimage sites, al-harawī writes about the existence of a tomb of the prophet jeremiah at al-dīmās.275 the coptic synaxarium locates a church with relics of st. john the baptist and the prophet elisha on one of the city’s two hills and reports that the church was known as al-dīmās.276 without hard evidence, modern scholars often identify (kawm) al-dīmās with the northern or western slope of kawm al-dikka, where a muslim graveyard has indeed been excavated.277 ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb reports that people told him about a miracle associated with the locked fortress north of kawm īmās: rubbish placed at the gate would miraculously be transferred to the top of the hill. although this precise story is not known from other sources, he is drawing here on existing themes in literature about alexandria.278 the late mamluk and early ottoman historian ibn iyās (d. ca. 903/1524) provides the closest parallel to ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s story. in his discussion of the muslim conquest of alexandria, he includes an anecdote about “an ever-locked gate with twenty-four locks,” whose location goes unmentioned. egypt’s byzantine ruler at that time, al-muqawqis, wished to open the gate but was strongly advised not to do so. when he eventually did open it, he found not the treasures he expected but instead images and inscriptions on the walls foretelling the establishment of muslim rule in the year in which the gate was opened. in that same year, according to the anecdote, muslims conquered alexandria.279 using a similar motif, our 274. al-silafī, muʿjam al-safar, 54. 275. al-harawī, al-ishārāt, 47. when he visited the city in 987/1579, alexandrians pointed hans jacob breüning to a site at which the house of jeremiah was believed to have stood and which had been turned into a mosque. he confirms that it stood on “a mountain”; see hans jacob breüning, orientalische reiß des edlen unnd besten hans jacob breüning […] (strasbourg: carolus, 1612), 122. 276. le synaxaire arabe-jacobite (rédaction copte), ed. and trans. rené basset (in patrologia orientalis 1, 3, 11, 16, 17, 20), 1:346–47 [132–33], which also connects the church with one of the city’s hills (akwām). 277. e.g., combe, “notes,” 143–44; mieczyslaw rodziewicz, “remarks on kom el demas in alexandria,” graeco-arabica 5 (1993): 315–19. for the graveyard, see barbara tkaczow, “the historical topography of kom el-dikka: notes on plans xii–xv,” in fouilles polonaises à kôm el-dikka (1986–1987), ed. zsolt kiss et al., 131–43 (warsaw: centre d’archéologie méditerrannéenne de l’académie polonaise des sciences, 2000), 139–43, and recent archaeological reports in emanuela kulicka, “islamic necropolis at kom el-dikka in alexandria: research in the 2010–2013 seasons,” polish archaeology in the mediterranean 24, no. 1 (2015): 62–72; grzegorz majcherek and emanuela kulicka, “alexandria, kom el-dikka: season 2014–2015,” polish archaeology in the mediterranean 25 (2016): 33–63, at 53–62; grzegorz majcherek and renata kucharczyk, “alexandria, kom el-dikka: season 2016,” polish archaeology in the mediterranean 26, no. 1 (2017): 37–58, at 38–45. see ibn jumayʿ, ṭabʿ al-iskandariyya, 54 for the location of alexandria’s (main) graveyards. 278. in addition to what follows, see also ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam’s anecdote about ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ’s clever entry into and escape from “the fortress in the bath (dīmās)” during the conquest of alexandria. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 77–78, copied in al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:445–46, and al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 19:304–5. al-ẓāhirī’s description of the city’s dār al-sulṭān as “always locked” (zubda, 40) is not relevant in this context. he means that this building was reserved strictly for the sultan’s use. 279. ibn iyās, badāʾiʿ al-zuhūr fī waqāʾiʿ al-duhūr, ed. muḥammad muṣṭafā (wiesbaden: franz steiner verlag, 1974–92), 1/1:106. ibn iyās’s anecdote has its roots in a very similar story connected with the muslim conquest of the iberian peninsula, which can already be found in the third/ninthand early fourth/tenth-century works al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 102 text claims that a spy sent by uhrayqil opened the locked fortress and thus destroyed the monument’s talisman. the cessation of the miraculous activity associated with the locked fortress occurred together with that of another monument. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb writes about a basin decorated with a large variety of images in which a sage lay buried (para. 6). he locates the basin on the coast between cleopatra’s needles. before a muslim king opened up the basin, it used to warn the city of approaching enemies and, in the event of their arrival, to scare them off. benjamin of tudela, who visited alexandria around 565/1170, records a very similar monument in the same location. at the coast, he writes, stands a sepulchre of marble on which are engraved all manner of beasts and birds; an effigy is in the midst thereof, and all the writing is in ancient characters, which no one knows now. men suppose that it is the sepulchre of a king who lived in early times before the deluge.280 describing why this basin/tomb and the locked fortress stopped performing their miracles, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb uses a literary theme commonly found in anecdotes about the destruction of the miraculous mirror on top of the city’s lighthouse, to which we will return shortly. like these anecdotes, our author ascribes the destruction of the city’s marvels to a byzantine emperor (uhrayqil). as in some of these anecdotes, the byzantine emperor had sent a spy who convinced the city’s muslim ruler of the presence of treasures in these monuments.281 it is the muslim ruler who eventually caused the monuments’ destruction through his attempt to retrieve the treasures.282 but of all the city’s monuments that ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb discusses, the pharos, alexandria’s famous lighthouse, receives most attention—and understandably so. the lighthouse played a central role in muslim collective memory of alexandria’s past. tellingly, authors such as the fourth/tenth-century al-masʿūdī and ibn al-kindī, but also the early seventh/thirteenth-century al-harawī, record the popular idea that the pharos had once stood literally in the center of the city,283 possibly reflecting the idea that the lighthouse of ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam (futūḥ miṣr, 206) and ibn khurdādhbih (kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, ed. michael jan de goeje [leiden: e. j. brill, 1889], 156–57). in later sources the anecdote exhibits a more elaborate narrative that is closer to ibn iyās’s version; e.g., al-masʿūdī (attr.), akhbār al-zamān, ed. ʿabd allāh al-ṣāwī (cairo: maṭbaʿat ʿabd al-ḥamīd a. ḥanafī, 1357/1938), 73; ibn khallikān, wafayāt al-aʿyān, 5:327–28; ibn al-wardī, jazīrat al-ʿajāʾib wa-farīdat al-gharāʾib, ed. anwar m. zannātī (cairo: maktabat al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 1428/2008), 74. for the territorialized articulation of muslim power in this anecdote, see travis zadeh, mapping frontiers across medieval islam: geography, translation and the ʿabbasid empire (london: i. b. tauris, 2011), 46. 280. benjamin of tudela, itinerary, 76–77 (english). 281. for such anecdotes involving a spy, see al-qazwīnī, āthār al-bilād wa-akhbār al-ʿibād (beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d.), 145–46, and al-thaʿālibī, thimār al-qulūb fī al-muḍāf wa-l-mansūb, ed. muḥammad a. ibrāhīm (beirut: al-maktaba al-ʿaṣriyya, 1424/2003), 422. 282. see the references in notes 298–300 below. 283. al-masʿūdī, kitāb al-tanbīh wa-l-ishrāf, ed. michael jan de goeje (leiden: e. j. brill, 1894), 48; ibn al-kindī, faḍāʾil miṣr, ed. ibrāhīm a. al-ʿadawī and ʿalī m. ʿumar (cairo: maktabat wahba, 1391/1971), 51; al-harawī, al-ishārāt, 48; pseudo-ibn ẓuhayra, al-faḍāʾil al-bāhira fī maḥāsin miṣr wa-l-qāhira, ed. muṣṭafā al-saqqā and kāmil al-muhandis (cairo: dār al-kutub, 1969), 57. see also bruning, “destruction of alexandria.” 103 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) stood at the center of the universe.284 other authors identified the pharos as one of the buildings built by the qurʾānic semi-prophet dhū al-qarnayn and, as such, considered it a precious remnant of the age of prophets and other god-sent messengers.285 as we shall see, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s description of the pharos shares many elements with descriptions of the lighthouse by other muslim authors, including its partial destruction. but what sets the text apart from these other descriptions is that our author uses his description of the pharos to bring home his argument about the urgency of pursuing ribāṭ in alexandria. the beginning of his description of the lighthouse is remarkable for its degree of detail. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb claims that the lighthouse stands in the center of four stories of vaults (ʿuqūd), for which he gives very precise measures. what he means here is not entirely clear. perhaps this is a somewhat cryptic description of a cistern,286 but it also recalls the idea that the lighthouse once stood on bridges or columns.287 ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb continues with a detailed description, including measurements, of the ninety-nine stairs that allegedly lead up to the lighthouse. that no other source confirms this description is not important.288 the details are a rhetorical device that is meant to give the impression that the author is intimately familiar with the monument he describes.289 according to our author, the lighthouse has many noteworthy features. these features resemble aspects of the pharos’s architecture as described by other authors, but our text is never identical to other descriptions of the lighthouse. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb writes, for 284. françois de polignac, “al-iskandariyya: œil du monde et frontière de l’inconnu,” mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’école française de rome 96 (1984): 425–39. 285. faustina c. w. doufikar-aerts, “alexander the great and the pharos of alexandria in arabic literature,” in the problematics of power: eastern and western representations of alexander the great, ed. m. bridges and j. ch. bürgel, 191–202 (bern: peter lang, 1996). 286. most authors do not hold, however, that the lighthouse stood on a cistern. if they do not give a (somewhat) realistic impression of its foundation (see the discussion in behrens-abouseif, “islamic history”), they mostly write that it stood on one or more crabs made of glass or marble; e.g., ibn al-faqīh, mukhtaṣar kitāb al-buldān, ed. michael jan de goeje (leiden: e. j. brill, 1885), 70, 118; ibn khurdādhbih, al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, 160; ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 80; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. charles barbier de meynard and abel pavet de courteille, rev. charles pellat (beirut: publications de l’université libanaise, 1966–79), 2:105 (§ 837), cited in al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:423; cf. al-thaʿālibī, thimār al-qulūb, 422. for possible interpretations of these crabs’ symbolism, see de polignac, “al-iskandariyya,” 431–34. the idea that the lighthouse stood on a cistern finds a parallel in stories about a muslim ruler who tore down the lighthouse in search of treasures that were said to lay hidden in storage rooms underneath it. see aḥmad b. muṭarrif, al-tartīb fī al-lugha, ed. ʿabd allāh b. fuhayd b. rashūd al-baqamī (ma thesis, jāmiʿat umm al-qurā, mecca, 1412/1993), 2:19–20, (copied in ibn faḍl allāh al-ʿumarī, masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār: l’égypte, la syrie, le ḥiǧāz et le yémen, ed. ayman f. sayyid [cairo: ifao, 1985], 90–92); al-dimashqī, nukhbat al-dahr fī ʿajāʾib al-barr wa-l-baḥr, ed. christian m. j. fraehn and a. f. mehren, cosmographie de chems-ed-din abou abdallah mohammed ed-dimichqui (st petersburg: m. m. eggers/h. schmitzdorff, 1866), 37; al-ḥimyarī, al-rawḍ al-miʿṭār fī khabar al-aqṭār, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās (beirut: maktabat lubnān, 1975), 54–55; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 2:105–6 (§ 838), cited in al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:423–24, and al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 1:396–97; al-qazwīnī, āthār al-bilād, 145–46. 287. isḥāq b. al-ḥusayn, ākām al-marjān, 85; al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:425; al-suyūṭī, ḥusn al-muḥāḍara, 1:89. 288. for an overview of descriptions of the lighthouse in muslim sources, see behrens-abouseif, “islamic history.” 289. antrim, routes and realms, 62–70. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 104 example, that the lighthouse possesses four doors equipped with pipes “which make a thunderous sound when they are turned [or rubbed].” other sources, al-masʿūdī (d. 345/956) being the earliest currently known, speak of a statue standing on top of the lighthouse that makes a horrible sound when an enemy approaches the city so that alexandria’s inhabitants can prepare for battle.290 our author also describes a banner on top of the pharos which turns with the mirror inside the lighthouse and claims that this mirror always points at the sun. other sources do not speak of banners but do mention a second statue that always points at the sun, whatever its position in the sky.291 but the lighthouse’s most noteworthy feature was its miraculous mirror, which, according to ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb, allowed one to see over a distance of 8,000 miles. it is not surprising that he discusses the mirror (and its destruction) in detail. the mirror that supposedly stood on or, according to others, hung in alexandria’s lighthouse was widely considered (to have been) one of the wonders of the world.292 like the pharos itself, the mirror was part and parcel of the collective memory of alexandria in medieval islam, and it features in many descriptions of the city. from the fourth/tenth century on, muslim historians generally dated the mirror to one of two distinct periods in egypt’s history. some ascribed the building of the mirror to an ancient egyptian king.293 a popular fourth/tenthor fifth/ eleventh-century text, mostly known as kitāb al-ʿajāʾib or akhbār al-zamān and regularly cited by ayyubid and mamluk authors,294 dates it to the reign of king miṣrāyim, a greatgrandson of nūḥ and the first to rule egypt after the flood. his sons are said to have built in the center of raqūda (to be understood as a predecessor of alexandria295) a copula of gilded 290. al-dimashqī, nukhbat al-dahr, 36–37; al-ḥimyarī, al-rawḍ al-miʿṭār, 54; ibn waṣīf shāh, mukhtaṣar ʿajāʾib al-dunyā, ed. sayyid k. ḥasan (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1421/2001), 185; al-ibshīhī, al-mustaṭraf fī kull fann mustaẓraf, ed. mufīd m. qumayḥa (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1406/1987), 2:306–7; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 2:105 (§ 837), cited in al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:423; al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 1:396. 291. al-dimashqī, nukhbat al-dahr, 36–37; ibn waṣīf shāh, mukhtaṣar, 185; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 2:105 (§ 837), cited in al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:423; al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 1:396; al-suyūṭī, ḥusn al-muḥāḍara, 1:89. 292. see, e.g., a popular tradition going back to ʿabd allāh b. ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ (d. 65/684) on the four wonders of the world in ibn al-faqīh, mukhtaṣar, 72; ibn al-jawzī, al-muntaẓam fī taʾrīkh al-mulūk wa-l-umam, ed. muḥammad ʿa. ʿaṭā and muṣṭafā ʿa. ʿaṭā (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1415/1995), 1:164 and 165; ibn khurdādhbih, al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, 115; ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 78; al-suyūṭī, al-durr al-manthūr fī al-tafsīr al-maʾthūr (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1432–33/2011), 3:488; al-thaʿālibī, thimār al-qulūb, 422; see also ibn faḍl allāh al-ʿumarī, masālik al-abṣār, 92. not everyone believed that this miraculous mirror had existed. doubters included the author of the kitāb al-baḥth, ascribed to the second/eighth-century alchemist jābir b. ḥayyān (cited in paul kraus, jābir ibn ḥayyān: contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’islam [cairo: ifao, 1942–43], 1:296–97). al-harawī (al-ishārāt, 48–49) argues that because the mirror no longer exists, the lighthouse cannot be considered a wonder. 293. in addition to what follows, ibn ḥawqal (writing between 331/942 and 378/988) ascribes the building of the lighthouse and its mirror to a mighty king in kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ, ed. j. h. kramers (leiden: e. j. brill, 1938), 1:151. the fourth/tenth-century isḥāq b. ḥusayn ascribes it to ancient “sages” in ākām al-marjān, 86. 294. the text is explicitly copied in al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:425. see also al-bakrī, al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, 2:533 and 594 (§§ 881 and 988); murtaḍā b. al-ʿafīf, l’égypte de murtadi fils du gaphiphe, trans. pierre vattier, introd. and annot. gaston wiet (paris: imprimerie nationale, 1953), 119; and al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 15:44. 295. bruning, “destruction of alexandria.” 105 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) brass on which they placed a mirror. but the text also credits other ancient egyptian kings with building alexandria’s famous mirror.296 like archimedes’s mirror, it allowed those who controlled it to shoot beams of sunlight at approaching enemy ships.297 however, the idea that alexander the great, in this context often identified as dhū al-qarnayn, built the city’s lighthouse and its mirror enjoyed greater popularity and can be found in many sources. like ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s mirror, the mirror alexander the great built was believed to have been a powerful instrument to identify approaching enemy ships from afar—especially those from constantinople, the seat of islam’s byzantine archenemy—and, like king miṣrāyim’s mirror, to burn these ships with sunlight.298 in short, alexandria’s miraculous mirror was thought to have formed the city’s most important defense mechanism. in contrast to these sources, which describe the mirror as an artifact of the ancient past, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb claims that the mirror existed until very recently. he writes that he witnessed a byzantine attack on the city, led by the son of uhrayqil, during which the city’s treasurer sided with the byzantines and destroyed the mirror’s ability to move. having done this, the treasurer fled the city. stories of the mirror’s destruction circulated in various forms.299 our text’s version is not known from other sources. nonetheless, it shows its author’s familiarity with more popular versions. a version al-masʿūdī recorded in egypt became widespread and has frequently been cited.300 it involves an unnamed byzantine emperor who sent a servant to make the umayyad caliph al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 86–96/705–15) believe that much wealth lay hidden underneath the pharos. only after the caliph had torn down the lighthouse’s upper half in search of these treasures, and thus had destroyed the mirror, did alexandrians realize that the caliph was being misled. by that time, the byzantine emperor’s servant had fled.301 by and large, this version’s plot is identical to that of ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb: the byzantine emperor sends someone (a servant or his son) to destroy the mirror; this person convinces a muslim (the caliph or the city’s treasurer) to cooperate; and after the successful destruction of the mirror someone flees 296. al-masʿūdī, akhbār al-zamān, 131. 297. ibn waṣīf shāh, mukhtaṣar, 114 = al-masʿūdī, akhbār al-zamān, 154. 298. aḥmad b. muṭarrif, al-tartīb fī al-lugha, 2:18–19 (copied in ibn faḍl allāh al-ʿumarī, masālik al-abṣār, 91); al-gharnāṭī, tuḥfat al-albāb (wa-nukhbat al-aʿjāb), ed. gabriel ferrand in journal asiatique 207 (1925): 1–148 and 193–303, at 70–71; al-ḥimyarī, al-rawḍ al-miʿṭār, 54; ibn waṣīf shāh, mukhtaṣar, 114 = al-masʿūdī, akhbār al-zamān, 154; al-ibshīhī, al-mustaṭraf, 2:306–7; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 2:105–6 (§ 838), cited in al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:423–24; al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 1:396; and al-suyūṭī, ḥusn al-muḥāḍara, 1:89); murtaḍā b. al-ʿafīf, l’égypte, 119; al-suyūṭī, ḥusn al-muḥāḍara, 1:90–91; yāqūt al-rūmī, muʿjam al-buldān, 1:186. 299. e.g., benjamin of tudela, itinerary, 75 (english); yāqūt al-rūmī, muʿjam al-buldān, 1:186–87. for short references to the mirror’s destruction on the orders of a byzantine emperor, see isḥāq b. al-ḥusayn, ākām al-marjān, 86; al-masʿūdī, akhbār al-zamān, 154 (partially cited in al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:425, but ascribed to ibn waṣīf shāh); al-muqaddasī, aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm, ed. michael jan de goeje (leiden: e. j. brill, 1877), 211; murtaḍā b. al-ʿafīf, l’égypte, 119–20; nāṣir-i khusraw, book of travels (safarnāma), trans. w. m. thackston jr. (albany: state university of new york press, 1986), 42. 300. e.g., in al-bakrī, al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, 2:635 (§ 1059); al-dimashqī, nukhbat al-dahr, 37; al-ibshīhī, al-mustaṭraf, 2:307; al-maqrīzī, khiṭaṭ, 1:423–24; al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab, 1:396–97; and al-suyūṭī, ḥusn al-muḥāḍara, 1:89–90. al-qazwīnī, in āthār al-bilād, 145–46, presents a very similar version. 301. al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, 2:105–6 (§ 838). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 106 the city. our text’s description of alexandria’s lighthouse, with its various noteworthy features, is firmly rooted in ideas circulating about alexandria’s past. however, our text differs from these other descriptions of the pharos in one significant way. ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb uses the story about the mirror’s destruction at the hands of the city’s treasurer not to highlight the lighthouse’s fantastic past but rather to mobilize contemporary muslims for the defense of alexandria against enemy attacks. whereas, he writes, the preceding part of his description of the lighthouse was based on texts, he emphasizes that he himself found the lighthouse “inoperative [but] still matching that description.” indeed, the text implies that some of the pharos’s noteworthy features, such as the doors that make a sound or the banner that follows the course of the sun, still function. but perhaps more significantly, his story about the mirror’s destruction stresses that now is the time to engage in ribāṭ in alexandria. other sources date the mirror’s destruction to the first islamic century. in addition to al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik, also the egyptian governor ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ (in office 19–25/640–45 and 38–43/658–64) and the caliph ʿabd al-malik b. marwān (r. 65–86/685–705) appear as the muslim ruler who ordered the pharos’s destruction.302 by contrast, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb writes that he himself witnessed the city lose its most famous and important defense. thus, he not only points out that the city is partially unprotected but also adds urgency to his message. conclusion ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria is a rich and complex literary creation. the author exhibits some familiarity with the city itself (e.g., its gates, cemeteries, city walls, mosques, and colleges) and with stories about the city’s ancient monuments and its place in eschatological schemes. this feature of the text makes it an interesting source on (ideas about) alexandria and its cityscape in a rather tumultuous period of egypt’s history. at the same time, the author seems uninterested in or incapable of accurately describing the city’s defenses and exaggerates the strength of its garrison. indeed, accuracy seems not to be of prime importance for our author. he uses literary motifs and amplifies the role of religious authorities, notably sufi masters, in his praise of islam in alexandria. similarly, his description of the pharos may share features with legends surrounding it but is far removed from the building’s real sixth/twelfththrough eighth/fourteenth-century architecture. despite being framed as an insider’s description of the city, the account is evidently highly stylized. in fact, ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb wrote the account with the aim of mobilizing muslims for ribāṭ performance in alexandria. i have argued that he first praises the city’s military and religious character in order to make the city an attractive destination for volunteer warriors before focusing on weaknesses in the city’s defenses. the text reaches its dramatic climax with the destruction of part of the city’s most famous monument, the pharos, at 302. al-gharnāṭī, tuḥfat al-albāb, 70–71; ibn iyās, badāʾiʿ al-zuhūr, 1/1:106–7; ibn waṣīf shāh, mukhtaṣar, 185; al-suyūṭī, ḥusn al-muḥāḍara, 1:91. in al-thaʿālibī, thimār al-qulūb, 422, the muslim ruler is not identified. aḥmad b. muṭarrif, al-tartīb fī al-lugha, 2:18–20 (copied in ibn faḍl allāh al-ʿumarī, masālik al-abṣār, 90–92) refers to an unnamed alexandrian ruler. 107 • jelle bruning al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the hands of non-muslim aggressors coming from outside egypt. that ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb ascribes the lighthouse’s partial destruction to a recent attack on the city reveals that his concern for alexandria’s protection rests on heightened fears of a real attack. such fears were certainly not groundless. sicilians besieged alexandria in 569–70/1174, and awareness among crusaders of the strategic benefit that control over egypt offered for their conquest of the holy land led to attacks on egypt’s mediterranean coast, culminating in the frankish occupation of damietta in 615/1219 and 647/1249.303 because alexandria itself hardly suffered attacks after 569–70/1174 until pierre de lusignan’s sack of the city in 767/1365,304 the account may voice fear of an assault on alexandria as well as a general sense of anxiety about frankish or byzantine attacks on the egyptian coast. indeed, studies of prose and poetry written in this period show that the frankish threat was sometimes understood in eschatological terms and gave impetus to the composition of a variety of literature, exhorting muslims to defend the realm of islam against non-muslim aggressors, regularly including fictitious elements and possessing a strong spatial character (such as local histories and faḍāʾil works).305 ibn ʿabd al-wahhāb’s account seems to belong to this wave of literary composition. it calls for a highly localized reaction against what its author perceived as an eschatological threat to islam. 303. ibn al-athīr, al-kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, ed. abū al-fidāʾ ʿa. al-qāḍī et al. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1407/1987), 10:375–80; al-maqrīzī, kitāb al-sulūk li-maʿrifat duwal al-mulūk, ed. muḥammad m. ziyāda (cairo: maktabat dār al-kutub al-miṣriyya, 1934–73), 1/2:333–36. 304. niall christie, “cosmopolitan trade centre or bone of contention? alexandria and the crusades, 487–857/1095–1453,” al-masāq 26, no. 1 (2014): 49–61. franks are said to have attacked the city’s harbor in 658/1260; see ibn taghrī birdī, al-nujūm al-zāhira, 7:148–49. 305. e.g., abbès zouache, “les croisades en orient: histoire, mémoires,” tabularia 15 (2015): 75–119, at 80–87; osman latiff, the cutting edge of the poet’s sword: muslim poetic responses to the crusades (leiden: brill, 2017), 30–39, 172–83; kenneth a. goudie, reinventing jihād: jihād ideology from the conquest of jerusalem to the end of the ayyūbids (c. 492/1099–647/1249) (leiden: brill, 2019), 83–116. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a call to arms: an account of ayyubid or early mamluk alexandria • 108 bibliography sources 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damascus: ifpo, 2008. ———. “les croisades en orient: histoire, mémoires.” tabularia 15 (2015): 75–119. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023): 45-76 abstract based on the armenian chronicle attributed to sebēos, some scholars have argued for a large, failed muslim expedition against constantinople in or around 654 ce during ʿ uthmān’s caliphate and muʿāwiya’s governorship of syria. others seem to ignore the possibility, especially since there is no reference to such a siege in arabiclanguage sources beyond perhaps one sentence in the history of khalīfa b. al-khayyāṭ. the poet abū al-ʿiyāl alhudhalī, active in egypt during the reigns of ʿumar and ʿuthmān, provides a third possible source for this event in his description of a major muslim military defeat against the byzantines. julius wellhausen, in an overlooked article, noticed the historical significance of the poem but misdated it to the 660s. this essay redates the poem to the early to mid-650s and suggests that it refers to an early failed assault on constantinople. it further argues that although the event is virtually ignored by the arabic-language sources, it can help explain the egyptian military’s hostility to ʿuthmān, which culminated in his assassination. introduction in the course of their wars with the byzantines, the umayyads undertook two multiyear sieges of constantinople, one starting around 48/668 and led by yazīd b. muʿāwiya, and the other beginning in 98/717, led by maslama b. ʿabd al-malik.1 the arabic and non-arabic accounts of both are complex and ambiguous. the first of the two sieges is often considered * my thanks go to andrew marsham for several helpful conversations on this subject in its early stages, as well as to juan cole for reading and commenting on an early draft. research and time to write this essay were made possible by a leverhulme early career fellowship, with support from the isaac newton trust, at the university of cambridge, and by a humanities research fellowship for the study of the arab world at new york university’s abu dhabi institute. i also thank the two anonymous peer reviewers as well as alison vacca and zayde antrim for their many invaluable and detailed suggestions, which are too numerous to detail in the footnotes. any remaining errors or infelicities are my own. 1. dates will be given according to first the hijrī and then christian calendars, separated by a slash. dear muʿāwiya: an “epistolary” poem on a major muslim military defeat during the mediterranean campaigns of ah 28–35/649–56 ce* nathaniel a. miller new york university abu dhabi (nam10023@nyu.edu) © 2023 nathaniel a. miller. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 46 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 47 the first islamic siege conducted against the byzantine capital; this is the stance, for example, of marek jankowiak, who has argued, on the basis of a comprehensive survey of the sources, for the 48/668 date.2 however, some scholars, drawing on the seventh-century armenian chronicle attributed (on no evidence) to the bishop sebēos (hereafter pseudo-sebēos), have proposed that an earlier large-scale assault took place around 33–34/654.3 although it is now widely recognized that the study of islamic history requires the simultaneous use of arabic and non-arabic sources, for disciplinary reasons arabic poetry, once widely used by scholars, has become an underutilized source. evidence for a major military failure in the eastern mediterranean around the time of the 33–34/654 assault described by pseudosebēos—and quite possibly the very same failed attack on constantinople—can be found in a handful of poems by abū al-ʿiyāl al-hudhalī, a member of the hudhayl tribe4 who served in the islamic army based in egypt during the conquest period. his poetry is preserved in the recension of the baghdadi philologist abū saʿīd al-sukkarī (d. 275/888), sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, the only surviving example of a collection of a particular tribe’s poetry (dīwān). three sets of abū al-ʿiyāl’s poetic texts support the claim of an early first assault in 33–34/654: an exchange of poems with a fellow tribesman, which sheds light on social life in early islamic egypt; an elegy mourning another kinsman, who apparently died fighting at constantinople; and, most importantly, an epistle in verse addressed to muʿāwiya b. abī sufyān (d. 60/680), along with two successive governors of egypt, ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ (d. 43/664) and ʿabd allāh b. saʿd b. abī sarḥ (d. 36 or 37/656–58). the specific issue of an early attack on constantinople is representative of a larger difficulty in making sense of our sources’ perspectives. for islamic sources dealing with the conquests, military victories were teleologically expressive of divine purpose, while defeats were minimized. the seeming inevitability of the islamic conquests seeps into historical analysis, despite conscious scholarly awareness of the issue.5 poetry represents a vital source for dealing with this blind spot, not because it is any less ideological—and its generic conventions and language are in many ways more difficult to untangle than the language of chronicles is—but simply because poets gave voice to multiple, varied interests that were very different from those of the iraqi religious scholarly elite that mostly produced the great abbasid chronicles. the first islamic thrust to conquer constantinople constitutes a key singularity in this teleological narrative: if an assault in fact took place before the civil 2. marek jankowiak, “the first arab siege of constantinople,” in constructing the seventh century, ed. constantin zuckerman, 237–320 (paris: association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2013). 3. primarily, shaun o’sullivan, “sebeos’ account of an arab attack on constantinople in 654,” byzantine and modern greek studies 28, no. 1 (2004): 67–88. o’sullivan draws on the arguments of james howard-johnston, and other scholars appear to have accepted their conclusions, as discussed below. 4. following the same morphological principle by which the nisba of quraysh is qurashī, not qurayshī, and sulaym’s is sulamī, the nisba of hudhayl is always hudhalī. 5. see, for example, petra m. sijpesteijn, “the arab conquest of egypt and the beginning of muslim rule,” in egypt in the byzantine world, 300–700, ed. roger s. bagnall, 437–59 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007), at 441, n. 21: “in the muslim sources, however, these military setbacks have mostly been suppressed, leaving us with a picture of the conquest as a series of valiant battles and sieges.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 47 war that began in 35/656, it was likely an extremely large-scale affair, yet it left very little impression in the sources. according to abū al-ʿiyāl’s poetry, discussed below, the poet and his kinsmen were directly involved in some large-scale military defeat, and concerns of tribal status along with an ethics of (in this case unrequited) retribution overrode any religio-ideological imperative to soften his criticisms of the islamic leadership. indeed, as will also be discussed below, there is very little religio-ideological sentiment, islamic or otherwise, in early hudhalī poetry, and what there is is probably more representative of pre-islamic arabic mores than it is of a nascent islamic identity. in part as a result of these source-critical issues, the possibility of an early attack on constantinople has been curiously elided from current discussions. abū al-ʿiyāl’s poems, although long known, have also fallen by the wayside for more contingent reasons. after summarizing this historiographical context, i discuss the portions of his texts—first the exchange with his fellow tribesman, which sheds light on social conditions in egypt, and then his elegy for his cousin who died at constantinople—that are relevant for understanding the third and most important text, his epistle poem to muʿāwiya, which i translate in full and which i redate to 28–35/649–56; the poem has previously been thought to postdate the civil war that ended in 41/661. evidence internal to the poems supports placing the epistle to muʿāwiya near the latter end of this range, quite probably in relation to muʿāwiya’s eastern mediterranean campaigns aimed at constantinople during this period. abū al-ʿiyāl expresses the same dissatisfaction with ʿuthmān’s foster brother (akh fī al-raḍāʿa) ibn saʿd b. abī sarḥ, the governor of egypt, that led to the murder of the caliph at the hands of the egyptian army. the epistle poem is also probably linked to the failed expedition against constantinople, and the unstated justification of hudhayl’s participation in the assassination provides the most likely context for the poem’s origin. historiographical context and sources the historiography around the possible early assault on constantinople faces a number of linguistic and source-critical challenges. as a result, there has been very little direct discussion of it in secondary scholarship—or rather, the event has received only the attention its apparent footprint in the sources seems to merit, which is little. at issue is a short passage in pseudo-sebēos, which describes a large battle but is also highly rhetorical. although several careful siftings of the arabic prose sources have been undertaken, abū al-ʿiyāl’s poems about a military defeat, whose historical significance was noticed long ago by julius wellhausen, have been largely overlooked. like pseudo-sebēos’s account, they are difficult to interpret because of their rhetorical characteristics. they do, however, provide a valuable view of a major defeat from within the islamic military, and they almost certainly have a connection to constantinople or, at least, to the broader context of muʿāwiya’s eastern mediterranean military activity as governor of syria in the run-up to the civil war. if the islamic conquests followed a bumpier course than the islamic sources’ teleological sensibility would imply, there is a logic to supposing that by the early 30s/650s the muslims’ strategy would have come to focus on constantinople. in the two years following the battles of yarmūk and qādisiyya in 15/636, the muslims conquered damascus and then 48 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 49 jerusalem.6 ctesiphon, the capital of the sasanian empire, fell in (probably) 16/637. in 20/641 the byzantines agreed to the staged capitulation of alexandria, withdrawing the following year.7 by this time mesopotamia had fallen and syria was being administratively consolidated under muʿāwiya. none of this was inevitable. rome retained the ability to fight back, for example by briefly retaking alexandria in 25/646.8 likewise, muslim armies in nubia were initially beaten back, and some sasanians struggled on under yazdgird iii from rayy and then from iṣfahān and iṣṭakhr until the emperor’s death in 31/651.9 after a very successful muslim incursion into armenia in 21/642, theodoros ṛshtuni was able to inflict a decisive defeat the following year, and armenia recognized roman rule for several years thereafter.10 after the final defeat of the sasanians, the romans and their allies posed the greatest danger to the newly conquered territories, and it is logical that the muslims in general and muʿāwiya in particular would have taken aim at constantinople in the late 20s/640s or early 30s/650s.11 despite the awareness that the conquests were not inevitable, there is an unwillingness to resolve the problem of whether muʿāwiya attempted, as one would expect, an assault on constantinople while he was governor of syria (from after 18/639 to 41/661).12 in lawrence conrad’s view, muʿāwiya was at this time engaged in “a long naval campaign that step by step brought [him] closer to his ultimate objective—constantinople.”13 reconstructing this campaign entails heavy reliance on non-muslim sources. this source problem obtains for the entire naval campaign, but conrad singles out what was perhaps the campaign’s first major step, the attempt to take the strategically important island of arwād off the coast of tartous in 28–29/649–50, for which the key source is ultimately the account of theophilus 6. walter emil kaegi, byzantium and the early islamic conquests, 1st paperback ed. (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1995), 112–49. 7. frank r. trombley, “fiscal documents from the muslim conquest of egypt: military supplies and administrative dislocation, ca. 639–644,” revue des études byzantines 71, no. 1 (2013): 5–38, at 21. 8. sijpesteijn, “arab conquest of egypt,” 441, n. 20. 9. robert g. hoyland, in god’s path: the arab conquests and the creation of an islamic empire (oxford: oxford university press, 2015), 76–77, esp. n. 11. 10. marius canard, “armīniya 2. armenia under arab domination,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; pseudo-sebēos, the armenian history attributed to sebeos, trans. robert w. thomson (liverpool: liverpool university press, 1999), 111, 258–59. theodoros (or t‘ēodoros) played both sides against each other, and the historiographical image of him typically emphasizes his alliance with the arabs against the romans. 11. this was, in fact, how the armenian historians saw things; synthesizing two statements of pseudo-sebēos, the tenth-century stepʻanos succinctly writes that “when the king of ismael saw that the kingdom of persia had been extinguished, he gave an order to all his forces to undertake war with the kingdom of the romans so that they might seize constantinople and destroy that kingdom as well”: tim greenwood, the universal history of stepʻanos tarōnecʻi: introduction, translation, and commentary (oxford: oxford university press, 2017), 185. 12. for the question of the dates of muʿāwiya’s governorship of syria, damascus, and/or homs, see martin hinds, “muʿāwiya,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 13. lawrence i. conrad, “the conquest of arwād: a source-critical study in the historiography of the early medieval near east,” in the byzantine and early islamic near east: papers of the first workshop on late antiquity and early islam, ed. averil cameron, lawrence i. conrad, and g. r. d. king, 317–401 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1992), at 322, esp. n. 15. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 49 of edessa (d. 785), as transmitted most usefully in the syriac chronicle of 1234.14 although there are accounts of the arwād campaign also in arabic sources, such as the kitāb al-futūḥ of ibn aʿtham al-kūfī (wr. first half of the fourth/tenth century), they are contradictory and often implausible.15 after arwād, arab historians’ accounts of muʿāwiya’s invasion of cyprus in 28/649 and of rhodes around 32–33/653 are confused and folkloric, but inscriptions seem to confirm major activity there as well.16 the questions seem to emerge around a possible muslim attack on constantinople around the year 34/654–55. although it is widely accepted that around this time the muslims achieved a naval victory against the byzantines in an engagement known as the battle of the masts (dhāt al-ṣawārī) near present-day finike (phoenix in lycia), it is difficult to draw conclusions about its context from al-ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) notice (khabar) on the event.17 it was apparently a massive battle—al-ṭabarī reports that the byzantines had five hundred ships and that “the waves washed the shores with blood and tossed up corpses of men in piles.”18 according to theophanes, the byzantines were seeking to thwart a planned largescale assault on constantinople.19 it is only through pseudo-sebēos’s chronicle, dating to the 660s or shortly thereafter, that we can connect the battle at phoenix to an actual attempted (and failed) full-scale muslim assault on constantinople.20 according to pseudo-sebēos: all the troops who were in the east assembled: from persia, khuzhastan, from the region of india,21 aruastan, and from the region of egypt [they came] to muawiya, the prince of the army who resided in damascus. they prepared warships in alexandria and in all the coastal cities. they filled the ships with arms and artillery—300 great ships with a thousand elite cavalry for each ship. he ordered 5,000 light ships to be built, and he 14. ibid., 322ff. 15. ibn aʿtham is often placed in the early third/ninth century, but this dating has recently been plausibly revised by ilkka lindstedt in “al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla and the death of ibrāhīm al-imām,” in case studies in transmission, ed. jaakko hämeen-anttila, raija mattila, and robert rollinger, 103–30 (münster: ugarit-verlag, 2014), at 118–23. 16. conrad, “conquest of arwād,” 377; richard stephen humphreys, muʿawiya ibn abi sufyan: from arabia to empire (oxford: oneworld, 2006), 53–57; theophanes, the chronicle of theophanes confessor: byzantine and near eastern history, a.d. 284–813, trans. cyril a. mango, roger scott, and geoffrey greatrex (oxford: clarendon press, 1997), 479, esp. n. 1, and 481; o’sullivan, “sebeos’ account,” 68–70. 17. abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk = annales quos scripsit abu djafar mohammed ibn djarir at-tabari, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1879), 1:2865–72. see also abū al-qāsim ʿabd al-raḥmān b. ʿabd al-ḥakam, the history of the conquest of egypt, north africa and spain known as the futūḥ miṣr, ed. charles cutler torrey (new haven, ct: yale university press, 1922), 189–91; khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh, ed. akram ḍiyāʾ al-ʿumarī (najaf: maṭbaʿat al-ādāb, 1967), 145 (under ah 34). 18. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:2868. 19. theophanes, chronicle, 482. 20. on pseudo-sebēos’s authorship, motivations, and style, see tim greenwood, “sasanian echoes and apocalyptic expectations: a re-evaluation of the armenian history attributed to sebeos,” le muséon 115, no. 3–4 (2002): 323–97. 21. meaning some area near the red sea: pseudo-sebēos, history, 133, n. 826; philip mayerson, “a confusion of indias: asian india and african india in the byzantine sources,” journal of the american oriental society 113, no. 2 (1993): 169–74. 50 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 51 put in them [only] a few men for the sake of speed, 100 men for each ship, so that they might rapidly dart to and fro over the waves of the sea around the very large ships.22 neither the numbers nor the demographics of the force can be taken literally; the description relies on common tropes in armenian historiography to signify a very large army.23 according to pseudo-sebēos, muʿāwiya simultaneously prepared a land army in syria, and “he himself took the troops with him and marched to chalcedon. when he penetrated the whole land, all the inhabitants of the country submitted to him.”24 linking up with the land army at chalcedon, ships equipped with siege engines were about to make an assault on constantinople’s sea walls, but “when they were about two stades’ distance from dry land, then one could see the awesome power of the lord. for the lord looked down from heaven with the violence of a fierce wind. . . . the towers collapsed, the machines were destroyed, the ships broke up, and the host of soldiers were drowned in the sea.”25 this took place in the thirteenth year of emperor constans ii (r. 641–68), so in 32–33/653–54.26 did this failed attempt on constantinople happen? in 1912 leone caetani noted that al-ṭabarī, citing al-wāqidī, mentions a “raid” (ghazwa) by muʿāwiya against the “straits” of constantinople in the hijrī year 32 (652–53 ce), and that this corresponded with pseudosebēos’s account.27 caetani’s observation has not been widely cited.28 more recently, shaun o’sullivan, drawing on james howard-johnston’s commentary on the english translation of pseudo-sebēos’s armenian history, has argued for the historicity of the assault.29 o’sullivan dates it to 33–34/summer 654 and sees the battle of phoenix/the masts as the muslim thwarting of a byzantine counterattack in the following year, 34–35/655.30 in addition to 22. pseudo-sebēos, history, 144. 23. more problematically, greenwood, in “sasanian echoes,” 369–71, argues that the passage in pseudosebēos is an “elaborate reconstruction pieced together by the compiler,” using primarily biblical allusions to recapitulate the 626 sasanian attack on constantinople, the description of which by pseudo-sebēos shares many resemblances with the later attempt. greenwood nevertheless concedes that the compiler may have been “aware of a failed assault on constantinople in 654” (371). one might ask why it is not rather the account of the earlier sasanian attack that represents a reconstruction of the 654 attack. be that as it may, for the purpose of this essay it is enough that pseudo-sebēos at least confirms a failed naval attack in 654. 24. pseudo-sebēos, history, 144. 25. ibid., 144–45. 26. ibid., 145, n. 885. 27. leone caetani, annali dell’islām, vol. 2 (paris: librairie paul geuthner, 1912), 338; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:2888–89. 28. salvatore cosentino, “constans ii and the byzantine navy,” byzantinische zeitschrift 100, no. 2 (2007): 577–603, at 591. 29. o’sullivan, “sebeos’ account”; pseudo-sebēos, history, 274–76. 30. o’sullivan, “sebeos’ account,” 73–74. constantin zuckerman does not accept this argument, and both he and cosentino see the battle of the masts and the attack on constantinople as part of the same campaign: constantin zuckerman, “learning from the enemy and more: studies in ‘dark centuries’ byzantium,” millennium 2 (2005): 79–135, at 115; cosentino, “constans ii,” 592. reconstructing the exact sequence is fraught, but cosentino’s argument that muʿāwiya defeated constans at phoenix and continued on to constantinople, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 51 al-ṭabarī, khalīfa b. al-khayyāṭ (d. 240/854), in his chronicle, also laconically mentions that “muʿāwiya led an expedition to the straits of constantinople” (ghazā muʿāwiya al-maḍīq min qusṭanṭīna) in the year 32/652–53.31 on the face of it, this is chronologically very close to pseudo-sebēos’s account, although the assigning of dates in this period is liable to any number of errors, and it is likewise difficult to distinguish between plundering raids and large-scale, conquest-oriented expeditions.32 this apparently major event has, evidently without much discussion, been alternately ignored or readily accepted in recent narratives of the early islamic conquests. neither stephen humphreys nor hugh kennedy include the battle in their accounts of the military activities of muʿāwiya (as governor of syria) and the caliph ʿuthmān.33 marek jankowiak, in a long consideration of the better-known muslim siege of constantinople (which he dates to 47–48/early 668) led by yazīd i during the caliphal reign of his father muʿāwiya, does not refer to the 33–34/654 attack described by pseudo-sebēos, although he is aware of o’sullivan’s article.34 on the other hand, petra sijpesteijn, heather keaney, robert hoyland, and clive foss all refer to the siege of 654 matter-of-factly in their accounts of the early islamic period.35 in none of these cases am i aware of any explicit arguments made for or against howard-johnston’s and o’sullivan’s pseudo-sebēos-based case for an assault around this time. the byzantinists constantin zuckerman and salvatore cosentino have both followed and expanded on howard-johnston and o’sullivan in their discussions of the where he was then defeated by pseudo-sebēos’s storm, seems straightforward and plausible. 31. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh, 143. neither howard-johnston nor o’sullivan cite khalīfa. hoyland does: in god’s path, 105, n. 4. two other citations of khalīfa place the raid in ah 30 (my thanks to mehdy shaddel for pointing these out to me): abū ʿabd allāh muḥammad b. salāma al-qāḍī al-quḍāʿī, kitāb ʿuyūn al-maʿārif wa-funūn akhbār al-khalāʾif, ed. jamīl ʿabd allāh muḥammad al-miṣrī (mecca: umm al-qura university, 1995), 304; idem, kitāb al-inbāʾ bi-anbāʾ al-anbiyāʾ wa-tawārīkh al-khulafāʾ al-maʿrūf bi-taʾrīkh al-quḍāʿī, ed. ʿumar ʿabd al-salām tadmurī (beirut: al-maktaba al-ʿaṣriyya, 1998), 185. 32. there is also another notice in pseudo-sebēos of a naval attack on constantinople by muʿāwiya, which howard-johnston dates to 649: pseudo-sebēos, history, 111. in his commentary, howard-johnston conveniently summarizes these reports from pseudo-sebēos with other accounts of naval battles in dionysius of tel-mahre and theophanes: ibid., 259–62. 33. hugh kennedy, the prophet and the age of the caliphates: the islamic near east from the sixth to the eleventh century, 3rd ed. (new york: routledge, taylor, and francis, 2016); humphreys, muʿawiya ibn abi sufyan, 58–63. humphreys views muʿāwiya’s activities at this time as somewhat defensive, aimed at avoiding the repetition of earlier byzantine sea raids against the syrian coast (54–55). 34. jankowiak, “first arab siege,” 302, n. 294. it should be noted that the information on this 668 siege is also largely derived from one non-muslim source, the chronographia of theophanes confessor, but for his part, howard-johnston refers to the entire account as a “myth”: j. d. howard-johnston, witnesses to a world crisis: historians and histories of the middle east in the seventh century (oxford: oxford university press, 2011), 304. 35. sijpesteijn, “arab conquest of egypt,” 448; petra m. sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state: the world of a mid-eighth-century egyptian official (oxford: oxford university press, 2013), 76; hoyland, in god’s path, 105–8; robert g. hoyland, seeing islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of christian, jewish, and zoroastrian writings on early islam (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1997), 125; clive foss, “egypt under muʿāwiya part ii: middle egypt, fusṭāṭ and alexandria,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 72, no. 2 (2009): 259–78, at 276; heather keaney, ʿuthman ibn ʿaffan: legend or liability? (london: oneworld, 2021), 83–84. 52 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 53 byzantine empire during this period.36 the present essay will offer some further evidence from arabic poetry in favor of the historicity of the 33–34/654 assault. i have already noted the positive testimony of khalīfa, which does not seem to play any major role in most discussions, but there is a third arabic source that has attracted no attention in this context. this source consists of a set of eleven poems by two poets of the hudhayl tribe, abū al-ʿiyāl and badr b. ʿāmir, who lived in egypt shortly after the conquest and participated in the war with byzantium. as is usually the case with poets, almost nothing credible is known about them outside of their texts, but i will argue below that one poem (incipit: “min abī al-ʿiyāli akhī hudhaylin”) can be dated on internal evidence to the period 28–35/649–656, when muʿāwiya’s first mediterranean campaign against the byzantines took place. abū al-ʿiyāl’s and badr’s poems, which are part of a collection compiled by abū saʿīd al-sukkarī and now published in full as sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, were first edited in part by johann gottfried ludwig kosegarten in 1854 as carmina hudsailitarum. julius wellhausen noticed the potential historical significance of “min abī al-ʿiyāl,” which he refers to as number 56 in kosegarten’s edition, and published a german translation and commentary of it in 1912. however, his article has been overlooked in recent discussions of the possible siege of constantinople, no doubt due in no small part to its now singularly obscure title, “carmina hudsailitarum ed. kosegarten nr. 56 und 75.” but there are good reasons to reconsider this and several other poems by badr and abū al-ʿiyāl. aside from abū al-ʿiyāl’s participation in the ultimately failed mediterranean naval campaign, he also shares a profile with the egyptian military contingent most heavily involved in the murder of the caliph ʿuthmān in the year 35/656, buttressing the likely significant link between the two events.37 “min abī al-ʿiyāl” is a poetic complaint in the form of an epistle addressed to muʿāwiya and two other leaders, ʿamr and ibn saʿd, composed by a hudhalī who, according to al-sukkarī’s comment, was reportedly taken prisoner by the byzantines. there is no direct evidence in the poem to corroborate the author’s imprisonment or to connect the text to the 33–34/654 attack on constantinople, but abū al-ʿiyāl also composed an elegy for a cousin who died fighting on byzantine territory, probably at constantinople. a competitive exchange of poems in matching rhyme and meter (muʿāraḍa) between abū al-ʿiyāl and badr establishes an egyptian connection and refers to siege engines in passing. in view of the addressees’ identities, dates, and known whereabouts, discussed below, the most plausible event motivating “min abī al-ʿiyāl” is the failed 654 combined land and sea assault on constantinople described by pseudo-sebēos. the primary concern in this essay is to redate “min abī al-ʿiyāl”—which wellhausen erroneously dated to the early 40s/660s (after the first civil war)—to the period 28–35/649– 56. the identities of the addressees, muʿāwiya, ʿamr, and ibn saʿd, help date the poem, as do its references to the post (barīd) system, islamic months, and religious language. first, 36. cosentino, “constans ii,” 590; zuckerman, “learning from the enemy,” 114–15. cosentino, at 591, gives details on a neglected reference, apparently to a combined land and sea assault, in the greek apocalypse of daniel. 37. keaney, ʿuthman ibn ʿaffan, 83–84. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 53 however, i will show that the muʿāraḍa between abū al-ʿiyāl and badr establishes the geographical setting as egypt, while abū al-ʿiyāl’s elegy for his cousin indicates that his tribe or military unit was almost certainly involved in an assault on a byzantine city. abū al-ʿiyāl and badr b. ʿāmir in egypt of the three sets of texts relevant to the egypt-based hudhayl tribe’s potential involvement in a constantinople campaign (the muʿāraḍa between abū al-ʿiyāl and badr, abū al-ʿiyāl’s elegy for his cousin, and the epistle poem to muʿāwiya), this section deals with the first two. the epistle poem is of more direct historical relevance, but the muʿāraḍa and the elegy provide valuable indirect information on the tribe’s social life, presence in egypt, and religious culture. the muʿāraḍa, in particular, is of more literary than historical interest, and even within that realm it is not, in truth, all that interesting. methodologically, however, it needs to be carefully situated intertextually, as medieval editors’ glosses cannot be taken at face value. abū al-ʿiyāl has a short biography (tarjama) in the kitāb al-aghānī of abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī (d. 356/967).38 the information given by abū al-faraj on his subjects is sometimes picaresque, but in this case some of the details he provides are corroborated by the texts of the poems. if abū al-ʿiyāl had a given name besides his unusual agnomen (which means “the children’s father”), it is not recorded. his father’s name is given as ibn abī ghuthayr, ibn abī ʿutayr, ibn abī ʿantara, or ibn abī ʿanbar, all of which are orthographic variants, indicating multiple written transmissions of the material.39 abū al-ʿiyāl converted along with the rest of hudhayl after the conquest of mecca and moved to egypt during the reign of ʿumar (thus between 18/639 and 24/644).40 some members of his family, at least, were involved in combat against the byzantines. the poetic exchange between badr and abū al-ʿiyāl was supposedly motivated by the death of the latter’s nephew, who was a bystander during a fight; in the aftermath of the death, abū al-ʿiyāl suspected that badr would oppose his interests, presumably in seeking vengeance or negotiating bloodwite.41 prose lore (akhbār) such as this anecdote and the accompanying poetic citations were clearly often transmitted separately and then reassembled by compilers.42 as such, a prose 38. abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās, 3rd ed. (beirut: dār ṣādir, 2008), 24:106–10. a few more references can be found in régis blachère, histoire de la littérature arabe des origines à la fin du xve siècle de j.-c. (paris: a. maisonneuve, 1952), 2:280. 39. the first two variants are found in abū saʿīd al-ḥasan b. al-ḥusayn al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, ed. ʿ abd al-sattār aḥmad farrāj (cairo: maktabat dār al-ʿurūba, 1963), 407; al-sukkarī cites al-aṣmaʿī for “ʿutayr.” the latter two are given by al-iṣfahānī in aghānī, 24:107. 40. al-iṣfahānī, aghānī, 24:108. al-sukkarī also states in his introductory comment to badr’s and abū al-ʿiyāl’s poems that they settled in egypt (ashʿār, 407). abū al-faraj cites abū ʿamr al-shaybānī (ca. 93–210/712–825) as the lone source (khāṣṣatan) asserting that abū al-ʿiyāl himself fought in the byzantine expeditions that were led by yazīd b. muʿāwiya and in which ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. zurāra al-kilābī (d. ca. 50/670) died. abū ʿamr thus places the events abū al-ʿiyāl refers to in the context of the later siege of constantinople in 48/668 (or thereabouts). 41. al-iṣfahānī, aghānī, 24:108–9. 42. wellhausen noticed this about the hudhalī battle lore (ayyām) material: julius wellhausen, skizzen und 54 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 55 account (khabar) and its poem can often be considered independent sources, and the details of the khabar have little historical value unless confirmed by the poetic texts.43 al-sukkarī comments that badr and abū al-ʿiyāl lived in egypt, but the only poetic evidence for this claim is a line in their muʿāraḍa in which abū al-ʿiyāl describes the two of them as “two brothers from two branches of hudhayl that have come west (gharrabā), like a lofty mountain whose roots stretched far below the ground.”44 it is difficult to interpret the westward movement denoted by gharrabā as indicating anything other than settlement in egypt. furthermore, other evidence from sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn points to egypt as hudhayl’s primary area of activity during the conquests and the umayyad period. another hudhalī poet from khunāʿa, abū al-ʿiyāl’s clan, complains of having been left behind in arabia while his family has gone to egypt (miṣr).45 still another hudhalī, abū ṣakhr, declares that some kin “have left tihāma, our land, and for mecca have exchanged babylon (bāb al-yūn),” referring to the byzantine name for the egyptian fortress adjacent to which the muslim garrison of fusṭāṭ was established.46 these poetic references to hudhayl in egypt are corroborated by abū al-qāsim ʿabd al-raḥmān b. ʿabd al-ḥakam (d. 257/871), the chronicler of the egyptian conquests, who mentions the location of hudhayl’s quarter in early fusṭāṭ.47 the texts of the muʿāraḍa between badr and abū al-ʿiyāl make absolutely no reference to the narrative of a slain nephew, so there is no reason to accept the latter as the poems’ subject. about badr b. ʿāmir nothing is recorded beyond his interaction with abū al-ʿiyāl. if we examine the eight poems exchanged between them on their own merits, they consist of an amicable introductory overture by badr, six poems whose course of alternating boasts and deprecation is largely dictated by rhetorical play on a set of shared images, and, finally, a threat of violence by abū al-ʿiyāl: “you will taste the edge of a sheathed sword, stowed away [until now].”48 it is impossible, of course, to know how seriously to take this conclusion. it is in the first poem, badr’s overture, that we find a reference to siege warfare. the bipartite qaṣīda is introduced with an eight-line amatory prelude (nasīb) addressed to fuṭayma; most of this is occupied by the speaker’s boast about the many pathless deserts he has crossed. lines 9–15 then conclude with praise of abū al-ʿiyāl as a fortress and then a lion (i omit the latter segment from my translation): vorarbeiten, vol. 1, lieder der hudhailiten, arabisch und deutsch (berlin: g. reimer, 1884), 107ff. and passim. werner caskel observed the same thing, describing some lines of poetry as “yanked in by the hair” in the service of prose anecodotes: werner caskel, ğamharat an-nasab: das genealogische werk des his̆ām ibn muḥammad al-kalbī (leiden: brill, 1966), 60–61. 43. julius wellhausen, “carmina hudsailitarum ed. kosegarten nr. 56 und 75,” zeitschrift für assyriologie und verwandte gebiete 26 (1912): 287–94, at 288. 44. al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 411. 45. ibid., 758. 46. ibid., 971. 47. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 117, 120, 141. 48. al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 423. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 55 [al-kāmil] ِمْنُكْم ِبُسوٍء يـُْؤِذيِن َوَيُسويِن َوأبُو ٱْلِعياِل أِخي َوَمْن يـَْعِرْض َلُه ٩ 9. abū al-ʿiyāl is my brother, so whoever among you does ill to him injures and harms me— كٱحْلِْْصِن ِشيَد آبُجٍر َمْوُضوِن إيِّنِ َوَجْدُت أاب ٱْلِعياِلِ َوَرْهَطُه 1٠ 10. i have found abū al-ʿiyāl and his clan to be like a fortress, built with well-laid baked brick49 فـَتـَرَْكَنُه َوأَبـَرَّ بٱلتَّْحِصنِي أْعيا ٱْلَمجانِيَق ٱلدَّواِهَي ُدونَُه 11 11. before which calamitous mangonels fail, so that they depart, and with its fortifications it prevails—50 abū al-ʿiyāl rejects the overture in the following poem, comparing badr to a losing horse, the expectations for which fail to match reality. he also accuses badr of collaborating with unnamed adversaries.51 badr responds by describing his initial praise poem as a priceless gift that has been requited with an unproductive milch-camel. he reiterates another offer of a poem, which he compares to a fine pair of sandals, but he expects to be repaid with a similar poem.52 abū al-ʿiyāl takes up the camel and sandal imagery to heap scorn on badr’s poems, accusing him of disingenuousness.53 badr rejects this charge and offers reconciliation, blaming abū al-ʿiyāl for their disharmony.54 in this same round of the exchange, badr also reveals a possible cause for the dispute, namely, that he has received some sort of advancement to the detriment of abū al-ʿiyāl: “i would have loved for you, when i faltered and could not obtain lofty honor and its virtue, to have abetted me.”55 abū al-ʿiyāl responds by demanding that badr cease to participate in the exchange rather than continue to feign innocence.56 badr attempts to conclude by depicting abū al-ʿiyāl as unduly affected by powerful rhetoric, before boasting of his own poetic abilities.57 abū al-ʿiyāl takes this assertion of rhetorical prowess as, again, an opportunity to blame badr for an obsession with superficial meaning and thus for hypocrisy, before concluding with the threat mentioned above. 49. var. “rock,” jandal. 50. al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 409. i have also consulted the manuscript on which al-farrāj’s edition of al-sukkarī’s commentary is based, ms leiden, or. 549, fol. 50r. 51. al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 410–12. 52. ibid., 413–14. 53. ibid., 414–16. 54. ibid., 417. 55. ibid., 417: fa-wadadtu annaka idh wanaytu wa-lam anal | sharafa l-ʿalāʾi wa-faḍlahū takfīnī. 56. ibid., 418. 57. ibid., 419–21. 56 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 57 it is difficult to know what to make of this exchange without knowing its context. abū al-faraj himself finds it overly lengthy (yaṭūlu dikhruhā) and unattractive (laysat la-hā ṭulāwa); he reports recording it only because of its usefulness as a specimen of arabic (al-faṣāḥa) and because he could find nothing else attributed to abū al-ʿiyāl.58 it does, however, contain some allusions to biblical imagery and levantine flora that should be noted in discussions of early islamic culture. according to joseph hell, commenting on the conversion of the hudhayl tribe, badr and abū al-ʿiyāl are examples of the first generation of converts, whose poetry makes no reference to the new religion; an islamic sensibility (indicated by the appearance of technical terms such as masjid and ṣalāḥ) appears only in the following generation, which flourished between 29/650 and 81/700.59 however, although hell is correct that neither of the two poets seems very religious, the content of abū al-ʿiyāl’s poems, together with his reference to al-kitāb al-munzal (the revealed scripture, discussed below), perhaps points toward the henotheistic but pre-islamic arabian religious culture that the earliest muslims manifested.60 in accusing badr of hypocrisy, abū al-ʿiyāl compares him to a hungry, sallow-faced man who smears his face with oil to appear healthy. this allusion, an inversion of matthew 6:16–18, would not be so conspicuous if in the next line he did not refer to a proverbially small mustard-seed (mithqāl ḥabbati khardal), which appears in both the quran and the new testament.61 badr, like the scriptures to which he alludes, invokes olive trees along with his vast range of vocabulary derived from the ethos and lifeways of arabian camel nomadism.62 such references to flora, religious doctrine, and mangonels (and the incorporation of the non-arabic word for them, majānīq), provide a small glimpse into the social history of 58. al-iṣfahānī, aghānī, 24:111. 59. joseph hell, “der islam und die huḏailitendichtungen,” in festschrift georg jacob zum siebzigsten geburtstag, ed. theodor menzel, 80–93 (leipzig: o. harrassowitz, 1932), at 88. 60. patricia crone refers to the pre-islamic henotheists as “pagan monotheists” in a nuanced discussion in “the religion of the qur’ānic pagans: god and the lesser deities,” arabica 57, no. 2 (2010): 151–200. by “henotheism,” i do not mean that abū al-ʿiyāl recognized lesser deities, but rather that whatever doctrinal distinctiveness his monotheism had was not yet very carefully defined as specifically islamic. there was, as will be seen, a sense of a bounded and exclusive community defined by a revealed scripture, but he does not express any particular theological content that would have been constitutive of that community. he thus seems to represent a younger version of nicolai sinai’s “quranic pagans”; see nicolai sinai, rain-giver, bone-breaker, score-settler: allāh in pre-quranic poetry (new haven, ct: american oriental society, 2019), esp. 57–63. sinai concludes that there is significant overlap between the quran’s pagan opponents and pre-islamic poets with regard to their respective conceptions of the personality of allāh, albeit with significant exceptions explicable in part by their differing contexts—predominantly sedentary in the former and nomadic in the latter case. another salient index of such background sensibilities (i.e., the reference to quasi-biblical proverbs) is umayya b. abī al-ṣalt, on whom see nicolai sinai, “religious poetry from the quranic milieu: umayya b. abī l-ṣalt on the fate of the thamūd,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 74, no. 3 (2011): 397–416. 61. al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 422, ll. 2–3; see quran 21:47 and 31:16, as well as matthew 13:31–32, 17:20; mark 4:30–32; and luke 13:18–19. 62. al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 421, l. 6. on such agricultural imagery in the quran, see patricia crone, “how did the quranic pagans make a living?,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 68, no. 3 (2005): 387–99. it is not actually immediately clear to me that olive trees could not be grown in the hijaz, but they are never alluded to in hudhayl’s pre-islamic poetry. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 57 the period. even if badr and abū al-ʿiyāl belonged to the convert generation, they fail to express much islamic doctrine in their poetry, but they do demonstrate some conversance with sedentary culture—religious idioms, agriculture, and military affairs. all this illustrates a point that many scholars have now made: that the early adherents of what became islam, nomadic pastoralists though many of them were, were probably already fairly well integrated into late antique mediterranean culture, with all that it entailed. this, in turn, enabled the rapid assimilation of many elements of that culture during the conquest period.63 that badr’s passing reference to mangonels means these poets actually participated in frontier warfare with the byzantines is confirmed by abū al-ʿiyāl’s elegy for his paternal cousin (ibn ʿamm) ʿabd b. zahra. abū al-faraj does not appear to have known of this text, although it is found in ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, and both ibn qutayba and al-jāḥiẓ seem to consider it abū al-ʿiyāl’s best-known work.64 the poem is fifty-three lines long and composed in the uncommon meter of majzūʾ al-wāfir, a truncated form of the much more common wāfir form. this may be interpreted as an accommodation of a traditional early meter to some new circumstance; in other settings, shorter meters were used for music. lines 1–9 describe first ʿabd’s bravery in battle and oratorical ability and then the speaker’s emotional response using imagery of sickness, bereaved camel mares, and leaking waterskins that emblematize tears. abū al-ʿiyāl then returns to praise of ʿabd, who possessed a sound lineage, fed orphans, and participated in the war against constantinople (ll. 11–20). the remainder of the poem focuses on ʿabd’s martial qualities: his lineage is manifest in his steadfast courage in battle (ll. 21–28); he fights well both ahorse (ll. 29–31) and afoot in heavy armor (ll. 32–33); his spear and sword are described (ll. 34–41); and ʿabd is depicted mounted on horseback and rallying his men against the enemy before the final line: “[his loss is] a great affliction to his tribe (qawmihī); they have neither given nor taken any price (thaman) for it,” meaning they have not received a bloodwite nor “given” vengeance (ll. 42–53). the lines translated here contain what little detail the poem offers about its occasion: [wāfir] أَقـاَم لَـَدى َمدينَـِة آِل ُقْسـطَْنِطنَي َوِٱنـَْقَلبوا 1٤ 14. he stood firm at the city of constantine’s people when others retreated— َأال هّلِلِّ َدرَُّك ِمْن فـىَََت قـَْوٍم إذا َرِهُبوا 1٥ 15. ah, by god, what a fighter for the tribe you are, when they took fright, 63. for a summary of such scholars’ views insofar as they relate to poetry, in particular, see sinai’s notes in rain-giver, 61–62. 64. blachère, histoire de la littérature arabe, 2:280. 58 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 59 َوقالوا َمْن َفىًَت لِلثـّْغِر يـَْرقـُبُنا َويـَْرَتِقُب 1٦ 16. asking “who will venture forth at the front line to guard us and be on guard?” فـََلْم يـُْوَجْد ِلُشْرطَِتِهْم َفىًَت ِفيِهْم َوَقْد نُِدبُوا 1٧ 17. they’d been entrusted with the vanguard’s banner but found no one to carry it. َفُكْنَت فَتاُهُم فيها ِإذا ُتْدُعى هََلا تَِثُب 1٨ 18. but you were their man for it! when you were summoned, you leapt to it.65 these lines appear to describe an act of heroism during an attack on constantinople, although the circumlocution “the city of constantine’s people” (madīnat āl qusṭanṭīn) is unusual. likewise, the agent of the verb inqalabū, “they retreated,” is ambiguous and could be either the enemy or the muslims. evidently, at a critical moment in battle, when the muslims’ fortunes were waning, ʿabd played a decisive role, leading the vanguard (shurṭa). within the context of the poem, however, this description amounts to a set piece that showcases the bravery of the deceased, and the primary value of the poem for present purposes lies in connecting a relative of abū al-ʿiyāl to a military expedition against constantinople. it is also noteworthy that the values of militaristic virility extolled in this poem are largely tribal; the two sides in the battle are not represented in religio-ideological terms (with terms such as kuffār, for example). according to their internal evidence, then, abū al-ʿiyāl’s poetic texts are representative of a member of the islamic military in egypt during the conquest period. from the perspective of social history, his muʿāraḍa with badr sheds some light on the (limited) development of a doctrinally distinct monotheistic islamic identity in this period. the muʿāraḍa is also perhaps indicative of social tensions, and, based on the elegy, abū al-ʿiyāl’s tribal-military unit was likely directly involved in efforts against constantinople. abū al-ʿiyāl’s epistle to muʿāwiya, ʿamr, and ibn saʿd however, the richest of abū al-ʿiyāl’s texts for confirming hudhayl’s involvement in the 33–34/654 defeat that pseudo-sebēos describes is his epistle in verse to muʿāwiya, which establishes the date and location of his activities more firmly. this poem contains a description of military disaster that appears to square well with pseudo-sebēos’s 65. al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 426; german translation by rudolf abicht, aśʻâru-l-huḏalijjîna: die lieder der dichter vom stamme hudail (namslau: o. opitz, 1879), 39–41; ms leiden, or. 549 fol. 55r. both the manuscript and the print edition represent the lines without a caesura, as i have. although there is a metrical caesura, it is not very rigidly observed because of the short line (i.e., arabic words are divided by the caesura), and its representation would have produced a text that is visually more difficult to read. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 59 account of the muslims’ anatolian land army’s defeat following the failed naval assault on constantinople. the addressees of the poem help date it. in particular, the reference to ʿabd allāh b. saʿd b. abī sarḥ, the governor of egypt in the period leading up to the civil war and the primary naval commander at the battle of the masts, dates the poem to before 35/656. the epistle poem also expresses resentment toward ibn saʿd over the division of spoils, a grievance abū al-ʿiyāl evidently shared with the egyptian military delegation to medina that was involved in ʿuthmān’s assassination. these circumstantial connections suggest that the poem may have been generated in an attempt to justify hudhayl’s involvement in the assassination following a catastrophe at constantinople. the complete arabic text of the poem, with translation, is given below. meter: al-kāmil rhyme: -lū source: al-sukkarī, sharḥ ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn, 433–35 (= ms leiden, or. 549, fols. 57v–58r); al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, 24:107–8 (with different line ordering)66 [al-sukkarī’s gloss:] abū al-ʿiyāl—he and some of his companions having been imprisoned in the land of the romans in the time of muʿāwiya—wrote an epistle (kitāb) to muʿāwiya and read it out loud to the people. he said: قـَْويِل َوال تـََتَجْمَجموا ما أُْرِسُل ِمن َأيب ٱْلِعياِل َأيب ُهَذْيٍل فٱمْْسَُعوا ١ 1. from abū al-ʿiyāl of hudhayl: listen [o messenger] to me speak and don’t misspeak [the message] i send.67 يـَْهِوي ِإلَْيِه هِِبا ٱْلرََبِيُد األْعَجُل أَبِلْغ ُمعاِويََة ْبَن ْصْخٍر آيًَة ٢ 2. bring muʿāwiya b. ṣakhr a sign that the swiftest courier will fly to him with, ِميّّن يـَُلوُح هِِبا ِكتاٌب ُمْنَمُل َوٱْلَمْرَء َعْمراً فَْأتِِه ِبَصِحيَفٍة ٣ 3. and the lord ʿamr, bring him a page from me, on which a finely penned script is visible, أَْزَرى بِنا يف َقْسِمِه ِإْذ يـَْعِدُل َوِإىل ِٱْبِن َسْعٍد ِإْن أَُؤخِّْرُه فـََقْد ٤ 4. and to ibn saʿd—if i put him last it is because his dividing wronged us when he 66. the references to wellhausen’s german translation in the notes that follow refer to wellhausen, “carmina hudsailitarum,” 287–88. 67. according to abū al-faraj, lā tatajamjamū means “don’t suppress” (lā taktumū). 60 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 61 ِإْكراَمُه َوَلَقْد أََرى ما يـَْفَعُل يف ٱلَقْسِم يـَْوَم ٱلَقْسِم مُُثَّ تـَرَْكُتُه ٥ 5. divided unevenly on distribution day, but i let him go on and deferred to his dignity,68 though i saw what he did— َحْيُث ٱْلَبِقيَُّة َوٱْلِكتاُب ٱْلُمنـَْزُل َوِإىل أُْويِل اأَلْحالِم َحْيُث َلِقيتـَُهْم ٦ 6. and to whatever reasonable men you come to, the upright [among whom] the scripture was revealed:69 ِمن جاِنِب ٱأْلَْمراِج يـَْوماً ُيسَأُل َأاّن َلِقينا بـَْعدَُكْم ِبِدايران ٧ 7. after you [departed], we fought in our camp near the fields on a day that will be asked about,70 ُمَهُج ٱلنُّفوِس َولَْيَس َعْنُه َمْعِدُل أَْمراً َتِضيُق ِبِه ٱلصُُّدوُر َودونَُه ٨ 8. an inescapable, chest-oppressing affair in which souls’ blood [was shed]— يـَْهِوي َكَعْزالِء ٱْلَمزاَدِة تـُْزِغُل يف ُكلِّ ُمْعرََتٍِك تـََرى ِمّنا فـىًََت ٩ 9. throughout the battle you see strong young fighters of ours falling and spurting like a waterskin’s spout أَْو جاحِِناً يف َصْدِر ُرْمٍح َيْسُعُل أَْو َسيِّداً َكْهاًل مََيُوُر ِدماُغُه 1٠ 10. and older sayyids spilling their brains while others are bent double, coughing [up blood] onto spear-shafts. َومُُجاَدايِن َوجاَء َشْهٌر ُمْقِبُل َحىَّت ِإذا َرَجٌب خََتَلَّى َوٱنـَْقَضى 11 11. and now rajab has come and gone, and the two jumādās, and the month of shaʿbān ِتْسعاً نَعدُّ هََلا ٱْلَوفاُء فـََتْكُمُل َشْعباُن َقدَّْران ِلَوْقِت َرحيِلِهْم 1٢ 12. has come, and we thought for nine full [nights] that we counted that their army had left. 68. taraktuhū ikrāmahū. wellhausen: “ehre ich ihn nicht mehr.” al-sukkarī: yaqūl: akramtuhū fa-lam ashkuhū wa-lam ahjuh. 69. wellhausen: “die guten alten und korankenner.” he thus reads the line as referring to two authoritative groups, usually referred to as al-ashrāf and al-qurrāʾ in other sources. although this reading is eminently plausible, on the evidence of the text alone the speaker seems to be referring metonymically to muslims as an exclusive group. 70. wellhausen reads diyār as “lager.” it is possible that al-amrāj is a toponym, but it is not found in the usual references and wellhausen has no suggestion. i am tempted to read it as amwāj (the waves) in order to provide a coastal location. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 61 َعَلقاً َومََيريها ٱْلَغِويُّ ٱْلُمْبِطُل َوجََتَرََّدْت َحْرٌب َيكوُن ِحالهُِبا 1٣ 13. [but suddenly] a battle broke out that milked blood, at the hands of a false and deceitful [enemy]—71 َطْوراً َوَطْوراً رِْحَلٌة فـُتـَنـَقَُّلوا فَٱْستـَْقَبلوا َطَرَف ٱلصَِّعيِد ِإقاَمًة 1٤ 14. [then] they headed [back] to the edge of the open area, halting at times and at times moving on, until they departed. مُُشْساً َكَأنَّ ِنصاهََلُنَّ ٱلسُّنـُْبُل فـرَََتى ٱلنِّباَل َتِعرُي يف أَْقطاران 1٥ 15. the arrows were whizzing around us, their heads like wheat spikes, leaping, َأْشطاُن بِْئٍر يُوِغُلوَن َونُوِغُل ا ِهَي بـَيـَْننا َوَترى ٱْلرِّماَح َكَأمَّنَّ 1٦ 16. and the spears were like [taut] well-ropes as they stabbed at us and we stabbed back. unlike in his elegy for ʿabd, here abū al-ʿiyāl appears to be speaking quite biographically and historically—the poem is what alfred bloch called a botschaftsgedicht, a reusable structure employing message formulae such as abligh . . . āyatan.72 the names employed and the sequence of months given encourage a reading of the message structure either as authentic in a documentary sense or, more probably, as an authentic record of a genuine hudhalī tribal objection preserved in the wake of a real historical event. there is no indication within the text that the speaker is imprisoned, as al-sukkarī’s note indicates, although it remains plausible. most significantly, though, the abject and violent defeat at the hands of the christians that is described in the poem is unembellished, a very infrequent occurrence in comparison with stereotyped poetic boasts about similar events, lending significant credibility to the piece.73 also, as in the elegy for ʿabd, the enemy is not described in religious terms. the reference to the postal routes (al-barīd al-aʿjal) is potentially historically significant, although not positively valuable in terms of dating. the term barīd has often been said to have its roots in the latin veredus or greek beredos, meaning “post horse,” and the system is thought to have been inherited from the byzantines.74 the truth is more diffuse. by the 71. wa-yamrīhā l-ghawiyyu l-mubṭilū. wellhausen: “und melker des kampfes waren verzweifelt heldenhafte männer.” typically, neither ghawī nor mubṭil have positive connotations, so i take this as referring rather to the enemy, who seem to have surprised the muslims. 72. alfred bloch, “qaṣīda,” asiatische studien 2 (1948): 106–32. for a summary and comments on the possible role of this genre in the development and social role of early arabic poetry, see ewald wagner, grundzüge der klassischen arabischen dichtung: die altarabische dichtung, vol. 1 (darmstadt: wissenschaftliche buchgesellschaft, 1987), 68, 122. 73. wellhausen, too, notes the stylistic discrepancy between this piece and the triumphalist one for ʿabd (wellhausen, “carmina hudsailitarum,” 288). 74. d. sourdel, “barīd,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 62 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 63 byzantine period, the imperial roman system had largely given way to the militarized, horse-based system, the cursus velox (the “swift route,” so called because it was faster than the cursus publicus), which was not so dependent on wheeled vehicles and a wellmaintained road system.75 both this system and persian ones were well known in arabia by the time of islam’s emergence. as adam silverstein has demonstrated, the word barīd meaning post routes is attested in sixth-century ce sabaic inscriptions as well as pre-islamic poetry.76 thus, despite the fact that the later islamic historiographical tradition assigns the barīd’s creation to the caliph muʿāwiya, it evidently predates him.77 the earliest papyrus evidence, from 49/669, does show muʿāwiya reforming the postal system, and this reform may have begun in egypt as early as 38/658 during his rule there.78 more interestingly still, the term used here, al-barīd al-aʿjal, resembles nothing so much as a calque of the latin cursus velox—used in the context of military conflict with the roman army.79 if these are all coincidences, they are striking ones. wellhausen takes “min abī al-ʿiyāl” to refer to one of the expeditions to southeast asia minor that began after the first civil war, under now-caliph muʿāwiya, in 42 or 43/662 or 663, citing theophanes and al-ṭabarī.80 he understands the poem’s addressees as muʿāwiya b. abī sufyān, whose father ṣakhr (abū sufyān) is named directly in the text; the famous conquest-era military leader ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ; and ʿabd allāh b. saʿd b. abī sarḥ, the governor of egypt under ʿuthmān (r. 23–35/644–56).81 these identifications are compelling, but wellhausen takes ʿamr’s death in 43/664 as the poem’s terminus ante quem. the poem cannot, however, have been composed during the early part of muʿāwiya’s caliphate in the early 40s/660s, because ibn saʿd b. abī sarḥ’s death in the late 30s/650s, probably in 36/656–57, provides an earlier terminus ante quem. this will be discussed further below, but the episode must refer to muʿāwiya’s campaigns against the byzantines while he and ibn saʿd were governors of syria and egypt, respectively, under ʿuthmān in the early to mid-30s/650s. according to the military narrative recounted in the poem, the speaker and his fellow soldiers were part of a muslim contingent left behind in byzantine territory after the withdrawal of a larger force; this perhaps took place at the end of a summer campaign. if the dates are correct, and if we assume a hijrī date of 34 (654–55 ce), the months named in the poem (rajab, jumādā i and ii, and shaʿbān) correspond to the period from mid-november 75. adam j. silverstein, postal systems in the pre-modern islamic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007), 31, 35. 76. on the term’s pre-islamic attestations, especially the marib dam inscription, see adam j. silverstein, “a new source on the early history of the barīd,” al-abhath 50–51 (2002–3): 121–34. on the poetry, see idem, “a neglected chapter in the history of caliphal state-building,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 30 (2005): 293–317. 77. so says al-ʿumarī (d. 1349), quoted in silverstein, postal systems, 53–54. 78. jelle bruning, “developments in egypt’s early islamic postal system (with an edition of p.khalili ii 5),” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 81, no. 1 (2018): 25–40, at 29. 79. ibid., 56, n. 11. 80. wellhausen, “carmina hudsailitarum,” 289. 81. ibid. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 63 654 to mid-march 655. the speaker and his contingent were left surrounded by the enemy and were thus unable to withdraw. they suffered serious losses at this time. at a certain point, they thought that the enemy had withdrawn, only to suffer further losses in a surprise attack.82 pseudo-sebēos describes the roman defeat of the muslim land forces sent along with the naval expedition against constantinople in 34/654 thus: “the other army, which was quartered in cappadocia, attacked the greek army. but the greeks defeated [that muslim force], and it fled to aruastan pillaging fourth armenia. after the autumn had passed and winter was approaching, the army of ismael came and took up quarters in divin.”83 pseudo-sebēos’s information is particularly compelling, because it involves interaction with armenia, about which he was better informed than he was about constantinopolitan affairs. here, too, we have a roman defeat of an army led by muʿāwiya and some sort of botched retreat taking place during the autumn and early winter. all this maps very closely onto abū al-ʿiyāl’s poem. abū al-ʿiyāl appears, like pseudo-sebēos, to be describing a group isolated and pinned down by the romans somewhere in anatolia. of the poem’s three addressees, the identity of muʿāwiya is fairly self-evident, but it is worth observing that no caliphal title is used for him. as this is a poetic text, it is possible that it is elided for metrical reasons, but given the expanded insult against ibn saʿd b. abī sarḥ and the space devoted to the description of the barīd, the composer of the text should have had no difficulty including a title, if he had been so disposed. on the face of it, then, this reference to muʿāwiya would indicate that the poem was composed before he began to use the caliphal title amīr al-muʾminīn around 40–41/660–61 and thus before 35/656, when ʿuthmān was assassinated and raids against byzantium paused.84 that “ʿamr” refers to ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ is perhaps the least obvious.85 he is addressed as al-marʾ, which, if taken to mean “the man,” the typical dictionary definition of the word, appears dismissive. however, the root m-r-ʾ is also a metathesis of ʾ-m-r, and cognates in hatran aramaic, syriac, and sabaic all attest to meanings similar to amīr, namely, “lord, suzerain, social superior,” a meaning that seems to be attested with some frequency in early arabic as well.86 there is thus no need to transfer the clearly hostile sentiment expressed 82. ibid. 83. pseudo-sebēos, history, 146; the bracketed addition is mine. 84. andrew marsham surveys sources that give a range of dates from 37 to 41/658 to 661 and plausibly suggests that muʿāwiya was recognized as caliph locally in syria in 658 before his widely recognized accession in 661; andrew marsham, “the architecture of allegiance in early islamic late antiquity: the accession of muʿāwiya in jerusalem, ca. 661 ce,” in court ceremonies and rituals of power in byzantium and the medieval mediterranean: comparative perspectives, ed. alexander beihammer, stavroula constantinou, and maria g. parani, 87–112 (leiden: brill, 2013), esp. 90–97. khaled keshk believes muʿāwiya began asserting his claim to the caliphate from 36/656: khaled keshk, “when did muʿāwiya become caliph?,” journal of near eastern studies 69, no. 1 (2010): 31–42. 85. al-sukkarī notes in his commentary, “i believe (aẓunnu) this is ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ”: al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 433. 86. see, for example, a. f. l. beeston et al., sabaic dictionary/dictionaire sabéen (louvain-la-neuve: peeters; beirut: librairie du liban, 1982), s.v. mrʾ; greg fisher, ed., arabs and empires before islam (oxford: oxford university press, 2015), 34, 42, 55. 64 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 65 toward ibn saʿd onto ʿamr. ʿamr had no known public role from 28/648–49 (at the latest), when he was removed from the governorship of egypt by ʿuthmān, until he joined muʿāwiya early on in the civil war and famously participated in the battle of ṣiffīn in 37/657.87 he probably spent most of the intervening years (between 648 and 657) in palestine, where he had an estate called ʿajlān near ascalon.88 in 38/658, he was reappointed to the governorship of egypt by muʿāwiya during the civil war, and he remained in this post until his death in 43/664.89 although he is not known to have held a leadership role at the time of the events to which abū al-ʿiyāl’s poem refers, this does not mean he had none.90 after all, the muslim sources do not record a 33–34/654 assault on constantinople either. in the poem, ʿamr is identified only by his first name, which is also how he is referred to by the seventh-century chronicler john of nikiu (d. ca. 693) and by conquest-era papyri.91 given the association of abū al-ʿiyāl with egypt, as established above, the identification of ʿamr as ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ is highly plausible. ibn saʿd b. abī sarḥ’s identity is the most crucial for our purposes, since his death around 36/656–57 provides the earliest possible terminus ante quem for the poem.92 ibn saʿd and ʿamr were both qurashī contemporaries of the prophet and had a close relationship with each other at least from the time of the conquest of egypt (which took place primarily between 18/639 and 21/642), if not earlier. ibn saʿd was in charge of the right wing (al-maymana) of ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ’s army; when fusṭāṭ was apportioned out to the first conquerors (ahl al-rāya), ibn saʿd had a palace among them; and the families of ʿamr and ibn saʿd pastured their flocks together.93 following the conquests, ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb appointed ibn saʿd over the ṣaʿīd, by which is meant fayoum specifically, not the modern sense of “upper egypt”; this region included cities such as aswān that were still under nubian control at the time.94 ʿumar was assassinated in 23/644, and the subsequent 87. for the dates of his removal from office, see michael lecker, “the estates of ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ in palestine: notes on a new negev arabic inscription,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 52, no. 1 (1989): 24–37, at 29. 88. jeffrey a. blakely, “ajlan: locating the estate of amr b. al-as,” near eastern archaeology 73, no. 4 (2010): 210–22; lecker, “estates of ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ.” 89. lecker, “estates of ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ,” 29. for ʿamr and muʿāwiya’s agreement to cooperate at the beginning of the civil war, see andrew marsham, “the pact (amāna) between muʿāwiya ibn abī sufyān and ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ (656 or 658): ‘documents’ and the islamic historical tradition,” journal of semitic studies 58, no. 1 (2012): 69–96. 90. according to a report in al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh that appears highly anecdotal (1:2932), ʿamr was involved in a session of governors and other leaders, also including muʿāwiya and ibn saʿd, that ʿuthmān convened in medina to discuss rebel demands in the year 34 ah. 91. trombley, “fiscal documents,” 6; petra m. sijpesteijn, “amr,” in the encyclopedia of ancient history, ed. roger s. bagnall et al., 383–84 (hoboken, nj: john wiley, 2012); l. s. b. maccoull, “bm 1079, cpr ix 44, and the chrysargyron,” zeitschrift für papyrologie und epigraphik 100 (1994): 139–43. 92. the commentary is obscure on his identity, stating only that he was a meccan and a qurashī: al-sukkarī, ashʿār, 434. 93. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 58, 93, 110–11, 141. if i read him correctly, he also states that ibn saʿd was part of ʿamr’s shurṭa at one point (233). 94. ʿ umar appointed him over “ṣaʿīd fayyūm”: ibid., 173–74. al-kindī simply mentions the “ṣaʿīd” and places ibn saʿd’s death “at end of the reign of ʿumar,” thus around 23/644: abū ʿumar muḥammad b. yūsuf al-kindī, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 65 sequence of events in egypt is confused. ʿuthmān may have appointed ibn saʿd over all of egypt at this point before recalling ʿamr briefly to deal with the byzantine-supported revolt in alexandria in 24–25/645–46.95 at any rate, early in ʿuthmān’s reign, some time between 25/646 and 28/649, ibn saʿd was given full control over egypt. the historical memory of ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ and ibn saʿd b. abī sarḥ in egypt affected reports about their relationship. in secondary literature it is often portrayed as negative, but there is in fact little evidence for this. one anecdote, in particular, has been cited frequently as evidence of their mutual disdain.96 following ʿamr’s restoration of alexandria to muslim control, ʿuthmān proposed that ʿamr retain authority over military affairs while ibn saʿd is put in charge of taxation. ʿamr complained that this would be like holding onto the horns of a cow while another milked it.97 ibn saʿd was then given the governorship over all egypt. in the context of this transition, ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, writing in the third/ninth century (or perhaps his source layth b. saʿd, writing in the 120s/740s), refers to an account preserved in his day by the descendants (āl) of ibn saʿd. according to the story, ibn saʿd, addressing ʿabd allāh b. ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ, magnanimously (or sarcastically?) offered to divide egypt between ʿamr and ʿamr’s son, appointing ʿamr over the delta and ʿabd allāh over upper egypt, without, he pointedly adds, “envying” them as they had him.98 the role of ʿamr’s son in the anecdote and that of ibn saʿd’s descendants in transmitting it point to later contentions between the two families. these contentions left their mark in the historiographical record as tendentious tropes about dividing up egypt similar to the cow anecdote. the assumption that the cow anecdote conveys any real information about the relationship between ʿamr and ibn saʿd should thus probably be discarded.99 ibn saʿd’s tenure as governor was marked by numerous military accomplishments. around 27/647–48 (with perhaps a second campaign in 33/653–54) he continued the push west to ifrīqiyā initiated by ʿamr, killing the patrician gregory, the (rebel) leader of the governors and judges of egypt or kitâb el-’umarâ’ (el-wulâh) wa kitâb el-qudâh of el-kindî, ed. rhuvon guest (leiden: brill; london: luzac, 1912), 10. 95. this is the impression one gets from both al-balādhurī and al-kindī: aḥmad b. yaḥyā b. jābir al-balādhurī, kitāb futūḥ al-buldān = liber expugnationis regionum auctore imámo ahmed ibn jahja ibn djábir al-beládsorí, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1866), 223; al-kindī, kitāb al-wulāh wa-l-quḍāh, 10. 96. see, for example, alfred j. butler, the arab conquest of egypt and the last thirty years of the roman dominion (oxford: clarendon press, 1902), 489; martin hinds, “the murder of the caliph ʿ uthmân,” international journal of middle east studies 3, no. 4 (1972): 453, n. 6; sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state, 61; keaney, ʿuthman ibn ʿaffan, 68. 97. one version of the quotation is found in ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 178; al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, 223. 98. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 174. on layth b. saʿd, see edward zychowicz-coghill, the first arabic annals: fragments of umayyad history (berlin: de gruyter, 2021). 99. al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh (1:2818–19) also contains a description of their mutual disdain, but with a different funny anecdote. in it, an enraged ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ, having been removed from office, goes to see ʿuthmān, wearing a cotton-stuffed cloak (jubba). ʿ uthmān asks, “what is your cloak stuffed with?” ʿ amr answers, “ʿamr.” ʿ uthmān replies, “i knew it was stuffed with ʿamr; i didn’t mean that. i was asking whether it was stuffed with cotton or something else?” 66 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 67 byzantine africa;100 in 31/651–52 he pushed into nubia as far as dongola (in present-day northern sudan), agreed to a truce, and inaugurated what would prove a long-lasting diplomatic status quo;101 and he participated in muʿāwiya’s naval expeditions in the mediterranean against cyprus in 28/649 and later as the naval commander at the battle of the masts in 34/654–55.102 two aspects of all this activity are relevant. first, it shows that ibn saʿd was heavily involved in the naval activity coordinated by muʿāwiya in the early 30s/650s while the latter was governor of syria, beginning with arwād, continuing through cyprus and rhodes, and culminating, as i am arguing here, in a planned siege of constantinople. as abū al-ʿiyāl was based in egypt but addressed the governors of both syria and egypt in his poem, the eastern mediterranean naval campaign of 28–34/649–55 is the most plausible context for the battle he describes. egypt supported the expedition with its tax revenues, maritime expertise, and shipbuilding facilities. pseudo-sebēos reports that the muslims “prepared warships in alexandria and all the coastal cities” for the 33–34/654 attack on constantinople, and papyri amply document egypt playing an identical naval staging role later, in the 40s/660s.103 second, during the ifrīqiyā campaign or campaigns, the spoils were apparently divided according to some centrally imposed policy, provoking the ire of the egyptian military in an anticipation of the eventual murder of ʿuthmān. two historiographical tendencies are discernible in descriptions of ibn saʿd’s fiscal measures. in the chronicle tradition, al-ṭabarī gives voice to an oppositional or critical tendency while ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam represents a more favorable one. martin hinds has analyzed the critical tendency as the expression of the “early-comers” or longtimers in the muslim military, under the initial leadership of ʿamr, whose status and privileges deteriorated in the face of the influx of new muslim military contingents and increasing central control over taxation and salaries.104 alfred butler observed long ago that the negative attitudes recorded toward ibn saʿd derived from his enforcement of ʿuthmān’s more rigorous taxation policies, a point noted by severus b. al-muqaffaʿ, a later coptic christian source, as well.105 at issue in the disagreement over the ifrīqiyā spoils was a directive from ʿuthmān that, 100. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:2813–19; al-kindī, kitāb al-wulāh wa-l-quḍāh, 12; ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 183–85; al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, 226–28. it is noteworthy that al-balādhurī connects (probably apocryphally) the famous hudhalī poet abū dhuʾayb to ibn saʿd’s campaign against roman africa. for some reason al-balādhurī includes a fabulous number of prominent tābiʿūn in his account, including but not limited to maʿbad b. ʿabbās b. ʿabd al-muṭallib, marwān b. al-ḥakam, ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr, ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb, and ʿabd allāh b. ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ. 101. al-kindī, kitāb al-wulāh wa-l-quḍāh, 12; al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, 237; ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 188–89. 102. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:2826; al-kindī, kitāb al-wulāh wa-l-quḍāh, 13; ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 189–91. 103. pseudo-sebēos, history, 144; clive foss, “egypt under muʿāwiya part i: flavius papas and upper egypt,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 72, no. 1 (2009): 1–24; foss, “egypt under muʿāwiya part ii.” 104. hinds, “murder of the caliph ʿuthmân.” 105. butler, arab conquests of egypt, 459, 466–67, esp. 489, n. 1; b. evetts, ed. and trans., history of the patriarchs of the coptic church of alexandria ii: peter i to benjamin (661), (paris: firmin-didot, 1904), 501. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 67 according to al-ṭabarī, allowed ibn saʿd to personally retain a fifth of the caliph’s fifth. his men rejected this arrangement, and ibn saʿd eventually reversed his stance.106 however, this question of the division of spoils is one of several points that were remembered in two opposing ways in the historiographical record. whereas al-ṭabarī records the critical version, ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam merely lists those who benefited from ibn saʿd’s generosity on the ifrīqiyā campaign.107 the same is true of descriptions of another grievance—that ibn saʿd forced converted muslims (al-mawālī) to pay the jizya: this was evidently held against him as an offence to piety by al-ṭabarī’s sources, whereas ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam reports that ibn saʿd himself had his own mawālī pay (only) the kharāj.108 in point of fact, the term kharāj is absent from documentary sources from the umayyad period, so ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam’s anachronism here is of value primarily as a positive representation of ibn saʿd’s memory.109 in general, the iraqi historiographical tradition, represented by al-ṭabarī, views ibn saʿd as a participant in ʿuthmān’s “nepotism”; according to al-ṭabarī, ʿuthmān’s murderers listed ibn saʿd as one of the members of ʿuthmān’s entourage (biṭāna) who benefited from the latter’s “favoritism” (al-takhayyur).110 abū al-ʿiyāl shares the critical view of ibn saʿd, and we thus see him (ll. 4–5) deliberately place ibn saʿd last in his list of addressees and accuse him of injustice in dividing spoils (al-qasm). although the poem need not necessarily reference the ifrīqiyā campaign, in particular, abū al-ʿiyāl is clearly tapping into the same vein of moral indignation about centralized fiscal rigor described by butler and hinds and embodied in the complaints recorded by al-ṭabarī and severus. abū al-ʿiyāl, as a hudhalī, seems to fit squarely into the demographic of the egyptian military whose hostility to ibn saʿd and ʿuthmān culminated in the latter’s assassination. according to abū al-faraj, abū al-ʿiyāl emigrated to egypt under ʿumar. even if hudhayl were not members of ʿamr’s initial force drawn from different tribes, the “ahl al-rāya,” the tribe had areas (khiṭaṭ) apportioned to it in fusṭāṭ near the rāya.111 the hudhalīs were thus part of hinds’ “old guard” of “egyptian early-comers.”112 these early-comers suffered under ibn saʿd, as ever more contingents were allocated space in fusṭāṭ and new conquests leading to settlement expansion failed to materialize.113 the death of ibn saʿd is interesting for two reasons: its date limits the window of abū al-ʿiyāl’s mediterranean misadventures to the period directly preceding the civil war, and its location (ascalon) seems to imply a closer connection with ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ than is 106. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:2814. 107. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 184–85. 108. ibid., 146. on this complaint against ibn saʿd, see hinds, “murder of the caliph ʿuthmân,” 457. 109. marie legendre, “caliphal estates and state policy over landholding: theory and practice between literary and documentary evidence from early islamic egypt,” in authority and control in the countryside: from antiquity to islam in the mediterranean and near east (6th–10th century), ed. alain delattre, petra m. sijpesteijn, and marie legendre, 392–419 (leiden: brill, 2019), at 405, 409. 110. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:2981. 111. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 118. 112. hinds, “murder of the caliph ʿuthmân,” 452, 456. 113. ibid., 460. 68 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 69 depicted in the chronicles, particularly al-ṭabarī’s. the accounts of ibn saʿd’s activities as he attempted to alternately intervene with the angry egyptians and warn his foster brother ʿuthmān of the danger he was in, shuttling between medina and egypt, are in some cases quite anecdotal.114 but the upshot is that on one of these trips, muḥammad b. abī ḥudhayfa, who had seized power in egypt in his absence, prevented ibn saʿd from returning there. on hearing that ʿuthmān had been killed, ibn saʿd then headed to ascalon, according to both the egyptian historian abū ʿumar al-kindī (d. 350/961) and ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam.115 fascinatingly, ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ’s primary estates, as noted above, were at ʿajlān, which is probably around present-day khirbet ajlan near tell el-hesi, 20 km southeast of ascalon.116 there were presumably some other sights to see in ascalon, but the fact that abū al-ʿiyāl names ʿamr and ibn saʿd in one breath and that shortly thereafter we find ibn saʿd seeking refuge from a world-shattering crisis within an easy day’s ride of ʿajlān probably indicates that ibn saʿd had maintained close contact with ʿamr.117 ʿamr was thus most likely playing some political role after his dismissal from the governorship of egypt in 28/648–49; the enmity between him and ibn saʿd is an historiographical chimera; and it makes perfect sense that they would be named together by abū al-ʿiyāl. it is ultimately only in the date of ibn saʿd’s death where wellhausen’s analysis of abū al-ʿiyāl’s poem must be decisively revised. he believed al-ṭabarī’s claim that ibn saʿd had been at ṣiffīn in 37/657 and lived beyond it.118 more recent scholars, particularly c. h. becker and gerald hawting, have rejected this theory.119 indeed, every other primary source has ibn saʿd dying in ascalon shortly after the assassination of ʿuthmān. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam gives the year 36/656–57, noting that he died before “the people collectively agreed upon muʿāwiya” (ijtimāʿ al-nās ʿalā muʿāwiya), meaning 40/660 or 41/661, when sufyānid victory in the war cemented the family’s hold on the caliphate.120 al-kindī gives the same place 114. according to al-kindī (kitāb al-wulāh wa-l-quḍāh, 14), in rajab 35 (january 656) he went personally to medina to deal with the discontent with ʿuthmān, but on the way back to egypt he was refused entry (16). he then went to ascalon and died there shortly after ʿuthmān’s assassination on 12 dhū al-ḥijja 35 (1 june 656). as noted above (n. 90), al-ṭabarī depicts him conferring with ʿuthmān alongside other governors and leaders over how to deal with the rebels. this meeting takes place in medina. al-ṭabarī (taʾrīkh, 1:2999) also has him attempt and fail to enter egypt before heading to palestine. 115. al-kindī, kitāb al-wulāh wa-l-quḍāh, 17; ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 263. 116. this is according to blakely, “ajlan.” lecker, in “estates of ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ,” proposes al-sabʿ in bayt jibrīn/beit guvrin, 31 km east-southeast of ascalon. 117. according to al-ṭabarī (taʾrīkh, 1:3235), he fled to muʿāwiya in damascus after hearing about ʿ uthmān’s death. 118. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:3269. 119. c. h. becker, “ʿabd allāh b. saʿd,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.: “shortly before the latter’s march to ṣiffīn, he died in askalon or ramla (in 36 or 37/656–8). his supposed participation in the battle of ṣiffīn and his late death in the year 57/676–7 belong to the numberless myths connected with the battle of ṣiffīn.” hawting cites this comment in his translation of al-ṭabarī and states that “it is generally accepted that [ibn saʿd] died before ṣiffīn and was not present there”: abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, the first civil war: from the battle of ṣiffīn to the death of ʿalī, trans. g. r. hawting, vol. 17 of the history of al-ṭabarī: an annotated translation (albany: state university of new york press, 1996), 15, n. 64. 120. ibn ʿabd al-ḥakam, futūḥ miṣr, 263. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 69 and date for ibn saʿd’s death.121 al-balādhurī, in ansāb al-ashrāf, states that he died shortly after ʿuthmān’s murder, and certainly before the caliphate of ʿalī had come to an end.122 moreover, beyond a couple of references in al-ṭabarī, ibn saʿd plays no role in egyptian or syrian politics after 37/656, corroborating the earlier date of death.123 to recapitulate, abū al-ʿiyāl evidently lived in egypt during the reigns of ʿamr and ibn saʿd, while muʿāwiya was governor of syria. this in itself strongly supports wellhausen’s identification of these individuals in abū al-ʿiyāl’s poem. two additional factors increase the certainty that the ibn saʿd in the poem is ʿabd allāh b. saʿd b. abī sarḥ. both abū al-ʿiyāl and the historiographical tradition link ibn saʿd to controversy over the division of spoils and a strict fiscal policy. and ibn saʿd (like abū al-ʿiyāl himself, as we know from his elegy for his cousin ʿabd) was heavily involved in muʿāwiya’s mediterranean naval campaigns. by using ʿabd allāh b. saʿd b. abī sarḥ’s latest death date of 37/658 and the chronology of muslim military activity under muʿāwiya as governor of syria, the poem can be dated to the period between 28/649 and 35/656. the only question that remains is in which battle did abū al-ʿiyāl and his comrades suffer so horrifically. conclusion abū al-ʿiyāl’s epistle, then, is a complaint directed at muʿāwiya as well as ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ and ʿabd allāh b. saʿd b. abī sarḥ, whose death date of ca. 37/658 provides the initial terminus ante quem for the poem; this can be further moved two years earlier to 35/656, when muslim military activity against byzantium paused with the onset of the first civil war. abū al-ʿiyāl’s exchange with badr shows that his unit was based in egypt. since abū al-ʿiyāl also elegizes a cousin who died in the campaign against the byzantines, the epistle to muʿāwiya probably, though not certainly, refers to the same engagement. it cannot be said with certainty that abū al-ʿiyāl is referring in both cases to the land army muʿāwiya personally led that withdrew from chalcedon following the naval defeat outside constantinople as reported by pseudo-sebēos, but it would make a great deal of sense. a few caveats are in order. i have dated abū al-ʿiyāl’s epistle to between 649 and 656 in conjunction with the argument that ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ was still politically active after his dismissal from the governorship of egypt around 28/648–49. i have used 28/649, the apparent date of the attack on cyprus, which involved both ibn saʿd and muʿāwiya, as a starting point. however, it is conceivable that the poem was in fact written significantly earlier, before 28 ah, when ʿamr was still governor. there is, moreover, nothing to prevent its being dated as early as the invasion of egypt itself, in which case muʿāwiya’s assumption 121. al-kindī, kitāb al-wulāh wa-l-quḍāh, 16. 122. aḥmad b. yaḥyā b. jābir al-balādhurī, kitāb jumal min ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. suhayl zakkār and riyāḍ ziriklī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1996), 3:161. 123. discussions of egypt and syria in the immediate aftermath of ʿuthmān’s assassination include charles pellat, “muḥammad ibn abī ḥudhayfa,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed.; giorgio levi della vida et al., “il califfato di ʿalī secondo il kitāb al-ašrāf di al-balādhurī,” rivista degli studi orientali 6, no. 2 (1913): 471–77; rudolf veselý, “die ansar im ersten bürgerkriege (36–40 d. h.),” archiv orientální 26 (1958): 36–58; marsham, “pact between muʿāwiya and ʿamr.” 70 • nathaniel a. miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 71 of the governorship of syria in 18/639 might be a relevant terminus post quem. however, none of these possibilities explains why these three individuals, in particular, are named in the epistle. if, for example, the epistle was composed in direct response to ibn saʿd’s spoils distribution controversy in ifrīqiyā it is difficult to see why it would also address ʿamr and muʿāwiya. as for a possible later date, although modification in transmission is certainly likely, i cannot see what would have motivated the composition of an epistle poem to these three figures after the civil war. and since ibn saʿd died at the start of the civil war, it cannot be from the civil war period, either. indeed, the context that best explains the motivation behind abū al-ʿiyāl’s epistle is a failed siege of constantinople followed by the murder of ʿuthmān, in which some egyptian forces took part. such an act clearly required a strong motivation, and heather keaney has recently speculated on the connection between military defeats and ʿuthmān’s eventual assassination.124 the vitriol of the egypt-based abū al-ʿiyāl’s poem dovetails with such a narrative. according to al-ṭabarī, at the battle of phoenix muḥammad b. abī ḥudhayfa, who was soon to usurp ibn saʿd as governor, was already denouncing ibn saʿd as a reprobate who had been condemned by the prophet during the latter’s lifetime. ibn saʿd subsequently put ibn abī ḥudhayfa on a ship crewed entirely by non-muslims.125 this could be read as an early manifestation of dissatisfaction with the caliph ʿuthmān, ibn saʿd’s foster brother. or it could be read as an insertion aimed at associating an ultimately unsuccessful campaign with ʿuthmān and ibn saʿd’s impiety. the egyptian military contingent was more involved than other units were in the siege of ʿuthmān’s residence and his eventual murder. as hinds has pointed out, these men were distinguished from other provincial military groups by a few factors. many of the egyptian agitators in medina were “early-comers” whose pay, local influence, and control over land in and near fusṭāṭ were being eroded both by the increasing settlement of new arabian arrivals and by the centralizing reforms being undertaken by ibn saʿd. however, in this, they in many ways resembled the kūfan provincial army. the crucial difference, according to hinds, was that demographic pressures in egypt were not eased by any settlement possibilities opened up by ibn saʿd’s victories in ifrīqiyā, nubia, or the mediterranean, where apparently some of muʿāwiya’s syrians began settling cyprus.126 we know nothing of abū al-ʿiyāl after around 33–34/654, but according to al-balādhurī, his tribe, hudhayl, was involved in ʿuthmān’s assassination.127 if the epistle was not produced in 654 or 655, the next most likely possibility is that it was produced early in the civil war in order to justify hudhayl’s role in ʿuthmān’s murder in 35/656. a few more points ought to be mentioned in favor both of a muslim defeat at constantinople in 33–34/654 and of its connection to ʿuthmān’s death. the later umayyad 124. keaney, ʿuthman ibn ʿaffan, 61–86, esp. 82. 125. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 1:2870–71. as almost all of the crews were non-arabian (see zuckerman, “learning from the enemy,” 108), these must have been non-muslim fighters. 126. hinds, “murder of the caliph ʿuthmân,” 460. 127. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 11:259–60. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) dear muʿāwiya • 71 attempt to take constantinople in 98–100/717–18 under maslama b. ʿabd al-malik was associated with apocalyptic expectations, and its failure was traumatic.128 on a material level, the failed push against constantinople in 654 proposed by o’sullivan and howardjohnston would have terminated egyptian hopes for settlement opportunities after years of intense campaigning under ibn saʿd decisively enough to motivate the rebellion that in fact took place. finally (although this is circumstantial, as we know nothing of ʿamr’s life during this period), if ʿamr was in fact involved in the 654 attempt on constantinople and this military failure precipitated the revolt leading to ʿuthmān’s assassination, this would make sense of ibn saʿd’s journey to ascalon near ʿamr’s estates at ʿajlān in the aftermath of ʿuthmān’s assassination. ibn saʿd could have intended to consolidate his position there in conjunction with the other leaders of the assault, as muʿāwiya and ʿamr in fact went on to do as civil war brewed, but instead, around the thirty-sixth hijrī year, death came for him in or near ascalon. as a historical phenomenon, the success of the islamic conquests was not inevitable. although we might consciously accept this and attempt to incorporate non-arabic sources, the sheer volume of islamic arabic material, which of course tends to view the conquests teleologically as divinely ordained, can have an unconscious effect on us. the many smaller setbacks the muslims experienced, which i highlighted in the introduction, are often elided from islamic chronicles. it is possible that abū al-ʿiyāl’s poetry refers to some such setback that we simply cannot identify with our extant sources, but on the available evidence it very probably refers to muʿāwiya’s land army’s withdrawal from chalcedon following the massive and confidence-sapping defeat at constantinople that pseudo-sebēos describes. bibliography abicht, rudolf. aśʻâru-l-huḏalijjîna: die lieder der dichter vom stamme hudail. namslau: o. opitz, 1879. al-balādhurī, aḥmad b. yaḥyā b. jābir. kitāb futūḥ al-buldān = liber expugnationis regionum auctore imámo ahmed ibn jahja ibn djábir al-beládsorí. edited by m. j. de goeje. leiden: brill, 1866. ———. kitāb jumal min ansāb al-ashrāf. edited by suhayl zakkār and riyāḍ ziriklī. 13 vols. beirut: dār al-fikr, 1996. 128. antoine borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leiden: brill, 2011), 231–59. a perhaps unrelated but intriguing apocalyptic ḥadīth attributed to ʿamr b. al-ʿāṣ’s son ʿabd allāh in nuʿaym b. ḥammād’s (d. 227/841–42) kitāb al-fitan states, “you will invade constantinople three times. in the first you will face affliction and hardship.” quoted in suliman bashear, “apocalyptic and other materials on early muslim-byzantine wars: a review of arabic 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studies, trinity college (zayde.antrim@trincoll.edu) * qamarayn means “two moons” in arabic. it is a dual noun form often used to refer to a beautiful pair. it is also likely to be familiar to many readers as the title of a song by the famous egyptian musician amr diab. thank you to alison vacca and dana sajdi for help with the title. a draft of this paper was presented in a workshop at the columbia university middle east institute. i am grateful to all the participants for their comments and questions and especially to najam haider for inviting me and to sahar ishtiaque ullah for delivering an incisive response. i would also like to acknowledge the generosity of rob corber, matthew keegan, roger kittleson, dana sajdi, rachel schine, and alison vacca, whose feedback on drafts pushed me to sharpen my analysis, and of kathleen kete, who solved a tricky translation problem. finally, thank you to the three anonymous readers for the journal whose detailed reviews helped me improve the article considerably; the weaknesses that remain are entirely my own. © 2020 zayde antrim. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. abstract this two-part article argues that the earliest arabic manuscripts of the 1001 nights celebrate sameness, especially physical sameness, in sexual relationships to the extent that a category of erotic embodiment emerges that cannot be understood through a binary construction of sex. the first part of the article proposes a reading of a fifteenth-century manuscript that takes its descriptions of beautiful bodies on their own terms. eroticized characters recur as both lover and beloved in a series of parallel sexual encounters that situate them in emphatic mutual relation and accumulate weight as the text unfolds. the resulting erotics of sameness decenters the perspective of adult men and displaces or undermines, at least temporarily, the lines of gender otherwise drawn in the stories. by contrast, when difference is stressed via explicitly sexed or racialized bodies, it is used to deem a relationship ridiculous or threatening. the second part of the article presents a diachronic analysis of one story, “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” to show how modern editors, translators, and scholars have read binary sex into the text in order to make sense of its erotics. manuscripts of the nights dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries differ considerably from the earliest arabic print editions in their presentation of the story. this case study reveals what translators and scholars miss when they work from these print editions and/or from modern constructions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment. mailto:zayde.antrim%40trincoll.edu?subject= 2 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) a wealthy businesswoman discovers a young man reciting the qurʾan at the heart of an enchanted city and is struck by passion. she recites poetry to convey the experience of his beauty: … by the soft myrtle of his rosy cheeks, by his carnelian lips and mouth of pearls, which sends the fragrance of the honey breath, and the sweet wine which in its sweetness purls, by his graceful neck and his boughlike frame, which bears two pomegranates on the breast, by his charming, tender, and slender waist, and hips that quiver while they move or rest…1 today’s reader may be disoriented by this episode from a fifteenth-century manuscript of alf layla wa-layla (1001 nights). while the gender roles may be surprising, the young man’s embodied presence, as evoked by the poem, may seem downright unlikely. is this beautiful youth really male? is the poem feminizing his body as a way of eroticizing it? questions like these spring from assumptions about what a male body or masculine desirability looks like, assumptions that should not be projected onto the past. in fact, examples throughout this manuscript cultivate what might be called an erotics of sameness, in which bodies are described in ways that stress their similarities, regardless of gender. this has the effect of producing for the audience a field of sexual possibility that cannot be understood through modern categories of sexuality or norms of embodied gender. this article proceeds in two parts. in the first part, i propose a reading of this fifteenthcentury manuscript that takes its descriptions of beautiful bodies, like the one above, on their own terms. the evidence here, as in the reams of arabic poetry composed in the same period unselfconsciously eroticizing both young men and women, confirms previous claims that sex difference was not what made passionate love either aesthetically successful or socially acceptable.2 rather, in this manuscript eroticized characters recur as both lover and beloved in a series of parallel sexual encounters that situate them in emphatic mutual relation and accumulate weight as the text unfolds. the resulting erotics of sameness decenters the perspective of adult men and displaces or undermines, at least temporarily, the lines of gender otherwise drawn in the stories. by contrast, when difference emerges via explicitly sexed or racialized bodies, it is used to deem a relationship ridiculous or 1. this excerpt is from husain haddawy’s excellent translation of the twelve-verse poem in the arabian nights (new york: w. w. norton, 2008), 166–67. subsequent translations from the arabic are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 2. see khaled el-rouayheb, before homosexuality in the arab-islamic world, 1500–1800 (chicago: university of chicago press, 2005), especially chapter 2; thomas bauer, “male-male love in classical arabic poetry,” in the cambridge history of gay and lesbian literature, ed. e. l. mccallum and mikko tuhkanen, 107–23 (new york: cambridge university press, 2014); adam talib, how do you say “epigram” in arabic: literary history at the limits of comparison (leiden: brill, 2018); franz rosenthal, “male and female: described and compared,” in homoeroticism in classical arabic literature, ed. j. w. wright and everett k. rowson, 24–54 (new york: columbia university press, 1997); and the many works of everett rowson cited below. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 3 threatening. in the second part of the article, i present a diachronic analysis of one story, “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” to show how modern editors, translators, and scholars have read binary sex into the text in order to make sense of its erotics. manuscripts of the nights dating from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries differ considerably from the earliest arabic print editions in their presentation of the story. this case study reveals what translators and scholars miss when they work from these print editions and/or from modern constructions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment. part 1: sameness and difference in a fifteenth-century manuscript of the 1001 nights for historians working on earlier periods, it is often a challenge to interpret sexual practices and norms without reproducing, even unintentionally, modern binaries, such as the homosexuality/heterosexuality binary and the binary construction of sex.3 even a term such as “same-sex desire,” which is often seen as a less anachronistic alternative to homosexuality, centers a binary notion of sameness and difference derived from the sexed body. in general, modern sexual taxonomies depend on the concept of sexual dimorphism, in which male and female bodies are understood as categorically and self-evidently different, with a particular emphasis on genitalia. however, scholarship on the history of the body has shown that sexual dimorphism may not have always underpinned scientific or religious thought.4 in the field of islamic history, indira falk gesink argues that despite the importance of a gender binary to the realms of marriage, the household, inheritance, and ritual, muslim scholars from across the spectrum of premodern jurisprudence exhibited flexibility when confronted with morphological ambiguity. they adopted a category of “complex sex” and allowed people to hold different sex designations simultaneously or to 3. literature on the concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality is vast and crosses multiple fields. terms such as binary sex, gender roles, and embodied gender have become widespread in academic writing. as should be clear already, i take a historical constructionist, rather than an essentialist, approach, and i use these terms throughout the article in particular reference to the primary sources i am analyzing. i also cite relevant secondary scholarship from the fields of medieval and islamic history and arabic literature in the notes below. however, if a reader would like to situate these terms in a broader context, informed by recent insights from scholarship in biology and linguistics, starting points that include useful definitions are ann fausto-sterling, “gender/sex, sexual orientation, and identity are in the body: how did they get there?,” journal of sex research 56, nos. 4–5 (2019): 529–55; and lauren ackerman, “syntactic and cognitive issues in investigating gendered coreference,” glossia: a journal of general linguistics 4, no. 1 (2019): 1–27 (art. 117). as for sexuality, homosexuality, and heterosexuality, i use these terms not in my analysis of primary sources but rather only in reference to modern systems of sexual classification or to specific scholarly works that are cited in the notes. 4. for the well-known if controversial “one-sex” model, see thomas walter laqueur, making sex: body and gender from the greeks to freud (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1990). for critics of laqueur’s model, see joan cadden, meanings of sex difference in the middle ages: medicine, science, and culture (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1995); katharine park, “cadden, laqueur, and the ‘one-sex body,’” medieval feminist forum 46, no. 1 (2010): 96–100; and helen king, the one-sex body on trial: the classical and early modern evidence (farnham: ashgate, 2013). 4 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) pass from one to another.5 medieval arabic medical texts go a step further and elaborate what ahmed ragab calls a “sexscape” in which bodies were observed and placed along a continuum from ultramasculine males at one extreme to ultrafeminine females at the other, with plenty of options in between. although these texts predictably focus on anatomy and morphology, they deemphasize genitalia, at least in comparison to other physical markers, in locating a body on the continuum.6 this scholarship highlights the inadequacy of a binary construction of sex for understanding the way bodies were perceived and positioned in premodern legal and medical discourses. one of the goals of this article is to build on this emerging scholarship by showing the way a literary text also complicates modern binaries in its eroticization of bodies. existing scholarship on medieval and early modern arabic literature has tended to use binary sex to establish sexual categories even if other kinds of differences regularly cross-cut those categories. khaled el-rouayheb’s important monograph on arabic sources from the ottoman empire historicizes the homosexuality/heterosexuality binary and denaturalizes the emphasis on identity and essentialism associated with these modern terms.7 although the focus on homoeroticism and same-sex desire centers a category of same-sexed bodies, el-rouayheb shows that distinctions of age and status organized erotic life among men. in general, scholars of arabic literature from earlier periods have not paid as much attention to problematizing modern sexual categories as el-rouayheb has, but have nonetheless found similar patterns. in abbasid-era belles-lettres, everett rowson observes a basic division in society between elite adult men, who authored and acted in texts as sexual agents, and everyone else, who constituted “the ranks of the not-male.”8 witty disputations between 5. indira falk gesink, “intersex bodies in premodern islamic discourse: complicating the binary,” journal of middle east women’s studies 14, no. 2 (2018): 152–73. see also saqer a. almarri, “‘you have made her a man among men’: translating the khuntha’s anatomy in fatimid jurisprudence,” transgender studies quarterly 3, nos. 3–4 (2016): 578–86; and sara scalenghe, disability in the ottoman arab world, 1500–1800 (new york: cambridge university press, 2014), chapter 4. 6. ahmed ragab, “one, two, or many sexes: sex differentiation in medieval islamicate medical thought,” journal of the history of sexuality 24, no. 3 (2015): 428–54. see also emily selove and rosalind batten, “making men and women: arabic commentaries on the gynaecological hippocratic aphorisms in context,” annales islamologiques 48, no. 1 (2014): 239–62; and sherry sayed gadelrab, “discourses on sex differences in medieval scholarly islamic thought,” journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences 66, no. 1 (2011): 40–81. two related subgenres that predictably focus more attention on genitalia are ʿilm al-bāh (sexology) and ʿilm al-firāsa (physiognomy), the latter in particular for the purposes of evaluating enslaved people; however, the focus on genitalia only accentuates morphological diversity and a spectrum of possible bodies. on these genres, see pernilla myrne, female sexuality in the early medieval islamic world (london: i. b. tauris, 2020), chapters 1–2; and antonella ghersetti, “the representation of slave girls in a physiognomic text of the fourteenth century,” mamlūk studies review 21 (2018): 21–45. 7. el-rouayheb, before homosexuality. for related work on ottoman turkish sources, see dror ze’evi, producing desire: changing sexual discourse in the ottoman middle east (berkeley: university of california press, 2006); and walter g. andrews and mehmet kalpaklı, the age of the beloveds: love and the beloved in early-modern ottoman and european culture and society (durham, nc: duke university press, 2005). 8. everett k. rowson, “gender irregularity as entertainment: institutionalized transvestism at the caliphal court in medieval baghdad,” in gender and difference in the middle ages, ed. sharon farmer and carol braun pasternack, 45–72 (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2003). see also rowson, “the traffic in boys: al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 5 those who preferred sex with young men and those who preferred sex with women and well-documented practices of cross-dressing imply that gendered and/or sexed bodies mattered in sorting through those ranks. overall, however, rowson suggests that difference structured all normative sexual relationships, but power difference, expressed in terms of gender, age, religion, or legal status, mattered more than difference derived from the sexed body. the corollary to this was that sameness—which in these texts usually meant two elite adult men—was often portrayed, for at least one of them, as abject or pathological.9 pernilla myrne reads arabic sources from the same period for women’s voices and finds that they sought as diverse an array of partners as the men whose point of view is easier to identify, but that there was less of an emphasis on power asymmetry. for instance, the particular negative associations that attached to sexual relations between adult men did not apply to the case of “female homosexuality,” which myrne understands in line with modern discourses as an “orientation” within a category of same-sexed bodies.10 based on this scholarship, it is clear that concepts of sameness and difference organized sexual practices and norms as portrayed in premodern arabic literature. moreover, it is clear that these concepts could not always be mapped onto a binary construction of sex, even if this is not always stated outright. nonetheless, the emphasis on same-sex desire in much of this work obscures the extent to which the bodies of young men and women are portrayed as strikingly similar in literary texts.11 these similarities cannot be chalked up solely to the tendency of adult men to sexualize subordinate members of society, especially when viewed through a piece of popular literature such as the 1001 nights. in the fifteenthcentury manuscript under study here, beautiful heand she-characters recur as both lover and beloved, both active and passive, and even if they also serve as fantasies for an audience, slavery and homoerotic liaisons in elite ʿabbāsid society,” middle eastern literatures 11, no. 2 (2008): 193–204; and idem, “homoerotic narratives from mamlūk literature: al-ṣafadī’s lawʿat al-shākī and ibn dāniyāl’s al-mutayyam,” in wright and rowson, homoeroticism in classical arabic literature, 158–91. 9. rowson’s work on the category of the mukhannath (“effeminate”) suggests that from the ninth century on some adult men chose to position themselves as sexually available for other adult men and were frequently stigmatized; see rowson, “the effeminates of early medina,” journal of the american oriental society 111, no. 4 (1991): 671–93; and idem, “gender irregularity.” on this category as well as the related maʾbūn, see also el-rouayheb, before homosexuality, 13–25; and frédéric lagrange, “the obscenity of the vizier,” in islamicate sexualities: translations across temporal geographies of desire, ed. kathryn babayan and afsaneh najmabadi, 161–203 (cambridge, ma: harvard center for middle eastern studies, 2008). 10. see myrne, female sexuality, chapters 4–6; and sahar amer, “medieval arab lesbians and lesbian-like women,” journal of the history of sexuality 18, no. 2 (2009): 215–36. 11. this is a point that is always raised, but the attention to homoerotic poetry in much of the secondary scholarship has left the significance of these similarities as well as the way they operate in other kinds of literature underdeveloped. the question of whether the use of the masculine pronoun in such poetry “masks” a female beloved for reasons of either prosody or propriety is often as far as the discussion goes. in any case, in all the examples below from the nights the pronouns in the poems match the pronouns used for the character elsewhere in the story. for an important discussion of the question of love poetry and pronouns, which concludes that they can, for the most part, be taken at face value, see thomas bauer, liebe und liebesdichtung in der arabischen welt des 9. und 10. jahrhunderts: eine literaturund mentalitätsgeschichtliche studie des arabischen ġazal (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 1998), 150–62. 6 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the stories insist upon their comparability and juxtaposition.12 in other words, well-matched pairs are those who are described as similar to each other, regardless of the body parts that are (or may be imagined to be) involved. of course, gender differences are central to the stories of the nights, particularly in their portrayal of marriage, the family, and politics. but sameness, especially physical sameness, is celebrated in the context of erotic love to an extent that destabilizes the relationship between gender difference and embodiment. among the implications of this erotics of sameness for scholars of arabic literature and sexuality is that it decenters the perspectives of elite adult men. diverse observers are pictured admiring beautiful characters who are in turn pictured admiring each other, establishing multidirectional circuits of desire.13 another consequence is to expand what has heretofore counted as evidence for homoeroticism. when heand she-characters are eroticized in nearly identical terms, it is unnecessary for the text to portray men attracted to men or women to women for it to incite or affirm such attractions in an audience. this may have been a way of “masquerading” illicit desires, but more broadly it raises questions about the field of sexual possibility produced by literature like this and the role played by the sexed body in structuring it.14 in what follows of the first part of this article, i focus on the earliest surviving manuscript of the 1001 nights, likely produced in syria in the fifteenth century.15 it was acquired by antoine galland in the early eighteenth century and made famous as the basis for his best-selling translation and adaptation les mille et une nuits, published in paris in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717.16 now held in the bibliothèque nationale de france, the manuscript opens with a story of two brother-kings who, upon discovering that their wives have been unfaithful, set out on a journey during which they become convinced of the essential treachery of women.17 after returning to his kingdom, the elder brother, shahrayar, decides to take a new wife each night and execute her in the morning as a way of protecting himself from further cuckoldry. as she watches the king’s vizier procure a new bride for him every day, the vizier’s daughter, shahrazad, hatches a plan to save the women 12. i use the terms heand she-characters to reflect the grammatical gender binary produced by the arabic language and avoid the terms male and female, which are associated with binary sex. 13. this idea was inspired by chapter 2 of afsaneh najmabadi’s women with mustaches and men without beards: gender and sexual anxieties of iranian modernity (berkeley: university of california press, 2005). 14. “masquerade” comes from najmabadi, women with mustaches, 27. 15. in his critical edition (which i use for all references to the manuscript below), muhsin mahdi dates the manuscript to fourteenth-century syria; see mahdi, the thousand and one nights (alf layla wa-layla): the classic edition (1984–1994), 2 vols. (leiden: brill, 2014), 1:12–36 [hereafter mahdi, 1/2]. scholarly consensus now, however, accepts a fifteenth-century date. for more on this, see heinz grotzfeld, “the manuscript tradition of the arabian nights,” in the arabian nights encyclopedia, ed. ulrich marzolph and richard van leeuwen, 2 vols., 1:17–21 (santa barbara, ca: abc-clio, 2004). 16. see paulo lemos horta, marvellous thieves: secret authors of the arabian nights (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2017), chapter 1; and muhsin mahdi, the thousand and one nights (leiden: e. j. brill, 1995), 11–49. 17. the three-volume manuscript is bnf arabe 3609-3611. for more on it, see ibrahim akel, “liste des manuscrits arabes des nuits,” in arabic manuscripts of the “thousand and one nights,” ed. aboubakr chraïbi, 65–114 (paris: espaces & signes, 2016), 70–71. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 7 of the kingdom. she insists that her father marry her to the king, involves her younger sister dinarzad in the plot, and proceeds to tell stories to the king every night, breaking off at a climactic point in the narrative just as the sun rises and thereby convincing him to let her live to continue the tale the next evening. the manuscript is clearly unfinished, as it ends abruptly in the middle of night 281, but no one knows exactly how many nights it or its now-lost predecessor(s) contained.18 although manuscripts from later centuries include different sequences of nights, the earliest surviving arabic manuscripts containing a full 1,001 nights date from the early nineteenth century.19 following muhsin mahdi’s assessment of the manuscript in his 1984 critical edition, as supplemented by more recent historical work, i am persuaded that it contains a text that was shaped by and for an arabic-speaking, urban constituency, likely located primarily in egypt and syria during the period of the mamluk sultanate (1250–1517 ce).20 i do not, however, insist on its particular authenticity or originality, nor do i ignore the fact that it certainly preserves material transmitted either orally or in writing from earlier periods and different geographical and linguistic contexts.21 nonetheless, it is a datable artifact that has been shown to be a product of its time in terms of literary style, themes, and sociocultural references and that provides abundant material for analyzing expressions of erotic love. while i also make no claims for its essential representativeness, the existence of manuscript copies of much the same text from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as related examples, both earlier and later, of what aboubakr chraïbi calls “arabic middle literature,” suggest it reflected ongoing and fairly mainstream late medieval readerly appetites.22 i will 18. muhsin mahdi argues that its immediate predecessor did not reach 1,001 nights and may never have been intended to; see mahdi, 1:12–36. others have argued that manuscripts with a full 1001 nights certainly existed prior to this, but were always likely to have been rare because of cost and the likelihood that they were broken up for sales. see heinz grotzfeld, “creativity, random selection, and pia fraus: observations on compilation and transmission of the arabian nights,” in the arabian nights in transnational perspective, ed. ulrich marzolph, 51–63 (detroit: wayne state university press, 2007). 19. for a list of all known manuscripts to date, see akel, “liste.” 20. in addition to mahdi’s work, see the following for evidence that the manuscript reflects a mamluk or, more broadly, medieval islamic milieu: aboubakr chraïbi, “introduction,” in chraïbi, arabic manuscripts, 15–64; jean-claude garcin, pour une lecture historique des “mille et une nuits” (paris: actes sud, 2013); muhsin j. al-musawi, the islamic context of “the thousand and one nights” (new york: columbia university press, 2009); and heinz grotzfeld, “contes populaires de l’époque mamlouke dans les mille et une nuits,” aram 9–10 (1997– 98): 43–54. 21. the earliest evidence for what has come to be called the 1001 nights in arabic is a ninth-century paper fragment that introduces a book with the phrase alf layla (a thousand nights) in its title and a woman named dinazad exhorting another woman to entertain her with stories at night. two major tenth-century authors (al-masʿūdī and ibn al-nadīm) refer to both a persian antecedent called the hazār afsāna (a thousand tales) and its arabic adaptation, called alf layla, and a documentary reference from the cairo geniza notes a book titled alf layla wa-layla (1001 nights) circulating in the mid-twelfth-century. for good overviews of this history, see robert irwin, the arabian nights: a companion (new york: penguin books, 1994), chapter 2; and aboubakr chraïbi, les mille et une nuits: histoire du texte et classification des contes (paris: harmattan, 2008), chapter 1. 22. see chraïbi, “introduction,” especially 62–64. see also bruce fudge, “introduction,” in a hundred and one nights, ed. and trans. bruce fudge, xiv–xxviii (new york: new york university press, 2016). dwight reynolds claims that the relatively few references to the nights in medieval sources suggest that it may not have been 8 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) add to my analysis three seventeenth-century manuscripts, which are among the earliest to conclude the story that is cut off at the end of the galland manuscript (“the story of qamar al-zaman and budur”).23 these versions exhibit sufficient intertextuality with the surviving contents of the fifteenth-century manuscript to convince me to think of them as a single tradition.24 i will return to this story and present further manuscript evidence in the second part of the article. 1.1 beautiful bodies the eroticization of characters in the nights depends heavily on descriptions of their physical beauty. these descriptions are almost always in rhymed prose (known in arabic as sajʿ) and/or accompanied by poetry. such stylistic features set physical descriptions apart from the narrative around them, not unlike the way illustrations break up a written text. indeed, it has been noted that poetry serves as a visual element in manuscripts of the nights, which, likely for reasons of cost, seem to have rarely included illustrations.25 a very popular work; see reynolds, “a thousand and one nights: a history of the text and its reception,” in arabic literature in the post-classical period, ed. roger allen and d. s. richards, 270–91 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006), 272. however, konrad hirschler argues that the scholarly elites who wrote the majority of the sources that have come down to us from this period tended to mention such literature only when they perceived it to impinge on their own authority. it is likely that the content and reading practices associated with the nights were perceived as unthreatening and therefore did not occasion comment. the relatively small number of extant early manuscripts may also reflect a phenomenon hirschler describes for other kinds of popular literature: the practice of commercial lending. the wear and tear involved in this kind of lending would have lessened the chances of a manuscript’s survival. although it is likely that the nights was transmitted at least in part orally over the centuries, hirschler’s demonstration of the increasing importance of “textualization” from the twelfth century on reinforces the literary arguments made by chraïbi, fudge, and others that the fifteenth-century manuscript represents a written tradition that was intended to be read, either silently alone or out loud for an audience. see konrad hirschler, the written word in the medieval arabic lands: a social and cultural history of reading practices (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2012), especially chapter 5. 23. these are bnf arabe 3612 (on which see akel, “liste,” 76); bnf arabe 3621; and bnf arabe 3623. the latter two are standalone versions of the story. bnf arabe 3621 includes night divisions but drops large chunks of the story (as does bnf arabe 3612). bnf arabe 3623 is dated 1698 and is highly abridged throughout. i will add a third seventeenth-century standalone manuscript of the story to my analysis in the second part of the article. 24. apart from its continuation as “the story of amjad and asʿad,” garcin argues that the version of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur” presented in mahdi’s critical edition (which is concluded on the basis of an eighteenth-century manuscript, not the sixteenth-century manuscript cited by garcin) exhibits considerable intertextuality with the rest of the fifteenth-century manuscript; garcin also cross-checks with one of the seventeenth-century manuscripts i use here. see garcin, pour une lecture historique, 110–25. 25. see geert jan van gelder, “poetry and the arabian nights,” in marzolph and van leeuwen, arabian nights encyclopedia, 1:13–17; and wolfhart heinrichs, “the function(s) of poetry in the arabian nights: some observations,” in o ye gentlemen: arabic studies on science and literary culture, ed. arnoud vrolijk and jan p. hogendijk, 353–62 (leiden: brill, 2007). for the two seventeenth-century manuscripts of the nights known today to include illustrations, see akel, “liste,” 73–76; for the role played by one of them in a late eighteenthcentury lending library, testifying to issues of cost and circulation, see boris liebrenz, “the library of aḥmad al-rabbāṭ: books and their audience in 12th to 13th/18th to 19th century syria,” in marginal perspectives on early modern ottoman culture: missionaries, travelers, booksellers, ed. ralf elger and ute pietruschka, 17–59 (halle [saale]: zentrum für interdisziplinäre regionalstudien, 2013). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 9 although poetry also serves other purposes in the stories, the way its highly effusive and metaphorical language is used to evoke characters’ bodies was likely intended to paint a picture in the minds of the audience. fifteenth-century audiences would have been familiar with such descriptive genres of poetry, and sometimes with the exact poems, from other texts and contexts. in ulrich marzolph’s words, this kind of repetition is a highly effective narrative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares. on the one hand, the process of recognition links to previous experiences and familiar contexts, thus creating an atmosphere in which the audience would feel welcome and appreciated; on the other, a tale’s unexpected turn of events would attract attention and entertain the audience by introducing something new.26 in the case of the poetry and prose descriptions that eroticized bodies in the nights, one element that would certainly have been familiar to the audience was the beauty ideal at work. what may have been new was the scenario in which the description was embedded, as well as the cumulative effect of the different kinds of scenarios in which the same kinds of descriptions occurred. previous scholarship on premodern arabic, persian, and ottoman turkish belletristic and visual cultures has established that ideals of beauty for young men and women were very similar to each other.27 at its most basic and across traditions, beauty was associated with youth and a moonlike appearance. in terms of facial features, some combination of dark eyes, arching brows, rosy or ruddy cheeks, and white teeth, often framed by black and/or curling hair and accentuated by a dark beauty mark or mole, seems to have constituted an ideal, moonlike type.28 such traits abound in the nights, as do the various words for moon in arabic, including badr and qamar, which recur in both poetry and prose descriptions and as names of both heand she-characters. while the moon in all its guises is the dominant metaphor for beauty, the sun appears too, and radiance seems to be the main aesthetic effect produced by desirable characters. the most common words for beauty in arabic, such as jamāl and ḥusn, as well as the adjective malīḥ, which appears right at the beginning of the vast majority of descriptions, also apply equally, despite the tendency of some english 26. ulrich marzolph, “making sense of the ‘nights’: intertextual connections and narrative techniques in the ‘thousand and one nights,’” narrative culture 1, no. 2 (2014): 239–57, at 240. the poetry in the fifteenthcentury manuscript is overwhelmingly unattributed, but it has been suggested that this was because an audience would have known in many cases who the author was without the need for identification; for more on this, see heinrichs, “function(s) of poetry.” 27. unlike in arabic, third-person pronouns and verb forms in persian and ottoman turkish are genderneutral. this means it is sometimes difficult to guess the gender of the person being described. even in arabic, though, the rules of poetic meter may dictate the use of a masculine or feminine noun, adjective, or verb form, regardless of the person being described. for representations of beauty in early modern ottoman and qajar art and literature, see andrews and kalpaklı, age of beloveds, passim; najmabadi, women with mustaches, chapters 1–2; and francesca leoni and mika natif, eds., eros and sexuality in islamic art (farnham: ashgate, 2013). 28. the way this beauty ideal is racialized will be discussed further below. 10 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) translations to distinguish “handsome” men from “beautiful” women.29 for instance, the following series of rhyming words accompanies the entrance of both heand she-characters into their stories: dhāt ḥusn wa-jamāl wa-bahāʾ wa-kamāl wa-qadd wa-ʿtidāl (having beauty, elegance, radiance, perfection, stature, and symmetry).30 overall, there is no generic term or metaphor for physical beauty that seems gender-specific in the fifteenth-century manuscript under study. faces dominate the paeans to physical beauty in the nights and are the main referent for the ubiquitous lunar metaphors, but bodies are also described, sometimes in considerable detail. the ideal figure is slender and supple, with some fleshiness in the belly, hips, and buttocks. recurring metaphors include young deer, gazelles, willow boughs, and spears, all of which apply equally to heand she-characters. sometimes the bodies of she-characters are noted as having breasts that are firm or upright (qāʿidat al-nahd/nahd qāʾim).31 the emphasis seems to be on firmness rather than size, which is sustained by more figurative descriptions of the term “chest” (ṣadr) upon which “two pots” (ḥuqqān) or “pomegranates” (rummān) may appear.32 significantly, this latter metaphor also appears in the poem that opens this article, which is repeated in two different stories to describe a he-character, raising questions about the extent to which breasts can be understood to sex the body.33 reinforcing this impression of embodied sameness, both heand she-characters are described as possessing “soft curves” (līnat al-aʿṭāf) and “hips/haunches/buttocks” (ridf) that are “quivering” (murtijj), “full to bursting” (daghaṣ), or “heavy” (thaqīl).34 similarly, necks, arms, thighs, and bellies are praised for being soft, smooth, and silky; the belly and its navel, folds, or creaminess in particular function as a catalyst for sexual arousal in the stories.35 the provocative sight of the belly, rather than the genitals, cannot be attributed 29. for example, compare haddawy, arabian nights, 66 and 114; in the former, a shābb malīḥ is a “handsome young man” and in the latter, a ṣabiyya malīḥa is a “beautiful girl.” in a related inconsistency, even where the term ṣabiyy is used, it is sometimes translated as “young man” (see, for instance, haddawy, arabian nights, 142, 173), whereas ṣabiyya appears frequently and is almost always translated as “girl.” 30. mahdi, 1:128 (she), 212 (he), 232 (he), 233 (he), 240 (she), and with variation in sequence 226 (he). 31. mahdi, 1:128, 157, 245, 436. brief appearances of juwar, young women purchased as concubines, are described as having “virginal breasts” (nahd abkār); see mahdi, 1:311, 380. 32. the description of the doorkeeper in “the story of the porter and three ladies” is unusual for its emphasis on size, comparing her chest to “a fountain” (shādharwān) and her breasts to “two large pomegranates” (faḥlayn rummān); see mahdi, 1:129. for caskets/pots of ivory or musk, see mahdi, 1:194, 542 (see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 226a; and bnf arabe 3621, fol. 1a). 33. mahdi, 1:206; bnf arabe 3612, fol. 224a. for an even more explicit example in english translation by one of the most famous poets of the ninth century, see thomas bauer, “the arabic ghazal: formal and thematic aspects of a problematic genre,” in ghazal as world literature ii: from a literary genre to a great tradition; the ottoman gazel in context, ed. angelika neuwirth, michael hess, judith pfeiffer, and börte sagaster, 3–13 (würzburg: ergon verlag, 2006), 9–10. for more examples from this genre, along with the argument that pronouns in arabic love poetry can, for the most part, be taken at face value, see bauer, liebe und liebesdichtung, passim. 34. mahdi, 1:194, 206, 230, 246, 260, 436, 483, 500, 540; bnf arabe 3612, fol. 224a. 35. mahdi, 1:129, 251, 333, 541–42 (see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 226a; and bnf arabe 3621, fol. 1a–1b), 584 (see also bnf arabe 3621, fol. 15b; and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 8b). belly “folds” (ṭayyāt) are mentioned in the case of two she-characters, but neither seems to conform to the gendered ideal of fatness marion holmes katz al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 11 to politesse, since genitals are explicitly named in other scenarios. rather, the belly’s role in arousal likely reflected the expectations of the audience just as it provided an opportunity to eroticize heand she-characters in the same way. the association of youth with so many of these beautiful bodies may suggest that what appears to be a shared beauty standard is actually a standard for feminine beauty to which young men are assimilated before they acquire the trappings of adult masculinity (usually marked by the growth of a full beard). this could mean that young men are being feminized when they are eroticized or that they occupy a temporary and separately gendered space, distinct from women but still subordinate to adult men.36 the evidence in this manuscript does not, however, clearly align with either of these options. i have not found a single instance of the use of the term amrad (beardless youth), a well-attested and age-sensitive category of embodied masculinity.37 more generally, there are very few words that could be said to pertain only to embodied masculinity or femininity. the two most frequent examples are ʿidhār (beard down) and nahd/nuhūd (breasts), but these are by no means used every time a heor she-character, respectively, is described.38 in fact, the ease with which characters cross-dress convincingly in several stories suggests that bodies were imagined to be either so similar or so variable as to provide little visual evidence of sex or gender beyond what clothing was understood to convey.39 indeed, clothing is the most obviously gendered element in physical descriptions, as when the occasion for praising a she-character’s face is the lifting of a veil (though beautiful he-characters’ faces are also “uncovered” for dramatic effect), but often it communicates as much about luxury and wealth as about gender.40 moreover, in contrast to many of the other textual environments describes for fourteenthand fifteenth-century cairo; see katz, “fattening up in fourteenth-century cairo: ibn al-ḥāǧǧ and the many meanings of overeating,” annales islamologiques 48, no. 1 (2014): 31–53. as mentioned above, references to full or heavy hips and buttocks in this manuscript apply equally to heand she-characters, and belly folds do not prevent one of the aforementioned she-characters (princess budur) from significant physical activity as well as successfully passing as a he-character. 36. see el-rouayheb, before homosexuality, especially 25–33, 60–75; and najmabadi, women with mustaches, 11–25. 37. ghulām, usually considered an equivalent of amrad but without the literal association with facial hair, appears occasionally. the most common words for desirable characters are shābb, ṣabiyy/ṣabiyya, and jāriya. 38. it is impossible to say whether he-characters who are not described with beard down are meant to be imagined as beardless or with some other form of facial hair; nor is it possible to say whether desirable she-characters are meant to be imagined with any facial hair at all, though none is mentioned to the best of my knowledge. likewise, dark hair and “curling sidelocks” (ʿaqrab/ʿaqārib) are praised equally on heand she-characters (for examples, see mahdi, 1:206, 246, 333, 536). the only two references i found to very long hair, reaching to the waist or ankles, are for she-characters (see mahdi, 1:246, 483); this does not, of course, tell us anything about the length or style of hair of others. 39. the most obvious example of this is the lengthy period in which princess budur is dressed as a man in “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” which will be discussed below. other examples include king shahrayar’s twenty concubines in the frame story who become ten concubines and ten “black slaves” after taking off their clothes and the episode in which budur’s brother dresses as a woman in “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur.” 40. for examples of unveiling that apply to she-characters only, see mahdi, 1:126, 294 (shālat al-shaʿriyya); and 290, 319 (kashafat/shālat al-niqāb). for examples of uncovering that apply to both heand she-characters, 12 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) in which late medieval arabic-speakers would have encountered eroticized descriptions, which explicitly establish separate categories for young men and women, the fifteenthcentury manuscript of the nights jumbles them up, heand she-characters moving in and out of plots and falling in love with other heand she-characters.41 all in all, i am not convinced that desirable young men in this manuscript are being either feminized or placed in their own category. rather, a select group of both heand she-characters occupy a shared space of the erotic, not defined by subordination to older men, in which bodies appear virtually interchangeable. that said, because arabic secondand third-person pronouns, verbs, and many nouns have masculine and feminine forms, characters are always identifiable in terms of a grammatical gender binary. it could be argued that the combination of arabic grammar and the roles played by characters elsewhere in the stories prompted readers to “flesh out” generic or metaphorical descriptions of beautiful bodies so as to stress gender differences or binary sex, at least in their imaginations if not also in improvised ways in front of an audience.42 however, i maintain that it is significant that these differences are not stressed in the text, especially in light of the tendency, discussed in the second part of this article, for modern editors and translators to make interventions that do just that. moreover, scholars of the nights have noted that repetition—of motifs, of descriptive language, of the framing device itself—is an “economy” that allows for the crafting of highly sophisticated narratives.43 for instance, the same poetic verses and rhyming prose passages are recycled for different characters in the fifteenth-century manuscript. some might object, therefore, to placing such emphasis on a series of repetitive, even formulaic, descriptions that were, in any case, secondary to plot. at the same time, repetition draws attention to itself in ways that accumulate as a reader moves through a text, especially when, as sandra naddaff puts it, “repetition is attended by difference.”44 when poetic evocations of eroticized bodies, which would be familiar to audiences by virtue of literary compendia authored by well-known men, issue from the mouths of both heand she-characters in a series of new or surprising narrative contexts, they likely attracted notice in ways they would not have done otherwise. this kind of repetition may have served, in sahar ishtiaque ullah’s see mahdi, 1:306, 321, 458, 540 (see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 225b; and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 2b), 544 (see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 227a; bnf arabe 3621, fol. 2b; and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 3a), 545 (see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 227a; and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 3b) (kashafa al-wajh, kashafa al-ghiṭāʾ/al-mulāʾa ʿan al-wajh). 41. for examples from the proliferation of literary anthologies in this period that devote separate chapters to young men and women, see talib, “epigram” in arabic, passim; and for essays that explicitly compare young men and women from the centuries-old arabic literary genre of contrastive enumeration, see rosenthal, “male and female.” 42. we have no direct evidence of how the nights was consumed at the time of the production of the fifteenth-century manuscript under study, but it is likely to have been in ways analogous to the consumption of epic literature in the period, i.e., read either quietly alone or out loud in front of an audience. see hirschler, written word, chapter 5. 43. see daniel beaumont, “literary style and narrative technique in the arabian nights,” in marzolph and van leeuwen, arabian nights encyclopedia, 1:1–5. 44. sandra naddaff, arabesque: narrative structure and the aesthetics of repetition in “1001 nights” (evanston, il: northwestern university press, 1991), 82. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 13 words, “not only to convey what is important but also to inform and cultivate audiencereader expectations.”45 although we have no direct evidence regarding who constituted the readership of the fifteenth-century manuscript of the nights, the stories themselves portray heterogeneous audiences whose appreciation for a pair of lovers or a beautiful body might be considered to reflect or model external audience attitudes.46 finally, if what is said, repeatedly, in a text is important, so is what is unsaid. when the sexed body is repeatedly unsaid, a binary construction of sex or embodied gender may not be a helpful way to understand, and may in fact cause us to misunderstand, eroticism within the nights as well as, perhaps, outside it. 1.2 pairs, parallels, and triangles not only are eroticized heand she-characters described in similar terms in the fifteenthcentury manuscript, but they are also put emphatically into relation with each other. multiple stories revolve around a pair of characters whose beauty is explicitly compared using the terms mithl (like/the same as), shakl (likeness/resemblance), ashbaha (to be similar/resemble), qāraba (to approximate/be equivalent to), or ʿādala (to be equal to) and whose mutual, if often thwarted, desire traces the plot’s dramatic arc.47 these pairings convey the sense that beautiful people belong together and that a sameness that transcends or displaces distinctions of gender is the most appropriate basis for a relationship. in addition, there is no hint in this manuscript that beauty equates to passivity in matters of love and lust. this is true of both heand she-characters, whose parallel pursuit of partners decenters the perspective of adult men, so well established in other genres of literature. these pairs and parallels also make space for sexual attraction between characters of the same grammatical gender, while triangles in the text allow for outsiders to collude in the erotics on display. since passionate love need not be experienced or expressed as erotic, key to this analysis are the moments when characters react to beautiful bodies in ways that strongly imply sexual desire.48 these reactions range from verbal declarations, such as “fire exploded in my heart” or “i lost my mind,” to seemingly uncontrollable nonverbal responses like intense gazes, sighs, rapid heartbeat, trembling hands, fainting, exclamations, kisses, and embraces.49 many of these encounters culminate in sexual intercourse, referred to using numerous arabic terms, including the euphemistic but usually contextually clear “sleeping 45. sahar ishtiaque ullah, “a response to zayde antrim’s ‘sex, sameness, and embodiments of desire in the 1001 nights,’” paper presented at the islamic history workshop, columbia university, february 20, 2020. 46. khaled el-rouayheb’s discussion of the relationship between homoerotic literature and real-life attitudes is also applicable here; see el-rouayheb, before homosexuality, 75–85. 47. for examples of these terms in use, see mahdi, 1:240, 459, 490, 500, 544 (see also bnf 3612, fol. 227a; bnf 3621, fol. 2b; and, for a variant, bnf arabe 3623, fol. 3b), 547 (see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 228a), 582 (see also bnf arabe 3621, fol. 14b), 590 (see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 237b; bnf arabe 3621, fol. 18a; and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 9a), 591 (see also bnf arabe 3621, fol. 18b; bnf arabe 3623, fol. 9a; and, for a variant, bnf arabe 3612, fol. 237b). 48. for a discussion of the relationship between passionate love and sexual desire in poetry of this period, see el-rouayheb, before homosexuality, 85–95. 49. examples of such reactions in the text are legion. for the two specific phrases here, see mahdi, 1:329, 380. 14 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) with/spending the night with” (nāma ʿinda/bāta maʿa). in four cases, it is formulated as a he-character “taking the virginity of” a she-character, but in the more than three times as many cases in which some form of intercourse clearly takes place no mention of virginity is made, nor is virginity as such an attribute stressed in descriptions of beautiful bodies.50 other pleasurable activities, primarily eating, drinking, bathing, and massaging, but also talking, reciting poetry, and playing games, are often preludes to sexual intercourse, but when they stand on their own it is not always clear whether they should be read as erotic.51 when a succession of such activities takes place between characters who have both been established as beautiful or who have been described in terms of sameness, i am interpreting the ambiguity as suggestive of the sexual nature of the relationship. in the two stories in which the comparable beauty of a pair of characters functions most explicitly as a plot device, their union is facilitated, at least initially, by the supernatural powers of the jinn (“genies” or demons). in both stories, the humans are each championed by a demon, resulting in a kind of beauty contest between them, which is then either left unresolved or resolved on the basis of something other than the physical attributes of the characters, further emphasizing the sameness of their looks. for instance, at the beginning of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” a stalemate is broken between the two beautiful humans, prince qamar al-zaman and princess budur (whose gender-neutral names both mean “moon”) not on the basis of their shared physical perfection—which makes them equally desirable—but on the basis of their actions. while qamar al-zaman is able to resist kissing the sleeping budur, she cannot help kissing and embracing him when their positions are reversed. at this point the narrator of the story interjects a well-known stereotype: “the desire (shahwa) of women is stronger than that of men.”52 this is a gendered distinction, but not one presented, at least in this context, in terms of embodied difference.53 qamar al-zaman’s restraint takes the form of an internal monologue in which he makes a set of calculations involving his expectation of marriage and willingness to defer gratification, while budur is simply portrayed as not thinking at all. in the end, qamar al-zaman wins the contest, not because he is either more or differently physically beautiful, but because he exhibits self-control. 50. for these four cases, see mahdi, 1:250, 440, 486, 532. interestingly, these four cases include the only two times in which an act of sexual intercourse described as part of a story’s plot results in a baby. 51. this is particularly complicated in scenes of attachment between fathers and sons, which sometimes involve displays of physical intimacy and declarations of passionate love that might strike readers today as sexual. the two most prominent examples of this are in “the story of the two viziers” and “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur.” 52. the fifteenth-century manuscript breaks off just before this point in the story, so here mahdi’s edition follows an eighteenth-century manuscript, which i supplement with three seventeenth-century manuscripts. see mahdi, 1:551; bnf arabe 3612, fol. 229a; and bnf arabe 3621, fol. 4a. bnf arabe 3623 does not include this line. for more on the shahwa of women, see myrne, female sexuality, 57–60. 53. i will discuss this episode further in part 2 of this article. for a different interpretation based on a psychoanalytic reading, see daniel beaumont, slave of desire: sex, love, and death in the “1001 nights” (madison, nj: farleigh dickinson university, 2002), chapter 4. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 15 similarly, in “the story of the two viziers” two demons stage an elaborate ruse whereby a young man, badr al-din, is transported from basra to cairo to replace a hunchbacked groom whose physical appearance makes him, in the world of the story, unworthy of the bride, sitt al-husn, who also happens to be badr al-din’s long-lost cousin. after a brief dispute in which a she-demon champions the beauty of sitt al-husn and a he-demon the beauty of badr al-din, they let the contest go unresolved in order to act as matchmakers. at the wedding of sitt al-husn and the hunchback, the women attendants allow badr al-din into the bride’s unveiling, as they are, en masse, smitten by him. during the proceedings, badr al-din gazes upon the dazzling bride, just as the assembly gazes upon him, all with mounting passion. afterward, when sitt al-husn finds badr al-din rather than the hunchback in her bedroom, she implores him to sleep with her, quoting poetry to urge him on. though he is easily persuaded, she is portrayed as the initiator and, by implication, as the one with less self-control.54 in both stories, the message appears to be that beauty manifests itself equally in both kind and degree among heand she-characters, but the way a character acts on feelings of sexual attraction may reflect gender stereotypes. nevertheless, the fifteenth-century manuscript produces parallels in which both heand she-characters express attraction in similar ways and pursue partners whose appropriateness is established in terms of a sameness that includes but also exceeds the physical. the clearest examples of these parallels come from “the story of the porter and the three ladies,” especially the tales of the second and third dervish (he-characters) and the tales of the mistress of the house and the doorkeeper (she-characters).55 the second and third dervish both tell stories in which their lack of self-control spells their doom, proving that women are not the only ones who let their appetites command them. when the dervishes first enter, they have each lost an eye and shaved their hair, defects that keep them from being described as beautiful at the outset. later, their role as narrators of their own tales means they are never described as they were before their downfall, though their self-narrated encounters with beautiful characters suggest that they too possessed similar qualities at the time. in the case of the second dervish, after he spends a night enjoying the charms of a gorgeous woman imprisoned in a subterranean chamber, her captor, a demon, discovers them and exclaims in rage and betrayal, “it is clear that like (jins) yearns only for like (jins).”56 the use of the term jins, which today may be translated as sex, gender, race, or nation, here may refer to the category of humankind (versus the category of jinn).57 regardless of its exact meaning, the demon is recognizing and attributing the affair to an essential sameness in the pair. in the third dervish’s tale, the narrator happens upon an attractive young he-character who had been hidden away by his father in another 54. mahdi, 1:249. 55. for an analysis of these parallels in terms of narrative repetition, see naddaff, arabesque, especially chapter 4. 56. mahdi, 1:163. 57. the term jins here may also be understood as a reference to aristophanes’s speech in plato’s symposium, which portrays lovers as two halves of the same whole. for an articulation of this idea in arabic in a well-known eleventh-century work, see ibn ḥazm, ṭawq al-ḥamāma (damascus: maktabat dār al-bayān, 2002), 25–32. i thank one of my anonymous reviewers for pointing this out. 16 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) subterranean chamber, in this case to escape a fatal prophecy. the youth is initially hesitant but is then reassured that they can enjoy each other’s company because they are “like” (mithl) each other and he is “of his kind” (min jinsihi), which is specified as meaning both human and elite, though other forms of sameness, such as gender, may be implied.58 although it is left ambiguous as to whether the two engage in any sex acts, the language used for the pleasurable activities they do together—eating, drinking, bathing, staying up late, having stimulating conversation, and sleeping together—is nearly identical to that of scenarios in other stories that explicitly involve sexual intercourse.59 the tales of the mistress of the house and the doorkeeper, whose beauty had been established by the time they tell their stories, highlight physical sameness as well as status and reciprocity to justify their unions. in the encounter featured at the beginning of this article, the mistress of the house falls in love with a captivating prince reciting the qurʾan alone in an enchanted city and begs him to accompany her back to her home in baghdad. to convince him to agree, she asserts that she is a successful merchant and head of her household, while pledging to become his “concubine” (jāriya) and “wife” (ahl), if he will be her “lord/husband” (baʿl).60 to this, he answers, “yes, indeed, for you are my mistress (sayyidatī) and patron (mawlātī); whatever i do, i will not disobey you.”61 her wealth and independence balance his piety and nobility, and their promises to each other emphasize reciprocity and mutual devotion. status also factors in the story of the less self-possessed doorkeeper, who agrees to marry a total stranger because of his good looks and the fact that they are each heads of their respective households.62 like the dervishes, the two women are filled with desire at the sight of a beautiful body that mirrors their own, but shared status is also stressed as a basis for the relationship. sometimes status difference may be ignored or minimized by an emphasis on reciprocity, as when free men are paired with unfree women. the figure of the refined and sexually desirable concubine (jāriya) makes relationships with kings or well-to-do men legible within the terms of sameness advanced by the fifteenth-century manuscript, especially when feelings are mutual.63 jullanar, for instance, is a concubine to a king who is so attached to 58. mahdi, 1:183. 59. the language differences are subtle; for instance, in this case the text says, “we slept” and “when he slept i slept,” rather than “i slept with him.” for this particular episode, see mahdi, 1:184–85. there are many episodes to compare it with, but the most obvious is the parallel episode in the second dervish’s tale; see mahdi, 1:159. 60. i have translated jāriya as “concubine” throughout this article, as it is most often used to describe a category of enslaved woman. that is not literally the case here, but the connotation applies in that love has made her a captive to his will. the other connotation of jāriya is sexual availability, which is also implied here. 61. mahdi, 1:207–8. the terminology in this exchange blurs distinctions of free and unfree legal status just as it blurs the gendered hierarchy early muslim jurists insisted defined marriage; for more on this, see kecia ali, marriage and slavery in early islam (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2010). 62. mahdi, 1:212. another example of this comes in “the story of jullanar of the sea”: when badr’s mother is looking for a bride for him, she says she will only marry him to “his like” (mithlihi) in both beauty and a series of other qualities that include intelligence and social status; see mahdi, 1:499. 63. for a related story type that occurs in later manuscripts of the nights, as well as in a handful of authored works of medieval arabic belles-lettres, see geert jan van gelder, “slave-girl lost and regained: transformations of a story,” marvels & tales 18, no. 2 (2004): 201–17. for more on the figure of the jāriya in this period, see the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 17 her that he forsakes all the other women of his household. in recognition of his devotion, she reveals herself as the daughter of an undersea king, but agrees to stay with him on land and bear his son and heir.64 shams al-nahar, a concubine of the storied caliph harun al-rashid, has a tragic love affair with an elegant young man, one of the “sons of the kings of persia” (awlād mulūk al-ʿajam). they are portrayed repeatedly as well-matched in beauty and eloquence, if ultimately doomed by circumstance.65 finally, anis al-jalis, a concubine purchased for a king, falls in love with the son of a vizier whose beauty rivals her own. upon his promise never to marry, abuse her, or sell her, they spend the rest of their lives together under the approving eyes of various observers, including caliph harun al-rashid.66 the text does not offer, however, any parallel possibility of appropriate relationships between free women and unfree men, as will be discussed further below. another way in which sameness is emphasized in many stories is through roughly equivalent age pairings. although exact ages are given in only a few cases, the words most frequently used for beautiful characters—shābb, ṣabiyy/ṣabiyya, ghulām, jāriya—all either literally mean young or have strong connotations of youth.67 badr al-din and qamar al-zaman are just over twenty when they encounter, respectively, sitt al-husn, described as “about twenty,” and budur, whose many similarities to qamar al-zaman include, it is stated, age.68 the ages of the respective partners of the second and third dervishes are also specified, the first being a ṣabiyya malīḥa (beautiful young woman) of thirty-seven and the second a shābb malīḥ (beautiful young man) of fifteen, though it is unclear how old the dervishes themselves are at the time of the encounters.69 in some cases boys are described as beautiful as they grow up, with the ages of twelve, fifteen, and sixteen invoked as moments when their looks are admired and/or they are deemed ready for marriage, but the girls with whom they are eventually paired seem to be about the same age.70 beard down (ʿidhār) and, in one case, a mustache (shārib) appear in physical descriptions of beautiful he-characters, but facial hair is not mentioned at all in at least as many other descriptions, which does essays in matthew s. gordon and kathryn a. hain, eds., concubines and courtesans: women and slavery in islamic history (new york: oxford university press, 2017). 64. mahdi, 1:486–88. 65. mahdi, 1:380–82. 66. mahdi, 1:436–43, 480. 67. it is important, however, to remember that the concept of “youth” is a social construction and may have varied considerably from the way we understand it today. syrinx von hees’s analysis of qurʾanic commentaries from the mamluk period reveals that the term shabāb referred to the prime of life enjoyed by bearded men up to the age of forty; see von hees, “die kraft der jugend und die vielfalt der übergangsfasen: eine historischanthropologische auswertung von korankommentaren des 10. bis 15. jahrhunderts,” in islamwissenschaft als kulturwissenschaft i: historische anthropologie – ansätze und möglichkeiten, ed. stephan conermann and syrinx von hees, 139–76 (schenefeld: eb-verlag, 2007). 68. mahdi, 1:234, 240, 536, 590 (on budur’s age, see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 237b; and bnf arabe 3621, fol. 18a). 69. mahdi, 1:161, 164, 184. 70. see, for examples, mahdi, 1:233, 496, 499. in “the first old man’s tale,” two marriages take place, one in which the girl is twelve (and, it is said, has yet to go through puberty) and another in which the boy is twelve; see mahdi, 1:78–81. 18 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) not mean, of course, that it was not present.71 only one beautiful character, to the best of my knowledge, is portrayed as growing a full beard, at which point in the story he begins to pursue a youth who turns out to be his son.72 regardless, the vast majority of couples in the fifteenth-century manuscript are about the same age, which complicates the emphasis in other texts on the erotic agency of elite men, whose dominance was often expressed sexually through age asymmetry.73 by contrast, the appeal here seems to be the spectacle of sameness produced by characters of commensurate age, beauty, and status attracted to each other. in many cases, this spectacle is staged explicitly for admiring audiences within the story, audiences in which elite men are by no means the majority. as has already been discussed, in two stories the role of demons is to test, and attest to, the sameness of a beautiful pair; this involves much gazing down on human forms and rhapsodizing over their loveliness. other stories feature various groups of bystanders whose eyewitness testimony and seemingly involuntary physical reactions make clear that a character is being eroticized. in “the story of the two viziers,” whenever badr al-din would go out in the city of basra, people would “look” (naẓara) at him and marvel at his beauty.74 when he is later transported to cairo for sitt al-husn’s wedding, the guests “look” (naẓara) and “gaze” (aḥdaqa) at him, imagining themselves in his arms.75 finally, after the wedding night, when he is dropped in his sleep outside the gates of damascus by the jinn, a crowd assembles to admire his half-naked form, exclaiming in pleasure at the sight of his creamy thighs and belly.76 similarly, when princess budur, disguised as a man, appears to a group of courtiers and state officials, they are inspired just by “looking” (naẓar) at her/his beauty and elegance.77 the responses of these diverse observers suggest that the erotics of sameness cultivated in the stories was imagined as enjoyable for both men and women, rich and poor. in several stories, third parties act as go-betweens for or witnesses to a well-matched pair, resulting in a triangulation of desire. the tragic love story of ʿali b. bakkar and shams al-nahar is set in motion by a merchant whose appreciation of the two beautiful young people motivates him to abet their union. hidden behind a piece of furniture, he describes his pleasure in watching them recite passionate poetry to each other: “i have never before 71. for examples of beard down, see mahdi, 1:114, 206, 220, 262, 438, 497, 536; for a mustache, see mahdi, 1:490. 72. see mahdi, 1:260. this is a highly ambiguous episode, in which the father rhapsodizes about the son’s beauty, feeds him from his hand, and follows him around the city. the son accuses the father of inappropriate sexual desire before they realize they are father and son and the desire was actually just a case of “blood longing for blood”; see mahdi, 1:261–69. 73. this has been particularly well elaborated in everett rowson’s work on early arabic literature, in which adult men may sexually pursue subordinate members of society, including younger men, women, non-muslims, and slaves, without endangering their masculinity and social status; see, for instance, rowson, “traffic in boys.” see also el-rouayheb, before homosexuality, chapters 1–2; and bauer, “male-male love.” 74. mahdi, 1:234. 75. mahdi, 1:243–44. 76. mahdi, 1:251. 77. mahdi, 1:592; bnf arabe 3612, fol. 238a; bnf arabe 3621, fol. 19a. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 19 seen two people more beautiful than the two of them, as i have never, before them, seen a sun embrace a moon.”78 similarly, in the love story of nur al-din and anis al-jalis, two scenes are staged in which a third character bears witness to the eroticized sameness of the pair. first, an elderly gardener finds them sleeping on the grounds of a caliphal estate and, after uncovering their faces, is so taken by their beauty—“they were like two moons (qamarayn)”—that he cannot bring himself to evict them. instead, he is moved to recite poetry and to begin massaging the legs of nur al-din.79 later, the couple persuades him to feast with them in one of the palaces on the grounds. upon noticing the lights in the building, caliph harun al-rashid devises a plan to climb a tree and catch the trespassers in the act. peering through a window, he is greeted by such a delightful sight—“two moons” drinking wine and making music—that his anger melts away and he is moved to bestow upon them his considerable largesse.80 in another story, an old woman acts as a go-between for a young couple who fall in love at first sight, she on her balcony and he on the street below. in this case, the old woman recites poetry to each of them, ventriloquizing one’s devotion and visualizing the other’s beauty. through the pictures she paints with words, the old woman functions as a stand-in for the absent beloved.81 such scenes of witnessing, enabling, and enacting may have presented an opportunity for audiences outside the text to imagine themselves within the story. third parties can be seen as proxies for readers who have before them two seemingly interchangeable, though in these cases grammatically distinct, objects of desire. this form of triangulation makes space for difference, thus enlarging the field of sexual possibility for the audience, without disturbing the erotics of sameness produced by the pairs and parallels in the stories. 1.3 sexed and racialized bodies when difference is emphasized, however, in sexual scenarios, it is done primarily for the purpose of comedy or derision. this is usually signaled by an explicitly sexed or racialized body. the most graphic references to genitalia in the fifteenth-century manuscript occur in encounters structured by socioeconomic difference. in these situations, the appearance of genitalia suggests sexual arousal but also throws into question the mutuality of the encounter, blurring the line between titillation and ridicule. this reinforces the sense conveyed elsewhere in the manuscript that the sexed body is peripheral to and may even interrupt circuits of desire. unlike socioeconomic difference, which provides fodder for comedy in the stories, racial difference, when marked, invites contempt and, ultimately, violence. black skin is never mentioned as a feature of a beautiful body in the fifteenthcentury manuscript. in terms of color, redness is the dominant attribute of beautiful faces, 78. mahdi, 1:388. 79. mahdi, 1:458–59. other pairs are described as “two moons” (qamarayn), using the arabic dual that stresses the sameness of their beauty; for examples, see mahdi, 1:226, 545 (see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 227a; and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 3b), 592. 80. mahdi, 1:466. 81. mahdi, 1:329–33. 20 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) with ruddy, rosy, or ruby cheeks set in contrast to white teeth, black hair, or a dark beauty spot.82 radiance and luminosity, as when a sun or moon illuminates a sky, may imply a light complexion, but the far-ranging geographies, both imagined and real, that the stories traverse likely conjured various forms of racialized desirability within the parameters of this beauty ideal.83 what is absolutely clear, however, is that all the characters marked as “black” in the stories are also attributed slave status, and the two sexual scenarios that involve a she-character and a “black slave” are presented as evidence of women’s perfidy and punished dramatically. one of the most well-known erotic sequences in the nights, the opening to “the story of the porter and the three ladies,” may be read as both sexual fantasy and physical comedy. it features a porter hired by a well-dressed woman in a market in baghdad who ends up inviting him to spend the evening feasting in her sumptuous home along with her two beautiful sisters. the porter is included in the revelries out of a combination of amusement and pity; he recites verses to plead his case that make the women laugh, and the sister who initially hired him wants to reward him for his hard work. ultimately, he returns the payment he received for his services in the market and says, “take me as a servant (khadīm) rather than a companion (nadīm).”84 his socioeconomic difference thus accentuated, the partying begins, replete with singing, dancing, and various forms of touching: kissing, biting, rubbing, and so on. as they get drunk, a game of erotic wordplay commences. each sister undresses, first washing herself as the others watch, and then sits in the porter’s lap, demanding he name her genitals. every time the porter comes up with a name that does not please her, he gets slapped. when it is his turn, he undresses and does the same, culminating in a witty punchline in which he plays the name of his penis—“inserts” it, perhaps—into the metaphorical names each of the women had previously insisted on for their vaginas.85 the lengthy lists of arabic terms for genitalia that come out of this scene, ranging from the formal to the crude, emphasize sex difference, just as the porter’s service profession and the fact that he is not described as beautiful in any way cement his social and physical difference from the women. although most of the episode seems pleasurable for all involved, the porter’s perspective is described as one of astonishment and bliss, whereas the women’s reactions tend toward amusement and laughter. moreover, although 82. comparisons of skin to cream, silk, or marble seem more immediately evocative of texture than of color. one beautiful character is described twice as having “a neck like marble” (ʿunuq ka-l-marmar); see mahdi, 1:231, 244. husain haddawy translates this as “a neck like white marble,” which seems an instance of reading color into the text; see haddawy, arabian nights, 196, 210. 83. this is reinforced in three places in the fifteenth-century manuscript when a group of concubines (juwar) are described as of “all geographical origins” (sāʾir al-ajnās). one of these scenes is set in a slave market specified as having concubines for sale representing regions and peoples from sub-saharan africa, europe, and central asia; see mahdi, 1:449, 457, 481. 84. mahdi, 1:131–32. 85. for an analysis of the language used in this episode, see erez naaman, “eating figs and pomegranates: taboos and language in the thousand and one nights,” journal of arabic literature 44 (2013): 335–70, at 362–64. for a contrasting reading that focuses on the metaphorical language of the female body, see naddaff, arabesque, especially chapter 2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 21 slapping, like biting can certainly be associated with eroticism, the repeated references to the porter’s sore neck and shoulders to the point that he starts to “worry” (karaba) and to feel as though he is “choking to death” (inkhanaqa) suggest that he is not having as much fun as his hosts. ultimately, in this scene the porter walks the line between being laughed with and being laughed at, and in any case the comedic elements certainly balance, if not outweigh, the erotic ones. if “the story of the porter and the three ladies” can be read as a sexual fantasy in which an ordinary man gets to spend the night of his life with three beautiful women, the tales of the barber’s six brothers in “the hunchback story” feature a series of ordinary men who suffer just for daring to dream of such a scenario. for instance, “the tale of the second brother” stages what could be thought of as a mean-spirited version of the opening to “the porter and the three ladies.” the brother is lured to a mansion by an old woman who promises him luxury and pleasure. she leaves him in an opulent garden where he is soon joined by a beautiful she-character surrounded by companions. as they eat, drink, and listen to music, she pretends to flirt with him, all the while laughing at him behind his back. she begins slapping him and encourages her companions to hit him too. she then orders that they shave his facial hair, take off his clothes, and make him chase her around the garden until his penis becomes erect. at that point she lures him to a trapdoor that plunges him—naked, hairless, and aroused—into the middle of a crowded marketplace, where he gets beaten up and hauled away by the police.86 in two other stories, the barber’s brothers are lured by beautiful women into financial scams, one of which involves a gruesome mass murder. all six tales, including those that do not directly involve sexual encounters, stage elaborate scenes of humiliation or stress the brothers’ gullibility, disability, and poverty.87 though this may not seem funny today, the intended comic effect is evidenced by the fact that the barber’s narration of his brothers’ stories is immediately directed at a caliph, who greets each vignette with laughter and at one point falls on his back in mirth.88 while it may be possible to imagine someone fantasizing about being in the shoes of the porter, it is difficult to imagine the same in the case of the barber’s brothers. one moment in “the hunchback story,” however, offers up a match better suited to such characters. the barber, describing some of his friends to a well-to-do young man he meets in baghdad, emphasizes the beauty of one of them, a garbage collector, in terms reminiscent of other eroticized heand she-characters in the stories, reciting verses that compare his movement to the swaying of a bough.89 although this physical description evokes a beautiful body that anyone might appreciate, it seems to be his socioeconomic status, not his grammatical gender, that makes him a more appropriate match for the barber and his ilk than for the 86. mahdi, 1:354–57. 87. the issue of disability and its relationship to difference, as it manifests here as well as in the various hunchback characters and the one-eyed dervishes, is worth further investigation from a historical perspective; for an illuminating study that addresses this time period, though not the nights, see kristina l. richardson, difference and disability in the medieval islamic world: blighted bodies (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2012). 88. mahdi, 1:363. 89. mahdi, 1:342. 22 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) well-to-do young man, who shows no interest whatsoever. this is also an opportunity for comedy, since the verses conclude with wordplay on the garbage collector’s lowly profession, and the well-to-do young man reacts with amusement as well as exasperation. this poem is notable for being the only one, to the best of my knowledge, in the fifteenthcentury manuscript that reflects the contemporary popularity of a poetic genre in which non-elite men and women were eroticized through witty takes on their urban trades.90 though characters of lower socioeconomic standing are frequently the butts of jokes, their aspirational desires are depicted as unrealistic rather than threatening. characters described as “black,” however, are not only even less fully developed but also associated with sexual deceit and danger.91 as rachel schine has shown, the scenes of infidelity and their violent aftermaths in the frame story are shot through with blackness.92 the parties involved in the first act of infidelity, king shahzaman’s wife and a kitchen servant, are not described physically, but their clear status difference and the murderous rage into which the sight of them sends shahzaman set up the next, more spectacular, scene of infidelity.93 this scene, which is first witnessed by shahzaman from a window and then repeated later under the eyes of both brothers, features king shahrayar’s gazelle-like wife and a “black slave” (ʿabd aswad) named masʿud who jumps down from a tree to mount her. she is accompanied by twenty companions in women’s clothing who, once undressed, appear as ten concubines (juwar) and ten “black slaves” (ʿabīd sūd), both categories of enslaved people but the former connoting higher status than the latter. these ten pairs then proceed to copulate.94 while the concubines are racially unmarked, one of the terms used for the sex acts that ensue is sakhkhamūhum, which means slangily “[the slaves] fucked them” and literally “[the slaves] blackened them.”95 schine argues that this verb and the mass violence with which king shahrayar ultimately reacts—killing all of the women in the palace and vowing to take a new wife every night only to execute her in the morning—reveal profound anxiety about racial mixing in the royal household.96 this anxiety is intensified not only by the fact of the deception but also by the apparent difficulty of detecting it, as each time upon getting 90. see adam talib, “citystruck,” in the city in arabic literature: classical and modern perspectives, ed. nizar f. hermes and gretchen head, 138–64 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2018); thomas bauer, “‘ayna hādhā min al-mutanabbī!’: toward an aesthetics of mamluk literature,” mamlūk studies review 17 (2013): 5–22; and rosenthal, “male and female.” 91. the same could be said of sexual relations across the human/demon divide, and demons are sometimes described as “black” or associated with “darkness”; see mahdi, 1:23, 160. the difference is that they are portrayed as the captors of women, rather than as the women’s chosen sexual partners. 92. rachel schine, “reading race and racism in the 1001 nights,” in approaches to teaching the arabian nights, ed. paulo lemos horta (forthcoming). see also ferial j. ghazoul, nocturnal poetics: “the arabian nights” in comparative context (cairo: american university in cairo press, 1996), 26–27, 32–33. 93. mahdi, 1:57. in eighteenthand nineteenth-century versions, this “man from among the kitchen boys” (rajul min ṣibyān al-maṭbakh) was changed to a “black slave” (ʿabd aswad); see mahdi, 2:34. 94. mahdi, 1:59. 95. the concubines are not described as “white” in the fifteenth-century manuscript. that adjective is inserted only in eighteenth-century manuscripts; see mahdi, 2:35. for the use of the verb sakhkhama, see mahdi, 1:62. 96. schine, “reading race.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 23 dressed the group “became twenty concubines to anyone who saw them (yarāhum).”97 thus framed by an optical illusion of sameness, the dysfunction at the heart of this orgiastic spectacle is rendered even more shocking. a more elaborate example comes not long after the frame story in “the tale of the enchanted king,” in which a king discovers that his wife has been cheating on him with a “diseased black slave” (ʿabd aswad mubtalan). the combination of blackness, slave status, and a “blighted body” seems intended to elicit disgust from the audience.98 moreover, his unkempt dwelling in a slum outside of town, the crude food and drink he offers her, and the rough floor where they lie together present a parodic inversion of the opulent erotic scenes in other stories and make the queen’s behavior appear particularly irrational and demeaning. even worse, her desire for him seems greater than his desire for her. she calls him “beloved of my heart” (ḥabīb qalbī), whereas he calls her “cursed woman” (malʿūna) and threatens to withhold sex if she does not do as he wants.99 the entire situation stands in stark contrast to her marriage to a king whose beauty is evoked at the beginning of the story and whose status as her cousin makes their match in many ways an exemplar of sameness. ultimately, this king, with help from another king who feels sorry for him, manages to get revenge, and both the wife and her lover end up slain. these stories of infidelity and retribution emphasize the treachery of women and the abjection to which their lack of self-control may drive them, themes that come up elsewhere in the nights. the likelihood that audiences would have imagined some of the many concubines that fill the pages of the fifteenth-century manuscript with dark skin suggests that the problem in these cases was not just racial mixing, but queens choosing slaves over kings.100 this is arguably also why the bodies of the “black slaves” in these scenarios are unsexed; they are primarily signifiers of women’s duplicity and sexual excess and only secondarily racial stereotypes or biological threats in and of themselves.101 nonetheless, it is likely that these stories confirmed both misogynistic and racist attitudes among the audience of the fifteenth-century manuscript. as opposed to the situations in which sexed 97. mahdi, 1:59, 61. 98. mahdi, 1:117. i take “blighted body” from the subtitle of richardson’s difference and disability in the medieval islamic world. translators sometimes render mubtal as “leprous,” though richardson shows that more specific terms tended to be used for leprosy in this period. 99. mahdi, 1:117. 100. for examples of diversity among concubines in the stories, see mahdi, 1:368, 449, 457, 481. for explicit mentions of a “black concubine,” see mahdi, 1:208, 296. for a related interpretation of the “husband-wifemaster-slave” dynamic in the frame story, see beaumont, slave of desire, 49. as schine reminds me, “this is a legal breach as well as a social one” (personal communication). according to kecia ali, the possibility that women might have sexual rights to their slaves akin to those granted men (and the related possibility that women might therefore have licit access to more than one sexual partner as men did) was shut down early on in the development of islamic jurisprudence; see ali, marriage and slavery, 12–15, 176–83. 101. that said, in other examples of popular arabic literature from the period, it is “the female body’s sexual and biological vulnerability [that] is cautionarily represented through the black body”; see rachel schine, “conceiving the pre-modern black-arab hero: on the gendered production of racial difference in sīrat al-amīrah dhāt al-himmah,” journal of arabic literature 48 (2017): 298–326, at 325. 24 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) bodies highlight poor men’s inappropriate desire for comedic effect, the situations involving racialized bodies highlight rich women’s excessive desire and always result in death.102 part 2: modern (mis-)readings of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur” while sex across racial difference retains its negative associations in the modern dissemination of the nights, a new set of anxieties crops up over sameness.103 what seems taken for granted in the fifteenth-century manuscript—namely, that heand she-characters are eroticized in the same way and that the field of sexual possibility is not structured by binary constructions of sex or embodied gender—seems to require explanation or intervention starting in the nineteenth century. specifically, the two most important arabic print versions of the nights, the bulaq (1835) and calcutta ii (1839–42) editions, alter the conclusion to “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur” so as to emphasize sexual binaries.104 this tendency is magnified in subsequent translations and scholarship that read sexed bodies into other parts of the story in order to make sense of its erotics. “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur” provides a useful case study for these nineteenth-century changes, as it features recurring evocations of physical beauty, multiple sexual pairings, and an extended episode of cross-dressing. it has also received particular attention in recent scholarship on sexuality. it presents, however, challenges for a diachronic analysis, as the fact that it was cut off in midstream in the fifteenth-century manuscript means that it is more difficult to establish a baseline for comparison. that said, later manuscripts sometimes preserve older material than earlier manuscripts do, especially when oral transmission and multifarious, fragmentary, and lost manuscript traditions are involved, as they are with the nights.105 for my analysis, i use the version presented in mahdi’s critical edition, which is based on the fifteenth-century manuscript 102. in a third example from “the story of the three apples,” a husband kills his wife because of a rumor, later disproved, that she was having an affair with a “black slave”; see mahdi, 1:223. 103. the racism in later editions may in fact be more pronounced. for instance, the character described as a “diseased black slave” in the fifteenth-century manuscript is, in nineteenth-century arabic manuscripts and print editions, further ridiculed for his protruding, ugly lips. such elements were exaggerated even further in nineteenth-century english and french translations, like those of richard burton and joseph charles mardrus, just as, in some more recent examples, they have been downplayed or erased. for more on this, see schine, “reading race”; and robert irwin, “the dark side of ‘the arabian nights,’” critical muslim 13 (2015), https:// www.criticalmuslim.io/the-dark-side-of-the-arabian-nights/. 104. w. h. macnaghten, ed., the alif lailá, or book of the thousand nights and a night/alf layla wa-layla, 4 vols. (calcutta: w. thacker, 1839–42) [hereafter calcutta ii]; and ʿabd al-raḥmān al-ṣafatī al-sharqāwī, ed., alf layla wa-layla, 2 vols. (cairo: al-maṭbaʿa al-kubrā bi-būlāq, 1251/1835) [hereafter bulaq]. for the purposes of this analysis, i am considering “the story of amjad and asʿad,” which is presented as a continuation of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur” in most of the versions under study here, as a separate story, in part on the basis of garcin’s historicist assessment; see garcin, pour une lecture historique, 352–53. it has also received less attention in scholarship on sexuality. therefore, when i refer to the conclusion of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” i am referring to the reunion between qamar al-zaman and budur in the ebony islands. for a different assessment of “the story of amjad and asʿad” from a literary perspective, see jamel eddine bencheikh, les mille et une nuits ou la parole prisonnière (paris: gallimard, 1988), 97–135. 105. for an example of this dynamic, see chraïbi, “introduction,” 54–58. https://www.criticalmuslim.io/the-dark-side-of-the-arabian-nights/ https://www.criticalmuslim.io/the-dark-side-of-the-arabian-nights/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 25 through the middle of night 281 and then concluded on the basis of a manuscript copied in egypt in 1764, though this is missing the crucial final scene. i supplement this with the three seventeenth-century manuscripts cited in the first part of this article, two of which are standalone versions of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” and i cross-check them with three early nineteenth-century representatives of the manuscript tradition known as zotenberg’s egyptian recension (zer) that are among the first extant examples to feature a full 1,001 nights.106 where they diverge, i tend to prefer the earliest manuscript version available and give variations in the notes, but all of them have more in common with each other than they do with the bulaq and calcutta ii print editions, particularly at the story’s conclusion. this matters because these editions have come to represent the nights for a modern global audience.107 it is possible that what i see as changes in the print editions are actually continuities with earlier oral traditions, manuscripts i have not studied, or now-lost manuscripts. however, the way in which the print version of the conclusion differs from all the manuscripts i have consulted persuades me that the difference is the work of nineteenth-century editors, magnified by subsequent translators and scholars, concerned with (or simply defaulting to) modern sexual binaries. as we have seen, the beginning of the story features a beauty contest adjudicated by demons. qamar al-zaman is deemed the winner for the restraint he shows when presented 106. these are gotha forschungsbibliothek ms. orient. a 2633 [hereafter gotha]; munich bayerische staatsbibliothek cod.arab 623 [hereafter munich]; and bnf arabe 3602. the latter two manuscripts were both copied by the same person, though they are not identical texts. the munich manuscript is dated 1806. my analysis of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur” indicates that bnf arabe 3602 is identical to bnf arabe 3598, so i include references only to the former (which is a clearer copy). according to garcin, both of these manuscripts are identical to cairo dār al-kutub 13523z, which is dated 1809; see garcin, pour une lecture historique, 25–26. for more on zotenberg’s egyptian recension, see grotzfeld, “manuscript tradition.” i have also cross-checked with a third standalone manuscript of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” datable to the seventeenth century: bnf arabe 3622. this was one of the manuscripts brought to france from syria by antoine galland, and ibrahim akel suggests it may have been used as the basis for the story as it appears in galland’s french translation (if that is the case, however, galland took considerable liberties with it); see akel, “quelques remarques sur la bibliothèque d’antoine galland et l’arrivée des mille et une nuits en occident,” in antoine galland et l’orient des savants, ed. pierre-sylvain filliozat and michel zink, 199–215 (paris: académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2019), 205–9. what is interesting for the purposes of this study, however, is that the text of bnf arabe 3622 is identical to the version of the story presented in a third early print edition, known as the breslau edition; see maximilien habicht and heinrich fleischer, eds., tausend und eine nacht/alf layla wa-layla, 12 vols. (breslau: j. max, 1825–43) [hereafter breslau]. this version differs in a few striking places from the other versions under study here, and i will provide details in the notes. 107. for more on these editions, see mahdi, thousand and one nights, 87–126. famous early english translators of the bulaq and calcutta ii editions include edward w. lane (bulaq) and richard burton (calcutta ii). more recently, calcutta ii has been translated into english by malcolm c. lyons with ursula lyons and into french by jamel eddine bencheikh and andré miquel, whereas husain haddawy has produced a collection of select stories (including “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur”) from the bulaq edition. see lyons with lyons, trans., the arabian nights: tales of 1001 nights, 3 vols. (london: penguin books, 2008); bencheikh and miquel, trans., les mille et une nuits, 3 vols. (paris: gallimard, 2005); and haddawy, trans., sindbad and other stories from the arabian nights (new york: w. w. norton, 2008). for the way english translations of the nights influenced its reception among nineteenth-century arabicand persian-speaking audiences, see kamran rastegar, “the changing value of alf laylah wa-laylah for nineteenth-century arabic, persian, and english readerships,” journal of arabic literature 36, no. 3 (2005): 269–87. 26 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) with the near-naked sleeping body of budur. even though it is his gendered behavior that wins him the day, it is the physical sameness of the two bodies that dominates the narration of the sequence, presented initially in lengthy descriptions of the beauty of each and then repeated as the contest ensues, punctuated by astonished exclamations on the part of the jinn about how similar the two look. qamar al-zaman’s beauty is described right at the beginning of the story in terms that recall previous descriptions, including the poem quoted at the beginning of this article that is first used for the beloved of the mistress of the house in “the story of the porter and the three ladies.” the fifteenth-century manuscript presents only the first six verses of the twelve-verse poem for qamar al-zaman.108 in two of the early nineteenth-century manuscripts i consulted, the poem appears in its full twelve verses with only minor variations in wording from its first appearance in “the story of the porter and the three ladies.”109 in the bulaq and calcutta ii editions, however, only ten of the twelve verses appear, with what may be a telling omission.110 one of the dropped verses is the seventh verse, which praises qamar al-zaman for his bough-like figure and the “two pomegranates on his chest.” this verse may not have conformed to nineteenthcentury norms for embodied masculinity, and its omission serves to downplay the sense of interchangeability among beautiful heand she-characters that repetition of this kind of poetry conveys.111 even without that verse, twentieth-century french translators jamel eddine bencheikh and andré miquel feel the need to explain the poem in a footnote: “this evocation is more reminiscent, classically so, of a woman and becomes only more suspect given that it has to do with a young man obviously disinclined toward the other sex… and given that one of these women, so disparaged by him, will save him.”112 this reading suggests that the poem may not actually describe qamar al-zaman’s body, or, if it does, his 108. there is a slight variation in the first verse. compare mahdi, 1:206 (“the story of the porter and the three ladies”) and 536 (“the story of qamar al-zaman and budur”). for a full english translation of the twelveverse poem when it first appears in the fifteenth-century manuscript, see haddawy, arabian nights, 166–67. 109. bnf arabe 3602, fols. 435b–436a; gotha, fol. 49b. one of the seventeenth-century manuscripts i consulted includes eleven verses of the poem, omitting only the second verse; see bnf arabe 3612, fol. 224a–224b. the other two seventeenth-century manuscripts are missing the beginning of the story where this poem occurs. 110. bulaq, 1:345; calcutta ii, 1:815–16. one of the manuscripts i consulted also omits the seventh verse: munich, fol. 450a. 111. this poem does not appear at all in “the story of the porter and the three ladies” in the bulaq edition; see bulaq, 1:44–46. it does appear in the earlier story in the calcutta ii edition, and there it includes the “pomegranate” verse but drops two others (the fourth and the sixth); see calcutta ii, 1:125–26. the breslau edition has the poem in “the story of the porter and the three ladies” (breslau, 1:318–19) but drops it entirely in “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur” and inserts instead into the first description of budur a description of her breasts as being like “a large pair of pomegranates” (breslau, 3:182; bnf arabe 3622, fol. 5b). 112. bencheikh and miquel, mille et une nuits, 1:1196, n. 3. they do not comment on the poem when it occurs earlier in “the story of the porter and the three ladies.” by contrast, in his 1885 translation of the calcutta ii edition, richard f. burton restores the “pomegranate” verse to “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” explaining in a footnote, “these lines occur in night xvii.; so i borrow from torrens (p. 163) by way of variety”; see burton, trans., the book of the thousand nights and a night, 10 vols. (reprint: project gutenberg ebook, 2001), 3:n. 232. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 27 looks are a function of his “disinclination toward the other sex” and/or a prefiguration of the beautiful female body that will “save” him. the assumption that the story opens with a crisis of sexual orientation—especially one that muddies the otherwise clear waters of sexual dimorphism—does not match up with the way any of the arabic versions under study here present the issue. in the fifteenthcentury manuscript, both qamar al-zaman and budur reject the prospect of marriage until they lay eyes on each other. in qamar al-zaman’s case, he explains his rejection by saying that his “soul is not sympathetic to/inclined toward women” (lā lī nafs tamīlu ilā al-nisāʾ) because he has read cautionary tales about their deceitfulness. his position is amplified by additional poetry in the nineteenth-century versions, but the rationale remains the same: women are not to be trusted.113 although it might be possible to read the verb “to be inclined toward” in terms of sexual object choice, the immediate context in which it occurs, reinforced by the broader environment of the nights with its prominent theme of marital infidelity, strongly suggests that it is marriage, not the female body, that qamar al-zaman is refusing.114 in budur’s case, all versions have her explaining that she is already a princess (sayyida) and a ruler (ḥākima, malika) and does not want a man to rule over her.115 while the explanations invoke gender stereotypes and norms (women are treacherous; men wield more power in marriage), the more striking effect is to stress the sameness of the two protagonists: both are powerful, self-sufficient, and loath to put themselves in a structurally vulnerable position. the fact that they are both promptly locked up by their fathers to punish them for their disobedience only reinforces the parallel. in other words, the problem is not one of object choice in which qamar al-zaman just needs to find a sufficiently desirable female body; it is that both qamar al-zaman and budur need to meet 113. compare mahdi, 1:534–35; bnf arabe 3612, fols. 223b–224a; and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 2a; with bnf 3602, fols. 434a, 435a; gotha, fols. 47b–48b; munich, fols. 448a, 449a; bulaq, 1:343–44; and calcutta ii, 1:812–14. in “the hunchback story,” the young man from baghdad who meets the barber is also initially described as a hater of women, but no reason is given. one glimpse of a beautiful woman on a balcony and his “hatred of women was reversed by love”; see mahdi, 1:328–29. 114. on the use of this verb form, see el-rouayheb, before homosexuality, 48–49. the french translator joseph charles mardrus embellishes these explanations to make them seem much more like sexual preferences; see mardrus, the book of the thousand and one night, trans. e. powys mathers, 4 vols. (1923; repr., london: routledge, 1986), 2:3, 9 [hereafter mardrus-mathers]. this has led brad epps, on the basis of the mathers translation of mardrus, to argue, “inasmuch as both qamar and budur had already professed to reject not only marriage but also any interest in the opposite sex, qamar’s self-control may be as consistent with his previously expressed penchant as budur’s lack of self-control is inconsistent with hers”; see epps, “comparison, competition, and cross-dressing: cross-cultural analysis in a contested world,” in babayan and najmabadi, islamicate sexualities: translations across temporal geographies of desire, 114–60, at 119–20 and n. 17. david ghanim copies this word-for-word from epps; see ghanim, the sexual world of the arabian nights (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018), 40. 115. see mahdi, 1:542; bnf arabe 3612, fol. 226b; bnf arabe 3621, fol. 1b; bnf arabe 3602, fol. 440b; gotha, fol. 54b; munich, fol. 455a–455b; bulaq, 1:349; and calcutta ii, 1:825. the highly abridged bnf arabe 3623 (fol. 3a) just says she “does not want marriage.” 28 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) someone similar enough to themselves to put their fears about the gendered institution of marriage to rest.116 like bencheikh and miquel, other translators and scholars read a binary construction of sex into the story’s opening sequence. brad epps claims that phallic imagery recurs in the beauty competition and that its resolution hinges in large part on the presentation of “women as lacking ‘the thing’ that men have and, perhaps on the basis of that ‘lack,’ as being less capable of self-control …”117 however, almost all of the examples of phallic imagery are embellishments made by joseph charles mardrus in his notorious sixteen-volume french translation (1899–1904) as rendered in english by e. powys mathers in 1923.118 for example, mardrus tempers the physical resemblance between the two protagonists by emphatically sexing their bodies: “… the two upon the couch might be twins, save in the matter of their middle parts. each had the same moonlit face, the same slim waist, and the same rich round croup; if the girl lacked the youth’s central ornament, she made up for it in marvelous paps which confessed her sex” (italics mine).119 the arabic versions i have consulted liken qamar al-zaman and budur to “two moons” (qamarayn) and/or “siblings” (akhawayn) when they are first placed next to each other, but it is likely that the rest of the passage was inserted at that point in the story by mardrus, and i have found no arabic equivalent for the italicized phrases in any version i have consulted.120 although the arabic manuscripts and print editions alike portray the excitement of each protagonist upon encountering parts of the other’s body that may be interpreted as signifying binary sex—budur’s breasts, qamar al-zaman’s penis—these are very brief mentions, particularly in comparison with the lengthy descriptions of other aspects of their physical beauty.121 at one point a demon 116. the tendency to conflate marriage and heterosexuality is an effect of modern discourses of sexuality. fedwa malti-douglas’s reading of the frame story, while groundbreaking and insightful in so many ways, is an example; see malti-douglas, woman’s body, woman’s word: gender and discourse in arabo-islamic writing (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1991), chapter 1; and idem, “homosociality, heterosexuality, and sharazâd,” in marzolph and van leeuwen, arabian nights encyclopedia, 1:38–42. 117. epps, “comparison, competition, and cross-dressing,” 121. 118. one is epps’s own misinterpretation of the phrase “his waist sometimes complained of the weight which went below it”; see epps, “comparison, competition, and cross-dressing,” 118. mardrus leaves this ambiguous (mardrus-mathers, 2:2), but the arabic versions clearly refer to the weight of his hips (ardāfihi), not of his penis, a description consistent with the recurring image of beautiful men and women with fleshy hips and buttocks below slim waists; see bnf arabe 3612, fol. 224a; bnf arabe 3602, fol. 435b; gotha, fol. 49b; munich, fol. 450a; bulaq, 1:345; and calcutta ii, 1:815. among mardrus’s blatant embellishments is the reference to the enormous zabb (an arabic term for penis) on one of the demons, which does not appear in any arabic version i have seen; see mardrus-mathers, 2:14; and epps, “comparison, competition, and cross-dressing,” 118. for more on the mardrus translation, see irwin, arabian nights, 36–40. 119. mardrus-mathers, 2:12. 120. for this scene, see mahdi, 1:545; bnf arabe 3602, fol. 442a; gotha, fol. 56b; munich, fol. 457b (qamarayn aw badrayn … akhawayn); bnf arabe 3612, fol. 227a (omits akhawayn); bulaq, 1:351; calcutta ii, 1:828 (tawʾamān aw akhawān munfaridān); and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 3b (qamarayn aw najmatayn aw tuffāḥatayn). bnf arabe 3621 does not include this section. 121. for breasts (nuhūduhā), see mahdi, 1:548; bnf arabe 3612, fol. 228b; bnf arabe 3602, fol. 444b; gotha, fol. 59a; munich, fol. 460a; and bulaq, 1:353. the only variant is calcutta ii, 1:833 (nuhūduhā mithl ḥuqqayn min al-ʿāj), while bnf arabe 3621 is missing this section. bnf arabe 3623 does not mention qamar al-zaman looking al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 29 observes that “the sweetness of women is a thing and the sweetness of men is a[nother] thing” (ḥalī al-nisāʾ shayʾ wa-ḥalī al-rijāl shayʾ), but in no specific way does the scene indicate the relevance of the sexed body to either the kind or the degree of beauty.122 though budur’s reaction to qamar al-zaman is more intense than is qamar al-zaman’s to budur, it is presented as a matter of masculine self-control rather than as one of embodiment. thus while it is true that the outcome is a gender hierarchy, it is not one rooted in the body or its “middle parts.” the next phase of the story has also prompted readings that understand sexual attraction as a matter of object choice. sahar amer calls this phase a “lesbian interlude” and argues that it highlights the appeal of a female body to another female body.123 after qamar al-zaman and budur, so fleetingly united by supernatural forces, eventually find their way to each other in the light of day, as it were, they get married. however, on a journey together qamar al-zaman is lured away from his wife’s sleeping body and loses his bearings. waking up alone, budur realizes she must cope without qamar al-zaman and decides to dress in his clothes. traveling as a man, budur arrives in the capital of the ebony islands and is given an audience with the king, who is so taken with the beauty and regal bearing of the person he sees in front of him that he offers budur his kingdom and his daughter, hayat al-nufus, in marriage. the newlyweds pass several nights together before budur, under pressure to consummate the marriage, tells hayat al-nufus that she is a woman. together they devise a ruse involving chicken blood to convince her father the consummation has taken place, thus extending the marriage and budur’s reign. during this time, all of the officials of the kingdom are fully convinced that budur is a man, and the story describes budur as a skillful, just, and beloved ruler.124 at her breasts at all. for qamar al-zaman’s genitals, see mahdi, 1:551 (shayʾ bayn fakhidhayhi); bnf arabe 3612, fol. 229a; bnf arabe 3621, fols. 3b–4a (hādhā alladhī bayn afkhādhihi wa-huwa isbaʿ); bnf arabe 3602, fol. 446b; gotha, fol. 61a; munich, fol. 462a; bulaq, 1:355; and calcutta ii, 1:837 (ayrihi). bnf arabe 3623 does not mention his genitals at all. by contrast, in mardrus’s version budur lingers over qamar al-zaman’s penis, and it is implied that she inserts it into her vagina. she then later tells her nurse that she lost her virginity; see mardrus-mathers, 2:18, 26. in the arabic versions, she kisses him between his eyes and on his mouth and hands and then embraces him, putting her arm under his neck; see mahdi, 1:551; bnf arabe 3612, fol. 229a; bnf arabe 3621, fol. 4a; and bnf arabe 3623, fol. 4a (slight variant). for variants that have budur kissing him all over his body, see bnf arabe 3602, fol. 446b; gotha, fol. 61a; munich, fol. 462a; bulaq, 1:355; and calcutta ii, 1:837. i do not see any evidence anywhere that she “mounts him,” as stated by ghanim, sexual world, 40. 122. bnf arabe 3612, fol. 227a; bnf arabe 3621, fol. 2b. this line is dropped completely in bnf arabe 3623. the eighteenth-century manuscript used by mahdi reads, “the sweetness of women is different from (ghayr) the sweetness of men”; see mahdi, 1:544. in the nineteenth-century manuscripts and print editions, the text reads, “the female case (ḥāl al-unthā) is different from the male case (ḥāl al-dhakar)”; see bnf arabe 3602, fol. 441b; gotha, fol. 56a; munich, fol. 457a; bulaq, 1:351; and calcutta ii, 1:827. mardrus changes it completely: “if there is equality between a male and a female, the male bears off the prize” (mardrus-mathers, 2:12). 123. sahar amer, “cross-dressing and female same-sex marriage in medieval french and arabic literatures,” in babayan and najmabadi, islamicate sexualities, 72–113, at 77. relatedly, garcin suggests that budur may have been modeled on the “lesbian” daughter of the timurid ruler shah rukh (r. 1405–47); see garcin, pour une lecture historique, 204. 124. mahdi, 1:592–93; bnf arabe 3612, fols. 237b–238a; bnf arabe 3621, fols. 18b–19b; bnf arabe 3623, fols. 9a–9b; bnf arabe 3602, fols. 468b–469a; gotha, fols. 86b–87b; munich, fols. 485b–486a; bulaq, 1:375; calcutta ii, 30 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) in some ways, this is a remarkable episode, both for budur’s utterly persuasive embodiment of a young man and accomplished ruler and for the extended marital relationship between budur and hayat al-nufus.125 however, in other ways it is merely an extension of the pattern already established in the fifteenth-century manuscript of the nights in which beautiful characters are marked by sameness, regardless of gender. indeed, the nights budur and hayat al-nufus spend together are very much a parallel of erotic encounters in earlier stories. there is a shared bed, conversation, playing, laughing, embracing, caressing, kissing, and sleeping, at the very least.126 as with other ambiguous episodes (such as that between the third dervish and the young man in the subterranean chamber), i interpret these activities as strongly suggestive of eroticism even if the verbs used in previous stories for sexual intercourse are not used here.127 thus, although i would not call this an example of “homosexual marriage” or “lesbian sexuality,” as amer does, it is not because i do not believe any sex acts took place. it is because i do not believe that this episode is any more indicative of sameness in sexual relations than are any of the other pairings in the nights, nor do i think it involves object choice. amer’s reading depends heavily on the assumption that budur’s and hayat al-nufus’s bodies are to be understood as categorically different from qamar al-zaman’s, a reading that, like others examined above, imposes modern sexual binaries onto the story. key to amer’s argument is the moment in which budur declares herself to be a woman to hayat al-nufus. in the eighteenth-century manuscript that mahdi follows at this point in his critical edition, budur switches to a “real,” “feminine” voice and uncovers her breasts and genitals.128 the only earlier manuscript to include this scene does not refer to breasts or genitals at all but says rather that she uncovers “her thighs” and hayat al-nufus sees that she is “a virginal girl” (bint bikr), at which point budur then explains that she is an “elite [secluded] woman” (imrāʾ dhāt khidr).129 the earlier manuscript thus stresses sameness of 1:880–81. throughout the story, the narrator uses feminine pronouns and verb forms to refer to budur, even while she is cross-dressed. however, when she is referred to directly by another character who believes her to be a man, that character uses masculine pronouns and verb forms. 125. this has prompted wendy doniger to argue that budur should be seen as the story’s protagonist; see doniger, “the rings of budur and qamar al-zaman,” in scheherazade’s children: global encounters with the arabian nights, ed. philip f. kennedy and marina warner, 108–26 (new york: new york university press, 2013). 126. mahdi, 1:592–93, 595; bnf arabe 3612, fol. 238a; bnf arabe 3621, fol. 19a; bnf arabe 3623, fol. 9b; bnf arabe 3602, fols. 468b–469b, 471b; gotha, fols. 86b–87b, 89b–90a; munich, fols. 485b–486b, 488b; bulaq, 1:375, 377; calcutta ii, 1:880–81, 885. 127. amer argues that the formulation in the eighteenth-century manuscript that mahdi follows at this point of the story, dakhalat budūr ilā ḥayāt al-nufūs, refers to penetrating a sexual partner; see amer, “crossdressing and female same-sex marriage,” 96; and mahdi, 1:592. the same formulation appears in gotha, fol. 86b. in the two seventeenth-century manuscripts i consulted, the text reads, rather, dakhalat budūr al-bayt; see bnf arabe 3612, fol. 238a; and bnf arabe 3621, fol. 19a. the line is skipped entirely in bnf arabe 3602, fol. 468b; bnf arabe 3623, fol. 9b; munich, fol. 485b; bulaq, 1:375; and calcutta ii, 1:880. 128. mahdi, 1:595. 129. bnf arabe 3612, fol. 238b. the other manuscripts use similar wording for her vocal change, but then say only that budur “uncovered her situation” and “showed herself” to hayat al-nufus; see bnf arabe 3602, fol. 471a; munich, fol. 488a. one of them adds the part about budur being an elite woman; see gotha, fol. 89b. for al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 31 gender and status between budur and hayat al-nufus rather than the sexing of the body. in either version, this moment may have been received by the audience, to use amer’s words, “in titillation” and as a “sexual act,” but its cursory presentation contrasts with the lengthy and poetic evocations of budur’s memories of qamar al-zaman while she is with hayat al-nufus.130 this is not evidence that budur prefers qamar al-zaman to hayat al-nufus or male bodies to female bodies. it is, rather, to suggest that in that room three commensurable objects of desire are conjured. just before budur declares herself a woman, she is portrayed gazing upon hayat al-nufus and reminiscing about qamar al-zaman: when princess budur entered hayat al-nufus’s room and she found the candles burning and hayat al-nufus sitting there like the moon on the fourteenth night, she gazed upon her and thought about her beloved qamar al-zaman and what had passed between them of the good life, of embracing necks, [kissing mouths], hugging chests, letting down hair, nibbling cheeks, and biting breasts.131 it is significant that budur takes in the candlelit spectacle of hayat al-nufus’s beauty and then immediately recalls her sexual past. the generic references to activities with body parts (all plural nouns without possessive pronouns) might apply to any of the three characters “in the room” at that moment. in the nineteenth-century manuscripts, in fact, this prose passage is followed by a poem describing qamar al-zaman’s beauty in terms that could easily be used for budur or hayat al-nufus, including verses about him shaking out his locks and unveiling his face and about his slender waist and heavy buttocks.132 it is this multidirectional circuit of desire, i would submit, rather than budur’s sexed body, that charges the scene with eroticism. while amer sees the heightened pleasure that follows budur’s revelation as evidence of “an alternative female space” where “heterosexuality is critiqued, denaturalized, animalized,” it is far from clear to me that this is about female bodies or even gendered solidarity, much less homosexuality vs. heterosexuality. 133 however, i certainly agree with amer that scenes like this one may have provided fodder for audience members to fantasize about a multiplicity of sexual configurations, including those not sanctioned or otherwise available in their lives.134 a slightly abridged version, see bnf arabe 3623, fol. 9b. bnf arabe 3621 skips over this part. the print editions do not include any references to budur’s body, voice, or status and merely say she “showed herself” to hayat al-nufus; see bulaq, 1:377; and calcutta ii, 1:884. 130. amer, “cross-dressing and female same-sex marriage,” 98–100. 131. mahdi, 1:594. see also bnf arabe 3612, fol. 238b; and bnf arabe 3621, fol. 19b. i add the “kissing mouths” from the nineteenth-century manuscripts: bnf arabe 3602, fol. 470a; gotha, fol. 88b; munich, fol. 487a. this passage is dropped in bnf arabe 3623. 132. the poem ranges from twelve to fifteen verses; see munich, fol. 487a–487b; gotha, fol. 89a–89b; and bnf arabe 3602, fol. 470a–470b. the printed editions do not include the prose passage and give only eight verses of the poem; see bulaq, 1:376; and calcutta ii, 1:883. 133. amer, “cross-dressing and female same-sex marriage,” 99–101. 134. this could also be said of the conclusion to the story, in which the three end up in one household together. although this restores the gender order (qamar al-zaman becomes king in budur’s place, while 32 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) that said, the concluding scene, particularly with the dramatic changes made to the bulaq and calcutta ii editions, may have contributed to the tendency to see this story as exploring the relationship between the sexed body and sexual attraction. in all the manuscript versions i have consulted, when budur finally locates qamar al-zaman, she plays a trick on him in which she maintains her guise as a king to force qamar al-zaman into sexual activity.135 throughout the encounter qamar al-zaman refuses repeatedly and expresses extreme distress, even breaking down in tears several times, while budur alternately cajoles, threatens, and screams at him. it is a drawn-out scene in which budur forces him first to give her a leg massage and then to straddle her and put his hand underneath her tunic, ostensibly to fondle her “stick” (qaḍīb).136 in each of these two phases of physical contact, the narrative breathlessly follows qamar al-zaman’s hands as they move up budur’s lower body, encountering skin smoother than cream at each turn. by the end, qamar al-zaman has transitioned from tears to exclamations of surprise and pleasure. when he touches her genitals, he exclaims: “by god, how lovely! a king with a pussy (kuss)!”137 even then, it does not occur to qamar al-zaman that he is with a woman, much less his long-lost wife, until she starts laughing, asks how he could have forgotten her, and takes him into her arms. readers today are likely to understand this as a scene of rape. there is no doubt that qamar al-zaman is being coerced into physical intimacy against his will. he invokes god’s protection repeatedly and at one point uses the term “transgression” (fāḥisha) and at another “ugly thing” (shayʾ qabīḥ).138 it seems that his distress is at least in part due to budur becomes a co-wife with hayat al-nufus), it keeps the possibilities for sexual desire open-ended and multidirectional. garcin, however, questions this ending, wondering whether it was rewritten to enable the addition of “the story of amjad and asʿad”; see garcin, pour une lecture historique, 119–20. 135. this scene is missing from the mahdi edition and has been rather violently crossed out in bnf arabe 3621, fols. 23b–24a. the nineteenth-century manuscripts i have consulted are very close to the version in bnf arabe 3612, which i will follow below, noting variants in the notes. 136. bnf arabe 3612, fol. 242b; bnf arabe 3602, fol. 479a; gotha, fol. 100a; munich, fol. 496b. bnf arabe 3623 does not include this. 137. bnf arabe 3612, fol. 243a. bnf arabe 3623, fol. 11a, has faraj rather than kuss. the nineteenth-century manuscripts use much the same wording: bnf arabe 3602, fol. 479b; gotha, fol. 100b; munich, fol. 496b. the breslau edition has qamar al-zaman laugh and say, “a king with a woman’s tool!” (malik wa-lahu ālat al-nisāʾ); see breslau, 3:274; and bnf arabe 3622, fol. 25b. there is a parallel here with “the story of ʿali shar and zumurrud,” which does not appear in the fifteenth-century manuscript. zumurrud, a concubine disguised as a king, plays the same trick on her long-lost lover, ʿ ali shar, as budur plays on qamar al-zaman. when ʿ ali reaches between the king’s legs, he exclaims, “a king with a pussy! this is a marvel!” only after zumurrud sees that he is thoroughly sexually aroused does she tell him who she is. unlike the conclusion to “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur,” however, the conclusion to this story seems to be the same in the nineteenth-century manuscripts i have consulted and the print editions. see, for instance, bulaq, 2:234; and calcutta ii, 2:249–50; and compare with gotha, fol. 226a. 138. bnf arabe 3612, fol. 242b. bnf arabe 3623, fol. 11a, has “the sultan wants to ruin me” (al-sulṭān yurīd yaʿmal maʿī al-ʿāṭil) (?). the nineteenth-century manuscripts i have consulted insert a line that may be read as “the king wants to make me effeminate” (al-malik yaṭlubu yukhannit[h]unī), adding that this would be a “reprehensible act” (munkar), a term that, like fāḥisha, has a religious connotation. this may make more explicit qamar al-zaman’s objections, though the rest of the scene is very close to that in the seventeenthcentury manuscript. see bnf arabe 3602, fol. 478b; gotha, fol. 99a; and munich, fol. 495b. on takhannuth al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 33 his belief that he is being confronted with male anatomy, as the prospect of touching a “stick” provokes a fresh round of protests and the discovery of a “pussy” cheers him up considerably, even without knowing whose it is. however, even before this, the text implies that there is mutual pleasure in the encounter. in between his protests, qamar al-zaman is portrayed wondering at the softness of the king’s skin, and his hand keeps shaking and slipping, signs of sexual attraction elsewhere in the nights. likewise, budur’s arousal is evoked in physical terms; “her insides tremble” (khafaqat aḥshāʾuhā) at qamar al-zaman’s touch.139 these reactions may be interpreted as either increasing or belying the vehemence of qamar al-zaman’s objections and budur’s threats. arguably the most prominent element in the scene is the suspense generated by the gradual exploration of a body beneath clothes, as if anything is possible—including a pleasant surprise. here clothing makes the sexed body effectively imperceptible, though perhaps not entirely irrelevant. undress a king and who knows what you will find? by contrast, the bulaq and calcutta ii editions remove the ambiguity, budur’s aggression, and most of the touching. from the start, the scene is clearly about the king’s preference for male sexual partners, and most of the narrative consists of a verbal debate between budur and qamar al-zaman on its permissibility and appeal.140 qamar al-zaman’s protests focus on the issues of sin, religious law, and god’s judgment. budur attempts to persuade qamar al-zaman that it is not forbidden for youths below a certain age to be penetrated. although she admits that the penetrator—which it is implied will be her—does bear blame, she explains that because her “temperament and nature” (al-amzija wa-l-ṭabīʿa) are corrupt, she cannot help herself.141 then she recites a succession of ten bawdy poems about the attractions of boys, the drawbacks of girls, and the overall pleasures of anal sex.142 many of (effeminacy) in the premodern period, see rowson, “effeminates”; and idem, “gender irregularity.” on fāḥisha and its association with the story of lot in the qurʾan, see scott siraj al-haqq kugle, “sexuality, diversity and ethics in the agenda of progressive muslims,” in progressive muslims: on justice, gender and pluralism, ed. omid safi, 190–234 (oxford: oneworld, 2003); and sara omar, “in search of authenticity: modern discourse over homosexuality through early islamic thought,” in routledge handbook on early islam, ed. herbert berg, 339–58 (new york: routledge: 2018). 139. the striking parallel with the scene at the beginning of the story in which budur’s hand slips and her insides tremble as she moves her hand up the thigh of the sleeping qamar al-zaman reinforces this sense. compare, for example, bnf arabe 3612, fol. 229a and fols. 242b–243a. 140. the breslau edition follows bnf arabe 3622 and hews much closer to the other manuscripts i have consulted than to the bulaq and calcutta ii editions. it adds, however, a scenario in which budur forces qamar al-zaman to assume a position with raised buttocks as if he were about to be anally penetrated (breslau, 3:272; bnf arabe 3622, fol. 25a), whereas the rest of the manuscripts say that budur turned onto her back “as a woman lies down with a man” or “as a woman does” (bnf arabe 3612, fol. 242b; munich, fol. 496b; bnf arabe 3602, fol. 479a; gotha, fol. 100a) for qamar al-zaman to straddle her. the breslau edition also adds a line in which qamar al-zaman says to himself, “by my life, the king likes boys!” (breslau, 3:270; bnf arabe 3622, fol. 24b), and many times it inserts variants on the word “fuck” (nayk), which does not appear in any of the other versions i have consulted. 141. bulaq, 1:382, 383–84; calcutta ii, 1:897, 899. 142. this series of short poems represents a literary subgenre known as mujūn-maqāṭīʿ (obscene epigrams), and at least two of them can be found in the relevant chapter of an important fifteenth-century literary anthology analyzed, edited, and translated in talib, “epigram” in arabic, 128–56 (the epigrams that appear in 34 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) the poems play on religious symbolism, an irreverent echo of qamar al-zaman’s concern with sin.143 convinced by these poems that there is no dissuading her, qamar al-zaman agrees to “one time only” (ghayr marra wāḥida), in the hope that god will forgive him this isolated transgression.144 at this point, they get into bed, and after some brief kissing and embracing he reaches between budur’s thighs to find “a domed shrine of many blessings and motions (barakāt wa-ḥarakāt).”145 he then muses to himself, “perhaps this king is a khunthā, neither male nor female (wa-laysa bi-dhakar wa-lā unthā),” before asking budur directly, “o king, you do not have a tool (āla) like the tools of men (ālāt al-rijāl), so what made you do this?”146 at that point, budur laughs and tells him who she is. this version of the scene is very different from any of the manuscripts i have consulted, perhaps the most thoroughly altered scene in the entire story.147 it represents a preference for male sexual partners as a matter of “temperament and nature” and in so doing appears much closer to a modern understanding of sexuality, with its emphasis on object choice and essentialism, than anything discussed thus far. the poems recited by budur explain the king’s orientation in terms of both sex and gender; men are “unique in beauty” (farīd al-jamāl) and comparatively more socially accessible, while women have the added drawback of menstruating and bearing children.148 although the poems themselves may have been considered titillating, as they describe sexual organs and positions, the actual physical encounter between qamar al-zaman and budur is decidedly brief. the delight expressed in the manuscript versions over “a king with a pussy” contrasts with the rather formal consideration in the printed editions of the medical and legal status of khunthā, which is the bulaq and calcutta ii editions are #9 and #23). for more on mujūn in arabic literature, see zoltan szombathy, mujūn: libertinism in medieval muslim society and literature (cambridge: e. j. w. gibb memorial trust, 2013); and adam talib, marlé hammond, and arie schippers, eds., the rude, the bad and the bawdy: essays in honour of professor geert jan van gelder (cambridge: e. j. w. gibb memorial trust, 2014). 143. on this use of language, as well as a comparison with “the story of ʿali shar and zumurrud,” see the analysis in naaman, “eating figs,” 351–56. 144. bulaq, 1:383; calcutta ii, 1:899. the manuscripts also have qamar al-zaman asking budur to assure him this would be one time only, but without the lengthy passage afterwards about sin, repentance, and god’s forgiveness; see bnf arabe 3612, fol. 242b; bnf arabe 3602, fol. 479a; gotha, fol. 100a; and munich, fol. 496a. 145. this is erez naaman’s translation. naaman points out the double entendre in the word for motions (ḥarakāt), which can refer to both sexual activity and prayer; see naaman, “eating figs,” 353, n. 59. 146. bulaq, 1:384; calcutta ii, 1:900. 147. garcin makes particular reference to this scene and argues that the changes were made by the bulaq “éditeur-poète”; see garcin, pour une lecture historique, 123–25. very little is known about the editor of the bulaq edition, nor do we know what manuscript(s) he used; all we have is ʿ abd al-raḥmān al-ṣafatī al-sharqāwī’s name and the date of publication in a colophon on the last page of the second volume. 148. the bulaq edition contains an additional poem that the calcutta ii edition lacks. interestingly, it is a poem that appears earlier in both editions (but not in any of the manuscripts i have consulted) by way of praising qamar al-zaman’s beauty as sufficient to make a man forsake women; see bulaq, 1:382–83; and calcutta ii, 1:897–99. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 35 immediately explained with reference to a binary construction of sex—“neither male nor female.”149 the bulaq and calcutta ii editions are still too early to reflect the influence of the homosexuality/heterosexuality binary, and this scene does demonstrate affinities with other modes of organizing erotic life. among these are a distinction between insertive and receptive sexual roles and the significance of age in interpreting and evaluating sexual practices.150 however, the anxiety, religious and otherwise, around object choice that seems to pervade this version of the scene does not resonate at all with the erotics of sameness cultivated in the fifteenth-century manuscript of the nights or even elsewhere in “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur.” * * * brad epps, despite reading this scene through the mardrus-mathers translation, argues that it “conjures forth a different sexual economy than one that rises and falls on a modern hetero/homo, male/female divide.”151 i wholeheartedly agree and add that untethering the concepts of sameness and difference from sexual binaries helps illuminate this “different sexual economy.” the pattern in the fifteenth-century manuscript of the nights is that sameness is mapped onto bodies in ways that stress their physical similarity, regardless of the body parts that are (or may be imagined as being) involved. beautiful heand she-characters proliferate, mirroring each other in a variety of erotic encounters that draw the approving attention of onlookers from all walks of life. repetition of descriptive poetry and prose within these encounters demonstrates that while embodiment is central to the portrayal of sexual attraction, embodied difference is not. in fact, emphasizing embodied difference serves to flag a relationship as inappropriate or dysfunctional. at the same time, triangles within the text, and the possibility that triangulation might also reach into the world outside the text, make space for a variety of erotic possibilities, if only in the realm of fantasy. t h e s e o b s e r v a t i o n s s h o u l d r e m i n d u s t h a t t e r m s s u c h a s “ h o m o s e x u a l i t y , ” “heterosexuality,” and “same-sex desire” privilege anatomical notions of sameness and difference and risk sidelining other ways of understanding sexual relations. my broader goal, however, is to question any assumption that the sexed body is always already there, qualifying otherwise similar evocations of beauty, ratifying grammatical gender (or exposing it as a lie), and making sense of desire. in this view, undressing a body, whether it happens literally in a text or in the mind of a scholar, provides a stable foundation for understanding and interpreting expressions of erotic love. however, historians can only perceive bodies 149. it is possible that this insistence on neither/nor for the category of khunthā, which, as gesink shows, was understood historically to be mutable and complex, represents an intermediate position between the greater ambiguity of the manuscript tradition and the modern fetishization of the binary; see gesink, “intersex bodies,” especially the conclusion. 150. on these distinctions, see el-rouayheb, before homosexuality, especially chapter 1. for their genealogical relationship to modern homosexuality, see david m. halperin, “how to do the history of male homosexuality,” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 6, no. 1 (2000): 87–123. 151. epps, “comparison, competition, and cross-dressing,” 152. 36 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) through their discursive production; we cannot assume we know what they “really” looked like, or which body parts mattered, especially when confronted with formulaic, terse, or counterintuitive evidence. why bracket this evidence as a function of narrative technique or literary convention? what if it also reflected a historical reality in which socially legible gender was much more dependent on clothing and context and much less dependent on the shape of the body than we have come to see it today? after all, a “king with a pussy” is not the same as a queen, and the implications of this should prompt a rethinking of the extent to which we read binary constructions of sex or embodied gender into our sources.152 by taking descriptions of beautiful characters on their own terms in the context of a source-critical, historicist study, i hope to have shown that the 1001 nights offers rich possibilities for this kind of rethinking. this is particularly true since the nights is “a heterogeneous work with a complex textual history,” and therefore questions of point of view, voice, and reception are more open than they are for other arabic genres associated with eroticism.153 that said, it is crucial for scholars to look beyond the canonical print editions and perform comparative close readings of earlier manuscripts.154 my analysis of “the story of qamar al-zaman and budur” indicates that nineteenth-century editors and translators had a heavy hand in shaping its sexual content. given the relationship in this period between the rise of european colonialism and the production of modern discourses of gender and sexuality, it is all the more pressing to pursue source-critical and historicist projects.155 ultimately, if further research shows that erotic love was imaginable in ways that throw into question modern binaries, it will be important to rethink not only our language but also how we understand embodiment as part of the sexual past. 152. this observation may resonate with those working in the field of transgender history. for a recent discussion of “the possibilities of non-binary lives in our archives,” see shireen hamza, “annulling the marriage of two men: a marginal note in a yemeni manuscript,” journal of the history of ideas blog, june 10, 2020, https:// jhiblog.org/2020/06/10/annulling-the-marriage-of-two-men-a-marginal-note-in-a-yemeni-manuscript/. 153. see ibrahim muhawi, “the arabian nights and the question of authorship,” journal of arabic literature 36, no. 3 (2005): 323–37, at 323. 154. recent examples of what can be achieved by this kind of work, although without a focus on sexuality, can be found in chraïbi, arabic manuscripts. unfortunately, the most recently published book on sexuality in the nights does not engage in any source criticism and recycles arguments (sometimes verbatim) made by other scholars; see ghanim, sexual world. 155. for the close association between british and french colonialism in north africa and india and the publication of the nineteenth-century arabic print editions of the nights, see mahdi, thousand and one nights, 87–126; and horta, marvellous thieves, especially chapter 3. for the relationship between european colonialism and the production of modern discourses of gender and sexuality, see maría lugones, “heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system,” hypatia 22, 1 (2007): 186–209. https://jhiblog.org/2020/06/10/annulling-the-marriage-of-two-men-a-marginal-note-in-a-yemeni-manuscript/ https://jhiblog.org/2020/06/10/annulling-the-marriage-of-two-men-a-marginal-note-in-a-yemeni-manuscript/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) qamarayn: the erotics of sameness in the 1001 nights • 37 bibliography manuscripts bnf arabe 3598: bibliothèque nationale de france. département des manuscrits. arabe 3598. les mille et une nuits [1]. early nineteenth century. http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf. fr/ark:/12148/cc314904/ca59731810403405. bnf arabe 3602: bibliothèque nationale de france. département des manuscrits. arabe 3602. les mille et une nuits [1]. early nineteenth century. copied by ʿalī al-anṣārī b. ibrāhīm al-anṣārī. http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc31491c/ ca59731810073677. bnf arabe 3609–11: bibliothèque nationale de france. département des manuscrits. arabe 3609–11. les mille et une nuits. fifteenth century. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b8433372b. bnf arabe 3612: bibliothèque nationale de france. département des manuscrits. arabe 3612. les mille et une nuits. seventeenth century. http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/cc314943. bnf arabe 3621: bibliothèque nationale de france. département des manuscrits. arabe 3621. histoire de qamar al-zamân et de badr al-bodoûr. seventeenth century. http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc31502x. bnf arabe 3622: bibliothèque nationale de france. département des manuscrits. arabe 3622. histoire de qamar al-zamân et de badr al-bodoûr. seventeenth century. http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc315035. bnf arabe 3623: bibliothèque nationale de france. département des manuscrits. arabe 3623. [histoire de qamar al-zamân et de badr al-bodoûr.] 1109/1698. http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc31504d. gotha: forschungsbibliothek gotha. orientalische handschriften. ms. orient. a 2633. alf laila wa-laila [2]. early nineteenth century. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:urmel934a5920-afb4-4939-a2ea-b5c1d981380f1. munich: bayerische staatsbibliothek cod.arab 623. alf laila wa-laila [1]. 1221/1806. copied by ʿalī al-anṣārī b. ibrāhīm al-anṣārī. http://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/ urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00072405-6. print editions and translations of the “1001 nights” bencheikh, jamel eddine, and andré miquel, trans. les mille et une nuits. 3 vols. paris: gallimard, 2005. http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc314904/ca59731810403405 http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc314904/ca59731810403405 http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc31491c/ca59731810073677 http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc31491c/ca59731810073677 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8433372b https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8433372b http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc314943 http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc314943 http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc31502x http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc315035 http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc31504d https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:urmel-934a5920-afb4-4939-a2ea-b5c1d981380f1 https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:urmel-934a5920-afb4-4939-a2ea-b5c1d981380f1 http://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00072405-6 http://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00072405-6 38 • zayde antrim al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) burton, richard f., trans. the book of the thousand nights and a night. 10 vols. 1885. reprint: project gutenberg ebook, 2001. haddawy, husain, trans. the arabian nights. new york: w. w. norton, 2008. ———. sindbad and other stories from the arabian nights. new york: w. w. norton, 2008. habicht, maximilien, and heinrich fleischer, eds. tausend und eine nacht/alf layla wa-layla. 12 vols. breslau: j. max, 1825–43. 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society and literature. cambridge: e. j. w. gibb memorial trust, 2013. talib, adam. “citystruck.” in the city in arabic literature: classical and modern perspectives, edited by nizar f. hermes and gretchen head, 138–64. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2018. ———. how do you say “epigram” in arabic?: literary history at the limits of comparison. leiden: brill, 2018. ———, marlé hammond, and arie schippers, eds. the rude, the bad and the bawdy: essays in honour of professor geert jan van gelder. cambridge: e. j. w. gibb memorial trust, 2014. ullah, sahar ishtiaque. “a response to zayde antrim’s ‘sex, sameness, and embodiments of desire in the 1001 nights.’” paper presented at the islamic history workshop, columbia university, february 20, 2020. ze’evi, dror. producing desire: changing sexual discourse in the ottoman middle east. berkeley: university of california press, 2006. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 573-602 abstract beginning with our major source, al-ṭabarī’s taʾ rīkh, both contemporaries and modern historians have noted the extraordinary persistence of the zanj rebellion, with the forces of the ʿabbasid caliphate winning only after a protracted siege of the rebel capital, al-mukhtāra. victory came not just through superiority in arms, but through a strategy of persuasion: large numbers of rebels, including commanders, were induced to defect and received in public ceremonies involving bestowal of robes of honor, an important feature of which was silk brocade. historians have paid more attention to the symbolic aspects of the rebellion than the material ones. redressing the balance, a focus on the necessarily material character of all semiosis requires an analysis of the agency of silk cloth in the uprising. silk cloth was not only a sign of honor and allegiance, but its material qualities also brought about defection and re-subjection of rebels. understanding this materiality requires analysis of silk cloth production, which elucidates the ultimate superiority of the resources the ʿabbasids had access to, as well as our own relative ignorance of the details of the material bases of production and distribution in the world both ʿabbasids and zanj rebels inhabited. in 266/879 abū aḥmad al-muwaffaq (d. 278/891), brother of the caliph al-muʿtamid (r. 279–89/892–902) and commander of the ʿabbasid forces in their war on the zanj rebels, arrived outside the zanj capital of al-mukhtāra for the first time, accompanied by his son abū al-ʿabbās. according to the preeminent account of the revolt in al-ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, al-muwaffaq was astonished by the city’s scale, the quality of its fortifications, and the range and size of the rebels’ weaponry, the likes of which he had never seen in any previous rebellion. the zanj raised a cry that made the earth tremble. faced with these mighty opponents, who started to hurl arrows and stones with their hands and a variety of machinery, al-muwaffaq revealed his stratagem: entangled symbols: silk and the material semiosis of the zanj rebellion (869–83)* philip grant associate scholar, center for persian studies, university of california, irvine (philipagrant@gmail.com) © 2022 philip grant. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:philipagrant%40gmail.com?subject= 574 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) when troops from two zanj galleys sought safe conduct (amān) for themselves and their equipment, boats, and sailors, he “ordered that brocade robes of honour (khilaʿ dībāj)1 and jewel-bedecked belts and other gifts” be given to them, including “robes of red silk and white garments” (khilaʿ min khilaʿ al-ḥarīr al-aḥmar wa-l-thiyāb al-bayḍ); their sympathy thus won, the coopted rebels were posted in a place where their former comrades could see them. “this was the most humiliating stratagem ever employed against the profligate,” al-ṭabarī reports, as other zanj wished to be treated likewise, and a number rushed to go over to al-muwaffaq. this provoked a battle between zanj forces trying to prevent the defectors’ departure and ʿabbasid troops trying to enable it; the zanj lost.2 until this point, the insurrection of the zanj had been remarkably successful. the rebels had defeated government forces numerous times at the outset of their rebellion and effectively controlled much of the sawād of al-ʿirāq and the province of al-ahwāz, including the cities of basra, ahwaz, and wasit. al-mukhtāra, to the east of basra, was an extensive place; besides the fortifications noted above, it contained markets, public buildings, a mosque, and a prison. this episode was a turning point in the rebellion: the government commander demonstrated that the well-entrenched, well-supplied, and wellorganized rebels might be defeated not by sheer force of arms but through an altogether different strategy: the bestowing of gifts, among which silk, in the form of robes of honor, figured prominently. despite its crucial role in the outcome of the zanj revolt, scholarship has so far ignored the role of silk and, for that matter, of other materials when explaining the revolt’s course and especially its conclusion. this paper aims to rectify this omission through examination of silk as a material semiotic actor—in other words, by focusing on the agency of silk robes of honor and other silk objects. it therefore has two principal aims. first, by examining the zanj revolt through the action of silk cloth, it seeks to offer a richer explanation of the course and outcome of this historical event. and second, by focusing on materiality in the zanj revolt, it highlights a major lacuna in research on rebellions and other events in this period, namely, the lack of consideration given to both the agency of materials and the entanglement of such events in complex chains of production and distribution. the paper has four main parts. i start with a brief account of the rebellion, an overview of the historiography of the revolt indicating where the focus of scholarship has traditionally lain, and a note on the sources. i then turn to the theoretical framework of this paper, considering the agency of materials through material semiosis, entanglement, and object 1. dībāj, one of many silk-related words of persian origin, is generally translated as brocade. david jacoby, “silk economics and cross-cultural artistic interaction: byzantium, the muslim world, and the christian west,” dumbarton oaks papers 58 (2004): 197–240, at 241, describes it as “all-silk, figured and glossy cloth.” w. eilers, m. bazin, c. bromberger, and d. thompson, in their entry “abrīšam iii. silk textiles in iran,” in encyclopædia iranica, online ed., ed. ehsan yarshater, updated july 19, 2011, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abrisamsilk-index#pt3, suggest these are “vague,” “non-specialist” terms and opt for “brocade.” 2. abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. m. de goeje (1879; repr., leiden: brill, 1964–65), 3:1982–84; english translations from david waines, trans., the revolt of the zanj, vol. 36 of the history of al-ṭabarī, ed. ehsan yarshater (albany: state university of new york press, 1992), and philip fields, trans., the ʿabbasid recovery: the war against the zanj ends, ad 879–93/ah 266–79, notes by jacob lassner, vol. 37 of the history of al-ṭabarī, ed. ehsan yarshater (albany: state university of new york press, 1987). https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abrisam-silk-index#pt3 https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/abrisam-silk-index#pt3 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 575 implosion. the third part examines the appearances of silk cloth in our sources and tackles the two puzzles these appearances bring up: how the wearing of silk was reconciled with the ostensible prohibition on muslim men’s doing so, and why so many rebels were prepared to defect to their enemy. finally, given the sheer quantities of silk cloth implied by the sources, the fourth part is an extended discussion of how silk cloth was produced. the theoretical framework adopted here requires as detailed an understanding of silk and silk production as possible, which in turn necessitates drawing on a broad range of disciplines and subdisciplines, giving rise to extended discussions of both theoretical and technical questions that may not seem immediately relevant to the events under discussion, yet without which the importance of silk cloth in the uprising cannot be satisfactorily appreciated. overview of the uprising and sources to understand fully what is omitted by ignoring the material element, it is worth revisiting what the zanj rebellion was and how it has been treated historiographically. it began in basra in 255/869 with one ʿalī b. muḥammad, probably an arab from a village named warzanīn near rayy, who claimed both to be an ʿalid (according to our admittedly hostile sources, al-ṭabarī and al-masʿūdī),3 with a variety of different genealogies, and to hear voices from heaven. together with a small number of companions, this ʿalī freed some of the enslaved laborers who worked on the shūraj, the salt steppe, outside basra, clearing the ground of sibākh, “nitrous topsoil” or “natron” (a combination of different sodium salts)4 in order to prepare the ground for cultivation on behalf of their and the land’s owners. unlike his previous attempts to stir up rebellion in al-baḥrayn, baghdad, and basra,5 ʿalī’s endeavor in the marshes was successful, as more enslaved laborers were freed to join the uprising. the rebel host swelled to include some local villagers and bedouin and became large enough to defeat local detachments of government troops. eventually, the zanj forces were sufficiently large and well organized to carve out significant amounts of territory in lower al-ʿirāq and the adjacent province of al-ahwāz. only a concerted and protracted campaign led by al-muwaffaq was ultimately able to defeat them, crucially using 3. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:1742–48; abū al-ḥasan ʿ alī b. al-ḥusayn b. ʿ alī al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. and trans. charles barbier de meynard and abel pavet de courteille, rev. charles pellat (paris: société asiatique, 1962), 8:31. alexandre popovic, the revolt of african slaves in iraq in the 3rd/9th century, trans. léon king (1976; repr., princeton, nj: markus wiener, 1999), 34–35, discusses an alternative version of ʿalī’s “real” origins provided by al-ṣafadī much later. 4. formed by the evaporation of alkaline lakes, “natron” may include natron in the strict sense (na2co3·10h20), but also trona (na2co3·nahco3·2h20), burkeite (na6co3·2so4), and halite (common salt, nacl); v. devulder and p. degruyse, “the sources of natron,” in glass making in the ancient greco-roman world, ed. patrick degruyse, 87 (leuven: leuven university press, 2014). kurt franz, in kompilation in arabischen chroniken: die überlieferung vom aufstand der zanǧ zwischen geschichtlichkeit und intertextualität vom 9. bis ins 15. jahrhundert (berlin: de gruyter, 2004), 40, 49–50, translates shūraj as “saltpeter,” that is, potassium nitrate (kno3), rather than “natron,” as in popovic, revolt, 13, 24, but without explaining this difference. saltpeter could be used as fertilizer. 5. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:1743–46. 576 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) silk robes to divide the rebels’ leadership, as described above. the rebels were either killed in battle, incorporated into ʿabbasid forces after defecting (probably the greatest number), enslaved by bedouin after fleeing the downfall of al-mukhtāra,6 or (in the case of a handful of leaders who did not surrender) imprisoned and eventually executed.7 the historiography has focused on a number of questions, often inconclusively although by no means without insight. these include, first, the “sectarian” affiliations of the revolt and especially of its leader: was he shiʿite, kharijite, or simply an “opportunist”?8 second, who exactly were the rebels, and in particular the zanj? where did they come from? how did they get there? were they mainly slaves? did they come from east africa or from further west or north in africa? or were they rather mainly free men, even including east african merchants resident in basra? third, is the rebellion correctly characterized as a “slave revolt”?9 were its adherents bound principally by ethnic or racial solidarity, or should it be read in class terms, as an alliance of the oppressed including enslaved and free laborers, peasants, bedouin, and discontented townsfolk? fourthly, did its scope and especially the rebels’ control of some of the caliphate’s richest tax-bearing lands deal a fatal blow to the ʿabbasids as a strong central power?10 it is clear from the above summary that the materiality of the revolt has not been the subject of historical debate, and the agency of specific objects or classes of objects (such as silk and silk cloth), in particular, has been ignored by the several generations of scholars to have treated the uprising. it is for this reason that i argue that attention to materiality— further examples of which i provide briefly in the conclusion—is the most promising new avenue for research on what is otherwise well-trodden ground. before considering how to approach the question of materiality, however, it is important to evaluate the contributions and limits of our main source for the events of the insurrection. al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh provides us with an unusually detailed narrative of the revolt, at least of its early initial and concluding periods, one roughly three times as long as any account by a subsequent medieval historian; he was furthermore decisive in shaping the tradition of reports about the zanj. he himself relies almost entirely on the lost kitāb akhbār ṣāḥib al-zanj of abū al-ḥasan muḥammad b. al-ḥasan b. sahl (d. 280/893–94), who is often referred 6. ibid., 3:2094. 7. ibid., 3:2111. 8. this last is fukuzo amabe’s expression in the emergence of the ʿabbasid autocracy (kyoto: kyoto university press, 1995), 194. for summaries of these debates, see amabe, emergence, 173–99; popovic, revolt, 27, 43, 130–31, 149–52; and most recently, franz, kompilation, 29–31. 9. principally a “slave rebellion”: theodor nöldeke, “a servile revolt,” in sketches from eastern history, trans. john sutherland black (london: a. & c. black, 1892), 146–75; popovic, revolt, but more cautiously. franz, kompilation, 56–57, argues for the redundancy of the term and for thinking in terms of a spectrum of unfree labor (including slavery). not a slave rebellion: m. a. shaban, islamic history: a new interpretation, vol. 2 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1971), 101–7; ghada talhami, “the zanj rebellion reconsidered,” international journal of african historical studies 10, no. 3 (1977): 443–61. talhami and also fayṣal sāmir, thawrat al-zanj (baghdad: dār al-qāriʾ, 1954), emphasize class rather than slave vs. free or “racial” elements, without denying the importance of freed slaves. 10. analyzed most carefully by david waines, “the third century internal crisis of the abbasids,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 20, no. 3 (1977): 282–306. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 577 to by the laqab shaylama. the work’s title is known from its appearance in al-masʿūdī’s murūj al-dhahab and in ibn nadīm’s fihrist; al-ṭabarī used a written copy of this text.11 al-ṭabarī seems to have removed much of the middle section of the account and rearranged the narrative in the annalistic format of his taʾrīkh, while adding, in the later stages of the revolt, epithets such as al-khabīth (“the vile one”) to describe ʿalī b. muḥammad. it is not clear what use al-masʿūdī made of shaylama’s work, since the books in which he described the revolt in detail are lost, but the information he includes in his murūj indicates he had access to traditions that al-ṭabarī did not. there is a centuries-long tradition of historical writing about the zanj rebellion in arabic. only miskawayh (d. 421/1030) in his tajārib al-umam has significant new information about the working conditions of zanj slaves. in general, however, all later historians are dependent on al-ṭabarī’s history—and therefore ultimately on shaylama’s collection of akhbār. shaylama came from an illustrious family; his uncle was al-maʾmūn’s influential vizier, al-faḍl b. sahl dhū riyāsatayn, and his father, al-ḥasan, a high official under the same caliph. shaylama himself had been a kātib in samarra. despite this, he joined the rebellion, although like many others he would eventually defect. after returning to samarra he had access to a number of other former rebels, as evident from the isnāds of the various reports (sixteen different participants in total), as well as to government sources. he was thus uniquely placed to understand the workings of both the ʿabbasid government and the rebellion and, crucially for our purposes, their interaction through the bestowal of silk robes on defectors. despite his reconciliation with the ʿabbasid regime, apparent from the more hostile picture of the rebels and the more sympathetic treatment of al-muwaffaq and abū al-ʿabbās in the later stages of the narrative, he was eventually executed by the latter, now the caliph al-muʿtaḍid, for his part in an ʿalid plot. given shaylama’s importance to al-ṭabarī, i describe the compiler of the bulk of our reports about the uprising alternately as al-ṭabarī and as al-ṭabarī-shaylama. material semiosis, entanglement, object implosions following the feminist philosopher and historian of science donna haraway, the main premise of this paper is that materials are necessarily also semiotic—under which heading, for present purposes, i include the symbolic realm—and signs and symbols are always necessarily material. haraway pointed, some time ago now, to the tendency in western knowledge production to separate the material from the semiotic and to privilege the interpretation of signs (implied by the longstanding idea that the social world can be “read” like a text).12 a complementary idea running through haraway’s work is the observation that nature and culture cannot be separated; to do so is characteristic both of the androcentric epistemology of modern science—the self-extraction of a reasoning, male observer from 11. for this account of shaylama and the relationship of his akhbār with the taʾrīkh, i draw especially on franz, kompilation, 83–113. see also popovic, revolt, 145. 12. donna haraway, “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective,” feminist studies, 14, no.3 (1988): 575–99. 578 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the nature he experiments on and seeks to dominate—and of many strains of social science, including certain types of feminist critique, where the unique diversity of human culture is invoked to rebut attempts to reduce human behavior to the workings-out of evolution or to separate us from (other) animals. haraway stresses instead the importance of physical and biological processes and the fundamentally symbiotic character of all life, including our own: our cultural achievements and potential would be impossible without billions of microbes, fungi, plants, animals, and inorganic matter in all their complexity and dynamism. social analysis and critique must therefore account for what she calls “naturecultures.”13 such an approach can be described as “symmetrical,” drawing on the vocabulary developed (often in parallel to and sometimes in conversation with haraway) in the social studies of science and technology by bruno latour and in economic sociology by michel callon and koray çalışkan.14 decoupling agency from consciousness or moral responsibility, this approach rejects the cartesian and kantian separations of subject and object, humans who act and non-humans who are merely acted on, to argue for a study of the networks, assemblages, or agencements15 of subjects and objects, humans, animals, and things, all of which are agents and must therefore be given equal weight in our explanations, instead of the asymmetrical privileging of human agency and intentionality. a complementary concept is that of entanglement, in this case the revolt’s entanglement with silk production. i take this term from archaeologist ian hodder, who means by it that humans and things are mutually dependent and that researchers, rather than taking these entanglements for granted, need to pay greater attention to how things become things and what other things make them possible.16 for hodder it is insufficient to talk, as many scholars do, of materiality but then focus only on how materials are construed rather than on the materials themselves. counteracting this tendency requires incorporating analyses of how things come to be—what the properties of different materials are; 13. donna haraway, the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness (chicago, il: prickly paradigm press, 2003). note that haraway’s coinage naturecultures is also a riposte to social constructionism: just because things are socially constructed does not mean that they are not also part of some reality that is not of human making. 14. bruno latour, nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symmétrique (paris: la découverte, 1991); koray çalışkan and michel callon, “economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization,” economy and society, 38, no. 3 (2009): 369-98. haraway notes that latour was not a feminist, but his conclusions meant that he could easily be made into one: haraway, “situated knowledges,” 596, n. 1; and she notes that they have both developed an analysis of the material and the semiotic as mutually implicating because of a shared catholic background (that is to say, they were inspired to this insight by the idea of transubstantiation): haraway, staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene (durham, nc: duke, 2016), 179, n. 35. 15. in “economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets,” economy and society, 39, no. 1 (2010): 1-32, koray çalışkan and michel callon refer to the range of associated humans and material, technical, and textual devices that are necessary for any activity to take place (to pilot a boat for example); agency, or the capacity to act, is distributed across these entities, something that is captured in the french agencement but is lost in its common english translations “assemblage” and “arrangement.” 16. ian hodder, entangled. an archaeology of the relationship between humans and things (chichester: wiley-blackwell, 2012). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 579 how they are combined physically and chemically; how these processes participate in more extensive ecosystems; how humans fit into these assemblages; what effects they have on those assemblages (constrained and enabled by the physical properties of materials); and how the reorganization and transformation of matter and energy may also involve human institutions and relationships. smelting iron, for example, involves the interaction of tongs and metal and the generation of heat, but also rights, debts, obligations, institutions (such as guilds and conceptions of property), and relationships (including with the divine).17 in discussing the naturalcultural and material-semiotic dimensions of the zanj rebellion, i adapt as technique the “object implosion exercise” developed by the anthropologist joe dumit,18 itself a formalization of haraway’s challenge to her classes to “unpack” any mundane object around them. objects are “sticky tissues” made up of economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic, and textual threads; “facts, media, things, people are equally all implosions, all material-semiotic actors, all unpackable, all full of different threads that can—and often should” be teased out.19 haraway herself defines implosion as a force bringing multiple dimensions together, connecting them, and also “a claim for heterogeneous and continual construction through historically located practice, where the actors are not all human.”20 for dumit, “imploding” an object reveals the “embeddedness of objects, facts, actions, and people in the world and the world in them,” encompassing details, non-obvious connections, labor, and professional, material, technological, political, economic, symbolic, textual, bodily, historical, and educational dimensions.21 dumit suggests beginning by writing down everything one knows about the object and its multiple dimensions, including how one comes to know about it and what assumptions this involves, and how it came to be in the world and the world in it, and then going through the resulting list trying to make systematic connections. he calls for attention to the labor involved in making the object; the professional and epistemological dimensions of the labor process; the materials and technologies involved; their histories; the object’s context and situatedness (how it appears in the world, in relation with and next to what other things); its economic dimensions (not just labor, but how it appears in markets, as a commodity, how it is distributed, purchased, and consumed, and its costs); its political dimensions (who or what claims authority over it, and how it contributes to or challenges political orders); its bodily or organic dimensions (what kinds of bodies use it or are in relation to it, and how these are gendered, racialized, or otherwise marked); its historical dimensions (how it came to be or was invented, and who tells its histories and how); its educational dimensions (how and when it appears in our socialization); its mythological dimensions (in what sorts 17. ibid., 48-52. 18. joe dumit, “writing the implosion: teaching the world one thing at a time,” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2 (2014): 344–62; donna haraway, modest_witness@second_millennium: femaleman©meets_oncomouse™: feminism and technoscience (new york: routledge, 1997). 19. dumit, “writing,” 349. 20. haraway, modest_witness, 97. 21. dumit, “writing,” 350. 580 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) of narratives of identity does it play a part); and its symbolic dimensions (what kinds of systems of metaphor and meaning it is a part of, and how these are contested).22 these different dimensions overlap, and from a historian’s perspective all of them have a historical character. although the examples dumit gives are clearly contemporary (patents, an object’s presence in the education system), his formula can easily be adopted for the study of the past, including one more than eleven centuries distant—even if, more often than not, the easiest thing to demonstrate is our own ignorance. in his exposition of this technique, dumit notes the possibility of exhaustion,23 a consequence of the sheer complexity of even the simplest of objects when it comes to all the material and symbolic factors that go into making and distributing it and therefore a consequence too of the amount of knowledge that is required to implode in this way an object whose scope and variety elude any one thinking subject. for the ninth century ce, this process is further complicated by both the patchy quality of the literary evidence and its mediation through what mainly elite, male (near-)contemporaries saw fit to record and how. meanwhile, material remains from al-ʿirāq and adjacent regions are extremely scarce, although i discuss one prominent example below. moreover, modern knowledge production about silk is scattered across a variety of disciplines and is rarely the focus of historiography. for these reasons, i will not attempt to follow dumit’s formal procedure to anything near the letter. instead, i will make threefold use of it as an impromptu guide for asking new questions of our sources, as an invitation to combine the concerns of historians of the zanj rebellion (and ʿabbasid political historians more generally) with those of scholars who have written about textiles and dyes, and as what dumit calls an “ignorance map” that will help in elaborating future research agendas.24 silk banners and robes in the uprising with this theoretical framework of material semiosis and object implosion in place, it is time to turn to the appearance of silk objects in the course and especially the final stages of the zanj revolt. the zanj had a silk banner. rayḥān b. ṣāliḥ, an early recruit to the cause who is described as a ghulām who himself supervised ghilmān of the shurajiyyūn,25 the landlords exploiting forced and hired labor to clear the sibākh, related the following: 22. ibid., 350–53. 23. ibid., 354. hodder, entangled, 60, likewise observes that even for prehistoric technology the “network” or “assembly” that made objects possible is already too complicated to be represented pictorially. 24. dumit, “writing,” 355. 25. both david waines commenting on the english translation of this text in revolt, 35, n. 143, and m. a. shaban in islamic history give the impression that the laborers are the shurajiyyūn, but this makes no sense since the text is unambiguous that it is slaves of the shurajiyyūn who are freed and the shurajiyyūn and their agents who are captured. the word comes from shūraj, “salt steppe, plain” (middle persian sōrag). franz, kompilation, 49, also points out this mistake. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 581 he [rayḥān] was returning from baghdad with shibl b. sālim, one of the slaves of the dabbāsīn [sellers of date juice, dibs], who had silk material (ḥarīra) which ʿalī b. muḥammad had commissioned for a banner; on it in red and green were written “god has purchased the souls of believers and their property, for they have attained to paradise fighting in the way of god …” [q 9:111], to the end of the verse, and also ʿalī’s name and his father’s. the banner (liwāʾ) was fastened to a barge pole.26 this passage, together with the extant zanj coins, has been a key piece of historiographic evidence in debates over ʿalī b. muḥammad’s religious disposition. although interpreting the banner’s words and decoding its color symbolism are undoubtedly important, i focus here on the banner as an object resulting from complicated chains of production.27 there is a methodological challenge here. our oldest surviving silk banner is more than three centuries younger than the zanj rebellion.28 it might reasonably be objected, therefore, that we cannot implode this object, since all we have are textual representations of it. perhaps we should restrict ourselves to textual analysis after all. yet i plead the incidental rather than accidental quality of silk in the text as justification for imploding silk cloth as an object. it is not accidental that first shaylama and then al-ṭabarī preserved rayḥān b. ṣāliḥ’s narration of his involvement in obtaining silk for a banner. the revolt might have started out rather provisionally, with a handful of followers and weapons,29 but the display of a silk banner was an indication of organization and a declaration of seriousness of intent, indicating that the rebels thought themselves the equals of the ʿabbasids with their famous black banners. besides the banner, al-ṭabarī also presents us with a silk hat (qalansuwa khazz)30 worn by a man who is initially seized by rayḥān b. ṣāliḥ by the ends of his turban, before he can declare that he wishes to join the rebels.31 most frequently and strikingly, 26. waines, revolt, 34; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:1748. 27. as webb keane, “semiotics and the social analysis of material things,” language and communication 23, nos. 2–3 (2003): 409–25, points out, colors, however symbolic, do not exist independently; they have to be “co-present” with a material. see also reza husseini’s article in this issue for color symbolism in one khorasani revolt. 28. this is an example from al-andalus famously captured at the battle of las navas de tolosa in 1212. yuka kadoi, “flags,” encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. kate fleet, gudrun krämer, denis matringe, john nawas, and everett rowson (leiden: brill online), posted 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_27157. 29. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:1752. 30. khazz could be either pure silk or silk interwoven with wool. oleg grabar, in “silks, pots and jugs: al-jahiz and objects of common use,” in iconography in islamic art, ed. bernard o’kane, 197–200 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2003), 199, notes a rare passage in which al-jāḥiẓ (in his kitāb al-bukhalāʾ) gives readers details of textiles; he romanizes it as khuzz, states that it was half-woollen, and contrasts it with qizz (“floss silk,” often vocalized qazz) mentioned in the same passage (p. 199). medieval authors often used this technical vocabulary in more than one sense or were imprecise in their explanations, which means that it is not always clear what is being described. see david jacoby, “silk economics,” 221, for the example of sundus, and vera-simone schulz, “crossroads of cloth: textile arts and aesthetics in and beyond the medieval islamic world,” perspective 1 (2016): 93–108, at 106–7, for būqalamūn. 31. he is also described as wearing “red shoes” (khuff aḥmar) and a “woollen tunic” (durrāʿa); al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:2001. these curious details remind us of how lacking in this sort of detail we are—how were most rebels dressed?—but also of the myriad ways in which symbolism and materials were co-present in people’s attire. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_27157 582 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) however, silk appears in the form of the “robe of honor” (sing. khilʿa; pl. khilaʿ) bestowed on defecting rebels by the ʿabbasid commander al-muwaffaq, an event recorded some thirteen times in al-ṭabarī’s narrative.32 these mentions of silk are incidental: they are not dwelled on or analyzed. the reports take the production and distribution of the material itself for granted; its presence needs no explanation. precisely because it is incidental, but not accidental, to the narrative, silk cloth invites modern scholars to treat it as an object to be imploded, to try to explain its presence. the first point to raise in relation to the materiality of silk is the degree to which the rebellion was entangled in transcontinental practices of commerce and exploitation. as the story of the acquisition of the silk quoted above shows, the silk for the zanj banner was brought from baghdad, where it had been purchased, although the narrative implies, without saying how, that the rebels had the ability to turn it into a banner in basra at this early stage of the uprising. there is, however, another element in this story that indicates the more extensive trade relations in which the zanj were entangled. the silk is brought back to al-mukhtāra by, among others, a slave or some kind of subjected worker (kāna min ghilmān al-dabbāsīn) of date-juice sellers. dibs, transported in turquoise, blue, or green glazed jars, was a major item of commerce exported from lower al-ʿirāq and al-ahwāz to destinations including the persian gulf port of siraf and thence around the indian ocean;33 later in the rebellion (in 256/869–70), the rebels capture fourteen seagoing ships (marākib al-baḥr) and spend three days removing booty from them.34 although the zanj uprising— unlike the ʿabbasid revolution, for instance—was intensely local in its theater of operations, attention to little details about materials reveals that it was entwined in assemblages of actors that potentially spanned vast distances. disruption to the transcontinental trade of which al-ʿirāq was one of the major nodes and which enabled enslavement as well as enriching ʿabbasid elites was an integral part of the revolt’s material-semiotic challenge to meanings may often remain obscure to us, but as richard bulliet notes in cotton, climate, and camels: a moment in world history (new york: columbia university press, 2009), 46–47, wool, a common clothing material, was associated with poverty and abjection. on the other hand, jonathan bloom and sheila blair, in the “introduction” to and diverse are their hues: color in islamic art and culture (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2011), 32, drawing on the writings of abū muḥammad al-ṭayyib al-washshāʾ, a younger contemporary of al-ṭabarī, explain that red shoes were considered appropriate footwear in “refined circles.” a fancy hat and shoes but a rough garment: an elite man who had left the house in haste? 32. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:1972, 1981, 1983, 1990, 1998, 1999, 2019, 2051, 2069, 2070, 2071, 2080, 2097. in none of these instances is it recorded that al-muwaffaq or his son gave an ex-rebel their own robe, something that is recorded for other presentations of a khilʿa and that would have been an even stronger material-symbolic statement. see dominique sourdel, “robes of honor in ʿabbasid baghdad during the eighth to eleventh centuries,” trans. david saʿdah, in robes and honor: the medieval world of investiture, ed. stewart gordon, 137–45 (london: palgrave macmillan, 2001); gavin hambly, “from baghdad to bukhara, from ghazna to delhi: the khilʿa ceremony in the transfer of kingly pomp and circumstance,” in gordon, robes and honor, 192–222. 33. marcus milwright, an introduction to islamic archaeology (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2013), 164; pseudo-jāḥiẓ, le kitāb al-tabaṣṣur bi-l-tiǧāra attribué à ǧāḥiẓ, ed. and trans. charles pellat, arabica 1, no. 2 (1954): 153–65, at 160 (al-ahwāz). 34. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:1836. no month is given. the plunder included “slaves,” raqīq, who presumably joined the rebels; it is not clear whether they were crew members, slaves of merchants on board, or being transported for sale. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 583 ʿabbasid dominion. the symbolic element of this challenge was embodied in, among other things, the silk of the banner. as mentioned above, it is in the form of the khilʿa that silk appears most frequently in the al-ṭabarī-shaylama narrative. right up to the end of the siege, al-muwaffaq continues to welcome defectors, both named commanders and unnamed troops. indeed, most of ʿalī b. muḥammad’s commanders eventually defect, and all are received with honors, including robes and other gifts, and a place in the government army. defectors are paraded in front of their former peers to encourage further defections and weaken the morale of the zanj leader. the material semiotics of the robes can be analyzed in terms of what they declare and how they act. whereas the silk banner declared and thus enacted a rebellion of people who regarded themselves, and not the ʿabbasids, as the legitimate authority, silk robes declared that the wearer was now an honored ʿabbasid follower and acted by turning rebels into simultaneously honored and subjected supporters of the authorities, while inciting others to defect. attention to the material semiosis of robes and robing enables us to move beyond the fact of defection and submission to how it was achieved, with the agency of silk cloth at its heart. this triple agency—inciting, honoring, subjecting—is present throughout the descriptions of robing, most strikingly in a succession of episodes that take place in 269/882 as defections accelerate. first, al-muwaffaq refuses to give a safe conduct to one zanj commander, sulaymān b. mūsā al-shaʿrānī, on account of the amount of blood the latter has shed. however, he relents on hearing that his refusal has disheartened other potential defectors. al-shaʿrānī and his companions are all given robes before being paraded on a boat by abū al-ʿabbās. seeing that al-muwaffaq’s amān is trustworthy, a number of other zanj officers and men defect and receive the same robes and presents.35 al-shaʿrānī’s replacement on the zanj side, shibl b. sālim (the former ghulām of the date-juice sellers who had brought the silk banner from baghdad), likewise defects along with his household and some of his officers and men. they have to fight off a group of their ex-comrades sent by ʿalī b. muḥammad to detain them. shibl and his men are also treated with honor and given robes, despite shibl having been an early associate of ʿalī b. muḥammad who had fought courageously on his side.36 al-muwaffaq even seeks shibl out for his advice and then sends him on a night mission against al-mukhtāra, in the course of which shibl kills many rebels and strikes fear into the zanj camp. for this feat he and his men are rewarded with yet more robes.37 that honoring also involved subjection is on display in the next episode. al-muwaffaq, having decided on a general assault, summons all his troops and upbraids the former rebels among them for their service to the “profligate” (al-fāsiq), stating that he could have legitimately killed them (“their blood was licit to him,” qad kāna abāḥa lahu damāʾuhum), but that he had pardoned (qad ghafara) them. he reminds them of his kindness and gifts, enjoining them to loyalty and “to fight zealously in the holy war against the enemy of god” 35. ibid., 3:2068–69. 36. ibid., 3:2070. 37. ibid., 3:2071. 584 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) (al-jidd wa-l-ijtihād fī mujāhada ʿaduww allāh), especially since they know al-mukhtāra. if they do so, he tells them, they will receive a reward; if not, they will face loss of rank and status. the ex-rebels respond by abjuring their former errors and promising obedience (al-samʿ wa-l-ṭāʿa) and to spill their blood for al-muwaffaq.38 a central argument of this paper is that, following al-ṭabarī-shaylama’s lead in the extract with which we began, what won the day for the ʿabbasids was not simply the superior quality or size of their army but this strategy of suborning zanj troops and leaders and incorporating them into the ʿabbasid forces. the robing ceremonial played a crucial role in the rebels’ subordination and incorporation into the ʿabbasid camp. strikingly, military might and khilaʿ combined toward the end of the revolt, when the stratagem of undermining zanj morale through gifts of silk robes was already well established. the government troops were reinforced by soldiers commanded by luʾluʾ, the eunuch general who had defected from the autonomous ruler of egypt, aḥmad b. ṭūlūn (r. 254–70/868–84), whose deputy (ghulām) and companion (ṣāḥib) he had been.39 because of their numbers, skills, and bravery, luʾluʾ’s troops enable a number of victories over the rebels in the later stages of the rebellion.40 when al-muwaffaq approves luʾluʾ’s request to join his forces, he receives him and his men with magnificent presents, a doubling of their pay, and khilaʿ. luʾluʾ is already described as being dressed “in fine attire” (fī zī ḥasan) on meeting the ʿabbasid chief. the following day he and 150 of his officers (qāʾid min quwwādihi) receive robes (yakhlaʿu ʿalayhi) and are then paraded on horses caparisoned in gold and silver, preceded by a hundred ghilmān carrying purses and unspecified garments. more such clothing is given to the officers according to their rank.41 although this theater is not aimed at the zanj rebels, it is analogous in its design: its purpose is to demonstrate that formerly disaffected fighting forces could be received with honor into the government army, and that this honor could be performed—and future loyalty demanded—through the ceremonial bestowal of gifts, including, significantly, silk robes that simultaneously declare and act. receiving a khilʿa and being displayed—whether in front of the army one is joining or in front of one’s former comrades—are both signs of a new status and the thing that makes that status, giving it physical form. al-muwaffaq’s adroit use of robes to detach zanj rebels and make them visibly loyal to the caliphate was a pioneering intensification of this practice. in their accounts of the development of the khilʿa, both dominique sourdel and gavin hambly point to the second half of the third islamic century as the moment of its first flourishing, the former listing various examples of ʿabbasid caliphs bestowing robes and the latter emphasizing the importance of robes in forging relationships between the caliphs and first the tahirids (821–73) and then the samanids (819–999) in khorasan and transoxiana.42 curiously, 38. ibid., 3:2072–73; fields, recovery, 117–18. 39. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:2025. 40. ibid., 3:2081–82, 2086–87, 2089, and 2093, where it is a ghulām from luʾluʾ’s troops who brings al-muwaffaq the head of the rebel leader. 41. ibid., 3:2080–81; fields, recovery, 124. 42. sourdel, “robes of honor”; hambly, “from baghdad.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 585 however, neither of them notes the role of robes in the zanj rebellion at the beginning of the period they identify, prior to ismāʿīl b. aḥmad’s expansion of samanid influence in the 280s. in this light, it is significant that the practice, especially in the form of caliphs giving robes to their governors and other high officials, seems to have become formalized during the reigns of al-muʿtaḍid (r. 279–89/892–902) and his middle son al-muqtadir (r. 295–320/908–32). the future caliph al-muʿtaḍid, then known by the kunya abū al-ʿabbās, was present alongside his father al-muwaffaq during the final campaign against the zanj.43 it is thus possible that he took the practice from the battlefield to the caliphal court in baghdad. bestowing khilaʿ was designed to be spectacular, in the sense that the robes and parading were intended to draw the attention of an audience. in his conclusion to the volume in which sourdel’s and hambly’s essays appear, stewart gordon astutely observes that the broader “semiotic and ceremonial metalanguage” of robing—the bestowal of robes, often accompanied by horses and weapons—cannot be discounted as mere “spectacle.”44 but if we understand spectacle as designed to attract an audience and incite it to act, then in the case of the zanj, bestowing and donning robes and parading the robed former rebels was indeed a spectacle. the robes were meant to be seen and to make a powerful impression on the spectators, serving as powerful tokens and agents of the defected rebels’ new position under and relation with the ʿabbasids. for the rebels who continued to hold out, the semiotic charge of seeing their former comrades paraded in magnificently colored and embroidered silk finery, in some cases with horses and weapons, must have been immense. the charge was inextricably physical, too. the lives of the zanj were increasingly threatened. holed up under siege, their supply lines cut, they were at risk of starvation, especially after an ʿabbasid raid on al-mukhtāra destroyed a massive threshing floor.45 then there was the threat of being captured and dismembered as punishment for rebellion, a prospect that became more likely by the day as al-muwaffaq’s troops gained the upper hand. under these circumstances the spectacle of the khilʿa would have induced all manner of hopeful sensations, including the sheen and glamour of silk, the admiration of one’s fellows, and incorporation into a fighting force led by the caliph’s brother, whose victory seemed increasingly likely, whose attitude was forgiving, and whose abundant resources contrasted starkly with the dire circumstances of the zanj camp. two puzzles nonetheless remain: was not the wearing of silk clearly forbidden to muslim men? and why would the rebels, having fought for so many years to maintain autonomy from ʿabbasid rule, be content to be folded into the very forces against which they had been engaged in a life-and-death struggle? the “problem” of silk for muslim men al-ṭabarī describes the robes the rebels were given to wear as unambiguously being made of “red silk,” khilaʿ min khilaʿ al-ḥarīr al-aḥmar, which suggests that the entire garment 43. hambly, “from baghdad,” 194–96. hambly mentions the zanj rebellion, but only as a distraction from the caliphate’s relations with potentates further east. 44. gordon, “robes, kings, and semiotic ambiguity,” in gordon, robes and honor, 379–85. 45. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:2079. 586 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) consisted of silk. the robes are also described as being made of dībāj, silk brocade. al-ṭabarī uses this term twice in his tafsīr to explain the meaning of the words sundus and istibraq, types of (green) silk garments promised to the faithful in paradise. sundus, he writes, is “fine” (raqīq) dībāj while istibraq is “coarse” (ghalīẓ) dībāj.46 a group of well-known ḥadīths prohibits the use of silk garments by muslim men in this life.47 the use of silk strips up to the breadth of two or three fingers was allowed, paving the way for the argument that ṭirāz, the band of silk inscriptions that often decorated robes of honor, was permissible.48 however, as discussed above, the khilaʿ bestowed on defected zanj rebels were made entirely of silk, and nowhere in the al-ṭabarī-shaylama account is mention made of ṭirāz, although we have a contemporary fragment of ṭirāz from nishapur and earlier literary evidence of it from ifrīqiya.49 more importantly, material and textual evidence indicates that the use of silk garments continued to be popular among muslim men.50 the ʿulamāʾ’s prohibition clearly did not outweigh the attraction of the luxury product with all its associations of status and wealth. similarly, the circumstances of the rebellion obviously trumped any possible worries the caliph’s general or the rebels might have had about the legality of donning silk robes. those fighting the zanj rebellion are presented as embodying and defending islam throughout its domains. the amīr al-muʾminīn, his brother, and his nephew were engaged in a war against a man claiming to be an ʿalid and to receive divine visions. al-muwaffaq enjoined zanj defectors to fight a holy war (mujāhada) against an “enemy of god,” and at the conclusion of the war he ordered that letters be written to all the “centers of the muslim world” (amṣār al-islām) announcing victory and safety for their inhabitants.51 as for the defectors, they hardly had a choice to opt for the kind of life urged upon the faithful by the ʿulamāʾ; they could either resist to the death, in increasingly difficult circumstances, alongside ʿalī b. muḥammad, or be incorporated into the fighting body of their adversaries, but with the honor of robes, rank, and weapons. even if they were at all worried that silk clothes were not proper attire for muslims, the fact that their wearing was 46. abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl āy al-qurʾān, ed. ʿabd allāh b. ʿabd al-ḥasan al-turkī (cairo: dār hijr, 1422/2001), 15:255 (q 18:31); 16:499–500 (q 22:23); 23:550–51 (q 76:12, 21). 47. as employed by richard bulliet in his discussion of why the cotton trade became the occupation of choice for iranian ʿulamāʾ : cotton, 42–68. 48. ibid., 54–56. it seems likely that the term ṭirāz is of persian origin, derived from tarāz, “adornment”: nicholas sims-williams and geoffrey khan, “zandanījī misidentified,” bulletin of the asia institute 22 (2008): 207–13, at 210. bulliet, in cotton, 51, points to the association of silk with the defeated, effete, luxurious sasanian court, already a well-established literary topos by the third/ninth century ce, as noted by petra sijpesteijn in “request to buy coloured silk,” in gedenkschrift ulrike horak, ed. hermann harrauer and rosario pintaudi, 255–72 (florence: gonnelli, 2004), 260. but as the persian origins of the word suggest, and evidence of both persian and roman state manufacture of ṭirāz-style textiles confirms, by approving ṭirāz the ʿulamāʾ were hardly promoting an absolute break with the pre-islamic imperial past. 49. for khorasan, see “tiraz fragment, dated a.h. 266/a.d. 879–80,” metropolitan museum of art website, accessed september 1, 2022, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/448603. for ifrīqiya, see sijpesteijn, “request,” 263. 50. bulliet, cotton, 51–52. 51. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:2097; fields, recovery, 139. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/448603 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 587 ordered in the name of the highest authority in the islamic lands would surely have been sufficient justification. as for the lack of disapproving comments from al-ṭabarī in his selection from shaylama’s work, we might surmise that he preferred to demonstrate the effectiveness of al-muwaffaq’s policy of distributing silk robes for preserving the unity of the caliphate, with which al-ṭabarī was deeply concerned and which had been so severely challenged by the zanj, over expressing the concern that, as richard bulliet put it, “for muslims this vision of luxury [the silk garments of q 22:23] was reserved for saved souls.”52 the earliest surviving khilʿa dates from 390/1000, and it bears a ṭirāz inscription in honor of the buyid amīr bahāʾ al-dawla.53 as a proxy for the robes that have long since been lost to us, it is worth looking at one near-contemporary, possibly iraqi silk item, which ended up as the shroud of st. mengold, kept at the collegiate church of huy in belgium. radiocarbon dating indicates that with a 95.4% probability it was manufactured between 780 and 980 ce, and with a 68.2% probability between 870 and 970.54 geoffrey khan and nicholas simswilliams have shown that the textile contained arabic writing in a ninth-century hand, indicating that an amīr called ʿabd al-raḥmān had purchased it for 37 2/3 dinars. it was probably a wall hanging, 2.4 meters long, originally richly polychrome, depicting sasanianstyle animals (rams or stags) in roundels. the unit of account suggests it was purchased in egypt, syria, or iraq. the dominant color in a recent reconstruction (the original is a faded and indistinct brown) is red with a brownish tinge, but it also contains green, blue, white, and a brownish yellow.55 with its shining fabric, its vivid colors, its figurative sasanian designs, and its palpably luxury quality, the wall hanging would no doubt have made a grand impression on visitors to the house of the commander with the impeccably muslim name who had the foresight to state his ownership on the back. even if it was not a garment, it can help us imagine the sort of wonder zanj defectors might have felt when presented with robes of similar material, coloring, and artisanship. from one hierarchy to another the second puzzle is why so many rebels would have been content to defect to the very forces they had rebelled against, thus committing themselves to risking life and limb fighting their former comrades. as discussed in the papers by hannah-lena hagemann and petra sijpesteijn in this issue, rebels, especially higher-ranking ones (socially and militarily), could count on receiving clemency in the form of a safe conduct if they switched sides in time. in accounts of such defections, however, the bestowing of gifts and khilaʿ does not play a role. when studying what prompted ʿalī b. muḥammad’s supporters to join his uprising, it becomes clear why khilaʿ could play the role they did in the conclusion of the zanj revolt: the initial, existential motivation for the participation of many of ʿalī b. muḥammad’s early supporters in the rebellion seems to have become less relevant over time. 52. bulliet, cotton, 62. 53. sourdel, “robes.” 54. sims-williams and khan, “zandanījī,” 209. 55. for images of the two side by side, see sims-williams and khan, “zandanījī,” 214, pl. 8. 588 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) from the very beginning of the revolt, ʿalī had committed himself to ensuring freed slaves would never be betrayed, to improving their condition, and to fighting against corruption.56 early in the uprising, the fear of being returned to slavery clearly animated those rebels who had been forced to labor on the salt steppes. by the time of the siege of al-mukhtāra, however, this possibility was no longer on the agenda. al-muwaffaq’s offer of pardon, embodied in and enacted through khilʿa ceremonies, clearly did not entail a return to slavery. there is no evidence that the rebels were bound by a particular ideology or reform program that prevented them from switching sides to the ʿabbasids. what united the rebels was a desire to escape various forms of degradation and exploitation, including chattel slavery. there is no indication, however, that the rebels shared an egalitarian ethos. on the contrary, theirs was a world of gendered, property-owning hierarchy. ʿalī b. muḥammad promised early recruits property and slaves (ʿabīd).57 this is borne out by references in both al-ṭabarī and al-masʿūdī to rebels owning slaves, including women used as domestic servants and concubines.58 ʿalī b. muḥammad not only gave his followers possessions they had not had access to before but also empowered them in other ways. the zanj army mirrored ʿabbasid military organization, with its commander and, below him, various ranks of officers and lieutenants. we may infer that many rebels, beyond freeing themselves from exploitation, aspired to occupy a place in a hierarchy that paralleled the ʿabbasid one in numerous respects. in other words, the rebellion offered its followers access to power and possessions and the recognition that came with them, which were all the more welcome to those who had been enslaved and thus cut off from kin and community. this prospect, offered by a charismatic visionary whose language drew on a range of contemporary islamic oppositional idioms, was enough to raise a powerful opposition, but only for as long as the undertaking was successful. when the zanj were pressured, the ʿabbasid alternative, which promised rewards, freedom, prestige, and integration into a similar hierarchy, became at least as attractive. as we have seen, zanj fighters were conditionally but publicly recognized as valued members of the ʿabbasid fighting forces. their rebellion might have failed, but it had nonetheless empowered them sufficiently to ensure that they were treated with respect, offered suitable peace conditions, and rewarded with precious gifts. neither fighting nor hierarchy were at all alien to them, and it is important to note that in a world in which the classification, and also stigmatization, of human groups on the basis of ethnicity and skin color was common, the composition of the ʿabbasid army was not too dissimilar from that of the zanj, containing both “white” and “black” ghilmān. luʾluʾ reportedly led a massive 56. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:1746–57. 57. ibid., 3:1750–51. 58. ibid., 3:1992, 2055, 2078; al-masʿūdī, murūj, 8:60–61. more generally, see matthew gordon and kathryn hain, eds., concubines and courtesans: women and slavery in islamic history (new york: oxford university press, 2017). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 589 army with men from ferghana and rum, turks, berbers, blacks (sūdān), and others.59 ultimately, there was a place in the government ranks for almost all the rebels: for the mass of unnamed fighters who defected with their commanders and partook in the latter’s honors; for someone like shibl b. sālim, who, having once been a slave in baghdad, would have been aware how much better a position he now had as an officer in al-muwaffaq’s army providing advice to the commander-in-chief; and for individuals like shaylama himself, who originated in the ʿabbasid elite and understood that he had to choose between death at ʿalī b. muḥammad’s likely defeat or reincorporation into that elite. in this context, khilaʿ were an especially effective way to win over the zanj rebels to the ʿabbasid side. al-muwaffaq clearly recognized their potential and used it to great effect. for the defectors, the reception of silk robes was both a sign that one had been accepted into a new, more enduring hierarchy and the act that actually made one part of it. the sheer quantity of robes distributed, however, raises the question of the conditions of the production and distribution of silk, to which we now turn. silk cloth production al-muwaffaq bestowed hundreds of silk robes on defected rebels and on his own men. luʾluʾ and his 150 officers each received a robe. shibl b. sālim and his men received robes once on defection and again after their successful night action. even if we allow for the exaggeration of numbers typical in contemporary textual sources, the quantity of textiles the ʿabbasids had at their disposal means historians should absolutely not take production for granted, since access to these robes helped determine the course of the revolt. to produce these silk robes required enormous quantities of silk and dyes, whose production required additional organic materials (food, manure, water); cultivation and harvest demanded human and animal power, while the material infrastructure (irrigation canals, roads, workshops, storage facilities) involved in silk cocoon and textile production in turn necessitated a host of additional material and human investments. by imploding silk as a product it will thus be possible to examine how silk robing ceremonies were entangled in complex chains of production. to do this i draw on a range of primary and secondary texts as well as scientific studies of sericulture and dye production. analysis of early islamic textiles has been hampered both by their propensity to decay, meaning they rarely show up in archaeological excavations except in areas such as egypt where conditions have favored their preservation, and by the division of labor between specialists of texts (historians) and of artifacts (art historians).60 historians have also attended more closely to the symbolism of objects (e.g., of their color) than to their materiality— what it means to produce, obtain, transport, distribute, and use the objects. this tendency is clear in three important studies of ʿabbasid-era rebellions that have appeared in the last half century and in which colored cloth ought not to be merely incidental to the accounts of the political and social dimensions of the uprisings concerned. paul cobb’s white banners, which looks at the practice of tabyīḍ, syrian rebels’ raising of white banners and donning 59. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:2080. 60. schulz, “crossroads,” 105. 590 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) of white clothes in response to the ruling ʿabbasids’ black banners, contains only a brief mention of the dichotomous symbolism of white (umayyad/sufyanid) and black (ʿabbasid) and barely any discussion of the banners of the title at all, let alone of what materials they were made of and how.61 moshe sharon’s study of the ʿabbasid “revolution” itself includes a handful of pages discussing the black banners of the work’s title. he argues that black was originally a pragmatic choice, “inconspicuous” when the movement was still clandestine, its “ideological” significance later attributed to it by court historians and traditionalists; again, there is no discussion of the banners’ materiality.62 finally, patricia crone’s monumental study of the iranian “nativist” rebellions certainly explores the symbolism of their varied colors of clothing but never considers those colors’ material support.63 scholars have, however, pointed out that textiles had a far greater importance, both economically and aesthetically, in the medieval muslim lands than they do for us today.64 nonetheless, the nature of our sources means that the evidence remains fragmentary: medieval writers often took colors and fabrics for granted (we cannot even assume that they saw colors in the same way we do),65 and they paid even less attention to production processes.66 david jacoby has observed that scholars of medieval silks have largely failed to analyze the economics of silk or the techniques of weaving and dyeing.67 paula sanders, in her study of fatimid robes of honor, has noted that they are points of convergence of symbolic and economic value—they could indeed be forms of capital, bequeathed in wills or sold for money, and eventually, with the arrival of production for non-elite strata (bearing generic or pseudo-inscriptions), commodities.68 as sarah fee and pedro machado write of textiles produced for east african markets from the ninth to twentieth centuries, historians should attend to types of textiles in the full range of their specificity, as wool, silk, or cotton, dyed, colored, or striped, and produced with an eye to purchasers’ demands, and therefore “implicating specific materials, technologies, knowledge, geographies and supply chains.”69 61. paul cobb, white banners: contention in ʿabbasid syria, 750–880 (albany: state university of new york press, 2001), 5, 47, 64, 129, 136. 62. moshe sharon, black banners from the east, vol. 2, revolt: the social and military aspects of the ʿ abbasid revolution (jerusalem: max schloessinger, 1984), 79–86. 63. patricia crone, the nativist prophets of early islamic iran (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012). 64. jenny balfour-paul, indigo in the arab world (london: routledge, 1997), 121–22, drawing on the work of shelomo dov goitein and maurice lombard, stresses their commercial importance in particular; schulz, “crossroads,” 106, quotes art historian oleg grabar, commenting on nāṣir-i khusraw (fifth/eleventh century), on the role of fine textiles as standards of “transmedial” aesthetic judgment. 65. a point repeatedly made by the historian of color in medieval europe michel pastoreau, e.g., in noir: histoire d’une couleur (paris: seuil, 2008), 5. 66. balfour-paul, indigo, 40–41. 67. jacoby, “silk economics,” 197. 68. paula sanders, “robes of honor in fatimid egypt,” in gordon, robes and honor, 225–41, at 229. 69. sarah fee and pedro machado, “entangled histories: translocal textile trades in eastern africa, c. 800 ce to the early twentieth century,” textile history 48, no. 1 (2017): 1–14, at 2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 591 modern historians are hampered by the general disdain of men of the pen for crafts and manufactures, despite the great prestige of certain textiles, especially fine silks.70 for descriptions of silk thread extraction, weaving, and dyeing, we are largely dependent on accounts from earlier or later periods and/or other places. from mulberry tree to woven cloth the adventure of silk fabric begins with the cultivation of morus alba, the white mulberry tree. indigenous to southwest china but long cultivated further afield, it can withstand a variety of tropical, subtropical, and temperate climates, including those with wide temperature variations, as experienced on the iranian plateau.71 it needs level, moist, light, fertile soil and takes three to six years to mature. we have evidence of mulberry cultivation in ifrīqiya in the fourth/tenth century,72 but it was cultivated further east in the caspian region already from the sixth century ce.73 to be useful to silk production, the trees have to be discouraged from fruiting so that more energy is deployed to growing the leaves that the silkworms eat.74 silkworms are the larvae of a monophagous pest, bombyx mori, which makes silk cultivation dependent on that of mulberry.75 silkworms began to be raised in late antiquity in the roman and sasanian lands, though raw silk continued to be imported from further east.76 b. mori had been selectively bred for centuries in china.77 larvae go through five “instars” (stages) of development, growing rapidly as long as they are constantly hand-fed with fungus-free mulberry leaves, hand-shredded during the first instar. healthy development requires an environment with controlled light, humidity, and temperature 70. although, as david jacoby points out in “silk economics,” 197, this has meant that historians have paid some attention to silks produced for and worn or displayed by elites. 71. f. aljane and n. sdiri, “morphological, phytochemical and antioxidant characteristics of white (morus alba l.), red (morus rubra l.) and black (morus nigra l.) mulberry fruits grown in arid regions of tunisia,” journal of new sciences 35, no. 1 (2016): 1940–47; sogand hashemi and ali khadivi, “morphological and pomological characteristics of white mulberry (morus alba l.) accessions,” scientia horticulturae 259 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2019.108827. susan whitfield, silk, slaves, and stupas: material culture of the silk road (berkeley: university of california press, 2018), 193 and n. 11, suggests an origin in northern china and possibly as far west as the himalayas. 72. david jacoby, “silk economics,” 198 (his source is a fatwa from before 996 ce). 73. whitfield, silk, 206; eilers et al., “abrīšam iii.” 74. henrietta aiken kelly, the culture of the mulberry silkworm (washington, dc: us department of agriculture and government printing office, 1903). 75. gayatri manogna, kasturaiah kandukuru, shamitha gangupantula, and anitha mamillapalli, “spermidine enhances the silk production by mulberry silkworm,” journal of insect science 14, no. 1 (2014), https://doi. org/10.1093/jisesa/ieu069; k. h. dhanyalakshmi and k. n. nataraja, “mulberry (morus spp.) has the features to treat as a potential perennial model system,” plant signalling and behavior 13, no. 8 (2018), https://doi.org/1 0.1080/15592324.2018.1491267. 76. whitfield, silk, 202, explains the complicated politics of silk, involving roman-sasanian rivalry, trade with south india, axumite merchants, and sasanian quarrels with turco-sogdian merchants. jacoby, “silk economics”, 198, discusses silk production in rome before and after justinian. 77. whitfield, silk, 192. https://doi.org/10.1093/jisesa/ieu069 https://doi.org/10.1093/jisesa/ieu069 https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2018.1491267 https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2018.1491267 592 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) (23º–25ºc); fecal matter must be regularly removed before it starts fermenting.78 cocoons are best harvested within seven to ten days, before they grow lighter. the whole process lasts forty to forty-five days.79 figures relating to silkworm cultivation indicate just how great a material input is necessary for production. a batch of 340–700 cocoons weighs 1 kilogram, of which 14.3% is silk and 68.2% water. one thousand kilograms of leaves are necessary for the hatchlings from 28 grams of silkworm eggs to reach maturity, yielding (before pasteur’s use of microscopes to remove diseased eggs) 29.6–40.9 kilograms of cocoons.80 the subsequent stage in the process involves cocoons being exposed to the sun, or steamed and dried, to kill the chrysalids. the cocoons are then unwound; in nineteenthcentury gilan, this was done using a hook and a wheel, usually operated by a woman.81 the threads can be up to nine meters long. to make warp thread they must then be twisted, either by hand or using a spindle wheel. by the time of the zanj rebellion, weaving took place on “drawlooms,” the fruit of long technological development in china, in the sasanian and roman empires, and under muslim rule. weavers’ assistants drew up large numbers of rods that changed the patterns, meaning that a nine-meter-long patterned bolt of cloth might take weeks to produce.82 dyeing the bolts of cloth then have to be dyed. before the advent of synthetic chemistry in the second half of the nineteenth century, this meant using so-called natural colorants,83 which were in fact naturalcultural, since they were the product of complex processes for extracting vivid and lasting colors from plants—indigo for blue; madder, rubia tinctora, or other species for red; a wide range of locally varying plants for yellows—or from the larvae of insects, such as “armenian” cochineal from porphyrophora hamelii and lac from kerria lacca in india and from kermes vermilio, sometimes confused with k. ilicus, around the mediterranean. for instance, the pregnant females of armenian cochineal were crushed to produce a brilliant red dye called qirmiz in arabic.84 the glands of shellfish, the famous murex and purpura sea snails used in the mediterranean from high antiquity to produce 78. manogna et al., “spermidine”; aitken kelly, manual. 79. manogna et al., “spermidine”. 80. aiken kelly, culture. 81. eilers et al., “abrīšam iii.” 82. whitfield, silk, 198–99. 83. thomas bechtold and rita mussak, eds., handbook of natural colorants (chichester: wiley, 2009). it is not the “naturalness” of earlier dyes that distinguishes them from “synthetic” ones but the way they were produced by skilled dyers whose techniques did not draw on knowledge about materials’ molecular structure and the means to manipulate this. 84. elena phipps, “cochineal red: the art history of a color,” metropolitan museum of art bulletin 67 no. 3 (2010): 4–48. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 593 purple, were also extracted.85 the indigo (nīl) plant,86 most commonly indigofera tinctoria, was indigenous to southern india but also cultivated further west in iran, yemen, and egypt; it generally requires warm conditions and plenty of water, often from irrigation, and grows well where cotton and sugar do, too. it produced the most prestigious blue and therefore also green dyes.87 we have more evidence of cultivation and production processes from later periods. al-muqaddasī (d. ca. 380/990) and ibn ḥawqal (d. after 367/978) note that blue (and green) dyes could be derived from the copious and cheap woad (wasma, isatis tinctoria) cultivated in palestine, or they could be the superior (according to ibn ḥawqal) dyes of kabul. ibn al-faqīh (d. 290/903) reports on the importance of indigo (khiṭr) from yemen in a khabar attributed to the grammarian al-aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828).88 dyeing, like silk thread manufacture, was a naturalcultural process that could involve considerable human violence toward nonhuman animals. in the case of the red dyes, it also involved cultivation of the plants on which these insects were parasitic, such as quercus cocciferra, kermes oak, for k. vermilio.89 both plant and insect dyes required an enormous ratio of cultivated raw material input to the output of finished dye. for example, 3,700 kilograms of fresh leaves might produce only 7 kilograms of indigo—a yield of 0.2%. and 7 kilograms of indigo would provide enough dye for only 7 kilograms of textile!90 sixty to eighty dried pregnant female insects were needed for just one gram of crimson red.91 like the red insect dyes,92 indigo had been a high-value trade item for centuries, and later 85. maria melo, “history of natural dyes in the ancient mediterranean world,” in bechtold and mussak, handbook, 3–20, at 14, points out that these species have been reassigned to different genera. expensive dyes— whether purple, red, or blue (and the boundaries between these colors are blurred)—had a variety of cheaper, plantor mineral-based substitutes, which could also be used to adulterate the more expensive dyes; jacoby, “silk economics.” 86. pseudo-jāḥiẓ, tabaṣṣur, 160, notes its export from kirmān province using an arabized form, nīlaj, of its middle persian name. 87. balfour-paul, indigo, 8. generally produced by mixing blue and yellow, green could also be obtained from buckthorn plants such as rhamnus chlorophorus and rh. utilis: harby ezzeldeen ahmed, “history of natural dyes in north africa ‘egypt,’” in bechtold and mussak, handbook, 27–36, at 34. 88. balfour-paul, in indigo, 20, calls him “al-asmi” and states that he died in 831 ce, but abū ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad b. muḥammad b. isḥāq al-hamadhānī (ibn al-faqīh), in kitāb al-buldān, ed. yūsuf al-hādī (beirut: ʿālam al-kutub, 1416/1996), 96, makes it clear that it is the grammarian who is meant. according to b. lewin, in “al-aṣmaʿī,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman, th. bianquis, c. e. bosworth, e. van donzel, and w. p. heinrichs (leiden: brill online), posted 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_813, other writers do give later dates for his death. although al-aṣmaʿī says that indigo grows only in yemen, earlier in the same work ibn al-faqīh himself states that indigo (nīl) comes from sind (buldān, 72). 89. phipps, “cochineal,” 6–8. 90. this figure is from colonial bengal, in 1900: philip john, “indigo – extraction,” in bechtold and mussak, handbook, 105–134, at 119. 91. this figure relates to k. vermilio and the ancient mediterranean: dominique cardon, “colours in civilizations of the world and natural colorants: history under tension,” in bechtold and mussak, handbook, 21–26, at 24. for this reason, cheaper plant dyes such as madder were often preferred. 92. phipps, “cochineal,” 6–10. the phoenicians transported kermes vermilio–derived red across the mediterranean, and indian lac was certainly being taken to the iranian and sogdian world in late antiquity, if not before. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_813 594 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) evidence from the cairo geniza, for example, gives us a glimpse of a market with different qualities of indigo, auctions, trade involving merchants from across the mediterranean, and prices that fluctuated but generally indicated that indigo was a prestige good.93 once dyed, cloth would be cut, stitched, and embroidered, including with gold thread for brocade; at least between the fifth/eleventh and ninth/fifteenth centuries, this labor was carried out by women in the muslim world, and we have plenty of evidence from third/ ninthand fourth/tenth-century egypt of women sewers and embroiderers, too.94 silk fabric workshops there is ample evidence from other parts of the islamic lands and other periods that state-owned and -controlled workshops for khilʿa manufacture existed. in al-andalus such workshops are attested in cordoba already during the reign of ʿabd al-raḥmān ii (206– 38/821–52). in ifrīqiya they are mentioned in the third/tenth century, though we have a fragment of an earlier garment. for egypt we have a ṭirāz fragment commissioned by the caliph al-amīn (193–98/809–13), albeit from a “public” (ʿāmma) workshop. in baghdad workshops are mentioned from the early fourth/tenth century onward.95 ʿabbasid caliphs also had recourse to workshops in khuzistan and fars, where textile production was already well established in sasanian times.96 in arabic these were generally known as dār al-ṭirāz, after the ṭirāz bands, which often gave details of the workshop in which they were made. dominique sourdel has suggested that rulers’ monopoly on the production of ṭirāz was analogous to their monopoly on minting coins.97 the bestowing of robes was not freely allowed but rather was limited to the caliph and his deputies. al-muwaffaq was obviously authorized to hand out khilaʿ in the name of the caliph to the defected zanj rebels. another example is the commander maṣrūr al-balkhī, who received the rebel aḥmad b. laythawayh’s surrender with robes of honor in 265/879.98 the garments produced in such workshops—in fatimid ifrīqiya staffed, at least in 93. balfour-paul, indigo, 26. 94. maya shatzmiller, “women and wage labour in the medieval islamic west: legal issues in an economic context,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 40 no. 2 (1997): 174–206. she suggests dyers were women, whereas balfour-paul, indigo, 75, maintains they were men in later periods, except in the maghrib. for women sewers in egypt, see sijpesteijn, “request,” 267. 95. various authors beginning with r. b. serjeant have presumed, however, that there was such a workshop in baghdad already in the third/ninth century; see r. b. serjeant, “material for a history of islamic textiles up to the mongol conquest,” ars islamica 9 (1942): 54–92, at 69–80. for the two fragments, see “fragment of the so-called marwan tiraz,” metropolitan museum of art website, accessed september 1, 2022, https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/479404, and muhammad abbas muhammad selim, “textile fragment,” in “discover islamic art,” museum with no frontiers (website), accessed september 1, 2022, http://islamicart. museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;isl;eg;mus01;49;en. 96. r. b. serjeant, “material for a history of islamic textiles up to the mongol conquest. ch. iv: ṭirāz cities in khuzistan,” ars islamica 10 (1943): 71–104, at 71–77; again, much of the evidence comes from geographers writing in the following century. 97. sourdel, “robes of honor,” 141. 98. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:1933. governors also minted coins. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/479404 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/479404 http://islamicart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;isl;eg;mus01;49;en http://islamicart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;isl;eg;mus01;49;en al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 595 part, by enslaved men or war captives99—were of the highest quality and not sold in public markets. they were both prestigious signs and effective instruments of sovereign power. the transition from each of these production stages to the next entailed distribution, marketing, monetary and nonmonetary exchanges, storage, and the involvement of merchants, traders, and government officials. these processes, in turn, involved interactions between climate, weather, soil conditions, irrigation systems, plant and insect genetics, conventions surrounding property and money, the deployment of skills and techniques passed from older to younger generations, and gendered divisions of labor. all of these factors have extensive and often difficult to recover histories—and this is far from an exhaustive list. what is offered here is a small sample of the extraordinary range of temporalities and material, naturalcultural, and political-economic forces condensed in the shining silk of the robes the zanj received. understanding the immensity of materials and labor condensed into the khilaʿ allows a greater appreciation of, on the one hand, the robes’ value and prestige in the eyes of the zanj rebels and, on the other, the power emanating from the person able to hand out such robes, especially on so enormous a scale as al-muwaffaq. the ʿabbasids certainly did not control all the forces involved in the production of khilaʿ, but they had a far more influential position in the entangled skeins of infrastructure than did their adversaries. impressive though the zanj silk banner recalled in one rebel’s account of the beginning of the events no doubt was, the rebels purchased it in baghdad on the open market at a time when travel between baghdad and basra was still possible for the insurgents. as the insurrection progressed, and despite their impressive territorial control and military organization, the zanj had no capabilities comparable to al-muwaffaq’s ready access to silk production. attention to the material semiosis of the khilaʿ thus also brings to the fore the salient shift in power relations between the ʿabbasids and the zanj at this moment in their conflict, explaining how the shift could happen and what form it took. imploding the object allows us to go beyond the incidental character of silk in our sources and to complement much excellent work on the rebellion by exploring in greater depth the material causes of the ʿabbasids’ eventual victory. conclusion a preeminent historian of the first islamic centuries, hugh kennedy, stated in an article about the zanj uprising for the broader public that “the basic facts are well-known and not really in dispute whilst the military conflict is covered in minute and sometimes wearisome details.”100 through a material semiotic analysis of a single object associated with the rebellion—silk cloth—it has become clear that there are, in fact, still many basic elements of the revolt about which we are largely ignorant. at the same time, i have sought to demonstrate that by seizing incidental details of objects and imploding them to the best of our abilities we can begin to examine the entanglements of the zanj rebellion with 99. jacoby, “silk economics,” 238. 100. hugh kennedy, “the revolt of the zanj,” critical muslim 13, no. 2 (n.d.), accessed september 1, 2022, https://www.criticalmuslim.io/the-revolt-of-the-zanj/. https://www.criticalmuslim.io/the-revolt-of-the-zanj/ 596 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) processes of production and distribution that have hitherto been dealt with by an entirely separate body of literature. in so doing we open up the possibility of new narratives of the zanj uprising, ones that start from the symmetrical agency of humans and things. in particular, this paper has shown that al-muwaffaq’s ability to distribute silk robes to entice zanj defectors should be regarded as central to ʿabbasid success in defeating the rebels. the effectiveness of this policy illuminates the hierarchical character of zanj organization and the importance of a political anthropology of the rebellion—the zanj desire for possessions and positions. moreover, in order to understand the agency of silk cloth, particularly in view of the apparently enormous quantities of it deployed by the ʿabbasids, it is vital to understand the privileged position of the ʿabbasids in the entanglement of natural and cultural agencements many centuries in the making. connecting the khilaʿ to the many processes and infrastructures involved in their production also allows the robes’ evaluation as both material objects and as articles embodying, symbolizing, and enacting power in the eyes of the rebels and the ʿabbasids alike. with this analysis, i have sought to move historians’ debates away from the opposition of nonhuman structures and human agency, debates to which bulliet suggested historians of early islam had in any case made little contribution.101 even striking instances of human agency such as the zanj defections or the ʿabbasids’ stratagem are determined by and contingent on nonhuman materialities, and instead of seeing humans as somehow ontologically separate from structures, it is preferable to view their actions symmetrically as necessarily entangled in, and both enabled and restricted by, the assemblages of persons and things, objects and subjects, of which they are only in part the builders. many other agents apart from silk also played a role, of course, and any serious rethinking of the zanj revolt must involve, for example, an in-depth investigation of the hydropolitics of the marshes and canals (urban and rural) in and around which it largely took place.102 more generally, if we are to write the history of rebellions, especially ones as well studied as that of the zanj, we need to pay attention to things that have not up to now been a concern for the analysts of uprisings in the medieval islamic lands—or rather, to pay attention to things, which have not up to now been the main object of concern. where in our histories of the zanj or of other rebellions do we have extensive treatment of things as diverse and yet interrelated as weapons, siege equipment, boats, clothing, buildings, and gifts, or of the materials from which these were made, the processes of extraction and processing and distribution that made them possible, and the labor relations between humans and human exploitation of animal power? i have here traced the agency of silk to illustrate how the events of a rebellion are at once materially contingent and determined: contingent, because had the government forces not been able to manipulate silk in the form of robes bestowed on rebels, defections might well have been slower in coming or harder to induce, and the siege of al-mukhtāra more protracted; and determined, precisely because the effects of 101. bulliet, cotton, vii. 102. the importance of this waterscape has been noted by all previous historians of the revolt, but we now have peter verkinderen’s magnificent study, waterways of iraq and iran in the early islamic period: changing waterways and landscapes of the mesopotamian plain (london: i. b. tauris, 2015), which draws extensively on al-ṭabarī’s account of the zanj, to guide us. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entangled symbols • 597 this deployment of silk were decisive for the particular course of the rebellion, though it would no doubt have proceeded had a silk banner never been raised, and been defeated had silk robes never been bestowed. robes of honor were both symbolically charged and outcomes of complex and incompletely understood processes of production that mobilized chains of humans, animals, and things over great distances—physically, metaphorically, and temporally. our histories of rebellions would be immensely enriched by an attention to material semiosis and the entanglement of human action—the conventional center of attention for primary sources and modern historians alike—with broader physical and naturalcultural processes. 598 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) bibliography ahmed, harby ezzeldeen. “history of natural dyes in north africa ‘egypt.’” in handbook of natural colorants, edited by thomas bechtold and rita mussak, 27–36. chichester: wiley, 2009. aiken kelly, henrietta. the culture of the mulberry silkworm. washington, dc: us department of agriculture and government printing office, 1903. aljane, f., and n. sdiri. “morphological, phytochemical and antioxidant characteristics of white (morus alba l.), red (morus rubra l.) and black (morus nigra l.) mulberry fruits grown in arid regions of tunisia.” journal of new sciences 35, 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muhammad. “textile fragment.” in “discover islamic art,” museum with no frontiers (website). accessed september 1, 2022. http://islamicart. museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;isl;eg;mus01;49;en. serjeant, r. b. “material for a history of islamic textiles up to the mongol conquest.” ars islamica 9 (1942): 54–92. ———. “material for a history of islamic textiles up to the mongol conquest. ch. iv: ṭirāz cities in khuzistan.” ars islamica 10 (1943): 71–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2214-871x_ei1_sim_6075 http://islamicart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;isl;eg;mus01;49;en http://islamicart.museumwnf.org/database_item.php?id=object;isl;eg;mus01;49;en 602 • philip grant al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) shaban, m. a. islamic history: a new interpretation. vol. 2. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1971. sharon, moshe. black banners from the east. vol. 2, revolt: the social and military aspects of the ʿabbasid revolution. jerusalem: max schloessinger, 1984. shatzmiller, maya. “women and wage labour in the medieval islamic west: legal issues in an economic context.” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 40, no. 2 (1997): 174–206. sijpesteijn, petra. “request to buy coloured silk.” in gedenkschrift ulrike horak, edited by hermann harrauer and rosario pintaudi, 255–72. florence: gonnelli, 2004. sims-williams, nicholas, and geoffrey khan. “zandanījī misidentified.” bulletin of the asia institute 22 (2008): 207–13. sourdel, dominique. “robes of honor in ʿabbasid baghdad during the eighth to eleventh centuries.” translated by david saʿdah. in robes and honor: the medieval world of investiture, edited by stewart gordon, 137–45. london: palgrave macmillan, 2001. al-ṭabarī, abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. jarīr. jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿ an taʾwīl āy al-qurʾān. edited by ʿ abd allāh b. ʿabd al-ḥasan al-turkī. cairo: dār hijr, 1422/2001. ———. taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk. edited by m. de goeje. 1879. reprint, leiden: brill, 1964–65. talhami, ghada. “the zanj 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https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/448603 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 1-46 the poetics of the sufi carnival: the rogue lyrics (qalandariyyāt) as heterotopic countergenre(s)* matthew thomas miller roshan institute for persian studies, university of maryland, college park (mtmiller@umd.edu) i. introduction as early as the eleventh century, persian poets began producing a new type of poetry that later litterateurs would term the qalandariyyāt. these lively lyrics, as their name suggests, focus on the antinomian exploits of the figure of the “rogue” (qalandar), his similarly socially disruptive associates (qallāsh/rascal, haunter of the winehouse/kharābātī, awbāsh/ruffian, rind/libertine, ʿayyār/roguish man of wiles), and the religious and social abstract the carnivalesque poetics of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) of medieval sufi poetry have excited the interest of varied audiences since premodern times. this attention is not surprising: these poems' purported celebration of proscribed actions, antinomian figures, and even apostasy shocks readers and demands interpretation. many sufi interpreters, followed by a substantial group of contemporary scholars, have read the carnivalesque imagery of such poetry as an esoteric symbolic code that must be explicated through the sufi hermeneutic tradition. other scholars, largely approaching these poems from the perspective of the history of sufism, have sought to understand this poetry’s relationship with the historical antinomian groups of the medieval islamic world. what has been lost in these discussions, however, is an understanding of the qalandariyyāt’s poetics and its function within the larger early persian genre system. this study focuses on elucidating the “poetics of the sufi carnival” through an exploration of how the qalandariyyāt constructs its heterotopic poetics in its parody of ascetic-homiletic (zuhdiyyāt-mawʿiẓa) and panegyric (madḥiyyāt) poetry. the qalandariyyāt operates as a countergenre, but not in the singular. subsumed under this broad generic umbrella are multiple subgenres— a point that also illustrates the considerable complexity and historical specificity of the early persian genre system. * i am grateful to cameron lindley cross, ahmet t. karamustafa, fatemeh keshavarz, paul losensky, john mullan, austin o’malley, michael pifer, and lynne tatlock for their suggestions and feedback on various versions of the text in this article. © 2022 matthew thomas miller. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercialnoderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 2 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) minorities (zoroastrians, christians, even infidels) whom they befriend and often fall in love with in their self-imposed exile from mainstream islamic society. the “revers[ed] world” of the qalandariyyāt takes destruction as its starting point.1 in this sense, the famous comment of the powerful thirteenth-century sufi master abū ḥafṣ ʿumar al-suhrawardī (d. 1234) about historical qalandar groups—namely, that their principal characteristic is that they engage in the “destr[uction] of customs and discard[ing] of the protocols of social interaction and engagement”—is equally applicable to the poetic ethos adopted by the qalandarī poets.2 as ʿaṭṭār remarks in one of the rubāʿī that he places in the qalandariyyāt chapter of his mukhtār-nāma: the beloved does not want high position or lordship, the beloved wants bewilderment and destruction. how would i know how to be a mantle-wearing ascetic (zāhid) when the friend wants me to be a qalandar!3 this impulse to destroy, as ʿaṭṭār confesses here, originates not with the poetic persona of the qalandar himself, but with the enigmatic and many-faced figure of the “beloved.”4 appearing alternatively as an “idol,” a young and seductive member of a religious minority, 1. the reference here is to the important book on symbolic inversion and transgression edited by barbara babcock and victor turner, the reversible world: symbolic inversion in art and society (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1978). 2. abū ḥafṣ ʿumar al-suhrawardī, ʿawārif al-maʿārif, ed. aḥmad ʿabd al-raḥīm sāyiḥ and tawfīq ʿalī wahba (cairo: maktabat al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 2006), 89. al-suhrawardī’s account is the touchstone for almost all discussions of qalandars and antinomians in the premodern islamic world. see, for example, fritz meier, abū saʿīd-i abū l-ḫayr: wirklichkeit und legende (leiden: e. j. brill, 1976), 496–97; ahmet t. karamustafa, god’s unruly friends: dervish groups in the islamic later middle period, 1200–1550 (salt lake city: university of utah press, 1994), 34–36; j. t. p de bruijn, “the qalandariyyāt in persian mystical poetry, from sanāʾī onwards,” in the legacy of mediaeval persian sufism, ed. leonard lewisohn, 75–86 (new york: khaniqahi nimatullah publications, 1992), 76; idem, persian sufi poetry: an introduction to the mystical use of classical persian poems (richmond: curzon, 1997), 73–74; ashk dahlén, “the holy fool in medieval islam: the qalandarīyāt of fakhr al-dīn ʿarāqī,” orientalia suecana 53 (2004): 64; muḥammad riżā shafīʿī-kadkanī, qalandariyya dar tārīkh: digardīsī-hā-yi yik īdiʾuluzhī (tehran: sukhan, 1386 [2007–8]), 137–39; lloyd ridgeon, “reading sufi history through ādāb: the perspectives of sufis, jawānmardān and qalandars,” in ethics and spirituality in islam, ed. francesco chiabotti et al., 379–402 (leiden: brill, 2017), 390–92. 3. farīd al-dīn ʿaṭṭār, mukhtār-nāma: majmūʿa-yi rubāʿiyyāt-i farīd al-dīn ʿaṭṭār nīshābūrī, ed. muḥammad riżā shafīʿī-kadkanī, 2nd ed. (tehran: sukhan, 1386 [2007–8]), 293. persian text: معشوقه نه سر، نه سروری می خواهد حیرانی و زیر و َزبَری می خواهد من زاهد فوطه پوش چون دانم بود چون یار مرا قلندری می خواهد 4. to be clear, when i speak of the “poet as qalandar” or the “qalandarī poet,” i am referring to the qalandarī poetic persona that the poet has adopted in this poem, not the historical figure of the poet. on poetic personae in persian poetry, see julie scott meisami, medieval persian court poetry (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1987), 261–62; idem, structure and meaning in medieval arabic and persian poetry: orient pearls (new york: routledgecurzon, 2003), 29. for a more recent and theoretically rich consideration of the relationship between the “poetic ‘i’”/“lyrical i”/“poetic self” and the historical poet, see domenico ingenito, beholding beauty: saʿdi of shiraz and the aesthetics of desire in medieval persian poetry (leiden: brill, 2021), 104–9, 137. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 3 a “cupbearer,” or a “friend” (yār), this roguish beloved calls the poet to this path of “bewilderment and destruction”: a life of revelry aimed at the subversion, inversion, and transgression of all that is celebrated as sacred and respectable in mainstream islamic society—at times even going as far as praising the “infidelity” (kufr) of the winehouse and decrying the highest islamic principle of “divine unity” (tawḥīd) as “infidelity” (kāfirī).5 it is in this sense that the qalandariyyāt can be said to constitute an islamic form of carnivalesque or heterotopic poetics. these poems, each in its own way, imagine a poetic world in which, as mikhail bakhtin has famously outlined in his work on the premodern carnivals of europe, normal social hierarchies are inverted, official high culture (including religion and its rituals) is mocked, and socio-religious rules are suspended.6 such intense subversion and parody of the hegemonic symbolic order most frequently occurs in this poetry in the various liminal spaces located at the fringes of medieval islamic urban centers, such as the “dilapidated winehouse” (kharābāt) or christian monastery (ṣawmaʿa). however, the rogue’s iconoclastic behavior cannot always be contained in these “counter-sites,” to adopt michel foucault’s terminology from his work on heterotopias. indeed, one of the most consistent impulses in the qalandariyyāt is for its eponymous rogues to burst out of the confines of the various sanctuaries of antinomianism and to assail the pious sensibilities and cherished scared objects of god-fearing muslims.7 the ultimate aim of this sufi carnival is to shock the average muslim into a deeper and richer form of islam that leads to the annihilation of the individual’s self—the final “veil” that separates the sufi aspirant from their divine beloved and the realization of true “divine unity” (tawḥīd). but the apparently sacrilegious nature of the qalandariyyāt’s thematics has made these lyrics an obvious source of interest and speculation throughout their nearly thousand-year history. far from being a marginal literary oddity, their carnivalesque poetics have exerted a strong influence on the later development of persian poetry and 5. abū al-majd majdūd b. ādam sanāʾī, dīvān-i ḥakīm abū al-majd majdūd b. ādam sanāʾī ghaznavī, ed. muḥammad taqī mudarris-i rażavī (tehran: sanāʾī, 1388 [2009–10]), 653–54. 6. in literary-cultural studies, the terms “carnival” and “carnivalesque” are used to refer to real or imagined spaces in which normative social, cultural, political, and even religious values, institutions, and rules are mocked, transgressed, and inverted into a “revers[ed] world.” it is a space of symbolic inversion, transgression, “parody,” and “profanation” of all that is high and holy. there are, however, some differences between bakhtin’s original conception of these terms and the sufi “carnival” of the qalandariyyāt (e.g., there are no elements of “grotesque realism” in the latter). see mikhail bakhtin, rabelais and his world (bloomington: indiana university press, 1984); peter stallybrass and allon white, the politics and poetics of transgression (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1986), 6–26. 7. similar in many ways to bakhtin’s notion of the carnival, foucault’s heterotopic “counter-sites” are liminal spaces where carnivalesque and deviant behavior and objects can be exhibited and normal relations are “contested and inverted.” see michel foucault, “of other spaces,” diacritics 16 (1986): 24–26; daniel defert, “foucault, space, and the architects,” in politics/poetics: documenta x–the book, ed. catherine david and jeanfrancois chevrier, 274–83 (ostfildern-ruit: cantz, 1997), 275–76. for a theoretical exploration of transgressive and “subversive” elements in persian sufi literature (which brings foucault into conversation in another way), see claudia yaghoobi, subjectivity in ʿ aṭṭār, persian sufism, and european mysticism (west lafayette, in: purdue university press, 2017). 4 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) other persianate poetic traditions, such as urdu/hindi and ottoman turkish, in which the figure of the rogue and associated antinomian topoi remained fixtures for centuries, even until the modern era.8 yet little poetic analysis has been done on the history and generic development of the qalandariyyāt; indeed, several prominent scholars have questioned whether it was ever a coherent genre in the first place.9 with a few exceptions, most of the work that has engaged qalandariyyāt poetry has done so primarily with an eye toward broader historical questions about its relationship to antinomianism in the islamic world or its place in the sufi hermeneutic tradition.10 in different ways, these studies all attempt to answer the question of what role this transgressive poetics historically played in the medieval islamic world and sufi piety. this study will not settle these debates. rather, it focuses on a foundational aspect of the qalandariyyāt that too often has been lost in the discussion over its place in islamic culture: its poetics.11 situating the qalandariyyāt within the early persian poetic system, 8. see, for example, j. c. bürgel, “the pious rogue: a study in the meaning of qalandar and rend in the poetry of muhammad iqbal,” edebiyât 4 (1979): 43–64. 9. on the debate over qalandariyyāt’s generic status, see matthew thomas miller, “genre in classical persian poetry,” in routledge handbook of persian literature, ed. kamran talattof (new york: routledge, forthcoming). 10. on historical connections between qalandariyyāt poetry and antinomianism in the islamic world, see karamustafa, god’s unruly friends, 32–33; idem, sufism: the formative period (berkeley: university of california press, 2007), 155–66; meier, abū saʿīd-i abū l-ḫayr, 494-516; shafīʿī-kadkanī, qalandariyya dar tārīkh; matthew thomas miller, “the qalandar king: early development of the qalandariyyāt and saljuq conceptions of kingship in amir moʿezzi’s panegyric for sharafshāh jaʿfari,” iranian studies (forthcoming); bürgel, “pious rogue.” on the place of qalandarī poetry in sufi theory and the hermeneutic tradition, see nasrollah pourjavady, “rindī-yi ḥāfiẓ (1),” in bū-yi jān: maqāla-hā-yi darbāra-yi shiʿr-i ʿ irfāni-yi fārsī, ed. nasrollah pourjavady, 214–47 (tehran: intishārāt-i markaz-i nashr-i dānishgāhī, 1372 [1993–94]); idem, “rindī-yi ḥāfiẓ (2): zuhd va rindī,” in pourjavady, bū-yi jān, 248–88; leonard lewisohn, “prolegomenon to the study of ḥāfiẓ,” in hafiz and the religion of love in classical persian poetry, ed. leonard lewisohn, 3–73 (new york: i. b. tauris, 2010); idem, “sufi symbolism in the persian hermeneutic tradition: reconstructing the pagoda of ʿaṭṭār’s esoteric poetics,” in ʿaṭṭār and the persian sufi tradition: the art of spiritual flight, ed. leonard lewisohn, 255–308 (new york: i. b. tauris, 2006); janis esots, “the image of qalandar in the dīvān-i shams,” in light upon light: essays in islamic thought and history in honor of gerhard bowering, ed. jamal j. elias and bilal orfali, 239–55 (leiden: brill, 2020); ève feuillebois-pierunek, a la croisée des voies célestes, faxr al-dīn ‘erâqi: poésie mystique et expression poétique en perse médiévale (tehran: institut français de recherche en iran, 2002); idem, “le qalandar: réalité et fiction en perse médiévale,” in etrangeté de l’autre, singularité du moi: les figures du marginal dans les littératures, ed. ève feuillebois-pierunek and z. ben lagha, 111–27 (paris: classiques garnier, 2015); dahlén, “holy fool”; cyrus ali zargar, sufi aesthetics: beauty, love, and the human form in the writings of ibn ʿarabi and ʿiraqi (columbia: university of south carolina press, 2011). 11. the distinction i want to make here between sufi hermeneutic or symbolist approaches and my approach is largely the distinction of “hermeneutics” vs. “poetics,” as elaborated by jonathan d. culler. culler, in his classic study, argues that poetics is the study of the “devices, conventions and strategies of literature, of the means by which literary works create their effects”—in short, the study of “how works produce the effects they have for readers”—whereas hermeneutics is the “practice of interpretation, whose goal is to discover or determine the meaning of a text.” while not mutually exclusive and typically used in tandem, they are two different modes of analysis, and a lack of focus on poetics, in particular, leads to a rather poor understanding of how literary texts produce meaning. see jonathan d. culler, structuralist poetics: structuralism, linguistics and the study of literature (new york: routledge classics, 2002), vii–viii. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 5 i will argue that the qalandariyyāt needs to be understood first and foremost as a heterotopic countergenre to ascetic-homiletic (zuhdiyyāt-mawʿiẓa) and panegyric (madḥiyyāt) poetry.12 12. there exists considerable ambiguity in both premodern and modern discussions of the generic boundaries of ascetic (zuhdiyyāt) and homiletic (mawʿiẓa) poetry. these two types of poetry are often treated as the same, or at least closely related in both modern scholarship and the historical tradition, so i have discussed them as one category here. modern persian literary critics frequently use these two generic terms in the same studies, sometimes portraying them as nearly identical in meaning and other times qualifying their position somewhat by placing more emphasis on their deep interrelation, though not necessarily their absolute unity. at times the reader can even sense an author oscillate between these two positions within the same text. j. t. p. de bruijn, in his treatment of “homiletic poetry” and “poems of abstinence,” seems to largely equate zuhdiyyāt and mawʿiẓa/vaʿẓ poetry; see j. t. p. de bruijn, of piety and poetry: the interaction of religion and literature in the life and works of ḥakīm sanāʾī of ghazna (leiden: brill, 1983), 164–82; idem, persian sufi poetry, 29–50. sīrūs shamīsā refers to both zuhdiyyāt and vaʿẓ/mawʿiẓa poetry as “wisdom and ethics” (ḥikmat va akhlāq) poetry that is primarily didactic (taʿlīmī) in nature; see sīrūs shamīsā, anvāʿ-i adabī (tehran: nashr-i mītrā, 1370 [1991–92]), 55. julie scott meisami employs these terms in a way that indicates she sees a difference between them, although she also argues that the origins of the persian homiletic qaṣīda (mawʿiẓa) can be found in the zuhdiyyāt of the arabic tradition. see julie scott meisami, “poetic microcosms: the persian qasida to the end of the twelfth century,” in qasida poetry in islamic asia and africa, ed. stefan sperl and christopher shackle, 1:137–82 (new york: e. j. brill, 1996), 1:173–74. leonard lewisohn avers that “the sufi poetry composed by sanāʾī in the zuhdiyyāt genre is, in many cases, often indistinguishable in content from nāṣir-i khusraw’s odes also penned in this genre,” but he then goes on to say that “one of the main stylistic factors which nāṣir-i khusraw shares with other qaṣīda poets of the generation immediately preceding him . . . is an emphasis on preaching and wise instruction (mawāʿiẓ wa ḥikam)” before proceeding again to refer to nāṣir-i khusraw’s poetry as “zuhdiyyāt.” see leonard lewisohn, “hierocosmic intellect and universal soul in a qasida by nāsir-i khusraw,” iran 45 (2007): 194. in a subsequent study, lewisohn seems to clarify his position on the relationship of zuhdiyyāt and mawʿiẓa poetry by primarily associating nāṣir-i khusraw with “mawāʿiẓ wa ḥikam” poetry but saying that “these genres also contain resonances of what j. t. p. de bruijn calls ‘poems of abstinence’ (zuhdiyyāt).” see leonard lewisohn, “nāṣir-i khusraw’s ode to the universal soul and intellect,” in pearls of persia: the philosophical poetry of nāṣir-i khusraw, ed. alice c. hunsberger, 53–70 (new york: i. b. tauris and institute of ismaili studies, 2012), 54–55. the ambiguity between these thematic genres can also be seen in the way in which scholars discuss individual poems. for example, when muḥammad riżā shafīʿī-kadkanī discusses sanāʾī’s famous “muslamānān, muslamānān! muslamānī, muslamānī!” qaṣīda, he identifies it as a prototypical homiletic (vaʿẓ) qaṣīda of sanāʾī, but in ms kitāb-khāna-yi millī-yi malik (mim) 5468 it is classified as a zuhdiyyāt poem; see muḥammad riżā shafīʿī-kadkanī, tāziyāna-hā-yi sulūk: naqd va taḥlīl-i chand qaṣīda az ḥakīm sanāʾī (tehran: āgāh, 1372 [1993–94]), 219. in another case, de bruijn discusses a poem that he terms a “representative example” of sanāʾī’s homiletic poetry but that the organizer(s) of ms mim 5468 identify as a zuhdiyyāt poem; see de bruijn, of piety and poetry, 170–79. this example is especially interesting because the final line of this poem itself seems to identify it as a poem of “zuhd va mas̱al” (asceticism and “moral advice”). from a historical perspective, the evidence from the manuscript tradition, poetic manuals, and other early works that discuss poetic genres in early new persian poetry is similarly ambiguous. muḥammad b. badr jājarmī (fl. early to mid-fourteenth century), in his poetic anthology muʾnis al-aḥrār, includes the categories of “tawḥīd, naʿt-i muḥammad mustafā, ḥikmat va mawʿiẓa”; see ẕabīḥ allāh ṣafā, tārīkh-i adabiyyāt dar īrān va dar qalamraw-yi zabān-i pārsī (tehran: intishārāt-i firdaws, 1388 [2009–10]), 3/1:320. kaykāvūs b. vushmgīr mentions zuhd and tawhīd poetry together in the qābūs-nāma, but he lists only zuhd as one of the five main categories of poetry (madḥ, ghazal, hijā, mars̱iyyat, and zuhd). see ʿunsur al-maʿālī kaykāvūs b. vushmgīr, qābūs-nāma, ed. ghulāmḥusayn yūsifī (tehran: shirkat-i intishārāt-i ʿilm va farhang, 1345 [1966–67]), 190–92. meisami notes that nāṣir-i khusraw refers to his poetry only as “shiʿr-i zuhd,” “shiʿr-i ḥikmat,” and “shiʿr-i pand”; see julie scott meisami, “nāṣir-i khusraw: a poet lost in thought?,” in hunsberger, pearls of persia, 223–55, at 224. this ambiguity around the generic boundaries of zuhdiyyāt and mawʿiẓa poetry can also be seen in some of the earliest manuscripts of sanāʾī’s dīvān. the early mim 5468 and kabul museum 318 (km) manuscripts contain 6 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) its parodic inversion of these normative genres is a complex intergeneric poetic game in which it adopts and modifies the conventions of other medieval persian (thematic) genres in the construction of its own distinct carnivalesque poetics. moreover, the emergence and development of this countergenre, including its ramification into multiple subgenres, illustrates the flexibility, complexity, and historical specificity of the early persian genre system, as shorter, monothematic poems began to challenge the early dominance of the classical polythematic panegyric qaṣīda.13 ii. the qalandariyyāt in the persian poetic system the qalandariyyāt as heterotopic countergenre genres—whether formal or thematic—are not born into a vacuum; nor do they enter a literary tradition preformed as a platonic archetypal form. they develop within specific poetic systems, at particular historical moments, and they gradually create a flexible generic “identity” through a complex process of adopting and modifying the established conventions of their respective literary traditions and their constituent genres. the qalandariyyāt is no exception. poets forged this genre in a poetic dialogue with the other important genres of early persian poetry—most notably, the royal panegyric and the ascetic-homiletic ode. they assumed the reader would be familiar with the conventions of these other genres and would read the qalandariyyāt’s carnivalesque mockery of them as a poetic riposte to these poems as much (or, in some cases, possibly more than) as a statement of antinomianism, zuhdiyyāt sections in which the medieval editors have placed sanāʾī’s homiletic poetry, poems in praise of the prophet (naʿt-i rasūl), and poetry on unity (tawḥīd). on the other hand, the table of contents of the oldest dated manuscript of sanāʾī’s dīvān, ms velieddin 2627 (dated 1285 ce), does not use the term zuhdiyyāt at all but rather divides these poems into the categories of mawʿiẓa, tawḥīd-i bārī, and naʿt-i rasūl. other manuscripts use all of these terms in a variety of different combinations: mss kitāb-khāna-yi millī-yi farhang (mif) 2353 and british museum or. 3302 include the categories of tawḥīd va ḥikmat va ams̱āl and ḥikam va mas̱al; ms india office 2722 uses the terms tawḥīd, naʿt-i payghambar, and mawʿiẓa va zuhd va ḥikmat; and ms india office 927 arranges sanāʾī’s poems into the categories of tawḥīd, naʿt-i payghambar, and andar mawʿiẓa va zuhd va ḥikmat. (although these are not explicitly marked within the text of the poems themselves, the divisions can be discerned relatively clearly by examining the poems, as nizar ahmad has shown.) i was not able to consult the mif, british museum or. 3302, india office 2722, and india office 927 manuscripts personally. i am relying here on de bruijn’s and ahmad’s analyses of these manuscripts: see nazir ahmad, “some original prose and poetical pieces of hakim sana’i,” indo-iranica 16 (1963): 48–65; de bruijn, of piety and poetry, 104. finally, i will mention that andras hamori, stefan sperl, and philip kennedy also identify close links between homiletic literature and zuhdiyyāt poetry in the arabic tradition: stefan sperl, mannerism in arabic poetry: a structural analysis of selected texts (3rd century ah/9th century ad–5th century ah/11th century ad) (new york: cambridge university press, 1989), 73, 82; andras hamori, “zuhdiyyāt,” in ʿ abbasid belles-lettres, ed. julia ashtiany and t. m. johnstone, 265–74 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1990), 266, 268–269, 272; philip f. kennedy, “zuhdiyya,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online), posted 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_1392. it is possible that future studies of this vast corpus of poetry may reveal distinctions between these two poetic categories in specific historical contexts, but it is undeniable that they are closely associated with one another in both the persian and the arabic tradition and, broadly speaking, contain a similar array of symbols, motifs, and thematic concerns. for this reason, i have decided to discuss these poems here as one poetic tradition: ascetic-homiletic poetry. 13. for more on the early persian genre system, see miller, “genre in classical persian poetry.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 7 an esoteric versification of mystic realities, or a critique of institutionalized sufi orders. in the parlance of literary studies, they created a countergenre. the term “countergenre” is of relatively recent provenance. however, the literary dynamic or generic relationship that has come to be called a countergenre is not. scholars of a number of the world’s literary traditions have argued that analogous literary mechanisms of generic inversion have long played a role in the development of new genres, stretching back all the way to greek literature. as a theoretical concept in literary studies, countergenre has come to denote a genre that consciously seeks to invert another genre’s principal characteristics at the symbolic and structural levels (e.g., plot, narrative, scale, poetic persona, formal aspects, dramatis personae, setting, ethos).14 in the words of alastair fowler, it takes an “antithetic” position vis-à-vis the genre it is responding to, parodying its generic expectations, symbolic values, and general modus operandi.15 although this process of parodical inversion may have implicit or even explicit political/ cultural import, countergenres are first and foremost complex literary games that play out across a literary tradition (synchronically and diachronically) and develop its genre system in new directions.16 they should not be read, necessarily, as straightforward embodiments of an author’s values, nor should an author’s decision to invert and mock another genre be construed as entailing any ideological opposition to the values it espouses.17 in the context of arabic and persian poetry, this can clearly be seen in the fact that the same poets who compose poems in popular countergenres such as khamriyyāt (wine poetry) and qalandariyyāt also often write poems in the very genres that they parody in these countergenres. in traditional arabic and persian poetics, there is no exact equivalent for the contemporary term “countergenre.”18 however, several different notions of poetic antithesis have existed within these poetic traditions from the beginning. at the level of rhetorical devices, both arabic and persian poetry manuals typically discuss the important rhetorical figure of “antithesis” (muṭābaqa/ṭibāq/mutażādd). traditional literary critics seem to have conceived of this rhetorical device primarily as operating at the level of the individual line 14. claudio guillén first elaborated the term “countergenre” in the early 1970s. on the general theory of “countergenre” or “antigenre” in euro-american literary criticism, see claudio guillén, “genre and countergenre: the discovery of the picaresque,” in literature as system: essays toward the theory of literary history, 135–58 (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1971), 146–58; idem, “on the uses of literary genre,” in literature as system, 107–34, at 133–34; idem, “toward a definition of the picaresque,” in literature as system, 71–106, at 74, 97; idem, “literature as historical contradiction: el abencerraje, the moorish novel, and the eclogue,” in literature as system, 159–217, at 179; heather dubrow, genre (new york: methuen, 1982), 24–30, 114–116; alastair fowler, kinds of literature: an introduction to the theory of genres and modes (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1982), 174–79, 251–55. 15. fowler, kinds of literature, 174–79, 251–55. 16. for a treatment of the cultural politics of early qalandariyyāt poetry and how its rogue poetics can operate in seemingly counterintuitive ways, see miller, “qalandar king.” 17. dubrow, genre, 25. 18. although there are significant differences between the persian and arabic poetic systems, i agree with meisami that it is “meaningful to speak of these two closely related and interdependent traditions as constituting one larger system” (meisami, structure and meaning, xi–xii). 8 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) or between sections of a particular poem (e.g., nasīb and madḥ), but there are indications that some poets and litterateurs extended its logic to the level of genre as well.19 kaykāvūs, for example, says to his son in his qābūs-nāma (ca. 1082, the earliest extant discussion of persian poetry): if you want to compose invective and you do not know how, say the opposite of the praise that you would say of that person in a panegyric because whatever is the opposite of panegyric is invective (hijāʾ), and love (ghazal) and elegy (mars̱iyyat) are the same [i.e., they, too, have an antithetic relationship, presumably in their contrasting affective aims of merriment and mourning].20 kaykāvūs does not give this generic/thematic category interrelation a specific name, but his remark—which is echoed by other persian and arabic litterateurs—indicates at the very least that premodern literary figures were well aware of thematic antitheses and the poetically productive role that thematic inversion could play in crafting poetry.21 although direct discussions of generic interrelationships are rare in premodern persian and arabic literary criticism, many scholars of these traditions have clearly shown that poets consciously inverted generic expectations of other genres in their construction of new ones.22 much of this scholarship has focused on the process of generic inversion in the context of the explosion of monothematic genres that occurred in muḥdath 19. on antithesis (and parallelism) between individual lines and sections of poems, see meisami, structure and meaning, 253–64. it is also worth underlining that the lack of explicit or lengthy discussion of a poetic feature (e.g., the “organic unity” of poem) does not necessarily mean that it was not part of poetic practice or was not just assumed to exist (meisami, structure and meaning, 9–11). 20. kaykāvūs b. vushmgīr, qābūs-nāma, 191. on the complexities of reading early discussions of these thematic categories (i.e., hijāʾ, ghazal, mars̱iyyat) as genres or terms for thematic sections within poems, see franklin d. lewis, “reading, writing and recitation: sanā’i and the origins of the persian ghazal” phd diss., university of chicago, 1995), 1–111; idem, “the transformation of the persian ghazal: from amatory mood to fixed form,” in ghazal as world literature, vol. 2: from a literary genre to a great tradition: the ottoman gazel in context, ed. angelika neuwirth et al., 121–39 (würzburg: ergon, 2006); miller, “genre in classical persian poetry.” 21. echoing the same point, kāshifī, in his introduction to his poetic treatise badāʾiʿ al-afkār, also remarks that hajv/hijāʾ is the opposite (żidd) of panegyric (madḥ); see kamāl al-dīn ḥusayn vāʿiẓ kāshifī shīrāzī, badāʾiʿ al-afkār fī ṣanāʾiʿ al-ashʿār, ed. mīr jalāl al-dīn kazzāzī (tehran: nashr-i markaz, 1369 [1990–91]), 82. riccardo zipoli extends this discussion of the opposition of hijāʾ and madḥ to hazl and jidd, citing many other examples of poets discussing these binaries. see riccardo zipoli, irreverent persia: invective, satirical and burlesque poetry from the origins to the timurid period (10th to 15th centuries) (leiden: leiden university press, 2015), 21–28. for an example from the arabic tradition, see geert jan van gelder, “some brave attempts at generic classification in premodern arabic literature,” in aspects of genre and type in pre-modern literary cultures, ed. bert roest and herman vanstiphout, 15–31 (groningen: styx, 1999), 20. 22. in addition to the citations on muḥdath poetry in the following two footnotes, see suzanne pinckney stetkevych, the mute immortals speak: pre-islamic poetry and the poetics of ritual (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1993), 87–157; james t. monroe, the art of badīʿ az-zamān al-hamadhānī as picaresque narrative (beirut: center for arab and middle eastern studies of american university of beirut, 1983), 20–38, 166–170; idem, “preliminary study,” in al-maqāmāt al-luzūmīyah, ed. james t. monroe, 1–110 (leiden: brill, 2002), 2–3, 9. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 9 arabic poetry. scholars working on arabic poetry of this period have shown, for example, how the khamriyyāt, ghazal, zuhdiyyāt, hazliyyāt, and mujūniyyāt/sukhf operate as parodic countergenres to both the traditional arabic qaṣīda and each other, creating what meisami refers to as a “well-constructed literary game”23 in which the topoi, rhetorical figures, and stylistic particularities of each type of poem create an additional layer of intertextual meaning as they play off one another.24 a similar dynamic has been observed in persian poetry, but to date it has received less attention than the parallel phenomenon in the arabic tradition has. the iranian scholar sīrus shamīsā, for example, mentions in his study of genre theory in persian literature that the ghazal can productively be read as a “countergenre” (nawʿ-i mukhāsim yā muqābil) of the classical persian panegyric qaṣīda. however, he offers no explanation or exploration of the topic beyond this remark.25 others have pointed to more specific countergenre relationships in persian poetry, showing in their analyses of ascetic-homiletic, prison (ḥabsiyyāt), obscene, and invective/satirical poetry (hajv/hazl/hazliyyāt) that these genres can be understood as parodic responses to other thematic genres, such as panegyric, mystical, heroic, and love poetry.26 but with regard to the qalandariyyāt specifically, no studies to date have explored its complex poetic game of generic inversion and parody despite numerous passing comments about the antithesis between the ethos, symbols, and figures celebrated in qalandarī and ascetic-homiletic poetry.27 instead, existing studies 23. julie scott meisami, “arabic mujūn poetry: the literary dimension,” in verse and the fair sex: studies in arabic poetry and the representation of women in arabic literature, ed. frederick de long, 8–30 (utrecht: m. th. houtsma stichting, 1993), at 17–18. 24. andras hamori, on the art of medieval arabic literature (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1974), 3–77; m. m. badawi, “from primary to secondary qasīdas: thoughts on the development of classical arabic poetry,” journal of arabic literature 11 (1980): 26–29; idem, “‘abbasid poetry and its antecedents,” in ashtiany and johnstone, ʿabbasid belles-lettres, 146–66, at 163–64; john mattock, “description and genre in abū nuwās,” quaderni di studi arabi 5/6 (1987): 531–36; sperl, mannerism in arabic poetry, 82, 93–96, 175–76; meisami, “arabic mujūn poetry”; philip f. kennedy, the wine song in classical arabic poetry: abū nuwās and the literary tradition (oxford: clarendon press, 1997), 46, 52, 219–26; meisami, structure and meaning, 31–45, 163–89, 219–20; yaseen noorani, “heterotopia and the wine poem in early islamic culture,” international journal of middle east studies 36 (2004): 345–66; zoltan szombathy, mujūn: libertinism in medieval muslim society and literature (exeter: gibb memorial trust, 2013); sinan antoon, the poetics of the obscene in premodern arabic poetry: ibn al-hajjāj and sukhf (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014). 25. shamīsā, anvāʿ-i adabī, 286. 26. meisami, “poetic microcosms,” 172–73; idem, structure and meaning, 181–89; rebecca gould, “wearing the belt of oppression: khāqānī’s christian qasida and the prison poetry of medieval shirvān,” journal of persianate studies 9 (2016): 11–34; paul sprachman, “hajv and profane persian,” in persian lyric poetry in the classical era, 800–1500: ghazals, panegyrics and quatrains, ed. ehsan yarshater, 579–602 (new york: i. b. tauris, 2019); zipoli, irreverent persia, 18; ingenito, beholding beauty, 151–203. daniel rafinejad advances a related argument in his analysis of one of nāṣir-i khusraw’s famous poems as an “anti-ode of spring,” exploring how it flips the generic expectations of the conventional spring ode (bahāriyya). in a slightly different way, the poem also showcases the countergenre dynamic that i am concerned with here. see daniel rafinejad, “‘i am a mine of golden speech’: poetic language and self-reference in nāṣir-i khusraw’s qaṣidas,” in hunsberger, pearls of persia, 39–52. 27. de bruijn, shafīʿī-kadkanī, ève feuillebois-pierunek, nasrollah pourjavady, and franklin lewis have all commented on the opposition between the values and symbols of qalandarī poetry and those of traditional sufi 10 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) have remained primarily focused on the import of this poetry for the development of sufi thought and symbolism. in this study, i want to take the discussion of qalandariyyāt’s opposition to ascetichomiletic poetry a step further and analyze how the qalandariyyāt constructs its poetics through its parody of not only ascetic-homiletic, but also royal panegyric poetry. moving from the purely symbolic level of analysis to the poetic is important because the qalandariyyāt is not just the product of two opposing modes of piety (malāmatī sufi vs. ascetic/legalistic islam) or symbolic systems (in the sense of sufi hermeneutics). its poetics can be fully appreciated only when we understand that each qalandarī poem is, in a sense, an intergeneric and intertextual response to a wide range of other poems and the full range of their poetic particularities. from heterotopic countergenre to heterotopic countergenres one of the crucial inflection points in the development of the premodern persian genre system is the dramatic rise in importance and quantity of shorter monothematic poems in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. often simply labelled with the broad brush of ghazals in modern scholarship and editorial practice, these poems differ in some important ways from the later formal or technical ghazals.28 it may be more accurate to think of them as akin to the various types of short monothematic arabic qaṣīdas of the abbasid period in which the poets selected one of the thematic sections (aghrāḍ) of the traditional polythematic qaṣīda (e.g., ghazal, khamr, zuhd) and developed it exclusively in a dedicated poem (though always in a unspoken dialogue with the other thematic types).29 also similar to these abbasid period poems is the way in which early persian ghazal poets seem to have conceived of their monothematic poems as belonging to different thematic genres and even, in some cases, to subgenres of these larger thematic categories. the qalandariyyāt constitutes one such larger thematic grouping, but there are many others as well—such as love (ghazaliyyāt), wine (khamriyyāt), and ascetic-homiletic (or “ascetic”) (zuhdiyyāt-mawʿiẓa) poetry— that appear in early manuscripts, thematically arranged anthologies of poetry, and, less piety and the “lords of the sharīʿa/islamic law” (to use shafīʿī-kadkanī’s words), which are celebrated in ascetichomiletic poetry. see pourjavady, “rindī-yi ḥāfiẓ (2),” 281ff.; shafīʿī-kadkanī, qalandariyya dar tārīkh, 34–35, 297; de bruijn, “qalandariyyāt in persian mystical poetry,” 79–81, 85; lewis, “reading, writing and recitation,” 559, 564, 574; de bruijn, persian sufi poetry, 76–77; feuillebois-pierunek, a la croisée des voies célestes, 240–53, 308; lewisohn, “prolegomenon to the study of ḥāfiẓ,” 31. lewis’s observations in his analysis of five qalandarī ghazals of sanāʾī come the closest to understanding the relationship between qalandarī and ascetic-homiletic poetry as a countergenre phenomenon. he seems to view it that way, but he does not develop this line of thought. 28. see lewis’s studies on the ghazals of sanāʾī for a discussion of the development of the persian ghazal: “reading, writing and recitation,” 1–111; “transformation of the persian ghazal.” de bruijn has also commented on the significant differences between early ghazals and the classical ghazal: j. t. p. de bruijn, “the ghazal in medieval persian poetry,” in yarshater, persian lyric poetry, 315–487, at 363–64 (on the earliest ghazals, see 351–67). 29. see meisami, structure and meaning, 30–31, 35, 189. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 11 frequently, manuals on persian poetry.30 lewis, in his pioneering study of the early ghazal, argues that there are many such “fluid and not fixed, illustrative and instructive rather than absolute” thematic “genres” or “sub-genres” in the pre-ḥāfiẓian period of persian poetry. it seems necessary to me, at least in the period up to hāfeẕ, to deconstruct the notion of the ghazal and to recognize that different topoi with various and perhaps mutually exclusive semiotic horizons should be considered as separate genres and not merely as a static entity, the ghazal. the wine ode, the dying love poem, the love enjoyed theme, the ascetic, the mystical, the qalandari, the sufi initiation, the courtly praise theme, perhaps all should be seen as different genres which only gradually grew to share a common formal structure.31 i concur with lewis on this point, but i would push the argument even further: many of these overarching thematic genres are themselves quite diverse internally and contain other recurring subtypes of poems, some of which may have even risen to the status of subgenres in the minds of poets of this early period.32 part of the difficulty in pinning down the number and boundaries of these generic distinctions is that generic development is a dynamic process. as meisami has argued, “genres may be combined or included; one genre may become a topic of another, or a topic may be amplified until it takes on the status of a new, independent genre.”33 the qalandariyyāt is an illustrative example of the variegated nature of these early thematic genres.34 even setting aside the slightly more complex issue of the polythematic poems classed as qalandariyyāt by the editors of early thematically arranged dīvān manuscripts, a number of recurring poetic patterns can be seen in the monothematic qalandarī poems of this genre’s most prolific early practitioners, sanāʾī (d. 1131), ʿaṭṭār (d. 1221), and ʿirāqī (d. 1289).35 i refer to these recurring types or patterns of poems as subgenres only provisionally. like lewis, i see them as “fluid and not fixed, illustrative and instructive rather than absolute,” and i am more interested in their heuristic value than 30. for a more detailed overview of this argument and its evidence, see miller, “genre in classical persian poetry.” 31. lewis, “reading, writing and recitation,” 36, 106–7, 438; lewis, “transformation of the persian ghazal,” 136. 32. the identification and study of different thematic types or genres/subgenres within premodern persian poetry has only just begun. for more on this point, see charles-henri de fouchécour, “iran viii: persian literature, (2) classical,” in encyclopaedia iranica, ed. ehsan yarshater, 2006, updated 2012, https://iranicaonline.org/ articles/iran-viii2-classical-persian-literature; miller, “genre in classical persian poetry.” 33. meisami, structure and meaning, 29. 34. on the case of polythematic qalandariyyāt, see miller, “qalandar king.” 35. de bruijn recognized this internal diversity in his early (and unfortunately quite brief) study in which he classified qalandariyyāt into three categories: (1) poems centered on the kharābāt; (2) anecdotal poems focused on qalandarī themes; and (3) andarz poems with qalandarī elements. his observation of the internal diversity of the qalandariyyāt is important to build on, but his typology is insufficiently detailed. see de bruijn, “qalandariyyāt in persian mystical poetry,” 79. 12 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) in establishing a rigid typology. below i provide a brief overview of the seven subgenres that i have identified in early monothematic qalandariyyāt poetry, and in the final section i present three detailed case studies focused on poems of the rogue boast, rogue figure, and rogue address types by sanāʾī, ʿaṭṭār, and ʿirāqī, respectively. (1) rogue boasts (spiritual mock fakhr):36 these poems focus on the enumeration of disreputable acts. they are a poetic performance of blame-seeking behavior and read as rogue confessions or manifestos, with the poet proudly listing his litany of misdeeds done in service of the qalandarī way.37 they are one of the most widespread subtypes of qalandarī poetry. many—although not all—are based on an end rhyme of -am or -īm (“i am” or “we are”), for obvious reasons. (2) rogue figure poems (mock panegyrics):38 these poems are distinguished by their almost exclusive focus on one of the transgressive figures of the qalandarī poetic world, such as the magian youth (mugh-bacha),39 the christian youth (tarsā-bacha),40 the infidel 36. for examples of poems of this type, see sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 73–74 (also type 7, rogue ode), 359–60 (“again” motif, on which see below), 393–94 (also type 7, rogue ode), 401–2; farīd al-dīn ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, ed. taqī tafażżulī (tehran: shirkat-i intishārāt-i ʿilm va farhang, 1375 [1996–97]), 41, 120 (also type 4, rogue anecdote), 200–201 (“our master” motif, on which see footnote 41), 389–90, 390–91, 391–92, 392–93, 486, 486–87, 491, 491–92 (“again” motif), 499, 506–7, 509–11; afżal al-dīn khāqānī shirvānī, dīvān-i khāqānī shirvānī, ed. żiyāʾ al-dīn sajjādī (tehran: intishārāt-i zavvār, 1388 [2009–10]), 629, 630–31, 643; fakhr al-dīn ibrāhīm b. buzurgmihr ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī (majmūʿa-yi ās̱ār-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī), ed. nasrīn muḥtasham (khuzāʾī) (tehran: intishārāt-i zavvār, 1382 [2003–4]), 102–3, 103, 105–6 (“again” motif), 106–7, 107–8 (also type 7, rogue ode), 183–84 (“again” motif), 245 (“again” motif), 280–81, 297 (“again” motif). the “again” motif denotes the common motif of the poet, his master, or his beloved “again” engaging in some carnivalesque behavior. lewis translates and discusses an example of this type by sanāʾī in “reading, writing and recitation,” 364, 560–64. 37. lewis seems to gesture toward this type as well when he remarks in the introduction to his discussion of a selection of sanāʾī’s qalandarī ghazals that “the genre [qalandarī poems] frequently assumes an anthem-like quality, celebrating spiritual virtues of debauchery.” see lewis, “reading, writing and recitation,” 560. 38. for examples, see sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 25–26, 89 (possibly also type 3, proto-shahr-āshūb), 89–90 (also type 4, rogue anecdote) 128–29 (also type 4, rogue anecdote), 135–36, 1008–9; ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 65–66, 158–59, 177–79, 227, 360, 433–35, 435, 435–36, 488, 539–40, 585–86 (also type 5, rogue exhortation), 603–4, 638–39, 643–44, 659–60, 666–67, 693–94, 695–96; ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 101–2 (also type 6, rogue address), 237–38, 245–46 (possibly also type 3, proto-shahr-āshūb). lewis translates and discusses an example of this type by sanāʾī in “reading, writing and recitation,” 367, 574–76. 39. the standard doubling of the ch is eliminated in these terms for magian, christian, and infidel bachchas, rendering the expected bachcha into bacha. see lewis’s discussion of this phenomenon in the context of tarsābacha poetry in “sexual occidentation: the politics of conversion, christian-love and boy-love in ʿattâr,” iranian studies 42 (2009): 717. i am grateful to fatemeh keshavarz for drawing my attention to this point. 40. lewis has written an article on this type of poem in ʿaṭṭār’s dīvān. he argues that ʿaṭṭār’s “christian boy” (tarsā-bacha) poems are a “topical sub-genre of [his] ghazals,” estimating that about 15 of the 872 ghazals (about 2 percent) in tafażżulī’s edition can be placed in this subgenre (“sexual occidentation,” 717). i would actually put this number a bit higher; see footnote 38. i agree that this should be considered a topical subgenre of ʿ aṭṭār’s poetry, but it should be understood as a subgenre of the larger qalandariyyāt genre of ʿaṭṭār’s poetry because the tarsā-bacha topos shows up in several of the rubāʿiyyāt that ʿaṭṭār places in the qalandariyyāt section of his mukhtār-nāma. see three different examples in the opening pages of the qalandariyyāt section of ʿaṭṭār’s mukhtār-nāmah, 292–93. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 13 youth (kāfir-bacha), the qalandarī turk (turk-i qalandar), the young man (pisar), the mock master/disgraced master (pīrī, pīr-i mā),41 the slave (ghulām), or even the cupbearer (sāqī).42 they read as mock panegyrics in the sense that they are poems dedicated to antiheroic rogue figures or mock masters, and they revolve around the celebration of these figures’ antinomian deeds. these poems sometimes have a narrative element to them as well, although they are not essentially concerned with relating a single anecdote like the rogue poetic anecdotes (discussed below) are. (3) city disturber (proto-shahr-āshūb) poems:43 these poems read as early specimens of “city disturber” (shahr-āshūb, shahr-angīz) poetry because they elaborate, in different ways, the same basic poetic plot of a beautiful, roguish beloved who comes into town (often specifically to the market) and throws the entire town into a happy chaos because of the love he evokes in all who come into contact with him.44 he upends the foundations of the entire city and everyone in it: individuals lose their (rational) minds and forsake their religious commitments, entire social spaces (e.g., markets, winehouses) burst into commotion, and true lovers willingly head to the gallows. these poems could, in a sense, 41. the poems referencing “master” or “our master” (pīrī, pīr-i man/mā) revolve around the figure of the poet’s master. depending on the role of the master in the poem, poems with this figure can be placed in different subgenres. 42. i agree with afsaneh najmabadi that we need to think carefully about how to translate the different terms used for the (usually male) figure of the young beloved in premodern persian sources. as khaled el-rouayheb has noted, the terms for these male youths are “somewhat loosely employed in the [premodern islamicate] sources” (at times applied to youths up to the age of twenty-one), but the bulk of the evidence points to the mid-teen years as the ideal age of male beauty. these figures, at least in the premodern islamicate conception of the phases of life, are thus not typically prepubescent children but rather are usually best understood as adolescents or even “young men” in the way we use this last term in contemporary english to indicate a male who is not a fully mature adult man but no longer a young child either. i have tried to reflect this more complex notion of the young beloved’s age in my translations of the various terms employed in qalandariyyāt for the young beloveds rather than opting for strictly literal translations that often obscure the complexity of these terms’ use in the premodern context. for more on the age of the figure of the beloved in the islamic world, see khaled el-rouayheb, before homosexuality in the arab-islamic world, 1500–1800 (chicago: university of chicago press, 2005), 30–32; afsaneh najmabadi, women with mustaches and men without beards: gender and sexual anxieties of iranian modernity (berkeley: university of california press, 2005), 15, 24, 60; ingenito, beholding beauty, 199–200. 43. sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 89 (possibly also type 2, rogue figure), 141; ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 224; ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 73–74 (wine), 74–75 (love), 76–77, 151–52, 245–46. in the poems tagged with “wine” and “love,” the role of the “city disturber” is played by wine and love, respectively. lewis translates and discusses an example of city disturber poetry by sanāʾī and comments that “it eventually developed into a sub-genre of the ghazal all its own,” indicating, it appears, that he, too, sees it as a discrete subgenre that poets later developed further. see lewis, “reading, writing and recitation,” 368, 576–78. 44. for more on the shahr-āshūb genre, see aḥmad gulchīn-maʿānī, shahr-āshūb dar shiʿr-i fārsī (tehran: amīr kabīr, 1346 [1967–68]); sunil sharma, persian poetry at the indian frontier: mas’ûd sa’d salmân of lahore (delhi: permanent black, 2000), 107–15; idem, “generic innovation in sayfī buḫārāʾī’s shahrāshūb ghazals,” in neuwirth et al., ghazal as world literature, 2:141–49; idem, “shahrāshūb,” in yarshater, persian lyric poetry, 569–78; j. t. p. de bruijn, “shahrangīz 1. in persian,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., posted 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_com_1026. 14 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) be viewed as a subtype of the rogue figure poem, since they focus primarily on a rogue figure, his transgressive actions, and the disruptive consequences of his presence in an area. commenting on the rogue figure poem of sanāʾī that i discuss below, de bruijn remarks that this poem is “another specimen of the shahrâshub motif,” which suggests that he sees the poems that i have categorized separately as rogue figure and proto-shahr-ashūb poems as part of one larger subtype of qalandariyyāt.45 it seems to me, however, that the poems i have classed here as proto-shahr-ashūb constitute a separate and well-developed type (i.e., not just a motif) that becomes increasingly popular over time. though not identical in all respects with shahr-āshūb poetry, they share important affinities and should be considered close relatives. (4) rogue poetic anecdotes:46 the poems of this fairly well-developed class relate a sustained anecdote or an encounter between the poetic persona and other figures, sometimes with lengthy dialogues included.47 there is an important difference, in my view, between poems of this type, which are generally structured around a single poetic anecdote, and those that contain anecdotal sections amidst others. most, though not all, of these poems are quite lengthy (some even exceed twenty lines).48 (5) rogue exhortation poems (mock pand):49 these poems are, as their name indicates, characterized by repeated commands or implied exhortations to their imagined audience to take up the carnivalesque qalandarī way of life and to reject normative modes of piety and social life. unsurprisingly, this type of poem frequently—though not always—has an imperative verb form as a part of its end rhyme or poetic refrain (radīf). some are short, playful instructions in verse to a novice “haunter of the winehouse” (kharābātī). others are longer and take a more didactic tone, making them seem more like narrative homilies. 45. de bruijn, “ghazal in medieval persian poetry,” 382–83. 46. sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 89–90 (“master”), 128–29 (possibly also type 2, rogue figure), 163, 666–68; ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 11–12, 120 (“our master”), 193-195 (“our master”), 209 (“our master”), 221–22 (“our master”), 361; ʿ irāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿ irāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 84–85 (“master”). also see another example of a rogue poetic anecdote by ʿaṭṭār translated and discussed by meisami in structure and meaning, 213–14. 47. there are some similarities between this type of qalandariyyāt and some of the anecdote-heavy arabic khamriyyāt (especially those of abū nuwās). meisami points out that the latter “typically contain ‘plays within plays’: descriptions of, and dialogues with, the companions, the tavern-keeper, the object of abū nuwās’s affections” (meisami, structure and meaning, 100). 48. there are also similarities between these qalandarī anecdote poems and the “fable-like” poems of nāṣir-i khusraw. see rafinejad, “‘mine of golden speech,’” 48. 49. sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 179–80, 295, 311–12, 312, 408, 480–81, 481–82, 482–84, 496, 496–97, 506, 585–86 (also type 2, rogue figure), 627; ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 504–5 (also type 6, rogue address); ʿalī b. muḥammad anvarī, dīvān-i anvarī, ed. muḥammad taqī mudarris-i rażavī (tehran: intishārāt-i ʿilmī va farhangī, 1376 [1997– 98]), 859; ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 78–80, 80–81. lewis translates and discusses an example of this type, referring to it as a “sermon” and “homily or catechism,” in “reading, writing and recitation,” 366, 570–73. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 15 (6) rogue address poems:50 these poems are structured around a direct address to a particular figure, usually the beloved or a cupbearer. the address often takes the form of a series of imperative commands (closer in tone to supplications) in which the poet requests wine or the figure’s attention. in some poems the address is more didactic in nature, and these poems thus overlap with rogue exhortation poems at times. (7) rogue odes and ditties:51 this final dual grouping of poems is admittedly the most inexact. rogue odes are typically at least ten lines long and sometimes run into the high teens. their most defining feature is their more well-developed internal structure and segmentation. they can often be divided into several separate but interrelated sections. some evince a tripartite structure (strophe, antistrophe, metastrophe) that makes them look like mini-qaṣīdas with interchangeable thematic sections of mock fakhr, apostrophe/ exhortation, anecdote, and/or homily with a short concluding cap of one or two lines.52 others exhibit a chiastic/ring design or equal segmentation into sections of (roughly) two to four lines each. although most of the monothematic qalandarī poems that appear in the qalandariyyāt sections of sanāʾī’s early manuscripts are longer poems (ten lines or more), there is also a small collection of shorter poems that i have labeled as rogue ditties. this type of poem is less common in comparison to the others, but the shorter length of these poems is likely indicative of other differences in performance context, function, etc. some of the foregoing subgenres may come to be rejected or adjusted in subsequent studies of this poetry. some poems straddle more than one subgenre (as i have indicated in the footnotes), and one could possibly add additional ones, such as the mock ubi sunt poem53 and the winehouse conversion poem,54 among others. there is also the persistent difficulty of determining when one of these distinguishing patterns should be regarded as just a common motif and when it merits consideration as a genuine subgenre because of its centrality to the structure of a large number of poems. despite these limitations, however, these categories are useful tools for deepening our understanding of what medieval persian litterateurs meant when they employed the term qalandariyyāt. they help us disaggregate this broad thematic category and see patterns that may not otherwise be apparent, such as sanāʾī’s overrepresentation in the rogue exhortation category, ʿaṭṭār’s manifest 50. sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 312 (also type 5, rogue exhortation), 586; ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 504–5 (also type 5, rogue exhortation); ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 98–99 (mock ubi sunt), 101–2 (also type 2, rogue figure), 108–9. 51. sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 26, 73–74 (also type 1, rogue boast), 74, 74–75, 75, 75–76, 80–81, 98–99, 128–29, 163, 335–36, 337–38, 358, 393–94 (also type 1, rogue boast), 653–54; ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 33–34, 192–93 (“our master”); anvarī, dīvān-i anvarī, 784–85; khāqānī shirvānī, dīvān-i khāqānī shirvānī, 630–31; ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 77–78, 80, 100–101, 107–8 (also type 1, rogue boast), 236–37, 246–47. 52. on reading ghazals as mini-qaṣīdas, see julie scott meisami, “a life in poetry: hāfiz’s first ghazal,” in the necklace of the pleiades: 24 essays on persian literature, culture and religion, ed. franklin d. lewis and sunil sharma, 163–81 (leiden: leiden university press, 2010); meisami, structure and meaning, 163–66, 183, 186, 205–6. 53. see, for example, ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 98–99, 247–48. 54. see, for example, ʿ aṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿ aṭṭār, 11–12; ʿ irāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿ irāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 84–85. 16 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) predilection for the rogue figure subtype, ʿirāqī’s preference for proto-shahr-āshūb-style poems, or sanāʾī’s and ʿaṭṭār’s predominance in the production of rogue poetic anecdotes. further studies on these preliminary observations may show these patterns to be the result of an individual poet’s idiosyncrasies, but they may also provide important insights for the broader study of stylistic and generic development in medieval persian poetry. for example, i suspect that the more concerted use of the longer anecdotal structure in sanāʾī’s and ʿaṭṭār’s poetry would fall into this latter camp. moreover, analyzing the shifting and imbricated boundaries of these poetic types also reveals something important about the much more complex history of stylistic and generic development in medieval persian poetry—a history that can only now be obliquely glimpsed in the persian poetic manual tradition, early manuscripts, and other writings that comment on persian poetry (e.g., qābūs-nāma, chahār maqāla).55 these poetic artifacts show that poets were conceptualizing and composing poems in a multidimensional generic space that included a much wider array of variables than most modern discussions of genre in persian poetry admit. poetic form and what we might call the poem’s “primary thematic category”—e.g., love, ascetic-homiletic, panegyric, or wine—are certainly strong factors in this generic calculus, but so, too, are more nuanced poetic characteristics, such as certain guiding plot scripts, styles of lyrical presentation (e.g., homiletic vs. anecdotal), and recurring internal structural patterns. these features inflect the first-order considerations of each poem’s classical formal genre and primary thematic category to such an extent that we cannot just speak about qalandariyyāt or ghazaliyyāt. we have to be more exact: we have rogue figure or rogue poetic anecdote qalandariyyāt, and “dying love” and “love enjoyed” ghazaliyyāt, as lewis says. we thus need to examine the qalandariyyāt not as a single genre but as a cluster of heterotopic countergenres if we are to elaborate its full range of intergeneric responses to panegyric and ascetic-homiletic poetry. iii. setting the (generic) scene: panegyric poetry and ascetic-homiletic poetry in the persian tradition before we can dive into a deeper analysis of qalandariyyāt, we need a basic picture of the generic features of panegyric and ascetic-homiletic poetry. both of these genres are complex and dynamic traditions that vary across historical periods and, like the qalandariyyāt, are internally diverse.56 my goal here is not an exhaustive portrayal of all 55. as lewis argues, we should see these thematic types of poetry as “overlapping sets and sub-sets of thematic, typological and rhetorical strategies” whose “symbols, imagery and thematics . . . are by no means restricted to that particular genre and often bleed into those of a related topos, scene or mood.” however, this “fuzziness” of generic borders should not be read as “evidence that the genre categories are artificial, were unperceived as such by the ancient authors or that no poem can ever be assigned to a single genre.” see lewis, “reading, writing and recitation,” 438–40, 560 (discussing the qalandariyyāt specifically); “transformation of the persian ghazal,” 123–24. 56. on diversity and development in panegyric poetry, see, e.g., muḥammad riżā shafīʿī-kadkanī, muflis-i kīmīyā-furūsh: naqd va taḥlīl-i shiʿr-i anvarī (tehran: sukhan, 1372 [1993–94]), 85–95; franklin d. lewis, “sincerely flattering panegyrics: the shrinking ghaznavid qasida,” in lewis and sharma, necklace of the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 17 possible permutations of their poetics but a distillation of their principal features so we can better understand the broader generic landscape in which qalandariyyāt poems operate. each poem, of course, will fit this prototype to varying degrees depending on where it falls in the generic spectrum. qalandariyyāt, in any case, do not typically respond to or imitate particular ascetic-homiletic or panegyric poems.57 rather, they gesture toward a caricature of these poetic types, parodying, often to absurd levels, their most striking thematic and stylistic elements. panegyric poetry panegyric poetry was the genre par excellence of the medieval persian court.58 panegyrics in the persian tradition can be tripartite (nasīb/exordium or introit, raḥīl/journey, and madḥ/praise), bipartite (nasīb and madḥ), or even monothematic (madḥ). a trior bipartite panegyric traditionally begins with a garden, nature, desert, or romantic scene in the nasīb (and, if tripartite, transitions to another section treating the journey or another descriptive theme) before proceeding to the central panegyric section of the poem, often concluding with a closing prayer/duʿā.59 pleiades, 209–50; gabrielle van den berg, “the nasībs in the dīvān of farrukhi sistani: poetic speech versus the reflection of reality,” edebiyât 9 (1998): 17–34. 57. i have not identified any specific example of a qalandariyyāt poem responding to or imitating an ascetichomiletic or panegyric poem in a formal javāb or istiqbāl, though such poems almost certainly did exist. paul sprachman has identified an interesting instance of sūzanī (d. 1173–74) parodying a “serious” ghazal of sanāʾī in one of his obscene poems. see sprachman, “hajv and profane persian.” on response poems and poetic imitation in persian poetry, see the classic study of paul e. losensky, welcoming fighānī: imitation and poetic individuality in the safavid-mughal ghazal (costa mesa, ca: mazda, 1998). 58. the general portrait of panegyric poetry in the persian tradition presented here is a synthesis of the following studies’ treatment of this poetry: shamīsā, anvāʿ-i adabī, 244–47, 273–82; shafīʿī-kadkanī, muflis-i kīmīyā-furūsh, 83–106; ṣafā, tārīkh-i adabiyyāt dar īrān, 1:367–68, 2:353–54; jerome w. clinton, the dīvān of manūchihrī dāmghānī: a critical study (minneapolis: bibliotheca islamica, 1972), 31–43, 73–96, 126–46; meisami, medieval persian court poetry, 40–76; jerome w. clinton, “court poetry at the beginning of the classical period,” in persian literature, ed. ehsan yarshater, 75–95 (albany, ny: bibliotheca persica, 1988), 88–95; julie scott meisami, “ghaznavid panegyrics: some political implications,” iran 28 (1990): 31–44; michael glünz, “poetic tradition and social change: the persian qasida in post-mongol iran,” in sperl and shackle, qasida poetry in islamic asia and africa, 1:183–203; meisami, “poetic microcosms,” 139–164; idem, “the poet and his patrons: two ghaznavid panegyrists,” persica 17 (2001): 91–105; idem, structure and meaning, 66–110, 144–55, 235–43, 366–77. shafīʿī-kadkanī also touches on various aspects of panegyric poetry in his important study of poetic imagery in the earliest period of new persian poetry: muḥammad riżā shafīʿī-kadkanī, ṣuvar-i khiyāl dar shiʿr-i fārsī: taḥqīq-i intiqādī dar ṭatavvur-i īmāzh-hā-yi shiʿr-i pārsī va siyar-i naẓariyya-yi balāghat dar islām va īrān (tehran: āgāh, 1350 [1971–72]). 59. in general, early new persian panegyric qaṣīdas are more similar to the arabic panegyric qaṣīdas of the muḥdath period in terms of their symbolic world (emphasis on garden and court imagery rather than the desert imagery more typical of the classical arabic qaṣīda) and their structure (more frequently bipartite or even monothematic rather than tripartite and polythematic like the classical arabic qaṣīda). however, there are important differences as well. for more on these issues, see meisami, medieval persian court poetry, 40–41; idem, “ghaznavid panegyrics,” 31; idem, “poetic microcosms,” 140ff. on the arabic panegyric tradition, see sperl, mannerism in arabic poetry; andras hamori, the composition of mutanabbī’s panegyrics to sayf al-dawla (leiden: e. j. brill, 1992); suzanne stetkevych, the poetics of islamic legitimacy: myth, gender, and ceremony 18 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the central figure of the panegyric is the mamdūḥ, the object of praise.60 regardless of whether he is a king, a court official, or a powerful religious figure, he functions as the poetic axis of the panegyric, and its poetic world revolves around celebration of his power, prowess, and accomplishments of epic proportions in the battlefield, recreational arenas (palatial gardens and hunting or polo grounds), royal feasts, or even spiritual realms. the panegyric is a “poetic microcosm” or poetic “analogue” of the court life that it reflects, as meisami has argued, and each constituent element in its poetic world is defined in relation to the mamdūḥ.61 if the mamdūḥ is a political leader, the poet will typically extol him as an idealized islamic leader who exudes wisdom, piety (taqvā), faith (īmān), justice, courage, mercy, and generosity at court and who fights valiantly against any enemy of islamdom (kāfir) as the defender of the faith (islām, dīn) on foreign and domestic battlefields.62 the mamdūḥ’s power is often portrayed as divinely ordained and his dominion as extending over the whole world (all seven climes). the grandeur of his rule can be seen in the majesty of all his royal accessories, including his court, his throne, his crown, his great armies, and his treasure. panegyric poetry, in short, is primarily a poetics of power and social order, as glünz and bürgel have argued.63 although my focus here is on qalandarī poetry as a countergenre to royal panegyric, it is important to note that panegyric poetry in the persian tradition is not restricted to praise for kings and political elites alone. there is also a rich body of panegyrics dedicated to religious elites of the medieval islamic world. in general terms, the poet of a religious panegyric will paint his mamdūḥ as the undisputed sovereign of the religious and spiritual domains. although the power, dominion, and accomplishments celebrated in these poems may be of a decidedly more spiritual nature, they are no less grand than those in panegyrics for political leaders, and more importantly, the poetic axis in these religious-spiritual panegyrics continues to be the mamdūḥ.64 the poet will eulogize his piety, religious in the classical arabic ode (bloomington: indiana university press, 2002); beatrice gruendler, medieval arabic praise poetry: ibn al-rūmī and the patron’s redemption (new york: routledgecurzon, 2003). 60. praise (madḥ) in the panegyric is not just sycophantic adulation. when poets praise the mamdūḥ, they celebrate not just an individual but rather an idealized portrait of their patron as the embodiment of the most revered social and spiritual values appropriate to his position in the medieval islamic sociopolitical system. see meisami, medieval persian court poetry, 43–48; idem, “ghaznavid panegyrics,” 32, 34; idem, structure and meaning, 88–90, 136–38, 147–48; j. c. bürgel, “qasida as discourse on power and its islamization: some reflections,” in sperl and shackle, qasida poetry in islamic asia and africa, 1:451–74; glünz, “poetic tradition and social change,” 184, 188, 200; sperl, mannerism in arabic poetry, 9–27. 61. meisami, “poetic microcosms,” 144–45, 163–64. see also idem, “the grand design: medieval persian poetic microcosms,” in proceedings of the xiith congress of the international comparative literature association, 458–63 (munich: judicium, 1990). 62. this last point is especially true in the panegyrics for maḥmud of ghazna composed by his illustrious court poets farrukhī and ʿunsurī. they both wax eloquently about his campaigns against “infidels” (kuffār) in which he mercilessly destroyed their “idols” (but) and “idol temples” (but-khāna) (e.g., farrukhī’s qaṣīda 35 on the destruction of the somnath temple and its idols). see meisami’s discussion of some these qaṣīdas in “poetic microcosms,” 147–48 and structure and meaning, 235–43. 63. bürgel, “qasida as discourse on power”; glünz, “poetic tradition and social change,” 184. 64. i do not mean to suggest any significant separation of the political and religious-spiritual domains here. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 19 knowledge, mystical power, and exalted spiritual state, painting an idealized portrait of the mamdūḥ as an embodiment of the virtues and ideals associated with his particular position in the religious-spiritual hierarchy of the medieval islamic world. because of a shared concern with certain religious-spiritual values, there is considerable overlap between the respective symbolic/conceptual worlds of religious-spiritual panegyrics and ascetichomiletic poetry.65 ascetic-homiletic poetry in ascetic-homiletic poetry we may have what constitutes the first countergenre to royal panegyric poetry.66 the poetic axis of the ascetic-homiletic poet is not the court of the panegyric’s mamdūḥ, nor is his central concern the enumeration of the mamdūḥ’s illustrious deeds and achievements. rather, the poetic world of the zuhdiyyāt-mawʿiẓa revolves around a poetic axis that is firmly anchored in god’s court—the eternal court that rules over the entire cosmos and casts the pleasures and achievements of the mundane world in a starkly different light. even if not set there specifically, the rule, power, and values celebrated in the zuhdiyyāt-mawʿiẓa emanate from that celestial court. the poet of ascetic-homiletic poetry is the preacher of the “arena of religion” (maydān-i dīn), as nāṣir-i khusraw declares in a famous poem.67 he is the admonisher (vāʿiẓ) of the my point is only that the poet’s focus in the religious panegyric is shifted decidedly toward the panegyrized’s religious and spiritual virtues, with only implicit recognition of the political power this exalted religious status may carry. 65. qalandarī themes may even appear in panegyrics for sufi masters or mystically inclined political rulers. a particularly interesting example of this can be found in amīr muʿizzī’s panegyric with a qalandarī nasīb for fakhr al-dīn al-maʿālī abū ʿalī sharafshāh jaʿfarī, which is discussed and translated in miller, “qalandar king.” see also examples in abū al-majd majdūd b. ādam sanāʾī, kulliyyāt-i ashʿār-i ḥakīm sanāʾī ghaznavī [facsimile of manuscript], ed. a. a. bashīr (kabul: muʾassasa-yi intishārāt-i bayhaqī, 1356 [1977–78]), 516–18; sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 388–92, 587–89; fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī (hamadānī), kulliyyāt-i shaykh fakhr al-dīn ibrāhīm hamadānī mutakhallas bih ʿirāqī, ed. saʿīd nafīsī (tehran: kitāb-khāna-yi sanāʾī, 1362 [1983–84]), 69–70; ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i ʿirāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 311–14. 66. the general portrait of ascetic-homiletic poetry in the persian tradition presented here is a synthesis of the following studies’ treatment of this poetry: shafīʿī-kadkanī, ṣuvar-i khiyāl dar shiʿr-i fārsī, 550–63; idem, tāziyāna-hā-yi sulūk, 47–52, 219; ṣafā, tārīkh-i adabiyyāt dar īrān, 1:368, 2:356–57, 3/1:332–33; jerome w. clinton, “the madāen qasida of xāqāni [khāqānī] sharvāni, i,” edebiyât 1 (1976): 156–62; idem, “the madāen qasida of xāqāni [khāqānī] sharvāni, ii: xāqāni and buhturī,” edebiyât 2 (1977): 200–205; de bruijn, of piety and poetry, 164–82; idem, persian sufi poetry, 29–50; julie scott meisami, “symbolic structure in a poem by nasir-i khusrau,” iran 31 (1993): 103–17; idem, “poetic microcosms,” 164–81; idem, “places in the past: the poetics/ politics of nostalgia,” edebiyât 8 (1998): 84–89; idem, structure and meaning, 39–40, 69–71, 172–81, 200–204, 219, 303–4, 375–76; lewisohn, “hierocosmic intellect and universal soul,” 193–226; alice c. hunsberger, “‘on the steed of speech’: a philosophical poem by nāṣir-i khusraw,” in hunsberger, pearls of persia, 147–90, 158–80; lewisohn, “nāṣir-i khusraw’s ode”; meisami, “nāṣir-i khusraw.” on zuhdiyyāt in the arabic tradition, see james d. martin, “the religious beliefs of abū’l-ʿatāhiya according to the zuhdīyāt,” transactions–glasgow university oriental society 23 (1970): 20–25; sperl, mannerism in arabic poetry, 71–96; hamori, “zuhdiyyāt”; gregor schoeler, “bashshār b. burd, abū ʾl-ʿatāhiyah, and abū nuwās,” in ashtiany and johnstone, ʿabbasid belles-lettres, 275–99; kennedy, “zuhdiyya.” 67. see the translation and discussion of this poem in hunsberger, “‘on the steed of speech.’” 20 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) entire muslim world who recalls for his readers the great military victories of past kings and their awe-inspiring monuments (e.g., the ruins of magnificent palaces of ctesiphon) not to praise these figures but to remind his audience of the transitory nature of all earthly life. death and related symbols of morbidity such as graves or ruins are thus dominant topoi in the zuhdiyyāt-mawʿiẓa, and ascetic-homiletic poets frequently employ the ubi sunt (“where is?”) motif, often anaphorically, to reinforce the absolute transiency of earthly life. while lamenting the desolation, evil, and illusionary pleasures of the world, the preacher poet exhorts his audience to piety (taqvā), repentance (tawba, istighfār), and good works so as to guarantee themselves a place in the eternal world of god’s court. the mode of piety that is encouraged in this poetry can be broadly characterized as abstemious (zuhd/parhīz/pārsāʾī) in the sense that it categorically rejects the attractions and achievements of the material world and counsels the reader to adopt a sober code of conduct in line with religion (dīn), the quran, normative islamic law (sharīʿat), and the prophet’s custom (sunnat). it decries kufr (unbelief/infidelity) and earthly idols (but) and enjoins the reader to have absolute trust in god (tavakkul) even in the face of adversity and to let a fear of god’s wrath on judgment day guide their actions. ascetic-homiletic poetry has sometimes been described as a long “string of admonitions” in verse on the aforementioned topics and other, related ones, such as divine unity, faith (īmān), the quran, pious acts of obedience and worship (ṭāʿat), right guidance (hudā), shame (sharm), wisdom/intellect (hikmat, khirad), divine justice, and praise of the prophet, his family, and his companions.68 although this pejorative characterization of ascetic-homiletic poetry is unfair, the symbolic and conceptual world of zuhdiyyāt and mawʿiẓa does revolve around these concepts and motifs.69 iv. the qalandariyyāt as heterotopic countergenre(s): three case studies “well done, young infidel!”: a rogue figure poem of sanāʾī although it is clear that the qalandariyyāt topoi were under development before sanāʾī, it is only in his dīvān that we begin to find a substantial number of monothematic qalandariyyāt poems longer than the rubāʿī form.70 his dīvān contains a representative sampling of all of the major subgenres of the qalandariyyāt, and given the considerable influence his poetry exerted on subsequent poets, it is likely that his qalandariyyāt poems served as foundational models for later qalandarī poets, such as ʿaṭṭār and ʿirāqī. the following qalandariyyāt poem about a “young infidel” (kāfir-bacha) is an example of one of the most popular of these “models,” the rogue figure poem. 68. like panegyric poetry, ascetic-homiletic poetry does at times incorporate imagery and themes from wine poetry and even qalandariyyāt. the zuhdiyyāt poem by sanāʾī that de bruijn discusses in his persian sufi poetry (38–40) is a perfect example. 69. hunsberger and meisami critique this atomized reading of nāṣir-i khusraw’s ascetic-homiletic poetry in their recent studies on his poetry; see hunsberger, “‘on the steed of speech’”; meisami, “nāṣir-i khusraw.” 70. for a discussion of the early history of the qalandariyyāt, see miller, “qalandar king.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 21 1 you have cut me off again from the muslims—well done, young infidel! you have made me a prisoner again—well done, young infidel! 2 in the ranks of lords of love—those “all-in” gambling types— you place me again—well done, young infidel! 3 it seems you returned from apostasy (lit. being an infidel) to being muslim only in order to uproot islam (lit. being muslim)—well done, young infidel! 4 with a face like the fountain of the sun and tresses like crosses, you renewed the christian religion—well done, young infidel! 5 in the dilapidated qalandarī winehouse, in the ranks of the wine drinkers, you know hundreds of strange disguises—well done, young infidel! 6 you are the joseph of the era, and for you, behind each moses there are a hundred jacobs—well done, young infidel!71 the most striking feature of this poem is the repeated apostrophization of the “young infidel” in its laudatory radīf.72 the use of this rhetorical device is widespread in persian poetry. in most cases, it serves to highlight for the audience the focus of the poem.73 in panegyric poetry, the poet apostrophizes the mamdūḥ using a combination of his name, one of his honorific titles, or an adjectival confection that praises as it identifies the mamdūḥ in a more allusive manner. in ascetic-homiletic poetry (including naʿt and manāqib), the apostrophized figure could be god, prophet muḥammad, one of the prophet’s companions, or another important religious figure. when performed, such apostrophizations would likely prompt the performer to gesture physically in the direction of the addressee, 71. sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 1008–9. this poem is not listed as a qalandariyyāt in mudarris-i rażavī’s edition, but a similar version is listed in the qalandariyyāt section in the km manuscript: sanāʾī, kulliyyāt-i ashʿār-i ḥakīm sanāʾī ghaznavī, 575. i have followed the latter version of this poem. persian text: بردیم باز از مسلمانی زهی کافر بچه کردیم بندی و زندانی زهی کافر بچه در صفات پاکبازان در صف ارباب عشق هر زمانم باز بِنشانی زهی کافر بچه در مسلمانی مگر از کافری باز آمدی تا براندازی مسلمانی زهی کافر بچه با رخی چون چشمٔه خورشید و زلف چون صلیب تازه کردی کیش نصرانی زهی کافر بچه در خرابات قلندر در صف می خوارگان صد لباسات عجب دانی زهی کافر بچه یوسف عصری و اندر زیر هر موسی ترا هست صد یعقوب کنعانی زهی کافر بچه de bruijn, in his recent work (“the ghazal in medieval persian poetry,” 382–83), translates and briefly discusses a different version of this poem from the edition of sanāʾī’s ghazals produced by valentina zanolla for the lirica persica project, which he argues contains the “most reliable texts now available” of sanāʾī’s poems (p. 370). 72. see footnote 39 above on the elimination of the doubled chih in kāfir-bacha, and see footnote 42 for more on the age and gender of this “young infidel.” 73. for more on the “poetic refrain” (radīf) in persian poetry, see paul e. losensky, “‘demand, ask, seek’: the semantics and rhetoric of the radīf ṭalab in the persian ghazal,” turkish studies association bulletin 21 (1997): 19–40; franklin d. lewis, “the rise and fall of a persian refrain: the radīf ‘ātash u āb,’” in reorientations: arabic and persian poetry, ed. suzanne pinckney stetkevych, 199–226 (bloomington: indiana university press, 1994). 22 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) further highlighting the gravity of these moments in the poem and the importance of this literary device.74 sanāʾī’s use of the apostrophe for the lowly “young infidel” plays off these expectations. it marks this most socially marginal and despised figure as the poetic axis of the poem while simultaneously inverting all of the attendant expectations of a figure who would be extolled in a poem. the return to this device in the radīf at the end of each line mocks it through its repetition to an almost absurd degree: even the most fulsome panegyrics do not typically apostrophize their mamdūḥ in every line of the poem! the figure of the young infidel dominates the poem in other ways highly reminiscent of traditional mamdūḥs, but in a decidedly antiheroic manner.75 the young infidel is portrayed throughout the poem as the agent whose herculean deeds animate its entire poetic world and whose extraordinary qualities are meant to engender astonishment in the audience. his actions are as awe-inspiring as those of the powerful islamic kings, prophets, and other holy figures in normative forms of panegyric verse, even as they are their diametric opposite on the scale of social laudability. inverting at the outset the move toward societal or spiritual “aggregation” (discussed below in connection with ʿirāqī’s poem), the infidel youth “cut[s]” sanāʾī off from the “muslims,” making him a “prisoner again” in the “dilapidated qalandarī winehouse” (kharābāt-i qalandar) where the “lords of love,” “‘all-in’ gambling types,” and “wine drinkers” congregate in their mock court (lines 1–2, 5). he does not slay the enemies of islam on the battlefield; he aids them, even if indirectly, by weakening islam and imprisoning its adherents (lines 1, 3–4). he does not righteously propagate the sharīʿat and the pillars of the faith; he is a playful trickster or “man of wiles”–type character with “hundreds of strange disguises” who is hell-bent on the destruction both of sanāʾī’s respectable (muslim) character and of the entire normative system of medieval islamic society embodied by the opening persona of “sanāʾī the muslim poet” (lines 3, 5). the pinnacle of the mock mamdūḥ’s treachery occurs, not surprisingly, at the poem’s center point (lines 3–4).76 it features a mock conversion of sorts, in which the young infidel’s apparent return to the islamic fold in the first hemistich of line 3 (his “retur[n] from apostasy to being muslim”) is revealed in the second hemistich to be nothing more than clever subterfuge aimed at “uproot[ing] islam” itself. this stunning deed is followed in the next line with sanāʾī’s claim that the youth’s beauty and cross-like tresses are so potently intoxicating that they have empowered him to “rene[w] the christian religion” (line 4): they are an antidote to the superficial islam practiced by most muslims. by the end of the poem, sanāʾī’s own mock conversion is complete, as he concludes his enumeration of the 74. on the importance of gesturing in the performance of persian poetry, see lewis, “reading, writing and recitation,” 99, 109–10. 75. sprachman has pointed to an analogous phenomenon in one of sūzanī’s satirical responses to a poem of sanāʾī in which sūzanī casts his penis as an “anti-mamdūḥ” (“hajv and profane persian,” 590). similarly, meisami has shown abū nuwās transforming wine into a mock mamdūḥ; see meisami, structure and meaning, 332. 76. meisami, in her exhaustive study of structural patterns in persian and arabic poetry, has shown that key elements of the poem are often placed at its center point (meisami, structure and meaning, 149, 164, 182–83, 185, 191–95, 236). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 23 young infidel’s awe-inspiring transgressive feats by again praising his beauty and crowning him the “joseph of the era”—the carnival king of the medieval islamic (homoerotic) beauty contest—who is loved by a “hundred jacobs.”77 whether we read this last line as a kind of mock coronation or only as high praise, the radical inversion of the normative islamic symbolic hierarchy in comparing an “infidel youth” to an islamic prophet remains. the mock conversion here is violent, even if liberatory and somewhat playful. the infidel youth is not passively proselytizing for christianity on a corner in the marketplace—which would be impossible. he is disguising himself as a muslim in order to “uproot” or even “overthrow” islam (bar-andāzī). he is physically, or at least metaphorically (likely both), invading normative islamic spaces to gain recruits to his christian-cuminfidel-cum-qalandarī winehouse rite. this attack should ultimately be understood as salvific in the sense that it is ironically the infidel youth who will bring the poet and the townspeople to “true islam.” but this liberation of the muslims from their superficial modes of piety can also be read in other ways. for example, it is a clear (mystical) inversion of royal panegyrics’ typical kingly prerogative to protect islamdom and defeat its enemies. but even more important, i think, is the way the poem plays off and spiritualizes the different types of “raids” seen in ṣuʿlūk (“brigand”), mujūn, and khamriyyāt poetry, which all tend toward the literal brigand, anacreontic, or sexual “raiding” models.78 the infidel youth’s raid on the muslims is referenced only allusively in this poem, but the trope is developed in far greater, sometimes poem-length, detail in qalandariyyāt poetry of the city disturber (proto-shahr-āshūb) type. this mock praise poem also shares another important feature with ascetic-homiletic and courtly panegyric poetry: its strong association with a particular physical location in the imaginal geography of medieval islamic poetry. the symbol that is undoubtedly most closely associated with the qalandariyyāt generally is the “dilapidated winehouse” (kharābāt), which in this poem sanāʾī specifies further as a “dilapidated qalandarī winehouse.”79 literally, the kharābāt are “ruins”—a word that comes from the same khāʾ-rāʾ-bāʾ arabic trilateral root as the word “destr[uction]” in suhrawardī’s famous characterization of the qalandars mentioned in the introduction—but in the poetry of this period the kharābāt is understood to be a place of wine, merriment, and debauchery. here, being “ruined” or “destroyed” (kharāb, met. “drunk, wasted”) is not an admonition to readers but rather the sine qua non of participation in this poetic world. this place of ruin or destruction does not function to warn the reader of the transience of mundane pleasures and glory, as do the lifeless “ruins” of ascetic-homiletic poetry (such as, most famously, the ruins of ancient ctesiphon in 77. joseph is considered both a prophet and a symbol of beauty par excellence in the islamic tradition. 78. on the importance of raiding in ṣuʿlūk poetry, see stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 87–157. a few examples of sexual violation of the beloved as “raiding” in mujūn and khamriyyāt can be found in kennedy, wine song, 53–54; meisami, structure and meaning, 165–66. 79. de bruijn, too, makes this point in his introductory study of sanāʾī’s qalandariyyāt poetry: de bruijn, “qalandariyyāt in persian mystical poetry,” 79–80. although kharābāt is typically translated as “tavern,” i have opted to translate it as “dilapidated winehouse” in an effort to convey (even if only indirectly) both the image of a “place of illicit drink” (i.e., tavern) and the sense of a “ruin” (the literal meaning of the term). 24 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) khāqānī’s madāʾin qaṣīda).80 rather, in the qalandariyyāt, the kharābāt is alive with mystical merriment and serves as the center of transgressive activities. its implied decrepitude— whether architectural, metaphorical, or both—is a reflection of the inner psychological state of its denizens and, if intended literally, an implicit critique of the vaunted palaces and grand architectural wonders that are celebrated, at times at great length, in other genres of poetry.81 the “haunters of the kharābāt” (kharābātiyyān) reject the worldly logic of these ostentatious earthly structures not because of an ascetic disposition (as in ascetic-homiletic poetry, which sees all earthly monuments as transient and as distractions from heaven) but rather because it is only by psychologically mirroring the destruction of the kharābāt that they can achieve union with the mock king of the winehouse, the roguish beloved. the kharābāt functions as a mock court of sorts in this poetry, and it is fully equipped with its own courtiers, such as the “lords of love” (line 2) and, in many other poems, cupbearers (sāqī) and minstrels, and even its own court regalia (“strange disguises,” line 5).82 in this poem, the infidel ruler of the court has even arrogated to himself the royal power to imprison muslim subjects (line 1) (albeit with love)—a prerogative of kings and an experience that was of such concern to medieval persian court poets that they developed it into its own thematic genre, the ḥabsiyyāt (prison poetry).83 the sufi “carnivalesque court” is decidedly not the royal court of medieval islamic societies’ political and religious elites that is portrayed in panegyric poetry, nor is it the heavenly court of god as fashioned by the ascetic-homiletic poets. it is their inverse. it is positioned outside of medieval islamic society in both a geographical and a moral sense, with its geographic marginality in the poetic imagination serving as a spatial reminder of the “outside the bounds” nature of the socially and religiously transgressive activities (such as drinking, gambling, and illicit sexual activities) that occur in these houses of ill repute. one wishing to engage in such transgressive activities would necessarily need to do so outside of the bounds of the established social order, which are represented by the city and its institutions of religious and political power (e.g., courts, mosques, sufi lodges). 80. meisami, “poetic microcosms,” 173–81. 81. on poems celebrating the architectural achievements of the political and religious elites and their role in promoting a “‘monarchitectonics’ of imperial ideology,” see paul e. losensky, “the palace of praise and the melons of time: descriptive patterns in ʿabdī bayk šīrāzī’s garden of eden,” eurasian studies 2 (2003): 1–29; idem, “‘the equal of heaven’s vault’: the design, ceremony, and poetry of the ḥasanābād bridge,” in writers and rulers: perspectives on their relationship from abbasid to safavid times, ed. beatrice grundler and louise marlow, 195–215 (wiesbaden: reichert, 2004); idem, “coordinates in space and time: architectural chronograms in safavid iran,” in new perspectives on safavid iran empire and society, ed. colin p. mitchell, 198–219 (new york: routledge, 2011); idem, “‘square like a bubble’: architecture, power, and poetics in two inscriptions by kalim kāshāni,” journal of persianate studies 8 (2015): 42–70; julie scott meisami, “palaces and paradise: palace description in medieval persian poetry,” in islamic art and architecture, ed. oleg grabar and cynthia robinson, 21–54 (princeton, nj: markus wiener, 2001). 82. although sanāʾī does not explicitly refer to the winehouse as a court in this poem, he does do so in other poems. see, for example, sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 74. 83. on the ḥabsiyyāt, see sharma, persian poetry at the indian frontier, 68–106; gould, “wearing the belt of oppression.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 25 at all of these levels, this rogue figure poem of sanāʾī can be read as a mock panegyric. some of the specific image complexes in this poem are unique, but the general carnivalesque poetic currents and frameworks from which sanāʾī draws inspiration produce a predictable— though never boring—pattern of variation on these basic themes in other rogue figure poems.84 “we are taking the road from the qibla to the dilapidated winehouse”: ʿaṭṭār’s rogue boast (mock fakhr) ʿaṭṭār is the second major poet who writes in the qalandariyyāt genre. his qalandarī poems clearly draw heavily on sanāʾī’s models, but he also developed the genre in new ways. his much more extensive development of the rogue figure and rogue boast subgenres is the most obvious example, although the issue of ʿaṭṭār’s unique contributions to the qalandariyyāt genre is obviously more complicated than this and not one that can be dealt with in full here. the following poem is an example of one of ʿaṭṭār’s rogue boasts. 1 we are taking the road from the qibla85 to the dilapidated winehouse, then we will do our prayers in the gambling house. 2 sometimes we cause an uproar from the pain of the dregs; other times we sigh from the pure wine of the winehouse. 3 since we are not sober for a moment in the hermitage, we will do the work of the winehouse drunk and wasted. 4 o wise elder! come and see how gentle we are to the youthful libertines just to get some dregs! 5 those spiritual prattlers are repenting from our dregs while we, without hypocrisy, are repenting from their spiritual conceits! 6 we are not boasting of “going all in” and debauchery,86 nor claiming any exalted states or stations. 7 where are all our enlightenment and miracles? for all we desire is enlightenment and miracles. 8 we are dreg-drinkers so we are no longer men of religion. we are rendering infidelity lawful for the people of religion!87 84. for an important discussion on the essential role of variation on a select range of themes, see keshavarz’s discussion of the “shifting field of similarities” in saʿdī’s poetry in lyrics of life: saʿdi on love, cosmopolitanism and care of the self (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2015), 108–35. 85. the qibla is the direction in which muslims pray. it is determined by the location of the kaʿba, the holiest shrine in islam, which all muslims face in prayer. 86. the oldest manuscript (majlis 2600) reads rindī here instead of mardī; as the former seems to make more sense in this context, i have opted for this alternative reading. 87. a textual variant could change the meaning of this line to “we boast of infidelity to the people of religion.” 26 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 9 tell the people to do bad to us! for we do not retaliate against or judge anyone. 10 o sāqī! the people of longing/dregs in this circle are ready! give them wine, for we are doing the essential work of the wine. 11 we will checkmate the king—supported by one knight—(ref. “sun”) on the chess board using only your face/rook, without even a single pawn. 12 we are the night riders traversing the desert to the heart’s kaʿba. we meet and converse with the shāhids of the soul!88 13 regarding acquiring learned and rational knowledge, like ʿaṭṭār this time we take up the work of the winehouse for a day or two.89 in this complex tripartite rogue boast (1–3, 4–12 [4–9, 10–12], 13), ʿaṭṭār constructs a variation on the important qalandariyyāt end rhyme of -āt. the -āt rhyme was a popular choice for qalandarī poets because it rhymes with the persian word for the qalandars’ lair, the kharābāt. to this common rhyme, ʿaṭṭār adds a twist, appending the poetic refrain mī-kunīm (“we do, we make”). the persian verb kardan—the base infinitive form of the present form mī-kunīm—is almost always used as the verbal element of a compound verb. its meaning is highly flexible and depends on the word(s) by which it is accompanied for much of its semantic meaning in different contexts. its translation, therefore, can differ substantially from sentence to sentence. however, the shared base meaning of doing or making something or engaging in some activity remains constant. this action-oriented radīf is particularly apropos for this rogue boast poem since it keeps the reader ineluctably regardless of the way in which we read this line, the valorization of infidelity (kufr) over (dīn) remains. 88. the figure of the shāhid is a beautiful person—typically a young man—used in a sufi meditative ritual called shāhid-bāzī in which the sufi gazes upon the beautiful human form as an earthly embodiment of god’s limitless beauty. see footnote 42 for more on the age and gender of this figure. 89. ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 509–11. persian text: ما ره ز قبله سوی خرابات می کنیم پس در قمارخانه مناجات می کنیم گاهی ز صاِف میکده َهیهات می کنیم گاهی ز دَردِ دُرد هیاهوی می زنیم مست و خراب کارِ خرابات می کنیم چون یک نفس به صومعه هشیار نیستیم از بهر دردیی چه ُمراعات می کنیم پیرا بیا ببین که جوانانِ رند را ما بی نفاق توبه ز طامات می کنیم طاماتیان ز دُردیِ ما توبه می کنند نه الفِ پاک بازی و رندی همی زنیم نه دعوِی مقام و مقامات می کنیم بر آرزوی کشف و کرامات می کنیم ما را کجاست کشف و کرامات کین همه بر اهل دین به کفر مباحات می کنیم دُردی کشیم و تا بنباشیم مرد دین گو بد کنید در حقِ ما َخلق زانکه ما با کس نه داوری نه مکافات می کنیم ای ساقی اهل درد درین حلقه حاضرند می ده که کار می به مهمات می کنیم سلطانِ یک سوارٔه نَطعِ دو رنگ را بی یک پیاده بر رخ تو مات می کنیم ما شب روانِ بادیٔه کعبٔه دلیم با شاهداِن روح مالقات می کنیم هم یک دو روز کاِر خرابات می کنیم در کسبِ علم و عقل چو عطار این زمان al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 27 focused throughout on the actions and feats for which ʿaṭṭār is praising himself and his fellow “night riders traversing the desert to the heart’s kaʿba” (line 12). “boast” or “self-praise” poetry (fakhr) has a long tradition in persian and arabic, with which poets such as sanāʾī, ʿaṭṭār, and ʿirāqī would have been deeply familiar. numerous examples of pre-islamic fakhr poetry have survived (although how truly “pre-islamic” they all are is a debate for elsewhere), and it remained a fixture of islamic persian and arabic poetics, too. poets commonly include fakhr sections in polythematic poems that proclaim their unparalleled poetic skills, intellectual stature, or moral probity. such boasts could move from the personal to the social register as well, becoming a poetic statement of a larger group’s values, memorialization of its achievements, and assertion of its strength and unity.90 in ʿaṭṭār’s poem, and in qalandarī poetry more generally, the traditional “boast” is not eliminated but transformed. it is more akin to the mock fakhr of the khamriyyāt, hazliyyāt, or ṣuʿlūk poetry in which the poet celebrates his rejection of social institutions and norms and the heterotopic countersites and individuals who inspire the sufi carnival.91 the qalandarī poet, however, is not only antisocial. he is also a “self-deprecator” (kamzan), as both sanāʾī and ʿaṭṭār term it in several other poems.92 his boast is equal parts antisocial and anti-self—and at a deeper level, statements of the former type also serve the latter purpose since society and its structures are in a sense projections and outgrowths of the individual self and its illusion of separateness from ultimate reality/god. in a direct affront to the foundational logic of traditional fakhr, the qalandariyyāt’s mock fakhr can be understood as a poetic performance of the destruction of the self, a performative assertion that there ultimately is no self to praise or reintegrate (a point i will return to below): all is god, the beloved. ʿaṭṭār’s assertion in line 6 (the center of the poem) that “[w]e are not boasting of ‘going all in’ and debauchery / nor claiming any exalted states or stations” seems to be an indirect acknowledgment that this poem is a boast of a certain sort or at least could be interpreted that way. notwithstanding ʿaṭṭār’s claim, the very act of disassociating one category from another highlights the subterranean connections between them. the tension contained in this disavowal is noteworthy because it embodies the janus-faced nature of countergenre poetics: one face must always look back to the poetics that it parodies even as it rejects and inverts it. the qalandarī poet does not want to “boast” even though he undeniably does boast of his “blame-seeking” (malāmatī) behaviors.93 but poetic boasts of a political or 90. for a few examples of fakhr in different types of arabic and persian poetry, see stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 33–42, 274–83; meisami, structure and meaning, 201–3. 91. on the rejection of traditional fakhr or use of mock fakhr in ṣuʿlūk, khamriyyāt, and hazliyyāt, see stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 87–157; meisami, structure and meaning, 167, 219–20; kennedy, wine song, 53–54, 56. 92. see sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 311–12, 337–38; ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 200–201, 361, 506–7. 93. the term used for “blame” here, malāmat, is important because many scholars maintain that qalandarī poetry was a poetic outgrowth of an early islamic spiritual movement called the malāmatī (blame-seekers). see the studies cited in footnote 2. ṣuʿlūk poets also portray themselves at times as targets of social opprobrium (stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 117–18). 28 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) spiritual nature are associated with courtly panegyric poets and, especially in the mind of the qalandarī poets, with their archnemeses, the “ascetics” (sing. zāhid). as ʿirāqī says in line 8 of his poem below, “pour me wine! for i have repented from asceticism / because i saw nothing from ascetics except boasting and ostentation.”94 the qalandarī poet, therefore, must mock the fakhr in terms that will alert the audience to the intended genre of parody while also radically inverting its horizon of expectations. this is the delicate dance of “rogue boasts” or, as the qalandarī poet would likely prefer to call it, self-deprecation (kam-zanī). one of the most common ways in which rogue boast poems establish their connection to the larger fakhr tradition is through their sustained focus throughout the poem on the poetic “i” or “we” and their self-proclamation of their (un)praiseworthy acts and characteristics. although not all or even necessarily the majority of poetic boasts follow this pattern, many do employ the first-person plural pronoun to boast of the exceptional qualities and achievements of their “tribe” or societal group.95 the nature of the boasts in all of these poems differs substantially, but their shared poetic script of extended selfglorification/denigration by the poetic persona gives the reader an immediate sense that they are drawing from a shared repository of models and that their affinities are intended, even if only for parodic effect. in the multidimensional space of the persian genre system, such poems would gravitate toward one another on this axis at least, stretching their primary generic fields in new directions through their deliberate and simultaneous adoption and transformation of fakhr poetry’s vast historical repertoire. in ʿaṭṭār’s poem specifically, self-glorification takes a number of interesting forms—some already familiar, others novel variations. the opening boast can be read as a mock raḥīl (journey passage), a parodic response to the traditional raḥīl that shows similarities with the refiguring of the journey passage in khamriyyāt and ṣuʿlūk poetry.96 ʿaṭṭār proudly proclaims that the journey of the poetic “we”—i.e., ʿaṭṭār and his fellow “night riders traversing the desert to the heart’s kaʿba” (line 12)— is not to the powerful court of a mamdūḥ, to god’s heavenly court, or to a holy sanctuary on earth (e.g., the kaʿba) but rather to the “dilapidated winehouse” (kharābāt): the carnivalesque court of the cupbearer (sāqī, line 10) and the wise elder (pīr, who is often portrayed as a “magian”; line 4) discussed previously. in this qalandarī court, they cavort with courtiers who are the most marginal 94. ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī, 108–9. ʿaṭṭār expresses a similarly negative view of boasting in a self-critical signature verse of another of his qalandariyyāt: ʿaṭṭār, dīvān-i ʿaṭṭār, 392–93. note, however, that shafīʿī-kadkanī doubts the attribution of this poem to ʿaṭṭār (shafīʿī-kadkanī, qalandariyya dar tārīkh, 313). 95. see, in particular, the examples of the “stereotyped tribal fakhr genre” excerpted in peter webb, “poetry and the early islamic historical tradition: poetry and narratives of the battle of ṣiffīn,” in warfare and poetry in the middle east, ed. hugh kennedy, 119–48 (new york: i. b. tauris, 2013), 135, and the fakhr as “expression of rebellious individualism” in abdullah el tayib, “pre-islamic poetry,” in arabic literature to the end of the umayyad period, ed. a. f. l. beeston et al., 27–113 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983), 82–83 (on fakhr more broadly, see 81–85). meisami also discusses an example of mock fakhr in a hazliyya of sūzanī in which the poet “enumerates his sins” in an analogous way (structure and meaning, 219). 96. see also the examples of mock raḥīl in khamriyyāt and the reformulation of the traditional raḥīl in ṣuʿlūk poetry in kennedy, wine song, 39–41, 44–45, 54–56; meisami, structure and meaning, 35, 100, 162; stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 87–157. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 29 of social and religious actors (libertines/rind, line 4) and perform their prayers not in mosques but rather in illicit houses of wine and gambling (line 1). ʿaṭṭār represents this antithesis strikingly in the opening lines of the poem, where he portrays himself and his merry band turning away from the qibla to journey instead to the kharābāt, which is the qibla and holy sanctuary of the qalandars. the poem’s focus in both its opening and closing sections on the opposition between the road to the winehouse and the qibla (line 1) and the implied contrast between the “heart’s kaʿba” and the physical kaʿba (line 12) establishes the inversion of the prayer direction or mock-kaʿba motif as one of the foundational elements of this poem.97 ʿaṭṭār then transitions to exploring the theme of drunkenness, telling us that sometimes the agent of intoxication (wine) produces an “uproar” or “clamor” (hayāhū), other times “sighs” (line 2). this state of affective disruption is, as he insists in the third line, the permanent state of those who have chosen the way of the winehouse (may-kadah) or (christian) hermitage (ṣawmaʿa).98 one is never “sober” in these places, as the preacher/ ascetic (vāʿiẓ/zāhid) poet of ascetic-homiletic poetry implores his readers to be, and one is not a true “rogue” unless one is constantly engaged in the antiheroic pursuit of wine, drunkenness, and social disruption. this obsessive and incessant celebration of drunkenness and depravity in the winehouse represents, as others have argued in the context of arabic wine poetry (khamriyyāt), a type of mock heroism that parodies the grand heroic deeds and attributes of the courtly panegyric’s mamdūḥ.99 apostrophizing the wise, non-islamic master of the kharābāt and drawing his attention to their favorable treatment of the young men of the winehouse (line 4), ʿaṭṭār returns to developing the opposition between the kharābātiyyān and their nemeses, the ṭāmātiyyān (“spiritual prattlers,” figures associated, or at least allied, with the ascetic-homiletic poet in the conceptual universe of the qalandariyyāt; line 5).100 he tells us in the first hemistich that the ṭāmātiyyān are busy repenting of their sins (in this case, drinking), but in the second hemistich he inverts the image, triumphantly announcing that the kharābātiyyān are joining them in repenting, but only in “repenting” from spiritual conceits (ṭāmāt). 97. poetic “closure,” to adopt meisami’s terminology, occurs in line 12 before the poetic “cap”—in this poem, the takhallus, or signature verse. meisami uses the term “cap” to refer to concluding verses that mark a shift in focus or theme, including transitions to signature verses, supplications (duʿā), self-reflection, summative statements, admonition, or mock raḥīl (as seen in the example of ʿirāqī’s poem below). they can sometimes appear disjunctive with the rest of the poem. see meisami, structure and meaning, 109, 118–20, 122. 98. in this poem and many other qalandariyyāt poems the “hermitage” (ṣawmaʿa) is to be understood as a christian hermitage to which muslims would go to drink illicit wine. in other poems, however, it seems to be associated with the religious centers of muslim ascetics (zāhid) and/or hypocritical sufis (as lewis points out with regard to ḥāfiẓ’s poetry), who are the antithesis of the qalandar and other antinomian figures associated with the winehouse. see franklin d. lewis, “hafez viii: hafez and rendi,” encyclopaedia iranica, ed. ehsan yarshater, 2002, updated 2012, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/hafez-viii. 99. hamori, on the art of medieval arabic literature, 3–77; meisami, structure and meaning, 35–38, 40, 164; noorani, “heterotopia and the wine poem.” 100. ṭāmāt (spiritual conceits) are associated with the figure of the traditional—and in the mind of the qalandarī poet, hypocritical—sufi in qalandariyyāt poetry. for more on the term ṭāmāt, see shafīʿī-kadkanī, qalandariyya dar tārīkh, 287–93. 30 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the mock-repentance motif illustrated here is another one of the mainstays of qalandariyyāt poetry, and it highlights the antithetical relationship between the poetic worlds of ascetichomiletic and qalandarī poetry. the refusal of the “haunters of the winehouse” to repent and cease tippling their illicit wine is by no means their worst sin. they seek the inversion of the entire moral order of the existing world: wine has led them to renounce religion entirely and make “infidelity” (kufr) lawful for the “people of religion” (line 8). the motif of the abrogation of the moral order occurs in a number of ways in qalandariyyāt poetry. oftentimes it is expressed as the poet’s having been “liberated” from or “rise[n] above good name and shame.” other times, as we see in this poem and the previous poem by sanāʾī, kufr and other religions are celebrated as superior to islam. those who follow the path to the winehouse must not only reject the normative religion (īmān, dīn, and sharīʿat) of ascetic-homiletic and panegyric poetry but also be willing to extol the virtues of non-islamic religious traditions and even profess infidelity or apostasy. the radically transgressive nature of these claims is astonishing if taken at face value. in the view of some medieval islamic legal scholars, such statements could constitute apostasy (ridda), one of the most serious crimes in medieval islamic society, which was punishable by death. while we should not read ʿaṭṭār’s or other qalandarī poets’ celebration of infidelity (or any of the qalandariyyāt’s other antinomian acts) literally, neither should we reduce it to some purely esoteric symbol that is completely divorced from the term’s highly charged and distinctly negative valuation in different modes of religious and political discourse. the poetic potency of kufr and related carnivalesque motifs in qalandarī poetry is predicated on the radical transgressivity associated with these terms and images in the reader’s mind. the poem articulates the opposition between the established social and religious order and the carnivalesque poetic world of the qalandariyyāt in other ways as well. in line 9, ʿaṭṭār orders “the people” to “do bad” to him and his folk, for they do not “judge” or “retaliate against” anyone. the poet’s profession of extralegality situates the kharābātiyyān and their winehouse outside normative legal and religious frameworks. whereas these regimes regulate behavior and render judgment on its (im)permissibility, the qalandarī poet encourages his readers to be free of these binds. ʿaṭṭār then returns to the themes of wine, beautiful youths, and mock raḥīl (lines 10–12). apostrophizing the cupbearer (sāqī) and ordering wine for the novices of the winehouse (line 10), he praises the cupbearer’s beautiful face (rukh) in a complex chess metaphor that also functions as a boast. this line’s imagery is richer in persian than it appears in the english translation because ʿaṭṭār is punning on the names for the two key figures in this line. rukh means “rook” in the context of chess, and sulṭān-i yik savārih can also be read as a reference to the sun. therefore, the boast here operates on two levels: (1) the poetic “we” of the poem uses the cupbearer’s beautiful face to achieve the seemingly impossible task of checkmating the sun, and (2) they use a rook, without even a supporting pawn, to check the chessboard’s king, who also has the aid of a knight.101 101. as an anonymous reviewer of this article pointed out, it is quite difficult to checkmate an opponent when all you have left is a rook. i am indebted to this reviewer for pointing out the incredible complexity of the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 31 the main section of the poem ends with a striking image that brings us back to the opening line. ʿaṭṭār announces that “we”—the collective poetic persona that took the path from the qibla to the dilapidated winehouse in the first hemistich of the poem— “are the night riders traversing the desert to the heart’s kaʿba. / we meet and converse with the shāhids of the soul!” the image he crafts in this mock raḥīl of his roguish brethren as carnivalesque pilgrims crossing the desert to the winehouse is undoubtedly an ironic gesture toward the classical raḥīl through the desert. but there is also an emotive energy to the line that makes it feel like a rallying cry for the kharābātiyyān, announcing that rather than return to society, they will remain forever liminal (a point i return to below). indeed, the poem as a whole reads as a map of their poetic world. after it describes turning away from the qibla and heading toward the dilapidated winehouse in the mock raḥīl of the opening lines, the intervening lines (lines 2–11) elaborate the poetic world of the kharābāt (its dramatis personae, carnivalesque ethos, rituals, etc.) before returning to the mock raḥīl as ʿaṭṭār identifies his motley crew as the “night riders”102 who are headed to the “heart’s kaʿba” to meet with the “shāhids of the heart.” as he implies in the opening hemistich (but makes explicit only in line 12), the dilapidated winehouse is the kaʿba of the qalandariyyāt. this kaʿba of the heart is not the qibla or the place of pilgrimage for outwardly pious muslims with their prayer beads, prayer rugs,103 and spiritual conceits (ṭāmāt). rather, it is a mock kaʿba, a kharābāt whose pilgrims are social outcasts who celebrate their mock ḥajj (pilgrimage) with wine, drunkenness, gambling, games, and beautiful youths. this is a carnivalesque kaʿba that is simultaneously the qalandarī poet’s qibla, holiest sanctuary, and court of disrepute. the poem then concludes with a self-deprecating signature verse that again reinforces the essential dichotomy between the world of the winehouse and the rest of the world and centers the poem on the primary target of mock fakhr: ʿaṭṭār.104 rejecting the socially praiseworthy act of “acquiring learned (ʿilm) and rational (ʿaql) knowledge,” the poetic “we” happily confess to “like ʿaṭṭār this time / take up the work of the winehouse.” there is an implied contrast here between the antiheroic and unglorified “work of the winehouse/ wine” (referenced in lines 3, 10, and 13) and the “work” of other sites of poetic activity— namely, royal courts, mosques/religious centers, and, in a metaphoric sense, god’s heavenly court. readers are left with a choice between these worlds. they can take the road to the qibla or to the royal courts or they can take “the road from the qibla toward the dilapidated winehouse” and the “gambling house” (line 1). but this decision is not just a religious or ideological one. it is a poetic one as well. taking the road to the qalandar’s kharābāt entails not just abandoning the symbols, poetics, and genres of ascetic-homiletic and royal imagery in this line and the fact that an important part of its boast lies in the pun described above. 102. the persian word here, shab-raw, can also be read in a negative sense as “thief.” however, i think that in this context it may be better read as “night goer” or “night rider.” 103. although these images are not included in the poem, the prayer beads (tasbīḥ) and prayer carpet (sajjāda) of pious muslims are likewise standard symbols of normative religion that the persona of the qalandariyyāt rejects. 104. for the role and importance of the signature verse in persian poetry, see paul e. losensky, “linguistic and rhetorical aspects of the signature verse (takhallus) in the persian ghazal,” edebiyât 8 (1998): 239–71. 32 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) panegyric poetry but rather, as ʿaṭṭār does here, inverting and reimagining them. he does not jettison the poetic mainstays of the raḥīl, the kaʿba, the qibla, apostrophe, the court, or fakhr. he parodies them by selectively skewing their principal features to such an extent that their original uses are inverted even as they remain recognizable to a knowledgeable reader/audience member. “o young man! give me some magian wine”: ʿirāqī’s rogue address poem the final poem that i will discuss is from the dīvān of ʿirāqī. although chronologically he comes later than sanāʾī and ʿaṭṭār, he is often thought of as the consummate qalandarī poet because of the elaborate—though likely fictional—story in his hagiography of his conversion to the qalandarī way at the hands of a beautiful young qalandar.105 the following poem, which is similar to the poem that ʿirāqī purportedly recites to this young man (pisar) as he joins the wandering qalandars, is an example of a “rogue address” poem:106 1 o young man (pisarā)! give me some magian wine if you are our companion for we are no longer fixed on the path of asceticism and piety. 2 i considered the sufi lodge to be of no importance—i do not intend to be virtuous! fill me a chalice and bring it to me! what’s the delay? 3 i have not gold nor silver, nor heart nor faith/religion—not even obedience! it is only my companion and i in a corner with a song of poverty. 4 i am not of the people of asceticism and piety—bring me a goblet of wine! for truthfully i have repented of my hypocritical worship. 5 bring pure wine! but if you don’t have that, bring the dark dregs to me for from the dark dregs the heart and eyes will find illumination. 6 i went to the gambling house and saw players who went “all in,” but when i went to the ascetics’ lodge, all i found was deception. 105. for more on this story, see matthew thomas miller, “embodying the beloved: (homo)eroticism, embodiment, and the construction of desire in the hagiographic tradition of ʿirāqī,” journal of middle eastern literatures 21, no. 1 (2018): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262x.2018.1492134; idem, “‘the ocean of the persians’: fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī; poet and mystic,” in mystical landscapes: voices and themes in medieval persian literature, ed. fatemeh keshavarz and ahmet t. karamustafa (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, forthcoming). 106. nafīsī identifies the following as the opening line of the poem: که دراز و دور دیدم ره زهد و پارسایی پسرا، ره قلندر سزدار بمن نمایی both this line and the opening line in muḥtasham’s edition, given here in the text, are very similar to the following bayt that appears in the anonymous introduction immediately after ʿirāqī converts to the qalandarī path: که دراز و دور دیدم سر کوی پارسایی پسرا، ره قلندر بزن ار حریف مایی see anonymous, “muqaddima-yi dīvān,” in ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i ʿirāqī, ed. nafīsī, 46–65, at 50. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 33 7 since i broke my repentance, do not break our covenant. at least once ask of my broken self: “how are you? where are you?” 8 pour me wine! for i have repented of asceticism because i saw nothing from ascetics except boasting and ostentation. 9 free us from the sorrow of the age with wine at least once for i did not find anyone free from the sorrow of the world except through wine. 10 when i am drunk, what is the difference between the church and the kaʿba? when i abandoned the self, what is union? what is separation? 11 i went to circumambulate the kaʿba, but they did not allow me to pass into the sanctuary, saying: “go! you? who are you to presume you can come inside the kaʿba?” 12 at night i was knocking on the monastery’s door when from inside i heard a call: “ʿirāqī! come inside! you are our companion.”107 this poem is built on two primary poetic features: addresses to the young male cupbearer and ʿirāqī’s acceptance and rejection in various spaces—moments that also entail implied even if not always elaborately detailed mock raḥīls. the repeated address to the cupbearer grounds the poem in the world of the winehouse and continually reminds the reader that this is the qalandar’s true home, even as he wanders unsuccessfully elsewhere—most notably to the kaʿba in the penultimate line. although the cupbearer is not as omnipresent a figure as, for example, is the “young infidel” in sanāʾī’s rogue figure poem above, he still occupies a privileged position. he is apostrophized in the first word of the poem (pisarā), and the poem itself is an ongoing address to him in which lines of direct address in the imperative (lines 1–2, 4–5, 7–9) are punctuated by (almost) regular non-imperative interludes of ʿirāqī’s 107. this text is from ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i fakhr al-dīn ʿirāqī, ed. muḥtasham, 108–9 (with the addition of a و in the second hemistich of line 8 from nafīsī's edition). with slight textual variations (the most significant of which is mentioned in the preceding note), this same poem appears in ʿirāqī, kulliyyāt-i ʿirāqī, ed. nafīsī, 295–96. the persian text below is from muḥtasham’s edition: پسرا، مِی مغانه بده ار حریِف مایی که نماند بیش ما را سِر زهد و پارسایی کم خانگه گرفتم، سر مصلحی ندارم قدحی شراب پر کن به من آر، چند پایی؟ نه زر و نه سیم دارم، نه دل و نه دین، نه طاعت منم و حریف کنجی و نوای بی نوایی نه ام اهل زهد و تقوی به من آر ساغر می که به ِصدق توبه کردم ز عبادت ریایی مِی صاف ار نداری به من آر تیره دردی که ز درِد تیره یابد دل و دیده روشنایی به قمارخانه رفتم همه پاکباز دیدم چو به صومعه گذشتم همه یافتم دَغایی چو شکست توبٔه من َمِشَکن تو عهد، باری ز من شکسته بررس که: چگونه و کجایی؟ تو مرا شراب در ده که ز زهد توبه کردم چو ز زاهدی ندیدم جز الف و خودنمایی ز غِم زمانه ما را برهان به می زمانی که نیافت جز به می کس ز غِم جهان رهایی چو ز باده مست گشتم، چه کلیسیا چه کعبه چو به ترِک خود بگفتم، چه وصال و چه جدایی به طواِف کعبه رفتم، به حرم رهم ندادند که برو، تو خود که باشی که درون کعبه آیی دِر دیر می زدم شب ز درون ندا شنیدم که درون درآی عراقی که تو هم حریف مایی 34 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) reflection on his state and the nature of the world (lines 3, 6, 10, with lines 11–12 functioning as a “cap”).108 the cupbearer in this poem should not be understood as a social inferior or menial service worker at whom ʿirāqī is barking commands. ʿirāqī’s repeated calls to him for wine and attention are more supplications than demands. the youthful cupbearer is the poetic beloved, the mock king and representative of god in the qalandar’s carnivalesque world, with whom ʿirāqī is establishing a new “covenant” (ʿahd, line 7), even if he sometimes remains distant and emotionally aloof from the poet (a conventional characteristic of the figure of the beloved in persian poetry). ʿirāqī’s use of the term ʿahd here is noteworthy because it adds a considerable degree of gravity to the figure of the cupbearer and to ʿirāqī’s relationship with him. the normative covenant for all muslims is god’s covenant that he establishes in the quran with his followers (q 2:27). ʿirāqī here breaks this covenant as he parodies it in his pledge of loyalty to his new lord of the winehouse. the entire poem, in a sense, is ʿirāqī’s mock petition for subject status in the cupbearer’s winehouse kingdom.109 it opens with ʿirāqī’s supplication for wine and his announcement of his transfer of allegiance from the “path of asceticism and piety” to the way of the winehouse and its lord, the cupbearer.110 ʿirāqī repeatedly implores his new lord for wine because imbibing it is the ritual affirmation of allegiance to the cupbearer and the key to drawing closer to him. the wine here, ʿirāqī tells us, is “magian wine”—a designation that intensifies the transgressivity of the (already) illicit act of drinking by adding an element of religious transgressivity, too.111 wine and drunkenness (lines 4–5, 8–10, 12) and, to a lesser extent, the winehouse and the monastery (dayr; lines 3, 12) are the central images of this poem. they function as the symbolic antitheses of the images and concepts associated with the rejected people and path of asceticism and piety: asceticism and ascetics (zuhd va pārsāʾī, zāhid), religion (dīn), good behavior (maṣlaḥī), pious acts of obedience (ṭāʿāt), piety (taqvā), repentance (tawba), worship (ʿibādat), the sufi lodge (khānagāh, ṣawmaʿa),112 the kaʿba, and, echoing ʿaṭṭār’s poem above, boasting and ostentation (lāf va khwudnamāʾī). as he says in line 4, “i am not of the people of asceticism and piety (zuhd va taqvā)—bring me a goblet of wine!” (it is worth highlighting that the term “asceticism,” zuhd, is the 108. see footnote 97 on poetic closure and “caps.” 109. for other examples of pledges or transfers of allegiance in poems, see samer m. ali, arabic literary salons in the islamic middle ages: poetry, public performance, and the presentation of the past (notre dame, in: university of notre dame press, 2010), 119–52; majd yaser al-mallah, “doing things with odes: a poet’s pledges of allegiance; ibn darrāj al-qasṭallī’s ‘hāʾiyyah’ to al-manṣūr and ‘rāʾiyyah’ to al-mundhir,” journal of arabic literature 34, no. 1–2 (2003): 45–81; suzanne pinckney stetkevych, the mantle odes: arabic praise poems to the prophet muhammad (bloomington: indiana university press, 2010), 3, 9–10, 16–17, 30–69; stetkevych, poetics of islamic legitimacy, 18, 37, 40, 48–109, 180–240. 110. although it is only implied in this poem, in other qalandarī poems the point about the qalandar way’s being an alternative path is made explicitly. for example, sanāʾī says in reference to the winehouse and its bacchic rituals, “this is our religion (dīn) and the qalandarī way”; see sanāʾī, dīvān-i sanāʾī, 653–54. 111. see footnote 62 on how similar themes were treated (quite differently) in farrukhī’s and ʿunsurī’s panegyrics. 112. in contrast to ʿ aṭṭār’s poem above, in ʿ irāqī’s poem ṣawmaʿa seems to be associated with muslim ascetics and/or hypocritical sufis, as lewis argues it is used in ḥāfiẓ’s poetry: lewis, “hafez viii.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 35 etymological origin of the genre of ascetic or religious poetry, zuhdiyyāt.) ʿirāqī sharpens his rejection of this world by employing the mock repentance motif several times as well, telling us he is “repenting of” various pious acts such as “hypocritical worship” (line 4) and “asceticism” (line 8) and has “broke[n] [his] repentance” (line 7) in order to demonstrate his commitment to his new, illicit “covenant” with the beloved cupbearer. ʿirāqī’s heavy reliance on the mock repentance motif is particularly noteworthy because it directly parodies the central concern of ascetic-homiletic poetry: the call for repentance. like sanāʾī and ʿaṭṭār, ʿirāqī elaborates in positive terms the antithesis of the ascetichomiletic and panegyric poetic worlds that he so stridently rejects in this poem: the winehouse, with its liberating, “magian” wine (lines 1–2, 4–5, 8–10, 12), its music (line 3), its companions (lines 3, 7), and its gambling (line 6). the poet of this mock court is a rogue who flagrantly courts socioreligious opprobrium and ultimately aims to abandon his “self” (line 10) in a wine-induced stupor. on this alternative path, it is the transgression of normative islamic law, not pious obedience to it, that produces spiritual advancement, while wine enables release from the “sorrow of the world” (line 9). even in its “dark dregs” one can find “illumination” (line 5). wine/drunkenness is perhaps the most radical element of the poetic world of the qalandariyyāt because it is the agent that reveals the illusory nature of the normative social and religious order that is celebrated so profusely in panegyric and ascetic-homiletic poetry. as ʿirāqī suggests in line 10, it is capable of subverting the seemingly immutable social hierarchies and divinely ordained religious distinctions of earthly reality to the point at which there is no longer any difference between a church and the kaʿba, or between the kaʿba and a christian monastery-cum-winehouse, as we see in the final two lines of ʿirāqī’s poem. ʿirāqī concludes his poem with a powerful two-line mock ḥajj (mock raḥīl)/mock kaʿba cap that is prefigured both in the first line of the poem and at its center point (line 6).113 in his opening declaration that he has abandoned the “path of asceticism and piety” there is an implied mock raḥīl because he later associates this “path” with physical locations that he reports having visited and observed, such as the “sufi lodge” (khānagāh) and “ascetics’ lodge” (ṣawmaʿa) (line 2, 6, 8). the implication, then, is that his opening address—“o young man!”—announces his arrival at a winehouse at the completion of the journey, which also took him to the more welcoming quarter of the “gambling house” in line 6 at the midpoint of the poem. the entire picture of ʿirāqī’s peregrinations comes together beautifully in the closing lines, where he narrates his failed attempt to go on pilgrimage (ḥajj) to the kaʿba in mecca in order to circumambulate (ṭawāf) the holy shrine, as is incumbent upon all pious muslims. he fails in this journey not because of a lack of spiritual resolve but rather because his way into the sanctuary (ḥaram) is blocked by an anonymous “they,” who in the broader context of this poem should be understood as representatives of the antithetical poetic world of ascetic-homiletic poetry (e.g., the zāhid of line 8 and the institutionalized, hypocritical 113. as meisami has pointed out in the context of the qaṣīda, persian poets sometimes move the raḥīl to the end of the poem. see meisami, medieval persian court poetry, 65; idem, “poetic microcosms,” 158–60; idem, structure and meaning, 339. 36 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) sufis and ascetics of the khānagāh and ṣawmaʿa from lines 2 and 6). implicitly asserting their own self-importance and self-righteousness (the antithesis of ʿirāqī-the-qalandar’s “abandon[ment of] the self” in the preceding line), they shoo ʿirāqī away, asking him rhetorically, “who are you to presume you can come inside the kaʿba?” rejected but not distraught, ʿirāqī heads to the christian monastery (dayr). in contrast to the kaʿba of the pious muslims, in the monastery-cum-winehouse he is welcomed with open arms as a “companion” (line 12). the monastery of the closing line harkens back to the implied winehouse in the opening of the poem, with the figure addressing ʿirāqī as a “companion” in the final line being identical to or at least synonymous with (in a spiritual sense) the young cupbearer whom ʿirāqī apostrophizes and tentatively calls “our companion” in the first line. by the conclusion of the poem, the cupbearer of the monastery has deemed ʿirāqī worthy of acceptance into his winehouse kingdom, and the poem ends with him officially welcoming ʿirāqī, saying “come inside!” and affirming to all that, indeed, “you [ʿirāqī] are our companion.” the transfer of allegiance is complete. ʿirāqī has reached his (spiritual) home. he is now a denizen of the winehouse. this entire mock raḥīl image complex, which we see not only in this poem but quite prominently in ʿaṭṭār’s poem, too, is a striking inversion of the concluding social or heavenly reintegration or “reaggregation” imperative that several scholars have argued characterizes much preand early islamic and zuhdiyyāt poetry.114 ʿirāqī, like the qalandarī poetic personae of sanāʾī and ʿaṭṭār, is ultimately integrated, but not into normative earthly or heavenly “society.” he finds acceptance only in the liminal spaces that exist outside of or at best on the periphery of the medieval islamic social sphere. the poem is built on his rejecting (lines 1–2, 4, 6, 8) and being rejected by (line 11) various representatives of the normative islamic order before his ultimate cathartic acceptance into the christian/ zoroastrian “monastery” as one of its “companions” in the last line of the poem.115 the refusal of integration with mainstream islamic society is mutual: as much as its representatives reject ʿirāqī’s assimilation, he rejects their company, denouncing them all as hypocritical, deceptive, ostentatious, boastful, and ultimately concerned only with the superficialities of islamic piety. the only possibility of “reaggregation” for the qalandar, as for the ṣuʿlūk persona, lies in the heterotopic countersites associated with non-islamic religious minorities or openly antinomian muslim rogues.116 but in contrast to the ṣuʿlūk, for the qalandar these liminal, asocial places are not the ultimate goal. they are doorways that take the qalandar beyond even the heavenly pavilion (the site of aggregation in zuhdiyyāt) to an ultimate reintegration into god, the beloved—a feat that can be accomplished only through the disintegration of the earthly self (line 10). 114. on “reaggregation” or “incorporation” in the traditional qaṣīda, see jaroslav stetkevych, the zephyrs of najd: the poetics of nostalgia in the classical arabic nasīb (chicago: university of chicago press, 1993), 26–49; stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 3–83. on “disintegration in this life” and “reintegration in the next world” in the zuhdiyyāt, see meisami, structure and meaning, 175. 115. the conflation of seemingly irreconcilable religious particularities—e.g., magian wine in a christian monastery—occurs not infrequently in medieval persian sufi poetry. 116. on the rejection of “reaggregation” in ṣuʿlūk poetry, see stetkevych, mute immortals speak, 87–157. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the poetics of the sufi carnival • 37 v. conclusion the concluding image in ʿirāqī’s poem above captures the raison d’être of qalandarī poetics more broadly. ʿirāqī, blocked from the sanctuary (ḥaram) of the kaʿba in mecca by self-righteous ascetics, institutionalized sufis, and other guardians of traditional piety, must abort his ḥajj pilgrimage and undertake an alternative, mock ḥajj to the mock kaʿba of the christian/zoroastrian monastery-cum-winehouse. the turn away from the kaʿba in this poem (and, in other qalandarī poems, the turn away from the mosque, ascetics’ lodge, etc.) is, in a sense, a metaphoric performance of the qalandarī poet’s rejection of the poetic world of ascetic-homiletic and royal court poetry. at a more general level, the decision of sanāʾī, ʿaṭṭār, ʿirāqī, and other “rogue” poets to take the metaphoric path from the courts of god and the political elites to the mock court(s) of the sufi carnival inaugurates anew in each qalandarī poem the intergeneric poetic game of constructing the qalandariyyāt and its carnivalesque counter(sub)genres.117 although the basic thematic contours of the qalandarī poetic world are in place as early as amīr muʿizzī (d. ca. 1125–27) and sanāʾī, and possibly even earlier if the attribution of the qalandarī poem to burhānī (d.1072–73) is sound, the construction of qalandarī poetics did not end with them.118 the intergeneric process of parodic inversion that created the qalandariyyāt in the first place continued as each new poet responded in new ways to the existing canon, spawning not just new qalandarī topoi but even new subgenres of the qalandariyyāt that reacted in highly specific ways to existing models and poetic scripts in the broader tradition of perso-arabic poetics. the new typology of qalandariyyāt that i present here is admittedly provisional, but the broader point it illustrates is that there is considerable diversity in the poems placed in the qalandariyyāt category (a feature that is by no means unique to this genre), and each qalandarī poet engages this tradition in different ways, developing some types of qalandarī poems more than others. this disaggregation of qalandariyyāt poetry does not yield simple answers or nice and neat subcategories in all cases, but it does provide additional insight into this poetic type as a historical construct. it also challenges the much too frequent and overly simplistic portrayals of the persian genre system as primarily composed of formal genres, with a few noteworthy thematic ones of secondary status— a view that is particularly problematic when applied to the earliest period of the development of shorter monothematic poems (later all classified, somewhat problematically, simply as ghazals). my case study of a few prominent qalandarī poets from the late eleventh to thirteenth centuries is but a small window into this highly dynamic and variegated system. the manifest complexity observed in these poems should serve as a cautionary note against any simplistic, prescriptive, or ahistorical approaches to genre in persian poetry and as an impetus for more detailed studies of other thematic genres and subgenres. 117. for discussions of the 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tehran: nashr-i mītrā, 1370 [1991–92]. sharma, sunil. “generic innovation in sayfī buḫārāʾī’s shahrāshūb ghazals.” in ghazal as world literature, vol. 2: from a literary genre to a great tradition: the ottoman gazel in context, edited by angelika neuwirth, michael hess, judith pfeiffer, and borte sagaster, 141–49. würzburg: ergon, 2006. ———. persian poetry at the indian frontier: mas’ûd sa’d salmân of lahore. delhi: permanent black, 2000. ———. “shahrāshūb.” in persian lyric poetry in the classical era, 800–1500: ghazals, panegyrics and quatrains, edited by ehsan yarshater, 569–78. new york: i. b. tauris, 2019. sperl, stefan. mannerism in arabic poetry: a structural analysis of selected texts (3rd century ah/9th century ad–5th century ah/11th century ad). new york: cambridge university press, 1989. sprachman, paul. “hajv and profane persian.” in persian lyric poetry in the classical era, 800–1500: ghazals, panegyrics and quatrains, edited by ehsan yarshater, 579–602. new york: i. b. tauris, 2019. 46 • matthew thomas miller al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) stallybrass, peter, and allon white. the politics and poetics of transgression. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1986. stetkevych, jaroslav. the zephyrs of najd: the poetics of nostalgia in the classical arabic nasīb. chicago: university of chicago press, 1993. stetkevych, suzanne pinckney. the mantle odes: arabic praise poems to the prophet muhammad. bloomington: indiana university press, 2010. ———. the mute immortals speak: pre-islamic poetry and the poetics of ritual. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1993. ———. the poetics of islamic legitimacy: myth, gender, and ceremony in the classical arabic ode. bloomington: indiana university press, 2002. al-suhrawardī, abū ḥafṣ ʿumar. ʿawārif al-maʿārif. edited by aḥmad ʿabd al-raḥīm sāyiḥ and tawfīq ʿalī wahba. cairo: maktabat al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 2006. szombathy, zoltan. mujūn: libertinism in medieval muslim society and literature. exeter: gibb memorial trust, 2013. tayib, abdullah el. “pre-islamic poetry.” in arabic literature to the end of the umayyad period, edited by a. f. l. beeston, t. m. johnstone, r. b. serjeant, and g. r. smith, 27–113. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983. webb, peter. “poetry and the early islamic historical tradition: poetry and narratives of the battle of ṣiffīn.” in warfare and poetry in the middle east, edited by hugh kennedy, 119–48. new york: i. b. tauris, 2013. yaghoobi, claudia. subjectivity in ʿaṭṭār, persian sufism, and european mysticism. west lafayette, in: purdue university press, 2017. zargar, cyrus ali. sufi aesthetics: beauty, love, and the human form in the writings of ibn ʿarabi and ʿiraqi. columbia: university of south carolina press, 2011. zipoli, riccardo. irreverent persia: invective, satirical and burlesque poetry from the origins to the timurid period (10th to 15th centuries). leiden: leiden university press, 2015. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 297-345 introduction muslims have narrated ḥadīths, discussed them, and commented on them since the early days of islam. as jonathan brown has noted, “[o]n controversial issues from jihad and martyrdom to women’s rights under islamic law, ḥadīths always provide key and often hadīth as common discourse: reflections on the intersectarian dissemination of the creation of the intellect tradition* pamela klasova macalester college (pklasova@macalester.edu) * i would like to dedicate this article to michael cook. the holberg seminar and all of its members have been an inspiration for me in my own development as a scholar. the friendships, fellowship, and collaboration that started there will, i hope, far outlive the last meeting. i thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided extensive feedback and abdallah soufan for his comments on an earlier draft. . abstract the ḥadīth about the creation of the intellect has enjoyed a high status in the shīʿī tradition and opens one of the four books of the shīʿī ḥadīth canon, al-kulaynī’s (d. 329/940) al-kāfī. it appears also in many sunnī works and has traveled among other muslim groups, changing its meaning and form over time and generating several commentaries. ḥadīths are usually studied in a jurisprudential context, as forming the basis for legal positions; in this article, i study the ḥadīth not as a legal text with a fixed meaning but as a literary text with a meaning that is changeable. first, i revisit previous scholarly views on the provenance of the ḥadīth. i argue that it first circulated in basran society in the late second/eighth century as a popularized version of the muʿtazilī tenet of obligation (taklīf) before being written down as a ḥadīth. i then follow its later journey among different groups in the medieval period as it changed forms and meanings and in the early modern period as it became the subject of commentaries by the shīʿī philosopher mullā ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640) and by the sunnī scholar murtaḍā al-zabīdī (d. 1205/1791). the translation of the two commentaries can be found in the appendix. the ḥadīth’s intersectarian dissemination and fluid nature make it an excellent case study for exploring the literary side of the ḥadīth genre, which served as common discourse for different islamic sects and intellectual and social groups over the centuries. © 2020 pamela klasova. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:pklasova%40macalester.edu?subject= 298 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 299 determinative evidence.”1 this is how ḥadīths are usually seen: as the basis for islamic law and the primary sources providing evidence for certain positions in islam. this image carries with it the idea of unchangeability, connected to an immutable and atemporal legal tradition stretching from the early days of islam until today. in this article, i will highlight a different face of ḥadīths—namely, their ability to adapt to new environments and change form and meaning. for this purpose, i will use the case study of a non-legal ḥadīth about the creation of the intellect, which traveled over the course of more than a millennium from sect to sect, shifting in form, function, and meaning along the way. this ḥadīth offers an example of a tradition that functioned not as a basis of law but as a manifestation of ideas already circulating in society and as a vehicle of expression for new ideas when it traveled elsewhere. western ḥadīth scholarship has traditionally focused on issues of dating and authentication, but more recently scholars have explored the literary aspects of the ḥadīth genre. sebastian günther, for instance, has applied modern literary theory to these traditions and identified some of their fictional elements, such as their ability to reflect the sociocultural world in which they arose and the creativity of the transmitters who gave them their form by selecting, omitting, replacing, and adding material at their disposal.2 the growing interest in the agency of later compilers who used ḥadīths to participate in the discourses of their time has also driven scholars to look at ḥadīth more as a literary practice. stephen r. burge has observed the “tense relationship between the ḥadīth compilation that is rooted in the temporality of the real world, whilst simultaneously being rooted in the atemporal abstract ‘ḥadīth literature,’”3 and he argues for reading ḥadīth collections as literary works.4 another way to understand how ḥadīths participated in later discourses is to study ḥadīth commentaries, as joel blecher has done in his recent book. blecher observes that “one set of questions has yet to be fully investigated: how did muslims interpret and reinterpret the meanings of hadith and hadith collections?. . . when the needs of interpreters’ social interests came into conflict with their fidelity to the apparent meanings of the hadith, how did commentators attempt to thread the needle, balancing both sets of concerns?”5 in this article, i also explore the ḥadīth genre’s literary possibilities and its participation in temporal debates, but i do so through the study of a single ḥadīth, taking a longue durée approach to it. in the first part of the article, i revisit previous scholarly views on the origins of the ḥadīth, which describes the divine creation 1. j. a. c. brown, hadith: muhammad’s legacy in the medieval and modern world (london: oneworld, 2009), 267. 2. s. günther, “modern literary theory applied to classical arabic texts: ḥadīth revisited,” in the hadith, ed. m. shah, 4:28–33 (london: routledge, 2010). see also the other studies dealing with the literariness of the ḥadīth genre in this volume. 3. s. r. burge, “the ‘ḥadīṯ literature’: what is it and where is it?,” arabica 65, no. 1/2 (2018): 64–83, at 81. 4. s. r. burge, “myth, meaning and the order of words: reading hadith collections with northrop frye and the development of compilation criticism,” islam and christian-muslim relations 27, no. 2 (2016): 213–28, at 213. 5. j. blecher, said the prophet of god: hadith commentary across a millennium (oakland: university of california press, 2018), 2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 299 of the intellect. i propose that it emerged as a popular reformulation of a muʿtazilī tenet in the second/eighth-century basra, from where it spread among sunnī and shīʿī circles.6 the origin and early dissemination of the ḥadīth illustrate the porousness of the boundaries between these groups, which all dealt with the same material. in the second part of the article, i follow the ḥadīth’s later journey. i choose three medieval variants that circulated in different muʿtazilī and shīʿī circles to illustrate the different types of treatment that the ḥadīth received. the ḥadīth’s changing forms and meanings show that even after the ahl al-ḥadīth monopolized the ḥadīth enterprise, other groups were still using ḥadīth material to express and negotiate their ideas about the world. finally, i discuss two examples of early medieval commentaries on the ḥadīth, one by the shīʿī philosopher mullā ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640) and by the sunnī scholar murtaḍā al-zabīdī (d. 1205/1791). these commentaries reveal that even after the ḥadīth (and its variants) could no longer be altered, it continued to spark ideas and to be reinterpreted in order to befit the two thinkers’ worldviews. thus, this case study seeks to highlight that ḥadīths functioned over centuries as a common, intersectarian discourse among different groups of the islamic society. the existence of this common discourse opens a window onto a world in which the boundaries between sects and intellectual traditions were not set in stone. at the end of the article, i include the translation of mullā ṣadrā’s and al-zabīdī’s texts as a sample of the genre of ḥadīth commentary. from a different perspective, the appendix could be seen as the core of the article, and the study of the intellect ḥadīth as an extended introduction to it. 1. the muʿtazilī origins of the ḥadīth the ḥadīth under study talks about the creation of the intellect (ʿaql) and about the intellect’s obedience to god. it opens one of the four books of the shīʿī ḥadīth canon, al-kāfī (“the sufficient book”) by shaykh al-kulaynī:7 when god created the intellect, he made it speak and then he told it: “come forward!” and it came forward. then he told it: “go back!” and it went back. then he said: “by my might and by my glory, i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are. i perfected you only in those i love. it is you whom i order, it is you whom i forbid, it is you whom i punish, and it is you whom i reward.”8 lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla istanṭaqahu. thumma qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā 6. the use of the terms “sunnī” and “shīʿī” for this early period may be misleading because the groups’ identities had not yet been fully formed. as a result, some scholars have opted for the terms “proto-sunnī” and “proto-shīʿī.” for a nuanced discussion of the terminology see m. dann, “contested boundaries: the reception of shīʿite narrators in the sunnī ḥadīth tradition,” (phd diss., princeton university, 2015), 5–16. 7. a hijri date usually spans two consecutive years in the gregorian calendar. since many death dates in the first centuries of islam are not entirely certain anyway, i will give only one gregorian equivalent for each, corresponding to the hijri year in the month of muḥarram. 8. throughout the article, ḥadīth texts are written in bold. 300 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 301 khalaqtu khalqan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. wa-lā ukammiluka illā fī-man uḥibbu. amā innī iyyāka āmuru wa-iyyāka anhī wa-iyyāka uʿāqibu wa-iyyāka uthību.”9 the ḥadīth’s prominent position in al-kulaynī’s compilation mirrors the prominent place that it has held in the shīʿī tradition. it is followed by thirty-three other reports united by the theme of ʿaql, which include some of the ḥadīth’s variants. the ḥadīth is recorded with almost10 unblemished chains of transmission (isnāds) to the imams muḥammad al-bāqir (d. 114/732) and jaʿfar al-ṣādiq (d. 148/765). sunnī critics have considered it weak, but it is nonetheless recorded in numerous sunnī compilations with many different isnāds. furthermore, the ḥadīth has also found its way to ṣūfī circles. it constitutes, for instance, an important piece of evidence in ibn ʿarabī’s (d. 638/1240) theosophical ṣūfism.11 by contrast, the theologian ibn taymiyya (d. 728/1328) considered the ḥadīth the epitome of a broader conspiracy against islam that in his eyes was led by the shīʿīs, the ṣūfīs, and the philosophers alike. in the early modern period, two prominent islamic thinkers analyzed the ḥadīth closely in their commentaries: the iranian shīʿī philosopher and theologian mullā ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640) and the indian sunnī humanist and polymath murtaḍā al-zabīdī (d. 1205/1791). a translation of the two commentary texts, which display the authors’ creative incorporation of their ṣūfī and theosophical ideas, is presented in the appendix to this article. in modern scholarship, ignaz goldziher observed the ḥadīth’s importance for esoteric islamic thought and interpreted it as a neoplatonic teaching about emanation in the form of a prophetic saying.12 he noted that the ḥadīth reflects the belief that the intellect is the first and immediate emanation from the primordial existence, a divine substance that links god’s transcendence, from which all things emanate, with the corporeal reality of this world.13 douglas s. crow, in his 1996 dissertation, which centers on this ḥadīth, rejected goldziher’s interpretation in favor of a native islamic context.14 having argued that goldziher incorrectly based his interpretation on a later version of the ḥadīth that emphasizes the idea of the intellect as the first creation,15 crow placed the origins of the ḥadīth in the context of 9. al-kulaynī, uṣūl al-kāfī (beirut: manshūrāt al-fajr, 2007), 1:5, no. 1. al-kulaynī took this tradition from al-barqī, al-maḥāsin, ed. m. al-rajāʾī (qum: majmaʿ al-ʿālamī li-ahl al-bayt, 2011), 1: 306, no. 604. i transliterate arabic texts on the basis of how they are written (including vowels), not how they are pronounced. 10. to my knowledge, there is one weak transmitter in the shīʿī isnāds, sahl b. ziyād, and one isnād recorded by al-ṣaddūq that is questionable. he includes this variant among the nawādir (rare variants), and many of the transmitters in the isnād are unknown. see nos. 16 and 17 in shīʿī variants below. 11. brown, hadith, 194. 12. i. goldziher, “neuplatonische und gnostische elemente im ḥadīṯ,” zeitschrift für assyriologie und verwandte gebiete 22 (1908): 317–44, at 318–20. 13. or better yet, intellects. for instance, the philosopher al-fārābī (d. 339/950), following earlier neoplatonic ideas, designed a complex scheme in which ten intellects emanate from the necessary being. the lowest of them connects with the sublunar realm. 14. d. s. crow, “the role of al-ʿaql in early islamic wisdom with reference to imam jaʿfar al-ṣādiq” (phd diss., mcgill university, 1996). 15. the version of the ḥadīth that goldziher considered primary differs from the version above. what al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 301 the first/seventh-century polemics between predestinarians (jabriyya) and the proponents of human free will (qadariyya).16 he suggested that the ḥadīth echoed pre-islamic wisdom material as well as qurʾānic and biblical elements.17 this argument seems to be driven by the old debate over whether the islamic intellectual tradition was formed through external influences or internal developments. differing with both goldziher and crow, i argue for a muʿtazilī origin for the ḥadīth. more precisely, i argue that the ḥadīth emerged in the early second/eighth century in basra as a popular saying communicating to broader audiences the doctrine of obligation (taklīf), which was essential to the muʿtazilī belief system. this placing of the ḥadīth is most interesting because it brings us to the basran beginnings of the muʿtazila in the generation of its founders, such as wāṣil b. ʿaṭāʾ (d. 131/748) and ʿamr b. ʿubayd (d. 144/761), who first formulated these core muʿtazilī ideas in their public debates. the ḥadīth should be understood as an echo of these debates from a time long before the first systematic muʿtazilī theologian abū al-hudhayl al-ʿallāf (d. between 226/840 and 235/849) wrote his treatises; as part of a public oral culture, which existed alongside the traditionist circles and in which ideas were exchanged and shared by people from different sects and social groups, including muʿtazilīs, shīʿīs, sunnīs, and ṣūfīs. before i begin to furnish my claim with evidence, i should make my method and assumptions clear. i limited the texts studied in this part to the ḥadīth’s variants recorded in the early sources—up to the fourth/tenth century—and to those with isnāds.18 this does not mean that i consider variants appearing only in later collections forged, but i needed to sift through the sources to produce a dataset of texts (matns) and isnāds that we can concerns us here is the beginning, which reads “the first thing that god created was the intellect” (awwalu mā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqlu) instead of “when god created the intellect” (lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla). see goldziher, “neuplatonische und gnostische elemente,” 318. although a small difference, it prompted significant conclusions. in goldziher’s scenario, ahl al-sunna altered the beginning of the ḥadīth to express a more neutral position focused on the creation of the intellect, not on the first creation of all. crow has reversed goldziher’s periodization of the two main variants, arguing that the neutral lammā version is the original one because it is found in most of the early texts containing the ḥadīth. crow, “role of al-ʿaql,” 3. 16. a classic study of the qadar debate is w. m. watt, free will and predestination (london: luzac, 1948). crow has also pointed to a connection with “the first-century views on the divine parceling out of the ʿuqūl,” which hold that god has distributed ʿaql to humans in different measures (tafāḍul), and he quotes a saying ascribed to muʿāwiya b. qurra al-muzanī (d. 113/731) to illustrate this belief: “people perform good [deeds]; however, they receive their recompense on resurrection day in proportion to the measure of their intelligence (ʿaql).” see crow, “role of al-ʿaql,” 8–9. it is important, however, to distinguish between ʿaql as an autonomous entity that acts and speaks (the intellect), as the ḥadīth conceives of it, and ʿaql as the human faculty of intelligence or reason, as it is treated in al-muzanī’s tradition. 17. crow refers to a report by wahb b. munabbih that speaks of god’s adorning his rule with ʿaql, on the theme of the rejection and vindication of god’s wisdom in the bible (crow, “role of al-ʿaql,” xxiv, n. 11), and of “pre-creation wisdom (hokmah & sophia & iranian xrad)” (p. xxv). he also references (at 39, n. 7) other scholars who have considered the ḥadīth to be inspired by biblical wisdom literature: i. eisenberg, “die prophetenlegenden des muḥammad b. ʿabdallāh al-kisāʾī” (phd diss., university of bern, 1898), xx f., and t. fahd, “la naissance du monde selon l’islam,” sources orientales 1 (1959): 237–77, at 264. 18. i did not duplicate identical variants. 302 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 303 assume with some confidence to have circulated in the early period.19 i then identified the regional affiliations of the transmitters. as behnam sadeghi has noted, regionalism is a prominent feature of early traditions and can be used for dating purposes, and this is also true in the case of this ḥadīth.20 three assumptions underpin my discussion. first, i consider the main intention of the ḥadīth to be an important signpost of its intellectual context. by main intention i mean the core message that the ḥadīth conveys in its most basic form.21 second, i assume that medieval ḥadīth criticism (the biographical rijāl works) contains some historical information about the transmitters. in other words, i do not believe that the critics inferred all their information retrospectively from the ḥadīths. and third, i assume that like the rijāl works, the isnāds—even single strands22—were generated during the transmission process more often than they were forged. when tracing the ḥadīth’s isnāds, i have drawn on crow’s painstaking work, with the difference that i put less emphasis on the ascriptions to the earliest famous narrators and look with more confidence to the following two generations.23 based on my first assumption, i do not find crow’s hypothesis that the ḥadīth emerged in debates about predestination (qadar) convincing. let us examine the ḥadīth’s content more closely, this time in its simplest variant, which appears in ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad b. ḥanbal’s (d. 290/903) zawāʾid (“additions”) to his father’s kitāb al-zuhd: “when god created the intellect, he told it: ‘come forward!’ and it came forward. then he told it: ‘go back!’ and it went back. so he said: ‘i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are. through you i take and through you i give.’”24 a closer look at the text of the ḥadīth shows that the qadarī position cannot be the main intention of the ḥadīth. the qadar debate was among the first major controversies in islamic 19. of course, we can never be entirely certain about that, for even the third/ninthand fourth/tenthcentury works have been generally preserved in later manuscripts. 20. b. sadeghi, “the traveling tradition test: a method for dating traditions,” der islam 85, no. 1 (2010): 203–42, at 204. 21. by most basic form, i mean the parts of the ḥadīth that can be found in most of its versions. intention, which implies authorship, may seem incompatible with the oral aspects of the ḥadīth’s emergence; however, this is not necessarily the case. umberto eco, for instance, has theorized an intention of art that is public and not in the head of the author. d. compagno, “theories of authorship and intention in the twentieth century: an overview,” journal of early modern studies 1, no. 1 (2012): 37–53, at 49. 22. single-strand isnāds are isnāds that do not cross others. according to juynboll, such isnāds should be suspected of being fabrications. see h. motzki, “dating muslim traditions: a survey,” arabica 52, no. 2 (2005): 204–53, at 224. 23. crow takes the presence in the isnāds of first/seventh-century figures such as kurayb (the mawlā of ibn ʿabbās) or al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. ca. 110/729) as historical data and their qadarī loyalties as evidence of the ḥadīth’s qadarī origins. this is rather problematic, for these figures attained a semilegendary aura and appeal. see, for example, s. mourad, early islam between myth and history: al-hasan al-basri (d. 110 h/728 ce) and the formation of his legacy in classical lslamic scholarship (leiden: brill, 2005), 243. the members of the generation of narrators after them, by contrast, are much more marginal figures, which inspires more confidence since later transmitters have little reason to ascribe the ḥadīth to them. 24. aḥmad b. ḥanbal, kitāb al-zuhd, with the zawāʾid of his son ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad b. ḥanbal, ed. ḥ. al-basyūnī (cairo: dār al-ḥadīth, 2004), 372, no. 1872. for the transliteration, see the section sunnī isnāds and matns below. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 303 theology (kalām).25 the proponents of free will (qadarīs) asked how god could reward and punish people in the afterlife for their deeds if those deeds had already been predestined, and they concluded that it was necessary for humans to have free will. although the ḥadīth under study does imply that human acts have intrinsic value (good or evil), it does not present the intellect as having free will. it can lead to asserting the necessity of free will, but that requires an external premise and a few more logical steps; see figure 1. figure 1. the connection between the ḥadīth and the argument for free will. since these steps are not self-evident in the text of the ḥadīth, free will could hardly be the ḥadīth’s primary intention. that being said, the ḥadīth circulated widely and different people appropriated it for their own purposes, and it undoubtedly also entered the qadarījabrī controversy in the course of its journey.26 but because the ḥadīth is not primarily about free will, it is unlikely that this debate was the context in which it emerged. 25. for a succinct discussion of the debate and the controversies that surround it in modern scholarship, see a. treiger, “origins of kalām,” in the oxford handbook of islamic theology, ed. sabine schmidtke, 27–43 (oxford: oxford university press, 2016). for a crucial scholarly work on the debate, see, for instance, m. a. cook, early muslim dogma: a source-critical study (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1981). 26. although crow deems most versions of the ḥadīth to express qadarī views, he also identifies a few that expound the opposite predestinarian/jabrī position. see, for example, crow, “role of al-ʿaql,” 12–13. the intellect acts in accordance with god's will; the intellect can distinguish between good and evil therefore, humans have intrinsic value (good or evil) some evil acts exist therefore, human beings can choose evil of their own will ( = they have free will) god cannot be the source of evil acts (external premise of the qadariyya and the muʿtazila) 304 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 305 the ḥadīth is about ʿaql being a parameter for distinguishing between good and evil. the group most famously connected with ʿaql was the muʿtazila, who emerged from qadarī circles. they were proponents of rationalistic ethics and moral objectivism and the first ones to articulate a coherent system of religious moral theology, which, i contend, is reflected in this ḥadīth. the muʿtazila believed that human acts have intrinsic values that can be known through reason, a doctrine that came to be known as al-taḥsīn wa-l-taqbīḥ al-ʿaqliyyān (“establishing good and evil through reason”). because god is necessarily good and just, human reason and divine revelation both guide humans toward the same goal. as such, they are in harmony and do not contradict each other. this doctrine is reflected in the first point made in the ḥadīth on the creation of the intellect, which states that ʿaql is absolutely obedient, acts only in accordance with god’s will, and reaches conclusions about good and evil that accord with god’s justice. therefore, it is the creation dearest to god. being able to distinguish good from evil through reason is one thing; being obliged to act on this knowledge is another. the latter thus needs to be stated separately, yielding the second point of the ḥadīth, expressed in the last sentence, “through you i take and through you i give.” it means that reason is the locus of obligation (al-ʿaql manāṭ al-taklīf). the muʿtazila conceived of a causal connection between one’s conduct in this world and one’s reward or punishment in the hereafter. they believed that god imposed obligation (taklīf) on human beings to benefit them by giving them the opportunity to attain reward.27 one of the early muʿtazilī theologians, abū hāshim al-jubbāʾī (d. 303/915), defines the value of human acts according to whether they merit reward or punishment.28 the doctrine of taklīf, with the prominent place it gives to ʿaql, lay at the heart of muʿtazilī teachings for as long as we are aware. already the first systematic muʿtazilī philosopher whose teachings are known to us, abū al-hudhayl al-ʿallāf, held that one is “under obligation due to reason (ʿaql) to know god beyond any doubt” even if one has not yet received revelation, and that one “is also duty bound to know the goodness of the good and the evil of the evil, with the consequent obligation of pursuing the good, such as truth and justice, and avoiding the evil, such as lying and injustice.”29 reason (ʿaql) is therefore the tool of both knowledge and punishment, because it is by means of knowledge that the human subject is liable to punishment. the ḥadīth encapsulates these beliefs, albeit in a much more rudimentary form, and attests to their existence long before abū al-hudhayl wrote down his teachings in early second/eighth-century basra. let us next move to the isnāds of the ḥadīth, which identify the time and place of its emergence and early circulation. the first thing that stands out when we look at the lists of sunnī and shīʿī isnāds and matns of the ḥadīth and at charts 1 and 2, which represent them graphically, is that the two charts do not show a single common transmitter between the 27. s. vasalou, moral agents and their deserts: the character of muʿtazilite ethics (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2008), 32. this obligation can be either rationally known (taklīf ʿaqlī) or known through revelation (taklīf samʿī). for the relationship between the two, see chapter 3 in vasalou, moral agents, 38–66. 28. “the evil [act] is that for which, taken in isolation, one deserves blame.” g. f. hourani, islamic rationalism: the ethics of ʿabd al-jabbār (oxford: clarendon press, 1971), 49. vasalou’s book revolves around the muʿtazilī conceptions of desert. 29. al-shahrastānī, muslim sects and divisions, trans. a. k. kazi and j. g. flynn (london: routledge, 1984), 47. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 305 two traditions. in this case, then, what has not been recorded of its transmitters is almost as important as what has. the absence of shared transmitters begs for explanation, because it is not plausible that the ḥadīth emerged and developed completely independently in the two traditions. the muʿtazilī scenario will provide the link. the sunnī variants speak to the earlier circulation of the ḥadīth, and i will therefore start with them and then move to the shīʿī variants. the cities with which the transmitters were affiliated according to rijāl works are my guiding tool, along with the transmitters’ approximate lifetimes. therefore, in the list of sunnī isnāds and matns that follows, i include the places where narrators lived and, when known, their death dates (but i omit them on subsequent mentions of the same person). on the whole, these early variants closely resemble each other and the basic version quoted above, with some minor additions here and there.30 sunnī variants (isnāds and matns) 1. aḥmad b. ḥanbal (d. 290/903): 31ʿalī b. muslim al-ṭūsī (d. 253/867, baghdad)—sayyār b. ḥātim al-ʿanazī (d. 199 or 200/815, basra)—jaʿfar b. sulaymān al-ḍubaʿī (d. 178/794, basra)—mālik b. dīnār (d. 127/745, basra)—al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 110/728, basra), marfūʿ32 lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. fa-qāla “mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥabba ilayya minka. bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī.” 2. abū jaʿfar al-ʿuqaylī (d. 322/933, mecca):33 aḥmad b. dāwūd al-qūmsī (d. 295/907, baghdad)—abū hammām (= al-walīd b. shujjāʿ, d. 243/857, kufa, baghdad)—saʿīd b. al-faḍl al-qurashī (d. ca. 200/815, basra, damascus, munkar al-ḥadīth)—ʿumar b. abī ṣāliḥ al-ʿatakī (majhūl, munkar al-ḥadīth)—abū ghālib (basra)—abū umāma (d. 81/700, hijaz, syria)—the prophet lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla: “wa-ʿizzatī mā khalaqtu khalqan huwa aʿjabu ilayya minka. bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 30. i have organized the variants based on common traits that they show. variants 1-5 all show the basic form of the ḥadīth (similar to the one recorded by ibn ḥanbal) on occasion with some minor additions; the rest include additional orders that god addresses to the intellect. variants 6 and 7, for example, both include the order “qum!” “stand up!” and variants 8 and 9 expand on the divine orders with “uqʿud!” “sit down!” “unṭuq!” “speak!” “uṣmut!” “be quiet!”. some of the variants also emphasize the warning in the last part of the ḥadīth by inserting the expression “iyyāka” “beware,” similarly to the variant found in al-kāfi. 31. aḥmad b. ḥanbal, kitāb al-zuhd, with the zawāʾid of his son ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad b. ḥanbal, ed. ḥ. al-basyūnī (cairo: dār al-ḥadīth, 2004), 372, no. 1872. 32. this is the one isnād that al-zabīdī considers sound. see appendix, n. 163. 33. abū jaʿfar al-ʿuqaylī, kitāb al-ḍuʿafāʾ, ed. ʿa. a. qalʿajī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1984), 3:175, no. 1169. 306 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 307 3. al-ṭabarānī (d. 360/971):34 muḥammad b. yaḥyā b. manda al-iṣbahānī (d. 301/913, isfahan, basra, kufa)—abū hammām al-walīd b. shujjāʿ (d. 243/857, kufa, baghdad)— saʿīd b. al-faḍl al-qurashī (munkar al-ḥadīth)—ʿumar b. abī al-ṣāliḥ al-ʿatakī (majhūl, munkar al-ḥadīth)—abū ghālib—abū umāma—the prophet lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla la-hu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. qāla: “wa-ʿizzatī mā khalaqtu khalqan aʿjabu ilayya minka. bika uʿṭī wa-bika al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 4. ibn abī al-dunyā (d. 281/894):35 muḥammad b. bakkār (d. 238/852, baghdad, ruṣāfa)— ʿabd al-raḥmān b. abī al-zinād (d. 174/790, medina, baghdad)—muḥammad b. ʿuqba (mawlā of zubayr, medina)—kurayb (d. 98/716, mawlā of ibn ʿabbās, hijaz, possibly basra) lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. qāla—wa-huwa aʿlamu bihi—“wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī lā ajʿaluka illā fīman uḥibbu wa-mā khalaqtu shayʾan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka.” 5. al-ḥusayn b. ziyād—abū ismāʿīl al-azdī:36 al-ḥusayn b. ziyād—abū ismāʿīl muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh (= “author” of the book, basra)—abū jahḍam al-azdī (syria, basra)— sufyān b. sulaym (syria, wasit, overseeing police squads in basra under al-ḥajjāj in 93/711)—al-ḥārith b. ʿabd allāh al-azdī (appointed governor of basra in 45/665) [qāla lanā nabiyyunā ṣallā allāhu ʿalayhi anna] allāha lammā khalaqa al-ʿaqla fa-qaddarahu wa-ʿawarrahu wa-faragha min khalqihi qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla: “wa-ʿizzatī mā khalaqtu min khalqī shayʾan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. bika uḥmadu wa-bika uʿbadu wa-bika uʿrafu wa-bika tanālu ṭāqatī wa-bika tudkhalu jannatī. 6. ibn abī al-dunyā:37 muḥammad b. bakkār—ḥafṣ b. ʿumar (qāḍī of aleppo, munkar al-ḥadīth)—al-faḍl b. ʿīsā al-raqāshī (d. 132/749, basra, wāʿiẓ, qadar, munkar al-ḥadīth)—abū ʿuthmān al-nahdī (d. 95/713, lived 130 years)—abū hurayra (d. 59/678)—the prophet lammā khalaqa allāhu taʿālā al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “qum!” fa-qām. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “uqʿud!” fa-qaʿada. fa-qāla allāhu ʿazza wa-jalla: “mā khalaqtu khalqan khayran minka wa-lā akrama minka wa-lā-afḍala minka wa-lā aḥsana minka. bika ākhudhu 34. al-ṭabarānī, al-muʿjam al-kabīr, ed. ḥ. ʿa. al-salafī (cairo: maktabat ibn taymiyya, 1983), 8:339–40, no. 8086. 35. ibn abī al-dunyā, al-ʿaql wa-faḍluhu, ed. l. m. al-ṣaghīr and n. ʿa. khalaf (riyadh: dār al-rāya, 1989), 40–41, no. 16. 36. abū ismāʿīl al-azdī, kitāb futūḥ al-shām (calcutta: baptiste mission, 1854), 178. 37. ibn abī al-dunyā, al-ʿaql wa-faḍluhu, 39–40, no. 15. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 307 wa-bika uʿṭī wa-bika uʿazzu wa-bika uʿrafu wa-iyyāka uʿātibu wa-bika al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.”38 7. ibn shāhīn (d. 385):39 yaḥyā b. muḥammad b. ṣāʿid—al-ḥasan b. ʿarafa (d. 257/870, baghdad)—sayf b. muḥammad b. ukht sufyān (kufa, baghdad, kadhdhāb)—sufyān al-thawrī (d. 161/778, khurasan, kufa, basra)—al-faḍl b. ʿīsā al-raqāshī—(matrūk, munkar al-ḥadīth, qadarī, qāṣṣ)abū ʿuthmān al-nahdī—abū hurayra—the prophet lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “qum!” fa-qām. thummā qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. fa-qāla lahu: “mā khalaqtu khalqan huwa khayrun minka wa-lā aḥsanu minka wa-lā akramu minka wa-lā aḥabbu ilayya minka. bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-bika uʿrafu wa-laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 8. al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī (d. between 318/936 and 320/938):40 ʿabd al-raḥīm b. ḥabīb— dāwūd b. muḥabbir al-baṣrī41 (d. 206/821, basra)—al-ḥasan b. dīnār (d. mid-second/ eighth century)—al-ḥasan al-baṣrī—several companions of the prophet—the prophet [addition in the beginning: “the intellect is light. god the almighty created it and divided it among his worshippers according to his will concerning them and knowledge of them. for it was narrated that the prophet said:”] lammā khalaqa allāhu taʿālā al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “uqʿud!” fa-qaʿada. thumma qāla lahu: “unṭuq!” fa-naṭaqa. thumma qāla lahu: “uṣmut!” fa-ṣamata. fa-qāla: “wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī wa-kibriyāʾī wa-sulṭānī wa-jabarūtī mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥabba ilayya minka wa-lā akrama ʿalayya minka. bika uʿrafu wa-bika uḥmadu wa-bika uṭāʿu wa-bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-iyyāka uʿātibu wa-laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 9. al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī:42 hishām b. khālid (d. 249/863, syria)—baqiyya b. al-walīd (d. 197/812, syria)—al-awzāʿī (d. 158/774, syria)—the prophet lammā khalaqa allāhu taʿālā al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “uqʿud!” fa-qaʿada. thumma qāla lahu: “unṭuq!” fa-naṭaqa. thumma qāla lahu: “uṣmut!” fa-ṣamata. fa-qāla: “wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī wa-kibriyāʾī wa-sulṭānī wa-jabarūtī mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥabba ilayya minka wa-lā akrama ʿalayya minka. bika uʿrafu wa-bika uḥmadu wa-bika uṭāʿu wa-bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-iyyāka uʿātibu wa-laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu. wa-mā akramtuka bi-shayʾin afḍala min al-ṣabri.” 38. the same matn and isnād appear in ibn ʿadī al-jurjānī. 39. ibn shāhīn, al-targhīb fī faḍāʾil al-aʿmāl, ed. m. ḥ. m. ḥ. ismāʿīl (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2004), 84, no. 252. 40. al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī, al-nuskha al-musnada min nawādir al-uṣūl fī maʿrifat maṣādir al-rasūl, ed. i. i. m. ʿawaḍ (cairo: maktabat al-imām al-bukhārī, 2008), 2:764, no. 1035. 41. the edition gives his name incorrectly as dāwūd b. muḥammad b muḥarrim al-baṣrī. 42. al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī, al-nuskha al-musnada, 2:764, no. 1036. 308 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 309 chart 1: sunnī isnāds as mentioned earlier, medieval sunnī critics considered the ḥadīth highly unreliable, largely because many of its transmitters are classified as unknown or untrustworthy. the criteria developed by some modern scholars also render it dubious, because its isnāds consist mainly of different single strands.43 on the other hand, however, these two features may in fact provide a reason for greater confidence in the isnāds. the large number of transmitters deemed unreliable by the sunnī tradition suggests that these transmitters had some historical connection with the ḥadīth, because if later transmitters had wanted to forge full isnāds, they would have probably chosen to name more reliable narrators to give their forgery greater authority. the first thing that stands out when we look at the early sunnī variants of the ḥadīth is that most of their isnāds are basran; especially in the early second/eighth century, many people are reported to have narrated this ḥadīth in basra. variants 1, 6, 7, and 9 feature exclusively basran transmitters in the second/eighth century. variants 2 and 3 include an unknown transmitter, ʿumar b. abī ṣāliḥ al-ʿatakī, who connects two basran transmitters, so these isnāds can also be safely considered basran. the isnād of variant 4 is medinan in its second/eighth-century portion, but it, too, shows connections with basra.44 43. see note 22. 44. the earliest transmitter named in the isnād, kurayb, was a mawlā of ibn ʿ abbās and served as the governor of basra. ibn ʿabbās himself had a strong presence in mecca and basra. the second transmitter, muḥammad b. ʿuqba, although medinan, was a mawlā of al-zubayr b. al-ʿawwām. basra had strong zubayrid inclinations and connections. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 309 variant 5 is more complicated. it was recorded not in a ḥadīth compilation like the others but in a historical work, futūḥ shām (“conquests of syria”), attributed to abū ʿismāʿīl al-azdī al-baṣrī, which some modern scholars believe was compiled in the late second/ eighth century.45 the isnād is composed exclusively of members of the tribe of azd. i suspect that abū ismāʿīl attached the ḥadīth to the broader narrative, which touches on the theme of ʿaql, as a rhetorical embellishment.46 this variant nonetheless constitutes an important piece of evidence to support the idea that by abū ʿismāʿīl’s time the ḥadīth was well known in basra to the extent that it sprang to mind when the theme of ʿaql was broached. variant 10 is syrian, but if i am correct that the ḥadīth spread in early second/eighth-century basra, the variant’s earliest transmitter—the famous al-awzāʿī—lived too late to interfere with the ḥadīth’s basran provenance (if we wanted to give this variant some historical credit). finally, variant 8 is basran as well as kufan; however, the isnād’s kufan part is most probably forged. as al-dāraquṭnī (d. 385/995) noted, the unique isnād implies that only one person heard the ḥadīth from sufyān al-thawrī, which would be odd in the case of such a famous muḥaddith.47 if this part of the isnād is indeed forged, it is significant that it is attached to the name of a basran figure, al-faḍl b. ʿīsā al-raqāshī, who was not particularly highly regarded in ḥadīth circles―for if the isnād had been forged in its entirety, it would have been more logical to populate it with well-regarded transmitters. al-faḍl’s very unreliability thus lends greater credibility to the ḥadīth’s historical connection with him. even if we disregard al-dāraquṭnī’s argument and consider the isnād possibly sound, al-faḍl b. ʿīsā remains important, because he is then the closest to a common link we get. either way, he is a noteworthy narrator whose interest in ʿaql and connections with the muʿtazila suggest that he probably played some role in the historical transmission of the ḥadīth. he was a basran muʿtazilī preacher (qāṣṣ, wāʿiẓ) and a follower of ghaylān al-dimashqī (fl. ca. 100/719), who, according to josef van ess, emphasized the role of ʿaql.48 45. see s. a. mourad, “on early islamic historiography: abū ismāʿīl al-azdī and his futūḥ al-shām,” journal of the american oriental society 120, no. 4 (2000): 577–93. 46. there are three reasons for my suspicion. first, the ḥadīth plays no role in the narrative; it is merely a digression on the theme of ʿaql mentioned in a story about an encounter between khālid b. al-walīd and a byzantine general by the name of bāhān. second, if conciseness is any indicator of historicity, as some scholars have argued, this version, with all its additions, seems to be later. cf. motzki, “dating muslim traditions,” 212–13. finally, the name of the third transmitter, abū jahḍam al-azdī, provides an important clue: he also narrated other stories about bāhān. see al-azdī, futūḥ shām, 185, 192, 193. it seems likely, therefore, that abū ismāʿīl heard the narrative together with others and added the ḥadīth to it. it is also noteworthy that although abū jahḍam is usually described in rijāl works as a syrian who narrated from kufans such as shurayḥ, ibn ḥibbān says that he is counted among the people of basra (ʿidāduhu fī ahl al-baṣra). ibn ḥibbān, kitāb al-thiqāt (hyderabad: majlis dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1973), 7:144. 47. al-dāraquṭnī also notes that just as sayf b. muḥammad is the only person who narrated it from sufyān, al-ḥasan b. ʿarafa is the only person who narrated it from sayf. al-dāraquṭnī and abū al-faḍl al-maqdisī, aṭrāf al-gharāʾib wa-l-afrād min ḥadīth rasūl allāh li-l-imām al-dāraquṭnī, ed. m. m. m. ḥ. naṣṣār and s. yūsif (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1998), 5:240. 48. j. van ess, zwischen ḥadīt̲ und theologie: studien zum entstehen prädestinatianischer überlieferung (berlin: de gruyter, 1975), 121–22. ibn ḥajar says about al-faḍl “qāla yaʿqūb b. sufyān “muʿtazilī, ḍaʿīf al-ḥadīth.” ibn ḥajar, tahdhīb al-tahdhīb, vol. 8, (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1984), no. 521. 310 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 311 finally, another basran transmitter who looms over others in rijāl works as the culprit for “forging” the ḥadīth confirms the muʿtazilī origin theory. al-dāraquṭnī and others agree almost unanimously that a certain dāwūd b. muḥabbir and a couple of men associated with him49 forged the ḥadīth. this dāwūd, according to the critics, spent too much time with the muʿtazila, and they ruined his reputation.50 dāwūd b. muḥabbir is the author of a work titled kitāb al-ʿaql. this work, which was still available to ḥadīth scholars such as al-ḥāfiẓ al-ʿirāqī (d. 806/1404),51 collected ḥadīths that dealt with the theme of ʿaql, and it also included the ḥadīth under study. dāwūd was probably responsible for the ḥadīth’s wide dissemination in sunnī circles. his poor reputation probably accounts for the fact that he does not appear as the common link. it is possible that some later narrators indeed forged some of the isnāds, precisely because they wanted to cite the ḥadīth without mentioning the disgraced dāwūd. the sunnī isnāds thus strongly suggest that the ḥadīth circulated in early second/eighthcentury basra, which was the hub of the forming muʿtazila. the rijāl works also point overwhelmingly to a muʿtazilī connection, though they do so inadvertently (since they claim that dāwūd forged the ḥadīth, not simply disseminated it). let us now consider the ḥadīth’s circulation among early shīʿī traditionists. in contrast to its dubious reputation among medieval sunnī critics, the ḥadīth enjoys a canonical status in shīʿī circles. the variants here are taken from three prestigious early ḥadīth collections: al-barqī’s maḥāsin, al-kulaynī’s kāfī, and al-ṣaddūq’s āmālī and man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh. a glance at the isnāds tells us that the ḥadīth circulated in kufa, which is not surprising as kufa was the center of shīʿism in this time. the isnāds and matns are listed chronologically according to the compilers’ death dates. all variants closely resemble one another, with the exception of variants 15 and 17, which represent much-expanded versions that nonetheless still contain the basic ḥadīth.52 shīʿī variants (isnāds and matns) 10. al-barqī (d. 274/887):53 muḥammad b. ʿalī—wuhayb b. ḥafṣ (kufa, wrote books)— abū baṣīr (d. 150/767, kufa)—imam al-ṣādiq 49. four names are usually mentioned: maysara b. ʿabd rabbihi, dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir, ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. abī rajāʾ, and sulaymān b. ʿīsā al-sanjarī. see al-zabīdī’s commentary below for more detail. dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir is the only one of these four mentioned in the isnāds. it thus seems that he was the one responsible for the ḥadīth’s spread and circulation among sunnī muḥaddiths. many sources quote al-dāraquṭnī as the author of the accusation that dāwūd forged the ḥadīth. in the printed material available to me, i found al-dāraquṭnī’s denunciation of dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir, but not one made in the context of this ḥadīth. see, e.g., abū al-ḥasan al-dāraquṭnī, sunan, ed. a. a. ʿabd al-mawjūd and a. m. muʿawwaḍ (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, 2001), 1:386–87; al-dāraquṭnī, al-ḍuʿafāʾ wa-l-matrūkūn, ed. m. b. ʿa. b. ʿabd al-qādir (riyadh: maktabat al-maʿārif, 1984), 202. 50. see appendix. 51. al-ḥāfīẓ al-ʿirāqī was one of the leading shāfiʿī scholars of his time. he wrote a commentary on al-ghazālī’s iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. 52. see below for a discussion of the “armies” ḥadīth. 53. al-barqī, al-maḥāsin, 1: 306, no. 602. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 311 inna allāha khalaqa al-ʿaqla fa-qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā khalaqtu shayʾan aḥabba ilayya minka. laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 11. al-barqī:54 al-sindī b. muḥammad—al-ʿalāʾ b. razīn (kufa)—muḥammad b. muslim (companion of imams al-bāqir, and al-ṣādiq, kufa)— imam al-bāqir and imam al-ṣādiq lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. fa-qāla: “wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥsana minka. iyyāka āmuru wa-iyyāka anhī wa-iyyāka uthību wa-iyyāka uʿāqibu.” 12. al-barqī and al-kulaynī:55 aḥmad b. muḥammad b. ʿīsā—al-ḥasan b. maḥbūb (= al-sarrād, narrated from imam al-riḍā, “one of the four pillars of his era”)— al-ʿalāʾ b. razīn—muḥammad b. muslim—imam al-bāqir lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla istanṭaqahu. thumma qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā khalaqtu khalqan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. wa-lā ukammiluka illā fīman uḥibbu. amā innī iyyāka āmuru wa-iyyāka anhī wa-iyyāka uʿāqibu wa-iyyāka uthību.” 13. al-barqī:56 ʿalī b. al-ḥakam (companion of imam al-jawwād, baghdad)—hishām b. al-ḥakam (companion of imams al-ṣādiq and musā al-kāẓim, great mutakallim, wasit, baghdad)57— imam al-ṣādiq lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā khalaqtu khalqan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-ʿalayka uthību.” 14. al-barqī:58 muḥammad b. khālid—ʿabd allāh b. al-faḍl al-nawfalī—the latter’s father—imam al-ṣādiq—the prophet khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla: “mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥabba ilayya minka.” qāla: fa-aʿṭā allāhu muḥammadan ṣallā allāhu ʿalayhi wa-ālihi wa-sallam tisʿata wa-tisʿīna juzʾan thumma qassama bayna al-ʿibādi juzʾan wāḥidan. 54. ibid., no. 603. 55. ibid., no. 604; al-kulaynī, al-kāfī, 1:5, no. 1. 56. al-barqī, al-maḥāsin, 1:307, no. 605. 57. the other possibility is hishām b. sālim. ʿalī b. al-ḥakam narrated ḥadīth from both hishāms. 58. ibid., no. 606. 312 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 313 15. the “armies ḥadīth”; al-barqī, al-kulaynī, and al-ṣaddūq:59 ʿalī b. ḥadīd—samāʿa b. mihrān (companion of imam al-ṣādiq, kufa)— imam al-ṣādiq god created the intellect, which is the first creation among spiritual beings residing to the right of the throne from his light, and . . . . . . qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. thumma qāla lahu: “aqbil” fa-aqbala. fa-qāla allāhu taʿālā lahu: “khalaqtuka khalqan ʿaẓīman wa-karramtuka ʿalā jamīʿ khalqī.” then he created ignorance . . . [a long narrative follows about ignorance’s disobedience and about the creation of seventy-five armies for both the intellect and ignorance] 16. al-kulaynī:60 muḥammad b. al-ḥasan—sahl b. ziyād (qum, rayy, ghalw, weak ḥadīth narrator) ibn abī najrān (kufa, narrated from imam riḍā, d. 203/817)—al-ʿalāʾ b. razīn—muḥammad b. muslim—imam al-bāqir lammā khalaqa allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. fa-qāla: “wa-ʿizzatī mā khalaqtu khalqan ahsana minka. iyyāka āmuru wa-iyyāka anhī wa-iyyāka uthību wa-iyyāka uʿāqibu.” 17. al-ṣaddūq:61 muḥammad b. ʿalī al-shāh—abū ḥāmid aḥmad b. muḥammad b. aḥmad b. al-ḥusayn—abū yazīd aḥmad b. khālid al-khālidī—muhammad b. aḥmad b. ṣāliḥ al-tamīmī—the latter’s father—muḥammad b. ḥātim al-qaṭṭān62— ḥammād b. ʿamr—imam ṣādiq—imam bāqir—zayn al-ʿābidīn (d. 95/712)—ʿalī b. abī ṭālib (d.40/661) [part of a narrative several pages long about the prophet’s waṣiyya to ʿalī] yā ʿalī: inna awalla khalaqa khalqahu allāhu ʿazza wa-jalla al-ʿaqlu fa-qāla lahu: “aqbil!” fa-aqbala. thumma qāla lahu: “adbir!” fa-adbara. fa-qāla: “wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā khalaqtu khalqan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-bika uthību wa-bika uʿāqibu.” 59. ibid., 1:311, no. 620; al-kulaynī, al-kāfī, 1:11, no. 14; al-ṣāddūq, amālī al-ṣaddūq (beirut: muʾassasat al-aʿlamī li-l-maṭbūʿāt, 2009), 304. 60. al-kulaynī, al-kāfī, 1:13, no. 26. 61. al-ṣaddūq, man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh, ed. ʿa. a. al-ghaffārī (qum: muʾassasat al-nashr al-islāmī, 1429h), 4:369, no. 5765, isnāds to ḥammād and anas on p. 536 (unreliable isnād). 62. al-ṣaddūq provides also an alternative isnād, which replaces muḥammad b. ḥātim al-qattān and ḥammād b. ʿamr with anas b. muḥammad abū mālik and his father. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 313 chart 2 : shīʿī isnāds. the shīʿī variants document the spread of the ḥadīth in the middle of the second/ eighth century in kufa, around the same time that dāwūd was disseminating it in sunnī circles. since we did not see many kufan figures in the earlier sunnī isnāds, the ḥadīth must have originated outside kufa and traveled there from basra. al-ʿalāʾ b. razīn, who lived in the second half of the second/eighth century, seems to be the common link and the main candidate for the disseminator of the ḥadīth in basra. in the shīʿī tradition, he is considered a reliable transmitter who had books from which “everyone narrated ḥadīth.”63 another interesting transmitter, given what we know of his life, is hishām b. al-ḥakam (d. 179/795), the famous shīʿī theologian who debated the muʿtazila—if it is indeed this hishām who is meant here.64 in any case, it is evident that the ḥadīth spread first in basra and then in kufa by the second half of the second/eighth century. 63. lahu kutub yarwīhā jamāʿatun; al-khūʾī, muʿjam rijāl al-ḥadīth (najaf: maktabat al-imām al-khūʾī, n.d.), 12:184. 64. ʿ alī b. al-ḥakam narrated from two hishāms, hishām b. al-ḥakam and hishām b. sālim. see al-khūʾī, rijāl, 12:411–25, esp. 414. 314 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 315 the real common link between the sunnī and shīʿī traditions is not a single person but the muʿtazilī environment of basra. in basra, the ḥadīth emerged as a saying encapsulating a muʿtazilī teaching about human responsibility conditioned by the intellect’s ability to tell good from evil. the early muʿtazila were not a private group, quite the opposite; they sent out missionaries (duʿāt) to spread their doctrine and instructed them in public disputations.65 the two founding fathers of the muʿtazila, wāsit b. ʿaṭāʾ and ʿamr b. ʿubayd, were both famed preachers. early second/eighth-century basra was thus infused with muʿtazilī ideas. it is important to emphasize that we are not dealing here with a quotation from a treatise by a great systematic muʿtazilī theologian such as al-ʿallāf or even wāṣil himself;66 rather, the ḥadīth is an echo of muʿtazilī teachings among the broader basran public. in this way, the ḥadīth’s emergence highlights an important function of the genre as a means of communicating the intellectual debates of the day to the public. therefore, we do not need to talk about direct influences or borrowings between different sects. basra was a booming intellectual center in the early second/eighth century, where different people participated in lively debates and from which ideas spread to the wider world. the transformation of a muʿtazilī teaching into the form of a ḥadīth is what subsequently enabled it to spread among people and groups of different inclinations. the examination of the ḥadīth’s variants shows that all kinds of later collectors recorded it, even those who can in no way be suspected of having sympathies for the muʿtazila. this is the case, for example, with ibn abī al-dunyā, a famous sunnī scholar and a representative of the ascetic strand of ahl al-ḥadīth who not only recorded this ḥadīth but also compiled a book on ʿaql.67 it is thanks to its ḥadīth form that this former muʿtazilī teaching could be dissociated from its original setting and reinterpreted by various narrators, for ḥadīths were accepted by all and accessible to all, regardless of sect or socioeconomic status. ibn abī al-dunyā, as his book suggests, did not understand the ḥadīth it in rationalistic terms but as a tradition about divine wisdom. the ḥadīth form turned any idea into a currency up for grabs for any group, which could then infuse its ideas into it. the muʿtazilī origin of the ḥadīth and its subsequent spread in the sunnī and shīʿī circles furthermore illustrates the porousness of the boundaries between these groups in the second/eighth century. michael dann has documented the important role that shīʿī transmitters played in the transmission of ḥadīths in the proto-sunnī milieu before 150/767. 68 it is worth emphasizing that none of these groups was yet a well-defined entity in this time. early muʿtazila was still “a tradition of socially and politically disembodied 65. s. stroumsa, “the beginnings of the muʿtazila reconsidered,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 13 (1990): 265–93, at 287–91. 66. if wāṣil indeed wrote books. van ess suggested that the books attributed to him whose names have been preserved may have been written later by ḍirār b. ʿamr. stroumsa, “beginnings of the muʿtazila,” 291. 67. ibn abī al-dunyā, al-ʿaql wa-faḍluh, 40. 68. m. dann, “contested boundaries: the reception of shīʿite narrators in the sunnī hadith tradition” (phd diss., princeton university, 2015). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 315 intellection,” in michael cook’s words,69 and as for early shīʿism, both medieval and modern scholars have struggled to categorize its various groups (for example, tashayyuʿ and rafḍ).70 regarding the sunnīs, some scholars have objected to the use of the term prior to the fifth/ eleventh century.71 in the second/eighth century, as racha el-omari observed, “seemingly everyone was engaged in reporting ḥadīth [...] including proto-muʿtazilites” 72 and thus it is not surprising that these group would share some of the ḥadīth material. the relationship between early shīʿism and the muʿtazila, in particular, has been hotly debated, because the two groups later on came to overlap on many points. scholars have argued either that the shīʿīs acquired muʿtazilī positions early on or that they developed them independently.73 by contrast, others, such as mohammad ali amir-moezzi, have painted early shīʿism as an esoteric (not a rationalist) movement.74 what is interesting is that in their efforts to present early shīʿīsm as rationalistic or esoteric, respectively, both camps have used this ḥadīth and other ʿaql traditions to support their positions.75 in a way, then, they continue the practice of reinterpreting and engaging with the ḥadīth in their modern scholarly practice. by the end of the second/eighth century, however, the sectarian boundaries became much more defined. the ahl al-ḥadīth appropriated ḥadīth as their dominion, through the rising institution of isnād and excluded non-ahl al-ḥadīth transmitters from it,76 while other groups, especially the muʿtazila, criticized them for abusing ḥadīth as an ideological weapon.77 however, as the next section shows, using the example of ʿaql ḥadīth, different groups continued to use, adapt, and interpret ḥadīths for centuries. especially non-legal ḥadīth (like the one under study) were under much less scrutiny. the genre’s adaptability to new environments and intellectual frameworks is one of its important literary facets and ḥadīths should be thus seen as an important vehicle for expressing ideas and creating memorable shortcuts. 69. m. cook, commanding right and forbidding wrong in islamic thought (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004), 195. sarah stroumsa has also pointed out that there was no one political platform that united the muʿtazila. stroumsa, “beginnings of the muʿtazila.” 70. dann, “contested boundaries,” 30–34. 71. ibid., 8. 72. r. el-omari, “accommodation and resistance: classical muʿtazilites on ḥadīth,” journal of near eastern studies 71, no. 2 (2012): 231-256, at 232. 73. h. a. abdulsater, shiʿi doctrine, muʿtazili theology: al-sharīf al-murtaḍā and imami discourse (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2017), 2–3. 74. m. a. amir-moezzi, the divine guide in early shiʿism: the sources of esotericism in islam (albany: state university of new york press, 1994). 75. amir-moezzi understands the shīʿī ʿaql as a phenomenon he labels “hiero-intelligence,” which has four dimensions—cosmogonic, ethical-epistemological, spiritual, and soteriological. in his view, the transformation of ʿ aql into the logical ʿ aql of the theologians began in the third/ninth century under the influence of aristotelian texts. amir-moezzi, divine guide, 11. for his discussion of ʿ aql, see 6–13. cf. w. madelung, “early imāmī theology as reflected in the kitāb al-kāfī of al-kulaynī,” in the study of shiʿi islam: history, theology and law, ed. f. daftary, 465–74 (london: i. b. tauris, 2014), 467–68. 76. on the decline of shīʿī narrators in the proto-sunnī milieu see dann, “contested boundaries,” 1-28. 77. el-omari, “accommodation and resistance,” 234-236. 316 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 317 2. the journey of the ʿaql ḥadīth in the middle ages and the early modern period by the fourth/tenth century, the ʿaql ḥadīth had spread across the whole islamic world in the works of authors with divergent interests, from the pious sunnī ascetic ibn abī al-dunyā in baghdad to the adīb ibn ʿabd rabbihi (d. 328/940) in cordoba and the ṣūfī master al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī in termez in modern-day uzbekistan.78 throughout its long journey, the ḥadīth was reinterpreted and adapted to new contexts in a number of different ways. i have chosen five examples. the first three come from the medieval period and illustrate the diverse ways in which the text of the ḥadīth could be molded. three medieval variants the first example presents the ḥadīth unchanged but set into a new intellectual framework and reinterpreted. this instance is associated with aḥmad b. khābiṭ (d. between 227/842 and 232/847), who had studied with the muʿtazilī theologian al-naẓẓām.79 ibn khābiṭ was from a well-known basran muʿtazilī family, but the muʿtazilīs denounced his teachings about the migration of souls as going too far, and as a result he was investigated under the caliph al-wāthiq. he and his companion faḍl al-ḥadathī are reported to have taught the ḥadīth with a twist. according to the heresiologist ʿabd al-qāhir al-baghdādī (d. 429/1037), they held that there were two lords of the universe, one eternal and one created, the latter being jesus, who is identical with the ʿaql of the ḥadīth. al-baghdādī quotes ibn khābiṭ and al-faḍl saying: “the messiah armored himself with a body; before that he was ʿaql.”80 the second example shows the ḥadīth combined with another, forming a new narrative. in this form it appears in kitāb al-aẓilla (“book of shadows”), a text written in the circles of shīʿī ghulāt (“extremists”) in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries in iraq and preserved as quotations in various nuṣayrī texts.81 (the nuṣayrīs were a group of ghulāt who left iraq and settled in syria.) the ḥadīth speaks about god first creating a name of four letters (mḥmd), then other names from it, then his throne on water, and only then the ʿaql. it continues: then god spread his light, and from that light he created an image. then from knowledge (ʿilm), power (qudra), light (nūr), and will (mashīʾa) he created by his command intelligence (ʿaql). he then commanded: “turn toward me!” and intelligence turned toward him. then he commanded: “turn away!” and it turned away. god then 78. ibn ʿabd rabbihi, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, ed. m. m. qumayḥa (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1997), 2:107. without isnād. for the other references, see chart 1. 79. on aḥmad b. khābiṭ, see j. van ess, theology and society in the second and third centuries of the hijra, trans. g. goldbloom (leiden: brill, 2018), 3:467–72. 80. al-baghdādī, al-farq bayna al-firaq, ed. m. m. ʿabd al-ḥamīd (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-madanī, 1964), 277. 81. m. asatryan, “shiite underground literature between iraq and syria: ‘the book of shadows’ and the history of early ghulat,” in texts in transit in the medieval mediterranean, ed. y. t. langermann and r. g. morrison, 128–61 (university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2016), 131. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 317 told it, “by you i reward and by you i punish,” and made it live with water, possessed of knowledge, eternally in the realm.82 the part that comes from a different ḥadīth is the motif of knowledge, power, light, and will; this element has been recorded in the ikhtiṣāṣ, attributed to shaykh mufīd (d. 413/1022).83 mushegh asatryan places the teaching of the kitāb al-aẓilla in the iraqi ghulāt milieu of the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries, whose center was in kufa. this is probably where the two ḥadīths crossed trajectories.84 in the context of shīʿī ghulāt, asatryan and dylan burns connect the idea of the ʿaql moving back and forth over a primordial water to jewish sapiential traditions about the presence of the divine wisdom at the moment of first creation.85 the third example, which i call the “armies ḥadīth,” is the ʿaql ḥadīth’s much-extended variant. this tradition, also included in al-kulaynī’s kāfī as no. 14, has not lost its appeal, as a modern commentary on it by ruhollah khomeini indicates.86 it includes the motif of the intellect’s creation and obedience and expands on it by describing the creation of ignorance, its failing the obedience test, and the divine allotment of seventy-five armies to the two opposing sides: god, may he be glorified and exalted, created ʿaql first among the spiritual entities; he drew it forth from the right of his throne (ʿarsh), making it proceed from his own light. then he commanded it to retreat, and it retreated, to advance, and it advanced; then god proclaimed: “i created you glorious, and i gave you pre-eminence over all my creatures.” then ignorance (al-jahl) was created; seeing its pride and its hesitation in approaching god, he damned it: “then, from the briny ocean god created dark ignorance; he ordered it to retreat and it retreated, to advance and it did not advance. then god said to it “certainly you have grown proud,” and he damned it and chased it from his presence. [. . .] then god endowed ʿaql with 75 armies; when ignorance saw god’s generosity toward ʿaql, it became ferociously hostile and said to god: “o lord, here is a creature similar to me; you have privileged it and made it powerful. i am its adversary and i have no power. give me troops like those of ʿaql.” and god replied, “so be it, but if you revolt again, i shall banish you and your troops from my mercy.”87 whereas the more basic version of the ḥadīth is about taklīf, this extended variation partakes in a wider shīʿī dualistic discourse about the cosmic struggle between the powers 82. m. asatryan and d. burns, “is ghulat religion islamic gnosticism? religious transmissions in late antiquity,” in l’ésotérisme shi’ite, ses racines et ses prolongements, ed. m. a. amir-moezzi, m. de cillis, d. de smet, and o. mir-kasimov, 55–86 (turnhout: brepols, 2016), 60. the translation is theirs, hence the differences in wording. 83. asatryan, “shiite underground literature,” 141–42. 84. ibid., 142. 85. asatryan and burns, “is ghulat religion islamic gnosticism?,” 82. 86. r. khomeini, junūd al-ʿaql wa-l-jahl, trans. into arabic a. al-fahrī (beirut: muʾassasat al-aʿlamī li-lmaṭbūʿāt, 2001). 87. translation from amir-moezzi, divine guide, 8. 318 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 319 of good and evil, which likely built on and mixed with more ancient traditions in the region.88 amir-moezzi has drawn parallels, for instance, between the “armies ḥadīth” and the mazdean teaching that the entities of wisdom and ignorance are engaged in perpetual combat.89 variously expressing ideas about the identification of ʿaql with jesus as the lesser creator, reflecting jewish beliefs about the divine wisdom, or echoing mazdean dualistic teachings, the ḥadīth traveled from one community to another, with each adapting the text to reflect its world view. these changes should be seen not in terms of forgery, falsification, or plagiarism but rather as a more organic process. the exchange of formulas, the filling in of words, and the addition of short passages are all to be expected in a society whose members had immediate access to large databases of texts and traditions stored in their memory. ḥadīths were the substance that traveled across sectarian boundaries and social classes and and that people molded consciously or unconsciously to communicate different ideas effectively. two early modern commentaries the ḥadīth’s legacy extended well beyond the medieval period, as the ḥadīth continued to be narrated and reinterpreted. by the early modern period, the sunnī and shiʿī ḥadīth traditions were well established, and so we turn to ḥadīth commentaries to see how the ḥadīth was understood at this time. ḥadīth commentaries are not “merely a derivative and rarified literary practice,”90 as they were once perceived; rather, they constitute an arena in which commentators engaged with tradition creatively and in novel ways. the two commentaries analyzed here, by murtaḍā al-zabīdī and mullā ṣadrā, show how the authors use the ḥadīth as inspiration for intellectual contemplation. they approach it as a hermeneutical challenge. the two scholars, one known mainly as a ḥadīth scholar and the other as a philosopher, both grapple with the ḥadīth and creatively reinterpret it to fit their understanding of the world. regarding ṣadrā’s commentary, jari kaukua asks: “does ṣadrā simply read his philosophical doctrine into the religious texts, or do the latter have a significant influence on his philosophy?”91 kaukua concludes that the philosopher’s main motivation is “to maintain the integrity of the philosophical theory.”92 this may indeed have been his internal motivation, but it does not invalidate his earnest attempt to weave in the religious traditions. more than anything, the two scholars’ treatment of the ḥadīth shows their efforts to harmonize different strands of islamic thought and their creativity in expounding their ideas through this ḥadīth. 88. on the early shīʿī dualistic discourse, see m. a. amir-moezzi, the silent qur’an and the speaking qur’an: scriptural sources of islam between history and fervour, trans. e. ormsby (new york: columbia university press, 2015), 92–96. 89. amir-moezzi, divine guide, 8, n. 13. 90. blecher, said the prophet of god, 13. 91. j. kaukua, “the intellect in mullā ṣadrā’s commentary on the uṣūl al-kāfī,” forthcoming. 92. kaukua, “intellect in mullā ṣadrā’s commentary.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 319 the first commentary on the ḥadīth is taken from sharḥ uṣūl al-kāfī, mullā ṣadrā’s seventeenth-century commentary on the first part of al-kulaynī’s al-kāfī.93 mullā ṣadrā, “arguably the most significant islamic philosopher after avicenna,”94 was an iranian shīʿī thinker who became famous for his attempt to synthesize philosophical methods with insights from theology and mysticism; he exerted a dominant influence on modern shīʿī thought.95 his interpretation of the ḥadīth shows influences from avicennan philosophy, the ishrāqī (“illuminative”) school associated with al-suhrawardī, and the ṣūfī metaphysics of being formulated by ibn ʿarabī. the second text comes from itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn (“the gift of the god-fearing sayyids”), an eighteenth-century commentary by murtaḍā al-zabīdī on iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (“revival of the religious sciences”) by the famous sunnī theologian abū ḥāmid al-ghazālī (d. 505/1111).96 al-zabīdī, a prominent sunnī scholar of ḥadīth and a ṣūfī theologian, was a towering figure of his age. a man of universal erudition, he hosted visitors who came to meet him from near and far, and he had a vast scholarly network and excellent relations with the ottoman court. he was born in bilgrām in modern-day india, grew up in zabīd in yemen, and settled in cairo. his fame rests mainly on his tāj al-ʿarūs (“bridal crown”), the largest arabic lexicon ever written. the two scholars’ motivated engagement with the tradition is clear, in the first instance, in the close attention that they pay to the ḥadīth’s isnāds. al-zabīdī examines with particular care the sunnī isnāds, whose reliability has been seriously contested, and argues against his major source of isnād criticism, al-ḥāfiẓ al-ʿirāqī,97 that not all of the ḥadīth’s pathways (ṭuruq) are weak. he singles out the variant recorded by ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad in his zawāʾid to his father’s kitāb al-zuhd (variant 1 above) as a having a sound isnād. in an effort to salvage some of the ḥadīth’s credibility, he concludes that “what can be said about it at most is that it is weak in some of its pathways (ṭuruq).”98 both mullā ṣadrā and al-zabīdī attempt to harmonize contradictory traditions and explain away any inconsistencies. i mentioned earlier that there were two versions of the ḥadīth.99 the first—which is attested in the earlier versions—started with lammā, “when,” whereas the second began with awwalu mā, “the first thing [that god created].” the awwalu mā formula was shared by a large number of other sayings that talk about the first creation but substitute some other entity, such as light, spirit, a cherub, or the pen, for ʿaql. some 93. mullā ṣadrā, sharḥ uṣūl al-kāfī, ed. m. khawājawī (tehran: muʾassasa-i muṭālaʿāt wa taḥqīqāt-i farhangī, 1366h), 215–19. 94. s. rizvi, “mulla sadra,” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, spring 2019 ed., ed. e. n. zalta. 95. the studies on mullā ṣadrā are too numerous to be listed here. for an exhaustive bibliography, see rizvi, “mulla sadra.” 96. al-zabīdī, itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn bi-sharḥ iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (cairo: maṭbaʿat al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1894), 452–56. 97. al-ʿirāqī, takhrīj aḥādīth iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, ed. a. ʿa. m. b. m. al-ḥaddād (riyadh: dār al-ʿāṣima, 1987). the text thus usually consists of three main levels: the iḥyāʾ of al-ghazālī, the commentary of al-ʿirāqī, and the commentary of al-zabīdī. in the analytical part al-ʿirāqī’s text is substituted by the work of shaykh najm al-dīn. see below. 98. see appendix. 99. see note 15. 320 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 321 of these sayings contradict the ʿaql ḥadīth in spirit; for example, the version with the pen takes a predestinarian position by portraying god’s first act as the creation the divine pen, which then writes down all human destiny: “the first thing god created was the pen. then he said to it, ‘write.’ so [the pen] wrote what came to pass and what will come to pass until the day of resurrection.”100 mullā ṣadrā makes clear, at the outset of his discussion of the ḥadīth, that these seemingly different and conflicting ḥadīths all refer to the same reality: the intellect is the first creation, the closest of the created things (majʿūlāt) to the first truth, the greatest, the most perfect, and the second among the existents in existentiality (mawjūdiyya)—although the almighty has no second in his reality (fī ḥaqīqatihi) because his oneness (waḥdatuhu) is not countable as others in the genus of countable things (waḥdāt) are. and this is what is meant in what has come to us in the ḥadīths from him [the prophet], may god bless him and his family, and in his sayings in the version, “the first thing that god created was the intellect,” and in the version, “the first thing that god created was my light,” and in the version, “the first thing that god created was my spirit,” and in the version, “the first thing that god created was the pen,” and in the version, “the first thing that god created was a cherub (karūbī).” all of these are attributes and descriptions of one thing in different phrasings. it is called by a different name in reference to each attribute. the names are multiple, while the named (musammā) is one in essence and existence. later in the text, mullā ṣadrā explains that all of these entities are just different names for the intellect. he argues, for example, that the intellect “was referred to as the pen only because it is the tool [of god] to represent the truths (al-ʿulūm wa-l-ḥaqāʾiq) on the spiritual tablets of divine decree and of fate (al-alwāḥ al-nafsāniyya al-qaḍāʾiyya wa-l-qadariyya).”101 al-zabīdī, for his part, relies on an earlier text to harmonize these accounts through a linguistic argument. he quotes at length shaykh najm al-dīn (d. 654/1256), an iranian ṣūfī intellectual who fled from the mongol invasion to anatolia, where he played an important role in the development of mysticism. in the quoted passage, shaykh najm al-dīn explains that god referred to the intellect as the pen synecdochally, using a part to stand for the whole (that is, the intellect writing with the pen): “when he [god] called it [the intellect] the pen, he told it: ‘tell what will come to pass from now until the day of judgment.’ calling it ‘pen’ is like calling the owner of a sword ‘sword.’”102 he also argues for the functional and semantic equivalence of the two terms a little later in the text, when he points out that “the pen is close in meaning to the intellect” on the basis of q 96:4, which states that god “taught 100. this is the version found in ʿalī b. ibrāhīm al-qummī, tafsīr, ed. ṭ. m. al-jāzāʾirī (najaf: maktabat al-hudā, 1966–68), 2:198, quoted in crow, “role of al-ʿaql,” 126. van ess has located the emergence of the “pen” ḥadīth among the jabrī circles of first/seventh-century kufa. it makes sense that a concrete entity such as a pen, which has a clear antecedent in qurʾān q 68:1, would spark the creation of a ḥadīth earlier than would the more abstract ʿaql, which lacks such clear qurʾānic referents. the qurʾān does not even contain the noun ʿaql, only the verbal forms ʿaqala and yaʿqilu. when it refers to the intellects of people it usually uses the terms albāb or afʾida. 101. see appendix. 102. see appendix. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 321 by the pen.” similarly, “things are known through the intellect.” this example shows that ṣadrā and al-zabīdī spared no effort to bring the divergent traditions into harmony. finally, they use the ḥadīth as inspiration to show that these ideas do not contradict the ḥadīth but rather provide the intellectual framework for its full understanding. both refer to the ṣūfī teaching about the pre-eternal muḥammadan reality (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya).103 many thinkers, such as ibn ʿarabī, considered the muḥammadan reality the first entity created by god and thus identified it with the logos, the intellect, and the pen, which is also the context in which ṣadrā and al-zabīdī introduce it. for them, the muḥammadan reality or spirit is the perfect equivalent of the immaterial intellect. this equation allows further symbolic interpretation of the ḥadīth and the synthesis of different traditions. commenting on the part of the ḥadīth that reads “then he told it: ‘go back!’” ṣadrā interprets it as referring to the night of muḥammad’s journey to the divine presence (miʿrāj) and to “his departure from the realm of the world.” both commentaries are also imbued with philosophical concepts. al-zabīdī’s discussion of the nature of the intellect is a good example. it offers a response to al-ghazālī, who presents the following conundrum: if the intellect is an accident, how is it possible that it was created before everything else? and if it is a substance, “how could it exist on its own without occupying space (lā yataḥayyazu)?” al-zabīdī, in the tradition of scholastic avicennan philosophy, provides a taxonomy of substances and identifies five types of substance—matter, form, body, soul, and intellect—to argue that some substances, such as the intellect, are abstract and therefore do not occupy space. here, philosophy helps to resolve a philosophical problem that the ḥadīth raises; the system is in harmony, and as a welcome corollary, the reader has been edified. ṣadrā discusses many of his own philosophical and theological theories, always proceeding from the ḥadīth. he takes up the argument that i quoted earlier, about all the first creations—the pen, the intellect, and so on—referring to the same named thing (musammā), to launch his discussion about the notions of essence and existence.104 103. the muḥammadan reality guides the prophet (and anyone who wants to follow him) during his ascent to the divine presence (miʿrāj), which the tradition links to q 53:18 and which also appears in ṣadrā’s commentary. the tradition and the commentary also speak about the muḥammadan light and the muḥammadan spirit as equivalents of the muḥammadan reality, but some authors have distinguished between the three; see w. chittick, imaginal worlds: ibn al-ʿarabi and the problem of religious diversity (albany: state university of new york press, 1994), chap. 2. 104. the distinction between essence and existence is already present in the work of aristotle, but it assumes true significance only in the works of al-fārābī and avicenna. posterior analytics ii β 92b10, metaphysics, δ v.5, 1015a20–b15; 7, 1017a7–b10; also ε and z, de interpretatione 11 21a25–28, referred to in o. lizzini, “ibn sina’s metaphysics,” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (summer 2019 edition), ed. e. n. zalta. in particular, avicenna developed the distinction between the existence of something and its “reality by virtue of which something is what it is,” that is, its essence, quiddity, thingness. scholarship on the issue is abundant; see for instance, r. wisnovsky, avicenna’s metaphysics in its context (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2003). mullā ṣadrā’s key contribution to the discussion is the doctrine of the ontological primacy of existence (aṣālat al-wujūd). ṣadrā argued that existence must be ontologically prior because it applies to all things, whereas essence applies only to some things, such as genera or species. all things are composites of existence and essence except for god, who has no essence (god cannot be a composite, and further, essence implies multiplicity because it is shared by a multitude of subjects). everything is therefore an instantiation of existence, including god’s connection 322 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 323 he defines the intellect as the highest of all created things in terms of its degree of existence, for it needs only god and nothing else. he also brings in the doctrine of simple reality (basīṭ al-ḥaqīqa), which draws on neoplatonic ideas of emanation and the sequence of intellects and posits that all things flow from the simple one. god is simple, pure existence devoid of quiddity105 that would imply complexity and multiplicity (e.g., genera, composition, divisions). all things flow from this simple reality and are both in it and not in it.106 in this context of emanation, ṣadrā invokes the rule of the most noble contingency (qāʿidat al-imkān al-ashraf)—namely, that the nobler being must be prior to the less noble in grades of existence107—and identifies the intellect as “the noblest possible and the most distinguished creation.” further, the theme of love, inspired by the part of the ḥadīth that says, “i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are,” takes up a significant portion of the discussion. love, in ṣadrā’s view, is pure good connected with perfection of existence. on this point, he debates earlier theologians and specifically al-zamakhsharī, who claimed love would make god deficient in his essence. ṣadrā refutes this position: “they did not know that his, the almighty’s, love for his creation stems from his love for himself.” after him there are the “rational substances, luminous spirits, and holy angels, [all of whom are] delighted with him . . . for they are divinely lovers.” in this case, the ḥadīth serves ṣadrā as evidence for his philosophical views. finally, ṣadrā interprets the last part of the ḥadīth, “it is you whom i order, it is you whom i forbid, it is you whom i punish, and it is you whom i reward,” as reflecting the intellect’s function as the condition for obligation (taklīf), although he problematizes the doctrine by distinguishing between obligation of this world and rewards in heaven. with ṣadrā’s discussion of taklīf, the journey of the ḥadīth has come full circle. on this last stop, the ḥadīth has, once more, acquired new meanings and significations, this time not by modifying the ḥadīth itself but by collecting and harmonizing its variants and weaving it into other intellectual frameworks. for the commentators, the ḥadīth posed an occasion to espouse their ideas about the world and a challenge to formulate a harmonious system in which ḥadīths, ṣūfī ideas, and philosophy all had their place. to the world. this doctrine, which mullā ṣadrā used for his own proof of god’s existence, was also informed by the ṣūfī metaphysics of ontological monism (waḥdat al-wujūd) associated with ibn ʿarabī. ṣadrā’s monism is expressed in the phrase basīṭ al-ḥaqīqa kull al-ashyāʾ (“the simple reality is all things”), which is based on neoplatonic teachings of the simple one. god, as the simple one and pure being, is the totality of existence. rizvi, “mulla sadra”; i. kalin, knowledge in later islamic philosophy: mullā ṣadrā on existence, intellect, and intuition (oxford: oxford university press, 2010), 89–95. 105. see previous note. 106. this doctrine reconciles the tension between the unity of existence and its multiplicity as it appears in this world and provides a proof for the existence of god through an analysis of simplicity. the doctrine of basīṭ al-ḥaqīqa relates to ṣadrā’s doctrine of aṣālat al-wujūd (see note 108) as well as to his doctrine of the gradation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd), which posits that all things in the world are different degrees of a single whole, in a chain and hierarchy of existence. s. h. rizvi, mulla sadra and metaphysics: modulation of being (london: routledge, 2009), 104–5; rizvi, “mulla sadra.” 107. mullā ṣadrā, al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya fī al-asfār al-ʿaqliyya al-arbaʿa, ed. r. luṭfī, i. amīnī, and f. a. ummīd (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth, 1981), 3:244. see also rizvi, mulla sadra and metaphysics, 108. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 323 conclusion the ḥadīth about the creation of the intellect originated in basra in the first half of the second/eighth century. it reflected muʿtazilī ideas about the intellect’s obedience to god’s will and its ability to distinguish between good and evil—ability that makes it at the same time the locus of human obligation to choose good. around the mid-second/ eighth century or a little after, the ḥadīth was disseminated widely in sunnī traditionist circles in basra and among shīʿī ḥadīth collectors in kufa, and then spread across the whole islamic world, changing meanings and audiences. in the early modern period, its journey continued in ḥadīth commentaries, in which the ḥadīth was, once more, reinterpreted to fit to a new intellectual context. genre matters. the saying gained currency the moment it acquired the form of a ḥadīth. thanks to its ḥadīthization, it could travel across sectarian boundaries and be adapted and readapted for diverse contexts. only as a ḥadīth could it become part of an intersectarian common discourse. the fluidity, openness to reinterpretation, and capacity for inspiration that the case study of the ʿaql ḥadīth has demonstrated make ḥadīths an effective literary vehicle. there are, clearly, other aspects of ḥadīths that contribute to making them so compelling. one such aspect is the aura of reality that they carry. stefan leder observed that the apparent reality of the akhbār is achieved by the employment of isnāds and a narrative technique that leaves the narrator in the background.108 daniel beaumont added that the isnād’s function is to “anchor the text to the actual instance of enunciation.”109 these effects are naturally magnified in the case of ḥadīths. stefan sperl has underlined the isnād’s role of holding “the promise of a direct, authentic and virtually unmediated access to the past.”110 this past is not any past; it is the unmitigated prophetic authority speaking. mircea eliade’s ideas about two types of time, sacred and profane, further illuminates the emotional power of ḥadīths. religious rites and services mark a break in profane time, and by reenacting events that took place in sacred time, they take participants back to that time.111 all narration of ḥadīths is a similar practice, a ritual through which a community is transmitted to a different temporal sphere. eliade notes that christianity, with its insistence on the historicity of christ, radically changed the conception of sacred time. whereas people had―through their rites and myths―traditionally striven to return to a primordial cosmic time, christianity sanctified a clearly defined historical time.112 the same can be said 108. s. leder, “the literary use of the khabar: a basic form of historical writing,” in the byzantine and early islamic near east, vol. 1, problems in the literary source material, ed. a. cameron and l. conrad, 277–315 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1992), 307–8. 109. d. beaumont, “hard-boiled: narrative discourse in early muslim traditions,” studia islamica 83 (1996): 5–31, at 28. 110. s. sperl, “man’s ‘hollow core’: ethics and aesthetics in ḥadīth literature and classical arabic adab,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 70, no. 3 (2007): 459–86, at 480. 111. m. eliade, the sacred and the profane: the nature of religion, trans. w. r. trask (new york: harcourt, brace and world, 1959), 68 ff. 112. eliade, sacred and profane, 111. 324 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 325 about islam and the time of the prophet, and from this perspective, isnāds serve as a direct connection to this sanctified historical past, as a time machine that takes one back to the sacred time of the first muslim generation. the act of ḥadīth narration transforms into an experience of encountering the prophet. the case of the ʿaql ḥadīth is different. the ḥadīth goes even a step further, for it takes the listeners to eliade’s primordial cosmic time, to the moment of first creation, in the beginning. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 325 appendix: translation first text: sharḥ uṣūl al-kāfī by mullā ṣadrā (ṣadr al-dīn muḥammad al-shīrāzī)113 k114: several of our companions115 [i.e., shīʿīs], including muḥammad b. yaḥyā al-ʿaṭṭār, narrated to me (ḥaddathanī): ṣ: [muḥammad b. yaḥyā al-ʿaṭṭār is] abū jaʿfar al-qummī [fl. before 300/913], [about whom it is said] in al-khulāṣa [by al-ḥillī, d. 726/1325]116 and other works [that he is] the master among our companions in his time, k: reliable (thiqa), ṣ: the source of many ḥadīths (ʿayn kathīr al-ḥadīth), k: on the authority of aḥmad b. muḥammad, ṣ: [who is] ibn ʿīsā b. ʿabd allāh b. saʿd b. mālik al-aḥwaṣ, with ḥāʾ and ṣād muhmalatān [i.e., without diacritical points], whose kunya is abū jaʿfar al-qummī, the shaykh of qum. he was one of its prominent men and its faqīh. he met abū al-ḥasan al-riḍā [d. 202/817, the eighth imam] and abū jaʿfar al-thānī [d. 220/835, the ninth imam] and abū al-ḥasan al-ʿaskarī [d. 254/868, the tenth imam], peace be upon them. he was reliable (thiqa) and wrote books. k: on the authority of al-ḥasan b. maḥbūb, ṣ: [who is] al-sarrād, called al-zarrād, whose kunya is abū ʿalī kūfī, a reliable source, who narrated on the authority of al-riḍā, peace be upon him. he [al-ḥasan] was of noble standing, and is considered one of the four pillars of his era.117 al-kashshī said: “our companions agreed on approving what is narrated truly on their authority118 and on assenting to them, and they [i.e., our companions] endorsed their legal opinions (fiqh) and their learning,” and he mentioned al-ḥasan b. maḥbūb as one of this group. [al-kashshī added:] “some mentioned in his place al-ḥasan b. ʿalī b. faḍḍāl.” k: on the authority of al-ʿalāʾ b. razīn, ṣ: the first letter [in razīn] being rāʾ and the following zāʾ; he was reliable (thiqa), of noble standing (jalīl al-qadr), and a prominent man (wajh), k: on the authority of muḥammad b. muslim, 113. mullā ṣadrā, sharḥ uṣūl al-kāfī, 215–19. 114. ṣ stands for mullā ṣadrā, k stands for al-kulaynī. in the original text al-kulaynī’s words are distinguished by double parentheses. 115. shīʿī ḥadīth scholars in general take the expression “several of our companions” used by al-kulaynī to refer to five specific people (including muḥammad b. yaḥyā al-ʿaṭṭār) when narrating from aḥmad b. muḥammad b. ʿīsā; see the introduction to al-kulaynī, al-kāfī, 48. 116. cf. al-ʿallāma al-ḥillī, khulāṣat al-aqwāl fī maʿrifat al-rijāl, ed. j. al-qayyūmī (qum: muʾassasat al-nashr al-islāmī, 1417h), 61. 117. cf. al-ḥillī, al-khulāṣa, 97. 118. “they” in al-kashshī’s text are not in fact the four pillars. mullā ṣadrā and his source, al-ḥillī, somewhat misquote al-kashshī here, because al-kashshī is referring to the six most reliable members of the second generation in transmitting imāmī traditions. cf. al-ḥillī, al-khulāṣa, 97; muḥammad al-kashshī, rijāl al-kashshī, ed. a. al-ḥusaynī (karbala: muʾassasat al-aʿlamī li-l-maṭbūʿāt, 1962), 556. 326 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 327 ṣ: [muḥammad b. muslim] b. ribāḥ abū jaʿfar, one of the prominent companions of kūfa, a pious faqīh, a companion of abū jaʿfar [imam al-bāqir] and abū ʿabd allāh [imam al-ṣādiq], peace be upon them. he narrated on their authority, and he was one of the most reliable people. al-kashshī [d. ca. 350/961] narrated with an isnād reaching al-ʿalāʾ b. razīn from ʿabd allāh b. abī yaʿfūr that he said: “i said to abū ʿabd allāh [imam al-ṣādiq], peace be upon him: ‘i cannot meet you every time and [sometimes] coming is impossible, and [then] a man from among our companions comes and asks me, and i do not always have the answer to everything119 that he is asking about.’ he [imam al-ṣādiq] said: ‘what prevents you from [going to] muḥammad b. muslim? for he has heard ḥadīth from my father [i.e., imam al-bāqir] and according to him, he [muḥammad b. muslim] was a prominent man.’”120 and [al-kashshī narrated also] on the authority of abū jaʿfar b. qawlawayh, with the isnād reaching ʿalī b. asbāṭ on the authority of his father, asbāṭ b. sālim, that abū al-ḥasan mūsā b. jaʿfar, peace be upon them, said: “muḥammad b. muslim is one of the disciples (ḥawāriyyūn)121 of abū jaʿfar muḥammad b. ʿalī [i.e., imam al-bāqir] and his son [imam] jaʿfar b. muḥammad al-ṣādiq, peace be upon them.” al-kashshī said: “he [muḥammad b. muslim] is one of those on whose reliability the community (ʿiṣāba) agrees and whose knowledge/legal opinions (fiqh) it follows.”122 k: that [imam] abū jaʿfar, peace be upon him, said: “when god created the intellect, he made it speak and then he told it: ‘come forward!’ and it came forward. then he told it: ‘go back!’ and it went back. then he said: ‘by my might and by my glory, i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are. i perfected you only in those i love. it is you (iyyāka) whom i order, it is you whom i forbid, it is you whom i punish, and it is you whom i reward.’” ṣ: commentary o my brothers, walking the path of god on the feet of gnosis (ʿirfān), know that this intellect is the first creation, the closest of the created things (majʿūlāt) to the first truth, the greatest, the most perfect, and the second among the existents in existentiality (mawjūdiyya)—although the almighty has no second in his reality (fī ḥaqīqatihi) because his oneness (waḥda) is not countable (ʿadadiyya) as others in the genus of countable things (waḥdāt) are. and this is what is meant in what has come to us in the ḥadīths from him [the prophet], may god bless him and his family, and in his sayings in the version, “the first thing that god created was the intellect,” and in the version, “the first thing that god created was my light,” and in the version, “the first thing that god created was my spirit,” and in the version, “the first thing that god created was the pen,” and in the version, “the first thing that god created was a cherub (karūbī).” all of these are attributes and descriptions of one thing in different phrasings. it is called by a different name in reference 119. kulla mā rather than kullamā, as in the published text. 120. cf. abū jaʿfar al-ṭūṣī, ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl, ed. m. al-rajāʾī (qum: muʾassasat āl al-bayt, 1404h), 1:383. 121. ḥawāriyyūn is also the term for the twelve apostles of jesus in arabic. 122. cf. al-kashshī, rijāl, 10. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 327 to each attribute. the names are multiple, while the named (musammā) is one in essence (dhāt) [1] and existence (wujūd) [2]. [1] as for the quiddity (māhiyya) and essence [of the intellect], it is a substance (jawhar) that has no relation of any kind to bodies (ajsām): not in terms of existence, like accidents, and not in terms of actions (taṣarruf), and not in terms of governance, like souls, and not in terms of particularity (juzʾiyya) or mixing (imtizāj), like matter and form. in general: the substantial created things (majʿūlāt jawhariyya) fall into three groups, differentiated on the basis of their degrees of existence. the first and highest of them is one that needs only god and does not look to anything except god, and does not pay attention to anything but the almighty. the second is one that needs only the almighty for its mere existence (aṣl al-wujūd). but in perfecting its existence (fī istikmāl wujūdihi) it does need what is other than god. the perfection of its existence [comes] after its mere existence, [but from another perspective] it [the perfection of its existence] comes before it. and the third is one that needs what is other than the almighty in both matters—that is, in the basis of existence and in its perfection. the first one is the intellect, the second one is the soul, and the third one is the body or its part. [2] as for the existence (wujūd) and the reality (ḥaqīqa), their proof is the existence of the almighty reality. for since the one with the simple reality (basīṭ al-ḥaqīqa)123 is knowing, powerful, magnanimous, and merciful; possessed of supreme virtue, great force, and boundless power; and encompassing all virtues, good qualities, and perfections, it is not possible for him, given his noble nature, mercy, and compassion, to refrain from emanation (fayḍ) and mercy or to be sparing124 of the good and generosity toward the worlds. so it is inevitable that beings emanate from him in the best order and in the most perfect arrangement and [it is inevitable that] he begins with the noblest (ashraf) and proceeds to the next noblest, as the principle of most noble contingency (qāʿidat al-imkān al-ashraf) dictates.125 there is no doubt that the noblest possible being and the most distinguished creation is the intellect, as you know. for it is the first of the emanations (ṣawādir) and the closest and dearest to the truth. and that is why he said: “i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are.” and we will repeat this saying in order to investigate god’s love for his creation. this existent’s reality (ḥaqīqa) is the same as the very reality of the great spirit, a matter that has been pointed out in the almighty’s saying: “say: ‘the spirit [cometh] by command of my lord’” [q 17:85]126 and his saying: “is it not his to create and 123. see my earlier discussion of ṣadrā’s doctrine of the simple reality, basīṭ al-ḥaqīqa” 124. reading yaḍinnu for yaẓunnu. 125. for the principle of the most noble contingency, see mullā ṣadrā, al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya, 3:244. see also rizvi, mulla sadra and metaphysics, 108. 126. q 17:85 reads as follows: “they ask thee concerning the spirit [of inspiration]. say: ‘the spirit [cometh] by command of my lord; of knowledge it is only a little that is communicated to you, [o men!]’” 328 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 329 to govern?” [q 7: 54],127 and it [the intellect] was referred to as the pen only because it is the tool oftruth to represent the truths (al-ʿulūm wa-l-ḥaqāʾiq) on the spiritual tablets of divine decree and of fate (al-alwāḥ al-nafsāniyya al-qaḍāʾiyya wa-l-qadariyya).128 indeed, the “pen” of god is neither cane nor iron nor a different body. likewise, his tablet is not made of wood or papyrus. when he called it “pen,” he said: “let come to pass what will come to pass until the day of judgment.” [furthermore,] because it [the intellect] is an existence free of the darkness of corporeality and concealment and of the darkness of shortcomings and inexistence, it is called “light” (nūr). for light is existence and darkness inexistence, and it is apparent to itself and makes other things apparent. because it [the intellect] is the origin of life of high and low souls alike, it is called “spirit” (rūḥ). it [the intellect] is also the muḥammadan reality (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya) in the view of the greatest and the most accomplished (muḥaqqiq) ṣūfīs because it is the perfection of his [muḥammad’s] existence, may god bless him and his family, which commences from him and returns to him, as shown in some ḥadīths of the imams, peace be upon them. on this topic [we have undertaken] a demonstrative investigation (taḥqīq burhānī) whose discussion would lengthen our discourse, and we will come back to it in the explanation of those ḥadīths. whoever scrutinizes this point finds that how the first intellect has been described and what has been narrated about it correspond to the characteristics of his [muḥammad’s] spirit, may god bless him and his family, and his peace be upon him. and [the imam’s] saying, peace be upon him, “he [god] made it [the intellect] speak (istanṭaqahu),” means that he endowed it with speech/reason and discourse (jaʿalahu dhā nuṭq wa-kalām) appropriate to its status. as for his words, “then he told it: ‘come forward!’ and it came forward. then he told it: ‘go back!’ and it went back,” this was the case with the spirit [i.e., the prophet], may god bless him and his family, when god told him: “come to the world and descend on earth as a mercy to the two worlds [of human beings and jinns]!” and he came, and his light was concealed in each prophet, while in the person described [as muḥammad] it was apparent, as in the statement reported from him, “we are the last ones and the first ones,” meaning the last ones to come out and appear, like a fruit, and the first ones in creation and existence, like a seed. so, he [muḥammad] is the seed of the tree of the world. “then he told him: ‘go back!’” this meant: “return to your lord!” and he [muḥammad] turned away from the world and returned to his lord on the night of miʿrāj and on his departure from the realm of the world. then he said: “by my power and by my glory, i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are.” and this was also his [muḥammad’s] case, may god bless him and his family, because he was god’s beloved and the most beloved among his creatures. 127. q 7:54 reads as follows: “your guardian lord is god, who created the heavens and the earth in six days; then he established himself on the throne [of authority]: he draweth the night as a veil over the day, each seeking the other in rapid succession; he created the sun, the moon, and the stars, [all] governed by laws under his command. is it not his to create and to govern? blessed be god, the cherisher and sustainer of the worlds!” 128. as muḥammad khawājawī, the editor of ṣadrā’s text, points out, by the two types of spiritual tablets ṣadrā refers to universal souls and to the universe’s faculty of imagination. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 329 the rational aspect in this is that love belongs to the perception of existence (idrāk al-wujūd) because it is pure good.129 and everything130 with a more perfect existence is also greater in goodness, stronger in the perception of it, and more intensive in its delight in it. and the most sublime [thing] delighted by itself is the first truth (al-ḥaqq al-awwal), because it/he perceives most intensely the greatest of what there is to be perceived. it/ he has the most perfect virtue, the most shining light, and the most elevated sublimity, and it is pure good. after it/him in goodness, existence, perception, and delight are the rational substances (jawāhir ʿaqliyya), luminous spirits (arwāḥ nūriyya), and holy angels (malāʾik qudsiyya), [all of whom are] delighted with him, the almighty, and with themselves through their being delighted with him, for they are divinely lovers (ʿushshāq ilāhiyyūn). after their level there is the level of the souls yearning for him (nufūs mushtāqūn ilayhi), the almighty, [which varies] according to their attainment and perception of him; they are the heavenly angels. and after those—in terms of passion for him, the almighty—there are human souls and the happy among the lords of right (aṣḥāb al-yamīn) possessing different degrees of faith in god, the almighty.131 as for those close to god (muqarrabūn) among the human souls in the hereafter, who are the lords of spiritual ascent, their position in the afterlife will be like that of the angels, who are close to the almighty in terms of love and delight in him. if you know this, then [you know that] the love of god, the almighty, for his servants stems from his love for himself. for since it has been established that the thing dearest to him, the almighty, is himself and that he is most delighted with himself, [and since it has been established] that whoever loves something loves all of its actions, movements, and effects for the sake of the beloved and that what is closer to him is [also] dearer to him, and [since it has been established] that all contingents (mumkināt) of different levels are the effects of truth and his actions, for god loves them for his own sake, and [it has been established that] the creation closest to him is the muḥammadan spirit, may god bless him and his family, here called the “intellect”—[in view of all of the above, it follows that] it is true that he is the creature dearest to him. there are some theologians, such as al-zamakhsharī and his contemporaries, who have denied god’s love for his servants, claiming that it would necessarily imply that he is deficient in his essence. [but] they did not know that his, the almighty’s, love for his creation stems from his love for himself. [consider] his saying in another version: “through you i know, through you i take, through you i give, and through you i reward.” all of this applies to the prophet, may god bless him and his family, for who does not know the prophet, may god bless him and his family, in his prophecy and message does not know god as he should, even if he had a 129. love in mullā ṣadrā’s thought is seen in cosmological terms as penetrating all beings. it is the innate natural tendency of all things to reach their natural perfection. 130. reading kullu mā for kullamā. 131. there are two possible explanations for the term “lords of right” (aṣḥāb al-yamīn). the first is that they are those who are given the book in their right hand on the day of judgment; that is, they are in great standing before god. the other is that they are people bestowed with great blessings. see j. al-subḥānī, mafāhīm al-qurʾān (qum: muʾassasat al-imām al-ṣādiq, 2000), 363–65. 330 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 331 thousand proofs for the ways of knowing god! the meaning [of these words] is: “i [god] am known through knowing you [muḥammad].” that means, “who knows you in your prophecy knows me in my lordship.” “through you i take” means, “i take the obedience of the one who took from you what you were given of religion and law.” and “through you i give” means, “i give, by way of your intercession, a level to the people of levels [i.e., i elevate them from their level to a higher one in heaven], as he [muḥammad] said: “[all] people, even abraham, peace be upon him, need my intercession!” and “through you i punish and through you i reward.” and this is [the manifestation] of the words of the almighty: behold! god took the covenant of the prophets, saying: “i give you a book and wisdom; then comes to you a messenger, confirming what is with you; do ye believe him and render him help?” god said: “do ye agree, and take this, my covenant, as binding on you?” they said: “we agree.” he said: “then bear witness and i am with you among the witnesses.” [q 3:81] this is because god, the almighty, made a covenant with each prophet he sent to a group of people (qawm) so that they would believe in muḥammad and his family, may god bless them, and to entrust his community (umma) with faith in him and with support for his religion. and whoever believed in him among the nations of the past before his mission and among the bygone nations belongs to the people of reward (ahl al-thawāb), whereas whoever did not believe in him among the ancient and the recent ones belongs to the people of punishment. so his words are true: “through you i punish and through you i reward.” as for his words in this version, “it is you (iyyāka) whom i order, it is you whom i forbid, it is you whom i punish, and it is you whom i reward,” it is probable that the word “you” here means “through you” (bika) and “for your sake” (min ajlika) by way of extension. if we took this expression literally, it would also be true and correct, because the reality of the intellect is the condition for obligation (malāk al-taklīf) [and for] order, probation, reward, and punishment. however, its reality has [various] stations and levels, since the oneness of the intellect is not a numerical oneness. its [the intellect’s] being the thing dearest to him, the almighty, is with regard to its utmost perfection and closeness to the first, the almighty; its being punished and tortured is with regard to its distance from him, the almighty; its being obligated (mukallaf), commissioned, and forbidden is with regard to its position in the house of obligation [i.e., this world]; and its being rewarded is with regard to its being in the hereafter in levels of heaven.132 132. in this paragraph, mullā ṣadrā interprets the last sentence of the ḥadīth. he recognizes its reference to the notion of taklīf, discussed earlier. the complication that he tackles here lies in the fact that the ḥadīth, in this version, seems to treat the intellect, not the human being, as the immediate mukallaf, the subject of divine reward and punishment. ṣadrā proposes two possible explanations: what is meant is either that the intellect is the tool of fulfilling obligations or that the intellect is the immediate subject of obligation by way of being the condition for it. if the latter is the case, the question how the intellect can be rewarded and punished is raised. ṣadrā explains that reward and punishment consist of either closeness to or distance from god. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 331 second text: itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn by muḥammad b. muḥammad al-ḥusaynī al-zabīdī133 g134: [the prophet] said, may god honor him and grant him peace: “o people, reason (aʿqilū ʿan) through your lord.” z: that is, learn and understand through him, for it is said: “i have reasoned [i.e., understood] something through him.” g: and advise one another [to cherish] the intellect! z: that is, its perfection. g: know through it what you were ordered and through it what you were forbidden, and know that it z: that is, the intellect g: is your savior before your lord. z: [it is found] in this way in al-ʿirāqī’s edition, but in others [it is found as] “aids you before god.” g: and know that a rational person is one who obeys god even if he were of a misshapen z: with al-dāl al-muhmala [the letter dāl without a diacritical point], that is, ugly g: appearance, z: with regard to what is apparent in him g: of little importance, z: that is, in standing and value g: of low rank, z: that is, of miserable rank g: and of shabby exterior. z: with regard to his clothes and how much toil and hardship he has had to endure, which has made him disheveled g: and verily the ignorant z: he [al-ghazālī] included the ignorant as the opposite of the rational because knowledge and the intellect come from one source, as we have pointed out above g: [is the one] who disobeys god, even if he is of a beautiful appearance, of great importance, of a noble rank, and of a handsome exterior, z: these [features—misshapen appearance, little importance, low rank, and a shabby exterior] are four descriptions in opposition to four descriptions [namely, beautiful appearance, great importance, noble rank, and a handsome exterior]. for the first thing that thrills man is the beauty of his looks, and if, in addition, his importance is great, this is the highest position, and through it he will reach a noble rank and a handsome exterior. then he [al-ghazālī] adds another two descriptions, saying: g: eloquent and articulate. z: and what a hideous man is one whose corporeal prison is—in comparison with the ugliness of his soul—a paradise in which an owl resides, a sacred place protected by a wolf, as a wise man [once] said to an ignorant with a graceful face: “the house is good, but its resident is wicked.” and how hideous of him that he is concerned with the amount of his 133. al-zabīdī, itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn, 452-455. 134. g stands for al-ghazālī and z for al-zabīdī. 332 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 333 wealth and the excellence of his possessions (athāth). verily, some wise people called the rich billy goats whose wool is pearls and donkeys whose excrement is silken shawls.” g: monkeys and pigs are more rational (aʿqalu) before god than is a person who disobeys him. z: for it is disgraceful (qabīḥ) for a rational man (dhū al-ʿaql) to be a beast when it is surely possible for him to be a human being, and [it is disgraceful for a rational man] to be a human being when he has the potential to become an angel. for we have not seen among the flaws of people a failing equal to the failing of those who are capable of perfection.135 g: and do not be seduced by the glorification of you by the people of the world, for they are among the losers. z: al-ʿirāqī said: it was narrated to us in the kitāb al-ʿaql by dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir136 in the version (riwāya) of abū al-zanād [d. ca. 130/748] on the authority of al-aʿraj [d. ca. 117/735] on the authority of abū hurayra on the authority of the prophet, may god honor him and grant him peace, that he [too] said this, except that he said, “indeed they were considered among the losers,” and al-ḥārith b. abī usāma narrated it in his musnad on the authority of dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir.137 there was disagreement about dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir. ʿabbās al-dawrī narrated on the authority of yaḥyā b. maʿīn [d. 233/847], who said that he was a known transmitter, but then he left it [the practice of ḥadīth transmission] and became associated with a group of the muʿtazila (ṣaḥaba qawman min al-muʿtazila). “they corrupted him, but he is reliable.” abū dāwūd [al-sijistānī, d. 275/888] said: “he is reliable, though he appears weak” (thiqa shibh ḍaʿīf). aḥmad [b. ḥanbal, d. 241/855] said: “he does not know what ḥadīth is” (lā yadrī mā al-ḥadīth). al-dāraquṭnī [d. 385/995] said: “his ḥadīths are to be abandoned” (matrūk). ʿabd al-ghanī b. saʿīd al-azdī al-miṣrī [d. 409/1019] narrated on the authority of al-dāraquṭnī that he said: “four men forged (waḍaʿa) kitāb al-ʿaql. maysara b. ʿabd rabbihi was the first of them, then dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir stole it and attached to it isnāds different from maysara’s, then ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. abī rajāʾ stole it and attached to it other isnāds, then sulaymān b. ʿisā al-sanjarī stole it and invented other isnāds,” or as he [al-dāraquṭnī] said. 135. this a verse from a poem by abū al-ṭayyib al-mutanabbī, which starts malūmukumā yajillu ʿan al-malāmī see abū al-ṭayyib al-mutanabbī, dīwān al-mutanabbī (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1964), 483. 136. see my earlier discussion of dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir. 137. cf. al-ḥārith b. abī usāma, bughyat al-bāḥith ʿ an zawāʾid musnad al-ḥārith, ed. m. al-saʿdānī (cairo: dār al-ṭalāʾiʿ, n.d.), 257, no. 833. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 333 according to what al-dāraquṭnī said, ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. abī rajāʾ stole it from dāwūd. he shortened it, created another isnād for it, and narrated it on the authority of mālik, on the authority of suhayl, on the authority of his father, on the authority of abū hurayra and abū saʿīd al-khudrī [d. ca. 74/694] that they said: “the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace, said: ‘son of adam, obey your lord and you will be called rational; do not disobey him, [otherwise] you will be called ignorant.” abū nuʿaym [al-iṣbahānī, d. 430/1038] narrated it in his ḥilya and al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī [d. 463/1071] in [his] asmāʾ man rawā ʿan mālik [“names of those who transmitted ḥadīth from mālik”]138 through the narration (riwāya) of the abovementioned ibn abī rajāʾ.139 al-khaṭīb said: “this ḥadīth is to be rejected (munkar) from the corpus of mālik [b. anas]’s ḥadīths.” al-dāraquṭnī said: “abd al-ʿazīz b. abī rajāʾ’s ḥadīths are to be abandoned” (matrūk). al-dhahabī [d. 748/1348] said in his al-mīzān:140 “it is falsely attributed to mālik [b. anas]” (bāṭil ʿalā mālik). z: i say that the kunya of dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir b. mukharram al-bakrāwī was abū sulaymān al-baṣrī. he was a resident of baghdād, and he died in the year 206 [821]. muḥabbir is [to be read] as muḥaddith. his father narrated on the authority hishām b. ʿurwa [d. 146/763], and his son dāwūd narrated on the authority of shuʿba [b. al-ḥajjāj, d. 160/776] and hammām and several others, and on the authority of muqātil b. sulaymān [d. 150/767]. abū umayya and al-ḥārith b. abī usāma and several others narrated on his authority. al-dhahabī mentioned in his mīzān through his [dāwūd’s] narration a ḥadīth about the virtue of qazwīn, which ibn māja recorded (akhrajahu)141 in his sunan. then he [al-dhahabī] said: “verily, ibn māja disgraced his sunan by adding this forged ḥadīth to it.” all ḥadīths of maysara and ibn abī rajāʾ and sulaymān b. ʿīsā are to be abandoned. g: the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace, said: “the first thing that god created was the intellect. he told it: ‘come forward.’ and it came forward. then he told it: ‘go back!’ and it went back. then god said: ‘by my might and by my glory, i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are. through you i take, through you i give, through you i reward, and through you i punish.’” z: shaykh najm al-dīn [d. 654/1256],142 the narrator of this ḥadīth, may god’s mercy be upon him, said: 138. this book has not come down to us. ibn rashīd al-ʿaṭṭār al-qurashī produced an abridgment of it, removing the isnāds. ibn rasḥīd al-ʿaṭṭār al-qurashī, mujarrad asmāʾ al-ruwāt ʿan mālik li-l-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, ed. m. s. b. a. al-salafī (medina: maktabat al-ghurabāʾ al-athariyya, 1997). 139. cf. abū nuʿaym al-iṣfahānī, ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ wa-ṭabaqāt al-aṣfiyāʾ (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1932–38), 7:318. 140. al-dhahabī, mīzān al-iʿtidāl fī naqd al-rijāl, ed. ʿa. m. al-bajāwī (cairo: al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1963), 2:628. 141. akhraja means recording a report with the isnād. 142. this is najm al-dīn abī bakr ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad b. shāhawar al-rāzī al-azadī, d. 654/1256. see his manārāt al-sāʾirīn ilā ḥaḍrat allāh wa-maqāmāt al-ṭāʾirīn (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2004), 38; j. curry, the transformation of muslim mystical thought in the ottoman empire (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2010), 264, n. 61. 334 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 335 on the basis of this, it has been concluded that the intellect is preparatory for receiving revelation and believing in it. another version reads: “and through you, i am worshipped.” that is, it [the intellect] was the first to whom god allotted revelation, speech (khiṭāb), love, knowledge, worship, veneration, and the prophecy of the messages of almighty truth, as he told it to know itself and its lord. and if you saw in depth and relied on the light of god you would realize that knowledge [comes] through the intellect and that the one that is described by the allotment of inspiration, speech, love, knowledge, worship, veneration, and prophecy is the spirit of god’ beloved and his prophet muḥammad, may god honor him and grant him peace. for he is the one who said: “the first thing that god created was my spirit,” and in a different version, “my light.” for his [muḥammad’s] spirit is luminous essence and his light is the intellect and he is an accident in his substance (ʿaraḍ qāʾim fī jawharihi).143 that is why [the prophet], may god honor him and grant him peace, said: “i was a prophet [already] while adam was still between spirit and body.”144 that is, he was neither spirit nor body yet. that is why he [the prophet] said: “the one who knows his soul indeed knows his lord.” for it [the intellect] knew its soul because god made it know it, when he said to it: “i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are.” it also knew god through god’s making himself knowable to it when he said: “by my might and by my glory, i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are.” so, it [the intellect] knew that he is god, whose attributes include might, glory, power of creation, and love, and that he is known to every gnostic (ʿārif), and that he has the power and authority to take, to give, to reward, and to punish, and that he is the one who deserves to be worshipped. it has reached us from the accounts of some great masters that the first creation was a cherub (karūbī), called the intellect, and that he was the lord of the pen, as is demonstrated by the words: “‘come forward!’ and it came forward. then he told it: ‘go back!’ and it went back.’” and when he called it [the intellect] the pen, he told it: “tell what will come to pass [from now] until the day of judgment.” calling it “pen” is like calling the owner of a sword “sword.” also, it is not unlikely that the spirit of god’s prophet, may god honor him and grant him peace, is called “angel” because of the large quantity of his angelic attributes, in the same way as gabriel, peace be upon him, is called “spirit” because of the predominance of his spirituality. as we say, one is a flame of fire because of the sharpness of his mind. likewise, he [the prophet] is called “intellect” because of the abundance of his intellect and “pen” because he writes what is being created, and he is called “light” for his illumination. “the intellect” may be understood in language as “the reasoning” (ʿāqil), so on the basis of this assessment and interpretation the prophet’s spirit, may god honor him and grant him peace, is the first creation. understood as such, it is, however, also “angel,” “intellect,” “light,” and “pen.” pen is close in its meaning to the intellect. for the almighty god said: “he taught by the pen,” as has come down to us in the exegesis of some; that is, by the intellect, 143. as in mullā ṣadrā’s commentary, the ṣūfī notion of the muḥammadan spirit appears here. 144. cf. john 8:58: “‘very truly i tell you,’ jesus answered, ‘before abraham was born, i am!’” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 335 because things are known through the intellect. in his saying: “come forward, and so on” there is an allusion to the fact that the intellect encompasses both “coming” and “going.” the devoted inherited its “coming,” and they are the predecessors close to god who were among the prophets and the saints, and they are the lords of right and the people of paradise. the negligent inherited its “going,” and they are the lords of left (mashʾama) and the people of hell, to which the following words of the almighty god allude: “and you became of three classes,” and so on [q 56:7]. z: i transmitted his [najm al-dīn’s] account in its entirety because of its logical interconnectedness and its usefulness. as for the recording (takhrīj) of the ḥadīth, al-ʿirāqī said: it was narrated on the authority of abū umāma, ʿāʾisha, abū hurayra, ibn ʿabbās, and al-ḥasan on the authority of several of the companions. the ḥadīth of abū umāma, in turn, was narrated by al-ṭabarānī in al-awsaṭ145 and by abū al-shaykh [b. ḥibbān] in his kitāb faḍāʾil al-aʿmāl from the narration of saʿīd b. al-faḍl al-qurashī, who said: “ʿumar b. abī sāliḥ al-ʿatakī related to us on the authority of abū ghālib on the authority of abū umāma that he said: ‘the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace, said:“when god created the intellect,” but [in this version] he [god] did not say, ‘by my glory,’ but rather said, ‘[there is no creature] more wonderful (aʿjabu) to me than you are,’ and ‘through you [there is] reward and punishment.’” ʿumar b. abī ṣāliḥ [al-ʿatakī] was mentioned by al-ʿuqaylī in al-ḍuʿafāʾ, and he recorded this ḥadīth as his (awrada lahu hādhā al-ḥadīth).146 al-dhahabī said in al-mīzān: “he [ʿumar] is not known” (lā yuʿrafu). and he then said that the narrator on the authority of ʿumar b. abī ṣāliḥ [al-ʿatakī] is among the unknown147 and that the story [i.e., the ḥadīth] is false (al-khabar bāṭil). z: i say that al-ʿuqaylī’s exact wording in al-ḍuʿafāʾ is: “this ḥadīth is to be rejected (munkar).”148 ʿumar and saʿīd, who narrated on his authority, are entirely unknown in the field of transmission (fī al-naql), and he [saʿīd] has not been corroborated by anyone else [in narrating this ḥadīth], and it [the ḥadīth] is not sound (lā yutābaʿu ʿalā ḥadīthihi wa-lā yuthbatu). then al-ʿirāqī said: as for ʿāʾisha’s ḥadīth, abū nuʿaym narrated it in his al-ḥilya and he said: “abū bakr ʿabd allāh b. yaḥyā b. muʿāwiya al-ṭalḥī informed us that al-dāraquṭnī told him (bi-ifādat) on the authority of sahl b. al-marzubān b. muḥammad al-tamīmī on the authority of ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr al-ḥumaydī on the authority of ibn ʿuyayna on the authority of manṣūr on the authority of al-zuhrī on the authority of ʿurwa on the 145. cf. al-ṭabarānī, al-muʿjam al-kabīr, 8:190–91. 146. cf. al-ʿuqaylī, kitāb al-ḍuʿafāʾ, 3:916, no. 1171: ʿumar b. abī ṣāliḥ al-ʿatakī. 147.  the text says منكــرات , but it is probably نكــرات . 148. cf. al-ʿuqaylī, kitāb al-ḍuʿafāʾ, 3:916, no. 1171: ʿumar b. abī ṣāliḥ al-ʿatakī. 336 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 337 authority of ʿāʾisha, may god be pleased with her, that she said: ‘the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace, said: “the first thing that god created was the intellect.”’149 and he [abū nuʿaym] mentioned this ḥadīth in this way in his biographical entry on sufyān b. ʿuyayna [d. 198/814]. i did not find in his isnād anyone who might be described as weak; nevertheless, there is no doubt that this [ḥadīth] is attached to this isnād, and i do not know who did it. the ḥadīth is to be rejected. z: i say that the exact wording of ʿāiʾsha’s ḥadīth, according to what is written in the ḥilya, is that ʿāʾisha said: “the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace, narrated to me: ‘the first thing that god created was the intellect. he told it: “come forward!” and it came forward. then he told it: “go back!” and it went back. then he said: “i have not created a creature better than you are. through you i take and though you i give.”’” abū nuʿaym said that this is a gharīb [i.e., a ḥadīth conveyed by only one narrator] among the ḥadīths of sufyān, manṣūr, and al-zuhrī.150 i do not know of any narrator on the authority of al-ḥumaydī other than sahl, and [so] i consider him [sahl] mistaken in it[s narration] (wāhiyan). and then al-ʿirāqī said: as for abū hurayra’s ḥadīth, al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī narrated it in the 206th chapter (aṣl),151 where he said: “al-faḍl b. muḥammad narrated to us that hishām b. khālid al-dimashqī narrated to him that yaḥyā”—by whom he meant, in my view, yaḥyā al-ghassānī— “narrated to him that abū ʿabd allāh, the client (mawlā) of the banū umayya, narrated to him on the authority of abū ṣāliḥ on the authority on abū hurayra, may god be pleased with him, that he said: ‘i heard the messenger of god say: “the first thing that god created was the pen; then he created the nūn,”152 which is the inkwell, and so on. and it goes on: “and then god created the intellect and said: ‘by my might, i will perfect you only in those i love, and i will make you deficient in those i made deficient.’”’ as for abū ʿabd allāh, i do not know who that is.” z: i say that ibn ʿasākir [d. 571/1176] recorded (akhraja) in his tārīkh [madīnat dimashq] the following: “abū al-ʿizz aḥmad b. ʿabd allāh informed us that muḥammad b. aḥmad b. ḥasanūn informed him that abū ḥusayn al-dāraquṭnī informed him that the qāḍī abū ṭāhir muḥammad b. aḥmad b. naṣr narrated to him that jaʿfar b. muḥammad al-faryānī narrated 149. cf. abū nuʿaym, ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ, 7:318. 150. cf. abū nuʿaym, ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ, 7:318. 151. in the edition i used, the ḥadīth is found in the 208th chapter. see al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī, al-nuskha al-musnada, 1:765. however, in the available abridged version (which omits the isnāds) it indeed appears in the 206th chapter. see al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī, nawādir al-uṣūl fī maʿrifat aḥādīth al-rasūl, ed. ʿa. ʿumayra (beirut: dār al-jīl, 1992), 2:254. 152. al-zabīdī’s version contains “light” (nūr) instead of the word nūn (the name of the letter ن ). however, i chose to use nūn, because nūr is likely to be the result of an oversight by the editor. other versions of the ḥadīth in this edition mention nūn along with “pen,” likely alluding to the qurʾānic verse 68:1. furthermore, it is the meaning of nūn, not of nūr, that is discussed later in the text. finally, another edition of selections of commentaries on iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn mentions nūn here. see al-ʿirāqī, takhrīj aḥādīth iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, 233. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 337 to him that abū marwān hishām b. khālid al-azraq narrated to him that al-ḥusayn b. yaḥyā al-khushanī narrated to him on the authority of abū ʿabd allāh, the client (mawlā) of the banū umayya, on the authority of abū ṣāliḥ on the authority of abū hurayra that he said: ‘i heard the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace, say that the first thing that god created was the pen; then he created the nūn, which is the inkwell, and then he told it: “write!” and it replied: “and what should i write?” he said: “write what is and what will come to pass of actions or effects or allotments (rizq) and appointed times (ajal).” so it wrote what is and what will be until the day of judgment.’” and this is [what god meant in the qurʾān by] saying: “nūn. by the pen and by the [record] that [men] write” (q 68:1). [the report continued:] “then he sealed the pen and it [the pen] did not speak. it will not speak until the day of judgment. then he [god] created the intellect and said: ‘by my might, i will perfect you in those i love and i will make you deficient in those i hate.’” and this is a good corroboration (mutābaʿa) of what the shaykh of al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī had narrated (the shaykh of al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī is al-faḍl b. muḥammad), even though the shaykhs of hishām differ in the two narrations, as you can see. i say that abū ʿabd allāh is the client of the banū umayya; his name is nāṣiḥ, and he was mentioned by ibn ʿasākir. and sumayy also narrated it on the authority of abū ṣāliḥ. ibn ʿadī153 [al-jurjānī, d. 365/976] said: ʿīsā b. aḥmad, the ṣūfī, narrated to us in egypt, and al-rabīʿ b. sulaymān al-jīzī narrated to him that muḥammad b. wahb al-dimashqī narrated to him that al-walīd b. muslim narrated to him that mālik b. anas [d. 179/795] narrated to him on the authority of sumayy, and he quoted it [the ḥadīth], except that it contains: “actions or appointed times (ajal) or effects, and the pen pinned down (jarā) what will come to pass until the day of judgment.” and it also contains: “and the omnipotent said: ‘i have not created a creature more wonderful to me than you are,’ and so on.” ibn ʿadī said:154 “it [this ḥadīth] is false (bāṭil) and to be rejected (munkar), and its ruin (āfa) is muḥammad b. wahb. he has more than one rejected ḥadīth.” and [al-dhahabī] said in al-mīzān: “ibn ʿadī said the truth that this ḥadīth is false.”155 al-dāraquṭnī recorded (akhraja) it in al-gharāʾib156 on the authority of ʿalī b. aḥmad al-azraq on the authority of aḥmad b. jaʿfar b. aḥmad al-fahrī on the authority of al-rabīʿ b. sulaymān al-jīzī with this isnād [that continues with al-dimashqī]. and he [al-dāraquṭnī] said: this ḥadīth is not well-known either from mālik or from sumayy.” and al-walīd b. muslim is reliable, and muḥammad b. wahb and the [transmitter] after him are unobjectionable (laysa bihim baʾs). and i am afraid that they may have mixed 153. ibn ʿadī al-jurjānī, al-kāmil fī ḍuʿafāʾ al-rijāl, ed. m. b. m. al-sarsāwī (riyadh: maktabat al-rushd, 2013), 9:379–80. 154. ibn ʿadī, al-kāmil, 9:380. 155. al-dhahabī, al-mīzān, 4:61. 156. this book has been lost. 338 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 339 up the ḥadīth. ibn ʿadī157 and al-bayhaqī158 recorded through the narration of ḥafṣ b. ʿumar that al-faḍl b. qays al-raqāshī159 narrated to him on the authority of abū uthmān al-nahdī on the authority of abū hurayra, who raised it to the prophet (rafaʿahu),160 and he quoted it in the same way as abū umāma’s ḥadīth, mentioned above. as for al-faḍl, yaḥyā said about him: “he is a bad man.” as for ḥafs b. ʿumar, he was the qāḍī of aleppo and ibn ḥabbān said about him: “he narrates forged ḥadīths on the authority of reliable transmitters, and it is not permitted to use his ḥadīths as legal proofs (lā yaḥillu al-iḥtijāj bihi).” al-dāraquṭnī161 recorded it from the narration of ḥasan b. ʿarafa, [who said:] “sayf b. muḥammad narrated to us on the authority of sufyān al-thawrī on the authority of al-fuḍayl b. ʿuthmān on the authority of abū hurayra,” and so on, as mentioned earlier. it was agreed that sayf was a liar (sayf kadhdhāb bi-l-ijmāʿ). al-ʿirāqī said: the ḥadīth of al-ḥasan [al-baṣrī] on the authority of a number of transmitters (ʿan ʿ idda) was also narrated by al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī,162 who said: ʿ abd al-raḥīm b. ḥabīb narrated to us that dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir narrated to him that al-ḥasan b. dīnār said: i heard al-ḥasan say: “i heard from a number of companions of the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace, that the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace, said: ‘when (lammā) god created the intellect,’ and so on, and he added to it (zāda fīhi): ‘then he [god] told it: “sit down!” and it sat down. then he told it: “depart!” (inṭaliq) and it departed. then he told it: “be quiet!” and it was quiet. then he said: “by my might and by my glory and by my greatness and by my magnificence and by my power and by my omnipotence, i have not created a creature dearer to me than you are or nobler to me (akram) than you are. through you i am known, through you i am praised, through you i am obeyed, through you i take, through you i give, it is you that i blame, and it is you that i reward, and to you belongs punishment.”’” all of its [this ḥadīth’s] narrators except for al-ḥasan al-baṣrī are to be damned (halkā). ʿabd al-raḥīm b. ḥabīb al-faryābī is worthless, as yaḥyā b. maʿīn said. ibn ḥibbān said that he may have forged more than five hundred ḥadīths. dāwūd was already mentioned. al-ḥasan b. dīnār is also weak. and dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir narrated it also in [kitāb] al-ʿaql with an interrupted isnād (mursalan), saying, “ṣāliḥ al-murrī narrated to us on the authority of al-ḥasan b. abī ḥusayn,” and then he gave a shortened version. so, as a whole, all of its [this ḥadīth’s] pathways are weak. 157. ibn ʿadī, al-kāmil, 4:82. 158. al-bayhaqī, al-jāmiʿ li-shuʿab al-īmān, ed. m. a. al-nadawī (riyadh: maktabat al-rushd, 2003), 6:349. 159. he is discussed earlier under the name al-faḍl b. ʿīsā al-raqāshī; qays is probably a scribal error. 160. this means that he directly attributed the ḥadīth to the prophet, omitting some narrators in the isnād 161. cf. al-suyūṭī, al-laʾālī al-maṣnūʿa fī al-aḥādīth al-mawḍūʿa (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, n.d.), 1:129; ibn al-jawzī, kitāb al-mawḍūʿāt, ed. ʿa. m. ʿuthmān (medina: al-maktaba al-salafiyya, 1966–68), 1:174. 162. al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī, al-nuskha al-musnada, 764. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 339 z: i say that al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī163 said that al-faḍl b. muḥammad narrated to him that hishām b. khālid narrated to him on the authority of baqiyya [b. makhlad] on the authority of al-awzāʿī the same ḥadīth from the messenger of god, may god honor him and grant him peace. as for what he [al-ʿirāqī] said—that dāwūd b. al-muḥabbir narrated it in [kitāb] al-ʿaql with an interrupted isnād (mursalan), and so on—al-bayhaqī recorded it (akhrajahu), and after quoting the ḥadīth from the narration of the previously mentioned ḥafṣ b. ʿumar, he said: “the isnād is not strong (ghayr qawī).” and it is famous from the statement of ḥasan: “abū ṭāhir muḥammad b. maḥmish narrated to us that abū ṭāhir al-muḥammad ibādī narrated to him that al-faḍl b. muḥammad b. al-musayyab narrated to him that ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-ʿābisī narrated to him that ṣāliḥ al-murrī narrated to him on the authority of al-ḥasan that he said: ‘when almighty god created the intellect,’ and he quoted it.” ʿabd allāh b. aḥmad, in zawāʾid al-zuhd, said: ʿalī b. muslim narrated to us that sayyār narrated to him that jaʿfar narrated to him that mālik b. dīnār narrated to him on the authority of al-ḥasan, who raised it to the prophet (yarfaʿuhu): “when god created the intellect, he told it: ‘come forward!’ and it came.then he told it: ‘go back!’ and it went back. then he told it: ‘i have not created a creature better than you. through you i take and through you i give.’” this is, as you see, a good chain [of transmitters], so al-ḥāfiẓ al-ʿirāqī’s statement that “as a whole, all of the ḥadīth’s pathways are weak” deserves further investigation. and [the same applies to] what ibn al-jawzī said in al-mawḍūʿāt, which was followed by ibn taymiyya as well as al-zarkashī and others. what can be said about it at most is that it is weak in some of its pathways.164 indeed, the ḥadīth was also narrated on the authority of ʿalī, may god be pleased with him. al-ḥāfiẓ al-suyūṭī said in his al-laʾāliʾ al-maṣnūʿa that al-khaṭīb said:165 ʿalī b. aḥmad al-razzāz informed us (akhbaranā) that al-faraj ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn al-kātib informed him that the qāḍī abū jaʿfar aḥmad b. muḥammad b. naṣr narrated to him that muḥammad b. al-ḥasan al-raqqī narrated to him that mūsā b. ʿabd allāh al-ḥasan b. ḥasan b. ʿalī b. abī ṭālib narrated to him from fāṭima bt. saʿīd b. ʿuqba b. shaddād b. umayya al-juhanī on the authority of her father on the authority of zayd b. ʿalī on the authority of his father and his grandfather on the authority of ʿalī on the authority of the prophet, may god honor him and grant him peace, that he said: “the first thing that god created was the pen; then he created an inkwell, and he continued [the ḥadīth]. in it, he created the intellect. then he interrogated it and it answered him. then he told it: ‘go back (idhab)!’ and it went back. then he told it: ‘come forward!’ and it came forward. then he interrogated it and it answered him. he [god] said: ‘by my might and by my glory, i have not created anything dearer to me than you are or and better than you are,’” until the end of what he mentioned. 163. al-ḥakīm al-tirmidhī, al-nuskha al-musnada, 764. 164. this is an important point: al-zabīdī makes an effort to salvage the ḥadīth. 165. cf. al-suyūṭī, al-laʾāliʾ al-maṣnūʿa, 1:128–32. 340 • pamela klasova al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 341 g: and if you say: “assuming that the intellect was an accident, how was it created before bodies (ajsām)?” z: because accidents cannot exist on their own. g: “and assuming that it was a substance, how would it exist on its own without occupying space (lā yataḥayyazu)?” then know that this belongs to z: the realm of g: esoteric knowledge (ʿilm al-mukāshafa) [i.e., ṣūfism], and it should not be mentioned z: and another copy (nuskha) has “it is not appropriate that it be mentioned” g: in the context of exoteric knowledge (ilm al-muʿāmala), and our objective z: here and now g: is exoteric knowledge. z: al-rāghib [al-iṣfahānī, early fifth/eleventh century] conveyed this study in his dharīʿa166 in a shortened version. he said: the intellect is the first substance (awwalu jawhar) that the almighty god created (awjadahu) and honored. this is proven by the ḥadīth whose isnād was raised to the prophet (marfūʿ): ‘the first thing (awwalu mā) that god created was the intellect,’ and so on. and were it an accident, as a group of people have imagined, it would not be correct to say that it is the first creation. for it is not possible for any accident to exist before the existence of a substance that could carry it. z: and the examination of this point [has shown] that the substance is quiddity (māhiyya), such that when it exists in the sensible world (aʿyān) it would not exist in a substrate (mawḍūʿ). it is confined to five [types]: matter (hayūlā), form (ṣūra), body (jism), soul (nafs), and intellect (ʿaql).167 because it [i.e., the substance] is either abstract (mujarrad) or not. as for the first [kind, the abstract], it is either not connected to the body (badan) by way of governance or control, or it is so connected. the former is the intellect and the latter the soul. as for the non-abstract, it is either composite or noncompound (basīṭ). the former is the body and the latter is either something that inheres in a substratum (ḥāl) or a substratum (maḥall). the former is the form and the latter the matter, and it is called the reality (ḥaqīqa). the substance is divided into spiritual noncompounds, such as abstract intellects and souls, and bodily noncompounds, such as the elements, and into those that are composite in the intellect and not in the external world, such as the composite substantial essences of genus and differentiae, and those that are composite, such as the three generated classes (muwalladāt thalātha) [i.e., minerals, plants, and animals]. 166. al-rāghib al-iṣfahānī, al-dharīʿa ilā makārim al-sharīʿa, ed. a. y. a. z. al-ʿajamī (cairo: dār al-salām, 2007), 1:133. 167. this division follows the tradition of scholastic avicennian philosophy. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 341 bibliography abdulsater, h. a. shiʿi doctrine, muʿtazili theology: al-sharif al-murtaḍā and imami discourse. edinburgh: edinburgh university 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dār ṣādir, 1964. najm al-dīn. manārāt al-sāʾirīn ilā ḥaḍrat allāh wa-maqāmāt al-ṭāʾirīn. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2004. el-omari, r. “accommodation and resistance: classical muʿtazilites on ḥadīth.” journal of near eastern studies 71, no. 2 (2012): 231-256. al-rāghib al-iṣfahānī. al-dharīʿa ilā makārim al-sharīʿa. edited by a. y. a. z. al-ʿajamī. cairo: dār al-salām, 2007. rizvi, s. “mulla sadra.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (spring 2019 edition), edited by e. n. zalta. ———. mulla sadra and metaphysics: modulation of being. london: routledge, 2009. al-ṣāddūq. amālī al-ṣaddūq. beirut: muʾassasat al-aʿlamī li-l-maṭbūʿāt, 2009. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) ḥadīth as common discourse • 345 ———. man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh. edited by ʿa. a. al-ghaffārī. qum: muʾassasat al-nashr al-islāmī, 1429h. sadeghi, b. “the traveling tradition test: a method for dating traditions.” der islam 85, no. 1 (2010): 203–42. shah, m., ed. the hadith. london: routledge, 2010. al-shahrastānī. muslim sects and divisions. translated by a. k. kazi and j. g. flynn. london: routledge, 1984. sperl, s. “man’s ‘hollow core’: ethics and aesthetics in ḥadīth literature and classical adab.” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 70, no. 3 (2007): 459–86. stroumsa, s. “the beginnings of the muʿtazila reconsidered.” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 13 (1990): 265–93. al-subḥānī, j. mafāhīm al-qurʾān. qum: muʾassasat al-imām al-ṣādiq, 2000. al-suyūṭī, jalāl al-dīn. al-laʾālī al-maṣnūʿa fī al-aḥādīth al-mawḍūʿa. beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, n.d. al-ṭabarānī. al-muʿjam al-kabīr. edited by ḥ. ʿa. al-salafī. cairo: maktabat ibn taymiyya, 1983. treiger, a. “origins of kalām.” in the oxford handbook of islamic theology, edited by sabine schmidtke, 27–43. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. al-ṭūṣī, abū jaʿfar. ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl. edited by m. al-rajāʾī. qum: muʾassasat āl al-bayt, 1404h. al-ʿuqaylī, abū jaʿfar. kitāb al-ḍuʿafāʾ. edited by ʿ a. a. qalʿajī. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1984. van ess, j. theology and society in the second and third centuries of the hijra. translated by g. goldbloom. leiden: brill, 2018. ———. zwischen ḥadīt̲ und theologie: studien zum entstehen prädestinatianischer überlieferung. berlin: de gruyter, 1975. vasalou, s. moral agents and their deserts: the character of muʿtazilite ethics. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2008. watt, w. m. free will and predestination. london: luzac, 1948. wisnovsky, r. avicenna’s metaphysics in its context. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2003. al-zabīdī, murtaḍā. itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn bi-sharḥ iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. cairo: maṭbaʿat al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1894. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023): 1-44 key to the kingdom: variation as a key to understanding the arabic gospel manuscripts phillip w. stokes university of tennessee, knoxville (pstokes2@utk.edu) abstract this paper takes a fresh approach to the study of the arabic gospel manuscripts. although considerable success has been achieved at mapping out macro-families, there are still large lacunae in our knowledge of the arabic gospels as well as of the linguistic and scribal cultures that produced them. arabic gospel manuscripts notoriously vary at every level, and much of the variation is idiosyncratic. in previous work, this variation has by and large been considered background noise to be filtered out. in this paper, i study variation in the lexical, grammatical, and orthographic domains in the gospel of matthew as attested in twenty-two manuscripts belonging to multiple manuscript families. i use a principal component analysis (pca) to detect possible patterns in the variation. at each level, the variation is patterned in ways that contribute to our understanding of the manuscripts and their production. most significantly, i argue that grammatical variation is not random, as previously assumed, and that several distinct grammatical traditions are detectable. i thus show that far from being an obstacle to the study of the arabic gospels, variation is in fact key to fully understanding them. 1. introduction scholarly study of the arabic gospel manuscript tradition is by now well more than a century old.1 the bulk of this scholarship has focused on two aspects of the manuscript tradition. first, much work has been done on translation efforts in the early islamic period, with the goal of determining when the earliest translations were produced, and in what contexts. second, scholars have devoted significant efforts to determining the vorlagen from which the arabic gospels were translated, identifying the various translation styles and techniques used, and establishing families and subgroupings of manuscripts based on 1. for example, see i. guidi, le traduzioni degli evangelii in arabo e in etiopico, atti della reale accademia dei lincei, ser. 4, vol. 4 (rome: tipografia della reale accademia dei lincei, 1888). © 2023 phillip stokes. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 2 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) verbal similarities. considerable progress has been made,2 especially in the latter endeavor, such that hikmat kashouh in a recent monograph proposes a comprehensive classification of a few hundred manuscripts based on lexical similarities.3 although the state of the field has advanced dramatically, there are still crucial lacunae in our understanding of both the relationships between manuscripts and families and especially the scribal practices attested across the corpus. the most immediate reason for these remaining lacunae is the fact that the corpus is characterized by a considerable degree of variation in all domains—lexical, grammatical, and orthographic. these overlapping arenas of variation have led scholars to describe the corpus as rather like a “jungle,”4 or indeed a “massive forest, made up of many trees with intertwined branches.”5 numerous studies address the nature of the grammar and orthography attested in particular manuscripts.6 however, these works have typically approached the manuscripts with the assumption that classical arabic was, originally at least, the target register, and that differences between christian arabic and classical arabic were due to mistakes. consequently, instances of non-classical features, both orthographic and grammatical, are cited from each manuscript, but with no systematic description of the distribution of most features in any one manuscript.7 as a consequence, no systematic comparison of the patterns of orthographic or grammatical variation across manuscripts in the arabic gospels has yet been undertaken. the seminal work, which offers a synthesis of features from more than one manuscript, is joshua blau’s three-volume grammar. in it, blau offers general categories of what he considers hyperand hypo-corrections,8 with a handful of citations from numerous manuscripts as examples of these trends. however, blau, too, refrains from 2. r. vollandt, “the status quaestionis of research on the arabic bible,” in studies in semitic linguistics and manuscripts: a liber discipulorum in honour of professor geoffrey khan, ed. n. vidro, r. vollandt, e.-m. wagner, and j. olszowy-schlanger, 442–67 (uppsala: uppsala university press, 2018). 3. h. kashouh, the arabic versions of the gospels: the manuscripts and their families (berlin: de gruyter, 2012). 4. s. k. samir, “la version arabe des évangiles d’al-asʿad ibn al-ʿassāl,” parole de l’orient 19 (1994): 441–551, at 444. 5. kashouh, arabic versions, 2. 6. among others, see j. blau, “über einige christlich-arabische manuskripte aus dem 9. und 10. jahrhundert,” le muséon 75 (1962): 101–8; s. arbache, “une version arabe des évangiles: langue, texte et lexique” (phd diss., université michel de montaigne bordeaux iii, 1994), and subsequently idem, l’évangile arabe selon saïnt luc: texte du viiie siècle, copié en 897, édition et traduction = al-inǧīl al-ʿarabī bišārat al-qiddīs lūqā (brussels: éditions safran, 2012); j. p. monferrer-sala, “dos antiguas versiones neotestamentarias árabes surpalestinenses: sin. ar. 72, vat. ar. 13 y sus posibles vorlagen respectivas greco-aljandrina y siriaca de la pesitta,” ciudad de dios 213, no. 2 (2000): 363–87. 7. this is the case even with otherwise quite meticulous works, such as arbache’s three-volume dissertation study of ms sinai arabic 72. for example, while arbache provides statistics and data for his discussion of the verbal categories attested in the manuscript, his discussion of, e.g., nominal case is quite sparse, being limited to references to the “middle arabic” nature of the text and a few citations of non-classical tanwīn alif use. he does not examine the syntactic contexts in which these citations occur or how frequently—if at all—classical accusative marking occurs. see arbache, “une version arabe des évangiles,” 123–24. 8. j. blau, a grammar of christian arabic: based mainly on south-palestinian texts from the first millennium, 3 vols. (louvain: secrétariat du corpus sco, 1966–67). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 3 undertaking either analysis of feature distribution within each manuscript or systematic comparison across manuscripts. ultimately, by treating these features primarily as mistakes caused by the inability of christian scribes to master aspects of classical arabic grammar not active in their dialects, previous studies have conceptualized non-classical feature distribution (at least implicitly) as basically random within and across manuscripts. text-critical studies of the arabic gospel manuscripts have typically focused almost exclusively on lexical similarities to establish relationships between manuscripts.9 likely because of the nearly ubiquitous treatment of these texts in grammatical studies, neither grammatical nor orthographic patterns have received direct attention, and indeed in many cases they have been considered noise to be filtered out. for example, kashouh, in discussing the role of linguistic variants in establishing textual relationships between manuscripts of a single family (his family k), dismisses them as “very common grammatical mistakes” (that is, non-classical arabic variants) which “need not be taken into consideration.”10 likewise, in the same section he argues that orthographic variation should be filtered out because “there seems to have been no standardized way of spelling some of the words,” and such variants should thus “not be included among what we call valuable variants.”11 to be sure, no single standard existed by which all gospel manuscripts were composed. yet this fact has resulted in a rather extreme lack of attention to systematic documentation and comparison of variation in these domains within and across manuscripts. but the presence of variation does not entail the absence of meaningful patterns, and claims about grammatical and orthographic mistakes lacking value for text-critical purposes require testing. an approach that has not featured in text-critical studies of the arabic gospel manuscript tradition is the study of repeated lexical variation—how the same phrase is translated across multiple passages of the same manuscript and where that variation is replicated across manuscripts. the goal of this paper is to explore nontraditional approaches and tools for conceptualizing and studying the variation attested in every domain of the arabic gospel manuscripts, as well as to illustrate how these might nuance, complement, and in some cases change our understanding of these manuscripts and the people who produced them. specifically, i document and test whether and how lexical, grammatical, and orthographic variation form meaningful patterns across arabic gospel manuscripts by comparing instances of idiosyncratic variation in each domain. the idiosyncratic lexical variation measured here consists of different phrases used to translate the phrases “kingdom of god” and “kingdom of heaven” in the gospel of matthew, both within and across manuscripts. for grammatical variation, i selected and compared fifty-eight grammatical variants from each manuscript, again taken from the gospel of matthew. orthographic variation in this 9. in addition to kashouh, arabic versions, see, among many others, g. graf, geschichte der christlichen arabischen literatur, vol. 1, die übersetzungen, studi e testi 118 (rome: biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1944); c. peters, “proben eines bedeutsamen arabischen evangelien-textes,” oriens christianus 11 (1936): 188–211; j. valentin, “les évangéliaires arabes de la bibliothèque du monastère ste-catherine (mont sinai): essai de classification d’après l’étude d’un chapitre (matth. 28); traducteurs, réviseurs, types textuels,” le museon 116 (2003): 415–77; s. griffith, the bible in arabic: the scriptures of the “people of the book” in the language of islam (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2013). 10. kashouh, arabic versions, 215. 11. ibid.; the emphasis is kashouh’s. 4 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) study involves differences in the spelling of the word malakūt, “kingdom,” as well as the orthographic means by which tanwīn is indicated. these patterns are mapped and compared across twenty-two manuscripts without coding for the family to which they are assigned in kashouh’s study. to analyze and visualize the results, i use a principal component analysis (pca), discussed further in section 2. i show that in each domain, the variants pattern in meaningful ways that correlate in many cases with manuscript family reconstructions established on the basis of lexical similarity. idiosyncratic lexical patterns are replicated across manuscripts, sometimes with great faithfulness, confirming close textual relationships between several families. the results also offer insight into the nature of the grammatical and scribal practices attested across the corpus. perhaps most significantly, my analysis of grammatical variation reveals the existence of some distinct grammatical traditions, which often correlate with text families. finally, orthographic variation in one sense validates some of kashouh’s skepticism, insofar as a close study of the orthography of the noun malakūt in family jb does not result in a meaningful pattern within the family. however, there are nevertheless scribal patterns that connect certain families and that are suggestive of a connection between the circles that produced the manuscripts and distinct scribal subcultures and practices. i conclude that far from being an obstacle to understanding these manuscripts, the variation is in fact a defining feature and one that is significant both for our understanding of the linguistic and scribal background of christian arabic manuscripts and for the textual-critical study of the corpus. documenting and studying such variation should consequently occupy a prime position in any investigation of the corpus. 2. methodology, manuscripts, and manuscript families the scholarship on the comparison of arabic gospel manuscripts and the establishment of vorlagen as well as genetic relationships between families based on those vorlagen is long, and a full review is beyond the scope of the present paper.12 i will take kashouh’s classification as a starting point and reference other proposals as relevant to the data presented below.13 the manuscripts included in this study are listed in table 1.14 12. in addition to kashouh, arabic versions, some of the most significant are guidi, le traduzioni degli evangelii; g. graf, catalogue de manuscrits arabes chrétiens conservés au caire (rome: biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1934); idem, geschichte der christlichen arabischen literatur; a. vööbus, early versions of the new testament: manuscript studies (stockholm: estonian theological society, 1954); blau, “über einige christlicharabische manuskripte; idem, “sind uns reste arabischer bibelübersetzungen aus vorislamischer zeit erhalten geblieben?,” le muséon 86 (1973): 67–72; a. s. atiya, “codex arabicus (sinai arabic ms. no. 514),” in homage to a bookman: essays on manuscripts, books and printing written for hans p. kraus on his 60th birthday oct. 12, 1967, ed. h. lehmann-haupt, 75–85 (berlin: mann, 1967); s. h. griffith, “the gospel in arabic: an inquiry into its appearance in the first abbasid century,” oriens christianus 67 (1983): 126–67; s. k. samir, “la tradition arabe chrétienne: état de la question, problèms et besoins,” in actes du premier congrès international d’études arabes chrétiennes, ed. k. samir, 21–120, orientalia christiana analecta 218 (rome: pont. institutum studorum orientalium, 1982); arbache, “une version arabe des évangiles”; valentin, “les évangéliaires arabes.” 13. for a list of all the manuscripts included in kashouh’s study along with their proposed families, see kashouh, arabic versions, 45–77. 14. all of the manuscripts with the exception of sinai arabic 106 and sinai arabic 84 were accessed via the sinai manuscripts digital library website, hosted by the ucla library and created in partnership with st. https://sinaimanuscripts.library.ucla.edu/catalog?f%5bhuman_readable_language_sim%5d%5b%5d=arabic&q=&search_field=all_fields al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 5 table 1. manuscripts included in the study, with their dates and their families according to kashouh. manuscript date family sinai arabic 74 9th ce a sinai arabic 72 897 ce a vatican borg. arabic 95 9th ce a sinai arabic 70 9th ce c sinai arabic 75 9th/10th ce d vatican borg. arabic 13 8th/9th ce h sinai arabic 115 13th ce ja sinai arabic 106 1056 ce jb sinai arabic 69 1065 ce jb vatican borg. arabic 71 11th ce jb sinai arabic 84 1262 ce jb sinai arabic 82 1262 ce jb sinai arabic 89 1285 ce jb sinai arabic 90 1281 ce jb sinai arabic 91 1289 ce jb sinai arabic 80 1479 ce jb sinai arabic 76 13th ce jc vatican coptic 9 1204/5 ce k sinai arabic 112 1259 ce k sinai arabic 147 13th ce k sinai arabic 628 1336 ce k sinai arabic 68 14th ce k catherine’s monastery of the sinai, egypt. for these manuscripts, the viewer provides folio, recto, and verso information. sinai arabic 106 and 84 are not available on this platform, and they were accessed through the website of the library of congress. for these manuscripts, folio, recto, and verso information is not given, so references are to the numbers of the images on which the cited examples are found. https://www.loc.gov/collections/manuscripts-in-st-catherines-monastery-mount-sinai/?fa=partof:manuscripts+in+st.+catherine%27s+monastery,+mount+sinai:+microfilm+5014:+arabic 6 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) throughout the following sections, “sinai arabic” is abbreviated sar.; vatican borg. arabic is abbreviated vat. borg. ar.; and vatican coptic is abbreviated vat. copt. the manuscripts are color-coded here according to family, and these colors recur in the charts and the pca visualization below. note that these proposed manuscript family designations are not coded in the analysis in any way. obviously, the present study does not pretend to be exhaustive; rather, the goal is to illustrate the value of such studies and to pave the way for the inclusion of more manuscripts and variants. the manuscripts included in this study were selected on the basis of two main criteria, namely online accessibility and manuscript family representation. the families represented in my sample include the three that are earliest historically (including the early families a and h) and the two that are most commonly attested in the medieval period, namely family j (especially family jb, the “melkite version”) and family k (the “alexandrian vulgate”). potential manuscripts were also evaluated for their completeness, with every effort made to compare variants from the same verses across manuscripts. for these reasons, three manuscripts (sinai arabic 54 and 71 from family a, and sinai arabic 146 from family ja) were omitted, despite being accessible, because of their fragmentary nature. in order to measure the variation in each domain that is the objective of this study, i created columns in a spreadsheet for each selected manuscript, and rows for the biblical citations in which each included variant occurred. the combination of dozens of manuscripts and dozens of features makes it virtually impossible to detect patterns by simply looking at the data in spreadsheet form; instead, a tool is required to analyze and visualize any patterns that might emerge. in order to detect such patterns as well as visualize them in helpful ways, i used a principal component analysis (pca). a pca is particularly useful with the kind of high-dimensional data that result from comparison of many variants from nearly two dozen manuscripts. for an excellent lay introduction to pca as well as an example of its use in an analysis of the quran, see behnam sadeghi’s excellent study.15 for my purposes, the important benefit of this method is that with a data set as large as the one i use in this study, an attempt to find patterns of correlation in the data can reveal myriad ways in which aspects of the data pattern together.16 a pca is a tool (if 15. b. sadeghi, “the chronology of the qurʾān: a stylometric research program,” arabica 58 (2011): 210–99, at 247–52. 16. for the pcas, i ran each in python, with the specific pca functions taken from scikit-learn. empty cells in any manuscript for a particular feature resulted in the row in which the empty cell occurs being omitted from the pca analysis. these data were nonetheless included in the charts in this study in order to provide as full a picture of the data as possible. importantly, in many instances the tables that follow contain more than two features. for the sake of presenting the data in this article i have numbered these features 1, 2, 3, etc., but this is not how they were coded. if they had been, whatever feature happened to be coded 2 would have been treated as lying halfway between the one coded 1 and the one coded 3. this would, of course, be extremely problematic, since changing the order would result in a completely different distribution. instead, all the data have been binarized. for example, let us say that the following three features were attested across all manuscripts: ʾilay-hi “to him” ʾilay-hī ʾilay-hu al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 7 admittedly a rather crude one) for capturing the maximum amount of variance in the data and visualizing it plotted across two dimensions.17 in the visualizations, each manuscript is color-coded according to its manuscript family (see table 1 above); however, this family identification was not included in the data. any clustering is therefore purely a result of the data distribution. the x axis corresponds to the first principal component, which is the one that covers the largest amount of variance in the data. the y axis corresponds to the second principal component, which covers the second-largest amount of variance in the data. thus proximity along the x axis indicates similarity captured by the first principle component, whereas proximity along the y axis indicates similarity captured by the second principle component. manuscripts that are close on both axes thus attest stronger relationships than those close on just one axis. we turn now to a discussion of the specific variants and analysis of the data. 3. “kingdom of god” and “kingdom of heaven”: idiosyncratic lexical variation as noted earlier (in footnote 9), most studies that have explored the relationships between arabic gospel manuscripts have focused on lexical similarities. in such studies, a passage or passages are collated and then compared with the same passages in other manuscripts. identical or very similar lexical and stylistic usages, which can indicate a shared textual history, are used to group manuscripts. one weakness of this strategy, as kashouh notes in a discussion of subgrouping manuscripts within family k, is that a scribe’s lexical choice in any particular instance might be independent of the same choice made by another scribe—that is, the similarity could be coincidental. thus, in establishing secure relationships between manuscripts on the basis of shared lexical choices in particular places in a passage, the more cases, the better: “when the number of agreements rises, the level of probability grows.”18 therefore, many examples from numerous passages are needed to establish a relatively high degree of confidence that the shared lexical choices indeed signify shared history. instead of simply labeling them 1, 2, and 3 in that order, which would result in ʾilay-hī being treated as a halfway form between ʾilay-hi and ʾilay-hu, each feature is split into three variables. so if a manuscript has ʾilay-hi, the data for that feature are interpreted as follows: ʾilay-hi = 1, ʾilay-hī = 0, ʾilay-hu = 0 whereas another manuscript, which has ʾilay-hī, is treated thus: ʾilay-hi = 0, ʾilay-hī = 1, ʾilay-hu = 0 this way, the data—and the distribution of the pca—are not affected by the numeric assignments given to the features. for the specific code used and a step-by-step reproduction of the process, see my github page. the code, written by hythem sidky, can be found here. i also thank marijn van putten for his very valuable assistance in adapting the code to suit the analyses conducted in this study. any errors in the pcas and analyses of the data are mine alone. 17. for a similar use of pca and its visualization in studying multiple features, see m. van putten and h. sidky, “pronominal variation in arabic among the grammarians, quranic reading traditions, and manuscripts,” in “formal models in the history of arabic grammatical and linguistic tradition,” ed. r. villano, special issue, language and history 65, no. 1 (forthcoming). 18. kashouh, arabic versions, 215. https://github.com/pwstokes/key-to-the-kingdom https://github.com/hsidky/quranic_pronouns 8 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) a related but distinct method, which does not suffer from the same limitation and can thus play a significant role in text-critical analysis of the manuscripts, is to investigate a particular word or phrase across a manuscript, compare how it is translated (or spelled; see section 5 below) within a manuscript, and determine whether that same pattern is attested in other manuscripts. good examples from the gospels of phrases that occur frequently and whose distribution is frequently idiosyncratic are the phrases “kingdom of god” and “kingdom of heaven.” five variations in arabic of the latter phrase are attested in the gospel of matthew in at least one (and usually more) of the twenty-two manuscripts included in my study (see table 1); in total, the phrase occurs thirty-seven times in the gospel of matthew. in these variants, three words are used for “kingdom” (mulk, malakūt, and mamlakah), and both singular and plural forms of the word “heaven” (samāʾ and samāwāt) appear. the five variants are the following: 1. mulk al-samāʾ 2. mulk al-samāwāt 3. malakūt al-samāʾ 4. malakūt al-samāwāt 5. mamlakat al-samāwāt (mamlakat al-samāʾ not attested) some manuscripts, such as vat. borg. ar. 13, sar. 70, and sar. 75, use a single phrase each for “kingdom of god” and “kingdom of heaven.” however, in most of the manuscripts included in this study, more than one phrase is used, especially for “kingdom of heaven.” in some cases, the manuscripts use one and the same word for “kingdom” but render the word “heaven” variously in the singular and in the plural. this is the case in sar. 112, 147, 68, and 628 and in vat. copt. 9. in the remaining manuscripts, both “kingdom” and “heaven” vary. this point is significant and bears repeating: the ways in which the same phrase is translated vary within a single manuscript. this is the kind of lexical variation studied here, not simply the use of one or another of these phrases to translate the phrase. if this lexical variation is idiosyncratic, dependent on the tastes of individual scribes, we would expect little meaningful clustering to occur. that is, the variation in one manuscript should not mirror that of another. on the other hand, meaningful clustering, especially in cases in which manuscripts contain multiple variants, is highly unlikely to be due to chance and is suggestive of a strong textual relationship. table 2 shows the distribution of the five possible variants across the twenty-two manuscripts. in the table, 1 = mulk al-samāʾ, 2 = mulk al-samāwāt, 3 = malakūt al-samāʾ, 4 = malakūt al-samāwāt, and 5 = mamlakat al-samāwāt. cells left empty indicate that another phrase is used (see table 3 below). a dash (–) indicates that the manuscript does not contain any phrase in that location. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 9 table 2. “kingdom of heaven” variants in the gospel of matthew across manuscripts. text ms v13 74 72 v95 70 75 115 106 69 v71 84 82 89 90 91 80 76 112 147 68 628 v9 3:2 3 1 2 2 1 3 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 – 3 5 1 4 4 4 4 4:17 3 1 2 2 1 3 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 – 3 2 3 3 4 4 4 5:3 3 1 1 3 1 3 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 3 4 4 4 4 5:10 3 1 1 3 1 3 2 3 3 – 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 4 4 4 4 4 5:12 – – – – – – – 3 3 – – 3 3 – – 1 – – – – – – 5:19a 3 2 2 4 1 3 4 3 3 – 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 4 4 4 4 4 5:19b 3 2 2 2 1 3 2 3 3 – 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 4 4 4 – 4 5:20 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 – 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 3 4 4 4 4 7:21 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 4 4 3 4 4 4 8:11 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 3 4 4 4 4 10:7 4 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 3 4 4 4 11:11 3 1 1 1 1 3 3 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 4 5 4 3 3 4 11:12 3 2 2 1 – – 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 4 – 3 3 4 4 12:28 3 3 – – 13:11 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 2 4 4 4 4 13:24 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 13:31 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 13:33 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 13:44 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 4 4 4 4 13:45 3 2 2 1 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 4 4 4 4 13:47 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 4 4 4 4 13:52 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 3 3 4 4 16:19 3 2 2 1 1 3 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 4 4 4 4 18:1 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 3 4 4 4 4 10 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) 18:3 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 4 4 4 4 18:4 3 – – 2 1 3 3 1 1 3 3 1 1 1 3 1 2 4 4 4 4 4 18:23 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 4 4 4 4 19:12 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 3 4 19:14 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 3 4 3 – – 4 4 19:23 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 4 3 3 3 4 4 19:24 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 20:1 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 4 4 4 4 21:31 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 21:43 3 3 3 3 3 22:2 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 3 3 4 4 23:13 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 3 3 4 4 25:1 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 4 4 4 4 in five verses, matthew 6:33, 12:28, 19:24, 21:31, and 21:43, the vorlagen read “kingdom of god.” in the latter four verses, at least one of the manuscripts included here replaces this phrase with some version of “kingdom of heaven.” in matthew 6:33, however, all manuscripts have a variant of “kingdom of god.” in table 3, the variants of “kingdom of god” across the manuscripts are tabulated: 1= mulk allāh, 2 = malakūt allāh. as in table 2, empty cells indicate another phrase is used, and a dash marks the absence of any phrase in that location. table 3. “kingdom of god” variants in the gospel of matthew across manuscripts. text ms v13 74 72 v95 70 75 115 106 69 v71 84 82 89 90 91 80 76 112 147 68 628 v9 6:33 2 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 – 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 – 2 2 2 12:28 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 – 2 2 2 19:24 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 21:31 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 21:43 2 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 11 for this pca, i concatenated both of these tables instead of running only one or the other or both separately. the results of the pca of the data are displayed in figure 1. fig. 1. lexical variation in “kingdom of heaven”/“kingdom of god” across manuscripts.19 it is immediately clear that there are obvious clusters, which largely correspond to previously proposed manuscript families. as already noted, the variation characteristic of many of these families, especially family j and family a, is based on the replication across manuscripts of idiosyncratic patterns within manuscripts. there is no doubt that the clustering in these cases reflects the respective scribes’ reliance on a shared exemplar, which, at least in the case of these phrases, the scribes followed quite closely. although scribes generally felt fairly free to make lexical changes or updates to the exemplar, these phrases, which are perhaps a bit less salient than other, more stylistically or theologically 19. the first principal component accounts for 38.1% of the variation and the second principal component for 22.3%, so a total of 60.4% of the variation in the data is accounted for by the two principal components. 12 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) loaded terms, fly under the radar, as it were. they can thus serve as a highly meaningful indicator or marker of family identity when future manuscripts are sorted into these families. first, it is important to note that, with a few exceptions (discussed below), relying solely on the variation in this phrase within and across manuscripts replicated the subgroupings from kashouh’s work. indeed, several of the proposed manuscript families and subfamilies of which multiple manuscripts were included in my study emerged as strongly related, especially family a (colored blue) as well as the large subfamily jb (colored green). family k (colored purple), a large and eclectic family, shows some clustering, especially between sar. 68, sar. 628, and vat. copt. 9; sar. 147 is an outlier of this cluster and sar. 112 a much further outlier. sar. 115, the representative of kashouh’s family ja (colored yellow), is much closer to jb than it is to jc, which is represented by sar. 76 (colored aqua). second, families a, jb, and k exhibit the most lexical variation in the translation of these phrases, which makes their results especially significant. the manuscripts of families a and jb are especially closely clustered. such strong clustering, defined by such idiosyncratic lexical variation, cannot be the result of chance. it therefore must be the result of textual relationships and dependence on a shared exemplar, which was often copied, at least in these cases, with great faithfulness. on the other hand, the close clustering of sar. 75 (family c, colored orange) and vat. borg. ar. 13 (family h, colored gray) is very possibly due to chance, insofar as they both used the same phrases throughout (malakūt al-samāʾ and malakūt allāh)—an overlap that is as likely to be due to independent preference for these phrases as it is to reflect a shared textual exemplar. family k, as noted above, is a rather eclectic family, and thus we see close relationships between some of the family’s manuscripts (e.g., vat. copt. 9 and sar. 68 and 628) but not others (e.g., sar. 112 and sar. 147). this approach has limits, of course, chief among them that it cannot always distinguish different families. the results above group families c and h together, but although a relationship between the two families is possible, it is far from certain, since it is also possible that the similarity represents an independent preference for the singular phrase used in both. in such cases, it is preferable to use other methods to supplement this kind of analysis. i have argued that the study of replicated lexical idiosyncrasies can serve as a valuable tool for text-critical studies. it is important to note that the above comparison involved manuscripts that, according to most scholars, belong to separate language families. it is worth exploring briefly whether the same idiosyncrasies, insofar as they are not always replicated exactly, might be helpful for further grouping manuscripts from the same (sub) family. i tested this possibility on family j, then further on subfamily jb, and finally on family k. i chose these families because they were the families represented in my study with the largest number of manuscripts. figure 2 illustrates the results of a pca of family j.20 it recreates the preexisting subgroupings of the family quite neatly: the manuscripts of family jb cluster together, whereas those of ja and jc stand apart from them and from each other. 20. the first principal component captured 56% and the second principal component 18% of the variation. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 13 fig. 2. pca of “kingdom of god”/“kingdom of heaven” variation within family j fig. 3. pca of “kingdom of god”/“kingdom of heaven” variation within family jb. 14 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) an analysis of just family jb produced the results shown in figure 3.21 the manuscripts sar. 82, sar. 84, sar. 90, and sar. 106 cluster rather closely, with sar. 89 an outlier of this group. sar. 68, sar. 91, and especially sar. 80 are greater outliers. as will be seen in sections 4 and 5 below, sar. 69 and sar. 80 diverge in other ways, too, from the norms of the group. fig. 4. pca of “kingdom of god”/“kingdom of heaven” variation within family k. finally, a study of family k provided the results seen in figure 4.22 three of the five manuscripts (sar. 68, sar. 628, and vat. copt. 9) cluster together; two others (sar. 147 and sar. 112) are outliers. as with the outliers in family jb, sar. 147 and sar. 112 are outliers from the other three in other ways as well (as discussed in sections 4 and 5). it should be noted here that family k is the largest of kashouh’s families, so more manuscripts would ideally be included to get a more nuanced picture of the family. however, these results— and those from family j and subfamily jb—suggest that this approach is potentially useful for grouping manuscripts within families as well as across them. 21. the first principal component captured 29% and the second principal component 24% of the variation. in order to capture the maximal amount of variation, i have omitted from this analysis vat. borg. ar. 71, which is missing the first six instances of these phrases. as mentioned above, any empty cell in any column triggered the elimination of the entire row of variants from inclusion in the analysis. 22. the first principal component captured 62% and the second principal component 27% of the variation. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 15 the present approach is thus most helpful when a particular word or phrase is repeated multiple times within or across the gospels and when several words or phrases are used to translate it. when attested, idiosyncratic lexical variation can pattern meaningfully, as demonstrated here. the fact that these thirty-eight variants replicate to a large degree the findings of a study as detailed as kashouh’s is indicative of the potential usefulness of this approach. 4. grammatical variation within and across manuscripts and families for all practical purposes, the modern study of the grammar of christian arabic corpora began with—and is still defined by—blau’s three-volume work on the subject.23 blau categorized these manuscripts as middle arabic, which he approached through the lens of classical arabic, focusing on those elements that are non-classical. he provided no quantitative or frequency data, instead pulling examples of non-classical features from various manuscripts. these are typically explained as either dialectalisms or hypercorrections.24 it is important to note the implications of such a treatment: features are considered important only insofar as they indicate imperfect attempts to write classical arabic. no manuscript in blau’s grammar is treated in toto, and there is no effort to trace the distribution of the non-classical features.25 blau’s framework was based on the belief that pre-islamic arabic had by and large been homogeneous, essentially identical to classical arabic, which led blau to assume that classical arabic, and specifically a version of classical arabic equivalent to textbook descriptions like that of wright26 or fischer,27 should form the default grammar against which any corpus is analyzed.28 despite their differences in other areas, most scholars of 23. blau, grammar of christian arabic. 24. hypercorrections are grammatically incorrect forms that result from a writer’s attempt to use a prestigious form, usually one that differs from a dialectalism. for a discussion of these forms, see j. blau, on pseudo-corrections in some semitic languages (jerusalem: israel academy of sciences and humanities, 1970); b. hary, “hypercorrection,” in encyclopedia of arabic language and linguistics, ed. k. versteegh, vol. 2, 275–79 (leiden: brill, 2007). 25. a good example of such impressionistic description is provided by blau’s discussion of features that supposedly distinguish christian arabic from other middle arabic varieties, such as judeo-arabic. in numerous places he claims that a feature, such as purported traces of living aramaic (p. 55), is “not rare.” but we are not told how frequent such features are, whether they are equally frequent in texts from a certain period, or whether they are equally frequent in translated and original texts. blau’s implicit claim is that they are found more frequently in christian arabic than in judeo-arabic, but he offers no quantitative comparisons between representatives of the two corpora. 26. w. wright, arabic grammar (1896–98; repr., mineola, ny: dover, 2005). 27. w. fischer, a grammar of classical arabic, trans. jonathan rodgers (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2002). 28. blau, grammar of christian arabic, 19–20; idem, “the beginnings of the arabic diglossia: a study of the origins of neoarabic,” afroasiatic linguistics, no. 4 (1977): 1–28; idem, a handbook of early middle arabic (jerusalem: hebrew university of jerusalem, 2002), 14–22. 16 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) christian arabic have adopted this framework, explicitly or implicitly,29 assuming that since the manuscripts were written in middle arabic, any non-classical features were unintentional, caused by imperfect knowledge. insofar as the imperfections reflected an individual scribe’s knowledge (or lack thereof) of classical arabic, the middle arabic features were bound to be random.30 the foregoing approach relies on a historical model of arabic that posits that pre-islamic arabic was largely equivalent to classical arabic, that the quran was composed in classical arabic (or perhaps a poetic koiné combining various classical features), and that this variety of arabic was the prestige variety in the early islamic period.31 however, these assumptions have all become extremely problematic in light of advances in the study of the early history of arabic. for example, it has become clear that pre-islamic arabic was quite diverse.32 further, classical arabic, as described by the grammarians, is itself linguistically heterogeneous.33 and evidence from other corpora, especially the damascus psalm fragment, demonstrates that non-classical arabic varieties were prestigious in the 29. see, for example, samir, “la tradition arabe chrétienne,” 58; kashouh, arabic versions, 6–8; m. l. hjälm, christian arabic versions of daniel: a comparative study of early mss and translation techniques in mss sinai ar. 1 and 2 (leiden: brill, 2016), 371, n. 206; j. grand’henry, “le moyen arabe dans les manuscrits de la version arabe du discours 40 de grégoire de nazianza,” in moyen arabe et variétés mixtes de l’arabe à travers l’histoire: actes du premier colloque international (louvain-la-neuve, 10–14 mai 2004), ed. j. lentin and j. grand’henry, 181–91 (louvain-la-neuve: peeters, 2008); p. bengtsson, two arabic versions of the book of ruth: text edition and language studies (lund: lund university press, 1995), 85–94. 30. a reviewer of this article suggested that scholars in general would not assume that grammatical variation would necessarily be random. however, i do not see how one can draw another conclusion from the works and discussion outlined above. indeed, if grammatical variation were seen to be patterned, it would be important to determine how it was patterned, which is a primary goal of this paper. no one to my knowledge has done this. it thus seems difficult to conclude anything other than that scholars have treated grammatical variation as implicitly idiosyncratic and random. this is exemplified in, e.g., kashouh’s introduction, in which he states, regarding “linguistic limitations” to the study of the arabic gospel manuscripts, that “in the earliest manuscripts, generally speaking, there seems to be no effort in producing a linguistic homogenous [sic] text. moreover, there was no systematic linguistic rules, neither syntactical nor orthographical, that the scribes were following or even wanted to follow”; kashouh, arabic versions, 7 (emphasis his). 31. for example, kashouh makes this explicit when he claims that linguistic corrections were introduced in order to bring the language “close to the classical [sic] arabic”; kashouh, arabic versions, 7. 32. for example, arabic inscriptions written in the safaitic and hismaic scripts attest to numerous non-classical arabic features, some archaic and others innovative; see a. al-jallad, an outline of the grammar of the safaitic inscriptions (leiden: brill, 2015); idem, “the earliest stages of arabic and its linguistic classification,” in the routledge handbook of arabic linguistics, ed. e. benmamoun and r. bassiouney, 315–31 (new york: routledge, 2018). van putten and i have argued that the language underlying the quranic consonantal text typifies the dialects of the hijaz and differs from classical arabic in numerous ways; m. van putten and p. w. stokes, “case in the qurʾānic consonantal text,” wiener zeitschrift für die kunde des morgenlandes 108 (2018): 143–79. 33. the grammatical variation assembled in sībawayh’s kitāb and al-farrāʾ’s luġāt al-qurʾān attest to this diversity, as does the quran and its reading traditions; see, e.g., m. van putten, “arabe 334a: a vocalized kufic quran in a non-canonical hijazi reading,” journal of islamic manuscripts 10 (2019): 327–75; idem, quranic arabic: from its hijazi origins to its classical reading traditions (leiden: brill, 2022), 47–98. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 17 early islamic levant.34 we can thus no longer assume that pre-islamic arabic was equivalent with classical arabic, that classical arabic itself—even as a target—consisted of a single set of features, or that there were no other prestigious varieties with which scribes might interact when composing a text or a translation. perhaps most significantly, middle arabic is only a negatively defined category, which “encompasses all the attested written layers of the language which can be defined as entirely belonging neither to classical arabic nor to colloquial arabic.”35 middle arabic, insofar as it represents the mixing of various registers and/or varieties, is a sociolinguistic phenomenon that has likely always existed.36 authors of medieval middle arabic texts incorporated any number of registers and varieties when composing texts,37 and they did so in patterned ways in various places and times.38 numerous systematic norms have been identified in different corpora, and in some cases these persisted over long periods of time.39 and crucially, although features associated with what we think of as classical arabic were clearly part of the spectrum along which many middle arabic authors worked, they were not the only “high-register” forms from which authors might select.40 in other words, the claim that authors of middle arabic were incompetent at producing classical arabic is, in most cases, unwarranted and untenable.41 thus, the fact that the gospels are written in middle arabic simply indicates that they are not written in classical arabic; it does not entail that their authors were targeting classical arabic, nor that the variation in them is not patterned. another, related claim that serves as a reason for the relative lack of attention to the comparative grammar of the gospels, in particular, is the scholarly belief that the gospels’ status as translations makes their grammar somehow different from “real” arabic, however conceived. for example, blau claims that “most of the cha [= christian arabic] texts are translations from greek and syriac, sometimes (especially the translations of the holy writ) 34. a. al-jallad, the damascus psalm fragment: middle arabic and the legacy of old ḥigāzī (chicago: oriental institute, 2020). 35. j. lentin, “middle arabic,” in the encyclopedia of arabic language and linguistics, ed. k. versteegh, vol. 3, 215–24 (leiden: brill, 2008), at 216. 36. g. khan, “middle arabic,” in semitic languages: an international handbook, ed. s. weninger et al., 817–35 (berlin: de gruyter, 2011), at 817. 37. lentin, “middle arabic,” 217–18. 38. a. bellem and g. r. smith, “‘middle arabic’? morpho-syntactic features of clashing grammars in a thirteenth-century arabian text,” in languages of southern arabia: papers from the special session of the seminar for arabian studies held on 27 july 2013, supplement to proceedings of the seminary for arabian studies 44, ed. o. elmaz and j. c. e. watson, 9–17 (oxford: archaeopress, 2014). 39. j. lentin and j. grand’henry, introduction to lentin and grand’henry, moyen arabe et variétés mixtes, xvii xxiii, at xviii–xx. 40. p. w. stokes, “in the middle of what? a fresh analysis of the language attested in the judaeo-arabic commentary on pirqê ʾāvōṯ (the sayings of the fathers), middle arabic, and implications for the study of arabic linguistic history,” journal of semitic studies 66, no. 2 (2021): 379–411. 41. j. den heijer, “introduction: middle and mixed arabic, a new trend in arabic studies,” in middle arabic and mixed arabic: diachrony and synchrony, ed. l. zack and a. schippers, 1–26 (leiden: brill, 2012), at 11. 18 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) so awkward and literal that they are hardly worthy of being called arabic at all.”42 more recently, in his article on the status quaestionis of arabic bible research, ronny vollandt argues regarding the linguistic study of the texts that the linguistic aspect [of the arabic bible] is certainly important, and should not be neglected. however, biblical translations often follow a grammar of their own, which is governed by a wish to imitate the exalted source text and maintain a high degree of literalism in the translation. . . .the language used could often be described as a professional translation language. . . . this means that these biblical translations reflect only a rather specific register of middle arabic. thus the concentration on the linguistic aspects alone limits and undermines the historical significance of these translations.43 although it is undoubtedly the case that translators often imitated their source material, especially in lexical choice but also occasionally in aspects of syntax such as word order, these instances are far from sufficient to warrant such relegation of translations. translations, even when intentionally wooden, were nothing if not intended to communicate the interpreted meanings of texts to their audience.44 labeling syntactic features as odd, apparently for no other reason than their divergence from the norms associated with classical arabic, is methodologically unsafe in light of the evidence for the diversity of pre and early islamic arabic briefly reviewed above. further, we still know far too little about too many aspects of the varieties of arabic used by medieval christians to feel confident judging how natural or unnatural any structure might have seemed to contemporary arabic speakers.45 in addition, although it is undeniable that genre-specific norms can present challenges for scholars and students of translations, whatever their source and target languages, this is no less the case with other genres. indeed, any text of any genre will have norms and practices that must be taken into account in order to accurately deduce the linguistic reality evident in the text.46 42. blau, grammar of christian arabic, 20; emphasis mine. 43. r. vollandt, “status quaestionis,” 454; emphasis mine. 44. as kashouh rightly notes, arguing that “the meaning which the sacred text conveys is the goal” of these translations; kashouh, arabic versions, 7. 45. no lesser a text than the quran contains numerous examples of oddities, in terms of both syntax and lexicon, to the degree that numerous works, from al-farrāʾ’s maʿānī al-qurʾān to ibn khalawayh’s al-ḥuǧǧa, were written to document linguistic variants of the quran’s consonantal text (rasm) and recitation traditions (qirāʾāt). and although debates have raged over the language behind the consonantal, no one, to my knowledge, has argued that the quran is of limited or no linguistic significance for understanding the linguistic situation of the hijaz in the seventh century ce. 46. this task is likely even more complicated in some cases. for example, kootstra’s study of the inflection of construct ʾab, “father,” in the papyri from the first three islamic centuries reveals that genre has some effect on the degree to which it is inflected as in classical arabic, but an even larger effect was found in contexts within documents that are more formulaic, such as lines of address. so in formulaic contexts, ʾab in construct is inflected more frequently according to classical arabic norms than it is in subsequent parts of letters that are less formulaic. see f. kootstra, “a quantitative approach to variation in case inflection in arabic documentary papyri: the case of ʾab in construct,” journal of american oriental society, 2022. therefore, genre, while meaningful, is always a challenge for understanding the language system and simultaneously far from the only al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 19 a final methodological issue with this perspective, and one that is often implicit, is its equation of lexicon (and to a lesser extent syntax) with “grammar.” though important, grammatical analysis goes far beyond lexicon and word order, and i see no reason translations cannot provide scholars with phonological and morphological data that are just as meaningful as what is found in other genres. whether the registers attested in the gospels were strictly those associated with scribal translations or whether they were more widespread, i take it as uncontroversial that it is important to determine what patterns exist and how they correlate with other domains, such as text type. the present study therefore approaches the grammatical variation attested in the arabic gospel manuscripts without assuming any particular identity for the target register(s). conversely, it does assume that the grammatical variants within and across manuscripts reflect intentional decisions made by the scribes. even if there was no homogeneous target at which a scribe aimed,47 the absence of a single grammatical standard can coexist with patterns in scribal decision-making just as a modern educated arabic speaker who mixes colloquial and modern standard arabic in various ways will produce output that falls along a spectrum of normed patterns and linguistic outputs.48 i assume that scribes wrote what they intended, in ways that followed some norms or patterns, which it is our job to identify. one possible methodological objection to my including multiple witnesses to the same family or subfamily is that given their close textual relationship, we might expect related manuscripts to replicate much of the same grammar and thus to be naturally closer to one another than to manuscripts from other families. however, the witnesses to a particular family or subfamily frequently attest to different grammatical patterns, especially in terms of case marking. the versions of matthew 4:16 (“the people sitting in darkness have seen a great light”) found in manuscripts in subfamily jb illustrate the point (see table 4). in three of these eight manuscripts (sar. 69, 84, and 80), both noun and adjective are marked accusative with tanwīn and alif, and in two others a “dialectal tanwīn” distribution is attested, with the noun marked (with kasratān) and the adjective unmarked in one (sar. 90), and both noun and adjective marked with tanwīn alif but only the noun with tanwīn in another (vat. borg. ar. 71).49 in four of the eight, no tanwīn marking is attested. it is clear, then, that many grammatical categories, such as case and tanwīn marking, are variable even within manuscript subfamilies. factor. in so-called original works, context and the nature of the document affect the nature of the grammar attested. although translations present obvious challenges, these are not unique, nor are translations self-evidently farther from “real” arabic. indeed, the features detailed here are also common to other, non-translated texts. 47. kashouh, in arabic versions, 7, argues that “there seems to be no effort in producing a linguistic homogenous text” (emphasis original). as i argue throughout this paper, although this is true, the common inference—that a lack of homogeneity equals a lack of meaningful patterns—is unwarranted and contradicted by the data. 48. g. meiseles, “educated spoken arabic and the arabic language continuum,” archivum linguisticum 11, no. 2 (1980): 118–43; r. henkin, “functional codeswitching and register in educated negev arabic interview style,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 79, no. 2 (2016): 279–304. 49. on the distribution of tanwīn in these and other manuscripts from the arabic gospel corpus, see p. w. stokes, “nominal case in christian arabic translations of the gospels (9th–15th centuries ce),” arabica, forthcoming. 20 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) table 4. variation in case marking of “great light” in matt. 4:16 in manuscripts of family jb. ms/folio arabic text sar. 69, 8v ]sic[ الشعب اجلالس يف الظلمه ابصروا ضوا عطيما sar. 80, 8r الشعب اجلالس يف الظلمه لقد ابصر نورًا عظيًما sar. 82, 11r الشعب اجلالس يف الظلمه ابصر نور عظيم sar. 84, 16 الشعب السالك يف الظلمه ابصر نورًا عظيًما sar. 89, 5v الشعب اجلالس يف الظلمه ابصر نور عظيم sar. 90, 12r الشعب اجلالس يف الظلمه ابصر نوٍر عظيم sar. 106, 14 الشعب اجلالس يف الظلمه ابصر نور عظيم vatican borg. ar. 71, 6r الشعب اجلالس يف الظلمه ابصر ضًوا عظيما another example is the treatment of the noun ʾaḫ, “brother,” in matthew 5:23. the noun ʾaḫ is one of five nouns (in arabic called al-ʾasmāʾ al-ḫamsah, “the five nouns’’) that, when in construct, manifest a long case vowel; e.g., ʾaḫūka “your (nom) brother” / ʾaḫīka “your (gen) brother” / ʾaḫāka “your (acc) brother.” in matthew 5:23 (“if you bring your offering to the altar and remember that your brother has something against you”), ʾaḫ follows the particle ʾan(na), which variously triggers nominative ʾaḫūk or accusative ʾaḫāk in various manuscripts. this variation occurs within a single manuscript family, as table 5 shows for family a. table 5. variation in the inflection of ʾaḫ in matt. 5:23 in manuscripts of family a. ms/folio arabic text sar. 74, 8r وان قربت قرابنك علي املذبح وذكرت ان اخوك غضبان عليك sar. 72, 6v فان انت قربت قرابنك على املذبح وذكرت هناك ان اخاك غضبان عليك vat. borg. ar. 95, 8v وان قربت قرابنك على املدبح وذكرت مث ان اخوك غضبان عليك in sar. 74 and vat. borg. ar. 95, the particle ʾinna triggers the nominative case, whereas in sar. 72, it triggers the accusative.50 grammatical variation regularly crosses manuscript families. this variation includes differences that affect both consonantal representations and, in vocalized texts, vocalization markings. if grammatical variation were essentially random, as is often (implicitly) assumed, then we should expect to find either no meaningful clustering at all or clustering that does not correspond with manuscript families or subfamilies. as we will see, that is not the case. 50.  the same variation between nominative and accusative following ان occurs in the early arabic papyri; see kootstra, “quantitative approach,” §4.1.1 for data and analysis. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 21 there is an almost unlimited number of variants that could be selected for such a study, and the following list should be expanded in future studies. i have chosen features that are attested in both unvocalized and vocalized manuscripts. these include a number of tanwīn-related features, which deserves methodological comment before proceeding. as i argue elsewhere, christian scribes used the orthographic tools at their disposal in both unvocalized and vocalized manuscripts to mark tanwīn in certain syntactic contexts. those contexts would, in classical arabic grammar, have variable case markings, depending on the context. i show that although christian scribes indicated the presence of tanwīn in these contexts in some of the manuscripts included in his study, especially those belonging to family jb, there were apparently no underlying phonetic distinctions between cases in its realization. this, i suggest, parallels contemporary “dialectal tanwīn,” where dialects attest a singular morpheme (usually /in/, /ən/, or /an/, but also /un/ in yemen). this means that two manuscripts from the same family can mark the same word with tanwīn, but with two different orthographic means: sar. 82, 9r صوٍت مسع يف الرامه “a voice is heard in ramtha” but sar. 80, 6r صوًت مُسع يف الرامه “a voice is heard in ramtha” this orthographic variation will be addressed further below in section 5. whereas the vocalized manuscripts make use of tanwīn vocalizations as well as tanwīn alif, unvocalized manuscripts rely purely on the latter. therefore, unless otherwise specified, the presence or absence of tanwīn will include any combination of orthographic means, whether tanwīn alif (families a, c, d, and h) or various vocalizations (families j and k). for this reason, i do not differentiate between tanwīn markings with different orthographic or vocalization signs. since these manuscripts tend to mark the same roles, but not with the same frequency or in the same places, the goal here is to discover patterns of tanwīn marking and to reduce the degree to which orthographic variation might otherwise obscure grammatical patterning.51 finally, note that, in some instances, manuscripts use the fatḥatān vocalization without a tanwīn alif, even when orthographically eligible for the latter (e.g., sar. 106 اًب instead of ااًب). to distinguish these two forms in transliteration, i have transliterated the former -an and the latter -an, i.e., ʾab-an transliterates اًب and ʾab-an transliterates ااًب. otherwise, i have transliterated tanwīn simply as -n. the implications of these orthographic notes will be discussed in the context of other aspects of orthographic variation in section 5 below. table 6 lists the grammatical variants included in this study. i have chosen features that, insofar as possible, are comparable across the manuscripts included. another way of approaching a grammatical comparison would be to tally features for comparison. for example, we might choose a portion (or the whole) of each manuscript, tally up all occurrences of the dual on nominal forms, tagging for historically nominative and oblique cases, and then calculate the percentage of classical and non-classical arabic forms for each. i have done this for triptotic case marking in both unvocalized and vocalized texts.52 but although revelatory in one sense, such an approach obscures in another: the percentages 51. for a discussion of some patterns based on the vocalizations used, see stokes, “nominal case,” §3. 52. stokes, “nominal case.” 22 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) can vary depending on the frequency of a category’s occurrence, and percentages are often similar across manuscripts in which the details are otherwise quite different. i have therefore chosen specific verses in which the manuscripts attest similar grammatical structures. this allows us to get a sense of how similar or different scribal grammatical choices were across the manuscripts. table 6. selected grammatical variants from the gospel of matthew. biblical text grammatical category variants attested 25:36–44 ksw/ksy variation 1. fa-kasaytumūnī, 2. fa-kasawtumūnī ksw/ksy variation 1. fa-kasaynāk, 2. fa-kasawnāk, 3. ʾalbasnāk verbal negation 1. fa-lam taksūnī, 2. fa-mā kasaytumūnī verbal negation 1. lam negation, 2. mā except for ksw/y, 3. lam bookends adjectives nunated or not 1. nunated, 2. not nunated 14:21 men singular or plural 1. raǧul, 2. riǧāl men nunated or not 1. raǧul-n, 2. raǧul men before or after number 1. before, 2. after thousands singular or plural 1. ʾalf, 2. ʾālāf 15:38 men singular or plural 1. raǧul, 2. riǧāl men nunated or not 1. raǧul-n, 2. raǧul men before or after number 1. before, 2. after thousands singular or plural 1. ʾalf, 2. ʾālāf 16:9 five (loaves) masculine or feminine 1. ḫams ḫubz(āt), 2. ḫamsat ḫubz(āt) loaves singular or plural 1. ḫubz, 2. ḫubzāt five loaves definiteness pattern 1. al-ḫams ḫubz(āt), 2. al-ḫams al-ḫubzāt, 3. ḫams al-ḫubzāt five (thousand men) masculine or feminine 1. ḫams thousands, 2. ḫamsat thousands thousand(s) singular or plural 1. ʾālāf, 2. ʾalf five (thousand men) definite or indefinite 1. ḫams(at) thousands, 2. al-ḫams(ah) thousands al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 23 16:9, cont. seven (loaves) masculine or feminine 1. sabʿ loaves, 2. sabʿat loaves loaves singular or plural 1. ḫubzāt, 2. ḫubz seven loaves definiteness pattern 1. al-sabʿ al-ḫubzāt, 2. al-sabʿ ḫubzāt, 3. sabʿ al-ḫubzāt four (thousand men) masculine or feminine 1. ʾarbaʿ thousands, 2. ʾarbaʿat thousands four (thousand men) definite or indefinite 1. ʾarbaʿ(at) thousands, 2. al-arbaʿah thousands thousand(s) singular or plural 1. ʾālāf, 2. ʾalf 19:6 initial verb indicative or non-indicative 1. indicative, 2. non-indicative, 3. singular, 4. laysa predicate of verb nunated or not 1. unmarked, 2. fully marked, 3. dialectal tanwīn final predicate nunated or not 1. unmarked, 2. fully marked, 3. adjective only 17:17 “unbelieving generation” indefinite and nunated or definite 1. indefinite ǧīl-n multawiy-n, 2. definite 19:17 “no one is good but god” wording 1. laysa ʾaḥad, 2. mā ʾaḥad, 3. laysa ṣāliḥ, 4. wa-lā “no one is good but god” nunation pattern 1. ʾaḥad ṣāliḥ, 2. ʾaḥad-n ṣāliḥ, 3. ʾaḥad-n ṣāliḥ-n, 4. ṣāliḥ, 5. ʾaḥad-u ṣāliḥ, 6. ṣāliḥ-n 13:27 zawān nunated or not 1. zawān-n, 2. zawān, 3. definite 9:9 object of naẓara ʾilā nunated or not 1. fully marked, 2. dialectal tanwīn, 3. unmarked, 4. transitive verb used 17:14 subject raǧul/ʾinsān nunated or not 1. nunated, 2. not nunated 17:20 subject šayʾ nunated or not 1. šayʾ-n, 2. šayʾ 3:9 ʾab nominative or accusative 1. ʾab-n, 2. ʾabūnā, 3. ʾabānā 8:6 ṭarīḥ as predicate of ʾinna nunated or not 1. ṭarīh-n, 2. ṭarīḥ, 3. maṭrūḥ muḫallaʿ nunated or not 1. muḫallaʿ-n, 2. muḫallaʿ 24 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) 5:23 case of ʾaḫ 1. ʾn ʾaḫāk, 2. ʾn ʾaḫūk, 3. li-ʾaḫīk, 4. fī nafas ʾaḫīk predicate of ʾanna nunated or not 1. nunated, 2. not nunated 2:8, 3:3, 3:17, 17:5, 25:6, 27:46, 27:50 ṣawt nunated or not 1. marked, 2. unmarked 5:29–30 *ʾaʿḍāʾi-ka “your body parts” written with or without <y> 1. ʾaʿḍāk, 2. ʾaʿḍāyk, 3. mafāṣil-ak, 4. ʾawṣāl-ak 19:8 *nisāʾi-kum “your wives” written with or without <y> 1. nisākm, 2. nisāykm, 3. accusative 3:11 *ḥiḏāʾi-h “his sandal” written with or without <y> 1. ḥiḏāh, 2. ḥiḏāyh, 3. accusative, 4. no suffix 25:6 *li-liqāʾi-h “to meet him” written with or without <y> 1. li-liqāy-h, 2. li-liqā-h, 3. another root, 4. istiqbāl-h 21:42 “builders” nominative or oblique 1. bannāʾūn, 2. bannāʾīn “become the cornerstone” grammar 1. raʾs li-l-zāwiyah, 2. li-raʾs al-zāwiyah, 3. raʾs al-bunyān, 4. raʾs-n li-lzāwiyah, 5. li-l-zāwiyah raʾs-a(n), 6. raʾs al-zāwiyah, 7. fī raʾs al-zāwiyah, 8. rukn al-banā 6:9–13 case of “our father” 1. ʾabūnā, 2. (yā) ʾabānā verbal form of “hallowed be thy name” 1. yataqaddas ism-ak, 2. yuqaddas ism-ak, 3. li-yataqaddas ism-ak, 4. taqaddas ism-ak verbal form of “thy kingdom come” 1. yaʾtī mulk-ak, 2. taʾtī malakūt-ak, 3. li-taʾti malakūt-ak, 4. li-yaʾti malakūt-ak, 5. yaʾti malakūt-ak verbal form of “(thy will) be done” 1. yakūn, 2. takūn, 3. (fa)li-takun, 4. li-takūn verbal form of “give (us this day)” 1. ʾaʿṭīnā, 2. ʾaʿṭinā, 3. irzaqnā while many of the features selected above are straightforward, several require some contextual discussion. the features from matthew 25:36–44 concern the alternation between iii-w and iii-y of the verb ksw/ksy “to clothe,” which in some manuscripts is ksy in each verse but in others alternates (kasaytamūnī “you clothed me” but kasawnāk “we clothed you”). further, the negation of specific verbs is in many manuscripts accomplished with al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 25 lam (family a and family k), whereas others use mā for the first and last in the series and lam in the remainder of instances (family ja), and a third group uses mā (except in matthew 25:43). the next three sets of features all occur in three successive chapters of matthew (14–16) in which jesus first feeds five thousand men (not counting women and children; matt. 14), then feeds four thousand (matt. 15), and finally rebukes the disciples for not remembering both groups (matt. 16). in each, the treatment (grammatical gender, number, and definiteness patterns) of the numbers (five, four, and thousands) and nouns (men and loaves of bread) vary across manuscripts. in matthew 17:17, jesus addresses the “unbelieving generation,” which is either grammatically indefinite or definite. in the former subset, the addressee is frequently nunated with fatḥātān and tanwīn alif (but once without alif): sar. 82, 42r اًي جياًًل ملتواًًي “o unbelieving generation” but vat. borg. ar. 71, 30r اًي جيًل ملتواًي “o unbelieving generation” this pattern is not the default one in classical arabic, but such a nunated form is attested in some poetic traditions, especially when the noun is followed by an adjective or another noun, as in yā mūqid-an nār-an, “o you who would kindle a fire!” and ʾa rākib-an kamiyyan, “o you heroic horseman!”53 finally, the word ṣawt, “a voice,” occurs at least seven times in the arabic versions of the gospel of matthew included in this study (matt. 2:8, 3:3, 3:17, 17:5, 25:6, 27:46, 27:50). in many of these instances across the manuscripts the word is nunated, even in manuscripts that otherwise rarely indicate tanwīn orthographically. as with the lexical data discussed in section 3, i entered each variant into rows in a spreadsheet, with each column dedicated to one manuscript, as in tables 2 and 3. in those tables as in table 7, the abbreviated labels for the manuscripts that constitute the column heads are color-coded to denote manuscript families as in table 1. the biblical citations in the left-hand column match those in table 6 above. the numbers in the cells refer to the variant numbers in column 3 of table 6. finally, a dash indicates a lacuna in the manuscript, and an empty cell shows that a different phrase is used. 53. fischer, grammar of classical arabic, 96, n. 4. 26 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) table 7. distribution of selected variants within and across manuscripts. text ms 74 v95 72 70 75 v13 115 106 v71 84 82 89 90 91 69 80 76 112 147 628 v9 25: 36– 44 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 – 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 4 14:21 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 15:38 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 – 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 – 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 – 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 – 1 1 1 16:9 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 – 2 2 2 1 1 1 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 – 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 2 2 2 1 2 1 1 – 2 1 2 2 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 2 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 2 1 2 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 27 19:6 2 2 2 2 2 1 3 2 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 1 2 4 2 3 1 1 3 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 2 2 2 2 17:17 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 19:17 1 1 3 3 1 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 4 2 2 1 1 5 5 2 5 3 1 1 1 1 2 5 1 2 2 4 4 4 6 6 13:27 2 2 2 2 1 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 9:9 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 3 1 4 4 4 4 4 17:14 2 2 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 17:20 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 – 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 1 1 3:9 1 1 1 1 4 4 1 1 3 3 3 3 3 – 4 3 1 1 4 4 4 8:6 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 5:23 2 2 1 1 3 4 1 2 – 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 3 2 2 2 – 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 2:8, 3:3, 3:17, 17:5, 25:6, 2 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 2 2 1 2 2 – 2 1 2 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 2 – 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 – 2 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 – 2 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 1 5:29– 30 1 1 1 2 3 4 2 1 – 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 19:8 3 3 3 – 3 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 3 3 3 3 3 3:11 3 3 3 3 1 1 3 3 1 3 1 1 1 – 1 2 1 3 3 3 25:6 1 1 1 1 3 4 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 28 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) 21:42 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 2 8 4 5 6 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 7 4 6 6 6 6:9– 13 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 – 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 – 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 4 3 3 – 3 3 3 3 3 3 1 3 1 – 5 1 1 1 2 1 2 2 3 3 – 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 2 – 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 – 3 3 3 3 3 4 3 3 2 – 2 2 1 2 2 1 2 4 2 2 – 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 2 2 – 2 2 fig. 5. pca of grammatical variation in gospel manuscripts.54 a pca of the data yields the results displayed in figure 5. the figure shows clear clustering, especially among manuscripts of the same manuscript family. since, as noted above, scribes felt comfortable changing or modifying the grammar of the manuscript from which they copied, the fact 54. the first principal component accounts for 29.2% and the second accounts for 18.1% of the variation in the data, for a total of 47.3%. this is rather low, but a low percentage is almost inevitable given the large amount and chaotic nature of the data. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 29 that the manuscripts pattern together so consistently is significant—and even more so given that many of the features selected above are indicated via different orthographic means in textually related vocalized manuscripts. in other words, the scribes were clearly following similar grammatical paradigms, which they represented in a variety of orthographic ways, and thus were not simply copying what their exemplars attested. family a (marked in blue) forms a cluster, and within the family, sar. 74 and vat. borg ar. 95 are closer to each other than either is to sar. 72. this supports previous scholars’ claims that sar. 72 represented a stylistic improvement over sar. 74 and vat. borg. ar. 95.55 of the other families attested, family d (red) is closest to family a, and indeed there are several places in which sar. 70 shares non-classical grammatical features word for word with members of family a, such as marking ʾaḥad with tanwīn alif in matthew 9.30: sar. 72, 11v وقال هلما انظرا ان ال يعلم احدا “and he said to them, ‘see that no one knows’” sar. 70, 12r وقال انظر اال يعلم احدا “and he said, ‘see that no one knows’” it is, of course, possible that sar. 75 represents “the culmination of the attempt on the part of a group of palestinian christians to achieve an arabic version of the gospel in the early islamic period which could pass for literary arabic,” as griffith claims.56 alternatively, the results presented here suggest that sar. 70 is another candidate for such a culmination, or at least belongs to a closely related grammatical tradition in which tanwīn on non-accusatives is limited to lexical items such as ʾaḥad. the manuscripts of family k (purple) also cluster together, and within family k, sar. 112 and 147 are particularly closely related to each other, while sar. 628 and vat. copt. 9 form another close pair. this patterning is characterized, among other ways, by more consistent use of tanwīn vocalization signs in the latter two manuscripts. family jb (green) once again forms a distinct cluster, which stands apart from the other families and from the representatives of ja (yellow) and jc (aqua). seven of the nine jb manuscripts cluster quite tightly; sar. 69 and sar. 80 are slight outliers. the latter two manuscripts are outliers in other respects, too. as we saw in section 3, sar. 69 stands apart from the other jb manuscripts also in terms of its lexical and orthographic characteristics. sar. 80 is the latest of the representatives of jb included in this study and is grammatically closer to family k, for example, than the other members of family jb are. this convergence with family k makes sense in the light of family k’s increasing importance and dominance after the thirteenth century ce.57 the representatives of ja and jc are much closer to each other than either group is to jb, which supports kashouh’s claim of a closer relationship between the two on the basis of verbal and lexical similarities,58 and they pattern quite closely with family k. again, although the scribes of ja and jc evidently relied on different exemplars than those of family k did, they were clearly part of a scribal culture—with corresponding grammatical preferences—that was very similar to the culture behind family k. 55. kashouh, arabic versions, 93. 56. griffith, “gospel in arabic,” 155. 57. kashouh, arabic versions, 205–6. 58. ibid., 203. 30 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) in general, we can discern three primary clusters: 1. family a 2. families k, ja, and jc 3. family jb the latter is the outlier, as represented visually by the differences along the x and y axes, which indicate a high degree of dissimilarity in both the first and the second principal components. between 1 and 2 are several families that, so far, are represented by only a single manuscript each (at least, only one available to me at present). in order to get a sense of how the manuscripts of each family pattern in relation to other manuscripts from the same (sub)family, i ran pcas that included manuscripts from only one family. as in section 3, i focused on the families represented by the most manuscripts: family j, family jb, and family k. the results of the pca of the data from family j are shown in figure 6.59 as in my analysis of the “kingdom of god”/“kingdom of heaven” data, sar. 69 and sar. 80 are clear outliers. intriguingly, sar. 80 is grammatically closest to sar. 76. this proximity deserves closer study.60 fig. 6. pca of grammatical variation in family j. 59. the first principal component captured 37% of the variation, and the second principal component captured 19%. because vat. borg. ar. 71 lacked several features, i omitted it from this analysis. 60. impressionistically, this is unsurprising. both, for example, utilize tanwīn vocalizations more frequently than other manuscripts in family jb do. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 31 when we include only manuscripts from family jb, we obtain the results shown in figure 7. as can be seen, this does little to change the picture: most of the manuscripts are grammatically very similar, with sar. 69 and sar. 80 clear outliers.61 finally, figure 8 illustrates the results of an examination of the manuscripts from family k.62 again, there are two clear outliers, sar. 147 and sar. 112. fig. 7. pca of grammatical variation in family j. 61. for a discussion of sar. 80 and its history, see both kashouh, arabic versions, 185–94; and j. valentin, “des traces de la vetus syra des évangiles en traduction arabe? étude critique des variantes significatives en mc 5,1–20 dans le sinaï arabe 80,” in reading the gospel of mark in the twenty-first century: method and meaning, ed. g. van oyen, 765–79 (leuven: peeters, 2019). 62. the first principal component captured 56% and the second principal component 29% of the variation. 32 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) fig. 8. pca of grammatical variation in family k. like idiosyncratic lexical variation, grammatical variation, too, exhibits significant patterns. the different textual traditions are characterized by related but distinct grammatical traditions. as shown above, manuscripts do not replicate the grammar of the other members of their respective families or of the exemplar, which makes the strong clustering found here all the more meaningful: it shows that they participated in a shared grammatical tradition. it is striking that a systematic comparison of grammatical variants across manuscripts reveals both rather clear grammatical traditions and the fact that these generally align with text type. by focusing solely on grammatical variants, we get very close in many respects to kashouh’s subgroupings. and intriguingly, analyses of individual (sub) families result in subgroupings that are remarkably similar to those arising from studies of textual variation, such as that in section 3. so although scribes do not seem to have replicated every grammatical choice made in their respective exemplars, idiosyncratic variants were nevertheless copied with sufficient frequency to leave distinct signatures in the manuscripts. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 33 5. orthographic variation in addition to idiosyncratic lexical and grammatical variation, repeated idiosyncratic orthographic variation can be a powerful tool for establishing textual and scribal relationships. in a recent article, van putten documents the idiosyncratic variation in the spelling of the phrase niʿmat allāh, “the grace of god,” which in early manuscripts of the quran is spelled sometimes with tāʾ marbūṭah نعمــه هللا and sometimes with tāʾ maftūḥah نعمــت in about equal numbers.63 he then compares the way those two spellings pattern across ,هللا manuscripts and shows that the idiosyncrasies were carefully and faithfully reproduced by the scribes of the quran. the fact that they were reproduced with such care can only mean that all of these manuscripts descended from a single written archetype. consequently, instead of the variation’s being random, at the whim of each scribe, the spelling is the same at each location in every manuscript. it is thus reasonable to study idiosyncratic orthographic variation in the gospel manuscripts in order to determine whether the same kind of faithful replication occurred, and if it did not, whether any meaningful patterns appear at all. such a study will also allow us to weigh kashouh’s contention that orthographic variants are not valuable for establishing relationships between manuscripts of the same family.64 the first variant under study is the spelling variation associated with malakūt, “kingdom,” in the subset of manuscripts that use it for some (or all) of the “kingdom of god”/“kingdom of heaven” phrases investigated in section 3 above. malakūt is spelled in two ways depending on the manuscript—with either tāʾ maftūḥah ملكــوت or tāʾ marbūṭah ملكــوة/ملكوه—and the spelling can vary even in the same manuscript and sometimes on the same page (cf. the similar phenomenon in the quranic niʿmat allāh in q 16:71 بنعمه هللا vs. q 16:72 بنعمت هللا). the orthographic variation in the spelling of malakūt is part of a larger orthographic divide. historically, some words ending in ūt exhibited the same orthographic variation; for example, tābūt, “chest, ark,” was spelled variously as اتبــوت and as اتبــوه, with no consensus on what phonetic realization underlies the وهspellings. whatever the difference in pronunciation was historically, by the time the arabic gospels were composed, the fact that the form ملكــوت was seen as a legitimate spelling strongly suggests that the pronunciation underlying both was /malakūt/, at least in construct. in some manuscripts, the word malakūt is spelled either ملكــوت or ملكــوة / ملكــوه, and the distribution of the two spellings is idiosyncratic. in others, only ملكــوت is used. there are no manuscripts in which only ملكوة / ملكوه is attested. table 8 shows the variation in the subset of manuscripts in which malakūt occurs. in the table, the spellings are indicated by a representative consonant: [ ه ] indicates a spelling with tāʾ marbūṭah ملكــوة / ملكــوه, and [ ت ] indicates a spelling with tāʾ maftūḥah ملكــوت. as in tables 2, 3, and 7, dash (–) indicates a lacuna in the manuscript, and an empty cell indicates that a different phrase (either mulk or mamlakah) is used instead. 63. m. van putten, “‘the grace of god’ as evidence for a written uthmanic archetype: the importance of shared orthographic idiosyncrasies,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 82, no. 2 (2019): 271–88. 64. kashouh, arabic versions, 215. 34 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) table 8. orthographic variation in manuscripts containing malakūt. text mss v13 75 115 84 106 82 89 91 90 80 v71 69 76 112 147 68 628 v9 3:2 ت ت ه ه ه ه – ه ت ه ه ت ت ت ت ت 4:17 ت ت ت ه ه ت ه – ه ت ه ه ت ت ت ت ت 5:3 ت ت ه ت ه ه ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 5:10 ت ت – ه ت ه ه ه ه ت – ت ت ت ت ت ت 5:12 – – – – ه ه ه – – – ه – – – – – – 5:19a ت ت ت ه ت ه ه ه ه ت – ت ت ت ت ت ت 5:19b ت ت ه ت ه ه ه ه ت – ت ت ت ت – ت 5:20 ت ت ت ه ت ه ه ه ه ت – ت ت ت ت ت ت 6:33 ت ت ت – ت ت – ت ت ت 7:21 ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 8:11 ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 10:7 ت ت ت ه ت ت ت ه ت ت ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 11:11 ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 11:12 ت – ت ت – ت ت ت ت 12:28 ت ت ت ت ه ه ه ت ه ه ت ت ت ت – ت ت ت 13:11 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ت ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 13:24 ت ت ت ه ه ت ت ه ت ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 13:31 ت ت ت ت ت ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 13:33 ت ت ت ه ت ه ه ت ت ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 13:44 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 13:45 ت ت ت ه ت ت ت ه ت ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 13:47 ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ه ت ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 13:52 ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ه ت ت ت ت ت ت 16:19 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ه ت ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 18:1 ت ت ت ه ه ت ت ه ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 18:3 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 18:4 ت ت ت ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت 18:23 ت ت ت ه ه ت ت ه ت ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 19:12 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 35 19:14 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ت ت ه ت – ت ت ت 19:23 ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 19:24 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 20:1 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 21:31 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ت ه ه ت ه ت ت ت ت ت ت 21:43 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ه ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 22:2 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ه ت ه ت ت ت ت ت ت ت ت 23:13 ت ت ت ت ه ه ه ت ت ه ت ت ه ت ت ت ت ت 25:1 ت ت ت ه ه ه ه ت ه ه ه ت ه ت ت ت ت ت the most immediate observation arising from this examination is that family jb patterns separately from all other families, with manuscripts regularly utilizing both ملكــوة / ملكــوه and spellings of malakūt. at the same time, no two manuscripts in jb are identical in this ملكــوت respect, although sar. 82 and 89 are differentiated only by the former’s use of ملكــوت in matthew 4:17, where sar. 89 uses ملكــوة. this similarity is unsurprising, since the two manuscripts’ colophons indicate that both are products of the same hand. the case of sar. 69 is interesting, because it clearly belongs to jb in view of its idiosyncratic lexical and grammatical variation (sections 3 and 4), yet it differs quite dramatically from the other jb manuscripts in the spelling of malakūt, patterning more closely with family k in its preference for ملكــوت over ملكــوة / ملكــوه (which occurs only four times in this manuscript, compared with at least nineteen instances in the other jb manuscripts). the sole jc manuscript included here, sar. 76, is the only other manuscript in the study that uses ملكــوة, and it does so only once (in matt. 19:14). the third subgroup of family j included here is family ja (sar. 115), and it attests only ملكــوت spellings. family k is consistent in its use of ,spellings. there are, then, two main groups: families jb and jc, which use both spellings ملكوت and families c, d, ja, and k, which use only ملكوت. the common use of the ملكوة / ملكوه spelling in family jb and its concomitant absence (with one exception in sar. 76) outside of this group demonstrate the distinct—and unique— nature of the scribal culture associated with family jb. this observation correlates with the patterns of lexical and grammatical variation, where families ja and jc again align with family k (and in this case all others, too) against jb. at the same time, the spelling within the family is rather chaotic, with no manuscript replicating the pattern of another exactly. thus we might ask whether the data do not in fact corroborate kashouh’s claim that orthographic variation is not useful for subgrouping manuscripts in the same family.65 however, a pca of the variation in these manuscripts turns up some visible clusters, shown in figure 9.66 65. ibid. 66. the first principal component captured 42% and the second principal component 22% of the variation. 36 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) fig. 9. pca of malakūt orthographic variation in family jb. several clusters are evident, including one consisting of sar. 82, sar. 89, and sar. 90 and another with sar. 84, sar. 91, and sar. 80. another factor relevant to the interpretation of these visual results is that the x axis, which tracks the proximity or distance between any two manuscripts horizontally, plots the first principal component, which captures the greatest amount of variation between the manuscripts. in this case, all manuscripts except sar. 69 are rather close to each other along the x axis; it is mainly the second principal component—tracked along the y axis with vertical space indicating the proximity or distance between any two manuscripts—that separates them. as we have seen in sections 3 and 4, sar. 69 is an outlier in the group. although far from conclusive, this study of a single orthographic variant shows promise, and the topic warrants further study. it certainly casts doubt on kashouh’s claim that orthographic variants are not valuable for subgrouping manuscripts of the same family.67 the second area of orthographic variation, discussed briefly in section 4, concerns the frequency and execution of tanwīn vocalizations. once again, orthographic variation is the norm; no two manuscripts utilize the exact same combination of vocalization signs with the same frequency. however, here, too, there are patterns to the distribution. four of the families studied here, ja, jb, jc, and k, consist of manuscripts that are vocalized to one degree or another. the remarks below are therefore limited to manuscripts from these families. further, i focus here on the means by which tanwīn is indicated orthographically; i make no 67. kashouh, arabic versions, 215. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 37 comments on morpho-syntax. specifically, i do not consider the degree of overlap between classical arabic tanwīn and the tanwīn found in the manuscripts i study, nor am i grouping manuscripts on the basis of their treatment of any specific instance of tanwīn, since, as noted above, closely related manuscripts often diverge in particular instances (see the examples in section 4). instead, i focus on the combination of the three vocalizations (ḍammatān ٌ / kasratān ٍ / fatḥatān ً ) that each scribe utilized.68 in this respect, the manuscripts in families ja, jb, jc, and k can be divided into three categories: 1. use only fatḥatān/tanwīn alif 2. use both fatḥatān/tanwīn alif and kasratān 3. use all of the three vocalizations here, too, the data come from the gospel of matthew. classifying each manuscript according to these three categories yields the groupings shown in table 9: table 9. orthographic categories of vocalized manuscripts according to tanwīn. ms family category sar. 106 jb 1 vat. borg. ar. 71 jb 1 sar. 82 jb 2 sar. 84 jb 2 sar. 91 jb 2 sar. 69 jb 2 sar. 147 k 2 sar. 89 jb 3 sar. 90 jb 3 sar. 80 jb 3 sar. 115 ja 3 sar. 76 jc 3 sar. 112 k 3 sar. 628 k 3 sar. 68 k 3 vat. copt. 9 k 3 68. for a discussion of the correlation between the orthography and (morpho-)syntactic categories in these manuscripts, see stokes, “nominal case.” 38 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) these category divisions do not fall neatly along manuscript family lines; however, we can still derive meaningful insights from this distribution. only three of the nine manuscripts belonging to family jb included in this study utilize ḍammatān, and sar. 89 uses it just once, while sar. 90 attests it only three times. within family jb, the use of only fatḥatān/tanwīn alif and kasratān is by far the dominant norm. by contrast, families ja, jc, and k, with one counterexample in the latter family (sar. 147), make use of all three forms. interestingly, although the jc manuscript uses ḍammatān, it is noticeably less frequent in this manuscript than it is in ja and k manuscripts, occurring only nineteen times in sar. 76’s gospel of matthew. still, orthographically families ja and jc pattern much more closely with family k than they do with family jb. once again, although no two manuscripts are identical in terms of how and when they indicate tanwīn, there are clear patterns that point to a distinct scribal (sub)culture behind family jb. 6. discussion the data and results described above are significant in many ways for the study of the christian arabic gospel manuscripts, as well as for the study of christian and middle arabic more broadly. first, the data and analysis in section 3 demonstrate the significance of lexical variation, especially idiosyncratic variation replicated across manuscripts, as a text-critical tool related to—but distinct from—simple lexical comparison in any one instance. second, the results show that grammatical variation within and across manuscripts is not random. if grammatical variation were random, the result of idiosyncratic scribal behaviors, we should have found little meaningful clustering in the data. instead, it appears that a text family was characterized by certain grammatical norms and patterns. kashouh’s statement that “there seems to be no effort in producing a linguistic homogenous text [sic]”69 is thus technically true; however, the implication that “arabic grammar and syntax were not the concern of the translators”70 is contradicted by the patterns detected in this study. although no two texts are grammatically identical, most pattern much more closely with related texts than they do with unrelated ones. this observation has potential text-critical implications that should be further explored. third, and finally, the idiosyncratic orthographic variation points to different scribal cultures associated with the different text families, especially family jb. my findings generally corroborate kashouh’s intuition regarding the relative lack of importance of such variation for establishing relationships within manuscript families, but this topic requires much further work before such a principle should be broadly assumed. these discoveries are meaningful and pave the way for future work to explore and define the nature of the patterns detected here. the clear distribution observed in the idiosyncratic lexical variation in the spelling of the phrases “kingdom of god” and “kingdom of heaven” in the gospel of matthew across twenty-two manuscripts provides conclusive evidence that the manuscripts classified as belonging to family a, as well as those of family jb, were copied from single originals. the idiosyncrasies are copied too consistently for such replication to be attributable to chance. relatedly, although scribes clearly felt free to alter and change 69. kashouh, arabic versions, 7; emphasis in the original. 70. ibid., 7. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 39 lexical and grammatical aspects of their exemplars as style and preference dictated, they nevertheless faithfully copied many aspects of the exemplar. a focus on more banal lexical choices, and especially lexical variation, can help add nuance in ways that a focus on lexical similarities cannot. the study of orthographic variation provides new insight into the scribal production of the arabic gospels. in section 5, i demonstrated that the spelling of malakūt with a tāʾ marbūṭah was quite common in the scribal circles that produced the jb manuscripts. that no two manuscripts replicate the same idiosyncratic distribution of those spellings confirms the absence of a norm and the freedom with which scribes alternated spellings, even disagreeing with the exemplar. nevertheless, the fact that this spelling is found only in the manuscripts of jb (with one exception in family jc) points to a distinct set of scribal practices. this finding correlates with the strong clustering of these manuscripts against the other families in terms of the lexical and grammatical variation studied here as well. likewise, the orthographic variation that characterizes the representation of tanwīn supports the existence both of shared trends (notably writing tanwīn with kasratān or fatḥatān regardless of the context) and of different schools. perhaps most significant of all of my findings is the demonstration that the grammatical variation is in fact patterned. the present study provides one model for detecting patterns of grammatical variation in middle arabic corpora. when multiple versions of the same text or text tradition exist, comparing select variants across manuscripts can help identify where the main divisions fall. of course, in-depth study of each manuscript within a group or family is also crucial. every effort should be made to include as many variants as possible from as many grammatical categories as possible. when comparisons are made between texts that are not versions of the same original or related to one another by content, it is important to quantify grammatical trends by tagging all forms in a significant portion of each manuscript and making note of both form and context in order to facilitate comparison. since the goal of section 4 was merely to determine whether the grammatical variation in the arabic gospel manuscripts included here attests to such patterns, attempting a typology of the various groups identified lies outside the scope of this paper. nevertheless, some preliminary remarks can, i believe, further illustrate the significance of the present study. many of the features included here are morphological or morpho-syntactic in nature, including variation in iii-w/y roots, the use of tanwīn, nominal inflection of the “five nouns” in various contexts, and verbal mood. of the vocalized manuscripts, those from family jb utilize tanwīn vocalizations least frequently, while ja and jc manuscripts as well as those belonging to family k—especially sar. 628 and vat. copt. 9—utilize them much more frequently. families a and jb share certain similarities, such as use of certain orthographic tools (tanwīn alif in family a and the various tanwīn vocalizations in family jb) to mark a specific set of roles (e.g., nominal predicates, subjects of existential clauses, and words for either a single person or a group of people),71 even when such marking is out of step with classical arabic grammatical and orthographic norms. these tools occur in families 71. see stokes, “nominal case.” 40 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) ja and k, too, but are less common than they are in a and k. the main exception is sar. 80, which uses tanwīn vocalizations much more frequently than do other jb manuscripts. this is likely a major reason sar. 80 falls closer to families ja, jc, and k than it does to the other manuscripts of family jb. other manifestations of case marking also attest to a spectrum. family a regularly features the oblique in sound masculine plural nouns (cf. matthew 21:42 above), whereas the other families, including jb, display a more classical distribution, with both nominative and oblique forms common. words ending in *-āʾ (e.g., *ḥiḏāʾ, “sandal,” and *liqāʾ, “meet”), which, when suffixed with a pronoun, will in classical arabic manifest a glide corresponding to the case vowel of the noun, appear with a classical inflection in families ja, jc, and k more frequently than they do in either a or jb. inflection of the “five nouns” (al-ʾasmāʾ al-ḫamsah) in the examples above is a mixed bag, with *ʾanna triggering either the nominative or the accusative form in each of the families; however, in families ja, jc, and k the accusative is more common than it is in families a and jb, for example. at this juncture, it is worth stating explicitly that the non-classical features that occur in each of the manuscripts studied here follow regular patterns and are thus clearly part of a register, or perhaps rather a spectrum of patterns, considered prestigious to one degree or another by each of the scribes. in some grammatical domains, such as the masculine plural, the register found in manuscripts belonging to families ja, jc, jb, and k is more similar to classical arabic than is the register visible in family a. in terms of final glide inflection, for example, families a and jb tend to indicate nominal case with a glide less frequently than families ja, jb, and k do. on the other hand, as noted above, case inflection of the “five nouns” varies. for example, the particle ʾanna triggered accusative and nominative inflection in members of families a (sar. 72) and jb (sar. 69 and 80). by contrast, although one manuscript of family k (sar. 112) shows nominative inflection in the same context, all others use the accusative, as do manuscripts of both ja and jc. finally, orthographic representation of tanwīn in vocalized manuscripts corresponds closely with manuscript families, but all families, with the exception of family h (vat. borg. ar. 13), display the same patterns of non-classical tanwīn.72 future work that examines the distribution of variants, such as historically nominative versus oblique dual and plural forms and the inflection of the five nouns and final-glide nouns in manuscripts from each family, will be crucial to understanding more precisely the patterns of variation. 7. conclusion this paper has investigated variation in three domains—lexical, grammatical, and orthographic—in order to determine the degree to which the variation attested in the domains of lexical patterns, grammar, and orthography across arabic gospel manuscripts is patterned in meaningful ways. in each domain, the variation is frequently idiosyncratic in any given manuscript. i have argued that it is precisely this idiosyncrasy that makes the patterns that emerge across manuscripts so compelling. lexically, the idiosyncratic nature of the translation of the phrases “kingdom of god” and “kingdom of heaven” provides perhaps the strongest evidence yet that many of the manuscript families previously established reflect copies based on an exemplar that is, in this case at least, remarkably well preserved. grammatical variation 72. for details of frequency and syntax, see stokes, “nominative case.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) key to the kingdom • 41 patterns in clusters that by and large correlate with previously proposed manuscript families, and they thus offer strong support for the existence of distinct grammatical traditions in the various scribal circles that produced the manuscripts. consequently, the various text types are characterized by distinct varieties (or registers). in turn, we should indeed think of multiple christian arabics, rather than a single “christian arabic.” orthographic variation is the most variable of the three types of variance investigated here, but even this variation corroborates the existence of distinct scribal cultures associated with major manuscript families. most importantly, the present paper has demonstrated that the variation that characterizes the corpus, although often idiosyncratic, is neither patternless nor meaningless for understanding the corpus as a whole and the text-critical relationships between its manuscripts and manuscript families. rather than background noise to be filtered out, variation turns out to be key to understanding the arabic gospels. future work is needed to further map out these differences, as well as to expand the number of variants and the breadth of manuscripts and families included in the comparison. bibliography al-jallad, a. the damascus psalm fragment: middle arabic and the legacy of old ḥigāzī. chicago: oriental institute, 2020. ———. “the earliest stages of arabic and its linguistic classification.” in the routledge handbook of arabic linguistics, edited by e. benmamoun and r. bassiouney, 315–31. new york: routledge, 2018. ———. an outline of 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archaeopress, 2014. 42 • phillip w. stokes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 31 (2023) bengtsson, p. two arabic versions of the book of ruth: text edition and language studies. lund: lund university press, 1995. blau, j. “the beginnings of the arabic diglossia: a study of the origins of neoarabic.” afroasiatic linguistics, no. 4 (1977): 1–28. ———. a grammar of christian arabic: based mainly on south-palestinian texts from the first millennium. 3 vols. louvain: secrétariat du corpus sco, 1966–67. ———. a handbook of early middle arabic. jerusalem: hebrew university of jerusalem, 2002. ———. on pseudo-corrections in some semitic languages. jerusalem: israel academy of sciences and humanities, 1970. ———. “sind uns reste arabischer bibelübersetzungen aus vorislamischer zeit erhalten geblieben?” le muséon 86 (1973): 67–72. ———. “über einige christlich-arabische manuskripte aus dem 9. und 10. jahrhundert.” le muséon 75 (1962): 101–8. den heijer, j. “introduction: middle and mixed arabic, a new trend in arabic 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versions of the new testament: manuscript studies. stockholm: estonian theological society, 1954. wright, w. arabic grammar. 1896–98. reprint, mineola, ny: dover, 2005. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 516-553 abstract this article addresses the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj, which occurred between 116 and 128 ah (734–46 ce) in umayyad khurasan. combining bactrian documents, chinese, arabic, and persian narratives, and numismatic evidence, it highlights the local aspect of this rebellion. it shows that in the frontier region of khurasan, the umayyads were only one political group among many other local and regional powers, all with different political priorities. al-ḥārith b. surayj successfully united arab soldiers, sogdian converts, and local western bactrian rulers by appealing to their political priorities and by mobilizing local cultural symbols against the umayyads. the role of bactrian local rulers in the initial success but also in the downfall of al-ḥārith’s rebellion turns out to have been crucial. introduction in the year 116/734, an unprecedented anti-umayyad rebellion started in the garrison of andkhud,1 an area west of balkh in the frontier region of khurasan. the rebellion was led by al-ḥārith b. surayj (d. 128/746), an arab muslim notable of tamīm, an important tribe in khurasan, who was the commander of the umayyad troops in the garrison. he declared that he was fighting for the qurʾān (al-kitāb), the prophet’s tradition (al-sunna), and allegiance * this research was supported by the european research council under grant number 683194. i would like to thank petra sijpesteijn, alon dar, and edmund hayes, the reviewers, and editors of the journal for their valuable comments and suggestions for revising this article. i am also grateful to jonathan lee for his insightful comments and for editing the draft of this article. 1. that is modern andkhui, located in northwestern afghanistan on the turkmenistan border. the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj (116–28/734–46): the local perspective* said reza huseini cambridge university (sh2170@cam.ac.uk) © 2022 said reza huseini. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:sh2170%40cam.ac.uk?subject= 517 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) to the leadership of the “elected one” (al-bayʿa li-l-riḍā).2 his rebellion weakened umayyad rule in the region and facilitated the abbasid takeover that started there a few years after al-ḥārith’s death. unexpectedly, al-ḥārith was able to unite muslims and non-muslims, arabs and non-arabs in his uprising.3 further, this was the only time that arab muslim forces turned against the umayyad government while allying with a strong non-muslim enemy—namely, the türgesh turks, who themselves were challenging umayyad rule in the east. although the rebellion of al-ḥārith is a well-known event in the history of late umayyad khurasan, its local context, and particularly the role played by bactrian rulers, has been understudied.4 accounts of the rebellion of al-ḥārith appear in later arabic sources. using bactrian documents alongside arabic, persian, and chinese narratives and numismatic data, this article places al-ḥārith’s rebellion in the very complex context of the frontier region of khurasan. such a local perspective offers a nuanced understanding of the forces and motives that gave rise to this revolt. making use of regional accounts and material sources, other scholars have already provided insight on the history of early islamic khurasan, where local interests and motives played at least as important a role in the unfolding of events as did imperial politics initiated in capitals thousands of kilometers away.5 this study builds on their methodology by applying it to the rebellion of al-ḥārith.6 to be able to study this rebellion from a local perspective, we need to understand the situation “on the ground” in bactria at the time of the rebellion. non-arabic sources do not contain any direct references to al-ḥārith’s rebellion, but they do provide essential background information about social and economic conditions as well as political relations in the region before and after the uprising; the former, as we will see, played a crucial 2. muḥammad b. jarīr al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1879–81), 9:1566–67. 3. these terms are not straightforward and are used here in their general meaning. for discussion of this terminology, see p. webb, imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016). 4. for a short overview on al-ḥārith, see m. j. kister, “al-ḥārith b. suraydj,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online). 5. see, for instance, k. athamina, “taxation reforms in early islamic khurasan,” der islam 65 (1988): 272–78; ʿ a. f. al-ʿafnān, “al-qabāʾil al-ʿarabiyya fī khurāsān wa-bilād mā warāʾ al-nahr” (phd diss., umm al-qura university of mecca, 1413/1993); p. pourshariati, “iranian tradition in ṭus and the arab presence in khurasān” (phd diss., columbia university, 1995); m. d. luce, “frontier as process: umayyad khurāsān” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2009); p. crone, the nativist prophets of early islamic iran: rural revolt and local zoroastrianism (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012); a. azad, sacred landscape in medieval afghanistan: revisiting the “faḍāʾil-i balkh” (oxford: oxford university press, 2013); é. de la vaissière, “the ʿabbāsid revolution in marw: new data,” der islam 95, no. 1 (2018): 110–46; r. haug, the eastern frontier: limits of empire in late antique and early medieval central asia (london: i. b. tauris, 2019). this is not, of course, a full bibliography on this subject. 6. in its effort to understand early islamic khurasan, especially its function as a frontier zone of geographically and culturally diverse people and rulers, this article fits into the larger project of my forthcoming doctoral thesis, which examines the arab conquest of bactria with special attention to the role of local actors: s. r. huseini, “framing the conquest: bactrian local rulers and the early muslim domination of bactria (31–128 ah/651–746 ce)” (phd diss., leiden university, 2022). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 518 role in the revolt. first, there are documents written in bactrian, the only middle iranian language that uses the greek alphabet.7 they date to between the early fourth and the late eighth century ce and offer important insights into the concerns and activities of the bactrian inhabitants of the region. the political fragmentation of the region—the continuing dominance of the turkic qaghān even as the umayyads sought to establish their authority—comes out clearly in the bactrian documents. it is also clear that local bactrian rulers in this period remained powerful, controlled local resources, and even had their own military forces. in addition, the documents show that worshippers of old iranian deities and buddhists coexisted in the region. finally, the documents reflect the limits of conversion on the ground, as well as the gradual changes in the political structure of bactria during the umayyad period.8 7. the bactrian documents contain administrative, economic, and legal documents as well as official and private letters reflecting the sociopolitical circumstances in bactria. however, they do not cover the entire bactrian region and were mostly produced in rob in the south, guzgan (modern juzjan) and gaz (possibly darray-i gaz, south of balkh) in the west, and samingan (modern samangan), kadagstan (possibly in modern baghlan), and warnu (probably qala-i zal or qunduz) in the east of bactria. no bactrian document has thus far been found from the balkh oasis. the information these documents yield is limited to the areas where the documents were produced and circulated. nevertheless, they display a continuity in their form and formulas that implies administrative and cultural continuity despite regime changes over the long time span that they cover. the documents have been translated and published by nicholas sims-williams in several publications: n. sims-williams, “new documents in ancient bactrian reveal afghanistan’s past,” iias newsletter 27 (2002): 12–13; “nouveaux documents bactriens du guzgan (new bactrian documents from guzgan),” comptes rendus des séances de l’académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 146, no. 3 (2002): 1047–58; “bactrian letters from the sasanian and hephthalite periods,” in proceedings of the 5th conference of the societas iranologica europæa, ravenna, 6–22 october 2003, vol. 1, ancient and middle iranian studies, ed. a. panaino and a. piras, 701–13 (milan: mimesis, 2006); bactrian documents from northern afghanistan, vol. 2, letters and buddhist texts (london: nour foundation and azimuth editions, 2007); bactrian documents from northern afghanistan, vol. 1, legal and economic documents, rev. ed. (oxford: nour foundation, azimuth editions, and oxford university press, 2012); n. sims-williams and f. de blois, studies in the chronology of the bactrian documents from northern afghanistan, with contributions by h. falk and d. weber (vienna: verlag der österreichischen akademie der wissenschaften, 2018). there is a long list of publications on the bactrian documents, but this article is not the place to mention all of them. 8. these documents have been available for more than two decades but have still not made the impact on historiography that their importance deserves. interest in this material has, however, taken flight in recent years. for earlier studies, see g. khan, “the pre-islamic background of muslim legal formularies,” aram 6 (1994): 193–224; k. rezakhani, “the bactrian collection: an important source for sasanian economic history,” sasanika 13 (2008): 1–14; idem, “balkh and the sasanians: economy and society of northern afghanistan as reflected in the bactrian economic documents,” in ancient and middle iranian studies, ed. m. macuch, d. weber, and d. durkin-meisterernst, 1–21 (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2010); k. van bladel, “the bactrian background of the barmakids,” in islam and tibet: interactions along the musk routes, ed. a. akasoy, c. burnett, and r. yoelitlalim, 43–88 (burlington, vt: ashgate, 2011); r. payne, “the making of turan: the fall and transformation of the iranian east in late antiquity,” journal of late antiquity 9, no. 1 (2016): 4–41; a. azad, “living happily ever after: fraternal polyandry, taxes and ‘the house’ in early islamic bactria,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 79, no. 1 (2016): 33–56. for more recent work, see k. rezakhani, reorienting the sasanians: east iran in late antiquity (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2017); a. azad, “the beginning of islam in afghanistan: conquest, acculturation and islamization,” in afghanistan’s islam from conversion to the taliban, ed. nile green, 41–55 (oakland: university of california press, 2017); h. sheikh, “studies on the bactrian legal documents” (phd diss., georg-august-universität göttingen, 2017); s. r. huseini, “acts of protection 519 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) apart from the bactrian documents, the personal accounts and travelogues of chinese and korean buddhist pilgrims who visited bactria before and after the arab muslim conquests provide valuable information. from their descriptions of encounters, observations, and reflections on what they came across on their travels, much can be deduced about the region and its population.9 a number of multilingual coins minted in anbir (modern sari-i pul) in guzgan in the umayyad period are also included in this study. they were part of a hoard identified in kabul in the early nineteenth century, which was then bought by various museums and private collections in the united kingdom and france.10 in addition, there are the monolingual silver dirhams issued by al-ḥārith—the only local source discussed here that directly references his revolt—which are crucially important to understanding his uprising as they reflect his political agenda and his use of religious vocabulary.11 finally, a persian narrative contains some unique information that seems to have a local provenance; this makes it a useful source despite its late composition.12 together, these sources give us an impression of the conditions in the region, especially the competing political groups operating in it that form the background against which al-ḥārith’s revolt took place. the sources show that the umayyads were not the sole political power in the region, but one among many. reading the arabic narratives that offer the most complete reports on the events with this local perspective in mind sheds light on the complex political and social dynamics that help explain both the initial success and the ultimate failure of al-ḥārith’s rebellion. among the arabic sources that discuss the revolt, al-balādhurī’s ansāb al-ashrāf (genealogies of elites) and al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk (history of prophets and kings) offer the most extensive accounts of the rebellion.13 other arabic sources written before al-ṭabarī either do not include this rebellion or provide only a meager amount of information.14 the arabic narratives written after him mostly summarize the story and do represented in bactrian documents,” annales islamologiques 54 (2021): 107–24; idem, “the idea and practice of justice represented in bactrian documents,” association for iranian studies newsletter 41, no. 2 (2020): 28–31; idem, “between turks and arabs: household, conversion and power dynamics in early abbasid bactria (700– 772),” in the ties that bind: mechanisms of social dependency in the early islamic empire, ed. e. hayes and p. m. sijpesteijn (forthcoming). 9. see si-yu-ki: buddhist records of the western world, trans. s. beal (london: kegan paul, trench, trübner, 1906); hye ch’o, the hye ch’o diary: memoir of the pilgrimage to the five regions of india, trans. y. han-sung et al. (berkeley, ca: asian humanities press, 1984), 52. 10. j. cribb, “coinage in afghanistan during the period of islamic conquest, c. ah 70–150 [ad 690–767],” paper presented at the workshop “contesting empires: sogdiana, bactria and gandhara between the sasanian empire, the tang dynasty and the muslim caliphate (ca. 600–1000 ce),” leiden, september 17, 2020. i am grateful to the author, who provided me with a draft of the paper. 11. s. d. sears, “the revolt of al-ḥārith ibn surayj and the countermarking of umayyad dirhams in early eighth century ce khurāsān,” in the lineaments of islam: studies in honor of fred mcgraw donner, ed. p. cobb, 377–405 (leiden: brill, 2012). thanks to mehdy shaddel, who provided me with this article. 12. ʿabd al-ḥayy b. zaḥāk gardīzī, zayn al-akhbār, ed. ʿa. ḥ. habībī (tehran: dunyā-yi kitāb, 1363/1984). 13. aḥmad b. yaḥyā al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1417/1996). 14. other authors, including khalīfa b. khayyāṭ (d. 240/854), aḥmad b. dāwūd al-dināwarī (d. 290/902), aḥmad b. yaḥyā al-balādhurī (d. 279/892), aḥmad b. abī yaʿqūb b. wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī (d. 292/905?), and ibn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 520 not offer any new details.15 these narratives are, of course, well known and have been used in previous studies of the revolt. but this article offers a rereading of the arabic narratives that focuses on the local conditions and gives special attention to the role of bactrians and khurasanis in the rebellion. for this purpose, al-ṭabarī’s taʾrīkh is a central source of information. al-ṭabarī’s narratives of the revolt come mostly from ʿalī b. muḥammad al-madāʾinī (d. 228/843), who is said to have composed several books on khurasan.16 al-ṭabarī includes information on certain local bactrian rulers, their locations, and their positions in the rebellion that is not mentioned in any other arabic source. it is only al-ṭabarī who informs us which bactrian rulers supported al-ḥārith and which ones did not. further, his reports include local voices, which adds to the importance of his work as far as this article is concerned. his taʾrīkh corroborates the picture of political fragmentation under turkic overlordship painted by the bactrian documents and pilgrims’ reports. combining all these sources to fully comprehend the rebellion in its local and regional context, i argue that this rebellion successfully united both muslim and non-muslim and both arab and local followers who all had different motives but one common purpose: repelling umayyad authority from the east. indeed, the arab muslims were only one political group among many that joined the revolt. i show that local bactrian rulers played a crucial role, their actions dictated by their own interests and shifting political circumstances. in this sense, the rebellion fit into regional power dynamics in the east that had been in place already prior to al-ḥārith’s revolt and that continued into the abbasid period. to provide an overview on the rebellion, i start with an evaluation of previous studies. i then explain al-ḥārith’s early career in khurasan and discuss what might have motivated him to take up arms against umayyad forces. this part also considers why al-ḥārith’s message appealed to the arab muslim troops and their leaders against the background of umayyadtürgesh fighting in the region. turning to the local conditions of the revolt, i examine the controversy over the poll tax (jizya) and its relation to the rebellion, including al-ḥārith’s support among sogdian converts. i then discuss al-ḥārith’s local allies, particularly bactrian rulers and the reasons for their support of him. finally, i examine umayyad responses to the rebellion and the role of bactrian rulers therein. aʿtham al-kūfī (d. 314/926), wrote before al-ṭabarī. however, khalīfa b. khayyāṭ’s and ibn aʿtham al-kūfī’s reports on al-ḥārith’s rebellion are very short and do not provide any details about his local supporters. al-dināwarī’s narratives on late umayyad khurasan do not even mention the rebellion. see khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, ed. a. z. al-ʿumarī (riyadh: dār ṭayba, 1405/1985), 346–48; ibn aʿtham al-kūfī, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. ʿa. shīrī (beirut: dār al-aḍwāʾ, 1411/1991), 8:282–83; aḥmad b. dāwūd al-dināwarī, kitāb al-akhbār al-ṭiwāl, ed. v. gergas (leiden: brill, 1888), 318–30. al-yaʿqūbī provides some information on the reign of caliph hishām (r. 105–25/723–42), but he does not discuss the rebellion of al-ḥārith; see aḥmad b. abī yaʿqūb b. wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh al-yaʿqūbī, ed. ʿa. a. muhannā (beirut: shirkat al-ʿālamī li-l-maṭbuʿāt, 1431/2010); idem, kitāb al-buldān, ed. t. g. j. juynboll (leiden: brill, 1860). 15. see, for instance, ʿizz al-dīn b. al-athīr, al-kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, ed. a. f. ʿa. a. al-qāḍī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1407/1987); aḥmad b. ʿabd al-wahhāb al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab fi funūn al-adab, ed. s. ʿa. f. ʿāshūr (cairo: wizārat al-thaqāfa wa-l-irshād al-qawmī, 1963); ismāʿīl b. kathīr al-dimashqī, al-bidāya wa-lnihāya, ed. ʿa. shīrī (beirut: dār al-iḥyāʾ wa-l-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1408/1988); sibṭ b. al-jawzī, mirʾāt al-zamān fī tawārīkh al-aʿyān, ed. m. barakat, k. al-kharāt, and a. rayḥāwī (damascus: dār al-risāla al-ʿālamiyya, 1434/2013). 16. u. sezgin, “al-madāʾinī,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed. 521 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) previous studies various reasons have been proposed in previous studies to explain the response to al-ḥārith’s call for revolt. these include his religious piety, the umayyads’ decision to impose jizya on recent converts in sogdiana and the protests this decision raised, and umayyad changes in the military and political organization of khurasan, which various local power holders saw as threatening. i will discuss these explanations one by one and offer my evaluation of the arguments put forward. according to gerlof van vloten, al-ḥārith was a “pious muslim, ascetic and reformer.”17 he thus suggests a specific religious appeal behind the revolt. others, too, have sought the reason for al-ḥārith’s success in his religious character. al-ḥārith is thereby often referred to as murjiʾī.18 the murjiʾa was a religious movement that stressed faith over actions and was active in khurasan.19 saleh said agha has argued that the murjiʾī character of al-ḥārith’s rebellion and his “uncompromising puritan posturing” are the reasons behind muslim and non-muslim support for the uprising.20 al-ḥārith’s relationship with jahm b. ṣafwān (d. 128/746) seems to have been the main factor that prompted these scholars to identify him as a murjiʾī.21 jahm’s identity as a murjiʿī leader in khurasan is, however, not undisputed.22 moreover, although opponents of the umayyads regularly couched their dissatisfaction in religious terms, this tendency does not mean they shared a sectarian program. al-ḥārith’s interest in debate with his umayyad rivals on the issue of the application of the qurʾān and the sunna, as well as his military operations against the umayyads, may create a temptation to connect his cause with that of the kharijites, the military groups that challenged umayyad authority in iraq and in the central and eastern parts of iran. however, the evidence is too weak to identify him as a kharijite.23 using religious slogans and taking up arms against 17. cited in h. a. r. gibb, the arab conquests in central asia (london: royal asiatic society, 1923), 78. 18. wellhausen mentions that al-ḥārith appeared as a murjiʾī; j. wellhausen, the arab kingdom and its fall, trans. m. graham weir (calcutta: university of calcutta, 1927), 464. 19. for details on the murjiʾa in khurasan, see w. madelung, “the early murjiʾa in khurasan and transoxiana and the spread of ḥanafism,” der islam 59, no. 1 (1982): 1–39; k. athamina, “the early murjiʾa: some notes,” journal of semitic studies 35, no. 1 (1990): 109–30; ḥ. ʿaṭwān, al-murjiʾa wa-l-jahmiyya bi-khurāsān fī al-ʿaṣr al-umawī (beirut: dār al-jil, 1413/1993). for more information, see p. crone and f. zimmermann, the epistle of salim ibn dhakwan (oxford: oxford university press, 2001), 219–50, and v. l. novak, “the delineation between believer, rebel and heretic” (ma thesis, university of maryland, 2012). 20. s. s. agha, the revolution which toppled the umayyads (leiden: brill, 2003), 154. 21. the association between these two characters is mentioned in most of the studies. for instance, see wellhausen, arab kingdom, 464–65; madelung, “early murjiʾa,” 33–35; athamina, “early murjiʾa,” 124–25; m. parvīsh and m. tabārakī, “aużāʿ-i sīyāsī khurāsān az vurūd-i islām tā payān-i khilāfat-i umaviyān,” khiradnāma 22 (1390sh/2011): 33–34; m. bihishtī sirisht and m. m. pūr, “rīshahā-yi qiyām-i ḥārith b. surayj va natāyij-i ān,” taʾrīkh dar āyina-yi pazhūhish 9, no. 2 (1390–91sh/2012–13): 31; e. urban, “the early islamic mawālī: a window onto processes of identity construction and social change” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2012), 128. 22. for detail on jahm’s thought, see j. van ess, “jahm b. ṣafwān,” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed., ed. e. yarshater, updated april 10, 2012, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/jahm-b-safwan; kh. al-ʿulā, “jahm b. ṣafwān wa-makānatuhu fī al-fikr al-islāmī” (ma thesis, baghdad university, 1965). 23. al-ḥārith is called a khārijī in ḥabībī’s edition of gardīzī’s zayn al-akhbār, 257, but this description could have been added later by a copyist. moshe sharon rejected al-ḥārith’s identification as a khārijī in revolt: the https://iranicaonline.org/articles/jahm-b-safwan al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 522 the umayyads were commonplace in this period.24 most importantly, viewing al-ḥārith’s actions in an exclusively ideological and theological vein fails to appreciate fully the social and political context in which his rebellion occurred. this context has, however, been taken up by some other scholars. julius wellhausen, for example, regards the revolt as having been directed against the imposition of jizya tax on sogdian converts, and he portrays al-ḥārith as an advocate for the rights of indigenous converts.25 vasily barthold discusses al-ḥārith’s revolt in the same context and argues that it did not have an “anti-dynastic character” at the beginning.26 however, khalid blankinship notes that the sogdian converts on whom the umayyads imposed the jizya had already voiced their resentment before al-ḥārith’s revolt. al-ḥārith’s revolt then incorporated and built on these protests. blankinship argues that “the ties of many of al-harith’s followers to the earlier reform movement prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the later movement was a continuation of the previous one.”27 nevertheless, he points out that this “movement must have been the product of extreme tensions of local provenance.”28 awad mohammad khleifat effectively rejects any connection between the jizya and al-ḥārith’s rebellion because of the absence of any evidence that the revolt was aimed at the defense of converts’ rights.29 unfortunately, khleifat does not offer an alternative explanation. the arguments that seek to connect al-ḥārith’s revolt with the converts’ protests might have been valid if the rebellion had taken place in sogdiana, where the movement against the jizya had arisen some years before. as i will argue, however, al-ḥārith’s mission began instead in andkhud in bactria, where the jizya was not imposed on the local population as it was in sogdiana. similarly, al-ḥārith is presented as the champion of the rights of mawālī, or clients.30 elizabeth urban has questioned that relation. in a discussion of the rebellion in the context of factionalism in umayyad khurasan, she assigns al-ḥārith a religious program, emphasizing his religious slogans and ascribing a murjiʿī sectarian identity to him.31 social and military aspects of the ʿabbāsid revolution (jerusalem: hebrew university, 1990), 30–31. 24. see h.-l. hagemann, “was muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī a khārijite? rebellion in the early marwānid period” in the present issue. for al-ḥārith’s emphasis on the qurʾān, the sunna, and shūrā, see p. crone and m. hinds, god’s caliph: religious authority in the first centuries of islam (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1986), 59–65; see also p. crone, god’s rule: government and islam (new york: columbia university press, 2004), 277–78. on the significance of al-ḥārith’s call for shūrā and the leadership of the elected one, see p. crone, “on the meaning of the ʿabbasid call to al-riḍā,” in the islamic world from classical to modern times: essays in honor of bernard lewis, ed. c. e. bosworth et al., 95–111 (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1989). 25. wellhausen, arab kingdom, 465. 26. w. barthold, turkestan down to the mongol invasion (london: oxford university press, 1928), 190–91. 27. k. y. blankinship, the end of the jihād state: the reign of hishām ibn ʿabd al-malik and the collapse of the umayyads (albany: state university of new york press, 1994), 177. 28. blankinship, end of the jihād state, 177. 29. a. m. khleifat, “the caliphate of hisham b. ʿabd al-malik (105–125/724–743) with special reference to internal problems” (phd thesis, school of oriental and african studies, university of london, 1973). 30. e. urban discusses these studies in “early islamic mawālī,” 128–35. 31. ibid. 523 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the final group of arguments takes a regional focus, pointing to the impact of the settlement of umayyad forces on the local balance of power, which led to a struggle for power and control between the arab newcomers and local power holders. h. a. r. gibb argues that al-ḥārith’s revolt was primarily a fight for control over khurasan between the umayyads and türgesh forces. he notes that the umayyad governor’s administrative and military mismanagement in khurasan provoked resentment, including al-ḥārith’s, and that “it may even be questioned whether he [al-ḥārith] and his small personal following were not rather the tools than the leaders of the elements making for the overthrow of the umayyad administration in khurāsān.”32 m. a. shaban has viewed al-ḥārith’s rebellion as a reaction to the reorganization of arab settlements in khurasan by hishām b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 105–25/723–42). the movement of troops in khurasan was aimed at keeping potentially disloyal forces far from marw and occupied in fighting the empire’s enemies, especially the türgesh, while retaining the fighters who were loyal to the caliph in marw. this reorganization was not acceptable to the arab tribesmen sent on these missions, who saw it as “an unfair reward for their obedience to the government to be sent from marw, which they considered their home, to new locations which virtually amounted to exile.”33 ʿabd allāh mahdī al-khaṭīb discusses the rebellion in the context of competition between local eastern iranian leaders and newly emerging arab elites in khurasan.34 likewise, kurūsh ṣālihī and javād bahrāminiyā maintain that al-ḥārith’s goal was to implement economic and social reforms to benefit local people living under umayyad authority.35 robert haug places the rebellion in the context of a frontier region in which various political groups coexisted and reacted differently to the umayyad incorporation of eastern iranian territories.36 haug questions the presumed centrality of religion to the rebellion and instead focuses on al-ḥārith’s opposition to the marwānids, which attracted arabs and non-arabs alike.37 recently, stuart sears has drawn attention to another local aspect of the revolt on the basis of numismatic evidence. he analyzes a group of silver coins issued by al-ḥārith in balkh and the silver dirhams countermarked by the hephthalites of bactria in support of al-ḥārith. the participation of the hephthalites in this rebellion was already discussed by shaban,38 but sears is the first to use numismatic evidence for this purpose.39 one more scholar should be mentioned here, although his study deals with the abbasid revolution that took place after al-ḥārith’s revolt had already been subdued. étienne de la vaissière highlights the sociopolitical situation in the region of marw where 32. gibb, arab conquests, 78. 33. m. a. shaban, the ʿabbāsid revolution (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1970), 118. 34. ʿ a. m. al-khaṭīb, ḥukūmat-i banī umayya dar khurāsān, trans. b. musavī (tehran: intishārāt-i tūkā, 1357/1978). agha has similar ideas about the role of iranians in the abbasid revolution; see agha, revolution. 35. k. ṣālihī and j. bahrāminiyā, “muṭāliʿa-yi taṭbīqī qiyāmahā-yi ʿabd al-raḥmān b. ashʿas va ḥārith b. surayj,” pazhūhishnāma-yi taʾrīkh-i islām 10 (1392sh/2013): 79–105. 36. these territories were bactria, sogdiana, and khwarazm. 37. haug, eastern frontier, 141–43. 38. shaban, ʿabbāsid revolution, 6–14. 39. sears, “revolt of al-ḥārith ibn surayj,” 377–405. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 524 abū muslim (d. 137/755) rose to power. as la vaissière shows, abū muslim successfully managed local politics for his own ends, which culminated in his domination of the region. he convincingly argues that abū muslim formulated his mission using local vocabulary and symbols, particularly the black garments that were such an important symbol to the indigenous population and that had already been used by al-ḥārith before him.40 as i argue below, it is exactly this awareness of local sentiments and concerns, including the use of black garments, that explains the support received by al-ḥārith’s movement. my reconstruction of the rise and fall of al-ḥārith’s movement, therefore, builds on the work of scholars who have already considered the local context from one or more points of view. it is, for instance, indebted to haug’s emphasis on fragmentation within khurasani society due to the region’s position as a frontier. in fact, it was precisely al-ḥārith’s ability to appeal to different groups for different reasons that explains his initial success. in that sense, my study also follows the approach applied by la vaissière in explaining the very successful, albeit later, efforts of abū muslim to drum up local support for his revolutionary movement. for al-ḥārith, it was such local support, i contend, that played a crucial role in the course of the revolt, and it was the withdrawal of this local support that marked the beginning of the end of his uprising. by contrast, i will show that some of the explanations proposed for his revolt, including al-ḥārith’s religious identity and the idea that his movement was motivated by fiscal discrimination against converts, are unfounded. al-ḥārith b. surayj al-ḥārith belonged to the tribe of tamīm. surayj, his father, lived in the garrison of basra in the quarter of the banū mujāshiʿ and is known to have received a stipend (ʿaṭā) of 700 dirhams, which means that he was a member of the fighting forces (muqātila).41 whether al-ḥārith was born in khurasan or was sent there is not clear. al-khaṭīb remarks that al-ḥārith was from dabussiya, which was an arab muslim garrison in sogdiana.42 al-ḥārith’s first appearance in history is as a soldier in the arab muslim army of khurasan at the battle of paykand, near bukhara on the right bank of the amu darya, in 108/727–28. when türgesh forces blocked the irrigation canal and deprived the muslim army of drinking water, al-ḥārith appears on the stage as a hero. he encourages the soldiers of tamīm and qays to fight the turks and eventually succeeds in pushing the enemy back from the canal.43 not much is known about al-ḥārith after this incident until the beginning of his revolt in the garrison of andkhud. al-ḥārith started his rebellion by inviting people to the application of the qurʾān and the sunna and allegiance to the leadership of the elected one. such leadership could have been legitimized only via a shūrā, or an assembly of pious muslim leaders. the first two elements of al-ḥārith’s program (adherence to the qurʾān and the sunna) were fundamental religious tenets for all muslims, but the insistence on a shūrā was highly political, as it 40. la vaissière, “ʿabbāsid revolution,” 110–46. 41. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 12:110. 42. al-khaṭīb, ḥukūmat-i banī umayya, 105. wellhausen mentions the same thing in arab kingdom, 464. 43. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1513–14. 525 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) called into question the very basis of umayyad political legitimacy. establishing a shūrā was thus a rebellious act, removing decision-making power from the caliph and placing it in the hands of an assembly of arab muslim elites in khurasan, to which al-ḥārith belonged. la vaissière argues that al-ḥārith’s call for al-riḍā was in fact a way to invoke his own leadership.44 according to this view, al-ḥārith appealed for al-riḍā because it necessitated a shūrā, in which he would play a major role, and which would thus give him power over all appointments in khurasan. al-ḥārith’s intention to rebel was known to some arab notables already before his calling for the shūrā. when he invited people to join his cause in balkh, qaṭan b. ʿabd al-raḥmān, an arab muslim figure from the garrison in balkh, responded that he would not trust al-ḥārith’s words even if “[the archangel] gabriel stands on his right and michael on his left.”45 clearly, qaṭan did not believe al-ḥārith’s claim that his movement was purely or merely a call to adherence to the qurʾān and the sunna. rather, he suspected a far more personal motive. the umayyad authorities soon became aware of al-ḥārith’s political ambitions, and he was punished. al-ṭabarī mentions that al-ḥārith was whipped publicly in balkh by a certain al-tujībī during the governorship of junayd b. ʿabd al-raḥmān (in office 111–16/730–34).46 al-balādhurī writes that he was whipped for his refusal to be a janība, or subordinate, to a certain murra, who stood above al-ḥārith in administrative rank.47 others, however, ascribe the punishment to al-ḥārith’s political ambitions. khālid al-qasrī (d. 126/743), the governor of iraq, assumed that al-ḥārith wanted to be caliph but dismissed this prospect, saying, “how remote are the means of the caliphate from a saddle?”48 the personal ambitions ascribed to al-ḥārith by these historical figures in umayyad service could very well explain some of al-ḥārith’s strategic choices, such as joining forces with the türgesh turks and attaching himself to local bactrian rulers (see below). but how did his political agenda appeal to the arab muslim soldiers of the garrison in andkhud? al-ḥārith’s revolt and arab support the rebellion of al-ḥārith should be considered in the context of a series of political and military interactions in khurasan initiated by umayyad attacks. these affected various local actors differently, laying the ground for al-ḥārith’s clever appeal to these different local groups with specific arguments and programmatic points. in the early eighth century ce, umayyad armies led by qutayba b. muslim al-bāhilī (d. 96/715) incorporated bactria and sogdiana into the political structure of umayyad khurasan through campaigns of conquest. when the umayyad armies reached chach, a city located on the right bank of the syr darya river, they entered the world of the steppe, a region from where nomadic bands of warriors had appeared to attack sedentary societies and create nomadic empires.49 shortly after the 44. la vaissière, “ʿabbāsid revolution,” 136. 45. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1657. ibn aʿtham al-kūfī calls his followers “people of corruption” in futūḥ, 7:283. 46. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1567. 47. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 12:111. 48. ibid. 49. for these nomadic empires, see c. beckwith, empires of the silk road: a history of central eurasia from al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 526 umayyad conquests, the türgesh turks united under the leadership of the qaghān sülü (r. 716–36 ce). they fought the umayyads for control of sogdiana, which led to two decades of war. the türgesh defeated the umayyad troops in the battle of the “day of thirst” (yawm al-ʿaṭsh) in 106/724 and in the battle of the “day of the mountain pass” (yawm al-shiʿb) in 112/731.50 the nomadic nature of the türgesh turks and their highly mobile cavalry, which could operate around the year and under diverse geographic conditions, put them at an advantage vis-à-vis the umayyads. the umayyads, in turn, relied on both lightly and heavily armored cavalry (al-mujarrada and al-mujawwafa). the türgesh policy of plundering ensured that even when the turks lost a battle, there was not much left for the umayyad forces to gain. similarly, the turks’ nomadic tradition meant that the umayyads were unable to impose regular taxes on them even if they did conquer their territories.51 the continuing türgesh-umayyad warfare put enormous pressure on the umayyad soldiers in khurasan, which laid the foundation for al-ḥārith’s support among the arab troops. al-ḥārith’s plan to establish an independent government was attractive to arab muslim soldiers for several reasons. independence would end the war in the east. the arab troops were exhausted from the war with the türgesh turks. moreover, the iraqi soldiers, who had by now become integrated in social and economic life in khurasan, were particularly disappointed by the umayyad losses.52 unlike the syrian troops, who were loyal to the caliph, the iraqis were more interested in retaining their socioeconomic position in the region. before al-ḥārith’s rebellion, the iraqis of khurasan had sent a delegation to the governor of iraq to complain: “we are on a frontier, facing the enemy in an endless war. each one of us wears the steel armor to the point that it is connected to his skin …, but you are in a province where you live in prosperity wearing colorful and exquisite dress.”53 al-ḥārith’s promise to establish just government on the basis of shūrā with the aim of limiting the caliph’s burdensome military policies would have been an incentive for these troops to join his revolt. the local context and the role of bactrian leaders arab muslim control of the frontier region of khurasan was far from secure or comprehensive. this was due in part to the geography of umayyad khurasan, which belonged to the pamir-makran “shatter zone.”54 an important characteristic of this shatter the bronze age to the present (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2009). the most recent study on this subject is w. ball, the eurasian steppe: people, movement, ideas (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2021). on the umayyads’ reaching chach (modern tashkent) and its consequences, see haug, eastern frontier, 111–37. 50. blankinship, end of the jihād state, 126–28, 155–61. for a discussion on the battle the “day of the mountain pass,” see s. s. agha, “the ‘battle of the pass’: two consequential readings,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 63, no. 3 (2000): 340–55. 51. blankinship, end of the jihād state, 126. 52. ibid., 126–28. 53. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1460–61. 54. the pamir-makran shatter zone was created by a tectonic collision that formed a “massive system of mountain chains.” see s. r. bowlby and k. h. white, “the geographical background,” in the archaeology of afghanistan from earliest times to the timurid period, ed. r. allchin and n. hammond, rev. ed., ed. w. ball 527 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) zone is its extreme geographical diversity. the plains contain large areas of desert, marshes, rivers, and high hills, all situated together in one region. this terrain posed significant logistical difficulties for the arab muslim invaders, who had no experience with this kind of geography. umayyad khurasan also had a diverse population with a variety of religious groups.55 these factors meant that umayyad control in the region was limited, often confined to garrison towns established outside existing urban spaces. arabic narratives describe the trials that the umayyads endured in their efforts to control khurasan. the main challenges lay, on the one hand, in settling arabs in khurasan,56 keeping the arab tribal leaders loyal to the umayyad caliphs, and uniting them in defense of the northeastern frontier,57 and, on the other hand, in imposing umayyad authority over local independent, warlike iranian and turkic rulers who moved between their winter capitals on the plains and their summer capitals in the mountains.58 other challenges included maximizing provincial revenue and organizing the province’s administration.59 the difficulty the umayyads experienced in dealing with these diverse issues is indicated by the frequent changes of governors between 86 and 130/705–4760 as well as by the eruption of intertribal wars among the arabs of khurasan61 and various rebellions led by local rulers and arab muslim elite members. the rebellion of al-ḥārith occurred within this complicated regional political situation. the umayyads were at war with the nomadic türgesh confederation, which was as ambitious and expansionist as the umayyads were. this had an impact on local arab troops. local arab muslim elites also resented the umayyads’ centralizing policies, and they shared these resentments with arab elites in other provinces. at the same time, the umayyads had to deal with numerous sogdian and bactrian rulers who made alliances with outside powers to secure their own political priorities. in the early eighth century ce, bactria and sogdiana were controlled by a number of local independent rulers. however, most of them recognized the overlordship of the qaghān of the western turks.62 to protect their positions, these local rulers shifted their (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2019), 16–17. 55. luce, “frontier as process,” 12–52; haug, eastern frontier, 9–14. 56. pourshariati, “iranian tradition”; e. l. daniel, “ʿarab iii. arab settlements in iran,” in encyclopaedia iranica, updated august 10, 2011, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/arab-iii. 57. an example is the rebellion of ʿαbd allāh b. khāzim and his son mūsā and their attempt to create de facto rule in khurasan (haug, eastern frontier, 99–109). 58. the best example is the attempt by yazīd b. al-muhallab and later qutayba b. muslim to subdue ṭarkhān nizak, the hephthalite prince of badghis (haug, the eastern frontier, 119–121). 59. the tax reforms of ashras al-sullāmī described by al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1507–10, offer an example. 60. for instance, saʿīd b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz was governor of khurasan for only one year. he was replaced by saʿīd al-ḥarashī, who also remained in office for a year. later, jarrāh b. ʿabd allāḥ al-ḥakamī kept his position for just seventeen months. 61. for the arab tribal war in balkh, see al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1472–77. 62. la vaissière called this situation in sogdiana “fragmentation territoriale”; é. de la vaissière, samarcande et samarra: élites d’asie centrale dans l’empire abbasside (paris: association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2007), 23–36, 68–75. there are some bactrian documents attesting to this situation in bactria (documents t, tt, u, uu, v, x, and y in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:98–103, 104–5, 106–11, 113–15, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/arab-iii al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 528 loyalties frequently and applied intricate political strategies. thus, it is not a surprise that the chaghān khudā the king of chaghaniyan in northern bactria, invited the umayyads into his territory to protect him from hostile neighboring rulers.63 similarly, ghūrak, the local ruler of samarkand, signed a peace treaty with qutayba b. muslim64 but later assisted the türgesh against the umayyads.65 ghūrak also appealed to the tang emperor in china for help against the umayyads66 but then did not hesitate to save the retreating arab troops in their war with the türgesh.67 control over revenue collection, such as tribute and taxation, not only was a bone of contention between local arab elites and central umayyad authorities but also mobilized local non-arab rulers. the provincial revenues from khurasan came from a variety of sources. the main sources of income besides booty and gifts were tribute paid in cash (dirham ʿājila) by local rulers after negotiations and the conclusion of peace treaties (ṣulḥ) with the arab muslim conquerors, annual tribute (dirham fī kull ʿām), the poll tax, and later the land tax (kharāj).68 the taxation process involved arab muslim financial officials, local rulers, and taxpayers. taxes were collected by the local rulers and delivered to the umayyad financial agents. their monopoly over tax collection benefited the local rulers while simultaneously preventing direct contact between the arab muslim agents and the local population, a policy that left the local rulers’ financial and political authority intact.69 the jizya, mentioned frequently in the arabic sources, was collected from non-muslims and could become a political issue at any time. when it was imposed on converts who had accepted islam in the hope that they would be released from this imposition, resistance and even revolt sometimes ensued.70 in a frontier zone, such an imposition was fraught 116–25, 136–41, 142–43). 63. aḥmad b. yaḥyā al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1866), 419–20. 64. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 7:160–62. 65. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1533–45. 66. é. chavannes, documents sur les tou-kiue (turcs) occidentaux (saint petersburg: commissionnaires de l’académie impériale des sciences, 1903), 204–5. 67. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1542–43. 68. al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, 447–90; abū yūsuf, kitāb al-kharāj (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, 1399/1979). the plunder of paykand by qutayba brought enormous wealth to the arabs according to abū bakr muḥammad b. jaʿfar al-narshakhī, taʾrīkh-i bukhārā, trans. a. n. a. b. m. b. n. al-qubāvī, summarized by m. b. zafar, ed. m. t. mudarris rażavī (tehran: maṭbaʿa-yi dawlatī, 1362/1983), 61–63. 69. athamina, “taxation reforms,” 272–78. d. r. hill provides information on the income raised by the conquests in the termination of hostilities in the early arab conquests a.d. 634–656 (london: luzac, 1971), 144–52. a similar arrangement can be observed in egypt. arietta papaconstantinou has argued that leaders of the egyptian christian community exploited their position of authority vis-à-vis the local population as long as they functioned as middlemen for the arab muslim rulers; a. papaconstantinou, “‘great men,’ churchmen, and the others: forms of authority in the villages of the umayyad period,” in village institutions in egypt in the roman to early arab periods, ed. d. rathbone and m. langellotti, 178–89 (london: british academy, 2020). 70. in egypt, too, arab officials continued levying the jizya on converts, which led to protests. people showed up to protest the situation at the governmental palace in fustat; p. m. sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state: the world of a mid-eighth-century egyptian official (oxford: oxford university press, 2013), 193–95. see also d. c. dennett, conversion and the poll tax in early islam (1950; repr., new delhi: idarah-i adabyat-i delli, 2000), http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/view/creators/90004197.html 529 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) with danger, since the discontented could join forces with the türgesh turks. indeed, the umayyad jizya policy angered local sogdian converts who appealed to the türgesh for help against the arab muslim authorities in khurasan. but did the jizya policy in sogdiana really trigger al-ḥārith’s rebellion? as noted above, some scholars have argued that this was the case. however, it does not appear that the jizya issue was particularly important for al-ḥārith at the beginning of his uprising, although he subsequently exploited the discontent around this tax when he needed local support. before discussing that, however, we need to ask why these muslim converts chose to revolt rather than negotiate with the umayyad authorities. the umayyad jizya policy helped al-ḥārith gain local support for his revolt once it had started. but it was not the direct cause of his rebellion. the jizya was a recurring political issue that had plagued previous governors of khurasan when al-ḥārith served the government. it caused problems during the reign of caliph ʿumar ii (r. 99–101/717–20), whose piety and justice are praised in the chronicles particularly because he abolished the practice of demanding the jizya from converts.71 however, lifting the jizya from converts in khurasan may have been an act not of sheer piety but rather of realpolitik. al-ṭabarī mentions that in the year 100/719, the governor of khurasan, al-jarrāḥ b. ʿabd allāh al-ḥakamī (d. 111/730), sent a delegation (wafd) to the caliph. usually, such delegations represented arab muslim elites of the province and defended their interests.72 in this case, however, a local mawlā (client) of the banū ḍubba named ṣāliḥ b. ṭarīf, known as abū al-ṣaydā, was part of the delegation. he was not a sogdian, but he was a recent convert who was well aware of the situation in the region. he complained to the caliph: there are 20,000 mawālī fighting alongside muslim soldiers without receiving a salary or rations (bi-lā ʿaṭā wa-lā rizq), and another 20,000 of the protected people (ahl al-dhimma) who converted to islam but still have to pay the jizya. and the amir [al-jarrāḥ] who came to khurasan is a harsh man who discriminates between people and loves his own tribe. he is a sword of al-ḥajjāj (sayf min suyūf al-ḥajjāj) who rules by oppression and hostility.73 in light of the presence of the türgesh in khurasan and their relation to the local population, the caliph must have been aware of the danger developing in the east. it highly likely (though not certain) that he declared his decision to exempt all converts from payment of the jizya with the eastern situation in mind.74 in a similar decision, in 106/725 the governor of khurasan asad b. ʿabd allāh al-qasrī (d. 120/737) ordered that jizya 104–13. 71. see a. borrut, “entre tradition et histoire: genèse et diffusion de l’image de ‘umar ii,” mélanges de l’université saint-joseph 58 (2005): 329–69; j. tannous, the making of the medieval middle east: religion, society, and simple believers (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2018). 72. for details on the wafd, see m. tillier, “représenter la province auprès du pouvoir impérial: les délégations (wufūd) égyptiennes aux trois premiers siècles de l’islam,” arabica 67, no. 2–3 (2020): 125–99. 73. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1353–54. 74. ibid., 9:1354. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 530 not be taken from converts to prevent them from joining the türgesh. however, his policy was discontinued when he was dismissed in 109/728.75 in 110/729, the governor ashras al-sullāmī (d. 111/730) attempted to reinstate asad’s policy while also tasking abū al-ṣaydā with converting people to islam. however, ghūrak objected, pointing to the financial loss the policy would cause.76 the sources regularly quote umayyad governors offering the same argument, making it something of a topos.77 for local non-muslim rulers, however, any active conversion policy had a direct negative effect on their income base. moreover, conversion created new social ties for the converts, decreasing the rulers’ local support base in general terms, as well.78 sogdian rulers thus attempted to stop this undermining of their lucrative role as local tax collectors. under pressure from sogdian rulers, the muslim authorities instituted new criteria for exemptions from the jizya: converts seeking such exemptions had to prove that they were good muslims, circumcised, praying regularly, and able to recite the qurʾān. in response to this ruling, sogdian converts in samarkand protested, but their complaints were suppressed and their leaders, including abū al-ṣaydā and bishr b. jarmūz, were arrested. further, umayyad fiscal administrators humiliated some local notables by ripping their clothes, putting their belts around their necks, and taking the jizya by force. as a result, sogdian converts sought the aid of the türgesh turks against the muslim government.79 during the anti-jizya protests in sogdiana, al-ḥārith was based in ashras al-sullāmī’s camp. he witnessed all these events but showed no interest in supporting the protests against the imposition of the jizya on converts. his revolt commenced a full six years after these events took place, which makes it unlikely that this was the rebellion’s main trigger. moreover, he issued his call for revolt not in sogdiana but in the garrison of andkhud on the bactrian side of the amu darya. these facts indicate that the umayyad jizya policy in sogdiana was not the cause of al-ḥārith’s revolt in bactria. however, as we will see later, he did exploit the jizya issue to attract sogdian converts once his revolt was underway. the beginning of al-ḥārith’s revolt al-ḥārith launched his rebellion in 116/734 in the andkhud garrison and counted on the support of its arab muslim soldiers. unexpectedly, he did not move to marw, the political center of khurasan, but instead marched toward balkh, where the garrison of baruqān was located. was this accidental or a calculated military move? what could al-ḥārith hope to find in balkh? according to al-ṭabarī, al-ḥārith marched on balkh with four thousand troops belonging to tamīm and azd who had joined him from the andkhud garrison. he first encountered arab muslim forces under naṣr b. sayyār (d. 131/749), head of the garrison of baruqān, which is said to have housed ten thousand troops from various arab tribes. al-ḥārith invited 75. blankinship, end of the jihād state, 125, 127. 76. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1508. 77. sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state, 193–95. 78. i discuss the problems created by conversion in a bactrian household in “between turks and arabs.” 79. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1507–10; athamina, “taxation reforms,” 278. 531 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) naṣr and other arab muslim elites to heed his call for the application of the qurʾān and the sunna and for allegiance to the leadership of the elected one, but his message was rejected. after a quick skirmish, naṣr fled,80 though the reason for his flight is not given. possibly he did not want to witness another conflict like the one he had seen earlier in balkh when arab muslim soldiers had refused to fight the türgesh. in that instance, the soldiers had mutinied, and the situation rapidly turned into a tribal war between troops from rabīʿa and those from yaman. naṣr had been able to suppress the rebels only with the help of troops sent to him by the chaghān khudā.81 after capturing baruqān, al-ḥārith appointed sulaymān b. ʿabd allāh b. khāzim governor of balkh. the ibn khāzim family had shown opposition to umayyad rule on several occasions. sulaymān’s brother was the famous mūsā (d. 85/704–5) who had established de facto rule in tirmidh after tribal leaders, provoked by ʿabd al-malik (r. 65–86/685–705), had killed his father ʿabd allāh b. khāzim in 72/691. ibn khāzim’s family had also supported ʿabd allāh b. zubayr (d. 73/692) during the second fitna (61–73/680–92).82 al-ḥārith’s appointment of sulaymān was not only a declaration of his anti-umayyad intentions but also an attempt to gain the support of the remaining members of ibn khāzim’s family, who were known for their long struggle against the umayyads. the repeated participation in different revolts by members of the umayyad elite is also addressed in the contributions of petra sijpesteijn and hannah-lena hagemann to this issue. it raises interesting questions about the umayyad polity’s apparent ability and desire to restitute and reintegrate members of its elite who had shown temporary dissatisfaction and disagreement with its policies. and it challenges the definition of a rebellion as constituting an absolute and definite break between rebels and representatives of the central authority, as raised in the introduction. ibn khāzim’s complaints about umayyad central power were similar to those of other local arab muslim elites. as the main consumers of provincial revenues, they rejected the caliph’s attempts to limit their autonomy or their access to provincial resources.83 any encroachment on what they perceived as their right was opposed, often by force. the resentment of local arab elites about expanding umayyad administrative power and the resulting competition over local resources seem to have been recurring motifs in revolts throughout the umayyad empire in this period, including revolts in egypt, iraq, and khurasan as discussed by hagemann, sijpesteijn, and alon dar in this issue.84 al-ḥārith celebrated his victory over naṣr b. sayyār by striking coins in balkh. both the legend “god commanded justice for the triumphant one” (amara allāh bi-l-ʿadl li-l-manṣūr) on his coins and the legend “o victorious” (yā manṣūr) that was reportedly used as a slogan 80. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1566–67. 81. ibid., 9:1473–77. 82. ibid., 9:1568. 83. for example, al-ḥakamī al-ghifārī rejected muʿāwiya’s request for tribute (ibid., 7:110). qutayba directly warned caliph sulaymān, saying that “he will dismiss the caliph like he removes his shoe” (ibid., 8:1283–85). 84. see also yaacov lev on the coptic-arab revolts in early eighth-century ce egypt: y. lev, “coptic rebellions and the islamization of medieval egypt (8th–10th century): medieval and modern perceptions,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 39 (2002): 303–44. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 532 by his followers announced the arrival of a new government whose priority was justice. the title manṣūr refers to al-ḥārith and shows his political ambition to establish an independent government in khurasan.85 the act of minting coins, assigning his own appointee over balkh, and insisting on a shūrā to decide on all further appointments in khurasan were acts of rebellion against the umayyad authorities. in balkh, al-ḥārith was in a position to reach out to three different groups. the first two groups were the arab troops and members of the local elite, in particular families such as the banū khāzim. al-ḥārith knew about the resentment of the arab muslim soldiers in baruqān who had refused to fight the türgesh and whose resistance had been suppressed by naṣr b. sayyār. more importantly, balkh was a strategic location, and by capturing it al-ḥārith could expand the geography of his rebellion and bring local rulers over to his side. balkh was on the main route to sogdiana, where large numbers of muslim converts lived, and these converts were potential recruits. for an anti-umayyad alliance to emerge and the rebellion to succeed, al-ḥārith also needed to persuade local elites to join him. the arguments he could use to win arab muslim supporters were discussed earlier, but what could he offer the locals? what did they see in his revolt that was worth their support? the answer is found in the zayn al-akhbār (ornament of histories), a persian chronicle dealing with ghaznavid history written by ʿabd al-ḥayy b. zaḥāk gardīzī, who lived in the eleventh century ce. according to gardīzī, once al-ḥārith prevailed in balkh, he invited people to the qurʾān and the sunna but also promised to maintain existing agreements with the “protected peoples” (ahl al-dhimma), that is, mainly non-muslim christians, zoroastrians, and jews; to refrain from levying the kharāj tax on muslims; and to not oppress anyone. as a result, many people are said to have answered his call.86 in gardīzī’s narrative, al-ḥārith’s call contains various layers that need to be examined in turn. as before, the appeal to the qurʾān and the sunna targeted arab muslims, but the newly introduced promises were clearly directed at local non-muslims and local converts to islam. usually, the agreements that al-ḥārith promised to respect were made not with ordinary non-muslims but with elites who had the authority to negotiate and sign agreements. the pledge not to extract the kharāj from “muslims” refers to the jizya that was systematically being collected from converts. al-ṭabarī mentions that al-ḥārith met bishr b. jarmūz, an ally of abū al-ṣaydā, and some other elite arabs in guzgan on his way to marw. many of abū al-ṣaydā’s supporters who were from sogdiana joined al-ḥārith at this point, which suggests that al-ḥārith addressed sogdian converts not at the beginning of the revolt but only later, after he had taken balkh, and that he promised them that they would be required to pay only the taxes that 85. sears, who published these coins, emphasizes the ideological nature of al-ḥārith’s message; sears, “revolt of al-ḥārith ibn surayj,” 395. 86. gardīzī, zayn al-akhbār, 257–58. gardīzī’s narrative may come from the akhbār wulāt khurāsān (reports about the governors of khurasan), a now-lost arabic text compiled by abū al-ḥusayn ʿalī b. aḥmad and his brother in eleventh-century ce khurasan. recently, muḥammad ʿalī kāẓim begi has tried to reconstruct the original text by collecting relevant information from other sources. see ḥusayn b. aḥmad al-sullāmī, akhbār wulāt khurāsān, reconstructed by m. ʿa. kāẓim bigī (tehran: mīrāth-i maktūb, 1390/2011), 62. 533 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) were due on all muslims.87 gardīzī’s narrative, supported by the encounter reported by al-ṭabarī, indicates that it was only after al-ḥārith’s victory at balkh that the abolition of the jizya for converts became part of his reform program. this addition seems to have been motivated by a conscious effort to mobilize support among the local population. since sogdian converts had been suffering from the arab muslim government’s discrimination, al-ḥārith’s adoption of abū al-ṣaydā’s goal to lift the jizya and establish just government was an inclusive and powerful message aimed at uniting the cause of sogdian converts with that of the discontented arab muslim soldiers. the third group of local khurasanis who were attracted to al-ḥārith’s movement played a crucial role in the course of the revolt. following the victory in balkh, local bactrian rulers warmly welcomed al-ḥārith’s conquests. according to al-ṭabarī, a number of rulers in western bactria declared their support for his revolt. they included the rulers of guzgan, tarsul the dihqān (local chief) of faryab, the shahrāb (ruler) of talaqan, and qaryāqis the dihqān of marw.88 unlike the sogdian converts, who were upset by the continuing jizya requirement, the bactrians do not seem to have had a problem with this imposition. the bactrian documents do not help with this line of inquiry, since the earliest evidence of taxes is later, from the abbasid period.89 the textual sources contain no references to oppressive umayyad taxation, to a policy of demanding the jizya from converts, or even to large-scale conversion in bactria. the only concrete evidence of the jizya is a few coins minted in anbir in guzgan. interestingly, these coins are silver dirhams based on the sasanian model with the name of the governor of khurasan, yazīd b. al-muhallab (d. 102/720), and the date 84/703, three decades before al-ḥārith’s rebellion. the coins have different legends in arabic, bactrian, and middle persian and countermarks on their margins.90 on the obverse of the coins the name yazīd b. al-muhallab and the legend bi-sm allāh al-ʿaẓīm, “in the name of god, the great,” is written in arabic. the image of the sasanian king and some middle persian words are depicted as well. on the reverse, the coins have a unique and rather enigmatic arabic legend, “struck for jizya in juzjan” (ḍuriba jizyatan bi-l-juzjān), as well as the name of zhulad, king of guzgan (r. 80–91/699–711), in bactrian; the date and the place of minting are in middle persian. the coins are countermarked by a tamgha, or stamp, representing the name of the local king.91 although these coins make an unambiguous reference to the jizya, this term could also refer to tribute in a more general sense, rather than specifically to the islamic poll tax, which was a personal tax on individuals. all in all, the combination of names and languages as well as the obscure and unique arabic reference to the jizya make it difficult to understand the 87. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1568. 88. ibid., 9:1569. 89. g. khan, arabic documents from early islamic khurasan (london: nour foundation and azimuth editions, 2007), 92–136. 90. h. m. malik, arab-sasanian numismatics and history during the early islamic period in iran and iraq: the johnson collection of arab-sasanian coins (london: royal numismatic society, 2019), 1:71–72. 91. cribb, “coinage in afghanistan.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 534 function of the coins and the circumstances under which they were struck. whether they were minted on the orders of yazīd or of zhulad king of guzgan for the payment of tribute cannot be determined with certainty. in any case, despite the coins’ reference to jizya payments, the muslim authorities would have found it difficult to enforce regular and strict tax collection in the mountainous area of western bactria, where independent rulers largely continued to hold sway. evidence of the levying of taxes associated with muslim rule in bactria comes only from later periods. a bactrian legal document from the rob region in southern bactria, dating to 525 of the bactrian calendar, which corresponds to 747 ce, refers to taxes called γαζιτο and βαριτο levied on a bactrian household (χανο).92 the word γαζιτο could have been the bactrianized form of the arabic jizya; alternatively, it might represent the equivalent of a former bactrian tax.93 the kharāj was collected from individuals in bactria in the early abbasid period, according to several arabic documents dating from 138–60/755–77.94 however, all of these documents postdate al-ḥārith’s death and cannot be regarded as evidence of umayyad taxation before or during his rebellion. other evidence confirms that conversion to islam progressed at a slower pace in bactria than it did in sogdiana. zoroastrianism and buddhism remained the major religions in bactria.95 bactrian documents show that the worship of old iranian deities such as wakhsh, ram-set, and zhun continued in the region: their names are referenced in legal documents produced between 659 and 747 ce and96 appear as popular personal names,97 and they were worshipped in purpose-built temples.98 bactria also continued to 92. bactrian document w in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:126–35. 93. sims-williams, bactrian documents, 2:205. my thanks to jonathan lee, who suggested that this could have been the equivalent of a former tax called τογο. 94. arabic documents 1–23 in khan, arabic documents, 92–136. 95. there was a significant christian presence in the region under the sasanids, when christianity was an important religion in the empire; see n. sims-williams, “baršabbā,” in encyclopaedia iranica, updated december 15, 1988, https://iranicaonline.org/articles/barsabba-legendary-bishop-of-marv-and-founderof-the-christian-church-in-eastern-iran; haug, eastern frontier, 57. many hephthalites had converted to christianity, and there were bishoprics in badghis, bushanj, and quhistan; see c. e. bosworth, sīstān under the arabs: from the islamic conquest to the rise of the ṣaffārids (30–250/651–864) (rome: ismeo, 1968), 8–9. a number of turkic tribes had also converted en masse to nestorian christianity; see d. wilmshurst, the martyred church: a history of the church of the east (london: east and west, 2011) and c. baumer, the church of the east: an illustrated history of the assyrian church (london: i. b. tauris, 2016). 96. see the attestation of wakhsh (οαχþο), the god of the amu darya, in the beginning of, e.g., the bactrian legal documents o, r, s, ss, tt, uu, v, and u in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:80–83, 92–93, 94–95, 96–97, 104–5, 112–15, 116–25, and in document ji in 2:138–39. he also appears as “king of gods” (βαγανο ƥαυο) in documents o and tt in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:80–83, 104–5. ram-set is referenced in legal documents produced in 660 ce and 671 ce at marogan market in samingan, an area to the east of balkh (bactrian documents p and q in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:84–87, 88–91). 97. the deity zhun is preserved in the personal names zhun-lad (“given by zhun”), zhulad, and zhun-bandag: n. sims-williams, bactrian personal names, pt. 7 of iranisches personennamenbuch, vol. 2, mitteliranische personennamen (vienna: verlag der österreichischen akademie der wissenschaften, 2010), 65–66. zhulad, the king of guzgan, was also named after this deity. 98. bactrians built temples called baglān and nishālm in which to house the images of these deities and https://iranicaonline.org/articles/barsabba-legendary-bishop-of-marv-and-founder-of-the-christian-church-in-eastern-iran https://iranicaonline.org/articles/barsabba-legendary-bishop-of-marv-and-founder-of-the-christian-church-in-eastern-iran 535 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) be an important center of buddhism in the region. the chinese buddhist pilgrim xuanzang encountered substantial buddhist communities in bactria in 630 ce in tirmidh, chaghaniyan, kulab, qubadiyan, balkh, guzgan, gaz, and samingan.99 balkh alone had a hundred monasteries with three thousand monks of the hināyānā school. xuanzang’s reports have been confirmed by archaeological surveys and excavations in the region.100 buddhism was still popular in bactria when the korean buddhist pilgrim hye ch’o visited around 725–26 ce. he noted that the region was dominated by arabs but that the local population and its kings were mostly buddhist.101 it is unlikely that western bactrian rulers, whose population was still mostly zoroastrian and buddhist, would have been interested in al-ḥārith’s call to apply the qurʾān and the sunna. likewise, there were no mistreated converts to speak of in bactria and thus no audience for al-ḥārith’s promise of just government. the source of the local leaders’ political legitimacy was entirely different. so what attracted non-muslim bactrian rulers to al-ḥārith’s rebellion? al-ṭabarī’s list of bactrian rulers who joined al-ḥārith highlights an important point. except for the dihqān of marw, all of the local rulers or their family members had joined the earlier revolt of nizak ṭarkhān, the hephthalite prince of badghis, against qutayba b. muslim in 90/710.102 during the first fifty years of arab muslim presence, from 652 to 705 ce, bactria remained largely independent. bactrian documents of this period show that local rulers controlled their areas independently while recognizing the overlordship of the turkic qaghān.103 arab muslim forces mainly used bactria as a safe passage on their way to raid sogdiana, and local rulers mostly cooperated with the umayyads. however, between 90 and 94/710–13, the campaigns of qutayba b. muslim brought western bactria under umayyad authority, incorporating local rulers into the political structure of umayyad khurasan.104 local leaders subsequently rose in protest under nizak ṭarkhān. qutayba, however, killed nizak ṭarkhān 105 along with badhān, the marzbān, or margrave, of marw worship them (bactrian documents p, q, tt, v, and w in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:84–87, 88–91, 112–15, 116–25, 126–35). 99. si-yu-ki, 38–49. 100. p. bernard, r. besenval, and p. marquis, “du ‘mirage bactrien’ aux réalités archéologiques: nouvelles fouilles de la délégation archéologique française en afghanistan (dafa) á bactres (2004–2006),” comptes rendus des séances de l’académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 150, no. 2 (2006): 1217–29. the ruins of stupas are still visible in various places in northern afghanistan, including balkh, dawlatabad, charkint, and marmul; personal observation, 2004–9. 101. hye ch’o, diary, 52. a similar situation is reflected in the tang-i safidak inscription; see j. lee and n. sims-williams, “the antiquities and inscription of tangi safidak,” silk road art and archaeology 9 (2003): 169–84. 102. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 8:1204–6. 103. see bactrian documents n, nn, p, q, s, and t in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:68–69, 74–75, 84–87, 88–91, 94–96, 98–103. 104. ibn aʿtham al-kūfī mentions that no one had ever suppressed the rulers in the east the way qutayba did (futūḥ, 7:153). 105. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 8:1221; ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 7:149. al-ṭabarī refers to a poem in which nizak ṭarkhān and his relatives are mentioned (taʾrīkh, 8:1226–27). see also haug, eastern frontier, 114–21. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 536 al-rūd.106 there were even rumors that qutayba had poisoned the king of guzgan,107 though the royal family of guzgan survived. to control western bactria, qutayba established a network of garrisons filled with soldiers from syria, iraq, and the marw region.108 qutayba then appointed his brothers and relatives as commanders of these garrisons.109 these measures reduced the autonomy of western bactrian rulers, who joined the rebellion of al-ḥārith likely in order to try and recover their independence. other hephthalites joined al-hārith’s rebellion for similar reasons. some umayyad dirhams produced in iraq, fars, and marw bear the hephthalite tamgha, a specific mark of association with a certain family. sears has argued that these dirhams are countermarked to support al-ḥārith’s movement.110 moreover, local leaders’ expressions of independence by revalidating umayyad dirhams with their own stamps was accompanied, according to sears, with financial support for al-ḥārith’s movement. the countermarks thus reflect the hephthalite rulers’ attempt to reduce umayyad power by supporting an antiumayyad rebel. the bactrian documents show that western bactrian leaders still had access to military forces at this time, and these also likely bolstered al-ḥārith’s forces.111 not all bactrian rulers supported al-ḥārith. local notables such as the barmak, the head of the buddhist monastery of the naw bahar in balkh, and his relative the chaghān khudā, the king of chaghaniyan, did not join al-ḥārith.112 the barmak’s father (also called barmak) had been killed by a nizak after he had supported arab muslims in the past.113 the chaghān khudā had invited arab muslims to help him vanquish rival kings in northern bactria.114 in all likelihood, these two holdouts were not able to stand up against the other powerful bactrian rulers who had joined al-ḥārith. however, they remained loyal to the umayyads and helped them against al-ḥārith later when the situation allowed (as discussed below). al-ḥārith’s rebellious army is said to have consisted of sixty thousand arab, sogdian, and bactrian troops, with many others also joining in for the purpose of plunder.115 al-ḥārith habitually wore black garments and carried a black banner, which was not an arab tradition.116 al-ḥārith’s use of black quickly became a symbol of resistance against 106. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 7:152. 107. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 8:1184–85. 108. ibid., 8:1206–7. 109. al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, 2:208. 110. sears, “revolt of al-ḥārith ibn surayj,” 380. 111. for instance, bactrian local military forces and their commanders are mentioned in bactrian document t in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:98–103 and in document jg in 2:134–35. 112. for detailed information on the barmak, see é. de la vaissière, “de bactres á balkh, par le now bahar,” journal asiatique 298, no. 2 (2010): 517–33. 113. ibid., 525. 114. al-baladhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, 419–20; al-tabarī, taʾrīkh, 8:1180. 115. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1570; khleifat, “caliphate of hisham b. ʿabd al-malik,” 222. 116. al-ṭabarī mentions that muḥammad b. al-muthannā, who led the azdite soldiers in al-ḥārith’s camp, had his own flag. most probably the azdites’ banner was not black, otherwise al-ṭabarī would have said so. naṣr b. sayyār, who confronted al-ḥārith near balkh, was astonished by al-ḥarith’s black dress and banner (al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1575–76). 537 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyads. in a poem sent to the arab elite in marw, the famous umayyad-era poet kumayt b. zayd al-asadī (d. 126/741) referred to the connection between black banners and the followers of al-ḥārith. for kumayt, the black banner was a sign of support for the hāshimites. he asked the local elite of marw to support al-ḥārith by raising black banners and called the umayyads “people of ignorance and oppression” (ahl al-ḍalāla wa-ltaʿaddī).117 however, the arabic narratives, such as those of al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī, that were produced in and reflect the concerns of the caliphal center give no indication that al-ḥārith’s arab muslim soldiers dressed in black or displayed black banners. this suggests that al-ḥārith used black dress and banners specifically to communicate with the local population, for which these symbols would have been meaningful. the symbolism of the black dress that al-ḥārith used to communicate with his local constituency had a long history in the pre-islamic east. scholars have argued that al-ḥārith exploited current messianic expectations among muslims with his use of black symbolism.118 it is true that messianic appeals related to the removal of the umayyads had probably spread to khurasan from syria and iraq. however, the symbolism of the color black was not initially imported to khurasan from the western lands; rather, it was an ancient symbol in the east that first migrated westward from khurasan before returning in the abbasid period, accompanied by strong messianic symbolism. the apocalyptic idea that umayyad rule would come to an end a century after the hijra (emigration) of the prophet from mecca to medina was known among the arab muslims in khurasan. it was mentioned in a letter sent in 719 ce by ghūrak, the king of samarkand, to the tang emperor, in which the sogdian ruler asked for help against the arabs.119 it is possible that the arab muslims in sogdiana informed ghūrak about this expectation. however, there is no evidence to connect awareness of such apocalyptic ideas to the use of black garments in 719 ce. it seems that al-ḥārith’s rebellion combined the color black with the apocalyptic vision of the end of the umayyad caliphate and that this symbol was subsequently taken up further west by the abbasids. this theory is supported by the fact that the majority of the reports attributed to the prophet relating to the appearance of holders of black banners (ṣāḥib al-rāyāt al-aswad) who will bring an end to umayyad rule are collected in kitāb al-fitan (“book of social disturbances”) compiled by nuʿaym b. ḥammād al-marwazī (d. 227/844), a native of marw who lived in the ninth century ce.120 instead of seeing al-ḥārith’s use of black dress and banners as reflecting later islamic apocalyptic associations, his use of color symbolism should be understood in a local eastern context, in which it was associated with political change, political power, buddhism 117. ibid., 9:1575–76. 118. see sharon, revolt, 30–31; idem, black banners from the east: the establishment of the ʻabbāsid state; incubation of a revolt (jerusalem: magnes press, 1983); k. athamina, “the black banners and the socio-political significance of flags and slogans in medieval islam,” arabica 36, no. 3 (1989): 307–26. 119. for an english translation of the letter, see v. a. livshits, sogdian epigraphy of central asia and semirech’e, trans. t. stableford, ed. n. sims-williams (london: school of oriental and african studies, 2015), 49. 120. nuʿaym b. ḥammād al-marwazī, kitāb al-fitan, ed. s. zakkār (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1414/1991). similarly, la vaissière has argued that “most texts saying that it was the colour of the flag of the prophet, or his turban, are ʿabbāsid reconstructions trying to justify the choice of black”; la vaissière, “ʿabbāsid revolution,” 140. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 538 and mourning. during the southern and northern dynasties of china (386–589 ce), and specifically during the reign of emperor wu of the northern zhou (r. 560–578), a prophecy spread that the wearer of a black garment would take the throne. emperor wu took the prophecy very seriously. to prevent its realization, he listened to the preaching of two influential daoists, wei yuansong and zhang bin, who agitated against buddhists, accusing them of being the black garment wearers. the emperor prohibited the use of black and ordered the execution of many buddhists. during the tang dynasty (618–907), the tang emperor, who was also known as wu but whose real name was li yan (r. 840–846) seems to have reacted to rumors that a “tiānzǐ,” or son of heaven, dressed in black would appear to depose him.121 we know that many sogdians, bactrians, and other people from central asia traded or settled in china and spread buddhism in the region.122 on the basis of xuanzang’s account, renato sala calculated that at least 496 monasteries with 22,500 monks existed in the southern parts of central asia in 630 ce.123 many of these buddhist monasteries were in bactria. balkh was the center of buddhism in the eastern iranian regions. according to xuanzang, followers of the sarvāstivādā buddhist sect were present in gaz, an area to the south of balkh.124 hye ch’o, during his visit in 725–26 ce, also noted the presence of the sarvāstivādā sect.125 it is said that the buddhist monks in the sarvāstivādā tradition wore black garments.126 it is not known, however, whether the buddhists of balkh related the color black to any apocalyptic narrative. la vaissière made an important observation regarding the significance of black garments in sogdiana: he showed that black was the color of mourning in seventhand eighth-century central asia. some ossuaries show mourners in black dress, and a text from the tongdian, the chinese institutional history, refers to mourners in samarkand who wore black.127 given that bactria, samarkand, and bukhara shared strong ethnic, cultural, and commercial ties, it is likely that bactrians, too, used black as a mourning color.128 it is also important to 121. i would like to thank shuqi jia for providing me with detailed information on the symbolism of black in china. the main chinese sources on this issue are: sima qian, “annals of qin shi huang” [秦始皇本紀], in records of the grand historian [史記] (beijing: zhonghua shuju, 1973), juan 6; dao xuan, guang hong ming ji (40 juan) [廣弘明集: 40卷] (shanghai: zhonghua shuju, 1936), juan 8. brief information in english on black garments is also given in k. s. ch’en, buddhism in china: a historical survey (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1964), 186–87. 122. é. de la vaissière, sogdian traders: a history, trans. j. ward (leiden: brill, 2005); v. hansen, the silk road: a new history (oxford: oxford university press, 2012). 123. r. sala, “the spread of buddhism from gandhara to south, west and east central asia (i bc–xiv ad),” in religions of kazakhstan and central asia on the great silk road: materials of the international scientific and practical conference, 12–13 june 2017, 248–72 (almaty: service press, 2017), 260. 124. si-yu-ki, 44–49. 125. hye ch’o, diary, 52. 126. m. deegalle, “theravāda pre-understanding in understanding mahāyāna,” in three mountains and seven rivers: prof. musashi tachikawa’s felicitation volume, ed. s. hino and t. wada, 43–64 (delhi: motilal banarsidass, 2004), 55. 127. la vaissière, “ʿabbāsid revolution,” 140–42. 128. similarities in the ways in which the nawrūz festival is celebrated in these areas are a good example of 539 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) note that various groups of chionites and turks migrated westward and settled in sogdiana and bactria. these nomadic groups continued to have relations with china and with eastern iranian regions. thus, it is not implausible that the symbolism of black passed from one region to another.129 the fact that al-ḥārith’s rebellion began in bactria and attracted many bactrian and sogdian supporters may explain al-ḥārith’s use of black clothing and banners. by wearing black, al-ḥārith may have tapped into a “regional color code” that was understood by his local supporters,130 who were familiar with black as the color of power, political change, and mourning.131 al-ḥārith represented these cultural elements in his clothing, though the specific meanings that he may have attached to black beyond its regional significance are unknown. in his mission, al-ḥārith successfully combined the political priorities of local bactrian rulers with ideological terminologies and symbols that appealed to other groups. his message was inclusive and powerful and generated a large group of supporters from various backgrounds to whom he appealed with different arguments. he used the prioritization of the qurʾān, the sunna, and just government based on shūrā for his arab muslim supporters; the abolition of the jizya for sogdian converts; and messianic the cultural ties between these regions. the symbolism of black is also reflected in the shāhnāma (book of kings) composed by abū al-qāsim firdawsī in tenth-century ce khurasan. a large part of the shāhnāma is related to the eastern iranian world, as attested by the geographical names and characters that appear in it. in the shāhnāma, black is the color of political power and mourning. the tents of the mythical iranian kings (shāh-i ērān) were black, and afrāsiyāb, the king of turān, wore black and carried a black banner when he fought the iranians. in the shāhnāma, turān is the region beyond the amu darya, which included sogdiana and northern parts of bactria. when eraj son of afrīdūn was killed, the iranians dressed in black, and the wearing of black garments to mourn the deaths of iranian kings, princes, and heroes is mentioned several times in the shāhnāma. all these examples indicate that the shāhnāma reflects a very similar view of the color black as that which we have seen in the sogdian and chinese examples. it is highly unlikely that firdawsī’s portrayal of black as the color of mourning and a symbol of power was his own innovation or an adaptation of abbasid narratives. had it been a later adaptation, we should have seen it in his work. see abū al-qāsim firdawsī, shāhnāma, available online at https://ganjoor.net/. black color as symbol of mourning continued in bactria to the sixteenth century. it is reported in mirzā muḥammad ḥaidar dughlāt, taʾrīkh-i rashīdī, ed. abbāsqulī ghaffārīfard (tehran: mirāth-i maktūb, 1383/2004), 275. 129. the relations between the turks and the chinese have been studied by various scholars. see, for instance, h. ecsedy, “the trade and war relations between the turks and china in the second half of the 6th century,” acta orientalia academiae scientiarum hungaricae 21, no. 2 (1968): 131–80; n. di cosmo, “chinasteppe relations in historical perspective,” in complexity and interaction along the eurasian steppe zone in the first millennium ce, ed. j. bemmann and m. schmauder, 49–72 (bonn: vorund frühgeschichtliche archäologie, rheinische friedrich-wilhelms-universität, 2015); n. di cosmo, “the relations between china and the steppe from the xiongnu to the turk empire,” in empires and exchanges in eurasian late antiquity: rome, china, iran, and the steppe, ca. 250–750, ed. n. di cosmo and m. maas, 35–53 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018). 130. thanks to étienne de la vaissière, who informed me that this was a local cultural code (personal communication, october 11, 2021). 131. la vaissière has argued that abū muslim’s choice of black as symbol of his revolution was a strategic move (la vaissière, “ʿabbāsid revolution,” 140). the use of symbols as an effective tool of communication in rebellions has been studied in detail in the medieval european context. these studies show similarities with the meanings of symbols discussed in this article. see, for example, j. firnhaber-baker and d. schoenaers, eds., the routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (abingdon: routledge, 2016). https://ganjoor.net/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 540 propaganda combined with messages of authority and political change through his use of black dress and banners for local elites. despite his huge and diverse army, al-ḥārith’s mission ultimately failed. even so, however, it had been powerful enough to break down the political structures of umayyad khurasan—structures that would crumble for good a couple of years later under another black banner, that of the abbasid revolution of abū muslim. the umayyad response to the rebellion after conquering andkhud and balkh, al-ḥārith marched on marw, which alarmed the umayyad authorities. unable to unite the arab muslims of marw against al-ḥārith, ʿāṣim al-hilālī, the governor of khurasan at the time (in office in 116/734), withdrew to abarshahr to recruit more forces and prepared to breach the dam on the marw river to flood al-ḥārith’s camp.132 however, these strategies failed to stop the advance of the rebels. in the end, what prevented a complete collapse of umayyad authority in khurasan was the internal conflict that broke out in al-ḥārith’s camp. his arab muslim soldiers as well as the arab tribal leaders in the region who had not joined al-ḥārith were alarmed by the large number of local supporters in al-ḥārith’s army. the unwelcome prospect of non-arab dominance formed a common threat that united the arabs—both those in the umayyad camp and those in al-ḥārith’s. the azdite soldiers of al-ḥārith abandoned him and joined al-hilālī before the battle for marw commenced.133 the dissent in al-ḥārith’s camp combined with al-hilālī’s breaching of the dam caused al-ḥārith’s first military defeat. this, in turn, prompted his bactrian allies to desert him. al-ḥārith was left with a small group of loyal soldiers, mostly from tamīm. the sources do not specify the reason the local rulers abandoned al-ḥārith.134 the battle at marw, however, was not the end of the rebellion. the rebels’ attack on the political center of khurasan was taken seriously by caliph hishām. on the advice of al-hilālī, he combined the forces of iraq and khurasan and placed them under the command of khālid al-qasrī (d. 126/743),135 who sent his brother asad al-qasrī (d. 120/738) to khurasan with twenty thousand syrian troops. al-hilālī, too, had advised the caliph not to rely on the iraqis of khurasan but to send syrian forces, who had fought for the caliph faithfully.136 when asad al-qasrī arrived in khurasan, the entire region was in turmoil. asad divided his forces, sending one division to marw and another to marw al-rūd. marw and marw al-rūd were soon reconquered, and al-ḥārith retreated to balkh. those arab troops who had abandoned al-ḥārith earlier now joined al-hilālī and asad’s service.137 al-ḥārith then crossed the amu darya and surrounded tirmidh but could not capture it despite having the support of the turks and the spāhbed, or military commander, of nasaf. though al-ḥārith was defeated at tirmidh, he managed to send a number of his followers—soldiers and their families—to safety in the tabushkān fortress, located somewhere in eastern bactria. the 132. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1569–71. 133. blankinship, end of the jihād state, 177. 134. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1569–71. 135. ibid., 9:1574–82. 136. blankinship, end of the jihād state, 179. 137. ibid., 180. 541 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) fortress was given to him by the yabghu of tukharistan.138 once al-ḥārith had left, asad entered balkh. from balkh, he sent judayʿ b. ʿalī al-kirmānī (d.129/746), a senior leader from the azd, to take the tabushkān fortress with syrian forces as well as two and a half thousand soldiers from balkh (jund balkh). al-kirmānī took the fortress by force, killed the men sheltering there, and sold both arab and non-arab women and children on the market in balkh as slaves. a number of the arab muslim notables who had supported al-ḥārith were sent to balkh, where asad publicly executed them.139 it is likely that the purpose of al-kirmānī’s and asad’s brutal acts was to show that they would not tolerate any rebels, whether muslim or non-muslim. bactrian rulers turn against al-ḥārith the defection of the local bactrian rulers who had initially supported al-ḥārith accelerated his defeat. having no other option, al-ḥārith fled and took refuge with the qaghān of the türgesh turks, who was preparing to invade bactria.140 however, the arrival of asad al-qasrī in balkh divided the bactrian rulers into two camps, one pro-umayyad and another pro-türgesh—that is, backing al-ḥārith. in order to attract more local support and drive a wedge between al-ḥārith and the bactrian rulers, asad shifted his capital from marw to balkh and appointed the barmak to restore the city by using the faʿla, or corvée labor, which the local inhabitants contributed as part of the tribute they were supposed to deliver to the arab muslim officials.141 the city of balkh was heavily fortified, but its fortifications had been damaged during the wars of the early seventh century ce. most of its population had also left.142 for this reason, the arabs did not settle in the city but founded the baruqān garrison outside the city walls.143 asad reasoned that the restoration of the city would attract people to return. he ordered the arab muslim soldiers to leave baruqān and settle in the city among the local people. asad also moved the official registers (sing. dīwān) from marw to balkh and restored the city’s irrigation system. the locals appreciated these efforts, and some of them consequently shifted their allegiance to asad and the umayyads.144 the first great conflict between asad and the qaghān occurred in 119/737 in khuttal in eastern bactria. the king of khuttal, angered by asad’s raids and plunder, complained to the qaghān, accepted his overlordship, and invited him to khuttal. the king hoped to destroy the arab muslims by the hand of the türgesh turks. he nonetheless surely intended to maintain his autonomy and did not expect the qaghān to stay after vanquishing the arabs. 138. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1582–85, 1590–92; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 12:111. 139. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 7:283. 140. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1594; ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 7:283. 141. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1591. 142. si-yu-ki, 44. 143. abū bakr ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar b. muḥammad al-wāʿiẓ al-balkhī, faḍāʾil-i balkh, trans. ʿabd allāh muḥammad b. muḥammad al-ḥusaynī al-balkhī, ed. ʿa. ḥ. ḥabībī (tehran: intishārāt-i bunyād-i farhang-i īrān, 1350/1971), 34, 43. 144. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1490–91. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 542 the türgesh army arrived and took asad by surprise.145 the clash triggered a run on both sides to secure the assistance of supporters with the aid of threats and promises, carrots and sticks. al-ṭabarī reports that asad sent a letter to a certain commander, ibrāhīm b. ʿāṣim, informing him that he would kill him and sell all his family members as slaves in the balkh market if he were to join the enemy. the qaghān, for his part, ordered his forces to attack chaghaniyan and other non-arab supporters of the umayyads to demonstrate the consequences of siding with the arabs. the türgesh qaghān also sent a message to asad via one of al-ḥārith’s supporters, saying that the region beyond the amu darya belonged to him and that he had the right to defend it against arab attacks. however, in practice, the qaghān claimed the entire region and invaded bactria as far west as marw al-rūd. even so, some local commanders remained loyal to asad, including the chaghān khudā, who was killed defending asad.146 the defeat at khuttal taught asad a bitter lesson—namely, that his syrian forces were as weak as the iraqis in the war against the türgesh.147 asad was therefore in desperate need of local support. in balkh, he ordered fires to be lit on the city walls to invite people from the surrounding villages (min al-rasātīq) to join him. then he called a large gathering at which he accused al-ḥārith of being “god’s enemy” and of having invited the türgesh to bring down destruction on the people.148 shortly before asad’s arrival, türgesh forces had already attacked guzgan and destroyed the rulers’ palaces. it is possible that some bactrian rulers had been unsettled by the sight of the türgesh and their allies plundering bactria. indeed, the local rulers and rural inhabitants of this region may have seen al-ḥārith as more of a threat than an ally.149 they thus preferred to make an alliance with the arabs to defend bactria against plundering by türgesh forces. one of the local rulers who remained loyal to the qaghān was the yabghu of tukharistan, who hosted the qaghān after the battle of khuttal.150 such autonomous eastern bactrian rulers had traditionally recognized the overlordship of the qaghān.151 the outcome of 145. ibid., 9:1592–94. 146. ibid., 9:1594–1601. 147. blankinship, end of the jihād state, 181. 148. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1603. 149. ibid., 9:1603–5. 150. ibid., 9:1604. 151. several bactrian documents from rob dated to between 629 and 671 ce reflect the qaghān’s overlordship and refer to the king of rob with the turkic title tapaghlïgh iltäbir of the qaghān (documents n, p, and q in sims-williams, bactrian documents, 1:68–73, 84–87, 88–90). the rulers of rob retained their territorial control, court, and administration until 747 ce (documents u and v in ibid., 1:106–11,116–25). the region of gaz was ruled by the ser (possibly means ruler) of the turks in 691 ce (document s in ibid., 1:94–96), and this situation may have continued. in kadagstan in 700 ce, bag-azyas, the queen of the qutlugh tapaghlïgh bilgä sävüg, gifted farm land and a female slave to a priest named kamird-far. the army of kadagstan was led by a commander called baralbag, and the administration functioned under the turks (document t in ibid., 1:88–91). the turkic control of kadagstan continued much longer, as indicated by a legal document dated to 772 ce (document y in ibid., 1:142–43). it is most likely that these local rulers were on the qaghān’s side because they traditionally recognized turkic overlordship. al-ṭabarī’s report that the türgesh qaghān requested the rulers of tukharistan to join him with their forces supports this idea (al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1604). 543 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the revolt was finally decided at the battle of kharistan in guzgan in 119/737. the battle is described in detail by al-ṭabarī, but none of the existing studies have explained it, and they have thus missed the role played by local western bactrian rulers in the defeat of the qaghān and al-ḥārith. the türgesh qaghān was accompanied by al-ḥārith and the king of khuttal, as well as the local rulers of sogdiana and the yabghu of tukharistan. the main part of the türgesh army, however, had been scattered with orders to plunder the region. consequently, the qaghān had only a small contingent of troops, which was furthermore weighed down with a large amount of booty and cattle.152 asad, by contrast, commanded a coalition force of syrian and iraqi troops and several western bactrian allies, most importantly the king of guzgan. before the battle, the qaghān ordered that all guzganis who had joined the arabs were to be killed if asad was defeated. despite this threat, the ruler of guzgan eventually decided to stay with asad. the guzganis, who knew the region well, and some arabs mounted a surprise attack on the qaghān. al-ḥārith fought valiantly, particularly against the syrians, but was eventually defeated. while fleeing, he even saved the qaghān’s life. the qaghān and al-ḥārith retreated to the upper amu daraya region, where they planned to regroup and attack samarkand.153 however, the unexpected murder of the qaghān by bugha kul cür, chief of the “yellow bone clan,” ended this ambitious plan.154 aftermath the qaghān’s death caused the turks to divide into competing and hostile factions. they never again challenged umayyad power in khurasan. al-ḥārith lost his most powerful supporter, but he continued to live among the turks.155 the death of the qaghān had a significant impact on the region. it encouraged the local rulers of western bactria to remain loyal to the umayyads, which helped preserve bactria as part of umayyad khurasan until the abbasid revolution. it also provided an opportunity for asad to consolidate umayyad authority over bactria. the implosion of the türgesh allowed asad to punish the king of khuttal, removing another potentially powerful opponent in the process.156 asad’s successor, naṣr b. sayyār, campaigned in sogdiana with the aid of bactrian rulers, in particular the ruler of guzgan.157 the battle of kharistan showed that in the end bactrian elites preferred to be ruled by the umayyads rather than by al-ḥārith or his ally, the türgesh qaghān, whose troops had resorted to plunder and violence. like al-ḥārith’s arab muslim supporters, who wearied of al-ḥārith’s alliance with powerful local commanders and defected to the umayyads, his 152. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1604–14. 153. ibid. 154. c. beckwith, the tibetan empire in central asia: a history of the struggle for great power among tibetans, turks, arabs, and chinese during the early middle ages (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1987), 90. 155. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 7:283; αl-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1613, 1689. 156. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 9:1630–33. 157. ibid., 9:1695–96. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the rebellion of al-ḥārith b. surayj • 544 local allies, too, turned against al-ḥārith because of his alliance with the qaghān. after the battle, al-ḥārith was never able to attract local support and eventually met his death in marw in 128/746 after failing to organize another anti-umayyad rebellion.158 conclusion the rebellion of al-ḥārith revolved around the power dynamics that existed in the frontier region of umayyad khurasan, involving not only the arab muslims but also many local rulers who ruled their territories independently. depending on the political situation, these rulers either cooperated with the umayyads or made alliances with tang china or the türgesh. this flux made central control over the northeastern frontiers of the umayyad empire far from easy. although the umayyad governors represented imperial authority, they faced a difficult task in keeping both arab muslim elites and local rulers on their side. cooperation with these muslim and non-muslim elites was essential for creating and maintaining political stability in khurasan. at the same time, the governors had to maintain good relations with the caliph and the governor of iraq. they had to ensure regular fiscal income from the province without upsetting the arab tribal leaders and local rulers, who represented provincial authority. mismanagement, favoritism, or discrimination by the governors could lead to rebellion. al-ḥārith’s rebellion should be understood in the context of competition between central imperial power and provincial authority, which was not limited to local arab elites. al-ḥārith effectively exploited anti-umayyad sentiments among the various groups that joined his rebellion, basing his appeals to them on the specific needs and political concerns of each faction. the allegiance of arab and non-arab, muslim and non-muslim, local, umayyad, and türgesh supporters to his cause undermined umayyad control in khurasan, even though he eventually lost the war. his supporter base crumbled, first through the defection of a large proportion of his arab supporters and subsequently through the departure of a number of bactrian notables. ironically, the umayyads were subsequently able to create a coalition of arab muslims and mostly non-muslim bactrians against al-ḥārith and his turkish, sogdian, arab, and bactrian allies. when raising support for his rebellion, al-ḥārith made clever use of various local dissatisfactions. he exploited arab soldiers’ disappointment with umayyad authority, drew on the resentment of sogdian converts forced to pay the jizya, and appealed to western bactrian rulers who wanted to free themselves of increasingly intrusive and burdensome umayyad control. he also tapped into indigenous color symbolism through his use of black clothing and banners. al-ḥārith utilized an inclusive and powerful message to unite muslims and non-muslims and created a coalition of arabs, sogdians, and bactrians. though this diversity was the basis of his power, his inability to keep his coalition together led to his downfall. his later alliance with the türgesh qaghān who invaded bactria also turned local rulers in western bactria against him. although al-ḥārith’s rebellion failed to overthrow umayyad rule in khurasan, it was successful at uniting muslims and non-muslims in the region for a single cause. the 158. ibid., 9:1917–33. 545 • said reza huseini al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) complexity of the local context, including the distinct interests, dissatisfactions, and ambitions of different groups, makes it clear that it is not enough to grasp just one group’s interest in or opposition to al-ḥārith’s movement when trying to explain its success and ultimate failure. al-ḥārith’s rise in andkhud, the expansion of his revolt to balkh, and his downfall in kharistan highlight the role of local bactrian rulers in his rebellion. sogdian converts and local arab muslim elites 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fragile, norms of communication within which violence was a calculated gambit, one of a repertoire of available and accepted tactical options. indeed, despite the violent death of ibn al-jārūd and a number of his close followers, his supporters, high-ranking commanders among them, were reintegrated into the caliphate and were soon participating again in the political system, including through rebellions. the article thus argues for a re-evaluation of revolts and for their conceptualization not as a breakdown of government structures or as a rejection of them by those rebelling but rather as an understood and even inevitable feature of a political system in which certain tensions between different centers of authority and instruments of control could be mediated and resolved only through open conflict. if people fear punishment, they take the misdeed seriously. if they feel safe from punishment, they will think little of trespassing. but if they despair of forgiveness, that turns them into rebels.1 — al-muhallab b. abī ṣufra in a letter to al-ḥajjāj closing ranks: discipline and loyalty in the umayyad army* petra m. sijpesteijn leiden university (p.m.sijpesteijn@hum.leidenuniv.nl) * this research was supported by the european research council under grant number 683194. i completed it during my 2020–2021 senior fellowship at the historisches kolleg in munich. i would like to thank alon dar, hannah-lena hagemann, andrew marsham, pamela klasova, and mehdy shaddel for their insightful comments. the careful and attentive anonymous reviewers saved me from countless mistakes. any remaining faults are naturally my own. © 2022 petra sijpesteijn. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 470 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 1al-ḥajjāj was the first to execute rebels.2 —al-balādhurī by the time al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf (d. 95/714) was appointed governor of iraq in the year 75/694 his fame as a suppressor of revolts and mutinies was already well established. his appointment as governor of one of the most important but also most restless provinces was both a reward and a strategic calculation on the part of the caliph ʿabd al-malik (r. 65–86/685–705), who was obliged to find a successor to his deceased brother and governor of iraq bishr b. marwān (d. 75/694). the new governor’s first goal was to restore discipline among the soldiers stationed at the garrisons of kūfa and baṣra, who refused to fight. he set about it with a will. although al-ḥajjāj’s exacting measures had some initial success in restoring order and obedience, dissent was not so easily quashed and serious opposition soon began to emerge under the leadership of ʿabd allāh b. al-jārūd al-ʿabdī (d. 76/695), chief of the ʿabd al-qays. this resistance was quelled and al-ḥajjāj’s position saved only when ibn al-jārūd was killed in battle. this episode was neither the first nor the last expression of organized discontent by iraq’s inhabitants. what it offers, however, is a window onto how complaints were expressed and grievances addressed, what systems were available to deal with such disruptions, and how the act and rhetoric of revolt operated within the political systems of the time. comparing the ways in which ibn al-jārūd and his followers, on the one hand, and al-ḥajjāj, on the other, framed their respective grievances and justified their actions offers valuable insights into how dissent and resistance were conceived of and responded to in the umayyad empire as remembered in later accounts. even though al-ḥajjāj’s tactics are sometimes depicted as uncommonly brutal in their use of exemplary violence—a depiction that, no doubt, also reflects this notorious governor’s stereotypically severe image in the sources—the events of this episode clearly show that rough and ready procedures did exist to address and even resolve disagreements between rulers and the ruled, even when violence or the threat thereof was involved. indeed, taking a step back, it is possible to read what has been labeled ibn al-jārūd’s “revolt” rather as a negotiation within the existing systems of exchange, disputation, and redress.3 ibn al-jārūd and his fellow “rebels” sought not to remove or 1. inna al-nās idhā khāfū al-ʿuqūba kabbarū al-dhanb wa-idhā aminū al-ʿuqūba ṣaghgharū al-dhanb wa-idhā yaʾisū min al-ʿafw akfarahum dhālika; al-mubarrad (d. 286/900), al-kāmil, ed. w. wright (leipzig: g. kreysing, 1874), 667. because of the context of the quotation—al-ḥajjāj and al-muhallab were discussing the rebellious nature of the soldiers under al-muhallab’s command, and al-ḥajjāj had a tendency to call rebels “unbelievers”—i opted to translate akfarahum as “it will turn them into rebels” rather than, literally, as “it turns them into unbelievers.” i would like to thank geert jan van gelder and peter webb for helping me understand this passage properly. 2. wa-kāna al-ḥajjāj awwal man ḍaraba aʿnāq al-ʿuṣāt; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. w. ahlwardt as anonyme arabische chronik band xi (greifswald: hinrichs, 1883), 275. unless otherwise indicated, all references to al-balādhurī’s ansāb are to this edition. 3. for the application of the term “revolt” to ibn al-jārūd’s actions in modern studies, see, among others, everett k. rowson, trans., the marwānid restoration, vol. 22 of the history of al-ṭabarī (albany: state university of new york press, 1989), 23; jean baptiste périer, vie d’al-hadjdjâdj ibn yousof (41–95 de l’hégire = 661–714 de j.-c.) d’après les sources arabes (paris: librairie emile bouillon, 1904), 81. major revolts in later al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 471 replace existing political structures of dialogue and compromise, but rather to use them to express and remedy what were felt to be justified complaints and to restore what they saw as proper rule.4 negotiation eventually turned into open and very violent conflict between the umayyad governor and his iraqi opponents, but this did not end political engagement between the actors involved; rather it escalated it into a different phase. in fact, with the exception of some high-profile supporters and the rebel leader himself, ibn al-jarūd’s followers were soon rehabilitated and reintegrated into umayyad society and politics. in other words, the standoff between al-ḥajjāj and ibn al-jārūd is not evidence of a breakdown of a hierarchical relationship, with rebels operating outside the political formation and in contravention of the standards of political engagement, but rather brings to the fore the multicentric umayyad governance structure within which various stakeholders—the caliph, his governors, soldiers, tribal chiefs—conceived of power in different ways. assertions of rights and appeals to responsibilities could always be negotiated, even if the parties vehemently maintained entitlements to control and dominance. negotiation, if necessary with violent means, constituted a normative tool of power, even as it challenged the gradually crystallizing notions of regulating, centralized authority.5 after presenting a short medieval european cities have been similarly observed to have “employed long-established venues for and methods of complaint to pursue their aims”; j. firnhaber-baker, “introduction: medieval revolt in context,” in the routledge history handbook of medieval revolt, ed. j. firnhaber-baker and d. schonaers, 1–15 (milton park: routledge, 2017), at 4 (describing the findings of a comparative study of bruges and york by jelle haemers and christian liddy). a reassessment of “some kinds of violence [including revolt; ps] not as crime but as politics” is also inherent in the re-valuation of revolt as negotiation (firnhaber-baker, “introduction,” 5); see c. wickham, “looking forward: peasant revolts in europe, 600–1200,” in firnhaber-baker and schonaers, routledge history handbook, 155–67, at 155–56. patrick lantschner, in “revolts and the political order of cities in the late middle ages,” past and present 225 (2014): 3–46, at 4, has emphasized that “revolts were not, in general at least, an antithesis, subversion or pathology of the political order, but formed a fundamental part of the political interactions in late medieval cities.” another way to problematize the historic label “revolt” is gerd althoff’s argument that rulers in medieval europe expressly provided ways and possibilities out of (violent) conflicts as they aimed to facilitate a mostly antagonism-free coexistence in their realms; g. althoff, spielregeln der politik im mittelalter: kommunikation in frieden und fehde, 2nd ed. (darmstadt: wbg, 2014), 21–153, 364 and n. 7. a similar approach is applied by erich gruen who looks at the contingent nature of uprisings which are not always aimed at imperial power and do not always follow a similar inevitable trajectory; e. s. gruen, “when is a revolt not a revolt? a case for contingency,” in revolt and resistance in the ancient classical world and the near east: in the crucible of empire, ed. j. j. collins and j. g. manning, 10–37 (leiden: brill, 2016). 4. in this view, the building of state structures was accompanied by expectations of proper governance among the ruled, and when these were not met, protest would ensue (firnhaber-baker, “introduction,” 4). lantschner, in his comparative study of revolts in fifteenth-century italy and syria, emphasizes that protesters and rebels invoked their legitimate right to stand up against tyranny employing legalistic arguments and political instruments; lantschner, “invoking and constructing legitimacy: rebels in the late medieval european and islamic worlds,” in firnhaber-baker and schonaers, routledge history handbook, 168–88, at 168–70, 178–80. the opposite phenomenon—namely, a state’s expansion clashing with the established privileges of the ruled and causing frustration—also plays a role in the episode under discussion and elsewhere. cf. y. lev, “coptic rebellions and the islamization of medieval egypt (8th–10th century): medieval and modern perceptions,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 39 (2012): 303–44; and c. wickham, framing the early middle ages (oxford: oxford university press, 2005), 140–43, 163–64, 529–33. 5. violence (or the threat thereof) was also obviously exercised by ibn al-jārūd and his followers, identifying his movement as a rebellion. in rebellion studies, the discourse of revolt has been gaining attention; it focuses 472 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) summary of the relevant events and a brief discussion of the sources, this paper explores the conflict between al-ḥajjāj and ibn al-jārūd in light of the triangular relationship between the caliph, his appointees or representatives, and the people over whom they ruled, and demonstrates how the competing views within this triangle formed a fragmented but nevertheless integrated system of political authority. disaffected soldiers the insurrection of the garrisons in kūfa and baṣra was provoked by two major grievances.6 the first was the endless, costly, and dangerous campaign against the khārijites. the second, as always, was concern about pay. the khārijite insurgents had been preoccupying the governors of iraq since the late seventh century ce. although they had been pushed back several times, their continued attacks on the rich villages of the tigris and euphrates river valleys and their expansion eastward toward khurāsān and india were nuisances that the caliph and his governor could ill afford to tolerate. the kūfan and baṣran troops had been fighting the khārijites under the command of al-muhallab b. abī ṣufra (d. 82 or 83/702–3) in rāmhurmuz, some 600 kilometers west of kūfa on the tigris. but when iraq’s governor bishr b. marwān died in 75/694, they returned en masse to kūfa and baṣra and refused to fight further.7 no one in charge, neither the military commanders on how such activities were remembered by subsequent generations or used for political purposes. hannahlena hagemann has examined the historiography of khārijite revolts and identified a concern among authors for the consequences of (overly) pious norms: h.-l. hagemann, the khārijites in the early islamic historical tradition: heroes and villains (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2021), 15. that historical sources apply the term revolt to a variety of expressions of social unrest and dissatisfaction is noted in several articles in the routledge history handbook of medieval revolt, including firnhaber-baker, “introduction,” 5, 7–8, and wickham, “looking forward,” 155. myles lavan explains the almost complete absence of accounts of revolts in the roman empire by roman historians’ disinterest in common people’s dissatisfaction in his “writing revolt in the early roman empire,” in firnhaber-baker and schonaers, routledge history handbook, 19–38. see also paul cobb’s interpretation of rebellions as a form of contention, referring also to earlier authorities, in white banners: contention in ʿabbasid syria, 750–880 (albany: state university of new york press, 2001), 6–7. 6. the following account is based mainly on al-balādhurī’s (d. 279/892) ansāb, 266–303, which served as the basis for ibn al-athīr’s (d. 630/1233) version in al-kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, ed. c. j. tornberg, 13 vols. (leiden: brill, 1867), 4:380–84. al-balādhurī seems to have made use of a lost kitāb ibn al-jārūd wa-rustaqabād by al-madāʾinī (d. ca. 228/843); r. sayed, die revolte des ibn al-ašʿat und die koranleser (freiburg: klaus schwarz, 1977), 130. al-madāʾinī is certainly the main authority he cites in this passage, alongside a few references to abū mikhnaf (d. 157/774). other, less extensive, accounts are found in al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923), taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. m. j. de goeje, 3 vols. (leiden: brill, 1879–1901), 2:864–75, and al-masʿūdī (d. 345/956), murūj al-dhahab, ed. c. barbier de meynard and a. pavet de courteille, 9 vols. (paris: imprimerie impériale, 1861–77), 5:291–302. finally, there are very short references of a line or two in al-bāladhurī’s futūḥ, ibn khayyāṭ’s (d. 240/854) taʾrīkh, the maʿārif by ibn qutayba (d. 276/889), and ibn kathīr’s (d. 774/1373) al-bidāya wa-l-nihāya. especially important single events or those that occur in some sources only are indicated in the footnotes. 7. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:857. a. dietrich’s remark in “al-ḥadjdjādj b. yūsuf,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al., 3:39–43 (leiden: brill, 1971), at 41, that the troops returned “at the instigation of bishr” seems a mistake. al-masʿūdī adds that upon al-ḥajjāj’s entrance into the city of kūfa, soldiers who were supposed to have been away on campaign were sitting around in groups “of twenty, thirty, and more” with their families and clients (min ahlihi wa-mawālihi); al-masʿūdī, murūj, 5:292. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 473 nor the governors of baṣra and kūfa, was able to convince them to return to their posts.8 in the accounts describing the course of events, al-ḥajjāj arrives incognito at the kūfan mosque and sits on the minbar for some time in silence before addressing the troops and haranguing them with imprecations and threats.9 presenting himself as the deadliest “arrow” in the caliph ʿabd al-malik’s “quiver,” purposely aimed by the caliph at the kūfans, he accuses the kūfans of “factionalism, hypocrisy, lawlessness, and rumourmongering.”10 he promises to give the soldiers their pay but in exchange demands that they return forthwith to al-muhallab, who has been fighting the aẓāriqa, the main branch of the khārijites, since 64/684 and is continuing to do so with much effect under al-ḥajjāj’s governorship. the mutinous soldiers are to rejoin al-muhallab’s campaign immediately on pain of loss of life and property.11 as the kūfans continue to waver, al-ḥajjāj resorts to more severe inducements. he summons the elderly tribal leader ʿumayr b. ḍābī al-tamīmī and demands to know why he has not yet left for rāmhurmuz. ʿumayr points to his age and infirmity and pleads that he is sending his son, who is much stronger and fiercer, to fight in his stead. unmoved, al-ḥajjāj has him executed as an example. a town crier announces ʿumayr’s death throughout the city, adding that anyone remaining within the city walls after that day can expect the same fate. soon the streets leading out of the town are crowded with soldiers leaving for rāmhurmuz. a similar course of events takes place in baṣra, where al-ḥajjāj subsequently relocates. delivering another threat-laden speech in the local mosque, he executes sharīk b. ʿamr, chief of the banū yashkur, after dismissing sharīk’s claim that bishr, the previous governor, had exempted him from military service on account of his hernia and blindness. the baṣrans, seeing that the new governor’s patience is not to be tried, start flooding out of the city and back to al-muhallab, who expresses his joy at the arrival of such a strong and determined governor. having reimposed order in kūfa and baṣra, al-ḥajjāj marches with a contingent of baṣran soldiers to rustaqabādh on the road to rāmhurmuz, intending to support al-muhallab from the rear.12 in rustaqabādh he delivers another speech, prohibiting the soldiers from leaving 8. this is despite increasingly harsh measures imposed on the reluctant soldiers; m. a. shaban, islamic history: a new interpretation, vol. 1, a.d. 600–750 (a.h. 132) (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1971), 102. 9. al-ḥajjāj’s famous speech is cited in several sources: al-balādhurī, ansāb, 267–69; al-mubarrad, kāmil, 215–16; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:864–66; al-masʿūdī, murūj, 5:295–96. for a more extensive list of citations, see ʿabd al-ameer dixon, the umayyad caliphate 65–86/684–705: a political study (london: luzac, 1971), 143 n. 2. for a close reading of the speech that al-ḥajjāj gave in kūfa, see p. klasova, “empire through language: al-ḥajjāj b. yūsuf al-thaqafī and the power of oratory in umayyad iraq” (phd diss., georgetown university, 2018), 208–24. the payment of stipends, supervised by al-ḥajjāj himself, is described in al-masʿūdī, murūj, 5:297-98; al-mubarrad, kāmil, 216. 10. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 268–69; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:865–66. 11. the soldiers get three days to move or al-ḥajjāj turns them into outlaws by removing their protection (fa-man wajadtuhu baʿd thālitha min jaysh ibn miḥnaf fa-bariʾat minhu al-dhimma; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 270, 274) or cuts off their heads (wa-aqsimu bi-llāh lā ajidu aḥadan baʿd thālitha mimman akhalla bi-markazihi illā ḍaraba ʿunuqahu; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 271). 12. the military camp that al-ḥajjāj set up at rāmhurmuz later became known as ʿaskar mukram. see m. 474 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) their stations until the khārijites have been destroyed, even if it takes years. although the soldiers react by affirming their eagerness to fight, their enthusiasm falters when al-ḥajjāj goes on to announce that as an economizing measure,13 the raise in their stipends, agreed to by muṣʿab b. al-zubayr (d. 72/691) and, according to the soldiers, confirmed by the caliph ʿabd al-malik and implemented by his governor bishr, will be cancelled.14 the troops take fierce exception, and when al-ḥajjāj refuses to bend, prominent leaders such as al-hudhayl b. ʿimrān b. al-fuḍayl al-burjumī (d. 76/695),15 ʿabd allāh b. ḥakīm b. ziyād al-mujāshiʿī (d. 76/695), and qutayba b. muslim (d. 96/715)16 begin to work with ʿabd allāh b. al-jārūd to arrange al-ḥajjāj’s removal as governor of iraq.17 initially, the mutineers seem to be winning. they even manage to raid al-ḥajjāj’s camp, seizing weapons and other possessions, including two of his wives.18 however, more and more of ibn al-jārūd’s supporters begin to switch sides, some being uncomfortable with opposing the caliph’s legitimate representative, others claiming tribal solidarity.19 in the ensuing battle at the end of rabīʿ i 76 (july 695), ibn al-jārūd is almost immediately hit by an arrow and killed.20 instantly, ibn al-jārūd’s party falls apart, with his soldiers giving themselves up or deserting to al-ḥajjāj. the two other main figures who have remained loyal to his cause, al-hudhayl b. ʿimrān al-burjumī and ʿabd allāh b. ḥakīm b. ziyād al-mujāshiʿī, are captured and killed on al-ḥajjāj’s orders. the two of them along with ibn al-jārūd are then crucified and put on display. ibn al-jārūd’s head, together with those of some dozen streck and l. lockhart, “ʿaskar mukram,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., 1:711 (leiden: brill, 1960). 13. “why do you, may god make the amīr thrive, leave us here imprisoned? take us to those dogs who will be chanceless when the two garrisons [of kūfa and baṣra] pound on them” (wa-limā taḥbisunā aṣlaḥa allāh al-amīr bi-hādhā al-makān sir binā ilā haʾulāʾi al-kilāb fa-mā hum idhā ajtamaʿa ahl al-miṣrayn ʿalayhim bi-shayʾ; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 279). because of the mismanagement of his predecessors, al-ḥajjāj encountered a rather empty treasury upon his arrival in iraq, motivating his decision to cut costs (sayed, die revolte, 129; shaban, islamic history, 104; dixon, umayyad caliphate, 144). that al-ḥajjāj was more concerned with fighting the caliphate’s enemies than with raising salaries for the troops is, however, confirmed by a disagreement he had with al-muhallab about the importance of collecting taxes versus fighting the khārijites (al-mubarrad, kāmil, 668). 14. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 280; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:874 (bishr is not mentioned). attempts to lower the amount paid out in stipends appear often in the history of iraq. 15. p. crone, slaves on horses: the evolution of the islamic polity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1980), 114. 16. crone, slaves, 136–37. 17. they express their support for ibn al-jārūd’s replies to al-ḥajjāj concerning the cut in their stipend (naḥnu maʿaka wa-yaduka wa-aʿwānuka inna hādhā al-rajul ghayr kāffin wa-yanquṣanā hādhihi al-ziyāda) and even give him a secret oath of allegiance with the purpose of removing al-ḥajjāj (fa-halumma nubayiʿuka ʿalā ikhrājihi min al-ʿirāq; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 281). the conspiracy also appears in the very short entries in ibn khayyāṭ’s (d. 240/854) taʾrīkh (khalaʿūhu, i.e. al-ḥajjāj, wa-bāyaʿū ʿabd allāh b. al-jārūd), and in ibn qutayba’s maʿārif (wa-ijtamaʿat ʿalayhi al-qabāʾil min ahl al-baṣra wa ahl al-kūfa fa-wallawhu amrahum). see ibn khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh, ed. a. ḍ. al-ʿumarī (2nd revised edition; riyad: dār ṭayba, 1405/1985), 272; and ibn qutayba, maʿārif, ed. tharwat ʿukāsha (electronic edition; riyad: turath for solutions, 2014), 339–40. 18. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 283. 19. ibid., 280, 284, 287. 20. he dies just one hour after the start of the battle; ibid., 289. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 475 of his followers, is sent to al-muhallab’s camp, where it provides a great morale boost for his soldiers and a grim reminder to the khārijites of what lies in store for those resisting al-ḥajjāj.21 although al-ḥajjāj offers the regular troops a general pardon or safe-conduct (amān), the senior figures in ibn al-jārūd’s party are given less forgiving treatment. some escape by running away to remote corners of the empire, seeking the protection of local strongmen. those who eventually fall into al-ḥajjāj’s hands are almost without exception killed. only a few manage to escape this fate, mostly through the intercession of the caliph himself. distorting sources ibn al-jārūd’s rebellion occurred at a crucial point in the history and historiography of the islamic empire. the reports of the conflict between ibn al-jārūd and al-ḥajjāj are preserved in the works of abbasid historians writing a century or more after the events took place under a different dynasty. scholars who have examined the discourse of revolt have pointed to the distortion of historical accounts in later debates that have exploited them for their rhetorical value.22 the presence of al-ḥajjāj in this story warrants additional caution. al-ḥajjāj is best known for his image in the sources as a merciless enforcer of caliphal rule, demanding from others the same absolute obedience and dedication he demanded of himself. as in our account, al-ḥajjāj’s actions are, however, often depicted as needlessly cruel, excessively harsh, and in general going against the rules of good government, especially in his refusal to exercise clemency and leniency toward dissenters, which sometimes even placed him at odds with the caliph ʿabd al-malik.23 as in his treatment of ibn al-jārūd, 21. ibid., 291–92. 22. see above, n. 5. 23. for a discussion of al-ḥajjāj’s strongly negative image in the muslim historical sources that describe his dealings with khārijites, see hagemann, khārijites, 233–40. for his general bad press, see klasova, “empire,” ch. 1. indeed, the sources offer various interactions between the caliph and his governor. most famously, al-ḥajjāj directly disobeyed the caliph ʿabd al-malik’s orders when he decided to bomb the kaʿba in response to ibn al-zubayr’s (d. 73/692) continuing resistance in mecca. the caliph’s insistence that al-ḥajjāj show ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr clemency compares well with ʿabd al-malik’s attempt to convince ʿabd allāh’s brother musʿab b. al-zubayr to lay down his resistance in exchange for his life and the governorship of iraq. the high profile background of these sons of an important companion of the prophet muḥammad surely motivated these repeated attempts at reconciliation. for al-ḥajjāj’s upright behavior and his insistence on similar behavior from others, sometimes in contravention of ʿabd al-malik’s orders, see dietrich, “al-ḥadjdjādj.” obviously, there are plenty of examples of al-ḥajjāj’s showing quick and full obedience to the caliph’s orders. in one instance, for example, ʿabd al-malik ordered al-ḥajjāj to leave the taxes of the province of fārs, which al-muhallab had regained from the khārijites after many years of intensive fighting, to pay for the maintenance of the commander’s troops, and al-ḥajjāj immediately and without any problems executed the order (al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:1004). christian chroniclers also contain negative accounts. his suspension of the patriarchate of the church of the east because of what he considered abuse of power by the patriarch is extensively discussed. the patriarchate was reinstated only at al-ḥajjāj’s death sixteen years later. see p. wood, the chronicle of seert: christian historical imagination in late antique iraq (oxford: oxford university press, 2013), 266. al-ḥajjāj’s rejection of the request for tax exemption by the inhabitants of the iraqi town of najrān, sought on the basis of the inhabitants’ descent from the population of the arabian najrān, is deemed excessively cruel in the sources (wood, seert, 251). dionysus 476 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) al-ḥajjāj had little patience for mutinous troops, offering them a narrow window to repent and subsequently punishing without mercy those who continued to resist.24 but the sources also contain examples of al-ḥajjāj’s uprightness, such as his rigorous rejection of bribes, his generosity to the poor, his forgiveness toward (some) defeated opponents, and his protection and patronage of christian holy men and pious muslim men and women.25 in addition to his successful handling of rebellions in iraq, he was especially appreciated by the caliph for being a reliable agent in administrative matters, collecting taxes, building infrastructure so that even more taxes could be raised, and ensuring that peace and quiet prevailed in the land.26 the view of an excessively tyrannical and hot-headed al-ḥajjāj in the sources can be explained by the general anti-umayyad tendency of abbasid historiography.27 al-balādhurī, of tel maḥre devotes a section to “the evil deeds of al-ḥajjāj and muḥammad b. marwān in their provinces” where he describes the two as “powerful men, capable of shedding blood without the slightest pity”; a. palmer, the seventh century in the west-syrian chronicles (liverpool: liverpool university press, 1993), 109, 200. the historian relates in relation to al-ḥajjāj’s governorship of iraq: “given authority over persia, al-ḥajjāj began to wreak destruction pitilessly. he even murdered the leading men of the arabs and looted their houses”; palmer, west-syrian chronicles, 201. but other christian sources are more neutral, e.g., the citations gathered in robert hoyland, theophilus of edessa’s chronicle (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2011). by contrast, ʿabd al-malik’s successor, al-walīd (r. 86–96/705–15), did not interfere with al-ḥajjāj’s policies. 24. al-ḥajjāj offered ibn al-jārūd a short period in which to show penitence, as he had done with other opponents such as ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr and ibn al-ashʿath, but when they refused (out of fear of being punished anyway), he fought them until absolute defeat, death, or execution, as caliph ʿabd al-malik himself had done with musʿab b. al-zubayr in iraq. 25. on the orders of ʿabd al-malik, al-ḥajjāj gave the nestorian john of daylam (d. 738) 12,000 silver pieces for the building of monasteries; s. brock, “a syriac life of john of dailam,” parole de l’orient 10 (1981–82): 123–89, at 148–49, 165–68. (i would like to thank philip wood for pointing me to this reference.) al-ḥajjāj gave to the poor any money he had left after paying for his regular expenses and those of his family; al-jahshiyārī (d. 331/942), kitāb al-wuzarāʾ wa-l-kuttāb, ed. m. al-saqqāʾ et al. (cairo: maṭbaʿat ʿabd al-ḥamīd aḥmad al-ḥanafī, 1357/1938), 42. al-ḥajjāj let go a khārijite who did not renounce ʿalī and ʿuthmān; hagemann, khārijites, 235. pamela klasova has interpreted the anecdotes that the fifth/twelfth-century ibn al-ʿasākir gathered in his taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq depicting al-ḥajjāj engaging in superior moral acts as a rehabilitation of his image; klasova, “empire,” ch. 3. 26. best illustrated by an anecdote set at the caliph al-manṣūr’s (r. 136–58/754–75) court that al-ṭabarī relates and that, incidentally, also reflects al-ḥajjāj’s contested reputation. while waiting to gain access to the caliph, some courtiers debate al-ḥajjāj’s achievements: some greatly admire him, but others vehemently despise the governor. as they enter into the caliph’s presence, one of them complains: “o commander of the faithful, i did not think that i would live to see the day when al-ḥajjāj would be discussed in your house and on your carpet and given praise.” the caliph replies: “why do you disapprove of that? he was a man whom the umayyads entrusted with power and he served them well. i would be happy, by god, if i could find a man like al-ḥajjāj so that i could hand over my responsibilities to him.” see al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:400–401; translation from h. kennedy, trans., al-manṣūr and al-mahdī, vol. 29 of the history of al-ṭabarī (albany: state university of new york press, 1990), 102–3. the passage is also partially quoted in t. el-hibri, “the redemption of umayyad memory by the ʿabbāsids,” journal of near eastern studies 61, no. 4 (2002): 245–61, at 244. 27. el-hibri, “redemption.” on the memory of umayyad history in abbasid historiography, see also a. borrut, “the future of the past: historical writing in early islamic syria and umayyad memory,” in power, patronage, and memory in early islam: perspectives on umayyad elites, ed. a. george and a. marsham, 275–300 (oxford: oxford university press, 2018); idem, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 477 the historian whose elaborate account forms the basis of this article, was especially closely associated with the abbasid caliphal court. even more than other abbasid historians, he was concerned with moral questions of good governance and proper behavior, using historiography to illustrate explicit ethical principles. at the same time, as a court historian, he had to entertain his readers and clothe his historical accounts in engaging anecdotes, which might explain his attention to gruesome and dramatic details in the description of ibn al-jārūd’s downfall. it could also account for the romanticized depiction of ibn al-jārūd as a tragic hero fighting an abusive representative of the established power.28 finally, al-balādhurī’s close association with the abbasid rulers made him more prone to emphasize the moral decay of umayyad rulers as a justification for the regime change initiated by his masters.29 comparing the treatment of al-ḥajjāj by three abbasid historians, mohamed el yamani concluded that al-balādhurī shaped the figure of al-ḥajjāj to serve as an instrument for instructing his audience about good—that is, measured, controlled, and just—governance versus cruel, harsh, and unjust rule.30 several historical circumstances should also be taken into account when considering ibn al-jārūd’s revolt and al-ḥajjāj’s uncompromising reaction to it as reported in the sources. after the crisis of the second fitna, which al-ḥajjāj crucially helped to decide in favor of the umayyads, the marwānid caliphs launched their famous program of state building, characterized by centralization, uniformization, arabicization, and islamicization. as governor in the ḥijāz and especially later in iraq and beyond, al-ḥajjāj was an essential instrument for implementing the caliph’s policies. as part of this program of administrative reform, the traditional power structures relying on ashrāf, local arab noblemen, had to be broken down to make space for the new marwānid order. this context explains the ashrāf’s resistance to these changes as well as al-ḥajjāj’s application of exemplary violence against their main representatives to break their resistance (see below on the execution of tribal leaders).31 interestingly, this crackdown on arab tribal leaders is also reported by dionysus of tel maḥre (d. 845).32 the watershed changes in administrative practice and organization under the marwānids were not the first adjustments to government, nor were they the last. most notable is obviously the development of ideas on governance under the abbasids, resulting in the building of the elaborate government infrastructure described in countless works of statecraft; this is also the period in which the authors i draw upon in this article wrote their versions of the events. the clear-cut opposition between the caliph as an absolute ruler and les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leiden: brill, 2010), 79–108. 28. the image of the late seventh-century iraqi khārijite rebel shabīb b. yazīd (d. 77/696 or 78/697–98) as a pious and honourable fighter contrasting a scheming and deceptive al-ḥajjāj is similar, and not only in al-balādhurī; hagemann, khārijites, 237–38. 29. ibid., 204, 258. 30. m. el yamani, “al-ḥaǧǧāǧ b. yūsuf al-ṯaqafī: entre histoire et littérature” (phd diss., inalco, 2014), 258. 31. clifford e. bosworth, sīstān under the arabs, from the islamic conquest to the rise of the ṣaffārids (30–250/651–864) (rome: ismeo, 1968), 60. see also the contributions by alon dar and reza huseini in this issue. 32. “he even murdered the leading men of the arabs and looted their houses”; palmer, west-syrian chronicles, 201. 478 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) his insubordinate governor who subverts his policies and decisions is a false dichotomy that belongs to the more developed governmental context of the abbasid period. in fact, al-ḥajjāj was a loyal and reliable instrument of marwānid policy, and these two seemingly opposed poles of political authority operated in a much more fluid and fragmented governance system in the umayyad caliphate.33 there was not an absolute caliphal hegemony radiating out from the capital and encompassing the entire empire, but rather a multinodal imperial structure in which caliph, governor, and those under their rule operated as interconnected and overlapping sources of authority, sometimes aligned, sometimes contradicting, on a fluid and unstable continuum between dutiful obedience and violent defiance.34 in relation to ibn al-jārūd’s story, however, it is important to realize that rules and moral standards of good governance had already been already established by the umayyad period.35 in addition, even without the centralizing measures imposed by al-ḥajjāj, iraqi muslims had been engaged in almost continuous revolt, rallying around a variety of ʿalid, khārijite, and other protest movements. twice their preferred caliph, ʿalī in the first fitna and ibn al-zubayr in the second, had lost out against umayyad alternatives. this history made the iraqis prone to revolt—to try to have their priorities heard, as it were. it may be exactly the iraqis’ persistence, however, that explains al-ḥajjāj’s recalcitrance in dealing with the rebels: he may have wanted to foreclose future opportunities for revolt. perhaps al-ḥajjāj, whose support of the umayyad caliphate was unequivocal, felt a need to deal once and for all with the “losers of history,” for whom, moreover, he had little respect.36 33. similarly, another key figure of marwānid administrative change, the governor of egypt qurra b. sharīk (in office 90–96/709–14), is described in the historiographical sources as tyrannical and bent on imposing direct and absolute supremacy, whereas papyri show him as strict and consistent, but with limited tools to enforce government control. see a. papaconstantinou, “the rhetoric of power and the voice of reason: tensions between central and local in the correspondence of qurra ibn sharīk,” in official epistolography and the language(s) of power, ed. s. procházka, l. reinfandt, and s. tost, 267–81 (vienna: österreichische akademie der wissenschaften, 2015). discussing this point with andrew marsham clarified its significance appreciably for me, and i would like to thank him for that. 34. firnhaber-baker, “introduction,” 2–5. cf. above, n. 4. 35. these were similar to the “rules of the game” that governed political interactions in early medieval europe. the latter, however, remained largely undefined and unrecorded; althoff, spielregeln, 233, 366. the need for predictable behavior in political interaction and communication, especially when looking for compromises in and solutions to conflicts, predates the recording of such rules (ibid., 257). the presence of standardized and inferable rules of governance is reflected already in the peace treaties that the arab conquerors concluded during their conquests; see m. levy-rubin, non-muslims in the early islamic empire: from surrender to coexistence (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018), 32–56. papyri likewise provide evidence of the introduction of a governance etiquette and practice by the arab conquerors; p. m. sijpesteijn, shaping a muslim state: the world of a mid-eighth-century egyptian official (oxford: oxford university press, 2013), 64–81. 36. see klasova’s discussion of al-ḥajjāj’s speech in kūfa in “empire,” 208–24. al-ḥajjāj does not hide his dismay and disappointment at the achievements and attitude of the iraqi troops. in 77/696 he writes to ʿabd al-malik, asking him to send syrian troops to deal with the khārijite revolt under shabīb b. yazīd because the kūfan garrison is entirely hopeless; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:943. someone in al-ḥajjāj’s entourage confirms that the governor has mobilized kūfan troops but does not find them very reliable (ibid., 3:945). finally, when shabīb b. yazīd is threatening to enter kūfa, al-ḥajjāj scolds the kūfan troops, telling them to “go and join the jews and christians in al-ḥīra,” as he now has syrian soldiers to handle the problem (ibid., 3:955). al-ḥajjāj claims that the syrian troops he has brought are more disciplined than the “lazy and hypocritical (nāfiq)” local soldiers. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 479 the final historical circumstance that could explain al-ḥajjāj’s crackdown is closely related to the relentless insurrections in iraq and to the weariness of the iraqi troops tasked with dealing with them. these troops had been in the field for many intensive years of warfare. their exhaustion and disillusionment must have been real. the endless and hopeless fighting motivated other rebels as well, such as those following al-ḥārith b. surayj in umayyad khurāsān (116–28/734–46), discussed by reza huseini in this issue, who claimed that they had worn their armor without interruption to the point that it had grown into their flesh. al-ḥajjāj went to iraq accompanied by syrian troops. his men were not only more obedient but also more effective than the local forces. governors and caliphs before al-ḥajjāj had used both reward and punishment in their attempts to convince the iraqi soldiers to maintain their positions on the battlefield, especially in the form of assignments and withdrawals of the fayʾ, that is the revenue from conquered lands, in the form of stipends. caliphs and their governors variously raised and lowered the stipends, or ʿaṭāʾ, paid to the iraqi troops to motivate them to continue fighting.37 as a consequence, dissatisfaction about pay was a constant grievance and a flashpoint for revolts. with the arrival of al-ḥajjāj, however, the fate of the iraqi troops was sealed. he simply diverted iraq’s income to pay his own soldiers, eventually abolishing the iraqi garrisons altogether and founding al-wāsiṭ for his syrian troops.38 it may not be possible at this moment to disentangle the negative elements of al-ḥajjāj’s image, especially his more cruel and seemingly unreasonable acts, from his actions in the specific historical context of ibn al-jārūd’s revolt.39 the purpose of this article is, however, to use ibn al-jārūd’s conflict with al-ḥajjāj to analyze the function of rebellions as an integral feature of the political culture of the time, responding to rules and expectations of conduct that regulated the political cut and thrust. for such an understanding of revolts, al-ḥajjāj’s and ibn al-jārūd’s specific actions in their interaction matter less compared with what they represent in terms of how contemporary and later observers understood the course and resolution of conflicts.40 in other words, the account illustrates what the rules of engagement the syrians are said to have functioned as the governor’s private police force, fighting iraqi expressions of dissatisfaction (sayed, die revolte, 129). 37. for examples of the withholding of payments, cancellation of payment increases, and disagreements about payments, see sayed, die revolte, 32–33; h. kennedy, the armies of the caliphs: military and society in the early islamic state (london: routledge, 2001), 38–42, 76–77. shabīb b. yazīd, the most famous khārijite rebel in iraq, is even said to have revolted because his stipend was withheld because of an administrative error; k. v. zetterstéen and c. f. robinson, “shabīb b. yazīd,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., 9:164–65 (leiden: brill, 1997). the caliph yazīd b. al-walīd (r. 126/744) acquired the nickname al-nāqiṣ for, among other reasons, reversing the ten-dirham increase on the stipends that al-walīd b. yazīd (r. 125–26/743–44) had initiated (al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:1825). 38. kennedy, armies, 41, 42. 39. even though there is an explicit possibility within the system for an individual historical actor to maneuver within the unwritten and implicit rules of interaction; althoff, spielregeln, 366–67. 40. in other words, even though anecdotes may be used to embellish the story, its audience expects both parties to behave according to rules in conflicts, and the normative behavior in these situations is made clear even in the beautified and exaggerated account (ibid., 372). 480 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) were and how they were transgressed, manipulated or adhered to by the actors involved.41 the threat and even use of violence and force were central elements of these negotiations, driving the recourse to rebellion and determining the response to and popular perception of rebellions.42 exploiting the dynamics of this system, al-ḥajjāj was able to maneuver the negotiator ibn al-jārūd into the position of a rebel who had to be annihilated as a threat to the new political order in an increasingly centralized umayyad state. but the rhetoric of the rebellion had not developed to the point that ibn al-jārūd’s case could be invalidated, and a more pragmatic solution had to be found whereby the soldiers’ grievances were redressed and they and their leaders were reintegrated into the caliphal order. playing by the rules of the game within a view of violent protest as an integral part of a multipolar political system, an examination of al-ḥajjāj’s and ibn al-jārūd’s navigation of the instruments of power offers interesting insights into how and when the articulation of complaints against the caliphate’s governance turns into revolt. the actions of ibn al-jārūd and his supporters in their struggle against al-ḥajjāj conform to a striking degree to normative patterns, in the sense that they adhere to political and legal prescriptions and mores. both men participate fully in the political game, interacting with authorities and using established political and legal instruments. al-ḥajjāj, representing legitimate rule, is challenged by the rebels both for his neglect of the moral responsibilities that come with this position and for his goal of asserting the caliph’s authority more thoroughly. within a politically fragmented landscape in which caliph, governor, local commanders and chiefs, and military troops compete for authority, power, and access to constituencies, ibn al-jārūd and al-ḥajjāj effectively exploit the political avenues of communication available to them. as a result, those involved in the conflict constantly change their political and military configurations, switch allegiances seemingly at will, appeal to alternative powers beyond those directly ruling them, and claim legitimate rule or decry oppression and tyranny to support their acts of protest or their subsequent reactions.43 the conflict between al-ḥajjāj and the iraqi troops starts with negotiations over stipends to which the iraqi troops feel entitled but which al-ḥajjāj declines to pay. both parties present their arguments. al-ḥajjāj refuses outright to concede, dismissing his predecessor muṣʿab b. al-zubayr’s promised pay raise as the work of a “heretic, hypocrite, and sinner” (mulḥid munāfiq fāsiq), calling ibn al-jārūd a liar, and threatening him when he suggests that the governor is rolling back a legitimate decision.44 the soldiers add that ʿabd al-malik confirmed muṣʿab’s decision and that his appointed governor (and brother) bishr effected the increased payments.45 indeed, as already mentioned, access to iraq’s fayʾ in the form of 41. ibid., 369. 42. wickham, “looking forward,” 158. 43. acknowledging the agency of rebels is an important shift in the field of rebel studies (firnhaber-baker, “introduction,” 1). 44. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 280; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:874 (fāsiq munāfiq). 45. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 280; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:874. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 481 stipends for the troops was a constant point of conflict, motivating rebellions on more than this one occasion. al-ḥajjāj’s measures are in that sense no different from those of other governors, except that the influx of syrian troops under his command decided the case in his favor once and for all. at the outset of their protest, ibn al-jārūd and his men emphasize that they do not intend to fight al-ḥajjāj, let alone kill him, but “merely” want to see him recalled by the caliph, who will then be asked to send a replacement governor. al-balādhurī, our main source for the events, states that ibn al-jārūd “disagreed [with al-ḥajjāj] and the people concurred with him to remove al-ḥajjāj from iraq and to ask ʿabd al-malik to appoint someone else as governor.”46 ibn al-jārūd sees open battle as a last resort, to be pursued only if al-ḥajjāj refuses to leave the governorship of his own accord.47 in response to al-ḥajjāj’s threats, ibn al-jārūd exclaims, “why [do you say this]? by god, i am truly a counselor to you and verily my words reflect what my followers say.”48 in other words, ibn al-jārūd and his men are not seeking to throw off umayyad rule or even to challenge the caliph’s right to appoint his representative over the province. rather, they appeal precisely to the caliph’s prerogatives when they ask that al-ḥajjāj be removed and a different governor be sent. the possibility of removing the caliph himself, should he be unwilling to accede to their request, is quickly discounted, with the argument that the caliph would never risk losing their support as long as they are needed to fight the khārijites.49 these actions find echoes in similar instances in other places and times in the umayyad caliphate, when troops appealed to higher authorities to intervene in local appointments that did not sit well with the jund. disagreements over the suitability of a local ruler could be solved through a menu of expedients ranging from diplomacy to violent means.50 46. khālafa wa-tābiʿahu al-nās ʿalā ikhrāj al-ḥajjāj min al-ʿirāq wa-masʾalat ʿabd al-malik tawliyat ghayrihi; al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1866), 281. 47. wa-lakin li-yakhruj ʿ annā madhmūman madḥūran wa-illā qātalnāhu … wa-kāna rayʾuhum an yukhrijūhu ʿanhum wa-lā yuqātilūhu; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 283. 48. wa-limā wa-llāh innī laka la-nāsiḥ wa-inna qawlī hādhā la-qawl man warāʾī; ibid., 280. 49. ibid., 281. 50. asking a higher authority to replace a local administrator was a common tactic on the part of local troops dissatisfied by such appointees. when the request was not honored, things could get out of hand, as the case of ibn al-jārūd shows. in another case, the ashrāf of ifrīqiya assassinated the governor yazīd b. abī muslim (in office 102/720–21) because they were dissatisfied with his rule. interestingly, they objected because yazīd b. abī muslim tried to implement a policy copied from al-ḥajjāj, namely, sending converts who had moved to the garrison back to their place of residence and ordering them to continue to pay the poll tax. the ashrāf reinstalled yazīd’s predecessor and were quick to inform the caliph that their loyalty to him was unwavering (innā lam nakhlaʿ aydaynā min al-ṭāʿa). the caliph yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik indeed confirmed the re-installed governor in his position (al-jahshiyārī, wuzarāʾ, 57; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:1435). a similar later incident developed rather differently. in the year 177/793 the jund of tūnis, dissatisfied with their local ruler, al-mughayra b. bishr b. rawḥ, wrote to his uncle al-faḍl b. rawḥ, governor of ifrīqiya, asking for a replacement. when the latter did not answer, the troops resolved to oust al-mughayra, writing to faḍl that they did not want to be disobedient but that they were forced into it by al-mughayra’s bad behavior; their missive used language similar to that of the previous “rebels” (innā lam nakhruj yaddan ʿan ṭāʿa lakinnahu asāʾa al-sīra). the troops asked that the governor appoint over them someone they approved of (fa-walli ʿalaynā man narḍāhu), but when the governor instead appointed another family member, the troops felt betrayed and rose up in a full-fledged rebellion (confusingly 482 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) two references in al-balādhurī’s account, however, point to a more explicit and immediate goal of undermining the government on ibn al-jārūd’s part, one that contrasts with more loyalist voices in his camp arguing for a conciliatory approach. at the second confrontation between al-ḥajjāj and ibn al-jārūd, when the governor repeats his intention to lower the men’s stipend, a certain maṣqala b. karib b. raqaba b. khawtaʿa al-ʿabdī in ibn al-jārūd’s entourage expresses unease: “it is not right for the herd to oppose its shepherd; we heard what the amīr said, so we hear and obey, whether we like it or not.” ibn al-jārūd is not impressed, and, with an obvious dislike for the lower ranks getting involved in decision-making, dismisses maṣqala’s reservations outright.51 when it is clear that a violent confrontation is imminent, groups move from one camp to the other. the first party to leave ibn al-jārūd’s side for al-ḥajjāj’s does so “fearing to fight and to oppose the authorities (sulṭān).”52 these expressions of opposition by ibn al-jārūd’s supporters to his aim of securing their rights through violent confrontation show that the principle of obedience to caliphal representatives and caliphal decisions was contested.53 throughout the conflict, ibn al-jārūd and his men apply the instruments of an almost legalistic-seeming procedure. first, there is the secret bayʿa (oath of allegiance) with the specific and limited goal of removing al-ḥajjāj from iraq.54 the acts of giving the bayʿa and mutual pledges of loyalty between ibn al-jārūd and his supporters with the aid of contracts and treaties are formal and context-appropriate.55 the bayʿa functions here as an affirmation of loyalty for a specific, primarily military, purpose, and it follows pre-islamic arabian and early conquest practice.56 second, the dissidents’ plan to write to ʿabd al-malik and ask led by someone called ʿabd allāh b. al-jārūd known also as “slave of his lord” ʿabd rabbihi al-anbarī, obviously a different person than the protagonist of this study), killing the appointee and the governor. the caliph sent a new governor with an army, and they eventually subdued the insurgents and arrested the rebels. see ibn al-athīr, kāmil, 10:92–95 (where his name is rendered in the obvious misspellings ʿabd wayh, ʿadwayh, and baʿdwayh) and ibn khaldūn (d. 808/1406), taʾrīkh, 7 vols. (electronic edition; riyad: turath for solutions, 2014) 4:248–49. i would like to thank alon dar for referring me to this report. a final example is egypt’s financial governor ʿubayd allāh b. al-ḥabḥāb, who, operating in the interest of local egyptian ashrāf, would send back governors he deemed unfit and ask the caliph to appoint more suitable candidates; see n. abbott, “a new papyrus and a review of the administration of ʿubaid allāh b. al-ḥabḥāb,” in arabic and islamic studies in honor of hamilton a. r. gibb, ed. g. makdisi, 21–35 (leiden: brill, 1965). see also the case described by alon dar in this issue; in that case, however, no higher power was invoked to solve the disagreement of some ashrāf with the governor of egypt. 51. laysa li-l-raʿiyya an tarudda ʿ alā rāʿīhā wa-qad samiʿnā mā qāla al-amīr fa-samʿan wa-ṭāʿatan fīmā aḥabnā wa-karihnā; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 280–81. 52. wa-atāhu qawm min ahl al-miṣrayn fa-ṣārū maʿahu mustawḥishīn min muḥārabat al-sulṭān wa-mukhālafatihi; ibid., 284. 53. see the discussions in ḥadīth collections about whether alms collection and distribution ought to be managed by government officials or by individual muslims; sijpesteijn, shaping, 181–98. for competing views on the right to rebel, see k. abou el fadl, violence and rebellion in islamic law (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001), ch. 8. 54. nubāyiʿuka ʿalā ikhrājihi min al-ʿirāq; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 281. cf. nn. 17 and 46 above. 55. fa-bāyaʿahu al-nās sirran wa-aʿṭawhu al-mawāthīq ʿ alā al-wafāʾ wa-akhadha baʿḍuhum ʿ alā baʿḍ al-ʿuhūd; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 281. 56. a. marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy: accession and succession in the first muslim empire al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 483 him to send them another governor also shows respect for the established structures of government and the correct mechanisms for contact, in this case an official letter. ibn al-jārūd also adheres to the laws of war and diplomacy. when al-ḥajjāj dispatches a messenger, al-aʿyan, to invite ibn al-jārūd to surrender, the latter respects the traditional inviolability of messengers despite his inclination to treat al-aʿyan badly, exclaiming: “if you were not a messenger, i would kill you!”57 instead, he has al-aʿyan hit on the neck, perhaps in imitation of cutting off his head. in another incident, too, ibn al-jārūd carefully defers to the codes of conduct among muslim elites. in the raid on al-ḥajjāj’s camp, two of his wives are captured. ibn al-jārūd has them locked up, “fearing rascals [who might hurt them].”58 both ibn al-jārūd and al-ḥajjāj attempt to settle the conflict by persuading the other party to back down, in this sense operating as political equals. this is a reminder that revolts, even when they appealed to the rank and file, were led by notables whose motives might or might not overlap with those of their supporters.59 as just noted, al-ḥajjāj offers ibn al-jārūd the option of surrender with protection.60 similarly, ibn al-jārūd gives al-ḥajjāj several opportunities to leave for damascus before a battle breaks out, even though al-ḥajjāj is clearly in a disadvantageous position, standing alone with his special troops and family against ibn al-jārūd’s large army.61 in fact, in al-ḥajjāj’s own camp there are also those who advocate avoiding battle and securing safe-conducts.62 even after the battle is over, ibn al-jārūd’s followers continue to participate in political negotiations as they spread out across the caliphate in search of safe-conducts guaranteeing their security and property. the reports of al-ḥajjāj intentionally disregarding such (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009), 28–32, 66–68. see also the oath of allegiance that the jund of tūnis swore to their rebellious leader for the purpose of removing al-mughayra as governor of tūnis, while simultaneously stating that this did not mean they were disobedient to the governor (see above, n. 50). similarly ibn al-ashʿath’s followers offered their leader a bayʿa with the “limited” goal of removing al-ḥajjāj (bosworth, sīstān, 59). for other bayʿas given to rebels, see e. landau-tasseron, the religious foundations of political allegiance: a study of bayʿa in pre-modern islam (washington, dc: hudson institute, 2010), 26–29. 57. al-balādhurī, futūḥ, 281; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 283. 58. wa-ḥaṣṣanūhumā [corrected from ḥaṣṣanūhā at the suggestion of one of the anonymous reviewers] mukhāfat al-sufahāʾ. this passage is missing from ahlwardt’s edition of the ansāb but is present in another edition of the text, namely al-balādhurī, kitāb jumal min ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. suhayl zakkār and riyāḍ al-ziriklī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1417/1996), 7:3009. 59. revolts in the muslim empire and early medieval europe were often lead by notables (wickham, “looking forward,” 160; lev, “coptic rebellions”). 60. al-ḥajjāj similarly offered ibn al-zubayr and ibn al-ashʿath the possibility of surrendering on the eve of battle. both refused, with well-known, deadly results. see dietrich, “al-hadjdjadj.” 61. “my words are those of [everyone] behind me,” ibn al-jārūd exclaims when al-ḥajjāj asks him to obey (al-balādhurī, ansāb, 280). for the remark that al-ḥajjāj is alone except for his family and special troops (wa-laysa maʿahu illā khāṣṣatuhu wa-ahl baytihi), see ibid., 282. 62. this view is expressed by ziyād b. ʿamr al-ʿatakī, head of baṣra’s police force (ibid., 284; crone, slaves, 121). some years earlier, ziyād had led his tribe, al-azd, to side with the ʿabd al-qays (ibn al-jārūd’s tribe) in support of al-muthannā as the latter tried to raise support for al-mukhtār in baṣra (dixon, umayyad caliphate, 52–53). 484 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) guarantees of safety granted to his former opponents by notables throughout the empire and even by al-ḥajjāj himself seem to be inspired by the kind of colored reporting discussed above.63 in one such report, when al-ḥajjāj confronts ashyam b. shaqīq b. thawr al-hudhalī64 about the latter’s support of ibn al-jārūd, ashyam invokes the amān he has received from al-ḥajjāj, reminding him, “you forgave me for that,” but to no avail: al-ḥajjāj still has him killed.65 in some cases al-ḥajjāj is said to have even gone against specific orders from the caliph in his pursuit of ibn al-jārūd’s supporters. when a dispatch from the caliph orders the release of ibn al-jārūd’s banner-bearer, al-ḥajjāj hurries to cut off the man’s hands and feet as well as those of two other prisoners before they can be released.66 anas b. mālik al-anṣārī also holds an amān, but it does not stop al-ḥajjāj from confiscating his possessions as punishment for his support of ibn al-jārūd.67 the granting, acknowledging, and rejecting of amāns is another stage on which tensions between different centers of political authority were played out (see below). conflicting political ideologies al-ḥajjāj’s effectiveness as a governor stands out when compared to the failures of his predecessors. the previous governor of iraq and brother of the caliph, bishr b. marwān, was effectively cashiered because of his inability to deal adequately with the khārijite insurgents. the caliph instructed him in writing to escalate the pressure on the khārijites, but placed the reinforcements he sent for this purpose under the command of al-muhallab b. abī ṣufra, to bishr’s great chagrin. khālid b. ʿabd allāh (d. 93/711–12), bishr’s temporary successor, wrote a letter to the deserting soldiers. khālid was himself no weak administrator and had earned his stripes by forcing the khārijites to retreat some years earlier. in his letter he addressed the mutineers with al-ḥajjāj-like severity: he who defies the governors and rightful authorities brings down god’s wrath on himself, merits corporal punishment, and makes himself liable to confiscation of his property as spoil, cancellation of his stipend, and exile to the most remote and evil of lands. i swear by god that after this letter of mine, any rebel that i find i will surely slay, god willing.68 63. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 292. in another context al-ḥajjāj tries to obstruct someone’s obtaining an amān from a local governor, as discussed by hannah-lena hagemann in her contribution to this issue (nn. 23–24). 64. crone, slaves, 120. 65. wa-qatala ashyam b. shaqīq b. thawr al-hudhalī wa-yuqālu innahu dakhala fī amānihi man āmana fa-raʾāhu fī majlisihi fa-qāla lahu yā ashyam akharajta maʿa ibn al-jārūd qāla naʿam wa-qad atā ʿafwuka ʿalā dhālika; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 292. 66. ibid., 295. see also below. 67. ibid., 298–301. the case of al-ghaḍbān b. al-qabʿatharā is less clear. the caliph might have given him an amān while he was imprisoned by al-ḥajjāj or reminded the governor of the protected status that the caliph’s amān (obtained earlier) gave him, or al-ḥajjāj might also have released al-ghaḍbān of his own account because he was impressed by the poet’s clever replies (ibid., 291–92, 297). as andrew marsham and chase robinson have shown in “the safe-conduct for the abbasid ʿabd allāh b. ʿalī (d. 764),” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 70 (2007): 247–81, a ruler’s violation of an amān should be considered a literary topos. 68. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:858; translation from rowson, marwānid restoration, 6. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 485 nevertheless, his letter produced no effect at all. no wonder, then, that the caliph ʿabd al-malik emphasized that it was khālid’s “weakness in dealing with the [registered] soldiers in the garrison (ahl al-miṣr)” that had led to his dismissal.69 khālid’s deputy over kūfa, ʿamr b. ḥurayth, to whom the rebelling soldiers turned next with their request to abandon their station and return to the city, responded with a similarly condemnatory, though equally ineffectual, letter: “you have abandoned your assigned places and come here in rebellion and disobedience.”70 al-muhallab, in his capacity of general, also spoke to the troops, but his words had as little effect as had those of the others.71 in short, neither khālid, ʿamr, nor al-muhallab was able to convince the soldiers to return to their camp. al-ḥajjāj, by contrast, does not leave obedience up to chance or encouraging words. he starts his tenure by stating in no unclear terms what he thinks of the deserting soldiers. then, as described above, he turns to a show of exemplary force, executing two prominent inhabitants of kūfa and baṣra. but for all his ferocity, he does not rely on menace alone. after convincing the troops to return to al-muhallab, al-ḥajjāj travels after them to ensure that they do indeed continue all the way to the army camp. he sets up military checkpoints on the road, sends military controllers to hunt down soldiers who have gone into hiding on their way back to al-muhallab, and demands the soldiers present receipts to confirm their safe arrival in the camp and their renewed enrollment in the dīwān.72 the governor’s attitude is thus first and foremost one of realpolitik: as al-ḥajjāj has had ample occasion to learn, maintaining control requires constant vigilance, absolute obedience, and merciless punishment of any signs of deviance. comparing his approach to those of other caliphal agents, al-ḥajjāj’s policy in relation to the iraqi troops’ stipends or their refusal to fight does not seem to differ greatly, except in its effectiveness.73 this approach nevertheless represents a particular view on effective rule, which differs from that of other agents of the caliphate, as will be discussed below. besides his practical motives, al-ḥajjāj’s actions seem at times to be driven by ideology. what al-ḥajjāj’s ideological motivations are becomes clear when we examine what incites his anger. al-ḥajjāj’s main concern seems to be the display of obedience and respect toward those in power and strict adherence to god’s laws and intentions. when he reads out his letter of appointment from the caliph, he fumes at the behavior of the kūfans, who remain seated as the caliph’s greetings are read to them. he demands that they stand up and return the caliph’s written blessing with a spoken reply.74 his obsessive punishment of rebels and other disobedient opponents has already been discussed. 69. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 266–67. al-masʿūdī describes khālid as a “weak man” (rajul ḍaʿīf) in murūj, 5:291. after only two months in the position, khālid was replaced by al-ḥakām b. ayyūb b. al-ḥakam b. abī ʿaqīl, to whom al-ḥajjāj gave instructions to “treat khālid badly” (al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:872; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 266, 275). 70. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:859; translation from rowson, marwānid restoration, 7. 71. al-mubarrad, kāmil, 664–65. 72. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 271, 275, 279; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:866; al-mubarrad, kāmil, 665. for a more extensive description of the fleeing soldiers who, hidden in the sawad, ask their family members to bring them provisions, see al-masʿūdī, murūj, 5:301-302. 73. i would like to thank pamela klasova for bringing this point to my attention. 74. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:870; al-masʿūdī, murūj, 5:292. 486 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) indeed, al-ḥajjāj has a clear preference for sober military efficiency and order. although the description of his arrival at kūfa—alone, on a camel, without an entourage or regalia or indication of rank, and with only the qurʾān in his hands—is unlikely to be historical, as it makes all sorts of appealing references to pious celebrities of islamic history, it nevertheless fits al-ḥajjāj’s general image in the sources.75 al-ḥajjāj’s dislike of vanity and disdain for worldly attachments can be connected both to his pious reputation and his demonstrated antipathy to ostentatious behavior. his rejection of finery and needlessly and inconveniently long robes is illustrated by his call to al-hudhayl b. ʿimrān b. al-fuḍayl al-burjumī: “hey, al-hudhayl, lift up your robes!” al-hudhayl, whose high status among the notables of baṣra was indeed indicated by the sumptuousness of his garments, has to point out to the new governor that it is not proper to speak in this way to someone like him. unchastened, al-ḥajjāj adds to the insult by replying that it might not be appropriate to speak in such a way to someone of al-hudhayl’s stature, but it is surely fitting to have someone like him executed—a threat seemingly triggered entirely by al-hudhayl’s perceived overstatement of his elite status.76 this scene is echoed in the ridicule that al-ḥajjāj’s followers direct at two of ibn al-jārūd’s leading supporters, including al-hudhayl, whose robes are so long that one of them trips over them as he approaches the executioner to be beheaded.77 when ibn al-jārūd’s head is brought to al-ḥajjāj, he has it washed and decorated with a turban, seemingly to make fun of him.78 others, too, such as anas b. mālik al-anṣārī (d. 93/712), find that even the most honorable of backgrounds—in anas’s case more than ten years in the service of the prophet muḥammad—does not spare them al-ḥajjāj’s bitter contempt.79 the distaste al-ḥajjāj exhibits for any signs of moral corruption is apparent also at other moments in his career, for example when he scolds the inhabitants of medina for debasing themselves on his departure as governor of that city.80 al-ḥajjāj’s rejection of the trappings and entitlement of elite status is also behind another key motive for his actions—his role as an agent of centralizing marwānid policy determined to tame local centers of power and bring them firmly under caliphal control. it is al-hudhayl b. ʿimrān b. al-fuḍayl al-burjumī’s and ibn al-jārūd’s roles as the leaders of the revolt that brings al-ḥajjāj’s fury down upon their heads and inspires his ostentatious acts of disrespect toward them. but his treatment of the tribal leaders seems to be also driven by an underlying practical strategy of suppressing local tribal structures that oppose the expansionist and centralizing ambitions of the marwānid state.81 this comes out clearly in al-ḥajjāj’s confrontation with al-hudhayl before the latter joins ibn al-jārūd. al-ḥajjāj’s background, like al-muhallab’s, was modest, and ʿabd al-malik’s appointment of al-ḥajjāj was the product of a marwānid policy of prioritizing military and administrative skill rather 75. al-masʿūdī, murūj, 5:292. 76. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 279. 77. ibid., 291. 78. ibid. 79. ibid., 301. 80. périer, vie, 69–70. 81. see above, nn. 31–32. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 487 than family relations when selecting governors and other officials.82 by contrast, bishr, the caliph’s brother and al-ḥajjāj’s predecessor as governor of iraq, owed his position to his family connections.83 he held al-hudhayl in especially high esteem and had tried hard to obstruct al-muhallab’s progress by, for example, exempting tribal chiefs and members of the elite such as al-hudhayl from military service.84 this background may explain in part why al-ḥajjāj, who had previously not always been entirely supportive of al-muhallab, does everything he can to assist the commander after having been appointed governor of iraq.85 perhaps he sees getting rid of symbols of the previous order that favored elite members as part of his mandate. ibn al-jārūd and al-hudhayl, like the other leaders in ibn al-jārūd’s entourage, represent the old order of the iraqi ashrāf, whose lack of solidarity with those of lesser backgrounds is a recurrent theme in the sources.86 a disdain for the old order of partisan tribal politics probably underpins al-ḥajjāj’s dislike of many of bishr’s decisions. already mentioned is the case of sharīk b. ʿamr, chief of the banū yashkur, whose argument that bishr had given him a dispensation exempting him from military service because of his ill health is dismissed by al-ḥajjāj.87 another man who is brought before al-ḥajjāj charged with leaving the army without permission (ʿāṣin) asserts that he in fact “was never registered in the dīwān and has never seen an army camp” but is instead a weaver. al-ḥajjāj impatiently refuses to consider his claim and orders him to be executed. the swiftness and casualness with which al-ḥajjāj reaches this verdict is emphasized by the setting of the event: it happens during breakfast, and al-ḥajjāj’s guests do not even have time to put down their food before their appetites are ruined by the execution.88 the spectacle of al-ḥajjāj’s absolute power being advertised through an act of gruesome violence resonated both in its contemporary context and later at the abbasid court, where al-balādhurī’s telling of the events would have been read. 82. crone, slaves, 39–40. 83. there were, of course, plenty of governors from the caliph’s family who were appointed to or remained in office at this time. see, for example, another brother of ʿabd al-malik, ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. marwān, who was appointed governor of egypt (in office 65–86/685–705). examples from egypt and iran are discussed by simon gundelfinger and peter verkinderen in “the governors of al-shām and fārs in the early islamic empire: a comparative regional perspective,” in transregional and regional elites: connecting the early islamic empire, ed. h.-l. hagemann and s. heidemann, 255–330 (berlin: de gruyter, 2020). i would like to thank hannah-lena hagemann for referring me to this article. 84. for al-muhallab’s criticisms of bishr’s privileging of the elites, see al-mubarrad, kāmil, 663. 85. hannah-lena hagemann has shown that al-muhallab experienced obstruction from all three governors under whom he served in iraq; hagemann, khārijites, 219–27. 86. see, for example, ibn al-jārūd’s dismissive reaction to the suggestion offered by maṣqala b. karib b. raqaba b. khawtaʿa al-ʿabdī, whose status was obviously inferior to his, above, at n. 51. 87. the governor might also have been dismayed by the lack of prowess shown by sharīk b. ʿamr. compare his response to sharīk with his praise for the old fighter zuhra b. hawiyya (d. 77/696), “an old man who was unable to stand up by himself without a helping hand,” but who nevertheless suggested: “i have lost my strength and much of my eye-sight but send me out. i can stay on a saddled riding-camel well enough.” al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:942–43; translation by rowson, marwānid restoration. 88. the story is told in the third person in al-balādhurī, ansāb, 277, whereas al-mubarrad quotes it from an eyewitness in kāmil, 666. 488 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) al-ḥajjāj’s decision to offer a general amān to the regular troops who had joined ibn al-jārūd seems to be inspired by similar a motive: to favor lower social strata at the expense of members of the elite. al-ḥajjāj punishes the leaders in ibn al-jārūd’s army mercilessly but allows the common soldiers to return to their garrisons.89 the choice to punish the leaders of the revolt publicly but let the much larger group of common soldiers go unscathed serves a propagandistic goal but also has obvious practical benefits.90 it is striking that the caliph, by contrast, as discussed further below, offers amāns to several of ibn al-jārūd’s supporters among iraq’s ashrāf who had been captured and slated for punishment by al-ḥajjāj. even before he deals with ibn al-jārūd’s lieutenants, al-ḥajjāj’s focus on iraq’s ashrāf is evident. to bring the mutinous kūfan and baṣran troops to heel, he kills two of the cities’ prominent inhabitants. these are ʿumar b. ḍābī al-tamīmī and sharīk b. ʿamr, both of whom are ʿarīfs, tribal leaders, whose reputation and status has hitherto remained unchallenged.91 this decision directly contradicts ʿabd al-malik’s advice to the governor. in a letter to the caliph about the events surrounding the uprising of ibn al-jārūd, al-ḥajjāj writes: “they said: ‘leave our country [and go] to the one who sent you to us!’” ʿabd al-malik replies: “if the people of iraq express doubts about you, kill the insignificant ones (or those of lower status), and the important ones will be afraid of you.”92 there are other examples of the caliph’s objections to al-ḥajjāj’s methods. even before al-ḥajjāj’s arrival in iraq ʿabd al-malik has had occasion to restrain the governor, whose severity is notorious, and he has apparently regularly received complaints about it from those on its sharp end in iraq.93 as a consequence, ʿabd al-malik dispatches ʿabd al-raḥmān b. masʿūd al-fazārī94 to al-ḥajjāj to look into iraqi accusations (fī maẓālihihim) against the governor.95 as mentioned earlier, al-ḥajjāj flagrantly obstructs ʿabd al-raḥmān’s work by killing three of ibn al-jārūd’s followers who are about to be released as a result of ʿabd al-raḥmān’s intervention. ʿabd al-raḥmān confronts al-ḥajjāj about his brutality 89. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 289. 90. as seth richardson has shown so well for early mesopotamian states, practical limitations constrained (premodern) states in imposing de facto sovereignty over their constituencies. their simultaneous desire and inability to exert absolute domination led them to resort to a rhetoric of threats (of disorder and animosity) and persuasion (promises of order and abundance), which we see playing out in the ibn al-jārūd rebellion as well. see s. richardson, “early mesopotamia: the presumptive state,” past and present 215 (2012): 3–49, at 4, 36; idem, “before things worked: a ‘low-power’ model of early mesopotamia,” in ancient states and infrastructural power: europe, asia and america (empire and after), ed. c. ando and s. richardson, 17–62 (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2017), at 18–20, 43–44. i would like to thank mehdy shaddel for referring me to richardson’s work and hannah-lena hagemann for pointing out that annihilating an entire army would cause all sorts of practical problems. for the role of exemplary violence, see c. lange and m. fierro, eds., public violence in islamic societies: power, discipline, and the construction of the public sphere, 7th–19th centuries ce (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009). 91. both claimed to be entitled to an exemption from fighting. sharīk b. ʿamr’s claim rested on a ruling of bishr, seemingly confirming al-muhallab’s claim that bishr privileged members of the elite. 92. fa-idhā rābaka min ahl al-ʿirāq rayb fa-qtul adnāhum yurʿab minka aqṣāhim; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 294. 93. dietrich, “al-ḥadjdjādj.” 94. for this individual, see crone, slaves, 143. 95. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 295. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 489 and blatant defiance of the caliph’s orders, following him several steps up the minbar.96 “what of it?” responds al-ḥajjāj. even ʿabd al-raḥmān’s critical report to the caliph and ʿabd al-malik’s expression of support for ʿabd al-raḥmān and trust in his judgment fail to impress al-ḥajjāj.97 another remonstration to the caliph, however, ends less well for the governor. anas b. mālik al-anṣārī, a follower of ibn al-jārūd, is treated especially harshly by al-ḥajjāj. despite his excellent reputation, his long tenure in the service of the prophet muḥammad, his membership of the baṣran nobility, and his possession of an amān, al-ḥajjāj confiscates his property after ibn al-jārūd’s death and insults him gravely, accusing him of disloyalty and of repeated alliances with opponents of the umayyad regime. anas writes a petition to the caliph to complain about his treatment at the hands of the governor. ʿabd al-malik calls al-ḥajjāj to order in no uncertain terms, accusing him of overstepping his remit and exceeding his authority. it is only because he assumes, as he writes, that the scribe who composed anas’s petition must have exaggerated the case that he does not immediately punish al-ḥajjāj in the most terrible manner. the caliph nevertheless demands that al-ḥajjāj restore anas to his position, return his possessions, and ask anas personally for his forgiveness.98 while reading ʿabd al-malik’s letter, al-ḥajjāj, who has been expecting to get away with dealing with the disobedient iraqis in his own way, starts to sweat profusely, and his face becomes distorted. as al-ḥajjāj tries to explain what motivated him to treat anas in the way that he did, anas points out that there is always a higher authority that can be invoked against misbehaving officials: “i am powerless vis-à-vis you, so i entrust you to god and the caliph. for he protected my right, which you did not.”99 this anecdote displays the very different concepts of good governance that the caliph and his governor are drawing upon. for al-ḥajjāj, the ends justify the means, and if his utilitarian calculations show no practical advantage to be gained from leniency, he sees no reason to refrain from ruthlessness. the caliph’s view, by contrast, is encapsulated in the statement of al-ḥajjāj’s general al-muhallab b. abī ṣufra quoted at the beginning of this article: clemency and the possibility of forgiveness are essential instruments of sound government. mercy to those who have trespassed is granted on the basis of their position and past achievements, as in the case of anas. it can also be attained by the intercession of someone close to the ruler, as in the cases of a number of ibn al-jārūd’s supporters who obtain safe-conducts after their defeat. ʿikrama b. ribʿī, for example, flees to syria and then obtains an amān from the caliph through the intercession of yazīd b. abī al-nims al-ghassānī,100 because ʿabd al-malik owes the latter a favor. ʿikrama himself subsequently 96. wa-lammā qadima ibn masʿūd ʿalā al-ḥajjāj ṣaʿida al-ḥajjāj al-minbar wa-ṣaʿida ibn masʿūd darajatayn wa-thalāthan thumma qāla alā man yaṭlub al-ḥajjāj bi-maẓlima fa-l-yaqum; ibid., 295. 97. ibid., 296. for a similar mission to look into complaints against al-ḥajjāj sent a couple of years earlier by the caliph, who in that case, however, stood by his governor, see hannah-lena hagemann’s contribution to this issue (n. 38). 98. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 298–300. 99. wa-lam yakun bī ʿalayka quwwa fa-wakaltuka ilā allāh ʿazza wa-jalla wa-ilā amīr al-muʾminīn fa-ḥafiẓa min ḥaqqī mā lam taḥfaẓhu; ibid., 301. 100. for him, see crone, slaves, 163. 490 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) intervenes with the caliph on behalf of al-ghaḍbān b. al-qabaʿtharā;101 the caliph grants al-ghaḍbān an amān, which causes al-ḥajjāj to release him. ʿabd allāh b. faḍāla flees to khurāsān but is eventually imprisoned by al-ḥajjāj. his wife speaks on his behalf to ʿabd al-malik’s wife, who speaks to her husband, who then asks al-ḥajjāj to release him.102 anas, too, is rehabilitated thanks to his petition to ʿabd al-malik, as described above. these accounts serve an obvious rhetorical goal—namely, to present the caliph as a symbol of just rule and the ultimate appeals authority for the inhabitants of the caliphate. they also, however, demonstrate the radically different positions that could coexist in the same political structure. rather than competitors for power, with al-ḥajjāj cynically undermining the caliph’s orders and political aims, al-ḥajjāj and the caliph represent two different sources of authority in operation in the umayyad caliphate, both at the level of the state and its representatives and among its inhabitants. as governor of a notoriously rebellious province, al-ḥajjāj upholds a different model and practice of good governance than does the caliph, the symbol of absolute rule for all those in his realm. interestingly, some of the men opposing the umayyad regime were serial rebels, having variously joined the rebellions of ʿalī b. abī ṭālib (d. 40/661), muṣʿab b. al-zubayr, and al-mukhtār (d. 67/687) before enlisting with ibn al-jārūd, and some of them subsequently going on to join ibn al-ashʿath’s (d. 704) uprising. but this does not prevent the caliph from allowing them to reintegrate into society and even remain at the center of power.103 hannah-lena hagemann makes the same observation in relation to the supporters of muṭarrif b. al-mughīra al-thaqafī (d. 77/697) in her contribution to this issue, and reza huseini, in his article, notes that some of the participants in al-ḥārith b. surayj’s uprising in khurāsān (116–28/734–46) had taken part in other rebellions before his. on the one hand, this shows how easily the dissatisfactions of these iraqi ashrāf and their followers could be ignited by a variety of different sparks. on the other, it demonstrates the caliph’s implementation of the maxim that forgiveness and the possibility of rehabilitation are essential tools of sound rulership.104 but it is not only because he feared that the absence of the possibility of rehabilitation would drive people away that ʿabd al-malik exercised forgiveness. the caliph needed the support of the ashrāf, just as he needed the support and cooperation of the inhabitants of the empire in general. clemency, even against the will of some lower administrators or in defiance of their actions, was one of the tools the caliph could wield within the fragmented 101. for him, see ibid., 162. 102. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 290–91. 103. al-ḥajjāj accuses anas of having supported ʿalī, then muṣʿab b. al-zubayr, and finally ibn al-jārūd; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 298. see also the names of ibn al-jārūd’s followers who are subsequently found in ibn al-ashʿath’s army in ibid., 302–3. 104. see also the integration of another rebel by the caliph ʿabd al-malik discussed by suzanne pinckney stetkevych in “umayyad panegyric and the poetics of islamic hegemony: al-akhtal’s khaffa al-qatinu (‘those that dwelt with you have left in haste’),” journal of arabic literature 28 (1997): 89–122. marsham and robinson list a number of rebels, including some who initially refused a safe-conduct, who were offered amāns at defeat in “safe-conduct,” 254, 278, 280. by contrast, when the kharijite hārūn al-shārī was captured and brought to baghdad in 283/896 it was explicitly ‘without amnesty’ (min ghayr amān) (al-masʿūdī, murūj, 8:168). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 491 political structure of the early umayyad empire. he was the final and superior fount of justice. being able to govern through exceptions demonstrated that he stood above the rules. paradoxically, it was the caliph’s position in a web of power-holders, a multinodal power structure, rather than at the top of a hierarchical pyramid, that motivated his quintessential behavior. ultimately, he needed the ashrāf to maintain this position, as he competed with other figures of authority such as his governors and the troops. it was thus critical that he provide ways for his subjects to express their disagreement with his policies and with those of his appointees in some fashion. such diverging viewpoints could be articulated in petitions and complaints. refusing to follow particular orders fell, to a certain extent, in the same category. in short, protest against unjust behavior was allowed within the parameters of political communication and just governance. when al-ḥajjāj asks al-muhallab to kill potential rebels in his army and to report the names of deserters so he can put them or their relatives to death, al-muhallab replies: “i have only obedient men (muṭīʿ) here . . . so send over to me those persons whom you have called rebels (ʿuṣāt), because they are but brave horsemen (fursān abṭāl) and i hope that allāh may kill the enemy through them.”105 in other words, al-muhallab sees those who have expressed disagreement with al-ḥajjāj’s policy not as rebels who should be killed but rather as soldiers whose statements of dissent are, in his view, appropriate. by doing so, al-muhallab seeks to accomplish what he recommends to al-ḥajjāj in the letter quoted earlier: continuing to work with people after they have expressed disagreement, even to the point of insubordination, will keep them on board. al-ḥajjāj, by contrast, does exactly what al-muhallab warns against: he sees dissenters not as communicating acceptable disagreement within the state structure but as having left the community, and he cannot and will not forgive them. thereby, however, he drives them to total rejection and rebellion. he is unmoved by appeals from members of his entourage to pardon ibn al-jārūd’s deputies al-hudhayl and ʿabd allāh b. ḥakīm.106 leading followers of ibn al-jārūd are summarily killed, as are those who join the later revolt of ibn al-ashʿath. on other occasions he even reverses pardons when evidence of past misdemeanors emerges.107 even allowing for later constructions of a forgiving caliph set against a ruthless governor (the product of abbasid historians writing in a more fixed and clearly demarcated imperial world), al-ḥajjāj’s role and function on the ground in the famously rebellious province of iraq called for a tighter and more rigorous approach to governance and authority. when al-balādhurī writes that al-ḥajjāj was the first to execute rebels, he is precisely noting and criticizing the governor’s lack of leniency in his policies.108 105. al-mubarrad, kāmil, 667. 106. al-balādhurī, ansāb, 291. 107. such as having participated in ʿuthmān’s killing or having said something critical about his (al-ḥajjāj’s) behavior; ibid., 294–95, 302. 108. for the quotation, see above, n. 2. for the practice of executing rebels, see a. marsham, “attitudes to the use of fire in executions in late antiquity and early islam: the burning of heretics and rebels in late umayyad iraq,” in violence in islamic thought: from the qurʾān to the mongols, ed. r. gleave and i. kristó-nagy, 106–27 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2015); idem, “public execution in the umayyad period: early islamic punitive practice and its late antique context,” journal of arabic and islamic studies 11 (2011): 101–36; s. w. anthony, crucifixion and death as spectacle: umayyad crucifixion in its late antique context (new haven, ct: 492 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) conclusion ibn al-jārūd’s uprising was not the only expression of grievance in umayyad iraq. khārijites and ʿalids had been calling for autonomy, justice, and equality for decades, and they would continue to do so.109 most notably, the uprisings under muṭarrif (see hagemann’s article in this issue) and ibn al-ashaʿth expressed similar dissatisfactions with the governor’s rule, even if other demands, too, were mobilized in the course of the events. so how to interpret ibn al-jārūd’s movement and the way it was documented? the first point to acknowledge is the place that violent protest movements played in the eighthcentury ce political landscape. the umayyad caliphate was far from able to enforce absolute hegemony over its domains and the people and resources within its borders. the uprising of ibn al-jārūd occurred at a time when the marwānid dynasty was trying to tighten its grip. this effort ran into conflict with existing patterns of power and authority, especially those of the ashrāf, who staged rebellions all over the caliphate.110 at the same time, the constant assertions of autonomy in the form of rebellions and the necessity of suppressing these highlighted the state’s lack of definitive territorial control.111 the second point is that this rebellion, like others, was an integral element of the political landscape. both in their use of the channels of political communication and their appeal to diverse authorities within a multinodal system, revolts operated as a form of negotiation for rights and as a solution to conflicts. despite having ignored requests to return to their military camps, the garrisons of kūfa and baṣra eventually complied with al-ḥajjāj’s orders. the demand that soldiers enrolled in the dīwān should follow orders to fight was, after all, not entirely unjustified. the real problem arose when the governor overruled his predecessor’s decision to increase the soldiers’ stipends. this the soldiers experienced as unjust and unlawful. first, ibn al-jārūd and his supporters sought to address the threat of receiving less pay via regular administrative channels. when al-ḥajjāj refused, their next step was to demand his removal as governor, which they did through the existing governance structures of the empire, writing to ʿabd al-malik and asking him to appoint a substitute governor, as was common procedure in iraq and other provinces. they did not request that someone of their own constituency be appointed governor, nor did they question the legitimacy of umayyad rule. instead, they clearly intended to remain within the caliphal system in terms of ideology, administrative organization, and government. their intention was not to fight al-ḥajjāj, let alone kill him; their aim was simply to be ruled by a different caliphally appointed governor. even as ibn al-jārūd’s support grew, al-ḥajjāj refused to relent, and ibn al-jārūd did not see a need to back down either. a confrontation on the battlefield was thus inevitable. when ibn al-jārūd was killed, his supporters disbanded their movement as easily as they had formed it. conversely, his death did not mean the american oriental society, 2014). 109. sayed, die revolte, 32. 110. alon dar is currently examining such rebellions in his doctoral thesis research. already two centuries earlier, the iraqis and egyptians who traveled to medina to protest caliph ʿuthmān’s (r. 23–35/644–56) centralizing policy eventually murdered him. 111. richardson, “presumptive state,” 44; idem, “before things worked,” 21–28. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 493 end of expressions of discontent with al-ḥajjāj’s rule. as al-ḥajjāj continued to attack the position and privileges of the ashrāf in iraq, general dissatisfaction with the nature of umayyad rule grew. meanwhile, the concerns of ibn al-jārūd and his men were concrete and limited to the protection of their stipends. they did not consider themselves opponents of the umayyad regime in iraq, and several of ibn al-jārūd’s supporters disliked the idea of standing up against the appointed authorities, especially once violent conflict seemed unavoidable. it might indeed have been the imminent reality of military confrontation that motivated many of his followers to switch sides to al-ḥajjāj.112 just as the iraqi troops appealed to sources of authority other than the governor (the caliph, justice, history, precedence), al-ḥajjāj fulfilled a role different from that of other sources of power in the caliphate. these were not competing claims to control and command, but rather complementary elements in a political system in which the ruler did not enjoy absolute hegemony. the objectives of the caliph and his governor coincided in the long-term interests of the caliphate, but their roles therein differed. al-ḥajjāj was responsible for executing the marwānids’ centralizing policy in an especially troublesome province. maintaining order and establishing control on the ground were his main concerns. the caliph ʿabd al-malik operated on a very different moral and political level, as he claimed (but could not actually wield) absolute, god-approved sovereignty. finally, there is the general al-muhallab, whose thoughts on good governance quoted at the beginning of this article can be explained as much by his position as military leader on the battlefield as by any political philosophy. the mercy shown by the general and the caliph but not by the governor was not only a sign of the workings of the multinodal power structure of the caliphate; it also reflected their different functions within the flexible political structure. on the morning of the battle, ibn al-jārūd and his most loyal supporters, including al-hudhayl and ʿabd allāh b. ḥakīm, knew that they had no other option than to fight al-ḥajjāj, as the road to his forgiveness was now closed.113 with their forces having dwindled, as more and more of their followers had switched sides during the night, their ability to force al-ḥajjāj to back down with the threat of defeat disappeared too. as one of ibn al-jārūd’s supporters put it: “the time of good ideas is gone; now all that is left is patience.”114 ibn al-jārūd was so taken aback by this turn of events that he put his armor on 112. the role of (tribal) factionalism in their decision is hard to establish. on the one hand, some of those changing sides invoked tribal solidarity. for example, ʿabbād b. al-ḥuṣayn al-ḥabaṭī might have been driven to al-ḥajjāj by an insult concerning his tribal affiliation (al-balādhurī, ansāb, 287). qutayba b. muslim explained his joining al-ḥajjāj’s camp by his tribal background: a qaysī should not fight al-ḥajjāj (ibid., 287). cf. dixon, umayyad caliphate, 146, and sayed, die revolte, 130, who both see factionalism as the main reason for the failure of ibn al-jārūd’s movement. on the other hand, the tribal lines between the two parties were not absolute and alliances were not fixed, neither in this conflict nor in others. 113. see also hagemann’s observation that fear of al-ḥajjāj’s reaction drove protestors to rebel openly as negotiations broke down in her contribution to this issue. other examples of negotiations preceding rebellion are discussed by a. elad, “the siege of wasit (132/749): some aspects of abbasid and alid relations at the beginning of abbasid rule,” in studies in islamic history and civilisation: in honour of professor david ayalon, ed. m. sharon, 59–90 (leiden: brill, 1986). 114. wa-qad dhahaba al-raʾy wa-baqiya al-ṣabr; al-balādhurī, ansāb, 288. 494 • petra m. sijpesteijn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the wrong way around.115 ibn al-jārūd did not start off as a rebel opponent of the umayyad regime. rather, it was al-ḥajjāj’s refusal to reconsider his decision to lower the troops’ stipends and to acknowledge their perception of unjust treatment that drove ibn al-jārūd further and further along the road to rebellion. unable to achieve redress for their grievances in any other way, ibn al-jārūd and his men found themselves on the battlefield facing al-ḥajjāj’s army in open combat. the final step al-ḥajjāj took toward turning ibn al-jārūd’s movement into a rebellion was the crucifixion of the bodies of ibn al-jārūd, al-hudhayl, and ʿabd allāh b. ḥakīm and the dispatch of the heads of ibn al-jārūd’s leading supporters to al-muhallab as a warning to anyone contemplating revolt against the umayyads.116 in other words, al-ḥajjāj was as instrumental in creating ibn al-jārūd’s rebellion as ibn al-jārūd and his followers themselves were. two articles in the present issue—by hannah-lena hagemann and alon dar—discuss other instances in which conflict resolution between dissenters and an umayyad governor broke down. we cannot yet determine whether the reason that conflicts turned into open rebellion in provinces under al-ḥajjāj’s rule more often than they did elsewhere lay in his methods or in the historical conditions in iraq of the time. in any case, subsequent rebellions, such as that of ibn al-ashʿath, started off with the same desire to remove the governor, even if the movement later took on a religious-political program. as reza huseini shows in his article, rebellions could appeal to people bearing a variety of grudges who were dissatisfied for different reasons, and the movements might, moreover, develop new causes along the way. our sources are inclined to present a clear-cut picture of an absolute ruler forced to keep a tight lid on acts of protestation. any opposition group was thus quickly labeled rebellious and expressions of disagreement automatically characterized as attempts to overthrow the whole system on ideological or political grounds. what ibn al-jārūd’s movement and al-ḥajjāj’s and ʿabd al-malik’s interactions with its adherents show, however, is that such acts of dissent, in the various guises they took, were in fact an inherent part of the caliphate’s governance. 115. fadaʿā ibn al-jārūd bi-dirʿ fa-labisahā maqlūba fa-taṭayyara; ibid. 116. for the symbolic function of public execution and punishment, especially crucifixion, see anthony, crucifixion; marsham, “public execution”; t. seidensticker, “responses to crucifixion in the islamic world (1st–7th/7th–13th centuries),” in lange and fierro, public violence, 203–16; e. k. rowson, “reveal or conceal: public humiliation and banishment as punishments in early islamic times,” in lange and fierro, public violence, 119–29; p. m. sijpesteijn, “shaving hair and beards in early islamic egypt: an arab innovation?,” al-masāq 25 (2018): 9–25. ʿabd allāh b. al-zubayr also suffered at the hands of al-ḥajjāj after his defeat in mecca, even if crucifixion was expressly supposed to be used not for rebels but solely for highway robbers (hagemann, khārijites, 201–2, 238). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) closing ranks • 495 bibliography abbott, n. “a new papyrus and a review of the administration of ʿubaid allāh b. al-ḥabḥāb.” in arabic and islamic studies in honor of hamilton a. r. gibb, ed. g. makdisi, 21–35. leiden: brill, 1965. abou el fadl, k.. violence and rebellion in islamic law. cambridge: 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al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 183-234 abstract this article is an attempt to settle the debate about the floruit of the largely obscure ibn aʿtham al-kūfī and the date of the composition of his history. the standard death date given for him, 314/926–27, was recently revealed to be scholarly guesswork, and more than one scholar has argued in recent decades that the history may have been partially composed as early as 204/819–20. but the revision is mistaken, and this article presents three arguments to show why. first, manuscript evidence undermines the basis for the early dating. second, the comparative examination of a cluster of isnāds in the history that have often been discarded as unusable reveals ibn aʿtham’s connections to authorities active at the end of the third/ninth century. and third, building on the work of ilkka lindstedt, i affirm and further specify ibn aʿtham’s likely floruit on the basis of a network of biographical connections to ibn aʿtham. the conclusion offers a pair of suggestions for locating ibn aʿtham’s history within the broader scheme of islamicate historiography. the study of arabic historiography has often proceeded by guesswork. so few early works (that is, those written during the second/eighth century) survive in their original form that educated speculation based on minimal evidence is the norm.1 it is for precisely this reason, however, that the two histories of the obscure aḥmad b. aʿtham al-kūfī are noteworthy.2 on the one hand, the surviving portions of his kitāb al-fu tūḥ and * an earlier version of this article benefitted from the feedback of michael cook, najam haider, rachel fell mcdermott, and max shmookler. it was further improved by the comments of the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal. for this help, i am grateful; for any remaining faults, i am responsible. 1. as chase robinson put it: “islamicists are used to this kind of hedging, but it should be striking to everyone else”; islamic historiography (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003), 19. 2. it has been noted that inattention to ibn aʿtham’s history probably stems from its reputation as both a romantic and a shiʿi history. as qays al-ʿaṭṭār recently pointed out, however, twelver shiʿi authorities across a dating ibn aʿtham’s history: of persian manuscripts, obscure biographies, and incomplete isnāds* andrew g. mclaren centro de estudios de asia y áfrica, el colegio de méxico (amclaren@colmex.mx) © 2022 andrew g. mclaren. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 184 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) his kitāb al-taʾrīkh together represent one of the largest surviving works of arabic history composed during the “formative” period of islamicate history writing, spilling across more than 2,700 pages and eight volumes in the best edition.3 on the other hand, we know exceedingly little about the author, and scholars have disagreed on the dating of his history for more than five decades now.4 the debate has sharpened of late: lawrence conrad recently pointed out that the death date typically cited for ibn aʿtham, 314/926–27, was based on nothing more than speculation in the first place.5 already in the 1970s, scholars began to suggest that ibn aʿtham actually wrote at the beginning of the third/ninth century (circa 204/819–20). indeed, following vociferous arguments in favor of the revised dating, some scholars have accepted the newer hypothesis, and more than one reference work now includes the early date.6 in theory, the stakes of the debate are quite high. if some significant part of ibn aʿtham’s history was written in 204/819–20, it would be not only one of the earliest surviving relatively intact works of arabic historiography but also one of the largest surviving pieces of arabic prose tout court.7 closer scrutiny of the relevant evidence both inside and outside millennium have almost always identified ibn aʿtham as a non-shiʿi writer, and as i argued in the third chapter of my dissertation, ibn aʿtham’s history bears all the hallmarks of being epistemologically grounded in the same problematic that guided, e.g., the approaches of ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʿqūbī and abū jaʿfar al-ṭabarī. what has been less appreciated is that his approach to history writing has been obscured by the rough transmission history of the text. for al-ʿaṭṭār’s comments, see his introduction to ibn aʿtham, qiṭʿa min kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. q. al-ʿaṭṭār (karbala: dār al-kafīl, 1438/2017), 13–19. for the epistemological problem, see my “ibn aʿtham’s history: transmission and translation in islamicate written culture, 290–873/902–1468” (phd diss., columbia university, 2021), 128–86. 3. the best edition of the text remains ibn aʿtham, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. m. ʿ a. m. khān et al., 8 vols. (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1388–95/1968–75). for useful notes on existing editions, see m. schönléber’s review of al-ʿaṭṭār’s qiṭʿa in al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 421–29. on the separation of the history into futūḥ and taʾrīkh, stemming ultimately from a description made by yāqūt al-ḥamawī, see below. 4. for ease of exposition, i tend to refer to both the futūḥ and the taʾrīkh, which by all accounts continue one after the other, as “ibn aʿtham’s history.” needless to say, it is highly likely that the works were written at different times, possibly over many years. given both this likelihood and the general dearth of concrete evidence, “dating ibn aʿtham’s history” must be a relative claim, not an absolute one. 5. see l. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 87–125, at 92–93. 6. for the full argument in favor of revision, see conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 90–96. for invocations of the early dating, see robinson, islamic historiography, 34, n. 12; a. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leiden: brill, 2011), 91–93; j. scheiner, “writing the history of the futūḥ: the futūḥ-works by al-azdī, ibn aʿtham, and al-wāqidī,” in the lineaments of islam: studies in honor of fred mcgraw donner, ed. p. m. cobb, 151–76 (leiden: brill, 2012), 162 and 172; r. j. lynch, arab conquests and early islamic historiography: the futuh al-buldan of al-baladhuri (london: i. b. tauris, 2020), 157. for citations in reference works, see e. l. daniel, “ketāb al-fotuḥ,” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed., ed. e. yarshater et al. (new york: encyclopaedia iranica foundation, 1996–) [hereafter eir]; and s. c. judd, “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. k. fleet et al. (leiden: brill, 2007–) [hereafter ei3]. i owe the point about reference works to i. lindstedt, “al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla and the death of ibrāhim al-imām,” in case studies in transmission, ed. i. lindstedt et al., 103–30 (münster: ugarit-verlag, 2014), 123. 7. among histories, it would be bested only by the relatively lengthy fragments of sayf b. ʿumar’s (fl. late second/eighth century?) kitāb al-futūḥ and kitāb al-jamal, as edited by q. al-samarrai, and it might surpass the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 185 the text, however, reveals that the futūḥ and the taʾrīkh are all but certainly the product of the late third/ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries, as originally guessed more than a century and a half ago. thus, ilkka lindstedt demonstrated with reference to two key pieces of biographical information ibn aʿtham’s connections to two scholars through the first decades of the fourth/tenth century.8 indeed, lindstedt must be credited with turning up an absolutely crucial and otherwise unnoted report in ḥamza al-sahmī’s (d. 427/1038) taʾrīkh jurjān, the isnād for which offers a relative but clear date linking ibn aʿtham to the turn of the fourth/tenth century. but there is more to be said on the question in terms of critiquing the arguments of conrad et al. in favor of the early dating and strengthening the link to the fourth/tenth century with evidence internal to the text, neither of which were attempted by lindstedt. in this article, i aim to offer a conclusive examination of the debate around the dating of ibn aʿtham’s history. my overarching contention is that ibn aʿtham was writing near the end of the reign of the eighteenth abbasid caliph, al-muqtadir bi-llāh (r. 295–320/908–32), and likely died around the same time.9 i make my argument in three parts. first, i reexamine the argument in favor of the early dating, especially as advanced by conrad. his key piece of evidence came from an early fourteenth/late nineteenth-century lithograph of the sixth/ twelfth-century persian translation of ibn aʿtham’s futūḥ. the lithograph claims that ibn aʿtham’s futūḥ was composed in 204/819–20. i show, however, that earlier manuscripts of the persian translation do not include this claim; indeed, i found attestation of that date in no version of the translation other than the bombay lithographs. the late provenance of that information casts serious doubt on its reliability for dating ibn aʿtham’s history. second, by sorting out ibn aʿtham’s relationship to a number of the sources he cited in the history, i show that ibn aʿtham was actively gathering historical information at the end of the third/ninth century. there are evident difficulties in reading ibn aʿtham’s isnāds.10 as a result, most of ibn aʿtham’s readers have ignored the question of how he related to his sources. i demonstrate, however, that the isnāds in the text do not support the early dating and may, in fact, be interpreted as supporting the later dating. a little bit of spadework and some educated guesses show that everyone ibn aʿtham cited as a direct source lived through the end of the third/ninth century, indicating that ibn aʿtham himself must have lived beyond then. finally, i reexamine the biographical evidence turned up by lindstedt, revising and specifying his readings. lindstedt already ascertained the basic point: two different men taʾrīkh of khalīfa b. khayyāṭ (d. 240/854), which comes down to 232/847 (meaning it was probably still being composed at the time). 8. lindstedt, “al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 118–23. lindstedt subsequently expanded the argument and published a more definitive statement in his “sources for the biography of ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” in contacts and interaction: proceedings of the 27th congress of the union européenne des arabisants et islamisants, helsinki 2014, ed. j. hämeen-anttila et al., 299–309 (leuven: peeters, 2017). 9. the commonsensical conclusion that ibn aʿtham died around the time his history concluded, as reported by yāqūt al-ḥamawī (d. 626/1229) in his kitāb al-irshād, was drawn already by several scholars writing in arabic, but none of them added additional evidence. see below. 10. for a discussion of these difficulties, see conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 114–20, esp. 114–15. 186 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) (ʿabd allāh b. ʿadī, a famous scholar of hadith, and al-sallāmī, a famous historian of khorasan) who lived through the fourth/tenth century reported meeting ibn aʿtham in person. however, lindstedt did not consider the problems surrounding the death date of al-sallāmī, which is evidently incorrect as reported in the biographical dictionaries. a rereading of the biographical evidence reveals connections between ibn aʿtham and a handful of other figures of the fourth/tenth century. these reports all but confirm that ibn aʿtham was active after the turn of the fourth/tenth century, and they help us narrow down the possible date of his death to sometime around the year 320/932. textual corruptions and references to unknown figures in ibn aʿtham’s isnāds present significant challenges to dating these chains of transmission, and so my efforts are necessarily tentative. (as already noted, a little hedging is unavoidable.) the overall picture, however, is clear and consistent. combining the three types of evidence we have—manuscripts of the persian translation, isnāds in the history, and biobibliographical information—allows me both to affirm and to specify the initial estimate offered by lindstedt. 1. debating the date: problems with the early third/ninth-century dating a handful of important studies on both ibn aʿtham and his history have been published in recent years.11 as a group, these publications have significantly advanced our understanding of the text’s history and methodology.12 one study, in particular, calls for a response— namely, conrad’s long-circulated, but only lately published, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” the most extensive of the recent studies. it was in this article that conrad made the strongest statement in favor of revising the dating of ibn aʿtham’s history to 204/819–20. first, conrad pointed out that the commonly accepted date for ibn aʿtham’s death, 314/926–27, is based on nothing but a conjecture made by the germano-russian orientalist c. m. frähn (d. 1267–68/1851) in the nineteenth century.13 in a bibliographical survey addressed to russian imperial agents in central asia, frähn asked the agents to search for copies of the arabic version of ibn aʿtham’s futūḥ, which at the time was known only through a partial persian translation begun at the very end of the sixth/twelfth century. in his note on the futūḥ, frähn suggested that ibn aʿtham may have died in 314/926– 11. the following summary is indebted to antoine borrut’s introductory note to conrad’s article (conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 87), which is based on borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 91–93. see also lindstedt, “sources for the biography,” 299–300, and daniel, “ketāb al-fotūḥ.” 12. especially significant are lindstedt’s “al-madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla” and “sources for the biography.” conrad’s notes on the manuscript tradition are amply supplemented by m. schönléber, “notes on the textual tradition of ibn aʿtham’s kitāb al-futūḥ,” in contacts and interaction: proceedings of the 27th congress of the union européenne des arabisants et islamisants, helsinki 2014, ed. j. hämeen-anttila et al. (leuven: peeters, 2017), 427–38. 13. for a short biography of frähn, who for a time directed the asiatic museum of the russian academy of sciences, see the encyclopaedia britannica: a dictionary of arts, sciences, literature, and general information, 11th ed. (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1910–14), s.v. “frähn, christian martin.” for a preliminary version of the critique, see conrad’s lemma “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī (fl. early third/ninth century),” in routledge encyclopedia of arabic literature, ed. j. s. meisami and p. starkey, 1:314a–b (london: routledge, 1998), 1:314a. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 187 27, appending parenthetically the ever-useful question mark of scholarly uncertainty.14 in the absence of other information—we still know of no source offering any dates for ibn aʿtham—carl brockelmann incorporated frähn’s guess into his biobibliography of premodern arabic literature.15 as conrad noted, however, frähn gave neither sources nor rationale for his suggestion; its subsequent inclusion in an authoritative reference work conferred on it the impression of a certainty it did not have.16 even descriptions of the history made independently of brockelmann, such as that in charles rieu’s catalog of persian manuscripts in the british library, ultimately relied on frähn’s conjecture.17 conrad must be correct on this point: however reasonable the guess, it was just a guess.18 the second of conrad’s points is more troublesome. drawing on shorter, earlier statements by ʿabd allāh mukhliṣ,19 charles storey,20 and m. a. shaban,21 he argued that a significant part of the futūḥ was written near the beginning of the third/ninth century. he emphasized a single piece of evidence. as mentioned, a significant portion of ibn aʿtham’s futūḥ was translated into persian in southern khorasan beginning around the year 596/1199.22 in the early fourteenth/late nineteenth century, this persian translation 14. frähn, indications bibliographiques relatives pour la plupart a la littérature historico-géographique des arabes, des persans et des turcs (st. petersburg: l’imprimerie de l’académie impériale des sciences, 1845), 16 (no. 53). the title page of the bilingual russian-french work reads: “addressed especially to our employees and voyagers in asia.” 15. c. brockelmann, geschichte der arabischen litteratur, 2nd ed. (leiden: brill, 1943–49) [hereafter gal], supplement 1:220. 16. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 92–93. 17. rieu, catalogue of the persian manuscripts in the british museum (london: british museum, 1879–83), 1:151a. 18. as we will see, frähn’s guess was closer to the likely truth, but it remains unclear how he came up with 314/926–27. for one possible explanation of frähn’s oddly specific conjecture, see lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 121. 19. “taʾrīkh ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” majallat al-majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿarabī 6 (1926): 142–43. 20. storey’s note about the 204/819–20 date was in the supplementary volume. for the full entry on ibn aʿtham, see his persian literature: a bio-bibliographical survey (1927–1958, repr. london: luzac, 1970), 1.1:207–9; for the dating suggestion, see 1.2:1260. devin deweese was generous enough to provide detailed notes on the persian ibn aʿtham from yuri bregel’s russian revision of storey’s work (persidskaia literatura: bio-bibliograficheskii obzor [moscow: grvl, 1972], 1:612–16, with supplementary notes at 3:1425) and a. t. tagirdzhanov’s catalog of manuscripts at leningrad state university (opisanie tadzhikskikh i persidskikh rukopisei vostochnogo otdela biblioteki lgu, vol. 1, istoriia, biografii, geografiia [leningrad: izdatel’stvo leningradskogo universiteta, 1962], 90–96, nos. 50–54, mss 127, 137, 279, 280, and 581), which were otherwise unavailable to me. they do not add any information relevant to this question, but i am very grateful for professor deweese’s help. 21. m. a. shaban, “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill, 1954–2005) [hereafter ei2]; shaban, the ʿabbāsid revolution (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1970), xvii–xix. 22. for the persian translation, see daniel, “ketāb al-fotuḥ,” and e. l. daniel, “the rise and development of persian historiography,” in persian historiography, ed. c. melville, 101–54 (new york: i. b. tauris, 2012), 118–20. for the discovery of the arabic manuscripts, see a. n. kurat, “abū muḥammad aḥmad b. aʿtham al-kufī’s kitāb al-futūḥ and its importance concerning the conquests of central asia and the khazars,” ankara üniversitesi dil ve tarih-coğrafya fakültesi dergisi 7 (1949): 274–82, at 274–76, and schönléber, “notes on the textual tradition,” 427–28. 188 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was published in multiple lithograph editions in bombay, whence the key piece of evidence. in the first pages of the lithograph, it is claimed that ibn aʿtham’s futūḥ was composed in the year 204/819–20.23 this was the basis of conrad’s theory: given that the persian translation of the futūḥ runs from the election of abū bakr in 11/632 to the massacre of al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī and his supporters at karbalāʾ in 62/680,24 conrad suggested that the 204/819–20 date in the lithographs must refer to a first version of the futūḥ. ibn aʿtham, he reasoned, might have lived a couple of decades after its composition, but anything in the text beyond the mid-third/ninth century must have been added later by someone else.25 conrad argued for the plausibility of the date on the grounds that there would have been no point for the persian translator(s) to fabricate the date at the end of the sixth/twelfth century. without such a motive, the given date must have some sort of evidential basis. he suggested it might have come from the colophon of the arabic manuscript from which the persian translator worked.26 further, conrad downplayed the possibility that the date might be a copyist error or a misinterpretation on the part of the translator, as did elton daniel, who thought corruption “unlikely since dates in manuscripts are usually spelled out instead of written using numerals.”27 there is, however, a specific reason to suspect the accuracy of that date: it seems to find attestation only in the modern bombay lithographs. mukhliṣ, shaban, and conrad cited the lithographs only and no manuscripts. even ghulām-riḍā ṭabāṭabāʾī majd, the editor 23. aḥmad b. muḥammad b. ʿalī aʿtham-i kūfī, tarjama-yi kitāb al-futūḥ, trans. muḥammad mustawfī (wr. 596/1199–1200) (bombay: mīrzā muḥammad shīrāzī malik al-kuttāb, 1300/1883), 3.4 = tarjama-yi kitāb al-futūḥ, trans. al-mustawfī (bombay: mīrzā muḥammad shīrāzī malik al-kuttāb, 1305/1888), 3.3: dar sana-yi diwīst u-chahār 204 taʾlīf karda ast. (hereafter, these lithographs are cited as “bombay 1300” and “bombay 1305,” respectively.) 24. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 1:1–5:251. 25. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 93–94, 109. conrad’s argument is more complex than this brief summary, for reasons of space, lets on. he also sought to explain the text’s composition history in terms of the socioreligious context of the time, arguing that ibn aʿtham (whom he identified, on the basis of the text’s contents, as a shiʿi storyteller-preacher, a qāṣṣ) must have set out to rewrite islamic history from a shiʿi perspective after al-maʾmūn named the eighth of the twelver imāms, ʿalī b. mūsā al-riḍā, as heir apparent to the caliphate in 201/816. when al-riḍā died a couple of years later, conrad imagined, the polemical wind fell from ibn aʿtham’s theological sails, and the futūḥ was left incomplete, to be continued later to the fourth/tenth century. for this hypothesis, see the next section. 26. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 94. conrad claimed that there are “several” bombay lithographs independently repeating the date, implying widespread attestation. aside from the two bombay lithographs cited in an earlier note, which were issued by the same publisher (and were perhaps based on the same manuscript), brockelmann (gal, s1:220) noted an earlier version dated 1270/1853–54, but i have been unable to locate it. i know of no other versions. 27.  daniel, “ketāb al-fotuḥ.” numerals would be more easily conflated than the persian diwīst (200, دويســت) and, e.g., sīṣad (300, ســيصد), which have rather different consonantal skeletons. the date in the lithographs, however, is given in two ways—once in a logograph with the numerals over the word sana and once written out, with both styles being relatively common. in other words, it is possible that the spelled-out date derives from numerals (e.g., in the colophon of the arabic version consulted by the translator, as hypothesized by conrad), which are much easier to confuse. for logographs, see a. gacek, arabic manuscripts: a vademecum for readers (leiden: brill, 2009), 86. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 189 of the most critical edition of the persian translation, which relies on seven manuscripts, including the earliest surviving copy, had to cite the lithograph for the 204/819–20 date, indicating that none of the earlier manuscripts included it.28 it was storey alone who cited another source, muḥammad wafādār murādī’s catalog of manuscript holdings in the state library in mashhad, which include a copy of the persian translation. storey noted that murādī indicated that ibn aʿtham’s history might have been written in 204/819–20. the implication, then, is that the mashhad manuscript may have reproduced the date, offering some corroboration for the lithographs. but there are several reasons to doubt that the mashhad manuscript in question is a good source for the date. the catalog entry is ambiguous: murādī stated only that the arabic futūḥ was “composed in 204” (dar sana-yi 204 taʾlīf namūda).29 that is, he did not specify that the manuscript in question includes the 204/819–20 dating. what is more, murādī mentioned having compared the manuscript with the bombay lithograph, leaving open the possibility that he, too, had the date from the lithograph, not the manuscript. indeed, his language is decidedly reminiscent of the phrasing in both lithographs (dar sana-yi 204 taʾlīf karda ast), differing only by a verb.30 most importantly, however, the manuscript murādī described was copied in 1296/1879—not very long before the bombay lithographs themselves were done.31 in short, then, murādī did not cite an independent source for the date.32 and fourteenth/eighteenth-century copies of a sixth/twelfth-century translation can hardly be called an ideal evidentiary basis for dating a third/ninth-century original. further, neither the manuscripts of the persian translation i have been able to examine nor the catalog descriptions of other copies mention the 204/819–20 date.33 admittedly, 28. ibn aʿtham, al-futūḥ, trans. al-mustawfī, ed. g.-r. ṭabāṭabāʾī majd (1372sh/1993, repr. tehran: shirkat-i intishārāt-i ʿ ilmī wa-farhangī, 1392sh/2013–14), p. panjāh u-chahār, n. 11, citing bombay 1305 (cf. ibid., sī wa-du for the sigla, in this case cha, for chāp, “print”). to prevent confusion with the arabic edition, majd’s edition of the persian translation will hereafter be cited as mustawfī, futūḥ. lindstedt (“madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 120 and 123) also denied the validity of the persian manuscript dating, but he did so more by assertion than by argumentation. in particular, he claimed that the date was written out in the edinburgh manuscript used as the base text of majd’s edition and suggested that it probably represents a scribal error. but this point is incorrect on the grounds i have given in this note and the last one, namely that the date appears neither in the edinburgh manuscript nor only in a written-out form. 29. murādī, fihrist-i kutub-i khaṭṭī-yi kitābkhāna-yi markazī-yi āstān-i quds-i riḍawī (mashhad: sāzmān-i kitābkhāna-yi mūza-hā wa-markazī-yi āstān-i quds-i riḍawī, 1389–90/1970), 3:76 (chapter 14, no. 11). cf. the slightly updated catalog by m. ā. fikrat, fihrist-i alifbāʾī-yi kutub-i khaṭṭī-yi kitābkhāna-yi markazī-yi āstān-i quds-i riḍawī (mashhad: kitābkhāna-yi markazī-yi āstān-i quds-i riḍawī, 1369/1990), 99b, which includes the 204/819–20 date in connection with the same manuscript but does not resolve the confusion. 30. bombay 1300, 3.4 = bombay 1305, 3.3. 31. or perhaps even after; recall that brockelmann cited a lithograph done in 1270/1853–54. 32. additionally, there is at least one suggestion that the bombay lithographs stem from an indian family, not an iranian one. tagirdzhanov claimed (opisanie, 95–96, describing ms 127) that they represent an abbreviated and late redaction of the persian translation, copied in india in 1124/1712. it is unclear to me how he would have known this, as the lithographs themselves (unsurprisingly) do not name their exemplar text. 33. manuscripts: khuda bakhsh 493 2a.15–16. (i thank m. kaur for sending me photos of the relevant portions of the text.) see also the plates of the manuscripts used in mustawfī, futūḥ, pp. sī u-sih–chihil u-shish, none of which include the dates. catalogs: e. g. browne, a supplementary hand-list of the muḥammadan manuscripts, 190 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) my survey has been limited: more than fifty copies of the persian futūḥ survive, scattered throughout eurasia.34 given that the date in the lithographs appears immediately after the title of the work, however, it is exceedingly unlikely that the catalogers—who all successfully located the title—would have ignored the date if it appeared in the manuscripts they examined.35 as neither majd nor the catalogers mention the date as appearing in any manuscript, it is most likely absent from the majority of witnesses. conrad’s theory is complex, and he sought to interpret other parts of the text as supporting the earlier dating. certain of his points will be returned to below. in light of all these hints, however, it is most likely that the 204/819–20 date emerged late in the life of the text and cannot be read as credible evidence for the dating of ibn aʿtham’s history. 2. yāqūt’s description of ibn aʿtham’s history given that the 204/819–20 date has no particularly reliable basis, we must begin again with the evidence for the likely date of the work’s composition. there is only one independent description of the text, namely, the report of yāqūt al-ḥamawī (d. 626/1229) in his irshād al-arīb, which has been dismissed as unreliable on a number of grounds. let us reconsider the report in full: by [ibn aʿtham] are the kitāb al-maʾlūf and the kitāb al-futūḥ, which is well known36 and in which he recounts [events] down to the days of al-rashīd [r. 170–93/786–809]. also by him is the kitāb al-taʾrīkh, [which runs down] to the end of the days of al-muqtadir and which begins with the days of al-maʾmūn and verges on being a continuation (yūshik an yakūn dhaylan) to the first book. i have seen both books.37 including all those written in the arabic character, preserved in the libraries of the university and colleges of cambridge (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1922), 147 (no. 890 = king’s 105); e. sachau and h. ethé, catalogi codicum manuscriptorum bibliothecae bodleiana, vol. 13, catalogue of the persian, turkish, hindûstânî and pushtû manuscripts, part 1, the persian manuscripts (oxford: clarendon press, 1889), 69–72 (nos. 124–26); w. h. morley, a descriptive catalogue of the historical manuscripts in the arabic and persian languages preserved in the library of the royal asiatic society of great britain and ireland (london: j. w. parker, 1854), 16–17 (no. viii); w. ouseley, catalogue of several hundred manuscript works in various oriental languages (london: a. j. valpy, 1831), 10 (nos. 349–51); rieu, catalogue of the persian manuscripts, 1:151–52; a. sprenger, a catalogue of the bibliotheca orientalis sprengeriana (giessen: w. keller, 1857), 3 (nos. 32–33). 34. for a listing, see my “ibn aʿtham’s history,” appendix 2. 35. thus, rieu (catalogue of the persian mansucripts, 1:151b) paraphrased the very passage in which the date occurred and did not mention it. 36. i am disinclined to think that the kitāb al-maʾlūf actually refers to a second work (pace lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 119, and judd, “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī”). rather, it seems more likely to me to be some sort of comment by yāqūt about the futūḥ. for instance, the rhyme in yāqūt’s phrase is concealed in translation: kitāb al-maʾlūf wa-kitāb al-futūḥ maʿrūf. moreover, yāqūt said explicitly that he saw two books (al-kitābayn). see further the discussion of this passage in my dissertation: “ibn aʿtham’s history,” 191–94. 37. yāqūt, kitāb irshād al-arīb ilā maʿrifat al-adīb, ed. d. s. margoliouth (leiden: e. j. brill, 1923–31), 1:379.2–4 = ed. i. ʿabbās (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1993), 1:202.2–5. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 191 thus, at face value, yāqūt’s report indicates that ibn aʿtham wrote two works of history, the latter of which continued to the end of the reign of al-muqtadir (r. 295–320/908–32). some scholars have accepted this information as indicating that ibn aʿtham must have died sometime around 320/932, although none adduced any additional evidence in favor of this conclusion.38 other scholars have rejected yāqūt’s description, albeit for different reasons. conrad made two arguments. first, he pointed out that it is unlikely that an author writing in 204/819–20 could have lived long enough to write a history that covered the reign of al-muqtadir.39 given what we now know about that date, however, this argument may be discarded. second, following on from the first argument, conrad suggested that there were certain shifts in both the content and the style of the history that indicated a transition from one author to another, namely from a fervent partisan of the shīʿa writing in an early, monographic style (i.e., ibn aʿtham) to a more neutral (or sunnī) continuator writing in a later, annalistic style (i.e., an anonym).40 conrad’s specific argument about this transition does not bear directly on dating the history, thus exceeding the limits of this study, but i have sought to refute it elsewhere, arguing that the transition in style is far from clear-cut.41 as discussed by conrad, lindstedt, and others, several problems are evident. yāqūt’s description omits mention of al-amīn, passing directly from al-rashīd to al-maʾmūn, but al-amīn’s caliphate is treated in the work that survives.42 what is more, the break in the text that survives is different from the one described by yāqūt: instead of the scribal conclusion coming at the end of the reign of al-rashīd, the surviving text continues with accounts of al-rashīd for another forty pages and ends well before the reign of al-muqtadir, concluding with the briefest mention of al-mustaʿīn (r. 248–52/862–66).43 and although yāqūt referred to two works, the copyist of the only manuscript that attests to the later portions of the text (namely, ms ahmet iii 2956 in the topkapı sarayı library) referred to the whole work as the kitāb al-futūḥ.44 what is important to address here is a third argument, adduced by lindstedt, namely, that the continuator of the history is named in the text itself. lindstedt argued that yāqūt’s description was flawed, that only the kitāb al-futūḥ survives, and that the work was continued by ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-balawī (fl. fourth/tenth century), better known as the author of the sīrat ibn ṭūlūn, an account of the semi-independent military ruler 38. āghā buzurg al-ṭihrānī, al-dharīʿa ilā taṣānīf al-shīʿa (najaf: maṭbaʿat al-gharrī, 1356–90/1936–70), 3:221–22; m. j. abū saʿda, ibn aʿtham al-kūfī wa-manhajuhu al-taʾrīkhī fī kitāb al-futūḥ (cairo: self-published, 1987), 47–48; and al-ʿaṭṭār in ibn aʿtham, qiṭʿa, 23. 39. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 121–22. 40. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 96–104. 41. mclaren, “ibn aʿtham’s history,” chapter 2, esp. 79–125. 42. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 8:286–311. 43. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 8:245–86 (al-rashīd) and 354.5–7 (al-mustaʿīn). 44. see, e.g., the colophon of the second volume: ms ahmet iii 2956, 2:278a.6–17, reproduced in ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 8:354, n. 7. 192 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) of egypt aḥmad b. ṭūlūn (r. 254–70/868–84).45 the strength of this argument depends on how one interprets the apparent scribal conclusion (tamām) located two-thirds of the way through the eighth volume of the hyderabad edition, where it is announced: “the book of conquests has finished” (tamma kitāb al-futūḥ).46 the tamām is followed by an isnād that seems to begin with an ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-balawī, and the work then continues for another 110 pages. we cannot solve all of these problems decisively here.47 but we can clear up one of them—namely, the question of whether al-balawī actually continued ibn aʿtham’s history. indeed, the answer to this question is decisive for determining when the coverage of the work ended, which, in turn, suggests something about when it was composed and when ibn aʿtham lived and died. to resolve it, we must compare isnāds across ibn aʿtham’s history, beginning with the closest thing we have to ibn aʿtham’s own statements about where he landed in time. once we have sorted out this puzzle, we can return to considering the biobibliographical evidence, which the isnād data will help disambiguate in certain problematic places. 3. ibn aʿtham’s isnāds: evidence for the fourth/tenth-century dating the isnāds in ibn aʿtham’s history are difficult to interpret. they vary in form, occasionally mention unidentifiable figures, and often include misspellings, omissions, and other infelicities. in general, two sorts of conclusions have been drawn in previous scholarship examining ibn aʿtham’s isnāds. first, it has been remarked that the isnāds, being, on the whole, assembled unsystematically, represent problematic grounds for dating the text.48 despite the problems, however, scholars have still ventured various guesses about ibn aʿtham’s or the history’s dates on the basis of links between ibn aʿtham and a 45. lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 119, n. 107; 120; and 122, n. 128. for the sketchy details of al-balawī’s life, see g. e. shayyal, “al-balawī,” in ei2. 46. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 8:244–45. 47. i have argued elsewhere (“ibn aʿtham’s history,” 237–41 and 332–55) that we confront a very tricky manuscript problem. to wit, there are several pieces of evidence to indicate that ms ahmet iii 2956, although not apparently damaged itself, was based on an exemplar that had both missing and rearranged pages. for this reason, it seems more likely to me that yāqūt, who directly reported seeing a copy of both “parts” of the history more than two centuries before ahmet iii 2956 was copied, had better knowledge of the work than that which can be gained from a single problematic manuscript. this does not resolve every problem; we are left with yāqūt’s omission of al-amīn, for instance. still, it seems more likely that yāqūt simply neglected to mention al-amīn, even though the latter was included in ibn aʿtham’s history, than that the original history omitted him. 48. see, e.g., conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 114–20, esp. 116: “it is true, of course, that matters of isnād criticism were far more important in the field of hadith . . . than they were in akhbār. but this is not the point at issue here. the features discussed above demonstrate that ibn aʿtham did not handle isnāds with critical considerations in mind, and consequently, that one cannot assess them in terms of the formal critical principles which we know prevailed in his day. when we add to this problem his frequent citation (as in isnāds for individual reports) of unknown informants, his references to names which could refer to numerous persons, and the highly defective editorial state of many of the chains, it becomes amply clear that at present it is difficult to do much with these isnāds.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 193 source mentioned in the text with a known death date. thus the second conclusion: what readings of the isnāds are possible support the earlier dating.49 but we have seen that the manuscript evidence indicates the 204/819–20 dating is very likely incorrect.50 therefore, the argument that ibn aʿtham must have lived into the fourth/tenth century contradicts most interpretations of the isnāds.51 one conclusion or the other needs revision, and given the weakness of the case for the 204/819–20 composition, it seems clear that it is the isnād findings that need reconsidering. in the following sections, i demonstrate that the isnāds, with a few emendations, reveal a generally coherent picture (albeit one with a few idiosyncrasies). ultimately, the point i seek to make here is that none of the isnāds that seem to indicate that ibn aʿtham heard reports from second/eighth-century figures actually place ibn aʿtham in that period. instead, where it is possible to identify the dates of ibn aʿtham’s affiliates, they are figures belonging to the end of the third/ninth century, not its beginning. among these figures is the al-balawī lindstedt identified as the continuator, who i will argue must be someone other than the author of the sīrat ibn ṭūlūn. once we have a basic sense of how ibn aʿtham figures into the relative chronologies of the history’s isnāds, we can examine how ibn aʿtham is related to dateable figures appearing in other texts. 3a. reading ibn aʿtham’s isnāds: problems and possibilities before we can turn to examining the isnād information in ibn aʿtham’s history, however, a few points about the nature of reading isnāds must be made, particularly because the reliability of ibn aʿtham’s handling of such material has been so widely doubted. let us begin with the root assumption: citing a report (hadith, khabar, or otherwise) with an isnād tends to entail a claim that all the discourse reproduced is a quotation. this claim, in turn, contains the assumption that the quotation is verbatim and direct, and that each narrator heard (or otherwise received) the report from a previous authority and transmitted it without altering it. these relationships are founded, at least in theory, on the ideal of aural transmission. although it was possible to gain authorization to transmit in other ways, the vocabulary of transmission tends to reflect this ideal. the strongest claim one could make is that someone “narrated to me” (ḥaddathanī), which suggests one heard it directly from 49. kurat, “ibn aʿtham’s kitāb al-futūḥ,” 277 (wāqidī, d. 207/822); shaban, ʿabbāsid revolution, xviii (madāʾinī, d. 228/843?); conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 95 (jaʿfar al-ṣādiq, d. 148/765), 116 (ʿalī b. ʿāṣim, d. 201/816, and al-madāʾinī), and 120 (courtiers of al-manṣūr [r. 136–58/754–75] and al-mahdī [r. 158–69/775– 85]). there is one exception: lindstedt (“madāʾinī’s ki tāb al-dawla,” 122) identified at least two figures who‏ connect ibn aʿtham to the beginning of the fourth/tenth century. 50. thus lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 118 (citing shaban, ʿabbāsid revolution, xviii): “shaban says that further proof [for the earlier dating] can be found [in the fact] that ibn aʿtham uses isnads such as ‘ḥaddathanī al-madāʾinī,’ which means, according to [shaban], that ibn aʿtham was al-madāʾinī’s contemporary. this does not, of course, prove anything: ibn aʿtham and his fellow historians were not utilizing the isnad in such a systematic way as shaban says they were.” (lindstedt does not, however, substantiate his claim of non-systematic use.) 51. excepting lindstedt’s identification (“madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 121–22) of two figures whose appearance in isnāds he thought supported the later dating. they will be discussed below. 194 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the source.52 indeed, the assumption of such face-to-face transmission is foundational to traditional isnād criticism, which tests the plausibility of links between two figures. could they have met? did they live at the same time? did they pass through the same places? modern scholars have disagreed over the extent to which an isnād can be trusted as an accurate record of a report’s transmission history. some have found isnāds to be largely reliable; others regard them as susceptible to potentially insoluble problems.53 the rest land somewhere in the middle, arguing that comparing variations of the same report and their various isnāds can help show who was responsible for circulating the tradition in a given form.54 but this debate, which has focused on the possibility of distinguishing genuine information from the first/seventh century, has mostly to do with the origins of particular reports—that is, the extent to which the earliest links in isnāds actually connect their reporters to original eyewitnesses. here, however—and this is an important distinction— we are concerned primarily with later links in the chains, for ibn aʿtham usually stands at or near the end of the chains of transmission in question. later links, the scholarly logic holds, tend not to be subject to the same ideological pressures (i.e., the desire to connect information to a source both early and authoritative) assumed to have motivated the fabrication of the opening sequences of isnāds. in short, if we can correctly identify ibn aʿtham’s relationship to the authorities at the top of his isnāds, there is reason to think that we can ascertain useful, if relative, chronological information. one further distinction is necessary. although there is a significant amount of isnād-like data in the text, not all of it is isnād data for the text. because islamic history writing in this period often relied on quoting or reproducing parts of other, earlier texts, a later work may sometimes absorb the narrational structure of its sources. such absorption may include the direct-but-abridged quotation of an eyewitness to events that the author of the history in question could not possibly have heard. for example, there are several instances in ibn aʿtham’s history in which the early kufan jurist ʿāmir b. sharāḥīl al-shaʿbī (d. circa 110/ 728–29) appears to be quoted directly: all that is reported is “al-shaʿbī said . . .”55 52. especially as opposed to, e.g., claims that something “was said” (qīla) anonymously. there are, of course, certain exceptions: sometimes one might transmit just the gist of a statement rather than the verbatim wording (riwāya bi-l-maʿnā). 53. for example, contrast h. motzki, “the muṣannaf of ʿabd al-razzāq al-ṣanʿānī as a source of authentic aḥādīth of the first islamic century,” journal of near eastern studies 50 (1991), 1–21 (carefully credulous of ʿabd al-razzāq’s isnāds) with m. cook, early muslim dogma: a source-critical study (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1981), chapter 11 (structurally skeptical of isnāds). 54. there is a great deal of literature on this question. useful surveys include f. m. donner, narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1998), 5–25 (which is broader than hadith, but not unrelated to it); h. berg, the development of exegesis in early islam: the authenticity of muslim literature from the formative period (london: routledgecurzon, 2000), chapter 2; and n. haider, the origins of the shīʿa: identity, ritual, and sacred space in eighth-century kūfa (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011), chapter 2. one of the central ideas has been joseph schacht’s theory about “common links” (the origins of muhammadan jurisprudence [oxford: clarendon press, 1953], 172–75 and ff.), particularly as elaborated in g. h. a. juynboll, muslim tradition: studies in chronology, provenance, and authorship of early ḥadīth (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983), 206–17. 55. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 7:109.3, 109.9, 109.11, 110.5, 111.3. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 195 but even using the early third/ninth-century dating, it would be a stretch to think that ibn aʿtham himself heard what al-shaʿbī reported about any situation. rather, ibn aʿtham must have borrowed those reports, and thus the quotation of al-shaʿbī, from earlier sources. in other words, some of the passages that resemble isnāds in the history (that is, appear to indicate relative chronology) are almost certainly quoted from other texts and thus cannot refer to ibn aʿtham.56 to date the history relatively on the basis of its isnāds, therefore, requires separating the parts of the text that reveal its narrational structure (i.e., that attributable to ibn aʿtham) from parts of the text that reveal borrowed narrational structure (i.e., that carried forward from earlier sources). this point brings us back to the initial two attempts to date the text. conrad and others are correct that the isnād-like data in ibn aʿtham’s history, taken in the aggregate, paint an inconsistent picture. this inconsistency, however, does not mean the history itself is entirely inconsistent; rather, it stems from the juxtaposition of multiple narrational structures, caused by the quotational nature of islamic historiographical discourse.57 similarly, although shaban and others were right to suggest that quoted sources with known dates might in theory be used to date ibn aʿtham relatively, they have often misinterpreted the relationships in question because they considered only one instance and thus did not distinguish “native” from “borrowed” narrational structures. let us turn now to considering those isnāds that demonstrably go back to ibn aʿtham.58 3b. relative isnād chronology: ibn aʿtham and al-madāʾinī in this and the following sections, i demonstrate how a series of isnāds revolving around the early third/ninth-century historian abū al-ḥasan al-madāʾinī (d. 228/843?), when aligned, provide a clear suggestion for ibn aʿtham’s floruit. my approach here is to lay out isnāds with certain repeated sources next to each other in order to build a relative 56. this rule applies for the quotation, cited by conrad (“ibn aʿtham and his history,” 95, 118) and lindstedt (“madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 121), of jaʿfar al-ṣādiq, which is credited to “my father.” see ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:92.18. 57. for a typology and index of isnāds in the text, see my “ibn aʿtham’s history,” appendix 3. 58. it has already been noted that some cited figures who died near the turn of the fourth/tenth century appear to be direct sources for ibn aʿtham, but the isnāds illustrate precisely some of the challenges involved. the figures in question are muḥammad b. yazīd al-yamānī, i.e., al-mubarrad (d. 285/898), cited in ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 8:252.8–9, and ibn al-ḥubāb al-muqriʾ (d. 301/914), cited at 8:211.ult. see conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 105–8 (ascribing the citations to continuators), and lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 122, citing only ibn al-ḥubāb. both isnāds seem to suggest that ibn aʿtham was active in the last decades of the third/ninth century, but they are not without difficulties. for instance, between ibn aʿtham and al-mubarrad stands an unnamed figure called only “one of the people of knowledge” (baʿḍ ahl al-ʿilm)—a rather unhelpful chronological indicator. similarly, the anecdote transmitted on the authority of ibn al-ḥubāb does not begin with any reference to ibn aʿtham, implicit or otherwise. it simply reads: “al-ḥasan b. al-ḥubāb al-muqriʾ al-baghdādī said . . .” at the least, this leaves open the possibility that the attached report is perhaps an interpolation. lindstedt also identified a certain “aḥmad b. yaḥyā” (“madāʾinī’s ‘kitāb al-dawla,’” 122, citing ibn aʿtham, ‘futūḥ’, 8:212.5) as perhaps referring to al-balādhurī—but this isnād (of only two links) is also somewhat dubious for the same reason, namely, because it does not begin with any reference to ibn aʿtham. 196 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) chronology for all the isnāds together and thereby determine where ibn aʿtham ought to stand in relation not just to any given isnād, but to his sources more generally. it was m. a. shaban who argued most strongly in favor of the possibility that ibn aʿtham transmitted directly from al-madāʾinī.59 to substantiate this claim, shaban cited one of ibn aʿtham’s collective isnāds (hereafter “cis”).60 there are four such cis in ibn aʿtham’s futūḥ, each supporting lengthy accounts of major events.61 the ci in question (the second one in the history, hereafter “ci2”) introduces ibn aʿtham’s account of the murder of ʿuthmān b. ʿaffān, the third caliph (r. 23–35/644–55). al-madāʾinī is one of several authorities cited.62 shaban found corroboration for the link between ibn aʿtham and al-madāʾinī in the fact that “in the course of the narrative, [al-madāʾinī’s] name always occurs in its proper form as one of the most frequently mentioned authorities for significant traditions.”63 but this is a problematic claim: there are no citations of al-madāʾinī in the narrative following ci2, which belongs to the futūḥ; instead, al-madāʾinī is cited directly (several times) only in the taʾrīkh, as a source for the abbasid period.64 with one exception, these other citations of al-madāʾinī are not usable for dating the text because they do not appear in the form of isnāds. rather, ibn aʿtham simply remarked, as he did with al-shaʿbī, “al-madāʾinī said . . .” and then provided the report.65 in other words, these citations offer none of the narrational 59. shaban, ʿabbāsid revolution, xviii (and cf. the earlier, less detailed statement in shaban, “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī”). although shaban’s claims are in need of revision, his explorations are nevertheless to be appreciated, particularly because he worked on the text without the aid of the hyderabad edition, which was not fully published until later. 60. for collective isnāds, see m. lecker, “wāqidī’s account of the status of the jews of medina: a study of a combined report,” journal of near eastern studies 54 (1994), 15–32; t. khalidi, arabic historical thought in the classical period (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1994), 31–33, 38–39, 48–49; donner, narratives of islamic origins, 264–66; robinson, islamic historiography, 97 (citing lecker and donner). 61. al-wāqidī (attrib.), kitāb al-ridda wa-nubdha min futūḥ al-ʿirāq: kilāhumā riwāyat ibn aʿtham al-kūfī, ed. m. ḥamīd allāh (paris: tougui and beirut: al-sharīka al-muttaḥida li-l-tawzīʿ, 1989), 19 (for the account of the dispute over succession at the prophet muḥammad’s death, “ci1”); ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:207–9 (the murder of ʿ uthmān, “ci2”); 2:344–45 (the battle of ṣiffīn, “ci3”); and 4:209–11 (the murder of al-ḥusayn b. ʿ alī, “ci4”). for the (mis)attribution of the kitāb al-ridda, see m. muranyi, “ein neuer bericht über die wahl des ersten kalifen abū bakr,” arabica 75 (1978), 233–60. for its relationship to ibn aʿtham’s futūḥ, see schönléber, “notes on the textual tradition,” esp. 432–38. 62. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:147–49 = ms ahmet iii 2596 1b.2–13. 63. shaban, ʿabbāsid revolution, xviii. 64. most citations of al-madāʾinī are for the abbasid revolution, which is covered in the seventh and eighth volumes. these are the materials discussed in lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” esp. 106–8. lindstedt claimed (at 107) that “it should be noted that ibn aʿtham does not include much al-madāʾinī material before the ʿabbāsid revolution anonymously, either.” i demonstrated in a paper presented to the school of abbasid studies, however, that ibn aʿtham’s, al-balādhurī’s, and ibn abī al-ḥadīd’s accounts of the caliphate of al-ḥasan b. ʿalī are all adaptations of one (or perhaps two) accounts written by al-madāʾinī; al-balādhurī and ibn abī al-ḥadīd cited him, but ibn aʿtham did not. this is not to suggest that lindstedt is wholly incorrect but rather to point out that it is always difficult to draw such a wide-sweeping conclusion about a large work so laconic about its sources. mclaren, “ibn aʿtham’s archive.” 65. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 6:253–54 (the exception, a single-report isnād); 7:278.11; 8:159.9–10, 160.9–10, 190.4, 190.17, 192.4, 192.14, 195.7–8, 196.7, 202.3, 205.6, 206.12, 207.16, 218.1. cf. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 99 and 118, and lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 107. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 197 structure that might help us to discern where ibn aʿtham stood relative to his predecessor.66 thus, the only direct link between ibn aʿtham and al-madāʾinī is that found in ci2, and it does seem as though shaban drew the obvious conclusion from the relevant strand of the isnād: “abū muḥammad aḥmad b. aʿtham al-kūfī said, ‘abū al-ḥusayn ʿalī b. muḥammad al-qurashī reported to me, saying . . .’”67 shaban is certainly right that the latter figure is al-madāʾinī, although he noted that the latter’s teknonym (kunya) was actually abū al-ḥasan, as it appears later in the text.68 but there are good reasons to think that the isnāds describing how ibn aʿtham got his reports from al-madāʾinī suffer from textual corruption. indeed, a consistent picture of ibn aʿtham’s place relative to al-madāʾinī appears only when comparing all the isnāds in which the latter appears. such a comparison reveals that an intervening figure between ibn aʿtham and al-madāʾinī is likely missing from the isnāds as we know them. let us now turn to this missing link. 3c. ci2: a baseline reconstruction ibn aʿtham’s first citation of al-madāʾinī is only one strand of a broader collective isnād, the aforementioned ci2. we may begin by establishing the internal chronology of this particular strand, which reads as follows: abū muḥammad aḥmad b. aʿtham al-kūfī said: [1] abū al-ḥusayn ʿalī b. muḥammad al-qurashī related to me, saying: [2] ʿuthmān b. salīm reported to me from [3] mujāhid from al-shaʿbī and [2] abū miḥṣan from abū wāʾil and [4] ʿalī b. mujāhid from abū isḥāq . . .69 let us work through the problem of identifying the various figures in the isnād. (1) shaban already pointed out the small error in al-madāʾinī’s kunya, given here as abū al-ḥusayn rather than abū al-ḥasan. but the personal names and nisba reveal this individual to be certainly the historian al-madāʾinī.70 (2) certain of the figures—namely, ʿuthmān b. salīm and abū miḥṣan—i was unable to identify.71 but we have enough biographical information on the others that we can reconstruct the isnād’s internal chronology. (3) biographical sources record no mujāhid as transmitting from al-shaʿbī, but they do mention mujālid 66. perhaps ibn aʿtham was here quoting a written copy of al-madāʾinī’s text, as suggested by conrad (“ibn aʿtham and his history,” 99, n. 77, and 116, n. 153) and lindstedt (“madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 107–8). 67. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:147.3–4. 68. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 6:253.14. also noted by lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 107, n. 25. 69. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:147.3–5. 70. see now i. lindstedt, “al-madāʾinī,” in ei3. 71. the only person with the teknonym “abū miḥṣan” i have found in the biographical dictionaries is ʿukkāsha b. miḥṣan, a companion of the prophet who was killed in the ridda during the caliphate of abū bakr (r. 11–13/632–34). thus, this abū miḥṣan cannot have witnessed the murder of ʿuthmān, which took place in 35/655. see, e.g., ibn saʿd, kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. ʿa. m. ʿumar (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1421/2001), 3:86–87. 198 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) b. saʿīd (d. 144/762).72 that the person meant here is in fact mujālid finds confirmation in another isnād in the text in which it is indeed mujālid, not mujāhid, who transmitted from al-shaʿbī.73 (4) abū wāʾil must refer to shaqīq b. salama al-asadī, who was born some years before the start of the prophet muḥammad’s career (traditionally dated to 610), who is remembered as transmitting to al-shaʿbī, and who reportedly died in 82/701–2.74 (5) although the biographical sources do not record precise dates for ʿalī b. mujāhid, we can estimate them on the basis of the dates of the figures to whom he is connected. for instance, he reportedly transmitted from abū isḥāq ʿamr b. ʿabd allāh al-sabīʿī (d. 128/ 745–46), the next figure named in the isnād , and to, e.g., aḥmad ibn ḥanbal (164–241/780–855).75 we might presume, then, that ʿalī b. mujāhid lived around 120–90/738– 806. in other words, he must have been a direct source for al-madāʾinī, a second vector of transmission in the isnād. combining all these biographical points provides a clearer picture of the relative chronology of this strand of ci2, which may be illustrated as in figure 1. figure 1. the madāʾinī-shaʿbī strand 72. al-bukhārī, kitāb al-taʾrīkh al-kabīr (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1360–84/1941–64), 4.2:9 (al-shaʿbī, no. 1950); al-mizzī, tahdhīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl, ed. b. ʿa. maʿrūf (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 2002), 14:33 (al-shaʿbī) and 27:220 (mujālid); al-dhahabī, siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, ed. s. al-arnāʾūṭ et al. (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1417/1996), 4:297 (al-shaʿbī) and 6:285 (mujālid). 73. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 6:254.1 (this isnād will be discussed below). it is not difficult to imagine how this error occurred: the consonantal skeletons of both names are nearly the same, and the switch might have been caused by a scribal error—there is an ʿalī b. mujāhid mentioned in the same isnād. 74. al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 12:548–54 (no. 2767, mentioning that al-shaʿbī transmitted from him). al-mizzī also noted (at 12:552) that al-sabīʿī heard traditions from abū wāʾil, but apparently not in this case. at any rate, this is another chronological note that confirms that there are two parallel lines of transmission here—one through al-sabīʿī and one through mujālid. 75. al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, taʾrīkh madīnat al-salām wa-akhbār muḥaddithiyyahā wa-dhikr quṭṭānihā al-ʿulamāʾ min ghayr ahlihā wa-wāridiyyahā, ed. b. ʿa. maʿrūf (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1422/2002), 13:592–93; al-mizzī, tahdhīb, 21:117–120. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 199 we can see that al-madāʾinī represents a single meeting point for a cluster of lines of transmission stretching across approximately a century and a half. it is not difficult to see why shaban concluded that ibn aʿtham and al-madāʾinī were linked: there is nothing here to suggest otherwise. but it is only by comparing this initial presentation with other isnāds in the text that the fuller picture begins to emerge—namely, that there are intervening links missing, casting doubt on the chronological value of ci2 as we have it. 3d. the madāʾinī-shaʿbī strand: a missing link there are two other isnāds in the text that include part of the same bundle of transmissions—what i will call the “madāʾinī-shaʿbī strand” (madāʾinī < ʿuthmān < mujālid < shaʿbī). one of these two is another collective isnād (“ci3”), which essentially reproduces ci2 for a later event (the battle at ṣiffīn and the death of ʿalī b. abī ṭālib in 40/661).76 but it presents an interesting problem: it is evidently corrupted, for in that isnād, ibn aʿtham transmits directly from a “salīm.” as the hyderabad editors noted, the isnād is clearly meant to refer to ʿuthmān b. salīm, al-madāʾinī’s source in ci2. this suggests that a line of text is missing from ci3 and that al-madāʾinī ought to appear in it as well (see figure 2, with my emendations in dashed boxes). figure 2. ci2 versus ci3 a third isnād (“the muṣʿab isnād”), given for a report in which al-shaʿbī praises muṣʿab b. al-zubayr (d. 72/692), who governed iraq during the (anti)caliphate of his brother, ʿabd allāh (r. 64–73/683–92), reproduces once again the madāʾinī-shaʿbī strand. crucially, however, another authority now intervenes between ibn aʿtham and al-madāʾinī: he said: abū muḥammad ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-balawī related to me [that] abū al-ḥasan ʿalī b. muḥammad al-qurashī said: ʿuthmān b. salīm related to me from mujālid from al-shaʿbī, who said . . .77 76. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:344.10–345.9. 77. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 6:253.14–254.1. 200 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) here the picture begins to change. the first named figure in the muṣʿab isnād is abū muḥammad ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-balawī. this is the first suggestion that there may be a problem with the madāʾinī-shaʿbī strand as it appears in the two collective isnāds (ci2 and ci3). if there was an intervening figure between ibn aʿtham and al-madāʾinī in all three of these isnāds, ibn aʿtham would no longer be linked to the first decades of the third/ninth century by his connection to al-madāʾinī (see figure 3, again with dashed emendations). figure 3. al-balawī: the missing link? this possibility is confirmed by the fact that seemingly the same al-balawī appears in two other isnāds in ibn aʿtham’s history, but not in connection with the madāʾinī-shaʿbī strand. one of these isnāds (the “raids isnād”) is given in a section describing the raids (ghārāt) undertaken by muʿāwiya and his allies in the aftermath of the arbitration at ṣiffīn.78 the isnād reads: ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-balawī related to us, saying, ibrāhīm b. ʿ abd allāh b. al-ʿalāʾ al-qurashī al-madanī related to me, saying, naṣr b. khālid al-naḥwī and muḥammad b. khālid al-hāshimī related to me from his father from abū mikhnaf b. yaḥyā b. saʿīd al-azdī, who said . . .79 by comparing the muṣʿab and raids isnāds (see figure 4), crucial pieces begin to fall into place. the first link in the raids isnād seems to be ibn aʿtham, who is not named but implied—“al-balawī related to us.” it seems most likely that this al-balawī is the same as the al-balawī in the muṣʿab isnād, since both his name and his father’s name remain in place. al-balawī’s source, ibrāhīm b. ʿabd allāh b. al-ʿalāʾ al-qurashī al-madanī, is easily identified: 78. for a summary of these events (and a collection of references to other histories in arabic), see j. wellhausen, the arab kingdom and its fall, trans. m. g. weir (new york: routledge, 2017), 99–104. 79. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 4:36.11–37.2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 201 ibn abī ḥātim al-rāzī (d. 327/938) reported that his father (abū ḥātim al-rāzī, who lived 195–277/810–90) heard reports from ibrāhīm.80 to this we can add al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī’s (d. 463/1072) quotation of two authorities who report that ibrāhīm said his own father (i.e., ʿabd allāh b. al-ʿalāʾ) died in either 164 or 165 (780–82).81 thus, ibrāhīm must have died after 164/780. and if he lived long enough to transmit reports to abū ḥātim, the transmission must have taken place in the third/ninth century—abū ḥātim would have been five years old in 200/815, so it was probably no earlier than that. if al-balawī also transmitted reports from ibrāhīm, we can estimate that al-balawī was roughly contemporary to (or at least overlapped with) abū ḥātim al-rāzī, meaning that he, too, would have lived between the turn of the third/ninth century and its last decades, perhaps circa 200–280/815–94.82 we do not get much help from the lower links: abū mikhnaf (d. 157/773) is a well-known historian from the first part of the second/eighth century, but i have not been able to identify the other three figures mentioned in the raids isnād.83 we do learn one important thing, however: the muṣʿab isnād also seems to be slightly corrupted. the teknonym “abū muḥammad,” missing from the raids isnād but assigned to al-balawī in the muṣʿab isnād, must refer instead to ibn aʿtham, quoting from al-balawī, and an intervening verb of transmission (e.g., ḥaddathanā, “he reported to us”) must be missing. the text ought to read “abū muḥammad [i.e., ibn aʿtham] said, ‘ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-balawī [related to us] . . .’” it is because of this citation that lindstedt identified this al-balawī as the abū muḥammad al-balawī who lived in egypt and wrote about ibn ṭūlūn.84 i see little reason, however, to think they are the same. for instance, al-balawī’s name, given three times in the history, contains “abū muḥammad” only once; if we interpret the name in this instance as referring to ibn aʿtham, the coincidence of teknonyms between this al-balawī and the sīrat ibn ṭūlūn’s al-balawī disappears. moreover, the tentative dates established by his link to ibrāhīm ibn al-ʿalāʾ make it decidedly unlikely that the futūḥ’s al-balawī could have lived late in the fourth/tenth century. 80. al-bukhārī, taʾrīkh, 1.1:304 (no. 962, ibrāhīm) and 3.1:162 (no. 509, his father); ibn abī ḥātim, kitāb al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmaniyya, 1360–72/1941–53), 2:109 (no. 319, ibrāhīm) and 5:128–29 (no. 592, his father). 81. al-khaṭīb, taʾrīkh, 11:188–89 (no. 5086). the two reports disagree—one says 164, the other 165. 82. if this is true, muranyi’s suggestion that ibn aʿtham heard reports from ibrāhīm (“ein neuer bericht,” 236) cannot be correct (especially because muranyi does not question the 314/926–127 date). cf. al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. c. barbier de meynard and a. pavet de courteille, rev. c. pellat (beirut: al-jāmiʿa al-lubnāniyya, 1965–79), 1:13.15–16 (§8), mentioning among previous historians “ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad b. maḥfūẓ al-balawī al-anṣārī, companion of abū yazīd ʿumāra b. yazīd al-madīnī.” i have not been able to identify the latter, but he appears to be mentioned in other isnāds. see below. 83. h. a. r. gibb, “abū mikhnaf,” in ei2, and u. sezgin, abū miḫnaf: ein beitrag zur historiographie des umaiyadischen zeit (leiden: brill, 1971). 84. lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 122 and n. 128. for the author of the sīrat ibn ṭūlūn, see shayyal, “al-balawī.” 202 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) figure 4. the muṣʿab and raids isnāds compared this supposition is strengthened by a final corroborating isnād (the “shāfiʿī isnād”), which appears in a report about muḥammad b. idrīs al-shāfiʿī (d. 204/820) that is included in ibn aʿtham’s account of hārūn al-rashīd’s reign (r. 170–93/786–809) in the taʾrīkh. it reads: abū muḥammad related to us, saying that ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-balawī reported to us that ʿammār b. yazīd al-madanī said: aḥmad b. ʿubayd al-ḥayrī, who was among the greatest of the people of knowledge, said …85 here, there is a verb of transmission that separates ibn aʿtham (i.e., abū muḥammad) and al-balawī. moreover, the correctness of the basic structure of this isnād (specifically, the link between al-balawī and ʿammār) is further attested because it is repeated in nearly the same form in a different text, abū bakr al-bayhaqī’s (d. 458/1066) manāqib al-shāfiʿī.86 although i have been unable to identify this isnād’s figures precisely in the biographical sources, it fits well with the broader picture being worked out here: ibn aʿtham clearly stands at two removes from an event that transpired in the late second/early ninth century at the court of al-rashīd.87 85. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 8:245.2–4. 86. al-bayhaqī, manāqib al-shāfiʿī, ed. a. ṣaqr (cairo: maktabat dār al-turāth, 1390/1970), 1:130.6–12, especially the last two lines. the names are slightly different: al-bayhaqī cites ʿumāra b. zayd (perhaps the same companion of al-balawī mentioned by al-masʿūdī?) but does not mention ibn aʿtham’s ultimate source, aḥmad b. ʿubayd. for the figure to whom al-balawī related in al-bayhaqī’s isnād (muḥammad b. abī yaʿqūb al-dīnawarī), see al-khatīb, taʾrīkh, 4:616–17. al-khaṭīb notes no death date for ibn abī yaʿqūb, but he connects him to other figures whose dates are known. for instance, ibn abī yaʿqūb related reports to muḥammad b. yaḥyā b. ṣāʿid (al-khatīb, taʾrīkh, 16:341–45), who reportedly died in dhū al-qaʿda 318/december 930. this might make ibn abī yaʿqūb a contemporary of ibn aʿtham. 87. it is usually reported that al-shāfiʿī went to egypt circa 200/815–16; at any rate, he died in 204/820. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 203 to recap: shaban asserted, following the text of ci2 in the futūḥ, that ibn aʿtham was linked directly with al-madāʾinī. this connection to al-madāʾinī appears in one of the cis in the work; a second, nearly identical ci, however, is missing two links. in fact, there must be an intermediary missing from both cis because in a third isnād (the muṣʿab isnād), ibn aʿtham is connected to al-madāʾinī through a certain al-balawī. in a fourth isnād (the raids isnād), this same al-balawī is cited as transmitting a report from a figure, ibrāhīm ibn al-ʿalāʾ, who must have lived into the beginning of the third/ninth century. thus, al-balawī, who, i estimate, lived circa 200–280/815–94, or roughly at the same time as abū ḥātim al-rāzī (195–277/810–90), may very well have overlapped with al-madāʾinī, who lived roughly 135–228/752–843.88 by this estimate, al-balawī’s lifetime could easily have bridged the distance between al-madāʾinī in the first decades of the third/ninth century and ibn aʿtham at its end. moreover, he certainly cannot be identified with the al-balawī who wrote the sīrat ibn ṭūlūn. figure 5. the overall picture the overall picture, with emendations, is illustrated in figure 5. alas, this argument must remain tentative, as it depends on inserting names that are missing, and the biographies of certain relevant figures are lost. but even if none of these isnāds alone solves the problem, comparing all five reveals a consistent picture—to wit, ibn aʿtham must stand at one remove from al-madāʾinī, joined to him by the intervening al-balawī. there is one further point to make here. i mentioned previously that ibn aʿtham treated citations of al-madāʾinī in two different ways. in some cases, ibn aʿtham cited him via an intermediary; in others, he cited al-madāʾinī directly. the difference might be explained as reflecting ibn aʿtham’s place in the transmission history of al-madāʾinī’s knowledge. when he had a direct link to authorize his transmission (i.e., when he could say that he got the knowledge from somebody who got it from al-madāʾinī), he mentioned his source. when he did not name the source, as conrad and lindstedt have suggested, he must have 88. for al-madāʾinī’s dates, which are somewhat troublesome, see u. sezgin, “al-madāʾinī,” in ei2. 204 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) drawn on a copy of one of al-madāʾinī’s texts.89 this basic distinction fits well with how ibn aʿtham treats other prominent historians who were roughly contemporary to al-madāʾinī, including hishām b. al-kalbī (d. 204/819), al-wāqidī (d. 207/822), and al-haytham b. ʿadī (d. 207/822?). ibn al-kalbī, who appears in two of the cis and in one other isnād, is always cited through an intermediary, a certain abū yaʿqūb isḥāq b. yūsuf al-fazārī.90 al-wāqidī is also cited in the cis—in one place with two intermediaries (abū jaʿfar ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-mubārak < nuʿaym b. muzāhim al-minqarī), in two other places with just the latter intermediary, and in a fourth place with two intermediaries again (this time abū ḥātim sahl b. muḥammad al-ṣāniʿ < nuʿaym al-minqarī).91 al-haytham b. ʿadī appears in the fourth ci, ensconced among transmitters, but when he is mentioned five times in the seventh volume, no intermediary is cited.92 unfortunately, these links are harder to assess—ibn aʿtham appears to have heard their reports via otherwise unknown intermediaries.93 we see, however, that in the broader picture, the claim in the isnād that ibn aʿtham transmitted directly from al-madāʾinī is exceptional, providing a further reason to think that the work of emending his isnāds is worthwhile. 4. ibn aʿtham’s biographical connections with these conclusions in mind, we can now return to examining the biobibliographical data on ibn aʿtham. unfortunately for our purposes, there is essentially no decisive biographical information about ibn aʿtham. the few biographies we have for him are rather vague.94 we can, however, build something of a circumstantial case for ibn aʿtham’s floruit and thus the time of composition of his history from a range of evidence both internal and external to the text. lindstedt has already started to do so, drawing primarily on a few bits 89. there may have been a written text involved in both cases. in the first case, however, ibn aʿtham’s transmission would have been “authorized” if he had read part or all of al-madāʾinī’s text with someone who had studied it with al-madāʾinī himself. in the second case, ibn aʿtham may simply have purchased the text without having studied it with an acknowledged madāʾinī tradent. on this distinction, see j. pedersen, the arabic book, trans. g. french, ed. r. hillenbrand (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1984), 24–36 (pedersen’s interpretations are probably too typicalizing), and g. schoeler, the genesis of literature in islam: from the aural to the read, rev. with and trans. s. m. toorawa (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009), chapter 8 (“listening to books, or reading them?”), which discusses works in a variety of genres. 90. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:148.2–3 (ci2), 342.4–5, 344.14–345.1 (ci3). 91. al-wāqidī, ridda, 19.5–6 (both intermediaries); ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:147.6 (only nuʿaym), 344.12–13 (only nuʿaym), and 4:209.7–8 (both intermediaries). perhaps this should be taken as evidence that an intermediary between ibn aʿtham and nuʿaym is missing in the second and third instances. 92. ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 4:210.9–10 (ci3) and 7:52.8, 124.2 (mentioning al-haytham’s sources), 131.13, 138.13– 15, 145.10–11. the manuscript (ahmet iii 2956, 1:171b) contains obviously erroneous readings—e.g., in line 4, “muḥammad b. ʿawāna b. al-ḥakam b. al-haytham b. ʿadī,” which must refer to separate people, ibn al-ḥakam and al-haytham. 93. there is, of course, naṣr b. muzāhim al-minqarī (d. 212/827), known for his account of the battle of ṣiffīn. muranyi (“eine neuer bericht,” 237) thought that the nuʿaym mentioned in the futūḥ was simply a mistake for naṣr, but conrad (“ibn aʿtham and his history,” 115 and n. 146) argued they must be different people since naṣr is cited elsewhere in the text (at ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 2:344.12 and 345.6). 94. for a survey of the biographical references, see lindstedt, “sources for the biography.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 205 of biobibliographical information and a cursory treatment of isnāds in ibn aʿtham’s history, and he has concluded that ibn aʿtham must have died sometime “in the first half of the fourth/tenth century.”95 a more thorough examination of the evidence allows us to narrow the likely range of ibn aʿtham’s floruit and his writing. 4a. once in jurjān: when did ibn ʿadī meet ibn aʿtham? let us begin with ḥamza al-sahmī’s taʾrīkh jurjān, a biographical work on hadith transmitters who lived in or visited jurjān.96 the work includes a notice on ibn aʿtham that is based on a report the latter transmitted to al-sahmī’s teacher, the famous jurjānī scholar of hadith, abū aḥmad ʿabd allāh b. ʿadī (d. 365/976), best known as the author of a collection on weak hadith transmitters, al-kāmil fī ḍuʿafāʾ al-rijāl. according to the report’s isnād, ibn aʿtham transmitted the report from abū ʿumar ʿabd al-ḥamīd b. muḥammad al-imām al-ḥarrānī (d. 266/880) to ibn ʿadī. thus, as lindstedt concluded, “because ibn ʿadī … died ca. 365/976 and ʿabd al-ḥamīd b. muḥammad in 266/880, this information preserved in the isnād places, with high probability, ibn aʿtham’s death date to the first half of the fourth/ tenth century.”97 lindstedt assumed that ibn aʿtham’s death must have fallen roughly halfway between the death dates of the two other figures. but this broad range leaves many questions unanswered, and reconsideration of both this evidence and other reports in the taʾrīkh jurjān can add further detail and precision. the report does not state when ibn aʿtham met al-ḥarrānī or how old ibn aʿtham was at the time, but the isnād implies that ibn aʿtham was born before al-ḥarrānī died in 266/880. in addition, ibn ʿadī specified in the isnād that he met ibn aʿtham in jurjān.98 the first possible approach to estimating how old al-imām al-ḥarrānī, ibn aʿtham, and ibn ʿadī were when they met one another is to examine this particular isnād against the broader backdrop of aural transmission in this period. the second approach is to comb through the biography of ibn ʿadī and the texts attributed to him in search of chronological clues about his career that might suggest when he met ibn aʿtham. 95. see lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 118–23. 96. by jurjān, al-sahmī meant the whole region around the old city of jurjān, including nearby towns. see his taʾrīkh jurjān, 594.1–5, where he contrasted his catchment area with that applied in abū saʿd al-idrīsī’s (seemingly lost) taʾrīkh istrābādh, which apparently focused only on that city. the old city of jurjān (or gurgān) seems not to have recovered after the mongol conquests in the seventh/thirteenth century. the modern city of gurgān is a post-mongol city founded at the site of old istrābādh (or astarābād); old jurjān is now called gunbad-i qāwūs (“the tower of qāwūs”), a reference to the tomb of the ziyārid qābūs b. washmgīr, who ruled jurjān in the late fourth and early fifth/late tenth and early eleventh centuries. see c. e. bosworth, “gorgān, vi. history from the rise of islam to the beginning of the safavid period,” in eir, and c. e. bosworth, “ziyarids,” in eir. 97. lindstedt, “madāʾinī’s kitāb al-dawla,” 120. 98. what is more, ibn ʿadī (cited by al-sahmī) recorded ibn aʿtham’s genealogy through several generations (i.e., his nasab). this information is notable because it is not attested in any witness to ibn aʿtham’s own text, in which ibn aʿtham is usually called simply abū muḥammad aḥmad b. aʿtham al-kūfī (if he is named at all). the inclusion of this information in al-sahmī’s work seems to suggest that ibn aʿtham himself gave his nasab to ibn ʿadī, from whom al-sahmī received it later, rather than either of the latter finding it, e.g., in a copy of the history. 206 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) let us begin with the first approach. richard bulliet has suggested, on the basis of a quantitative study of the information recorded in abū al-ḥasan ʿabd al-ghāfir al-fārisī’s (d. 529/1135) biographical dictionary of hadith scholars in nishapur in 317–514/929– 1120, that most scholars began learning hadith between the ages of five and twenty and then left educational contexts, eventually returning in their fifties to teach hadith and continuing to do so until they died, sometimes as long as twenty years.99 the results of bulliet’s quantitative investigation reflect a period of transition in the ideals of hadith transmission. after the “canonization” of major hadith texts in the fourth/tenth century, the standard of transmitting shifted from strict dependence on sound aural transmission to an emphasis on the performance of aural transmission undergirded by written texts.100 that is, the transmitter’s memory of the audited material mattered less than did the simple presence of a teacher to oversee the audition of a text previously verified as accurate. this development led to a shift in the age structure of transmission. whereas earlier authorities, taking aurality as their standard, had argued that sound transmission depended on the recipient’s having reached maturity (at least fifteen years of age, according to certain madhhabs), later authorities argued that children, supported by texts, could serve as authoritative transmitters later in life.101 the corresponding benefit was a shortening of isnāds, a closing down of the temporal distances between transmitters. instead of waiting for each generation of transmitters to reach maturity, transmissions could “skip” generations as elderly authorities taught young children. of course, this shift in the age structure was supported, at least in part, by reference to exceptional precedents: later authorities combed the archive of hadith for cases such as those of people who were credited with 99. see r. bulliet, “the age structure of medieval islamic education,” studia islamica 57 (1983): 105–17, esp. 107–12 (cited in conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 113). the work in question is ʿabd al-ghāfir al-fārisī’s muntakhab siyāq taʾrīkh naysābūr. on al-fārisī and his family, see r. bulliet, the patricians of nishapur: a study in medieval islamic social history (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1972), 165–68. there are, of course, reasons to doubt the applicability of bulliet’s model to our case. ibn aʿtham is not, strictly speaking, remembered as a transmitter of hadith of the caliber of ibn ʿadī, so it is possible that his investment in a typical hadith education was limited. yāqūt (in irshād, ed. margoliouth, 1:379.2 = ed. ʿabbās, 1:202.2–3) claimed ibn aʿtham was regarded as a “weak” transmitter by scholars of hadith. but he gave no source for this judgment, and, notably, ibn ʿadī did not mention ibn aʿtham in his own work on weak hadith transmitters. one wonders whether yāqūt made the judgment himself, perhaps on the basis of his examination of ibn aʿtham’s use of isnāds in the history, particularly the use of collective isnāds. still, there are certain structural parallels between his model and our case: jurjān and nishapur are both in the islamic east, and ibn ʿadī was certainly alive in the period covered by al-fārisī’s dictionary. 100. on these and related developments, see j. brown, the canonization of al-bukhārī and muslim: the formation and function of the sunnī ḥadīth canon (leiden: brill, 2007), esp. chapter 5; p. heck, “the epistemological problem of writing in islamic civilization: al-ḫaṭīb al-baghdādī’s (d. 463/1071) taqyīd al-ʿilm,” studia islamica 94 (2002), 85–114; and g. a. davidson, carrying on the tradition: a social and intellectual history of hadith transmission across a thousand years (leiden: brill, 2020), esp. chapter 1 (locating oral/ aural transmission in the period after “canonization,” especially its persistence next to a certain acceptance of written transmissions of, e.g., the ṣaḥīḥayn). 101. davidson, carrying on the tradition, 67 and 70 (citing al-rāmhurmūzī, whose views are transitional, and al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, who takes text-as-guarantor for granted). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 207 reporting about the prophet even though they were only children at the time of his death.102 but bulliet’s quantitative analysis and the biographical examples cited by asma sayeed and garrett davidson show that the shift was not merely one of ideals.103 given this ongoing transition, we might expect, then, that ibn ʿadī collected hadith primarily in the early part of his life, when he met an older ibn aʿtham, before turning to teach later on in his life. we may now turn to the second approach: what evidence is there of ibn ʿadī’s activities? in the taʾrīkh jurjān, al-sahmī provided a summary biography of ibn ʿadī, including an autobiographical statement. al-sahmī wrote: i heard ibn ʿadī say, “my father, ʿadī b. ʿabd allāh, said that i was born on saturday, the first day of dhū al-qaʿda in the year 277 [14 february 891], the year in which abū ḥātim al-rāzī died.” ibn ʿadī himself died on … the first day of jumādā al-ākhira in the year 365 [5 february 976] and was buried beside the mosque of kurz b. wabara,104 to the right of the direction of prayer (al-qibla) in a spot adjoining the courtyard of the mosque. ibn ʿadī was copying hadith in jurjān in the year 290 [902–3] and then traveled to iraq, syria, and egypt in the year 297 [909–10].105 according to this passage, then, ibn aʿtham must have been in jurjān no earlier than 290/902–3. we do not, however, have to take al-sahmī’s word for it. because his work is focused on muḥaddithūn, al-sahmī structured his prosopography around citing particular hadith transmitted by the subjects of his work.106 one of his primary sources was hadith gathered by ibn ʿadī, probably, as lindstedt noted, drawn from ibn ʿadī’s muʿjam asāmī al-mashāyikh, which al-sahmī cited three times.107 indeed, al-sahmī included in his taʾrīkh ninety-seven isnāds in which ibn ʿadī mentioned hearing a report from a certain authority in a certain place; of these instances of transmission, seventy-three took place in 102. davidson, carrying on the tradition, 70–71. 103. a. sayeed, women and the transmission of religious knowledge in islam (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2013), 168–69, 175–77 (citing specific examples of the ages of female transmitters of hadith), and davidson, carrying on the tradition, 66–75 (esp. n. 91). 104. kurz was a part of the army of yazīd b. al-muhallab, who conquered the area and founded the city of jurjān in the year 98/716–17. according to al-sahmī, kurz settled in jurjān and built there a mosque that still existed in al-sahmī’s own day. see taʾrīkh jurjān, 375.12–14. 105. al-sahmī, taʾrīkh jurjān, 287.11–288.4. cf. al-dhahabī, siyar, 16:154, paraphrasing al-sahmī; al-samʿānī, ansāb, 3:238; and al-subkī, ṭabaqāt al-shāfiʿiyya al-kubrā, ed. m. m. al-ṭanāḥī and ʿa. f. m. al-ḥilw (cairo: ʿīsā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1383/1964), 3:315. 106. thus, the entries in the taʾrīkh, which is organized alphabetically, begin with the name of the entry’s subject, followed by typically sparse (if any) biographical details, followed (usually but not always) by one or more hadith transmitted on the authority of the subject. 107. al-sahmī, taʾrīkh jurjān, 633.10–11, 635.4–5, 636.4–5. although al-sahmī did not say explicitly how much information he obtained from ibn ʿadī’s mashāyikh, there are implicit indications that he drew on the work. works described as muʿjam tended to be organized alphabetically, as was al-sahmī’s taʾrīkh. thus, the taʾrīkh often contains partial alphabetical sequences citing ibn ʿadī for a certain hadith, interspersed with biographies citing other authorities from whom ibn ʿadī could not have transmitted. see taʾrīkh jurjān, nos. 26–28, 134–36, 434–37 (except no. 435), 544–48 (except no. 546), 688–92 (except no. 690). 208 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) jurjān (including his encounter with ibn aʿtham) and twenty-four occurred elsewhere.108 paying attention to ibn ʿadī’s isnāds is useful for two reasons. first, in a few cases, they offer additional information, such as the year in which ibn ʿadī heard the report in question. they thus give us further biographical information on ibn ʿadī’s activities as a muḥaddith. second, examining ibn ʿadī’s sources provides us indirect prosopographical evidence on ibn aʿtham’s life. although the relations between generations of muḥaddithūn are not governed by strict demographic laws, so to speak, if we assume that ibn aʿtham was similar in age to ibn ʿadī’s other mashāyikh (a generic term that implies a certain age relationship between “old” authorities and younger students), any biographical data we can turn up on those other sources should provide us a clearer idea of when ibn aʿtham lived. what information do ibn ʿ adī’s isnāds add to al-sahmī’s brief biography? we may first note an important deviation from al-sahmī’s information: ibn ʿadī mentioned in one isnād that he heard a report in jurjān in 288/901, two years before al-sahmī said he began collecting hadith.109 thus, ibn aʿtham cannot have been in jurjān earlier than that year. other isnāds included by al-sahmī (and also found in ibn ʿadī’s kāmil) indicate that ibn ʿadī was active in hadith transmission in the region of jurjān through the 290s/900s and that he heard reports in both jurjān and astarābād in 295/907–8.110 still other isnāds in the taʾrīkh jurjān attest to ibn ʿadī’s travels, including mentions of (from east to west) bukhārā, astarābād, dāmghān, āmul, baghdad, aleppo, tyre, and mecca.111 although al-sahmī included no dated reports on ibn ʿadī’s activities elsewhere, additional chronological information can be found in ibn ʿadī’s kāmil. there he mentioned being in iraq in 297–98/909–11, seeing a certain baghdadi authority in 297/909–10, and hearing a report in kufa in 298/910–11.112 in another place, 108. for isnāds mentioning jurjān, see al-sahmī, taʾrīkh jurjān, 42.9–10, 46.12, 47.9–11, 50.8, 53.ult, 57.6–7, 61.5–6, 63.3–4, 67.12, 68.5–6, 85.10–11, 112.2–3, 112.10–11, 113.5–6, 115.9–10, 117.6–7, 149.5–6, 150.7–8, 154.12– 13, 155.14–15, 159.2–3, 162.11–12, 169.10–11, 206.14–15, 209.3–4, 219.8–9, 293.ult, 259.10–11, 273.ult, 435.11–12, 276.ult, 284.11–12, 285.ult, 286.9–10, 325.1–3, 334.4–5, 340.9–10, 345.3–5, 345.11–12, 346.8–9, 346.12–13, 347.5–6, 347.13, 348.3–4, 362.10–11, 367.11–12, 368.ult, 445.15–16, 446.4, 449.6–7, 451.1–2, 453.9–10, 454.10–11, 455.7–9, 457.9–10, 458.14–15, 460.ult, 461.11–12, 461.16–17, 462.11–12, 463.1–2, 470.ult, 473.5–6, 480.6–7, 534.ult, 540.3–4, 540.11–12, 543.7–9, 544.1–2, 548.ult, 565.4–5, 567.12–13, 578.ult. for isnāds mentioning other cities, see the following notes and z. ʿu. ʿa. nūr, ibn ʿadī wa-manhajuhu fī kitāb al-kāmil fī ḍuʿafāʾ al-rijāl (riyadh: maktabat al-rushd, 1418/1997), 1:95–103, giving an alphabetical list of eighty-five places ibn ʿ adī reportedly visited (based largely on isnāds in the kāmil), but without any chronological information. 109. al-sahmī, taʾrīkh jurjān, 458.14–15. cf. ibn ʿadī, al-kāmil fī ḍuʿafāʾ al-rijāl, ed. ʿa. a. ʿabd al-mawjūd et al. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1418/1997), 8:140, 9:145. 110. ibn ʿadī, kāmil, 7:549 (292/904–5), 7:558 (295/907–8), 8:112 (291/903–4), 8:131 (ditto), 8:140 (288/900– 901), 9:145 (ditto); al-sahmī, taʾrīkh jurjān, 38.12 (291/903–4), 62.3–4 (295/907–8, in astarābād), 264.13-14 (291/903–4), 320.4 (292/904–5), 406.8–9 (291/903–4). 111. aleppo: al-sahmī, taʾrīkh jurjān, 330.8–9; āmul: 56.11–12, 547.10–11; astarābād: 52.9–10, 62.3–4, 133.7–8, 185.12–13, 213.6–8, 633.10–11, 635.4–5, 636.4–5; baghdad: 191.5–6, 252.6–7, 255.1–2, 301.10–11, 444.5–6; bukhārā: 400.6–7, 400.ult–401.1; dāmghān: 321.3–4; mecca: 30.1–2, 144.7–8, 263.7–8; tyre: 56.3–4. absent from this list is egypt, which al-sahmī mentioned in his biography of ibn ʿadī; he must have known of the isnāds in the kāmil that attest to this trip (or he may have heard about them from ibn ʿadī himself). 112. ibn ʿadī, kāmil, 5:437 (iraq); 1:327 (baghdad); 6:442 (kufa). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 209 ibn ʿadī reported copying down hadith from a certain authority in egypt and mentioned two trips there, one in 299/311–12 and the other in 304–5/916–18.113 to these details, we may add one other line of consideration. there are a number of isnāds in which ibn ʿadī reported hearing hadith in towns to the east of jurjān, including nishapur, sarakhs, marw, and bukhārā.114 given that he would have passed by none of these towns on his two trips to the west, it may be that ibn ʿadī made a third trip, this time to the east, to gather hadith in the cities of khorasan and transoxiana.115 further, there is a hint that such a trip may have taken place after his second trip to the west. thus, in one isnād in the kāmil, ibn ʿadī mentioned hearing a certain report twice, once in jurjān in 291/903–4 and then again in “banūjird” in 316/928–29. i have found no city by that name in any of the geographical texts, and i think it is a corruption of the phrase bi-yanūjird, i.e., “in yanūjird” (also called janūjird), a noted stop for caravans five farsakhs (roughly 30 kilometers) south of marw on the road to sarakhs.116 given that the isnād in question has ibn ʿadī relating a report from a certain sinān b. ʿabd al-raḥmān al-sarakhsī, the correction makes geographical sense.117 of course, the relative distances are much shorter: ibn ʿadī would likely not have spent two or more years on the road, as he had in the west. still, if we suppose that ibn ʿadī was absent from jurjān for some months in 316/928–29, this is another time when he could not have met ibn aʿtham. therefore, if ibn aʿtham related a report to ibn ʿadī in jurjān, he must have done so in one of the following periods: (a) after ibn ʿadī started recording hadith but before he left jurjān on his broader travels, i.e., 288–297/901–909; (b) between ibn ʿadī’s two major trips, when he might have returned to jurjān, i.e., 299–304/911–916; or (c) after ibn ʿadī returned to jurjān from his second trip west and before his death, circa 304–365/916–976, excluding some amount of time in/around the year 316/928–929, when he may have traveled east.118 do we have any reason to think that ibn aʿtham was in jurjān in any one of these periods? 113. ibn ʿadī, kāmil, 2:400. cf. 3:114 (mentioning being in damietta in 299/911–12); 4:63 (mentioning being in egypt in rajab 299/february–march 912); and 7:123 (mentioning hearing a report in egypt first in 299/911–12 and again in 305/917–18). 114. nishapur: ibn ʿadī, kāmil, 5:420, 7:169; sarakhs: 1:371; marw: 1:339, 7:559, 8:401; bukhārā: 1:124, 1:190, 1:227, 1:253, 1:367, 1:423, 1:492, 1:511, 2:9, 2:141, 3:294, 3:449, 4:223, 5:109, 5:273, 5:238, 5:355, 6:48, 6:134, 6:214, 7:284, 7:341, 7:356–58, 8:87, 8:130, 8:174, 8:281, 8:358, 8:408. 115. it is, of course, also possible that ibn ʿadī made multiple trips—but given that these cities were all more less linked by a single route, it would have been most efficient to visit them all at once. 116. ibn khurdādhbih, kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1889), 24.10 (describing the route from sarakhs to marw), 202.6 (describing the route from nishapur to marw); al-maqdisī, aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1877), 348.2 (referring incorrectly to “jarūjird”); yāqūt, muʿjam al-buldān (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1397/1977), 2:172 (s.v. “janūjird”). for a general description of the road, see g. le strange, lands of the eastern caliphate: mesopotamia, persia, and central asia from the moslem conquest to the time of timur (cambridge: university press, 1905), 430–32. 117. ibn ʿadī, kāmil, 8:112.13. 118. elsewhere (kāmil, 3:535), ibn ʿadī reported recording a hadith (albeit from a text) as late as muḥarram 360/november–december 970. somewhat relatedly, al-sahmī mentioned (taʾrīkh jurjān, 102.11–14) that a certain scholar came to read the kāmil and other works with ibn ʿadī in jurjān in 364/974–75. 210 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) it is worth recalling at this point that the emended madāʾinī cluster of isnāds showed that ibn aʿtham’s immediate sources were reaching the ends of their lives in the 260s and 270s/880s and 890s—corresponding well with his audition from al-imām al-ḥarrānī (d. 266/880). but knowing when someone was active does not necessarily tell us how old that person was at the time, nor does it allow us to pinpoint the time of the person’s death. however, there are a few suggestive hints about ibn ʿadī’s teachers, who must have been more or less ibn aʿtham’s contemporaries. first, although the earlier one looks in the biographical literature, the rarer birth dates are, we can nonetheless find two suggestions of age relations. one of the scholars ibn ʿadī met in jurjān, a certain abū ḥāmid aḥmad b. ḥamdūn al-naysābūrī, was reportedly about ninety years old when he died in rabīʿ al-awwal 321/march 933.119 this implies he was born around 231/845–46 and would have been in his late fifties when ibn ʿadī began collecting hadith in 288/901–2. further, one of the scholars ibn ʿadī met in baghdad, aḥmad b. nasṛ al-baghdādī, was reportedly in his seventies when he died in ramaḍān or shawwāl 320/september–november 932.120 this suggests he was born before 250/864–65 and would also have been in his late forties or early fifties when ibn ʿadī met him in baghdad. although it would be reckless to generalize about all these scholars on the basis of two examples, there is at least a suggestion here that ibn ʿadī’s teachers were, as bulliet’s model of the age structure might lead us to expect, men in their fifties or older—and thus that ibn aʿtham himself may have been born sometime between 230 and 250/844 and 865, corresponding reasonably well to his hearing hadith from al-imām al-ḥarrānī before 266/880. next, we may look to the handful of isnāds—some in his own kāmil, some in al-sahmī’s taʾrīkh—in which ibn ʿadī mentioned the year in which he heard a given report in jurjān.121 between the kāmil and the taʾrīkh jurjān, i found eight isnāds in which ibn ʿadī specified the time, seven pertaining to jurjān (the old city) and one to astarābād. each of the isnāds is connected to a different report, but they feature only five different authorities and four different years (288/900–901, 291/903–4, 292/904–5, 295/907–8). three of the isnāds refer to the same authority and the same year (288) and thus probably stem from a single meeting. ibn ʿadī met two other authorities in 291, one of these again in the next year (292), and two others in 295. still, the overall range of dates provided is decidedly narrow: all belong to the period 288–95/900–908. tentatively, then, we might see these isnāds as suggesting that ibn ʿadī was most active in gathering hadith in the region of jurjān in the first period mentioned above, 288–97/901–9, before he traveled elsewhere to collect further hadith. certainly, this pattern would conform to the ideal propounded by some authorities—namely, that young scholars should master local hadith first before traveling to other regions.122 if ibn aʿtham 119. al-dhahabī, siyar, 14:553–54. 120. al-khaṭīb, taʾrīkh, 6:409 (ramaḍān or shawwāl); ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 6:51–53 (ditto); al-dhahabī, siyar, 15:68 (ramaḍān). 121. for a list of these isnāds (with citations), see appendix 1. 122. see, for instance, the comment ascribed to ṣāliḥ b. aḥmad al-hamadhānī by al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī: “it behooves the seeker of hadith and he who concerns himself with [such seeking] that he begin by recording the hadith of his country and the knowledge of its people, comprehending it and mastering it until he knows its healthful from its ailing (ṣaḥīḥahu wa-saqīmahu) and knows its transmitters and their affairs in a complete al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 211 was born in 230–50/844–65, he would have been at least in his late thirties and perhaps even in his sixties at the height of ibn ʿadī’s activity in jurjān, which would make him the right age to be ibn ʿadī’s teacher. still, the evidence is limited: ibn ʿadī specified the date on which he heard a report in jurjān in only eight instances within a much larger list. but the evidence is not yet exhausted. more chronological information may be gleaned from examining the death dates of ibn ʿadī’s authorities, which constitute the latest possible times at which ibn ʿadī could have heard the relevant reports. among all the isnāds cited in the taʾrīkh jurjān that mention ibn ʿadī hearing hadith from an authority in a specific place, i found death dates for twenty-nine of the cited authorities, some in the taʾrīkh jurjān and some in other prosopographical sources.123 these authorities all died between 292 and 337/904 and 949.124 of course, these death dates are not necessarily proximate to the meetings in question, as the authorities might have died years after meeting ibn ʿadī, as was the case for at least three authorities. three of the isnāds (from aleppo, baghdad, and damghān, respectively) seem to refer to authorities he met on his travels west, so no later than 305/917–18. all three, however died after 310/922–23, one of them as late as 331/945. in other words, ibn ʿadī must have met these authorities five to twenty-five (or -six) years before their deaths. consequently, although twenty of ibn ʿadī’s authorities—more than two-thirds of them— reportedly died after he returned from his second trip (i.e., in or after 307/920), it is possible that ibn ʿadī heard them much earlier. at any rate, at least some of these isnāds can be located definitively in time. to the eight isnāds dating from the first period (288–97/901–9) we may add six more meetings in jurjān, for six of ibn ʿadī’s authorities died before 296/908–9. this means that fourteen isnāds in total attest to his collecting activities before he ever left jurjān. three other authorities died within the next decade, which included four or more years that ibn ʿadī spent outside of jurjān; he may thus have met those authorities, too, before traveling. let us now draw the various threads together. we know that ibn aʿtham was alive before the death of al-imām al-ḥarrānī in 266/880, although it is unclear for how long. if we assume that ibn aʿtham was roughly contemporary to ibn ʿadī’s teachers (at the least the ones on whom we have any information), we might estimate that he was born between 230 and 250/844 and 865 and died sometime in 292–337/904–49. given the general age structure in hadith transmission, it seems more likely to me that ibn aʿtham was born and died toward the end of these ranges, meeting al-imām al-ḥarrānī when he was in his teens or twenties. if we assume, for instance, that ibn aʿtham was born in 245/859–60, he would have been fashion (yaʿraf … maʿrifatan tāmmatan), whatever there has been in his country of knowledge and scholars, ancient and recent. then he may occupy himself with the hadith of [other] countries and traveling to them.” see al-khaṭīb, taʾrīkh, 2:6.7–12. quoted and translated (with slight differences) in f. rosenthal, a history of muslim historiography, 2nd ed. (leiden: brill, 1968), 166. 123. given how many places are mentioned in the kāmil, i have not tried to find death dates for all the authorities listed there; it seems to me the isnāds included in the taʾrīkh jurjān (some of which are also found in the kāmil) are roughly representative. a more detailed study of ibn ʿadī’s career, however, would certainly require such analysis. 124. for a list of these authorities and the sources for their death dates, see appendix 2. 212 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) over fifty by the time ibn ʿadī was setting out on his first journey to the west in 297/909–10. and if we posit that ibn ʿadī was most active in gathering hadith in jurjān in the first decade of his career, we might posit that he met ibn aʿtham there when the latter was in his forties or early fifties. of course, ibn ʿadī was something of an exceptional scholar of hadith: as the yanūjird isnād attests, he continued to gather reports as late as 316/928–29, when he was already in his late thirties, slightly extending the range in which he might have met ibn aʿtham. what is perhaps more important, however, is that this estimate seems to correspond relatively well to the claim made by yāqūt—namely, that ibn aʿtham’s history concluded around the year 320/932. if ibn aʿtham was born in 245/859–60 and survived to an advanced age, he certainly could have lived long enough to write such a work. 4b. apologies: when did al-sallāmī meet ibn aʿtham? let us now reconsider yāqūt al-ḥamawī’s mention in his irshād al-arīb that a certain abū ʿalī al-ḥusayn b. aḥmad al-sallāmī reported meeting ibn aʿtham at some point.125 according to this al-sallāmī, ibn aʿtham recited the following lines of poetry to him: if a friend one day to you apologizes, / as would a true brother for some one of his sins, forgo your harshness and be satisfied, / for the noble man ignores offense.126 conrad deemed the identity of al-sallāmī ambiguous, noting that several men were known by this or a similar name, but lindstedt assumed al-sallāmī to be the author of a famous, lost arabic history of the rulers of khorasan.127 we now know that lindstedt was correct. in a more recent edition of the irshād, iḥsān ʿabbās added several biographies that are missing from older editions of the irshād but appear in a later abridgment of the text. these added biographies include one for “al-ḥusayn b. aḥmad b. muḥammad al-sallāmī abū ʿalī al-bayhaqī [al-khwārī128], the learned man, the chronographer (al-adīb al-muʾarrikh). he died in the year 300 [912–13]. he was among the students of ibrāhīm b. muḥammad al-bayhaqī, and abū bakr al-khwārazmī was among his students.”129 if al-sallāmī lived until 125. yāqūt, irshād, ed. ʿabbās, 1:202.4–7. 126. idhā iʿtadhara al-saḍīqu ilayka yawman / min al-taqṣīri ʿ udhrata akhin muqirrin // fa-ṣunhu ʿ an jafāʾika wa-rḍa ʿanhu / fa-inna l-ṣafḥa shaymatu kulli ḥurrin. al-sallāmī is quoted as saying that ibn aʿtham “recited to me” (anshadanī), which seems to suggest immediate contact rather than, for instance, having read ibn aʿtham’s lines in a book. 127. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 94; lindstedt, “sources for the biography,” 304. on the historian al-sallāmī, see w. barthold, “zur geschichte der ṣaffāriden,” in orientalische studien: theodor nöldeke zum siebzigsten geburtstag (2. märz 1906), ed. c. bezold, 1:171–96 (giessen: alfred töpelmann, 1906), 173–75; cf. w. barthold, turkestan down to the mongol invasion, trans. t. minorsky, ed. c. e. bosworth, 3rd ed. (1968; repr. new delhi: munshiram mahorlal, 1992), 10–11 and 20–21. 128. in irshād, ed. ʿabbās, 3:1029.4, yāqūt gives his nisba as “al-ḥawārī,” but ibn funduq, in tārīkh-i bayhaq, ed. a. bahmanyār, 2nd ed. (tehran: kitābfurūshī-yi furūghī dar chāpkhāna-yi islāmiyya, 1965), 154.15–17, has “al-khwārī,” which is more likely correct. the latter refers to a village near bayhaq—thus ibid., 34.4, and more generally, ʿa-ak. dihkhudā, lughatnāma, ed. m. muʿīn et al. (tehran: intishārāt wa-chāp-i dānishgāh-i tihrān, 1998), 7:10,020b (s.v. “khwār”). 129. yāqūt, irshād, ed. ʿabbās, 3:1029–30. ʿabbās added this biography on the basis of a manuscript of al-takrītī’s abridgment of the irshād, entitled bughyat al-alibbāʾ min muʿjam al-udabāʾ; see ʿ abbās’s introduction al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 213 300/912–13 and met ibn aʿtham, ibn aʿtham would be linked again (albeit indirectly) to the turn of the fourth/tenth century. there remains, however, a significant problem, one not broached by lindstedt. yāqūt claimed (as did ibn funduq al-bayhaqī) that al-sallāmī died in 300/912–13, but vasily bartol’d argued that this date must be judged incorrect.130 ibn funduq and yāqūt both claimed that al-sallāmī was taught by ibrāhīm b. muḥammad al-bayhaqī, a companion (and thus contemporary) of the abbasid poet-prince ibn al-muʿtazz (247–96/861–908) and that he taught abū bakr al-khwārazmī (323–83/934–93).131 had al-sallāmī died in 300/912– 13, he would have been roughly contemporary with his own teacher and deceased before one of his students was even born. bartol’d proposed that the apparent problem could be explained as a transmissional mishap: perhaps yāqūt and ibn funduq both drew on a source that originally gave al-sallāmī’s death date as “three hundred and something,” but the decade and year were lost in transmission. speculating on the missing part of the date, bartol’d suggested that the accounts of certain events in al-gardīzī’s (d. after 423/1032?) persian history, the zayn al-akhbār, and ibn al-athīr’s (d. 630/1233) arabic chronicle, the kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, so closely resemble one another that they must rely on the same source, which he surmised to be al-sallāmī’s history of khorasan, which is quoted by both authors. the accounts in question include detailed information about the fate and death (in 344/955) of abū ʿalī al-chaghānī, a powerful governor of khorasan under the samanids with whom al-sallāmī was reportedly affiliated.132 bartol’d reasoned that because this bit of information is the last shared by gardīzī and ibn al-athīr, al-sallāmī must have lived long enough to include his patron’s death in his history— that is, he must have been writing until sometime after the mid-fourth/tenth century, and certainly beyond 300/912–13.133 of course, there are other possibilities—al-sallāmī’s work might have been finished by somebody else in the orbit of the chaghāniyyān, for example— but in light of the former point about the lifetimes of al-sallāmī’s teacher and student, it is certainly plausible he himself continued writing. conrad also argued that the al-sallāmī in question must have died in the mid-fourth/ tenth century. as he noted, the khurāsānī anthologist abū manṣūr ʿabd al-malik al-thaʿālibī (irshād, from p. jīm). 130. ibn funduq, tārīkh-i bayhaq, 154.9–17. cf. barthold, “zur geschichte der ṣaffāriden,” 175, n. 2, which gives the passage from a manuscript. it is possible that yāqūt took this date from ibn funduq, as he was rather familiar with the latter’s works, including the tārīkh-i bayhaq. see yāqūt, irshād, ed. ʿabbās, 4:1762.9–1763.20. 131. ibn funduq (tārīkh-i bayhaq, 154.15–17) described both relationships with the word shāgird, “pupil” or “disciple.” for the two men, see c. brockelmann, “al-bayhaḳī,” in ei2, and c. pellat, “al-khwārazmī,” in ei2. for ibn al-muʿtazz’s dates, see al-khaṭīb, taʾrīkh, 11:302.8–10 and 307–8. 132. al-thaʿālibī, in yatīmat al-dahr (cairo: ma ṭbaʿat al-ṣāwī, 1352/1934), 4:29, wrote that al-sallāmī was‏ “an affiliate (munḥariṭ fī silk) of abū bakr ibn muḥtāj and his son, abū ʿalī.” for the latter two figures, see c. e. bosworth, “the rulers of chaghāniyān in early islamic times,” iran 19 (1981): 1–20, at 4–9, and, more briefly, c. e. bosworth, “āl-e moḥtāj,” in eir. 133. barthold, “zur geschichte der ṣaffāriden,” 174–75: “when abū ʿalī died in rajab 344 (mid-november 955), his body was taken back to chagāniyān; this is the last event reported concordantly by gardīzī and ibn al-athīr, so it was probably the conclusion of al-sallāmī’s work” (cf. barthold, turkestan, 21). 214 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) (d. 429/1038), in reporting some lines of poetry attributed to al-sallāmī, said, “i did not hear these two lines from him; rather, i found them in his work.”134 conrad argued: the implication of this statement is clearly that al-thaʿālibī anticipated that his audience would suppose that he had heard the verses from the author himself; this in turn suggests that he could have done so—i.e. that al-sallāmī was his older contemporary. as al-thaʿālibī was born in 350/961 … it is unlikely that he would have been hearing poetry from al-sallāmī before about 365/975. this year can thus be taken as approximating the earliest possible death date for this al-sallāmī.135 conrad’s reasoning about al-sallāmī’s likely date of death is roughly in line with that of bartol’d: if al-sallāmī died in 365/975, he certainly could have reported on abū ʿalī chāghānī’s death in 344/955.136 the guess is imprecise, for who can say when al-thaʿālibī would notionally have found the lines and noted them down? at any rate, if he did in fact meet al-sallāmī at some point, it must have been sometime after al-thaʿālibī’s birth in 350/961, meaning that al-sallāmī cannot have died in 300/912–13.137 if al-sallāmī lived that far into the fourth/tenth century, and he knew ibn aʿtham, he must have met ibn aʿtham in that century as well. when it comes to al-sallāmī’s hearing poetry from ibn aʿtham, however, it is more important for us to know when al-sallāmī might have been born, which we can perhaps estimate on the basis of the death of his teacher, ibrāhīm al-bayhaqī. two pieces of evidence point to the time of ibrāhīm al-bayhaqī’s death. one was already mentioned—he is described as having been a companion of ibn al-muʿtazz, who died in 296/908. the second comes from a surviving text ascribed to ibrāhīm al-bayhaqī called kitāb al-maḥāsin wa-lmasāwī. friedrich schwally, who edited the text, argued that al-bayhaqī must have lived into the reign of al-muqtadir (r. 295–320/908–32) because a story in the maḥāsin mentions that a signet ring taken from a “chinese general” after a battle at samarqand had been passed down in the abbasid family “and is now with the caliph al-muqtadir.”138 because al-bayhaqī referred to the present day and mentioned no figures later than al-muqtadir, schwally concluded that al-bayhaqī died during or shortly after al-muqtadir’s reign.139 for our purposes, then, we can take the dates of al-muqtadir’s reign as a rough estimate of the period of al-bayhaqī’s death. if we assume that al-sallāmī was a child or even a young man (say, no older than twenty-five) when his teacher, ibrāhīm al-bayhaqī, died, al-sallāmī 134. al-thaʿālibī, yatīmat al-dahr, 4:90.8: al-baytān lam asmaʿhumā minhu wa-innamā wajadtuhumā fī nuskhatihi. 135. conrad, “ibn aʿtham and his history,” 94–95, n. 47. 136. of course, for conrad this conclusion meant that al-sallāmī the khurāsānī historian could not have been the one who heard ibn aʿtham, given his acceptance of the 204/819–20 date for the futūḥ. 137. f. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums (leiden: brill, 1967), 1:352, gave 350/961 as al-sallāmī’s approximate death date, apparently using al-thaʿālibī’s birth date. cf. w. l. treadwell, “the political history of the sāmānid state” (phd thesis, university of oxford, 1991), 7–9. 138. al-bayhaqī, kitāb al-maḥāsin wa-l-masāwī, ed. f. schwally (giessen: j. ricker, 1902), 504.8. 139. al-bayhaqī, kitāb al-maḥāsin, viii. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 215 would have been born in the last decades of the third/ninth or the first decades of the fourth/tenth century (circa 270–315/883–928). unfortunately, the age relationship between ibn aʿtham and al-sallāmī is ambiguous: were they peers? or student and teacher? we can try both ideas on for size. if ibn aʿtham was born in the 230s or 240s/850s or 860s, as implied by his link to al-imām al-ḥarrānī, he would have been more than one hundred years old by the time al-thaʿālibī was born. and if ibn aʿtham and al-sallāmī were roughly contemporary to one another, we would expect al-sallāmī to have been born not long after ibn aʿtham—meaning that he, too, would have been of an advanced age by the time al-thaʿālibī was born. it thus seems more likely that ibn aʿtham was somewhat older than al-sallāmī and that the latter was born closer to the end of the third/ninth century and thus died a few decades after ibn aʿtham, sometime after 350/961. 4c. summary: biographical connections ultimately, what we discover in the biographical literature is a broad network of connections to ibn aʿtham, both direct and indirect. although we stand in the realm of speculation in several places, we can identify a handful of scholars who we have strong reason to think belong either to the generation preceding ibn aʿtham, to his own generation, or to the generation after. the following table brings these connections together. table 1. ibn aʿtham’s biographical connections figure born died relative to ibn aʿtham al-imām al-ḥarrānī ? 266/880 older ʿabd allāh al-balawī ca. 200/815? ca. 280/894? older abū ḥāmid al-naysābūrī ca. 231/845–46 321/933 contemporary ibn al-muʿtazz 247/861 296/908 contemporary aḥmad b. nasṛ al-baghdādī before 250/864–65 320/932 contemporary ibrāhīm al-bayhaqī ? before 320/932? contemporary ibn ʿadī 277/891 365/976 younger al-sallāmī ? after 350/961? younger abū bakr al-khwārazmī 323/934 383/993 younger al-thaʿālibī 350/961 429/1038 younger 216 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) to summarize the evidence for ibn aʿtham’s floruit, we can begin with a figure we know to be older than ibn aʿtham, al-imām al-ḥarrānī. if ibn aʿtham heard a report from al-ḥarrānī, he must have been born before the latter died in 266/880; indeed, if the usual age structure of hadith transmission applies, he may well have been born perhaps five to twenty years earlier, around 246–261/860–875. this range fits with the admittedly scant information we have about ibn ʿadī’s teachers, who, we can assume, were roughly contemporary with ibn aʿtham. of the two authorities cited by ibn aʿtham whose birth dates are known, an extremely old one (abū ḥāmid al-naysābūrī) was born circa 231/845 and a younger one (aḥmad b. nasṛ al-baghdādī) circa 250/865. a final hint lies in ibn aʿtham’s relationship with one of his sources for the history, ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad al-balawī, an apparent contemporary of abū ḥātim al-rāzī (195–277/810–90). al-balawī, like abū ḥātim, would likely have been in his forties or fifties around the middle of the third/ninth century, when i suspect ibn aʿtham was born, and their relative ages once again conform to the common pattern in hadith transmission. for the sake of clarity, i will tentatively suggest that ibn aʿtham was born around 250/865. let us now work backward, from someone we suspect was younger than ibn aʿtham, namely al-sallāmī. bartol’d’s hypothesis about al-sallāmī’s outliving abū ʿalī al-chaghānī (d. 344/955) and conrad’s hypothesis about his meeting al-thaʿālibī (b. 350/961) together suggest that al-sallāmī died some years after 350/961. according to ibn funduq, al-sallāmī was a pupil (shāgird) of ibrāhīm al-bayhaqī and the teacher of abū bakr al-khwārazmī (323–83/934–93). al-bayhaqī’s dates are not directly attested, but schwally hypothesized on the basis of textual evidence that he died during the reign of al-muqtadir (i.e., before 320/932). furthermore, al-bayhaqī seems to have been a companion of ibn al-muʿtazz (247– 96/861–908). but there is reason to think he outlived ibn al-muʿtazz, who died an unnatural death, executed for his involvement in a plot to remove the newly inaugurated al-muqtadir. at any rate, if al-sallāmī learned from both al-bayhaqī and ibn aʿtham, we may assume that the latter two were contemporaries—which implies that ibn aʿtham would have been contemporary to ibn al-muʿtazz as well. it would be most helpful if we knew the date of al-sallāmī’s birth, which would give us a terminus post quem for his meeting with ibn aʿtham. unfortunately, we can only guess. if his teacher al-bayhaqī died as late as 320/932, al-sallāmī must have been born some time before this. if we imagine that al-bayhaqī tutored him as a small child (a relationship often depicted in chronicles), he might have been born around 310–15/922–27 at the latest. in that case, al-sallāmī would have been in his late twenties or thirties in 344/955, when bartol’d thought he was still in the service of the chaghāniyyān. further, it would certainly be reasonable to think that he lived beyond 350/961, as he would have been only in his forties at that time. but if so, he would have been no more than a decade older than abū bakr al-khwārazmī, who was reportedly born in 323/934—a possibility that fits uneasily with ibn funduq’s calling al-khwārazmī the shāgird of al-sallāmī. if al-sallāmī and ibn ʿadī were roughly the same age, many of these points would be clearer. if al-sallāmī was born circa 277/891 and lived until 365/976, as ibn ʿadī was and did, he easily could have studied with al-bayhaqī circa 300/912, served as a senior counselor al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 217 to the chaghāniyyān in the 330s and 340s/940s and 950s, and met a young al-thaʿālibī after 350/961. but this timeline would require him to be nearly ninety years of age at his death, as ibn ʿadī was, which is even now an above-average lifespan. by contrast, had he been born in 290/902–3, he could have done all these things around the same times, but as a slightly younger man. let us return, finally, to yāqūt’s report that ibn aʿtham’s taʾrīkh concluded near the end of the reign of al-muqtadir. in light of all the foregoing, it is decidedly reasonable to think that ibn aʿtham died circa 320/932, as has often been claimed (if never demonstrated). even if we exclude the text-internal evidence, it is plausible that ibn aʿtham died in 320/932. if he was born in 250/865, for instance, he would have been nearly thirty years old when ibn ʿadī was born in 277/891, in his late forties by the time ibn ʿadī was preparing for his first study trip in 297/909, in his late fifties when ibn ʿadī returned to jurjān after the second trip around 306/918–19, and only sixty-seven years old in 320/932. similarly, if he was born in 250/865 and died in 320/932, he would have been only a little younger than ibn al-muʿtazz and certainly could have been active during the reign of al-muqtadir, as ibrāhīm al-bayhaqī seems to have been. of course, it is also possible that ibn aʿtham finished (or gave up) writing his history around the end of al-muqtadir’s reign but lived for a few years more.140 but at a minimum, we may say that ibn aʿtham almost certainly died circa 320/932. going further, i might propose an approximate range: estimating generously from his various biographical connections, ibn aʿtham likely lived from about 250 to about 325/865–937. 5. conclusion: ibn aʿtham, islamicate historiography, and written culture ultimately, evidence both internal and external to ibn aʿtham’s history indicates that he must have lived and written through the first decades of the fourth/tenth century, as suggested long ago by frähn and recently affirmed by lindstedt. in this article, i have attempted to settle the debate conclusively. three points are particularly important. first, the alternate date of composition, 204/819–20, offered in the later persian translation, the keystone of conrad’s argument, is not attested in any source other than the modern bombay lithographs of the persian translation (or perhaps the late branch of the manuscript tradition they represent). thus, there is little reason to take it as credible evidence for the composition of ibn aʿtham’s history. second, although reading the isnāds in ibn aʿtham’s history is hampered by errors more or less commonly found in manuscript transmission, i showed that comparing a series of related isnāds in the text—and making certain corresponding emendations—reveals them to be largely consistent with the later dating, as they connect ibn aʿtham to figures working in the last decades of the third/ninth century 140. thus, as mentioned above, khalīfa b. khayyāṭ’s taʾrīkh concludes in 232/847, but he died several years later in 240/854. similarly, abū jaʿfar al-ṭabarī died in 310/923, but the version of his taʾrīkh we have only goes down to dhū al-ḥijja 302/july 915 (as noted in c. gilliot, “al-ṭabarī,” in ei2). but cf. ibn al-qifṭī’s claim that al-ṭabarī’s history continued to 309/921–22. see al-zawzanī’s abridgement: al-muntakhabāt al-mulṭaqaṭāt min kitāb ikhbār al-ʿulamāʾ bi-akhbār al-ḥukamāʾ li-ibn al-qifṭī, ed. j. lippert with a. müller (leipzig: dieterich, 1320/1903), 110.8–9, cited in rosenthal, muslim historiography, 81. 218 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) and the first decades of the fourth/tenth century (especially al-balawī). third, and finally, further examination of the biographical evidence adduced by lindstedt demonstrates that the relative dates established by ibn aʿtham’s various connections to at least seven other, better-known historical figures (al-imām al-ḥarrānī, ibn ʿadī, and al-sallāmī, plus ibrāhīm al-bayhaqī, abū bakr al-khwārazmī, ibn al-muʿtazz, and al-thaʿālibī) place his activities securely in the closing decades of the third/ninth century and the first decades of the next one. all in all, i argued, the broader picture of ibn aʿtham’s biographical connections shows that yāqūt’s report that ibn aʿtham’s taʾrīkh concluded with the reign of al-muqtadir is not only plausible but a fairly good indication of when ibn aʿtham died, sometime around 320/932. there are two conclusions we may draw from this examination of ibn aʿtham’s history, a conventional one and a slightly more unconventional one. the conventional conclusion has to do with locating ibn aʿtham in the development of islamicate historiography. it is not difficult, of course, to imagine why shaban, conrad, and others were interested in the possibility that ibn aʿtham’s text was written early in the third/ninth century. if the futūḥ had been written then, it would provide early attestation for particular ways of framing the history of islamic politics and society.141 it must be admitted, however, that the later dating accords much better with the generally accepted model of the emergence of arabic historiography. like other historians of the fourth/tenth century, ibn aʿtham joined themes that in the previous century might have been treated separately in more narrowly focused “monographs.” disparate accounts of caliphal politics, the conquest of particular places or regions, and rebellions (especially of the maqtal sort) were synthesized into a single chronological stream.142 here, then, is an important methodological point for future studies in aʿthamology: if we are to interpret the contents of ibn aʿtham’s history with an eye to the context in which it was produced, we must look to developments in the early fourth/tenth century. in particular, my study of the isnāds suggests that we must think of ibn aʿtham as a receptor of the earlier “monographic” narratives, perhaps even especially as a reader (rather than an auditor) of those narratives. this position will have important implications both for studying the particularities of ibn aʿtham’s narratives and for establishing how the methodological assumptions underpinning his history relate to the approaches of his contemporaries, such as al-balādhurī (d. 279/892?), al-yaʿqūbī 141. as shaban contended—see his “ibn aʿtham al-kūfī” and cf. lindstedt, “sources for the biography,” 300. 142. i regard as the standard account of that development robinson’s treatment in islamic historiography, 20–38, but it was preceded by a number of important studies. see h. a. r. gibb, “tarikh” in studies on the civilization of islam, ed. s. j. shaw and w. r. polk (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1962), 108–37 (a reprint of a lemma from the first encyclopaedia of islam); rosenthal, muslim historiography (esp. part 1, chapter 3); a. noth, “der charakter der ersten großen sammlungen von nachrichten zur frühen kalifenzeit,” der islam 47 (1971): 168–99; a. noth with l. conrad, the early arabic historical tradition: a source-critical study, trans. m. bonner (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1994); and donner, narratives of islamic origins. khalidi (in his arabic historical thought) took a contrasting perspective, proceeding by epistemology rather than source structure and pointing out a certain diversity in the use of shared textual forms. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 219 (d. after 292/905), and al-ṭabarī (d. 310/922).143 future work focused on ibn aʿtham’s history will have to begin from the fourth/tenth-century dating, not the third/ninth-century one. still, it is decidedly ironic—if it is not purely coincidental—that the author of a lengthy and relatively early work of islamicate historiography should be so obscure. those who knew something specific about the historian (e.g., al-sahmī) apparently knew nothing of the history; and those who knew of the history (e.g., yāqūt) knew almost nothing about the historian.144 the surviving biographical traces are faint and indirect, fleeting impressions of personal encounters in the realms of poetry and hadith, not in that of historiography. and yet ibn aʿtham’s history was copied on and off for some time: the dates of the witnesses we have range from the seventh to the thirteenth (thirteenth to nineteenth) centuries. whatever later readers found interesting about the history, however, they seem not to have connected it to the person of ibn aʿtham. this irony points to the more unconventional conclusion to be drawn from the history of ibn aʿtham’s history. the difficulty of dating ibn aʿtham points toward a need to reconceptualize our developmental model of the history of islamicate history writing, or at least to question some of the assumptions underlying it. in particular, the case of locating ibn aʿtham and his history in time provides a direct challenge to what we might think of as “the library assumption.” once a physical text, almost always in the form of a modern print edition, is caught in the bibliographical net of a library catalog, we assume a correspondence between the work and its author.145 this assumed correspondence parallels (or perhaps even generates) a hermeneutical assumption that the contents of the work—for which the author serves as a chronological marker—function to document a moment in intellectual history.146 143. for al-balādhurī’s use of sources, see especially k. athamina, “the sources of al-balādhurī’s ansāb al-ashrāf,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 5 (1984): 237–62, in which athamina argued that al-balādhurī distinguished between sources he had heard and those he had read in his style of citation. much as ibn aʿtham seems to have done, in the former case al-balādhurī cited full isnāds, whereas in the latter case he opted for brief references. athamina’s conclusions have recently been extended by r. lynch in the third chapter of his arab conquests and early islamic historiography: the “futuh al-buldan” of al-baladhuri (london: i. b. tauris, 2020), in which he argued that similar citational patterns are present in al-balādhurī’s kitāb futūḥ al-buldān. as noted above, i made an attempt at outlining (and distinguishing) certain methodological presumptions in the works of ibn aʿtham, al-yaʿqūbī, and al-ṭabarī in the third chapter of my dissertation—“ibn aʿtham’s history,” 128–86. 144. the one exception, perhaps, is the hadith scholar ibn mākūlā (d. 475/1082), who, in his text on commonly mistaken names, both recorded ibn aʿtham’s nasab (from al-sahmī?) and mentioned his history. see lindstedt, “sources for the biography,” 303. 145. for a discussion of similar assumptions in european book history, see d. f. mckenzie, bibliography and the sociology of texts (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999), esp. 1–21. cf. r. chartier, the order of books: readers, authors, and libraries in europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, trans. l. g. cochrane (stanford, ca: stanford university press, 1994), 25–60, tracing the conceptual emergence of authorship and literary property in europe as a function of the production and sale of printed books. 146. see, e.g., h. motzki, “the author and his work in the islamic literature of the first centuries: the case of ʿabd al-razzāq’s muṣannaf,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 28 (2003): 171–201, at 171: “the author … plays a crucial role in dating a work. the author’s birth or death dates often supply the only indication of the work’s place in time and space. this information can be used to reconstruct the development of thinking and writing in different branches of knowledge and literature. without being able to identify the authors it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to compose a history of literature.” having said that, however, motzki went 220 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the library’s shelves offer us a series of data points, which, when arranged chronologically, offer a picture of linear development. in other words, if we can locate ibn aʿtham’s history in time, we can get on to the project of interpreting the work and translating its particular form and contents into one instantiation (among many) of the broader, singular intellectual phenomenon we think of as islamic historiography. the problem with this assumption, however, is apparent even in the history: whatever ibn aʿtham thought about historiography in his own time is nearly entirely implicit in his text. as far as we know, ibn aʿtham never mentioned anything like an ʿilm al-taʾrīkh, let alone anything about how his own work or understanding of the past related to it. it was only a few centuries later that such an idea would emerge among islamicate historians. therefore, figuring out the most likely date on which ibn aʿtham’s history was composed on the way to figuring out its significance in documenting the rise of islamic historiography represents a chronological operation that has more to do with the pursuit of a modern academic goal—namely, the attempt to develop an encompassing historical model of the development of an intellectual tradition with, it is assumed, some underlying unity—than it does with tracking the discourse of any given historian of ibn aʿtham’s time.147 but it is precisely the nature of the evidence for dating, the difficulty of the operation, that shows that ibn aʿtham’s history cannot be reduced to an instantiation of a particular intellectual project at a particular time. rather, ibn aʿtham’s history as we know it, as a material object existing in a diversity of unique copies, reflects textual practices in a variety of social contexts. it serves to document not a single point in the development of an islamic historiography but rather a web of transmissive and intertextual relationships across time and space—and across language boundaries, for that matter. furthermore, these later appearances have already had important implications for the interpretation of the history. conrad’s reading of the text and his ideas about not only the date of its composition but also the sociohistorical motivations behind its composition were based in large part on information gleaned from a thoroughly modern version of the text, the bombay lithographs. in this case, the modern reception of ibn aʿtham’s history has been (so far) more decisive for our interpretations than the original—so much so that a modern datum overpowered an apparent conclusion: as already noted, ibn aʿtham’s on to argue in the rest of this article that certain of our assumptions about authors and books are incongruous with islamicate texts. 147. on the slow development of the concept of history as a separate “discipline” of knowledge, see rosenthal, muslim historiography, 30–42. notably, the idea seems to have emerged earliest in persian histories; to rosenthal’s citations of fakhr al-dīn rāzī’s (d. 606/1209) ḥadāʾiq al-anwār we may add the slightly earlier invocations of the persian phrase ʿilm-i tārīkh (in a few forms) in the introduction to ibn funduq’s (d. 565/1169– 70) tārīkh-i bayhaq, 4.16 (ʿilm-i tārīkh), 7.16 (ʿilm-i tawārīkh), 8.19 (ʿilm-i tawārīkh), 10.6 (ḥifẓ-i īn ʿilm āsān-tar ast), 11.15 (ʿulūm-i tawārīkh), 15.14 (hīch kas badīn ʿilm ḥājatmandtar). rosenthal (muslim historiography, 35, n. 2) read an early occurrence of a similar phrase (ʿilm al-taʾrīkhāt) in ibn fārighūn’s (fl. mid-fourth/tenth century) jawāmiʿ al-ʿulūm as referring to the division of history into eras, rather than to a discipline. khalidi (arabic historical thought, 132) and robinson (islamic historiography, 36) both noted that al-masʿūdī (d. 345/956?) stated in murūj al-dhahab, 1:12, §7 that he “wished to leave for the world a blessed reminder and a prepared and organized knowledge” (ʿilman manẓūman ʿatīdan) in the form of his history, but the phrase does not seem to reflect a broader “disciplinary” awareness. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 221 history is clearly more related to the later synthetic chronographies than it is to the earlier monographs. but the modern version of the text, in turn, depended for its existence on a decision taken in yet another nonoriginal context—namely, that of translating the text into persian, a reflection of the reading practices of an aʿyān-amīr circle centered in southern khorasan.148 i do not mean to suggest here that dating is a pointless endeavor or that modern academic articulations necessarily misconstrue historical phenomena by not merely reproducing them in their original terms.149 after all, my purpose in this article has been precisely to perform this internal chronological operation on the basis of as much as evidence as possible. even if ibn aʿtham’s history ought to be imagined as standing in a web of chronological relations rather than in a straightforward chronology of development, we cannot dispense entirely with locating him and his work in time. nor do i mean to suggest that ibn aʿtham’s history lacks any continuity with its original composition, that it was so thoroughly subjected to progressive revision that each generation of reader-historians remade the text entirely in the image of their own presuppositions about the past. indeed, where the manuscripts of ibn aʿtham’s history overlap, they differ primarily in terms of the traces of the inevitable mouvance of manuscript reproduction.150 it is certainly possible to attempt to place our image of the original history into something like a chronological developmental sequence. further, reconsidering ibn aʿtham’s history in light of its material and reception histories will certainly not solve some of the informational problems we face. 148. in his introduction to the translation, muḥammad al-mustawfī (futūḥ, pp. panjāh u-yak–panjāh u-panj) recounts that the suggestion to translate ibn aʿtham in 596/1199 was made by an unnamed grandee apparently in the orbit of the khwārazmshāhs based in tāybād and zawzan. for a discussion and further references, see my “ibn aʿtham’s history,” 250–58 and 363–65. 149. as marshall hodgson aptly put it in a slightly different context, “though each particular step in the formation of the sharîʿah had its immediate rationale, there were inevitably many potential alternatives. that the major choices prevailed as they did was surely due to their enabling muslims to come closer to fulfilling the overall ideals of the sharîʿah-minded. these ideals they did not present in the abstract manner required by the historian, who measures them against the corresponding ideals of other eras. we must state in our own modern terms, and against the background of the ages that had preceded, what it was that those early muslims were taking for granted; what it was that they were acting upon without articulating. but we may hope to come to a formulation which, while they would not have made it, they would not have repudiated once they understood it”; m. g. s. hodgson, the venture of islam: conscience and history in a world civilization, vol. 1, the classical age of islam (chicago: university of chicago press, 1974), 318. 150. with some notable exceptions: for instance, the arabic and persian texts differ sharply in their accounts of the circumstances of the death of al-ḥasan b. ʿalī. compare ibn aʿtham, futūḥ, 4:205–6 (in which al-ḥasan dies naturally) with mustawfī, futūḥ, 789–91 (in which al-ḥasan is poisoned in a conspiracy led by his erstwhile opponent, muʿāwiya b. abī sufyān). see also m. schönléber’s instructive examination of the divergences between two very different witnesses to ibn aʿtham’s account of the ridda in “notes on the textual tradition,” 432–38, noting for instance, two starkly different approaches to the inclusion of poetry. the concept of mouvance is from p. zumthor, essai de poétique médiévale (paris: editions de seuil, 1972), 65–75, esp. 71–74, arguing that modern understandings of texts and authorship tend to exclude the variation inherent in both the performance and the reproduction of premodern texts (in his case, especially vernacular poetry). for a brief discussion of the idea’s application to islamicate poetry, see o. m. davidson, “the text of ferdowsi’s shâhnâma and the burden of the past,” journal of the american oriental society 118 (1998): 63–68. 222 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) copyists tend to be even more obscure than historians like ibn aʿtham, and manuscripts do not always reveal the exact circumstances of their own production. but the point is precisely that no one set of circumstances, neither those of its author nor those of any given witness to the text, will ever explain what ibn aʿtham’s history has been or is. indeed, the whole infrastructure of our knowledge in the case of ibn aʿtham’s history—and i see no reason to regard him as particularly atypical—is built on the interventions of people living in different places, working on different, if related, projects of knowledge production. even if the loss or reconfiguration of works may sometimes be due to pure vagaries in transmission (mishandling, munching worms, fire, forgetting), such losses may also result structurally from the workings of a written culture that produced not only ibn aʿtham’s histories but many other works in all manner of genres.151 in short, ibn aʿtham’s history (and, i venture, other works like it) cannot be seen only as a singular document of intellectual history, bearing one set of articulations of the islamicate past made in a particular time and place. rather, it is an artifact of the longue durée, reflecting overlapping practices in a culture of writing the past that unfolded across time and in varying sets of circumstances. even if we need not despair of successfully understanding the history of islamicate historiography, some rethinking is certainly in order. what must be avoided is projecting historical development into a telos in which all later interpretive engagements reflect the trajectory of an original, contextdelimited essence moving forward in time. indeed, to my mind, the problem is suggested by the very phrase “islamic” (or “arabic” or “persian” or “abbasid”) historiography, which serves to locate the broader phenomenon in relation to a particular ideological origin. what is needed instead, i think, are fine-grained accounts of how received knowledge, contemporary interpretation, biobibliographical reception, sociopolitical circumstances, and material textual practice congealed in the particular versions of works that we have. a truly historical understanding of the practice of historiography in islamicate society will depend not on assembling developmental sequences of ideal types but on interpreting how textual materiality reveals the interaction of intercontextual dynamics that is part and parcel of the transmission of works in islamicate written culture. 151. it might even be argued that the vulnerability of islamicate manuscripts to such vagaries is a function of this particular written culture, dependent as it was on the fragile medium of paper in frequently inhospitable environments. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 223 appendix 1. ibn ʿadī’s isnāds with dates (from ibn ʿadī’s kāmil and al-sahmī’s taʾrīkh jurjān) date number in al-sahmī/name location source 288/ 900–901 682. muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh al-maṣīṣī jurjān kāmil, 8:140 288/ 900–901 682. muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh al-maṣīṣī jurjān kāmil, 9:145 288/ 900–901 682. muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh al-maṣīṣī jurjān al-sahmī, 458.14–15 291/ 903–4 549. ʿalī b. muḥammad al-khālidī jurjān kāmil, 8:112 291/ 903–4 684(?). muḥammad b. aḥmad b. ḥakīm jurjān kāmil, 8:131 292/ 904–5 549. ʿalī b. muḥammad al-khālidī jurjān kāmil, 7:549 295/ 907–8 muḥammad b. ʿalī al-anṣārī al-marwazī jurjān kāmil, 7:558 295/ 907–8 48. aḥmad b. ʿabd allāh al-harawī astarābād al-sahmī, 62.3–4 total: 8 224 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) appendix 2. death dates of authorities in ibn ʿadī’s location-specifying isnāds in al-sahmī’s taʾrīkh jurjān note: in all but two cases, the isnād-with-location given by ibn ʿadī appears in al-sahmī’s biography for the figure in question. where this is not the case, i have noted the number of the biography in which it appears in brackets. for the sake of concision, i have given only limited onomastic information, but al-sahmī and the other prospographers frequently include more. death date number in al-sahmī/name location source 292/ 904–5 984. yaʿqūb b. yūsuf al-jūbārī jurjān ti, 6:1067–68 rabīʿ i 293/ jan 906 600. al-faḍl b. ʿabd allāh al-tamīmī jurjān san, 13:573–74 jumādā ii 293/ mar–apr 906 27. aḥmad b. mūsā al-jannābī jurjān tj dhū al-qaʿda 294/ aug–sep 907 655. muḥammad b. yaḥyā al-marwazī jurjān tj rabīʿ i 295/ jan 908 673. muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh al-rāzī jurjān tj 296/ 908–9 666. muḥammad b. ʿalī al-anṣārī jurjān tj; san, 13:516 (293) 291–300/ 903–13 368. shurayḥ b. ʿaqīl al-isfarāʾinī jurjān ti, 6:952 301/ 913–14 139. ibrāhīm b. hāniʾ al-shāfiʿī jurjān san, 14:194 305/ 917–18 29. aḥmad b. al-ʿabbās al-istrābādhī astarābād ti, 7:86 ramaḍān 307/ jan–feb 920 21. aḥmad b. muḥammad al-wazzān jurjān tj 309/ 921–22 415. ʿabd al-raḥmān b. ʿabd al-muʾmin al-muhallabī jurjān tj; ti, 14:222–23 310/ 922–23 508. ʿalī b. aḥmad al-jurjānī aleppo tj; ti, 7:241 (311/923) 301–10/ 913–23 397. ʿabd al-muʾmin b. aḥmad al-ʿaṭṭār jurjān ti, 7:185 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 225 death date number in al-sahmī/name location source 301–10/ 913–23 1165. muḥammad b. jaʿfar al-istrābādhī astarābād ti, 7:193 316/ 928–29 418. ʿabd al-raḥmān b. muḥammad al-qurashī jurjān ti, 7:310 dhū al-qaʿda 317/ dec 929–jan 930 549. ʿalī b. muḥammad al-khālidī jurjān a, 5:24 ramaḍān 320/ sep–oct 932 aḥmad b. nasr al-baghdādī [in no. 651] baghdad tb, 6:409 (or shawwāl); tmd, 6:51–53 (ditto); san, 15:68 (ramaḍān) 320/ 932 434. ʿabd allāh b. jaʿfar al-āmulī jurjān tj rabīʿ i 321/ mar 933 31. aḥmad b. ḥamdūn al-naysābūrī jurjān a, 1:312–14; san, 14:553–54 323/ 934–35 208. bundār b. ibrāhīm al-istrābādhī jurjān ti, 7:474 ṣafar 324/ jan 936 938. mūsā b. al-ʿabbās al-āzādhyārī jurjān ti, 7:502 rabīʿ i 325/ jan–feb 937 437. ʿabd allāh b. al-sarī al-istrābādhī jurjān ti, 7:509 muḥarram 325/ nov–dec 936 680. muḥammad b. saʿīd al-naysābūrī jurjān san, 15:258 after 325/ 936–37 589. al-ʿabbās b. ʿabd allāh al-baghdādī jurjān tb, 14:47–48; tmd, 26:266–68 326/ 937–38 169/1068. ismāʿīl b. al-ṃuhammad al-ḥamakī astarābād tj jumādā ii 331/ feb–mar 943 885. muḥammad b. ibrāhīm al-dāmghānī [in no. 492] dāmghān tj; ti, 7:649 rabīʿ ii 333/ dec 944 742. muḥammad b. muḥammad al-juhanī jurjān tj 337/ 948–49 191. isḥāq b. ibrāhīm al-baḥrī jurjān san, 15:471–72 337 (end)/ 949 (mid) 496. ʿīsā b. zayd al-fārisī jurjān a, 9:340 total: 29 226 • andrew g. mclaren al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) death date number in al-sahmī/name location source abbreviations tj = al-sahmī, taʾrīkh jurjān tb = al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī, taʾrīkh madīnat al-salām a = al-samʿānī, al-ansāb tmd = ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq san = al-dhahabī, siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ ti = al-dhahabī, taʾrīkh al-islām al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dating ibn aʿtham’s history • 227 bibliography manuscripts ibn aʿtham, aḥmad al-kūfī. kitāb al-futūḥ. ms istanbul, topkapı sarayı museum, ahmet iii 2956. 2 vols. dated 873/1468. ———. futūḥ-i ibn-i aʿtham. ms patna, khuda bakhsh oriental public library, no. 493. not dated 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(2) edited by i. ʿabbās. 7 parts in 1 vol. beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1993. ———. muʿjam al-buldān. 5 vols. beirut: dār ṣādir, 1397/1977. al-zawzanī, muḥammad b. ʿalī al-khaṭībī (d. ?). al-muntakhabāt al-mulṭaqaṭāt min kitāb ikhbār al-ʿulamāʾ bi-akhbār al-ḥukamāʾ li-ibn al-qifṭī. edited by j. lippert with a. müller. leipzig: dieterich, 1320/1903. zumthor, p. essai de poétique médiévale. paris: editions du seuil, 1972. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016): 42-113 abstract as derrida charged, plato’s famous declaration of speech’s superiority to writing would seem to have resonated with inheritor cultures similarly transitioning from orality to literacy, and especially the islamicate; despite the explosion of writerly culture from the 2nd/8th century onward, arabic scholarship continued to evince a categorical, if increasingly rhetorical, mistrust of writing. in the 8th/14th century, however, as the age of encyclopedism dawned throughout the islamicate heartlands, the superiority of writing to speech was formally and categorically asserted by arabic and persian encyclopedists, including most prominently ibn al-akfānī (d. 749/1348) of mamluk egypt and shams al-dīn āmulī (d. after 787/1352) of ilkhanid iran. it is hardly coincidental in this connection that the same century also witnessed the burgeoning popularity among scholarly and ruling elites of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), kabbalah’s coeval cognate—the occult science that posited the cosmos itself as a text to be read, even rewritten. synthesizing these literary and occult-scientific currents, in the early 9th/15th century a network of muslim neopythagoreanizing lettrists—chief among them ibn turka of isfahan (d. 835/1432)—developed the first formal metaphysics of writing. this article analyzes ibn turka’s unprecedented valorization of writing over speech in terms both epistemological and ontological, as well as the sociocultural ramifications of this move throughout the postmongol persianate world. letter-number, he argued, is a form of light eternally emanated from the one; hence vision, that faculty of light, must be the sense most universal; hence visible text must be the form of the one most manifest. in support of this thesis, he synthesized the avicennan-ṭūsian doctrine of the transcendental modulation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd) with its illuminationist upgrade, the transcendental modulation of light (tashkīk al-nūr), to produce his signature doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf: letters of light as uncreated, allcreative matrix of the cosmos, gradually descending from the one in extramental, mental, spoken and finally written form. far from being a peculiar intellectual rabbit trail of no enduring significance, i argue that ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light was embraced by subsequent thinkers in iran as the most effective means of conceptualizing and celebrating islamicate writerly culture; these include the famed philosophers jalāl aldīn davānī (d. 908/1502) and mīr dāmād (d. 1040/1630), founder of the so-called school of isfahan. nor was its of islamic grammatology: ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light* matthew melvin-koushki university of south carolina (mmelvink@sc.edu) * my thanks to mana kia, nicholas harris, gil anidjar, alireza doostdar, nicole maskielle, kathryn edwards, joshua grace, tom lekan, antoine borrut and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a draft of this article. 43 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) influence limited to aqquyunlu-safavid philosophical circles; i further argue that ibn turka’s system informed the explosion of persianate book culture more generally, and by extension persianate visual culture, from the early timurid period onward. a telling example in this context is the emergence of the album preface as a new genre of art history-theory in early safavid iran, a phenomenon that has been well feted and studied by art historians; but they have wholly elided high lettrism as the genre’s most immediate philosophical context. this principle may be extended to the persian cosmopolis as a whole: two of the most seminal discourses on writing developed in the ottoman and mughal contexts, by taşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561) and abū l-fażl ʿallāmī (d. 1011/1602) respectively, are demonstrably ibn turkian. like derrida was to do half a millennium later, in sum, early modern muslim lettrists rejected plato’s speech-writing hierarchy; unlike derrida, for whom writing can have no ontological edge, they put forward a profoundly humanistic neopythagorean ontogrammatology as core of the philosophia perennis—and that so trenchantly that it served to shape islamicate intellectual and aesthetic culture alike for centuries. the modern ideologues of east-west rupture notwithstanding, moreover, i propose this cosmology as a major node of islamo-christianate cultural continuity even to the present. * * * * the pen is the most powerful of talismans, and writing its [magical] product.1 —apollonius of tyana the one who will shine in the science of writing will shine like the sun.2 [t]he science of writing—grammatology—shows signs of liberation all over the world, thanks to decisive efforts.3 —jacques derrida in the phaedrus, plato famously declared speech superior to writing, that bastard child of the soul.4 yet he made this declaration in writing; and so it has reverberated to the present. this paradox expresses the central anxiety in cultures transitioning from orality to literacy, in this case greek: does writing diminish our humanity—or enhance it? does it denature philosophic or moral authority—or preserve it intact over time? is not the divine fiat lux eternally spoken, not written? more worryingly, once writing, that pandora’s box, attains to cultural hegemony, can we ever again think or speak beyond its seductive strictures? can there be any escape from logocentricity graphemically embodied? certainly not, says derrida, while diagnosing a terminal metaphysical distrust of writing in western culture, from plato to the present, and epitomized by saussure’s platonic damnation of writing as a perversion of speech, as tyranny.5 but derrida upends 1. al-qalam al-ṭilasm al-akbar wa-l-khaṭṭ natījatu-hu. this line is attributed to apollonius (balīnās) in al-tawḥīdī’s (d. 1414/1023) treatise on calligraphy (rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī on penmanship,” 25). 2. this ancient egyptian description of a scribe, taken from the 1963 colloquium essay l’écriture et la psychologie des peuples, opens of grammatology (3). 3. ibid., 4. 4. the works of plato, tr. jowett, 322-27. 5. it should here be borne in mind that a distrust of writing is common to ancient greek, zoroastrian and al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 44 this hoary hierarchy and bids us obey our perverting tyrant. for writing writes us; the world is a litter of its hieroglyphs of light.6 what of islamicate culture, then, half western, heavily hellenic, just as thoroughgoingly logocentric, and reputedly even more phonocentric? did it too fail to develop a grammatology? the answer, quite simply, is no: derrida’s diagnosis is inapplicable to islam.7 as i argue, despite the high degree of genetic continuity between christianate and islamicate cultures, muslim scholars came to valorize writing over speech to a greater degree than many of their counterparts to the west, such that by the 9th islamic century (15th century ce) a formalized neoplatonic-neopythagorean metaphysics of writing had become hegemonic from anatolia to india—precisely as printing was emerging in renaissance europe. like derrida, these thinkers inverted the semiotic hierarchy;8 unlike derrida, they asserted written language to be superior to spoken both epistemologically and ontologically, universal in its reliance on the comprehensive faculty of vision: written letters as forms of light fully descended from the all-emanating one. the latter, in short, were hardly the forerunners of derridean hyperstructuralism, yet propounded—and that with remarkable success across much of the early modern afro-eurasian ecumene—a semiological physicsmetaphysics that may be styled hyperstructuralist with equal justice.9 vedic and rabbinic jewish contexts—in the latter two writing was even considered ritually impure (zadeh, “touching and ingesting,” 462). 6. derrida, of grammatology; idem, “plato’s pharmacy”; goody, the power of the written tradition, 111. most significantly for the purposes of this study, for derrida writing precedes being “insofar as writing conditions history and all genesis”; hence his term arche-writing (lawlor, “eliminating some confusion,” 84). it must be emphasized, however, that his definition of writing, écriture, is far broader than the standard empirical one. as geoffrey bennington summarizes: “[t]he concept of writing [for derrida] exceeds and comprehends that of language … writing or text in derrida’s sense is not discourse or any other recognizable determination of language, but the beginning of the in-determination of language into the absolute generality of the trace-structure.” as such, he is “primarily concerned to bring out the conditions of impossibility of any grammatology” (“embarrassing ourselves,” los angeles review of books, 20 march 2016 <https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/embarrassing-ourselves>). 7. to be clear: i invoke derrida here as somewhat of a straw man; his project to fundamentally deconstruct western culture pointedly excludes islam—precisely because western modernity itself depends on the recasting of islam as the eternal, oriental tout autre—, and is not historiographical in the slightest. (his perplexing contention that islam, like judaism, is not logocentric—a qualification he reserves for christianity alone—stems from his idiosyncratic definition of the term as referring to the essential independence of reason, logos, from linguistic mediation (lawlor, “eliminating some confusion,” 79).) that proviso notwithstanding, i conclude this study with an attempt to put derrida in conversation with the islamojudeo-christian lettrist-kabbalist tradition, and particularly its ibn turkian formulation, of which his deconstructionist project is curiously reminiscent. on the theme of derrida and islam see almond, “derrida’s islam”; anidjar, semites. 8. this similarity, of course, is merely terminological; derrida “does not wish to reverse a binary opposition” between speech and writing, but to disappear that opposition altogether by redefining language, whether written or spoken, as a necessary absence, a mark whose structure “has the attributes often given to writing” (personal communication from gil anidjar). 9. derrida’s project has been variously described as poststructuralist, antistructuralist, ultrastructuralist and hyperstructuralist (see e.g. dosse, history of structuralism, 2/17-31). the handle hyperstructuralist has 45 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) a growing number of studies investigate the social and literary aspects of the development of islamicate writerly culture during the “classical” and “postclassical” eras both, though focusing almost exclusively on the arabophone abbasid and mamluk contexts, and art historians have thoroughly explored the physical and metaphysical ramifications of calligraphy as the islamic art of arts. but the specific mechanics of this islamicate metaphysics of writing shaped by and shaping such social and aesthetic phenomena have yet to be schematized. the present article is a preliminary offering in this direction. for reasons of space i limit myself to a representative case study of one of the most influential metaphysicians of writing in islamic history, ibn turka of isfahan, this as prompt to further research; examples could easily be multiplied. i introduce our thinker below. but first, some context: when did islamicate writerly culture emerge and reach maturity? and why has its contemporary metaphysical framework been largely ignored in the literature to date? from prophetic orality to encyclopedic textuality following in the footsteps of its greek exemplar, burgeoning arabic-islamic culture, centered in abbasid baghdad, underwent the transition from orality to literacy from the 2nd/8th century onward; by the middle of the 3rd/9th century books had become a fullblown obsession.10 a technological revolution in papermaking and the concurrent abbasid translation movement together gave visual form to an arabic philosophia perennis, the surviving, recorded wisdom of the greek, egyptian, hebrew, persian and indian ancients.11 at the same time, many scholarly exponents of this new, synthetic arabic-islamic culture, predicated in the first place on the explicitly oral revelation that is the quran and the vaster corpus of hadith, resisted this seachange, continuing to assert the superiority of speech over writing in all matters doctrinal and legal, and by extension grammatical, medical and philosophical—presuming, that is, in increasingly anachronistic fashion, a strict and permanent equivalency between arabic-islamic culture and oral isnād culture.12 as gregor schoeler observes: [i]n islam in particular, scholars upheld the idea—or sustained the fiction—that writing should have an auxiliary function at most in the transmission of learning (and in establishing legally valid proof). until the time in which literary books as we similarly been applied to lacanian psychoanalytical theory. 10. the famed bibliomaniac and litterateur al-jāḥiẓ is here a case in point; see e.g. montgomery, al-jāḥiẓ, 4. on the burgeoning of abbasid writerly culture more generally see toorawa, ibn abī ṭāhir ṭayfūr. 11. the authoritative study here is gutas, greek thought, arabic culture. saliba has proposed an earlier beginning to the translation movement, i.e., in the umayyad period (islamic science, 27-72); whether or not his argument holds, the importance of writing already under the umayyads has likely been underestimated (my thanks to antoine borrut for this observation). 12. hirschler, the written word, 11. on legal debates over the materiality of the quran as text—including its magical-medical and talismanic applications from the 2nd/8th century onward—see zadeh, “touching and ingesting.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 46 know them emerged, and even beyond that time, the true transmission of knowledge remained oral, from person to person—at least in theory.13 but as sociocultural realities change, so must theory. social historians have shown that the initial explosion of writerly culture in the abbasid caliphate in particular only gained in intensity and scope in the arabophone west with the rise of the ayyubid and then mamluk sultanate, such that the heart of the arabic cosmopolis shifted definitively from iraq to egypt and syria.14 most notably, during the transformative 7th/13th and 8th/14th centuries, which saw the mass immigration of maghribi and mashriqi scholars alike in the face of invasion and plague, mamluk cairo and damascus emerged as islamdom’s intellectual center of gravity, which had theretofore been in iran; the mongol conquest on the one hand and the reconquista and general political turbulence on the other forced a mixing of eastern and western intellectual traditions that had been developing semiindependently for centuries.15 this arabo-persian synthesis in turn generated an islamic cultural florescence more explicitly and thoroughgoingly textual than any that had preceded it: the age of encyclopedism had begun.16 it is hardly surprising, then, that the encyclopedic classifications of the sciences (sg. taṣnīf al-ʿulūm) produced during this period testify precisely to this definitive triumph of writing over speech as preeminent vehicle of scholarly authority in islamic culture. that is, while the fictitiousness of writing’s status in arabic letters as mere auxiliary to speech had become patent long before, encyclopedists did not begin to assert its superiority to 13. schoeler, the oral and the written, 85; see also cook, “the opponents of the writing of tradition”; macdonald, “literacy in an oral environment.” the theory, or fiction, of speech’s superiority to writing became increasingly and clearly rhetorical from an early period. shiʿi hadith specialists, for instance, were privileging written elements in collected traditions and wisdom sayings already in the 2nd/8th century (see crow, “the role of al-ʿaql”). it should be noted that europeanists have investigated this theme at much greater length; see e.g. patrick geary, “oblivion between orality and textuality.” (my thanks to antoine borrut and an anonymous reviewer for the latter references.) 14. hirschler’s the written word is the definitive study on the mamluk context; and see now his medieval damascus. on arabic book culture more generally see e.g. rosenthal, muslim scholarship; pedersen, the arabic book; bloom, paper before print; leder, “spoken word and written text”; atiyeh, ed., the book in the islamic world; schoeler, the genesis of literature in islam; günther, “praise the book!”; and see now the two volumes of intellectual history of the islamicate world (4/1-2 (2016) and 5/1 (2017)), edited by maribel fierro, sabine schmidtke and sarah stroumsa, dedicated to islamicate book cultures, from the fatimids and the cairo geniza to 18th-century china and 20th-century egypt. 15. it should be noted that this larger process was first set in motion by a 4th-5th/10th-11th-century climate change event. as richard bulliet has shown (cotton, climate, and camels), the big chill wrecked the cotton industry in iran (a primary basis of the ulama’s wealth), creating a diaspora of persophone scholars— whence the vast persian cosmopolis; it also precipitated the epochal mass turkish migration southand westward. both developments transformed the face and sociopolitical structure of islamicate civilization and eventually shifted its cultural center of gravity back to the eastern mediterranean, where it remained until the rise of the great turko-mongol perso-islamic empires of the early modern era. ibn turka is here representative: like a host of his fellow persophone elites, the isfahani scholar completed his education—and was transformed into a lettrist—in mamluk cairo. 16. see hirschler, the written word, 19; muhanna, “encyclopædism in the mamlūk period”; idem, “encyclopaedias, arabic,” ei3; gardiner, “esotericism,” 276. 47 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) speech categorically until the 8th/14th century. ibn al-akfānī (d. 749/1348), for instance, succinctly asserts in the first section of his guidance for seekers of the sublimest of goals (irshād al-qāṣid ilā asnā l-maqāṣid), an immensely influential arabic instance of the genre that served as model for the subsequent mamluk-ottoman encyclopedic tradition: the benefit [of writing (kitāba)] is manifest; for this science, together with [the science of reading (qirāʾa)], is trained on a single purpose: to provide knowledge of how writing signifies speech. know that all things that can be known can only be made known in three ways: by gesturing (ishāra), speaking (lafẓ) or writing (khaṭṭ). the first requires one to be directly witnessed [by the addressee]; the second requires the addresse’s physical presence and their ability to hear; but writing requires nothing, for it is the most universal and the most excellent [form of communication], and the only one exclusive to humankind.17 though he declined to elaborate, the cairene physician-alchemist could not be clearer in his verdict: writing not only far outstrips speech in practical terms (a principle that had been held since the high abbasid period), but is also the only means whereby we can realize our humanity.18 nor are such assertions of humanistic textual universalism exclusive to the mamluk arabic tradition; contemporary persian encyclopedists take the same point further. most notable among them is shams al-dīn muḥammad āmulī (d. after 787/1352), ibn al-akfānī’s cognate in ilkhanid iran, who proposes in his equally influential and far more comprehensive jewels of sciences delightful to behold (nafāyis al-funūn fī ʿarāyis al-ʿuyūn) a wholesale epistemological restructuring of the religious and rational sciences— one in which writing alone stands as the foundation of the edifice of human knowledge.19 like ibn al-akfānī, he devotes the first section of his encyclopedia to the literary sciences 17. irshād al-qāṣid, 26-27. on this encyclopedia see witkam, “ibn al-akfānī.” in the k. al-ḥayawān (1/3334), al-jāḥiẓ identifies four modes of communication—speech (lafẓ), writing (khaṭṭ), gesturing (ishāra) and finger counting (ʿaqd)—, and notes that some authorities count five. 18. al-jāḥiẓ’s famous section in his k. al-ḥayawān in praise of books suggests the same humanistic conclusion, although it is not stated so clearly or succinctly; see montgomery, al-jāḥiẓ. but as he rhetorically asks: ‘what could be of greater benefit, or a more assiduous helper, than writing?’ (k. al-ḥayawān, 1/48). similarly, abū rayḥān bīrūnī (d. after 442/1050) opens his celebrated taḥqīq mā li-l-hind with praise for writing that is yet tellingly qualified (1): truly has it been said: second-hand reporting cannot compare to direct observation (laysa l-khabar ka-l-ʿiyān). for observation entails the immediate perception by the eye of the observer of that observed in a single moment and place. but were reporting not subject to the buffetings of ill circumstance, its virtue would exceed that of observation; for the latter is restricted to the moment of perception, and cannot extend to other moments in time, whereas reporting encompasses all moments equally, whether those past or future, and indeed all that exists and does not exist. and writing (kitāba) might almost (yakādu) be [judged] the noblest of all types of reporting: for how could we learn of the histories of nations (akhbār al-umam) were it not for the pen, whose traces perpetually endure? 19. on the nafāyis al-funūn and its status as model for most subsequent persian encyclopedias see vesel, les encyclopedies persanes, 38-41; melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 48 (ʿulūm-i adabī); unlike his egyptian peer, however, who despite his valorization of writing does not give it explicit pride of place in this section,20 āmulī formally classifies it as the first of his 15 literary arts (fann)—he is the first encyclopedist in the islamicate tradition as a whole to do so21—and argues for writing’s epistemological supremacy with proofs both traditional and rational. given its status as watershed persian statement on this theme, i translate the relevant passage in full: the first art of the first discourse of the first section of this book, jewels of sciences delightful to behold, is the science of writing (ʿilm-i khaṭṭ), meaning the knowledge of graphically representing utterances with the letters of the alphabet, the manner of their construction and the conditions that pertain thereto. this is a craft most esteemed and a science most instructive; through it beauty and elegance is perennially achieved, and all hold it in the highest respect. in every place it presents itself boldly; for every group it is the keeper of secrets. it is always the engine of fame and honor; the tyrannical cannot overmaster it. it is recognized in all lands and leaves its imprint on every edifice. indeed, the magnitude of its excellence is epitomized by the declaration of the lord of lords, his names be sanctified, in his revelation most true: n. and by the pen, and what they inscribe (q 68:1). and again: recite: and your lord is most generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he knew not (q 96:3-5). the pen that produced the book suffices for all honor to the end of time: for god has sworn by the pen. said [ʿalī b. abī ṭālib] (upon him be peace): “write beautifully, for it is a source of provision.”22 and said a certain sage: “writing is a form of spiritual geometry (al-khaṭṭ handasa rūḥāniyya) manifested by means of a physical instrument.”23 it has also been described as “the breeder of thought, the lamp of remembrance, the language of distance, the life of the seeker of knowledge.” jāḥiẓ declared: “writing is the hand’s tongue, the mind’s emissary, the repository of secrets, the exposer of reports, the rememberer of achievements past.”24 it has further been said: “writing is black to sight but white to insight.”25 again: “excellent speech recorded in beautiful 20. under the rubric of ʿilm al-adab ibn al-akfānī gives equal treatment to speech and writing as vehicles of communication, with emphasis on poetry and rhetoric, treating sequentially of lugha, taṣrīf, maʿānī, bayān, badīʿ,ʿarūḍ, qawāfī, naḥw, qawānīn al-kitāba, qawānīn al-qirāʾa and manṭiq (irshād al-qāṣid, 22-29). 21. see vesel, les encyclopedies persanes. 22. ʿalay-kum bi-ḥusn al-khaṭṭ fa-inna-hu min mafātīḥ al-rizq. this and many of the following dicta in praise of writing are also found in, for example, abū ḥayyān al-tawḥīdī’s treatise on the subject, translated and transcribed in rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī.” 23. al-tawḥīdī attributes this statement to euclid (ibid., 15/25 no. 56): al-khaṭṭ handasa rūḥāniyya ẓaharat bi-āla jasadiyya. 24. this sentence is not present in modern editions of the k. al-ḥayawān, suggesting it as a later addition. 25. al-tawḥīdī attributes this statement to one hāshim b. sālim (rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī,” 13 no. 42). 49 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) writing is delightful to the eye, sweet to the heart and fragrant to the spirit.” [in sum], it is [universally] held that writing is superior to speech: for writing, unlike speech, profits those near and those far alike.26 scholars disagree as to who invented writing. some are of the opinion that when the real most high taught adam all the names (q 2:31)—that is, taught adam (upon him and our prophet be peace) the names of every thing and the virtues of each—he also taught him about the virtues of the pen, and adam then communicated this to seth, who invented writing. other scholars cite the saying the first to write (khaṭṭa) and sew (khāṭa) was enoch (idrīs) to argue in favor of enoch’s (upon him and our prophet be peace) status as the inventor of writing (and sewing). it is also transmitted from ʿurwa b. al-zubayr and ʿabd allāh b. ʿamr al-ʿāṣ that adam, a hundred years before his death, assigned a language to each of his children [and their offspring] as a separate group; [to this end], he inscribed on a mass of small sheets like rosepetals the script appropriate to each language and its basic rules, then baked them [for preservation]. but the sheet for the arabic language was lost in noah’s flood, and its people forgot how to write and speak it until the time of ishmael (upon him be peace). ishmael, having made his home in mecca and there acceded to the honor of prophethood, dreamed one night that a treasure was buried on abū qubays mountain [outside the city]; on the morrow he therefore arose and walked around that mountain, searching it assiduously until he discovered the sheet. but because it was tall and wide and filled with strange markings, he was greatly confused. he therefore called out: “o god! teach me its secret!” the real most high accordingly sent to him gabriel (upon him be peace) to provide instruction in the matter; and so ishmael came to know the arabic language and its script. ʿabd allāh ʿabbāsī (god be pleased with him) has similarly transmitted that the first person to establish arabic and its script was ishmael. it is transmitted from [hishām] kalbī, however, that [arabic] writing had three inventors: marāmir b. marra [or marwa], aslam b. sidra and ʿāmir b. jadhra.27 the first invented the letterforms; the second invented their conjunctions and separations; the third invented their diacritical points. still others hold that members of the ṭasm clan invented arabic writing; they were the rulers of midian during the lifetime of seth (upon him and our prophet be peace). their kings were [six], named as follows: abjad (abjd), hawwaz (hwz), ḥuṭṭī (ḥṭy), kalman (klmn), saʿfaṣ (sʿfṣ) and qarshat (qrsht). they put these names into graphic form, and to them added two further constructions from the remaining letters, termed auxiliary: thakhadh (thkhdh) and ḍaẓagh (ḍẓgh).28 [for his part], abū jaʿfar ṭabarī transmitted from zayd b. arqam and żaḥḥāk that these six are rather the names of the six days of creation wherein the real most high created the 26. cf. ibid., 11 no. 27, where the same principle is attributed to one ibn al-tawʾam. 27. cf. ibn al-nadīm, al-fihrist, 12, where slightly different versions of these names are given. 28. i.e., the original 22 hebrew letters plus six additional arabic ones. the same is report is transmitted in ibn al-nadīm, al-fihrist, 11. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 50 heavens and the earth—hence the fact that all instruction must needs begin with the abcs (abū jād). of all the well-known scripts, including arabic, greek, uyghur, indian and chinese, the arabic script is the loveliest and most elegant; [the techniques] whereby it is refined and beautified are firmly established. in former days, the standard script among the arabs was the maʿqilī script, after which the kufic script was developed. as for the type that is now most common, some say ibn muqla developed it; others credit [ʿalī b. abī ṭālib], commander of the faithful. the latter say [in this regard] that when [ʿalī] was teaching ʿabd allāh b. ʿabbās [how to write] he instructed him: “ʿabd allāh, widen the space between each line, bring the letters close together, preserve the correspondence between their forms and give each letter its due.”29 thereafter a group of those who strove to further refine this craft, including ibn bawwāb and others, created a diverse range of calligraphic styles, including muḥaqqaq, thuluth, naskh, riqāʿ, ʿuhūd, tawqīʿ, taʿlīq, rayḥānī, manshūr, mudawwar, ṭūmār, musalsal, muthannā, ghubār, habāʾ, and so on.30 this celebration of writing draws heavily on abbasid bibliophilic precedent, al-jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869) and ibn al-nadīm (d. 380/990) in particular, including in the first place its valorization of textuality over orality. but āmulī’s case for an islamic textual universalism goes beyond earlier formulations to fully textualize revelation itself; and textualized revelation as a perpetual historical process in turn constitutes the genesis and basis for a sacralized, universal intellectual history: the philosophia perennis. writing is the primordial prophetic act; men are to wield pens as god wields the pen. literacy, that is, is here elevated to a sacred calling, and writing to a metaphysical category. it is an embodied spiritual geometry, says the sage—and so an aperture onto supernal realities. in short, encyclopedists like ibn al-akfānī and shams al-dīn āmulī are far past the orality-textuality tension that defined early islamicate scholarship; by the mid-8th/14th century writerly culture reigned supreme in mamluk egypt and ilkhanid iran alike.31 this did not entail the obsolescence of oral methods of transmitting knowledge, to be sure, especially in the context of education or with respect to disciplines more esoteric or elite; but the epistemological hierarchy that prevailed in the first centuries of islam was now inverted: textuality had become primary and orality auxiliary—the preferred mode, at least ostensibly, for keeping secrets.32 29. al-tawḥīdī gives a different version of this saying (rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī,” 18-19 no. 88). 30. nafāyis al-funūn, 1/22-24. for similar treatments see roxburgh, prefacing the image, 112 n. 113. 31. symptomatic of this definitive textual turn is the fact that early legal debates over the medical and magical potencies of the quranic text and their application as part of prophetic medicine (al-ṭibb al-nabawī)— practices strongly favored, for example, by abū ʿubayd b. sallām (d. 223/838) in his faḍāʾil al-qurʾān, but just as strongly rejected by contemporary scholars—finally gave way to a consensus in favor of such practices in the 7th/13th and 8th/14th centuries, exemplified by jurists like al-nawawī (d. 676/1277) and ibn qayyim al-jawziyya (d. 751/1350) (zadeh, “touching and ingesting,” 465-66). 32. works on the occult sciences serve as the best index of this epistemological textuality-orality inversion. even during the great florescence of occultism that swept the islamicate heartlands from the late 8th/14th century onward, whereby the production and copying of occult-scientific texts was increasingly 51 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) as a majority of scholars now recognize, the so-called postclassical era (a polemical misnomer) was in no way one of cultural decadence and stagnation, but rather scene to a remarkable cultural florescence, one intensely textual in orientation; book production massively increased and new commentarial practices and arts of the book were born.33 the sheer mass of surviving texts—at least 90% of them unpublished and still more unstudied— is indeed overwhelming;34 previous generations of orientalists, perpetuating colonialist declinism, accordingly found it more convenient to dismiss “postclassical” islamicate intellectual and cultural history out of hand as derivative, baroque and sterile than to risk drowning in that immense textual ocean.35 over the last decades, however, specialists have begun the rehabilitation process on many fronts, from philosophy, poetry, painting and law on the one hand to political and social history on the other, such that some now identify the post-mongol era not simply as one of equal brilliance to the formative high caliphal period but indeed as the era of islam’s greatest cultural, political and economic flourishing, its apogee of henological imperial-intellectual universalism. the studies cited heavily patronized by ruling and scholarly elites, such texts still feature the formulaic injunctions against revealing their contents to the unworthy, lest powerful techniques fall into the wrong hands and cause the breakdown of society, that had long been standard; yet the burgeoning of an occultist writerly culture would seem to render the traditional preference for oral transmission obsolete. as noah gardiner has shown (“esotericism in a manuscript culture,” 78-160), books themselves became teaching and initiatic instruments within the “esotericist reading communities” that coalesced around the letter-magical writings of aḥmad al-būnī (on whom see below) in mamluk egypt during the 7th/13th century; in this context, the primary technique for keeping secret the occultist lore the sufi mage divulged in his works was no longer oral transmission, but rather intertextuality. that is to say, his reliance on tabdīd al-ʿilm, the ‘dispersion of knowledge,’ whereby the keys to understanding any individual work were scattered across his corpus as a whole, rendered mere possession of a single būnian text by the uninitiated an insufficient condition for mastering its contents. rather, it was only through membership in an esotericist reading community that had access to and mastery of the corpus that one could understand each of its components. by the 9th/15th century, then, when books emerged in mamluk-timurid society as “standalone sources of knowledge” (159) and the de-esotericization of occultism was rampant, it was precisely intertextuality, not orality, that served as the primary means of keeping occultist secrets for the protection of society. on this orality-textuality tension in shiʿism see dakake, “hiding in plain sight”; on the same in jewish kabbalah see halbertal, concealment and revelation; wolfson, “beyond the spoken word.” 33. on the illegitimacy of the term “postclassical” in an islamicate context see e.g. bauer, “in search of ‘post-classical literature’”; on the later islamicate commentary culture see e.g. ingalls, “subtle innovation,” 1-31. 34. estimates of the current number of surviving arabic manuscripts only (to say nothing of persian or turkish) range from 600,000 to several million—these, of course, representing a small fraction of what was originally produced (gardiner, “esotericism,” 17). the first estimate is far too low, moreover; until recently almost 400,000 manuscripts were preserved in timbuktu alone. 35. fuat sezgin (b. 1924) is here representative. his magisterial geschichte des arabischen schrifttums (1967) is not merely positivist in approach, but blatantly triumphalist, eurocentric and whiggish, and pointedly excises what he deems the religio-intellectual cancer that is occultism by acknowledging only the achievements of valiant muslim thinkers laboring to preserve “real” science—greek, not eastern (persian and indian), and certainly not occult; thus only was arabic science able to transmit the torch of the classical greek heritage to europe, subsiding into irrelevance after 430/1038 (for further examples see lemay, “l’islam historique”). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 52 above on the explosion of writerly culture in the arabic heartlands during the middle period are here cases in point.36 yet there persists in the literature that peculiarly modern penchant for divorcing sociopolitical currents from their intellectual-spiritual contexts and vice versa, a reflexive insistence on decoupling manifest from occult, ẓāhir from bāṭin—a strategy that does great violence to our sources and renders the worldview of our historical actors illegible.37 this problem is most acute precisely with respect to the period 1200-1900, and to disciplines now considered intellectually illegitimate, including in the first place the occult sciences themselves; the intellectual and social history of mainstream, heavily patronized, naturalmathematical disciplines like astrology, alchemy or geomancy has yet to be written.38 needless to say, such scholarly vivisectionism but perpetuates the enlightenmentand especially victorian-era attempt to separate out “science,” “magic” and “religion” as distinct categories, this in order to valorize the first, damn the second, quarantine the third 36. while “middle period” is much preferable to “medieval,” the eurocentric adjective most frequently used in the literature for post-1100 islamicate developments, its implication as to the “postclassicalness” of phenomena so described makes it problematic. nevertheless, i use it here for the sake of convenience, while holding that alternate periodizations like “high persianate,” spanning the 8th/14th century to the 13th/19th and in some regions the 14th/20th, are more neutral and appropriate for the post-mongol context (for a discussion of this term see melvin-koushki and pickett, “mobilizing magic”). 37. shahzad bashir’s recent sufi bodies, for instance, exemplifies the analytical benefits that accrue from recoupling ẓāhir to bāṭin in the study of islamicate societies. on this theme more generally see now shahab ahmed’s posthumous masterpiece, what is islam?, which argues for contradiction and ambiguity as primary structuring principles of islamicate civilization, and especially its persianate or balkans-to-bengal subset; and mana kia’s forthcoming sensibilities of belonging: transregional persianate community before nationalism. 38. the standard arabic term for the occult sciences more generally, including astrology (aḥkām al-nujūm), alchemy (kīmiyā) and a variety of magical and divinatory techniques, is ʿulūm gharība, meaning those sciences that are unusual, rare or difficult, i.e., elite; less frequently used terms are ʿulūm khafiyya and ʿulūm ghāmiḍa, sciences that are hidden or occult. these terms are routinely used in classifications of the sciences, biographical dictionaries, chronicles, etc. its 19th-century european flavor notwithstanding, the term “occultism” is used here simply to denote a scholarly preoccupation with one or more of the occult sciences as discrete natural-philosophical or mathematical disciplines. occultism is thus to be strictly distinguished from sufism and esotericism, for all that scholars from corbin onward have habitually and perniciously disappeared the former into the latter. a number of scholars are beginning to address this gaping lacuna with respect to islamicate occultism in the post-mongol period: on ottoman astrology see, for example, şen, “reading the stars”; on mughal astrology see orthmann, “circular motions”; on mamluk alchemy see harris, “better religion through chemistry,” and on its ottoman continuation see artun, “hearts of gold”; on ilkhanid-timurid-mughalsafavid geomancy (ʿilm al-raml) see melvin-koushki, “persianate geomancy”; on mamluk lettrism see gardiner, “esotericism,” and coulon, “la magie islamique”; on its timurid continuation see melvin-koushki, “the quest”; on ottoman lettrism and geomancy see fleischer, “ancient wisdom”; on ottoman astrology, lettrism and geomancy see şen and melvin-koushki, “divining chaldiran”; on ottoman talismanic shirts and oneiromancy (ʿilm al-taʿbīr) see felek, “fears, hopes, and dreams”; on deccan sultanate talismanic shirts see muravchick, “objectifying the occult”; on ottoman physiognomy see lelić, “ʿilm-i firāsat”; on safavid oneiromancy and various divinatory practices see babayan, “the cosmological order”; on safavid bibliomancy see gruber, “the ‘restored’ shīʿī muṣḥaf”; on safavid geomancy, lettrism and alchemy see melvin-koushki, “the occult sciences”; and on mangit lettrism see melvin-koushki and pickett, “mobilizing magic.” 53 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) and disappear the sociopolitical context of all three. many critical theorists have shown, of course, that this project was the primary theoretical engine of european colonialism, a natural extension of its (wildly successful) divide et impera strategy—and hence worthless as a heuristic for studying human societies, past and present, east and west, civilized and savage: for it is the mission civilisatrice itself that orientalizes and savages.39 why then are scientistic positivism and occultophobia still so sorcerously hegemonic in academe generally and the study of islam specifically? why are the islamicate “positive sciences” such as astronomy still studied in strict isolation from their immediate sociopolitical and intellectual contexts? why do we not speak of a metaphysics of empire?40 why has no history of the practice of islamicate philosophy been written?41 and as for the great middle period explosion of writerly culture here in view, the social, literary and aesthetic aspects of this transformation have been and are being masterfully explored;42 but should we not also seek for a metaphysics of writing? as noted, this article proposes to complement the social, literary and aesthetic history of islamicate writerly culture during the 7th-10th/13th-16th centuries by supplying its original letter-metaphysical context. in so doing, it constitutes a historical-philological extension and correction of the seminal studies of annemarie schimmel and seyyed hossein nasr on the metaphysics, or spirituality, of islamicate calligraphy,43 and a confirmation and refinement of the more recent work of gülru necipoğlu and david roxburgh on persianate visual theory.44 i argue that ibn al-akfānī’s celebration of textuality as the key to our humanity and āmulī’s renewed emphasis on writing’s status 39. see e.g. latour, we have never been modern; taussig, the magic of the state; bracken, magical criticism; kripal, authors of the impossible; styers, making magic; hanegraaff, esotericism and the academy. 40. on this theme see melvin-koushki, “early modern islamicate empire.” 41. rizvi, “philosophy as a way of life”; this question is pursued in melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” 42. on its literary aspects see e.g. losensky, welcoming fighānī; bauer, “mamluk literature.” 43. these include schimmel’s calligraphy and islamic culture and deciphering the signs of god (particularly the chapter “the word and the script”) and nasr’s islamic art and spirituality. while these studies are broad in scope, they overwhelmingly focus on sufism to the detriment of occultism, often disappearing the latter into the former, and hence do not discern the increasingly philosophically systematic valorization of writing over speech in islamicate culture for which i argue here. most problematically, ibn turka, chief among muslim metaphysicians of writing, is wholly absent from schimmel’s account, while nasr does indeed cite him in passing—but only as a sufi thinker. the latter even acknowledges ibn turka’s signature doctrine of the three levels of the letter (islamic art, 32-33); but because it is excised from its original philosophical context, ibn turka’s fundamental point that written language is ontologically superior to spoken is lost. cf. samer akkach’s reading of islamicate architecture in ibn ʿarabian terms (cosmology and architecture) and carl ernst’s discussion of a timurid sufi treatise on calligraphy (“sufism and the aesthetics of penmanship”), as well as oliver leaman’s general introduction to the topic (islamic aesthetics). 44. in his prefacing the image, for instance, roxburgh surveys its theoretical and literary-historical context, with some attention to physics-metaphysics; necipoğlu focuses on the latter aspect in her recent and magisterial programmatic article “the scrutinizing gaze,” wherein she updates her findings in the topkapı scroll (1995) to argue for an early modern islamicate hyperrealism (over against renaissance naturalism) predicated on the emergent theoretical primacy of “sight, insight, and desire,” this by way of a synthesis of neoplatonic, aristotelian and sufi discourses on beauty and the power of imagination and vision. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 54 as spiritual geometry are in no way mere rhetorical conceits or mystical gushings, but rather directly informed by contemporary philosophical developments in mamluk egypt and ilkhanid iran; they must be taken seriously as such. doing so will not only enhance our understanding of this major social transformation, but also bring to light cultural connections and discourses that have been largely or wholly occluded in the literature to date. quite simply: restoring the bāṭin of arabo-persian textuality to its ẓāhir reveals a rather different picture of islamicate culture during this pivotal period—one more occult than is usually acknowledged. to illustrate the interdependence of social and intellectual history posited above, then, i offer a brief case study of an outstanding thinker active in late mamluk egypt and early timurid iran: ṣāʾin al-dīn ʿalī b. muḥammad turka iṣfahānī (770-835/1369-1432), longtime resident of cairo, shafiʿi chief judge of isfahan and yazd and the most influential occult philosopher of the 9th/15th-century persianate world. most significantly for our purposes here, ibn turka appears to be the first in the arabo-persian philosophical tradition as a whole to propose and systematize, in expressly neopythagorean-neoplatonic terms, what may be called a lettrist metaphysics of light. he did so, moreover, explicitly to lionize and explain the explosion of islamicate textual culture as vehicle of the philosophia perennis: for only writing can constellate that golden chain that is intellectual-prophetic history; only light—and by extension the human faculty that perceives it, sight—is universal; hence only written text can fully manifest the one. as i argue, this is the most relevant theoretical context for understanding the unprecedented degree of text-centrism in middle period islamicate culture, exemplified by encyclopedists like ibn al-akfānī and āmulī and their heirs. the warm reception of ibn turka’s system in philosophical circles in iran, from the aqquyunlu-safavid period through the late qajar, as well as its reverberations in mughal india and ottoman anatolia, further suggests it as perhaps the most successful islamic metaphysics of writing to have ever been developed. reading the two books in islam: lettrism the study of later islamicate societies remains in its infancy; yet even so, that those metaphysicians most obsessed with understanding the world as text—lettrists—have been systematically elided in studies of islamicate writerly culture to date is an irony particularly striking, and a classic symptom of the vivisectionist, occultophobic bias identified above. compounding this irony, the same bias has now been largely retired in the study of early modern christianate culture, particularly that of the renaissance and the so-called scientific revolution; the cosmological doctrine of the two books, scripture and nature, is widely feted by specialists as the basis for the emergence of “scientific modernity”—the upshot of europeans (and no one else) reading the world as text. the kabbalistic decoding of this text becomes science; its recoding, originally by way of magic, becomes technology. yet contemporary muslim neopythagorean-occultists were no less committed to reading the world as (arabic) text, including in the first place ibn turka and his colleagues and heirs; but because their brand of kabbalist hermeneutics did not lead to scientific 55 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) modernity, did not progress beyond its literalist-transcendentalist-magical reading of the world, they may be safely disappeared from this hallowed teleology. this remains the case even for those scholars and theorists who have successfully shown “modernity” to be a profoundly logocentric and illusory, even sorcerous, construct.45 but eurocentrism in this respect is unavoidable: the almost total absence of scholarship on relevant muslim thinkers makes it impossible for nonspecialists to account for cognate developments in islam. christian kabbalah is here a case in point. first advanced by giovanni pico della mirandola (d. 1494) as the core of his humanistic philosophy—indeed as the best means of divinizing man, of finally marrying plato and aristotle—, this hebrew-cum-latin science is now widely recognized to have been a central preoccupation of and inspiration for later heroes of the european renaissance, including giordano bruno (d. 1600) and john dee (d. 1608), major exponents of the two books doctrine and devoted kabbalists; they in turn laid the groundwork for the “scientific revolution” (more properly a mathematical revolution, being largely confined to astronomy and physics) as spearheaded by committed neopythagorean-occultists like johannes kepler (d. 1630) and isaac newton (d. 1727), whose principia mathematica then became the basis for scientific modernity.46 yet lettrism, kabbalah’s coeval arabic cognate, enjoyed a similarly mainstream status in the islamicate world during precisely this period, rendering the two books doctrine equally salient to muslim metaphysicians—but not a single study to date has acknowledged, much less attempted to analyze, this striking intellectual continuity. it is therefore imperative that the double standard that still prevails among historians of science be retired, whereby pico’s or dee’s obsession with kabbalah, and kepler’s selfidentification as a neopythagorean, heralds the modern mathematization of the cosmos, but ibn turka’s obsession with lettrism heralds but islamic decadence and scientific irrelevance: for islam produced no newton. (it also produced no oppenheimer.) most perniciously, this double standard elides a major problematic in global history of science and philosophy. triumphalist teleologies notwithstanding, that is, it is remarkable that, in the absence of direct contact, the quest for a universal science was universally pursued along neopythagorean-kabbalist lines throughout the islamo-christianate world during the early modern period—a trend that became mainstream significantly earlier in the persianate context, where the cosmos was first mathematized.47 in sum: if we seek a formal islamicate metaphysics of writing, it is to the lettrists we must turn. given how thoroughly lettrism has been occulted in the literature, however, a definition and brief historical overview of its development are first in order.48 while the arabic ‘science of letters’ (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), like its hebrew cognate,49 is properly 45. see n. 39 above. 46. wirszubski, pico della mirandola’s encounter. 47. melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” 48. an adequate survey of lettrism’s development over 14 centuries is of course well beyond the scope of this article; for a fuller treatment see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 167-283. 49. see e.g. wasserstrom, “sefer yeṣira and early islam”; ebstein, mysticism and philosophy in al-andalus; anidjar, “our place in al-andalus.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 56 an umbrella category covering a wide range of theories and techniques, some of them being transformed or shed over time, the term (sometimes in the form khawāṣṣ al-ḥurūf, ‘the active properties of letters’) is nevertheless regularly used in the sources to identify a discrete science from the 3rd/9th century onward. as such, lettrism encompasses the two modes of applied occultism as a whole in its basic division into letter magic (sīmiyāʾ) on the one hand and letter divination (jafr) on the other. letter-magical techniques include most prominently the construction of talismans (sg. ṭilasm), usually defined as devices that conjunct celestial influences with terrestrial objects in order to produce a strange (gharīb) effect according with the will (niyya, himma) of the practitioner.50 the engine of a talisman is usually a magic square (wafq al-aʿdād), which may be populated with letters or numbers relevant to the operation at hand; these are designed to harness the specific letter-numerical virtues of personal names, whether of humans, jinn or angels, phrases or quranic passages, or one or more of the names of god. (the latter operation, it should be noted, is a typical example of the sufi-occultist practice of ‘assuming the attributes of god,’ aka theomimesis (takhalluq bi-akhlāq allāh)—hence the divine names as a major focus of lettrism, often termed for that reason ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ, or even simply ʿilm al-asmāʾ, ‘the science of names.’) letter divination, for its part, includes most prominently the construction of a comprehensive prognosticon (jafr jāmiʿ), a 784-page text containing every possible permutation of the letters of the arabic alphabet.51 from such a prognosticon may be derived the name of every thing or being that has ever existed or will ever exist, every name of god in every language, and the knowledge of past, present and future events—especially political events—to the end of time. this divinatory aspect of lettrism is associated in the first place with the mysterious separated sura-initial letters in the quran (muqaṭṭaʿāt), similarly held to contain comprehensive predictive power, and to have inspired the basic lettrist technique of taksīr, separating the letters of words or names for the purposes of permutation. most letter-magical and letter-divinatory operations are profoundly astrological in orientation, moreover; careful attention to celestial configurations is essential for the success of any operation, and letter magic often involves the harnessing of planetary spirits (taskhīr al-kawākib) (together with angels and jinn). fasting, a vegetarian diet, seclusion and maintenance of a state of ritual purity are also regularly identified as conditions of practice in manuals on these subjects. among the occult sciences that became permanently intertwined with islamicate culture from its very inception, including in the first place astrology and alchemy, it is lettrism that underwent the most complex evolution. most significantly, it eventually emerged as the most islamic of all the occult sciences, this despite its explicitly late antique, non-islamic parentage—or rather because of it. that is to say, lettrism’s reception as an essential component of the philosophia perennis, this through its association with 50. this is the definition standard from ibn sīnā onward. see e.g. his r. fī aqsām al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya, 75; and quṭb al-dīn shīrāzī, durrat al-tāj, 155-56. 51. a completed comprehensive prognosticon has 784 pages, with 784 cells and 3,136 letters per page, resulting in 87,808 cells and 2,458,624 letters in total (fahd, la divination arabe, 221 n. 1; note that a misprint gives the incorrect figure 2,458,424). 57 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) the prophet-philosopher-king solomon and a host of other ancient prophets and their sage disciples, especially hebrews like daniel, greeks like pythagoras and plato, egyptians like hermes, persians like zoroaster and indians like ṭumṭum and sāmūr, mirrored the status of the quran itself as the culmination of prophetic history.52 historically, lettrism first entered the islamic tradition by way of two main vectors: 1) the symbolical cosmogonical speculations and sorcerous proclivities of so-called extremist (ghulāt) shiʿi circles of 2nd/8th-century iraq, largely inspired by late antique hellenic “gnostic” movements;53 and 2) the divinatory texts associated with the house of the prophet, including the original comprehensive prognosticon (al-jafr wa-l-jāmiʿa) and the codex (muṣḥaf) of fāṭima.54 it is the second vector in particular that prepared the way for lettrism’s definitive islamicization, with ʿalī b. abī ṭālib and jaʿfar al-ṣādiq being routinely identified in later lettrist tradition as the science’s supreme exponents for the islamic dispensation. it then underwent a progressive philosophicization within a neoplatonicneopythagorean framework, particularly on display in the 3rd/9th-century jābir b. ḥayyān corpus and the 4th/10th-century rasāʾil of the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ; during this phase lettrism became associated with ismaʿilism in north africa, which combined its cosmogonical and magical-divinatory applications as eclectically explored during the fraught emergence of shiʿism. (the semi-ismaʿili epistles famously declare magic, together with astrology, alchemy, medicine and astral travel (ʿilm al-tajrīd), the queen of all sciences and ultimate goal of philosophy.55) seminal maghribi grimoires like maslama al-qurṭubī’s (d. 353/964) ghāyat al-ḥakīm, enthusiatically received in the latinate world as the picatrix, were direct products of this ikhwānī philosophical-spiritual current.56 during the same period and primarily in the same place—north africa and al-andalus— lettrism underwent a process of sanctification, this entailing its recasting in specifically sufi terms rather than either natural-philosophical or shiʿi. this move was part of the larger sufi challenge to shiʿism, whereby sufis began to position themselves as rival claimants to the shiʿi category of walāya, the ‘sacral power’ peculiar to the imams; this category was therefore massively expanded by sufi theoreticians to designate islamic sainthood in general. most notably for our purposes here, and perhaps due to residual ismaʿili influence, the same sufi theoreticians elevated lettrism to the dual status of science of the saints (ʿilm al-awliyāʾ) and science of divine oneness (ʿilm al-tawḥīd) par excellence: simultaneously a tool for cosmological speculation and for controlling creation, as well as vehicle of mystical ascent or return to the one. 52. see e.g. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 318-28; van bladel, the arabic hermes. 53. see tucker, mahdis and millenarians. the handle “gnostic,” of course, is an almost unusably flabby one (my thanks to dylan burns for clarifying this point); see smith, “the history of the term gnostikos.” on late antique gnosticizing and platonizing christian number symbolism see kalvesmaki, the theology of arithmetic. 54. modarressi, tradition and survival, 4-5, 18-19. 55. epistles of the brethren of purity: on magic i, 95-96. 56. see e.g. de callataÿ, “magia en al-andalus”; fierro, “bāṭinism in al-andalus”; saif, the arabic influences. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 58 this sanctification process began in the late 3rd/9th century and came to full flower in the work of two authorities in particular: aḥmad al-būnī (d. 622/1225?), the greatest mage of islam, at least in his later reception, representing applied lettrism (i.e., letter magic); and ibn ʿarabī (d. 638/1240), the greatest mystical philosopher of islam, representing theoretical lettrism (i.e., letter metaphysics). the oeuvres of both authorities together thus represent the definitive synthesis of all the preceding lettrist currents; in their hands lettrism became the most quintessentially islamic of sciences, yet without losing any of its old occult potency—indeed, that potency was amplified, now combining both philosophical-scientific and spiritual-religious legitimacy. in short, by the 7th/13th century lettrism was emerging as a universal science, the marriage of ancient and modern, hellenic and islamic, the ideal vehicle for neoplatonic-neopythagorean philosophy on the one hand and the performance of sainthood on the other. significantly for our purposes here, the suficization of lettrism was accomplished by “esotericist reading communities,” as noah gardiner has called them, that coalesced around the writings of al-būnī in mamluk cairo and those of ibn ʿarabī in mamluk damascus over the course of the 7th/13th century.57 while these reading communities were highly secretive (hence the handle esotericist), at some point in the 8th/14th century al-būnī’s lettrist treatises in particular suddenly exploded on the cairene scene as favorite objects of elite patronage; production of manuscript copies of his works sharply increased in the second half of that century and remained relatively high through the end of the 9th/15th.58 in other words, the unprecedented elite reception precisely of suficized lettrism played a crucial role in the explosion of mamluk writerly culture; and cairo’s new status as intellectual hub of the islamicate world (as well as damascus to a lesser extent) meant that this western būnian-ibn ʿarabian science was rapidly propagated eastward by the many persophone scholars who came to the mamluk realm to study—including, of course, ibn turka. having initially come to cairo to study law, the isfahani scholar there became the star student of sayyid ḥusayn akhlāṭī (d. 799/1397), kurdish tabrizi lettrist-alchemist and personal physician to sultan barqūq (r. 784-92/1382-90). while his own surviving writings on lettrism are scattered and piecemeal, akhlāṭī nevertheless stands as the greatest occultist of his generation, pivot to a vast occultist network operative between anatolia and iran via cairo. most notably, he was responsible for training the two most influential and prolific occultist thinkers of the early 9th/15th century: ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454), chief architect of ottoman occultist imperial ideology;59 and ibn turka, who sought to fill the same role for the timurids.60 this, then, was the context in which middle period encyclopedists like ibn al-akfānī and shams al-dīn āmulī constructed their writing-centric classifications of knowledge. that of the former, a cairene physician-alchemist who perished in the black death epidemic of the 57. gardiner, “esotericism,” 43-46, 78-160. 58. ibid., 263-70, 347-50. 59. fleischer, “ancient wisdom”; gardiner, “esotericism,” 329-40. 60. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 16-18, 47-49. i examine the political-imperial ramifications of this lettrist revolution in my forthcoming the occult science of empire in aqquyunlu-safavid iran: two shirazi lettrists. 59 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) mid-8th/14th century,61 is accordingly heavily occultist in tenor, this despite its avicennan framework; it posits an astrology-talismans-magic continuum62 as the very backbone of natural philosophy, running the epistemological-ontological gamut from celestial simple bodies to terrestrial or elemental composite bodies, and allowing the competent philosopher-scientist experiential control of the cosmos.63 despite his clear letter-magical proclivities, however, ibn al-akfānī’s highly succinct treatment of these sciences does not directly reflect the burgeoning popularity of specifically sufi lettrism; but that of his ilkhanid colleague does. as noted, āmulī’s encyclopedia offers a far fuller and more comprehensive treatment of the religious and rational sciences; the theory of knowledge and classificatory scheme it advances is unprecedented in the arabo-persian encyclopedic tradition as a whole. what makes the nafāyis al-funūn truly pivotal in the present context, however, is its status as the first encyclopedia to register a) the rise of sufism to sociopolitical hegemony, and b) the sanctification of occultism. āmulī flags these twin developments by first elevating the science of sufism (ʿilm-i taṣavvuf) to the status of supreme islamic science, equal in importance to all the other religious sciences (including jurisprudence, hadith and theology) combined, then designating lettrism the supreme sufi science.64 at the same time, he retains the category of sīmiyā, letter and talismanic magic, as an applied natural science, further classifying it as one of the ‘semitic sciences’ (ʿulūm-i sāmiyya)—i.e., positing a connection to hebrew kabbalah.65 yet even there he stipulates that proficiency in sīmiyā is predicated on, among other things, a mastery of astronomy (a mathematical science) and astrology (a natural science).66 āmulī’s sophisticated and nuanced classification here thus signals the emergence of lettrism as a simultaneously islamic, natural and mathematical science—that is to say, a universal science—and a defining feature of the religio-intellectual landscape of the islamicate heartlands from the mid-8th/14th century onward. 61. it should here be noted that the sudden explosion of elite interest in būnian lettrism occurred in tandem with the black death catastrophe, followed by recurring plague outbreaks and consequent famines for decades thereafter. this was hardly coincidental; i suggest that the apocalyptic conditions that prevailed in mamluk cairo, where half of the population perished virtually overnight, are precisely what created this elite demand for books on letter magic, presumably in a bid to establish a measure of control over a world politically, socially, economically and biologically in flux. 62. respectively, ʿilm aḥkām al-nujūm, ʿilm al-ṭilasmāt and ʿilm al-siḥr. 63. see melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” 64. nafāyis al-funūn, 2/91-110. 65. nafāyis al-funūn, 3/183. ibn al-akfānī gives an etymology of the term sīmiyāʾ (> gr. sēmeia) as deriving from the hebrew shem yah, ‘the name of god,’ indicating the science’s association with the divine names as loci of magical power (irshād al-qāṣid, 51). 66. nafāyis al-funūn, 3/191. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 60 seeing the text: ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light the supernal pen is made of light and extends from heaven to earth.67 —ḥusayn vāʿiẓ kāshifī the eye, that is the window of the soul, is the principal way whence the common sense may most copiously and magnificently consider the infinite works of nature.68 —leonardo da vinci [v]ision is tele-vision, transcendence, crystallization of the impossible.69 —maurice merleau-ponty such was the state of the art when a young ibn turka left his native iran around 795/1393 to study shafiʿi law in cairo—and there was so intellectually captivated by sanctified ibn ʿarabian lettrism that he made it the focus of his life’s work.70 unlike the andalusian master, however, his prime exemplar, ibn turka sought to formally systematize this lettrist tradition so as to open it to philosophical-scientific-imperial use; to this end, he drew on his broad mastery of avicennan and illuminationist philosophy on the one hand and theoretical sufism on the other to synthesize a wholly unprecedented lettrist metaphysics of light. integral to this new system was ibn turka’s categorical assertion, equally unprecedented in the lettrist tradition, of the epistemological and ontological superiority of writing to speech, which he explicitly advanced as a framework for explaing the rise of islamicate writerly culture as culmination of the philosophia perennis. for all his reliance on mainstream avicennan-illuminationist philosophy, however, ibn turka sought to fundamentally undercut it by delegitimizing its exponents’ preoccupation with such concepts as existence (wujūd) or quiddity/essence (māhiyya). in several of his lettrist works he advances the premise that drove his intellectual project as a whole: these faux-universal concepts of avicennan-illuminationist philosophical speculation notwithstanding, only the letter (ḥarf) encompasses all that is and is not, all that can and cannot be; it alone is the coincidentia oppositorum (taʿānuq al-aḍdād); hence lettrism is the only valid form of metaphysics.71 67. this assertion is part of kāshifī’s explication, in his popular quran commentary mavāhib-i ʿaliyya, of god’s swearing by the pen in sūrat al-qalam (4/320): ḥaqq subḥāna-hu sūgand yād farmūd bi davāt u qalam va bi qalam-i aʿlā ki az nūr ast va ṭūl-i ū mā bayn al-samāʾ va-l-arż. ḥusayn vāʿiẓ kāshifī (d. 910/1505), sabzavari polymath extraordinaire, naqshbandi sufi and chief preacher of herat, was the most important writer on lettrism and the other occult sciences of late timurid iran, and author of the first thoroughgoingly lettrist tafsir, javāhir al-tafsīr, unfortunately unfinished, which features ibn turka as a source (see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 261-67). on kāshifī’s asrār-i qāsimī, a grimoire that became hugely popular in the safavid period, see subtelny, “sufism and lettrism” (my thanks to professor subtelny for sharing a working draft of this article). 68. quoted in summers, judgment of sense, 73. 69. the visible and the invisible, 273. 70. as noted, his teacher in cairo was sayyid ḥusayn akhlāṭī, who dispatched his star student and fellow persophone scholar back to iran to promulgate lettrism among timurid elites. 71. that is to say, letter-number, as the coincidentia oppositorum, renders the immaterial material; unites 61 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) at the same time, the isfahani occult philosopher commandeers the distinctive avicennan doctrine of tashkīk al-wujūd, the transcendental modulation of existence, as the basic framework for his lettrist metaphysics. this doctrine was first proposed, in a form unknown to hellenic philosophy, by ibn sīnā (d. 428/1037) in his mubāḥathāt as a means of avoiding the conclusion that the essence (dhāt) of god, defined as the necessary existent (wājib al-wujūd), is composite of and dependent on the two concepts existence and necessity, which violates the principle of absolute divine oneness (waḥda) and selfsufficiency (istighnāʾ).72 it should be noted, however, that by tashkīk al-wujūd the shaykh al-raʾīs means only the transcendental modulation of the concept of existence (tashkīk fī mafhūm al-wujūd), not the reality of existence (tashkīk fī ḥaqīqat al-wujūd).73 in his upgrade of avicennism, suhravardī (d. 587/1191) accordingly enlarged the scope of this concept, proposing rather the doctrine of tashkīk al-nūr, the transcendental—and real, not conceptual—modulation of light, the ground of all being, as the basis for his essentialist answer to ibn sīnā.74 but it is only with naṣīr al-dīn ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) that the levels of such transcendental modulation, whether of existence or light, are formally identified as semantic; writing thus becomes the level of being furthest from extramental reality. in his seminal commentary on ibn sīnā’s al-ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt, an expansion of fakhr al-dīn rāzī’s (d. 606/1209) commentary on the same, ṭūsī asserts the following in explication of the ishāra on the relation between a term (lafẓ) and its meaning (maʿnā) as it pertains to logic:75 because there is a certain connection between a term and its meaning. i say: things possess being in extramental reality (al-aʿyān), being in the mind (al-adhhān), being in [spoken] expression (al-ʿibāra) and being in writing (al-kitāba). writing thus signifies [spoken] expression, which in turn signifies a meaning in the mind. both [writing and speech] are conventional signifiers (dalālatān waḍʿiyyatān) that differ as conventions differ, whereas mental meanings signify external [realities] in a natural manner that is always and everywhere the same. thus between a spoken utterance (lafẓ) and its meaning only an artificial connection obtains; hence his statement occult (bāṭin) with manifest (ẓāhir), first (awwal) with last (ākhir); makes the one many and the many one; marries heaven and earth. the verse he is the first and the last, the manifest and the occult (q 57:3) is hence the central motto of ibn turka and his lettrist colleagues. 72. treiger, “avicenna’s notion,” 329. 73. eshots, “systematic ambiguity of existence.” 74. on the place of ibn al-haytham’s (d. ca. 430/1039) theory of optics in islamicate discourses on vision see necipoğlu, “the scrutinizing gaze,” 34-40; on the metaphysics of light in its european receptions see e.g. cantarino, “ibn gabirol’s metaphysic of light”; lindberg, “kepler’s theory of light.” 75. the ishāra in full (al-ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt: al-manṭiq, pt. 1, 53-56): because there is a certain connection between a spoken word (lafẓ) and its meaning, such that the modalities of its utterance may affect those of its meaning, the logician must therefore be sure to deploy a term in its absolute sense, as it is in itself, undelimited by the usage (lugha) of any one group. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 62 a certain connection, for the only true connection (al-ʿalāqa al-ḥaqīqiyya) is that between a [mental] meaning and its extramental reality.76 here ṭūsī reiterates, in short, the standard conventionalist definition of writing as signifier of a signifier. (saussure would be pleased.) as sajjad rizvi has shown in his monograph on the subject, it is this avicennan-suhravardian-ṭūsian fourfold schema of the semantics of being that mullā ṣadrā (d. 1045/1635) drew on in formulating his signature doctrines of tashkīk al-wujūd and aṣālat al-wujūd, the two cornerstones of his radically existentialist philosophy. in his logical epitome, al-tanqīḥ fī-l-manṭiq, for instance, the safavid sage restates ṭūsī’s formulation essentially verbatim: ‘the being of a thing is extramental (ʿaynī), mental (dhihnī), uttered (lafẓī) or written (katbī).’77 the celebrated sadrian synthesis, usually taken to represent the culmination of all preceding philosophical and mystical currents in islam, sunni and shiʿi alike, would thus seem to provide for an adequate metaphysics of writing. yet we are still far from a properly lettrist metaphysics—necessarily radically anticonventionalist—wherein letters transcend the very categories of existence and essence themselves. we have seen that lettrism had become intellectually mainstream in iran by the ilkhanid period; given that philosophy was emphatically not a hermetically sealed discipline in the way it is in the euro-american academy, and philosophers were often acclaimed as powerful occultists in service of state and society (suhravardī, fakhr al-dīn rāzī and ṭūsī all being cases in point), we might therefore expect it to have been incorporated into philosophical discourse on the nature of writing during the three-century interval between ṭūsī and mullā ṣadrā. enter ibn turka. as i argue, his emanationist-creationist lettrist system may be said to pivot on the twin doctrines of aṣālat al-ḥarf, the ontological primacy of the letter, and tashkīk al-ḥarf, the transcendental modulation of the letter in written, verbal, mental and extramental form.78 that is to say, ibn turka sought in his challenge to philosophy to replace the avicennans’ wujūd and the illuminationists’ māhiyya and nūr with ḥarf in all respects, and found tashkīk a concept eminently suited to this end.79 ibn turka was clearly a master of the philosophical curriculum standard by the early 9th/15th century; his doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf should thus be considered an innovative critique of and formal alternative to the avicennan-suhravardian-ṭūsian model of the semantics of being, whose conventionalism it utterly rejects. in ibn turka’s reading of the world as text, letter-number is the uncreated, all-creative matrix of reality, transcending both being and essence—and hence the only conceivable subject of metaphysics. more to the point: letternumber, he argues, is a form of light eternally emanated from the one—and so his tashkīk al-ḥarf is equally tashkīk al-nūr, the signature illuminationist doctrine now reformulated in explicitly occultist-lettrist terms. 76. ibid., 53-54. see rizvi, mullā ṣadrā, 1. 77. al-tanqīḥ fī-l-manṭiq, 19; trans. in rizvi, mullā ṣadrā, 1-2 (slightly modified here). 78. the isfahani lettrist nowhere uses the terms aṣālat al-ḥarf and tashkīk al-ḥarf, though the connotation of each matches his philosophical position precisely; i suggest them here as useful heuristics. 79. mullā ṣadrā himself may be said to have simply replaced nūr with wujūd in his own formulation and reinforced the proofs offered by suhravardī (eshots, “systematic ambiguity,” 2). 63 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of letters ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light, then, is entirely predicated on this fourfold tashkīk schema; the latter accordingly structures his most important lettrist works. for reasons of space only two will be examined here. his earliest such work is the persian treatise of letters (r. ḥurūf), written in shiraz in 817/1414 for the timurid (occult) philosopher-king iskandar sulṭān (r. 812-17/140914), grandson of temür (r. 771-807/1370-1405) and main competitor with shāhrukh (r. 807-50/1405-47) for control of iran.80 the r. ḥurūf divides lettrists into two broad camps: the ahl-i khavāṣṣ, concerned with the practical applications of the science, associated with al-būnī in particular; and the ahl-i ḥaqāyiq, concerned with its theoretical basis, associated with ibn ʿarabī in particular; the treatise provides for its royal patron a survey of the latter approach.81 the author then proceeds to lay out his core doctrine of the three (or rather four) descending levels of the letter, which alone constellate the chain of being in its emanation from the one, and allows for the ascent and descent thereof: spiritual-mental (maʿnavī lubābī), spoken-oral (lafẓī kalāmī) and written-textual (raqamī kitābī). (the fourth and highest extramental (ʿaynī) level is not assigned a separate section here, but is clearly operative.) as he states in the introduction: now three loci of self-manifestation (majlā) have been created for the letterform, through which it manifests and reveals the end and the essence of every thing. the first is the faculty of sight (baṣar), to which the ʿayn in the word ʿabd (ʿbd, servant) refers; the second is the heart (qalb), to which the bā in ʿabd refers; the third is the faculty of hearing (samʿ), to which the dāl in ʿabd refers. by this measure, then, the letter may be divided into three categories (qism): 1) the written-textual (raqamī kitābī) form, which through the agency of fingers and hands is given form upon the open spread of white pages and reveals realities to both sight (abṣār) and insight (baṣāyir) as its proper loci; the exponents of this mode are those possessed of hands and vision (ūlū l-aydī wa-l-abṣār) (q 38:45).82 2) the verbal-oral (lafẓī kalāmī) form, which through the agency of the tongue and the various points of articulation that modify the breath is embodied and 80. while he lost this contest to his more conservative, sunnizing uncle, iskandar sulṭān nevertheless stands as an early and important model for the new forms of universalist islamicate kingship, explicitly predicated on occult-scientific principles, that were developed in the post-mongol persianate world; see melvin-koushki, “early modern islamicate empire.” 81. on this treatise see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 88-90; an edition and translation are provided at pp. 463–89. in it ibn turka refers to a major lettrist work in progress, likely to be identified with his k. al-mafāḥiṣ. he also refers to his important commentary on ibn ʿarabī’s fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, unique among the host of commentaries on this text in its overtly lettrist approach, and completed in 813/1411, presumably for iskandar sulṭān as well (ibid., 112-13). 82. cf. r. shaqq-i qamar, 111, 116, where this phrase refers to the imams as repositories of all occult knowledge. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 64 expresses realities to the hearing (asmāʿ) and to reason (ʿuqūl) as its proper loci; its exponents are the folk of verbal remembrance (ahl al-dhikr) (q 16:43, 21:7). 3) the spiritual-mental (maʿnavī lubābī) form, which through the agency of the rational and imaginative faculties (quvvat-i ʿāqila u mutakhayyila) is analyzed within the broad realm of meaning with the heart as its proper locus; its exponents are those possessed of minds (ūlū l-albāb) (q 2:179, etc.): he gives wisdom to whomever he will, and whoso is given wisdom has been given much good; yet none remembers save those possessed of minds (q 2:269). each of these categories is specific to one of the three primary human faculties, to wit, the heart, the hearing, and sight. it is in this respect that quranic verses typically refer to all three together, usually giving precedence to either the heart (as in the verse surely in that there is a reminder to him who has a heart, or will give ear with a present mind (q 50:37), and the verse there is nothing his like; he is the all-hearing, the all-seeing (q 42:11)) or to the hearing (as in the verse and he appointed for you hearing, and sight, and hearts (q 16:78, 9:32, 67:23)). the first order reflects the fundamental and essential precedence of the heart with respect to the other members, and indeed with respect to all things in existence, whereas the second order reflects hearing’s precedence at the moment of creation, inasmuch as it was the faculty singled out to receive the [spoken] command be! (kun) from among the various members and faculties of perception. however, because the accepted usage in teaching (taʿlīm, tafhīm) involves giving precedence to that which is the most manifest (aẓhar)—as for example in the verse how well he sees! how well he hears! (q 18:26)—it is here more appropriate and useful to treat first the written form of the letters. (indeed, the fact that the imperative form is used in the verse just cited suggests precisely the objective of teaching.) yet it must be noted that despite the fact that its written form is more manifest and its spiritual form more occult (akhfā), the first is not self-evident and must be learned, whereas knowledge of the second need not be; that is to say, knowledge of the numbers and their degrees is innate, in contrast to knowledge of the written form of the letters and their shapes, which cannot be understood until they are learned. this is so because of a basic principle of divine oneness (tawḥīd), as those who have studied this know.83 here ibn turka, in short, overturns lettrist precedent by promoting the written form of the letters over the oral, which had long been awarded epistemological precedence in the tradition due to its association with prophetic revelation84—including by the ikhwān 83. r. ḥurūf, 478-79. 84. a similar dynamic long obtained among jewish kabbalists; as elliot wolfson observes in his magisterial language, eros, being (78): in spite of the persistent claim on the part of kabbalists to the oral nature of esoteric lore and practice—a claim always made in written documents—at least as far as historians are concerned there is little question that kabbalah as a historical phenomenon evolved in highly literate circles wherein writing was viewed as the principal channel for transmission and embellishment of the 65 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) al-ṣafāʾ themselves;85 his tashkīk schema even departs from ibn ʿarabī, who is aware of the ṭūsian formulation but assigns it little importance.86 most significantly, this new theoretical framework allows the isfahani lettrist to associate prophethood (nubuvvat) strictly with the spoken level of the letters, and sacral power or sainthood (valāyat), its actualization, with the written and mental both; ibn turka’s innovation here is his bold assertion of the superiority of written to spoken, of walāya to nubuwwa, to the same degree that vision is superior to all other physical senses: for light (nūr), unlike sound, is incorruptible and universal, the directest aperture onto the one. in so doing, he is giving lettrist form to the infamous ibn ʿarabian doctrine of the superiority of sainthood to prophethood.87 this lettrist physics-metaphysics of light in turn explains ʿalī b. abī ṭālib’s status as primary vector of walāya during the islamic dispensation, for he was responsible for perfecting the written shapes of the 28 (or 29) arabic letterforms, matrix of the uncreated quran, which alone allow for the transmission of words through time and space—and also inventor of the prognosticative mathematical science of jafr, which allows us to write the history of the future.88 in other words, ibn turka posits writing as simultaneously an exclusively alid patrimony and primary vehicle of the philosophia perennis, from adam to the end of history. at the same time, he holds number (ʿadad)—the mental-spiritual form of the letter—to represent the core of the prophetic revelation as actualized by the elite among the saints in every generation, including in the first place pythagoras as foremost disciple of solomon.89 yet here too ibn turka designates this perennial doctrine a special patrimony of the house of the prophet. as he states: [t]he ancient sages held the science of number to be the alchemy in whose crucible traditions. 85. as necipoğlu summarizes (“the scrutinizing gaze,” 31-32): the brethren regard hearing and sight as “the best and noblest of the five senses,” reminding their audience of the koranic affirmation that god endowed humans with the gift of “hearing, sight and hearts” (koran 23:78). nonetheless, their neoplatonic view of mimesis (recalling the parable of the cave) accords a superior status to hearing: the species that inhabit this world are only representations and likeness of forms (ṣuwar) and beings of pure substance that inhabit the higher world of the celestial spheres and heavens, “just as the pictures and images [al-nuqūsh wa-l-ṣuwar] on the surface of walls and ceilings are representations and likenesses for the forms” of animate beings of flesh and blood. 86. it should be noted that ibn ʿarabī offers no such consistent lettrist schema; in his al-futūḥāt al-makkiyya, for instance, the andalusian master refers twice in merest passing to ṭūsī’s formulation (1/45, 4/315). 87. see e.g. elmore, islamic sainthood, 147, 155-60. 88. r. ḥurūf, p. 481. i have discussed elsewhere the imamophilia intrinsic to the sunni lettrist tradition, especially in the timurid context (melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 69-77). it must also be emphasized in this connection that lettrist theory is necessarily predicated on the doctrine of the uncreatedness of the quran; ibn turka accordingly bemoans the contemporary popularity of zamakhsharī’s (d. 538/1144) kashshāf, singling out his failure to recognize the intrinsic ontological majesty of the quranic letters for special censure (melvinkoushki, “the quest,” 59, 54, 76, 116, 342). 89. see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 315-20. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 66 all other sciences are produced and the elixir [productive] of all manner of rarities and marvels. the holy imam jaʿfar [al-ṣādiq] (upon him be peace) also greatly vaunted this science, and those who cleave to the threshold of his walāya have penned numerous works on the subject.90 but celestial-mathematical realities cannot be preserved except in written—which is to say, talismanic—form.91 ibn turka accordingly identifies the greatest exponents of the perennial philosophy, the imams and the ancients, together with their disciples in every age, with the quranic phrase ūlū l-aydī wa-l-abṣār: those possessed of hands and vision, or men of main and vision—to wit, the coterie of inspired thinkers who have preserved for posterity prophetically revealed neopythagorean-neoplatonic philosophy in written form. evidence suggests that from ibn turka onward this phrase entered common usage as a designation of sages and philosophers in general.92 the book of inquiries shortly after completing of letters, and again almost certainly at the instance of iskandar sulṭān, ibn turka began writing his magnum opus, the book of inquiries (k. al-mafāḥiṣ): the first arabic summa of islamic neopythagoreanism. this book, completed in 823/1420 and revised and expanded in 828/1425, represents the fullest expression of his lettrist metaphysics.93 as such, it massively expands on the fourfold schema first proposed in his earlier treatise, treating of the meanings of the letters according to their three forms, numerological (iḥsāʾī), symbological (kitābī) and phonological (kalāmī), as well as the letters as they are in themselves (fī anfusi-hā). as ibn turka elsewhere states, knowledge of these three forms is the sole preserve of the companions and true heirs of the prophet (aṣḥāb al-khātam wa-warathatu-hu)—i.e., those men of main and vision occupying the highest rank in his intellectual hierarchy, the imams and their lettrist followers.94 the primary purpose of this work, the author asserts, is to demonstrate the roots of 90. r. ḥurūf, 472. the alchemical references are here significant; ibn turka has in mind jābir b. ḥayyān in particular, whose science of the balance (ʿilm al-mīzān), the basis of jābirian alchemy, is fundamentally lettrist in approach (melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 180-82, 353). 91. in her discussion of calligraphy in deciphering the signs of god, schimmel emphasizes the talismanic and divinatory applications of the quranic text (152-54); and nasr observes (islamic art and spirituality, 30): “since the verses of the quran are powers or talismans, the letters and words which make possible the visualization of the quranic verses also play the role of a talisman and display powers of their own.” 92. in sharaf al-dīn yazdī’s munshaʾāt (85), for instance, ūlū l-aydī wa-l-abṣār is used in a letter written for ibrāhīm sulṭān b. shāhrukh (d. 838/1435) to denote the leading lights of the muslim community charged with the preservation and transmission of the quran. similarly, in his popular akhlāq-i jalālī (320-21) davānī applies the phrase to the ‘famed sages’ (ḥukamā-yi nāmdār), and in his r. khalq al-aʿmāl (68) to the al-aʾimma al-kibār, here meaning the leading theologians and philosophers (man mārasa ṣināʿataya l-ḥikma wa-l-kalām) who have dealt with the subject of the creation of human actions. it should be noted in this context that the shirazi philosopher, following ibn turka, also explicitly associates the written form of the letters with the men of main and vision (r. tahlīliyya, 65). 93. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 97-99, 330-78. 94. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 315-20. 67 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) all manifestation in the one and schematize the mechanics of multiplicity’s derivation therefrom. this information, in turn, will allow the adept to manipulate the letters—the uncreated, creative matrices through which the one self-manifests—to access and control every epistemological and ontological level of the cosmos, thus constituting a continuum from ultra-rarefied letter theory to purely practical letter magic. the supreme dignity of its object necessarily renders lettrism the supreme science: the subject of the science we have here in view is the one (al-wāḥid) insofar as it is one, regardless of the form in which it manifests in all the variety of its significations. the all-pervasive, all-encompassing nature of one with respect to existence being obvious, this science is therefore necessarily superior to all other sciences by an order of magnitude.95 he proceeds to make an invidious comparison between the object of lettrism and the concept of absolute existence (al-wujūd al-muṭlaq), the standard focus of avicennan philosophy; because this concept is only relevant to things that exist, and is forever relativized by its opposite, it can hardly serve as the object of a universal metaphysical science. only the letter encompasses all that is and is not, all that can and cannot be; it alone is the coincidentia oppositorum, the intellect’s only vehicle of return to the one.96 (it should be noted in this context that the isfahani lettrist is here updating the ibn ʿarabian concept of the creative imagination (khayāl) as all-encompassing faculty, making explicit what the andalusian master left relatively implicit by privileging the role of the letters with respect to the creative imagination’s mechanics and outworkings.97) in the exordium that opens the mafāḥiṣ, ibn turka therefore flatly declares metaphysics the supreme science, and lettrism—that branch of metaphysics focused on the one rather than existence or essence—the only valid form of metaphysics: the metaphysical sciences (al-ʿulūm al-ilāhiyya), in all their methodological varieties and with all their programmatic differences, represent the highest object to which [human] ambition aspires and the ultimate point to which the chargers of generous natures are led. but it is only a science that admits of not the slightest insinuation of doubt that can truly show the [different] rankings [of its practitioners] as the finest riders compete on its racing grounds for the palm: [the science of letters] … it is this [science] that god has spread out in the abode of his islam as groundcloth for the 95. ms majlis 10196 f. 53b. 96. see e.g. ms majlis 10196 ff. 55a, 58b, 76a; ibn turka cites the concept of the marriage of opposites variously as taʿānuq ḍiddayn, taʿānuq al-aṭrāf, majmaʿ li-l-ṭarafayn wa-muʿtanaq li-l-mutaqābilayn, etc. the latin term was coined, intriguingly, by ibn turka’s later contemporary nicholas of cusa (d. 1464); on the latter’s equally thoroughgoingly neopythagorean project see albertson, mathematical theologies. more generally, on the coincidentia oppositorum as a pivotal concept in the history of religions movement see wasserstom, religion after religion. 97. that is to say, letters, as the most fundamental of images, represent the atoms of the imaginal realm (ʿālam al-mithāl) (personal communication with william chittick). on the similar importance of the creative imagination to thinkers in late medieval and early modern south india, for example, see shulman, more than real. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 68 repast of his speech, favoring his servants with the varieties of growth that sprout forth from the ground of their aptitude at the banquets of his lawāmīm, feeding them so as to strengthen them and bring them to maturity with the delicacies of the doves of his ḥawāmīm, giving them to drink of [the water of] tasnīm so as to revive them to an everlasting life from the cups of his ṭawāsīn.98 he then classifies lettrist metaphysicians as historically belonging to one of three camps: 1) those focused on speech; 2) those focused on writing; and 3) those focused on number, the heirs of ʿalī b. abī ṭālib, inventor of jafr. while all access a measure of supernal truths with their chosen method, writing is far superior to speech, and number far superior to both—yet it has been curiously neglected. ibn turka therefore issues a call for scholars to return, in effect, to the neopythagorean project of the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, who in their rasāʾil likewise found all of human knowledge on the science of number. at the same time, he updates and fully islamicizes their model by synthesizing it with the ibn ʿarabian theory of walāya, then giving the whole a distinctively imamophilic-perennialist cast:99 how often have consummate and vigorous [thinkers] among the leading figures of this community sought to acquire [this science]; driven by the burning cravings of their aspiration, they were not willing to settle for the toughened, jerked meat left by those who have gone before but rather strove to reach ripe and succulent truths from the boughs of each second of each hour, from now to eternity. such individuals include those who make for the east of expansiveness and manifestation (basṭ, ẓuhūr) and succeed in picking the ripe fruits from the crown of the tree of his manifestation by way of speech (kalāmī), limiting their diet to this and seeking nothing further. they also include those who rather make for the west of constriction and occultation (qabḍ, khafāʾ) and are fortunate enough to amass priceless pearls from the submerged hoards of his manifestation by way of writing (kitābī)—and upon my life, it is the latter who inherit the choicest truths (khaṣāʾiṣ) from the holy seal (al-ḥaḍra al-khatmiyya).100 these include the oral (matluwwa) wealth he passed down 98. ms majlis 10196 f. 52a. the muqaṭṭaʿāt references here stand metonymically for lettrism as a whole. 99. while ibn turka’s sunni identity is not in doubt, it is testament to his lettrist-imamophilic proclivities that he breaks with ibn ʿarabī’s identification of the khātam al-walāya al-muṭlaqa/al-ʿāmma as jesus, in this appearing to follow the shiʿi mystical philosophers ʿalī b. sulaymān al-baḥrānī (d. ca. 670/1271), maytham b. maytham al-baḥrānī (d. after 681/1282) and ḥaydar āmulī (d. after 787/1385), who similarly awarded this status to ʿalī as part of their project to synthesize ibn ʿarabian theory with twelver theology (see al-oraibi, “rationalism in the school of bahrain,” 333-34). 100. the theme “west is best” similarly runs through ibn ʿarabī’s writings, and particularly in the ʿanqāʾ mughrib, where he identifies the mahdi, for example, with the ‘sun rising in the west’ (shams al-maghrib) as sign of the last hour (see elmore, islamic sainthood, 163-95). as ibn ʿarabī states in his r. al-intiṣār (trans. in ibid., 175): for the spiritual opening of the west (fatḥ al-maghrib) is unrivalled by any other opening, since its allotted existential time is the night (al-layl), and [the night] precedes the daytime (al-nahār) in the glorious scripture in every passage. in [the night] the ‘night-journey’ (al-isrāʾ) takes place for the prophets, and therein the spiritual benefits (al-fawāʾid) arise [for the saints], and the selfrevelation of the real shall come to pass for his servants … for the ‘virgin-secrets’ (abkār al-asrār) 69 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) to his heirs (aqrabīn), having himself inherited it from his noble forefathers, i.e., the preeternal speech (al-kalām al-qadīm) taught him by one terrible in power, very strong, [who] stood poised (q 53:5-6), as well as the new rarities he possessed, ripe fruits [unique] to the seal’s garden, i.e., the temporally-originated speech (al-kalām al-ḥadīth) that he read from the [eternal] tablet of he revealed to his servant what he revealed (q 53:10). god reward these [pioneers] on our behalf with the greatest reward. however, in restricting the path of superabundance to these two nodes, both among the seal’s most prized possessions, and making them the [only] path, [the leading scholars of the community] neglected the third [node], which is the rarest and choicest and serves to strengthen [the first two].101 it is through this last that the gate of veriest truth (ʿayn al-ṣawāb)102 is opened, and behind this gate are the treasuries of the seal’s glory and the protected space of his intimacy (qurb) which contain necklaces of precious jewels (ʿuqūd farāʾid al-jawāhir) and all else laid there in store. [the seal] collected all this and provisioned therewith his son [ʿalī b. abī ṭālib], the seal of sacral power ( walāya) and standard-bearer of understanding and guidance. these necklaces (ʿuqūd) are numerical knottings (al-ʿuqūd al-ʿadadiyya), the spiritual-intellectual form of the book that was sent down from the highest pen to the noble tablet. number (ʿadad), then, is the best means of acquiring sciences of great benefit and numerous as grains of sand, the primordial mine preserving the gems [at the core] of all the standard and mainstream sciences.103 as noted, the book of inquiries as a whole is structured according to the fourfold schema ibn turka first deployed in his of letters; but now the substance (mādda) of the letter is identified as light, which alone makes possible his revolutionary lettrist valorization of writing over speech. space does not here permit a full analysis of this extremely dense and complex work—naturally still unpublished and unstudied despite its status as a seminal work for centuries.104 for the purposes of the present study, however, a paraphrase of the introductory subsection of each of the four levels of the letter provides an adequate outline of ibn turka’s unprecedented lettrist metaphysics of light: are only ‘deflowered’ with us [in the west]. thereafter, they emerge before you in your east (mashriqu-kum) as ‘divorcees’ (thayyibāt) who have ended their period of waiting. then you marry them at the horizon of the orient. for we share equally in the pleasure of ‘marriage,’ but we [in the west, particularly] win the pleasure of ‘deflowering’! 101. cf. q 36:14: when we sent unto them two men, but they cried them lies, so we sent a third as reinforcement (fa-ʿazzaz-nā bi-thālithin). 102. ṣawāb (ṣwab) = 99. 103. ms majlis 10196 ff. 52a-b. note that ʿadad, translated here as ‘number,’ is also the standard term for arithmetic as part of the quadrivium. 104. a preliminary analysis is offered in melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 330-78. i am currently preparing a critical edition and translation of the mafāḥiṣ. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 70 section 1: on the mental form of the letters in order to analyze the cosmos at the macro level it is necessary to use the most general, comprehensive categories possible; hence the use in metaphysics of such concepts as existence (wujūd), oneness (waḥda), quiddity (māhiyya), etc. philosophers hold absolute existence (al-wujūd al-muṭlaq) to be the most comprehensive of all such general concepts. yet even by the philosophers’ own standard this concept cannot be all-encompassing, since it, like most philosophical concepts, is offset and relativized by its opposite, in this case forms of absolute nonexistence (al-aʿdām al-muṭlaqa); forms of relative existence are likewise counterbalanced by forms of relative nonexistence (al-aʿdām al-muḍāfa). in short, every positive category is twinned with its negative inversion. the sole exception to this rule is the concept of waḥda, the state of being one; because it cannot be thusly relativized, the one alone is all-encompassing. that is to say, every other concept, even multiplicity (kathra) itself, may be understood in terms of its singularity—it is a concept. it is the one that necessitates, qualifies and constitutes the many (al-kathīr); it alone is capable of being united with its opposite without impairing its essential integrity. furthermore, the concept of one and its ascending numerical degrees is wholly self-evident (badāha), unlike the concept of existence, whose supposedly self-evident status nevertheless requires demonstration. this is why all the revealed prophetic books dwell exclusively on the one, not on existence as such. let the researcher therefore set aside his various misconceptions and inquire into the matter of number, for it is the fountainhead of all the sciences, the quarry of all realities, an ocean of insights both manifest and occult.105 section 2: on the written form of the letters the written form is the most manifest (ajlā) of the letterforms and the most fixed in its manifestation. the author first counterposes the view that this distinction belongs rather to the spoken form of the letters, in that speech is more universal than writing—indeed, even animals communicate through sound—, whereas only the educated elite of humanity, very few in number (shirmidha khāṣṣa min aṣnāf al-insān), become capable of expressing themselves through writing after years of training and laborious effort, and must spend further years developing the methods of critical thought. ibn turka states in response to this that two considerations obtain here: 1) the prophetic mission must indeed rely on the spoken form of language in order to reach the greatest number of people, especially as its point is to exhort them to physical acts of piety; spoken words may also powerfully affect listeners 105. ms majlis 10196 f. 56a-b. ibn turka is here restating almost verbatim the declaration of the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ at the beginning of their rasāʾil: ‘the science of number is the root of the sciences, the essence of wisdom, the foundation of knowledge and the [principal] element of all things’ (rasāʾil, 1/21–22; trans. in endress, “mathematics and philosophy,” 133). 71 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) precisely because they are fleeting. spoken letterforms are thus most appropriate to the prophetic mission. 2) by contrast, the responsibility to guide laid upon those possessed of sacral power (walāya) is far better suited to the written form of language, since it is only through this medium that the full complexity of that contained implicitly within the prophetic mode may be expounded, this in a form that endures and is capable of communicating to each generation the central revelatory truths (al-ḥaqāʾiq al-kashfiyya). the written form also has the distinction of being that form that fully intermixes (imtizāj) with the perception of it to the point of total identification (ittiḥād), unlike any other sensible form. this is because written letterforms are communicated to the light of vision (nūr al-baṣar) by light (ḍiyāʾ), and the meeting of separate rays of light results in total union rather than mere conjunction. thus one can see two clashing colors at the same time without either being denatured (fasād) by the other, unlike all other types of sensory data such as sounds, smells, textures and tastes, wherein clashing instances are mutually denaturing when they occur simultaneously; if one hears two inharmonious sounds at once, for example, one cannot make out either, since their medium is air rather than light. in other mediums discrete sensory data must follow in succession to be perceived properly, whereas visible things may be seen simultaneously and still maintain their integrity. written letterforms are thus not bodies and cannot clash, and for this reason they stand unique among sensory objects in their abstraction (tajarrud) from denaturing and obscuring material constraints (al-mafāsid al-hayūlāniyya wa-qādhūrāti-hā l-ẓulmāniyya). by the same token, spoken letterforms as communicated through airwaves (al-tamawwujāt al-hawāʾiyya) that pass with the elapsing of each moment are susceptible to such denaturing by virtue of their medium. in addition, the more descended (anzal) such forms are, the more they are complete, encompassing and comprehensive of special characteristics (akmal wa-ajmaʿ li-l-khaṣāʾiṣ wa-ashmal).106 section 3: on the spoken form of the letters while it is the written form of the letter alone that remains imprinted on the pages of time across the ages, all peoples from ancient times to the present laboring to record and preserve the choicest insights of humanity in the form of various sciences, the spoken form of the letter, for its part, encompasses every mode of expression, both rational and irrational, that gives voice to the consciousness of man and animal. the final level of descent from existential oneness (al-waḥda al-wujūdiyya)—itself the shadow of the true or divine oneness (al-waḥda al-ḥaqīqiyya)—down through the chain of being that comprehends all is described 106. ms majlis 10196 ff. 72b-73b. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 72 by the technical term of oneness of genus (al-waḥda al-jinsiyya). this level in turn involves descent through levels of its own through which its fullness is expressed, this descent terminating in the low genus (al-jins al-sāfil), its fifth and final stage ... this lowest level, moreover, is reflected in another type termed oneness of species (al-waḥda al-nawʿiyya), the category comprising man as microcosm (al-kawn al-jāmiʿ). when this process of descent is complete, the last level becomes host to the divine name the living (al-ḥayy) and site of the manifestation of its properties, as well as those of all the names subsidiary thereto. the first thing that is engendered from this blessed union (jamʿiyya) is a perfect existential form that discloses the contents of consciousness termed the voluntary voice (al-ṣawt al-ikhtiyārī); this is what first manifests from an animal upon birth … now it may be asked: how can vocal expression (ṣawt) be existential, for it is clear that it is but a transitory accident, a fleeting engendered thing? i answer: this refers only to the voluntary voice associated in the first place with the animal; it is evident that voice is necessarily attributable to existence when it constitutes a reality expressive of what is contained in the hidden levels of existence, yet remains an engendered accident insofar as it is borne to the hearing by soundwaves. the two properties are not mutually exclusive. this is the view of the speculative [philosophers and theologians] (ahl al-naẓar); in terms of sapiential insight (al-wajh al-ḥikmī), however, the voice is a corporeal representational form (ṣūra jasadāniyya mithāliyya) subsisting existentially in itself, regardless of the fact that it manifests through airwaves, in this respect being similar to light (ḍawʾ) (which topic was discussed in the section on the written form of the letter). for this reason the philosophers hold contradictory views on the subject, with some being of the opinion that the two are separate bodies. it is, however, clear to the intelligent that it cannot be a body qualified by flowing and moistness (ruṭūba) and subject to superficial alterations. given this premise, then, know that the spoken form of the letter is an accidental form pertaining to the voice and compounded of parts and vocalizations that serve to distinguish [utterances] according to context. this may be known from the fact that air, due to its subtle and balanced nature, is uniquely fitted to enter the kingdom of the human constitution as servant, there to wait upon its caliph, the holy secret (al-laṭīfa al-qudsiyya), and withdraw upon its command arrayed in robes of light. thus no majlis or other gathering is worth the name if luminous words be lacking. the quranic reference here: surely good deeds will drive away evil deeds; that is a remembrance unto the mindful (q 11:114). that is to say, good things—the light of existence—must needs drive away evil things—the darkness of nonexistent engendered beings. insofar as the spoken form of the letter represents speech, then, it conveys the holy lights that negate the darkness of the material realms. it is for this reason that most of the religious duties god imposes on his servants have to do with this spoken 73 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) form, such as ritual prayer and other forms of worship—this fact alone suffices to indicate its great dignity.107 section 4: on the letters as they are in themselves, i.e., the material substance (mādda) underlying the letters’ three forms as discussed above having discussed the three aspects of the letters together with the properties, effects, accidents and concomitants of each—this discussion representing the choicest intellectual fruits of the age and providing the framework for extracting exalted types of wisdom from the revealed heavenly letters—, we must now turn to the letters themselves to explicate their supreme eminence in the sensible realms of engendered existence; for the letters are the straight path for all seekers. every fixed substance and transient accident that exists in the visible world falls into one of two categories. the first comprises those that are luminous (nūrānī), i.e., those which are apparent in themselves and manifest other objects through their effects, such as the sun. the second comprises those that are dark (ẓulmānī), i.e., those which are nonapparent in themselves and obscure other objects, such as gross bodies (ajrām kathīfa). given this premise, it will be clear to anyone with a modicum of discernment that only things that are in the first category may serve to provide us new information about what is unknown. however, the first category comprises many subcategories, since substances and accidents differ widely in the extent to which they furnish such information. some things only illuminate their immediate surroundings, such as a lamp, while others illuminate all sensible objects, such as the sun and moon. despite their difference in degree, however, these two instances do not fundamentally differ in that both reveal objects to the perception without themselves perceiving; this category therefore represents the first level of light (nūr). the second level of light comprises those things that are capable of perceiving objects in their own right as well as making the same objects perceptible to other things, such as the light of vision (nūr al-bāṣira) with respect to colors and luminosities. this level is superior to the first, yet is still incapable of fully expressing the category of light: for such things cannot perceive themselves nor occulted or absent objects, and those objects they do perceive they frequently perceive inaccurately—moving things as motionless, large things as small, etc. the third level of light comprises that which is capable of perceiving itself as well as all other existents, whether sensory or immaterial, present or absent, occult or manifest, and of making such objects perceivable to others: this is the intellect or reason (al-ʿaql). yet it too, despite its great facility in revealing objects as they are, suffers from a certain incapacity in fully expressing the divine name light (al-nūr), since by its nature it tends towards what is interior (buṭūn) and hence is best able to perceive universals and the categories of transcendence and incomparability (taqdīs, tanzīh); when it attempts to analyze that which is external (ẓāhir), however, 107. ms majlis 10196 f. 83a-b. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 74 involving rather a comprehensive awareness (jamʿiyya) of engendered particulars and the category of similarity (tashbīh), it is incapable of doing so directly and must rely upon other faculties. given the necessity of such reliance, reason cannot but fall prey to various types of ambiguity and confusion (talabbus, tashawwush) and thereat hesitate and vacillate (taraddud, tadhabdhub). this is because the faculties upon which reason relies are often at cross purposes with each other, which leads to conflicting and contradictory data (taqābul, taʿāruḍ). more, in seeking the assistance of these faculties reason’s own power is compromised and it cannot maintain its control over them; they rather interfere even in the arenas proper to reason and confuse its perception, such that it is rarely able to carry out its office free of doubt. finally, the fourth level of light comprises that which is able to reveal things as they are in an absolute sense, and pertains solely to the revealed heavenly form which is wholly unsusceptible to error from within or without: this is the letter. to it alone belongs the all-comprehensive sublimity (al-ʿuluww al-iḥāṭī) that allows it to transcend all dichotomies (mutaqābilāt), through it alone are the scales of judgment preserved from any deviation or irregularity of measurement proper to most engendered beings. for every nature (ṭabīʿa), excepting the letter itself, must needs occupy one of two opposed categories (mutaqābilayn). the letter therefore stands to all dichotomies in the manner described by the verse: praise be to god who has sent down upon his servant the book and has not assigned unto it any crookedness (q 18:1). for this reason the letter is uniquely capable of making perceptible not only things that exist (mawjūdāt) but also things that do not or cannot exist (maʿdūmāt, mumtaniʿāt), and this in equal measure. it alone may reveal the absolute (al-iṭlāq) that otherwise transcends all perception and thought. the preeminence of the letters is such that god has included them (i.e., the muqaṭṭaʿāt) among those holy substances he sent down to his servants by way of his prophets to guide them to felicity. the letter is the enlightening elixir (al-iksīr al-munīr); were a drop of it to strike the vaults of dark bodies that fill the realms of contingency (al-ʿawālim al-imkāniyya), it would forthwith dispel their intrinsic darkness and transform their substance from base to noble, rendering those gross bodies pure light to illumine the dark realms of matter and becoming.108 as ibn turka argues, in sum, every level of the letter is a construct of eternally emanated divine light, both ontologically and epistemologically—even speech. yet writing is its most manifest form, for it alone is apprehended by vision, that human faculty proper 108. ms majlis 10196 ff. 88b-90a. after citing these demonstrative analogies and rhetorical-poetical proofs as to the ontological and epistemological supremacy of the letter, ibn turka proceeds to list selected quranic verses and hadiths that support his point, followed by sayings from the companions and successors (including ʿalī and ḥusayn) and from the righteous salaf, such as aḥmad b. ḥanbal and al-shāfiʿī. the author ends the opening section of part four by singling out zamakhsharī’s failure to recognize the intrinsic majesty of the quranic letters for special censure. the remainder of part four pursues this theme by applying it in various ways to the three forms of the letters established above. it treats successively the supreme name allāh (alh), the basmala, and various grammatical and rhetorical considerations, ending with an examination of the ontological and epistemological status of prosody. 75 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) to light and hence most universal. for all that plato is lionized by lettrists like ibn turka as preeminent exponent of the philosophia perennis, then, and original model of the theosized sage, in the early 9th/15th century they finally called his phaedrean bluff: far from being the guarantee of philosophical integrity, speech is metaphysically the least reliable form of the letter; but its written-numerical form—epitomized by the quranic muqaṭṭaʿāt—is the very key to the cosmos.109 lettrism and sociocultural history needless to say, ibn turka’s revolutionary metaphysics of writing was hardly worked out in vacuum, but rather reflective of equally sweeping sociocultural and political changes taking place in the islamicate heartlands during the 8th/14th and 9th/15th centuries—including in the first place the burgeoning of arabo-persian writerly culture. tabulating such changes is of course well beyond the scope of this article, which simply proposes ibn turkian lettrism as their relevant metaphysical context. nevertheless, the pairing of intellectual history with sociocultural or political history i called for above has the potential to enrich, perhaps even transform, many current scholarly lines of inquiry. though their ramifications cannot be pursued here, those relevant to the study of middle period islamicate writerly culture include: post-mongol imperial ideology i have elsewhere argued at length that ibn turkian lettrism, together with astrology, was an essential component in the construction of a timurid universalist imperial ideology; this dual astrological-lettrist platform in turn served as template for the aqquyunlu, safavid, mughal and ottoman versions of the same. that is to say, post-mongol islamicate imperialism, to a far greater degree than its pre-mongol iterations, was heavily occultist in tenor. this political transformation began under the ilkhanids, as reflected, for instance, in āmulī’s nafāyis al-funūn, but only became systematized in the early 9th/15th century. ibn turka played a pivotal role in this process: he almost certainly wrote his of letters and began his book of inquiries for iskandar sulṭān, his first timurid patron, who despite an abortive reign came to stand as model of universal (occult) philosopher-kingship, a status pointedly claimed by the millennial sovereigns of the early modern persianate world. as such, the theory and practice of post-mongol islamicate imperialism simply cannot be understood without reference to lettrism.110 furthermore, the sharp increase in elite patronage of occultist texts during this period significantly impacted writerly and manuscript culture: works on lettrism and the other occult sciences constitute as much as ten percent of the massive corpus of surviving 109. this is not to imply a direct reception of the phaedrus in arabic, which does not appear to have occurred (gutas, “greek philosophical works,” 811). 110. i develop this theme in melvin-koushki, “early modern islamicate empire.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 76 manuscripts, still almost wholly untapped.111 ibn turka’s philosophical-scientific works on lettrism aside, even those of his treatises that are more strictly literary in tenor stand as index of this dramatic shift in postmongol imperial ideology—as well as the unconscionable neglect in scholarship to date of sources of the closest pertinence to this theme. his debate of feast and fight, naturally still unpublished and unstudied, is here representative. completed in 829/1426 for the timurid prince-calligrapher bāysunghur b. shāhrukh (d. 837/1434), the munāẓara-yi bazm u razm is an ornate persian work that expressly imperializes the venerable feast vs. fight (i.e., court vs. military) trope within a lettrist-literary framework. for the first time in the centuries-old arabo-persian munāẓara tradition, that is, which had never before allowed a debate’s resolution, ibn turka marries the opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his timurid royal patron: he is to perform the role of lord love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities.112 this lettrist mirror for princes is thus not simply unprecedented in persian literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache of these scientists of letters, but also serves as key to timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase.113 history of science ibn turka and his student and friend, sharaf al-dīn ʿalī yazdī (d. 858/1454), the timurid dynastic historian and mathematician, were friends and colleagues to the preeminent astronomer qāżīzāda rūmī (d. 835/1432), first director of ulugh beg’s (r. 811-53/1409-49) samarkand observatory; yazdī even worked there for a time. now historians of science acclaim qāżīzāda, together with his student ʿalī qūshchī (d. 879/1474), as being responsible for the revolutionary mathematization of astronomy by ridding it of aristotelian physics— the freeing of astronomy from philosophy, as jamil ragep has summarized their project.114 the same scholar has argued that this newly mathematized astronomy served in turn as a primary inspiration for copernicus.115 these remarkable findings aside, the current historiography of science nevertheless wholly abstracts these timurid astronomers from their lived, sociopolitical context—a context in which lettrists and mathematicianastronomers appear to have professed a common, expressly neopythagorean purpose, maintaining a correspondence with one another and sharing their treatises to this end. in 111. see melvin-koushki and pickett, “mobilizing magic.” 112. it is here significant that al-qalqashandī (d. 821/418)—ibn turka’s contemporary and fellow resident of cairo—penned for one amir abū yazīd al-dawādār al-ẓāhirī, favorite of sultan barqūq and like bāysunghur a skilled calligrapher, a debate on the variant theme of sword vs. pen (mufākharat al-sayf wa-l-qalam) that rather concludes with both parties formally making peace of their own accord and declaring their perfect equivalence (ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, 14/231-40). barqūq, of course, was likewise akhlāṭī’s patron, and seems to have had a keen interest in the occult sciences in general and lettrism in particular. 113. for an edition and translation of this work see my forthcoming the lettrist treatises of ibn turka; for an analysis see my forthcoming “the coincidentia oppositorum imperialized: ibn turka’s munāẓara-yi bazm u razm (1426) as a lettrist mirror for timurid princes.” 114. “freeing astronomy.” 115. saliba advances a similar thesis in his islamic science. 77 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) such a context, in other words, it was only natural for a neopythagorean like qāżīzāda— or kepler after him—to seek to mathematize the cosmos; and his warm friendship, from childhood, with ibn turka cannot but have shaped his thinking.116 it will be recalled that the isfahani lettrist began pushing precisely for a return to a mathematical cosmology, this in his mafāḥiṣ, in 823/1420: number as key to the cosmos and highest expression of walāya. in the same year construction of the samarkand observatory was begun. there is thus every reason to suspect that qāżīzāda had read and taken inspiration from the book of inquiries, and his letter thanking ibn turka for sending him a copy of the latter’s lettrist sharḥ al-basmala, dedicated to ulugh beg, is extant. indeed, there survives a great deal of ibn turka’s correspondence with the spiritual, intellectual and political elites of his day, which allows for a reconstruction of the sociopolitical networks in which he and his colleagues and students moved—an islamicate republic of letters, as evrim binbaş has called these networks.117 the explosion of islamicate writerly culture, in short, also entailed an upsurge in epistolary culture; we may therefore speak of scientific-philosophical networks in the islamicate world, just as later emerged in europe. such social networks, then, are the proper context for studying mathematical astronomers like qāżīzāda rūmī—together with their lettrist colleagues. comparative intellectual history i noted above the remarkable degree of intellectual continuity between the islamicate and christianate realms in the early modern period, with lettrism/kabbalah as a major vector. why the sudden obsession with world as text in 15th-century iran and italy? scholars have yet to explain this signal cultural shift, common to the mediterranean zone, or identify its mechanics. while a few european scholar-occultists, like ramon llull (d. 1316), did know some arabic, there is no evidence of direct east-west transmission before the 17th century,118 and certainly not persian-latin (though perhaps persiangreek); rather, islamic and then reconquista spain would seem to be the pivot.119 that ibn ʿarabī, the greatest lettrist theoretician in islam to that point, was himself an andalusi is telling in this context. although very little research has been done on the relationship 116. melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” on kepler as neopythagorean see e.g. hallyn, the poetic structure of the world. 117. see his intellectual networks in timurid iran, which focuses on yazdī as timurid historian and committed lettrist. 118. exceptionally, the jesuit polymath athanasius kircher (d. 1680), “the last man who knew everything,” devotes a full chapter of his celebrated oedipus aegyptiacus (rome, 1652-54, 2.1/361-400) to cabala saracenica et agarena, saracenic-hagarenic (i.e., islamic) kabbalah, subtitling it de superstitiosa arabum, turcarumque philosophia hieroglyphica; it immediately follows a chapter on hebrew kabbalah (cabala hebræorum) (my thanks to liana saif for alerting me to this text; see stolzenberg, egyptian oedipus). 119. the eastern byzantine-ottoman connection was presumably also an important vector for the transmission of islamicate occultism, and perhaps even lettrism, to (greek) christendom, though this possibility has been little studied. most notably, gemistos plethon (d. 1452) himself, the great byzantine paganizing neoplatonist, seems to have become acquainted with the new brethren of purity during his purported sojourn in ottoman territory; see siniossoglou, “sect and utopia.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 78 of kabbalah to lettrism, the two currents seem to have coevolved from the beginning of the islamic period, reaching maturity together in 6th/12th-century islamic spain.120 with the reconquista, however, and the ultimate expulsion of jews and muslims from spain, kabbalah was carried north and east to france and italy, while lettrism was carried due east to egypt and syria, and thence the persianate world. (ibn turka, again, became a lettrist in cairo.) the sudden presence of jewish kabbalists in italy in particular led to the invention of christian kabbalah by pico in the late 15th century, which neopythagorean discipline would go on to inspire the most feted thinkers of early modern europe—as well as, in some part, the doctrine of sola scriptura itself, war-cry of the protestant reformation. it is just as well that hebrew kabbalah and not arabic lettrism was transmitted to europe; unlike the other arabic occult sciences received so eagerly in the latinate world, by the 7th/13th century lettrism—the most islamic of the occult sciences—was wholly predicated on the ontological supremacy of the quran. this would clearly have been a sticking point for christian occultists, had they been aware of lettrism as a science; they therefore turned to the hebrew bible instead as key to the cosmos. this slight divergence notwithstanding, the fact remains: something happened in islamic spain to engender the common lettrist-kabbalist cosmological doctrine of the two books, which by the 10th/16th century was espoused by thinkers as far afield as delhi and london, paris and shiraz. literary culture the 9th/15th century likewise saw the florescence of highly “artificial” persian poetic genres in iran, including in the first place the muʿammā or logogriph and the qaṣīda-yi maṣnūʿ. although both have long been cited by scholars as proof of timurid-turkmen cultural decadence, paul losensky in particular has shown them to rather epitomize the period’s structuralist-textualist turn, bent on the codification and amplification of the whole of the persian poetic tradition.121 but whence this new obsession with the written form of poetry, this ubiquitous interest in names? to what extent was the ‘fresh style’ (ṭarz-i tāza) then emergent in persian poetical practice and dominant by the safavidmughal period informed by the new lettrist-semiological sensibility sweeping the persophone world? whence many of its literary stars’ determination to ‘speak the new’ (tāza-gūʾī)—and render it in complex visual form?122 i have observed elsewhere that the muʿammā in particular, far from being an empty pastime for vapid litterateurs, was reconfigured by ibn turka’s student and friend sharaf al-dīn yazdī in his seminal treatise on the subject, embroidered robes (ḥulal-i muṭarraz), which explicitly presents the logogriph as a useful skill in the lettrist’s technical repertoire—an immediate, poetic means of analyzing a person’s name in order to discern their character, perhaps even their fate.123 (similarly, chronograms, properly constructed, offer insight into the texture of history.) logogriphs were most commonly deployed as 120. ebstein, mysticism and philosophy in al-andalus; anidjar, “our place in al-andalus.” 121. welcoming fighānī, 154-64. 122. ibid., 198-205, et passim. 123. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 379-89; binbaş, intellectual networks, 48, 81-89. 79 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) social calling cards, to be sure; but their extreme popularity testifies to a broader social consciousness, informed by influential timurid lettrists like ibn turka and yazdī, that the world is semantic, and hence deconstructable—and reconstructable—at a formal level. the same observation may be extended to contemporary mamluk arabic literary culture, wherein a preoccupation with the formal also prevailed as expression of a general mamluk “linguistic consciousness” that achieved the “poetization of everyday life.”124 it is hardly an accident in this context, then, that ibn turka himself was a leading exponent of the hybrid mamluk-timurid ornate literary culture of the early 9th/15th century.125 arts of the book as is well known, patronage of the arts of the book, especially calligraphy and painting, boomed under the timurids. responding to this cultural transformation, by the end of the timurid period historians began to pay far more attention to calligraphers and painters, from the reign of shāhrukh onward, than had ever before been merited; and in the 10th/16th century, under the successor safavids, an entirely new art-historical genre was born: the album preface.126 this genre is naturally of primary importance for understanding timurid-safavid writerly-artistic culture, and has been celebrated by islamic art historians as such; i accordingly look briefly at two safavid album prefaces in the next section to gauge the extent to which their discourse on writing exhibits lettrist influences. for now, however, i will simply observe that lettrists have here again been wholly elided in the historiography on timurid-safavid arts of the book; for reasons that should now be obvious, they must not be. the abovementioned timurid prince bāysunghur b. shāhrukh, for instance, achieved renown as a calligrapher; he also commissioned one of ibn turka’s most important lettrist treatises, query of kings (r. suʾl al-mulūk), wherein the isfahani thinker lays out his vision for a timurid occultist imperialism (as in his debate of feast and fight, written for the same prince). ibn turka’s valorization of the category ūlū l-aydī wa-labṣār, men of hands and vision, would also seem to be highly significant in this calligraphic context. by the same token, ibn turka’s unprecedented declaration of the epistemologicalontological superiority of sight to hearing, on strictly lettrist grounds, can be read as a 124. bauer, “mamluk literature,” 109, 130. 125. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 379-407. ibn turka’s sharḥ-i naẓm al-durar is a case in point: it represents the first persian adaptation of the new mamluk anthology-as-commentary genre first developed by ibn nubāta (d. 768/1366) and emulated by al-ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) and ibn ḥijja al-ḥamawī (d. 837/1434), the isfahani lettrist’s contemporary. it is also significant in this connection that the mafāḥiṣ ends precisely with a discussion of prosody (ʿarūḍ). most notably, malik al-shuʿarāʾ bahār (d. 1370/1951) presents ibn turka as one of the greatest stylists of ornate persian prose (nasr-i fannī) of the 9th/15th century, and identifies him as the first arabic and persian writer to use an ornate literary (adabī) style for scientific (ʿilmī) subjects (sabk-shināsī, 3/352; he devotes a separate section to ibn turka at 3/233-34). 126. roxburgh, prefacing the image, 125, et passim. it bears noting that the album preface derives from the taẕkira preface as parent genre, and so the latter is of equal salience here. nor is it incidental in this connection that dawlatshāh samarqandī’s (d. 900/1494 or 913/1507) taẕkirat al-shuʿarā—the model for most subsequent instances of the genre—valorizes ibn turka and yazdī as the two most prominent intellectuals of shahrukhid iran (melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 17). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 80 preface most appropriate to the burgeoning of persianate visual culture from the timurid period onward. that is: it is hardly an accident that the advent of ibn turkian lettrist hyperstructuralism directly preceded that culture’s embrace of hyperrealism.127 popularization as konrad hirschler has shown, textualization and popularization were interdependent processes in the arabophone west from the 7th/13th century onward.128 the same happened, of course, in the persophone east—and within the high occultist tradition itself. that is to say, the esotericist reading communities that coalesced around the writings of al-būnī in cairo and ibn ʿarabī in damascus during the 7th/13th century gave way to increasing levels of elite patronage for the production of copies of occult-scientific texts from the mid-8th/14th century onward; responding to this elite interest, lettrists like ibn turka and ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī wrote their most influential works in a persian or arabic style accessible and attractive to their royal patrons. both al-bisṭāmī’s arabic works on lettrism, encyclopedic in the signature mamluk style, and ibn turka’s persian and arabic treatises on the same, pellucidly clear and systematic, fly in the face of the perennial injunction to secrecy pervading the islamicate occultist tradition to that point.129 in other words, over the course of the 8th/14th century and especially the early 9th/15th occultism was effectively de-esotericized to an unprecedented extent.130 i suggest that this remarkable development was part and parcel of the textualization-popularization process taking place in the mamluk-timurid realms during this period.131 moreover, in sharḥ-i naẓm al-durar, his hybrid mamluk-timurid ornate persian commentary on the al-tāʾiyya al-kubrā of ibn al-fāriḍ (d. 632/1235), a major teaching text of the ibn ʿarabī school, ibn turka applies his tashkīk al-ḥarf schema to the question 127. on the neoplatonic, aristotelian and sufi discourses increasingly used to celebrate and promote this visual culture see necipoğlu, “the scrutinizing gaze.” her usage in this context of the term hyperrealism, as versus european renaissance naturalism (see n. 44 above), is not to be confused with, for example, its application to the critical theory of jean baudrillard (d. 2007), who posited history as simulation model (see e.g. the illusion of the end, 7). on the tired theme of islamic iconoclasm, nigār ẕaylābī has recently argued that early islamic prohibitions on painting had solely to do with its association with the manufacture of idols on the one hand and talismans on the other, and hence did not hinder the development of persian book painting in particular (“payvand-i ṭilismāt u ṣūratgarī dar islām”). i here argue, however, that it was precisely the occultist renaissance in the islamicate world from the 8th/14th century onward that partially inspired and informed emergent persianate visual culture. 128. the written word, 112. 129. where al-bisṭāmī seeks to present the lettrist tradition as exhaustively as possible, however, ibn turka mentions but few authorities (ibn ʿarabī, saʿd al-dīn ḥamuvayī, jābir b. ḥayyān), and is far more concerned to rationalize and systematize the tradition for philosophical-scientfic-imperial use. 130. gardiner suggests the descriptor “post-esotericist,” given that the formerly esoteric nature of the occult sciences only added to their prestige during this period (“esotericism,” 55); see n. 32 above. 131. similar arguments have been made with respect to the later impact of mass printing on language and literary practice and form (my thanks to mana kia for this observation). on printing’s transformation of traditional scholarship in the late 13th/19th and early 14th/20th century, for example, see el shamsy, “islamic book culture.” 81 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of popularization. he there summarizes his arguments as presented above, arguing for the primacy of sight vis-à-vis hearing: the latter is biased toward the spiritual realm and therefore cannot render a wordform in its fullness, unlike vision, which registers spiritual and physical objects with equal accuracy.132 at the same time, the faculty of hearing is the only means whereby the illiterate masses may be spiritually enlightened—hence the orality of prophecy. ibn turka therefore deems the recent explosion in production of sufi poetry to herald a new age of human development: for the masses, who constantly listen to this poetry performed to music, now have access to accurate knowledge of the structure of reality, which is therefore no longer the preserve of the intellectual and spiritual elite.133 aqquyunlu and safavid receptions the implications of incorporating ibn turkian lettrism into the sociocultural and political historiography of persianate societies are thus far-reaching indeed. what, then, of post-timurid intellectual history? did ibn turka have heirs in the later islamicate philosophical tradition? and to what extent was his metaphysics of writing mainstreamed in persianate scholarly culture as a whole? to understand the receptions of ibn turka in the persianate world in the centuries after his death, we must first bracket out his receptions in 20th-century scholarship, iranian and euro-american alike, which have served only to occlude and elide his occult philosophy as sketched above. in the influential reading of henry corbin and seyyed hossein nasr, ibn turka is but a sufi-shiʿi thinker serving as a modest, nondescript link in the intellectual chain of ascent from naṣīr al-dīn ṭūsī to mullā ṣadrā; as i have shown in detail elsewhere, such a designation radically misrepresents the isfahani lettrist’s project— he was certainly neither sufi nor shiʿi.134 similarly, ʿallāma ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1402/1981) celebrates ibn turka in his al-mīzān as a preeminent synthesizer of avicennan philosophy and theoretical mysticism (ʿirfān), ranking him in this regard with fārābī and suhravardī; that is to say, he recognizes him as a neoplatonist, but not as a neopythagorean, and in no way an occultist.135 departing somewhat from this consensus, the late muḥammadtaqī dānishpazhūh (d. 1417/1996), while more willing to acknowledge ibn turka’s lettrist commitments, declared him rather the ‘spinoza of iran.’136 (ʿabd al-ḥusayn zarrīnkūb (d. 1420/1999), in response, took issue with this title as being misrepresentative of ibn 132. sharḥ-i naẓm al-durr, 38-39. 133. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 401. note that in early modern persian taẕkiras poets are routinely portrayed as having access to supernal truths (my thanks to mana kia for this observation). cf. thomas bauer’s proposal that mamluk literature represents a shift to a participational aesthetics away from the monumental representationalism standard in the abbasid period (“‘ayna hādhā min al-mutanabbī!’”). 134. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 6-8. 135. al-mīzān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, 5/282-84. his association of ibn turka with suhravardī is not entirely inappropriate, however, given that, as i argue, the former commandeered the latter’s doctrine of tashkīk al-nūr for lettrist purposes. 136. “majmūʿa-yi rasāʾil-i khujandī,” 312; specifically, he asserts ibn turka to be the ‘spinoza of iran’ to rhetorically underscore the necessity of publishing and studying his works. needless to say, it is a rather ironic choice, given spinoza’s own project, essentially antithetical to ibn turka’s, of biblical criticism. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 82 turka’s mystical and lettrist concerns.137) all such readings are well-intentioned, to be sure, but err in their assumption that lettrism forever remained a minor subset of sufism—in this ignoring a massive body of evidence to the contrary, including the arabo-persian encyclopedic tradition itself. for ibn turka’s project is expressly revolutionary: he sought to demote sufism and philosophy both from their wonted positions at the top of the epistemological hierarchy and install his lettrist metaphysics-physics in their place.138 for all that this basic point is lost on modern scholars, it was manifestly clear to his contemporaries and heirs throughout the persianate world; and these include a number of thinkers far more feted in the scholarship than ibn turka himself. indeed, the best index of the centrality of lettrism to ibn turka’s project is the fact that he was received solely as a lettrist until the 13th/19th century.139 nor was the scope of his influence limited to iran during his own lifetime and after; in one later work, for instance, he declares himself a seeker of knowledge whose writings are borne abroad by the north and east winds and are well received in all regions and on all shores, with travelers from india (hindustān) and anatolia being dispatched in search of copies of his treatises and books, and whose students come to him from all lands, including shiraz, samarkand, anatolia and india (hind).140 in other words, ibn turka’s lettrist corpus, like al-būnī’s before it, quickly emerged as an important node in the explosion of persianate manuscript culture; many early copies of his mafāḥiṣ may indeed be found as far afield as istanbul,141 and lettrist treatises like the r. ḥurūf were equally popular—it is included, for instance, in ms fatih 5423 (tiem 2054), a gorgeous, deluxe collection of ibn turka’s works copied in 1439 for an elite ottoman patron.142 this would seem to be an unsually fitting fate for works that advance, for the first time in the islamicate context, a systematic metaphysics of writing. here again, a full account of ibn turka’s students and heirs is beyond the scope of this article; but i offer a few select examples to show that his lettrist metaphysics remained current in philosophical circles in iran through at least the early 11th/17th century— whence it permeated scholarly understandings of the nature and epistemologicalontological supremacy of writing throughout the persianate world, from anatolia to india, during the same period. the philosophers of aqquyunlu-safavid iran most openly indebted to ibn turka are 137. dunbāla-yi justujū dar taṣavvuf-i īrān, 142. 138. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 330-33. 139. on ibn turka’s reception in safavid and qajar iran see melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” 140. nafsat al-maṣdūr-i duvvum, 209-10. note that hind variously designates those regions of the subcontinent under muslim rule, the subcontinent as a whole, or the indo-gangetic region of north india only (my thanks to mana kia for this observation). 141. for a preliminary list of surviving manuscript copies in iran and turkey see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 97-98. 142. my thanks to maria subtelny for examining this majmūʿa on my behalf. for a preliminary list of surviving manuscript copies in iran and turkey see melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 88-89. 83 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) two: jalāl al-dīn davānī (d. 908/1502) and mīr dāmād (d. 1040/1630). both are widely acknowledged in the literature to be both pivotal figures in their own times and among the most influential philosophers in islamicate intellectual history more generally. the latter, hailed as the third teacher (muʿallim-i sālis) (i.e., after aristotle and fārābī), intimate of shah ʿabbās i (r. 995-1038/1587-1629) and mentor to mullā ṣadrā, is usually considered the founder of the so-called philosophical school of isfahan; as such, most of his works have been published and studied extensively. this safavid philosopher embraced ibn turka’s lettrist metaphysics in at least three works, including his seminal firebrands and meeting stations (jaẕavāt u mavāqīt), a persian summary of his philosophical system as a whole; citing the r. ḥurūf in particular, mīr dāmād even adopts the fourfold tashkīk al-ḥarf schema analyzed above.143 given persistent scholarly occultophobia, however, this crucial fact has been flatly ignored in the literature to date. for his part, davānī is celebrated as an eclectic illuminationist-ibn ʿarabian-ashʿari thinker, the last major heir of fakhr al-dīn rāzī, and together with his great rival mīr ṣadr al-dīn dashtakī (d. 903/1498) and the latter’s son mīr ghiyās al-dīn dashtakī (d. 949/1542) accounted the most important source for safavid philosophy.144 davānī’s influence in india, whence hailed a number of his students, was similarly outsize, and likewise in ottoman scholarly circles.145 the aqquyunlu philosopher penned two popular persian lettrist works, one of which, on the declaration of divine oneness (r. tahlīliyya), effectively reasserts ibn turka’s lettrist hierarchy of knowledge, whereby lettrism serves as supreme metaphysical science, superior to both avicennan-illuminationist philosophy and sufi theory; and his presentation of this science follows ibn turka’s to the letter—including, naturally, its signature tashkīk al-ḥarf schema.146 yet here too davānī’s embrace of ibn turkian lettrism has been wholly elided in the literature. nevertheless, that two of the most influential philosophers of iran, both in service to, respectively, aqquyunlu and safavid ruling elites, pointedly adopted ibn turka’s metaphysics of writing suggests it to have been well-known and attractive to scholarly elites more generally; it should therefore be detectable as a cultural discourse well beyond philosophical circles. i have argued elsewhere that mīr dāmād’s reception of ibn turka, pivoting consciously on davānī’s, is the crucial context for understanding the striking neopythagorean turn in safavid philosophy, whereby even ibn sīnā himself, the second aristotle, was 143. jaẕavāt u mavāqīt, 134, 143-34; see melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” 144. on the formative davānī-dashtakī rivalry see bdaiwi, “shiʿi defenders of avicenna.” 145. rizvi, “mīr dāmād in india”; el-rouayheb, islamic intellectual history, 52. 146. melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 256-61. davānī’s summary of these levels is useful in this context (r. tahlīliyya, 65-66): 1) spiritual-mental, wherein the letters take form in the human mind before being expressed, in this corresponding god’s knowledge of realities before their coming into being; these letters are called the high letters (ḥurūf-i ʿāliyāt) or thought letters (ḥurūf-i fikriyya). 2) oral, wherein the letters are expressed in audible form; these are called the medial letters (ḥurūf-i wusṭā). 3) written, wherein the letters are made visible to men of might and vision (q 38:45); these are called the low letters (ḥurūf-i sāfila). furthermore, letters have spirits, bodies and hearts. their spirits represent their numerical values, their hearts their oral form, and their bodies their written form. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 84 transmogrified into a neopythagorean-occultist;147 i further suggest it here as an important factor in the equally striking florescence of safavid book culture.148 most emblematic of safavid perennialist bibliophilia, even bibliomania, is the sharply increased production of philosophical anthologies (which often feature lettrist texts), on the one hand, and the consolidation of a new genre of art history-theory, the album preface, on the other. a telling example of the first is british library ms add. 16839, a classic 11th/17thcentury safavid anthology of philosophical and mystical texts that features a heavy lettrist emphasis; most significantly, it conjuncts a number of lettrist and other treatises by ibn turka, including the r. ḥurūf, with mīr dāmād’s jaẕavāt, together with treatises by a range of other authorities, from ibn sīnā and ṭūsī to davānī and mullā ṣadrā.149 a celebrated instance of the second is qāżī aḥmad’s (d. after 1015/1606) rose garden of art (gulistān-i hunar), an unprecedentedly comprehensive work of art historiographybiography completed around 1006/1598 (revised 1015/1606) and dedicated to shah ʿabbās. this is a curiously hybrid work, simultaneously a technical treatise on writing and a biographical dictionary of calligraphers, but also functioning, according to david roxburgh, as a “gargantuan album preface.”150 i wish to call attention to two features of the gulistān-i hunar relevant to the present context. first, qāżī aḥmad opens his work by copying and slightly reworking the beginning of shams al-dīn āmulī’s section on writing as translated above—a borrowing not previously noticed. that the nafāyis al-funūn is drawn on so prominently as a source for emulation is of special significance here: it implies that qāżī aḥmad was well aware of its status as the first persian encyclopedia of the sciences to a) formally valorize writing over speech, and b) elevate sufism, and by extension lettrism, to the status of queen of the islamic sciences. as i argue, these two departures from precedent are intimately connected, and would presumably have been understood to be so by a consummate scholar like qāżī aḥmad. his opening assertion of the supremacy of writing, moreover, like āmulī’s, is categorical: ‘it is evident to the minds of those with insight that the finest thing a person can possess is excellence and skill (fażl u hunar), and that no [skill] is finer than the ability to write beautifully (ḥusn-i khaṭṭ).’151 second, qāżī aḥmad, like all other safavid album preface writers of the 10th/16th century, places great store by ʿalī b. abī ṭālib’s status as inventor of the kufic script, as well as inspirer, through a dream vision, of ibn muqla (d. 328/940), the abbasid vizier universally considered to be responsible for codifying the ‘six scripts’ (al-aqlām al-sitta, shish qalam)152 derived from kufic and hence the patron saint of arabic calligraphy as such.153 (qāżī aḥmad also expands on this theme to praise imam ḥasan and imam zayn 147. melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” 148. see e.g. endress, “philosophische ein-band-bibliotheken.” 149. rieu, catalogue of the persian manuscripts, 2/833-35. 150. prefacing the image, 2. 151. gulistān-i hunar, 4. 152. i.e., thuluth, tarqīʿ, muḥaqqaq, naskh, rayḥān and riqāʿ. 153. roxburgh, prefacing the image, 188; on the reforms of ibn muqla see tabbaa, “the transformation.” 85 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) al-ʿābidīn ʿalī as potent calligraphers and copyists of the quran in their own right.) of imam ʿalī he declares: that script (khaṭṭī) that, like kohl, salved and illumined the eyes of men of vision (ūlū l-abṣār) in communicating the divine inspiration and commands and prohibitions vouchsafed the holy messenger (god bless and keep him and his house) was the kufic script. there survive to this day some of the letters (arqām) produced by the miraculous pens of the holy shah of sacral power (shāh-i valāyat-panāh) (the peace of god be upon him)—how richly do they illuminate the eye of the soul and burnish the tablet of the mind! none has written more beautifully than that holy eminence (the blessings and peace of god be upon him), who produced the finest examples of the kufic script ever written … masters [of this art] therefore identify that holy eminence (the blessings of god be upon him) as the originator (sanad) of that script and trace its chain of transmission back to him. the first to marry beautiful writing to beautiful conduct was murtażā ʿalī, and that mightily. for this reason said [the prophet] (god bless and keep him and his house): writing is half of all knowledge (al-khaṭṭ niṣf al-ʿilm). that is, for whomever writes well, it is as though he has mastered half of all sciences. whose writing did the chief of the prophets, in his knowledge and wisdom, declare the half of all knowledge? the prophet declared it of the writing of murtażā ʿalī. murtażā was truly the king of all saints (shāh-i awliyā); but when the caliphs usurped [his right] he made seclusion his practice, for a time eschewing all intercourse, preferring rather to copy the quran (kitābat-i muṣḥaf)— hence the great honor and majesty that redounds to writing! for how could writing like his be within human power? his script was beyond human, his writing other.154 given the imperial twelver shiʿi context in which qāżī aḥmad and his fellow album preface authors were writing during the 10th/16th century, most scholars have reflexively assumed such encomiums for ʿalī as simultaneously the inventor of kufic and “king of the saints” to be both historical fictions and quintessentially, uncontestably shiʿi. but such a conclusion is rash and unwarranted, especially if our goal is to recover the it is significant in this context that āmulī simply reports that scholars differ in crediting the invention of kufic to either ʿalī or ibn muqla, without supplying, like qāżī aḥmad, a dream-vision narrative to resolve the attribution in favor of ʿalī. 154. gulistān-i hunar, 13-14. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 86 safavid metaphysics of writing. for ibn turka—a committed sunni imamophile—appears to have been the foremost authority in safavid iran on matters letter-metaphysical, as we have seen; and his metaphysics of writing is founded on the doctrine that writing and mathematics are the directest expressions of walāya, whose preeminent exponent during the islamic dispensation is ʿalī—inventor, ibn turka says, of the kufic script and jafr both. such a neat congruency between ibn turka’s pneumatic-grammatic theory and qāżī aḥmad’s rhetoric is thus hardly coincidental. that is to say: lettrism was the sunni intellectual current most utilizable by shiʿi scholars seeking to construct a new imperial safavid shiʿi culture; any account of the transformative shiʿization of iran that elides timurid-aqquyunlu lettrist precedent must therefore remain incomplete. but the gulistān-i hunar does not explicitly employ the neoplatonic-neopythagorean schema systematized by ibn turka in ibn ʿarabian terms; for this we must turn to the most famous of the safavid album prefaces, that of dūst muḥammad (d. after 972/1564), written for the album prepared for bahrām mīrzā (d. 957/1549), brother of shah ṭahmāsb (r. 930-84/1524-76). the ornate opening passage of this preface has been analyzed masterfully by david roxburgh in particular;155 but no art historian has yet noted its overtly lettrist framework.156 it begins: the noblest writing … is praise of the creator, by whose pen are scriven and by whose tracing are limned the high letters (ḥurūf-i ʿāliyāt) and the supernal forms (ṣuvar-i mutaʿāliyāt). according to the dictum the pen exhausted its ink with [writing all] that will be until doomsday, the coalesced forms and variegated shapes of the entifications (aʿyān) were—according to the dictum i was a hidden treasure—secreted in the treasury of the unseen beyond time; then—according to its continuation i craved to be known, so i created creation in order to be known—he snatched with the fingers of destiny the veil of nonbeing from the countenance of being, and with the hand of mercy and grace and the pen of the first thing god created was the pen painted them masterfully on the canvas of existence. [it is praise of] the maker, who in the workshop of god created adam in his form rendered the totality of the human form—a microcosm (ʿālam-i sānī) in its all-comprehensiveness of forms and meanings—upon the page of creation in the most beautiful guise, wiping the dust of nonexistence from the tablet of his being with the polish of favor, then [set him to] ascend the levels of assume the attributes of god [by] making the mirror of creation the site of manifestation of his names and traces. 155. prefacing the image, esp. 189-98. 156. as roxburgh notes (ibid., 165), while most scholars agree that the content of dust muhammad’s preface is particularly remarkable … [i] ts turns of phrase and figures of speech were thought to be hackneyed (and incapable of signifying anything other than their life as literary devices), and the narrative content of its stories were considered topoi, the product of pure rhetoric, and never taken seriously. without thoroughgoing analysis of the preface, its immediate meaning—viz. the licitness of depiction—and rationale—a justification for depiction and explanation of safavid art in the present—came across to some scholars as somewhat flimsy, perhaps even as anachronistic. 87 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) [it is praise of] the almighty, who embellished the seven heavens—which are inimitable on the model of the seven repeated (sabʿ al-masānī),157 nay, by way of organization and stellation (tanjīm)158 on the model of the pages of the quran [as a whole]—with the verse-signs (āyāt) of the gorgeous stars and the tenth and the fifth [markers] that are the sun and the moon,159 and, having made rulings with the lines of light rays (khuṭūṭ-i shuʿāʿī), with the white ink of dawn and the vermilion of sunset established on the azure page of the celestial sphere a template for the four tablets.160 most significantly, dūst muḥammad here invokes the doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf: he posits the pen as first existent, whence are first produced extramental forms (aʿyān), which coalesce downward into the high letters (ḥurūf-i ʿāliyāt)—davānī’s technical term for the mathematical-mental level of the letter—,161 until finally their physical-elemental reality, which is to say the written form of the letter (and by extension painting), is manifested. it is striking that he ignores the level of speech altogether—creation is here entirely the product of the pen, not the divine utterance be! of similar significance is his poetic equation of the cosmos to the quran; this, of course, is a classic expression of the two books doctrine. a few decades later, mīr dāmād restated this doctrine in strictly philosophical terms in his jaẕavāt: the totality of macrocosm and microcosm together constitute the book of god, inscribed by the pen or universal intellect, with all existents being letters, words, sentences, verses and suras in that cosmic scripture.162 finally, dūst muḥammad associates the neoplatonic doctrine of man as microcosm with the ibn ʿarabian-būnian doctrine of the cosmos as manifestation of the infinite names of god (asmāʾ allāh), whereby human beings can reascend to the one, can self-divinize or achieve theosis (taʾalluh), by way of theomimesis (tashabbuh bi-l-bāriʾ)—fully incarnating the names through lettrist praxis. 157. i.e., the fātiḥa. 158. this term usually denotes astrology. 159. in illuminated manuscript copies of the quran, every fifth verse (khams) is marked with a gold rosette or kufic h, equal to 5, and every tenth with a gold medallion containing the word ten (ʿashr) (gacek, the arabic manuscript tradition, 22, 54). 160. dūst muḥammad’s preface, preserved as topkapı sarayı müzesi h.2154, is transcribed and translated in thackston, album prefaces, 4-17; the translation here, which renders the technical terminology more accurately, is mine. the four tablets are identified by ʿabd al-razzāq kāshānī (d. 730/1330) in his taʾwīlāt as follows (trans. in murata, the tao of islam, 155): there are four tablets: the tablet of precedent decree [qaḍāʾ] towers beyond obliteration and affirmation. it is the first intellect. the tablet of measure [qadar] is the universal rational soul, within which the universal things of the first tablet become differentiated and attached to their secondary causes. it is named the guarded tablet. the tablet of the particular, heavenly souls is a tablet within which is inscribed everything in this world along with its shape, condition, and measure. this tablet is called the ‘heaven of this world.’ it is like the imagination of the cosmos, just as the first [tablet] is like its spirit, and the second [tablet] is like its heart. then there is the tablet of matter, which receives the forms of the visible world. and god knows best. 161. see davānī’s definition of the four levels in n. 146 above. 162. jaẕavāt, 21-24; see melvin-koushki, “world as (arabic) text.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 88 by lettrist praxis i mean, of course, letter or talismanic magic, which, tellingly, was hugely popular in safavid iran.163 now it will be remembered that lettrism was first sanctified by ibn ʿarabī and al-būnī precisely through their fusion of neoplatonicneopythagorean cosmology with the sufi doctrine of names—hence lettrism’s alternate designation as ʿilm al-asmāʾ, and hence āmulī’s reclassification of lettrism as the supreme sufi science. (any technical reference to the names of god after the 7th/13th century, such as in dūst muḥammad’s preface, can therefore be safely assumed to have a lettrist resonance.) as a consequence, the practice of magic overwhelmingly became the practice of būnian sufi-letter magic, focused in the first place on the divine names, and by extension the names of angels, jinn, or any other being or thing in existence; a given name is made operational by mathematically processing its letters in a magic square, which then becomes the engine of a talisman, to be engraved or written on an appropriate medium. a talisman, in short, represents the marriage of text and number, of celestial and terrestrial; it epitomizes ibn turkian walāya. it is thus hardly surprising that persian writers on writing increasingly cast their subject in magical terms. a representative example is, once again, qāżī aḥmad. in his work’s introduction he indites in praise of the pen: [the pen] is a skilled worker, and finely sees, accomplishing its work with the might of its right hand; its art is the miracle of a mage (muʿjiza-yi sāḥirī): it is now a moses, now a samaritan (sāmirī).164 ottoman and mughal receptions so far the aqquyunlu-safavid metaphysics of writing; to what extent did ibn turka’s lettrist system inform scholars in the broader persianate world? a considerable one, it would seem. two examples must here suffice, one ottoman, one mughal. as cornell fleischer in particular has shown, ottoman imperial culture under sultan süleymān kanuni (r. 926-74/1520-66) was profoundly occultist in orientation, and especially lettrist. this outlook was rooted in the first place in the voluminous occultistapocalypticist corpus of ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī of antioch, ibn turka’s fellow heir of akhlāṭī and contemporary cognate in anatolia. most notably, al-bisṭāmī’s key to the comprehensive prognosticon (miftāḥ al-jafr al-jāmiʿ) appears to have served as ur-text in the construction of ottoman imperial identity; it is primarily on its basis that the ottoman self-understanding as last world empire was formed.165 given the great currency of bisṭāmian lettrism, then, we may assume there was a eager market for ibn turka’s lettrist works as well; and indeed, the latter’s claim that his writings were popular in anatolia is borne out by the presence of many surviving copies thereof in ottoman archives—the mafāḥiṣ chief among them. while al-bisṭāmī was rather more prolific on topics occult, his 163. see melvin-koushki, “the occult sciences in safavid iran.” 164. gulistān-i hunar, 9. in the quranic narrative, a samaritan was responsible for magically animating the golden calf for the israelites to worship in moses’s absence (q 20:83-97). 165. fleischer, “ancient wisdom.” 89 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) lettrism is equal parts ibn ʿarabian-būnian—that is to say, half theory and half praxis— and not philosophically systematic; his isfahani colleague’s magnum opus, by contrast, represents the first systematic treatment of lettrist metaphysics in the islamicate tradition, as well as the fullest expression of ibn turka’s signature tashkīk al-ḥarf schema. it is therefore striking, but not surprising, to find this schema adopted by muṣṭafā taşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561), the greatest ottoman encyclopedist of the 10th/16th century. his seminal arabic classification of the sciences, key to felicity and lamp to mastery (miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda), is closely modeled on ibn al-akfānī’s irshād al-qāṣid, but expands on it massively—especially with respect to the occult sciences, including lettrism.166 it served in turn as model for ḥājjī khalīfa (d. 1067/1657) and other subsequent arabic encyclopedists.167 like āmulī, moreover, but unlike ibn al-akfānī, taşköprüzāde formally valorizes writing over speech as the foundation of all human knowledge by classifying it as the first science of the first section (dawḥa) of his work. also like āmulī, he adds to the core humanistic maxim as to the superiority of writing (to wit, that it trumps speech because the latter is fleeting and local but the former is durable and portable, and is the only means by which we can historically realize our humanity) a selection of standard traditional and rational proofs in corroboration: on the virtue of writing, our need for it and the circumstances of its invention as for its virtue according to tradition: [in the first place], the saying of the most high: recite: and your lord is most generous, who taught by the pen, taught man what he knew not (q 96:3-5). he further attributed the teaching of writing to himself, graciously bestowing it on his servants—which alone should suffice to prove its excellence: n. and by the pen, and what they inscribe (q 68:1). thus did he swear by what they inscribe. it is transmitted from ibn ʿabbās (god be pleased with him) that he explicated his saying or a trace of a science (q 46:4) to refer to writing (al-khaṭṭ). it is further transmitted that solomon (upon him be peace) asked an afrit as to the nature of speech. the latter replied: “a passing wind.” said solomon: “then what can bind it?” said he: “writing.” ʿabd allāh b. ʿabbās described it thus: “writing is the hand’s tongue.” jaʿfar b. yaḥyā: “writing is the string of wisdom (simṭ al-ḥikma): thereon are its pieces set off [to greatest effect] and its dispersed parts brought into order.” said ibrāhīm b. muḥammad al-shaybānī: “writing is the hand’s tongue, the mind’s glory, the intellect’s emissary, thought’s legatee, knowledge’s weapon; it confers fraternal intimacy during separation and 166. see melvin-koushki, “powers of one.” 167. interestingly, khaled el-rouayheb has shown that ottoman scholars of the 11th-13th/17th-19th centuries identified less with taşköprüzāde and his contemporaries and more with persian scholars like davānī (islamic intellectual history, 52)—a fact that may be significant in lettrist terms, given davānī’s status and safavid reception as an exponent of the ibn turkian brand of the science. that the shirazi philosopher’s reception was equally warm in mughal india during the same period suggests a continued familiarity with his lettrist writings there as well. more generally, el-rouayheb has argued for the emergence of a more impersonal, text-based transmission of knowledge in ottoman scholarly culture from the 10th/16th century onward (“the rise of ‘deep reading’”). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 90 allows brothers to speak over great distances; it is the repository of secrets and the record of all things.” as for [its virtue] according to reason: even were the excellence of writing to be testified to only by the fact that god most high revealed it to adam (or hūd, upon them both be peace), and that he sent down written codices to his prophets, and that he gave inscribed tablets to moses (upon him be peace), that would be sufficient. yet [its excellence as rationally construed is universal]: for anything that one can mention as to passing thoughts, intellectual inclinations, intimations of understanding, limnings of imagination or sensory perceptions can be entrusted to writing, which orders it and expresses it truly. nor can any community depend on another in this respect, or any nation exempt another [of the responsibility to patronize writing]. for writing allows us to realize our very humanity; it distinguishes us from all other animals, gives us the ability to preserve intact sciences over time, to transmit information from age to age, to transport secrets from place to place. furthermore, writing guarantees rights and discourages rebellion among rational individuals by compelling them with recorded testaments and correspondence between people over great distances, ensuring far more accuracy than can be attained by the bearer of a message or through an interaction in person even if the individuals in question remember perfectly and express themselves with the greatest eloquence. therefore has writing been declared superior to speech: for speech informs those present only, while writing informs those present and those not.168 taşköprüzāde’s treatment of writing would thus seem to be little more than a modest embellishment on arabic and persian bibliophilic precendent; needless to say, the simple fact that he is strongly pro-occultist does not necessarily entail a familiarity with high lettrist theory. but familiar he certainly was: for the ottoman scholar breaks with āmulī, ibn al-akfānī and every other exponent of the arabo-persian encyclopedic tradition to propose a radically new hierarchy of knowledge as his primary structuring device for the work as a whole—tashkīk al-ḥarf. the first four sections of his encyclopedia, of seven, are thus as follows: 1) on the sciences of writing (fī bayān al-ʿulūm al-khaṭṭiyya) 2) on the sciences connected with speech (fī ʿulūm tataʿallaq bi-l-alfāẓ) 3) on the sciences that investigate mental objects (fī ʿulūm bāḥitha ʿammā fī l-adhhān) 168. miftāḥ al-saʿāda, 1/79-80. it must here be emphasized that in islamicate political theory the power to maintain personal connection despite absence is considered a primary foundation of social order—hence the great virtue and necessity of adab, simultaneously a system of writing conventions and a code of ethics (see kia, “adab as literary form and social conduct”). 91 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) 4) on the science connected with extramental realities (fī l-ʿilm al-mutaʿalliq bi-l aʿyān)169 this khaṭṭ-lafẓ-dhihn-ʿayn series, of course, is unmistakably ibn turkian. taşköprüzāde’s innovation here is his recognition of the inadequacy of the large set of traditionalist and rationalist proofs, relatively stable from the abbasid period onward, for the task of demonstrating the ontological supremacy of writing to speech. in the miftāḥ al-saʿāda, in other words, we have a conservative reiteration of the text-centric perennialisttraditionalist culture already long entrenched in the islamicate heartlands by the 8th/14th century—yet by the 10th/16th century its epistemological-philosophical context had profoundly changed. that is to say, taşköprüzāde does not flag the new lettrist context for his otherwise standard valorization of writing over speech; but he certainly expected it to be obvious to his fellow men of main and vision.170 what of mughal india? although much further research remains to be done on ibn turka’s reception in the subcontinent (not to mention his reception in general), it would appear his lettrist metaphysics of light received just as warm a scholarly welcome there as in the far west of the persianate world. certain safavid and ottoman scholars, as we have seen, drew eclectically on his lettrist theory, each to their own ends. the former emphasized his imamophilic doctrine of writing-number as vector of walāya, especially 169. the last three sections, in sequential order, are on practical philosophy (fī l-ḥikma al-ʿamaliyya), on the religious sciences (fī l-ʿulūm al-sharʿiyya) and on the interior or spiritual sciences (fī ʿulūm al-bāṭin). 170. in a recent article (“writing, speech, and history”), ali anooshahr has applied derrida to taşköprüzāde’s miftāḥ al-saʿāda to analyze the latter’s metaphysics of orality and writing; he argues that taşköprüzāde was responsible for overturning the initial valorization of speech over writing in ottoman historiography of the 9th/15th century. this suggests, in effect, that ottoman scholarship locally reprised the transition from speech-centric to text-centric that had already taken place centuries before throughout the islamicate heartlands. while a compelling thesis, it is unfortunately weakened by anooshahr’s failure to situate the miftāḥ al-saʿāda within the islamicate encyclopedic tradition itself, which leads him to claim a revolutionary status for taşköprüzāde on very different, and mistaken, grounds. that is, he presents the ottoman encyclopedist’s assertion of the superiority of writing to speech as being unprecedented, and describes his concluding statement—“therefore has writing been declared superior to speech: for speech informs those present only, while writing informs those present and those not”—as both “remarkable” and “outstanding” (59). as we have seen, however, this statement was already standard in arabic and persian encyclopedias both by the early 8th/14th century; it represents taşköprüzāde’s strict fidelity to precedent, and especially to ibn al-akfānī’s irshād al-qāṣid, and is not revolutionary in the slightest. as i argue, it is rather taşköprüzāde’s importation of ibn turka’s tashkīk al-ḥarf schema that is unprecedented in the tradition. in other words, anooshahr’s approach here shows the dangers of reading ottoman scholarship in isolation from its original arabo-persian context in general and its timurid-mamluk context in particular, as is still regrettably the rule. but the fact that taşköprüzāde found it necessary to import ibn turka’s metaphysics of writing to counter earlier ottoman historiographical trends only serves to strengthen anooshahr’s larger thesis, and especially his contention that the great 10th/16th-century scholar was responsible for reformulating ottoman history in a manner that destabilizes all dualisms, that obliterates all “binary opposite pairs” (44). which is to say: taşköprüzāde would seem to be applying the lettrist principle of the coincidentia oppositorum to dynastic historiography itself—a strategy that is indeed both remarkable and outstanding. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 92 useful to the safavid project of shiʿizing iran; the latter found his tashkīk al-ḥarf schema crucial for bringing a final ottoman organization to the great mass of human knowledge, the philosophia perennis, in preparation for the end of history. their mughal counterparts, by contrast, responding to different imperial needs, chose rather to highlight the postilluminationist tashkīk al-nūr component of ibn turka’s system. perhaps the most manifestly ibn turkian treatment of writing produced in india is that by abū l-fażl ʿallāmī (d. 1011/1602), vizier to emperor akbar (r. 963-1014/1556-1605) and chief architect of the new mughal imperial culture. the famous section on writing and painting in his monumental akbarian institutes (āʾīn-i akbarī) (which, like its safavid counterparts, treats the second as being strictly derivative of the first) opens as follows: in truth, [writing (khaṭṭ)] is for those who love beauty the site of manifestation of delimited light (nūr-i muqayyad), for the farsighted the undelimited world-reflecting cup (jām-i gītī-numā-yi muṭlaq). the talisman that is writing is a form of spiritual geometry from the pen of creation (ṭilism-i khaṭṭ rūḥānī handasaʾī-st az qalam-i ibdāʿ), a celestial writ from the hand of fate (āsmānī kitābaʾī az dast-i taqdīr). it is the secret-bearer of speech; it is the hand’s tongue. speech (sukhan) communicates the heart’s potency to those present only; writing informs those near and far alike. were it not for writing, speech would be lifeless, the heart ungifted by those who have gone before. those who see only bodies think [writing a mass of] mere inky shapes; but the servants of spirit (maʿnā) deem it the radiant lamp of knowledge (charāgh-i shināsāʾī). it is darkness despite its million rays for the pupils; it is a light with a black mole against the evil eye. it is the limner of intelligence, the loamy farmlands feeding the capital of meaning (savād-i shahristān-i maʿnā). it is a sun to nightpitchy [ignorance], a dark cloud heavy with [enlightening] knowledge. it is a mighty talismanic seal (shigarf ṭilismī) on the treasury of sight. though mute, it speaks; though immobile, it travels; though fallen, it soars. [the mechanics of its manifestation are thus:] from the fullness of divine knowledge shines a ray into the rational [human] soul (nafs-i nāṭiqa); the heart then communicates this onward to the realm of the imagination (khayāl), the intermediate plane (barzakh) between the immaterial (mujarrad) and material (māddī), where its immateriality is tempered with materiality and its undelimitedness with delimitation; and so it becomes manifest. if this occurs by way of the tongue, it enters the ear by aid of air; there it delivers itself of its burden, then flees back whence it came. but if that celestial traveler (musāfir-i āsmānī) journeys by aid of the fingers, traversing the lands and seas that are pens and ink visible to the eye (nūr-dīda), it finally sets down its burden in the pleasure-houses that are pages and retires from the highway of vision (dīda).171 this passage has been rightly celebrated by art historians: as a treatment of calligraphy it is unique in the arabo-persian encyclopedic tradition, for it adds to the standard tropes 171. āʾīn-i akbarī, 1.1/111-12. 93 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) and maxims a simultaneously poetic and precise metaphysics-psychology of light. what has not been recognized, however, is the fact that abū l-fażl is manifestly relying on a specifically timurid lettrist doctrine to this end.172 following ibn turka, either directly or via davānī, he asserts the letter to be a form of light emanated by the divine essence down through the four levels of being, from most occult to most manifest—the only cosmological model that explains the epistemological-ontological superiority of writing to speech: for only writing engages vision, that faculty of light, that highway to heaven. nor is his categorical equation of writing and talismans a rhetorical conceit, but rather a definition expressly scientific.173 as textual letter-magical devices based on number, talismans allow their maker to harness light at the celestial level for terrestrial purposes, to marry heaven to earth, to operationalize the cosmic aporia; this, abū l-fażl argues, is precisely what writing does—“though fallen, it soars.” the same applies to his bold oppositional light-dark imagery: the inky, calligraphed letter, deepest endarkenment, is the royal road of enlightenment. this, of course, is but a poetic expression of ibn turka’s signature doctrine of the letter as coincidentia oppositorum. abū l-fażl’s unprecedented modification of the euclidean dictum writing is a form of spiritual geometry, constantly repeated by encyclopedists from al-tawḥīdī onward, is thus of great philosophical-scientific significance; that is to say, it is surely the pithiest index of the intellectual and cultural seachange that transpired in the persianate world between the 8th-10th/14th-16th centuries, during which period muslim scholars began to take this ancient concept of writing—a spiritual geometry manifested by means of a physical instrument—very seriously indeed.174 “the talisman that is writing is a form of spiritual geometry from the pen of creation,” declares abū l-fażl, by which he means: written letternumber, simultaneously operative on the elemental and mathematical levels of being, can alone crystallize light, constellating the philosophia perennis; it alone is the gate of walāya, the ladder of theosis; it alone allows ascent back to the originary, all-writing one. and as for the imperial needs this indefatiguable mughal vizier was here serving: akbar understood himself as a talismanic being, a divine avatar of the sun, a holy body of light;175 what better prop to his claim to indo-timurid millennial kingship, then, than a timurid lettrist metaphysics of light? 172. it should be noted that blochmann’s own translation of this passage (the ain i akbari by abul fazl ‘allami, 1/97-98), frequently cited by specialists, is in places quite inaccurate, further obscuring its intellectual context. yael rice observes that overreliance on blochmann’s mistranslation has also given rise to the false notion that abū l-fażl deems writing far superior to painting (“between the brush,” 149). 173. abū l-fażl similarly calls painting (taṣvīr), an extension of writing in his treatment (if a lesser subset), a mighty magical operation (jādūkārī shigarf) (āʾīn-i akbarī, 1.1/116). 174. cf. the dictum attributed to apollonius (bālīnās) by al-tawḥīdī (and to plato by qāżī aḥmad), “the pen is the most powerful of talismans, and writing its product” (rosenthal, “abū ḥaiyān al-tawḥīdī,” 25). 175. moin, the millennial sovereign, 137-46; truschke, “translating the solar cosmology.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 94 conclusion being is a grammar; … the world is in all its parts a cryptogram to be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering.176 —jacques derrida this article does not pretend to be an “islamic answer to derrida,” or deconstruct deconstructionism: that is the task it has set itself. my approach here has rather been strictly historiographical and philological.177 but any history of western grammatology that elides, that writes off, its mainstream islamicate formulations—as is still regrettably and perniciously the default—is at best half complete. to supply this major historiographical lacuna, i have therefore presented a range of textual evidence for the emergence and persistence over centuries of a systematic islamic metaphysics of writing, an alternative western grammatology, this in response to the great middle period burgeoning of writerly culture throughout the islamicate world—a phenomenon that has been studied to date in strict isolation from its original occult-philosophical context. such an occultophobic, vivisectionist strategy, i argue, has occluded connections crucial for understanding the cultural, political and intellectual transformation of islamicate societies between the 7th-11th/13th-17th centuries. but if we read it carefully, the world muslims so fully wrote into being in the post-mongol era appears to be far more interconnected—far more intertextual—than has yet been appreciated. hence the hegemony of commentary culture and encyclopedism on the one hand and literary ornateness and speaking the new on the other, hence the fateful push to read the two books, to mathematize the cosmos: all pivot on the supremacy of the written, not spoken, word in islam. while this basic principle was first formulated by the bibliomaniacs of the high abbasid period, they did not supply a metaphysics to sustain and enforce it; but the occult philosophers produced by the mamluk-timurid burgeoning of writerly culture did. the metaphysics of writing the latter developed seems to have spread like wildfire, moreover, such that by the 10th/16th century islamicate discourses on writing, however literary, scientific or art-historical their context, came to bear an unmistakable lettrist stamp. such is the narrative that must now be recuperated as integral to the history of western grammatology, which (post-enlightenment colonialist-orientalist chauvinism notwithstanding) has long been and continues to be hellenic and islamic, jewish and christian, in equal measure, and a primary basis for the metaphysics of early modernity, modernity and postmodernity alike. at the same time, it must be emphasized that this science, for all its coherence as a western tradition from pythagoras and plato to the present, was and is a hotly contested site of cultural convergence and divergence, a pendulumic barrage of conand contradiction, a permanent complexio of oppositions— 176. “edmond jabès,” 94. 177. cf. paul de man’s observation that deconstruction is simply a form of philology (“the return to philology,” 24): “[i]n practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.” 95 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) making its comparative study equal parts hazardous and historiographically, even morally, pressing.178 to hazard a brief comparison of the science’s signal 15thand 20th-century iterations, ibn turkian and derridean respectively (assuming, for the nonce, that grammatologists as radically culturally different as ibn turka and derrida can legitimately and profitably be approached as members of the same western tradition): like derrida, it is true, if only terminologically, lettrists like ibn turka sought to prove writing’s superiority to speech;179 but unlike derrida, they hailed text not as tyrant but as theosizing talisman: inlibration as illumination, as salvation from the dark realms of matter and becoming.180 ibn turka’s doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf thus erects the neopythagorean ladder of return to the one. it is precisely this doctrine against which derrida categorically railed half a millennium later: the trace is the difference which opens appearance and signification. articulating the living upon the nonliving in general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent signification than an opaque energy and no concept of metaphysics can describe it. and as it is a fortiori anterior to the distinction between regions of sensibility, anterior to sound as much as to light, is there a sense in establishing a “natural” hierarchy between the acoustic imprint, for example, and the visual (graphic) imprint? the graphic image is not seen; and the acoustic image is not heard. the difference between the full unities of the voice remains unheard. invisible also the difference in the body of the inscription.181 according to derrida’s aporetic logic, that is, there can be no ontological superiority of writing to speech as empirically construed; he collapses the hierarchy to make transcendence of the text—and hence a grammatological metaphysics—impossible. and number figures not at all, light is a mere thud on the sensorium. there is no one, only the many; and they babble (babel) on forever. yet he collapses this semiotic hierarchy of being precisely to confine us in text. is our french-algerian post-jewish deconstructionist then simply a latter-day renegade kabbalist? perhaps so.182 as that may be, however, ibn turkian deconstruction was itself rather 178. as christopher lehrich notes (the occult mind, 46): comparative methods, which always uncomfortably mingle the synchronic and the diachronic, are thus not only useful but necessary. there is no way to avoid them. when we study people of other cultures or times, we ipso facto make comparison to ourselves, if only negatively or under the aegis of translation. to be sure, the claim that comparison implies identity, the eliade-yates reactualization, annuls important difference. but the pseudohistorical claim against comparison as intrinsically bad method is bigotry masquerading as rigor. 179. with the proviso, again, that derridean écriture is not to be understood in an empirical sense (see n. 8 above). 180. the term “inlibration” was coined by harry wolfson (the philosophy of the kalam, 244-62). 181. of grammatology, 70. 182. elliot wolfson argues that the kabbalistic features of derrida’s work are a product of convergence, not al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 96 renegade in its own day, as we have seen, and like derrida’s attacked the very basis of western metaphysics. the former’s neopythagorean doctrine of letter-number as coincidentia oppositorum undercut and transformed neoplatonized aristotelianism like the latter’s hyperstructuralist-antistructuralist doctrines of écriture and différance undercut and transformed structuralism. whether performed in french or persian, hebrew or arabic, deconstruction, quite simply, seeks to marry all opposites through perpetual revolution, eternal textual play, universal aporia.183 derridean writing thus conceptually corresponds not to ibn turkian writing, but to the neopythagorean letter-number itself. so much for theory; what of praxis? unlike its poststructuralist successor, which has unaccountably disowned magic, lettrist-kabbalist deconstruction made the marriage of opposites experimentally operational (and thus perennially attractive to scholarly and ruling elites): the prognosticon, the talisman. that is to say: it is also reconstructionist, for in place of the physics-metaphysics terminally deconstructed it supplies a new one most useful for working in and on the world, especially imperially.184 to accomplish his subversion of the metaphysics of modernity, in sum, derrida took western language conventionalism—common from aristotle onward and embodied in the 20th century by saussurian linguistics—to its furthest extreme; his lettrist and kabbalist forebears went to the opposite extreme. not only did they posit a radically anticonventionalist theory of language (based in the first place on the traditionalist doctrine of the uncreatedness of the quran or the torah),185 but asserted that language, carrier of consciousness and body of light, constellates a metaphysics-mathematicsmagic continuum that marries heaven to earth and the one to the many. in practical terms, letter-number—because it alone constructs and orders every level of being eternally emanating from the one, thereby erecting time and space—must contain within it the knowledge of past, present and future (hence the prognosticon), must allow for the changing, by means of human consciousness, of physical reality itself (hence the talisman)—and that in measurable, falsifiable, scientific fashion.186 indeed, that magic— like islam—remains a stumbling-block for latter-day deconstructionism, wherein it figures merely as not-science and not-religion, of use only for mocking metaphysicians, direct influence (“assaulting the border”); moshe idel rather posits “a certain residue of kabbalistic thought” in deconstruction, and characterizes derrida as “a thinker who has been influenced by kabbalistic views of the nature of the text” (absorbing perfections, 77, 83). 183. a classic example here is derrida’s deconstruction of the term pharmakon in “plato’s pharmacy,” signifying both “poison” and “antidote” (as well as “charm” or “spell”), which he uses to symbolize writing as constituting “the medium in which opposites are opposed,” and therefore allowing for the exploding of plato’s construction of binaries (127). 184. on this theme see my the occult science of empire. cf. ian almond’s comparative study of derrida and ibn ʿarabī (the latter, of course, being a primary source for ibn turka’s lettrism), sufism and deconstruction. 185. see n. 88 above. 186. naturally, i here use “scientific” and “experimentalist” in the much broader early modern sense of these terms. 97 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) is strategically unfortunate.187 for to take the explicitly experimentalist claims of lettristkabbalist deconstruction-reconstruction seriously is to fatally subvert modernity in general and the scientistic disciplines of the modern academy in particular; it is to write a different west in a way that might fairly rejoice derridean cockles.188 derrida himself, of course, made no pretense of being a historian: thus his diagnosis as to the superiority of speech to writing in western culture—and crypto-kabbalistic, aporetic overturning thereof—is as historically inapplicable to islam as it is to judaism. this is despite the fact that islamicate civilization was, as it were, strongly western in its orientation; ibn turka styled himself a pythagoras redivivus, disciple of solomon and ʿalī. more problematically for his deconstruction of western culture, derrida’s diagnosis likewise elides the christian kabbalists of renaissance europe (and their jewish teachers), who from the late 9th/15th century onward sought to reconcile the socratic and the hebraic;189 their success in this project heralded in some measure “scientific modernity.” but a hundred years earlier, their lettrist peers to the south and east, living under the banner of post-mongol universalist-perennialist islam—the religio-imperial coincidentia oppositorum that had long since married hellenic and abrahamic, shiʿi and sunni, persian and arab, nomad and settled, east and west—, established lettrism as the occult-manifest center of islamic knowing, the solomonic-imamic pythagorean-platonic core of the philosophia perennis, constellatable only through writing. i must here again emphasize the astonishing degree of islamo-christianate intellectual continuity during the 15th and 16th centuries, and that largely in the absence of direct contact. equally astonishing is the fact that this phenomenon is still essentially unstudied. that the upshot of christians—relying on jews—reading the world as mathematical text was scientific modernity, but that of muslims doing the same was not, cannot be cited (though it continues to reflexively be) as proof of the decadence, the weak reading, of the latter, or the inherent, eternal medievalness of islam. to state the obvious, that is, this outcome was simply a consequence of different cultural priorities as pursued within the strictures of different sociopolitical structures. triumphalist, whiggish backreading, to be sure, posits a great divergence, at the culture-genetic level, whereby (in spenglerian 187. for derrida, magic, for all that it does haunt his discourse, in the end can but be “a cheap deconstructionism, an ill-informed derrideanism, a false show of deconstructive elegance and insight that blinds itself to its impotence … but it may nevertheless act as a liberator by its protest against the deceptive demand for presence and truth with which magic’s various opposites (science, religion) mystify their operations” (lehrich, the occult mind, 171, 176). 188. wouter hanegraaff in particular has argued for esotericism (including occultism in the sense i use it here) as the primary other upon whose undead frame western modernity has been and continues to be constructed (esotericism and the academy, passim; see also von stuckrad, locations of knowledge, 200). taking a more strictly theoretical-critical approach, lehrich holds that “magic may be seen as a kind of prophecy of a structural thought yet unborn”; while it “cannot be defined as differance,” magic “often plays the part of its sign or, to be more precise, coexists with the thinking of or toward differance ….” as such, and despite his own inadequate definitions of the term, “derrida offers us the best analytical tools for thinking (about) magic. it is by standing upon derrida’s perhaps unwilling shoulders that we can learn to evade through recognition the destructive effects of magic as an object of thought” (the occult mind, 166, 175, 177). 189. cf. derrida, “edmond jabès,” 89. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 98 terms) apollonian-faustian christian linearity, a genius for division, for rupture, outpaced magian islamic circularity, a genius for wholeness, for synthesis, for ambiguity, for continuity.190 yet for all europe’s infatuation with aristotle and his materialist creed (via arabic astrology, ironically),191 it was largely the disciples of a semiticized plato, a solomonic pythagoras, who emerged as the philosophical-scientific elite of early modern islamdom and christendom alike; and most espoused a constructionist ontogrammatology. newton’s principia mathematica, in other words, is as intrinsically an arabic text as it is a latin; and pico found he could only marry plato and aristotle via kabbalah. its irreducible islamicness aside, ibn turka’s book of inquiries would have been perfectly legible as a liber quaestiones had it made the further crossing from anatolia to italy. but there was no enlightenment in islam—and so no equal and opposed endarkenment—, which is to say: no divorce of reason from revelation, occult from manifest, magic from science, heaven from earth, mind from body, man from nature, man from man. for enlightened materialist-positivist europeans, writing, that talisman of light, now went dark—whence the endarkenment of the romantics, occultists all: the incoincidentia oppositorum. the same did not happen for muslims until much later, and then only in the wake of the largely externally-imposed cultural rupture that was colonialism (made possible by the collusion of muslim scripturalists, to be sure).192 manuscript culture, a significant subset of it lettrist, hence persisted in most parts of the islamicate world through the early 14th/20th century; it persists in pockets even now. ibn turka’s ontogrammato logy, his lettrist metaphysics of light, is thus emblematic of the cultural continuity, not rupture, that defined islamicate civilization from its inception.193 staunchly perennialist in its own right, this synthetic alid-pythagorean-solomonic doctrine became, as we have seen, broadly influential from the early 9th/15th century onward, from india to anatolia, and endured as a mainstream philosophical discourse in iran until at least the 13th/19th. so much for divergence; what of reconvergence? surprisingly, or perhaps not, forms of what may be styled neo-neopythagorean ontogrammatology are coming back into vogue in euro-american culture, high and popular alike, pockets of which have continued to have fits of pique with the enlightenment for locking it away in the prison of dark matter—and claiming to have thrown away the key. it was precisely the mid-20th-century linguistic turn in critical theory, moreover, culminating in derrida’s curiously kabbalistic hostility 190. the organic continuity of arabic literature, for instance, as well as other great literary traditions, including persian, sanskrit and chinese, stands in sharp contrast to the “catastrophic” and rupturous form of change unique to european literary history (bauer, “mamluk literature,” 112). expanding on this argument, bauer has recently shown that the synthesizing ethos of islamicate civilization also entailed a high tolerance for ambiguity—legal, social, sexual, philosophical, etc.—, this, again, in sharp contrast to christendom (die kultur der ambiguität). the same is a central thesis of shahab ahmed’s what is islam? 191. see lemay, abu maʿshar and latin aristotelianism. 192. for a case study see melvin-koushki and pickett, “mobilizing magic.” 193. islamicate civilization was not simply the greatest heir of late antique eurasian cultures, that is, and especially the hellenic, persian and abrahamic, but rather their direct continuation and culmination (bauer, “in search of ‘post-classical literature,’” 142; fowden, before and after muḥammad). 99 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) to and subversion of modern structuralist metaphysics, that effectively cleared the way for the emergence in the academy of a new-old western physics-metaphysics pivoting on language and consciousness. a number of recent developments are here especially suggestive: peircean semiotics— wherein every existent is a sign—has become a cottage industry in philosophy;194 geneticists persist in speaking of chemical life in textual terms;195 and some cognitive scientists have mathematically hypothesized a monistic-panpsychist conscious realism, whereby perception alone erects time and space and quantum-mechanically codes what we take to be physical reality.196 the latter trend in particular derives from the new discipline of physics—which long since displaced metaphysics, including its kabbalist/lettrist branch, as queen of the sciences in the west—now burgeoning: the physics of information.197 this ontogrammatological turn is epitomized by princeton physicist john wheeler’s famous 1989 dictum it from bit—that is to say, “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”198 most strikingly, this emergent cosmology 194. as peirce (d. 1914) summarizes the central position of his pragmaticist semiotics (“the basis of pragmaticism,” 394): “the entire universe … is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.” 195. see e.g. von stuckrad, “rewriting the book of nature.” the american geneticist francis collins (b. 1950), past director of the human genome project and current director of the nih, is an avowed christian kabbalist; see e.g. his the language of god. 196. as donald d. hoffman, cognitive scientist at the university of california, irvine, and author of visual intelligence (1998), summarizes this model in his “hoffman’s law”: hoffman’s first law: a theory of everything starts with a theory of mind. quantum measurement hints that observers may create microphysical properties. computational theories of perception hint that observers may create macrophysical properties. the history of science suggests that counterintuitive hints, if pursued, can lead to conceptual breakthroughs. hoffman’s second law: physical universes are user interfaces for minds. just as the virtual worlds experienced in vr arcades are interfaces that allow the arcade user to interact effectively with an unseen world of computers and software, so also the physical work one experiences daily is a species-specific user interface that allows one to survive while interacting with a world of which one may be substantially ignorant. he elsewhere reiterates the planckian doctrine of mind as matrix of matter (“consciousness is fundamental”): i believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being … if matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. the mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession. 197. see e.g. vedral, decoding reality. 198. “information, physics, quantum,” 5. the passage in full: it from bit. otherwise put, every it—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its functions, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes or no questions, binary choices, bits. it from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) of islamic grammatology • 100 requires us to recognize the universe as a “metareality of information structures,” and the unidirectional flow of time and the strict limits of space as human constructs; hence the ability of human consciousness, logos processor that it is, to quantum-mechanically change physical reality by the mere act of observation, even in the past.199 information structures, of course, are embodied, are a form of writing; and observation is a vision of light. evolutionary theologians have seized upon this new physics of information in turn as the only workable means of reconciling the christian doctrine of creation with darwinian evolution (shades of pico’s embrace of kabbalah in pursuit of a project equally paradoxical): the universe as meaning-generating device.200 all of which sounds suspiciously talismanic; ibn turka would have grounds to be smug. pace derrida, then, western lovers of writing, muslim or christian, and however devoted to plato, have roundly called and do call foul on the phaedrus. deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions, and the registering of equipmentevoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe. echoing bauer’s observation as to a similar transition in mamluk literature (see n. 133 above), as well as hanegraaff’s theorization of a modern “disenchanted magic” (“how magic survived”), perhaps we can speak of a turn in physics from the cold representationalism of the newtonian model to the more intimate participationalism promised by the physics of information? 199. vallée, “a theory of everything (else).” 200. for examples see davies and gregersen, eds., information and the nature of reality; melvin-koushki, “the quest,” 447-48. 101 • matthew melvin-koushki al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 24 (2016) bibliography primary sources ʿallāmī, abū l-fażl, āʾīn-i akbarī, ed. h. blochmann, 2 vols., calcutta: asiatic society of bengal, 1869-72. ———, the ain i akbari by abul fazl ‘allami, tr. h. blochmann, 3 vols., calcutta: asiatic society of bengal, 1873. āmulī, shams al-dīn muḥammad, nafāyis 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use them for local anchorage during the seventh and eighth centuries while, at the same time, seeking to integrate them into stable and enclosed monastic structures. these solitary monks also fascinated arab populations since st. simeon both invented this asceticism and converted local bedouins. indeed, the muslim tradition contains important evidence of the influence exerted by the so-called ahl alṣawāmiʿ on muslims. in this article i demonstrate that during the first two centuries of the hijra, the concept of ṣawmaʿ(a) exactly matches the syriac understanding of esṭūnō as a retreat on top of a high construction, whether a square tower or a proper column. i rely on poetry, early lexicography, bilingual hagiography and historiography, and especially the syriac and arabic versions of abū bakr’s waṣiyya, which expressly refers to these monks. i then show how the developing islamic authorities tried to divert arab muslims from these initially privileged and valued figures. to this end, they used the same kinds of arguments as did the canonical anathemas against stylites, who were also often seen as competitors and threats by the official ecclesiastical authorities. scholars of ḥadīṯ, fiqh, and tafsīr developed their own rhetoric, distinguishing, for instance, between good stylites and bad “tonsured” ones, while jurists gradually restricted their initial tax privileges. finally, the latter, at the end of the second/eighth century, they required muslims to completely avoid them, completing the process of excommunicating both christianity and its most revered figure. * je remercie vivement l’équipe éditoriale d’al-ʿusūr al-wusṭā pour leur assidu travail de relecture. sans leur exceptionnelle acuité, jamais cet article n’aurait pu voir le jour. je remercie également mes évaluateurs anonymes pour leurs corrections et conseils, et pour ces inestimables références dont j’ignorais l’existence et sans lesquels cet article ne serait que l’ombre de ce qu’il est devenu. © 2020 simon pierre. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:sim.pierre85%40gmail.com?subject= 175 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 176 1. introduction : saints hommes syro-orthodoxes et communautés rurales et pastorales l’hagiographie syriaque conserve le souvenir d’une forme de voisinage et de coexistence entre les tentes des arabes et les « cahutes des solitaires » (kūrḥē d-iḥīdāyē). c’est ce dont témoigne par exemple l’histoire de bēt qōqā en adiabène1 à l’époque des abbés jean (r. 55–72/675–92) et šūbḥ al-māran (r. 72–111/693–729)2. les relations entre ce type de religieux chrétiens et les populations arabo-musulmanes ne furent pas rares et favorisèrent sans doute un prolongement, voire une consolidation du processus de christianisation après la conquête médinoise. les contacts que nouèrent, au milieu du vie siècle, les phylarques jafnides de palaestina iii, d’arabia et de phoenicia ii et les missionnaires et partisans de sévère d’antioche (r. 512–18) ont été bien étudiés ces dernières années3. pourtant, ce ne fut pas avant l’époque islamique que l’église miaphysite syriaque accorda des évêchés spécifiques à des populations que nous définirions comme des arabes (ʿammē ou ṭayyōyē), parfois même circonscrits à une expression tribale (namirōye, tanūkōyē, taglibōyē, maʿaddōyē)4. ces éléments suggèrent que les populations pastorales et bédouines continuèrent d’entretenir, après l’hégire, des liens très étroits avec certaines institutions chrétiennes, notamment auprès des miaphysites du jund de qinnasrīn-jazīra. john trimingham, dans 1. province ecclésiastique (ḥadyab en syriaque, ḥazzā en arabe) qui correspond au nōd-ardashiragan sassanide, centré autour de la métropole d’arbelā (erbil), entre la rive gauche du tigre au niveau de mossoul et la crête du zagros. 2. « histoire du monastère de bēth qōqā », dans sources syriaques 1, éd. a. mingana (leipzig : o. harrassowitz, 1908), 171‒220, ici 199‒202. à plusieurs reprises, ces moines parviennent à inspirer le respect à ces voisins imprévus. 3. à ce sujet, on se reportera utilement à h. lammens, « le chantre des omiades. notes bibliographiques et littéraires sur le poète arabe chrétien akhṭal », journal asiatique, 9e sér., 4 (1894) : 94‒242 et 381‒459, ici 121 ; j. segal, « arabs in syriac literature before the rise of islam », jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 4 (1984) : 89‒124, ici 121 ; i. shahid, byzantium and the arabs in the sixth century (washington, dc : dumbarton oaks, 1995) et g. fisher et p. wood, “arabs and christianity,” dans arabs and empires before islam, éd. g. fisher, 276‒372 (oxford : oxford university press, 2015) ; et les longues descriptions des auteurs médiévaux michel le syrien, chronique de michel le syrien, patriarche jacobite d’antioche, 1166–1199, éd. j.-b. chabot (paris : pierre leroux, 1910), 374 et chronicon anonymum ad annum christi 1234 pertinens, éd. j.-b. chabot (paris : csco 14, 1916), 213. 4. à propos des ʿammē et de leurs composantes ethniques, qui occupaient un échelon différent de la nomenclature ecclésiastique, que de celui des « cités, couvents, villages » (etc.) on se reportera à s. pierre, « les ʿammē en “ǧazīra et en occident”. genèse et fixation d’un ethnonyme standardisé pour les tribus arabes chrétiennes. les tanukōyē, ṭūʿōyē, ʿaqūlōyē à l’âge marwānide », annales islamologiques 52 (2018) : 11–44, ici 16 and 18–31. sur les taglibōyē voir mon article à paraître : s. pierre, « the subjugation and taxation of the banū taghlib in jazīra and mosul (ca. 153–193 h/770–809 ce) », dans the reach of empire, éd. s. heidemann et k. mewes (berlin : de gruyter, 2021). aucune source syro-orthodoxe ne fait allusion à de tels évêchés associés à une unité tribale comme les banū taġlib, ou à un ensemble lignager comme maʿadd avant la liste d’ordinations en annexe de michel le syrien, chronique, 753, 754, 755, 756, 758 et 759 qui débute en 793. antérieurement, il existe une mention, dans la lettre d’athanase, d’un évêque « de pērōz šāpūr inférieure et le peuple des ṭayyōyē namirōyē (al-namir) » en 8/629, préservée dans la même chronique, sans pouvoir être reliée à aucune attestation postérieure (ibid., 413). il existe une mention d’un joseph des taglibōyē, sous julien ii le romain (r. 66‒88/687‒708), mais dans un récit très remanié par le même michel le syrien ou sa source où joseph est aussi appelé d-ṭayyōyē de manière plus vague (ibid., 448). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 176 sa synthèse sur le christianisme arabe, a suggéré qu’une « forme spécifique d’ascétisme syrien qui attira les arabes bédouins était le stylitisme5 ». il fut particulièrement influencé par le concept de « l’homme saint » (holy man) défini par peter brown en 19716. ce dernier considérait que l’oikouménè civique était, dans l’environnement climatique syrien et dans l’implantation anthropique qui en découlait, constamment entremêlé avec l’érèmos rural, steppique et désertique7. selon lui, « l’homme saint » serait devenu le principal évangélisateur des communautés rurales qui subsistaient à la marge de la civilité chrétienne tardo-antique. hors de la hiérarchie officielle, les holy men formèrent aux yeux des populations rurales superficiellement christianisées, les pagani, des référents et des arbitres alternatifs, à la fois proches et charismatiques. selon brown, ils répondirent à une « crise de la liberté » qui aurait caractérisé un monde tardo-antique où les institutions étaient remplacées par des relations interpersonnelles8. brown a essentiellement fondé son modèle sur des récits hagiographiques grecs et syriaques des ve et vie siècle où les « hommes saints » adoptaient fréquemment un mode paradoxal de retraite au milieu du monde qui avait été inventé par siméon le stylite (m. 459)9. de fait il s’est appuyé sur les vies de ce saint et sur celles de plusieurs des reclus de la période antéislamique qui s'inspirèrent de son ascèse spectaculaire et sa stature d’arbitre des communautés. cet article a pour objectif d’aborder la figure du stylite dans les littératures arabomusulmanes et syriaques d’époque hégirienne. nous nous interrogerons sur son impact à l’égard des communautés chrétiennes après la conquête et sur les contestations qu’ils provoquèrent. nous envisagerons également la perception de ces anachorètes aux colonnes chez les auteurs arabo-musulmans et le développement progressif d’une forme parallèle d’opposition à ces pratiques, alors que l’islam se consolidait en tant que religion. nous montrerons que la figure du stylite constitue un point de fixation central de la civilisation 5. j. trimingham, christianity among the arabs in pre-islamic times (londres : longman, 1979), 233 : « a peculiar form of syrian asceticism that attracted bedouin arabs was stylitism. » 6. p. brown, « the rise and function of the holy man in late antiquity », journal of roman studies 61 (1971) : 80‒101. le présent travail s’inscrit dans le prolongement d’une communication pour la journée d’étude doctorale de l’école doctorale 1 (ed 22) de sorbonne université le 15/12/2018 : « confusions et délimitations confessionnelles au premier siècle de l’hégire. les arabes face au christianisme. » nous y avons pris pour point de départ l’intuition de peter brown et de john trimingham. la mise au contact des arabes avec le phénomène du stylitisme syro-mésopotamien, en particulier miaphysite, depuis l’époque de saint siméon jusqu’au début de l’époque hégirienne, et la réalité sous-tendue par ce topos littéraire et historiographique est partiellement abordé dans un article séparé : s. pierre, « le développement du stylitisme et l’enjeu de la christianisation des arabes en syrie-mésopotamie tardo-antique (ve–viiie siècles) », camenulae, à paraître. 7. brown, « holy man », 87‒93. 8. ibid., 99. sur la question du développement de l’ascétisme, la référence incontournable reste a. vööbus, history of asceticism in the syrian orient. a contribution to the history of culture in the near east (louvain : csco, 1958). 9. brown, « holy man », 83, 88, 90, 92 et 96. à propos du culte chalcédonien de siméon le stylite en syrie du nord, on se reportera à j. nasrallah, « le couvent de saint siméon l’alépin. témoignages littéraires et jalons sur l’histoire », parole de l’orient 1 (1970) : 327–56 et j. nasrallah, « couvents de la syrie du nord portant le nom de siméon », syria 49, no 1/2 (1972) : 127–59 ; il utilise beaucoup la vie de daniel le stylite (m. 493) qui officia ensuite surtout à constantinople. https://www.academia.edu/41110071/le_d%c3%a9veloppement_du_stylitisme_et_lenjeu_de_la_christianisation_des_arabes_en_syrie-m%c3%a9sopotamie_tardo-antique_ve-viii_e_si%c3%a8cles_ https://www.academia.edu/41110071/le_d%c3%a9veloppement_du_stylitisme_et_lenjeu_de_la_christianisation_des_arabes_en_syrie-m%c3%a9sopotamie_tardo-antique_ve-viii_e_si%c3%a8cles_ 177 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 178 tardo-antique des débuts de l’islam. elle semble avoir constitué, autant pour les autorités arabo-musulmanes que syro-orthodoxes, un modèle de piété et une figure à respecter, et en même temps, un rival et un danger pour le bon ordre du troupeau. cette position médiane laisse supposer que leur influence de holy man auprès des communautés rurales n’est pas qu’un topos, ou un simple motif canonique répétitif, mais qu’ils constituèrent bel et bien des agents essentiels de la christianisation des agriculteurs (pagani) et des pasteurs (aʿrāb). les dirigeants de ces communautés exercèrent diverses pressions afin de sauvegarder leur autorité politique et religieuse. plus largement, nous mettrons en évidence un exemple d’échanges interculturels entre les littératures chrétiennes et musulmanes à l’égard d’une figure commune. avant trimingham, brown avait aussi eu l’intuition, sans vraiment l’approfondir, que « les bédouins furent parmi [les] premiers clients10 » de ces hommes saints. les récits hagiographiques qui leurs sont consacrés accordent en effet une place non négligeable aux arabophones pastoraux (sarakènoi en grec et ṭayyāyē en syriaque), et même, dans une certaine mesure, à l’aristocratie arabe. la question de l’influence des stylites dans ce processus a été abordée successivement par henri lammens11 et françois nau12, puis john trimingham13 et juda segal14 et plus récemment par elizabeth fowden15, theresia hainthaler16 et greg fisher17. cependant, ils ont pour l’essentiel évité les sources arabomusulmanes et syro-orthodoxes traitant du phénomène à l’époque hégirienne18. siméon et daniel les anciens, ainsi que leurs disciples homonymes de la fin du vie siècle, semblent avoir été des partisans du concile de chalcédoine qui, en 451, avait établi le dyophysisme officiel romain19. pourtant, leur patronage fut tout autant revendiqué 10. brown, « holy man », 83. 11. h. lammens, « un poète royal à la cour des omeyyades », revue de l’orient chrétien 8 (1903) : 325‒87 et 9 (1904) : 32–64, ici 34 and 36‒37. il a mis l’accent sur la symbolique de la lampe et eu l’intuition que la ṣawmaʿa y avait quelque chose en rapport, voir infra. 12. f. nau, les arabes chrétiens de mésopotamie et de syrie du viie au viiie siècle (paris : cahiers de la société asiatique, 1933), 37‒38 et 104. 13. trimingham, christianity among the arabs, 143, 158, 189 et 229. 14. segal, « arabs in syriac literature », 104‒5 et 116‒17 ; sur la particularité syrienne du stylitisme, voir f. trombley, hellenic religion and christianization, c. 370–529 (leyde : brill, 1993) et d. t. m. frankfurter, « stylites and phallobates. pillar religions in late antique syria », vigiliae christianae 44, no 2 (1990) : 168–98. 15. e. k. fowden, the barbarian plain. saint sergius between rome and iran (berkeley : university of california press, 1999), 40 ; e. k. fowden, « des églises pour les arabes, pour les nomades ? », dans les églises en monde syriaque, éd. f. briquel-chatonnet, 391‒412 (paris : geuthner, 2013), 401. 16. t. hainthaler, « christian arabs before islam. a short overview », dans people from the desert. pre-islamic arabs in history and culture. selected essays, éd. n. al-jallad, 29–44 (wiesbaden : reichert, 2012), 40. 17. g. fisher, between empires. arabs, romans, and sasanians in late antiquity (oxford : oxford university press, 2011), 36‒37 et 44. 18. voir le bilan historiographique de la question dans pierre, « stylitisme et christianisation des arabes ». 19. sur cet enjeu, voir l’approche de p. peeters, le tréfonds oriental de l’hagiographie byzantine (bruxelles : société des bollandistes, 1950), 93‒136, ici 97‒101 il considère que le saint homme était bel et bien dyophysite et 134‒36 que ce ne fut que tardivement que son sanctuaire passa aux mains des miaphysites. nous retrouvons dans j. nasrallah, « l’orthodoxie de siméon stylite l’alépin et sa survie dans l’église melchite », parole de l’orient 2, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 178 par les miaphysites. emmanuel soler propose que les adeptes de cette ascèse se fussent refusés à prendre une position christologique tranchée20, et que cet exercice aurait été plus tard représentatif d’une position médiane. selon lui, aucun point de vue, miaphysite ou chalcédonien n’est réellement plus « authentique » que l’autre21. en outre, le complexe architectural de qalʿat simʿān ne peut être spécifié comme typiquement chalcédonien sur des fondements architecturaux22 et, à l’inverse, il serait erroné ou excessif de considérer qu’il aurait été complètement privatisé par les anti-chalcédoniens à la fin du vie siècle23. les clercs et les ermites chrétiens étaient partagés en courants et n’avaient pas encore établis d’églises hermétiquement distinctes dans le diocèse d’orient romain tandis que l’organisation de l’église sassanide ne se définit comme une « église de l’orient » qu’à la toute fin du vie siècle au plus tôt24. dès lors, tout en maintenant des formes de cohabitations, les religieux se disputaient âprement les sites cultuels, les monastères, ainsi que les lieux de mémoire des martyrs et des saints hommes et les grands sanctuaires à festival ; mais aussi les colonnes pour stationner25. en revanche, cette forme d’ascèse est complètement inconnue dans l’église de perse/de l’orient, y compris, autant que nous puissions le savoir, parmi les communautés miaphysites. il s’agit donc d’une spécificité syrienne, qui constitua un pilier de la politique monastique des différents courants opposés. les sources syro-orthodoxes confirment l’importance du stylitisme parmi les partisans de sévère dès le début du vie siècle et ensuite à l’époque de jacques baradée (m. 578), en particulier après leur disgrâce consécutive à la mort de justinien (r. 527–65)26. jean d’éphèse (m. v. 580) souligne en effet l’importance de cette figure dans sa formation chrétienne et celle de sa communauté rurale. ainsi, il existait dans son village natal une colonne occupée par un certain abraham, dont les habitants no 2 (1971) : 345‒65, à 345‒48 des arguments en faveur d’un siméon « hérétique » du point de vue chalcédonien, et la prise de position de l’auteur qui rejoint celle de paul peeters. plus récemment, la mise au point à propos de la tradition hagiographique par b. caseau, « syméon stylite l’ancien entre puanteur et parfum », revue des études byzantines 63 (2005) : 71‒96, ici 73‒83 et au sujet de sa confession éventuelle : e. soler, « la figure de syméon stylite l’ancien et les controverses christologiques des ve–vie siècles en orient », dans dieu(x) et hommes. histoire et iconographie des sociétés païennes et chrétiennes de l’antiquité à nos jours. mélanges en l’honneur de françoise thelamon, éd. s. crogiez-pétrequin, 187–210 (caen : publications des universités de rouen et du havre, 2005), 196‒99. 20. soler, « la figure de syméon stylite », 196‒99. 21. ibid., 209‒10. 22. ibid., 205‒6. 23. ibid., 208‒9. 24. dans une formule encore ambigüe chez le catholicos ezechiel (r. 570–81), synodicon orientale ou recueil de synodes nestoriens, éd. j.-b. chabot (paris : imprimerie nationale, 1902), 111 puis explicitement sous sabr-išōʿ (r. 596–604) (ibid., 206) ; voir aussi l’avis de s. brelaud, « présences chrétiennes en mésopotamie durant l’époque sassanide (iiie–viie siècles). géographie et société » (phd diss., sorbonne université, 2018), 220, n. 1235, qui reporte l’émergence d’une telle église régionale au viiie siècle. 25. i. peña, p. castellana et r. fernandez, les stylites syriens (milan : franciscan printing press, 1975), 65. 26. michel le syrien, chronique, 281 ; peña, castellana et fernandez, stylites syriens, 62 ; a. palmer, monk and mason on the tigris frontier. the early history of tur ‘abdin (londres : cambridge university press, 1990), 79 et 113‒14. 179 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 180 auraient exigé que mārūn, son frère, prenne à sa mort la succession27. andrew palmer a notamment étudié le développement du stylitisme dans le ṭūr ʿabdīn28 constatant qu’il était délibérément inspiré du modèle du saint antiochien siméon l’ancien. il a démontré que les stylites, appelés esṭūnōrē (ceux de la colonne : esṭūnō), occupèrent une place prééminente dans l’imaginaire syro-orthodoxe des deux premiers siècles de l’islam29. en tant que holy men, ils passèrent du statut de marginaux charismatiques à celui d’étape nécessaire du cursus spirituel des « solitaires » (iḥīdōyē). paradoxalement, ils continuèrent à occuper une position de rivaux potentiels de la hiérarchie officielle30. ils furent ciblés par une politique délibérée de domestication du monachisme à partir de la fin du vie siècle, aussi bien dans l’espace syriaque occidental que dans le monde sassanide, où, il faut le répéter, la mode stylitisme ne fit pas recette. dans le monde romain et post-romain du šām et de jazīra, en revanche, l’expression estūnōrō finit, au tournant de l’hégire, par désigner un grand nombre de genres de réclusion. pour la plupart, ils habitaient des tours plutôt que des « colonnes » de récupération romaines (ou construites pour l’occasion)31. souvent, ces édifices occupaient le voisinage de l’enclos du monastère, voire en était le cœur battant, l’axis mundi. à l’époque islamique, cette institution était devenue centrale, ainsi qu’en atteste le « pilier » (esṭūnō) qui donne son nom au principal monastère occupé par le patriarcat miaphysite jazīrien à l’époque abbasside32. plusieurs autres autorités importantes de l’église syro-orthodoxe, destinées à 27. palmer, monk and mason, 106 ; jean d’éphèse, « lives of the eastern saints. iv: next the fourth history, of the saints abraham and maro the brothers », éd. e. w. brooks, patrologia orientalis 17 (1923) : 56‒84, ici 56‒57, 59‒60, 69‒70, 78 et 82‒84 ; cet exemple est détaillé dans pierre, « stylitisme et christianisation des arabes ». 28. massif de collines arides situées entre nisibe, mārdīn et amid. 29. palmer, monk and mason, 106. 30. bar hébraeus, nomocanon gregorii barhebraei, éd. p. bedjan (leipzig : o. harrassowitz, 1898), 113 ; traduction dans f. nau, les canons et les résolutions canoniques (paris : p. lethielleux, 1906), 94 ; dad-išōʿ qaṭrāyā, traité sur la solitude et la prière (sept semaines de solitude) [livre des degrés], éd. a. mingana (toronto : woodbrooke studies, 1934), 201‒47, ici 202 ; voir aussi c. fauchon, « les formes de vie ascétique et monastique en milieu syriaque, ve–viie siècles », dans le monachisme syriaque, éd. f. jullien, 37‒63 (paris : geuthner, 2010), ici 37, n. 4. 31. fauchon, « vie ascétique », 49. voir les exemples étudiés par palmer, monk and mason, 102, 105, 188 et 217 et la lecture de a. desreumaux, « l’épigraphie syriaque du monachisme », dans jullien, le monachisme syriaque, 261‒90, ici 287 ; i. peña, p. castellana et r. fernandez, les reclus syriens. recherches sur les anciennes formes de vie solitaire en syrie (milan : franciscan printing press, 1980), 300‒301 ; sur les colonnes se reporter à o. callot et p.-l. gatier, « les stylites de l’antiochène », dans antioche de syrie. histoire, images et traces de la ville antique, lyon, 4–6 octobre 2001, éd. b. cabouret, p.-l. gatier et c. saliou, 573‒96 (lyon : société des amis de la bibliothèque salomon-reinach, 2004). 32. selon michel le syrien, chronique, 414, il fut édifié pour les réfugiés du couvent de qdar détruit par les envahisseurs « ṭayyōyē » dans les années 630, thème principal de la notice du « prêtre thomas » dans le « chronicon miscellaneum ad annum domini 724 pertinens », éd. e. w. brooks, dans chronica minora 1, 77–155 (paris : csco, 1903), 148, au sujet de cette chronique lire m. debié, l’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque. transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellénisme et islam (louvain : peeters, 2015), 545 ; autres mentions dans michel le syrien, chronique, 492 et 753. il existait également un « couvent de [...] speqlūs » (michel le syrien, chronique, 469) dans la région de raʾs al-ʿayn. très actif entre les années 64/684 et 108/726, son nom dériverait probablement du latin specula : « la al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 180 une postérité littéraire et/ou à de hautes fonctions épiscopales, s’avèrent avoir été, à un moment ou à un autre de leur carrière, des stylites. un grand nombre de ces personnalités furent alors, directement ou non, en contact avec des arabo-bédouins, voire responsables d’entreprises plus ou moins explicitement destinées à leur évangélisation33. ce faisant, les stylites devinrent de véritables arbitres, éducateurs et, souvent, des chefs de communautés rurales, comme l’ont observé uriel simonsohn et mathieu tillier34. 2. esṭūnō et ṣawmaʿa dans les débuts de l’islam 2.1. les reclus, les stylites et « ceux des ṣawmaʿa-s » dans le testament (waṣiyya) d’abū bakr (r. 11–13/632–34) les sources syriaques rapportent plusieurs témoignages explicites de rencontres d’arabes avec des stylites à l’époque post-hégirienne. la chronique anonyme jusqu’en 1234 qui préserve une partie de la chronique civile perdue du patriarche denys de tell maḥrē (r. 203–30/818–45) contient une mention particulièrement suggestive. elle attribue au premier calife abū bakr (r. 11–13/632–34) un discours destiné aux troupes en partance pour la syrie : alors que les forces des arabes (ṭayyōyē) se pressaient à sortir de « la cité » (mdī(n)tō = médine), abū bakr sortit avec eux et [. . .] leur déclara : « lorsque vous entrerez en ce pays (1) ne tuez ni vieillard, ni enfant, ni bébé, ni femmes (2) ne faites point descendre les stylites de leur place (lō tḥattūn ēsṭūnōrē men dūkōtō) (3) ne nuisez point aux solitaires (iḥīdōyē) parce qu’ils se sont dévoués eux-mêmes (prašū naf š -hūn) à servir (npallḥūn) dieu (4) n’abattez pas les arbres et ne détruisez point les plantations (5) n’éviscérez point les bêtes, les bœufs et les moutons35. » tour de garde » (h. takahashi and l van rompay, “reshʿayna, theodosiopolis”. dans encyclopedic dictionary of the syriac heritage, édité par s. brock et al., piscataway : gorgias, 2011, p. 351) ». 33. selon bar hébraeus, gregorii barhebraei chronicon ecclesiasticum quod e codice musei britannici descriptum [. . .], éd. j.-b. abbeloos et t. lamy (paris : maisonneuve/louvain : peeters, 1874), 2. col. 151, jean le chionite fut lui-même élu métropolite dans le monastère du knūšyō de sinjār, à la succession de paul qui y résidait également. ce lieu est lié aux tribus arabes chrétiennes comme le suggère la mention explicite dans la vie d’aḥūdemmeh ; histoires d’ahoudemmeh et de marouta, métropolitains jacobites de tagrit et de l’orient (vie et viie siècles), éd. f. nau, patrologia orientalis 3 (1909) : 27–28 et comme lieu de formation de deux évêques de tribus arabes, ḥabīb des banū taġlib sous denys de tell maḥrē (r. 203–30/818–45) et salomon des maʿadd sous son successeur jean iii ; marūtā est célèbre pour avoir fondé le monastère de ʿayn gagā non loin du ṯarṯār pour ses habitants et ses voyageurs, vie de marūtā, 88 ; quant à théodote d’amid, il est fameux pour avoir réuni des foules de « chrétiens et de ṭayyōyē » (et guéri un arabe) : vie de théodote, ms. mārdīn, église des quarante martyrs, no 275, fos 237r–296v, ici 270/548–49 ; 271/550‒51 : publication de l’édition de sa vie garšūnī et traduction à venir, par j. tannous, a. palmer et r. hoyland. 34. u. simonsohn, « seeking justice among the “outsiders”. christian recourse to non-ecclesiastical judicial systems under early islam », church history and religious culture 89, no 1–3 (2009) : 191‒216, voir 198‒99 ; u. simonsohn, a common justice. the legal allegiances of christians and jews under early islam (philadelphie : university of pennsylvania press, 2011), 36‒37 ; m. tillier, l’invention du cadi. la justice des musulmans, des juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’islam (paris : éditions de la sorbonne, 2017), 469. 35. chronicon 1234, 240. 181 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 182 naturellement, ce sont les deuxième et troisième clauses qui nous intéressent ici. ajoutons que la chronique du patriarche michel le syrien (r. 561–95/1166–99), qui suit généralement de près celle de son lointain prédécesseur denys36, ne conserva pas non plus cet épisode. dès lors, il est impossible de certifier que ce passage fut rédigé en syriaque au viiie ou au ixe siècle. néanmoins, l’anonyme de la chronique jusqu’en 1234 l’introduisit après avoir fait état de la répartition des terres à conquérir entre « quatre généraux », dont l’un aurait été chargé de soumettre les tribus arabes chrétiennes37. le discours du premier calife est bien connu dans l’historiographie arabo-musulmane sous le nom de « recommandation (waṣiyya) d’abū bakr ». dans la version des généalogies des notables (ansāb al-ašrāf) de l’historien al-balāḏurī (m. 280/893), le « successeur » du prophète aurait adressé à yazīd b. abī sufyān (m. 18/639) un discours très semblable à celui reproduit par denys : « vous trouverez un groupe (qawm) : ils se sont enfermés eux-mêmes (ḥabasū anfusahum) dans des ṣawmaʿa-s, laissez-les (daʿūhum) ainsi que ce où ils se sont enfermés38. » yazīd était le frère aîné de muʿāwiya, futur gouverneur de syrie puis commandeur des croyants (r. 23–40/644–60 puis r. 41–60/661–80). il correspond vraisemblablement à l’un des « quatre généraux » qu’abū bakr, selon une source chrétienne commune du viiie siècle, expédia en palestine et en balqāʾ (transjordanie). selon toute vraisemblance, la source de denys de tell maḥrē abrégea et traduisit simplement une information tirée de la tradition historiographique arabo-musulmane, à l’instar des traditions sur la conquête de chypre ou la mort de yazdgard (r. 11–30/632–51)39. de son côté, al-balāḏurī affirme avoir obtenu cette information (ḫabar) à la lecture d’ibn saʿd (m. 230/845), lequel l’avait entendue de son maître, le fameux al-wāqidī (m. v. 205/820) sans que ce dernier n’eusse nullement recouru à une quelconque chaine de transmission (isnād). son contemporain sayf b. ʿumar (m. v. 180/796), à en croire al-ṭabarī, aurait appris une sentence similaire du savant irakien al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (m. 110/728) : « vous passerez par des groupes (aqwām) qui se sont affairés eux-mêmes (faraġū anfusahum) dans des ṣawmaʿa, laissez-les à ce à quoi ils s’affairent40. » t a n d i s q u e l e t e x t e s y r i a q u e d i s t i n g u a i t l e s « s t y l i t e s ( e s ṭ ū n ō r ē ) » d e s « solitaires (īḥīdōyē) » qui « se sont dévoués eux-mêmes (nafš -hūn) », les deux variantes arabes abbassides fusionnaient en une seule catégorie : ceux « qui se sont enfermés/affairés eux-mêmes (anfusahum) dans des ṣawmaʿa-s ». par conséquent, ce dernier terme traduisait les demeures des deux types de reclus de la version syriaque. en second lieu, l’ordre du calife consistait à « abandonner/laisser » ces moines à leurs affaires. si la version syriaque 36. si l’on en croit l’introduction de a. palmer, the seventh century in the west-syrian chronicles (liverpool : liverpool university press, 1993), 85–103. 37. arbʿō dēn rīšay-ḥaylūtō d-eštadr(ū) men abū bakr [. . .] w-aḥrōnō lūqbal ṭayyōyē krisṭyōnē d-taḥīt pūqdōnō d-rūmōyē. 38. al-balāḏurī, jumal ansāb al-ašrāf, éd. s. zakkār et r. ziriklī, 13 vol. (beyrouth : dār al-fikr, 1996–2005), 10 : 113. 39. m. debié, « what can we learn from syriac historiography? », dans studies in theophanes, vol. 19, éd. f. montinaro et m. jankowiak, 365–82 (paris : association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2015), 379. 40. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīḫ al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, éd. m. de goeje, 3 séries (leyde : brill, 1879), sér. 1, 1850. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 182 était explicitement en faveur des reclus, la « recommandation » (waṣiyya) arabe préservait retenue et ambiguïté41. néanmoins, ce passage reprenait le topos, bien ancré à l’époque d’ibn saʿd et de denys, du respect dû aux moines et aux reclus de la part de conquérants non-chrétiens de la syrie. en effet, selon une source arabe contemporaine, ḫosrō ier (r. 531–79), archétype du despote éclairé, à la fois païen et juste, aurait lui aussi demandé à ses troupes en partance vers la syrie « qu’on laisse la ṣawmaʿa et qu’on sorte du couvent (dayr)42. » ʿabd al-razzāq al-ṣanʿānī (m. 211/827) rapporta aussi une version qui ressemble plus encore à celle de la chronique jusqu’en 1234. il l’imputait à une tradition de yaḥyā b. saʿīd (m. 145/762), à travers deux de ses maîtres du milieu du iie siècle de l’hégire, sufyān al-ṯawrī (m. 161/778) et ibn jurayj (m. 150/767). ceci suggère que cette tradition était encore tout juste émergeante au cours du iie/viiie siècle. le muḥaddiṯ inséra sa version dans la liste des règles du ius in bello en pays conquis. comme dans le texte syriaque, après avoir affirmé : « ne déracinez aucun dattier, ne les brûlez pas », abū bakr aurait ainsi poursuivi : « ne dévastez ni ne dépouillez (lā tajbunū wa-lā taġlulū) [. . .] ceux qui se sont enfermés eux-mêmes, ceux qui sont dans les ṣawmaʿa-s43. » contrairement aux versions d’al-balāḏurī et d’al-ṭabarī, le discours (ḥadīṯ) copié par ʿabd al-razzāq distinguait deux propositions, à l’instar de la notice de la chronique jusqu’en 1234 : (1) ceux qui se sont « reclus (ḥbs) eux-mêmes (anfusahum) » et (2) « ceux qui sont dans des ṣawmaʿa-s ». le lecteur moderne pourrait le comprendre comme un accolement à effet de redondance, classique en langue sémitique. pourtant, la comparaison avec la version syriaque qui sépare également les « stylites (esṭūnōrē) » des « solitaires (īḥīdōyē) » laisse supposer que l’auteur arabe du ḥadīṯ souhaita d’abord mentionner les reclus (ḥabīs-s) au sens large, puis aussi ceux qui résidaient dans les ṣawmaʿa-s. l’auteur syriaque avait rapporté une version détaillée de la waṣiyya d’abū bakr qui réservait aux stylites (esṭūnōrē) une position particulière, qui, à notre sens, équivaut à la partie ṣawmaʿa de la version arabe. il semble donc que les informateurs d’al-balāḏurī et d’al-ṭabarī fusionnèrent dans un second temps les deux catégories d’ascètes comme « ceux qui (1) se sont reclus (ḥbs) eux-mêmes (anfusahum) (2) dans des ṣawmaʿa-s ». ainsi, chez les auteurs arabes d’époque abbasside, une partie, puis la totalité des reclus étaient supposés résider dans ces structures. dès lors, ce vocable équivalait-il au lieu de retraite qui, en syriaque, caractérisait les stylites : la colonne (esṭūnō) ? 2.2. l’intuition de lammens : la ṣawmaʿa comme tour de stylite si la waṣiyya date véritablement d’abū bakr, il est nécessaire de comparer le sens de ṣawmaʿa dans la langue du compagnon du prophète avec le seul texte contemporain de ce dernier : le coran lui-même. malheureusement, le terme n’apparait qu’une seule fois dans la vulgate othmanienne préservée, au nombre d’une liste de vocables fléchis au pluriel et se 41. il est intéressant d’observer que les versions syriaques comme arabes insistent sur anfusahum/nafš-hūn. 42. abū ḥanīfa al-dīnawarī, al-aḫbār al-ṭiwāl, éd. ʿa. ʿāmir (le caire : dār iḥyāʾ al-kutub al-ʿarabī, 1960), 88. 43. ʿ abd al-razzāq al-ṣanʿānī, al-muṣannaf, éd. ḥ.. r. al-aʿẓamī, 11 vol. (beyrouth : al-maktab al-islāmī, 1983), 5 : 199. 183 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 184 référant à des lieux de culte : « si dieu ne repoussait pas les hommes les uns des autres, alors auraient été démolis : ṣawmaʿa-s, églises/synagogues (biyaʿ), [lieux de] prières (ṣalawāt) et “prosternatoires” (masājid) où est rappelé le nom de dieu !44 » ce verset quelque peu sibyllin fut accolé à d’autres sentences sur le culte mekkois. dès lors, il ne nous éclaire pas vraiment sur la signification précise des quatre termes. tous désignaient un type de lieu de culte monothéiste sans qu’il soit possible de discriminer l’orientation confessionnelle de chacun, non plus que le rapport de la umma primitive à l’égard de leurs occupants45. toutefois, une seconde occurrence du premier siècle de l’hégire apporte un éclairage précieux. il s’agit d’un distique du poète chrétien al-aḫṭal al-taġlibī (m. v. 101/720)46, un des plus fameux aèdes de la période omeyyade, qui peut se traduire approximativement comme suit : quant à moi, au [nom du] seigneur des chrétiens en leurs célébrations (ʿīd) et des musulmans lorsque les réunit l’assemblée (= le vendredi ? : jumaʿ). . . .et au [nom du] seigneur de tout reclus (ḥabīs) en haut (fawq) de sa ṣawmaʿa il marche, peu lui importe le monde (dunyā) ou l’envie (ṭamʿ)47 ! lammens, prêtre arabisant et historien orientaliste, avait déjà traduit ces vers en 1894 dans l’une de ses premières publications consacrées au chantre des omeyyades. il avait assez naturellement restitué la troisième strophe « par le dieu des anachorètes, du haut de leurs ermitages48 ». toutefois, dix ans plus tard, il avait repris l’étude du célèbre poète de la cour marwānide49 et, avec une intuition de dialectisant, s’était exclamé : nous nous étonnons que nous ayons pu nous y méprendre jadis, ou que personne parmi les orientalistes n’ait relevé notre erreur. car c’en était une quand, à la suite de certains 44. qurʾān 22 : 40 : law lā dafʿu llāh al-nāsa baʿḍahum bi-baʿḍin la-huddimat ṣawāmiʿu wa-biyaʿun wa-ṣalawātun wa-masājidu yuḏkaru fīhā ismu llāhi kaṯīran. 45. m. azaiez, « sourate 22 : al-ḥajj (le pèlerinage) », dans le coran des historiens, sous la direction de m. a. amir-moezzi et g. dye, 3 vols. (paris : le cerf, 2019), 2/1 : 833 traduit « monastères, églises, synagogues, et mosquées (ou “sanctuaires” en général) ». à propos de ṣawmaʿa, ils se fondent sur a. jeffery, the foreign vocabulary of the qurʾān, (baroda : oriental institute, 1938), 200–201 qui a traduit « cloister » et présumé un emprunt étranger, proposant, sur la foi de l’usage guèze tardif, d’y voir un mot d’origine sudarabique, tout en concédant « though we have as yet no s. arabian word with which to compare it ». je remercie antoine borrut pour m’avoir rappelé cette importante référence. 46. sa célèbre ode (qaṣīda) en hommage à la victoire de ʿabd al-malik en 72/691–92 a été étudiée en détail par s. stetkevych, « umayyad panegyric and the poetics of islamic hegemony. al-akhtạl’s “khaffa al-qatị̄nu” », journal of arabic literature 28, no 2 (1997) : 89–122 ; voir aussi s. stetkevych, « al-akhṭal at the court of ʿabd al-malik. the qaṣida and the construction of umayyad authority », dans christians and others in the umayyad state, éd. a. borrut et f. m. donner, 129–55 (chicago : oriental institute, 2016) ; a. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir. l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leyde : brill, 2011), 69, n. 23 souligne qu’il serait utile de « mieux préciser » « les conditions de transmission » du panégyrique qui lui est attribué. 47. al-aḫṭal al-taġlibī, šiʿr al-aḫṭal (riwāya [. . .] ʿan abī saʿīd al-sukkarī ʿan m. ibn ḥabīb ʿan ibn al-aʿrābī), éd. a. ṣāliḥānī, 4 vol. (beyrouth : imprimerie catholique, 1891), 71, vv. 5–6. 48. lammens, « le chantre des omiades », 109 [16]. 49. lammens, « poète royal », 35–36. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 184 lexicographes postérieurs, nous avons rendu « ṣaumaʿa » par ermitage, sens que lui assignent le plus souvent les dictionnaires actuels. ce n’est là ni l’unique ni surtout la primitive signification du terme, lequel se dit originairement d’une construction élevée, se terminant en forme de tour ou de pyramide. c’est ainsi que les minarets des mosquées sont également appelés ṣaumaʿa, et l’ancien tombeau romain de homs, à forme pyramidale, porte encore ce dernier nom. la signification d’ermitage s’est développée beaucoup plus tard, quand on avait perdu le souvenir de la vie des stylites et peut-être aussi sous l’influence de cette hostilité contre le célibat et l’ascétisme monastiques, hostilité concrétisée dans cet aphorisme très musulman : « les ermitages des fidèles, ce sont leurs demeures50 ». lammens a alors proposé de corriger sa première traduction de ṣawmaʿa du sens tardif et générique « d’ermitage » à celui d’une « tour » de « stylite51 ». il se fondait avant tout sur l’usage courant du même vocable pour désigner les minarets des mosquées dont l’apparence se rapprochait des tours de stylites de l’espace syrien tardo-antique. l’idée d’élévation, dans le distique d’al-aḫṭal, résidait avant tout dans la préposition « fawq », un usage qu’il est tentant de comparer à celui d’un ḥadīṯ attribué à ʿalī b. abī ṭālib (r. 36–41/656–61), dans l’exégèse d’ibn wahb (m. 197/813), à propos des moines (ruhbān)52. le calife les aurait définis comme ceux qui « s’enferment (ḥbs) eux-mêmes (anfusahum) en haut (ʿalā) des ṣawmaʿa-s53 ». il est aussi possible de rapprocher ce dispositif de celui du poète al-ʿattābī (m. 220/835) qui, d’après la « séance » (mujālasa) mystique d’abū bakr al-dīnawarī (m. 333/944), se serait exclamé : « alors que je passai près d’un couvent (dayr), j’entendis un moine m’appeler : je levai la tête vers lui et appelai : “ô moine !” et il me regarda d’en haut (ašrafa ʿalayya)54. » selon ibn ḥanbal (m. 241/855) l’ascète israélite archétypal nommé jurayj devait « monter (ṣaʿada) pour accéder à sa ṣawmaʿa »55. ici encore, la ṣawmaʿa consiste en une retraite monastique en hauteur56. toutefois lammens n’a jamais étayé son hypothèse et on ne peut déduire sans équivoque qu’« en haut » (fawq, ʿalā) désigne une tour d’ermitage à l’exclusion, par exemple, d’une grotte de montagne ou du sommet pyramidal d’un tertre57. il existe 50. ibid., 36. 51. ibid., 34–36. 52. dans qurʾān 18 : 103–4. 53. al-ṭabarī, jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan taʾwīl al-qurʾān, éd. a. m. šākir, 24 vol. (le caire : dār al-maʿārif, 1961), 18 : 126. 54. abū bakr al-dīnawarī, al-mujālasa wa-jawāhir al-ʿilm, éd. m. āl salmān, 10 vol. (bahrain : dār ibn ḥazm, 1998), 3 : 365. 55. ibn ḥanbal, musnad, éd. a. šākir, 8 vol. (le caire : dār al-ḥadīṯ, 1995), 8 : 155. 56. j.-m. fiey, assyrie chrétienne 3 (beyrouth : institut de lettres orientales, 1968), 242–43 avait observé que les ruines des monastères du bēt aramāyē étaient souvent appelées al-qāʾim : « les dressés ». 57. cette hypothèse fut à la fois reprise et critiquée par trimingham, christianity among the arabs, 233–35 qui pourtant ne cite pas lammens lorsqu’il traduit le vers. néanmoins, il critique l’emploi univoque de ṣawmaʿa comme colonne et rappelle son emploi comme ermitage au sens large dans al-ṭabarī à propos du moine baḥīra : « the arabic term sawmaʿa has caused confusion. this term was applied to any elevated structure. the taghlibī 185 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 186 de nombreuses occurrences de réclusions qui sont, symboliquement ou réellement, « en hauteur », sans qu’il soit possible de garantir qu’il s’agisse toujours d’une colonne de stylite. c’est notamment le cas, dans l’espace ex-sassanide, de ceux des moines « qui ont choisi la station et ne descendent point à terre » que le métropolite marūtā (m. 28/649) aurait installés près d’un couvent58. néanmoins, il est possible d’affirmer qu’au ive/xe siècle, le terme syriaque désignant la colonne du stylite (esṭūnō) pouvait correspondre sans difficulté à la ṣawmaʿa arabe. en effet, les syro-orthodoxes d’époque ayyūbide, michel le syrien et l’anonyme de 1234 coïncident dans la description d’une violente tempête qui, en plus d’arracher les arbres, fit « chuter — beaucoup de — colonnes (esṭūnē) de bienheureux (ṭūbōnē) — de leur place —59 » aux alentours de l’année 29/648. cette tradition syriaque est très probablement issue de la chronique perdue de denys de tell maḥrē. en outre, elle apparaît aussi dans les chroniques de deux historiens chalcédoniens, l’hellénophone théophane le confesseur (m. 201/817) et l’arabophone agapius/maḥbūb de manbij (m. après 330/942). le premier décrit le même évènement en rapportant que « beaucoup de fûts de colonnes (stulous kionōn) tombèrent60 » tandis que, un siècle plus tard, agapius traduisit, en une version en apparence fidèle à celle de théophane, que « beaucoup de ṣawmaʿa-s tombèrent61 ». ceci suggère nettement que cette information dérive d’une source commune. lawrence conrad et robert hoyland l’ont attribué à théophile d’édesse (m. v. 164/780), historien et astrologue de la cour abbasside qui aurait écrit une chronique en syriaque62. muriel debié a néanmoins démontré récemment que cette supposition n’était pas un fait assuré63, poet akhṭal swears “by the god of the solitaries, walking on the tops of their columns”. al-akhṭal, shiʿr, 71, l. 5. the column had a platform on top where the hermit could walk about. they were not confined to their column and would come down to attend church at festivals. but the term was also applied to the pyramidal-shaped structures in which desert ascetics frequently lived. » il n’apporte pas non plus de référence au qualificatif de ṣawmaʿa associé aux structures pyramidales de ces ascètes : « generally, sawmaʿa means simply “hermitage”, and the arab poets distinguish ruhban, “monks”, as ashab as-sawami: “dwellers of the hermitages”. the prophet muhammad, according to tradition (ṭabarī, i. 1124), associated with the rahib bahira in his sawmaa at bostra or during the journey there, and in the plural the word makes its appearance once in the qur’an, in sura 22:41. » 58. vie de marūtā, 88. 59. michel le syrien, chronique, 429 ; chronicon 1234, 260. 60. théophane le confesseur, chronographia, éd. c. de boor (leipzig : teubner, 1885), 343 ; il est instructif ici que les textes syriaques, grecs et arabes de 1234, théophane et agapius sont presque équivalents tandis que la version de michel est assez différente. 61. agapius de manbij, kitab al-ʿunvan, histoire universelle [. . .] (ii-2), éd. a. vassiliev, patrologia orientalis 8 (1912) : 397–550, ici 480 [220]. 62. l. i. conrad, « theophanes and the arabic historical tradition », byzantinische forschungen 15 (1990) : 1–44 ; borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 83 et 144 et a. borrut, « court astrologers and historical writing in early ʿabbāsid baghdād. an appraisal », dans the place to go. contexts of learning in baghdād, 750–1000 c.e., éd. j. scheiner et d. janos, 455‒501 (princeton, nj : darwin press, 2014), 458‒59 et 477‒79 ; robert hoyland a proposé une reconstruction de la chronique initiale dans r. hoyland, theophilus of edessa’s chronicle. the circulation of historical knowledge in late antiquity and early islam (liverpool : liverpool university press, 2011). 63. debié, écriture de l’histoire, 28‒30. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 186 car le témoignage de théophile se limiterait à la période 126–36/744–5464 et à quelques observations du règne d’al-manṣūr (r. 136–58/754–75), qui ne sont pas communs avec théophane65. en outre, maria conterno a remarqué que l’informateur de théophane semble avoir plutôt consulté une source arabe66, tandis que les notices syriaques similaires à celle du byzantin proviennent souvent d’un original grec67. enfin, la source commune la plus reconnaissable pour le viie siècle a de bonnes chances d’être issue d’un milieu officiel byzantin68. ici, théophane dépeint une catastrophe dont le paroxysme fut atteint par la chute d’antiques colonnes. pourtant, il ne mentionne pas les stylites. toutefois, denys de tell maḥrē comprit tout autrement un évènement dont la conséquence la plus drastique aurait été humaine : des colonnes des stylites furent abattues par une fulgurante tempête. ceci implique d’une part qu’il est possible que théophane (ou sa source byzantine) fut la véritable source commune de l’évènement, et que, dans un second temps, denys (ou sa source syriaque) l’interpréta avec une légère variation. d’autre part, nous apprenons que pour agapius, le terme ṣawāmiʿ (pluriel de ṣawmaʿa) est une fidèle et exacte traduction de stulous kionōn. en outre, il est possible que son interprétation fût influencée par un original syro-occidental consulté par denys : ṣawāmiʿ traduisait non seulement les « fûts de colonnes », mais peut-être également les « colonnes de bienheureux » (esṭūnē d-ṭūbōnē). nous disposons d’un second cas de traduction arabe du terme esṭūnōyō, mais dont la datation est moins aisée. ainsi, la version garšūnī69 de la vie de théodote d’amid (m. 696) comporte deux allusions à des ahl/ḏawī al-ṣawāmiʿ70. cette expression y traduit un original syriaque dont une copie est préservée à mārdīn, où les mêmes « gens des ṣawmaʿa-s » sont qualifiés d’esṭūnōyē : « allons aujourd’hui sortir et recevoir les bénédictions des bienheureux et des stylites (ahl al-ṣawāmiʿ = esṭūnōyē) et des reclus qui sont autour de la cité [. . .]71 » et aussi : « rappelle, seigneur dieu, en ce moment, tous les moines croyants, et aussi les reclus et les stylites (ḏawī al-ṣawāmiʿ = esṭūnōyē)72 ». comme dans la chronique jusqu’en 1234 à propos d’abū bakr, il y a une association sémantique et littéraire avec les ḥubasāʾ/ḥabīšōyē, sans que ces derniers ne soient toutefois confondus. par ailleurs, selon le 64. m. conterno, « theophilos, “the more likely candidate”? towards a reappraisal of the question of theophanes’ oriental source(s) », dans montinaro et jankowiak, studies in theophanes, 19 : 383–400, voir 395. 65. debié, « what can we learn », 380–81. 66. conterno, « theophilos », 396–98. 67. ibid., 387–93. 68. ibid., 386. 69. moyen-arabe écrit en faisant usage d’un alphabet syriaque. 70. vie de théodote, ms. st mark 199, fos 557 r/874 et 561v/883, je remercie jack tannous pour sa communication de l’édition et de sa traduction de la version garšūnī de ce récit. 71. vie de théodote, fo 551/271v : ar : fa-daʿā li-talmīḏihi yūsuf wa-qāla lahu : taʿāl al-yawm naḫruju wa-natabāraku min al-ṭūbāniyyīn wa-min ahl al-ṣawāmiʿ wa-l-ḥubasāʾ allaḏīna ḥawl al-madīna = syr : w-qrā l-yawsef talmīdeh w-emar leh : tā yawmōnō nafūq w-netbarīk men ṭūbōnō w-men esṭūnōyē w-ḥbīšōyē da-ḥdor mdī(n)tō. 72. ibid., fo 583/288v : b-ʿedōnōʿadnō hōnō, l-kulhūn yaḥīdōyē mhaymōnē w-ōf l-esṭūnōyē w-l-ḥabīšōyē. ar : al-ruhbān al-muʾmīnīn wa-l-ḥubasāʾ wa-li-ḏawī al-ṣawāmiʿ. 187 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 188 lexicographe bar bahlūl (m. fin ive–xe siècle) esṭūnā se traduit en arabe ṣawmaʿa isṭawāna et esṭūnārā est rendu par al-ṣawmaʿī73. comment, et à partir de quand, le terme ṣawmaʿa était-il devenu une traduction acceptable pour l’esṭūnō syriaque et le stulos kionos grec ? est-il possible de remonter au sens originel de ce vocable auquel les dictionnaires modernes donnent l’unique sens de « cellule » ? 2.3. la tour et le phare du moine en 1989, jonathan bloom a réalisé une synthèse sur l’histoire architecturale et philologique du minaret islamique. il s’est appuyé sur k. a. g. creswell qui avait déterminé, à l’appui d’une tradition isolée, que les premiers ṣawmaʿa-s de mosquée seraient apparus à fusṭāṭ en l’an 53/673, sans que le terme ne désignât une tour74. selon bloom, la mosquée de médine aurait été rebâtie au début du viiie siècle avec quatre tours d’angle comportant une petite guérite. elle aurait été imitée d’une forme architecturale des angles du téménos de baʿl-ḥadad/zeus-capitolin de damas, qui aurait été préservée dans la mosquée cathédrale impériale après 86/705. bloom s’est fondé sur une hypothèse de joseph schacht75 pour démontrer qu’un escalier de la mosquée omeyyade de boṣra conduisait, sur le toit, à une structure pour l’appel à la prière (miʾḏana). sa forme de cahute expliquerait l’usage d’un terme renvoyant à la cellule76. il faudrait donc, selon cette interprétation, considérer que ṣawmaʿa définissait initialement une cellule du type de celles des moines, avant de désigner une cabine pour l’appel à la prière, et, finalement, la tour qui l’aurait plus tard prolongée. toutefois, il est possible d’opposer à bloom que ce furent peut-être ces tours antiques de damas qui constituèrent, à l’inverse, le modèle de celles ajoutées à médine à l’époque marwānide. en outre, malheureusement pour cette théorie, le plus ancien lexicographe arabe, al-ḫalīl b. aḥmad (m. v. 170/786) n’associe ce vocable ni à une « cellule » de moine, rendue plus fréquemment par qill(ā)ya77, ni à une structure pour l’appel à la prière (miʾḏana)78. enfin, aucune des acceptions sémantiques renvoyant à une forme menue, étriquée, étroite, creusée et/ou quadrangulaire n’est reliée, dans les dictionnaires médiévaux, à la racine ṣamaʿa. 73. bar bahlūl, lexicon syriacum auctore hassano bar bahlule, éd. r. duval (paris : reipublicae typographaeo, 1888), 1 : 221–22. 74. k. a. g. creswell, the evolution of the minaret (londres : burlington magazine, 1926), 13 et 28–29. 75. j. schacht, « ein archaischer minaret-typ in ägypten und anatolien », ars islamica 5, no 1 (1938) : 46–54, ici 46. 76. j. bloom, minaret. symbol of islam (oxford : oxford university press, 1989), 31–32. 77. a. de biberstein kazimirski, dictionnaire arabe-français contenant toutes les racines de la langue arabe (paris : maisonneuve, 1860), 2 : 808, ne recense que la forme qilliyya ; bar bahlūl, lexicon syriacum, 3 : 1791 traduit qellāytā par « qillāya : logement, habitat, pièce du moine (rāhib) ». ces termes dérivent probablement du grec byzantin depuis le latin cellia. 78. al-ḫalīl, kitāb al-ʿayn, éd. m. al-maḫzūmī et i. al-sāmarrāʾī (bagdad : dār al-rašīd, 1980), 1 : 316. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 188 ainsi, le verbe ṣamaʿa fulān (bi-) signifie « frapper ou détourner quelqu’un (avec) » tandis que la variante ṣamiʿa fī induit, en plus de l’idée de « lapsus », un « départ sans crainte du danger ». ceci se rapproche de la notion de « moine » (rāhib) qui, en arabe, repose sur une racine sous-tendant le champ sémantique de l’effroi et de la fuite. quant à ṣammaʿa (forme ii), le sens induit est une « action qui suit une décision résolue » tandis que la forme vii confirme la notion de « persister dans une disposition d’esprit79 ». bar bahlūl proposait quant à lui de rapprocher la racine syriaque de la forme adjectivale arabe aṣmaʿ /ṣamʿāʾ80, qui désigne ce qui s’élève, se dresse, et par extension, d’une part, ce qui est insolent ou audacieux, et d’autre part le sabre, l’esprit vif et pénétrant. la deuxième forme arabe revêt un second sens, qu’elle partage avec la forme exceptionnelle ṣawmaʿa : « faire un tas en cône pointu81 ». il est possible de rapprocher ce sens du nom syriaque courant (ṣemʿā) qui désigne les ordures82 et qui a peut-être produit le (ou été dérivé du) sens du tas d’ordure en forme de cône, et a pu, dans un second temps, être associé au lieu de retraite des ermites dans les dépotoirs extra-urbains. néanmoins, ce schème hétérodoxe fawʿal(a) pose problème, il découle d’une forme araméenne pourtant absente des dictionnaires de syriaque classique. dès lors, le nom ṣawmaʿ (avec ou sans tāʾ marbūṭa) désigne à la fois la « tour », le « bonnet » conique, « l’aigle » ou le « petit couvent » tandis que la forme adjectivale aṣmaʿ, les adjectifs muṣammaʿ et muṣawmaʿa renvoient effectivement à quelque chose de pointu et de perçant83. pour synthétiser, les champs lexicaux figurés induisent l’idée d’une pénétration de l’esprit, d’une idée ferme, dressée et aigüe tandis que le sens propre renverrait à un objet, un animal, un matériau, ou un bâtiment pointu ou pointant. nous avons dit qu’al-ḫalīl b. aḥmad, au viiie siècle, ne connaissait ni le sens de minaret ni celui de petite pièce. en revanche, il connaissait bien une « ṣawmaʿa du moine » qu’il définissait comme le « phare (manāra) où il se réfugie/cloître (tarahhaba) »84. il est certain qu’un phare ne correspond pas systématiquement à une tour. néanmoins, bloom avait lui aussi envisagé que des feux de signalisation fussent généralement installés sur des structures élevées85. lammens a en son temps souligné l’expression de la « lampe du stylite » dans la poésie arabe post-hégirienne86. dès les fondements du stylitisme, au ve siècle, la colonne du reclus était déjà comparée, à tout le moins au sens figuré, à un phare, ainsi théodoret de cyr à propos de siméon disait : « les ismaélites, par exemple, asservis par myriades aux ténèbres (zofō) de l’impiété, c’est la station sur la colonne (kionos) qui les a éclairés (épi tou efōtise 79. de biberstein kazimirski, dictionnaire, 2 : 1371. 80. bar bahlūl, lexicon, 1671–72. et aussi la finesse d’une oreille dressée. 81. on se représentera un tas de fruits au sūq. 82. j. payne smith, a compendious syriac dictionary founded upon the thesaurus syriacus of robert payne smith (oxford : clarendon, 1903), 481. 83. de biberstein kazimirski, dictionnaire, 2 : 1371 ; mutaṣammiʿ semble utilisé surtout pour des plumes en forme de pointe. 84. al-ḫalīl, al-ʿayn, 1 : 316. 85. bloom, minaret, 37. 86. lammens, « poète royal », 34. 189 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 190 stasis). car, posée comme sur une lampe (luknos) [. . .] toute brillante, elle a projeté tous ses rayons à l’instar du soleil [. . .]87. » et encore, désignant siméon, certes, mais au sommet de sa colonne : « ils arrivent en bandes de 200 ou 300 en même temps, même parfois par milliers, ils renoncent à leurs erreurs ancestrales à grands cris, brisant devant ce grand luminaire (fōsteros) les idoles adorées par leurs pères88. » lukas schachner a mis en évidence « l’appropriation symbolique », par les stylites, de leur environnement, à travers à la fois leur propre « champ de vision » et « l’énorme visibilité de leurs piliers ». il a notamment dressé une très importante carte des contacts visuels entre les différents hommes saints perchés sur la crête calcaire, au croisement des voies apamée-cyrrhus et antioche-alep/chalcis89. à cette occasion, il a matérialisé cette citation de jean d’éphèse à propos des vies d’abraham et mārūn : « tandis que le monastère et le saint homme étaient visibles comme le soleil depuis le village90 » et l’a mise en relations avec l’organisation de l’espace91. le lexicographe al-ḫalīl ne nous a pas laissé de description de ce genre de « phare du moine » de retraite monacale. il considérait cette notion comme tellement évidente que, pour définir le terme polysémique qaws, il se contenta de le décrire comme « le sommet de la ṣawmaʿa »92. ce manque de précision révèle cependant que la forme d’une « tour de signalisation (manāra) » ne souffrait guère de débat à la fin du viiie siècle. une tradition attribuée au compagnon de ʿumar ii et son gouverneur pour mossoul, yaḥyā b. yaḥyā al-ġassānī, reflète cette notion de tour associée à la ṣawmaʿa. en effet, son petit-fils rapporte de lui qu’un moine résidait en une ṣawmaʿa qui se trouvait au sommet d’une manāra de la cathédrale st jean baptiste, au moment où al-walīd ier (r. 86–96/705–15) lança les travaux d’agrandissement de la mosquée93. de son côté, le sunnite cilicien abū ʿubayd b. sallām se proposa d’expliciter un ḥadīṯ prophétique qui conseillait aux voyageurs de presser la marche en passant près du ṭirbāl94. 87. théodoret de cyr, histoire des moines de syrie, éd. p. canivet et a. leroy-molinghen (paris : le cerf, 1979), 2 : 193 (xxvi.13). 88. ibid. 89. l. schachner, « the archaeology of the stylite », dans religious diversity in late antiquity, éd. d. m. gwynn et s. bangert, 329–97 (leyde : brill, 2010), 378–80. 90. jean d’éphèse, « lives of the eastern saints », 82. 91. schachner, « the archaeology of the stylite », 378, n. 182 a proposé que les sites de jabal sarīr ; ainsi que al-ṣawmaʿa, kīmār et androna, entre autres, fussent dominés de la sorte par leur solitaire. 92. al-ḫalīl, al-ʿayn, 5 : 189 ; à propos du qaws, ibn hišām, al-sīra al-nabawiyya, éd. m. al-saqqā, i. al-abyārī et ʿa. al-šallabī (beyrouth : iḥyāʾ turāṯ al-ʿarabī, 1971), 554 propose une définition semblable : al-qaws : ṣawmaʿat al-rāhib. 93. ibn ʿasākir, tāʾrīḫ madīnat dimašq, éd. u. al-ʿamrawī, 80 vols (beyrouth: dār al-fikr, 1995-2000), 2 : 252 : abū muḥammad al-sulamī → ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. aḥmad → abū muḥammad al-akfānī → ibrāhīm b. hišām b. yaḥyā b. yaḥyā al-ġassānī → yaḥyā b. yaḥyā : « il entra dans l’église et monta à la manāra ḏāt al-aḍāliʿ connue sous le nom des « heures » (al-sāʿāt) : il s’y trouvait un moine (rāhib) qui s’était retiré (yaʾawī) dans une ṣawmaʿa à lui. alors il le somma de descendre de la ṣawmaʿa mais le moine accrut ses paroles et la main d’al-walīd ne quitta point sa nuque (qafā) jusqu’à l’avoir fait descendre de la manāra. » 94. le ṭirbāl désigne une tour monumentale du iiie siècle située au centre de la « ville ronde » de gūr (fārs, iran), le terme arabe dérive probablement du tribulum (planche à battre), métonymie du cirque à battre le blé et al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 190 pour définir cet objet, il s’appuya sur le lettré abū ʿubayda, qui le décrivait ainsi : « ceci ressemble à une tour [. . .] de guet (manẓar) des perses (ʿajam) qui a l’aspect d’une ṣawmaʿa, c’est-à-dire d’une construction élevée95. » ainsi, à l’aube du ixe siècle, le terme ṣawmaʿa était en mesure de définir sans équivoque l’objet de tant de répulsion. il s’agissait en fait de l’énorme tour quadrangulaire qui darde le coeur de la « ville ronde » sassanide de gūr (iiie siècle). à l’époque d’abū ʿubayda, des minarets cultuels monumentaux commençaient à apparaître, mais il n’était pas envisageable de décrire le ṭirbāl comme une tour d’appel à la prière (miʾḏana)96. ainsi, la ṣawmaʿa était un terme profane qui désignait précisément une tour quadrangulaire, et ce bien avant d’avoir été associée à quelque bâtisse que ce fût sur le toit d’une mosquée. il nous semble donc établi que ṣawmaʿa, à haute époque, signifiait déjà une tour et, au moins à partir du iiie/ixe siècle, la tour d’un reclus, à l’exclusion des concepts respectifs de « cellule » et de « minaret », absents de la lexicographie de l’époque. il désignait avant tout un « phare » ou une structure juchée sur un « phare », voire au sommet d’une « colonne » (ʿamūd) comme la ṣawmaʿa décrite par abū ʿubayda dans le quartier damasquin de jayrūn97. dans cette zone, les larges colonnes qui subsistaient des propylées du téménos de zeus, ou celles du péribolos qui le prolongeaient98, étaient en effet propices à l’installation d’un stylite. dès lors, nous suivons schachner qui a récemment proposé de traduire le toponyme ṣawmaʿa, un village du jabal barīšā entre chalcis et antioche, où se situent les ruines impressionnantes d’une colonne, comme « a monk’s manār »99. les textes arabo-musulmans, lorsqu’ils dépeignent les communautés de moines autour de leurs ṣawmaʿa-s, se réfèrent à ces autorités à la fois conventuelles et solitaires. ce concept désignait la « colonne » (esṭūnō), qui prenait l’apparence générale d’une « tour » et se revêtait de la symbolique du « phare » (manāra) éclairant les croyants. comment cette équivalence sémantique entre le reclus, la tour et la colonne du stylite s’est-elle constituée dans l’environnement syro-mésopotamien dans lequel évoluaient les arabo-musulmans ? 2.4. le stylite comme reclus syro-occidental archétypal la fusion conceptuelle entre la retraite anachorétique et l’ascétisme du stylite domine dans la littérature syro-occidentale à l’époque hégirienne. elle constituait le résultat d’un par extension du poteau pour attacher la bête correspondant aussi à la meta de l’hippodrome, donc à un pilier, une tour. 95. abū ʿubayd ibn sallām, ġarīb al-ḥadīṯ, éd. m. a. ḫān, 4 vol. (hyderabad : dāʾirat al-maʿārif, 1964), 1 : 18 ; ibn qutayba al-dīnawarī, kitāb al-jarāṯīm, éd. m. j. al-ḥamīdī, 2 vol. (damas : ministère de la culture, s.d.), 2 : 302, se contente également de dire que le ṭirbāl est une « grande ṣawmaʿa ». 96. je n’ai pas trouvé cette définition dans ces œuvres. 97. ibn al-faqīh al-hamdānī, kitāb al-buldān, éd. y. al-hādī (beyrouth : ʿ ālam al-kutub, 1996), 162 ; schachner, « archaeology of the stylite », 382–83 n’a pas identifié de traces d’un stylite au cœur de damas. il est possible qu’il y ait confusion avec le toponyme jayrūn du mont liban. 98. m. eychenne, a. meier et é. vigouroux, le waqf de la mosquée des omeyyades de damas. le manuscrit ottoman d’un inventaire mamelouk établi en 816/1413 (beyrouth : presses de l’ifpo, 2018), 410–11. 99. schachner, « archaeology of the stylite », 333 ; il se fonde sur e. w. lane, an arabic-english lexicon, 4 vol. (londres : williams & norgate, 1872), 1728. 191 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 192 long et patient travail de domestication des ermites et solitaires dont l’influence et l’abus d’autorité sur les populations rurales posaient problèmes à la hiérarchie ecclésiastique. un avis de georges, évêque syro-orthodoxe des tribus (ʿammē) dans la région du jund de qinnasrīn (r. 68–105/687–724)100, dénonçait le fait que des gyrovagues erraient et, à l’aide d’amulettes usurpaient l’autorité divine pour influer sur les populations101. les autorités du monde syro-araméen étaient confrontées à un paradoxe. d’un côté, elles continuaient à considérer le retrait du monde comme l’une des voies privilégiées de la sainteté chrétienne, de l’autre, il leur fallait soumettre les solitaires errants et les ermites à un ordre monastique. ces deux motivations contradictoires les incitèrent à intégrer l’anachorèse à un cursus. ce processus est mieux connu pour l’église syro-orientale, en dépit du fait que l’archéologie n’y a pour le moment jamais identifié de tour ou de colonne et que la philologie n’y connaît aucun esṭūnārā (stylite). ainsi, dans l’ex-empire sassanide, dad-išōʿ le qaṭarien (m. v. 80/700) décrivait la hiérarchie depuis le laïc et le « fils du pacte » jusqu’aux gyrovagues et anachorètes en passant par les moines et les différents grades de solitaires102. il s’employait en fait à les intégrer à la règle monastique en prévoyant notamment une période cénobitique de trois ans avant de recevoir du supérieur l’autorisation de se reclure103. l’historiographie contemporaine comme l’histoire sainte nestorienne104 attribuent l’origine de cette réforme monastique à abraham de kaškar (m. 588)105. il aurait instauré une règle pour fédérer les solitaires de l’orient et, durant le demi-siècle précédant l’hégire, les institutions monastiques de l’adiabène, de l’irak et du golfe persique (baḥrayn) en furent profondément modifiées. les pères peña, castellana et fernandez avaient déjà remarqué comment les reclus syriens s’étaient le plus souvent installés dans des tours à ermitage et qu’il semblait manquer un terme syriaque pour définir ces retraites. ils ne connaissaient qu’un exemple pour l’année 457–58 où un dérivé du terme grec purgos (pūrqasā) était employé106. or, à cette date, le fondateur du stylitisme, siméon, était encore en vie et son modèle d’anachorèse 100. sur ce personnage voir n. 155. 101. bar hébraeus, nomocanon, 113. 102. dad-išōʿ, traité sur la solitude, 202, voir aussi fauchon, « vie ascétique », 42–48. 103. ibid. 104. l’idée d’une « église nestorienne » a été réfutée par s. brock, « nestorian church. a lamentable misnomer », bulletin of the john rylands library 78 (1996) : 23–53. pour autant, si l’on suit le raisonnement très argumenté de g. j. reinink, « tradition and the formation of the ‘nestorian’ identity in sixthto seventhcentury iraq », dans religious origins of nations? the christian communities of the middle east, éd. t. bas romeny, 217–50 (leyde : brill, 2009), l’expression n’est plus anachronique dès lors que l’on traite d’une période où tous les opposants à babay le grand, partisan d’une théologie exclusivement puisée aux enseignements de théodore de mopsueste, eurent été bannis de l’église dyophysite ou aient rallié les miaphysites, lesquels formèrent leur propre institution en 8/629. il semble en effet qu’une auto-identification « nestorienne » vit le jour au cours du ier/viie siècle. dès lors, ce terme nous parait légitime pour qualifier l’église de l’orient à l’époque islamique. à partir du viiie siècle, l’expression n’était clairement plus perçue par les intéressés comme réductrice pour les syriaques dyophysites de l’ancien espace sassanide et elle fut employée par šahdost de ṭīrhān lui-même dès les années 130/750 (reinink, « tradition », 219). 105. f. jullien, le monachisme en perse. la réforme d’abraham le grand, père des moines de l’orient, (louvain : peeters, 2008). 106. peña, castellana et fernandez, reclus syriens, 300–301. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 192 ne s’était pas encore diffusé107. dans l’espace syro-romain, l’église semble avoir opté, afin de conjuguer cet appel à la sainte retraite et sa méfiance à l’égard d’hommes saints autodidactes, pour une institutionnalisation consistant à les « emmurer dans l’enceinte d’un monastère ou percher sur une colonne de stylite dans la cour, comme dans les monastères du ṭūr ʿabdīn108 ». dans ce massif des confins orientaux de l’ex-empire romain, terrain favoris de retraite des moines syro-orthodoxes, de nombreuses colonnes furent édifiées au sein des établissements conventuels comme celle de lazare à ḥabsenūs datée de 175–76/791–92109. la vie de siméon des oliviers, outre de lui attribuer erronément la construction de cette « ronde colonne pour les reclus (ḥbīšōyē) », assure que les moines s’y relayaient « dans la tour (būrgō du gr. purgos, cf. : arabe al-burj)110 ». or il s’agissait bien d’une colonne, mais conçue en creux, comme un espace habitable111, à l’instar de la tour de réclusion quadrangulaire étagée identifiée par palmer dans l’enceinte du monastère principal de gabriel de qarṭmīn, assez largement répandue dans l’espace syro-romain112. selon schachner : « in syriac, the ambiguity of the term “pillar” (esṭunā) is even more apparent, as the syriac term esṭunā can also mean “tower”. most stylites—esṭunāyē or esṭunārē—were indeed of syriac origin, and the physical resemblance of pillar and tower has led to a certain degree of semantic interchangeability in syriac texts113. » 107. fauchon, « vie ascétique », 52–53. 108. r. payne, « monks, dinars, and date palms. hagiographical production and the expansion of monastic institutions in the early islamic persian gulf », arabian archeology and epigraphy 22 (2011) : 97–111, ici 101–2 : « the incorporation of the perfect life of solitaries, whether immured within a monastery’s walls or perched upon a stylite’s column in the courtyard as in the west syrian monasteries of tur ʿabdin ». il fait allusion au développement de modèles équivalents dans l’espace syro-oriental, lesquels, cependant, ne connaissent pas de stylites. 109. palmer, monk and mason, 105, 188 et 217. voir également desreumaux, « l’épigraphie syriaque », 287 : inscr a.9 : « cette colonne (esṭūnō) fut édifiée en l’an 1103 des grecs, marqūnō écrivit ceci ». au sujet du processus de domestication dans la sphère syro-occidentale ou syro-romaine, en milieu chalcédonien comme anti-chalcédonien, on lira utilement s. harvey, asceticism and society in crisis (berkeley : university of california press, 1990) et d. boero, « symeon and the making of the stylite » (phd diss., university of southern california, 2015). 110. vie de siméon des oliviers, ms. mārdīn, église des quarante martyrs, no 259, fos 105r–127r, ici 122v. 111. palmer, monk and mason, 102. elle aurait été fondée par siméon des oliviers (d-zaytē), évêque de ḥarrān (r. 80–115/700–34). 112. ibid., 105 ; peña, castellana et fernandez, reclus syriens, 300–301. la vie de jacques de ṣalaḥ décrirait une tour similaire dans le désert égyptien. le bandeau de mosaïque des « quatorze cités » qui fut peut-être aménagé entre 718 et 756 dans l'entrecolonnement de l'église st. etienne de kastron mefaa (umm rasas, jordanie) (p.-l. gatier, « inscriptions grecques, mosaïques et églises des débuts de l'époque islamique au proche-orient ». dans le proche-orient de justinien aux abbassides, peuplement et déynamiques spatiales, édité par a. borrut, m. debié, a. papaconstantinou, d. pieri et j.-p. sodini (turnhout : brepols, 2011), 22-25), symbolise ce même bourg par une colonne classique. pourtant, le bâtiment d'ermitage adjacent, parfaitement conservé, est bien une tour quadrangulaire creuse et aménagée. 113. schachner, « archaeology of the stylite », 333. 193 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 194 il s’est notamment fondé sur la vie de luc le stylite qui, à propos des adeptes de ce genre d’ascèse dans l’espace byzantin au ixe siècle, déclarait : « ils refusaient de vivre au sol, et s’élevèrent au sommet de colonnes en forme de tour (purgoeidès)114 ». ce dernier terme y caractérise en outre la colonne de daniel près de constantinople115. certaines de ces bâtisses, notamment dans le nord du massif calcaire, ressemblaient beaucoup à des tours de guet domaniales ou politiques. les fouilles du sanctuaire de st siméon et de dayḥis (syr. dēḥes) ont mis en évidence l’existence de multiples tours dont celles édifiées à l’entrée des monastères purent avoir servi de poste de surveillance ou de guérite116. néanmoins, schachner a remarqué que ces tours étaient le plus souvent construites dans le même espace que les colonnes, et partageaient les mêmes fonctions ascétiques et symboliques, ce dont atteste encore le site de qaṣr b(a)rād au nord du sanctuaire de saint siméon117. la fonction ambigüe de ces tours et leur identification à des colonnes ou piliers de réclusion restent à ce jour incertaines et nécessiteraient de poursuivre les recherches archéologiques, épigraphiques et textuelles. pour autant, il existe une seconde allusion à une tour occupée par un stylite dans la vie de siméon des oliviers. l’évêque de ḥarrān aurait en effet nommé un certain « jovien, moine et stylite » comme son représentant à nisibe, dans le monastère de saint élisée, qui, dit-on, « était confiné (ḥbīš) dans une tour (būrgō)118. autrement dit, l’ensemble des attestations syriaques de « stylites » (esṭūnōyē/esṭūnōrē) désigneraient en réalité l’ensemble des ermites prenant abri dans une structure en forme de tour ou de colonne. ainsi, le terme esṭūnōrō serait alors devenu un quasi-synonyme de reclus (ḥbīšōyō). à l’aube de l’hégire, selon claire fauchon, « les stylites ne sont plus des stylites mais simplement des ascètes, plus spécialement des reclus119 ». ceci permet de comprendre pourquoi la chronologie de qarṭmīn donne autant d’importance à sa liste de stylites (esṭūnōrē) et n’hésite pas à la faire débuter par « mathieu le reclus (ḥbīšōyō) », pourtant antérieur à siméon le stylite120. en outre, les « stylites » n’étaient plus des autorités solitaires et sans attaches, mais étaient bien souvent inclus dans un cadre cénobitique, voire à l’intérieur même de la mandra, le mur d’enceinte du monastère121. 114. ibid., 377, n. 174 citant delehaye, saints stylites, chap. 5. 115. ibid., 333, citant delehaye, saints stylites, chap. 7 ; schachner, « archaeology of the stylite », 377, n. 173 signale aussi, que cet élément impacta les représentations géorgiennes de stylite, ainsi que celle de siméon dans la nouvelle « église cachée » de göreme en cappadoce. 116. j.-l. biscop, « réorganisation du monachisme syrien autour du sanctuaire de saint-syméon », dans les églises en monde syriaque, éd. f. briquel-chatonnet, 131–67 (paris : geuthner, 2013) ; j.-l. biscop, m. mundell mango et d. orssaud, deir déhès, monastère d’antiochène. étude architecturale (beyrouth : institut français d’archéologie du proche-orient, 1997). 117. schachner, « archaeology of the stylite », 377. 118. vie de siméon des oliviers, fo 117r. 119. fauchon, « vie ascétique », 49. 120. palmer, monk and mason, 105. 121. palmer, monk and mason, 80 ; voir également a. binggeli, « les stylites et l’eucharistie », dans pratiques de l’eucharistie dans les églises d’orient et d’occident, éd. n. bériou, b. caseau et d. rigaux, 421–44 (turnhout : brepols, 2009), 430. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 194 deux ou trois siècles plus tard, ceci était devenu une institution : une colonne avait sa propre communauté monastique, dont le devoir était de servir le stylite et ses visiteurs et d’y fournir un successeur à sa mort [. . .]. un tel monastère rendait physique la relation existant entre les consciences des moines de ces régions, même lorsqu’il n’y avait point de colonne, entre le coenobium et l’ermitage122. les exemples de dignitaires ayant opté pour cette forme de retraite en colonne ou en tour (ou issus de celle-ci) se multiplièrent au cours des viie–viiie siècles, comme, entre autres, georges (m. v. 80/700)123, thomas de tellā (m. 80/699)124 ou zacharie d’édesse (évêque en 145–46/762–63)125. dans la province de takrīt, jean, le métropolite héritier de marūtā, est surnommé chionite (kyūnōyō) : un synonyme de stylite126. en outre, il était admis qu’un évêque abandonnât son office en fin de vie pour se retirer dans un monastère de sa fondation à l'instar de théodote ier d’amid à qellet, dans le district de ṣawrā, sur la bordure nord-ouest du ṭūr ʿabdīn127. quant à son successeur théodote ii (r. 94–v. 110/712 ou 713–v. 728 ou 729), il aurait passé ses dernières années sur une colonne (esṭūnō) du ṭūr ʿabdīn128 : ce saint théodote, évêque d’amid, [. . .] abdiqua de l’épiscopat de la ville. il se retira donc de son siège et, quittant la cité, il descendit dans la région de dārā, dans les confins qui sont entre dārā et amid, il se construisit là une colonne (esṭūnō) sur laquelle il monta, marchant sur les traces de mār thomas de tellā. il bâtit aussi dans ce même lieu un grand monastère : celui-là même qui jusqu’à présent est établi à côté du village appelé qalūq129. son contemporain siméon des oliviers, évêque de ḥarrān (r. 81–116/700–34), serait quant à lui entré en contact avec le premier théodote d’amid130. en outre, il aurait longtemps habité la colonne d’un monastère du ṭūr ʿabdīn131. plus tard, « il construisit une colonne 122. ibid., 106 : « two or three centuries later this had become an institution: a column had its own monastic community, whose duty it was to serve the stylite and his visitors and to provide a successor for him when he died [. . .]. such a monastery made physical the relationship which existed in the minds of monks in this region, even where there were no columns, between coenobium and “mourner”. » 123. « chronicon anonymum ad ad 819 », dans chronicon 1234, 1–24, ici 13. 124. chronique de zuqnīn = chronique de denys de tell-mahré. quatrième partie [. . .], éd. j.-b. chabot (paris : e. bouillon, 1895), 12 ; « chronicon 819 », 13 ; vie de théodote, fo 286r, dans la version garšūnī son titre est traduit : ʿāmūd. 125. chronique de zuqnīn, 77. 126. bar hébraeus, chronicon ecclesiasticum, 2 : col. 159. 127. palmer, monk and mason, 88–90. 128. chronique de zuqnīn, 20–21, à ne pas confondre avec théodote ier d’amid mort en 68/698, voir infra. 129. chronique de zuqnīn, 20–21. 130. vie de siméon des oliviers, fo 116r. 131. ibid., fos 106r, 108v, 109v, 110r, 120r. 195 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 196 (esṭūnō) grande et haute pour les reclus (ḥbīšōyē) » dans un monastère à l’extérieur de nisibe132 et une autre dans le monastère de saint lazare133. pour l’hagiographe, il était naturel qu’un reclus au sens large vive dans une colonne, qu’elle fût ou non cylindrique et pleine. quant à denys de tell maḥrē, nous avons vu qu’il comprit l’information concernant la chute des colonnes comme une catastrophe touchant les « bienheureux » qui y vivaient. cette interprétation met en évidence à quel point le terme « colonne » était interprété, par les auteurs syro-occidentaux et notamment miaphysites, comme indissoluble de ce stylitisme134. ainsi, l’élévation, la tour, le phare ou la colonne (ēsṭūnō = ṣawmaʿa) semblent avoir désigné à la fois l’ensemble des retraites des moines et des reclus. siéger au sommet d’une motte conique, d’une tour ou d’une colonne, à proximité ou non d’un monastère, constituait une expression sociale et spirituelle similaire. il reste toutefois nécessaire de poursuivre les recherches sur les stylites dans la littérature syro-occidentale afin de vérifier l’importance de cette association sémantique et terminologique ainsi que ses variations géographiques. certains, à l’instar de leur modèle originel, eurent des relations importantes avec les populations arabes de leur voisinage. la figure du stylite semble avoir également été très liée à la question de la christianisation de ces tribus, et ce dans le prolongement de l’œuvre du premier d’entre eux, saint siméon l’ancien. nau a mis en évidence les passages de la vie de siméon le stylite sur la conversion des bédouins saracènes qu’il a conçu comme le modèle littéraire et social du processus d’évangélisation des arabes du proche orient à l’aube de l’islam135. en effet, les trois vies rédigées en son honneur insistent sur l’influence du saint à l’égard de populations bédouines. la question de la christianisation des arabes semble s’être accrue entre le milieu du ve siècle et le début du viie siècle. lorsque théodoret faisait simplement allusion à l’attractivité de l’homme saint chez des populations bédouines informes136, une vie syriaque peut-être moins ancienne que ce que n’en dit le colophon137 ajoute des éléments sur des démarches officielles liées au royaume d’al-ḥīra138, quant, finalement, la vie grecque tardive attribuée à antoine assure que le souverain lui-même 132. ibid., fo 110r. 133. ibid., fo 122v. 134. michel le syrien, chronique, 429 ; chronicon 1234, 260 ; sur la question d’un stylitisme spécifiquement miaphysite et syro-orthodoxe, voir pierre, « stylitisme et christianisation des arabes ». 135. nau, arabes chrétiens, 37–38 et 104. 136. théodoret de cyr, histoire des moines de syrie, 190 (xxvi.13). 137. p. peeters, « saint syméon stylite et ses premiers biographes », analecta bollandiana 61 (1943) : 29–71, à 48 note que le manuscrit comporte la date de 474 et la considère comme paléographiquement plausible, 57 ; lire à ce sujet s. brelaud, « al-ḥīra et ses chrétiens dans les guerres romano-perses », camenulae 15 (2016) : 1–26, ici 6–7. 138. vie syriaque de siméon stylite, éd. p. bedjan, dans acta martyrum et sanctorum 4, 507–644 (leipzig : o. harrassowitz, 1894), 597. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 196 se convertit139. ceci suggère un intérêt croissant de ses hagiographes et de ses imitateurs stylites pour les des saracènes et les ṭayyōyē, à l’aube de l’hégire140. 3. du privilège à l’hostilité : le stylite face aux autorités normatives syro-orthodoxes et arabo-musulmanes le discours attribué à abū bakr en sa waṣiyya incorpore sans grande équivoque l’essentiel des infrastructures cénobitiques comme érémitiques syriennes fédérées autour d’un homme saint sur son « pilier ». leur influence auprès des arabes était suffisamment importante pour que le deuxième dirigeant de l’état médinois enjoigne à ses troupes de les respecter tout en les évitant. en dépit de l’effort de « domestication » monastique, ils continuèrent de défier autant les canonistes de l’église syro-orthodoxe que les juristes et doctrinaires arabomusulmans. 3.1. le stylite et les arabes la ferveur des arabes à l’égard des moines et anachorètes est fréquemment attestée à l’époque islamique. ainsi, dès le milieu du viie siècle, le catholicos syro-oriental išōʿ-yahb iii d’adiabène (r. 28–39/649–59) soulignait, avec un brin d’exagération puisqu’il cherchait à réfuter les excuses de ses correspondants, que « non seulement [les arabes (ṭayyāyē)] ne combattent pas le christianisme, mais ils louent notre foi, honorent les prêtres et les saints de notre seigneur et font des dons aux églises et aux couvents (dayrātā) !141 ». une génération plus tard, jean bar penkāyē, auteur syro-oriental de nisibe qui écrivit dans le contexte de la deuxième fitna (v. 63–83/683–92), insistait encore sur le respect religieux que les solitaires inspiraient aux arabes : à propos de notre ordre (gr : tagma) des solitaires (iḥīdāyē = moines) il y eut prudemment quelque commandement de dieu afin qu’ils les (main)tiennent en honneur142 ! [. . .] ils reçurent, comme je l’ai dit plus haut, un commandement de leur guide (mhaddyānā) à propos du peuple (ʿamā) des chrétiens et à propos de l’ordre des solitaires143. alors que les monastères étaient ainsi révérés par les conquérants arabes, il semble que la forme de réclusion du stylitisme ait joui à la fin du ier siècle de l’hégire d’un important regain d’attractivité pour les moines syro-occidentaux et particulièrement chez les miaphysites. deux stylites du premier tiers du viiie siècle incarnent parfaitement la figure de l’autorité institutionnelle syro-orthodoxe alliée à celle du saint homme populaire en contact avec les arabes. nous avons vu plus haut que l’auteur de la vie de siméon des oliviers 139. voir la traduction chez r. doran, the lives of simeon stylites (collegeville, mn : cistercian publications, 1992) et la description de l’évènement : 95–96. 140. voir en détail dans pierre, « stylitisme et christianisation des arabes ». 141. išōʿ-yahb iii d’adiabène, išōʿyahb patriarchae iii liber epistularum, éd. r. duval, csco 64 (1904–5), 251. il avait comme objectif de dénoncer l’impiété de ses correspondants baḥrayniens/qaṭariens. 142. jean bar penkāyē, « rīsh mellē (livre 15) », dans mingana, sources syriaques 1, 143–71, voir 141. 143. ibid., 146. 197 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 198 lui attribuait la prime fondation d’une colonne de monastère hors de la porte sud-est de nisibe144, probablement dans le même couvent de mār élisée où son disciple jovien habitait une « tour145 ». il y aurait aussi fondé une hôtellerie (pūtqō, du grec pandokéion146, au même titre que le terme arabe funduq) pour les commerçants. cet établissement se trouvait ainsi à l’aboutissement de la route commerciale en provenance de balad sur le tigre et accueillait des négociants arabes147. en outre, selon la vie de gabriel de qarṭmīn il aurait fondé, à côté de l’église st théodore148, un « bēt ṣlūtō149 pour les arabes150 » qui est décrit en détail dans la vie de siméon des oliviers151. un second personnage représentatif de cette période est jean de mār zʿūrā. il est communément identifié avec le stylite jean de litarbā (m. 119/737), un des plus importants intellectuels syro-orthodoxes de l’époque marwānide152. ce dernier est connu pour ces écrits aux nombres desquels une lettre en forme de responsum à une question d’un certain daniel, « prêtre ṭuʿōyō », une des expressions ethniques du diocèse de georges153, l’évêque des tribus (ʿammē) (r. 687–724)154. elle portait sur le sujet de la succession prophétique, au cours de laquelle il s’appuyait sur l’autorité de georges, décrit comme « votre évêque155 ». 144. palmer, monk and mason, 107 ; vie de siméon des oliviers, fo 110 il fonde une colonne (esṭūnō) hors de la porte orientale de la ville. 145. vie de siméon des oliviers, fo 117r. 146. payne smith, dictionary, 440. 147. l’auteur de la vie de marūtā, 86 décrit un même type d’hôtellerie sur la route « entre l’euphrate et le tigre », qui comptaient des négociants « qui voyageaient dans le désert » (87), mais aussi de nombreux pèlerins, « principalement les peuples (ʿammē) qui demeurent dans cette ǧazīra » (86–87) mais aussi qaṣr sarij/ʿayn qnōyē, explicitement associé au culte des arabes dans la vie d’aḥūdemmeh, 29 situé à quelques kilomètre de la route commerciale entre balad et nisibe. le funduq monastique de nisibe est à mettre en relation avec le commerce saracène contraint de passer par nisibe et dārā sous justinien et ḫosrō ier. ménandre, the history of menander the guardsman, éd. r. c. blockley (liverpool : francis cairns, 1985), 70–72. 148. vie de siméon des oliviers, fo 112. 149. un bēt ṣlūtō, littéralement « demeure de prière », consiste en principe en une petite pièce ou chapelle accolée à une église pour des dévotions populaires, voir à ce sujet e. keser-kayaalp, « églises et monastères du ṭur ʿabdin. les débuts d’une architecture “syriaque” », dans briquel-chatonnet, les églises en monde syriaque, 269–88, ici 273 et 280 et e. keser-kayaalp, « church building in the ṭur ʿ abdin in the first centuries of the islamic rule », dans authority and control in the countryside. from antiquity to islam in the mediterranean and near east (6th–10th century), éd. a. delattre, m. legendre et p. sijpesteijn, 176–209 (leyde : brill, 2018), 194–95. 150. vie de gabriel de bēt qūsṭān, dans « a critical edition and annotated translation of the qartmin trilogy », éd. a. palmer (cambridge, 1989), 55–92, ici 89. 151. vie de siméon des oliviers, fo 114v : un masgdō et madraseh. 152. debié, écriture de l’histoire, 199–200 ; sa retraite est mentionnée par peña, castellana et fernandez, stylites syriens, 51. 153. pierre, « les ʿammē », 31–33. 154. dans les sources du iie/viiie siècle, georges n’était pas qualifié « d’évêque des arabes », mais uniquement d’« évêque des ʿammē » ce qui n’est pas sans importance (« chronicon 819 », 13 ; « chronicon ad annum 846 pertinens », éd. e. w. brooks, dans chronica minora 2, 157–238 [paris : csco 3, 1904], 232). georges ne signe jamais non plus autrement que comme évêque des ʿammē des tanūkōyē, des ʿaqūlōyē et des ṭūʿōyē. 155. w. wright, catalogue of syriac manuscripts in the british museum (londres : gilbert & rivington, 1871), 2 : 988 : ms. bl add 12,154, fos 291–93. sur cette lettre, lire j. tannous, between christology and kalam? the life al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 198 en outre, l’archivistique syro-occidentale préserva jusqu’à nos jours un court traité subdivisé en « sermons (mēmrē) » adressé aux « clercs du peuple/de la tribu (ʿamō) croyant des arabes (ṭayyōyē)156. » litarbā était un bourg à proximité immédiate de la zone des stylites étudiée par schachner où se trouvaient, entre autres, le sanctuaire de saint siméon, le site d’al-ṣawmaʿa et le monastère de tell ʿaddē où siégeait régulièrement le patriarche syro-orthodoxe. jean de mār zʿūrā aurait donc résidé lui-aussi à proximité immédiate des principales voies commerciales du jund de qinnasrīn. ce dernier est surtout connu pour les multiples responsa que lui aurait renvoyées jacques d’édesse (m. 89/708). un certain nombre des questions qu’il y aborda traitent de la proximité de certains arabes (ṭayyōyē) et/ou musulmans (mhaggrōyē) avec l’église157. ainsi, dans la deuxième lettre, il apprenait de jacques que les portes d’une église devaient demeurer closes « à cause des mhaggrōyē, afin qu’ils ne puissent entrer ». il interrogeait aussi le maître canoniste sur la possibilité de les soigner ou exorciser158, une pratique généralement bien attestée de la part des hommes saints syriaques159. plus avant, il s’interrogeait sur la nécessité du re-baptême d’un ancien chrétien désireux de « revenir de son paganisme160 ». enfin, étonné de voir juifs et musulmans des environs prier tous vers le sud, il en demanda la raison à jacques, qui, pour avoir voyagé en égypte, savait qu’ils priaient « en direction de jérusalem et de la kaʿba, le lieu ancestral de leur peuple161. » ce stylitisme officialisé et généralisé eut une influence non-négligeable sur les arabes conquérants. en outre, le caractère visuel spectaculaire et la localisation sur les routes commerciales, dans les cols de l’antiochène ou le long de la route trans-mésopotamienne, impressionnaient nécessairement les commerçants. dès lors, l’institution, par les arabomusulmans, d’un tel privilège explicite attribué à la waṣiyya d’abū bakr prend tout son sens. 3.2. les arabo-musulmans et le clergé chrétien il existe de bonnes raisons pour avancer que les solitaires et notamment les stylites et autres saints hommes (holy men) des communautés influencèrent le courant ascétique islamique en formation à tel point que, comme l’a souligné thomas sizgorich : « le moine, emblème de militantisme et de piété ascétique joint en la personne d’une avant-garde and letters of george, bishop of the arab tribes (piscataway, nj : gorgias press, 2009), 676. 156. alice croq prépare actuellement une étude sur ce texte. je la remercie infiniment de m’avoir informé de son existence. 157. m. penn, envisioning islam. syriac christians and the early muslim world (philadelphie : university of pennsylvania press, 2015), 144–60 ; voir les traductions de ces lettres dans m. penn, when christians first met muslims. a sourcebook of the earliest syriac writings on islam (oakland : university of california press, 2015), 167–73. 158. lettre 1, trad. penn, when christians met muslims, 167. 159. j. tannous, the making of the medieval middle east. religion, society, and simple believers (princeton, nj : princeton university press, 2018), 154. 160. lettre 1, trad. penn, when christians met muslims, 168–69. mentionnée par tannous, the making of the medieval middle east, 335. 161. lettre 4, trad. penn, when christians met muslims, 172–73. 199 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 200 communautaire réémerge dans les premières descriptions islamiques du jihād et de ceux qui l’accomplissaient162. » à en croire ibn isḥāq (m. 150/768), le célèbre compagnon salmān « le perse » fut lui-même un moine anachorète d’obédience syro-orientale dont les maîtres ne cessèrent, à la veille de leurs trépas respectifs, de le recommander à un autre, ce qui l’aurait conduit, en bout de chaine, à rejoindre le prophète163. plus tard, mystiques et ascètes de la fin de la période abbasside se référèrent à ce personnage comme fondateur de leur mouvement, en insistant sur son inspiration chrétienne. en outre, ce compagnon clef fonde la chaine de transmission d’un ḥadīṯ qui confirme cette opinion islamique favorable aux reclus : « “laisse les prêtres (qasīsūn) dans les ṣawmaʿa-s et les ruines”, m’a déclaré l’apôtre, “car parmi eux, il y a des ṣiddiqūn (véridiques) et des ruhbān”164. » ce ḥadīṯ reprenait la proposition modèle de la waṣiyya d’abū bakr « laisse les . . . » et entretient l’ambivalence exégétique du verset. le ḥadīṯ de salmān confirmait l’influence et la vénération dont jouissaient les moines stylites tout en entretenant une certaine ambiguïté. il opposait les « prêtres » chrétiens qui vivent dans « les ṣawmaʿa-s et les ruines » et qui sont bel et bien « véridiques » à d’autres prêtres, desquels il faut se méfier et qu’on ne doit pas « laisser ». il démontre comment des arabo-musulmans étaient encore tentés par l’intercession des solitaires tandis que leur opinion « nazaréenne » était repoussée comme hétérodoxe. au sujet de l’intercession des moines nazaréens, ibn abī šayba (m. 235/849) transmit un avis du juriste syrien al-awzāʿī (m. 157/774) qu’il aurait lui-même appris d’un maître d’époque omeyyade165 : « il n’y a point de mal de dire “amen” à la prière invocatoire du moine [s’il invoque pour toi] ; car ils nous en font profiter tandis qu’ils ne s’en font pas profiter eux-mêmes !166 ». cet avis constitua un des fondements de la religiosité ascétique d’abū bakr al-dīnawarī, un siècle postérieur (m. 333/944) dans sa séance mystique167. pour ibn abī šayba, savant muḥaddiṯ contemporain de la miḥna, il semble toutefois refléter un moment d’ambivalence où l’on révérait encore l’extraordinaire piété exemplaire des solitaires des hauteurs, tout en combattant ardemment le credo chrétien. dans la même veine, muqātil b. sulaymān (m. 150/767), un des premiers exégètes, tenta d’expliquer les termes clefs du verset qurʾān 9 : 30 qui affirme que les enseignants (aḥbār) et les moines (ruhbān) auraient été adoptés par les chrétiens « comme maîtres/seigneurs (arbābā-n) » en place de dieu. les premiers, selon muqātil, seraient des savants, « des ʿulamāʾ de leurs religions », sans que le savant eût eu connaissance du lien probable avec 162. t. sizgorich, violence and belief in late antiquity. militant devotion in christianity and islam (philadelphie : university of pennsylvania press, 2009), 160 : « the monk as an emblem of militancy and ascetic piety joined in the person of a communal vanguard reemerges in early islamic descriptions of jihād and those who waged it. » 163. ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, éd. m. ʿāṭāʾ, 8 vol. (beyrouth : dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1990), 4 : 56 ; ibn hišām, sīra, 1 : 214–22; sur sa migration mystique, s. bowen savant, the new muslims of post-conquest iran. tradition, memory, and conversion (cambridge : cambridge university press, 2013), 63. 164. ibn abī šayba, musnad, éd. ʿā. al-ʿazzāzī et a. al-mazīdī, 2 vol. (riyad : dār al-waṭan, 1997), 309–10. 165. ḥassān b. ʿaṭiyya al-muḥāribī. 166. ibn abī šayba, al-muṣannaf ,éd. k. y. al-ḥawt, 7 vol. (riyad : maktabat al-rušd, 1988), 6 : 105. 167. abū bakr al-dīnawarī, al-mujālasa, 3 : 365. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 200 le vocabulaire judéo-araméen. quant aux seconds ils « sont les mujtahidūn de leur religion (dīn) : ce sont les gens des ṣawmaʿa-s168. » il semble donc avoir opposer les savants formels que seraient les aḥbār aux intellectuels, « ceux qui s’efforcent » (mujtahidūn), que seraient les habitants des tours d’ermitage. cependant, ce verset dut être accordé avec qurʾān 57 : 26–27 qui édicte que « le monachisme (rahbāniyya), ils l’inventèrent!169 ». muqātil envisagea donc une voie médiane, où, parmi les vrais chrétiens persécutés et retirés dans les ṣawmaʿa-s, aurait fini par apparaître un groupe qui aurait finalement renoncé à sa vraie religion pour adopter le « nazaréisme » : « lorsque les polythéistes se multiplièrent et que les croyants furent vaincus et méprisés, après jésus fils de marie, ils se retirèrent et prirent les ṣawmaʿa-s. ceci dura longtemps et alors certains renoncèrent (rajaʿa ʿan) à la religion de jésus (ʿīsā) et inventèrent le nazaréisme (naṣrāniyya)170. » l’exégète de la fin viiie siècle hésite, comme nombre de ses contemporains, à adopter ou non une posture respectueuse des ermites, garants de la vraie foi chrétienne. le livre saint critiquait de manière acerbe l’anachorèse et reflétait la méfiance ecclésiastique syroorthodoxe à l’égard des ermites. en revanche, muqātil produisit un véritable « hors sujet » et atténua — voire inversa — la thématique. il ne parlait plus de l’invention du monachisme du point de vue d’opposants à l’aura des moines, mais de l’invention de la doctrine nazaréenne, œuvre de certains, seulement, des stylites ou ermites, décrits collectivement comme les vrais croyants du christianisme primitif. 3.3. le bon stylite et le mauvais tonsuré ibn abī šayba rapporta, outre une version assez classique de la waṣiyya171, un propos du calife abū bakr connecté à cette tradition, où le calife aurait interdit explicitement de « tuer le moine (rāhib) dans la ṣawmaʿa172 ». cette formulation abrupte qui prohibait avec force d’occire le reclus dans sa tour suggère que ces derniers jouissaient d’un statut d’exception parmi les chrétiens ordinaires qui auraient légitimement pu être abattus. une génération auparavant, les chroniqueurs al-wāqidī et sayf b. ʿumar, ainsi que le muḥaddiṯ ʿabd al-razzāq avaient seulement reçu d’abū bakr l’ordre de « laisser » les stylites en paix. ces nouvelles problématiques du ixe siècle reflètent à notre sens une crispation des savants sunnites à l’égard des religions de l’écriture. un indice important pourrait être la récurrence dans la littérature syriaque, à partir des années 160/780 et de manière accrue sous hārūn al-rašīd (r. 169–93/785–809) et après sa mort, de mentions de destructions d’églises « nouvellement construites » en syrie du nord et en haute-mésopotamie173. 168. muqātil b. sulaymān, tafsīr, éd. ʿa. m. šiḥāta, 5 vol. (beyrouth : dār iḥyāʾ al-turāṯ al-ʿarabī, 2002), 2 : 167–68 (cf. : q. 9 : 30). 169. ce verset fut l’objet d’intenses débats entre les exégètes, et ce à toutes les époques. 170. muqātil, tafsīr, 4 : 246. 171. ibn abī šayba, al-muṣannaf, 6 : 484 (no 33134). 172. ibid., 6 : 483 (no 33127). 173. sur ce processus j.-m. fiey, chrétiens syriaques sous les abbassides surtout à bagdad, 749–1258 (louvain : csco, 1980), 44–46 ; a. noth, « problems of differentiation between muslims and non-muslims. re-reading the “ordinances of ʿumar” », jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 9 (1987) : 103–24 ; m. levy-rubin, 201 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 202 ces excès et autres émeutes populaires légalisées se multiplièrent à partir de la fin de la quatrième fitna (v. 193–209/809–825)174. ciblant des édifices dont la population musulmane considérait qu’ils auraient été élevés après le traité (ṣulḥ) de leur conquête, ces églises étaient dénoncées comme illégales. en effet, les annales arabo-musulmanes confirment certains débats et décisions judiciaires à cette époque175. ibn abī šayba illustrait parfaitement cette tension et transmit le même propos, mais cette fois attribué au prophète en personne (par une tradition de ibn ʿabbās et ʿikrima), avec la même interdiction explicite : « sur le point d’expédier ses légions, il aurait déclaré : “ne tuez point les gens des ṣawmaʿa-s”176 ». qu’un combattant musulman fût sommé d’épargner le stylite et de le « laisser à lui-même » n’allait plus de soi, seule la figure prophétique pouvait encore leur éviter le sort qu’on désirait désormais infliger aux infidèles. les savants de l’époque de la miḥna recoururent abondamment à des ḥadīṯ muḥammadiens pour justifier ce type de privilèges ou d’exceptions devenus alors inhabituels ou inacceptables, tandis que leurs prédécesseurs s’étaient contentés d’avis ou de précédents de compagnons et de premiers califes177. un courant opposé aux stylites semble alors avoir entrepris de reformuler l’ensemble des traditions favorables aux reclus. ʿabd al-razzāq lui-même avait ajouté dans sa composition un second ḥadīṯ, rapporté par le savant syrien maʿmar b. rāšid (m. 153/770) à partir du grand juriste pro-omeyyade al-zuhrī (m. 121/740), où la recommandation d’abū bakr revêtait une toute autre tonalité : « vous trouverez un groupe (qawm), ils se sont tonsurés (faḥaṣū) le sommet de la tête avec des épées. et puis vous trouverez un groupe (qawm), ils se sont enfermés eux-mêmes dans les ṣawāmiʿ. ignorez-les (ḏarhum) à leurs erreurs/péchés (ḫaṭāyā) !178 » non-muslims in the early islamic empire. from surrender to coexistence (cambridge : cambridge university press, 2011), 60–68, 70–75, 78–84, 100-103 ; p. wood, « christian elite networks in the jazīra, c. 730–850 », dans transregional and regional elites. connecting the early islamic empire, éd. h.-l. hagemann et s. heidemann, 359–84 (berlin : de guyter, 2020), 371 et entre autres nombreux témoignages : al-ṭabarī, ta’rīḫ, série 3, 713 ; théophane, chronographia, 452–53 ; michel le syrien, chronique, 478. 174. la bibliographie manque encore sérieusement à ce sujet, voir notamment l’opinion de fiey, chrétiens syriaques, 87–89. 175. al-kindī, kitāb wulāt wa-quḍāt miṣr, éd. m. ismāʿīl et a. al-mazīdī (beyrouth : dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2003), 99–100 ; j. m. fiey, mossoul chrétienne. essai sur l’histoire, l’archéologie et l’état actuel des monuments chrétiens de la ville de mossoul (beyrouth : librairie orientale, 1959), 20–25 mentionne al-azdī, taʾrīḫ al-mawṣil, éd. ʿa. ḥabība (le caire : al-majlis al-aʿlā li-l-šuʾūn al-islāmiyya, 1967), 244 (année 163/779) et c. robinson, empire and elites after the muslim conquest. the transformation of northern mesopotamia (cambridge : cambridge university press, 2000), 11–12, al-azdī, al-mawṣil, 340 (année 200/815), voir aussi la version d’alḫaṭīb al-baġdādī, taʾrīḫ madīnat al-salām (baġdād), éd. b. ʿa. maʿrūf (beyrouth : dār al-ġarb al-islāmī, 2002), 8 : 456. 176. ibn abī šayba, al-muṣannaf, 6 : 484 (no 33132) ; l’informateur du ḥadīṯ prophétique est incertain, il s’agit d’un šayḫ médinois, qui transmet d’un mawlā non nommé lui-même d’un disciple de ʿikrima. ceci incite à douter de la pertinence de ce propos prophétique isolé. 177. voir par exemple au sujet du cas des chrétiens banū taġlib, le recours au ḥadīṯ prophétique par le même auteur et son contemporain ibn saʿd, à propos d’un sujet auquel tous leurs prédécesseurs se contentaient des précédents des premiers califes, s. pierre, « subjugation and taxation ». 178. al-ṣanʿānī, al-muṣannaf, 5 : 199–200. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 202 dans ces différentes versions, le calife distinguait le qawm des stylites et autres reclus d’un autre groupe (qawm) de « tonsurés ». les deux types de religieux chrétiens devaient être épargnés, mais plus par souci de préserver les musulmans de « leurs errements » que pour leur manifester respect ou déférence. en revanche, il est impossible d’éclaircir le passage faisant allusion à une tonsure réalisée « avec les épées » sans recourir à certains éléments collectés par des muḥaddiṯ-s contemporains. ainsi, abū ʿubayd (m. 224/838) entreprit de définir précisément le verbe faḥaṣa dans son dictionnaire des ḥadīṯ étranges : « tu trouveras un groupe (qawm), ils se sont tonsuré (faḥaṣū) leurs têtes. alors frappe avec l’épée ce qu’ils ont tonsuré ! et vous trouverez un groupe (qawm) dans les ṣawmaʿa-s, alors laisse-les (daʿhum), et (pour/ainsi que ?) ce qu’ils se sont faits à eux-mêmes [. . .]179. » le célèbre légiste recomposait ici différemment le même ḥadīṯ califal : il insistait sur la distinction entre, d’une part, les bons reclus (« “quant aux gens des ṣawāmiʿ” : cela veut dire : “les moines” (ruhbān)180 ») que l’on doit laisser tranquille, et, d’autre part les mauvais religieux qui sont tonsurés, et que l’on doit frapper « avec l’épée ». ceci suggère que la version de ʿabd al-razzāq, où l’épée aurait servi de rasoir, était défectueuse. abū ʿubayd fournit en outre une piste d’interprétation au sujet de ces mystérieux tonsurés : « il désigne les šamāmisa qui se sont tonsurés181 ». le singulier šammās est un calque du vocable šammōšō qui désigne en syriaque le ministre du culte et le diacre et en arabe, par extension, n’importe quel clerc chrétien182. les tonsurés équivalaient déjà à ces clercs dans la composition de ʿabd al-razzāq quelques décennies plus tôt183. ce courant de traditions manifeste une violente aversion à l’égard des dignitaires officiels des églises. il opposerait clairement deux types de religieux chrétiens : (1) le moine solitaire, qui, a minima doit jouir d’un privilège, et (2) le clerc, l’ecclésiastique qu’il faut pourchasser. le croyant aurait dès lors autant le devoir d’épargner les premiers que de combattre les seconds. par conséquent, selon abū ʿubayd, le ḥadīṯ distinguerait entre de bons moines reclus dans leurs tours et des diacres et des prêtres affiliés à l’ordre épiscopal. malheureusement, cette hypothèse séduisante se concilie difficilement avec l’usage de la tonsure dans la littérature syriaque de son temps. les sources syro-orientales associent même cette marque capillaire à abraham de kashkar (m. v. 586), le (ré)formateur du cénobitisme dans l’empire sassanide. ainsi, selon išōʿ-dnaḥ de baṣra (m. fin-iiie/ixe siècle), « il initia la tonsure (sūfrā) qui est sur la tête des solitaires (iḥidāyē = moine au sens large)184 ». 179. abū ʿubayd, ġarīb al-ḥadīṯ, 2 : 231 ; presqu’identique dans ibn abī šayba, al-muṣannaf, 7 : 198, de yaḥyā b. abī muṭayʿ : « vous atteindrez un groupe (qawm), ils sont dans des ṣawāmiʿ, laissez-les et ce qu’ils se font à eux-mêmes [ibid. jusqu’ici la 6 : 484 (no 33134)]. puis vous irez à un qawm qui se sont tonsurés le sommet du crâne au milieu de la tête [. . .] frappez alors ce qu’ils ont rasés au milieu de leur tête ! » 180. abū ʿubayd, ġarīb al-ḥadīṯ, 2 : 231. 181. ibid. 182. šammōšō, du verbe šammeš (forme ii : paʿʿel) qui signifie : « servir un culte » et par extension : « célébrer la messe », à l’origine, de toute évidence, il s’agissait de servir un culte solaire (araméen et akkadien : šmš). 183. al-ṣanʿānī, al-muṣannaf, 5 : 200. 184. išōʿ-dnaḥ de baṣra, le livre de la chasteté composé par jésusdenah, évêque de baçrah, éd. j.-b. chabot (rome : école française de rome, 1896), 7 ; chronique de seert = histoire nestorienne inédite. seconde partie (i), éd. a. scher, patrologia orientalis 7 (1911) : 42–43 (al-sufār). 203 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 204 dès lors, contrairement à l’affirmation d’abū ʿubayd, la tonsure constituait une des marques par excellence du monachisme et n’aurait donc que peu à voir avec le clergé. néanmoins, l’insistance des sources sur cet aspect de la réforme d’abraham de kashkar induit aussi que cette norme était encore peu développée au début de la période hégirienne. selon dad-išōʿ (m. v. 70/690), la tonsure était le propre des moines en couvent (dayrāyē)185 depuis que babay le grand (m. 6/628), le successeur d’abraham, l’avait imposée à tout nouvel entrant186. nous avons vu que dad-išōʿ situe les cénobites à un degré inférieur aux différents rangs des « solitaires » (iḥīdāyē) qui, au terme d’une période de probation, devaient accéder au droit de devenir ascète. ces derniers n'auraient eu dès lors plus l’occasion d’être à nouveau tondus, si tant est qu’ils eussent bien été intégrés à ce cursus théorique. par ailleurs, selon l’auteur anonyme de la chronique de séert, un responsable politique (ṣāḥib) du bēt garmay qui siégeait à al-sinn au début de l’époque islamique aurait accordé une exonération de jizya à « quiconque se vêtit de laine, qu’il fussent tonsurés (musaffar) ou non », privilège qui était toujours en vigueur à l’époque de l’auteur187. était-ce à cette dichotomie entre le moine tonsuré et le stylite/reclus non-tonsuré que les informateurs d’abū ʿubayd et d’ibn abī šayba faisaient référence ? selon une seconde interprétation, abraham de kashkar aurait imposé une tonsure (ēskīmā) pour distinguer celle de ses frères de celle (ēskīmā grīʿā) des moines « sévériens », c’est-à-dire des miaphysites qui se répandaient alors dans l’empire perse (= les futurs syroorthodoxes)188. ainsi, il n’aurait pas inventé la tonsure, mais l’aurait rendue spécifique et reconnaissable, par souci de se distinguer des héritiers de jacques baradée. par ailleurs, l’auteur de la vie de rabban hormizd, un saint homme syro-oriental et dyophysite d’adiabène mort peu avant la deuxième fitna, se refusait à appeler ses rivaux autrement que « moines tonsurés (grīʿē) » et « hérétiques189 ». ces derniers semblent avoir été nombreux à pratiquer le monachisme et l’anachorèse. ainsi, la première des trois questions posées par ḫosrō ii (r. 589–7/628) lors de la controverse intra-chrétienne de 612 opposait « les nestoriens (nesṭūryānē) » aux miaphysites, simplement désignés comme « les moines (dayrāyē)190». florence jullien confirme que « le terme de “moines” renvoie classiquement aux syro-orthodoxes » et ajoute que « l’organisation et la constitution de cette église étaient 185. fauchon, « vie ascétique », 42. 186. ibid., 45, dans le canon 19. 187. chronique de seert = histoire nestorienne inédite. seconde partie (ii), éd. a. scher, patrologia orientalis 13 (1919) : 312–13. 188. ibid., 45–46 ; f. jullien, « les controverses entre chrétiens dans l’empire sassanide. un enjeu identitaire », dans les controverses en milieu syriaque, éd. f. ruani (paris : geuthner, 2016), 209–38, ici 216 ; thomas de margā, the book of governors . the historia monastica of thomas, bishop of margâ a. d. 840 [. . .], éd. e. w. budge (londres : k. paul, 1893), livre 1, 23. 189. « histoire de rabban hormizd », dans the histories of rabban hormizd the persian and rabban bar-idta [. . .], éd. e. w. budge, 2–109 (londres : luzac, 1902), 54, 57, 58, 60–62, 64, 69–70. 190. jullien, « controverses », 221 ; babay le grand, « martyr de giwargis mihram-gushn-asp », dans histoire de mar-jabalaha, de trois autres patriarches, d’un prêtre et de deux laïques, nestoriens, éd. p. bedjan, 416–571 (leipzig : o. harrassowitz, 1895), 516–17. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 204 en effet avant tout l’œuvre de moines, ordonnés en masse pour les besoins de la mission191. » selon cette interprétation, la tonsure constituait peut-être encore, au début du viie siècle, un critère de discrimination des moines « sévériens ». ce motif rhétorique aurait-il pu être repris par les arabo-musulmans ? est-il possible d’en déduire que les tonsurés étaient jacobites par excellence, et que les non-tonsurés étaient, à l’inverse, les syro-orientaux dyophysites192 ? quelle que fut la signification des « tonsurés » par rapport aux « stylites/reclus », il est intéressant de constater que dans les versions plus anciennes, abū bakr interdisait de faire le moindre mal à chacun des deux groupes également. dans le ḥadīṯ produit par ibn abī šayba, une génération plus tard, la waṣiyya d’abū bakr leur réservait pourtant deux sorts différents : 1) ceux des ṣawāmiʿ, les esṭūnōrē des sources syriaques équivalentes (denys de tell maḥrē dans 1234) devaient être « abandonnés à ce qu’ils se faisaient eux-mêmes », préservant une tonalité relativement neutre : passer son chemin, ne point les opprimer, mais sans les suivre pour autant. 2) à l’inverse, les tonsurés devaient être « frappés » par les combattants au niveau même de leur tonsure : sur la tête ! de quelle manière l’antagonisme entre ces deux types de figures religieuses chrétiennes se constitua-t-il dans la littérature moyen-orientale des débuts de l’islam ? 3.4. une autorité populaire et contestée : le stylite devin plusieurs traditions attribuent à une autorité divinatoire vivant dans une ṣawmaʿa la fondation des capitales abbassides de bagdad et al-raqqa193. un certain ibn jābir rapporte de son père une histoire à propos d’al-manṣūr qu’al-ṭabarī situait à la fois lors de la fondation de bagdad en 145/762 et de celle de rāfiqa en 154/771, et répèta même à une troisième reprise. nous ne citerons qu’une seule des versions : il voulut construire al-rāfiqa dans la terre des romains, les gens d’al-raqqa s’opposèrent et voulurent le combattre, en disant : « tu vas endommager nos marchés, faire fuir nos aliments et rétrécir nos domiciles ! » il était soucieux à l’idée de les combattre. il envoya donc (un message) à un moine dans la ṣawmaʿa : « as-tu connaissance qu’un humain construira ici même une cité ? » il répondit : « on m’a informé qu’un homme appelé miqlāṣ devait la bâtir ». 191. jullien, « controverses », 221. 192. thomas de margā, monastica, livre 2, 91 insiste à l’inverse pour dire que les moines sévériens sont eux-mêmes spécifiquement tonsurés (grīʿē) ; quant à la chronique de seert (i), 42–43 et 80 elle n’associe pas l’existence ou la forme de la tonsure à une distinction, mais uniquement les vêtements des moines. 193. mentionnées par c. sahner, « the monasticism of my community is jihad. a debate on asceticism, sex, and warfare in early islam », arabica 64, no 2 (2017) : 149–83, ici 162. 205 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 206 il dit alors : « [par dieu], c’est moi miqlāṣ194 ! » et il la construisit sur le modèle de construction de bagdad195. la localisation surprenante de « rāfiqa dans la terre des romains (arḍ al-rūm)196 » ne doit pas surprendre car elle désigne couramment la partie anciennement romaine de l’empire abbasside, le bilād al-šām, dans les sources syriaques. en revanche, il s’agit d’un indice de l’origine possiblement chrétienne d’une telle information. de manière amusante, le géographe iranien ibn al-faqīh (iiie/ixe s.)197 transmit un ḫabar légèrement semblable à ces traditions, à partir d’un obscur baṣrien, ibn bašīr, en partance pour une expédition estivale (ṣāʾifa). il aurait appris d’un « moine (rāhib) dans une ṣawmaʿa » la prochaine révolution abbasside et la fondation consécutive de bagdad. pourtant, « il ne s’y trouvait rien d’autres que des dattiers, des villages et un couvent (dayr) [le sien . . .] ; il y avait du gibier (daʿālija) et le reste n’était que désert ». ces récits ne spécifient nullement que ces ermites furent systématiquement des reclus ou des stylites, même si la disposition est proche. il est frappant de retrouver chez l’anonyme de zuqnīn un récit très similaire à propos de la « reconstruction de callinice (al-raqqa) ». l’auteur était lui-même possiblement un stylite, et un témoin vivant de cet évènement198 : [al-manṣūr] avait une propension à suivre les magiciens et les devins199, il écoutait et faisait tout ce qu’ils lui disaient. [. . .] ils lui dirent : « il y aura un roi fort, qui bâtira une ville à côté de callinice [al-raqqa] ; il ira ensuite à jérusalem et y bâtira une mosquée. il doit régner quarante ans ». ce misérable dit : « c’est moi !200 » ceci permet de suggérer qu’al-ṭabarī faisait probablement erreur en associant l’une des versions à la fondation de bagdad. cette tradition s’inscrit plus probablement à raqqa, dans l’espace où l’institution des stylites est bien attestée pour le iie/viiie siècle. l’anonyme de zuqnīn cessa d’écrire peu de temps après le lancement du projet urbain, vers 159/775, époque présumée où vivait son contemporain musulman ibn jābir. ceci implique que cette légende circula nécessairement très tôt dans les différents milieux jazīriens, musulmans et chrétiens. ces récits sont le probable produit de l’exagération de faits réels : la recherche par l’autorité publique d’une justification divinatoire par le recours à un homme saint, face à l’opposition de l’élite urbaine locale. les sources syriaques et musulmanes divergent toutefois sur la qualité du conseiller surnaturel du prince. pour les musulmans, c’est une autorité chrétienne dont l’aura s’étend à la bourgeoisie syriaque comme à l’élite arabomusulmane. pour les syro-orthodoxes de haute-mésopotamie, à l’inverse, il s’agit d’un 194. dans la version consacrée à bagdad, il s’exclame : « j’ai été appelé miqlāṣ dans ma jeunesse ! ». 195. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīḫ, série 3, 276 ; voir également 372. 196. ibid., 372. 197. ibn al-faqīh, al-buldān, 357–58. 198. voir n. 236. 199. jullien, « controverses », 226. 200. chronique de zuqnīn, 120. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 206 magicien de cour, sans rapport avec l’église même s’il put être chrétien de confession201. il est important de souligner que les holy men d’une église rivale étaient constamment dépeints comme des sorciers (ḥarašē) et des séducteurs, même lorsqu’il s’agissait d’un évêque, voire d’un patriarche. dès lors, ce récit de la fondation d’al-rāfiqa se rapproche d’un passage de polémique antichalcédonienne de la source commune des chroniques miaphysites de 1234 et de michel le syrien, probablement denys de tell maḥrē. selon lui, théodore, le frère d’héraclius (r. 610–20/641), cheminait avec son armée pour mater l’invasion des arabes (ṭayyōyē), considérés avec mépris : ils arrivèrent au village appelé gūsīt, dans la région d’antioche où se tenait un chalcédonien sur une colonne (esṭūnō), à la manière d’un moine. [415] theodore alla le trouver avec quelques-uns des capitaines (rēšōnē). [. . .] alors le stylite (ēsṭūnōyō) déclara à théodore : « je sais que l’empire des romains sera livré entre tes mains [. . .] et je suis persuadé que tu reviendras victorieux si tu me promets qu’à ton retour tu feras disparaître les partisans de sévère. » en entendant ces choses, théodore répondit : « moi-même, en dehors de ta parole, j’étais disposé à persécuter les partisans de jacques (baradée) ». un des soldats qui l’accompagnaient était orthodoxe, en entendant ce qui se disait, il brûla d’un grand zèle. [. . .] les arabes l’emportèrent contre les romains, et les romains se mirent à fuir [. . .]. ce soldat s’approcha de theodore et lui dit : « quoi donc, théodore ! où sont les promesses que le stylite t’a faites, que tu reviendrais avec un grand nom ?202 » ces textes invoquent successivement la préscience réelle ou supposée d’un moine depuis sa ṣawmaʿa. l’esṭūnōrō, orthodoxe ou hérétique, véridique ou fallacieux constituait sans doute, au viiie siècle, une figure prophétique commode autant dans les littératures syriaques qu’arabes203. le topos s’étend à chaque fois à l’aura dont il jouit parmi les laïcs, du petit peuple à l’élite foncière d’une grande cité comme raqqa/callinice, et même à un membre des cours impériales romaines et abbassides. cette instrumentalisation confirme l’autorité charismatique dont les stylites jouissaient effectivement. ces récits reflètent ainsi une même défiance de la part de l’orthodoxe ecclésiastique chrétien comme du savant musulman à des stylites comme autorités spirituelles rivales et enseignants autoproclamés. 201. au sujet des magiciens, astrologues et médecins chrétiens des cours d’al-manṣūr et al-mahdī, et du cas spécifique de théophile, on se reportera à borrut, « court astrologers », 458–59, 461, n. 34, 462, 473 et surtout 477–81 ; et borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 83 et 144. 202. michel le syrien, chronique, 414–15 et chronicon 1234, 242–44. version de michel citée par tannous, making of the medieval middle east, 162. selon peña, castellana et fernandez, stylites syriens, 69 : gūsit équivaut à jūsiya al-ḫarab : une journée au sud de ḥimṣ. ce serait aussi l’emplacement du fameux village de baʿaltān d’où est originaire le patriarche georges (r. 758–89). 203. jūsiya aurait accueilli un autre stylite avant lui, du nom de serge, qui aurait écrit un traité de controverse contre les juifs durant la première moitié du viiie siècle, édité par a. p. hayman, the disputation of sergius the stylite against a jew [csco 338–339] (louvain : secrétariat du corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium, 1973). je remercie bastien dumont pour cette référence essentielle. 207 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 208 3.5. dénonciation des stylites chez les syro-orthodoxes ce modèle de sainteté, plus constant que l’errant et plus admirable que le cénobite constituait un des piliers du christianisme syrien. les différentes tentatives d’intégration des solitaires à l’ordre monastique n’étaient pas parvenues à étouffer la concurrence qu’exerçaient les reclus à l’égard des hiérarchies ecclésiastiques en construction. même emmurés dans des cloîtres, ils continuèrent à poser problème aux évêques et, dès lors, leurs abus émanèrent régulièrement de la littérature canonique204. en outre, nombre de ces saints hommes des hauteurs furent admis dans les ordres du diaconat et de la prêtrise afin d’être intégrés à l’église officielle. siméon stylite le jeune lui-même avait été ordonné diacre puis prêtre au milieu du vie siècle205. il est établi qu’il prêchait, depuis sa colonne située dans l’octogone à l’ouest du complexe cultuel, notamment à des laïcs contrairement à ce que sa vie prétend. en l’absence d’ambon dans l’église de la sainte trinité, il a été suggéré que sa fonction put avoir été supplantée par la colonne du saint homme206. ceci explique pourquoi se posait la question de leur position face à l’évêque consécrateur à la fin du ier siècle de l’hégire. ainsi jacques d’édesse, principal intellectuel de l’église syro-orthodoxe du tournant des viie et viiie siècles condamnait le fait que certains usurpassent la prêtrise : « il n’est point licite aux stylites (esṭūnōrē) d’offrir l’hostie du haut de leur colonne [. . .] sauf en cas de nécessité. [. . .] il n’est pas juste que le stylite brandisse le saint corps au-dessus de sa colonne207. » ces stylites ordonnés diacres (šammās = šammōšō) ou prêtres célébraient sans doute des messes au mépris des règles ecclésiastiques. parfois, peut-être, ne respectaient-ils point le monopole sacerdotal et élevaient-ils l’eucharistie sans même en avoir reçu l’onction208. en outre, ils se constituaient en chefs spirituels de communautés rurales lorsqu’ils « faisaient, en plus, des assemblées autour d’eux »209. jean de litarbā210, lui-même stylite, arrache cependant à jacques, son maître spirituel, qu’il est juste (zdaq) « de placer le corps sacré 204. o. ioan, « controverses entre la hiérarchie ecclésiale et les moines dans le christianisme syriaque », dans jullien, le monachisme syriaque, 89–106, voir 95–100 décrit le processus qui conduisi moines et évêques, détenteurs de légitimités ecclésiastiques inverses et concurrentes, à fusionner dans la figure du moine-évêque, que favorisa la période hégirienne et les tendances musulmanes. 205. a 33 ans en 554 selon a. belgin-henry, « a mobile dialogue of an immobile saint. st. symeon the younger, divine liturgy, and the architectural setting », dans perceptions of the body and sacred space in late antiquity and byzantium, éd. j. bogdanović, 149–65 (new york : routledge, 2018), 151 ; binggeli, « les stylites et l’eucharistie », 436–38. 206. belgin-henry, « symeon the younger », 155 a affirmé qu’il était inimaginable qu’il ne fut pas inclus dans la liturgie d’un complexe édifié en son honneur, voir aussi l’opinion de binggeli, « les stylites et l’eucharistie », 435 et 442–43. 207. bar hébraeus, nomocanon, 112. cité par tannous, making of the medieval middle east, 163–64. s. harvey, « the stylite’s liturgy. ritual and religious identity in late antiquity », journal of early christian studies 6, no 3 (1998) : 523–39, ici 535–36, s’est interrogée sur les implications du canon de jacques d’édesse. 208. binggeli, « les stylites et l’eucharistie », 428-29. 209. le canon 7 de jacques d’édesse dans synodicon in the west syrian tradition, éd. a. vööbus, 2 vol., csco 367 et 375 (1975–76), 1 : 270. 210. voir n. 153. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 208 (l’hostie) près d’eux, sur la colonne (ēsṭūnō) »211. il arrivait même, à en croire l’évêque démissionnaire d’édesse, que des stylites refusent de descendre de leur tour lorsqu’un évêque, afin d’officialiser leur statut de pasteur, se résolvait à les ordonner « de telle sorte que celui qui devrait l’ordonner se tiendrait au sol sous lui ! ». cette pratique était jugée inacceptable car « les pères n’ont même pas voulu en parler, [. . .] il ne leur est jamais apparu que ça ait jamais existé !212 ». en plus d’arbitrer les conflits, « l’ēsṭūnōrō se dresse contre l’[évêque] et écrit des interdits/excommunication (ḥermē) dans les districts ruraux (qūryās) ». jacques répond avec véhémence que l’on doit « l’interdire (nettaḥram), ainsi que quiconque reçoit ses interdits213 ». dès lors, on comprend mieux le risque que présentaient certains hommes saints lorsqu’ils s’élevaient contre la hiérarchie, voire soutenaient ou menaient des mouvements hérétiques ou messianiques qui menaçaient l’ordre établi. ce fut notamment le cas d’un certain marūtā, un demi-siècle plus tard. après avoir quitté le cénobitisme de mār mattay pour vivre en solitaire cinq années à sinjār214, il fut exclu de la communauté et vint s’installer dans le village de ḥāḥ dans le ṭūr ʿabdīn215. il en devint le véritable directeur spirituel tout en acquérant une réputation étendue de guérisseur et de protecteur contre les démons, prodiges que réfute absolument l’anonyme de zuqnīn216. devenu un quasi-gouverneur de sa communauté, car « un évêque ou un moine ne pouvait aller là, ni dire quelque chose, sans s’exposer à être tué par les habitants de ce village qui disaient : “vous êtes jaloux de lui !” », il bénéficia, au gré du bouche à oreille, de l’afflux de caravanes qui commencèrent à inclure le bourg dans leurs itinéraires217 : ainsi tous les pays se mettaient en mouvement et venaient vers lui. on lui apportait de l’or, de l’argent, des marchandises et des objets précieux. [. . .] il se tenait sur un siège élevé comme un évêque, bien qu’il eût seulement reçu l’ordre du diaconat. il est prescrit par les canons apostoliques que le prêtre (qašīšō) ne soit béni que par son confrère prêtre ou par l’évêque [. . .]. cet audacieux, non seulement bénissait, mais il faisait même le signe de la croix et imposait la main sur la tête des prêtres. il faisait aussi l’huile de la prière [. . .] de cette manière : il récitait dessus une prière, puis il crachait dedans et la consacrait par son crachat218. finalement, en 153/770, face à l’immensité de son aura populaire : saint mār cyriaque, évêque de l’endroit, voyant que son troupeau était détenu captif par le malin, qu’ils n’écoutaient point ses paroles et voulaient même le mettre à mort, 211. synodicon in the west, 1 : 247–48. 212. ibid., 1 : 167. 213. bar hébraeus, nomocanon, 112 : « de même, le supérieur et les moines qui font un kanon, c’est-à-dire des réunions, contre [lui] et ne lui obéissent pas, seront déposés [. . .]. » 214. chronique de zuqnīn, 140–41. 215. ibid., 141–42. 216. ibid., 144–45. 217. ibid., 143 : sīrtō et šīʿtō. 218. ibid., 145. 209 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 210 se rendit près du vénérable patriarche david [de dārā, r. v. 147–58/764–75, lequel] en apprenant ces choses, fit enlever le séducteur et l’enferma dans la prison de ḥarrān. cela ne mit pas fin à ses impostures, car beaucoup de gens venaient le trouver dans la prison [. . .]219. ce genre de reclus était encore en mesure de mener ce type de dissidences doctrinales et ecclésiastiques comme il apparaît du synode réuni en mai 168/785 par le patriarche georges220 à kefar nabū, non loin de sarūj. ainsi, après avoir traité d’autres formes d’hétérodoxie superstitieuse, comme le re-baptême et l’onction du myron aux malades, le dix-neuvième canon stipulait que « quiconque des abbés, stylites (ēsṭūnōrē) ou reclus (ḥbīšōyē) rédigeait des lettres d’interdiction (ḥermō) aux cités et aux districts ruraux (qūryās), nous tous avons décidé, par l’ordre et l’interdit de dieu qu’ils ne les écrivent point [. . .] ». il est intéressant de constater à quelles communautés laïques les stylites, parmi d’autres autorités monastiques, destinaient leurs lettres d’excommunication : les « cités et les villages ». à georges succéda, une décennie plus tard, cyriaque le takrītien (r. 176–201/793–817), qui convoqua à bēt batīn non loin de ḥarrān en 177/794, peu de temps après son intronisation, un concile dont le dix-huitième canon reprenait en substance la même thématique. il figurait au bas d’un décret menaçant les abbés qui s’opposeraient à leurs évêques. si des abbés, ceux qui sont avec eux parmi les stylites (ēsṭūnōrē) et les reclus (ḥbīšōyē) [. . .] écrivent des lettres d’interdiction (ḥermō) et d’oubli — au nom du patriarche ou de l’évêque — aux cités et aux districts ruraux (qūryō) — ou qui mal-font le myron — nous avons décidé par notre ordre collectif qu’ils n’ont aucune juridiction de dieu de faire ceci. mais s’ils [. . .] enfreignent notre canon ; qu’ils n’aient point d’autorité de dieu pour servir (šammeš = agir au rang de diacre) jusqu’à ce que l’évêque du pays en ait été informé !221 cet élément montre que de nombreux reclus et stylites entouraient les abbés et officiaient comme ministres du culte (šammōšē), parfois à la limite de la légalité canonique. non contents de célébrer la messe, de réunir des assemblées, de s’opposer à leurs évêques et de prononcer des excommunication, certains stylites usurpaient même le rôle séculier de gouverneurs et de juges. simonsohn a récemment abordé cette fonction du juge-arbitre222 typique des holy men décrits par brown. les ʿabday-šlāmā223, capables de rallier les adeptes des églises rivales, se muaient si nécessaire en médiateur (mṣaʿʿāyā), voire en directeur des communautés rurales dont ils étaient le saint protecteur vivant. ainsi, le nomocanon de bar 219. ibid., 145–46. 220. syrien de formation, il avait été persécuté par le parti jazīrien et les évêques de qarṭmīn, et condamné à la prison par al-manṣūr de 147/765 à 158/775 environ, avant d’être libéré par al-mahdī, à condition de ne pas retourner en syrie et de ne pas s’éloigner de la cour, voir fiey, chrétiens syriaques, 17 et 30. 221. synodicon in the west, 2 : 11. 222. simonsohn, « seeking justice », 198–99. 223. mathieu 5 : 9. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 210 hebraeus préserve un canon de georges (m. 105/724), évêque des ʿammē224 : « il n’est point licite aux abbés (rēš dayrōtō) et stylites (ēsṭūnōrē) de rédiger des lettres de décrets (psōqē), de jugements (dīnē), ou d’admonitions (martyōnwōtō) aux cités et villages225. » il semble que ce « canon » dérive en réalité d’une discussion avec jean de litarbā qui aurait initialement posé cette question à jacques d’édesse : « est-il licite pour les stylites (ēsṭūnōrē) de donner proclamation (tūrgamō) ou admonition (martyōnūtō) au peuple (ʿamō) ou d’administrer des jugements et de décréter des lois (namūsē) en usant de la parole de dieu (melltō d-alōhō) ?226 ». le canoniste de qennešrē et de kayšūm aurait répondu en insistant sur fait que des solitaires montés sur la colonne (esṭūnō) « afin de pouvoir vivre selon le plaisir de dieu à travers leurs œuvres et en silence, dans la quiétude (nawḥō), et avec prière sincère, sans distraction227 » en auraient détourné le but, afin de « devenir les juges du peuple (dayyōnē l-ʿamō) et de décréter des lois (nefsaqūn namūsē)228. » jacques d’édesse considérait ces deux fonctions contradictoires et suspectait une forme de tartufferie. il s’interrogeait ainsi sur la sincérité de l’engagement des stylites, et dénonçait à mots à peine couverts leurs abus d’influence sur l’opinion de la foule (ʿamō). nous retrouvons ici inversée, la dichotomie employée par le ḥadīṯ arabo-musulman entre le bon moine stylite et le mauvais clerc (šammās) hypocrite. pour jacques, leur enseignement devait passer par l’exemplarité de leurs œuvres et non par la « parole et la voix » (meltō w-qōlō). en revanche, ceux d’entre eux qui auraient souhaité être arbitres ou instituteurs « qu’ils descendent à terre et enseignent ». ils devaient renoncer à leur ascèse spectaculaire, afin de ne pas profiter d’une position élevée superficielle229. il est possible de déduire de ce propos que les stylites s’érigeaient, réellement et constamment, en enseignants de la foule (malfōnō l-ʿamō), directeurs de vie des gens du commun. déjà, leur inspirateur, siméon l’ancien, est réputé avoir ordonné à une communauté villageoise, en la personne de son prêtre côme, de limiter leurs taux d’intérêts usuraires à 0,5% par an230. ces usurpations de la fonction magistrale, voire de celle de la magistrature, étaient perçues comme un véritable danger pour les autorités syro-orthodoxes instituées. le problème principal de l’autorité des stylites semble avoir été caractérisé par leur « arrogance » (maʿūlnūtō) à usurper la fonction arbitrale, judiciaire, voire législative et 224. voir n. 155. 225. bar hébraeus, nomocanon, 113 ; cité par tillier, invention du cadi, 469 et simonsohn, common justice, 106. 226. synodicon in the west, 1 : 248. 227. ibid., 248. 228. ibid. 229. ibid., 248–49. 230. s. e. al-samʿānī, acta sanctorum martyrum orientalium et occidentalium in duas partes distributa. adcedvnt acta s. simeonis stylitae. omnia nvnc primvm svb avspiciis johannis v. lusitanorum regis e bibliotheca apostolica vaticana prodeunt (rome : j. collini, 1748), 2 : 394–96, la traduction de son courrier et la réponse du prêtre côme représentant du village, (2 : 376–788), se trouvent dans h. lietzmann, das leben des heiligen symeon stylites (leipzig : hinrichs, 1908), 183 et 187 pour le pourcentage, et la seconde dans doran, lives of simeon stylites, 194–97. 211 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 212 gouvernementale. selon l’opinion de jacques, l’ensemble du clergé, et pas seulement les moines et solitaires, n’était point autorisé à juger des causes non-religieuses. en somme, le pouvoir, la justice et les lois « du monde » (d-ʿōlmō) ne devaient pas être l’apanage des prêtres, et encore moins celui des stylites qui n’étaient pas forcément ordonnés. et au sujet de ce que j’ai ajouté qu’ils administrent des jugements et décrètent des lois séculières (namūsē d-ʿōlmō) au peuple (l-ʿamō) en usant de la parole de dieu (meltō d-alōhō), c’est une grande arrogance. car ce pouvoir (šūlṭōnō) de la parole de dieu n’a point été donné aux prêtres (l-kōhnē) pour qu’ils l’utilisent dans les affaires séculières (sūʿrōnē d-ʿōlmō), mais uniquement pour ceux qui pêchent et pour ceux qui se repentent [. . .]231. on comprend dès lors mieux pourquoi jacques fut poussé à la démission de l’évêché d’édesse (r. v. 64–68/684–88) en raison, précisément, de la radicalité de ses canons qui choquèrent autant ses subordonnés, ses collègues et même le patriarche julien ii le romain (r. 66–88/687–708)232. en outre, la réédition constante de ces interdits au cours des siècles suivants laisse supposer que cette active opposition ne cessait de se poursuivre, quelle que fut l’origine géographique, conventuelle et politique du patriarche. en effet, cette question fut à nouveau abordée en détail dans la lettre introductive d’ignace au synode du couvent de mōr zakkay, près de raqqa, en 264/878233. les évêques étaient constamment menacés par la concurrence des monastères, et de ces solitaires qui, tels des magiciens, faisaient usage d’onguents magiques proscrits et, tels des dirigeants, appliquaient des sentences sur les laïcs sans en aviser la hiérarchie. afin de contrôler ces concurrents dans l’éducation et l’influence des masses rurales, et notamment des populations tribales, la hiérarchie avait finalement opté pour l’ordination et, donc, pour la cléricalisation des stylites. ainsi, à partir de l’anachorète originel, le stylite avait été domestiqué et intégré au monastère. pourtant, devenu le pilier du couvent qui l’accueillait, il avait continué à se rendre autonome, d’abord du supérieur du couvent, puis de la hiérarchie du diocèse, elle-même de plus en plus représentée par des évêques d’origine monacale. il avait donc 231. synodicon in the west, 1 : 249. 232. debié, écriture de l’histoire, 548. 233. synodicon in the west, 2 : 54–55 : [ignace, lettre introductive du synode de mār zakay près de raqqa (264/878)] : « beaucoup de ceux qui revêtent la sḫēma du monachisme qui n’ont pas été auparavant examinés et certifiés aux causes de la perfection (myattrūtō), certains parmi eux n’ont pas même atteint le niveau du plein serment ; un certain trouble (ḥāffō) s’empare d’eux et ils se ruent vers une station (qawmō) qui est sur la colonne (ēsṭūnō). celle-ci est assurément une posture (dūkrō) angélique qui élève du bas-monde ; puis quand leur espoir est déçu, ils descendent de cette élévation qu’ils n’avaient pas montée avec leur esprit et deviennent de ce fait cause de moquerie et de scandale pour beaucoup ! en conséquence, nul n’a l’autorité de monter à la colonne (ēsṭūnō) sauf par la connaissance et permission de l’évêque. [. . .] il n’a pas l’autorité de servir à la prêtrise, et pas non plus de prononcer des jugements (dōynīn dīnē) et d’affronter l’évêque, ou de s’impliquer eux-mêmes dans des choses qui ne leurs sont pas autorisées ou de se servir d’écrits circulaires (ktībwōtō gūnōyōtō) et de trancher des litiges (nepsaqūn psōqē). » al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 212 fallu en faire un prêtre, et continuer de lutter pied à pied contre leur autorité concurrente, rurale et informelle234. parallèlement, ce processus de cléricalisation des stylites et du reste des monastères accompagna l’émergence corrélée d’une hostilité dans la littérature islamique. 3.6. une hostilité islamique grandissante celle-ci se matérialisa pour la première fois lorsque commença à être aboli le privilège fiscal et social dont semblent avoir joui les holy men reclus avant le milieu du viiie siècle. théophane le confesseur imputait au calife abbasside al-manṣūr d’avoir, vers 139/756–57, « accru les taxes sur les chrétiens tant et si bien qu’il l’imposa aux moines (monakous), aux cloîtrés (enkleistous) et aux stylites (kionitas) qui menaient des vies qui plaisent à dieu235. » cette information concorde avec l’assertion du contemporain du calife, l’anonyme de zuqnīn pour l’année 157/774–75, à la fin de sa longue (com)plainte fiscale : « ils s’attaquèrent aux moines, aux reclus et aux stylites (īḥīdōyē w-ḥbīšōyē w-ēsṭūnōyē), ils en firent descendre beaucoup de leurs colonnes (men esṭūnē), et firent sortir les reclus (ḥbīšōyē) de leurs retraites.236 » la ressemblance entre les deux notices indique que les deux auteurs puisaient l’information à une origine commune. or l’anonyme de zuqnīn, lui-même peut-être un stylite du nom de josué, était un témoin vivant des faits qu’il décrivait237. il était aussi le contemporain du fameux théophile d’édesse à qui on a attribué nombre d’informations orientales reprises dans la chronographie de théophane238. l’anonyme miaphysite de zuqnīn eût-il pu informer théophane ? il était en tout cas au fait des mêmes évènements que ceux rapportés par l’anonyme miaphysite de zuqnīn : les exactions fiscales d’un calife tout récemment décédé. ces deux textes convergent à dénoncer une même abolition d’un privilège fiscal qui trouvait en partie son fondement légal dans la waṣiyya d’abū bakr. c’est aussi dans ce contexte qu’il faut comprendre le rappel appuyé de l’auteur de la chronique 234. binggeli, « stylites et l’eucharistie », 431–32 cite une anecdote d’anastase le sinaïte, les récits inédits du moine anastase, tr. f. nau (paris : revue de l’institut catholique , 1902), p. 137 (n° 43) à propos d’un stylite qui confirma la validité de l’eucharistie d’un prêtre dont on lui aurait dit du mal, à l’occasion d’un festival populaire dans un monastère de la région de damas. 235. théophane, chronographia, 430–31. 236. l’auteur de la chronique était lui-même probablement stylite selon la chronique de zuqnīn, 201. on notera l’énumération ternaire qui réserve aux stylites la plus haute place en termes de sainteté. 237. voir la synthèse des éléments probants dans debié, écriture de l’histoire, 561. voir le point de vue de f. nau, « les parties inédites de la chronique de denys de tell mahré », revue de l’orient chrétien 2 (1897) : 11–68, ici 47–48 et a. harrak, the chronicle of zuqnin, parts iii and iv. a.d. 488–775 (toronto : pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, 1999), 4–9 mais a. palmer, « who wrote the chronicle of joshua the stylite? », dans lingua restituta orientalis. festgabe für julius assfalg, éd. m. görg et r. schulz, 272–84 (wiesbaden : o. harrassowitz, 1990), 272 en doute même s’il s’accorde avec eux pour assurer qu’il n’est pas l’auteur de la chronique edessénienne que l’auteur final y a inclus. le manuscrit pourrait même être autographe de ce moine de zuqnīn selon harrak, zuqnin, 11–14, à partir des comparaisons paléographiques de e. tisserant, « codex zuqninensis rescriptus veteris testamenti. texte grec des manuscrits vatican syriaque 162 et mus. brit. additionnel 14 665 », studi e testi 23 (1911) : xxx–xxxii et d’autres caractéristiques internes de nature textuelle et codicologique. 238. voir sur ce débat, n. 63 à 69. http://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_en/anzeige.php?sachtitelwerk=codex+zuqninensis+rescriptus+veteris+testamenti%3a+texte+grec+des+manuscrits+vatican+syriaque+162+et+mus.+brit.+additionnel+14665&pk=467406 http://opac.regesta-imperii.de/lang_en/anzeige.php?sachtitelwerk=codex+zuqninensis+rescriptus+veteris+testamenti%3a+texte+grec+des+manuscrits+vatican+syriaque+162+et+mus.+brit.+additionnel+14665&pk=467406 213 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 214 de séert, à propos de l’exemption de la jizya sur les « vêtus de laine » de la province du bēt garmay239. les sources musulmanes confirment cette évolution, et abū yūsuf (m. 182/798), promu à la toute nouvelle fonction de grand qāḍī une décennie plus tard, émit un avis (rāʾī) correctif à l’exemption dont abusaient certains stylites : « les gens des ṣawmaʿa-s, s’ils ont quelque richesse et aisance (ġinān wa-yasār), et s’ils ont transféré (ṣayyarū) ce qui est à eux à quelqu’un qui le dépense pour les couvents et ceux qui s’y sont fait moines (mutarahhibūn) et les résidents (qāʾim), qu’on leur prélève la jizya, que le responsable (ṣāḥib) du couvent la prélève240. » al-šāfiʿī, légèrement postérieur (m. 204/820), s’attaqua aussi à l’immunité fiscale des reclus en rappelant qu’ils ne sont rien d’autres que des chrétiens : « tous ceux qui divergèrent (ḫālafa) de l’islam parmi les gens des ṣawmaʿa-s et autres, parmi ceux qui sont soumis à la religion des gens de l’écriture, alors ce sera soit l’épée soit la jizya241 », symbole de leur sujétion confessionnelle. l’expression employée par le juriste révèle que certains pourraient ne pas diverger des dogmes de l’islam, suggérant que les ermites des hauteurs n’étaient pas tous explicitement considérés comme des chrétiens. cette remarque théorique reflète l’aura, l’autorité et le prestige qui émanait encore à la toute fin du iie siècle de ces anachorètes, y compris sur les populations arabo-musulmans, ce qui légitimait encore partiellement certains passe-droits par rapport à leur église chrétienne de tutelle. muqātil b. sulaymān (m. 150/767) montrait une affection significative pour les stylites lorsqu’il faisait l’exégèse d'un verset passablement anti-chrétien qui dénonce ceux qui prirent les moines (ruhbān) « comme maîtres en place de dieu242 ». pourtant, en d’autres occurrences, il s’attaquait aussi à ces même reclus. ainsi, selon lui, l’expression coranique « les plus grands perdants pour leurs œuvres » (aḫsarīn aʿmālān) désignerait « parmi les nazaréens, les gens des ṣawmaʿa-s243». un peu plus loin, pour expliquer qurʾān 5 : 82, il relate comment le prophète s’opposa au désir de ses compagnons de « s’interdire à nous-même la nourriture, le vêtement et les femmes244 ; alors [. . .] certains d’entre [les compagnons du prophète] se tranchèrent les testicules, s’habillèrent de peu (yalbisu al-masraḥ) et construisirent des ṣawmaʿa-s, s’y cloitrèrent et se dispersèrent ». ces commentaires critiques à l’égard de cet ascétisme extrême reflète la symétrique méfiance et les condamnations de l’église ancienne contre ces excès de jeûne et de chasteté. les autorités arabo-musulmanes, à l’instar des canonistes syro-orthodoxes, dénonçaient l’excès d’ascèse des stylites charismatiques. ces avis illustrent un glissement progressif de l’opinion générale à l’égard de la piété spectaculaire de ces ermites chrétiens. les musulmans semblent être passés assez rapidement d’une attitude d’obédience, à tout le moins d’admiration, à un rejet assez radical. cependant, à l’inverse, ils repoussaient aussi 239. chronique de seert (ii), 312–13. voir n. 188. 240. abū yūsuf yaʿqūb, kitāb al-ḫarāj, éd. t. saʿd et s. muḥammad (le caire : al-maktaba al-azhariyya, 1999), 135. 241. al-šāfiʿī, al-umm, 8 vol. (beyrouth : dār al-fikr, 1990), 4 : 304. 242. voir n. 169 et 171. 243. muqātil, tafsīr, 2 : 604 (q. 18 : 102–3). 244. ibid., 5 : 499 (q. 5 : 82). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 214 le cléricalisme auxquels les ecclésiastiques étaient parvenus à associer les stylites, parfois à leur corps défendant, notamment, on l’a vu, en les ordonnant245. finalement, dans le second quart du ixe siècle, ibn ḥanbal rapporta de šuʿba (m. 160/776) l’opinion du père d’un de ses maîtres, abū ṣāliḥ, qui, au début du viiie siècle, était « sorti en expédition au šām (syrie) ». « alors les syriens (ahl al-šām) passaient devant des gens des ṣawmaʿa-s et les saluaient (yusallimūn ʿalayhim). j’ai entendu mon père dire : “ne commencez pas à les saluer vousmêmes (lā tabdaʾūhum) : contraignez-les au plus étroit/à leurs chemins (ilā aḍyaqihi) !”246. » ce qualificatif de « gens du šām » renvoie, en fonction du contexte, soit aux seuls arabo-musulmans de la province, soit aux habitants indigènes chrétiens ou enfin à tous les habitants de la région du « nord » indépendamment de leur communauté confessionnelle ou linguistique. en tout état de cause, ce ḥadīṯ non-prophétique constitue un rappel impérieux, de la part d’un « homme saint » (holy man) musulman et anonyme, de ne point se placer en situation d’obédience à l’égard des stylites. cet avis reflète néanmoins une situation de compromission et de flou entre les voyageurs arabo-musulmans, les arabes syriens et l’autorité dont se revêtaient les moines. le salut que leur prodiguaient les voyageurs impliquait sans doute une subordination, d’autant plus intolérable aux tenants de l’orthodoxie islamique en construction. 4. conclusion nous avons souhaité démontrer que l’expression arabe courante des « gens des ṣawmaʿa-s (ahl al-ṣawāmiʿ ou aṣḥāb al-ṣawāmiʿ) » recoupe régulièrement celles des sources syrooccidentales qualifiant les stylites : esṭūnōrē ou esṭūnōyē. le phénomène du stylitisme était devenu tellement important dans l’espace syrien (et pas, selon toute vraisemblance, dans l’ancien espace sassanide), que bien des types d’anachorèse furent associés directement ou non à l’ermitage « en hauteur ». bien qu’il soit impossible de certifier à tout coup cette équivalence, il existe un faisceau de présomptions assez dense qui permet d’une part d’assurer que la ṣawmaʿa désignait une tour, et d’autre part que tous les reclus dans des tours étaient qualifiés de « stylites ». au cours du iiie/ixe siècle, les deux termes étaient devenus de commodes synonymes de traduction. dès lors, cet archétype de « l’homme saint » (holy man) de peter brown était devenu la principale autorité, en dépit des officiers de l’état omeyyade, et des prélats de la hiérarchie de l’église, à arbitrer les différends des communautés de l’ancien diocèse d’orient. ces solitaires pouvaient ainsi se tenir, par le biais de la colonne, au milieu du monde duquel ils auraient dû s’éloigner. leur influence sur les populations rurales, et sur les groupes pastoraux en particulier, fut sans aucun doute déterminante, depuis siméon l’ancien au ve siècle jusqu’au milieu de la période abbasside. ainsi, les officiels sassanides, romains et arabo-musulmans vouèrent tous respect et admiration au stylite, notamment reputé pour ses qualités de divination. 245. binggeli, « les stylites et l’eucharistie », 438 : « il y a sans aucun doute de la part de l’église une volonté de récupérer à son profit une partie du prestige du saint homme ». 246. ibn ḥanbal, musnad, 8 : 350 (n o8542). 215 • simon pierre al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 216 nous avons présenté la tradition commune à la chronique syriaque de 1234 et à la plupart des recueils de traditions historiques sur la recommandation (waṣiyya) d’abū bakr, le premier calife, au moment où il lançait ses troupes à la conquête de la syrie. il aurait alors formulé une triple injonction : ne point taxer les stylites, les laisser tranquilles, ainsi que tout ermite, à leur culte, et enfin, passer son chemin et ne point se mêler de leurs affaires. la polysémie des expressions utilisées montre bien l’ambivalence des points de vue des autorités arabo-musulmanes ultérieures. la récurrence de l’admiration, du respect et de la méfiance à leur égard dans les traditions musulmanes ressemble à maints égards à celle éprouvée par les partisans de l’église syro-orthodoxe en construction. les dignitaires et intellectuels de l’église syro-orthodoxe réagirent dès la fin du ier siècle de l’hégire. jacques d’édesse et georges des arabes tentèrent initialement de limiter leur influence en menaçant les rebelles d’excommunication. ils proscrivirent leurs anarchiques missions d’enseignement et de justice de paix. par la suite, la répétition des synodes montre une tendance à les intégrer au clergé, à les adjoindre aux organes officiels au cours des décennies suivante. en parallèle, l’admiration et la terreur superstitieuse qu’éprouvaient les arabomusulmans à leur égard commença à intimer méfiance et répulsion de la part de leurs élites. en effet, ces autorités incontrôlées et situées en terrain flou dérangeaient tout autant les institutions califales et islamiques. ceux qui, de plus en plus, se réclamaient de l’ascèse restaient attirés par leur idéal et prenaient les bons moines comme modèle. dès lors, leur rapprochement avec le clergé facilita la tâche du « milieu sectaire » islamique et conduisit à les dénoncer comme les déformateurs d’une bonne doctrine chrétienne désormais perdue. ce changement radical de paradigme s’explique par l’accroissement de l’hostilité générale à l’égard du christianisme durant la seconde moitié du iie siècle. il est également contemporain d’une plus grande rigueur apportée à la collecte des taxes sur les revenus monastiques, jusqu’alors en grande partie exemptés. cette dénonciation se développait aussi afin de justifier l’abolition de leurs privilèges fiscaux, ce dont témoignèrent, ulcérées, les sources chrétiennes qui mirent explicitement en exergue le ciblage des stylites (chionites, esṭūnōyē). dans un premier temps, la vindicte à laquelle on vouait les officiels tonsurés par les églises chrétiennes épargnait les plus indépendants des solitaires. finalement, la waṣiyya d’abū bakr commença à être amendée et à évoluer vers une dénonciation « des erreurs » des stylites et autres ermites « d’en haut », associée à une répulsion désormais générale du clergé. du côté des intellectuels musulmans syriens et irakiens, il était encore possible de demander des invocations de moines tout en considérant que leur dogme associationiste les vouait aux enfers. finalement, les auteurs du iiie/ixe siècles décidèrent d’abroger les nombreuses dispositions qui en faisaient des autorités chrétiennes privilégiées. ainsi, les traditions littéraires islamiques comme syro-orthodoxes ciblèrent les reclus en général, et parmi eux, les stylites en particulier. ces attaques traduisent la crainte de ces élites institutionnelles et politiques à l’égard de la concurrence d’autorités qu’ils percevaient comme rebelles et hétérodoxes. elles occupèrent tout d’abord l’espace médian entre la centralisation ecclésiastique syro-orthodoxe et le rejet radical du cléricalisme chrétien par les arabo-musulmans. pris entre ces deux positions, les stylites continuèrent de proposer une influente troisième voie, en concurrence du clergé ordinaire qui tentait de les intégrer al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020) le stylite (esṭūnōrō) et sa ṣawmaʿa • 216 et des savants du milieu muḥammadien, qui les voyaient de plus en plus clairement comme des clercs nazaréens. la question de l’esṭūnōrō dans sa ṣawmaʿa, venue se nicher jusque dans l’exégèse arabomusulmane, signale à quel point l’influence de ces hommes saints fut déterminante sur les relations sociales, culturelles et spirituelles des arabophones de l’espace syro-mésopotamien pendant la période formative de l’islam. il s’agit d’un bon exemple de « l’inertie religieuse » des simple believers mise en lumière par jack tannous247. c’est peut-être à leur contact que certains groupes furent rattachés à l’église syro-orthodoxe tandis que d’autres alternaient avec le pôle muḥammadien. progressivement, à mesure que la définition confessionnelle de l’islam se faisait plus précise, il fallut que chacun choisisse de devenir musulman ou non248. au cours de cette structuration, les stylites devinrent des rivaux sociaux et institutionnels qui devaient être marginalisés ou soumis. les églises et les milieux de construction du ḥadīṯ s’y résolurent ardemment, ce dont nous avons gardé les traces. pour l’église syro-orthodoxe, il s’agissait de limiter au maximum leur influence sur les monastères et les communautés rurales. plus tard, le stylitisme décrut et le terme de ṣawmaʿa fut restreint aux petits couvents ou ermitages isolés, tandis que les musulmans avaient pris l’habitude d’ainsi qualifier les tours de leurs mosquées congrégationnelles. les holy men 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university of pennsylvania press, 2009. soler, e. « la figure de syméon stylite l’ancien et les controverses christologiques des ve–vie siècles en orient ». dans dieu(x) et hommes. histoire et iconographie des sociétés païennes et chrétiennes de l’antiquité à nos jours. mélanges en l’honneur de françoise thelamon, édité par s. crogiez-pétrequin, 187–210. caen : publications des universités de rouen et du havre, 2005. ———. « al-akhṭal at the court of ʿabd al-malik. the qaṣida and the construction of umayyad authority ». dans christians and others in the umayyad state, édité par a. borrut et f. m. donner, 129–55. chicago : oriental institute, 2016. ———. « umayyad panegyric and the poetics of islamic hegemony. al-akhtạl’s “khaffa al-qatị̄nu” ». journal of arabic literature 28, no 2 (1997) : 89–122. synodicon in the west syrian tradition. édité par a. vööbus. 2 vol. csco 367 et 375 (1975–76). synodicon orientale ou recueil de synodes nestoriens. édité par j.-b. chabot. paris : imprimerie 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of thomas, bishop of margâ a. d. 840 [. . .]. édité par e. w. budge. londres : k. paul, 1893. tillier, m. l’invention du cadi. la justice des musulmans, des juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’islam. paris : éditions de la sorbonne, 2017. tisserant, e. « codex zuqninensis rescriptus veteris testamenti. texte grec des manuscrits vatican syriaque 162 et mus. brit. additionnel 14665 ». studi e testi 23 (1911). trimingham, j. christianity among the arabs in pre-islamic times. londres : longman, 1979. trombley, f. hellenic religion and christianization, c. 370–529. leyde : brill, 1993. vie de gabriel de bēt qūsṭān. dans « a critical edition and annotated translation of the qartmin trilogy », édité par a. palmer, 55–92. cambridge : cambridge university press, 1989. vie de siméon des oliviers. ms. mārdīn, église des quarante martyrs, no 259. 105r–127r. vie de théodote. ms. mārdīn, église des quarante martyrs, no 275. 237r–296v. vööbus, a. history of asceticism in the syrian orient. a contribution to the history of culture in the near east. louvain : csco, 1958. wood. p. « christian elite networks in the jazīra, c. 730–850 ». dans transregional and regional elites. connecting the early islamic empire, édité par h.-l. hagemann et s. heidemann, 359–84. berlin : de guyter, 2020. wright, w. catalogue of syriac manuscripts in the british museum. londres : gilbert & rivington, 1871. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 256-302 blurred boundaries and novel normativities: the jews of arabia, the quranic milieu, and the “islamic judaism” of the middle ages* aaron w. hughes. shared identities: medieval and modern imaginings of judeo-islam (oxford: oxford university press, 2017), 240 pp. isbn 978-01-906-8446-4. price: $105.00 (cloth). aaron w. hughes. muslim and jew: origins, growth, resentment (london: routledge, 2019), 106 pp. isbn 978-11385-9944-4. price: $60.00 (cloth). michael e. pregill lecturer, chapman university and postdoctoral researcher, erc synergy project “the european qur’an” (michael.pregill@gmail.com) abstract this article discusses critical issues surrounding the jewish-muslim encounter, framed as an evaluation of the approach and conclusions of two recent publications by aaron w. hughes: shared identities: medieval and modern imaginings of judeo-islam (2017) and muslim and jew (2019). hughes’s works present a critique of the established historiography on jewish-muslim relations and exchanges, examining such subjects as the jews of late antique arabia, the jewish matrix of the quran and formative islam, and the judeo-islamic synthesis of subsequent centuries. i interrogate hughes’s use of sources, treatment of previous scholarship, and privileging of the specific lens of the “religionist” in approaching the historical evidence. both of the works under consideration here exhibit numerous problems of conception and argumentation that undermine their value for broadening current horizons of research or refining prevailing pedagogies. ultimately, although they provoke numerous important questions and deftly expose the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of older scholarship, the books fail to offer a constructive path forward for specialists or stimulate a meaningful paradigm shift in the field. * feedback from numerous readers improved this essay tremendously. i am exceedingly grateful for the productive comments i received from phil lieberman, brian pennington, and stephen shoemaker, as well as from the anonymous reviewers of the article. luke yarbrough provided numerous invaluable suggestions at multiple junctures. i also thank cate bonesho for her kind help with a bibliographic matter. naturally, errors and failures of judgment remain my responsibility alone. © 2021 michael e. pregill. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. review essay mailto:michael.pregill%40gmail.com?subject= 257 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) despite the long flourishing of scholarship on the topic, the muslim-jewish encounter remains for the most part an undertheorized and less than cogent field of research.1 this is perhaps not surprising, because the scholarly work relevant to it, though considerable, is distributed among a number of areas that are notionally interconnected but have little to do with one another in practice. thus, someone broadly interested in jewish-muslim relations and exchanges might take note of the significant research done in recent years on the quran’s representations of jews and relationship to traditions of late antique judaism, or of the perennial effort to uncover the social and religious history of the jews of arabia in the time of muḥammad. regarding the later period, the massive advances in geniza studies over the last couple of decades, illuminating numerous aspects of the florescence of an islamicate judeo-arabic culture in the high middle ages, are surely no less relevant for the subject. one might also consider the ongoing revision of our understanding of that titan of medieval jewish intellectual and religious life, maimonides, whose profound engagement with not only arab but also islamic thought has been at the forefront of recent endeavors to reorient the prevailing image of his significance. we could readily adduce other topics that demonstrate the persistent importance of the muslim-jewish encounter for our understanding of the history and development of both traditions. given the complexity of the evidence, the lack of cross-pollination between fields, and the sheer magnitude of research production in europe, the americas, israel, and parts of the islamic world, a competent synthesis integrating these disparate areas of inquiry into a theoretically coherent whole is likely beyond the ability of any single scholar. the perceptive reader will notice that i have already invoked a couple of slippery descriptors for the religious, cultural, social, and historical relationships between jews and muslims. although terms such as “encounter,” “exchange,” and “engagement” seem innocuous enough, upon reflection they are far from transparent, and each carries a significant amount of cultural and ideological baggage. other terms have often been deployed in describing those relationships, and many of them are even more self-evidently problematic: “influence,” “dependence,” “borrowing,” “symbiosis,” “coevolution.” this lexicon features prominently in the most important works on the subject by some of the greatest scholars of jewish and islamic studies stretching back two hundred years to the 1. there is no equivalent in the field of premodern jewish-muslim relations to gil anidjar’s provocative and complex the jew, the arab: a history of the enemy (stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2003), which focuses on modernity. anidjar prefers the ethnonym “arab” as the antipode to “jew” and generally eschews a specific focus on religious identity. however, despite this, many of anidjar’s observations apply equally well to muslims as an ideological construct in european thought as to arabs, reflecting the fact that “muslim” and “arab” are often used interchangeably in the heavily racialized discourses of historical and contemporary islamophobia in the anglo-european world. conversely, despite the broader remit implied by hughes’s focus on muslims and islam, he is overwhelmingly concerned with the arabophone world in both of the books under consideration here. another important theoretical precursor to hughes’s endeavor in shared identities is rina drory’s functionalist-structuralist approach to islamicate jewish literature in models and contacts: arabic literature and its impact on medieval jewish culture (leiden: brill, 2000). though her critique of shopworn conceptions of “influence” is relevant to hughes’s project, he cites drory only in passing in shared identities, making one brief reference to her article on the proliferation of established arab-muslim genres in karaite literature. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 258 early nineteenth century. despite those aspects of their work that now seem objectionable or outmoded, the impact of figures such as abraham geiger, ignác goldziher, s. d. goitein, bernard lewis, and norman stillman still resonates today, and their vision and ideas haunt much contemporary scholarship. the legacy previous generations of scholars have bequeathed to us, particularly the terminology and frameworks we use to conceive of and describe the dynamic of jewishmuslim relations, is the subject of two recent books by aaron hughes. the first, shared identities: medieval and modern imaginings of judeo-islam, is an extended reflection on the historiography of the jewish-muslim encounter from the early islamic period to the middle ages. here hughes focuses on the methodologies and underlying ideologies that guided past scholarship in an attempt to come to a more theoretically sophisticated understanding of that encounter. the second, muslim and jew, is a streamlined survey, presumably intended for classroom use, that is much broader in scope than shared identities.2 here hughes offers a suite of three concise chapters centering on major themes in jewish-muslim relations— “origins,” “growth,” and “resentment”—from the foundational period to the modern era. hughes avers that this new survey offers a fresh perspective that builds upon the theoretical insights he developed in shared identities, setting it apart from the classic works in the genre by goitein, stillman, lewis, and others that are still often used as introductory textbooks today.3 shared identities and muslim and jew perhaps represent the most significant, and certainly most ambitious, attempts at reevaluation and synthesis of the judeo-islamic encounter in recent years; given that such attempts are relatively rare, appearing only once every couple of decades at most, hughes’s works warrant close and critical scrutiny.4 hughes contends that much historical scholarship on the subject of jewish-muslim relations has been driven by questionable ideological commitments, and that these commitments merit careful examination and interrogation. this is especially so, he argues, because contemporary scholarship, though usually less transparently ideological, barely improves upon older research insofar as it tends to be theoretically anemic and so fails to come to a more refined understanding of how jewish-muslim relations should be 2. with a list price of 60 usd for a short hardcover, muslim and jew is perhaps not practical for classroom use, though in the post-covid era the e-book version of the volume, priced under $20, may present a reasonable alternative. 3. hughes explicitly notes at the beginning of muslim and jew (p. xi) that in this book he operationalizes the “post-symbiotic” perspective developed in shared identities, where he claims to have articulated the critical vocabulary that enables the reassessment he offers in his brief survey. the most important precursors to muslim and jew in english are s. d. goitein, jews and arabs, first published in 1955 and subsequently revised (3rd rev. ed., new york: schocken, 1974); norman stillman, the jews of arab lands: a history and sourcebook (new york: jewish publication society of america, 1979); and bernard lewis, the jews of islam (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1984). 4. the only other synthetic work of this sort to appear in the twenty-first century, at least in english, is jacob lassner’s jews, christians, and the abode of islam: modern scholarship, medieval realities (chicago: university of chicago press, 2012), a work that is now almost a decade old. notably, hughes has a third volume on the jewish-muslim encounter forthcoming: somewhere between islam and judaism: critical reflections (sheffield: equinox, 2021). 259 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) conceptualized and described. the main questions i will pursue here are whether hughes succeeds in his task of theoretical reevaluation in the first book, and whether the second consequently represents a significant improvement over currently available surveys. i suggest that although hughes’s critical intervention is timely and necessary, his efforts in both volumes are impaired by various conceptual roadblocks that he fails to surmount. in the case of shared identities, despite the work’s many virtues, pervasive problems in both conception and the handling of evidence undermines the work’s value for its intended audience of scholarly specialists who work in this field. these problems recur in muslim and jew, where they are considerably exacerbated by still other problems, and these flaws obscure many of the issues that would be critical for the book’s intended audience of nonspecialists and students to apprehend clearly. a “post-symbiotic” perspective on the jewish-muslim encounter in shared identities, hughes investigates the critical period from the seventh through the eleventh century ce, during which time both judaism and islam gradually acquired their mature forms through complex dialogical processes of mutual enrichment and codevelopment. judaism contributed to major aspects of islam during the latter’s formation, and islam subsequently came to “return the favor” by contributing to the reformulation and reshaping of judaism during the high middle ages.5 this is why the history of judeoislamic (or islamo-judaic) engagements should be characterized as a dynamic of reciprocity, in contrast to the emphasis among previous generations of scholars on judaism’s antiquity and thus originality and priority as the donor tradition, with islam as the latecomer and so the passive recipient of that donor’s largesse.6 as noted above, hughes is particularly interested in dissecting and exposing “the cognitive problems associated with framing metaphors” and so seeks to rectify or discard conceptual and descriptive frameworks such as “influence,” “exchange,” and “symbiosis” that so frequently predominate in the literature on these processes.7 5. shared identities, ix. 6. hughes presents normative judaism and normative islam as both only gradually crystallizing out of a complex and fluid milieu in the early centuries after the arab conquests; this is his main justification for considering mature judaism and islam as the products of mutually fruitful processes of coevolution. this statement regarding messianism as a discourse transcending the boundaries between groups is typical of his approach: “[a]n unstable islam created further instability in various jewish and judaizing groups by providing vocabularies and tropes, many of which had been adopted and adapted, reused and recycled, from earlier jewish messianic circles” (shared identities, 64). bulliet makes a similar observation about christianity and islam, which can be imagined as two halves of a single civilizational complex that emerged at roughly the same time and followed parallel trajectories for centuries. this argument is predicated on the idea that after the arab conquests christian culture was essentially “rebooted” (my term), with islam gradually becoming demographically dominant in what became the muslim middle east and christianity eventually dominant in europe. see richard bulliet, the case for islamo-christian civilization (new york: columbia university press, 2004), ch. 1. 7. shared identities, 29. one does occasionally find slippages in the book, as when hughes refers to forms of judaism “beholden” (p. 70) or “indebted” (p. 80) to islam. i am fully sympathetic to the difficulty he faces in critiquing problematic terminology while attempting to redescribe the phenomena to which it is al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 260 these frameworks have often been predicated on the notion that judaism and islam were largely well-defined and stable entities already at the time of their earliest encounters, and especially that judaism was a fully formed and largely monolithic tradition when islam emerged. further, many scholars of the past proceeded from the assumption that the relationships between jewish and muslim communities were superficial and transactive rather than impactful and transformative. however fruitful their reciprocal engagements may have been—so the conventional narrative goes—the two communities remained separate and discrete throughout their long shared history, distinct and immutable in their spiritual and doctrinal essences.8 in particular, despite the considerable impact of islamic “host cultures” upon arab, persian, central asian, and andalusian jews in the middle ages, their judaism at its core remained a pure, unadulterated judaism, the essential, unchanging faith of their forefathers. as samuel bäck put it in his 1878 history of the jewish people, despite the massive achievements of the jews of medieval spain under muslim rule and their profound embeddedness in a culture dominated by islam, they “maintained a steadfast fidelity to their religion . . . [they] never forgot that they were jews.”9 to hughes, the premises that inform such an approach simply do not and cannot withstand critical scrutiny. throughout shared identities, he repeatedly emphasizes that in fact the opposite situation must have prevailed: during the initial centuries of their interactions and engagements, not only were judaism and islam both quite malleable and pluriform, but at various junctures, groups of jews and muslims may have been largely indistinguishable from one another. approaches that assume otherwise vastly overstate the degree to which the traditions had cohered on the practical level, let alone been codified on the doctrinal level; scholars of the past (and many today as well) err in assuming that religious communities are always and everywhere characterized by stable essences. in asserting that the porous boundaries between the traditions were populated by “jewmuslims” or “muslimjews” who drove the encounters that shaped both traditions over the centuries during which the classical forms of their doctrines, practices, and textual conventionally applied, since i have myself written a number of studies critiquing the concept of “influence” and likewise struggled, perhaps even less successfully, to formulate and implement meaningful conceptual and terminological alternatives. 8. this model typically centers language as the primary index of identity, with arabic supposedly being the medium of “secular” culture and commerce among diglossic or polyglot jews but hebrew maintaining its time-honored status as the preferred language of religious expression and creativity (and so being privileged as the primary and indispensable marker of personal and communal identity). with the much-discussed greek/ hebrew divide in antiquity, “hellenism” has traditionally been downplayed as only minimally manifest in, and so irrelevant to, “hebraic” (that is, quintessentially jewish) cultural forms; similarly, many scholars have tended to assume that the ongoing use of hebrew in religious and some cultural contexts indexes an absence of significant arabization or islamization, at least as determining individual or communal identity. recent research has shown, however, that hellenism or romanization may be reflected in and expressed through literary production in hebrew. this is only one of the ways in which the dubious dichotomy between hellenistic and “original” hebraic judaism has been challenged in contemporary scholarship. 9. hughes’s translation of the german of bäck’s die geschichte des jüdischen volkes (shared identities, 23). a similar emphasis on the normative, mature, and clearly bounded form of judaism that impacted the rise of islam is found in the works of geiger and graetz; see, e.g., shared identities, 24–25 and 50–51. 261 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) traditions coalesced, hughes sets his sights on no less grand a goal than the formulation of “a new paradigm . . . that acknowledges and taxonomizes the fluidity of religious and ethnic identity.”10 however, it is unclear whether he really achieves this goal by the book’s conclusion. in seeking to articulate a new paradigm—explicitly described in both shared identities and muslim and jew as a “post-symbiotic” perspective11—hughes sets the stage by examining the previously (and currently) dominant outlook governing the study of jewish-muslim relations during this germinal period. thus, in the introduction and chapter 1 of shared identities, he discusses the regnant categories invoked in scholarship and the various figures of the nineteenth and twentieth century—heinrich graetz, bäck, goitein, and others—whose work established much of the terminology, framing, and conceptual baggage that we still bring to the subject today and that continues to influence research agendas in ways both subtle and overt. subsequent chapters of the book focus on specific subtopics that traverse the historical period under consideration here: the emergence of islam and the problem of muḥammad’s relationship to the jews of his milieu (and supposed “debt” to jewish informants); the heterodox fringe of early jewish (or judeo-islamic) messianism after the arab conquests; kalām as a shared rationalist discourse that bridged and shaped both jewish and muslim intellectual developments and ultimately contributed to the doctrinal (and thus notional) distinction of the traditions; the vaunted “golden age” of convivencia that produced maimonides and other magisterial jewish thinkers and litterateurs of the judeo-arabic tradition; and finally jewish sufism as a case study demonstrating the ongoing porousness of boundaries between jew and muslim after the maturation of both traditions and the general hardening of social and religious distinctions between groups. specialists who work in fields touching upon muslim-jewish relations will likely recognize the necessity, even urgency, of hughes’s attempt to interrogate and refine the categories and language we use in seeking to describe those relations. in both books, but especially muslim and jew, hughes explicitly acknowledges the larger political implications of this work in our contemporary context. although he expresses some caution regarding the politicization of scholarly priorities, he himself sets an overtly political agenda for his project in muslim and jew.12 10. shared identities, 63. in his treatment of the early islamic period here, hughes repeatedly refers to the work of peter webb on arab ethnogenesis (imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam [edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016]), which has received a fair amount of criticism for exaggerating the degree to which arab identity was an invention of the caliphal era, a point that seems germane to hughes’s approach to the sources as well (see, e.g., the review of youssef m. choueiri, journal of near eastern studies 76 [2017]: 377–79). 11. the term “post-symbiotic” recurs a number of times in shared identities, though only once in muslim and jew (p. xi), which is, as already noted, presented as a “post-symbiotic” survey. 12. thus, in shared identities hughes critiques the concept of convivencia as problematically inflected by contemporary concerns, particularly a quest to anchor the modern value of tolerance in the past (pp. 29–30). however, he explicitly presents his own work as intended to address contemporary political problems, for example in both the introduction and chapter 3 of muslim and jew, as well as in the conclusion of shared identities itself (pp. 145–49). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 262 hughes’s reevaluation is particularly indebted to the pioneering and massively influential work of daniel boyarin, whose approach to the early jewish-christian relationship hughes seeks to apply to the comparatively underexplored jewish-muslim dynamic.13 shared identities in particular also conspicuously rehearses the arguments of steven wasserstrom’s 1995 monograph between muslim and jew: the problem of symbiosis under early islam, a groundbreaking study that likewise aimed at a serious theoretical reevaluation of the early muslim-jewish encounter.14 hughes’s book retreads much of the territory covered in between muslim and jew, pursuing fundamentally similar goals and touching upon many of the same subjects. however, in what feels like an odd manifestation of the anxiety of influence—ironic given the topic at hand—hughes downplays the importance of wasserstrom’s precedent and cites his work explicitly only a handful of times in shared identities.15 in between muslim and jew, wasserstrom drew attention to the years after the arab conquest of the middle east as a notoriously obscure period in jewish history.16 he engaged goitein’s work specifically for its foregrounding of the complex and admittedly problematic concept of symbiosis (thus the subtitle of the book) and argued that in the early period, islam and judaism were so closely intertwined socially and religiously that at least some communities at the margins of the traditions were practically indistinguishable or even identical. this early proximity was largely ignored by later jewish spokesmen, while muslim commentators effaced most traces of it, relegating groups such as the isawiyya, whose “syncretistic” (wasserstrom’s term, p. 86) prophetological and messianic doctrines may be seen as vestigial traces of that proximity, to the category of “heresy.” modern scholars have long been similarly perplexed by such seemingly hybrid groups, which explains the inability of the analytical language we have inherited to describe such phenomena in a sophisticated way, as well as why attempts to do so typically come up short.17 in subsequent chapters of between muslim and jew, wasserstrom showed that later developments— kalām, heresiography, isrāʾīliyyāt, judeo-arabic philosophy—similarly preserve traces of the early intimacy (or even identity) of the traditions, as well as demonstrating the efforts 13. daniel boyarin, border lines: the partition of judaeo-christianity (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2004). the recent work of michael penn, envisioning islam: syriac christians and the early muslim world (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2015), explicitly seeks to apply boyarin’s approach to the muslim-christian encounter under islamic dominion in the early centuries ah. 14. steven m. wasserstrom, between muslim and jew: the problem of symbiosis under early islam (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1995). 15. hughes graciously acknowledges wasserstrom as a conversation partner at the beginning of shared identities (p. xiii), but the paucity of explicit citations of between muslim and jew in both of his books seems to me to conceal a much more broad-ranging engagement with wasserstrom’s work than is readily apparent. 16. steven wasserstrom, between muslim and jew, 17–18, citing, among others, salo w. baron, goitein, and leon nemoy; cf. shared identities, 83–84, focusing on goitein’s view of the “blackout period” in particular. 17. see between muslim and jew, ch. 2. it is tempting to invoke the term “hybrid” in response to communal formations that seem to combine elements from others, especially larger or more dominant groups. however, the term is misleading because it implies the combination of traits from two established species, whereas both wasserstrom and hughes would emphasize that the existence of the “hybrid” form actually demonstrates the instability of the original entities. 263 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) of later spokesmen to separate the two traditions and marginalize, quarantine, or eliminate ambiguous or boundary-challenging phenomena. hughes retreads much of the same territory that wasserstrom explored almost thirty years ago, although the former’s work is rather more focused. insofar as hughes does acknowledge his precedent, he avers that wasserstrom’s approach is marred by an uncritical reliance on the concept of symbiosis. to be fair, however, i read wasserstrom as rather persistently interrogating and problematizing this notion, which we mainly inherit from goitein, throughout between muslim and jew. questioning the utility of symbiosis as a concept while exploring some of its lesser-known implications seems to me to be the whole point of wasserstrom’s book, and so hughes’s critique strikes me as misplaced.18 despite its significant impact on specialists working in this field of study (or perhaps because of it), it is certainly true that wasserstrom’s book is ripe to be revisited and updated; moreover, many of his most important insights are often couched in language that is overly dense, opaque, or recherché.19 one of the great virtues of hughes’s work is its clarity and accessibility: his prose is direct and elegant, and he excels at analyzing and summarizing complex historiographic problems, so that his exposition of the underlying ideology and implications of historical scholarship on jewish-muslim encounters is deft, vigorous, and lucid. while wasserstrom’s book still strikes me as endlessly rich, provocative, and exciting, he often operates in what we might recognize as a mode of scholarly discourse characteristic of the history of religions approach pioneered in islamic studies by marshall hodgson (whose inspiration wasserstrom openly acknowledged). like many provocative works, wasserstrom’s book can be forbidding to the uninitiated; thus, we can welcome shared identities as a productive revisiting and reformulation of wasserstrom’s attempt at a more theoretically self-conscious exploration of the muslim-jewish encounter that might be more comprehensible and appealing to nonspecialists.20 18. while acknowledging the value of wasserstrom’s work, hughes claims that “the term nevertheless remains his default model, and it is ultimately left intact at the end of his analysis” (shared identities, 4). as proof he cites the concluding remarks of between muslim and jew (p. 224), where wasserstrom summarizes the ways in which he has sought to expand and reinterpret the concept of symbiosis. it is not clear to me how hughes improves upon this by rejecting this term (among others) outright without replacing it with any practically deployable alternative. 19. in the recent tribute volume all religion is inter-religion: engaging the work of steven m. wasserstrom, ed. kambiz ghaneabassiri and paul robertson (london: bloomsbury academic, 2019), only a couple of the contributions refer to wasserstrom’s theoretical insights in between muslim and jew, and none engage its main subject matter directly. this suggests that it is wasserstrom’s broader work on methodology in religious studies, particularly his monograph on the eranos school, religion after religion: gershom scholem, mircea eliade, and henry corbin at eranos (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1999), that has had the widest impact on the field. however, this author can attest (admittedly only on the basis of anecdotal evidence) that numerous other scholars who now work in the field of judeoislamica/islamojudaica were significantly impacted by between muslim and jew in choosing to explore this area of research. a brisk, unsystematic survey of citations of between muslim and jew via google search demonstrates that the book has been cited in at least a dozen monographs of significance, as well as numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and reference works. 20. hodgson’s works on both historiography and esoteric shiism are cited in between muslim and jew. moreover, an early paper of wasserstrom’s dealing with both of these topics was awarded the 1984 marshall g. s. hodgson memorial prize at the university of chicago and subsequently published as “the moving finger al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 264 however, specialists may find hughes’s work frustrating, for it is not clear that it represents a significant conceptual and methodological advance over wasserstrom’s achievement. for one thing, hughes’s attempt to apply boyarin’s approach to the formative jewish-christian encounter in border lines to its later jewish-muslim counterpart is obviously laudable, but the study of the former at the time boyarin undertook this endeavor was light-years ahead of where the study of the latter is right now, despite the significant progress made in various fields of inquiry relevant to the topic over the last couple of decades. moreover, boyarin’s insights in border lines built upon his formidable command of the sources and extensive research in the years leading up to it; his theoretical intervention was grounded in his previous work on rabbinic literature and his demonstrable philological mastery of the relevant literature. likewise, wasserstrom’s approach was informed by his deep engagement with classical islamic sources, particularly the work of the twelfth-century heresiologist shahrastānī, whose survey of jewish sects was central to wasserstrom’s (still unpublished!) doctoral dissertation at the university of toronto.21 in contrast, hughes is a specialist in medieval philosophy; thus, unsurprisingly, his chapter in shared identities on the historiography of the spanish golden age is the most robust and provocative section of the book.22 he has also published numerous works of methodological reflection on the discipline of religious studies, and one can see a direct continuity between the discourse analysis of contemporary academic approaches to the study of islam he executes in those books and the analytical lens he trains on various influential figures in the study of the muslim-jewish encounter among previous generations of anglo-european scholars in shared identities.23 however, hughes’s approach to islamic origins and the jews of early islam—subjects located in a period well outside of his area of main expertise—sometimes reflects a problematic handling of the sources and a neglect of writes: mughīra b. saʿīd’s islamic gnosis and the myths of its rejection,” history of religions 25 (1985): 1–29. a mentor of mine who will remain anonymous here once remarked that hodgson is the scholar most likely to induce fits of aggravation in undergraduates; my personal experience indicates that wasserstrom is also a strong contender for this honor. 21. steven m. wasserstrom, “species of misbelief: a history of muslim heresiography of the jews” (phd diss., university of toronto, 1987). 22. hughes, shared identities, ch. 5. 23. hughes’s criticisms of the contemporary field of islamic studies have often devolved into ad hominem attacks and precipitated strident counter-critiques, especially in online forums. a common response to his allegations is that they rest upon distorted characterizations of scholars of note and their claims. thus, hughes’s theorizing islam: disciplinary deconstruction and reconstruction (abingdon: routledge, 2012) focuses on a critique of what he sees as uncritical, and even “insular and apologetic” (p. 2), tendencies in the discourse and ideology of the academic study of islam as practiced in north america, especially in circles of scholars associated with the american academy of religion. for an unvarnished evaluation of this book and its allegations, see devin j. stewart, “a modest proposal for islamic studies,” in identity, politics and the study of islam: current dilemmas in the study of religions, ed. matt sheedy, 157–200 (sheffield: equinox, 2018). notably, this edited volume was itself a response to a public controversy between hughes and omid safi and the discussions that followed; see the interview with the editor, “identity, politics, and the study of islam,” available online at https://edge.ua.edu/nota-bene/identity-politics-and-the-study-of-islam-an-interview-with-matt-sheedy/. hughes reiterated many of the critiques of theorizing islam even more strenuously in islam and the tyranny of authenticity: an inquiry into disciplinary apologetics and self-deception (london: equinox, 2016). 265 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) significant ongoing debates that are directly relevant to his argument. i cannot say whether his questionable interpretations and misleading representations of texts stem from an indifference to philology or an insensitivity to historical matters, but at various junctures in both of the books under consideration here, one is confronted with perplexing oversights and misprisions, especially (but not solely) pertaining to early and classical islam. a skeptical religionist peers into the darkness: the “aporia” of islam’s origins of course, one cannot expect a scholar’s research interests to be bounded perpetually by their original or primary area of expertise. naturally, scholars grow intellectually, foster expanding or divergent interests, and apply their knowledge and methods to new problems. but acknowledgment of hughes’s disciplinary location and background—and the constraints they seem to impose on his project—seems to me to be justified not only because the issue is directly relevant to an evaluation of his work, but also because the author actually foregrounds the question of disciplinary specialization and orientation himself. at the beginning of shared identities, hughes explicitly asserts that his work is not grounded in a historical or philological approach but rather is conceived as operating in a separate (and seemingly higher?) realm, that of the scholar of religion or “religionist.”24 this perhaps explains why his “suggestive and critical intervention”25 is most effective when hughes is critiquing the established scholarship on his subject, deftly dissecting the presuppositions and implications of much of the previous work on the jews of the islamic world; much contemporary work in religious studies operates in this foucauldian mode of genealogical and discourse analysis. however, hughes overlooks much current scholarship that is pertinent to his subject and sometimes seems to be operating at a sharp disadvantage in his handling of relevant, even indispensable, primary evidence as well. in chapter 1 of shared identities, hughes somewhat blithely critiques a number of recent contributions to the field of judeo-islamic/islamo-judaic studies (both premodern and modern) as being mainly or solely historical or philological in nature and so failing to achieve a broader synthesis or to reach deeper and more theoretically insightful conclusions. hughes is correct that the works he mentions here focus on specific subjects pertaining to the muslim-jewish encounter—dismissed rather derisively as “micro topics”26—and aim at more specifically contextualized types of insights and conclusions. however, it seems rather unfair, as well as inaccurate, to disparage these authors for not reflecting on broader issues of specific concern to scholars of religion or for failing to explicitly invoke theoretical language or models that are conventional or fashionable in some circles in religious studies. 24. further, hughes is explicit that he is not concerned with bringing new evidence per se to the table but rather seeks to operate synthetically and critically, interrogating and critiquing the established literature. the implication often seems to be that the main task of the scholar of religion is to perform second-order analysis on data yielded by other, lower-level types of study that generally do not aim at or achieve true critical insights. this both sells scholarship generated in other disciplines short and effaces the significant work in critical, methodologically oriented religious studies done by scholars who directly engage the historical or contemporary phenomena they study, integrating both types of research activity. 25. shared identities, x. 26. ibid., 2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 266 further, needless to say, even absent such explicit reflection on the part of these scholars, the kind of second-order theoretical analysis hughes wishes to engage in would not be possible without the more historically grounded or philologically rigorous research into the sources conducted by the scholars he disparages here.27 in chapter 2 of shared identities (“origins”), hughes interrogates past and contemporary scholarship on the jews of the prophet muḥammad’s time.28 since the foundational work of abraham geiger (d. 1874), scholars have persistently explored the question of these jews’ identity and religious orientation, a question of great significance for our understanding of the quran and the emergence of islam. in particular, as hughes notes, the “strong judaic cast” of proto-islam induced geiger and others to speculate regarding the possible jewish background of the prophet’s career and milieu, as the impact of the jews of muḥammad’s time on the quran was often explained via a unidirectional movement of ideas and practices from these jews to the fledgling community. i have elsewhere dubbed this the influence paradigm, though hughes for some unspecified reason favors the language of “larceny.”29 the logic behind this coinage escapes me, since the scholars of past generations who posited this unidirectional movement of cultural goods from the jews to islam almost always utilized the language of debt and borrowing and seldom, if ever, characterized this movement of ideas as theft per se.30 27. in the note in which he specifies the historical-philological studies he is talking about, hughes explicitly states: “none of them . . . are interested in larger questions supplied by the study of religion” (ibid., 152, n. 3). this is a stunningly misleading characterization of the work of the scholars in question (mark cohen, marina rustow, david freidenreich, jessica goldberg, arnold franklin, shai secunda, and phillip ackerman-lieberman). it is possible that hughes simply means to distinguish himself from these scholars, identifying them (in contrast to himself) as historians or philologists by training and method rather than scholars of religion per se. however, the point of such a distinction is lost on me, and it is simply incorrect in at least one case, that of freidenreich, whose work is squarely located in religious studies and deeply embedded in its critical discourses. i will address the question of methodology, and what hughes specifically claims to bring to the table as a “religionist,” further below. 28. moving into hughes’s treatment of particular subjects in his books, i should note that on many occasions material from shared identities is repeated verbatim in muslim and jew; on others, the older material is synopsized but the takeaway is the same, while in a few other cases, muslim and jew offers a substantially different approach to a specific topic. i will sometimes note the parallels and divergences between the books below, though i have not attempted to do so systematically. 29. see shared identities, 43–53 passim. hughes cites my early article on geiger (“the hebrew bible and the quran: the problem of the jewish ‘influence’ on islam,” religion compass 1 [2007]: 643–659) in shared identities (166, n. 41), but i did not characterize the language shared between the quran and contemporaneous varieties of judaism as “semitic” in nature there, as he seems to suggest (p. 48). for a more up-to-date version of my argument about the concept of “influence” as it has historically been deployed in discussions of the background to the quran, see my the golden calf between bible and qur’an: scripture, polemic, and exegesis from late antiquity to islam (oxford: oxford university press, 2020), esp. 34–41. 30. hughes appears to attribute the language not only of borrowing but also of theft to abraham geiger (shared identities, 48), but i have not found a single reference to muḥammad’s relationship to judaism as diebstahl in geiger’s was hat mohammed aus dem judenthume aufgenommen?, rev. ed. (leipzig: kaufmann; new york: bloch, 1902), whereas references to aufnahme or ableitung are ubiquitous. hughes is certainly correct in noting the extremely widespread impact of geiger’s approach among scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (shared identities, 48–49), but my overarching impression of this literature is that 267 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) be that as it may, hughes effectively unpacks the conspicuous and problematic political and ideological commitments that have so often informed scholarship in this area. in particular, he emphasizes that many attempts to resolve the question of the origins and pedigree of the jews of the ḥijāz reflect a deep-seated—and ultimately defensive and apologetic—concern with continuity. by asserting the antiquity of this jewish community, as well as its basically rabbinic orientation, geiger and his many followers establish not only the privileged and more original status of the jews vis-à-vis islam, but also forge an important link in a chain that stretches from jewish antiquity to the middle ages, rooting the culture of european jewry in the legacy of ancient israel. however, as hughes recognizes, the notion of a teleological spread of normative judaism in this period—and the monolithic hegemony of rabbinic judaism, in particular—has fallen out of favor among most scholars, as numerous studies have shown that rabbinic authority was only gradually constructed and established in diasporic jewish communities in the high middle ages.31 the main impression one gets from hughes’s approach to both islamic origins in general and the jewish background to islam specifically is that of a pervasive agnosticism. in discussing older trajectories of scholarship, hughes problematizes the idea that the jews of muḥammad’s time were straightforwardly rabbinic and thus that their beliefs— and consequent impact on the quran and formative islam—conform to the supposedly “traditional” judaism naturalized as authoritative in the classical rabbinic canon. he concludes this discussion by stating: “[t]he problem remains: what did judaism look like on the arabian peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries? since we have no idea, how and why do we continue to claim that a normative rabbinic judaism was present at the ‘birth’ of islam” (p. 46). it is true that the array of questionable presuppositions and ideologically suspect answers scholars working on the “jewish question” in islamic origins have sometimes produced suggests that, like views on the historical jesus, any conclusion one might draw about the jews of muḥammad’s time ultimately reflects only the image of the beholder. in other words, from the time of geiger to the present day, scholars have gazed eagerly into the darkness, striving to catch a glimpse of historical reality, but have often just spotted their own reflection and so in the end merely confirmed their own geiger’s followers have similarly favored the language of transaction and indebtedness rather than that of theft, and that the most prevalent characterization of the situation is not one of jews being victims of “larceny,” but rather of muslims being pervasively indebted to exemplary jewish models. this is one of the most fundamental ways in which geiger’s work impacted approaches to the quran and islamic origins in the anglo-european tradition. in any event, hughes presents the term “larceny” in quotation marks (e.g., in the heading “‘larceny’: the history of an idea,” 50) as if he is quoting someone else’s coinage, but i have been unable to discern any precedent for it. none is indicated by direct citation. 31. see, e.g., talya fishman, becoming the people of the talmud: oral torah as written tradition in medieval jewish cultures (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2011). hughes productively makes use of—dare i say “borrows”?—bulliet’s metaphor of the “spreading inkblot” to describe ingrained conceptions of the spread of islam after the arab conquests—ineluctable, natural, and homogeneous. hughes suggests, quite rightly in my view, that this is also how the spread of normative rabbinic judaism in late antiquity is commonly imagined (shared identities, 8; cf. 53). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 268 presuppositions and biases.32 here hughes, too, gazes into the abyss, but what he sees is rather different from what previous generations managed to glimpse. to be clear, i absolutely share hughes’s skepticism of overly positivistic studies on the subject of the jews of late antique arabia and the jewish social and religious context of the quran. most notably, we concur in our evaluations of the 2014 monograph of haggai mazuz, who argues on the basis of a highly problematic negotiation of the evidence that the jews of medina were thoroughly rabbinic in orientation.33 similarly, it is difficult to disagree with hughes’s assertion that islam could not have been—as geiger and his followers postulated—the product of a unilateral communication of “influences” from a stable, well-defined judaism to the prophet and his fledgling muslim community. as already noted, hughes favors an alternative position, conjecturing that a host of diverse, but by and large unknowable, expressions of jewish identity in the late antique milieu contributed to the precipitation of early islam out of a variegated matrix, with what became the mature, normative forms of both traditions gradually emerging only over the course of centuries through a complex dynamic of mutual exchange and coevolution. however, i am not confident that a position of complete agnosticism is merited or that it is the current consensus position among contemporary scholars working in this area. for one thing, considerable progress has been made in the study of arabian jewry on the basis of epigraphic evidence, in particular. in the case of south arabia, the massive output of christian julien robin and other scholars over the last two decades might allow us to draw some conclusions, however provisional, about the development and spread of some form of judaism on the peninsula in late antiquity. in shared identities, hughes briefly cites a single piece by robin, his long article “himyar et israël” from 2004, but he does not take into account the substantial development of robin’s thinking in the fifteen years since in his numerous subsequent contributions, nor the more recent and complementary work of iwona gajda and others. granted, we cannot directly ascertain anything about how normative the judaism of the jewish tribes of medina was—the main question of interest to hughes—by studying the rather earlier judaization of ḥimyar, quite far afield from the ḥijāz, though linked to it through trade and other networks maintained by the highly 32. this tendency is, of course, true of scholarly engagements with muḥammad himself; for an incisive investigation of the complex investments western scholars have brought to inquiry into the biography of the prophet, see kecia ali, the lives of muhammad (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2014). hughes himself asserts that contemporary professors of islamic studies have produced an image of muḥammad of a particularly apologetic bent by projecting their own values upon the founder of islam (theorizing islam, 34). 33. haggai mazuz, the religious and spiritual life of the jews of medina (leiden: brill, 2014). compare hughes’s review in the journal of the american academy of religion 83 (2015): 580–82 and my “the jews of medina and the challenge of early islamic historiography,” review of qur’anic research 2, no. 2 (2016), https:// lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/rqr/article/view/332. hughes efficiently exposes the problems with mazuz’s methodology, focusing particularly on the latter’s problematic reliance on the principle of mukhālafa and positing that early muslims’ insistence on acting in a fashion dissimilar to jews in fact signals self-consciousness about the original similarity, or even identity, of the groups. hughes’s criticism of the shortcomings of mazuz’s methodology is spot on, but his critique would have been strengthened considerably by engagement with the major discussion of mukhālafa in ze’ev maghen, after hardship cometh ease: the jews as backdrop for muslim moderation (berlin: de gruyter, 2006), which he overlooks. https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/rqr/article/view/332 https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/rqr/article/view/332 269 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) mobile population at the time. nevertheless, the case of ḥimyar provides an important precedent for the similar (and far more successful) project of monotheization pursued by muḥammad in the ḥijāz. moreover, considering what scholars have learned about “judaism” and how it can or should be defined in the yemenite milieu is surely informative for similar questions of definition as they might pertain to the later ḥijāzī milieu. i am not suggesting that the example of ḥimyar contradicts any of the conclusions hughes draws here, only that given its direct relevance to the questions hughes is asking, i would have imagined this case would have merited far greater consideration in his theoretical investigation in shared identities.34 presumably hughes came to recognize this lacuna himself, because muslim and jew includes a slightly more robust discussion of the ḥimyarite evidence, where hughes briefly notes its utility for corroborating the fluid and heteronormative nature of the “judaism” to which the yemenite kingdom supposedly converted in late antiquity.35 we might also consider the significant contributions to the question of the jewish background to islam that have been made recently by scholars in quranic studies. it is true that many scholars working on the quran in a textualist-philological vein are generally reticent to advance more sweeping hypotheses of a positivist historical sort.36 nevertheless, much of the work done in quranic studies over the last decade is extremely pertinent to the topic of the jewish impact on the quran and muḥammad, yet hughes almost completely neglects this literature here, engaging it only as it relates to more peripheral topics.37 34. on the other hand, the case of ḥimyar is not relevant for the reason hughes explicitly adduces here, namely that muḥammad sent some of his followers to seek refuge in yemen “among other communities of monotheists” when he was being persecuted in mecca (shared identities, 44). hughes is likely thinking of the so-called first hijra to axum, in which a small group of the prophet’s followers fled to ethiopia under the leadership of jaʿfar b. abī ṭālib, muḥammad’s cousin. 35. muslim and jew, 14–16, citing a much broader body of secondary literature, including recent or relatively recent work by g. w. bowersock, george hatke, norbert nebes, and iwona gajda alongside somewhat older studies by reuben ahroni and joseph naveh (curiously, robin continues to be represented by only the single article from 2004). hughes has recently devoted a longer piece to the subject that more adroitly navigates the relevant primary and secondary sources: “south arabian ‘judaism,’ ḥimyarite raḥmanism, and the origins of islam,” in remapping emergent islam: texts, social settings, and ideological trajectories, ed. carlos a. segovia, 15–43 (amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2020). here hughes aptly conjectures that ḥimyarite monotheism may have been a combination of elements, “a thin overlay of some type of non-normative judaism over a type of autochthonous arabian monotheism,” and implies that a similar synthesis of elements may have been behind the rise of islam in the ḥijāz far to the north (pp. 37–38). 36. see my discussion of the problematic disjunction between contemporary quranic studies and current historical perspectives on the late antique milieu in which islam emerged in “positivism, revisionism, and agnosticism in the study of late antiquity and the qurʾān,” journal of the international qur’anic studies association 2 (2017): 169–99. 37. thus, the monographs of holger zellentin (the qurʾān’s legal culture: the didascalia apostolorum as a point of departure [tübingen: mohr siebeck, 2013]) and emran el-badawi (the qurʾān and the aramaic gospel traditions [abingdon: routledge, 2014]) appear in a note concerning jewish christianity in the early islamic milieu (shared identities, 175, n. 64), though one readily imagines that they are, or should have been, much more central to hughes’s discussion. patricia crone, “jewish christianity and the qurʾān (part one),” journal of near eastern studies 74 (2015): 225–53 appears here as well (though not its sequel from the following year). this is the only one of crone’s more recent articles hughes cites, although her notorious early study with michael cook, hagarism: the making of the islamic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1979) is cited in both al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 270 ignoring the substantial discussions of the quran among specialists is a peculiar decision given their relevance to the question of what reliable information about the prophet’s milieu may be discerned in or extrapolated from the corpus, broadly recognized as the most important primary source for the rise of islam. to be fair, wasserstrom did not engage with contemporary debates on the quran at all either, but he published between muslim and jew at a time when quranic studies was a far less active field of inquiry than it is today. if one had to judge by hughes’s bibliography, one would conclude—quite wrongly—that not much of significance had been happening in this area of research over the last fifteen years or so.38 admittedly, much contemporary work on the biblical currents or subtexts in the quran trends against the idea of a direct impact of rabbinic judaism on the prophetic milieu— favoring, for example, syriac christian literature as a more pervasive and proximate literary context.39 however, there is no shortage of other research that would tend to ratify the conclusion of geiger and others that the quran directly reflects the stamp of late antique shared identities and muslim and jew, and her meccan trade and the rise of islam (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1987) appears in the former. stupendously, there is no reference to angelika neuwirth at all except as coeditor of the collection in which the previously mentioned article of nebes appears. the works of john wansbrough receive some attention in shared identities, for example in dialogue with the work of boyarin (pp. 85–86). hughes is certainly correct in discerning wansbrough’s analogous significance for inducing skepticism about the received narratives of islam’s origins, but however instrumental wansbrough may have been in triggering major changes in our understanding of formative islam and the emergence of the quran, his work is hardly reflective of where the field is today. the quran features somewhat more prominently in hughes’s article “religion without religion: integrating islamic origins into religious studies,” journal of the american academy of religion 85 (2017): 867–88, though much of the relevant research of the last decade is again ignored. 38. there is a brief discussion of the quran in muslim and jew, 18–19, that seems to reflect some minor improvement in the author’s awareness of issues of significance in the field today, such as the possible impact of the quran on jewish literature rather than vice versa as geiger et al. asserted, but no secondary sources other than geiger and james kugel on midrash (in potiphar’s house: the interpretive life of biblical texts [cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1990]) are cited here. the reader is given the impression that hughes’s insights on chronology are original, which they are not. this is hardly the only place in either book in which welltrodden arguments are presented as if ex novo, or current scholarship is neglected. another striking example is the discussion of jewish sufism in chapter 6 of shared identities; this topic has recently benefited from a significant uptick in scholarly interest, but judging by hughes’s bibliography on the subject, one might conclude that very little had been published on it since the 1980s. 39. in this connection, it should be noted that most scholars working on the origins of islam and the background to the quran today would emphasize that both were undoubtedly the products of complex interactions and dialogues between multiple communities in late antiquity, in which not only jews but also christians and pagans participated along with the quranic community; this multifaceted dynamic continued well into the early and medieval periods of islamic history. hughes’s work reflects and responds to a particular trajectory in the historical scholarship, and so he emphasizes the jewish-muslim dialogue to the exclusion of other participants. for a model study that often succeeds in capturing the polyvalent complexities of social and religious interactions among jews, christians, muslims, and others from late antiquity to the high middle ages, see uriel simonsohn, a common justice: the legal alliances of christians and jews under early islam (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2011). the aforementioned work of lassner, jews, christians, and the abode of islam, likewise succeeds at triangulating between the traditions both theoretically and in the case studies it considers. 271 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) jewish thought, though this is now conceived and articulated in a more sophisticated, less reductive way than it has been in the past. here a conspicuous problem presents itself. on the one hand, the archaeological and epigraphic data suggest that a form or forms of judaism prevailed in both ḥimyar and the ḥijāz that we can characterize at most as diffuse and heteronormative (at least relative to rabbinic normativity, an entirely problematic construct in the late antique context). on the other hand, some contemporary work on the quranic evidence suggests that textual traditions rather close to those that survive either in the standard rabbinic corpus or in “pararabbinic” corpora (such as the piyyutim) supply the most plausible literary precursors for the quran.40 it is not clear whether and how these trajectories can be reconciled. as with the case of ḥimyar, it is striking that hughes almost entirely ignores them. it is a shame that hughes generally overlooks recent work on the quran, because there is much here that would enrich his perspective and perhaps move his argument forward out of the foggy state of agnosticism that he dwells in when discussing this critical period. in acknowledging the presence of jews in and around the arabian milieu, hughes briefly mentions ḥimyar but also refers to the famous community settled at elephantine in egypt during the persian period; since the papyrus remains of the jewish colony there date to the fifth century bce, one wonders if this datum is really a relevant comparandum for illuminating the situation in late antiquity.41 what is surely more relevant is crone’s work on the belief system the quran attributes to the mushrikūn, muḥammad’s “pagan” opponents. in a number of publications before her untimely death in 2015, crone argued that the evidence of the quran itself militates in favor of a view of the prophet’s interlocutors as themselves informed by—and so presumably acculturated to—a worldview that is fundamentally “biblical.” neither the tradition nor the quran identifies the mushrikūn as jews, and crone opts for the hypothesis that at some point, presumably through direct contact with “israelites”—a population somehow anchored in and defining itself in relation to some register of ancient biblical tradition—the ḥijāzī arabs of muḥammad’s time had become strongly assimilated to monotheism of an israelite-judaic stripe.42 as in the case of ḥimyar, the evidence of the quran suggests gradual acculturation to a diffuse form of israelite monotheism rather than conversion to a formally defined rabbinic or quasirabbinic judaism. this way of understanding the milieu and muḥammad’s contemporaries 40. on the question of canonical rabbinic or pararabbinic precursors to quranic material, see now my “the two sons of adam: rabbinic resonances and scriptural virtuosity in sūrat al-māʾidah,” journal of the international qur’anic studies association 6 (2021) (forthcoming) and the bibliography therein. 41. shared identities, 44. one could argue that the case of elephantine is in fact relevant since the form of judaism reflected in the papyri sometimes diverges quite acutely from what we know of the “normative” or “mainstream” judaism of the time as evidenced in the literary (that is, biblical) sources for the period. moreover, karel van der toorn has proposed that the elephantine community was originally samarian in origin and only gradually acquired a diasporic jewish identity in response to changing circumstances in egypt; see his becoming diaspora jews: behind the story of elephantine (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2019). these points seem to me to be quite relevant for hughes’s argument, but the case of elephantine is raised only as evidence of a jewish presence in the arabian (or at least eastern roman) environs in the pre-islamic period. 42. most of the studies collected in patricia crone, the qurʾānic pagans and related matters, vol. 1 of collected studies in three volumes, ed. hanna siurua (leiden: brill, 2016) are pertinent to this theme. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 272 is surely pertinent to hughes’s main point of interest in the proto-islamic period, namely, the presence and status of jews—or “jews”—in the milieu, and his work would have been considerably enriched by engaging with crone and other scholars working in the field of quranic studies.43 intriguingly, crone’s approach dovetails with a strand in older scholarship that postulated that the jewish tribes of muḥammad’s time were “converts”—judaized arabs rather than arabized jews, as it were.44 it is emblematic of hughes’s agnosticism about the jews of the ḥijāz that he is skeptical both of claims of the ancient palestinian origins of the community and of the thesis that they were converts, as earlier scholars such as hugo winckler and d. s. margoliouth held.45 however, although some of their ideas are now problematic, the approach of these older scholars is in some sense vindicated by contemporary research on the spread of some form of israelite or jewish identity in both yemen and the ḥijāz in the pre-islamic period. hughes’s objection to this approach centers on the fact that he sees conversion itself as a problematic notion in this context. given the lack of doctrinal and institutional coherence hughes sees as typical of most (all?) varieties of late antique judaism, he justifiably asks what such putative converts are thought to be converting to; surely we cannot take for granted any kind of formal process of conversion signifying a decisive movement from one clearly delineated system of belief and practice to another. another strange lacuna in hughes’s work confronts us in this connection, for there is an established, and considerable, scholarly literature on conversion, expressions of communal belonging, and nominal-symbolic or practical boundary-crossing between communities in late antiquity, much of which would surely have been relevant to his interests here. be that as it may, if we accept the notion that the “jews” of muḥammad’s time were neither rabbinic in orientation nor formal converts but rather arabs who assimilated to some form of judaic or israelite cultural identity—crone’s “god-fearers”46—we again face the question that is central to hughes’s enterprise: what was judaism in the late antique, protoislamic milieu anyway? the evidence of the quran, at least as read by crone, corroborates hughes’s thesis of a diffuse, poorly defined, heteronormative judaism in this environment. and yet we must ask how diffuse membership in the jewish community (or banū isrāʾīl, or 43. as noted, one of the most striking omissions is the work of neuwirth, who for many years, in a massive corpus of publications, has articulated an extremely sophisticated approach to the genesis of the quranic revelation, rejecting the influence paradigm that prevailed in the past in favor of a sophisticated, nuanced presentation of the prophet and his community as deeply engaged with a judaic literary and social environment. this is extremely relevant to the “jewish question” as it pertains to islamic origins, and so neuwirth’s absence from hughes’s discussion is especially glaring. 44. in his discussion of the origins of arabian jewry in his classic a history of the jews of arabia from ancient times to their eclipse under islam (columbia: university of south carolina press, 1988), gordon newby strikes a judicious balance between the accounts of ancient jewish migration into arabia—which he seems to perceive as grounded in historical reality despite the obvious ideological commitments of many scholars positing this model of origins—and the numerous traditions that suggest that many of the jews of arabia were converts. trenchantly, newby observes pre-islamic arab conversion to judaism as a foreshadowing of islamization (p. 53). 45. shared identities, 51–53. 46. patricia crone, “pagan arabs as god-fearers,” in islam and its past: jahiliyya, late antiquity, and the qurʾan, ed. carol bakhos and michael cook. 140–64 (oxford: oxford university press, 2017). 273 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) ahl al-kitāb, all floating signifiers) could really have been in muḥammad’s time, since it was cogent enough to be a major criterion of social distinction in the quran itself. quranic discourse presupposes that individual and communal identity are determined by the path one follows, and so we must infer from this that the criteria of distinction between the prophetic community of believers and the jews (yahūd, sometimes styled alladhīna hādū, “those who profess judaism”) were substantial enough to be both legible and meaningful to the quran’s audience. it is difficult to imagine that when the quranic revelation insinuates that the jews merit both worldly sanction and eschatological punishment for their misdeeds, the prophet’s followers were uncertain about who was meant or how they differed from members of their own community. though the distinctions may have been rudimentary and the social boundaries blurry at times, they must have been basically coherent; to be a jew, whatever that meant, was something significant to the quran’s audience. nor could such distinctions have been ideal or abstract, unless one imagines—contrary to the consensus—that the quran was revealed in a vacuum and that its message had no direct social implications. i assume hughes would agree with this overall appraisal, but to me this all underscores the pertinence of the quranic evidence to arguments about the jewish context of islam’s origins. those of us who work in this area are well accustomed to abiding in the shadowy realm of conjecture, and so we typically aim at probability and plausibility rather than absolute certitude. however, it is debatable whether a position of total agnosticism is still warranted today and whether we should be content to throw up our hands and claim that the attempt to reach any conclusions about the varieties of judaism represented in the ambit of the proto-islamic community is hopeless. there are surely some arch-revisionists still out there who would share hughes’s supposition that we have no idea what was happening in the ḥijāz in this period, but to present this as the status quaestionis seems like a rather nihilistic mischaracterization of the field as it now stands. although this subject must surely be treated with caution and approached with skepticism, hughes’s repeated emphasis on the “aporia” of the jews of late antiquity and early islam in our historical understanding—an extreme, though at times selective, revisionism—is conspicuously uninformed by contemporary debates.47 it is clear we cannot go back to the unreflective and unselfconscious positivism of the nineteenth century; but the jewish presence in pre-islamic arabia is hardly a total black box either, and recent approaches have rehabilitated the perspectives of at least some of the scholars of past generations, though these approaches are largely overlooked by hughes. among the believers: from the prophetic to the early islamic period a pervasive ambiguity regarding the reliability of the available sources for the protoislamic period runs throughout hughes’s work. while he generally adopts a skeptical pose, at times he equivocates and becomes more sanguine regarding what exactly we can know 47. the term aporia (literally a disjunction or impasse) recurs several times in shared identities; hughes employs it to signify what he alleges to be the current state of our historical understanding (or lack of understanding) of the nature of jewish-muslim relations in periods for which we either have no sources or our sources cannot answer the kinds of questions we wish to pose to them. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 274 about the prophetic milieu (or at least what questions we can ask and plausibly answer on the basis of the sources). his perspective on the so-called constitution of medina is instructive in this regard. hughes initially sounds a rather pessimistic note about this document given that it survives only in a source dating to more than a century after the time of the prophet, the sīrat rasūl allāh of ibn isḥāq (d. 150/767). he observes that both michael lecker and uri rubin have sought to address the question of the identity (and specifically the tribal affiliations) of the document’s jewish signatories and concludes that even if we judge it reliable, what it primarily attests to is the fuzziness of the boundaries delineating jewish groups from others in the milieu: “[t]he contours of these ‘jewish’ groups . . . are impossible to ascertain with any historical clarity.”48 he thus reads the document as an imperfect approximation of a complex reality in which “jews,” however they might have been defined or identified themselves, were incorporated into or accommodated by the early umma. however, one might object that in the end, it is clear that the jews are not reducible to simply one of several tribal configurations among the others mentioned in the constitution of medina; rather, these groups are exceptional among its signatories. pace hughes, one wonders what the basis of that exceptionalism is if it is not somehow religious in nature. one senses a kind of revisionist sleight of hand here: the text of the pact, like the vast majority of extant traditions on the rise of islam, is preserved in a source that dates from at least a century after the event and so is asserted to be intrinsically suspect; but at the same time, insofar as it is reliable, what it supposedly signals for hughes is the blurry boundaries of the early umma and the impossibility of determining what “jewish” identity could have meant in this context.49 although hughes does not cite him in this passage, one senses fred donner’s well-known thesis about the fluidity of the early movement of the believers (as he dubs the primitive community under the guidance of the prophet) in the background here.50 donner, according to whom muslim was not a distinct, formal religious identity per se but rather a designation limited to arab converts lacking a previous monotheistic communal identity, is acknowledged elsewhere in shared identities, however; for example, he is cited as corroborating hughes in emphasizing the vagueness of the terms qualifying someone as a member of the early community (p. 9), though in a footnote to this passage, hughes actually criticizes donner for characterizing the early movement as specifically “religious” in nature (p. 153, n. 21). 48. shared identities, 60. stunningly, this is the only reference to uri rubin’s important work in either book. this is perhaps the apposite place to observe that hughes chronically undercites works and authors relevant to his argument throughout both books; sometimes the omissions are quite startling, as when hughes ignores studies that are indispensable to a responsible handling of the topic at hand. the problem is especially acute in muslim and jew. 49. this ambiguity is characteristic of hughes’s approach to the isawiyya as well, where late and problematically ideological sources are by and large assumed to represent historical verities when they confirm hughes’s basic thesis about the blurring of boundaries and the ambiguity of identities. in this, hughes follows wasserstrom, who struggles to negotiate a critical approach to heresiography while relying on such works for his revisionist historiography. see the discussion of the isawiyya and messianism below. 50. fred m. donner, muhammad and the believers: at the origins of islam (cambridge, ma: belknap press, 2010). 275 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) however, it is not clear to me that hughes has apprehended the real point of donner’s argument. donner’s project in muhammad and the believers is to show—primarily on the evidence of the quran itself—that the early umma was far more ecumenical than has been previously recognized, and specifically that the first followers of muḥammad welcomed pious jews and christians alongside muslim or “submitting” arabs in a common pietistic and apocalyptic movement.51 to donner, the prophet was not founding a new, formally bounded and well-defined “religion” in the modern sense (and so here he and hughes are in agreement), or even in the sense according to which muslims would assert categorical prerogatives over jews and christians as an imperial ruling class only a few decades after his death. this does not mean, however, that markers of identity and distinction were not operative in the early community, or that they did not quickly come to predominate in the conceptual repertoire shared by various groups in the caliphal period—points hughes fails to appreciate.52 it is noteworthy that hughes acknowledges lecker more substantially in his discussion of the constitution of medina.53 in numerous studies published over the course of decades, lecker has shown through methodical and at times ingenious interpretation of data provided in the oft-maligned traditional muslim sources on the formative islamic period that we can actually discern much useful and plausibly reliable historical information in those sources. much of lecker’s work pertains to the jews of the ḥijāz, and although he is predominantly interested in questions of tribal affiliation, diplomatic relations, genealogy, and so forth, he has also offered various conjectures pertinent to the subject of the jewish tribes’ religion and its impact upon the formative muslim tradition. however, most of lecker’s titanic output is dismissed or simply overlooked by hughes; there is no acknowledgment, for example, of his major 2014 monograph on muḥammad and the jews.54 one might imagine that lecker’s work was of limited benefit to hughes’s project because lecker by and large seems to assume that the jewish tribes of arabia were aligned with the rabbinic judaism of palestine and babylonia; his conclusion that aspects of the medinan jews’ culture reflected a hegemonic rabbinic normativity contradicts hughes’s argument on a fundamental level.55 more broadly, it is possible that lecker’s disposition toward drawing 51. see now also stephen j. shoemaker, the apocalypse of empire: imperial eschatology in late antiquity and early islam (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2018), emphasizing apocalyptic piety both as the basis of the “ecumenism” of muḥammad’s movement and as the common denominator shared with many other communities in the late antique and early islamic period. 52. donner’s thesis is cited more straightforwardly in muslim and jew, but again as demonstrating the indistinctness of the categories “muslim” and “jew” rather than the ecumenism of the umma, which i take to be the real thrust of donner’s argument. 53. see shared identities, 59–60; a briefer discussion appears in muslim and jew, 30. 54. michael lecker, mûḥammad ve-ha-yehûdîm [muḥammad and the jews] (jerusalem: makhon ben-tzvi, 2014). lecker’s extensive scholarly output in english from the last twenty years is readily available in a number of collected volumes. 55. alternately, we might imagine that not enough of lecker’s work addresses the religion of the jews of medina per se, although—as hughes himself would remind us—it is supposedly impossible to isolate religion from other categories of identity and behavior at this time (this is the crux of his critique of donner, which strikes me as somewhat misplaced). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 276 positivistic conclusions about the primitive islamic milieu on the basis of the later muslim sources is simply unappealing to hughes, as it seems to be to many scholars of a revisionist bent; hughes is hardly the only contemporary scholar who seems at best indifferent to lecker’s numerous contributions to the field, whether published in hebrew or in english. the problematic nature of other aspects of hughes’s navigation of the early historiographic tradition becomes apparent as he transitions from the prophetic period to the early centuries of the islamic dominion. aspects of hughes’s treatment of the sīra of ibn isḥāq in muslim and jew are strong, as when he recognizes that sīra traditions function exegetically, anchoring the interpretation of the quran in episodes in the life of the prophet rather than conveying objectively reliable historical information. he also notes that some aspects of the sīra serve to cast muḥammad as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, a wellestablished argument in the field.56 however, he veers into somewhat dubious territory when he asserts that the first section of ibn isḥāq’s work, the so-called mubtadaʾ, which collects traditions on muḥammad’s prophetic precursors, was sheared off by ibn hishām (d. 218/833) and other transmitters specifically because of ibn isḥāq’s copious reliance upon isrāʾīliyyāt, which had fallen into “disrepute” by this time.57 although the abridgment of the sīrat rasūl allāh has been much discussed, the claim that it was judged to be necessary on the basis of on the work’s proliferation of isrāʾīliyyāt already in the third/ninth century (as newby, hughes’s source here, avers) is no longer tenable. for one thing, insofar as ibn hishām’s motivations for his interventions into ibn isḥāq’s work may be thought to be dogmatic in nature, this perception more likely stems from problematic narratives such as the famous satanic verses episode.58 as regards the mubtadaʾ specifically, most scholars would understand the truncation of the work as reflecting the rapid obsolescence of an approach to the sīra that anchored it in pre-islamic prophetic tradition. the wide circulation of ibn isḥāq’s material on pre-islamic history in other sources of the period—the basis of newby’s reconstruction of the mubtadaʾ— demonstrates that the supposedly censorious attitude toward that material that hughes attributes to ibn hishām and other transmitters of the sīra could hardly have been widespread in the early centuries of islamic history. insofar as objections to the inclusion in the sīra of material on the pre-islamic prophets arose in this period, they were more likely based on evolving conceptions of genre than an aversion to reliance on materials of a jewish or quasi-jewish ambience such as would prevail in some circles much later on. 56. these statements (muslim and jew, 21–22) reflect a nuanced understanding of the nature of sīra and how it functioned in the early period; however, they are rather familiar ones in contemporary scholarship, and hughes fails to cite a single corroborating source here. 57. hughes’s source is the introduction to gordon darnell newby, the making of the last prophet: a reconstruction of the earliest biography of muḥammad (columbia: university of south carolina press, 1989). newby’s account of the evolution of the ibn isḥāq corpus was stridently criticized at the time of its publication (see the review of lawrence i. conrad, “recovering lost texts: some methodological issues,” journal of the american oriental society 113 [1993]: 258–63) and is quite out of date today. 58. on the complex history of ibn isḥāq’s account of this episode, see shahab ahmed, before orthodoxy: the satanic verses in early islam (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2017). 277 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) hughes’s position here demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the history and development of isrāʾīliyyāt as a concept. the copious preservation of ibn isḥāq’s material on pre-islamic history itself suggests that the kind of censorial activity hughes attributes to ibn hishām, based on the material’s “disreputable” association with jews, is plainly anachronistic for the third/ninth century. but more to the point, much critical investigation of isrāʾīliyyāt has shown that this construct should not be taken at face value or understood to be operative in the early centuries of islamic tradition, as is still sometimes assumed. numerous studies have shown that the concept of the isrāʾīliyyāt is an ideological tool that developed quite late in the history of the tradition, but the notion of a categorical opposition to this material because of its questionable authenticity and association with jews and judaism has often been projected back and nativized as an aspect of muslim scholarship early on, a position that simply does not hold up to critical scrutiny.59 the motivation to censor the mubtadaʾ as part of a concerted effort to suppress material of a judaic cast can only fancifully be ascribed to authors and transmitters of the early centuries ah. hughes’s approach to the question of the isrāʾīliyyāt is unfortunate because this phenomenon is undoubtedly significant for his larger project; as a discourse, isrāʾīliyyāt is a preeminent example of an ideologically freighted form of traditional muslim engagement with judaism. the idea of the isrāʾīliyyāt as a corpus of traditions that contaminated and undermined a pure, genuinely “islamic” form of knowledge handed down from the prophet and the salaf is one component of an ideology of separation or boundary-drawing between sunnism and various supposed heterodoxies that developed in the post-mongol era— assuming, as many would, that the mamluk-era jurist ibn taymiyya (d. 728/1328) should be recognized as the watershed figure in that development. asserting that there was authentic hostility to supposed jewish intrusions into the pure stream of prophetically validated religious knowledge from islam’s very beginnings, or even in the early centuries ah, or that a corpus of so-called isrāʾīliyyāt could be objectively demarcated and partitioned off from genuinely muslim lore, is to naturalize and validate a much later, conspicuously polemical, conception of the received tradition. concerned as he is with the dynamics of differentiation and separation that have contributed to false ideas of a coherent distinction between judaism and islam—a distinction hughes repeatedly avers was objectively lacking— one would imagine that he would be more sensitive to the function of the very category of isrāʾīliyyāt as an ideologically motivated discursive tool used to promote a myth of pristine origins for the received tradition of islamic religious knowledge. (one also imagines that hughes should have been more sensitive to anachronistic arguments, given his propensity to target them in others’ works.) curiously, when hughes discusses the importance of such origin myths elsewhere, no reference to the discourse of isrāʾīliyyāt is to be found, though it would have augmented his argument considerably. i will return to this point presently. 59. see roberto tottoli, “origin and use of the term isrāʾīliyyāt in muslim literature,” arabica 46 (1999): 193–210 and michael pregill, “isrāʾīliyyāt, myth, and pseudepigraphy: wahb b. munabbih and the early islamic versions of the fall of adam and eve,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 34 (2008): 215–84, esp. 237–41. hughes cites the latter article in his bibliography in shared identities but seems to miss the import of my argument. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 278 hughes’s approach to other primary sources for the period and their interpretation is similarly problematic.60 one of these is the doctrina jacobi nuper baptiziati, a complex text in the christian adversus iudaeos tradition that has attracted scholarly attention both for its putatively accurate attendance to actual jewish beliefs on the eve of islam and for certain statements it makes about muḥammad, in particular its seeming attestation of jewish belief in muḥammad as a herald of the messiah. notably, the date of the text has been disputed: some see it as genuine contemporary testimony to early jewish support for islam as a messianic movement, while others note that at least some of the claims made in the text clearly reflect later conceptions.61 hughes repeatedly cites the text (consistently referring to it as the doctrina iacoba) as evidence of the interconnection and porousness of the three monotheisms at the time, seeing groups from each community genuinely marshaled together under the apocalyptic banner of early islam: “a rather generic late antique apocalypticism encompasses jews, christians, and muslims.”62 however, the most cautious reading of the doctrina is that it has conflated the jewish belief that the rise of islam is a harbinger of the coming of the messiah (a plausible claim borne out by other sources) with the notion of actual active jewish support for islamic dominion (a rather less plausible one). it is more problematic, in my view, to read the text as evidence that jews widely embraced islam, that the movement was perceptible from the outside as “ecumenical” and friendly to jews, or—the notorious reading of patricia crone and michael cook’s hagarism—that protoislam was rooted in a kind of jewish messianic revolt. (i would judge all of these claims to be rather farfetched, as they seem to me to misconstrue what are at most polemical assertions about jews in the doctrina, but again, i admit that there is disagreement about all this.) at most, what the doctrina seems to testify to is the coincidence of jewish and christian apocalyptic expectations on the eve of islam, and that the mission of muḥammad and the subsequent arab conquests appeared to validate those expectations in the eyes of both.63 60. in muslim and jew hughes raises the subject of “non-canonical” sources that shed light on early islam (p. 26), though what he actually seems to mean are references to the prophet and the rise of islam found in early non-muslim sources. these texts are indeed technically “non-canonical” from the islamic perspective, in distinction to the quran and hadith, but this strikes me as a rather idiosyncratic way to characterize them. i infer that the choice of label is motivated by hughes’s desire not to project confessional categories onto the sources, his whole point being that we should not reify the distinctions between islam and other traditions in this period. 61. the established consensus among scholars of late antiquity is that the text is genuinely dateable to the 630s. among islamicists, this dating is accepted by robert hoyland and shoemaker (robert g. hoyland, seeing islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of christian, jewish and zoroastrian writings on early islam [princeton, nj: darwin press, 1997], 55–61; shoemaker, apocalypse of islam, 87–89, and compare his treatment in a prophet has appeared: the rise of islam through christian and jewish eyes [oakland: university of california press, 2021], 37–44). however, sean anthony favors a later date of composition sometime around the 670s (sean w. anthony, “muḥammad, the keys to paradise, and the doctrina iacobi: a late antique puzzle,” der islam 91 [2014]: 243–65, now reiterated in muhammad and the empires of faith: the making of the prophet of islam [oakland: university of california press, 2020], 41–58). 62. muslim and jew, 27. as hughes himself acknowledges, much of this chapter recycles material from his article “religion without religion,” and so this passage recapitulates the mishandling of the doctrina found there (pp. 877–78). 63. hughes’s main source for his discussion of the doctrina is shoemaker’s the death of a prophet: the end 279 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) it seems like a significant overreading to suggest that the text is proof that “the three monotheisms are not separate from one another at this point in history.”64 hughes’s discussion of the doctrina is closely linked to the subject of the sect of the isawiyya; hughes views both that movement and the “polythetic and inclusive” messianic literary works of the period as reflecting the spirit of an age in which jewish, christian, and muslim groups circulated, absorbed, and operationalized numerous ideas and claims that would later be branded as heterodox.65 for hughes, as for wasserstrom before him, this shadowy sect is particularly valuable as prime evidence of the reciprocity of messianic developments among muslims and jews in the early period.66 muslims drew on jewish traditions about the messiah in articulating their own ideas about the imminence of the eschaton, while “hybrid” or “syncretic” groups such as the isawiyya seem to have remained oriented toward a publicly jewish identity as they articulated a theology that strongly overlapped with emergent forms of early shiʿism. the isawiyya apparently combined muslim and jewish terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to be legible to both communities; their theology was muslim, but their rituals were jewish (jewish enough that they apparently intermarried with rabbanites, according to shahrastānī). as hughes cleverly puts it, the group appears to have operated in that liminal space “on the margins of the hyphen in the phrase ‘jewish-muslim.’”67 for him, they epitomize (to again invoke his terms) the type of the muslimjew or jewmuslim that ultimately challenges the conceptual stability of the terms jew and muslim, which scholars have only artificially naturalized as antipodes. as i read them, a crucial difference between wasserstrom and hughes seems of muhammad’s life and the beginnings of islam (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2011), who here sees both the doctrina and the secrets of shim’on bar yoḥai as testifying to jewish believers (or believers) aligned with muḥammad’s community (pp. 20–33), though shoemaker seems rather more cautious about such claims in his more recent apocalypse of empire. 64. muslim and jew, 27, reiterating “religion without religion,” 878. 65. shared identities, 70–75; the reference to “polythetic and inclusive messianic works” (specifically the doctrina and the secrets of shim’on bar yoḥai) is on p. 74. hughes’s reliance on wasserstrom is particularly strong here. 66. hughes here attributes a peculiar claim to shlomo pines, stating that pines argued that the isawiyya were directly “influenced” by apocalyptic sources such as the doctrina; hughes critiques this view as reducing the complex dynamics that gave rise to the sect to mere “borrowing” facilitated by the circulation of texts (shared identities, 71–72). the pines piece cited here is “the jewish christians of the early centuries of christianity according to a new source,” proceedings of the israel academy of sciences and humanities 2, no. 13 (1966), which discusses the then-recently discovered tathbīt dalāʾil al-nubuwwa of qāḍī ʿ abd al-jabbār and advances the controversial thesis that this eleventh-century muʿtazilite text preserves evidence of the endurance of jewish christianity well into the islamic period. pines briefly mentions the founder of the isawiyya, abū ʿ īsā al-iṣfahānī, at 44–45; however, the textualist argument for “influence” of apocalyptic texts on the movement decried by hughes is nowhere to be found in pines’s long article. nor is there any reference here to the doctrina or any other apocalyptic text. the gist of wasserstrom’s critique of pines is not that the latter overstates processes of “influence” in the emergence of the isawiyya but rather that he mistakenly insists that the group is a late survival of an authentically ancient jewish christianity and not a reflex of contemporary islamic phenomena (wasserstrom, between muslim and jew, 37–38, and cf. the comparison with the approach of israel friedlaender at 82). 67. shared identities, 73. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 280 to lie in how typical each imagines the isawiyya and other “hybrid” groups to be. for wasserstrom, such groups are provocative because they are so anomalous, compelling us to interrogate our theoretical and phenomenological assumptions (particularly the absence of jewish sectarianism between the second temple period and the karaites). for hughes, by contrast, the isawiyya seem to be exemplary, demonstrating an ambiguity in the distinction between jew and muslim that he sees as chronic, pervasive, and persistent.68 in shared identities, hughes’s discussion of the isawiyya segues to the secrets of shim’on bar yoḥai, a jewish apocalyptic text dated to around the mid-eighth century ce; hughes holds that this work is significant for his argument because it “identifies muhammad as the fulfillment of jewish messianic speculation.”69 hughes is correct in noting that the work is evidence of a kind of feedback loop between jewish and muslim communities in this period, as the secrets “recycles muslim apocalyptic speculation, some of which had already been paradoxically recycled from jewish sources by early muslims.”70 he elegantly describes the creative process that generated the text as an example of “collective world-making in an environment wherein ideas moved freely between porous boundaries,” but perplexingly, he concludes the paragraph by stating: “the result is that it is impossible to know what is ‘jewish’ and what is ‘muslim.’”71 this verdict seems farfetched to me, since what this source testifies to is the availability of shared symbolic and imaginative resources to diverse communities operating in the early islamic period, a kind of messianic-apocalyptic koine, but one whose meaning was clearly contested by the various participants who appropriated and deployed this koine for their own ends. i imagine that hughes would likely see this as an oversimplification, but to me it seems rather evident that the deployment of this koine to advance an argument for islam as the final prophetic dispensation may simply be called “muslim,” while its deployment as a prophecy of the imminent redemption of israel may be called “jewish.” the specific origins of particular aspects of the koine may be ambiguous, but as operationalized in the secrets, it is not evidence of blurred boundaries; it is evidence of the articulation of a specific communitarian and sectarian orientation through contesting the meaning of the aforementioned shared symbolic and imaginative resources. i am not even sure that “collective worldmaking” is really an accurate characterization of this dynamic, since this “collective worldmaking” was pursued in the service of mutually incompatible worldviews. this is abundantly clear in the secrets, because the text as redacted contains at least two strata: an early one that presents the ishmaelite kingdom as a divine instrument used to deliver the jews from rome and thus as a harbinger of the redemption—a clear endorsement 68. another significant difference in their approaches is highlighted by hughes himself: whereas wasserstrom presents the isawiyya and other contemporary jewish groups as reacting to islamicization, hughes sees them as “caught up in” that very process—embedded and participating in larger religious, political, and cultural trends that ultimately shaped both traditions (shared identities, 77). 69. shared identities, 76. to be fair, this characterization is shoemaker’s, who uses almost the exact same phrasing, “the fulfillment of jewish messianic expectations” (death of a prophet, 24), though he is not cited here. 70. shared identities, 77. it is unclear to me why the “paradoxically” should be necessary here. 71. ibid. 281 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) of and participation in the imperial eschatology seemingly embraced by the umayyad dominion in the first/seventh century—and a later one that is considerably more negative regarding that dominion. but neither stratum should really be understood as presenting the prophet as the “fulfillment of jewish messianic speculation.”72 at best, the coming of muḥammad is here interpreted as a positive sign of the imminence of the messianic era; at worst, it is understood as the beginning of the messiah’s birth pangs, a time of extreme, though portentous, suffering for jews. as extant, the secrets testifies to both viewpoints, and neither represents islam as anything but instrumental. at most, one might argue that the secrets contains evidence that some jews in the umayyad period saw the caliphate favorably and even assimilated it into older schemes of the imperial succession that would precede the advent of the messianic age, though this view would be tempered not long after. it is peculiar that hughes does not recognize the composite nature of the text of the secrets and thus the disparate perspectives that inform it, given that he quotes the text according to a witness from the cairo geniza that actually refers to muḥammad disparagingly as “a crazy man possessed by a spirit . . . [who] speaks lies about the holy one”; this is seemingly an emendation of an originally pro-umayyad tradition in the text that brings it into line with the later tradition that is here redacted together with it. one would think that all this signals a text that is clearly jewish in outlook—though perhaps complicating our ideas of the boundaries of judaism—and not by any means identifiable as muslim.73 overall, hughes is right to emphasize that messianism provides us with a distinctive basis for studying jewish-muslim engagements, as messianic groups “draw upon sets of decentralized messianic narratives to carve out ontic space for themselves”—a clear improvement over prevailing approaches to the traditions as cleanly defined binaries.74 but in the end, hughes overstates the degree to which the messianic enthusiasms shared by jews and muslims in the early islamic period really represent some kind of collective enterprise. apocalypticism may have been a common discourse legible to different groups, but that discourse was deployed to articulate utterly dichotomous truthclaims. there was nothing “generic” about its expressions at all. there are numerous other sources and phenomena from the early islamic period that would have further supported or nuanced hughes’s argument in both works yet curiously remain unmentioned in either book.75 these omissions are sometimes rather perplexing; 72. on the secrets and imperial eschatology, see shoemaker, apocalypse of empire, 98–100; on the redactional strata in the text, see the discussion, translation, and commentary of john c. reeves in trajectories in near eastern apocalyptic: a postrabbinic jewish apocalypse reader (leiden: brill, 2006), 76–89. 73. hughes’s source for the text of the secrets is the classic discussion of bernard lewis (“an apocalyptic vision of islamic history,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies, 13 [1950]: 308–38), who actually takes note of both the original and the pejorative readings registered in the witnesses, though hughes oddly does not acknowledge the original reading that supports his argument. compare reeves, trajectories, 79, n. 20. hughes’s discussion in muslim and jew, 28–29, an abbreviation that makes the same points and cites the same source, likewise acknowledges only the pejorative reading. 74. shared identities, 81. 75. as just one example, hughes is aware—again following wasserstrom—that the interface between the early shiʿa and contemporary jewish movements represents a productive site of inquiry regarding his concerns, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 282 for example, though he is concerned with boundary construction and the delineation of discourses about the other, hughes never mentions the word dhimmī and omits any reference to the pact of umar or the narratives about ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb’s interactions with jews, though these are crucial for understanding the normative discourse surrounding social and religious boundaries between muslims and non-muslims through the premodern period.76 further, the study of jews and christians as imperial subalterns in the caliphal period into the middle ages flourishes in contemporary scholarship, yet hughes ignores much of the recent secondary literature relevant to his arguments. overall, one gets the sense that hughes overstates his case for the blurriness of categorical distinctions between jews and muslims in the early period, and that this misprision is exacerbated by his chronic misreading of texts and lack of attention to critical debates in the scholarly literature. although social configurations and religious orientations certainly mapped differently in the early islamic period than they would later and were no doubt characterized by some fluidity in certain circumstances, the claim that boundaries were totally porous and that distinctions did not matter at all in this period seems like a clear exaggeration to me. it is especially implausible because of the evident propensity in this period for identity markers to be used strategically and ideologically as critical signifiers in apologetic and polemical discourse, beginning with the quran itself. was “islamic judaism” invented?77 it is important not to lose sight of hughes’s wholly admirable agenda of adopting a more theoretically sophisticated approach to the muslim-jewish relationship and critiquing the taxonomies and frameworks typically applied to the study of these communities in their formative period, with the ultimate goal of interrogating the nature of religious identity itself. putting aside the various issues of specialist concern that hughes’s treatment of particular bodies of evidence and areas of scholarship raises, we might ask whether his work succeeds overall as an exercise in the critical study of religion. that is, does hughes attain a more theoretically nuanced approach to the material, especially one that is of probative value for larger questions in the discipline of religious studies per se? from the outset, one might note that hughes’s inconsistent approach to historical evidence demonstrates why his explicit location of his own work at a supposedly higher level of theoretical conjecture and insight is problematic. aside from that, we might ask exactly how such an archimedean positioning of oneself as a theorist or religionist above but this possibility is barely fleshed out in either book, despite the significant research that has been done on the early shiʿa over the last two decades (e.g., hughes cites wasserstrom on ibn sabaʾ but totally overlooks the important study of sean w. anthony, the caliph and the heretic: ibn sabaʾ and the origins of shīʿism [leiden: brill, 2012]). hughes’s treatment of shiʿism is particularly idiosyncratic (if not erroneous) at times, as when he refers to the kharijites as pro-ʿalid and subsumes them under the rubric of ghulāt (shared identities, 71). 76. see the robust treatments in lassner, jews, christians, and the abode of islam and milka levy-rubin, non-muslims in the early islamic empire (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011). both studies are ignored by hughes. lassner’s book, in particular, overlaps in many ways with the concerns of shared identities. 77. with apologies to brian pennington for the shameless pastiche of his book title: was hinduism invented? britons, indians, and the colonial construction of religion (oxford: oxford university press, 2005). 283 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) and apart from the narrow details of historical or textual specifics is ideally meant to work. what methodology should religionists follow in order to transcend the conventional limitations of overly detail-oriented “micro study,” and what are the rules of the game? can such an attempt at achieving a god’s-eye view of the phenomena under discussion actually yield cogent insights? i agree wholeheartedly with hughes’s basic diagnosis of the problem: much historical and contemporary scholarship on premodern muslims and jews still labors under overly positivistic and sometimes anachronistic assumptions that project the stable and welldefined categories of a later age back to the formative period and reify ethnic, religious, cultural, national, or even racial essences as the basis of premodern identities. these reified essences often come into play when scholars seek to imagine intercommunal relations transactively, positing that groups have reciprocally “influenced” one another through different phases in which one “loans” elements that the other “borrows.” all of this is ripe for reexamination and reevaluation. adopting a more nuanced perspective, we may recognize that it is the phenomenon of engagement and exchange across permeable and even purely notional boundaries that is itself definitive for various groups exhibiting highly contingent and fluid characteristics profoundly shaped by the particulars of specific social and cultural circumstances. thus, to overcome anachronistic essentialisms, we should attempt to understand the posture and attitude of groups as they engage in moments of dynamic interaction as the most salient means of apprehending how communities construct themselves and their others—or rather, construct themselves by means of constructing their others. hughes foregrounds this perspective when he asserts, in boyarinesque mode, that his goal is to show how judaism and islam—like judaism and christianity in a previous age—“emerged dialectically with and from one another.”78 however, when we scrutinize the specifics of hughes’s approach to the muslim-jewish encounter—epitomized by his statement (again strongly echoing boyarin) that “the ‘history’ of the border between judaism and islam has primarily been interpretive and that what brings it into existence is a set of imaginative acts”79—one wonders whether this perpetual insistence on fluidity, blurry boundaries, and lack of clear definitions is perhaps at times misplaced.80 following wasserstrom, hughes sees the early islamic period as characterized by an abundance of “manifold and overlapping muslim and jewish subcultures that shared a common vocabulary and set of taxonomies,” a diversity that supposedly persisted into the middle ages.81 for hughes, as for wasserstrom, this diversity is epitomized by the aforementioned sect of the isawiyya, but—as already noted—one often gets the impression 78. shared identities, 5. 79. ibid., 18. 80. hughes’s debt to boyarin is acknowledged explicitly (e.g., shared identities, 4), though perhaps not often enough. one detects other theoretical precursors lurking in the background, for example bruce lincoln’s work on discourse and authority; lincoln is credited once in this role alongside j. z. smith and russell mccutcheon (ibid., 3) but not again. judith butler’s germinal thought on the performative nature of identity seems to me to be quite relevant here as well, though their work is not cited by hughes in either book (and only once in boyarin’s border lines). 81. shared identities, 19. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 284 that hughes sees this diversity, manifest in a plenitude of overlapping social formations, as both pervasive and persistent. thus, the isawiyya are not an anomalous case that tests our assumptions about norms; rather, hughes sees fluidity itself as the norm, in numerous settings, for quite some time. i readily admit that such an approach is a refreshing alternative to the prevailing view in much of the classic scholarship in the field, in which judaism and islam are perceived as wholly separate and integral monoliths that are largely unchanging in their historical essences, with the occasional moments of interface between them characterized as isolated instances of exchange (the transactive movement of some quantum from one to the other group), convergence (the metaphorical intersection of two discrete bodies moving in parallel courses throughout time), or hybridity (the exceptional grafting of two originally discrete species together to make a third entity distinct from both).82 as hughes skillfully demonstrates, this approach, especially common among jewish historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was particularly motivated by an emphasis on jewish distinctiveness, predicated upon the notion of an unchanging ethical core eternally at the heart of judaism across the centuries, as well as an anxiety about that jewish core being contaminated by external factors, especially aspects of arab and/or muslim culture.83 such a conception of the jewish-muslim encounter, constructed as an apologetic for jewish distinction, significantly underestimates the dynamism and vitality of both communities, as well as effacing the integral role that encounter played in their mutual development. scholars of religion have long recognized that boundary construction and maintenance not only are traditional obsessions of religious authorities but have often been replicated in various ways in the modern field of religious studies itself. previous generations of scholars implied or explicitly asserted that various religious phenomena can be neatly organized and cleanly demarcated, in theory and in practice; in directing considerable amounts of intellectual labor toward this goal, scholars often inadvertently recapitulated the normative and prescriptive discourses indigenous to the very traditions they sought to objectively describe. as scholars’ primary means of access to information about traditions, especially premodern ones, has been the literature generated through such normative discourses, in whatever cultural milieu and historical setting, the field has unfortunately often exhibited a characteristic confusion of prescriptive claims with lived religious realities, which more often than not tend to be messy, diverse, and inchoate (like most realms of human endeavor). 82. another familiar metaphor is intertwining, made famous as a metaphor for jewish-muslim engagements by the influential monograph of hava lazarus-yafeh, intertwined worlds: medieval islam and bible criticism (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1992). intertwining implies that two separate things have come together to make up a single strand, balancing the notion of unity with that of distinctiveness and separability. it is the latter aspects that hughes would likely find objectionable in the metaphor. 83. this theme is a familiar one in religious studies, the quest for pristine origins of religious traditions having been thoroughly exposed by contemporary scholars such as russell mccutcheon (manufacturing religion: the discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia [oxford: oxford university press, 1997]) and tomoko masuzawa (in search of dreamtime: the quest for the origin of religion [chicago: university of chicago press, 1993]), both of whom hughes cites in shared identities. 285 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the main analytical payoff of work exposing the underlying ideologies and unacknowledged blind spots of the field is the insight that the idealizing perspectives of religious authorities preserved in canonical texts and other literary sources should not be confused with the elusive historical realities of social configurations, quotidian practice, and non-elite worldviews. that said, it is ironic that throughout hughes’s work, which emphasizes the fluidity of phenomena and the artificiality of attempts at boundary construction, the distinction between lived realities and normative discourse is itself blurred. in chapter 4 of shared identities (“the manufacture of orthodoxy”), hughes transitions to a discussion of what he repeatedly terms “islamic judaism,” a form or forms of jewish discourse in the high middle ages that sought to construct a new jewish normativity while operating in the realm of—and thus being fundamentally shaped by—islamic (or islamicate) discourse.84 here hughes deliberately moves to counter older scholarly approaches and biases: thus, he explains “islamic judaism” as a mode in which jews “think arabically and islamically,” though goitein and others characterized the work of such figures as sa’adya gaon and maimonides as reflecting only a superficial islamic “influence” on judaism.85 one can certainly sympathize with hughes’s desire to overcome the reified categories and essentialism that constrain earlier studies of these major intellectual figures of the islamic middle ages. but we might also note a particular tension surrounding notions of identity and distinction that emerges here and subsequently recurs throughout both of hughes’s books. one imagines that by the period under discussion, both judaism and islam had developed enough to be readily distinguishable, at least in theory if not always in practice—though the juridical prescriptions enforcing social distinctions would have made the boundary between muslims and jews real enough. islam, in particular, was culturally, politically, and legally dominant in the abbasid era, and so the jews of muslim lands constituted a subculture, but one that was so thoroughly shaped by prevailing islamic patterns, norms, and frameworks that it came to be fundamentally “islamic” in character, orientation, and articulation.86 this would actually seem to imply much less blurriness than 84. a condensed summary of hughes’s perspective on the phenomenon of “islamic judaism” that emphasizes its emergence out of the dazzling variety of expressions of jewish identity that prevailed during the geonic period is found in his “messianism and the shadow of history: judaism and islam in a time of uncertainty,” in islamic studies today: essays in honor of andrew rippin, ed. majid daneshgar and walid saleh, 145–63 (leiden: brill, 2017). here again the familiar leitmotifs of hughes’s books abide: the importance of normative rabbinic judaism has been overstated, boundaries between judaism and islam were blurred or nonexistent in the formative period, and many forms of jewish belief and practice were functionally indistinguishable from their muslim counterparts in the early islamic milieu. 85. shared identities, 83. the phrase “islamic judaism” appears a number of times in both shared identities and muslim and jew and should be understood as central to hughes’s thinking on the subject at hand. 86. whether minority groups impacted by islamic cultural patterns may be thought to have performed islam within the contours of their own traditions is a question usefully provoked by shahab ahmed’s muchdiscussed what is islam? the importance of being islamic (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2015), where he gives the example of sikh wrestlers who ritually invoke ʿalī before competing (pp. 445–46). (ahmed’s conception of islam as performative itself strongly echoes butler, who is ignored by ahmed as well as hughes.) of the numerous scholars overlooked by hughes, ahmed is one of the most conspicuous, as many of his theoretical al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 286 purportedly prevailed in the earlier period discussed by hughes, and yet he often discusses the major figures of this era—sa’adya, maimonides, abraham ibn ezra, bahya ibn paquda, and others—as if they were still dwelling in the earlier era of foggy indeterminacy.87 whether there was actually anything like an “islamic judaism” and whether the phantasmal “jewmuslims” or “muslimjews” hughes posits ever actually existed are still, to my mind, unanswered questions. but we certainly must acknowledge the reality of potent discourses of separation and distinction that operated throughout the history of the jewishmuslim encounter from the very beginning. it was certainly the case, for many if not most insiders, that the boundary between judaism and islam was very real, regardless of whether those constructs corresponded exactly to the doctrinally coherent and largely orthopractic varieties that prevailed later on. as we have already seen, a distinction between judaism and islam is basic to the quran; that the differences between them had yet to be fleshed out dogmatically, institutionally, and otherwise seems to me to be beside the point. likewise, even if the distinctions between the traditions were irrelevant to some in the early centuries of islam—whoever they may have been—many others were certainly keenly aware of them, and it is these others who tended to be responsible for the surviving cultural productions of the period that allow us our shadowy glimpses of the past. i do not think that this point is immaterial, yet it frequently appears to be a blind spot in hughes’s analysis. he often seems to overstate his case in repeatedly asserting that boundaries and distinctions were largely artificial and themselves the products of a long, drawn-out historical process of engagement between jews and their muslim counterparts/ others/doppelgängers—that the entire history of the encounter between “muslimjews” and “jewmuslims” is a “genealogy of indeterminacy.”88 the problem comes to the fore in his approach to the “islamic judaism” of the high middle ages. he asserts that modern scholars largely invented the idea of judaism and islam as discrete and autonomous entities, noting that narratives of boundaries and distinctions “were manufactured in scholarly workshops.”89 but if this were really the case, what should we make of our normativizing insights seem quite germane to hughes’s argument. one might suppose that ahmed’s book, which was published in 2015 and widely discussed in 2016, appeared too close to the publication of shared identities for hughes to take it into account, but i observe several books and articles from 2016 cited in hughes’s bibliography (e.g., the aforementioned monograph of webb, cited a number of times in the book), so the omission is not circumstantial. hughes did address ahmed’s work in a short review published on the blog of the american academy of religion on september 8, 2017 (https://readingreligion.org/books/what-islam). 87. as just one example, see shared identities, 134–35, where hughes evocatively describes the avicennian echoes in a poem by ibn ezra as reflecting an attempt at “producing a judaism that conformed to the intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities of arab-islamic culture” (p. 135). however, this enterprise was hardly novel in ibn ezra’s time, by that stage having already been centuries in the making. further, hughes’s conclusion simply does not follow from the evidence: “this could only be done . . . if judaism was a lot more unstable than the likes of goitein would have us believe” (ibid.). by this logic, judaism is perpetually unstable, being redefined at every historical moment, in every era. perhaps this is hughes’s intention, but if that is the case, there is nothing exceptional about the jewish-muslim engagements of the middle ages, and hughes’s project in these books threatens to collapse. 88. shared identities, 86. 89. shared identities, 18. it is clear from the context that hughes here refers to the work of modern 287 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) sources for the period, which seem quite conspicuously concerned with erecting boundaries and enforcing distinctions from early on, virtually from the dawn of islam? at times—again following the boyarin approach—hughes recognizes that the work of partition is exactly what the communal spokesmen who furnish us with our primary sources for the period are doing. that is, we can plainly see that figures such as sa’adya gaon and maimonides seek to articulate jewish orthodoxy in islamic terms—a project that is novel in their time, though not entirely innovative, as hellenistic jews had sought to do much the same in seeking to define judaism according to the canons and categories that dominated the philosophical discourse of their day.90 yet the “manufacturing” of orthodoxy is repeatedly asserted to be a modern phenomenon. hughes’s approach to sa’adya gaon epitomizes some of these tensions. he locates sa’adya’s work in the context of the contemporaneous project of hadith collectors, jurists, and quran commentators to define and articulate islamic norms; thus, sa’adya usefully comes into focus as a jewish analogue to muslim peers who formulated the doctrinally cogent expressions of identity that eventually produced the mature forms of classical islam.91 but this does not mean that a coherent conception of judaism did not precede sa’adya, just as a coherent conception of islam surely preceded al-ṭabarī.92 yet hughes scholars, the “genealogies of terms and narratives” (p. 19) that continue to have repercussions in contemporary scholarship, though somewhat earlier on he refers to the “workshops” in which the babylonian rabbis sought to develop a normative judaism in late antiquity (p. 14). the metaphor of the scholarly workshop is reminiscent of masuzawa’s discussion of max müller in in search of dreamtime, which appropriates the metaphor from müller himself: the latter titled his multivolume collection of philological essays chips from a german workshop (1867–75). as masuzawa and hughes depict müller and various other scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the metaphor seems to me to be meant to evoke a kind of idealizing imaginative work divorced from reality. 90. it is one thing to suggest that a broadly imposed rabbinic normativity was still novel in this era and only beginning to be widely diffused throughout the jewish world—this, to me, is the crux of work on rabbinization by seth schwartz, hayim lapin, talya fishman, and others. it is entirely another to claim that there was no stable sense of jewish identity prior to the time of sa’adya at all, which is the impression one gets (albeit somewhat inconsistently) from hughes’s approach. 91. as with his discussions of the early islamic period, there are numerous aspects of hughes’s treatment of the islamic middle ages that cry out for elaboration, and many scholars whose work i would consider indispensable to consider in this context are almost entirely ignored. the short shrift given to such major scholars as camilla adang, haggai ben-shammai, ross brann, lassner, lazarus-yafeh, and meira polliack in both books is surprising, but hughes either mentions these scholars only in passing in notes or includes them in the bibliography without comment. much contemporary work of relevance is simply ignored, which is especially surprising given that shared identities is a work of historiography directed at the critical evaluation of scholarly trends. 92. in his approach to major thinkers of the islamic middle ages, hughes is clearly deeply influenced (so to speak) by boyarin’s work on figures such as justin martyr, whom boyarin spotlights as a major architect of christian difference and distinction. hughes is of course correct in casting sa’adya as a seminal figure in the emergence of a doctrinally and halakhically coherent form of normative judaism that would have a wide impact on jewish communities throughout the islamic world, the mediterranean, and europe. but hughes often writes as if sa’adya worked in the religious and social environment of the second century ce, in which the distinctions between jews, christians, and others were rudimentary (at least according to boyarin’s model), and not in the rather different milieu of the tenth. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 288 seems to imply exactly this at times, for example in characterizing sa’adya as the originator of a jewish normativity that was only beginning to be imagined in the high middle ages. reimagined, perhaps; but surely sa’adya did not invent what became normative judaism ex nihilo. further, at other times hughes seems to insinuate that sa’adya and maimonides were not simply proposing an islamically inflected conception of judaism—using islam as an instrument to refine and reorient that prevailing conception—but were in some substantial way “doing” islam and reshaping it into judaism.93 is this what sa’adya and maimonides perceived themselves to be doing? it is one thing to say there is no firm categorical or phenomenological difference between their activity and that of their muslim peers. but was it not precisely their intention to impose a distinction between the traditions through implementing those very shared discourses that positions them on the boundary between judaism and islam? they surely did not believe they were inventing judaism from whole cloth; rather, they were using islam, the well-defined and socially dominant creed and culture in their environment, to reshape another creed and culture that they understood as distinct, even though hughes as a critical religionist may insist that the distinctions are fuzzy, ephemeral, artificial, or illusory. i myself prefer the formulation that sa’adya was “doing” judaism by selectively appropriating aspects of islam, through an instrumental engagement with islam as a primary resource available to him in articulating his vision of judaism.94 we must concede that boundaries and definitions are at least at times emic and not etic; if we do not, we adopt the position that spokesmen like sa’adya and maimonides were wholly alienated from the tradition they sought to uphold and the community whose integrity they aspired to defend. again, from the outside, it may be productive for us to recognize that sa’adya was functionally a mutakallim or maimonides a faylasūf, essentially no different from their contemporary muslim counterparts, without any need to impose the adjective “jewish” to make such characterizations cogent or convincing.95 i believe this is the main insight hughes means to express through his treatment of these figures. however, the key point as i see it is that these people participated in a common discourse with their muslim peers despite seeing themselves as categorically different; wholly apart from the question of whether their work was in any substantial sense distinct from that of their peers, it seems obtuse to suggest that they themselves did not conceive of such a difference or actually invented it themselves. objectively speaking, the boundary between judaism and 93. again, insofar as we might imagine sa’adya “doing” islam in his mode as mutakallim (and not a specifically jewish kind of kalām), both butler and ahmed seem indispensable to hughes’s approach here. 94. i would thus object to the aforementioned account of ahmed portraying sikh wrestlers as “doing” islam. it rather seems to me that if we take their intentionality into account—intent and agency being central to ahmed’s understanding of what it means for muslims to “do” islam—then these sikh wrestlers are actually “doing” sikhism through or with islam, appropriating aspects of islam in their articulation of their sikhism. 95. for example, in introducing the “islamic judaism” of maimonides in shared identities (p. 109), hughes emphasizes that the creed of maimonides “betrays no sense of the hyphen” imposed in such formulations as “jewish-muslim,” by which i believe he means that it is misleading to think of his judaism as somehow hybrid or syncretic. is this “islamic judaism” then simply a form of islam? here hughes’s meaning is rather unclear. 289 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) islam might have been all in their heads, but is it not the case that religious activity is commonly, if not exclusively, constituted by imaginative acts? on some level, it is always all in our heads, and the perception and intentionality of a sa’adya or maimonides—let alone of the rank-and-file religious subjects who lived the messy realities we as historians or religionists aspire to capture and convey—is surely as significant as any phenomenological reconstruction we might generate for the sake of analysis. in seeking to avoid overly reified conceptions of judaism and islam, we perhaps run the risk of overstating the evanescence of categories and distinctions that were entirely real for historical religious subjects. of course their categories and distinctions were different from ours, but likely no less “real” from their perspective; even if sa’adya and maimonides merely crafted these categories and distinctions in their own “scholarly workshops,” they had to have some plausible claim of facticity to have any traction for their coreligionists. hughes’s constant emphasis on the blurriness of the boundaries between judaism and islam results in some misrepresentation of the major figures who stood at the interface of the traditions, and this seems to me to be the real danger we face in imposing the heuristic of the phenomenologist (for whom distinctions seem ephemeral) upon historical subjects (for whom distinctions appear conceptually, practically, and affectively real). for example, he presents sa’adya as if he differs from his muslim mutakallim counterparts simply in citing biblical prooftexts for his arguments instead of quranic ones and even clims that “it is difficult to know how ‘jewish’ someone like saadia regarded his thinking to be.”96 but the point, i think, is that kalām was a shared discourse that did not differ substantially whether it was a jew or a muslim (or a christian) who employed its techniques, and thus that kalām was essentially, for lack of a better term, nondenominational. the point is surely not that the mutakallim abandoned any sense of their own or their tradition’s particularism by engaging in it. it is hard for me to imagine that sa’adya regarded his thinking as anything but jewish. i wholeheartedly agree that hughes’s approach presents a much-needed corrective to a prevalent view of sa’adya that insulates his religious views—his “essential” jewish identity—from his islamic milieu, an approach that has historically dominated the study of maimonides as well.97 but hughes seems to me to go too far in effacing the critical element of sa’adya’s self-perception in the formation of his religious ideas and ideals; he certainly did not see himself as a mutakallim first and foremost and as a jew second, which is the impression one might get from hughes’s presentation. to presume that jewish authors did not operate with a strong sense of the distinction between their tradition and islam, despite the de facto proximity between the traditions, strips them of agency. it should not 96. shared identities, 100. 97. a sterling example of this trend is robert brody’s biography sa’adyah gaon (oxford: littman library of jewish civilization, 2013), a rich and nuanced treatment of sa’adya’s background in and contributions to contemporary judaism that almost completely ignores his islamic cultural and intellectual context. sa’adya’s work is ripe for a revisionist corrective along the lines of what has transpired in the rethinking of maimonides and his significance in the twenty-first century; see, e.g., joel l. kraemer, maimonides: the life and world of one of civilization’s greatest minds (new york: doubleday, 2008) and sarah stroumsa, maimonides in his world: portrait of a mediterranean thinker (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2009). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 290 be impossible for us to balance a recognition of the phenomenological similarity, or even points of practical identity, between judaism and islam in the formative period of both with an acknowledgment of these figures’ self-conception and intentional appropriation of islamic ideas in the shaping and reframing of what they considered to be the wholly unique reality of judaism.98 time and again hughes depicts the thought of islamicate jews, especially in the middle ages, as evidence of the persistent lack of a stable core to the jewish tradition and the anxieties this produced—try as they might, they could not find any essential aspect of their religion to “fall back on or turn to in solace.”99 i am sympathetic to the work of reframing that such a characterization is meant to do, but i remain deeply skeptical that it accurately captures the attitude of sa’adya, or maimonides, or any of the other figures hughes discusses. the thought of these figures seems to me to reflect medieval jewish acculturation to islam—the deliberate or inadvertent conforming of a previous assemblage of beliefs, practices, and attitudes to that of the dominant, and quite distinct, communal formation in the environment. hughes often seems to be at war with himself on this score: sometimes sa’adya is unprecedented in creating a normative judaism of the sort we might recognize as a distinct religious tradition; at other times, as when hughes says sa’adya’s accomplishment is his framing judaism in terms of islam, or rather “the creation of an islam recast as a judaism,” he seems to concede that some notion of judaism must have preceded sa’adya (otherwise, what was it that guided this “recasting”?).100 would that older heritage of judaism not be exactly what sa’adyah or others would “fall back on or turn to in solace”? and yet hughes’s overattention to semantics brings us to a point of near-incoherence: “rather than characterize saadya as a ‘jewish mutakallim,’ we should envisage him simply as a mutakallim who was jewish. . . . [this] avoids the religio-ethnic signifier and instead sees saadya as but another arab-speaking mutakallim . . .”101 but what, then, did his judaism consist of? how does this leave us with any trace of his significance for judaism—or better, of the significance of judaism for him, which was surely considerable? we can (and should) continue to consider whether and to what degree the twinned traditions of judaism and islam were really distinct in theory or practice; we might even entertain the notion that the islamicate civilization of this time actually constituted a 98. hughes’s exaggeration of the porousness and indefiniteness of the boundary between judaism and islam in this period is epitomized by his depiction of the famous muslim polemicist ibn ḥazm, who made use of contemporary jewish writings in his polemics. astoundingly, what this represents for hughes is that “jewish and muslim mutakallimūn do not neatly and simply bifurcate into . . . religious adjectives. the border . . . is not yet closed” (shared identities, 100). once again, one senses boyarin’s approach to justin martyr in the background here, but it seems unimaginable to me that we can understand the andalusian context in the eleventh century as anything like that of palestine in the second. the availability of jewish writings to ibn ḥazm by no means implies the kind of indeterminacy hughes eagerly seeks here; social intimacy and intellectual proximity do not equate to porous boundaries. in many cases, intimacy and proximity lead to anxiety about boundaries, and so to efforts to shore them up. 99. muslim and jew, 65 (a curiously vague passage that implies that medieval jews were cognizant of the historical flux and development that shaped their tradition). 100. shared identities, 99. 101. ibid. 291 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) single shared tradition expressed in two separate idioms, one jewish and one muslim.102 but it seems exceedingly unlikely to me that muslims or jews of the time would have seen it that way, and it is dangerously anachronistic to suggest that the distinction between islam and judaism was only heuristic, or merely a distant convention to premodern members of either community.103 put another way, although we might see the difference between them as epiphenomenal, from the inside the perceived difference must have been monumental. otherwise, what would have been the point of all the intellectual work of definition and differentiation that these medieval thinkers undertook? and yet somehow hughes concludes that “such towering medieval thinkers did not see a clear boundary between judaism and islam . . .”104 in insisting on characterizing the situation this way, hughes seems to confuse the persistent permeability between islam and judaism in the middle ages with the fluidity he asserts to have been the norm in earlier centuries.105 modern politics, representations, and realities as noted above, hughes adopts a more explicitly political agenda in muslim and jew, suggesting that the critical study of the dynamics of jewish-muslim engagements in the past may help to address and somehow ameliorate our contemporary political situation. asserting that the tensions surrounding the israeli-palestinian conflict are “structurally similar to that produced by earlier iterations of muslim-jewish cohabitation” (p. viii), hughes claims that examining significant aspects of the historical jewish-muslim relationship can illuminate the current version of the “dialectic of self-definition and other-abnegation” (p. ix) that continues to have repercussions today. although this is a perfectly admirable intention, one cannot fail to notice that something important appears to have been elided here. despite the significant infusion of conspicuously 102. or that jews constituted a muslim subculture, with all that that implies. i borrow the metaphor of judaism and islam as dialects or idioms from boyarin, who applies it (with some reservations) to judaism and christianity in their formative period; see border lines, 17–22. marshall hodgson’s widely influential concept of the “islamicate” has been criticized in recent years, particularly for the way in which it segregates “religion” as a special category of cultural production and meaning-making (see, e.g., ahmed, what is islam?, 157–75), but it remains a salient category for many scholars in islamic studies. 103. admittedly, one might cite the famous averroist conception of the double truth to support exactly the claim that at least some medieval jewish and muslim philosophers would have embraced the idea that rationally apprehended truth is unitary and the distinctions between creeds are ultimately irrelevant. without delving into this possibility here, i will note only that hughes himself does not invoke this concept to vindicate his claims, so i do not feel obligated to stage a defense on his behalf on this basis either. 104. shared identities, 19. 105. see also hughes’s discussion of bahya ibn paquda as “but one iteration of how jews used the dominant narrative of islam to actively create judaism” (shared identities, 138; cf. muslim and jew, 52–54)—not recreate? compare the discussion of ibn kammuna (shared identities, 100–102; muslim and jew, 45–46), where hughes avers that labels such as “jewish” and “muslim” are anachronistic and unhelpful in characterizing him, though it seems equally accurate to represent him as a rationalist jew who was particularly openminded about islam (and “jewish” and “muslim” were surely not anachronistic categories in thirteenth-century ilkhanid baghdad). chapter 2 of muslim and jew improves on this situation somewhat by concluding with a discussion of the sabbateans, to whom talk of porous boundaries and blurred categories seems rather more applicable. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 292 religious ideologies into both the palestinian resistance and mainstream zionism since the 1980s, arab opposition to israel is by no means reducible to “islamic” factors, nor are zionist positions or israeli state policy simply translations of jewish outlooks. hughes is surely aware of this, but he sometimes effaces what seem to me to be important distinctions, and the continuities he asserts are often left implicit and not carefully explained or justified. hughes recognizes, of course, that not all palestinians are muslim, but he nevertheless holds that significant elements of older jewish-muslim dynamics of engagement are recapitulated in the modern conflict, in particular the tendency for each group to evoke ideas about the antipodal other as a means of shaping conceptions of an ideal self. echoing one of the leitmotifs of shared identities, hughes provocatively suggests that the selfconsciousness and anxiety triggered by social and religious proximity in the past has in the modern period been triggered by actual physical proximity instead; thus, contemporary struggles are only “the latest attempt on behalf of jews and muslims to invoke their religious traditions to make sense of an encounter fraught with the nearness and concomitant apprehension of the other.”106 but although anyone who teaches jewish-muslim relations in broad perspective surely has to address the impact of the rise of zionism and the conflict over palestine on both groups in the modern period, the overly neat way in which hughes dovetails the past into the present here seems too clever by half. the proposition that the political conflict between arabs and jews in the modern era refracts and reconfigures aspects of the tensions between jews and muslims in premodern islamicate societies is intriguing, but as executed in the brief chapters of muslim and jew (especially chapter 3, dedicated to the modern period), hughes’s argument is barely substantiated and relies on vague and at times misleading suggestions. at worst, it rests on a conspicuous misrepresentation of the textual evidence, recapitulating some of the problems that recur throughout shared identities. it is true that spokesmen on both sides of the israeli-palestinian divide have often positioned themselves as heirs to a perpetual struggle that long preceded arab or jewish nationalist ambitions, and so both groups have repeatedly invoked what hughes terms “nostalgic” and “lachrymose” paradigms—arabs alluding to the glorious heritage of islamic dominion and cultural achievement, jews to the centuries of oppression, discrimination, and violence to which they were perennially subjected under muslim rule.107 in order to 106. muslim and jew, 66. 107. in muslim and jew, 3, “lachrymose” is presented as if it is hughes’s own coinage, though it is not. as noted by mark cohen, baron characterized the negative conceptions of jewish life in christian europe prevalent in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century historiography in this way; in turn, cohen adapts this characterization and applies the term “neo-lachrymose” to the pessimistic view of jewish history under islamic rule that became popular in certain circles after the six-day war in 1967 (cohen, under crescent and cross: the jews in the middle ages [princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1994], ch. 1). hughes acknowledges cohen’s “neo-lachrymose” terminology once in shared identities (p. 34). the citational problems are distinctly more acute in muslim and jew than they are in shared identities, but they appear repeatedly in both books. note, e.g., the references to “epistemic space” (muslim and jew, 5, 86), which i read as allusions to neuwirth, who has used exactly this terminology in her work (e.g., “locating the qurʾān in the epistemic space of late antiquity,” in books and written culture of the islamic world: studies presented to claude gilliot on the occasion of his 75th birthday, ed. andrew rippin and roberto tottoli, 159–79 [leiden: brill, 2015]), but who is absent from both 293 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) substantiate this point in chapter 3, hughes might have adduced examples of modern ideologues from both the arab and zionist camps drawing upon particular aspects of traditional thinking—nationalist arguments on either side rehearsing the terms of older religious polemic—or evoking the ideas and ideals of a previous age to explain modern conditions. i infer that this is what hughes meant to do in the chapter of muslim and jew he dedicates to the modern period. however, for the most part what he offers us here is a basic overview of major political developments from the rise of zionism to contemporary times. this survey is occasionally punctuated by substantial quotations from primary sources that are presumably intended to support his contentions but are actually of questionable probative value for his argument. here the contradiction between the evident significance of texts and the meaning hughes imputes to them—a chronic problem in both books—seems particularly acute. early on in the chapter, hughes suggests that both sides in the modern conflict invoke ancient history as a way of alleviating tensions and anxieties; both jews and palestinians take recourse to narratives of a sacred past as an explanatory mechanism that endows the present struggle with meaning. as an example, he refers to arafat’s famous 1974 address to the united nations, claiming that it “appeals indirectly to the past, to the shared destiny of jews and muslims in places like the arabian peninsula and muslim spain.” however, this subtext is wholly absent from the passage hughes quotes here, which actually speaks to the distinction between judaism and jewish colonialism and warns of the threat to international security posed by zionist “terrorism.”108 similarly, a long quotation from jabotinsky is cited as foreshadowing the idea of a transfer of the palestinian population out of israel to other arab territories, but the whole point of the quoted passage is that the arabs would be allowed to remain on the land (and might actually become even more numerous) but would eventually have to accommodate the reality of becoming a minority with the continuing migration of jews to palestine. jabotinsky notes explicitly that forced relocation would not be necessary for the future zionist state (“there is no question of ousting the arabs”)— the opposite of the point hughes claims the passage makes.109 still further, one would imagine that discussion of hamas would be especially productive for hughes, as the group’s political discourse explicitly capitalizes on older narratives representing the jews of muḥammad’s time as subversive, perfidious, and treacherous; this technique would seem to epitomize, as hughes puts it, the use of a past “selectively remembered to make a political point in the present.”110 but the texts from hamas he subsequently quotes simply do not demonstrate this.111 hughes then goes on to mention the importance of an idealized unity books, as noted above. admittedly, boyarin also refers to the “epistemic” in border lines. in any event, hughes is hardly original in applying the foucauldian notion of the episteme to the exchanges and confrontations between jews, christians, and the quranic community in late antiquity. 108. muslim and jew, 79. 109. ibid., 75. 110. ibid., 82. 111. the long quotation from article 8 of the hamas charter (ibid., 82) discusses the zionist conspiracy throughout modern history; the subsequent long quotation from article 28 (ibid., 82–83) discusses zionist infiltration of modern institutions; and the next quotation, from article 31 (ibid., 83), portrays the hamas vision al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 294 under the caliphate to modern muslim ideologues—another apposite theme—but does not support this claim in any way.112 the maladroit, partial, and inadequate nature of the evidence hughes offers in support of his argument is rather conspicuous in this chapter. in the end, the arguments he proposes to make at the beginning simply do not manifest; at best, we are presented with a conspicuously circular logic, in which texts in which arabs and zionists express their anxieties about the other are cited as proof that arabs and zionists experience anxieties about the other. there is certainly an important point to be made about the persistence of certain ideas about the past and their deployment for ideological and political gain in the propaganda of hardline religious groups in both the jewish and palestinian camps, but hughes’s continuing misrepresentation of texts and their meaning in this chapter impairs and overshadows his discussion. this is to say nothing of the numerous conspicuous omissions: as noted previously, hughes’s argument would have been well served if he had addressed the question of the isrāʾīliyyāt in this context, as this would have provided a compelling example of a modern muslim discourse that conflates the distant islamic past and present political realities. moreover, one cannot fail to notice that two of the most important thinkers germane to hughes’s argument—sayyid qutb and meir kahane—receive no mention here, though the type of ideologically burdened evocations of history that hughes wishes to highlight are central to the intellectual projects of both. hughes’s arguments are less effective than they should be in other respects as well. in both shared identities and muslim and jew, the distinction between representation and reality is not always evident. at times hughes seems entirely cognizant that our available sources, especially muslim depictions of jews, serve an ideological function, each group’s portrayal of the other serving to address internal communal issues. (this is exactly the argument he purportedly wishes to make in chapter 3 of muslim and jew.) such awareness aligns hughes’s project with a number of important studies from the last decade, particularly those of ze’ev maghen, david freidenreich, and most of all david nirenberg, concerning what we might term the imaginative politics of christian and muslim representations of jews.113 but at other times hughes cites his sources as evidence of the blurriness or of islamism as a creed promoting justice and peaceful coexistence. these passages touch on themes familiar from traditional sources, such as jewish corruption and subversion, but none refers to premodern history. 112. ibid., 84. on this important topic, see, e.g., mona hassan, longing for the lost caliphate: a transregional history (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016). 113. as noted above, maghen’s work is overlooked by hughes, while that of freidenreich is casually dismissed in shared identities. an older monograph by nirenberg is briefly cited in shared identities, but hughes does not engage with his magnum opus, anti-judaism: the western tradition (new york: norton, 2013), at all in either book, another puzzling omission. strangely, in muslim and jew hughes coins the term “theology” for the primary “prism” framing his analysis, by which he means the various expressions of a religious community thinking about itself through representations of the other, providing “the script whereby a group situates itself, ideally and theoretically, within a social space” (p. 6). it is unclear to me why “theology” should be the preferred term for such strategies of representation. the term is also used according to its more conventional sense (e.g., for the discourse of kalām) in this book, and in shared identities it is used solely in the conventional sense (e.g., “theology represents the systematic articulation of what are imagined as religious truths—the nature of god, the relationship between god and humans, providence . . .”; p. 89). 295 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) fluidity he so frequently seeks to discern in various historical periods, when what those sources actually attest to is the proclivity of jews and muslims across the centuries to invoke the other in constructing an ideal self or promoting myths of communal origins. his two arguments thus seem to be unhelpfully conflated. for example, in chapter 1 of muslim and jew, hughes once again foregrounds the question of “decentralized pluralism,” the blurred boundaries he asserts were typical of the era in which islam emerged, but the texts quoted here sometimes seem to attest instead to later authors’ concern with solidifying the boundaries between groups and with sanctifying and sanitizing islam’s origins by emphasizing jewish difference and distinction from the followers of muḥammad.114 this is particularly striking as later in the chapter he explicitly recognizes that identities are not only maintained but actually defined at (imagined or real) borders as sites of encounter through the negotiation of (imagined or real) difference in dialectic with the other. in chapter 2, which focuses on the middle ages, hughes begins by claiming that the subject to be discussed is the tendency among both muslims and jews to deploy portrayals of the other as “literary stand-ins” in discourses of self-reflection. here he will supposedly focus on the use of a fictive jew as a foil by muslim authors to construct an image of the ideal muslim, marginalize certain varieties of islam as illegitimate (by reclassifying them as jewish), and enforce the boundary between islam and judaism.115 i agree wholeheartedly that this is exactly what many muslim depictions of jews and judaism throughout the centuries, especially in classical and medieval islamic texts, are intended to do. however, this agenda quickly recedes into the background in the chapter and is never directly discussed again. instead, most of the chapter actually discusses the impact of islam on jewish thinkers and movements, first addressing major medieval figures and then groups such as the sabbateans. despite this, at the end of the chapter, hughes emphasizes that in this era, when muslims talked about jews, they were really talking about islamic orthodoxy. one can readily agree with this contention, which has been established in a number of other studies published over the last decade, but not on the strength of the foregoing discussion by hughes himself. this incongruity is paralleled in shared identities. in the final chapter of that book (chapter 6, “re-frame”) hughes initially seems acutely aware of the function of literary texts in manipulating representations for various ideological ends, as he discusses the antipodes “muslim” and “jew” as sites for self-fashioning in each community’s discourse.116 but by the end of the chapter he veers back into his favorite subject, the persistent blurred boundaries between groups across the centuries, and the question of the political and ideological aspects of representation unfortunately recedes into the background again.117 114. e.g., the quotation from the sīra of ibn isḥāq concerning jewish opposition to muḥammad and hypocrisy (muslim and jew, 20). 115. ibid., 36. 116. once again, this section feels like a reformulation of the insights of other scholars who remain unacknowledged in the discussion, such as rubin and nirenberg. 117. it is difficult to account for the multiple disconnects between hughes’s framing and summative statements in both books and the actual subject matter dealt with in his chapters. hughes acknowledges that the first two chapters of muslim and jew rework previously published articles, and much of the material here al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 296 conclusion in sum, hughes’s recent offerings in the area of jewish-muslim exchanges and engagements raise numerous important issues, but specialists may find these works to be of limited value for advancing the field. as noted, hughes criticizes wasserstrom for interrogating the construct of “symbiosis” without going far enough in proposing a coherent alternative. the same critique may be leveled at hughes himself; he problematizes many aspects of the established scholarship—and rightly so—but falls short of moving the field forward substantially in terms of offering a coherent methodology, let alone in achieving anything like the paradigm shift at which he aims. it is certainly true that hughes has performed a significant service to the field simply by raising these issues and indexing the abiding and persistent problems that chronically haunt explorations of the intersections between judaism and islam. as he himself has noted, jewish studies, in particular, has long been insulated from other fields and so has often been quite slow to accommodate new perspectives not anchored in the traditional commitments of insiders. this has had an array of implications for the field, not least regarding approaches to the study of jewish-muslim relations.118 anyone familiar with the discipline, at least in north america, will recognize that however much the field has changed over the last decades, there is still considerable work to be done in broadening the scope of its scholarly purview. the impact of traditional commitments and orientations on the study of the jews of late antiquity, in particular, has long been noted, especially the double hegemony that the rabbinic tradition enjoys in many institutional and scholarly contexts: first, it is still frequently—and anachronistically—assumed to have been the de facto reality for the vast majority of jews in the mediterranean and middle east by the time of the emergence of islam (despite numerous critiques arguing against this position); and second, it is all too readily naturalized as the default object of study in conversations about judaism in antiquity after the greco-roman period, which is still often assumed to be largely synonymous with the judaism of the palestinian and babylonian academies. i remain skeptical regarding hughes’s near-total agnosticism about what we can or cannot know about the judaisms of late antiquity and the early islamic period. however, we can readily recognize the corrective value of such a posture in dislodging many of the still-regnant axioms and assumptions enshrined in various institutional contexts in the field of jewish studies. i do not think it unfair to say that inquiry into the intersections between islam and judaism, especially in the era before the full flowering of the judeo-arabic culture of the middle ages, remains marginal to mainstream jewish studies despite the important implications of such research.119 hughes positions himself as a scholar of religion first and seems condensed and repurposed (or simply taken over verbatim) from shared identities as well. that being the case, one wonders whether the incongruities and redactional seams are an unfortunate result of the author’s compositional process. 118. aaron w. hughes, “jewish studies is too jewish,” chronicle of higher education, march 24, 2014. for a recent reevaluation of hughes’s argument, see sarah imhoff, “jews, jewish studies and the study of islam,” in sheedy, identity, politics and the study of islam, 121–37. 119. as one means of indexing this marginality, one might peruse the conference schedules and archived 297 • michael e. pregill al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) foremost, but his main academic appointment is in jewish studies, and so his books address numerous problematic approaches and conceptions that remain conspicuous in the latter field: the persistent emphasis on rabbinic normativity; the perennial quest to discern the original roots of an essentialized judaism; the corresponding neglect of the complex and, yes, fluid nature of jewish identity at various points in late antiquity; and the consequent foreclosure of the possibility that the historical dialogue between jews and muslims exerted a significant impact on integral aspects of both. seen in this light, hughes’s attempt to revive wasserstrom’s project is laudable, renewing the call for a more vigorous investigation of this supposedly obscure period in jewish history and especially for more scholarly activity in this area on the model of the ample attention now paid to the jewish-christian “symbiosis” of the early centuries ce. especially given the progress in the field of jewish-muslim exchanges and encounters since the early 1990s, hughes’s theoretical intervention is timely, and succeeds in provoking and sustaining important questions even if his books fail to deliver in other respects, especially in providing a reliable and cogent point of entry to this area of research for students and nonspecialists. abstracts from the past two decades of the annual conference of the association for jewish studies, available at https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/2020-annual-conference/past-conferences. even a cursory search of the programs of past meetings demonstrates that only a tiny number of panels and presentations have addressed jewish-muslim engagements in any period, especially earlier phases. https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/2020-annual-conference/past-conferences al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) blurred boundaries and novel normativities • 298 bibliography ahmed, shahab. before orthodoxy: the satanic verses in early islam. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2017. ———. what is islam? the importance of being islamic. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2015. ali, kecia. the lives of muhammad. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2014. anidjar, gil. the jew, the arab: a history of the enemy. stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2003. anthony, sean w. the caliph and the heretic: ibn sabaʾ and the origins of shīʿism. leiden: brill, 2012. ———. “muḥammad, the keys to 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edinburgh university press, 2016. zellentin, holger m. the qurʾān’s legal culture: the didascalia apostolorum as a point of departure. tübingen: mohr siebeck, 2013. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 384-434 “the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named”: al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd in late antique accounts of the marwānids and the third fitna* leone pecorini goodall university of edinburgh (s1434872@ed.ac.uk) abstract this article is concerned with the representation of al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd’s involvement in the muhallabid revolt (102/720) and the third fitna (126–36/744–54) across arabic-islamic and christian sources. the contribution makes a case for the study of “minor figures” as a means to contend with the eulogizing and historiographical reimagining of the marwānid past by later ʿabbāsid compilers. it sheds light on the status of concubine-born sons of marwānid caliphs, who were unable to become caliph until precisely this period and the generational shift that occurred in the 120s/740s. al-ʿabbās appears in arabic-islamic sources as foreshadowing the impending fitna, warning of its consequences and attempting to dissuade his brother, yazīd b. al-walīd (d. 126/744), from revolting against the caliph al-walīd b. yazīd (d. 126/744). eventually “captured” by his brother yazīd b. alwalīd’s supporters, al-ʿabbās’ bayʿa (oath of allegiance) turns the tide in yazīd’s favor. in contrast, late antique christian sources in arabic, armenian, greek, and syriac see him as instrumental in the fall of al-walīd b. yazīd, wanting the caliphate for himself and betraying his cousin. the following analysis will demonstrate how christian sources employed figures internal to their own traditions to understand and explain caliphal history. the overlapping but competing historiographies of al-ʿabbās shed light on the source material and agendas of arabic-islamic and christian late antique sources. this study also helps to disentangle some of the conflicting elements of the fitna narrative, while underlining the polycentric nature of marwānid rule and how members of the imperial elite were legitimized and exerted authority. 1. introduction of the four fitnas of early islamic history, the third (126–36/744–54) is the most confusing, at times a contradictory and tumultuous object of study.1 perhaps because of this, it has * this research was made possible by the generous support of the sgsah ahrc doctoral training partnership. this paper was first delivered at the fourth annual edinburgh graduate conference in late antique, islamic, and byzantine studies. huge thanks to everyone who asked questions and shared their reflections. i am grateful to marie legendre, jaakko hämeen-anttila, yannis stouraitis, and tim greenwood, © 2022 leone pecorini goodall. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:s1434872%40ed.ac.uk?subject= 385 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) not attracted substantial scholarly interest, whereas scholars have discussed at length the background and the reasons for the success of the ʿabbāsid revolution—itself arguably part of the fitna—reaching the point where even in the early 1990’s humphreys noted the ʿabbāsid movement had “engendered a substantial scholarly literature.”2 just as many questions should be asked, however, of the events that preceded it, as the ʿabbāsid daʿwa was not the first or only revolt confronted by the marwānids in the turbulent 120s/740s.3 the present paper addresses these issues by looking at the role of al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd (d. 132/750), the eldest son of the third marwānid caliph, al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 86–96/705–15) and the events leading up to death of the eighth caliph al-walīd b. yazīd (d. 126/744) as preserved in arabic, armenian, greek, and syriac sources.4 one of the difficulties with studying the fitna is undoubtedly the number of different figures who appear in the narratives; to aid with this a genealogical tree is available in the appendix (appendix 1). focusing on a “minor” figure such as al-ʿabbās touches upon issues of periodization and evidences the generational developments of the late marwānid period.5 the decision to focus on al-ʿabbās is informed not only by his presence across a variety of sources but also because, as hämeen-anttila noted in his study of khālid b. ṣafwān (d. 135/752), “stories about minor characters are less prone to conscious manipulation. they have, obviously, also undergone changes during transmission but there is no strong hidden agenda behind these.”6 as we shall see, references to al-ʿabbās are confined to two major events, yazīd b. al-muhallab’s revolt in 102/720 and the third fitna. both these events are described as fitna and the edinburgh early islam group for their comments and suggestions. i am additionally indebted to kyle brunner (for transliteration) and andy hilkens for their generosity and assistance in approaching the syriac texts. i would also like to thank the peer reviewers and editors for their feedback and advice. 1. the third fitna is notoriously hard to date. the dating adopted here take as its extremities the rebellion against al-walīd b. yazīd in 126/744 (as per hawting) and the defeat of the ʿabbāsid pretendant ʿabd allāh b. ʿalī in 136/754, which, as argued by borrut, saw the consolidation of the ʿabbāsid dynasty. see gerald r. hawting, the first dynasty of islam (london: routledge, 2000), 90; antoine borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leiden: brill, 2010), 354–81. 2. r. stephen humphreys, islamic history: a framework for inquiry, rev. ed. (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1991), 104. 3. the work of steven judd is one exception to this; see steven judd, “the third fitna: orthodoxy, heresy and coercion in late umayyad history’ (phd diss., university of michigan, 1997); idem, “reinterpreting al-walīd b. yazīd,” journal of the american oriental society 128, no. 3 (2008): 439–58; idem, “medieval explanations for the fall of the umayyads,” in umayyad legacies: medieval memories from syria to spain, ed. antoine borrut and paul m. cobb, 89–104 (leiden: brill, 2010). 4. al-zubayrī, kitāb nasab al-quraysh, ed. e. levi-provencal (cairo: dār al-maʿārif li-l-ṭibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 1953), 165. ibn ʿasākir, tārīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. ʿumar al-ʿamrawī, 70 vols. (cairo: n.p., 1995), 36:438. 5. my characterization of al-ʿabbās as a “minor figure” is not a comment on his historical significance, but rather reflect the fact that accounts concerned with him are not widespread, but are confined to specific events. he does not have a significant presence in adab works, nor has he been focused on by secondary literature, and he is largely absent from the indices of major publications and historical overviews. the most recent encyclopaedia of islam entry on him goes some way to recognizing his significance. see k. blankinship, “al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. kate fleet et al. (leiden: brill online). 6. jaakko hämeen-anttila, portrait of an eighth-century gentleman: khālid ibn safwān in history and literature (leiden: brill, 2020), vii. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 386 in the arabic-islamic sources and are salient examples of the factionalism of the marwānid state as well as of competing historiographies.7 despite only featuring prominently in these two events, al-ʿabbās is depicted as the most senior figure of the late marwānid state and is associated with narratives of piety, foreshadowing the looming fitna. this study aims to disentangle some of the conflicting elements of the narrative as well as to underline the polycentric nature of marwānid rule and the ways that members of the imperial elite were legitimized and exerted authority. this cannot be done using exclusively arabic sources, which modern scholars have long recognized as having consolidated and synthesized conflicting memories of the past to generate an imperial and hegemonic narrative.8 it is necessary then to incorporate the sources of the wider late antique tradition, produced in regions within or peripheral to the marwānid caliphate, in this case armenian, greek, and syriac. this decision to adopt a comparative approach is greatly informed by the insightful and influential studies carried out by conrad, hoyland, borrut, conterno, and vacca.9 all of these scholars have contributed by evidencing that many traditions circulated between different confessional and linguistic groups, although, as stressed by hoyland and vacca, this does not presume direct written textual transmission. 10 specifically, the present paper builds on the work of borrut in choosing a figure who is present across a wide variety of late antique sources and studying the instances in which he appears across the canon.11 the aim of this paper is to use a moment of tribulation and tension, paired with a relatively minor figure who has not been subjected to extensive historiographical re-imagining, to illuminate the ʿabbāsid-era memory of marwānid collapse. it first investigates the depiction 7. for the muhallabid revolt as fitna, see ibn ʿatham al-kūfī, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. s. ʿabd al-wahhāb al-bukhārī, 8 vols. (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, 1975), 8:8; for a full discussion on competing historiographies in fourth-/tenth-century texts, see antoine borrut, “vanishing syria: periodization and power in early islam,” der islam: zeitschrift für geschichte und kultur des islamischen orients 91, no. 1 (2014): 37–68, at 51. i aim to publish a more comprehensive comparative discussion of the various representations of fitna in arabic sources in future. 8. chase f. robinson, islamic historiography (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003), 40–43, esp. 41; borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 61–108. 9. lawrence i. conrad, “the conquest of arwad: a source-critical study in the historiography of the early medieval near east,” in the byzantine and early islamic near east: i. problems in the literary source material, ed. averil cameron and lawrence i. conrad, 317–404 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1992); robert g. hoyland, seeing islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of christian, jewish, and zoroastrian writings on early islam (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1997); theophilus of edessa, theophilus of edessa’s chronicle and the circulation of historical knowledge in late antiquity and early islam, trans. robert g. hoyland (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2011); borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir; maria conterno, la “descrizione dei tempi” all’alba dell’espansione islamica: un’indagine sulla storiografia greca, siriaca e araba fra vii e viii secolo, la “descrizione dei tempi” all’alba dell’espansione islamica (berlin: de gruyter, 2014); alison vacca, “the fires of naxčawan: in search of intercultural transmission in arabic, armenian, greek, and syriac,” le muséon 129, no. 3–4 (2016): 323–62. 10. hoyland, seeing islam, 34; vacca, “the fires of naxčawan,” 353. 11. e.g., borrut’s chapter on the generation of the heroic figure maslama b. ʿabd al-malik (borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 229–82); this paper is also heavily influenced by conrad and vacca’s studies of a single event through the comparison of sources internal and peripheral to the arabic tradition; see conrad, “the conquest of arwād”; vacca, “the fires of naxčawan.” 387 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) of al-ʿabbās before the fitna, highlighting the circumstances faced by concubine-born sons of caliphs and how they participated actively within the polity despite seemingly being ineligible for the caliphate itself. this is followed by a brief discussion on the generational and genealogical changes that underpinned the third fitna: the emergence of a new generation of the marwānid elite—grandsons or great grandsons of ʿabd al-malik—and the centrality of concubine-born sons. finally, it turns to a comparative overview of the accounts of the fitna across our late antique sources, dealing with each narrative tradition separately to demonstrate how different communities and authors interpreted the fall of the marwānids in different contexts of production. while al-ʿabbās takes center stage in both the arabic-islamic and late antique traditions, he is seen as a pious and foreshadowing figure in the arabic-islamic tradition whilst in the late antique christian tradition he is presented as the architect of the dynasty’s demise, actively wanting the caliphate for himself and betraying his cousin al-walīd b. yazīd. 2. al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd before the fitna al-ʿabbās has perhaps not been the focus of extensive scholarship due to his perceived ineligibility for the caliphate: his mother was an unnamed concubine, or umm walad (lit. mother of child), making him hajīn (mixed).12 he first appears in islamic sources during the reign of his father al-walīd, accompanying his uncle maslama b. ʿabd al-malik (d. 121/738) on the raid of tyana in 88/707 and playing a central role in its conquest.13 maslama first appears only two years earlier, in 86/705, underlining al-ʿabbās’ longevity in the source material and his advanced age for being a grandson of ʿabd al-malik; he was al-walīd’s eldest son.14 al-ʿabbās was granted the governorship of ḥimṣ by his father, which he would 12. see the recent encyclopaedia of islam entry on al-ʿabbās: k. blankinship, “al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd.” the use of hajīn here does not entirely reflect the language of our annalistic and genealogical sources, which typically refer to sons in relation to their parents’ generation, i.e., commenting that their mother was an umm walad (mother of child) or jāriya. however, in other genres such as poetry, eschatology, dictionaries, and adab sources we see it employed frequently. see al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. ʿ aẓm maḥmūd firdaws, 13 vols. (damascus: dār al-yaqaẓa, 1997), 9:249; al-farāhīdī, kitāb al-ʿayn, ed. mahdī al-makhzūmī and ibrāhīm al-samārāʾī, 8 vols. (beirut: dār wa-maktabat al-hilāl, n.d.), 3:392; ibn ʿabd rabbih, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, ed. muḥammad saʿīd al-ʿaryān, 8 vols. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1983), 7:140; nuʿaym b. ḥammād, kitāb al-fitan, ed. sumayr b. amīn al-zuhayrī, 2 vols. (cairo: maktabat al-tawḥīd, 1991), 2:449; nuʿaym b. ḥammād, the book of tribulations: the syrian muslim apocalyptic tradition, trans. david cook (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2017), 265. for a discussion on how hajīns may have been viewed as non-arab in the pre-islamic period see, rachel schine, “race and blackness in premodern arabic literature,” oxford research encyclopedia of literature, 2021, https:// oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1298. 13. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, ed. suhayl zakkār, 2 vols. (damascus: wizārat al-thaqāfa wa-l-siyāḥa wa-l-irshād al-qawmī, 1967), 1:399; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history on the umayyad dynasty (660–750), trans. carl wurtzel (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2015), 172–73; al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh al-yaʿqūbī, ed. m. t. houtsma, 2 vols. (leiden: brill, 1883), 2:350; idem, the works of ibn wāḍiḥ al-yaʻqūbı̄: an english translation, trans. c. f. robinson et al., 3 vols. (leiden: brill, 2018), 3:1002; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. m. j. de goeje, 15 vols. (leiden: brill, 1879–1901), 2:1194; idem, the history of al-ṭabarī, vol. 23, the zenith of the marwānid house, trans. martin hinds (albany: state university of new york press, 1990), 142; anon., fragmenta historicorum arabicorum, ed. m. j. de goeje, 2 vols. (leiden: brill, 1869–71), 1:3. 14. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 1:359; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 159; al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:350; https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1298 https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1298 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 388 hold until 96/715.15 he regularly led the summer raid (ṣāʾifa) during his father’s reign and may have even led the ḥajj in 86/705 or 94/713.16 mcmillan interprets al-walīd’s ḥajj policy, which saw many of his sons lead the pilgrimage (including ʿabd al-ʿazīz, al-ʿabbās, bishr, ʿumar, and ʿuthmān), as mirroring “his intention of keeping leadership of the community within that same family.”17 al-ʿabbās was not the only hajīn to be granted the role; both bishr and ʿumar were born to umm walads, indicating that despite there not being a hajīn caliph until the third fitna, these individuals were not exempt from accumulating religious or military capital in the early eighth century.18 al-ʿabbās is best remembered for his military legacy; al-masʿūdī (d. 346/956) says that owing to his valorous nature (shihāma) he was known as fāris banī marwān (horseman of the marwānids).19 al-ʿabbās is recorded as having raided the thughūr a total of nine separate times, most often in the company of his uncle maslama. 20 six of these raids took place during the caliphate of his father and three under his uncle yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik (d. 101–5/720–24).21 al-ʿabbās appears to have fallen out of favor in the intervening reigns of his uncle sulaymān b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 96–99/715–17) and cousin ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz (r. 99–101/717–20). sulaymān removed him from his governorship in ḥimṣ and seemingly barred him from military positions, but yazīd restored him in 102/720, although, as will be discussed, he also fell out of favor during the rule of his uncle hishām.22 the following section will explore al-ʿabbās’ absence during these five years to demonstrate the factionalism of the banū marwān and how the sons of previous caliphs were not guaranteed to maintain their positions of authority under a new ruler. 2.1 al-ʿabbās between the caliphate of al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik and yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik (96–101/715–20) evidence for al-ʿabbās’ loss of favor under sulaymān can be seen in part of a larger speech given by the governor turned rebel, yazīd b. al-muhallab (d. 102/720), in which he explicitly idem, the works, 3:1002. 15. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 1:417; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 186. 16. m. e. mcmillan, the meaning of mecca: the politics of pilgrimage in early islam (london: saqi books publishers, 2011), 95–96. 17. ibid., 106. 18. al-zubayrī, kitāb nasab al-quraysh, 165. notably al-masʿūdī highlights al-ʿabbās, bishr, ʿ umar, and yazīd as the only sons of al-walīd deserving of praise; see al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. and trans. barbier de meynard and a. pavet de courteille, 9 vols. (paris: société asiatique, 1861–77), 5:361. 19. al-masʿūdī, murūj, 5:361. 20. i opt to use the arabic thughūr (sing. thaghr) rather than “frontier,” reflecting the language of the sources. for more on the nomenclature, see asa eger, the islamic-byzantine frontier: interaction and exchange among muslim and christian communities (london: i. b. tauris, 2015), esp. 8. 21. under al-walīd in 88/707, 90/709, 93/712, 94/713, 95/714, 96/715; and under yazīd in 102/721, 103/722, 104/722–23. 22. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 1:418; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 186. khalīfa specifically states under the subheading of [governors] of the syrian districts (al-shāmāt) that al-ʿabbās governed ḥimṣ until al-walīd died (ḥattā mawt al-walīd), indicating he was removed after this. 389 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) states that sulaymān wanted to remove al-ʿabbās from the banū marwān but was talked out of it by yazīd b. al-muhallab.23 that sulaymān would be able to remove al-ʿabbās from the banū marwān is indicative of the “liminal” status of hajīns under the umayyads. al-ʿabbās’ loss of favor under his uncle sulaymān is clear from his absence from the second siege of constantinople (97–99/715–17) led by maslama, which is surprising given how often the two are paired together in the source material. borrut has pointed out that maslama owes much of his “heroic” reputation to the siege.24 if maslama gained such prominence from a failed conquest, it is likely that al-ʿabbās would have too, as we shall see later; his other activities on the thughūr led to a sustained memory of him in syriac chronicles. so, al-ʿabbās does not seem to have participated in the failed siege. one syriac source does place him at the siege, but it appears to have muddled it with the already mentioned conquest of tyana. the only reference to al-ʿabbās and the siege is found in the eighth-century chronicle of zuqnīn, well known for its preservation of a unique narrative of the event. however, al-ʿabbās only appears after the marwānid defeat, routing a roman army who had attempted to ambush the retreating, famished, and weakened muslim forces.25 the narrative ends with the conquest of tyana and the sacking and raiding of the surrounding area. the author here appears to have mixed up the retreat of 99/716–17 with the 88/707 raid.26 indeed, the narrative as preserved in zuqnīn fits much better with the events of tyana found in al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923) and the chronographia of theophanes (d. 817). both attest that the force led by maslama and al-ʿabbās wintered nearby, with theophanes adding that the muslims were considering turning back due to famine.27 the famine experienced by the muslim forces besieging constantinople is well documented, and the retention of this 23. francesco gabrieli, “la rivolta dei muhallabiti nel ʿirāq e il nuovo balāḏurī,” rendiconti della classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 14, no. 6 (1938): 199–236, at 226. related on the authority of abū mikhnaf (d. 157/773–74), al-balādhurī states: “wa-ʿāqir al-nāqat nasṭūs b. nasṭūs—yaʿnī al-ʿabbās—alladhī kāna sulaymān b. ʿabd al-malik ʿazama ʿalā nāfihi fa-kalimatahu fīhi ḥattā aqarahu ʿalā nasabihi (the one who hamstrung the she-camel, nasṭūs b. nasṭūs—i.e., al-ʿabbās—who sulaymān b. ʿ abd al-malik was determined to banish [nafy], but i [yazīd] spoke to him concerning him [al-ʿabbās] until he [sulaymān] established his genealogy)” (al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. suhayl zakkar, 13 vols. [damascus: dār al-fikr, 1997], 8:326). identifying al-ʿabbās as the wounder of the she-camel (ʿāqir al-nāqa) is a reference to the myth of the thamūd, who, having been tasked by the prophet ṣāliḥ to allow the she-camel of god (nāqat allāh) to drink from their water on alternate days, were struck down after having hamstrung the camel (fa-ʿaqarū-l-nāqata, q 7:77). the comparison here is that, like the thamūd who were destroyed by god for having harmed his she-camel, al-ʿabbās shall suffer for having opposed yazīd’s revolt. on the thamūdic myth, see jaroslav stetkevych, muhammad and the golden bough (bloomington: indiana university press, 1996). 24. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 231: “maslama doit essentiellement sa renommée à son expédition dirigée contre la capitale byzantine.” for a full discussion, see the chapter on “la fabrique des héros omeyyades: maslama b. ʿabd al-malik, le héros combattant,” 229–82. 25. anon., chronicle of zuqnīn: part iii and iv, a.d. 488–775, trans. a. harrak (toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, 1999), 152. 26. palmer alludes to this transposal but is not explicit; see andrew palmer, the seventh century in the west syrian chronicles (liverpool: liverpool university press, 1993), 64. 27. theophanes the confessor, theophanis chronographia, ed. carl de boor (lipsiae: b.g. teubnneri, 1883), 377; idem, the chronicle of theophanes confessor: byzantine and near eastern history a.d. 284–813, trans. cyril a. mango and roger scott (oxford: clarendon press, 1997), 525–26. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 390 element in both theophanes and zuqnīn may account for the latter’s transposal to the siege narrative. furthermore, al-ṭabarī and zuqnīn follow a similar sequence of events, with the conquest being preceded by a heavy loss for the muslim forces, followed by al-ʿabbās taking matters into his own hands.28 tyana is then conquered and the muslim army pillages the surrounding environs. theophanes states, “they [the people of tyana] accepted a promise of immunity and came out to the arabs, leaving the city deserted until this very day.”29 tyana was conquered again a century later by hārūn al-rashīd (d. 193/809) in 190/806, meaning that theophanes’ comment about its depopulation derived from the source(s) he relied on rather than reflecting the realities of the early ninth century.30 it is doubtful that it was raided again a decade later by the same two individuals since zuqnīn does not preserve any earlier narrative regarding tyana; the presence of al-ʿabbās in zuqnīn should then be chalked up to a transposal rather than his participation in the siege. possible confusion could even be attributed to an account in the breviarium of patriarch nikephoros (d. 828) who claims that after tyana a contingent of thirty troops went all the way to chrysopolis (across from constantinople) to burn the ferries on the bosporus.31 al-ʿabbās’ relevance amongst non-muslim communities living around the thughūr is made further evident by the chronicle of zuqnīn’s characterization of him as “one among the famous of the caliphate.”32 the insertion of al-ʿabbās into the siege narrative was not an attempt to grant him status through the event; rather, it is indicative of his strong association with the the thughūr and his uncle maslama. it is unlikely, then, that al-ʿabbās was involved in the siege of constantinople, and this would support a five-year hiatus from military activity and the loss of his governorship under sulaymān b. ʿabd al-malik. this was probably the result of the newly ascended caliph’s attempts to demote the sons of his predecessor al-walīd, who had attempted to replace him with al-ʿabbās’ brother, ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-walīd (d. 110/728–29).33 ʿumar b. 28. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1191–92; idem, the history, 23:140–1; anon., chronicle of zuqnīn, 152. in al-ṭabarī he invokes his troops by asking “where are the people of the qurʾan who desire paradise?”(ʿayn ahl al-qurʾān alladhīna yurīdūna al-janna). in zuqnīn he is said to have personally asked maslama for a force to fend off the byzantines. 29. theophanes, chronographia, 377; idem, the chronicle, 525–26; anon., chronicle of zuqnīn, 152; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1191–92; idem, the history, 23:140–41. 30. for theophanes’ sources on the eighth century, see muriel debié, “theophanes’ ‘oriental source’: what can we learn from syriac historiography?,” in studies in theophanes, ed. marek jankowiak and federico montinaro, 53–71 (paris: association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2015); on the conquest of tyana as found in theophanes, see conterno, la descrizione dei tempi, 92–94; on hārūn’s conquest of tyana, see al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 3:710; idem, the history of al-ṭabarī, vol. 30, the ʿabbasid caliphate in equilibrium, trans. c. e. bosworth (albany: state university of new york press, 1989), 263. 31. nikephoros, patriarch of constantinople, short history, trans. cyril a. mango (washington, dc: dumbarton oaks, research library and collection, 1990), 106–7. notably, nikephoros does not claim al-ʿabbās was present but rather that it was maslama and solymas (σολυμᾶς), which is probably sulaymān. however, no sulaymān is found raiding until sulaymān b. hishām in 117/736. it could be a reference to sulaymān b. ʿabd al-malik, but i have not found any record of him on the thughūr. 32. anon., chronicle of zuqnīn, 152. 33. on al-walīd’s attempts to subvert the succession order, see al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1274; on poetry produced 391 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) ʿabd al-ʿazīz, who succeeded sulaymān, instituted a change in military policy and ceased aggressive raiding, meaning that even if al-ʿabbās were to have regained his position, it is not visible in the source material.34 his fortunes changed upon the accession of his other uncle, yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik, under whose rule he led raiding expeditions three times over a four-year reign. this reversal is most visible in yazīd’s decision to task al-ʿabbās and maslama with suppressing the revolt of yazīd b. al-muhallab in 102/720, but would be shortlived as al-ʿabbās reportedly lost favor again under his uncle hishām b. ʿabd al-malik.35 the following section will investigate the representation of al-ʿabbās in the muhallabid revolt, shedding light on how non-arab heritage was often used to deride hajīns as well as al-ʿabbās’ matrilineal line. 2.2 the rebel and the hajīns yazīd b. al-muhallab, once governor of khurāsān under ʿabd al-malik and later also of iraq under sulaymān, had been imprisoned during the reign of ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz, escaping to basra just before ʿumar died; upon the accession of yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik he promptly refused to give him the bayʿa (oath of allegiance) and entered into open rebellion.36 yazīd b. al-muhallab’s revolt throughout the narratives takes on a distinctly anti-syrian tone and perhaps even serves as a foreshadowing for the ʿabbāsid “revolution.”37 yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik dispatched his brother and nephew to deal with the revolt. upon discovering the impending arrival of the two hajīns al-ʿabbās and maslama to iraq, yazīd b. al-muhallab exclaimed—according to al-jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868), on the authority of khālid b. ṣafwān (d. 135/752)—during his khutba delivered in wāsiṭ: “maybe the rabble says: ‘maslama has come, al-ʿabbās has come, and the syrians (ahl al-shām) have come,’ but the people of syria are nothing more than nine swords, seven of which are with me, and two of which are against me. as for maslama he is a yellow locust (jarāda ṣafrāʾ) whereas al-ʿabbās is nasṭūs b. nasṭūs.”38 a similar version is preserved in the futūḥ of ibn ʿatham, who adds that maslama was qusṭanṭīn b. qusṭanṭīn.39 this notice is unique to the futūḥ, with all other sources to support his claim, see andrew marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy: accession and succession in the first muslim empire (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009), 114–15. 34. khalid yahya blankinship, the end of the jihād state: the reign of hishām ibn ʿabd al-malik and the collapse of the umayyads (albany: state university of new york press, 1994), 31–33. 35. al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh 2:372–73. 36. al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh 2:370. for what is still the best discussion of the revolt, see gabrieli, “la rivolta dei muhallabiti.” 37. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 261. 38. innī qad asmāʿu qawl al-raʿāʿ: wa-qad jāʾa maslama, wa-qad jāʾa al-ʿabbās, wa-qad jāʾa ahl al-shām, wa-mā ahl al-shām illā tisʿat asyāf, sabʿa minhā maʿī wa-ithnān minhā ʿalayī, wa-ammā maslama fa-jarāda ṣafrāʾ, wa-ammā al-ʿabbās fa-nasṭūs b. nasṭūs (al-jāḥiẓ, al-bayān wa-l-tabyīn, ed. ʿabd al-salām muḥammad hārūn, 3 vols [beirut: dār al-jīl], 1:292–93). the nine swords here most probably refer to generals or military contingents; the assertion that seven of the syrian swords are with him are indicative of the widespread support enjoyed by yazīd b. al-muhallab, whilst the two against him refer to the two named generals opposing him, i.e., maslama and al-ʿabbās. 39. ibn ʿatham al-kūfī, kitāb al-futūh, ed. ʿalī shīrī, 8 vols. (beirut: dār al-aḍwāʾ, 1991), 7:225. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 392 that preserve the insults levied by the rebel against the two hajīns referring to maslama solely as “the yellow locust” and al-ʿabbās as nasṭūs b. nasṭūs.40 borrut has noted that the “yellowness” ascribed to maslama is a reference to the byzantines, who are often called banū al-aṣfar in both ḥadīth and historical narratives, and thus stresses maslama’s non-arab descent.41 nasṭūs or nasṭās is the arabic rendition of the greek anastasios, which accounts for the varied spellings of the lampoon.42 both maslama and al-ʿabbās were concubine-born, so we should view yazīd’s comments as a means by which to undermine their “arabness” as well as to present the syrians as non-muslim. al-balādhurī’s account of the event underlines this, as he describes the marwānid force as composed of barbarians (barābira), chaldeans (jarāmqa), mardaites (jarājima), nabateans (anbāṭ), sons of peasants (abnāʾ fallāḥīn), mixed riff-raff (awbāsh akhlāṭ) and copts (aqbāṭ).43 urban has shown that hajīns in the early islamic period proved themselves to the umma either through military service (using maslama as an example) or through scholarship.44 the presence of various hajīns on the frontier speaks to this phenomenon, whether it was because, as she posits, “they had one foot in the land of the conquerors, and one foot in the land of the conquered,” or more simply that arab-born sons had more connections at birth to draw upon, and as such were better equipped to use tribal connections to attain the caliphate.45 in the case of marwān b. muḥammad, the support generated through military leadership would eventually be sufficient to allow him to lay claim to the caliphate. al-ʿabbās’ non-arab maternal heritage is stressed in the descriptions in al-ṭabarī’s tārīkh and al-balādhurī’s ansāb al-ashrāf of the pivotal moment when al-ʿabbās is “forced” to defect from al-walīd b. yazīd, in which he is referred to as ibn qusṭanṭīn (a son of constantine).46 ibn ʿasākir reports on the authority of abū bakr b. ʿayyāsh (d. 193/809) that his mother was christian.47 unfortunately, we do not know her name or anything else about her; like many women in premodern society, and particularly unfree women, her existence is only preserved due to her connection with a male member of the ruling elite. on this 40. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 8:318; anon., kitāb al-ʿuyūn, 70; al-masʿūdī, murūj 5:454; ibn ʿabd rabbih, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, ed. muḥammad saʿīd al-ʿaryān, 8 vols. (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1983), 4:214. the kitāb al-ʿuyūn reads basṭūs b. basṭūs, which should be corrected to read nasṭūs b. nasṭūs, as al-balādhurī, al-jāḥiẓ, al-masʿūdī, and ibn ʿabd rabbih preserve nasṭūs/nasṭās. 41. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 261. 42. for instance, al-masʿūdī renders the regnal title of emperor anastasios ii (r. 713–15) as nasṭās b. fīlibiqūs. this was not, in fact, the son of the preceding emperor phillipikos, but his secretary. the assumption that byzantine emperors achieved the post dynastically is noteworthy in and of itself but is deserving of separate treatment. see al-masʿūdī, kitab al-tanbīh wa-l-ishrāf, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1894), 141; idem, le livre de l’avertissement et de la révision, trans. b. carra de vaux (paris : imprimiere nationale, 1896), 225. 43. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 8:318. 44. elizabeth urban, conquered populations in early islam: non-arabs, slaves, and the sons of slave mothers (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020), 122. 45. urban, conquered populations in early islam, 131. other hajīn sons of caliphs to feature on the thughūr are: muḥammad b. marwān, sulaymān b. hishām, and marwān b. muḥammad b. marwān. 46. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1798; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:177. 47. ibn ʿasākir, tārikh madīnat dimashq, 36:440. 393 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) occasion, the appellation may in fact reflect a kernel of historical truth: instead of nasṭūs here we have qusṭanṭīn, which underlines once again al-ʿabbās’ non-arab heritage. the use of different catch-all and generic greek names is significant in that across the sources there was a stress on the idea of al-ʿabbās’ non-arab maternal line. these references to al-ʿabbās’ genealogy occur exclusively in narratives of fitna and internal caliphal violence. as pointed out by borrut, for maslama vis-à-vis the muhallabid revolt, these narratives are influenced by two simultaneously competing historiographical strands: one that exalts maslama, and the other yazīd b. al-muhallab.48 furthermore, it should be added that khālid b. ṣafwān, who narrates the above-mentioned story, was in all probability an eyewitness to events and was, at the very least, “friendly” with yazīd b. al-muhallab.49 therefore, this narrative is told from a pro-muhallabid perspective, lending credence to borrut’s conclusions. al-ʿabbās is afforded a less central role in these narratives and presented as a sidekick and a source of derision, contrasting with the more “heroic” maslama with whom he appears. the literary pairing of the two hajīns can be seen in another khabar (notice, report) narrated by khālid b. ṣafwān and relating to events said to have occurred between khālid and al-ʿabbās at hishām b. ʿabd al-malik’s (r. 105–25/724–43) court at ruṣāfa. the first point of note is that the account states that the people flooded upon al-ʿabbās when he arrived at the caliphal capital, indicating the esteem in which he was held. he is also said to have been fasting, inserting a narrative of piety, as is common in depictions of al-ʿabbās.50 he then prompted khālid to share the story of aḥnaf b. qays (d. 72/691)—the conqueror of khurāsān—and how he allegedly won the day at marw al-rūdh by disguising himself and walking unnoticed amongst his own camp, in turn obtaining the inspiration on how to defeat the hephthalite armies.51 so, al-ʿabbās is again presented as a military figure and as a visitor to ruṣāfa, despite not having led any expeditions under hishām, nor holding any governorate. khālid’s narrative, in and of itself, says little about al-ʿabbās at the time of hishām; however hämeen-anttila highlights it as an example of what he calls “the upgrading of interlocutors,” i.e., the replacement of a lesser-known figure in an anecdote by a more 48. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 262. 49. the relationship between the two is touched upon in hämeen-anttila, portrait of an eighth-century gentleman, 24, 75. there is even an anecdote involving maslama and khālid after the death of yazīd, where the former enquires about the pietist al-ḥasan al-baṣrī (d. 110/728), with maslama expressing shock at how a community led by such a figure could follow yazīd b. al-muhallab (ibid., 156–58.). 50. see the discussion, translation, and full references of the khabar in hämeen-anttila, portrait of an eighth-century gentleman, 158–60. this khabar is preserved in ibn nubāta (d. 768/1366), al-jarīrī (d. 390/1000), and ibn ʿasākir (d. 571/1176). this is not the only time al-ʿabbās is presented as pious as we shall see in the following discussion of the killing of al-walīd. in al-ʿawtabī’s (d. early sixth/twelfth century) kitāb al-ansāb, a genealogical history of the tribe of ʿazd with particular focus on the muhallabids, upon returning to yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik with the captured muhallabids, al-ʿabbās is said to have recited from sūrat nūḥ (q 71:26–27) implying that in this case the kāfirs are the muhallabids. see martin hinds, an early islamic family from oman: al-ʿawtabī’s account of the muhallabids (manchester: university of manchester, 1991), 75. 51. for a discussion of a similar narrative concerning aḥnaf as found in al-ṭabarī, see robert haug, the eastern frontier: limits of empire in late antique and early medieval central asia (london: i. b. tauris, 2018), 84–86. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 394 important one.52 in this case, other variations of the narrative identify maslama as the interlocutor rather than his less famous nephew. this “upgrading” continues until allegedly it is hishām himself who prompts khālid to talk about aḥnaf.53 the replacement of al-ʿabbās with maslama reflects their roles in historiography, where we often find al-ʿabbās as subordinate to his uncle. there is some indication that al-ʿabbās opposed hishām’s attempts to remove al-walīd b. yazīd from the succession, but this is only preserved in ibn ʿasākir.54 a further khabar, narrated by al-balādhurī on the authority of al-madāʾinī (d. 225/843), may reveal why al-ʿabbās lost favor under hishām.55 in the aftermath of the muhallabid revolt, al-ʿabbās is said to have gone to his uncle yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik to convince him to nominate his half-brother ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-walīd as his successor over hishām.56 yazīd initially agreed but then was convinced by maslama, who asked him: “are the sons of ʿabd al-malik dearer to you or the sons of al-walīd?”57 the caliph listened to maslama, and nominated their brother hishām as his immediate successor, to be succeeded by his own son al-walīd b. yazīd.58 this narrative indicates that some marwānid hajīns had sufficient authority to attempt to influence succession. al-ʿabbās, additionally, continues to mirror his uncle in these narratives; they are both hajīn military commanders and amongst the most senior members of the banū marwān, a position they used to shape succession politics. more importantly, this dialogue highlights a pivotal concern for the sons of ʿabd al-malik and stresses a generational component to succession. if the caliphate were to pass to a nephew, it is probable that older generations, and their progeny, would lose their status and individual spheres of influence. it is well documented that members of the banū marwān received sizable stipends and land grants, and privileged positions such as governorships probably augmented this.59 the following section will place al-ʿabbās as having operated primarily around ḥimṣ and the thughūr, to demonstrate the long-lasting effects of gubernatorial appointment and the continued elite status of members of the banū marwān. 52. hämeen-anttila, portrait of an eighth-century gentleman, 106–8. 53. ibid., 108, 160. one variation of the report even sees muʿāwiya b. hishām prompt khālid. 54. this is introduced with: “i read in the writing (khaṭṭ) of abū al-ḥasan rashaʾ b. naẓīf and he was informed by abū al-qāsim b. ʿalī b. ibrāhīm and abū waḥsh subayʿa b. al-muslim […] haythām b. ʿadī (d. ca. 208/822) narrated to him from ʿāmir b. muslim al-haḍramī.” the letter is written in verse. see ibn ʿasākir, tārikh madīnat dimashq, 26:446–47. 55. as will be discussed in part 4, al-balādhurī seems to be accessing al-madāʾinī directly. 56. ʿabd al-ʿazīz was the son of al-walīd and his cousin umm banīn bt. ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. marwān, and thus his grandfathers were ʿabd al-malik and ʿabd al-ʿazīz. al-walīd had tried to replace sulaymān as heir with his son, but was unsuccessful: upon sulaymān’s death ʿabd al-ʿazīz tried to seize the caliphate but renounced his claim when he discovered that his uncle ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz had been chosen. for more on this, see s. judd, “ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-walīd,” in encylopaedia of islam, 3rd ed., ed. kate fleet et al. (leiden: brill online); on umm banīn, see al-zubayrī, kitāb nasab al-quraysh, 165. 57. yā amīr al-muʾminīn, awlād ʿ abd al-malik aḥabb ilāyka am awlād al-walīd?; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 8:369–70. 58. ibid., 370. 59. see for instance the granting of egypt as ṭuʿma to ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. marwān by his brother ʿabd al-malik in al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:335; idem, the works, 3:985. 395 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 2.3 locating al-ʿabbās on the thughūr khālid b. ṣafwān’s placement of al-ʿabbās at ruṣāfa in the previous anecdote is noteworthy, as it fills in some of the gaps in al-ʿabbās’ career between yazīd and the fitna. al-yaʿqūbī reports that he led the prayers over hishām in 125/743 after he died in his capital of ruṣāfa.60 al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī state that al-ʿabbās was sent to the city by hishām’s successor, his cousin al-walīd b. yazīd, to retrieve what riches were left there and imprison hishām’s sons. 61 these notices make it probable that al-ʿabbās was still operating out of ḥimṣ despite being replaced as governor nearly thirty years earlier.62 if he were in ḥimṣ, as i suggest, he would have been well positioned to go to hishām’s capital, as travel between the two took less than a week. tracing al-ʿabbās across the forty years he is present in the source material we can determine a distinct geographical remit in which he operated; bounded by the orontes in the west and the euphrates to the east, al-ʿabbās appears pre-eminent in the central thughūr.63 the maintenance of the central thughūr may have been his responsibility at one point as well. al-balādhurī claims he fortified and built a congregational mosque (masjid jāmiʿ) in marʿash at some point between 75/695 and 127/745.64 al-ʿabbās is also reported by al-balādhurī to have moved people from qinnasrīn to marʿash, indicating he had authority over his uncle maslama’s previous governorship.65 following al-ʿabbās regaining favor under his uncle yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik, his actions in marʿash should be dated to the aftermath of the muhallabid revolt as maslama saw his remit expand to encompass iraq (from which he was quickly removed) and then to governor of the north under hishām, leaving al-ʿabbās to fill this void.66 eger defines marʿash as “the divide between the western 60. al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:394. for hishām’s death, see also khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 1:533; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 245; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1729; idem, the history of al-ṭabarī, vol. 26, the waning of the umayyad caliphate, trans. carole hillenbrand (albany: state university of new york press, 1989), 71, where he is reported to have been prayed over by al-walīd b. yazīd and his son maslama respectively. 61. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1751; idem, the history, 26, 100; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:143. 62. ibn ʿasākir, for instance, explicitly states that he continued to live in ḥimṣ. see ibn ʿasākir, tārikh madīnat dimashq, 36:438. 63. on the characterization of the area largely correspondent to the aleppan plateau, see eger, the islamicbyzantine frontier, 34–68. 64. for the identification of the site, see ibid., 66; these dates come from al-balādhurī’s placement of the notice between a raid in 75/695 by muḥammad b. marwān and its being rebuilt by marwān b. muḥammad after subduing the emesenes (after 127/745). see al-balādhurī, futūḥ al-buldān, 2nd ed. (leiden: brill, 1968), 189; al-balādhurī, origins of the islamic state, trans. p. hitti and f. murgotten (new york: columbia university press, 1924), 294. 65. al-balādhurī, futūḥ, 189; idem, origins, 294. how this information corresponds to robinson’s assessment that qinnasrīn had been detached from the jund of ḥimṣ (itself strongly based on al-balādhurī) is not entirely clear. however, it does seem as if al-ʿabbās had significant authority over the central thughūr. see c. robinson, empire and elites after the muslim conquest (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2000), 39. 66. for a very good discussion on maslama’s actions in the north, see alison vacca, “the umayyad north (or: how umayyad was the umayyad caliphate?),” in the umayyad world, ed. andrew marsham, 219–39 (abingdon: routledge, 2021), 226–29. for his removal as governor of iraq, see khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 1:473; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 206. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 396 thughūr al-shāmiyya and eastern thughūr al-jazariyya.”67 the association of al-ʿabbās with marʿash in the 100s/720s consolidates the image of him as an important figure on the thughūr, so that despite him seemingly not having an official role in the caliphate of his uncle, he seems to have remained active in marwānid political life. these links to the central thughūr become even more evident when one considers the construction of the city of ʿanjar in modern day lebanon.68 the site is located approximately fifty kilometers northwest of damascus in the biqāʿ valley. the account of its foundation dates to the reign of al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik and is preserved both in the anonymous syriac chronicle of 846 and the chronographia of theophanes the confessor. the former attributes it to al-walīd, whereas the latter states that in 709–10 al-ʿabbās raided the location, took many captives, returned home, and began to build garis in the region of heliopoulis (baʿalbek).69 mango identified this toponym as ʿanjar or ʿayn al-jarr. the construction of the city is further attested in p. lond. iv 1434, a greek papyrus dated to 96–97/714–16, which enquires about a worker from ʿayn al-jarr (αειναλγερ) who had returned to egypt.70 this papyrus corroborates that construction began during the reign of al-walīd with the assistance of egyptian workmen; the city was home to both a mosque and a dār al-imāra alongside minor palaces and a ḥammām.71 the coincidental dating of the building and al-ʿabbās’ successful raids and taking of captives led chehab to speculate on whether or not these captives were used as labor in the city’s construction.72 if so, the city would have been constructed by a multilingual and multiethnic community from egypt, anatolia, and syria. epigraphic evidence from the quarries at kamid, seventeen kilometers southwest of the city, indicates that a multilingual community was, in fact, present in 96/714–15. five syriac inscriptions refer to the year 96 of the hijri calendar, and there is also one inscription in pahlavi and one in greek.73 three of the dated inscriptions announce the beginning of a trench-cut, indicating that the masonry used for the construction of ʿanjar may have been from the nearby quarry. chehab has demonstrated that some of the dressed 67. eger, the islamic-byzantine frontier, 66. 68. the city exists to this day and in the 1930s was resettled by armenian refugees; archaeological work is ongoing. 69. e. w. brooks, “a syriac chronicle of the year 846,” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 51, no. 4 (1897): 569–88, at 581; theophanes, chronographia, 377; idem, the chronicle, 526. 70. h. i. bell, “translations of the greek aphrodito papyri in the british museum. iv,” der islam: zeitschrift für geschichte und kultur des islamischen orients 4 (1913): 87–96, at 87. 71. aila santi, “ʿanjar in the shadow of the church? new insights on an umayyad urban experiment in the biqāʿ valley,” levant 50, no. 2 (2018): 267–80, at 269. the presence of a dār al-imāra and a congregational mosque validates its qualification as a madīna; on this see, idem, “the mosque‒dār al-imāra complex at ʿanjar: preliminary notes from a multi-layered exploration of ceremonial spaces in the marwānid period,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 235–66. 72. hafez k. chehab, “on the identification of ʿanjar (ʿayn al-jarr) as an umayyad foundation,” muqarnas 10 (1993): 42–48, at 44. 73. paul mouterde, “inscriptions en syriaque dialectal à kāmed (beqʿa),” mélanges de l’université saint joseph 22 (1939): 73–106. they are numbered 5, 10, 20, 21 and 28. 397 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) stones seem to derive from the quarry; however, more work needs to be done in this regard before the two sites can be concretely linked.74 situated less than two days from damascus, on the other side of the anti-lebanon mountains, and on the main route between the umayyad capital and ḥimṣ (al-ʿabbās’ old governorate), ʿanjar was well positioned to serve as an administrative center or gathering place. al-walīd, much like his father ʿabd al-malik, was known for his “itinerant kingship,” according to which the ruler travels around his dominion to maintain loyalty and publicly display authority.75 borrut has convincingly argued that this was not only undertaken by caliphs but also by “prince-soldiers,” indicating that perhaps ʿanjar was constructed or used by al-ʿabbās to generate his own sphere of influence.76 it bears noting that the arabic tradition does not contain any mention of ʿanjar until the third fitna, when it was the site of the decisive battle between marwān b. muḥammad and sulaymān b. hishām.77 summarizing, al-ʿabbās was an active military figure, tasked from a young age and early in his father’s reign with a role on the thughūr and granted the influential governorship of ḥimṣ. however, despite his prominence as eldest son he was never factored into the succession plan, probably due to his concubine-born status. by the time of the fitna he was amongst the eldest members of the marwānid family (or the eldest son of the eldest son, i.e. al-walīd), and al-ṭabarī even cites a notice that says that al-ʿabbās was “the head (sayyid) of the banū marwān” and that his son al-ḥārith was old enough to be given the governorship of iraq by yazīd b. al-walīd.78 as we have seen al-ʿabbās held considerable political and military clout, comparable to that of his uncle maslama with whom he was often paired. studying the two in conjunction reveals important aspects of the representations of hajīns; while concubine-born sons could prove themselves through external military actions, narratives that take place within the marwānid polity conflict with other “historiographical filters” and use their matrilineal line as a source of derision.79 furthermore, al-ʿabbās’ removal from some anecdotes indicates that, despite his being an influential figure, later ʿabbāsid compilers “upgraded” their narratives by inserting more “heroic” and recognizable figures such as maslama or hishām. the high esteem in which maslama was held by the ʿabbāsids, epitomized by the fact his family were allowed to maintain their positions in and around ḥiṣn maslama in the balikh valley of al-jazīra, means that he was quite simply not an easy figure to forget.80 al-ʿabbās, on the other hand, despite playing a bigger role than is 74. chehab, “on the identification of ʿanjar,” 45. 75. for the most recent contribution on itinerant kingship in early islam, see antoine borrut, “pouvoir mobile et construction de l’espace dans les premiers siècles de l’islam,” in le gouvernement en déplacement: pouvoir et mobilité dans l’antiquité à nos jours, ed. s. destephen, j. barbier, and f. chausson, 243–67 (rennes: presses universitaires de rennes, 2019). 76. on the term “prince-soldiers,” see borrut, “vanishing syria,” 58. 77. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1876–79; idem, the history, 26:249. 78. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:193; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1784, 1838; idem, the history, 26:137, 198. a similar notice is found in anon., kitāb al-ʿuyūn, 133. 79. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 61–62. 80. asa eger, “ḥiṣn, ribāṭ, thaghr or qaṣr? semantics and systems of frontier fortifications in the early islamic period,” in the lineaments of islam: studies in honor of fred mcgraw donner, ed. paul m. cobb, 427–56 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 398 typically recognized, was not as well remembered. the “forgetting” of al-ʿabbās can be seen in all four manuscripts of al-ʿawtabī’s (d. early sixth/twelfth century) kitāb al-ansāb, where he is found as al-ʿabbās b. yazīd rather than al-walīd.81 like other sons of marwānid caliphs, we can associate al-ʿabbās with a geographical space and region, strengthening the case for a polycentric understanding of marwānid history and the generation of local support and legitimacy. 3. the genealogical context of the third fitna before investigating the long-term memory of al-ʿabbās across the sources for the third fitna, it is important to understand the generational changes of the elite that characterized the fall of the marwānids. when accounting for the causes of the fitna, we can identify two novel demographic phenomena. first, all of the claimants to the caliphate—al-walīd b. yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik, yazīd b. al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik, ibrāhīm b. al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik (d. 126/744), and al-ḥakam b. al-walīd b. yazīd (d. 126/744)—represented a new generation of the marwānid elite; they were grandsons (or great-grandsons) of ʿabd al-malik, whereas up until that point every caliph was a son of ʿabd al-malik or ʿabd al-ʿazīz.82 it might not be a coincidence that the victor to emerge from the inter-marwānid conflict, marwān b. muḥammad b. marwān, who is depicted as avenging his murdered cousin al-walīd b. yazīd (and al-walīd’s sons al-ḥakam and ibrāhīm), belonged to an earlier generation.83 this generational component informs the older generations’ anxieties regarding losing their status and, as discussed above, the restricting of the caliphal line appears to be a chief concern of the banū marwān. in other words, when the caliphate moved “vertically” down it was unlikely to move back up again. the second demographic change brought to the fore by the fitna was that yazīd b. al-walīd, al-ḥakam, and marwān were all sons of umm walads, who had begun to form a much larger portion of the population of the qurashī elite in the generations following marwān b. al-ḥakam (r. 64–65/684–85).84 scholars have long noted that hajīns were impeded from becoming caliph within the early umayyad polity.85 ibn ḥazm (d. 456/1064) in his naqṭ (leiden: brill, 2012), 433, n. 23. 81. m. hinds, an early islamic family from oman, 69, n. 184. perhaps al-ʿawtabī’s original read correctly; however, that the copyists of the manuscript were unable to recognize the mistake speaks to the relatively unknown status of al-ʿabbās. 82. on the continued importance of marwānid paternal descent, see marsham, rituals, 118. 83. our arabic sources claim to retain verses produced by al-ḥakam nominating marwān as his successor as the heir was in prison, further indicating that marwān positioned himself as re-establishing the appropriate succession order. see al-balādhurī, ansāb, 9:249; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1891; anon., fragmenta, 1:156. 84. robinson, making use of the nasab quraysh of al-zubayrī (d. ca. 233/848), demonstrates that for the two generations after ʿabd al-malik concubine-born children account for 42% and 38% of qurashī-born children. see majied robinson, marriage in the tribe of muhammad: a statistical study of early arabic genealogical literature (berlin: de gruyter, 2019), 96. for the mothers of yazīd, ibrahīm, and marwān, see al-zubayrī, kitāb nasab al-quraysh, 165, 167; for the mother of al-ḥakam, see ibn ḥazm al-andalusī, jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿilmiyya, 1983), 91. 85. for instance, see the encyclopaedia of islam entry where lammens claims, “the chance of [maslama’s] 399 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) al-ʿarūs, states that: “in the first place no caliph was appointed who had an umm walad except yazīd b. al-walīd, ibrāhīm b. al-walīd, and marwān b. muḥammad.”86 this should not be viewed as prejudice or the idealization of pure-arab identity (as championed by goldziher). rather, as shown by majied robinson, the absence of hajīn caliphs among the umayyads of the east was owed instead to the informal tribal connections and alliances afforded by paternal and maternal familial relations, upon which the hajīn could not call.87 urban agrees with robinson, adding: “as the arabian tribesmen gradually migrated to the garrison towns and frontiers—away from their wives, mothers, other kin groups—these tribal ties ceased to operate and were replaced by other types of political networks, most notably military factionalism.”88 the rise of marwān b. muḥammad fits in well with these ideas; as long-term governor of the north, marwān was able to draw upon not only his local garrisons, but also apparently 15,000 armenian cavalry led by prince ashot bagratuni (d. 762).89 urban’s argument bears considerable weight here when one considers that all caliphs preceding al-walīd b. yazīd were products of unions made prior to or during the birth—his mother was a slavegirl—prevented him from rising higher” (h. lammens, “maslama,” encyclopaedia of islam, 1st ed., ed. m. th. houtsma et al. [leiden: brill online]); while rotter, in the second edition of the encyclopaedia of islam, says, “like his uncle muḥammad b. marwān, whom he [maslama] succeeded in asia minor in many respects, he was, as the son of a slave-girl, excluded from the succession to the caliphate” (g. rotter, “maslama b. ʿabd al-malik b. marwān,” encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. j. bearman et al., [leiden: brill online]). 86. ibn ḥazm al-andalusī, rasāʾil ibn ḥazm al-andalusī, ed. iḥsān ʿabbās, 4 vols. (beirut: al-muʾassasa al-ʿarabiyya li-l-dirāsāt wa-l-nashr, 2007), 2:104. no such limitations were in place during ibn ḥazm’s own lifetime, when it came to both the ʿabbāsids and the umayyads of al-andalūs, where caliphs were born nearly exclusively to concubines; see d. fairchild ruggles, “mothers of a hybrid dynasty: race, genealogy, and acculturation in al-andalus,” journal of medieval and early modern studies 34, no. 1 (2004): 65–94. 87. the debate on whether there was a general prejudice against hajīns is a long one, starting with goldziher, passing through lewis, towards the slightly more nuanced interpretations of bashear and ʿathamina. whereas lewis uses this discrimination to argue for the success of the ʿ abbāsid revolution, he brings minimal evidence to the discussion and makes use of discriminatory language. the other three instead inform robinson’s assessment of the goldziher argument, which he summarizes as: “not all men took concubines; the majority seem to have been highly critical of the practice. the children of these unions were subsequently discriminated against as a result of the chauvinistic beliefs of the arab majority; evidence for this is in the derogatory reports that claim to be dated to the time, as well as the lack of hajīn caliphs and the poor performances of hajīns in the marriage market. but over time these attitudes softened and with the arrival of the ʿabbāsids came greater tolerance” (robinson, marriage, 98–106, quote from 102). see also i. goldziher, muslim studies, ed. s. m. stern, trans. c. r. barber and s. m. stern, 2 vols. (chicago: aldine, 1966), 1:98–136; bernard lewis, race and slavery in the middle east: an historical enquiry (oxford: oxford university press, 1990), 38–39; suliman bashear, arabs and others in early islam (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1998), 39–40; k. ʿathamina, “how did islam contribute to change the legal status of women,” al-qantara 28, no. 2 (2007): 383–408, at 395–96. 88. urban, conquered populations in early islam, 125–26. 89. łewond, “the history of łewond (patmabanut‘iwn łewond),” in matenagirk‘ hayoc‘, ed. geworg tēr-vardanean, 6:711–854 (ant‘ilias: calouste gulbenkian foundation, 2007), 6:817. et‘ē ehas patrikn hayoc‘ i t‘ikowns awgnaganowt‘ean ew owni ǝnd iwr ǝntirs heceloc‘ hngētasan hazar aranc‘ vaṙeloc‘; translated in jean-pierre mahé, bernadette martin-hisard, and alexan hakobian, eds. and trans., lewond vardapet: discours historique; avec en annexe la correspondance d’omar et de léon (paris: peeters, 2015), 124; vacca cautions against viewing this as explicit support for marwān’s claims to the caliphate, but a consequence of the bagratunimamikonean rivalry; see vacca, “the umayyad north,” 231. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 400 second fitna.90 by the third fitna considerable generational and demographic shifts had taken place amongst the imperial elite, with the descendants of ʿabd al-malik splintering into disparate factions in an attempt to achieve the caliphate. in turn, these factions began to be constituted around military ties that allowed individual heirs to draw upon local power bases, primarily in syria, al-jazīra, and the caliphal north. as evidenced by the case of marwān b. muḥammad, these dynamics favored heirs who had served on the frontier or as long-term governors, and our narrative sources place the events in these areas of the caliphate.91 as we shall see, both al-walīd b. yazīd and yazīd b. al-walīd, who had not enjoyed gubernatorial and military appointments, were highly reliant on the loyalty of their kinsmen who had. maslama, as the scholarship’s hajīn par excellence, is said to have never become caliph due to lack of opportunity, the circumstances of his birth, and because he died during hishām’s long reign.92 al-ʿabbās, who outlived both maslama and hishām, saw both his concubine-born brothers take up the title of caliph, so why would he not throw his own name into the lot? as will be discussed in the subsequent section, the christian tradition shows he may have, while the arabic-islamic sources present a figure who foresaw the fitna and aimed to prevent it. 4. al-ʿabbās’s role in late-antique sources on the fitna the two main sets of sources used to reconstruct the role of al-ʿabbās in the third fitna are arabic-islamic sources and christian sources in greek, syriac, and arabic. as can be seen in the following table these sources overlap considerably in their memory and presentation of al-ʿabbās, preserving raiding notices prior to the fitna as well as maintaining a similar chronology of events. łewond, interestingly, omits the role of al-ʿabbās, but does make mention of al-walīd’s killing. what is particularly notable is the fact that the christian sources’ perception of al-walīd b. yazīd is in line with the notices in the arabic-islamic sources, where he is presented as a drunkard and unfit for the caliphate.93 furthermore, 90. the youngest of ʿabd al-malik’s sons to become caliph was hishām, born in 72/691, the same year as the defeat of muṣʿab al-zubayr. see al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1466. 91. blankinship argues that this model originates with maslama b. ʿabd al-malik, referring to marwān b. muḥammad as one of his protégés. as we have seen, al-ʿabbās appears at a very similar time, and perhaps the first hajīn to do this was muḥammad b. marwān. however, blankinship correctly identifies the possibility of the generation of independent power bases established by various princes in the 100s/720s. see blankinship, the end of the jihād state, 87–88. 92. as robinson rightly points out, “there are other reasons [besides being concubine-born] why maslama never became caliph such as his lack of opportunity (he died towards the end of the long reign of his brother hishām) and his responsibility for the failed siege of constantinople” (majied robinson, “prosopographical approaches to the nasab tradition: a study of marriage and concubinage in the tribe of muḥammad, 500–750 ce” [phd thesis, university of edinburgh, 2013], 126). for examples of maslama’s ineligibility in the scholarship, see n. 85 in this article. 93. this is not only the case for al-walīd, as shall be demonstrated, but also for hishām b. ʿabd al-malik. notably, the same cannot be said for ʿ umar b. ʿ abd al-ʿazīz, as his representation in michael the syrian is overtly negative whilst in other syriac sources it is largely positive. see borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 303–5; this is not unique to the syriac either, with the armenian author łewond stating that: “he [ʿumar] was, they say, the noblest of all those people of his lineage (zsa asen aznowakanagoyn k‘an zamenayn ars azgatohmi iwroy)” 401 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) nearly all of the sources assessed here preserve the notice of al-ʿabbās’ arrival at ruṣāfa and imprisonment of the banū hishām. table 1: al-ʿabbās in late antique sources.94 arabic armenian “eastern source” syriac al-madāʾinī “dionysius” sources information a lla yt h b. s aʿ d a ly aʿ qū bī k ha līf a b. k ha yy aṭ a lṭa ba rī a lba lā dh ur ī k it āb a lʿu yu n łe w on d th eo ph an es a ga pi us o f m an bi j m ic ha el t he s yr ia n ch ro ni cl e 12 34 m ic ha el t he s yr ia n (a rm ) ch ro ni cl e of zu qn īn ch ro ni cl e 84 6 conquest of tyana x x x x x x x x x x raid, 90/708–9 x x x x x raid 93/711–12 x x x x x x x x x raid 94/712–13 x x raid 103/721–22 x x x x x x prays over hishām x al-ʿabbās sent to ruṣāfa (imprisoning hishām’s sons) x x x x x x x put in charge of caliphate x x x mistreats hishām’s family x x x x x desires caliphate x x spreads rumors x x betrays al-walīd x x x x x x x x x x al-walīd’s licentiousness x x x x x x x x x concubine narrative x x x forced to betray alwalīd for yazīd x x x x x revolt in ḥimṣ x x x x x x x x al-ʿabbās dies in prison x x x x x mistakes al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd for ʿabbāsids x x (łewond, patmabanut‘iwn, 6:761). 94. the categorization of the sources reflects the needs of the article and the divisions presented do not reflect late antique sources as a whole, as these are not easily classifiable or independent of one another based on the confessional identity of the author or language of production. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 402 4.1 arabic-islamic sources the main arabic-islamic sources for reconstructing the third fitna are the histories of khalīfa b. khayyāṭ (d. 240/855), al-balādhurī (d. 279/892), al-yaʿqūbī (d. 284/897–98), and al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923). the following discussion will trace the role of al-ʿabbās in the killing of his cousin al-walīd b. yazīd across the four arabic-islamic sources mentioned above, which do not appear to have been reconciled and demonstrate significant confusion and contradictions. for the sake of clarity, a brief outline of the main themes is warranted. first of all, we must recognize that the only detailed narrative account of events is that of al-madāʾinī, which is accessed by al-ṭabarī through the recension of aḥmad b. zuhayr, while al-balādhurī seems to have been accessing the material directly.95 the absence of the transmitter in khalīfa’s account of the killing of al-walīd—despite al-madāʾinī serving as one of his main sources prior to this—may indicate that he did not have access to this material, or that it did not fit the terse narrative style of his text. khalīfa’s narrative corroborates the two al-madāʾinī transmissions of al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī; in it al-ʿabbās warns against the uprising against al-walīd b. yazīd, following which he was captured by his brother yazīd’s supporters. the other possibility is that khalīfa had yet to incorporate this material by the time baqī b. makhlād (d. 276/889) learnt his tārīkh and brought it west, but this we cannot prove.96 the sources (aside from al-yaʿqūbī) all agree that al-ʿabbās tried to dissuade his brother yazīd b. al-walīd from opposing al-walīd b. yazīd. second, paired with al-ṭabarī’s classification of him as sayyid banī marwān, we should identify al-ʿabbās as the most senior figure in the wider marwānid family. this responsibility may have prevented him from immediately joining the younger aggrieved factions of the banū al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik and banū hishām, who appear explicitly as the opposition to al-walīd b. yazīd. that in both traditions he turns the tide of events testifies to his position within the polity, as well as foreshadowing the impending fitna. third, al-ʿabbās’ high status indicates that hajīns were integral to late marwānid politics and is a reminder that caliphal succession was often determined years, if not decades, prior to the event and thus should not reflect how we view the political realities of individual reigns.97 furthermore, almost all of the major figures presented in the narratives were hajīns: yazīd b. al-walīd, bishr b. al-walīd, ʿumar b. al-walīd, al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd, ibrāhīm b. al-walīd, saʿīd b. ʿabd al-malik, and ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. ḥajjāj. this is probably not a coincidence; as mentioned above, they had been appointed to governorships and they led raids. in the increasingly fragmented marwānid state they appear to be among the few members of the imperial elite who maintained a sustained territorial influence and could rely on military support. however, as in the case of 95. ilkka lindstedt, “the transmissions of al-madāʾinīs historical material to al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī: a comparison and analysis of two khabars,” studia orientalia 114 (2013): 41–64. on al-balādhurī’s use of al-madāʾinī, see also ryan j. lynch, arab conquests and early islamic historiography: the futuh al-buldan of al-baladhuri (london: i. b. tauris, 2019), 78–79. 96. on the transmission of khalīfa’s tārīkh, see tobias andersson, early sunnī historiography: a study of the tārīkh of khalīfa b. khayyāṭ (leiden: brill, 2019), 16–20. 97. as we saw earlier, al-walīd b. yazīd’s nomination was secured in the aftermath of the muhallabid revolt in the early 100s/720s. 403 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the muhallabids, they also had to face anti-hajīn rhetoric, probably reflecting the anxieties of a “pure” arabian elite in the face of growing practice of concubinage.98 fourth, all the build up to al-walīd’s death at al-bakhrāʾ allows us to ascertain that al-ʿabbās was operating largely out of ḥimṣ and was able to call upon active military support. this is a further reminder that even if a figure were removed from a position they could continue to enjoy the privileges and status associated with office. steven judd has demonstrated that the narratives of the beginning of the third fitna, including al-walīd’s killing in al-bakhrāʾ, are often confused and anachronistic, reflecting the contemporary concerns of the ʿabbāsid-era compilers.99 his analysis is built on the accounts as found in al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī, who nearly exclusively follow the basran transmitter, al-madāʾinī (d. ca. 228/842–43). despite their reliance on the same source, the two compilers focus on different aspects; al-balādhurī highlights religious disputes, while al-ṭabarī identifies tribal and factional divisions.100 khalīfa b. khayyāṭ’s account of the fitna, on the other hand, does not use what up until this point was his main source, al-madāʾinī, but a minor authority, ismāʿīl b. ibrāhīm—khalīfa may have used al-madāʾinī more for chronology than akhbār.101 as steven judd’s analysis does not include khalīfa’s account, a brief outline of it is warranted, as it corroborates al-madāʾinī’s account but does not contain its pietistic and foreshadowing embellishments. the only legitimizing narrative present in khalīfa’s account pertains to the killing itself, where he draws a comparison between al-walīd b. yazīd and another murdered caliph, ʿuthmān b. ʿaffān (d. 35/654). according to the historian, when al-walīd was surrounded he picked up the qurʾān and said, “i shall be murdered the same way the son of my paternal uncle, ʿuthmān, was murdered [i.e. reading the qurʾān].”102 this is the only eulogizing or legitimizing narrative within his account of al-walīd’s killing, and the fact that it is positioned after a khabar in which the caliph is referred to as a “sodomite” (lūṭī), and a sermon delivered by yazīd b. al-walīd, imply that it is doubtful that khalīfa lent it much credence. khalīfa downplays al-walīd’s depravity and drunkenness, focusing on administrative and political matters.103 there is no reference to the qadarīs or kalbīs, and khalīfa’s matter of fact narration places the caliph’s cousins at 98. robinson has shown that by the 100s/720s the percentage of marwānid sons born to concubines outstripped the qurashī average (robinson, marriage, 180–81). for the anxieties around the liminal status of hajīns, see the apocalyptic tradition stating that they will join the byzantines (al-rūm) against the caliphate in nuʿaym b. ḥammad, fitan, 2:449; idem, the book of tribulations, 265. 99. judd, “medieval explanations,” 103–4. 100. ibid., 91–93. this tribal distinction is strongly taken up by later compilers, e.g., al-masʿūdī, al-tanbīh wa-l-ishrāf, 8:323; idem, le livre de l’avertissement, 418. 101. as mentioned, his main source is ismāʿīl b. ibrāhīm who, by my count, for the years between 126/743–44 to 130/747–48 is cited as his transmitter for seventeen of thirty-nine notices. this is operating on wurtzel and andersson’s suggestion that khalīfa (or his transmitter baqī b. makhlad) may have regularly confused ismāʿīl’s paternal grandfather, so ismāʿīl b. isḥaq and ismāʿīl b. ibrāhīm were counted as one and the same. see khalīfa b. khayyāṭ. khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 36; andersson, early sunnī historiography, 112, 119. 102. wa-qāla aqtula kamā qutila ibn ʿammī ʿuthmān (khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:550; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 256). 103. andersson, early sunnī historiography, 270–71. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 404 the forefront of the plot to overthrow him. the first khabar of his reign (after the notice regarding his date of death, age, birthplace, and regnal length) states: ismāʿīl b. ibrāhīm < ʿabd allāh b. wāqid al-jarmī, who was a witness to the killing of al-walīd. when they agreed to murder al-walīd, they entrusted the leadership (qalladū amruhum) to yazīd b. al-walīd b. ʿ abd al-malik b. marwān. ʿ abd al-ʿazīz b. al-ḥajjāj b. ʿ abd al-malik (d. 126/744), a member of his family, pledged allegiance to him. yazīd b. al-walīd went out one night to his brother, al-ʿabbās, to consult him (shāwara) about killing al-walīd. he advised him against it. 104 khalīfa, therefore, does not provide a reason for the killing of al-walīd but introduces the two main actors: yazīd b. al-walīd and ʿabd al-ʿazīz. yazīd b. al-walīd was the son of al-walīd and shāh afrid bt. fīrūz b. yazdegerd (iii), an umm walad.105 ʿabd al-ʿazīz was a minor figure up until this point, the son of the hajīn al-ḥajjāj b. ʿabd al-malik and either an umm walad or rayṭa bt. ʿubayd allāh b. ʿabd allāh, the mother of the first ʿabbāsid caliph abū al-ʿabbās.106 furthermore, ʿabd al-ʿazīz married a daughter of hishām, umm salama, with whom he went on pilgrimage in 124/741–42.107 considering that al-walīd had imprisoned hishām’s family upon his accession, it is understandable that ʿabd al-ʿazīz was prominent in the anti-walīd faction. he would be rewarded by yazīd later, being named walī al-ʿahd (heir apparent) after ibrāhīm b. al-walīd.108 that yazīd sought al-ʿabbās’ advice supports his position in the post-hishām period as the head of the marwānids. khalīfa’s narrative continues with al-ʿabbās going to support al-walīd at al-bakhrāʾ (21 km south of palmyra) with an army of ḥimṣīs (jund min ahl ḥimṣ) who reached al-walīd without their general, as he had been seized by his brother’s troops.109 al-ʿabbās was seized by ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s generals and forced to swear the bayʿa to yazīd, prompting a large defection from al-walīd’s camp.110 the specification of ahl ḥimṣ indicates that for our chroniclers al-ʿabbās maintained authority in his old governorate, despite his removal nearly thirty years prior. syrian military loyalty, therefore, is presented as not being to al-walīd but to al-ʿabbās, 104. wa-kāna shahada qatal al-walīd qāla lammā ajmaʿū ʿalā qatal al-walīd qalladū amruhum yazīd b. al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik b. marwān, wa-bāyʿahu min ahl baytahu ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-ḥajjāj b. ʿabd al-malik fa-kharaja yazīd b. al-walīd fa-atā akhāhu al-ʿabbās laylan fa-shāwara fī qatl al-walīd fa-nahāhu ʿan dhālika (khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:548; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 254). 105. al-zubayrī, nasab al-quraysh, 165; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 8:66. 106. in the early nasab tradition he is the son of an umm walad (see al-zubayrī, nasab al-quraysh, 168); whereas later he is found as the daughter of rayṭa (ibn ḥazm, rasāʾil, 2:147; ibn ʿasākir, tārikh madīnat dimashq, 36:269–71); for the mother of abū ʿabbās, see al-zubayrī, nasab al-quraysh, 30; ibn ḥazm, jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, 20. 107. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1727; idem, the history, 26:68. 108. marsham, rituals, 120. 109. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:549; on bakhrāʾ, see d. genequand, “al-bakhra (avatha), from the tetrarchic fort to the umayyad castle,” levant 36 (2004): 225–42. 110. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:549; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 255. 405 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) indicating that the hajīn, although not the caliph, as sayyid banī marwān swayed loyalties and allegiances. 4.1.1 al-madāʾinī’s account of al-ʿabbās’ role as noted previously, al-balādhurī’s and al-ṭabarī’s narratives of the killing of al-walīd are transmitted on the authority of al-madāʾinī.111 the fifth/eleventh century kitāb al-ʿuyūn wa-l-ḥadāʾiq fī akhbār al-ḥaqāʾiq also makes use of al-madāʾinī; however it is more or less the same account as that of al-balādhurī with minor variations. this means we are able to reconstruct al-madāʾinī’s narrative as preserved across these three sources, but because of the texts’ dates of production and the similarities between the ansāb and the ʿuyūn, the main comparison will be between al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī. this will be done by undergoing a thorough overview of the akhbār narrated on the authority of al-madāʾinī, which will be compared to the “dionysius circuit” later. to repeat, according to al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī, al-walīd b. yazīd sent al-ʿabbās to ruṣāfa to imprison hishām’s progeny and secure the treasury or storehouses (al-khazāʾin).112 according to al-ṭabarī, al-walīd’s kātib, ʿiyāḍ—who had been imprisoned at ruṣāfa by the caliph—ordered the storehouse/treasury doors (abwāb al-khazāʾin) to be shut upon hishām’s death.113 how the imprisoned scribe managed to do this is difficult to imagine; however, as we shall see, the syriac sources report that al-ʿabbās entered into the treasury (gazzâ) as well. the narrative of ʿiyāḍ being sent to secure the khazāʾin upon hishām’s death and al-ʿabbās’ imprisonment of the caliph’s sons may indicate that al-walīd feared he would not be granted access to the riches of the caliphate, hampering his succession. although al-madāʾinī’s account does not contradict that of khalīfa, literary embellishments are much more common in his narrative, with the inclusion of poetry and conversations. al-ʿabbās is employed to foreshadow the impending fitna and warn of regicide, seemingly the only figure who perceived that the dispute between al-walīd b. yazīd and yazīd b. al-walīd would bring about the fall of the banū marwān. in terms of how our two main sources accessed this material, lindstedt has argued that al-balādhurī’s isnāds make it appear as if he is accessing the material directly, whilst al-ṭabarī always cites it on 111. judd, “medieval explanations”; judd, “reinterpreting al-walīd b. yazīd.” the anonymous kitāb al-ʿuyūn largely contains the same notices, conforming more closely to al-balādhurī’s version. but due to its late date of production (late eleventh century) and close use of earlier sources, it does not factor greatly into my discussion here. 112. to what exactly khazāʾin refers here is difficult to say. hillenbrand has opted for “storehouses” in her translation, but texts such as the kitāb al-amwāl of qudāma b. jaʿfar seem to imply that khazāʾin were used to store ghanāʾim and tribute (jizya). a more in-depth study of the terminology in question would be helpful. al-ṭabarī frequently uses khazāʾin throughout his text, while khalīfa b. khayyāṭ includes it in his list of caliphal administrators as separate from bayt al-māl but still under that individual’s purview, e.g., for hishām: al-khazāʾin wa-buyūt al-amwāl ʿ abd allāh b. ʿ amr b. al-ḥarith ([administrator] of the warehouses and treasuries) (khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:545; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 252), for a recent discussion of these lists in khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, see m. legendre, “the translation of the dīwān and the making of the marwanid ‘language reform’: secretarial agency, economic incentives, regional dynamics in the umayyad state,” in navigating language in the early islamic world, ed. antoine borrut and alison vacca (turnhout: brepols, forthcoming). 113. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1751; idem, the history, 26:100. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 406 the authority of aḥmad b. zuhayr (d. 279/892).114 although there are a variety of differences in the two authors’ accounts, for the sections dealing with al-ʿabbās they preserve similar material.115 al-ṭabarī corroborates yazīd’s consultation with the head of the marwānids, following a discussion between yazīd and one of his supporters: according to aḥmad b. zuhayr < ʿalī (al-madāʾinī): if al-ʿabbās gives you [yazīd b. al-walīd] the oath of allegiance, no one else will oppose you (bāyaʿaka lam yukhāllifka aḥad). if al-ʿabbās refuses, then the people will be more likely to obey him. if you insist on sticking to your opinion, then proclaim publicly that al-ʿabbās has given the oath of allegiance to you […] yazīd came to his brother al-ʿabbās and told him what had been happening. yazīd asked his advice (shāwarahu) and spoke abusively of al-walīd. then al-ʿabbās said to him: “go easy, yazīd. by breaking god’s oath (ʿahd allāh) you corrupt both true religion and this life on earth.”116 al-ʿabbās is again presented as pious, as a protector of the covenant of god, and as the most influential of the marwānids. the use of the terms shūra/shāwara and ʿahd allāh in the khabar is reflective of the language of succession in the early marwānid period.117 al-ṭabarī’s isnād is problematic here since al-madāʾinī was born nearly a decade after the events, and thus could not have been an eyewitness, and we have no other indication of where the information comes from.118 kilpatrick points out that al-ʿabbās’ alleged piety in this matter drew comparison with his most pious uncle, ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz, in the kitāb al-aghānī.119 yazīd returned to his brother to convince him again, but was called “the most inauspicious lamb (ashām sakhla) of the banū marwān,” and al-ʿabbās even threatened to tie him up and send him to al-walīd.120 al-madāʾinī’s account contains further references to al-ʿabbās’ opposition, such as a confrontation with his brother in reaction to marwān’s letter of support for al-walīd b. yazīd, which marwān, the governor of the north, had sent to saʿīd b. ʿabd al-malik, the governor of palestine, who forwarded it to al-ʿabbās.121 al-ʿabbās summoned (daʿā) yazīd and threatened him. yazīd responded that marwān’s 114. ilkka lindstedt, “the role of al-madāʾinī’s students in the transmission of his material,” der islam 91, no. 2 (2014): 295–340, at 307. 115. for a comparison between how the two compilers used the akhbarī’s material, see lindstedt, “the transmissions.” 116. al-ṭabarī, al-tārīkh, 2:1784; idem, the history, 26:137. 117. we should not, however, assume that this was fully formulated, nor does its appearance here indicate the veracity of the report; see marsham, rituals, 114–17. 118. lindstedt, “transmission,” 42. 119. hilary kilpatrick, “images of the umayyads,” in umayyad legacies: medieval memories from syria to spain, ed. antoine borrut and paul m. cobb, 63–87 (leiden: brill, 2010), 69; on ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s image as the most pious caliph, see borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 283–320. 120. al-ṭabarī, al-tārīkh, 2:1785; idem, the history, 26:138. 121. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:170–71; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1785–88; idem, the history, 26:139–41; patricia crone, slaves on horses: the evolution of the islamic polity (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1980), 129. 407 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) claims of rebellion were lies (irjāf), and he promised (khalafa) his brother that he would abandon the opposition (muʿāraḍa) and not attempt to depose al-walīd.122 therefore, in al-madāʾinī’s narratives, al-ʿabbās wishes to preserve the status quo and exerts substantial authority. his allegiance, in the eyes of our compilers, would be enough to sway the dispute. furthermore, his status as a senior member of the marwānids is evident in his summoning of yazīd as well as in his being saʿīd’s port of call on how to proceed. saʿīd’s presence in the narrative is curious as, despite being a son of ʿabd al-malik, he defers to al-ʿabbās. saʿīd was a hajīn and led the ṣāʾifa in 106/725.123 the nasab tradition is not always organized chronologically; however the fact that he is placed nearly last in both al-zubayrī’s and al-yaʿqūbī’s lists of ʿabd al-malik’s fourteen sons (he is eleventh) may indicate that he was in fact amongst the youngest. this is further supported by his late appearance in the sources and the fact that he was still active in the 120s/740s. al-ʿabbās’ pre-eminence amongst the marwānids is probably owed to his relatively advanced age by this point, as well as his greater military experience. al-ʿabbās’ opposition to the impending regicide is reported in another khabar relayed by his nephew, the unnamed son of bishr b. al-walīd, on the authority of al-madāʾinī, that takes the shape of a conversation between al-ʿabbās and his brother yazīd.124 bishr urges his brother, al-ʿabbās, to support yazīd but is again rebuffed, prompting al-ʿabbās to exclaim, “i believe god has permitted your destruction.”125 the foreshadowing and anachronisms in the representation of al-ʿabbās are most probably a literary construct aimed at warning against regicide and urging the avoidance of fitna at all costs. this motif is alluded to in a poem attributed to al-ʿabbās and set after his conversation with bishr: may god protect you from tribulations (fitan) looming like mountains, which then violently erupt. indeed, the creatures have grown weary (mallat) of your (pl.) policy (siyāsatakum) so, hold tight to the pillar (ʿamūd) of religion and withhold yourselves. 126 again, al-madāʾinī presents al-ʿabbās as wanting to preserve marwānid rule, while the foreshadowing imagery of the mountains and the use of fitan are anachronistic projections. al-ʿabbās is presented as pious, dissuading yazīd’s faction from following through, becoming the bulwark trying to hold back the oncoming fitna. writing in the aftermath of the fourth fitna, issues of regicide and factional disputes must have been particularly relevant for 122. despite both citing al-madāʾinī as their source, the conversation between the two brothers appears quite different linguistically when comparing the two sources. see al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:171; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1787; idem, the history, 26:140–41. 123. al-zubayrī, nasab al-quraysh, 165; khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:491; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 217; al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:394; idem, the works, 1049. 124. the chain of transmission is aḥmad b. zuhayr < ʿalī al-madāʾinī < ibn bishr al-walīd. 125. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:171; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1787–88; idem, the history, 26:141. 126. the translated verses (my own) are the shorter variants found in al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:171; an extra bayt is found in the version narrated in al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1788; idem, the history, 26:141. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 408 al-madāʾinī.127 al-madāʾinī’s narrative comes full circle in the lead up to al-walīd b. yazīd’s death. as in khalīfa, al-ʿabbās is intercepted by one of ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-ḥajjāj b. ʿabd al-malik’s generals, manṣūr b. jumhūr or yaʿqūb b. ʿabd al-raḥmān al-kalbī, and forced to go over to ʿabd al-ʿazīz and give his allegiance to yazīd.128 in al-balādhurī, manṣūr calls al-ʿabbās ibn qusṭanṭīn, whilst in al-ṭabarī it is yaʿqūb; this is the only significant variation in the account, and both sources even agree he was accompanied by thirty men, corroborating khalīfa. when al-ʿabbās was forced to swear the bayʿa to his brother, yazīd b. al-walīd, his supporters raised the banner of al-ʿabbās (naṣabū rāyatan) and announced that he had given his allegiance to the amīr al-muʾminīn, yazīd, prompting again a major defection from al-walīd’s camp. al-ʿabbās is then reported to have exclaimed, “this is one of the wiles of the devil (khudʿa min khudiʿ al-shayṭān). the banū marwān are destroyed!”129 al-ʿabbās’ capture is made explicitly clear by both al-balādhurī and the kitāb al-ʿuyūn, which add: “he was like a prisoner amongst them.”130 the lack of this notice in al-ṭabarī indicates some editing by our authors. a variant of the capture is preserved in al-ṭabarī, still attributed to al-madāʾinī but this time on the authority of al-muthannā b. muʿāwiya, an alleged eyewitness in al-walīd b. yazīd’s camp.131 al-ʿabbās is said to have sent a messenger to al-walīd, but on this occasion we are informed that al-walīd suspected (ittahama) al-ʿabbās and asked him to go to the caliph’s camp. the return messenger was intercepted by manṣūr, who threatened al-ʿabbās, ordering him to stay in place. after being ambushed by the troops of ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-ḥajjāj, al-ʿabbās went to his brother’s camp, and al-walīd b. yazīd’s men seeing this (al-ʿabbās going to the other side), retreated.132 al-balādhurī has a similar narrative, but not on the authority of al-madāʾinī; instead it is narrated by hishām b. ʿammar (d. 245/859). according to this account al-ʿabbās fought on the side of al-walīd, confirming his bayʿa, but was thrown from his horse by one of ʿabd al-ʿazīz’s men. he then went over (ʿadala) to ʿabd al-ʿazīz, again prompting defection, and the khabar ends with yazīd pardoning (ṣafaḥa) and freeing his brother.133 al-ʿabbās is therefore again able to single-handedly prompt large-scale defection from al-walīd’s camp. these variants fill in some of the gaps, such as how yazīd’s supporters knew where to intercept him but leave quite a few questions unanswered. if al-ʿabbās was dedicated to al-walīd’s cause, why did he retreat to ʿabd al-ʿazīz and what happened to his 127. signficantly al-ṭabarī’s account of the fourth fitna also comes from al-madāʾinī; see t. el-hibri, “the regicide of the caliph al-amīn and the challenge of representation in medieval islamic historiography,” arabica 42, no. 3 (1995): 334–64. 128. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1798–99; idem, the history, 26:152; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:177–78. this part is introduced with the isnād aḥmad b. zuhayr < ʿalī al-madāʾinī< ʿamr b. marwān al-kalbī < yaʿqūb b. ʿibrāhīm al-walīd. 129. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1799; idem, the history, 26:152–53; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:178; anon., kitāb al-ʿuyūn, 141. 130. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:178; anon., kitāb al-ʿuyūn, 141. 131. the full isnād is aḥmad b. zuhayr < ʿ alī al-madāʾinī < ʿ amr b. marwān al-kalbī < al-muthannā b. muʿāwiya. 132. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1804–5; idem, the history, 26:157–59. 133. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:180. 409 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) cavalry, of which we are told but who do not seem to have witnessed his “imprisonment”? conveniently, their failure to witness the ambush prompts their defection, thinking their leader had himself defected. al-ʿabbās’ role in al-madāʾinī’s narrative, therefore, does not contradict that presented in khalīfa’s, but the account is embellished with lines of verse and direct conversations, foreshadowing motifs that warn of the dangers of fitna and regicide. al-ʿabbās appears as the only figure who foresees that the dispute between al-walīd b. yazīd and yazīd b. al-walīd would bring about the fall of the marwānids. however, reading between the lines, it also conveys the sense that he enjoyed substantial authority over the marwānids, as is evident in his being a port of call for shūra. additionally, al-ʿabbās allegedly swayed the outcome of the dispute simply by offering his bayʿa. al-madāʾinī’s narrative clearly shows how al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik’s progeny had strongly linked themselves to those of hishām, with al-walīd b. yazīd’s treatment of them sparking significant anger, exacerbated by his alleged appropriation of a jāriya belonging to the family.134 al-ʿabbās’ role in the imprisonment of hishām’s sons, as well as his support for al-walīd, curiously do not seem to have drawn much ire from his fellow marwānids. al-balādhurī’s inclusion of an element in which al-ʿabbās is pardoned may indicate that there was bad blood, but it is only preserved in a single khabar, transmitted on the authority of a figure who did not live under the umayyads. this is why al-ʿabbās’ defection narrative is unsatisfying in explaining the partisanship of the fitna and simply too convenient for yazīd b. al-walīd’s faction. al-madāʾinī’s use of al-ʿabbās as the figure to warn of looming fitna serves to foreshadow the ensuing events, of which the audience, living after the fall of the marwānids, would have been acutely aware. 4.1.2 al-yaʿqūbī and the ḥimṣī revolt al-yaʿqūbī’s account of the death of al-walīd contains no mention of al-ʿabbās and appears too difficult to reconcile with the narratives unless we entertain, as i suggest below, that the author or the copyists may have mixed up the reigns of al-walīd b. yazīd and yazīd b. al-walīd. al-yaʿqūbī’s relatively short account of the caliph’s reign is characterized by al-walīd b. yazīd’s mistreatment of hishām’s maternal family and his governors, and narratives of his wine drinking, building a drinking tent atop the kaʿba, and general neglect for caliphal affairs.135 the narrative contains some tribal elements as found in al-ṭabarī, but no mention of yazīd’s qadarī affiliation (as found in al-balādhurī) until the latter’s death.136 al-ʿabbās does not feature in the narrative until the reign of his brother yazīd b. al-walīd, where he is reported to have rebelled against the reigning caliph, but to have been saved 134. judd, “reinterpreting al-walīd b. yazīd,” 450. this is also from the al-madāʾinī circuit; see al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1776. 135. the account of al-walīd’s reign is very short, occupying less than two folios of the manchester manuscript. see arabic ms 231 [801], fols. 288–89, https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/ man4medievalvc~4~4~993914~163319. for a discussion of the manchester manuscript (the older of the two extant manuscripts), see al-yaʿqūbī, the works, 1:23–26. 136. al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:397–400, 402; idem, the works, 1052–56. https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/man4medievalvc~4~4~993914~163319 https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/man4medievalvc~4~4~993914~163319 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 410 by sulaymān b. hishām b. ʿabd al-malik.137 however, al-madāʾinī’s account has al-ʿabbās imprison sulaymān on al-walīd’s orders. we are then told sulaymān escaped from prison in amman upon al-walīd’s death and went to yazīd b. al-walīd, who proceeded to marry hishām’s daughter umm hishām.138 the inclusion of this marriage notice after sulaymān’s escape may be a means for the compilers to express a further consolidation between the sons of al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik and those of hishām. this is one of the major contradictions in al-yaʿqūbī’s section on the fitna and warrants considerable skepticism: if al-ʿabbās had revolted against yazīd, why would sulaymān come to his aid? sulaymān would be yazīd’s general at ʿanjar against marwān b. muḥammad, and his imprisonment under al-walīd b. yazīd speaks to his loyalty to his cousin, evidenced also by the marital connection. other figures reported by al-yaʿqūbī to have rebelled against al-yazīd b. al-walīd are bishr b. al-walīd in qinnasrīn, ʿumar b. al-walīd in jordan, and yazīd b. sulaymān b. ʿabd al-malik in palestine.139 this means that, in al-yaʿqūbī, three of four revolts against yazīd b. al-walīd were carried out by his own brothers, which contradicts the strong fraternal aspect of the other accounts. in the notice from al-madāʾinī discussed above, bishr attempts to convince al-ʿabbās to join their brother yazīd’s cause and ʿumar admonishes al-walīd b. yazīd regarding his appropriation of a jāriya.140 bishr is also depicted in most sources as opposing marwān b. muḥammad during the reign of his brother ibrāhīm b. al-walīd, and al-ṭabarī claims that he was given the governorship of qinnasrīn only under yazīd.141 ʿumar is recorded as governor of jordan under his father al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik, and like al-ʿabbās it seems he retained his influence there long after his official post ended.142 it is clear that there was no love lost between al-walīd b. yazīd and his cousins; therefore their rebellion against their own brother yazīd seems unlikely. the only revolt that fits with what we have already seen is that of yazīd b. sulaymān in palestine, who was raised up by the palestinian jund at the expense of saʿīd b. ʿabd al-malik who escaped to yazīd.143 exacerbating the contradictions in al-yaʿqūbī is the fact that the notice of al-ʿabbās’ revolt is introduced with the claim that he was supported by the people of ḥimṣ (shāyaʿahu ahl ḥimṣ), his ex-governorate. as we shall see shortly that is not the case; al-ʿabbās features as the main victim of this revolt due to his defection from al-walīd in both the “al-madāʾinī circuit” and the christian sources. in their translation of al-yaʿqūbī’s tārīkh, robinson et al. have posited that the text suffered some corruption when it comes 137. al-yaʿqūbī, 2:401; idem, the works, 1057. 138. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1827; idem, the history, 26:185. 139. al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:401; idem, the works, 1057. 140. for bishr, see al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:171; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1787–88; idem, the history, 26:141. for ʿumar, see al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1776; anon., ʿuyūn, 131. 141. bishr met marwān in the vicinty of aleppo, less than a day’s march from qinnasrīn. see khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:564; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 267; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:199–200; al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:403; idem, the works, 1058; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1876; idem, the history, 26:250. 142. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:417. 143. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1831; idem, the history, 26:189–90. this is, again, on the authority of al-madāʾinī. 411 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) to these notices, and the incongruity of the report of this revolt when compared with other sources seem to support this.144 i would cautiously suggest these notices were transposed accidentally into the account of yazīd b. al-walīd’s caliphate when they were originally included in the reign of al-walīd b. yazīd. this suggestion is based, firstly, on the fact that the similarity of their names makes misattribution likely.145 a second reason for suspecting misattribution is that in both notices the author states that the “regions went into revolt (iḍṭarabat).” however, for al-walīd no examples are given, whilst for yazīd we are provided with the examples of the three sons of al-walīd and that of sulaymān.146 as pointed out by lliteras in her study of marginalia in arabic manuscripts from timbuktu, “confusion in the copying occurs when a word is repeated in the text, causing the scribe to skip the sentence or words immediately following which ended with the repeated word.”147 therefore, the similarity in the names al-walīd and al-yazīd coupled with the formulaic nature of the text may have led to a mistake, especially when considering the factional dynamics presented by other sources. as we have seen, it is more likely that the sons of al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik revolted under their cousin al-walīd b. yazīd rather than under their own brother yazīd b. al-walīd. furthermore, in the following sentence of al-yaʿqūbī’s account, we are informed that muḥammad b. ʿabd al-malik had been made commander by the men of jordan and defied yazīd’s brother ibrāhīm b. al-walīd.148 al-ṭabarī, still on al-madāʾinī’s authority, indicates that muḥammad b. ʿabd al-malik had opposed yazīd in jordan.149 this indicates that ʿumar b. al-walīd had been ousted by the jund of jordan due to his role in the regicide of al-walīd b. yazīd, similarly to what occurred to saʿīd b. ʿabd al-malik. thus, al-yaʿqūbī’s notices about the revolts under yazīd b. al-walīd would require us to re-evaluate the partisanship of the fitna. i am more inclined to attribute this to a scribal error that saw the initial notices of both caliph’s reigns get swapped, or textual corruption, rather than internal contradictions within al-yaʿqūbī’s text, as he does not often provide alternative versions of events. despite the obvious contradictions and inaccuracies in al-yaʿqūbī’s narrative, he does corroborate al-ʿabbās’ long-standing influence in ḥimṣ and indicates that a revolt occurred there in the aftermath of al-walīd b. al-yazīd’s death. this revolt is also found in the al-madāʾinī circuit, where we find that the ḥimṣī population, upon discovering al-ʿabbās 144. al-yaʿqūbī, the works, 3:1057, n. 2545. 145. i would be lying if this confusion had not occurred to me throughout the course of writing, and i have spent more time engaging with the account than a copyist would have. the cambridge manuscript is in all probability a descendant of the earlier manchester manuscript. despite there being two extant manuscripts, then, they are not independent, meaning a scribal error may have been transposed if the scribe or owner did not have a different version of the text to consult. 146. al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:400–401; idem, the works, 1056. 147. susana molins lliteras, “a preliminary appraisal of marginalia in west african manuscripts from the mamma haïdara memorial library collection (timbuktu),” in the arts and crafts of literacy: islamic manuscript cultures in sub-saharan africa, ed. andrea brigaglia and mauro nobili, 143–78 (berlin: de gruyter, 2017), 157. 148. al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:402; idem, the works, 1057. 149. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1831; idem, the history, 26:189–90. the isnād is aḥmad b. zuhayr < ʿalī al-madāʾinī < ʿamr b. marwān al-kalbī < muḥammad b. saʿīd al-ḥassān al-urdunnī. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 412 had defected, wrecked and looted al-ʿabbās’ home, took his wives and household, and imprisoned his sons. al-ʿabbās then escaped to yazīd.150 so, although al-ʿabbās enjoyed the support of the ḥimṣī military (or a section of it), loyalists of al-walīd were also present in ḥimṣ and blamed al-ʿabbās for his defeat. the mention of his house serves as final indication that he was based out of ḥimṣ as well as providing another example of how strongholds held by participants in the anti-walīd faction turned against their leaders upon the caliph’s murder. it bears noting that ḥimṣ does appear to have had a large military population due to its proximity to the thughūr, much like qinnasrīn. therefore, it is possible the ḥimṣī response was in part owed to yazīd b. al-walīd’s infamous reduction of military salaries, from whence came his laqab al-nāqiṣ (the reducer).151 after the revolt in ḥimṣ, al-ʿabbās disappears from the narrative, aside from the notices about his son being named governor or deputy governor of iraq by yazīd b. al-walīd that have been mentioned earlier.152 he returns during marwān b. muḥammad’s caliphate, imprisoned in ḥarrān. a detailed imprisonment narrative is not known to me; however, we can assume that due to marwān’s positioning of himself as avenger of al-walīd, al-ʿabbās’ role in turning the tides must not have endeared him to the new caliph. we therefore find him again in prison in ḥarrān with the ʿabbāsid imām ibrāhīm b. muḥammad (d. 132/750) and yazīd’s governor of iraq, ʿabd allāh b. ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz.153 there are many varying accounts of how the prisoners died, with the most oft repeated being that of disease breaking out.154 but a variant account, narrated by quite a few sources, is that al-ʿabbās and ʿabd allāh were attacked by mawlās and smothered using pillows, while ibrāhīm had his head stuck into a bag of unslaked lime (nūra).155 although suffocation is a relatively common topos in early islamic literature, i do not know of any other instance where unslaked lime was used for this purpose.156 the uniqueness of this method is reflected by its preservation across a variety of sources without a specific transmitter ascribed to it; it was rare and strange enough to merit preservation and transmission. the only other instance known 150. al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1826; idem, the history, 26:184. 151. on the nature of ḥimṣ, see cobb, white banners, 13; on the origin of the nickname, see al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:189–90; khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, tārīkh, 2:556; idem, khalifa ibn khayyat’s history, 261; al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:401; idem, the works, 3: 1057. ḥimṣ throughout the fitna appears to have been constantly in revolt, first against yazīd and then against marwān, despite the ḥimṣīs claiming to support the children of al-walīd, whom marwān claimed to have avenged. 152. see above, n. 78. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9: 193; al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1784, 1838; idem, the history, 26:137, 198. a similar notice is found in anon., kitāb al-ʿuyūn, 133. 153. on ibrāhīm’s capture and imprisonment by marwān, see khalid blankinship, “the tribal factor in the ʿabbāsid revolution,” journal of the american oriental society 108, no. 4 (1988): 589–603. 154. see the following two encyclopaedia of islam articles: k. v. zettersteen and f. gabrieli, “al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. j. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online); blankinship, “al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd.” 155. unslaked lime was traditionally used as a depilatory. this would have led to ibrāhīm’s suffocation and would have been quite a painful death. see al-balādhurī, ansāb, 1996, 4:122; al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:409; idem, the works, 3:1065; al-masʿūdī, murūj, 6:71–72; ibn ʿabd rabbih, ʿiqd, 5:222. 156. see, for instance, the narrative of the caliph al-hādī’s death in 170/786 in al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 3:569–71; idem, the history, 30:42–55. 413 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) to me within adjacent historical traditions is in the chronographia of theophanes the confessor where, amazingly, as we shall see shortly, it is not ibrāhīm b. muḥammad who is suffocated with unslaked lime, but al-ʿabbās.157 the incongruities across the arabic-islamic written tradition and the overtly foreshadowing role and anachronistic representation of al-ʿabbās in al-madāʾinī leave a few unanswered questions. why, if he was like a prisoner in yazīd’s camp, as al-balādhurī points out, was he then let go, particularly given he had done al-walīd’s bidding in imprisoning the sons of hishām and effectively permitting him to assume caliphal office? and why would his son be named as governor of iraq under yazīd b. al-walīd, if his father had opposed him? furthermore, his imprisonment under marwān indicates the influence he wielded and probably his support of yazīd b. al-walīd. in sum, al-ʿabbās’ actions in the immediate aftermath of the killing of al-walīd seem irreconcilable with the narrative presented of al-ʿabbās warning against fitna and defecting to his own brother. if the arabic sources were all we had this would probably close the chapter on al-ʿabbās; however sources written in christian milieus in a variety of languages remember al-ʿabbās as playing a very different role, with a far more nefarious agenda. they represent him as central to al-walīd’s downfall, which he had planned from when he first set foot in the caliphal treasury at ruṣāfa. 4.2 christian sources in arabic, armenian, greek, and syriac on the role of al-ʿabbās the stark contrast between the depiction of al-ʿabbās’ role in the caliphate of his cousin al-walīd in late antique christian sources and that given in the arabic-islamic tradition merits us turning our attention to this adjacent discourse. the sources used for the following discussion are the chronicle of michael the syrian (d. 1199),158 the anonymous chronicle of 1234,159 the chronicle of theophanes the confessor, the kitab al-ʿunwān of the melkite author agapius of manbij (d. 941–42),160 the history (patmabanutʿiwn) of the second/eighth century armenian chronicler łewond,161 and the anonymous syriac chronicles of zuqnīn and 846. these first four sources, however, appear to share a common source, what has been termed in scholarship the “eastern source” associated with theophilus of edessa (d. 775).162 157. theophanes, chronographia, 421; idem, the chronicle, 583. 158. michael the syrian, chronique de michel le syrien, ed. j. b. chabot, 4 vols. (paris: ernest leroux, 1899– 1910) [hereafter referred to as msyr]. 159. anon., chronicon anonymi auctoris ad annum christi 1234 pertinens [textus], ed. j. b. chabot, 2 vols. (louvain: durbecq, 1917–20.) [hereafter referred to as chron 1234]. 160. agapius, “kitab al-ʿunvan, histoire universelle écrite par agapius (mahboub) de menbidj,” in patrologia orientalis, ed. a. a. vasiliev, 399–547 (paris: firmin-didot, 1912). 161. on the debate around the dating of łewond, see tim greenwood, “a reassessment of the history of łewond,” le muséon 125 (2012): 99–167; c. settipani, “the seventh-century bagratids between armenia and byzantium,” in constructing the seventh century, ed. c. zuckerman, 559–78 (paris: association des amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de byzance, 2013); jean-pierre mahé, “le problème de l’authenticité et de la valeur de la chronique de łewond,” in l’arménie et byzance: histoire et culture, 119–26 (paris: éditions de la sorbonne, 2015). 162. conrad, “the conquest of arwad”; theophilus, theophilus. i believe that the above-mentioned works have done a great deal to raise awareness and push the field towards more comparative and source-critical al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 414 furthermore, the first two are dependent on the now lost chronicle of dionysius of tel mahrē (d. 845) and place al-ʿabbās as central in their narratives of the fitna.163 however, the other two sources, namely those of theophanes the confessor and agapius of manbij, also retain a prolonged memory of al-ʿabbās. łewond does not mention al-ʿabbās but largely supports the depictions of al-walīd found across the sources. al-ʿabbās’ absence from this text further attests to his geographical influence being confined to the central thughūr, with the armenian chronicler’s focus being on those hajīns who operated in the north, as well as sulaymān b. hishām.164 the fact that so many syriac chronicles were produced in this region may be one reason why al-ʿabbās is so well recorded.165 this geographical focus can also be seen in their regular recording of his raiding activities for the years 707–8, 709, 711–13, and 721–22, indicating he was internal to their tradition. the sources that align most closely with the events of arabic-islamic tradition are those written in syriac, and it is to these we shall turn next, after which we will move on to the account of al-ʿabbās’ death preserved in theophanes and his depiction as forefather of the ʿabbāsid dynasty in the chronicle of 1234. the christian sources maintain the same sequence of events as the arabic-islamic tradition: al-ʿabbās being sent to ruṣāfa, the emergence of the conspiracy against al-walīd, al-bakhrāʾ, the revolt in ḥimṣ and then the death of al-ʿabbās in prison. however, in these accounts al-ʿabbās appears as an antagonist rather than as a supporter of his cousin and is given a central role in the conspiracy, allegedly even using the trust al-walīd b. yazīd placed in him to betray the caliph. 4.2.1 the dionysius circuit the chronicle of michael the syrian and chronicle of 1234 are said to have both made use of the now lost writings of dionysius of tel mahrē, and in all probability we can attribute their narrative of events to this common source. it is therefore tentatively possible to place the generation of these narratives not in the late twelfth/mid-thirteenth century, but as a product of mid-ninth-century syriac historiography. obviously, it is necessary to caution approaches. however, the identification of a single source used by these four sources seems unlikely. rather, following the conclusions of conterno, debié, and hilkens, i prefer to refer to a semitic source or source(s). for recent scholarship on the matter, see andy hilkens, the anonymous syriac chronicle of 1234 and its sources (louvain: peeters, 2018), 274–79. see also a. papaconstantinou’s review of r. g. hoyland, the chronicle of theophilus in le muséon 126, nos. 3–4 (2013): 459–65. 163. hilkens, chronicle of 1234, 274. 164. for whom they do remember, see vacca, “the umayyad north.” 165. for an outline of the sources including place of production, see brock, a brief outline of syriac literature (piscataway: gorgias press, 2011), 62 (zuqnin), 73 (msyr), 74 (chron 1234); for a recent publication on dionysius, see philip wood, the imam of the christians: the world of dionysius of tel-mahre c. 750–850 (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2021). the syriac sources frequently mention the building of infrastructure such as canals and irrigation projects on the euphrates. for example, maslama and hishām are credited as having built a canal in the chronicle of zuqnīn, while in the chronicle of 846, the anonymous chronicler characterizes hishām’s reign by his building projects. see anon., chronicle of zuqnīn, 160–61; brooks, “a syriac chronicle of the year 846,” 584. on the identification of these canals along the euphrates, see eger, islamic-byzantine frontier, 82. 415 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) that the text may have undergone significant revision by the time it was used by either of these authors, and one or both may have accessed it through an intermediary. however, for the sake of clarity, their narrative shall be referred to as the “dionysius circuit” where they are in close agreement, in the same way i have referred to the “al-madāʾinī circuit” in the previous section. this does not mean that we can reconstruct the history of the ninth-century dionysius, but rather that these two sources’ common use of this material allows us to view these narratives as connected. picking up from hishām’s death in 125/743, michael and chronicle of 1234 support the narrative that al-walīd b. yazīd immediately acted against hishām’s progeny and “mistreated his household and plundered their houses (w-ʾabeš l-bnay bayteh d-hašîm w-bazz bātayhôn).”166 this accords with the arabic-islamic sources, lending further credence to the imprisonment of hishām’s sons and the idea that they were a threat to al-walīd b. yazīd. the two syriac sources—and the armenian recension of michael—place al-ʿabbās center stage at ruṣāfa after hishām’s death, but with a different agenda: when this ʿabbās came to be in charge of the treasury of the kingdom and when he fell upon the sea of gold of the house of hishām, he desired to seize the rule from walīd. he deceitfully won over to himself all the chiefs of the arabs by ascribing to walīd all manner of odious vices. yet the king trusted him as he trusted himself.167 when paired with the notice about locking the storehouse/treasury upon hishām’s death in the arabic-islamic tradition, a serious concern about imperial finances during the transition of caliphal authority becomes apparent in the texts.168 that there would even be a “sea of gold” at ruṣāfa is corroborated within christian sources: agapius and dionysius both characterize hishām as avaricious and imposing high taxes.169 this can also be found in the arabic-islamic sources, where hishām is presented as miserly.170 this common 166. msyr, 4:463; chron 1234, 1:314; theophilus, theophilus, 240. the armenian reads “and he did evil to the house of hishām” (ew arar č‘ar tann heshmay); michael the syrian, zhamanakagrutʻiwn teaṛn mikhayēli asorwotsʻ patriarkʻi, haneal i hnagoyn grchʻagrē (jerusalem: i tparani srbotsʻ hakovbeantsʻ, 1871), 342 [hereafter referred to as msyr arm]. notably, we can also see this in agapius; however, he should not be constituted as part of the dionysius circuit (see agapius, “kitab al-ʿunvan,” 510). 167. chron 1234, 1:314, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 240; msyr, 4:463, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 240. “when he fell upon the gold of the empire, which was like the sea, he desired to seize the rule. he won over to himself the chiefs of the arabs by ascribing to walīd odious vices. yet the king trusted him as he trusted himself.” the armenian recension reads: ew ēarkʾ ǝzna yoski ew i ganj tʾagaworowtʾeann tačkatsʾ ibrew i cov (“he [al-walīd] sent him [al-ʿabbās] to the royal treasury of the arabs, which was like a sea of gold”); msyr arm, 342. on the armenian recension of michael, see a. schmidt, “the armenian versions i and ii of michael the syrian,” hugoye: journal of syriac studies 16 (2013): 93–128. 168. it is probable that there was no clear division between caliphal finances and personal wealth, and since hishām’s successor was not one of his sons, it is possible that his sons may have been able to claim it as inheritance. see al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1751; idem, the history, 26:100. 169. agapius, “kitab al-ʿunvan,” 505; msyr, 4:457, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 224; chron 1234, 1:309, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 224. 170. e.g., al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1733; idem, the history, 26:75; al-masʿūdī, murūj, 5:479, where maslama calls hishām “miserly” (bakhīl) and “cowardly” (jabān). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 416 representation of the caliph is a testament to the interconnectedness of these traditions and the fact that these sources drew upon a collective memory of hishām.171 the idea that al-ʿabbās coveted the caliphate for himself is not found in the arabic tradition, as we have seen, but for now cannot be discounted as mere conjecture. the notice that al-ʿabbās generated rumors about his cousin al-walīd b. yazīd is novel; this refers to al-walīd’s reputation as a figure prone to debauchery.172 the dionysius circuit mentions his penchant for drinking, gambling, and pleasure-seeking later on, informing the assumption that this is to what they refer.173 this representation is preserved not only in michael and chronicle of 1234 but also in the anonymous syriac chronicle of 846, which characterizes the caliph as “a man given to wine and debauchery.”174 łewond substantiates this claim stating that “he [vlitʾ/al-walīd] also occupied himself with drunkenness [and] in unhindered sordid fornication.”175 this characterization of al-walīd across arabic-islamic, christian arabic, armenian, and syriac literature draws upon a common memory and perception of the caliph.176 therefore, if al-ʿabbās spread these rumors, he certainly was very successful, but it is instead more likely that these sources are picking up on a narrative promoted by the opposition to al-walīd, i.e., that he had shown himself unfit to be caliph. thus, al-ʿabbās is also presented as a pivotal figure in the fall of al-walīd in the syriac sources. the dionysius circuit continues, setting the scene for al-walīd’s death; the locations vary but are largely in agreement with the arabic-islamic sources: michael simply states it occurred in the desert, while the chronicle of 1234 correctly places it at al-bakhrāʾ.177 the other christian sources such as agapius do not reference al-ʿabbās, and the events are given very little mention, focusing on the later events in damascus. agapius, however, does reference ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-ḥajjāj as yazīd’s general, as does zuqnīn.178 returning to the circuit, michael the syrian does not mention ʿabd al-ʿazīz, but he does claim that these events were owed to al-ʿabbās’ imperial ambitions, and the chronicle of 1234 also 171. it bears noting that conquered populations under early islam often characterized rulers as overly zealous in taxation. however, the presence of the treasury narrative in both sources should be enough for us not to view it simply as a topos. for a recent comparative discussion between armenian and syriac sources on taxation, see vacca, non-muslim provinces, 204–8, also 191 on taxation as humiliation. 172. for an overview of the negative perception of al-walīd in the arabic sources, see judd, “reinterpreting al-walīd b. yazīd.” 173. msyr, 4: 463–64, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 246; chron 1234, 1:315–16, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 246–47. 174. brooks, “chronicle of 846,” 586. 175. łewond, patmabanutʿiwn, 6:814. verēr ǝnt nmin arbašṙout‘eamb yanargel giǰout‘iwn igaxazout‘ean. i’d like to thank alison vacca for corrections to this translation. 176. agapius, “kitab al-ʿunwan,” 511–12. 177. of the non-dionysius-reliant sources, zuqnīn says “near the town of al-qurā,” on the road from palmyra, while agapius believes it occurred at palmyra; see chron 1234, 1:315–16, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 246–47; msyr, 4:463–64, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 246; agapius, “kitab al-ʿunwan,” 511–12, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 245–46; anon., chronicle of zuqnīn, 166, n. 5. 178. agapius, “kitab al-ʿunvan,” 511–12, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 245–46; anon., chronicle of zuqnīn, 166. 417 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) places al-ʿabbās center stage. the dionysius circuit therefore states that al-ʿabbās enjoyed substantial authority over the caliphate at this point, something that is present but not explicit in the arabic-islamic sources. the dionysius circuit notably maintains that al-ʿabbās’ rule would not have been recognized by the arabs (ṭayyāyê) because he was the son of a concubine (bar druktā).179 the recognition that hajīns could not become caliph is surprising in twelfth/thirteenth century texts, particularly as the ʿabbāsids and umayyads of al-andalus had no such limitations and all ʿabbāsid caliphs after al-maʾmūn (d. 218/833) were born to concubines.180 thus, this knowledge of succession practices lends credence to the idea that these notices derive from dionysius, as it is unlikely that later sources would have remembered or viewed his birth status as an impediment, given the predominance of concubine-born rulers under the later ʿabbāsids. that this notice lines up with the historical context of marwānid succession indicates an earlier provenance of this material and its historical accuracy. the dionysius circuit then states that due to this impediment yazīd was made caliph, while the chronicle of 1234 specifies that he was born to a free woman (bar ḥêrtā), which is not the case as he was the son of shāh afrid bt. fīrūz b. yazdegerd, the granddaughter of the last sasanian shāh.181 the insertion of details of al-ʿabbās’ ineligibility demonstrates how these sources aimed to justify why this figure, so central to their narrative of the fitna, did not end up as caliph. al-ʿabbās’ concubine-born status may have previously been an impediment, but in this context he may have harbored imperial ambitions as a senior member of the family. michael then proceeds directly to al-walīd’s decapitation whilst the chronicle of 1234 provides a more detailed narrative, including yazīd sending his general ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. al-ḥajjāj and informing “ʿabbās, his brother, of the day on which they would be at the place where the king would be encamped on such a day. walīd did not suspect any treachery at all, and it did not occur to him that he would encounter any harm from his brother ʿabbās.”182 this notice implies that al-ʿabbās partook actively in the conspiracy against al-walīd and used that trust against the caliph. unlike in the arabic-islamic sources, al-ʿabbās is informed of his brother yazīd’s location; this may be an allusion to his later defection, implying it was a planned betrayal. the statement that he and al-walīd were brothers is incorrect and 179. msyr, 4: 463–44, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 246–7; chron 1234, 1:315, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 247. 180. ʿathamina states, “clear evidence of this change of attitude may be seen in the fact that only three of the ʿabbāsid caliphs, whose number was 38, were born to arab mothers, while the rest were born to freed slave women (ummahāt awlād)” (ʿathamina, “how did islam contribute,” 395). those born to arab mothers are: abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ (r. 132–36/750–54) whose mother, raytā, we have already seen; al-mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85) whose mother was arwā bt. manṣūr al-ḥimyarī (d. 146/764); and muḥammad al-amīn (r. 193–98/809–13) whose mother was zubayda bt. jaʿfar bt. abī jaʿfar al-manṣūr (d. 216/831). 181. msyr, 4: 463–64, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 246–47; chron 1234, 1:315, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 247. chron 1234 gives al-ʿabbās more agency, while msyr uses the plural, implying it was the arabs who selected yazīd. hoyland states (without referencing) that al-ʿabbās’ mother was a slave whilst yazīd’s was a free woman. the nasab sources are unanimous that she was an umm walad, and an umm walad is by definition “a slave woman who had produced a child by her master.” see robinson, marriage, 90; theophilus, theophilus, 246, n. 711. 182. chron 1234, 1:315, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 247. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 418 may indicate confusion with the familial make up of the late marwānids or it may be used to indicate their closeness but not necessarily imply a genealogical bond. when al-walīd is first introduced he is categorized correctly as son of yazīd [b. ʿabd al-malik].183 that this active role in the conspiracy is only found in the chronicle of 1234 indicates that these insertions do not come from dionysius, but from a later source or the author himself.184 paired with the notices from the arabic-islamic sources, al-ʿabbās’ defection seems a means to defeat al-walīd. al-ʿabbās is also said to have revolted against al-walīd in zuqnīn implying that it was he, rather than yazīd, who was the mastermind.185 so, christian sources ranging from the late eighth to mid thirteenth centuries are largely unanimous in remembering that al-ʿabbās was central in the plot against al-walīd, contrary to the arabicislamic. the fact that this is preserved in the dionysius circuit, as was the claim that the defection was planned as a means to betray al-walīd, fills in the gaps of the arabic-islamic account of a forced defection. if this was ever circulating in the arabic-islamic tradition, it would be remarkable that the sources would have rehabilitated the figure who sparked the fitna into one who forewarned it; rather it should be seen as further indication of how the sources used a figure within their own tradition to generate a collective “historical” memory of the end of the marwānids. the arabic-islamic tradition presents al-ʿabbās as the upholder of legitimacy and respect of caliphal precedent, which is in line with other pious depictions of him. this does not mean that the narrative presented by the dionysius circuit should be discarded as ahistorical, especially given the structural narrative similarities, but perhaps these were accusations lobbied against al-ʿabbās that gained traction within communities who already viewed him in a negative light. in fact, even in the arabic-islamic tradition, we have seen that the ḥimṣīs partially blamed al-ʿabbās, indicating an accusatory undercurrent. the negative perception of al-ʿabbās in christian sources is evident in the case of theophanes, the focus of the next section, and is probably owed to his raiding activity. 4.2.2 al-ʿabbās’ death and legacy after al-walīd’s decapitation and yazīd’s seizure of rule, al-ʿabbās disappears from the syriac narratives, except when it comes to the ensuing events at ḥimṣ. the ḥimṣī reaction to al-ʿabbās’ betrayal of al-walīd is only preserved in the chronicle of 1234, supporting hilkens’ suggestion that the chronicler had access to an arabic source for the rise of marwān.186 the chronicle corroborates that the people of ḥimṣ “pulled down and destroyed 183. chron 1234, 1:314, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 240. 184. compare with msyr, 4: 463, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 240. hilkens has shown that the anonymous chronicler often inserted differing episodes or further expanded where available, particularly when compared with michael. see hilkens, chronicle of 1234, 20. it is highly likely that the anonymous chronicler was making use of arabic sources to augment dionysius’ narrative (see hilkens, chronicle of 1234, 281–91, esp. 285–86). 185. “during this year civil war broke out in the whole country because of the rebellion which ʿabbas and his brothers had instigated against walid (ii)” (anon., chronicle of zuqnīn, 166). 186. hilkens, chronicle of 1234, 286; see also, as hoyland points out, the transliteration of fitna as ptnā two lines later in chron 1234, 1:316, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 248, n. 717. 419 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the villas, taverns, inns and all the property that belonged to ʿabbas in their city in their zeal for the murdered king.”187 as in al-madāʾinī’s narrative, al-ʿabbās’ property is targeted by the revolting ḥimṣīs, further testament to a perception of his betrayal of al-walīd and his entrenchment in the city. ḥimṣ is also the location of the final reference to al-ʿabbās within the christian sources, where theophanes narrates al-ʿabbās’ death, dating it to the year am 6236/743–44. the strangeness of theophanes’ narrative merits quoting it in full: he [marwān] killed abas in prison—a man who had shed much christian blood and had devastated and depopulated many places. the ethiopian who was dispatched by marouam [marwān] to carry out this task filled a bag with unslaked lime (ασβέστου) and having approached abas, placed it over his head and nostrils and so smothered him, thus contriving a just punishment for the magician. for he had wrought much evil to the christians by means of magic and the invocation of demons. he had also shared in the murder of oualid [al-walīd].188 this narrative immediately recalls the account of ibrāhīm b. muḥammad’s death discussed earlier, but instead of taking place in a prison in ḥarrān in 750, it is in ḥimṣ in 744–45. the narratives seem to be drawing upon the same event, but theophanes dated it to four or five years prior and “upgraded” ibrāhīm to al-ʿabbās. the absence of al-ʿabbās’ death from the other sources, means in all probability it does not come from the “eastern source” used by agapius, michael the syrian, and the chronicle of 1234 but from an underlying christian, potentially greek, source available to theophanes.189 as suggested by conterno, remembering al-ʿabbās as a “magician” (γόητι) and an invoker of demons may indicate that the material on his death originated from christian communities on the thughūr, for whom al-ʿabbās was an important figure due to his raiding.190 notably, maslama is not even afforded a death notice, though he too is often described in negative terms within the chronographia.191 the specification that it was an ethiopian who carried out the murder is peculiar; in the arabic sources it is reported as having been a mawlā. thus the perpetrator is “othered” in both narrative circuits. it is not improbable to think that frontier or local communities would have taken an interest in the prince’s death; since ibrāhīm b. muḥammad was not a figure 187. chron 1234, 1:316, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 248. 188. theophanes, chronographia, 421; theophanes, the chronicle, 583. 189. conterno, la “descrizione dei tempi,” 94. 190. conterno goes a step further than this in asserting that this may be the same source that provides theophanes’ account of the conquest of tyana (conterno, la “descrizione dei tempi,” 94). theophanes (or his source) seemed quite keen on describing people as magicians. for example, our iconophile author blames the adoption of yazīd b. ʿabd al-malik’s iconoclast policies on a jewish magician (theophanes, chronographia, 402). 191. maslama (found as μασαλμας) is often described as cowardly and deceitful. e.g., am 6222 [729–30] and am 6223 [730–31] in theophanes, chronographia, 409; idem, the chronicle, 567. the only christian source known to me that records maslama’s death is the chronicle of elias of nisibis (d. 1046), though he is here drawing upon an islamic source. see elias of nisibis, la chronographie, trans. l. j. delaporte (paris: h. champion, 1910), 103. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 420 that was relevant to these communities, he was “upgraded” to al-ʿabbās.192 in fact, the chronicle of 1234, although remembering that an ibrāhīm was in jail in ḥarrān, mistakes him for the caliph ibrāhīm b. al-walīd, stating that the imprisoned ibrāhīm was the brother of the “tyrants ʿabbās and yazīd.”193additionally, despite not providing a detailed account of al-walīd’s death, theophanes identifies al-ʿabbās as a participant in the plot, creating a unanimity about his involvement across christian sources. theophanes’ focus on al-ʿabbās’ death brings us to the most startling assertion in the christian sources, namely the claim by the chronicle of 1234 that al-ʿabbās “is the ʿabbās after whom are named those in baghdad who rule in our day and are called ʿabbāsid caliphs, and from him they have this name and it is not, as some uneducated arabs think and say, from the name of ʿαbbās, uncle of their prophet muḥammad.”194 this material is in all probability not from dionysius, as it is not found in michael the syrian; therefore either michael omitted it knowing it was false or it was not part of dionysius in the first place. it might therefore be a later addition from another source that mentioned al-ʿabbās, or an interjection from the anonymous chronicler. the source does, however, show a knowledge and understanding of ʿ abbāsid legitimizing discourse. later, during its treatment of the reign of nūr al-dīn (d. 564/1174), the chronicle of 1234 does support the traditional etymological explanation, i.e., that the ʿabbāsids took their name from the prophet’s uncle al-ʿabbās b. ʿabd al-muṭṭalib (d. 32/653).195 this speaks to hilkens’ conclusion regarding the composite nature of the text and how it draws from a variety of sources for different sections.196 the chronicle also says, after the defeat of marwān at the zāb in 132/750, that this marked a shift from the umayyads to “the sons of hashim.”197 the addition of “who rule in our time” does not help us understand where this notice comes from; however, an earlier notice may. recounting that hishām appointed marwān as governor over armenia in 732, the chronicle of 1234, states, “this marwān was the one who made his seat at mayferqat [mayyāfāriqīn], and he named it his capital. until today the descendants of marwān are famous there.”198 as hoyland notes, this is obviously a reference to the kurdish marwānids who ruled from 192. the author does later mention ibrāhīm in the context of the ʿabbāsid revolution for the year am 6240 [747–48]. see theophanes, chronographia, 424; theophanes, the chronicle, 587. he does not mention his death or imprisonment, unlike agapius or chron 1234, lending further credence to their use of an arabic-islamic source. see theophilus, theophilus, 274–75. 193. chron 1234, 1:324–25, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 275. 194. chron 1234, 1:314, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 240. hānâ îtaw(h)y ʿabbās haw d-metknên hānnôn dab-baġdād w-yawmānâ sîmîn w-metqrên kalîpê ʿabbāsāyê. w-menneh ît lhôn hānâ šmâ. w-law ʾayk d-sābrîn lâ yāddûʿê d-ṭayyāyê; w-âmrîn d-men ʿabbās lam dādeh d-muḥammad nbîyâ dîlhôn ît lhôn šmâ hānâ. 195. chron 1234, 2:162; anon., chronicon anonymi auctoris ad annum christi 1234 pertinens, trans. j. b. chabot and a. abouna, 2 vols. (louvain: durbecq, 1937–74), 2:122. i am grateful to andy hilkens for pointing out that the chronicle inserts the prophet’s uncle as accompanying ʿumar into its narrative of the conquest of jerusalem. this insertion probably comes from the chronicler’s use of islamic sources. see chron 1234, 1:254–55, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 116. 196. hilkens, chronicle of 1234, 325–30, especially 327. 197. chron 1234, 1:330, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 278. 198. chron 1234, 1:310, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 230. 421 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 380–478/990–1085, indicating that the source for this material can be dated at the earliest to the end of the tenth century.199 these two attempts at genealogical and nomenclatural identification may derive from the same source, ruling out dionysius as the origin of this material as he predates the kurdish marwānids. as with theophanes’ focus on al-ʿabbās, these identifications of contemporary ruling powers with marwānid figures demonstrate how certain figures known for their raiding, who appear as largely peripheral in the arabic sources, were used as reliable and central references in the christian tradition.200 theophanes’ “upgrading” of al-ʿabbās in the narrative of the death of ibrāhīm b. muḥammad paired with the chronicle of 1234’s assertion that it was the marwānid al-ʿabbās who was the forefather of the ʿabbāsids raises questions about the ʿabbāsid daʿwa as presented in arabic sources. it is clear that christian communities in the west of the caliphate explained the dynastic shift through figures internal to their own traditions and concerns. perhaps we should not simply assume that these sources are mistaken though, and instead interpret these notices as testaments to the gradual development and articulation of the narrative of the ʿabbāsid call to riḍā (satisfaction or agreement [with the leader of the islamic umma]), the origins of which are still debated and which undoubtedly underwent significant reworking to establish ʿabbāsid legitimacy.201 the development of the ʿabbāsid daʿwa is a complicated topic, best reserved for a study of its own. however, as demonstrated by blankinship, the ʿabbāsid sources were “informed by the needs of the ʿabbāsids to make the interregnum as short as possible to help establish their own legitimacy.”202 blankinship goes on to say that “following these conclusions we can reject […] [ibrāhīm’s] designation of abū al-ʿabbās (d. 137/754) as his successor, as apocryphal.” therefore, the role of al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd in the christian tradition is testament to the fact that the narrative of the ʿabbāsid revolution had not yet developed in the 130s/mid-eighth century. overall, the christian tradition places al-ʿabbās center stage and corroborates what we saw in the arabic sources; umayyad family and syrian loyalty appears to have been towards him rather than al-walīd. in both textual traditions, al-ʿabbās’ change of allegiances (whether purposeful or not) was a crucial turning point in the earliest part of the third fitna. these sources leave no doubt that al-ʿabbās is the subject of their focus due to his activities on the thughūr; his raiding is regularly recorded, and theophanes’ account of his death refers to his actions against christians. furthermore, his hajīn status is specified by the syriac sources. this may have been an attempt to delegitimize al-ʿabbās, although this seems unlikely as it may come from dionysius who was typically positive about the 199. theophilus, theophilus, 230, n. 655. 200. we can see the same for muḥammad b. marwān and maslama b. ʿabd al-malik in the armenian sources, where their frontier activities are re-dated or reinterpreted to fit the agenda of the sources. see vacca, “the fires of naxčawan,’ 346–47; greenwood, “reassessment,” 131. 201. on the development of the ʿabbāsid riwāya (recension) of the revolution, see saleh said agha, the revolution which toppled the umayyads: neither arab nor ἁbbāsid (leiden: brill, 2003), especially chapters 1 and 5, 7–38, 117–44; on the call to riḍā see, patricia crone, “on the meaning of the ʿabbāsid call to riḍā,” in the islamic world: from classical to modern times, ed. c.e. bosworth et al., 95–111 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1989). 202. blankinship, “the tribal factor in the ʿabbāsid revolution,” 603. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 422 ʿabbāsids, especially al-maʾmūn, who was born to an umm walad, marājil.203 we are also presented with the same sequence of events as is given in the arabic-islamic tradition, corroborating the framework of the al-madāʾinī dominated narrative. the absence of a shūra narrative makes a convincing case that the christian sources were not drawing upon islamic sources for their accounts of al-ʿabbās’ imperial pretentions; rather, it most probably reflects localized memories and interpretations of events. al-ʿabbās’ relevance within these sources is clear throughout; he was a referenceable figure that the reader would recognize.204 5. conclusions the various accounts of al-ʿabbās’ involvement in al-walīd’s death as told in the arabic, armenian, greek, and syriac sources, raise a variety of questions related to the development of late antique historiography and memory. by assessing these narratives, we can see that al-ʿabbās is representative of the changes that occurred during the establishment and development of early islamic rule. not only is he remembered in sources largely internal to the centralizing narratives of fourth-/early-tenth-century caliphal historiography, but he is center stage in sources adjacent to these discourses. as i have argued, the focus on him is due to his long-term presence and impact on the central thughūr and his raiding practices, rather than the result of a legitimizing rhetoric aimed at promoting imperial or religious ambitions. it is exactly this localized influence that allowed him to impact succession and maintain a power base in the central thughūr. al-ʿabbās is not the only marwānid who was able to do this; his brothers appear to have maintained influence in their ex-governorates as well.205 al-ʿabbās should then be viewed as another maslama, the two having had relatively parallel careers, as that is how the primary sources remember him: an important military figure and a leading member of the family. while secondary scholarship has actively focused on maslama—probably due to his role in the siege of constantinople—al-ʿabbās has not received the same treatment, due to his presence across fewer events, which in turn informs our understanding of how these authors produced their narratives. neither maslama nor al-ʿabbās became caliph. however, the lack of discussion on hajīn succession during the third fitna may, in fact, indicate this was not the barrier to the throne that recent scholarship has assumed it to be.206 certainly, al-walīd’s nomination of his own 203. on the relationship between the two figures, see wood, the imam of the christians, 161–85; hilkens, chronicle of 1234, 289; on al-maʾmūn’s mother marājil, see al-yaʿqūbī, tārīkh, 2:538; idem, the works, 1205. 204. e.g., when recounting marwān’s uprising against yazīd and ibrāhīm, yazīd is identified as “the brother of ʿabbās.” see chron 1234, 1:316–17, translated in theophilus, theophilus, 249–50. 205. ʿumar b. al-walīd in jordan and bishr b. al-walīd in qinnasrīn. 206. bashear uses a poem attributed to al-walīd b. yazīd against yazīd b. al-walīd and found in ibn ʿasākir to argue that being “a hajīn was a reason for the rejection of his claim to the throne” (bashear, arabs and others, 39–40). however, this same poem is attributed to al-walīd’s son al-ḥakam in al-ṭabarī and al-balādhurī, in the fragmenta historicorum arabicorum (ed. de geoje), as well as later on in ibn ʿasākir. al-ḥakam was himself a hajīn, meaning we should read the verse: a-tankuthu bayʿatī min ajli ummī // wa-qad bāyaʿtumū qablī hajīnā (“did you break your oath to me on account of my mother?// when you have pledged allegiance to a hajīn before me?”) as a means of establishing his (and marwān’s) eligibility rather than as a means to discredit 423 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) hajīn son al-ḥakam and the eventual succession of marwān b. muḥammad b. marwān as the final marwānid caliph should suffice to show that towards the end of the marwānid period sons of concubines were eligible for the caliphate.207 representations of marwān as the rightful heir of al-walīd b. yazīd’s sons indicate the generation of a layer of historical memory that aimed to maintain a narrative of continuous succession and an attempt at legitimizing the final marwānid caliph.208 the comparative approach used in this study serves to draw out various layers of historical memory and, by seeing where sources agree, to understand what they identified as relevant. as already mentioned, al-walīd b. yazīd was the first of a new generation of marwānids—grandsons of ʿabd al-malik—to come to power. unlike his cousins, however, al-walīd had not benefited from sustained governorship or raiding activity. furthermore, given the extended rule of hishām and the time al-walīd spent as heir (more than any other walī al-ʿahd), the sons of other previous caliphs were in a strong position to make a claim. tracing the changing role of hajīns and understanding the nuances of succession policy within the umayyad polity is not the sole benefit of studying al-ʿabbās. like maslama, he is extremely well documented across the source material; however, unlike maslama, no “heroization” took place, leaving us with a more conflicting but perhaps less problematic picture of him.209 the question of reliability of sources is the foremost one raised by an analysis of this nature. however, the narratives about al-ʿabbās do not appear reconcilable, nor should we expect them to be. whether al-ʿabbās had planned to betray al-walīd or was captured is beyond our ability to determine. thus we cannot know the “correct” account, but by investigating we can shed light on what the authors wanted to convey. as vacca has put it when assessing the burning of armenian churches at naxčawan, “these discrepancies in fact reveal the tampering of the compiler or historian. if so, the misinformation is at least as significant as the ‘correct’ account, because it provides clues to the goal of the historian.”210 the near absence of any internal arabic narrative for al-walīd’s death that is not transmitted on the authority of al-madāʾinī raises the question of the agenda behind their transmission. khalīfa b. khayyāṭ’s account, as demonstrated, is terser than al-madāʾinī’s but does not contradict it. al-yaʿqūbī provides an extremely short and muddled account for al-walīd’s reign. al-madāʾinī’s use of al-ʿabbās to warn of fitan and to foreshadow yazīd b. al-walīd. see al-ṭabarī, tārīkh, 2:1891; anon., fragmenta, 1:156; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:249; ibn ʿasākir, tārikh madīnat dimashq, 15:81, 83. 207. on the documents for al-ḥakam’s nomination, see marsham, rituals, 146–64. 208. in the same poem as referenced in n. 206, attributed to al-ḥakam b. al-walīd while imprisoned, the short-lived heir nominated marwān as caliph after himself: fa-inna ahlaku anā wa-walī ʿahdī // fa-marwānun amīru al-muʾminīnā (“if i and my heir-apparent [walī ʿahdī] should die//then marwān [should be] commander of the faithful”) (al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 9:249). 209. borrut’s analysis of maslama’s “héroisation” touches upon a plethora of eulogizing narratives that are used to redeem his memory. the lack of these narratives for al-ʿabbās who, as we have seen, fulfilled a very similar role, may indicate a less worked and perhaps earlier historical memory. borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 271–84. 210. vacca, “the fires of naxčawan,” 351. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 424 coming events appears anachronistic or teleological at best, while khalīfa does not have this undercurrent and merely points out that he dissuaded yazīd from his political ambitions. the fact that all extant arabic sources were produced after al-maʾmūn’s killing of his brother al-amīn must be borne in mind. el-hibri has outlined the similarities between these two narratives of regicide—both narrated by al-madāʾinī—which focus on al-walīd and al-amīn’s inadequacies for caliphal rule and even include mirroring accounts of their deaths.211 the notion of how the source material grapples with regicide and adhere to the “orthodox” succession narrative is an important one, and further work comparing the two accounts is warranted. the arabic-islamic and christian traditions both attribute the beginning of the end of the umayyad dynasty to al-ʿabbās’ eventual support of his brother yazīd. al-ʿabbās’ representation as pious in the arabic sources runs against the christian sources, which present him as orchestrating al-walīd’s death. theophanes’ “upgrading” of ibrāhīm b. muḥammad for al-ʿabbās may demonstrate that the christian sources were attempting to contextualize the fall of the umayyads through a figure internal to their historical tradition. however, it is highly unlikely that theophanes’ narrative of al-ʿabbās’ death is entirely independent of that in the arabic-islamic sources; suffocating someone with lime is hardly common. this is not to suggest that the chroniclers used the same sources. rather, these traditions were circulating amongst different linguistic and confessional groups, who interpreted and reappropriated them to fit their needs. it is apparent from the christian sources that there was not a strong understanding of where the ʿabbāsids came from, which is unsurprising given that this was still being conceived and formatted in precisely this period. thus, they explained it through a different al-ʿabbās rather than the prophet’s uncle, as is visible in the chronicle of 1234’s preservation (or insertion) of the claim that al-ʿabbās was the forefather of the ʿabbāsid dynasty. therefore, despite their similarities in chronological structure, the sources emphasize different aspects to suit their contexts of production and target audience. within linguistic groupings we cannot and should not expect to find agreement. the shared use of al-madāʾinī by al-balādhurī and al-ṭabarī, though, does indicate the use and interpretation of a single tradition, while the accounts of khalīfa and al-yaʿqūbī demonstrate the fact that the narrative of al-walīd’s death did not develop uniformly. in a similar way, michael the syrian and the chronicle of 1234’s common use of dionysius of tel mahrē indicates the centrality of succession narratives for syriac sources, which use caliphal order to structure their texts, underlining the fact that their historiographical tradition was internal to caliphal history. 211. like al-walīd, al-amīn “stands out as the epitome of political incompetence and reckless behavior. a man deficient in political wisdom, most at home in extended sessions of drinking and revelry, and with a flair for unpredictable eccentricities.” el-hibri’s analysis at times may be overstated and the literary nature of the sources over-emphasized; however, the question of how one discusses the killing of a recognized caliph was undoubtedly one ʿabbāsid-era sources grappled with. see t. el-hibri, reinterpreting islamic historiography: harun al-rashid and the narrative of the abbasid caliphate (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1999), 59–94, at 59. 425 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) theophanes’ focus on al-ʿabbās but not on wider succession issues, by contrast, indicates the localized focus of the non-roman elements of his narrative. this article has demonstrated that al-ʿabbās is a significant figure in early islamic history and historiography despite his presence in only two events recounted in the primary sources and the minimal attention hitherto paid to him in secondary literature. however, both events, the muhallabid revolt and the third fitna, are fundamental for understanding the ʿabbāsid memory of the marwānid period. moments of tribulation and tension reveal the nuances and agenda of the source material. at the very least it is hoped that the present contribution will serve to incorporate al-ʿabbās into footnotes concerned with “caliphs that could have been” like maslama and add to the growing body of work on hajīns and the demographic changes of the late marwānid period. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the ʿabbās after whom those who rule in baghdad are named • 426 appendix 1: marwānid family tree legend: [#] — indicates order in marwānid succession al-ʿabbās b. al-walīd — italicised name indicates they were born to an umm walad. 427 • leone pecorini goodall al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) bibliography primary sources 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behind;2 but this was a unique event in his life, and in 1. i have spoken about the material discussed in this paper in several settings—at the hebrew university of jerusalem (for the research group on ancient arabia at the institute for advanced studies, 2010), at the university of wisconsin (as part of the merle curti lectures, 2014), at the institute for advanced study in princeton (at a colloquium in honor of patricia crone, 2015), at the university of pennsylvania middle east center (2015), at the university of maryland (for the first millennium seminar, 2015), and at the university of chicago (for the middle east history and theory conference, 2015). in each case i profited from the comments and questions of my audiences. i also received numerous useful remarks on an early written draft from three students in my graduate seminar in the spring of 2015: usaama al-azami, michael dann, and jelena radovanović. a subsequent draft was read by ella landau-tasseron and michael lecker; they generously provided me with extensive comments, references, and corrections. finally, i have benefited from the remarks of three anonymous reviewers. 2. ss 1-2:399.20 = sg 183. i use abbreviations for the sources i cite most often: ss is the sīra of ibn hishām in the edition of saqqā and others, sg is the same work in the translation of guillaume, and w is wāqidī’s maghāzī in the edition of jones (i do not provide page references to the translation of faizer and others, since muḥammad’s deputies in medina abstract it would be a reasonable inference from our sources that each time muḥammad was away from medina he left behind a deputy. the object of this paper is to collect and interpret the information our sources provide about these deputies. after a brief introduction, the second and third sections assemble and contextualize the data. the fourth section then discusses questions of interpretation: how far we can rely on the information in our sources, what this information can tell us about the kind of people muḥammad would appoint as deputies, and how the emerging pattern might be explained historically. the main finding is that the data, if at all reliable, indicate that deputies were frequently people with little ability to cope with emergencies, and that muḥammad must have been giving priority to political considerations in choosing them. readers interested only in the interpretative questions could skip the second and third sections. 2 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) any case such a separation would not have solved the delegation problem. one context in which muḥammad was accordingly unable to avoid delegation was when he decided to mount an expedition—usually but not always for military purposes—outside his home base in medina. on each such occasion he faced a stark choice. if he chose to stay at home he needed to appoint a commander to lead the expedition.3 alternatively, if he chose to lead the expedition himself, he had to appoint a deputy to take his place at home.4 this was a choice that he faced on average around seven times a year during his decade in medina, so that it was by no means a trivial aspect of his governance.5 it is the occasions on which muḥammad chose to lead the expedition himself and appoint a deputy over medina that are our primary concern in this article. it has two objectives. one is simply to bring together the relevant data from the sources, and the other is to ask what this information, if reliable, can tell us about muḥammad’s style of leadership. as to the question whether the information is in fact reliable, i will offer some comments but no definitive answer. before we go to the sources, it is worth asking what we might expect to find in them. if for a moment we put ourselves in muḥammad’s sandals, what would we be looking for in a deputy? one obvious qualification for the job would be trustworthiness: to hand over one’s base to someone one cannot trust does not seem like a good idea. the other obvious qualification would be competence—in particular the ability to handle political and military trouble should it arise in muḥammad’s absence. during much of his time in medina, he confronted enmity and opposition among various groups, be they pagans, jews, or hypocrites (munāfiqūn). and even when he had overcome his enemies, he was still at the head of a fractious coalition. the tension between his meccan and medinese supporters—the muhājirūn and the anṣār—threatened discord on more than one occasion: it nearly exploded at muraysīʿ during the raid on the banū ʾl-muṣṭaliq thanks to a minor incident at a watering hole, it reappeared in the aftermath of the battle of ḥunayn, and it threatened to disrupt the community on muḥammad’s death. so it stands to reason that muḥammad would set considerable store by appointing deputies with the competence to nip trouble in the bud. two things would tend to correlate with such competence. one would be experience: a rookie deputy would be more likely to make a mess of things than one who had held the post before. the other would be social and political clout: a deputy who could mobilize men and resources in an emergency would do a better job than one who could not. so in effect we have three criteria: trustworthiness, experience, and clout. we might therefore expect that having identified a limited number of men who met these requirements, muḥammad would have made it his practice to appoint them again and it gives the pagination of jones’s edition). 3. there were thirty-seven such expeditions if we go by ibn hishām, fifty-two if we go by wāqidī. there are accounts suggesting that initially muḥammad did not appoint commanders, with unfortunate results (landautasseron, “features of the pre-conquest muslim army”, 320). 4. ibn hishām and wāqidī are in agreement on the twenty-seven such expeditions. these are very clearly expeditions mounted on specific occasions with specific objectives; they are not part of a pattern of itinerant rulership. 5. he faced it sixty-four times in all if we go by ibn hishām, seventy-nine if we go by wāqidī. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 3 again. with these a priori expectations in mind, let us now proceed to the data. readers interested only in the upshot of this study may, however, prefer to skip the following two sections and go directly to the discussion. 2. the data 2.1 terminology the language in which the sources inform us of muḥammad’s appointments of deputies is not uniform, and we have always to reckon with the possibility that the usage of our sources may be anachronistic. but the pattern is fairly consistent, with the terms employed consisting overwhelmingly of variations on two roots: kh-l-f and ʿ-m-l. let us begin with the root kh-l-f.6 as will be seen, one of our two major sources for muḥammad’s deputies is wāqidī (d. 207/823), who regularly uses the verb istakhlafa (“he appointed as deputy”), as for example when he tells us that at the time of a certain expedition muḥammad “appointed ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān as deputy over medina” (istakhlafa al-nabī (ṣ) ʿalā ʾl-madīna ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān).7 on three occasions he uses another form of the root, the verb khallafa (literally “he left behind”, but also “he appointed as his khalīfa”),8 as when he says of abū lubāba ibn ʿabd al-mundhir that muḥammad “appointed him deputy over medina” (khallafahu ʿalā ʾl-madīna).9 he never uses the noun khalīfa in the sense of “deputy”, but a somewhat later author, balādhurī (d. 279/892f), frequently does so. he tells us, for example, that at the time of the expedition to ḥudaybiya, “his deputy in medina was ibn umm maktūm” (kāna khalīfatuhu biʾl-madīna ibn umm maktūm).10 often he refers to the deputy as “the deputy of the messenger of god” (khalīfat rasūl allāh),11 and he occasionally employs the abstract noun khilāfa, “deputyship”.12 but he too uses the verb istakhlafa.13 the use of the root in the context of delegation is koranic: 6. i owe to david graf the information that the noun ḫlf occurs in an as yet unpublished thamūdic inscription from ḥumayma. 7. w 196.4. in addition wāqidī or his sources use the term in the following passages: w 7.20, 7.21, 180.16, 182.6, 183.18, 197.3, 199.3, 371.8, 384.4, 402.11, 496.17, 537.13, 537.20, 546.20, 573.8, 636.11, 995.14. 8. see lane, lexicon, 793c. 9. w 101.9. the sense here cannot be “he left him behind” since abū lubāba initially accompanied muḥammad on the way to badr; muḥammad then had second thoughts and sent him back (see w 159.11). for the other passages in which wāqidī uses khallafa see w 277.13 (khallafahu biʾl-madīna yuṣallī biʾl-nās) and 684.4 (khallafahu ʿalā ʾl-madīna). in the last case wāqidī has already used the verb istakhlafa of the same person regarding the same expedition (w 636.11). 10. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 350.21; similarly 287.5, 287.11, 287.17, 287.22, 339.4, 340.17, 341.13, 349.3, 352.22, 368.18, 368.24. typically the preposition is “over” rather than “in”. 11. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 294.2, 309.23, 310.18, 310.24, 338.15, 340.7, 342.15, 345.18, 347.19, 352.11, 353.11, 364.13, 368.17. this, of course, is a standard title of the caliphs; khalīfa means both “deputy” and “successor”. 12. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 339.21 (where ibn umm maktūm is described as muqīman ʿalā khilāfat rasūl allāh), 352.22. 13. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 289.7, 311.19, 311.24, 348.13, 350.22. 4 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) in q7:142 moses, before going to speak with god, tells aaron: “be my deputy among my people (ukhlufnī fī qawmī).” yet the first form of the verb is rarely used in our sources with regard of muḥammad’s deputies.14 turning to the root ʿ-m-l, we find that one of our other major sources for the deputies, ibn hishām (d. 218/833), always uses the verb istaʿmala (“he appointed as his agent”) when speaking of the appointment of a deputy. thus he tells us that at the time of his first expedition muḥammad “appointed saʿd ibn ʿubāda as his agent over medina” (istaʿmala ʿalā ʾl-madīna saʿd ibn ʿubāda).15 but wāqidī too occasionally employs this verb.16 neither of them uses the noun ʿāmil (“agent”), though khalīfa ibn khayyāṭ (d. 240/854f) in his account of muḥammad’s deputies does so once in a slightly ambiguous context.17 there is perhaps some reason to think that the use of the root kh-l-f in the context of muḥammad’s deputies is older than the use of ʿ-m-l. whenever wāqidī is unambiguously quoting earlier sources, the verb used is istakhlafa rather than istaʿmala—though this may not mean very much since istakhlafa is his own preferred usage, and he could simply be assimilating earlier sources to his own practice.18 the same could be true of ibn hishām when he quotes the father of ʿabd al-ʿazīz ibn muḥammad al-darāwardī (the latter being a well-known medinese traditionist who died in 187/802f) as using the verb istaʿmala in reference to the appointment of a deputy at the time of the expedition to tabūk.19 but in one place ibn isḥāq (d. 150/767f), who does not usually give us information about the appointment of deputies, quotes a tradition going back to ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabbās (d. 68/687f) about the appointment of a deputy at the time of the fatḥ (the conquest of mecca); here the verb used—contrary to ibn hishām’s normal usage—is istakhlafa.20 my impression is 14. i have noted a couple of exceptions. maqrīzī in his account of the expedition against the banū liḥyān says of muḥammad: wa-kāna yakhlufuhu ʿalā ʾl-madīna ibn umm maktūm (imtāʿ al-asmāʿ, 1:258.15). ibn isḥāq, in describing how muḥammad appointed ʿalī to take care of his family during the tabūk expedition, has muḥammad say fa-ʾkhlufnī fi ahlī wa-ahlika (ss 3-4:520.2 = sg 604), but this incident is implicitly linked to the koranic verse. 15. ss 1-2:591.1 = sg 737 no. 337. for other examples see ss 1-2:598.10 = sg 738 no. 345, ss 1-2:601.6 = sg 738 no. 348. ibn hishām’s usage is so consistent that there is little point in giving exhaustive references for it; in all he uses the verb regarding the appointment of deputies twenty-eight times. 16. w 159.11, 404.4, 441.1. in none of these cases is it likely that in deviating from his usual practice wāqidī is respecting the exact wording of a source. 17. following his account of the death of muḥammad in 11/632, khalīfa gives an account of those who held office under him (khalīfa, taʾrīkh, 61–4). here the first section has the heading tasmiyat ʿummālihi (ṣ), which we would normally render something like “naming of his governors” (61.8); the list begins with muḥammad’s deputies, then goes on to his governors. in his account of the appointment of the deputies (including one that muḥammad appointed in mecca when he left it after the conquest) he uses only the verb istakhlafa (five times in eleven lines), whereas for the governors he uses istaʿmala (62.3) and wallā (62.6, 62.12). without any ambiguity abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī (d. 430/1038) describes sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa as ʿāmil al-nabī (ṣ) ʿalā ʾl-madīna ʿām ḥunayn (maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 1451.12). 18. for cases in which wāqidī is unambiguously citing information about the appointment of deputies from a specific source, see w 180.16, 183.18, 197.3, 402.11. 19. ss 3-4:519.10 = sg 783 no. 860. for ʿabd al-ʿazīz ibn muḥammad al-darāwardī see mizzī, tahdhīb, 18:187–95. 20. ss 3-4:399.19 = sg 545; the same verb appears in a parallel passage from the rāzī recension of ibn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 5 that other sources that are plausibly old likewise use the verb istakhlafa.21 the only other roots i have noted in this context are ʾ-m-r, w-l-y, and n-w-b. ibn isḥāq employs the verb ammara, “to appoint as amīr”, in relation to the arrangements made by muḥammad while he was on the way to badr,22 and ibn ḥabīb (d. 245/860) likewise uses the term amīr when referring to the appointment of deputies.23 ibn ḥibbān (d. 354/965) in an entry on sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa says that the prophet put him in charge of—wallāhu— medina when he went out to khaybar.24 muḥyī ʾl-dīn ibn ʿarabī (d. 638/1240) uses the term nuwwāb, which does indeed mean “deputies”; but i have not seen it used elsewhere in the context of the deputies appointed by muḥammad.25 the fact that different roots are used to refer to deputies raises the question whether there might be a distinction between more than one kind of deputy. as we will see, there is a small amount of evidence that would support such a distinction, but it is not linked to the use of the two main roots. 2.2 three early sources for muḥammad’s deputies three early sources provide us with either a list of deputies or the information that enables us to generate one. wāqidī provides such a list in the introductory section of his maghāzī.26 he has just informed us that the number of expeditions in which muḥammad himself participated was twenty-seven (as opposed to the fifty-two which he sent out but did not accompany).27 he then tells us whom muḥammad appointed as deputy (istakhlafa) on each occasion, naming the expedition and the deputy; in reproducing the information below, i number isḥāq’s work quoted in ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, i/1627.16 = history, 8:168. it should be understood that ibn isḥāq’s account of the life of muḥammad was current in numerous transmissions that differed from one another to a greater or lesser extent; the only transmission that survives in a form approaching completeness is that embedded in the sīra of ibn hishām. 21. thus ibn saʿd (d. 230/845) in his entry on ibn umm maktūm uses the verb in his own voice (ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:150.26), after which it appears ten times in the traditions he quotes (151.3 and the four traditions immediately following, 153.15 and the two traditions immediately following). these traditions go back to traditionists of the generation of the successors. 22. ss 1-2:688.17 = sg 331 (ammara abā lubāba ʿalā ʾl-madīna). this departure from normal usage might be significant, see below, text to note 334. 23. ibn ḥabīb, muḥabbar, 125.16, 127.2, 127.3. his usage could be affected by the fact that he includes these deputies in a wider category of appointees whom he terms umarāʾ rasūl allāh (125.15). 24. ibn ḥibbān, thiqāt, 3:181.8. see also below, note 334 and text to note 342. 25. muḥyī ʾl-dīn ibn ʿarabī, muḥāḍarat al-abrār, 1:75.3, and cf. 77.18. 26. w 7.20. the isnād is qālū, “they said”, referring back to the massive composite isnād with which the work opens. 27. the number twenty-seven is wāqidī’s (w 7.14). fifty-two is my count based on his list (w 2–7) with a minor adjustment to eliminate a doublet: the expedition of ʿabdallāh ibn unays against sufyān ibn khālid al-hudhalī makes two appearances in the list (w 3.9, 4.12), but only the second is matched by an account in the body of the text (w 531–3). 6 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) the expeditions and add the date of each as given by wāqidī.28 the text of the list as we have it omits one expedition, no. 6; this is doubtless a scribal error, and i supply the missing information from the body of wāqidī’s work.29 the column on the far right gives a reference to the account of the expedition in the body of the work. where this account provides information about the deputy, the reference takes the form of a page and line number; but where such information is not given, i give the page number or numbers for the entire account. as can be seen, wāqidī omits to give the relevant information in a third of the cases. 1. ṣafar 2 waddān30 saʿd ibn ʿubāda w 11–12 2. rabīʿ i 2 buwāṭ saʿd ibn muʿādh w 12 3. rabīʿ i 2 kurz ibn jābir31 zayd ibn ḥāritha w 12 4. jumādā ii 2 dhū ʾl-ʿushayra abū salama ibn ʿabd al-asad w 12f 5. ramaḍān 2 badr al-qitāl abū lubāba ibn ʿabd al-mundhir32 w 101.833 6. shawwāl 2 qaynuqāʿ abū lubāba ibn ʿabd al-mundhir w 180.16 7. dhū ʾl-ḥijja 2 sawīq abū lubāba ibn ʿabd al-mundhir w 182.6 8. muḥarram 3 kudr34 ibn umm maktūm al-maʿīṣī w 183.18 9. rabīʿ i 3 dhū amarr35 ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān w 196.4 10. jumādā i 3 buḥrān36 ibn umm maktūm w 197.3 11. shawwāl 3 uḥud ibn umm maktūm w 199.337 12. shawwāl 3 ḥamrāʾ al-asad ibn umm maktūm w 334–40 13. rabīʿ i 4 banū ʾl-naḍīr ibn umm maktūm w 371.8 14. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 4 badr al-mawʿid ʿabdallāh ibn rawāḥa w 384.4 15. muḥarram 5 dhāt al-riqāʿ ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān w 402.11 16. rabīʿ i 5 dūmat al-jandal sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa w 404.4 17. shaʿbān 5 muraysīʿ zayd ibn ḥāritha w 404–26 18. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 5 khandaq ibn umm maktūm w 441.1 28. i take the dates from wāqidī’s chronological summary (w 2–7), where necessary converting them to the form “month year”. like jones, i base my tables on wāqidī’s dating “only because his chronological system is more complete” (jones, “chronology of the maghāzī”, 245, and cf. 272, 276). 29. w 180.16. the omission is at w 8.1. 30. so in the list of deputies (w 7.20), but in the body of the work this expedition is referred to as ghazwat al-abwāʾ (w 11.17, and cf. 2.12). 31. in the body of the work this expedition is referred to as ghazwat badr al-ūlā (w 12.9). 32. for the view that he was in fact present at the battle, see ibn ḥibbān, thiqāt, 1:192.3. i will not be concerned with the deputy muḥammad appointed over “qubāʾ and the people of the ʿāliya” at this time (w 101.9). 33. also w 159.11, 180.16. 34. in the body of the work this expedition is referred to as ghazwat qarārat al-kudr (w 182.10). 35. in the body of the work this expedition is referred to as ghazwat ghaṭafān bi-dhī amarr (w 193.13). 36. in the body of the work this expedition is referred to as ghazwat banī sulaym bi-buḥrān bi-nāḥiyat al-furʿ (w 196.6, so vocalized). 37. also w 277.13. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 7 19. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 5 banū qurayẓa ibn umm maktūm w 496.17 20. rabīʿ i 6 banū liḥyān ibn umm maktūm w 537.13 21. rabīʿ ii 6 ghāba ibn umm maktūm w 537.2038 22. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 6 ḥudaybiya ibn umm maktūm w 573.8 23. jumādā i 7 khaybar sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī w 636.11 (abū dharr)39 24. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 7 ʿumrat al-qaḍiyya40 abū ruhm al-ghifārī41 w 731–41 25. ramaḍān 8 fatḥ, etc.42 ibn umm maktūm w 780–960 26. rajab 9 tabūk ibn umm maktūm w 995.14 sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa (muḥammad ibn maslama)43 27. dhū ʾl-ḥijja 10 ḥajjat rasūl allāh44 ibn umm maktūm w 1088–1115 ibn hishām does not provide a list of deputies, but the information he gives enables us to construct one. in the list that follows i take wāqidī’s listing of the expeditions and their dates as a template and substitute the names of the deputies as given by ibn hishām, together with references to the arabic text of his sīra. because wāqidī and ibn hishām do not always agree on the chronology of the expeditions, my listing entails some changes to the order in which ibn hishām—and presumably ibn isḥāq before him—present the expeditions, as can be seen from the page numbers. but there is no disagreement between 38. also w 546.20. 39. for sibāʿ as deputy see also w 684.4. at 637.1 he adds that “it is said” that the deputy was abū dharr, sc. al-ghifārī, but prefers the view that it was sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa. i indicate non-preferred alternatives in parentheses. 40. usually known as the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ (see w 6 n. 1 and 731 n. 1); i use this latter form when speaking in my own voice. 41. note however that ibn saʿd quotes from wāqidī a report that implies that abū ruhm was with the expedition (ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:180.2). 42. the fatḥ is the conquest of mecca, which led on to the battle of ḥunayn and an attack on ṭāʾif. i will not be concerned with the deputy muḥammad appointed over mecca at this time (w 889.12, 959.13). 43. in his list, wāqidī gives the deputy as ibn umm maktūm, adding “and it is said muḥammad ibn maslama al-ashhalī” (w 8.11). in his account of the expedition in the body of the work, however, wāqidī identifies the deputy as sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī, again adding that “it is said” that it was muḥammad ibn maslama, this being the only expedition (sc. led by the prophet) in which he did not participate (w 995.14). but in a quotation from wāqidī found in ibn ʿasākir’s history of damascus we read that the deputy was sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa, or it is said muḥammad ibn maslama, or it is said ibn umm maktūm, with muḥammad ibn maslama preferred (athbatuhum ʿindanā, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. shīrī, 2:35.18); according to the isnād, ibn ʿasākir received his text of wāqidī by much the same line of transmission as we do (compare 33.12 and w 1.2), so the discrepancy is unexpected. altogether, the unusual proliferation of candidates for the position of deputy for this particular expedition may be related to the problem of absenteeism associated with it in the sources; for anyone who was not there, to have been appointed deputy in medina could justify an absence that was otherwise potentially problematic. 44. so wāqidī’s list (w 8.12), but in the body of the work he refers to it as the ḥajjat al-wadāʿ (w 1088.5). note that i use the conventional vocalization ḥijja in the month-name “dhū ʾl-ḥijja”, but defer to the vocalization marked in the text of wāqidī in writing “ḥajjat rasūl allāh” and “ḥajjat al-wadāʿ”. for the two vocalizations see lane, lexicon, 514b. 8 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) wāqidī and ibn isḥāq—and hence ibn hishām—as to either the number or the identity of the expeditions led by muḥammad.45 1. ṣafar 2 waddān saʿd ibn ʿubāda ss 1-2:591.1 2. rabīʿ i 2 buwāṭ sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn ss 1-2:598.10 3. rabīʿ i 2 kurz ibn jābir46 zayd ibn ḥāritha ss 1-2:601.6 4. jumādā ii 2 dhū ʾl-ʿushayra47 abū salama ibn ʿabd al-asad ss 1-2:598.16 5a. ramaḍān 2 badr al-qitāl48 ʿamr ibn umm maktūm ss 1-2:612.14 5b. ramaḍān 2 badr al-qitāl abū lubāba49 ss 1-2:612.15 6. shawwāl 2 qaynuqāʿ50 bashīr ibn ʿabd al-mundhir51 ss 3-4:49.2 7. dhū ʾl-ḥijja 2 sawīq bashīr ibn ʿabd al-mundhir52 ss 3-4:45.3 8. muḥarram 3 kudr53 sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī ss 3-4:43.14 ibn umm maktūm54 9. rabīʿ i 3 dhū amarr ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān ss 3-4:46.8 10. jumādā i 3 buḥrān55 ibn umm maktūm ss 3-4:46.12 11. shawwāl 3 uḥud ibn umm maktūm ss 3-4:64.1 12. shawwāl 3 ḥamrāʾ al-asad ibn umm maktūm ss 3-4:102.1 13. rabīʿ i 4 banū ʾl-naḍīr ibn umm maktūm ss 3-4:190.22 14. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 4 badr al-mawʿid56 ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy57 ss 3-4:209.15 45. for ibn isḥāq’s statement that their number was twenty-seven, and his list of them, see ss 3-4:608.13 = sg 659f. caetani in his chronological digest of early islamic history gives a list of deputies for eighteen of muḥammad’s expeditions (annali, 2:1:523f n. 2, with cross-references to his accounts of the individual expeditions); he follows ibn hishām closely, 46. here safawān or badr al-ūlā (ss 1-2:601.2, 601.9 = sg 286). 47. here ʿushayra (ss 1-2:598.14, 599.7, 599.14 = sg 285). 48. here badr al-kubrā (ss 1-2:606.6 = sg 289). 49. for abū lubāba, in addition to ss 1-2:612.15 = sg 292 and 738 no. 354, see ss 1-2:688.16 = sg 331. the first is from ibn hishām, the second from ibn isḥāq. it is presumably the second that has a parallel in the rāzī transmission of his work noted by mughulṭāy ibn qilīj (al-zahr al-bāsim, 907.6, where salama is salama ibn al-faḍl al-rāzī). mughulṭāy also mentions that mūsā ibn ʿuqba (d. 141/758f) said the same (907.12), and repeats it in his ishāra, 200.6; this is confirmed by a report from mūsā found in abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 403 no. 1203, where mūsā transmits from zuhrī. incidentally, the report immediately following (no. 1204) may be an early attestation of knowledge of ibn hishām’s work in the east. for the possibly distinct roles of ibn umm maktūm and abū lubāba see the first subsection of section 4.3 below. 50. here banū qaynuqāʿ (ss 3-4:47.1 = sg 363). 51. that is abū lubāba. 52. adding wa-huwa abū lubāba. 53. here ghazwat banī sulaym biʾl-kudr (ss 3-4:43.11 = sg 360). 54. the two are given as alternatives with no expression of preference, though the order would suggest that sibāʿ is the preferred candidate. 55. here ghazwat al-furuʿ min buḥrān (ss 3-4:46.11 = sg 362; furuʿ is so vocalized at 46.14). 56. here ghazwat badr al-ākhira (ss 3-4:209.10 = sg 447). 57. adding the name of ubayy’s mother salūl and the nisba al-anṣārī. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 9 15. muḥarram 5 dhāt al-riqāʿ abū dharr al-ghifārī ss 3-4:203.14 (ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān)58 16. rabīʿ i 5 dūmat al-jandal sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī ss 3-4:213.16 17. shaʿbān 5 muraysīʿ59 abū dharr al-ghifārī ss 3-4:289.11 (numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī)60 18. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 5 khandaq ibn umm maktūm ss 3-4:220.6 19. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 5 banū qurayẓa ibn umm maktūm ss 3-4:234.5 20. rabīʿ i 6 banū liḥyān ibn umm maktūm ss 3-4:279.10 21. rabīʿ ii 6 ghāba61 ibn umm maktūm ss 3-4:284.15 22. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 6 ḥudaybiya numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī ss 3-4:308.8 23. jumādā i 7 khaybar numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī ss 3-4:328.8 24. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 7 ʿumrat al-qaḍiyya62 ʿuwayf ibn al-aḍbaṭ al-duʾalī ss 3-4:370.12 25. ramaḍān 8 fatḥ, etc. abū ruhm al-ghifārī63 ss 3-4:399.21 26. rajab 9 tabūk muḥammad ibn maslama al-anṣārī ss 3-4:519.9 (sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa)64 27. dhū ʾl-ḥijja 10 ḥajjat rasūl allāh65 abū dujāna al-sāʿidī ss 3-4:601.11 (sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī)66 the third list is provided by khalīfa in his taʾrīkh.67 it gives information for only 58. ʿuthmān is mentioned with the formula “it is said”. 59. here ghazwat banī ʾl-muṣtaliq (ss 3-4:289.6 = sg 490). 60. numayla is mentioned with the formula “it is said”. 61. here ghazwat dhī qarad (ss 3-4:281.2 = sg 486; cf. ss 281.6, 281.12). 62. here ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ (ss 3-4:370.4 = sg 530). 63. giving his name as kulthūm ibn ḥuṣayn ibn ʿutba ibn khalaf. unusually, the naming of the deputy comes not from ibn hishām but rather from a tradition going back to ʿabdallāh ibn al-ʿabbās and transmitted by ibn isḥāq; that this cannot be an unmarked interpolation of ibn hishām’s is shown by the parallel in the ḥarrānī transmission of ibn isḥāq’s work (see abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 2388 no. 5848; for the ḥarrānī transmitters muḥammad ibn salama and abū jaʿfar al-nufaylī see mizzī, tahdhīb, 25:289–91 and 16:88–92 respectively). oddly, abū nuʿaym elsewhere describes sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa as ʿāmil al-nabī ʿalā ʾl-madīna ʿām ḥunayn (maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 1451.12). 64. after mentioning muḥammad ibn maslama, ibn hishām goes on to quote the father of ʿabd al-ʿazīz ibn muḥammad al-darāwardī to the effect that the deputy was sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa (ss 3-4:519.10 = sg 783 no. 860). ṭabarī, by contrast, attibutes this information to ibn isḥāq (ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, i/1696.4 = history, 9:51; for his line of transmission from ibn isḥāq see below, note 87). ibn ʿasākir, however, attributes the statement that muḥammad appointed muḥammad ibn maslama to ibn isḥāq (taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. shīrī, 2:31.1; his transmitter from ibn isḥāq is yūnus, that is the kūfan yūnus ibn bukayr (d. 199/814f), see 23.18). 65. here ḥajjat al-wadāʿ (ss 3-4:601.4 = sg 649). 66. sibāʿ is mentioned with the formula “it is said”. 67. khalīfa, taʾrīkh, 61.9. in his narrative coverage of the expeditions (13–58) he only mentions one deputy appointed over medina, namely muḥammad ibn maslama at the time of the expedition to kudr (16.8). he ascribes this information to ibn isḥāq, whose work he knows in two baṣran transmissions (see 8.7); it does not appear in ibn hishām’s recension (ss 3-4:43.12), nor in the rāzī transmission quoted by ṭabarī (taʾrīkh, i/1363.11 = history, 7:88). 10 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) nineteen of the expeditions.68 again i take wāqidī’s listing of the expeditions and their dates as a template, and substitute the names of the deputies as given by khalīfa.69 note that he states that ibn umm maktūm was deputy for thirteen expeditions, but in the text as we have it he only names twelve of them.70 1. ṣafar 2 waddān ibn umm maktūm 2. rabīʿ i 2 buwāṭ ibn umm maktūm 3. rabīʿ i 2 kurz ibn jābir ibn umm maktūm 4. jumādā ii 2 dhū ʾl-ʿushayra ibn umm maktūm 5a. ramaḍān 2 badr al-qitāl ibn umm maktūm 5b. ramaḍān 2 badr al-qitāl abū lubāba 6. shawwāl 2 qaynuqāʿ — 7. dhū ʾl-ḥijja 2 sawīq ibn umm maktūm 8. muḥarram 3 kudr muḥammad ibn maslama 9. rabīʿ i 3 dhū amarr ibn umm maktūm 10. jumādā i 3 buḥrān ibn umm maktūm 11. shawwāl 3 uḥud ibn umm maktūm 12. shawwāl 3 ḥamrāʾ al-asad ibn umm maktūm 13. rabīʿ i 4 banū ʾl-naḍīr — 14. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 4 badr al-mawʿid — 15. muḥarram 5 dhāt al-riqāʿ ibn umm maktūm 16. rabīʿ i 5 dūmat al-jandal — 17. shaʿbān 5 muraysīʿ numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī 18. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 5 khandaq — 19. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 5 banū qurayẓa — 20. rabīʿ i 6 banū liḥyān — 21. rabīʿ ii 6 ghāba — 22. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 6 ḥudaybiya ʿuwayf ibn al-aḍbaṭ of the banū al-duʾil 68. compare the traditions according to which the number of muḥammad’s expeditions was nineteen (ibn abī shayba, muṣannaf, ed. laḥḥām, 8:467 nos. 1–3, 5). in khalīfa’s narrative of events i count twenty-two expeditions. 69. i also take for granted the alternative names of expeditions already noted. khalīfa refers to kudr as qarqarat al-kudr in his list (taʾrīkh, 61.15), though not in his actual account of the expedition (16.3); for this variant form of the name see w 182 n. 4. 70. whether or not the discrepancy goes back to khalīfa himself, it is old: the part of khalīfa’s list relating to ibn umm maktūm is reproduced by ibn ʿabd al-barr (d. 463/1071) in one of his biographical entries on him (istīʿāb, 1198f no. 1946), and the same discrepancy appears. here the passage is prefixed with the words “he came to medina a little after badr” and apparently ascribed to wāqidī (1198.15). this ascription of the passage should be disregarded, among other things because the prefixed words and the list of expeditions are incompatible: if ibn umm maktūm only came to medina a little after badr, then he could not have acted as deputy for the first four expeditions. compare also the way the prefixed words are continued in ibn ʿabd al-barr’s other entry on ibn umm maktūm (997.11), and the unattributed parallel in ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, 4:1:150.25. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 11 23. jumādā i 7 khaybar abū ruhm al-ghifārī 24. dhū ʾl-qaʿda 7 ʿumrat al-qaḍiyya abū ruhm 25. ramaḍān 8 fatḥ, etc. abū ruhm al-ghifārī kulthūm ibn ḥuṣayn 26. rajab 9 tabūk sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī 27. dhū ʾl-ḥijja 10 ḥajjat rasūl allāh ibn umm maktūm khalīfa adds that ghālib ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī served as deputy at the time of some unspecified expedition or expeditions of the prophet (fī baʿḍ ghazawātihi); this can perhaps be identified as that against the banū liḥyān.71 in any case i will include ghālib in what follows. as will become cumulatively evident, posterity paid a lot of attention to the data given by wāqidī and ibn hishām. khalīfa’s contribution, by contrast, seems to have had little impact.72 2.3 other relatively early sources for muḥammad’s deputies there are, of course, many other sources that provide information on muḥammad’s deputies, but my impression is that, while they offer us occasional points of interest, they mostly tend to repeat the data of wāqidī or ibn hishām without telling us anything new. i treat here sources of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries, and relegate later sources to an appendix. ibn saʿd (d. 230/845), in his account of the expeditions led by muḥammad, in general names deputies identical to those given by wāqidī73—no surprise given his close connection to him.74 but he does contribute a finer point. the reader may (or may not) recollect that with regard to the expedition to tabūk (no. 26), wāqidī confuses us: he names the deputy as ibn umm maktūm in one place, as sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa in another, and in both places adds that it is also said that it was muḥammad ibn maslama. here ibn saʿd gives us his own opinion on the question, in apparent disagreement with wāqidī: he tells us that the deputy was muḥammad ibn maslama, adding that in his opinion this view is more to be relied on than any alternative.75 in his biographical entries he sometimes tells us that the person in 71. khalīfa, taʾrīkh, 61.18. ibn al-kalbī states that muḥammad appointed him deputy for the liḥyān expedition (no. 20; jamharat al-nasab, 142.2). 72. for a possible exception, see ibn al-athīr, usd al-ghāba, 4:330.23, where it is stated that muḥammad ibn maslama served as deputy for an expedition that some say was qarqarat al-kudr (no. 8); neither wāqidī nor ibn hishām says this, but khalīfa does. 73. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 2:1:1–136. except for tabūk the only departure is the ḥajjat al-wadāʿ, for which he does not name a deputy (124–36). for the fatḥ he agrees with wāqidī in naming the deputy as ibn umm maktūm (97.20), but later quotes a tradition that would place him with the expedition (102.4). 74. ei2, art. “ibn saʿd” (j. w. fück). 75. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 2:1:119.17 (wa-huwa athbat ʿindanā mimman qāla ʾstakhlafa ghayrahu). in his biography of muḥammad ibn maslama he has him as deputy without any qualification (3:2:19.8, 19.17). though not found in wāqidī’s work as we have it, it could be that this in fact goes back to him (see above, note 43). 12 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) question served as deputy, and the information he provides there regularly agrees with what he has told us in his account of the expeditions.76 another author who has something to offer is ibn ḥabīb (d. 245/860) in his chapter on people on whom muḥammad conferred authority (umarāʾ rasūl allāh).77 here, in a mixed bag made up mostly of what we might call provincial governors, he names those whom muḥammad appointed over medina for four (and only four) expeditions. the first is ḥudaybiya (no. 22), for which ibn ḥabīb names abū ruhm al-ghifārī,78 in disagreement with all three of our authors, but, as will shortly be seen, in agreement with balādhurī’s mention of an alternative. the second is khaybar (no. 23), for which he names sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī,79 in agreement with wāqidī; he adds that it is also said that it was abū ruhm, in agreement with khalīfa. the third is the fatḥ (no. 25), for which he again names abū ruhm,80 in agreement with ibn hishām and khalīfa. the fourth is tabūk (no. 26), for which he names ʿalī ibn abī ṭālib,81 whom we here encounter as a deputy for the first time. 76. the only further discrepancy concerns ibn umm maktūm, who he tells us was deputy for badr (ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:151.14, a kūfan tradition from a raqqan source; contrast 2:1:6.23). this agrees with ibn hishām and khalīfa. 77. ibn ḥabīb, muḥabbar, 125–8. 78. ibn ḥabīb, muḥabbar, 127.1. 79. ibn ḥabīb, muḥabbar, 127.2. that his name appears in the text as subayʿ is likely to be a copyist’s error. 80. ibn ḥabīb, muḥabbar, 127.4. 81. ibn ḥabīb, muḥabbar, 125.16. that muḥammad appointed ʿalī as the deputy over medina (istakhlafa ʿaliyyan ʿalā ʾl-madīna) for tabūk is already explicitly stated in what looks like a baṣran tradition from saʿd ibn abī waqqāṣ preserved by ʿabd al-razzāq (muṣannaf, 11:226 no. 20,390; contrast 2:395 no. 3828, where the deputy is named as ibn umm maktūm). this is to be compared with what ibn isḥāq tells us: ʿalī was left behind to look after muḥammad’s family, for which he was mocked by the hypocrites (ss 3-4:519.17 = sg 604). other versions of the tradition have an air of equivocating between these two views. thus the text given by ibn saʿd says only that muḥammad left ʿalī behind in medina (khallafahu biʾl-madīna, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:1:15.8), not that he made him deputy over it; likewise a version in bukhārī’s ṣaḥīḥ does not specify over what ʿalī was appointed (bukhārī, ṣaḥīḥ, 5-6:309 no. 857 = maghāzī 80; the reference to women and children is compatible with either view). in this tradition ʿalī is upset at being left behind, to which muḥammad replies: “are you not satisfied to have the same status (manzila) in relation to me as aaron had in relation to moses, except that there is no prophet after me?” the reference is to q7:142, where moses, before going to speak with god, tells aaron: “be my deputy among my people (ukhlufnī fī qawmī), and put things right (aṣliḥ), and do not follow the way of the workers of corruption.” though the verse does not use the noun khalīfa, the term is regularly employed by the exegetes to gloss ukhlufnī as kun khalīfatī, “be my deputy” (ṭabarī, tafsīr, 6:49.3; abū ʾl-layth al-samarqandī, tafsīr, 1:567.15; zamakhsharī, kashshāf, 2:500.21; ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān, 2:473.21; fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī, tafsīr, 14:227.10, all to q7:142). the verb istakhlafa likewise appears in references to aaron’s role as deputy; thus ṭabarī in his history says of moses that he istakhlafa hārūn ʿalā banī isrāʾīl (“made aaron his deputy over the children of israel”, taʾrīkh, i/489.9 = history, 3:72; similarly thaʿlabī, qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, 184.5, and qummī, tafsīr, 1:241.19 to q7:142; for the noun istikhlāf in this context see ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān, 2:473.29). yet the role of ʿalī as deputy for the tabūk expedition is to my knowledge the only context in which the mosaic model is invoked with regard to muḥammad’s deputies, and i have seen no echo of the koranic use of the verb aṣlaḥa to describe the duties of a deputy. altogether, the identification of ʿalī as deputy for tabūk could be tendentious (a view firmly adopted by caetani, see annali, 2:1:245, where he says of the story “la sua natura apocrifa è più che manifesta”), and we are clearly in the thick of early sectarian tensions. but i suspect that the sources i cite here are as yet innocent of the imāmī argument that the fact that the prophet appointed ʿalī his deputy (istakhlafahu) over medina implies that he was to be his successor al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 13 in sum: 22. ḥudaybiya abū ruhm al-ghifārī 23. khaybar sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī 25. fatḥ, etc. abū ruhm 26. tabūk ʿalī ibn abī ṭālib the case is similar with balādhurī (d. 279/892f).82 his data are identical with those provided by wāqidī except for a cluster of five expeditions in years 6 to 9 (nos. 22-26 in the lists above).83 they are as follows (with alternatives in parentheses): 22. ḥudaybiya ibn umm maktūm (abū ruhm kulthūm ibn al-ḥuṣayn al-ghifārī) 23. khaybar sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-kinānī (numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-kinānī) 24. ʿumrat al-qaḍiyya abū dharr jundab ibn junāda al-ghifārī (ʿuwayf ibn rabīʿa ibn al-aḍbaṭ al-kinānī) 25. fatḥ, etc. ibn umm maktūm (abū ruhm al-ghifārī) 26. tabūk ibn umm maktūm (muhammad ibn maslama al-anṣārī, abū ruhm, sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa) as can be seen by comparing this list with wāqidī’s, in one case—the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ— balādhurī does not mention the (preferred) deputy named by wāqidī, but in the other four cases he does, putting him first. in each case, however, he cites at least one alternative. two of the three alternatives he names for tabūk are also mentioned by wāqidī. at the same time, five of balādhurī’s alternatives for these expeditions are mentioned by ibn hishām. in two cases balādhurī tells us something we have not heard before: in naming abū ruhm as an alternative for tabūk, and in naming abū dharr as the (preferred) deputy for the ʿumrat al-qaḍiyya. like ibn hishām and ibn saʿd, balādhurī takes the view that muḥammad ibn maslama is the deputy of choice for tabūk.84 yaʿqūbī (d. 284/897f) does not generally bother to name deputies, but on two occasions he does so: the fatḥ (no. 25) and tabūk (no. 26). for the fatḥ he gives the deputy as abū lubāba ibn ʿabd al-mundhir—already familiar to us as a deputy, but only for early (khalīfatuhu) after his death (al-ʿallāma al-ḥillī, minhāj al-karāma, ed. sālim, 169.1; for shīʿite use of the appointment and the ḥadīth al-manzila in this connection, see mufīd, irshād, 1:154–8 = trans. howard, 106–9; miskinzoda, “significance of the ḥadīth of the position of aaron”, especially 72, 76f). 82. for his coverage of muḥammad’s expeditions see balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 287–371. 83. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 350.21, 352.11, 352.22, 353.11, 364.13, 368.17. one might have expected disagreement to be more frequent for the earlier years, and especially for the minor raids of those years. there must be some relationship between the treatments of this cluster by ibn ḥabīb and balādhurī, but i don’t know what it is. 84. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 368.19. for ibn saʿd, see above, note 75. 14 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) expeditions.85 for tabūk, like ibn ḥabīb, he identifies ʿalī as the deputy.86 the major sources used by ṭabarī (d. 310/923) for the expeditions led by muḥammad are wāqidī and ibn isḥāq.87 he specifies the deputy for just over half the expeditions, and the names he provides regularly agree with those given by wāqidī, whom he often identifies as his source. but on two occasions he states that he owes his information about the deputy to ibn isḥāq. one is the fatḥ (no. 25), where he identifies the deputy as abū ruhm al-ghifārī, quoting on the authority of ibn isḥāq the same tradition that we find in ibn hishām’s work.88 the other is tabūk (no. 26), for which ṭabarī quotes ibn isḥāq naming the deputy as sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa;89 this does not appear in ibn hishām’s transmission, though he quotes a tradition from another source to the same effect.90 masʿūdī (d. 345/956) in one of his works gives an account of muḥammad’s life that includes his expeditions.91 except in two instances he names the deputies, and except in four instances these names agree with those given by wāqidī. the four instances where there is divergence are dūmat al-jandal (no. 16), for which masʿūdī names ibn umm maktūm;92 banū qurayẓa (no. 19), for which he names abū ruhm al-ghifārī;93 the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ (no. 24), for which he names sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa;94 and tabūk (no. 26), for which he names ʿalī, adding that others say it was abū ruhm, ibn umm maktūm, muḥammad ibn maslama, or sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa, and then commenting that the best view (al-ashhar) is that it was ʿalī.95 i have not seen parallels for the first three of these expeditions; for tabūk, as we have seen, ʿalī is named by ibn ḥabīb and yaʿqūbī, and all the others are mentioned at least by balādhurī. ibn ḥibbān (d. 354/965) has an extended biography of the prophet at the beginning of one of his works.96 in the course of this he gives the names of the deputies for about threequarters of muḥammad’s expeditions, and these names agree with those found in wāqidī in all but two cases. the first of these is unremarkable: for the fatḥ (no. 25) he names abū 85. yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, ed. houtsma, 2:59.4. 86. yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, ed. houtsma, 2:70.5. 87. the lines of transmission by which he received their works are different from those by which we have them. our transmitter of wāqidī’s maghāzī is muḥammad ibn shujāʿ al-thaljī (d. 266/880), whereas ṭabarī’s is muḥammad ibn saʿd (d. 230/845). the key figure in our transmission of ibn isḥāq’s life of muḥammad is the egyptian ibn hishām (d. 218/833), whereas the transmitters to ṭabarī are the rāzīs salama ibn al-faḍl (d. after 190/805) and muḥammad ibn ḥumayd (d. 248/862f). 88. ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, i/1627.14 = history, 8:168; ss 3-4:399.19 = sg 545. 89. ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, i/1696.4 = history, 9:51. 90. ss 3-4:519.10 = sg 783 n. 860. 91. masʿūdī, tanbīh, 202–43. 92. masʿūdī, tanbīh, 215.6. 93. masʿūdī, tanbīh, 217.8. 94. masʿūdī, tanbīh, 228.6. 95. masʿūdī, tanbīh, 235.20, 236.4. 96. ibn ḥibbān, thiqāt, 1:14–2:151. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 15 ruhm al-ghifārī,97 in agreement with ibn isḥāq, khalīfa, and others. the second is new to us: for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ he names nājiya ibn jundab al-aslamī, whom i have not seen mentioned as a deputy in any other source; this could well be an error.98 i will leave aside the data provided by these and later sources in my main analysis, though i will cite them occasionally in particular connections. it is worth noting that these seven relatively early sources provide us with only two names of deputies that are absent from the data provided by wāqidī, ibn hishām, and khalīfa: ʿalī and nājiya ibn jundab. 2.4 the extent of agreement between the three major sources how far do our three major sources agree on the information they provide? let us begin with the two full lists, that provided by wāqidī and that derived from ibn 97. ibn ḥibbān, thiqāt, 2:42.7. 98. ibn ḥibbān, thiqāt, 2: 26.4. nājiya ibn jundab is not well-known, but neither is he a complete nonentity (for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1522f no. 2650; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:2:44.22, 45.6). his name and that of his father appear in a variety of forms (thus wāqidī sometimes refers to him as nājiya ibn al-aʿjam, see for example w 587.11, and contrast the following line, while ibn saʿd treats the latter as a distinct person), but his tribal affiliation is clear: he belonged to aslam (t201), yet another of the local tribes of the ḥijāz (see ei2, art. “khuzāʿa” (m. j. kister), 78b for their early alliance with muḥammad), and within it to the clan of sahm. as a deputy he would thus be similar to our various kinānīs. he himself is not found in t201, but he would belong there as a descendant of dārim ibn ʿitr. he died in medina in the reign of muʿāwiya (ruled 41–60/661–80), and is known mainly for two things. the first is that muḥammad would put him in charge of his sacrificial animals when taking or sending them to mecca for the pilgrimage (for al-ḥudaybiya see w 572.15, 575.3, and ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:2:44.24; for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ see w 732.16, ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 2:1:87.19, 4:2:45.1, and balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 353.8; for the pilgrimage led by abū bakr see w 1077.5, and ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 2:1:121.18; for the ḥajjat al-wadāʿ see w 1090.18, 1091.1, and ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 2:1:124.19, 4:2:45.3). the second is that at a thirsty moment on the expedition to ḥudaybiya, muḥammad sent a man down a well to poke around with an arrow and thereby release a supply of water; his fellow-tribesmen later claimed that nājiya was the one in question, and convincingly backed this up with some snappy verses exchanged between him and a slave-girl while he was working at the bottom of the well (w 587.8; ss 3-4:310.10 = sg 501; and see ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:2:45.9). he has no record of military deeds in our sources, but he boasts of being a warrior in these and other verses (for his verses spoken at khaybar see w 701.5; ss 3-4:348.11 = sg 521); moreover he carried one of the two standards of aslam at the fatḥ (w 800.17, 819.11, and ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:178.24, 4:2:45.13). ibn saʿd informs us that he had no descendants (4:2:45.16), but wāqidī tells us that he owes his knowledge of the verses spoken at the well and at khaybar to a descendant of nājiya’s called ʿabd al-malik ibn wahb (w 588.3, 701.8). as pointed out to me by michael lecker, wāqidī was himself a mawlā of aslam, and specifically of sahm (see ei2, art. “al-wāqidī” (s. leder), and w 5 of the editor’s introduction); this connection may have eased his access to such information and boosted nājiya’s reputation. returning to nājiya’s alleged role as deputy, it will be apparent that ibn ḥibbān’s statement that nājiya was deputy for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ conflicts with several sources that have him in charge of the sacrificial animals on that occasion. in fact the text of ibn ḥibbān reads at this point, speaking of muḥammad: thumma aḥrama wa-sāqa sabʿīn badana fī sabʿimiʾat rajul, wa-ʾstaʿmala ʿalā ʾl-madīna nājiya ibn jundab al-aslamī (thiqāt, 2:26.4). given the immediately preceding reference to sacrificial animals, it is likely enough that at some point in the transmission of the textʿalā ʾl-budn was corrupted to ʿalā ʾl-madīna in this sentence, perhaps by a scribe who was expecting a statement about the appointment of a deputy (the use of istaʿmala with regard to oversight of sacrificial animals is in place, see, for example, w 572.16, 1077.7). 16 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) hishām. comparing the tables given above, we see that the two agree unambiguously on sixteen of the twenty-seven expeditions,99 and disagree unambiguously on eight.100 in between, they are in ambiguous agreement on the remaining three—that is to say, in each of these cases ibn hishām, and in one case also wāqidī, give alternatives, and at least one of the alternatives is shared.101 in tabular form: wāqidī and ibn hishām: unambiguous agreement: 16 ambiguous agreement: 3 unambiguous disagreement: 8 _______________________________ total: 27 how does khalīfa’s list compare? here the comparison is only for nineteen expeditions— call it twenty to include the case of the deputy whom khalīfa adds to his list without specifying an expedition. within these twenty, as regards khalīfa and wāqidī, we have unambiguous agreement in six cases,102 ambiguous agreement in one,103 and unambiguous disagreement in thirteen cases.104 as regards khalīfa and ibn hishām, we have unambiguous agreement in five cases,105 ambiguous agreement in two,106 and unambiguous disagreement in thirteen cases.107 among these there are two expeditions for which khalīfa agrees ambiguously or unambiguously with ibn hishām against wāqidī.108 in tabular form: khalīfa and wāqidī: unambiguous agreement: 6 ambiguous agreement: 1 unambiguous disagreement: 13 __________________________________ total: 20 99. nos. 1, 3–7 (but not 5a), 9–13, 16, 18–21. 100. nos. 2, 14, 17, 22–25, 27. it is again surprising that disagreements are most frequent in the later rather than the early years. 101. nos. 8, 15, 26. in the first and second cases it is the second name given by ibn hishām that is shared; in the third case it is his first name and wāqidī’s second. 102. nos. 5/5b, 10–12, 24, 27. 103. no. 26. in this case khalīfa shares the first name given by wāqidī in his account of the expedition, though not in his introductory list. 104. nos. 1–4, 7–9, 15, 17, 22–23, 25, plus the case of ghālib. khalīfa’s naming of ghālib constitutes an unambiguous disagreement irrespective of which expedition he might be assigned to, since ibn hishām and wāqidī do not name him for any expedition. 105. nos. 5a-b, 10–12, 25. 106. nos. 17, 26. in each case the agreement is with ibn hishām’s second name. 107. nos. 1–4, 7–9, 15, 22–24, 27. 108. no. 17 is a case of ambiguous agreement, and no. 25 is a case of unambiguous agreement. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 17 khalīfa and ibn hishām: unambiguous agreement: 5 ambiguous agreement: 2 unambiguous disagreement: 13 __________________________________ total: 20 if we compare all three, we see that there are four cases of unambiguous agreement across the board,109 one of ambiguous agreement,110 and sixteen of unambiguous disagreement.111 that leaves six cases where wāqidī and ibn hishām agree but khalīfa is silent.112 in tabular form: all three sources: unambiguous agreement: 4 ambiguous agreement: 1 unambiguous disagreement: 16 agreement but khalīfa is silent: 6 _____________________________________ total: 27 there are a couple of curious points to note here about ibn umm maktūm. first, khalīfa’s statement that he served as deputy for thirteen expeditions (though he only names twelve) is not isolated. there is also a kūfan tradition from shaʿbī (d. 104/722f) to the same effect.113 moreover, the number of expeditions for which wāqidī assigns ibn umm maktūm as deputy is thirteen, though one case is ambiguous.114 so there is a notable 109. nos. 5b, 10–12. 110. no. 26. 111. in nos. 1–4, 7–9, 15, 17, 22–25, and 27, plus the case of ghālib, khalīfa is in disagreement with one or both of the other authors. in no. 14 khalīfa is silent, but wāqidī and ibn hishām disagree. i leave aside no. 5a, where khalīfa agrees with ibn hishām but wāqidī is silent. 112. nos. 6, 13, 16, 18–21. this totals seven, but one of them is presumably the expedition to which ghālib would be assigned. 113. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:151.3. the transmitter from shaʿbī and to the wāsiṭī yazīd ibn hārūn (d. 206/821) is the kūfan muḥammad ibn sālim al-hamdānī (for whom see mizzī, tahdhīb, 25:238–42). the expeditions in question are not named. note also the statement of al-haytham ibn ʿadī (d. c. 206/821) that muḥammad appointed ibn umm maktūm deputy over medina for most of his expeditions (fī akthar ghazawātihi, see balādhurī, ansāb, ed. al-ʿaẓm, 9:276.3); see also ʿabd al-razzāq, muṣannaf, 2:395 no. 3829 (the prophet would appoint ibn umm maktūm deputy over medina when he was traveling). 114. nos. 8, 10–13, 18–22, 25–27; the ambiguous case is no. 26 (tabūk). ibn saʿd in his biography of ibn umm maktūm quotes a list transmitted by wāqidī of the expeditions for which he served as deputy (ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:153.25). here twelve expeditions are listed (actually eleven, since ghāba and dhū qarad are the same expedition), viz. nos. 8–13, 18–22; in comparison with the list given by wāqidī in his maghāzī, this omits nos. 25–27, but adds no. 9, for which he there names ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān as deputy. ibn hishām names ibn umm maktūm as deputy in only ten cases, one of them ambiguous (nos. 5a, 8, 10–13, 18–21; the ambiguous case is no. 8). 18 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) agreement here between khalīfa and wāqidī. and yet when it comes to naming the expeditions in question, the agreement largely dissolves: they agree on only four cases,115 and disagree on eight.116 this might suggest that the number thirteen came first, and that the attempts to identify the thirteen expeditions came later. second, there is a baṣran tradition from qatāda ibn diʿāma (d. 117/735f) that says something very different: that the prophet appointed ibn umm maktūm as his deputy over medina twice117—and no more. it is not isolated, for we have the same information from the khurasanian exegete ḍaḥḥāk ibn muzāḥim (d. 105/723f).118 2.5 the pool of deputies one thing—not the only thing—we can do with the lists of deputies discussed above is to merge their data to produce a pool of deputies, that is to say, a list of all the men who are said by any of our three main sources to have served in this role. in the list that follows, the numbers identify the expeditions for which each author names the man in question as deputy. where an author provides an alternative name, the one he prefers is marked with a single question mark (“26?”), the other with two (“26??”). here is the pool, a total of eighteen names, in alphabetical order: ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy wāqidī: ibn hishām: 14 khalīfa: ʿabdallāh ibn rawāḥa wāqidī: 14 ibn hishām: khalīfa: abū dharr al-ghifārī wāqidī: 23?? ibn hishām: 15?, 17? 115. nos. 10–12, 27. 116. nos. 1–4, 5a, 7, 9, 15. 117. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:151.10. the transmitter from qatāda and to the baṣran ʿamr ibn ʿāṣim (d. 213/828f) is the baṣran hammām ibn yaḥyā (d. 164/781). for hammām, see mizzī, tahdhīb, 30:30210, and for ʿamr ibn ʿāṣim, see 22:87–90. ibn ʿabd al-barr (istīʿāb, 1199.6 no. 1946) quotes the tradition from qatāda from the baṣran companion anas ibn mālik (d. 91/709f), noting that he cannot have heard what others had heard (sc. about the number of times ibn umm maktūm served as deputy)—though god knows best. the tradition is also found in abū dāwūd, sunan, 3:131 no. 2931 (al-kharāj waʾl-imāra waʾl-fayʾ 3), and in ṭabarī, tafsīr, 12:444 no. 36,322, where it forms part of an exegesis of q80:1–2; the isnāds are solidly baṣran (for ṭabarī’s see horst, “zur überlieferung im korankommentar aṭ-ṭabarīs”, 301). 118. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:153.21, in an exegesis of q80:1–2. the transmitter from ḍaḥḥāk and to yazīd ibn hārūn is juwaybir ibn saʿīd al-azdī, a balkhī who was reckoned among the kūfans (see mizzī, tahdhīb, 5:167–71). this tradition also appears in ṭabarī, tafsīr, 12:444 no. 36,325, where the transmitter from ḍaḥḥāk is ʿubayd ibn sulaymān al-bāhilī, a kūfan who settled in marw (see mizzī, tahdhīb, 19:212f) and in turn transmits to a marwazī (see horst, “zur überlieferung im korankommentar aṭ-ṭabarīs”, 304). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 19 khalīfa: abū dujāna al-sāʿidī wāqidī: ibn hishām: 27? khalīfa: abū lubāba bashīr ibn ʿabd al-mundhir al-ʿamrī wāqidī: 5, 6, 7 ibn hishām: 5b, 6, 7 khalīfa: 5b abū ruhm al-ghifārī wāqidī: 24 ibn hishām: 25 khalīfa: 23, 24, 25 abū salama ibn ʿabd al-asad wāqidī: 4 ibn hishām: 4 khalīfa: ghālib ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī wāqidī: ibn hishām: khalīfa: unspecified ibn umm maktūm al-maʿīṣī wāqidī: 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26?, 27 ibn hishām: 5a, 8??, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 21 khalīfa: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5a, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 27 muḥammad ibn maslama al-ashhalī wāqidī: 26?? ibn hishām: 26? khalīfa: 8 numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī wāqidī: ibn hishām: 17??, 22, 23 khalīfa: 17 saʿd ibn muʿādh wāqidī: 2 ibn hishām: khalīfa: saʿd ibn ʿubāda wāqidī: 1 ibn hishām: 1 khalīfa: sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn wāqidī: 20 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn hishām: 2 khalīfa: sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī wāqidī: 16, 23?, 26? ibn hishām: 8?, 16, 26??, 27?? khalīfa: 26 ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān wāqidī: 9, 15 ibn hishām: 9, 15?? khalīfa: ʿuwayf ibn al-aḍbaṭ al-duʾalī wāqidī: ibn hishām: 24 khalīfa: 22 zayd ibn ḥāritha wāqidī: 3, 17 ibn hishām: 3 khalīfa: of these eighteen names, two are peculiar to wāqidī, three to ibn hishām, and one to khalīfa. five are shared by wāqidī and ibn hishām but not khalīfa, two by ibn hishām and khalīfa but not wāqidī, and none by wāqidī and khalīfa but not ibn hishām. only five are shared by all three authors. yet if we set aside khalīfa’s list as incomplete and compare only wāqidī and ibn hishām, the number shared between them is ten out of seventeen. of course, if we take into consideration the particular expeditions to which the names are assigned, the agreement diminishes substantially. this clearly raises questions about the reliability of the data, but for the moment let us take the pool as is. 3. contextualizing the data 3.1 tribal affiliation there are a number of things we might like to know about the men named as deputies, but one of the most accessible is their tribal affiliation. this is something that clearly mattered intensely to the society in which they lived, and the information has been well preserved for posterity. here then are the eighteen members of the pool arranged according to their tribal affiliations. an annotation of the form “t11.23” indicates where the person appears in a standard set of genealogical tables.119 as a reminder of how well or poorly attested these men are as deputies, i assign to each a grade: [i] means that only one of our authors mentions him, [ii] that two of them do, and [iii] that all three do so.120 119. caskel, ğamharat an-nasab, vol. 1. in “t11.23”, 11 is the number of the table and 23 the line number within the table. 120. this grading takes no account of the number of times each author mentions the deputy in question, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 21 a. qurashīs four out of the eighteen are qurashīs, that is to say members of the meccan tribe of quraysh to which muḥammad himself belonged. for each of them i give a clan affiliation within quraysh in parentheses:121 abū salama, ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabd al-asad (makhzūmī, t22.22) [ii] ibn umm maktūm, ʿamr ibn qays122 (ʿāmirī,123 t28.23) [iii] sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn (jumaḥī, cf. t24.22)124 [i] ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān (umawī, t11.23) [ii] b. anṣārīs seven of the eighteen are anṣārīs, that is to say members of the medinese tribes of aws and khazraj who provided muḥammad’s hosts in medina. again i indicate clan affiliation in parentheses. three of them are awsīs: abū lubāba, bashīr ibn ʿabd al-mundhir (ʿamrī,125 t178.30) [iii] muḥammad ibn maslama (ḥārithī,126 t180.29) [iii] saʿd ibn muʿādh (ashhalī, t179.30) [i] it is no accident that the clans to which muḥammad ibn maslama and saʿd ibn muʿādh belonged are part of a wider sub-group of aws known as the nabīt. unlike most awsī clans this sub-group lived in lower medina (the sāfila as opposed to the ʿāliya) along with the khazrajī clans, and were not doing well in the years before muḥammad’s arrival; like the khazrajī clans, they were early converts to islam.127 or whether he is named only as an alternative. 121. distinguishing between tribes, clans within them, and wider tribal groupings that include them is a convenient western practice; it does not correspond to any consistent usage of the arabic sources. for this see landau-tasseron, “alliances among the arabs”, 142–4 (using the term “section” rather than “clan”). 122. for the question of his and his father’s names see below, text to notes 148f. 123. he also bears the nisba al-maʿīṣī, maʿīṣ being a sub-clan of ʿāmir (see t27–28). 124. the table shows sāʾib ibn maẓʿūn and his brother ʿuthmān. so in principle sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn could be either a son of ʿuthmān not recorded here or a doublet of sāʾib ibn maẓʿūn. the first seems more plausible (cf. below, note 162). either way, it is clear that we have the right lineage: ibn isḥāq names several more ancestors for sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn or his father (ss 1-2:258.5 = sg 116, ss 327.14 = sg 147, ss 367.9 = sg 168, ss 684.18 = sg 329), and they are identical with those of sāʾib ibn maẓʿūn and his brother ʿuthmān as shown in t24. 125. that is to say of ʿamr ibn ʿawf ibn mālik ibn al-aws (see t177.22). 126. wāqidī gives him the nisba al-ashhalī (w 8.11), referring to the closely related clan of the banū ʿabd al-ashhal (see t179) of which he is said to have been an ally (ḥalīf, ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1377.6 no. 2344). 127. i am indebted to michael lecker for pointing this out to me; see ei3, art. “al-aws” (y. perlman), especially 12. 22 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) the other four are khazrajīs: ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy (of sālim al-ḥublā, t189.29) [i] ʿabdallāh ibn rawāḥa (ḥārithī, t188.28) [i] abū dujāna, simāk ibn aws (sāʿidī, t187.29) [i] saʿd ibn ʿubāda (sāʿidī, t187.29) [ii] c. members of other tribes seven of the eighteen are members of tribes other than quraysh, aws, and khazraj. with one exception they stem from ḥijāzī desert tribes that in turn are considered to be parts of the wider tribal grouping of kināna, to which quraysh themselves belonged.128 three of them are ghifārīs, the banū ghifār being a small tribe living between mecca and medina with a reputation as robbers:129 abū dharr al-ghifārī, jundab ibn junāda (t42.18) [ii] abū ruhm al-ghifārī, kulthūm ibn ḥuṣayn (t42.19) [iii] sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī130 [iii] two of them belong to the clan of kalb, part of the tribe of layth ibn bakr, which again is considered as part of kināna (and to be distinguished from the large and well-known tribe of kalb, that is to say, kalb ibn wabara):131 ghālib ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī (t37.19) [i] numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī (t37.22) [ii] one belongs to duʾil ibn bakr (this is the same bakr as in the case of layth ibn bakr):132 ʿuwayf ibn al-aḍbaṭ al-duʾalī (t43.17)133 [ii] the last of the seven was born into the tribe of kalb—kalb ibn wabara—which lived far to 128. for the genealogical relationships of these tribes to each other, see t3, t36, and t42. 129. ei2, art. “ghifār” (j. w. fück); and see t42, showing them as part of ḍamra. caskel describes the tribe as poor (ğamharat an-nasab, 2:266a). note, however, that ibn ḥazm refers to them as a large clan (baṭn ḍakhm, jamhara, 186.1), and that muḥammad’s troops at the fatḥ are described as including 300 or 400 ghifārīs (ss 3-4:421.9 = sg 557; w 819.9; but the context is one in which exaggeration could easily be suspected). they had a quarter (maḥalla) in medina known as sāʾila (ibn shabba, taʾrīkh al-madīna, 1:261.7). for their reputation as robbers of the pilgrims (surrāq al-ḥajīj), see for example bukhārī, ṣaḥīḥ, 5-6:20 no. 48 (manāqib 7). this and other traditions in the chapter invoke the prophet to defend ghifār; thus in no. 49 he includes ghifār among a set of tribes that are better in the eyes of god, or on the day of the resurrection, than the major tribes of arabia. the context of these traditions makes it clear that the audience might find such a claim surprising. 130. he does not appear in t42, nor in ibn ḥazm’s jamhara. 131. see t36. 132. again see t36. for the vocalization of the name of the tribal ancestor (duʾil or dīl), and of the nisba (duʾalī), i follow caskel, ğamharat an-nasab, 2:234a. 133. the table gives the ism of al-aḍbaṭ as rabīʿa. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 23 the north in the syrian desert:134 zayd ibn ḥāritha (t291.33) [ii] 3.2 biographical profiles tribal affiliation apart, what sort of people were these men, at least as they appear in our sources? what qualities did they possess that might have been advantageous—or disadvantageous—for their performance of the role of deputy? i will attempt to lay the foundations for an answer to these questions by assembling a biographical profile for each member of our pool of deputies. i will take them in the order i used for their tribal affiliations, so again we start with the qurashīs. abū salama, ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabd al-asad (makhzūmī, t22.22) [ii] wāqidī and ibn hishām agree in naming abū salama as deputy for one expedition (no. 4).135 we have good reason to see him as someone muḥammad could trust. he was an early convert—it is said the eleventh—with close links to muḥammad: he had a hāshimī mother, he was a milk-brother of muḥammad, and on his deathbed he asked muḥammad to marry his widow umm salama.136 his career was cut off early—his death in 4/625 was a result of a wound sustained at the battle of uḥud in 3/625.137 nevertheless we are told that muḥammad appointed him commander of 150 men whom he sent out on an expedition to qaṭan in 4/625.138 he belonged to the powerful meccan clan of makhzūm, so there was nothing wrong with his social standing; and the fact of his marriage to umm salama tends to confirm this—her father abū umayya ibn al-mughīra, likewise a makhzūmī, was famously generous among quraysh,139 so he must have been wealthy, and she herself was reputed to have been the first woman to make her hijra to medina in a litter.140 nevertheless, abū salama did not belong to the leading branch of the clan, which was strongly opposed to muḥammad, and he had few fellow-clansmen with him in medina.141 he had two sons,142 but apparently no further descendants.143 134. see t279, and, for their location, ei2, art. “kalb b. wabara”, section on the pre-islamic period (j. w. fück). 135. for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 939f no. 1589, 1682 no. 3013. 136. see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 939.18, 939.17, 940.1, 940.7 respectively. 137. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1682.10 (but the year has to be 4, not 3 as stated). 138. w 3.17, 341.5, 341.9; ss 3-4:612.2 = sg 661f. 139. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1920.15 no. 4111 (aḥad ajwād quraysh al-mashhūrīn biʾl-karam). 140. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1921.2 no. 4111, 1939.9 no. 4160 (awwal ẓaʿīna dakhalat al-madīna muhājiratan). 141. ei2, art. “makhzūm” (m. hinds), especially 138a. 142. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:1:170.21. 143. t22 shows none, and ibn ḥazm mentions none (jamhara, 169.7). 24 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn umm maktūm, ʿamr ibn qays (ʿāmirī, t28.23) [iii] as we have seen, our three authors agree that ibn umm maktūm served as deputy many times—far more than anyone else; though wāqidī and ibn hishām are in frequent agreement regarding the expeditions for which he served, khalīfa is not.144 he was no doubt someone muḥammad could trust. he was an early convert,145 his mother was a maternal aunt of khadīja, muḥammad’s first wife, and on one account he made his hijra to medina ahead of muḥammad, or perhaps it was a little after the battle of badr.146 on the other hand, despite his koranic fame—to which we will come shortly—much is obscure about him.147 his name is disputed: was it ʿabdallāh or ʿamr?148 so too is the name of his father—was it qays, zāʾida, or shurayḥ?149 instead, he is known as the son of his mother umm maktūm,150 an indignity in a patrilineal society.151 he is said to have been present at the battle of qādisiyya (c. 15/636), holding the standard, or at least a banner152—a task for which he claimed to be uniquely well-qualified: as he used to say, “give me the standard, i’m blind, i can’t run away, put me between the two ranks (aqīmūnī bayn al-ṣaffayn)!”153 indeed his blindness colors much of what we are told of his life. he was dependent on his dog, as he explained to muḥammad when the order went out to kill the dogs of medina;154 this would suggest that he was too poor to purchase a slave. but his main claim to fame among posterity was his identification as the “blind man” of the opening of sūrat ʿabasa: “he frowned and turned away that the blind man came to him” (ʿabasa wa-tawallā an jāʾahu ʾl-aʿmā, q80:1–2). the story was that muḥammad, at this time still in mecca, was approached by ibn umm maktūm and brushed him off because he was busy talking to a polytheist grandee; god responded by upbraiding his prophet for this behavior, and muḥammad then changed his tune. that the blind man was ibn umm maktūm is affirmed, for example, by all the traditions quoted by ṭabarī that name him.155 nor is this the only 144. see above, text to note 115. for the biography of ibn umm maktūm see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 997f no. 1669, 1198f no. 1946, from which the information that follows is taken unless otherwise stated. 145. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 997.9 (kāna qadīm al-islām bi-makka). 146. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 997.10, 1198.13, 1198.15. 147. his obscurity is stressed by caetani (annali, 2:1:524). 148. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1198.11. 149. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 997.7, 997.17. 150. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1198.8. 151. the well-known baṣran traditionist ismāʿīl ibn ibrāhīm ibn miqsam (d. 193/809), commonly known as ibn ʿulayya after his mother, disliked being so-called, and is said to have considered himself slandered thereby (ibn ḥanbal, ʿilal, 2:372 no. 2653, and the editor’s footnote thereto). 152. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1199.1, and cf. 998.4; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:155.26, 156.5; ṭabarī, tafsīr, 12:444 nos. 36,323f. 153. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:154.19. 154. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:153.5. the dog was given only a temporary reprieve. 155. ṭabarī, tafsīr, 12:443f nos. 36,318–26, with the exception of no. 36,323, which does not relate to the incident. muḥammad’s preferred interlocutor is described in no. 36,318 as one of the most powerful of the polytheists (min ʿuẓamāʾ al-mushrikīn), in no. 36,322 as a leading qurashī (rajul min ʿilyat quraysh), in no. 36,325 as a wealthy qurashī polytheist (kathīr al-māl, ghanī), and in no. 36,326 as a noble (hādhā ʾl-sharīf). see al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 25 koranic verse that bears the imprint of ibn umm maktūm’s disability. we are told that q4:95 originally came down in the form: “such believers as sit at home are not the equals of those who struggle in the path of god.”156 thereupon ibn umm maktūm complained about the unfairness of this for someone like himself, and in response the phrase “unless they have an injury” (ghayru ulī ʾl-ḍarar) was promptly sent down and inserted after “such believers as sit at home”.157 he is nevertheless said to have been present at the battle of qādisiyya, as we have seen, and even to have been killed there.158 alternatively, he returned to medina after the battle and died, nothing further being heard of him after the reign of the caliph ʿumar (ruled 13–23/634–44)159—which might suggest that his contemporaries were not paying attention to him in his last years. he does not appear to have had descendants.160 sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn (jumaḥī, t24.22) [i] ibn hishām has him as a deputy for one early expedition (no. 2). his biography is rather threadbare—ibn ʿabd al-barr gives him only six lines.161 he tells us that he was one of the early muslims who took refuge in ethiopia, along with his father and two uncles,162 that he was present at badr and other unspecified engagements, and that he was killed at the battle of yamāma (12/633) while still only in his thirties.163 so he would have been in his twenties at the time when he served as deputy.164 there seems to be a dearth of information about what he did between the battles of uḥud and yamāma.165 the also ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:153.8, 153.15. as one of my audience in philadelphia pointed out to me, shīʿite scholars are unhappy with the notion that it was muḥammad who frowned and turned away, and deny it outright; but they too identify the blind man as ibn umm maktūm (qummī, tafsīr, 2:298.4; ṭūsī, tibyān, 10:268.7, 268.15; ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān, 5:437.15). their concern is, of course, the apparent imputation of sin to the prophet. 156. see for example ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:155.6, 155.17. 157. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:154.13, and the six traditions that follow there; ṭabarī, tafsīr, 4:230–2 nos. 10,238–45, 10,247f, 10,250–5 (again there is no naming of a rival candidate for the role). ṭabarī explains ḍarar as referring to loss of sight and other afflictions that stand in the way of participation in holy war (229.17). 158. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1199.2. 159. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1199.3; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:156.5. 160. t28 shows none, and ibn ḥazm mentions none (jamhara, 171.13). 161. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 575 no. 896. 162. this makes him a son of ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn unrecorded at t24.23. ibn ʿabd al-barr also has a brief entry on sāʾib ibn maẓʿūn, who likewise took refuge in ethiopia and was present at badr; he remarks that he does not know when he died (istīʿāb, 575 no. 899). muṣʿab al-zubayrī states that the entire family of maẓʿūn were emigrants (hājara āl maẓʿūn kulluhum, rijāluhum wa-nisāʾuhum, nasab quraysh, 394.7; i owe my references to this source to ella landau tasseron). 163. this information about his death is also found in balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 213.13. 164. balādhurī tells us that he was born when his father was thirty, and that his father died aged thirtyseven (ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 213.14); that would make him a child at the time he was deputy. 165. ibn hishām does not mention him after badr, nor wāqidī after uḥud. 26 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) meagerness of the attestation of his life may in part result from a lack of descendants.166 we nevertheless hear more of his father ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn, though he died not long after badr.167 an early convert,168 the message of his biography is how close he was to muḥammad, a closeness that was fully displayed in the context of his death, after which muḥammad would visit his tomb and refer to him as a “righteous predecessor” (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ).169 whether he was a person of consequence is less clear, but ibn hishām tells us that he was in charge of the first ten muslims to take refuge in ethiopia.170 despite his early death, he would still have been alive at the time when his son sāʾib served as deputy. he did not have descendants other than his two sons.171 ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān (umawī, t11.23) [ii] both wāqidī and ibn hishām name him as a deputy for a couple of expeditions (nos. 9 and 15). he was an early convert, and successively the husband of two of muḥammad’s daughters. he was also a member of the powerful sub-clan of umayya within the clan of ʿabd shams, and a wealthy merchant, the first socially prestigious convert to the new religion. moreover, unlike the other qurashī deputies, he had with him in medina a reasonable number of men associated with his clan.172 but he was not prominent in the time of muḥammad or his first two successors.173 one modern scholar has referred to his “glaring lack of military prowess”;174 he never commanded an expedition. he was, of course, to become the third caliph (ruled 23–35/644–56), but that could have been precisely because he was “the most unassuming and least important” of the major players at the time, who “wanted a log for their king”;175 in contemplating him as a possible 166. see below, note 171. 167. he rates an entry in ei2, art. “ʿuthmān b. maẓʿūn” (a. j. wensinck); and see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1053-6 no. 1779. 168. it is said the fourteenth convert to islam (ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1053.8). 169. for muḥammad’s visits to his tomb, see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1054.2, and for the phrase al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ, see 1053.20. muḥammad likewise speaks of him as salafunā ʾl-ṣāliḥ (balādhurī , ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 212.14, 212.18, 213.2). 170. ss 1-2:323.6 = sg 146 and 721 n. 190. 171. muṣʿab al-zubayrī, nasab quraysh, 394.9; ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 161.16; ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 575 no. 899; and cf. t24. 172. ibn isḥāq provides us with a list of qurashīs deemed present on the muslim side at the battle of badr, organizing it by clans. if we can take this as any indication of the relative demographic strength of the various qurashī clans in medina, then at sixteen those associated with ʿabd shams were the largest such group, though most of them were allies or freedmen rather than full members of the clan; the clans to which abū salama, ibn umm maktūm, and sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān belonged had only five men each, though the proportion of full members was much higher (ss 1-2:677–85 = sg 327–30). the figures given by wāqidī are close (w 153–7). these figures may, of course, be tendentious; for an anecdote illustrating the politics of the data regarding ʿabd shams, see landau-tasseron, “status of allies”, 22. 173. for all this see ei2, art. “ʿuthmān b. ʿaffān” (g. levi della vida and r. g. khoury), especially 946. 174. madelung, succession to muḥammad, 79. 175. wellhausen, arab kingdom, 40. this explanation is rejected by madelung, but not because he takes al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 27 successor, his predecessor is said to have described him as a mild man (rajul fīhi līn).176 he had numerous descendants.177 this completes our survey of the qurashī deputies; we now move on to the anṣārīs, starting with the awsīs. abū lubāba, bashīr ibn ʿabd al-mundhir (ʿamrī, t178.30) [iii] all three of our authors agree that on the way to badr muḥammad sent him back to take charge of medina, and wāqidī and ibn hishām agree that he was also deputy for the next two expeditions. he was commonly known by his tecnonym (kunya) as “abū lubāba”, and there was doubt about whether his name was bashīr or rifāʿa,178 or whether these were in fact two brothers.179 he must have been a person of some authority if at the second ʿaqaba meeting prior to the hijra he was in fact chosen to be one of the twelve leaders (naqībs) who were “to take charge of their people’s affairs” (li-yakūnū ʿalā qawmihim bi-mā fīhim); even if it was rather his brother who was appointed, that could still tell us something about his social standing.180 when the banū qurayẓa, who were allies of aws, were under siege and considering surrender to muḥammad, they had him send abū lubāba to them so that they could consult him; this again suggests that he was a person of some significance. the consultation led to a dramatic incident: abū lubāba let it slip to the banū qurayẓa that they would be executed, whereupon he was so stricken by conscience for having betrayed god and his prophet that he bound himself to a pillar in the prophet’s mosque, and went on hunger strike until such time as god forgave him.181 he may also have been wealthy, since he helped the nefarious builders of the masjid al-ḍirār with timber (khashab) which he took back after the demolition (hadm) of the mosque;182 that there was enough of it for him to build himself a house with it may be significant, given that timber was a scarce a different view of ʿuthmān’s character; he remarks that prior to his election to the caliphate he had not displayed any “qualities of public leadership” (succession to muḥammad, 80). 176. ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, i/2779.6 = history, 14:146 (“a gentle person”). 177. see t11, and ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 83.6 (where the enumeration of ʿuthmān’s descendants occupies the best part of four pages, and includes some in spain, 85.20). 178. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 173 no. 195, and 1740.4 no. 3149. 179. they appear as such at t178; so also ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 334.2, and balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 241.2. 180. see ss 1-2:443.4 = sg 204 for the role of the naqībs, and 444.17 = 204 for the inclusion of rifāʿa ibn ʿabd al-mundhir (his kunya is not mentioned) among the three awsī naqībs. this is from ibn isḥāq; ibn hishām then tells us that the scholars do not in fact include him (445.2 = 727 n. 241). balādhurī does not include either brother as a naqīb (see ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 252.8), though ibn ʿabd al-barr clearly believes abū lubāba to have been one (istīʿāb, 500.14 no. 778, 1740.8). 181. ss 3-4:236.10 = sg 462f; w 505.20. for his refusal to eat or drink, see w 507.17. another view was that his offense was hanging back from the tabūk expedition (on the disagreement see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1741.3). 182. w 1047.5. for a translation of the passage and a commentary see lecker, muslims, jews and pagans, 117f. abū lubāba also appears in a poor light in a story about a legal dispute with an orphan (w 281.12, 505.3). 28 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) resource in the arabian wilderness. this too can be reckoned a brush with notoriety. at the fatḥ he carried the banner of his clan.183 he died in the reign of ʿalī (ruled 35–40/656–61);184 we are told that he had descendants.185 muḥammad ibn maslama (ḥārithī, t180.29) [iii] all three of our authors name him as a deputy, khalīfa for one expedition (no. 8), wāqidī and ibn hishām for another (no. 26—but alongside alternatives).186 an early convert in medina,187 he was close enough to muḥammad to be a member of the small group that killed kaʿb ibn al-ashraf in 3/624, and in one account its leader.188 in 3/625, at the time of the battle of uḥud, muḥammad put him in charge of a guard (ḥaras) of fifty men patrolling around the camp (ʿaskar).189 in 6/627 he commanded thirty men in an expedition against the quraṭāʾ,190 followed by one to dhū ʾl-qaṣṣa leading ten men;191 in 7/629, at the time of the ʿumrat al-qaḍiyya, he was put in charge of a hundred horsemen.192 the report mentioned by wāqidī that he was deputy for tabūk stresses that this was the only one of muḥammad’s campaigns that he missed.193 though not a major player in public affairs, he would seem to have prospered: he had ten sons and six daughters, borne to him by five wives and two concubines;194 and whether or not he started rich, by the time of the tabūk expedition in 9/630, he was sufficiently well-off to be among those who bankrolled 183. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1740.14; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:29.20; and cf. w 800.8, 896.3. 184. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1740.16. 185. none appear in t178, but see ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:29.23 (lahu ʿaqib al-yawm). ibn ḥazm notes a great-grandson of his who was killed at the battle of qudayd in 130/747 (jamhara, 334.3; for this battle see khalīfa, taʾrīkh, 413.15). see also ibn qudāma, istibṣār, 278.12, 331.7. 186. for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1377 no. 2344. ibn ʿabd al-barr gives him a little less than a page. 187. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:19.3. 188. for divergent accounts of his role, see lecker, “wāqidī’s account”, 25f. 189. w 217.2; balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 315.17. for other such commands see w 504.5, ss 3-4:238.13 = sg 463 (where he is in command of the ḥaras al-nabī at the time of the attack on the banū qurayẓa) and w 602.7 (where he is one of three men who take turns commanding the guard on the ḥudaybiya expedition). 190. w 4.13, 534.7; ss 3-4:612.4 = sg 662. for the quraṭāʾ see t95 and caskel, ğamharat an-nasab, 2:472a. 191. w 4.17, 551.5, 551.17. ibn isḥāq assigns this raid to abū ʿubayda ibn al-jarrāḥ (ss 3-4:609.12 = sg 660). 192. w 733.9. 193. w 995.15; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:19.6. an uncharitable suspicion might be that the claim that he was deputy is an attempt to gloss over his absence from this campaign—absenteeism being a prominent theme in accounts of the tabūk expedition. note that the same claim appears in a boastful account of his campaigning transmitted from muḥammad ibn maslama by his great-great-grandson ibrāhīm ibn jaʿfar (ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:19.15; for his genealogy see lecker, “wāqidī’s account”, 17, and for ibrāhīm’s role in transmitting a similarly tendentious report about his ancestor, 26). this ibrāhīm can no doubt take some credit for the fact that muḥammad ibn maslama appears many times more often in the index to wāqidī’s work than he does in that of ibn hishām’s. 194. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:18.20. ibn ḥazm notes a descendant of his, a traditionist living near toledo (jamhara, 341.17; for the location see 99.14 and n. 3). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 29 the campaign.195 at his death in 46/666 or so, it was marwān ibn al-ḥakam, the governor of medina, who prayed over him.196 was he already prominent before muḥammad came to medina, or did he owe his success to his close relationship with him? the report that after he came to medina muḥammad paired him with abū ʿubayda ibn al-jarrāḥ in the “brothering” (muʾākhāt) at least suggests that he cannot have been a nobody.197 yet there is something about the services he renders muḥammad that portrays him as an individual the prophet could rely on to be useful, rather than as a player with a constituency of his own. thus he served muḥammad well in winding up the affairs of each of the three jewish tribes.198 this is particularly telling in the case of the banū qurayẓa: they were allies of the tribe of aws,199 and unlike muḥammad ibn maslama, the tribe at large interceded with muḥammad on their behalf.200 likewise when ʿumar ibn al-khaṭṭāb urged muḥammad to order the killing of the leading hypocrite—the khazrajī ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy—ʿumar told muḥammad to have muḥammad ibn maslama do the deed.201 it might be going too far to describe him as someone who would do a patron’s dirty work, but there is at least a hint of this in the sources; thus he was still being useful to ʿumar when the latter was caliph, helping him out with “sensitive matters” (umūr muʿḍila) in the provinces.202 his progeny have already been noted.203 saʿd ibn muʿādh (ashhalī, t179.30)[i] only wāqidī names him as a deputy, and only for one expedition (no. 2). apart from ʿuthmān, he is easily the most prominent figure we have yet considered.204 he was chief of his clan and, by the time of his death in 5/627, as we will soon see, of his tribe. he was an early convert in medina,205 and a strong supporter of muḥammad till he died from a wound sustained at the battle of the khandaq; muḥammad had him nursed in a tent set up in the mosque, and would visit him daily while he lay dying.206 four incidents show his political standing. the first was that when he converted, his entire clan converted with him, men and women.207 the second took place on the way to badr, when muḥammad held 195. w 991.10. 196. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1377.7; i adopt the death-date given by ibn saʿd (ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:20.17). 197. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:19.5; balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 224.2, 271.9. 198. see w 178.16 (banū qaynuqāʿ), 366.18, 374.8, 377.8 (banū ʾl-naḍīr), 509.16 (banū qurayẓa). 199. ei3, art. “al-aws” (y. perlman), 12. 200. w 510.10 (where the narrator is muḥammad ibn maslama); ss 3-4:239.5 = sg 463. 201. w 418.18, 420.18. in ibn isḥāq’s version ʿumar names ʿabbād ibn bishr (ss 3-4:291.7 = sg 491), like muḥammad ibn maslama an awsī (t179). 202. madelung, succession to muḥammad, 112 n. 163. 203. though they do not appear in t180. 204. he has an entry in ei2, art. “saʿd b. muʿādh” (w. m. watt). 205. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 602.15 no. 958. 206. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 603.4. 207. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:2.14. 30 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) a consultation with his followers. the question was whether the anṣār would fight for him, something they had no obligation to do since the fighting was not defensive; it was saʿd ibn muʿādh who responded on behalf of the anṣār, assuring muḥammad of their support.208 the third incident took place in the context of the battle of the khandaq. muhammad was considering buying off a part of the enemy coalition with a third of the date-harvest of medina (thulth thimār al-madīna), but before going ahead he needed to have the anṣār on board—it was their harvest, not his. so he talked to the awsī saʿd ibn muʿādh and the khazrajī saʿd ibn ʿubāda; but saʿd ibn muʿādh—and presumably also saʿd ibn ʿubāda—were unwilling to entertain the idea.209 the two saʿds thus represented their respective tribes, and saʿd ibn muʿādh on this occasion spoke for both of them. the final incident took place a few months later, when saʿd ibn muʿādh was dying. in the face of the demand of the awsīs that their jewish allies the banū qurayẓa should be spared, muḥammad reached an agreement with them that one of their number should give judgment. he then selected saʿd ibn muʿādh, who proceeded to put his loyalty to muḥammad ahead of the loyalties of his tribe, pronouncing that the men of the banū qurayẓa should be killed and their women and children enslaved.210 despite the outcome, which was not what saʿd’s fellow-tribesmen would have liked to see, the appointment presupposed that he could validly speak for them. indeed muḥammad underlined saʿd’s standing with them by giving the instruction “stand for your chief!” when saʿd arrived to give judgment.211 he had descendants.212 continuing with the anṣārīs, we come now to the khazrajīs. ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy (of sālim al-ḥublā, t189.29) [i] ibn hishām names him as deputy for one expedition (no. 14).213 the clan to which he belonged was a respected one among the anṣār.214 his father ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy was notoriously both a powerful tribal chief and the leading hypocrite of medina till his death in 9/631.215 the son was as good a muslim as the father was a bad one, and was killed at the battle of yamāma in 12/633.216 the question for us is whether at the time of the expedition 208. w 48.14; ss 1-2:615.8 = sg 294. in wāqidī’s narrative saʿd says “i’ll answer on behalf of the anṣār”. 209. ss 3-4:223.5 = sg 454. in wāqidī’s version the two saʿds speak jointly (w 478.10), as they do on another occasion when they speak for the anṣār with regard to the spoils of the banū ʾl-naḍīr (w 379.10). 210. w 510.14, 512.11; ss 3-4:239.8 = sg 463f. 211. w 511.16; ss 3-4:239.22 = sg 463. in ibn isḥāq’s version the muhājirūn took this to be addressed to the anṣār, while the anṣār took it to be addressed to everyone. for the problems this instruction posed for later muslim scholars see kister, “massacre of the banū qurayẓa”, 91f. 212. t179 shows none, but see ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 339.5, 339.7, and ibn qudāma, istibṣār, 212.1. 213. for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 940–2 no. 1590; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:89–91. neither tells us much about ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabdallāh himself. 214. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 940.13 (li-banī ʾl-ḥublā sharaf fī ʾl-anṣār). 215. for ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy see ei2, art. “ʿabd allāh b. ubayy” (w. m. watt); lecker, “king ibn ubayy and the quṣṣāṣ”, especially 36–57. for the date of his death see w 1057.6. 216. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 942.2. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 31 for which ibn hishām has him as deputy—in 4/626—he would have gained more from his father’s high social and political standing than he lost through his tense relationship with him, and we have no way to answer it. one anecdote about him could nonetheless be read as evidence of a marked political astuteness, if we can set any store by it. this was at the time when ʿumar was urging muḥammad to have ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy killed. apparently unaware that muḥammad had rejected ʿumar’s imprudent proposal, the son went to muḥammad and offered to do the deed himself, pointing out that if anyone else did it, he feared that as the most dutiful son in all of khazraj he would lose control of himself and kill the killer, thereby slaying a believer for an unbeliever and going to hell.217 naturally god’s prophet would hardly order a man to kill his own father in cold blood, and the son had thus politely served notice on muḥammad that if anyone else undertook the killing he would retaliate. he had descendants.218 ʿabdallāh ibn rawāḥa (ḥārithī, t188.28) [i] wāqidī names him as deputy for one expedition (again no. 14).219 an early convert to islam in medina, and a zealous enemy of the idols of his clan,220 he was one of the twelve naqībs.221 he also had considerable poetic talent, and retained it after his conversion. when he used it in mecca at the time of the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ to proclaim the triumph of muḥammad over the polytheists, ʿumar asked him how he could recite poetry in the sanctuary of god and in the presence of his prophet; but muḥammad responded that ibn rawaḥa’s verse caused more grief to the polytheists than a hail of arrows.222 he was the commander of a minor expedition in 6/628,223 and muḥammad used him in other roles that make it clear he was someone he could trust, notably with regard to the administration of the produce of the oasis of khaybar after its conquest.224 a certain manly cunning is displayed in an anecdote about how he once tricked his wife.225 but despite the fact that he was one of the naqībs, we do not get a sense of someone with a constituency. it may not be altogether fanciful to remember him as jābir ibn ʿabdallāh did at the end of the expedition to muraysīʿ, ill-advisedly setting out alone on the road to medina in the middle of the 217. w 420.18; ss 3-4:292.24 = sg 492. 218. t189 shows none, and ibn ḥazm mentions none (jamhara, 355.1), but ibn saʿd lists five sons and states that he had progeny (lahu ʿaqib), see ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:90.22, 91.1. 219. for his biography see ei2, art. “ʿabd allāh b. rawāḥa” (a. schaade); ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 898–901 no. 1530 (mainly about his poetry). 220. for anecdotes about his role in the desecration and destruction of idols, see lecker, “idol worship”, 338, 339f. 221. ss 2-3:443.12 = sg 204. 222. bayhaqī, al-sunan al-kubrā, 10:228.15. in the parallel in w 735.15 muḥammad’s exchange with ʿumar is laconic (see 736.6), while in ss 3-4:371.11 = sg 531 it is missing altogether. 223. w 5.10, 566.1; ss 3-4:618.8 = sg 665. according to wāqidī thirty men went on this expedition (w 567.2). 224. see lecker, “idol worship”, 339. 225. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 900.16. 32 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) night.226 he was killed at the battle of muʾta in 8/629,227 and is said to have had descendants in spain.228 abū dujāna, simāk ibn aws (sāʿidī, t187.29) [i] ibn hishām names him as deputy for one expedition, the last (no. 27), though with an alternative.229 like ʿabdallāh ibn rawāḥa (and saʿd ibn ʿubāda) he was involved at an early stage in breaking up the idols of his clan.230 it is disputed whether his father’s name was aws or kharasha. in the “brothering” soon after muḥammad came to medina, he was paired with ʿutba ibn ghazwān—an early meccan convert (he claimed to be the seventh), but not a qurashī.231 he showed great prowess as a fighter on the battlefield, and is described as “the bravest anṣārī of his day”;232 as just one example, he played a prominent part in defending muḥammad in the thick of the battle of uḥud.233 he does not, however, appear as a leader, on the battlefield or elsewhere—though muḥammad assigned him the standard of khazraj in the tabūk expedition.234 the paucity of his record of leadership correlates with the fact that he was poor: he was one of two men who alone among the anṣār were given a share of the spoils of the banū ʾl-naḍīr, the reason being that they were both needy (muḥtājayn).235 he died at the battle of yamāma in 12/633—though another account has it that he survived to participate in the battle of ṣiffīn (37/657).236 ibn saʿd notes a son and states that in his own day there were descendants of abū dujāna in medina and baghdad.237 saʿd ibn ʿubāda (sāʿidī, t187.29) [ii] wāqidī and ibn hishām agree in naming him as deputy for the first expedition led by 226. w 439.14. 227. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 898.5. 228. ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 363.14; contrast ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:79.18 (laysa lahu ʿaqib). 229. for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 651f no. 1060, 1644 no. 2938. as ibn ʿabd al-barr remarks, he is known by his tecnonym (651.18). 230. lecker, “idol worship”, 341; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:143.4. 231. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1644.14. for ʿutba’s biography see 1026–9 no. 1764. he was an ally (ḥalīf) of the qurashī clan of nawfal (1026.13). 232. ibn durayd, ishtiqāq, 456.8 (ashjaʿ anṣārī fī dahrihi). most of balādhurī’s references to him are in connection with men he killed on the battlefield (ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 149.6, 298.2, 299.20, 300.15, 301.1, 301.4, 334.14, 335.10, 335.12); most of wāqidī’s references to him are likewise in connection with his valorous deeds. 233. w 240.20, 246.9; ss 3-4:82.11 = sg 381. 234. w 996.6. 235. w 379.13; ss 3-4:192.7 = sg 438; and see lecker, muslims, jews and pagans, 123. according to ibn isḥāq the two pled poverty (dhakarā faqran). 236. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 652.4. 237. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:101.15, 102.13. by contrast, t187 shows no descendants, and ibn ḥazm mentions none (jamhara, 366.6). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 33 muḥammad (no. 1). the sources present him as the khazrajī counterpart of the awsī saʿd ibn muʿādh: the chief of his clan, and, in due course, of his tribe.238 he converted earlier than his counterpart, played a part in breaking the idols of his clan,239 and was one of the twelve naqībs.240 he also outlived him. we have already seen how he and saʿd ibn muʿādh appear together representing their respective tribes; in one of these contexts ibn ʿabd al-barr (d. 463/1071) remarks that “they were the chiefs of their two tribes (sayyiday qawmihimā), saʿd ibn muʿādh was the chief of aws and saʿd ibn ʿubāda of khazraj”.241 what made him very different from saʿd ibn muʿādh was his continuing identification with the interests of his tribal constituency; this was strong enough to damage his reputation with posterity.242 at the fatḥ his wish to deal harshly with quraysh put him at odds with muḥammad, who reacted by making him hand over the standard to one of his sons.243 when the resentment of the anṣār at the skewed distribution of the spoils of hawāzin boiled over, and muḥammad asked saʿd where he stood on the matter, he replied, “i can only stand with my people” (mā anā illā min qawmī).244 and in the succession crisis following muḥammad’s death, though ill at the time, he was a contender for power; typically, the support he had from within his own tribe was partial, while aws rejected him.245 “i will never give allegiance to a qurashī!” (lā ubāyiʿu qurashiyyan abadan), as he is later said to have told an emissary of ʿumar’s.246 his authority as a tribal chief was reinforced by the fact that he was independently wealthy: his family had an ongoing tradition of inviting all comers to free meals, and would give ten sacrificial animals to the goddess manāt, later to the kaʿba.247 he died in syria within a few years of muḥammad, in rather obscure circumstances sometimes said to involve the jinn.248 he had descendants: two of his six sons had progeny in spain.249 this completes the anṣārī deputies, and we come now to members of tribes other than quraysh, aws, and khazraj. we begin with the three ghifārīs. the banū ghifār, as 238. for his biography see ei2, art. “saʿd b. ʿubāda” (w. m. watt); ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 594–9 no. 944. ibn qudāma refers to him as “chief of all khazraj” (sayyid al-khazraj kullihā, istibṣār, 93.5). 239. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:143.4. 240. ss 1-2:444.9 = sg 204. 241. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 596.18. likewise mubarrad (d. 286/900) describes them as sayyidā ʾl-ḥayyayn al-aws waʾl-khazraj (kāmil, 1249.1). 242. in addition to those that follow, for another incident of this kind see w 431.7; ss 3-4:300.17 = sg 496 (in the context of the ifk). 243. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 597.9, 598.15. for another version see ss 3-4:406.12 = sg 549. 244. ss 3-4:499.2 = 596. or perhaps rather “i’m just one of my people”; wāqidī has it as mā anā illā ka-aḥadihim (w 957.8). 245. lecker, “king ibn ubayy and the quṣṣāṣ”, 29 n. 2; ei3, art. “bashīr b. saʿd” (m. lecker). 246. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 589.14. 247. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 595.6, 595.11, 595.17. they were muṭʿimūn. 248. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 599.5. 249. for his six sons (by two wives) see ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:142.13. for the two with descendants in spain, see ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 365.17; only these two appear in t187. see also ibn qudāma, istibṣār, 97.7, 99.3, 99.6. 34 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) already noted, were a small tribe living between mecca and medina, and like quraysh were considered a part of the wider grouping of kināna. abū dharr al-ghifārī, jundab ibn junāda (t42.18) [ii] wāqidī names him as a deputy for one expedition (no. 23), ibn hishām for two (nos. 15 and 17), in each case with an alternative. abū dharr was well-known for his uncompromising piety.250 after hearing about muḥammad, he came to mecca to check him out, and became a very early convert to islam, it is said the fourth or fifth; he then returned to his tribe.251 but before he did so a characteristic episode took place. muḥammad advised him not to let the meccans know that he had converted, whereupon abū dharr promptly betook himself to the sanctuary—the social centre of meccan society—and declaimed the muslim confession of faith at the top of his voice. for this he was duly beaten up and had to be rescued by muḥammad’s uncle ʿabbās, who cleverly pointed out that the ghifārīs bestrode the trade route between mecca and syria. the next day abū dharr repeated his performance, and had to be rescued again.252 but despite his early conversion, he did not join muḥammad in medina until after the battle of the khandaq.253 even then his role in muḥammad’s expeditions does not seem to have been particularly prominent.254 later he went to syria, where he got into trouble with the governor, muʿāwiya ibn abī sufyān, over a loaded exegetical question: when god promised punishment for “those who treasure up gold and silver, and do not expend them in the way of god” (q9:34), was he talking about the people of the book, as muʿāwiya maintained, or about muslims too, as abū dharr insisted?255 muʿāwiya complained to the caliph ʿuthmān that abū dharr’s presence in syria was subversive,256 and as a result of this commotion the caliph exiled him to rabadha, where he died in 32/653 or so.257 rabadha was located three days’ journey from medina, and is described by abū dharr’s wife umm dharr—and by the prophet—as a desert (falāt min al-arḍ).258 in this appropriate setting, ʿabdallāh 250. for his biography see ei2, art. “abū dharr” (j. robson); ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 252–6 no. 339, 1652–6 no. 2944; cameron, abû dharr al-ghifârî, which collects much material on him (for his role as deputy, see 28–31, 44, not without errors). there is a wide range of views about his name and that of his father (ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 252.2, 1652.10). 251. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 252.11, 1653.1. 252. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1654.10. 253. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 252.13. this makes it unlikely that muḥammad can have paired him with al-mundhir ibn ʿamr al-sāʿidī—one of the twelve naqībs—in the “brothering” that he instituted soon after arriving in medina (see 1450.3 no. 2494 for this disputed question). 254. at one point he is listed among twenty horsemen (w 571.8), and twice he carries the standard of the banū ghifār (see 819.9 for the fatḥ, and 896.10 for the battle of ḥunayn). 255. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:166.15 (the first half of the verse is about rabbis and monks, so that muʿāwiya’s interpretation, however politically tendentious, is entirely plausible). for this conflict between abū dharr and muʿāwiya see cameron, abû dharr al-ghifârî, 62–119. 256. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:166.26 (inna abā dharr qad afsada ʾl-nās biʾl-shām). 257. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 253.1; cameron, abû dharr al-ghifârî, 120–5. 258. see yāqūt, muʿjam al-buldān, 3:24b.16, art. “al-rabadha”; for the phrase falāt min al-arḍ, see ibn al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 35 ibn masʿūd, who prayed over him (and himself died later in the same year), summed up the character of abū dharr with the words: “he lived alone, he died alone, and he’ll be resurrected alone.”259 the ultimate loner, nothing we are told about him suggests an ability to work with others, or to handle trouble as opposed to making it through his inflexibility. muḥammad is said to have refused a request from abū dharr to be given a position of authority (imāra), telling him he was “weak” (ḍaʿīf).260 that he is mentioned among the ahl al-ṣuffa suggests that he may have been poor;261 but he may not have remained so, since he is reported to have acquired a court (dār) containing several houses (buyūt).262 he seems to have had no descendants.263 abū ruhm al-ghifārī, kulthūm ibn ḥuṣayn (t42.19) [iii] all three of our authors name him as a deputy for one or more of the later expeditions (nos. 23, 24, and 25), though there is not much agreement as to which expedition or expeditions it was.264 one of these was a particularly long absence: during the fatḥ (no. 25) and the campaigns that followed it, muḥammad was away from medina for some two-anda-half months.265 abū ruhm is known by his tecnonym, but his name is not in dispute, though there is disagreement about his father’s name.266 he lived in medina—though he also had a place to stay (manzil) in or near the territory of his tribe267—and he converted after muḥammad’s arrival. he clearly had standing with his tribe. during the preparations for the fatḥ, muḥammad sent emissaries to mobilize the various tribes on whose support he was counting; one of his two emissaries to ghifār was abū ruhm.268 muḥammad did the ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 253.17, 254.4. for a very different view of rabadha in early islamic times as “a thriving place, and not the contemporary equivalent of siberia”, see ei2, art. “al-rabadha” (s. ʿa. ʿa. al-rashid), citing archaeological evidence. 259. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 253.10. in other accounts the remark goes back to muḥammad (w 1000.14, 1001.5; ss 3-4:524.6, 524.16 = sg 606). 260. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:170.14, and cf. 170.10. 261. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 1:2:14.9; balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 272.10; ei2, art. “ahl al-ṣuffa” (w. m. watt). 262. ibn shabba, taʾrīkh al-madīna, 1:253.17. 263. t42 shows none, and ibn ḥazm states that he had none (jamhara, 186.9). but see cameron, abû dharr al-ghifârî, 33 for some descendants in modern iran. 264. note also the expeditions assigned to abū ruhm by ibn ḥabīb and balādhurī (see above, text to notes 78–81, 83). 265. muḥammad left medina on 10 ramaḍān (ss 3-4:399.22 = sg 545; w 801.7) and did not return until near the end of dhū ʾl-qaʿda, or even in the following month (ss 3-4:500.16 = sg 597, 782 n. 853; w 960.2, 973.11). 266. for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1327 no. 2209 and 1659f no. 2960. the second of these two entries records the alternative names of his father. 267. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1327.8, 1660.4. 268. w 799.16. the text seems corrupt: ilā banī ʾl-ḥuṣayn is no doubt to be deleted, and the addition of ḍamra to ghifār does not make sense since ḍamra is a larger tribal grouping that includes ghifār (see t42 and ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 465.20). 36 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) same thing for the tabūk campaign, and again he sent abū ruhm to his tribe;269 this was an unpopular expedition, and muḥammad later questioned abū ruhm about ghifārīs who had stayed behind.270 but abū ruhm’s usefulness was not confined to dealings with his own tribe. after the battle of ḥunayn, the defeated tribe of hawāzin asked muḥammad for the return of their captive women and children, and to be able to grant this petition he needed the agreement of his troops. thus at one point he sent emissaries to three constituencies to secure their consent: the anṣār, the muhājirūn, and the arab tribes (qabāʾil al-ʿarab). the emissary to the arab tribes was abū ruhm.271 significantly, we hear of no such commissions being entrusted to abū dharr. but equally significantly, we would not expect an outsider like abū ruhm to have standing among the core tribes of muḥammad’s community, and there is nothing to suggest that he had it. like abū dharr, abū ruhm is not said to have had descendants.272 the date of his death is not recorded. sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī [iii] all three authors name him as a deputy for one or more of five expeditions (nos. 8, 16, 23, 26, and 27), in a couple of cases with an alternative.273 though he is not known to the genealogists, we can take it that he was a ghifārī because the sources regularly refer to him as one.274 and these two things—his role as deputy and his tribal affiliation—are in fact almost all that our sources have to tell us about him.275 thus the references made to him by wāqidī, ibn hishām, khalīfa, balādhurī, and ṭabarī relate exclusively to his role as deputy, and ibn ʿabd al-barr in his entry on him can add to this only that he was one of the older companions of muḥammad (min kibār al-ṣaḥāba).276 we do not know the date of his death or whether he had descendants. we now come to two deputies belonging to the clan of kalb, which as already mentioned is part of the tribe of layth ibn bakr, which again is a part of kināna.277 the two look like they could be brothers, but are not. 269. w 990.15. 270. w 1001.18; ss 3-4:529.1 = sg 609; and cf. ss 518.21 = sg 603. 271. w 952.9. 272. none appear in t42 or are mentioned in ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 186.17. 273. of these deputyships one—for the khaybar expedition (no. 23)—is unusually widely attested because it is central to a well-known tradition about abū hurayra’s arrival in medina; i will return to it below, text to notes 320, 329. 274. see, for example, w 8.9; ss 3-4:43.14 = sg 751 n. 563. the nisba balādhurī gives him is al-kinānī (ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 341.13, 352.11), kināna being the wider grouping to which ghifār belongs. 275. for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 682 no. 1129; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. ʿumar, 5:108.3 no. 753 (both entries of less than two lines). he is said to have acquired a building-plot (khiṭṭa) at the muṣallā, which is not where the ghifārīs at large settled in medina (ibn shabba, taʾrīkh al-madīna, 1:261.5). 276. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 682 no. 1129. 277. this clan is often referred to as “kalb layth” to distinguish it from the much larger tribe of kalb (see, for example, ss 3-4:622.18 = sg 667). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 37 ghālib ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī (t37.19) [i] only khalīfa mentions him as a deputy, and without specifying for which expedition or expeditions he was appointed; in other words, this is the vaguest reference to a deputy in our corpus of evidence.278 what ghālib was remembered for was his role as the commander of three expeditions sent out by muḥammad: one against the banū murra in 7/628f, one to mayfaʿa in 7/629, and one to kadīd in 8/629.279 he reappears as a military commander during the early conquests outside arabia.280 a vivid narrative of his expedition against the banū murra depicts a man with a talent for military leadership—someone with impressive presence who makes tactical decisions quickly and decisively.281 virtually the only other thing we are told about him is that muḥammad sent him ahead to clear the path for him (li-yusahhila lahu ʾl-ṭarīq) at the time of the fatḥ.282 no descendants are recorded.283 numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī (t37.22) [ii] wāqidī does not name him as a deputy, but ibn hishām does so for three expeditions (nos. 17, 22, and 23), and khalīfa for one (no. 17). numayla and ghālib appear to be three generations apart, which is odd.284 numayla is a little-known figure.285 more precisely, apart from his genealogy and his role as deputy, there are only two things we are told about him. one is that he was among a few dozen people to whom muḥammad gave allowances (ṭuʿam) from the produce of a part of khaybar after its conquest in 7/628.286 the other is that at the fatḥ he killed a drunken cousin of his father, miqyas ibn ṣubāba;287 this miqyas was one of the people muḥammad had explicitly excepted from the general amnesty he 278. but for a possible identification, see above, note 71. for ghālib’s biography, see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1252 no. 2057. there is some disagreement about his father’s name. 279. for the expedition against the banū murra, see w 723.18; ss 3-4:622.18 = sg 667; khalīfa, taʾrīkh, 40.9. for the expedition to mayfaʿa, see w 5.17, 726.9 (ibn hishām has no account of this expedition, see jones, “chronology of the maghāzī”, 254 n. 20). for the expedition to kadīd, see w 6.3, 750.14; ss 3-4:609.20 = sg 660. some sources mention a much earlier raid led by ghālib on sulaym and ghaṭafān in 2/624 (ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, i/1364.1 = history, 7:89; ibn ḥabīb, muḥabbar, 117.3). ibn saʿd’s entry on him speaks only of the raids he led (ṭabaqāt, ed. ʿumar, 5:122.1 no. 780). 280. ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, i/2188.6, 2196.7, 2233.13 = history, 11:201, 209, 12:27. in the first two of these references the troops he commands are described as belonging to kināna; no such statements are made about the men he commands in the time of muḥammad, and none of the individuals mentioned by name in the accounts of the relevant expeditions given by wāqidī and ibn hishām are kinānīs. 281. w 724.4; see also 727.1 on the mayfaʿa expedition. 282. ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1252.14; and see bukhārī, al-taʾrīkh al-kabīr, 4:1:99.2 no. 437. 283. see t37; ibn ḥazm does not mention him in his jamhara. 284. see t37, where their last common ancestor is seven generations before numayla and four before ghālib. 285. for his biography see the brief entries in ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1533f no. 2664; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. ʿumar, 5:126.11 no. 784. balādhurī gives him the nisba al-kinānī (ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 352.12). 286. w 695.4 (i take the document to end at 695.6); ss 3-4:352.7 = sg 522. 287. his father’s name appears variously as ṣubāba, ḍubāba, and ḥubāba. 38 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) extended to the meccans.288 as a result numayla was criticized locally for having disgraced his kinsfolk.289 he would seem to have lived into the time of the first civil war;290 we do not know of any descendants.291 we have one more deputy from the local tribes of the ḥijāz, this time a member of duʾil ibn bakr, yet another part of kināna. ʿuwayf ibn al-aḍbaṭ al-duʾalī (t43.17) [ii] ibn hishām and khalīfa agree that he was deputy for an expedition, but disagree as to which it was (no. 22 or no. 24). he is perhaps the least-known of all our deputies.292 neither wāqidī nor ṭabarī mentions him; nor do ibn hishām or khalīfa, except to name him once as a deputy. unlike our other deputies, he is said to have converted only in the year of the expedition to ḥudaybiya, that is in 6/628; if so, it would seem unlikely that he would have served as deputy for that expedition (no. 22). according to a somewhat cryptic report, during the expedition to ḥudaybiya the tribe of khuzāʿa urged muḥammad to attack the most powerful family of tihāma (aʿazz bayt bi-tihāma); he responded that the women of ʿuwayf ibn al-aḍbaṭ should not be scared, for he was urging his people to adopt islam (kāna yaʾmuruhum biʾl-islām).293 if this indicates the standing of the family of ʿuwayf in tihāma, it is curiously inconsistent with his general obscurity. we do not know the date of his death or whether he had descendants.294 as already mentioned, the last of our deputies was born into the far-away tribe of kalb ibn wabara. zayd ibn ḥāritha (t291.33) [ii] zayd is named as a deputy by both wāqidī and ibn hishām for one expedition (no. 3) and by wāqidī alone for another (no. 17). in our pool of deputies he stands out as an 288. w 408.10, 860.16, 875.5; ss 3-4:410.19 = sg 551. the story goes back to an incident of friendly fire during the expedition to muraysīʿ (see w 407.20, 861.7; ss 3-4:290.11, 293.14 = sg 490, 492). for the general amnesty see w 825.7; ss 3-4:409.8 = sg 550. 289. see w 861.4; ss 3-4:410.20 = sg 551, where the verses are attributed to a sister of miqyas. 290. he reports a letter sent by umm salama to the people of iraq urging unity (abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 2708 no. 6471). 291. none are shown in t37, and ibn ḥazm does not indicate any (jamhara, 182.1). 292. for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1247f no. 2051 (a five-line entry); ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. ʿumar, 5:133.1 no. 792. for his name there is a variant form ʿuwayth; his father’s name may also be given as rabīʿa, with al-aḍbaṭ (“ambidextrous”) as his nickname. balādhurī, in a practice of his that is by now familiar, gives him the nisba al-kinānī (ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 353.12). 293. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. ʿumar, 5:133.3; balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ʿaẓm, 10:36.10; ibn mākūlā, ikmāl, 1:15.14, 6:174.5, and the editor’s footnotes to the second passage. 294. t43 shows none; he is not in ibn ḥazm’s jamhara. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 39 exceptional case in more than one respect.295 first, he was not by origin a local—he did not belong to any of the tribes of kināna or to either tribe of the anṣār. second, he had been a slave: though born a free member of the northern tribe of kalb, he had had the misfortune to be sold into slavery. his presence in mecca arose from this enslavement; that he was later manumitted could not wipe out the social and political stigma that arose from it according to the norms of arabian society. third, he happened to be the slave, freedman, and for a while adopted son of muḥammad himself.296 he was thus closely bonded to muḥammad,297 but had no agnatic ties to the wider community of his followers. the resulting tensions were manifested both socially and politically. socially, he got to marry four qurashī women,298 but anecdotal evidence suggests that two of them disliked the prospect so much that they gave way only in the face of overwhelming pressure from god and his prophet. one objected that she was zayd’s social superior (anā khayr minhu ḥasaban), the other angrily complained—with her brother—that muḥammad had married her to his slave (zawwajanā ʿabdahu).299 politically, zayd commanded a quite unusually large number of expeditions. ibn isḥāq’s data put the number at six, whereas no other person commanded more than two expeditions, and most commanded only one; wāqidī’s data put the number at eight, whereas no other person commanded more than three expeditions, and most again commanded only one.300 he would no doubt have commanded yet more expeditions had he not been killed at the battle of muʾta in 8/629. but again, this prominence was not well received: according to remarks ascribed to muḥammad close to the time of his own death, these appointments were resented.301 zayd had descendants.302 295. for his biography see ei2, art. “zayd ibn ḥāritha” (m. lecker); powers, zayd. he also stands out in being the only companion named in the koran (q33:37), but this need not concern us. 296. adoption would seem to have been an uncommon practice in pre-islamic arabia, and one that did not put the adopted son on the same footing as a real son (see landau-tasseron, “adoption”, 171f). 297. as a member of muḥammad’s household he was naturally an early convert, though just how early was disputed (see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 546.1, and ibn ʿabd al-barr’s own comment thereto). 298. for his marriages see ei2, art. “zayd ibn ḥāritha”, 475b; balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 469.4, 471.7. 299. see ṭabarī, tafsīr, 10:301f no. 28,516 for zaynab bint jaḥsh, and no. 28,517 for umm kulthūm bint ʿuqba ibn abī muʿayṭ. these traditions appear overwhelmingly in tafsīr to q33:36 (but for an exception, though very likely of exegetical origin, see w 1126.19). the second is quoted in arazi, “les enfants adultérins”, 9, together with a parallel to the first in which the zaynab indignantly asks muḥammad “you marry your niece to your freedman (mawlā)?” see further powers, zayd, 32f and 129 n. 19. the other two qurashī women whom zayd married were durra bint abī lahab and hind bint al-ʿawwām; i have not seen such anecdotes about them. 300. powers gives the number of expeditions commanded by zayd as nine (zayd, 106; but cf. below, note 366). i will return to the role of zayd as a commander below, text to notes 366f. 301. w 1119.3; ss 3-4:650.10 = sg 679; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 2:2:41.13 (and see 3:1:32.2); abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 1139 no. 2855 (from mūsā ibn ʿuqba); powers, zayd, 76. the context is the grumbling against the last commander muḥammad ever appointed, usāma ibn zayd; muḥammad reminisces that there had likewise been discontent about his father’s role as commander. 302. see t291; ibn ḥazm, jamhara, 459.5; also ei2, art. “zayd ibn ḥāritha”, 475b, and powers, zayd, 85f on his numerous grandchildren. 40 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) this completes our survey of the pool of deputies named in our three early sources. above we noted in passing two additional persons named as deputies in relatively early sources: one was ʿalī, named by ibn ḥabīb, yaʿqūbī, and masʿūdī for tabūk (no. 26), and the other was nājiya ibn jundab al-aslamī, named by ibn ḥibbān for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ (no. 24).303 ʿalī’s deputyship, unlike nājiya’s, is mentioned by several later authors.304 i have also noted three further names found only in later authors: sakhāwī (d. 902/1497) mentions jiʿāl ibn surāqa al-ḍamrī as deputy for muraysīʿ (no. 17) and bashīr ibn saʿd al-anṣārī for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ (no. 24), while diyārbakrī (writing c. 940/1534) names one ibn abī mikraz as deputy for uḥud (no. 11).305 in the cases of nājiya, bashīr, and ibn abī mikraz, there is at least some reason to suspect that these names represent errors of transmission rather than the survival of information deriving from early sources now lost to us. in any case, i do not include any of these five names in the pool. we are now ready to proceed to a discussion of the data. 4. discussion 4.1 what to believe our evidence regarding the deputies is of two kinds. first, there are the specific statements found in the sources about their appointment as deputies. second, there is the wider range of biographical information we have assembled about them. let us consider each in turn. as we have seen, statements about the deputies muḥammad appointed appear regularly in works of the late second and early third century, but not earlier. this, of course, is the best part of two centuries after the events that the sources describe. frequently we are told nothing about how the information reached our sources; thus it is unusual for us to find it backed up with a chain of authorities (isnād), despite the fact that the use of such chains was already well-established in the scholarly culture of the day.306 this suggests that it was 303. for ʿalī see above, text to notes 81, 86, 95; for nājiya see above, note 98. 304. ibn ḥazm, ibn ʿabd al-barr, ṭabrisī, mughulṭāy, ibn khaldūn, diyārbakrī, and ḥalabī (see the appendix). of these seven, only ṭabrisī is shīʿite. 305. see the appendix. 306. there are only four expeditions out of the twenty-seven for which we know or have reason to believe that ibn isḥāq named the deputy: badr (see above, note 49), kudr (see above, note 67), the fatḥ (see above, note 63, and text to notes 20, 88), and tabūk (see above, note 64 and text to note 89); only one of these, the third, comes with an isnād going back to a companion of muḥammad, namely ʿabdallāh ibn al-ʿabbās. apart from ibn isḥāq, the first and last of these are also supported by other lines of transmission (for badr see above, note 49, and for tabūk see above, text to note 19, and note 64). in the case of tabūk we also have the tradition about the appointment of ʿalī going back to saʿd ibn abī waqqāṣ (see above, note 81). in addition, we are told by ibn ʿabd al-barr that zuhrī named the deputy for the khandaq (see below, the third paragraph of the appendix), and we have the widely-attested tradition from or about the companion abū hurayra regarding the khaybar expedition (see below, text to notes 320, 329). when we come to wāqidī matters are less clear: it may not be obvious what is and is not covered by an isnād, and in any case his isnāds can be rather vague (qālū, “they said”, preceding statements about the appointment of deputies at w 277.8, 546.20, 683.15, 995.5). that leaves six isnāds for information about deputies that are worth attention (w 100.17, 180.15, 183.18, 197.3, 402.11, 537.17; they relate to badr, to badr, qaynuqāʿ, and sawīq, to kudr, to buḥrān, to dhāt al-riqāʿ, and to al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 41 only rather late that the idea emerged that no account of an expedition led by muḥammad was complete without the identification of his deputy in medina; wāqidī and ibn hishām clearly thought this way, but two generations before them ibn isḥāq only occasionally saw fit to mention a deputy.307 to this we can add an argument from silence. some now lost biographical works on the life of muḥammad by contemporaries of ibn isḥāq survived for centuries. thus the spanish scholar abū bakr ibn khayr al-ishbīlī (d. 575/1179) had access to those of mūsā ibn ʿuqba (d. 141/758f) and sulaymān ibn ṭarkhān (d. 143/761), while ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī (d. 852/1449) still had access to that of mūsā ibn ʿuqba.308 the medieval scholars quote these works quite frequently, yet i have only seen a single instance of a quotation from one of them making reference to a deputy.309 so there is real doubt as to how information dating from the time of muḥammad reached our sources—if it did. a crucial question here is how far we have mutually independent sources that could corroborate each other’s testimony. we tend to be suspicious if the sources agree too much or too little with each other—too much because it would suggest interdependence, too little because not enough is corroborated. in the present case the complaint can hardly be that the sources agree too much. while they do agree on the basic principle that when going out on an expedition muḥammad would appoint a deputy, once we ask who the deputy was for any particular expedition, our three main sources are much more likely to disagree than to agree—though things look better if we confine ourselves to wāqidī and ibn hishām.310 and as we have seen, the extent of the overlap between the sources increases considerably if, rather than concern ourselves with particular expeditions, we are content to assemble a pool of people who at one time or another are said to have served as deputies; can we then take that overlap as corroboration? we can, of course, argue that it is not clear what motive people would have had for inventing information about who acted as deputies. but there is a ready answer to this: given the emergence of the principle that every expedition had to have its deputy, there would have been an obvious motive for the ghāba respectively). as usual, several of wāqidī’s informants are not covered by the biographical literature of the traditionists, but it is worth noting that all but the first and last of these six isnāds go back two links before wāqidī, one of them to the medinese ʿabdallāh ibn abī bakr ibn ḥazm (d. 135/752f) (w180.15; for this traditionist see mizzī, tahdhīb, 14:349–52 no. 3190). the first and sixth isnāds go back three links. the first stems from the medinese ʿabdallāh ibn muknif al-ḥārithī, whose floruit must have been around the early second/eighth century (on him see 16:176 no. 3591). the sixth goes back to the companion salama ibn al-akwaʿ (d. 74/693f) (for whom see 11:301f no. 2462). in sum, putting together the data set out in this note, we find that there are attributions going back behind the generation of wāqidī and ibn hishām for eleven of the twenty-seven expeditions, although only four of these attributions are supported by isnāds claiming to go back to companions of muḥammad. 307. for the four expeditions for which we have evidence that ibn isḥāq named a deputy, see the preceding note. 308. see abū bakr ibn khayr al-ishbīlī, fahrasa, 230.11, 231.3, and ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, al-muʿjam al-mufahras, 74 no. 189. for the arrival of both works in spain, see jarrar, prophetenbiographie, 72, 81. 309. for mūsā ibn ʿuqba on abū lubāba as deputy for badr, see above, note 49. it is significant that the focus of the report is on who was deemed present at badr, not on who was deputy (abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 403 no. 1203; the passage begins: wa-shahida badran (read so) min al-anṣār min al-aws…). 310. see the tabulations in section 2.4 above. 42 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) scholars of the generation of wāqidī and ibn hishām to plug any gaps. yet why they should have plugged so many gaps with people of such little consequence is harder to explain in these terms. one strategy that considerations of this kind might suggest would be to see what sort of a picture emerges if we consider only our better-attested deputies—let us say those rated [iii] in my listing above. that would limit us to a subpool of five: ibn umm maktūm, abū lubāba, muḥammad ibn maslama, abū ruhm al-ghifārī, and sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī. but the main thing that emerges from all these thoughts is indeterminacy: we have no way to be sure whether, or to what extent, our lists of deputies do or do not have a real historical foundation.311 similar doubts arise about the wider biographical material, though in a more diffuse way. what we can say on the basis of the sketches presented above is that the picture of any given deputy that emerges from our sources tends to possess a certain coherence. but how far that coherence is a historical or a literary phenomenon is a question we have again no sure way to answer. in addition, it is perhaps worth drawing attention here to two factors that could skew our sense of the prominence or otherwise of particular deputies in the lifetime of the prophet. one is the date of a man’s death: to die before the conquests was to miss out on a quite exceptional opportunity to amass wealth and power and thereby gain the attention of posterity.312 the other is whether he has descendants:313 an energetic descendant can be an effective lobbyist promoting the reputation of an ancestor. whether these factors operated across the board is hard to tell, but as we have seen they both find a striking illustration in the case of muḥammad ibn maslama.314 we have, then, two options. we can give up on any attempt to use the material in our sources for the reconstruction of what actually happened, in which case this article ends here. or we can ask what historical reconstruction is possible if we make the assumption that the sources do in fact convey to us a significant measure of truth. this assumption does not seem unreasonable, and the rest of the article will be based on it.315 4.2 what we see near the beginning of this article i referred to the expectation that muḥammad would tend to appoint deputies who satisfied three criteria: they would be men he could trust, they would be men with previous experience of the job, and they would men with significant social and political clout. in contrast to tribal affiliation and previous experience 311. for skeptical comments on the historicity of the information on deputies found in our sources, see cameron, abû dharr al-ghifârî, 30, 31. 312. the deputies known to have lived longest are, in ascending order of their death-dates, abū dharr, ʿuthmān, abū lubāba, and muḥammad ibn maslama. 313. the deputies known to have descendants are abū salama, ʿuthmān, all the anṣārīs bar ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy, and zayd ibn ḥāritha. that none of the six kinānīs are recorded to have had descendants could mean that they lived in less favored circumstances, or that our sources were less attentive to them. 314. for his progeny see above, note 193, and text to note 194. 315. to use the analogy of two of patricia crone’s works, i take my cue from her slaves on horses rather than her meccan trade and the rise of islam. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 43 of the job, trust and clout are not things that can be established unambiguously with a quick reference to the sources; instead they require research that is more laborious and judgments that are more subjective. but the biographical profiles of the individual deputies that i provided above were intended in considerable measure to collect the relevant information insofar as it is available. trust need not detain us long. we cannot administer polygraph tests to muḥammad’s deputies, but if we go by such indications as early conversion, piety, zeal, personal closeness to muḥammad, financial probity, or willingness to kill a kinsman because muḥammad wanted him dead, then i would be inclined to divide the eighteen deputies into three categories. for twelve of them we have reason to believe that muḥammad could trust them, and no reason to think otherwise. for two of them we have some reason to believe that he could trust them, but at the same time some ground for reservation—in the case of abū lubāba his lapse when he went to counsel the banū qurayẓa and his connection with the masjid al-ḍirār, and in the case of saʿd ibn ʿubāda his excessive loyalty to his clan or tribe. that leaves four—none of them members of the core tribes—of whom the sources have nothing relevant to say. my categorization of some individuals is inevitably rather subjective, and things could have changed over the course of muḥammad’s time in medina, but the overall conclusion is hard to avoid. it is also unremarkable—we would not have expected muḥammad to appoint deputies he was unable to trust.316 previous experience in the job is easy to reckon. if we go by wāqidī’s data as tabulated above,317 he names twelve men as having served as deputies, or having been alleged to have done so. seven of them would have served once only, two of them twice, two of them thrice, and one of them thirteen times. if we go by ibn hishām’s data as tabulated, he names fifteen men as having served or been alleged to serve. nine of them would have served once only, two of them twice, two of them thrice, one of them possibly four times, and one of them ten times. in percentage terms, the proportion of deputies who serve only once is 58 percent for wāqidī and 60 percent for ibn hishām. thus in both cases the majority of those who served as deputy did so only once—which is not what we would have expected. what then can we say about clout? here it may be worth summarizing the data in a table. i use the following code: yes = definitely has clout yes = perhaps has clout no = perhaps lacks clout no = definitely lacks clout 316. perhaps we could imagine muḥammad on some occasion appointing ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy as his deputy in analogy with lyndon johnson’s celebrated remark about j. edgar hoover that it was “better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” but our sources do not suggest that muḥammad ever picked a deputy in this way, though his generous treatment of his former meccan enemies in the aftermath of the fatḥ perhaps meets the johnson criterion (ei2, art. “al-muʾallafa qulūbuhum” (ed.)). 317. for wāqidī and ibn hishām’s data see above, sections 2.2 and 2.5. the outlier is in each case ibn umm maktūm. 44 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) in parentheses i give a brief justification; for details, see the biographical profile for the deputy in question. again my individual ratings are somewhat subjective, but the overall shape of the results is fairly robust. qurashīs: abū salama no (few fellow-clansmen in medina) ibn umm maktūm no (blind, insignificant, known after his mother, etc.) sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn no (little known, too young) ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān yes (unwarlike, but rich, future caliph) awsīs: abū lubāba yes (perhaps a naqīb, trusted by qurayẓa, wealthy) muḥammad ibn maslama yes (competent commander, owed success to prophet?) saʿd ibn muʿādh yes (strong clan and tribal chief) khazrajīs: ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy yes (rather little-known, at odds with his father) ʿabdallāh ibn rawāḥa no (naqīb, but rather alone) abū dujāna no (brave warrior but not a leader) saʿd ibn ʿubāda yes (powerful clan and tribal chief) kinānīs: abū dharr al-ghifārī no (little clout in medina, imprudent, inflexible, loner) abū ruhm al-ghifārī no (clout with his tribe but not much in medina) sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa al-ghifārī no (little clout in medina, virtually unknown) ghālib ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī no (fine commander but little clout in medina) numayla ibn ʿabdallāh al-laythī no (no clout in medina, virtually unknown) ʿuwayf ibn al-aḍbaṭ al-duʾalī no (no clout in medina, virtually unknown) kalbī: zayd ibn ḥāritha no (servile background, no constituency, resented) totals: yes: 3 yes: 3 no: 4 no: 8 several points stand out here. first, there is a set of three anṣārī deputies who meet the clout criterion with flying colors, and are the only ones to do so. the two saʿds are perfect, both of them clan chiefs who could readily mobilize their constituencies in the face of an emergency. at the same time abū lubāba clearly satisfies the criterion. moreover, the fact that these three were al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 45 anṣārīs made them particularly apt appointments. for one thing, being medinese, they were better placed than the muhājirūn to respond to local challenges; for another, when muḥammad went out on campaign he was likely to take with him a higher proportion of the muhājirūn than of the anṣār. this is no doubt relevant to the fact that seven of the deputies are anṣārīs but only four of them qurashīs. but not quite half of the anṣārī deputies fully meet the criterion. muḥammad ibn maslama, ʿabdallāh ibn ʿabdallāh ibn ubayy, and ʿabdallāh ibn rawāḥa are less convincing, and abū dujāna—a fine warrior but not a leader—is not convincing at all. second, of the four qurashīs, the only one close to meeting the criterion is ʿuthmān. abū salama lacked fellow-clansmen and sāʾib ibn ʿuthmān ibn maẓʿūn was a little-known figure and too young. but the most egregious case is of course ibn umm maktūm. in political terms he was a nobody, albeit one remarkably well-known to posterity thanks to the attention paid to him on two occasions by god. he was called after his mother rather than his father, he was poor, he was easily brushed off, and above all he was blind. why then would muḥammad appoint a blind man to watch his back when he went out on campaign? and yet the consensus is that ibn umm maktūm was deputy for something like a dozen campaigns, far more than anyone else; and even if he only served twice, as a deviant tradition has it, that would still stand in need of explanation. third, we have a set of six kinānīs—three ghifārīs, two laythīs, and one duʾalī. simply by virtue of their tribal affiliations they would have lacked significant constituencies in medina. moveover several of them are little known figures—notably sibāʿ, numayla, and ʿuwayf—and that fact alone makes it unlikely that they were people of consequence at the time. so we have a puzzle. our sources are telling us that muḥammad was more likely than not to appoint as his deputy someone who lacked both experience of the job and the political and social clout needed to respond to an emergency in his absence.318 if that really is what muḥammad did, why would he do it? the rest of this discussion will be about ways in which we might solve this puzzle. 4.3 how do we explain it? what is the role of the deputy? a first question here would be whether we—or rather i—might have misunderstood the role of the deputy in the opening section of this paper. what do the sources actually tell us 318. this feature of the deputies was already noted by caetani, who with some exaggeration stated that muḥammad always appointed “persone di nessuna importanza ed influenza sociale” (annali, 2:1:522; he later speaks more accurately of the obscurity of the names of the greater part (“della maggior parte”) of these persons, 524). for caetani at this point in his work their obscurity was not a puzzle: these men were merely leaders of the communal prayer (522, 524). yet earlier in the work he had clearly tended to think of them as exercising an administrative role: the terms he uses most often for the deputies he names in his accounts of the individual expeditions are “luogotenente” and “rappresentante”, and in the context of the tabūk expedition he speaks of “il governo”, as well as leading the prayer, being left to the deputy (see, for example, 1:461, 533, 585, 707, and, for tabūk, 2:1:245f). in these pages he only occasionally mentions the task of leading the prayer in addition to this role (2:1:118, 245f) or on its own (1:481, 568, 691). 46 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) that a deputy does? here information is scarce because their attention is nearly always on muḥammad and his expedition; they rarely tell us anything about what is happening back home in medina while he is absent. but we may hope to glean things here and there. we can at least start on solid ground. the role of the deputy that we hear most of is taking the place of muḥammad in leading the communal prayer in the prophet’s mosque in medina.319 thus when abū hurayra came to medina with a group of fellow-tribesmen, muḥammad was away on the expedition to khaybar; they accordingly prayed the morning prayer behind sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa, who was deputy on this occasion.320 likewise at one point in his account of the battle of uḥud, wāqidī remarks of ibn umm maktūm that muḥammad had left him behind in medina to conduct the prayer (khallafahu biʾl-madīna yuṣallī biʾlnās).321 ibn saʿd tells us that muḥammad appointed him to act as deputy over medina, conducting the prayer, for most of his expeditions, and quotes a series of traditions to back this up.322 the close link between serving as deputy and conducting the prayer is apparent in shaʿbī’s response to the question whether a blind man may lead the prayer (a-yaʾummu ʾl-aʿmā ʾl-qawm?); he replies only that the prophet appointed ibn umm maktūm as deputy (istakhlafa).323 another tradition tells us that while serving as deputy for one expedition (no. 8), ibn umm maktūm would conduct the friday prayer (kāna yujammiʿu bihim), and would deliver the sermon (yakhṭubu).324 this is just the kind of thing ibn umm maktūm 319. the view that this was the only role of the deputy was, as we have seen, adopted by caetani, for whom at this point “maometto non ebbe mai luogotenenti o ministri”, annali, 2:1:524 (contrast his use of the term “luogotenente” with reference to a deputy eleven times earlier in the work). his position is adopted by cameron (abû dharr al-ghifârî, 28–31). 320. w 636.15; similarly ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:2:54.18. this tradition is widely known; see, for example, ibn ḥanbal, musnad, 2:345.29; bukhārī, al-taʾrīkh al-awsaṭ, 1:91 no. 53; bukhārī, al-taʾrīkh al-ṣaghīr, 1:18.2; abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 1451f no. 3679; bayhaqī, dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, 4:198.7; and for further references, see ibn ḥanbal, musnad, ed. arnaʾūṭ, 14:226f no. 8552, n. 2. the common link for most of these traditions is a little-known medinese ghifārī, khuthaym ibn ʿirāk ibn mālik (for whom see mizzī, tahdhīb, 8:228–30 no. 1679); he transmits the tradition from his father ʿirāk ibn mālik, a better-known medinese pietist who died sometime in the years 101–5/720–4, and again was of course a ghifārī (for him see mizzī, tahdhīb, 19:545–9 no. 3893). in some versions abū hurayra himself tells the story, in others it is told about him. one version inserts “a group of ghifārīs” (nafar min banī ghifār) between abū hurayra and ʿirāk (see bayhaqī, dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, 4:198.7, and cf. bukhārī, al-taʾrīkh al-awsaṭ, 1:91.11, and ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:2:54.18). in other words, the message of this isnād is that the tradition is a reminiscence about sibāʿ treasured by his ghifārī fellow-tribesmen, and that for them the role of abū hurayra is incidental. 321. w 277.13; similarly ibn hishām (ss 3-4:64.1 = sg 752 no. 583). 322. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:150.26. in the traditions phrases like yuṣallī biʾl-nās alternate with yaʾummu ʾl-nās (151.4, 151.7, 151.9, 151.15). 323. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:153.22. conversely, one of the arguments in favour of the legitimacy of abū bakr’s caliphate was that he led the prayer during muḥammad’s final illness. 324. w 183.18; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:153.25. he would stand beside the minbar, not on it. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 47 was good at: he also taught people the koran,325 and was one of muḥammad’s muezzins.326 but what if there was trouble? to my knowledge there is only one clear occasion when we get to see a deputy under severe stress. this, unsurprisingly, came at the time of the defeat of muḥammad at uḥud, when the remnants of his forces fled back to medina with the false rumour that muḥammad himself had been killed. ibn umm maktūm, who was the deputy, expressed his vexation to those who had fled (jaʿala yuʾaffifu bihim), then walked out on the road to uḥud till he encountered the returning forces and learnt from them that muḥammad was alive.327 here we get a strong sense of his personal concern, but not that he was asserting command and control in what could have been a disastrous situation. at the time of the expedition against the banū liḥyān (no. 20) we are told that the anṣār were concerned that an enemy might attack medina in their absence (inna ʾl-madīna khāliya minnā wa-qad baʿudnā ʿanhā, wa-lā naʾmanu ʿaduwwan yukhālifunā ilayhā); in response muḥammad assured them that angels were guarding every gap in its perimeter, but made no mention of any role of the deputy (who was ibn umm maktūm).328 what we do encounter on one occasion is a deputy who takes care of a tribal delegation that had come to medina at the time when muḥammad was away leading the expedition to khaybar: after the morning prayer abū hurayra and his fellow-tribesmen approached the deputy, sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa, and he supplied them with some provisions (fa-zawwadanā shayʾan) for their journey to see muḥammad at khaybar—or in a variant text, “he equipped us” (jahhazanā).329 this indicates that sibāʿ was in charge, and suggests that muḥammad had placed some public resources at his disposal. but there is no trace in our sources of the pairing of leading the prayer with military command so characteristic of later provincial government. so did muḥammad just not concern himself with the possibility that things might go wrong in medina? did he really leave things to the angels? or did he make other arrangements, perhaps ones that our sources do not usually report? there are some faint indications that he might have done something of this kind, at least on occasion. one such occasion is the battle of badr. wāqidī tells us in four places that muḥammad 325. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:151.25. we are told that when he arrived in medina he settled in the dār al-qurrāʾ, identified with the dār makhrama ibn nawfal (ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:150.25). presumably we should think of the dār al-qurrāʾ as located in the court later acquired by makhrama ibn nawfal (d. 54/673f); he converted only at the time of the fatḥ (ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 1380.14 no. 2349), and so could not have been in possession of his court in medina at the time of ibn umm maktūm’s arrival. samhūdī, by contrast, identifies the dār al-qurrāʾ as belonging to ʿabdallāh ibn masʿūd (see lecker, “wa-birādhān mā bi-rādhān”, 59, and samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:267.14, 295.8, 3:58.1). 326. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:152.3, and several further traditions on this page. there is no suggestion in the sources that his religious competence gave him a wider authority. 327. w 277.12. compare also the case of badr (below, text to note 335). 328. ibn ḥazm, jawāmiʿ, 201.7; ibn ʿabd al-barr, durar, 197.12. neither wāqidī nor ibn hishām has this anecdote. 329. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:2:54.18 (in the biography of abū hurayra). the parallel passage in wāqidī’s work omits the reference to provisions (w 637.1), but it is found in, for example, ibn ḥanbal, musnad, 2:346.1, and bayhaqī, dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, 4:199.1. for the variant with jahhazanā see abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, 1452.4; the term jahāz could refer to military equipment (cf. below, text to note 358). 48 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) appointed abū lubāba as deputy over medina at this time;330 there is nothing unusual here except that in one place he adds that muḥammad sent him back from rawḥāʾ (four days journey from medina on the way to badr), appointing him (istaʿmalahu) deputy over medina.331 presumably he had had second thoughts about the home front. we likewise find in ibn hishām’s work a passage in which, according to ibn isḥāq, it is alleged that abū lubāba went out with muḥammad, who then sent him back, appointing (ammara) him over medina.332 all this would imply that muḥammad had not appointed a deputy as he was leaving medina—unless indeed he successively appointed two deputies. that he did just that is stated by ibn hishām, who tells us that he first appointed (istaʿmala) ibn umm maktūm to conduct the prayer (ʿalā ʾl-ṣalāt biʾl-nās), and then sent back abū lubāba from rawḥāʾ, appointing him over medina (istaʿmalahu ʿalā ʾl-madīna).333 are we then to think of abū lubāba as replacing ibn umm maktūm in the role of deputy, or as playing a distinct role alongside him? the only thing that is suggestive in these passages is the terminology. the term istaʿmala, which wāqidī does not normally use, might perhaps suggest something closer to the appointment of a governor, just as the exceptional use of the term ammara by ibn isḥāq might point to something like the appointment of a commander (amīr).334 do these word choices then hint at a differentiation of abū lubāba’s role from ibn umm maktūm’s? on the other hand, at the point at which we see him in action, abū lubāba does not behave as if he had authority of such a kind. when the false rumour spread that muḥammad had been defeated at badr, one of the hypocrites exulted in telling abū lubāba about this muslim defeat; abū lubāba told him firmly that god would show his words to be false (yukadhdhibu ʾllāh qawlaka),335 but we do not exactly see him taking charge of a volatile situation. moreover, it seems that while he was at rawḥāʾ on the way to badr, muḥammad had heard of some untoward development among one of the awsī clans, the banū ʿamr ibn awf; but instead of leaving it to abū lubāba to take care of the matter as deputy, he sent back someone else to deal with it.336 the next occasion on which we hear anything of this kind is ḥudaybiya. here all three of our main authors name a single deputy, though in each case a different one. balādhurī, however, starts by naming ibn umm maktūm, adds that it is said that it was abū ruhm, 330. w 8.1, 101.9 (khallafahu), 159.11 (istaʿmalahu), 180.16 (istakhlafahu). 331. w 159.12; similarly ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:29.13 (istaʿmalahu). for the distance from medina to rawḥāʾ, see 2:1:7.24. 332. ss 1-2:688.16 = sg 331. 333. ss 1-2:612.13 = sg 738 no. 354; similarly khalīfa, taʾrīkh, 61.11. maqrīzī tells us that muḥammad appointed ibn umm maktūm ʿalā ʾl-madīna wa-ʿalā ʾl-ṣalāt (imtāʿ al-asmāʿ, 1:83.2), implying that when he subsequently appointed abū lubāba (112.9), the latter can only have been a replacement. 334. compare the statement of ibn sayyid al-nās that muḥammad sent abū lubāba back to medina as governor (wāliyan, ʿuyūn al-athar, 1:297.2). 335. w 115.12. 336. ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 2:1:6.25. here ibn saʿd says that muḥammad sent back ḥārith ibn ḥāṭib al-ʿamrī to the banū ʿamr ibn awf “because of something he heard about them” (li-shayʾ balaghahu ʿanhum). both abū lubāba and ḥārith belonged to the clan in question. for a discussion of this and related reports, see lecker, muslims, jews and pagans, 138–40. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 49 and ends by mentioning a third view: “some say that he appointed both of them deputies (istakhlafahumā jamīʿan), and that ibn umm maktūm was in charge of prayer (ʿalā ʾl-ṣalāt).”337 that would imply that abū ruhm’s job description was something else. we come now to the fatḥ and the ensuing events. again, the point of interest is something balādhurī tells us. he has already dealt with the fatḥ itself, stating that the deputy was ibn umm maktūm, or it is said abū ruhm.338 he then goes on to the battle of ḥunayn, and tells us that muḥammad now confirmed ibn umm maktūm and abū ruhm over medina.339 then he turns to the expedition to ṭāʾif, and informs us that the deputy was ibn umm maktūm or abū ruhm.340 the “and” in the second of the three passages, taken on its own, would support the idea of a dual appointment; but of course we cannot put any weight on the text at this point—from “or” to “and” (aw to wa-) is an easy corruption. there is perhaps one more thing that should be added here. at the time of the expedition to ghāba, wāqidī quotes his sources as saying (qālū) that muḥammad made ibn umm maktūm deputy over medina, and in the same breath adds that saʿd ibn ʿubāda stayed behind (aqāma) to guard medina with three hundred men of his people for five nights, until muḥammad returned.341 but the language used here is not that employed to refer to the appointment of deputies. in contrast to all this tantalizing ambiguity, there is one scholar who seeks to reconcile the sources by pursuing the idea of dual deputyships in a forthright manner. this is the cairene author of the biography of muḥammad commonly known as al-sīra al-ḥalabiyya, ʿalī ibn ibrāhīm al-ḥalabī (d. 1044/1635). speaking of the battle of badr, he tells us that muḥammad designated abū lubāba as governor of medina (wāliyan ʿalā ʾl-madīna), and that he appointed ibn umm maktūm over prayer in medina (ʿalā ʾl-ṣalāt biʾl-nās fī ʾl-madīna).342 speaking of the expedition to kudr (no. 8), he notes that sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa and ibn umm maktūm are mentioned as alternative deputies on this occasion.343 he then goes on to argue that there need be no contradiction here, since the pair could have served concurrently in different capacities. thus he reads a tradition in the collection of abū dāwūd (d. 275/889) to mean that the appointment of ibn umm maktūm was only over prayer in medina, to the exclusion of the administration of justice (al-qaḍāyā waʾlaḥkām), since a blind man cannot function as judge; so muḥammad could have delegated 337. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 350.21. 338. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 364.13. 339. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 365.4. 340. balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 366.23. 341. w 546.20. in the parallel passage in ibn saʿd we find khallafa in place of aqāma, with muḥammad as the subject of the verb (ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 2:1:58.10). we hear of such forces of guards in other contexts in the life of muḥammad (see, for example, balādhurī, ansāb, ed. ḥamīd allāh, 314.10); what is exceptional is the pairing of the commander of the guards with the deputy that we find in this instance. 342. ḥalabī, insān al-ʿuyūn, 2:381.3, 381.6. 343. ḥalabī, insān al-ʿuyūn, 2:470.18. 50 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) judicial authority to sibāʿ.344 finally, speaking of the expedition to ḥudaybiya, he echoes the third view noted by balādhurī, that muḥammad appointed both ibn umm maktūm and abū ruhm, with ibn umm maktūm over prayer; he then goes on to specify, as balādhurī did not, that abū ruhm’s role on this view would be as guardian of the security of medina (ḥāfiẓan lil-madīna).345 he does not say that this is how it was, but he clearly likes the idea. i present these remarks of ḥalabī’s because they are conceptually interesting, not because they are historically compelling. the only piece of evidence he cites is, as we have seen, a tradition from the collection of abū dāwūd. it is the sole tradition in the chapter on the blind man as a prayer-leader (bāb imāmat al-aʿmā).346 this baṣran tradition states that muḥammad made ibn umm maktūm his deputy (istakhlafa), leading the prayer despite being blind (yaʾummu ʾl-nās wa-huwa aʿmā). it is hard to read this tradition as saying anything one way or another about what further roles ibn umm maktūm might or might not have assumed when serving as deputy. in short, evidence for dual deputyships exists, but it is rather shadowy. if we took it seriously, it might help to explain why the sources so often disagree about who was deputy—they could be picking different members of the pair. but it would be putting a lot of strain on the evidence we have to imagine that muḥammad made such an arrangement each time he left on an expedition. the fact is that we are usually very much in the dark about any arrangements muḥammad may have made for medina in his absence other than the appointment of a single deputy. are deputies the b team? a very different point about deputies is that whoever muḥammad appointed would not be with him on the expedition. in other words, leaving someone behind as deputy comes with an opportunity cost, and the greater the deputy’s political and military skills, the greater the opportunity cost. as ibn taymiyya (d. 728/1328) explains, when rulers go out on campaign they take with them those from whose presence they stand to benefit most—those whose counsel, good judgment, eloquence, and martial force they depend on; in the absence of serious problems (siyāsa kathīra) in the capital, the person who stays behind does not need all this.347 from such a point of view it could be argued that there was a reason to appoint inferior men as deputies. nothing was lost by not having ibn umm maktūm on the battlefield, despite his brave assertion that blindness was a virtue in a standard-bearer; and this fact might help to explain why we find him serving as deputy 344. he later refers back to this solution, see ḥalabī, insān al-ʿuyūn, 2:480.15. so far as i know he is the only author to consider judicial authority in connection with the role of the deputy. 345. ḥalabī, insān al-ʿuyūn, 2:689.7. 346. abū dāwūd, sunan, 1:162 no. 595 (ṣalāt 64). 347. ibn taymiyya, minhāj al-sunna, 4:88.13. note, however, that in this passage he has in mind the tabūk expedition, which he sees as exceptional in the absence of any threat to medina at the time (89.3). contrast the insistence of a well-known imāmī scholar, the shaykh al-mufīd (d. 413/1022), in his discussion of the same expedition that muḥammad knew that only ʿalī was competent to take his place in deterring the enemy, safeguarding medina, and protecting its inhabitants (irhāb al-ʿaduww wa-ḥirāsat dār al-hijra wa-ḥiyāṭat man fīhā, irshād, 155.12 = trans. howard, 107). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 51 for nearly half of muḥammad’s expeditions. the same was no doubt true of the unwarlike ʿuthmān. but a number of considerations should discourage us from pushing this line of thought very far. first, some of those chosen by muḥammad to be deputies were very effective on the battlefield, for example abū dujāna as a common soldier and ghālib ibn ʿabdallāh as a commander. and yet neither of them had the clout to be an effective deputy—abū dujāna because he was not a leader, and ghālib because he had no constituency worth speaking of in medina. second, we could expect that the strength of this motive would vary with certain features of the expeditions or their contexts. for example, one might speculate that muḥammad needed more formidable deputies when he was first establishing his power in medina than he did towards the end of his time there. and one might argue that it was indeed so from the fact that the two saʿds are mentioned as serving only for the first and second expeditions. but other plausible hypotheses of this kind fare less well. one would be that muḥammad’s need for deputies with clout would correlate with the distance the expedition was taking him from medina. but here no clear pattern emerges: if we take the seven expeditions that went more than a hundred miles or so from medina,348 we find that the great majority of the deputies named by our three authors are low in clout. yet another expected correlation might be with the size of the expeditions—the larger the expedition, the fewer reliable supporters of muḥammad would remain in medina, and the more he would need a deputy with clout. but the fact that the two alternative deputies for the fatḥ—an occasion for which muḥammad assembled the largest force he had yet brought together—were ibn umm maktūm and abū ruhm al-ghifārī is not encouraging: the first lacked clout altogether, and the second lacked it in medina. finally, if military optimization was a serious concern for muḥammad, we would expect this to be manifested in his choice of commanders for the expeditions he sent out when he himself stayed at home; and as we will see below, it was not.349 so what was muḥammad thinking? from the discussion so far it is hard to avoid the conclusion that for the most part muḥammad preferred not to appoint deputies with the experience and clout needed to take care of medina in his absence. this is the obvious way to understand many of his choices, notably his repeated use of ibn umm maktūm and of members of minor tribes from outside mecca and medina. the apparent job-description of the deputies would seem to reinforce this: the strong emphasis on leading the communal prayer, and the fact that even when a different role is indicated we are almost never told just what it is. so also would the finding that according to our sources over half the deputies serve only once, and that apart from ibn umm maktūm none serve more than four times at the most.350 348. nos. 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27. another way to approach this point would be to look for a correlation between the clout of deputies and the duration of muḥammad’s absences. 349. see the following subsection. 350. see above, text to note 317. 52 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) a deputy with some clout who served repeatedly would be in a position to build up a set of understandings and arrangements that he could activate each time he served. but no deputy other than ibn umm maktūm was given the opportunity to do this, and nothing we know about ibn umm maktūm suggests that he had the capacity to use the position in such a way. why then did muḥammad usually prefer not to appoint deputies with clout?351 there are two possible motives here. one concerns the community at large, and the other muḥammad in particular. with regard to the community at large, muḥammad’s concern could have been to maintain the balance between the various elements of his community—or more precisely, to avoid the kind of imbalance that could alienate some part of it.352 by definition a deputy with clout has a constituency, and the more his appointment pleases his constituency, the more it is likely to create resentment in other constituencies. up to this point we have thought of a deputy with clout as someone who can rein in trouble if it occurs on his watch; but perhaps we should rather think of him as someone liable to provoke trouble. by contrast, a blind pietist or a member of an insignificant tribe could be relied on not to make waves in this way. the same consideration—the desire not to alienate—would apply to muḥammad’s treatment of the most powerful individuals in the community. a couple of years after his death, when the dying abū bakr (ruled 11–13/632–4) appointed ʿumar as his successor, abū bakr is said to have made the acid comment: “i have entrusted your affairs to him who i feel is the best of you. each of you has a swollen nose because of that, for each wants the succession to be his instead.”353 a swollen nose is a symptom of rage.354 we can readily imagine that temperaments were not much different a few years earlier, and that appointing deputies who lacked clout was a good way to avoid swollen noses. all this may reflect the rather flat social structure of arabian tribal society, and its consequent allergy to strong leadership.355 with regard to muḥammad himself, his concern could have been to secure his own position by avoiding arrangements that would enable any of his followers to accumulate too much power. the pattern of his appointments of deputies is certainly compatible with a concern to avoid the emergence of overmighty subjects (to employ a term that goes back to the english civil wars of the fifteenth century). again, we may detect a similar concern at work in the years following muḥammad’s death.356 at the same time anecdotal evidence 351. of course we would also like to be able to explain why he did sometimes appoint deputies with clout. 352. in response to a questioner in maryland, i went back to the data to see if i could discern a pattern of alternation between different constituencies in successive appointments of deputies and commanders. but such a pattern is not in evidence. 353. ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, i/2139.10 = history, 11:148 (fa-kullukum warima anfuhu min dhālika, yurīdu an yakūna ʾl-amr lahu dūnahu); for a variant text, see ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 30:420.21. 354. for this idiom see lane, lexicon, 3052a. 355. in contrast, for example, to steppe nomads, where a clear distinction between nobles and commoners was to be found (crone, slaves on horses, 19f, 22f). 356. speaking of the “peer-group” of senior companions in this period, ella landau-tasseron remarks that as a rule these people did not leave the ḥijāz, and gives as one possible explanation for this the caliph’s anxiety that if such grandees were to settle in the provinces, they might amass enough power to contest his al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 53 about other aspects of the life of muḥammad would fit this. consider, for example, the way he handles abū bakr—one of his closest associates, the father of his favourite wife, and his eventual successor—on the eve of the fatḥ. for good reason muḥammad made it a practice to keep the destination of his expeditions secret so that the enemy should not have advance warning.357 yet one might have assumed that in planning the fatḥ, muḥammad would have taken someone like abū bakr into his confidence. but what we are told is that abū bakr learnt of the impending expedition only by chance: he happened one day to visit his daughter ʿāʾisha, and found her preparing muḥammad’s military equipment (jahāz). even she did not know the destination of the expedition.358 the story is telling, though it could of course represent a later concern to minimize the role of abū bakr in the affairs of the community. it is not easy to find evidence that would enable us to choose unambiguously between these two explanations, and perhaps both were in play. indications from other aspects of muḥammad’s life could be expected to help here, and the most obvious comparison would be with the commanders of expeditions whom muḥammad appointed when he himself stayed at home in medina. in fact our information about commanders is likely to be more reliable than what we are told about deputies, and this for two reasons.359 the first is that it is attested earlier; thus ibn hishām’s data for commanders, as not for deputies, regularly go back to ibn isḥāq. the second is that there is considerably more agreement between ibn hishām and wāqidī about commanders than there is about deputies; while ibn hishām has only thirty-seven expeditions that went out under commanders to wāqidī’s fifty-two, in all the thirty-four cases where ibn hishām includes an expedition in his main narrative sequence, he names the same commander as wāqidī.360 so the data on the commanders are well worth attention. again, one might have expected muḥammad to cultivate a small number of tried and tested commanders whom he used repeatedly, or even a single commander-in-chief—much as joshua serves as moses’ commander-in-chief in the pentateuch . but that is far from what we find. this is not the place to consider the subject in detail, but several points are worth making by way of comparing deputies and commanders. the first is that in general we see a similar tendency to avoid the repeated use of the same commander. if we go by wāqidī’s data, we have a total of fifty-two expeditions; twenty-five of them are led by twenty-five commanders who serve only once, ten by five authority (“from tribal society to centralized polity”, 193f). 357. w 990.8; ss 3-4:516.7 = sg 602. 358. ss 3-4:397.15 = sg 544; but see also w 796.9 (and note that here jahhaza refers to the preparation of provisions). 359. as pointed out to me by an anonymous reader, in the case of muḥammad’s commanders—as opposed to his deputies—we also get a sliver of apparently independent information in a non-muslim source, though it does not help us with our present concerns. the context seems to be the expedition that was defeated by byzantine forces at the battle of muʾta (theophanes, chronographia, 1:335.12 = trans. mango and scott, 466; hoyland, theophilus of edessa’s chronicle, 91, and see 92 n. 177). 360. for the present purpose there would be no point in extending the comparison to khalīfa, since for commanders his standard source is ibn isḥāq. 54 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) commanders who serve twice, and nine by three commanders who serve three times.361 if we go by the information provided in ibn hishām’s work, we have a total of thirty-seven expeditions that muḥammad did not himself command; nineteen of these were led by nineteen commanders who served only once, twelve by six commanders who served only twice.362 here, for comparison, is the proportion of all deputies and all commanders who serve once only; i express the ratios as percentages, for what they are worth: deputies wāqidī 58% ibn hishām 60% commanders wāqidī 74% ibn hishām 73% in other words, muḥammad would appear to have been even less concerned to maximize previous experience in the job for his commanders than he was for his deputies.363 another way to make the same basic point is to pick out from muḥammad’s commanders those men who a decade or so later would be the leading generals of the arab conquests: abū ʿubayda ibn al-jarrāḥ, a prominent figure in the conquest of syria; ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ, the conqueror of egypt; saʿd ibn abī waqqāṣ, who played a key role in the conquest of iraq; and khālid ibn al-walīd, a major figure on both the syrian and iraqi fronts. if these men had an unusual talent for military leadership at the time of the conquests, they very likely possessed it already in the days of muḥammad. so how often did he appoint them as commanders? abū ʿubayda ibn al-jarrāḥ twice ʿamr ibn al-ʿāṣ once saʿd ibn abī waqqāṣ once khālid ibn al-walīd twice or thrice this result is particularly striking in the case of abū ʿubayda and saʿd, both of whom had converted long before muḥammad began mounting expeditions. ʿamr and khālid, by contrast, converted only in 8/629;364 but at this point there were still expeditions to come— 361. i extracted wāqidī’s data from his introductory list (w 2–7). for the moment i leave aside a single outlier, zayd ibn ḥāritha. 362. i collected ibn isḥāq’s data scattered through ibn hishām’s sīra, where they regularly go back to ibn isḥāq. again i leave aside the single outlier, zayd ibn ḥāritha. 363. we could rework the figures to show the proportion of occasions on which muḥammad delegated to a deputy or commander who had not served before. for deputies the ratio is twelve out of twenty-seven, or 44%, for wāqidī, and fifteen out of twenty-seven, or 56%, for ibn hishām. for commanders, the ratio is thirty-four out of fifty-two, or 65%, for wāqidī, and twenty-six out of thirty-seven, or 70%, for ibn hishām. 364. for their conversions see w 743.16, 748.17; ss 3-4:277.22 = sg 485; for the date, see w 745.16. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 55 seventeen according to wāqidī, anything between three and ten according to ibn hishām (the ambiguity arises from the fact that he leaves several expeditions undated). seen in purely military terms, none of this makes much sense. even a naturally talented commander needs time to build up experience and bond with his men. the implication is that the motivation for the dispersal of military leadership was not military but political. as with the deputies, muḥammad clearly liked to spread delegated authority thinly.365 the second point concerns the remaining expeditions—eight in wāqidī’s count and six in ibn hishām’s. these are the expeditions led by zayd ibn ḥāritha,366 which make him the counterpart of ibn umm maktūm among the deputies. once again, seen from a purely military point of view, this could not have been an optimal arrangement: zayd’s servile origins were no doubt a significant element in the resentment his leadership is said to have inspired—a resentment echoed in accounts of the reactions of some the women muḥammad pressed to marry zayd. but in political terms the advantage of the arrangement was obvious: zayd was a dependant of muḥammad without strong links to the wider community. muḥammad’s choice of zayd as a frequent commander is certainly compatible with a desire to avoid the trouble that could be stirred up by appointing commanders with constituencies, but it is even more in tune with the wish to avoid the emergence of overmighty subjects. it can hardly be accidental that the only commander whom muḥammad appointed repeatedly—in contrast to his regular pattern of dispersing delegated authority—should have been his own freedman, and that he was not deflected from this by the resentment it created among his followers.367 in this respect it would not be out of place to see zayd as the first mamlūk commander in islamic history. the third point, or rather set of points, concerns the distribution of appointees between our three main tribal categories: qurashīs, anṣārīs, and members of other tribes. (we are concerned here with the number of individuals who served or may have served as deputies, not with the number of expeditions.) here are the figures: qurashīs anṣārīs others (locals) total deputies: wāqidī 3 5 4 (3) 12 ibn hishām 4 5 6 (5) 15 365. a more thorough study of muḥammad’s commanders than is attempted here would need to consider whether other factors might have contributed to the dispersal, such as the need for commanders to be familiar with the territory to which they were being sent, or to have connections with the relevant tribes (i owe both these suggestions to ella landau-tasseron). 366. we are also told on the authority of wāqidī that zayd commanded seven expeditions (ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:1:31.5; the number “nine” given at 31.9 is very likely a corruption of “seven”). a list of his expeditions given by ibn saʿd (31.13), again on the authority of wāqidī, agrees with what we find in wāqidī’s listing except in omitting the expedition to wādī ʾl-qurā in 6/627 (for which see w 5.6; there seems to be no account of this expedition in the body of the work). 367. an alternative explanation that has been suggested to me for muḥammad’s choice of zayd—and others lacking in clout—is that he intended to make a moral or meritocractic point against the prevailing tribal order of society. such a motive is not to be ruled out, but given the pronounced pragmatic streak with which muḥammad is portrayed in the sources, i doubt whether it is sufficient to explain the pattern. 56 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) qurashīs anṣārīs others (locals) total commanders wāqidī 12 9 13 (4) 34 ibn hishām 11 5 10 (5) 26 so what do we notice? first, among the deputies anṣārīs outnumber qurashīs, whereas among commanders qurashīs outnumber anṣārīs. this is just what we would expect given the differing roles of the two groups in muḥammad’s polity. the qurashīs were both closer to him and initially less well-placed to make a living in medina than the anṣārīs, making them more likely to participate in expeditions; and the anṣārīs were naturally better informed about the politics of their own oasis. second, the proportion of members of other tribes is about the same for both deputies and commanders, namely a third or a little over; here is the proportion, again expressed as a percentage, for what it is worth: deputies wāqidī 33% ibn hishām 40% commanders wāqidī 38% ibn hishām 38% in other words, muḥammad here shows the same tendency to disperse authority that we saw when we looked just now at the figures for expeditions, and the same lack of concern for the social and political clout of those to whom he delegates. third, whereas the category of “others” is dominated by members of the local tribes in the case of the deputies, this is not the case for the commanders, who are recruited from a considerably wider range of tribal groups,368 thereby contributing further to the pattern of dispersal. the bottom line of this comparison of deputies and commanders is that if muḥammad appoints commanders in a militarily suboptimal fashion for political reasons, then we should not be surprised to find him doing something similar in appointing deputies. in other words, it would seem that we have uncovered a feature that may well characterize his delegation of authority in general.369 how are we to explain this pattern? in some measure it might reflect muḥammad’s own personality. to some extent it could reflect 368. in the case of the deputies, the local tribes are ghifār for wāqidī, and the same plus layth and duʾil for ibn hishām. in the case of the commanders they are murra ibn ʿabdmanāt, layth, sulaym, and ghifār for wāqidī, and the same plus aslam for ibn hishām. leaving aside the special case of zayd ibn ḥāritha and his son usama, the non-local tribes are as follows. in the case of the deputies, there are none. in the case of the commanders they are asad (thrice), quḍāʿa, kilāb, ghanī, and fazāra for wāqidī, and asad (twice) and fazāra for ibn hishām. 369. in this connection it would be worth looking at his appointments of agents—governors or tax-collectors—to deal with outlying tribes, but i have not attempted to do this. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 57 cross-pressures that any leader needing to delegate is subject to.370 but the main reason is likely to have been the character of arabian society, located as it was in a desert environment where the scarcity of material resources meant that power was typically more personal than institutional. we have been concerned in this paper with a relatively obscure aspect of the way muḥammad ran his state, but it does have a couple of implications for what came after. first, though we are unlikely ever to be in a position to reconstruct muḥammad’s expectations of the future in the last years of his life, the fact is that someone so reluctant to delegate to a single person on a regular basis was unlikely to groom a successor.371 contrast the biblical image of moses: he has a track-record of delegation, and in response to divine instructions he enhances the authority of joshua in anticipation of his own death. from this point of view the surprise is not that muḥammad’s death precipitated a succession crisis, but that the crisis was so quickly resolved. second, no law-giver operating in the arabian environment with muḥammad’s political style was likely to leave a welldeveloped array of institutions occupying the space between himself and those he ruled.372 in this respect we might contrast him with an earlier lawgiver, solon. a different man in a different environment, in the early sixth century bc he devised a dense array of political institutions for the citizens of the greek city state of athens, and then voluntarily departed from the city for ten years.373 not so muḥammad, and here we plausibly have one root of the relative scarcity of formal institutional structures in the early islamic polity. 370. the cross-pressures discussed in this paper are not the only ones that can arise. jennifer davis writes of charlemagne’s delegation of judicial authority to multiple provincial officials: “this may not have been the most efficient approach to governance, but it left ample room for creativity, adaptation, personal dynamics and flexibility” (davis, “pattern for power”, 246). a somewhat similar point is made by beatrice manz about timur’s style of government (manz, “administration and the delegation of authority”, 206f). both scholars are making the point that it may be advantageous for a ruler not to maximize efficiency. 371. as pointed out to me by an anonymous reader, if muḥammad did in fact believe the end of the world to be at hand, that could be another reason for his omitting to groom a successor. for a recent discussion of the imminence of “the hour” in parts of the koran, see shoemaker, death of a prophet, 160–3; for early traditions exhibiting the same tendency, see 172–8. 372. pre-islamic arabia was not devoid of institutions as such. a notable example is the ḥums, a meccan institution that has been described as “a community made up of various tribal groups, united by religious beliefs and customs that marked it off from others”; but it lacked a formal central authority, coercive power, or a fiscal role (landau-tasseron, “from tribal society to centralized polity”, 182). by contrast, a striking account of a king ruling over his clan in medina three generations before the arrival of muḥammad presupposes that he had neither bodyguards nor a retinue (lecker, “king ubayy and the quṣṣāṣ”, 33–5). 373. see aristotle, “athenian constitution”, chapter 11, in warrington (trans.), aristotle’s politics, 253. 58 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) appendix in this appendix i survey the data regarding deputies found in twenty-three later sources. my coverage of such sources is by no means comprehensive, but those i have consulted are likely to be fairly representative of what is available. they date from the fifth/eleventh century to the eleventh/seventeenth. note that when i remark in this appendix that an author follows wāqidī or ibn hishām, or use wordings similar to this, i am not implying that he takes his data directly from either source, or that he acknowledges such dependence. my impression, for what it is worth, is that few if any of these authors had direct access to the text of wāqidī’s maghāzī. māwardī (d. 450/1058) in his compendium of shāfiʿite law includes accounts of muḥammad’s expeditions (ḥāwī, 14:23–91) in the course of which he generally names the deputy. leaving aside three cases where he does not do so, we find that he departs from wāqidī’s data as found in our text of the maghāzī only with regard to two expeditions. one is the fatḥ, for which he names abū ruhm al-ghifārī (64.6); the other is tabūk, for which he names muḥammad ibn maslama (82.25). the first agrees with ibn hishām and khalīfa, the second with ibn saʿd. typically, neither of these departures from wāqidī’s data involves the naming of a person we have not already encountered as a deputy for one expedition or another. ibn ḥazm (d. 456/1064) and ibn ʿabd al-barr (d. 463/1071) in their closely related works on the biography of muḥammad name the deputies for all but six of the expeditions they cover—the same six in each case (ibn ḥazm, jawāmiʿ, 100–262; ibn ʿabd al-barr, durar, 103–284). the names they give are those of ibn hishām with a single exception: they include ʿalī as an alternative for the tabūk expedition (jawāmiʿ, 251.6; durar, 254.9, where ibn ʿabd al-barr goes on to remark that this is the most reliable view). there are also some minor points of interest. thus with regard to the appointment of ibn umm maktūm as deputy for the battle of uḥud, they echo ibn hishām (ss 3-4:64.1 = sg 752 no. 583) in specifying that this was to conduct the prayer of those muslims who remained in medina (lil-ṣalāt bi-man baqiya biʾl-madīna min al-muslimīn, jawāmiʿ, 157.8; similarly durar, 154.11). with regard to the battle of the khandaq, ibn ʿabd al-barr ascribes the information that ibn umm maktūm was the deputy to ibn shihāb (durar, 181.7), that is to say to zuhrī (d. 124/742). for the relationship between the two works see jarrar, prophetenbiographie, 169–73. the elder ibn rushd (d. 520/1126) gives an account of muḥammad’s expeditions (al-bayān waʾl-taḥṣīl, 17:424–79) in which he names the deputy only once, for the ḥajjat al-wadāʿ, as abū dujāna or, it is said, sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa (478.20); this agrees with ibn hishām against wāqidī and khalīfa. there is a parallel passage in his later work al-muqaddimāt waʾl-mumahhidāt, 3:387.13. ṭabrisī (d. 548/1154) includes a substantial biography of muḥammad in his iʿlām al-warā, but in his treatment of his expeditions (163–263) he rarely identifies the deputy. predictably—since he is a shīʿite, in fact the only one considered in this appendix—he names ʿalī as deputy over medina for the tabūk campaign (243.18, citing the manzila tradition, 244.7). more unusual is his deputy for the fatḥ, abū lubāba (218.20); we have al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 59 encountered this only in yaʿqūbī (see above, text to note 85). ibn al-jawzī (d. 597/1201) in his chronicle gives accounts of the various expeditions in which he regularly identifies the deputy (muntaẓam, 2:202–449). the names he gives agree with wāqidī’s with one exception: for the battle of badr he mentions not just abū lubāba (208.23), as wāqidī does, but also ibn umm maktūm (208.19). in thus naming both he is in line with ibn hishām and khalīfa. ibn al-athīr (d. 630/1233) gives accounts of muḥammad’s expeditions in his chronicle (kāmil, 2:7–167), naming the deputy for a bit over half of them. except in one instance his data agree with those of wāqidī; the exception is the fatḥ, where he is in agreement with ibn hishām against wāqidī (117.25). kalāʿī (d. 634/1237) in his account of muḥammad’s expeditions in the second volume of his iktifāʾ does not to my knowledge mention any deputies. muḥyī ʾl-dīn ibn ʿarabī (d. 638/1240) in his muḥāḍarat al-abrār gives a list of deputies in which he reproduces the data of ibn hishām (1:75–7). he wrongly includes the expedition to rajīʿ (in the year 4/625) as one led by muḥammad (76.5), but the only point of real interest is a terminological one already noted (see above, text to note 25). sharaf al-dīn al-dimyāṭī (d. 705/1306) gives brief accounts of the expeditions in his short biography of muḥammad (al-sīra al-nabawiyya, 185–255).374 his data are those of wāqidī; that he opts for muḥammad ibn maslama as the best-founded claimant to the deputyship for tabūk (250.2) leads us to suspect that his access to wāqidī was through ibn saʿd, and the wording he uses confirms this (wa-huwa athbat mimman qāla ʾstakhlafa ghayrahu, see above, note 75). nuwayrī (d. 733/1333) gives an account of the expeditions in his encyclopaedic compendium (nihāyat al-arab, 17:4–378). he brings together data deriving from both wāqidī and ibn hishām. his access to wāqidī is through ibn saʿd, as is indicated both by his references to him and by his naming the deputy for tabūk as muḥammad ibn maslama without qualification (354.9). the only discrepancy is that on the authority of ibn saʿd he names abū dharr al-ghifārī as deputy for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ (376.6); ibn saʿd in fact names abū ruhm al-ghifārī (ṭabaqāt, 2:1:87.18), though as we have seen abū dharr is named by balādhurī. nuwayrī sometimes attributes ibn hishām’s data to ibn isḥāq. ibn sayyid al-nās (d. 734/1334) in his biography of muḥammad gives accounts of his expeditions (ʿuyūn al-athar, 1:270–2:354). he regularly names the deputy, usually citing ibn hishām, but occasionally citing or following ibn saʿd. dhahabī (d. 748/1348) in the first volume of his taʾrīkh al-islām gives accounts of the expeditions (47–711), naming the deputy for about half of them. in these cases he follows wāqidī or ibn hishām. ibn qayyim al-jawziyya (d. 751/1350) in his zād al-maʿād gives accounts of the expeditions (3:164–548) in the course of which he generally names the deputy, usually in agreement with ibn hishām but sometimes with wāqidī. mughulṭāy ibn qilīj (d. 762/1361) has two relevant works. in one, al-zahr al-bāsim, he 374. the title is the editor’s; dimyāṭī himself gives his work no formal title, but describes it as a brief book about the life of the prophet (kitāb mukhtaṣar fī sīrat al-nabī, see al-sīra al-nabawiyya, 25.3). 60 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) mentions deputies sporadically in his accounts of the expeditions (880–1407), drawing on the data of wāqidī and ibn hishām; there are only a couple of points of interest here, already noted in connection with the deputyship of abū lubāba for the badr campaign (see above, note 49). in the other work, the ishāra, he names deputies for most expeditions (190–346), basing himself on the data of wāqidī supplemented with information deriving from ibn hishām; the one exception is that he mentions ʿalī in connection with the tabūk expedition (337.2). ibn kathīr (d. 774/1373) in his chronicle gives an expansive account of the expeditions (bidāya, 3:190–5:163). he regularly names the deputy, following ibn hishām and attributing the information to him. he rarely cites wāqidī for a deputy (as at 3:194.8, 195.17); he is in agreement with him in mentioning sibāʿ ibn ʿurfuṭa as deputy for the khaybar campaign, but derives the information from the tradition of abū hurayra (4:147.17). ibn khaldūn (d. 808/1406) covers the expeditions in his ʿibar (2:744–841). he usually names the deputy, following ibn hishām faithfully despite a couple of corruptions and the addition of ʿalī as an alternative for tabūk (820.5). maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) in his work on the biography of the prophet gives a list of deputies (imtāʿ al-asmāʿ, 9:227.3) that mostly follows wāqidī, but diverges in some places. with regard to two expeditions there seems to be confusion between abū salama and abū lubāba (227.6). for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ he names abū dharr, like balādhurī (227.22; cf. above, text to note 83); his alternatives for expeditions, when not simply those of wāqidī, are shared with balādhurī (as in the cases of ḥudaybiya and tabūk, where he mentions abū ruhm, 227.14, 227.16). he also assigns a deputy in connection with activity following the conquest of khaybar that is not usually recognized as a separate expedition (227.21). the list is clearly incomplete: five expeditions are not covered, including badr (with regard to the deputyship over medina) and the fatḥ; two of these missing expeditions no doubt belong in the lacuna that clearly follows the mention of ʿuthmān ibn ʿaffān (227.19). earlier in the work maqrīzī identifies the deputy in his accounts of most of the individual expeditions (1:73–2:120); the names he gives are predominantly wāqidī’s, with occasional divergences that align him with ibn hishām and, in one instance, balādhurī (1:331.11). a couple of minor points of interest have already been noted (see above, notes 14, 333). sakhāwī (d. 902/1497) in his history of medina provides a list of deputies (al-tuḥfa al-laṭīfa, 1:64.18–65.16). for the most part he clearly draws on wāqidī and ibn hishām, but at two points he diverges. first, he says that ibn isḥāq names the deputy for muraysīʿ as “jiʿāl al-ḍumayrī” (64.22); this must be jiʿāl (or juʿāl or juʿayl) ibn surāqa al-ḍamrī, who is not otherwise known as a deputy (for his biography see ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 245f no. 329, 274 no. 360; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:180f; he was poor and very ugly). the claim that he was deputy for the musaysīʿ expedition is incompatible with the statement of ibn saʿd that jiʿāl was present on this raid (ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:181.14 on the authority of wāqidī). he is not known to the genealogists, and his tribal affiliation is somewhat uncertain: the nisba “ḍamrī” implies of course that be belonged to ḍamra, which was part of kināna (see t36 and t42); we also find him with the nisba “ghifārī” (ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 245.9 no. 329), implying that be belonged to ghifār, itself part of ḍamra. but then again he is described as a thaʿlabī (presumably referring to one or other of the tribal al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 61 groups that might be spoken of as banū thaʿlaba), and is also said to have been reckoned (ʿadīd) with the banū sawād, who belonged to the khazrajī clan of the banū salima (ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 4:1:180.24; see t190)—implying that he was something less than a full member of the group. sakhāwī’s source for jiʿāl’s deputyship is most likely ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, iṣāba, 1:482.1; ibn ḥajar there gives the same information on the authority of ibn isḥāq about jiʿāl’s role as deputy for the muraysīʿ expedition (with the correct spelling of the nisba), followed by the remark that it is contradicted by a report of mūsā ibn ʿuqba’s placing jiʿāl with the expedition (just as we have seen ibn saʿd says). ibn ḥajar in turn is likely to have taken the report from ibn al-athīr’s dictionary of companions (usd al-ghāba, 1:284.9). here, however, there is no mention of ibn isḥāq, who in any case says no such thing in his work as we know it; instead ibn al-athīr gives his source as “abū mūsā to ibn manda” without reproducing abū mūsā’s isnād.375 if we were to take jiʿāl’s alleged deputyship seriously, he would fit easily into the set of deputies belonging to the local tribes. second, sakhāwī notes that it is said that the deputy for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ was bashīr ibn saʿd al-anṣārī (al-tuḥfa al-laṭīfa, 1:65.14); this bashīr was a ḥārithī, more broadly a khazrajī (t188; for his biography, see ei3, art. “bashīr b. saʿd” (m. lecker); ibn ʿabd al-barr, istīʿāb, 172f no. 193; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:83f). by contrast, wāqidī shows bashīr as with the expedition: muḥammad put him in charge (istaʿmala) of the weapons (silāḥ) (w 733.10; ibn saʿd, ṭabaqāt, ed. sachau, 3:2:84.5). one accordingly wonders whether the use of the verb istaʿmala here could have led to confusion (compare the case of nājiya, above, note 98). he died in battle in the caliphate of abū bakr (ruled 11–13/632–4) (84.7), and had descendants (83.17). diyārbakrī (writing c. 940/1534) in his biography of muḥammad covers the expeditions (taʾrīkh al-khamīs, 1:363–2:153) and regularly names the deputy, mixing data from ibn hishām and wāqidī. like many authors, he adds ʿalī as a possible deputy for tabūk, citing zayn al-dīn al-ʿirāqī (d. 806/1404) and ibn ʿabd al-barr (2:125.14). more noteworthy is that he names an alternative to ibn umm maktūm for the battle of uḥud who is not to my knowledge found in other sources: an unidentifiable ibn abī mikraz (1:422.6). given the consensus that the deputy for uḥud was ibn umm maktūm—no other source names an alternative—it is perhaps not to be ruled out that “ibn abī mikraz” is a corrupt doublet of “ibn umm maktūm”. ʿalī ibn ibrāhīm al-ḥalabī (d. 1044/1635) in his biography of muḥammad (commonly known as al-sīra al-ḥalabiyya) devotes considerable attention to his expeditions (insān al-ʿuyūn, 2:347–3:133) and to the ḥajjat al-wadāʿ (3:307–40). he regularly names the deputy, bringing together the data of ibn hisham and wāqidī, and adding a couple of variants that we have encountered in balādhurī (abū ruhm for ḥudaybiya, 2:689.6, and abū dharr for the ʿumrat al-qaḍāʾ, 780.5). for tabūk he mentions ʿalī (3:102.5). as we have seen, the most 375. the reference is to the additions of abū mūsā muḥammad ibn abī bakr ibn abī ʿīsā al-iṣfahānī (d. 581/1185) to the maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba of abū ʿabdallāh muḥammad ibn isḥāq ibn manda (d. 395/1005). for ibn manda’s work see sezgin, geschichte, 1:215 no. 1; for the biography of abū mūsā see dhahabī, siyar, 21:152–9 no. 78 (and for his dhayl maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba see 154.8). that abū mūsā’s work expanded the maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba of ibn manda, and not that of abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, is apparent from ibn al-athīr’s introduction to his usd al-ghāba (1:4.3); he cites abū mūsā’s work with great frequency in the body of the usd al-ghāba. 62 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) interesting thing he offers us is an explicit conception of dual deputyships (see above, text to notes 342-6). i have also scanned the entries on each of the members of my pool of deputies in the standard dictionaries of companions, and noted any significant points. as the reader will have seen, i cite the istīʿāb of ibn ʿabd al-barr (d. 463/1071) as my biographical source of first resort. i have skimmed the relevant entries in the maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba of abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī (d. 430/1038), the usd al-ghāba of ibn al-athīr (d. 630/1233), and the iṣāba of ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī (d. 852/1449), but i rarely have occasion to cite them. going back to the twenty-three works covered above, the overall results of this survey could be summed up as follows. overwhelmingly their data derive directly or indirectly from wāqidī, ibn hishām, or both. when they do diverge, they often do so in ways already attested in other early sources, notably balādhurī. yet every now and again the later sources give us information (or misinformation) not found in the early sources available to us, raising at least the possibility that they may be preserving old information otherwise lost to us (rather than corrupting information we already have). the most striking example of this is sakhāwī, an author of the ninth/fifteenth century who names two deputies that are entirely new to us. occasionally later authors are interesting because they are innovative; ḥalabī is the leading instance of this. list of works cited ʿabd al-razzāq ibn hammām al-ṣanʿānī, muṣannaf, ed. ḥ. al-aʿẓamī, beirut 1970–2. abū bakr ibn khayr al-ishbīlī, fahrasa, ed. f. codera and j. ribera tarrago, beirut n.d. abū dāwūd, sunan, ed. m. m. ʿabd al-ḥamīd, n.p n.d. abū ʾl-layth al-samarqandī, tafsīr, ed. ʿa. m. muʿawwaḍ and others, beirut 1993. abū nuʿaym al-iṣbahānī, maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba, ed. ʿa. y. al-ʿazāzī, riyadh 1998. ʿallāma al-ḥillī, al-, minhāj al-karāma, in ibn taymiyya, minhāj al-sunna al-nabawiyya, ed. m. r. sālim, vol. 1, cairo 1962. arazi, a., “les enfants adultérins [daʿīs] dans la société arabe ancienne: l’aspect littéraire”, jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 16 (1993). aristotle, “the athenian constitution”, in j. warrington (trans.), aristotle’s politics and athenian constitution, london 1959. balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. m. f. al-ʿaẓm, damascus 1997–2010. balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, vol. 1, ed. m. ḥamīd allāh, cairo 1959. bayhaqī, dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, ed. ʿa. qalʿajī, beirut 1985. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 63 bayhaqī, al-sunan al-kubrā, hyderabad 1344–55. bukhārī, al-taʾrīkh al-awsaṭ, ed. m. i. al-luḥaydān, riyadh 1998. bukhārī, al-taʾrīkh al-kabīr, hyderabad 1360–98. bukhārī, al-taʾrīkh 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al-khamīs, cairo 1283. ei2 = encyclopaedia of islam, second edition. ei3 = encyclopaedia of islam three. encyclopaedia of islam, second edition, leiden 1960–2009 (abbreviated ei2). encyclopaedia of islam three, leiden 2007– (abbreviated ei3). ḥalabī, ʿalī ibn ibrāhīm al-, insān al-ʿuyūn, cairo 1964. horst, h., “zur überlieferung im korankommentar aṭ-ṭabarīs”, zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft, vol. 103 (1953). hoyland, r. g., theophilus of edessa’s chronicle and the circulation of historical knowledge in late antiquity and early islam, liverpool 2011. ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-durar fī ikhtiṣār al-maghāzī waʾl-siyar, ed. s. ḍīf, cairo 1966. 64 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-istīʿāb fī maʿrifat al-aṣḥāb, ed. ʿa. m. al-bujāwī, cairo n.d. ibn abī shayba, muṣannaf, ed. s. al-laḥḥām, beirut 1989. ibn ʿarabī, muḥyī ʾl-dīn, muḥāḍarat al-abrār wa-musāmarat al-akhyār, vol. 1, ed. m. m. al-khūlī, cairo 1972. ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 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al-jawzī, al-muntaẓam fī tawārīkh al-mulūk waʾl-umam, ed. s. zakkār, beirut 1995–6. ibn al-kalbī, jamharat al-nasab, ed. n. ḥasan, beirut 1986; see also caskel, ǧamharat an-nasab. ibn kathīr, al-bidāya waʾl-nihāya, ed. ʿa. m. muʿawwaḍ and ʿa. a. ʿabd al-mawjūd, beirut 1994. ibn khaldūn, ʿibar, beirut 1956–9. ibn mākūlā, ikmāl, ed. ʿa. y. al-muʿallimī al-yamānī, hyderabad 1962–88. ibn qayyim al-jawziyya, zād al-maʿād, ed. s. and ʿa. al-arnaʾūṭ, beirut 1979. ibn qudāma, al-istibṣār fī nasab al-ṣaḥāba min al-anṣār, ed. ʿa. nuwayhiḍ, n.p. 1972. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 65 ibn rushd, al-bayān waʾl-taḥṣīl, ed. m. ḥajjī and others, beirut 1984–91. ibn rushd, al-muqaddimāt al-mumahhidāt, ed. m. ḥajjī and s. a. aʿrāb, beirut 1988. ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. e. sachau and others, leiden 1904–21. ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. ʿa. m. ʿumar, cairo 2001. ibn sayyid al-nās, ʿuyūn al-athar, beirut 1980. ibn shabba, taʾrīkh al-madīna al-munawwara, ed. f. m. shaltūt, beirut 1990. ibn taymiyya, minhāj al-sunna al-nabawiyya, būlāq 1321–2. jarrar, m., die prophetenbiographie im islamischen spanien: ein beitrag zur überlieferungsund redaktionsgeschichte, frankfurt am main 1989. jones, j. m. b., “the chronology of the maghāzī—a textual survey”, bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies, vol. 19 (1957). kalāʿī, al-iktifāʾ bi-mā taḍammanahu min maghāzī rasūl allāh waʾl-thalātha al-khulafāʾ, ed. m. k. ʿi. ʿalī, beirut 1997. khalīfa ibn khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh, ed. a. ḍ. al-ʿumarī, najaf 1967. kister, m. j., “the massacre of the banū qurayẓa: a re-examination of a tradition”, jerusalem studies in arabic and islam, vol. 8 (1986). landau-tasseron, e., “adoption, acknowledgement of paternity and false genealogical claims in arabian and islamic societies”, bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies, vol. 66 (2003). landau-tasseron, e., “alliances among the arabs”, al-qanṭara, vol. 26 (2005). landau-tasseron, e., “features of the pre-conquest muslim army in the time of muḥammad”, in a. cameron (ed.), the byzantine and early islamic near east: iii: states, resources and armies, princeton 1995. landau-tasseron, e., “from tribal society to centralized polity: an interpretation of events and anecdotes of the formative period of islam”, jerusalem studies in arabic and islam, vol. 24 (2000). landau-tasseron, e., “the status of allies in pre-islamic and early islamic arabian society”, islamic law and society, vol. 13 (2006). lane, e. w., an arabic–english lexicon, london 1863–93. lecker, m., “idol worship in pre-islamic medina (yathrib)”, in m. lecker, jews and arabs in preand early islamic arabia, aldershot 1998, article i. 66 • michael cook al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) lecker, m., “king ibn ubayy and the quṣṣāṣ”, in m. lecker, people, tribes and society in arabia around the time of muḥammad, aldershot 2005, article ii. lecker, m., muslims, jews and pagans: studies on early islamic medina, leiden 1995. lecker, m., 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maʿrūf, beirut 1985–92. mubarrad, kāmil, ed. m. a. al-dālī, beirut 1986. mufīd, al-shaykh al-, irshād, qumm 1413; trans. i. k. a. howard as kitāb al-irshād: the book of guidance into the lives of the twelve imams, horsham 1981. mughulṭāy ibn qilīj, al-ishāra ilā sīrat al-muṣṭafā, ed. m. n. al-futayyiḥ, damascus 1996. mughulṭāy ibn qilīj, al-zahr al-bāsim fī sīrat abī ʾl-qāsim, ed. a. a. ʿabd al-shakūr, cairo 2012. muṣʿab al-zubayrī, nasab quraysh, ed. é. lévi-provençal, cairo 1976. nuwayrī, nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, cairo 1923–. powers, d. s., zayd, philadelphia 2014. qummī, tafsīr, beirut 1991. rāzī, fakhr al-dīn al-, al-tafsīr al-kabīr, cairo c. 1934–62. sakhāwī, al-tuḥfa al-laṭīfa fī taʾrīkh al-madīna al-sharīfa, cairo 1957–8. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015) muḥammad’s deputies in medina • 67 samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā, ed. q. al-sāmarrāʾī, london 2001. sezgin, f., geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, leiden 1967–2010. sg = ibn hishām, sīra, trans. guillaume. shoemaker, s. j., the death of a prophet: the end of muhammad’s life and the beginnings of islam, philadelphia 2012. ss = ibn hishām, sīra, ed. saqqā and others. t = the tables of caskel, ğamharat an-nasab. ṭabarī, tafsīr, beirut 1992. ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul waʾl-mulūk, ed. m. j. de goeje and others, leiden 1879–1901; trans. f. rosenthal and others as the history of al-ṭabarī, albany 1985–2007. ṭabrisī, iʿlām al-warā, qumm 1417. ṭabrisī, majmaʿ al-bayān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, qumm 1403. thaʿlabī, qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, beirut n.d. theophanes, chronographia, ed. c. de boor, leipzig 1883–5; trans. c. mango and r. scott as the chronicle of theophanes confessor: byzantine and near eastern history ad 284–813, oxford 1997. ṭūsī, abū jaʿfar, al-tibyān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān, najaf 1957–63. w = wāqidī, maghāzī. wāqidī, maghāzī, ed. m. jones, london 1966 (abbreviated w); trans. r. faizer and others as the life of muḥammad: al-wāqidī’s kitāb al-maghāzī, london 2011. wellhausen, j., the arab kingdom and its fall, beirut 1963. yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, ed. m. t. houtsma, leiden 1883. yāqūt, muʿjam al-buldān, beirut 1957. zamakhsharī, kashshāf, ed. ʿa. a. ʿabd al-mawjūd and ʿa. m. muʿawwaḍ, riyadh 1998. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 20-80 the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica (hereafter psah) are a group of texts surviving in arabic that claim to record conversations between aristotle and alexander the great. in these conversations, aristotle instructs alexander about the cosmos, the comingto-be of everything in it, and astral magic—more precisely, talismanry, rituals for attracting the spiritual and planetary forces of the cosmos, the creation of amulets, and extensive astrological rules. the purpose of the instruction is to support alexander’s military career and personal life. aristotle claims to have received this knowledge from hermes trismegistus. there are very few studies dedicated to these fascinating and influential texts; therefore, this article offers a preliminary study of the psah that introduces the texts and their contexts systematically. a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica: texts, context, and doctrines* liana saif university of amsterdam (l.w.i.saif2@uva.nl) *i am indebted to charles burnett for his support and guidance, which proved indispensable for this article, and to my friend a.o.m. for his generosity with manuscripts. i am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this submission, who provided detailed and generous feedback, and to travis zadeh for his encouragement and guidance with primary and secondary sources. finally, i extend my gratitude to mariano errichiello and julian strube for their constructive comments.. abstract the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica are an understudied yet influential group of texts surviving in arabic that claim to record conversations between aristotle and alexander the great. i propose a ninth-century dating for these texts on the basis of textual and contextual evidence. in them, aristotle instructs alexander on two major subjects to aid his royal pupil’s military career and personal life: the cosmos, the genesis of everything in it, and astral magic. this study provides a preliminary analysis of the texts’ manuscripts and content, discussing what makes them aristotelian and hermetic and highlighting the resonances of zoroastrian astro-cosmogenic doctrines. © 2021 liana saif. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. file:l.w.i.saif2%40uva.nl 21 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 22 we can identify the following constituent treatises within the psah cluster: al-isṭimākhīs,1 al-isṭimāṭīs,2 al-hādhīṭūs, and al-ustuwaṭṭās.3 together, they seemed to have formed a single work entitled kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. to these we can add al-madīṭīs (which is an abridgment of kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt), kitāb al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya, and dhakhīrat iskandar. modern scholarship has been bedeviled by a great deal of confusion about the spellings of these titles in manuscripts and secondary sources, which has prevented scholars from seeing the various connections between the texts that show them to have been part of a larger corpus. nevertheless, the designation “pseudo-aristotelian hermetica” and the abbreviation used here, psah, must not lead us to overemphasize the homogeneity of the texts, for three reasons. first, a more thorough inspection of the surviving manuscripts is required to confirm the works’ textual stability. second, the constituent texts have been grouped in divergent ways, as evinced by some manuscripts and their careers, and sometimes compiled with non-psah texts into clusters that had separate trajectories, as in the case of what i refer to below as the psah cycle and kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. third, two of the texts identified here as pseudo-aristotelian and hermetic—namely, kitāb al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya and dhakhīrat iskandar—are later compositions that drew on what had become a dynamic islamic philosophical and scientific tradition espousing the doctrines of aristotle and hermes. the importance of the psah as a major source of elements that became ubiquitous in and fundamental to the medieval occult sciences cannot be overstated. their influence is visible in the rūḥāniyyāt, talismanic practices, and astral causality in maslama al-qurṭubī’s ghāyat al-ḥakīm, in the magic and astrology of rasāʾil ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, and the science of letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) of aḥmad al-būnī in the thirteenth century and ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī in the fifteenth, among others.4 as a pivotal current in islamic intellectual culture, the occult sciences coproduced and enriched knowledge about nature, the cosmos, and their forces. therefore, it is not hard to see the significance of the psah beyond the occult sciences in islamic intellectual history as a whole. what paul magdalino and maria mavroudi have said about byzantine culture extends to islamic culture: “intellectual engagement with the occult was rooted in, or sought to cohere with, the philosophical systems of greco-roman antiquity. . . . the learned practitioners of the occult had a basic general education, including philosophy, and tended to combine their special expertise with a variety of intellectual interests, which made it appropriate to describe them as philosophoi.”5 similarly, ḥakīm (sage or philosopher) designated occult scientists in medieval islamic intellectual culture. 1.  based on ms london, british library, delhi arabic 1946, fol. 1v. in ms oxford, bodleian, marsh 556, fol. 111r, it is vowelized as al-iṣṭamākhus, اإلصطَماُخس . 2.  based on marsh 556, fol. 4r. in delhi arabic 1946, fol. 32v it is found as al-iṣṭimāṭīs, االصطماطيس. 3.  following the vowelisation in arabe 2577, fol. 1r; in delhi arabic 1946, fol. 32r it is found as al-isnūṭās, .االسنوطاس 4. l. saif, “from ġāyat al-ḥakīm to šams al-maʿārif: ways of knowing and paths of power in medieval islam,” arabica 64 (2017): 297–345, at 306–9, 330–31. 5. p. magdalino and m. mavroudi, “introduction,” in the occult sciences in byzantium, ed. p. magdalino and m. mavroudi, 11–38 (geneva: la pomme d’or, 2006), 13. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 22 magic and alchemy, in particular, were considered the epitome of wisdom (ḥikma). the islamic reception of aristotle was, in reality, that of a master philosopher, sage, and mage, as demonstrated by the so-called theology of aristotle. the work is, in fact, an arabic paraphrase of plotinus’s enneads iv–vi along with porphyry’s commentary, which turns aristotle into a sage of high neoplatonism. moreover, the pseudo-aristotelian sirr al-asrār (the secret of secrets, lat. secretum secretorum) cemented aristotle’s image as a mage with consummate knowledge of occult properties, astral influences, and talisman construction. along with the psah, these texts helped establish a hermetized and neoplatonized aristotelianism that became definitive of islamic scientific, philosophical, and religious knowledge pertaining to the universe, generation and corruption, and the place of human beings in the cosmos. in this article, i first identify the constituent treatises of the psah and their relationships to one another. i then argue for a ninth-century date for their production on the basis of citations in texts influenced by them as well as contextual considerations, especially the coinciding of their composition with the codification of zoroastrianism in texts such as the bundahishn and dēnkard. these texts could have familiarized the author or authors of the psah or their intellectual atmosphere with astro-prophetical cycles and the cosmic networks revolving around the “spiritual beings” known as rūḥāniyyāt. moving to the content, i show how the philosophical and magical background of the psah demonstrates a consequential melding of aristotelian hylomorphism and causality with what was perceived as “hermetic” theurgic and astro-magical aspects. i. the texts and manuscripts the first step toward understanding the pseudo-aristotelian hermetic corpus is to draw a circle around its known and surviving constituent treatises—a real challenge considering the scattered manuscripts, widespread confusion about the titles, and the lack of dedicated studies. the psah were widely known in the islamic world, especially during the medieval and early modern periods, but the titles were often confused. ibn abī uṣaybiʿa (d. 668/1270), in ʿuyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ (the choicest reports on the classes of physicians), mentions several psah texts in a chapter dedicated to the works of aristotle. one of these is “al-isṭimākhīs, composed when he [alexander] wished to leave the land of rūm,” exactly as described in the prologue of al-isṭimākhīs. he also mentions kitāb al-malāṭīs, a certain “kitāb al-ismāṭālīs,” and “a book for alexander on the rūḥāniyyāt and their actions in the climes,” which is possibly a reference to al-isṭimāṭīs and its discussion of the seven climes.6 under a section on hermes’s writings on “nīranjs,7 occult properties, and talismans,” ibn al-nadīm (d. 380/990) lists “kitāb al-harīṭūs on nīranjs, trees, fruits, oils, and grasses”; 6. ibn abī uṣaybiʿa, ʿuyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ, ed. n. riḍā (beirut: dār maktabat al-ḥayyāt, n.d.), 105; online ed., e. savage-smith, s. swain, and g. j. van gelder, eds., a literary history of medicine (leiden: brill, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1163/37704_0668ibnabiusaibia.tabaqatalatibba.lhom-ed-ara1. 7. in occult literature “nīranjs” refer to magical concoctions made from organic material. it is claimed that they cultivate a sort of “spiritual force” that overpowers that of animals and people. they are often ingested or suffimigated. they are discussed in more detail in section iv.5. 23 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 24 this is al-hādhīṭūs, which has chapters on these precise genres. under hermes’s writings on alchemy, ibn al-nadīm lists “al-hārīṭūs” again, as well as al-malāṭīs, “al-isṭimākhis,” and a certain kitāb al-salmāṭīs.8 in a section of his tārīkh discussing alexander the great, ibn khaldūn (732–808/1332– 1406) mentions al-isṭimākhīs, which contains “the ancient devotions” (al-ʿibāda al-ūlā). he notes that “the people of the seven climes used to worship the[ir] planet, for each clime has a planet to which they prostrate, suffumigate, make sacrifices, and slaughter. the rūḥāniyya of this planet manages their affairs, they claim.” the “ancient devotions” is likely to be a reference to the laws of the first sage-prophets in al-isṭimāṭīs. discussion of the seven climes can also be found in al-ustuwaṭṭās and al-isṭimāṭīs. ibn khaldūn does make reference to “kitāb al-isṭimāṭīs, which contains [information on] conquering cities and fortresses by talismans and [astrological] judgment; among them are talismans to bring down rain and to draw water.” this is an appropriate description of the contents of this text. he also mentions a “kitāb al-ishṭurṭās on elections according to the procession of the moon through the mansions and applications,” which is likely to be a reference to al-ustuwwaṭṭās. and he adds “other books on the benefits and occult properties of animal parts, stones, trees, and grasses,” which recalls the content of al-hādhīṭūs.9 ibn khaldūn’s description is worded similarly to that of the coptic historian jirjis al-makīn (602-672/1205-1273) in his al-majmūʿ al-mubārak (the blessed compendium): aristotle interpreted the books of hermes, the first egyptian sage, and he translated them from the egyptian tongue to the greek. he explained the knowledge, judgments, and talismans therein. one of these [books] is kitāb al-isṭimākhīs, and it contains the devotions of the first peoples. he mentions in it that the people of the seven climes used to worship the seven planets; and in every clime they worshipped one of these planets, prostrating, suffumigating, making sacrifices, and slaughtering to it. the rūḥāniyya of this planet appeared to its clime and addressed [its people], fulfilling their needs in all that they seek. one of these [books] is kitāb al-isṭimāṭīs, which contains [information] on conquering cities, fortresses, strongholds, and seizing kingdoms with the talismans and judgments they make. among them are talismans that bring down rain and water to them in thirsty deserts and dry wildlands. there is also kitāb al-ustuwaṭṭās.10 ḥājjī khalīfa (1017–1608/1609–1657), in kashf al-ẓunūn, lists some of the psah texts: al-hārīṭūs (this is likely al-hādhīṭūs) and al-malāṭīs.11 he also mentions “the book on attracting the rūḥāniyya of animals from the writings of hermes, interpreted by aristotle. it is the book named al-madāṭīs.” this is a description of the contents of the text known as istijlāb rūḥāniyyāt al-bahāʾim (on attracting the rūḥāniyyāt of animals)—also referred 8. ibn al-nadīm, al-fihrist (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, n.d.), 434, 496. 9. ibn khaldūn, tārīkh ibn khaldūn, ed. kh. shiḥāda and s. zakkār, 7 vols. (beirut: dār al-fikr, 2000), 2:223–24. 10. ms oxford, bodleian library, huntington 188, fol. 131r. 11. ḥājjī khalīfa, kashf al-ẓunūn, ed. m. sh. yāltaqāyā and r. b. al-kalīsī, 2 vols. (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, n.d.), 1:657–58. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 24 to in the text as al-madhāṭīs12 which constitutes a chapter in al-ustuwaṭṭās.13 other texts mentioned include an “al-isṭālīs,” an “al-isfūṭās,” al-isṭimāṭīs,14 the al-malāṭīs al-akbar, al-ustuwaṭṭās, a certain al-hāwīṭūs, a “book of the moon by hermes the sage, which [contains material] on occult properties and talismans that consider the advent of the moon and its progression in the mansions,”15 and, finally, “epistles by aristotle to his son and to alexander on managing the kingdom and on magic, too.” ḥājjī khalīfa also mentions “kitāb al-rūḥāniyyāt and their actions in the climes” by aristotle.16 modern scholars have identified some of the psah’s constituent treatises, often confusing the titles, and supplementing their identification with reference to other sources, especially the lists of ibn al-nadīm and ḥājjī khalīfa. for example, in aristoteles arabus, f. e. peters identifies five separate texts: al-isṭimākhīs, al-isṭimāṭīs, al-malāṭīs (equating it with al-madīṭīs), the k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt, and dhakhīrat iskandar.17 in geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, fuat sezgin lists al-shuʿrā and k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt under the heading “astronomy, astrology, and magic”18 and includes under aristotelian works al-isṭimākhīs, al-ustuwwaṭṭās (which he deems identical to al-isṭimāṭīs), al-malāṭīs or al-miyalāṭīs, and dhakhīrat iskandar.19 in die naturund geheimwissenschaften im islam, manfred ullmann identifies as separate texts al-isṭimākhīs, al-isṭimāṭīs, al-ustuwaṭṭās, al-madīṭīs, al-hādhīṭūs, and dhakhīrat iskandar.20 as noted earlier, very little research has tackled the problem of the titles. the result is that certain treatises have been considered separate works even though they are in fact interconnected. nevertheless, ʿabd al-raḥmān badawī edited the passages about the perfect nature (al-ṭibāʿ al-tāmm) from al-isṭimākhīs on the basis of ms cairo, dār al-kutub, 4291, fols. 136r– 137r.21 recently, kevin van bladel has drawn attention to the psah in his investigations into hermes, hermetic writings, and their circulation.22 charles burnett has uncovered a case of twelfth-century reception of k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt in the latin west in the form of a paraphrase entitled liber antimaquis,23 mentioned in de essentiis by hermann of carinthia, 12. not to be confused with al-madīṭīs described below. 13. ibid., 2:1389. 14. ibid., 2:1390. 15. ibid., 2:1463. 16. ibid., 2:1421. 17. f. e. peters, aristoteles arabus: the oriental translations and commentaries of the aristotelian corpus (leiden: brill, 1968), 58–59. 18. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 9 vols. (leiden: brill, 1967–2000), 4:41–42. 19. ibid., 4:40–42; 7:102–3. 20. m. ullmann, die naturund geheimwissenschaften im islam (leiden: brill, 1972), 374–77, 394–95. 21. ʿa. badawī, al-insāniyya wa-l-wujūdiyya fī al-fikr al-ʿarabī (cairo: maktabat al-nahḍa al-miṣriyya, 1947), 177–84. 22. k. van bladel, the arabic hermes: from pagan sage to prophet of science (oxford: oxford university press, 2009), 101–2, 114, 178, 224. 23. ms london, british library, sloane 3854 (fifteenth century), fols. 105v–110v (“the book of the spiritual works of aristotle, or the book antimaquis, which is the book of secrets of hermes: wonderful things can be accomplished by means of this book and it is the ancient book of the seven planets”); l. thorndike, a history 25 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 26 who worked in the twelfth century and also translated several arabic astrological works, including ones by abū maʿshar al-balkhī (c. 171–c.272/787–886).24 on the basis of ms oxford, bodleian, marsh 556 (al-madīṭīs) and ms paris, bnf, arabe 2577, burnett has provided an analysis of the interconnections among these texts and their influence on the magic blockbuster ghāyat al-ḥakīm (the goal of the sage) and its latin reception.25 in the rest of this section, i introduce the constituent texts of the psah, highlighting cross-references among the texts and historical evidence that attests to their relative cohesion. the list of manuscripts consulted is not exhaustive. for the next stage of research, which should include producing a critical edition of the psah, a more comprehensive survey of manuscripts is necessary. all the manuscripts consulted are listed in the appendix. 1. the psah cycle the manuscripts consulted show that certain pseudo-aristotelian hermetic texts traveled together. this cluster includes treatises that are not pseudo-aristotelian or hermetic but reflect the same themes—namely, amulets, talismans, and the occult properties of stones. in this article, i refer to this combination of texts as the psah cycle. i shall begin with the pseudo-aristotelian hermetic texts and then move to the others. the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica are framed as lessons to alexander the great and commentaries on hermetic knowledge by aristotle, composed over a period of time at different stages of various military campaigns. the first composition is al-isṭimākhīs, which begins as follows: this is kitāb al-isṭimākhīs [on knowledge] received from hermes and composed by aristotle the sage to alexander when he wished to exit the land of rūm [for a military campaign] to the eastern lands (arḍ al-mashriq). this was during the fourth year of his rule.26 the text consists mainly of instructions for talismans and amulets for securing military success, but it also contains an introduction to the central concept of the perfect nature of magic and experimental science: during the first thirteen centuries of our era, vol. 2 (london: macmillan, 1923), 260. 24. c. burnett, “hermann of carinthia and the kitāb al-isṭamāṭīs: further evidence for the transmission of hermetic magic,” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 44 (1981): 167–69; idem, “aristoteles/hermes: liber antimaquis,” in hermetis trismegisti astrologica et divinatoria, ed. p. lucentini et al., 179-221 (turnhout: brepols, 2001); idem, “the establishment of medieval hermeticism,” in the medieval world, ed. p. linehan and j. l. nelson, 111–30 (london: routledge, 2001). see also s. page, magic in the cloister: pious motives, illicit interests, and occult approaches to the medieval universe (university park, pa: penn state university press, 2013), 94–95, where page draws attention to the commonalities in “visionary framework” and practices between the psah and the medieval liber de essentia spiritum by a sevillian author. see also b. láng, unlocked books: manuscripts of learned magic in the medieval libraries of central europe (university park, pa: penn state university press, 2008), 105–6. 25. c. burnett, “ṯābit ibn qurra the ḥarrānian on talismans and the spirits of the planets,” la corónica: a journal of medieval hispanic languages, literatures, and cultures 36, no. 1 (2007): 13–40. 26. ms london, british library, delhi arabic 1946, fol. 1v. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 26 (al-ṭibāʿ al-tāmm), which is a rūḥāniyya—a “spiritual” being—that watches over the philosopher/sage and belongs to her/his ruling planet, acting as a guide to wisdom and selfcultivation. al-isṭimākhīs also includes the famous story of the discovery of the hermetic emerald tablet in a dark crypt. these parts of the text are discussed in more detail below. another text that appears in the psah cycle is a part of (min) kitāb al-isṭimāṭīs. it is stated that al-isṭimāṭīs was composed after al-isṭimākhīs: from kitāb al-isṭimāṭīs, composed by hermes in (fī) ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt, divided according to the seven climes and their nature, operations, and substances. this is the book wherein aristotle the sage explains the causes of the rūḥāniyyāt, their activities, their substances, and their differences across the seven climes and according to the seven planets.27 the next major constituent treatise of the psah is al-ustuwaṭṭās, a section of which appears in the psah cycle under the title kitāb istijlāb rūḥāniyyāt al-bahāʾim. according to its prologue, it is also referred to as “al-madāṭīs”.28 nevertheless, at the end of the text, we read: “this is the end of what the sage described in kitāb al-ustuwaṭṭās.”29 this seems to be, then, a chapter from alustuwaṭṭās. the text begins as follows: the book of attracting the rūḥāniyyāt of all animals according to the words of hermes, interpreted by aristotle. it is the book titled al-madāṭīs. when i read this book, i found in it these four amulets (khirz) mentioned and praised by hermes.30 another part of the kitāb al-ustuwaṭṭās is included in the cycle. it is a chapter from “al-ishnūṭās” (االشــنوطاس) according to ms delhi arabic 1946, fol. 85v and ms arabe 221, fol. 60r; however, the content seems like a continuation of the episode of admānūs’s learning from hādūs about the conditions for magical practice which we encounter in al-ustuwaṭṭās it is only a matter of scribal variation in dotting; so it seems to be a chapter of .(األُســتوطّاس) al-ustuwaṭṭās. in the prologue, we read: this is a chapter (faṣl) from the book of al-ustuwaṭṭās. aristotle the sage said: in his education of admānūs in the hidden secrets and the subtle spiritual actions, the first thing hādūs taught him in the secrets of the stars was the clarification of the twentyeight mansions. these are the stations which constitute the first division, knowledge, and roots of the entirety of the first edifice.31 other manuscripts, discussed below, contain additional parts of al-ustuwaṭṭās, indicating that it is one of the major constituent texts of the psah corpus as a whole. 27. ibid., fol. 32v. 28. ibid., fol. 21v. 29.  ibid., fol. 32r (in the text it is dotted as االسنوطاس). 30. ibid., fol. 21v. 31. ibid., fol. 85v. 27 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 28 an interesting reiteration of al-ustuwaṭṭās is associated with the scholar and grammarian sirāj al-dīn abū yaʿqūb al-sakkākī (555–626/1160–1229), and it appears in ms tehran, majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 4752 (fols. 1r–42v). in addition to dhakhīrat iskandar and another text on stones, which is described below, this manuscript includes the third bāb, entitled al-isqūṭās, from al-sakkākī’s magic text al-kitāb al-shāmil fī al-baḥr al-kāmil (the comprehensive book on the perfect sea).32 like all the psah texts identified here, al-isqūṭās—also called kitāb al-manlāṭīs istūṭāṭīs in the kitāb al-shāmil—is set within a historical narrative. a sanad is given, which begins with al-sakkākī and ends with a certain shakārkun madīlā al-mūṣilī in al-kitāb al-shāmil in the soas manuscript, and with yazīd al-mūṣilī in the majlis manuscript. in the narrative, this al-mūṣilī has arrived in egypt and has been admitted to the company of its ruler aḥmad b. ṭūlūn.33 there he finds an old shaykh dressed as a priest talking about the wonders and uncanny elements of ancient knowledge to a group of listeners. when asked about his sources, the shaykh mentions a single book that he inherited from his forefathers, containing several parts, retrieved from the treasuries of khosraw i by kanaka the indian,34 a master of conjunctions, who counted it among the hermetic books (al-kutub al-hirmisiyya) translated by aristotle and known as kitāb mīlāṭīs al-akbar. it is a book that contains a description of the [lunar] mansions, twentyeight of them, their natures and properties, and the names of the angels in charge, their suffumigations, and the nīranjs made under them. ibn ṭūlūn expresses interest in obtaining a copy of the book for his treasury. the shaykh responds by handing him this very book. ibn ṭūlūn then orders a man called sahl b. 32. for the entire kitāb al-shāmil, i have consulted ms london, soas, no. 46347, fol. 2r. see m. noble, philosophising the occult: avicennan psychology and the hidden secret of fakhr al-dîn al-râzî (hamburg: de gruyter, 2021); t. zadeh, “commanding demons and jinn: the sorcerer in early islamic thought,” in no tapping around philology: a festschrift in honor of wheeler mcintosh thackston jr.’s 70th birthday, ed. a. korangy and d. j. sheffield (wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2014), 131–60. emily selove at the university of exeter is the principal investigator of the leverhulme-funded research project “a sorcerer’s handbook,” which will produce an edition, a translation, and a literary study of al-sakkākī’s text. 33. interestingly, there seems to be a proximity between the family of ibn ṭūlūn to magic. it is mentioned in ghāyat al-ḥakīm, where we learn that in a commentary on an aphorism belonging to ptolemy’s centiloquium/ the fruit by aḥmad b. yūsuf the secretary, there is a story set in the time of khmārūwīh b. aḥmad b. ṭūlūn in egypt about a byzantine resident of egypt who was able to save a boy from a scorpion sting with a magical seal, was used to stamp a piece of frankincense that was then given to the afflicted to drink. it received its powers from the planets in a specific configuration. maslama b. qāsim al-qurṭubī, picatrix: das ziel des weisen, ed. h. ritter (leipzig: b. g. teubner, 1933), 54–55. 34. many astrological works are attributed to the semilegendary kanaka, whose name, meaning gold in sanskrit, is often invoked in works dedicated to the astral sciences (astrology, astronomy, and talismanry). he is described by pingree as “a favorite symbol used by intellectuals of the islamic tradition to indicate the partial dependence of some of their sciences upon sanskrit sources.” pingree links him to sassanian intellectual culture and suggests he learned astrology in the abbasid context, holding a position in the caliphal court. several treatises are attributed to kanaka; see j.-c. coulon, la magie en terre d’islam au moyen âge (paris: cths, 2017), 108–10, 150, 159; sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 7:94–97; ullmann, naturund geheimenwissenschaften, 289–301; d. pingree, from astral omens to astrology, from babylon to bīkāner (rome: istituto italiano per l’africa e l’oriente, 1997), 51–62. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 28 mahīdān to translate it.35 what follows is the text of this psah work, which includes another interesting narrative that explicitly sets this text apart from al-ustuwaṭṭās and asserts an indian provenance for its content: kanaka the indian said: this is the book i translated from [another work by] my esteemed sire aristotle when i was composing my book describing the planetary rūḥāniyyāt and their activity, influences, actions, and properties. i was so thorough i did not leave anything unmentioned. this has been obtained from the lights of the esteemed hermes, tripled in abundant wisdom that emanates over me and those like me. it occurred to me to mention the lunar mansions and their rūḥāniyyāt, their properties, the nīranjs made under them, alchemical operations (tadbīr al-ṣanʿa), and descriptions of fatal poisons, so that this book would be comprehensive in knowledge and operations, unlike al-ustuwaṭṭās and the rest of my books. i could not find anything like this with me, and i found it strange that i have overlooked this matter. time passed in investigation and thought about this, until i found myself in the army of the philosopher-king (al-malik al-faylasūf) and pupil (tilmīdh)36 alexander, son of philip the greek, [heading] to the land of india. he requested at its threshold all the old books by the ancient sages. so i brought to him many books on all kinds of verified occult sciences (al-ʿulūm al-ḥaqīqa al-khafiyya). among them was a book penned by idriyās. he (kanaka) said: upon reading it i realized that it contained what had been weighing on my mind regarding the mansions, their properties, and what is done under each mansion. i mention their rūḥāniyyāt as i recall them from hermes trismegistus, combining all that i had come across. so i thanked the cause of all causes, the creator of all creatures, for inspiring in me wisdom and spiritual insight (al-khāṭir al-rūḥānī).37 this narrative elicits couple of important observations. first, the psah, and the al-ustuwaṭṭās in particular, are depicted here as a standard to follow and adapt to the occult practices of the thirteenth century. indeed, the text is similar to al-ustuwaṭṭās in its description of the magical operations of the lunar mansions, but the practices prescribed by the two texts are different, and the rūḥāniyyāt in this text are more like angels with hebraic names. second, the psah were legitimized and sensationalized by their insertion into a “historical imaginary,” which is understood here as a shared understanding of the past created by various discourses—political, religious, scientific, philosophical, literary, and so on—which shapes the way in which a community relates to its immediate and ancient past and to its entanglements with different groups. in the case of the psah, this historical imaginary is one that reconstructs and celebrates a dynamic islamic culture that hybridizes persian, indian, and greek heritage. 35. soas 46347, fols. 30v–31v. 36. it is likely that the definite article is missing. al-tilmīdh means “the student,” not “student of,” indicating alexander’s tutelage under aristotle. 37. soas 46347, fols. 31v–32r. 29 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 30 the last pseudo-aristotelian hermetic treatise found in the cycle is kitāb al-hādhīṭūs. aristotle is absent from this text, but a cross-reference in the aforementioned al-istijlāb38 confirms its belonging to the psah, “according to what was described by hermes.”39 furthermore, an anonymous translator is mentioned. the text begins as follows: this kitāb al-hādhīṭūs is the book that god, powerful and exalted, taught adam. when he forced him to descend from paradise, he taught him every beneficial thing, and every craft with which he could make good his land.40 the narrative about admānūs (adam) in this text is consistent with the rest of the corpus and provides a complementary trajectory by describing the magical knowledge that admānūs received from the demiurge hādūs (see below). the creation of admānūs is described in other texts of the psah. four other works, which do not belong to the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica, also found their way into the cycle. the first is the giranis, which is attributed to hermes but does not feature aristotle. it is concerned with the occult properties of natural things and is organized alphabetically.41 the work is an arabic translation of an early greek version of the kyranides that has not survived. it may have differed from the traditional greek versions.42 as toralniehoff notes, this may be called the earliest arabic translation of a hellenistic text on magic. she also highlights the work as evidence of medieval islamic intellectual knowledge of ancient magic and of muslims’ ability to contextualize such knowledge successfully.43 the latter is attested by the work’s inclusion among the pseudo-aristotelian hermetic texts, which demonstrates a medieval conceptualization of a wider magical “hermetic” tradition.44 we also find in the cycle a treatise entitled kitāb al-aḥjār (the book of stones). although the work begins abruptly, a title is given in the conclusion. in content, the text is almost identical to another collection of stone and ring magic, ms istanbul, süleymaniye, ayasofya 3610, fols. 1v–143r.45 the compiler of this manuscript claims to have relied on several books “that describe some of the writings of the light of knowledge, aristotle the sage, retrieved from the book by hermes the sage” (fol. 2r). this makes it a pseudo-aristotelian hermetic 38. the treatise on attracting animals that forms part of al-ustuwwaṭṭās, see above and the appendix. 39. delhi arabic 1946, fol. 85r. 40. ibid., fol. 53r. 41. this text was edited and studied by isabel toral-niehoff on the basis of ms oxford, bodleian, arab d. 221 in kitab giranis: die arabische übersetzung der ersten kyranis des hermes trismegistos und die griechischen parallelen (munich: herbert utz, 2004). 42. toral-niehoff, kitab giranis, 37–38. 43. toral-niehoff, kitab giranis, 16. 44. a.-j. festugière, ed., la révélation d’hermès trismégiste, vol. 1: l’astrologie et les sciences occultes (paris: les belles lettres, 1989), 201–16. 45. this is a royal manuscript copied for the treasury of sultan abū al-naṣr sayf al-dīn al-ashraf qaytbay (r. 1468–96); see fol. 1r. the colophon dates the manuscript to the beginning of shaʿbān 888/september 1483. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 30 text. however, in the version of the text found in the psah cycle the reference to aristotle and hermes is absent since the first half of the text is missing. kitāb al-aḥjār is followed in the cycle by kitāb ʿuṭārid b. muḥammad al-muḥāsib fī manāfiʿ al-aḥjār wa-l-khiraz wa-ṭillismātihā wa-khawātim al-kawākib al-sabʿa (the book of ʿuṭārid b. muḥammad al-muḥāsib on the benefits of stones, amulets, and their talismans, and the rings of the seven planets), according to the title given at the text’s conclusion.46 the psah cycle includes only the last part of the actual text attributed to ʿuṭārid on the construction of planetary rings. the first part of the work is found in the stone magic collection ms paris, bnf, arabe 2775 (second text, fols. 102r–114r) and in the second part of ayasofya 3610 (fols. 44v–168v). moreover, a version of ʿuṭārid’s work appears in ms tehran, majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, fols. 80r–88v, the same persian manuscript that contains the third bāb (al-isqūṭās) of al-sakkākī’s shāmil (fols. 43r–79v), discussed above, as well as the pseudoaristotelian dhakhīrat iskandar (fols. 1r–42v).47 the ubiquity of the psah in all kinds of compilations on the theme of the occult properties of stones, talismans, and nīranjs testifies to their deep impact on arabicand persian-language audiences interested in the occult sciences. ʿuṭārid b. muḥammad is described by ibn al-nadīm as an astrologer and an astronomer.48 in arabe 2775 we read that ʿuṭārid was inspired to write his own work on stones by a certain book of the same genre by hermes that constitutes one of “the treatises (alṣuḥuf) known [collectively] as ūjāyaqī,49 which bring together writings on stones, trees, and all animals whose benefits i (ʿuṭārid) found in the book of the seven talismans of wisdom (kitāb al-ṭillismāt li-l-ḥikma al-sabʿa).” ʿuṭārid claims to have gathered in his work all writings on stone magic “by the arabs.”50 in arabe 2775, we also find a text containing passages from kitāb al-ūjāyaqī fī al-ṭillismāt (the book of ūjāyaqī on talismans, fols. 127r– 131r). in ayasofya 3610, the ūjāyaqī is a corpus of writing (musḥaf) which contains “a book on temples and stones” (kitāb al-barābī wa-l-aḥjār), but we do not find any actual discussion of temples in either ayasofya 3610 or arabe 2775. however, there is a similar discussion in another stone magic collection in ms cambridge, dd. 4. 28,51 in a treatise titled muṣḥaf hirmis al-harāmisa (the book of hermes of the hermae, fols. 100r–119v), described as “the second book that covers the kinds of stones and their minerals, and wherein there is [a discussion of] their benefits, explained clearly, and wherein he also mentions several temples” (fol. 100v). there is no reference here to the ūjāyaqī. a text attributed to hermes 46. on the astral scientist ʿ uṭārid b. muḥammad al-ḥāsib (fl. ninth–tenth century) and for comparisons of his work with ghāyat al-ḥakīm on the basis of ms madrid, el escorial, no. 939, fols. 16v–17v, see m. j. parra pérez, “el ‘sirr al-asrār’ de ʿuṭārid b. muḥammad al-ḥāsib y sus aforismos,” anaquel de estudios árabes 20 (2009): 165–86. 47. see more on these two texts below. 48. ibn al-nadīm, al-fihrist, 387; sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 5:254; 6:161; 7:137. 49.  ms paris, bnf, arabe 2775, fol. 102v. in ms istanbul, süleymaniye, ayasofya 3610, fol. 144v, the book’s title is given as: إِْرَحانِيقِى. 50. ms paris, bnf, arabe 2775, fols. 102v–103v. 51. this manuscript carries the title kitāb azmār al-afkār fī jawāhir al-aḥjār (the divulsion of ideas on the precious stones) it was sponsored for the treasury of al-malik al-nāṣir nāṣir al-dīn muḥammad b. qalāwūn (r. 1293–94, 1299–1309, 1310–41). the manuscript ends abruptly. 31 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 32 with that title perhaps once existed, containing the material in muṣḥaf hirmis al-harāmisa, the material in ʿuṭārid’s text (in arabe 2775 and ayasofya 3610), and kitāb al-ūjāyaqī fī al-ṭillismāt (arabe 2775).52 the final text in the psah cycle is al-kitāb al-majmūʿ fī khawāṣṣ al-aḥjār (the collection concerning the occult properties of stones), which contains kitāb maʿrifat al-ḥijāra wa-khāṣṣiyatihā wa-nuqūshihā (on the knowledge of stones, their occult properties, and their inscriptions) taken from al-hādhīṭūs by the first hermes,53 as well as other books (maṣāḥif). the text begins as follows: this is the book on the knowledge of stones, their occult properties and inscriptions, what is made from them, and these things with which its practice is accompanied, retrieved from kitāb al-hādhīṭūs by the first hermes and the books of wisdom (maṣāḥif al-ḥikma).54 one of the five texts featured in this collection is referred to as bāb maḥakkāt al-aḥjār min kalām aristotle wa-ghayrihi (“a chapter on the pulverulence of stones from the writings of aristotle and others”).55 its content is identical with that of a section called dhikr maḥakkāt al-ḥijār al-sabʿa (“reference to the pulverulence of the seven stones”) in cambridge, dd. 4. 28, fols. 120r–122r. both are based on the sayings of a sage named funṭus. 2. kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt and more of al-ustuwaṭṭās according to the manuscript evidence, k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt is known as a two-part composition, comprising a text from al-ustuwaṭṭās and a second part, which lacks a title. the text from al-ustuwaṭṭās, which constitutes the first half of k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt, is concerned with the ontological links between the macrocosm and the microcosm, aristotelian hylomorphism and the generation of the terrestrial world, the celestial structure of the cosmos, and the role of the rūḥāniyyāt in the administration of the celestial, 52. arabe 2775 also contains “the scintillating pearls on the properties of stones and minerals” (al-laʾāliʾ al-muḍīʾa fī khawāṣṣ al-jawāhir wa-l-aḥjār) by aḥmad al-tīfāshī (1184–1253) (fol. 1v), a book on the properties of stones by ḥunayn b. isḥāq (fol. 76v), a book by hermes on the occult properties of stones (fol. 161v), and an epistle on ancient opinions concerning stones, heavily featuring aristotelian writings on stones (fol. 131v). 53. abū maʿshar al-balkhī describes three different figures named hermes in a surviving portion of his lost kitāb al-ulūf. the first hermes was identified as idrīs and is presented as an antediluvian prophet who constructed egyptian temples. his father is gayōmard. he is a consummate astronomer/astrologer and the first physician. the second hermes is babylonian who excelled in medicine, philosophy, and mathematics. pythagoras is his pupil. the third hermes of abū maʿshar lived in egypt after the flood. he is skilled in drugs and poisons and composed books on alchemy and precious stones. k. van bladel, “hermes and hermetica”, in encyclopaedia of islam three, ed. kate fleet, gudrun krämer, denis matringe, john nawas, everett rowson (leiden: brill, online on 11 october 2021 http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_23130; van bladel, arabic hermes, 27 esp. n. 21, 28, 31–32; d. pingree, the thousands of abū maʿshar (london: warburg institute, 1968); c. burnett, “the legend of the three hermes and abū maʿshar’s kitāb al-ulūf in the latin middle ages,” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 39 (1981): 231–34; d. pingree, from astral omens to astrology, from babylon to bīkāner (rome: istituto italiano per l’africa e l’oriente, 1997), 53-54. 54. delhi arabic 1946, fol. 126r. 55. ibid., fol. 154r. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 32 terrestrial, and human worlds. it also discusses the creation of admānūs and ḥaywānus, and the lunar mansions and associated nīranjs. it thus perfectly matches the content of al-ustuwaṭṭās in the psah cycle (see above). in addition, it complements the content of al-hādhīṭūs, which describes itself as “the book that god, powerful and exalted, taught adam.”56 the same divine lessons to admānūs are covered in the part of al-ustuwaṭṭās found in kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. in the second part, we read that k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt is in fact a translation, and we are given a summary of the second part’s contents: ḥunayn b. isḥāq said: among the books of aristotle that we have found and i have translated from the greek tongue to the arabic is kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt by hermes. it is divided according to the seven climes, their nature, and their operations. this is the book wherein aristotle explains the causes of the rūḥāniyyāt, the nīranjs, their substances, and their differences, distributed among the seven climes. for alexander asked aristotle the sage [for this information] when he had just completed kitāb al isṭimākhīs, which he had explained to him during his march to persia.57 the reported contents of this part of k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyya and the stated chronology of its composition indicate that it is al-isṭimāṭīs, which, according to the prologue found in the psah cycle, is likewise organized “according to the seven climes and their nature, operations, and substances” and treats “the causes of the rūḥāniyyāt, their activities, their substances, and their differences across the seven climes and according to the seven planets.”58 the texts’ own narratives and the cross-references established by this study demonstrate the unity between the texts of the psah cycle and the kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. we can conclude that the first text written was al-isṭimākhīs, followed by al-isṭimāṭīs. al-ustuwaṭṭās was part of a larger hermetic work called k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. it is not a farfetched possibility that al-isṭimākhīs, al-isṭimāṭīs, al-ustuwaṭṭās, and al-hādhīṭūs are all parts of the larger k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. it remains unclear whether they were written all at once or over a period of time, but together they constitute the core texts of a pseudo-aristotelian hermetic corpus, containing a comprehensive and consistent cosmology according to which the world is ruled by god and a demiurge, unique genesis myths, planetary reverence, and magical and theurgic practices set within this world. 3. al-madīṭīs the work known as al-madīṭīs is an abridged reformulation of the content of the psah core texts. the text begins as follows: this is the book of hermes on the operations pertaining to moving animals (fī ṣanāʾiʿ al-ḥayawān al-mutaḥarrika). it is the one he called kitāb al-madīṭīs, interpreted by 56. ibid., fol. 53r. 57. ms paris, bnf, arabe 2577, fol. 38r. 58. delhi arabic 1946, fol. 32v. 33 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 34 aristotle the sage, and mentioned by aristotle to alexander the king in al-isṭimāṭīs.59 according to the text, al-madīṭīs is the title given to the work by aristotle, who interpreted the knowledge revealed to hermes about the secrets of creation obtained in a dark crypt.60 this is the same story as that which we find in al-isṭimākhīs, where hermes meets his personal rūḥāniyya, known as the perfect nature.61 the text proceeds to summarize some content from al-isṭimākhīs. elsewhere, more textual history is given, clearly delineating the relationship between al-madīṭīs and other texts of the psah: aristotle said: you are satisfied only with the most extensive research and analysis (al-baḥth wa-l-istiqṣāʾ). yes, through it i have found the description of these things, the nīranjs, and the employment of wet and dry organs (aʿḍāʾ) that the maker of nīranjs needs. these are their hidden secrets that, along with [all] its aspects, were not possible to recount [here] because of their length. i dedicated a book to these [things] and named it kitāb al-asrār [the book of secrets], and i specified in it the times and hours that the practitioner of these nīranjs needs to keep. [. . .] the sage omitted mention of these in their [suitable] place to avoid prolongation [. . .], so he placed them all in a single book and named it kitāb al-ustuwaṭṭās,62 which is translated as “the secrets” (al-asrār). he also added into this book all the secrets needed from of kitāb al-isṭimākhīs and kitāb al-isṭimāṭīs,63 the book that compiles the secrets the practitioner of nīranjs needs. this the sage described in “the book of the qualities of moving animals.” this book is completed by the aid of god and his kindness. this is the book named al-madīṭīs, aristotle’s interpretations for alexander the great.64 the book continues with content from al-isṭimākhīs. 4. dhakhīrat iskandar (the treasury of alexander) dhakhīrat iskandar deals with astrology and the principles of astral influences, talismanry, occult properties, and alchemy. ana maria alfonso-goldfarb studied the work and, with safa abou chahla jubran, produced a translation into portuguese on the basis of ms madrid, el escorial no. 947 (which also contains ghāyat al-ḥakīm), and ms berlin, staatsbibliothek zu berlin, wetzstein ii 1209, fols. 1v–42v (see appendix).65 dhakhīrat iskandar is one of the most popular of all the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica, circulating widely in persian translations.66 it begins thus: 59. ms oxford, bodleian, marsh 556, fol. 5r. 60. ibid., fol. 5v. 61. delhi arabic 1946, fols. 4v–5r. .االسطوطاس  .62 .االسطماطيس ,االسطماخيس  .63 64. marsh 556, fol. 110v. 65. a. m. alfonso-goldfarb, livro do tesouro de alexandre: um estudo de hermética árabe na oficina da história de ciência, trans. alfonso-goldfarb and s. abou chahla jubran (petrópolis: editora vozes, 1999), 23–25. 66. c. a. storey, persian literature: a bio-bibliographical survey, vol. 2, part 3 (leiden: brill, 1977), 457–58. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 34 al-amīr al-muʿtaṣim had heard that there was an ancient monastery associated with antiochus, pupil of alexander dhū al-qarnayn, son of philip the greek. antiochus had built and fortified it, appointing a group to service it and to safeguard a house in it that they claim to contain some of the relics (āyāt)67 of the prophets and their remains. for the sake of the group responsible for maintaining the monastery, antiochus sponsored (waqqafa ʿalā) several estates, and he wrote down for them records that he notarized in byzantium (thabattahā fī rūmiyya al-kubrā) to preserve its contents, establish covenants with the byzantines and greeks so that they would not allow anyone to target them or to obstruct that which he had sponsored for them, and prevent the opening of the gate to the house of the remains to honor [anyone]. so al-muʿtaṣim sent a message to the people of this monastery, ordering them to allow him [to enter] the house of the remains. he said: “if this house contains nothing but the remains of prophets, as you claim, we will not usurp it or damage what is in there. if it contains money or books of wisdom, there would be no benefit in leaving them sealed there after the death of their owners. we are more entitled to them.”68 eventually, according to the narrative, al-muʿtaṣim also guaranteed the safety of the monastery attendants’ lives and property, and they trusted him. then he dispatched the intelligence courier al-malik b. yaḥyā, the astrologer ʿalī b. aḥmad, and the engineer muḥammad b. khālid to search this monastery, but to no avail; they found nothing. muḥammad b. khālid suspected that the attendants had transferred the objects somewhere else. the latter protested and nearly convinced him and al-muʿtaṣim that nothing had been hidden. after this event, al-muʿtaṣim saw in a dream the caliph al-maʾmūn telling him that in this house he should find “the treasury of alexander dhū al-qarnayn and the knowledge of aristotle and hermes the great.” as soon as he woke up, he called for muḥammad b. khālid and ordered him to destroy the walls and their foundations. eventually, the searchers found a copper box covered with hematite (al-ḥadīd al-ṣīnī), and inside it was a box made of red gold, locked with a golden key hanging from a golden chain. on the box was writing in greek script, and inside it was a 360-page golden book whose pages were also made of red gold. every page had twelve lines, written sometimes in greek and sometimes in latin script. this was the treasury of alexander. to honor muḥammad b. khālid, the treasury’s finder, al-muʿtaṣim tasked him with writing the prologue to this highly sought-after and treasured work. the prologue claims that the text was discovered after the sack of amorium in 223/838.69 the theologian ibn taymiyya (661–728/1263–1328) knew the dhakhīra and considered it a book on the astral religion of the sabians, among whose adherents he counted aristotle.70 there is no reference in the work to any of the other titles of the psah, but its contents match their magical concerns and practices. 67.  damage in io islamic 673, fol. 1v, obscures the word آيــات (āyāt). on close inspection, however, it seems to be آالت (ālāt), “possessions”, which is found in ms tehran, majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 4752, fol.1r. 68. ms london, british library, io islamic 673, fols. 1v–2r. 69. io islamic 673, fols. 1v–5r. 70. ibn taymiyya, darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa-l-naql, ed. m. r. sālim, 10 vols. (riyadh: imam mohammad ibn saud islamic university, 1991), 1:312. 35 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 36 in the tenth-century magic handbook ghāyat al-ḥakīm, the work’s author, maslama al-qurṭubī (d. 353/964), mentions a work by aristotle called al-malāṭīs containing nīranjs made by kīnas al-hindī, about whom alexander the great had inquired. according to al-qurṭubī, kīnās had been known as al-rūḥānī (“the theurgist”) and had reached the age of 540 under the emperor hadrian. al-qurṭubī goes on to provide numerous recipes from al-malāṭīs over two chapters.71 this kīnas and his nīranjs are also mentioned in al-madīṭīs.72 nevertheless, beyond such superficial similarities, nothing substantiates a real connection between al-malāṭīs and al-madīṭīs.73 the title al-malāṭīs is likewise mentioned in the alchemical work tadbīr hirmis al-harāmisa and seems to be foundational to it.74 the abovementioned third bāb of al-kitāb al-shāmil claims to contain a certain al-mīyālāṭīs al-akbar and says to contain “a description of the [twenty-eight lunar] mansions . . . , their natures and properties, and the names of the angels in charge, their suffumigations, and the nīranjs made under them”.75 the work continues with the exposition of the mansions according to this al-mīyālāṭīs.76 the content is different from that of the dhakhīra and the ghāya. al-malāṭīs al-akbar/dhakhīrat iskandar is thus likely to be a later work that elaborates aristotelian-hermetic magical and alchemical practice. 5. al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya or aḥkām ṭulūʿ al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya the text known as al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya is a popular, predominantly astrological text on prognostication by the star sirius. the prologue claims that it is based on a text by hermes, the treasured book (al-kitāb al-makhzūn), on which aristotle drew and which he interpreted. it was translated into “the ancient tongue”77 by nafṭūya the sage, and in ms paris, bnf, arabe 2578, we are told that it was known to wahb b. al-munabbih (34–109/654– 728), the author of a sacred history entitled qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (stories of the prophets).78 edgar blochet saw no reason to contradict this claim and proposed a greek or syriac origin for the work. he went as far as stating that al-shuʿrā was the basis for the part of arabe 2577 that contains al-ustuwaṭṭās and k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt, an opinion accepted by sezgin.79 however, a comparison of the works does not support this assertion. the cosmology and 71. al-qurṭubī, picatrix, ed. ritter, 248–85; sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 7:66. 72. marsh 556, fol. 47r. on kīnās and nīranjs, see sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 7:66; ullmann, naturund geheimwissenschaften, 367–68. 73. ullmann, naturund geheimwissenschaften, 366–67. 74. p. carusi, “alchimia ermetica e arte del vetro: il tadbīr harmis al-harāmisa,” quaderni di studi arabi 10 (1992): 175–200, at 176–78; ullmann, naturund geheimwissenschaften, 168, 366–68; sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 4:39 (no. 3). 75. ms, london, british library, delhi arabic 1915, fols. 91r–91v; soas 46347, fols. 30v–31v. 76. soas 46347, fols. 31r–59v. 77. in ms paris, bnf, arabe 2578, fol. 1v: “the ancient book,” kitāb. 78. arabe 2580, fol. 1v. 79. e. blochet, “études sur le gnosticisme musulman,” rivista degli studi orientali 4, no. 1 (1911): 47–79, at 57–58; see also sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 4:35. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 36 content of k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt (which, as we have seen, included al-ustuwaṭṭās) differ considerably from those of al-shuʿrā despite their common astrological concerns, so the latter seems more like a sister text to the former rather than its basis. ii. dating the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica for dating purposes, we are fortunate that the psah were influential on some major early texts on magic, in which they are cited by name. in some recensions of the tenth-century esoteric encyclopedia of ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ known as rasāʾil ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ (the epistles of the brethren of purity), reference is made to al-ustuwaṭṭās as the source of the epistle’s discussion of the lunar mansions.80 the rasāʾil were written in iraq in the first half of the tenth century, thus giving a terminus ante quem for al-ustuwaṭṭās.81 to this we can add references made in one of the best-known texts on astral magic in arabic, ghāyat al-ḥakīm, which was written in 348/959 according to its andalusian author, maslama al-qurṭubī, who traveled to the eastern domains, including iraq.82 another possible clue to the date of the psah comes from one of the treatises themselves, namely, the version of al-isṭimāṭīs found as the second part of k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt in arabe 2577 and ms manisa, national library of manisa, no. 1461. that text claims that the prominent translator ḥunayn b. isḥāq (d. 260/873) had come across the text among works written by aristotle and translated it from greek into arabic.83 if this is true, we have a terminus post quem for the text. however, the putative role of ḥunayn b. isḥāq is one of the apocryphal elements of the psah texts alongside the attribution of the texts to aristotle and the attribution of aristotle’s knowledge to hermes. no such translation by ḥunayn is recorded in historical accounts, and i have found no evidence of the work’s greek origins or references to it in ancient texts. the mention of ḥunayn is reminiscent of the attribution to him of the aforementioned book on stones in arabe 2775 and of the translation of kitāb nawāmīs aflāṭun (the secrets of plato, known in latin as liber vaccae), a ninth-century work mentioned in the early 80. ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, rasāʾil ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, 4 vols. (beirut: dār ṣādir, 2008), 4:443–45; ms istanbul, süleymaniye, atıf efendi 1681, fols. 572a–576a; ms manisa, national library of manisa (genel kitaplik), no. 1461, fols. 18v–25v. 81. according to maribel fierro, “it is safe to conclude that they were written before 325/936”; m. fierro, “bāṭinism in al-andalus: maslama b. qāsim al-qurṭubī (d. 353/964), author of the rutbat al-ḥakīm and the ghāyat al-ḥakīm (picatrix),” studia islamica 84 (1996): 87–112. if the text’s reference to ʿīd ghadīr points to the public commemoration of ghadīr khumm started by the buyids, the terminus post quem should be 945, the year the buyids took over baghdad. this is supported by abū ḥayyān al-tawḥīdī’s account of the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ’s being active under the buyids; see a. hamdani, “abū ḥayyān al-tawḥīdī and the brethren of purity,” international journal of middle east studies 9, no. 3 (1978): 345–5. see also g. de callataÿ, “magia en al-andalus: rasāʾil ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, rutbat al-ḥakīm y ghāyat al-ḥakīm (picatrix),” al-qanṭara 34, no. 2 (2013): 297–344. 82. al-qurṭubī, picatrix, ed. ritter, 1. 83. arabe 2577, fol. 38r. 37 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 38 tenth-century kitāb al-tajmīʿ (the book of assemblage) attributed to jābir b. ḥayyān.84 all of this lends greater support to a ninth-century dating. in one manuscript of al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya (arabe 2578, fol. 1v), the reader is told that wahb b. al-munabbih knew the text as he was an expert on the subject of astral influences. the suggestion that al-shuʿrā was composed in the eighth century is tempting, especially if it was indeed translated from middle persian. however, this reference to wahb is absent from the rest of the manuscripts consulted. further, there is nothing to suggest that the claim is true, although the association with wahb is interesting; existing fragments of his kitāb al-mabādiʾ (the book of principles) indicate his interest in astral knowledge, and this is confirmed by some accounts.85 blochet argues that “the political horizon” of the shuʿrā’s author is that of the first mamluk sultans, thus suggesting a twelfthto fourteenth-century egyptian origin. he supports his argument with the geographic names that appear in the text—namely, rūm, syria, constantinople the great, maghreb, algeria and kairouan, nūba, abyssinia, india and sind, china, and the countries of the turks and kiptchak.86 the claim remains highly speculative and unconvincing. the perceived egyptian connection rests on the fact that the text provides predictions for the flooding of the nile, but interest in this topic was hardly limited to mamluk-era egyptians; it was also a concern for the abbasids, whose centralized taxation systems and extensive administrative reach encompassed egypt. the flooding of the nile would have been a significant event also for other dynasties in other periods. nevertheless, like the dhakhīra, the shuʿrā is not cited in early texts as the rest of the psah are, and neither work contains cross-references to other psah texts. this means that they cannot be set firmly in the ninth century, unless we take at face value the references to the ninth-century sack of amorium in the dhakhīra and to wahb b. munabbih, who was active in the eighth century, in the shuʿrā. without further evidence, the dating of these two texts remains open to challenge. 84. l. saif, “the cows and the bees: arabic sources and parallels for pseudo-plato’s liber vaccae (kitāb al-nawāmīs),” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 79 (2016): 1–47. david pingree considers the liber vaccae a sabian text on the basis of a passage that describes the convictions of the masters of secrets (nawāmīs), opfices aneguemis; however, nowhere in the passage are sabians mentioned. d. pingree, “the ṣābians of ḥarrān and the classical tradition,” international journal of the classical tradition 9, no. 1 (summer 2002): 8–35, at 34–35; m. van der lugt, “‘abominable mixtures’: the liber vaccae in the medieval west, or the dangers and attractions of natural magic,” traditio 64 (2009): 229–77, at 229, 232–33; d. n. hasse, “plato arabico-latinus: philosophy—wisdom literature—occult sciences,” in the platonic tradition in the middle ages: a doxographic approach, ed. s. gershwin and m. j. f. m. hoenen, 31–66 (berlin: de gruyter, 2002), 53–54; d. pingree, “plato’s hermetic book of the cow,” in il neoplatonismo nel rinascimento, ed. p. prini, 133–45 (rome: istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1993), 133–34. 85. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 7:99; r. g. khoury, “un fragment astrologique inédit attribué à wahb b. munabbih,” arabica 19, no. 2 (1972): 139–44; n. abbott, “wahb b. munabbih: a review article,” journal of near eastern studies 36, no. 2 (1977): 103–12; a.-l. de prémare, “wahb b. munabbih, une figure singulière du premier islam,” annales: histoire, sciences sociales 3 (2005): 531–49. blochet, “études sur le gnosticisme musulman,” 57–58; see also sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 4:35–35. 86. blochet, “études sur le gnosticisme musulman,” 61–62. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 38 the dating of certain psah texts has been connected to the dating of the better-known sirr al-khalīqa (the secret of creation) by pseudo-apollonius, a “hermetic” cosmological text concerned mostly with the etiology of all created and generated things, from angels to minerals, with pronounced astrological undertones. the real apollonius (bālīnās) was known as “the master of talismans,” according to various arabic sources.87 in this work, a christian priest called sājiyūs from nablus is mentioned as the translator of “kitāb al-ʿilal” which was the title of the book which was given to apollonius by the perfect nature (al-ṭibāʿ al-tāmm) in the dark crypt from which he also retrieved the emerald tablet.88 the first part, or introduction, of sirr al-khalīqa is a commentary by the priest establishing the truth of monotheism (a theme that is continued in the following part), and it contains an interpretation of twenty-two divine names.89 the priest identifies himself as a rūmī (byzantine) and positions his beliefs about the nature of god in contrast to those of the brahmins, who caused the indians to deviate from the words of the buddha, believing that god is a body of light. he also denounces the sabians for believing that god mixes with his creation.90 minor interventions by a muslim editor, such as prayers upon the prophet muḥammad as section starters and conclusions, are found through the text.91 ursula weisser, martin plessner, and hellmut ritter have identified several parallels between al-ustuwaṭṭās, al-isṭimāṭīs, and sirr al-khalīqa, especially the division of causes into four types92 and the story of the dark crypt in which the existence of the perfect nature is revealed and the emerald tablet.93 thus, the dating of one can shed light on the dating and context of the other and locates its place in a particular intellectual tradition or religious current. plessner was hesitant to ascribe a pre-islamic origin to sirr al-khalīqa, although he considered it older than the psah treatises. weisser argued that the author of sirr al-khalīqa used “a pre-islamic version” of al-isṭimāṭīs.94 she concluded, on the basis of brief and speculative linguistic comparisons, that both texts had a non-arabic origin. zimmermann, in his review of weisser’s monograph, asserted that weisser was right in arguing that sirr al-khalīqa depends on al-isṭimāṭīs, but wrong in suggesting that the borrowing took place 87. m. k. zanjani asl, “sirr al-khalīqa and its influence in the arabic and persianate world: ʿawn b. al-mundhir’s commentary and its unknown persian translation,” al-qanṭara 37, no. 2 (2016): 435–73, at 437–40. 88. ps. apollonius of tyana, buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung und die darstellung der natur (buch der ursachen), ed. u. weisser (aleppo: institute of the history of arab science, university of aleppo, 1979), 100. 89. ps. apollonius, geheimnis der schöpfung, 1-50, 53-65. 90. ps. apollonius, geheimnis der schöpfung, 63–65; u. weisser, das buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung von pseudo-apollonius von tyana (berlin: de gruyter, 1980), 82–83. 91. ps. apollonius, geheimnis der schöpfung, 99–100. 92. ps. apollonius, geheimnis der schöpfung, 13–14; cf. al-ustuwaṭṭās, arabe 2577, fols. 2r–3r. 93. ps. apollonius, geheimnis der schöpfung, 5–7; cf. al-isṭimākhīs, delhi arabic 1946, fols. 4r–5v. for the parallels, see weisser, das buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung, 55, 68–69; m. plessner, “neue materialien zur geschichte der tabula smaragdina,” der islam 16 (2009): 77–113, at 93–95; maslama al-qurṭubī, picatrix: das ziel des weisen; translated to german from the arabic, trans. and ed. h. ritter and m. plessner (london: warburg institute, 1962), 198–202. see also van bladel, arabic hermes, 124–25, 158–61, 170–71, 178–79. 94. weisser, das buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung, 69. 39 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 40 at a “pre-arabic” stage. in his view, it was more probable that it was the “arabic version” of al-istimāṭīs that had been used in the compilation of the arabic version of sirr al-khalīqa.95 there is no reliable information that suggests a pre-islamic origin for either sirr al-khalīqa or the psah. their pseudo-epigraphic nature places them within a widespread tradition of (mis)attributions common in the ninth and tenth centuries. applying the principle of occam’s razor, sirr al-khalīqa is more likely a text composed or heavily paraphrased by the priest sājiyūs and a muslim redactor, whose touches are present throughout the text. as weisser herself has pointed out, it is difficult to differentiate the “original” text from these intrusions.96 the author knew al-isṭimāṭīs and al-isṭimākhīs, and sirr al-khalīqa was where he transferred, negotiated, rejected, and christianized some of their doctrines. this becomes even more evident when we look at his discourse on monotheism and his take on the rūḥāniyyāt, which he calls rūḥāniyyūn. the author of sirr al-khāliqa criticizes the sabians, “the people (aṣḥāb) of trees,” “the people of the sun,” “the people of the stars,” idolaters, “the people of the natures (aṣḥāb al-ṭabāʾiʿ),” and others who claim that god has a partner in creation.97 he challenges a particular group of people on their belief that “the first creator authorized some of his creatures to create”98—a belief reminiscent of the power given to hādūs by the 95. f. w. zimmermann, review of das buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung by weisser, medical history 25 (1981): 439–40; j. ruska, tabula smaragdina: ein beitrag zur geschichte der hermetischen literatur (heidelberg: carl winter’s universitätsbuchhandlung, 1926), 67. antoine isaac silvestre de sacy believed sirr al-khāliqa to be an originally greek work penned by the christian priest sājiyūs and subsequently translated into syriac and expanded anonymously. this syriac version was then translated into arabic by a muslim who added islamic linguistic elements (weisser, das buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung, 8). françois nau, on the other hand, contended that the text’s “essence” was indeed attributable to apollonius of tyana, although it had undergone many redactions. he identified the translator into syriac as sergios (d. 536) from ras al-ayn in syria and argued that ḥunayn b. isḥāq was the translator into arabic; see, ibid., 9. julius ruska was of the opinion that the work had been produced between the sixth and eighth centuries in northeast persia; he remained uncertain about a greek original and was inclined to consider sājiyūs the invention of a muslim redactor; see, j. ruska, tabula smaragdina: ein beitrag zur geschichte der hermetischen literatur (heidelberg: carl winter’s universitätsbuchhandlung, 1926), 122–27, 129. martin plessner saw a pre-islamic origin unlikely; see, martin plessner, “neue materialien zur geschichte der tabula smaragdina,” der islam 16 (2009): 77–113. paul kraus suspected that the author, who belonged to hellenized circles in syria, adapted an early translation into arabic, with a final redaction under the caliph al-maʾmūn; see, p. kraus, jābir ibn ḥayyān: contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’islam, vol. 1: le corpus des écrits jābiriens (cairo: french institute of oriental archaeology, 1943), 290-303. louis massignon deemed it the work of a “heterodox muslim” under al-maʾmūn, based on a “hermetic prototype”; see, l. massignon, “inventaire de la littérature hermétique arabe,” in festugière, la révélation d’hermès trismégiste, 1:384–400, at 395. ruska, meanwhile, concluded that “the arabic hermetic writings”—by which he meant the psah—are not based on coptic or greek models but rather were created in the tenth or eleventh century on the basis of borrowings from ghāyat al-ḥakīm, which at that time was erroneously attributed to the mathematician maslama al-majrītī (950–1007); see, j. ruska, tabula smaragdina: ein beitrag zur geschichte der hermetischen literatur (heidelberg: carl winter’s universitätsbuchhandlung, 1926), 67. 96. weisser, das buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung, 69. 97. ps. apollonius, geheimnis der schöpfung, 35–37. 98. ibid., 46. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 40 “first creator” in al-isṭimāṭīs. furthermore, he refers to adam as admānūs, the name used across the psah, and describes him, along with lucifer (iblīs), as the first sinner.99 in a subsequent section, “on the creation of angels,” the author describes angels as “the luminescent intelligences” (al-arwāḥ al-mutafakkira al-nāʾira). the higher ones, he says, are created from simple fire, water, or air, but not from earth, as that is too terrestrial for their sublime nature. such beings also include jinn, devils (shayāṭīn), “dwellers of the air, fire, sea and land,” and the rūḥāniyyūn of the two luminaries (the sun and the moon), planets, stars, and spheres who govern celestial and terrestrial affairs.100 unlike the psah, sirr al-khalīqa seeks to “demystify” the nature of these beings, repeatedly stressing that though they are immortal, but like animals and plants, they emerge from the elements, not from ether or through some other cosmogenic forces.101 the author goes on to describe the traits and responsibilities of the planetary rūḥāniyyūn, which include fighting off rebellious devils (maradat al-shayāṭīn). interestingly, the role of guardian angels (al-ḥāfiẓūn) over children is given to mercurial rūḥāniyyūn.102 lunar rūḥāniyyūn are assigned to guard the stars from the evil shīṭāʾīl (lucifer) and his progeny, who eavesdrop on the higher assembly, that is, the solar rūḥāniyyūn.103 this recalls quran 37:6–8: “we have adorned the low heavens with embellishing planets (6) as protection from every rebellious devil (shayṭān mārid) (7) so they may not eavesdrop on the higher assembly, pelted from every side (8).” moreover, the author provides a peculiar angelic hierarchy. the two highest classes of supra-solar angels are what he refers to as samūrā and the carriers (al-ḥamala), and below them are the subsolar karūbā and the treasurers (khazana). their description contains similarities, albeit unsystematic ones, with christian angelology. the karūbā are likely to be the cherubim; both groups are described as having four wings. the samūrā occupy a position similar to that of the seraphim, but they have zoomorphic appearances (the faces of oxen, lions, and eagles, in addition to human faces), a feature traditionally associated with the cherubim. the carriers are reminiscent of the quranic ḥamalat al-ʿarsh (the carriers of the throne), who, like the christian thrones, occupy a high station. the treasurers—the lowest category of angels according to sirr al-khalīqa—recall the dominations.104 this angelic hierarchy is different to the celestial hierarchy of pseudo-dionysius the areopagite (fifth–early sixth century), which was translated as part of the corpus dionysiacum in 1009 by ʿalī ʿīsā b. isḥāq of emesa.105 however, christian medieval angelology coalesced and was formalized in the thirteenth century, when reflections on the angels’ metaphysical nature came to rely more heavily on aristotelian problems and categories. sirr al-khalīqa’s reworking of christian 99. ibid., 47-48. 100. ibid., 161–56. 101. ibid., 155–58. 102. ibid., 169. 103. ibid., 166, 178–79. 104. ibid., 179–84. 105. a. treiger, “the arabic version of pseudo-dionysius the areopagite’s ‘mystical theology,’ chapter 1: introduction, critical edition, and translation,” le muséon 120, nos. 3–4 (2007): 365–93. 41 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 42 angelology can be seen to reflect an important moment before its standardization, when scholastics were developing “their ideas about angels and the creation in response to arab and greek ideas about intelligences and the origins of the world.”106 the sirr al-khalīqa’s major objectives were spurred by ideas about the rūḥāniyyāt found in al-isṭimāṭīs and al-isṭimākhīs, which supports the conclusion that the latter two texts preceded sirr al-khalīqa.107 before the tenth century, although references to apollonius as a master of talismans and philosopher abound, direct citations of sirr al-khalīqa are very rare, and even where its influence has been detected, the evidence has fallen short.108 a notable exception is the jābirian corpus, specifically kitāb al-aḥjār ʿalā raʾī bālīnās (the book of stones according to apollonius) and kitāb mīdān al-ʿaql (garden of the intellect). in addition, the ismāʿīlī dāʿī abū ḥātim al-rāzī (d. 322/935) claims in his kitāb al-nubuwwa (the book of prophecy) that sirr al-khalīqa was apocryphal and had been written in the time of al-maʾmūn (r. 196–201/813–833). however, this statement is too obscure to be accorded much weight, especially given the literary genre of the work that contains it—namely, a debate between abū ḥātim al-rāzī and abū bakr b. zakariyā al-rāzī (251–313/865–925).109 accepting the jābirian corpus as the late ninthor early tenth-century product of a collective united by a conception of a jābirian program of knowledge centered on the occult sciences, especially alchemy and magic,110 and further accepting 959 as the time of composition of the ghāya,111 which cites the psah and the jābirian kitāb al-nukhab (the compendium)—the latest treatise in the corpus – we may place the psah, kitāb al-nukhab, and kitāb al-aḥjār chronologically before the ghāya. there is no evidence of the influence of sirr al-khalīqa on the ghāya, which is not surprising given their different contents and especially their disparate positions on the rūḥāniyyāt; in addition, perhaps they were 106. d. keck, angels and angelology in the middle ages (oxford: oxford university press, 1998), 71. 107. risālat bālīnās al-ḥakīm fi taʾthīr al-rūḥāniyyāt, ms madrid, el escorial, no. 921; kitāb ṭalāsim bālīnās al-akbar, ms paris, bnf, arabe 2250, fols. 84r–134v. the latter title is also given for ms berlin, petermann i 66, fols. 41v–74r, which has the same prologue as the aforementioned madrid manuscript. the rest of its contents are an amalgam of material from the psah. on kitāb ṭalāsim bālīnās al-akbar, its greek background, and the two manuscripts, see l. raggetti, “apollonius of tyana’s great book of talismans,” nuncius 34 (2019): 155–82. the rūḥāniyyāt in risālat bālīnās al-ḥakīm fi taʾthīr al-rūḥāniyyāt (the epistle of apollonius the sage on the influences of the rūḥāniyyāt) are construed in a way that is more aligned with their depiction in the psah, whereas in kitāb ṭalāsim bālīnās al-akbar (the great book of talismans by apollonius), the spiritual agents are angelic (malak) with hebrew names such as ishmiyāl and hirbīl. 108. for direct references from the early tenth century, especially by ismāʿīlī dāʿīs, see zanjani asl, “sirr al-khalīqa and its influence.” 109. jābir b. ḥayyān, mukhtār rasāʾil jābir b. ḥayyān, ed. p. kraus (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1936), 126, 223; s. n. haq, names, natures, and things: the alchemist jābir ibn ḥayyān and his “kitāb al-aḥjār” (dordrecht: kluwer, 1994), 29–30; sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 4:77–88. 110. p. kraus, jābir ibn ḥayyān: contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’islam, vol. 1: le corpus des écrits jābiriens (cairo: french institute of oriental archaeology, 1943), xxiii–xxvi, xxxiv–xxv. 111. as indicated by the manuscripts; see also fierro, “bāṭinism in al-andalus,” 97. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 42 composed too closely together in time for one to have influenced the other. we are thus left with two possible scenarios: scenario 1: psah (early ninth century) → sirr al-khalīqa (midto late ninth century) → al-nukhab and al-aḥjār (early tenth century) → ghāya (mid-tenth century) this scenario places sirr al-khalīqa in or near the time of al-maʾmūn’s reign. if one accepts sezgin’s and haq’s objections to kraus’s dating of the jābirian corpus and their alternative dating of it to the eighth century, a different,112 less likely, scenario emerges in which the psah is a seventhor eighth-century composition and sirr al-khalīqa is written shortly after it: scenario 2: psah (seventh–eighth century) → sirr al-khalīqa (seventh–eighth century) → al-nukhab and al-aḥjār (eighth century) → ghāya (mid-tenth century) there is no evidence of the influence of the psah on the magic or worldview of the jābirian corpus. al-kindī (d. between 252–260/866–873) and thābit b. qurra (d. 288/901), both of whom wrote on magic, also show no knowledge of the psah in their writings,113 and neither does abū maʿshar al-balkhī, who took a deep interest in the legend of hermes. their neglect of the psah could mean that these texts were not produced as early as the seventh or eighth centuries; however, it is just as likely to be indicative of the diversity of magic traditions in these foundational periods in the history of the islamic occult sciences. in dating the psah, some contextual considerations are necessary, especially given the absence of a smoking gun. the first of these is the trend of hermetic enthusiasm witnessed in and around the ninth century. among the hermetic works translated from greek to middle persian were a treatise known by its latin title de stellis beibeniis and translated into arabic as kitāb asrār al-nujūm (the book of astral secrets), which david pingree dates to 505, and kitāb hirmis fī taḥāwīl sinī al-mawālīd (the book of hermes on the revolutions of the years of the nativities), which was translated from persian into arabic.114 the eighth-century astrologer-translator abū sahl b. nawbakht (eighth century) in his now lost kitāb al-nhmṭʾn115 and the great astrologer abū maʿshar in his kitāb al-ulūf (the book 112. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 4:191–213; haq, names, natures, and things, 19–29. 113. m.-th. d’alverny and f. hudry, “al-kindi: de radiis,” archives d’historie doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 41 (1974): 139–260; g. bohak and c. burnett, thābit ibn qurra on talismans and pseudo-ptolemy on images 1–9: a reconstruction based on the judaeo-arabic and latin texts, together with the “liber prestigiorum thebidis” (forthcoming); c. burnett and g. bohak, “a judaeo-arabic version of tābit ibn qurra’s de imaginibus and pseudo-ptolemy’s opus imaginum,” in islamic philosophy, science, culture, and religion: studies in honor of dimitri gutas, ed. f. opwis and d. reisman, 179–200 (leiden: brill, 2012). 114. van bladel, arabic hermes, 28; d. pingree, “classical and byzantine astrology in sasanian persia,” dumbarton oaks papers 43 (1989): 227–39. 115. i follow van bladel and use the name nhmṭʾn (with short vowels unknown) since “it has never been satisfactorily explained, though presumably it masks a distorted middle persian or other iranian word; see, van bladel, arabic hermes, 30-31, and n. 37. 43 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 44 of thousands) further articulated and popularized a “historical” narrative for hermes the sage.116 as van bladel writes: “references to hermes and zoroaster in such works illustrate for us one aspect of the intellectual milieu of the third century, when hermetic texts were said by our arabic sources to have been transmitted to the persian empire.”117 in a recent article, van bladel demonstrates the frustration expressed by the astrologer al-birūnī (d. after 442/1050) in ifrād al-maqāl fī amr al-ẓilāl (the special treatise on the subject of shadows) about books on alchemy and talismans parading as authentic texts by hermes. al-bīrūnī was familiar with the works of eighthand ninth-century arabic astrologers who used and cited astrological books attributed to hermes.118 the upswell of interest in hermes not only supports a ninth-century date for the psah but also demonstrates the entanglement of zoroastrian ideas, especially concerning astrology, with intellectual and religious thought in the ninth century in the eastern domains of the islamic mediterranean, including the eastern and southern frontiers of byzantium. such entanglement is also an evident feature of the psah. furthermore, between the eighth and tenth centuries, the rate of conversion from zoroastrianism to islam or to other zoroastrian subaltern currents was high.119 moreover, the early abbasids sought to create a new islamic polity that borrowed some elements from persian zoroastrian traditions, and this aim manifested in the administrative power of the barmakid family and the employment of zoroastrian leaders for projects of translation from middle persian to arabic.120 in the case of astrology, pingree argues that early abbasid knowledge “was largely sasanian and greek in origin with indian material entering in through its being intermingled with the greek and iranian elements in sasanian astrology, while most of the practicing astrologers of the late eighth and early ninth centuries were iranian.”121 finally, it was during the ninth 116. van bladel, arabic hermes, 27 esp. n. 21, 28, 31–32; d. pingree, the thousands of abū maʿshar (london: warburg institute, 1968); c. burnett, “the legend of the three hermes and abū maʿshar’s kitāb al-ulūf in the latin middle ages,” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 39 (1981): 231–34. 117. van bladel, arabic hermes, 47. 118. k. van bladel, “al-bīrūnī on hermetic forgery,” gnosis: journal of gnostic studies 3 (2018): 54–66, at 58, 63. the following is al-bīrūnī’s statement as translated by van bladel: “i do not say this to defame hermes, for it is he who occupied such a position with respect to wisdom that the greeks counted him among the prophets. he transmitted the sciences of the chaldaeans to egypt, and the chaldaeans—the people of babylon—were so evidently advanced in the sciences that they were called sorcerers on that account, even if nothing is extant of their sciences today apart from their conception of the motion of the celestial sphere—which bespeaks a continuous care in observing it for millennia—and the traditions related from them by practicing astronomers, ptolemy and others. nevertheless, the books of hermes, and the books of alchemy and talismans, suffer from an affliction: that fakers are devoted to composing and forging them, imputing them to the sages.” 119. t. daryaee, “zoroastrianism under islamic rule,” in the wiley blackwell companion to zoroastrianism, ed. m. stausberg, y. s.-d. vevaina, and a. tessmann, 103–18 (chichester: wiley blackwell, 2015), 104 and 108; j. k. choksy, “zoroastrians in muslim iran: selected problems of coexistence and interaction during the early medieval period,” iranian studies 20, no. 1 (1987): 17–30, at 21. 120. daryaee, “zoroastrianism under islamic rule,” 107; d. gutas, greek thought, arabic culture: the graeco‐arabic translation movement in baghdad and early ʿabbāsid society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries) (london: routledge, 1998), 29, 45–51, 136. 121. pingree, from astral omens to astrology, 41. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 44 century that a significant number of zoroastrian middle persian texts were taking shape as canon.122 the dēnkard and the bundahishn were part of “a new didactic, apologetic and polemic literature” produced in this period.123 recently, emily cottrell and micah ross challenged the “middle persian hypothesis” of pingree, who, in a series of publications instrumentalized the discovery of an arabic version of dorotheus’s pentabiblos to overemphasize, according to cottrell and ross, the role of a persian intermediary between greek astrology and its arabic reception.124 pingree based his claim on a report by ibn nawabakht found in ibn al-nadīm’s fihrist. cottrell and ross questioned the strength of pingree’s evidence and concluded that there is no strong support for the claim that a third-century project of translating scientific texts into persian paved the way for the arabic reception of greek ideas, as pingree argued.125 it is not the aim of the present article to insert the psah within some fixed line of transmission, whether directly from greece or through an intermediate. however, what the narratives and reports of ibn nawabakht, ibn al-nadīm, and others do provide is an insight into how islamic culture in the ninth and tenth centuries envisioned its scientific and intellectual heritage. it is this heritage and historicization that is internalized in the psah, whether by a trajectory of textual and material transmission or by naturalization. it remains true that the psah are the product of a dynamic atmosphere of translation activity, hermetic fervor, and codification of middle persian zoroastrian religious texts, whether they contain greek influences or not.126 iii. aristotelian, hermetic, or sabian? around one hundred pseudo-aristotelian works were in circulation in the middle ages. these works were overwhelmingly concerned with the occult sciences, including alchemy, 122. daryaee, “zoroastrianism under islamic rule,” 109–10; choksy, “zoroastrians in muslim iran,” 18, 20. 123. j. c. bürgel, “zoroastrianism as viewed in medieval islamic sources,” in muslim perceptions of other religions: a historical survey, ed. j. waardenburg (new york: oxford university press, 1999), 202–12, at 203. 124. d. pingree, “classical and byzantine astrology in sasanian persia,” dumbarton oaks papers 43 (1989): 227–39; pingree, from astral omens to astrology, 39–50. 125. e. j. cottrell and m. t. ross, “persian astrology: dorotheus and zoroaster, according to the medieval arabic sources (8th–11th century),” in proceedings of the eighth european conference of iranian studies, vol. 1: studies in pre-islamic iran and on historical linguistics, ed. p. b. lurje, 87–105 (saint petersburg: state hermitage publishers, 2019). 126. cottrell and ross show that the “middle persian hypothesis” focused on a reference to the almagest of ptolemy in book 4 of the dēnkard but neglected the fact that “the megistīk ī hrōmāy” (the megistik, or “romans,” among the greeks), referred to ptolemy’s work by its arabic title, not its greek one (syntaxis). they also point out that book 4 of the dēnkard, like ibn nawbakht, indicated that the growing interest in science came from khosraw anūshirwān, so the hypothesis of a third-century persian intervention was unnecessary. ptolemy was known at the sixth-century sasanian court from testimonies describing the comparison of the indian and ptolemaic coordinates that led to the creation of the zīj al-shahriyar. cottrell and ross, “persian astrology,” 90. this information lends an element of credence to the historical narrative in al-sakkākī’s shāmil about aḥmad b. ṭūlūn’s guest, who displays a single book retrieved from the treasuries of khosraw i by “kanaka the indian” (see above). 45 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 46 chiromancy, and physiognomy.127 some of these works were renowned and influential, such as kitāb al-siyāsa fī tadbīr al-riʾāsa (the book of governance and administration), which purports to be an epistle from aristotle to alexander the great, offering political, moral, and dietary advice. known in the tenth century, the work (mentioned earlier in this article) is often referred to by its subtitle sirr al-asrār, which is also the title of the last chapter concerned with astral magic.128 it was known in latin europe as secretum secretorum. other pseudo-aristotelian texts include the chiromantia and the physiognomia.129 the psah are related to this genre in their shared subject matter and historical proximity in the form in which we know them—that is, as arabic productions. many of the pseudo-aristotelian (not necessarily hermetic) texts also take the form of epistles or instructions to alexander the great and, more generally, belong to the “mirrors for princes” genre. more significantly, the psah contain theories and concepts that are aristotelian, in particular the discussion of causality in k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt and the link (ittiṣāl) between the macrocosm and the microcosm: the first cause is the cause for the sake of which the thing comes to be, and the second cause is the thing for the purpose of which the thing comes to be. an example of this is the jeweller who works a [metal] sheet into a ring. if someone asks about its element (ʿunṣuruh), the metal sheet would be the answer. if someone asks about its cause, it is 127. c. b. schmitt and d. knox, pseudo-aristoteles latinus: a guide to latin works falsely attributed to aristotle before 1500 (london: warburg institute, 1985), 4; l. thorndike, “the latin pseudo-aristotle and medieval occult science,” journal of english and germanic philology 21, no. 2 (1922): 229–58, at 231; idem, history of magic, 2:246–78; s. j. williams, “defining the corpus aristotelicum: scholastic awareness of aristotelian spuria in the high middle ages,” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 58 (1995): 29–51. 128. m. manzalaoui, “the pseudo-aristotelian ‘kitāb sirr al-asrār’: facts and problems,” oriens 23/24 (1974): 147–257, at 158–59; thorndike, history of magic, 2:249, 257–58, 268–78; pseudo-aristotle, al-uṣūl al-yūnāniyya li-l-naẓariyyāt al-siyāsiyya fī al-islām, ed. ʿa. badawī (cairo: maktabat al-nahḍa al-miṣriyya, 1954), 69. on the influence, circulation, and structure of this text, see m. grignaschi, “l’origine et les métamorphoses du sirr al-asrâr,” archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 43 (1976): 7–112; idem, “la diffusion du secretum secretorum dans l’europe occidentale,” archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 48 (1980): 7–70; idem, “remarques sur la formation et l’interprétation du sirr al-asrâr,” in pseudo-aristotle’s “the secret of secrets”: sources and influences, ed. w. f. ryan and c. b. schmitt, 3–33 (london: warburg institute, 1982); s. j. williams, “the early circulation of the pseudo-aristotelian ‘secret of secrets’ in the west,” in le scienze alla corte di federico ii, ed. m. r. mcvaugh and v. pasche, 127–44 (turnhout: brepols and florence: sismel, 1994); k. van bladel, “the iranian characteristics and forged greek attributions in the arabic sirr al-asrar (secret of secrets),” mélanges de l’université saint-joseph 57 (2004): 151–72; m. maróth, “the correspondence between aristotle and alexander the great: an anonymous greek novel in letters in arabic translation,” acta antiqua 45 (2001): 231–315; d. gutas, “review article: on greco-arabic epistolary ‘novels,’” middle eastern literature 12 (2009): 59–70; w. f. ryan and m. taube, the secret of secrets: the east slavic version (london: warburg institute, 2020). 129. schmitt and knox, pseudo-aristoteles latinus, v–vi. a translation of a pseudo-aristotelian physiognomy is attributed to ḥunayn b. isḥāq. the greek original is dated to about 300 bce, and it was translated into latin in the thirteenth century by bartholomaeus de messana; see s. vogt, aristoteles: opuscula vi: physiognomonica (berlin: akademie verlag, 1999), 197; r. forester, scriptores physiognomonici, graeci et latini, vol. 1 (leipzig: b. g. teubner, 1893), vii–cxcii, 4–91. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 46 the smithing of the jeweller. if it is asked “for what purpose is it created?”, for wearing it is said. altogether, the principles in this are four-fold: the cause (ʿilla), the instrument (sabab), the action, and the agent. [. . .] he said: the action indicates the agent; the action is connected to the agent in a manifest manner, unhidden, since there is no action without the agent, and every agent indicates the action. to the agent is the action of motion; motion produces heat.130 according to the ʿilal, the genesis of the cosmos was a result of the primordial principles of action, motion, heat, and cold. action resulted from motion producing heat, from which emerged the masculine principle, whereas stillness generated coldness, the feminine principle; “the four elements came together in couples (muqtarina), and these were the mother elements.”131 astral causality and its aristotelian elements are not unique to the psah. although k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt does not divulge its sources, by the ninth century these ideas had permeated cosmological discussions via influential works that formulated an astrologized ontology and cosmogony based on the theories of generation and corruption and the nature of the heavens found in aristotelian works. i have argued elsewhere that applying aristotelian causality to explain astral influences, in the explicit context of astrology in theory and practice, and the relationship between the world above and the world below is a deeply influential development in medieval islam, primarily systematized by the most prominent astrologer abū maʿshar al-balkhī and his teacher al-kindī. adopting the aristotelian epistemological stance, abū maʿshar perceived the heavenly bodies as causes of generation and corruption, and it was precisely because of their causal role that resemblances occurred in nature. in physics, aristotle explains that the study of nature is an inquiry into causes from their effects. by adopting this basis for astrological investigation, abū maʿshar famously established astrology as a part of natural philosophy in the aristotelian sense and as a science that reveals causes through the observation of effects. in his kitāb al-madkhal al-kabīr ilā ʿilm aḥkām al-nujūm (great introduction to astrology), the planets themselves are given a generative role as agents and efficient causes, responsible for the perpetual link between the celestial world and the sublunary world below. abū maʿshar writes that “the terrestrial world is connected to the celestial world and its motions by necessity. therefore, due to the power of the celestial world and the celestial motions, terrestrial things, generated and corruptible, are affected.” they are affected specifically by the heat produced by the motions of the celestial bodies, which causes transformation—including corruption—of generated things. in on generation and corruption, aristotle attributes the coming to be and passing away of things to the circular motions of the heavens. in meteorology, he also explains that elementary transformations take place because the celestial bodies emit heat that affects the sublunary world. according to abū maʿshar, the celestial bodies cause transformations 130. arabe 2577, fols. 2r–3r. 131. ibid., fol. 3r. 47 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 48 in the sublunary world (tataghayyar, ḥadath istiḥālāt), which consequently experiences generation and corruption (sarā fīhā al-kawn wa-l-fasād).132 before abū maʿshar, al-kindī also assigned the heavenly bodies a generative and causal role in two treatises, al-ibāna ʿan al-ʿilla al-fāʿila al-qarība li-l-kawn wa-l-fasād (on the explanation of the proximate cause of generation and corruption) and al-ibāna ʿan sujūd al-jurm al-aqṣā (on the explanation of the bowing of the outermost body). the notion of astral causation can be found in the latter work, which is addressed to the son of the caliph al-muʿtaṣim as a response to the question regarding the meaning of the quranic verse that states that the stars and the trees bow down. the philosopher explains that the act of prostration described in the verse is not literal but rather indicates the stars’ casting of influence to the earth and being causes of the generation of all terrestrial things. therefore, the sacred order of the stars and the planets is not an arbitrary arrangement of signs but an order of causes. in al-ibāna ʿan al-ʿilla, al-kindī explains that the planets and their motions are the origin of everything that exists in the sublunary world.133 before both al-kindī and abū maʿshar, however, a prolific commentator on aristotle, alexander of aphrodisias, who was active in the late second and early third century, also attributed to the motions of the celestial spheres a role in causing and maintaining the terrestrial-celestial link. alexander begins his fī mabādiʾ al-kull bi-ḥasab raʾī aristūtālīs (the principles of the whole according to the opinion of aristotle) by establishing his aristotelian epistemological stance: there are instruments (sabab) and causes (ʿilla), and the earliest cosmogonical simple principles are the causes that account for the behavior of generated things and their motions by internal and external principles.134 in k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt, a similar distinction is made: the link (ittiṣāl) between the macrocosm and the macrocosm “stems from an instrument and a cause. the cause is twofold and the instrument is singular. the instrument of the thing is that from which it originates. the cause is twofold: the cause of the thing before it comes to be and the cause of the thing after it comes to be.”135 alexander emphasizes that the motions of the higher spheres are linked (muttaṣila) to the divine bodies (including the celestial bodies) and the sublunary world.136 this necessitates the existence of a hypostatic chain, at the top of which is the prime mover to whom the intellect aspires, mobilized by a perfect, circular, pneumatic motion toward perfection for the sake of the good.137 the intellect imparts motion to the sphere of the fixed stars, which in turn imparts motion to the planets, which, with their 132. l. saif, the arabic influences on early modern occult philosophy (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2015), passim. 133. saif, arabic influences, 17. 134. alexander of aphrodisias, on the cosmos: arabic text with english translation, introduction, and commentary, ed. and trans. c. genequand (leiden: brill, 2001), 42. 135. arabe 2577, fols. 2r–3r. 136. alexander of aphrodisias, on the cosmos, 66, 112–14. 137. ibid., 68, 96–98. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 48 varying movements, cause the potential for and actualization of transformation, including generation and corruption.138 a statement in k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt recalls a particularly alexandrian doctrine: all things are both active (fāʿil) and passive (munfaʿil), for all things begin as a result of an agent (fāʿil); the agent signifies the action, and the action signifies the thing that is acted upon (mafʿūl). the thing acted upon indicates its agent; therefore, the thing that is acted upon indicates how it is ‘enacted upon’ in explaining the action and the agent.139 in fī al-mabādiʾ, alexander notes that “among the things in it [the world] there are those that are agents only (fāʿil); some are passive (munfaʾil) only; and some are both agent and passive. this is how some are ready to connect and remain with one another (yatahayyaʾ an yattaṣil baʿḍuhā bi-baʿd wa-yalzam baʿḍuhā baʿḍ).”140 this is a departure from aristotle, for whom everything that moves is moved by something else and, as charles genequand explains, the inner nature of the elements cannot be the efficient cause of their motion.141 it is important to recognize, however, that this astrologization of generation and corruption that emerges from late aristotelian traditions is characterized by the assimilation of (neo-)platonic doctrines, from the discussion of hypostatic structures to the application of the psychological theory of de anima to the ensouled stars and planets.142 this crucial aspect is discussed below in the context of the animated and animating principles of the cosmos, especially the psah’s rūḥāniyyāt. for now, it is sufficient to stress the philosophical framework of psah, which is reliant on aristotelian notions of causality. the model of a conversation between aristotle and alexander, the subject matter, and the philosophical rationale for the connection between the macrocosm and the microcosm place the psah firmly within the pseudo-aristotelian genre. the magical and theurgic elements are supported by the astrologization of aristotelian causality via the reconciliation of aristotle and hermes, whose works are presented as the source of the former’s knowledge. the content is thus in this sense “hermetic,” but this does not imply that the psah embody a transhistorical body of fixed dogma or a set of doctrines uniting texts and thinkers in various languages across time and space under the anachronistic rubric of hermeticism/ hermetism, as bladel insists in the arabic hermes.143 nonetheless, the psah do constitute a substantial body of texts with a thematic and mythic consistency that lends itself to the construction of a medieval arabic “hermeticism” constructed by medieval agents as filling the pages of “hermetic books” (al-kutub al-hirmisiyya). this level of coherence invited 138. ibid., 86, 112, 120. 139. arabe 2577, fol. 2v. 140. alexander of aphrodisias, on the cosmos, 114 (my translation, for the sake of accuracy). 141. ibid., 7, 62–64. 142. ibid., 6. 143. a.d. nock, “a new edition of the hermetic writings,” journal of egyptian archaeology 11, no. 3/4 (1925): 126–37, at 177; van bladel, arabic hermes, 17–22. 49 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 50 many medieval and early modern thinkers to associate the psah with a single religious group—namely, the sabians, as discussed below. most scholarship touching on the texts of the psah identifies them as “technical hermetica,” since they contain magical, astrological, and alchemical instructions, to distinguish them from “philosophical hermetism” as encapsulated in the corpus hermeticum, which is a product of roman egyptian society that synthesized greek and egyptian views.144 some go as far as to describe the “technical hermetica” as “religious” in contrast to the corpus hermeticum, which is seen as the “philosophical” counterpart largely on the basis of the assessment by the dominican friar andre-jean festugière, who dissociated the latter from any “religious” doctrine.145 this dyadic approach echoes the misleading yet tenacious binary imposed on “hermetic” magic, which is divided into natural and ceremonial magic.146 it lies behind pingree’s search for the sources of the “neoplatonic justifications” found in the ghāyat al-ḥakīm’s description of the pagan practice of statue vivification. he admits to not understanding how “neutral” non-corporeal celestial forces (rūḥāniyyāt) were conceived in opposition to the “divine and demonic beings” that are represented in ancient amulets. as a result, he proposes that the practice originated in sabian-ḥarrānian anxieties about their reputation as “practitioners of the black arts” who— according to pingree—produced a large body of pseudo-hermetic and pseudo-aristotelian texts, although the evidence for this link is lacking. he suggests that “unpublished hermetic texts such as the kitāb al-isṭimākhīs” could shed light on the relationship between the sabians-harranians and the psah.147 for pingree, the psah are thus “scientific texts more characteristic of sabians,”148 which neutralized “the nauseous details of psychic magic” in ways that would leave someone like plato “horrified to learn what ends his philosophy has been made to serve.”149 it is important to recognize that the psah are different from the greek hermetica. the psah belong to a large group of texts attributed to hermes that “are later works originally composed in arabic. yet even where the texts themselves are not of ancient origin, the idea of hermes is.”150 the corpus hermeticum usually refers to the philosophical corpus that was celebrated in the fifteenth century and translated by marsilio ficino (1433–99) into latin. many “technical” greek hermetica, such as iatromathematica and to asclepius on the plants of the seven planets, remain unstudied. as christian h. bull has pointed out, the distinction between a technical and a philosophical corpus is false even from the point 144. van bladel, arabic hermes, 7; g. fowden, the egyptian hermes: a historical approach to the late pagan mind (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1993 [first ed. 1986]), 69–74. 145. p. lucentini and v. p. compagni, “hermetic literature i: antiquity,” in dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism, ed. w. hanegraaff, 517–29 (leiden: brill, 2005), 487–88, 499; festugière, la révélation d’hermès trismégiste, 1:81–87; 2:50. 146. a. sannino, “from hermetic magic to the magic of marvels,” in the routledge history of medieval magic, ed. s. page and c. rider, 153–68 (london: routledge, 2019), 154. 147. pingree, “ṣābians of ḥarrān,” 15. 148. ibid., 30. 149. ibid., 33. 150. van bladel, arabic hermes, 10. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 50 of view of the traditional egyptian traditions from which the greek hermetica emerged.151 the psah’s emphasis on technical instructions should not distract from its philosophical and cosmological elements, laid out in k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. especially given the psah’s consistent mythology and cosmological framework, which render them even more unique; the psah are the most reliable sources for the construction of the arabic hermes. it is tempting to surmise that the psah were codified texts belonging to a certain group. historically, as noted above, they have been associated with the sabians. for example, moses maimonides (1138–1204) writes in dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn that kitāb al-isṭimākhīs is commonly “attributed to aristotle, [but] he is free of this (ḥāshāh) [. . .] and another one is attributed to aristotle [. . .] those that i mention to you are all scriptures (asfār) of the idol worshippers that were made available in the arabic tongue.”152 for him, al-isṭimākhīs belongs to the sabians, who believe that there is no god and that only the planets deserve reverence.153 as mentioned earlier, ibn taymiyya knew the dhakhīra and considered it a book of the sabians, among whom he counted aristotle.154 many scholars have tackled the question of the identity of the sabians, and this is not the place to recount their arguments; suffice it to say that the term emerged from a heresiographical and polemical discourse and has been used to refer to various groups that revered and practiced complex devotions to the planets and the stars.155 nevertheless, historical sources contain many references alluding to practices similar to those described in the psah, particularly within discussions of the sabians, and it is worth mentioning some of these. al-shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), in his kitāb al-milal wa-lniḥal (the book of sects and creeds), notes that according to the sabian madhhab (set of 151. c. h. bull, the tradition of hermes trismegistus: the egyptian priestly figure as a teacher of hellenized wisdom (leiden: brill, 2018), 280, 370–71; cottrell is critical of van bladel’s exclusion of the alexandrian hermetica represented by the corpus hermeticum, which, she argues, is cited in medical works and in particular by hippocrates and galen, whose syriac and arabic translations circulated already in the ninth century; e. cottrell, “l’hermès arabe de kevin van bladel et la question du rôle de la literature sassanide dans la presence d’écrits hermètiques et astrologiques en langue arabe,” bibliotheca orientalis 72 (2015): 336–401. 152. moses maimonides, dalāʾil al-ḥāʾirīn, ed. ḥ. atāy (cairo: maktabat al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, n.d.), 588. 153. ibid., 588. 154. ibn taymiyya, darʾ taʿāruḍ, 1:312. 155. the sabians are mentioned three times in the quran, at 2:26, 5:69, and 22:17. the first mention (q 2:26) reads: “indeed, those who believed and those who were jews or christians or sabians—those who believed in god and the last day and did righteousness—will have their reward with their lord, and no fear will there be concerning them, nor will they grieve.” this reference has puzzled historians, and there are no sources contemporary to the quran that mention the sabians, so it is not possible to be certain of their identity. for a good summary of research on the sabians from historical and etymological perspectives, see t. green, city of the moon god: religious traditions of harran (leiden: brill, 1992), 3–6, 101–8; f. de blois, “sabians,” in encyclopaedia of the qurʾān, ed. j. dammen mcauliffe (leiden: brill, online), http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18753922_q3_eqsim_00362. for a detailed critique of “uncontrolled historical speculation” about the harranians’ being sabians, see van bladel, arabic hermes, 65–82. for an example of such outdated speculation, see a. e. affifi, “the influence of hermetic literature on moslem thought,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 13, no. 4 (1951): 840–55, at 842–43; m. noble, “sabian astral magic as soteriology in fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī’s al-sirr al-maktum,” in islamicate occult sciences in theory and practice, ed. l. saif, f. leoni, m. melvin-koushki, and f. yahya, 207–29 (leiden: brill, 2020). 51 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 52 convictions) the rūḥāniyyāt, who receive their power from god, are the governors of all affairs in the world below.156 indeed, he calls the sabians “the people of the rūḥāniyyāt” (aṣḥāb al-rūḥāniyyāt).157 according to al-shahrastānī, the sabians were experts in the construction of planetary temples, divination, astrology, and incantations; they wrote books on rings (khawātīm), occult properties (khawāṣṣ), and images (ṣuwar).158 so far, the description does not warrant jumping to the attractive conclusion that al-shahrastānī is referring to the group that produced the psah. however, he makes a striking statement that does recall k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt in the first part called al-ustuwaṭṭās : “they say the celestials are the fathers and the elements are the mothers.”159 in this part of k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt, as described earlier, the genesis of the cosmos is said to have resulted from the primordial principles of action, motion, heat, and cold, with motion and heat giving rise to the masculine principle and stillness and coldness giving rise to the feminine one. here, too, there is an explicit reference to procreation: “the four elements came together in couples (muqtarina), and these were the mother elements.”160 al-masʿūdī (d. 345/956), in his murūj al-dhahab (meadows of gold), gives a similar description of the practices of the sabians and their belief in the rūḥāniyyāt. however, a fascinating passage describes a belief concerning the periods of zodiacal sovereignty (discussed in detail below) that, as far as i am aware, is found only in al-ustuwaṭṭās. according to al-masʿūdī, a group of people conceived of the time leading up to the end of the world in the following way: the sovereignty of that time will be for virgo, which is 7,000 years [long], and this is the age of the human world, with jupiter aiding virgo in governance [. . .] they claimed that the sovereignty of the sign of aries is 12,000 years; the sovereignty of taurus is 11,000 years; the sovereignty of gemini is 10,000 years; the sovereignty of cancer is 9,000 years; the sovereignty of leo is 8,000 years; the sovereignty of virgo is 7,000 years; the sovereignty of libra is 6,000 years; the sovereignty of scorpio is 5,000 years; the sovereignty of sagittarius is 4,000 years; the sovereignty of capricorn is 3,000 years; the sovereignty of aquarius is 2,000 years; and the sovereignty of pisces is 1,000 years. the total is 78,000 years.161 this view is identical to the description of the periods of zodiacal sovereignty in al ustuwaṭṭās, discussed below.162 the overlap is probably an indication of al-shahrastānī’s and al-masʿūdī’s knowledge of the psah, adopting the common narratives about their connection to the beliefs and identity of the sabians. 156. al-shahrastānī, al-milal wa-l-niḥal, ed. m. b. f. badrān, 2 vols. (cairo: maktabat al-anjilū al-miṣriyya, n.d.), 2:8. 157. ibid., 2:7. 158. ibid., 2:8, 30–31, 52–53, 61. 159. ibid., 2:8. 160. arabe 2577, fol. 3r. 161. al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab, ed. k. ḥ. marʿī, 4 vols. (beirut: al-maktaba al-ʿaṣriyya, 2005), 2:170. 162. arabe 2577, fol. 7r–v. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 52 none of the psah texts refer to themselves as sabian or ḥarrānian. however, that they were viewed related is exhibited in ms leiden, leiden university, or. 1235. it includes a collection of treatises that share the themes of the psah, such as a treatise on suffumigation and planetary rings attributed to ṭamṭam al-hindī which cites aristotle in multiple places. it also contains parts of both al-ustuwaṭṭās and al-isṭimāṭīs. in addition, one finds a treatise entitled “the secrets of the sabians on knowing the hours of transformations (al-qalb)” which describes magical operations such as for making planetary rings and talismanic engravings. the title of the text is not a reliable indication of a “sabian” identification or origin, as it could have been given by the work’s compiler or scribe on the basis of a perceived association. there is no reference to sabians in the text itself. calling the psah sabian would thus be misleading. the most defining feature of the psah remains the texts’ apocryphal attribution to aristotle and hermes, which is used to justify the amalgamation of aristotelian causality and hylomorphism with perso-arabo-hermetic astrological and magical materials. the nature of the sabian religion is understandably very intriguing, but we must rein in our enthusiasm, which might lead us to see ḥarrān and the sabians where they are not present. for example, in some manuscripts of al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya, the astral sciences are said to be the special knowledge of the people of ḥarrān (ahl al-ḥarrān);163 in other manuscripts, they are associated with the people of india (ahl al-hind).164 the rush to identify sabian harranian rituals led hellmut ritter to misread the month of ḥuzayrān as ḥarrān in the ghāyat al-ḥakīm’s description of a sabian rite of passage (imtīḥān al-ghilmān) even though the manuscripts show the name of the month consistently, with the result that he and others who viewed the sabian rituals described in the ghāya as ḥarrānian.165 iv. the astrological cosmogony of the psah and its zoroastrian resonances the practical astrology of the psah, which includes rules of practice (exaltations, houses, lunar mansions, aspects, etc.), is, for the most part, greek. other sources have been noted; for example, burnett and pingree highlight indo-persian influences on the psah’s conception of the lunar mansions and show that it reflects the nakṣatrāṇi of classical indian astrology.166 however, astral/astrological theories in the psah underlie the structuring 163. arabe 2580, fol. 1v. 164. arabe 2578, fol 1v. 165. al-qurṭubī, picatrix, ed. ritter, 226. in preparing an english translation of the ghāya, i consulted twentyfour manuscripts, all of which mention ḥuzayrān, not ḥarrān, in this section. see, for example, ms istanbul, süleymaniye, hamidiye 852, fol. 99v; ms dublin, chester beatty, ar. 3313, fol. 151v. the mistake is reproduced in g. bing’s foreword to the german translation (p. i), in the introduction by ritter and plessner (pp. 22, 31–32), and in the translation itself (p. 238): al-qurṭubī, picatrix, ed. ritter and plessner; also reproduced in green, city of the moon god, 187, 213. 166. c. burnett, “arabic, greek, and latin works on astrological magic attributed to aristotle,” in pseudoaristotle in the middle ages: the theology and other texts, ed. j. kraye, w. ryan, and c. schmitt, 84–96 (london: warburg institute, 1986), 84–96, 87; a. panaino, “between astral cosmology and astrology: the mazdean cycle of 12,000 years and the final renovation of the world,” in the zoroastrian flame: exploring religion, history and tradition, ed. a. williams, s. stuart, and a. hintze, 113–33 (london: bloomsbury, 2016), 121–22. 53 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 54 of the cosmos, its primordial creation activity, and the volitional causality that governs its affairs. it is in this type of astrological cosmogeny that we find zoroastrian influences. this is not surprising when we consider the time that i have proposed for the production of these texts: the ninth century. many scholars have clarified the zoroastrian/middle persian link with “pseudo-hermetic” works, especially in the minds of muslim intellectuals.167 my comparison between the doctrines of the psah and zoroastrianism is not meant to imply that the former represent a variety of zoroastrianism. rather, as stressed earlier, i am interested in the historical imaginary that encompasses and assimilates variegated doctrines and ideas (dualism, creation myths, demiurges, spirits, etc.) into narratives that feed societal, intellectual, and political aspirations by linking the past to the present.168 it is not unusual to encounter local traditions and belief systems in the ninth century that are reminiscent of zoroastrianism but do not correspond to it. influential ideas from zoroastrianism were absorbed into a wider historical imaginary that also encompassed ideas originating with other local traditions, thus creating entangled identities.169 it is the astrological cosmogony of the psah that carries the most fascinating elements of these texts: 1. the crucial role of cosmogenic and cosmological cycles 2. the story of the creation of humans by the demiurge hādūs 3. the seven sage-prophets 4. the system of volitional causality whose agents are the rūḥāniyyāt, “spiritual entities” 5. magical practice all five elements are found in the psah, as well as in the summary text, al-madīṭīs. 1. cosmological cycles in the first part of k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt entitled al-ustuwaṭṭās aristotle introduces an unusual zodiacal cycle: “he [god] assigned to each sign a period of sovereignty, and this is so because for every beginning there is a conclusion, and the beginning of a thing denotes its conclusion and its end.”170 he then proceeds to list these periods of sovereignty, which he uncovered through his efforts to comprehend the “hidden, protected secrets” (istakhrajtuhu min al-asrār al-mughayyaba al-maknūna): aries: 12,000 years; taurus: 11,000 years; gemini: 10,000 years; cancer: 9,000 years; leo: 8,000 years; virgo: 7,000 years; libra 6,000 years; scorpio: 5,000 years; sagittarius: 4,000 years; capricorn: 3,000 years; 167. sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums, 4:35–36; van bladel, arabic hermes, passim. 168. on the question of what makes a doctrine or a religion zoroastrian, see p. crone, the nativist prophets of early islamic iran: rural revolt and local zoroastrianism (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2012), 318–20. 169. ibid., 23–27. 170. arabe 2577, fol. 7r. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 54 aquarius: 2,000 years; pisces: 1,000 years. these periods add up to a cycle of 78,000 years, whose end marks “the conclusion of the macrocosm and the dissolution of its parts.”171 furthermore, these periods of zodiacal sovereignty mark stages in the generation of earth’s creatures. citing hermes’s al-kitāb al-makhzūn, aristotle explains that during the reigns of aries, taurus, and gemini—that is, during the first 33,000 years—moving animals did not exist, nor was there a rūḥāniyya population on earth (ʿimāra rūḥāniyya). instead, the stars were working their influences in the belly of the earth, preparing for the emergence of plants. when the sovereignty of cancer began, the rūḥāniyyāt of the stars gained strength in their courses and sustenance drew itself up, as did the sphere, rounded in its course. [when] the signs became strong in their qualities, the rūḥāniyya of life poured down and caused to emerge the manifest action (al-ẓāhir) from the invisible and hidden (al-khafiyy al-bāṭin) action. god, powerful and exalted (ʿazza wa-jall), created (kawwana) aquatic beings and the insects of the earth during the entirety of cancer’s cycle.172 during leo’s sovereignty, four-legged animals multiplied. under virgo, god created from virgo’s rūḥāniyya the first man and the first woman, admānūs and ḥaywānus.173 during the sovereignty of libra, birds were created. al-madīṭīs recounts the same story, adding that at the end of this cosmic cycle, the universe will return to “its first state of being” (ilā kawnihi al-awwal).174 this description of a 78,000-year cosmic cycle (in other words, the age of the universe) is unique to the psah. the persian system of the fardār, which was known in hebrew, arabic, and latin, refers to a sequence of seventy-five-year periods. in the ninth century, abū maʿshar expanded the range and added the “big fardār,” a period of seventy-eight years ruled successively by the twelve signs with the same order and pattern of decreasing reigns as we find in alustuwaṭṭās. he also outlined a “middle fardār,” a cycle of 675 years containing nine individual fardārs of seventy-five years each, and a “small fardār,” a period of seventy-five years divided among the seven planets and the lunar nodes known as the head and tail of the dragon in the order of their exaltation.175 the astrologer al-bīrūnī, in his qānūn al-masʿūdī (the canon of al-masʿūdī), also recognized these periods. as pingree has shown in his reconstruction of abū maʿshar’s lost kitāb al-ulūf, the fardār periods are elements of “a complex system of cycles which determine the dominant planetary or zodiacal influences at any particular point in time”—a system that islamic astrology inherited from sasanian persia.176 171. ibid., fol. 7r–v. 172. ibid., fols. 7v–8r. 173. ibid., fol. 8r. 174. marsh 556, fol. 10v. 175. abraham ibn ezra, the book of the world, ed. and trans. s. sela (leiden: brill, 2010), 21–22 and n. 115. 176. pingree, thousands of abū maʿshar, 15–32. godefroid de callataÿ and i discuss the cycles in the psah and their medieval reception in greater detail in “astrological and prophetical cycles in the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica and other islamic esoterica,” in bilan et perspectives des études sur les encyclopédies médiévales, 55 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 56 moreover, the psah’s 78,000-year cycle is reminiscent of the zoroastrian cosmic cycle of 12,000 years, divided into twelve equal periods of zodiacal sovereignty as discussed in the bundahishn. the cosmic duel between ohrmazd and ahreman took place during this cycle.177 the earliest phase of creation covered the first 3,000 years of the mēnōg state, denoting the realm of mental existence, which is the realm of “spirit.”178 this was followed by another 3,000 years, in which ahreman was sent into a dormant state by ohrmazd by means of a prayer known as ahunwar. rising from his sleep, ahreman attacked creation. this event marked the beginning of the 6,000-year period of the gētı̄g realm, which is the “living” and “physical” dimension of existence. it was in this phase that the astral bodies were set in motion.179 the first 3,000 years of the gētı̄g concluded with the revelation of the mazdean faith to zoroaster, whereas the final period of 3,000 years will witness, at the end of each millennium, the birth of one of the three sons of zoroaster. they will announce the liberation from the darkness, and with the birth of the third son—the revitalizer par excellence, the sōshāns—the destruction of ahreman will take place. the stars were set in motion after ahreman’s invasion.180 panaino notes of the 12,000 year-cycle that “the elaboration of this doctrine represents one of the most original and radical innovations developed by the iranian speculative mind in the course of history.”181 thus, in the bundahishn we have a period of primordial cosmic activity divided into 12,000 years of zodiacal sovereignty, but these periods of sovereignty differ from the psah’s periods of zodiacal sovereignty in their fixed lengths of 1,000 years per sign. since the psah were composed in a place of intense ideological exchange with recently codified zoroastrian texts, we can discern the fusion of two originally persian ideas in them— abū maʿshar’s modification of the fardār into a period of seventy-eight years ruled by twelve signs in the now familiar descending order, and the cycle of 12,000 years with each millennium under the protection of a particular zodiacal sign. the adoption of these ideas did not necessarily happen consciously; it may have been the result of these influential astrological ideas coalescing and reforming in accordance with the cultural and intellectual context. by their nature, these ideas lend themselves to reinvention since, as panaino remarks, “these patterns are not strictly astrological, being purely symbolical and based on a simple proportional comparison, in which a single month corresponds to 1,000 years.”182 ed. g. de callataÿ, m. cavagna, b. van den abeele, and f. van haeperen (louvain la neuve: université catholique de louvain, publications de l’institut d’études médiévales, forthcoming). see also e. kennedy, “ramifications of the world-year concept in islamic astrology,” in proceedings of the tenth international congress of the history of science, 23–43 (paris: hermann, 1962), 26–30; g. de callataÿ, annus platonicus: a study of world cycles in greek, latin and arabic sources (louvain: peeters, 1996). 177. a. panaino, “cosmologies and astrology,” in stausberg, vevaina, and tessmann, wiley blackwell companion to zoroastrianism, 235–58, at 238. 178. ibid., 236; the bundahišn: the zoroastrian book of creation; a new translation, trans. d. agostini and s. thrope (new york: oxford university press, 2020), 3–5, 40–42, 18–26 (the celestial world of the bundahishn). 179. panaino, “cosmologies and astrology,” 236, 239. 180. ibid., 237–38, 240; panaino, “between astral cosmology and astrology,” 114–15; bundahišn, 40–50. 181. panaino, “between astral cosmology and astrology,” 116. 182. ibid., 117. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 56 classical astrology was not yet practiced in the second millennium bce; it entered iran in parthian times and became current, with some adaptations, in the sasanian period.183 edward kennedy and pingree conclude that astrologers of the islamic era such as māshāʾallāh “superposed the conjunction astrology upon a zoroastrian millennial cosmology in which the duration of the universe is to be 12,000 years.”184 abū maʿshar’s application of the fardār system and its cosmic amplification in the psah are cases of the astrologization trend seen in the bundahishn’s 12,000 cycles. 2. adam, eve, and the demiurge more signs of the aforementioned ideological convergence can be seen in the story of the creation of admānūs (adam) and ḥaywānus (eve) under the rule of virgo (7,000-yearlong cycle) and of the demiurge who creates them. according to this story, when all the planets were in their exaltations, “they lifted their resolve (himma) to the highest sphere, which is their governor, asking for a corporeal creation (khilqa jismāniyya) into which their rūḥāniyyāt may pour, so they may direct it. as a result of this resolve, a pure, strong, angelic spirit was generated (fa-tawallada min tilk al-himma rūḥan qawiyyan malakan naqiyyan), called hādūs.”185 hādūs, the story goes, created the first man from hundreds of celestial rūḥāniyyāt, giving him the form of the macrocosm. at first, admānūs was “like animals, not cognizant of anything (lā yaʿqil shayʾ),” but then hādūs lifted admānūs’s resolve to the creator, exalted and high (al-bāriʾ, jalla wa-ʿalā) and connected it to the stars and planets because of their innate spirits (arwāḥ) of intellect (ʿaql), logic (manṭiq), and thought (fikr). in the moment in which the first man was created, the planets were occupying their exaltations and pouring into him their benefic influences, except for saturn, which was in the exaltation of mars and thus handed down the major misfortune (al-naḥs al-kabīr) that could be suffering in general or specifically death.186 the concept of the demiurge was available through plato’s timaeus, which had been translated by ibn al-biṭrīq and possibly revised and translated again by ḥunayn b. isḥāq.187 according to this work, the universe is created and maintained by a purposeful, and beneficent agency. it is the handiwork of a divine craftsman, the demiurge, who bestows 183. panaino, “cosmologies and astrology,” 241, 245. 184. e. kennedy and d. pingree, the astrological history of māshāʾallāh (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1971), vii. see also e. g. raffaelli, “astrology and religion in the zoroastrian pahlavi texts,” journal asiatique 305, no. 2 (2017): 171–90, at 180. 185. arabe 2577, fol. 8v. 186. ibid., fol. 8bis r. 187. on the reception of plato in the arabic-speaking world, see f. rosenthal, “on the knowledge of plato’s philosophy in the islamic world,” islamic culture 14 (1940): 387–422; r. walzer, “platonismus in der islamischen philosophie (arabische übersetzung aus dem griechischen),” in antike und orient im mittelalter: miscellanea mediaevalia 1, 179–95 (berlin: de gruyter, 1962); d. gutas, “platon: tradition arabe,” in dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vol. 5, ed. r. goulet, 845–63 (paris: cnrs, 2012); r. arnzen, “plato’s timaeus in the arabic tradition: legend—testimonies—fragments,” in il timeo: esegesi greche, arabe, latine, ed. f. celia and a. ulacco, 181–267 (pisa: pisa university press, 2012). 57 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 58 mathematical order on primordial chaos to generate the ordered cosmos. the universe and all its parts are arranged to produce good effects. in plato’s view, this arrangement is not fortuitous but rather the outcome of the deliberate intent of the intellect (nous), represented by the craftsman who designs and constructs a world that is as excellent as its nature permits it to be.188 the demiurge here is identical to nous in plato’s philebus, too.189 however, there is nothing in the psah that evokes any recognizably platonic interpretation of the demiurge’s nature or its activity. the asclepius’s famed demiurge, by contrast, rings a bell: pouring down essence and taking matter up, drawing both round himself and to himself all things, and from himself giving all things to all. for he it is whose goodly energies extend not only through the heaven and the air, but also onto earth, right down unto the lowest depth and the abyss. and if there be an essence which the mind alone can grasp, this is his substance [. . .] but whence this [substance] doth arise, or flows forth, he, [and he] only, knows. [. . .] the reins are life, and soul, and spirit, deathlessness, and genesis.190 however, the asclepius—known in late antiquity as the perfect discourse—was translated into latin and coptic but does not seem to have been known in arabic,191 which reduces the likelihood of its being among the sources of influence on the psah. of course, the zoroastrian demiurge of the bundahishn is a possible inspiration, especially if the production of the bundahishn coincided with the composition of the psah. but the demiurge of the psah appears after the creation of the stars and the earth; therefore, he is not responsible for all creation, only for the creation of human beings. he does not appear to be responsible for the emergence of birds in the following period of sovereignty, that of libra. moreover, hādūs is neutral in comparison to the zoroastrian demiurge,192 although his intentionality is not clear, for saturn, unlike all the other planets, was not in its exaltation at the moment hādūs created admānūs, and we do not know whether it was by hādūs’s choice that misfortune and death were astrologically introduced into the life of the first humans. furthermore, zoroastrianism’s strict duality is absent from the psah. nevertheless, we still find a parallel with some zoroastrian doctrines. in the 12,000year cycle in the bundahishn, it was in the period of gētı̄g, from the seventh millennium onward and after ahreman’s irruption, that the whole celestial sphere was put in motion. with the beginning of the gumēzishn (the mixed state of good and evil in the 188. d. zeyl and b. sattler, “plato’s timaeus,” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, summer 2019 ed., ed. e. n. zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/plato-timaeus. 189. s. menn, “aristotle and plato on god as nous and as the good,” review of metaphysics 45, no. 3 (1992): 543–73, at 546. 190. g. r. s. mead, ed. and trans., thrice-greatest hermes: studies in hellenistic theosophy and gnosis, vol. 1 (london: theosophical publishing society, 1906), 269–71. 191. van bladel, arabic hermes, 133. 192. panaino, “cosmologies and astrology,” 235. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 58 material world),193 the domination of the new millennium passed to libra, the sign representing the most significant point of astrological depression, but also saturn’s place of exaltation.194 thus, kēwān (saturn), the most dangerous of the planetary demons, became the lord of that millennium and, after thirty years, decreed the death of the first man, gayōmard.195 in the psah, the sovereign of the millennium in which the first man appears is virgo, whose ruler is traditionally mercury. in the horoscope of gayōmard given in the bundahishn, all the seven planets were in their exaltation except for mercury, which was in its fall in pisces, rather than in virgo, the ruling sign of that millennium according to the psah.196 the same principle is at work in the bundahishn: one planet is off and disordered, and this explains astrologically the presence of suffering, death, and evil. in the psah, the malefic nature of saturn is responsible for confusion (ḥīra), mutability (taghyīr), and sadness (ḥuzn), whereas in the bundahishn it is saturn, the ruler of this period, that introduces death, and a malefic mercury may signal a troubled existence.197 as for ḥaywānūs, she was created to distract admānūs from his fascination with hādūs. according to the story, admānūs was hopelessly fixated on the mighty hādūs, finding solace in the latter’s presence. the demiurge then decided to strike admānūs with his hand between the shoulders, “grabbing from him” something spiritual and something corporeal. giving some of his own power to strengthen the rūḥāniyya of resolve (al-himma), he created ḥaywānūs as the embodiment of the feminine principle (fa-khalaqa minhu ḥaywānūs bi-l-unūtha). this caused admānūs to pay attention to her and find solace in her, and they thus “came together through masculinity and femininity, as a result of which she gave birth to the human race.”198 it is difficult, at this stage, to identify the origins of this fascinating narrative despite the shallow similarities with the story of adam and eve. from our description thus far, the similarity between admānūs and gayōmard lies in their monogenesis and the astrological background of their birth; in addition, as yishai kiel observes: the convergence of adam and gayōmard as a first man figure is found, in fact, already in central manichaean works written in iranian languages from the third century onwards. rather than identifying adam and eve with mašī and mašyānī (the first human couple and the descendants of gayōmard), mani identifies gayōmard (manichaean middle persian, gēhmurd) with adam and, leaving out mašī, he identifies mašyānī (manichaean middle persian, murdiyānag) with eve. the use of zoroastrian mythology in central manichaean works reflects the attempt on the part of mani and his followers 193. bundahišn, 5, 7, 14. 194. ibid., 41. 195. panaino, “cosmologies and astrology,” 240; bundahišn, 49. 196. bundahišn, 35–39. 197. arabe 2577, fols. 6v, 8v, 9v, 13v; a. panaino, “saturn, the lord of the seventh millennium,” east and west 46, nos. 3–4 (1996): 235–50, at 238–40; raffaelli, “astrology and religion,” 180; panaino, “cosmologies and astrology,” 250–51; idem, “between astral cosmology and astrology,” 121. 198. arabe 2577, fols. 12v–13r. 59 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 60 to package the manichaean message in a manner that would be more agreeable and familiar to local adherents to zoroastrianism.199 kiel’s objective in his article was to present the talmudic story of adam and eve in light of zoroastrian and manichean doctrines. however, the similarities that he establishes concern elements that are absent from the creation myth of the psah—namely, sex with demons and atonement with abstinence. nevertheless, it is possible that such accumulative processes of doctrinal merging resulted in the admānūs-gayōmard hybrid in the psah. 3. the seven sage-prophets the celestial being hādūs not only created the first man and woman but also introduced admānūs to the sciences: he taught him logic and “the occult sciences and subtle operations” (al-ʿulūm al-khafiyya wa-l-aʿmāl al-laṭīfa).200 he also taught him about animals, their anatomy and the flow of certain rūḥāniyyāt within them, and what they are good for. then hādūs gave him knowledge of plants and minerals. aristotle mentions “the secrets of the four sciences and their causes, the secrets of medicine and its causes, and the secrets of the elements and their composition.”201 it is not clear what is meant by the four sciences; however, given the mention of the occult sciences earlier we can assume them to be magic, astrology, alchemy, and divination. this first knowledge of nature was thus revealed to human beings by the demiurge before he “ascended away” (murtafiʿ ʿanka) from admānūs and ḥaywānus, requesting that they populate the earth with their progeny.202 one of their offspring is shītālūs, who is mentioned in al-hādhīṭūs and whom hādūs “clothes” with admānūs’s “spiritual garments” (innī urīd an ulbisuhu libāsaka li-l-rūḥāniyya).203 the knowledge imparted by hādūs was not maintained by admānūs’s descendants. as a result, seven sage-prophets were possessed by the rūḥāniyyāt of their climes and planets. these rūḥāniyyāt brought religious laws and rituals (tusharriʿ al-adyān wa-lʿibādāt).204 reporting hermes’s teachings, aristotle explains that the rūḥāniyya of each planet, possesses a “sage” (ḥakīm) who emerges at the beginning of every millennium and bestows wisdom on the people of his clime. at the end of each millennium, the rūḥāniyya assigned to the sage ascends, and a new millennium with a new sage begins. the reason for this process is that the highest sphere shifts by one degree every 1,000 years. when the prophetic rūḥāniyya is generated from that sphere, it descends to the realm of the planets and generates another rūḥāniyya, which then generates twelve more, corresponding to the signs of the zodiac.205 each sage-prophet teaches the people of his clime about their 199. y. kiel, “creation by emission: reconstructing adam and eve in the babylonian talmud in light of zoroastrian and manichaean literature,” journal of jewish studies 66, no. 2 (2015): 300–301. 200. arabe 2577, fol. 13r. 201. ibid., fols. 14v–16r. 202. ibid., fol. 16v. 203. delhi arabic 1946, fol. 55v. 204. arabe 2577, fol. 54r. 205. ibid., fol. 23v. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 60 practical obligations to the rūḥāniyyāt of the planet (including sacrifices, nīranjs, poisons, talismans, rings, idols, and the names of the rūḥāniyyāt).206 human history structured by a millennial scheme, the eschatological role of immortal kings and heroes, and the intervention of deities are major elements of zoroastrian religious traditions.207 according to the mazdean tradition, the history of humankind covers six millennia from the first man, gayōmard, to the last of the three future saviors, sōshāns. the mazdean cosmic cycle has been variously said to consist of 12,000, 9,000, or even 7,000 years, but the latter number is found only in islamic texts.208 enrico raffaelli notes that the byzantine millenary chronocratoria system has saturn first and then the other planets in the order of hellenistic astronomy, each ruling over one millennium of history. such a system is missing from the bundahishn, which has the 12,000-year cycle discussed above. nevertheless, arabic sources mention some mazdean chronologies, which most likely date from the sasanian period, according to which the key part of world history lasts for 7,000 years. furthermore, a planetary chronocratoria system is attributed to the persians by al-sijzī (ca. 334–411/945–1020) in his muntakhab kitāb al-ulūf (the abridgment of the book of thousands).209 astrological sacred history is present in the ninth-century zoroastrian text dēnkard, which mentions twelve astrologers named after the twelve zodiac signs. this story is referenced in arabic sources; however, in the tenth-century historical bibliography, al-fihrist, of ibn al-nadīm, the same story is modified to feature seven astrologers corresponding to the seven planets and hermes as the representative of mercury. this association proved very influential on the arabic constructions of the legend of hermes.210 the content of the psah was the product of a setting in which these hellenistic and persian doctrines of astrological cycles were accessible and influential, leading to their incorporation into the cosmological framework of the psah. 4. rūḥāniyyāt the volitional causality of the psah’s cosmos is based on the activity of the rūḥāniyyāt, the spiritual agents who determine the qualities of natural things, including human beings, and transmit astral influences. “volitional causality” is a term i have employed elsewhere to describe the network created by these spiritual agents that penetrates the celestial and terrestrial worlds, carrying down and putting into action the will of god. these spiritual agents are “immanent principles—beings manifesting divine plenitude and profusion,” the core of the universe’s nonmechanistic efficiency.211 as we saw earlier, the creation of the first man was the result of this volitional causality via the demiurge. 206. ibid., fols. 54v–98v. 207. panaino, “cosmologies and astrology,” 260. 208. ibid., 250–51; pingree, from astral omens, 39–40. 209. raffaelli, “astrology and religion,” 180–81. 210. van bladel, “al-bīrūnī on hermetic forgery,” 59; idem, arabic hermes, 31–32. 211. saif, the arabic influences, 4, 172, 181. 61 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 62 events in the world below are inclined by the influences of the rūḥāniyyāt and tuned by the planetary and astral configurations through which their agency flows. it is not an exaggeration to say that by and large, medieval and early modern magical traditions, from ghāyat al-ḥakīm through the works of the arch-mage aḥmad al-būnī to contemporary practices and writings, have been permeated by the rūḥāniyyāt. however, as their sources were typically not identified, they were often confused with the more traditional “spirits,” and this association solidified over time. consequently, in later literature they became interchangeable with jinn or angels or were given a special status within a more expressly islamic cosmology.212 the rūḥāniyyāt permeate all the treatises that make up the psah. we are told that when god first “established the secrets of the macrocosm in the microcosm,” there was nothing physical—no bodies, substances, or accidents in the microcosm.213 what the microcosm had was “spiritual (rūḥāniyya) parts connected with one another.”214 as noted earlier, the genesis of the observable cosmos is explained as the result of the primordial principles of action, motion, heat, and cold. these produce the masculine and feminine principles, which in turn give rise to primordial elements (usṭuquṣṣāt), which are “the fundamentals (uṣūl) from which spiritual and physical things are generated.”215 thus, there are three principles of creation: corporeality, the spiritual dimension (rūḥāniyya), and their “partnership” (shirka). the corporeality of the macrocosm manifests in the variation of forms, the spiritual dimension is the decreed life (al-ḥayāt al-muqaddara), and their partnership comprises “actions influencing the bodies from the spiritual dimension” through the mediation of the seven planets.216 about the rūḥāniyyāt, we read: “the highest sphere is the governor (mudabbir) by its essence (bi-dhātihi), and from it the rūḥāniyyāt of good and evil pour downward to the bodies by the authority of the rūḥāniyya of the highest—that is, the highest sphere.” these rūḥāniyyāt flow through the planets and the microcosm, multiplying and branching as they descend.217 every event results from their actions. however, their very nature is determined by the primordial elements, the principles of heat/masculinity and cold/femininity. there are rūḥāniyyāt of planets, zodiac signs, physical attributes, cognitive faculties, animals, plants, minerals, climes, and so on. by means of the rūḥāniyyāt, the microcosm and the terrestrial world are connected to the celestial world and the macrocosm.218 a particular rūḥāniyya takes center stage in the life of the mage/sage/king. this is the personal rūḥāniyya, about which we learn in al-isṭimākhīs. aristotle advises alexander the great as follows: 212. saif, “from ġāyat al-ḥakīm.” 213. arabe 2577, fol. 1v. 214. ibid., fol. 2v. 215. ibid., fol. 3r. 216. ibid., fol. 3v. 217. ibid., fol. 4r–v. 218. ibid., fols. 7v–12v. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 62 the first thing you ought to begin with in your affairs is to look to your governing rūḥāniyya, whose parts are linked with your star and who is devoted to you and [looks] after you by directing the rulership of your star. this is the perfect nature (al-ṭibāʿ al-tāmm), mentioned by hermes in his book. for he said that if the microcosm, the human being, is perfect in nature, his heart is like the stable disk of the sun in the sky, which extends her rays over all horizons. likewise, the perfect nature takes the role of an intermediary in the heart, and so its rays pass through and come into contact with the faculties of subtle wisdom; then the rays attract these powers of wisdom until they establish them in the heart where they belong, the way the rays of the sun attract the powers of the world and raise them into the air. socrates the sage said: the perfect nature is the sun of the sage and his origin. hermes was asked: by what means does he [the sage] bring down wisdom? he said: by means of the perfect nature. he was asked: what is the key of wisdom? he said: the perfect nature. he was asked: what is the perfect nature? he said: the rūḥāniyya of the philosopher, which is connected to his star and its governor, unlocking for him the latches of wisdom and teaching him all that puzzles him, inspires him with its own awareness (ṣawābuhā) and hands him the key to its [wisdom] gates in sleep and in wakefulness.219 this advice is followed by a story similar to the narrative about the extraction of the emerald tablet in the sirr al-khalīqa. instead of the tablet, the name of the perfect nature that is revealed:220 hermes said: when i wanted to retrieve the science and methods of the causes of creation, i stumbled upon a dark crypt filled with shadows and winds. i could not see anything because of its darkness, and no lamp could be kindled because of the abundance of winds. in my sleep, a visitor came in the most beautiful form. he said: take a fire and place it inside a clear glass container, and it will show you [the way]. enter the crypt, dig in its center, and extract from it a statue with a built-in talisman. if you remove this statue, the wind will dissipate, and you shall see the crypt and it will be illuminated for you. then dig in its four corners and you shall retrieve the science of all creation, the science of nature, and the genesis of all things and their ways. i asked him: and you; who are you? he answered: your perfect nature. if you wish to see me, call me by my name: bmāghīs, fqdīsūghdās, wghdās, nūfāghādīs.221 these four, the text tells us, are the “letters of the names of this rūḥāniyya.”222 the perfect nature then teaches hermes the ritual to summon it. there is no magic without the rūḥāniyyāt, and there is no wise and victorious philosopher or king without the perfect nature.223 219. ibid., fols. 3v–4r. 220. haq, names, natures, and things, 29–30. 221. delhi arabic 1946, fols. 4v–5r. 222. ibid., fol. 4v. 223. ibid., fols. 5v–6r. 63 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 64 i have argued elsewhere that the rūḥāniyyāt are akin to or even a reformulation of the greek daemones. the neoplatonic chain of divine beings consists of god, daemons, heroes, and souls. daemons are “the common bond that connects gods with souls, and that causes their linkage to be indissoluble. they bind together a single continuity from top to bottom.” the bond between the daemons and the gods is generative, too, as the former “receive from the gods on high the causal principles of all these things” and, subjecting themselves to the goodness of the gods, cause “the formless to shine forth in forms.”224 through the influence of the arabic sources that they knew, such as ghāyat al-ḥakīm, known in europe in its latin translation, picatrix,225 european natural philosophers, occultists, and esotericists depaganized the daemons, rendering them more palatable to christian thinkers. 226 some european medieval and early modern natural philosophers and occultists encountered “daemones” in iamblichus’s de mysteriis aegyptiorum, chaldaeorum, assyriorum (on the mysteries of the egyptians, chaldeans, and assyrians), a paraphrase of which was completed by the priest, mage, and philosopher marsilio ficino in 1497. ficino also translated and published in 1497 porphyry’s de abstinentia ab esu animalium (on abstinence from killing animals). other sources include plato’s symposium on love and ficino’s commentary on it, cratylus, as well as the timaeus.227 furthermore, the perfect nature recalls the personal daemon from apuleius’s on the god of socrates (de deo socratis). when the creation of a human soul takes place, a daemon is assigned to guard and watch over it. this daemon is a genius who communicates through signs, inspiration, and dreams in order to guide human beings by inclining towards one action or event, or to forewarn them of harms.228 5. magical practice the magical instructions and practices across the psah are consistent in terms of ritual types, construction formats, and conditions of practice. all treatises in the corpus save the dhakhīra claim that these rituals and operations belong to the knowledge hādūs endowed on admānūs. the agents of efficaciousness are the rūḥāniyyāt and the occult properties of animals, plants, minerals, and stones.229 the magic of the psah includes talismans, the organic concoctions referred to as nīranjs, invocations to the rūḥāniyyāt, suffumigations, sacrifices, magic rings, poison antidotes, and magic connected to the lunar mansions. nīranj originally refers to a type of zoroastrian prayer known in middle persian as nērang, commonly, and shakily, translated as “incantation.” a nīranj identifies “the forces that shape and animate existence, whether spiritual (mēnōg) or physical (gētīg).”230 224. ibid., 187. 225. ibid., 179-81; d. pingree, “from hermes to jābir and the book of the cow,” in magic and the classical tradition, ed. c. burnett and w. f. ryan, 19–28 (london: warburg institute, 2006), 21. 226. saif, arabic influences, 189–94. 227. saif, arabic influences, 186–89. 228. ibid., 179 and n. 60. 229. delhi arabic 1946, fol. 12r. 230. r. e. payne, a state of mixture: christians, zoroastrians, and iranian political culture in late antiquity (oakland: university of california press, 2015), 86–89; m. boyce, “pāydāb and nērang: two pahlavi terms al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 64 in addition, it denotes standard formulas to be uttered on specific occasions, such as after killing noxious creatures and sneezing. the word has proven difficult to translate precisely given its use in different contexts of zoroastrian cultic practice and its islamic appropriation. other known nērangs have similar purposes as the nīranjs we encounter in the psah: they are recited to defeat sorcerers, give courage, restore a relationship between a husband and a wife, and promote healing.231 panaino discusses two nērangs, one in middle persian and the other in pazend. they contain an invocation of the most important stars and planets of the zoroastrian tradition.232 the first of the two is aimed at tying the mouths of demons, tyrants, sinners, thieves, murderers, and oppressors: “in the name of god (yazd) in the name of the brave fredon, in the name of the star tishtar (sirius), in the name of the star sadwes (fomalhaut), in the name of the star wanand (vega), in the name of the stars haftoring (ursa major).” the day of the operation is specified: “in the name of ohrmazd, the creator, on the day of spandarmad, in the month of spandarmad, i have tied down [. . .]”233 the second nērang cures fevers and other afflictions caused by demons and the evil eye “by the powers of the stars and the planets.”234 in the psah, the nīranj is not identified with zoroastrians; however, it is a staple medieval magical object, seen in the ghāya, rasāʾil ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, and al-sakkākī’s shāmil and appearing in ibn sīnā’s al-ishārat wa-l-tanbīhāt as well as in myriad unstudied manuscripts.235 it is possible that its ubiquity is the result of a direct co-optation of zoroastrian practices, but it is more realistic to view this “influence,” discussed at length in this section and encapsulated by the psah, as an indication that a cosmography and a set of practices that were once deeply iranian were naturalized by the ideological dynamism of the eastern islamic domains, reaching al-andalus and latinate europe. burnett has drawn attention to the nature of the nīranjs in the psah within the arabic tradition and the way in which they passed into the latin world through translations of some psah treatises such as al-istijlāb (from al-ustuwaṭṭās) and a portion of al-madīṭīs known as antimaquis, as well as through the translation of ghāyat al-ḥakīm, herman of further considered,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 54, no. 2 (1991): 281–29, at 284–85; m. stausberg, “monday-nights at the banaji, fridays at the aslaji: ritual efficacy and transformation in bombay city,” in zoroastrian rituals in context, ed. m. stausberg, 653–718 (leiden: brill, 2004), 666. 231. c. burnett, “nīranj: a category of magic (almost) forgotten in the latin west,” in natura, scienze e socièta medievali: studi in onore di agostino paravicini bagliani, ed. c. leonardo and f. santi, 37–66 (florence: sismel, 2008), 37–38; f. m. kotwal and p. g. kreyenbroek, “prayer,” in stausberg, vevaina, and tessmann, wiley blackwell companion to zoroastrianism, 333–43, at 341; j. j. modi, “a few parsee nîrangs (incantations or religious formulae),” in anthropological papers read before the anthropological society of bombay, part 3, 52–71 (bombay: nabu press, 1924), 55–56. 232. a. panaino, “two zoroastrian nērangs and the invocations to the stars and the planets,” in the spirit of wisdom (mēnōg ī xrad): essays in memory of ahmad tafazzoli, ed. t. daryaee and m. omidsalar, 196–218 (costa mesa, ca: mazda publishers, 2004), 196–97, 206–7. 233. ibid., 198–99. 234. ibid., 200–201. 235. ibid., 207, 209–10; soas 46347, fols. 30v–31r; noble, philosophising the occult, 22–23; l. saif, “a study of ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ’s epistle on magic, the longer version (52b),” in saif et al., islamicate occult sciences, 162–206, at 187–88. 65 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 66 carinthia’s de essentiis (which contains a reference to “data neiringet initia” attributed to aristotle), and the liber lune secundum aristotelem.236 v. conclusion the aim of this article was to present the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica as a recognizable corpus unified by cross-references among its constituent texts, the historical narrative articulated across them, and their consistent cosmological and mythic foundations. drawing on both internal and external evidence, i have argued for a ninth-century provenance. a clear and systematic introduction to this dense corpus required first disentangling the confusion about the titles and number of the constituent treatises through a careful reading of the texts. the major texts of the psah are al-isṭimākhīs, al-isṭimāṭīs, al-ustuwaṭṭās, and al-hādhīṭūs, all of which are likely to be parts of a larger work entitled k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. there also exists an abridgment of the latter work, entitled al-madīṭīs. we are aware of two additional texts that can be considered pseudo-aristotelian and hermetic but that were composed much later, modeled on the aforementioned texts; these are dhakhīrat iskandar and al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya. what makes the psah unique is their content. magical recipes and planetary rituals are woven into a creation myth according to which a demiurge, hādūs, teaches admānūs the sciences and doctrines required to cultivate his soul, intellect, and progeny and to secure prosperity for human civilization. the first sciences revealed to admānūs, given their necessity for survival, are the occult sciences, knowledge of natural properties, and medicine. however, the generations after admānūs went astray, so seven sage-prophets, embodying planetary rūḥaniyyāt, appear in successive epochs to different peoples to reestablish law and wisdom. creation and generation—and their counterparts, cosmic collapse and corruption—as well as prophecy and revelation are structured by astrological cycles. i have shown the considerable extent to which these ideas demonstrate the blending of zoroastrian notions, especially astrological ones, with greek ideas in the psah corpus. the prologues of the psah texts, examined in detail here, reveal that the entire corpus is located within a historical imaginary, which consolidates aristotle and hermes trismegistus philosophically and doctrinally. alexander the great becomes a model of a sagacity that links the understanding of the celestial world with that of the terrestrial, the divine with the mundane. the philosophisation of the occult through the hermes–aristotle–alexander triad proved profoundly influential and forms the basis for the cosmological and philosophical principles of major occult texts such as ghāyat al-ḥakīm, rasāʾil ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, al-sakkākī’s al-kitāb al-shāmil, and the works of aḥmad al-būnī. this trend highlights a closely interrelated canon of early medieval islamic occult sciences that include the jābirian corpus, the pseudo-apollonian sirr al-khalīqa, and other important but understudied works.237 236. burnett, “nīranj,” 44–66, where the liber lune secundum aristotelem is edited and translated. 237. the influence of the psah is also evident in kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya, currently being studied by jeancharles coulon, who is also preparing a critical edition. see j.-c. coulon, “the kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya and medieval islamic occult sciences,” in saif et al., islamicate occult sciences, 317–79. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 66 the influential esotericist and lettrist ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454) presents at the beginning of his shams al-āfāq (the sun of the horizon) an extensive reading list on occult sciences, which includes kitāb al-ishnūṭās (al-ustuwaṭṭās), al-isṭimākhīs, al-hādhīṭūsh (al-hādhīṭūs), and al-malāṭīs, in addition to texts attributed to kīnās, ghāyat al-ḥakīm, and the works of al-būnī, among others.238 therefore, by giving the psah its due attention, we become better equipped to understand the diversity of ideas, practices, and sources in a foundational period in the history of the islamic occult sciences, namely, the eighth to tenth centuries, which continued to echo in later periods. the deep influence of these ideas is not restricted to the realm of the occult sciences but also infiltrated the wider discourse on wisdom and the production of knowledge about the universe, its forces, and the place of human beings in the cosmos. the overall objective of this article has been to catalyze scholarly interest in the psah. a more exhaustive analysis of the available manuscripts is needed to support the essential undertaking of editing and translating the psah, which would make more widely available a hitherto unnoticed corpus arising from a community active under islamic rule with unique myths, cosmology, and practices. the striking parallels between the contents of the psah and later descriptions of sabian doctrines and rituals deserve further attention— not necessarily for the purpose of identifying who the sabians actually were but as a genealogical approach to sabian religion as a construct instrumentalized in the formation of an islamic cultural identity by means of relating and othering, as we see in al-shahrastānī’s al-milal wa-l-niḥal. the psah invites us to consider the relationship it has with ancient local sets of beliefs that relate to zoroastrianism such as the “ghulāt” and “the specific complex of syro-mesopotamian gnostic traditions [that] likely contributed to the religious milieu out of which ghulāt thought emerged;” 239 this becomes more pressing when we consider the role of the demiurge in the world of the psah. another subject for future investigation is the reception and circulation of the psah within the islamic world and beyond from the perspective of manuscript studies, intellectual history, history of science, and material culture, in order to get closer to understanding the communities from which these texts emerged and the traditions that were shaped by them. 238. ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī, shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-awfāq, ms london, british library, no. 7494, fols. 3r–6r; see also n. gardiner, “books on occult sciences,” in treasures of knowledge: an inventory of the ottoman palace library (1502/3–1503/4), vol. 1: essays, ed. g. necipoğlu, c. kafadar, and c. h. fleischer, 735–66 (leiden: brill, 2019); j.-c. coulon, “building al-būnī’s legend: the figure of al-būnī through ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī’s shams al-āfāq,” journal of sufi studies 5, no 1 (2016): 1–26. 239. crone, the nativist prophets of early islamic iran, 22–27, 191– 215; m. asatryan and d. burns, “is ghulāt religion islamic gnosticism? religious transmissions in late antiquity,” in le ésotérisme shi‘ite: ses racines et ses prolongement, ed. m.a. amir-moezzi, m. de cillis, d. de smet, and o. mir-kasimov (turnhout: brepols, 2016), 55–86. 67 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 68 appendix: manuscripts consulted the pseudo-aristotelian hermetic cycle complete manuscripts: • ms oxford, bodleian, arab d. 221, fols. 1r–82r. the sequence of folios is disordered. dated 417/1026. a. f. l. beeston has challenged the dating, arguing that the text is instead an early fourteenth-century composition.240 isabel toral-niehoff, however, has proposed 921/1515 as a terminus ante quem on the basis of repeated notes within the text that are dated between 921/1515 and 933/1527.241 • ms london, british library, delhi arabic 1946, fols. 1v–200r. undated. estimate: late nineteenth century. • ms tonk, rajasthan, maulana abul kalam azad arabic persian research institute, no. 2142. described by isabel toral-niehoff and hans daiber.242 despite several attempts, i, like toral-niehoff and daiber, was unable to gain access to this manuscript.243 the constituent treatises of the cycle are the following: a. al-isṭimākhīs (psah), fols. 1v–21r in delhi arabic 1946. b. kitāb istijlāb rūḥāniyyāt al-bahāʾim (on attracting the rūḥāniyyāt of animals, psah), fols. 21v–32r in delhi arabic 1946. also referred to as al-madāṭīs, according to the prologue.244 at the end of the text, we read: “this is the end of what the sage described in k. al-ustuwaṭṭās.”245 it thus seems to be a chapter of al-ustuwaṭṭās (see also “e” below). c. from (min) kitāb al-isṭimāṭīs (psah), fols. 32v–52v in delhi arabic 1946. d. kitāb al-hādhīṭūs (psah), fols. 53r–85r in delhi arabic 1946. aristotle is absent, but the text’s identity is confirmed by a cross-reference in al-istijlāb: “according to what was described by hermes.”246 an anonymous translator is mentioned. e. another chapter from al-ustuwaṭṭās (psah), fols. 85v–92v in delhi arabic 1946 (see also “b” above). f. giranis (not psah), fols. 93r–115v in delhi arabic 1946. 240. a. f. l. beeston, “an arabic hermetic manuscript,” bodleian library record 7, no. 1 (1962): 20–23. 241. toral-niehoff, kitab giranis, 28. 242. toral-niehoff, kitab giranis, 29; h. daiber, “new manuscript findings from indian libraries,” manuscripts of the middle east 1 (1986): 26–48, at 39, no. 156. 243. the catalog can be accessed here: http://www.maapritonk.nic.in/pdf/a-handlist-of-arabic-mss.pdf. 244. delhi arabic 1946, fol. 21v. 245. ibid., fol. 32r. 246. ibid., fol. 85r. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 68 g. kitāb al-aḥjār (the book of stones, not psah), fols. 116r–119r in delhi arabic 1946. the title is given at the end; the text begins abruptly. identical in content to the stoneand ring-magic collection in ms istanbul, süleymaniye, ayasofya 3610, fols. 1v–143r.247 h. kitāb ʿuṭārid b. muḥammad al-muḥāsib fī manāfiʿ al-aḥjār wa al-khiraz wa ṭillismātihā wa khawatim al-kawākib al-sabʿa (the book of ʿuṭārid b. muḥammad al-muḥāsib on the benefits of stones, amulets, and their talismans, and the rings of the seven planets, not psah), fols. 119r–126r in delhi arabic 1946. the title is given at the text’s conclusion. the psah cycle includes only the last part of the actual text attributed to ʿuṭārid on the construction of planetary rings. the second text in the stone-magic collection ms paris, bnf, arabe 2775 (fols. 102r–114r) and the second part of ayasofya 3610 (fols. 44v–168v) contain the first part of ʿuṭārid’s work. i. al-kitāb al-majmūʿ fī khawāṣṣ al-aḥjār (the collection concerning the occult properties of stones, not psah), which contains kitāb maʿrifat al-ḥijāra wa-khāṣṣiyatihā wa-nuqūshihā (on the knowledge of stones, their occult properties, and their inscriptions) taken from al-hādhīṭūs (see “d” above) by the first hermes and other books (maṣāḥif); fols. 126r–197r in delhi arabic 1946. one of the five texts featured in this collection is referred to as “bāb maḥakkāt al-aḥjār min kalām aristotle wa-ghayrihi” (“a chapter on the pulverulence of stones from the writings of aristotle and others,” fol. 154r), which is identical to a section called “dhikr maḥakkāt al-ḥijār al-sabʿa” (“reference to the pulverulence of the seven stones”) in ms cambridge, dd. 4. 28., fols. 120r–122r. both are based on sayings by a sage named funṭus. kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt and al-ustuwaṭṭās complete manuscripts: • ms paris, bnf, arabe 2577, fols. 35v–104r. undated. estimate: fourteenth century. al-ustuwaṭṭās on fols. 1v–34r; al-isṭimāṭīs on fols. 35v–104r. in this manuscript, fols. 104r–105r contain sections from kitāb nawāmīs aflāṭūn, known in latin as liber vaccae or liber aneguemis. • ms manisa, national library of manisa (genel kitaplik), no. 1461. dated 771/1370. al-ustuwaṭṭās: fols. 1v–25v; ps.2: fols. 26v–72r. incomplete manuscripts: • ms berlin, staatsbibliothek zu berlin, petermann i 66. eighteenth century, according to the catalog. parts from al-isṭimāṭīs are found in fols. 41v–73v. 247. this is a royal manuscript copied for the treasury of sultan abū al-naṣr sayf al-dīn al-ashraf qaytbay (r. 1468–96); see fol. 1r. the colophon dates the manuscript to the beginning of shaʿbān 888 ah (september 1483). 69 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 70 • ms leiden, leiden university, or. 1235. undated. this is a collection of treatises on the subject of planetary talismans and invocations from various works, including al-ustuwaṭṭās on fols. 9r–17v, 35r–38v, and 52r, and an abridgment by ibn waṣīf of kitāb al-mīlāṭīs “described by kīnās” on fols. 76v–101r (see below under kitāb al-mīlāṭīs al-akbar). al-madīṭīs • ms oxford, bodleian, marsh 556, fols. 4r–152r. the date has been scratched off. this is an abridged reformulation of k. ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt. dhakhīrat al-iskandar (the treasury of alexander) complete manuscripts: • ms london, british library, io islamic 673, fols. 1v–59r. the date has been scratched off. • ms berlin, staatsbibliothek zu berlin, wetzstein ii 1209, fols. 1v–42v. incomplete manuscripts: • ms tehran, majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 4752, fols. 1r–42v, under the title kitāb milāṭīs al-akbar. this manuscript includes the third bāb, entitled al-isqūṭās (al-ustuwaṭṭās?), from al-kitāb al-shāmil fī al-baḥr al-kāmil (the comprehensive book on the perfect sea), a magic text by sirāj al-dīn abū yaʿqūb al-sakkākī (1160–1229). al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya or aḥkām ṭulūʿ al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya complete manuscripts: • ms paris, bnf, arabe 2578, 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ullmann, m. die naturund geheimwissenschaften im islam. leiden: brill, 1972. van bladel, k. the arabic hermes: from pagan sage to prophet of science. oxford: oxford university press, 2009. ———. “hermes and hermetica.” in encyclopaedia of islam three, ed. kate fleet, gudrun krämer, denis matringe, john nawas, everett rowson. leiden: brill, online http:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_com_23130 ———. “al-bīrūnī on hermetic forgery.” gnosis: journal of gnostic studies 3 (2018): 54–66. ———. “the iranian characteristics and forged greek attributions in the arabic sirr al-asrar (secret of secrets).” mélanges de l’université saint-joseph 57 (2004): 151–72. van der lugt, m. “‘abominable mixtures’: the liber vaccae in the medieval west, or the dangers and attractions of natural magic.” traditio 64 (2009): 229–77. vogt, s. aristoteles: opuscula vi: physiognomonica. berlin: akademie verlag, 1999. weisser, u. buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung und die darstellung der natur. aleppo: university of aleppo, 1979. ———. das buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung von pseudo-apollonius von tyana. berlin: de gruyter, 1980. williams, steven j. “defining the corpus aristotelicum: scholastic awareness of aristotelian spuria in the high middle ages.” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 58 (1995): 29–51. ———. “the early circulation of the pseudo-aristotelian ‘secret of secrets’ in the west.” le scienze alla corte di federico ii, edited by m. r. mcvaugh and v. pasche, 127–44. turnhout: brepols and florence: sismel, 1994. zadeh, t. “commanding demons and jinn: the sorcerer in early islamic thought.” in no tapping around philology: a festschrift in honor of wheeler mcintosh thackston jr.’s 79 • liana saif al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 80 70th birthday, edited by a. korangy and d. j. sheffield, 131–60. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2014. zanjani asl, m. k. “sirr al-khalīqa and its influence in the arabic and persianate world: ʿawn b. al-mundhir’s commentary and its unknown persian translation.” al-qanṭara 37, no. 2 (2016): 435–73. zeyl, d., and b. sattler. “plato’s timaeus.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, summer 2019 ed., edited by e. n. zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/ entries/plato-timaeus/. zimmermann, f. w. review of das buch über das geheimnis der schöpfung von pseudoapollonius von tyana, edited by u. weisser, medical history 25 (1981): 439–40. all manuscripts mentioned: compilation containing al-isṭimāṭīs, kitāb bālīnās li-ibnihi, and other untitled texts: ms berlin, staatsbibliothek zu berlin, petermann i 66. compilation of texts on stones: ms paris, bnf, arabe 2775. dhakhīrat al-iskandar: ms madrid, el escorial, no. 947. dhakhīrat al-iskandar: ms london, british library, io islamic 673. dhakhīrat al-iskandar: ms berlin, staatsbibliothek zu berlin, wetzstein ii 1209. ghāyat al-ḥakīm: ms istanbul, süleymaniye, hamidiye 852. ghāyat al-ḥakīm: ms dublin, chester beatty, ar. 3313. kitāb azmār al-afkār fī jawāhir al-aḥjār: ms cambridge, dd. 4. 28. kitāb hirmis al-harāmisa (al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya): ms paris, bnf, arabe 2578. kitāb hirmis al-harāmisa (al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya): ms paris, bnf, arabe 2579. kitāb hirmis al-harāmisa (al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya): ms paris, bnf, arabe 2580. kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt: ms paris, bnf, arabe 2577. kitāb ʿilal al-rūḥāniyyāt: ms manisa, national library of manisa (genel kitaplik), no. 1461. kitāb milāṭīs al-akbar and others: ms tehran, majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 4752. kitāb al-jawāhir wa-l-aḥjār: ms istanbul, süleymaniye, ayasofya 3610. kitāb ṭalāsim bālīnās al-akbar: ms paris, bnf, arabe 2250. liber antimaquis: ms london, british library, sloane 3854. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/plato-timaeus/ https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/plato-timaeus/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a preliminary study of the pseudo-aristotelian hermetica • 80 al-madīṭīs: ms oxford, bodleian, marsh 556. al-majmūʿ al-mubārak: ms oxford, bodleian, huntington 188. psah cycle: ms oxford, bodleian, arab d. 221. psah cycle: ms london, british library, delhi arabic 1946. psah cycle: ms tonk, rajasthan, maulana abul kalam azad arabic persian research institute, no. 2142. rasāʾil ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ: ms istanbul, süleymaniye, atıf efendi 1681. risālat bālīnās al-ḥakīm fi taʾthīr al-rūḥāniyyāt: ms madrid, el escorial, no. 921. shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-awfāq by ʿabd al-raḥmān al-bisṭāmī: ms london, british library, no. 7494. al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya: ms tehran, majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 6451/3. al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya: ms tehran, majlis-i shūrā-yi millī, no. 4448/7. al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya: ms leipzig, vollers 831. al-shuʿrā al-yamāniyya: ms princeton, islamic manuscripts, garrett no. 547h. sirr al-asrār by ʿuṭārid b. muḥammad al-ḥāsib: ms madrid, el escorial, no. 939. al-ustuwaṭṭās and others: ms leiden, leiden university, or. 1235. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022): 320-383 translating race in the islamic studies classroom* rachel schine university of maryland (rschine@umd.edu) abstract this article offers a set of race-conscious approaches to teaching premodern arabic texts in translation, tailored to courses in islamic studies and related subject areas. throughout, i address the productive tension generated by the fact that many contemporary translations do not consistently signpost moments of racial thinking as such despite the increase in scholarship on medieval race and racism as well as in the call, on the part of students, to grapple with racialization in our course materials. on the one hand, i argue that such translations can perpetuate what kimberlé crenshaw dubs “perspectivelessness” by discursively disengaging from race in various ways, but on the other, i contend that this opens opportunities for critical reading of translation practices as well as of the historical source texts themselves. i offer guided readings of nine arabic texts in translation from two major press series—penguin classics and the library of arabic literature—that lend themselves to classroom use, in which i demonstrate how to foster reading with race in mind. in doing so, i offer an extended meditation on racialization as a comparative and historicizable hermeneutic for understanding premodern islamic histories and literatures. introduction to write the history of racism thus necessarily involves a study of the work done by comparative thinking. might such a history also allow us to turn comparison on its eurocentric head and reveal the global connections that have shaped racial histories in different parts of the world? or would it be like trying to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house or to curse in the colonizer’s tongue?—ania loomba1 * i am grateful for the thoughtful comments provided by alison vacca, zayde antrim, and the anonymous reviewers, to whose feedback i hope to have done justice. drafts of this essay were read and commented on by samantha pellegrino and shamma boyarin, and i benefitted from conversations with and readings © 2022 rachel schine. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. mailto:rschine%40umd.edu?subject= 321 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) in the push and pull of meaning, translation can certainly dominate, domesticate, or displace; but when done with a certain measure of transparency, facing difference can also create the possibility of seeing in intimate terms the aspirations, values, and basic humanity of others. —travis zadeh2 while still in graduate school in the fall of 2018, i had the opportunity to teach the first leg of the university of chicago’s survey of islamic thought and literature, one of two year-long sequences that forked off of the pathbreaking “civilizational” studies courses curated by marshall hodgson and recently historicized by kevin van bladel.3 for the unit on the rise of arabic prose, i assigned tarif khalidi’s translation of al-jāḥiẓ’s epistolary satire, fakhr al-sūdān ʿalā al-bīḍān (“the boasts of the blacks over the whites”). throughout, al-jāḥiẓ anthologizes poetry and anecdotes by and about authors raced, in his milieu, as black (aswad, zanjī) connecting them with a tissue of remarks from an imagined group of black interlocutors.4 in class, i briefly introduced the terms sūdān and zanj, the transsaharan slave trade in the early abbasid period, and the interrelated histories of africa and arabia that linked al-jāḥiẓ’s experiences, moving between basra and baghdad, with the personas he conjures into his text. then we launched into discussion. almost immediately, students raised the fact that a number of the stereotypes in the text—that black people are preternaturally musical, sexual, strong—were familiar in uncomfortable ways. most, however, did not describe these stereotypes as “racist,” and did not identify al-jāḥiẓ’s “blacks” or “whites” as racial formations. like the translation itself, in which the word “racism” does not occur, and “race,” incongruously, but once,5 we danced around the meat of our comparison between al-jāḥiẓ’s episteme and our own. a mea culpa is warranted here as well: it was my job to make space for a discussion that could try to “turn comparison on its eurocentric head” by naming evidence of others’ racial histories as such, as ania loomba suggests in the above quote. i could have begun with the fact that blackness and whiteness are always already essentializing markers, though to recommended by kristina richardson, tom abi samra, justin stearns, and s. j. pearce. i am thankful to lucie taylor at the library of arabic literature for encouraging this article’s growth from a seed attempt at answering its central questions in a library of arabic literature blog post, and for supplying desk copies of several of the analyzed texts, and to james montgomery and shawkat toorawa for soliciting that initial essay. thanks also to melanie magidow for furnishing me with a copy of the tale of princess fatima. the remainder of the research expenditures for this paper were made possible through an nyu abu dhabi humanities research fellowship. 1. ania loomba, “race and the possibilities of comparative critique,” new literary history 40, no. 3 (2009): 501–22, at 501–2. 2. travis zadeh, “on reading the library of arabic literature,” journal of arabic literature 47, no. 3 (2016): 307–35, at 311. 3. kevin van bladel, “a brief history of islamic civilization from its genesis in the late nineteenth century to its institutional entrenchment,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 28 (2020): 150–73, at 163–66. 4. al-jāḥiẓ, “the boasts of the blacks over the whites,” trans. tarif khalidi, islamic quarterly 25, no. 1 (1981): 3–51. 5. khalidi translates ajnās as “races” in a discussion of the umayyad poet al-farazdaq having sex with all varieties of women. al-jāḥiẓ, “the boasts of the blacks,” 21. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 322 whom they are applied and within which paradigms of social control has fluctuated across time and space. we may have thence wended our way through the biopolitics of al-jāḥiẓ’s sexualization of black women, his implicit juxtaposition of the “curse of ham” (in allāh lam yakhluqnā sūdān tashwīhan6) with climatology (and perhaps the thorniness this raises around yet another tangle of ostensible anachronisms in the form of religion7 and science8), and the question of who actually speaks for and from a position of black self-identification— if anyone—in his text. like many theorists of the topic, we may not have all agreed on whether to call what we were seeing “race” (though i would personally do so). nevertheless, we would have grappled with our struggle to talk about this text without recourse to the idea of race and the body of theory and language its critical analysis has generated, even in the word’s lexical, historical absence in the text at hand.9 of course, we read with race in mind all the time where the word itself is absent. one example (plucked from my bookshelf) is celeste ng’s 2014 novel, everything i never told you, centered on a chinese-american family in the late 1970s, in which the word “race,” in the sense of the social construction of human kinds, never occurs.10 the constellation of reviews and blurbs that comprise the book’s frontmatter nonetheless repeatedly mentions the prominence of the novel’s racial themes. why is al-jāḥiẓ different? partly, it is the anxieties of temporal and cultural remove—can our vocabularies describe this world so far 6. al-jāḥiẓ, rasāʾil al-jāḥiẓ, ed. ʿabd al-salām hārūn (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1979), 1:219. 7. against the trend in religious studies towards periodizing “religion” as a modern, european invention, reified through protestant—and subsequently, secular—ideas of a personal religious life separate from epistemologies of the social, rushain abbasi has recently written a profound rebuttal. he argues for the translatability of dīn as religion as well as for the pioneering of its reification as a discrete sphere of life and action in premodern islamic thought. see rushain abbasi, “islam and the invention of religion: a study of medieval muslim discourses on dīn,” studia islamica 116, no. 1 (2021): 1–106. 8. on the “historical contingency” attending use of the term “science” to describe preand early-modern intellectual activity in islamic societies, see justin k. stearns, revealed sciences: natural sciences in islam in seventeenth-century morocco (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2021), 5–7. 9. authors have developed a variety of jargon to balance the fact that earlier texts are rendered newly intelligible through critical race theories and methods with their concerns about speaking of race and racial discrimination avant la lettre. perhaps the most well-known is benjamin isaac’s phrasing, “proto-racism.” cord whitaker likewise would have us differentiate between premodern “race-thinking” and modern “racism.” in prior work, i have borrowed the term “racialism” to invoke ethnocentrist and race-naturalist thinking about fellow humans while avoiding the term “racism,” which via modern sciences has entailed systemic denials of belonging within or identicality across the human species, but i no longer find this nominal separation useful. instead, alongside other recent scholarship, i contend against marking a difference between modern and premodern race-concepts and racism at the level of vocabulary, preferring the flexibility and nuance of holding the two apart or drawing them together through analysis. see benjamin isaac, the invention of racism in classical antiquity (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2004); cord whitaker, black metaphors: how modern racism emerged from medieval race thinking (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2019); rachel schine, “conceiving the pre-modern black-arab hero: on the gendered production of racial difference in sīrat al-amīrah dhāt al-himmah,” journal of arabic literature 48, no. 3 (2017): 298–326. 10. celeste ng, everything i never told you (new york: penguin books, 2015). the adjectival form “racial” occurs twice in the novel, and in both instances amidst other linguistic cues, like “mongrel,” “mixed,” “mismatched,” that show race's tenacity in vocabularies that far exceed the word itself and further race's conceptual work. 323 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) away, or only inscribe anachronism? partly, it is students’ and faculty’s own comfort or lack thereof in initiating conversations about race. and i propose it is also a byproduct of the trust we all place in the translator to be the one who, in effect, reviews and explicates the source text—who signposts another language’s lexica of racialization, or does not. two of these elements, namely, how our various personal experiences with race affect our approaches to source material and how trends and training in american race talk shape our classroom conversations around that material, are both taken up by critical race theorist and law professor kimberlé crenshaw in her brief 1988 essay, “toward a raceconscious pedagogy in legal education.” there, crenshaw critiques the dominant myth of “perspectivelessness” in the legal classroom, in which instructors treat their sources and teachings of them as objective rather than normative and universal rather than by-and-for people in majoritized gendered, raced, and classed positions. this, crenshaw states, exerts a chilling effect not only on minoritized students voicing opposing views, but also on the majoritized students’ abilities to recognize the sociohistorical contingencies underpinning what now appear to be the discursive rules of the field.11 in other words, crenshaw asserts that race-conscious pedagogy looks in multiple directions, considering the text of one’s sources, the pre-text of one’s own subjectivity, and the context of who is in the room, in order to foster more significant readings. to this, i add that in the undergraduate islamic studies classroom and adjacent spaces we must also consider the translators’ choices that entrench forms of perspectivelessness. because we are compelled to teach with translations, our pedagogies are inevitably premised on what translations have made available. perspectivelessness as defined and critiqued by crenshaw has several notable resonances with the contested concept of “transparency” in translation studies, towards which many translators nonetheless strive. writing in 1921, walter benjamin claims that transparency is what “true translation” offers.12 its ultimate object is approaching the phenomenon of “pure language,” or the underlying truths that impel us to create linguistic systems of signification in the first place, and that all literature seeks in its own ways to represent. for benjamin, pure language can ironically be best revealed13 through the hybridizing and supplemental potentials of translation, or using other languages to “[break] through the rotten barriers” of one’s own.14 many have questioned whether “true translation” so defined is possible or ethical. in his 2008 translator’s introduction to abdelfattah kilito’s thou shalt not speak my language (lan tatakalama lughatī), waïl s. hassan writes that benjamin’s vision of a pure language approached through interlinguistic symbiosis is figmentary—power, competition, and 11. kimberlé williams crenshaw, “toward a race-conscious pedagogy in legal education,” national black law journal 11, no. 1 (1988): 1–14. 12. walter benjamin, “the translator’s task,” trans. steven rendall, ttr: traduction, terminologie, redaction 10, no. 2 (1997): 151–65, at 161. 13. i use this word to indicate that benjamin speaks of language (particularly poetry) and its transmission in sacred terms, consonant with both aspects of the “german academic discourse” of his era and his attunement to kabbalistic writings. see paul de man, “‘conclusions’ walter benjamin’s ‘the task of the translator’ messenger lecture, cornell university, march 4, 1983,” yale french studies 69 (1985): 25–46, at 31 and 42–43. 14. benjamin, “the translator’s task,” 163. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 324 conquest inhere in interlinguistic exchange, such that when unchecked, “in the extreme, translation becomes a species of cannibalism whereby the translator consumes the original text, at once eliminating it and absorbing its power.”15 disturbing modes of consumption are also at issue in lawrence venuti’s 1995 volume, the translator’s invisibility, in which he argues that transparency has come to mean that a translation reads with such domesticated fluency that the translator is herself invisible. venuti claims that this is due largely to anglo-american capitalist enterprise: translation must be marketable, and to be so it must feel streamlined, comfortable, and authentic to a “narcissistic” and “ethnocentrist” clientele, whose presumed whiteness, we might note, is likewise rendered invisible through references instead to language (english) and geography (the anglo-american sphere).16 in the epigraph above, travis zadeh commends “a measure of transparency” in arabicenglish translation practices, enacted by presenting translations and originals on equal, co-present footing, as in the library of arabic literature’s bilingual editions. however, his is not a transparency of the kind that, for benjamin, is a means to arriving at semiotic essences (though zadeh invokes benjamin’s praise for interlinear translation), or that for hassan sparks concerns about translators’ self-delusions, and for venuti about their profitdriven annihilations of self and other. instead, zadeh suggests that insofar as it showcases an array of differences, transparency is an end in itself. it “expos[es] the inner workings of the process,” by presenting the choices that translators make as choices, and the reader is left to do with this knowledge what they wish.17 like venuti and hassan, zadeh insightfully speaks of the “unevenness” of power dynamics between different languages and cultures. nonetheless, his reading of benjamin presents us with a definition of transparency that treats intra-linguistic choices made by translators and audiences as individuated. via crenshaw, i examine how these individual choices of interpretation in what is nominally one target culture are also part of systemic hierarchies, and how despite lexical transparency we are still being given a normative range of “correct” possibilities of representation. this article conducts close readings of a number of contemporary translations and their critical apparatuses in order to model race-conscious approaches. i elucidate a productive tension around race in the contemporary islamic studies classroom: as calls from students to consider race and racialization in our syllabi have multiplied, translators are increasingly translating in ways that minimize or remediate racial thinking.18 i am concerned with the specific politics of translating and teaching premodern sources, which simultaneously constitute the ideal media for historicizing the concept of race and the terrain where the 15. see waïl s. hassan’s “translator’s introduction” in abdelfattah kilito, thou shalt not speak my language, trans. waïl s. hassan (syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2008), xiii. 16. lawrence venuti, the translator’s invisibility: a history of translation (new york: routledge, 1995), esp. 15–20. 17. zadeh, “the library of arabic literature,” 313. 18. to be sure, this tendency is not new: ghenwa hayek traces selective translation practices in her hallmark study on the 1986 translation of hanan al-shaykh’s novel, the story of zahra, a “metropolitan teaching text” that was “stripped of some of its racial nuances in the process of translating it into english,” itself a political, marketing-minded maneuver. ghenwa hayek, “whitewashing arabic for global consumption: translating race in the story of zahra,” international journal of middle east studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 91–104, at 93. 325 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) anxieties of anachronism, vectors of comparison, and translatability most fiercely collide. much as i have tried to avoid psychologizing translators’ intent below, i have felt recurrently in my readings of new translations of premodern arabic literature that the translation or critical demarcation of racializing language and the language of “race” was often undertheorized and internally inconsistent. moreover, a dialogue was not discernible between and among the translation projects at hand, even when under the same editorial auspices, funding bodies, and political conditions. at the same time, i do not advise any particular praxis toward translating and teaching through translation with race in mind beyond one of care, but rather that we have such praxis to begin with. by locating the engine of praxis’ formulation in the classroom rather than in the marketplace of translation, i attempt to respond to student initiatives that have already elicited new reading practices around race and to acknowledge the overlapping agencies that pedagogues, learners, and colleagues— customers—have in making translation happen. much has been written on formulating pedagogies and reading practices in the islamic studies classroom in ways that query our own field’s historical and political commitments to modern race sciences. a less studied question is that of how to teach regional histories of constructing racial difference. scholars such as eve troutt powell and chouki el hamel describe the complications of pursuing this endeavor, resulting from transnational historiographical and archival silences; ehud toledano offers the related concept of an “attitude hurdle” in talking about enslavement and the african diasporic presences it produced across once-ottoman territories.19 parisa vaziri turns the problem back on historians, noting that in assuming the fragmentariness, suppression, or destruction of indian ocean slavery’s archive, and even its “live referent[s],” scholars compound racialized erasures.20 meanwhile, ilyse morgenstein fuerst has demonstrated that our discipline’s very access to archives and societies, through the training and hiring of certain scholars and funding of their projects, is always already overdetermined by the racialization of the study of religion in our academic institutions.21 islamic studies in the west is not alone in endeavoring to reckon with its various trajectories of epistemic violence by first redressing its racial positionality and then historicizing that of its subjects; european medieval studies, similarly, continues to tumultuously undergo a process of centering the analytic of racialization that began with visibilizing and critiquing the whitewashed, hermetic fictions of europe’s past selves that medievalists have long sustained.22 19. eve troutt powell, tell this in my memory: stories of enslavement from egypt, sudan, and the ottoman empire (stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2012), 3; chouki el hamel, black morocco: a history of slavery, race, and islam (new york: cambridge university press, 2014), 6–7; ehud toledano, as if silent and absent: bonds of enslavement in the islamic middle east (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2007), 15–17. 20. parisa vaziri, “false differends: racialized slavery and the genocidal example,” philosophy today (2022): https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2022120437. 21. ilyse morgenstein fuerst, “job ads don’t add up: arabic + middle east + texts ≠ islam,” journal of the american academy of religion 88, no. 4 (2020): 915–46. 22. this is not to say that islamic studies must “catch up” with or imitate other disciplines. if anything, because of the field’s situation in always already international and often diasporic contexts and its own prior experiences of reckoning, addressing topics of race and racialization is a discursive feature that we may further https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2022120437 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 326 in islamic studies, the fictions are different. orientalist translations of islamic texts were initially suffused with and motivated by theories of race. often, they strategically advanced visions of a profoundly “mixed” orient or a “blackened” barbary that territorialized islam in places that at once were marked by the profane (contemporary) cross-pollinations and the pristine (biblical) origins of all the world’s races.23 europeans were uniquely entitled to excavate and interpret the latter because of the degenerative effects of the former. the obsession with racially taxonomizing west asia and north africa’s peoples dictated not only the method but the matter of what was translated, circulated, and canonized. ramzi rouighi, for example, notes that the francophone discourse on indigenous north africans was reified through “khaldunization,” in which translations of ibn khaldūn’s kitāb al-ʿibar became the timeless prooftext for the region’s underlying berber essence.24 as elise burton has recently shown, via translation both into and out of languages such as arabic, turkish, hebrew, and persian, colonial racial mappings were vernacularized and retrofitted onto the deep past to lend regional twentieth-century nationalisms ethnological credence.25 these racial-national projections were concurrently extended by agendas of genetic-scientific corroboration. new racial histories were also applied to litigate hierarchies of belonging in various colonies and to underwrite the ethnogenetic narratives that best served colonial powers’ interests.26 in postcolonial contexts, translations of race concepts from muslim societies, and in particular of expressions of antiblack racism, have at times been used to propitiate the interests of certain communities in the west by selectively remembering eastern pasts. ali mazrui, for example, has identified the phenomenon of “black orientalism,” also phrased by hisham aïdi as a form of “anti-arab black nationalism,” which represents islam and its predominantly arab or arabizing disseminators as deleterious to the african continent in ways that have permeated academic discourse as well as political theater.27 though aïdi identifies this most recently as an epiphenomenon of midto late-twentieth-century zionist attempts to cultivate black allyship by suggesting arabs were their common oppressors, orientalist representations of black africa’s islamic history obtain even in some of the take up and innovate in our present moment, as justin stearns’ recent critique of geraldine heng’s invention of race in the european middle ages suggests: see stearns, “race in the islamicate middle east: reflections after heng,” the cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry (2022): 114–21, at 119. 23. on hypotheses of racial “admixture” in middle eastern genetics, see elise burton, genetic crossroads: the middle east and the science of human heredity (stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2021), passim. on the role of blackness in orientalist depictions of north african ethnicity, see amy aisen elouafi, “the colour of orientalism: race and narratives of discovery in tunisia,” ethnic and racial studies 33, no. 2 (2010): 253–71. 24. ramzi rouighi, inventing the berbers: history and ideology in the maghrib (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2019), passim, esp. 135–44. 25. burton, genetic crossroads, 14–16. 26. bruce hall discusses this in relation to how various groups and their local ethnogenetic narratives were used and refashioned by french colonizers in the niger bend. see bruce hall, a history of race in muslim west africa, 1600–1960 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011), 105–73. 27. ali a. mazrui, “black orientalism? further reflections on ‘wonders of the african world,’” the black scholar 30, no. 1 (2000), 15–18; hisham aïdi, “slavery, genocide, and the politics of outrage: understanding the new racial olympics,” middle east report 234 (2005): 40–56, at 45. 327 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) earliest and most groundbreaking writings on the topic. w. e. b. du bois, for example, poetically references a “cloud of semitic mohammedanism” that “veiled” africa from european contact for a millennium, and hence from european historiography.28 du bois identifies the islamic conquests as the first instance of anchoring a transregional slave trade in africa, where it drew from an enduring non-muslim populace, but nonetheless ascribes this to “religious and political rather than […] racial reasons.”29 indeed, contra the concerns of mazrui and aïdi, a number of recent academic works assert that muslim societies were not nearly as racialized as their medieval and earlymodern christian counterparts; to use one scholar’s phrasing, these societies prized “black excellence,” and were equal opportunity in both taking enslaved people from around their peripheries and in processing them into manumitted and upwardly mobile muslims.30 in order to make these arguments, though, authors overwhelmingly center arab-muslim voices.31 of course, despite pretentions to fixity, what it has meant to speak as an “arab” in different spaces is itself mutable and contested.32 nonetheless, rudolph ware has written 28. w. e. b. du bois, the negro (1915; repr., philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2014), 17. 29. ibid., 27. 30. haroon bashir goes so far as to claim the western academy has elided arab authors’ investment in “black excellence” in order to perpetuate orientalist prejudices and exonerate western racisms. jonathan a. c. brown employs a similarly whataboutist line of rhetoric in his recent book, slavery & islam, in which brown recurrently notes the multiple origins and situations of enslaved people in muslim society in contrast to atlantic world slavery as a means of decoupling riqq with modern, scholarly definitions of slavery and unfreedom. it should go without saying that thinking about categories such as race, class, and unfreedom transregionally and even comparatively does not excuse the violence of euro-american racism and racial slavery. extreme prejudice in one community does not imply the absence of prejudices elsewhere. nor does this disparity render us unable to discuss concepts of race and slavery that are prior or elsewhere in our vernaculars, with care and attention to difference as much as to similarity. indeed, to silence dialogue in shared, modern languages of oppression flies in the face of significant activist pushes across the middle east and africa to recognize deep regional histories of race and racism and enact restorative justice. see haroon bashir, “black excellence and the curse of ham: debating race and slavery in the islamic tradition,” reorient 5, no. 1 (2019): 92–116; jonathan a. c. brown, slavery & islam (london: oneworld academic, 2019). on racial justice movements and the articulation of histories of “race” in the middle east and africa, see bruce s. hall, “reading race in africa and the middle east,” anthropologia 7, no. 1 (2020): 33–44. 31. “arab” is a signifier that incorporates a vast range of people, including those who are raced in various contexts as black; the arab-muslim voices i mention here as used in modern apologetics for racisms in the premodern islamic world are authors predominantly from the middle east, north africa, and northern mediterranean and are identified as nonblack. on the role of arab ancestry in identity construction in the sahel and sub-saharan africa, see xavier luffin, “‘nos ancêtres les arabes …’ généalogies d’afrique musulmane,” civilisations 53, no. 2 (2006): 177–209. 32. peter webb, imagining the arabs: arab identity and the rise of islam (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016), 8–9. the idea of arabness, moreover, continuously undergoes reckoning and reconfiguration. recent work to theorize afro-arabness and related modes of designation is particularly instructive. see hisham aïdi, “national identity in the afro-arab periphery: ethnicity, indigeneity and (anti)racism in morocco,” pomeps 40 (2021): https://pomeps.org/national-identity-in-the-afro-arab-periphery-ethnicity-indigeneityand-antiracism-in-morocco. see also momtaza mehri, “the consensus of seasons,” shubbak (2021): https:// www.shubbak.co.uk/the-consensus-of-seasons/, which is taken also up extensively in zavier wingham’s meditation on the past and future contours of the african diaspora within ottoman studies. zavier wingham, “arap bacı’nın ara muhaveresi: under the shadow of the ottoman empire and its study,” yillik: annual of https://pomeps.org/national-identity-in-the-afro-arab-periphery-ethnicity-indigeneity-and-antiracism-in-morocco https://pomeps.org/national-identity-in-the-afro-arab-periphery-ethnicity-indigeneity-and-antiracism-in-morocco https://www.shubbak.co.uk/the-consensus-of-seasons/ https://www.shubbak.co.uk/the-consensus-of-seasons/ al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 328 compellingly about the ways in which the common belief that islam was a product of “arab genius,” and therefore an ill-fitting african import, have historically affected how muslims produce race and how this reverberates in the field of islamic studies, to the exclusion especially of west african muslims.33 hannah barker has written similarly of the trend driven by credulous readings of isolated arabic sources to favor discourses that have minimized both the muslimness and the humanity of peoples dwelling near the black sea. this has led researchers to unreflectively reproduce strategic essentialisms about, for example, tatars selling their own children into enslavement in the middle ages.34 these assorted orientalist techniques of and premises for reading and translating inherently obscure the ethnogenetic beliefs, applications of categories, and contests of identity that already feature in the primary sources we might wish to teach. in other words, many of our sources themselves contain racial contents and logics, but often in different ways and for different ends than those discussed above. in the recent past, a number of translations have offered an unspoken corrective to prior practice: rather than their content being strategically appropriated into contemporary racial epistemologies, many translators have elected to leave “race” and related concepts out of their lexica almost entirely. there is ample cause for doing this. as i discuss further below, in classical arabic there is no single word that one necessarily might translate as “race,” and as i mention above, there is much debate about whether and how racialization obtains across time and space. however, there is also an undeniable cost to translating without race—or translating with race inconsistently—insofar as it could help us better understand other periods and places. as zadeh notes in the epigraph, translation has the power to create intimacy and foster the recognition of others’ humanity, but what of translations’ capacity to point to where others have failed to recognize humanity and to feel such intimacies themselves? the generational differences between faculty and students mean that many faculty are acquainted with reading against the grain of explicitly racist translations or seeking out new translations that aspire to zadeh’s ideals, but are less versed in the racial metatexts latent in these latest efforts. this is also due to the fact that much of the precolonial but postorientalist history of racialization in and among arabic-speaking muslim societies—that is, those that which showcases these societies “emerging as a series of historical positions, including those that enunciate essentialisms”—is still in the process of being written.35 denise ferreira da silva describes the impulse to avoid speaking in terms of race as a project of erasure that provides “moral relief” but fails to have explanatory power because istanbul studies 3 (2021): 177–83. 33. rudolph t. ware, the walking qurʾan: islamic education, embodied knowledge, and history in west africa (chapel hill: the university of north carolina press, 2014), 23. 34. hannah barker, that most precious merchandise: the mediterranean trade in black sea slaves, 1260–1500 (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2019), 125–130. 35. i borrow this explication of postorientalism from gyan prakash. see gyan prakash, “writing postorientalist histories of the third world: perspectives from indian historiography,” comparative studies in society and history 32, no. 2 (1990): 383–408, at 384. 329 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) racial thinking systemically configures our lives.36 many of the translators explored in this essay often acknowledge this fact themselves, obliquely, in front matter that expatiates the social dynamics of their texts in racial terms even as the actual translations hold the language of race at arm’s length; in doing so, they at once acknowledge race’s existence in the past and either suspend its mention from that past’s literature or render the literature as incoherent on race. this approach selectively paints a picture of premoderns as “pre-political,” while at the same time many translations and their critical apparatuses resist this canard with dynamic approaches to gender, sexuality, freedom, class, and so on.37 because of this, the sorts of contemporary primary source translations that one might use in an islamic studies classroom contain a problem for the instructor: in endeavoring to reject pernicious translation practices, many translators have taken racialization from being an object of comparison and history—a facet of human experience that bridges language—and left an uncanny haunting in its place. in certain moments, like when my class encountered stereotypes in al-jāḥiẓ that they had seen countless times before, this haunting is especially loud and insistent that we help resolve its unfinished business. how, then, can we help students to read contemporary translations with race in mind? educational missions between press and text: penguin classics and the library of arabic literature in this study, i present a number of guided readings. i have restricted my analysis to contemporary (post-2000) translations from arabic to english produced by two prolific series that both market themselves heavily for classroom use: penguin classics, a subsidiary of penguin random house, and the library of arabic literature, a subsidiary of new york university press. while recognizing the problems inherent in using exclusively arabic sources to address islamic studies pedagogies, it is also critical to point to the ways in which these sources sit at the normative core of muslim identity as articulated by the arabic-language authors i discuss below as well as in current institutional essentializations of religious and historical studies—in the words of ilyse morgenstein fuerst, for many in higher education, “islam = arabic + middle east + texts.”38 this equation constructs a set of hegemonies that “islamic studies scholars dedicate their careers to dismantling” 36. denise ferreira da silva, toward a global idea of race (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2007), xxxvii. 37. geraldine heng writes of the problems of figuring premodern (european) people as “pre-political,” which is to say, as politically naïve and thus incapable of organizing systematic social projects, across her body of work. i believe this idea finds its best expression in the following passage: “the fantasy of the medieval past itself, constructed and reinforced by postmedieval periods, delivers material effects: the fantasy of a pre-political, pre-racial, pre-nationalist, and pre-imperial time that is the middle ages—a zone of freedom evacuated of the dispositions bedeviling modernity and capital—has enabled the production of the very identities we know as modern, but at a distinct cost, and with material consequences for our understanding of race today” (geraldine heng, empire of magic: medieval romance and the politics of cultural fantasy [new york: columbia university press, 2003], 15). 38. morgenstein fuerst, “job ads don’t add up,” passim. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 330 and contours student demand, the future of tenure lines, and more.39 presses, too, are institutions with certain preconceived ideas of relationality between their authors, subjects, and audiences. both penguin classics and the library of arabic literature have shaped the present pool of works available in english translation, and both emphasize the accessibility of their translations—expressed by penguin as “appealing” and the library of arabic literature as “lucid.”40 nonetheless, these two outlets’ stated visions for fostering engagement with literature in translation are somewhat different. therefore, a word is in order about how these presses construe their respective missions in their promotional materials. penguin classics, as the older of the two outlets, has undergone a series of ideological and structural transformations that led to the series’ eventual creation in 1986.41 the press itself traces the beginning of its interest in “what were regarded as classics” to the 1930s, which resulted in the proliferation of a number of small series coordinated by both its british and american offices, all of which were later brought together under one umbrella. though penguin does not define what we might regard as classics, a split meaning is indicated in their prose. on the one hand, the press notes that “classical education” is on the wane, which justifies their sustained interest in a “core” of greco-roman works. on the other, they are adding ever more titles in both vernacular english (especially “women’s writing”) and other languages in order to embrace a “much broader sense of literary tradition.” the stakes of its projects of retention and growth are, ultimately, to shed light on humanity’s divisions, or “essential differences,” and unities, or “universal truths,” the respective immutability of which is implied. in straddling its role as a conservator of classical heritage, conventionally understood to be foundational to western modernity, and as a cosmopolitan vanguard fashioning works by those underrepresented in western modernity into what we might call modern classics, penguin’s language indicates some constraints under which they still labor. as early as 1937, we are told, what was to become penguin classics already featured a number of translations “from russian, spanish, italian, swedish, norwegian, german and a growing number of middle and far eastern languages,” and yet even now, “the vast non-western canon remains a challenge that can only be met gradually.” this is a significant acknowledgment of enduring biases of scholarship and readership. yet the non-specificity in its references to asian and african languages, described through geographically relativistic euphemisms, as well as the assumption of a single canon, however large, that cuts across them flattens three quarters of the world’s literature and articulates its value using narrow terms of prestige that penguin classics complicates elsewhere. europe, in contrast, is alive with internal diversity, and the press’ promise to address earlier lacunae in european literary regard—leaving out women authors, for instance— 39. ibid., 916. 40. “about penguin classics,” penguin.com, penguin group usa llc, https://www.penguin.com/penguinclassics-overview/; philip f. kennedy, “about the library of arabic literature,” libraryofarabicliterature.org, new york university press, https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/about-the-series/. 41. this information and each of the subsequent quotations in this and the following paragraph are taken from “about penguin classics.” https://www.penguin.com/penguin-classics-overview/ https://www.penguin.com/penguin-classics-overview/ https://www.libraryofarabicliterature.org/about-the-series/ 331 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) upholds narratives of historical and moral progressivism by giving the lie to the concept of canonicity. at the same time, penguin classics’ ambivalent designation of a “non-western canon” has little to do with perceptions of exemplary literature in the cultures it aspires to spotlight; several of the arabic works published by penguin that i discuss below are works of popular literature in middle or mixed arabics authored outside of the scholarly and bureaucratic establishment. they were explicitly positioned against and beneath adab, the refining and refined textual projects of the social elite. penguin’s offerings from arabic also overwhelmingly, temporally, fall within the pale of centuries when this distinction was most operable and thus span the third/ninth to ninth/fifteenth centuries. as such, penguin’s output invites us to probe prescriptions of literariness in the premodern arabicspeaking world, as well as the classed, gendered, and raced dynamics they reify. the library of arabic literature offers a similarly multi-register repertoire of translations from both classical arabic and vernacular, poetry and prose, and elite and popular genres, with the stated objective of creating a “corpus, not a canon.”42 though this corpus is diffuse, it is time-bound; the library of arabic literature has not admitted texts that postdate the thirteenth/nineteenth century. instead of emphasizing the canonicity of those works it elects to feature, it underscores the traditional credentialing and eminence of its translators, all of whom are “internationally recognized scholars.”43 though headquartered at new york university’s abu dhabi campus, its current editorial board heavily favors scholars working in the united states and the uk, with a handful of individuals from its home institution and two members from the american university of beirut being the outliers. the series itself is young, as is the campus out of which it is run, and so it does not carry the weight of its history as penguin classics does. however, in its short life, the series has garnered reviews from taste-making outlets like the wall street journal and the l.a. review of books, as well as academic journals; its translators have been decorated with prizes and nominations. whereas penguin began as a press for the epicurean consumer of classics and evolved into a trusted source for the classroom, the library of arabic literature has moved in a reverse trajectory. this is partly because one of the most unique features of the series is its commitment to bilingualism and, concomitantly, to the production of editions of the arabic texts that it translates. these are usually based on extensive manuscript research. each volume from the library of arabic literature is published in at least two versions: one with arabic and english facing, and another, cheaper softcover english-only version. occasionally, the english-only versions feature additional frontmatter; where the bilingual copies of muḥammad al-tūnisī’s travelogue in darfur: an account of the sultanate and its people feature an in-depth historical introduction by british africanist r. s. o’fahey, the english-only copy adds a two-page foreword by the british-ghanaian philosopher, kwame anthony appiah, some of whose most notable works are on race, identity, and morality.44 a single text from the 42. shawkat m. toorawa, “a corpus, not a canon (nor an anthology): creating a ‘library of arabic literature,’” journal of world literature 2, no. 3 (2017): 356–76. 43. kennedy, “about the library of arabic literature.” 44. muḥammad al-tūnisī, in darfur: an account of the sultanate and its people, trans. humphrey davies (new york: new york university press, 2020), ix–x. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 332 library of arabic literature therefore, in fact, connotes a plurality of units that elicit different ways of reading, some of which explicitly relate to questions of racialization of and within the source works and the differential, contemporary stakes for its audiences. the concept of race in arabophone premodernity: historiographical overview what might racialization mean for the premodern, arabic-speaking world? in his essay, “race, ethnicity, and technologies of belonging,” peter wade argues that concepts of race have two main indicators. first, human differences are organized according to understandings of one’s “dynamic relation to the environment, social and natural.”45 this subsumes a host of beliefs about the situation of different human and nonhuman types in the ordered cosmos, heredity and kinship, and humoral-pathological reasoning about the broad effects of what hippocrates famously dubbed “airs, waters, and places.” race is therefore a covert construction, one made by society but expressed in the idiom of suprahuman laws, divine and scientific.46 it is at once reductive—flattening differences between many, often mutually distinguishing groups—and expansive—aggregating all these groups together based on perceived biobehavioral sameness. wade’s second indicator for whether one is looking at race is whether these distinctions are marshalled towards a “colonial world order” that assumes a changing map for some and a static one for others.47 in wade’s view, this order articulates naturally different human kinds as endemic to specific geographies and as ever increasingly subject to imperial domination and knowledge production. in other words, racialization presumes and aims to reify the categorical difference of subject populations from powerholders: it endeavors not only to make sense of where humans fit within one’s own world order, but also to universalize that order while constraining who controls and shapes its narrative. silva refers to those who monopolize this ability to classify self and other as “transparent subjects”; sara ahmed refers to them as the “absent center.”48 they are those who move through their societies with the greatest ease, anonymity, and presumed independence from or agency in structures of power—or who figure tacitly as the embodiments of putatively transcendent concepts like intellect and morality, as zahra ayubi has recently shown in her work on islamic virtue ethics.49 the violence of imperial growth and maintenance is very real and embodied, and this is not to minimize that fact. however, scholars note that racecraft is also accomplished 45. peter wade, “race, ethnicity, and technologies of belonging,” science, technology, & human values 39, no. 4 (2014): 587–96, at 590. 46. i borrow the phrase “covert construction” from ron mallon. see mallon, “performance, self-explanation, and agency,” philosophical studies: an international journal for philosophy in the analytic tradition 172, no. 10 (2014): 2777–98, at 2785. 47. wade, “race, ethnicity, and technologies of belonging,” 591. 48. silva, towards a global idea of race, passim; sara ahmed, “a phenomenology of whiteness,” feminist theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68, at 157. 49. zahra ayubi, gendered morality: classical islamic ethics of the self, family, and society (new york: columbia university press, 2019), esp. 220–22. 333 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) through the epistemic violence of the idiom of empire, even in empire’s infrastructural absence or when taken up by subject populations within imperial formations. as such, denise kimber buell writes that early christian authors worked against fragmentation, subjugation, and non-peoplehood by “borrow[ing] from hegemonic groups such as the romans by claiming both to be the superior descendants of a degenerate, once glorious people and to be a people potentially open to all.”50 in so doing, they laid the foundations for their own simultaneously racialized and universalized hegemony and supplied a “past” for their aspirational world order, the ultimate violence of which is well known. in her discussion of “magical arabs”—figures troped as having ancient or occult knowledge best harnessed by jews of learning—sara ronis also notes that rabbis featured in the babylonian talmud took up the idiom of empire in order to formulate themselves as superseding these others: the rabbis are not the dominant power in sasanian babylonia; they have no ongoing or even imagined project of colonization, yet their discourse imagines a world in which true power is held by god and god’s authorized interpreters, the rabbis themselves. this imagined rabbinic empire serves to recenter the rabbis within a fundamentally unstable world. for the rabbis, the tayyaʿaʾ51 reinforces the claim that rabbinic laws are universal laws; rabbinic history is world history.52 and so, a caveat to wade’s argument is that in setting forth world orders, colonialism also sets up what it means to imagine world order. minority actors and those outside of the political formations against which they define themselves thus nonetheless frequently take up the terms of conquest and hierarchy, and author their own lineal primordiality or supersession as paradigmatic of meaningful group identities. empire, in other words, was a thing to think with when making race; people like buell’s christians and ronis’ rabbis toyed in the abstract with being the centers of empire, encountering and incorporating global others, and establishing the dominion of their truths and ways of being. wade has a white, european referent in mind, and moreover has in mind the specific manifestation of european colonialism in the early-modern period as the moment when racemaking begins. however, in combination with this caveat, the expansionist epistemology that wade outlines according to which specific parts of the world are cognized as the 50. denise kimber buell, why this new race? ethnic reasoning in early christianity (new york: columbia university press, 2008), 64. 51. ronis follows others in translating this term as “arabs,” noting its synonymy in rabbinic writings with ʿaravayīm, and she makes a compelling argument throughout for the term’s racialization. in her recent dissertation, jessica sylvan mutter advises translating this exonymic refashioning of the name of the tribe of ṭayy—which saw increased and shifting use as syriac authors sought to describe the movement begun by muḥammad and his followers in the first/seventh century—instead as “arabians,” in acknowledgment that the people falling under the term may not have had an ethnic collective consciousness. see jessica sylvan mutter, “by the book: conversion and religious identity in early islamic bilād al-shām and al-jazīra” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2018), 49–83. 52. sara ronis, “imagining the other: the magical arab in rabbinic literature,” prooftexts 39, no. 1 (2021): 1–28, at 12. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 334 “natural home of particular kinds of people, who have, or are coming to have, a particular place in the emerging colonial world order that is being constructed and dominated by european power,” is useful for describing the medieval arab-muslim world as well.53 this is conspicuous in the vocabularies that were increasingly generalized by medieval arabicspeaking authors as a means to divide humanity, which feature a “complex of closely associated terms that linked both behavior and appearance to nature and production.”54 among these, one finds words bearing overlapping connotations of one’s “root” (primarily ʿirq, aṣl), one’s stock (primarily jins, ʿunṣur), and one’s lineal heritage (nasab), all of which articulate individuals’ biocultural inheritance in essentialized and metaphorical terms that suggest its traceability to a primordial place or people of origin. they construe one’s group identity as a product of deeply historical, spatially situated, natural processes. in contrast with the connotations of terms like raza in spanish, which ana m. gómezbravo shows was initially used to mean a defect in an object’s purity, as with an alloyed metal or stained gemstone, to have nasab, ʿirq, or ʿunṣur in early arabic literature is to have strength of social standing: nasab is typically found paired with ḥasab, or inherited merit, and one who is said to have these two qualities is typically a person with known lineal bona fides.55 according to louise marlow, in the early islamic period this usage spurs an apologetic counter-narrative, in which people claim that their ḥasab is their dīn (religious fidelity) and that their nasab is their islam, effectively saying that individual righteousness can outweigh lineage while also reinforcing lineage’s rhetorical importance.56 in this sense, the field of biobehavioral terms found in early arabic literature is more analogous to what charles de miramon has noted of the first appearances of the word race in medieval french texts, in which—akin to people possessing ḥasab and nasab—it became linked with ideas about heritable nobility within dynasties. according to de miramon, ideas of biologically transferred merit became “related to the selfconsciousness of european nobles but are peripheral and even against the ideological core of nobility, which insists on individual virtue.”57 likewise in arabic-speaking domains racialized descriptors were but few of several factors that were used to render individuals socially comprehensible; their use was both sustained and militated against in various forms of islamic discourse. this is a point of contrast with the later european epistemes in which wade claims race originates, but this does not validate his periodization. indeed, 53. wade, “race, ethnicity, and technologies of belonging,” 591. 54. david nirenberg, “was there race before modernity? the example of ‘jewish’ blood in late medieval spain,” in neighboring faiths: christianity, islam, and judaism in the middle ages and today, 232–64 (chicago, il: university of chicago press, 2014), 248. 55. ana m. gómez-bravo, “the origins of ‘raza:’ racializing difference in early spanish,” interfaces: a journal of medieval european literatures 7 (2020): 64–114, at 80. 56. louise marlow, “ḥasab o nasab,” in encyclopaedia iranica, online ed., ed. ehsan yarshater, updated march 20, 2012, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hasab-o-nasab; see also “ḥasab wa-nasab,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online). 57. charles de miramon, “noble dogs, noble blood: the invention of the concept of race in the late middle ages,” in the origins of racism in the west, ed. miriam eliav-feldon, benjamin isaac, and joseph ziegler, 200–16 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2009), 215. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hasab-o-nasab 335 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) david nirenberg recognizes a contradiction at the heart of the project of assigning race’s origins to a specific era at all: we can embrace the view that the pre-modern work of differencemaking can fruitfully be compared to modern concepts of race and still be concerned that claiming to locate the origins of race risks producing partial and provincial histories that replicate the genealogical errors they claim to criticize.58 we might nonetheless conceive of there being periodizable differences in the human scales and costs of forms of racialization. modern, racialized technologies of information gathering and processing, killing, policing, border-construction, and so on can now do local and global violence to people in ways that polities identified as premodern “racial states”59 could not.60 silva likewise subscribes to wade’s periodization even as she inverts its causality, saying that constructions of race reify ideas of time and place. she further claims that the very ways in which we now cognize the human are through an intellectual architecture that she dubs the “analytics of raciality,” the fashioning of which co-constituted many supposed signature features of modernity such as science, globalism, and subjectivity. but to view the premodern world as being preracial by comparison appears to confuse degree with kind. and as i discuss below, the progression to the racial present is neither uniform nor linear. much as in modernity, the explanatory framework of race is ideational and idealtypical; it does not always do the work it is supposed to do. in the medieval arab-islamic context, the significance of the observability of one’s putative origins is thrown into sharp relief in critical moments where their unintelligibility could cast one’s social standing into doubt. one common arabic euphemism sometimes used to point redemptively to the occurrence of atavism—first articulated by aristotle as traits such as skin color from several generations back making a sudden resurgence in one’s offspring—was nazaʿa ilā iʿrāqihi (“he took after his ancestral qualities”).61 the prophet muḥammad uses a similar phrase in a pronouncement on the paternity of children who do not bear the same complexion as their parents: “there is no grounds for condemnation if a man does not identify with his child’s 58. david nirenberg, “race and religion,” in a cultural history of race in the middle ages (800–1350), ed. thomas hahn, 67–80 (new york: bloomsbury, 2021), 69. 59. perhaps the most prominent recent uptake of this term is geraldine heng’s description of seventh/ thirteenth century england, which she has referred to as the “first racial state in the west.” adam hochman has applied david theo goldberg’s characterization of the “racial state” in interpreting heng’s characterization of the medieval english church as statist, although, as he notes, goldberg uses this definition to restrict race to the modern and to correlate its instantiation with the nation state. see geraldine heng, england and the jews: how religion and violence created the first racial state in the west (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019); adam hochman, “is ‘race’ modern? disambiguating the question,” du bois review: social science research on race (2020): 1–19, at 12. 60. the model of sovereignty that extends these mechanisms of racialized violence has been termed “necropolitics” by achille mbembe. see mbembe, “necropolitics,” trans. libby mientjes, public culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 61. on aristotle’s opinions regarding inheritance, see devin henry, “aristotle on the mechanism of inheritance,” journal of the history of biology 39, no. 3 (2006): 425–55. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 336 color, for it is simply a root toward which [the child] has inclined (huwa ʿirq nazaʿahu).”62 notably these cases usually involve accusations of women’s adultery with non-arab racialized people. in the preand early-islamic period, those with mixed paternal arabian and maternal non-arabian lineage were dubbed hajīns, a pejorative term sometimes translated as “mongrel.” however, after the rise of islam, legal nasabs gradually came to exclusively emphasize patrilineal descent, in a move that elizabeth urban describes in part as a plea for the enduring legitimacy of the leadership classes by “redefin[ing] concubines’ children as full ‘arabs’ and thus fully deserving of the caliphate.”63 mixed identities ensuing from relationships between various historic arabian families and non-arabian women were legally elided despite still having everyday social impacts, which came to pose new trials for children who were raced differently than their arab fathers in literature and in life.64 legal structures such as umm walad (“mother of a child”) supported patrilineal pathways to assimilation into arabness as well by ensuring that children born to an enslaved mother— who, as a matter of course, was typically ethnically as well as religiously different from her owner65—would assume their father’s family name and social rank. the patriarchal underpinning of this structure is a double-edged sword. the practice of denying paternity of mainly female children born to enslaved concubines and rendering them muwalladāt (“born” into slavery) endured in the early islamic period.66 gendered treatment of the transmission of ethnic status ramified elsewhere, too. there is some evidence that the terminologies, and assuredly the stigmas, relating to being born to a non-arab father and arab mother persisted into the islamic period, and that this vocabulary was mapped onto understandings of enslaveability. such people were designated as muqrif, which literally indicates something adulterated or, in husbandry, “a horse or some other creature of lower pedigree whose mother is arabian and whose father is not,” and, like hajīn, was said in the jāhiliyya and early centuries of islam to have designated heritable low social rank or bastardy.67 the sixth-century poet hind bt. al-nuʿmān used the term iqrāf (mixed offspring) to vaunt her own family by claiming that her having ignoble children 62. muḥammad b. mukarram b. al-manẓūr, lisān al-ʿarab (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1955), 4395; ibn ḥajar and al-bukhārī, “bāb idhā ʿaraḍ bi-nafī al-walad,” in fatḥ al-bārī sharḥ ṣaḥīḥ al-bukhārī, ed. ʿabd al-ʿazīz b. ʿabd allāh b. bāz (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, 1959), 9:442. 63. elizabeth urban, conquered populations in early islam: non-arabs, slaves, and the sons of slave mothers (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020), 119. 64. i have discussed this in brief in the following as well: rachel schine, “race and blackness in premodern arabic literature,” oxford research encyclopedia of literature, 2021, https://oxfordre.com/literature/ view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1298. 65. on the evolution of the phenomenon of ethnically differentiated, non-arabian enslavement, see ramon harvey, “slavery, indenture, and freedom: exegesis of the ‘mukātaba verse’ (q. 24:33) in early islam,” journal of qurʾanic studies 21, no. 2 (2019): 68–107, at 72. 66. elizabeth urban, “race, gender and slavery in early islamicate history,” history compass 20, no. 5 (2022): 1–11, at 7. 67. ibn al-manẓūr, lisān al-ʿarab (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1981), 3600–3601. https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1298 https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1298 337 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) was proof that her lovers had been lesser than (wa-in yaku68 iqrāfan fa-mā anjaba al-faḥl); a line attributed to bashshār b. burd shows him satirizing the decadence of the times by stating that muqrifs had become society’s chiefs, and those metaphoric stallions with parents of pure lineage (ṭirf) kept the company of saddled-up donkeys (al-ḥimār al-mūkaf).69 constructions of mixed identities, like those of race broadly, are social and not biological.70 in testament to this, the conception of people as muqrif has a longer legal life than hajīn in human applications. in one fourth/tenth-century bill of sale, muqrif is ostensibly used to designate a woman born to a man who had an enslaved father and free mother (muwalladat al-muqrif),71 indicating the term’s continued currency for and conflation with heritable, racialized unfreedom. free, arab women were discouraged from mixed relationships by such prospects, and indeed their insulation from legal harm (ḍarar) through them was enshrined by various islamic legal schools through the concept of kafāʾa, which emphasized parity of ability, nasab, and degree of freedom between spouses.72 at the same time that the definitive flow of nasab was taking these gendered turns in islam’s first centuries, it was also transforming from a local aspect of arabian social capital into a heuristic for describing all of humanity. the advent of the abbasids and their secretariat brought with it an interest in and capabilities for mapping the span of their empire and modeling knowledge of the world, visually and in prose. the third/ninth-century caliph al-maʾmūn, legendary for his thirst for knowledge, is said to have commissioned a no-longer extant map of the known world, inspired by the work of ptolemy.73 chancery functionaries, historians, scientists, and anthologists synthesized information conveyed through isrāʾīliyyāt and translations from myriad other late antique sources in a plastic set of mapping traditions whose focuses 68. here, read yakun, the final letter of which is apocopated for the sake of meter. 69. muḥyī al-dīn al-nawawī, kitāb al-majmuʿ, ed. muḥammad najīb al-muṭīʿī (jeddah: maktabat al-irshād, 1992), 18:59; kimberley carole mcneil, “a critical translation of the article on the horse from al-damiri’s ‘hayat al-hayawan al-kubra’” (ma diss., university of arizona, 1983), 13. al-tawḥīdī, al-baṣāʾir wa-l-dhakhāʾir, ed. muḥammad al-sayyid ʿuthmān (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2014), 128. 70. i here paraphrase conclusions made by josep lluís mateo dieste in his comparative study of mixedness in north africa. see josep lluís mateo dieste, “are there ‘mestizos’ in the arab world? a comparative survey of classification categories and kinship systems,” middle eastern studies 48, no. 1 (2012): 125–38. 71. see naïm vanthieghem, “quelques contrats de vente d’esclaves de la collection aziz atiyya,” the journal of juristic papyrology 44 (2014): 163-87, at 179-90. though used here to simply mean “born to,” muwallad(a) is a term that also evokes mixing, culturally or according to biological epistemologies, and in various times and places has indicated someone of non-arab heritage who arabizes through their milieu, or someone of part-arab heritage. in iberia, for example, as being a mawlā by clientage rather than manumission receded as a practice, the term muwallad encoded those who may previously have fallen under the institution while also distancing new iberian converts to islam and arabizers from old, prestigious families of mawālī to the umayyads. on classing muwalladūn vis-à-vis mawālī in umayyad al-andalus, see janina safran, defining boundaries in al-andalus: muslims, christians, and jews in islamic iberia (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2013), 56–61. 72. y. linant de bellefonds, “kafāʾa,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill online). 73. michael cooperson, al-ma’mun (oxford: oneworld, 2005), 103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_sim_3772 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 338 tended to vary in accordance with their authors’ own locales.74 through their diffuse efforts, nasab came to encompass and account for all the people about whom knowledge was increasingly being generated via noahic genealogy, an analytic already in use in the early stages of the arabian conquests and their chroniclers who initially drew up classifications for the peoples to whom they and their peers were exposed and of whom they were aware. they traced all of humanity to one of noah’s three sons—sam, yafet, and ham. each of the sons was said to have populated a different region of the globe. sam’s progeny were thought to occupy the world’s idealized central latitudes, yafet’s the world’s north, and ham’s the south. the points farthest north and farthest south were regarded as least habitable for any form of humanity, and the people that live there were therefore often linked with eschatological imagery in addition to this primordial prophetic history: the fires of hell char the skin and inscribe sinfulness in a similar fashion to the world’s far southern reaches, the frigidity of the north breeds stout bodies and fierceness and foments the irrational irreligiosity of peoples like gog and magog.75 as this geographic logic attests, in abbasid-era writings the habituations and temperaments of the brothers’ offspring became grafted onto greek schemes of the “climes,” or bands of similar climate that produced similar effects in the body’s humors, and in flora and fauna, across large swaths of the world. those residing in temperate climes, like sam’s children, were said to have more normative dispositions and physical features than those in non-temperate zones. the environs of ham’s children, known as the bilād al-sūdān (“lands of the blacks”), where the extreme heat and dryness blackened the skin and curled the hair and swelled the lips and caused intellectual lassitude and pleasureseeking, deviate from the norm in one direction. in contrast, the lands of yafet’s progeny, known by a handful of regional monikers rather than one, color-coded term, had cold and damp climates that lightened one’s features and straightened one’s hair and made one more militant and less rational. sometimes the persians are descendants of yafet, sometimes of sam. as zoltán szombathy states, the configurations of these groupings in arabic works are not wholly separate from local uses of lineage among and across arabian cultures, but have a common thread: the common element, if any, in what is called nasab in various societies—arab or non-arab, sedentary or nomadic—may well be found in the fact that nasab is always and invariably a symbol, and more specifically a symbol of power and rights.76 we might further say that in imperially motivated and rigorously established arabiclanguage epistemologies of racial difference, the terms listed above act not just as symbols 74. i borrow the term “mapping traditions” from zayde antrim. see antrim, mapping the middle east (london: reaktion books, 2018). 75. aziz al-azmeh, “barbarians in arab eyes,” past and present: a journal of historical studies 134 (1992): 3–18, at 10, 15. 76. zoltán szombathy, “genealogy in medieval muslim societies,” studia islamica 95 (2002): 5–35, at 35. emphasis in the original. 339 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) but as “floating signifiers” whose symbolism is subject to change and contestation.77 rigor and malleability are not mutually exclusive, per what wade notes above about racialization’s principal importance for including and excluding members, probing frontiers, and consolidating power within a colonial world order. ann laura stoler similarly reminds us that concepts are flexible implements to which we have ascribed and given false stability; otherwise, they would not require “repeated and assertive performance.”78 it therefore follows that the exact number and boundaries of the climes is not fixed across sources even as patterns emerge—sometimes southern arabia is in the same clime as the “lands of the blacks,” other times not, and sometimes their geographic closeness was not mapped onto human appearance.79 some thinkers put great determinative stake in connections with pre-islamic arabs, others the earliest muslim community, and still others see the two as nearly indistinct, effectively essentializing islam as arab. in each case, writers configured humanity in ways that staked claims of historical kinship, wedding these with contemporary articulations of power. this persists across genres, though in different permutations. as such, i have divided the translations i address below into the three broad categories of travel literature, mannered literature, and popular literature, in order to point out the connections within and between these forms, the racial narratives they employ, and how translators have navigated their rendering. travel literature: ibn faḍlān, abū zayd al-sīrāfī, and muḥammad b. ʿumar al-tūnisī in much the way that expanding imperial horizons caused geographic and travel writing to proliferate and wax in importance in the abbasid era, modern readerships prize these writings on “others’ others” as a tool for broadening their perspectives on heterogeneity at home. julia schleck notes that travel narratives that feature encounters between “nonwhite individuals and white europeans” present students with counternarratives to whitewashed national histories and are therefore instrumental “sites for antiracist work.”80 they also captivate and educate in myriad other ways, as attested in the fact that both penguin classics and the library of arabic literature have given travel writings significant billing 77. this phrase was originally coined by stuart hall in: sut jhally and stuart hall, race: the floating signifier (northampton, ma: media education foundation, 1996). 78. ann laura stoler, duress: imperial durabilities in our times (durham, nc: duke university press, 2016), 17–18. 79. though the clime schemes were typically longitudinal, al-idrīsī, for example, places the “lands of the blacks” primarily in the west of the first clime but acknowledges the existence of black people in cities farther north and east, lying in the second clime on the west coast of the red sea in places like ʿaydhāb. locations that are longitudinally parallel and on red sea coast’s east, like jeddah, are not said to have black residents. he also divides those located in the first clime but situated in south and east asian locales, including parts of india and china and those who “encircle the sea” (kullu man yaḥtaḍinu al-baḥr), as “brown” (sumr) and restricts being black (sūd) to those in african locales (including coastal ones, as with the lands of the zanj), distinguished by their peoples’ desert dwelling (ahl al-ṣaḥārā). see al-idrīsī, kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (cairo: maktabat al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 2002), 1:134, 98. 80. julia schleck, “stranger than fiction: early modern travel narratives and the antiracist classroom,” in teaching medieval and early modern cross-cultural encounters, ed. karina f. attar and lynn shutters, 87–101 (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014), 88. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 340 amid their offerings. in one instance they even overlap, with both presses producing their own versions of aḥmad b. faḍlān’s fourth/tenth-century epistle about his travels as an abbasid envoy, referred to in arabic simply as his risāla. the penguin classics translators of the risāla of ibn faḍlān, paul lunde and caroline stone, echo schleck’s bid for normalizing a multiethnic portrait of premodernity by remarking on the surprising mundanity of an arab dignitary’s run-in with vikings, saying the encounter “was not […] as unexpected as might at first appear.”81 they then explain the routes of trade—primarily in furs—that networked volga river traders with numerous, more southerly muslim cosmopolises. throughout their introduction to the text, and indeed in the title under which they chose to publish it—ibn faḍlān and the land of darkness— lunde and stone center the encounter between the baghdadi envoy and these people who have traveled downriver from a “mysterious” region.82 their reasons for this are clear: the vikings’ presence in the territories of the bulghār king to whom our author was sent was an accident of timing, but the resulting descriptions have far overshadowed the journey’s original intents in contemporary receptions. lunde and stone magnify this further by regaling us with the land of darkness (diyār al-ẓulumāt), an arabic moniker for the northernmost reaches of the known world, where dwell the epitomes of difference between the children of sam and the children of yafet, such as the peoples of gog and magog, who figure in the eschaton across a number of traditions. in so doing, the translators emphasize a meeting not only between south and north, but east and west, in that the viking rusʾ, hailing originally from sweden, are now aligned with schleck’s “white europeans,” and arabs with “nonwhite individuals.” what might appear to be a reference to conrad on the cover for the uninitiated is quickly reversed when they explain that ibn faḍlān would have been “very much aware” that baghdad typified “sophisticated civilization”—the lifestyles of the northerners less so.83 in contrast to lunde and stone’s tactic of simultaneously centering and subverting europeanness, the library of arabic literature’s translator of the same text, james montgomery, achieves what we might call a provincialization of europe by focusing primarily on the journey’s stated target, a religiously edifying entente between the newly islamized turkic bulghārs, referred to in the text as ṣaqāliba, and the abbasid caliph. in a west that has long failed to appreciate the distinctions between arabs and turks, and between the muslims and non-muslims among them, with conflating exonyms like “saracen” still disturbingly common even in academic medieval studies, montgomery renders this rendezvous strange rather than mundane.84 he asks rhetorically, “why would someone make such a journey in the early fourth/tenth century, from the luxurious splendor of 81. ibn faḍlān, ibn fadlān and the land of darkness: arab travelers in the far north, trans. paul lunde and caroline stone (london: penguin classics, 2012), xiii. 82. ibid., xvii. 83. ibid., xxi. 84. on the contemporary scholarly use of the term saracen and its problems, see shokoofeh rajabzadeh, “the depoliticized saracen and muslim erasure,” literature compass 16, no. 9–10 (2019): 1–8. 341 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) caliphal baghdad to a billet in a yurt among the bulghārs, a semi-nomadic turkic tribe?”85 the answer lies in the title montgomery gives to his own rendering of the text, mission to the volga: “mission” is a double entendre that indicates the abbasid’s “mutually inclusive” designs of religio-political expansion through missionizing and the daring, dangerous adventure with which ibn faḍlān and his comrades are tasked.86 through this choice of focus, montgomery also urges readers to dispense with cynical readings that construe the text’s proselytism as a convenient cover for purely economic motives. and yet, as lunde and stone raise, certain economic valences are unmistakable when read against other arabic sources about the lands ibn faḍlān traversed.87 most prominent among these other works are a host of references to the trade in ṣaqāliba— sometimes rendered as “slavs” but, as shown in these uses, indicating an extensive identity formation comprising various peoples of the northern steppes. ṣaqāliba is not an entirely exonymic usage, but rather is an arabic rendering, likely via greek, of the term slovenes, and though authors note that while some who came under the moniker in arabic would certainly have self-designated as slovenes, many also would not. henry and renée kahane argue that because of transformations to the term in greek, it had been an indicator of unfreedom rather than a mere ethnonym when it was taken up in arabic.88 the multivalence of ṣaqāliba often results in qualified glosses, such that marek jankowiak defines it as “a term that in medieval arabic literature denoted the slavic populations of central and eastern europe (and possibly some of their neighbors).”89 people who fell under the term also did so because of how they arrived in different muslim-ruled lands, in the west via markets in prague or in the east, of course, via the volga.90 those enslaved from these regions were commonly used in central islamic lands as concubines, soldiers, and eunuch guards, and they could only legally come under this condition if they were non-muslim. one third/ninth-century author relates that the ṣaqāliba, who are often counterposed with the zanj in a white-black polarity, are said to be improved by castration, which “makes one smarter, sharpens his acuity, and strengthens his nature and energies”; before castration, ṣaqāliba are notoriously brutish.91 the paternalist logic here is self-evident; this brief passage both writes the ṣaqāliba as depraved and finds a key to their remediation in a violent, self-serving mechanism that brings the ṣaqāliba under implicitly muslim control. so synonymous did the two become that in certain instances, the term ṣaqāliba is used to simply mean “eunuchs.” both the resonances of ṣaqāliba as light85. ibn faḍlān, mission to the volga, ed. and trans. james montgomery, in two arabic travel books, ed. and trans. tim mackintosh smith and james e. montgomery (new york: new york university press, 2014), 167. 86. ibid., 178. 87. ibn faḍlān, ibn fadlān and the land of darkness, xxx. 88. henry kahane and renée kahane, “notes on the linguistic history of sclavus,” in studi in onore di ettore lo gatto e giovanni maver, 345–60 (florence, 1962), 360. 89. marek jankowiak, “what does the slave trade in saqaliba tell us about early islamic slavery?” international journal of middle east studies 49, no. 1 (2017): 169–72, at 169. 90. ibid. 91. al-jāḥiẓ, kitāb al-ḥayawān, ed. ʿabd al-salām muḥammad hārūn (cairo: muṣṭafā al-bābī al-ḥalabī, 1965), 1:116. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 342 skinned enslaved people vis-à-vis the zanj or sūdān and the resonance of them as eunuchs diffused into other parts of the mediterranean, with cognates in spanish that indicate gelding, and with the old french chanson de roland making use of a cognate to indicate parts of the “saracen” militia distinct from those that are “dark” (brun).92 just as the raciality of the term renders who precisely is meant by the nominal ethnonym zanj in various instances unclear—what is sometimes a particular term for a variety of african ethnicities from the continent’s southeast elsewhere means anyone with dark skin, with particular unfree and/or subordinated statuses, and so on—the term ṣaqāliba thus invites slippage in abbasid-era sources. those dubbed ṣaqāliba discursively meld with various denizens of the northern and western peripheries of the islamic world. when the poet jarīr once acerbically declared “[the tribes of] taym and ismāʿīl are as much kin to each other as the blacks (zanj) are to the byzantines (rūm),” a listener replied, “the ṣaqāliba are more distant [from the zanj],” indicating that they would have offered a more apt comparison, and was met with the response “jarīr doesn’t differentiate between byzantines and ṣaqāliba.”93 happily, lunde and stone include a variety of other, later sources about the far north with which to compare ibn faḍlān’s writings on the ṣaqāliba and others. tellingly, it is only with these later sources that the two translate using the term “race.” is ibn faḍlān then pre-racial? in his own exonymic slippage, ibn faḍlān refers to his host not as the leader of the bulghārs, or even of a group of turks, but as malik al-ṣaqāliba, “king of the slavs,” though when the king orders his own title proclaimed in friday sermons, it is malik bulghār.94 where lunde and stone’s translation contains no mention of the bulghār ethnicity outside of their few self-designating moments, montgomery has added several mentions of the bulghār territories and people to the text where genericisms (e.g., baladuhum) are used, seemingly to signpost and clarify who is being discussed. we might wonder how ibn faḍlān’s own views of the bulghārs-qua-ṣaqāliba were prefigured by the fact that the caliph al-muqtadir, by whom he was dispatched, was said to have conspicuously consumed the services of 11,000 eunuchs, including “7,000 blacks and 4,000 white slavs (ṣaqāliba bayḍa),” who “formed a prominent element in the court’s audiences and parades.”95 per the foregoing, ṣaqāliba may already have been synonymous with whiteness for ibn faḍlān in his era, and as such he does not discuss their color. however, he is struck by the particular “perfection” of the tall bodies and pale (shuqr) tending toward ruddy (ḥumr) visages of the new-to-him rūs (fa-lam ar atamm abdān minhum).96 by contrast, the invisible or presumed whiteness of the ṣaqāliba for ibn faḍlān serves as a reminder that many arab authors in central abbasid lands by ibn faḍlān’s time themselves also identified as white (abyaḍ). this is an identity that al-jāḥiẓ, writing a few decades before ibn faḍlān, queries through his black narrators in 92. kahane and kahane, “notes on the linguistic history of sclavus,” 359. 93. al-jāḥiẓ, kitāb al-ḥayawān, 7:236 94. ibn faḍlān, mission to the volga, 218–19. 95. nadia maria el-cheikh, “eunuchs at the court of al-muqtadir,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 48, no. 2 (2005): 234–52, at 236; hilāl b. al-muḥsin al-ṣābiʾ, rusūm dār al-khilāfa, ed. mikhāʾīl ʿawwād (beirut: dār al-rāʾid al-ʿarab, 1986), 8. 96. ibn faḍlān, mission to the volga, 240. 343 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) fakhr al-sūdān ʿalā al-bīḍān, saying “the arabs are of us, not of the whites, because of their closeness in color to us. indians (al-hind) are brighter (asfar) in color than the arabs, yet are [said to be] among the blacks.”97 the crystallization of the presumption of arab whiteness later led the eighth/fourteenth-century author ibn khaldūn to remark of northern people that they “are not called by their color, because the people who established the conventional meaning of words were themselves white,” and as such there was no deviation from the norm that elicited marking (fa-lam yusammū bi-iʿtibār alwānihim li-ann al-bayāḍ kāna lawnan li-ahl tilka al-lugha wa-l-wāḍaʿa li-l-asmāʾ fa-lam yakun fīhi gharāba taḥmalu ʿalā iʿtibārihi).98 true to this, throughout the aforementioned sources, ṣaqlabī whiteness is indicated most frequently when in contradistinction with enslaved people who are raced as black. that their whiteness is particularly visibilized in sources where their unfreedom is also emphasized is illustrative both of relative ṣaqlabī proximity to and precarity within whiteness as a hegemonic mode of being; their whiteness is most insisted upon when it poses the least likelihood of category confusion because it is forming part of a classed opposition that did not signify vis-à-vis arabness. similarly, writing of depictions of enslavement in arabmuslim painting, lamia balafrej notes that, “images of black workers thus fulfilled a double role: as the nonidentical twin of the white slave, and as the reversed image of the free arab.” she detects dichotomies between black and white slaves and between unfree black and free arab actors in artworks, but identifies multiple common elements that forge iconographic similarity between enslaved white people and free arabs, such that the impression of complete reversal does not obtain. instead, in her view, this implies that unfree white figures are given representational “respite or possibility of change” in their subject positions.99 at the confluence of the volga and kama rivers, straddling modern europe and asia, and encountering a variety of “white,” loosely related children of yafet whom we now regard as turkic, slavic, and nordic, ibn faḍlān’s travels therefore prompt us not just to subvert or provincialize europe’s gaze, but to go a step further by redressing europe’s notional monopoly on the discourses of whiteness. the text and its translations instead enable us to query the racialization of whiteness in transregional premodern consciousness. when reading the text with race in mind in this fashion, agreements emerge between ibn faḍlān’s observations and the generally accepted portrait of the peoples of the north sketched above. the ways that the bitter cold of the north is described link it ineluctably with paganism and related practices while also heightening the apparent bravery of our narrator; encamping on the frozen amu darya, ibn faḍlān tells us the land is like zamharīr, or the harsh cold of hell that, like its harsh heat, is said to be a “form of punishment” (lawn al-ʿadhāb) unparalleled on earth (ashadd mā tajidūna min al-bard min zamharīr 97. al-jāḥiẓ, kitāb al-rasāʾil al-siyāsiyya (beirut: dār wa-maktabat al-hilāl, 2002), 552. 98. translation as quoted in paul hardy, “medieval muslim philosophers on race,” in philosophers on race: critical essays, ed. julie k. ward and tommy l. scott, 38–62 (oxford: blackwell publishers, 2002), 51; ibn khaldūn, muqaddimat ibn khaldūn, ed. ʿabd allāh muḥammad darwīsh (damascus: dār yaʿrib, 2004), 192. 99. lamia balafrej, “domestic slavery, skin color, and image dialectic in thirteenth-century arabic manuscripts,” art history 44, no. 4 (2021): 1012–36, at 1031, 1024. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 344 jahannam).100 much of our intrepid envoy’s party cannot continue farther because of it. pressing onward, though, ibn faḍlān comes across evidence that the climate breeds difficulties in conveying religious truth, with its attendant norms of physical and intellectual comportment, and so on: one turk jokes that if god is punishing them with this cold, they’ll just give him whatever he wants. elsewhere, various northern pagans are flattened together by a common vocabulary of difference-making: both the ghuzzīya (the “filthiest of the turks”) and the rūs—the description of whose poor hygiene is infamous—are straying asses (ḥamīr ḍālla), which resonates multiply with representations of unbelievers in the qurʾān as astray (ḍāllīn) and as asses who turn away from warnings of the day of judgment (ḥamīr mustanfira) or who are immodest in other ways (q 31:19).101 that this phrase punctuates ibn faḍlān’s comments on these peoples’ physical filth calls us to consider the implied relationship between external and internal attributes. it also recalls paul hardy’s statement that those in temperate zones were the “human paradigm […] all human beings are admitted to the conversation of justice, indeed, to the conversation of philosophy itself but only if they conform to this paradigm.”102 ibn faḍlān essentializes several groups in intemperate zones in nonhuman terms that other authors extend much further. as both montgomery and lunde and stone note, ibn faḍlān’s writings predate a genre of diaristic travel narrative. this genre would also become heavily blended with written sources on geography that taxonomically stitched together the climate and its humoral effects with race, rationality, and belief. ibn faḍlān ultimately does not make these connections explicit. however, there are other moments that suggest his awareness of the sciences of bodily scrutiny that were marshalled in these later literatures. where ibn faḍlān extols the ruddiness (ḥumr) of the rūs, he claims that he did not see any ṣaqāliba who shared a similar undertone to their skin (iḥmirār), the phrasing of which closely matches the english idea of being in the “pink of health.” along with this lack of a red cast, the ṣaqāliba are colicky, many of them dying from the condition (qūlanj), which in medical understandings was linked with coldness and dryness of the humors and an excess of black bile.103 this reference to general distemper evokes physiognomic and medical discourses that further deepen the impression of the ṣaqāliba as unidealized and not-quite-white in their racialization, even as they dwell at the earth’s famously pale extreme.104 100. ibn faḍlān, mission to the volga, 196; al-nisāʾī, tafsīr al-nisāʾī, ed. ṣabrī b. ʿabd al-khāliq al-shāfiʿī and sayyid b. ʿabbās al-jalīsī (beirut: muʾassasat al-kutub al-thaqāfiyya, 1990), 2:660. 101. ibn faḍlān, mission to the volga, 200–201, 242–43 n. 18. 102. hardy, “medieval muslim philosophers on race,” 50. 103. ibn faḍlān, mission to the volga, 238. 104. though she does not employ the lens of conditional whiteness to the texts themselves, claire weeda traces the learned use of physiognomic and climatological writing—and flytings—in western european academies that had heterogenous memberships as prefiguring a range of virulent ethnonationalisms that structure hierarchies within whiteness in analogous fashion to ibn faḍlān’s comparisons. weeda refers to these claims as establishing preferential distinctions between “shades of whiteness,” because their authors expressed them in terms of their direct observability. the language of conditional whiteness, meanwhile, centers these distinctions’ social work as well as their mediation through elite institutions. weeda further notes the major role played by latin translations of islamic scientific texts in supporting these claims. see claire weeda, ethnicity in 345 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) ibn faḍlān’s use of ruddiness as an indicator of health is likely based on more than mere intuition; by his era, translations of the iconic physiognomic treatise of polemon circulated in central islamic lands and its knowledges became embedded in everyday learned discourse.105 even before then, the use of professional physiognomists was common in the prophet muḥammad’s lifetime, and a branch of prophetic medicine also consolidated their ways of seeing the body.106 a combination of these knowledges was instrumental to, among other things, the purchase of slaves. manuals for purchase were a genre dominated by physicians who instructed would-be purchasers in discerning the health of each of the different types of people they might own, particularly because indicators of greater than normal humoral imbalance in those with black skin were different than those with white, and because slavers had varying, respective techniques for hiding their infirmity.107 ibn faḍlān’s ability, therefore, to detect and differentiate between the temporary, accidental indicators of health and the essential natures of those he encounters in the north offers an occasion to discuss the diverse roles of natural sciences in supporting different forms of social hierarchy based on health, physical ability, and race. on the one hand, physiognomy could be used to evaluate the individuated and ephemeral. on the other, it was also taken up to reify collective and immutable identities. parsing the former from the latter throws racialization’s selective essentialisms into relief. the risāla is a stepping-stone through which to begin interrogating these notions, but it does not explicitly catalogue them. indeed, ibn faḍlān’s lack of direct reliance on systematic knowledges and the air of authorial uniqueness that results earns comment in both translations’ introductions. montgomery, for his part, reads ibn faḍlān as particularly “honest” in his “humanity.”108 he writes things earnestly and as he sees them, he frequently “entertain[s] contradictions,” but when he fails to understand his surroundings, he occasionally has recourse to indulging the ugly human quality of “superiority.”109 what montgomery identifies as humanity, lunde and stone name “objectivity,” saying that those cultural elements ibn faḍlān makes an honest effort to understand, like “food, drink, dress, manners, beliefs, customs, laws, taxes, and burial rites,” are the same ones a “modern anthropologist” might examine, though these categories of analysis have always been strategically and subjectively chosen.110 each translator in their own way problematically inscribes ibn faḍlān as perspectiveless in their frontmatter—his experience is universally human or aloofly social-scientific, yet also divorced from intellectual streams of sources and traditions, to say nothing of his own racialized positionality. in so doing, though, they put their fingers on the pulse of something medieval europe 950–1250: medicine, power, and religion (york: york medieval press, 2021), 104–5 and passim. 105. robert hoyland, “physiognomy in islam,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam, 30 (2005): 361–402, 361. 106. ibid., 362–65. 107. see, e.g., ibn buṭlān, risālat jāmiʿat al-funūn al-nāfiʿa fī shirāʾ al-raqīq wa-taqlīb al-ʿabīd, in nawādir al-makhṭūṭāt, ed. ʿabd al-salām hārūn (cairo: muṣṭafā al-ḥalabī, 1973), 2:379; hannah barker, that most precious merchandise, 99–100. 108. ibn faḍlān, mission to the volga, 171. 109. ibid. 110. ibn faḍlān, ibn fadlān and the land of darkness, xxv. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 346 in the author’s own voice. moreover, they gift us the opportunity to inspect prior forms of whiteness and perspectivelessness alongside our own. it is perhaps ironic that a much clearer perspective appears in a piece of travel literature that, unlike ibn faḍlān’s, is not single-authored. where penguin anthologizes ibn faḍlān alongside other authors writing about the far north in arabic, the library of arabic literature pairs it with a text that addresses wholly different parts of the world, abū zayd al-sīrāfī’s accounts of china and india (akhbār al-ṣīn wa-l-hind). despite its attribution, al-sīrāfī’s dependency on other sources, written and oral, is clear. indeed, the term akhbār, “reportage” or “accounts,” already connoted an established literary type by the time of this travel book’s third/ninth-century appearance, predicated on the ethic of trustworthily recording eyewitness depictions. it was not until al-sīrāfī, though, that the form was put to work in expounding the islamic world’s eastern neighbors, an endeavor that also required soliciting the akhbār of those not always thought of as authoritative witnesses in other media: merchants, travelers, pilgrims, sailors, and factotums. the first book (kitāb) that al-sīrāfī synthesizes into his collection is in fact more properly ascribed to an otherwise unidentified merchant, sulaymān, along with other nameless reporters.111 the lines between al-sīrāfī as editor and his anecdote-supplying colleagues are blurred, lending many of the text’s value judgments an air of consensus and compelling us to recall that much of the work of naturalizing race, per wade’s criteria above, lies in occluding the individual and all too human voices behind race’s social construction. where in ibn faḍlān this occurs at the level of language, for al-sīrāfī it also occurs at the level of source selection; both inscribe a normative balance between the said and unsaid. like ibn faḍlān, al-sīrāfī does not explicitly taxonomize the climes. he does, however, echo the late antique conception that those at the known globe’s farthest reaches are the least normative, speaking of islands where men go naked and practice cannibalism in the southern indian ocean, as opposed to the urbane precincts of china and india. these differences are paired with physiognomic indicators that are ascribed aesthetic value. and so, the island-dwelling cannibals are “black and have frizzy hair, hideous faces, and long feet,” whereas china, which is described as yet healthier terrain than india, is populated by the “pale-skinned” and “good looking”; its people are the most similar to arabs.112 this perception of china’s relative healthfulness may have roots in antiquity as, in addition to latitudinal climate divisions, some authors held that longitudinally those easterners closest to the sun when it rose were at a humoral advantage compared to those farther west.113 the translator, tim mackintosh-smith, appears in one instance to register this disparity as well as that between the reporters and their subjects as a racial one. where their respective non-muslimness is discussed, he translates the two groups—indians and chinese people—as “either race” (ṣanafayn). however in a context in which the term “race” 111. abū zayd al-sīrāfī, accounts of china and india, trans. tim mackintosh-smith, in mackintosh-smith and montgomery, two arabic travel books, 5. 112. ibid., 27, 43. 113. joshua t. olsson, “the world in arab eyes: a reassessment of the climes in medieval islamic scholarship,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 77, no. 3 (2014): 487–508, at 497–99. 347 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) otherwise does not occur and which has not primed us to consider geography’s role in racecraft in its frontmatter, this choice feels alienated from discussions of what it has meant, throughout history, to construct the human “kinds” that aṣnāf stands in for.114 such discussions might be more fruitfully staged through the ways that the text hierarchizes the subjects under study; despite their religious difference, there is greater respect implicit in descriptions of china. this also maps onto perceived dominion, with even the indians and chinese averring that china’s ruler ranks just below the rulers of arabia and above byzantium, while india’s king is fourth in prominence.115 one could use this text in the classroom to talk about how race is used to consolidate and code relations of power that define self, allies, and others. from his perches at two great abbasid entrepots, the port cities of sīrāf and basra, our author performs knowledge of the world’s peoples in ways that are at once encyclopedic and targeted, ultimately sorting people into those with whom a muslim can have meaningful exchange and those with whom he cannot. in the words of abdul janmohamed, the “simple machinery of the manichean allegory,” or binary oppositions that authors use to represent self and other, belies the seeming diversity of “natives” represented in colonial ethnography, all of whom are ultimately commodified through various strategies of symbolism, while the author is the commodifier.116 similarly, though al-sīrāfī’s encyclopedic approach presents us with seemingly diametrically opposed ugly, dark-skinned cannibals and pale-faced, beautiful civilizational helpmates, he also garners all this knowledge through, and places it at the disposal of, the endeavors of travel, trade, and exploration that collectively enriched the abbasid empire. the breadth of interaction with the goods and people into which al-sīrāfī gives insight became instrumental to the abbasids’ cosmopolitan reputation both in its understanding in the medieval period and today.117 the abbasid caliphate took an active interest in sustaining the dynamics that al-sīrāfī represents, with the first known state interventions to promote indian ocean trade through the abolition of import tariffs taking place under al-wāthiq in the mid-third/ninth century.118 the reverberations of these cultivated interactions across imperial boundaries led at times to strife abroad: the bustling trade that the merchant sulaymān, via al-sīrāfī, describes that linked basra with the chinese city of guangzhou, to which “muslim, christian, jewish, and zoroastrian” foreign merchants were granted privileged access through chinese governmental protection, led to a late-third/ninth114. al-sīrāfī, accounts of china and india, 63. 115. ibid., 39. 116. abdul r. janmohamed, “the economy of manichean allegory: the function of racial difference in colonialist literature,” critical inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 59–87, at 64. 117. on the fraught application of the term cosmopolitanism due to its erasure of inequality, particularly in the abbasid world as recalled by arabic popular tales, see arafat razzaque and rachel schine, “teaching the worlds of the 1001 nights,” approaches to teaching the global middle ages, ed. geraldine heng, 66–84 (new york: modern language association of america, 2022). on the question of “cosmopolitanism” as a term of use for islamic history, see mana kia, “space, sociality, and sources of pleasure: a response to sanjay subrahmanyam,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 61 (2018): 256–76. 118. timothy power, “the abbasid indian ocean trade,” in the world in the viking age, ed. søren sindbaek and athena trakadas, 46–49 (roskilde: the viking ship museum, 2014), 49. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 348 century revolt targeting nonlocal traders.119 we may thus use al-sīrāfī to discuss abbasid imperial and inter-imperial trajectories. these were marked in this period, according to peter von sivers, by a trend away from militancy and the “fiscal gains of conquest,” and toward commercial development not just in the indian ocean but also on their western frontiers, in part because of the byzantine consumption of indian ocean goods transported along the euphrates and then overland through syria.120 as one of the first arabic texts to chronicle the indian ocean world, al-sīrāfī is often linked with the legendary travels of sindbad, whose abortive attempts at mercantile life whisk him away to a number of indian ocean islands where he encounters giant cannibals, black apelike humans or humanlike apes, people with a custom of burying widows and widowers alive, and untold riches, from roc eggs to jewels large enough to hew into tableware.121 this perfect storm of otherness in sindbad and its analogues, in the estimation of maurice pomerantz, at times tilts from the wondrousness of ʿajāʾib into horror.122 their stories bring about an intimate and pious meditation on one’s own soul not dissimilar to enlightenment philosophers allegorizing the sublime using threatening, raced bodies and the fear they inspire.123 in construct with al-sīrāfī’s accounts, sindbad’s journeys can be used to query which parts of the known world were figured as more remote, and more inherently open to dramatization and fantasy, than others, as well as to ask which forms of racialization and which racialized others became subject in narrative to hybridization with animals, monsters, or jinn. such comparison throws into sharp relief the relationship between the contours of empire and the parameters of thinkable difference, even in storytellers’ imaginative romps. given the standard historiography of race, it is perhaps unexpected that many of the radical forms of difference in evidence in the above travel literature are absent in the library of arabic literature’s most modern offering in this area, the twelfth/eighteenth-century traveler muḥammad al-tūnisī’s in darfur (tashḥīdh al-adhhān bi-sīrat bilād al-ʿarab wa-lsūdān), translated by humphrey davies. as al-tūnisī’s arabic title indicates, darfur was not simply represented by the author as a regional entity with a unified character, but rather as a patchwork characterized by lines between, across, and through arabness and blackness. by this time, these identities are historicized for al-tūnisī as a function of traceability or a lack thereof to arabia, and particularly with the illustrious families of scholars (sayyids) and descendants of the prophet (sharīfs) who resided there.124 though predicated on a 119. tayeb el-hibri, the abbasid caliphate: a history (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2021), 95. 120. peter von sivers, “taxes and trade on the ‘abbasid thughūr, 75–962/133–351,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 25, no. 1 (1982): 71–99, at 73. 121. on the connection between al-sīrāfī and sindbad, see maria kowalska, “from facts to literary fiction: medieval arabic travel literature,” quaderni di studi arabi 5–6 (1987–88): 397–403. 122. maurice pomerantz, “tales from the crypt: on some uncharted voyages of sindbad the sailor introduction,” narrative culture 2, no. 2 (2015): 250–69, at 262. 123. meg armstrong, “‘the effects of blackness’: gender, race, and the sublime in aesthetic theories of burke and kant,” the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 54, no. 3 (1996): 213–36, at 218–21. 124. muḥammad al-tūnisī, in darfur: an account of the sultanate and its people, ed. and trans. humphrey davies (new york: new york university press, 2018), 1:xxiii. 349 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) particular place of origin, these networks are no longer so localized; the sultan of morocco is a sharīf, the instructors of egypt’s al-azhar are sayyids, and so on. in the yet deeper past, their ties are all still bound to one of noah’s sons. these category formations were to transform under british colonialism, though, and become territorially entrenched in sudan as an “arab” north and a “black” south.125 it may be for this reason that r. s. o’fahey opines in his introduction that in the twentieth century, “there was now introduced a racial, ‘arab’ versus ‘african,’ dimension into the complex tribal politics of darfur.”126 it is precisely this racial dimension—globalized through the international coverage of the turn-of-the-century conflict in darfur and cathected through primarily african american experiences of racial oppression—that hisham aïdi references as stoking anti-arab hate abroad and further ossifying the categories of black and arab as separate, though he notes that marking racial difference in sudan well preceded british colonialism.127 in contrast to this contemporary narrative, we quickly find that al-tūnisī lives the entanglements between the two categories named in his title, his grandfather having remarried an ethiopian woman and abandoned his cairene family, and his father having followed suit; al-tūnisī nonetheless speaks admiringly of his family and its learning, which, as davies points out, afforded them the mobility that echoes throughout preand early-modern narratives of ṭalab al-ʿilm—quests for islamic learning that also involved the professional exercise of one’s education to sustain the journey—and that led to their resettlement in the bilād al-sūdān in the first place. their multigenerational itineracy leads al-tūnisī to have several uncanny encounters with extended family en route. in contrast with these thick connections to which the author devotes the first chapters of his log, al-tūnisī’s personal travel narrative (riḥla) begins with rupture. as his team embarks from fusṭāṭ, he recalls the “travails” (matāʿab) of travel, compounded by realizing that he is surrounded by those who are, in davies’ english, “not of my own race” (ghayri abnāʾ jinsī), and who are instead children of ham (abnāʾ ḥām).128 this is the only time that davies employs the word race in the first book of his two-volume translation of the text. in her own translation of this vignette in her book, a different shade of colonialism: egypt, great britain, and the mastery of the sudan, eve troutt powell renders jins not as race but as tribe, likely because of the relationship al-tūnisī establishes between his jins and the lineage of sam, in contrast to the denizens of darfur descended from ham.129 here, al-tūnisī’s inheritance of premodern, lineage-essentialist categories of human kinds is on ample display, as is the relationship of concepts of race to those of biobehavioral heredity, articulated primarily as a matter of ancestry and only secondarily as one of geography 125. on the role of racialization in this division, see amir idris, “rethinking identity, citizenship, and violence in sudan,” international journal of middle east studies 44, no. 2 (2012): 324–26. 126. muḥammad al-tūnisī, in darfur, 1:xxi. 127. aïdi, “slavery, genocide, and the politics of outrage,” 46. 128. muḥammad al-tūnisī, in darfur, 1:64–65. 129. eve troutt powell, a different shade of colonialism: egypt, great britain, and mastery of the sudan (berkeley: university of california press, 2003), 34. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 350 given al-tūnisī’s destination, and this is apparent in either of the two renderings.130 gesturing towards the determinacy of his categories, al-tūnisī speaks of an abiding animosity (ʿadāwa) between the children of sam and ham, despite spending the foregoing chapters discussing his other ancestors’ pacific lives among them.131 but al-tūnisī seems to undermine this polarizing picture in the same breath in other ways. he quickly pivots to poetry extolling the virtueand friendship-building benefits of travel in foreign lands, which stands in stark contrast to the original, mournful verses he declaims upon realizing he is surrounded by difference: “your body, your clothes, and your countenance are black upon black upon black (fa-jismuka maʿa thiyābika wa-l-muḥiyyan sawād fī sawād fī sawād).”132 at first, this poem seems self-referential, with al-tūnisī speaking to himself in the second person, but troutt powell reads the countenance mentioned here not as belonging to al-tūnisī, but to the other in whose midst he finds himself.133 this ambivalence—sitting between metaphor and actuality, self and other, and black and arab—reflects the tone that al-tūnisī takes in much of the remainder of his writing, which amounts ultimately to a densely observed account of the practices, politics, and potentates of the fūr sultanate that only periodically relies on the traditional racial knowledges discussed above. as both troutt powell and the library of arabic literature’s choice of foreword author for the paperback, kwame anthony appiah, note, al-tūnisī’s most egregious failures are in his representations of gender. “if race is one marker of cultural difference and boundaries, then women are the signposts of civilization,” states troutt powell.134 appiah finds that in al-tūnisī’s “moral and intellectual universe,” enslaved eunuchs and their castration are unremarkable, and that his views of local women—made especially libidinous by the clime’s heat and designated the “root of every disaster”—make for difficult reading.135 al-tūnisī’s treatment of gender is not merely that, though, but rather marries the most traditionist elements of his racial education with ideas about the meaning of respectability for women and men with varying degrees of legal freedom, culminating in unreflective misogynoir toward the free women of darfur and complacency with the castration of its unfree men.136 troutt powell reminds us that the darfur of al-tūnisī was on the precipice of becoming an egyptian colonial holding but was not yet so. in her words, his “racial distinctions are not based on a hatred of blacks,” and in a sense they can’t yet be. 137 nonetheless we see that, despite al-tūnisī’s lack of animus, his work entails and gives occasion to discussions of 130. i borrow the phrase lineage-essentialism from ron mallon. see mallon, the construction of human kinds (oxford: oxford university press, 2016), passim, esp. 34. 131. muḥammad al-tūnisī, in darfur, 1:64. 132. ibid., 64–65. 133. troutt powell, a different shade, 34. 134. al-tūnisī, in darfur (2020), ix–x. 135. troutt powell, a different shade, 37. 136. the term misogynoir was coined and elaborated by moya bailey and trudy aka @thetrudz, who are often uncredited for doing so. see moya bailey and trudy, “on misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism,” feminist media studies 18, no. 4 (2018): 762–68. 137. troutt powell, a different shade, 38. 351 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) racialization, alongside class and gender. it also elicits a rethinking of how we periodize the aforementioned human scales and costs of racial work. suzanne conklin akbari advocates teaching medieval literature from single languages, traditions, or nations in ways that showcase non-teleological histories of communication between and among cultures, drawing on what peregrine horden and nicholas purcell call “periods of intensification” and “abatement.”138 this disrupts reductionist narratives of, for example, antisemitic and islamophobic paroxysms in various parts of western europe. it also disrupts ideas of progress and periods themselves; not everyone’s middle ages follow the same patterns. arguably, they do not occur at the same time. teaching medieval and early modern arabic literature in translation with race in mind does similar disruptive work: at the very time that we might expect to see emergent racist constructions in a narrative whose era is everywhere characterized by colonialism and chattel slavery, we find the forms race takes in al-tūnisī’s writing instead rely on a set of much older and even attenuated tropes. al-tūnisī’s abated framework is unlike al-sīrāfī’s intensified gaze under the abbasids in a major trading city, but it is also visibly informed by traditions of geography, physiognomy, and so on that are rooted in this prior time and space. moreover, al-tūnisī’s gendered and classed representations of race suggest who reaps the narrative and social benefits of rapprochement in moments of abatement, and whom it is enduringly politic to epistemically diminish. mannered literature: ibn qutayba and al-nuwayrī writing in the early fourth/tenth century, abū zayd al-sīrāfī and ibn faḍlān were pioneering a polyvalent, as yet unformed genre of travel and geographic writing, but both the anthological practices employed by al-sīrāfī and the chancery etiquettes evinced by ibn faḍlān were already well established products of the abbasid world and its adab, or refined forms of writing and social comportment. the contours of adab grew not only out of the migration of oral to written modes with the acquisition of paper and efflorescence of book arts, nor only out of the development of a centralized caliphal court culture. rather, adab was parametrized by the particularities of where and with whose collaboration these other elements emerged. the significance of a large persian upper class in shaping abbasid high culture is well rehearsed, but its formative role in structuring how tastemakers and statesmen alike defined arabness and racialized muslimness is less so. recent work by peter webb shows that as dust settled from the abbasid revolution in second/eighth-century iraq, arab-identifying littérateurs increasingly concretized what this identity meant for them through scriptural interpretation, creative writing, and historiography. authors wrote arabness as a combination of putatively traceable indicators of arabian autochthony and its shared narrative that amounted to more than the sum of its parts. they did this in construct with the large persian presence in their midst in ways that were both inclusive and exclusive: 138. suzanne conklin akbari, “modeling medieval world literature,” middle eastern literatures 20, no. 1–2 (2017): 2–17, at 4. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 352 the paradigm of original arab monotheism, a brief slip into paganism, and then a return to islam appears to operate across genres, and it was not a fringe fancy of arab partisans: it was shared by a variety of writers and appears as a logical construct to project arabian-arabness as monotheistic, noble, and relatively accommodating with persians—just as iraqi society was muslim, powerful, and cosmopolitan.139 persians, meanwhile, underwent a related process that sarah bowen savant refers to as a balance of practices of remembering and forgetting.140 they remembered themselves not as arabs, but as muslims who had a deeply historicized claim on monotheistic propensities as well. the claims they staked, similarly to those of their arab-identifying peers, were often genealogical, tracing their identities to figures that would render them cousins of ishmael and inheritors of the prophets. persian authors’ articulations of belonging in the umma bear a striking resemblance to the early locutions used by the syrian mahjar in the united states to argue for legal whiteness, and therefore eligibility for citizenship, while upholding their own particularity. many such arguments were staked on their christianity and the levant’s status as the birthplace of jesus and numerous saints. sarah gualtieri refers to this conditioned bid for majoritization as the “emergence of ethnicity” rather than the “triumph of assimilation.”141 in moments of partisanship in the medieval context, though, some thinkers essentialized islam as perfectible only by those with certain inherited, biobehavioral bona fides. this is the position that the littérateur and jurist ibn qutayba appears to take in his fourth/tenthcentury treatise, the excellence of the arabs (faḍl al-ʿarab wa-tanbīh ʿalā ʿulūmihā), in which he opines: god subsequently brought islam, and from the arabs elevated the prophet (god bless and cherish him), chief of all prophets […] god caused the arabs to multiply, put an end to dissension among them, supported them with his angels, and strengthened them with his power. he established them in the land and enabled them to tread upon other nations’ necks. he endowed them with the caliphate, with succession to prophethood, and then with the imamate […] it was then, when there were no easterners present, that god addressed the arabs, saying: “you are indeed the best community that has ever been brought forth for mankind.” other communities acqire excellence after the arabs (wa-l-umam ṭurran dākhila ʿalayhā fīhi).142 here, the arabs are characterized as uniquely primed to receive and promote islam. this uniqueness is constituted in two primary ways, the first being ibn qutayba’s patterning of arab ascendance on prior narratives of national chosenness that harken to other 139. webb, imagining the arabs, 269. 140. sarah bowen savant, the new muslims of post-conquest iran: tradition, memory, and conversion (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2013), 14–25. 141. sarah gualtieri, between arab and white: race and ethnicity in the early syrian american diaspora (berkeley: university of california press, 2009), 156. 142. ibn qutayba, the excellence of the arabs, trans. sarah bowen savant and peter webb (new york: new york university press, 2017), 69. 353 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) communities who have received revelation. ilana pardes notes, linking several passages, that the massiveness and fecundity of the children of israel, who are described in the hebrew bible as “countless as the dust (per abraham’s memorable vision),” leads them to “‘dwell apart, not reckoned by the nations,’’ and this “is seen as a proof of [their nation’s] cultural strength.”143 ibn qutayba’s setting apart of the arabs is not merely retrospective, he also anticipates islam’s future when he states that god designated the community to whom the qurʾān was first revealed as the best at a time when no “easterners” (which is how the translation glosses ʿajam, an ambiguous term meaning both non-arabs, persians, and in ibn qutayba’s case, non-arab and non-khorasanian persians) had yet mixed with it. his statement that other groups acquire excellence after the arabs can alternatively be read as stating that they are included within excellence at the arabs’ bidding; it is not merely posterior, but also causal. despite myriad traditions to the contrary in which muḥammad’s early company of believers and close companions hail from the many neighboring empires in arabia’s midst—strategically figured as such in traditional islamic historiographies that also showcase leaders like the najāshī of axum, the qayṣar of byzantium, and the kisrā of persia acknowledging islam’s religiopolitical legitimacy, and hence positive relationality with other religiopolitical formations144—ibn qutayba pursues an alternative strategy commensurate with his purist aims. he casts the original muslim umma as entirely arab and the preservation of unadulterated arab posterity as the force that will sustain islam through the authority of caliphs, imams, and descendants of muḥammad. it is perhaps with this essentialism in mind that the concept of race arises in the translators’ introduction to the library of arabic literature version of the excellence of the arabs. ostensibly, ibn qutayba is committing this claim to writing in the face of competing declarations of racialized prestige, particularly from persianate “bigots,” or shuʿūbīs, those persian elites who were labeled as partisan to their own people and indices of aristocracy.145 these contestations were coming increasingly to the fore at the very time when, in ibn qutayba’s view, arab superiority could not be more patently divinely consecrated by the success of the conquests and efflorescence of the abbasids. however, per sarah bowen savant, “why—modern interpreters should ask more seriously—have historians turned up virtually no self-professed shuʿūbīs, only their opponents?”146 in other words, ibn qutayba draws on an external designation for an alternative cultural chauvinism that was hardly prevalent in his era, representing it as an existential threat to arab moral and social pride of place for his audience. the falsification of shuʿūbī cultural dominance by ibn qutayba and his peers has only been inflated, according to savant, by western historiography.147 143. ilana pardes, the biography of ancient israel: national narratives in the bible (berkeley: university of california press, 2002), 134. 144. nadia maria el cheikh notes that the rulers of pre-islamic powers also became parts of umayyad “imaginary ancestry” and their self-positioning within universal history, sustaining their importance in caliphal strategies of legitimation as “traditional rulers on earth.” see nadia maria el cheikh, byzantium viewed by the arabs (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2004), 85. 145. ibn qutayba, excellence of the arabs, 5. 146. savant, new muslims, 28. 147. sarah bowen savant, “naming shu‘ūbīs,” in essays in islamic philology, history, and philosophy: a al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 354 true to this, webb and savant note that at the time that ibn qutayba was writing, he was writing not only against the rising stars of persians in his midst, but also against decreased identification of the people of iraq with membership in “an arab race (expressed in terms of arab umma, jīl, or nasab [arab “people” or “kin”]),” and increased identification with provincial identities that even led some of them to see themselves as persian because of their locales and norms.148 webb and savant ascribe this shift to the ethnic mixedness of iraqi cosmopolises, which “made it difficult to maintain pure tribal/racial lineages for long,” though the notion of pure lineage is typically upheld less by the maintenance of endogamy than by the selective elision of intercommunal differences.149 as people’s understandings of self and social membership change, their techniques of racialization do as well. webb’s own work shows this in accounting for how people in the arabian peninsula began to conceive of themselves as an “arab” unit rather than as distinct regional and tribal groups. it is therefore worth considering which transformations of identity and its expression ibn qutayba is happy enough to overlook in crafting his authentic arab ideal, and which aspects he regards as “irreducible and unsublatable because [they are] an effect of the laws of nature that produce the existing variety of bodily and social configurations.”150 despite ibn qutayba’s—and most premodern muslim thinkers’—“monogenetic” understanding of humankind, which some have described as foreclosing on racemaking because it does not allow for the delineation of different human species, ibn qutayba ably formulates and advises on the maintenance of fixed human categories by arguing for the preservation of primordial, if not original, lineages.151 ibn qutayba’s vision of continuous arab descent, and hence distinctness as a social group, hinges on two relatively recent discursive developments: an emphasis on patriliny and credence in sciences of genealogy that were first formalized in the abbasid age. in making his case against the “bigots,” he probes global genealogies and rebuffs the persians’ polemical claim to descend from isaac and their assertion that this makes them superior to the arabs, descended from ishmael and his enslaved mother.152 ibn qutayba avers, instead, that hagar was purified by god and so valued by the egyptians that she was given to sarah festschrift in celebration and honor of professor ahmad mahdavi damghani’s 90th birthday, ed. k. a. thackston, w. m. mottahedeh, and w. granara, 166–84 (berlin: de gruyter, 2016). 148. ibn qutayba, excellence of the arabs, xiii. 149. ibid., xiii. 150. silva, toward a global idea, 127. 151. robert bartlett’s well-known article on the question of premodern “race” vs. “ethnicity” adduces belief in monogenesis as a key differentiating element between premodern and modern projects of differentiating human identities. in his recent book, the smell of slavery, andrew kettler nuances this by saying that the emergence of theories of polygenesis characterize the rise of scientific racism, but not of racecraft and racism itself, and that monogenesis was a prevalent hypothesis well into the modern history of the atlantic world. thinkers who subscribed to monoand polygenetic theories often shared much more in common in their racial epistemologies than marking this out as a defining difference would suggest. see robert bartlett, “medieval and modern concepts of race and ethnicity,” journal of medieval and early modern studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 39–56, at 45; andrew kettler, the smell of slavery: olfactory racism and the atlantic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020), 25. 152. ibn qutayba, excellence of the arabs, 21. 355 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) as a gift. overall, proximity to abraham takes priority, and ibn qutayba elevates descent through elite foreign concubinage—also a norm among arab potentates of his day, as he notes—by arguing for its divine favorability. as noted above, elizabeth urban argues that this is a maneuver that late-umayyad and early-abbasid authorities themselves made as well; because caliphs, imams, and their heirs were increasingly born from relationships between a father of prominent, arabian nasab and a mother of foreign origin, the elites authored the patriliny of nasab and therefore their own full arabness.153 they did so against the backdrop of jāhiliyya mores, in which mothers could also pass on nasab and its social networks to their children, and children born of “mixed” relationships were regarded as half-arabs, rather than as directly assuming their father’s pedigree. to suggest their own chosenness, figures claiming divine authority adduced the examples of hagar and of muḥammad’s coptic concubine, māriya, and suggested that having a “slave ancestress does not dilute [one’s] arab lineage.”154 while ibn qutayba superficially critiques the “bigots’” derision of hagar and of concubines’ uncleanliness, he also is taking their investment in matriliny to task. god has clearly favored those with prominent fathers. though his defense of enslaved women would seem to reach across class lines, ibn qutayba is in fact heavily concerned with preserving a system in which such women underwrite the legacies of upper-crust arabs rather than complicate them. similarly, he elevates the people of khorasan as a second-tier elite, or what we today might call a “model minority,” because they, too, have propped up their arab stewards and helped the abbasids secure power. he emphatically exempts khorasanians from his discussion, noting that they had only briefly and latterly come under the power of “easterners” (lam yazālū fī akthar mulk al-ʿajam liqāḥan), which the translation glosses as a reference to the sasanians, but that khorasanians had frequently been a check on persian might both in the pre-islamic era and in their role during the abbasid revolution.155 in this, they are not unlike the arabs who had only momentarily lapsed into polytheism but also preserved many elements of the “original monotheism” (al-ḥanafiyya).156 in effect, ibn qutayba posits an ethnic separation reified through the performance of political loyalties that renders the khorasanians as a population once subject to but not of the ʿajam. though this may relate to his own khorasanian roots, ibn qutayba is also writing here in a tradition of praise by members of the abbasid court for the khorasanians’ loyalty. in his risāla fī al-ṣaḥāba, which is concerned in large measure with preserving the khorasanian army’s complacency with abbasid rule, ibn al-muqaffaʿ (d. ca. 141 ah/759 ad) writes: the army of the people of khorasan is one to which none in [the realms of] islam can compare, and they have a vigor (manʿa) through which they may, god willing, fulfill 153. on the role of paternalizing nasab in the authority of the imamate, as well as the role played by the mothers of imams in their racialization, see amina inloes, “racial ‘othering’ in shiʿi sacred history: jawn ibn huwayy the ‘african slave’, and the ethnicities of the twelve imams,” journal of shiʿa islamic studies 7, no. 4 (2014): 411–39. 154. urban, conquered populations, 129. 155. ibn qutayba, excellence of the arabs, 72–73. 156. ibid., 67. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 356 their excellence (yutammu faḍlahum). indeed, they are a people versed in obedience [of authority] (baṣar bi-l-ṭāʿa), favored among men (faḍl ʿinda al-nās), restrained in their emotional and physical desires, opposed to corruption, and obsequious under governors. we do not know of this bearing (ḥāl) manifesting in anyone outside their ranks.157 ibn al-muqaffaʿ discusses these virtues as essentially latent in khorasanians and as yet unactualized rather than as ephemeral qualities that will disappear under mismanagement. their abilities are to be disciplined (taʾdīb, taqwīm) to abbasid ends through management by the commander of the faithful or squandered on some other less worthy cause. ibn qutayba similarly uses khorasanian identity to tie respectability both to one’s birth station and to subscribing, by dint of innate upper-class decorum (sharaf), to a system in which one is obligated to arab rulers who are inevitably yet more advantaged.158 in contrast to this inborn loyalty, some “lower-class easterners” have tried to fabricate prestige out of jealousy of the arabs by claiming descent from “[the easterners’] kings and cavalry,” which they can do because their “genealogical system is extensive and unmonitored.”159 ibn qutayba draws on a common trope: even in the first formal works of arab prosopography, anxiety arises about the charlatanism of some genealogists. muḥammad is said to have called out genealogists who lied about the number of generations between ishmael and maʿaḍḍ, for example.160 the forgery of nasab in order to garner authority became a topic of study that shared some methods with ʿilm al-rijāl, or ḥadīth criticism, and was based on normative ideas of who was trustworthy and who not.161 on two fronts, ibn qutayba claims that the easterners’ heredity lacks probative rigor, in that they both take seriously the position of female ancestors and fail to have a hard science of tracking lineages. in the face of their claims that the arabs come from tarnished stock, ibn qutayba essentially accuses them of being the real liars and adulterators, who have fabricated their superiority and infiltrated god’s “best community.” ibn qutayba thus enables us to talk with students about how racial logic works, circularly, to reify a fragile status quo by demonizing any counterclaim as scientifically weak or in defiance of the god-given natural order, even when both the science and the social order are relatively new. the belief that arabs alone had perfected the study of genealogy also appears in the significantly later work of shihāb al-dīn al-nuwayrī, the eighth/fourteenth-century author of the ultimate ambition in the arts of erudition (nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab), an outstanding exemplar of the mamlūk “age of encyclopedias” that has been abridged and 157. ibn al-muqaffaʿ, athār ibn al-muqaffaʿ (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1989), 311. 158. ibn qutayba, excellence of the arabs, 4. 159. ibid., 7. 160. hishām b. al-kalbī, jamharat al-nasab, ed. ʿabd al-sattār farrāj (kuwait: wizārat al-iʿlām, 1983), 1:65. 161. on the science and falsification of genealogy, see zoltán szombathy, “motives and techniques of genealogical forgery in pre-modern muslim societies,” in genealogy and knowledge in muslim societies: understanding the past, ed. sarah bowen savant and helena de felipe, 24–37 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014). 357 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translated by elias muhanna for penguin classics.162 as the title indicates, al-nuwayrī has tasked himself with anthologizing the epitomes of adab, or the necessary bits of selfrefining know-how for the discerning individual. in a sense, al-nuwayrī’s entire project is genealogical, or in muhanna’s words, “hierarchical,” in that it is premised on the ordering, classification, and appraisal of viable knowledge.163 more explicitly, al-nuwayrī includes a specific section “on genealogy” (fī al-ansāb) in his book on humans, which he opens—like many professional genealogies—with the thirteenth verse of sūrat al-ḥujarāt, translated by muhanna as “o mankind, we have created you male and female, and appointed you races [shuʿūb] and tribes [qabāʾil], that you may know one another.”164 al-nuwayrī reminds readers that the arabs “boasted against the non-arabs” over their use of genealogy, rendering their knowledge of one another as unmatched.165 in translating shuʿūb as “races,” muhanna follows a number of qurʾānic translators, including a. j. arberry, for whom the concept of “race” when he published his the koran interpreted in 1955—but five years after unesco’s famous paper, the race question, which both upheld the jargon of racial anthropology and condemned racism—likely still consisted in category formations like mongoloid and caucasoid.166 more recent translators, too, like m. a. s. abdel haleem, have made use of the word “race” to convey this passage’s egalitarianism.167 several others translate the term instead as “peoples” or “nations.”168 further along, al-nuwayrī himself defines shuʿūb as being like the head of a body, with finergrain kinship formations below.169 the figurative rendering of a biosocial superstructure as the head of a body is emblematic of a trend throughout the selected material: racial logic becomes a medium and means for comparison coextensive with the taxonomic logic and aesthetics of the encyclopedia. because the enterprise of assembling an encyclopedia is fundamentally a conservative one, al-nuwayrī’s anthology rehearses much of what has been discussed above: he explains the effects of the climes on humors, flora, and fauna in his assaying of different nations’ 162. shihāb al-dīn al-nuwayrī, the ultimate ambition in the arts of erudition: a compendium of knowledge from the classical islamic world, trans. elias muhanna (new york: penguin books, 2016), xvii. 163. al-nuwayrī, the ultimate ambition, xix. 164. to the best of my knowledge, a trend of opening a genealogies with this verse originates with ibn ḥazm’s jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, in which ibn ḥazm glosses the verse’s citation of “mutual knowledge” (taʿāruf) as a justification for genealogical sciences, saying, “thus the mutual knowledge (taʿāruf) of people by means of their nasab is an objective that the almighty had in creating us peoples and tribes, hence it must be the case that the science of nasab is a science of high regard (jalīl rafīʿ), for with it comes mutual knowledge (taʿāruf)”; see ibn ḥazm, jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, 1948), 1–2. this trend continues for several centuries. for a modern example, see abū al-fawaz muḥammad amīn al-baghdādī al-suwaydī, sabāʾik al-dhahab fī maʿrifat qabāʾil al-ʿarab (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1986), 7. 165. ibid., 71. 166. a. j. arberry, the koran interpreted: a translation (new york: touchstone, 1996), 232; “the race question” (paris: unesco, 1950). 167. the qurʾan, trans. m. a. s. abdel haleem (oxford: oxford university press, 2004), 339. 168. e.g., the qurʾan, trans. tarif khalidi (new york: penguin books, 2008), 424. 169. al-nuwayrī, the ultimate ambition, 73. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 358 merits and introduces the sciences of scrutinizing and grouping bodies of all kinds, animal, human, and celestial. as discussed above, nasab became generalized during the abbasid era, transmuting from a local way of articulating kinship ties into a means of describing the “universal genealogical chart” accounting for all of noah’s offspring, which is to say, all of humankind.170 coterminous with its earliest uses for humans, though, it was also used for animals, and this continued to be the case as the implications of lineage changed in anthropocentric contexts. scrutiny of animal pedigrees, using the tools of ʿilm al-ansāb, could explain everything from the makeup of one’s own camel herd to the exotic appearances of rare creatures at the world’s far edges—erudite trivia that is adab’s bread and butter. it is unsurprising, then, that another section in which genealogy looms large in al-nuwayrī’s encyclopedia is that on zoology. we are told, for example, that the elephant “derives from the buffalo and the pig,” and the cheetah from a “lion and pantheress.”171 the giraffe is most superficially legible as the composite of a camel, panther, gazelle, cow, and deer, but this tangled lineage, which would have required superfecundation through the mixing of the different males’ seminal fluids in the female, is unsupported by the fact that giraffe parents have been seen giving birth to giraffe offspring.172 more hauntingly, al-nuwayrī includes the opinion that the monkey is a “cross between a human being and a beast.”173 longstanding philosophical trends that considered the consequences of hybridity and interbreeding are vividly on display, as is the idea that bodies externally divulge their histories. in the in-betweenness of primates lies fruitful comparability with the many chroniclers, from al-idrīsī to john mandeville, who wrote in the herodotan tradition and whose indian ocean world was replete with blemmyes and cynocephalae. in the somaticization of heritage, one finds a reminder that just as both humans and animals had observable pedigrees for al-nuwayrī and his ilk, beliefs about race-making in a variety of european contexts were given empirical legitimation and techniques of experimentation through practices of animal husbandry. in the atlantic world, these methods were weaponized to sustain chattel slavery. though al-nuwayrī’s animals are especially titillating for their hybridity, human kinds are often put to their highest use in his literary excerpts as pure archetypes, particularly in the copious descriptive (waṣf) poetry that dots the book’s entries. in one poem, the dawn chases away the night as if it were “an african damsel [zanjiyya] fleeing a greek [harabat quddām rūmī].”174 reading further, in another set of verses, a peach is the fly-stung cheek of an implicitly light-skinned beloved, while figs are either the small breasts of abyssinian women (thudayy sighār banāt al-ḥabash) or the “wounded head of an african” (hāmat 170. zombathy, “genealogy in medieval muslim societies,” 19. 171. al-nuwayrī, the ultimate ambition, 147, 137. 172. ibid., 149. 173. ibid., 151. 174. ibid., 25; al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-ʿarab fī funūn al-adab, ed. mufīd qamīḥa (beirut: dar al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2004), 1:136. 359 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) zinjī ʿalayhā jirāḥ).175 ripe mulberries likewise are like the “bloody wounds of the sons of ham” (yaḥkī jirāḥan damuhā sāʾil laday jusūm min banī ḥām), which we might note in the original are yet more gorily depicted as streaming blood from their bodies.176 the repetition of this motif is possibly because this was simply a well-worn cliché, but also likely related to the fact that in epigrammatic exchanges it was common for multiple poets to riff using the same closing image and similar subject matter.177 these poems’ treatment of bodies also redounds to a broader catalogue of imagery visible in the verse about night and day. they showcase recurrent literary tropes that attended black-white polarities, indicating which types are loveable, which conquerable and consumable, and which the receivers of aestheticized and therefore distanced violence. the motifs are sexualized such that both white and black bodies are compared lustfully with fruits,178 but the masculine day rapaciously chases the feminine night. in addition, they are mapped. across these verses we find a seeming geography—lands of the abyssinians, the zanj, the children of ham—that is in fact a racial and affective topos born out of diaspora, in which these references become implicitly interchangeable elements in the poetics of color, not unlike jarīr’s byzantines and ṣaqāliba. this racialization of space ironically produces figures who are “ungeographic-yetblack,” in the words of zavier wingham, who writes of black characters in ottoman shadow plays that were alternatively referred to as arap, zenci, and so on.179 the poetics at hand is not immediately apparent from the translation, though. we might thus pause with students at the rendering of zanjiyya as “african” and consider what this conjures, particularly in light of the clear non-identification of the natively egyptian—which is to say, african— al-nuwayrī with these figures. the term zanj by this time was typically identified with black people from various parts of africa, to be sure, but not with a continental africa, which was not yet an imagined geographical whole. the geographical entity that would come to be known around the world as africa, meanwhile, housed countless varieties of people, not all of whom were raced in the same ways.180 the persistent rendering of zanj as african in translation tends to make “africans” where there were none.181 and because of the verses’ imagery that 175. al-nuwayrī, nihāyat al-ʿarab, 11:105. 176. al-nuwayrī, the ultimate ambition, 203; idem, nihāyat al-ʿarab, 11:107. 177. adam talib, how do you say “epigram” in arabic? literary history at the limits of comparison (leiden: brill, 2018), 20. 178. though the poems comparing abyssinian women’s breasts with figs clearly discuss people who are gendered female, the line on the peach more ambiguously references a grammatically masculine ḥabīb, which may or may not refer to a male lover. 179. zavier wingham, “arap bacı’nın ara muhaveresi,” 177–83, at 178 and 183. 180. there is evidence that in addition to so-called berbers, nubians and ethiopians, as well as native egyptians, or aqbāṭ (copts), were constructed as qualitatively different from the rest of the peoples of the bilād al-sūdān in various instances, on grounds of perceived religious proximity, genealogical proximity, or both. see al-idrīsī, nuzhat al-mushtāq, 1:61; hussein a. h. omar, “‘the crinkly-haired people of the black earth:’ examining egyptian identities in ibn ʿabd al-ḥākim’s futūḥ,” in history and identity in the late antique near east, ed. philip wood, 149–67 (oxford: oxford university press, 2013). 181. i borrow this clever phrasing from peter webb, who is similarly concerned with translating medieval al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 360 impels us to read zanjiyya as indicating a black woman, it renders all of africa as “black africa.” we might also meditate on the whitewashing in arabic parlance of byzantium (al-rūm) and its denizens, such that rūmī here essentially means white though byzantium similarly incorporated multifarious heritages, including numerous people identified in byzantine literatures as “ethiopian,” as shown in recent work by roland betancourt.182 the translation of zanjiyya as “african” and of rūmī as “byzantine,” ironically, renders africa as a black category formation and byzantium as a white one even as it tries to escape these essentialisms through geographic “accuracy,” and indeed the poem’s subject matter leads us ultimately to infer a black-white juxtaposition in any case. here we therefore can problematize the racialization of geographies and ethnicities through pedagogy, just as we might with ibn qutayba’s sweeping depictions of the ʿajam, or “easterners.” thinking across these two authors, we can also help students unpack the normative work done by texts created in order to consolidate knowledge that adab helped produce and reify, such as anthologies and encyclopedias. popular literature: the 101 nights, tales of the marvellous, the tale of princess fatima, and war songs popular literature—those works that stood outside of adab because of their modes of production and circulation—has long garnered negative reviews for its triteness, lack of educational merit, and the virulent prejudices it seems to wear on its sleeves. in premodern contexts, these judgments were largely dispensed from members of the udabāʾ who coveted a monopoly on the esteemed written word, and by members of the ʿulamāʾ who were concerned to curate the contents and contexts of mass consumption in ways that edified more than entertained.183 mamlūk cairo witnessed restrictions on the sale and promotion of popular epics (siyar shaʿbiyya; sing. sīra) in the form of fatwās and market guidelines; tales from pre-islamic persian lore, many of which were epicized, earned the reputation of being lahw, or diverting in a way that distracted from more erudite enterprises.184 the 1,001 nights, meanwhile, were khurāfāt, tall tales that were generally overlooked by the elite because they, at least, shored up existing political hierarchies and were sanctioned in the eyes of some by an ambiguous collection of ḥadīth.185 these criticisms and ambivalences are a testament to arabic popular literature’s success as a form; even those who did not participate in its cultures of reading, listening, and performance had their own opinions. james monroe and mark pettigrew demonstrate that in times of imperial decentralization texts in ways that create “arabs where there were none.” see rachel schine and peter webb, “skin and blood? blackness and arabness in middle eastern perspectives” (online, princeton university, december 14, 2021). 182. roland betancourt, byzantine intersectionality: sexuality, gender, and race in the middle ages (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2020), esp. 161–205. 183. konrad hirschler, the written word in the medieval arabic lands: a social and cultural history of reading practices (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2012), 185–86, 193. 184. ibid., 169; savant, new muslims, 175–76. 185. rina drory, “three attempts to legitimize fiction in classical arabic literature,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam, 18 (1994): 146–64. 361 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) and the dissolution of courtly patronage structures, the lettered elite dabbled in popular registers for financial and creative reasons.186 literary enterprises undertaken outside of government institutions were far from apolitical, though, and the largely anonymous collectivism through which popular works were composed and traveled invites salient discussions about systemic racial thinking that resonate today. this discussion is already taking place among popular audiences, though noticeably less so in scholarly literature; robert irwin has distressingly referred to racism in the premodern islamic world as “a crime without a history.”187 the 1,001 nights remains the primary work of arabic popular literature that has attracted modern visibility and, on its heels, critique for its racial politics. it has been taken as an exemplar of “racist prejudices not only regarding blacks, but also with respect to jews, persians and europeans,” as well as of gendered abuse. fedwa malti-douglas reads this last set of prejudices as vital to the text’s objective of disciplining male patterns of desire.188 in general, it often appears that the purpose of othered presences in the text—whether they are receiving good treatment or ill—is to serve its core male, majoritized audience. the recent re-adaptation of aladdin as a live action film for disney spawned censure of, on the one hand, the new version’s sustained orientalist failings and, on the other, the racial dynamics endemic to the original story as narrated to the french author antoine galland by his syrian interlocutor, ḥannā diyāb. recalling the “african” origins of the evil sorcerer in galland’s tale as well as the story’s anti-jewish representations, stefan weidner writes in qantara: we must therefore concede that there is racism in the aladdin story, but also that this is not a particularity of western culture […] after all, arab and islamic history exhibits enough racist misgivings and stereotypes relating to africans and jews, such as can also be found in those tales from the thousand and one nights that clearly have arab origins.189 it is remarkable, then, that in the frontmatter of both the penguin classics 2008 edition of the arabian nights (alf layla wa-layla) and the library of arabic literature’s 2016 edition of the 101 nights (miʾat layla wa-layla), which shares significant overlaps with the notoriously racialized frame tale and several other stories featured in its larger yet younger sibling (to paraphrase its foreword writer, robert irwin), questions of race are absent.190 as above, 186. james t. monroe and mark f. pettigrew, “the decline of courtly patronage and the appearance of new genres in arabic literature: the case of the zajal, the maqāma, and the shadow play,” journal of arabic literature 34, no. 1–2 (2003): 138–77. 187. robert irwin, “the dark side of ‘the arabian nights,’” critical muslim 13 (2015), https://www. criticalmuslim.io/the-dark-side-of-the-arabian-nights/. 188. fedwa malti-douglas, woman’s body, woman’s word: gender and discourse in arabo-islamic writing (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1991), 15. 189. stefan weidner, “the aladdin controversy,” trans. ayca turkoglu, qantara (2019), https://en.qantara. de/content/hollywood%ca%b9s-flirtation-with-1001-nights-the-aladdin-controversy?nopaging=1&qt-nodes_ popularity=1. 190. the single exception to this appears to be in robert irwin’s introduction to the second volume of malcolm lyons’ translation for penguin, on the theme of provenance and other nights translations, in which https://www.criticalmuslim.io/the-dark-side-of-the-arabian-nights/ https://www.criticalmuslim.io/the-dark-side-of-the-arabian-nights/ https://en.qantara.de/content/hollywood%ca%b9s-flirtation-with-1001-nights-the-aladdin-controversy?nopaging=1&qt-nodes_popularity=1 https://en.qantara.de/content/hollywood%ca%b9s-flirtation-with-1001-nights-the-aladdin-controversy?nopaging=1&qt-nodes_popularity=1 https://en.qantara.de/content/hollywood%ca%b9s-flirtation-with-1001-nights-the-aladdin-controversy?nopaging=1&qt-nodes_popularity=1 al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 362 this absence becomes double-edged when one is confronted by the patent hierarchies in the text’s first pages because it simultaneously implies pre-raciality on the part of the source material and the expectation of post-raciality in the modern reader. the 101 nights’ translator, bruce fudge, does go into meticulous detail explaining the likely buddhist and sanskrit-via-chinese origins of the frame tale in which a gifted female storyteller arrives to a king’s court after he and his brother (in alf layla) or comrade (in miʾat layla), both cuckolded by slaves, one or both of whom are said explicitly to be black depending on the edition, ultimately come to renounce the manipulations of women.191 however, in extant revisions of the buddhist version, though physiognomy looms large in other ways, the two cuckolded men find their wives with a stranger and a horse groomer of indeterminate appearance.192 the translation of the tale into a new milieu’s matrix of race and class deserves our attention, and even was mentioned by the originator of the buddhist forerunner hypothesis, the early-twentieth-century french scholar emmanuel cosquin, despite not being mentioned in fudge’s introduction where cosquin is cited.193 such a discussion in the classroom could pair productively with don j. wyatt’s the blacks of premodern china, allowing us to ask where race and class intersect in the history and narrative of cultures that were in at least indirect communication and where these links are either absent or obviated.194 more noteworthy than the elision of questions of race in the corpus of nights literature in translation, though, is their evolution in other related translations. six years after issuing his nights translation with penguin, malcolm lyons published his rendering of tales of the marvellous and news of the strange (al-ḥikāyāt al-ʿajība wa-l-akhbār al-gharība). the text itself embodies the mysteries its title promises; only one manuscript of the ḥikāyāt is known to us and, like most popular works, it is undated and anonymous.195 robert irwin features as the author of the introduction, which is divided into a series of thematic sections. following two on gender, titled “misogyny and rape” and “deceitful women,” irwin offers a section called “racism.”196 the section is primarily concerned with antiblack racism, and irwin draws a connection between associations of blackness with ugliness and ugliness with villainy to explain some of the text’s choices of antagonist. this, he adds, is a trend hardly exclusive to arabic literature, and he names the novelists sax rohmer, dennis wheatley, and ian fleming as examples, all of whom are white, british, modern men who wrote for popular audiences and likewise used the slippage between ugliness, foreignness, he states that burton heightens both the eroticism and racism of the original. the arabian nights: tales of 1001 nights, vol. 2, trans. malcolm c. lyons (london: penguin classics, 2008), xiii. 191. a hundred and one nights, ed. and trans. bruce fudge (new york: new york university press, 2016), xix. 192. emmanuel cosquin, “le prologue-cadre des mille et une nuits, les légendes perses et le livre d’esther,” revue biblique 6, no. 1 (1909): 7–49, at 13–14. 193. ibid., 30. 194. don j. wyatt, the blacks of premodern china (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2010). 195. tales of the marvellous and news of the strange, trans. malcolm lyons (london: penguin books, 2014), xii. 196. ibid., xxii–xxv. 363 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) and criminality to concoct radically alien images of evil.197 in discussing racism rather than race, irwin avoids reifying race as a category while still explicating some of the narrative impacts of its assumed existence. the range of these impacts is limited, though, by the fact that racism is most material to irwin’s analysis when its directions and implications are most visible to us, that is, when it is antiblack and connected with extremes of moral difference and depravity. what might it look like to read these tales with the assumed existence of race in mind for all their subjects? a glimpse of this can be gained through looking in this way at the “tale of julnar of the sea,” a tale that also appears in the 1,001 nights corpus. in the ḥikāyāt, the king shahriyar, whose harem is massive and contains women from all corners of the earth, but who has yet to have a son, is given a nonspeaking enslaved woman procured for 1,000 dinars. her beauty has “no match on the face of the earth.”198 after a year of silence, when she is with child, the woman speaks, saying that she is a princess from the sea, which explains her peerless otherworldliness. her people dwell there with a greater diversity of creatures than those on the earth, sustaining their aquatic lives using amulets. she summons her family to her using an exotic drug, and they appear with “moonlike” faces—a classic indicator of beauty in arabic literature—and green hair—far less typical.199 when julnar, as the woman is named, goes into labor, her family employs medicine and techniques that are unknown to shahriyar, indicating their distinct physiology, level of civilizational advancement, or both. julnar gives birth to a boy named badr, and her family takes him under the water and reemerges, with the child now bearing jewels of untold rarity; badr is of two natures and can transcend land and sea, reaping the unique benefits of each.200 here we may recall our working understanding of racial differences as those that construct disparate essential, natural constitutions and relationships to nature among human groups and that are given meaning through notional and real projects of expansion into and empowerment over their differentiated realms. in this light, julnar’s water-dwelling family arriving to king shahriyar’s consciousness may be read as a moment of racial construction. shahriyar comes to know julnar’s kin through his worldwide search for a panoply of women who might give him heirs, a search which he conducts at incredible expense, and which is afforded by his subjects’ global knowledges and networks. when presented with a seemingly unique specimen, shahriyar at first only registers his bride’s preciousness. later, though, he discovers that she is from a people whose difference is elemental and in whose vast realm he now has a stake. when the two have a son, we are assured that his mix of royal stocks is a strength. at the same time, his in-betweenness causes perturbation and danger: his father is distressed by his long disappearances underwater, and the sea princess with whom he 197. ibid., xxv. 198. ibid., 115. 199. ibid., 118. 200. this salutary hybridity may be an inversion of the liminal status of people who, like badr, lived between these two worlds through the occupation of pearl-diving, direct reference to which occurs elsewhere in the nights corpus in the fifth voyage of sindbad. i am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for this observation. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 364 falls in love judges his interloping in the sea “inauspicious” and uses water magic to bewitch him.201 when he eventually weds the princess after becoming king of a faraway, glittering city-state, he gives her sea-dwelling father half of his territory to oversee. in badr’s story one finds a rich historical intertext concerned with the periodically tenuous blending of different peoples under islamic administrations, brokered through kinship structures that are most salutary when they support the aims of effective dominion. the 2021 abridgment and translation by melanie magidow of the tale of princess fatima, warrior woman (sīrat al-amīra dhāt al-himma) for penguin features a similarly strategic use of hybridity in narrativizing the crossing and mastery of frontiers, as magidow notes obliquely in her introduction. there, magidow focuses on the son of the text’s eponymous heroine, ʿabd al-wahhāb, saying, “princess fatima’s sole child, ‘abdelwahhab, is black, although she and the child’s father are not.”202 magidow adds that his unique color vis-à-vis his parents and tribe causes conflict, but not exclusion; the central characters in the text and adoring audiences of listeners alike are spurred on by the hero’s exploits. however, magidow also mentions that this inclusion is conditioned on a certain enclavism, with ʿabd al-wahhāb “commanding and having deeper relationships with people of color” in the military, true to the segregated nature of muslim armies throughout history.203 magidow characterizes these divisions as “racial and colorist,” that is, as entailing prejudices about biologized differences of social kind that also redound to hegemonic standards of beauty and hierarchies of resemblance across kinds; under white supremacy, lighter-skinned people raced as black benefit socially, with implications for class mobility, marriageability, and more.204 colorism is thus typically defined as a form of intra-racial discrimination and stratification that privileges people who are more visibly proximal to other groups that are more advantageously raced. robert l. reece goes beyond analytical frameworks that reduce colorism to a matter of individual “preference,” instead exploring the ways in which it is structural. he adduces the systemic persistence of colorism in the united states to query whether, after the instantiation of the “one-drop rule,” the united states “ever truly moved past its triracial system” in which the category of “mulatto” was officially reified.205 for reece, colorism is therefore in part an artefact of prior racial categorizations in which mixed persons were enshrined in law as an intermediary social stratum. magidow does not explicitly discuss the construction of ʿabd al-wahhāb’s difference as produced through racial categorization, colorist categorization, or both. this is perhaps because in the arabic text, there is significant ambiguity as to which factor is most operative in which moments: ʿabd al-wahhāb is said in several instances to have arab facial features but be dark-skinned, and elsewhere this is contravened by analogizing him with non-arab peoples from places like nubia and assigning him features that are stereotyped as black, 201. ibid., 123–24. 202. the tale of the princess fatima, warrior woman: the arabic epic of dhat al-himma, trans. melanie magidow (new york: penguin books, 2021), xvi. 203. ibid., xvii. 204. ibid., xvii. 205. robert l. reece, “color crit: critical race theory and the history and future of colorism in the united states,” journal of black studies 50, no. 1 (2019): 3–25, at 21. 365 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) like a flat “cow-like” nose (furṭūsuhu ka-furṭūs al-ʿijl).206 when fāṭima’s father first sees the child, he remarks not that he is dark, but that he is “of the black kind” (aswad al-jins), whom another tribesman remarks are “not lineally exchangeable with” and “completely unlike” white people (nasl al-bīḍ mā yabdulu bi-sūd, wa-laysa al-bīḍ ḥaqqan mithla sūd).207 this split perception overlaps strongly with the divide between the heroes and villains and their supporters and detractors in the text, such that the pious arab-muslim figures with whom ʿabd al-wahhāb is most aligned acknowledge his group membership and likeness to them while their christianized detractors do not, focusing instead on his stereotyped blackness. other heroes in the sīra corpus evidence similar ambiguities and simultaneously sharpen our understanding of the ways in which blackness signifies a difference of kind in these works: across various written and recited traditions of sīrat banī hilāl, the hero abū zayd who, like ʿabd al-wahhāb, is born to arab parents but is consistently raced as black, is sometimes said to “have the same features as a white child.”208 elsewhere, he incorporates an uncanny mixture of black and white, in unmixed patches on his body.209 the re-racing implications of blackness in the worlds of the sīras is thrown into especially sharp relief in a third sīra that incorporates a black hero, sīrat ʿantar. when one of ʿantar’s uncles, shās, is kidnapped by a tribal rival, he is aided in his escape by an elderly woman who possesses magical powers: in haste, [the old woman] rose and grabbed one of her large cauldrons, filled it with water, put it over the fire, and threw some grasses in there that none but the great sages (al-ḥukamāʾ al-kibār) know [the properties] of […] then she took shās over to the cauldron and sat him before her, with him following her every deed without question. the old woman removed his clothing and began pouring the medicament from the cauldron over him […] she had him rub the substance in himself, as before, and he became like a slave (sāra ka-annahu ʿabd), like the son of a black slave woman (ama zanjiyya), black-colored like the deep night. she waited a bit until he had air-dried and then applied oil, so that his skin shone like expensive ebony,210 then garbed him in the clothing of enslaved shepherds and gave him a staff.211 206. sīrat al-amīra dhāt al-himma, ed. ʿalī b. mūsā al-maqānibī (beirut: al-maktaba al-shaʿbiyya, 1980), 1:598. 207. ibid., 600, 611. 208. caroline stone, “the great migration of the bani hilal,” aramcoworld (2016), 14–19, at 16, https:// www.aramcoworld.com/articles/november-2016/the-great-migration-of-the-bani-hilal. 209. cathryn anita baker, “the hilālī saga in the tunisian south” (phd diss., university of indiana, 1978), 67–68, 652. 210. this passage’s reference to both body oiling and commodification echoes a reference in ibn buṭlān’s epistle on slave purchasing, in which he writes that buyers must be wary of sellers’ attempts to make dark (samrāʾ) skin appear healthier or more appealing than it is by giving it a golden (dhahabiyya) glow through the application of a caraway tincture (wuḍiʿat fī abzan fīhi māʾ al-karāwiyā)—this allows them to “swindle” (yudallisūna) buyers by inflating enslaved people’s value. see ibn buṭlān, risālat jāmiʿat al-funūn, 379. 211. sīrat ʿantara b. shaddād (cairo: al-maktaba al-jumhuriyya al-ʿarabiyya, 1980), 1:365. https://www.aramcoworld.com/articles/november-2016/the-great-migration-of-the-bani-hilal https://www.aramcoworld.com/articles/november-2016/the-great-migration-of-the-bani-hilal al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 366 shās then absconds from the camp in the guise of an enslaved black man. despite having all the same features as before, he does not register for others as a darker arab or an arab man wearing makeup, but instead passes himself off as black through the combination of his blackness and his humble clothing. the category of an arab with visible proximity to blackness is in effect absent from the racial imaginary at hand.212 the seeming impossibility of being a black arab also emerges for ʿabd al-wahhāb when, as in abū zayd’s situation, his fellow tribesmen assume that he is different not because he is simply darker, but because his mother has committed adultery with a slave of non-arab heritage and is thus himself not lineally a fellow member of the tribe. when this proves not to be true, he nonetheless remains raced throughout the text as “the black of the banū kilāb.” and indeed, a difference of nature is at work in his origin story. as i have argued elsewhere, ʿabd al-wahhāb’s narrative of conception, birth, and paternity dispute posits numerous explanations for his unexpected appearance that rely on mutually inclusive theories both of science and divine intervention.213 he is said ultimately to be black because he was conceived at the time of his mother’s menses, and the “black” menstrual blood mixed with her partner’s nuṭfa, or sperm drop, and dyed ʿabd al-wahhāb’s skin, not unlike the old woman’s concoction dyed shās’.214 however unlike in the case of shās, for ʿabd al-wahhāb these changes are neither ephemeral nor skin deep. not only does his blackness structure his entire life experience, but it also is embedded across various manuscripts of his sīra with a host of other, more internal modalities of alterity, including disease, mental illness, and physical disability; one exemplary manuscript notes that “[i]f a man has intercourse with his wife while she is menstruating, the child will be either black (aswad) or defective (nāqiṣ) or insane (maʿtūh) because of the corruption of the menstrual blood.”215 there are also long traditions in various near eastern literatures of associating children conceived during one’s menses with leprosy and other types of contagion.216 212. disability periodically intervenes in this dichotomy. in sīrat dhāt al-himma and sīrat ʿantar alike, black characters frequently pass themselves off as disabled in ruses to gain access to various spaces and are received in kinship when they do so. when ʿantar’s sibling, shaybūb, feigns palsy and partial blindness and pretends to be a beggar to enter an encampment, he is greeted with, “to which arabs [i.e., tribes] do you belong and where have you come from?” such treatment may indicate etiquettes of euphemism that applied both to disability and blackness. see sīrat ʿantara, 2:331; a. fischer, “arab baṣīr ‘scharfsichtig’ per antiphrasin = ‘blind,’” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 61 no. 2 (1907): 425–34, on 429. 213. rachel schine, “conceiving the pre-modern black-arab hero,” passim. 214. ibid., 321–22; cf. the tale of princess fatima, 101. 215. bibliothèque nationale de france, ms arabe 3855, fol. 173. 216. nādir kāẓim notes that the conditions of ʿabd al-wahhāb’s conception should have resulted in him being leprous if in accordance with numerous islamic traditions, which have a significant jewish counterpart in the medieval commentarial text leviticus rabbah, as has been discussed by haggai mazuz. shai secunda notes, though, that the demonic and world-polluting ontogenesis for menstruation in zoroastrian creation stories may have begun to influence associations between menstruation and disease much earlier, generating significant differences in this regard between the babylonian and jerusalem talmud; these combined and extended repercussions for interacting with menstruants arguably circulated in islamic popular traditions as well, as evidenced by the aforementioned manuscript’s list. i address the co-constitution of techniques of racialization and understandings of disease and pollution at length in forthcoming work using these and other sources. 367 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the vignette in which ʿabd al-wahhāb is born appears as the chapter “trials of motherhood” in magidow’s translation, in which she details the full account of fāṭima’s rape during her menses.217 gesturing toward the racialization of ʿabd al-wahhāb, magidow capitalizes “black,” while elsewhere the translation seems to suggest that at hand is a difference of complexion within a preconceived spectrum and not of social category, as when one man queries “‘have you ever seen two light-skinned parents have a child that dark?’” (araʾitum mawlūd ummuhu bayḍāʾ tasṭaʿu wa-abūhu ashqar abqaʿ yaʾtī lawnuhu aswad azlaʿ).218 in arabic, this passage has a resonance in which ʿabd al-wahhāb’s father’s whiteness is called into question rather than shored up by association with fāṭima’s brilliant whiteness. he is described as “pale yet mottled” (ashqar abqaʿ) with abqaʿ explicated in ibn al-manẓūr’s seventh/thirteenth-century lexicon, lisān al-ʿarab as “something whose whiteness is mixed with another color (al-abqaʿ mā khālaṭa bayāḍuhu lawn ākhar).” he continues: it is said that [some] are called buqʿān because of their differences of color and their descent from two kinds (li-ikhtilāf alwānihim wa-tanāsulihim min jinsayn). qutaybī said: al-buqʿān are those who have whiteness and blackness in them, thus you would not call someone who is entirely white and not mixed with black abqaʿ, so how could the byzantines (al-rūm) be deemed buqʿān when they are purely whites (wa-hum bīḍ khullaṣ)?219 when it is proven that ʿabd al-wahhāb is black not due to obscured ancestry but instead through an interaction of different-hued bodily fluids, this in turn proves the whiteness of both his parents. through his change in nature, ʿabd al-wahhāb becomes an agent of assimilation in the story because his free, elite arab nasab and blackness allow him to simultaneously make inroads with and bolster the largely enslaved black community in his midst, many of whom he converts and manumits himself. two of his recurring sidekicks and loyal servants, abū al-hazāhiz and maymūn, are both described in the arabic text as black and as hulking warriors. in the original, abū al-hazāhiz fights nearly naked and can use whole trees in lieu of spears;220 magidow translates the vignette in which maymūn is first gifted to ʿabd al-wahhāb, at which point we are told he has been given a nickname because he is “like a water buffalo” (jammās, or “jamas” in the translation) due to his strength and size. he is gifted alongside nineteen other enslaved black men, of whom the only other named figure is nafiʿ, whose name, “benefit,” magidow does not gloss for us as she does jamas, but which gestures to his subservient and commodified role as an asset to see nādir kāẓim, tamthīlāt al-ākhar: ṣūrat al-sūd fī-l-mutakhayyal al-ʿarabī al-wasīṭ (beirut: al-muʾassasa al-ʿarabiyya li-l-dirāsāt wa-l-nashr, 2007), 343–44; haggai mazuz, “midrashic influence on islamic folklore: the case of menstruation,” studia islamica 108 (2013): 189–201; shai secunda, “the fractious eye: on the evil eye of menstruants in zoroastrian tradition,” numen 61 (2014): 83–108. 217. the tale of princess fatima, 75–103. 218. the tale of princess fatima, 85; sīrat dhāt al-himma, 1:599. 219. ibn al-manẓūr, lisān al-ʿarab (1955), 326. 220. sīrat dhāt al-himma, 1:884–97. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 368 his namers.221 in the arabic, it becomes clear that these men are used to recruit yet more geoculturally remote black others; after a stint in abyssinia, maymūn assumes leadership over an especially potent and profoundly foreign group of black warriors who return with the arabs, from the mythologized african ethnicity damādim. they “crop one another’s ears when they are afflicted with sadness or have a change in leadership (idhā ḥazanū aw nābathum nāʾiba).”222 this reference naturalizes a practice supposedly common in branding and stigmatizing enslaved people in pre-islamic arabia and proscribed in islam as endemic in enslavable peoples’ cultural practices, and therefore renders the practice as foreign, ignorant, and regressive.223 these details suggest the logic within the text of cultivating pathways to effectively gathering, refining, and incorporating men of ʿabd al-wahhāb’s ilk into the muslims’ ranks, which ʿabd al-wahhāb does with great efficacy. in this smaller of heroic triumphs, he sketches the shape of a formidable muslim community that puts each of its components’ strengths to fitting use. magidow’s strategy of abridgement and choice to center her telling on the life of fāṭima means that ʿabd al-wahhāb’s activities are focalized primarily in relation to her and not to the band of men from the bilād al-sūdān whom he and his slaves command, or his adventures therein. however, in the relationships between him, his enslaved black charges, and his clientalized companion abū al-hazāhiz, the relational nature of racialization is on ample display. the “facts of blackness” in the sīra, such as its entanglements with bastardy, unfreedom, commodification, and ultimately the mechanics of islamic expansion itself, through which black figures maximize on these associations to earn heroes’ laurels, are also made manifest in magidow’s volume. after all, per the translation, ʿabd al-wahhāb recognizes that “god made me black for a reason. he knows best.”224 ʿabd al-wahhāb’s heroic role in the the tale of princess fatima allows for conversations about the conditions of inclusion: what makes one an ideal “diverse” actor in an arabmuslim environment, which institutions (military, marital, agnatic) are accessible to such figures, and on what terms? it occasions a discussion of the unique work ʿabd al-wahhāb’s hybridity does in the text in contrast with figures with more legibly foreign origins as well as with those who are socially recognized as full arabs. and, finally, it prompts a more fundamental question: with ʿabd al-wahhāb’s arab parentage and his upbringing between 221. the tale of princess fatima, 105. 222. sīrat dhāt al-himma, 5:552. 223. on the significance of exoticizing depictions of people from the damdam (alt. lamlam), see michael a. gomez, african dominion: a new history of empire in early and medieval west africa (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2018), 45. on the appearance of cutting and piercing the body of an enslaved person as a form of stigma and discipline in islamic prophetology, see elizabeth urban, “hagar and mariya: early islamic models of slave motherhood,” in concubines and courtesans: women and slavery in islamic history, eds. matthew s. gordon and kathryn a. hain, 225–43 (oxford: oxford university press 2017), 226. on the relationship between offshoots of ear cropping—in which an enslaved person wishing to change owners would crop the ear of his or her intended owner’s livestock and thus be given as compensation to the new owner—and their possible relationship to jāhilī practices, see orlando patterson, slavery and social death: a comparative study (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1982), 202–3. 224. the tale of princess fatima, 88. 369 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) arab and african groups, why is it that we only ever see him referred to in the translated text as black? this is especially striking because of how the arabic text frequently troubles ʿabd al-wahhāb’s standing within a discrete racial category from his parents, something that magidow does at times emphasize through the language of colorism. indeed, that ʿabd al-wahhāb is labeled black (in both arabic and english versions) despite all this destabilization is partly because a similar process to that described by reece occurred within early the islamic world. where previously those like ʿabd al-wahhāb—a figure of radically altered nature but, uncannily, also of pure arab heritage—were rendered socially intelligible through various classifications of mixedness, now they may be conferred certain unofficial benefits of proximity to arabness but are knowable only as either arab or black. ʿabd al-wahhāb’s everyday experiences and affinities mark him continually as the latter. his simultaneous blackness and pure arab nasab carries the category crises latent in the elision of mixed identities to a form of logical extreme. the tensions between newer and older racial epistemologies in crafting literary legacies can also be fruitfully addressed by looking across to another translation of a text that, at first blush, more properly belongs in the ranks of mannered literature than in those of popular texts: the library of arabic literature’s edition of the anthology (dīwān) of the pre-islamic poet turned posthumous epic hero, ʿantara b. shaddād, translated by james montgomery under the title war songs. in his edition of the dīwān, montgomery includes not only the works that we can say with greater certitude originated with the half-abyssinian warrior poet of the tribe of ʿabs, but also a series of poems from the sīra shaʿbiyya of which a euhemerized ʿantara is a protagonist; these he divides by section. in so doing, montgomery provides a window on a telling contrast, namely, that despite montgomery following many abbasid-era anthologists in referring to ʿantara as one of a handful of “black warrior-poets born to black women,” in his earliest extant poetry—stress-tested through comparison across a number of collectors’ arrangements—ʿantara does not once refer to himself as black.225 the earliest redaction of his poetry is that of al-aṣmaʿī (d. 212–213 ah/828 ad), which is reproduced and referenced by a number of later authors, and to whom ʿantara’s sīra is also fictively attributed; the later anthologies that montgomery uses are from the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries, and unlike with epicists’ flexible and locally tailored craft, learned anthologists and their copyists practiced fidelity to the letter, written or heard, of prior texts.226 across multiple poems, ʿantara mentions his mother’s distinct origins as a descendant of ham. he also discusses her blackness, describing her “black brow” as like the kaʿba’s cornerstone (ḥajar al-maqām) that held significance as a relic even before the structure was restored to monotheistic worship by muḥammad.227 in the same breath he often mentions his father, as a member of his tribe, and once as the “finest of the clan (min khayr ʿabs),” but not as a son of sam or even as an arab.228 montgomery writes in the introduction that this 225. ʿantara b. shaddād, war songs, trans. james montgomery (new york: new york university press, 2018), xx. 226. ibid., lvii. 227. ibid., 154–55. 228. ibid., 30–31. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 370 provincialism is to be expected, as, per webb and others, the concept of arab ethnicity was not yet a fixture in the imagination of pre-islamic arabians.229 in some of the comparisons of his father as the cream of his people with his mother as one of a diffuse population of the primordial ham’s descendants who is more readily likened to an arabian structure rather than any reference point from her homeland, there is already a latent disparity of autobiographical recordkeeping. in a few lines at the end of one poem, ʿantara seems to give the two sides even more unequal weight, saying min āl ʿabs manṣibī wa-faʿālī minhum abī ḥaqqan fa-hum lī wālid wa-l-umm min ḥām fa-hum akhwālī, which montgomery nimbly renders as “i yield my fame to my father’s clan—my mother descends from the sons of ham.”230 much more clunkily, these lines could be read as saying, “my rank and deeds derive from the people of ʿabs, my father, truly, is from them and as such they are my progenitor, while my mother is from ham and so they [=ham’s people] are my maternal uncles.” here, ʿantara is not simply acknowledging his hybridity, he is making a rhetorical ploy for greater belonging with the men with whom he was raised. elsewhere, ʿantara can be seen more defiantly invoking his mixedness by using the typically derogatory term hajīn, which montgomery translates as “half-blood.”231 there again, ʿantara uses the word “black,” as well as a word translated by montgomery as “white” (aḥmar), in keeping with the fact that aswad and aḥmar co-occur as opposites in some early texts, but which is also interpretable as ruddy; he places himself in neither of the two categories. similarly to the use of abqaʿ above, there are indications that in the preand earlyislamic period, people who were hajīns were expected to occupy an intermediary space in terms not only of their social position. moreover, sources suggest that it was believed their mixedness would be physically self-evident, though in one story this notional observability again proves a fickle metric for racial construction because of the possibility of atavism. an anecdote narrated by the prophet’s companion abū ʿubayda and collected by the early fourth/tenth-century lexicographer ibn durayd tells of a man from the tribe of ʿāmar wedding a woman from his own clan (qawmuhu), only to have a child who is, to his eye, aḥmar like a ḥajīn, though he expected the child to be dark like himself (khālif alwān banī al-jawn). he is about to retaliate against his spouse when she proclaims that she has white yet upstanding ancestry (in lahu min qibalī ajdād bīḍ al-wujūh karaman anjādan) and that they earn their honor in battle despite not being black (a-lā yakūnu lawnuhum sawādan).232 in this narration, we see that some preand early-islamic arabian groups are said to have identified as dark, recalling the above discussion of whiteness’ rhetoricity and evolution as a hegemonic construct. ibn durayd elsewhere offers corroborating details, as when he comments on the arab saying, “this is clear to the black and white (mā yakhfā dhālika ʿalā al-sawdāʾ wa-l-ḥamrāʾ wa-ʿalā al-aswad wa-l-aḥmar),” that aswad indicates the arabs, because “darkness (udma) is the common color in most arabs, while ruddiness and pallor 229. ibid., xxvi. 230. ibid., 136–37. 231. ibid., 216–17. 232. i am indebted to nathaniel miller for pointing me to this anecdote. see al-marzubānī, ashʿār al-nisāʾ, ed. sāmī makkī al-ʿānī and hilāl nājī (baghdad: dār al-risāla, 1976), 82. 371 • rachel schine al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) (al-ḥumra wa-l-shuqra) is the common color in most ʿajam.”233 moreover, the terms aswad, aḥmar, and abyaḍ appear to form a spectrum, much as they do in the qurʾān (q 35:27), with aḥmar occupying a range of middle, brown positions between white and black.234 and yet, per ʿantara’s poem in which aḥmar and aswad are counterposed, we see that color is portrayed in relative and relational modes; it is not only the case that ʿantara does not physically describe himself, he may not have had a single, fixed way of doing so. in view of this, we can see the figure of ʿantara change before our eyes. it is not until the poetry taken from ʿantara’s epic—the earliest mention of which, as with the tale of princess fatima, dates to the sixth/twelfth century, and the first extensive extant manuscripts to the mid-ninth/fifteenth century235—that one finds in montgomery’s edition an ʿantara with a more familiar face, describing himself as black and vaunting himself over arabs, in one instance declaring himself superior to the “ʿamrs and zayds” that surround him.236 in the prose of his sīra, ʿantara’s features are exaggeratedly black as well. when he is born, he is described as gigantic and “black and swarthy (adgham) like an elephant, flat-nosed and broad-shouldered, with wide eyes. the creation of the glorious king (ṣinaʿat al-malik al-jalīl) was frown-faced, coily-haired, large-mouthed […] with big ears and pupils that emitted sparks of fire.”237 in the hands of skilled sociallyand selfconscious epicists similar to those who fashioned the tale of princess fatima, ʿantara’s identity as a hajīn has given way to two competing claims, the first his self-proclaimed sense of arab belonging and, the second, his peers perceiving only racial blackness, at times with mocking derision (yaʿibūna lawnī aswadan).238 where above, with ibn qutayba, the paternalization of nasab and the decline of hajīn identities worked to apologetic effect by strengthening the arabness of the abbasid caliphs, the epical ʿantara shows that the decline of hajīn identity in narratives about people who became raced as black under a monoethnic episteme encodes the reverse: though ʿantara’s father is rendered in his epic as an arab who extends a paternity claim to the child (ilhāq) because of his exceptional heroism, and thus entitles him to his nasab, ʿantara continues throughout the text to contend with society labelling him not as a member of ʿabs, but as a “black slave” (ʿabd aswad).239 the abbasid-era biographers whose entries on ʿantara montgomery translates in a few appendices note that in pre-islamic arabia, children born to enslaved mothers were born into slavery yet could gain recognition as arab and claim their fathers’ nasabs through feats of gallantry in adulthood. however their full assimilation is not implicit in this—ʿantara is, 233. ibn durayd, jamharat al-lugha, ed. ramzī munīr baʿalbakī (beirut: dār al-ʿilm li-l-malayīn), 1:523. 234. i discuss this color spectrum in depth elsewhere. see rachel schine, “on blackness in arabic popular literature: the black heroes of the siyar shaʿbiyya, their conceptions, contests, and contexts” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2019), 51–57. 235. peter heath, the thirsty sword: sīrat ʼantar and the arabic popular epic (salt lake city: university of utah press, 1996), 28. 236. ʿantara b. shaddād, war songs, 249. 237. sīrat ʿantara, 1:74. 238. ʿantara b. shaddād, war songs, 248. 239. sīrat ʿantara, passim; m. s. sujimon, “istilḥāq and its role in islamic law,” arab law quarterly 18, no. 2 (2003): 117–43. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) translating race in the islamic studies classroom • 372 after all, ultimately remembered for his difference, and he describes his maternal heritage recurrently in his poetry. his non-arab origins likely followed him throughout his life in other intangible and unknowable ways despite his successful bid for a change in legal claim on lineage; later portrayals articulate this experience as black racialization, but we have little evidence from ʿantara’s own words that this is the precise form his alterity took. like ʿabd al-wahhāb, ʿantara continuously vies for inclusion in his sīra and compensates for his difference through feats of heroism long after formal recognition, but these deeds are simultaneously enlarged and frustrated because of distance from this pre-islamic past, the structural displacement of mixed identities, and the concomitant impossibility of black arabness within the world of the text. there is a marked disconnect between ʿantara’s and ʿabd al-wahhāb’s literary treatment, with the shifts in histories of racialization that they evoke, and that of ibn qutayba’s constellation of arabized potentates who profited from these selfsame changes. this gulf ultimately demands a discussion of passing and privilege as transhistorical phenomena, as well as of the particularities and politics of historical forms of mixedness. it shows us that the tools of legitimation, the burdens of proof, and the benefits of belief, have long been designed to serve some more readily than others. conclusion this article has argued that grappling with racialization and critical theories thereof is vital simultaneously to comparing and deeply historicizing individual texts, events, and phenomena from islamic premodernity. it is moreover vital to pedagogies centered on what students will themselves identify, compare, and seek to historicize. to that end, i have offered a set of detailed, guided readings of nine arabic texts in translation focused on discussing race in the classroom, particularly in premodern, comparative contexts. i have used these readings to trouble the twin myths of what kimberlé crenshaw has called perspectivelessness, or treating the normative as the objective in a field of study and sphere of human action. on the one hand, perspectivelessness is propounded by the ways in which both translators and instructors treat dominant modern narratives of race as unique to the post-enlightenment west, thereby marking out texts from premodernity or the non-west as pre-racial and divesting ourselves of a responsibility to bring race into the islamic studies classroom. on the other hand, perspectivelessness is latent in premodern and non-western texts themselves, in the unspoken discursive norms enshrined on the part of the authors discussed above, teased apart beautifully in several of the translators’ commentaries. by reading with race in mind, from identifying the role of whiteness in ibn faḍlān to that of hybridity in the dīwān of ʿantara, we historicize these norms and analyze their functions as tools of social positioning at local, imperial, and inter-imperial levels. in thinking through the processes of 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entered the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ). i raised my head and looked at the mosaic * i am very grateful to alain george and mehdy shaddel for the time they took to read and comment on an earlier draft of this article. i would also like to thank the peer reviewers for their extremely helpful comments and advice. 1. for al-nawfalī, see sebastian günther, “al-nawfalī’s lost history: the issue of a ninth-century shiʿite source used by al-ṭabarī and abū l-faraj al-iṣfahānī,” british journal of middle eastern studies 36, no. 2 (2009): 241–66; for muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh abī al-karrām b. muḥammad b. ʿalī b. ʿabd allāh b. jaʿfar b. abī ṭālib, a loyal supporter of the abbasids during the rebellion of the hasanid talibid muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh “al-nafs al-zakiyya,” see amikam elad, the rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya in 145/762: ṭālibīs and early ʿabbāsīs in conflict (leiden: brill, 2016), 257–58, 377. the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque in medina* harry munt university of york (harry.munt@york.ac.uk) abstract this article offers a translation and discussion of a chapter of a relatively little known late third/ninthor early fourth/tenth-century text that contains a transcription of the inscriptions that could be seen around the prophet’s mosque in medina after the renovation work undertaken there on the orders of the third abbasid caliph, muḥammad al-mahdī. this text thus adds significantly to our corpus of known inscriptions from early abbasid imperial monuments. the article discusses the sources of information about these inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque, the fate of the umayyad-era inscriptions in the early abbasid period, and what the new abbasid-era inscriptions have to tell us about the abbasids’ claims to authority in the decades immediately following their seizure of power. © 2022 harry munt. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) inscription in the mosque, which includes, “[this is] among that which the commander of the faithful al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik ordered.” all of a sudden someone said, “a man from the banū hāshim called muḥammad is going to efface this inscription and write his own name in its place.” i said, “i’m muḥammad and i’m from the banū hāshim. son of whom?” “son of ʿabd allāh.” “i’m the son of ʿabd allāh. the son of whom?” “son of muḥammad.” “i’m the son of muḥammad. the son of whom?” “the son of ʿalī.” “i’m the son of ʿalī. the son of whom?” “the son of ʿabd allāh.” “i’m the son of ʿabd allāh. the son of whom?” “the son of ʿabbās.” and even though i could not reach al-ʿabbās, i had no doubt that this was about me. i told people about this dream at that time, though i did not know about al-mahdī. but he spoke to people about it, so when he entered the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ), he raised his head, took a look, and saw the name of al-walīd. he said, “i see the name of al-walīd is in the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) to this day.” he asked for a chair, and one was brought to him in the courtyard of the mosque. he said, “i’m not going anywhere until it has been effaced and my name has been inscribed in its place.” he had workmen, scaffolding, and all that was necessary summoned and did not leave until it had been altered and his name had been inscribed.2 this anecdote fits well within the genre of reports that display the trope of confused apocalyptic expectations of the role to be played by a member of the family of the prophet (here identified as banū hāshim) who carries the prophet’s own name, muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh.3 for the purposes of this article, it highlights the significance of inscriptions in major caliphal, imperial monuments. just as his grandson and the future caliph al-maʾmūn (r. 198–218/813–33) was to do with the umayyad caliph ʿabd al-malik b. marwān’s (r. 65–86/685–705) name in the inscriptions of the dome of the rock in jerusalem, the third abbasid caliph muḥammad al-mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85) here had the name of the umayyad caliph al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik (r. 86–96/705–15) in the foundation inscription of the prophet’s mosque in medina effaced and his own name inscribed in its place.4 2. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, ed. m. j. de goeje et al. (leiden: brill, 1879–1901), 3:534–35. 3. see, for example, the discussion in amikam elad, “the struggle for the legitimacy of authority as reflected in the ḥadīth of al-mahdī,” in ʿabbasid studies ii: occasional papers of the school of ʿabbasid studies, ed. john nawas, 39–96 (leuven: peeters, 2010). 4. for al-maʾmūn and the dome of the rock, see, among many discussions, marcus milwright, the dome of the rock and its umayyad mosaic inscriptions (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016), 51, 65. for an introduction to foundation inscriptions across the premodern islamic world, see sheila blair, islamic inscriptions 80 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 81 al-mahdī reigned, as this anecdote reminds us, at a time when umayyad rule was still within living memory and the abbasids and their supporters were still working to articulate precisely the reasons why they were the legitimate caliphal family in the face of numerous opponents’ challenges.5 monumental, commemorative construction projects were one way of articulating the necessary messages of legitimacy, and the abbasids seem to have jumped at the chance to highlight their victory over their umayyad predecessors by ostentatiously effacing their names from these imperial monuments. this suggests, in turn, that the epigraphic programs in such major imperial monuments might have quite a bit to tell us about the nature of umayyad and early abbasid rule.6 indeed, such programs, together with other aspects of these monuments’ form and decoration, have formed the basis of important studies on umayyad caliphs’ political agendas.7 these studies have focused, perfectly understandably, on a fairly small number of monuments, especially the dome of the rock in jerusalem and the umayyad mosque in damascus; when it comes to the early abbasids’ articulation of political messages through epigraphic programs in explicitly caliphally patronized monuments, there has been less work. this is in large part due to the relative paucity of texts that remain physically extant, although for the umayyad period the inscriptions from the dome of the rock are a particularly important survival.8 from the early abbasid period, there is, for example, a milestone found near (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 1998), 29–42. 5. among many studies, see, for example, ʿabd al-ʿazīz al-dūrī, “al-fikra al-mahdiyya bayn al-daʿwa al-ʿabbāsiyya wa-l-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī al-awwal,” in studia arabica et islamica: festschrift for iḥsān ʿabbās on his sixtieth birthday, ed. wadād al-qāḍī, 123–32 (beirut: american university of beirut, 1981); jacob lassner, islamic revolution and historical memory: an inquiry into the art of ʿabbāsid apologetics (new haven, ct: american oriental society, 1986); patricia crone, “on the meaning of the ʿabbāsid call to al-riḍā,” in the islamic world: from classical to modern times, ed. c. edmund bosworth et al., 95–111 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1989); idem, medieval islamic political thought (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2004), 87–98; muhammad qasim zaman, religion and politics under the early ʿabbāsids: the emergence of the proto-sunnī elite (leiden: brill, 1997); and deborah g. tor, “the parting of ways between ʿalid shiʿism and abbasid shiʿism: an analysis of the missives between the caliph al-manṣūr and muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya,” journal of abbasid studies 6, no. 2 (2019): 209–27. 6. for the purposes of this article, “the early abbasid period” refers to the reigns of the first three abbasid caliphs: abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ (r. 132–36/749–54), abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr (r. 136–58/754–75), and muḥammad al-mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85). the umayyad period is often divided into three periods, and that discussed in this article is almost always the marwanid era, from 64/684 to 132/749; see further andrew marsham, “introduction: the umayyad world,” in the umayyad world, ed. andrew marsham, 1–20 (london: routledge, 2021), 14–15. 7. a large number of studies on the dome of the rock are relevant here, but for use of the inscriptions, see gülru necipoğlu, “the dome of the rock as palimpsest: ʿabd al-malik’s grand narrative and sultan süleyman’s glosses,” muqarnas 25 (2008): 17–105, at 45–56; and milwright, dome of the rock (which also provides references to important earlier studies). see also finbarr barry flood, the great mosque of damascus: studies on the makings of an umayyad visual culture (leiden: brill, 2001); alain george, “paradise or empire? on a paradox of umayyad art,” in power, patronage, and memory in early islam: perspectives on umayyad elites, ed. alain george and andrew marsham, 39–67 (new york: oxford university press, 2018); idem, the umayyad mosque of damascus: art, faith and empire in early islam (london: gingko, 2021). 8. for the lack of extant monumental inscriptions from the early abbasid period, see, for example, blair, islamic inscriptions, 59. a good example of the problem can be seen in sheila blair, the monumental inscriptions from early islamic iran and transoxiana (leiden: brill, 1992): of the seventy-nine inscriptions/bunches of 82 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) mafraq in northern jordan, which mentions that it was constructed at the command of one “al-mahdī” in the year 135/752–53;9 a text from baysān/scythopolis commemorating the construction or renovation of an unspecified building during the reign of abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ in 135/753;10 an inscription from the mosque in sanaa recording work patronized by the caliph in 136/753–54;11 an inscription from the masjid al-bayʿa near mecca dated to 144/761–62;12 an inscription recording work on a minaret (miʾdhana) and mosque in ascalon in 155/771–72;13 an inscription from the masjid al-ḥarām in mecca dated to 167/783–84;14 and one of the milestones discovered so far along the darb zubayda, the major route that connected baghdad/kufa and mecca, undated but certainly early abbasid, that mentions the patronage of a caliph.15 inscriptions datable to the first five centuries ah included in this work, none dates to the first century, one to the second century, and one small collection of graffiti to the third century. for a quick overview of extant umayyad-era inscriptions from caliphally patronized monuments, see beatrice gruendler, the development of the arabic scripts: from the nabatean era to the first islamic century according to dated texts (atlanta: scholars press, 1993), 15–21 (the relevant texts are e4, e9–10, e12–16); and ilkka lindstedt, “arabic rock inscriptions up to 750 ce,” in marsham, umayyad world, 411–37, at 428. some of these can be consulted in étienne combe et al., eds., répertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe (cairo: institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1931–91) [henceforth rcea], within 1:8–24 (nos. 9–12, 14–17, 25, 27–28). 9. khaled al-jbour, “the discovery of the first abbasid milestone in ‘bilād ash-shām,’” studies in the history and archaeology of jordan 8 (2004): 171–76. since the text is curtailed, the only word visible in the patron’s title is al-mahdī, but as al-jbour notes, since the caliph abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ is called “al-mahdī” in other texts (see nn. 10–11), the title here probably refers to that caliph. 10. see amikam elad, “the caliph abūʾl-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ, the first ʿabbāsid mahdī: implications of an unknown inscription from bet-shean (baysān),” in masʾat moshe: studies in jewish and islamic culture presented to moshe gil, ed. ezra fleischer, mordechai a. friedman and joel a. kramer, 9–55 (heb.), with eng. summary at v–vi (jerusalem: bialik institute, 1998), esp. 9 for this text; and moshe sharon, corpus inscriptionum arabicarum palaestinae (leiden: brill, 1997–) [henceforth ciap], 2:214–19, esp. 215 for the text. 11. this is perhaps the most frequently discussed to date of these early abbasid caliphal foundation inscriptions. a photograph and transcription were first published by eugen mittwoch, “eine arabische bauinschrift aus dem jahre 136 h.,” orientalia 4 (1935): 235–38. since then, the text has also been provided in al-dūrī, “al-fikra al-mahdiyya,” 124; robert b. serjeant and ronald lewcock, “the architectural history and description of ṣanʿāʾ mosques: the great mosque,” in ṣanʿāʾ: an arabian islamic city, ed. ronald lewcock and robert b. serjeant, 323–50 (london: world of islam festival trust, 1983), 345 (photograph) and 348 (edition and translation); and elad, “caliph abūʾl-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ,” 16 (with further discussion in idem, “struggle,” 39–40, 42). there is also a brief but misleadingly inaccurate citation of the text in muḥammad al-ḥajrī, masājid ṣanʿāʾ: ʿāmiruhā wa-muwaffīhā (sanaa: maṭbaʿat wizārat al-maʿārif, 1361/1942), 26. 12. saʿd b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama (riyadh: wizārat al-maʿārif, wikālat al-āthār wa-l-matāḥif, 1423/2003), 122. there is another nearby but undated inscription that may be related to this one; see ibid., 122–25. a new edition and study of the known early abbasid inscriptions from mecca is currently being prepared by mehdy shaddel. i am very grateful to him for discussing these with me. 13. another oft-discussed early abbasid inscription; see rcea, 1:32–33 (no. 42); ciap, 1:144–47; elad, “struggle,” 58 (with references to further discussions). 14. al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 111–13. there is another inscription nearby that seems closely associated with this text and probably comes from the same period; see ibid., 113–14. mehdy shaddel’s forthcoming publication will also include a third text dating to al-mahdī’s caliphate from the masjid al-ḥarām. 15. see saʿd b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz al-rāshid, “arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya min al-ʿaṣr al-ʿabbāsī: dirāsa wa-taḥqīq,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 83 the paucity of physically surviving texts makes the study of those epigraphic programs whose traces are preserved in literary sources all the more important. the study of apparent documentary evidence that is preserved in premodern arabic literary sources has a long history among scholars interested in the early islamic period.16 such study does not appear to be receding, and ever more studies are published on “documents” that are preserved only in later arabic texts.17 as far as epigraphic programs are concerned, that which accompanied al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik’s new mosque in damascus, relatively well known among modern historians of the umayyad era, can be studied only on the basis of discussions in arabic literary sources. it is, for example, the famous damascene historian ibn ʿasākir (d. 571/1176) who tells us that on narrow bands in blue and gold along the qibla wall could be found the throne verse (q 2:255) followed by al-walīd’s foundation inscription as well as sūras 1 and 79–81 of the qurʾan.18 reports of the inscriptions that could be found in the prophet’s mosque in medina after the building projects of al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik between 88/706–7 and 91/709–10 and of a few abbasid caliphs, especially that of muḥammad al-mahdī between 162/778–79 and 165/781–82, can provide modern historians with some of the most extensive such material.19 some aspects of the epigraphic programs known from this mosque over the al-ʿuṣūr 5, no. 1 (1990): 123–42, at 124, 130–31; there is also a very brief note on this inscription in idem, “a new ʿabbāsid milestone from al-rabaḏa in saudi arabia,” arabian archaeology and epigraphy 3, no. 2 (1992): 138–43, at 139. for further discussion of this particular inscription, see the appendix to this article. 16. a number of the texts included in the early volumes of rcea, for example, are attested only in premodern arabic literary sources. another well-studied example is the so-called constitution of medina, on which see michael lecker, the “constitution of medina”: muḥammad’s first legal document (princeton, nj: darwin press, 2004). for an example of recent reluctance (though in this case perhaps appropriate) to use texts of inscriptions from the abbasid period preserved in literary sources, see hagit nol, “dating early islamic sites through architectural elements: a case study from central israel,” journal of islamic archaeology 6, no. 1 (2019): 41–80, at 57. 17. for just four examples, see wadād al-qāḍī, “an umayyad papyrus in al-kindī’s kitāb al-quḍāt?,” der islam 84, no. 2 (2007): 200–245; andrew marsham and chase f. robinson, “the safe-conduct for the abbasid ʿabd allāh b. ʿalī (d. 764),” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 70, no. 2 (2007): 247–81; andrew marsham, “the pact (amāna) between muʿāwiya ibn abī sufyān and ʿ amr ibn al-ʿāṣ (656 or 658 ce): ‘documents’ and the islamic historical tradition,” journal of semitic studies 57, no. 1 (2012): 69–96; and milka levy-rubin, “the surrender agreements: origins and authenticity,” in marsham, umayyad world, 196–215. 18. ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, vols. 1 and 2, ed. ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-munajjid (damascus: al-majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿarabī, 1951–54), 2/i:37. his source for this information is abū yūsuf yaʿqūb b. sufyān al-fasawī (d. 277/890), but it cannot be found in the extant parts of the latter’s kitāb al-maʿrifa wa-l-taʾrīkh. the editor of the latter work included it in his edition on the basis of ibn ʿasākir’s citation; see al-fasawī, kitāb al-maʿrifa wa-l-taʾrīkh, ed. akram ḍiyāʾ al-ʿumarī, 3rd ed. (medina: maktabat al-dār, 1410/1989–90), 3:433–34. other sources provide a text for the foundation inscription as well; see, in general, barbara finster, “die mosaiken der umayyadenmoschee von damaskus,” kunst des orients 7, no. 2 (1970–71): 83–141, at 119; flood, great mosque, 247–54; and george, umayyad mosque, 76–77, 175–78, 206–7. 19. for studies of these two building programs in medina (al-walīd’s is much better studied than al-mahdī’s), see esp. jean sauvaget, le mosquée omeyyade de médine: étude sur les origines architecturales de la mosquée et de la basilique (paris: vanoest, 1947); k. a. c. creswell, early muslim architecture: umayyads, a.d. 622–750, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (oxford: clarendon press, 1969), 142–49; ghazi izzeddin bisheh, “the mosque of the prophet at madīnah throughout the first-century a.h. with special emphasis on the umayyad mosque” (phd diss., 84 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) second/eighth century have been discussed before, especially the evidence for al-walīd’s inscriptions.20 the abbasid-era texts have received less attention, although they were subjected to a fairly thorough study by jean sauvaget based on a good range of sources that were available to him at the time.21 renewed study of these inscriptions is, however, long overdue. the most significant reason for this is that no detailed study to date has made use of the most important source for research into these inscriptions: a late third/ninth or early fourth/tenth-century work known as kitāb al-manāsik wa-amākin ṭuruq al-ḥajj wa-maʿālim al-jazīra.22 sauvaget’s study, upon which most other historians have relied, was written before the publication of this kitāb al-manāsik and so was based primarily on the inscriptions discussed by ibn rusta, who visited the mosque in 290/903, supplemented by material provided by the later local historian of medina ibn al-najjār (d. 643/1245) and the very brief discussions provided by ibn qutayba (d. 276/889), ibn ʿabd rabbih (d. 328/940), and ibn al-nadīm (d. before 388/998).23 sauvaget also made some use of another local history of medina, that of al-samhūdī (d. 911/1506), although he mostly used the briefer of the extant histories by that author; a much more detailed work also survives, and although it does not provide a full survey of the inscriptions, it does offer important supplementary material that is crucial to their interpretation.24 university of michigan, 1979), 201–48; marcel behrens, “ein garten des paradieses”: die prophetenmoschee von medina (würzburg: ergon, 2007), 85–90; and harry munt, the holy city of medina: sacred space in early islamic arabia (new york: cambridge university press, 2014), 105–11, 115–17. 20. for discussion of al-walīd’s inscriptions, see sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 78–80; finster, “mosaiken,” 132; bisheh, “mosque of the prophet,” 218; estelle whelan, “forgotten witness: evidence for the early codification of the qurʾān,” journal of the american oriental society 118, no. 1 (1998): 1–14, at 8–13; flood, great mosque, 196–97, 204–5; elias khamis, “two wall mosaic inscriptions from the umayyad market place in bet shean/ baysān,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 64, no. 2 (2001): 159–76, at 171; and alain george, “calligraphy, colour and light in the blue qurʾan,” journal of qurʾanic studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 75–125, at 97. 21. sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 54–68; see also, more recently, george, “calligraphy, colour and light,” 98–101. 22. see kitāb al-manāsik wa-amākin ṭuruq al-ḥajj wa-maʿālim al-jazīra, ed. ḥamad al-jāsir (riyadh: dār al-yamāma, 1389/1969), 385–95 for the discussion of the inscriptions. the authorship of this work is discussed further below. for some discussion of this source’s provision of the text of early abbasid inscriptions from the prophet’s mosque, see elad, “struggle,” 39, n. 4; munt, holy city of medina, 115–16, 167–68; and now bea leal, “the abbasid mosaic tradition and the great mosque of damascus,” muqarnas 37 (2020): 29–62, at 31–32. 23. for these sources’ discussions of the inscriptions, see ibn qutayba, al-maʿārif, ed. tharwat ʿukāsha, 4th ed. (cairo: dār al-maʿārif, n.d.), 562–63; ibn rusta, al-mujallad al-sābiʿ min kitāb al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1891), 70–71, 73–75; ibn ʿabd rabbih, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, ed. aḥmad amīn, aḥmad al-zayn, and ibrāhīm al-abyārī (cairo: maṭbaʿat lajnat al-taʾlīf wa-l-tarjama wa-l-nashr, 1359–72/1940–53), 6:260–63; ibn al-nadīm, kitāb al-fihrist, ed. ayman fuʾād sayyid (london: muʾassasat al-furqān li-l-turāth al-islāmī, 1430/2009), 1/i:15–16 (future references are to this edition unless otherwise stated); ibn al-najjār, al-durra al-thamīna fī taʾrīkh al-madīna, ed. muḥammad ʿazab (cairo: maktabat al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 1416/1995), 176–77, 179. the inscriptions as provided by ibn rusta were also included in rcea, 1:29–30, 35–38, 65–66 (nos. 38, 46–47, 83); and 2:265 (no. 786); and that provided by ibn qutayba partially (possibly via al-samhūdī, who also provides it partially in his wafāʾ al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā, ed. qāsim al-sāmarrāʾī [london: muʾassasat al-furqān li-l-turāth al-islāmī, 1422/2001], 2:296) in rcea, 1:98 (no. 122). 24. sauvaget used al-samhūdī’s khulāṣat al-wafā bi-akhbār dār al-muṣṭafā; for an edition, see ed. ʿalī muḥammad ʿ umar (cairo: maktabat al-thaqāfa al-dīniyya, 1427/2006). the more important work is al-samhūdī’s al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 85 ibn rusta’s catalog of inscriptions from the prophet’s mosque was the most comprehensive to have been published when sauvaget was at work on his study, but ibn rusta noted at the end of his survey of some of the texts, “there are many texts in places around the mosque and its entrances, inside and outside, which i have not transcribed, preferring concision.”25 the kitāb al-manāsik includes also the texts that ibn rusta omitted. several other mamluk-era local histories of medina that have been published since sauvaget’s study are also useful, especially that by al-fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1414), which also provides the text of a number of the inscriptions contained in the kitāb al-manāsik but not in other works.26 after a brief survey of what is known about work in general on the prophet’s mosque over the marwanid and early abbasid periods, this article offers a discussion of the kitāb al-manāsik’s sources for its transcription of the mosque’s inscriptions as well as the sources of some of the other relevant premodern authors and a translation of the section of the kitāb al-manāsik that deals with those inscriptions. this, then, forms the basis for further discussion of what these inscriptions can tell us about several issues relevant to modern research into early islamic history. i focus more heavily on texts from the early abbasid period, since it is these that the kitāb al-manāsik reproduces more fully than any other source does, but i also give some consideration to the umayyad-era texts. it is my hope that this article can help bring the prophet’s mosque in medina more fully into discussions of umayyad, and especially early abbasid, imperial building programs to grant it a place in modern scholarship more fitting of its clear importance to caliphs and other muslims in the second/eighth century. construction work in the prophet’s mosque in the marwanid and early abbasid periods although various developments in the structure of the prophet’s mosque in medina are said to have taken place during the era of the rāshidūn caliphs, it is really with the work ordered by al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik that the building came to take much of the shape that defined it throughout the premodern period.27 this caliph is known for ordering significant construction work on a number of major mosques around the caliphate, including in jerusalem (the aqṣā mosque), damascus, mecca, sanaa, homs, and al-fusṭāṭ, as well as in medina.28 the work he ordered in medina was carried out by the governor of that town, his wafāʾ al-wafā. for more on this author, see ḥamad al-jāsir, “al-samhūdī: ashhar muʾarrikhī al-madīna,” majallat al-ʿarab 7 (1392/1972): 161–78; al-sāmarrāʾī’s introduction to his edition of the wafāʾ al-wafā, at 1:7–47; 2:5–23; and harry munt, “mamluk historiography outside of egypt and syria: ʿalī b. ʿabd allāh al-samhūdī and his histories of medina,” der islam 92, no. 2 (2015): 413–41. 25. ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 75. 26. al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba fī maʿālim ṭāba, ed. ḥabīb maḥmūd aḥmad et al. (medina: markaz buḥūth wa-dirāsāt al-madīna al-munawwara, 1423/2002), 1:425–35. 27. much of this section is summarized from the discussion in munt, holy city of medina, 105–11, 115–17, where further references are given. for discussion of the literary accounts of the pre-marwanid mosque, see thallein antun, the architectural form of the mosque in the central arab lands, from the hijra to the end of the umayyad period, 1/622–133/750 (oxford: british archaeological reports, 2016), 50–70. 28. for discussion, see finster, “mosaiken,” 127–39; and flood, great mosque, esp. 184–92. see also rafi grafman and myriam rosen-ayalon, “the two great syrian umayyad mosques: jerusalem and damascus,” 86 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) cousin and the future caliph ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz, and ṣāliḥ b. kaysān between 88/706–7 and 91/709–10.29 as part of this project, the mosque was substantially enlarged to the east, north, and west. as sauvaget noted, it is impossible to provide exact measurements for the size of the new mosque, since the building itself does not, of course, survive and the figures given in literary sources vary.30 one such set of numbers gives 167.5 cubits for the southern wall, 135 cubits for the northern wall, and 200 cubits for the eastern and western walls.31 within these walls, a central courtyard was surrounded by arcades comprising numerous columns. this enlargement work brought the prophet’s grave, now within a dedicated chamber, within the walls of the mosque for the first time (it was located near the southeast corner), and other features classically associated with mosques, including a concave miḥrāb and corner towers later identified as minarets, were apparently introduced at the same time.32 the building work was accompanied by a lavish program of decoration, most famously a series of mosaics that, according to a well-known report transmitted by the early medinan local historian ibn zabāla (more on this figure below), depicted “the trees and villas (quṣūr) of paradise.”33 it has often been suggested that these mosaics perhaps resembled those that can still be seen in the umayyad mosque in damascus.34 famously, this work was apparently carried out with the assistance of laborers and resources sent by the byzantine emperor justinian ii (r. 685–95, 705–11 ce).35 after al-walīd’s work, not much more appears to have been done during the remaining years of umayyad rule. as we will soon see, however, some inscriptions recorded in the kitāb muqarnas 16 (1999): 1–15; and especially now alain george, “a builder of mosques: the projects of al-walīd i, from sanaa to homs” in fruit of knowledge, wheel of learning: essays in honour of robert hillenbrand, ed. melanie gibson, 16–49 (london: gingko, 2022). 29. these, at least, are the dates given by the early local historian of medina ibn zabāla (on whom see below), as cited in ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 71–72; and al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:273–74. 30. sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 70; see also antun, architectural form, 66–67. 31. bisheh, “mosque of the prophet,” 211. various lengths for cubit (dhirāʿ) were known in the early islamic centuries; they were usually somewhere around half a meter, give or take, though sometimes varied more considerably. umayyad-era buildings were apparently built with a cubit equivalent to 0.56m; see grafman and rosen-ayalon, “two great syrian mosques,” 5–6; george, umayyad mosque, 136. this equivalence gives us 112 m for the western and eastern walls, 75.6 m for the northern wall, and 93.8 m for the southern wall. sauvaget (mosquée omeyyade, 91) offers a reconstruction of al-walīd’s mosque that agrees roughly with these measurements, although it has the northern and southern walls more similar to one another in length. 32. for these features of the mosque, see also sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 69–92; bisheh, “mosque of the prophet,” 201–48; munt, holy city of medina, 106–11. for other discussions of their origins, see, for example, estelle whelan, “the origins of the miḥrāb mujawwaf: a reinterpretation,” international journal of middle east studies 18, no. 2 (1996): 205–23; nuha n. n. khoury, “the mihrab: from text to form,” international journal of middle east studies 20, no. 1 (1998): 1–27; jonathan m. bloom, the minaret (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2013). for two other features closely associated with the mosque in medina, see heba mostafa, “the early mosque revisited: introduction of the minbar and maqṣūra,” muqarnas 33 (2016): 1–16. 33. for the quotation, see kitāb al-manāsik, 364–65; ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 69; ibn al-najjār, al-durra al-thamīna, 176; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:270. 34. for a recent note of the link, see george, “paradise or empire,” 53. 35. for a discussion of this with reference to earlier scholarship, see bisheh, “mosque of the prophet,” 201–11; george, umayyad mosque, 87–88. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 87 al-manāsik and other sources suggest that work was undertaken in the mosque during the reigns of the first two abbasid caliphs, abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ and abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr.36 it was, however, the construction work ordered by the third abbasid caliph, muḥammad al-mahdī that gave the prophet’s mosque the general form it would have down to the nineteenth century.37 between 162/778–79 and 165/781–82, according to some sources, this caliph had the mosque expanded northward by 100 cubits (ca. 56 m) and made several changes to the interior decoration. he also apparently wished to remove the additional steps that an umayyad caliph had added to the prophet’s minbar in the mosque to return it to its original form, but eventually decided against doing so out of fear that the necessary work would damage the wood of the original steps. as part of his renovations to the interior decoration of the mosque, al-mahdī established a program of inscriptions that incorporated some earlier texts around the courtyard and the entrances to the mosque. it is this program of inscriptions about which the kitāb al-manāsik provides much more information than can be found in almost any other extant source. sources for the texts of the inscriptions although the extant works discussed above preserve the texts of numerous inscriptions from al-mahdī’s epigraphic program in medina, very few offer eyewitness descriptions by their authors; almost all of the authors relied on earlier witnesses to these inscriptions. (there are no extant sources authored by eyewitnesses to the umayyad-era texts.) this raises the question of when the inscriptions disappeared. our most reliable terminus post quem for their disappearance is provided by ibn rusta, who did apparently see at least some of the texts himself when visiting medina during the ḥajj season of 290/903, a date that falls after the death of the kitāb al-manāsik’s principal source, abū al-ḥusayn yaḥyā b. al-ḥasan al-ʿaqīqī, in 277/890 (see further discussion of this figure below).38 after this date, the precise circumstances of their disappearance are hard to pin down. for what it is worth, the andalusī writer ibn ʿabd rabbih, when discussing the prophet’s mosque, notes within his description of the layers of decoration along the internal qibla wall that “above that there is a marble band (izār) as well, within which is a sky-blue strip (ṣanīfa39 samāwiyya) over which are five lines inscribed with gold in a thick script, roughly a finger’s width, which contain the short sūras at the end of the qurʾan (qiṣār al-mufaṣṣal).”40 since, as we will shortly see, the umayyad-era qibla wall inscription is said to have included sūras 91 to 114, ibn ʿabd rabbih’s comment might suggest that this element, at least, could still be seen in the early fourth/tenth century, although there is some debate over the relationship between ibn ʿabd rabbih’s description and the actual appearance of the mosque in medina 36. see also munt, holy city of medina, 115–16. 37. ibid., 116, with further references. 38. ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73. for a brief discussion of ibn rusta’s trip to the ḥijāz, see zayde antrim, routes and realms: the power of place in the early islamic world (new york: oxford university press, 2012), 69–70. 39. sauvaget (mosquée omeyyade, 78) reads this as ṣuffa. 40. ibn ʿabd rabbih, al-ʿiqd al-farīd, 6:261. 88 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) in his time.41 al-samhūdī noted that some remnants of mosaic from the time of al-mahdī’s expansion of the mosque could still be found in his day by the northwest minaret and along the western wall near that minaret, but that these were subsequently destroyed in the devastating fire that broke out in the mosque in ramaḍān 886/november 1481.42 it is unclear whether these surviving mosaic fragments included any epigraphy. the inscriptions were certainly still visible throughout the third/ninth century, however, and may have been restored in the middle of that century along with other features of the mosque’s decoration: according to al-balādhurī (d. before 279/892), the caliph jaʿfar al-mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–61) ordered repairs to be undertaken on the prophet’s mosque in 246/860–61, for which purpose he sent “plenty of mosaic” there.43 the two best known sources from the late second and third/ninth centuries cited as eyewitnesses to the abbasid-era inscriptions are ibn zabāla (wr. 199/814) and yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī. al-samhūdī says explicitly that “he [yaḥyā] and ibn zabāla recounted the inscriptions, inside and outside [the mosque], as well as around its entrances. we have left them out because they have not survived.”44 when al-samhūdī does actually provide the text of a handful of these inscriptions, mostly in his chapter discussing the entrances to the mosque, he almost always credits ibn zabāla and/or yaḥyā as his source.45 the author of the kitāb al-manāsik is quite clear that his source was yaḥyā (both this work and yaḥyā are discussed below). there is no reason not to accept ibn rusta’s claim that he read at least some of these texts himself—the fact that he is the only source to reproduce an inscription recording work ordered by the caliph al-muʿtaḍid (r. 279–89/892–902) in 282/895–96 seems to confirm this46—although it is clear that he otherwise made heavy use of ibn zabāla’s akhbār al-madīna as a source for his account of medina; it is also clear that ibn al-najjār made heavy use of ibn zabāla’s work, so the latter may well have been the ultimate source for ibn al-najjār’s discussion of the inscriptions.47 qāsim al-sāmarrāʾī seems convinced that ibn zabāla was the source for al-fīrūzābādī’s discussion of these inscriptions. although i cannot see that clearly stated in 41. sauvaget made heavy use of this passage in his reconstruction of the prophet’s mosque; see his mosquée omeyyade, 31, 69–92; and finster, “mosaiken,” 132. nuha khoury, however, has discussed this passage in a particularly interesting way that questions its relationship to a medinan reality; see her “the meaning of the great mosque of cordoba in the tenth century,” muqarnas 13 (1996): 80–98, esp. 89–94. that said, flood (great mosque, 193–94) has argued in favor of taking ibn ʿabd rabbih’s description seriously. 42. al-samhūdī, khulāṣat al-wafā, 1:317; idem, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:296. for this fire and its consequences, see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:413–30; sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 46–47; behrens, “garten des paradieses,” 93–96. 43. al-balādhurī, kitāb futūḥ al-buldān, ed. m. j. de goeje (leiden: brill, 1866), 7. 44. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:274. 45. see, for example, ibid., 2:291; 3:8, 14, 23. 46. ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74: “abū al-ʿabbās, the imam al-muʿtaḍid bi-llāh, the commander of the faithful, may god lengthen his remaining time, ordered the building’s restoration in the year 282 [895–96 ce].” see also rcea, 2:265 (no. 786); and discussion in sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 57–58. 47. for these (and other) sources’ reliance on ibn zabāla, see harry munt, “writing the history of an arabian holy city: ibn zabāla and the first local history of medina,” arabica 59, no. 1–2 (2012): 1–34, at 2–3, 13, 15, 19, 23–27. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 89 the latter’s work, given the considerable overlap between material in al-fīrūzābādī’s history and that attributed elsewhere to ibn zabāla, the claim is certainly plausible.48 ibn zabāla’s akhbār al-madīna (probably known through at least one later recension) was without doubt the single most important source for the history of medina’s early islamic topography, population, and monuments for many later authors, especially those active in the ayyubid and mamluk periods. this work has, however, been discussed in detail elsewhere.49 here, we will focus on the kitāb al-manāsik and that work’s main source for the inscriptions, yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī. the kitāb al-manāsik is not a work particularly interested in the rites of the ḥajj and the ʿumra but rather a very important source of geographical and topographical information on the arabian peninsula. it is particularly concerned, as its full given title suggests, with the routes that pilgrims used to travel from regions across the caliphate to the ḥijāz. it survives in a single manuscript held in mashhad.50 that manuscript is missing its introduction, and consequently there has been some debate over the identity of its author. the text’s editor, ḥamad al-jāsir, argued forcefully that the author was abū isḥāq ibrāhīm b. isḥāq al-ḥarbī (d. 285/898–99), and others have often followed this identification when citing the work.51 the identification has, however, been challenged by abdullah al-wohaibi, who has instead argued for the work’s attribution to muḥammad b. khalaf wakīʿ (d. 306/918), otherwise well known, especially for his extant history of the judiciary in the early islamic centuries.52 some aspects of al-wohaibi’s case are convincing, particularly the overlap he points to between the sources used and the manner of their citing in the kitāb al-manāsik, on the one hand, and in wakīʿ’s akhbār al-quḍāt, on the other. al-wohaibi also notes that ibn al-nadīm credits wakīʿ with a kitāb al-ṭarīq, which apparently contained “reports about regions and routes,” although ibn al-nadīm also reports that the work remained unfinished.53 48. al-sāmarrāʾī in al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:274, n. 8. 49. see most recently (with references to further discussions) ṣalāḥ ʿabd al-ʿazīz zayn salāma, akhbār al-madīna li-muḥammad b. al-ḥasan b. zabāla (medina: markaz buḥūth wa-dirāsat al-madīna al-munawwara, 1424/2003); munt, “writing the history.” 50. ms mashhad, al-maktaba al-riḍawiyya, no. 5751. the manuscript is undated, but its most prominent student, ḥusayn ʿalī maḥfūẓ, suggested that it was copied approximately in the early sixth/twelfth century; it was certainly owned by someone in 899/1493–94. i have been unable to consult maḥfūẓ’s studies directly, but see the summary in al-jāsir’s lengthy introduction to his edition of the kitāb al-manāsik, 9–273 (henceforth jāsmuq.), at 271. 51. for al-jāsir’s argument, see jāsmuq., esp. 262–70; and idem, “makhṭūṭ ʿan maʿālim jazīrat al-ʿarab li-l-imām al-ḥarbī (198–285 h)” (part 2), majallat al-ʿarab 3, no. 3 (1388/1968): 193–98. 52. abdullah al-wohaibi, the northern hijaz in the writings of the arab geographers, 800–1150 (beirut: al-risalah, 1973), 450–53. al-wohaibi refers to the kitāb al-manāsik by the title manāzil ṭarīq makka. for discussion of wakīʿ’s akhbār al-quḍāt, see mathieu tillier, l’invention du cadi: la justice des musulmans, des juifs et des chrétiens aux premiers siècles de l’islam (paris: publications de la sorbonne, 2017), esp. 154–55. 53. ibn al-nadīm, fihrist, 1/ii:353. wakīʿ was an important source for al-khaṭīb al-baghdādī’s (d. 463/1071) topographical discussion of baghdad, and jacob lassner speculated that the latter may have taken material from wakīʿ’s kitāb al-ṭarīq, but there is nothing in the extant kitāb al-manāsik that (if this work were by wakīʿ) could confirm this; see jacob lassner, the topography of baghdad in the early middle ages: text and studies (detroit: wayne state university press, 1970), 30–31. 90 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) whatever the author’s precise identity, the studies of al-jāsir and al-wohaibi have firmly established, largely on the basis of the authorities cited, that the kitāb al-manāsik is a work of the late third/ninth or early fourth/tenth century. the kitāb al-manāsik’s direct source for discussion of the inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque is cited at least thirty-three times throughout the work as a whole. abū al-ḥusayn yaḥyā b. al-ḥasan b. jaʿfar b. ʿubayd allāh b. al-ḥusayn al-aṣghar b. ʿalī zayn al-ʿābidīn b. al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī b. abī ṭālib, known as al-ʿaqīqī, was, according to al-samhūdī, one of the first, along with ibn zabāla, to compose a history of medina.54 we know a fair amount about his life, his ancestors, and his descendants, mainly thanks to notices in ʿalid genealogies.55 yaḥyā was born in medina in 214/829, seven years before the death of his father at the age of thirty-seven in 221/835–36.56 his grandfather jaʿfar is said to have been recognized as an imam by some zaydīs and was known as al-ḥujja, “the proof.”57 jaʿfar was presumably seen as a threat by the abbasid caliphs, because he was arrested by hārūn al-rashīd’s last governor of medina, abū al-bakhtarī wahb b. wahb, and held for eighteen months.58 the family does not seem to have been permanently at odds with the abbasids, but many of them are reported to have been imprisoned or to have come to otherwise nasty ends.59 there is, for example, a suggestion that the abbasids’ revolutionary commander abū muslim tried to poison abū jaʿfar ʿubayd allāh b. al-ḥusayn al-aṣghar.60 the family also appears to 54. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:65. 55. abū naṣr al-bukhārī, sirr al-silsila al-ʿalawiyya, ed. muḥammad ṣādiq baḥr al-ʿulūm (najaf: al-maktaba al-ḥaydariyya, 1382/1963), passim; al-najāshī, fihrist asmāʾ muṣannifī al-shīʿa al-mushtahar bi-rijāl al-najāshī, ed. mūsā al-shabīrī al-zanjānī (qum: muʾassasat al-nashr al-islāmī al-tābiʿa li-jamāʿat al-mudarrisīn, 1407/1986), 64 (no. 149), 441–42 (no. 1189); al-ṭūsī, al-fihrist, ed. muḥammad ṣādiq āl baḥr al-ʿulūm, 2nd ed. (najaf: al-maṭbaʿa al-ḥaydariyya, 1380/1961), 208 (no. 801). extracts from these and several other premodern sources on yaḥyā’s life and works are also usefully collated in the editor’s introduction [henceforth kāẓmuq] to yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī, kitāb al-muʿaqqibīn min wuld al-imām amīr al-muʾminīn, ed. muḥammad al-kāẓim (qum: maktabat āyat allāh al-ʿuẓmā al-marʿashī al-najafī, 1422/2001), 6–9. modern discussions include ṣāliḥ aḥmad al-ʿalī, “al-muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya ʿ an al-madīna wa-l-ḥijāz,” majallat al-majmaʿ al-ʿilmī al-ʿirāqī 11 (1384/1964): 118–57, at 129–30; fuat sezgin, geschichte des arabischen schrifttums (leiden: brill, 1967–) [henceforth gas], 1:273; ḥamad al-jāsir, “muʾallafāt fī taʾrīkh al-madīna,” majallat al-ʿarab 4 (1389–90/1969–70): 97–100, 262–66, 327–34, 385–88, 465–67, at 386; sebastian günther, quellenuntersuchungen zu den “maqātil aṭ-ṭālibiyyīn” des abūʾlfarağ al-iṣfahānī (gest. 356/967): ein beitrag zur problematik der mündlichen und schriftlichen überlieferung in der mittelalterlichen arabischen literatur (hildesheim: georg olms, 1991), 226–28; kazuo morimoto, “the formation and development of the science of talibid genealogies in the 10th and 11th century middle east,” oriente moderno 18, no. 2 (1999): 541–70, at 544–45; teresa bernheimer, the ʿalids: the first family of islam, 750–1200 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2013), esp. 18–19. 56. ibn al-ṭiqṭaqā, as cited in kāẓmuq., 8; see also kāẓmuq., 11. 57. for detailed discussion of the significance of the shiʿi use of the term ḥujja to describe the imam, albeit in imāmī rather than zaydī circles, see mohammad ali amir-moezzi, la preuve de dieu: la mystique shiʿite à travers l’œuvre de kulaynî ixe–xe siècle (paris: éditions du cerf, 2018). 58. abū naṣr al-bukhārī, sirr al-silsila, 71–72. 59. see the discussion in bernheimer, ʿalids, 19. 60. abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, ed. aḥmad ṣaqr, 4th ed. (beirut: muʾassasat al-aʿlamī li-lmaṭbūʿāt, 1427/2006), 159. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 91 have had some problems with other ʿalids; yaḥyā’s brother, ʿubayd allāh b. al-ḥasan b. jaʿfar, for example, is said to have been killed by al-ḥasan b. zayd in ṭabaristān.61 of yaḥyā himself we know relatively little. apart from his birth date, noted above, we know that he died in mecca in 277/890 and that the abbasid governor of mecca at the time, hārūn b. muḥammad, prayed over him.62 he may have studied with ibn zabāla in medina, since according to al-samhūdī’s citations he is yaḥyā’s most frequently cited direct source.63 however, what we know of ibn zabāla’s life suggests that this would be highly unlikely for chronological reasons; it is more probable that yaḥyā simply used ibn zabāla’s akhbār al-madīna as a source or studied it with one of the latter’s students. this suggestion is supported by four isnāds in the kitāb al-manāsik that have yaḥyā transmit ibn zabāla’s material with the latter’s best-known transmitter (rāwī), al-zubayr b. bakkār (d. 256/870), as an intermediary between the two.64 yaḥyā apparently had seven sons, one of whom, ṭāhir, was allegedly murdered.65 as al-samhūdī mentions, yaḥyā’s descendants came to be the local rulers of medina for centuries;66 the first to have held this position seems to have been yaḥyā’s great-great-grandson ṭāhir b. muslim b. ʿubayd allāh b. ṭāhir b. yaḥyā.67 the premodern biobibliographical sources attribute four works to yaḥyā: akhbār al-madīna,68 ansāb āl abī ṭālib,69 kitāb al-manāsik ʿan ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn,70 and kitāb al-masjid.71 of these four titles, only one, ansāb āl abī ṭālib, survives, and that possibly 61. ibid., 558. 62. ibn funduq al-bayhaqī, al-marwazī and ibn al-ṭiqṭaqā, as cited in kāẓmuq., 7–8. 63. see also al-ʿalī, “al-muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 129–30. 64. kitāb al-manāsik, 365, 367, 369, 379. for al-zubayr b. bakkār as a rāwī of ibn zabāla, see munt, “writing the history,” 14–18, 24–25. 65. for yaḥyā’s seven sons, see fakhr al-dīn al-rāzī, cited in kāẓmuq., 7; on ṭāhir’s murder, see abū al-faraj, maqātil, 551. 66. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:424. 67. see richard mortel, “the origins and early history of the ḥusaynid amirate of madīna to the end of the ayyūbid period,” studia islamica 74 (1991): 63–78, at 64–66; though cf. the slightly different version of events in ella landau-tasseron, “arabia,” in the new cambridge history of islam, vol. 1: the formation of the islamic world, sixth to eleventh centuries, ed. chase f. robinson, 397–447 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010), 411. 68. al-sakhāwī, al-iʿlān bi-l-tawbīkh li-man dhamma al-taʾrīkh, ed. franz rosenthal and ṣāliḥ aḥmad al-ʿalī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, n.d.), 274; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:424; 2:65, 159; 3:141; 5:27, 61, 107; ḥājjī khalīfa, kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-l-funūn, ed. şerefettin yaltkaya and rifat bilge (istanbul: maarif matbaası, 1360–62/1941–43), 1:29. modern discussions include al-ʿalī, “al-muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 129–30; ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-munajjid, muʿjam mā ullifa ʿan rasūl allāh (ṣ) (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-jadīd, 1402/1982), 93–94; ʿabd allāh ʿusaylān, al-madīna al-munawwara fī āthār al-muʾallifīn wa-l-bāḥithīn qadīman wa-ḥadīthan (medina: ʿabd allāh ʿusaylān, 1418/1997), 32–33. 69. al-najāshī, rijāl, 442; al-ṭūsī, fihrist, 208; also discussed in gas, 1:273; morimoto, “formation and development,” 544–45; kāẓmuq. 70. al-ṭūsī, fihrist, 208. 71. al-najāshī, rijāl, 442; al-ṭūsī, fihrist, 208; ibn shahrāshūb, cited in kāẓmuq., 7. the title is said to refer to the prophet’s mosque. muḥammad al-kāẓim also mentions (kāẓmuq., 12) four other works by yaḥyā, but these do not appear in the premodern biobibliographical literature that i consulted: akhbār al-fawāṭim, akhbār 92 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) only partially.72 as for the other three, there is some evidence to suggest that they should actually be regarded as one and the same work and that the different titles were attached to different recensions of this one work during the long process of transmission. we can be reasonably confident that akhbār al-madīna and kitāb al-masjid refer to the same work. the three extant sources that quote a significant number of traditions from yaḥyā— the kitāb al-manāsik (at least thirty-three citations), al-marāghī’s (d. 816/1414) taḥqīq al-nuṣra (at least thirty-six citations),73 and al-samhūdī’s wafāʾ al-wafā (approximately 280 citations)—use him as a source for the prophet’s mosque much more frequently than they do for any other subject: thirty-two citations in the kitāb al-manāsik, twenty-four in the taḥqīq al-nuṣra, and just over three-quarters of the citations in the wafāʾ al-wafā.74 many of the other citations from yaḥyā in these works concern subjects that might reasonably be included in a discussion of the prophet’s mosque, including medina’s distinctive merits (faḍāʾil),75 the prophet’s hijra,76 the prophet’s death,77 the performance of ziyāra (pilgrimage or pious visit) to the prophet’s tomb,78 and other mosques in which the prophet was believed to have prayed.79 it seems likely, therefore, that yaḥyā’s akhbār al-madīna and kitāb al-masjid were originally one and the same work that came to be transmitted via different routes under different titles.80 such a conflation would hardly be unique, since many works from the earliest islamic centuries were transmitted to later periods under multiple titles, most likely because they never originally had a single specific title. although the author of the kitāb al-manāsik appears to be citing yaḥyā directly, we know from al-samhūdī that there were several recensions of yaḥyā’s akhbār al-madīna; he had seen at least two, maybe three, and possibly, although less likely, four.81 he may have had one recension from an unnamed transmitter and certainly had one from yaḥyā’s grandson abū muḥammad al-ḥasan b. muḥammad b. yaḥyā, known as ibn akhī ṭāhir al-zaynabāt, kitāb fī al-khilāfa, and al-makr fī man kunniya bi-abī bakr. 72. yaḥyā, muʿaqqibīn. 73. al-marāghī, taḥqīq al-nuṣra bi-talkhīṣ maʿālim dār al-hijra, ed. ʿabd allāh ʿusaylān (medina: ʿabd allāh ʿusaylān, 1422/2002). 74. the editor of al-marāghī’s taḥqīq assumed that all mentions of a “yaḥyā” refer to one yaḥyā b. saʿīd. however, since most of the relevant passages are either near parallels to material quoted from yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī in al-samhūdī’s wafāʾ al-wafā or show a reliance on similar sources, i think that the editor was incorrect, except in the few cases in which al-marāghī gives the full name yaḥyā b. saʿīd for his source. 75. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:154; 3:320–21, 323. 76. ibid., 1:414, 424–25, 425–26, 433, 442–44, 447–48, 453, 456. 77. al-marāghī, taḥqīq al-nuṣra, 146–47; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:526, 528; 3:390. 78. al-marāghī, taḥqīq al-nuṣra, 172, 193–94; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 5:27, 29, 42–43, 61, 77, 101, 107–8. 79. kitāb al-manāsik, 425; al-marāghī, taḥqīq al-nuṣra, 56; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:147, 152, 169, 175, 177, 178, 182, 183, 195–96, 215, 228, 231, 240, 249, 250, 253, 421, 426, 428, 432, 433–34, 440. 80. since it seems that sunni sources were more likely to know the work as akhbār al-madīna and shiʿi sources as kitāb al-masjid (see references in nn. 68 and 71), there appears to have been a sectarian divide in the work’s transmission. 81. al-jāsir (“muʾallafāt,” 386) and al-sāmarrāʾī (in the introduction to his edition of al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:36) thought he had access to three; al-ʿalī (“al-muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 129) suggested four. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 93 (d. 358/969).82 at least one more recension was available to al-samhūdī, via yaḥyā’s son abū al-qāsim ṭāhir; al-ʿalī has suggested that ṭāhir transmitted two different recensions, but this is probably incorrect.83 we also know that one of the transmitters of abū al-qāsim ṭāhir’s recension of his father’s work was called ibn firās.84 yaḥyā’s grandson ibn akhī ṭāhir also appears in some sources as a transmitter of yaḥyā’s ansāb āl abī ṭālib.85 abū al-qāsim ṭāhir’s recension of his father’s work appears to have been the most widely used. it is the one that al-samhūdī mentions most frequently, and when later local historians of medina such as ibn al-najjār and al-marjānī (d. after 770/1368–69) cite abū al-qāsim ṭāhir b. yaḥyā, they are presumably referring to his recension of yaḥyā’s work.86 there may have been one more recension of yaḥyā’s work on medina, since al-sakhāwī notes that one muḥammad b. yaḥyā al-ʿalawī composed a book on the history of medina.87 since there is no mention of yaḥyā’s son muḥammad’s writing a work on medina anywhere else, this probably refers to al-ḥasan b. muḥammad b. yaḥyā’s (ibn akhī ṭāhir’s) recension of yaḥyā’s history, although it could be yet another recension of its own.88 as can be said of many other works from the third/ninth century, neither the existence of several recensions of yaḥyā’s work(s) on medina nor the lack of a uniform title means that yaḥyā did not compile a work on medina for dissemination with a relatively fixed form.89 again, however, we have to assume that the nature of the transmission of texts in this period would have left its mark on yaḥyā’s original. for example, al-samhūdī notes a minor difference between the recensions of abū al-qāsim ṭāhir and ibn akhī ṭāhir and tells us that ibn firās added to his recension of ṭāhir’s recension some information that he had received orally from ṭāhir.90 82. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 1:447; 2:239. 83. ṭāhir’s recension is noted in ibid., 1:155, 424; 2:239, 256, 314, 3:215, 5:29. al-ʿalī’s argument for a fourth recension stems from the fact that, at one point, al-samhūdī says (wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:256), “such is in the copy that his son transmitted on the authority of abū al-ḥasan al-madāʾinī.” al-ʿalī suggested (“al-muʾallafāt al-ʿarabiyya,” 129) that this means that ṭāhir transmitted another copy of yaḥyā’s work, this time not directly from his father but rather on the authority of one abū al-ḥasan al-madāʾinī, who had, in turn, taken it from yaḥyā. however, this abū al-ḥasan al-madāʾinī is almost certainly the famous abū al-ḥasan ʿalī b. muḥammad al-madāʾinī (d. between 225/839–40 and 235/849–50), who predeceased yaḥyā by quite some time. a more likely explanation is that al-madāʾinī is the source of this particular report in yaḥyā’s work. 84. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:314. 85. for example, in al-ṭūsī, fihrist, 208; and in the works of al-ʿumarī and ibn ʿinaba, as cited in kāẓmuq., 6, 8. 86. see ibn al-najjār, al-durra al-thamīna, 63, 205; al-marjānī, bahjat al-nufūs wa-l-asrār fī taʾrīkh dār hijrat al-nabī al-mukhtār, ed. muḥammad ʿabd al-wahhāb faḍl (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 2002), 1:209. 87. al-sakhāwī, iʿlān, 273; followed by al-munajjid, muʿjam, 93–94; and ʿusaylān, al-madīna al-munawwara, 33. 88. incidentally, yet another confusing title, an akhbār al-madīna of one yaḥyā b. jaʿfar al-nassāba, is thrown into the mix in al-munajjid, muʿjam, 93–94. this yaḥyā, however, is clearly our yaḥyā b. al-ḥasan b. jaʿfar al-ʿaqīqī, the author of a work entitled ansāb āl abī ṭālib, hence also al-nassāba, “the genealogist.” 89. for a similar argument concerning ibn zabāla’s akhbār al-madīna, see munt, “writing the history,” 14–18. 90. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:239, 314. 94 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) since we know that yaḥyā was a descendant of the husaynid imam ʿalī zayn al-ʿābidīn (d. ca. 95/713–14) and the author of a genealogical work on the descendants of abū ṭālib, it is only to be expected that his works display some pro-ʿalid inclinations. his genealogical work shows that yaḥyā was concerned with the persecution faced by the descendants of abū ṭālib. in the surviving manuscript, a list of ʿalids who came to an unfortunate end as the result of persecution is provided, besides the usual genealogical material. the list covers topics such as descendants of ʿalī who were poisoned, hasanids who were killed during the reign of abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr, and ʿalids who died in prison during the reign of hārūn al-rashīd (r. 170–93/786–809).91 the citations from his work on the history of medina also show that he was interested in traditions concerning fāṭima and the ʿalids. for example, he is the main source of the kitāb al-manāsik and al-samhūdī for discussion of fāṭima’s apartment and tomb chamber in the prophet’s mosque, and al-samhūdī cites a prophetic ḥadīth from yaḥyā to the effect that on the day of resurrection, muḥammad, fāṭima, ʿalī, al-ḥasan, and al-ḥusayn will be in the same position.92 in line with the earlier noted title of yaḥyā’s own work on pilgrimage rites (manāsik), quotations of his guidance about how to perform the pilgrimage to the tomb of the prophet include examples of how prominent ʿalids, especially ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn zayn al-ʿābidīn, acted when visiting the tomb.93 he had a specific interest in how ʿalids undertook visits to another mosque closely associated with the prophet’s career in medina, the mosque in qubāʾ to the south of the town.94 there are also a number of traditions cited on yaḥyā’s authority with isnāds of prominent ʿalids, often including the imams ʿalī al-riḍā (d. 203/818), jaʿfar al-ṣādiq (d. 148/765), and muḥammad al-bāqir (d. 115/733).95 however, yaḥyā by no means restricted his interests to pro-ʿalid material. reports that either display a clear pro-ʿalid inclination or feature prominent ʿalids in their isnāds are very much in the minority among extant material cited from yaḥyā; and although he may have been al-samhūdī’s key source for the tomb of fāṭima, he was also an important authority on the tombs of the first two caliphs, abū bakr and ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb.96 yaḥyā’s work on medina seems to have received early acceptance as an important source, as he is the kitāb al-manāsik’s most often cited source for the history of the prophet’s mosque. although he was little used in medinan local histories over the next several centuries, this changed with al-marāghī, in whose work he is the second most frequently cited medinan historian from the first three islamic centuries, behind ibn zabāla. similarly, he is al-samhūdī’s most important source for matters concerning the prophet’s mosque up to the mid-third/ninth century. 91. yaḥyā, muʿaqqibīn, 116–17, 117–23, 125–30. 92. kitāb al-manāsik, 366–67; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:207–10. 93. al-marāghī, taḥqīq al-nuṣra, 146–47; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 5:61, 77. 94. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:152. 95. kitāb al-manāsik, 367; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:44, 337–38; 3:323; 5:27–29, 61. 96. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:309–18. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 95 before we move on to look more closely at the kitāb al-manāsik’s section on the inscriptions, it is worth considering briefly one of yaḥyā’s sources for his material about the umayyad-era inscriptions, as preserved in the former. the isnād given for that material mentions one muḥammad b. yaḥyā, almost certainly the figure otherwise known as abū ghassān al-kinānī (d. between 201/816–17 and 210/825–26).97 he was the single most important source for the iraqi ʿumar b. shabba’s (d. 262/876) history of medina, appearing as the latter’s direct source in the isnāds of 278 out of 1,065 reports that make up the first part of the extant manuscript of this work.98 the vast majority of the discussion of the prophet’s mosque is missing from this manuscript, but abū ghassān is cited in the portion of that discussion that does survive, and he also appears as a source on seventeen occasions (all bar one through one or two intermediaries) in the kitāb al-manāsik.99 some have considered whether, in light of this prolific activity, he may have penned a work of his own on medina’s history. al-jāsir, for example, has drawn attention to the fact that abū ghassān descended from a long line of administrators (kuttāb) and noted that we should not, therefore, be surprised if he had committed his knowledge to writing.100 tilman nagel has also suggested that abū ghassān had likely written down the reports on the revolt of muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh “al-nafs al-zakiyya” that were then transmitted by ibn shabba and cited by al-ṭabarī (d. 310/923).101 abū ghassān was a source for a large quantity of written documents, including a letter by ʿalī b. abī ṭālib and the famous correspondence that passed between abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr and al-nafs al-zakiyya, and this does indicate that he valued written material and sought to ensure its transmission.102 ibn shabba also stated at least twice that he had found something written on abū ghassān’s authority that he had not heard from him.103 elsewhere, he cited a piece of writing (kitāb) by abū ghassān for a report but added that he had read over the report in question with him.104 taken together, these pieces of information make it likely that abū ghassān possessed at least 97. see, for example, al-mizzī, tahdhīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl, ed. bashshār ʿawwād maʿrūf (beirut: muʾassasat al-risāla, 1402–13/1982–92), 26:636–39; al-dhahabī, taʾrīkh al-islām wa-wafayāt al-mashāhīr wa-laʿlām, ed. ʿumar ʿabd al-salām tadmurī (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-ʿarabī, 1407–24/1987–2004), 14:379. 98. ibn shabba, taʾrīkh al-madīna al-munawwara, ed. ʿalī muḥammad dandal and yāsīn saʿd al-dīn bayān (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1417/1996), 1:7–344. 99. on seven of those occasions, the intermediaries are hārūn b. mūsā and yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī, as in the section translated below; see kitāb al-manāsik, 359, 363, 369, 381, 383, 385–86, 403. 100. al-jāsir, “muʾallafāt,” 328; see also elad, rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya, 415–18. 101. tilman nagel, “ein früher bericht über den aufstand von muḥammad b. ʿabdallāh im jahre 145h,” der islam 46 (1970): 227–62, at 236–38; see also the thoughts in elad, rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya, 418. 102. for ʿalī’s letter, see ibn shabba, taʾrīkh, 1:139–41; for the letters between al-manṣūr and al-nafs al-zakiyya, see al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:207–15, with discussion in nagel, “ein früher bericht”; zaman, religion and politics, 44–45; elad, rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya, 171–93; and tor, “parting of ways.” for some other documents transmitted by abū ghassān, see ibn shabba, taʾrīkh, 1:96; and michael lecker, “the preservation of muḥammad’s letters,” in his people, tribes and society in arabia around the time of muḥammad, no. 10 (aldershot: ashgate, 2005), 12, n. 60. 103. ibn shabba, taʾrīkh, 1:72, 80. 104. ibid., 1:365. 96 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) personal notebooks containing traditions and copies of documents dealing with the history of medina, which were distributed to his students. the upshot of all this is that, in general terms at least, we have reason to be relatively confident about the transcription of the inscriptions provided in the kitāb al-manāsik, at least those that were added in the early abbasid period. between ibn zabāla, yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī, the author of the kitāb al-manāsik, ibn rusta, and perhaps (although this is far less certain) abū ghassān, we have several avenues of relatively early written testimonies to them (compiled between the late second/early ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries), involving figures of different backgrounds and with different scholarly interests. of course, as the notes to the translation below show, there are some differences in the readings of some of the inscriptions offered in the various sources, and sometimes those differences are meaningful. this does make it more difficult for us to establish what the actual text of the inscription was, but it does not mean there was no original text. such discrepancies could easily come down to the nature of the reception of such epigraphic schemes among visitors/readers, a topic that will be taken up again briefly later in this article. i do not want the arguments of this article to become circular, and since the evidence of the protocols for referring to the caliphs in these texts will be picked up later in the discussion, we should not place too much emphasis on them when verifying the general accuracy of the transcribed texts. it can be pointed out, however, that many aspects of the texts given for these inscriptions, and particularly the protocols for referring to caliphs, are generally in line with what can be expected on the basis of extant inscriptions from the second/eighth century, as well as of similar protocols on other objects, such as coins.105 many of the relevant inscriptions offer variations on one of two standard phrases: either amara ʿabd allāh [ism] “the servant of god, [name], amīr al-muʾminīn bi-. . . the commander of the faithful, ordered . . .” or, slightly less commonly, mimmā amara bihi “[this is] among that which ʿabd allāh [ism] the servant of god, [name], amīr al-muʾminīn . . . the commander of the faithful, ordered . . .” in other texts, other titles are added to the early abbasid inscriptions, but this is where things get more interesting; i will pick up this discussion later on. 105. for references to extant inscriptions, see above, nn. 8–15. some early abbasid coins with similar rules for providing titles and names for a reigning caliph are discussed in michael l. bates, “khurāsānī revolutionaries and al-mahdī’s title,” in culture and memory in medieval islam: essays in honour of wilferd madelung, ed. farhad daftary and josef w. meri, 279–317 (london: i. b. tauris, 2003). for the point that ʿabd allāh [ism] amīr al-muʾminīn was the standard way of referring to umayyad caliphs, see aram aldo shahin, “struggling for communitas: arabian political thought in the great century of change (ca. 560–ca. 660 ad)” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2009), 410. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 97 the kitāb al-manāsik on the inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque the following is a translation of the section of the kitāb al-manāsik that deals with the inscriptions that could be seen in the prophet’s mosque.106 this work records texts inscribed between the caliphates of al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik and hārūn al-rashīd. the notes provide references to the same texts in other sources. those that can also be found in the surviving section of ibn rusta’s al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa have been the basis for almost all existing discussions to date. the one other source that provides almost (but not quite) as complete an account of these inscriptions as the kitāb al-manāsik’s is al-fīrūzābādī’s al-maghānim al-muṭāba fī maʿālim ṭāba. although some use will be made of the latter work in this article, it is the kitāb al-manāsik’s account around which my discussion will center. translation: kitāb al-manāsik [p. 385] this is an account of the inscriptions (al-kitāb) that run around the mosque yaḥyā b. ḥasan b. jaʿfar abū al-ḥusayn al-ʿalawī107 — hārūn b. mūsā108 — muḥammad b. yaḥyā109 — ḥusayn b. muṣʿab:110 ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz had the texts (kutub) inscribed in the mosque, and [he is] the one who inscribed the text (kitāb) that is along the qibla [wall] of the prophet’s (ṣ) mosque; it starts with the whole of umm al-qurʾān, and then “by the sun and its brightness in the forenoon,” down to finishing with “say, ‘i seek refuge with the lord of men.’”111 it runs from opposite you to the right when you enter the mosque from the entrance next to dār marwān along to bāb ʿalī.112 106. kitāb al-manāsik, 385–95. the page numbers from al-jāsir’s edition are given in square brackets in the translation. i have numbered the inscriptions for ease of cross-referencing. 107. this is yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī, discussed above. 108. hārūn b. mūsā b. abī ʿ alqama al-farwī al-madīnī (d. in 252/866–67 or 253/867), a student of abū ghassān and a teacher of yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī; see al-mizzī, tahdhīb al-kamāl, 26:637; 30:113–15. 109. this is almost certainly abū ghassān muḥammad b. yaḥyā al-kinānī, discussed above. 110. he is listed by al-mizzī among those from whom ibn zabāla narrated (tahdhīb al-kamāl, 25:62), although not among abū ghassān’s teachers. ibn zabāla and abū ghassān, however, belonged to the same generation of medinan scholars, and many topics discussed on the authority of both are very similar, so it makes sense that they shared many sources. 111. i.e., q 1 and 91–114. all translations of verses from the qurʾan are slightly adapted from those of alan jones, the qurʾān (cambridge: gibb memorial trust, 2007), unless otherwise specified. (i regularly make alterations to the capitalization of certain words.) 112. al-mahdī’s mosque seems to have had a large number of entrances, with some twenty-odd regularly listed in the sources; see the overview in al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:5–31; and also see below, fig. 1. it is less clear how many there were in the umayyad period; see sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 75–78. the entrance by dār marwān would be that near the southwest corner of the mosque along the western wall, which came to be known as bāb al-salām and does seem to have existed in al-walīd’s structure; see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:28–30; sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 77. i follow al-samhūdī (wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:7–8) in identifying bāb ʿalī as the southernmost entrance along the eastern wall of the mosque, so probably loosely opposite the entrance by 98 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) he said: it was inscribed by a mawlā of āl ḥuwayṭib b. ʿ abd al-ʿuzzā, called saʿd ḥaṭaba.113 he said: ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz is the one who put up the lead that runs around the mosque and the waterspouts that are made of lead. only two waterspouts of those put up by ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz remain; one is in the place where funeral prayers take place (mawḍiʿ al-janāʾiz),114 and the other is over the entrance through which [p. 386] the people from the east (ahl al-mashriq115) enter and which is known as bāb ʿātika. the mosque had no merlons (shurafāt) before those constructed by ʿabd al-wāḥid b. ʿabd allāh al-naṣrī,116 who was the governor of medina in the year 104 [722–23 ce]. the ḥarūriyya destroyed the inscription that was in the mosque’s courtyard, though ʿabd al-malik b. muḥammad b. ʿaṭiyya al-saʿdī restored it when he was governor of medina in the year 130 [747–48 ce].117 then dāwūd b. ʿalī destroyed it when he came as governor for abū al-ʿabbās in the year 132 [749–50 ce]. ṣāliḥ b. kaysān118 helped him restore it, but dāwūd passed away before he could complete it; ziyād b. ʿabd allāh [sic] al-ḥārithī finished it.119 one of the mawālī of the medinans, who was called ibn ghazāla, was summoned to him, and he is the one who altered it and completed it. dār marwān. these two entrances thus corresponded roughly to the bāb al-salām and bāb al-baqīʿ as identified on the plan of the prophet’s mosque following the saudi work of 1949–55 in ʿabd allāh al-ḥusaynī, al-kharīṭa al-athariyya li-l-madīna al-munawwara (cairo: majmūʿat najjār li-l-tijāra wa-l-ṭibāʿa, 2005). 113. an important and renowned early copyist of the qurʾan. he is the individual also identified as responsible for these inscriptions in ibn al-nadīm, fihrist, 1/i:15–16. he was apparently known as “saʿd ṣāḥib al-maṣāḥif”; see ibn abī ḥātim, kitāb al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1371–73/1952–53), 3:550. 114. this was by bāb ʿalī; see below and al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:8. 115. ibn al-najjār (al-durra al-thamīna, 176) has “people from the marketplace” (ahl al-sūq). 116. many other sources have al-naḍrī instead, although al-naṣrī seems to be correct; see al-jāsir’s note in kitāb al-manāsik, 386, n. 1. he was governor of medina and also, seemingly, of mecca and taif from 104/722–23 to 106/724–25; see al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:1449–52, 1471, 1487. 117. the ḥarūriyya here are the followers of abū ḥamza al-mukhtār b. ʿawf, who led an army from south arabia that briefly occupied mecca and medina in 129–30/747; for discussion with further references to their activities in the ḥijāz, see harry munt, “caliphal imperialism and ḥijāzī elites in the second/eighth century,” al-masāq 28, no. 1 (2016): 6–21, at 6–7, 12–13. ibn rusta (al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 70) gives the date of the inscription’s restoration as 128/745–46, but this is clearly a mistake. 118. a well-known figure closely associated with al-walīd’s and ʿ umar b. ʿ abd al-ʿazīz’s work on the prophet’s mosque; see munt, holy city of medina, 106–7. he died in 140/757–58; see ibn saʿd, kitāb al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr, ed. ʿalī muḥammad ʿumar (cairo: maktabat al-khānjī, 1421/2001), 7:513. 119. dāwūd b. ʿalī died in 133/750. he is famously associated with having taken other, violent measures against members of the umayyad family in the ḥijāz during his brief tenure in the region; see chase f. robinson, “the violence of the abbasid revolution,” in living islamic history: studies in honour of professor carole hillenbrand, ed. yasir suleiman, 226–51 (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2010), 239. ziyād b. ʿubayd allāh was governor of medina (and also at times mecca, taif, and al-yamāma) from 133/750 to 141/758–59; see al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:73, 81, 84, 90–91, 121, 124, 127, 129, 137–38, 161. he apparently oversaw the work that abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr ordered to be undertaken in the masjid al-ḥarām in mecca; see al-azraqī, akhbār makka wa-mā jāʾa fīhā min al-āthār, ed. rushdī al-ṣāliḥ malḥas (mecca: al-maṭbaʿa al-mājidiyya, 1352–57/1933–38), 2:58. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 99 we have made a copy of what was inscribed along the qibla and what was inscribed after it in its place, letter by letter. when ibn ghazāla had finished, he came to ziyād b. ʿabd allāh asking him for his pay. ziyād said, “ibn ghazāla, when you see us act in accordance with what has been written, then come and take your pay.” abū al-ḥusayn said: this is the inscription that ibn ghazāla wrote and finished: [§1] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. there is no god but god, who is one and has no companion. muḥammad is his servant and his messenger, whom he sent “with the guidance and the religion of truth, to cause it to prevail over all [other] religion, even though the polytheists dislike that.”120 [p. 387] the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful, has commanded fear of god and obedience to him as well as action in accordance with the book of god and obedience to it/him as well as the sunna of his prophet (ṣ). [the caliph commands] doing right by one’s family, the magnification/veneration of god’s ordinances that the tyrants belittled, and the belittling of the falsehoods that they magnified; [he commands] the revival of the rights that they killed off, and the killing off of the enmity and oppression that they revived. [he commands] that god be obeyed and that servants be disobeyed [when necessary] out of obedience to god. obedience is owed to god and to those who obey god; no obedience is due to anyone acting in disobedience to god. we call for the book of god and the sunna of his prophet (ṣ) and for justice in governing the affairs of the muslims, the equitable division of the fayʾ among them, and the appropriate expenditure of the “fifths” that god commanded [be distributed] to “kinsmen, orphans, the destitute, [and] travelers.”121 when ibn ghazāla had finished, he came to ziyād asking for his pay. ziyād, who was irrationally angry with him, said to him, “ibn ghazāla, when you see us act in accordance with what is in it, then come and take your pay.”122 the inscriptions of al-mahdī (may god have mercy upon him) abū al-ḥusayn said: immediately after this [i.e., the above inscription] is this inscription, which al-mahdī had written in the year 162 [778–79 ce]:123 120. q 9:33. 121. cf. q 2:177. for other versions of this story and this inscription, sometimes abbreviated or with a slightly different text, see ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 70–71; ibn al-najjār, al-durra al-thamīna, 176–77 (with a very important variant, discussed further later in this article); al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:436–38; rcea, 1:29–30 (no. 38). for discussion, see sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 54–56. ibn rusta also provides a second version of the inscription, with slightly different wording; see ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73; rcea, 1:36–38 (no. 47); sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 56–57. 122. it is a bit strange that this anecdote is repeated here, with very slightly different wording. perhaps there has been a change of source? 123. given what follows in the inscription, it cannot actually have been written before 165/781–82, although it refers to the period of building work that began in 162/778–79. 100 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) [§2] the servant of god, al-mahdī, the commander of the faithful, may god ennoble him and glorify his victory, ordered the expansion and strengthening of the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) out of desire for god alone and the last abode—may god grant him the greatest recompense—and to make it more spacious for his family and his descendants among all the muslims who pray there. may god magnify the reward of the commander of the faithful for the pious work he intended [p.388] and make great his recompense.124 [§3] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. **then he had the whole of umm al-qurʾān inscribed.**125 **inscribed after that was “the only ones to visit god’s places of worship . . .”, the whole verse.**126 **then he had written:** the expansion of the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) that the servant of god, al-mahdī muḥammad, the commander of the faithful—may god ennoble him—ordered was started in the year 162 [778–79 ce]. it was completed in the year 165 [781–82 ce]. the commander of the faithful—may god make him thrive—lavishes praises upon god for permitting him the distinction of (re)constructing the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) and making it more spacious. we praise god, the lord of the worlds, at all times.127 next to this inscription is another, written during the reign of abū al-ʿabbās, which this inscription [i.e., the one given above] reaches. it is: [§4] the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful, ordered that this mosque be decorated, that its adornments be put in order (tartībihi), and that the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) be made more spacious in the year 132 [749–50 ce], desiring god’s pleasure and reward. for with god is “the reward of both this world and the next. god is hearing and observing.”128 124. see also ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73–74; ibn al-najjār, al-durra al-thamīna, 179. ibn rusta presents this text as a continuation of his repeat of the previous inscription (§1) without any intervening words, so some have considered it part of the previous text; see, for example, rcea, 1:36–38 (no. 47). the kitāb al-manāsik, however, clearly supports sauvaget’s earlier argument (mosquée omeyyade, 56–57) that it was originally a separate text. 125. i.e., q 1. the paired asterisks mark text in which the kitāb al-manāsik—or its source(s)—is summarizing the content rather than providing it in full transcription. 126. q 9:18. 127. see also ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74; ibn al-najjār, al-durra al-thamīna, 179; rcea, 1:35–36 (no. 46); sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 58–59. between the preceding text and this one, ibn rusta inserted an inscription commemorating work undertaken during al-muʿtaḍid’s caliphate (r. 279–289/892–902) in 282/895–96; see ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74; rcea, 2:265 (no. 786); sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 57–58. both ibn al-najjār and the kitāb al-manāsik omit this inscription, which makes sense since it postdates the deaths of their stated or likely sources (discussed above). 128. a slight rearrangement of the wording of q 4:134. for alternative versions of the text, see ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74 (where the date is given as 162/778–79); al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:291. this inscription is sometimes discussed as a continuation of the previous one; see rcea, 1:35–36 (no. 46). this text is discussed in more detail later in this article. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 101 [p. 389] abū [al-]ḥusayn said: there is a marker (ʿalāma) of the first mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) on the ceiling, crescent moons in gold, next to the interior wall opposite the first mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ). [another] marker of the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ), next to the courtyard on the western side, is four arches finished with mosaic, all of them dark green/blue (khuḍr). the upper parts of the arches of the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) along the qibla [side] are blocked with teak, which is twisted (muḥarraf).129 there are small openings along the eastern [side] together with arches blocked with teak. above them are panels with no openings.130 in the eastern corner of the inside of the mosque is written: [§5] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. o god! your servant and your caliph (khalīfataka), ʿabd allāh, (son of)131 the commander of the faithful, praises you for permitting him to (re)build this mosque and to adorn it. the servant of god, ʿ abd allāh, the commander of the faithful, commanded the decoration of this mosque, the ordering of its adornments, and making the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) more spacious in the year 133 [750–51 ce], desiring god’s pleasure, his reward, and his generosity. for with god is “the reward of both this world and the next. god is hearing and observing.”132 there is no god but god, who is one and has no companion. “we serve only god and we associate nothing with him.”133 god be praised and exalted. moreover, may god be praised and exalted high above what the unbelievers say.134 there is no power or strength save with god the high, the magnificent. between bāb al-nabī135 and bāb ʿuthmān136 is inscribed the following on a broad panel (ṣafḥa) on the interior wall in mosaic, between it and the marble: [§6] among what the servant of god, hārūn, the commander of the faithful—may god lengthen his remaining time—ordered to be carried out by ibrāhīm b. muḥammad,137 129. perhaps this should be read as mujawwaf, “hollow” or “concave,” instead. 130. this is quite a confusing passage. an abridged version, which removes the more confusing portions, can be found in ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74. an alternative, likewise less confusing description of the known spots that mark sections of the original mosque built by the prophet after his arrival in medina can be found in kitāb al-manāsik, 360; and al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:54 (followed by detailed further discussion). 131. the text has a “bn” here, but it is unclear whether it should be there or not. it does not appear in the list of titles in the following sentence. 132. a slight rearrangement of the wording of q 4:134. 133. part of q 3:64. 134. cf. q 17:43. 135. i follow al-samhūdī (wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:7–8) in identifying bāb al-nabī as the second entrance along the eastern wall of the mosque heading north from the qibla wall. 136. also known as bāb jibrīl; see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:8–12; sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 76. 137. ibrāhīm b. muḥammad was one of hārūn al-rashīd’s governors of medina, according to al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:739. it is not precisely clear when he served in this position, but al-ṭabarī lists him as the fifth out of ten governors of medina during hārūn’s caliphate. 102 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) may god make him thrive. it is the work of people from jerusalem.138 to the left of the arch of bāb al-nabī (ṣ): [§7] this is where the work carried out by the people of jerusalem ended. along the qibla [wall] on the outside, at the place where the funeral prayers are held (mawḍiʿ al-janāʾiz), where the dead are prayed over [p. 390], by bāb ʿalī b. abī ṭālib (may god be pleased with him), is inscribed:139 [§8] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “god and his angels bless the prophet. o you who believe, bless him and salute him.”140 o god, bless muḥammad (ṣ). the mercy of god and his benedictions. over bāb al-nabī (ṣ) is inscribed on the outside: [§9] “in the creation of the heavens and the earth,” **the whole verse**.141 over bāb ʿuthmān is inscribed: [§10a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “god and his angels,” **the whole verse**.142 o god, bless muḥammad the prophet (ṣ), make him blameless, increase his standing, ennoble his structure, honor his lodging places/stations, and reward him with the best reward you could give to a prophet, as he brought us your message and strove to carry out your command so that he made your religion clear and your authority was manifest, your words were finished, and he made lawful what you had made lawful and forbade what you had forbidden. that did not deviate from your oneness;143 you have no companion. may peace be upon the prophet, and the mercy of god, and his benedictions. to the right of bāb ʿuthmān is inscribed: [§10b] the work of the people of homs. and to its left is inscribed: [§10c] the work of the people of homs. 138. see also ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74–75; rcea, 1:65–66 (no. 83); sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 67. sauvaget assumes, probably correctly, that this inscription commemorates only small restoration work to the decoration on this wall. 139. for bāb ʿalī, see above, n. 112. 140. q 33:56. 141. q 3:190. al-samhūdī (wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:8) has this text by bāb ʿalī and not by bāb al-nabī. 142. q 33:56. 143. al-jāsir was obviously unsure what to make of this in his edition. i read: wa-lam yaʿul dhālika waḥdaka. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 103 on the outside of bāb ʿuthmān is inscribed: [§10d] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “a messenger has come to you from among yourselves,” **to the end of the sūra**.144 on the inside of the entrance facing (bāb)145 dār rayṭa is inscribed: [§11a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “god, there is no god but him, the living, the eternal,” **up to** “hearing and knowing.”146 on the outside of the entrance facing dār rayṭa: [§11b] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “the only ones to visit god’s places of worship,” **the whole verse**.147 on the inside of the entrance facing (bāb)148 asmāʾ bt. al-ḥasan [sic] is inscribed: [§12a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “o man, fear your lord, and be afraid of a day,” **to the end of the sūra**.149 [p. 391] on it [the same entrance] on the outside is inscribed: [§12b] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “o you who believe, fear god and speak straight speech.”150 on the inside of the entrance opposite dār khālid151 is inscribed: 144. i.e., q 9:128–29; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:426; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:12. 145. this second “bāb” is clearly written in the edition, but the text would make more sense without it. the text should here be describing bāb dār rayṭa, which, according to al-samhūdī (for example, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:8), is the next entrance along the eastern wall after bāb ʿuthmān. the rayṭa in question was the daughter of abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ and bāb rayṭa/bāb dār rayṭa is also known as bāb al-nisāʾ; see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:12–13; sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 76. 146. q 2:255–56. q 2:255 is, of course, the famous throne verse, which al-samhūdī (wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:13) also noted was inscribed on this entrance (though he has it on the outside) on a mosaic panel before it was destroyed in the second major fire. according to al-fīrūzābādī (al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:426), the verse was inscribed on the outside of this entrance. two other later medinan local historians, al-maṭarī (d. 741/1340) and al-marjānī (d. after 770/1368–69), both also mention that the verse was inscribed on a mosaic panel over the outside of this entrance: see al-maṭarī, al-taʿrīf bimā ansat al-hujra min maʿālim dār al-hijra, ed. saʿīd ʿabd al-fattāḥ (riyadh: maktabat nizār muṣṭafā al-bāz, 1417/1997), 89; and al-marjānī, bahjat al-nufūs, 1:545. 147. q 9:18. this verse is also included in another inscription cited above (§3). according to al-fīrūzābādī (al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:426), it was inscribed on the inside of this entrance. 148. this seems to be a mistake and should read “dār,” since the entrance opposite dār asmāʾ is the next entrance after bāb rayṭa as discussed in al-samhūdī’s survey of the entrances (see wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:13–14), still along the eastern wall. according to him, the asmāʾ in question is asmāʾ bt. al-ḥusayn b. ʿabd allāh b. ʿubayd allāh b. al-ʿabbās b. ʿabd al-muṭṭalib. 149. i.e., q 31:33–34; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:427. 150. q 33:70; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:427. 151. on this entrance, opposite dār khālid b. al-walīd, still in the eastern wall of the mosque, see al-samhūdī, 104 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) [§13a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “your god is one god,” **the two verses**.152 immediately following it is: [§13b] “when my servants question you about me . . . ,” **the verse**.153 on the outside of it [the same entrance] is inscribed: [§13c] “they say, ‘praise belongs to god, who has removed grief from us,’” **the verse**.154 on the border (ḥāf)155 of the entrance, on the inside, is inscribed: [§13d] o god, bless156 muḥammad the prophet (ṣ). [this is] among [the things] that al-mahdī muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, commanded and is among what the basrans carried out in the year 162 [778–79 ce].157 it is the place where al-mahdī’s enlargement of the mosque began.158 on the inside of the entrance facing zuqāq al-manāṣiʿ159 is inscribed: [§14a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “your lord is god who created the heavens and the earth,” **the two verses**.160 and on the outside of it is inscribed: [§14b] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “rivalry in worldly gain has distracted you,” **to the end of the sūra**.161 wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:14. 152. this could be q 2:163–64 or q 16:22–23. it is probably the former, since q 2:163 begins with a wāw, which this inscription apparently included. that this text was inscribed here is also noted by al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428 (the editor of this text suggests that the verses cited were q 2:163–64). 153. q 2:186; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428. 154. q 35:34; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428. 155. al-samhūdī (wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:14) reads “lintel” (nijāf), which may make more sense. 156. reading ṣalli instead of ṣallā. 157. see also al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:14. 158. i have assumed that this is a comment by the kitāb al-manāsik’s author (or his source), rather than part of the text of inscription §13d. 159. for this entrance, still in the eastern wall, see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:14–15. 160. this could be either q 7:54–55 or q 10:3–4. given the general tenor of the qurʾanic verses used in umayyad and early abbasid mosques, the latter is perhaps more likely. that this text was inscribed here is also noted by al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428 (this text’s editor suggests that the inscription is q 7:54–55). 161. q 102; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:428. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 105 on the inside of the entrance next to al-ṣawāfī is inscribed:162 [§15a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. **from the start of āl ʿimrān down to** “as he wishes. there is no god but him, the mighty and the wise.”163 o god, bless muḥammad, your servant and your prophet.164 and on the outside of it is inscribed: [§15b] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “there will be a blast on the trumpet, and all who are in the heavens and all who are on earth will swoon,” **the two verses**.165 at the back of the mosque in the direction of syria on the inside of the first entrance is inscribed:166 [§16a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “those who repent and act righteously turn to god in repentance,” **to the end of the sūra**.167 and on the outside is inscribed: [§16b] “god. there is no god but him. he will indeed gather you to the day of resurrection,” **the verse**.168 o god, bless muḥammad, your servant and your messenger, imam of the god-fearers and seal of the prophets.169 on the inside of the second entrance is inscribed: [§17a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “in houses [p. 392] that god has allowed to be raised,” **to the end of the three verses**.170 and inscribed on the outside: [§17b] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. o god, bless muḥammad, your servant and your messenger, and reward him with the best reward you grant to the prophets and the best of what you give to the messengers. the servant of god, 162. on this entrance, apparently the northernmost along the eastern wall, see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:15–16. al-ṣawāfī were also known as abyāt quhṭum; see ibn shabba, taʾrīkh, 1:158; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:59. 163. i.e., q 3:1–6. 164. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429. 165. i.e., q 39:68–69; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429. 166. we have now moved on to the northern wall of the mosque. 167. i.e., q 25:71–77; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429. 168. q 4:87. 169. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429. 170. i.e., q 24:36–38; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429. 106 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) al-mahdī muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, ordered work to build this mosque and make it more spacious.171 on the inside of the third entrance is inscribed: [§18a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “prosperous are the believers,” **down to** “those are the inheritors.”172 and inscribed on the outside: [§18b] there is no god but god. he is the living, who cannot die. may god be praised and exalted high above what they associate with him.173 it is he “who has not taken to himself a son.”174 “he is the high and the great.”175 on the inside of the fourth entrance176 is inscribed: [§19a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “the companions of the garden and the companions of the fire are not equal. the companions of the garden are the winners,” **down to** “high above what they associate [with him]” (wa-taʿālā ʿammā yushrikūn).177 and inscribed on the outside: [§19b] god is the mighty and the wise.178 he has permitted, with his grace and distinction, the servant of god and his caliph (khalīfatihi) al-mahdī muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, to enlarge the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ), to make it more spacious, and to adorn it. may god magnify his reward, perfect for him his grace, let him enjoy his generosity, and glorify his victory.179 171. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:429, albeit with a slight variant: “the servant of god, al-mahdī muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, ordered work to adorn this mosque and make it more spacious.” 172. i.e., q 23:1–10; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430. 173. this passage recalls many verses of the qurʾan, but see in particular q 17:43, also alluded to in an earlier inscription (§5). 174. cf. q 17:111 and 25:2 (the inscription is slightly closer in language to the former). 175. see q 22:62, 31:30, 34:23 and 40:12. that this text was inscribed here is also noted by al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430, with a slight variant: “he is the living who has not taken to himself a son . . .” 176. al-samhūdī mentions four entrances along the northern wall of the mosque; see his wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:16–17. 177. this presumably refers to q 59:20–23, but in the ʿuthmanic text, the end of q 59:23 reads “subḥān allāh ʿammā yushrikūn.” i assume that the text here contains a mistake that has crept in at some stage; its wording does not appear among the variants recorded by arthur jeffery in his materials for the history of the text of the qurʾān: the old codices (leiden: brill, 1937). the wording does appear in several other qurʾanic verses. that this text was inscribed here is also noted by al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430 (where the more “standard” qurʾanic text for the final verse’s ending is given). 178. these two epithets appear together on twenty-nine occasions in the qurʾan, including q 62:3. 179. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430, with a very minor variant: “his servant and his al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 107 on the inside of the last of the entrances to the mosque along the western side, near dār munīra,180 is inscribed: [§20a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “in the creation of the heavens and the earth,” **down to** “you will not break the tryst.”181 and on the lintel of the entrance, on the inside of the arch, is inscribed: [§20b] o god, bless muḥammad, your servant and your messenger. [this is] among what the servant of god, al-mahdī muḥammad, the commander of the faithful, ordered. it is the work of the people of basra.182 between there and the next entrance there is a manjanīq,183 used when necessary to sweep the roof of the mosque;184 there is another manjanīq to the east of the maqṣūra. on the outside of this is inscribed: [§21] “the smiter,” **until the end**.185 [p. 393] on the inside of the entrance that is also opposite dār munīra186 is inscribed: [§22a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “muḥammad is the messenger of god,” **to the end of the sūra**.187 and on its outside is inscribed: [§22b] “o my servants, who have been prodigal against yourselves.”188 caliph” instead of “the servant of god and his caliph.” 180. this is the first of the entrances along the western wall, starting from the north, discussed in al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:17–18. al-samhūdī notes that the munīra in question was a mawlā of umm mūsā; ibn shabba (taʾrīkh, 1:144) has munīra as a mawlā of the commander of the faithful. presumably, therefore, she was a mawlā of al-khayzurān, the mother of mūsā al-hādī, who along with one of her slaves, called muʾnisa, was responsible for some work on the prophet’s tomb enclosure in 170/787; see munt, holy city of medina, 117. 181. i.e., q 3:190–94; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430. 182. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430 (although he leaves out the caliph’s name muḥammad). he also notes more specifically that it could be found “on the lintel of the entrance, inside, below/ aside from (dūn) the arch.” 183. this word usually refers to a device for flinging stones, such as an onager or a mangonel, but here it presumably refers to some form of scaffolding or crane. 184. the existence of this manjanīq used for sweeping the roof is noted also by al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430, although he does not discuss the text inscribed on it. 185. i.e., q 101. 186. al-samhūdī, following ibn zabāla and yaḥyā (so perhaps on the basis of this same passage), notes that there was a second entrance along the west wall opposite dār munīra; see his wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:18. 187. q 48:29. 188. part of q 39:53. the kitāb al-manāsik does not mention in this instance that the whole verse was inscribed, but perhaps this is an accidental omission. it would certainly make more sense with the rest of the verse. 108 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) on the inside of the entrance facing dār nuṣayr189 is inscribed: [§23a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “he will say, ‘how long have you remained on earth, by number of years?,’” **down to the end of the sūra**.190 o god, bless muḥammad, your servant and your prophet.191 and inscribed on the outside: [§23b] “praise belongs to god, who has been true to us in his promise,” **the two verses**.192 on the inside of the entrance opposite dār jaʿfar b. yaḥyā193 is: [§24a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “praise belongs to god, who has not taken to himself a son,” **the verse**.194 o god, bless muḥammad, your servant and your messenger, in the best way you have blessed any of your prophets or your messengers. o god, send him to the blessed station that you promised him so the ancients and those who followed them can emulate him there, just as he delivered your message, advised your servants, and recited your verses.195 on the arch underneath this is inscribed: [§24b] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “your lord [is god] who,” **down to** “lord of all beings.”196 may the blessings of god be upon muḥammad, and greetings, the mercy of god, and his benedictions.197 inscribed on its outside is: [§24c] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “have we not expanded for you your breast,” **down to the end**.198 189. for this entrance, see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:18. nuṣayr was a mawlā of al-mahdī and in charge of the prayer ground to the west of the prophet’s mosque (ṣāḥib al-muṣallā). 190. i.e., q 23:112–18. 191. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:430–31. 192. i.e., q 39:74–75; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431. 193. for this entrance, see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:18–19. the onetime owner of the dār is jaʿfar b. yaḥyā b. khālid b. barmak. 194. q 17:111. 195. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431. 196. q 7:54. in the text of the kitāb al-manāsik, the word “allāh” is missing from the opening text of this sūra: inna rabbakum allāh alladhī . . . the omission of allāh does not appear as a variant among those noted by jeffery in his materials, and i assume it is a copyist’s mistake or a typographical error in the edition. 197. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431 (although he omits the basmallah). 198. i.e., q 94. the text of the kitāb al-manāsik here has “a-lam tashraḥ laka ṣadraka,” instead of the more “standard” nashraḥ. here, too, i assume the wording to be a typographical or copying error, since this variant makes little sense and does not appear among the variants noted by jeffery in his materials. that this text (with the “standard” nashraḥ) was inscribed here is also noted by al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431. the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 109 on the inside of bāb ʿātika199 is inscribed: [§25a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “the messenger believes,” **to the end of the sūra**.200 the inscription (kitāb) on the arch201 comes to an end [with]: [§25b] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “a messenger has come to you [p. 394] from among yourselves,” **the two verses**.202 “say, ‘he is god, one,’” **to the end**.203 may god bless muḥammad the prophet and may greetings, the mercy of god, and his benedictions be upon him.204 inscribed outside it is: [§25c] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “god enjoins justice, doing good and giving to kinsfolk,” **the verse**.205 the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful, ordered building work in this mosque.206 on bāb ziyād207 there is a teak plaque nailed up and inscribed on the outside of the mosque and another inscription (kitāb) on the inside:208 [§26] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “god. there is no god but him,” **the verse**.209 muḥammad is the messenger of god, whom he sent editor of al-fīrūzābādī’s text assumes the inscription contained only q 94:1, but the kitāb al-manāsik makes it clear the whole sūra is meant. 199. ʿātika bt. ʿabd allāh b. yazīd b. muʿāwiya. for this entrance, see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:19–21; sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 76–77. the entrance has also been known as bāb al-sūq and bāb al-raḥma and is supposedly one of the entrances given to the mosque in the original building of the prophet himself (although al-samhūdī offers an interesting investigation of this claim). 200. i.e., q 2:285–86; see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431. 201. al-fīrūzābādī simply places this inscription “beneath it [the entrance or the previous text] on the arch”; see his al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431–32. 202. i.e., q 9:128–29. 203. i.e., q 112. 204. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:431–32. 205. q 16:90. 206. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:432. 207. this entrance is named after the aforementioned early abbasid governor of medina, ziyād b. ʿubayd allāh. for a discussion of this entrance, see al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:21–27. 208. it is unclear whether this inscription is found on one side of this entrance, runs between the two sides, or is repeated once on each side. al-samhūdī notes only (wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:23), citing ibn zabāla and yaḥyā, that it was inscribed on the outside, and al-fīrūzābādī (al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:432) reports the same. it is quite a lengthy text, especially if it does include the throne verse, so perhaps it started on the outside of the entrance and was continued on the inside. 209. there are several verses this could refer to, but the obvious candidate is the throne verse, q 2:255, also used elsewhere in the mosque (§11a). al-fīrūzābādī’s text of this inscription mentions explicitly that it was indeed the throne verse; see his al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:432–33. 110 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) “with the guidance and the religion of truth.”210 the servant of god, ʿabd allāh,211 the commander of the faithful, may god ennoble him, ordered building work on the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) and the construction of this courtyard, to make the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) more spacious and for those muslims who come to it, in the year 151 [768–69 ce], out of desire for god alone and the last abode. the commander of the faithful, may god ennoble him, is the most worthy of men to oversee that because of his close kinship to the messenger of god (ṣ) and because of his caliphate (khilāfatihi) with which he/he distinguished him.212 may god magnify the reward of the commander of the faithful and make great his recompense.213 there is no inscription on the khawkha, neither inside nor outside.214 on the inside of the entrance that is by dār marwān215 is inscribed: [§27a] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “god and his angels bless the prophet. o you who believe, bless him and salute him.”216 o god, bless muḥammad the prophet (ṣ) and salute him, make him blameless, increase his standing, ennoble his structure, honor his lodging places/stations, and reward him with the best reward you could give to a prophet to/on behalf of/away from his community (ʿan ummatihi). for he brought your message and strove to carry out your command so that your religion was mighty and [p 395] your authority was manifest, your word was finished, what you had made lawful was made lawful, and what you had forbidden was forbidden. he commanded [in line with] your justice your oneness, you have no companion.217 may peace be upon him and the mercy of god and his benedictions.218 the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful, ordered work on the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) in the 210. part of q 9:33. al-fīrūzābādī’s text gives a slightly fuller quotation from this verse. 211. al-fīrūzābādī omits the second ʿabd allāh. 212. al-fīrūzābādī has “because of his close kinship to the messenger of god (ṣ) and because of his caliphate with which god distinguished him.” 213. al-samhūdī provides the text of this inscription from “the servant of god” to “the last abode” in his wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:23. al-fīrūzābādī offers the whole text in his al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:432–33. there are some other variations between the versions of this inscription offered by the kitāb al-manāsik and al-fīrūzābādī, but i have here noted only those that may alter the meaning. for some discussion of this text, see munt, holy city of medina, 167–68; and further below in this article. 214. for this statement and a discussion of this khawkha, “small opening,” also known as khawkhat abī bakr al-ṣiddīq, see also al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:27–28 (citing ibn zabāla for this statement). 215. see above, n. 112, on this entrance. 216. q 33:56. 217. al-fīrūzābādī’s text reads alternatively: “with you that enforced your oneness, you have no companion” (wa-bika naffadha dhālika waḥdaka lā sharīk laka). 218. up to this point the inscription is very similar to that on the loosely opposite entrance, bāb ʿuthmān (§10a). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 111 year 160 [776–77 ce],219 a [sign of] generosity from god through which he ennobled his caliphate, a treasury that those before him stored away for him, and a gift that he gave to him over those who come after him.220 praise be to god, who brought the commander of the faithful to rule after others221 and whom he ennobled with the [. . .] of his community,222 the spreading of his customs (sunan) and purifying him/ it.223 may god magnify the reward of the commander of the faithful and multiply his good deeds.224 and inscribed on the outside: [§27b] there is no god but god, who is one and has no companion. muḥammad is the messenger of god, whom he sent “with the guidance and the religion of truth,” **the verse**.225 o god, grant forgiveness to your prophets and the caliphs of the believers (khulafāʾ al-muʾminīn), alive and dead. o god, bless muḥammad, your servant and your prophet, you, your angels, and all of the believers.226 the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful, ordered work on the mosque of the messenger of god, the restoration of what had been brought into disrepair, and its (re)construction in the year 152 [769–70 ce].227 the inscription that was written for ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz along the qibla [wall] of the mosque, the one that saʿd ḥaṭaba inscribed,228 begins: [§28] in the name of god, the compassionate, the merciful. “praise belongs to god,” **to its end**,229 and “by the sun and its brightness in the forenoon,” **to its end**.230 219. there is a potential date/name problem here since the reigning caliph in 160/776–77 was muḥammad al-mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85), although this seems not to be an error (see further discussion later in this article). al-fīrūzābādī has the year as 130/747–48, which is equally (and in fact more) problematic. 220. al-fīrūzābādī has “through which god ennobled his caliphate from a treasury that he had stored for him apart from those who came before him and a gift that he gave to him over those who come after him.” in some ways, this makes a little bit more sense. 221. al-fīrūzābādī has “who put the commander of the faithful in charge of making it more spacious after others.” 222. the edition reads b*l*s*r millatihi; al-jāsir suggests reading the first word as bi-naṣr, thus giving “with the victory of his community.” 223. this makes little sense. al-fīrūzābādī has the more meaningful “and whom he ennobled with adorning and purifying it.” 224. for this text, see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:433–34. i have noted only the variants that alter the meaning of the inscription. 225. q 9:33. 226. a clear reference to q 33:56. 227. see also al-fīrūzābādī, al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:434. 228. the edited text here reads saʿd khaṭaba, but the earlier saʿd ḥaṭaba is surely correct. 229. i.e., q 1. 230. i.e., q 91. since we were told at the beginning of this section of the kitāb al-manāsik that this qibla inscription included all the verses from q 91 to the end of the qurʾan, that is presumably what is meant here as well. 112 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) * * * in total, the kitāb al-manāsik reports fifty separate inscriptions in the abbasid mosque after al-mahdī’s renovations, one of which (§28) had survived from the umayyad period. the kitāb al-manāsik reproduces the texts of these inscriptions in a fairly straightforward and logical manner. it begins with the courtyard inscriptions, starting with that along the qibla side of the courtyard and proceeding all the way around the courtyard in order. then it reports the texts of the remaining inscriptions, mostly but not exclusively around entrances to the mosque, running from the southeast corner along the eastern, northern, and western sides to the southwest corner and finally ending where it began with the text of the umayyad inscription that remained along the qibla wall of the mosque. see figure 1 for an approximate plan of the locations of the courtyard inscriptions and the entrances to the abbasid mosque. the umayyad-era inscriptions and their fate in the abbasid period the kitāb al-manāsik adds little that is completely new to our understanding of the form and content of the epigraphic program that accompanied al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik’s construction of the prophet’s mosque in medina, although it does help clarify some issues. it is also clear from this source that marwanid inscriptions ran along the length of the qibla wall of the mosque and that they comprised the qurʾanic sūras 1 and 91 to 114; there had also been at least one inscription in the mosque’s courtyard.231 there was presumably a foundation inscription as well; that would be expected, and the existence of one is necessary to understand al-nawfalī’s anecdote with which this article began. there are no surviving inscriptions from any of al-walīd’s mosques, and they may not all have had any to begin with.232 two other mosques that he had constructed, however, are reported to have had inscriptions, and the reported contents of these are loosely in line with those reported for the prophet’s mosque. we have seen above that abū yūsuf al-fasawī (d. 277/890) observed in the great mosque of damascus inscriptions on narrow bands in blue and gold along the qibla wall containing the throne verse (q 2:255) followed by al-walīd’s foundation inscription as well as sūras 1 and 79–81 of the qurʾan.233 there is also said to have been an inscription in al-walīd’s mosque in al-fusṭāṭ on green plaques (“tables vertes”), although the original has been lost and is known only through a french translation published by pierre 231. other sources to note some of these inscriptions include ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 70; and ibn al-nadīm, fihrist, 1/i:15–16. that at least one (and maybe more) of the early abbasid inscriptions around the courtyard seems to have replaced an earlier umayyad-era text is discussed below. 232. one description of al-walīd’s mosque in sanaa provides some information about the decoration of the qibla wall but does not seem to note the existence of inscribed texts; see al-rāzī, taʾrīkh madīnat ṣanʿāʾ, ed. ḥusayn b. ʿabd allāh al-ʿamrī, 3rd ed. (damascus: dār al-fikr, 1409/1989), 135–37. cf., however, serjeant and lewcock, “architectural history,” 323, 347, where it is noted (citing al-rāzī) that the miḥrāb al-walīd installed in the mosque in sanaa contained inscriptions. al-rāzī states that “nuqūsh waraqāt” could be seen as part of the decoration in this miḥrāb, but this need not mean inscribed texts. 233. ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 2/i:37; see also finster, “mosaiken,” 119; flood, great mosque, 247–54; george, umayyad mosque, 175–78. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 113 vattier in 1666.234 according to that translation, the inscription, dated to 92/711, seems to have contained several verses from the qurʾan (q 3:18, 4:172, 9:33, and 57:2) and called for various blessings for the prophet and the caliph. that caliph is recorded as ordering the expansion of the mosque and is addressed as “the servant of god, al-walīd, the commander of the faithful” (“gabdolle le valide commandeur des fidelles”). it also seems that at one point in this text al-walīd was referred to as “caliph” or deputy (khalīfa): “en le faisant vostre lieutenant.” the work is recorded as having been carried out by al-walīd’s governor of egypt from 90/709 to 96/714, qurra b. sharīk (“corras fils de serique”). like the texts from damascus and al-fusṭāṭ, the umayyad inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque appear to have been set in gold letters against a blue/dark green background. the only source, however, to state this explicitly is ibn ʿabd rabbih, whose testimony has been questioned and is in any case relatively late and may refer to the qibla wall’s postumayyad decoration.235 different materials seem to have been used for the umayyad-era inscriptions: ibn ʿabd rabbih has the qibla inscriptions in marble, while other sources describe inscriptions from al-walīd’s time in mosaic. al-nawfalī’s anecdote, for example, is explicit that the foundation inscription it refers to was in mosaic, and it can be inferred from al-samhūdī’s discussion, as well, that the other texts were inscribed in mosaic: “from the discussion of ibn zabāla on the inscriptions (kitāba) around the entrances to the mosque in the time of al-mahdī, it can be ascertained that it had been decorated with mosaic (bi-l-fusayfisāʾ), just as al-walīd had done.”236 since gold letters on a dark blue/green background was the setting of choice for other umayyad caliphal inscriptions in mosaic, including those in the dome of the rock and at the marketplace patronized by hishām b. ʿabd al-malik at baysān/scythopolis, it does seem reasonable to assume that this scheme was also applied to the epigraphic program in medina.237 others have discussed the imperial connotations of such a color scheme in the late antique roman and early islamic empires.238 one problem concerning the umayyad inscriptions that the kitāb al-manāsik does help us clear up is the identity of the figure responsible for the design of the inscriptions: a mawlā of āl ḥuwayṭib b. ʿabd al-ʿuzzā called saʿd ḥaṭaba. a figure called saʿd has previously been identified as having played a role in the creation of these texts, but often only as the patron of another qurʾanic copyist, called ibn abī al-hayyāj. the source for this supposed 234. gaston wiet, matériaux pour un corpus inscriptionum arabicarum, première partie: égypte, vol. 2 (cairo: imprimerie de l’institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1930), 6–9; rcea, 1:17–18 (no. 19). 235. see above, nn. 40–41. ibn al-nadīm (see below, n. 243) confirms that the letters were in gold but does not mention the color of the background. 236. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:296. 237. khamis, “two wall mosaic inscriptions”; milwright, dome of the rock; see also george, “calligraphy, colour and light,” 97. 238. flood, great mosque, 102; george, “calligraphy, colour and light,” 95–104; lawrence nees, “blue behind gold: the inscription of the dome of the rock and its relatives,” in and diverse are their hues: color in islamic art and culture, ed. sheila blair and jonathan bloom, 152–73 (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2011); milwright, dome of the rock, 197–99. for a wide-ranging discussion of the use of gold letters in late antique mosaics, see sean v. leatherbury, inscribing faith in late antiquity: between reading and seeing (abingdon: routledge, 2020), 42–56. 114 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) outsourcing of the work is a brief passage in ibn al-nadīm’s fihrist.239 however, thanks to the kitāb al-manāsik’s provision of a crucial piece of information—namely, that this saʿd was known as saʿd ḥaṭaba—we now know that saʿd himself was responsible for the execution of the texts and that ibn abī al-hayyāj had nothing to do with them. this fact clears up a difficult reading in ibn al-nadīm’s fihrist and reveals that the common (mis)understanding of the latter passage was caused by a variant that happened to appear in the manuscript that formed the basis of gustav flügel’s edition of the text.240 the relevant passage can now be read as follows: the first to write out a muṣḥaf at the very beginning and to be known for the beauty of [his] calligraphy was khālid b. abī al-hayyāj. i have seen a muṣḥaf in his hand. saʿd ḥaṭaba241 used to write out maṣāḥif, poetry, and anecdotes (akhbār) for al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik; it is he who carried out the inscription (kitāb) that is on the qibla [wall] of the prophet’s (ṣ) mosque in gold, from “by the sun and its brightness in the forenoon” to the end of the qurʾan.242 it is said that ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz said to him, “i want you to write a muṣḥaf for me along this model.” so he wrote for him a muṣḥaf with the utmost care. ʿumar came to inspect it and praised it highly, but he set a high price for it, so he refused [to buy] it.243 this rereading confirms the identity of the figure who executed the epigraphic program in al-walīd’s prophet’s mosque in medina. it helpfully clarifies who this otherwise randomly appearing and unidentified saʿd in ibn al-nadīm’s text is and explains why saʿd ḥaṭaba is elsewhere referred to as a noted copyist of the qurʾan.244 finally, it removes the problem, first identified by nabia abbott, caused by the fact that ibn abī al-hayyāj is elsewhere in the fihrist identified as a companion of ʿalī b. abī ṭālib and would, therefore, have had to be either a very young associate of ʿalī or a very old designer of the inscriptions in al-walīd’s mosque and copyist for ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz.245 239. ibn al-nadīm, fihrist, 1/i:15–16; translations offered in sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 79–80; alain george, the rise of islamic calligraphy (london: saqi, 2010), 74–75. for discussion, see nabia abbott, the rise of the north arabic script and its ḳurʾānic development, with a full description of the ḳurʾān manuscripts in the oriental institute (chicago: university of chicago press, 1939), 54; khamis, “two wall mosaic inscriptions,” 171; whelan, “forgotten witness,” 10–13. 240. ibn al-nadīm, kitāb al-fihrist, ed. gustav flügel (leipzig: f. c. w. vogel, 1871–72), 1:6. 241. this is the word that caused the confusion. sayyid’s edition of ibn al-nadīm has saʿd ḥuṣṣah, but this must surely be the same person as the saʿd ḥaṭaba mentioned in the kitāb al-manāsik. ibn al-nadīm, al-fihrist, ed. riḍā tajaddud (tehran: maktabat al-jaʿfarī, 1391/1971), 9, has saʿd khuṣṣah. so the text in these editions reads wa-kāna saʿd ḥuṣṣah/khuṣṣah yaktubu al-maṣāḥif. sayyid’s edition notes that a variant in a surviving manuscript reads instead wa-kāna saʿd naṣabahu li-katb al-maṣāḥif, “saʿd had commissioned him to compose maṣāḥif . . . ,” and, as tajaddud mentions in a note, flügel’s edition has this text as well, which is presumably why previous translations have followed this alternative reading. saʿd ḥaṭaba is clearly the correct reading. 242. i.e., q 91–114. 243. translation based on ibn al-nadīm, fihrist (ed. sayyid), 1/i:15–16. 244. see above, n. 113. 245. ibn al-nadīm, fihrist, 1/i:107; abbott, rise of the north arabic script, 54. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 115 before we turn to the inscriptions added to the mosque in the early abbasid period, it is worth considering the fate of these umayyad texts after the fall of that dynasty. many umayyad inscriptions from the major imperial monuments founded during ʿabd al-malik’s and al-walīd’s reigns seem to have been either destroyed or appropriated by abbasid rulers and their representatives, a process that flood has labeled “epigraphic mutilation.”246 al-maʾmūn famously had ʿabd al-malik’s name in the dome of the rock’s foundation inscription replaced with his own and also had extra inscriptions bearing his name added to the copper panels bearing umayyad inscriptions by the entrances to that same building.247 in damascus, it seems to have been the qurʾanic texts that were effaced by al-maʾmūn, according to al-fasawī.248 the anecdote with which this article opens depicts al-mahdī having al-walīd’s name in the foundation inscription of the prophet’s mosque replaced with his own. sauvaget thought he had identified in the extant notices about the abbasid inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque evidence of such a replacement of the name of the umayyad caliph by an abbasid ruler, and his argument is in some ways persuasive.249 his argument concerns ibn rusta’s version of an inscription explicitly credited in the kitāb al-manāsik to the first abbasid caliph, abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ (§4). sauvaget’s interest was raised by the fact that in ibn rusta’s account, this inscription is credited to a ruler designated “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” but is then dated to 162/778–79. the date would place the text during the construction work of al-mahdī, but that caliph was called muḥammad, not ʿabd allāh. he also noted the significant overlap in content with the first part of an inscription not reported by most of the sources discussed here—its text is provided by ibn qutayba—which credits work on the prophet’s mosque to al-maʾmūn. ibn qutayba records the following text: the servant of god [or: ʿabd allāh] ordered work on the mosque of the messenger of god (ṣ) in the year 202 [817–18 ce], desiring recompense from god, reward from god, 246. flood, great mosque, 125–26; see also idem, “signs of silence: epigraphic erasure and the image of the word,” in the image debate: figural representation in islam and across the world, ed. christiane gruber, 46–71 (london: gingko, 2019), esp. 49–56 on the abbasid era. this is, of course, not a feature unique to the early abbasid islamic world; see, for example, the discussion of pre-islamic iranian epigraphic practices in matthew p. canepa, “inscriptions, royal spaces and iranian identity: epigraphic practices in persia and the ancient iranian world,” in viewing inscriptions in the late antique and medieval world, ed. antony eastmond, 10–35 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015); and, in the same volume, jonathan m. bloom, “erasure and memory: aghlabid and fatimid inscriptions in north africa,” 61–75. the months surrounding the abbasid takeover of power from the umayyads also witnessed many episodes of revolutionary violence targeted at relatives and supporters of the deposed ruling family; see further robinson, “violence.” later decades saw, alongside “epigraphic mutilation,” extensive efforts to rewrite the memory of the umayyad era and umayyad rulers; see esp. antoine borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leiden: brill, 2011). 247. for the latter, see milwright, dome of the rock, 76. 248. ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 2/i:37; flood, great mosque, 126, 253; cf. now in part george, umayyad mosque, 175–76. 249. sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 58–67. 116 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) and god’s generosity. for with god is “the reward of both this world and the next. god is hearing and observing.”250 the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, has commanded fear of god and awe of him as well as doing right by one’s family and action in accordance with the book of god and the sunna of his messenger (ṣ). [he commands] the magnification/veneration of god’s ordinances that the tyrants belittled and the revival of the justice that they killed off; [he commands] the belittling of the enmity and oppression they magnified. [he commands] that god be obeyed and that those who obey god be obeyed and that those who disobey god be disobeyed. no obedience is due to any creature acting in disobedience to god. [he commands] the equitable division of the fayʾ among them and the appropriate expenditure of the “fifths.”251 the second part of this text is clearly a version of the ibn ghazāla inscription discussed by the kitāb al-manāsik (§1) and other sources. the first part does indeed heavily overlap in content with §4, although of course the date is completely different. for inscription §4, then, we do seem to have three different readings of the same text, and it is worth emphasizing that it can be inferred from ibn rusta’s account of the abbasid texts, which he places around the courtyard of the prophet’s mosque, that §4 would have been followed by §1.252 the main difference is the dates: the kitāb al-manāsik and al-samhūdī (both citing yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī) have 132/749–50; ibn rusta has 162/778–79; and ibn qutayba has 202/817– 18. there has been scepticism about ibn qutayba’s reading of the text for centuries, and sauvaget followed al-samhūdī’s precedent in, correctly, rejecting it; sauvaget astutely assumed that ibn qutayba had tried to make the date match a caliph he knew to have been called ʿabd allāh.253 sauvaget ended up arguing that the discrepancy between the name of the caliph and the date—recall that he was basing his discussion on ibn rusta’s version of the inscription—is the end result of an abbasid rewriting of an originally umayyad text: the name al-walīd was replaced, for reasons of calligraphic fit, with the name ʿabd allāh and the date was altered.254 since sauvaget was working with ibn rusta’s account of the early abbasid inscriptions, his argument made some sense of a confusing text. other texts, however, remove the need for such a convoluted argument. the fact that yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī (according to both the 250. a slight rearrangement of the wording of q 4:134; see also rcea, 1:98 (no. 122). 251. ibn qutayba, maʿārif, 562–63. 252. see below, fig. 1, and the plan in sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 64. (§1 is sauvaget’s “a” and §4 is sauvaget’s “e.”) that inscriptions §§1–4 were located “around the courtyard of the mosque” is mentioned in ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73. 253. for al-samhūdī’s scepticism, see his wafāʾ al-wafā, 2:296. 254. there is a reconstruction of what the relevant sections of both texts might have looked like in sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 66. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 117 kitāb al-manāsik and al-samhūdī) dated the text to 132/749–50 removes the problem of the discrepancy between the date of the text and the name of the caliph. alternatively, if ibn rusta’s reading of the date as 162/778–79 were correct, there are other extant inscriptions (§27a, for example, and see the discussion below) that suggest that the caliph muḥammad al-mahdī might have been referred to in inscriptions as ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh, “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh.” finally, sauvaget’s argument has always begged the question of why al-mahdī would have replaced the name al-walīd with ʿabd allāh for reasons of calligraphic fit: after all, al-maʾmūn’s reworking of the inscription in the dome of the rock suggests that abbasid caliphs could be content with fairly crude alterations to umayyad texts.255 this particular inscription, then, may not turn out to be a case of abbasid-era “epigraphic mutilation” of an originally umayyad text. that such mutilation happened, however, seems clear enough. al-nawfalī’s anecdote suggests that it did happen in the prophet’s mosque, and there is other evidence, too. both the kitāb al-manāsik and ibn rusta, in their respective narratives of events leading up to the composition of inscription §1, state that this text was the result of early abbasid reworking of a text originally put in place by ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz during the construction work in al-walīd’s reign. in another version of inscription §1, provided by ibn al-najjār, the name of the caliph in the text is actually given as “the servant of god, the commander of the faithful, al-walīd.”256 this seems to represent ibn al-najjār’s attempt to restore an original umayyad text and it is a logical enough attempt at restoration, even though, as will be discussed below, the language of §1 as a whole is much more aligned with abbasid than with umayyad political vocabulary. despite the evidence for early abbasid “epigraphic mutilation” in the prophet’s mosque, however, it does seem to be the case that the umayyad-era qurʾanic texts along the qibla wall remained. ibn rusta does not explicitly confirm that they were among the inscriptions he read on his visit in 290/903—in fact, he refers (albeit vaguely) to other sources to note their existence257—but ibn ʿabd rabbih’s testimony, if accurate, supports their continuing existence. so does the kitāb al-manāsik’s author’s decision to repeat their content at the very end of the survey of inscriptions around the entrances to the mosque (§28). that survey began near the southern corner of the eastern wall and ended near the southern corner of the western wall. the notice of the umayyad inscriptions along the qibla wall, therefore, completes a full circuit and suggests that those texts were still in situ after al-mahdī’s work on the mosque. 255. for the crude nature of al-maʾmūn’s replacement of ʿabd al-malik’s name with his own, see the transcription of the relevant part of the text in christel kessler, “ʿabd al-malik’s inscription in the dome of the rock: a reconsideration,” journal of the royal asiatic society (1970): 2–14, at 9; there is also an image in blair, islamic inscriptions, 30. the most important transcription of the dome of the rock’s mosaic inscriptions can now be found in the foldouts at the front and back of milwright, dome of the rock, but in the relevant place he restores ʿabd al-malik’s name. 256. ibn al-najjār, al-durra al-thamīna, 177. 257. ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73: “more than one scholar has reported that . . .” 118 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the early abbasid inscriptions the kitāb al-manāsik provides a fair amount of information about the forty-nine texts it describes that were added to the prophet’s mosque in the early abbasid period, although some details remain frustratingly obscure. perhaps the most frustrating such detail is the material used to create the inscriptions. a few texts are explicitly said either by the kitāb al-manāsik or by another source to have been in mosaic, and one seems to have been written on a teak plaque.258 there is also the aforementioned notice from al-samhūdī to the effect that according to ibn zabāla’s account of the inscriptions, al-mahdī used mosaic in the prophet’s mosque just as al-walīd had done.259 the way this comment is phrased suggests, as alain george has also noted, that many of the early abbasid inscriptions in the mosque were executed in mosaic, perhaps—although there is no explicit evidence for this—in the caliphal/imperial color scheme of gold on blue.260 we can, therefore, study these texts on the basis of their locations and content alone, since we have so little evidence of other aspects of their nonverbal communication.261 we have, for example, no indication of the script(s) used. it would be interesting to compare these texts with those that have survived in mecca and are dated to the early abbasid period, although these await a full study. what has been published so far indicates that two texts from the masjid al-ḥarām, one dated to 167/783–84 during al-mahdī’s caliphate and the other probably linked to this text, both located close to that mosque’s bāb al-ṣafā, are in raised kufic script on marble columns.262 another inscription from the masjid al-bayʿa in mecca, dated to 144/761–62, is in what its editor has labeled a “ḥijāzī” script on a rectangular granite pane.263 it is possible that some of the inscriptions around the entrances to the prophet’s mosque may have been similar, but there is little indication that this was the case. it would also be possible to consider other extant examples of arabic architectural inscriptions in mosaic, wood, and stone from the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries to gain some indication of what the visual effect of the prophet’s mosque’s inscriptions may have been. since, however, 258. mosaic: §6; ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74–75; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:13 (which corresponds to §11a). teak plaque: §26; al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:23. see also leal, “abbasid mosaic tradition,” 32. al-marjānī and al-maṭarī also note that §11a was on a mosaic panel, although they date it to the caliphate of al-walīd b. ʿ abd al-malik: see al-maṭarī, taʿrīf, 89; al-marjānī, bahjat al-nufūs, 1:545. since, however, they both also, confusingly, seem to attribute all the entrances in al-mahdī’s mosque, including those in the portions added to the structure by al-mahdī, to al-walīd, they may well have been wrong about this, too; see below, n. 270, for reference to their confusion over the entrances. 259. see above, n. 236. for further discussion of the use of mosaics to decorate abbasid monuments over the first abbasid century or so, see leal, “abbasid mosaic tradition,” esp. 30–34 for the use of mosaic in the ḥijāz. 260. george, “calligraphy, colour and light,” 98. that said, a mosaic inscription added to one of the entrances to the masjid al-ḥarām in mecca by abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr, recording work undertaken between 137/754 and 140/758, was apparently actually in the reverse color scheme, “in black mosaic on gold mosaic”; see al-azraqī, akhbār makka, 2:58–59; also sheila blair, “inscribing the hajj,” in the hajj: collected essays, ed. venetia porter and liana saif, 160–68 (london: british museum, 2013), 161–62. 261. for the importance of nonverbal, visual evidence in interpreting epigraphic schemes, see the essays collected in eastmond, viewing inscriptions. 262. al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 111–14. 263. ibid., 122. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 119 any comparison would have to remain almost entirely conjectural, it seems more appropriate to focus our attention here on what we do know about these texts. the kitāb al-manāsik and ibn rusta between them allow us to pinpoint quite clearly the locations of most of the early abbasid inscriptions. according to the latter, several of these texts (§§1–4) were “around the courtyard of the mosque, above the arches and beneath the merlons (shurafāt).”264 sauvaget offered a credible plan of their arrangement around the courtyard, and nothing in the kitāb al-manāsik suggests his plan is incorrect.265 of the additional early abbasid texts discussed by the kitāb al-manāsik, one was in the “eastern corner of the inside of the mosque” (§5), presumably, given the context, by the southeast corner; one was along the outside of the qibla wall by the southeast corner (§8); and one was on the manjanīq next to the northern end of the western wall (§21). the remaining inscriptions (§§6–7, 9–20, 22–27) were located around the entrances to the mosque, both inside and outside, and sometimes on connected arches and lintels (see fig. 1).266 there is some dispute surrounding the number of entrances to the prophet’s mosque in the second/eighth century. sauvaget noted that the state of the entrances to al-walīd’s mosque is very difficult to ascertain, although he made a valiant effort.267 ibn zabāla mentions four entrances, all in the western wall, that were apparently there in the very early abbasid period, before al-mahdī’s expansion.268 most of our sources are more interested in discussing the entrances to the mosque after al-mahdī’s expansion of the building, but they nonetheless disagree over their total number and sometimes over their location. the main dispute surrounds any entrances that may or may not have been found along the qibla wall of al-mahdī’s mosque. ibn zabāla apparently gave the mosque twenty-four entrances, eight along each of the eastern and western walls and four each along the northern and southern walls.269 al-samhūdī, however, disputed that some of these were really entrances and in his own survey discusses only twenty, those along the eastern, northern, and western walls.270 ibn rusta says he counted twenty-two entrances when he visited the prophet’s mosque in 290/903.271 the kitāb al-manāsik mentions twenty entrances in its survey of the 264. ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 73. 265. sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 64. 266. the relatively extensive use of inscriptions to decorate the mosque is not particularly surprising in an abbasid-era context. the (admittedly a century or so later) mosque of ibn ṭūlūn in cairo famously had an inscription two kilometers long on wood; see k. a. c. creswell, a short account of early muslim architecture, rev. james w. allan (cairo: american university in cairo press, 1989), 402. 267. sauvaget, mosquée omeyyade, 75–78, 91. 268. al-samhūdī, wafāʾ al-wafā, 3:24. 269. ibid., 3:6–7. 270. ibid., 3:7–31. al-fīrūzābādī’s survey of the entrances (see his al-maghānim al-muṭāba, 1:425–35) differs slightly in places from al-samhūdī’s, but the latter in his own survey argues persuasively for his reconstruction, which agrees fully with the kitāb al-manāsik’s arrangement. al-maṭarī and al-marjānī both discuss twenty entrances, which they claim were put into the mosque by al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik, but since they include entrances found only in the extension built on the instructions of al-mahdī, they were clearly confused: see al-maṭarī, taʿrīf, 88–91; and al-marjānī bahjat al-nufūs, 1:543–48. 271. ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 75. 120 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) inscriptions, which starts in the southeast corner (along the eastern wall) before progressing in order along the eastern, northern, and western walls; these are the same twenty discussed by al-samhūdī, who seems to have based his discussion on yaḥyā al-ʿaqīqī’s and ibn zabāla’s surveys of the inscriptions. texts are located on or around all of them except one, the small opening (khawkha) in the western wall.272 of the inscriptions around the entrances, those from §§13 or 14 up to §§23 or 24 were in the new section of the mosque added as part of al-mahdī’s enlargement.273 the contents of the texts are fairly regular and fall under four main themes (more than one theme can appear in one inscription). first of all, there are texts commemorating building projects commissioned by particular caliphs. fourteen of the inscriptions mention such work, with three identifying abū al-ʿabbās as the commissioning caliph (§§1, 4, 5), two al-manṣūr (§§26, 27b), one hārūn al-rashīd (§6), and seven al-mahdī (§§2, 3, 13d, 17b, 19b, 20b, and almost certainly 27a); one (§25c) names the caliph as “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” but provides no other identifying information or date. these texts are often associated with thanks to god, praise for the prophet, and calls for god’s blessings and rewards for the caliph.274 second, there are texts that identify the origins of the craftsmen who worked on those sections of the mosque:275 two texts credit craftsmen from jerusalem (§§6, 7), two workers from homs (§§10b, 10c), and two basrans (§§13d, 20b). no craftsmen are named individually—the sole inscription that mentions the agency of an individual other than the caliph (§6) refers to a local official who oversaw the work—but such identification would be uncommon for architectural epigraphy in this period.276 mention of the geographical origins of groups of craftsmen, however, seems to have been relatively common in the ḥijāz around this time. two extant early abbasid texts from the masjid al-ḥarām in mecca 272. although the only text located near bāb ʿalī is §8, and it is not entirely clear how close to the entrance it was. 273. the kitāb al-manāsik is clear that texts §13a–d were around the entrance that marked the place along the eastern wall where al-mahdī’s expansion began, but it is unclear whether this entrance was at the limit of al-walīd’s mosque or in a section of the wall that existed only after the early abbasid expansion. there is no such explicit information about the western wall, but from its relative location bāb dār jaʿfar b. yaḥyā seems likely to mark the corresponding spot there. the next entrance heading south, bāb ʿātika, is one thought to have been in al-walīd’s mosque. 274. as blair notes, “in a typical foundation inscription, far more space was given over to the patron than to what he built”; see her islamic inscriptions, 35. 275. this, at least, is what appears to be meant. it is just about possible that the inscriptions commemorate sections paid for by the communities identified, but it is more likely that they refer to specific craftsmen. 276. for this phenomenon in later periods, see sheila blair, “place, space and style: craftsmen’s signatures in medieval islamic art,” in eastmond, viewing inscriptions, 230–48; idem, islamic inscriptions, 49–52. for artisans’ individual signatures on portable objects from the first four centuries ah, see fanny bessard, caliphs and merchants: cities and economies of power in the near east (700–950) (oxford: oxford university press, 2020), 221–26. some architectural inscriptions from the early islamic centuries do give the names of their inscribers, but not of those who undertook work on the wider decorative schemes; see, for example, bilha moor, “mosque and church: arabic inscriptions at shivta in the early islamic period,” jerusalem studies in arabic and islam 40 (2013): 73–141, at 79, 80, 87, 90. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 121 also identify the geographical origin of those who worked on sections of the mosque, in both cases kufa.277 moreover, the midto late fourth/tenth-century traveler al-muqaddasī, who visited mecca at least twice, in 356/967 and 367/978, noted that the outsides of the walls of the arcades of the masjid al-ḥarām were decorated in mosaic, executed by workers from syria and egypt whose names could be seen there.278 that caliphal projects in the marwanid and early abbasid periods could involve large numbers of craftsmen and laborers moved around the empire and perhaps even brought in from outside the empire has been well established, thanks largely to papyrological evidence from egypt and some literary evidence for al-walīd’s building projects.279 these meccan and medinan inscriptions seem to provide further corroboration of such migrations of laborers to work on major imperial monuments. we also should not be surprised to see different teams of craftsmen at work on different sections of the mosque, since it also seems to have been the case that several teams of mosaicists worked on monuments such as the dome of the rock and al-walīd’s mosque in damascus.280 third, many of the texts include demands for praises, blessings, and greetings for the prophet from either god, his angels, or the muslims in general. the mosque in medina does, of course, contain the prophet’s grave, but there is little in these inscriptions in praise of muḥammad that would be out of place anywhere in the islamic world. some texts do call on muslims to pray for or greet the prophet, which could be related to ideas about pilgrimage to the prophet’s grave in the mid-second/eighth century, but discussions in favor of such pilgrimage from that period are relatively difficult to uncover.281 in any case, calls of this kind are also frequently found in inscriptions elsewhere in the islamic world.282 the fourth theme is, of course, citations from the qurʾan. clear direct citations from the qurʾan can be identified in forty of the inscriptions, and still more texts contain obvious allusions to the qurʾan or make use of qurʾanic vocabulary, even if they do not quote it directly. twenty-three of the texts contain only quotations from the qurʾan, often following a basmallah.283 there is a clear preference for extracts of a verse or several verses from a longer sūra rather than full citations of short sūras. the latter, of course, is what apparently 277. al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 111–14. 278. al-muqaddasī, aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm, ed. m. j. de goeje, 2nd ed. (leiden: brill, 1906), 73; see 101 for the dates of his visits to mecca. it is not clear when these mosaics were first put in place, as noted by leal, “abbasid mosaic tradition,” 31. 279. recent discussion in george, umayyad mosque, 77–91. 280. see the discussions in george, rise of islamic calligraphy, 60–68; idem, umayyad mosque, 146; milwright, dome of the rock, 111–14. 281. see the discussion in munt, holy city of medina, 123–47. 282. similar calls appear, famously, in the dome of the rock’s inscriptions, for example. to give just one further example, they can also be seen in one of the texts (probably early abbasid) from mecca; see al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 113–14. 283. §§9, 10d, 11a, 11b, 12a, 12b, 13a, 13b, 13c, 14a, 14b, 15b, 16a, 17a, 18a, 19a, 20a, 21, 22a, 22b, 23b, 24c, 25a. for some discussion of the use of qurʾanic verses to adorn entrances to mosques throughout the premodern islamic world, see erica cruikshank dodd and shereen khairallah, the image of the word: a study of quranic verses in islamic architecture (beirut: american university of beirut, 1981), 1:73–80. 122 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) dominated the umayyad mosque’s epigraphic program, but among the early abbasid inscriptions only sūras 1, 94, 101, 102 and 112 were cited in full. some verses were cited twice: this was certainly the case for q 2:255, 3:190, 9:18, 9:33, and 9:128–29, and q 33:56 was cited directly three times. q 7:54 was probably cited twice (although one of these may have been another verse instead); q 17:111 was cited directly once and alluded to on another occasion; and q 4:134 and 17:43 seem to have been alluded to twice. the citation of or allusion to these particular verses, including those referenced more than once, is not really surprising in this context: many invoke qurʾanic references to the prophet/messenger, to “mosques” (masājid), or to the superiority and triumph of islam over other faiths. as robert hillenbrand has noted, “the choice of quranic inscriptions for use in a mosque was only theoretically wide. in practice it was narrow.”284 it is, therefore, not surprising to see significant overlap between the verses used in al-mahdī’s mosque in medina and those used in other premodern mosques. of the sūras that hillenbrand identified as those most commonly drawn upon in architecture—q 2, 3, 9, 17, 24, 48, 112, and 114—verses from all bar the last were used in al-mahdī’s inscriptions in medina (and, of course, q 114 may well still have been visible in the umayyad qibla wall inscription).285 and of the verses from sūra 9 that were most commonly used in architectural settings—q 9:18, 21–22, and 33—verses 18 and 33 were both cited twice in medina.286 that said, it is a point of interest that q 9:33 is apparently cited frequently on funerary stelae, so its use here, in the mosque that contained the prophet’s grave, is possibly notable.287 the appearance twice of the so-called throne verse (q 2:255) also fits that verse’s regular use in other monuments associated with caliphal patronage.288 two of the verses cited or referenced more than once (q 33:56 and 17:111) 284. robert hillenbrand, “qurʾanic epigraphy in medieval islamic architecture,” revue des études islamiques 54 (1986): 171–87, at 172. that said, sometimes specific verses not commonly used elsewhere were used to fit specific monuments, such as q 3:96–97, which was used in the mosaic inscription erected above an entrance to the masjid al-ḥarām in mecca by abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr; see al-azraqī, akhbār makka, 2:58–59; blair, “inscribing the hajj,” 160–61. 285. hillenbrand, “qurʾanic epigraphy,” 172; hillenbrand’s data is drawn from dodd and khairallah, image of the word. there is also some overlap with the qurʾanic inscriptions, perhaps dating to the early to mid-second/ eighth century, in the mosque at shivta (al-subayṭā); for these, see moor, “mosque and church.” 286. q 9:18 is apparently “by far the most common koranic text used in the decoration of a mosque,” and it is often found in foundation inscriptions, as in §3 here; see dodd and khairallah, image of the word, 1:63. 287. hillenbrand, “quranic epigraphy,” 173. that said, q 9:33 does appear in another (this time extant) early abbasid inscription in sanaa, dated to 136/753–54, which commemorates the restoration/construction of mosques; see mittwoch, “eine arabische bauinschrift,” 235, 237; al-dūrī, “al-fikra al-mahdiyya,” 124; serjeant and lewcock, “architectural history,” 348; elad, “caliph abūʾl-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ,” 16. it also apparently featured in al-manṣūr’s inscription in the masjid al-ḥarām in mecca; see al-azraqī, akhbār makka, 2:58–59; blair, “inscribing the hajj,” 161. 288. see, for example, flood, great mosque, 247–48; milwright, dome of the rock, 74–79; milka levy-rubin, “why was the dome of the rock built? a new perspective on a long-discussed question,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 80, no. 3 (2017): 441–64, at 462. gülru necipoğlu suggests (“dome of the rock,” 46) that the throne verse was also displayed in the dome of the umayyad dome of the rock, although the earliest witness is from the sixth/twelfth century, after the fatimids had rebuilt the dome and renovated its decoration. for the verse’s use in other mosques across the premodern islamic world, see dodd and khairallah, image of the word, 1:64–65. in light of the fairly common use of this verse in umayyad and early abbasid al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 123 also appeared on the outer face of the umayyad mosaic inscription in the dome of the rock, as did q 112, which was used once in the early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque (§25b).289 although many of these qurʾanic citations and blessings for the prophet of course had a specific significance for the message the inscriptions’ patrons were attempting to promote, the decoration of a mosque with such texts in and of itself would presumably have contributed to the sanctity of the space. this article will end with a discussion of what these inscriptions from the prophet’s mosque can tell us about early abbasid messages concerning the legitimacy of their rule. before we get there, however, it is important to consider how visitors to the mosque might have reacted to the texts. they were clearly designed to be visible, although that does not necessarily mean they were designed to be easily legible;290 we cannot say much about how difficult it was to read them without knowing much more about their precise locations (including how they faced the light) and their material. that said, their location around the entrances and the courtyard seems significant. on the one hand, these locations may have ensured that at least some of the texts did receive as much light as possible. and on the other hand, inscribed scriptural passages were often used to decorate (and perhaps to sanctify) entrances to many late antique religious buildings, as well as certain locations in the interior of such buildings, and this significance may have been apparent to visitors to the prophet’s mosque even if they could not always read the texts of the inscriptions.291 the various extant sources reporting the inscriptions’ contents do disagree over their wording. sometimes the divergence is a matter of minor variations, but sometimes significant portions are read differently, notably (as we have seen) the dates of some of the texts. the differences could, of course, simply be a result of errors in transcription or by later copyists of the manuscripts. i have also discussed some cases in which the dates or the names of caliphs may have been altered to make the data fit better with a later scholar’s knowledge (ibn qutayba) or in an effort to reconstruct a more original text (ibn al-najjār). they could also, however, reflect engagement with these texts by visitors and readers who appreciated the general gist of the message and perhaps often recognized specific imperial monuments, it is interesting that greek biblical inscriptions displaying comparable messages of divine dominion and god’s throne over the roman triple gate in the southern wall of the temenos in damascus were left in situ in the new mosque there; see george, umayyad mosque, 95. 289. this may actually account for all of the qurʾanic inscriptions used in the outer-face text in the dome of the rock. others have also identified references there to q 57:2 and 64:1, which do not appear in the prophet’s mosque, but scott lucas has argued intriguingly that these may have been incorrectly identified and that the inscription in that location is actually citing a prophetic ḥadīth instead; see his “an efficacious invocation inscribed on the dome of the rock: literary and epigraphic evidence for a first-century ḥadīth,” journal of near eastern studies 76, no. 2 (2017): 215–30. 290. see, for example, hillenbrand, “qurʾanic epigraphy,” 178: “even if inscriptions are visible they do not need to be legible.” the ways in which late antique inscriptions in religious buildings were supposed to be read and engaged with features heavily in the recent discussion in leatherbury, inscribing faith; see, for example, the comments at 14–18. 291. leatherbury, inscribing faith, 262–71. irene bierman has made a similar point about the use of inscriptions to adorn entrances in city walls; see her writing signs: the fatimid public text (berkeley: university of california press, 1998), 31–32, 35, 73. 124 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) qurʾanic verses but were not necessarily familiar with the precise names, dates, and other information the inscriptions may have contained. those who cared more about precision on such details, including the authors of our surviving sources, tried to make them out, albeit with varying results. but we might assume that many visitors were largely unconcerned with the details of the texts, principally marking (but not, of course, necessarily accepting) their messages of prophetic authority and obedience to god, adherence to which could be demonstrated by recognizing the legitimacy and philanthropic generosity of the reigning “servant of god” and “commander of the faithful.”292 as modern scholars have long understood “one of the main reasons to erect a monumental inscription was propaganda and advertising, to broadcast a ruler’s good name and works or to mark his sovereignty.”293 even if the texts in medina were not designed to be legible, aspects of their setting may have emphasized their imperial message; this would be the case, for example, with any texts that may have been executed in the gold-on-blue scheme. it is also worth noting that the appearance of inscriptions around all the entrances to the mosque as well as along the qibla wall and around the courtyard would have meant that texts encircled large sections of the mosque, and encircling texts have been identified as conveying important messages of imperial rule in late antique and early islamic contexts.294 what the inscriptions actually said is, of course, still important, and some of the texts provide an indication of how these early abbasid caliphs expected visitors to the mosque to understand the nature of their sovereignty and the reasons for the legitimacy of their authority. the details of the early abbasids’ justifications for overthrowing the umayyads and of their own claims to caliphal authority have long been a matter of debate among historians, who have attempted to track the developments in their claims to rule on the basis of being members, in a more or less particular fashion, of banū hāshim, the family of the prophet.295 the early abbasid inscriptions from the prophet’s mosque in medina provide some examples of already generally well-known strategies and claims, but also evidence of some less-known efforts. among the better-known claims found in these inscriptions are those that fit nicely the context of the years that followed the abbasids’ successful seizure of power from the umayyads. these come, appropriately, in the text supposedly installed by ibn ghazāla to 292. there is an interesting discussion of the necessity of the readability of royal inscriptions in pre-islamic iran in canepa, “inscriptions,” for example at 13: “even if their contents were not exactly known, inscriptions’ tangible presence extended the power and presence of the royal patron beyond the palace into the landscape.” see also the discussion in jeremy johns, “arabic inscriptions in the cappella palatina: performativity, audience, legibility and illegibility,” in eastmond, viewing inscriptions, 124–47. 293. blair, islamic inscriptions, 41. 294. see, for example, milwright, dome of the rock, 197, 254; see also the wider discussion of inscriptions that encircled religious buildings in late antiquity in leatherbury, inscribing faith, 148–55, and the comments about inscriptions encouraging viewers to move around monuments at 248–53, 259, 286. 295. see above, n. 5, for some relevant studies. that “hāshimī” was a label used already in the umayyad period to describe members of the family of the prophet more broadly than was the case with the labels “talibids” or “ʿalids” was observed by wilferd madelung, “the hāshimiyyāt of al-kumayt and hāshimī shiʿism,” studia islamica 70 (1989): 5–26. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 125 replace an earlier umayyad text (§1). first, we see here calls to action in accordance with the book of god and the sunna of his prophet as well as an emphasis on the necessity of disobeying and overturning the false practices of tyrants. anti-umayyad rebels, including those leading the movement that brought the abbasids to power, apparently made frequent and somewhat generic use of calls for action in accordance with “the book of god and the sunna of his prophet.”296 other texts (for example, §27a) also emphasize that it is the abbasid caliph who is the guardian of the sunna. the ibn ghazāla inscription (§1) also calls for just caliphal oversight of fiscal matters, principally through the “equitable division of the fayʾ” and the “appropriate expenditure of the ‘fifths.’” this call, too, fits well in the context of rulers who had recently seized power from the umayyads, since the latter family’s supposed mismanagement of the empire’s finances was a major complaint of rebels against their rule.297 this inscription thus offers a symbolic rewriting of an umayyad-era text with many of the key messages proclaimed by the rebels whose actions had eventually brought the abbasids to power. the more interesting language revealed in these inscriptions includes the relatively common reference to the abbasids as “caliphs” or as possessors of “caliphate,” in two cases within a list of titles (see §§5 and 19b) and in three cases in other parts of the text (see §§26, 27a, and 27b). this may seem innocuous enough, since we are well aware that the title “caliph” was applied to all these rulers. the debate about the precise meaning of this title continues, however, and it also remains the case that relatively few caliphs from the umayyad and early abbasid periods are known to have made use of this specific title in public media.298 although the title al-khalīfa does appear occasionally on coins during 296. patricia crone and martin hinds, god’s caliph: religious authority in the first centuries of islam (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1986), 58–96. for the existence of various different ideas in the early abbasid period about the meaning of “the sunna of the prophet” and the identity of its most appropriate guardians, see also zaman, religion and politics, esp. within 70–118. 297. see, for example, the accusations leveled in the sermon of the anti-umayyad rebel abū ḥamza al-mukhtār b. ʿ awf in 129–30/747, in crone and hinds, god’s caliph, 131–32; more generally, see crone, medieval islamic political thought, 52; andrew marsham, “fayʾ,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 3rd ed. 298. the classic study is crone and hinds, god’s caliph. in line with trends in scholarship on the early islamic centuries over the past couple of decades, many more discussions have been published on umayyad caliphs’ titles and political thought than have appeared on those of the early abbasids; see, for example, wadād al-qāḍī, “the religious foundation of late umayyad ideology and practice,” in saber religioso y poder político en el islam: actas del simposio internacional (granada, 15–18 octubre 1991), 231–73 (madrid: agencia español de cooperación internacional, 1994); shahin, “struggling for communitas”; luke treadwell, “the formation of religious and caliphal identity in the umayyad period: the evidence of the coinage,” in a companion to islamic art and architecture, ed. finbarr barry flood and gülru necipoğlu, 1:89–108 (hoboken, nj: john wiley, 2017); andrew marsham, “‘god’s caliph’ revisited: umayyad political thought in its late antique context,” in george and marsham, power, patronage, and memory, 3–37; sean w. anthony, “prophetic dominion, umayyad kingship: varieties of mulk in the early islamic period,” in marsham, umayyad world, 39–64. some discussions of early abbasid titles and political thought are referenced in footnotes throughout this article (esp. but not exclusively in n. 5); in addition, particularly useful among recent studies are the relevant sections of andrew marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy: accession and succession in the first muslim empire (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009), 183–249; and linda t. darling, “‘the viceregent of god, from him we expect rain’: the incorporation of the pre-islamic state in early islamic political culture,” journal of the american oriental society 134, no. 3 (2014): 407–29. 126 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the reigns of muḥammad al-mahdī, mūsā al-hādī (r. 169–70/785–86), hārūn al-rashīd, and ʿabd allāh al-maʾmūn, often in conjunction with another title or laqab, it is hardly known on public media other than coins.299 this fact makes the five apparent uses of the title around one building by the late second/eighth century quite remarkable. it is also important to point out that in the two cases in which the word forms part of the caliph’s titles, it is explicit that he is god’s caliph; this is entirely to be expected given the conclusions of earlier studies on this question.300 one text, in particular, is worth looking at in a bit more detail: the inscription from bāb ziyād toward the southern end of the western wall commemorating abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr’s work, dated to 151/768–69 (§26).301 in this text, the abbasid caliph makes the explicit point that “the commander of the faithful, may god ennoble him, is the most worthy of men to oversee that because of his close kinship to the messenger of god (ṣ) and because of his caliphate with which he/he distinguished him.” it is the juxtaposition of al-manṣūr’s caliphate (khilāfa) with his “close kinship to the messenger of god” that is particularly notable here. it has long been pointed out that the rebellion of the hasanid ʿalids muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh “al-nafs al-zakiyya” and his brother ibrāhīm in 145/762, while not necessarily a serious military threat to early abbasid rule, presented the new ruling family with a major challenge to the claims underpinning their authority from members of a family that felt it had a better claim to rule on the basis of the closeness of its relationship to the prophet.302 this inscription from medina suggests that in the aftermath of the revolt, al-manṣūr saw the public patronage of work on the prophet’s mosque as a way of countering the claims of rivals within the wider family of the prophet.303 quite how successful such claims were in heading off opposition and winning over muslims who were not members of the family of the prophet is not obvious. among the interesting surviving letters said to have passed between the syrian legal scholar ʿabd al-raḥmān al-awzāʿī (d. 157/773–74) and abbasid caliphs or their representatives or family members there is a set of three letters that can be dated to 138–39/755–57 and are addressed to al-manṣūr, urging him to ransom muslims captured by the romans/byzantines in qālīqalā (modern erzurum). in one of these, al-awzāʿī urges the caliph to see following the prophet’s sunna as more important for appropriate rulership than the closeness of the ruler’s relationship to the prophet.304 299. the title was perhaps also used on coins by ʿalid rebels of this period; see george c. miles, “al-mahdī al-ḥaqq, amīr al-muʾminīn,” revue numismatique, 6th ser., 7 (1965): 329–41; michael bonner, “al-khalīfa al-marḍī: the accession of hārūn al-rashīd,” journal of the american oriental society 108, no. 1 (1988): 79–91. 300. see esp. crone and hinds, god’s caliph. 301. much of this paragraph repeats an argument made originally in munt, holy city of medina, 167–68. 302. see especially elad, rebellion of muḥammad al-nafs al-zakiyya; and tor, “parting of ways.” 303. the undated but probably early abbasid inscription from the masjid al-bayʿa in mecca also attempts to emphasize the significance of the abbasids’ eponymous ancestor, al-ʿabbās b. ʿabd al-muṭṭalib, in the muslim community’s history by celebrating his role in the oath of allegiance (bayʿa) to the prophet that that mosque was built to commemorate; see al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 122–25. 304. for the letter, see ibn abī ḥātim, al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl, 1:195–97 (the relevant section is at 195–96); and for discussion, see rana mikati, “missives from the frontier (130–152/747–769): al-awzāʿī and the abbasids,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 127 the final contribution the inscriptions from medina make to our understanding of the nature of early abbasid rule concerns the public use of titles by reigning caliphs. there are probably at least six extant inscriptions commemorating caliphally sponsored building work from the early abbasid period that both mention a reigning caliph and provide a date that can help us to identify him specifically. there are two others that are not dated but that can, thanks to other information provided by the inscriptions, be dated fairly securely to the early abbasid period, and one more that can perhaps be linked to a nearby dated text. table 1 provides information about how these nine texts refer to the reigning caliph.305 table 1 location date (ah) titles (arabic) titles (english) mafraq306 135 al-mahdī [. . .]307 “the mahdī” baysān/scythopolis308 135 al-mahdī ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn “the mahdī, the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” sanaa309 136 al-mahdī ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn310 “the mahdī, the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” journal of abbasid studies 7, no. 1 (2020): 1–32, esp. 13–18. 305. i am leaving aside references to reigning caliphs on coins and other media and types of inscriptions, although these can provide interesting parallels; see, for example, bates, “khurāsānī revolutionaries.” there is, however, one interesting item that could be considered here as well. an arabic inscription on an ivory casket held in the treasury of the basilica of st gereon in cologne notes that it was produced in (or perhaps imported to) aden (in today’s yemen) and calls on god’s blessing for “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” (ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn). given that the inscription also mentions the governor of yemen, ʿabd allāh b. al-rabīʿ, the caliph in question would be either abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ or abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr. for this text, see j. gildemeister, “zwei arabische inschriften auf elfenbeinbüchsen,” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 25, no. 1–2 (1871): 248–50; rcea, 1:32 (no. 41). it is briefly discussed in elad, “struggle,” 39–40, n. 5; and in noelia silva santa-cruz, “the siculo-arabic ivories and their spreading to al-andalus,” journal of transcultural medieval studies 4, no. 1–2 (2017): 147–90, at 153 (with several further references). for the suggestion that this casket was imported to yemen rather than produced there (as the inscription suggests), see ralph pinder-wilson, “ivory working in the umayyad and abbasid periods,” journal of the david collection 2, no. 1–2 (2005): 13–23, at 15. it has been suggested that the casket could be dated slightly later on the basis of the governor’s name, to sometime in the reign of muḥammad al-mahdī, but the reasoning behind this suggestion is flawed; see avinoam shalem, the oliphant: islamic objects in historical context (leiden: brill, 2004), 26. 306. al-jbour, “discovery.” 307. the text breaks off at this point. 308. elad, “caliph abūʾl-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ,” 9; ciap, 2:215. 309. mittwoch, “eine arabische bauinschrift”; al-dūrī, “al-fikra al-mahdiyya,” 124; serjeant and lewcock, “architectural history,” 348; elad, “caliph abūʾl-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ,” 16. since abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ died midway through the last month (dhū al-ḥijja) in the year 136, he is almost certainly the caliph mentioned in 128 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) mecca310 (masjid al-bayʿa)311 144 ʿabd allāh (ʿabd allāh)312 amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, (ʿabd allāh), the commander of the faithful” mecca (masjid al-bayʿa)313 no date (perhaps connected to the above) ʿabd allāh (ʿabd allāh)314 amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, (ʿabd allāh), the commander of the faithful” ascalon315 155 al-mahdī amīr al-muʾminīn316 “the mahdī, the commander of the faithful” mecca (al-masjid al-ḥarām)317 167 ʿabd allāh muḥammad al-mahdī amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, muḥammad, the mahdī, the commander of the faithful” mecca (al-masjid al-ḥarām)318 undated (but presumably connected to the above) ʿabd allāh al-mahdī muḥammad amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, the mahdī, muḥammad, the commander of the faithful” darb zubayda milestone (held today in jedda)319 undated (but perhaps from al-mahdī’s caliphate) al-mahdī ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn “the mahdī, the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” this text; see al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:87. cf., however, serjeant and lewcock, “architectural history,” 348 (who assume that the caliph in question was al-manṣūr). 310. al-ḥajrī, masājid ṣanʿāʾ, 26, mistakenly reads amīr al-muʾminīn ʿabd allāh al-mahdī, “the commander of the faithful, the servant of god [or ʿabd allāh], the mahdī.” 311. al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 122. 312. al-rāshid’s edition of the text omits one ʿabd allāh, but it is clearly there in the photograph he provides. 313. al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 122–25. 314. al-rāshid’s edition of the text omits one ʿabd allāh, but it is clearly there in the photograph he provides. 315. rcea, 1:32–33 (no. 42); ciap, 1:144. 316. it has been suggested that this should read al-mahdī [bn] amīr al-muʾminīn, “al-mahdī, [son of] the commander of the faithful”; see elad, “struggle,” 58, n. 91; moshe gil, a history of palestine, 634–1099, trans. ethel broido (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1992), 193. that would certainly overlap with usage on coinage, for which see jere l. bacharach, “laqab for a future caliph: the case of the abbasid al-mahdī,” journal of the american oriental society 113, no. 2 (1993): 271–74; bates, “khurāsānī revolutionaries.” it is not, however, what this inscription actually says, so i am inclined to follow sharon (ciap, 1:146–47) and read it without the added “bn.” 317. al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 111–13. 318. to be included in mehdy shaddel’s forthcoming publication on the extant early abbasid inscriptions from mecca. 319. see the appendix. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 129 the early abbasid inscriptions from the prophet’s mosque reported in the kitāb al-manāsik provide another fourteen texts that contain formal titles for reigning caliphs. listed in table 2, these extend the list substantially:320 table 2 §§ caliph titles (arabic) titles (english) §§1, 4, 5 abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” §5 abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ (inna) ʿabdaka wa-khalīfataka ʿabd allāh (bn)321 amīr al-muʾminīn “your servant and your caliph, ʿabd allāh, (son of) the commander of the faithful” §§26, 27b abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” §2 muḥammad al-mahdī ʿabd allāh al-mahdī amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, the mahdī, the commander of the faithful” §§3, 17b, 20b muḥammad al-mahdī ʿabd allāh al-mahdī muḥammad amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, the mahdī, muḥammad, the commander of the faithful” §13d muḥammad al-mahdī al-mahdī muḥammad amīr al-muʾminīn “the mahdī, muḥammad, the commander of the faithful” §19b muḥammad al-mahdī (li-)ʿabd allāh wa-khalīfatihi al-mahdī muḥammad amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god and his caliph, the mahdī, muḥammad, the commander of the faithful” §27a muḥammad al-mahdī322 ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” §6 hārūn al-rashīd ʿabd allāh hārūn amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, hārūn, the commander of the faithful” §25c not clearly identifiable ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the commander of the faithful” 320. neither of these lists is comprehensive. there are certainly more extant texts out there, either awaiting discovery or in publications i have not seen; and there are plenty more relevant inscriptions reported in other literary sources for other towns and regions of the caliphate. these two lists, however, suffice for the analysis here. 321. see above, n. 131, for the oddity of the “bn,” “son of,” here. 322. given the placement of this inscription in the epigraphic program, it is possible that the kitāb al-manāsik has incorrectly recorded the date of the text and that it could be a text dating to al-manṣūr’s caliphate, just as §§26 and 27b are. 130 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) there are three initial observations worth making here. the first is a reiteration of the fact that the word caliph, khalīfa, was apparently used within titles in the prophet’s mosque inscriptions in medina, although use of that title is not attested on extant building inscriptions that commemorate caliphal patronage from the early abbasid period. second, although in every extant text dating to the caliphate of abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ (from mafraq, baysān/scythopolis and sanaa) he is referred to with the title al-mahdī, as seemingly is abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr on one occasion (in ascalon), the two caliphs are not given this title in the medinan texts. only the third caliph, the one most commonly identified as “al-mahdī,” is called al-mahdī here, as he also is in a great many other extant objects and documents.323 the medina texts (specifically §27a) do, however, suggest, especially in combination with an extant inscription (that held currently in jedda), that the caliph muḥammad al-mahdī could be designated, just as his father and uncle had been, as ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh, “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh,” despite the latter not being his given name. this, in turn, allows us to consider the possibility that this particular repeated phrase/theophoric name could have been a more broadly used early abbasid title for a reigning caliph, not only for those who carried the given name ʿabd allāh (as the brothers abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ and abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr both apparently did). although there are ways in which these titles all seem to fit a somewhat standard pattern, particularly in the regular use of at least one ʿabd allāh, “servant of god,” and amīr al-muʾminīn, they also display significant variation at times. there appears to have been a set of standard vocabulary for protocols for early abbasid caliphs in official texts, but it seems that elements of that vocabulary could be selected and arranged in different ways. this suggests that there was some experimentation in the early abbasid period with how caliphs were given titles, perhaps reflecting some recognition of the necessity to develop the ways in which the abbasids argued for the legitimacy of their authority. this apparent fluidity contrasted with the situation in the late umayyad period, when the formula ʿabd allāh [ism] amīr al-muʾminīn, “the servant of god, [name], the commander of the faithful,” seems to have been the official standard on building inscriptions.324 it might also be contrasted with inscriptions commemorating building work by abbasid caliphs in the third/ninth century, which typically offer only minor variations on the basic formula 323. for discussion of abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ being given the title “al-mahdī,” see especially al-dūrī, “al-fikra al-mahdiyya,” 128; elad, “struggle”; al-jbour, “discovery,” 173; and borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 83–84, 369–71. for the use of the title “al-mahdī” on coins and in documents referring to muḥammad, the son of abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr, including during his time as heir apparent (walī al-ʿahd), see the references above in n. 316; and geoffrey khan, arabic documents from early islamic khurasan (london: nour foundation, 2007), 96 (no. 3), 132 (no. 21), and discussion at 35–37. for further discussion of al-mahdī being designated heir apparent and given this title, see, for example, al-dūrī, “al-fikra al-mahdiyya,” 129–32; muhammad qasim zaman, “routinization of revolutionary charisma: notes on the ʿabbāsid caliphs al-manṣūr and al-mahdī,” islamic studies 29, no. 3 (1990): 251–75; marsham, rituals of islamic monarchy, 193–202; elad, “struggle”; and borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 374–76. 324. see the references with directions to finding extant texts above, n. 8. foundation inscriptions as reported in literary texts for marwanid caliphs also offer this fairly standard formula; see, for example, flood, great mosque, 252. and see also the discussion above (references in n. 234) of the inscription from the mosque in al-fusṭāṭ known only though vattier’s seventeenth-century french translation. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 131 ʿabd allāh [ism] al-imām [laqab] amīr al-muʾminīn, “the servant of god, [name], the imam, [personal title], the commander of the faithful”; see table 3 for examples. table 3 location date (ah) titles (arabic) titles (english) jerusalem (dome of the rock)325 216326 ʿabd allāh ʿabd allāh al-imām al-maʾmūn amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, ʿabd allāh, the imam, al-maʾmūn, the commander of the faithful” near mecca (at a resting stop for pilgrims, found near ʿarafa)327 245 ʿabd allāh jaʿfar al-imām al-mutawakkil ʿalā allāh amīr al-muʾminīn “the servant of god, jaʿfar, the imam, al-mutawakkil ʿalā allāh, the commander of the faithful” medina (prophet’s mosque)328 282 abū al-ʿabbās al-imām al-muʿtaḍid bi-llāh amīr al-muʾminīn “abū al-ʿabbās, the imam, al-muʿtaḍid bi-llāh, the commander of the faithful” this form of abbasid caliphal titles continued to be used in inscriptions in the later third and fourth/tenth centuries.329 conclusions the texts that could be seen around the prophet’s mosque by the end of the caliphate of muḥammad al-mahdī, preserved most fully in the late third/ninthor early fourth/tenthcentury kitāb al-manāsik, reveal a significant corpus of architectural inscriptions from the early abbasid period. perhaps first and foremost, therefore, the study of this corpus can help narrow down an appropriate methodology for the use of extant literary descriptions of inscriptions, and perhaps of monuments and objects more broadly, that themselves have long since disappeared. premodern arabic texts about mecca and medina actually offer abundant descriptions of buildings in those two towns’ early islamic history, a material 325. on the mosaic inscription: kessler, “ʿabd al-malik’s inscription,” 9. on the copper plates: milwright, dome of the rock, 53, 76. 326. since the texts that al-maʾmūn had added to the copper plaques by the entrances were dated to 216/831, the replacement of ʿabd al-malik’s name in the mosaic inscription was presumably undertaken at this time as well. 327. al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 125–26. 328. reported in ibn rusta, al-aʿlāq al-nafīsa, 74; rcea, 2:265 (no. 786). the lack of an ʿabd allāh at the start is perhaps ibn rusta’s (or a later copyists’) accidental omission 329. see, for example, the texts from the caliphates of abū muḥammad al-muktafī (r. 289–95/902–8) and jaʿfar al-muqtadir (r. 295–320/908–32) published in george c. miles, “ʿali b. ʿīsâ’s pilgrim road: an inscription of the year 304 h. (916–917 a.d.),” bulletin de l’institut d’égypte 36 (1955): 477–87; solange ory and dominique sourdel, “une inscription ʿabbaside en syrie du nord,” bulletin d’études orientales 18 (1963–64): 221–40; and amikam elad, “two identical inscriptions from jund filasṭīn from the reign of the ʿ abbāsid caliph, al-muqtadir,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 35, no. 4 (1992): 301–60. 132 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) culture of which, as is well known, very little has survived.330 this article has focused on one small example of such available literary material, but it is an example with potentially wide-ranging implications. since so few inscriptions in monuments commissioned by early abbasid caliphs have survived, the testimony of literary sources to the existence of several dozen others is important for modern research into second/eighth-century arabic epigraphic practices and, especially, the use of inscriptions by caliphs to promote their authority and legitimacy. we certainly have to be careful when studying inscriptions of the early islamic centuries that survive only in quotations of their texts in extant literary sources. there is often much that we would like to know about such inscriptions that no sources were interested in telling us. we can rarely use the extant descriptions to gain much of an understanding of the visual impressions these inscriptions would have made on their viewers. similarly, we cannot often learn much about how these texts’ contents may have engaged with other elements in their buildings’ decorative schemes. both these problems apply to the inscriptions analyzed here. for the prophet’s mosque in medina, however, we do have relatively early testimonies, with a seemingly good history of written transmission, regarding the contents and locations of a large number of inscriptions. through a study of this information, we can learn quite a bit about the messages that the early abbasid caliphs wished to convey to visitors to this imperial monument. the inscriptions in the prophet’s mosque in medina after al-mahdī’s renovation work have much to add to our perspective on early abbasid claims to legitimacy, their reuse and/or “epigraphic mutilation” of umayyad-era texts, and the ways in which particular verses and sūras from the qurʾan were used in the decoration of mosques in the second/ eighth century. their study is important in part simply because the early abbasid mosque in medina is much more poorly understood than its umayyad predecessor is. in large part, of course, this is thanks to the important work of sauvaget and his successors in revealing the history of the latter. as this article has demonstrated, however, there is considerably more material available on the early abbasid mosque and al-mahdī’s work there than is often appreciated. the study of the prophet’s mosque in the second half of the second/eighth century is important because medina was a particularly important place for early abbasid caliphs to articulate the legitimacy of their rule. by this time it held an emerging significance among many muslims as a ḥaram and as a holy city;331 and it had been the site of the major ʿalid revolt against early abbasid rule during the caliphate of abū jaʿfar al-manṣūr. that the caliph responsible for most of the inscriptions supplied by the kitāb al-manāsik was al-mahdī adds a further significance, since his reign is often considered to have been a period in which the precise reasons the abbasids and their followers were giving to underpin their legitimacy were being altered.332 muhammad qasim zaman has suggested briefly that the mosques in mecca and medina played an important 330. see, for example, the discussions of two local histories of medina in munt, “writing the history”; and idem, “mamluk historiography.” 331. this, at least, is the argument of munt, holy city of medina. 332. see, for example, zaman, religion and politics, 45–48; crone, medieval islamic political thought, 92–93. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 133 role in al-mahdī’s efforts to emphasize his and his family’s connections to the prophet and to contribute to religious discourse.333 the inscriptions discussed here provide much more evidence for what, exactly, these efforts entailed and reveal the importance of the prophet’s mosque in medina specifically as a site of early abbasid imperial commemorative efforts and as a place of experimentation as they tried to find the most effective way of expressing the legitimacy of their authority in the face of various opponents, umayyads and ʿalids among many others. 333. zaman, religion and politics, 205–6. 134 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) appendix: an early abbasid milestone from (near) the darb zubayda this milestone discovered near the darb zubayda is currently held in jedda in the king abdulaziz center, no. 33. its inscription is particularly important for understanding the usage of caliphal titles in the early abbasid period. since the only current edition of the text known to me is in a publication that is not widely accessible, it seems helpful to provide an edition and brief discussion here.334 the inscription has been referred to in a handful of other publications, often simply as a milestone dating to the caliphate of al-mahdī.335 it consists of eight lines in a clearly legible kufic script:336 ١ – هذا ما امر به ا ٢ – لمهدي عبد هللا ٣ – عبد هللا امير ا ٤ – لمومنين على يدي ٥ – يقطين بن موسى ٦ – هذا على اثني ٧ – عشر ميال من بريد ٨ – اسود العشاريـ this was ordered by al-mahdī ʿabd allāh, the servant of god, the commander of the faithful, to be carried out by yaqṭīn b. mūsā. this is twelve miles from the post station (barīd) at aswad al-ʿushāriyy[āt].337 despite the lack of a date and the fact that the caliph seems to be given titles that otherwise accord with the designation of the first abbasid caliph, abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ, in extant inscriptions, saʿd al-rāshid assumed without further discussion that the caliph mentioned in this text is muḥammad al-mahdī.338 it does actually seem at least possible that this is correct, although it is certainly a suggestion that requires further justification. 334. al-rāshid, “arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya,” edition of this inscription at 124. 335. see, for example, al-rashid, “new ʿ abbāsid milestone,” 139; ahmad bin ʿ umar al-zaylaʿi, “les inscriptions arabo-islamiques sur pierre,” in routes d’arabie: archéologie et histoire du royaume d’arabie saoudite, ed. ali ibrahim al-ghabban et al., 486–87 (paris: musée du louvre and somogy, 2010), 487. 336. this is my reading based on the best photograph known to me, that provided in al-zaylaʿi, “inscriptions arabo-islamiques,” 487. my reading agrees entirely with saʿd al-rāshid’s (“arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya,” 124), whose article also provides a photograph and facsimile of the text (ibid., 137, 139). 337. aswad al-ʿushāriyyāt is approximately 200 km southwest of fayd, on the route between fayd and medina. that it was the location of a post station (barīd) is also confirmed in kitāb al-manāsik, 518–19. for further discussion of this location, see al-rāshid, “arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya,” 130–31 (and see also its location on the map at 135). the term barīd had several usages in the abbasid period, but for this particular meaning, see manfred ullmann, zur geschichte des wortes barīd “post” (munich: verlag der bayerischen akademie der wissenschaften, 1997), 43. for discussion of the communications network in the marwanid and early abbasid empires, see adam silverstein, postal systems in the pre-modern islamic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007), 59–84. 338. al-rāshid, “arbaʿat aḥjār mīliyya,” 123, 130. this assertion of al-rāshid’s was accepted without comment by al-zaylaʿi (see above, n. 335). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid inscriptions in the prophet's mosque • 135 the main reason for thinking that the caliph in question might be muḥammad al-mahdī is the reference to yaqṭīn b. mūsā (d. 186/802) as the overseer of the work. this figure served several abbasid caliphs and had apparently been around already in kufa during the abbasid movement’s revolutionary phase;339 he was, however, particularly well known for his work on behalf of muḥammad al-mahdī, by this stage of his career primarily in the ḥijāz. he was, for example, put in charge of al-mahdī’s work on the expansion of the masjid al-ḥarām;340 he was held responsible for problems with the water supply for pilgrims;341 and, most significantly, al-mahdī charged him in 161/777–78 with making significant improvements to various aspects of the infrastructure—including milestones—of the pilgrim route to mecca, work that he continued until 171/787–88.342 it is possible that al-mahdī put him in charge of such work because he had previous experience overseeing similar projects for an earlier caliph. we are told, for example, that the first abbasid caliph, abū al-ʿabbās, ordered the placement of milestones (amyāl), together with beacons (manār), along the route from kufa to mecca in 134/751–52.343 however, another passage indicates that the work ordered by abū al-ʿabbās on the route to mecca—although here the only structures mentioned specifically are quṣūr and not milestones—covered only the northeast section of the route from al-qādisiyya to zubāla, so it would not have reached anywhere close to the location of this extant milestone.344 it is, of course, possible that the caliph mentioned in this text is nonetheless abū al-ʿabbās al-saffāḥ, but given the fairly sparse state of our extant evidence for early abbasid caliphs’ titles on building inscriptions, together with the potential evidence from the prophet’s mosque inscriptions that muḥammad al-mahdī could be referred to with similar titles (§27a), we should perhaps keep all possibilities open for now. this is an area where we might reasonably hope that future discoveries can provide greater clarity. 339. see, for example, akhbār al-dawla al-ʿabbāsiyya wa-fīhi akhbār al-ʿabbās wa-waladihi, ed. ʿabd al-ʿazīz al-dūrī and ʿabd al-jabbār al-muṭṭalibī, 2nd ed. (beirut: dār al-ṭalīʿa, 1997), 231; al-dīnawarī, kitāb al-akhbār al-ṭiwāl, ed. ʿabd al-munʿim ʿāmir and jamāl al-dīn al-shayyāl (cairo: wizārat al-thaqāfa wa-l-irshād al-qawmī, 1960), 358, 379; al-yaʿqūbī, al-taʾrīkh, ed. m. th. houtsma (leiden: brill, 1883), 2:439–40; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:103, 390, 567; al-fasawī, al-maʿrifa wa-l-taʾrīkh, 1:119; al-rāzī, akhbār fakhkh wa-khabar yaḥyā b. ʿabd allāh wa-akhīhi idrīs b. ʿabd allāh, ed. maher jarrar (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1995), 147, 185. 340. al-fasawī, al-maʿrifa wa-l-taʾrīkh, 1:156; al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh, 2:476–77; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:520; see also al-azraqī, akhbār makka, 2:62, 203; and al-fākihī, akhbār makka fī qadīm al-dahr wa-ḥadīthihi, ed. ʿ abd al-malik b. ʿabd allāh b. duhaysh, 2nd ed. (beirut: dār khiḍr and mecca: maktabat wa-maṭbaʿat al-nahḍa wa-l-ḥadītha, 1414/1994), 2:169. he is also mentioned in one of the extant inscriptions commemorating al-mahdī’s work in the masjid al-ḥarām, discussed above; see al-rāshid et al., āthār minṭaqat makka al-mukarrama, 111–13. 341. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 3:502. 342. ibid., 3:486. 343. ibid., 3:81. 344. ibid., 3:486. 136 • harry munt al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) figure 1 this figure provides a rough outline (not accurately to scale) of the prophet’s mosque after al-mahdī’s renovation work to offer an indication of the approximate location of the courtyard inscriptions (§§1–4) and the entrances to the mosque discussed in the kitāb al-manāsik (twenty in total, including four unnamed entrances along the northern wall). apart from the courtyard inscriptions, almost all of the texts mentioned by the kitāb al-manāsik can be located loosely in relation to one of these entrances. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) the umayyad and early abbasid 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al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories: tribal, ideological, and legal incentives behind the transmission of the prophet’s biography* ehsan roohi independent scholar abstract due to their heavy reliance on late, contradictory, and tendentious literary sources, scholars of formative islam have always been in danger of taking as authentic evidence what is mere literary topos. adopting a form-critical methodology that includes both classic and “new” approaches to the accounts of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna expeditions, this article strives to reveal the literary devices deployed in the sources and to demonstrate the motivations behind their utilization. it will argue, using the classic form-critical method, that reports about the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna raids reflect far more about the circumstances of their composition and redaction than about first/seventh-century arabia. motivated by second/eighth-century tribal feuds, many components of these narratives owe their existence to later modifications and adornments that were retrojected to the time of the prophet muḥammad. we shall, furthermore, see that by the third/ninth century, when tribal motivations ceased to be amongst the prime socio-political exigencies of the time, new incentives emerged for the transmission of these narratives, which can be uncovered through implementation of “new” form criticism. introduction at a date not far removed from the meccans’ resounding victory at the battle of uḥud, when morale amongst the infant islamic community is poor, and privation and the menace of foreign aggression is about to bring the denizens of medina to their knees,1 * this article benefited immensely from the insightful comments of the anonymous uw reviewers, to whom i owe deep gratitude. 1. on the tumultuous period following the battle of uḥud see al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, ed. marsden jones (beirut: aʿlamī, 1989), 1:342; walid arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme in the story of khubaib b.ʿadiyy and the related poems,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 21, no. 1 (1958): 15–30, at © 2022 ehsan roohi. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. 268 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) two simultaneous dramas, known as the massacres of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna, strike a crippling blow to the already vexed adherents of the emerging creed in the arabian peninsula. dispatched by the prophet to promulgate the cause of islam in najd, two contingents of “pious” companions fall victim to the adversaries’ perfidy, are seized by them, and then slaughtered or brought into captivity. this is a succinct narration of the incidents as reported in the vast corpora of islamic historiographical and exegetical sources, where the memory of the expeditions’ participants, through deployment of hagiographical embellishments, has been held in profound reverence.2 as laudable and extraordinary as the narrated destiny of these supposed “holy bands” may appear, the actual course of events does not seem to have diverged considerably from the mundane realities of the time. appraising the relevance of muslim narrative sources for the historical reconstruction of the rise of islam has long been a challenge to modern scholars.3 whereas the islamic faith emerged, according to some, “in the full light of history,”4 for others first/seventhcentury arabia is largely, if not entirely, terra incognita.5 radical theories aside, a growing understanding seems to have now been shaped about the problematic nature of our sources, which, so it is often opined, may be of some use as direct historical testimonies, but with which one is bound to deal with due caution.6 it would seem, then, that the sīra literature is yet regarded as “an indispensable source”7 for the study of “the historical muḥammad” and that a significant number of scholars still hold that they can “work” with the traditional material,8 formidable though it might be: to this end, differing critical methodologies have 24; meir jacob kister, “the expedition of biʾr maʿūna,” in arabic and islamic studies in honor of hamilton a. p. gibb, ed. george makdisi, 337–57 (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1965), 355. 2. on the wide range of the sources in which these stories feature, see below. 3. see, for instance, harald motzki, “the question of the authenticity of muslim traditions reconsidered: a review article,” in method and theory in the study of islamic origins, ed. h. berg, 211–57 (leiden: brill, 2003); herbert berg, “competing paradigms in the study of islamic origins: qurʾān 15:89–91 and the value of isnāds,” in method and theory in the study of islamic origins, ed. h. berg, 259–90 (leiden: brill, 2003); gregor schoeler, the genesis of literature in islam: from the aural to the read, in collaboration with and translated by shawkat m. toorawa (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009), 9–12; fred m. donner, muhammad and the believers: at the origins of islam (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2012), 50–56; sean w. anthony, muhammad and the empires of faith: the making of the prophet of islam (oakland, ca: university of california press, 2020), 1–21. 4. ernest renan, “muhammad and the origins of islam,” in the quest for the historical muhammad, ed. ibn warraq, 127–66 (amherst, ny: prometheus books, 2000), 128. 5. patricia crone and michael cook, hagarism: the making of the islamic world (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1977), 3; john wansbrough, the sectarian milieu: content and composition of islamic salvation history (oxford: oxford university press, 1978), x. 6. j. n. mattock, “history and fiction,” occasional papers of the school of abbasid studies 1, no. 1 (1986): 80–97, at 97; see also fred m. donner, “muhammad und die frühe islamische gemeinschaft aus historischer sicht,” asiatische studien 68, no. 2 (2014), 439–51; idem, “early muslims and peoples of the book,” in routledge handbook on early islam, ed. h. berg, 177–93 (new york: routledge, 2017), 189. 7. anthony, muhammad, 7. 8. according to crone’s oft-quoted sentence, “one can take the picture presented [in ibn isḥāq’s sīrat rasūl allāh] or one can leave it, but one cannot work with it” (patricia crone, slaves on horses: the evolution of the islamic polity [cambridge: cambridge university press, 1980], 4). her view was nonetheless called into al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 269 been expounded. while the practitioners of these methods have, albeit not to the same degree, an awareness of the source-critical challenges, one fundamental flaw has been likely to adversely affect the results of all such critical, let alone naïve, approaches to the traditional biography of the prophet.9 this is the fact that scholars are often in danger of taking as authentic evidence what is a mere literary topos, a pitfall to which one is particularly prone when having to redeem the historical realities from the faḍāʾil material. the sīra nabawiyya genre seldom narrates the incidents it relates outside the framework of the individual in question’s “virtues” (manāqib/faḍāʾil) and/or “vices” (mathālib), and when it does, the narration is notoriously tainted with discrepancies and inaccuracies, chronological and otherwise. the significance of the issue of faḍāʾil may well be symptomatic of fierce rivalries of whatever kind that were taking place at various stages in the collection and compilation of the prophet’s biography.10 a tradition circulated by a political, tribal, or confessional faction to burnish its own image would have engendered rival traditions disseminated by the opposing party,11 with the natural repercussion being the proliferation of literary commonplaces and parallel faḍāʾil motifs. one may venture to say that the early tradents’ endeavor to preserve “what really happened” was demonstrably feeble, if indeed it was, for some of them, ever an aim. the anecdotes contained in the sīra should then be question by later scholarship; see, for example, the “promising approaches to uncovering historical facts about muḥammad” (in spite of the serious “limits” thereof) in andreas görke, “prospects and limits in the study of the historical muhammad,” in the transmission and dynamics of the textual sources of islam: essays in honour of harald motzki, ed. n. boekhoff-van der voort, k. versteegh, and j. wagemakers, 137–51 (leiden: brill, 2011). despite its serious problems, the accounts of the sīra have been utilized, at least as supporting evidence, even by some “skeptical” scholars. see, for example, stephen j. shoemaker, “muḥammad,” in routledge handbook on early islam, ed. h. berg, 49–64 (new york: routledge, 2017), 59, who holds that the juxtaposition of the qurʾān, non-muslim sources, and the biographical traditions can be a promising line of approach in the quest for “the historical muḥammad.” 9. for an overview of these methodologies, see fred m. donner, narratives of islamic origins: the beginnings of islamic historical writing (princeton: darwin press, 1998), 5–31; on the academic debate between the representatives of “sanguine” and “skeptical” scholarship, see stephen j. shoemaker, “in search of ʿurwa’s sīra: some methodological issues in the quest for ‘authenticity’ in the life of muḥammad,” der islam 85, no. 2 (2011): 257–344; andreas görke, harald motzki, and gregor schoeler, “first-century sources for the life of muḥammad? a debate,” der islam 89, no. 2 (2012): 2–59. it is not within the purview of the present study, it should be stressed, to treat, let alone to settle, any aspect of these vexing controversies. instead, this article aims to re-address some form-critical methodologies and to urge caution about the abundance of literary devices in our narrative sources, points that seem to have been overlooked by different modern biographers of the prophet, regardless of the degree of their skepticism or sanguinity about the sīra. 10. for the traces in the sīra of political, sectarian, and legal disputes, see isaac hasson, “contributions à l’étude des aws et des ḫazraǧ,” arabica 36, no. 1 (1989): 1–35, at 25; robert hoyland, “writing the biography of the prophet muhammad: problems and solutions,” history compass 5 (2007): 1–22, at 3–4; shoemaker, “in search of ʿurwa’s sīra,” 337–8. 11. michael lecker, “the death of the prophet muḥammad’s father: did wāqidī invent some of the evidence?,” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 145, no. 1 (1995): 9–27, at 11; gautier h. a. juynboll, “shu‘ba b. al-ḥajjāj (d. 160/776) and his position among the traditionists of baṣra,” le muséon 111, no. 1–2 (1998): 187–226, at 193. 270 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) treated with due circumspection, with an acute consciousness of the literary devices they might contain and the motivations behind their utilization.12 adopting a form-critical approach to our narrative sources, the present article strives to demonstrate (inter alia) what wide-reaching ramifications the tribal and sectarian rivalries might have had on the historiography of formative islam. it is fitting, then, to first provide brief introductory notes on form criticism, including the classic and “new” approaches. concerned with a text’s formal features, classic form criticism (ger. formkritik)13 is a modern exegetical method that rests on the working premise that behind each narrative unit of a given text lies an oral “form” (form) and a “social setting” (sitz im leben). in addition to the synchronic assessment of a text, a form critic’s task is to peruse “the history of form” (formgeschichte), viz., to diachronically analyze the different redactional stages undergone by the narrative.14 form criticism approaches, thus, a historical report from the vantage point of parsing its building blocks. though not always a simple job, the “lines of cleavage” between the narrative’s (once independent) subunits are often recognizable in the islamic traditional material, thanks to the tradents’ use of isnāds15 and schemata (in the form of transitional formulae).16 mention should be made, too, of “new” form criticism that, unlike its traditional counterpart, is not concerned with sitz im leben,17 but with sitz in der literatur (“setting in literature”), concentrating on the narrative as it stands before us.18 12. on the significance of topoi and their underlying motivations, see donner, narratives of islamic origins, 267–8; albrecht noth, “iṣfahān-nihāwand: a source-critical study of early islamic historiography,” in the expansion of the early islamic state, ed. fred m. donner, 241–62 (new york: routledge, 2008), 253. 13. while the german word formgeschichte has been translated by some as “form criticism,” certain recent studies, particularly those followed by richter (who deserves the credit “for being the first scholar to offer terminological and methodological clarity”), rendered formgeschichte as “form history.” according to richter, “formgeschichte (‘form history’) proceeds mainly diachronically [but] form criticism is strictly synchronic”; see johannes p. floss, “form, source, and redaction criticism,” in the oxford handbook of biblical studies, ed. j. w. rogerson and judith m. lieu, 591–614 (oxford: oxford university press, 2006), 596. on rendering “form criticism” as formkritik, see marvin a. sweeney, “form criticism: the question of the endangered matriarchs in genesis,” in method matters: essays on the interpretation of the hebrew bible in honor of david l. petersen, ed. joel m. lemon and kent harold richards, 17–38 (atlanta: society of biblical literature, 2009), 18. on the use of the terms “formgeschichte” and “gattungsforschung,” respectively, by dibelius and gunkel as equivalents for “form criticism,” see samuel byrskog, “a century with the sitz im leben: from form-critical setting to gospel community and beyond,” zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche wissenschaft 98, no. 1–2 (2007): 1–27, at 3. 14. marvin a. sweeney, “form criticism,” in dictionary of the old testament wisdom, poetry and writings, ed. tremper longman iii and peter enns, 227–41 (downers grove, il: intervarsity press, 2008), 227; idem, “form criticism: the question of the endangered matriarchs,” 17; floss, “form, source, and redaction criticism,” 592, 596; michael graves, “form criticism or a rolling corpus: the methodology of john wansbrough through the lens of biblical studies,” journal of the international qur’anic studies association 1 (2016): 47–92, at 48. 15. wansbrough, the sectarian milieu, 4 16. albrecht noth, the early arabic historical tradition: a source-critical study, 2nd ed., in collaboration with lawrence i. conrad, trans. michael bonner (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1994), 174–7. 17. the term was coined by gunkel, see, for instance, hermann gunkel, “die grundprobleme der israelitischen literaturgeschichte,” deutsche literaturzeitung 27 (1906): 1797–1800. 18. martin j. buss, “goals and processes of the ‘new’ form criticism,” in the book of the twelve and the new form criticism, ed. mark j. boda, michael h. floyd, and colin m. toffelmire, 305–9 (atlanta, ga: society of al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 271 deconstructing the accounts of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna expeditions, one discerns distinct formal subunits within the reports that each possess their own generic character19 and setting. we shall see that these stories share a high number of similar literary motifs that serve to aggrandize or, rather, vindicate the members of these sariyyas (expeditions). furthermore, some episodes of the former story have salient parallels in the narratives of other historical events occurring during the umayyad caliphate. one must then cast one’s net wider and examine not only the accounts of the expeditions themselves, but certain isolated records scattered here and there in the immense body of the islamic tradition.20 this will no doubt render our task more daunting, but the result will probably be more reliable, for we are more likely to be able to distinguish a historically tenable narrative from a patchwork of topoi in this way. a similar line of approach has already been pursued by noth who, in a seminal article, expounded the view that traditions concerning the conquest of iṣfahān and nihāwand are made up of individual “narrative motifs which can be separated as easily as they have been joined together.” he further observed that the motifs shaping these stories appear elsewhere in the same or a differing order.21 following in the footsteps of form critics in islamicist circles, and drawing upon the rich and extensive body of literature in the sphere of biblical form criticism, the present article seeks to scrutinize the historiographical implications conveyed by formal assessment of the sources. to this end, the formal similarities between the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna narratives, and parallel motifs found in accounts of the former event and the records of umayyad-era movements, will be addressed. implementing the classic form-critical approach, it shall subsequently be demonstrated that rivalries between various tribes (be they minor clans of the aws and the khazraj, or larger tribal entities like the quraysh and the anṣār) dramatically affected the way in which our narratives were constructed. as is customary in form-critical practice, the diachronic evolution of the expeditions’ reports will then be investigated. though analysis of the “original” tradition and life-setting of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna (viz., the classic form-critical approach) is the primary concern of this study, the “new” form-critical method will also be brought to bear on the al-rajīʿ and biblical literature, 2015), 306; colin m. toffelm, “sitz im what? context and the prophetic book of obadiah,” in the book of the twelve and the new form criticism, ed. mark j. boda, michael h. floyd, and colin m. toffelmire, 221–44 (atlanta, ga: society of biblical literature, 2015), 224. for the supplementary discussion see below, the section on “the massacre narratives in their broader contexts: ‘new’ form criticism.” 19. as noted by wilson, the terms “form” (form) and “genre” (gattung) are quite frequently used interchangeably by form critics; see robert r. wilson, “new form criticism and the prophetic literature: the unfinished agenda,” in the book of the twelve and the new form criticism, ed. mark j. boda, michael h. floyd, and colin m. toffelmire, 311–22 (atlanta, ga: society of biblical literature, 2015), 313. however, some used these words in a different sense; see sweeney, “form criticism: the question of the endangered matriarchs,” 18. in the present essay, the terms have been deployed interchangeably. 20. noth, the early arabic historical tradition, 18–19. 21. noth, “iṣfahān-nihāwand,” 246–9. the same contention has been propounded in lawrence i. conrad, “the conquest of arwād: a source-critical study in the historiography of the early medieval near east,” the byzantine and early islamic near east: problems in the literary source material, ed. averil cameron and lawrence i. conrad, 317–401 (princeton, nj: darwin press, 1992), 386–98. 272 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) biʾr maʿūna accounts, and the stories’ functions within the context of the muslim literary collections (ḥadīth or otherwise) will be probed in the final section of the article. parallels between the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna expeditions below is a comparative analysis of the narrative motifs (erzählmotive) that constitute the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna accounts. it will be shown that contained in these reports are certain transferrable motifs and hagiographic topoi that, strung together, make up our extant tales.22 the accounts that are quoted below are drawn from the compilations of the foremost maghāzī authorities,23 including (but not exclusive to) ibn isḥāq (hereinafter is), mūsā b. ʿuqba (mu),24 maʿmar b. rāshid (mr), and al-wāqidī (wq),25 in which the massacre stories with similar erzählmotive, analogous wordings and roughly the same narrative plot quite often appear.26 22. an example of a useful case for form-critical practice in the domain of biblical studies is “the endangered matriarchs” story in gen 12, 20, and 26, in which three separate stories have been shaped by similar erzählmotive, narrating a tale in which a patriarch (abraham/isaac) passes his wife (sarah/rebeka) off as his sister. see klaus koch, the growth of the biblical tradition: the form-critical method, trans. s. m. cupitt (new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1969), 112–15. also see the formal similarities between the major tellings of the prophet shuʿayb’s tale in john wansbrough, quranic studies: sources and methods of scriptural interpretation, with foreword, translations, and expanded notes by andrew rippin (amherst, ny: prometheus books, 2004), 21–3. 23. the compilations of ibn isḥāq (d. 150/767) and two of his contemporaries, maʿmar b. rāshid (d. 153/770) and mūsā b. ʿuqba (d. 141/758), are the earliest biographies of the prophet. ibn isḥāq’s sīra have come down to us in several redactions, noteworthy amongst which is that of ibn hishām (d. 218/834). maʿmar’s maghāzī has survived in the recension of his student, ʿabd al-razzāq b. hammām (d. 211/827). mūsā b. ʿuqba’s work has been preserved in later quotations (see the following note). these first, abbasid-era compilers of the prophet’s biography, along with their successor, al-wāqidī, based themselves on materials, many (but not all) of which were transmitted from the late-umayyad authorities, most particularly ʿurwa b. al-zubayr (d. 94/713) and ibn shihāb al-zuhrī (124/742); see josef horovitz, the earliest biographies of the prophet and their authors, trans. and ed. lawrence conrad (princeton, nj: the darwin press, 2002). 24. throughout this study, various reports from mūsā b. ʿuqba’s lost sīra have been gleaned and cited from later works, e.g., dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, ʿuyūn al-athar, imtāʿ al-asmāʾ, al-iṣāba, and al-iktifāʾ. this is not, however, to endorse the ascription of all of the material found under mūsā b. ʿuqba’s name in later sources (despite the fact that recent studies have shown that a remarkable portion of the material attributed to him is not “fictitious”; see gregor schoeler, “mūsā b. ʿuqba’s maghāzī,” in the biography of muhammad. the issue of the sources, ed. h. motzki, 67–97 [leiden: brill, 2000]). the inclusion of the accounts allotted to mūsā b. ʿuqba in our analysis is just to ensure as comprehensive an analogy as possible between the earliest narratives of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna massacres, while acknowledging that some of these reports may not be authored by mūsā b. ʿuqba. this, nevertheless, in no way changes the main results of the present essay’s formal analysis. 25. the translations given throughout this essay from the works of ibn isḥāq and al-wāqidī are from, respectively, guillaume and faizer. very slight alterations are at times introduced to the texts for the sake of clarity. furthermore, when an analogous narrative motif occurs in various sources, guillaume’s translation of ibn hishām’s recension of ibn isḥāq’s sīra is quoted, but the works of other historiographical authorities are likewise cited and their notable variants with ibn isḥāq’s text are mentioned. 26. the same criteria for the comparison of historical accounts have also been adopted in previous studies; see ehsan roohi, “between history and ancestral lore: a literary approach to the sīra’s narratives of political assassinations,” der islam 98, no. 2 (2021): 425–72, at 428; jens scheiner, die eroberung von damaskus: quellenkritische untersuchung zur historiographie in klassisch-islamischer zeit (leiden: brill, 2009), 7–8. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 273 1. the arrival of the tribal deputies in medina both stories open with the respective tribal delegations arriving at medina and expressing their enthusiasm to embrace islam. beneath the veneer of the envoys’ apparently heartfelt sincerity lies, however, a subterfuge to lure the muslims into a place in which they are to be caught in an ambush.27 a) al-rajīʿ: after uḥud a number of ʿaḍal and al-qāra28 came to the apostle (is: qadima ʿalā rasūl allāh rahṭ min ʿaḍal wa-l-qāra, mu: inna nafaran min ʿaḍal wa-l-qāra qadimū ʿalā rasūl allāh, wq: fa-qadima sabʿat nafar min ʿaḍal wa-l-qāra). they said that some of them had already accepted islam and they asked him to send some of his companions (is, mu, wq: fa-ibʿath maʿanā nafaran min aṣḥābika) to instruct them in religion, to teach them to read the qurʾān, and to teach them the laws of islam.29 b) biʾr maʿūna: abū barāʾ ʿāmir b. mālik b. jaʿfar,30 “the player with spears,” came to the apostle in medina (is, mu31, wq: qadima abū barāʾ ʿ āmir b. mālik b. jaʿfar mulāʿib al-asinna ʿalā rasūl allāh, mr: jāʾa mulāʿib al-asinna ilā al-nabī bi-hadiyya). the apostle explained islam to him and invited him to accept it. he said: “o muḥammad, if you were to send some of your companions to the people of najd (is, wq: law baʿathta rijālan [wq: nafaran] min aṣḥābika, mu: ibʿath maʿī man shiʾta min rusulika, mr: fa-ibʿath ilā aḥl najd man shiʾta) and they invited them to your affair, i have good hopes that they would give you a favorable answer.32 27. both stories, as we shall see below, have another recension in which there is no mention whatsoever of the proselytizing character of the mission. 28. the north arabian ʿ aḍal and al-qāra tribes belonged to al-hūn b. khuzayma, a branch of the muḍar tribal confederation. they were parts of the so-called aḥābish, the traditional allies of the quraysh, and had close ties with mecca. they were also on friendly terms with the hudhayl tribe; see w. montgomery watt, muhammad at medina (oxford: oxford university press, 1956), 88. 29. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, trans. alfred guillaume (oxford: oxford university press, 1954), 426; ibn hishām, al-sīra al-nabawiyya, ed. muṣṭafā al-saqqā, ibrāhīm al-abyārī, and ʿabd al-ḥafīẓ shalabī (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, 1971), 2:169; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:354. see also mūsā b. ʿuqba’s account in al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, ed. ʿabd al-muʿtī qalʿajī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1985), 3:327. 30. abū barāʾ was the chief of the ʿāmir b. ṣaʿṣaʿa tribe, a branch of the hawāzin, which was a prominent subdivision of the northern arabian federation of qays ʿaylān b. muḍar. ʿāmir b. ṣaʿṣaʿa’s territory extended from the west of the turaba oasis to the uplands south of the riyadh–mecca road (w. caskel, “ʿāmir b. ṣaʿṣaʿa,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. [leiden: brill, 1954–2009]). 31. mūsā b. ʿuqba’s words are the same ones that appear in ibn isḥāq’s and al-wāqidī’s versions, though there is a minor variation in the word order. 32. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 433–4; ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:169; maʿmar b. rāshid, kitāb al-maghāzī, trans. sean w. anthony (new york: new york university press, 2014), 108; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:346. see mūsā b. ʿuqba’s report in al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:343. 274 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) 2. the nomads’ treacherous assault on the muslim party the stories proceed with the muslims departing from medina and a surprise raid being launched on them en route at a watering place. as for al-rajīʿ, the tribe of hudhayl33 (or a branch thereof called liḥyān, at whose instigation the members of ʿaḍal and al-qāra come to medina) set an ambush for the prophet’s companions, while in the case of biʾr maʿūna, it is abū barāʾs nephew, ʿāmir b. ṭufayl, who devises the fiendish plot against the muslims. a) al-rajīʿ: the band got as far as al-rajīʿ, a watering place of hudhayl. there they (ʿaḍal and al-qāra) betrayed them and summoned hudhayl against them (is, mu: fa-istaṣrakhū ʿ alayhim hudhaylan, wq: fa-istaṣrakhū ʿ alayhim aṣḥābahum al-ladhīna baʿathahum al-liḥyāniyyūn). while they were off their guard sitting with their baggage (is, mu: fī riḥālihim) suddenly they were set upon by men (is: ghashūhum), with swords in their hands, so they took their swords to fight them.34 b) biʾr maʿūna: the muslims went on until they halted at biʾr maʿūna watering place. when they alighted at it, they sent ḥarām b. milḥān with the apostle’s letter to the enemy of god, ʿāmir b. ṭufayl. when he came to him, he rushed at the man and killed him before he even looked at the letter. then he tried to call out the banū ʿāmir against them (is, wq: istaṣrakha ʿalayhim banī ʿāmir, mu: fa-istanfara banī ʿāmir, mr: fa-istajāsha ʿalayhim ʿāmir b. ṭufayl banī ʿāmir), but they refused to do what he wanted, saying that they would not violate the promise of security which abū barāʾ had given these men. then he appealed to the tribes of banū sulaym35 (is, wq: fa-istaṣrakha ʿalayhim qabāʾil min banī sulaym, mu: fa-istanfara lahum ʿāmir b. ṭufayl banī sulaym, mr: fa-istajāsha ʿalayhim banī sulaym) and they agreed and came out against them and surrounded them (is: ghashū al-qawm) as they were sitting with their baggage (is: fī riḥālihim). seeing them, they drew their swords and fought to the last man.36 33. the north arabian tribe of hudhayl belonged to the khindif subdivision of the muḍar. their territory was in the ḥijāz, the area located to the north and east of mecca, and they were closely connected with the quraysh. see kirill dmitriev, “banū hudhayl,” in encyclopedia of islam three, ed. kate fleet et al. (leiden: brill, 2017). 34. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 426; ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:170; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:355; see mūsā b. ʿuqba’s account in al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:343. 35. the sulaym tribe was a branch of qays ʿaylān b. muḍar. the banū sulaym’s territory was in the vicinity of the road between mecca and medina, and this caused the inhabitants of both cities to establish good relations with the sulaym. the lands of the banū ʿāmir lay on the sulaym’s southern border. see the chapter “tribes in preand early islamic arabia,” in michael lecker, people, tribes and society in arabia around the time of muḥammad (aldershot: ashgate, 2005), 30. 36. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 434; ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:185; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:347; maʿmar b. rāshid, al-maghāzī, 108–10. see mūsā b. ʿuqba’s account in al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:343; ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, al-iṣāba fī tamyīz al-ṣaḥāba, ed. ʿādil aḥmad ʿabd al-mawjūd (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1995), 6:172. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 275 3. the fate of the participants the fate of those who are killed is narrated at some length in each story. we hear in this section of intrepid warriors who refrain from succumbing to the enemies and yearn to embrace martyrdom. a) al-rajīʿ: marthad b. abī marthad, khālid bukayr, and ʿāṣim b. thābit said: “by god, we will never accept an undertaking and agreement from a polytheist.” (is: wa-llāhi lā naqbalu min mushrik ʿ ahdan wa-lā ʿ aqdan abadan). according to al-wāqidī, “ʿāṣim b. thābit, marthad, khālid b. abī bukayr, and muʿattab b. ʿubayd refused to accept their (i.e., the adversaries’) protection and their security” (fa-abaw an yaqbalū jiwārahum wa-lā amānahum). ʿāṣim b. thābit then said, “i swear that i will never accept the protection of a polytheist” (wq: innī nadhartu allā aqbalu jiwār mushrik abadan, mr: ammā ana fa-lā anzilu fī dhimmat kāfir).37 b) biʾr maʿūna: having killed all the companions, narrates al-wāqidī, the banū ʿāmir told al-mundhir b. ʿamr, the muslims’ commander: “if you wish, we will protect you.” he replied, “i will never submit nor accept your protection (wq: lā aqbalu lakum amānan) unless you bring me to the place of ḥarām’s killing38 and then free me from your protection (wq: bariʾa minnī jiwārukum).” they protected him until they brought him to the place of ḥarām’s death, and then released him from their protection (wq: bariʾū ilayhi min jiwārihim), and he fought them until he was killed.39 4. the martyrs’ last words having found themselves in the face of certain death, the warriors pray to god to convey their message to the prophet. a) al-rajīʿ: the polytheists raised khubayb on the wood (to crucify him), and when they had bound him he said, “o god, we have delivered the message of thy apostle, so tell him tomorrow what has been done to us (is: allāhumma innā qad ballaghnā risālat rasūlika fa-ballighhu al-ghadāt mā yuṣnaʿu binā).” according to al-wāqidī, khubayb said: “o god, there is no one here who will take your messenger greetings from me, so please convey my greetings to him.” (allāhumma innahu laysa hāhunā aḥad yuballighu rasūlaka minnī al-salām fa-ballighhu anta ʿannī al-salām).40 37. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 426; ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:170; maʿmar b. rāshid, al-maghāzī, 60; al-wāqidī, kitāb al-maghāzī, trans. rizwi faizer (new york: routledge, 2013), 1:173; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:355. 38. al-mundhir aspired, so the story says, to die where ḥarām’s blood spilled on the ground. 39. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:348; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:170. 40. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 428; ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:173; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:360; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:176. here, mūsā b. ʿuqba’s wording is analogous to al-wāqidī’s, see ibn sayyid al-nās, ʿuyūn al-athar fī funūn al-maghāzī wa-l-shamāʾil wa-l-siyar, ed. ibrāhīm muḥammad ramaḍān (beirut: dār al-qalam, 1993), 2:62. 276 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) b) biʾr maʿūna: as reported on the authority of anas b. mālik,41 the last words of the participants of biʾr maʿūna are to be found in some sīra and ḥadīth compendia presented in the following form: “o god, deliver from us to our prophet our message that we have met you, and we are pleased with you and you are pleased with us.” (allāhumma balligh ʿannā nabiyyanā annā qad laqaynāka fa-raḍaynā ʿanka wa-raḍayta ʿannā).42 5. divine revelation concerning the victims once the prophet’s emissaries are slain, he is made aware of their death and their last words by a revelation. the prophet then announces lugubriously to his entourage that the members of the sariyya have met a tragic end, and were cut into pieces at the hands of the deceitful najdī tribes. a) al-rajīʿ: mūsā b. ʿuqba says: “it is alleged (zaʿamū) that the messenger of god— seated in the gathering of his companions on the day in which khubayb and zayd b. al-dathinna were killed—said: “peace be upon you,” the quraysh killed khubayb (khubayb qatalahu quraysh).” al-wāqidī’s report runs as follows: “usāma b. zayd related to me from his father that the messenger of god was seated with his companions, when a faint overcame him just as when he is inspired by a revelation. then we heard him say, ‘and peace unto him and god’s blessings.’ then he said, ‘this is gabriel who brings me greetings from khubayb.’”43 b) biʾr maʿūna: not long following the prophet dispatching an envoy to banū ʿāmir, he ascended the pulpit, praised god, and lauded him, saying: “your brothers met the polytheists and they cut them to pieces, and none of them survived.”44 41. anas b. mālik, a member of the najjār subdivision of the khazraj, was allegedly the last companion of the prophet to die, in basra in 93/712. anas’ purported life span covers the entire first century ah, making him a key figure on whose authority prophetic traditions have been reported. his name frequently occurs in traditions with baṣran isnāds, the anṣār-favoring material in particular. see gautier h. a. juynboll, encyclopedia of canonical ḥadīth (leiden: brill, 2007), 131; idem, “shuʿba b. al-ḥajjāj,” 206. 42. according to some accounts, these words (that occur in the sources with certain variants) were allegedly once part of the qurʾānic text, but were eventually abrogated; see al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:350; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, ed. muḥammad ʿ abd al-qādir ʿ aṭā (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1990), 3:390; ibn ḥanbal, musnad (beirut: dār ṣādir, 1969), 1:416; muslim b. al-ḥajjāj, ṣaḥīḥ (beirut: dār al-fikr, n.d.), 6:45; ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, ed. ʿalī shīrī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1415 ah), 26:104. see also the doubts expressed by juynboll as to the authenticity of these traditions in gautier h. a. juynboll, “the qurrāʾ in early islamic history,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 16 (1973): 113–29, at 128–9. 43. see mūsā b. ʿuqba’s account in al-maqrīzī, imtāʿ al-asmāʾ, ed. muḥammad ʿabd al-ḥamīd al-namīsī (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1999), 13:273; ibn sayyid al-nās, ʿuyūn, 2:62; al-kalāʿī, al-iktifāʾ fī maghāzī rasūl allāh wa-l-thalātha al-khulafāʾ, ed. muḥammad ʿalī bayḍūn (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2000), 1:407. see also al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:176. 44. al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:344; al-ḥākim al-nīsābūrī, al-mustadrak ʿalā al-ṣaḥīḥayn, ed. yūsuf ʿabd al-raḥmān al-marʿashlī (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, n.d.), 2:111. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 277 6. a parallel “virtue” tradition from the viewpoint of the earliest authors and audiences of the sīra, the narratives’ apogee was the episodes in which they could relate or hear the heroic tales of islam’s “golden age,” where the image of the companions was adorned with innumerable faḍāʾil traditions. it should come as no surprise, therefore, that the remarkably analogous accounts of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna are also alike in the way in which their martyrs are exalted. our stories have episodes in which the protagonists’ corpses vanish in a miraculous fashion; one “ascends to the sky,” the other is “swallowed up by the earth.” a) al-rajīʿ: after a period of imprisonment in mecca, khubayb b. ʿadī is taken out by the meccans to al-tanʿīm and is crucified there. purportedly sent by the prophet to take down khubayb’s crucified body, ʿ amr b. umayya is the supposed narrator of the following account: “i came to the cross to which khubayb was bound, frightened that someone might see me, climbed up it, and untied khubayb. he fell to the ground, and i withdrew a short distance. then i turned round, and i could not see a trace of khubayb; it was as though the earth had swallowed him up (ibtalaʿathu al-arḍ).” the account concludes, “and no trace of khubayb has appeared up to this time (lam yudhkar li-khubayb rimmatan ḥattā al-sāʿa).”45 b) biʾr maʿūna: the episode of the biʾr maʿūna story that is of interest to us here is a faḍīla narrated about ʿāmir b. fuhayra, the mawlā of the first caliph, abū bakr. the person into whose mouth the tradition puts the virtues of ʿāmir b. fuhayra is none other than his slayer, jabbār b. salmā. ʿāmir, who is killed by jabbār’s spear, ascends, much to his murderer’s astonishment, to the sky, and it is his marvelous ascension to the heavens that convinces jabbār to convert to islam. al-wāqidī’s account also stresses that “the angels have concealed [ʿāmir’s] dead body”46, and ibn saʿd assures us that his corpse was never found (lam tūjad juththatahu), just as with the body of khubayb b. ʿadī.47 7. banū nawfal, the driving spirit behind the massacre we have seen so far that the turn of the fourth year of the islamic era witnessed two almost simultaneous disasters befalling the muslims. the sources aver that two proselytizing groups of companions were entrusted at roughly the same time the similar task of preaching 45. al-ṭabarī, the history of al-ṭabarī, vol. 7, foundation of the community, trans. w. montgomery watt and m. v. mcdonald (albany, ny: state university of new york press, 1987), 146–7; al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:332; ibn ḥanbal, musnad, 4:139; ibn al-athīr, usd al-ghāba fī maʿrifat al-ṣaḥāba (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1989), 1:599; ibn ḥajar, al-iṣāba, 2:226. see also sean w. anthony, crucifixion and death as spectacle: umayyad crucifixion in its late antique context (new haven, ct: american oriental society, 2014), 38. 46. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:170: al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:353; ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 4:344. 47. ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 3:174; ibn ḥabīb, kitāb al-muḥabbar, ed. i. lichtenstadter (beirut: dar al-āfāq al-jadīda, n.d.), 183; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. suhayl zakkār (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1996), 1:194. 278 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) islam in an identical geographical region, najd. both parties are attacked en route at a watering place and die the deaths of martyrs. in addition to this, the diction and narrative schemes of the tales are very much alike. but there is more to this analogy. the authors/ compilers of the sīra reports want us to believe that both incidents involve a specific clan of the quraysh, namely the banū nawfal,48 as their instigators. as regards al-rajīʿ and its most dramatic occurrence, viz., khubayb’s crucifixion, the sources unequivocally state that the “rationale for his murder” was his killing al-ḥārith b. ʿāmir of nawfal, an act that prompted the latter’s fellow-tribesmen to wreak vengeance upon khubayb.49 akin to this situation are the circumstances surrounding the muslims’ massacre at biʾr maʿūna. here, we have again an implacable opponent of islam from nawfal, ṭuʿayma b. ʿadī, whom muslims kill at badr. this induces his kinsmen, his maternal uncle (anas b. ʿabbās al-sulamī) in particular, to exact revenge on the muslims by launching an onslaught against the members of biʾr maʿūna.50 the tradition’s claim concerning the banū nawfal having been culpable in the two allegedly simultaneous tragedies is not impossible, but there are hints that what is at work here is not a reoccurrence of a similar situation in two separate incidents, but a literary topos tout court. although it is the very “logic behind the plot of khubayb’s death and the cruelty of his executioner,”51 the attribution of al-ḥārith b. ʿāmir’s murder to khubayb b. ʿadī is wholly at odds with the maghāzī scholars’ consensus that the latter was not present at badr, and that it was another khubayb, the son of īsāf, who was responsible for al-ḥārith b. ʿāmir’s murder.52 as arafat has convincingly argued, khubayb b. ʿadī is a historically obscure figure with a murky background whom ibn saʿd does not even deem worthy of an entry in his biographical compendium.53 the sīra’s khubayb b. ʿadī is, in fact, more of a mythical hero than a historical character. if he is not remembered, as seems entirely credible, as performing a role in the expedition of badr, the banū nawfal’s supposed retaliatory actions at al-rajīʿ and their complicity in killing khubayb would then become a dubious motivation in the al-rajīʿ story, which merely serves to promote khubayb to the stature of a renowned warrior and to impart more drama into his anecdote.54 48. banū nawfal was a clan of the meccan tribe of quraysh. according to the classic islamic genealogies, nawfal was the brother of hāshim, the prophet’s great-grandfather. despite this family link, banū nawfal was reportedly present in the quraysh’s anti-islamic measures, including the boycott of banū hāshim. see w. montgomery watt, “nawfal,” encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill, 1954–2009). 49. anthony, crucifixion, 35. 50. see kister, “biʾr maʿūna,” 350–4; michael lecker, the banū sulaym: a contribution to the study of early islam (jerusalem: institute of asian and african studies, 1989), 174. 51. anthony, crucifixion, 35. 52. see arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 20; anthony, crucifixion, 35; nicolet boekhoff-van der voort, “the raid of the banū hudhayl: ibn shihāb al-zuhrī’s version of the event,” in analyzing muslim traditions: studies in legal, exegetical and maghāzī ḥadīth, ed. h. motzki et al., 305–83 (leiden: brill, 2010), 367. 53. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 19. 54. nawfal’s supposed role in al-rajīʿ has been accepted as historical in kister, “biʾr maʿūna,” 356. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 279 8. the chronology of the massacres the “lateness and artificiality”55 that runs through the entire sīra’s chronology seems also to frustrate any attempt at the precise dating of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna raids. but the dates of these events are of interest to us from a historiographical perspective, as they give us an idea, tentative as it may be, of the kind of concerns and criteria based on which the chronology of the prophet’s maghāzī came to be standardized by the medieval sīra scholars.56 the al-rajīʿ incident is explicitly stated by al-wāqidī to have taken place in ṣafar of 4/625, but there are competing accounts at play. khubayb was reportedly brought to mecca in the sacred month of dhū al-qaʿda 4/625 and was crucified when the sanctified months had passed, which means that his incarceration lasted no longer than a couple of months. the liḥyān expedition, a retaliatory raid purportedly launched by the prophet himself to take vengeance for the martyrs of al-rajīʿ, is dated to 6/627. the account of this incident claims, however, that khubayb was still imprisoned in mecca at the time of this sariyya, adding that when the prophet arrived at al-ghamīm, the quraysh said that “muḥammad only came to al-ghamīm to get khubayb.”57 according to al-wāqidī, the liḥyānīs’ onslaught on the members of al-rajīʿ was itself a punitive measure due to fact that a companion of the prophet had assassinated the chief of liḥyān, sufyān b. khālid. al-wāqidī conflictingly assigns sufyān’s murder to fifty-four months ah, while he himself places al-rajīʿ at thirty-six months ah.58 the chronology of al-rajīʿ, as can be seen, is anything but apparent, though amidst this chronological mess one date was of obvious appeal for the sīra scholars: the assertion that muḥammad got the news of both events on the same night (fī layla wāḥida).59 in line with this claim are a number of reports that the prophet cursed the liḥyān together with the sulaym. the account of the prophet’s curse on the muḍar and the sulaym is a well-known episode of the biʾr maʿūna story.60 that some, though not certainly all, of our reports include the liḥyān in the tribes cursed by the prophet signifies later attempts to show the simultaneity of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna. 55. shoemaker, “in search of ʿurwa’s sīra,” 261. see also andreas görke and gregor schoeler, die ältesten berichte über das leben muḥammads: das korpus ʿurwa ibn az-zubair (princeton, nj: darwin press, 2009), 291–2; pavel pavlovitch, “the sīra,” in routledge handbook on early islam, ed. h. berg, 66–78 (new york: routledge, 2017), 76. 56. see, in this respect, j. m. b. jones, “the chronology of the maghāzī: a textual survey,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 19, no. 2 (1957): 245–80, at 258–9; rizwi faizer, “muhammad and the medinan jews: a comparison of the texts of ibn ishaq’s kitāb sīrat rasūl allāh with al-waqidi’s kitāb al-maghāzī,” international journal of middle east studies 28 (1996): 463–89, at 471. 57. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 2:263. see jones, “the chronology of the maghāzī,” 276, where he astutely observes that the liḥyān expedition’s account is nothing but “a curious patchwork of themes.” 58. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:354 and 2:531. 59. al-wāqid, al-maghāzī, 1:360, appears to be the sole early attestation of this claim which has subsequently been repeated in later sources; see al-samarqandī, tafsīr, ed. ʿumar ʿamrī (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1416 ah), 3:424; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 2:40. 60. see meir jacob kister, “o god, tighten thy grip on muḍar,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 24, no. 3 (1981): 242–73; uri rubin, “muhammad’s curse of muḍar and the blockade of mecca,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 31, no. 3 (1988): 249–64. 280 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) this artificial synchronization, preferred by al-wāqidī, appears to be yet another attempt by the traditionists to make the al-rajīʿ incident all the more analogous to the massacre of biʾr maʿūna, to assign to the martyrs of each expedition an equal share of the prophet’s grief, and finally, to render the overall picture all the more poignant and dramatic. the above comparative assessment of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna’s accounts has crucial implications. the virtually identical narrative lines, the analogous circumstantial details, and the correspondences in the wording of the two stories can hardly be regarded, even by the most credulous readers, as mere coincidences. it is by no means tenable that an entirely similar catastrophe happened to concurrently dispatched “holy bands” and that the prophet received the news of both massacres on the same night. be that as it may, it is worth attempting to delve deeper into the process of, and the impetus behind, the formation of the parallelism in these accounts, for the light it sheds on the sitz im leben of the prophet’s traditional biography, and on the way in which our literary sources are to be treated. before proceeding to the historical background of these stories, however, it is necessary to deal with the marked resemblance that one of the aforesaid stories, al-rajīʿ, bears to the accounts of certain rebellious movements of the umayyad caliphate. parallels between the al-rajīʿ massacre and umayyad-era movements for no other figure involved in the al-rajīʿ incident do we have such a great bulk of faḍāʾil accounts as we do for khubayb b. ʿadī.61 nonetheless, the traditions about his virtues and sufferings, as arafat observes, are of a legendary character, consisting as they do of a series of pious attempts at “virtually canonizing khubayb.”62 what deserves closer inspection in this respect is the fact that khubayb’s maudlin tale is a mélange of hagiographic motifs that are not specific to his story but are also deployed broadly elsewhere, for example in the accounts of the insurrections and tribulations of umayyad-era rebels, including (but not limited to) such (pro-)ʿalid figures as ḥujr b. ʿadī, al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī, and zayd b. ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn. these similarities have not gone entirely unnoticed in previous scholarship, receiving passing mention in the works, for instance, of arafat and keshk.63 however, the analogies made therein are not exhaustive.64 arafat draws attention to only one parallel between the khubayb and al-ḥusayn stories, while keshk offers a brief comparison of the analogous episodes in the accounts of khubayb and ḥujr b. ʿadī; neither scholar mentions the other motifs shared by khubayb’s martyrology and certain accounts related to various politico-religious dissidents during the umayyad caliphate. we need thus to draw a more 61. cf. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 18; anthony, crucifixion, 37. ʿāṣim b. thābit occupies the second place. 62. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 19. 63. ibid., 23; khaled keshk, “the historiography of an execution: the killing of ḥujr b. ʿadī,” journal of islamic studies 19, no. 1 (2008): 1–35, at 12–13. 64. this is despite the fact that both articles present insightful hints concerning the motifs that khubayb’s story share with the accounts of the (pro-)ʿalid revolts. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 281 comprehensive comparison between these narratives. this is undertaken in the remainder of this section. 1. the final prayer of the martyr the first noteworthy parallel is found in the episode of khubayb’s imprisonment, where his story betrays apparent correspondences with that of ḥujr b. ʿadī. ḥujr, a fervent partisan of the fourth caliph, ʿalī, is renowned for having fomented an insurrection against muʿāwiya. the rebellion proved ill-fated and was quelled by muʿāwiya’s governor in kufa, ziyād b. abīhi, who subsequently sent ḥujr and his adherents to marj ʿadhrāʾ, where, after a period of incarceration, ḥujr was sentenced to death.65 khubayb and ḥujr are thus alike in being held in captivity for a short period, at the end of which they are executed. a more significant similarity, touched upon by donner and discussed at more length by keshk, appears in the moment of the protagonists’ execution, when they both seek solace in praying to god, asking the executioner to allow them to pray two rakʿas.66 the parallel becomes all the more overt when, taking into account that “ḥujr’s words to his executioners [are] exactly the same as those of khubayb,” both hurriedly finish the prayer and say: “were it not that they might think i was afraid, i would have taken more time with them [i.e., the two rakʿas of prayer].”67 keshk seems to have taken it as axiomatic that the hagiographical elaboration of ḥujr’s account has its roots in khubayb’s martyrology,68 but, as we shall argue later, the nature of khubayb’s story does not permit one to make such firm assertions. anyhow, whether khubayb’s story inspired or was inspired by ḥujr’s, there is no doubt about the existence of sectarian rivalries at the turn of the first islamic century, mirrored in the identification of the first person to pray two rakʿas before martyrdom (rakʿatayn ʿinda al-qatl).69 and it is interesting to note that the traditionist ibn sīrīn (d. 110/728), in a blatant act of reconciliation, contends that these two rakʿas were prayed by khubayb and ḥujr (ṣallāhumā khubayb wa-ḥujr wa-humā fāḍilān).70 2. the performance of miracles during the imprisonment khubayb’s preternatural qualities are redolent of the miracles our sources allot to ḥujr. while in captivity in the house of a woman called māwiyya, khubayb is once seen by her 65. gerald r. hawting, the first dynasty of islam: the umayyad caliphate ad 661–750 (london: routledge, 2002), 41; andrew marsham, “public execution in the umayyad period: early islamic punitive practice and its late antique context,” journal of arabic and islamic studies 11 (2011): 101–36, at 128. 66. donner, narratives of islamic origins, 271; keshk, “the historiography of an execution,” 12–13. 67. ibid. 68. ibid., 13. 69. see ibn abī shayba, al-muṣannaf, ed. saʿīd al-laḥḥām (beirut: n.p., 1409 ah), 8:340; al-masʿūdī, murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, ed. asʿad dāghir (qumm: dār al-hijra, 1409 ah), 3:3; ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-istīʿāb fī maʿrifat al-aṣḥāb, ed. muḥammad al-bajāwī (beirut, 1992), 2:441; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 2:43. 70. ibn al-ʿadīm, bughyat al-ṭalab fī taʾrīkh ḥalab, ed. suhayl zakkār (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1988), 5:2111; ibrāhīm b. muḥammad al-thaqafī, al-ghārāt, ed. jalāl al-dīn ḥusaynī urmawī (tehran: anjuman-i athār-i mellī, 1353 ah), 2:814. 282 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) “with a bunch of grapes in his hand as big as a man’s head from which he was eating.” “i did not know,” says the astonished māwiyya, “that there were grapes on god’s earth that could be eaten (at that time).”71 on the day of his execution, khubayb is reported to have asked māwiyya to lend him a razor to cleanse himself before death (ataṭahharu bihā li-l-qatl).72 she sends her son to give khubayb the razor but suddenly gets apprehensive lest khubayb kill her son in revenge. she hastens towards them and finds the boy sitting on the prisoner’s thigh. khubayb lets the lad go, however, assuring the woman that “in his religion, treachery is not lawful.”73 the tradition tends likewise to exalt the imprisoned ḥujr by recounting his deeds of piety. khubayb and ḥujr do not merely resemble one another in their being depicted as paragons of virtue, but also in regard to “purification” (ṭahāra) as a key element in the glorifying traditions woven around these early islamic martyrs.74 during his imprisonment, we read, ḥujr becomes ritually impure. he asks his jailer to give him his ration of drinking water to perform ghusl (the ritual ablution) (aʿṭinī sharābī ataṭahharu bihā). the latter refuses, saying: “i fear you might perish from thirst, and then muʿāwiya would kill me.” ḥujr then prays to god, and he sends forth a rain cloud, providing ḥujr with the water he needs for the ghusl. aside from the common episodes centered upon the notion of ṭahāra in the narratives of khubayb and ḥujr’s incarceration, the miracle-working character of khubayb also bears strong parallels to the protagonists of certain stories outside the corpus of shīʿī martyrology. similar to khubayb’s case, an imprisoned person eating of heavenly sustenance occurs in accounts about the messianic claimant of marwānīd syria known as the shepherd (al-rāʿī), who initiated “a movement among syro-mesopotamian jewry during the caliphate of sulaymān b. ʿabd al-malik.”75 the life and career of the shepherd has recently been subject to an in-depth examination by sean anthony, which he conducted using, among other sources, a report of the no longer extant kitāb al-maqālāt of abū ʿīsā al-warrāq (d. after 249/864), preserved in bayān al-adyān, a persian heresiography authored by abū al-maʿālī al-ʿalawī (writing ca. 485/1092). amongst the miracles ascribed to the shepherd, we read that after he was thrown in damascus’ prison (ū rā dar damishq be zendān kardand), “every day there would fall near him sustenance” (har rūz be nazdīk-e ū khūrdanī yāftand).76 this is a reflection, as anthony notes, of “a similar miracle attributed to the 71. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 428; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:175. 72. ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:172. 73. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:175. 74. on khubayb remaining in the “state of purity” till his martyrdom, see david cook, martyrdom in islam (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007), 22. 75. sean w. anthony, “who was the shepherd of damascus? the enigma of jewish-messianist responses to the islamic conquests in umayyad syria and mesopotamia,” in the lineaments of islam: studies in honor of fred mcgraw donner, ed. p. cobb, 21–59 (leiden: brill, 2012), 21. on khubayb and the shepherd eating from “sustenance of an unknown origin,” see ibid., 29. 76. abū al-maʿālī al-ʿalawī, bayān al-adyān, ed. ʿabbās iqbāl āshtiyānī, muḥammad taqī dāneshpazhūh, and muḥammad dabīr siyāqī (tehran: enteshārāt-e rūzana, 1997), 75. the translation is quoted from anthony, “who was the shepherd of damascus?,” 27. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 283 qurʾānic mary,”77 which has likewise been assigned to the syrian pseudo-prophet of ʿabd al-malik b. marwān’s caliphate, al-ḥārith b. saʿīd.78 3. echoes of al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī’s martyrology in the story of khubayb in an illuminating case of detection, arafat noticed a similar poetic composition found in khubayb and al-ḥusayn b. ʿalī’s martyrological tradition. castigating khubayb’s murderers for their nefarious deeds, the poet asks: “what would you say if the prophet speaks to you when the loyal angels are in the horizon?”79 an analogous poem, preserved by al-ṭabarī, was reportedly recited by a hāshimī woman after al-ḥusayn’s martyrdom, on the occasion of his family’s arrival in medina. “what would you say if the prophet says to you,” the woman asks, “‘what have you done – you who are the last of peoples – with my relations and my family, after my death?’ among them are captives and bloodstained dead.”80 both excerpts of poetry are instances of censure directed against evildoers, reminding them of their tremendous guilt and the turmoil of the day of judgment in which the prophet is to ask them about their wrongdoings. particularly noteworthy is the fact that the former poem’s first hemistich (i.e., mādhā taqūlūna in qāla al-nabī lakum) is a verbatim repetition of the latter. as shown by arafat, the first poem exhibits flagrant signs of late origin and secondary status, foremost among which is the verse’s insinuation that, unlike the actual circumstances at the time of the al-rajīʿ raid, the prophet is dead and has to interrogate the executioners about their villainous acts only on the day of judgment.81 one may assume that the incongruity in the verse stems from the poet being inspired by the material at his disposal on al-ḥusayn’s martyrdom, which was composed years after the prophet’s death. there is further evidence, which has gone unmentioned by arafat, that substantiates his shrewd, though passing, remark on the existence of shared motifs in khubayb’s story and the shīʿī martyrological heritage. al-ṭabarī reports, on the authority of jābir al-juʿfī, that in his final moments, al-ḥusayn approaches the euphrates river to quench his intense thirst, but, all of a sudden, he is struck by the enemy’s arrow and blood gushes out from his mouth. he then raises his hands, beseeches god to bring down wrath upon his adversaries, and says: “o god! count their number, kill them one by one, and do not let one of them remain on the earth” (allāhumma aḥṣihim ʿadadan wa-uqtulhum badadan wa-lā tadhar ʿalā al-arḍ minhum aḥadan).82 the last words supposed to have been uttered by khubayb are almost identical with al-ḥusayn’s prayer. he says: “o god! count their number, kill them one by one, and let none of them escape” (allāhumma aḥṣihim ʿadadan wa-uqtulhum badadan 77. ibid. 29. 78. s. w. anthony, “the prophecy and passion of al-ḥāriṯ ibn saʿīd al-kaḏḏāb: narrating a religious movement from the caliphate of ʿabdalmalik ibn marwān,” arabica 57 (2010): 1–29, at 1. 79. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 22. see the verse in ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:177. 80. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 23. the poem is to be found in al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, ed. muḥammad abū al-faḍl ibrāhīm (beirut: dār al-turāth, 1967), 5:467; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 3:221; al-masʿūdī, murūj, 3:68. 81. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 23. 82. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 3:201; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 5:449; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 5:470. 284 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) wa-lā tughādir minhum aḥadan).83 the similarities between these invocations of divine retribution are very striking, but there is more to the curses of khubayb and al-ḥusayn. the sources relate in vivid detail the fates of the bystanders in the al-rajīʿ and karbalāʾ incidents, on whom divine punishment is said to have been inflicted. muʿāwiya b. abī sufyān, who was allegedly present at khubayb’s crucifixion, is said to have been thrown on the ground by his father from fear of khubayb’s curse (daʿwat khubayb). abū sufyān believed, we are told, “if a man is cursed and is thrown to one side, the curse will pass over him.”84 having attended khubayb’s execution, saʿīd b. ʿāmir al-jumaḥī, governor of ḥimṣ under the second caliph, is reported to have had a fainting spell whenever he remembered the martyr’s tragic death.85 no less than seven individuals are mentioned by name in al-wāqidī’s account as either fearfully fleeing or concealing themselves somewhere in fear of khubayb’s curse, one of whom says: “by god, i did not think that khubayb’s prayer would miss any one of them (the meccans),”86 (mā ẓanantu an tughādira daʿwat khubayb minhum aḥadan). as regards al-ḥusayn, there is similarly an impressive number of individuals who are said to have perished in fulfillment of al-ḥusayn’s curse.87 he is reported as cautioning ʿubayd allāh b. al-ḥurr that “by god, those who hear our wailing (wāʿiya) and do not help us will perish.”88 elsewhere al-ḥusayn is quoted as exhorting some of his entourage, “leave here lest you hear my wailing (wāʿiya), for he who hears our wailing without answering and helping us will be thrown into the fire.”89 one may then speak of a parallelism in the sources, that of wāʿiyat al-ḥusayn vis-à-vis daʿwat khubayb. and it is significant that hearing the martyr’s curse, in both cases, would be accompanied by evil consequences for passive bystanders.90 4. the crucifixion episode one recognizes in the climax of khubayb’s lachrymose narrative, the crucifixion episode, some motifs that are by no means characteristic of his story, but also occur elsewhere, for 83. ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:173; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:359; maʿmar b. rāshid, al-maghāzī, 62; al-bukhārī, ṣaḥīḥ (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1981), 5:12; ibn ḥanbal, musnad, 2:294; boekhoff-van der voort, “the raid of the banū hudhayl,” 362. 84. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 428. also see al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:359. 85. ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:173–4; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:359–60. 86. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:175. 87. on al-ḥusayn’s curses see, for instance, al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 5:45; abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī, maqātil al-ṭālibiyyīn, ed. aḥmad ṣaqr (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, n.d.), 117. 88. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 5:407. 89. al-ṭūsī, muḥammad b. ḥasan, ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl (rijāl al-kishshī), ed. ḥasan muṣṭafawī (mashhad: mashhad university press, 1409 ah), 114. a similar tradition is found in ibn bābawayh, al-amālī (tehran: ketābchī, 1376 ah), 137. 90. admittedly, the notion of the duʿāʾ maẓlūm (“the call of the oppressed”) is a general martyrological theme (cook, martyrdom, 22) and cannot be linked exclusively to khubayb and al-ḥusayn. however, the fact that the curses of these martyrs (allāhumma aḥṣihim ʿadadan …) are almost identical in diction signifies a stronger connection between these stories than the mere utilization of the theme of al-duʿāʾ al-maẓlūm. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 285 example in the crucifixion account of the renowned shīʿī rebel, zayd b. ʿalī (d. 122/740).91 the latter is said to have been crucified facing the direction of the euphrates. the next morning, however, his cross (khashabatahu) was reportedly found facing toward the qibla, and this event occurred several times (mirāran).92 in a similar vein, the qibla’s direction is a prominent element in the narrative of khubayb’s crucifixion, which has it that the meccan polytheists directed the crucified khubayb towards “where he came from” (min ḥaythu jāʾa). he then said, “regarding your turning my face away from the qibla (ammā ṣarfukum wajhī ʿan al-qibla), indeed god says: wherever you turn is god.”93 according to a rival account, the meccans faced him in a direction other than the qibla, but his body turned miraculously towards the qibla, and this was to happen several times (mirāran) until they let him remain in the direction of the qibla.94 as observed by anthony, the “miraculous shift of the cross” bearing a martyr is similarly attested in armenian accounts of the martyrdom of david of dwin (d. 703/705), whom the umayyads crucified.95 david was a former muslim soldier by the name of surhān who “apostatized” upon his arrival at armenia and became a christian. his cross is reported to have been “raised facing south,” or, as anthony and sahner plausibly posit, toward the qibla.96 as david’s vita puts it,97 “the cross, which was facing south, turned to the east (viz., the christian direction of prayer). this miraculous sign was shown to the believers and unbelievers, so that the power of christ might be manifest.”98 the miraculous turn of the martyr’s corpse is then a topos functioning as a proof for the supremacy of the creed for which the martyr lays down his life, and as such, it could – and did – readily appear in different martyrological traditions. the attempt by the martyr’s fellow rebels or co-religionists to take down his body is another oft-repeated motif in different crucifixion accounts. the crucifixion site in the martyrological accounts of khubayb and zayd is reported as having been guarded by a number of men in order to thwart the people from taking the martyr’s crucified corpse 91. zayd, the great-grandson of the fourth caliph, ʿalī b. abī ṭālib, led an insurrection against the umayyad caliphate that gave rise to the formation of the zaydiyya sect. his revolt broke out during the caliphate of hishām b. ʿabd al-malik and was crushed by the governor of iraq, yūsuf b. ʿumar al-thaqafī. zayd’s decapitated body remained crucified in the kunāsa of kufa for six years, wilfred madelung, “zayd b. ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn,” encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill, 1954–2009); anthony, crucifixion, 46–51. 92. ibn ʿ asākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 19:479; ibn al-ʿadīm, bughyat al-ṭalab, 9:4050; anthony, crucifixion, 48. 93. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:176. 94. see ibn ḥajar, al-iṣāba, 2:227, who quotes ʿabd al-dāʾim b. al-marzūq al-qayrawānī (d. after 467/1074). 95. anthony, crucifixion, 59. anthony detects the appearance of this motif in the martyrologies of david and zayd, but does not refer to the similar episode in khubayb’s story. 96. ibid.; christian c. sahner, christian martyrs under islam: religious violence and the making of the muslim world (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2018), 250. 97. the life of david, or the so-called passion of david of dwin, was written “shortly after the martyr’s death” in 703/705 (ibid., 93). david’s story features also in the armenian history written by john catholicos (d. ca. 925). on david and his vita, see robert hoyland, seeing islam as others saw it: a survey and evaluation of christian, jewish and zoroastrian writings on early islam (princeton, nj: the darwin press, 2002), 370–3. 98. hoyland, seeing islam, 676. 286 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) down from the cross. ʿamr b. umayya al-ḍamrī is said to have tried, though eventually in vain, to take down the body of khubayb, whose khashaba was surrounded by guards watching over him (ḥawluhu ḥaras yaḥrusūnahu).99 zayd’s body is likewise reported to have been kept under surveillance (ʿalayhi ḥaras yaḥrusūnahu) lest his body be stolen. like ʿamr b. umayya, dāwūd b. ʿalī b. ʿabd allāh b. ʿabbās allegedly attempts to take down zayd’s corpse, but he is ultimately forced to withdraw due to the intervention of the kufan governor’s forces (khayl).100 to conclude, khubayb’s narratives are comprised of a general body of hagiographic motifs that not only appear elsewhere in the islamic (including the shīʿī) tradition, but feature in the christian martyrologies as well. it goes without saying that this kind of material is sorely problematic for the purpose of positivist historical enquiry. beneath the surface of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna narratives: classic form criticism the point-for-point correspondence between certain episodes of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories, and the former’s considerable similarities with the reports of umayyad-era insurrections, undoubtedly demand an explanation other than chance. the immediate question arising is which individual or faction could be responsible for putting these stories in circulation and what the motivation was behind the literary borrowing between these stories. shared episodes in the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna accounts: literary form and life-setting a fundamental step in formkritik is to determine our narratives’ form.101 the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories attained significance and popularity as they mirrored the norms and concerns of the community in which they were generated. to appropriately determine the narratives’ form would, therefore, be a useful guide to our tales’ life-setting.102 as shown by wansbrough, the sīra nabawiyya encompasses some of andre jolles’ “simple forms” (einfache formen), each of which is characterized by a specific “mental disposition”103 (geistesbeschäftigung) and “verbal gesture” (sprachgebärde).104 to take two pertinent examples: the “legend” (legende) reflects the need for heroic ideals and models, with its mental disposition being imitatio (emulation of shining moral and spiritual examples), and its verbal gesture being the typical constituents of saints’ vitae, for example, torture instruments, a heavenly voice, etc. another form, “saga” (sage), is the result of a 99. ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:170; al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 2:544; al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:336. 100. al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 3:234, 256; akhbār al-dawla al-ʿabbāsiyya, ed. a. a. duri and ʿ abd al-jabbār al-muṭṭalibī (beirut: dār al-ṭalīʿa, 1391 ah), 232. notably, the crucified body of mītham al-tammār (the date seller) is said to have been stolen and subsequently buried by his fellow date sellers (anthony, crucifixion, 55). 101. george w. coats, “genres: why should they be important for exegesis,” in saga, legend, tale, novella, fable: narrative forms in old testament literature, ed. george w. coats, 7–15 (sheffield: jsot press, 1985), 9. 102. graves, “form criticism or a rolling corpus,” 56. 103. or “motive” in wansbrough’s rendering (idem, the sectarian milieu, 33). 104. ibid., 4; pavlovitch, “the sīra,” 69. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 287 preoccupation with family, tribe, and blood kinship, with its characteristic sprachgebärde being, for instance, the issue of inheritance.105 however, classifying a narrative under such common generic taxonomies is not always a straightforward practice. aside from the morphological criteria, there are subtler factors that must likewise be taken into consideration (of particular significance among which is the abovementioned geistesbeschäftigung).106 the task becomes all the more challenging in the discipline of islamic historiography, where the character of the sīra’s sitz has brought about a situation in which the genres are not always neatly demarcated.107 thus, we see that a not insignificant portion of the miracles (the distinguishing feature of legende in jolles’ definition) are recounted with the purpose of promoting familial and/or tribal glory. this holds true for both the miracles performed by the prophet to show a companion’s merits and the miracles performed by the companions themselves. naturally, such faḍāʾil tales are quite often replete with episodes featuring “the abolition of the boundary between the supernatural and the natural,”108 and they fully adopt the verbal gesture of legende, but in doing so the mental disposition of imitatio is either absent or very tenuous. rather, geistesbeschäftigung of clan and consanguinity remains dominant in many of these faḍāʾil materials.109 the sīra’s “extensive use of the basic form of the saga,”110 along with the frequent occurrence of “family accounts” in the prophet’s biography,111 have been stressed in previous scholarship. and this is the very point of which we should not lose sight when we want to categorize the sīra’s reports (including the ones having supernatural sub-narratives) under the customary typology of narrative forms. tellingly, the accounts of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna expeditions gravitate also toward sage, these narratives’ inclusion of miraculous scenes and virtue materials notwithstanding. as we shall see, both internal and external evidence testifies that the issue of family and 105. see andré jolles, simple forms, trans. peter j. schwartz (london: verso, 2017), 19–67. on legende see also edgar v. mcknight, what is form criticism? (philadelphia, pa: fortress press, 1969), 24. 106. john j. collins, “introduction: towards the morphology of a genre,” semeia 14 (1979): 1–20, at 1–2; rolf knierim, “review of the growth of the biblical tradition: the form-critical method, by klaus koch,” interpretation 24 (1970): 243–8, at 247; koch, the growth of the biblical tradition, 151; sweeney, “form criticism: the question of the endangered matriarchs,” 22. also, see in this regard, martin j. buss, biblical form criticism in its context (sheffield: sheffield academic press, 1999), 15–16. 107. on the “overlapping, or intersecting genres” in the islamic literary tradition, see nancy khalek, “‘he was tall and slender and his virtues were numerous:’ byzantine hagiographical topoi and the companions of muhammad in al-azdī’s futūḥ al-shām,” in writing “true stories:” historians and hagiographers in the late antique and medieval near east, ed. a. papaconstantinou, m. debié, and h. kennedy, 105–23 (turnhout: brepols, 2010), 110. 108. dan ben-amos, narrative forms in the haggadah: structural analysis (bloomington, in: indiana university, 1967), 87. also cited in anthony j. saldarini, “‘form criticism’ of rabbinic literature,” journal of biblical literature 96, no. 2 (1977): 257–74, at 270–1. 109. see roohi, “between history and ancestral lore,” 435–9. 110. wansbrough, the sectarian milieu, 33; pavlovitch, “the sīra,” 71. 111. michael lecker, “the assassination of the jewish merchant ibn sunayna according to an authentic family account,” in the transmission and dynamics of the textual sources of islam: essays in honour of harald motzki, ed. n. boekhoff-van der voort, k. versteegh, and j. wagemakers, 181–96 (leiden: brill, 2011). 288 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) tribe was integral in relaying the pious deeds of these stories’ martyr-companions, whose heroic feats were invoked, years after their death, by their offspring during the polemically charged tribal mufākharas in the squares of medina. let us start with the hints within the text itself. as is the case with a sizable fraction of the sīra, the detailed tribal affiliations of our narratives’ dramatis personae are introduced at the outset of the tales. it is possible, therefore, to see khubayb and ʿāṣim b. thābit’s episodes, for example, as khubayb and ʿāṣim’s sagen. there is nonetheless more to it than that. the explicit references to the matter of tribe and consanguinity are palpable enough in our reports that they do not escape the notice of even a half-acquainted modern reader (as opposed to the first-century medinan audiences, who deeply breathed the atmosphere of a tribally segmented society). thus, in an episode of the biʾr maʿūna account, anas b. mālik narrates the laudable sage of his uncle (khāl), ḥarām b. milḥān, and elsewhere there are ample clues in the story that render it a sage of the larger tribal group of anṣār (known also as “sons of qayla”).112 we shall now turn to the historical evidence on our stories’ sitz that argues in favor of their identification as sage. as juynboll has demonstrated, “most traditions brought into circulation by certain traditionists in early islam prompted contemporary or later traditionists, who were the adherents or, the case so being, adversaries of the former, to proliferate their own, more or less closely related, traditions.”113 as regards the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna narratives, real-life tribal rivalries have gone hand in hand with the proliferation of faḍāʾil motifs in the domain of historiography. what we have here, as will be argued, is a case of back-projection into the prophet’s history of faḍāʾil traditions by members of the aws (more precisely, the ʿamr b. ʿawf subdivision) and the khazraj (more specifically, the banū najjār branch) to bolster their claim of superiority in the formative period of islam.114 members of the aws and the khazraj tribes constituted, as arafat has observed, the majority amongst the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna expeditions, respectively.115 the most famous martyrs of al-rajīʿ, i.e., khubayb and ʿāṣim b. thābit, upon whose characters the sources’ glorifying traditions almost exclusively centered, belonged to ʿamr b. ʿawf.116 similarly, as a 112. see below in this section. 113. juynboll, “shuʿba b. al-ḥajjāj,” 193. 114. the aws and the khazraj were two major medinan tribal groups that were called banū qayla (after their eponymous mother) in pre-islamic times, but were designated as the anṣār (“the helpers”) following muḥammad’s immigration to medina. on the aws’ and the khazraj’s subdivisions, see watt, muhammad at medina, 154; michael lecker, muslims, jews, and pagans: studies on early islamic medina (leiden: brill, 1995), 5, 7. 115. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 16, 28. arafat, however, generally speaks of the preponderance of the aws and the khazraj in these expeditions and does not refer specifically to najjār and ʿamr b. ʿawf. moreover, he asserts that “the group [sent to al-rajīʿ] included none from the khazraj,” which is at odds with the traditional material, for only one member of the khazraj, i.e., zayd b. al-dathinna, was reportedly among the participants of this expedition. on him, see ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:170; ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-istīʿāb, 2:553; ibn ḥazm, jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1983), 375. 116. the great reverence shown by the tradition towards ʿāṣim b. thābit likely has much to do with his family relations with prominent political figures. he was the maternal uncle of ʿāṣim b. ʿumar b. al-khaṭṭāb and the latter was the maternal ancestor of the umayyad caliph ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz (ibn al-athīr, usd al-ghāba, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 289 glance at the biographical sources reveals, the members of the banū najjār were noticeably more numerous amongst the participants in the biʾr maʿūna raid.117 it has been reported that: “for no other companions of his did the prophet lament as he did for the people of biʾr maʿūna (aṣḥāb biʾr maʿūna).”118 the pronounced pro-najjārī/khazrajī tendency of this tradition comes to light when one takes into account the overwhelming numerical preponderance of the najjār (and the khazraj in general) at the day of biʾr maʿūna. moreover, of the companions whose alleged great exploits are recounted in the reports of biʾr maʿūna, two khazrajīs, namely ḥarām b. milḥān (of the najjār) and al-mundhir b. ʿamr (of the sāʿida with maternal kinship with the najjār119) take centre stage. the virtues of the so-called qurrāʾ (reciters) who were slain at biʾr maʿūna have been reported in various sīras and ḥadīth collections on the authority of anas b. mālik, himself a najjārī, who held these qurrāʾ, most particularly his uncle (khāl), ḥarām b. milḥān, in great esteem.120 having been raised to the status of saint-like figures, the qurrāʾ are described in the following terms: when it was evening they would gather on a side of medina, studying together and praying, until it was dawn. they would gather fresh water and firewood and bring it to the rooms of the messenger of god. their families thought that they were in the mosque, while the people in the mosque thought that they were with their families.121 the other participant of biʾr maʿūna to be highly venerated in the tradition is al-mundhir b. ʿamr, to whom the prophet is said to have given the epithet al-muʿniq li-yamūt, “the quick to seek death (viz., martyrdom).”122 it should be clear by now that the ʿamr b. ʿawf and banū najjār played the most active part at al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna respectively, or, at any rate, the tradition tended to single them out for extravagant praise. we may reasonably assume, therefore, that later tradents from these tribes would have incorporated similar faḍāʾil motifs into their al-rajīʿ and 3:11; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 1:428; ibn ḥazm, jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, 152; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 5:253; anthony, muhammad and the empires of faith, 129). ʿāṣim b. ʿumar’s mother, jamīla bt thābit is reported to have divorced ʿumar and married a man from her own clan (ḍubayʿa b. zayd of ʿamr b. ʿawf) named yazīd b. jāriya. ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz seems to have been on good terms with some of his maternal kin from ḍubayʿa b. zayd, as he appointed ʿabd al-raḥmān b. yazīd b. jāriya (i.e., the maternal brother of ʿāṣim b. ʿumar) as the qāḍī of medina (ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 5:62; ibn ḥajar al-ʿasqalānī, tahdhīb al-tahdhīb [beirut: dār al-fikr, 1984], 6:267). 117. as far as this author was able to count in various biographical compendia, there were fourteen najjārī participants at biʾr maʿūna. they can be said to have clearly outnumbered the members of other tribes viz., nabīt of the aws (with three participants), sāʿida of the khazraj (one), zurayq of the khazraj (four), ʿamr b. ʿawf of the aws (two, including a member and a client), and the muhājirūn (four). while this reckoning makes no claim for exhaustiveness, it sufficiently demonstrates the numerical majority of the najjār (and also the khazraj in general) in comparison with other tribes at biʾr maʿūna. 118. ibn ḥanbal, musnad, 3:111; maʿmar b. rāshid, al-maghāzī, 110. see also al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:345. 119. see arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 15. 120. ibn ḥanbal, musnad, 3:270; maʿmar b. rāshid, al-maghāzī, 110; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 3:390; muslim, ṣaḥīḥ, 6:45. 121. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:169. 122. ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:184; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:348. 290 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) biʾr maʿūna accounts to articulate the notion that their tribal background was no less praiseworthy than that of their rivals. remarkably, the tribally motivated concoction of the analogous “virtue” material in the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories is not a mere supposition implied by the sources, as there is direct evidence that one of the companions to whom the accounts of these expeditions ascribe spectacular feats and great miracles is in fact the very figure whose name is invoked elsewhere in the context of aws–khazraj, anṣār–quraysh, and muḍar–yemen,123 disputations and mufākharas, where each tribal entity strives to eulogize their ancestors, and in doing so, to substantiate their superior status at the dawn of islam. undoubtedly, this kind of representation by the traditionists of the past was in line with, and hence deeply tinged by, their contemporary needs and concerns. put another way, one of the manifestations of sectarian feuds at the time of the sīra’s collection and compilation (the late first and early second centuries of the islamic era) was the attribution by differing factions of extraordinary faḍāʾil to their progenitors and bragging about these alleged virtues in the face of the opposing party. perusal of these mufākhara materials is revealing in terms of the elucidation of the true nature of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories. it is reported that: the aws and the khazraj boasted over one another (iftakharat al-aws wa-l-khazraj). the aws said, “from us is ḥanẓala b. abī ʿāmir, the one washed by the angels (ghasīl al-malāʾika), and from us is the one protected by the wasps (man ḥamathu al-dabr, i.e.,ʿāṣim b. thābit),124 and from us is the one at whose death the throne shook (saʿd b. muʿādh) and from us is the one whose testimony was equivalent to the testimonies of two men (khuzayma b. thābit).” the khazraj then said, “from us are the four men who collected the qurʾān during the lifetime of the prophet: ubayy b. kaʿb, muʿādh b. jabal, zayd b. thābit, and abū zayd.”125 the symbolic scene of the aws’ invocation of, among others, ʿāṣim b. thābit in front of their arch-rivals, the khazraj, contains a valuable clue as to the significance for the aws of this figure in the context of their rivalries with the khazraj.126 it is worth highlighting that 123. the islamic genealogists categorize the arabs as the sons of ismāʾīl (northerners) and the sons of qaḥṭān (southerners). the latter group was also referred to as al-yamaniyya (yemenis). of the northerners, the most prominent subdivision was the progeny of one of ismāʾīl’s descendants named muḍar. the qaysiyya, the descendants of qays, one of muḍar’s offspring, also received specific attention in the sources, see patricia crone, “were the qays and yemen of the umayyad period political parties?” der islam 71, no. 1 (1994): 1–57, at 2. 124. he is reported as saying in his last moments, “o god, i defended your religion from the first light, so protect my flesh at the end of the day.” in fulfillment of his aspiration, god sends a swarm of wasps to prevent the polytheists from getting access to his body; see al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:174. 125. this tradition appears with minor variants in al-ṭabarānī, al-muʿjam al-kabīr, ed. ḥamdī ʿabd al-majīd (beirut: 1404 ah), 4:10; ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-istīʿāb, 1:382; ibn al-athīr, usd al-ghāba, 5:128; ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 16:368. 126. there is ample evidence that the pre-islamic aws-khazraj feuds endured well into the islamic period; see hasson, “contributions à l’étude des aws et des ḫazraǧ,” 29–31. see also abū al-faraj al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, n.d.), 3:29, where the renowned singer of the umayyad period, ṭuways (d. 92/711), is said to have renewed by his provocative verses the hostilities between the aws and the khazraj. it is by no means surprising, then, that such a drawn-out conflict would have left its vestiges on the al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 291 among the companions mentioned in this tradition, both the ʿamr b. ʿawf and najjār have two representatives. ʿāṣim and ḥanẓala belonged to the former, and ubayy b. kaʿb and zayd b. thābit were from the latter.127 no doubt, these invocations were intended to resonate with, and had a clear meaning for, their contemporary medinan audiences. some genealogical remarks would be useful here to explicate the tribal interests behind the aggrandizement of ʿāṣim and ḥanẓala, and also khubayb. ʿāṣim b. thābit belonged to the ḍubayʿa b. zayd clan of ʿamr b. ʿawf. of the same clan was ḥanẓala al-ghasīl, who was also ʿāṣim b. thābit’s maternal uncle.128 given the prominence of matrilineal ties in arabian society,129 it is easy to see why the names of ʿāṣim b. thābit and ḥanẓala al-ghasīl came to be so firmly associated with each other in the tradition. the renowned anṣārī poet of the umayyad period, al-aḥwaṣ (d. ca. 105/723), who was of ʿāṣim b. thābit’s progeny,130 boasts in a poem of his “father” (i.e.,ʿāṣim) “whose flesh the wasps protected” and of his “uncle” (khāl) “who was washed by the angels.”131 tellingly, ʿāṣim b. thābit’s wife was of the banū jaḥjabā, a clan of the ʿamr b. ʿawf, of which khubayb was a member.132 due to the bonds of kinship on both the maternal and paternal side, ʿāṣim b. thābit’s offspring had ample reason to extol ʿāṣim and khubayb, leaving us with an image of saintly martyrs whose historical characters have been buried underneath the overlays of pious inventions. what renders the hypothesis of the ʿamr b. ʿawf–najjār rivalry all the more tenable is the fact that the parallelism in the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories is not the sole example of these tribes’ vying with one another in the realm of literature. there are more instances of ʿamr b. ʿawf–najjār polemics, including their both claiming one and the same “virtue” for their own tribe. the identification of the mosque alluded to in q 9:108 (“the mosque founded upon god-fearing”), as lecker aptly notes, has provoked considerable controversy amongst “the aws and khazraj, or perhaps more specifically, the ʿamr b. ʿawf and the najjār.” the mosque in question, according to the “aws/ʿamr b. ʿawf claim,” is the qubāʾ mosque, historiography of formative islam. 127. on ʿāṣim and ḥanẓala’s lineage, see, for example, ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-istīʿāb, 2:779, and ibn al-athīr, usd al-ghāba, 1:543; and on ubayy and zayd, see ibn ʿabd al-barr, al-istīʿāb, 1:65, and ibn al-athīr, usd al-ghāba, 2:126. 128. see ibn ḥazm, jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, 333. 129. on the somewhat undervalued “significance of matrilineal kinship and marital links,” see asad q. ahmed, the religious elite of the early islamic ḥijāz: five prosopographical case studies (oxford: prosopographica et genealogica, 2011), 12–13. see also watt, muhammad at medina, 273, who observes that “the material on which we are dependent was written down at a time when the patrilineal system had superseded the matrilineal, and that the writers therefore tend to exaggerate the patrilineal features.” 130. he was ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad b. ʿabd allāh b. ʿāṣim b. thābit; see ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 32:198; al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, 4:411; ibn qutayba al-dīnawarī, kitāb al-shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarā, ed. aḥmad muḥammad shākir (cairo: dār al-ḥadīth, 2006), 1:509. on him see also everett k. rowson, “the effeminates of early medina,” journal of the american oriental society 111, no. 4 (1991): 671–93, at 686–92. 131. al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, 4:411; al-bakrī, muʿjam mā istaʿjam, ed. m. al-saqqā (beirut: ʿ ālam al-kutub, 1403 ah), 2:642. 132. ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 3:352; ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 32:198. on the “closely-knit” clan of banū jaḥjabā, see watt, muhammad at medina, 162. 292 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) while on the basis of the “khazraj/najjār contention” it is none other than “the mosque of the prophet, which was on khazrajī soil.” 133 the roots of the controversy that shrouds the evidence concerning the leadership of the anṣār at the battle of al-ḥarra must likewise be sought in ʿamr b. ʿawf–najjār antagonism. it is not coincidental that while certain accounts mention ʿabd allāh b. ḥanẓala al-ghasīl (of ʿamr b. ʿawf) as commanding the anṣār, other reports speak of muḥammad b. ʿamr b. ḥazm (of najjār) as having been the anṣār’s commander.134 the final, and perhaps most vivid, exemplification of deep-seated ʿamr b. ʿawf–najjār rancor lies in the bitter accusation of complicity in the murder of ʿuthmān b. ʿaffān leveled by ʿamr b. ʿawf against the najjār. particularly noteworthy in this respect are the elegies on ʿuthmān, allegedly recited by ḥassān b. thābit, the famous poet of the banū najjār.135 in one of these poems, he rebukes his own tribe, the najjār, for their treachery against ʿuthmān and expressly lauds the ʿamr b. ʿawf for “fulfilling their vow” (awfat banū ʿamr b. ʿawf nadhrahā wa-talawwathat ghadran banū al-najjār).136 the historical background of the poem is of great importance. the reason for ḥassān praising ʿamr b. ʿawf and lampooning his own tribe is their supposed role in the circumstances surrounding the assassination of the third caliph. during the siege of ʿuthmān, it is reported that al-zubayr sent his client to the caliph to inform him of his loyalty and that of the banū ʿamr b. ʿawf towards the caliph, and of ʿamr b. ʿawf’s consent to defend ʿuthmān against the besiegers. the attackers, however, killed ʿuthmān before the ʿamr b. ʿawf arrive.137 the rebels are said to have broken the siege and reached the caliph through the house of ʿuthmān’s neighbor, ʿamr b. ḥazm (of the najjār).138 in another poem, ḥassān addresses zayd b. thābit, the “chief of banū al-najjār,” and asks him to protect his people from committing a grievous sin (viz., the caliph’s murder).139 arafat adduces a persuasive body of evidence that calls the 133. lecker, muslims, jews, and pagans, 79. 134. as for ʿabd allāh b. ḥanẓala, see al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 5:324; al-yaʿqūbī, taʾrīkh (beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d.), 2:251; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 5:49; gernot rotter, die umayyaden und der zweite bürgerkrieg (680–692) (wiesbaden: deutsche morgenländische gesellschaft, 1982), 47. on muḥammad b. ʿamr b. ḥazm, see ibn ḥibbān, kitāb al-thiqāt (hyderabad: dāʾirat al-maʿārif al-ʿuthmāniyya, n.d.), 5:347; ibn ḥajar, tahdhīb al-tahdhīb, 9:329. on the contradictory nature of the evidence on the anṣār’s leadership at the battle of al-ḥarra, see lecker, muslims, jews, and pagans, 111. 135. ḥassān b. thābit is the most famous of several companions reputed for their poetic career. while traditionally known as muḥammad’s “poet laureate,” ḥassān had reportedly attained considerable fame already during the jāhiliyya, composing panegyrics for the lakhmid and ghassānid kings. see walid arafat, “ḥassān b. thābit,” in encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al. (leiden: brill, 1954–2009). 136. walid arafat, “the historical background to the elegies on ʿuthmān b. ʿaffān,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 33, no.1 (1970): 276–82, at 277; ḥassān b. thābit, dīwān, ed. w. arafat (london: e. j. w. gibb memorial series, 1971), no. clvii; ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 39:542. 137. arafat, “the historical background,” 281; wilfred madelung, the succession to muhammad: a study of the early caliphate (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004), 105. 138. ibn shabba, taʾrīkh al-madīna al-munawwara, ed. fahīm muḥammad shaltūt (beirut: dār al-fikr, 1410 ah), 4:1279; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 5:591; arafat, “the historical background,” 281; madelung, the succession, 128, 374. 139. arafat, “the historical background,” 277. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 293 ascription of these poems to ḥassān into question. according to arafat, the forger betrays his ulterior intentions when he forgets “how illogical it would be for ḥassān to slander his own tribe so viciously on such feeble grounds, to praise an awsite clan without a very good cause.”140 it is almost certain that the panegyric poetry in praise of the ʿamr b. ʿawf is not recited by the najjārī ḥassān, but by a forger from ʿamr b. ʿawf, who shows his hand by the fulsome admiration he expresses for his own clan. this artificial glorification of the ʿamr b. ʿawf by ḥassān is likewise discernable in the narratives of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna, which are embellished by a large number of ḥassān’s tragic elegies on khubayb, a man of ʿamr b. ʿawf with no kinship to the poet, but contain only “one line in one poem” in lamentation of al-mundhir b. ʿamr, a man from the khazraj who was ḥassān’s maternal cousin.141 the true provenance of the elegies on ʿuthmān is unveiled by a vituperative poem composed by al-aḥwaṣ, ʿamr b. ʿawf’s famous poet. he says: “do not be moved with pity for a ḥazmī if you see poverty in him or even if the ḥazmī has been thrown into the fire. those who pricked the mule of marwān at dhū khushub, the invaders of ʿuthmān’s house.”142 thus the very allegation of treachery that (pseudo-)ḥassān makes against the banū najjār (more specifically against the ḥazmīs) is the central thread of al-aḥwaṣ’ satiric verse. this does not seem to leave room for doubt that the severe reprimand that the najjār receive in the elegies on ʿuthmān is to be attributed to a forger from the ʿamr b. ʿawf,143 who simply put his words into the mouth of the prestigious poet of the banū najjār, ḥassān b. thābit.144 140. ibid., 282. 141. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 19. 142. al-ṭabarī, the history of al-ṭabarī, vol. 29, al-manṣūr and al-mahdī: a.d. 763–786/a.h. 146–169, trans. hugh kennedy (albany, ny: state university of new york press, 1990), 125. the poem is attested likewise in al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, 1:54; ibn shabba, taʾrīkh al-madīna, 4:1279. 143. some (though not all) of the sources maintain that these verses belonged originally to a poet of tamīm whose poem ḥassān ascribed to himself (tanaḥḥala); see, for example, ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 39:542. however, it is hardly credible that a tamīmī poet would have engaged in polemical controversies between the medinan tribes. this is hardly what one would envisage as regards arabian tribal society. given that these verses tally perfectly with the late first-/seventh-century satiric poems recited by a member of ʿamr b. ʿawf to denigrate the banū najjār, it makes much more sense to attribute them to a later source belonging to the ʿamr b. ʿawf tribe. 144. on the traces of professional forgeries in the sīra’s poems, attributed to various early islamic figures, including ḥassān, see walid arafat, “an aspect of the forger’s art in early islamic poetry,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 28, no. 3 (1965): 476–82, at 478; idem, “the historical significance of later anṣārī poetry – i,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 29, no. 1 (1966): 1–11. towards the end of his review of the edition of ḥassān b. thābit’s dīwān edited by arafat, kister offers some critical hints on arafat’s assessment of anṣārī poetry. while kister’s criticism is on the whole justifiable, one of the points he raises deserves comment. he asserts that “a poem that contains boasting with regard to the ancestors of the anṣār does not necessarily indicate that the poem is forged” (meir jacob kister, “on a new edition of the dīwān of ḥassān b. thābit,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 39 [1976]: 265–86, at 284–6). a priori, there would seem to be no reason to impugn kister’s contention. however, this essay’s negative observations, along with some recent critical studies on tribal/family accounts, appear to offer no room for charitable reading of the tribal and family traditions in general, and of the anṣārī poetry in particular; see, for instance, shoemaker, “in search of ʿurwa’s sīra,” 337–8, and roohi, “between history and ancestral lore,” 425–72, esp. 454–64. 294 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) worth pondering here is the fact that al-aḥwaṣ was on decidedly acrimonious terms with abū bakr b. muḥammad b. ʿamr b. ḥazm, the qāḍī and governor of medina.145 al-aḥwaṣ is said to have frequently expressed his invective against ibn ḥazm by calling him “ibn ḥazm b. fartanā” (fartanā was reportedly a prostitute during the pre-islamic era),146 and ibn ḥazm is reported to have given al-aḥwaṣ one hundred lashes, poured oil on his head, and paraded him in humiliation before the populace of medina. the antagonism between al-aḥwaṣ and his “inveterate enemy,” ibn ḥazm, reached its climax when the latter sent al-aḥwaṣ into a five-year exile on the red sea island of dahlak, at the end of which caliph yazīd ii pardoned him due to the intervention of al-zuhrī, the well-known partisan of the umayyads.147 this conflict appears to have had far-reaching consequences and to have continued unabated up until the caliphate of al-manṣūr. a medinan deputation received by al-manṣūr in baghdad is said to have included “a young man of the descendants of ʿamr b. ḥazm” who brings his complaint to the caliph, saying, “o commander of the faithful, al-aḥwaṣ recited a poem about us148 and we were deprived of our wealth sixty years ago because of it.” al-manṣūr orders him to read the poem and is finally persuaded to return the estates of the banū ḥazm.149 in reviling the banū ḥazm for their alleged involvement in ʿuthmān’s murder, al-aḥwaṣ can be said to have looked at the past from the viewpoint of the present. as a historical testimony, al-aḥwaṣ’s verses are, then, more informative about the sectarian strife of the late first/seventh century than the first half of the century. similarly, it seems highly likely that these very same ʿamr b. ʿawf–najjār polemics can be seen in the formation of the parallel virtue motifs that are projected back to the events of the prophet’s era, the raids of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna. though initially intended as aws–khazraj polemics, the invocation of the martyrs of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna and description of their extraordinary merits transcended the 145. a descendant of the companion ʿamr b. ḥazm, who was faced with the charge of treachery against ʿuthmān, abū bakr b. ḥazm was the qāḍī of medina during the caliphate of walīd b. ʿabd al-malik. when ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz succeeded to the caliphate, he appointed abū bakr as governor. on this figure, see antoine borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir: l’espace syrien sous les derniers omeyyades et les premiers abbassides (v. 72–193/692–809) (leiden: brill, 2011), 310; steven c. judd, religious scholars and the umayyads: piety-minded supporters of the marwānid caliphate (london: routledge, 2014), 153–4; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 5:335–6; and ibn ḥazm, jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, 348. 146. see michael lecker, “ʿamr ibn ḥazm al-anṣārī and qurʾān 2,256: ‘no compulsion is there in religion’,” oriens 35 (1996): 57–64, at 58; al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, 4:419. 147. rowson, “the effeminates of early medina,” 687; horovitz, the earliest biographies of the prophet, 56; ibn ʿ asākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 32:208; al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, 4:427. it is probably not accidental that the same al-zuhrī, as recent research has demonstrated, had the leading role in the dissemination of the al-rajīʿ story: see juynboll, encyclopedia of canonical ḥadīth (leiden: brill, 2007), 718; boekhoff-van der voort, “the raid of the banū hudhayl,” 305–82. after all, the narratives of al-rajīʿ were an important part of the ancestral pride of ʿamr b. ʿawf, with whom the caliph ʿumar b. ʿabd al-ʿazīz had family ties. it is not hard to envisage that the ardent supporter of the umayyads, al-zuhrī, would have been behind the admiration of the umayyad caliph’s maternal kin. on al-zuhrī’s adherence to the umayyads, see michael lecker, “biographical notes on ibn shihāb al-zuhrī,” journal of semitic studies 41, no. 1 (1996): 21–63; borrut, entre mémoire et pouvoir, 73–6; anthony, muhammad and the empires of faith, 132–7. 148. i.e., the above-quoted poem accusing them of ʿuthmān’s murder 149. al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh (trans. kennedy), 29:125. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 295 boundaries of intra-medinan tribal disputes, gaining special prominence in the wider polemical context, the anṣār–quraysh and muḍar–yemen mufākharas. despite the active part they played during muḥammad’s days, the anṣār never achieved political power comparable to that of the quraysh in the decades after the prophet’s death.150 it was only in the realm of the ḥadīth and the sīra that the anṣār strove to secure their share of glory.151 it is reported, via baṣran isnāds,152 that no single arabian tribe (ḥayyan min aḥyāʾ al-ʿarab) had more martyrs than the anṣār, of whom seventeen were slain at the day of uḥud, seventeen at the day of biʾr maʿūna, and seventeen at the day of yamāma.153 to substantiate their claim to leadership of the islamic community after the prophet’s death, the anṣār purportedly boasted in the hall (saqīfa) of the banū sāʿida of their most influential figures, amongst whom are numbered the names of “the one whose flesh the wasps protected” and “the one washed by the angels.”154 it is these very martyrs whose names are invoked in a gathering held in caliph al-saffāḥ’s palace, where the members of muḍar and yemen enumerated their ancestor’s glorious feats.155 shared episodes in accounts of al-rajīʿ and umayyad-era movements: literary form and life-setting as is the case with the great bulk of the sīra material, the narratives of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna are of a heterogonous nature, with each portion being of its own provenance and having its own ulterior motives.156 the parallelism between al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna, and in ʿamr b. ʿawf–najjār polemics discussed so far pertains to the first half of the al-rajīʿ story, viz., prior to khubayb’s captivity. the imprisonment of khubayb is something of a turning point in the al-rajīʿ narratives, as from this point onwards, the story bears many more parallels with reports of umayyad-era revolts than the account of biʾr maʿūna. from arafat’s 150. aside from some notable examples like zayd b. thābit and muḥammad b. maslama, the number of anṣār who enjoyed great political prominence or had close ties to the qurashī ruling circle was demonstrably exiguous. abū bakr b. muḥammad b. ʿamr b. ḥazm, the grandson of the companion ʿamr b. ḥazm, was the first among the anṣār to be appointed as governor (horovitz, the earliest biographies of the prophet, 41). the scarcity of the anṣār among those whose names are reported as medinan estate owners in the umayyad era is bitterly ironic, and perhaps equally striking is that when we sporadically hear of an anṣārī’s land ownership, it is in the context of such staunch partisans of the umayyads as abū bakr b. ḥazm, whose landholding is known to us only in the context of the confiscation of his estates by al-walīd b. ʿabd al-malik; see harry munt, “caliphal estates and properties around medina in the umayyad period,” in authority and control in the countryside: from antiquity to islam in the mediterranean and near east (sixth-tenth century), ed. a. delattre, m. legendre, and p. sijpesteijn, 432–63 (leiden: brill, 2019), 435. 151. see juynboll, “shuʿba b. al-ḥajjāj,” 206; arafat, “the historical significance of later anṣārī poetry – i,” 1–3. 152. on basra as the “bulwark of anṣār-supported traditions” see juynboll, “shuʿba b. al-ḥajjāj,” 212. 153. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:350; al-bukhārī, ṣaḥīḥ, 5:38; al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:277. 154. al-wāqidī, kitāb al-ridda, ed. y. al-jubūrī (beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1990), 45. 155. ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 16:105. on the antagonism between muḍar and yemen, see hawting, the first dynasty of islam, 53–55, 73–76; crone, “were the qays and yemen of the umayyad period political parties?”. 156. cf. pavlovitch, “the sīra,” 66. 296 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) standpoint, it was shīʿī or shīʿī-sympathizer traditionists “who saw the parallel between the killing and crucifixion of khubayb and the sufferings of the various descendants of ʿalī.”157 but, as already shown here, the narrative motifs that fashion khubayb’s tale have parallels outside the corpus of the shīʿī tradition. one cannot, therefore, assign a specific role to the shīʿīs for “canonizing” the anṣārī martyr, khubayb. furthermore, it has been pointed out that parallelism in the genre of faḍāʾil, which means the attribution of one and the same “virtue” to different individuals, is shaped mostly in polemical milieus. it is highly implausible, therefore, that a shīʿī narrator would have utilized the very martyrological motifs used of al-ḥusayn and zayd b. ʿalī (with their extreme sensitivity in shīʿī eyes) to embroider the story of khubayb. there is evidence to the effect that the faḍāʾil of both anṣārī and shīʿī martyrs were sometimes recounted in polemical milieus, central in which was the issue of ancestral pride.158 for example, al-aḥwaṣ is reported to have once been in sukayna bt al-ḥusayn’s presence when they heard the chanting of the adhān (call to prayer). when the muʾadhdhin said: “i testify that muḥammad is the messenger of god,” she started boasting about her illustrious pedigree, which prompted al-aḥwaṣ to praise his forefather and uncle, i.e.,ʿāṣim b. thābit and ḥanẓala al-ghasīl (fakharat sukayna bi-l-nabī fa-fākharahā bi-jaddihi wa-khālihi).159 this makes it clear that the mental preoccupation behind the ʿāṣimvenerating episode of the al-rajīʿ story is consanguinity and blood relationship, and that one may safely speak here of ʿāṣim’s sage (despite the abundance in his story of miraculous happenings). of note in this context is also a piece of evidence preserved by al-ṭabarī. according to him, when zayd b. ʿalī’s head was brought to medina, an anṣārī poet recited in front of it: “o violator of the covenant, rejoice in what has brought you disaster! you have violated the trust and the covenant. you are steeped in wrongdoing. satan has broken faith over what he promised you.”160 therefore, the correspondence between khubayb’s heart-rending tale and the (pro-)ʿalid rebels’ tragic dramas seems to owe its existence, pace arafat, to pro-anṣārī tradents, not to the “shīʿītes or narrators with shīʿī tendencies.”161 given the wide cluster of common themes used by muslim and non-muslim sects to “lionize their martyred heroes,”162 it would seem safer to suppose that the literary character of the anṣārī 157. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 30. 158. though the pro-ʿalid leaning was discernable amongst the anṣār as early as the rāshidūn caliphate, they were in no way unanimous in backing the ʿalids. on the anṣārīs who did not give their allegiance to ʿalī, see maya yazigi, “ʿalī, muḥammad, and the anṣār: the issue of succession,” journal of semitic studies 53, no. 2 (2008): 279–303, at 302. 159. al-iṣfahānī, kitāb al-aghānī, 4:417. even if we tend not to take the anecdote’s finer points of detail at face value, the wider context that the account takes for granted, i.e., the shīʿī–anṣārī polemical encounter, sounds historical. 160. al-ṭabarī, the history of al-ṭabarī, vol. 26, the waning of the umayyad caliphate: prelude to revolution, a.d. 738–745/a.h. 121–127, trans. carole hillenbrand (albany, ny: state university of new york press, 1989), 52. 161. arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 30. 162. sahner, christian martyrs under islam, 251. also see in this respect, khalek, “‘he was tall and slender,’” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 297 martyr of the al-rajīʿ story has its provenance in the martyrological materials which were in vogue equally amongst non-muslims and muslims, including (but not exclusively) the shīʿīs. a diachronic assessment of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna accounts the oral tales of those massacred at al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna, as recounted in the quarters of medina by the events’ contemporaries, seem to have little to do with the elaborate written accounts of the second/eighthand third/ninth-century biographers of the prophet. the analysis of the historical evolution of a narrative is one of form criticism’s essential functions, for which some criteria have been postulated. it is conventionally presumed, for instance, that the more concise texts are the earlier ones.163 additionally, more archaic recensions are often assumed to be profane in character, leaving more questions unanswered, more critical points unexplained, and more problematic matters exposed. eventually, though, the equivocal points are elucidated, and problematic facts are glossed over in more recent texts in response to changing life-settings and emerging ideological or apologetic needs.164 it is noticeable that both the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories underwent a metamorphosis from utterly mundane accounts to highly embellished hagiographies and martyrologies. for both expeditions, there are two rival depictions of the event at work—one calling the participants mere scouting contingents (ʿuyūn) and the other introducing them as “holy bands” dispatched for proselytizing purposes. the former version of both stories appears to be the archaic stratum of our extant material. regarding al-rajīʿ, the account attributed to ʿurwa b. al-zubayr simply states that “the messenger of god sent the companions of al-rajīʿ as spies to mecca to inform him of the quraysh. they went towards al-najdiyya until they reached al-rajīʿ, where the banū liḥyān confronted them.”165 this report fulfills virtually all the criteria: it is truly succinct and demonstrably mundane, and must be very close to the “original” story. here, there is no mention whatsoever of the martyrs’ extraordinary feats, nor do we even hear of the mere idea of their proselytizing mission or the mendacious ʿaḍal and al-qāra, let alone khubayb’s miracles and pietistic deeds.166 ʿurwa’s account is also 105–23. 163. see koch, the growth of the biblical tradition, 126; graves, “form criticism or a rolling corpus,” 55. however, this is not always the case with the islamic literary tradition: see pavel pavlovitch, “dating,” in the wiley blackwell concise companion to the hadith, ed. d. w. brown, 113‒32 (hoboken, nj: wiley-blackwell, 2020), 122–3. 164. gerhard von rad, genesis: a commentary, trans. w. l. jenkins (philadelphia, pa: the westminster press, 1972), 227–8; claus westermann, genesis 12–36: a commentary, trans. john j. scullion (minneapolis, mn: augsburg, 1985), 161; koch, the growth of the biblical tradition,122–7; graves, “form criticism or a rolling corpus,” 55. 165. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:173. see also maʿmar b. rāshid, al-maghāzī, 60, where the members of the expedition are said to have been spies. 166. on the archaic style of a portion of the traditions ascribed to ʿurwa, see andreas görke, “prospects and limits,” 145–6. on the “matter-of-fact” fashion of ʿ urwa’s epistles, see görke and schoeler, die ältesten berichte, 287. 298 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) opaque in many respects, noteworthy among which is the actual reason behind hudhayl’s deep hostility towards the muslims. our earlier evidence’s silence notwithstanding, al-wāqidī avers that in slaying the muslims at al-rajīʿ, the hudhalīs actually took vengeance for their leader, sufyān b. khālid, who had been assassinated at the prophet’s instigation. here, the historically questionable murder of sufyān b. khālid167 functions as a pseudocause to explain what earlier versions of the al-rajīʿ massacre left unresolved. but the hasty and superficial link al-wāqidī created between the massacre of al-rajīʿ and the assassination of sufyān b. khālid (which seems to be grounded on nothing beyond the mere common hudhalī affiliations of the actors of two entirely separate stories) placed him, as we have seen, in an obvious predicament, eventuating an overt inconsistency in his chronology of the prophet’s expeditions. the crucifixion of khubayb also deserves particular attention. as emphasized by previous scholarship, the crucifixion did not appear in al-zuhrī’s account of khubayb’s execution, which says merely that the meccans “killed him (qatalahu).”168 this stands in stark contrast to ibn isḥāq’s “acute focus on the details and narratives of khubayb’s death.”169 in his crucifixion and death, anthony sets out to appraise the authenticity of the reports of earlyislamic crucifixions, whose “most vivid example” is the case of khubayb. the sīra’s sourcecritical problems, however, do not allow anthony to reach a firm conclusion. though seeing in the sīra “a wealth of archaic data” and assigning the reports of khubayb’s crucifixion to “the earliest, initial strata of the genre,” anthony concedes the possibility of “anachronistic embellishments in the khubayb story.” khubayb’s tale, he says, tallies with the “normative descriptions” of crucifixion as detailed by late-umayyad and early-abbasid jurists. not only do the finer minutiae of the story of khubayb’s death sound highly suspicious, but the sources do not permit anthony to acknowledge even the historicity of “the raw ‘fact’” of khubayb’s crucifixion.170 the form-critical analysis undertaken in the present essay may allow us to make a somewhat more confident contention concerning the historical value of reports of khubayb’s crucifixion. it has been argued that the accounts of khubayb’s imprisonment and death are an amalgamation of the motifs found in the stories of the insurrections that happened during the umayyad caliphate. that the crucifixion episode, the apex of khubayb’s story, does not feature in the version of al-zuhrī cannot be a fortuitous coincidence. the construction of the al-rajīʿ story was an ongoing process of augmentation, commencing in the form of ʿurwa b. al-zubayr’s matter-of-fact account, to which significant additions were subsequently made over the course of time. it is not unexpected, then, that the crucifixion motif made its way to ibn isḥāq’s sīra after the death of al-zuhrī in 124/742,171 167. see roohi, “between history and ancestral lore,” 458–9. 168. anthony, crucifixion, 36; boekhoff-van der voort, “the raid of the banū hudhayl,” 372. 169. anthony, crucifixion, 36. 170. ibid., 37. 171. and most probably before ibn isḥāq left his native medina at the beginning of the abbasid caliphate (given the medinan/pro-anṣārī character of the al-rajīʿ story). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 299 the year preceding hishām b. ʿabd al-malik’s (r. 105-125/723–43) death.172 turning to look at the historical circumstances during the time of and immediately following al-zuhrī’s death would be revealing, as the events occurring in this period might have been mirrored in the al-rajīʿ story. hishām’s two-decade-long reign witnessed a considerable number of insurgents’ crucifixions. the qadarī heretic ghaylān of damascus was crucified sometime between 115/733 and 117/735.173 zayd b. ʿalī met a similar fate a couple of years later.174 zayd’s rebellion against the umayyads’ authority was remarkable enough to end up even in non-muslim sources. agapius of manbij and elias of nisibis allot a very terse entry to zayd’s revolt, but the event receives more detailed treatment in the syriac chronicle of 1234 in which, aside from the chronological hints, we hear of the disloyalty of zayd’s entourage (ḥaḏ men aylēn d-sām ʿammeh tanway lā ʿaḏreh) and the disgraceful nature of the umayyads’ deed of slaying a man who was a descendant of their own prophet (men šarbṯēh da-nḇīyā dīlhun muḥammad).175 moreover, according to the chronicle of zuqnīn, it was during hishām’s caliphate that an imposter (maṭʿyānā) named severus176 appeared in the west (arʿā d-maʿrḇā) and seduced many jews. this false messiah is reported to have been crucified by the consent of the caliph at the hands of his former supporters who “made him suffer all kinds of tortures and injuries (koll šendē wa ulṣānē).”177 some other well-known rebels were crucified in the period between the caliphate of hishām’s successor, al-walīd b. yazīd (r. 125-126/743-744), and the end of umayyad dynasty in 132/750. yaḥyā b. zayd, judayʿ b. ʿalī al-kirmānī, and the khārijī rebel abū ḥamza are but certain noteworthy examples.178 to this list we may add david of dwin who, though being crucified some twenty years before the beginning of hishām b. ʿabd al-malik’s caliphate, is nonetheless of particular concern to 172. that is perhaps why the narratives of khubayb’s crucifixion tallies precisely with “the trending normative descriptions in the discussions of crucifixion in islamic legal discourse” (anthony, crucifixion, 36). 173. anthony, crucifixion, 76. 174. zayd’s crucifixion has variously been dated by the chroniclers between 120/738 and 122/740 (al-ṭabarī, taʾrīkh, 7:160; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 5:251; al-masʿūdī, murūj, 3:206), and al-zuhrī’s death is reported to have been in 124/742 (khalīfa b. khayyāṭ, taʾrīkh [beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1995], 231; al-balādhurī, ansāb al-ashrāf, 10:48; ibn saʿd, al-ṭabaqāt, 5:356). 175. agapius of menbij, kitāb al-ʿunwān, ed. and trans. alexander vasiliev (turnhout: brepols, 1912), 509; elias of nisibis, eliae metropolitae nisibeni, opus chronologicum, ed. e. w. brooks and j. b. chabot (paris: n.p., 1909–10), 2:168; j. b. chabot, chronicon ad annum 1234, csco 81 (paris: l’académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 1920), 1:312. theophilus of edessa’s lost chronicle seems to have been the ultimate source of this account; see robert hoyland, theophilus of edessa’s chronicle and the circulation of historical knowledge in late antiquity and early islam (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2011), 235. on “the moral impact” of the killing of zayd as a descendant of muḥammad, see khaled abou el fadl, rebellion and violence in islamic law (new york: cambridge university press, 2001), 72. 176. he has been identified by anthony with the above-mentioned shepherd of damascus (anthony, “who was the shepherd of damascus?,” 46). 177. j. b. chabot, ed., incerti auctoris chronion pseudo-dionysianum vulgo dictum, csco 91 (louvain: peeters, 1927), 2:174; amir harrak, trans., the chronicle of zuqnīn parts iii and iv, a.d. 488–775 (toronto: pontifical institute of mediaeval studies, 1999), 164. 178. ibn ḥabīb, al-muḥabbar, 484; marsham, “public execution in the umayyad period,” 135–6. 300 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) us in that his crucifixion account (like that of zayd b. ʿalī) had strikingly similar motifs to khubayb’s martyrology.179 it is plausible that, inspired by the numerous crucifixions of the rebels of the time, the (pro-)anṣārī tradents incorporated the crucifixion episode into the story of the historically obscure khubayb. the participation of khubayb in the battle of badr and his killing of al-ḥārith b. ʿāmir (and hence the very “rationale for [khubayb’s] murder”) is extremely dubious, as is the “raw” fact of his crucifixion. by contrast, the crucifixions of the famed rebels of the umayyad time are undoubtedly historical. it makes sense thus to assume that these dissidents’ destiny was a source of inspiration for the crucifixion episode in the story of the enigmatic khubayb. naturally, the ornate account of khubayb’s crucifixion was unlikely to have appeared in the report of al-zuhrī, who died right at the time, or rather shortly after, some of these tragic events were unfolding. some time would have had to pass such that the traditionists, now seeing the late-umayyad crucifixions in retrospect, recognized these incidents as fitting for the elaboration of the story of al-rajīʿ. the pious endeavors of the (pro-)anṣārī tradents blossomed, therefore, in ibn isḥāq’s recension of khubayb’s narrative. the accounts of biʾr maʿūna seem to have likewise gone through a process of modification and elaboration, changing from a more mundane portrayal to an ideologically embellished report. the muslim party sent by muḥammad is said, in some portrayals of the event, to have been “his spy in najd” (ʿaynan lahu fī ahl najd).180 the later versions, however, elevate these ʿuyūn above the level of ordinary people, representing them as a group of divinely chosen individuals, with the appellation of qurrāʾ, who spend the whole night in prayer and provide fresh water for the prophet at dawn, without any of their contemporaries being aware of their great spiritual eminence.181 it is in the same spirit of embellishment that the number of biʾr maʿūna’s victims is rounded up to forty/seventy, as are the numbers of the anṣārī martyrs in the battles of uḥud and yamāma. as opposed to these “appealing numbers,”182 muqātil b. sulaymān’s “demonstrably ancient” account speaks of twenty-seven martyrs at biʾr maʿūna.183 these aggrandizing endeavors pertain to a period wherein the members of the aws and the khazraj had long ceased to be of political prominence and had nothing to be proud of except the genuine and fictitious glories of their ancestors.184 179. according to sahner, “there is strong internal evidence that the biography [of david] was written shortly after the martyr’s death,” viz., not too remote from the time when the foregoing late-umayyad crucifixions had taken place. sahner argues plausibly that various factions “had recourse to the same hagiographic motifs in order to lionize their martyred heroes” (see sahner, christian martyrs under islam, 93, 251). 180. al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:343; ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 26:101; kister, “biʾr maʿūna,” 340. 181. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:347; ibn ḥanbal, musnad, 3:235; ibn ʿasākir, taʾrīkh madīnat dimashq, 26:102. 182. see lawrence i. conrad, “seven and the tasbīʿ: on the implications of numerical symbolism for the study of medieval islamic history,” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 31 (1988): 42–73. 183. juynboll, encyclopedia of canonical ḥadīth, 291. see also al-samarqandī, tafsīr, 3:423, where eighteen of the anṣār and muhājirūn are said to have been dispatched to najd; and ibn ḥabīb, al-muḥabbar, 118, where the author gives the number of the participants as twenty-six from the anṣār and four from the muhājirūn. 184. arafat assigns, rightly it seems, the genesis of the anṣār aggrandizing traditions to the period following the battle of al-ḥarra (arafat, “the historical significance of later anṣārī poetry – i,” 1). al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 301 one of the main alterations introduced in the course of time to the biʾr maʿūna story concerns the presence of the muhājirūn in this expedition, a point that the tradition takes pains to repudiate. of muhājirūn participation at biʾr maʿūna there is not a word in some early sīra compendia, and when this point finally appears in al-wāqidī’s account, it is emphatically rejected by the author who insists that “only the anṣār were with the raid.”185 notwithstanding the tendency on the part of the sīra scholars to gloss over or reject the participation of the muhājirūn (most particularly saʿd b. abī waqqāṣ) in biʾr maʿūna, their presence in the sariyya is confirmed in the tafsīr sources. the account given in the sīra avers that ʿamr b. umayya and a certain anṣārī did not accompany the main group and “were with the camels at pasture.”186 the tafsīr counter-tradition includes saʿd among those who “lost their camel” (aḍalla baʿīran lahum) and “lagged behind” their fellow-muslims.187 the statement “leaving behind” in this context must be taken as a euphemistic alternative for “fleeing.” as kister puts it, “later collections of the maghāzī preferred not to mention the version claiming that saʿd b. abī waqqāṣ, the first who shed blood for the cause of islam, the hero of al-qādisiyya, did not take part in the battle of biʾr maʿūna but saved his own life, while the other companions died the death of martyrs.”188 when it comes to saʿd’s part at biʾr maʿūna, we are likely dealing with a literary topos that is found in similar form in the account of the raid of nakhla, in which he and ʿutba b. ghazwān are reported to have “left behind” the main party and “lost their camel” (aḍalla baʿīran lahumā).189 saʿd’s “numerous progeny” who left us with a range of “family accounts” on him could be responsible for whitewashing the character of their forebear.190 the massacre narratives in their broader contexts: “new” form criticism the traditional biblical form criticism which was propounded in roughly the middle of the twentieth century later underwent fundamental alterations, culminating in what has now been termed “new” form criticism.191 as opposed to “old” form criticism’s preoccupation with sitz im leben, the “new” approach is concerned with sitz in der literatur (“setting in literature”), focusing on the text as it lies before us.192 to offer an example: while certain versions of the “ancestress of israel in danger” story in genesis have been classified, on account of their exaltation of yhwh and divine assistance, as legende according to the classic form-critical method,193 “new” form criticism contends that “the pentateuchal 185. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī (trans. faizer), 1:173. 186. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 434; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:347. 187. muqātil b. sulaymān, tafsīr, ed. ʿabd allāh maḥmūd shaḥāta (beirut: dār al-turāth, 1423 ah), 1:458; al-ṭabarānī, tafsīr (irbid: dār al-kitāb al-thaqāfī, n.d.) 2:367. 188. kister, “biʾr maʿūna,” 357. 189. al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:17; ibn hishām, al-sīra, 1:602. 190. see watt, muhammad at medina, 7. 191. wilson, “new form criticism and the prophetic literature,” 311. 192. buss, “goals and processes of the ‘new’ form criticism,” 306; idem, the changing shape of form criticism: a relational approach (sheffield: sheffield phoenix press, 2010), 191. 193. sweeney, “form criticism: the question of the endangered matriarchs,” 22. 302 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) narrative [including the “endangered matriarch” story] at large must be recognized generically as a saga,” as it concentrates on “the formation of the people of israel.”194 in a similar vein, the formal character of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories may be determined, on the basis of a “new” form-critical approach, by taking into account the broader literary contexts in which these narratives feature. in other words, whereas tribal feuds played a pivotal part in the formation of narratives of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna expeditions, from the late second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries onwards the issue of clan and consanguinity ceased to be the main incentive behind the dissemination of these stories. the accounts of these incidents feature in a wide spectrum of sources (including the sīra nabawiyya, tafsīr, ḥadīth, and fiqh compendia) with variegated editorial policies and concerns on the part of the actual authors in whose compilations the massacre reports have been preserved. in what follows, we shall take a look at the wider contexts of the massacre accounts in different genres of islamic religious literature, and identify the narratives’ formal character and the motivations behind their transmission. 1. the articulation of the notion of martyrdom amongst the major impetuses behind the narration in later muslim collections of massacre stories were the inclusion of moving martyrdom episodes, which abound with flattering portrayals of the martyr-companions as exempla of both temerity and piety.195 as committed and god-fearing muslims, the martyrs are frequently said to have abstained from accepting the polytheists’ protection, and to have passionately craved martyrdom.196 the narratives of al-rajīʿ include the martyrology of khubayb, in which many “classical elements” of martyrdom are unmistakably observable.197 likewise, the theme of martyrdom is central in the reports of biʾr maʿūna, to extent that this massacre is one of the historical events to which “the most famous and often-cited verse (on the concept of martyrdom),”198 q 3:169–70,199 has been attributed by the exegetical sources.200 additionally, the story of biʾr maʿūna appears in certain ḥadīth collections under martyrdom-related rubrics (e.g., bāb faḍl al-shahāda and bāb al-shahīd),201 which shows how integral a theme martyrdom is to 194. ibid., 25. 195. on the significance of “the companions as military and spiritual heroes,” see khalek, “‘he was tall and slender,’” esp. 106, 108. 196. see above, part three of the section “parallels between the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna expeditions.” 197. david cook, martyrdom in islam, 22. 198. ibid., 18. 199. “think not of those who are slain in allāh’s way as dead. nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their lord; they rejoice in the bounty provided by allāh. and with regard to those left behind, who have not yet joined them (in their bliss), the (martyrs) glory in the fact that on them is no fear, nor have they (cause to) grieve.” the translation is by yūsuf ʿalī. 200. see, for instance, al-qurtubī, al-jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-qurʾān (beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1985), 4:268; al-thaʿlabī, al-kashf wa-l-bayān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān (beirut: dār al-kitāb al-thaqāfī, 1422 ah), 3:201. 201. ʿabd al-razzāq al-ṣanʿānī, al-muṣannaf, ed. ḥabīb al-raḥmān al-aʿẓamī (beirut: al-majlis al-ʿilmī, 1972), 5:267; ibn ḥibbān, ṣaḥīḥ, ed. shuʿayb al-arnaʿūt, (beirut: n.p., 1993), 10:508. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 303 this story. all such attestations of the massacre reports in islamic compendia stem from the mental disposition of imitatio.202 in this context, thus, our stories should be categorized generically as legende. 2. the dalāʾil al-nubuwwa material in the massacre reports the stories of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna were also appealing for tradents on account of the supernatural tales and miraculous happenings whose ultimate function was the veneration of islam and the verification of muhammad’s prophetic status. this kind of material belongs to the category of “the signs of prophecy” (aʿlām/dalāʾil al-nubuwwa). episodes such as the awe-inspiring ascension of ʿāmir b. fuhayra’s body to the sky, khubayb eating of heavenly sustenance, the miraculous disappearance of his body, and the protection of ʿāṣim b. thābit’s corpse by “a swarm of wasps,” rendered the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories as perfect materials for the authors of the dalāʾil al-nubuwwa compilations.203 here, once more, the stories can be classified as legende. 3. the massacre reports and the ʿulūm al-qurʾān genre “the sciences of the qurʾān” (ʿulūm al-qurʾān) is another genre within islamic literature in which the story of biʾr maʿūna appears. the account of the qurrāʾ slaughtered at biʾr maʿūna was much adopted by the authors of ʿulūm al-qurʾān and tafsīr collections, serving as evidence in favor of the existence in the prophet’s time of people who knew the qurʾān (or some part thereof) by heart (ḥamalat al-qurʾān).204 furthermore, the biʾr maʿūna massacre and the verses supposedly revealed on that occasion but which failed to find a place in the final codex are commonly adduced for the articulation of the concept of the qurʾānic verses’ abrogation (naskh), i.e., the phenomenon of the supersession of earlier legal norms by means of more recent revelations.205 the text adopts then the formal character of “case” (kasus), which is concerned with norms and values.206 4. the biʾr maʿūna massacre and the legal controversies surrounding the qunūt the biʾr maʿūna story was of special interest for muslim scholars in the context of legal discourse over the permissibility or otherwise of the qunūt in the daily prayer. in this context, the narrative functions generically as a kasus whose geistesbeschäftigung is weighing actions against norms. one discerns heated discussions among the advocates of different schools as to in which (if any) prayer is the qunūt mandatory, where this practice 202. on companions as “figures worthy of pious emulation,” see khalek, “‘he was tall and slender,’” 107. 203. see al-bayhaqī, dalāʾil, 3:345; abū nuʿaym al-iṣfahānī, dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, ed. muḥammad rawwās qalʿajī and ʿabd al-barr ʿabbās (beirut: dār al-nafāʾis, 1986), 1:506–15; al-maqrīzī, imtāʿ al-asmāʾ, 13:271. 204. al-zarkashī, al-burḥān fī ʿulūm al-qurʾān (beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, 1410 ah), 1:336; al-suyūṭī, al-itqān fī ʿulūm al-qurʾān (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿarabī), 1:254. 205. al-farsī, al-ḥujja li-l-qurrāʾ al-sabʿa (beirut: dār al-maʾmūn li-l-turāth), 2:201; al-suyūṭī, al-itqān, 1:665. see also john burton, “abrogation,” in encyclopaedia of the qurʾān, ed. j. d. mcauliffe (leiden: brill, 2001–6). 206. jolles, simple forms, 124–44. 304 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) should be placed in the prayer (before or after the rukūʿ), what is the content and wording of the qunūt, and so on.207 muhammad’s alleged cursing of the slayers of the biʾr maʿūna martyrs in the qunūt of his morning prayers provides a possible precedent for the islamic community, and has thus occupied an important place in the qunūt-related debates in islamic fiqh and ḥadīth literature.208 5. the biʾr maʿūna massacre and the expedition against the banū al-naḍīr perhaps most telling in the context of the present article’s critical analysis of the sīra nabawiyya is the way in which the massacre reports are situated in the wider narratives of muḥammad’s life. by the end of the second/eighth century many of the sīra’s audiences, based upon the “orthodox” version of the prophet’s biography, must have shared the conviction that the expulsion from medina of the jewish tribe of banū al-naḍīr occurred in the immediate aftermath of the biʾr maʿūna massacre, and that these two events were closely related. during the course of his flight from the watering place at biʾr maʿūna to medina, according to ibn isḥāq and al-wāqidī, ʿamr b. umayya al-ḍamrī kills two men of the banū kilāb (of banū ʿāmir). the prophet departs for the banū al-naḍīr’s territory, requesting their assistance for the payment of the kilābīs’ blood money, for the banū al-naḍīr were confederates of the banū ʿāmir. the naḍrī jews allegedly attempt in vain to assassinate muḥammad (by throwing a stone at him from the top of their forts),209 and the latter lays siege to their fortresses and expels them from medina.210 as vividly as ibn isḥāq and al-wāqidī’s “orthodox” accounts remember the affair of biʾr maʿūna as related to banū al-naḍīr’s fate, the connection was in no way self-evident during and before al-zuhrī’s time. schöller argues, on the basis of tafsīr materials, that at a certain stage of the collection of the prophet’s biography, possibly at the end of the first islamic century, there existed an account of a joint conflict between the prophet and the medinan jews (yawm qurayẓa wa-lnaḍīr) which schöller designates the “qurayẓa-cum-naḍīr” episode. of this “unorthodox” recension of the prophet’s confrontation with the jews of medina a remnant is noticeable in the report of al-zuhrī, who relays that the jews of al-naḍīr asked muḥammad to attend a meeting in the company of thirty of his entourage, debating there with the jewish rabbis (who were also thirty in number). the jews hatch a plot to assassinate the prophet, who gets wind of their treachery through a jewish woman from al-naḍīr. subsequently, muḥammad besieges the strongholds of al-naḍīr, and then of the qurayẓa (which implies that the latter played some part in the treason), summoning them to the conclusion of a non-agression pact with him. the qurayẓa agree, but the banū al-naḍīr refuse and enter into an armed 207. for useful overviews on the issue and the sources in which these controversies appear, see kister, “muḍar,” 267–72; najam i. haider, “the geography of the isnād: possibilities for the reconstruction of local ritual practice in the 2nd/8th century,” der islam 90, no. 2 (2013): 306–46, at 329–36. 208. kister, “muḍar,” 267–8. 209. this is a ubiquitous topos in the reports of the prophet’s conflicts with the medinan jews: see marco schöller, exegetisches denken und prophetenbiographie: eine quellenkritische analyse der sīra-überlieferung zu muḥammads konflikt mit den juden (wiesbaden: harrassowitz verlag, 1998), 266. 210. ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:190; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:363–5. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 305 conflict with the prophet, which results in their defeat and exile.211 according to schöller, al-zuhrī’s report (which is confirmed by that of mūsā b. ʿuqba) preserves vestiges of the archaic qurayẓa-cum-naḍīr recension. and it is noteworthy that neither version speaks whatsoever of the connection between the biʾr maʿūna and banū al-naḍīr expeditions.212 in sum, the “orthodox” account of banū al-naḍīr may be said to be characterized by several main features: the murder by ʿamr b. umayya al-ḍamrī of the kilābī men following the biʾr maʿūna massacre, the prophet’s seeking help from the jews as regards the blood money, and the extremely dubious casus belli for the al-naḍīr expedition, namely the ubiquitous topos of “throwing a stone” to kill the prophet.213 seen in this light, the historical framework assigned to the biʾr maʿūna incident is of key significance for the authors of muḥammad’s “orthodox” biography to achieve their aim of separating the prophet’s expeditions against the qurayẓa and the banū al-naḍīr by an interval of two years.214 conclusion reading the sīra with intense cognizance of the literary tools used and the impetus behind their deployment carries negative implications for the historicity of the accounts. to recapitulate the results, we have observed that there is a close correspondence between the accounts of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna massacres, and that the former story comprised a wide array of hagiographic motifs shared by many medieval sources, muslim and non-muslim alike. the close similarities between the massacre reports have their roots in the tribal feuds between the ʿamr b. ʿawf of the aws and the najjār of the khazraj. significantly, the parallelism in the accounts of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna is not the sole manifestation of ʿamr b. ʿawf–najjār polemical encounters. the quintessential example 211. on the qurayẓa-cum-naḍīr episode and its residues in later accounts, see marco schöller, “sīra and tafsīr: muḥammad al-kalbī on the jews of medina,” in biography of muḥammad: the issue of the sources, ed. h. motzki, 18–48 (leiden: brill, 2000), 28–34; idem, exegetisches denken, 273–4. rizwi faizer, “expeditions and battles,” in encyclopaedia of the qurʾān, ed. j. d. mcauliffe (leiden: brill, 2001–6), leans in the same direction. it is interesting to note that some faint echoes of the qurayẓa-cum-naḍīr episode are yet audible even in the poems quoted by ibn isḥāq, which, inconsistent with his prose material, assign the calamity befalling on the qurayẓa and the naḍīr to saʿd b. muʿādh, otherwise known to be the protagonist only of the qurayẓa incident: “o saʿd, saʿd of b. muʿādh, for what befell qurayẓa and naḍīr (limā laqiyat qurayẓa wa-l-naḍīr).” see ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 713; ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:273. see also in this respect, barakat ahmad, muḥammad and the jews: a re-examination (new delhi: vikas publishing house, 1979), 92. 212. schöller, “sīra and tafsīr,” 33. 213. interestingly, the cause of war between the prophet and the jewish tribe of banū qaynuqāʿ is yet another topos, that of the sexual harassment by the jews of a (muslim) woman (ibn hishām, al-sīra, 2:48; al-wāqidī, al-maghāzī, 1:176), the occurrence of which was also reportedly the casus belli for the first battle of the so-called sinful wars (ḥurūb al-fijār): see patricia crone, meccan trade and the rise of islam (princeton: princeton university press, 1987), 145; schöller, exegetisches denken, 258. 214. schöller suggests (not implausibly) that multiplying the incidents in the prophet’s life (here the separation of the qurayẓa and naḍīr expeditions) might have been connected to the rise of different legal views on such “vital” matters as “practices of warfare and sharing the booty” (schöller, “sīra and tafsīr,” 42). if this interpretation is correct, then the mental disposition behind placing the biʾr maʿūna–naḍīr episode in their present context is that of norms, which corresponds to the form kasus. 306 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) of these tribes’ hostile confrontation in the domain of literature is to be found in pseudoḥassān’s elegies on ʿuthmān, in which a versifier with categorical bias in favor of ʿamr b. ʿawf carries out a severe verbal assault on the banū najjār. as far as can be gleaned from the sources, the descendants of the main actors of al-rajīʿ had the leading role in chastising the banū najjār for their purported culpability in the caliph’s murder. worth recalling is the trenchant satire of al-aḥwaṣ (the descendant of ʿāṣim b. thābit, and khubayb’s fellow-tribesman on the maternal side) against the najjār on account of their treachery (ghadr) against ʿuthmān. given this active presence of the progeny of al-rajīʿ victims in hostile encounters with the najjār, it is entirely conceivable that they themselves would have been behind the significant literary borrowing from the faḍāʾil motifs found in the biʾr maʿūna story. after all, the descendants of a person have the strongest motivation for extolling their ancestor,215 and the descendants of the al-rajīʿ martyrs were no exception. thus, it seems that we can speak of a period of antagonistic activities on the part of ʿamr b. ʿawf (in the realm of literature) against the najjār,216 culminating in the dissemination of poems regarding the najjār’s complicity in ʿuthmān’s assassination and in the formation of parallelism between the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna accounts. in the latter case, the forgers of ʿamr b. ʿawf did their best to include in the al-rajīʿ story the very faḍāʾil material of which the banū najjār were so proud. by the third/ninth century, when tribal motivations ceased to be amongst the prime socio-political exigencies of the time, new incentives emerged for the transmission of our narratives, which we have unfolded through assessment of the literary contexts in which the massacre accounts appear. form-critical analysis points once more to the fact that traditional islamic material must be treated, as noth propounds, as the combination of discrete erzählmotive transferable from one framework to another.217 this entails adopting “an all-encompassing view of the forms and biases of early islamic tradition as a whole in order to assess accurately even one” event.218 due probably to the “preliminary character” of noth’s source-critical studies, his detection of literary topoi was limited, for the most part, to the futūḥ traditions. as it turned out, the subsequent corpus of scholarship that owed its inspiration to noth’s quellenkritische studien remained mostly as limited in agenda as noth’s original endeavors, and no comprehensive attempt has been made to identify the literary commonplaces in the sīra nabawiyya.219 in his narratives of islamic origins, donner stresses the usefulness 215. see lecker, “the assassination of the jewish merchant ibn sunayna,” 181–96; chase f. robinson, “history and heilsgeschichte in early islam: some observations on prophetic history and biography,” in history and religion: narrating a religious past 68, ed. bernd-christian otto, 119–50 (berlin: walter de gruyter, 2015), 131; michael cook, “muḥammad’s deputies in medina,” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 23 (2015): 1–67, at 42. 216. the termini of this period cannot be precisely established, but it must have coincided with al-aḥwaṣ’ (d. ca. 105/723) professional career as the well-known poet of medina, so roughly the last quarter of the first islamic century. 217. noth, the early arabic historical tradition, 109; noth, “iṣfahān-nihāwand,” 246–7. 218. noth, the early arabic historical tradition, 18. 219. on the studies that were preoccupied with the literary analysis of the futūḥ accounts see, for example, thomas sizgorich, “‘do prophets come with a sword?’ conquest, empire, and historical narrative in the early islamic world,” the american historical review 112, no. 4 (2007): 993–1015, esp. 995, 1005–7; chase f. robinson, al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 307 of “a comprehensive catalog of topoi” to assess early islamic akhbār but, adds donner, “little further work on this task has been undertaken since noth’s preliminary listing.”220 unfortunately, the “comprehensive catalog” proffered by donner more than two decades ago seems to be still lacking, at least inasmuch as the biography of the prophet is concerned.221 as they stand, the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories are “undifferentiated reports” with “no genuine relation to any particular historical event.”222 the narratives are archetypal depictions of failed deputations and, as such, must be taken with a grain of salt. relevant in this context is the account of the deputation of ṭayyiʾ, comprised of many elements which feature in the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna accounts: (i) arrival of tribal deputation, (ii) daʿwa (summons to islam) made by the prophet, (iii) his premonition that the chief of ṭayyiʾ, zayd al-khayl, might die of the medina fever, (iv) the deputy departing with a letter documenting a land grant, (v) zayd’s being overcome by fever at a watering place in najd, and (vi) his poetic last words. readers with more positivistic leanings may nonetheless be inclined to go beyond mere historiographical assessment of the sīra, venturing to reconstruct the general outlines of events. after all “[a] topos may very well have a basis in fact, for it is often the case that a topos was once securely anchored to real historical referents.”223 a possible reconstruction in the case of the biʾr maʿūna event would be that the expedition may have commenced following the prophet’s daʿwa, an offer to embrace islam which, according to noth/conrad, “may very well correspond to reality.”224 however, the sariyya’s participants were undoubtedly not proselytizers, but envoys to convey the prophet’s letter (documenting land grant to abū barāʾ?), a mission ḥarām b. milḥān failed to successfully accomplish and for which he was killed by ʿāmir b. ṭufayl.225 lecker is of the opinion that geography, or more accurately the proximity of the sulaym’s gold mine to biʾr maʿūna, could be important to a proper understanding of the expedition. muḥammad’s letter to abū barāʾ, according to this interpretation, may be seen as a document intended to secure for abū barāʾ the contested rights over maʿdan banī sulaym.226 “the conquest of khūzistān: a historiographical reassessment,” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 67, no. 1 (2004): 14–39, at 30; khalek, “‘he was tall and slender,’” 118. 220. donner, narratives of islamic origins, 267. 221. donald p. little, “narrative themes and devices in al-wāqidī’s kitāb al-maghāzī,” in reason and inspiration in islam: theology, philosophy and mysticism in muslim thought, ed. todd lawson, 34–44 (london: i. b. tauris, 2005), 35, already highlights the necessity of the project of cataloging the topoi. on the limited scholarly attempts at identifying the topoi in the prophet’s biography see, for instance, donner, narratives of islamic origins, 269, 271; lawrence i. conrad, “theophanes and the arabic tradition: some indications of intercultural transmission,” byzantinische forschungen 15 (1988): 1–44, 17; robinson, “history and heilsgeschichte,” 141. 222. noth, the early arabic historical tradition, 148. 223. ibid., 109. see also nicola clarke, the muslim conquest of iberia: medieval arabic narratives (london: routledge, 2012), 2. 224. noth, the early arabic historical tradition, 165. 225. ibn isḥāq, sīrat rasūl allāh, 434. 226. michael lecker, “biʾr maʿūna,” in encyclopedia of islam three, ed. kate fleet et al. (leiden: brill, 2011). 308 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) all this said, there is no infallible methodological path from topoi to historical realities,227 and any historical reconstruction undertaken on the basis of literary topoi, including the one proposed here, remains hypothetical in nature. however, thanks to the approach pursued in this study, we are on firmer ground when it comes to separating historical realities from literary topoi in the stories of al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna. hitherto assumed as authentic, such elements of the stories as the religious nature of the expeditions, the crucifixion of khubayb (and presumably his very incarceration228), the supposed part played by the banū nawfal in the al-rajīʿ incident, and the simultaneity of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna events all seem to be highly dubious, not to say pure invention.229 our sources for the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna raids reflect far more about “the circumstances of [their] composition and redaction” than about first/seventh-century arabia.230 motivated by the second/eighth-century tribal feuds, many components of these narratives owe their existence to later modifications and adornments that were retrojected to the time of the prophet. should form-critical analysis be extended to encompass other anecdotes of the sīra, we might be able to discover more and more later accretions engendered not only by tribal discord, but also by disputations of other kinds, e.g., political, religious, and legal.231 though this method yields, by its nature, results that narrow the margins of our knowledge about the rise of islam, it remains an indispensable tool for historians of this period who often have to rely heavily, if not exclusively, on literary sources between which and the events they purport to narrate lies a yawning abyss of a century or so in which eyewitness accounts, if they existed at all, would have been contaminated by a gamut of distortions and falsifications.232 227. noth, early arabic historical tradition, 114; conrad, “arwād,” 322; pavlovitch, “the sīra,” 73. 228. the story of the hudhalīs selling their captives as slaves to the meccans is a famous pre-islamic theme whose occurrence in the al-rajīʿ account is in danger of being a topos, particularly when one takes into account the stereotypical character of khubayb’s story as a whole. see crone, meccan trade, 106; kirill dmitriev, “banū hudhayl,” in encyclopedia of islam three, ed. kate fleet et al. (leiden: brill, 2017); nathaniel ashton miller, “tribal poetics in early arabic culture: the case of ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn” (phd diss., university of chicago, 2016), 172. 229. see kister, “biʾr maʿūna,” 342; watt, muhammad at medina, 34; arafat, “the development of a dramatic theme,” 15; jones, “the chronology of the maghāzī,” 267, where al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna are considered roughly simultaneous; watt, muhammad at medina, 33, where the mission is taken as a proselytizing one; kister, “biʾr maʿūna,” 356, where nawfal’s role at al-rajīʿ is accepted as a historical fact; and keshk, “the historiography of an execution,” 13, where the author assigns the primary status to khubayb’s story vis-à-vis hujr’s. 230. pavlovitch, “the sīra,” 66. see also ilkka lindstedt, “‘one people to the exclusion of others’ – recategorized superordinate identity in the medinan community,” in the study of islamic origins: new perspectives and contexts, ed. mette bjerregaard mortensen et al., 325–76 (berlin: 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leiden: brill, 2011. ———. the banū sulaym: a contribution to the study of early islam. jerusalem: institute of asian and african studies, 1989. ———. “biographical notes on ibn shihāb al-zuhrī.” journal of semitic studies 41, no. 1 (1996): 21–63. ———. “biʾr maʿūna.” in encyclopedia of islam three, edited by kate fleet et al., leiden: brill, 2011. ———. “the death of the prophet muḥammad’s father: did wāqidī invent some of the evidence?” zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen gesellschaft 145, no. 1 (1995): 9–27. ———. muslims, jews, and pagans: studies on early islamic medina. leiden: brill, 1995. ———. people, tribes and society in arabia around the time of muḥammad. aldershot: ashgate, 2005. lindstedt, ilkka. “‘one people to the exclusion of others’ – recategorized superordinate identity in the medinan community.” in the study of islamic origins: new perspectives and contexts, edited by mette bjerregaard mortensen et al., 325–76. berlin: walter de gruyter, 2021. 316 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) little, donald p. “narrative themes and devices in al-wāqidī’s kitāb al-maghāzī.” in reason and inspiration in islam: theology, philosophy and mysticism in muslim thought, edited by todd lawson, 34–44. london: i. b. tauris, 2005. madelung, wilfred. the succession to muhammad: a study of the early caliphate. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004. ———. “zayd b. ʿalī b. al-ḥusayn.” encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al., leiden: brill, 1954–2009. maʿmar b. rāshid. kitāb al-maghāzī. edited and translated by sean w. anthony. new york: new york university press, 2014. al-maqrīzī. imtāʿ al-asmāʾ. edited by muḥammad ʿabd al-ḥamīd al-namīsī. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1999. marsham, andrew. “public execution in the umayyad period: early islamic punitive practice and its late antique context.” journal of arabic and islamic studies 11 (2011): 101–36. al-masʿūdī. murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar. edited by asʿad dāghir. qumm: dār al-hijra, 1409 ah. mattock, j. n. “history and fiction.” occasional papers of the school of abbasid studies 1, no. 1 (1986): 80–97. mcknight, edgar v. what is form criticism? philadelphia, pa: fortress press, 1969. miller, nathaniel ashton. “tribal poetics in early arabic culture: the case of ashʿār al-hudhaliyyīn.” phd dissertation, university of chicago, 2016. motzki, harald. “the question of the authenticity of muslim traditions reconsidered: a review article.” in method and theory in the study of islamic origins, edited by h. berg, 211–57. leiden: brill, 2003. munt, harry. “caliphal estates and properties around medina in the umayyad period.” in authority and control in the countryside: from antiquity to islam in the mediterranean and near east (sixth-tenth century), edited by. a. delattre, m. legendre, and p. sijpesteijn, 432–63. leiden: brill, 2019. muqātil b. sulaymān. tafsīr. edited by ʿabd allāh maḥmūd shaḥāta. beirut: dār al-turāth, 1423 ah. muslim b. al-ḥajjāj. ṣaḥīḥ. beirut: dār al-fikr, n.d. noth, albrecht. the early arabic historical tradition: a source-critical study. 2nd ed. in collaboration with lawrence i. conrad and translated by michael bonner. princeton, nj: darwin press, 1994. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 317 ———. “iṣfahān-nihāwand: a source-critical study of early islamic historiography.” in the expansion of the early islamic state, edited by fred m. donner, 241–62. new york: routledge, 2008. pavlovitch, pavel. “dating.” in the wiley blackwell concise companion to the hadith, edited by d. w. brown, 113‒32. hoboken, nj: wiley-blackwell, 2020. ———. “the sīra.” in routledge handbook on early islam, edited by h. berg, 66–78. new york: routledge, 2017. al-qurtubī. al-jāmiʿ li-aḥkām al-qurʾān. beirut: dār iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, 1985. renan, ernest. “muhammad and the origins of islam.” in the quest for the historical muhammad, edited by ibn warraq, 127–66. amherst, ny: prometheus books, 2000. robinson, chase f. “the conquest of khūzistān: a historiographical reassessment.” bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies 67, no. 1 (2004): 14–39. ———. “history and heilsgeschichte in early islam: some observations on prophetic history and biography.” in history and religion: narrating a religious past 68, edited by berndchristian otto, 119–50. berlin: walter de gruyter, 2015. roohi, e. “between history and ancestral lore: a literary approach to the sīra’s narratives of political assassinations.” der islam 98, no. 2 (2021): 425–72. rotter, gernot. die umayyaden und der zweite bürgerkrieg (680–692). wiesbaden: deutsche morgenländische gesellschaft, 1982. rowson, everett k. “the effeminates of early medina.” journal of the american oriental society 111, no. 4 (1991): 671–93. rubin, uri. “muhammad’s curse of muḍar and the blockade of mecca.” journal of the economic and social history of the orient 31, no. 3 (1988): 249–64. sahner, c. christian martyrs under islam: religious violence and the making of the muslim world. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2018. saldarini, anthony j. “‘form criticism’ of rabbinic literature.” journal of biblical literature 96, no. 2 (1977): 257–74. al-samarqandī. tafsīr. edited by ʿumar ʿamrī. beirut: dār al-fikr, 1416 ah. scheiner, j. die eroberung von damaskus: quellenkritische untersuchung zur historiographie in klassisch-islamischer zeit. leiden: brill, 2009. schoeler, gregor. the genesis of literature in islam: from the aural to the read. in collaboration with and translated by shawkat m. toorawa. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2009. 318 • ehsan roohi al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) ———. “mūsā b. ʿuqba’s maghāzī.” in the biography of muhammad. the issue of the sources, edited by h. motzki, 67–97. leiden: brill, 2000. schöller, m. exegetisches denken und prophetenbiographie: eine quellenkritische analyse der sīra-überlieferung zu muḥammads konflikt mit den juden. wiesbaden: harrassowitz verlag, 1998. ———. “sīra and tafsīr: muḥammad al-kalbī on the jews of medina.” in biography of muḥammad: the issue of the sources, edited by h. motzki, 18–48. leiden: brill, 2000. shoemaker, stephen. j. “in search of ʿurwa’s sīra: some methodological issues in the quest for ‘authenticity’ in the life of muḥammad.” der islam 85, no. 2 (2011): 257–344. ———. “muḥammad.” in routledge handbook on early islam, edited by h. berg, 49–64. new york: routledge, 2017. sizgorich, thomas. “‘do prophets come with a sword?’ conquest, empire, and historical narrative in the early islamic world.” the american historical review 112, no. 4 (2007): 993–1015. al-suyūṭī. al-itqān fī ʿulūm al-qurʾān. beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿarabī, n.d. sweeney, marvin a. “form criticism.” in dictionary of the old testament wisdom, poetry and writings, edited by tremper longman iii and peter enns, 227–41. downers grove, il: intervarsity press, 2008. ———. “form criticism: the question of the endangered matriarchs in genesis.” in method matters: essays on the interpretation of the hebrew bible in honor of david l. petersen, edited by joel m. lemon and kent harold richards, 17–38. atlanta, ga: society of biblical literature, 2009. al-ṭabarānī. tafsīr. irbid: dār al-kitāb al-thaqāfī, n.d. ———. al-muʿjam al-kabīr. edited by ḥamdī ʿabd al-majīd. beirut: n.p., 1404 ah. al-ṭabarī. taʾrīkh. edited by muḥammad abū al-faḍl ibrāhīm. beirut: dār al-turāth, 1967. ———. the history of al-ṭabarī. vol. 7, foundation of the community, translated by w. montgomery watt and m. v. mcdonald. albany, ny: state university of new york press, 1988. ———. the history of al-ṭabarī. vol. 26, the waning of the umayyad caliphate: prelude to revolution, a.d. 738–745/a.h. 121–127, translated by carole hillenbrand. albany, ny: state university of new york press, 1989. ———. the history of al-ṭabarī. vol. 29, al-manṣūr and al-mahdī: a.d. 763–786/a.h. 146–169, translated by hugh kennedy. albany, ny: state university of new york press, 1990. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 30 (2022) a form-critical analysis of the al-rajīʿ and biʾr maʿūna stories • 319 al-thaʿlabī. al-kashf wa-l-bayān fī tafsīr al-qurʾān. beirut: dār al-kitāb al-thaqāfī, 1422 ah. al-thaqafī, ibrāhīm b. muḥammad. al-ghārāt. edited by jalāl al-dīn ḥusaynī urmawī. tehran: anjuman-i athār-i mellī, 1353 ah. toffelm, colin m. “sitz im what? context and the prophetic book of obadiah.” in the book of the twelve and the new form criticism, edited by mark j. boda, michael h. floyd, and colin m. toffelmire, 221–44. atlanta, ga: society of biblical literature, 2015. al-ṭūsī, muḥammad b. ḥasan. ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl (rijāl al-kashshī). edited by ḥasan muṣṭafawī. mashhad: mashhad university press, 1409 ah. von rad, gerhard. genesis: a commentary. translated by w. l. jenkins. philadelphia, pa: westminster press, 1972. wansbrough, john. quranic studies: sources and methods of scriptural interpretation. with foreword, translations, and expanded notes by andrew rippin. amherst, ny: prometheus books, 2004. ———. the sectarian milieu: content and composition of islamic salvation history. oxford: oxford university press, 1978. al-wāqidī. al-maghāzī. edited by marsden jones. beirut: aʿlamī, 1989. ———. kitāb al-maghāzī. edited and translated by rizwi faizer. new york: routledge, 2013. ———. kitāb al-ridda. edited by y. al-jubūrī. beirut: dār al-gharb al-islāmī, 1990. watt, w. montgomery. muhammad at medina. oxford: oxford university press, 1956. ———. “nawfal.” encyclopaedia of islam, 2nd ed., ed. p. bearman et al., leiden: brill, 1954– 2009. westermann, claus. genesis 12–36: a commentary. translated by john j. scullion. minneapolis, mn: augsburg, 1985. wilson, robert r. “new form criticism and the prophetic literature: the unfinished agenda.” in the book of the twelve and the new form criticism, edited by mark j. boda, michael h. floyd, and colin m. toffelmire, 311–22. atlanta, ga: society of biblical literature, 2015. al-yaʿqūbī. taʾrīkh. beirut: dār ṣādir, n.d. yazigi, maya. “ʿalī, muḥammad, and the anṣār: the issue of succession.” journal of semitic studies 53, no. 2 (2008): 279–303. al-zarkashī. al-burḥān fī ʿulūm al-qurʾān. beirut: dār al-maʿrifa, 1410 ah. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021): 112-180 along with the history of yaḥyā b. saʿīd al-anṭākī, with which it has a close and complex relationship, the life of christopher is one of our most important testimo-nies to christian life in ḥamdānid syria.1 the chalcedonian patriarch christopher (d. 356/967), whose birth name was ʿīsā, was born and raised in baghdad, the life tells us. he then moved to syria and entered the ḥamdānid bureaucracy, where he became a favorite of the emir sayf al-dawla (r. 333–56/944–67). in about 349/960, he became the patriarch of antioch, the last to serve in that position before the byzantine conquest of the city in 358/969. the life was written by the byzantine official ibrāhīm b. yūḥannā. ibrāhīm knew christopher when the former was a young boy, but he did not write the life until 1. much of the information in this introduction, along with an earlier version of this translation, can also be found in my dissertation: joshua mugler, “a martyr with too many causes: christopher of antioch (d. 967) and local collective memory” (phd diss., georgetown university, 2019). the life of christopher joshua mugler hill museum and manuscript library (jmugler001@hmml.org) © 2021 joshua mugler. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. abstract christopher, a native of baghdad who became patriarch of antioch in about 349/960, was assassinated by muslim rebels in 356/967 because of his loyalty to their muslim ruler. when the byzantines conquered antioch two years later, his story was told in a variety of ways by those with different and competing interests. christopher was mentioned in byzantine histories and in antiochian liturgies. however, by far the most extensive and detailed version of the story comes to us in the life of christopher, written by ibrāhīm b. yūḥannā, a byzantine bureaucrat and translator who grew up in antioch and knew christopher when he, ibrāhīm, was a young boy. the hagiography was originally composed in greek and translated by its author into arabic, but only the arabic survives. here i provide, for the first time, both a critical edition of the two known arabic manuscripts and a full english translation. this text is a valuable testimony to christian life in antioch under both the ḥamdānids and the byzantines, and to the difficulties of life along the constantly shifting frontier of medieval northern syria. mailto:jmugler001%40hmml.org?subject= 113 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) his old age, around the late 410s/1020s. according to the heading of the text, he originally wrote it in greek and then translated his own text into arabic. nevertheless, only the arabic survives—and that only in two or possibly three manuscripts, one of which is currently unaccounted for. the ḥamdānids were one of many provincial dynasties that came to power as the central authority of the ʿabbāsid caliphate found itself stretched thin.2 they were members of the arab tribe of taghlib and originated from northern mesopotamia. nominally subordinate to the government in baghdad, different branches of the family ruled mosul and aleppo from the early fourth/tenth century to the early fifth/eleventh. it seems that they had shīʿī sympathies, but they were not aggressively sectarian, and their allegiances sometimes shifted with the tides of political opportunism.3 most of christopher’s adult life took place under the rule of the first ḥamdānid emir of aleppo, sayf al-dawla. sayf al-dawla made himself famous by patronizing some of the most prominent writers of the time, most notably the poets al-mutanabbī (d. 354/965) and abū firās al-ḥamdānī (320–57/932–68), a cousin of the emir.4 other scholars criticized sayf al-dawla’s harsh policies, but in the life of christopher we can see the protagonist receiving some of the same generous patronage that prompted so many celebrated poems.5 unfortunately for sayf al-dawla, his rise to power in northern syria coincided with a great expansion in byzantine power, and during the reigns of sayf al-dawla and his descendants, the byzantine empire began to regain territory in this region for the first time since the first-/seventh-century muslim conquests. most of the life’s action takes place within this context, as byzantine advances led to panic and rebellion in cities such as antioch that grew ever nearer to the border. a major rebellion broke out in antioch in 354/965, and this forms the pivot point of christopher’s patriarchate in the life.6 although sayf al-dawla was able to suppress the uprising, he had already begun to suffer from hemiplegia and was largely confined to his bed until his death in ṣafar 356/february 967, at which point the brief power vacuum prompted further chaos in ḥamdānid territory. as the ḥamdānids struggled with both internal and external pressures, the armies of emperor nikephoros ii (r. 352–59/963–69) conquered antioch in dhū al-ḥijja 358/october 969. although nikephoros was soon assassinated, his successor, john i (r. 359–65/969–76), thrilled to have regained control of the city that was once the great metropolis of syria, quickly sought to reintegrate antioch into the empire. as gilbert dagron puts it, “without antioch, the ‘reconquest’ would win no more for byzantium than some lands and cities; 2. hugh kennedy, the prophet and the age of the caliphates: the islamic near east from the sixth to the eleventh century (london: routledge, 2016), 229–43; clifford edmund bosworth, the islamic dynasties: a chronological and genealogical handbook (edinburgh: university press, 1967), 49–50; marius canard, histoire de la dynastie des h’amdanides de jazîra et de syrie (paris: presses universitaires de france, 1953). 3. kennedy, prophet, 231. 4. for selections from these poets and other authors that discuss sayf al-dawla and the events that took place under his rule, see marius canard, sayf al daula (algiers: editions jules carbonel, 1934). 5. hugh kennedy mentions the geographer ibn ḥawqal, who painted “a grim picture of overtaxation and exploitation”; see kennedy, prophet, 229. 6. ibid., 241. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 114 with antioch, it created a second pole, the virtual capital of a roman orient.”7 john sent secular and ecclesiastical administrators from constantinople and other parts of the empire to make antioch roman again. these administrators included the new patriarch, theodore ii, who is mentioned briefly in the life.8 the empire undertook the translation of the liturgy of constantinople into syriac for use in the church of antioch, replacing local practices with those of the capital.9 the life also mentions several stages of imperial commemoration of christopher, showing the new administration’s determination to incorporate this local martyr into the new ecclesiastical order. the life was written after about fifty years of these imperial efforts and reflects some degree of local discontent with roman control. the preceding rule of sayf al-dawla is presented in glowing terms, emphasizing the nuances and positive aspects of life with muslims at a time when the empire viewed them primarily as foreign enemies. the text celebrates the autonomy and influence of the antiochian church under muslim rule, in stark contrast to the situation of the church within the byzantine empire. around the time that the life was composed, in the late 410s/1020s, the empire’s fortunes in the region began to turn again, and after decades of stagnation and lost ground, antioch fell to the seljuk turks in 477/1084. we know fairly little about the life of ibrāhīm b. yūḥannā, author of the life of christopher, but we can make a general sketch.10 he was born in the early 340s/950s in antioch to a prominent family with close connections to the church, and he was educated there under patriarch christopher. he spent his career within the byzantine bureaucracy and attained the rank of prōtospatharios, along the way producing arabic translations of some of the greek works that had recently become available in antioch thanks to the byzantine reconquest of that city. these included works attributed to some of the greatest fourth-century ce christian theologians, such as pseudo-dionysius the areopagite and ibrāhīm’s older contemporary symeon metaphrastēs. it is very likely that he was also closely involved with the imperial project of translating the constantinopolitan liturgy into syriac. late in life, ibrāhīm finally found the time to compose a hagiography of christopher in greek and arabic—likely in conjunction with the celebration of christopher’s life under patriarch nicholas ii in the 410s/1020s—as he had long intended to do. he must have died around 421/1030 or shortly thereafter. although he is not as famous as some other translators from middle byzantine antioch, most notably ʿabd allāh b. al-faḍl (d. ca. 444/1052), his life 7. gilbert dagron, “minorités ethniques et religieuses dans l’orient byzantin a la fin du xe et au xie siècle: l’immigration syrienne,” travaux et mémoires 6 (1976): 177–216, at 205. 8. theodore is mentioned in §18 of the life. for examples of byzantines sent to administer the frontier cities, see jean darrouzès, ed., épistoliers byzantins du xe siècle (paris: institut français d’études byzantines, 1960). 9. joseph nasrallah, “la liturgie des patriarcats melchites de 969 à 1300,” oriens christianus 71 (1987): 156–81, at 156–59; sebastian brock, “syriac manuscripts copied on the black mountain, near antioch,” in lingua restituta orientalis, ed. regine schulz and manfred görg, 59–67 (wiesbaden: otto harrassowitz, 1990), 66–67. 10. for more details on ibrāhīm, see joshua mugler, “ibrāhīm ibn yūḥannā and the translation projects of byzantine antioch,” in patristic literature in arabic translations, ed. barbara roggema and alexander treiger, 180–97 (leiden: brill, 2020). 115 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) offers an important window into the transition from ḥamdānid muslim rule to byzantine christian rule in antioch, which he describes in the life.11 other testimonies to christopher’s story are far more limited in detail. they include byzantine histories in greek and entries in antiochian liturgical calendars, both syriac and arabic. the history of leo the deacon, for example, claims that antioch’s “former hagarene ruler killed the patriarch christopher, an apostolic and divinely inspired man, by driving a javelin through his chest, bringing against the man the charge of reverence for christ the savior.”12 this brief statement strips the story of any complexity and lends itself well to a polemic against the tyranny endured by christians under muslim rule. by contrast, the life provides a much more nuanced picture of the situation. the earliest and most reliable manuscript of the life is sinai arabic 405 (s), which consists of the may–june volume of a full-year menologion, a compilation of saints’ lives according to the ecclesiastical calendar.13 the manuscript was copied at mount sinai in kānūn al-awwal 6843 anno mundi, or rabīʻ al-thānī 735/december 1334. it was microfilmed by the library of congress in 1950, and the microfilm has now been made digitally available on the library’s website. more recently, the manuscript has been digitized in color and made available through the website of ucla’s sinai manuscripts digital library project.14 the second manuscript (z) was copied by būlus b. al-zaʿīm (d. 1079/1669), also known as paul of aleppo, son of patriarch makarios iii (d. 1083/1672). it is a compilation of stories and other texts relevant to the history of antioch. this manuscript was published with a french translation by habib zayat in 1952, but zayat did not have access to the sinai manuscript. zayat says that būlus’s manuscript “is found in our possession” (se trouve en notre possession) but does not clarify this statement or explain where the manuscript is located.15 after his death in 1954, the matter became even more obscure, and there is now 11. for more on ʿabd allāh, see alexandre m. roberts, reason and revelation in byzantine antioch: the christian translation program of abdallah ibn al-fadl (oakland: university of california press, 2020). 12. leo the deacon, the “history” of leo the deacon: byzantine military expansion in the tenth century, trans. alice-mary talbot and denis f. sullivan (washington, dc: dumbarton oaks research library and collection, 2005), vi.6. 13. on the antiochian menologion, the large, full-year compilation of hagiographies that includes this manuscript, see alexander treiger, “sinaitica (1): the antiochian menologion, compiled by hieromonk yūḥannā ʿabd al-masīḥ (first half of the 13th century),” khristīanskīĭ vostokʺ 8 (2017): 215–52; habib ibrahim, “liste des vies de saints et des homélies conservées dans les ms. sinaï arabe 395–403, 405–407, 409 et 423,” chronos 28 (2018): 47–114. treiger has recently redated the life of yūḥannā ʿabd al-masīḥ, and thus the compilation of the antiochian menologion, to the early fifth/eleventh century. a note in the menologion indicates that yūḥannā was a contemporary and acquaintance of ibrāhīm, and in fact it is now clear that he must have been one of christopher’s disciples, mentioned at the end of his life as “anbā yūḥannā the marvelous.” see alexander treiger, “the beginnings of the graeco-syro-arabic melkite translation movement in antioch,” scrinium 16 (2020): 306–32, at 327–32. habib ibrahim has also edited an abridged version of the menologion, published as yūḥannā ʿ abd al-masīḥ al-anṭākī, maʿīn al-ḥayāt: al-markab al-sāʾir fī mīnāʾ al-najāt, al-maʿrūf bi-kitāb al-dūlāb, ed. ḥabīb ibrāhīm, 2 vols. (beirut: markaz al-turāth al-ʿarabī al-masīḥī, 2020–21). 14. https://sinaimanuscripts.library.ucla.edu/ (accessed july 12, 2021). the library of congress microfilm is available at https://www.loc.gov/item/00279389955-ms/. 15. habib zayat, “vie du patriarche melkite d’antioche christophore († 967) par le protospathaire ibrahîm b. yuhanna: document inédit du xe siècle,” proche-orient chrétien 2 (1952): 11–38, 333–66, at 13. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 116 no way to determine where this copy can be found. fortunately zayat’s edition is available until būlus’s manuscript is uncovered again. alexander treiger has recently discovered an additional copy of the antiochian menologion, presumably including the life of christopher, located in st. petersburg: national library of russia, arab. n.s. 92.16 this eight-volume set was copied in damascus in 1261/1845 by ḥannā b. jirjis ṣarrūf al-dimashqī. treiger believes that it was copied from a manuscript in the collection of the greek orthodox patriarchate in damascus and that the antigraph was subsequently destroyed in the sectarian conflicts of 1276/1860, while arab. n.s. 92 was brought to russia by porfirīĭ uspenskīĭ. it will hopefully be available for study soon, but i have not been able to consult it in the process of preparing this edition. an edition of the text was published by ignatius dick in 1997, but even though it uses both the sinai manuscript and zayat’s text, it is not a critical edition.17 it lacks a thorough presentation of the variants between the manuscripts and instead presents a seamless text that leans heavily on the sinai manuscript, bringing in occasional corrections from zayat. furthermore, it is extremely difficult to obtain a copy of this book outside the middle east. finally, sofia moiseeva published a russian translation of zayat’s text in 2013, incorporating only those sinai variants that were found in a short excerpt published in a 1979 article by joseph nasrallah.18 zayat explains that his copy of the text was damaged and that būlus himself was copying from a badly damaged copy. būlus writes: be aware, my brother, that at the beginning of the patriarchate of my father, i found this marvelous and unique account at the end of a very old book, badly written, deprived of diacritical points, nearly illegible, and gnawed by mites; numerous passages had also disappeared. but in all the arab countries with their monasteries and churches, i have not been able to find a second copy of it. i believed it necessary to reproduce it here, because it is so precious.19 thus zayat’s text, although extremely valuable as a second witness alongside sinai ar. 405, has suffered greatly from the ravages of time. the historical sections of the life bear an obvious resemblance to those found in yaḥyā b. saʿīd al-anṭākī’s history, known as the dhayl. scholars have typically explained the similarity by claiming that the life is “the source” of these elements of the dhayl.20 in most cases, these scholars worked only with zayat’s published text, in which the verbatim 16. treiger, “beginnings,” 332. 17. ighnāṭiyūs dīk, sīrat al-baṭriyark kharīsṭūfūrus al-anṭākī ṣadīq sayf al-dawla (aleppo: n.p., 1997). 18. ibrāhīm b. yūḥannā, “zhitie antiokhiĭskogo patriarkha khristofora,” trans. s. a. moiseeva, in arabykhristiane v istorii i literature blizhnego vostoka, ed. n. g. golovnina, 28–61 (moscow: pstgu, 2013); joseph nasrallah, “deux auteurs melchites inconnus du xe siècle,” oriens christianus 63 (1979): 75–86, at 79–82. the translation is reprinted in moiseeva’s 2015 monograph; see sofia a. moiseeva, arabskai͡a mel’kitskai͡a agiografii͡a ix–xi vekov (moscow: pstgu, 2015), 142–75. 19. zayat, “vie,” 15. 20. ibid., 15; john harper forsyth, “the byzantine-arab chronicle (938–1034) of yaḥyā b. saʿīd al-anṭākī” (phd diss., university of michigan, 1977), 182–86. 117 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) borrowing from one text to the other is extensive. however, when examining the s version of the life, the relationship between the two works becomes far murkier: there is greater divergence between the two extant manuscripts in the historical sections than there is in other sections, and the most significant differences concern the summaries and verbatim equivalents of al-anṭākī’s account, which are consistently found in z but have no parallel— or are phrased very differently—in s.21 the z variants contain nothing that is not found in al-anṭākī’s text, but s does contain information not found elsewhere. for example, when christopher is assassinated, z states that the murderers threw his head into a public bath furnace—as described in al-anṭākī’s dhayl—whereas s claims instead that his body was dragged around the city on a ladder, a detail found in no other source.22 this makes it highly unlikely that the recension contained in s was produced by editing an original text closer to z. instead, it seems likely that the redactor of z’s version edited an earlier text while copying and summarizing material from the dhayl. the fact that s is an earlier manuscript witness than z is circumstantial evidence for this position. the editing may have been carried out by būlus b. al-zaʿīm or by one of his predecessors. perhaps it was done to make the text more historically rich and—occasionally—more straightforwardly comprehensible, as the literary style of s is sometimes rather difficult to follow.23 counterintuitively, therefore, much of the material shared between the two texts was actually added from al-anṭākī’s text to ibrāhīm’s by a later editor, not borrowed from ibrāhīm’s work by al-anṭākī himself. other, less substantial variants between s and z involve the replacement of archaic or obscure words in s with their more current equivalents in z or simply glossing obscure terms, as z does with the term bāqūlā.24 with all this in mind, it seems nearly certain that s is closer to the original text of the life than z is, especially in the historical sections in which z relies heavily on borrowing from al-anṭākī’s work. as a result, my approach in the edition has been to prefer the reading of s in most cases. this approach yields a more 21. the one exception to this rule occurs in §17 of the life, where s recounts in detail that peter the stratopedarkhēs was attacking aleppo while the syrian gang was trying to return the captive ibn mānik to him. here s follows closely the description of events in al-anṭākī’s dhayl, whereas z simply states that the syrians “brought him [ibn mānik] to the stratopedarkhēs” and ignores the attack on aleppo altogether. compare yaḥyā b. saʿīd al-anṭākī, “histoire de yahya-ibn-sa‘ïd d’antioche, continuateur de sa‘ïd-ibn-bitriq,” ed. and trans. i. kratchkovsky and a. vasiliev, patrologia orientalis 18, no. 5 (1924): 699–833, at 823–24. 22. ibrāhīm, life, §15; al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 809. 23. for example, s has a tendency to describe major characters and refer to them by epithets without revealing their names until the end of their part in the story, if at all. z rearranges the text to introduce characters by name, generally when they are first mentioned. this difference helps explain some of the quirks noted by moiseeva. for example, moiseeva notes an instance in which an entire set of sentences is repeated; it now seems clear that the first occurrence of these sentences is borrowed from al-anṭākī and placed earlier in z, whereas the second occurrence, found later in both manuscripts, reflects ibrāhīm’s original composition. the borrowing from al-anṭākī thus explains the repetition. see sofia a. moiseeva, “the early melkite arabic hagiography (ixth–xith centuries): evolution of the literary style,” parole de l’orient 39 (2014): 33–56, at 51; ibrāhīm, life, §17; al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 814. 24. ibrāhīm, life, §17. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 118 accurate picture of the text composed by ibrāhīm b. yūḥannā in the fifth/eleventh century while still giving access to the redactor’s later work in the apparatus. beyond variants, s fills most of the gaps present in the damaged text of z. more noteworthy than any of these variants and lacunae, however, is the presence in s of a two-page ethical preface that has been completely excised from z. in this introductory section, ibrāhīm lays out a vision of human nature and divine justice that should shape the way we read the text as a whole. he emphasizes the human capacity to improve and to turn away from a past life of sin—or even just a past life of ethical mediocrity—and argues that we, like god, “should view all those whom we see according to the way they look at the end of their days, whether they have been good and righteous or have returned to goodness and righteousness after straying far away.”25 this is the context in which ibrāhīm introduces his protagonist, christopher, whose early life in the luxurious context of government employment was suspect in ethical terms, but who turned from that life to one of asceticism and generosity when he became the patriarch of antioch. the inclusion of this preface and the benefits to be gained from critically comparing the two manuscripts will greatly improve our understanding of this valuable text. in this edition and translation, i have largely kept to the standard spelling of modern arabic with respect to issues such as the presence or absence of dots on the letters ى and however, i have preserved the forms of s that do not indicate .ة and ه and the letters ي the hamza, or glottal stop. i have also standardized proper names, which often differ slightly between the two manuscripts and from one occurrence to the next within a single manuscript, and i have not indicated their numerous small variants. otherwise, all variants have been noted in the apparatus to the edition; in the translation, i have mentioned only those variants that seem especially noteworthy or entail significant changes in meaning. the notes to the translation also clarify historical and narrative details that are relevant for understanding the text. i use س (in the edition) and s (in the translation) to refer to sinai arabic 405, and ز and z to refer to the lost manuscript edited by zayat in 1952. folio numbers in both edition and translation refer to the folios of s, from fol. 111v to fol. 131r. 25. ibrāhīm, life, preface. 119 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 111v بسم االب واالبن والروح القدس االاله الواحد اليوم الثالث والعشرون من ايار قصة سيرة البطريرك على انطاكية الشهيد خريسطوفورس وشهادته بها الفها ابراهيم بن يحنا االبروطسباثار الملكي بها يونانيا ثم نقلها ايضا عربيا نفعنا هللا بها امين ان الطبيعــة والجــري علــى الصــورة االالهيــة فعــل مــن افعــال هللا تبــارك ذكــره. فامــا الخطيــة والتعريــج عــن الرســوم الموجودة في الصورة فذلك فعل من افعال الشرير. وافعالنــا نحــن فقلنــا اوال انــه مــن افعــال هللا العتــراف الــكل بانــه تعالــى اســمه مــن غيــر موجــود خلــق الموجــودات واكــرم االنســان بيــده اذ خلقــه علــى صورتــه وذكرنــا فــي الثانــي انــه مــن افعــال ابليــس النــه حســد ابانــا ادم علــى هــذه الكرامــة التــي وصــل اليهــا. فغــره وخدعــه بامــل التالــه فاصــاره الــى الهبــوط والســقوط مــن الفضايــل الطبيعيــة ومناقــب الصــورة التــي صــور 112r صــار ثبــات الطبيعــة علــى اســها وقاعدتهــا وتــرك االنحيــاز عــن مركــز الصــورة فضيلــة. وصــارت عليهــا. فمــن هاهنــا االحــادة عــن واجبــات الطبيعــة والميــل عــن قاعدتهــا الــى ايــة جهــة كان ذلــك. وتــرك قصــد26 الصــورة نحــو مــا صــورت عليــه وتوجهها الى ضد ذلك نقيصة27 ورذيلة. فمــن هاهنــا صــار مــا ذكــره النبــي اذ قــال انــي ســاحكم عليــك بمــا اجــدك عليــه اخيــرا قــوال واجبــا. لعمــري ان ذلــك مــن اوجــب االشــيا واوالهــا. الن هللا تبــارك اســمه الــذي هــو الخيــر االول برانــا وخلقنــا علــى فعــل الخيــر ليكــون الخيــر غرضنــا وايــاه قصدنــا. ومتــى عدلنــا عنــه عدنــا اليــه فنصيــر بعــد انصرافنــا مــن هاهنــا صاعديــن اليــه الن المنــع مــن هــذه الحــال ليــس هــو مــن هللا جــل وعــز بــل مــن ارادتنــا نحــن هــو. وكيــف ال يكــون مــا قــد قيــل واجبــا. مــن هاهنــا ان28 يكــون يحكــم علينــا بمــا نوجــد عليــه فــي اخــر اوقاتنــا. فلذلــك صرنــا نحــن مــن مــن النــاس راينــاه علــى صــورة مــن الصــور فــي اخــر كان فــي كل اوقاتــه خيــرا صالحــا او عــاد الــى الخيــر والصــاح مــن انتــزاح عــرض لــه. فرجــع وقــد وجــب علينــا ان نمدحــه ونقرظــه لعلمنــا بانــه ال مانــع منعــه وقــد انصــرف علــى هــذه الصــورة مــن النفــوذ بغيــر عايــق يعوقــه الــى الخيــر االقصــى والماثور االبعد. ولســنا نخجــل متــى وجدنــا احــدا قــد تقدمــت لــه هفــوة فــي االول ثــم اســتقى لهــا اخيــرا ان نمدحــه ونعظمــه لموضــع مــا 112v مــن اضطهــاده ممدوحــا جــدا. لمــا صــار اليــه فيمــا بعــد. فمــن هاهنــا وجــب ان يكــون الوعــا المختــار بعــد مــا تقــدم انتهــى اليــه عــن الحــق جهــاده. وكذلــك ايضــا متــى النــه بعــد العشــر صــار بشــيرا. فــاذا كان مثــل هاذيــن احــد قــد تقــدم لــه ســبب عــاد بعــده الــى الفضيلــة وجــب ان يمــدح لمــا اســتانفه فيمــا بعــد. وان كان قــد تقــدم لــه زلــل فمــاذا نقــول فيمــن ال يتقــدم لــه الزلــل. بــل يكــون مــن اوســط النــاس فــي هــذه الحــال. فيمــا بيــن مــن تدنــس طوعــا او غيــر طــوع. وبيــن مــن اكثــر ذلــك ومــن اقــل. غيــر مــا نقــول ان مــن كانــت هــذه صورتــه فهــو ال محالــه فاضــل ومرتــب فــي جملــة مــن يجــب لــه المــدح الجزيل. 226  قصد: صححته؛ قصر: س 227  نقيصة: صححته؛ نقيضة: س 228  ان: صححته؛ ان يكون ما قد قيل واجبا من هاهنا ان: س arabic edition al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 120 ]1[ والــذي نعرفــه بهــذه الصــورة فهــو خريســطوفورس البطريــرك العظيــم والشــهيد الكريــم فيمــا تقــدم لــه مــن عطايــاه لمــا كان كاتبــا29 والشــديد الجلــد فيمــا تاخــر لــه بعــد ذلــك مــن الجهــاد والنســك الــذي لــم تتقــدم لــه بــه عــادة وال ســلفت رياضــه له القوي الحرارة في الغيرة وعلى الصغار من الصالحات والزايد الحرارة فيما بعد في المجاهدة عن الحق. وهــذا فوطنــه كان30 مدينــة الســام بغــداد التــي اعتاضهــا ولــد هاجــر عــن مدينــة اكتيســفون مدينــة ملكهــم فــي االول. وارض علومهــم والنقــي مــن الفاظهــم. وامــا والــداه فلســت اعــرف صورتهمــا كيــف كانــت غيــر انهمــا علــى كل حــال كبيــران جليــان. النهمــا لمثلــه31 والــدان. وامــا مــدة تربيتــه فكانــت يســيرة فــي مدينتــه بمقــدار مــا احتــاج اليــه مــن التــادب باوايــل العلــوم حتــى احكــم مــا امكــن مــن باغــة القــول. واحكــم اكثــر مــن ذلــك صناعــة الكتابــة باليــد. النــه كان اذا مــا كان يكتــب 113r احــد ان يــدري كيــف يميــز االفضــل مــن حــال خطــه فــي الحســن ام فــي الســرعة. فــان هاتيــن الحالتيــن لــم لــم يكــن تكونــا بالموجودتيــن فــي انســان واحــد متســاويتين. وامــا فيــه هــو فلــم تكونــا متســاويتين فقــط. بــل قــد كان يظــن مــن يــراه انهما يتسابقان. وتطلب الواحدة الزيادة على االخرى. ــي راس ــت بكرس ــي عني ــة الت ــة32 االالهي ــن العناي ــل م ــاه ب ــا ذكرن ــه مم ــت ل ــي حصل ــة الت ــن الفضيل ــا وم ــن هاهن فم الســليحيين عندنــا لــم يتيســر لــه المقــام فــي وطنــه طويــا. بــل لمــا تــادب بمــا امكــن ممــا ذكرنــا تشــبه بــاالب المختــار الــذي انتقــل مــن تلــك الديــار. فانتقــل وهــو ايضــا. النــه كان عتيــد ان يصيــر وهــو ايضــا لجماعــة ابــا كبيــرا. فانتقــل مــن بلــد الكلدانييــن الــى بلــد الســريانيين. ولســت اعنــي ببلــد33 الســريانيين بلــد الكنعانييــن الــذي هــو فــي هــذا الوقــت بلــد فلســطين. بــل اعنــي البلــد القريــب منــا وهــو نــازح قليــا عنــا وهــو بلــد حلــب. وكان التدبيــر فــي ذلــك كلــه مــن هللا الــذي يجعــل مباديــا34 تتقــدم الشــيا تنتهــي35 فيمــا بعــد الــى غايــة محمــودة. وفيمــا لجماعــة مــن النــاس فايــدة. فهــو عــز وجــل ال يــزال يقــدم مــن الصغار مقدمات لكبار ال تخطر فيما قبل بوهم.36 وذاك ان ابــن حمــدان الملقــب بســيف الدولــة كان37 ذكــره كبيــرا وقــد كانــت حالــه فــي ذلــك الوقــت فــي هــذا الصقــع كبيــرة. وكانــت اثــاره جليلــة. فــكان يعنــي38 بــكل مــن كانــت لــه فضيلــة مــن النــاس لمــا كان فيــه مــن الكــرم وكبــر الهمــة 113v ســاير االقطــار. فلذلــك قصــده الــذي تشــبه بــاالب القديــم فــكان كالحجــر المغنيطــس يجتــذب النــاس باالحســان39 مــن فــي النقلــة. وكان اســمه فــي االول عيســى.40 وكان عتيــدا ان يكــون مــا كان ســميه او مــا كان عتيــدا ان يســماه وكان قــد تقــدم فسميه. وكان بحسب ما لبس المسيح من المعمودية كذلك كان مستانفا ان يلبسه ومن دمه. 229  بسم االب . . . كان كاتبا: س؛ هذا المغبوط السعيد والبطريرك المعظم والمكرم الشهيد: ز 230  وهذا فوطنه كان: س؛ كان من: ز 231  لمثله: س؛ لمثله والدليل: ز 232  العناية: س؛ العناية االخرى: ز 233  ببلد: ز؛ ببلد السريان بلد: س 234  مباديا: س؛ مناديا: ز 235  تنتهي: س؛ تنهي: ز 236  بوهم: س؛ بذهن: ز 237  الملقب بسيف الدولة كان: ز؛ الملقب كان سيف الدولة: س 238  يعني: س؛ يعين: ز ]lacuna[239  فكان كالحجر . . . الناس باالحسان: س؛ وكان[. . .]يجيئه الناس: ز 240  عيســى: س؛ عيســى النــه كان عتيــدا ان يصيــر بطريــركا مثــل ابراهيــم وهــو بذلــك غيــر عليــم اال انــه تســمى فيمــا بعــد خريســطوفورس النه: ز 121 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) فســلمه علــي بــن حمــدان الــى ماميــر كبيــر مــن امــرا الباديــة يســمى خليفــة بــن جنــدي وكانــت امارتــه فــي ناحيــة شــيزر.41 فصار عيسى معه42 االشيا كلها43 مردودة من جهته اليه. ]2[ ولــم يكــن عنــد االنطاكييــن فــي االول معروفــا وال بالجملــة مســموعا بــه او موصوفــا ولكــن عــرف بعــد ذلــك ممــا نحــن ذاكــروه. وذلــك ان اكتيســفون التــي ذكرناهــا كانــت كبيــرة وعظيمــة الذكــر. النهــا كانــت تخمــا وحــدا وثغــرا44 لمملكــة الفــرس. وكان فيهــا جماعــة مــن النصــارى ال يســمى45 راعيهــم مطرانــا. الن رتبــة المطرنــة لــم تكــن فيهــا كفايــة لرعايــة جمــع مثــل هــذا كبيــر فــي ســاير بــاد فــارس ورد امورهــم46 الــى اســاقفة وحدهــم فقــد كان يــكاد ايضــا ان يكونــوا قليليــن. بــل قــد كانــت الحاجــة داعيــة الــى اســاقفة كثيريــن واســاقفة هــذه صورتهــم فــي الكثــرة47 فمــا كان يمكــن مطرانــا واحــدا ان يســيمهم48 ويشــرطنهم. فدعــت الحاجــة الضروريــة الــى كــون مطارنــة كثيريــن. ومــع ذلــك فكانــت تلــك الديــار شاســعة بعيــدة ــى ــات ال ــر االوق ــي اكث ــر ف ــن المصي ــع ع ــرس يمن ــة الف ــي مملك ــع ف ــك الموض ــم هللا. وكان ذل ــماة باس ــا49 المس ــن مدينتن ع 114r انطاكية حتى يصلح لكل موضع مطرانا. فتقــدم لهــذه الحــال مــن القدمــا سياســة اخــرى قــد جــرى مثلهــا فــي امــم مختلفــة واماكــن بعيــدة مثــل بلــد الجــرزان50 واالبخــاز والبلغــر.51 ان يســام انســان يكــون ســلطانه اكثــر52 مــن ســلطان المطــران ويســمى كاثوليــكا كمــا يســمى فــي تلــك المواضع التي ذكرناها. فاتبع قدماونا هذه العادة وشرطن المتقدم على مدينتنا كاثوليكا على مدينة اكتيسفون. ولمــا بنــى الهاجريــون53 مدينــة الســام التــي هــي بغــداد. ارادوا ان ينقلــوا54 النصــارى مــن القــرب منهــا. فنقلوهــم الــى بلــد بعيــد مــن بــاد الفــرس يدعــى شــاش. ونفــوا اليــه الكاثوليــك مــع مــن نفــوه مــن اصحابــه. وســميت تلــك العشــيرة المنتقلــة جماعة الروم. فوجب ان يكون اسم جمعهم هذا االسم. وصــار مقــام الكاثوليــك فــي شــاش مــدة مــن الزمــان ولــم يكــن احــد يناظــر علــى ذلــك وال ينــازع فيــه. فلمــا ابتــدا جمــع مــن اســرى الــروم يجتمــع وينعتــق55 منهــم جماعــة بــدت حينيــذ56 المنازعــة فيمــا بيــن الفريقيــن. فقــال الجمــع المجتمــع ببغــداد مــن النصــارى ان الكاثوليــك لنــا ونحــن اولــى بــه. الن مقامــه كان فــي اكتيســفون واكتيســفون فهــي بصقبنــا57 وفــي جوارنــا 241  شيزر: ز؛ شيزه: س 242  معه: س؛ تغمه: ز 243  االشيا كلها: س؛ االشياء: ز 244  وثغرا: س؛ –ز 245  يسمى: س؛ سيما: ز 246  امورهم: ز؛ امرهم: س 247  الكثرة: س؛ الصفة: ز 248  يسيمهم: س؛ يسميهم: ز 249  مدينتنا: س؛ مدينته: ز 250  الجرزان: صححته؛ الخرزان: س؛ الخزران: ز 251  والبلغر: ز؛ البرغر: س 252  اكثر: س؛ اكبر: ز 253  ولما بنى الهاجريون: س؛ فلما بنوا بني هاجر: ز 254  ارادوا ان ينقلوا: س؛ رأوا ينكفوا: ز 255  وينعتق: س؛ وتبعوا: ز 256  حينيذ: س؛ خبيثة: ز 257  بصقبنا: س؛ بعقبنا: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 122 وبالقــرب منــا. وقــال مــن كان فــي شــاش اننــا نحــن مــن58 اهــل ذلــك الموضــع والمنتقلــون مــن هنــاك الــى هاهنــا بكاثوليــك المشــرق اجمــع. وبحســب مــا ان االنســان اكــرم مــن كل مــا فــي االرض. فكذلــك. نحــن اوجــب59 ان يكــون الكاثوليــك لنــا 114v لنــا ذلــك اكثــر مــن وجوبــه لكــم. النكــم تطلبــون الــذي انتقــل معنــا ولنــا التقــدم اذ كنــا مــن الخليقــة ناطقيــن. ويجــب ان يكون لكم التقدم من الحجارة والتراب. وبينمــا كانــت المشــاجرة فيمــا بيــن الفريقيــن60 علــى هــذه الحــال اتفــق انــه توفــي الكاثوليــك الــذي كان فــي ذلــك الوقــت واحتيــج بعــده الــى انســان اخــر يتمــم61 خدمــة الكهنــوت بهــا. فلموضــع الحاجــة الــى مثــل ذلــك وفــد الــى مدينــة انطاكيــة مــن رومجــرد ثلثــة رســل طالبيــن شــرطونية كاثوليــك. وكان احدهــم62 قسيســا واالثنــان شماســين. وانــا القايــل والمصنــف رايتهــم وانــا صبــي مقيميــن بكنيســتنا وقايليــن انهــم لــن يعــودوا اال بعــد ان يســمع منهــم ويوهلــوا الخــذ63 كاثوليــك64 قــد قدمــوا مــن اقصــى االرض طالبيــه. فــكان عيســى المقــدم ذكــره قــد ســمع بقدومهــم ولــم65 يحســن موقــع مــا وردوا فيــه منــه النــه كان بغداديــا وأحــد المقاوميــن فــي بــاب الكاثوليــك والمتقــدم فــي ذلــك. فحــذرا مــن تمــام مــا وردوا فيــه66 فمــا تراخــى. وال مــع ذاك67 ضجــع فــي تــرك مــا هــو عليــه مــن الخدمــة وتجشــم العنــا الــى انطاكيــة ليدفعهــم عمــا وردوا فيــه. ولــم يكــن مــع ذاك انسان68 سامه ذلك. بل نهض اليه هو من ذات نفسه غيرة وحدها لوطنه. وكان فــي ذلــك الوقــت المتولــي سياســة بلدتنــا المنســوبة الــى هللا اغابيــوس69 بــن القعبــرون70 المتنيــح الــذي كان يدبــر البطركيــة قبلــه. فجــرت المناطــرة والمحــاورة والمشــاجرة قدامــه فــي نصــب الكاثوليــك. وكان عيســى المقــدم ذكــره شــديد71 المنازعــة عــن اهــل بلــده ومحتــج72 بحججهــم وطالــب الظفــر لهــم. واجتــذاب الكاثوليــك الــى مدينتهــم التــي هــي مدينــة الســام 115r وكان البطريــرك الحاكــم قــد اشــبه ان يكــون73 غيــر موثــر لمــا كان يطلبــه عيســى. ولكنــه والعــوض عــن اكتيســفون. احجــم لمقدرتــه فــي الوقــت واحتشــمه وعلــق74 االمــر. فاقتنــع بذلــك فــي الوقــت عيســى وانصــرف. اال انــه ابــان75 لانطاكييــن منه انه رجل كبير جلد وان له غيرة شديدة في امور الكنيسة. 258  من: ز؛ هم: س 259  اوجب: س؛ واجب: ز 260  الفريقين: س؛ الفئتين: ز 261  يتمم: ز؛ يتم: س 262  احدهم: ز؛ احدهما ايضا: س 263  الخذ: س؛ لمأخذ: ز 264  كاثوليك: س؛ كاثوليك والنهم كانوا: ز 265  ولم: س؛ وليس: ز 266  منه النه . . . وردوا فيه: ز؛ –س 267  مع ذاك: س؛ –ز 268  انسان: س؛ احد: ز 269  اغابيوس: ز؛ اغاثن: س 270  القعبرون: ز؛ القعيرون: س 271  شديد: ز؛ الشديد: س 272  ومحتج: ز؛ والمحتج: س 273  قد اشبه ان يكون: س؛ قدامه: ز 274  وعلق: س؛ وغلق: ز 275  ابان: س؛ بان: ز 123 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) ]3[ فلــم يكــن اال هنيهــة مــن الزمــان حتــى76 توفــي البطريــرك. وصــار اهتمــام االنطاكييــن فــي اختيــار بطريــرك وراع يكــون بعــده. الن االختيــار لــم يكــن هاهنــا لمطارنــة واســاقفة ال يهتمــون بشــي غيــر مــا يصلــح حــال نفوســهم وامــا مــا77 يصلــح احــوال الكافــة فــا يهتمــون بــه. بحســب مــا جــرت بــه العــادة فــي غيــر هــذا الموضــع. بــل كان االختيــار هاهنــا الــى مــن يولمــه هــذا االمــر. واهتمامــه واختيــاره فــي العامــة والخاصــة متســاويا. واذا مــا اراد ان يميــز المعنــى78 فــي االختيــار وجد ما جرى به الرسم هاهنا شيا ال يشوبه هوى. ومن هاهنا فيكون وهلل مرضيا. فلمــا اهتــم االنطاكيــون بهــذا البــاب افــاض79 جمعهــم فــي اختيــار واحــد بعــد اخــر. فلــم يجــدوا اوفــق لهــم واصلــح لكرســيهم مــن عيســى. فلمــا اتفــق اختيــار جماعتهــم عليــه طلبــوه مــن ســيف الدولــة. النــه كان المســتولى علــى هــذه الديــار. فحســن موقــع ذلــك منه.النــه كان الــى عيســى مايــا وبــه مختصــا. اال انــه لــم يكــن لــه طريقــا الــى اجابتهــم فــي اختيــاره لموضــع 115v الجــل مــا كان فيــه مــن الغلــظ والشــجاعة واالقــدام. وانــه لــم يشــكك توقيــه مــن قحــة االعرابــي الــذي كان يخدمــه في دفعه عن عيسى اذ كان كاتبه في ذلك الوقت. فــكان مــن توفيــق هللا ومــا اراد بــه تبــارك اســمه مــن حصــول مثلــه80 هاهنــا بطريــركا ان ســار ذلــك البــدوي القرمطــي مــع ســيف الدولــة فــي بعــض الغــزوات فــزل بــه81 الفــرس علــى جســر صارخــة82 وغــرق فــي نهــر اللــس.83 فاطلــق حينيــذ ــذ ــن هللا واخ ــرم م ــي المك ــليحيين العال ــس الس ــي ريي ــى كرس ــريعا عل ــار س ــتعلى المخت ــى. واس ــار عيس ــة اختي ــيف الدول س للشــرطونية مــن المطارنــة بحســب الواجــب. وكانــت شــرطونيته بهيــة واليقــة. وســمي84 خريســطوفورس بحســب الواجــب علــى85 مــا ظهــر مــن افعالــه انــه كان مشــتما علــى كل صالحــة فــي صــدره. واذا مــا قلنــا اخــص مــن هــذا القــول قلنــا انــه كان قد ضم المسيح في قلبه. ]4[ واســتلبه بعــد هــذا مــن طريقــة خفــض86 وترفــة طريقــة اخــرى خشــنة87 صلبــة. النــه وان كان لــم يصــر راهبــا اال انــه88 قــد زاد علــى الرهبــان فيمــا كان يســتعمله. وذاك انــه مــن بعــد شــرطونيته مــا طعــم شــيا مــن اللحــوم. ال النــه مــا كانــت تقدمتــه عــادة برســوم89 الرهبــان اال انــه مــا90 اقتنــع بمــا جــرت ســالفة الرهبــان عليــه فــي صــوم او ســهر او قيــام بــل زاد عليهــم فــي هــذه المعانــي كلهــا وعفــا. فــكان صومــه فــي كل يــوم مــن الليــل الــى الليــل. ومــن اول الســنة الــى اخرهــا بالســوا. 276  حتى: س؛ –ز 277  ما: ز؛ –س 278  المعنى: س؛ العقل: ز 279  افاض: ز؛ حاض: س 280  مثله: ز؛ مثله من: س 281  فزل به: س؛ فرمته: ز 282  صارخة: س؛ مارخة: ز 283  اللس: س؛ السن: ز 284  وسمي: س؛ وتسمى: ز 285  الواجب على: س؛ –ز ]lacuna[286  خفض: س؛ –ز 287  اخرى خشنة: س؛ احرز خشبة: ز 288  اال انه: ز؛ –س 289  برسوم: س؛ برسم: ز 290  اال انه ما: ز؛ –س al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 124 النــه منــذ تبطــرك مــا تنــاول شــيا مــن االغذيــة فــي يــوم مــن االيــام الــى وقــت المســا. وال كان لــه ايضــا91 اهتمــام بفنــو 116r مــن الطعــام بــل كان ال فــرق فيمــا يســتطعمه. وكانــت مايدتــه كيــف مــا اتفــق ال يحضرهــا فــي كثيــر مــن االوقــات ال بيض وال سمك وال ما يتنوق فيه. وكان شرابه ال يبلغ زيادة. بل كان يسيرا من الخمر مع كثير من الما. وامــا قيامــه92 فــكان فــي االيــام المحلولــة مــن وقــت كبيــر مــن الليــل وقبــل الفجــر بكثيــر. وامــا فــي ايــام االحــاد فــكان مــن مســا دخــول ليلــة االحــد الــى الصبــاح. وكان يجــدوا القســوس تبريرهــم93 بــه فــي ســهره مــن اجــل محبتــه الكبــرى كانــت هلل وكبــر نفســه. وامــا قيامــه فــكان كثيــرا ال ينثنــي عنــه طويــا حبــى رايتــه انــا عــدة دفعــات مــن شــدة الوقــوف يــكاد ان يســقط الــى االرض. وذكرنــا مــن هــذا المعنــى يســيرا نــدل94 بــه علــى خشــونة الســيرة التــي اســتعملها ولــم يتقــدم لــه بهــا تجربة. وقد يعرف صعوبة95 ما هذه سبيله وتعمده96 على رجل قد تربى في ترفة من يخبر97 ذاك ويعرفه. ــى ــت ال ــة دع ــرطونيته. وذاك ان الحاج ــد ش ــه بع ــن فعل ــا كان م ــر بم ــد التخبي ــكام ان يقص ــبيل ال ــذا فس ــد ه ]5[ وبع شــرطونية الســاقفة علــى الكراســي الفارغــة. فــاي98 الكراســي التــي اهتــم بهــم فــي االول. لــم يهتــم بمــا ليــس فيــه منازعــة وال بكرســي اخــر لــم يتقــدم لــه فيــه مدافعــة وال محابــاة ومجاذبــة. بــل بالكرســيين اللذيــن99 كان يناضــل عــن احدهمــا ويقــاوم االخــر. وكان اهتمامــه بهمــا ليــس بحســب مــا كان فــي االول مايــا ومعانــدا.100 بــل لمــا عــرف مــن نفســه انــه قــد تقــدم لــه ــن ــدم م ــا تق ــتقبل102 م ــة. راى ان يس ــاة101 والمقاوم 116v المحاب ــب ــب بحس ــن الواج ــه ع ــص في ــا زاد او نق ــل م ــا قب فيم تفريطه في هذا الباب. ويصلح مع اصاح نيته االمور التي توالها ليس بدون اصاح اعتقاده. ــل104 ــزان وجع ــذا المي ــيروطونية به ــوزن الس ــف. ف ــة ولط ــدل اال103 بحكم ــزان ع ــه بمي ــذا من ــى كان ه ــى اي معن وعل كاثوليكيــن احدهمــا علــى مدينــة الســام التــي هــي وطنــه كان مــن اهــل حلــب واســمه ذاويــذ105 واالخــر مــن اهــل انطاكيــة ــة ــة اللطيف ــذه السياس ــى ه ــاس عل ــن الن ــده م ــو ال106 يحم ــن ه ــا. فم ــي كان يقاومه ــرد الت ــى رومج ــوس عل ــمه اوتيكي واس 291  ايضا: س؛ –ز 292  قيامه: س؛ قيامه في الصالة: ز 293  تبريرهم: س؛ تدبيرهم: ز 294  نذل: ز؛ يدل: س 295  صعوبة: س؛ –ز 296  وتعمده: ز؛ وبعده: س 297  يخبر: س؛ تخيير: ز 298  فاي: س؛ فان: ز 299  اللذين: ز؛ الذين: س 2100  ومعاندا: س؛ وال معاندا: ز 2101  المحاباة: س؛ المجازاة: ز 2102  يستقبل: س؛ يستقيل: ز 2103  بميزان عدل اال: س؛ يميز ان عمل االمر: ز 2104  وجعل: س؛ وذلك ان جعل: ز 2105  ذاويذ: س؛ ماجد: ز 2106  ال: س؛ الذي لم: ز 125 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) الســديدة107 الموديــة الــى الســام108 واالتفــاق. النــه مــا ظلــم مدينتــه. وايضــا فاحســن النظــر لغيرهــا. ووهــب لاثنيــن109 اتفــاق النفوس والبعد من الخصايم والمنازعات. ]6[ ولكنــه هــل ضجــع بعــد هــذا فــي امــر الكراســي االخــرى110 التــي كانــت فارغــة او لمــا نظــر فــي بابهــا نظــر لرشــوة ام لشــفاعة ام لرضــا رييــس ام لفــرق مــن مقتــدر عبــوس. ال بــل كان اذا مــا راى وفــد المدينــة التــي تطلــب اســقفا وقــد ذكــروا لــه المســتحق للشــرطونية وهــو مرضــي هلل ولــه. قــد وضــع يــده عليــه للوقــت وتممــه ورضــي بمــا رضــوه111 ورضــخ لمــا طلبــوه. او لــم112 يــرض بــه فاختــار غيــره ممــن يرضــى اوليــك بــه ايضــا. ووضــع يــده عليــه بــراي الســينودس التــي تليــه113 فلــم يوخــر ذاك. الن114 المطارنــة الذيــن كانــوا قبلــه115 كانــوا يــرون حصافــة عقلــه وقــوة عزيمتــه وانــه ال يداخلــه محابــاة وال يرغب في عطا وال رشوة. فكيف كان يمكنهم ان يخالفوه في شي مما يومي116 اليه.117 117r وامــا قــوة عزيمتــه وكبــر قلبــه وغيرتــه فيمــا يجمــل البيعــة ويصلــح شــانها فانــه كان يقــاوم عــن ذلــك ويدافــع ]7[ وال يتحــرك وال يرتــدع. فــا بــاس ان ذكرنــا هاهنــا خبــرا قــد يدلنــا علــى ذاك جملــة.118 وهــو انــه كان قســيس يتطبــب قــد عــرض لــه هفــوة مــن الهفــوات الصغــار. فعقــده االب المطــوب119 ومنعــه مــدة مــا مــن اســتعمال الكهنــوت. وكان ذلــك القــس يخــدم انســانا مــن امــرا بنــي حمــدان عاتيــا عســوفا ال يطيــع فــي كثيــر مــن االشــيا وال البــن حمــدان. فاستشــفع بــه الــى البطريــرك فــي اطاقــه وحلــه مــن الربــاط. فمــا تاخــر ذاك عــن الشــفاعة تقديــر منــه بانــه ال يحســر احــد وال مــن اكابــر المسلمين على مخالفته. فكيف بطريرك120 وهو على كل حال نصراني121 ذمي في الحضيض.122 ــا ــي ايه ــب ل ــيس فه ــي القس ــن طبيب ــرى م ــا ج ــن خط ــا كان م ــا. مهم ــاطه قاي ــرك بانبس ــل البطري ــال راس ــذه الح فله البطريــرك ذنبــه فيــه واصفــح عنــه. فاجابــه قايــا. ليــس يمكننــي ذلــك يــا ســيدي االميــر. فاعــاد عليــه ذاك قايــا لــه فــي الجــواب. يــا اقلــف امــا تهابنــي بــل تجســر ان تقــول لــي مــا يمكننــي ذلــك. ومــاذا هــو الــذي ال يمكنــك اذا امرتــك انــا بــه. فاعــاد عليــه الفاتــك قايــا فــي الجــواب. كثيــرا مــن123 االشــيا ال يمكننــي ايهــا االميــر اذا كانــت مخصوصــة بدينــي ومذهبــي 2107  السديدة: ز؛ الشديدة: س 2108  السالم: س؛ السلم: ز 2109  ووهب لالثنين: س؛ ووجب اال يفتن: ز 2110  االخرى: س؛ االخر: ز 2111  رضوه: س؛ رضيوه: ز 2112  او لم: ز؛ ولم: س ]lacuna[2113  التي تليه: س؛ –ز 2114  ذاك. الن: س؛ ذلك. والجل ذلك: ز 2115  قبله: س؛ قبله لما: ز 2116  يومي: س؛ يرمي: ز 2117  اليــه: ز؛ اليــه. وامــا قــوة عزيمتــه وانــه ال يداخلــه محابــاة وال يرغــب فــي عطــا وال رشــوة. فكيــف كان يمكنهــم ان يخالفــوه فــي شــي مما يومي اليه: س 2118  جملة: ز؛ –س 2119  المطوب: ز؛ –س 2120  تقدير منه . . . فكيف بطريرك: س؛ لثقته برأفته: ز 2121  نصراني: س؛ –ز 2122  الحضيض: س؛ الخصيص: ز 2123  الفاتك قايال . . . كثيرا من: س؛ القائل قائال: الحوادث كثيرة من هذه: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 126 117v ان نخالفكــم. وامــا مــا كان حظــره الديــن وناموســي. الننــا124 نحــن فــي125 طوعكــم وفــي اشــيا126 اخــرى ال يمكننــا فنحــن فيــه مســتعدون للســجن وقواطــع الســيوف. فاعــاد عليــه. ولكــن عرفنــي علــى كل حــال مــا هــي هــذه الجنايــة التــي127 قــد تمــس دينــك. فقــال تلميــذ المســيح. امــا قبــل هــذا ايهــا االميــر. فقــد كانــت الجنايــة صغيــرة واســتقالتها متيســرة. فامــا128 االن فانهــا كبيــرة والصفــح عنهــا ال يــرام. النــه استشــفع بــك129 وانــت مســلم ومخالــف لنــا فــي مذهبنــا. والصــدق فــي130 هــذا ممــا ال يســتر131 اذ كان االمــر يخــص كنيســتنا. فاجابــه الهاجــري قايــا. فكــن مــن االن مدججــا بالســاح واعلــم علمــا يقينــا انك ستموت. وذاك اني اخذ راسك ولو كان في حضن االمير االكبر.132 فمــاذا الــذي مــن بعــد ذاك صنعــه هــذا الفاتــك.133 هــل جــزع. هــل الن. هــل انثنــى. هــل توقــف لمراســلة يراســل بهــا ابــن حمــدان. ال البتــة. بــل تصــور ذلــك كلــه بصــورة الهبــا المنثــور. ولــم يكــن لــه عنــده قــدر. بــل توجــه للوقــت الــى انطاكيــة134 ووثــق فــي ذلــك بــاهلل الــذي عنــه كان يناضــل. وكان اذ ذلــك بحلــب.135 فمــا اخطــا136 بحمــد هللا عرضــه. فهــذه كانــت صورتــه في غيرته وحرصه على ما جمل137 البيعة وزينها.138 ]8[ واذا كان مذهــب هــذا الرجــل الفاضــل فــي هــذا المعنــى علــى مــا شــرحناه. فهــل كذلــك139 كانــت صورتــه فــي غيــر هــذا البــاب صــورة مــن ال ينثنــي وال يليــن.140 وال141 الوديــع المحــب للبشــر الــذي ينثنــي عطفــه142 ويميــل اذنــه143 لمــن يســاله ويحتــاج144 الــى رحمتــه وحنانــه. ولكــن فــي هــذا الجــزو145 االخــر مــن كان يكــون اشــد تحننــا مــن خريســطوفورس او اليــن146 118r عطفــا للمنكوبيــن او اشــد رحمــة للمحتاجيــن. او اوفــر عطــا للعافيــن. علــى انــه لــم يكــن الوفــر عنــده وافــرا لموضــع مــا كان بيــن االمــم متصرفــا. وكان االرتفــاع الــذي يرتفــع اليــه ناقصــا. ولكنــه فيمــا كان يمكنــه مــا كان قــط فــي االحســان 2124  الننا: ز؛ ال: س 2125  في: ز؛ –س 2126  اشيا: ز؛ االشيا: س 2127  التي: ز؛ الذي: س 2128  فاما: ز؛ فلما: س 2129  النه استشفع بك: س؛ الني استشنع به: ز 2130  في: س؛ –ز 2131  يستر: س؛ يصير: ز 2132  االكبر: س؛ الكبير: ز 2133  الفاتك: س؛ القائل: ز 2134  انطاكية: س؛ انطاكية وكان اذ ذلك بحلب: ز 2135  وكان اذ ذلك بحلب: س؛ –ز 2136  اخطا: ز؛ اضر: س 2137  جمل: س؛ يجمل: ز 2138  وزينها: س؛ ويزينها: ز 2139  فهل كذلك: س؛ فكذلك: ز 2140  يلين: ز؛ –س 2141  وال: س؛ وال وكيف كان يليق انه من اعماله تلميذ المسيح: ز 2142  عطفه: س؛ عقله: ز 2143  اذنه: س؛ اذن: ز 2144  ويحتاج: س؛ ما يحتاج: ز 2145  الجزو: س؛ الحد: ز 2146  او الين: ز؛ واللين: س 127 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) ــكان ــع االم ــل اذ كان يتس ــر متص ــا وغي ــات وال متفوات ــر دفع ــدة وغي ــة واح ــس دفع ــذل لي ــة والب ــاد والعناي ــرا واالرف مقص ويساعد اليسر147 وال يقاوم العشر.148 وكان يرفــع اليــه الرقــاع وال يضجــع فــي قرااتهــا والتوقيــع بيــده فيهــا بــان يعطــى بعــض المســايلين149 ورقــا. ويعطــى االخــر كســوة واالخــر طعامــا. واالخــر شــرابا. وغيــر هــوالي اشــيا150 اخــرى. ولقــد رايــت انــا المصنــف لهــذا القــول قسيســا قــد رفــع اليــه قصــة. فادخلــه اليــه وســاله وقــال لــه. كــم لــك مــن العيــال. فاجابــه قايــا كــذا وكــذا. فقــال. ليدفــع اليــه كــذا وكــذا بــرا. وكــذا وكــذا زيتــا وكــذا وكــذا خمــرا بقــدر مــا يكفيــه للســنة فلمــا اومــى ذلــك القــس الــى الخــروج قــال لــه. عــد الــى ــم ــه. فل ــا يكفي ــا م ــذا ايض ــن ه ــه وم ــع الي ــن ليدف ــن االدم. ولك ــي م ــن151 او ش ــرة الطح ــس اج ــا باي ــك ي ــن ل ــن اي ــا. وم هاهن يتركه152 القديس ينصرف حتى قام له بجميع ما يقنعه لسنته كلها. وكان ايضــا153 اذا رفعــت اليــه154 قصــة مــن محبــوس او مطالــب بظلــم. ان كان يمكنــه ان يخلصــه بيســير155 مــن عطايــاه. مــا كان يتاخــر156 العطــا عنــه وال خاصــه ممــا يطالــب بــه. وان كان هنــاك صعوبــة شــديدة مــا كان يضجــع فــي الركــوب 118v وســواله فــي157 الصفــح لــه عمــا يــرام ان يغرمــه وامــا فــي حطيطتــه158 مــا امكــن مــن والممــر الــى مــن يطالبــه الجملــة. فهــذه كانــت صــورة نيقــوالوس الجديــد عندنــا159 الحــار العنايــة بــكل مــن كان فــي شــدة وضــرورة. وهــذه160 جملــة مما يستدل161 به على ما كان يفعله بنفسه ويبذل معروفه. ولمــا كان راســه وذروتــه والمتقــدم بالتمســك والتمثــل162 لــه المســيح الــذي كان ايمــاوه ابــدا163 بفكــره اليــه وكان حريصــا علــى التشــبه بــه لــم يقتنــع باشــباعه الوفــا مــن خبــزات164 قليلــة. بــل اضــاف الــى ذلــك مكافــاة165 اخــرى بيديــه الطاهرتيــن فغســل ارجــل تاميــذه فاجتهــد وهــذا الــذي هــو تلميــذه ايضــا اال يكتفــي بمــا شــرحناه ممــا تقــدم ذكــره بــل نضيــف166 الــى 2147  اليسر: س؛ البشر: ز 2148  العشر: س؛ المعشر: ز 2149  المسايلين: س؛ المساكين: ز 2150  اشيا: ز؛ اشياه: س 2151  الطحن: س؛ الطحين: ز 2152  يتركه: ز؛ يترك: س 2153  ايضا: س؛ –ز 2154  اليه: س؛ اليه ايضا: ز 2155  بيسير: س؛ بتيسير: ز 2156  يتاخر: س؛ يؤخر: ز 2157  في: س؛ –ز ]lacuna[2158  في حطيطته: س؛ –ز 2159  عندنا: س؛ –ز 2160  وهذه: س؛ وهدم: ز 2161  يستدل: س؛ يستبدل: ز 2162  بالتمسك والتمثل: س؛ بالتمثل: ز 2163  ايماوه ابدا: س؛ دايما مؤيدا: ز 2164  خبزات: ز؛ خيرات: س 2165  مكافاة: ز؛ مداواة: س 2166  نضيف: س؛ يضيف: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 128 ذلــك شــيا اخــر مــن الخدمــة167 بيديــه الخوتــه المنســوبين الــى معلمــه. وكان168 فــي ذلــك الحيــن بانطاكيــة مجاعــة شــديدة لــم يكــن يمكــن اال تمــس كافــة النــاس. فلذلــك جمــع خريســطوفورس جمعــا مــن الجريحيــن الذيــن نكاهــم169 الجــوع مــن شــيوخ ومرضــى. وقســوس وشمامســة وصبيــان وايتــام. كان قــد جمعهــم ورتبهــم فــي مكاتــب وكان يجعلهــم ويجلســهم علــى الموايــد ويكــون هــو قايمــا ال يقنــع باالمــر بــان يوفــر عليهــم الطعــام بــل كان ربمــا يقــوم بيــده ويســقي الشــراب واحــدا بعــد واحــد. ويتبين بذلك انه عبد للمسيح امين ومتشبه به تشبها ال يمكن غيره ان يساويه فيه. ]9[ واذ كنــت انــا هاهنــا قــد ذكــرت صبيــة170 وايتامــا فقــد يلزمنــي ان اذكــر مــن كان هــوالي الصبيــان. وتبيــن لــي ايهــا الســامع انــت ال كبــر171 نفســه فــي محبتــه للضعيــف فقــط. بــل وفضــل عقلــه ولطــف172 سياســته فــي مــا يجمــع بــه العــام مــن المنفعــة. وذلــك انــه لمــا راى ضيــق الوقــت وصعوبتــه. وانــه ال173 يتاخــر عــن العلــم لهــذه الحــال الفقــرا ومــن ال جنــس لــه مــن العــض174 وحدهــم بــل وقــد175 تضجــع فــي ذلــك كبــار176 مــن النــاس ذوو احســاب.177 فكانــت كنيســة هللا المقدســة178 119r في التعليم179 فكر وال همة. مختلة. وليس الكثر الناس ففكــر هــو فــي امــر180 كبيــر. بــان فيــه حســن181 سياســته. فاختــار مــن اولــي االحــوال182 الكبــار اثنــى عشــر صبيــا اذكيــا نجبــا. واســلمهم183 الــى مــودب بصيــر ليعلمهــم علــوم184 الكنيســة التــي تزيــد علــى غيرهــا. ثــم اقتــرع مــن الفقــرا قومــا غيرهــم وافــرد ايتامــا ســيية185 حالهــم وعددهــم مايــة وخمســون صبيــا وســلمهم الــى ثلثــة186 معلميــن ليعلمــوا كل واحــد مــا ينفــد فيــه. وتقــدم بــان يطبــخ فــي كل يــوم ثلثــة مراجــل187 كبــار فيهــا ملوهــا مــن الطعــام. ويحمــل كل مرجــل188 منهــا الــى كل واحــد 2167  الخدمة: س؛ المدنية: ز 2168  وكان: س؛ وذلك انه كان: ز 2169  نكاهم: ز؛ انكاهم: س 2170  وايتام. كان . . . ذكرت صبية: ز؛ –س 2171  ال كبر: ز؛ لكبر: س 2172  ولطف: س؛ لطيف: ز 2173  ال: س؛ ال يتيه وال: ز 2174  العض: س؛ العوز: ز 2175  وقد: ز؛ وقت: س 2176  كبار: س؛ الكبار: ز 2177  احساب: س؛ االحساب: ز 2178  المقدسة: س؛ –ز 2179  التعليم: س؛ العلم: ز 2180  امر: ز؛ امرا: س 2181  حسن: س؛ خير: ز 2182  االحوال: س؛ االموال: ز 2183  واسلمهم: س؛ وسلمهم: ز 2184  ليعلمهم علوم: س؛ بعلوم: ز 2185  سيية: س؛ شبيه: ز 2186  ثلثة: س؛ –ز 2187  مراجل: س؛ مواجل: ز 2188  مرجل: س؛ موجل: ز 129 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) مــن المكاتــب ويعطــى كل189 واحــد مــن الصبيــان مــا يكفيــه معمــا يحتــاج اليــه مــن الخبــز.190 ويجــب ان يعــرف مــا اجتمــع هاهنــا مــن المنافــع وهــي191 ثــاث كبــار. احداهــا طعــام192 ال يتعــب فيــه مــن ياكلــه. والثانيــة تعليــم ال يوخــذ الثــواب واالجــرة عليه. والثالثة خدمة للبيعة الشريفة.193 وهذه194 جملة من افعاله في هذا المعنى. ]10[ وانضــاف الــى ذلــك مــا هــو اكبــر195 منــه فــي معونــة الفقــرا وادعــام الديــن. وذاك ان الهاجرييــن يســتخرجون مــن النصــارى فــي بادهــم جزيــة196 نســميها نحــن جزيــة الــرووس ويســمونها197 هــم بــراة. النهــا تبــري الــذي يوديهــا مــن االذيــة والتتبــع. وليــس الحــد مــن النصــارى المقيميــن هنــاك مفيــض198 مــن تاديتهــا. الن مــن ال يوديهــا يقــاد بغيــر اختيــاره الــى ديــن االســام. وقــد يبصــر هنــاك ايضــا منظــر بديــع يرثــى لــه لمــن قــد بلــي بــه. فبعــض النصــارى يــودون199 البــراة بنيــة صادقــة 119v ذلــك بــرا ومعروفــا. النــه شــي يودونــه عــن دينهــم. وقــوم اخــر يضطهــرون النهــم اذا كان يمكنهــم ويتصــورون معســرون. فاالقــوى منهــم فــي الديــن ليــس هــو الــذي يتاخــر عــن االدا عنــد امكانــه. بــل والــذي يعطــي ويعيــن الضعيــف200 فيما يستادى منه. فلمــا راى خريســطوفورس المشــتمل فــي صــدره علــى المســيح هــذه الشــدة مــن هــذا البــاب لــم يكــف201 عــن العطيــة وال كان يقتنــع بزيــادة يزيدهــا فــي تاديــة202 بــراة بــل كان يضيــف الــى ذلــك تاديــة جملــة البــراة مــن عنــده عمــن ال203 يمكنــه. فلمــا كل ولــم204 يتيســر لــه وفــر يقــوم بــه فــي هــذا البــاب بحســب اعتقــاده. النــه لــم يكــن205 لــه غــزارة ارتفــاع. مــاذا يقــرر206 انــه اتــاه فــي هــذا المعنــى بدقــة همتــه فــي التشــبه بيوحنــا الرحــوم صاحــب االســكندرية المدينــة. انبســط علــى ســوال االميــر ســيف الدولــة فــي معاونتــه علــى محبــة المســاكين. فلــم يخالفــه207 ذاك النــه كان بالطبــع كريمــا وكان ميلــه الــى البطريــرك خاصــة208 ميــا شــديدا. فتقــدم الــى مســتخرجي الخــراج209 بــان يصفحــوا لــه منهــا210 كل ســنة عــن عشــرة االف درهــم يكــون 2189  كل: س؛ لكل: ز 2190  الخبز: ز؛ الخير: س 2191  وهي: س؛ وهن: ز 2192  احداها طعام: س؛ احداهن اهداء الطعام: ز 2193  الشريفة: ز؛ شريفة: س 2194  وهذه: س؛ –ز 2195  اكبر: س؛ اكثر: ز 2196  جزية: ز؛ جزية يسميها: س 2197  يسمونها: ز؛ يسميها: س 2198  مفيض: س؛ نقيض: ز 2199  يودون: ز؛ بوزن: س 2200  يعطي ويعين الضعيف: س؛ يعين ذا الضعف: ز 2201  يكف: س؛ يكفف: ز 2202  تادية: ز؛ بادية: س 2203  عمن ال: س؛ لما: ز 2204  ولم: ز؛ –س 2205  يكن: ز؛ يمكن: س 2206  يقرر: س؛ يقدر: ز 2207  يخالفه: س؛ يخالف: ز 2208  خاصة: ز؛ –س 2209  الخراج: س؛ البراءة: ز 2210  منها: س؛ منها في: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 130 يكتــب بهــا الرقــاع اليهــم لمــن يزيــد ان يرفــده. فــكان يكتــب لواحــد بالصفــح عــن براتــه كلهــا.211 ويكتــب لغيــره بالصفــح عــن نصف212 ما يراد منه. فما تقدم احد من النصارى على عهده الى دين االسام. ]11[ فحصــل للبطريــرك مــن هــذا مــع الثــواب مــن هللا قبــول213 شــديد باالميــر ســيف الدولــة وميــل مــن ســيف الدولــة 120r هــذا اليــه ايضــا. الن هــذا المعنــى موجــود هــو بالطبــع فــي النــاس اال يكــون المحســن اليــه يعتقــد مــواالة المحســن وحــده. بــل ويكــون المحســن ايضــا زايــد214 فــي االحســان اليــه. فالمحســن اليــه يحصــل لــه بالمــواالة اســتمداد215 االحســان وفيمــا بعــد ايضــا والمحســن فيريــد ان يــرب216 احســانه بالمبالغــة والمتابعــة ال ســيما اذا كان فــي طبعــه الجــود حتــى ال يضيــع ما تقدم من احسانه باالمساك. ــه ــرد عن ــان. انف ــن الزم ــة م ــدة طويل ــت م ــان ثب ــديد وعصي ــف ش ــة خل ــيف الدول ــى س ــرك عل ــا217 تح ــا. لم ــن هاهن فم ــن ــدا م ــط واح ــب فق ــي ان يخاط ــن. وال رض ــن االنطاكيي ــه م ــى علي ــن عص ــة م ــي جمل ــل ف ــم يدخ ــده ول ــرك وح البطري المتمردين. وكان الســبب فــي هــذا العصيــان ان الملــك نقفــور المغبــوط لمــا ملــك بلــد الثغــر االكثــر منــه عنــوة وبحــرب وطرســوس وحدهــا218 بامــان. الن الجــوع كان قــد هتــك219 اهلهــا وبلــغ منهــم اشــام220 مبلغــا ينقــص عــن الحــرب.221 وكان ســيف الدولــة فــي الحــال بميافارقيــن قــد افلــج. وامــا اهــل طرســوس222 قدمــوا الــى مدينــة انطاكيــة بنســائهم223 واوالدهــم. فحــذر مــن كان بانطاكيــة مــن الهاجرييــن علــى نفوســهم. وصــاروا الــى ابــن الزيــات224 المقــدم كان عليهــم يســالون ويتضرعــون فــي مقامــه عندهــم وتدبيــر امورهــم اذ كانــت اذ ذاك225 قــد تشــعثت وضعفــت.226 فلمــا راى ابــن الزيــات227 انهــا علــى هــذه الحــال وكان جزعه228 من نقفور الملك يكره.229 امتنع من المقام بالكلية. 2211  براته كلها: س؛ كل براءته: ز 2212  نصف: س؛ بعض: ز 2213  قبول: ز؛ قول: س 2214  زايد: س؛ رأيه: ز 2215  استمداد: س؛ استمداده: ز 2216  يرب: س؛ يرث: ز 2217  لما: ز؛ لم: س 2218  وبحرب وطرسوس وحدها: س؛ وخرب طرسوس واخذها: ز 2219  هتك: س؛ نهك: ز 2220  اشام: ز؛ –س 2221  ينقص عن الحرب: س؛ يصغر عنه الوصف: ز 2222  طرسوس: س؛ طرسوس فإنهم: ز 2223  بنسائهم: ز؛ بصبيانهم: س 2224  الزيات: س؛ المزان: ز 2225  اذ ذاك: س؛ –ز 2226  وضعفت: س؛ –ز 2227  ابن الزيات: س؛ –ز 2228  جرعه: س؛ يجزع: ز 2229  يكره: س؛ بكره: ز 131 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) فــزاد خــوف االنطاكييــن مــن امتناعــه وحداهــم ذلــك علــى قصــد رشــيق230 ثانــي ابــن الزيــات231 فــي االمــارة. فســالوه مــا كانــوا قــد التمســوه مــن ذاك. واجابهــم اال انــه اشــار عليهــم بالخضــوع لنقفــور الملــك والنــزول علــى حكمــه. النــه ذكــر 120v مــا فــي ذلــك مــن الخــط232 وانــه ال يتــم لهــم مــا يريدونــه مــن الهــدو والســكون اال بطاعتــه. فقبلــوا مشــورته لهــم وبعثــوا رســا الــى الملــك يبذلــون لــه حمــل233 االمــوال وعقــد الموافقــة برهايــن. فلموضــع مــا كان فــي الملــك مــن الركانــة واالحتــراز اجابهــم عمــا راســلوه فيــه وقــال. امــا مــال234 فلســت اقبلــه اذ كان235 ملــك الــروم غيــر محتــاج اليــه. والمســلمون ــا ــم ف ــم واكثره ــن بعضه ــع238 م ــا مواض ــن الن له ــا الرهاي ــل ايض ــدا. وال اقب ــه غ ــون237 من ــوم ويمتنع ــه الي ــد236 يعطون فق يفكــرون فيهــا. والــذي239 التمســه فهــو شــي واحــد متــى مــا اردتمــوه وعرفتــم مــا لكــم فيــه مــن الوفــا240 كان ســها خفيفــا. وهــو ان ابنــي فــي صخــرة داخــل مدينتكــم معقــا يكــون241 فيــه ســردغوس مــع عــدة يســيرة تحفظكــم242 واكــون انــا بهــا مستظهرا. فلمــا امتنــع االنطاكيــون مــن ذلــك فكــر رشــيق فــي الخجــل وان243 يكــون بصــورة مــن ال منــة فيــه. فــراى ان يكشــف راســه كمــا يقــال فــي العصيــان علــى ســيف الدولــة. وال ســيما معمــا كان عليــه مــن الفالــج244 واالمتنــاع مــن الحركــة. فــكان هــذا ممــا وســع فــي قلــة االكتــراث. فلمــا راى رشــيق هــذا الــراي جمــع245 وحشــد246 وقصــد مدينــة حلــب بالمــدد.247 فتســلمها عنــوة بغيــر تعــب. واخــذ فــي248 قتــال القلعــة بهــا وكانــت ال تــرام وكان فيهــا غــام لســيف الدولــة يدعــا اســمه قرغويــه يخــرج 121r لــم يظهــر ممــن كانــت فكانــت منهــا الــى رشــيق فــي كل يــوم رجــاال يقاتلونــه. فلحقــه مــن بعضهــم طعنــه فــي الحــرب ميتتــه فيهــا وســقط ميتــا وهــرب مــن كان معــه249 الــى انطاكيــة. فلمــا حصــل اصحابــه فيهــا تيقظــوا لنفوســهم. وقدمــوا منهــم 2230  رشيق: س؛ رشيق النسيمي الوارد من طرسوس وكان: ز 2231  الزيات: س؛ الزمان: ز 2232  الخط: س؛ الخطأ: ز 2233  حمل: س؛ تحصيل: ز 2234  مال: س؛ المال: ز 2235  اذ كان: س؛ الن: ز 2236  فقد: ز؛ فقد فقد: س 2237  ويمتنعون: س؛ ويمنعون: ز 2238  مواضع: ز؛ موضعا: س 2239  والذي: س؛ واما الذي: ز 2240  الوفا: ز؛ الوفاق: س 2241  يكون: س؛ ليكون لي: ز 2242  تحفظكم: س؛ تحفظهم: ز 2243  وان: س؛ وانه: ز 2244  الفالج: س؛ االلم: ز 2245  االكتــراث. فلما . . . الــراي جمــع: س؛ االكتــراث بــه. ثــم التصــق برشــيق رجــل مــن اهــل انطاكيــة يعــرف بالحســن االهــوازي وتولــى تدبيــر امــره وذلــك بمســاعدة اهــل انطاكيــة. وكان شــديد الحركــة. واطمعهــم بــان ســيف الدولــة ال يعــود الــى الشــام. واســتأمن رشــيق دزبــر الديلمــي وجماعة من الديلم الذين كانوا مع قرعونة غالم سيف الدولة. وسار رشيق وابن االهوازي وجمع: ز 2246  وحشد: ز؛ وحشر: س 2247  بالمدد: س؛ بالمدد. وجرى بينه وبين قرعونه حروب كثيرة: ز 2248  واخذ في: س؛ وحدق قبال: ز 2249  وكانت ال . . . كان معه: س؛ ثلثة اشهر وعشرة ايام. فقتل رشيق بعد ذلك بطعنة اصابته وانهزم اصحابه: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 132 مــن جعلــوه250 اميــرا عليهــم.251 وثبتــوا علــى مــا كانــوا عليــه مــن الخلــف والعصيــان. وكان الــذي يحرصهــم علــى ذلــك انسان من انطاكية شديد الحركة والنفاذ يسمى ابن االهوازي وهو كان مدبر االمور على عهد رشيق. فمــاذا صنــع البطريــرك فــي حيــن اضطــراب االمــور بانطاكيــة وانهــا كانــت موديــة بزيــادة252 فــي الصعوبــة كان مــن تدبيــر عقلــه الثبــات علــى مــواالة253 ســيف الدولــة. وانحــاز254 الــى ديــر القديــس مــار ســمعان الحلبــي. الن ســيف الدولــة وان كان يوميــذ قــد افلــج فمــا كان ضــاع عقلــه بالكليــة وال انضبــط لســانه عــن النطــق. ففــي مــدة مقــام255 البطريــرك بالديــر انكشــف امــره فــي الليــل الــى مــن بحلــب واشــتد256 ذلــك علــى العاصــي. واخــذ فــي قصــد257 اســباب البطريــرك واعتقــال ــات259 ــم ي ــى ل ــه مت ــال ان ــوت ع ــول بص ــة258 وكان يق ــي القاي ــا كان ف ــاير م ــى س ــم عل ــم. وخت ــق عليه ــه والتضيي خواص البطريرك ويتافاه260 واال خرج معه الى زيادة فيما يغمه. فهــل خنــع261 البطريــرك لذلــك او هلــع منــه او الن لــه.262 ال. ولكنــه ثبــت علــى جملتــه. ورااه263 علــى مثــل هــذا بعــض خواصــه وهــو ثاودولــس الــذي صــار بعــد قتلــه اســقفا علــى ســلوقية. وبنــى بانطاكيــة هيكليــن حســنين لاركيســتراتيغوس264 ــي ــا الراع 121v ان ــك. ــي بيعت ــذا ف ــد ه ــول265 بع ــيد ان يق ــا الس ــك ايه ــي نيت ــل ف ــه. ه ــال ل ــه وق ــر علي ــب. فجس ــم الذه وف الصالــح. ال266 تتــرك غنمــك فيتخطفهــا267 الذيــاب المفترســة. بــل ان رايــت فامــض وامــدد يــدا تعينهــم وتغيثهــم وال تقصــد بذلــك مــا يوثــره العاصــي. بــل مــا فيــه المصلحــة لــك ولرعيتــك. فقــال لــه البطريــرك امســك وانخــرس268 فلســت عارفــا بمــا تقوله. فلزمه االمساك. وبعــد مديــدة يســيرة لــم يصبــر269 غلمــان ســيف الدولــة علــى العــار. بــل حركــوه علــى المســير وانهضــوه. فســار مــن 2250  حصل اصحابه . . . من جعلوه: س؛ حصلوا بها تيقظوا وخافوا وجعلوا دزبر الديلمي: ز 2251  عليهم: س؛ عليهم وابن االهوازي المدبر له: ز 2252  وكان الذي . . . موديــة بزيــادة: س؛ وقصــد قرعونــة الــى انطاكيــة وجــرت بينهــم وقعــة انهــزم قرعونــة وعــاد الــى حلــب وســار دزبــر الديلمــي فــي اثــره الــى حلــب ولقيــه اصحــاب قرعونــة وحاربــوه ودافعــوه فرجــع الــى انطاكيــة. فلمــا رأى البطريــرك هــذا االضطــراب بانطاكيــة وانه مؤد لزيادة: ز 2253  مواالة: س؛ منزله من: ز 2254  وانجاز: س؛ فلجأ: ز 2255  مقام: ز؛ المقام: س 2256  بالدير انكشف . . . بحلب واشتد: س؛ والذين معه في الدير اشتد: ز 2257  العاصي. واخذ في قصد: س؛ العاصي ابن االهوازي، فأحنق وقصد: ز 2258  القاية: س؛ القاية، لما انكشف له من ميل البطريرك ومن معه الى سيف الدولة: ز 2259  يات: س؛ يأتي: ز 2260  ويتافاه: س؛ ويتافى امره: ز 2261  خنع: س؛ جزع: ز 2262  او الن له: س؛ –ز 2263  ورااه: س؛ وراه: ز 2264  لاركيستراتيغوس: صححته؛ لاكسيراتيقوس: س؛ االزكسعوطس: ز 2265  يقول: س؛ تقول: ز 2266  ال: س؛ –ز 2267  فيتخطفها: س؛ لتختطفها: ز ]lacuna[2268  المفترسة. بل . . . امسك وانخرس: س؛ –ز 2269  يصبر: س؛ تصبر: ز 133 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) ميافارقيــن الــى نواحــي معــرة مصريــن. وانتشــبت الحــرب فيمــا بيــن الفيتيــن. وكان الظفــر لســيف الدولــة. واســر روســا عسكر الخوارج وحصلهم270 في القيود والساسل. فســار271 البطريــرك عنــد ذلــك272 الــى حلــب مســرورا كغالــب قــد ظفــر فــي صــراع لوعيــا. 273فقبلــه ســيف الدولــة احســن قبــول. وصــار امامــه االشــيا كلهــا274 جليســا متقدمــا شــفيعا صالحــا275 مقبــوال. وانتقــل مــن حــال التابــع الصغيــر الــى حــال الصديــق االثيــر. ال يتهــم وال يســتصغر. النــه قــدم فــي وقــت الشــدة االمانــة المحافظــة276 والصبــر علــى المضــض. فكوفــي على ما اتاه في وقت الضرا باالختصاص والتقديم في وقت السرا. ــر ــد الصب ــذاب يبع ــن الع ــواع م ــان وان ــرب واالمته ــون بالض ــه278 يعاقب ــر عيني ــوه بنظ ــوا غم ــن كان ــرى الذي وكان277 ي عليهــا. فمــا كان يحســن موقــع ذلــك منــه كمــا كان يحســن موقعــه مــن غيــره. وال كان يتعظــم لظفــره بالوقــت. بــل كان يحــزن 122r مــن اعانــك عليــه. وال ويضيــق صــدره ويقلــق فكــره ويقــول. ارحــم ايهــا الســيد وخفــف عمــن ظفــرت بــه مــن اجــل ترد في شفاعتك والعفو عند المقدرة279 عما يجب لك. ولمــا راى فــي جملــة مــن كان يعاقــب جــارا لــه مــن المســلمين بمدينــة انطاكيــة وقــد اســرف عليــه بضــرب الســياط لــم يصبــر علــى الجلــوس لكنــه قــام قايمــا ثــم طــرح نفســه الــى االرض. وســال فــي280 ان يهــب لــه جرمــه. فلــم يمنــع ممــا طلبــه. ولكنهــا281 يــا لهــا مــن مصيبــة وشــر تجبــن282 لــه مــن هاهنــا يشــرحه القــول فيمــا بعــد. وليــس ذلــك بعجــب. وان كان مــن الواجــب قــد يبعــد وهــو غريــب. وذلــك ان علــى مثــل هــذا هــي مطبوعــة طبيعــة الحســد فــي النفــوس الخبيثــة ان يشــتعل283 مــن االحســان اكثــر ممــا يطفــا284 مــن االمتنــان. فلمــا اطلــق ذلــك الحســود285 وســمح لــه بمــا286 كان اوجــب عليــه عــاد الــى انطاكية بريا من التبعة.287 وليت ذلك لم يكن.288 2270  روسا عسكر الخوارج وحصلها: س؛ دزبر وابن االهوازي وجماعة كثيرة من عسكرهما وجعلهم: ز 2271  والساسل. فسار: س؛ والساسل وحملهم الى حلب وقتلهم وولى على انطاكية تقي الدين غامه. وقصد خريسطوفورس: ز 2272  ذلك: س؛ ذلك سيف الدولة: ز ]lacuna[2273  لوعيا: صححته؛ لو ىىيا: س؛ –ز 2274  امامه االشيا كلها: س؛ حينئذ امامه في كل االشياء: ز 2275  صالحا: س؛ مطلبا: ز 2276  المحافظة: س؛ والمحافظة: ز 2277  السرا. وكان: س؛ السراء. النه شكره على فعله من بعده عن المخالفين عليه. وقدمه وتخصص به. فكان: ز 2278  بنظر عينيه: س؛ –ز 2279  شفاعتك والعفو عند المقدرة:ز؛ استمتاعك بالمقدرة: س 2280  في: س؛ –ز 2281  ولكنها: س؛ ولكن: ز 2282  تجبن: س؛ تحنن: ز 2283  يشتعل: س؛ تشتعل: ز 2284  يطفا: س؛ تطفأ: ز 2285  الحسود: س؛ من الحضور: ز 2286  بما: ز؛ –س 2287  التبعة: ز؛ البيعة: س 2288  يكــن: س؛ يكــن. حتــى وان كثيريــن مــن شــيوخ انطاكيــة نقــم عليهــم ســيف الدولــة بســبب عصيانهــم وصادرهــم وتشــفع البطريــرك اليــه فــي بعضهــم وتوســط امــره معهــم فاجــاب مســالته فيهــم. فتوكــد فــي نفوســهم حينئــذ ممــا شــاهدوا مــن تمكــن حالــه عنــد ســيف الدولــة حســد لــه وحقد عليه: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 134 ]12[ وامــا البطريــرك فاقــام289 بعــد ذلــك مــدة يســيرة بحلــب. وســار بعــد ذلــك290 الــى مدينتــه ومعــه توقيعــات291 مــن ســيف الدولــة الــى اصحابــه الذيــن كان انفذهــم الــى انطاكيــة ليكافــوا مــن كان ســاعد292 الخارجييــن عليــه مــن االنطاكييــن. رســم لهــم فيهــا293 اال يقنعــوا للبطريــرك ببراتــه وجماعــة اصحابــه مــن كل تبعــة. بــل ويقبلــون ســواله فــي ســاير مــن يتوســط امره بمقدار ما يمكن القبول منه. الن مثل هذا كان غرض294 البطريرك في اكثر االشيا. فلمــا وصــل الــى انطاكيــة وجــد فيهــا اميــرا غامــا لســيف الدولــة295 يعــرف بتقــي296 ووجــد البطريــق كليــب هاهنــا يقبــض 122v مــن النعــم بــل كان يصــادر علــى امــوال النــاس ولكنــه لــم يكــن مامــورا بــان نقبــص297 قبضــا كليــا علــى كل شــي اصحابهــا بحســب مــا تصــل ايديهــم اليــه. ولــم يمســكه298 ســيف الدولــة عــن القبــض علــى نعمهــم رفقايهــم. بــل عمــل فــي ــا ــات. وام ــن االرتفاع ــع م ــاد ويمن ــرب الب ــاس ويخ ــر الن ــم299 يفق ــى النع ــض عل ــه راى ان القب ــه. الن ــا لنفس ــك صرف ذل المصــادرة فتبلــغ مــن االنســان300 مبلغــا يبقــى لــه بعــده مــا يعينــه علــى العمــارة والقيــام بتاديــة الخــراج ومــا يجــري مجــراه. ــا كان ــر م ــن اكث ــه م ــده301 ويخلص ــم يفت ــم ل ــن منه ــات. م ــذه المطالب ــي ه ــدون ف ــة يك ــل انطاكي ــرك اه ــا راى البطري فلم يطالب302 به. ومن منهم303 لم يخفف عنه. ومن لم يخلصه بالكلية. اذ كان فيهم من وصل الى خاصه جملة. وكان بانطاكيــة رجــل مــن تنايهــا304 شــديد الغنــى والثــروة النــه كان ذا عقــار305 وارتفاعــات كثيــرة. ولكنــه كان مضيقــا ــرج ــقي306 ال يف ــد كان الش ــه ق ــحه. الن ــم ش ــله وعظي ــن تدلـ ــن االرض م ــه م ــع راس ــا ال يرف ــه. وكان منحني ــي نفس ــه ف علي وال علــى307 نفســه بشــي مــن مالــه. فاخــذه اصحــاب ســيف الدولــة وكانــوا يعاقبونــه ويطالبونــه بثاثــة308 قناطيــر ونصــف309 مــن الذهــب. فراســل البطريــرك القديــس وهــو فــي وســط العقوبــات وقــال لــه. ارحــم ايهــا الســيد مثلــي انــا الشــقي. وكان 2289  فاقام: س؛ فانه اقام: ز 2290  بعد ذلك: س؛ –ز 2291  توقيعات: س؛ توقيعان: ز 2292  من كان ساعد: س؛ ما كان من شناعة: ز 2293  فيها: س؛ فيهما: ز 2294  غرض: س؛ عرض له: ز 2295  غاما لسيف الدولة: س؛ –ز 2296  بتقي: س؛ بتقي الدين الذي ذكرناه ف: ز 2297  على اموال . . . بان نقبص: س؛ –ز 2298  يمسكه: ز؛ يمسك: س 2299  نعمهم رفقايهم . . . على النعم: س؛ على النعم مما: ز 2300  فتبلغ من االنسان: س؛ فبلغت من الناس: ز 2301  يفتده: س؛ ينقذه: ز 2302  يطالب: س؛ يطلب: ز 2303  منهم: ز؛ من: س 2304  من تنايها: س؛ ما من شبابها: ز 2305  عقار: س؛ غناء: ز 2306  تدلـله وعظيم . . . كان الشقي: س؛ دالته وعظيم شخصه. الن الشقي كان: ز 2307  على: س؛ عن: ز 2308  بثاثة: س؛ بثاث: ز 2309  ونصف: س؛ –ز 135 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) لعمــري310 البطريــرك متشــمرا فيمــا هــذه ســبيله311 نشــيطا فــي مســاعدة مــن312 يســتعين بــه. فركــب لوقتــه وســاعته ورفــع عنــه العــذاب وتوســط امــره فيمــا كان يطالــب بــه. ومــا افــرج عــن المســالة فــي بابــه الــى ان حــط الجملــة الكثيــرة مــن خمســة 123r دينــار الــى العشــر منهــا وهــو مقــدار الفيــن وخمســماية دينــار. فقــال المســتخرجون انــه313 لــن يقــوم وعشــرين الــف وال314 بهــذا المقــدار بغيــر عقوبــة وضــرب. فقــال لهــم تلميــذ المســيح المتشــبه بــه315 فــي كل حــال. انــا اســلكم اال316 تســرفوا عليــه بعــد هــذا بعقوبــة. بــل ســلموه الــي انــا317 وانــا اكــون القيــم318 لكــم بالجملــة. فتســلمه البطريــرك وكان المســتخرجون يطالبــون البطريــرك بالجملــة. ويلــزم البطريــرك319 ان يكــون مطالبــا لــه بهــا. فكانــت المراســلة مــن البطريــرك اليــه فــي هــذا الباب في قلبه كمثل الطعنات. الن سهام الحسد كانت تعمل فيه. فصار فيما بعد مطابقا على قتل من احسن اليه. ]13[ وامــا قتــل البطريــرك بــل320 شــهادته التــي تمــت بــراي321 هــذا وغيــره فكانــت تنظــم فــي الخفيــة وتتــدرج322 قليــا قليــا. النــه اجتمــع عليــه مــن ميــل ســيف الدولــة اليــه مــادة فــي قلــوب المســلمين مــن الحســد. ولكــن لــم يكــن كلهــم متطابقيــن ــن ــد بي ــد324 الحس ــم. وذاك ان وال ــان اليه ــي االحس ــن323 زاد ف ــوا م ــا كان ــك انم ــى ذل ــوا عل ــن تطابق ــل الذي ــه. ب ــى قتل عل فيهم فعله.325 وكان بيــان ذلــك مــن هــذا المعنــى. الن ســيف الدولــة توفــي وقــدم مــن بلــد خراســان غــزاة متوجهيــن الــى انطاكيــة. فســرع منهــم اليهــا اقــوام. فخشــي326 ذلــك الملعــون الــذي احســن327 البطريــرك اليــه وكان ســم الحســد يعمــل فيــه. وقــد خطــر له ان يدبر عليه328 من تمكن البطريرك فيما بعد. اذا ما329 وّصل صاحب الخراسانية330 اال يتمكن منه فيفوته قتله. 2310  لعمري: ز؛ لعمرنا: س 2311  فيما هذه سبيله: س؛ في ما هذا بسبيله: ز 2312  من: ز؛ من من: س 2313  انه: س؛ له: ز 2314  وال: س؛ ولو: ز 2315  به: ز؛ –س 2316  اال: ز؛ ال: س 2317  انا: س؛ –ز 2318  القيم: س؛ القسيم: ز 2319  بالجملة. ويلزم البطريرك: ز؛ –س 2320  بل: س؛ مثل: ز 2321  براي: س؛ من: ز 2322  وتتدرج: س؛ ونؤرخ: ز 2323  من: س؛ ممن: ز 2324  والد: س؛ –ز 2325  فيهم فعله: س؛ فعله فيهم: ز 2326  غــزاة متوجهين... اقــوام. فخشــي: س؛ قــوم قاصديــن لغــزو الــروم، وســاروا الــى انطاكيــة ولقيهــم اهلهــا اجمــل لقــاء. فخشــي ابــن مانك: ز 2327  احسن: س؛ اخذه: ز 2328  عليه: س؛ فيه: ز 2329  اذا ما: س؛ فلما: ز 2330  الخراسانية: س؛ الخراسانية خاف: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 136 123v البطريــرك ضمنــه.332 لعلمــه333 بمــا كان عليــه فــي نفســه. واســتدعى انســانا فاســتدعى331 ابــن محمــود الــذي كان اخــر334 كان جــارا ايضــا للبطريــرك335 يدعــا بابــن دعامــة. فقــال لهمــا. مــا تقــوالن.336 هــل عندكمــا337 مــن الــراي ان نتــرك هــذا338 الكافــر يعيــش فيصــل الــى هاهنــا بعــد وقــت رييــس. ويكــون هــو جالســا ونكــون نحــن معاقبيــن كمثــل مــا كنــا فــي وقــت ســيف الدولــة. فقــاال339 لــه. ليــس ذلــك340 مــن الصــواب. فقــال لهمــا.341 فمــا رايكمــا فــي اكتتــاب فتيــة342 فــي بابــه الــى الفقيــه. فاحمــدا343 رايــه فــي هــذا وكتبــوا رقعــة بــراي مشــترك تســمى344 عندهــم فتيــة.345 ولــم يذكــروا البطريــرك باســمه. بــل قالــوا. مــا رايــك ايهــا الفقيــه فــي مــا يوجبــه الحكــم علــى مــن يدبــر علــى حصــن مــن حصــون المســلمين. فاجابهــم بانــه يجب عليه القتل. فقــال المتقــدم فــي الــراي والتدبيــر لاثنيــن االخريــن.346 هــذه الفتيــة ســبيلنا ان نريهــا للعامــة فهــم يقتلونــه للوقــت مــن نفوســهم. ولــم يكــن هــذا رايــه بالحقيقــة. بــل النــه كان هــو ايضــا مــن الفــرس وعارفــا بلســان347 الخراســانية. فــكان348 فــي ــرك وال ــوا البطري ــي يقتل ــة لك ــم الفتي ــة350 ويريه ــى انطاكي ــكرهم ال ــن عس ــرح م ــن تس ــا مم ــتدعي قوم ــى349 ان يس ــه ال نفس يجنحوا351 في ذلك. فكان هذا مما اقنعهم وحداهم على ما اراده. ــا ــا صادق ــه صديق ــرو.353 وكان ل ــي عم ــن اب ــرف باب ــلمين يع ــوه المس ــن وج ــرك352 م ــار البطري ــك ج ــرف ذل ]14[ فع ناصحــا.354 فاســرع اليــه وقــال لــه. مــاذا تعمــل. قــم مســرعا وخــذ لنفســك. واال فاعلــم انــك مقتــول بعــد قليــل. فقــال لــه. ولــم. 2331  فاستدعى: س؛ فاستدعى ثاثة من شيوخ انطاكية واماثلها الذي كان البطريرك توسط امرهم وشفع فيهم. فالواحد: ز 2332  البطريرك ضمنه: س؛ –ز 2333  لعلمه: ز؛ يعلمه: س 2334  واستدعى انسانا اخر: س؛ واالخر: ز 2335  ايضا للبطريرك: س؛ لهم: ز 2336  تقوالن: س؛ تقولون: ز 2337  عندكما: س؛ عندكم: ز 2338  نترك هذا: س؛ تقرروا: ز 2339  فقاال: س؛ فقالوا: ز 2340  ذلك: س؛ نراه: ز 2341  لهما: س؛ لهم: ز 2342  فتية: صححته؛ فتوة: ز؛ فيتة: س 2343  فاحمدا: س؛ فحمدوا: ز 2344  تسمى: ز؛ يسمى: س 2345  فتية: ز؛ فيتة. ولم: س 2346  لاثنين االخرين: س؛ –ز 2347  بلسان: س؛ باسباب: ز 2348  فكان: س؛ ففكر: ز 2349  الى: س؛ –ز 2350  ممن تسرح . . . الى انطاكية: س؛ من الخراسانية: ز 2351  يجنحوا: س؛ يحتجوا: ز 2352  اراده. فعرف ذلك جار البطريرك. س؛ ارادوا. وكان للبطريرك جار: ز 2353  بابن ابي عمرو: ز؛ بابي عمر: س 2354  ناصحا: س؛ مناصحا: ز 137 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) 124r اجتمــع عليــك جمــع خبيــث وســيل النامــوس. فاعطــى الفقيــه356 والي شــي ومــن اجــل مــاذا. فقــال لــه. النــه قــد355 فتيــة ذكــر357 فيهــا وجــوب القتــل عليــك. فاســتعلم منــه وقــال لــه. فمــاذا يجــب عنــدك ان اصنعــه. فقــال لــه. انــك لســت فــي هــذا الوقــت تحــت358 اعتقــال. فاخــرج مــن بــاب المدينــة اخــر النهــار وال يصبــح لــك الصبــح اال وانــت فــي نواحــي359 حلــب. ولــن يتبعــك احــد. وهــذا الــذي عنــدي.360 فقــال لــه. امــا انــت يــا ســيدي فــاهلل يجازيــك الحســنات. وامــا انــا فســبيلي ان افكــر فيما اعمله. فانصــرف الرجــل. واســتدعى البطريــرك ذلــك الرجــل الــذي قــال لــه فيمــا قبــل. وهــو فــي ديــر القديــس مــار ســمعان. لمــا ال يجــب361 الــى المصيــر الــى انطاكيــة فــي وقــت العصيــان. فهــل انــت ايهــا الســيد ممــن يقــول بعــد هــذا. انــا الراعــي الصالــح. فلمــا مثــل هــذا الرجــل بيــن يديــه قــال لــه. اعلــم ايهــا االنســان362 ان جارنــا فانــا صــار الــي فــي هــذه الســاعة واشــار علــي بكيــت وكيــت. فانــت مــاذا363 تــرى. فقــال لــه ذلــك الرجــل.364 ومــا اجــود هــذا يــا365 ســيدنا. فاســتخر هللا وافعــل. فقــال لــه. ان انــا فعلــت هــذا كنــت366 ايهــا الوقــاح ممــن يتهــزا بــي فيمــا بعــد ويقــول لــي. هــل367 انــت عتيــد ان تقــول انــا ــس ــم لي ــرك. نع ــه البطري ــال ل ــر. فق ــيا369 اخ ــيد. ذاك كان ش ــا الس ــا. ايه ــل قاي ــه368 الرج ــد. فاجاب ــي غ ــح ف ــي الصال الراع بالخافــي عنــي ان ذاك370 كان شــيا371 اخــر. بــل النــه كان كذلــك ولــم يكــن372 فــي ذلــك الوقــت موافقــا373 مــا فعلتــه. ولمــا لــم 124v الوقــت. افعلــه فقــد علمــت وانــت374 انــه لــم ينضــر بذلــك احــد مــن النصــارى. النــه لــم يكــن قتلــي المطلــوب ف ذلــك واالن فالمطلــوب هــو قتلــي. وليــس يطلــب ذلــك طلبــا مطلقــا. بــل بحــرص شــديد واجتهــاد وكيــد. الن الذيــن يطلبــون قتلــي حســاد وســم الحســد فــي اجســادهم375 مكنــون. ومتــى مــا افلــت مــن ايديهــم ولــم يقذفــوا ســمهم فــي لــم يبقــوا بعــد هــذا376 علــى 2355  قد: س؛ –ز 2356  وسيل الناموس. فاعطى الفقيه: س؛ واخرجوا: ز 2357  ذكر: س؛ ذكروا: ز 2358  تحت: س؛ في: ز 2359  نواحي: س؛ –ز 2360  عندي: س؛ عندي لك: ز 2361  لما ال يجب: س؛ لم ال تجب. س: سمعان لما يجب: ز 2362  ايها االنسان: س؛ –ز 2363  فانت ماذا: س؛ فماذا: ز 2364  ذلك الرجل: س؛ –ز 2365  يا: س؛ –ز 2366  كنت: س؛ كنت انت: ز 2367  ويقول لي. هل: س؛ وبعد هذا: ز 2368  فاجابه: س؛ فأجابه ذلك: ز 2369  شيا: س؛ سببا: ز 2370  ذاك: ز؛ ذاك كان شيا اخر. فقال له البطريرك نعم ليس بالخافي عني ان ذاك: س 2371  شيا: س؛ سببا: ز 2372  يكن: س؛ يكن موافقا: ز 2373  موافقا: س؛ –ز 2374  وانت: س؛ انت: ز 2375  اجسادهم: ز؛ اجشايهم: س 2376  بعد هذا: س؛ بعدها حاال: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 138 نصرانــي وال علــى كنيســة. ولكــن هــذا الوقــت377 الــذي يجــب378 لــي379 ان اقــول380 يــا هــذا. ليــس انــا الراعــي الصالــح فقــط. بــل واقــول مــع ذلــك. ان الراعــي381 الصالــح هــو الــذي يضــع نفســه دون اغنامــه. وانــت فســترى بعــد وقيــت382 هــذه اللحيــة مخضوبــة بدمايــي. ومــد يــده مــع هــذا اليهــا وختــم الــكام بهــذا383 المقــال لــم يعــد بعــد ذلــك كلمــة اخــرى النــه كان يوشــك انه قد تشور384 من الفكر. ]15[ وفكــر فيمــا بعــد فاوجــب385 الــراي عنــده ان يجتمــع بذلــك الشــرير المتهيــي فــي جــواره للعمــل عليــه. وقــد كان عالمــا علمــا يقينــا انــه قــد مــزج لــه قهــوة المــوت. اال انــه لــم يكــن يظــن انــه يفعــل بــه ذلــك فــي منزلــه. الن مثــل هــذا ال يستحســن اعرابــي وال احــد386 مــن ذوي احســاب387 المســلمين ان يقــدم اليــه فــي جريمــة. فراســله388 مراســلة قليلــة بعــد389 قليــل بغيــر حــذر منــه وال خــوف. انــي اريــد ايهــا الســيد ان اجتمــع بــك. فتــاذن لــي فــي ذلــك اذا مــا رايــت390 وكنــت خاليــا الصيــر اليــك. فاســتفرص ذاك391 هــذا القــول منــه وتصــوره غنيمــة. فقــال.392 لســت فــي وقتــي هــذا393 متفرغــا لــك ولكنــي ــة ــه وتقوي ــة علي ــغله بالحيل ــي لش ــله بش ــم يراس ــر ول ــي التدبي ــاره ف ــول نه ــزل ط ــم ي ــلك.394 ول ــذا اراس ــد ه ــن بع ــا م ان ما يطبخه له.395 125r ادرك الليــل وتصــرم وقــت كبيــر منــه وتنــاول البطريــرك مــا جــرت عادتــه396 يتناولــه مــن الطعــام ارســل فلمــا اليــه397 قايــا. انــي االن فــارغ لــك فــي هــذا الوقــت ايهــا البطريــرك. فــان رايــت ان احضــر فاحضــر. فذهــل خــروف المســيح مــن هــذه الرســالة فــي غيــر وقتهــا عنــد ســماعه لهــا وقــال الصحابــه. مــاذا ســبيلنا يــا قــوم ان نصنــع وقــد حضرنــا امــران غيــر موافقيــن.398 الن المضــي فــي هــذا الوقــت مــن الليــل ال يليــق وال يصلــح.399 وذاك ان الطعــام بعــد فــي فــي. والقــوة 2377  الوقت: س؛ الوقت هو الوقت: ز 2378  يجب: ز؛ يوجب: س 2379  لي: س؛ –ز 2380  اقول: س؛ اقول فيه: ز 2381  ان الراعي: س؛ والراعي: ز 2382  وقيت: س؛ وقت: ز 2383  الكام بهذا: س؛ الكل. وبهذا: ز 2384  تشور: س؛ تنور: ز 2385  فاوجب: س؛ ما اوجب: ز 2386  اعرابي وال احد: س؛ ان يكون إال الحد: ز 2387  احسار: س؛ اختيار: ز 2388  جريمة. فراسله: س؛ جريمته. فارسل له: ز 2389  مراسلة قليلة بعد: ز؛ قايا عن: س 2390  رايت: س؛ رأيت موافقا: ز 2391  فاستفرص ذاك: س؛ فلما سمع ابن مانك ذلك استفرص: ز 2392  فقال: س؛ فقال له: ز 2393  وقتي هذا: س؛ هذا الوقت: ز 2394  ولكني انا . . . هذا اراسلك: س؛ فاذا تفرغت ارسل فاعلمك: ز 2395  وتقوية ما يطبخه له: س؛ –ز 2396  عادته: س؛ عادته ان: ز 2397  اليه: س؛ اليه ذلك الملعون: ز 2398  موافقين: س؛ موافقان: ز 2399  يصلح: س؛ يصلح اذ كان: ز 139 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) ايضــا فضعفــت400 عــن خطــاب وانــا علــى هــذه الحــال. والتاخــر ايضــا فســبب ارييــه401 النــا نحــن كنــا الذيــن خطينــا402 الموعــد.403 ولكــن ســبيل واحــد منكــم ان يســتنكهني. فــان احــس منــي برايحــة خمــر احتججنــا404 وقلنــا. ان ذاك ال يمكننــا فــي هــذا الوقــت. وان كانــت نكهتــي نقيــة مضينــا علــى كل حــال. فلمــا اســتنكهه احدهــم ولــم يكــن هنــاك رايحــة.405 ســار علــى قدميه كمثل حمل406 باختياره الى الذبح. فلقيــه ذلــك الملعــون وســلم عليــه ســام مــودة والغــش فــي قلبــه مكنــون. ولمــا جلســا جميعــا. كان ذلــك مملــوا غيظــا منــه وحقــدا407 عليــه. فلــم يصبــر للبطريــرك ان يبتديــه408 بــكام. بــل قــال لــه. مــا بالــك يــا بطريــرك409 وانــت واحــد مــن اهــل هــذا البلــد مســاكن لنــا ورايــك راي ســو فــي معاملتنــا. وانــت410 تعمــل علينــا. فقــال لــه البطريــرك. وكيــف ذلــك يــا ســيدي ومــن 125v لــه. ومــا الدليــل علــى اي معنــى. فقــال لــه مجيبــا. النــك تكاتــب ملــك الــروم.411 وتكاتــب غــام ابــن حمــدان.412 فقــال ذلــك يــا ســيدي ومــن هــو الــذي وجــد لــي كتابــا بهــذه الصــورة. فتحــرك ذلــك413 كانــه يطلــب كتابــا ثــم قــام قايمــا وتكلــم بالفارسية واستدعى لمن كان قد414 اعدهم415 للقتل من الخراسانية. ــاف ــورة الخش ــال417 ص ــي الح ــه ف ــت صورت ــل وكان ــط. ب ــا فق ــن جبان ــم يك ــه ل ــد. الن ــق416 ويرع ــع ذاك يقل ــو م وه قلبــا وعينــا. الن قامتــه كانــت تــكاد اال تزيــد علــى الشــبر418 اال بمقــدار يســير. وكان منظــره يشــبه خشــافة419 فــي اللــون واللحــظ420 والبشــر. فلمــا حضــر مــن اســتدعاهم421 مــن القــوم المعديــن قــال لهــم عنــد ذلــك بلســانهم واســنانه ترجــف. هــذا هو المطلوب. هذا هو الذي يريد ان يسلم هذه المدينة. هذا هو عدو المسلمين. فدونكن واياه بضعوه بغير اشفاق. 2400  خطينا: ز؛ فتضعف: س 2401  والتاخر ايضا فسبب ارييه: س؛ والتأخير ايضا بسبب بلية: ز 2402  خطينا: س؛ اخطينا: ز 2403  الموعد: ز؛ الممر: س 2404  احتججنا: ز؛ احتجنا: س 2405  رايحة: ز؛ رايحة ولم يكن هناك رايحة: س 2406  حمل: س؛ حمل صاير: ز 2407  غيظا منه وحقدا: س؛ عظامه حقدا وغيظا: ز 2408  للبطريرك ان يبتديه: س؛ ان يبتدره البطريرك: ز 2409  ما بالك يا بطريرك: س؛ يا بطريرك ما بالك: ز 2410  وانت: س؛ النك: ز 2411  الروم: س؛ الروم وتستهذهم الى قصدنا وتطمعهم فينا: ز 2412  حمدان: س؛ حمدان ايضا: ز 2413  فتحرك ذلك: س؛ فنهض ابن مانك: ز 2414  قد: س؛ –ز 2415  اعدهم: ز؛ اعده: س 2416  يقلق: س؛ يعاين: ز 2417  الحال: س؛ الرجال: ز 2418  الشبر: س؛ اليسير: ز 2419  خشافة: س؛ خشافا: ز 2420  واللحظ: س؛ واللحظة: ز 2421  استدعاهم: ز؛ استدعاه: س al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 140 فلــو كان عــدو المســلمين422 يــا عيــن الفــارة ومــن هــو كلــه جــرذ423 فكيــف مــا كان424 عــدوك فــي وقــت شــديد425 بــل كان صديقــك والصديــق426 النافــع لــك مخلصــك مــن العــذاب. ولكــن الــذي كانــت نفســه نفــس تمســاح فــي مقابلــة الخير بشر.427 لما امر في بابه428 بما امر مد ذبح429 المسيح عنقه وهو جالس بغير انزعاج منتظرا اخذ راسه. فلــم يكــن مــع اوليــك مشــرفية. بــل خناجــر طــوال. فاقامــه واحــد منهــم قايمــا وضربــه االخــر بخنجــر طويــل. فعبــر430 كل الحديــد فــي بطنــه. وكان ســيف هللا431 مســنونا. اال انــه كان فــي ذلــك الوقــت مــردودا بحســب مــا عليــه العــادة مــن احــكام هللا فــي االنظــار432 الــى وقــت اخــر للمعاقبــة. فلمــا ســقط الشــهيد الــى االرض قطــع راســه ناحيــة واخــذت جثتــه الطاهــرة 126r في النهر وفتح لها الباب في الليل. وشدت على سلم بامر الجاحد هلل ولاحسان. وطرحت للوقت ولــم يســتتر433 ذلــك عــن كافــة النصــارى. بــل لمــا ســقط راعيهــم ذهلــوا واختبطــوا بمــا بدههــم434 مــن ذلــك وجزعــوا جزعــا شــديدا وتفرقــوا فــي بيــوت قــوم مــن المســلمين اســتتروا فيهــا. علــى انهــم435 لــم يطلبــوا مــن احــد. ولكنــه436 كان مــن الواجــب ان يتمــم437 مقــال ابيهــم الــذي تقــدم فقالــه مــن انهــم اذا اشــتفوا منــي بقتلــي وقذفــوا الســم الــذي اكنــوه438 فــي قلوبهــم علي فلن يطلبوا سواي. ]16[ وامــا ذلــك الحيــوان الضــاري439 الصــورة الزايــد فــي الوحشــية440 فلــم يــزل ممســكا الــى وقــت مــن الليــل النــه اوشــك441 ان روعــه مــا كان بعــد قــد442 رجــع اليــه. فلمــا تمــادى بــه الوقــت الــى الســحر عــاد الــى ذاتــه ووجــه اشــراطه قبــل الصبــح الــى البيعــة443 وقايــة البطريــرك. وكانــوا444 جماعــة ليفتشــوا الموضعيــن.445 وامــا قايــة البطريــرك فلــم يجــدوا فيهــا ]lacuna[2422  فدونكن واياه . . . عدو المسلمين: س؛ –ز 2423  جرذ: س؛ جود: ز 2424  ما كان: س؛ مارى: ز 2425  وقت شديد: س؛ شدتك: ز 2426  والصديق: س؛ –ز 2427  بشر: س؛ بالشر: ز 2428  في بابه: س؛ –ز 2429  ذبح: س؛ خروف: ز 2430  فعبر: س؛ جاز: ز 2431  هللا: ز؛ الدولة هللا: س 2432  االنظار: س؛ االنتظار: ز 2433  واخــذت جثته . . . ولــم يســتتر: س؛ وطــرح فــي اتــون الحمــام فــي جــوار دار ابــن مانــك. واخرجــت جثتــه الطاهــرة فــي الوقــت مــن باب المدينة بالليل وطرحت في النهر. ولم يستر: ز 2434  بدههم: س؛ دهمهم: ز 2435  على انهم: س؛ لكنهم: ز 2436  احد. ولكنه: س؛ واحد. النه: ز 2437  يتمم: س؛ يتم: ز 2438  اكنوه: س؛ اكنزوه: ز 2439  الضاري: ز؛ الصيل في: س 2440  الوحشية: س؛ الوحشة: ز 2441  اوسك: س؛ يوشك: ز 2442  بعد قد: س؛ –ز 2443  البيعة: س؛ البيعة التي هي كنيسة القسيان: ز 2444  وكانوا: س؛ فكانوا بها: ز ]lacuna[2445  ليفتشوا الموضعين: س؛ –ز 141 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) غيــر ماكــول مثــل قمــح وتيــن وزيــت وقــد446 احتفــظ بــه لمونــة الكنيســة وقــوت االخــوة بالمســيح. وامــا شــي اخــر فكيــف كان يوجــد ولــم يكــن هنــاك ذهــب مخزونــا.447 وكيــف كان يخــزن والنفقــة كانــت تســبق مــا يدخــل. وال كان هنــاك ايضــا ملبــوس. وكيــف كان يكــون448 لمــن كان لبســه الصــوف مــن449 غيــر اســكيم رهبانيــة كان عليــه. بــل كان هنــاك ثيــاب450 يسيرة نويسة451 للكهنوت كانت معه ولمن452 كان قبله على طول الزمان. فاخذوا جميعا.453 وفتحــوا خزانــة البيعــة. ولمــا لــم يجــدوا فيهــا شــيا يحتفــل بــه454 ظاهــرا عاقبــوا الخــازن الــى ان اظهــر لهــم المســتور كلــه 126v مــع الثيــاب456 الديبــاج ممــا كان يحتفــظ بــه لزينــة الكنيســة. ولــم يتركــوا شــيا غيــر مــن اوانــي455 الذهــب والفضــة نحــاس ومصاحــف لــم تكــن كثيــرة.457 فمــن هــذه الجملــة مــا حبــا بــه الملعــون لمــن تولــى ســفك الــدم النقــي الزكــي458 بحســب مــا كان وافقهــم عليــه. ومــن ذلــك مــا تمســك بــه لماطفــة مــن كان ينتظــره مــن الفــرس القادميــن لقصــد بلــدان459 الــروم. وفيمــا بيــن ذلــك قــدم القــوم وقبلهــم االنطاكيــون جميعــا460 قبــوال بهيــا. وكان461 ذلــك الكافــر اللعيــن المختــص بهــم. ال مــن اجــل مــا حملــه اليهــم فقــط. بــل والنــه كان مشــاركهم فــي قبيلتهــم ولســانهم. واخــذوا فــي الغــارات علــى اطــراف الــروم462 واجتياحها. ]17[ وكان اذ ذاك نقفــور الملــك المغبــوط متشــاغا بقصــد البلغــر.463 فلمــا عــاد464 انفــذ بطــرس االصطراطوبــذرخ.465 وكانــت لــه وقعــة مــع الخراســانية بناحيــة مدينــة االســكندر المعروفــة باالســكندرية. فانهــزم الفــرس بعــد مبالغتهــم فــي القتــال. وقــد كان معهــم جماعــة مــن فتــاك الطرسوســيين المســلمين اشــاروا عليهــم اال466 يلقــوا القتــال وال يصابــرون فــي الحــرب.467 2446  قمح وتين وزيت وقد: س؛ تين وزبيب قد: ز 2447  مخزونا: س؛ وال فضة مخزونة: ز 2448  يكون: س؛ يكون ولبس: ز 2449  من: س؛ –ز 2450  ثياب: س؛ اشياء: ز 2451  نويسة: س؛ نفيسة: ز 2452  معه ولمن: س؛ معد ممن: ز 2453  جميعا: س؛ جميعها: ز ]lacuna[2454  يحتفل به: س؛ –ز 2455  اواني: س؛ اواني البيعة: ز 2456  الثياب: س؛ السلف: ز 2457  كثيــرة: س؛ كثيــرة. واخــذوا ايضــا اليهــم كرســي مــار بطــرس الســليح وهــو مــن خشــب النخــل مصفــح بفضــة وحفظــوه فــي دار شــيخ من شيوخهم يعرف بابن عامر. ولم يزل في داره الى ان ملك الروم المدينة: ز 2458  الزكي: س؛ الذكي جنسه: ز 2459  بلدان: س؛ جهاد: ز 2460  جميعا: ز؛ جمعا: س 2461  وكان: س؛ وكان في مقدمتهم: ز 2462  ولسانهم. واخذوا . . . اطراف الروم: ز؛ –س 2463  البلغر: ز؛ البرغر: س 2464  عاد: س؛ بلغه ذلك: ز 2465  بطرس االصطراطوبذرخ: ز؛ لبطرس االسطراطوس: س 2466  مدينــة االســكندر . . . عليهم اال: س؛ االســكندرية الصغــرى وهــي التــي بيــن المصيصــة وانطاكيــة. لمــا عــادوا مــن غزواتهــم. فاوقــع بهــم وقتــل صناديدهــم واســر ســار العســكر وجماعــة منهــم. وقــد كان مــع الخراســانيين جماعــة مــن المســلمين الطرطوســيين. فاشــاروا عليهــم باال: ز 2467  الحرب: س؛ الحروب: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 142 اذ قالــوا. ان هــذا الجيــش الــذي يقاتلكــم عســكر ملكــي وليســت468 لكــم بهــم طاقــة. فلــم يقبــل منهــم الفــرس. بــل صابــروا الــى ان قتل صناديدهم469 واكثر رجالهم ثم اسر470 روساوهم. وكان الــكل471 مــن القضــا الواجــب عليهــم مــن الســما. اذ كان العــدل هنــاك472 لــم يصبــر عــن االنتصــار لــدم الشــهيد. فمــن هاهنــا اشــبه473 ان يطيــل474 القــول وان كان منــا ضعيفــا فــي تبييــن النظــام العجيــب النافــذ علــى ترتيــب بغيــر انفصــال 127r النفــع يحقــق عنــد الــكل مــن الفعــل الــى ان قوبــل االشــرار علــى اعمالهــم الرديــة. والتخبيــر فــي ذلــك ففيــه شــي مــن مــا جــا فــي النبــوة فــي بــاب الهبــوط والســقوط فــي يــد هللا الحــي. وان ذلــك لمجــزع شــديد.475 وان المجــازاة ربمــا476 اســرعت او اسرع477 بعضها فكان دليا على كون المتاخر فيما بعد. وذلــك ان روســا عســكر الهجرييــن478 الماســورين فــي479 تلــك الحــرب480 كان الواحــد منهــم ســار العســكر. فابتاعــه481 االنطاكيــون بمــال جســيم وثيــاب عــدة وماســورين كانــوا فــي حبــس بانطاكيــة ممــن اســره القــوم. فلمــا افتــك قــدم الــى انطاكيــة وتلقــاه جماعــة اهلهــا واحتفلــوا فــي تلقيــه482 كل االحتفــال. ولكــن بحســب مــا دخــل فــي ذلــك الوقــت مكرمــا وكان تكريمــه وتبجيلــه يزيــد علــى كل كرامــه. كذلــك كان خروجــه اخيــرا اقبــح خــروج واخــزاه. الن االنطاكييــن مــا صبــروا علــى مــا كان يجــري مــن483 رجالــه الذيــن افلتــوا484 مــن القتــال485 النهــم عــادوا هــم عــراة486 وعــاد هــو ايضــا مثلهــم. وكانــت الضــرورة487 تدعوهــم الــى تخطــف488 بمــا يقــوم بهــم. وكانــت ايديهــم تمتــد فــي بعــض االوقــات الــى امــوال االنطاكييــن489 فلــم يصبــروا 2468  وليست: س؛ وليس: ز 2469  صناديدهم: س؛ ابطالهم: ز 2470  اسر: س؛ اسروا: ز 2471  الكل: س؛ ذلك: ز 2472  هناك: س؛ هنالك: ز 2473  اشبه: س؛ اال شبه: ز 2474  يطيل: س؛ نطيل: ز 2475  لمجزع شديد: س؛ لمفزع ومخوف: ز 2476  ربما: ز؛ بما: س 2477  او اسرع: س؛ واسرع: ز 2478  روسا عسكر الهجريين: س؛ رؤساء الخراسانيين: ز 2479  في: ز؛ في في: س 2480  تلك الحرب: س؛ ذلك الوقت: ز 2481  فابتاعه: س؛ فاشتراه: ز 2482  عــدة وماســورين . . . في تلقيــه: س؛ كثيــرة وباالســارى الذيــن كانــوا اســروهم متقدمــا مــن الــروم كانــوا فــي حبــس انطاكيــة. ولمــا تخلص السار ووصل الى انطاكية تلقاه اهلها باالكرام والتعظيم واحتفلوا بلقاه: ز 2483  وكان تكريمه . . . يجري من: س؛ كان فعله معهم بالعكس. الن: ز 2484  افلتوا: س؛ سلموا: ز 2485  القتال: س؛ القتل: ز 2486  عراة: صححته؛ رعاة: س؛ عراة وحفاة: ز 2487  وكانت الضرورة: س؛ الن الضرورة كانت: ز 2488  تخطف: س؛ خطف: ز 2489  وكانت ايديهم . . . اموال االنطاكيين: س؛ فتسلطوا على االنطاكيين وصاروا يتخطفوا اموالهم ورحاالتهم: ز 143 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) لهم490 على ذلك. بل دافعوهم وانتشبت491 الحرب فيما بينهم واخرجهم اهل492 المدينة عراة. وكانــوا االنطاكيــون الذيــن تولــوا قتالهــم493 عصابتيــن. عمــل رييــس احداهمــا علــى رييــس االخــرى فقتلــه. ثــم494 ورد مــن ليغزوهــم497 يســير نقــر ومعــه عــاد496 ثــم هنــاك. وكان الطرسوســيين صعاليــك مــن افلــت مــن495 بعــض مصــر الــى اطــراف الــروم.498 وكان رييــس العصابــة االخــرى499 كرديــا مــن اهــل بوقــا يدعــا اســمه علــوش. وكان الــوارد مــن 127v الرغيلــي.500 وكانــت المدينــة اذ ذاك فــي يــد علــوش.501 فدخــل الرغيلــي يســلم عليــه. فلمــا انكــب مصــر اســود يســما ــن ــى امري ــر عل ــه. وجس ــه503 فقتل ــه ب ــي وضرب ــه الرغيل ــه. فاخترط ــى ركبتي ــا عل ــك معارض ــيف ذل ــده. كان س ــل502 ي يقب كبيريــن504 فــي وقــت واحــد بغيــر تعييــة.505 فاختــراط ســيف رييــس مــن حجــره والمبــادرة506 بغيــر توقــف الــى قتلــه. فتفــرق رجال المقتول وقد كانوا كثيرين. وصار االمر الى القاتل وكان رجاله قليلين جدا. ولكنــه مــا اقــام وال هــذا507 بعــد ذاك وال طالــت مدتــه. بــل قــدم بطــرس االصطراطوبــذرخ بعــد مديــدة يســيرة ومعــه عســكر ضخــم مــن عســاكر نقفــور الملــك الممــدوح فمــع نزولــه فتــح فــي ليلتــه المدينــة العظمــى المذكــورة508 التــي509 مــا كانــت تــرام. وذاك انــه وجدهــا510 ضعيفــة ممــا تقــدم مــن الغــارات علــى اعمالهــا. وضجــع اهلهــا فــي حفظهــا وحراســتها. النهــم مــا كانــوا قــد عرفــوا خبــر قصدهــا511 فــي ذلــك الوقــت. فمــا تمكنــوا فــي وقــت واحــد فــي512 جمــع رجــال يصعــدون 2490  لهم: س؛ لهم االنطاكيون: ز 2491  وانتشبت: س؛ واستوحشوا منهم وانتشب: ز 2492  واخرجهم اهل: س؛ واخرجوهم من: ز 2493  فتالهم: س؛ قتالهم حينئذ: ز 2494  احداهما على . . . فقتله. ثم: س؛ الفريق الواحد على رئيس الفريق االخر فقتله. وذلك انه كان قد: ز 2495  بعض من: س؛ الى انطاكية رجل اسود ممن: ز 2496  الطرسوسيين وكان هناك. ثم عاد: س؛ طرسوس يعرف بالرغيلي: ز 2497  ليغزوهم: س؛ ليغزوا بهم: ز 2498  الروم: س؛ الروم. فهذا كان رأس العصابة الواحدة: ز 2499  االخرى: ز؛ االخرى الباقي: س 2500  وكان الوارد . . . يسما الرغيلي: صححته؛ وكان الوارد من مصر اسود يسما يسما الرغيلي: س؛ –ز 2501  يد علوش: س؛ يده: ز 2502  يقبل: س؛ لتقبيل: ز 2503  به: س؛ به للحال: ز 2504  امرين كبيرين: صححته؛ امرين كثيرين: س؛ امران كبيران: ز 2505  بغير تعيية: س؛ –ز 2506  والمبادرة: س؛ المبادرة به: ز 2507  جدا. ولكنه . . . وال هذا: س؛ واستولى الرغيلي على انطاكية. لكنه ما قام والؤه: ز 2508  بــل قدم . . . العظمــى المذكــورة: س؛ الن بعــد مــدة يســيرة قــدم بطــرس االصطراطوبــذرخ ومعــه عســكر اضخــم مــن عســكر نيقيفــور الممدوح ونزل على انطاكية. واجتمع اليه ميخائيل البرجي المقيم بحصن بغراس. واقاموا يحاصرون المدينة العظمى: ز 2509  التي: ز؛ الذي: س 2510  وذاك انه وجدها: س؛ وهي اذ ذاك: ز 2511  قد عرفوا خبر قصدها: س؛ يشعروا انها تقصد: ز 2512  فما تمكنوا . . . واحد في: س؛ ولم يتمكنوا من: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 144 الــى الجبــل يحفظــون الســور. وبــادر الــروم بالصعــود اليــه فوجــدوه خاليــا فتمكنــوا513 مــن الصعــود اليــه وملكــوا المدينــة واسروا514 جميع من كان فيها. ولم يفلت منهم احد515 اال ذلك الملعون الذي كان اس البلية.516 وانظــر هاهنــا انــت يــا ســامع القــول الــى تاخيــر قضــا العــدل فيمــا تقــدم. واتمهــا اليــك517 فيمــا تاخــر. وذاك انــه كان518 امــره. االول فــي وخفــي االســام. بلــدان مــن كان519 مــا ايــن الــى ينجــو ان طالبــا ليــا المدينــة مــن خــرج 128r خاصــه مــن االســر وحــده فقــط. بــل ولتمكنــه علــى ظنــه مــن الحيلــة والتخــرص وكان مســرورا بذلــك. ال مــن اجــل والكــذب علــى هللا والمايكــة. وانهــم حملــوه فــي الهــوى وخلصــوه. وقــد كانــت جــرت عادتــه قديمــا بمثــل ذلــك. وكان يدقــق520 الحيلــة والمخرقــة والكــذب علــى رب العالميــن. ولكــن قضــا521 العــدل هاهنــا ســبقه وقــدم لــه فــي الطريــق باقولــة522 مــن الســريان فــي جبــل االقــرع مــا كانــوا علمــوا بفتــح المدينــة. فاخــذوه وقدمــوا بــه اليهــا لمــا عرفــوا ممــن كان معــه فتحهــا. وكان االصطراطوبــذرخ وقتيــذ علــى حلــب يطلــب منــه اهلهــا مصالحتــه فواقفــوه علــى امــوال جســيمة يحملونهــا اليــه وعــاد بعــد االســتيثاق منهــم فحمــل اليــه اهــل الباقولــة523 ذلــك الملعــون الــذي كانــوا اســروه. وكان يعــرف بابــن مانــك.524 فســلمه الى من يحتاط عليه الى ان ينظر ما يجب ان يعمل في بابه.525 فاجتمــع روســا العســكر الــى المشــورة فــي ذلــك.526 فاشــار بعــض الروســا بحملــه527 الــى الملــك. وخالفهــم غيرهــم وقالــوا. ــي530 ــدم الزك ــك ال ــا529 لذل ــه انتصاف ــيا قتل ــب االش ــل528 اوج ــة. ب ــرة ملكي ــى حض ــل ال ــل الحم ــى يوه ــذا حت ــو ه ــن ه وم الــذي ســفكه. فاجابهــم531 االخــرون الذيــن كانــوا اشــاروا بحملــه وقالــوا. مــا الصــواب ان يدنــس532 ذلــك الــدم الطاهــر بهــذا الــدم النجــس. فقــال فــي االخــر افســطاثيوس البطريــق اســطراتيغوس الكبــادوك533 المعــروف بالماينــي. هــل البطريــرك 2513  يحفظون السور . . . خاليا فتمكنوا: س؛ ليحفظوا السور. ورآه الروم خاليا فبادروا بالطلوع اليه فلم يروا احدا فيه وتمكنوا: ز 2514  واســروا: س؛ يــوم الخميــس لثلــث عشــر ليلــة خلــت مــن ذي الحجــة ســنة ثمــان وخمســين وثلثمايــة. وطــرح المســلمين النــار لتحيــل بينهم وبين الروم وفتحوا باب البحر وخرج منه جماعة من اهلها وأسر الروم: ز 2515  منهم احد: س؛ منه احد منهم: ز 2516  اس البلية: س؛ رئيس رأس البلية ابن مانك: ز 2517  واتمها اليك: ز؛ واستقالته: س 2518  كان: س؛ كان قد: ز 2519  اين ما كان: س؛ بلد: ز 2520  يدقق: س؛ يتقن: ز 2521  قضا: س؛ القضاء: ز 2522  باقولة: صححته؛ باقولة اي عصبة: ز؛ راقوله: س 2523  الباقولة: صححته؛ الراقوله: س 2524  ما كانوا . . . بابن مانك: س؛ ممن كانوا يغيرون انطاكية. فقبضوا عليه وجاووا به الى االصطراطوبذرخ: ز 2525  بابه: س؛ بابه. وانعم على اهل الباقولة بنعم جسيمة: ز 2526  فاجتمع روسا . . . في ذلك: س؛ –ز 2527  الروسا بحمله: س؛ الرؤساء بحمل ذلك الملعون ابن مانك: ز 2528  ملكية. بل: س؛ الملك. بل من: ز 2529  انتصافا: س؛ انتقاما: ز 2530  الزكي: س؛ الذكي: ز 2531  فاجابهم: ز؛ فاجابه: س 2532  يدنس: س؛ يتدنس: ز 2533  الكبادوك: ز؛ القباذوق: س 145 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) هاهنــا حاضــر534 يامرنــا بقتلــه حتــى يتدنــس مــن هــذا دمــه535 كمــا تقولــون. امــا ذاك فانســان قــد قضــى مــا يجــب عليــه 128v ومضــى وحصــل بحيــث ينتظــر مــن هللا المكافــاة الجميلــة. وامــا نحــن فــان كنــا نصــارى فيجــب لنــا ان ننتصــف لــه من الظلم الجاري عليه. ولمــا قــال لهــم مثــل هــذا القــول اقنعهــم وانفــذ المحكــوم عليــه الــى جســر بــاب البحــر الــذي كان هــو طــرح منــه الجثــة الكريمــة الــى النهــر. وقطــع قطعــة قطعــة بالســيوف ولــم يطــرح536 القطــع فــي النهــر وال اهــل لذلــك. بــل رمــي بــكل واحــدة منهــا الــى حيــث مــا537 اتفــق علــى الحضيــض وحصلــت طعمــا538 للطيــور والــكاب. وامــا االخــران539 اللــذان كانــا شــاركاه في اهراق الدم فكانا قد540 انفذا الى حبس541 طرسوس542 ولم يطلبا في ذلك الوقت وال نفذ في بابهما حكم.543 ]18[ ثــم اتفــق ان544 الملــك مــن قبــل معرفتــه بخبــر انطاكيــة علــى حقيقتــه قتــل وحصــل الملــك البــن السمســيق. وبــادر الــى انفــاذ ثــاودورس الراهــب مــن اهــل قلونيــة وجعلــه بطريــركا علــى مدينــة هللا انطاكيــة. وقدمــه الــى هاهنــا معمــن اوصلــه فســال لوقتــه545 عــن خبــر الشــهيد وطلــب بقيــة جســده الطاهــر. وذاك ان جثتــه كانــت546 ظهــرت بعــد ثمانيــة ايــام مــن شــهادته التــي كانــت فــي547 ليلــة اليــوم الثالــث والعشــرين548 مــن شــهر ايــار.549 وكان ظهورهــا فــي جزيــرة مــن النهــر قــد تعلقــت بطــراش هنــاك. ولــم يكــن الــراس الكريــم معهــا. النــه قيــل ان ذلــك الكافــر كان احرقــه. فخــرج قــوم مــن نصــارى انطاكيــة ســرا ودفنوهــا فــي الديــر المقــدس المعــروف بارشــايا. فلمــا عــرف ذلــك ثــاودورس البطريــرك لــم يتصبــر وال تثاقــل عــن 129r هنــاك. بــل صــار الــى الديــر المقــدس وحمــل ليبســانات551 القديــس ومعــه االكليــرس الطاهــر وخلــق النفــوذ الــى مــا550 مــن المومنيــن. وســاروا قدامهــا الــى المدينــة552 بليتيــن ومحفــل عظيــم. وجعلوهــا فــي جــرن لطيــف مــن الرخــام وحصــل على مايدة553 رخام في مغارب الكنيسة الكبرى. 2534  حاضر: ز؛ حاضرا: س 2535  يتدنس من هذا دمه: س؛ نتدنس نحن بدمه: ز 2536  يطرح: س؛ تطرح: ز 2537  الى حيث ما: س؛ حسبما: ز 2538  طعما: س؛ طعاما: ز 2539  االخران: س؛ ابن محمود وابن دعامة: ز 2540  فكانا قد: س؛ الذكي فانهما كانا: ز 2541  حبس: ز؛ جسر: س 2542  طرسوس: س؛ طرسوس وبقيا فيه مدة طويلة: ز 2543  وال نفذ في بابهما حكم: س؛ –ز 2544  ان: س؛ ان نقفور: ز 2545  وقدمه الى . . . فسال لوقته: س؛ وقدم الى هاهنا. ثم اوصله فسلك لوقته وسأل: ز 2546  كانت: س؛ الكريمة كانت قد: ز 2547  في: س؛ –ز 2548  والعشرين: س؛ والعشرون: ز 2549  ايار: س؛ أيار سنة ست وخمسين وثلثماية للهجرة: ز 2550  الى ما: صححته؛ الى ما الى ما: س؛ الى: ز 2551  ليبسانات: صححته؛ لمسنا: س؛ جسد: ز 2552  الى المدينة: س؛ –ز 2553  وحصل على مايدة: س؛ ووضعوه على مائدة من: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 146 اال ان انبــا554 نقــوال البطريــرك مــن بعــد برهــة مــن الســنين نقلــه مــن هنــاك باكــرام ايضــا. وحصلــه555 فــي جــوف بيــت القديــس مــار بطــرس راس الرســل مــع شــبوقته وكرســيه وحيــول عــدة وليبســانات لبابيــا البطريــرك556 ايضــا واغناطيــوس ــس ــبوقة557 خريصوصطوم ــة وش ــة المكرم ــدان والحرب ــا المعم ــار يوحن ــول م ــن حي ــرى م ــيا اخ ــا. واش ــرك ايض البطري ومنطقة مار سمعان الحلبي العمودي. وغير ذلك مما هو كله في خزانة القديس مار بطرس الى غايتنا هذه. ]19[ لكــن القضــا العالــي لــم يســكن كثيــرا فيمــا بعــد عمــن كان شــريكا فــي القتــل. فالواحــد مــن االثنيــن وهــو ابــن محمــود كان فــي ســجن طرســوس فــي كل شــقا وضــر والــم نفــس وجســم558 يعاقــب باعمالــه الــى ان ســلم559 نفســه الشــقية جاحــدة لاحســان ومقابلــة للمحســن560 بالقبيــح الــذي ال مزيــد عليــه. وامــا االخــر وهــو ابــن دعامــة فبقــي محبوســا الــى ان قــدم الــى انطاكيــة يــد عــدل مــن البطريــق البرجــي561 كان فــي ذلــك الوقــت. فانفــذ مــن احضــره وثقلــه562 بحجــارة وطرحــه فــي النهــر.563 وحصــل الثاثــة وهــم ابــن مانــك وابــن محمــود وابــن دعامــة الذيــن تولــوا قتــل القديــس مكافاتهــم بعــد افعالهــم وفي564 االخرة ينتظرون العقوبة الدايمة. ــان ــع الرهب ــا م ــن. وافق ــا للصديقي ــة. مخالط ــاكنا للكهن ــة مس ــموات العالي ــي الس ــل ف ــس فحص 129v القدي ــا ]20[ وام الناســكين فــي صــف الشــهدا المقدميــن.565 وذاك انــه كان لبعــض هــاوال القديســين تابعــا مقاربــا والحقــا صاقبــا.566 وكان فيهــم مــن مــاراه567 ولــم يبعــد عــن شــاوه568 وال كان متاخــرا عنــه. وفيهــم مــن ســبقه وزاد عليــه بحســب البيــن مــن افعالــه والداليــل المعروفة من اعماله. فابراهيــم569 كان منتقــا بامــر هللا مــن وطنــه570 وصــار ابــا المــم وعــد بهــا.571 افلــم يكــن هــذا ايضــا منتقــا مــن ذاتــه ووالــدا الوالد كثيــرة روحانييــن. واســحق فخطــب رفقــة بمراســلة. وهــذا خطــب البيعــة المقدســة بنفســه. ويعقــوب ورث بركــة ابيــه ولكــن بحيلــة. واخــذ البــن ولكــن البركــة اخذهــا بدقــة مــن الحيلــة المذكــورة.572 واالمراتــان اخذهمــا بعــد تعــب وشــقا شــقيه مــن اجلهمــا. وكان مــع ذاك ناظــرا الــى ثــواب ياخــذه ظاهــرا. وامــا هــذا بغيــر غــش ومــع كل صــدق وصــل الــى 2554  انبا: س؛ القديس: ز 2555  وحصله: س؛ وجعله: ز 2556  وليبسانات لبابيا البطريرك: س؛ ولباسات لآلباء البطاركة: ز 2557  المكرمة وشبوقة: س؛ الكريمة السيدية وشبوقة يوحنا: ز 2558  نفس وجسم: س؛ يقين وجسيم: ز 2559  سلم: س؛ هلكت: ز 2560  جاحدة لاحسان ومقابلة للمحسن: س؛ المقابلة للحسن: ز 2561  يد عدل من البطريق البرجي: س؛ ميخائيل البرجي البطريق: ز 2562  وثقله: ز؛ وثقل: س 2563  النهر: س؛ البحر: ز 2564  مكافاتهم بعد افعالهم وفي: ز؛ ومكافاته بضد فعاله في: س 2565  المقدمين: س؛ القديسين: ز 2566  مقاربا والحقا صاقبا: س؛ مقارنا والحقا صاحبا: ز 2567  ماراه: س؛ جاراه: ز 2568  شاوه: س؛ شأنه: ز 2569  فابراهيم: س؛ الن ابراهيم القديم: ز 2570  بامر هللا من وطنه: س؛ من وطنه بامر هللا: ز 2571  عد بها: س؛ كثيرة: ز 2572  واخذ البن . . . الحيلة المذكورة: س؛ –ز 147 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) بــركات مــن افــواه كثيريــن. والعــروس الروحانيــة التــي اخذهــا فلــم يخــل مــن نصــب573 مــن اجلهــا. ولكنــه مــا نظــر الــى ثواب حاضر. بل تحقق ثوابا مستانفا574 ال يبصر. ودعــة داود لعمــري مــا حصــل لهــذا كلهــا. النــه قــد كان575 تبقــى576 فيــه بقيــة يســيرة مــن عجــب577 الكتــاب. وســبيل الحــق فــي ذلــك ان يقــال اذ كان يمســه مــن ذلــك شــي مــا كان امكنــه بعــد ان يزيلــه بالكليــة. وعســاه قــد كان فــي ذلــك مجتهــدا وكان متمســكا ببعــض ذلــك عمــدا لموضــع الرياســة ومــا يحتــاج اليــه فــي التاديــب. وامــا ســليمان فمــا كان امكنــه ان يصــل 130r الــى حكمتــه. ولكــن كان فيــه عوضــا عــن ذلــك578 ثباتــه علــى االمانــة بــاهلل وعــدم الخضــوع579 الــى االالم واالنســحاب الى الخنى. وهذا580 فهو اشرف من حكمة الدنيا واثر عند هللا. وامــا االبرودرومــس ســاكن البــراري. فمــا كان شــي فــي هــذا منــه581 النــه لــم يكــن نبيــا وال ســابقا وال ســكن بريــة. اال انــه كان مناديــا باالمانــة ومبينــا لحســن العبــادة وكان بذلــك معروفــا. ومــا عمــد لعمــري جماعــة. ولكنــه خلــص كثيريــن مــن اطــراح المعموديــة والنــزوع عنهــا وعاونهــم582 ببذلــه ورفــده علــى حفظهــا ووصــل583 بعــد ذلــك الــى المعموديــة الكبــرى العليى التي ال تتدنس بشي من الوضر واالوساخ الثانية.584 وحصــل لــه مــن بطــرس غليــان االمانــة. ولكنــه ابعــد مــع ذاك عــن الجبــن واالنخــزال.585 وتشــبه مــن بولــص باالنتقــال ولكنــه لــم ينتقــل مــن حــال اضطهــاد الديــن. بــل مــن تخليــط العالــم وعقــاالت لذاتــه. وان كان مــن اورشــليم الــى اللوريقــوس لــم يصــل بالمنــاداة. وذلــك ان بولــص وحــده وصــل الــى ذلــك وهــو الــذي اختطــف الــى الســما الثالثــة وســمع الــكام الــذي ال شــرح.586 ولكــن لــم يقصــر ايضــا وال هــذا فيمــا امكنــه مــن قــوم يســندهم587 ويدعمهــم. وقــوم يعظهــم ويبصرهــم. وقــوم ينهاهم ويزجرهم. في مواضع كثيرة من الشدايد الكبار ينجيهم ويخلصهم. ]21[ ولكــن يــا هامــة588 االهيــة ذات كل طهــارة التــي كانــت عنــدي خاصــة معشــوقة. وعنــد الكافــة عامــة محتشــمة. ويــا مــن كان بجماعــة589 المذكوريــن متشــبها. وللكثيريــن منهــم عاشــقا. والــى كل حســنة ســابقا. اقبــل منــي هــذا القــول. 2573  نصب: س؛ تعب: ز 2574  مستانفا: س؛ سابقا: ز 2575  قد كان: س؛ كان قد: ز 2576  تبقى: ز؛ يبقا: س 2577  عجب: س؛ تحجب: ز 2578  ذلك: س؛ تلك: ز 2579  وعدم الخضوع: ز؛ وعدمه الخفوف: س 2580  الخنى. وهذا: س؛ الحياة. وهذا لعمري: ز 2581  منه: س؛ –ز 2582  والنزوع عنها وعاونهم: س؛ والتروغ عنها وعادتهم: ز 2583  ووصل: س؛ ومهد: ز 2584  الثانية: س؛ الثابتة: ز 2585  ذاك عن الجبن واالنخزال: س؛ ذلك الجبن واالنحراك: ز 2586  وذلك ان . . . ال شرح: س؛ –ز 2587  يسندهم: س؛ يشيدهم: ز 2588  ولكن يا هامة: س؛ ولبس باسلحة: ز 2589  بجماعة: س؛ لجماعة من: ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 148 130v فامــا ان تتصــوره مديحــا او تتصــوره مرثيــا او تجبيــرا.590 وخــذه بعيشــك البهــي وان كان قــوال فقيــرا.591 ولكنــه بحســب الطاقــة. وكمــا لــم592 تســتنكف ان تســعى بقدميــك مــن اجلــي حتــى ســلمتني الــى ذلــك المــودب االلهــي الفاضــل. عســاك رجــوت منــي ان اصيــر فاضــا.593 او تقدمــت فعرفــت انــي594 اصيــر كمــا صــرت فــي العلــوم ناقصــا. ولكنــك595 علمــت علــى كل حــال علمــا روحانيــا انــي596 اقــدر فــي بعــض االوقــات ان اكتــب خبــرك ليــا ينســى فــي طــول الزمــان. فكذلــك597 تعطــف علــي وفــي الوقــت هــذا598 واصفــح لــي عــن تاخيــري واجــب المقــال فيــك599 هــذه الغايــة. ال تحرمنــي عنــد وقوفــك االن فــي الســموات امــام المنبــر العظيــم بحســب مــا كنــت مشــتاقا او بحســب مــا كنــت حريصــا مجتهــدا ان تنظــر الــي.600 وتشــفع فــي. وقــد كان والــدي قــد عــول601 علــى عنايتــك فــي خافتــك فــي وفــي اخوتــي رضــي هللا عــن الجميــع. وتبالــغ فــي الســوال والتضــرع فــي ان تغفــر602 خطايــاي وينجــب ســعيي فــي بقيــة عمــري واخلــص مــن الشــدايد وانتقــل الــى مــا يرضــي هللا ويزلف لديه. ]22[ فلــك عــدة مــن التبــاع والمســاعدين االوالد الذيــن اولدتهــم بالمســيح وهديتهــم603 الــى الطريــق الموديــة الــى مــا يرضي هللا. وقد كانوا اغصانا مقدسة وازهارا روحانية ومقدمات من بلدنا النفيس604 االلهي مقبولة. ــمعان ــار س ــر م ــى دي ــس وراس عل ــور القدي ــك نقف ــي المل ــذي لق ــك605 ال ــك وغرس ــر. نصبت ــي الكبي ــا جرج ــم انب فمنه العمودي الحلبي الجبلي.606 131r على باد607 المشرق. ومنهم انبا يوحنا العجيب الذي اهل الن صار كاثوليكا ومنهــم انبــا خاريطــن الثانــي المجتهــد االرشــمندريتس رييــس608 ديــر مــار609 ســمعان العجايبــي البحــري الــذي فــي جبــل اللكام العجيب. 2590  مديحا او . . . او تجبيرا: س؛ موفقا او تتصوره مرتبا او تخبيرا: ز 2591  فقيرا: س؛ قاصرا: ز 2592  لم: ز؛ ال: س 2593  اصير فاضا: س؛ اصف واصبر قليا: ز 2594  اني: س؛ ان: ز 2595  ناقصا. ولكنك: س؛ فاضا. ولكني: ز 2596  روحانيا اني: س؛ وحاشا ان: ز 2597  فكذلك: س؛ فلذلك: ز 2598  وفي الوقت هذا: س؛ في هذا الوقت: ز 2599  فيك: س؛ فيك الى: ز 2600  الي: س؛ الرب: ز 2601  كان والدي قد عول: س؛ كانوا الذين عولوا: ز 2602  تغفر: س؛ يغفر: ز 2603  وهديتهم: س؛ وقدمتهم: ز 2604  بلدنا النفيس: س؛ لدن النفس: ز 2605  وغرسك: س؛ وغرستك: ز 2606  الجبلي: س؛ –ز 2607  باد: ز؛ بلد: س 2608  رييس: صححته؛ رئيس: ز؛ –س 2609  مار: س؛ سابا. ومنهم: ز 149 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) ومنهم انبا يعيش الحبيس610 الذي جاهد في611 انواع من عمد الحبس وصنع القوات العجيبة. ومنهــم انبــا افــرام رجــل هللا الحبيــس الــذي صبــر612 علــى ضيــق المحابــس الكثيــرة. ولــم ينتقــل عــن طريقــة واحــدة. وكان حبيسا بنا مخصوصا613 بل بالمسيح في دير القديس غريغوريوس الثاولوغس.614 ومنهــم انبــا ارميــا رفيقــه العجيــب رييــس ديــر615 الســيدة والــدة االلــه المعــروف بالجراجمــة الــذي انشــاه هــو فــي جبــل اللكام المقدس. ومنهم االب المغبوط افتيكيوس ابن فرخوس.616 ومنهــم617 انبــا غريغوريــوس الكبيــر الفاضــل رييــس ديــر الســيدة والــدة االلــه المعــروف بدفنونــا. وكفــى باشــهاره618 في الفضايل. وكذلــك فقــد ذكــرت لــكل منهــم خبــرا مفــردا علــى حــده619 كمــا اســتاهلوا ان يكونــوا مذكوريــن. وان كنــت اختصــرت فيــه غايــة االختصــار. وكفــا بانهــم620 مــن نصبــك مديحــا لهــم وذكــرا. وشــفاعتك621 وصلواتهــم اجمعيــن فلتكــن لنــا622 مخلصــة وحافظة االن ودايما والى اقصى الدهور كلها.623 امين. >وليقل كافة الشعب امين.<624 2610  الحبيس: س؛ الحلبي: ز 2611  في: س؛ –ز 2612  الحبس وصنع . . . الذي صبر: س؛ الحبيس وصبر: ز 2613  حبيسا بنا مخصوصا: س؛ حبيبا بنا: ز 2614  الثاولوغس: س؛ الثاولوغس ببتياس: ز 2615  دير: س؛ دير الست: ز 2616  فرخوس: س؛ فرجوس: ز 2617  ومنهم: ز؛ ومنهم انا: س 2618  بدفنونا. وكفى باشهاره: س؛ بدقنونا. وكفانا باشتهاره: ز 2619  حده: س؛ حدة: ز 2620  وكفا بانهم: س؛ وكفانا بهم: ز 2621  وشفاعتك: س؛ وشفاعتك وصلواتك: ز 2622  لنا: ز؛ له: س 2623  الدهور كلها: س؛ اخر الدهور: ز 2624  وليقل كافة الشعب امين: س؛ –ز al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 150 translation 111v in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, one god. the twenty-third day of may. the story of the life of the patriarch of antioch, the martyr christopher, and his martyrdom there. ibrāhīm b. yūḥannā, the imperial625 prōtospatharios there, composed it in greek, then also translated it into arabic. may god benefit us by it, amen. nature and actions in accordance with the divine image626 are among the deeds of god (blessed be every mention of him). as for sin and all things that diverge from the outlines of that image, they are among the deeds of the evil one. and as for our own deeds, we say first that they are among the deeds of god, because everything recognizes that he (exalted be his name) created all things that exist out of nothing and ennobled humans by his own hand when he created them in his image. but we mention secondly that they are among the deeds of iblīs, because he envied our father adam for the nobility that he had attained, so he deceived and misled him with the hope of divinization, making him sink and fall away from the natural virtues and outstanding traits of the image upon which he was formed. thus 112r it has become a virtue to establish our nature upon its original foundation and basis and to put an end to our separation from the core of the image, and it has become a shortcoming and a vice to remove ourselves from the duties of our nature, to turn away from its original basis in any direction, to abandon the image’s journey toward that upon which it was formed, and to turn our faces toward its opposite. thus the prophet’s saying “i will judge you according to the state in which i find you at the end”627 became necessary. by my life, this is one of the most necessary and important things! for god (blessed be his name), who is the first good, made us and created us to do good, so that good might be our goal and intention. after we have deviated from it, we return to it, so that we might begin to ascend toward it after turning away, because the only thing that prevents us from doing so is not god (powerful and great), but our own will. how, then, could this saying not be necessary? from this it follows that he will judge us according to the state in which we are found at the end of our days. so we have come to this point: whomever we see in a given form at the end, whether they have been good and 625. “imperial” (malakī) could also be translated “melkite” in a reference to ibrāhīm’s christological affiliation. however, compare ms british library or. 8607, fol. 28b, where an abraham (possibly this author) is described as “the emperor’s scribe,” kātbā d-malkā. see brock, “syriac manuscripts,” 62, 66–67. for more on this translation choice, see mugler, “ibrāhīm ibn yūḥannā,” 192–93; samuel noble, “a byzantine bureaucrat and arabic philosopher: ibrāhīm ibn yūḥannā al-anṭākī and his translation of on the divine names 4.18–35,” in caught in translation: studies on versions of late antique christian literature, ed. madalina toca and dan batovici, 276–312 (leiden: brill, 2020), 268–69. 626. the preface uses the roots ṣ-w-r and ṣ-y-r (“image,” “become,” etc.) as a running motif. 627. ezekiel 7:3? 151 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) righteous all of their days or have returned to goodness and righteousness after straying far away—they have returned, and we must praise and commend them, because we know that nothing prevented them and they have turned toward this form of power without anything to hinder them, unto the ultimate blessing and the furthest remembrance. when we find someone who first made a mistake and then apologized for it in the end, it is no embarrassment to praise and exalt them on account of what they became afterward. so the “chosen vessel,”628 despite his previous 112v acts of persecution, must be highly praised, since his struggle629 ended on the side of truth. the same applies to matthew, because he became an evangelist after collecting taxes.630 so if anyone is like these two, who first went one way but afterward returned to virtue, they must be praised for what they began to do afterward. and if this is true of those who were in error before, what can we say about one who was not in error before, but was rather in the middle ranks of people, among those who were polluted voluntarily or involuntarily, between the highest and the lowest? the person who fits this description must certainly be considered virtuous and counted among those who should be greatly praised. [1. the early years] one person we know who fits this description is christopher,631 the great patriarch and the noble martyr, because of the payments he received before, when he was a secretary,632 and because he endured his later struggle and devotion, though he did not have an earlier custom or precedent of religious exercise. he had a powerful passion and zeal for even the smallest good works and later had an even greater passion for struggling on behalf of the truth. his homeland was the city of peace, baghdad, which the early children of hagar substituted for the city of ctesiphon as their capital city, the land of their sciences and their pure language. as for his parents, i do not know what they were like, but they must have been prominent and important to become the parents of someone like him. the period of his education in his own city was brief, consisting only of what he needed to become well educated in the elementary sciences, then to master rhetoric as well as he could, and beyond that to master the skill of handwriting. for when he wrote, no 113r one could decide which was more perfect in his calligraphy: its beauty or its speed. for these two qualities had never been equally present in a single person. in him, not only were they equal, but everyone who saw him thought that they were competing with each other and striving for precedence. 628. saul/paul; acts 9:15. 629. jihād. 630. cf. matthew 9:9. 631. the text of z begins here and reads “christopher, the blessed, fortunate one.” 632. z omits: “because of . . . a secretary.” al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 152 for this reason, and due to his aforementioned virtue—or rather, due to the concern of divine providence for the see of the head of the apostles633 that is here—it was not possible for him to dwell in his homeland for long. once he had become as well educated as he could be, as we have mentioned, he imitated the chosen father634 who had migrated from those regions; he, too, migrated, because he, too, was going to become the great father of a multitude. he migrated from the land of the chaldeans to the land of the syrians. and by “the land of the syrians,” i do not mean “the land of the canaanites,” which is now the land of palestine, but i mean the town near us, not far away, the town of aleppo. the management of all of this was with god, who lays the foundations of things in advance, so that at last they come to a praiseworthy end beneficial to all. he (great and powerful) continuously makes small things the prologue to great things that do not even occur to the imagination beforehand. in this case, ibn ḥamdān, whose surname was sayf al-dawla and whose renown was great, was important and had a powerful influence in this region. he showed concern for every virtuous person who had nobility and high ambition, so he was like a magnetic stone whose goodness attracted635 people from 113v all other countries. therefore, the one who had imitated the ancient father in his migration headed in his direction. his name was originally ʿīsā,636 and he was going to become what he was going to be named—or rather, what he was going to be named came first, so he took that name.637 and just as he had put on christ in baptism,638 so he would also put him on in his blood. ʿalī b. ḥamdān handed him over to one of the great emirs of the wilderness, named khalīfa b. jundī, whose emirate was in the area of shayzar. so ʿīsā was with him, and all of his affairs were handed over to him. [2. the christians of iraq and central asia] he was not known among the antiochians at first; no one had heard of him or knew anything about him, but afterward he became known because of the coming story. ctesiphon, which we have mentioned, was large and greatly renowned, because it was the limit, frontier, and boundary of the kingdom of the persians. and there was a community 633. raʾs al-salīḥiyyīn, that is, peter, whose first see was in antioch. 634. abram/abraham, whose two names mean “great (or high) father” and “father of a multitude,” respectively; cf. genesis 11:31–12:9, 17:5. 635. lacuna in z omits: “like a . . . goodness attracted.” 636. the typically muslim name for jesus (the typically christian name is yasūʿ). z adds: “because he was going to become a patriarch like abraham, though he did not know it. but he was later named christopher.” 637. this sentence is confusing, and quite different in the two manuscripts. it seems, however, that the idea is that christopher was going to live up to his name by becoming a bearer of christ. the second part of the sentence suggests a correction to the first: he was already a bearer of christ, and that was why he chose the name christopher when he became patriarch. this assumes the audience’s knowledge that the greek name christopher means “bearer of christ,” which would have been obvious in the original greek. 638. cf. galatians 3:27. 153 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) of christians there whose pastor was not called a metropolitan, because the rank of metropolitan was not sufficient to shepherd such a large group throughout all the countries of persia and to hand over their affairs to bishops alone. for they were also rather few, and the situation called for numerous bishops, so many that it was not possible for one metropolitan to name and ordain them all, so there was a need for numerous metropolitans. moreover, those regions were distant, far from our city called by the name of god,639 and they were in the kingdom of the persians, which often prevented travel to 114r antioch for the appointment of a metropolitan for every place. there was already another policy among the ancients for this situation, the likes of which had been used for different nations and distant places, such as the georgians,640 the abkhaz, and the bulgars: a person was ordained whose authority was greater than the authority of a metropolitan, and he was called a catholicos, as they were called in those places that we mentioned. our predecessors followed this custom, and the leader of our city ordained a catholicos for the city of ctesiphon. when the hagarenes641 built the city of peace, which is baghdad, they wanted to move the christians away from its vicinity, so they moved them to a distant city in the persian lands, called shash,642 and sent the catholicos into exile there with his exiled companions. that relocated tribe was called “the community of the romans,” and naturally their group was called by this name.643 so the residence of the catholicos was in shash for some time, and no one challenged or disputed it. but when a group of roman prisoners began to accumulate and some of them obtained their freedom, a dispute began between the two sides. the group of christians gathered in baghdad said, “the catholicos belongs to us, and we are more deserving of him, because his residence was in ctesiphon, and ctesiphon is near us.” and the people in shash said, “we are the people of that place, who were moved from there to here with the catholicos of all the east, and as a person is nobler than any piece of land, it is necessary for us to have the catholicos, who moved here with us. we have precedence, as we are rational creatures, and it is more proper 114v for us than for you. you ask that you should have precedence on account of nothing but stones and dust!” while the quarrel between the two sides was ongoing, the current catholicos died, and there was need for another person after him to carry out the ministry of the priesthood there. therefore, three emissaries came to antioch from romagird requesting the ordination 639. a reference to antioch’s greek title of theou polis, or “city of god.” 640. for “georgians,” z reads: al-khazarān. there is no known catholicate among the khazars, and marius canard suggests that ibrāhīm intended jurzān, the georgians. this seems to be the reading in s, though it could also be read as khurzān. see marius canard, “une vie du patriarche melkite d’antioche, christophore († 967),” byzantion 23 (1953): 561–69, at 562. 641. for “hagarenes,” z reads: “children of hagar.” 642. now part of tashkent, uzbekistan. 643. apparently a reference to rōmagird (persian)/rhōmagyris (greek), the name of this christian colony in central asia. the etymology of the name is disputed and difficult to reconcile with ibrāhīm’s jamāʿat al-rūm; see néophyte edelby, “note sur la catholicosat de romagyris,” proche-orient chrétien 2 (1952): 39–46, at 40; canard, “vie,” 563. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 154 of a catholicos. one was a priest and the other two were deacons. i, the speaker and writer, saw them—while i was still a boy—remaining in our church and saying that they would not return until they were given an audience and allowed to take the catholicos whom they had come from the end of the earth to request. and the aforementioned ʿīsā heard they had come, and he was not pleased with their plan, because he was a baghdadi and one of their opponents on the topic of the catholicos—in fact, the leader of that side. working to put an end to their plan,644 he did not delay or rest, but left his work behind and took up the pain of the journey to antioch to drive them away. there was no one who appointed him to do this; he took up the cause of his own accord, simply out of zeal for his homeland. at that time, the one entrusted with the administration of our town named for god was the late agapios645 b. qaʿbarūn, who held the patriarchate before him. so the dispute, discussion, and quarrel over the installation of the catholicos took place in his presence, and the aforementioned ʿīsā fiercely contended for the people of his country, presenting their arguments and seeking victory for them—to bring the catholicos to their city, which is the city of peace and the replacement for ctesiphon. 115r as the patriarch judged, he seemed not to be swayed by what ʿīsā was requesting, but he recoiled from his skill and was ashamed to face him, so he left the matter hanging.646 ʿīsā was satisfied and departed, but he had shown the antiochians that he was a man of great endurance and that he had a fierce zeal for the affairs of the church. [3. his election to the patriarchate] it was only a little later that the patriarch died, and it became the concern of the antiochians to choose a patriarch and pastor to succeed him. for here, the choice did not belong to metropolitans and bishops—who care about nothing except what will improve their own situation, and do not care what will improve the situation of the masses—as is the custom in other places. here, the choice was available to everyone affected; both commoners and elites cared about it and had a choice in it. anyone who precisely considers the concept of choice will find that the system used here is unspoiled by personal desires, and therefore also pleasing to god. when the antiochians set about doing this, a group of them debated at length whether to choose one person or another. but they did not find anyone more agreeable to them or more suitable for their see than ʿīsā. so when their community agreed to choose him, they brought their request to sayf al-dawla, because he was in command of the region. he was pleased with their position, because he was partial and favorable toward ʿīsā. but he had no way to approve their choice, because he was wary of the impudence of the desert arab whom he was serving, 115v a man of great ruggedness, boldness, and audacity. he had no doubt that the man would fight to keep ʿīsā, his secretary. 644. s omits: “because he . . . their plan.” 645. for “agapios,” s reads: “agathon.” this is agapios i (bishop 341–48/953–59). 646. for “he left the matter hanging,” z reads: “he closed the matter.” 155 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) it was good fortune from god, who (blessed be his name) willed for such a man to become patriarch here, that that qarmaṭī bedouin647 went with sayf al-dawla on one of his raids.648 his horse slipped on ṣārikha649 bridge and he drowned in the halys650 river. then sayf al-dawla gave permission for the selection of ʿīsā, and the chosen one was quickly elevated to the exalted and god-honored see of the head of the apostles. he received ordination from the metropolitans, as is required. the ordination was splendid and dignified, and he naturally took the name christopher, for it was obvious from his actions that he bore all goodness within his breast—more precisely, we could say that he bore christ within his heart. [4. his asceticism and piety] from this point on he651 led him away from the path of ease and luxury onto another path, rough and difficult. for although he had not become a monk, he exceeded all monks in his practices: after his ordination, he tasted nothing of meat. because he had no previous custom of following the monastic lifestyle, he was not satisfied with the things that his monastic predecessors had done, whether in fasting or vigils or rising for prayer. rather, he exceeded and surpassed them in everything. he fasted every day from nighttime to nighttime, from the beginning of the year to the end, for from the time when he became patriarch, there was not a single day when he ate a bite of food before evening. nor was he concerned about different types 116r of food; he made no distinctions among the things he ate, and his table was spread in whatever way, often without eggs or fish or any other fine thing. his drinking was not excessive, but it included a little wine and plenty of water. on ordinary days he was awake for a large portion of the night, long before dawn.652 on sundays, he was awake from the evening before sunday until the morning. the priests took his vigils as a model because of the great love that he had for god and the greatness of his soul. and often he would not go back to bed for a long time, so that i even saw him nearly fall to the ground on numerous occasions because of the intensity of the practice. 647. badawī. the qarmaṭīs were an apocalyptic, revolutionary branch of ismāʿīlī shīʿī islam (at some points also closely associated with zoroastrianism) that gained numerous adherents in syria, among other regions, in the early fourth/tenth century. the movement lost much of its appeal, however, after the infamous, bloody qarmaṭī raid on mecca during the ḥajj season of 317/930. at this point, numerous qarmaṭīs entered the service of sunnī rulers, including the ḥamdānids. see canard, histoire, 1:315–18, 602–6, 632–34. 648. ghazawāt. 649. for “ṣārikha,” z reads: “mārikha.” 650. for “halys,” z reads: “al-sinn.” as canard notes, this is a slightly garbled reference to the halys (arabic “alis”), now the kızılırmak in northern turkey. ṣārikha appears in byzantine and muslim sources as well, and canard writes that this text allows us to place it precisely on the halys, “without doubt upstream from sivas.” zayat, on the other hand, takes “al-sinn” as the correct term and places it on the tigris. the connection to ṣārikha (as it appears in s, though it is misspelled in z) makes canard’s reading more likely. see canard, “vie,” 567; zayat, “vie,” 26. 651. that is, christ. 652. fajr. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 156 we have mentioned a few things on this topic to show the difficulty of the life that he led, in which he had no prior experience. anyone who has experienced this or has heard about it will surely know how difficult this path and practice were for a man who was raised in luxury. [5. the catholicos issue] it is now time to discuss what he did after his ordination. it was necessary to ordain bishops for the sees that were vacant. which sees did he turn to first? he did not turn somewhere uncontested, nor to a see in which he had no history of opposition or favoritism or contention, but to the two sees that he had defended and opposed. his concern for them was not the same as it had been earlier, partial and headstrong. when he realized within himself that he had not acted in an appropriate way, as a result of 116v his favoritism and opposition, he decided to confront the aspects of the situation that he had previously ignored and to reform both his own intention and the things that were now under his control, even reforming his own beliefs. thus he approached the situation with a just balance, but also with wisdom and kindness. so he weighed the ordination on this balance and created two catholicoi: one for the city of peace, his homeland, who was a man of aleppo named david,653 and the other for romagird (which he had opposed), a man of antioch named eutykhios. who will not praise him for this kind and correct policy that led to peace and harmony? for he did not wrong his own city, but he also looked well upon the other, and he gave them harmony of souls and removed their discord and contention. [6. other vacant sees] but did he then lie down on the issue of the other vacant sees? when he looked into the issue, did he consider bribes or intercessions, or a ruler’s pleasure, or the terror of a powerful person’s frown? no! on the contrary, when he saw that the delegation from a city requesting a bishop had mentioned someone worthy of ordination, and that person was pleasing to god and to him, he would lay his hands upon him immediately and confirm him, being pleased with what pleased them and yielding to their request. or if he was not pleased with that person, he would choose someone else with whom they were also pleased, and would lay his hands upon him with the consent of the following654 synod. there was no delay, because the metropolitans who were before him could see that his mind was judicious, his determination was strong, no favoritism affected him, and he did not desire gifts or bribes. so how could they contradict him in anything he decided?655 653. for “david,” z reads: “mājid.” tūmā bīṭār suggests that mājid (if this is the correct reading) might be the author of a fourth-/tenth-century arabic commentary on the nicene creed, though the evidence is limited, and the variant reading of s makes the identification even less likely. see tūmā bīṭār, al-qiddīsūn al-mansiyyūn fī al-turāth al-anṭākī (duma, lebanon: ʿāʾilat al-thālūth al-quddūs, 1995), 385–86. 654. lacuna in z omits: “following.” 655. s repeats: “his determination . . . he decided.” 157 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) [7. church administration] 117r he had a strong determination, a great heart, and a zeal to beautify and reform the church. he fought for it and defended it, never being moved or turned back. it should not be a problem for us to mention a story as proof. there was a priest, a physician, who committed a small fault, so the blessed father restrained him and suspended him from exercising the priesthood for some time. this priest was serving one of the ḥamdānid emirs—a fierce tyrant obedient to no one, not even ibn ḥamdān. he asked him to intercede with the patriarch to secure his release and cancel his suspension. his intercession came without delay, because he believed that no one—not even one of the most powerful muslims—would dare to disobey him. so how could the patriarch, a lowly christian dhimmī?656 therefore he addressed the patriarch gladly, saying, “whatever sin was committed by my physician, the priest, transfer his offense to me, o patriarch, and forgive him.” he answered him, saying, “that is not possible for me, o my lord the emir.” he responded to him, saying, “o uncircumcised man, don’t you fear me? yet you dare to tell me ‘that is not possible for me’? what could be impossible for you if i have commanded it?” the bold man responded to him, saying “many things are impossible for me, o emir, if they relate to my religion, my doctrine, and my law.657 for we are in obedience to658 you,659 and in other things it is not possible for us 117v to disobey you. but as for what religion has forbidden, when it comes to these things we are prepared to face prison and the blades of swords.” so he responded to him: “at least let me know what is this grave offense that has violated your religion.” the disciple of christ said, “before this, o emir, the crime was only a little one, and it would be easy to make satisfaction for it. but now it is great, and it is undesirable to forgive it, because he asked you to intercede660—you, a muslim, who disagrees with us in doctrine!661—and the truth of this case is no secret, since the matter concerns only our church.” the hagarene answered him, saying, “from now on, be armed to the teeth, and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are going to die. i would take your head even if it were on the breast of the great emir.” what did this bold man do after that? was he anxious? did he relent? did he bend the knee? did he stop to send a message about it to ibn ḥamdān? absolutely not! rather, he considered all of that to be nothing more than scattered dust of no importance. he set out at once for antioch and entrusted it to god, his defender. at that time he was in aleppo.662 praise god, his aim was not off the mark. and this was his zeal and ambition for all that would beautify and adorn the church. 656. for “because he . . . christian dhimmī,” z reads: “trusting in his kindliness, especially as he was a dhimmī.” 657. dīnī wa-madhhabī wa-nāmūsī. 658. for “are in obedience to,” s reads: “do not obey.” 659. plural. 660. for “he asked you to intercede,” z reads: “i find it horrible.” 661. madhhab. 662. z places “at that . . . in aleppo” after the word “antioch” in the previous sentence. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 158 [8. care for the poor] if the way of this virtuous man in these things was as we have described, did he behave the same way in other things—as one who does not bend over or yield, and not663 as the meek lover of humanity who lends his sympathy and inclines his ear to anyone who asks, anyone who needs his mercy and compassion? in other areas, who was stronger in compassion than christopher, or more tender 118r in sympathy for the afflicted, or stronger in mercy for those in need, or more generous in giving to the pure? his wealth was not abundant, because he was working among the gentiles, so his revenues were diminished. nevertheless, as far as it was possible for him, he never cut short his generosity, support, care, and giving—not only once, but many times, and not only occasionally, but continuously—if it was possible, conditions were easy, and he did not face difficult obstacles. he received messages, and he never failed to read them and to record with his own hand that one of the petitioners664 should be given documents,665 another clothing, another food, another drink, and still others similar things. i myself, the composer of this text, saw a priest who had told him a story, so he brought him into his presence and asked him about it, saying, “how many dependents do you have?” he answered him, saying such and such, so he said, “let him be paid this much wheat, this much oil, and this much wine,” enough to last him a year. when the priest was beginning to leave, he said to him, “come back here. where, o unfortunate one, will you get the price of milling666 or any seasoning? no; pay him this, too, whatever is enough for him.” the saint did not let him leave until he had given him enough to satisfy him for the whole year. furthermore, whenever the story of an imprisoned or unjustly extorted person came to him, if it was possible to redeem them with small gifts, he did not hesitate to give and to redeem them from whatever was demanded of them. but if there was an intense difficulty, he never failed to ride over to the one making the demands, 118v asking them to forgive whatever they wanted the person to pay and to make any possible reduction to the sum. this was the image of a new nicholas667 among us, passionate in concern for all who were in hardship and need. all of this is evidence of the things he would do of his own accord and of his generous kindness. his head, his zenith, the prototype to which he adhered and whose likeness he bore— christ, the imitation of whom was always in his thoughts and whom he desperately wished to emulate—was not content to fill the bellies of thousands with a few pieces of bread, but added another satisfying gift with his two pure hands: he washed the feet of his disciples.668 663. z adds: “how would he then have shown by his actions that he was a worthy disciple of christ?” 664. for “petitioners,” z reads: “poor.” 665. waraq. potentially paper money. 666. for “milling,” z reads: “flour.” 667. a fourth-century ce bishop of myra, famed for his generous gifts; inspiration for the modern santa claus and his counterparts. nicholas was extremely popular in this period. see roberts, reason, 68–72, 105–8, 111. 668. cf. john 13:1–20. 159 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) so this disciple of his also strove669 not to be satisfied with what we have described and added another service with his two hands for those who were his brothers in their connection to his teacher. in antioch there was an intense famine that naturally affected all the people. therefore, christopher gathered a group of those most severely injured by hunger—the elderly, the sick, priests, deacons, young people, and orphans. he gathered them, organized them into schools, and had them sit at tables while he stood, not satisfied just because they had abundant food, but sometimes taking the task into his own hands and serving them drinks, one by one. it is thus clear that he was a faithful slave of christ, imitating him in a way that no other could match. [9. educational works] since i have now mentioned young people and orphans,670 i must explain who these young people were. it is clear, o listener, that he extended his soul not only in love for the weak but also in excellence of mind and in the benevolent administration of everything for the greater good. he saw how tight and difficult things were and that for this reason people were falling behind in their learning—and that not only the poor and powerless but even the notables, the people of esteem, were failing in it. the holy church of god was lacking, and most of the people had no 119r thought or care for learning. so he thought of a major program that would show his good administration: he chose from among the powerful671 twelve young people, intelligent and distinguished, and handed them over to an insightful teacher, who would teach them the ecclesiastical sciences that surpass all others. then he cast lots to choose other people from among the poor, especially orphans in bad situations—150 young people—and handed them over to three teachers who would teach each one whatever they could do skillfully. he ordered that three large kettles full of food should be cooked every day, each one taken to one of the schools, and that every young person should be given whatever was enough for them, along with whatever bread they needed. we must recognize how many benefits he provided here—namely, three major ones: first, food that the eater did not have to labor for; second, education without price or payment; third, noble service to the church.672 these are all among his great deeds in this area. [10. defending the faith] he added to this an even greater help for the poor and support for the faith. the hagarenes extract from all christians in their countries a tax673 that we call the “head 669. ijtahada. 670. s omits: “he gathered . . . and orphans.” this lengthy variant is likely an accidental omission in s due to the repetition of “young people and orphans.” 671. for “powerful,” z reads: “wealthy.” 672. bīʿa. 673. jizya. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 160 tax”674 but they call the “acquittal,”675 because it acquits those who pay it of any damages or prosecution. none of the christians who live there can escape from paying it, because whoever does not pay is led without a choice into the religion of islam. an amazing and lamentable spectacle can be seen there among the afflicted. some christians pay the acquittal with righteous intentions, if they can, and consider 119v it a charitable gift and a good deed, because it is something they pay on account of their religion. but other people are oppressed by it because they are impoverished. thus the strongest n religion is not the one who hesitates to pay what they can, but rather the one who gives to assist the weaker person with whatever is demanded of them. when christopher, who held christ within his breast, saw the harshness of these things, giving was not enough for him, and he was not satisfied with making additions to people’s acquittal payments; rather, he went beyond that and paid from his own wealth the entire acquittal for people who could not pay. however, his wealth was wearing out, and it was not easy for him to do these things in the way that he believed he should, because he did not have abundant revenues. so how do you think he approached this issue? in precise imitation of john the merciful,676 master of alexandria. he happily asked the emir, sayf al-dawla, to help him in his love for the poor, and he did not reject him, because he was generous in nature and intensely favorable to the patriarch. he ordered the tax677 collectors to forgive 10,000 dirhams for him every year, and he678 would write messages to them on behalf of whomever he wished to help. so he might write to forgive the entire acquittal for one person and write for another forgiving half of the amount. thus not a single christian went over to the religion of islam during his time. [11. loyalty to sayf al-dawla] so the patriarch received—along with rewards from god—a strong welcome from sayf al-dawla the emir, and favor from the same sayf al-dawla. for this is part of human nature: not only does the one for whom good is done trust in the patronage of their benefactor, 120r but the benefactor also adds to the benefits given to them. the beneficiary derives benefits from the patronage, but then the benefactor wishes to give them still more benefits, going to great lengths in both quantity and duration—especially if they have goodness in their nature—so that their previous benefaction will not be made futile by their miserliness. thus when intense opposition and rebellion broke out against sayf al-dawla and persisted for a long time, the patriarch alone kept his distance from it and did not join the group of antiochians who were rebelling against him. he did not even wish to speak to the insurgents. 674. jizyat al-ruʾūs. 675. barāʾa. 676. john v, chalcedonian patriarch of alexandria 606–16 ce, known for his almsgiving. 677. s calls this tax kharāj; z calls it barāʾa. 678. that is, christopher. 161 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) now, the reason for this rebellion was that the blessed emperor nikephoros679 was taking possession of the border country,680 most of it by violence and war. tarsus alone681 he took by a treaty of safe conduct,682 for hunger had ravished its people, and they had reached a disastrous state, inadequate for war. at the time, sayf al-dawla was suffering from paralysis683 in mayyafariqin.684 as for the people of tarsus, they came to the city of antioch with their wives685 and children. the hagarenes of antioch were also concerned for themselves, so they went to ibn al-zayyāt,686 their governor,687 asking and begging him to stay with them and manage their affairs, since things were falling apart and becoming fragile. when ibn al-zayyāt saw that things were in such a state, he began to worry about emperor nikephoros. he loathed the idea and absolutely refused to stay. the fear of the antiochians increased at his refusal, which drove them to seek out rashīq,688 ibn al-zayyāt’s second-in-command. they asked him the same thing they had requested of the other, and he responded positively but indicated that they should submit to emperor nikephoros and yield to his rule. he reminded them 120v that this was the way of prosperity and that they would never attain the calm and tranquility that they desired if they did not obey him. they accepted his advice and sent messengers to the emperor, offering to bring money and to secure their agreement with pledges. because the emperor was unyielding and was wary of them, he responded to the message they had sent, saying, “i do not accept money, because the emperor of the romans has no need of it, and because the muslims might give it today and refuse it tomorrow. nor do i accept pledges, because while they have meaning for some people, most think nothing of them. i request only one thing, whenever you are ready and realize that it is an easy and insignificant thing for you to do: i wish to build on a rock formation within your city a fortress, in which i will have a stratēgos and a small number of others to defend you, and through them i will conquer.” when the antiochians refused that, rashīq felt ashamed and thought that he had become completely useless, so he decided to “uncover his head”—as the saying goes—in rebellion 679. nikephoros ii (r. 352–59/963–69). 680. balad al-thaghr. zayat translates this phrase as des villes du littoral (“the towns of the coast”), another potential (especially modern) meaning of thaghr, but it seems more likely that this is a reference to the islamic geographical concept of al-thughūr, the border fortresses on the frontiers of muslim-ruled territory, especially on the byzantine border. 681. for “took tarsus alone,” z reads: “destroyed tarsus and took it.” 682. amān. 683. aflaja. the primary meaning of this word is “to be victorious,” but the context (along with other historical sources) makes it clear that sayf al-dawla was suffering from paralysis, or fālij; see ʿizz al-dīn b. al-athīr, al-kāmil fī al-tārīkh, ed. muḥammad yūsuf al-daqqāq (beirut: dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1987), 7:279. 684. modern silvan, turkey. 685. for “wives,” s reads: “young people.” 686. for “ibn al-zayyāt,” z reads: “ibn al-zamān.” this variant continues throughout the text. 687. that is, the newly arrived governor of tarsus; see canard, histoire, 648–49. 688. for “rashīq,” z reads: “rashīq al-nasīmī, who had come from tarsus.” this is the first of the edits that have been made to z in order to bring it in line with the dhayl of yaḥyā b. saʿīd al-anṭākī; see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 797. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 162 against sayf al-dawla, especially because of his paralysis and inability to move, which made people think little of him. once rashīq had made this decision,689 he gathered his supporters together and headed for the city of aleppo.690 he took it by force without much effort and began to lay siege to the citadel, but it would not budge. a servant of sayf al-dawla named qarghuwayh691 was there, and he would send out men every day to fight rashīq. one of them—it was not clear who—struck him with a spear thrust during the battle, 121r so he died there, and when he fell dead,692 the others fled to antioch. when they arrived, they were concerned for themselves, and they set a member of their group at their head as their emir.693 they remained firmly committed to their opposition and rebellion. the one who encouraged them in this was a person of antioch named ibn al-ahwāzī, an intense and dynamic person who had been the manager of their affairs in the time of rashīq.694 what did the patriarch do during this time of chaos in antioch, which was only growing more and more difficult? his well-managed mind encouraged him to remain firm in the patronage of sayf al-dawla, so he withdrew to the monastery of st. symeon of aleppo. for even if sayf al-dawla was paralyzed at the time, his mind had not completely faded, and his tongue had not lost the power of speech. so while the patriarch695 was staying in the monastery, his situation was revealed by night to those in aleppo,696 and it was unbearable for the rebel. he began to investigate the patriarch’s connections and to arrest and harass his closest companions. he sealed up everything in the patriarchal cells697 and said aloud that if the patriarch did not come and take care of it, he would cause him even more grief. did the patriarch surrender to him, or get worried, or yield? no! he remained completely firm. one of his closest companions—theodoulos, who became bishop of seleucia after he 689. for “once rashīq . . . this decision,” z reads: “then a man of antioch known as al-ḥasan al-ahwāzī attached himself to rashīq and took over the management of his affairs with the help of the people of antioch. he was intense and dynamic, and he gave them hope that sayf al-dawla would never return to syria (al-shām). dizbar al-daylamī and a group of daylamites who were with qarghuwayh, the servant of sayf al-dawla, sought the protection of rashīq. rashīq and ibn al-ahwāzī set out.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 797–98. 690. z adds: “many battles took place between him and qarghuwayh.” see ibid., 798. 691. the spelling of this name is very uncertain. zayat transliterates it as qarghoyah and canard (histoire, 649–51) as qargawaih. 692. for “lay siege . . . fell dead,” z reads: “lay siege to the citadel for three months and ten days. afterward rashīq was killed by a spear thrust that hit him.” al-anṭākī includes the “three months and ten days” detail but not the detail about the spear thrust, which is probably a summarized form of s; see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 798. 693. for “they were . . . their emir,” z reads: “they were concerned and afraid, and they made dizbar al-daylamī their emir and ibn al-ahwāzī his manager.” see ibid. 694. for “the one . . . of rashīq,” z reads: “qarghuwayh headed for antioch and a battle took place between them, but qarghuwayh fled and returned to aleppo. dizbar al-daylamī went to aleppo after him, but the companions of qarghuwayh met him, fought him, and repulsed him, so he returned to antioch.” see ibid. 695. z adds: “and those with him.” 696. z omits: “his situation . . . in aleppo.” 697. z adds: “because of the inclination of the patriarch and those with him toward sayf al-dawla, which had been revealed to him.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 798. 163 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) was killed and who built two beautiful churches698 in antioch, for the arkhistratēgos699 and for chrysostom—observed him acting in this way. he grew bold and said to him, “sir, when this is all over, do you intend to tell your church,700 121v ‘i am the good shepherd’?701 do not leave your sheep for the ravishing wolves to snatch up! consider the matter, then go and extend a hand to help them, and do not think about what the rebel wants, but about what is best for you and your flock.” the patriarch said, “hold your tongue and be silent,702 because you do not know what you are saying.” so he had to hold his tongue. after a little while, the servants of sayf al-dawla could no longer bear their shame quietly. they got him started on his journey and helped him get up, so he journeyed from mayyafariqin to the area of maʿarrat miṣrīn, and war broke out between the two sides. the victory went to sayf al-dawla, and the chief officers of the rebels703 were taken prisoner. he put them in shackles and chains.704 then the patriarch made his way to aleppo, as happy as one who had triumphed in an agonizing705 struggle. sayf al-dawla gave him the warmest welcome and he became his close companion in all things, a helpful and beloved intercessor. he went from the status of an insignificant follower to that of an influential friend, not to be accused or belittled, because in the time of hardship he had been faithful, constant, and patient in spite of his affliction. what he had given in the time of distress was repaid in the time of happiness with special treatment and preference.706 he saw those who had grieved him punished before his very eyes with beatings, abuse, and other types of torment that are impossible to bear, but he was not pleased as others were. he did not grow arrogant on account of his victory; rather, he mourned, he felt a tightness in his chest, his thoughts were troubled, and he said, “have mercy, sir, and go easy 698. haykalayn. 699. for “the arkhistratēgos,” s reads: al-aksīrātīqūs; z reads: al-azkisʿūṭus. i take this to be the greek arkhistratēgos, “supreme commander” (a common epithet of michael, the “supreme commander” of the heavenly forces), as suggested to me by dmitry morozov. dick’s edition has al-iksābtirīghūs, greek hexapterygos, meaning “six-winged” (seraph). this must be dick’s guess at the original word, because it is not supported by either manuscript. the meaning is almost right, however, even if the word is not. see dīk, sīra, 15, 46. 700. bīʿa. 701. john 10:11, 14. 702. lacuna in z omits: “consider the . . . be silent.” 703. for “the chief . . . the rebels,” z reads: “dizbar and ibn al-ahwāzī and a large group of their soldiers.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 805. the term “rebels” translates khawārij (sg. khārijī), an allusion to the khārijī rebel group of the early islamic period, but ibrāhīm uses the term here in a general sense. 704. z adds: “and brought them to aleppo, and killed them, and he made his servant taqī governor of antioch.” see ibid. 705. this word is omitted in z and not fully legible in s. dick’s edition (dīk, sīra, 47) reads it as lūyā, but in s there seems to be at least one letter between the wāw and the yāʾ. i have read it here as lawʿiyyan, although the meaning of “agonizing” works for dick’s reading as well. it could perhaps be emended to lūdīyā and read as a reference (via greek and/or syriac) to the gladiator games, latin ludi. 706. z adds: “because he was grateful to him for his act of distancing himself from those who rebelled against him, and so he preferred him and gave him special treatment.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 806. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 164 on those you have defeated, for the sake of 122r the one who helped you stand against them! do not refuse intercession and forgiveness as much as your duty allows.” when he saw one of his neighbors, one of the muslims of the city of antioch,707 being punished and struck with far too many lashes, he did not sit patiently. he stood up, threw himself on the ground, and asked that the man’s crime be given to him, and his request was not rejected. but what misfortune and evil grew out of this for him, i will explain in what follows. and that should not be surprising, even if it is improbable and strange. for so the nature of envy is imprinted on malicious souls, that their fire is ignited by goodness more than it is extinguished by kindness. when that envious one was set free and released from everything that had been imposed on him, he returned to antioch without any consequences. if only it had not been so!708 [12. return to antioch] after that, the patriarch stayed for a little while in aleppo and then went to his city, bringing signed notes from sayf al-dawla to those whom he had dispatched to antioch in an effort to get even with everyone who had helped the antiochian rebels709 against him. he ordered them not only to absolve the patriarch and his companions of any responsibility but also to approve his requests—as often as possible—when he interceded on behalf of others, for the patriarch had taken up many such cases. when he arrived in antioch, he found a governor there, a servant of sayf al-dawla710 known as taqī.711 he also found the patrikios kulayb712 seizing the wealth of the people, though he had not been commanded to take713 so much, 122v and confiscating all of their possessions. sayf al-dawla did not show them the kindness of restraining him from seizing their goods but acted out of pure self-interest, for he could see that these seizures were714 impoverishing the people, ruining the country, and eliminating any revenue. the fines had 707. it is not entirely clear, but it seems from the description in §13 that this may be ibn mānik, the future leader of the assassination plot (not actually named in s until §17). 708. z adds: “even so, there were many other elders of antioch with whom sayf al-dawla was angry on account of their rebellion and whom he had arrested. the patriarch interceded with him for some of them and acted as his mediator with them, and he granted his request regarding them. so at that time, because they witnessed his powerful position with sayf al-dawla, their souls became set in envy and resentment of him.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 806–7. 709. khārijiyyīn, another allusion to the early islamic khawārij; see note 104 above. 710. z omits: “a servant of sayf al-dawla.” 711. for “taqī,” z reads: “taqī al-dīn, whom we have mentioned.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 805. 712. kulayb, likely a syriac orthodox christian, later became basilikos of antioch and eventually of melitene under byzantine rule; see ibid., 2:369, 373–74, 420. al-anṭākī simply calls him a “christian” (naṣrānī), but michael the syrian mentions that he sponsored construction work at a syriac orthodox monastery in melitene; see michael the syrian, chronique, ed. and trans. j.-b. chabot (brussels: culture et civilisation, 1963), 3:126, 4:553; catherine holmes, “‘how the east was won’ in the reign of basil ii,” in eastern approaches to byzantium, ed. antony eastmond, 41–56 (aldershot: ashgate, 2001), 49. 713. z omits: “the wealth . . . to take.” 714. z omits: “but acted . . . seizures were.” 165 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) brought people to such a state that they barely had enough to pay for housing, taxes, and other such things. when the patriarch saw the people of antioch struggling under these demands, whom did he not deliver and redeem from the bulk of their fines? whose burden did he not lighten? whom did he not redeem entirely, if he could? now, there was a resident715 of antioch who was very wealthy because he owned extensive real estate and had many sources of income but who thought of nothing but himself. he would hunch over as he walked, never raising his head from the ground, because he was such an arrogant miser. the wretch had never used a bit of his money to help anyone, not even himself. so the companions of sayf al-dawla seized him and began to punish him, demanding three and a half qinṭārs716 of gold. he sent to the holy patriarch in the midst of his punishment and said to him, “have mercy, sir, on a wretch like me.” by my life, the patriarch got to work quickly, as usual, eager to help anyone who asked for his aid. he rode over at that very moment, relieved him of his torment, and mediated for him regarding the amount that was demanded. he did not stop making requests on his behalf until he had reduced the massive sum from 25,000 123r dinars to a tenth of that, that is, 2,500 dinars. the tax collectors said, “he will not pay even this amount without being punished and beaten.” so the disciple of christ, who resembled him in every way, said, “i am asking you not to go overboard by punishing him any more, but to hand him over to me, and i will be responsible for the whole sum.” he was handed over to the patriarch, and the tax collectors would later demand from the patriarch the entire sum, and then the patriarch would have to717 demand it from him. whenever the patriarch would write to him about this, it was like his heart was being pierced, as the arrows of envy worked within him. thus he later consented to kill the one who had been his benefactor. [13. the assassination plot] now the killing of the patriarch—or rather, his martyrdom—was carried out by the decision of this man and others. it was organized in secret and proceeded little by little. for because sayf al-dawla was inclined toward him,718 the raw material of envy had accumulated in the hearts of the muslims. however, they were not all agreed on killing him. on the other hand, those who did agree were among those whom he had most generously benefited, for the father of envy was at work within them. the proof was as follows: after sayf al-dawla died,719 people came from the land of khorasan, warriors hurrying on their way to antioch.720 that cursed one, whose benefactor 715. it is not entirely clear, but it seems from his description in §13 that this may be ibn maḥmūd. 716. from latin centenarius/greek kentēnarion, the qinṭār is a variable weight equivalent to 100 arṭāl and sometimes used to refer to an indeterminate (large) amount. based on the typical syrian qinṭār of 256 kg, the amount demanded from this miser was likely almost 900 kg (nearly one ton) of gold. 717. s omits: “the entire . . . have to.” 718. that is, christopher. 719. 25 ṣafar 356/9 february 967. 720. for “from the . . . to antioch,” z reads: “from the land of khorasan, intending to raid the romans, so they traveled to antioch, and its people gave them the most beautiful welcome.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 807. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 166 the patriarch had been,721 in whom the venom of envy was at work, and who had thought to plot against the patriarch because of his empowerment, was afraid. if he did not communicate with the leader of the khorasanis,722 he would miss the chance of killing him. so he summoned723 ibn maḥmūd, for whom 123v the patriarch had vouched,724 who had made known to him what he had against him in his soul; and he summoned another person, a neighbor of the patriarch called ibn diʿāma. he said to them, “what do you say? do you think we should leave this infidel alive until a governor arrives, so that he will be sitting in court while we are punished, as we were in the time of sayf al-dawla?” they said, “that is not right.” so he said, “then what do you think about requesting a written fatwā725 about him from the jurist?” they praised this idea and with one mind, they all wrote a note called a fatwā.726 they did not mention the patriarch by name but said, “what is your opinion, o jurist, on the just response to someone who plots against a muslim fortress?” he answered that the person must be killed. the leader of the plot said to the other two, “this fatwā is the way: if we show it to the masses, they will kill him immediately.” this was not actually his opinion; rather, because he was also a persian and knew the language of the khorasanis, he was secretly planning to call a group of the soldiers who had been sent to antioch and show them the fatwā so that they would kill the patriarch without hesitation. this helped to convince them and to spur them toward what he wanted. [14. the patriarch’s decision] one of the patriarch’s neighbors, a prominent muslim named ibn abī ʿamr who was a true friend and adviser to him, found out about this. so he rushed over and said to him, “what are you doing? get up quickly and look out for yourself! otherwise, you should be aware that you are going to be killed soon.” he said, “why? for what reason?” he said, “because 124r a malicious group gathered against you and consulted the law, and the jurist gave a fatwā that says you must be killed.” he asked for more information and said, “what do you think i should do?” he said, “at the moment you are not under arrest, so leave through the city gate at the end of the day, and when morning breaks, you will be these soldiers were likely coming to reinforce the frontier defenses and preserve muslim control of antioch as word spread of byzantine advances in the region; see kennedy, prophet, 238, 240. 721. for “whose benefactor . . . had been,” z reads: “whom the patriarch had taken under his wing.” this is ibn mānik, likely the man whose punishment he alleviated at the end of §11 above. 722. this leader is not named here, but al-anṭākī (“histoire,” 807) claims that his name was muḥammad b. ʿīsā. 723. z adds: “three of the elders and model citizens of antioch for whom the patriarch had mediated and interceded.” see ibid. 724. z omits: “for whom . . . had vouched.” 725. throughout this passage, both s and z use a variety of spellings for this word, including fatwa (in z), fīta (in s), and futya (in both). 726. normally, fatwā would refer more specifically to the jurist’s response to their question, but ibrāhīm apparently uses it to mean both the question and the answer. 167 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) near aleppo, and no one will follow you. that is what i think.” he said, “sir, may god reward you with good things. as for me, i must think about what i will do.” the man departed, and the patriarch summoned that man who had said to him when he was at the monastery of st. symeon, “why do you not go to antioch in the time of rebellion? are you, sir, the sort of person who can say after this, ‘i am the good shepherd’?”727 when he arrived, he728 said to him, “you should know, o man, that our neighbor so-and-so came to me this very hour and told me such-and-such. what do you think?” the man said to him, “what could be better than this, sir? ask god’s blessing and do it!” he said, “if i do this, o insolent one, you will be among those who mock me afterward, saying, ‘can you say tomorrow, “i am the good shepherd”?’” the man answered, saying, “sir, that was different.” so the patriarch said to him, “yes, it is not hidden from me that it was different.729 that is why, because i did not agree with you then, i did not do it. and when i did not do it, even you knew that none of the christians would be harmed as a result, because no one was demanding my murder at that 124v time. but now, my murder is demanded, and not simply demanded, but demanded with intense desire and effort. for those who demand my murder are envious, and the venom of envy is concealed within their bodies. so if i slip out of their hands and they cannot inject their venom into me, they will not leave behind a single christian or a single church. this is the time, o man, when i must say not only ‘i am the good shepherd’ but also that ‘the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.’730 soon you will see this beard dyed with my blood.” with that, he moved his hand toward it. his speech ended with this saying, and after that he said not another word; he was almost ashamed at the thought. [15. the assassination] afterward, he gave it some thought and decided to meet with that evil man who was preparing to act against him. he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had mixed for him the brew731 of death. however, he did not think that he would do this in his home, for no desert arab,732 nor any esteemed person among the muslims, would consider this a good way to commit a crime. so after a little while, he sent him a note, showing neither wariness nor fear: “sir, i would like to meet with you. please tell me what you think and i will be available to come to you.”733 he saw this message as an opportunity and as potential spoils, 727. see §11. the man’s name is theodoulos. 728. christopher. 729. s repeats: “so the . . . was different.” 730. john 10:11. 731. qahwa. this arabic word became the word “coffee,” and it is the ultimate source of the beverage’s name in all languages, including english. however, coffee was (most likely) discovered several centuries after the composition of this text. at this time, according to lisān al-ʿarab, qahwa referred to a type of wine. in any case, the metaphorical meaning of the phrase is clear. 732. aʿrābī. 733. z adds: “when ibn mānik heard this.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 808. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 168 and he said, “i am not available at the moment, but later i will send for you.” then he spent his entire day on the plot and did not send him anything because he was busy deceiving him and strengthening what he had cooking for him. when 125r much of the night had come and gone, and the patriarch had eaten his customary food, he734 sent to him, saying, “i am now available, o patriarch, so if you want to come, then come.” when the lamb of christ heard this message, at such an unusual time, he was stunned and said to his companions, “what is the right thing to do, o people, when we are facing two irreconcilable options? going at this time of night is neither proper nor appropriate, because the food is already in my mouth, and my strength—i am too weak to speak at this point. but postponing would also lead to trouble, because then we would be the ones who missed the appointment. but there is a way: can one of you check my breath? if you smell wine on me, we will use that as an excuse and say that it is not possible at this time. but if my breath is clean, we will go anyway.” when one of them checked his breath and there was no odor,735 he went on his own two feet, like a lamb going to the slaughter736 of its own free will. that cursed one welcomed him and greeted him with affection, even as deceit was concealed within his heart. when they sat together, he was full of wrath and hatred against him, so he could not wait for the patriarch to begin speaking, but said to him, “what are you thinking, o patriarch? you are one of the people of this town, dwelling among us, yet you think badly of our interactions and act against us.” the patriarch said, “and how is that, sir? what do you mean?” he said in response, “because you correspond with the emperor of the romans,737 and you correspond with the servant of ibn ḥamdān.” so he said, 125v “and what is the evidence for that, sir? who has found such a letter from me?” he738 got up as if he were searching for a letter, then suddenly stood and spoke in persian, summoning the khorasanis whom he had prepared for the murder. still, he was worried and trembling. not only was he a coward, but to both heart and eye, he looked like a bat. for he was hardly taller than a span,739 only by a little. he looked like a bat in color, facial expressions, and complexion. when those whom he had prepared and summoned arrived, he said to them in their language, his teeth chattering, “this is the one you are looking for! this is the man who wants to hand over this city! this is the enemy of the muslims! here you are, and here he is! cut him to pieces without pity!” if he were the enemy of the muslims,740 you mouse’s eye, you complete rat, then why was he not your enemy in the time of difficulty? rather, he was your friend, the friend who 734. ibn mānik. z calls him “that cursed one.” 735. s repeats: “and there was no odor.” 736. cf. isaiah 53:7; jeremiah 11:19; acts 8:32. 737. z adds: “and incite them to come toward us, and encourage them against us.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 809. 738. for “he,” z reads: “ibn mānik.” see ibid. 739. a span (arabic shibr) is the distance from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger, roughly 23 cm—obviously hyperbole in this case. 740. lacuna in z omits: “here you . . . the muslims.” 169 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) was helpful to you and delivered you from torment! but when this one whose soul was like that of a crocodile, requiting goodness with evil, gave the command regarding him, the sacrificial lamb of christ stretched out his neck without any alarm, waiting for his head to be taken. those people had not swords, but long daggers. one of them made him stand up while the other struck him with a long dagger, and all of the iron passed through his belly. the sword of god741 was sharpened, but at that time it was held back, as god’s judgments often are, awaiting punishment at another time. when the martyr fell to the ground, his head was first cut off, then his pure body was dragged around on a ladder by the command of the one who had rejected both god and goodness. it was immediately thrown 126r into the river after the gate was opened for it at night.742 but this could not be hidden from the christian populace, and when their shepherd fell, they were stunned, struck by what had happened so suddenly, and intensely anxious. they scattered into the houses of some of the muslims, where they hid. however, no one sought them out, for it was necessary that the earlier saying of their father should be fulfilled: “if they satisfy their thirst for revenge by killing me, and inject into me the venom concealed within their hearts, they will not pursue anyone but me.” [16. plundering the church] as for that animal with the ferocious appearance, ever increasing in beastliness, he kept quiet for most of the night, because he was on the edge of losing his mind for good. but when dawn had come, he returned to himself and directed his guards toward the church743 and the patriarchal cells. there was a group to search each of the two places.744 in the patriarchal cells, they found nothing but some foodstuffs, such as wheat, figs, and oil, preserved as provisions for the church and nourishment for the brothers in christ. how could they find anything else when there was no gold745 hoarded there? how could he hoard when his expenses exceeded what he took in? nor was there any clothing. how could any belong to someone whose clothing was only wool,746 without even a monastic habit?747 but there were a few priestly funeral garments there that belonged to his predecessors throughout time, and they took all of them. and they opened the treasury of the church, and when they did not see anything there, they punished the treasurer until he showed them the hidden gold and silver utensils of the 741. sayf allāh. in s, the scribe mistakenly wrote sayf al-dawla before crossing out al-dawla and writing allāh. 742. for “then his . . . at night,” z reads: “and thrown into the furnace of the bath in the neighborhood of ibn mānik’s house. then his pure body was immediately brought out of the city gate by night and thrown into the river.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 809. 743. bīʿa. z adds: “the church of cassian” (kanīsat qusyān). see ibid., 809–10. 744. lacuna in z omits: “to search . . . two places.” 745. z adds: “or silver.” 746. ṣūf. 747. askīm rahbāniyya. askīm is from the greek skhēma. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 170 church, 126v along with the silk garments that were kept to decorate the church. they left nothing but a few copper things and manuscripts.748 out of all this, the cursed one did not give those who had shed the pure and innocent blood749 everything that they had agreed. he kept back some of it in order to give it as a gift to the persians whom he was expecting to come on their way to the land of the romans. in the midst of all this, they arrived, and the antiochians welcomed them magnificently. that cursed infidel was especially important for them, not only because of what he brought them, but also because he shared their tribe and language. and they began to raid the roman border regions750 and to devastate them. [17. divine retribution] now the blessed emperor nikephoros was busy with the bulgars. when he returned, he sent peter the stratopedarkhēs,751 who had a battle with the khorasanis near the city of alexander known as alexandria,752 and the persians were put to flight after extensive fighting.753 with them was a group of muslim assassins of tarsus754 who had advised them not to fight, nor to keep making war, for they said, “the army that is fighting you is an imperial army, and you have no power against them.” the persians did not accept this but persisted until their bravest men and most of the others were killed, and their chiefs were taken captive. all of this was a necessary judgment from heaven, for justice could not delay in avenging the blood of the martyr. here it seems that we may go on for too long—even if it would be insufficient, coming from us—in clarifying the marvelous and efficient system, working according to an uninterrupted arrangement, by which the wicked received an evil repayment for their deeds. but telling the story contains some 127r benefit, for from these facts everyone can verify what prophecy tells us about falling into the hands of the living god: both that it is terrifying, and that repayment might come quickly, or else only a part of it might come quickly, in which case it is evidence that the remainder will later come to pass. 748. z adds: “and they also took the chair of st. peter the apostle, which was made of palm wood overlaid with silver. they kept it in the house of one of their elders, known as ibn ʿāmir, and it remained in his house until the romans took possession of the city.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 810. 749. z adds: “those of his nation.” 750. s omits: “and language . . . border regions.” 751. an army commander. s: al-isṭirāṭūs. 752. this is alexandretta, now known as i̇skenderun. 753. for “and the . . . extensive fighting,” z reads: “which is between mopsuestia and antioch, as they were returning from their raids. he attacked them, killed their bravest men, and took the sālār of the army and others as captives.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 814. 754. for “tarsus,” z reads: “ṭarṭūs.” 171 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) one of the chiefs of the hagarenes755 imprisoned in that war was the sālār756 of the army. the antiochians purchased him for a massive amount of money, garments, and prisoners757 who were in antioch and whom the people had taken captive.758 when it was done,759 he came to antioch, and some of its people welcomed him and celebrated his arrival. however, as much as he entered in honor, and they honored and exalted him beyond any legitimate level, in the end he had the most shameful and disgraceful exit. for the antiochians could not endure what they were undergoing at the hands of his men who had escaped the fighting. they had returned naked, and he like them. thus necessity forced them to seize whatever would preserve them, and their hands stretched toward the wealth of the antiochians.760 they did not endure that from them, but resisted them, war broke out between them, and the people of the city drove them out naked. the antiochians who fought them were in two bands, and the chief of one turned against the chief of the other and killed him. for someone had come from egypt,761 one of the brigands762 of tarsus763 who had fled. he returned with a small band to raid the roman border region.764 the chief of the other band was a kurd from būqā765 called ʿallūsh, and the one who came from egypt was a black man named al-rughaylī.766 127v at that point the city was in the hand of ʿallūsh.767 al-rughaylī entered and greeted him, and when he bent over to take his hand, his sword was sideways on his knees. so al-rughaylī drew it, struck him with it, and killed him. thus he dared to do two impressive things at one time and openly: drawing a chief’s sword from his lap, and quickly killing him without a pause. so the followers of the one who was killed were scattered, even though they were many, and command passed to the killer, even though his men were very few.768 however, his rule did not endure and his time was not long, for peter the stratopedarkhēs came shortly with a huge contingent from the army of the praiseworthy emperor 755. z reads: “khorasanis.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 814. 756. a persian word for a chieftain or leader. 757. z adds: “whom they had previously taken captive from the romans.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 814. 758. z omits: “whom the . . . taken captive.” 759. for “when it was done,” z reads: “when the salār was set free.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 814. 760. for “and their . . . the antiochians,” z reads: “so they overpowered the antiochians and began to seize their wealth and their goods.” see ibid. 761. for “for someone . . . from egypt,” z reads: “a black man had come from egypt to antioch.” see ibid., 822. 762. “brigands” translates ṣaʿālīk. my impression is that this man had escaped from tarsus during the byzantine conquest. 763. z adds: “known as al-rughaylī.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 822. 764. z adds: “this was the chief of the first band.” 765. often spelled būqa, a fortress and village near antioch, somewhat important in the early centuries of islam but eventually lost. 766. z omits: “and the . . . al-rughaylī.” as with many of the names in this text, the correct spelling of the name “al-rughaylī” is uncertain (in arabic as well as in english). 767. for “in the hand of ʿallūsh,” z reads: “in his hand.” 768. z adds: “and al-rughaylī took control of antioch.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 822. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 172 nikephoros. when he came, he conquered the great city that very night,769 although he had not even been seeking it. he found it weak because of the previous raids on its territories, and he found its people neglecting to preserve and protect it, because they had not heard the news that someone was coming for it. they could not in one moment gather enough men to climb the mountain and defend the wall,770 so the romans quickly climbed it. they found it empty, so they were able to climb it. they took possession of the city771 and took everyone in it captive, and no one escaped except that cursed one who was the foundation of the whole catastrophe.772 now see here, o listener, how the just judgment for earlier actions is delayed but comes to you more perfectly later on. for he had gone out of the city at night, seeking to find safety in some place within the lands of islam, and at first the affair remained hidden. he was happy, not only because 128r he alone was saved from captivity, but also because he was able—as he thought—to trick, deceive, and lie to god and the angels, so that they had carried him through the air and saved him. this had long been his habit, and he had achieved precision in the art of tricking, swindling, and lying to the lord of the worlds.773 however, just judgment got ahead of him, and on the road, a bāqūlā774 of syrians met him on jabal al-aqraʿ.775 they did not know that the city had been conquered.776 they seized him and brought him there once they found out about the conquest from the people who were with him. at that time the stratopedarkhēs was in aleppo, and its people were seeking 769. for “he conquered . . . very night,” z reads: “michael bourtzēs, who was in charge of the fortress of baghrās, joined him, and they continuously besieged the great city.” see ibid. 770. antioch lies at the base of mount silpius, and its historic city walls climb up and enclose a portion of the mountain to provide additional protection from higher ground. 771. z adds: “on thursday, when thirteen nights had passed from dhū al-ḥijja, in the year 358 [28 october 969]. the muslims threw fire to turn the romans away from them and opened the sea gate, and some people left through it.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 822–23. 772. z adds: “ibn mānik.” see ibid., 823. 773. rabb al-ʿālamīn. 774. s reads: rāqūla, here and below. z adds: “that is, a gang” (ʿaṣaba). this seems to be an obscure syriac word, mentioned only in thomas audo’s dictionary: the agent-noun form of the equally obscure verb bqal, usually used for plants, meaning “to sprout, blossom, shoot up.” the literal translation would thus be “one who shoots up” or “springs up,” perhaps indicating that these syrians were a band of outlaws “springing up” in rebellion against the various rulers of aleppo, antioch, and beyond. such outlaws would no doubt find the mountains a congenial site for their operations. another possibility is that this is the greek word bakyla, meaning “sticks” or even “fasces,” or the syriac būqālā (cowherd). could there be a connection to the qarmaṭī rebels known as baqliyya, the “green vegetable people,” thanks to their ascetic vegetarian diet? this is not impossible, especially given the presence of qarmaṭīs in other parts of the life, but mentions of the baqliyya are mostly confined to the sawād region of southern iraq, and it would be strange to hear of qarmaṭīs who are also suryān (and thus likely christian). canard (“vie,” 565) even suggests that this may be the name of a tribe. if rāqūla is the correct form, the arabic word rāqūl, referring to a type of rope, is a possible origin, along with the syriac rakālā (peddler, merchant). the derivation of the present meaning is unclear in any case, and it is no surprise that the scribe of z—or one of his predecessors—felt the need to insert a less obscure arabic gloss. 775. also known as mount kasios, now on the border between turkey and syria, just south of antioch. z adds: “they used to raid antioch.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 823. 776. z omits: “they did . . . been conquered.” 173 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) a peace settlement with him. they agreed on a massive amount of money and brought it to him, and after he had checked the amount, he returned. so the people of the bāqūlā brought him that cursed one, whom they had taken captive; he was known as ibn mānik.777 he handed him over to someone who would guard him until he could determine what he needed to do with him.778 the chiefs of the army gathered to deliberate on the issue,779 and some of the chiefs advised that he should be brought to the emperor. but others disagreed and said, “who is this man that he is worthy to be brought into the imperial presence? the most appropriate thing is to kill him, in order to avenge the innocent blood that he shed.” but the others, who were advising that he be brought there, answered them and said, “it is not right to pollute that pure blood with this impure blood.” at last the patrikios eustathios, stratēgos of cappadocia, known as maleinos, said, “is the patriarch here ordering us to kill him, so that his blood can be ‘polluted,’ as you say? he completed what was necessary for him to do, 128v then departed and arrived at a place where he awaits a beautiful reward from god. but as for us, if we are christians, then we must avenge the injustice that was done to him.” when he said something like this, it convinced them, and they sent the one who had been judged to the bridge at the sea gate, from which he himself had thrown the noble body into the river. he was cut apart with swords, piece by piece, but the pieces were not thrown into the river, for he was not worthy of that. rather, each one was thrown at random onto the ground, and they became food for the birds and the dogs. as for the other two780 who had shared with him in spilling the blood, they were sent to the prison of tarsus.781 they were not sought at that time, and no judgment was carried out in their cases.782 [18. the remains of the saint] now as it happened, the emperor783 was killed before learning the news from antioch, and the empire passed to the son of tzimiskēs.784 he quickly sent theodore,785 a monk from koloneia, and made him patriarch of the city of god, antioch. he arrived here with those who brought him and immediately began to inquire about the story of the martyr and to seek out the remains of his pure body. for his body had appeared eight days after his martyrdom, which was on the night of the twenty-third day of may.786 it appeared on an 777. for “they seized . . . ibn mānik,” z reads: “they seized him and brought him to the stratopedarkhēs.” 778. z adds: “and he bestowed massive favors on the people of the bāqūlā.” 779. z omits: “the chiefs . . . the issue.” 780. for “the other two,” z reads: “ibn maḥmūd and ibn diʿāma.” 781. z adds: “and remained there a long time.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 825. 782. z omits: “and no . . . their cases.” 783. z adds: “nikephoros.” 784. john i (r. 359-65/969–76). 785. theodore ii (bishop 359–65/970–76). 786. z adds: “in the year 356 of the hijra.” this year corresponds to 967 ce. see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 809. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 174 island in the river, where it was caught on an oak tree.787 the noble head was not with it, and it was said that the infidel had burned it. some christians of antioch went out secretly and buried it in the holy monastery known as arshāyā.788 when patriarch theodore learned this, he did not delay in sending for what was 129r there but went to the holy monastery and took up the relics789 of the saint with the pure clergy and a crowd of believers. they went before them to the city with a procession790 and a great assembly and put them in a fine marble sarcophagus, which they placed on a marble table in the western part of the great church.791 after a few years, abba792 nicholas the patriarch793 again moved him with honor and put him inside the house of st. peter the head of the apostles, with his staff,794 his chair, numerous balms,795 the relics796 of patriarch babylas and patriarch ignatius, and other things: the balms of st. john the baptist, the honorable lance, the staff of chrysostom, the belt of st. symeon the stylite of aleppo, and so on. all of them are in the treasury of st. peter to this day. [19. more divine retribution] however, the highest judgment of those who shared in the killing did not delay long after that. one of the two, ibn maḥmūd, was in the prison of tarsus in total misery, distress, and pain of soul and body. he was punished for his deeds until he handed over his miserable soul, which had rejected goodness and repaid its benefactor with a vileness that cannot be surpassed. the other, ibn diʿāma, remained in prison until the just hand of the patrikios797 bourtzēs came to antioch. he sent people to take him, weigh him down with a stone, and throw him into the river. so the three—ibn mānik, ibn maḥmūd, and ibn diʿāma, who had taken upon themselves the murder of the saint—received the recompense for their actions, and in the afterlife they await eternal punishment. 787. ṭarrāsh, from syriac ṭarāshā. 788. located just outside antioch. see nasrallah, “auteurs,” 85; claude cahen, la syrie du nord à l’époque des croisades et le principauté franque d’antioche (paris: p. geuthner, 1940), 324. 789. for “relics,” z reads: “body.” s has limsanā, which i take to be a garbled version of the greek leipsana, “relics.” 790. lītīn. zayat and dick both interpret this word as a transliteration of the greek litēn (zayat simply writes it in his french translation as λιτή), meaning “procession.” i see no preferable alternative translation for this enigmatic word, though as canard notes (“vie,” 569), “one would like to find there a note and other examples.” 791. this seems to be the church of cassian mentioned earlier. 792. for “abba,” z reads: “saint.” 793. nicholas ii (bishop 415–21/1025–30). 794. shabūqa, from the syriac shabūqtā. 795. ḥuyūl. as canard notes (“vie,” 568), this is a technical term for a “miraculous liquid that oozes from certain icons,” as described by zayat in his history of ṣaydnāyā; see habib zayat, khabāyā al-zawāyā fī tārīkh ṣaydnāyā (harissa, lebanon: imprimerie de saint paul, 1932), 144–51. 796. libsānāt, from greek leipsana. z reads: “clothing” (libāsāt). 797. z adds: “michael.” see al-anṭākī, “histoire,” 825. 175 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) [20. comparison with other saints] as for 129v the saint, he has reached the dwellings of the priests in the highest heavens, mingling with the righteous, standing with the ascetic monks in the ranks of the earlier martyrs. for he closely followed and tightly adhered to one of the saints; another he contended with—neither far from the target nor far behind—and another he left behind and surpassed, as is obvious from his actions and the well-known evidence of his deeds. for798 abraham left his homeland by the command of god and became the father of the nations he was promised. did this man not also set out of his own accord and give birth to many spiritual children? and isaac became engaged to rebekah by correspondence,799 but this man became engaged to the holy church directly. and jacob inherited the blessing of his father, but by a trick—he inherited it as a son, but to be precise, he took the blessing itself by a trick.800 and as for his two wives, he took them only after labor and misery on their account, all the while looking toward an outward reward that he would receive.801 but this man, without fraud and in complete truthfulness, received blessings from the mouths of many, and while he was not lacking in labor for the sake of his spiritual bride,802 he was not looking toward a present reward but was ensuring that he would receive the unseen, anticipated reward. as for the gentleness of david, by my life, he did not possess it completely, for a small remnant of the vanity of the secretaries remained within him. the right way to approach this topic is to say that even if a bit of that still touched him, and he was never able to eliminate it completely, perhaps he struggled with it and even held onto some of it intentionally because of his leadership position and the strictness that goes along with it. as for solomon, he was not able to attain 130r his wisdom, but as a substitute, he had a firm faith in god and submitted neither to passions nor to the temptation of obscene things. this is nobler than the wisdom of the world and preferable in the sight of god. as for the prodromos,803 who dwelled in deserts, this man was nothing like him, for he was neither a prophet nor a forerunner and he did not dwell in the desert. however, he did call to faith and display the beauty of worship, and he was well known for this. by my life, he did not baptize a multitude, but he saved many from casting aside and losing baptism, helping them to preserve it by his expenditures and gifts. and afterward, he arrived at the greater, higher baptism, which is not polluted by any dirt or subsequent filth. from peter he received a fervent sort of faith, but he nevertheless avoided his cowardice and his denial.804 and he resembled paul in his transformation, though he did not turn from 798. z adds: “the ancient.” 799. cf. genesis 24. 800. z omits: “he inherited . . . a trick.” cf. genesis 27. 801. cf. genesis 29:15–30. 802. i take this as a reference to the church, specifically the church of antioch, thus establishing (as elsewhere in the text) a parallel between christopher and christ; cf. ephesians 5:22–33. 803. a greek word meaning “forerunner,” a title of john the baptist. 804. cf. matthew 26:69–75; mark 14:66–72; luke 22:54–62; john 18:15–18, 25–27. al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) the life of christopher • 176 persecuting religion805 but from the confusion of the world and the bondage of the self. and even if he did not make it from jerusalem to illyricum to preach806—for only paul made it that far, and he is the one who was snatched up to the third heaven and heard the speech that cannot be expressed807—he certainly did not fall short in what he was able to do. there were people whom he supported and strengthened, those he warned and informed, and those he restrained, rebuked, and often rescued and delivered from great difficulties. [21. address to the patriarch] but o divine crown, possessor of all purity, especially loved by me and generally venerated by the masses, o you who resembled all of those mentioned here, who loved so many of them and was first to every good deed, receive this discourse from me. 130v imagine it as an encomium, or imagine it as an elegy or a consolation, and receive it in your blessed life, even if it is a poor speech, for it is done according to my ability. you did not disdain to run the race for my sake until you could hand me over to that learned divine educator—perhaps you hoped that i would become highly learned, or perhaps you knew beforehand that i, like you, would be lacking808 in the sciences. in any case you knew by spiritual knowledge that i was planning to write down your story at some time, so that it might not be forgotten in the course of time. therefore have compassion on me even now, and pardon me for delaying so long the duty of speaking about you. do not reject me, now that you are standing in the heavens before the great dais, since i longed—or since i eagerly strove—for you to look upon me and intercede for me. my father relied on you when he made me and my brothers—may god be pleased with all of them809—your disciples. and you go to great lengths, asking and begging that my sins be forgiven, that my actions be noble for the remainder of my life, and that i be saved from difficulties and seek whatever will please god and bring me nearer to him. [22. his disciples] you had numerous followers and helpers, the children whom you fathered in christ and guided in the way that pleases god.810 they were holy branches, spiritual flowers, and pleasing first fruits from our precious, divine town. among them was abba george the elder, your plant and seedling, who met the holy emperor nikephoros and was head of the monastery of st. symeon the stylite of aleppo, the one on the mountain.811 805. cf. acts 9:1–19. 806. cf. romans 15:19. 807. z omits: “for only . . . be expressed.” cf. 2 corinthians 12:1–4. 808. for “lacking,” z reads: “excellent.” 809. raḍiya allāh ʿan al-jamīʿ. 810. several of the disciples listed here, along with ibrāhīm (the author of this text), became translators in antioch after the byzantine conquest; see treiger, “beginnings,” 314–32. 811. z omits: “the one on the mountain.” 177 • joshua mugler al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā 29 (2021) abba john the marvelous was worthy of becoming catholicos 131r over the lands of the east. abba chariton ii was the diligent archimandrite of the monastery of st. symeon the marvelous,812 the one by the sea on the marvelous mountain of lukkām.813 abba yaʿīsh the hermit814 struggled upon various pillars of seclusion and performed marvelous feats. abba ephrem, the man of god,815 was a hermit who patiently bore the confinement of many cells and did not turn away from his solitary path. he was mainly confined with us— or rather, with christ—in the monastery of st. gregory the theologian.816 abba jeremiah,817 his marvelous companion, was head of the monastery of our lady the mother of god al-jarājima,818 which he himself founded on the holy mountain of lukkām. the blessed father eutykhios, son of farkhos. the virtuous abba gregory the elder was head of the monastery of our lady the mother of god dafnūnā,819 and it suffices to mention how famous his virtues were. i have devoted to each of them an individual account, as they deserve to be remembered, even though i have been far too brief. the simple fact that they were planted by you suffices as a eulogy and commemoration for them. may your intercession and the prayers of all of them save and preserve us, now and ever and until the utmost of all the ages. amen. may all the people say amen.820 812. z writes that chariton was the archimandrite of the monastery of st. saba and lists symeon the marvelous as if he were another disciple of christopher, but symeon—also known as st. symeon the stylite the younger or as st. symeon of the marvelous/admirable mountain—lived in the sixth century ce. alexander treiger suggests that the text originally listed two charitons, one abbot of arshāyā and the other abbot of st. symeon’s monastery; see treiger, “beginnings,” 323–24. 813. that is, the black mountain (“lukkām” is from the syriac ūkāmā, meaning “black”), the ancient amanos, just northwest of antioch. this monastery is southwest of antioch, where the southern end of the lukkām range overlooks the orontes near its mouth. 814. for “yaʿīsh the hermit,” z reads: “yaʿīsh of aleppo.” yaʿīsh, along with jeremiah, is mentioned as a contemporary of st. timon in several synaxarion entries for march 25; see joseph-marie sauget, premières recherches sur l’origine et les caractéristiques des synaxaires melkites (xie–xviie siècles) (brussels: société des bollandistes, 1969), 367–69. 815. z omits: “of seclusion . . . of god.” it therefore combines yaʿīsh and ephrem into one person. 816. z adds “in bityas.” bityas, also within the lukkām mountain range, is now called batıayaz and lies west of antioch. 817. jeremiah is mentioned alongside yaʿīsh as a contemporary of st. timon in several synaxarion entries for march 25; see sauget, recherches, 367–69. 818. the jarājima, known to the byzantines as mardaites, were a christian group living in the mountains near antioch, often serving as mercenaries for the byzantines or their enemies; see nasrallah, “auteurs,” 81–82. 819. dafnūnā is a reference to daphnē (modern harbiye), 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